Line of Succession

by Brian Garfield

  Senator Wendell Hollander had a house in the same district, not three blocks from the apartment tower; the house was an elephantine structure of Georgian tastelessness surrounded by heavy trees whose branches were seasonally bare. Hollander, President pro tempore of the Senate, was third in line for the Presidency after Ethridge and Milton Luke; surely there would be a Secret Service mobile home in his drive.

  But there was no trailer. Riva smiled a little and the cab proceeded toward Senator Forrester’s house on Arizona Terrace.

  FRIDAY,

  JANUARY 14

  4:10 A.M. EST Dexter Ethridge lay awake with a mild headache reviewing his cram course in the Presidency. It was all flavored by Brewster’s noxious cigars. Cabinet members and generals had been delegated to brief Ethridge on the endless list of facts and questions; but President Howard Brewster was the dominant figure, always looming. Ethridge was learning how easily his appraisal of the frailties of a man like Brewster could obscure the overriding presence the man projected.

  Everyone knew the folksy mispronunciations were the smokescreen of a politician incarnate. The consummate shrewdness showed through; nobody was fooled. But Ethridge was learning that Brewster’s ways were even more misleading than he had always assumed.

  When Brewster said, “I’m gon’ be interested to know what you think, Dex,” it came out with a sincerity that almost persuaded him that what he thought was of paramount importance to Howard Brewster. Brewster did crave public attention like an addict, but that was what misled. It concealed the enormous self-confidence of the man. When Brewster asked an opinion he wanted support; but the support he required was merely political, never intellectual. Once Howard Brewster made up his own mind he knew he was right and he didn’t need the agreement or consensus of any group. It was a throbbing vital rectitude: an awesome and monumental self-assurance.

  It frightened Ethridge because each day’s White House consultation added to his conviction that Brewster’s larger-than-life stance of power and authority was a basic requisite for the job. A President needed to have that Sophoclean tragic-hero quality—and it was a quality Ethridge knew he didn’t possess.

  They said you grew into it. It came with the territory, look how Harry Truman grew. But Ethridge wasn’t satisfied with that. He thought himself an open-minded man, willing to hear out all sides of a question before making up his mind; it had always been a virtue but now it became a handicap and he was beginning to regard himself as an indecisive man. In the President’s chair that was no good: often you couldn’t wait for all the results to come in—often you had to make a spot decision.

  It was something Ethridge wasn’t sure he could learn to do. He wasn’t unaware of his own lackluster record in Congress and looking back he believed a good part of it was due to his overdeveloped willingness to sympathize with all sides—something that led to compromise rather than decision. Compromise was the basic weapon in any official’s political arsenal but there were times when it should not be employed. Would Ethridge recognize those times? Would he be prepared to act accordingly?

  The worry had kept him awake on rumpled sheets. He tried to take solace from his observations of others who had changed, grown, toughened. He remembered Bill Satterthwaite landing by helicopter late yesterday afternoon on the White House lawn after his exhausting trip to Spain. Satterthwaite had come striding into the Oval Office on his frail short legs and reported on his meeting with David Lime with all the assured authority of a born administrator. Cynicism had enlarged Satterthwaite, in Ethridge’s estimation; it had instilled political savvy in the little thinker.

  He remembered Satterthwaite from the old days—Satterthwaite’s early arrival in Washington, two cabinets ago. A young intellectual, donnishly provincial—fiery, loud, positive, insensitive. Satterthwaite had carried an intellectual chip—a contempt for the unsophisticated, a preposterously belligerent liberalism. Nine years ago they had been pushing a bill to unload a few hundred square miles of Kentucky swampland, formerly a Federal CBW testing range, onto the state as a wilderness preserve. The key to the bill’s passage had been the cooperation of Kentucky’s crusty Senator Wendell Hollander and the President had wooed Hollander energetically and it was clear Hollander was coming around despite the administrative expense the park would load on Kentucky. Then at a dinner party thrown by the wife of the Secretary of the Interior—Ethridge recalled it vividly—Satterthwaite had buttonholed Senator Hollander with an oblivious diatribe about elitist white neocolonialism in the South. Hollander had been astonished, then insulted. Satterthwaite kept grinding relentlessly away until he reached his climax, shouted in triumph and stalked away filled with righteous vindication—and Senator Hollander had said his chilly good-nights, the Kentucky wilderness bill dead as the League of Nations.

