Line of Succession (27 page)

The gravel-voiced wheeze taking its leave; Fairlie had heard oarlocks squeak—evidently the wheezer rowing back to shore alone.

He had thought he was aboard a boat—the same boat or a new one—until he'd heard the engine choke and sputter and begin to roar; he realized immediately it was an airplane.

A seaplane, then.

The second engine had whined into life and there was a great deal of gunning before he felt it begin to move. Taking off seemed to be touch and go: the sea had a wicked slap to it, the cabin lurched and pitched. The epithets of Abdul the black pilot were intense. Fairlie remembered Abdul's cool handling of the helicopter when Abdul had somehow killed the engine while pretending something had gone wrong with it; Abdul's anger now terrified Fairlie but finally they were airborne and he felt the seat tip under him as the plane climbed steeply.

There was no accurate way to estimate the length of time they had been in the air or which way they were heading or even where they had started from, but there was enough talk for Fairlie to identify the various voices and realize there were at least four of them in the plane with him: Abdul, flying it; Sélim, the leader who spoke with a Slavic accent; Lady, who attended him with a professional detachment; Ahmed, who had a Spanish sort of accent and tended to talk in dogmatic clichés.

It was very hard to concentrate. He thought there must be plans he ought to be making. Spotty recollections of all those Second World War memoirs by British aviators who had spent five years organizing incredibly elaborate schemes to escape from Nazi POW camps.
We have a duty to escape.

There was no
we,
there was only Fairlie, and escape was beyond question; his duty appeared clear enough for the moment—to maintain sanity. He could demand nothing more of himself, not now.

8:10
A.M.
Continental European Time
Lime was still on his packing crate. One of the Spanish uniformed cops came into the garage and beckoned: there was a radiophone call from Fleet. Lime took it in the
Guardia
jeep.

The Admiral. “I thought you'd better know—the rival firms are moving in.”

Lime went back inside, somewhat depressed. It was not to be avoided that agents for the other side would come into the case. The Russians, the Chinese, an indeterminate number of others. Suppose an Albanian hard-line field agent got in ahead of you, rescued Fairlie—suppose the Albanians decided to keep Fairlie? Farfetched, but it was a risk; you didn't want to exchange one set of kidnappers for another. What it amounted to was that you had to try and prevent the rival firms from finding out what you had found out. It wasn't easy, not with communications tapped routinely and areas of the world where members of the opposing teams sat on the corners of one another's desks. It meant Lime had to tighten his communications, use safe lines whenever possible, code his transmissions—another time-consuming chore.

More likely the rival firms were eager to help out. For a Russian or a Chinese team to rescue Fairlie would be a propaganda victory unprecedented in decades—a triumph of public relations if nothing else. But you still couldn't afford to work with them. Once you admitted them to partnership you would be delayed at every junction place; your partners would be required to check back with superiors and clear every decision through layers of bureaucracy.

You could expect a certain amount of help—technical stuff, manpower, communications—from the allies; but these were equally hamstrung by tiers of authority and in the end you had to keep your hand free. So you used everyone and gave nothing to anyone. In a very short time all of them would begin to resent Lime and he would find resistance when he sought further assistance.

The CIA had a hundred thousand employees of whom twenty thousand were field agents; of these a thousand or more were strung through the Mediterranean area, on call if and when Lime needed them. At the moment they merely had orders to check whatever contacts they had, find out what sort of rumors were floating through the underground.

The English sailor arrived at half past eight with the Basque fisherman in tow. The fisherman's name was Mendes; his smile looked slack-muscled, as if he had been posing too long for a slow photographer. His eyes were a faded blue and his drooping pinched mouth suggested a discontented lifetime of anxieties and disappointments. He smelled faintly of fish and the sea. He spoke no English and minimal Spanish. Lime had summoned a Basque-speaking
Guardiano
two hours ago; now he brought the
Guardiano
into the circle and began the session.

It was very kind of Señor Mendes to make the time to assist. The
commandante's
unfortunate manner was regrettable; it was to be hoped Señor Mendes had not been too offended—everyone was under great strain, perhaps the
commandante's
abruptness was understandable? Would Señor Mendes care for an American cigarette?

