Jack Ryan 9 - Executive Orders by Tom Clancy Read Free Book Online Page B

tell your people as much as possible not to move the aircraft parts around? We need to reconstruct the event, and it helps to leave things pretty much in place.”
    “The people—the bodies come first,” Magill pointed out. The federal official nodded with a grimace. This wasn't fun for anyone.
    “I understand.” He paused. “If you find the flight crew, please don't move them at all. Call us, and we'll handle it. Okay?”
    “How will we know?”
    “White shirts, shoulder boards with stripes on them, and they'll be Japanese, probably.”
    It should have sounded crazy, but it didn't. Magill knew that bodies often did survive airplane crashes in the most incredible outward condition, so intact that only a trained eye could see the signs of fatal injury on first inspection. It often unnerved the civilians who were usually the first to arrive at a scene. It was so strange that the human body seemed more robust than the life it contained. There was a mercy to it, for the survivors were spared the hellish ordeal of identifying a piece of burned, torn meat, but that mercy was balanced by the cruelty of recognizing someone that could not talk back. Magill shook his head and had one of his senior people relay the special order.
    The firefighters down below had enough of them already. The first special order, of course, had been to locate and remove the body of President Roger Durling. Everything was secondary to that, and a special ambulance was standing by for his body alone. Even the First Lady, Anne Durling, would have to wait a little for her husband, one last time. A contractor's mobile crane was maneuvering into the far side of the building to lift out the stone cubes that covered the podium area like a battered pile of children's hardwood blocks; in the harsh light it seemed that only the letters and numbers painted on their sides were lacking to make the illusion complete.
     
     
    P
    EOPLE WERE STREAMING
     in to all the government departments, especially the senior officials. It was hardly the usual thing for the VIP parking slots to fill up at
    
     midnight
    
    , but this night they did, and the Department of State was no exception. Security personnel were called in as well, for an attack on one government agency was an attack on all, and even though the nature of the attack on the government devalued the advantage of calling in people armed with handguns, it didn't really matter. When A happened, B resulted, because it was written down somewhere that B was what you did. The people with the handguns looked at one another and shook their heads, knowing that they'd be getting overtime pay, which put them one up on the big shots who'd storm in from their places in
    
     Chevy Chase
    
     and suburban
    
    
     Virginia
    
    
    , race upstairs, and then just chat with one another.
    One such person found his parking place in the basement and used his key-card to activate the VIP elevator to the seventh floor. What made him different was that he had a real mission for the evening, albeit one he'd wondered about all the way in from his
    
    
     Great Falls
    
    
     home. It was what he thought of as a gut check, though that term hardly applied here. Yet what else could he do? He owed Ed Kealty everything, his place in
    
    
     Washington
    
    
     society, his career at State, so many other things. The country needed someone like Ed right now. So Ed had told him, making a strong case for the proposition, and what he himself was doing was . . . what? A small voice in the car had called it treason, but, no, that wasn't so, because “treason” was the only crime defined in the Constitution, cited there as giving “aid and comfort” to the enemies of his country, and whatever Ed Kealty was doing, he wasn't doing that, was he?
    It came down to loyalty. He was Ed Kealty's man, as were many others. The relationship had started at Harvard, with beers and double dates and weekends at his family's house on the water, the good times of a lively