Line of Succession (29 page)

“I'm not dead yet,” he said very gently. The roses lay across the table between them; he pushed the roses away and covered her hand with his palm but she drew it away in pique and Lime laughed at her.

“It's not funny.”

“You said that before.”

“Now I'm sure you're listening,” she said. “God damn it they've got millions of people. It doesn't have to be you. If you don't find the kidnappers you'll be blamed for it for the rest of your life—and if you do find them they'll probably kill you.”

“I like your overwhelming confidence in me.”

“Oh I know, you're the master spy, you're the best in the world—I've heard all that drivel from your fawning admirers. I'm not impressed. Shit, David, they're setting you up for a fall guy.”

“I know they are.”

“Then why in the hell did you agree to it?” She sat snapping her thumbnail against her front teeth. “When you were making up your mind,” she said, “you didn't think of me at all.”

“That's right.”

“That's pretty shitty.”

“I know.”

“I'm beginning to wish you loved me a little.”

“I do.”

Now she smiled but it was crooked. “Well I suppose loving is more important than being loved. But really I don't like this—we're starting to sound like two characters in an Ingrid Bergman movie. You're even beginning to look a little like Paul Henreid.”

She was trying to play at his own game and it pleased him, ludicrously; he pushed his chair back and stood. She opened her handbag, fished for a lipstick, spread it on her mouth and squeezed her lips together to distribute it and inspected the result in her compact mirror. She was the closest to an unselfish human being he had ever known; he waited, keeping the jet waiting at Andrews, and heard the small crisp snap of her handbag and watched her get up and come around the table. She coiled her fingers around his arm. “All right. I'll wait dutifully. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“Yes.”

“One of these days you may learn to express your feelings. At least I've got you admitting you
have
feelings.”

That was true, and it was why he loved her.

Now his hands remembered the feel of her hard tight little ass and he opened his eyes to look at the ceiling and wondered how long he had dozed. The noise that had awakened him was repeated: urgent loud knuckles against the door. He climbed to his feet and unlocked it to Chad Hill.

“We've got a make.” Hill had a teleprinter decode in his hand. Lime took it.

FROM: SHANKLAND

TO: LIME

REF: LATENT FINGERPRINT PALAMOS

SUBJECT IDENTIFIED AS MARIO P. MEZETTI X WHITE

MALE AMERICAN X AGE 24 X HT 5–10 X WT 170 X

HR BLK X EYS BRN X NO IMS X WIREPHOTOS ENROUTE

X TRACER IN PROGRESS X SHANKLAND

Lime read it twice. “Never heard of him.”

“Not one of the people you identified with Sturka last week?”

“No.” Lime's eyes whipped up from the decode to Hill. “Corby. Renaldo. Peggy Astin. One John Doe.”

“Mezetti could be the John Doe.”

“So could the man in the moon.”

“Alvin Corby's black. Haven't you had him in mind for the chopper pilot from the beginning?”

“Offhand how many black revolutionaries would fit the description? The helicopter pilot was twenty pounds heavier than Corby. McNeely's seen the mug shots of Corby and said it wasn't the same man.”

He walked out into the bullpen and turned toward the UHF table where technicians were feeding incoming signals into the tape printers. There ought to be more coming in now; with a positive make at last there would be data from all over.

It came in bits and pieces during the next half hour. Mezetti was the son of an important industrialist. Five years ago he had been associated with one of the SDS wings and had been arrested, fingerprinted, questioned and released. No other criminal record. No FBI file; Mezetti was on the list of people not on the list.

Two CIA items: Mezetti had turned up in Singapore two and a half months ago ostensibly as a tourist, had been frisked by Singapore Customs because he looked freaky but had not been found to be carrying drugs of any kind; routine CIA coverage with cross-references to Passport Bureau records showed Mezetti had made fourteen trips from UCLA to Acapulco in ten months two years ago: he had been tossed seven times out of the ten but no drugs had been found on him. Narco Bureau had a note in a dead file that Mezetti had been suspected as a courier but had been found clean; whatever the purpose of his trips to Acapulco, it hadn't been narcotics. Subsequent notation from CIA's Acapulco stringer revealed Mezetti's mother and sister had spent the winter in question in Acapulco. Lime made a face.

