Line of Succession

by Brian Garfield

  “Given time we can force you to do it.”

  “Possibly. I think I’m reasonably tough.”

  “There are drugs.”

  “I doubt my voice would sound natural.”

  Sélim sat silent for a brooding interval. Fairlie felt cold, dismal. Possibly this refusal would cost him his life; he was not capable of facing that with equanimity.

  Very soft: “What do you want, Fairlie?”

  “What do I want?”

  “Let’s hear your side—perhaps we can strike a bargain. What is your price?”

  “I cannot be bought, you know that. A man in my position hasn’t the luxury of being able to afford being bought.”

  “I applaud your courage. But there must be some basis for discussion.”

  “Of course there is.” He felt irresponsibly lightheaded. “Agree to turn me loose.”

  “And if I do?” Sélim shifted the light; it stabbed directly into his eyes. “You know what we want, isn’t that right?”

  “I’ve read your ransom demands.”

  “And?”

  “I understand how from your point of view they may seem reasonable. They don’t to me.”

  “Why not?”

  “My freedom in exchange for the seven bombers we’ve got on trial? You don’t really——”

  “Now that’s much better,” Sélim murmured.

  “What?” A sudden suspicion: he reached up, twisted the lamp in Sélim’s hand.

  Light fell across the tape recorder. But the spools were still motionless.

  Sélim pulled the lamp out of his grip. “I’ll switch it on when you’re ready.”

  “I’ll speak into that thing only on my terms.”

  “And what are your terms, Fairlie?”

  “I speak my own words, free of restraint.”

  “We can hardly allow that.”

  “You’re free to splice the tape. But I’ll say no more than that I’ve been kidnapped and am alive and in good health. That should be evidence enough to serve your tactical purposes. It’s all I’ll give you.”

  “Of course you’d give us that much—it would suit your own purpose. You want them to know you’re still alive. They’ll search more strenuously, knowing you’re alive.”

  “It’s all I’ll give you. Take it or leave it.”

  Sélim abruptly set the work lamp down on the bench. Fairlie reached out and turned it away so that it shone against the wall. Sélim did not stop him; the others, who probably had not heard most of the talk, watched from the dim corners like ghosts.

  Sélim switched on the tape recorder, unreeled its microphone and spoke into it: “Uno, dos, tres, cuatro.…” He rewound the spools and switched it to playback and the machine said obediently, “Uno, dos, tres, cuatro.”

  Sélim rewound the few inches of tape so that the next recording would erase his test words. He pushed the microphone toward Fairlie. “Very well. We’ll try it your way. Whenever you’re ready.”

  Fairlie took the mike out of his hand, held it beneath his mouth. He nodded; Sélim’s long-fingered hand pressed the start-record buttons.

  “This is Clifford Fairlie speaking. I have been kidnapped, I’m being held in a place I can’t identify by a group of people who have not shown their faces to me or otherwise identified themselves except by obvious pseudonyms. They have not harmed me physically and I believe they do not intend to kill me.”

  He lowered the microphone. “That’s all.”

  “Say you expect to be released if your government agrees to our ransom demands.”

  He shook his head, standing mute; finally Sélim grunted and switched the recorder off. “Abdul.”

  The lights came on inside the garage; Sélim switched off the work lamp. “Abdul, tie him.”

  He watched, bleak, while Abdul came forward with wire and secured his hands. “The feet too?”

  “Not yet.” Sélim stood up, reached for the work lamp. He removed something from its cage—a disk, trailing fine wires. The wires ran down the lamp cord into the jumble around the socket. Sélim picked up the packing crate on which he had been sitting. Underneath it was a tape recorder identical to the one on the workbench. Sélim lifted it to the bench. “I think we have enough.” He began to rewind the spools; he said conversationally to Fairlie, “A good editing job requires two tape decks, you know.”

  It was no good screaming oaths. Fairlie closed his eyes. He had allowed them to draw his words; they had duped him so easily. Everything he’d said in the past half hour was on that tape.

