Line of Succession

by Brian Garfield

  Satterthwaite, grunting to indicate he had heard, turned the page.

  Dexter Ethridge said, “We decided this morning, Mr. President. We’ve already made the decision.”

  “I know that Dex. But we didn’t make it public.”

  “You’re saying we can still change our minds.”

  “We didn’t anticipate the reaction would come down this hard on one side, did we?”

  “Mr. President,” Ethridge said. The tone made Satterthwaite look up at him. Ethridge stirred slowly in his chair. A deep breath, a reluctant voice: “You’ve never been the kind of man who makes his decisions on the basis of who talked to him last. You’ve never needed public consensus to confirm your judgment. I find it hard to believe you’re going to let the unreasoning panic of a mob affect your——”

  “The country could split apart on this issue.” The President was harsh. “I’m not playing politics for God’s sake. I’m trying to hold this country together!”

  Ethridge was sitting up straight. It was the first time Satterthwaite could recall seeing him this angry. “You won’t hold it together by giving in to the yahoos.”

  The President waved his cigar toward the newspaper in Satterthwaite’s hands. “Some of those men are prominent public servants, Dex. Maybe some of them are yahoos too but you can’t always judge a case by its advocate.”

  Satterthwaite set the newspaper aside. “I think the President’s point is well taken. This morning we all listened to Fairlie’s voice. We reacted straight out of our guts—we’re civilized people, someone in our family is in trouble, we instantly concluded the ransom demands weren’t impossible to meet so we decided to agree to the exchange. The paramount consideration was Fairlie’s safety—we hadn’t had time to study the ramifications.”

  Ethridge was watching him narrowly. The muscles and nerves twitched in his face.

  President Brewster said, “If we give in it’ll give every two-bit terrorist gang in the world a green light to try this kind of thing again and again. Turning these seven killers loose, sending them into asylum—assuming there’s a country somewhere with the guts to grant them asylum—that would be kind of like telling every guerrilla in the world he’s free to go ahead and blow up people and buildings with impunity.”

  Ethridge’s skin was the hue of veal, he had unhealthy blisters under his eyes. He spread his hands in appeal: “Mr. President, I can only stick to what I said this morning. The kidnappers are offering an exchange and we all agreed that Cliff Fairlie’s life is worth a great deal more than the lives of those seven ciphers. I don’t see how that’s changed.”

  Satterthwaite turned, catching the President’s eye; he said to Ethridge, “If that were the real quid pro quo you’d get no argument. But it’s not a choice between Fairlie’s life and the lives of seven ciphers. It’s whether we can afford to give carte blanche to the extremists.”

  Ethridge sat stubbornly upright, his silence disagreeing. He squeezed his eyes with thumb and forefinger and when he opened them it seemed to take him a long time to bring them into focus. “I think we have to face the fact that whatever we do isn’t going to please everybody. We can’t avoid a split. The theoretical arguments pretty well cancel each other out—look, I can give you a strong case against taking a tough stand. You can’t simply refuse to turn the seven bombers loose, you’ll have to follow up with a police operation against all the radical cells. You’ll end up with a permanently enlarged security operation, and that means permanent curtailment of citizens’ rights. It’s the only way you’ll keep the lid on, and it seems to me that’s exactly what the militants want of us—a tough repression that will feed their anti-Establishment arguments.”

  Satterthwaite said, “You’re maintaining we’ve already lost.”

  “We’ve lost this round. We have to accept that.”

  “I don’t,” the President snapped. “I don’t at all.” He pawed around the surface of his desk, his eyes not following his hand; he was watching Ethridge. His hand closed around the lighter; the wheel snicked and the President lit his cigar. “Dex, are you going to make a public fight of this? A public break with me?”

  Ethridge didn’t answer directly. “Mr. President, the most important thing—more important than this entire tragedy—is to establish a long-term system of policies that will rebuild the self-confidence and security of the people. If the society hasn’t got enormous discontents to fuel the militant extremists, then the whole terrorist movement will wither away for lack of nourishment. Now it seems to me——”

  “Long-term policies,” Satterthwaite cut in, “are a luxury we haven’t got time to debate right now.”

