Line of Succession

by Brian Garfield

  “Cliff,” and now the voice was deep and filled to overflowing with sincerity, “I think we’re all together on this, I think the people are with us. Liberals and moderates and conservatives alike, all of us. We’re saturated with this damned violence. We’re all grieved and sickened by these atrocities. Now’s the time, Cliff—we’ve all got to join forces to freeze out the extremists, the violent animals. And if we don’t, then God help this country. If we don’t stop them right now then they’ll know for a fact nobody’s ever going to keep them from kicking over the pail.”

  “I see.”

  “Now at the same time,” the President continued briskly, “I mean to set an example of speedy justice with these bombers we’ve caught, because if we intend to deter other animals from trying the same kind of thing we’ve got to show that punishment can be immediate and complete. Now I don’t mean to try the case on television, mind you, but I’m going to make it clear to the people that there’s absolutely no cause for alarm—that we’ve taken the steps necessary to preserve the peace, that we’ve already got these murderers behind bars and we’re going to have their guts for guitar strings. I’m going to give them tough talk, Cliff, because I think it’s what the people need to hear, and I want to get in there ahead of the bleeding hearts before they start drowning the newspapers with crocodile tears about these poor unfortunate misunderstood children and how if they’re guilty then we’re all guilty, it’s society’s fault, all that crap.” The President drew a shuddering long breath to continue, “Before they can get up steam to do that I’m going to put these animals on trial in a public courtroom quicker than you can say Jack Robinson.”

  “Well I don’t see how you can do that overnight, Mr. President. They’ve got to have a fair trial. They’ll have to be defended—the attorneys will have to have time to prepare their case.”

  “I recognize that, Cliff, but I don’t mean to let any water flow under the bridge. I think you ought to have a little talk tonight with your Attorney General designate, because he’s going to have to pick this thing up in the middle and we need to make sure he’s not going to be wishy-washy.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Fairlie said. “But I’d like to come back to this national emergency you’re declaring. I still need to know the exact boundaries of it.”

  “Well Cliff, you named it before. A roundup.”

  Fairlie sucked breath into his chest and took his stand. “Mr. President, I don’t agree with the wisdom of that. I think it’s premature.”

  “Premature? My God, Cliff, they’ve slaughtered dozens of the best people in the American Government. Premature?”

  “You can’t very well blame the slaughter on every individual in the FBI’s files of suspicious radicals.”

  “The point is we’ve decided not to let them take advantage. We intend to put them on ice and keep them there until this case has been tried and we’ve demonstrated our toughness by executing these bombers.” Then, into Fairlie’s stubborn silence, President Brewster added, “I don’t hold with killing, you know that, but there would be one thing worse than killing these savages, and that would be not killing them.”

  “I haven’t disputed that part of it, Mr. President.”

  “Cliff, I need your support on this. You know that.” The President breathed hard into the phone. “The Establishment protects us, Cliff. We’re obliged to protect it.”

  “I think a roundup at this point would have a terrible effect on the country. It could only be interpreted as the overreaction of a government in panic.”

  “Not at all. It would demonstrate our self-respect. To ourselves and to the rest of the world. That’s damned important right now. How can any society expect to hold together without self-respect? It’s a matter of showing muscle, Cliff, and that’s something we’ve been too reluctant to do.”

  “Maybe with good reason. I think a roundup right now would give the radicals exactly the kind of provocation they want. Oh, keep surveillance on the really suspicious ones of course, but let them alone. Mr. President, the radicals have been trying for years to goad the Government into violence. If we start herding them into camps it’ll be exactly what they’ve been waiting for—there’ll be outraged cries of police state and fascist suppression and we can’t afford that now.”

  “Cliff, I think you’re more concerned about their outraged cries than you are about their bombs.”

  “I haven’t heard of any bombs since the Capitol, Mr. President. There doesn’t seem to be any chain reaction.”