  “You’ve been most cooperative,” Sélim said. “We appreciate that. We really do.” He placed the two machines side by side on the bench. “Ahmed, time for you to get to work.”

  One of the others came forward from the corner—stocky, this one, with dark brown hands. Possibly this one was a real Arab. Sélim relinquished the bench to him and Ahmed placed a set of earphones over his head and began to plug in wires that connected the two recorders together. His hands moved with professional adeptness.

  Abdul removed a wad of chewing gum from his mouth and pressed it to the underside of the workbench; he turned and gripped Fairlie’s arm. “Come on, Mr. President-elect. Time to get back in your box.”

  Sélim and Abdul walked him to the coffin. It was a simple box on the outside, its luxury limited to the quilted satin interior. The six handles were made of wood. A small hole had been bored through near the bottom at the head end, Fairlie saw; source of the fresh air for the occupant.

  Sélim said, “Get in please. We’re going to drug you. It’s not toxic, it’s an anesthetic which reduces respiration by a marked degree. You will be alive, but comatose. For a few hours, no more. During that time you’ll give every appearance of being dead. Your skin will be very pale, your breathing will be too shallow for detection. But you’ll be quite all right afterward, it wears off almost immediately. Lady?”

  They pushed him down on his back; he did not struggle, there was no point to it with his hands wired. The woman approached with a syringe. Held it up, squeezed a droplet from the needle’s tip. At least she appeared to know the drill—she wasn’t a fool who’d kill him with an injected air bubble. Fairlie kept his eyes open, watched bitterly as the needle sank into the vein of his inner elbow.

  Abdul loomed above the coffin and looked down at him and Abdul’s jaws worked; Fairlie could smell the chewing gum. It, or the drug, made him vaguely nauseous. He heard Sélim talking to someone: “This Ortiz had better be what you make him.”

  “No sweat. You go looking to buy yourself an official, you’ll find him sitting right on the counter.”

  Fairlie’s head began to swirl. The sucking and clicking of Abdul’s chewing gum became a very loud sound in the garage.

  Sélim: “I have a meet in—twenty minutes.”

  Ahmed: “In Palamos?”

  “Mm.”

  “Plenty of time then.”

  Fairlie’s eyes slid shut.

  “Kill the lights while I open the door.”

  Darkness. Fairlie fought. Very distantly he heard the scrape and thunder of the garage door: he tried to focus on it but he was falling in vertigo, a spiral without bearings. Slipping under, he was thinking toward the last that he was a fool and that was a shame because the world did not need a fool for a leader just now.

  9:40 P.M. EST The headache was a sharp burning blade against Dexter Ethridge’s right eye. He tried to ignore it. President Brewster was saying, “It’d be a bad mistake to let this distract us completely from the Spanish thing. Nobody seems to realize how important those bases are.”

  “Well we’re not going to be able to hang onto them forever,” Ethridge said.

  “You can’t always think in terms of forever, Dex. First you’ve got to think of right now. Today, tomorrow, the next twelve months.”

  Ethridge recognized the philosophy: it was Bill Satterthwaite’s and over the past few years more and more it had come to color the President’s acts.

  The President s
aid, “Right now—and right now is the point—the Reds have got us outshipped and outgunned and altogether militarily outclassed in the Mediterranean. The only thing we’ve got to balance it is the Spanish bases.”

  “It’s not as if we’re on the brink of war though.” Ethridge half-closed his right eyelid, trying to drive the pain away.

  “Dex. We have been on the brink of war continuously since Nineteen and Forty-seven.” The President was very tired; his voice had the quality of a rusty hinge in motion but Ethridge found it pleasantly abrasive, like a rough towel after a hot bath.

  They sat in private conference in the Lincoln Sitting Room; they had been there more than two hours, uninterrupted except for a staff aide’s intrusion with an item of news from Justice: an anonymous caller had warned Los Angeles police there was a plastic bomb concealed in the Federal Court Building, had said there would be an epidemic of bombs across the country if the Washington Seven were not released; the threat sounded as if it represented the voice of a vast nationwide conspiracy. But it turned out there was no bomb in the Federal Court Building; at any rate the Government had begun massive surveillance of known radicals a week ago and there was no sign of organized terrorist momentum. In fact the tragedy at the Capitol seemed to have brought quite a few hot-bloods to their senses; even the underground press was calling for a halt to violence.

