Line of Succession

by Brian Garfield

You could expect a certain amount of help—technical stuff, manpower, communications—from the allies; but these were equally hamstrung by tiers of authority and in the end you had to keep your hand free. So you used everyone and gave nothing to anyone. In a very short time all of them would begin to resent Lime and he would find resistance when he sought further assistance.

  The CIA had a hundred thousand employees of whom twenty thousand were field agents; of these a thousand or more were strung through the Mediterranean area, on call if and when Lime needed them. At the moment they merely had orders to check whatever contacts they had, find out what sort of rumors were floating through the underground.

  The English sailor arrived at half past eight with the Basque fisherman in tow. The fisherman’s name was Mendes; his smile looked slack-muscled, as if he had been posing too long for a slow photographer. His eyes were a faded blue and his drooping pinched mouth suggested a discontented lifetime of anxieties and disappointments. He smelled faintly of fish and the sea. He spoke no English and minimal Spanish. Lime had summoned a Basque-speaking Guardiano two hours ago; now he brought the Guardiano into the circle and began the session.

  It was very kind of Señor Mendes to make the time to assist. The commandante’s unfortunate manner was regrettable; it was to be hoped Señor Mendes had not been too offended—everyone was under great strain, perhaps the commandante’s abruptness was understandable? Would Señor Mendes care for an American cigarette?

  Lime made sure he had Mendes on the hook before he began to tug the line—gently at first: a day’s fishing was being lost by Señor Mendes’s detention, the American government assuredly wished to compensate him for his loss of time—would a thousand pesetas be sufficient? But very gently always because you couldn’t afford to offend; when Mendes took the money it was with the proud agreement he was not being bribed but rather being paid a suitable wage for his time and labor as a detective assisting in the search for the abducted American President-elect.

  It took time to undo the damage Dominguez had inflicted but in the end the Basque’s story came out. He had not seen any faces, only the Arab robes of three figures; a fourth man in some sort of uniform. Arriving on the coast in a hearse. Mendes had been a few hundred yards up the beach, walking from the boat basin to his home which was above the dunes not far from the breakwater where the hearse had drawn up. It had come without headlights; it was met by a dinghy from a boat lying close to shore.

  The three Arabs and the man in uniform had carried a coffin from the hearse to the dinghy. Someone—a fifth one, unseen by Mendes—had driven the hearse away. The others had gone aboard the boat with the coffin and the boat had set out to sea.

  Plainly it was not all Mendes had to say. Lime waited him out, not prompting; the man’s agreeability was fragile, the wrong question might close him up.

  Finally it came in a blurted rush: Mendes had recognized the boat.

  He had agonized; it troubled him deeply; the boat belonged to a friend, a colleague, and in Spain a Basque did not inform on a fellow Basque—yet it had to do with the kidnapping of the presidente.…

  “We understand,” Lime breathed sympathetically.

  The friend was Lopez, his boat the Maria Linda after Lopez’s wife. An old boat, somewhat the worse for age, but you would recognize her easily by the smokestack—she had this raked stack, comprende? Like a miniature ocean liner. You couldn’t miss her, there wasn’t another like her on the Costa Brava.

  Maria Linda had not returned to Palamos since that night, Mendes said sadly. Assuredly it was a long voyage, wherever she was bound.

  Lime turned, raised his eyebrows at Chad Hill. After a moment Hill came to; bounced away in belated obedience to start the machinery in motion for the wholesale search for Maria Linda.

  Lime kept at Mendes, his question-hammers wrapped in courteous padding. Details emerged; no further startling developments. He kept it up for an hour and sent Mendes away with his thanks, having learned a few things of possible interest: chief among them an address and Lime sent a runner immediately to locate Lopez’s wife.

  At quarter past ten she appeared, Maria Lopez, a tired woman gone to stoutness, the vestiges of beauty remaining in black eyes and long-fingered hands. Lime was straightforward with her: he told her of the seriousness of her husband’s predicament, he offered her money—ten thousand pesetas—and he asked his question: what did she know of the Arabs her husband had taken off the beach on Monday night?

