Line of Succession (32 page)

“We're divided. It's still, ah, hotly contested, as it were.”

“It's up to the President, though. Isn't it.”

“We live in a democracy,” Satterthwaite said, quite dry. “It's up to the people.”

“Sure it is.”

“David whether you like it or not it's a political decision. The consequences could be catastrophic if we do the wrong thing.”

“I've got a piece of news for you. The consequences will probably be catastrophic whatever you do. You'd better shit or get off the pot.”

“Funny—Dexter Ethridge said the same thing. In somewhat more genteel language of course.”

“Which makes Ethridge a little brighter than the rest of you,” Lime said. He glanced across the communications room. A dozen men were busy at phones and teleprinters; a few of them wore headsets. Chad Hill was handing a telephone receiver back to the man seated at the table beside him. Hill started to gesture in Lime's direction—something had developed that required Lime's attention. Lime waved an acknowledgment and said to the scrambler, “Look, we're glued onto Mezetti. Right now he's leading us in circles but I think he's going to take us to them if we give him a little time. I can't have——”

“How much time?”

“I'm not an oracle. Ask Mezetti.”

“That's what
you
ought to be doing, David.”

“Are you ordering me to pick him up?”

Static on the line while Satterthwaite paused to consider it. Lime was dropping the ball in his lap. “David, when I talked you into this it was with the understanding that the best way to get a job done is to pick the best people and give them their heads. I'm not going to start telling you how to do your job—if I were capable of that I'd be doing the job instead of you.”

“All right. But Mezetti may lead us right into the hive, and it could happen any time. I need to know how much latitude I've got if I have to start talking deals with them.”

“You're asking blood from a stone.”

“Damn it I have to know if you're going to agree to the exchange. Any negotiator has to know his bargaining points. You're tying my hands.”

“What do you want me to tell you? The decision hasn't been made yet. The instant it's made I'll let you know.”

It was all he was going to get. He stopped pressing it. “All right. Look, something's come up. I'll get back to you.”

“Do it soon.”

“Aeah. See you.”

He broke the connection and crossed the room and Chad Hill bundled him outside. In the Government House corridor Chad said, “He's changed course on us.”

“He's not landing in Gib?”

“The plane turned north.”

Lime felt relieved and showed it with a tight smile. “Now we're getting somewhere. Who's on him?”

“Two planes at the moment. Another one coming across from Lisbon to pick him up farther north.”

“All right then. Just let's don't lose the son of a bitch.”

The worst part was doing nothing, knowing things were happening out there but sitting still waiting for news. Lime sent a man out to buy him half a dozen packs of American cigarettes and if possible a large order of coffee. He retreated to his monk's cell and tried to put his head together.

His sense of time had been blurred: fatigue gave him a sunless sense of unreality, everything took place at a distance as if seen through a camera. He had to rest. Once again he stretched out on the floor and closed his eyes.

He pictured Bev but the image drifted and he was thinking of Julius Sturka, the vague face in the grainy photograph.

He didn't want it to turn out to be Sturka. He'd tried to get Sturka before and he'd failed. Failed in 1961 and failed again in the past fortnight.

In the old days he had wasted a lot of time learning nonfacts about Sturka—the sort of rumors that were always available to fill the holes between facts. Maybe it was true he was a Yugoslav who had watched the
fascisti
torture his parents to death in Trieste, or a Ukrainian Jew who had fought Nazis at Sevastopol, but Lime long ago had begun to distrust all the simplistic Freudian guesses about Sturka. There wasn't any doubt Sturka had a romanticized picture of himself but it wasn't the messianic sort that had characterized Ché Guevara. The nearest Lime could come to a definition was to think of Sturka as a sort of ideological mercenary. He couldn't fathom what motivated Sturka but it seemed clear enough that Sturka was preoccupied more with means than with ends. He had an unrealistic view of political strategy but his tactics were impeccable. He was a methodologist, not a philosopher. At least from a distance he resembled the master criminal who was more concerned with the mechanical complexity of his crime than with its reward. Sometimes it tempted Lime to think of him as an adolescent prankster doing something outrageous just to prove he could get away with it on a dare. Sturka had the traits of a game player, he took delight in moves and countermoves. At what he did, he was superb; he was a professional.