  “May I finish, please?”

  “I’m sorry. Go ahead.”

  “I don’t mean this as personal offense but I believe Cliff Fairlie is more likely to establish the kind of secure self-confident society we need than anybody else in government. His ideas are the first reform proposals I’ve ever seen that give us a real chance to build a more responsible and more responsive government in this country. And if we manage to recover Fairlie the wave of public sympathy will be so overpowering there’s a good chance he’ll be able to get congressional backing for a great many reform programs that could never be passed under any other circumstances.”

  Satterthwaite was rocked; he tried not to show it. The frail Vice-President-elect, with his sick eyes and his tall quixotic gauntness, was putting out a display of shrewd subtlety totally unexpected. Ethridge was crediting Fairlie with far more magic than Fairlie actually possessed; reforms had been proposed before, Satterthwaite saw nothing particularly new in any of Fairlie’s, but there was one place where Ethridge had an undeniably powerful point: Fairlie, if recovered intact, would generate exactly the kind of public outpouring Ethridge foresaw. On the crest of that wave, with any political ability at all Fairlie indeed would be able to push all sorts of unheard-of reforms through Congress before the legislators regained their composure.

  Satterthwaite’s eyes went past Ethridge, past the hanging flag to President Brewster; and he saw in the President’s lined face a surprise similar to his own—the awareness of the explosive significance of what Ethridge had just said.

  12:25 P.M. EST In the war room Lime’s patience was shredding. He had arrived almost an hour ago with his lunch in a paper bag stained dark around the bottom by coffee that had escaped from the lidded takeout cup. The cheap food rumbled uneasily in his stomach.

  He had pulled out an empty chair beside NSA’s Fred Kaiser, who was big and grizzled, a not unfriendly bear of a man; Lime knew him, not well. Kaiser was keeping two phones busy, sitting with a receiver propped between shoulder and one ear, a finger stuck in the other.

  Lime offhandedly sifted through typewritten reports, seeking slivers and scraps, finding nothing worthwhile. The long table was littered with growing piles of dog-eared papers—reports from the typists downstairs, from the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon, from stacks of Secret Service and NSA files that had been brought out needing the dust blown off their covers. Down at the end a woman with blue hair was typing up slotted index cards and inserting them in their proper alphabetical places in a Wheel-dex. The carriage of a teleprinter jerked back and forth, paper popped up through the glass slot and a uniformed major general ripped it off and stood reading it while the machine clicked beside him.

  The room was filled and busy. Mainly they were making lists and then evaluating them. There were lists of known radical activists and then there were other lists behind those: the lists of people who weren’t quite on the lists. Suspected but not known. Computer banks plugged into the teleprinters were analyzing histories—modus operandi, locale, the flimsy facts about the black American chopper pilot and the tire tracks two vehicles had left in the snow of the abandoned farm in the Pyrenees where the helicopter had been found.

  Over at the side of the room B. L. Hoyt had earphones strapped over his head and was listening—probably to a copy of the Fairlie tape—
imbecilically calm with his chilled blue eyes raised toward the ceiling. The end of the tape whipped through the heads and spun around the takeup reel, flapping; Hoyt did not stir.

  Fred Kaiser slammed down the phone and barked at Lime, “Jesus H. Christ.”

  “Mm?”

  “Nothing. Just rising to remark on the calamity.”

  “Mm.” Lime’s cigarette lay smoking at the rim of the table, growing a long ash, threatening to leave a burn on the wood. He rescued it, dragged off the stub and crushed it in the ashtray.

  “My wife thinks she’s a psychiatrist,” Kaiser said.

  “Does she.”

  “I went home for breakfast, right? She spends half an hour analyzing the bastards. All I want’s a quart of coffee and baconeggs, I get headshrinker guesses on why they snatched Fairlie.”

  “And why did they?” Lime pushed a typewritten sheet aside and overturned the next one.