  He had given her ten thousand; he held twenty thousand more in his hand. The woman spoke without moving her eyes away from the money. Lime listened coolly to the interpreter. They had approached Lopez Sunday after church, three Arab men and an Arab woman with a veil. They said they were from Morocco. Their brother had died in Barcelona but they could not get official permission to remove the body from the country. They said it was important to Bedouins to have their dead buried in family ground. They admitted it was a smuggling thing, against the law, but they appealed to Lopez’s sympathies and they offered a great deal of money. Lopez knew what it meant to be buried in consecrated ground of course. Mrs. Lopez was not sure how much money was involved but it was possibly fifty thousand pesetas or more, plus fuel and expenses.

  Had she seen the Arabs up close? No she had not seen them at all; Lopez had described them as four Arabs—three men and a woman. She spread her hands toward Lime: it was winter, a fisherman’s life was thankless. They had known nothing of any kidnapping.

  Chad Hill intercepted him at the garage door: “For Christ’s sake,” Hill complained.

  “What?”

  “They’ve had it twenty-four hours.”

  “Had what?”

  “The boat. The Maria Linda.”

  It was a fifty-minute helicopter ride from Palamos up the coast to the beach where Spanish coastguardsmen had found Maria Linda Wednesday morning impaled on a shoal in the lee of a breakwater. She hung at a vertiginous angle, anchor-chain taut. It looked as though she had sought shelter in a storm and been smashed aground. But there had been no storm Tuesday night and the weather since then had been blowy but not monstrous.

  By the time Lime’s chopper set him down a captain of Guardia had arrived to meet him with everything the Spanish police had collected on the case. Ordinarily it would have taken much longer but ordinarily no one was holding a blowtorch to the Guardia’s backside.

  The body had been removed to the police morgue in Barcelona. Lopez had been found dead on the beach within sight of the grounded boat, hidden by dunes from the coast highway which ran close along the Med at this point: they were north of Cape Creus, the French frontier was only seven kilometers away.

  Lopez had been stabbed several times, with more than one knife. The weapons had not been found. The murder case was being investigated but until now there had been no connection with the Fairlie kidnapping and therefore it hadn’t been brought to Lime’s attention.

  A few latent fingerprints had been found on the polished wood surfaces of the boat’s interior; photos were included in the folder just delivered to Lime. The prints were being processed in Madrid; as soon as Hill’s call had alerted the Guardia, copies of the prints had been forwarded to Interpol and Washington. It was assumed most of the prints were Lopez’s but everything was being checked: fingerprints were being lifted off the corpse for purposes of comparison and elimination.

  The Guardiano was a captain by rank, a precise cop with a professional voice. It droned on, filling Lime in, while a cool gray wind ruffled the sea and blew sand in Lime’s face. Tire tracks had been found between the highway and the beach, indicating that a vehicle had pulled off the road and driven up onto the small promontory overlooking the beach. It had parked there, pointed toward the sea, possibly to flash its headlights out to sea in signal. High tide had come and gone between the murder and the discovery; the only footprints found were high up, near the body and the tire tracks. The vehicle had been considerably heavier when it left than it had been when it arrived, an
d the departure tracks merged with the highway in a southerly direction, indicating the vehicle had arrived from the south and departed toward the south, retracing its course. Unfortunately the sand was too soft to reveal a tread pattern. The width between tires indicated a standard wheelbase for medium-sized automobile or small van.

  As for the reason for the abandonment of the boat, it appeared the engine-oil line had rusted through; the oil had leaked out and the engine had seized up.

  To Lime there was only one clue in all this that wasn’t ambiguous; it was a straightforward indication of the kidnappers’ intent. The Lopez boat had cracked up north of its point of departure. Assumption: they had been heading for France, or Italy.

