Executive Orders Read online

  Another day shot to hell, the President thought. He turned to his bodyguard. “Night, Jeff.”

  “Good night, sir,” Agent Raman said outside the door to the master bedroom. Ryan nodded his farewell to the man, and Raman waited for the door to shut. Then he looked left and right at the other Detail agents. His right hand brushed against the service pistol under his jacket, and his eyes smiled in a private way, knowing what might so easily have been. Word had not come back. Well, his contact was doubtless being careful, as well he should. Aref Raman had the duty tonight as supervisor for the Detail. He walked up the corridor, nodding to the agents on post, asked one innocuous question, then headed down the elevator to the State Floor, and outside to get some air, stretch, and look at the perimeter guard posts, where, also, everything was quiet. There were some protesters in Lafayette Park across the street, this time of night huddled together, many of them smoking—exactly what he didn’t know but had suspicions. Maybe hashish? he wondered with a cryptic smile. Wouldn’t that be funny. Beyond that there were only the traffic sounds, a distant siren to the east, and people standing at their posts, trying to stay alert by talking about basketball, or hockey, or spring training for baseball, eyes sweeping outward, looking for dangers in the shadows of the city. The wrong place to look, Raman thought, turning back to head for the command post.

  “IS IT POSSIBLE to kidnap them?”

  “The two older ones, no, too inconvenient, too difficult, but the youngest, that is possible. It could be both dangerous and costly,” Movie Star warned.

  Badrayn nodded. That meant picking especially reliable people. Daryaei had such people. That was obvious from what had taken place in Iraq. He looked over the diagrams in silence for a few minutes while his guest stood to look out the window. The demonstration was still under way. Now they were shouting “Death to America!” The crowds and the cheerleaders who organized them had long experience with that particular mantra. Then his intelligence man came back.

  “What exactly,” Movie Star asked, “is the mission, Ali?”

  “The strategic mission would be to prevent America from interfering with us.” Badrayn looked up. Us now meant whatever Daryaei wanted it to mean.

  ALL NINE OF them, Moudi saw. He ran the antibody tests himself. He actually did each three times, and the tests were all positive. Every one of them was infected. For the sake of security, they were given drugs and told that they’d be all right—as they would until it was determined that the disease had been transmitted in its full virulence, not attenuated by reproduction in the previous set of hosts. Mainly they were dosed with morphine, the better to keep them quiet and stuporous. So first Benedict Mkusa, then Sister Jean Baptiste, then ten criminals, and now nine more. Twenty-two victims, if one also counted Sister Maria Magdalena. He wondered if Jean Baptiste was still praying for him in Paradise and shook his head.

  SOHAILA, DR. MACGREGOR thought, looking over his notes. She was ill, but she had stabilized. Her temperature had abated a whole degree. She was occasionally alert. He’d thought jet lag at first, until there had been blood in her vomit and stool, but that had stopped ... Food poisoning? That had seemed the likely diagnosis. She’d probably eaten the same things as the rest of her family, but it could have been one bad piece of meat, or maybe she’d done what every child did, and swallowed the wrong thing. It happened literally every week in every doctor’s office in the world, and was particularly common among the Western community in Khartoum. But she was from Iraq, too, just as Patient Saleh was. He’d rerun the antibody tests on the latter, and there was no doubt. The bodyguard fellow was gravely ill, and unless his immune system rallied itself—

  Children, MacGregor remembered, somewhat startled by the connection, have powerful immune systems, rather more so than adults had. Though every parent knew that every child could come down with a disease and high fever in a matter of hours, the reason was simply that children, as they grew, were exposed to all manner of ailments for the first time. Each organism attacked the child, and in each child the immune system fought back, generating antibodies which would forever defeat that particular enemy (measles, mumps, and all the rest) whenever it again appeared—and rapidly defeating it the first time in nearly all cases, which was why a child could spike a high fever one day and be out playing the next, another characteristic of childhood that first terrified and then vexed parents. The so-called childhood diseases were those defeated in childhood. An adult exposed to them for the first time was in far greater distress—mumps could render a healthy man impotent; chicken pox, a childhood annoyance, could kill adults; measles had killed off whole peoples. Why? Because for all its apparent frailty, the human child was one of the toughest organisms known to exist. Vaccines for the childhood diseases had been developed not to save the many, but the few who for whatever reason—probably genetic, but that was still being investigated—were unusually vulnerable. Even polio, a devastating neuro-muscular disease, had done permanent harm to only a fraction of its victims—but they were mostly children, and adults protected children with a ferocity usually associated with the animal kingdom—and properly so, MacGrcgor thought, because the human psyche was programmed to be solicitous to children—which was why so much scientific effort had been devoted to childhood disease over the years.... Where was this line of thought taking him? the doctor wondered. So often his brain went off on its own, as though wandering in a library of thoughts, searching for the right reference, the right connection ...

  Saleh had come from Iraq.

  Sohaila had also come from Iraq.

  Saleh had Ebola.

  Sohaila showed symptoms of flu, or food poisoning, or—

  But Ebola initially presented itself as flu ...

