Line of Succession (34 page)

Sélim didn't fit into any concept of the quixotic rebel. He had none of the earmarks of the zealous reformer or the tantrum-throwing resenter. Some of his troops were that kind: Lady for one. (“Get your ass moving before I put my boot up it,” and a little while later, as they had got out of the car, “Do what you're told. If you hear a loud noise it'll be you dying.”) But Sélim didn't play at that game. Sélim had something else in mind.

Fairlie thought he saw what it was. Sélim did not so much want to improve the world as he wanted to improve his position in it.

10:30
A.M. EST
Bill Satterthwaite accepted his wife's unimpassioned kiss and left the house. Backed the car out of the garage and headed down New Hampshire Avenue toward the center of things. The Saturday morning traffic was moderate and he had good luck with the lights.

It was the first time he had been home since the kidnapping and it had proved unnecessary; if Leila had noticed his absence there was no sign of it. She had cooked breakfast for him. The boys were both well, and doing well, at Andover; the man was coming Monday to lay the new carpet in the upstairs hall and on the stairs; the nice pregnant young couple across the street had had a miscarriage; the new Updike novel was not up to his usual standard; how much of a contribution should we make this year to the Arena Theater?

He had called her at least once every day and she knew he was involved in the search for Clifford Fairlie; she knew better than to ask and he knew better than to volunteer anything.

They had married when they were both university instructors but he had learned that the intellectual gamesmanship at which she was adept was a strain for her; when they had come to Washington she had settled instantly and with evident relief into the less challenging
hausfrau
role and it suited Satterthwaite well enough. His home, now that the boys were away most of the year, was an unabrasive resort. Leila didn't complain when he shut himself in his study all evening, week after week, jotting in his crabbed hand and reading endless reports.

The three hours with Leila had relieved the pressure but when he set foot in The Salt Mine it hit him with renewed force.

Its symbols were trite: the big white electric clock on the wall, ticking toward inaugural noon; the teleprinters banging, hunched figures at the long table, the disordered mounds of documents. Some of these men had hardly left the room in the past sixty or seventy hours.

He spent nearly an hour with Attorney General Ackert and an Assistant Secretary of State discussing the details of the movement of the seven accused mass murderers to Geneva. Because of the Swiss Government's rigid neutrality regulations they would not use an Air Force plane; a commercial 707 would have to be chartered. Security would be maintained by FBI and Secret Service agents aboard the plane; Swiss police would reinforce the coverage once the plane landed. Permissions had to be arranged for international television and radio coverage at Geneva. Brewster had decided to follow the kidnappers' instructions to the letter—at least on the visible level.

Satterthwaite had lunch with FBI Director Clyde Shankland and an Assistant CIA Director. They reviewed the items that had been pinned down in the past twenty-four hours. Mario Mezetti had obtained at least six hundred thousand dollars in negotiables within the past few weeks, but what was being done with that much money was hard to tell.

Bob Walberg had opened up in last night's interrogation; the questioners had persuaded him they had obtained a confession from one of the other prisoners and Walberg had come apart under the influence of scopolamine. The confession and evidence weren't admissible in court but they were mildly useful. Walberg seemed to think Sturka had a partner, someone outside the immediate cell. Riva? The search was intensified. At the same time Perry Hearn had leaked Walberg's confession to the press, unofficially and without naming Walberg. The leak was designed to dispell the growing rumors of an enormous international conspiracy at work. It might be an international conspiracy but it was not enormous, at least in numbers. The public needed to know that.

The doubles were being coached, Shankland assured him. They would be ready in time.

The
Guardia Civil
had found the leak in the Gibraltar-Almería telephone operation—Mezetti's bi-hourly calls. It was a telephone operator in Almería. She had been paid an enormous sum of money by her reckoning: fifteen thousand pesetas. She had been supplied with a small radio transmitter, set to broadcast on an aviation-band wavelength, and she had been paid to tap the electronic pickup circuit of the transmitter into the switchboard line that fed the telephone to which Mezetti's calls had been dialed.