  Yet for nearly a half hour the President had digressed from the subject at hand—Fairlie’s abduction—to talk a hard line, angry with the “sellouts who grovel at the feet of these radical punks.” Ethridge had listened with dubious interest. When Brewster was warmed up his rhetoric improved but his marksmanship became erratic. Tonight the President was in an execrable temper. The air was poisoned by his cigar smoke.

  The President had battled his demons with fervid passion: “We should have stomped the bastards right off. Back in the Sixties. But we’re supposed to be tolerant and liberal. So we let them walk on us.”

  Brewster had been talking to his knees. He did not lift his head; he didn’t stir, but his eyes shifted quickly toward Ethridge as if to pin him. “Their Goddamned dogmatic righteousness. It makes a man sick, Dex. They talk about ‘liberate,’ they mean blow somebody up. They talk about participatory democracy, they mean turning everything over to five delinquents with a can of gasoline. They’ve made us accept their dirty minds and their dirty language—when was the last time you were shocked when you heard the words ‘fascist pigs’? They’ve radicalized all of us and it’s time to stop it.”

  Ethridge’s headache was a maddening distraction. He found it hard to summon the alertness Brewster’s talk seemed to require. Brewster had harped on the subject of the radicals until a few minutes ago when he had shifted abruptly to the Spanish bases. It bothered Ethridge because he knew the President was not given to idle ramblings. There was a reason for Brewster’s display of anger—it was a preamble to something specific and Ethridge kept trying to predict the President’s next moves but the headache intervened and finally he said, “Do you think someone could get me a couple of aspirins?”

  Brewster’s head moved quickly; dark hair fell over his eye. “Don’t you feel well?”

  “Sinus headache, that’s all.”

  “I’ll ring for the doctor.”

  “No.”

  “Dex, you were bombed, you got hit on the head, now you’ve got a headache. I want you looked at.”

  “Really it’s not necessary. I’ve had sinus trouble all my life—I get a headache every now and then. It always passes.” Ethridge raised one hand a few inches to acknowledge the President’s concern. “It’s nothing, I promise you. The doctors gave me every test known to medical science. I’m quite all right. I only need a couple of aspirins.”

  The President reached for his chairside telephone. Ethridge heard him mutter into it; he caught the word “aspirin” and sat back in relief.

  He didn’t want another battery of them poking at him, rousting him from one diagnostic machine to another, subjecting him to an infernal variety of pains and peeping eyes and the prisonlike boredom of enforced isolation. There was nothing wrong with him; it was the weather, his perennial sinus. Earlier he had been troubled by lethargy, the great amounts of sleep he had seemed to require after the bomb explosions; he had awakened the morning after the blast with a splitting headache and a curious weakness in his right arm and leg. He had informed the doctors of these symptoms—he wasn’t a prideful fool. There had been some somber talk about the possibility of a stroke or perhaps a “metabolic cerebral lesion.” More skull X rays, another electroencephalogram. Dick Kermode, his doctor, had come into the hospital room beaming on the third morning: Hell there’s nothing wrong with you. A man gets hit on the head, he’s got a right to a little headache. No lesions, no sign of a stroke. Headache gone today? Fine, then we’ll turn you loose—we’ve exhausted all the tests, they’re all negative. But if you have any trouble check back with me immediately, will you? Try a little Privine for that sinus.

  Howard Brewster cradled the telephone. “Promise me something, Dex. You’ll call your doctor first thing in the morning and tell him about this headache.”

  “It’s not worth——”

  “Promise me this little thing, all right?”

  He inclined his head. “Very well, then.”

  “You’re important, Dex. We don’t want any trouble with your health. If we don’t get Cliff Fairlie back by Inauguration Day you’re going to have to be healthy enough to step into these shoes.”

