Line of Succession

by Brian Garfield

  It was time. He stood up, apologizing sotto voce to the lady beside him; he placed his briefcase on the seat, as if to save it for his return, and made his way out into the aisle past the lady’s knees, and turned up to the back of the gallery. The uniformed guard watched him approach. Bob Walberg whispered in the guard’s ear and the guard pointed and whispered something which Bob Walberg didn’t catch, but he nodded and thanked the guard and slipped out.

  12:30 P.M. EST The East Portico afforded the best exit from the Capitol because you could head right out Maryland or Pennsylvania Avenue without getting tangled in the tortured traffic patterns of the Mall. With that in mind David Lime had posted himself beside the radio car on East Capitol Street immediately below the Portico where he could watch the faces of those who emerged from the building. It was a long shot; of course it was a long shot—everything was.

  He kept fighting the impulse to reach into the car and snatch up the microphone and bleat into it: has anybody found anything? They would let him know if they did.

  He looked around again, turning a full circle on his heels, and now he began to develop an interest in the spruce-green Plymouth that had pulled up at the curb below the New Senate Office Building. It had a young man in a self-conscious Afro at the wheel and white wisps of exhaust flailing from its tailpipe. Lime automatically noted the license number in his pocket pad and this time he succumbed to the urge to reach for the microphone.

  “Dispatch, this is Lime.”

  “Go ahead Lime.”

  “Have you got a squadrol on Maryland Avenue between here and Stanton Square?”

  “Hold on.… Car Five Niner, you on Maryland? Whereabouts? Okay, stand by.… Hello Lime?”

  “Right here.”

  “Affirmative your query.”

  “Request you hold your car on Maryland until further notice from me.”

  He heard Dispatch relay the message to Car 59 and re-experienced the irritation he always felt when dealing with vehicular patrols: you had contact with Dispatch but not with other cars and therefore everything had to be relayed through Dispatch. It was the only method that made real sense but nevertheless it was annoying.

  Lime said into the microphone, “Convey this to Car Five Niner, please. A ‘Seventy-two Plymouth four-door, blue-green, license New Jersey Samuel Bravo Dog Three Three Four. If that car comes north on Maryland with more than one person in it, I want it stopped.”

  “Affirmative Lime.… Car Five Niner——”

  Lime handed the microphone to the driver and turned to look up at the Capitol steps. Chad Hill was coming down two steps at a time, not out of any visible urgency but simply because that was the way he liked to move. When Lime had asked for his transfer out of NSA and they had shunted him over to Secret Service he had not succeeded in bringing any of his own people with him and he had been forced to pick an aide from among strangers. Having hired Chad Hill he was able to find no plausible reason to fire him; but Hill had an uncanny capacity to irritate him right up to the breaking point: God save us from eager beavers.

  Chad Hill reached the car and gave him a pained look. “We’ve eyeballed everybody in the visitors’ gallery and the uniformed boys have done a second go-round on packages and handbags.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not a damn thing.”

  “What about the press gallery?”

  Hill’s head jerked back. “My God. I never thought of that.”

  Neither did I until just now. Lime said gently, “Do it then.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Chad Hill turned to trot away and Lime’s glance rode up past him to the top of the steps. Lime said, “Never mind, Chad.”

  “What?” Hill was swinging back.

  A middle-aged black woman had emerged at the Portico and Lime had a feeling that was Beulah Moorehead from Los Angeles, and he was sure of it when the Walberg twins loped out behind her.

  Lime talked fast. “Get inside—tell our people to get to the PA mikes and clear the building. I’m calling the bomb squad. On the run, now.”

  Lime put his hand into the car window and the driver slapped the microphone into it. Two more people emerged at the Portico and trotted down the steps behind Mrs. Moorehead and the Walbergs. They were slanting north as they came down the wide steps—heading generally in the direction of the green Plymouth—and Lime barked into the mike, “Bomb Squad, Dispatch. Make it fast. I’ve made five suspects leaving the building. Tell Bomb Squad to start looking in the press galleries in both chambers. I’m having the building cleared now. Tell Car Five Niner to remain on station to pick up that green Plymouth if it gets away from me. Out.” He tossed the mike in past the driver and wrenched the door open. “Come on with me.”

