"Are you sure about the thing at State?" the New York Times asked.
Kealty nodded. "Positive, hundred percent. You mean you people haven't—come on, are you doing your job?" he asked tiredly. "In the middle of a Mideast crisis, he has the FBI harassing the most senior people we have, trying to accuse them of stealing a letter that was never there."
"And now," Kealty's chief of staff added, seeming to speak out of turn, "we have the Washington Post about to run a canonization piece on Ryan."
"Wait a minute," the Post reporter said, straightening his back, "that's Bob Holtzman, not my doing. I told my AME that it wasn't a good idea."
"Who's the leak?" Kealty asked.
"I don't have a clue. Bob never lets that out. You know that."
"So what is Ryan doing at CIA? He wants to triple the Directorate of Operations—the spies. Just what the country needs, right? What is Ryan doing?" Kealty asked rhetorically. "Beefing up defense. Rewriting the tax code to benefit the fat cats. And taking CIA back to the days of the Cold War. We're going back to the 1950s—why?" Kealty demanded. "Why is he doing all this? What is he thinking about? Am I the only one in this city asking questions? When are you people going to do your job? He's trying to bully Congress, and succeeding, and where is the media? Who's protecting the people out there?"
"What are you saying, Ed?" the Times asked.
The gesture of frustration was done with consummate skill. "I'm standing in my own political grave here. I have nothing to gain by this, but I can't just stand by and do nothing. Even if Ryan has the entire power of our government behind him, I can't just let him and his cronies try to concentrate all of the power of our government in a few hands, increase their own ability to spy on us, load the tax system in such a way as to further enrich people who've never paid their fair share, reward the defense industry—what's next, trashing the civil rights laws? He's flying his wife to work every day, and you people haven't even remarked that that's never happened before. This is an imperial presidency like Lyndon Johnson never dreamed of, without a Congress to do anything about it. You know what we have here now?" Kealty gave them a moment. "King Jack the First. Somebody's supposed to care about that. Why is it that you people don't?"
"What do you know about the Holtzman piece?" the Boston Globe wanted to know.
"Ryan has a lively history in CIA. He's killed people."
"James fucking Bond," Kealty's chief of staff said on cue. The Post reporter then had to defend his publication's honor:
"Holtzman doesn't say that. If you mean the time the terrorists came to—"
"No, not that. Holtzman's going to write about the Moscow thing. Ryan didn't even set that up. It was Judge Arthur Moore, when he was DCI. Ryan was the front man. It's bad enough anyway. It interfered with the inner workings of the old Soviet Union, and it never occurred to anyone that maybe that wasn't such a great idea—I mean, what the hell, right, screwing around with the government of a'country with ten thousand warheads pointed at us—you know, people, that's called an act of war, like? And why? To rescue their head thug from a purge for stepping over the line so that we could crack a spy ring inside CIA. I bet he didn't tell Holtzman that, did he?"
"I haven't seen the story," the Post reporter admitted. "I've only heard a few things." It was almost worthy of a smile. Kealty's sources inside the paper were better than those of the senior political reporter. "Okay, you say Ryan has killed people like James Bond. Support that," he said in a flat voice.
"Four years ago, remember the bombs in Colombia, took out some cartel members?" Kealty waited for the nod. "That was a CIA operation. Ryan went to Colombia—and that was another act of war, people. That's two that I know about."
It was amusing to Kealty that Ryan was so skillfully conniving at his own destruction. The PLAN BLUE move within CIA was already rippling through the Directorate of Intelligence, many of whose senior people faced either early retirement or the diminution of their bureaucratic empires, and many of those enjoyed walking the corridors of power. It was easy for them to think that they were vital
to the security of their country, and thinking that, they had to do something, didn't they? More than that, Ryan had stepped on a lot of bureaucratic toes at Langley, and now it was payback time, all the better that he was a higher target than ever before, that the sources were, after all, merely talking to the former Vice President of the United States— maybe even the real President, they could say—and not to the media, which was, after all, against the law, as opposed to a legitimate discussion of vital national policy.
"How sure of that are you?" the Globe asked.
"I have dates. Remember when Admiral James Greer died? He was Ryan's mentor. He probably set up the operation from his deathbed. Ryan didn't attend the funeral. He was in Colombia then. That's a fact, and you can check it," Kealty insisted. "Probably that's why James Cutter committed suicide—"
"I thought that was an accident," the Times said. "He was out jogging, and—"
"And he just happened to step in front of a transit bus? Look, I'm not saying that Cutter was murdered. I am saying that he was implicated in the illegal operation that Ryan was running, and he didn't want to face the music. That gave Jack Ryan the chance to cover his tracks. You know," Kealty concluded, "I've underestimated this Ryan fellow. He's as slick an operator as this town has seen since Alien Dulles, maybe Bill Donovan—but the time for that is past. We don't need a CIA with three times as many spies. We don't need to pile more dollars into defense. We don't need to redraft the tax code to protect the millionaires Ryan hangs out with. For sure we don't need a President who thinks the 1950s were just great. He's doing things to our country which we cannot allow to happen. I don't know" — another gesture of frustration— "maybe I have to go it all alone on this. I'm—I know I risk ruining my reputation for all history, standing up like this… but, damn it, once I swore an oath to the Constitution of our country… first time," he went on in a quiet, reflective voice, "when I won my first House seat… then into the Senate… and then when Roger asked me to step up and be his Vice President. You know, you don't forget that sort of thing… an', an', an' maybe I'm not the right guy for this, okay? Yes, I've done some pretty awful things, betrayed my wife, lived in a bottle for so many years. The American people probably deserve somebody better than me to stand up and do what's right… but I'm all there is, and I can't—I can't break faith with the people who sent me to this town, no matter what it costs. Ryan is not the President of the United States. He knows that. Why else is he trying to change so many things so fast? Why is he trying to bully the senior people at State into lying? Why is he playing with abortion rights? Why is he playing with the tax code through this plutocrat Win-ston? He's trying to buy it. He's going to continue to bully Congress until the fat cats try to have him elected king or something. I mean, who represents ihepeople right now?"
"I just don't see him that way, Ed," the Globe responded, after a few seconds. "His politics are pretty far to the right, but he comes across as sincere as hell."
"What's the first rule of politics?" the Times asked with a chuckle. Then he continued: "I tell you, if this stuff about Russia and Colombia is true… whoa! It is the 50s, fucking around with other governments that way. We're not supposed to do that anymore, sure as hell not at that level."
"You never got this from us, and you can't reveal the source at Langley." The chief of staff handed out tape cassettes. "But there are enough verifiable facts here to back up everything we've told you."