Line of Succession

Sunday, January 2

10:45 P.M. EST The girl’s body was found by a man in a raincoat. It was in an alley near the intersection of Euclid and Fourteenth Street Northwest — a black neighborhood of brick row-houses and urban ferment.

At first the man in the raincoat shrank from the body: he stood against the wall breathing shallowly, blinking, but in the end he knelt by the girl and began to search near and under the body, although there was little hope. If she had been mugged there would be no handbag.

A car was going by slowly. The man in the raincoat ignored it until it stopped, but then it was too late. The spotlight swiveled onto him and pinned him against the wall.

He threw up an arm in front of his eyes and heard the car door open and chunk shut. There was a voice:

“Turn around. Hands high against the wall.”

The man in the raincoat obeyed. He knew the routine. He splayed his feet a yard out from the base of the wall and leaned against his palms. The patrolman frisked him and found nothing and moved with a crunch of shoes to the girl’s body.

The second cop got out of the squad car. The first cop said, “DOA. Send in a squeal — we’ll want the wagon.”

The man in the raincoat heard the first cop get up and take two steps forward. The cop’s voice had changed: before it had been weary but now it was taut, angry. “What in the hell did you do that with?”

“I didn’t do nothing.”

He felt a sudden grip on his shoulder and the cop pulled him upright from the frisk position and cracked the handcuffs against his wrists.

“Now sit down.”

He slid down with his back against the brick wall. The drizzle ran down inside the collar of his raincoat and he hitched around on his buttocks to free enough cloth to cover the back of his neck. The spotlight was in his eyes and he kept them squinted almost shut.

“You vicious bastard,” the cop said, very soft.

When the boot caught him in the ribs he was half expecting it and he managed to ride with it, toppling over on his side; it hurt but it hadn’t broken anything. He stayed on his side with his cheek in the gravel. He had learned submission a long time ago. If you showed any fight at all they would kick the guts out of you.

The cop’s feet shifted and the man in the raincoat got ready for another kick but then the other cop came from the car. “Take it easy, Pete.”

“You didn’t see what the son of a bitch did to her. Take a look.”

“Just take it easy. Some lawyer sees him all black and blue they’ll turn him loose and hand us a reprimand.”

“Since when can anybody see black and blue on that spade hide?” But the cop didn’t kick him again.

The other cop went over to the dead girl. Breath whistled out through his teeth. “Sweet Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“What’d he do it with?”

“Beats me. He must have ditched the knife.”

“Took more than a knife.”

“I’ll have a look around.”

The first cop started to prowl the alley, and the second cop came over to the man in the raincoat. “Sit up.”

He obeyed. The cop was above him and when he looked up he could see the cop’s fleshy white face in the hard beam of the spotlight. The cop said, “You got some identification? Move your hands real slow.”

The man reached inside his raincoat and took out the little plastic case. The cop took it from him and lifted it, turning, to get it in the light. All it contained was a numbers slip, a welfare card, Social Security and a single dollar bill.

“Franklin Delano Graham,” the cop said. “Jesus Christ.”

11:20 P.M. “I think he’s telling it straight,” the lieutenant said.

The sergeant propped himself against the hip-high partition that delineated the lieutenant’s corner of the detective squad room. “Hell, he’s a junkie. He wouldn’t know the truth if it kicked him in the face.”

“Then what did he do? Mangle the girl like that, grab her bag, go away somewhere and hide the bag and the stuff he mangled her with, and then come back and hang around waiting for us to pick him up? I can’t buy that.”

The sergeant looked across the squad room. A dozen desks, men sitting at half of them. Franklin Delano Graham was on a bench against the far wall, guarded by the patrolman who had brought him in. Graham’s black face was closed up with the singular bleakness of a junkie who knows he’s not going to get his next hit in time.

The sergeant said, “I guess that’s right. But I’ll book him anyway.”

“Send him over to the methadone clinic.”

“What for?” But the sergeant went to his desk and sat down to type up the forms.

The lieutenant was on the telephone. “Have you got a make on the dead girl yet?”

11:35 P.M. Alvin stood just inside the window keeping watch on the street. The sill was a half inch deep in dust and there was a large white-painted X across the outside of the panes. He could see through it past the front steps to the sidewalk where Line and Darleen stood under the street lamp in tight vivid colors, both flaunt-it-baby black and lean, looking too casual to be sentries.

The bombs lay in a row on the table, and Sturka worked on them with studied concentration. The five people from California sat on wooden boxes in a little circle at the far side of the room. Peggy and Cesar were near the table watching Sturka work on the bombs; Mario Mezetti was in the corner on the floor, absorbed in rereading Ché’s diary.

Alvin looked out the window again. The air was misty but the drizzle had quit. When cars passed, the wind whipped away white exhaust spumes from their tailpipes. A few black people moved along the street and Alvin looked at their faces. Probably tomorrow wouldn’t change their lives at all. But you had to try.

Sturka was hunched over the long refectory table. No one spoke; it was a silence of discipline and sweat.

The room was broken plaster and splintered floorboards. Mario had cellotaped the photo of Mao on the door and beneath it one of his humorless posters, Long Live the Victory of the People’s War. The Californians’ suitcases were stacked neatly by the table and Peggy was using one for a seat, smoking a Marlboro and watching Sturka build his bombs. There was a gooseneck high-intensity lamp with an extension cord which Sturka moved from mechanism to mechanism as he worked on them. A pile of lumpy knapsacks on the floor, a scatter of ashes and dirt and empty styrofoam cups, and a stale sense of abandonment: the block was marked for demolition and that was why there were whitewash crosses on the windows.