  “My God,” MacGregor breathed. He rose from his desk and his notes and walked to her room. Along the way he got a syringe and some vacuum tubes. There was the usual whining from the child about a needle, but MacGregor had a good touch, and it was all over before she was able to start crying, which problem he left to her mother, who’d slept overnight in the room.

  Why didn’t I run this test before? the young doctor raged at himself. Damn.

  “THEY ARE NOT officially here,” the foreign ministry official told the health department official. “What exactly is the problem?”

  “He seems to have Ebola virus.” That got the other man’s attention. His eyes blinked hard, and he leaned forward across his desk.

  “Are you certain?”

  “Quite,” the Sudanese physician confirmed with a nod. “I’ve seen the test data. The doctor on the case is Ian MacGregor, one of our British visitors. He’s actually a fine practitioner.”

  “Has anyone been told?”

  “No.” The doctor shook his head emphatically. “There is no cause to panic. The patient is fully isolated. The hospital staff know their business. We aresupposed to make the proper notifications to the World Health Organization, informing them of the case and—”

  “You are certain there is no risk of an epidemic?”

  “None. As I said, full isolation procedures are in place. Ebola is a dangerous disease, but we know how to deal with it,” the physician answered confidently.

  “Then why must you notify the WHO?”

  “In these cases, they dispatch a team to oversee the situation, to advise on procedures, and to look for the focal source of the infection so that—”

  “This Saleh chap, he didn’t catch the disease here, did he?”

  “Certainly not. If we had that problem here, I would know of it straightaway,” he assured his host.

  “So, there is no danger of spreading the disease, and he brought it in with him, so there is no question that there is a public-health danger to our country?”

  “Correct.”

  “I see.” The official turned to look out the window. The presence of the former Iraqi officers in Sudan was still a secret, and it was in his country’s interest to make sure it stayed that way. Keeping secrets meant keeping secre
ts from everyone. He turned back. “You will not notify the World Health Organization. If the presence of this Iraqi in our country became widely known, it would be a diplomatic embarrassment for us.”

  “That might be a problem. Dr. MacGregor is young and idealistic and—”

  “You tell him. If he objects, I will have someone else speak to him,” the official said, with a raised eyebrow. Such warnings, properly delivered, rarely failed to get someone’s attention.

  “As you wish.”

  “Will this Saleh fellow survive?”

  “Probably not. The mortality rate is roughly eight of ten, and his symptoms are advancing rapidly.”

  “Any idea how he contracted the disease?”

  “None. He denies ever having been in Africa before, but such people do not always speak the truth. I can speak with him further.”

  “That would be useful.”

  PRESIDENT EYES CONSERVATIVES FOR THE SUPREME COURT, the headline ran. The White House staff never sleeps, though this privilege is occasionally granted to POTUS. Copies of various papers arrived while the rest of the city slept, and staff workers would take one of the copies and scan it for items of particular interest to the government. Those stories would be clipped, pasted together, and photocopied for the Early Bird, an informal publication which allowed the powerful to find out what was happening or at least what the press thought was happening, which was sometimes true, sometimes false, and mainly in between.

  “We got a major leak,” one of them said, using an X-Acto knife to cut out the story from the Washington Post.

  “Look like it. Looks like it gets around, too,” her counterpart on the Times agreed.

  An internal Justice Department document lists the judges being reviewed by the Ryan administration for possible nomination to fill the nine vacant seats on the Supreme Court.

  Each of the jurists listed is a senior appeals court judge. The list is a highly conservative roster. Not a single judicial appointee from presidents Fowler or Durling is to be found on it.

  Ordinarily such nominees are first submitted to a committee of the American Bar Association, but in this case the list was prepared internally by senior career officials at the Justice Department, overseen by Patrick J. Martin, a career prosecutor and chief of the Criminal Division.

  “The press doesn’t like this.”

  “Think that’s bad? Check this editorial out. Boy, they really responded fast to this one.”

  THEY’D NEVER WORKED so hard on anything. The mission had turned into sixteen-hour days, not much beer in the evenings, hasty pre-cooked meals, and only a radio for entertainment. That had to be played loud at the moment. They had lead boiling. The rig was the same as that used by plumbers, a propane tank with a burner on top, like an inverted rocket being static-tested, and atop that was a metal pot filled with lead kept in a liquid state by the roaring flame. A ladle came with the pot and this was dipped, then poured into bullet molds. The latter were .58 caliber, 505-grain, made for muzzle-loading rifles, rather like what the original mountain men had carried west back in the 1820s. These had been ordered from catalogs. There were ten of the molds, with four cavities per mold.

  So far, Ernie Brown thought, things were going well, especially on the security side. Fertilizer was not a controlled substance. Neither was diesel fuel. Neither was lead, and every purchase had been made at more than one place, so that no single acquisition was so large as to cause comment.

  It was still time-consuming menial labor, but as Pete had remarked, Jim Bridger hadn’t come west by helicopter. No, he’d traveled the distance on horseback, doubtless with a packhorse or two, making maybe fifteen or twenty miles per day, then trapping his beaver one at a time, doing everything the hard way, the individual way, occasionally bumping into another of his kind and trading for jugged liquor or tobacco. So what they did was in the tradition of their kind. That was important.

