Fowler poured himself a beer. It was a bottle of Dortmunder Union, a popular German brew that the Air Force flew over — being President did carry some useful and unofficial perks. Liz Elliot drank a French white, while the President's left hand toyed with her hair.
The movie was a sappy comedic romance that appealed to Bob Fowler. The female lead, in fact, reminded him of Liz in looks and mannerisms. A little too snappy, a little too domineering, but not without redeeming social value. Now that Ryan was gone — well, on the way to being gone — maybe things would settle down.
“We've certainly done well, haven't we?”
“Yes, we have, Bob.” She paused for a sip of wine. “You were right about Ryan. Better to let him go honorably.” So long as he's gone, along with that little shrew he married.
“I'm glad to hear you say that. He's not a bad guy, just old-fashioned. Out of date.”
“Obsolete,” Liz added.
“Yeah,” the President agreed. “Why are we talking about him?”
“I can think of better things.” She turned her face into his hand and kissed it.
“So can I,” the President murmured as he set his glass down.
“The roads are covered,” Cathy reported. “I think you made the right decision.”
“Yeah, there was just a bad one on the Parkway just outside the gate. I'll be home tomorrow night. I can always steal one of the four-by-fours they have downstairs.”
“Where's John?”
“He's not here right now.”
“Oh,” Cathy observed. And what might he be up to!
“While I'm here, I might as well get some work done. Call you in the morning.”
“Okay, bye.”
“That's one aspect of this place that I won't miss,” Jack told Goodley. “Okay, what have you developed?”
“We've been able to verify all the meetings through September.”
“You look like you're ready to drop. How long have you been up?”
“Since yesterday, I guess.”
“Must be nice to be still in your twenties. Crab a piece of the couch outside,” Ryan ordered.
“What about you?”
“I want to read over this stuff again.” Jack tapped the file on his desk. “You're not into this one yet. Go get some Z's.”
“See you in the morning.”
The door closed behind Goodley. Jack started to read through the NIITAKA documents, but soon lost concentration. He locked the file in his desk and found a piece of his own couch, but sleep wouldn't come. After a few minutes of staring at the ceiling, Ryan decided that he might as well stare at something less boring. He switched on the TV. Jack worked the controller to catch a news broadcast, but he hit the wrong button and found himself staring at the tail end of a commercial on Channel 20, an independent Washington station. He almost corrected the mistake when the movie came back. It took a moment. Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner… black and white… Australia.
“Oh yeah,” Ryan said to himself. It was On the Beach. He hadn't seen that in years, a Cold War classic from… Nevil Shute, wasn't it? A Gregory Peck movie was always worth the trouble. Fred Astaire, too.
The aftermath of a nuclear war. Jack was surprised at how tired he was. He'd been getting his rest lately, and…
… he went to sleep, but not all the way. As sometimes happened to him, the movie entered his mind, though the dream was in color, and that was better than the black-and-white print on the TV, his mind decided, then decided further to watch the movie in its entirety. From the inside. Jack Ryan began to take over various roles. He drove Fred Astaire's Ferrari in the bloody and last Australian Grand Prix. He sailed to San Francisco in the USS Sawfish, SSN-623 (except, part of his mind objected, that 623 was the number of a different submarine, USS Nathan Hale, wasn't it?). And the Morse signal, the Coke bottle on the windowshade, that wasn't very funny at all, because it meant that he and his wife would have to have that cup of tea, and he really didn't want to do that because it meant he had to put the pill in the baby's formula so that he could be sure that the baby would die and his wife wasn't up to it — understandable, his doctor was a wife — and he had to take the responsibility because he was the one who always did and wasn't it a shame that he had to leave Ava Gardner on the beach watching him sail so that he and his men could die at home if they made it which they probably wouldn't and the streets were so empty now. Cathy and Sally and Little Jack were all dead and it was all his fault because he made them take their pills so that they wouldn't die of something else that was even worse but that was still dumb and wrong even though there wasn't much of a choice was there so instead why not use a gun to do it and—
“What the fuck!” Jack snapped upright as though driven by a steel spring. He looked at his hands, which were shaking rather badly, until they realized that his mind was under conscious control now. "You just had a nightmare, boy, and this one wasn't the helicopter with Buck and John.
“It was worse.”
Ryan reached for his cigarettes and lit one, standing up after he did so. The snow was still coming down. The scrapers weren't keeping pace with it, down on the parking lot. It took time to shake one of these off, watching his family die like that. So many of the goddamned things. I've gotta get away from this place! There were just too many memories, and not all of them were good. The wrong call he'd made before the attack on his family, the time in the submarine, being left on the runway at Sheremetyevo Airport and looking at good old Sergey Nikolayevich from the wrong side of a pistol, and worst of all that helicopter ride out of Colombia. It was just too much. It was time to leave. Fowler and even Liz Elliot were doing him a favor, weren't they?
Whether they knew it or not.
Such a nice world lay out there. He'd done his part. He'd made parts of it a little better, and had helped others to do more. The movie he'd just lived in, hell, it might have come to pass in one way or another. But not now. It was clean and white out there, the lights over the parking lot just illuminating it enough, so much better than it usually looked. He'd done his part. Now it was someone else's turn to try his or her hand at the easier stuff.
“Yeah.” Jack blew his smoke out at the window. First, he'd have to break this habit again. Cathy would insist. And then? Then an extended vacation, this coming summer, maybe go back to England — maybe by ship instead of flying? Take the time to drive around Europe, maybe blow the whole summer. Be a free man again. Walk the beach. But then he'd have to get a job, do something. Annapolis — no, that was out. Some private group? Maybe teach? Georgetown, maybe?
“Espionage 101,” he chuckled to himself. That was it, he'd teach how to do all the illegal stuff.
“How the hell did James Greer ever last so long in this crummy racket?” How had he handled the stress? That was one lesson he'd never passed on.
“You still need sleep, man,” he reminded himself. This time he made sure the TV was off.
34
PLACEMENT
Ryan was surprised to see that the snow hadn't stopped. The walkway outside his top-floor window had almost two feet piled up, and the maintenance crews had failed completely to keep up with things through the night. High winds were blowing and drifting snow across the roads and parking lots more quickly than it could be removed, and even the snow that they did manage to move simply found another inconvenient place to blow over. It had been years since a storm like this had hit the Washington area. The local citizenry was already beyond panic into desperation, Jack thought. Cabin fever would already be setting in. Food stocks would not easily be replaced. Already some husbands and some wives were looking at their spouses and wondering how hard to cook they might be… It was one thing to laugh about as he went to get water for his coffee machine. He grabbed Ben Goodley's shoulder on the way out of the office.