Line of Succession (47 page)

“Why should he want you to think he was lying?”

“Because if there really wasn't any difference between him and Wendy there was no reason for me to back him.”

“You honestly believe there's no difference?”

“Howard Brewster has the capacity to make himself a demagogue in this country. Hollander doesn't. That's the salient difference, Bill. And that's why I won't abide by your request—his request.” Grant stood up. “I'm going to fight it publicly
and
privately, Bill. Every way I know how. I've already started—by giving you something to think about.”

Satterthwaite walked, almost in relief, to the door. Picked up his armed escort in the corridor and went out to the waiting gray Interagency Motor Pool sedan. On the way to the Executive Office Building he sat in the back seat and held his head as if it weighed half a ton.

Grant's notions were insidious. It was true Brewster was bearing down hard. In essence his argument was
“Aprés moi le déluge.
”

According to Grant you had to extend that. You had to start from that premise and look at the, evidence and reach the conclusion that Brewster really meant
“L'état c'est moi.
”

Satterthwaite closed his eyes. Things were reeling.

He had never been less than intensely loyal. Even when arguing with Brewster he had always played the role of loyal opposition. He had never aligned himself with Brewster's adversaries and he had never differed publicly with the President.

Suddenly he felt himself the man in the middle.

No,
he decided abruptly.

It was a mark of his exhaustion that he had let Grant play on his uncertainties. It was ridiculous. Suppose it was true? It still left the choice: Brewster or Hollander. And the choice was still clear.

Satterthwaite had served Brewster long enough to know him. He had observed Hollander for an equal length of time and regardless of Brewster's personal ambitions there really was no comparing the two men. Brewster had stature and conscience; Hollander had neither.

Satterthwaite left the car and headed for the caucus.

3:15
P.M.
North African Time
Lime sat in the bar drooling with drunken lechery, clumsily pawing the blonde. His cap was askew at an angle more precarious than rakish. “Hey innkeeper!” he roared at the top of an arrogant American tourist voice. The blonde gave him a blowsy loose smile but Lime wasn't looking at her; he was rearing his head around angrily to locate the bartender, Binaud. “Hey let's get these classes—glasses filled, what's taking you so damn long?” A corner of his vision held Benyoussef Ben Krim crossing the front of the room from the door to the front end of the bar. A big man, fat but not yet obese, limping slightly.

The CIA agent Gilliams had sent the blonde on request and she had brought the Levi's and loud Hawaiian shirt and the yachting cap with its golden anchor embroidered on the crown. Lime provided the rest: the appearance of a flabby dissipated American on a week's holiday from a Saharan oil-company job.

Ben Krim caught Binaud's eye and Lime saw Binaud's careful one-inch nod. Ben Krim stood impatiently while Binaud mixed a drink.

Lime stood up, almost upsetting the chair; patted the blonde and lurched toward the door as if headed for the toilet attached to the outside of the building.

Ben Krim turned to go out the door and Lime managed to collide with him.

“Jesus.” Lime started to get angry and then had another look at the size and ferocity of Ben Krim; Lime's face changed, he assumed a cowardly half smile. “Hey, look, I apologize. These freeways are murder aren't they, hey? Good seein' you old buddy.”

While he talked he was making drunken efforts to brush Ben Krim's jacket smooth. The Arab stared at him with hooded disgust and Lime stumbled through the door, almost fell off the step, staggered around the corner and poured himself into the toilet chamber.

Through gaps in the boards he had a restricted view along the outside wall of the bar to the road, the pier, the boats and airplane beyond. He saw Ben Krim walk stolidly out onto the pier, putting most of his weight on his left leg, dragging the right foot along. After a moment Binaud appeared and followed Ben Krim onto the pier. A third man got out of a black Citroen 2CV that was drawn up at the near end of the dock and Binaud made a point of inspecting his pilot's papers—Lime assumed that was what they were. Finally an envelope came out of Ben Krim's pocket and Ben Krim counted out money. Binaud counted it too and then put it away in his pants, and ushered the two men down the pier ladder to the dinghy he kept tied up there. Ben Krim followed them down out of sight.