  The timing worked out nicely. Pete was doing the ladle work now, and from the time he poured into the first mold-set until he poured the last, the first set hardened enough that, when dipped in water and opened—the two-piece tool was like a pair of pliers—the minié-ball-type projectiles were fully formed and solid. These were tossed into an empty oil drum, and the molds replaced in their holders. Ernie collected the spilled lead and dumped it back in the pot so that none would be wasted.

  The only hard part was getting the cement truck, but a search of local papers had found an auction sale for a contractor going out of business, and for a mere $21,000 they’d acquired a three-year-old vehicle with a Mack truck body, only 70,567.1 miles on the odometer, and in pretty good running shape. They’d driven that down at night, of course, and it was now parked in the barn, sitting twenty feet away, its headlights watching them like a pair of eyes.

  The work was menial and repetitive, but even that helped. Hanging on the barn wall was a map of downtown Washington, and as Ernie stirred the lead, he turned to look at it, his brain churning over the flat paper image and his own mental picture. He knew all the distances, and distance was the prime factor. The Secret Service thought it was pretty smart. They’d closed off Pennsylvania Avenue for the very purpose of keeping bombs away from the President’s house. Well, hell, weren’t they smart. They’d overlooked only one little thing.

  “BUT I HAVE TO,” MacGregor said. “We’re required to.”

  “You will not,” the health department official told him. “It is not necessary. The Index Patient brought the disease with him. You have initiated proper containment procedures. The staff are doing their job—you trained them well, Ian,” he added to assuage the heat of the moment. “It would be inconvenient for my country for this word to go out. I discussed it with the foreign ministry, and word will not go out. Is that clear?”

  “But—”

  “If you pursue this, we will have to ask you to leave the country.”

  MacGregor flushed. He had a pale, northern complexion, and his face too easily showed his emotional state. This bastard could and would make another telephone call, and he would have a policeman—so they called them here, though they were decidedly not the civilized, friendly sort he’d known in Edinburgh—come to his house to tell him to pack his things for the ride to the airport. It had happened before to a Londoner who’d lectured a government official a little too harshly about AIDS dangers. And if he left, he’d be leaving patients behind, and that was his vulnerability, as the official knew, and as MacGregor knew that he knew. Young and dedicated, he looked after his patients as a doctor should, and leaving them to another’s care wasn’t something he could do easily, not here, not when there were just too few really competent physicians for the patient load.

  “How is Patient Saleh?”

  “I doubt he will survive.”

  “That is unfortunate, but it cannot be helped. Do we have any idea how this man was exposed to the disease?”

  The younger man flushed again. “No, and that’s the point!”

  “I will speak to him myself.”

  Bloody hard thing to do from three meters away, MacGregor thought. But he had other things to think about.

  Sohaila had tested positive for antibodies also. But the little girl was getting better. Her temperature was down another half a degree. She’d stopped her GI bleeding. MacGregor had rerun a number of tests, and baselined others. Patient Sohaila’s liver function was nearly normal. He was certain she’d survive. Somehow she’d been exposed to Ebola, and somehow she’d defeated it—but without knowing the former, he could only guess at the reason for the latter. Part of him wondered if Sohaila and Saleh had been exposed in the same way—no, not exactly. As formidable as a child’s immune defenses were, they were not all that much more powerful than a healthy adult’s, and Saleh showed no underlying health problems. But the adult was surely dying while the child was going to live. Why?

  What other factors had entered into the two cases? There was no Ebola outbreak in Iraq—there had never been such a thing, and in a po
pulous country like that—didn’t Iraq have a bio-war program? Could they have had an outbreak and hushed it up? But, no, the government of that country was in turmoil. So said the SkyNews service he had at his apartment, and in such circumstances secrets like this could not be kept. There would be panic.

  MacGregor was a doctor, not a detective. The physicians who could do both worked for the World Health Organization, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and at CDC in America. Not so much brighter than he as more experienced and differently trained.

  Sohaila. He had to manage her case, keep checking her blood. Could she still infect others? MacGregor had to check the literature on that. All he knew for sure was that one immune system was losing and another was winning. If he were to figure anything out, he had to stay on the case. Maybe later he could get the word out, but he had to stay here to accomplish anything.

  Besides, before telling anyone, he had gotten the blood samples out to Pasteur and CDC. This strutting bureaucrat didn’t know that, and the phone calls, if they came, would come to this hospital and to MacGregor. He could get some word out. He could tell them what the political problem was. He could ask some questions, and relay others. He had to submit.

  “As you wish, Doctor,” he told the official. “You will, of course, follow the necessary procedures.”

  31

  RIPPLES AND WAVES

  THE PAYOFF WAS THIS morning, and again President Ryan suffered through the ordeal of makeup and hair spray.

  “We should at least have a proper barber chair,” Jack observed while Mrs. Abbot did her duty. He’d just learned the day before that the presidential barber came to the Oval Office and did his job at the President’s swivel chair. That must be a real treat for the Secret Service, he thought, having a man with scissors and a straight razor an inch from his carotid artery. “Okay, Arnie, what do I do with Mr. Donner?”