Executive orders - Tom Clancy [352]
At the parties, people joked that it was a fad, like hula hoops, amusing to watch and soon to fade, but every so often one of them would worry. The tolerant smile would freeze on his or her face in mid-joke, and they'd wonder if something genuinely new might be happening.
No, nothing genuinely new ever happened here. Everybody knew that. The system had rules, and the rules had to be obeyed.
Even so, a few of them worried at their dinner parties in Georgetown. They had expensive houses to pay off, children to educate, and status to maintain. All had come from somewhere else, and none wanted to go back there.
It was just so outrageous. How did the newcomers expect to find out what they needed to, without lobbyists from the Network to guide and educate them-and didn't they represent the people, too? Weren't they paid to do exactly that? Didn't they tell the elected representatives-worse, these new ones weren't elected, they were all appointed, many of them by governors who, in their wish to get reelected themselves, had bowed to President Ryan's impassioned but utterly unrealistic televised speech. As though some new religion had broken out.
At the parties in Chevy Chase, many of them worried that the new laws these new senators would pass would be laws, just like the ones produced by the system, at least in their power if not in their wisdom. These new people could actually pass new laws without being helped. That was so genuinely new an idea as to be frightening. But only if you really believed it.
And then there were the House races, just about to start around the country, the special elections required to repopulate the People's House, as everyone liked to call it, which was Disneyland for lobbyists, so many meetings all in one convenient complex of buildings, 435 lawmakers and their staffs within a mere twenty acres. Polling data that had been reported mainly in local papers was now being picked up by the national media in shocked disbelief. There were people running who had never run for anything before; businessmen, community leaders who had never worked the system, lawyers, ministers, even some physicians. Some of them might win as they spewed forth neo-populist-type speeches about supporting the President and restoring America-a phrase that had gained wide currency. But America had never died, the Network people told themselves. They were still here, weren't they?
It was all Ryan's doing. He'd never been one of them. He'd actually said more than once that he didn't like being President!
Didn't like it?
How could any man-person to the Network Establishment in the new age of enlightenment-not like having the ability to do so much, to pass out so many favors, to be courted and flattered like a king of old?
Didn't like it?
Then he didn't belong, did he?
They knew how to handle that. Someone had already started it. Leaks. Not just from inside. Those were little people with lesser agendas. There was more. There was the big picture, and for that, access still counted, because the Network had many voices, and there were still ears to listen. There would be no plan and no conspiracy per se. It would all happen naturally, or as naturally as anything happened here. In fact, it had already begun.
FOR BADRAYN, AGAIN, it was time on his computer. The task, he learned, was time-critical. Such things often were, but the reason was new in this case. The travel time itself had to be minimized, rather than arranged in such a way as to meet a specific deadline or rendezvous. The limiting factor here was the fact that Iran was still something of an outlaw country with surprisingly little in the way of air travel options.
Flights with convenient times were astoundingly limited: KLM 534 to Amsterdam left just after one A.M., and arrived in Holland