The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [43]
"Caught that one on TV last week. Bad."
The Secret Service agent nodded. "The way the subjects killed the cops, both in the back of the head, that was pretty ruthless, but there's people out there like that. Anyway, Director Murray decided to handle that one with a Roving Inspector out of Headquarters Division, and that usually means Pat gets to go do it."
"Tell him to be careful," Ryan said. Inspector Pat O'Day had saved his daughter's life less than a year before, and that act had earned him undying Presidential solicitude.
"Every day, sir," Special Agent Price-O'Day made clear.
"Okay, what's the schedule look like?" His "business" appointments were on his desk already. Andrea Price-O'Day filled him in every morning, after his national-security briefing from Ben Goodley.
"Nothing unusual until after lunch. National Chamber of Commerce delegation at one-thirty, and then at three the Detroit Red Wings, they won the Stanley Cup this year. Photo op, TV pukes and stuff, take about twenty minutes or so."
"I ought to let Ed Foley do that one. He's the hockey fanatic—"
"He's a Caps fan, sir, and the Red Wings swept the Caps four straight in the finals. Director Foley might take it personally," Price-O'Day observed with half a smile.
"True. Well, last year we got the jerseys and stuff for his son, didn't we?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good game, hockey. Maybe I ought to catch a game or two. Trouble to arrange that?"
"No, sir. We have standing agreements with all the local sports facilities. Camden Yards even has that special box for us—they let us help design it, the protective stuff, that is."
Ryan grunted. "Yeah, I have to remember all the people who'd like to see me dead."
"My job to think about that, sir, not yours," Price-O'Day told him.
"Except when you won't let me go shopping or to a movie." Neither Ryan nor his family was entirely used to the restrictions imposed on the life of the President of the United States or his immediate family members. It was getting especially tough on Sally, who'd started dating (which was hard on her father), and dating was difficult with a lead car and a chase car (when the young gentleman drove himself) or an official car with a driver and a second armed agent up front (when he did not), and guns all over the place. It tended to restrain the young gentlemen in question—and Ryan hadn't told his daughter that this was just fine with him, lest she stop speaking to him for a week or so. Sally's Principal Agent, Wendy Merritt, had proven to be both a good Secret Service agent and a superb big sister of sorts. They spent at least two Saturdays per month shopping with a reduced detail—actually it wasn't reduced at all, but it appeared so to Sally Ryan when they went out to Tyson's Corner or the Annapolis Mall for the purpose of spending money, something for which all women seemed to have a genetic predisposition. That these shopping expeditions had been planned days in advance, with every site scouted by the Secret Service, and a supplementary detail of young agents selected for their relative invisibility who showed up there an hour before SHADOW's arrival, had never occurred to Sally Ryan. That was just as well, as the dating problems grated on her badly enough, along with being followed around St. Mary's School in Annapolis by the rifle squad, as she sometimes termed it. Little Jack, on the other hand, thought it was pretty neat, and had recently learned to shoot at the Secret Service Academy in Beltsville, Maryland, with his father's permission (and something he'd not allowed the press to learn, lest he get hammered on the front page of The New York Times for the social indiscretion of encouraging his own son to touch, much less actually to fire, something so inherently evil as a pistol!). Little Jack's Principal Agent was a kid named Mike Brennan, a South Boston Irishman, a third-generation Secret Service agent with fiery red hair and a ready laugh, who'd played baseball at Holy Cross and frequently played catch and pepper with the President's son on the South Lawn of the White