Everything was laid out with professional neatness as if for a display — the five handbags and briefcases, innards exposed; the plastic gelatine and the wires and batteries and detonators and stopwatches.

Peggy was restless: she came to the window and looked out past him at Linc and Darleen on the curb. She touched his sleeve. “Bad vibes, Alvy?”

“No. Why?”

“You look tight.”

“Well it’s a heavy thing.”

“They’re not exactly homemade Embarcaderos.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

They had spoken low but Sturka’s head lifted and the intense eyes pushed against Alvin. He turned his shoulder to the room and Peggy went back to her suitcase and lit another Marlboro. Peggy was a sad tough girl and Alvin liked her. Three years ago in Chicago she had been demonstrating against the war — just standing in the crowd, not carrying a sign, not doing anything, but cops had charged into the crowd and a pig had dragged Peggy across the curb steps by her feet, bouncing her head on the concrete; they had manhandled her into a wagon and rousted her into a precinct station, and they had called that resisting an officer. Now she was twenty-three, angry, dedicated, rootless, and one other thing: she was a registered nurse. Sturka surrounded himself only with professionals.

Alvin had come down from New York on Monday night with Sturka and Peggy and four others after Sturka’s private meeting with Raoul Riva. The five who had volunteered to carry the bombs had arrived in Washington Thursday from the West Coast; Alvin hadn’t seen any of them before and they kept to themselves, so that he still knew very little about them beyond their names and faces. That was the way Riva and Sturka always worked. The less you knew the less trouble you could cause.

The five volunteers sat drinking coffee, two men and three women. The men were short-haired and clean-shaven, quite well dressed; the women looked middle class, the girl in a long-sleeved wool dress and the fat girl in sweater and skirt and the small black woman in a tweed suit. They didn’t look like terrorists and of course they weren’t supposed to. The little black woman was middle-aged: she had lost two sons in Indochina. She had been teaching at UCLA but they had dropped her contract because of her radical activities. She had a third son somewhere in Canada and a fourth in the Panthers in New York.

Cesar had recruited them. He had gone out to the Coast and hung around the fringes of the radical groups until he had found people who would suit Riva’s purposes. Cesar was persuasive as a recruiter: it was Cesar who had brought Alvin in. “Revolutions are made by professionals, not schoolchildren. Look, you’ve had it with soft-head protest, demonstrations that don’t mean nothing. And there ain’t no point to the crazies, that’s just random violencing. Corby, you got combat experience, you know about tactics and planning and being professional — you want to join an organization that knows where it’s at.”

The group had no name, no set of initials; even Sturka went under a false name — he was Stratten to everybody he didn’t trust, and he hardly ever trusted anyone.

There was no visible coalition but Raoul Riva was somewhere on the fringe — a part of Sturka’s operation but not a member of this cell. Possibly Riva had a cell of his own; Alvin wasn’t sure — he had seen the Cuban only once and at some distance. It was a taut cell and alliances were not discussed. Riva existed somehow on the periphery — an old warrior brother of Sturka’s, a shadow-figure.

Sturka seldom spoke to any of them; he had no small talk and he wasn’t a speechmaker. Indoctrination sessions were chaired by Cesar. Sturka remained aloof from the study groups; he absented himself often when Cesar was guiding them through the teachings of Marighela and Mao and Ché. At first Alvin had taken Sturka’s indifference badly: a revolutionary had to remember why he was fighting. But he soon learned Sturka had forgotten nothing: his memory was absolute and he required no refresher courses in the philosophy of liberation.

Sturka had no personal charm, he made no effort to light angry fires. He had no striking mannerisms, no habit movements, no interest in what impression he might be making. Alvin had never even heard him complain about injustice or the pig Establishment. Sturka’s leadership depended on his competence: he knew what had to be done and he knew how to do it.

Sturka was between forty and fifty, bigger than he looked — he seemed sick-chested because he tended to hunch his shoulders. His face was bony, long-jawed, pitted by the scars of some old skin affliction. He was dark for a Caucasian; he had straight black hair and a vague foreign accent that Alvin had never been able to place. According to Cesar, who had been with him longest, Sturka had fought with Ché and the Palestine guerrillas and in Biafra and Guyana and, fifteen years ago, in the Algerian FLN. From a few things that had been let drop Alvin had the impression Sturka had learned his professionalism as a mercenary in the Congo and in Indochina.

Sturka had an expert’s contempt for explosives. He knew the science of demolition and he had the concentration of a monk. Now he was hawked over the bombs, shaping them. The plastic gelatine had been manufactured in the United States but Mario had flown out to Singapore and bought it on the black market — it had been stolen from an arms dump near Da Nang. The stuff was malleable as modeling clay; Sturka was distributing it along sheets of lead foil inside the false bottoms of the three handbags and the two briefcases. The Number Eight detonators and battery packs were pressed into the plastic against the stopwatches that would trigger the detonators. Sturka had machined tiny combination levers, actuated by the lock fittings on the outsides of the cases, to push the start buttons of the watches. The lead-foil sheaths would prevent metal detectors from discovering the concealed mechanisms, and the use of stopwatches would avoid detection by listening devices which otherwise would pick up the ticking of a time-clock detonator.

