Line of Succession

by Brian Garfield

  “That’s the truth for God’s sake.”

  Lime kept grinding.

  “Look if you—Christ get that fucking thing off me!” Mezetti was trying to squirm away from the pliers but the two agents held him pinned in the chair. He began to reek with the sweat of fear.

  Abruptly Lime withdrew the pliers. “Now.”

  “If you know so much you know I’m telling the truth. Shit.”

  “But there’s outside help isn’t there?”

  “Well Sturka knows people all over the place. He’s got contacts you know.”

  “Name them.”

  “I don’t——”

  “Raoul Riva,” Lime said, and watched.

  It puzzled Mario. Lime dropped it. “When you left that boat on the shoals you killed the skipper. Then what did you do?”

  He made it sound like another test. Mezetti said, “It wasn’t me. I didn’t kill him.”

  “You’re as guilty as the rest, you know that.”

  “For God’s sake I didn’t kill anybody.”

  “You threatened to kill the pilot who flew you up here from Gibraltar.”

  “That was just to get him to cooperate. I didn’t kill him, did I?”

  “What did you do after you killed the boat owner?”

  Lime was toying with the pliers and Mezetti slumped in the chair. “We had another boat waiting.”

  “You still had Fairlie in the coffin?”

  Mezetti’s eyes grew round. He swallowed visibly. “Off and on. We didn’t keep him in it when we were out at sea.”

  “Where did you go from there?”

  “Down the coast.”

  “To Almería.”

  “Well that was the other boat,” Mezetti said. “I mean we did a couple of hundred miles in a truck about half way down the coast. We didn’t have time to do the whole thing in boats—it was too far.”

  “All right, you used a truck. Who set it up?”

  “Sturka did.”

  “No. Sturka arranged for it but Sturka wasn’t the one who put the truck there for you. Who delivered it?”

  “I never saw the guy.”

  “It was Riva wasn’t it?”

  “I never heard of any Riva.”

  “Hold him,” Lime said. He stood up and posted himself beside Mezetti and gently pushed the points of the pliers into Mezetti’s earhole. When he felt it strike the eardrum he put slow pressure on it; he held Mezetti’s head against the pressure with his left hand. “Now who was it Mario?”

  Mezetti started to cry.

  Lime reduced the pressure but kept the pliers in Mezetti’s ear and after a little while Mezetti hawked and snorted and spoke. “Look I never even met the guy.”

  “But you’ve seen him.”

  “… Yeah.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Sturka called him Binyoosef a couple of times.”

  Chad Hill said, “Binyoosef?”

  “Benyoussef,” Lime said absently, scowling on it. He withdrew the pliers. “A fat man with a bit of a limp.”

  “Yeah,” Mezetti said dismally. “That’s him.”

  Lime sat down facing him across the desk. “Let’s go back to that garage at Palamos where you made the tape recordings.”

  “Jesus. You don’t miss much.”

  “Now you were packing things up. You had Fairlie in the coffin. The coffin went in the hearse. Corby drove the hearse. The rest of you cleaned up the place—wiped it for fingerprints, gathered up everything you’d brought with you. Now everybody gets into the hearse.

  “But somebody had to switch off the light and close the garage door. You did that.”

  “Yeah. Christ did you have the whole thing on television?”

  “Sturka told you to go over and switch off the light.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you walked out and pulled the garage door shut. You wiped your fingerprints off the door and got in the hearse.”

  “Yeah yeah.” Mezetti was nodding.

  “Sturka watched you switch off the light didn’t he.”

  Mezetti frowned. “I guess he did, yeah.”

  “Then maybe when you came to close the garage door he handed you a rag to wipe it with.”

  “Yeah. Jesus Christ.”

  Lime sat back brooding. It was what he’d had to know.

  After a moment he changed the subject. “You went ashore at Almería. Did everybody go ashore?”

  “Just me. I rowed in on the raft.”

  “The rest of them stayed on the boat? What was the plan?”

  Mezetti was looking at the pliers. “Jesus Christ. You’re going to kill me anyway, aren’t you?”

