Two professionals. Was Sturka the better?
What is Fairlie to me that maybe I’ll have to die for him? But the adrenaline was pumping and Bev had been right: he had sought peace but boredom had become a kind of death and he was joyous with this job. He was at his best when he risked the most.
Needing sleep, his nerve-ends raw, his belly afire from caffeine and nicotine, he was alive. The malaise of David Lime: I have pain, therefore I am.
Five days to spring Fairlie. Well anyhow that was the spring Satterthwaite was trying to wind. If you didn’t get Fairlie back there was always Ethridge and if Ethridge turned out to be dying of something there was always Milton Luke. A senile cipher, Luke, but they’d survived Coolidge and Harding and Ike in his last years. The deadline was real but if it passed the world might hang together in spite of Lime’s failure.…
Thinking in circles now.
Was it really Sturka at the other end of the test line? Well it did have the earmarks, didn’t it. The little cell of operatives striking straight to the system’s nervous center. The knife straight into the vitals. The exquisite timing.
But if you assumed that much you still couldn’t jump to conclusions about Sturka’s base of operations. The fact that Sturka had once operated out of the djebel did not place him there now. Algeria was the logical place to look because Algeria was Sturka’s old stamping grounds and because Algeria had one of the few governments in the world that wouldn’t actively cooperate in the hunt for Fairlie; but the assumption it was Sturka was what militated most powerfully against the Algerian answer. Algeria was so obvious it was the one place Sturka would avoid.
And he had the signs they had blazed for him. The Arab robes, the boat turning north, now Mezetti flying north across Spain toward the Pyrenees with one hundred thousand dollars in his satchel. All of them deliberate misleaders, with the Arab robes a double bluff? Sturka was clever but was he that subtle?
Geneva, he thought, and that farm outside Almería where Mezetti had landed expecting to meet someone.
There was too much missing. In the field there was nothing to do but follow the facts and hope Mezetti would produce.
Sturka, he thought reluctantly. I suppose it must be. He dozed.
1:45 P.M. EST Satterthwaite sat tense with one shoulder raised, dry-washing his clasped hands. Images crowded his mind: the operating-room glances between doctors, eyes bleak over the tops of white surgical masks; the obscene pulsing of a respirometer bag; rhythmic green curves darting across a cardiograph screen with eyes watching it fearfully hoping the curve would not become a steady green dot sliding straight across from left to right.
Out at Walter Reed the neurosurgeons were drilling holes toward Dexter Ethridge’s brain. Cutting biparietal burr holes. At last report blood pressure was down to eighty over forty; a clot was suspected.
Satterthwaite looked at the man behind the big desk. Worry pulled at President Brewster’s mouth. Neither man spoke.
David Lime was in an airplane somewhere between Gibraltar and Geneva—an airborne jet transport with his big communications crew aboard. All of them following the track of the Mezetti Cessna. Maybe it would lead them to something. But if it didn’t?
The telephone.
The President looked up but only his eyes moved; he didn’t stir.
Satterthwaite reached out, plucked at the telephone.
It was Kermode. Dexter Ethridge’s doctor. He sounded aggrieved as if by some petty annoyance. “Ten minutes ago. It was a subdural hematoma.”
Satterthwaite covered the mouthpiece with his palm. “He’s dead.”
The President blinked. “Dead.”
Kermode was still talking. Satterthwaite got phrases: “Medicine’s not an exact science, is it. I mean in half these cases the diagnosis isn’t made until it’s too late—in a third of them it isn’t even considered. It’s my bloody fault.”
“Take it easy. You’re not a neurologist.”
“We’ve had them on the case since the bombing. Nobody spotted it. I mean it’s not a common problem. We found out by arteriography, but it was too late to evacuate the thing.”
“Take it easy, Doctor.”
“Take it easy. Sure. I mean I’ve just murdered the next President of the United States.”
“Nuts.”