  It was there in plain sight and because the kidnappers weren’t careless men it had to be assumed they meant it to be seen: they could have sunk the boat easily enough and left no traces. That was the thing. They had put it on display, they hadn’t concealed it. Lopez’s body, the boat. These had been meant to be found.

  He had to read something into that. They told him they were heading north. Now it was a question whether they wanted him to hunt north or, conversely, whether they wanted him to think that far ahead and hunt south.

  There were many layers of bluff. First level: if a clue appears it should be believed. Second level: if it is an obvious clue it must be a red herring designed to waste time and resources; it is so obvious it had better be dismissed. Third level: if it is so obviously an invitation to dismiss it and do the opposite then perhaps it ought to be obeyed after all because the kidnappers made it blatantly obvious just to confuse. Fourth level: the kidnappers, anticipating this dilemma in his mind, want him to think it through all the way to the end and then go ahead and investigate the clue exhaustively because, all other things being equal, a clue is a clue and even if it is a deliberate plant it may give away something it wasn’t intended to reveal.

  It came down to a question of the order of subtlety of the bluff and he knew once he became trapped analyzing levels of possibility he could burn his brain out trying to guess the truth.

  The one thing that stood out was that the kidnappers were professionals. Or at least they were led by a professional. A professional was a man who didn’t leave clues unless he intended to. This entire operation had been set up not by any amateur revolutionary but by a pro who had planned every step and timed every movement. The snatch caper at Perdido had been a model of economical efficiency. The mountain farm had been selected with exact precision for its proximity to the Mediterranean coast and its flying distance from Perdido because the kidnappers knew they had to get the chopper under cover before the authorities got a search operation under way. The kidnappers knew just how much time they had for each step of their operation and obviously they hadn’t rushed anything. They had taken Fairlie, concealed the chopper, driven openly by car from the farm to the garage outside Palamos—all this during the period of time when the authorities were still organizing for a search, still absorbing the impact of the incredibly simple crime that had been committed. But once under cover in that Palamos garage the kidnappers had stayed put, not allowing panic to push them into movement again until after dark. By that time they had to assume the police and security of a dozen nations were searching for them but they acted with aplomb, delivering Fairlie by hearse to the waterfront, getting aboard Lopez’s boat and heading out to sea.

  They hadn’t left things to chance at any other step and there was no reason to assume the abandonment of Lopez’s boat had been an accident. If the engine had frozen up it was probably because the kidnappers had poked a hole through the rusty oil pipe to make it look like an accidental failure.

  They might have left one inadvertent clue: the fingerprint on the light switch in the Palamos garage—if in fact the print belonged to one of the kidnappers and not the owner of the garage or one of its customers.

  It was the fingerprint that gave him the impression the kidnappers were amateurs led by a professional. A professional developed habit patterns, he never left fingerprints on anything and never had to think about it. By reflex he always went back and wiped things off.

  The light switch was the last thing they had touched on their way out and someone had forgotten to wipe it.

  If the print turned out to be Fairlie’s then Lime would believe it had been left on purpose to attest to the fact that Fairlie was alive. But he doubted it was Fairlie’s fingerprint; they wouldn’t have allowed Fairlie near a light switch. If the print belonged to any of the kidnappers then it hadn’t been left there deliberately; leaving misleading clues was part of the game but giving away the identity of your own man was not.

  Barcelona in winter was a distressing gray city of industrial blight and waterfront rot.

  The Spaniards had provided an office in an overflow annex a block from the government admin building; it was a quarter of bleak narrow streets—cobblestones and soot-black walls. From the aircraft carrier a whaleboat had brought ashore a Navy UHF scrambler transceiver; it had been manhandled into the office.

  The crew had arrived ahead of him and the office crawled with personnel but what took Lime by surprise was the presence of William T. Satterthwaite—rumpled, tired, his curly black hair awry.

  There was a small private room set aside for Lime’s use but Lime took a quick look at it and declined. “Have you got a car outside?”

  “Yes. Why?” Satterthwaite pushed his glasses up.

  “Let’s sit in the car and talk.”