  Satterthwaite had outgrown that. He was still capable of arrogance but he had learned where to tread softly.

  It was Wendy Hollander who hadn’t outgrown it. Hollander’s seniority had increased his power but his mind remained fixated in the nineteen forties. He survived on the Hill like a hardy troglodyte, literal and opinionated, hating in plurals: Commies, Negroes, the beneficiaries of the give-everything-to-the-poor programs. A cantankerous patriotic yahoo with a rheumy old-timer’s thoroughly prejudiced view of his fellow man.

  One of the prospects of the Presidency that horrified Ethridge was that every time he turned around in office he was going to have to deal with the chairman of Senate Appropriations. How did you deal at all with a man who was still capable of phrases like “cryptopinkos” and “the international Commie conspiracy”? Hollander was a rigid fundamentalist conservative, albeit a Democrat; he saw the world’s conflicts as a cut-and-dried dispute on the level of a cowboys-and-Indians game and anyone who denied this simple truth was a Commie trying to lull the Good People into a feeling of false security.

  Hollander chastised his farm constituents who received enormous government subsidies but he himself clung to the huge income from crops he didn’t grow on his Kentucky farm. Larcenous, almost senile, he had pared his political philosophy down to simpleminded slogans: exterminate the Commie enemy; let the poor dig out of poverty with their bare hands if they’ve got the gumption; restore the Constitution to virginity; return to law and order.

  The seniority system was rotten with Hollanders. It was what Cliff Fairlie was pledged to reform. Without Fairlie the impetus for reformation would dwindle because Ethridge couldn’t carry it: he knew that and it filled him with depression.

  Yet in six days’ time he might be taking the oath of office.

  An ordinary man forced by circumstances to meet an extraordinary challenge. That was how Ethridge had described himself in yesterday’s off-the-record background briefing to the press; it was in fact what he believed.

  He had spoken with quiet candor. He liked reporters as a group—that was inevitable; a man who enjoyed talking always liked those whose job was to listen. For an hour he had chatted with the White House press corps. And at the end of it, saving it for last because he wanted it to have appropriate impact, he had said with slow and carefully chosen words, “Now this is on the record—for immediate release. As you know, governments all over the world are working together to do everything possible to secure Clifford Fairlie’s immediate release. But we must all face the possibility that the President-elect will not be recovered in time for his inauguration. In that case of course I will be sworn in as interim President until such time as Clifford Fairlie returns. At that time I will be required to take certain steps in order to comply with the Constitution. Section Two of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution specifies that the President must nominate someone to fill any vacancy that may exist in the office of the Vice-Presidency. The nomination must then be confirmed by both houses of Congress.”

  He had their attention; they saw what was coming. He let the silence hang a moment before he went on.

  “We all hope this won’t be necessary—we all hope Clifford Fairlie wi
ll be installed as President at the appointed time. But if our hopes aren’t realized, I’ve asked a fine American to accept the Vice-Presidential nomination. He has agreed, and I will ask the Congress to confirm this nomination as its first matter of business following my inauguration. The nominee, as I’m sure most of you already know, is Congressman Andrew Bee of California.”

  It wasn’t news to the reporters but it was official confirmation. Ethridge had already informed the leaders of both houses; inevitably the word had begun to circulate but Ethridge’s public announcement would forestall any opposition claims that he was trying to railroad the nomination through in secret, behind closed doors.

  The key was the support of the majority leaders in both houses. Both were Democrats; Ethridge and Bee were Republicans. But no one could expect a Republican President to pick a Democratic Vice-President. Still, if Ethridge took office with an opposition Congress he had to start off on the right foot. He was playing the Bee nomination strictly by the rules.