Brewster stirred—reaching for a cigar—but he didn’t speak. Satterthwaite listened to the telephone voice: “It was an injury caused by the bomb blast when that desk hit him on the head. What happens, the cerebral hemispheres get displaced downward and you get a compression against the brain. It’s a hemorrhage but it’s not the usual run of cerebral hemorrhage. It’s between the layers—you can’t spot it with the usual diagnostic tools. These things take weeks to show up—sometimes months. Then it’s usually too late.”
Satterthwaite wasn’t willing to go on listening to Kermode’s mea culpa. “What about Judith Ethridge?”
“She’s here in the hospital. Of course she knows.”
“The President will call her.”
“Yeah.”
“Goodbye,” Satterthwaite said, and removed the muttering phone from his ear and hung it up.
The President glared at him.
“Shit.” Brewster spoke the word as if it had been chipped out of hard steel.
8:00 P.M. EST The snow had quit falling. Raoul Riva let the Venetian blind slat down and left the room in hat and overcoat, walked to the elevator and pressed the concave plastic square until it lit up. He rode down to the lobby and stood just inside the front door ignoring the doorman’s inquiring glance; stood there for a few moments as if judging the weather, then strolled outside with the air of a man in no hurry who had no particular destination in mind.
The phone booth was a few streets away and he approached it at a leisurely pace, timing his arrival for eight-twenty. The call wasn’t due until half past but he wanted to make sure no one else used the phone at that time. He stepped into the booth and pretended to be looking up a number in the directory.
The call was three minutes late. “I have an overseas call for Mr. Felix Martin.”
“Speaking.”
“Thank you.… Your call is ready sir. Go ahead.”
“Hello Felix?” Sturka’s voice was a bit distant; it wasn’t the best connection.
“Hello Stewart. How’s the weather over your way?”
“Very mild. How’s yours?”
“A little snow but it’s let up. I wish I were over there in all that sunshine. You must be having a ball.”
“Well you know, business, always business.” Sturka’s voice became more matter-of-fact. “How’s the market doing?”
“Not too great I’m afraid. A bad thing, Dexter Ethridge dying like that—you heard?”
“No. You say Ethridge died?”
“Yes. Some sort of hemorrhage—after effect of those bombs that blew up the Capitol. The news sent the market down another four points.”
“Well what about our holdings?”
“They’re slipping. Like all the rest.”
“I suppose things will recover. They always do. We’ll just have to hold on and wait for our price.”
Riva said, “Well the way things are going I wouldn’t be surprised if the SEC slapped some tougher controls on.”
“Yes. I suppose we’ll have to expect that.”
“These radicals are really pretty stupid, aren’t they. If they don’t turn Cliff Fairlie loose there’s going to be all kinds of hell breaking loose.”
“Well I don’t know, Felix. I get a feeling they’ve got some pretty brutal plans. I wouldn’t be surprised if they killed Fairlie and assassinated the Speaker of the House at the same time. Then they’d be guaranteeing that old Senator Hollander’d get the Presidency, and maybe that’s exactly what these clowns want—a right-wing fool like that in the White House would do more for the cause of the revolutionaries than anybody since Fulgencio Batista. You think maybe that’s what they’ve got in mind?”
“Tha
t sounds pretty fanciful if you ask me. I mean the Speaker must be ten feet deep in Secret Service protection. I can’t see how they’d be able to pull that off.”
“Well I’m sure they’d find a way. They always seem to, don’t they. Anyhow this call’s costing a bloody fortune, let’s not spend hours talking politics. Now look, from what you say about the market I’d think it might be a good time to get out of our blue chips, unload them first thing Monday morning. What do you say?”
“I think it might be better to hold off a few days, see which way things go.”
“You may be right. I’ll let you be the judge of that. But I do think it’s a damn good thing we unloaded that block of Mezetti Industries stock—we got out right under the wire.”
“You got out of it entirely?” Riva asked.
“Yes, we just took payment for the last block.”