  “On foot?”

  “Does your union prohibit it? Get your hand near your piece.” Lime was in motion, heading across the soggy dead grass with his plunging stride, a fresh cigarette dangling unlit. The driver panted to catch up. Ahead of them the five people were moving straight toward the Plymouth, walking very fast. Lime began to run, sweeping back the side-vented coat that accommodated his service revolver. He raised his arm overhead; his hand described a quick arc and Secret Service men began to converge from several points.

  Now the five were piling into the Plymouth, still unaware they had been made. The agent from the Senate Office Building doorway reached the passenger side of the car and showed them his gun. Lime, on his toes and running full out, couldn’t hear anything with the wind slapping his ears; the agent was talking into the car and then a burst of white exhaust puffed from the car’s pipe and the car was squealing out into the avenue. The agent spun all the way around, knocked off his feet.

  It was about forty yards: Lime got down on one knee and braced his shooting arm in the open palm of his left hand and shot for the tires, cocking the revolver with his thumb and firing single-action, six very rapid ones; then he was on his feet and running again, searching his pockets for fresh ammunition.

  He had exploded a rear tire but the Plymouth was still going, lumping along on the rim. Probably doing thirty miles an hour, with Lime and his men running after it. It was a block ahead when the squadrol, its red and blue lights flashing, came in sight on a collision course and slewed across the Avenue, blocking traffic in both directions and sealing off the Plymouth.

  Lime kept running, his coat flying, plugging cartridges into the side-swung cylinder of the S & W, and beyond the Plymouth the uniformed EPS cops were pouring out of the cruiser and clawing for their .38’s—it was not yet certain the Plymouth wouldn’t ram the squadrol. There was a great racket: the cruiser’s blockage had caused a rear-end chain collision in the far lanes of the avenue and there were bangs and squeals and grunts of metal. The Plymouth was lurching toward the curb and when Lime saw that they were trying to drive it up on the sidewalk to eel past the cruiser he dropped to his knee again and began to shoot with care. The EPS cops followed his lead and almost instantly someone’s bullet exploded a front tire and the Plymouth rocked over against the building wall, narrowly missing a terrorized pedestrian. The Plymouth dug its bumper corner into the building and it wasn’t going anywhere after that. Its doors popped open on the near side but the EPS cops had it enfiladed and Lime was coming in on the dead run, and when the six people climbed out of the car they had their hands in the air like victims of a stagecoach robbery in a John Ford movie.

  Lime pushed past the uniformed cops. He was puffing, and angry with himself for it: he hadn’t run more than three blocks’ distance. In college he had done the four-forty with no effort at all. He swept his glance over the six from the car, trying to single out the leader, but he couldn’t pick a spokesman by looking at them—so he made an arbitrary choice: he selected the weakest-looking face and went to work on Robert Walberg.

  The crowd from the wrecked cars in the avenue was making so much noise Lime could barely hear himself. He waved a couple of cops toward the incensed civilians and addressed himself to the Walberg boy. A muscle w
orked at the back of Walberg’s jaw. Lime kept talking to him: “Where are the bombs, boy? Where’d you leave them? Come on, let’s have it. Where’d you put the bombs, Bobby?”

  If you know the name, use the diminutive; it helps break them down, it makes you Authority. Maybe they’d called him Robbie or Bob-o but Bobby was most common, most likely. “Come on, Bobby.” Lime had a cigarette between his lips; he struck a match but did not stop talking so that the cigarette pumped up and down violently while he tried to light it; he succeeded only in blowing out the match, and tried another.

  Walberg’s eyes mirrored his terror and Lime didn’t even give him time to answer: he mentioned Stratten and Alvin Corby and made it very clear to Walberg that he knew everything: that he knew a great deal more than he did in fact know; and finally he let himself run down and waited for Walberg’s answer.