The preparation of the watches had been delicate and Alvin had watched with interest. Each watch crystal had to be unscrewed; the tip of the minute hand had to be bent up, and a metal prong soldered to the watchcase so that the minute hand in its circle would touch the prong, completing the electric circuit that would detonate the explosive. The watchcase was screwed to the housing but everything else was imbedded in the soft clay of the gelatine, so that the entire apparatus lay flat and looked a bit like a printed electronic circuit. Flattened neatly across the leaded bottom of each case, the bomb was no more than half an inch thick, but each case carried eighteen ounces of plastic explosive and that was enough.

Above the false bottoms the handbags and briefcases contained a variety of journalists’ commonplaces: pencils, pens, spiral notebooks, odds and ends of paper secured with paper clips, small pocket pencil sharpeners, ink jars, pocket combs, cosmetics, keys, cigarettes and cigarette lighters, banded packets of three-by-five index cards. Sturka had selected the items for their shrapnel value. A hurtling paper clip could pierce an eye; a cigarette lighter could kill.

Sturka was fitting sheets of lead foil across the tops of the molded bombs now; he was almost finished. It only remained to fit the false bottoms into the cases.

Cesar stood up, pressed his fists into the small of his back and stretched, bending far back; he windmilled his arms to loosen cramped muscles and came across the room to the window. Glanced at Alvin, glanced at Darleen and Line outside, and peeled back his sleeve to look at his watch. Alvin followed his glance: almost midnight. D Day. Alvin looked around the room and after a moment he said, “Where’s Barbara?”

“Gave her an errand to run,” Cesar said very offhandedly.

It bothered Alvin. Sturka and Cesar had gone out three hours ago with Barbara and had returned without her twenty minutes later. Alvin made his voice very low because he didn’t want to disturb Sturka. “Shouldn’t she be back by now?”

“No. Why?”

“Getting kind of close for time. We don’t want our people wandering around on the street where they could get picked up and maybe talk.”

“She won’t talk to anybody,” Cesar said, and moved away toward the table.

Alvin looked down at his hands, and turned them over and looked at his palms — as if he had not seen them before. It bothered him that they still didn’t trust him enough to tell him things.

Monday, January 3

2:10 A.M. EST The Assistant Medical Examiner had just settled gratefully into his chair when the phone rang. “M.E.’s office, Charlton speaking.”

“Ed Ainsworth, Doc.”

“Hello, Lieutenant.” The Assistant M.E. put his feet up on the desk.

“Doc, about that girl they brought in DOA from Northwest. My sergeant seems to have kind of a garbled report on her from your office. Maybe you can straighten it out for me.”

“Garbled?”

“He says you told him somebody’d cut out her tongue with a pair of pliers.”

“That’s right. I did.”

“A pair of pliers?”

“The jaws left clear indentations on what’s left of her tongue, Lieutenant. Maybe I phrased it badly in the report. I said they’d cut out her tongue. ‘Pulled’ would have been more accurate.”

“Good Christ.” After a moment the lieutenant resumed: “You did the autopsy yourself?”

“I regret to say I did.”

“And there’s no sign she was sexually molested?”

“None. Of course that’s not conclusive, but there’s no sign of vaginal irritation, no semen, none of the usual—”

“Okay. Now the cause of death, you’ve got ‘heart removal’ here. Now for Christ’s sake what—”

“Read the whole thing, Lieutenant.”

“I have. God help me.”

“Heart removal by probable use of ordinary household tools.”

“Yeah. You mean kitchen knife, that kind of thing?”

“That’s a utensil. I said tools. I suspect they used a hammer and chisel, although I can’t prove it.”

The lieutenant didn’t speak for a little while. When he did his voice was very thin. “All right, Doc, then tell me this. If the cause of death was a hammer and chisel against the breastplate how in hell did they get her to hold still for it?”

“I wasn’t there, Lieutenant. How should I know? Probably a few of them held her down and one of them did the job on her.”

“And she didn’t scream?”

“Maybe she screamed her head off. You know that neighborhood — they mug you on the street in broad daylight, nobody lifts a finger.”

Another pause. Then: “Doc, this has got the stink of some kind of ritual to it. Some hoodoo voodoo thing.”

“Was she Haitian or anything like that?”

“We haven’t got a make on her yet. I don’t know what she was.”

The Assistant M.E. had her face in his mind. It must have been a pleasant face before. Young — he had put her at twenty-one or -two. The proud Afro haircut, the good long legs. The telephone moved fitfully against his ear. He said, “I admit it’s one I haven’t come across before.”

“God forbid we ever come across it again. Listen, just for the record, if we come across a bloody pair of pliers can you match them up to measurements or anything?”

“I doubt it. Not unless you find tissues adhering to the pliers. We could set up a circumstantial case on the basis of blood type, I suppose.”

“Yeah. All right. Look, anything else you didn’t put in the report? Anything that might give a lead?”

“Up in New York and Chicago they seem to have quite a few mobster killings where they rub out somebody who squealed on them and leave the corpse lying around with a big plaster of tape over the mouth, or they pour a jar of acid in the mouth, that kind of thing. It’s a warning to other potential squealers — you know, see what happens to you if you open your mouth to the wrong people.”

“Sicilian justice.”

“Yes. But this girl wasn’t Sicilian, that’s for sure.”

“Maybe the killer is.”