  “They’ve hardly had time yet, have they.” The President was getting curt now; he had been long enough in power to get out of the habit of conciliatory argument.

  “I’d like to give it a little time, Mr. President. If we see a chain reaction starting in the next day or two—if the snipers and bombers start coming out from under those rocks you mentioned—then I’ll cooperate with you right up to the hilt. But if we don’t see any sign of that kind of trouble then I’m afraid I’m going to have to fight you on this.”

  An attenuated silence, and Fairlie could all but see Brewster’s agonized face. Finally the President said in a lower tone than he had used before, “I’ll have to get back to you, Cliff. I’ll have to consult with my people. If I can’t get back to you before my broadcast I suppose you’ll get my answer from that. If we decide we must go ahead with the program as I’ve outlined it to you, then you’ll do as you see fit, I guess, but I’d like to remind you this is a damned precarious time for all of us and there’s nothing we need quite so badly right now as a show of undivided solidarity.”

  “I’m very aware of that, Mr. President.”

  The courteous goodbyes were distant and chilled. Fairlie sat by the telephone and brooded at it. He realized that if he were in Washington today it would be much harder for him not to be swept up in the urgent sense of horror and the unreasoning emotional demand for reactive vengeance.

  It had been up to him to support Brewster, but his refusal reversed their positions. Brewster was the Chief Executive and had the right to make final decisions but only for the next sixteen days, after which the decisions would be Fairlie’s, and Brewster had to worry about that now because this decision wasn’t the kind he could present to his successor as a fait accompli. If Brewster arrested thousands of people and Fairlie quickly turned them loose, it could give Brewster and his party a terrible black eye; at the same time it could put a libertarian luster on Fairlie’s administration—perhaps not enough to convince the radicals that Fairlie could be trusted, but certainly enough to persuade them to postpone any full-scale anti-Fairlie warfare for an interim while they sat back and watched to see how Fairlie performed.

  These considerations had to be coursing through Howard Brewster’s mind right now in the White House and they were considerations not easy to dismiss. Brewster was almost singularly aware of history and his place in it; given time to reflect—and Fairlie’s brake had surely given him that—Brewster might decide to recant because the alternative was to risk condemnation for one final reckless act.

  There was no sure way to predict which way Brewster would go but Fairlie had offered him a way out—and Brewster, the political animal, would avail himself of it if he could.

  This was not the time to fly back to Washington. The President’s televised address would take place before Fairlie’s jet could get him farther than the west coast of Ireland. If Brewster ordered the roundup Fairlie would have to return to the States at once. But if Brewster softened his approach there would be no need to break off the planned visits to Rome and Madrid, and the announcement a few hours ago that Perez-Blasco had granted diplomatic recognition to Peking made it all the more important that Fairlie complete his schedule and resolve the question of the Spanish bases. In the meantime, in the next few hours, there was nothing to do but formulate his own statement and wait.

  6:35 P.M. EST The chill rain fell in a soup of drizzle and mist. It threw foggy halos around street lamps and the lights of cars that his
sed past on the wet paving. Guards stood in yellow police slickers and hoods at the steps of the Executive Office Building.

  David Lime crossed to the White House side of the drive and walked along the fence to the gate. At intervals inside the fence he could see the dripping shadows of alerted guards—members of the Executive Protective Service, formerly the White House Police Force, and of the White House Detail of the Secret Service: the first group to protect the building and grounds, the latter to protect the President and other persons.

  A knot of troubled people stood in the night rain outside the main gate. Lime threaded his way through them and presented himself to the guards, and was admitted.

  He invaded Brewster country by the low side entrance and had only just entered the press lobby, filled with reporters standing tense under the large formal paintings, when Halroyd, the Special Agent in charge of the White House Detail, drew him to the corridor again. “Mr. Satterthwaite said he’d like a word, sir.”

