Executive orders - Tom Clancy [23]
Jack. Her head turned. It's all true?
He nodded, then he hesitated before coming to sit next to Cathy. The kids?
Asleep. A pause. They don't really know what's going on. I guess that makes four of us, she added.
Five.
The President's dead? Cathy turned to see her husband nod. I hardly got to know him.
Good guy. Their kids are at the House. Asleep. I didn't know if I was supposed to do anything. So I came here. Ryan reached for his collar and pulled the tie loose. It seemed to take a considerable effort to do so. Better not to disturb the kids, he decided. It would have been hard to walk that far anyway.
And now?
I have to sleep. They get me up at five.
What are we going to do?
I don't know. Jack managed to get out of his clothes, hoping that the new day would contain some of the answers that the night merely concealed.
* * *
2 - PRE-DAWN
IT WAS TO BE EXPECTED that they'd be as exactly punctual as their electronic watches could make them. It seemed to Ryan that he'd hardly closed his eyes when the gentlest of taps at the door startled him off the pillow. There came the brief moment of confusion normal to the moment of awakening in any place other than one's own bed: Where am I? The first organized thought told him that he'd dreamed a lot of things, and maybe-But hard on the heels of that thought was the internal announcement that the worst of the dream was still real. He was in a strange place, and there was no other explanation for it. The tornado had swept him up into a whirling mass of terror and confusion, and then deposited him here, and here was neither Kansas nor Oz. About the best thing he could say, after five or ten seconds of orientation, was that he didn't have the expected headache from sleep-deprivation, and that he wasn't quite so tired. He slid out from under the covers. His feet found the floor, and he made his way to the door.
Okay, I'm up, he told the wooden door. Then he realized that his room didn't have an attached bathroom, and he'd have to open the door. That he did.
Good morning, Mr. President. A young and rather earnest-looking agent handed him a bathrobe. Again, it was the job of an orderly, but the only Marine he saw in the corridor was wearing a pistol belt. Jack wondered if there had been another turf fight the night before between the Marine Corps and the Secret Service to see who had primacy of place in the protection of their new Commander-in-Chief. Then he realized with a start that the bathrobe was his own.
We got some things for you last night, the agent explained in a whisper. A second agent handed over Cathy's rather tattered maroon housecoat. So, someone had broken into their home last night-must have, Jack realized, as he hadn't handed over his keys to anyone; and defeated the burglar alarm he'd installed a few years earlier. He padded back to the bed and deposited the housecoat there before heading back out. Yet a third agent pointed him down the hall to an unoccupied bedroom. Four suits were hanging on a poster bed, along with four shirts, all newly pressed by the look of them, along with half a score of ties and everything else. It wasn't so much pathos as desperation, Jack realized. The staff knew, or at least had an idea of what he was going through, and every single thing they could do to make things easier for him was being done with frantic perfection. Someone had even spit-shined his three pair of black shoes to Marine specifications. They'd never looked so good before, Ryan thought, heading for the bathroom-where, of course, he found all of his things, even his usual bar of Zest soap. Next to that was the skin-friendly stuff Cathy used. Nobody thought that being President was easy, but he was now surrounded by people who were grimly determined to eliminate every small worry he might have.
A warm shower helped loosen his muscles, and clouded the mirror with mist, which made things even better when he shaved. The usual morning mechanics were finished by 5:20, and Ryan made his way down the stairs. Outside, he saw through a window, a phalanx of camouflage-clad