Executive orders - Tom Clancy [314]
Everyman. But Everyman didn't work for CIA and go into the field to be a spy, did he? Damned sure Ryan was the first spy who'd ever made it to the Oval Office was that good?
There were so many blanks in his life. The thing in London. He'd killed there. The terrorists who'd attacked his home-he'd killed at least one of them there, too. This incredible story about stealing a Soviet submarine, during which, his source said, he'd killed a Russian sailor. The other things. Was this the sort of person the American people wanted in the White House?
And yet he tried to come across as Everyman. Common sense. This is what the law says. I take my oaths seriously.
It's a lie, Donner thought. It has to be a lie.
You're one clever son of a bitch, Ryan, the anchorman thought.
And if it was that he was clever, and if it was a lie, then what? Changing the tax system. Changes in the Supreme Court. Changes in the name of efficiency, Secretary Bretano's activities at Defense damn.
The next leap of imagination was that CIA and Ryan had had a role in the crash at the Capitol-no, that was too crazy. Ryan was an opportunist. They all were, the people Donner had covered for all of his professional life, all the way back to his first job at the network affiliate in Des Moines, where his work had landed a county commissioner in jail, and so gotten Donner noticed by the network executives at 30 Rock. Political figures. Donner reported on all manner of news from avalanches to warfare, but it was politicians whom he had studied as a profession and a hobby.
They were all the same, really. Right place, right time, and they already had the agenda. If he'd learned anything at all, he'd learned that. Donner looked out his window and lifted his phone with one hand while flipping the Rolodex with the other.
Ed, this is Tom. Just how good are those sources, and how quickly can I meet them? He couldn't hear the smile on the other end of the line.
SOHAILA WAS SITTING up now. Such situations provided a relief that never failed to awe the young doctor. Medicine was the most demanding of the professions, MacGregor believed. Every day, to a greater or lesser degree, he diced with Death. He didn't think of himself as a soldier, or a warrior knight on a bloodied charger, at least not in conscious terms, because Death was an enemy who never showed himself-but he was always there, even so. Every patient he treated had that enemy inside, or hovering about somewhere, and his job as a physician was to discover his hiding place, seek him out, and destroy him, and you saw the victory in the face of the patient, and you savored every one.
Sohaila was still unwell, but that would pass. She was on liquids now, and she was keeping them down. Still weak, she would grow no weaker. Her temperature was down. All her vital signs were either stabilized or heading back to normal. This was a victory. Death wouldn't claim this child. In the normal course of events, she would grow and play and learn and marry and have children of her own.
But it was a victory for which MacGregor could not really take credit, at least not all of it. His care for the child had been merely supportive, not curative. Had it helped? Probably, he told himself. You couldn't know where the line was between what would have happened on its own and what had made a real difference. Medicine would be far easier if its practitioners possessed that degree of sight, but they didn't yet and probably never would. Had he not treated her-well, in this climate, just the heat might have done it, or certainly the dehydration, or maybe some opportunistic secondary infection. People so often expired not from their primary ailment, but from something else