  “We’re going to take you back to Washington. You’ll get killed but not by me.”

  “Pig justice. A fascist gas chamber.”

  “A gas chamber has no politics,” Lime said mildly. “Your friend Sturka gassed a whole village once.”

  The mistake he’d made was stopping to think. It had given Mezetti time to reflect on the hopelessness of his position. It was going to be harder to get more out of him now; the pliers would open his mouth but he’d start trying lies. An extended interrogation would fix that; put pressure on and keep it up until they got the same answer every time.

  But Lime didn’t have that sort of time. He stood up and handed the pliers to one of the agents. “Take him down to Lahti.”

  It was about nine o’clock. Chad Hill trailed him into the police office. Lime’s coat was heavy and steamy with moisture; he got it off and threw it across the chair.

  “I think Benyoussef Ben Krim is around here somewhere. We’d better have a net. Photo and description to the airports particularly—he’s probably on his way out if he hasn’t left already.”

  Chad Hill said, “I thought Benyoussef was the guy who supplied the boat.”

  “He was.”

  “But that was in Spain. What makes you think he’s up here?”

  “Somebody left the car and the note for Mezetti.”

  “Why Benyoussef?”

  “He used to be Sturka’s errand boy. It looks as if he still is.”

  Chad Hill was still puzzled and Lime explained it. “Mezetti’s fingerprint in the garage was deliberate—Sturka’s idea. Sturka watched him switch off the light but didn’t tell him to wipe it.”

  “So?”

  “We were supposed to identify Mezetti,” Lime said. He struggled to his feet; sitting in the chair was too dangerous. He couldn’t afford to fall asleep just yet.

  Eighty-seven hours to inauguration. He arched his back, bracing his fists against his kidneys; heard the ligatures crackle. “Have we got that Concorde?”

  “It’s in Helsinki,” Hill said.

  “Good. We’d better get to it.”

  “You need sleep. You look like a corpse.”

  “I’ll sleep on the plane.”

  “Where to?”

  “Algiers,” Lime said. “That’s the place to start.” It was the place he should have started in the first place. Satterthwaite had been right. Sturka was a pro; a pro was somebody who didn’t make stupid mistakes. The fingerprint in the garage—you’d have to practice to get that stupid. Except that it wasn’t a mistake.

  So the red herring had drawn them off all the way to Finland and in the meantime Sturka was down in the Western Desert all the time. Benyoussef was the evidence that supported that. If Sturka was using the members of his old Algerian cell then that was where he had to be.

  The old stamping grounds. The place where Sturka had outwitted Lime every time.

  MONDAY,

  JANUARY 17

  3:20 A.M. EST The preparations had been completed and tonight Riva’s part of the plan went operational.

  Riva had watched the weather forecasts and timed the action to coincide with the arrival of the low-pressure front over Washington.

  The temperature was 34 degrees and that made it a wet snowfall, the flakes congealing in lumps and splashing where they struck. The thick flur
ries made bad visibility and that was what Riva wanted.

  They were working in two cars, Kavanagh and Harrison in a Chevrolet and Riva in the Dodge. They had ten of the molded satchel charges in the Chevrolet. Riva had fitted together a hosepipe bomb and had put it on the seat beside him under a folded newspaper.

  The attack on Milton Luke was the key to the rest; it had to work; yet of them all it was by far the most difficult since none of the others would be half so well guarded.

  Luke lived in a top-floor apartment in a high-rise on Wisconsin Avenue. It was virtually impossible to penetrate into the apartment itself; Secret Service had people everywhere in the building.

  So they’d ruled that out. It was always senseless attacking the enemy at his most strongly guarded points. Luke was the key target but there were satellite targets and the thing to do was to hit some of them first because they would help act as diversions.

  So they hit Senator Hollander’s house first. The idea was to shake up the old fascist but not hurt him. Riva drove by first. The big Georgian house was set well back from the street; its porch lights flickered through the snowfall and he could make out the heavy outline of the Secret Service van in the driveway. It looked like the same van they used to post at Dexter Ethridge’s house before Ethridge died.