  “We’ll have him back by then, Mr. President. I’m absolutely convinced of that.”

  “We’ve got to assume the worst,” Brewster said around his cigar. “That’s why you’re here now. We haven’t got a whole lot of time—you’ve got to be briefed on all the things I briefed Cliff on. My predecessor took six weeks showing me the ropes—I took just about that long with Cliff. Now you and I have got just nine days. You’ll have to visit with Defense and State, you’ll have to spend some time with my Cabinet people and the Security Council, but mainly there’s only one boy who can guide you through this here wilderness and that’s me. You’re going to have to spend so much time at my right hand for the next nine days you’ll get to hate the sight of me, if you don’t already.”

  In point of fact Ethridge did not hate the sight of him. He rather liked Howard Brewster. But it had taken years for Ethridge to accrete his impression of the President because the political Brewster was very hard to pin down. Superficially he was the embodiment of American tradition: he had grown up in rural Oregon believing in hard work and patriotism, believing there was opportunity for everyone, believing God loved nothing so much as a good fighter. It was was as if Brewster’s philosophers were Abraham Lincoln and Horatio Alger and Tom Mix. Brewster was an amalgam of liberal traditions and conservative mentality and the values of Main Street. And his weaknesses were typical: the transient piety, the chameleon sincerity, the flexible morality.

  In Ethridge’s estimation Howard Brewster was a respectable opposition President: he was not too terrible, considering that nobody could be good enough for the job.

  “Long hours, Dex,” the President adjured. “An awful lot to cram into your brain—top-secret stuff, in-progress stuff. That’s why I want you healthy.”

  The President leaned forward for emphasis. His hand moved away from his face, carrying the cigar, swathed in smoke. “You can’t afford headaches. You get me?”

  Ethridge smiled. “All right, Mr. President.”

  A staff aide brought Ethridge’s aspirin and a glass of ice water. Ethridge swallowed the tablets.

  “My cigar bother you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “That the truth or just politeness?”

  “I enjoy an occasional cigar myself, you know that.”

  “Well, some people get a headache, they get sensitive to things.” The aide withdrew and Brewster laid the cigar in the ashtray by his elbow. “You’re a polite cuss, Dex. I recollect back toward the beginnin
g of the campaign you kept showing up late for appearances and it turned out you kept getting slowed down holding doors open for people. Nobody else got to hold a door when you were around.”

  “They cured me of that after a while.”

  The President smiled, his eyes closed to slits. But his amusement seemed dispirited. “I wish I knew you better right now.”

  “Am I all that mysterious?”

  “You’re the Vice-President-elect, Dex. If we don’t get Cliff back alive within nine days you’re the next President of the United States. If I had my druthers I’d like to know you as well as I know m’own sons. It’d make me feel a whole lot easier.”

  “You’re afraid of turning it over to me, aren’t you. You don’t know I’ll be able to carry it.”

  “Well, I have every confidence in you, Dex.”

  “But you’d like reassurance. What do you want me to tell you, Mr. President?”

  Brewster made no direct answer. He stood up, moved around the room curiously—as if he were a visitor seeing the room for the first time. Looking at the paintings, the furniture; finally coming back to his chair and standing in front of it, leaning over to pick up his cigar. “Governing the people of this country from the eminence of this White House,” he said slowly, “is kind of like trying to swat a fly with a forty-foot pole. It’s not a question of whether your heart’s in the right place, Dex. I take it for granted your political beliefs aren’t all that different from mine. Some, maybe, but not a whole lot. But you and I served together in that Senate what, twelve years? I never did get to know you very well.”

  “I was on the other side of the aisle.”

  “There were plenty of Democrats I didn’t know nearly as well as some of the boys over to your side of the aisle.”

  “What you’re saying is I’ve never been a member of the club.”

  “Not to be indelicate about it, yes. It’s not that you were a maverick or one of those loudmouths nobody could ever talk to. Far from it. But you were an awful quiet Senator, Dex.”

  And the presidential eyes swiveled against him like twin gun muzzles. “An awful quiet Senator.”