Line of Succession

by Brian Garfield

  Chad Hill was listening to an announcer describe the arrival of the Washington Seven at Geneva Airport. Lime pictured a scene crawling with armed police and agents—like the arrival of the war-crimes prisoners at Nuremberg before the trials. The Seven had breached United States security to blow up hundreds of people; now the same security forces had to protect them against ambushes and lynch mobs. Those cops were less than happy about it and the announcer conveyed the flavor of their sentiments.

  “Oh Christ,” Lime said abruptly. He stared at Hill. “Ben Krim’s bound to be there isn’t he. And there’s still a pickup order out on him from Finland. We’ve got to cancel it or they’ll grab him in Geneva.”

  Hill said mildly, “I already took care of that.”

  It was a good thing somebody around here was using his head. Wordlessly Chad Hill handed a paper-wrapped sandwich to Lime. He sat down and ate it, getting crumbs on his knees, listening to the radio.

  “… prisoners will be sequestered under heavy guard at an unspecified hotel until further instructions are received from the kidnappers of Clifford Fairlie.…”

  Of course they would have Ben Krim on the scene. To have a look firsthand. He probably had phony press credentials; Sturka had what seemed to be an endless supply of expertly forged documents for all occasions.

  “Anything from down south yet?”

  “No. And we’re not likely to get much. Too many oil company planes going back and forth all the time out there. Who’s going to remember whether or not they heard Binaud’s PBY go overhead four nights ago?”

  But it had to be tried. If they lost Ben Krim it was the only lead they would have left.

  There was coffee from Binaud’s galley. Lime drank two cups greedily. He drank it too hot and burned his tongue. “If we assume Ben Krim’s in Geneva now it’ll take him at least five hours to get here. Probably eight or ten—I don’t know of any direct connections from Geneva to Algiers.”

  He glanced at Chad Hill. The young man’s fingernails were chewed down to the quick.

  “I need air.” Lime left the cabin and made his way abovedecks and stood on the fishing deck by the transom looking at the gloomy lights of the tavern and the quiet wave crests and the plentiful stars. The Med was calm tonight and it was quite warm. Not hot but pleasant.

  He checked the time. It was past midnight. A new day: Tuesday. In Washington it was still Monday evening. It brought up a fine point of interest. Suppose they recovered Fairlie. Suppose they recovered him at eleven o’clock in the morning Algerian time. Thursday. Suppose they rushed him to the American Embassy in Madrid or Tangier and the Ambassador administered the oath of office on the stroke of noon. By then it would be only six in the morning Washington time. Who would be President then? Fairlie or Brewster?

  Here I am counting angels on pinheads.

  TUESDAY,

  JANUARY 18

  6:30 A.M. North African Time Someone was shaking Peggy by the shoulder. “Go down and get him ready.”

  She sat up. Squeezed her eyes tight shut and popped them open. “God I’m tired.”

  “Pot of coffee over there. Take it down with you—he might need some.” As she struggled to her feet Sturka was adding, “He must talk this time, Peggy.”

  “If he’s not dead.” The anger was returning.

  “He’s not dead,” Sturka said with a kind of disgusted patience. “Alvin has been sitting up with him.”

  She took the coffee down to the cell. Alvin nodded to her. Fairlie was on his back, flat out on the cot, asprawl and asleep, his chest rising and falling very slowly.

  “Wake up please.” Her professional nurse voice. She touched his cheek—gray and cool, an unhealthy pallor. Respiration still low, she noted clinically. The pulse was slow but not terribly weak.

  His eyes fluttered, opened. She gave him a few moments to absorb his surroundings. “Can you sit up?”

  He sat up without help. She studied his face. “How do you feel this morning?” Echoes of the tutor in nursing school: And how do we feel this morning? An infuriating chirp.

  “Logy,” Fairlie was mumbling. He was making strange faces, popping his eyes, rolling them around, grimacing—trying to clear his head.

