Line of Succession (19 page)

The bread and ham had no flavor; he ate mechanically.

Sélim said, “How long do you suppose we've been sitting here talking?”

“Why?”

“Humor me. Answer the question.”

“Five minutes I suppose. Ten minutes. I don't know.”

“I imagine it's long enough for you to have cleared your voice. It sounds natural enough to me.” Sélim reached for the tape recorder, pushed it forward into the light. He did not switch it on yet. “Now we have a simple request. I have a short speech written out. You ought to find that familiar—you people always read speeches written for you by someone else, don't you.”

Fairlie refused to be drawn; fear chugged in his stomach and he was not prepared to debate questions of that nature.

“We'd like you to deliver this little speech for us in your own voice. Into the tape recorder.”

Fairlie only continued to eat.

Sélim was very patient, very mild. “You see we believe the greatest difficulty faced by the peoples of the world is that those in power simply do not listen—or at best, listen only to what they want to hear.”

“You've got a captive audience,” Fairlie said. “If it pleases you to bombard me with mindless invective I can't stop you. But I can't see how you expect it to do you any good.”

“On the contrary. We expect you to help us re-educate the world.”

“Thank you but I rarely send my brain out to be laundered.”

“An admirable sense of humor. You're a brave man.”

Sélim reached inside his robes, drew out a folded paper, pushed it into the light. Fairlie picked it up. It had been typewritten, single spaced.

“You'll read it exactly as written, with no editorial revisions and no imaginative asides.”

Fairlie read it. His mouth pinched into tight compression; he breathed deep through his nose. “I see.”

“Yes, quite.”

“And after I've obeyed your instructions?”

“We don't intend to kill you.”

“Is that a fact.”

“Fairlie you're no use to us dead. I realize I can't prove this to you. It's true, however.”

“You don't honestly think Washington will agree to these demands?”

“Why not? It's a very cheap price to pay for your safe return.” Sélim leaned forward. “Put yourself in Brewster's position.
You'd
do it. So will he. Come now, Fairlie, you're wasting our time. You can readily understand that right now for us time is blood.”

Fairlie glanced at the last line of the typewritten speech. “‘Instructions will follow.' What instructions? You can't bring this off, you know that.”

“We've brought it off up to now, haven't we Fairlie.” The voice was filled with quiet arrogance.

Fairlie tried to see him past the upheld hand lamp. Sélim's head, wrapped in linen, was only a vague suggestion. Fairlie's hand reached the table, gripped its edge; he put his fingertips on the document and pushed it away.

“You're refusing.”

“Suppose I do?”

“Then we'll break one of your fingers and ask you again.”

“I can't be brainwashed.”

“Can't you? Suppose I leave it to your imagination. You have to decide what your own life is worth to you—I can't tell you that. How much pain can you bear?”

Fairlie lowered his face into his hands to shut out the blinding hard light.

He heard Sélim's quiet talk. “We're individually important to no one, not even ourselves. You on the other hand are important to a great many people. You have obligations to them as well as to yourself.” Sélim's voice had dropped almost out of hearing.

Fairlie sat cramped and motionless facing the decision that would have to last his lifetime. Sophomoric questions of physical courage were beside the point; what mattered was position. If you stood for anything at all you must be seen to stand for it. You could not allow yourself to mouth words that mocked your beliefs. Not even when no one who heard you would believe for a moment that you had made the statement of your own free will.

He pulled the typewritten statement into the light and squinted against the glare. “‘They are to be released and given safe asylum.' Asylum where? No country in the world will touch them.”

“Let that be our problem. Haven't you enough of your own?”

Sélim dipped the light a little, out of his eyes. Fairlie shook his head. “‘Fascist pigs,' ‘white liberal swine,' ‘racist imperialists.' Cheap propaganda slogans that don't mean a thing. This document would have to be deciphered like a broadside from Peking.”

“I haven't asked you to interpret for us. Just read it.”

Fairlie looked into the shadows beside the light. “The point is I have a position in the world, you see—alive or dead I still represent that position. The man in that position can't put his voice to words like these.”