When Lime staggered out of the toilet they were rowing out to the Catalina. He gave them a casual glance and lumbered around to the front door of the bar. Tripped over the step and fell inside.

He picked himself up and stood in the shadows to watch Ben Krim and the pilot climb into the PBY, after which Binaud began to row back toward the pier. Lime walked to the table and removed the yachting cap, handed it to the blonde and said, “Thanks. You did fine.”

“Boy do you sober up fast.” She smiled and it was genuine this time; it made her look a lot better. “What was that all about anyway?”

“I needed an excuse to bump into him.”

“To pick his pocket?”

“Quite the reverse,” Lime said. He took two paces into the center of the room to look out through the door. The Catalina's engines were coughing into life and he watched the big-winged plane cast off from its buoy and turn and taxi out on the water.

He followed Binaud into the cruiser's forward cabin. Chad Hill and two agents sat drinking coffee. Hill was saying to Binaud, “You did very well.”

“May I have the money now?”

“Let him hold it,” Lime said. “Keep two men on him till this is wrapped up.” He looked at Hill's camera. “Get some good face shots?”

“I think so.”

They might need to be able to identify Ben Krim's pilot later on if things got murky. Lime hadn't got a good look at the man. Too small and fair-skinned to be Corby, but then it wouldn't have been Corby.

Hill put his cup down and yawned. “Time to get back to Algiers, I guess.”

The cars were concealed behind the bar. The two-way was blat-ting when they approached and Lime reached in to unsnap the mike and bring it to his mouth. “Lime here.”

“It's Gilliams. Didn't he get there yet?”

“He's already taken off. Haven't you got his bleeper signal?”

“It hasn't moved an inch.”

“That's the one on the boat. There were two of them. He took the plane.”

“I know. But the signals should have diverged if he's moved. It's still one signal. Standing still.” Gilliams' voice came out of the dashboard speaker, poorly defined, heavy with crackling.

Hill said, “Oh shit. The one on the plane isn't working then. It's my fault—I should have tested them.”

Lime said into the mike without taking his eyes off Hill, “Gilliams, switch your triangulators over to seventeen hundred. One seven zero zero, got that?”

“One seven zero zero. Hang on a minute.”

Chad Hill's puzzled eyes swiveled around to Lime.

Gilliams: “Right, we've got a pulse. It seems kind of weak though.”

“It's pretty small and it's inside the plane—it's got a lot of metal around it. Is it strong enough to follow?”

“I guess it is if we stick fairly close to it.”

“Then get your aircraft moving.”

“They're already moving.”

“All right. We're coming into Algiers. Expect us in half an hour. Have the Lear jet standing by. Have you got cars and choppers at Bou Saada?”

“Yes sir. And the Early Birds. Waiting down there with those dart guns.”

‘I'll see you in half an hour.” Lime hung the mike and turned to face Chad Hill. “Pick up the rest of the crew and tell them to follow us in the station wagon.”

Chad Hill said, “I'm sorry about the bleeper. But how'd you get that other one on the plane?”

“It's not on the plane. It's on Ben Krim,” Lime said. “It's in his pocket.”

He went around the car and got into the passenger seat. Hill slid in very slowly, as if he weren't sure the seat would support him.

The sun blasted down, the sand shot painful reflections against the eye. Green hills lifted above the beach. Lime sat back with his arms folded and his face closed up.

They were leaving two men on Binaud; the rest were getting into the station wagon and Chad Hill started the car and drove around the bar to the road.

Once, Hill stiffened, looking at something; Lime looked ahead and saw nothing but the curving road. Whatever it was Hill had identified it and dismissed it; he had relaxed now. He's in better shape than I am, Lime thought; Lime hadn't seen anything at all. His tired eyes stared out of a bottomless disgust.

They boarded the Lear jet to fly to Bou Saada, the “City of Happiness” on the Naïl Plateau. Gilliams' radio direction finders—at Algiers, at El Goléa, and in an airborne tracking station orbiting behind Ben Krim's Catalina—had the target on-screen and it was still moving when the Lear took off and climbed steeply to clear the coastal range. Lime had a one-to-four-million-scale Michelin map across his knees. It showed the whole of north Africa in enough detail to cover every potable waterhole, every jeep track and wadi and fort.

