Line of Succession

by Brian Garfield

  “You can charm the big bastard, Cliff.” Brewster had rolled the cigar in his mouth. “Use all the rational arguments, but lean on the son of a bitch too. Tell him you’re just as liberal as he is but God damn it Moscow’s got all those boats out in the Med and ask him if he really wants to see them turn the thing into a Russian lake.”

  It was a good thing Brewster was going out. His brand of gunboat diplomacy would lose the Spanish bases. Brewster’s premise was right: you were in competition with Moscow, that was no myth. But it wasn’t the kind of competition you won by frightening the customers. Perez-Blasco had to be shopping around for aid; he had already confirmed diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union and even McNeely had pointed out that where Egypt had gone Spain could easily follow. Perez-Blasco was by no means a far-leftist; nevertheless he was markedly to the left of the old Franco regime. He was a proud man who had come up from poverty, and you did not wave guns under a dignified man’s nose. Intimidation was not a very useful tool in modern international relations—not when the customer could get miffed, turn his back on you, and go to the competition.

  You had to be cool. You had to go to him, but not in a hurry and not as a beggar.

  Clifford Fairlie stood up, a Lincolnesque figure with a tall man’s stoop. Thirty-one years ago he had won a seat on the Media town council. In less than three weeks he would be President of the United States.

  7:00 A.M. EST At his desk in the Executive Office Building David Lime was half through his second breakfast of the morning. His eyes were focused wearily on the Barbara Norris file.

  The documents and photographs were scattered over the desk. Chad Hill, on his feet at the corner of the desk, was running his finger across them: an unassailably pleasant-faced young man packaged in a blue suit and striped shirt. “This one. Stratten. He seemed to be running the show, from her reports.”

  The blurred photograph suggested a rangy man with deep-set eyes overhung by dark brows: a somehow European face, between forty and fifty.

  Stratten, no first name, no initials. The active files of Lime’s Protective Research Section included some quarter of a million cases and according to the print-outs from the computer none of them mentioned anyone named Stratten or anyone who had ever used the name as an alias.

  It was an obvious case: classic and tiresome. Barbara Norris had infiltrated the group, had found out something she wasn’t supposed to know, and had been killed to guarantee her silence.

  The Stratten blowup showed a face full of latent violence. The Norris girl had snapped the picture a week ago with a Minolta concealed in the folds of her leather handbag.

  He reached for the phone. “Get me somebody over at NSA. Ames if you can get him.”

  He cupped the mouthpiece in his palm and looked up at Chad Hill. “Call the New York office and have them send some people over to that apartment this bunch was using on West End Avenue. Have them give the premises a good toss.”

  Hill went out to his own desk and the phone came alive in Lime’s fist. He put it to his ear. “Ames?”

  “No, this is Kaiser. Ames won’t be in till nine. Maybe I can help out, Mr. Lime?”

  Another of those pitchless voices, uninflected, sounding like some electronic contrivance programmed to imitate human speech. Lime closed his eyes and leaned back in the swivel chair. “I’d like to run a make on a character through your R & I machines.”

  “Mind if I ask the nature of the case?” It was spoken by rote. Agencies didn’t do favors for other agencies unless a reason was supplied.

  “It’s a protection case. Some hints about an assassination attempt. One of our people was working on it and they seem to have taken her out.”

  “Then she was onto something.” The observation was less redundant than it might have been: Lime’s department investigated thousands of assassination threats every season and virtually all of them proved trivial.

  “Nothing on your man from FBI?”

  “Nothing from any domestic files. We’ve run him through all of them.”

  “What have you got? Fingerprints?”

  “Fingerprints and a mug shot.” Barbara Norris had lifted the prints off a water glass Stratten had used: she had sprinkled it with talc and taken it off with masking tape, and washed the glass afterward.

  “Well that ought to be easy enough. Send them over.”

  “I’ll get a runner to you. Thanks.”

  He hung up and looked at the photo again while he buzzed for a messenger. The straight black hair was bushy at the back, not a distinctive cut, and he wondered what had persuaded him Stratten was a foreigner. Perhaps the set of the mouth or the slight lift to the right eyebrow. But there was something more than that and it still eluded him when the messenger came for the photo and fingerprints.

  Then Lime found it in Norris’s December 28 report: Slight accent, indeterminate, possibly Balkan. The notation was sandwiched into the center of a single-spaced paragraph but he’d read that report at least three times, the earliest five days ago and hadn’t caught it consciously until now.

  It was a bomb plot, an assassination attempt of some kind. Bombs were always surer than bullets. The one called Mario—they hadn’t known her long enough to trust her with full names—seemed to have thought they were planning to bomb the White House. But it was all very vague and Lime hadn’t been ready to buy it right off the shelf because the White House was isolated and heavily guarded and virtually impossible to attack with anything less than an armored combat division. The White House Detail had been alerted and Norris had received instructions to stay with Stratten’s group until she learned whether their intentions were real or only the idle bluffing of a handful of radicalized screwheads freaked out on bravado and drugs.