  Cesar appeared in his robes carrying a plate of food. She spent twenty minutes forcing Fairlie to eat and pouring coffee down him. He consumed everything obediently but without appetite and he chewed very slowly and sometimes seemed to forget to swallow.

  At seven o’clock Sturka entered with the tape recorder. “All ready now?”

  But Fairlie hadn’t even glanced to see who had entered. He’s still out of it, she thought. Too far out of it to put on the performance Sturka wanted?

  She waited in growing fear: she didn’t know what Sturka would do if it didn’t work. To Fairlie, or to her. The past few days Sturka had let his anger show through. She had never seen that before; he had always been emotionless; now the strain was showing and Sturka had begun to slip. She caught the edge of his feelings once in a while and the intense force was alarming. It was a chill that came off him like death.

  Sturka switched on the machine. Cesar sat on the corner of the bunk holding the microphone where it would pick up Fairlie’s voice. This time there wouldn’t be any editing; they wanted the pigs to know it was no trick this time, that Fairlie was talking without revisions.

  They had spent a long time working out the wording. There had to be topical references to prove the tape had been made recently.

  It was a fairly long speech because it contained detailed instructions for the release of the Washington Seven. Fairlie would have to read the whole thing cohesively. If his voice sounded weary and low that was all right but he couldn’t stumble over every other word.

  Sturka put his hand under Fairlie’s chin and lifted his head sharply. “Listen to me. We’ve got something for you to read aloud. Another speech like last time. You remember last time?”

  “… Yes.”

  “Then just do it. When you’ve done it you can go back to sleep. You’d like that wouldn’t you—to go back to sleep?”

  Fairlie blinked rapidly; it was as much of an affirmative as anyone needed. Sturka became harsh: “But if you don’t read this for us we’ll keep you awake until you do. You’ve heard of what happens to the minds of men who are prevented from sleeping for too long? They go completely insane. You know that?”

  “… I know. I’ve heard that.”

  His voice did sound better than it had last night. Peggy walked in relief to the front corner, out of the way.

  Sturka held the paper out to Fairlie—a long yellow ruled sheet from a legal pad.

  “Read this aloud. That’s all you have to do. Then you can sleep.”

  Fairlie held it in his lap and frowned at it as if trying to focus his eyes on the hand lettering. A finger came down on the sheet. “What’s this? El Dzamiba?”

  “El Djamila. It’s the name of a place.”

  Fairlie tried to sit up but it seemed to require too much effort. He sagged back against the wall and held the speech up, squinting at it. Cesar moved the microphone closer.

  “When should I start?”

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  Fairlie’s eyes wandered over the sheet. “What’s this about Dexter Ethridge—and this about Milton Luke?”

  “It’s all true. They’re dead.”

  “My God,” Fairlie whispered.

  The shock of that seemed to bring him around. He sat up again and maintained the position this time. “They’re dead? How?”

  “Ethridge seems to have died of natural causes,” Sturka lied. “Luke was killed by a bomb which blew up his limousine. Please don’t ask me who did it. I don’t know. As you can see it was none of us—we’re here, we’re not in Washington.”

  “My God,” Fairlie muttered again. “Has it started then?”

  “The revolution? If it hasn’t it’s about to.”

  “What time is it? What day?”

  “Tuesday. The eigh
teenth of January. It’s early morning. Who knows, if you cooperate promptly enough you may be home in time to be inaugurated. Or perhaps you’d rather just sleep a while. But you have to read this first.”

  Fairlie was trying to grapple with it but he was too far under, too drowned by the resistance-destroying weight of the drugs. He picked up the yellow sheet and began to read in a listless monotone, eyelids drooping, voice wandering into whispers every once in a while:

  “This—this is Clifford Fairlie speaking. I am very tired and under the influence of mild tranquilizers, which have been administered to me to insure that I don’t do any reckless things that might—uh—jeopardize my physical safety. That will explain the … sleepy sound of my voice. But I am in good health.

