"You never liked my quarantine policy."
"I kept looking for a better national policy, and I couldn't find one.Then I realized that I'm not the President, and what I should be looking for is a personal policy. That one I've found."
"Demonstrating?" asked Torrent.
"No, I'm not going to picket. Or call a press conference. I'm just going to take my oldest boy with me and go to Italy, where Catholic Charities is on the verge of reaching an agreement with the Italian government to fly them into Nigeria, with permission from Libya and Niger to cross their airspace."
Torrent looked angry now for the first time. "The Italians haven't told me that."
"I'm not working through government channels now," said Cecily, rising to her feet. "I'm submitting my resignation, effective immediately. Mr. President, I'm going to Africa."
Torrent also rose. "No you're not. I'll revoke your passport."
Cecily shook her head. "Don't make idle threats," she said. "The moment you oppose me, I will go on the air. Former adviser to President Torrent and all that. Much better if you make it look like this was your idea. Your own adviser, the widow of Reuben Malich, is leading the way to Africa. The administration is fully behind the effort to provide relief for Africa, and all those Americans who catch the nictovirus there but recover fully from it will be welcomed home as heroes."
Cecily looked around the table. Most of them weren't even looking at her—she had embarrassed them. The few who did meet her gaze seemed more amused than anything.
"You know that's the only way to play it," she said to them all. "It's the only way that turns this into a plus." She looked Torrent in the eye again. "Use me or oppose me, that's your choice. But my son Mark and I are going, one way or another."
"What about your other children?" asked Torrent.
"Yes, will you look in on them from time to time?" she said. Then she smiled. "I'm their mother. Don't imagine for a second that I haven't arranged for them to be well taken care of, no matter what happens to me."
Then she walked out of the nearest door, feeling Torrent's eyes burning into her back as she left.
unccmoTion
You have to have a plan. You also have to know when to throw it out and improvise. Even then you can only improvise on the basis ot what you're prepared to do. Pianists can improvise on the piano, jockeys on horseback, but don't expect them to swap instruments and make anything happen.
Unfortunately, many a politician, because raw chance makes something come out well for him, supposes that he must be good at improvising, when his only skill is pretending that this is how he wanted it to turn out from the start.
Some governments don't need to have an actual crisis in order to fall apart. They just have to believe there might be a crisis, and presto! The top government officials take off for other countries, where they have their money stashed; mid-level bureaucrats call in favors from friends and contacts in neighboring countries and get the hell out; and low-level government functionaries, fearing retribution from people who have had to bribe them in order to get a train ride, a ration book, or married, lie low and hope people won't notice them during the ensuing bloodbath.
So it was that even before the first reported case of sneezing flu in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, the government was, to all intents and purposes, gone.
The rebels and bandits who had been making life hellish, mostly in the north but also everywhere, suddenly found themselves, in a word, victorious. They all rushed to the capital in order to assert their claim to be the rightful rulers of one of the most miserable places on earth—a place whose economy had been wrecked by the actions of both government and bandits. Upon arrival, they started shooting one another and, of course, anyone within a half-mile of the shooting, since the bullets easily passed through the flimsy walls of the houses of the poor.
The bandits and rebels from the north and west also brought with them the first cases of nictovirus. Just one more service of the new "government."
Cole had been tracking all this from his headquarters in Calabar, Nigeria, where he had co-opted several abandoned university buildings as the base of operations for U.S. special ops in the region. Calabar was near the border with Cameroon, making it possible to hop from one country to the next if that became necessary; Calabar was also near the coast and nearly surrounded by rivers, for easy evacuation.
"What is the State Department thinking?" he asked his few aides. "Our embassy staff should have been out of Bangui last week. Now there's no safe way to get them out of there."
"Looks like a job for Iron Man," said Sergeant Jeep Wills, who was handling communications for Cole. When Cole was out on an operation, Wills was the one who decided which urgent information could wait till Cole got back, and which needed to be dealt with immediately through the Noodle. He had done a very good job and Cole was impressed, especially considering that Wills looked to be about fifteen, though his records indicated that he was twenty-one and had graduated from high school in three years and then did the same with college. Smart kid.
"Iron Man has a suit that can deflect bullets," Cole pointed out. "We just have Kevlar. And we actually exist."
"But I mean it," said Wills. "Just got this from State." He handed Cole a printout of an email and sure enough, one group of rebels had decided that the most useful point in Bangui to capture was the U.S. embassy.
"Unfortunately," said Wills, "there were only four people staffing the embassy, so there was no realistic possibility of holding out against a serious opponent. Actually, no possibility of holding out against a troop of Boy Scouts going for their hostage-taking merit badge."
"And what's the good news?" asked Cole.
"There are only four embassy personnel to rescue and get out of the CAR and they don't have families in-country, so at least the State Department kept the number of hostages low."
"That's it?"
"Minor stuff. There are only about two hundred bandits holed up at the embassy, declaring themselves the legitimate government of the CAR, or Sangoland as they want to call the country. Naturally, this has drawn all the other bandit groups that don't already have their own captive embassy or government office building, and there's a lot of gunfire. Fortunately, they're so badly trained that nobody hits anything except windows."