Lime made sure he had Mendes on the hook before he began to tug the line—gently at first: a day's fishing was being lost by Señor Mendes's detention, the American government assuredly wished to compensate him for his loss of time—would a thousand pesetas be sufficient? But very gently always because you couldn't afford to offend; when Mendes took the money it was with the proud agreement he was not being bribed but rather being paid a suitable wage for his time and labor as a detective assisting in the search for the abducted American President-elect.

It took time to undo the damage Dominguez had inflicted but in the end the Basque's story came out. He had not seen any faces, only the Arab robes of three figures; a fourth man in some sort of uniform. Arriving on the coast in a hearse. Mendes had been a few hundred yards up the beach, walking from the boat basin to his home which was above the dunes not far from the breakwater where the hearse had drawn up. It had come without headlights; it was met by a dinghy from a boat lying close to shore.

The three Arabs and the man in uniform had carried a coffin from the hearse to the dinghy. Someone—a fifth one, unseen by Mendes—had driven the hearse away. The others had gone aboard the boat with the coffin and the boat had set out to sea.

Plainly it was not all Mendes had to say. Lime waited him out, not prompting; the man's agreeability was fragile, the wrong question might close him up.

Finally it came in a blurted rush: Mendes had recognized the boat.

He had agonized; it troubled him deeply; the boat belonged to a friend, a colleague, and in Spain a Basque did not inform on a fellow Basque—yet it had to do with the kidnapping of the
presidente
.…

“We understand,” Lime breathed sympathetically.

The friend was Lopez, his boat the
Maria Linda
after Lopez's wife. An old boat, somewhat the worse for age, but you would recognize her easily by the smokestack—she had this raked stack,
comprende?
Like a miniature ocean liner. You couldn't miss her, there wasn't another like her on the Costa Brava.

Maria Linda
had not returned to Palamos since that night, Mendes said sadly. Assuredly it was a long voyage, wherever she was bound.

Lime turned, raised his eyebrows at Chad Hill. After a moment Hill came to; bounced away in belated obedience to start the machinery in motion for the wholesale search for
Maria Linda.

Lime kept at Mendes, his question-hammers wrapped in courteous padding. Details emerged; no further startling developments. He kept it up for an hour and sent Mendes away with his thanks, having learned a few things of possible interest: chief among them an address and Lime sent a runner immediately to locate Lopez's wife.

At quarter past ten she appeared, Maria Lopez, a tired woman gone to stoutness, the vestiges of beauty remaining in black eyes and long-fingered hands. Lime was straightforward with her: he told her of the seriousness of her husband's predicament, he offered her money—ten thousand pesetas—and he asked his question: what did she know of the Arabs her husband had taken off the beach on Monday night?

He had given her ten thousand; he held twenty thousand more in his hand. The woman spoke without moving her eyes away from the money. Lime listened coolly to the interpreter. They had approached Lopez Sunday after church, three Arab men and an Arab woman with a veil. They said they were from Morocco. Their brother had died in Barcelona but they could not get official permission to remove the body from the country. They said it was important to Bedouins to have their dead buried in family ground. They admitted it was a smuggling thing, against the law, but they appealed to Lopez's sympathies and they offered a great deal of money. Lopez knew what it meant to be buried in consecrated ground of course. Mrs. Lopez was not sure how much money was involved but it was possibly fifty thousand pesetas or more, plus fuel and expenses.

Had she seen the Arabs up close? No she had not seen them at all; Lopez had described them as four Arabs—three men and a woman. She spread her hands toward Lime: it was winter, a fisherman's life was thankless. They had known nothing of any kidnapping.

Chad Hill intercepted him at the garage door: “For Christ's sake,” Hill complained.

“What?”

“They've had it twenty-four hours.”

“Had what?”

“The boat. The
Maria Linda.
”

It was a fifty-minute helicopter ride from Palamos up the coast to the beach where Spanish coastguardsmen had found
Maria Linda
Wednesday morning impaled on a shoal in the lee of a breakwater. She hung at a vertiginous angle, anchor-chain taut. It looked as though she had sought shelter in a storm and been smashed aground. But there had been no storm Tuesday night and the weather since then had been blowy but not monstrous.

By the time Lime's chopper set him down a captain of
Guardia
had arrived to meet him with everything the Spanish police had collected on the case. Ordinarily it would have taken much longer but ordinarily no one was holding a blowtorch to the
Guardia's
backside.