SEC records by way of FBI showed Mezetti listed as owner-of-record of thirty-five thousand shares of Mezetti Industries Common. An IRS note appended: he was also listed as an officer of the corporation—probably a tax dodge, a funnel through which his father could pour funds into his son's account without facing inheritance taxes later on.

FBI was commencing washes of subject's known hangouts. Routine telephone checks established he was not at home; no one knew where he was; his mother thought he had gone to Europe on company business; his father knew nothing of any such thing.

Then a signal from FBI over Shankland's signature: Mezetti had flown by Air France from New York to Marseille on Saturday, January eighth.

That was thirty-six hours before Fairlie had been kidnapped.

“Christ,” Hill said. “Walking around right out in bare-ass open.”

“Well they must have done it to find out if he was clean.”

“So he's their outside contact—they need to know he's still free to move around.”

“Using a cover—his mother said he told her he was over here on company business.” He considered it. “All right. Items. He was clean Saturday night, they can't know about the fingerprint, so they've got to assume he's still free to move in the open. They'll keep using him.” His face changed abruptly: “Mezetti Industries. That's pretty big stuff. Then the kid's their bankroll.”

It made it a notch more likely the operation was fully independent—not a hire-contract job paid for by an organization. That made Lime's job harder; it meant the kidnappers were working alone without a network. You couldn't infiltrate a network that didn't exist.

Hill spoke slowly. “Now the question is do we keep it in the family or let the rival firms in?”

The rival firms would come into it in time even without invitation—KGB's immense machinery in Moscow would find out within twenty-four hours that the hunt was on for one Mario P. Mezetti. Peking would be close on the Russians' heels.

Lime made his decision in the time it took to formulate the words. “If we haven't found something by midnight we'd better bring Bizenkev into it.”

“Do we let it drop as if it's an accident or do we print him a formal invitation?”

“As formal as it can get.” If their help was solicited openly and with the knowledge of the world press, the Soviets would have less room for double crosses.

“And the same with the Chinese, I imagine,” Hill said.

Lime nodded. “Midnight. After that we can put out an APB on Mezetti.”

“What about between now and then?”

“Find out who deals with Mezetti Industries over here. They may even have ofiices of their own on this side. See if he's made contact with anybody. Put out an APB in the family but try to keep it confidential. The
Guardia
will have to know who to look for.”

“Tangier?”

“Not yet. Their mouths flap too much.”

“You're banking on them being on a boat, aren't you.” The question wasn't as astute as it seemed; Hill could make his deductions from a simple understanding of the timetable. If the kidnappers were using a boat they wouldn't have had time to reach Tangier yet. Hill said, “What about SDECE?”

“They'd better be in on it.”

“I know. But it makes it a fair bet the Russians will have it before midnight. If the French don't leak it the
Guardia
will.”

Which was being very polite to the CIA, Lime thought, but he let it go.

At half past four Madrid reported that Mezetti had checked through the French-Spanish border on Saturday, January eighth, driving a hired Renault four-door. The car hadn't turned up yet. Its description and plate number had been broadcast to all Spanish police.

It placed Mezetti in the Barcelona area shortly before the kidnapping; it added little to what Lime had already assumed but it was confirmation and that never hurt.

At five-ten the break came.

Hill took the call and hanging up turned to Lime: “Agency stringer in Gibraltar. He's just left the Mezetti Industries office. The kid's in a hotel there.”

Lime exhaled deeply.

Hill still had his hand on the cradled telephone receiver. “Pick him up?”

“No. I want a tail on him.”

“We could pull him apart, make him talk.”

“Tail him.”

“Jesus I wouldn't. He loses the tail, our heads roll.”

