Executive orders - Tom Clancy [331]
And that's the last word. Thank you, Mr. President.
Jack barely waited for the camera lights to go off a final time before unclipping the microphone from his tie and standing. The two reporters didn't say a word. Cathy glared at them.
Why did you do that?
Excuse me? Donner replied.
Why do people like you always attack people like us? What have we done to deserve it? My husband is the most honorable man I know.
All we do is ask questions.
Don't give me that! The way you ask them and the questions you choose, you give the answers before anyone has a chance to say anything.
Neither reporter responded to that. The Ryans left without another word. Then Arnie came in. Okay, he observed, who set this up?
THEY GUTTED HIM like a fish, Holbrook thought aloud. They were due for some time off, and it was always a good thing to know your enemy.
This guy's scary, Ernie Brown thought, considering things a little more deeply. At least, politicians you can depend on to be crooks. This guy, Jesus, he's going to try to-we're talking a police state here, Pete.
It was actually a frightening thought for the Mountain Man. He'd always thought that politicians were the worst thing in creation, but suddenly he realized that they were not. Politicians played the power game because they liked it, liked the idea of power and jerking people around because it made them feel big. Ryan was worse. He thought it was right.
God damn, he breathed. The court he wants to appoint
They made him look like a fool, Ernie.
No, they didn't. Don't you get it? They were playing their game.
* * *
34 - REBOUNDS
THE EDITORIALS WERE established by front-page stories in every major paper. In the more enterprising of them, there were even photographs of Marko Ramius's house-it turned out that he was away at the moment-and that of the Gerasimov family-he was home, but a security guard managed to persuade people to leave, after getting his own photo shot a few hundred times.
Donner came into work very early, and was actually the most surprised by all of that. Plumber walked into his office five minutes later, holding up the front page of the New York Times.
So who rolled whom, Tom?
What do you-
That's a little weak, Plumber observed acidly. I suppose after you walked out of the meeting, Kealty's people had another little kaffeeklatsch. But you've trapped everybody, haven't you? If it ever gets out that your tape wasn't-
It won't, Donner said. And all this coverage does is make our interview look better.
Better to whom? Plumber demanded on his way out the door. It was early in the day for him, too, and his first irrelevant thought of the day was that Ed Murrow would never have used hair spray.
DR. GUS LORENZ finished his morning staff meeting early. Spring was coming early to Atlanta. The trees and bushes were budding, and soon the air would be filled with the fragrances of all the flowering plants for which the southern city was so famous-and a lot of pollen, Gus thought, which would get his sinuses all stuffed, but it was a fair trade for living in a vibrant and yet gracious southern city. With the meeting done, he donned his white lab coat and headed off to his own special fiefdom in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC (and P had never been added to the acronym) was one of the government's crown jewels, an elite agency that was one of the world's important