Clear and Present Danger

Half an hour later, Pat O'Day saw Cutter jogging down the hill toward the George Washington Parkway. One nice thing about having the President out of town, the inspector thought, was that he didn't have to shake out of the rack at 4:30 to meet the bastard. He'd been here only forty minutes, spending a lot of time with his stretching exercises, and there he was. O'Day let him pass, then moved out, keeping up easily since the man was quite a bit older. But that wasn't all...

O'Day followed him for a mile, then two, approaching the Pentagon. Cutter followed the jogging path between the road and the river. Perhaps he didn't feel well. He alternately jogged and walked. Maybe he's trying to see if he has a tail, O'Day thought, but... Then he started moving again.

Just opposite the beginning of the northern parking lot, Cutter got off the path, heading toward the road as though to cross it. The inspector had now closed to within fifty yards. Something was wrong. He didn't know what. It was...

... the way he was looking at the traffic. He wasn't looking for openings, O'Day realized too late. A bus was coming north, a B.C. transit bus, it had just come off the 14th Street Bridge and -

"Look out!" But the man wasn't listening for that sort of warning.

Brakes screeched. The bus tried to avoid the man, slamming into another car, then five more added their mass to the pileup. O'Day approached only because he was a cop, and cops are expected to do such things. Vice Admiral James A. Cutter, Jr., USN, was still in the road, thrown fifty feet by the collision.

He'd wanted it to look like an accident , O'Day thought, but it wasn't. The agent didn't notice a passerby in a cheap-bodied government car who came down the other side of the parkway, rubbernecking at the accident scene like many others, but with a look of satisfaction instead of horror at the sight.

Ryan was waiting at the White House. The President had flown home because of the death of his aide, but he was still President, and there was still work to be done, and if the DDI said that he needed to meet with the President, then it had to be important. The President was puzzled to see that along with Ryan were Al Trent and Sam Fellows, co-chairmen of the House Select Committee on Intelligence Oversight.

"Come on in," he said, guiding them regally into the Oval Office. "What's so important?"

"Mr. President, it has to do with some covert operations, especially one called SHOWBOAT."

"What's that?" the President asked, on guard. Ryan explained for a minute or so.

"Oh, that. Very well. SHOWBOAT was given to these two men personally by Judge Moore under his hazardous-operations rule."

"Dr. Ryan tells us that there are some other things we need to know about also. Other operations related to SHOWBOAT," Congressman Fellows said.

"I don't know about any of that."

"Yes, you do, Mr. President," Ryan said quietly. "You authorized it. It is my duty under the law to report on these matters - to Congress. Before I do so, I felt it necessary to notify you. I asked the two congressmen here to witness my doing so."

"Mr. Trent, Mr. Fellows, could you please excuse me for a moment? There are some things going on that I don't know about. Will you allow me to question Dr. Ryan in private for a moment?"

Say no! Ryan wished as hard as he could, but one does not deny such requests to the President, and in a moment he and Ryan were alone.

"What are you hiding, Ryan?" the President asked. "I know you're hiding some things."

"Yes, sir, I am and I will. The identities of some of our people, CIA and military, who acted on what they thought was proper authority." Ryan explained further, wondering what of it the President knew and what he didn't. It was something he was sure he'd never fully know. Most of the really important secrets Cutter had taken to his grave. Ryan suspected what had happened there, but... but had decided to let that sleeping dog lie, too. Was it possible to be connected with something like this , he asked himself, and not be corrupted by it?

"What Cutter did, what you say he did - I didn't know. I'm sorry. I'm especially sorry about those soldiers."

"We got about half of them out, sir. I was there. That's the part I cannot forgive. Cutter deliberately cut them off with the intention of giving you a political -"

" I never authorized that! " he almost screamed.

"You allowed it to happen, sir." Ryan tried to look him straight in the eye, and on the moment of wavering, it was the President who looked away. "My God, sir, how could you do it?"

"The people want us to stop the flow of drugs."

"Then do it, do just what you tried to do, but do it in accordance with the law."

"It won't work that way."

"Why not?" Ryan asked. "Have the American people ever objected when we used force to protect our interests?"

"But what we had to do here could never be public."