  He drove straight past at a steady twenty-five and picked up the walkie-talkie when he had gone by. Spoke one word: “Copasetik.”

  He drove the Dodge on, heading for Massachusetts Avenue, listening for the walkie-talkie to reply. It would take a few minutes. The Chevrolet would drift past Hollander’s house and Kavanagh would toss the satchel into the shadows. They had picked the spot for it earlier. It wouldn’t do too much damage—perhaps uproot some shrubs and clang bits and pieces of shrapnel against the house and the Secret Service van—but it would wake everybody up and it would bring a great many cops up this way.

  The satchel had a half-hour time fuse and that would give them plenty of leeway.

  “Copasetik.”

  He glanced at the walkie-talkie on the seat. It resumed its silence. He turned three blocks up the avenue from the massive apartment building that housed a Senator and two Congressmen and the Secretary of the Treasury. Parked and turned the interior dome-light switch to the off position before he opened the car door and stepped out into the falling snow.

  It was a corner building and had two entrances, one on either face. There was also a service ramp that gave access to the basement in the rear. All three entrances were guarded: the Executive Protection Service had a man on each door and the two main entrances had armed doormen as well.

  Riva went softly into the service drive, a muffled figure moving without sound. He lifted the gun—a .32 caliber revolver with a perforated silencer screwed to the barrel. He cocked the hammer and then held the weapon down at his side where it was covered by the flapping skirt of his coat.

  The cop saw him approaching. Straightened up and stepped out under the light with his hand on his gun. “Hi there.” Friendly but cautious.

  “Hi,” Riva said and shot twice.

  The shots made little puffs of sound and the cop sagged back against the brick wall and slid down to the pavement. He left a glossy smear on the wall.

  Riva dragged the cop into the shadows and put the cop’s cap on his own head. From a distance it would do. He took up a post by the door with the cop’s key ring in his pocket.

  Americans had such childish ideas about security.

  A car turned in at the far end of the service drive. It flicked its lights. Riva lifted his left hand high over his head. The Chevrolet backed out of the driveway onto the street, pulled forward along the curb, backed into the driveway and came all the way to the service ramp in reverse.

  The lights went out and the car doors opened.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  It might have been one cop talking to another—his relief.

  Riva used the cop’s key to open the service door. “Easy now.”

  “Sure—sure.” Kavanagh and Harrison went inside lugging the five satchel charges.

  Riva checked the door to make sure it could be opened from inside without a key. All they had to do was push the crossbar down. He tossed the key ring on top of the dead cop and walked up the service drive past the Chevrolet. Its engine was pinging with the sound of cooling contraction. He wiped a droplet of snow off his nose and walked unhurriedly out to the street, around the corner, across the street and down the block to the Dodge.

  He sat in the car for thirty-five minutes—the length of time they had judged it would take. There was no reason to expect any trouble. There were no hallway guards in the apartment house and the various dignitaries didn’t have sentries posted at their doors. Americans couldn’t stand living that way. So all you had to do was get into the building; from there on you would be undisturbed.

  The bombs probably wouldn’t waste them all. Senator Grant’s bedrooom was in an outside corner of the building on the top floor and the nearest hallway was one room removed from the bed. The bomb would make a shambles of Grant’s kitchen and it would make him good and angry. That was just as good. With any luck the Treasury Secretary would get buried under a good deal of heavy debris. The satchel charges in the trash chutes next to the bedrooms of Congressmen Wood and Jethro would almost certainly kill both Representatives and their wives. As for columnist J. R. Ilfeld he would lose the priceless art works in his sybaritic parlor and that would serve to inflame his rage beyond reason.

  Riva heard the distant cry of sirens. The bomb on Hollander’s lawn, he thought. Before the night was over they’d be running in panic-stricken circles—chasing their tails. A pack of prize fools, the American security forces.

  “Copasetik.”

  He turned the key and waited with the engine idling until the Chevrolet drove past; he switched on the lights and pulled out to follow at a leisurely distance, heading for Wisconsin Avenue.