  In the car Satterthwaite said, “Do you honestly think they’d have the nerve to bug that office?”

  “It’s what I’d do. You don’t want foreigners running king-size security operations on your turf without finding out what they’re up to.”

  Satterthwaite was capable of dismissing the problem instantly: “All right. What about this coffin they carried Fairlie in? Do you think he’s dead?”

  “I doubt it. You don’t kill your ace in the hole until you have to—or until you’ve run out of a use for it. There’s a better question than that, though—how do we know it was Fairlie? It may have been a hundred fifty pounds of bricks.”

  “You mean you’re not buying the Lopez boat thing at all?”

  “Suppose they had accomplices who took Lopez’s boat to make it look as if they took Fairlie that way?” Lime hunted around the dashboard for the ashtray. “The only thing definite is they’ve given us two pieces we were meant to see.”

  “The Arab costumes and the boat headed north. One suggesting North Africa and the other suggesting western Europe. Do you think they could both be phonies? Maybe they’re going for the Balkans?”

  “It’s all guesswork right now. We’re chasing our tails.”

  “Don’t get so damned defeatist, David. There are hundreds of thousands of people working on this. Someone’s bound to come up with something.”

  “Why? We’re not dealing with wild-eyed freaks.”

  Satterthwaite’s eyes burned behind the high magnification of the lenses. “Who are we dealing with?”

  “A pro and a cell of well-trained amateurs. Not a government job, not a people’s liberation-movement thing. We won’t find an organization working the caper, although we may find one paying the bills.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you haven’t told me anything to the contrary.”

  “I don’t follow that.”

  Lime tapped ash, missed the ashtray, brushed ashes off his trouser leg. “If any establishment was behind it your hundreds of thousands of agents would have had a hint by now. It’s not the kind of operation a power bloc would try. The only political effect it can have is to solidify the existing powers. The Communists will help us, they won’t help the kidnappers; they’d expect reciprocal treatment if somebody snatched one of theirs, they can’t afford to open this kind of can of beans. It would start a free-for-all of assassinations and abductions. You can’t conduct international relations on that level and everybody since Clausewitz has known that
—look what happened after Saravejo.”

  Lime snubbed the butt out in the ashtray and pushed it shut. “Look, what’s their motive? You’ve heard the ransom demands. All they seem to want is the seven bombers. It’s the Marighella technique—nothing unusual about it. They arrest yours, you kidnap theirs and make a swap.”

  “Then we all know who’s running this show, don’t we,” Satterthwaite said. His eyes rested complacently against Lime.

  “Probably,” Lime replied, quite evenly. “But we’ve had the search out for Sturka and his people for more than a week. He may have gone to ground—this may be an entirely different bunch.”

  “You’re grabbing at straws,” Satterthwaite growled; he leaned even farther forward and his voice was an angry hiss: “Why in the hell do you think we had to force you onto this job?”

  “Because you assumed I knew it was Sturka.”

  “And Sturka is your boy, David. You nknow him better than anybody else—you’ve proved you know the way he thinks. You’ve covered the same ground he’s covered.”

  “I’ve never laid eyes on the man.”

  “But you know him.”

  “Maybe it is Sturka’s caper. But I’m not putting all my eggs in that basket. Logic points to Sturka but logic is a test of consistency, not truth. If it’s not Sturka, and I try to play as if it is, then we’ll end up farther behind than we started. I’ve got to work with facts, don’t you see that?”

  “Assume it’s Sturka, David. What then?”

  Lime shook his head. “We’ve made too many wrong assumptions already. Give me a fact and then I’ll go to work.” He found another cigarette in the crumpled pack. “Now you didn’t fly over here just to tell me I thought it was Sturka. You knew that already. Or are you just shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic to keep tabs on me?”

  “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “I just wanted it cleared up. That being the case I assume you’ve got orders for me—something you couldn’t even trust to a scrambler.”

  “All right. Knowing that much let’s see if you can guess what they are.”