“Even if they're true?”

“They aren't true.”

“Then you refuse.”

He would have preferred to be able to meet Sélim's eyes but the light made it impossible.

“Given time we can force you to do it.”

“Possibly. I think I'm reasonably tough.”

“There are drugs.”

“I doubt my voice would sound natural.”

Sélim sat silent for a brooding interval. Fairlie felt cold, dismal. Possibly this refusal would cost him his life; he was not capable of facing that with equanimity.

Very soft: “What do you want, Fairlie?”

“What do
I
want?”

“Let's hear your side—perhaps we can strike a bargain. What is your price?”

“I cannot be bought, you know that. A man in my position hasn't the luxury of being able to afford being bought.”

“I applaud your courage. But there must be some basis for discussion.”

“Of course there is.” He felt irresponsibly lightheaded. “Agree to turn me loose.”

“And if I do?” Sélim shifted the light; it stabbed directly into his eyes. “You know what
we
want, isn't that right?”

“I've read your ransom demands.”

“And?”

“I understand how from your point of view they may seem reasonable. They don't to me.”

“Why not?”

“My freedom in exchange for the seven bombers we've got on trial? You don't really——”

“Now that's much better,” Sélim murmured.

“What?” A sudden suspicion: he reached up, twisted the lamp in Sélim's hand.

Light fell across the tape recorder. But the spools were still motionless.

Sélim pulled the lamp out of his grip. “I'll switch it on when you're ready.”

“I'll speak into that thing only on my terms.”

“And what are your terms, Fairlie?”

“I speak my own words, free of restraint.”

“We can hardly allow that.”

“You're free to splice the tape. But I'll say no more than that I've been kidnapped and am alive and in good health. That should be evidence enough to serve your tactical purposes. It's all I'll give you.”

“Of course you'd give us that much—it would suit your own purpose. You want them to know you're still alive. They'll search more strenuously, knowing you're alive.”

“It's all I'll give you. Take it or leave it.”

Sélim abruptly set the work lamp down on the bench. Fairlie reached out and turned it away so that it shone against the wall. Sélim did not stop him; the others, who probably had not heard most of the talk, watched from the dim corners like ghosts.

Sélim switched on the tape recorder, unreeled its microphone and spoke into it:
“Uno, dos, tres, cuatro
.…” He rewound the spools and switched it to playback and the machine said obediently, “
Uno, dos, tres, cuatro.
”

Sélim rewound the few inches of tape so that the next recording would erase his test words. He pushed the microphone toward Fairlie. “Very well. We'll try it your way. Whenever you're ready.”

Fairlie took the mike out of his hand, held it beneath his mouth. He nodded; Sélim's long-fingered hand pressed the start-record buttons.

“This is Clifford Fairlie speaking. I have been kidnapped, I'm being held in a place I can't identify by a group of people who have not shown their faces to me or otherwise identified themselves except by obvious pseudonyms. They have not harmed me physically and I believe they do not intend to kill me.”

He lowered the microphone. “That's all.”

“Say you expect to be released if your government agrees to our ransom demands.”

He shook his head, standing mute; finally Sélim grunted and switched the recorder off. “Abdul.”

The lights came on inside the garage; Sélim switched off the work lamp. “Abdul, tie him.”

He watched, bleak, while Abdul came forward with wire and secured his hands. “The feet too?”

“Not yet.” Sélim stood up, reached for the work lamp. He removed something from its cage—a disk, trailing fine wires. The wires ran down the lamp cord into the jumble around the socket. Sélim picked up the packing crate on which he had been sitting. Underneath it was a tape recorder identical to the one on the workbench. Sélim lifted it to the bench. “I think we have enough.” He began to rewind the spools; he said conversationally to Fairlie, “A good editing job requires two tape decks, you know.”

It was no good screaming oaths. Fairlie closed his eyes. He had allowed them to draw his words; they had duped him so easily. Everything he'd said in the past half hour was on that tape.

“You've been most cooperative,” Sélim said. “We appreciate that. We really do.” He placed the two machines side by side on the bench. “Ahmed, time for you to get to work.”