“And Fairlie's. Don't you think I know that? Button him up tight—but don't touch him.” Lime turned toward the door. “Hustle me up an airplane, will you? I'm going down there.”

3:30
P.M. EST
Riva was acting the part of a Puerto Rican tourist. He had papers to prove it, if anyone should care to ask; no one had. His only concession to the need for a precautionary disguise was a hairpiece which filled in his widow's peak, gave him a head of salt-and-pepper hair and a lower forehead. Nothing more was needed; Riva was amorphous, people had to meet him eight or ten times before they could recall what he looked like.

He had come down from New York on the Metroliner and found a taxi driver at Union Station willing to take him around Washington on a sightseeing tour. Riva told the driver he particularly wanted to see the homes of Congressmen and Senators and Cabinet members.

He and Sturka had gone over the same route several times a month ago to check out locations and security arrangements; the tour today was designed mainly to discern what added security precautions had been taken. If any. Riva was unimpressed by the Americans' notions of security.

There was a house trailer in the driveway of Senator Ethridge's place; he had expected that much. The trailer would contain a Secret Service crew. That was all right; they could afford to bypass Ethridge. The cab drove on.

Milton Luke had an apartment in a high-rise building on Wisconsin Avenue. The cab cruised past and Riva saw no armed men on the curb or in the visible sector of the lobby. But that didn't mean much; later he would have to reconnoiter the building on foot.

On Massachusetts Avenue just above Sheridan Circle was a massive apartment building that housed among others Congressmen Wood and Jethro, Secretary of the Treasury Jonathan Chaney, Senator Fitzroy Grant, and syndicated political columnist J. R. Ilfeld. The concentration of targets made the building important in Riva's calculations and he studied it with care as they drove past. Again there was no indication of protection or surveillance.

Senator Wendell Hollander had a house in the same district, not three blocks from the apartment tower; the house was an elephantine structure of Georgian tastelessness surrounded by heavy trees whose branches were seasonally bare. Hollander, President pro tempore of the Senate, was third in line for the Presidency after Ethridge and Milton Luke; surely there would be a Secret Service mobile home in his drive.

But there was no trailer. Riva smiled a little and the cab proceeded toward Senator Forrester's house on Arizona Terrace.

FRIDAY,

JANUARY 14

4:10
A.M. EST
Dexter Ethridge lay awake with a mild headache reviewing his cram course in the Presidency. It was all flavored by Brewster's noxious cigars. Cabinet members and generals had been delegated to brief Ethridge on the endless list of facts and questions; but President Howard Brewster was the dominant figure, always looming. Ethridge was learning how easily his appraisal of the frailties of a man like Brewster could obscure the overriding presence the man projected.

Everyone knew the folksy mispronunciations were the smokescreen of a politician incarnate. The consummate shrewdness showed through; nobody was fooled. But Ethridge was learning that Brewster's ways were even more misleading than he had always assumed.

When Brewster said, “I'm gon' be interested to know what you think, Dex,” it came out with a sincerity that almost persuaded him that what he thought was of paramount importance to Howard Brewster. Brewster did crave public attention like an addict, but that was what misled. It concealed the enormous self-confidence of the man. When Brewster asked an opinion he wanted support; but the support he required was merely political, never intellectual. Once Howard Brewster made up his own mind he
knew
he was right and he didn't need the agreement or consensus of any group. It was a throbbing vital rectitude: an awesome and monumental self-assurance.

It frightened Ethridge because each day's White House consultation added to his conviction that Brewster's larger-than-life stance of power and authority was a basic requisite for the job. A President needed to have that Sophoclean tragic-hero quality—and it was a quality Ethridge knew he didn't possess.

They said you grew into it. It came with the territory, look how Harry Truman grew. But Ethridge wasn't satisfied with that. He thought himself an open-minded man, willing to hear out all sides of a question before making up his mind; it had always been a virtue but now it became a handicap and he was beginning to regard himself as an indecisive man. In the President's chair that was no good: often you couldn't wait for all the results to come in—often you had to make a spot decision.