A professional. Lime understood that; it was the highest accolade in his lexicon.

Two professionals. Was Sturka the better?

What is Fairlie to me that maybe I'll have to die for him?
But the adrenaline was pumping and Bev had been right: he had sought peace but boredom had become a kind of death and he was joyous with this job. He was at his best when he risked the most.

Needing sleep, his nerve-ends raw, his belly afire from caffeine and nicotine, he was alive. The malaise of David Lime: I have pain, therefore I am.

Five days to spring Fairlie. Well anyhow that was the spring Satterthwaite was trying to wind. If you didn't get Fairlie back there was always Ethridge and if Ethridge turned out to be dying of something there was always Milton Luke. A senile cipher, Luke, but they'd survived Coolidge and Harding and Ike in his last years. The deadline was real but if it passed the world might hang together in spite of Lime's failure.…

Thinking in circles now.

Was it really Sturka at the other end of the test line? Well it did have the earmarks, didn't it. The little cell of operatives striking straight to the system's nervous center. The knife straight into the vitals. The exquisite timing.

But if you assumed that much you still couldn't jump to conclusions about Sturka's base of operations. The fact that Sturka had once operated out of the
djebel
did not place him there now. Algeria was the logical place to look because Algeria was Sturka's old stamping grounds and because Algeria had one of the few governments in the world that wouldn't actively cooperate in the hunt for Fairlie; but the assumption it
was
Sturka was what militated most powerfully against the Algerian answer. Algeria was so obvious it was the one place Sturka would avoid.

And he had the signs they had blazed for him. The Arab robes, the boat turning north, now Mezetti flying north across Spain toward the Pyrenees with one hundred thousand dollars in his satchel. All of them deliberate misleaders, with the Arab robes a double bluff? Sturka was clever but was he that subtle?

Geneva, he thought, and that farm outside Almería where Mezetti had landed expecting to meet someone.

There was too much missing. In the field there was nothing to do but follow the facts and hope Mezetti would produce.

Sturka, he thought reluctantly. I suppose it must be. He dozed.

1:45
P.M. EST
Satterthwaite sat tense with one shoulder raised, dry-washing his clasped hands. Images crowded his mind: the operating-room glances between doctors, eyes bleak over the tops of white surgical masks; the obscene pulsing of a respirometer bag; rhythmic green curves darting across a cardiograph screen with eyes watching it fearfully hoping the curve would not become a steady green dot sliding straight across from left to right.

Out at Walter Reed the neurosurgeons were drilling holes toward Dexter Ethridge's brain. Cutting biparietal burr holes. At last report blood pressure was down to eighty over forty; a clot was suspected.

Satterthwaite looked at the man behind the big desk. Worry pulled at President Brewster's mouth. Neither man spoke.

David Lime was in an airplane somewhere between Gibraltar and Geneva—an airborne jet transport with his big communications crew aboard. All of them following the track of the Mezetti Cessna. Maybe it would lead them to something. But if it didn't?

The telephone.

The President looked up but only his eyes moved; he didn't stir.

Satterthwaite reached out, plucked at the telephone.

It was Kermode. Dexter Ethridge's doctor. He sounded aggrieved as if by some petty annoyance. “Ten minutes ago. It was a subdural hematoma.”

Satterthwaite covered the mouthpiece with his palm. “He's dead.”

The President blinked. “Dead.”

Kermode was still talking. Satterthwaite got phrases: “Medicine's not an exact science, is it. I mean in half these cases the diagnosis isn't made until it's too late—in a third of them it isn't even considered. It's my bloody fault.”

“Take it easy. You're not a neurologist.”

“We've had them on the case since the bombing. Nobody spotted it. I mean it's not a common problem. We found out by arteriography, but it was too late to evacuate the thing.”