  Lime lifted his eyebrows inquiringly and Halroyd took him along toward the basement offices which Satterthwaite and the other Presidential advisors used.

  The office was very small and unspeakably cluttered with paperwork. Satterthwaite, resident White House intellectual, had no interest in appearances; the disordered piles on his desk reflected the impatient brain. Of the five or six straight chairs only two were not heaped with papers; Lime chose one, following the command of Satterthwaite’s flapped hand, and sat.

  “Thanks very much, Halroyd.” Satterthwaite spoke in his high abrasive voice and the Special Agent withdrew; the door closed out the noises of voices and typewriters and teleprinters. “The President asked if I’d get a firsthand report from you before the broadcast. It was you who ran them down? One hell of an adroit piece of work. The President keeps talking about ‘that genius over in Secret Service who saved our bacon.’”

  “If I’d been a genius,” Lime said, “I’d have thought faster and we’d have got the bombs out before they went off.”

  “From what I’ve heard, based on the tiny bits of information you had not one man in ten thousand would have guessed there was anything going on at all.”

  Lime shrugged. He wasn’t insensitive to the fact that Satterthwaite’s words were at odds with the expression on his face. The face was marked by an indelible arrogance, the hauteur of a brilliant but tactless mind contemptuous of lesser brains. Satterthwaite was a forty-one-year-old mental machine who wore thick glasses that magnified his eyes to a startling size and dressed himself with studied indifference, a challenging lack of grace. The black hair was an untidy tangle of electric curls; the blunt little hands were perpetually in motion. He had the nimble aggressiveness of his diminutive size.

  “All right,” Satterthwaite said. “What have you got?”

  “Not too much from the bombers yet. We’re working them over.”

  “With rubber hoses I trust.”

  It seemed rhetorical; Lime didn’t rise to it.

  Satterthwaite said, “The NSA files identified the leader for you—the one behind these six. You know who he is. Julius Sturka.”

  Lime couldn’t altogether keep the anger out of his face and Satterthwaite jumped at the admission but Lime headed him off: “I never met the man. Fifteen years ago he was working the same part of the world I was, that’s all.”

  “He was an officer in the Algerian FLN. You were in Algeria during that nonsense.” Satterthwaite pushed it aside. “This man Sturka—who exactly is he?”

  “Armenian, I think—maybe Serbian. We never knew for sure. It’s not his real name.”

  “Balkan and obscure. That’s all rather Eric Ambler.”

  “I think he fancies himself that way. Soldier of fortune, trying to overturn the world order singlehandedly.”

  “But not a young squirt.”

  “Not unless he was a babe in arms when he was a light colonel in the FLN. As I say, I’ve never seen him. He’s supposed to be in his late forties roughly. We’ve got one bad snapshot—I don’t know of any other photographs. He’s camera shy. But name a war of liberation in the past ten years and he’s probably figured in it. Not at the top, but not as a menial either.”

  “A mercenary?”

  “Sometimes. Not usually. It’s possible he was just hired to do this one but we’ve got no evidence to indicate it. More likely it’s his own caper. Sometimes in the past few years he’s worked with a Cuban named Riva, but there’s no sign of Riva in this case. Not yet at least.”

  “Does he have much of a following? If he does it’s odd—I’ve never heard of him.”

  “He doesn’t work that way. He’ll put together a little cell or two and concentrate on the vitals of the government he’s trying to break. In Algeria I don’t think he had more than twenty soldiers, but they were all crack professionals. Did more damage than some regiments.”

  “For a man who’s never met him you know him pretty well, don’t you.”

  “I was supposed to nail him. I never did.”

  Satterthwaite licked his upper lip, like a cat washing itself. He pushed his glasses higher on his nose and watched without expression as Lime lit a cigarette. “Do you think you’ll get him this time?”

  “I don’t know. Everybody’s looking for him.”

  “You’ve alerted the other agencies? Other countries?”

  “Yes. He’s probably still in this country—at least we have reason to believe he was here until late last night.”