  But now it was time to leash them. Three hours ago Lime had put out the order to pick them up: Stratten and Alvin Corby and the others identified by FBI computers from information fed to Lime’s office by Barbara Norris.

  The initial tip had come by way of the FBI from a Panther plant they had in New York, a citizen whose mother had informed him vaguely that she was involved in an attempt to assassinate someone in Washington. The citizen had tried to dissuade his mother but it was all long-distance telephoning and very little could be said on an open line; he had failed to talk her out of it and so he had alerted the FBI because he wanted to protect his mother from the consequences of her foolishness. The FBI had passed it on to Secret Service Director B. L. Hoyt, and Hoyt had passed it on down the line through channels to Lime. Assassination threats were Lime’s bailiwick.

  The Secret Service was a sub-agency within the Treasury Department. It was charged with two distinct functions between which there was what could be called a “connection” only with some serious abuse of the word. It was B. L. Hoyt’s duty to apprehend counterfeiters and to protect the lives of politicians. The logic of it was on a par with most Washingtonian logic and it hardly even annoyed Lime any more.

  The ball was in his court and he had to play with it. He had makes on five of them: Alvin Corby, twenty-six, black, an Indochina veteran, a former member of several black radical groups; Cesar Renaldo, thirty-one, born in New York of Puerto Rican parents, arrested twice for possession of hashish and once for assaulting a policeman during an antiwar demonstration; Robert and Sandra Walberg, twenty-four, twin brother and sister, both former SDS-Weathermen, both carrying records of arrest and conviction for possession of marijuana (sentence suspended) and disorderly behavior during campus building occupations at the University of Southern California (six months probation); and Beulah Moorehead, forty-one, the mother of the FBI’s Panther plant.

  There was partial information on some others but none of it was hard. A black couple named Line and Darleen. The one called Mario whom Norris had described as “their banker, I think.” Two more recent arrivals from the West Coast called Claude and Bridget. And the Stratten item.

  Norris’s last report was three days old. She had included half-frame 16mm negatives of Str
atten, Corby, Renaldo and the five who had arrived that afternoon from California. There were fingerprints on Corby and the Walberg twins and a set on Stratten which had proved useless since they didn’t match any prints on file in Washington or St. Louis. Norris had not obtained a set of Renaldo’s fingerprints, but the New York police had identified his photograph by comparison with their mug books.

  The Walberg twins had histories of marijuana arrests; Renaldo and Corby had narcotics records. It was possible they were junkies. If you followed that reasoning you could assume they might wake up and realize what they’d done: the Norris murder. They might be terrified, they might run for it, disband, scatter, go to ground individually. They might forget any grandiose assassination plots in the rush to sanctuary.

  It was a comforting theory but it was no good. The hole-in-the-wall they’d been using on R Street Northeast was empty now—very empty and very clean. Clean enough to indicate they weren’t just a bunch of frightened addicts who had cleared out. Someone with presence of mind was directing the operation.

  What had she known? What had she discovered? Lime had long ago been disabused of the notion that you could rely on premonitions and portents; but this thing had all the telltales of a major professional assassination job.

  11:20 A.M. EST The car decanted Dexter Ethridge and his Secret Service bodyguards below the West Portico of the Capitol and Ethridge looked up past the crowd to the dome where the flag was going up the staff to indicate that Congress was convening: that the Ninety-fifth Congress was about to gather for the first time.

  He recognized many faces among those moving toward the doors. Most of the members would be entering by subway from the Senate and House office buildings but there were those like Ethridge who made a point of coming here to absorb the effect from outside before going in. Architecturally it was a faux pas and parts of it were endlessly in danger of falling down—some of the basements were shored up with clumsy brick walls and propped massive timbers—but if you were a politician you were very likely a sentimentalist as well and the great dome always instilled in Ethridge a properly sober respect and reverence.

  Dexter Ethridge had sat, listened, spoken, and cast his vote inside this building thousands of times: he had entered the House twenty-four years ago, served two terms, run for the Senate and lost, run again two years later and won, and served three full terms—eighteen years—as United States Senator from Michigan. In that time he had cast many votes for winning causes and many votes for losing causes, but he had never to his knowledge cast a deciding vote. From this day forward he would cast no vote that was not a deciding vote: Dexter D. Ethridge, Vice-President-elect of the United States, would be allowed to vote in the Senate only when his vote was required to break a tie.

  He climbed the steps, uncomfortably aware of the Secret Service men who never seemed to hurry but always managed to be within arm’s length of him. The agents in various shifts had been covering Ethridge and his family since the Denver Convention five months ago but he still wasn’t sufficiently accustomed to them to be able to ignore them; he found himself wasting altogether too much time exchanging small talk with them. But that had always been his weakness. From childhood he had been a buttonholer; he loved to engage people in conversation. Among his colleagues it was hardly a unique characteristic.

  At the head of the steps he stopped and turned a half circle on his heels to look down along the Mall. There was a small demonstration down there—a cluster of radic-libs carrying signs, girls in dirty Levi’s and men with self-consciously hirsute faces. From here Ethridge couldn’t read the placards but there wasn’t much doubt of their message: they wanted Freedom Now, they wanted the defense budget cut to a trickle and the highway program killed and a hundred billion for welfare and health and ecological cleanups.

