"By God," Jack said, watching the TV picture change. He looked down to the fax of the treaty outline, and it was not very different from his original concept. The Saudis had made changes, as had the Israelis, the Soviets, the Swiss, and, of course, the State Department, but the original idea was his - except insofar as he himself had borrowed ideas from a multitude of others. There were few genuinely original ideas. What he'd really done had been to organize them, and pick an historically correct moment to make his comment. That was all. For all that it was the proudest moment of his life. It was a shame that there was no one to congratulate him.

In the White House, President Fowler's best speech-writer was already working on the first draft of his speech. The American President would have primacy of place at the ceremony because it had been his idea, after all, his speech before the UN that had brought them all together in Rome. The Pope would speak - hell, they would all speak, the speechwriter thought, and for her that was a problem, since each speech had to be original and un-repetitive. She realized that she'd probably still be working on it while hopping the Atlantic on the -25 A, pecking busily away on her laptop. But that, she knew, was what they paid her for, and Air Force One had a laser-jet printer.

Upstairs in the Oval Office the President was looking over his hastily revised schedule. A committee of new Eagle Scouts would have to be disappointed, as would the new Wisconsin Cheese Queen, or whatever the young lady's title was, and a multitude of business people whose importance in their own small ponds quite literally paled when they entered the side door into the President's workshop. His appointments secretary was getting the word out. Some people whose visits were genuinely important were being shoe-horned into every spare minute of the next thirty-six hours. That would make the President's next day and a half as hectic as it ever got, but that, too, was part of the job.

"Well?" Fowler looked up to see Elizabeth Elliot grinning at him through the open door to the secretary's ante-room.

Well, this is what you wanted, isn't it? Your presidency will forever be remembered as the one in which the Middle East problems were settled once and for all. If - Liz admitted to herself in a rare moment of objective clarity - it all works out, which is not a given in such disputes as this.