“Maybe.”

The lieutenant sighed audibly. “With pliers and a hammer and chisel? I don’t know.”

“I’d like to help, Lieutenant. I’d love to put it all in your lap for you. But I’m all gone dry.”

“All right. I’m sorry I bugged you, Doc. Good night.”

3:05 A.M. The make on the dead girl came into the detective squad room on the wire from the FBI fingerprint files and the sergeant ripped it off the machine and took it to the lieutenant’s desk in the corner. The lieutenant read halfway into it and went back to the beginning and started again.

“A Federal snoop.”

“From Justice.”

“It’s an FSS number. She was Secret Service.” The lieutenant sat back and spent ten seconds grinding his knuckles into his eye sockets. He lowered his hands into his lap and kept his eyes shut. “Cripes. I was starting to get a picture.”

“What picture?”

“I had it worked out. She was a hooker and she rolled some capo from the Mob, not knowing who he was. So the capo sent some of his boys out to take care of her. But this blows it all to hell.”

The sergeant said, “Maybe we’d better call Justice.”

3:40 A.M. A telephone was ringing, disturbing David Lime’s sleep. He listened to it ring. He had never fallen victim to the compulsion to answer every telephone that rang within earshot; anyhow this was not his own bed, not his own bedroom, not his own telephone; but it disturbed his sleep.

He lay on his back and listened to it ring and finally the mattress gave a little heave and a soft buttock banged into his leg. There was a clumsy rattle of receiver against cradle and then Bev said in the dark, “Who the hell is this?... Shit, all right, hold on.” Then she was poking him in the ribs. “David?”

He sat up on his elbow and took the phone from her. “Uh?”

“Mr. Lime? Chad Hill. I’m damned sorry to have to—”

“The hell time’s it?”

“About a quarter to four, sir.”

“A quarter to four,” David Lime said disagreeably. “Is that a fact.”

“Yes, sir. I—”

“You called me to tell me it’s a quarter to four.”

“Sir, I wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t important.”

“How’d you know where to find me?” He knew Hill had something to tell him but first he had to clear the sleep from his head.

“Mr. DeFord gave me the number, sir.”

Bev was getting out of bed, storming into the bathroom. Lime dragged a hand down his jaw. “Bless Mr. DeFord. Bless the little son of a bitch.” The bathroom door closed — not quite a slam. A ribbon of light appeared beneath it.

“Sir, one of our agents has been murdered.”

Lime closed his eyes: a grimace. Not Smith’s dead. Not Jones has been killed. No. “One of our agents has been murdered.” Like a fourteen-year-old imitating Reed Hadley’s narration for a Grade B Warner’s picture: a mausoleum tone, One of our aircraft is missing! From what plastic packaging factory did they obtain these kids?

“All right, Chad. One of our agents is missing. Now—”

“Not missing, sir. Murdered. I’m down here at—”

“What agent has been murdered?”

“Barbara Norris, sir. The police called the office and I was on night duty. I called Mr. DeFord and he said I’d better get in touch with you.”

“Yes, I imagine he did.” Grandon Pass-the-Buck DeFord. Lime sat up, squeezed his eyes shut and popped them open. “All right. Where are you now and what’s happened?”

“I’m at police headquarters, sir. Suppose I put Lieutenant Ainsworth on, he can explain what they’ve got.”

A new voice came on the line: “Mr. Lime?”

“That’s right.”

“Ed Ainsworth. Detective Lieutenant down here. We had a DOA tonight, a young black girl. The FBI identifies her as Barbara Norris and they gave us an FSS service number for her so I called your office. You’re in charge of her section, is that right?”

“I’m the Deputy Assistant Director.” He managed to say it with a straight face. “DeFord’s the Assistant Director in charge of Protective Intelligence.”

“Uh-huh. Well Mr. DeFord said she was your agent. Do you want the details by phone or would you like to come down and see for yourself? I’m afraid they made a mess of her.”

“Definitely a homicide, then?”

“You could say that. They ripped out her tongue with a pair of pliers and they dug out her heart with a hammer and chisel.”

The door opened and Bev walked naked across the room, sat down in the chair and lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the match. She didn’t look at him: she stared at the floor.

Lime said, “Sweet Jesus.”

“Yes, sir. It was pretty God damned vicious.”

“Where did this happen, Lieutenant?”

“An alley off Euclid. Near Fourteenth Street.”

“What time?”

“About six hours ago.”

“What have you got?”

“Next to nothing, I’m afraid. No handbag, no visible evidence except the body itself. No evidence of sexual molestation. We found a junkie searching the body but he claims he found her that way and the evidence supports his story. I’ve had people combing the neighborhood but you know the way things are in those parts of town — nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything.”

“Any possibility she was killed somewhere else and dumped there?”

“Not likely. Too much blood in the alley.”

Bev stood up and padded to the bed. She handed him a freshly lighted cigarette and an ashtray and went back to her chair. Lime dragged suicidally on the cigarette. Choked, coughed, recovered, and said, “Do you need me down there to identify her? I seem to recall she had no next of kin.”

“Mr. Hill here gave us a positive identification on her. It won’t be necessary. But if you can give us a lead — if I knew what she’d been working on...”

Lime ducked it: “She was on a security case — I can’t give it to you. But if we come across evidence that might help in a criminal prosecution we’ll pass it on to you.”