  Clifford Fairlie might accomplish a few of those things, although there would be a great deal of harrumphing and pettifoggery because no Democratic Congress could afford to pass a Republican President’s programs without going through the motions of loyal-opposition resistance: Fairlie’s programs would be amended wordily, but that was window dressing. The interesting thing about Fairlie’s election was that it was going to force the Democrats to move even farther to the left, if only to enable them to continue berating the Republicans as obstructionist reactionaries.

  Fairtie had offered the running-mate slot to Dexter Ethridge because Ethridge was a Republican Senator from a big industrial state (the liberals had tried to pin on him the epithet “the Senator from General Motors”); Ethridge could be counted on to help attract the support of Big Business, and in the farm states he could be billed as a conservative candidate. Yet he had never in his life described himself as a conservative. “Moderate” was the word he liked, and it was only because he stood somewhere to Fairlie’s right that he had been regarded by the press and at least some of the voters as a rightist. But that was all politics—electioneering.

  Fairlie had been quite candid about it: “I’m too liberal to suit a lot of them. If I’m going to get wholehearted support from the party I’ve got to show my sincerity by picking a running mate they’ll approve. Ideally I suppose I ought to pick Fitzroy Grant or Woody Guest, but frankly that would tie my hands—I need a running mate who looks more conservative than he is. The right-wingers associate you with Detroit industrialists so I think they’ll approve.…Me? I think you’ve got a lot of common sense and a good conscience. How about it?”

  The thing was, he liked Cliff Fairlie. If it hadn’t been for that he might have refused the nomination: the Vice-Presidency was ordinarily a thankless job and for a man as inclined toward real political activity as he was it didn’t have irresistible appeal—a Senator with eighteen years’ seniority could wield considerably more power on the Hill than could a minority-party Vice-President. But Ethridge believed Fairlie could win and he allowed Fairlie to convince him that he could help Fairlie win.

  Now at the top step of the portico he looked out across the Mall and discovered, a bit to his surprise, that he did not regret it. He had no trouble recalling the excitement that had attended the arrival of the Kennedy Administration—that had been during Ethridge’s first Senate term—and he had the heady feeling this morning that Clifford Fairlie would bring the same kind of magic to Washington. It was an important if not vital event for the country at this point in its history: Kennedy had not been a particularly good administrator, he had been a bad politician really—in his handling of Congress he couldn’t hold a candle to Lyndon Johnson—and some of his decisions had been disastrously wrong. But the important thing about the Kennedys and the Fairlies was their quality of visible leadership. Not since Kennedy had the United States possessed a leader who commanded personal admiration, who stirred the imaginations of Americans and foreigners alike, who owned the aura of style and grace that made it possible to forgive their errors and to hope. Fairlie inspired that kind of hope.

  The sky above the Capitol was bleak with the threat of snow; Ethridge stood in the wind in his topcoat, his cheeks stinging a little, but he had been raised on Michigan winters and the chill did not drive him inside. Tourists and journalists gave him covert stares and filed past him to observe the ritual swearing-in of the houses of Congress on this day of convening. Down on the Mall the pathetic little circle of marchers continued, virtually unnoticed, to trample the brown grass with their picket signs lifted high. Ethridge nodded and smiled and spoke briefly to friends and colleagues and acquaintances who went past; but he kept his place, somehow reluctant to break the feeling of this place and time, this moment of anticipation and hope and half-realized thrill. It was seventeen days yet to the inauguration but today, this noon, marked the real beginning of the Fairlie years, for this Congress that first met today would be Fairlie’s Congress and everything they did in the next seventeen days would reflect that, regardless of Brewster’s lame-duck occupancy of the White House.

  11:40 A.M. EST David Lime strode the corridor toward the Seventeenth Street e
xit of the Executive Office Building, consulting his watch and shooting his cuff. Chad Hill kept pace with an athletic effortlessness that would have been commendable if it hadn’t been for his youth: he could spot Lime twenty years.

  “But shouldn’t we stay in the office?”

  “What for?”

  “Well some central location at least. To coordinate everything.”

  “Nothing to coordinate,” Lime said. “We’ve got a radio in the car.”

  They batted out through the glass doors. Lime pulled his coat collar up; the wind was a hard fast one, coming up from the Potomac, and the temperature had dropped sharply in the past few hours. Snow soon, he thought, and ducked to slip into the back seat of the plain green four-door Chevrolet that pulled to the curb to meet them. Hill slid in beside him and Lime said to the driver, “Right over to the Hill—the west steps, it’ll be faster.”

  The driver checked his mirror and waited for a line of cars to go by and then slid gently out into the traffic lanes. Chad Hill said, “You’d better speed it up. Use your siren.”

  “No,” Lime said. “There’s time. And I don’t need a traffic snarl of rubberneckers paralyzed by the siren.” He sat back and closed his eyes and wondered if his face reflected the inner scowl.

  Chad Hill said, “I hope to God you’re wrong.”