The gadget had been locked in an open-transmission position. It meant anyone within broadcast range—a hundred miles or so depending on altitude and interference—would be able to hear everything that took place on that particular telephone line.

The limited range of the transmitter meant nothing; someone might have been posted anywhere within a hundred-mile radius for the express purpose of listening for the telephone bell and relaying an alarum to another recipient if the Almeria phone failed to ring.

There was one more item. Scotland Yard had used several chemical processes on the pair of gloves found by the abandoned helicopter in the Pyrenees; the experiments had lifted a vague partial thumbprint and it had been run through the FBI's computers. It was not conclusive but the circumstantial web was too tight to dismiss: the print fitted several thumbs but one of them was that of Alvin Corby.

Corby had been tied to Sturka nearly two weeks ago. The helicopter pilot had been black, an American. It fit. Satterthwaite had sent the word on, not without petty satisfaction, to David Lime who was in Finland glued to Mario Mezetti's eccentric movements.

They had a growing accumulation of clues but still there was only one solid contact and Lime was sticking with Mezetti.

The Russians had the inside track in Algeria, if that was where Sturka had gone after all. The KGB had a far better network in North Africa than the CIA. At the moment there was no reason to believe the Russians knew Sturka was the quarry—but there was no proof they didn't. The KGB was dogging Lime's heels in Finland, and undoubtedly knew Mezetti was the subject under surveillance but they were hanging back, letting Lime carry the ball—perhaps out of political courtesy and perhaps for other reasons. When the trail had led as far as Finland the Russians had instituted a massive but very quiet search operation within the Soviet Union; it could prove acutely embarrassing to find the American President-elect was being held prisoner inside Russia somewhere.

Everybody in the world had a piece of this, Satterthwaite thought. The magnitude of it awed him even though he usually wasn't susceptible to reverence. This was the largest manhunt in human history.

At two o'clock he reported to the White House. Brewster was bloodshot from sleeplessness and expectably irascible. “I've just had a very rough phone conversation with Jeanette Fairlie.”

“I imagine it must have been.”

“She wants to know why we haven't got him back yet.”

“Understandable.”

Brewster was striding back and forth. “We haven't even got five full days left. Ethridge picked a hell of a time to die, didn't he.” He stopped and yanked the cigar out of his mouth and stared belligerently at Satterthwaite. “You're convinced you know the identity of this man who's got Fairlie?”

“Sturka? We're morally certain.”

“Do you think he'll keep his word?”

“Only if he thinks it'll profit him.”

“Otherwise he'd kill Fairlie. Whether or not we turn the seven loose. Is that what you're saying?”

“I can't read Sturka's mind, Mr. President. I don't know what his plans are. He'd kill without hesitation if he thought he had reason to.”

The President circled his desk and slumped into the big chair. “Then let's not give him an excuse.”

“You want to recall the doubles?”

“I think we'd better.”

“We can still send them along to Geneva. Keep them out of sight, use them if things look right for it.”

“Only if you can be damn sure nobody ever sees them.”

“We can do that,” Satterthwaite said. “Easy enough. If they go in singly nobody will give them a second glance anyway.”

“Play it tight, will you?” Brewster made a face at his cigar and put it down in the ashtray. “Milt Luke might survive a few days as interim President but God knows we couldn't afford him for four years.”

SUNDAY,

JANUARY 16

9:00
A.M.
Continental European Time
Lime pressed the field glasses into his eye sockets and made a square search pattern until he found the window he wanted. It was across the town common a good hundred yards away but the high-resolution lenses brought it up to arm's length. It was a Mark Systems gyroscopic binocular that had cost the Government something over four thousand dollars.

His breath poured from his nostrils like steam. He hadn't thought to pack clothes for the subartic; Chad Hill had scraped up scarf and gloves and tweed overcoat at Stockmann in Helsinki and Lime had borrowed an earflap cap from a local cop. The gloves were too small but the coat was a reasonable fit.

