The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

look on the face of his secretary. The forced smiles of the other bureaucrats in
the West Wing. But obscurity comes only after a blaze of publicity to announce
the fact: like the flare of light from an exploding star, public death is
preceded by dazzling fanfare. That was the media's job. The phone was ringing
off the hook. There had been twenty of them waiting outside his house in the
morning, cameras at the ready, sun-like lights blazing in his face. And knowing
what it had to be even before the first question.
That foolish little bitch! With her cow-like eyes and cow-like udders and broad
cow-like hips. How could he have been so stupid! Professor Charles Winston Alden
sat in his expensive chair and stared at his expensive desk. His head was
bursting with a headache that he attributed to stress and anger. And he was
right. But he failed to allow for the fact that his blood-pressure was nearly
double what it should have been, driven to new heights by the stress of the
moment. He similarly failed to consider the fact that he had not taken his
antihypertensive medication in the past week. A prototypical professor, he was
always forgetting the little things while his methodical mind picked apart the
most intricate of problems.
And so it came as a surprise. It started at an existing weakness in part of the
Circle of William, the brain's own blood-beltway. Designed to get blood to any
part of the brain, as a means of bypassing vessels that might become blocked
with age, the vessel carried a huge amount of blood. Twenty years of high
blood-pressure, and twenty years of his taking his medication only when he
remembered that he had an upcoming doctor's appointment, and the added stress of
seeing his career stop with a demeaning personal disgrace, culminated in a
rupture of the vessel on the right side of his head. What had been a searing
migraine headache became death itself. Alden's eyes opened wide, and his hands
flew up to grasp his skull as though to hold it together. It was too late for
that. The rip widened, allowing more blood to escape. This both deprived
important parts of his brain of the oxygen needed to function and further
boosted intra-cranial pressure to the point that other brain cells were squeezed
to extinction.
Though paralyzed, Alden did not lose consciousness for quite some time, and his
brilliant mind recorded the event with remarkable clarity. Already unable to
move, he knew that death was coming for him. So close, he thought, his mind
racing to outrun death. Thirty-five years to get here. All those books. All
those seminars. The bright young students. The lecture circuit. The talk shows.
The campaigns. All to get here. I was so close to accomplishing something
important. Oh, God! To die now, to die like this! But he knew that death was
here, that he had to accept it. He hoped that someone would forgive him. He
hadn't been a bad man, had he? He'd tried so hard to make a difference, to make
the world a better place, and now on the brink of something really important . .
. so much the better for everyone if this had happened while he was mounted on
that foolish little cow . . . better still, he knew in one final moment, if his
studies and his intellect had been his only pass –
Alden's disgrace and de facto firing determined the fact that his death would
take long to discover. Instead of being buzzed by his secretary every few
minutes, it took nearly an hour. Because she was intercepting all calls to him,