Dead or Alive (30 page)

“You could say the same thing about me,” Ryan pointed out.

“True, but you listen, and mostly you know what you don’t know.”

“Arnie, I
like
the life I have now. I have work to keep me busy, but I don’t have to run my ass off. I don’t have to watch every single word I say for fear of offending people who don’t like me anyway. I can walk around the house without my shoes on, and without wearing a tie.”

“You’re bored.”

“I’ve earned the right to be bored.” Ryan paused, took a sip of coffee, then tried to change the subject: “What’s Pat Martin doing now?”

“He doesn’t want to be AG again,” van Damm responded. “He’s teaching law at Notre Dame. He does seminars for newly frocked judges, too.”

“Why not Harvard or Yale?” Ryan wondered.

“Harvard wouldn’t have him. They’d like the idea of a former Attorney General there, of course, but not yours. Pat wouldn’t go there anyway. He’s a football fan, big-time. Harvard plays football, but not like the Dame.”

“I remember,” Jack admitted. “They wouldn’t even play us upstart Catholics at Boston College.” And the BC Eagles occasionally got to beat Notre Dame, when the Fates allowed.

“Willing to think about it?” Arnie asked.

“The United States of America chooses her own Presidents, Arnie.”

“That’s true, but it’s like a restaurant with a short menu. You can only choose from what the cook’s cooking, and you can’t leave and go to Wendy’s if you’re not happy with the selection.”

“Who’s sending you?”

“People talk to me. Mostly of your political persuasion—”

Jack cut him off with a raised hand. “I’m not a registered anything, remember?”

“That ought to make the Socialist Workers Party happy. So run as an Independent. Start your own party. Teddy Roosevelt did.”

“And lost.”

“Better to try and fail than—”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“The country needs you. Kealty is already shitting himself. He has his opposition research people digging into you right now. Haven’t you heard?”

“Bullshit.”

“They’ve been at it for almost a month. Georgetown’s got them worried. I’m telling you, Jack, we need to grab this thing while we can.” Ryan started shaking his head. “Listen, you didn’t plan it. People are all over the story because your numbers are still high.”

“Goddamn sympathy votes—”

“It won’t play out that way, believe me, but as far as grand entrances go, this one is golden. So: Got any dirty laundry out there?”

“Nothing you don’t know about.” But Jack managed to pull off that lie. Only Pat Martin knew about that particular legacy Ryan had left behind. He’d never even told Robby. “I’m too dull to be a politician. Maybe that’s why the media never liked me.”

“Those opposition research people will have access to everything, Jack, even CIA documents. You must have left some nasty things behind,” van Damm persisted. “Everybody does.”

“Depends on interpretation, I suppose. But revealing any of it would be a federal felony. How many political pukes would risk that?”

“You’re still a babe in the woods, Jack. Aside from being videotaped raping a girl or diddling a young boy, there isn’t much a politician would not risk for the Presidency.”

“That brings up a question I can’t quite get my head around: Does Kealty like being President?”

“He probably doesn’t even know himself. Is he doing a good job? No, not really. But he doesn’t even know that. He thinks he’s doing as well as any man could, and better than most. He likes playing the game. He likes answering the phone. He likes having people come to him when they have a problem. He likes being the guy who answers the questions, even when he doesn’t have a clue what the answer is. Remember what Mel Brooks said? ‘It’s good to be the king,’ even if the king is a total fuckup. He wants to be there, and for nobody else to be there, because he’s been a politician all his life. It’s Mount Everest, and he climbed up it because it’s there, and so what if you get to the top and there’s nothing you can do there? It’s there, and you’re on top of it, and nobody else is. Would he kill for the job? Probably, if he had the guts. But he doesn’t. He’d have one of his troops do it, deniably, with no written records. You can always find people who do that sort of thing for you, and you kiss them off if they get caught.”

“I never—”

“That guy John Clark. He’s killed people, and the reasons for it would not always have stood the test of public scrutiny. You have to do that sort of thing when you run a whole country, and fine, maybe it’s technically legal, but you keep it secret because it wouldn’t look good on the front page of the paper. If you left anything like that behind, Kealty will make it public, through intermediaries and carefully structured leaks.”

“If it came to that, I could handle it,” Ryan said coolly. He’d never reacted well to threats and had rarely issued them, not without a lot of gun in his holster. But Kealty would never let that happen. Like too many “great” men, and like very many political figures indeed, he was a coward. Cowards were the first to resort to a show of force. It was the sort of power that some men found intoxicating. Ryan had always found it frightening, but Ryan had never had to pull that gun out of the holster without grave cause. “Arnie, I’m not afraid of anything that bastard can throw at me, if it comes to that. But why should it come to that?”

“Because the country needs you, Jack.”

“I tried to fix it. I had the best part of five years, and I failed.”

“System’s too corrupt, eh?”

“I got a decent Congress. Most of them were okay—the ones who’ve gone back home because of campaign promises. Hell, those were the honest ones, weren’t they? Congress is much improved, but the President sets the national tone, and I couldn’t change that. Christ knows I tried.”

“Callie Weston wrote you some good speeches. You might have made a good priest.” Arnie leaned back and finished his coffee. “You did make an earnest effort, Jack. But it wasn’t enough.”

“So you want me to try again. When you bash your head against a stone wall, the squishy sound gets kinda depressing after a while.”

“Have Cathy’s friends found a cure for cancer yet?”

“No.”

“Have they stopped trying?”

“No,” Jack had to admit.

“Because it’s worth doing even if it’s impossible?”

“Playing with the laws of science is easier than amending human nature.”

“Okay, you can always just sit here and watch CNN and read the paper and bitch.”