  4:05 A.M. EST They had floodlights all over Senator Hollander’s lawn and the bomb squad was examining the pieces of shrapnel they had found imbedded in the siding.

  “A hell of a lot of force in that thing,” the sergeant said. “Christ look at that tree it knocked down.” It had been a giant of an old maple.

  Senator Hollander and Mrs. Hollander were stomping around the snowy lawn in slippers and robes, bellowing at everybody in sight. Lieutenant Ainsworth spoke into the radio: “It looks like a professionally made bomb. You’d better try and get in touch with Mr. Satterthwaite.”

  4:08 A.M. EST Riva drove slowly along Wisconsin Avenue and parked a block short of Milton Luke’s apartment building. The snow was still fluttering down in heavy wet streamers. It was beginning to accumulate on the sidewalks and lawns; the temperature had probably dropped a degree or two.

  A garage would have made it easier but there wasn’t any. It had been the last apartment building raised in Washington before the zoning laws forbade throwing up high-rises without built-in garages. So everybody had to scramble for parking spaces in the street—everybody except the VIPs. The limousine assigned to Speaker Luke, now President-designate Luke, had its own cordoned-off parking space immediately in front of the building. The chauffeur was a Secret Service agent and was always with the car. Two more Secret Service men were on the apartment house door. There were dozens of them inside the building, in the corridors, at the other entrances. You couldn’t get at Luke inside; you had to do it out here.

  Riva lifted the walkie-talkie. “All set?”

  “Copasetik.”

  “Synchronize. Three minutes from … now.”

  He was studying the crystal of his watch; now he slipped the hosepipe bomb out from under the newspaper, got most of it inside his coat pocket and the rest up his left sleeve, and stepped out of the car with his left hand in his pocket. The bomb was only an inch and a half in diameter but the charge inside was a German explosive gel that had the destructive equivalent of a six-inch naval s
hell. One end of the hosepipe was capped with aluminum, the other with a heat-sensitive detonating device, and powerful magnets were fixed to both caps and a ring around the center of the pipe. The magnets would hold the bomb snug against any piece of steel.

  The detonator was a tin-copper electrical device that relied on an increase in temperature to affect the expansion differential of the two metals: any temperature above 100 degrees Fahrenheit would cause contact and thereby detonate the bomb.

  He walked down the street on the sidewalk opposite the apartment building and glanced casually in its direction. The Secret Service agents were watching him as they would watch any pedestrian abroad at ten past four in the morning.

  Ahead of him a car was sliding among the lights of the intersection two blocks distant. Riva timed his turn to coincide with the bleat of the car’s horn as it came into the block.

  The horn attracted the Secret Service agents’ attention. The chauffeur was standing under the awning watching the limousine but his head also turned toward the advancing Chevrolet. Riva stepped off the curb between two parked cars and stood there waiting for the Chevrolet to go past him so he could walk across the street. He made it look as if he were walking toward the building beyond the apartment house.

  He heard the pneumatic hiss of the car as it grew closer and he took a step back to avoid the splash of snow. The car went by, doing about twenty-five; the agents’ heads swiveled, indicating their steady interest in it. Riva stepped out into the avenue, looked both ways and began to cross. His path was designed to take him past the back of the limousine toward the next building down.

  The agents were dividing their attention between Riva and the receding Chevrolet when Harrison in the back seat of the Chevrolet began to shoot. He was shooting at the windows of Milton Luke’s apartment. His shots were not expected to do any damage; it was a very high angle. But they accomplished their purpose; the Secret Service agents got behind pillars and cars and began to blaze away at the Chevrolet.

  Riva did what anybody would do. You’re a pedestrian in the middle of the open and suddenly guns start going off: you dive for cover.

  The cover he chose was the shadow of the VIP limousine and as he rolled past its rear bumper his left arm snaked up underneath the rear of the car. It took only a second or two to locate an exhaust pipe. He snapped the magnetized bomb on top of the pipe, immediately beneath the gasoline tank, and kept right on rolling over against the curb. Now he was a few feet behind the limousine, not within reach of it, and the Secret Service agents could see him if they chose to look.