“Then that was a good break.”
“Well you know me, Felix, always willing to cut my losses. I’m not one to hang onto something once it’s started to lose steam.”
“On the other hand,” Riva said, “I’d hang onto those blue chips a while longer before I unloaded them, if I were you. It’s too early to think about dumping them.”
“Well we’ll give it a few days then. I’ll talk to you again Monday night, all right?”
“Okay, fine. Have a good weekend.”
“You too.”
“Give my best to Marjorie.”
“I’ll do that. So long.”
“Bye.”
Riva left the booth and glanced toward the sky. The city’s glow reflected back from the underbellies of heavy rolling clouds. He turned the coat collar up against his throat and walked back toward the hotel.
SATURDAY,
JANUARY 15
7:00 A.M. North African Time It was Fairlie’s second morning in the gray room.
There were no windows. The iron legs of the cot were sealed into the concrete of the floor. The mattress was a flaccid tick.
No pillow or sheets. The light was a low-watt bulb recessed into the stucco ceiling with a steel grille imbedded flush with the ceiling to prevent the prisoner’s fingers from reaching up and unscrewing the light. It was never switched off.
Evidently it had been built to house prisoners. Possibly a relic of the Second World War. It had been designed to contain the kind of people whose first reaction to imprisonment was to escape. There was nothing he could tear apart to make a tool or weapon: the cot was a single welded frame with a plywood bed. And even so there were no window bars to pry open. The door was iron and fitted flush into its metal frame. It had no handle or keyhole on the inside. The crack beneath it was barely sufficient to admit air, which circulated up and exhausted, apparently, through ducts above the ceiling light. Up there a fan hummed constantly.
They had been feeding him twice a day since they’d captured him. It was his only way of reckoning time; he had to assume they were still keeping to the same schedule of meals.
An hour ago they had brought him coffee and a hard loaf of bread and a bar of soap. He took it to be breakfast; they usually fed him an adequate evening meal. So it was morning again.
He had no way of telling where he was. He had last seen the sky the other night aboard the pitching boat before they had blindfolded him. Then the ride in the amphibious airplane. The flight had seemed interminable but eventually the plane had come down—on land; the surface on which it landed was rough, no regular airport runway.
They had carried him a short distance and seated him in another vehicle. He had heard the airplane take off again and fly away, the sound of the engines diminishing as the car in which he sat began to move slowly across bumpy terrain: an ungraded dirt road, if it was a road at all.
The mask with which they had blinded him was opaque and they had taped it so tightly there was no way for light to reach his eyelids. But he had felt heat against his left cheek and shoulder during the ride and it made him certain the sun was up. If it was morning he was traveling south.
The car stopped once and evidently Ahmed got out; there was a rattling of metal, perhaps jerrycans. Lady was testing the pulse in Fairlie’s wrists. They had given him a shot shortly before the airplane had landed and from the vague euphoria it produced he assumed they were keeping him doped up on mild tranquilizers to maintain his docility. It did more than that; it kept his mind afloat, he couldn’t concentrate on anything long enough to think anything out.
It had been another journey too long to be timed subjectively. It might have been forty-five minutes, it might have been three hours. The car stopped; they lifted him out and walked him across some gravel. Into a building, through a number of turns—hallways? Down a flight of hard steps which seemed to be half buried in rubble; he had to feel his way carefully, kicking things off the steps. Finally they had turned him through a door into this cell where they had removed the mask and the gag and the wires that bound his hands.
It had taken a little while for his eyes to get used to the light and by the time he was able to see they had locked him inside alone, having stripped him of everything except the rudiments of his clothing.
That first evening Lady had brought him a good-sized helping of lamb stew on a military metal plate and an unlabeled bottle of raw primitive wine. Ahmed stood in the doorway, shoulder tilted, arms folded, showing the hard black oily gleam of a revolver. Watching him eat. “Just don’ make trouble. You don’ want your wife marching to slow organ music.”