  “Here in Washington, you mean?”

  “He left a calling card.”

  “That agent of yours who was killed.”

  “Yes, that one.”

  “What makes you say that’s his calling card?”

  “He seems to have been one of the people who stirred up the rebellion in Ceylon a few years ago. The government cracked down on that one hard—infiltrated the rebels and singled out the leaders and had them killed.

  “The Ceylonese insurgents had to take strong measures to protect themselves. According to NSA it was Sturka who took out the government infiltrators—butchered them dramatically, left them to be found in public buildings with their tongues and hearts ripped out. It was a warning—see what happens to informers who infiltrate us.”

  “Now I see what you mean by calling card.” Satterthwaite shook his head. “My God these people are of another species.” He removed his glasses and wiped them clean and held them up to the light at arm’s length, squinting at them. His eyes, Lime saw with surprise, were quite small and set too close together. The glasses had left red dents alongside the bridge of his nose.

  Satterthwaite gave the glasses a pained look and put them back on, hooking them over one ear at a time. It was the first time Lime had had personal contact with him, and one of the few times he had seen the man at all; Satterthwaite was not a frequent appearance-maker on television or in any public places. He was the President’s chief advisor and he cast a long shadow but he was one of those invisible figures usually described by the press as “a high White House source.”

  “Well.” Satterthwaite was reflective. “Shall we just stand here in outraged dignity? It’s a furious mess, isn’t it. The world’s most powerful system, and they can get us over a barrel so easily. Small groups can tyrannize simply by finding a pressure point. These terrorists use any weapon they can lay their hands on; they recruit any fool who’s willing to sacrifice himself in the name of some vague negative cause, and they know we’re handicapped because we can only fire the second shot.”

  “That deters most of the professionals,” Lime said. “The professional doesn’t mean to get caught. Terrorism’s usually an amateur occupation—they rarely get away free in the end, they tend to end up martyrs, and it’s the amateurs who go for that. They don’t care about the second shot—they don’t care if the second shot blows them in two.”

  “And here you’ve got the worst of both, haven’t you. A group of sacrificial amateurs commanded and operated by a professional who’s pulling the
strings. To tell you the truth,” Satterthwaite said, “I think we’ve got our ass in a crack.”

  When Satterthwaite talked he had the disconcerting habit of fixing his stare against the knot of Lime’s necktie; but now the enlarged eyes lifted, the abrasive voice hardened, the jaw crept forward. “Lime, you’re a professional.”

  Lime wanted no part of what he saw coming. “I’m pretty low on the totem pole.”

  “It’s hardly a time for blind obeisance to seniority and the chain of command, is it? We need a professional hunter—a man we can rely on to get the job done while the politicians keep hands off.”

  “The job of nailing Sturka.”

  “Yes. I’ll be frank: we’d decided to throw a net, bring in everybody who’s got a file folder, but something happened and we had to ditch that scheme. This is confidential, you understand—it doesn’t leave this room.”

  “All right.”

  “Everybody wants this thing wrapped up and sealed. Fast, and no loopholes. Get Sturka, and if there’s anyone behind him find out who or what it is.”

  “Suppose it turns out to be a foreign government?”

  “It won’t. I can’t buy that.”

  Lime didn’t buy it either, but anything was possible. “Let me ask you something. Are you suggesting we make Sturka a calling card?”

  Satterthwaite shook his head. “That would be playing their game. I don’t want him butchered. We’ve got to get the case packaged airtight and nail the son of a bitch and pin him up against it by the numbers. Arrest, trial, conviction, execution. It’s time to quit letting these radical prigs hector us—it’s time for us to start hectoring them for a change. But we can’t do it their way—we can’t ignore our own rules. They attacked the Establishment and it’s the Establishment that must bring them down, by Establishment rules.”

  “It sounds all right,” Lime said. “But you still want someone bigger than me.”