Executive orders - Tom Clancy [389]
What do you mean?
The man you go to meet, he is dangerous. He has the look of one who sees what we do not.
You've worked the country? John asked.
I have traveled through the country, yes.
And? This was Chavez.
And I have never understood them.
Yeah, Clark agreed. I know what you're saying.
An interesting man, your President, the Frenchman said again, and it was pure curiosity, actually an endearing thing to see in the eyes of an intelligence officer.
John looked right in those eyes and decided to thank the man for his warning, one pro to another. Yeah, he is. He's one of us, Clark assured him.
And those entertaining stories?
I cannot say. Delivered with a smile. Of course they're true. You think reporters have the wit to make such things up?
Both men were thinking the same thing, and both men knew it, though neither could speak it aloud: A shame we cannot get together some evening for a dinner and some stories. But it just wasn't done.
On the way back, I will offer you a drink.
On the way back, I will have it.
Ding just listened and watched. The old bastard still had it, and there were still lessons to learn from how he did it. Nice to have a friend, he said five minutes later on the way to the French aircraft.
Better than a friend, a pro. You listen to people like him, Domingo.
NOBODY HAD EVER said that governance was easy, even for those who invoked the word of God for nearly everything. The disappointment, even for Daryaei, who'd been governing Iran for nearly twenty years in one capacity or another, was in all the petty administrative rubbish that reached his desk and took from his time. He'd never grasped that it was almost entirely his fault. His rule was fair by his own reckoning, but harsh by most others. Most violations of the rules mandated death for the miscreant, and even small administrative errors on the part of bureaucrats could entail the end of a career-that degree of mercy depended on the magnitude of the error, of course. A bureaucrat who said no to everything, noting that the law was clear on an issue, whether it was or not, rarely got into trouble. One who broadened the scope of the government's power over the most minor of day-to-day activities was merely adding to the scope of Daryaei's rule. Such decisions came easily and caused little in the way of difficulty to the arbiter in question.
But real life wasn't that simple. Practical questions of commerce, for example, just the way in which the country did business in everything from the sale of melons to the honking of auto horns around a mosque required a certain degree of judgment, because the Holy Koran hadn't anticipated every situation, and neither had the civil law been based upon it. But to liberalize anything was a major undertaking, because any liberalization of any rule might be seen as a theological error-this in a country where apostasy was a capital crime. And so the lowest-level bureaucrats, when stuck with the necessity of saying yes to a request, from time to time, tended to hem and haw and kick things upstairs, which gave a higher-level official the chance to say no, which came just as easily to them after a career of doing so, but with somewhat greater authority, somewhat greater responsibility, and far more to lose in the event that someone higher still disagreed with the rare and erroneous yes decision. All that meant was that such calls kept perking up the pyramid. In between Daryaei and the bureaucracy was a council of religious leaders (he'd been a member under Khomeini), and a titular parliament, and experienced officials, but, disappointingly to the new UIR's religious leader, the principle held, and he found himself dealing with such weighty issues as the business hours for markets, the price of petrol, and the educational syllabus of grade-school females. The sour expression he'd adopted for such trivial issues