“Sure, that’s okay.” A voice of resignation: the lieutenant had known the answer before he’d asked the question. But you had to go through the motions. Everybody has to go through the motions, Lime thought.

“Tell Chad Hill I’ll be in the office as soon as I get dressed.”

“I will. Goodbye, sir.”

Lime rolled over on his side to cradle the phone. Light in the room was weak, splashing in through the open door of the bathroom. He thought about the dead girl and tried to remember her alive; he smashed out the cigarette and climbed off the bed.

Bev said, “I don’t know about the other guy. But your end of that conversation was right out of a rerun of Dragnet.”

“Somebody got killed.”

“I gathered.” Her soft contralto was deepened by the hour and the cigarette. “Anyone I know? Knew?”

“No.”

“Now you’re being strong and silent.”

“Just silent,” he said, and climbed into his drawers. He sat down to pull on his socks.

She got back into bed and pulled the sheet and blanket up over her. “It’s funny. No two men get dressed in the same order. My ex used to start from the top down. Undershirt, shirt, tie, then his shorts and pants and socks and shoes. And I knew a guy who refused to buy tight slacks because he always put his shoes on first and couldn’t get them through leg-huggers.”

“Is that right.” He went into the bathroom and washed his face with cold water. Used her toothbrush and glanced at the lady-electric shaver on the shelf, but decided against it; he had a shaver in the office. In the mirror there were bags pendant under his eyes. I can’t possibly be as old as I look. He looked like a big sleepy blond Wisconsin Swede gone over the hill and a little seedy. A little bit of office paunch, a fishbelly whiteness about the upper chest and arms. He needed a couple of weeks on a beach in the Virgin Islands.

He gargled mouthwash and went out into the bedroom and reached for his shirt.

Bev looked as if she had gone back to sleep but then her eyes drifted open. “I thought you’d got yourself out of the dagger end of things and confined yourself to cloaks.”

“I have. All I do is keep the papers moving.”

“I see. You send girls out to get killed for you.”

He cinched up his trousers and reached for his tie. Bev sat up, making a face, the good breasts lying a bit askew. “You’d better have a bite of breakfast, I suppose. It wouldn’t do to go ogling corpses on an empty stomach.”

“I could do with toast and coffee.”

She wasn’t tall but she stood tall: a straight-up girl with long legs and high firm hips and a fair amount of mischief in her face. Playful, tawny, good-tempered.

She was the woman he would love if he could love.

She went out to the kitchenette, belting a terrycloth robe around her. She wanted to be useful to him: it was part of her character to be useful; she was a widower’s daughter.

He got into his hairy brown sports jacket and his cordovan loafers and went into the kitchenette after her. Kissed the back of her neck: “Thanks.”

10:35 A.M. Continental European Time There was a knock at the door and Clifford Fairlie looked up from his newspaper. His eyes took a moment to focus on the room — as if he had forgotten where he was. The sitting room of the suite was quite grand in its fin-de-sieècle elegance: the Queen Annes, the Cézannes, the Boulle desk, the expanse of Persian carpet to the heavy double doors. It was a suite to which President-elect Fairlie had admitted few reporters because he had found that most journalists detested any politician who seemed to know the century in which the furniture around him had been crafted.

Knuckles again; Fairlie shambled to the door. He was a man who opened his own doors.

It was his chief aide, Liam McNeely, slim in a Dunhill suit. Behind him the Secret Service men in the anteroom looked up, nodded, and looked away. McNeely came in and pushed the door shut behind him. “Morning, Mr. President.”

“Not quite yet.”

“I’m practicing.”

The smell of expensive aftershave had come into the room with McNeely. Clifford Fairlie settled on the Queen Anne couch and waved him toward a chair. McNeely collapsed as if boneless: sat on the back of his neck, long legs crossed like grasshopper limbs. “Lots of weather we’re having.”

“I spent a winter in Paris once, a long time ago. I can’t remember the sun shining once in the five months from October to early March.” That had been the year he’d lost the Senate race for reelection from Pennsylvania. The President had twisted the knife by sending him to Paris as peace-talk negotiator.

McNeely uncrossed his legs with a getting-down-to-business sigh. The notebook came out of his pocket. “It’s about a quarter to eleven now. You’ve got the Common Market people at noon and lunch here in the hotel at one forty-five with Breucher.”

“Plenty of time.”

“Yes sir. I only mentioned it. You don’t want to show up at the meeting in that outfit.”

Fairlie’s jacket had leather patches at the elbows. He smiled. “Maybe I ought to. I’m Brewster’s emissary.”

McNeely laughed at the joke. “Press conference at four. They’ll mainly be asking about the plans for the trip to Spain.”

That was the nub, the trip to Spain. The rest was window dressing. The vital thing was those Spanish bases.

McNeely said, “And they’ll want your reactions to Brewster’s logorrhea last night.”

“What reactions? For Brewster it was damned mild.”

“You going to say that? Pity. It’d be a good chance to get in a few digs.”

“No point being inflammatory. Too much anger in the world already.”