The fertile crowded Tell region lay south of the Atlas Mountains, forming a bulge against the arid plateaus that fell across hundreds of dusty miles toward the Sahara. Putting together what he knew about Julius Sturka and what he had learned about the radius of the Catalina's previous flight, Lime studied the map and came to certain conclusions.

He could rule out the Sahara proper. The plane hadn't gone that far when they'd used it to carry Fairlie. And the Sahara was less a hiding place than a trap—there were too few places to hide. Sturka might be in the outback but he wouldn't be too far from avenues of flight. Somewhere down here in the
bled
within pragmatic distance of a decent road and a place to land and take off in an airplane if you had to. Bedouin country perhaps but not the Tuaregs' desert. Possibly even a farm in the Tell.

The wadi Binaud had pinpointed—the riverbed oasis where he'd picked up the Catalina last week—was east of Ghardaïa and north of Ouargla: arid plains around there, like parts of Arizona and New Mexico—hardpan clay earth that supported boulders and scrub brush, the occasional stunted tree, enough broken ground and cut-banks to conceal armies. Sturka had operated there before with the efficiency of an Apache Indian war chief and he would feel comfortable there.

Lime kept remembering the number of times he had gone looking for Sturka in that country: looking but never finding.

He had one or two advantages now he hadn't had then. Electronic surveillance had become more sophisticated. He didn't have to function in quite so much secrecy now. And he had almost unlimited manpower to draw upon. Gilliams had pulled every CIA man in North Africa into it, from Dakar to Cairo. There was the crew Lime had brought with him and then there were the Early Birds—the A-team killer squads Satterthwaite had sent from Langley. Lime had insisted the Early Birds be armed, in addition to their normal issue, with tranquilizer-dart bullets obtained from a Kenyan game preserve. The darts were fired by standard rifle cartridges; the chemical was M-99, a morphine derivative. The tranquilizer would take effect almost instantly and render the victim unconscious for fifteen or twenty minutes. It was standard procedure in wild-game protection; whether it had ever been used before in a quasi-military operation Lime didn't know and didn't care.

The objective was to get Fairlie out alive; what happened to the kidnappers was secondary but they couldn't afford to leave half a dozen corpses strewn across the Algerian landscape. Algiers wouldn't stand still for that and a fair number of opportunistic capitals—Peking, Moscow, the Third World towns—would join in the condemnations. Rescuing a VIP was one thing, starting a pocket battle on foreign soil was another. If it happened, the United States would survive it as she had survived Laos and the Dominican Republic and dozens of others, but it was better to avoid it if you could.

Lime lacked interest in the complexities of international relations but Satterthwaite had made it fairly clear to him that a gaffe in Algeria might cost the United States the nuclear bases in Spain which both Brewster and Fairlie had been trying mightily to protect before all this idiocy had erupted. Spain was not a NATO member, never had been. Overt American arrogance in Algeria would be too close to home; Perez-Blasco would have to turn away from Washington and that was to be avoided. So it was better to use drugged darts than bullets.

He hoped they were somewhere in the
bled.
It would be so much easier without witnesses. If they were holed up in the middle of one of the towns there would be no way to make it neat.

The chief dilemma was how to get Fairlie away from them. If you attacked them frontally they would use him as a shield.

It had to be played by ear and at any rate he had to find them first.

When they landed at Bou Saada the Catalina was still in the air, still being tracked southward.

“West of El Meghaier,” the radio man explained to Lime. “Still maintaining altitude.”

Lime left the radio shack and walked across the tarmac to the little gathering of aircraft—the Lear, the charter turboprop with the CIA people aboard, the Early Birds' helicopters.

Lime beckoned Gilliams over and showed him the map. “I think Ben Krim's heading for the same wadi where Binaud picked up the plane last week. Now that Catalina cruises at about a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. The Lear can do three times that speed. I want to be at that wadi before Ben Krim gets there. I'll want half a dozen of the A-team men with me. The rest of you had better rendezvous at Touggourt and wait for word from me. Have you got a portable scrambler set?”