And I do a lot of that,
Jack didn’t have to admit. The thing about Arnie was that he knew how to manipulate Ryan the same way a four-year-old girl could manipulate her father. Effortlessly and innocently. About as innocently as Bonnie and Clyde in a bank, of course, but Arnie knew how it was done.

“I’ll say it again, Jack. Your country—”

“And I’ll ask you again: Who sent you?”

“Why do you think somebody sent me?”

“Arnie.”

“Nobody, Jack. I mean it. I’m retired, too, remember?”

“Do you miss the action?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll tell you this: I used to think that politics was the highest form of human activity, but you cured me of that. You have to stand for something. Kealty doesn’t. He just wants to be the President of the United States because he figures he was in the line of succession, and it was his turn. At least that’s how he sees it.”

“So you’d jump with me?” Ryan asked.

“I’ll be there to help, and to advise you, and maybe you’ll listen to the voice of reason a little better this time around.”

“This terrorism thing—it’s too big a job for four years.”

“Agreed. You can reestablish your program for rebuilding the CIA. Beef up the recruitment program, get operations back on track. Kealty has crippled it, but he hasn’t completely destroyed it.”

“It would take a decade. Maybe more.”

“Then you get it back on track, step aside, and let somebody else finish it.”

“Most of my cabinet members won’t be coming back.”

“So what? Find new ones,”Arnie observed coldly. “The country’s full of talented people. Find some honest ones and work your Jack Ryan magic.”

Ryan Senior snorted at this. “It’ll be a long campaign.”

“Your first real one. Four years ago you were running for coronation, and it worked. It was disgustingly easy, flying around and giving speeches to uniformly friendly crowds—most of whom just wanted to see who they were voting for. With Kealty, it’ll be different. You’ll even have to debate him—and don’t underestimate him. He’s a skilled political operator, and he knows how to hit low,” Arnie warned. “You’re not used to that.”

Ryan sighed. “You’re a son-of-a-bitch, you know that? If you want me to commit to this, you’re going to be disappointed. I’ll have to think it over. I do have a wife and four kids.”

“Cathy will agree. She’s a lot tougher and a lot smarter than people realize,” van Damm noted. “You know what Kealty said last week?”

“What’s that?”

“On national health care. Some local TV crew in Baltimore interviewed her. She must have had a weak moment and said that she didn’t think government health care was a very good idea. Kealty’s reaction was, ‘What the hell does a doctor know about health-care issues?’”

“How come that didn’t make the papers?” It was delightfully juicy, after all.

“Anne Quinlan is Ed’s Chief of Staff. She managed to talk the
Times
out of putting it in print. Anne is no dummy. The managing editor up in New York is an old friend of hers.”

“How is it that they always bagged me when I put my foot in it?” Ryan demanded.

“Jack, Ed is one of them. You, on the other hand, are not. Don’t you ever cut your friends some slack? So do they. They’re human beings, too.” Arnie’s demeanor was more relaxed now. He’d won his main battle. It was time for magnanimity.

Having to think of reporters as human beings was enough of a stretch for Ryan at the moment.

N
EARLY A QUARTER of the world’s supply of heavy-lift cranes, Badr thought, staring out over Port Rashid. Thirty thousand of the world’s 125,000 cranes, all gathered in one place and for one purpose—to turn Dubai into the jewel of the planet and a paradise for the wealthiest of its inhabitants.

From where he stood he could see offshore the Palm and World islands—vast man-made archipelagoes, one in the shape of the tree itself, the other the earth—as well as the Burj Al Arab hotel, a 1,000-plus-foot-tall spire in the shape of a giant sail.

Inland, the city was a sea of skyscrapers and crisscrossing highways and construction equipment. And in another five years, attractions would continue to pop up across the landscape: the Dubai Waterfront, a crescent extending some fifty miles into the ocean; the Hydropolis Underwater Hotel; the Sports City and ski dome complexes; Space Science World. In less than a decade, Dubai had gone from what many considered little more than a desolate backwater speck on the map to one of the world’s top resort destinations, a playground for the super-rich. Before long, Badr thought, Dubai’s amenities and attractions would outpace even those of Las Vegas. Or perhaps not, Badr reminded himself. The global economic crisis had hit the UAE as well. Many of the cranes looming over the city were, in fact, still, as construction projects had ground to a halt. Badr suspected this was the hand of Allah. Such decadence in an Arab country was unthinkable.

“Magnificent, isn’t it?” Badr heard behind him, and he turned around.

“My apologies for being late,” the real-estate agent said. “As you’ve probably noticed, construction can be something of a nuisance. Mr. Almasi, yes?”

Badr nodded. It was not his name, of course, and the agent probably suspected as much, but another of Dubai’s many admirable traits was a universal respect for discretion and anonymity among its army of bankers, brokers, and agents. Business was business and money was money, and each was held in greater esteem than arbitrary and wholly subjective codes of conduct.

“Yes,” Badr replied. “Thank you for meeting me.”

“Not at all. This way, please.”

The agent walked to a nearby electric golf cart. Badr got in, and they started down the pier.

“You probably noticed the dock is not concrete,” the agent said.

“I did.” In fact, the surface had a slightly terra-cotta hue to it.

“It’s a composite material—something akin to synthetic decking material, I’m told, but much stronger and durable, and the color will hold for a lifetime. The designers thought it a more attractive alternative to standard gray concrete.”

They stopped before a warehouse at the far end and got out. “You mentioned the need for privacy,” the agent said. “Will this do?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“As you can see, it’s a corner unit, with water-access points at the front and the side. Enough to accommodate two ships of three hundred feet each. Of course, tracked derricks are available for lease, should you require them.”