Executive orders - Tom Clancy [337]
Poor Ryan, he thought, standing by the window and sipping his coffee. In his country-for him it would always be the Soviet Union-this would never have happened. A few uniformed guards and a hard look would have driven people off, or if the look alone didn't, then there were other options. But not in America, where the media had all the freedom of a wolf in the Siberian pines-he nearly laughed at that thought, too. In America, wolves were a protected species. Didn't these fools know that wolves killed people?
Perhaps they will go away, Maria said, appearing at his side.
I think not.
Then we must stay inside until they do, his wife said, terrified at the development.
He shook his head. No, Maria.
But what if they send us back?
They won't. They can't. One doesn't do that with defectors. It's a rule, he explained. We never sent Philby, or Burgess, or MacLean back-drunks and degenerates. Oh, no, we protected them, bought them their liquor, and let them diddle with their perversions, because that's the rule. He finished his coffee and walked back to the kitchen to put the cup and saucer in the dishwasher. He looked at it with a grimace. His apartment in Moscow and his dacha in the Lenin Hills-probably renamed since his departure-hadn't had an appliance like that one. He'd had servants to do such things. No more. In America convenience was a substitute for power, and comfort the substitute for status.
Servants. It could all have been his. The status, the servants, the power. The Soviet Union could still have been a great nation, respected and admired across the world. He would have become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He could then have initiated the needed reforms to clear out the corruption and get the country moving again. He would probably have made a full rapprochement with the West, and made a peace, but a peace of equals it would have been, not a total collapse. He'd never been an ideologue, after all, though poor old Alexandrov had thought him so, since Gerasimov had always been a Party man-well, what else could you be in a one-party state? Especially if you knew that destiny had selected you for power.
But, no. Destiny had betrayed him, in the person of John Patrick Ryan, on a cold, snowy Moscow night, sitting, he recalled, in a streetcar barn, sitting in a resting tram. And so now he had comfort and security. His daughter would soon be married to what the Americans called old money, what other countries called the nobility, and what he called worthless drones-the very reason the Communist Party had won its revolution. His wife was content with her appliances and her small circle of friends. And his own anger had never died.
Ryan had robbed him of his destiny, of the sheer joy of power and responsibility, of being the arbiter of his nation's path-and then Ryan had taken to himself that same destiny, and the fool didn't know how to make use of it. The real disgrace was to have been done in by such a person. Well, there was one thing to be done, wasn't there? Gerasimov walked into the mud room that led out the back, selected a leather jacket, and walked outside. He thought for a moment. Yes, he'd light a cigarette, and just walk up the driveway to where they were, four hundred meters away. Along the way he would consider how to couch his remarks, and his gratitude to President Ryan. He'd never stopped studying America, and his observations on how the media thought would now stand him in good stead, he thought.
DID I WAKE you up, Skipper? Jones asked. It was about four in the morning at Pearl Harbor.
Not hardly. You know, my PAO is a woman, and she's pregnant. I hope all this crap doesn't put her into early labor. Rear Admiral (Vice Admiral selectee, now) Mancuso was at his desk, and his phone, on his instructions, wasn't ringing without a good reason. An old shipmate was