The sum of all fears - Tom Clancy [235]
So why are you looking out at the water at two in the morning, ace?
I've made a difference! Jack's mind raged.
Who knows? Who cares?
But what of my friends?
A whole lot of good they do you - besides, what friends? When's the last time you saw Skip Tyler or Robby Jackson? Your friends at Langley - why not confide your problems to them?
Dawn came as a surprise, but not so much a surprise as that he'd actually slept, sitting alone in the living room. Jack rose, feeling the aches in his muscles unhelped by whatever number of hours he'd not been awake. It hadn't been sleep, he told himself on the way to the bathroom. It was just that he hadn't been awake. Sleep was rest, and he felt singularly unrested, with a pounding headache from the cheap wine of the previous night. The only good news - if that's what it was - was that Cathy didn't get up. Jack fixed his own coffee and was waiting at the door when Clark drove up.
"Another great weekend, I see," the man said, as Ryan got into the car.
"Et tu, John?"
"Look, Deputy Director, you want to take a swing at me, go right ahead. You looked like shit a couple of months back and you're getting worse instead of better. When's the last time you took a vacation, got away for more than a day or two, you know, maybe pretended you were a real person instead of some fuckin' government ticket-puncher who's afraid that if he leaves nobody'll notice?"
"Clark, you do have a way of brightening my mornings."
"Hey, man, I'm just a SPO, but don't bitch if I take the "protective" part seriously, 'kay?" John pulled the car over and parked it. "Doc, I've seen this before. People burn out. You're burning out. You're burning the candle both ends and the middle. That's hard to do when you're in your twenties, and you ain't in your twenties anymore, in case nobody bothered telling you."
"I'm quite aware of the infirmities that come with age" Ryan tried a wry smile to show that it wasn't that big a deal, that Clark was overdoing it.
It didn't work. Suddenly it occurred to John that his wife hadn't been at the door. Trouble at home? Well, he couldn't ask about that, could he? What he saw in Ryan's face was bad enough. It wasn't just fatigue. He was tiring from within, all the shit he was taking from up the chain of command, the strain of backstopping Director Cabot on damned near everything that went out the front door. Cabot - not a bad guy, he meant well, but the truth of the matter was that he just didn't know what the hell he was doing. So Congress depended on Ryan, and the Operations and Intelligence Directorates depended on Ryan for leadership and coordination. He couldn't escape his responsibilities, and didn't have the good sense to realize that some were really things he could leave to others. The directorate chiefs could have taken up more of the slack, but they were letting Ryan do it all. A strong bark from the Deputy Director's office could have set that right, but would Cabot back him up - or would those White House pukes take it as a sign that Jack was trying a takeover?
Fuckin' polities! Clark thought as he pulled back onto the road Office politics Political politics. And some thing was wrong at home, too. Clark didn't know what, but he knew it was something.
Doc, you're too damned good a man for this!
"Can I lay a piece of advice on you?"
"Go ahead," Jack replied, looking through dispatches.
"Take two weeks, go to Disney World, Club Med, find a beach and walk it. Get the hell out of town for a while."
"The kids are in school."
"So take them out of school, for Christ's sake! Better yet, maybe, leave them and get away, you and your wife. No, you're not that kind. Take them to see Mickey."
"I can't. They're in school-"
"They're in grammar school not graduate school, Doc. Missing two weeks of long-division