  “I didn’t listen too much. She had it all doped out, their parents rejected them or something. It’s all shit, you know. I can tell you what motivated them. Somebody put them up to it. Somebody recruited them, somebody trained them, somebody programmed them. Somebody took a bunch of damn fools and wound them up like walking toys and pointed them at Cliff Fairlie. Just like somebody pointed those seven assholes at the Capitol with fused bombs in their cases. Now we ought to find out who and why. You ask me we’d do worse than poke around Peking and Moscow.”

  “I don’t know.” Lime wasn’t a subscriber to the conspiracy theory of history.

  “Come off it. There used to be a day when we responded to this kind of crap with the Marines. This country used to be willing to go anyplace in the world with any cannon they needed to get back any lousy citizen of ours, let alone a President.”

  “Where would you send the Marines, Fred? Who would you shoot?” Lime kept most of the sarcasm out of his voice.

  “Aagh.” A phone rang: Kaiser turned with military abruptness, picked up the phone and talked and listened. Lime went back to his papers. Kaiser was a political infant but it didn’t annoy him; people like Kaiser inhabited a masculine technical sphere, they didn’t have to understand reality—only facts.

  Kaiser rang off. “Why Fairlie?”

  Lime glanced at him.

  “I mean, I know he was handy and all. But the son of a bitch is a flaming liberal. You’d think they’d pick on somebody pure American. Somebody they really hate.”

  “They never do. The best scapegoat’s the innocent one.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. The Aztecs used to choose virgins for their human sacrifices.”

  “Sometimes you don’t make a hundred per cent sense, you know that?”

  “It’s all right,” Lime said. “Distribution limited on a need-to-know basis.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You need a checkup, I swear to God.”

  Lime closed his eyes and nodded agreement. When he opened them they were aimed at the clock and as if by extrasensory signal Satterthwaite appeared.

  Satterthwaite whirled into the room, topcoat flying, more cluttered and disordered than ever; stopped, swept the room with his magnified myopic stare, spoke while shouldering out of his coat: “Anybody got anything important to tell me? If it’s not vital save it for later. Anybody?”

  No response: like a classroom full of children too shy to volunteer the spelling of a test word. Satterthwaite scrutinized them all, very fast, stance shifting as he went from face to face. When he got to Lime he flung out his arm, leveled his index finger, overturned his hand and beckoned imperiously. “Let’s go.”

  Without waiting acknowledgment Satterthwaite wheeled. Lime got to his feet, pushing the chair back with his knees, feeling curious eyes on him. Kaiser muttered, “Watch out for the son of a bitch’s teeth.”

  Lime found Satterthwaite in the corridor unlocking one of the No Admittance offices. They passed inside. It was a small private conference room, windowless and bare, air fluttering from ventilator ducts. Heavy wooden armchairs for eight, a walnut conference table, a stenographer’s desk in the corner. Lime closed the door behind him and located an ashtray and headed for it.

  Satterthwaite said, “I understand you have a theory.” Icily polite.

  “Well theories are a dime a dozen, aren’t they.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I didn’t think we had time to waste trotting out every wild speculation that comes along.”

  “David when I ask you to give me details I think we can assume we’re not wasting anyone’s time.”

  Lime scowled furiously at him. “By what curious process did you arrive at the conclusion I had anything useful to contribute?”

  “It’s not a conclusion, it’s a surmise, and it’s not mine. It’s Ackert’s. He saw you staring at the map as if you’d discovered a message in secret ink. Come on David, I haven’t time to drag it out of you word by word.”

  “If I had anything hard do you think I’d keep it to myself? What do you think I am?”

  “I’m sure you don’t really want an answer to that question. It’s throwing raw meat on the floor.”

  “Look, I admit I had an idea. I played around with it but it shot itself full of holes. It turned out to have far too many ifs in it. It’s not a theory any more, it’s a pipe dream—acting on it would distract us from what we ought to be doing. We need more to go on.”

  Satterthwaite tucked his chin in toward his Adam’s apple, showing his displeasure and his determination to carry on. “I think I know the direction your theory’s taken. Are you afraid to risk getting thrown into the arena personally? David, we’re talking about one of the most despicable crimes of the century. They’ve taken an innocent hostage—a man who’s vitally important to the whole world. It’s the kind of buck you just can’t pass.”