  “Uh—I have been informed of … deaths of Vice-President-elect Dexter Ethridge and Speaker Luke, for which I am allowed to express … deepest personal anguish.

  “The seven … political prisoners from Washington have been delivered to Geneva as instructed, and my captors have asked me to announce their further instructions now. The seven … prisoners are to be transported by air to Algiers. They are then to be transported to the town of El Dzam—El Djamila, where an automobile is to be provided for their use. They are to be told to drive south along the highway toward El Goléa until they are contacted.

  “If any survillance—surveillance is detected, I am told I will not be released. Neither the Algerian Government nor any other government is to follow the prisoners or make any other effort to determine their whereabouts. The prisoners will be provided by my captors with fresh transportation out of Algeria, but before they are sent on they will be stripped and examined by X ray to insure that no electronic devices have been concealed in their clothes or on their bodies.

  “If all conditions are met precisely, the seven prisoners will have forty-eight hours in which to disappear into asylum in a country that has not been identified to me.

  “If there is no indication of betrayal on the part of the United States or any other government, I will be released twenty-four hours after the release of the seven prisoners.

  “There is one final instruction. The seven prisoners are to be in their car leaving El Djamila at precisely six o’clock in the evening—that is eighteen hours by the European clock—on Thursday the twentieth of January. And I am told to repeat that any attempt to follow the prisoners’ car or to track it electronically will be detected and will result in my … death.”

  7:45 A.M. EST “… defies the whole purpose of the Constitution,” Senator Fitzroy Grant said.

  Satterthwaite was thinking of Woodrow Wilson’s phrase to describe the Senate: little group of willful men.… He said, “That has a high moral tone, but would you still say the same thing if Howard Brewster happened to be a Republican?”

  “Yes.” The Senate Minority Leader almost snapped it.

  “Even though the alternative is Hollander?”

  “You’re thinking in terms of immediate expediency, Bill. You always do. I’m thinking of the long haul. I don’t think we can jeopardize the whole meaning of the Constitution for the sake of a temporary crisis.”

  “It won’t be temporary if Hollander gets to spend four years in the White House. It may be the most permanent thing that’s ever happened to this country. If you agree annihilation can be regarded as permanent.”

  “Let’s leave out the sarcasms, shall we?” Grant’s voice beat rolling echoes around his office. Past Grant’s head through the window Satterthwaite could see the shell of the Capitol with snow on it. The building didn’t look much different on the outside from before the bombings. A few construction trailers drawn up against the East Portico, a larger number of guards than there had been a month ago. A bit of absurdity in that, since nobody was inside it except workmen.

  Fitzroy Grant’s dewlappy face turned slightly and picked up some light from the window; his eyes looked sad. He ran a hand carefully over the neat wave in his white hair. “Look Bill, the majority will vote with you anyway. My vote won’t matter.”

  “Then why not throw in with us?”

  The deep slow velvet voice was only faintly ironic. “Call it principle if you like. I realize the truth can’t prevail against a false idea whose time has come. But I have to follow my own inclinations.”

  “Can I ask at least for an abstention?”

  “No. I’m going to vote against.”

  “Even if you turn out to be the swing vote?”

  “I’m not that low in the alphabet.”

  “I’m backpedaling, you can see that. I’m not used to this kind of horsetrading. But it does seem to me there ought to be somewhere where we could meet on common ground. Some kind of compromise.”

  Grant seemed to smile. “You’re not half bad at it, Bill. Don’t run yourself down as a politician.”

  “Well I sure don’t seem to be getting anywhere with you.”

  “Howard Brewster’s pushing too hard, Bill. Love me love my ideas. He’s put himself on the line—everything he’s ever been, everything he’s got. One throw of the dice. All right, I realize he’s feeling the heat. I don’t like Hollander either. But this arrogance from the White House—that’s what I can’t stand. Frankly I believe we can handle Hollander. Hamstring him. There are ways, if only Congress will show the gumption. Hollander’s less of a threat than Howard Brewster, to my mind—because if Brewster puts this over on the country it’ll be one more nail in the coffin of the republic. The Roman Caesars came to power by stealing it away from the Senate. Brewster’s trying to get Congress to reinstate him in an office he just got through losing in a popular election. It smacks of coup d’état to me. I’m afraid I simply haven’t got the conscience to back this move. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Fitz, you talked to the President yesterday, and——”

  “Let’s say the President talked to me.”

