Executive Orders

There were a hundred fifty cages, in each of them an African green monkey. The black workers all wore protective gloves. The monkeys, as if sensing their fate, were in an evil mode, using every opportunity to bite and scratch at the handlers. They screeched, urinated, and defecated as well, but to little avail.

Inside, the flight crew watched, keeping their distance. They wanted no part of the transfer. These noisy, small, nasty little creatures might not have been designated as unclean by the Koran, but they were clearly unpleasant enough, and after this job was over, they'd have the aircraft thoroughly washed and disinfected. The transfer took half an hour. The cages were stacked and tied down in place, and the handlers moved off, paid in cash and pleased to be done with the job, and their truck was replaced by a low-slung fuel bowser.

"Excellent," the buyer told the dealer.

"We were lucky. A friend had a large supply ready to go, and his buyer was slow getting the money. In view of this…"

"Yes, an extra ten percent?"

"That would be sufficient," the dealer said.

"Gladly. You will have the additional check tomorrow morning. Or would you prefer cash?"

Both men turned as the 707 lit off its engines. In minutes it would take off, this flight a short hop to Entebbe, Uganda.

"I DON'T LIKE the smell of this," Bert Vasco said, handing the folder back.

"Explain," Mary Pat commanded.

"I was born in Cuba. Once my dad told me about the night Batista bugged out. The senior generals had a little meeting and started boarding airplanes, quick and quiet, off to where their bank accounts were, and left everybody else holding the bag." Vasco was one of the State Department people who enjoyed working with CIA, probably as a result of his Cuban birth. He understood that diplomacy and intelligence each worked better when working together. Not everyone at Foggy Bottom agreed. That was their problem. They'd never been chased out of their homelands.

"You think that's what's happening here?" Mary Pat asked, beating Ed by half a second.

"That's the morning line from where I sit."

"You feel confident enough to tell the President that?" Ed Foley asked.

"Which one?" Vasco asked. "You should hear what they're saying over at the office. The FBI just took over the seventh floor. That has things a little shook up. Anyway, yes. It's just a guess, but it's a good guess. What we need to know is, who, if anyone, has been talking to them. Nobody on the ground, eh?"

The Foleys both looked down, which answered the question.

"MR. RYAN'S ALLEGATIONS show that he's learned the shabby part of politics faster than the proper ones," Kealty said, in a voice more hurt than angry. "I had honestly expected better of him."

"So, you deny the allegations?" ABC asked.

"Of course I do. It's no secret that I once had an alcohol problem, but I overcame it. And it's no secret that my personal conduct has at times been questionable, but I've changed that, too, with help from my church, and the love of my wife," he added, squeezing her hand as she looked on with soft compassion and ironclad support. "That really has nothing to do with the issue here. We have to place the interests of our country first. Personal animosity has no place in this, Sam. We're supposed to rise above that."

"You bastard," Ryan breathed.

"This is not going to be pleasant," van Damm said.

"How can he win, Arnie?"

"Depends. I'm not sure what game he's playing."

"— could say things about Mr. Ryan, too, but that isn't the sort of thing we need to do now. The country needs stability, not discord. The American people are looking for leadership—experienced, seasoned leadership."

"Arnie, how much has this—"

"I remember when he'd fuck a snake, if somebody held it straight for him. Jack, we can't think about that sort of thing. Remember what Alien Drury said, this is a town in which we deal with people not as they are, but as they are reputed to be. The press likes Ed, always has. They like him. They like his family. They like his social conscience—"

"My ass!" Ryan nearly shouted.

"You listen to me right now. You want to be the President? You're not allowed to have a temper. You hold on to that thought, Jack. When the President loses his temper, people die. You've seen how that happens, and the people out there want to know that you are calm and cool and collected at all times, got it?"

Ryan swallowed and nodded. Every so often it was good to lose one's temper, and Presidents were allowed. But you had to know when, and that was a lesson as yet unlearned. "So what are you telling me?"

"You are the President. Act like it. Do your job. Look presidential. What you said at the press conference was okay. Kealty's claim is groundless. You're having the FBI check out his claim, but the claim doesn't matter. You swore the oath, you live here, and that's that. Make him irrelevant and he'll go away. Focus on this thing and you give him legitimacy."

"And the media?"

"Give them a chance, and they'll get things right."

"FLYING HOME TODAY, Ralph?"

Augustus Lorenz and Ralph Forster were of an age, and a profession. Both men had begun their medical careers in the United States Army, one a general surgeon, the other an internist. Assigned to the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MAC–V), in the time of President Ke

"I'd better, before the new kid takes my department over."

The Nobel candidate chuckled. "Alex is pretty good. I'm glad he got out of the Army. We did some fishing together down in Brazil, back when they had the…" In the hot lab, a technician made a final adjustment on the electron microscope. "There," Lorenz said. "There's our friend."

Some called it the Shepherd's Crook. Lorenz thought it more like an ankh, but that wasn't right, either. It was in any case not a thing of beauty. To both men it was evil incarnate. The vertical, curved strand was called RNA, ri-bonucleic acid. That contained the genetic code of the virus. At the top was a series of curled protein structures whose function wasn't yet understood, but which probably, both thought, determined how the disease acted.

Probably. They didn't know, despite fully twenty years of intensive study.

The damned thing wasn't even alive, but it killed even so. A true living organism had both RNA and DNA, but a virus had only one or the other. It lived, somehow, in a dormant state until it came in contact with a living cell. Once there, it came to murderous life, like some sort of alien monster waiting its chance, able to live and grow and reproduce only with the help of something else, which it would destroy, and from which it would try to escape, then to find another victim.