“A lot of it incited by that pisspot Napoleon in the White House.” McNeely had a Yale Ph.D., he had been an Oxford fellow, he had written eight volumes of political analysis, he had served two Administrations — one in the Cabinet — and he persisted in calling the incumbent President of the United States “this flimflam fuehrer” and “the schmuck on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

It was an attitude not without some justice. President Howard Brewster was a man who specialized in answers, not questions; he had the kind of mind to which Why-not-victory? oversimplifications were very attractive. Brewster represented to uncanny perfection that large segment of the populace which still wistfully hoped to win a war that had been lost a long time ago. To quick-minded sophisticates he stood for Neanderthal politics and nineteenth-century simplemindedness. Brewster was a man of emotional outbursts and political solipsism; to all appearances his attitudes had ceased developing at about the time the Allies had won World War II; and in the age of celebrity, when candidates could get elected because they looked good on a horse, Brewster’s total lack of panache made him a genuine anachronism.

But that view of Howard Brewster was incomplete: it did not take into account the fact that Brewster was a man of politics in the same way that a tiger is a creature of the jungle. The pursuit of the Presidency had cost Brewster almost thirty years of party-climbing and fund-raising dinners and bloc-wooing within the Senate in which he had sat for four consecutive terms. Yet the unresponsive Administration of the unresponsive Government, which McNeely deplored with vigorous sarcasms, was not really of Brewster’s making. Howard Brewster was not so much its architect as its inevitable and typical product.

It was no good condemning Brewster out of hand. He had not been the worst President in American history, not by a wide margin, and the election results had shown it: Fairlie hadn’t so much won the election from Brewster as avoided defeat, and by an incredibly small margin: 35,129,484 to 35,088,756. There had been a madness of recounts; Brewster supporters were still crying foul, claiming the Los Angeles machine had delivered to Fairlie the bloc votes of Forest Lawn Cemetery and the Pacific Ocean, but neither election officials nor Brewster’s campaigners had been able to furnish proof of their allegations and as far as Fairlie knew they weren’t true anyhow — the Mayor of Los Angeles wasn’t that fond of him, not by any means.

In the end Fairlie had eked out 296 votes in the Electoral College to Brewster’s 242, carrying the big states by small margins and losing the small states by large margins. Brewster’s support was in the South and in rural America and the confusion of party allegiances had probably cost him the election because he was nominally and loyally a Democrat while his Republican opponent was in fact somewhere to the left of him.

“Deep thoughts, Mr. President?”

McNeely’s voice lifted him from reverie. “God. I simply haven’t had enough sleep. What have we got laid on for tomorrow morning?”

“Admiral James and General Tesworth. From NATO in Naples.”

“Can you move it back to the afternoon somewhere?”

“Hard to do.”

“I’ve got to get some rest.”

“Just hold out a week, Mr. President. You can collapse in the Pyrenees.”

“Liam, I’ve been talked to by too many admirals and generals as it is. I’m not doing a big-stick tour of American military bases.”

“You could afford to touch a few. The right-wing press likes the idea that you’re doing a world tour of leftist capitals to cement relations with Commies and pinkos.”

London. Bonn. Paris. Rome. Madrid. Commies and pinkos? But Fairlie did not laugh. America’s cross to bear was its simple minds: the ones who saw no distinction between England’s socialism and Albania’s Communism.

McNeely said, “Now the L.A. papers are speculating you’re on your way to Madrid to give away the Spanish bases.”

“That’s a pretty good one.” Fairlie made a crooked smile.

“Uh-huh. We could have cleared some of it up, you know. But you’ve insisted we’re not to comment on that to the press.”

“It’s not my place to comment. Not yet. I’m here unofficially.”

“As Hollerin’ Brewster’s goodwill ambassador. Which is really, you know, quite rich.”

There was a point to it. Europe had taken on the aspect of an American sandbox and United States presidential elections had become quadrennial paroxysms of anxiety throughout the Continent. A shift in stance which Washington regarded as minor might well upset the entire equilibrium of Common Market affairs or NATO’s economy or the status of the Russian Mediterranean Fleet vis-à-vis the American Sixth. The idea had come up three weeks ago during the White House state briefings through which Howard Brewster had conducted Fairlie: to reassure “our valiant allies” — it was a Brewster phrase, typically irrelevant and typically outdated — of the continuity and goodwill of the American Government, wouldn’t it be a good idea for Republican President-elect Fairlie to call informally on half a dozen heads of state as the personal representative of Democrat President Brewster?

The idea had the kind of grandiose theatricality one had learned to expect of Howard Brewster. But Fairlie had agreed for his own reasons: he wanted to meet Europe’s heads of state face to face and an informal pre-inaugural series of meetings might find them more relaxed and natural than had some of the hurried Presidential visits to the same capitals earlier. Unburdened by administrative chores Fairlie would have time to get to know them.

But the Spanish upset had exploded against them all. The bloodless pre-Christmas takeover: Perez-Blasco had wrested Spain from Franco’s indecisive successors and Howard Brewster had growled to Fairlie, “God damn, we got a whole new ball game.” Even now the ink was hardly dry on the junta’s proclamations. Perez-Blasco was feeling his way, trying to shore up the first populist government in forty years. Spain was still the key to the Mediterranean, launch pad for the American nuclear structure in Europe — and Perez-Blasco’s spokesmen had sent up trial balloons in the Spanish press: should Madrid nationalize the nuclear bases and evict the Americans? Nothing was settled: no one knew which way Perez-Blasco would jump.

“You can charm the big bastard, Cliff.” Brewster had rolled the cigar in his mouth. “Use all the rational arguments, but lean on the son of a bitch too. Tell him you’re just as liberal as he is but God damn it Moscow’s got all those boats out in the Med and ask him if he really wants to see them turn the thing into a Russian lake.”