  “——and you told him you couldn’t support him. But you agreed to keep the secret until he opened it up. Why?”

  “My peculiar brand of personal loyalty I suppose. He made it personal. We’ve been friends for thirty years.”

  “Then may I prevail on that friendship for at least this much—that you agree not to campaign actively against the President’s move?”

  “By actively you mean publicly.”

  “No. I mean privately as well. While the committee is getting ready to report out the bill will you agree not to perform any of that quiet arm-twisting you’re so famous for?”

  Fitzroy Grant chuckled amiably. “Funny, I always thought it was Howard Brewster who was famous for that. What do you think you’re doing right now if not a little genteel arm-twisting?”

  “I’d appreciate an answer.”

  “Very well, I’ll give you one. But it requires a bit of a preamble. With me they always do.”

  Satterthwaite thought of looking at his watch, thought better of it, waited. He was thinking of the hard-backed chairs over in the Executive Office Building that would be filled in an hour’s time by the rumps of two dozen congressional leaders, among whose number the President hoped Fitzroy Grant yet might appear.

  “When you look out around you today,” Grant said, “you see nothing but the wreckage that’s been left by these incredible atrocities and outrages. To my mind that’s the inevitable result of our weakness as a people. The libertarian principles have obviously failed. For altogether too long we allowed these goons of the so-called New Left to spread sedition and terror. We stood by and listened while they boasted openly of the violence they were going to do us. Our well-intentioned lawmakers chose to call this treason ‘dissent’ while the goons were ambushing cops and plotting sabotage and laying the groundwork for insurrection right under our noses. Now it seems to me——”

  “Fitz, you’re condemning an entire society with guilt by association. There’s no proof more than a handful of criminals had any part in these atrocities. Their leaders aren’t even Americans.”

  “I’ve been hearing
that until it’s come out my ears.”

  “You don’t believe it?”

  “It’s totally beside the point. The point is that a society is too permissive, too weak, and too open to further attacks when it allows such things to happen as we’ve seen happen in the past couple of weeks.”

  “Yet the alternative is a kind of fascism. That’s what Hollander wants—it’s also what the radicals want.”

  “Fascism’s a strange word, Bill. It used to mean something specific. It doesn’t any longer. It’s just an epithet we use to indicate hatred of our enemies. If this country’s in any real danger of being taken over by a fascist sort of movement I think that danger exists in the nature of Howard Brewster’s effort to bend the Constitution far more than it exists in the senile brain of a weak old man like Wendy Hollander. Hollander’s a fool and everybody can see that—that’s our means of defense against him.”

  “Mussolini was a bit of a fool in his later years. It didn’t stop him from maintaining the stranglehold on his country.”

  “Until they killed him.”

  “You think we ought to kill Hollander then?”

  “No. I suppose most of us have thought of it though. I’m sure Howard Brewster has.”

  “It’s been mentioned.”

  “Why do you suppose he rejected it, Bill?”

  “Why do you reject it?”

  “Because I’m not a murderer. But then I’m not bucking for a second term in the White House.”

  “That’s slanderous, Senator.”

  “I expect it is. There’s probably some truth in it, however.” Grant’s chin lifted. His head was silhouetted against the window and Satterthwaite had a poor view of his face but the eyes seemed to gleam out at him. “Bill, that speech I just gave you about the country’s lack of strength—about the permissiveness that allows these things to happen. Did that ring a bell with you?”

  “Sure. I’ve heard a lot of people use those arguments. I half believe some of them myself.”

  “Ever heard Howard Brewster talk that way?”