  It might have worked but the big black one in the Afro butted in and none of the cops had the sense to stop him. “Don’t tell the pig nothing, boy. You go get fucked, honkie. We don’t tell you mothers nothing.”

  Lime made an angry gesture and his driver whipped past and yanked the big Negro away. It was probably too late after that but Lime kept pushing Walberg: “Come on, Bobby. Where are the devices? When are they set to go off? Come on, Bobby.” He had the gun in his fist and he allowed the terrible rage to leak out through his eyes; he was right up close against Walberg, breathing smoke into the boy’s face, and the boy’s jaw was juddering with fright.

  Then Lime heard the muted chug of the first explosion, like a hard-cued break against a rack of pool balls, and his face changed with the realization that his questions were too late.

  12:40 P.M. EST In the Senate the two bombs went off about seven seconds apart.

  Dexter Ethridge had watched Gardner, his successor, go down the center aisle to be sworn in, and then take his place at Ethridge’s old desk on the Republican side of the aisle.

  And now before Ethridge had time to move, before he had time to react at all, the wall behind the rostrum began to tilt and heave: the shock wave hit him, pressed him back into his chair.

  He saw the partition begin to crumble behind the podium, bringing the lower seats of the right-hand half of the press gallery down toward the Senate floor, as reporters shrieked and clawed. Chunks of masonry and wood shot through the air and choking dust filled the chamber and the overwhelming noise echoed and reverberated. A shoe, incredibly intact, hit the arm of Ethridge’s chair and lodged there. It grazed his fingertips, no more. Ethridge drew air wildly into his chest in panic. There were bodies, human bodies in clothes, hurtling through the air like projectiles. Pieces were cracking out of the high ceiling. Plaster andsawdust made an immediate dense stink.

  And now Ethridge was moving, sliding out of the chair, seeking blindly for shelter with the intuitive response of a man who once had heard 77mm shells coming in and knew how to dive for cover.

  Down on his face: he shoved his head under the seat of the chair and wrapped his arms around his face and he was like that when the second bomb exploded. The floor jumped, bashed his chest; debris rained on his exposed rump and the backs of his legs. He found himself thinking he was going to have a hell of a bruise on his hip from that one and he might be limping for a few days…

  Someone was screaming insistently close by, loud enough to drown out much of the other racket. Objects were slamming against walls and furnishings and something in this madness collapsed the chair above him: it broke off at one side and he felt the jarring blinding blow against the back and top of his head, and then he was sputtering and shoving with his arms and scrabbling with his feet to get out from under the weight of the thing that was on him.

  This is a hell of a position for the Vice-President-elect of the United States of America. He was giggling a little, backing out of the trap, his butt way up in the air, on his chest and knees, backing out, giggling.… He pulled his head out and up and saw that the chair had broken only on its left side; it had tilted over, rather than flattening straight down, and it had left a triangularly tent-shaped opening which had saved his skull the direct crushing smash of the enormous chunk of plaster that had fallen on it.

  His head stung with an awful pain and he lay facedown again, feet lodged against the base of some other chair. His eyes were closed against the pain. The cloudburst of debris had tapered off; things were cracking now, pattering like gravel, splitting and splintering and settling, but the overwhelming noise now was from human voices—the voices of terror and the voices of agony, and a man somewhere very nearby saying over and over again, “Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus.”

  There was a long splintering crack, and a momentary silence, and a shuddering crash afterward: a wall coming down, or a section of gallery. Someone yelped like a small dog and the voice nearby was still moaning, “Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus,” and Ethridge squinted his closed eyes tight against the pain in his head. In the distance he heard a long rising human scream and he had heard a scream like that once before from the throat of a man eviscerated by shrapnel on a dismal battlefield, but this was no battlefield this was the Senate of the United States and this could not possibly be happening here, it was unthinkable.

  When he opened his eyes virtually all the lights had gone out. Ethridge heard the moans and cries and had to check to make sure he wasn’t uttering sounds himself. He sat up slowly on his knees, bracing his hands against the remains of furniture but then his right hand slid against a resilience of flesh and he recoiled.