“Take it easy, Doctor.”

“Take it easy. Sure. I mean I've just murdered the next President of the United States.”

“Nuts.”

Brewster stirred—reaching for a cigar—but he didn't speak. Satterthwaite listened to the telephone voice: “It was an injury caused by the bomb blast when that desk hit him on the head. What happens, the cerebral hemispheres get displaced downward and you get a compression against the brain. It's a hemorrhage but it's not the usual run of cerebral hemorrhage. It's between the layers—you can't spot it with the usual diagnostic tools. These things take weeks to show up—sometimes months. Then it's usually too late.”

Satterthwaite wasn't willing to go on listening to Kermode's
mea culpa.
“What about Judith Ethridge?”

“She's here in the hospital. Of course she knows.”

“The President will call her.”

“Yeah.”

“Goodbye,” Satterthwaite said, and removed the muttering phone from his ear and hung it up.

The President glared at him.

“Shit.” Brewster spoke the word as if it had been chipped out of hard steel.

8:00
P.M. EST
The snow had quit falling. Raoul Riva let the Venetian blind slat down and left the room in hat and overcoat, walked to the elevator and pressed the concave plastic square until it lit up. He rode down to the lobby and stood just inside the front door ignoring the doorman's inquiring glance; stood there for a few moments as if judging the weather, then strolled outside with the air of a man in no hurry who had no particular destination in mind.

The phone booth was a few streets away and he approached it at a leisurely pace, timing his arrival for eight-twenty. The call wasn't due until half past but he wanted to make sure no one else used the phone at that time. He stepped into the booth and pretended to be looking up a number in the directory.

The call was three minutes late. “I have an overseas call for Mr. Felix Martin.”

“Speaking.”

“Thank you.… Your call is ready sir. Go ahead.”

“Hello Felix?” Sturka's voice was a bit distant; it wasn't the best connection.

“Hello Stewart. How's the weather over your way?”

“Very mild. How's yours?”

“A little snow but it's let up. I wish I were over there in all that sunshine. You must be having a ball.”

“Well you know, business, always business.” Sturka's voice became more matter-of-fact. “How's the market doing?”

“Not too great I'm afraid. A bad thing, Dexter Ethridge dying like that—you heard?”

“No. You say Ethridge died?”

“Yes. Some sort of hemorrhage—after effect of those bombs that blew up the Capitol. The news sent the market down another four points.”

“Well what about our holdings?”

“They're slipping. Like all the rest.”

“I suppose things will recover. They always do. We'll just have to hold on and wait for our price.”

Riva said, “Well the way things are going I wouldn't be surprised if the SEC slapped some tougher controls on.”

“Yes. I suppose we'll have to expect that.”

“These radicals are really pretty stupid, aren't they. If they don't turn Cliff Fairlie loose there's going to be all kinds of hell breaking loose.”

“Well I don't know, Felix. I get a feeling they've got some pretty brutal plans. I wouldn't be surprised if they killed Fairlie and assassinated the Speaker of the House at the same time. Then they'd be guaranteeing that old Senator Hollander'd get the Presidency, and maybe that's exactly what these clowns want—a right-wing fool like that in the White House would do more for the cause of the revolutionaries than anybody since Fulgencio Batista. You think maybe that's what they've got in mind?”

“That sounds pretty fanciful if you ask me. I mean the Speaker must be ten feet deep in Secret Service protection. I can't see how they'd be able to pull that off.”

“Well I'm sure they'd find a way. They always seem to, don't they. Anyhow this call's costing a bloody fortune, let's not spend hours talking politics. Now look, from what you say about the market I'd think it might be a good time to get out of our blue chips, unload them first thing Monday morning. What do you say?”

“I think it might be better to hold off a few days, see which way things go.”

“You may be right. I'll let you be the judge of that. But I do think it's a damn good thing we unloaded that block of Mezetti Industries stock—we got out right under the wire.”

“You got out of it entirely?” Riva asked.