Executive orders - Tom Clancy [29]
THE MARINES LOOKED very twitchy, Inspector O'Day saw. He parked his truck on Eighth Street, S.E. The Marine Barracks were thoroughly barricaded. The curbs were fully blocked with parked cars, the gaps in the buildings doubly so. He dismounted his truck and walked toward an NCO; he was wearing his FBI windbreaker, and carrying his ID in his right hand.
I have business inside, Sergeant.
Who with, sir? the Marine asked, checking the photo against the face.
Mr. Murray.
You mind leaving your side arm here with us, sir? Orders, the sergeant explained.
Sure. O'Day handed over his fanny pack, inside of which was his Smith & Wesson 1076 and two spare magazines. He didn't bother with a backup piece on headquarters duty. How many people you have around now?
Two companies, near enough. There's another one setting up at the White House.
There was no better time to lock the barn door than after the horse got out, Pat knew. It was all the more grim since he was delivering the news that it was all unnecessary, but nobody would really care about that. The sergeant waved to a lieutenant who had nothing better to do-the NCOs ran things like this-than to conduct visitors across the quad. The lieutenant saluted for no more reason than being a Marine.
Here to see Daniel Murray. He's expecting me.
Please follow me, sir.
The inner corners of the buildings on the quad had yet another line of Marines, with a third on the quad itself, complete with a heavy machine gun. Two companies amounted to upwards of three hundred rifles. Yeah, President Ryan was fairly safe here, Inspector O'Day thought, unless some other maniac driving an airplane was around. Along the way, a captain wanted to compare the photo on his ID with the face again. It was being overdone. Somebody had to point that out before they started parking tanks on the street.
Murray came out to meet him on the porch. How good is it?
Pretty good, the inspector replied.
Come on. Murray waved him in, and led his friend into the breakfast room. This is Inspector O'Day. Pat, I think you know who these people are.
Good morning. I've been on the Hill, and we found something a little while ago that you need to know, he began, going on for another couple of minutes.
How solid is it? Andrea Price asked.
You know how this works, O'Day responded. It's preliminary, but it looks pretty solid to me, and we'll have good test data after lunch. The ID's already being run. That may be a little shaky, because we don't have a head to work with, and the hands are all ripped up. We're not saying that we've closed the case. We're saying that we have a preliminary indication that supports other data.
Can I mention this on TV? Ryan asked everyone around the table.
Definitely not, van Damm said. First, it's not confirmed. Second, it's too soon for anyone to believe it.
Murray and O'Day traded a look. Neither of them was a politician. Arnie van Damm was. For them, information control was about protecting evidence so that a jury saw it clean. For Arnie, information control was about protecting people from things he didn't think they could understand until it was spin-controlled and spoon-fed, one little gulp at a time. Both wondered if Arnie had ever been a father, and if his infant had starved to death waiting for his strained carrots. Both noted next that Ryan gave his chief of staff a long look.
The well known black box really wasn't much more than a tape recorder whose leads trailed off to the cockpit. There they collected data from engine and other flight controls, plus, in this case, the microphones for the flight crew. Japan Airlines was a government-run carrier, and its aircraft had the latest of everything. The flight-data recorder was fully digitized. That made for rapid and clear transcription of the data. First of all, a senior technician made a clean, high-speed copy of the original metallic tape, which was then removed to a vault while he worked on the copy. Someone had thought to have a Japanese