  The public might resent it: the announcement, with its appearance of prematurity, appeared to imply disrespect for Cliff Fairlie. But Congress needed time to consider the proposed nomination—and, more important, Congress could not afford the appearance of having been bulldozed into compliance by the hasty arrogance of a last-minute President-designate.

  When Bee agreed to accept, Ethridge’s first move had been to consult with President Brewster. It was more than courtesy; if Brewster approved the nomination he would grease it. Speaker of the House Milton Luke was in Brewster’s pocket; the majority leaders were Democrats; they could be expected to follow the Brewster lead. And Brewster seemed willing to support Ethridge’s choice.

  Ethridge’s announcement last night had received ample coverage but it hadn’t stirred up any wave of public response; the public was preoccupied with Fairlie’s kidnapping as it should be. The telegrams that poured into Washington were the most numerous in history and they were divided starkly on the question whether the United States should accede to the kidnappers’ demands. The left wanted Fairlie back safe; the right wanted a once-and-for-all extermination of radical terrorists.

  Fitzroy Grant, leader of the Senate Republicans, had proclaimed that the nation could never allow itself to give in to extortion and the threat of terrorist violence. Grant implored the Administration to make the kidnappers understand that all the vast resources of the world’s most powerful police and military establishment would be used to track the kidnappers down—therefore the kidnappers should release Fairlie immediately and unconditionally as the only means of mitigating their guilt, forestalling execution, and preventing the world from discrediting leftist movements totally.

  Wendy Hollander, a Democrat but representing the yahoo wing on the far right, had been making an almost continuous series of inflammatory appeals: Washington should round up every suspected revolutionary-radical in the country and start executing them daily by platoons until Fairlie was released.

  The Hollander proposals had a simpleminded practicality which appealed to the Birchite fringe: Orange County was solidly behind Hollander, but his native Kentucky was not.

  Andrew Bee and the moderate-liberal alliances within both parties were publicly alarmed by the saber rattling of the Hollander wing. The Hollander proposals brought to mind the specter of Nazi reprisals. Even responsible conservatives like Fitz Grant were disavowing Hollander’s bloodthirsty cries for action, but Hollander had a frightening amount of support from men like House Armed Services Chairman Webb Breckenyear and FBI Director Clyde Shankland, who had been a Hoover protégé.

  Bee and the liberals had reminded the public that the office of the Presidency was more important than considerations of revenge or reprisal. The life of the President-elect was the issue. When all factors were weighed the balance had to come down in favor of saving Clifford Fairlie’s life; what happened afterward—to the seven fanatics on trial in Washington, and to the kidnappers, and to the radical revolutionary movement as a whole—was a matter for later decision.

  Both the left and the right employed the powers of reason and logic to support emotional conclusions. Compassion was the guiding factor for the liberals and rage was the guiding factor for the rightists. As usual Ethridge saw both sides: he had the compassion and the anger together in his own guts. In the end what decided him was the same vision that had guided him earlier: the feeling that if Fairlie could be recovered alive it would give Washington an unprecedented chance to institute reforms that could restore a stable democracy and discourage this kind of thing from happening again.

  But the hard-line opposition made it tough. The voice of reprisal was loud; it was forcing Howard Brewster to listen. The Pentagon, most of the members of the National Security Council, the law enforcement chiefs and the entire right wing were calling for a preemptive crackdown on all radical activists. The national uproar was tumultuous. Not many supported Hollander’s call for reprisive executions but millions wanted the radicals jailed.

  It made a kind of sense; that was why it got right to the nerve ends. But once you began that kind of crackdown it would lead inevitably to a full-scale conflict—a kill-or-be-killed war between the Establishment and the radicals. Militants at both extremes wanted just that. The fragile center held them at arm’s length—and at sword’s point.

  One man had been kidnapped: and it could ignite the world.

