Since then, he'd done as he'd been told. Nothing. Blend in. Disappear. Remember your mission, but do nothing. It was gratifying for the Ayatollah that he'd judged the boy well, for now he knew from the brief message that the mission was almost fully accomplished.
The word assassin is itself derived from hashshash, the Arabic word for the narcotic hashish, the tool once used by members of the Nizari subsect of Islam to give themselves a drug-induced vision of Paradise prior to setting out on missions of murder. In fact, they'd been heretics to Daryaei's way of thinking—and the use of drugs was an abomination. They'd been weak-minded but effective servants of a series of master terrorists such as Hasan and Rashid ad-Din, and, for a time that stretched between two centuries, had served the political balance of power in a region stretching from Syria to Persia. But there was a brilliance in the concept which had fascinated the cleric since learning of it as a boy. To get one faithful agent inside the enemy's camp. It was the task of years, and for that reason a task of faith. Where the Nizaris had failed was that they were heretics, separate from the True Faith, able to recruit a few extremists into their cult, but not the multitude, and so they served a single man and not Allah, and so they needed drugs to fortify themselves, as an unbeliever did with liquor. A brilliant idea flawed. But a brilliant idea nonetheless. Daryaei had merely perfected it, and so now he had a man close, something he'd hoped for but not known. Better yet, he had a man close and waiting for instructions, at the far end of an unknown message path that had never been used, all composed of people who'd gone abroad no more recently than fifteen years ago, an altogether better state of affairs than that which he'd set in place in Iraq, for in America people who might be scrutinized were either arrested or cleared, or if they were watched, only for a little while, until the watchers became bored and went on to other tasks. In some countries when that happened, the watchers became bored, picked up those whom they watched, and frequently killed them. So it was just timing before Raman completed his mission, and after all these years, he still used his head, un-addled by drugs and trained by the Great Satan himself. The news was too sublime even to occasion a smile. Then the phone rang. The private one. "Yes?" "I have good news," the director said, "from the Monkey Farm."
"YOU KNOW, ARNIE, you were right," Jack said, in the breezeway to the West Wing. "It was great to get the hell out of here."
The chief of staff noted the spring in his step, but didn't get overly excited about it. Air Force One had brought the President back in time for a quiet dinner with his family instead of the usual rigors of three or four such speeches, endless hours of schmoozing with major contributors, and the usual four-hour night that resulted—and that, often enough, in the aircraft—followed by a quick shower and a working day artificially extended by the revelries in the hustings. It was remarkable, he thought, that any President was able to do any work at all. The real duties of the office were difficult enough, and those were almost always subordinated to what was little more than public relations, albeit a necessary function in a democracy, in which the people needed to see the President doing more than sitting at his desk and doing… his work. The presidency was a job which one could love without liking it, a phrase seemingly contradictory until you came here and saw it.
"You did just fine," van Damm said. "The stuff on TV was perfect, and the segment NBC ran with your wife was okay, too."
"She didn't like it. She didn't think they used her best line," Ryan reported lightly.
"Could have been a lot worse." They didn't ask her about abortion, Arnie thought. To keep that from happening, he'd used up a few large markers with NBC, and made sure that Tom Donner had been treated at least as well as a senator, maybe even a Cabinet member, on the flight the previous day, including a rare taped segment in flight. The following week, Donner would be the first network anchor to have a one-on-one with the President in the upstairs sitting room, and for that there was no agreement on the scope of the questions, meaning that Ryan would have to be briefed for hours to make sure he didn't step on the presidential crank. But for now the chief of staff allowed his President to bask in the afterglow of what had been a pretty good day in the Midwest, whose real mission, aside from getting Ryan out of Washington and so get a feel for what the presidency really was, was to have him look like a President, and further marginalize that bastard Kealty.
The Secret Service people were as upbeat as their President, as they so often drew their mood from POTUS, returning his smiles and nods with spoken greetings of their own: "Good morning, Mr. President!" repeated by four of them as Ryan passed, finding his way to the Oval Office.
"Good morning, Ben," Ryan said cheerily, heading to his desk and falling into the comfortable swivel chair. "Tell me how the world looks."
"We may have a problem. The PRC navy's putting to sea," the acting National Security Advisor said. The Secret Service had just assigned him a code name, CARD-SHARP.
"And?" Ryan asked, annoyed that the morning might be spoiled.
"And it looks like a major fleet exercise, and they're saying there will be live-fire missile shoots. No reaction from Taipei yet."
"They don't have elections or anything coming up, do they?" Jack asked.
Goodley shook his head. "No, not for another year. The ROC has continued to spend money with the UN, and they're quietly lobbying a lot of countries in case they go through with a request for representation, but nothing remarkable about that, either. Taipei is playing its cards close to the vest, and not making any noise to offend the mainland. Their commercial relationship is stable. In short, we have no explanation for the exercise."
"What do we have in the area?"
"One submarine in the Formosa Strait, keeping an eye on a Chinese SSN."
"Carriers?" "Nothing closer than the Indian Ocean. Stennis is back in Pearl for engine repairs, along with Enterprise, and they'll be there for a while. The cupboard is still pretty bare." CARDSHARP reminded the President what he had himself said to his President only months before.
"What about their army?" the President asked next.
"Again, nothing new. We have higher-than-usual levels of activity, like the Russians said, but that's been going on for a while." Ryan leaned back in his chair and contemplated a cup of decaf. He'd found on his speechifying trip that his stomach really did feel better that way, and remarked on it to Cathy, who'd merely smiled and said / told you so! "Okay, Ben, speculate."