Project Cyclops Part 18

"Right. Who do you think we ought to use?"

"Anybody who worked on the security here would be good."

'That's got to be me," Spiros said ruefully.

"Okay. Beyond that, we'll need a first-cla.s.s SWAT team. This one is going to be rough. We need somebody who can handle explosives like a brain surgeon, maybe Marcel, out of Antwerp. Get him if you can find him sober. Also, we probably could use a negotiator. Somebody who can keep them busy while we get the real insertion in place. And a good sniper will be essential. Lots of friendlies."

"Okay. That sounds like Reggie. I'll run some names past Paris. But what are you going to do in the meantime?"

"Well, they know I'm here, but they don't know who I am. I'll concentrate on staying alive, and try to find out whatever I can about the MO. Catch you at 1700."

"Talk to you then," Dimitri said, and hung up.

Right, Vance thought. I'd definitely rather be in Philadelphia.

8:39 A.M.

"It's a go in five," Caroline Shaeffer announced in a stage whisper, leaning over his shoulder. A blond Ohio debutante, she was press secretary--a job she had fought for and loved --and she structured the President's media appearances with the bloodless efficiency of a n.a.z.i drill sergeant. This hastily arranged breakfast speech at New York's Plaza was no different. She had put it together in less than ten days, and anybody who mattered in New York politics was in attendance, smiling their way dirough stale _prosciutto con melone _and soggy eggs Benedict, for an awe-inspiring hour of "quality time" with President Johan Hansen.

The head table had the usual crowd: Mayor Jarvis, senators, representatives, state senators, state officials of every stripe, even the borough presidents. Hansen was almost as popular as Ronald Reagan had been in his heyday. The election was coming up in less than six weeks, and Johan Hansen held a commanding lead--twenty-eight points if you believed the latest Newsweek/Gallup poll. A "nonpolitical" event in the middle of the campaign allowed everybody to show up for a photo, regardless of party. President Hansen's speech was scheduled to begin at 8:44 A.M. sharp, perfectly timed to let Today and Good Morning America carry the opening remarks live eastern and central and not have to look like the networks were trailing CNN, indeed wiping its a.s.s, yet again. In any case, it would definitely make the evening news on all three. Precisely as Hansen intended.

Johan Hansen, whose perfect white hair and granite chin

made him look every inch a chief of state, had mixed feelings about his trips to the Big Apple. He relished the automatic media attention they received (Caroline claimed that whereas $2-million-a-year network anchors usually considered themselves above travel, in New York one or two might deign to show up), but chafed at the mechanics--the helicopters, traffic jams, awesome security. He also despised political food, which was why Caroline had packed his own private breakfast of shredded wheat and skimmed milk, to be downed discreetly while everybody else was busy clogging their arteries.

He was speaking on worldwide nuclear disarmament, and he intended his address to be a warm-up for one at the United Nations General a.s.sembly three weeks hence (which meant another d.a.m.ned trip to New York). Alter opening with his standard stump remarks, all partisan digs excised, he would then go on to a.s.sure his audience that the New World truly was here--which always got everybody in a receptive mood. He would then remind them that three years earlier (i.e., "When I a.s.sumed this office"), America was still spending $7 billion a year on new nuclear warheads. He had put an end to that, but now it was time to take the next step. Total nuclear disarmament worldwide. It was a stance that normally received polite applause at best, and stony silence at worst.

But it never failed to make the news.

This morning the broadcast networks and CNN had combined their resources--after all, the s.p.a.ce was limited--to provide pool coverage.

Although the usual ganglia of lights and wires were reduced to an absolute minimum, the back of the room still looked like a makeshift convention bureau. The broadcast correspondents all had their own "instant a.n.a.lysis" cameras set up, and the print people were all next to their own newly installed, dedicated phones.

Johan Hansen's acquisition of the Oval Office had come at the end of a hard-fought election battle that saw several firsts in American politics. For one thing, it proved, finally, that America truly was the land of opportunity. He was a first-generation Danish American, and he was Jewish--the latter being a part of his heritage that seldom, if ever, got press play.

He scarcely noticed either. In truth, it was only on his father's side-- which in Judaism did not really count. Hansen's father, Joost, had been a young Copenhagen college student in 1943 when the people of Denmark one night heroically evacuated all the country's Jews to Sweden, out of the looming grasp of the n.a.z.is. Shortly thereafter he had married Hansen's mother, a Swede named Erica who had helped in the evacuation, and then, after the war, they had immigrated to America. Joost Hansen had finished his doctorate in physics at Princeton--being a promising physicist was one of the reasons he could so readily get into the United States--and then had gone to work at Los Alamos.

On the liner that brought them, the birth of Johan Hansen was due any minute, and one hour after it docked on the pier on the west side of New York, he came bawling into the world--a brand-new citizen and native-born, thereby eligible by a matter of minutes to be President someday. Who could have known?

Young Johan remembered little of Princeton, New Jersey, but in Los Alamos he had gloried in the clear air of the mountains, had loved the old White Sands rocket test area where they vacationed, had loved everything about America. He'd gone on to try engineering at M IT, but he had soon realized he didn't have the makings to follow in his father's technical footsteps. He cared too much about human affairs to stay in the bloodless world of formulas and machines.