  His head throbbed, the pain fluctuating from moment to moment, stabbing behind his right eye. It didn’t worry him but it was an annoyance. The painkillers Dick Kermode had prescribed were brain-dullers as well and Ethridge hadn’t used them. He had already undergone endless examinations in Kermode’s office and at Walter Reed—an agonizing spinal fluid tap for fluid analysis, skull X rays, electroencephalograms; penetrating eye examinations; tests of plantar responses and flexion, half a dozen others he could hardly remember. All negative. He’d known they wouldn’t find anything wrong. It was tension: what could you expect? Everybody had some reaction to pressure. People got ulcers, heart trouble, asthma, even gout; with Ethridge it was sinus headaches.

  He glanced at the green glow of the bedside alarm. Nearly five o’clock.

  Crossing the carpet in his bare feet toward the bathroom door he felt disoriented, light-headed; he braced his hand against the door and stood still to gather strength. Perhaps he had got up too quickly, the blood rushing from his head.

  He glanced back toward the beds. A faint street-lamp illumination filtered in through the lace curtains and fell across the twin beds; Judith remained sound asleep.

  He stepped into the bathroom and pushed the door shut before he reached for the light switch; he didn’t want the light to wake her. His hand fumbled for the switch but suddenly there was no feeling in his fingers.

  He tried the left hand. The light clicked on.

  It was too bright against his eyes. He stood before the sink sweating lightly, staring down at his right hand. He tried to flex the fingers; his hand responded sluggishly, as if at a great distance.

  He took it badly. His hair rose, he dragged his uneasy left hand down across his face and began to shake.

  When he looked into the mirror his face was drawn with pain—unnaturally decayed, ravaged by a surreal gray putrefaction.

  An abrupt red explosion: the blinding stab of pain in his head.

  The mild eyes mirrored panic before they rolled up into the sockets.

  Faintly he heard the thrashing clatter his limbs made as he fell across the bathtub.

  10:30 A.M. Continental European Time David Lime sat behind the wheel of a blue Cortina watching the face of the bank across the street, waiting for Mario Mezetti to appear.

  Shadowing him seemed the best option. Today was the fourteenth of January and Fairlie was due to be inaugurated on the twentieth; there were six days, less whatever time it took to transport Fairlie to Washington from wherever he might be found: latitude enough to spend a few hours tailing Mezetti—or even as much as a day or two. If it failed
at the end of that time Lime would reconsider.

  Leaving Mezetti to his own devices had already produced an impressive amount of raw information. Mezetti had booked a room at the Queen’s Hotel on Grand Parade but he evidently intended to check out today because he hadn’t renewed the booking and he had arranged with Mezetti Industries for a plane and pilot to take him to Cairo today. Surveillance teams had been alerted in Cairo and all intermediate stops where the plane might set down to refuel; and Lime had a Lear jet with British civilian markings on tap at Gibraltar to shadow Mezetti directly in the air in case Mezetti failed to keep to his flight plan.

  In the meantime Mezetti had been making telephone calls every two hours at even-numbered hours. Because the calls were international—Gibraltar to Spain—it was easy enough to ascertain the number of the telephone receiving his calls; the phone was in Almería. Every call since eight o’clock the previous evening had been monitored by British and American agents but the eavesdropping hadn’t contributed much because Mezetti’s telephone calls were never answered. Mezetti would let it ring four times and hang up.

  A continuation signal, Lime guessed. Someone within earshot of the recipient telephone was supposed to be listening at even-numbered hours. If the phone did not ring it would indicate Mezetti had been detained. But Lime had ordered a stakeout on the house in Almería. It had gone into effect before ten o’clock last night; since then Mezetti had made seven calls to that number but no one was there. Guardianos had combed the house and found it vacant. Neighboring houses had been evacuated, their residents taken into custody, but it didn’t look as if any of the arrested people had any connection with the kidnapping. The line had been traced from the receiving phone to Almería Central in order to find out if the kidnappers had a tap on it but none had been discovered. Even the long-distance telephone operators were being interrogated.