  His head whipped around and the sudden movement blinded him with pain; he pressed his palms to his temples and slid fingers toward the top of his head, half expecting to probe into a pulpy mush at the top of his skull: but it was all normal hair and scalp, and chunks of plaster. He felt no softness, not even the dampness of blood. Now he moved his head with slow caution and in the very bad light he saw only a slow-swirling fog of dust and smoke.

  He stayed on his knees until moving beams of light began to play through the wheeling mist and he began to catch the voices of whole people, the ones using the flashlights. A small fire burned somewhere across the room. In the uncertain visibility Ethridge caught sight of a figure sprawled broken across the wreckage of a chair: he moved close and recognized the dead face of Allan Nugent who had been the senior Senator from Indiana.

  Ethridge climbed across Nugent’s corpse and made his cautious way down toward the worst destruction, looking for survivors to assist. He had been buffeted and slammed and abraded by the violence but he was on his feet and moving, and in the old Army if you were an officer capable of movement you helped.

  The dense dust settled faster now and more flashlights appeared; in the growing light he saw people making their way by ones and twos toward the exits, some walking unaided, some dragging themselves, some dragging others. One man was running, until someone stopped him with a stiff-armed block. No one was screaming any longer but the ruins were filled with groanings.

  He found Alan Forrester, the junior Senator from Arizona, sitting with his back to an overturned desk, rubbing his eyes with thumb-enclosed fists like a small child who has just been awakened. Ethridge knelt by him and pulled Forrester’s hands away from his face. “Are you all right?”

  “I—uh.”

  “Are you all right, Alan?”

  Now the eyes came open and Forrester blinked, squinting. His eyes were incredibly bloodshot but he didn’t look injured. Ethridge reached for his arm. “Come on.”

  Forrester let Ethridge assist him to his feet. “Dex? Dex?”

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “Christ, Dex.”

  “Head for the lights, Alan. Can you find your own way?”

  Forrester was shaking his head violently as if to clear it. “Never mind. I’m all right—I just came apart for a minute there. I’ll help you look.”

  “Good man.”

  The two of them prowled down into the incredible rubble. At once they fell upon a heap of debris and began to claw at
it because a human arm protruded from it but when they had pawed the rubble away they saw that the arm was severed: the young Arizonan looked up at Ethridge and his voice went rusty and almost soundless: “Oh my dear God, Dex.”

  Ethridge made a careful point of not looking at the fabric of the sleeve or the shape of the hand. He climbed over the pile and went on until he found a man slumped across a desk with one hand under his forehead and the other dangling at arm’s length. He lifted the man back in his seat by the shoulder and recognized young Gardner, his own successor in the Senate, who had been sworn just before the explosion, and for one terrible instant Ethridge thought Gardner was dead too but then the eyes fluttered open and rolled sightlessly.

  “Concussion, I think,” Ethridge said. “Can you carry him out Alan? I’m going to keep looking.”

  The flashlights were close by, moving fitfully; men were calling back and forth. Forrester got Gardner up on his wide back in a fireman’s carry and heaved him away, calling back over his shoulder: “Watch yourself, Dex.”

  Ethridge intended to. You didn’t help anyone by falling down and breaking your own ankle. He probed into the wheeling dimness and found a mangled body half-buried in shattered cords of wood. Nobody he recognized; probably a reporter; and now he began coming across bodies in great number, many of them mutilated but some of them uncannily natty in repose, and of the six or seven he tested for respiration and heartbeat he found only one member of the Senate—March of Idaho.

  Now the rubble stirred just ahead of him, somebody trying to dig himself out; a hand thrust out through a hole and Ethridge scrambled toward it and began heaving chunks of stone and plaster away and finally he had exposed the tunnel under a pair of adjacent senatorial desks—a tunnel which by some curious caprice had remained inviolate and had sheltered its occupant although the gallery partition had fallen right across it.

  It was Fitzroy Grant and he was quite alert and conscious.