One of the others came forward from the corner—stocky, this one, with dark brown hands. Possibly this one was a real Arab. Sélim relinquished the bench to him and Ahmed placed a set of earphones over his head and began to plug in wires that connected the two recorders together. His hands moved with professional adeptness.

Abdul removed a wad of chewing gum from his mouth and pressed it to the underside of the workbench; he turned and gripped Fairlie's arm. “Come on, Mr. President-elect. Time to get back in your box.”

Sélim and Abdul walked him to the coffin. It was a simple box on the outside, its luxury limited to the quilted satin interior. The six handles were made of wood. A small hole had been bored through near the bottom at the head end, Fairlie saw; source of the fresh air for the occupant.

Sélim said, “Get in please. We're going to drug you. It's not toxic, it's an anesthetic which reduces respiration by a marked degree. You will be alive, but comatose. For a few hours, no more. During that time you'll give every appearance of being dead. Your skin will be very pale, your breathing will be too shallow for detection. But you'll be quite all right afterward, it wears off almost immediately. Lady?”

They pushed him down on his back; he did not struggle, there was no point to it with his hands wired. The woman approached with a syringe. Held it up, squeezed a droplet from the needle's tip. At least she appeared to know the drill—she wasn't a fool who'd kill him with an injected air bubble. Fairlie kept his eyes open, watched bitterly as the needle sank into the vein of his inner elbow.

Abdul loomed above the coffin and looked down at him and Abdul's jaws worked; Fairlie could smell the chewing gum. It, or the drug, made him vaguely nauseous. He heard Sélim talking to someone: “This Ortiz had better be what you make him.”

“No sweat. You go looking to buy yourself an official, you'll find him sitting right on the counter.”

Fairlie's head began to swirl. The sucking and clicking of Abdul's chewing gum became a very loud sound in the garage.

Sélim: “I have a meet in—twenty minutes.”

Ahmed: “In Palamos?”

“Mm.”

“Plenty of time then.”

Fairlie's eyes slid shut.

“Kill the lights while I open the door.”

Darkness. Fairlie fought. Very distantly he heard the scrape and thunder of the garage door: he tried to focus on it but he was falling in vertigo, a spiral without bearings. Slipping under, he was thinking toward the last that he was a fool and that was a shame because the world did not need a fool for a leader just now.

9:40
P.M. EST
The headache was a sharp burning blade against Dexter Ethridge's right eye. He tried to ignore it. President Brewster was saying, “It'd be a bad mistake to let this distract us completely from the Spanish thing. Nobody seems to realize how important those bases are.”

“Well we're not going to be able to hang onto them forever,” Ethridge said.

“You can't always think in terms of forever, Dex. First you've got to think of right now. Today, tomorrow, the next twelve months.”

Ethridge recognized the philosophy: it was Bill Satterthwaite's and over the past few years more and more it had come to color the President's acts.

The President said, “Right now—and
right now
is the point—the Reds have got us outshipped and outgunned and altogether militarily outclassed in the Mediterranean. The only thing we've got to balance it is the Spanish bases.”

“It's not as if we're on the brink of war though.” Ethridge half-closed his right eyelid, trying to drive the pain away.

“Dex. We have been on the brink of war continuously since Nineteen and Forty-seven.” The President was very tired; his voice had the quality of a rusty hinge in motion but Ethridge found it pleasantly abrasive, like a rough towel after a hot bath.

They sat in private conference in the Lincoln Sitting Room; they had been there more than two hours, uninterrupted except for a staff aide's intrusion with an item of news from Justice: an anonymous caller had warned Los Angeles police there was a plastic bomb concealed in the Federal Court Building, had said there would be an epidemic of bombs across the country if the Washington Seven were not released; the threat sounded as if it represented the voice of a vast nationwide conspiracy. But it turned out there was no bomb in the Federal Court Building; at any rate the Government had begun massive surveillance of known radicals a week ago and there was no sign of organized terrorist momentum. In fact the tragedy at the Capitol seemed to have brought quite a few hot-bloods to their senses; even the underground press was calling for a halt to violence.