  Lime grunted.

  “David, we’re talking about needs. Realities.”

  Lime looked down at his shoes as if he were at a high window looking down through smoke at a fireman’s rescue net. “I guess we are,” he said. “I do tend to hate an amateur who tries to tell a professional how to do his job.”

  “Get off it. Do you think I’m a patronage hack? I’m a dollar-a-year man, David, I’m not in this for glory. I do my job better than anyone else who’s available.”

  “Modesty,” Lime breathed, “is an overrated virtue.”

  Satterthwaite gave him a cold look. “You were born with an innate grasp of the subtleties of the hunt which most men will never learn from years of training. When it comes to operating in the western Mediterranean you’re the only expert alive Worthy of the name.” And now Satterthwaite sank the knife, twisting it: “And when it comes to the Western Desert who else can you possibly pass the buck to, David?”

  “I haven’t been out there since Ben Bella.”

  “But I’ve hit it, haven’t I.”

  “So?”

  “You want Sturka for this one too, don’t you. Why? Intuition?”

  “I just don’t believe in coincidences,” Lime said. “Two well-organized capers, both on this scale, both with the same target.… But there are no facts. It was just an idea. You can’t put it in the bank.”

  Satterthwaite jabbed his finger toward the chair. “Come back here and sit down. Are you ready to start working?”

  “It’s not my department.”

  “Whose job do you want? Hoyt’s? He’s due for the chop anyway.”

  “You can’t fire civil servants.”

  “You can find shelves to put them on where they can’t do any damage. Ackert’s job? Would you settle for that? Name your price.”

  “There’s no price for a fool’s errand.” He hadn’t stirred toward the chair. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth, the smoke stinging his right eye.

  “Come on, let’s finish thrashing this out. You know I’ve got you over a barrel.”

  “I’ve got no facts to go on. Can’t you understand that? No
facts!” He took a step forward, filled with anger. “I’ve got no price—I’m not auditioning for your approval or anybody else’s. I’m not lacking in conscience—if I knew I was better equipped to handle the field assignment than anybody else I’d take the job, you wouldn’t need to degrade us both with stupid bribe offers.”

  Satterthwaite pushed his glasses up against his eyebrows. “You’re not a superman, David, you’re only the best chance we have among a variety of poor chances. You spent ten years of your life in that part of the world. You grew up in NSA before it rigidified into the kind of bureaucracy that became capable of fucking up the Pueblo affair—in your day imagination still counted for something. Do you think I don’t know your secrets? I’ve sized you up, I know your talents, your choice of friends and entertainments, your record, how much you drink and when. You were the man who opened the channel between Ben Bella and De Gaulle. Christ if they’d only had the sense to send you into Indochina.”

  Lime shook his head. “It’s no good, you know that.” It wasn’t altogether that he didn’t want a crack at it. He had wanted this boredom; now he was eager to get away from it; the old warhorse, he thought, but he turned back before reaching the point of commitment. “Look, things have changed, it’s a different world from the one I operated in. The quality of your mind doesn’t count—only the quality of your marksmanship. I’m a lousy shot.”

  “That’s a crock of shit and you know it.”

  “No. Nothing’s decided by brains any more—in spite of that think tank of yours across the hall. There’s no room left for chess players, you know that—it’s all decided by assassination and counterassassination.”

  “All right. Assassinate them. But find them first. Find Fairlie and bust him out.”

  Lime laughed off key. “Use the local boys over there. Spanish cops, Bedouins, desert rats—hell it’s their territory.”

  “I think it’s important to have an American in charge.”

  “It’s not Barbary pirates you know—these aren’t gunboat days.”

  “Look, it’s an American they’ve kidnapped and I suspect the kidnappers themselves are Americans. How would it look if a Spanish cop got too close to them and then bungled things? Do you have any idea what that would do to relations between Washington and Madrid? A little stupidity like that could slide Perez-Blasco right into Moscow’s camp. At least if an American runs the show it’s our success or our failure. If it’s a success I think we’ll climb quite a few notches in international esteem and we could use that right now, God knows.”