They still hadn’t shown him their faces—none but Abdul, the black pilot; and Abdul apparently was not here. Fairlie had to assume Abdul had flown the airplane back to its source, or at least away from this area.
For hours after Lady and Ahmed left him he sat like a stone, brooding, offended by his own sour body smell and the heavy stink of cheap disinfectant in the cell.
Drugs had sealed him in a protective shell within which he had become a passive observer, defending himself against outbursts of terror by the basic expedient of withdrawal. Emotionally dulled and mentally numbed, he had observed without reacting; he had absorbed without thinking.
The solitary incarceration allowed him to begin to emerge.
He sat on the cot with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up against his chest, arms wrapped around his legs, chin on knees, eyes fixed without focus on the water faucet opposite him. At first his brain stirred with sluggish reluctance. In time his muscles became cramped and he stretched out face down on the cot, chin on laced hands. It got the light out of his eyes and he tried to sleep but now his mind was awakening from its long recession and he began to reason.
Up to now he had accepted that he would be killed or he would be released: alternatives over which he had no control and therefore against which he should not struggle. He had prepared himself atavistically to wait in this limbo, however long it might take, until it ended with freedom or death.
There were further considerations but he began to recognize them only now.
The first was the idea of escape. A variety of fanciful schemes presented themselves and he entertained them all but in the end dismissed them, all for the same reasons: he was no storybook adventurer, he knew virtually nothing of physical combat or the methods of stealth, and he had no knowledge of what lay beyond the door of this cell.
They were feeding him, enough to sustain life; they had not assaulted him physically. They had gone to a great amount of evident trouble to spirit him away intact. They were using him as a bargaining tool; they needed him alive.
They wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble if they meant to kill him in the end. They had never showed their faces; he clung to that.
He spent the entire night reasoning it out. At times he was convinced they were going to let him go. At times he felt they would use him up and toss him away like a squeezed lemon, as dead as yesterday. At these times the chilly sweat of fear streamed down his ribs.
For hours too he though of Jeanette and their unborn child. The effect
all this would have on her. On them.
That was what finally stirred his anger: Jeanette and the children.
Until now it had all had an odd impersonality for him. In a way his abduction seemed an extension of politics: a military sort of thing. Abominable, inexcusable, terrifying—yet in its way rational.
But now it became personal. They had no right, he thought. There was no possible justification. To put an expectant mother and two adolescent children through this agony of unknowing.…
That made it personal and when it became personal it became hate.
He had been afraid of them; now he hated them.
He began to wonder why it had taken so incredibly long for him to think of Jeanette and the children. It was the first thought he had given to them in—how long? Three days? Four?
He had taken the coward’s refuge in mindless despair. Dulled his mind, curled up in a tight defensive little ball around himself—a total selfishness of reaction which appalled him.…
He had to get to know these animals. He had to penetrate the burnouses and the phony voices. He had to watch for every clue, no matter how trivial.
By the time they released him he had to know them: he had to be able to identify them for the world.
He dozed finally and came awake when they brought food: Abdul and Sélim. So Abdul had returned from wherever he had left the airplane.
He tried to draw them out but they both refused to speak. They took his plates away and the lock latched over with a heavy clank.
The rest of that day he had struggled with the problems he had set for himself. No simple resolutions offered themselves. He slept awhile and awoke dreaming of Jeanette.
A second dinner of stew, a second endless lamplit night, and now his second morning in the cell.
Sélim came in: a cold figure in his disguising robes, hard and poisonous—something sleek and cruel about him. No movement in the hooded eyes. Eyes that had seen everything. So cold. A man with whom he could make no real contact. Sélim seemed to possess a superb self-control but Fairlie sensed in him a wild animal unpredictability: an underlying mercurial spectrum of moods and tempers that could be triggered at any time. What was most frightening was that there would be no way to predict wHat might turn out to be the trigger.
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