It was a good thing Brewster was going out. His brand of gunboat diplomacy would lose the Spanish bases. Brewster’s premise was right: you were in competition with Moscow, that was no myth. But it wasn’t the kind of competition you won by frightening the customers. Perez-Blasco had to be shopping around for aid; he had already confirmed diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union and even McNeely had pointed out that where Egypt had gone Spain could easily follow. Perez-Blasco was by no means a far-leftist; nevertheless he was markedly to the left of the old Franco regime. He was a proud man who had come up from poverty, and you did not wave guns under a dignified man’s nose. Intimidation was not a very useful tool in modern international relations — not when the customer could get miffed, turn his back on you, and go to the competition.

You had to be cool. You had to go to him, but not in a hurry and not as a beggar.

Clifford Fairlie stood up, a Lincolnesque figure with a tall man’s stoop. Thirty-one years ago he had won a seat on the Media town council. In less than three weeks he would be President of the United States.

7:00 A.M. EST At his desk in the Executive Office Building David Lime was half through his second breakfast of the morning. His eyes were focused wearily on the Barbara Norris file.

The documents and photographs were scattered over the desk. Chad Hill, on his feet at the corner of the desk, was running his finger across them: an unassailably pleasant-faced young man packaged in a blue suit and striped shirt. “This one. Stratten. He seemed to be running the show, from her reports.”

The blurred photograph suggested a rangy man with deep-set eyes overhung by dark brows: a somehow European face, between forty and fifty.

Stratten, no first name, no initials. The active files of Lime’s Protective Research Section included some quarter of a million cases and according to the print-outs from the computer none of them mentioned anyone named Stratten or anyone who had ever used the name as an alias.

It was an obvious case: classic and tiresome. Barbara Norris had infiltrated the group, had found out something she wasn’t supposed to know, and had been killed to guarantee her silence.

The Stratten blowup showed a face full of latent violence. The Norris girl had snapped the picture a week ago with a Minolta concealed in the folds of her leather handbag.

He reached for the phone. “Get me somebody over at NSA. Ames if you can get him.”

He cupped the mouthpiece in his palm and looked up at Chad Hill. “Call the New York office and have them send some people over to that apartment this bunch was using on West End Avenue. Have them give the premises a good toss.”

Hill went out to his own desk and the phone came alive in Lime’s fist. He put it to his ear. “Ames?”

“No, this is Kaiser. Ames won’t be in till nine. Maybe I can help out, Mr. Lime?”

Another of those pitchless voices, uninflected, sounding like some electronic contrivance programmed to imitate human speech. Lime closed his eyes and leaned back in the swivel chair. “I’d like to run a make on a character through your R & I machines.”

“Mind if I ask the nature of the case?” It was spoken by rote. Agencies didn’t do favors for other agencies unless a reason was supplied.

“It’s a protection case. Some hints about an assassination attempt. One of our people was working on it and they seem to have taken her out.”

“Then she was onto something.” The observation was less redundant than it might have been: Lime’s department investigated thousands of assassination threats every season and virtually all of them proved trivial.

“Nothing on your man from FBI?”

“Nothing from any domestic files. We’ve run him through all of them.”

“What have you got? Fingerprints?”

“Fingerprints and a mug shot.” Barbara Norris had lifted the prints off a water glass Stratten had used: she had sprinkled it with talc and taken it off with masking tape, and washed the glass afterward.

“Well that ought to be easy enough. Send them over.”

“I’ll get a runner to you. Thanks.”

He hung up and looked at the photo again while he buzzed for a messenger. The straight black hair was bushy at the back, not a distinctive cut, and he wondered what had persuaded him Stratten was a foreigner. Perhaps the set of the mouth or the slight lift to the right eyebrow. But there was something more than that and it still eluded him when the messenger came for the photo and fingerprints.

Then Lime found it in Norris’s December 28 report: Slight accent, indeterminate, possibly Balkan. The notation was sandwiched into the center of a single-spaced paragraph but he’d read that report at least three times, the earliest five days ago and hadn’t caught it consciously until now.

It was a bomb plot, an assassination attempt of some kind. Bombs were always surer than bullets. The one called Mario — they hadn’t known her long enough to trust her with full names — seemed to have thought they were planning to bomb the White House. But it was all very vague and Lime hadn’t been ready to buy it right off the shelf because the White House was isolated and heavily guarded and virtually impossible to attack with anything less than an armored combat division. The White House Detail had been alerted and Norris had received instructions to stay with Stratten’s group until she learned whether their intentions were real or only the idle bluffing of a handful of radicalized screwheads freaked out on bravado and drugs.

But now it was time to leash them. Three hours ago Lime had put out the order to pick them up: Stratten and Alvin Corby and the others identified by FBI computers from information fed to Lime’s office by Barbara Norris.

The initial tip had come by way of the FBI from a Panther plant they had in New York, a citizen whose mother had informed him vaguely that she was involved in an attempt to assassinate someone in Washington. The citizen had tried to dissuade his mother but it was all long-distance telephoning and very little could be said on an open line; he had failed to talk her out of it and so he had alerted the FBI because he wanted to protect his mother from the consequences of her foolishness. The FBI had passed it on to Secret Service Director B. L. Hoyt, and Hoyt had passed it on down the line through channels to Lime. Assassination threats were Lime’s bailiwick.