The body had been removed to the police morgue in Barcelona. Lopez had been found dead on the beach within sight of the grounded boat, hidden by dunes from the coast highway which ran close along the Med at this point: they were north of Cape Creus, the French frontier was only seven kilometers away.

Lopez had been stabbed several times, with more than one knife. The weapons had not been found. The murder case was being investigated but until now there had been no connection with the Fairlie kidnapping and therefore it hadn't been brought to Lime's attention.

A few latent fingerprints had been found on the polished wood surfaces of the boat's interior; photos were included in the folder just delivered to Lime. The prints were being processed in Madrid; as soon as Hill's call had alerted the
Guardia,
copies of the prints had been forwarded to Interpol and Washington. It was assumed most of the prints were Lopez's but everything was being checked: fingerprints were being lifted off the corpse for purposes of comparison and elimination.

The
Guardiano
was a captain by rank, a precise cop with a professional voice. It droned on, filling Lime in, while a cool gray wind ruffled the sea and blew sand in Lime's face. Tire tracks had been found between the highway and the beach, indicating that a vehicle had pulled off the road and driven up onto the small promontory overlooking the beach. It had parked there, pointed toward the sea, possibly to flash its headlights out to sea in signal. High tide had come and gone between the murder and the discovery; the only footprints found were high up, near the body and the tire tracks. The vehicle had been considerably heavier when it left than it had been when it arrived, and the departure tracks merged with the highway in a southerly direction, indicating the vehicle had arrived from the south and departed toward the south, retracing its course. Unfortunately the sand was too soft to reveal a tread pattern. The width between tires indicated a standard wheelbase for medium-sized automobile or small van.

As for the reason for the abandonment of the boat, it appeared the engine-oil line had rusted through; the oil had leaked out and the engine had seized up.

To Lime there was only one clue in all this that wasn't ambiguous; it was a straightforward indication of the kidnappers' intent. The Lopez boat had cracked up
north
of its point of departure. Assumption: they had been heading for France, or Italy.

It was there in plain sight and because the kidnappers weren't careless men it had to be assumed they meant it to be seen: they could have sunk the boat easily enough and left no traces. That was the thing. They had put it on display, they hadn't concealed it. Lopez's body, the boat. These had been meant to be found.

He had to read something into that. They told him they were heading north. Now it was a question whether they wanted him to hunt north or, conversely, whether they wanted him to think that far ahead and hunt south.

There were many layers of bluff. First level: if a clue appears it should be believed. Second level: if it is an obvious clue it must be a red herring designed to waste time and resources; it is so obvious it had better be dismissed. Third level: if it is so obviously an invitation to dismiss it and do the opposite then perhaps it ought to be obeyed after all because the kidnappers made it blatantly obvious just to confuse. Fourth level: the kidnappers, anticipating this dilemma in his mind, want him to think it through all the way to the end and then go ahead and investigate the clue exhaustively because, all other things being equal, a clue is a clue and even if it is a deliberate plant it may give away something it wasn't intended to reveal.

It came down to a question of the order of subtlety of the bluff and he knew once he became trapped analyzing levels of possibility he could burn his brain out trying to guess the truth.

The one thing that stood out was that the kidnappers were professionals. Or at least they were led by a professional. A professional was a man who didn't leave clues unless he intended to. This entire operation had been set up not by any amateur revolutionary but by a pro who had planned every step and timed every movement. The snatch caper at Perdido had been a model of economical efficiency. The mountain farm had been selected with exact precision for its proximity to the Mediterranean coast and its flying distance from Perdido because the kidnappers knew they had to get the chopper under cover before the authorities got a search operation under way. The kidnappers knew just how much time they had for each step of their operation and obviously they hadn't rushed anything. They had taken Fairlie, concealed the chopper, driven openly by car from the farm to the garage outside Palamos—all this during the period of time when the authorities were still organizing for a search, still absorbing the impact of the incredibly simple crime that had been committed. But once under cover in that Palamos garage the kidnappers had stayed put, not allowing panic to push them into movement again until after dark. By that time they had to assume the police and security of a dozen nations were searching for them but they acted with aplomb, delivering Fairlie by hearse to the waterfront, getting aboard Lopez's boat and heading out to sea.