He passed within a quarter mile of the White House on his way west back over the Potomac River, and he looked to right about where his father would be now, just after returning from Mass with his mom, no doubt preparing to go straight to the West Wing to work the full day.
President Ryan wouldn’t take a day off with a crisis like this going on in America, and he had raised a son cut from the same cloth.
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The President of the United States and the First Lady had begun their Sunday by taking their two youngest children to Mass.
They did this as much as they could when they were both in town, but today was special for them, in that the Ryans’ elder daughter met them at the front steps of the cathedral to join them for the service. The President didn’t get to see much of Sally these days. She lived north of Baltimore and she didn’t like spending time at the White House, with the hassle of the media and the phalanx of security she had to endure, although whenever her parents and siblings could get away to their home on Peregrine Cliff she tried her best to drop in.
While Jack Ryan, Jr., had his father’s legacy to live up to and contend with, for his sister, it was all about Mom. Sally was currently in a neurosurgery residency at Johns Hopkins, and there, as was the case around the medical community in general, no one particularly cared that her father was the President of the United States. But there was no getting around it for Sally that her mother was the famous Dr. Cathy Ryan, chief of ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins.
Of course Cathy was also First Lady of the United States, but she’d been juggling these two hats for many years, and though she was old enough and comfortable enough to retire, she continued working, performing surgeries, teaching younger doctors, and serving on several hospital boards.
While everyone in the family still called her Sally, the eldest of the four Ryan children had begun using her given name, Olivia, over the past few years. Virtually everyone in the United States over the age of thirty knew the story about what had happened to the firstborn child of future President Jack Ryan, when Sally had been severely wounded by Irish Republican terrorists. The name Sally Ryan and the legacy of that attack followed her everywhere she went after that, so once she became a doctor she all but dropped it and went with Olivia.
Olivia had not yet married, but she was two years into a relationship with a good-looking orthopedic surgeon from Turkey named Davi who made her the happiest she had been in her entire life. She had all but lived for her studies in her twenties, and all but lived for her work so far in her thirties, but for the first time working sixty-hour weeks was becoming tough to manage, because with her boyfriend’s similarly arduous schedule of surgeries and on-calls, they rarely got to see each other more than a couple times a week.
Of course the press had gotten hold of the fact she was involved with a Turkish doctor, and they intimated that President Ryan would soon have a Muslim son-in-law, and wondered how that would affect U.S. foreign policy. Davi happened to be a Roman Catholic, something it would take the American media too much work to figure out and too many precious seconds of airtime to explain, so they didn’t clarify this point.
The President and his elder daughter’s boyfriend had gotten along well when they did sit down with each other, but Olivia was a private person when it came to her personal life, so besides a couple of all-but-mandated visits to the White House and a memorable Thanksgiving at Peregrine Cliff, Davi had been spared much of the public attention that would come with dating the daughter of the sitting Commander in Chief.
But Davi and Olivia’s relationship wasn’t conducted in complete privacy. The couple also had the Secret Service detail to contend with. Olivia had become a great friend of the two men and two women who worked her detail, but it had added a complication to her romantic life.
Just a month or so earlier Olivia and Davi had stayed at a cabin her parents had recently purchased in the Blue Ridge Mountains for a weekend of fresh air and grilling out. The Secret Service detail came along in a follow car and moved into two rooms of the five-bedroom luxury cabin on thirty-five wooded acres near Old Rag Mountain, and they walked point and rear security while the couple just seeking a brief time away from the city for some romance strolled the nearby mountain trails with their dogs.
It was a shock to the system for Davi, who still hadn’t gotten used to the chaperones accompanying him on his weekend getaways with his girlfriend, but by now Olivia was more than accustomed to always having a couple of extra friends with her wherever she went.
After Mass this morning Olivia, Katie, and Kyle went together to the Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall — along with the personal protection agents for all three of them — while Cathy and Jack Senior returned to the White House.
Ryan said good-bye to his wife in the private residence and turned for the West Wing without even taking off his jacket from church. He knew he’d have to go straight into the Situation Room to talk about the two bombings that had taken place overnight, but when he got there he learned from a frazzled-looking Bob Burgess that the commander of CENTCOM had been murdered that morning in Tampa.
Although today’s homily had been on grace, twenty minutes after the sermon ended, the President wanted to put his fist through the wall of the conference room.
When everyone was present and seated, Ryan saw there was a man he did not recognize in the room, sitting just one seat down from Secretary of Homeland Security Andy Zilko. Ryan knew this newcomer would be some sort of a briefer to add to something the DHS wanted to tell the President, but he wanted to know who the man was before they got started.
Ryan, still reeling from the news of General Caldwell’s death, said, “Andy, will you introduce your guest, please?”
Secretary Zilko said, “Yes, Mr. President. Dr. Robert Banks is the director of the National Cybersecurity Protection System. I brought him in to give you a briefing on outside intrusion attempts into federal networks.”
Dan Murray interjected, “If we could, Mr. President, I’d like to start with a rundown of last night’s terror attacks in the U.S. before we get into that.”
“Sure. Go ahead, Dan, then we’ll give the floor to Dr. Banks.”
The AG went into detail about the successful attacks in Pittsburgh and Monterey, and the new attack in Tampa. The President asked questions about the evidence found at the various scenes, video surveillance, DNA, and the methods and equipment used in the attacks. All three crime scenes were still active, so there would be more information to follow, but the attorney general had known Ryan would want a lot of detail, so he came prepared with an iPad loaded with all the preliminary information from each scene.
Bob Burgess added his input on the assassination outside MacDill Air Force Base. The U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigative Service had control of the scene, for now, but they had communicated everything to the FBI, so Burgess had little on the case that Murray did not. The Bureau had a full forensics, investigation, and counterterrorism team en route from D.C. to Tampa, and a Joint Terrorism Task Force unit from Miami was flying over the Everglades in a Falcon 50 right now, but the SecDef made it clear all these hits on the military meant the Pentagon wanted to be involved in every step of the process.
Murray and Ryan agreed that Homeland Security, Defense, and DoJ all needed to partner on this issue.
When Ryan asked about steps being taken to protect the military, Burgess said, “We are at the highest base readiness here in the States, we are notifying all our commands to communicate this new danger, but we haven’t done much tangible for those outside the wire of our bases.”