As a result, he shifted to political science, and after graduating he became an aide to one of Ma.s.sachusetts's liberal congressmen.

Eventually he ran for the House on his own. The Democratic primary was a model of rough-and-tumble Boston politics, but he won a squeaker and became a full-fledged member at thirty-one.

Thus began a career that continued through the Senate and, after two terms, to the Presidency. He had achieved his ambitions, and his soaring popularity was all the more amazing for accruing to a man who had restructured the military during the painful transition of the United States to a post-Cold-War economy. Turning swords into plowshares was never as easy as it sounded, but America's excess armaments capacity had gone back to reinvigorate her high-tech sectors.

If you could make an F-15, he had declared, you could by-G.o.d make anything. Now retool and get on with it. America had.

In his most important contribution to history, however, John Hansen had presided over the dismantling of more than half the world's nuclear a.r.s.enal. It's easy, he'd declared to the Russians, we just do nothing.

And in so doing, the tritium in all those warheads will simply decay.

End of bombs. You monitor our plants at Oak Ridge and Savannah River; we monitor you; and together we watch the nuclear threat to humanity simply tick away.

It was working, he often noted with pride. Maybe we're not going to melt the planet after all. Not only would future generations thank him; there would be future generations. But would they know enough history to appreciate what he'd done? he wondered ruefully. Only if the dismal state of American education could be improved. . . .

It was now 8:40 A.M. and the television lights had been switched on, turning the fake gold leaf on the ceiling into an intense white. The TelePrompTer had been readied, and the Secret Service detail was making last-minute checks around the room as un.o.btrusively as conditions would permit. Correspondents, for their own part, were poring over an advance copy of the text that Caroline's aide had just pa.s.sed out, making notes for the brief question period scheduled to follow.

The time was 8:41 when she walked up behind him and laid down a large gray envelope marked Top Secret. It was, she whispered, a couple of pages fresh off the secure fax that had been installed in the room just down the hall.

What was it? he wondered. Some eleventh-hour revisions by Jordan McCormick, a young new speechwriter from Harvard who liked to tinker till the very last minute? Puzzled, he ripped open the envelope. The first page was a covering memo from his personal secretary, Alicia Winston. Miss Winston, as she insisted on being called, was a spinster, fifty- eight, who guarded access to Johan Hansen with the ferocity of a pit bull. Get past her, junior members of Congress often declared, and you're home free. It was, however, more often a dream than a realization. Seduction was frequently discussed.

Alicia's note was brief and pointed. The second page, it said, was a copy of a fax that had just arrived on her desk from Ed Briggs, head of the Joint Chiefs. Hansen's chief of staff, Morton Davies, had asked her to fax it on to New York immediately. They both knew Morton was not a man to squander time.

Hansen glanced over to see a white phone, complete with scrambler, being nestled next to the official text of his speech. When he scanned the second sheet, he knew why.

"He's on the line," Caroline said.

He nodded and checked his watch. Eight forty-three. s.h.i.t. "Caroline, tell them there's been a five-minute hold. And see if you can have them kill those d.a.m.ned lights."

"You've got it." She signaled to the pool producer, pointed to the lights, and made a slashing motion across her throat. With a puzzled nod, he immediately complied, barking an order to his lighting director.

Hansen picked up the phone. "Ed, what the h.e.l.l is this about? I'm looking at the fax. You say this happened over six hours ago?"

"Mr. President, that came in about ten minutes ago from naval intel.

They've been trying to get the story straight. The BBC was carrying a rumor, but it was soft. We wanted to get all the facts before--"

"It was in the Med?" Hansen impatiently cut him off. "Why so long--?"

"They claim they took all this time trying to nail down who's responsible, and they still don't know for sure. All they've got that's hard is what I sent you. A frigate under contract to NSA got hit. About fifty known casualties. It could be our friends the Israelis, up to their old tricks, or it could be somebody who wants us to think it's them."

"Ed, I'm staring down half the press in the country right now, as we speak. I can't do anything till I get back. But check with Alicia. I think I'm scheduled in around noon, and I'd like to try and have a statement out by three today."

"All right, Mr. President, we'll do what we can. Let me secure-fax Morton everything I've got so far, and he can forward anything he thinks might help. But we've got to talk. This could be a tough call."

"What are the Israelis saying?"

'Their military intel told Morton they don't know a d.a.m.ned thing about it. But their emba.s.sy here's already on red alert, getting ready to start pushing out smoke."

'Typical." Hansen had no love for Israel. In his view, their intransigence had caused the lion's share of America's problems in the Middle East. They never told the truth about anything until three days later, when it was too late to matter. In the meantime, they just did whatever they wanted.

"Well, this time I almost think they may be straight," Briggs said. "It doesn't have any of their trademarks. For one thing, it had their name all over it--not their style."

Hansen scanned the fax again, noting the large-print Top Secret across the top, and tried to make it sink in. Concentration was difficult, considering the expectant stirrings in the room, the clank of silverware. But this was nothing short of a major episode. What did it mean?

"Okay, Ed, I want to see you first thing. And bring Bob with you"-- Robert Barnes was his a.s.sistant, Navy--"in case we need to scramble out of Crete."

"Roger, sir. I'll have Alicia get everything we need set up in the Sit Room."