Power and Empire

“That too, Bob,” Ryan said. “Although I sincerely hope any specific threats would have floated to the top already.”

Ryan stood to show the briefing was at an end. He was careful not to put any weight on his heel.

Ryan waited for everyone, including Arnie van Damm, to file out and their respective doors to close behind them before he hobbled toward his desk. He’d nearly made it when Mary Pat stuck her head back inside.

“I saw you limping, Jack,” she said, affecting the motherly voice she’d used on him when they were in the CIA together. MP was one of an extremely close cohort who still addressed him by his given name — but even she rarely did it in the Oval Office. She opened her hand to reveal a golf ball with the presidential seal in her open palm. “I got this from the stash of tchotchkes Betty gives out to visitors when they can’t get in to see you. Ed had a bout with plantar fasciitis a couple years ago. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Ryan leaned back in his chair, his eyebrows raised.

“Getting old isn’t for wusses,” he said.

“You’re not a wuss,” Mary Pat said. “You’re an invalid.”

Ryan sighed again. “Yeah, well, don’t spread that around. Press gets word I have a toothache and the markets drop fifty points.”

“I will treat your condition as highly classified,” Mary Pat said, and then tossed him the ball. “You’re supposed to take off your shoe and roll this around under the arch of your foot. It works wonders.”

Ryan looked back and forth from the golf ball to his aching foot.

“Well,” Mary Pat said, glancing at her watch, “my boss expects me to get some work done today. I’ll leave you to your rehab.”

• • •

Alone again, Ryan glanced at the paper copy of his schedule on the center of his desk. It was not uncommon for the document to be vague, as the President’s daily schedule was posted on the White House website. Betty or Arnie usually added a little handwritten commentary for him in the margins of his copy. This morning, his nine o’clock simply said: Meeting.

He’d just pressed his intercom when the door opened and his secretary stuck her head in. The woman’s prescience really did border on a superpower.

“What’s next, Betty?”

“Special Agent Montgomery, Mr. President, the new special agent in charge of your protection detail. He asked for five minutes to introduce himself.”

Grouchy from the pain in his heel, Ryan dropped the golf ball on the carpet and began to roll it around under his foot. “I liked Joe,” he muttered. “We got along well. He was good at his job. Why couldn’t they just leave me Joe?” Ryan glanced up at his secretary’s passive face. It was the closest she would ever come to chastising him — even when he deserved it.

“Lovely dress, Betty,” he said, by way of apology for his sulking.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” she said. “Special Agent O’Hearn will do a fine job as deputy director.” She raised her eyebrows and tilted her head like a mom, telling him to give the liver and onions a chance. “This Montgomery fellow seems like a very nice man.”

“Send him in,” Ryan said.

Betty placed a file folder in the center of Ryan’s desk and excused herself with a benign smile.

Prepared by the Secret Service, the folder contained the new agent’s photo, work history, and biography. Ryan had asked them to include his detail agents’ shooting scores and short bios of their families as well. It was the analyst in him. He’d already read Montgomery’s file but left his copy in the residence on the mile-high stack of briefs, budgets, and political ballyhoo he had to read every day along with the PDB.

Special Agent in Charge Gary Montgomery stepped in a moment later, wearing an expensive gray wool suit. His charcoal-colored hair was cut neat and short, just long enough to part. Ryan smiled. Everyone got a haircut and bought a new suit for their first meeting in this office — if they had the time. He remembered his first time in the Oval and shuddered a little.

Ryan guessed the agent at around six-three and well over two hundred pounds — with the ferocious look and thick neck of a guy you’d want protecting you when the shit hit the fan. People in the private sector — and even other countries — tended to hire their bodyguards by the pound, but the U.S. Secret Service was different. The agency understood that big didn’t necessarily mean competent.

Ryan had been around long enough to know that at some point in their careers, virtually all agents in the Secret Service had to punch their tickets by working on some kind of protection; the best were assigned to PPD — Presidential Protection Detail. But even those assignments could range from any one of a variety of positions — advance agent scouting locations prior to the President’s arrival, outer perimeter, countersurveillance, or lowly post-stander at any of dozens of doors at any given venue.