The Englishman said, “Well?”

“He's reading the
Herald Tribune.
”

“How frightfully unsporting of him.”

Mezetti hadn't drawn his drapes. He sat in the hotel room beside the telephone reading yesterday's Paris edition.

“Fat lot of good.” The Englishman drew his collar away from his jowls. They had the window wide open because it steamed up if they closed it. Mezetti's room evidently had double-pane windows. They were frosty in the corners but clear enough to see through.

The Englishman was fairly high up in MI-5. He was spherical and bland and appeared boneless; he wore a sandy officer's moustache and a striped regimental tie.

CIA kept a stringer in Lahti but like most of his kind he was so well known Lime didn't want to use him. All competent authorities, both Finnish and otherwise, would be expected to have dossiers on him and there was no point taking the chance of frightening Mezetti's contact away.

If there was a contact.

It stood to reason, if only because Mezetti had finally come to rest after leading them erratically across the length of Europe. He had checked into the hotel yesterday and taken all his meals in his room. He seemed to be waiting for the telephone to ring. Lime had a tap on it.

The Englishman said, “Have a look down there.”

Cars were parked haphazardly along the curbs; an East German Wartburg was slipping into a space.

“Ridiculous. Getting like a bloody business convention down there.”

“You know him?”

“He's with the Vopos. Plainclothes.”

The driver wasn't getting out of the car. The passenger had walked into the hotel lobby. After a moment he came out again, got back into the car and sat there. The car didn't move.

“Does he wear Moscow's collar?”

“I shouldn't think so. Not any more.”

There was a Renault containing a spook from the French SDECE and a four-door Volkswagen containing four large members of Bonn's BND. Lime swept the square with the
20X
binoculars and spotted occupants in five other cars. He recognized one of them—a Spanish agent he'd met in Barcelona three days ago.

It was a comic-opera medley. The Englishman was right; it was ridiculous.

Lime reached for the phone. “Chad?”

“Go ahead.”

“The square's crawling with spooks. Let's get them out of the way.”

“I'll try.”

“Use muscle.”

“They won't like it.”

“I'll apologize later.”

“Okay. I'll see what I can do.”

Lime went back to the window, preternaturally drained. Sleeplessness glazed his eyes; his lids blinked slowly with a grit-grainy sort of pain.

The Englishman sat by the window like a Buddha. Lime said, “It bothers me, the Russians not being down there. Everybody else is.”

“Perhaps you've got a point.”

“This is still Yaskov's area, isn't it?”

“You know him?”

“I've been here before. A while ago.”

“Yes, it's still his bailiwick.”

Yaskov was around here somewhere, Lime thought. Not as brutally obvious as these others, but around somewhere. Watching, biding.

He resumed his seat at the window beside the Englishman. Had a quick look through the glasses—Mezetti hadn't stirred; he was turning a page and Lime could read the headlines effortlessly through the gyros.

He set them aside and leaned forward to look down over the sill. A Volvo had entered the square, unobtrusive and quiet; it pulled over to the curb and four uniformed Finns got out and began to saunter along the storefronts. They approached the Volkswagen and Lime saw one of them stoop to talk to the occupants. The three remaining Finns continued up the walk; one of them approached the parked Wartburg and made a cranking motion with his hand to indicate he wanted the passenger to roll down his window.

Evidently there was some acrimony at the Volkswagen but in the end the Finn stood up and saluted stiffly and the VW's starter gnashed. It pulled out and rolled across the square, moving very slowly like a child dragging his heels; it disappeared into the southbound high road and the Wartburg left soon after.

The Finns continued on their rounds and presently seven cars had left the square. The Finns went back to their Volvo and drove away.

“Quite neat,” the Englishman applauded.

“We'll catch hell for it.”

“Well one could hardly have them falling all over themselves, could one.”

It would mark the end of whatever international cooperation there had been. But Lime had known that at the outset. Henceforth the cooperation would take the form of lip service. Nobody liked being insulted.