The Secret Service was a sub-agency within the Treasury Department. It was charged with two distinct functions between which there was what could be called a “connection” only with some serious abuse of the word. It was B. L. Hoyt’s duty to apprehend counterfeiters and to protect the lives of politicians. The logic of it was on a par with most Washingtonian logic and it hardly even annoyed Lime any more.

The ball was in his court and he had to play with it. He had makes on five of them: Alvin Corby, twenty-six, black, an Indochina veteran, a former member of several black radical groups; Cesar Renaldo, thirty-one, born in New York of Puerto Rican parents, arrested twice for possession of hashish and once for assaulting a policeman during an antiwar demonstration; Robert and Sandra Walberg, twenty-four, twin brother and sister, both former SDS-Weathermen, both carrying records of arrest and conviction for possession of marijuana (sentence suspended) and disorderly behavior during campus building occupations at the University of Southern California (six months probation); and Beulah Moorehead, forty-one, the mother of the FBI’s Panther plant.

There was partial information on some others but none of it was hard. A black couple named Line and Darleen. The one called Mario whom Norris had described as “their banker, I think.” Two more recent arrivals from the West Coast called Claude and Bridget. And the Stratten item.

Norris’s last report was three days old. She had included half-frame 16mm negatives of Stratten, Corby, Renaldo and the five who had arrived that afternoon from California. There were fingerprints on Corby and the Walberg twins and a set on Stratten which had proved useless since they didn’t match any prints on file in Washington or St. Louis. Norris had not obtained a set of Renaldo’s fingerprints, but the New York police had identified his photograph by comparison with their mug books.

The Walberg twins had histories of marijuana arrests; Renaldo and Corby had narcotics records. It was possible they were junkies. If you followed that reasoning you could assume they might wake up and realize what they’d done: the Norris murder. They might be terrified, they might run for it, disband, scatter, go to ground individually. They might forget any grandiose assassination plots in the rush to sanctuary.

It was a comforting theory but it was no good. The hole-in-the-wall they’d been using on R Street Northeast was empty now — very empty and very clean. Clean enough to indicate they weren’t just a bunch of frightened addicts who had cleared out. Someone with presence of mind was directing the operation.

What had she known? What had she discovered? Lime had long ago been disabused of the notion that you could rely on premonitions and portents; but this thing had all the telltales of a major professional assassination job.

11:20 A.M. EST The car decanted Dexter Ethridge and his Secret Service bodyguards below the West Portico of the Capitol and Ethridge looked up past the crowd to the dome where the flag was going up the staff to indicate that Congress was convening: that the Ninety-fifth Congress was about to gather for the first time.

He recognized many faces among those moving toward the doors. Most of the members would be entering by subway from the Senate and House office buildings but there were those like Ethridge who made a point of coming here to absorb the effect from outside before going in. Architecturally it was a faux pas and parts of it were endlessly in danger of falling down — some of the basements were shored up with clumsy brick walls and propped massive timbers — but if you were a politician you were very likely a sentimentalist as well and the great dome always instilled in Ethridge a properly sober respect and reverence.

Dexter Ethridge had sat, listened, spoken, and cast his vote inside this building thousands of times: he had entered the House twenty-four years ago, served two terms, run for the Senate and lost, run again two years later and won, and served three full terms — eighteen years — as United States Senator from Michigan. In that time he had cast many votes for winning causes and many votes for losing causes, but he had never to his knowledge cast a deciding vote. From this day forward he would cast no vote that was not a deciding vote: Dexter D. Ethridge, Vice-President-elect of the United States, would be allowed to vote in the Senate only when his vote was required to break a tie.

He climbed the steps, uncomfortably aware of the Secret Service men who never seemed to hurry but always managed to be within arm’s length of him. The agents in various shifts had been covering Ethridge and his family since the Denver Convention five months ago but he still wasn’t sufficiently accustomed to them to be able to ignore them; he found himself wasting altogether too much time exchanging small talk with them. But that had always been his weakness. From childhood he had been a buttonholer; he loved to engage people in conversation. Among his colleagues it was hardly a unique characteristic.

At the head of the steps he stopped and turned a half circle on his heels to look down along the Mall. There was a small demonstration down there — a cluster of radic-libs carrying signs, girls in dirty Levi’s and men with self-consciously hirsute faces. From here Ethridge couldn’t read the placards but there wasn’t much doubt of their message: they wanted Freedom Now, they wanted the defense budget cut to a trickle and the highway program killed and a hundred billion for welfare and health and ecological cleanups.

Clifford Fairlie might accomplish a few of those things, although there would be a great deal of harrumphing and pettifoggery because no Democratic Congress could afford to pass a Republican President’s programs without going through the motions of loyal-opposition resistance: Fairlie’s programs would be amended wordily, but that was window dressing. The interesting thing about Fairlie’s election was that it was going to force the Democrats to move even farther to the left, if only to enable them to continue berating the Republicans as obstructionist reactionaries.

Fairtie had offered the running-mate slot to Dexter Ethridge because Ethridge was a Republican Senator from a big industrial state (the liberals had tried to pin on him the epithet “the Senator from General Motors”); Ethridge could be counted on to help attract the support of Big Business, and in the farm states he could be billed as a conservative candidate. Yet he had never in his life described himself as a conservative. “Moderate” was the word he liked, and it was only because he stood somewhere to Fairlie’s right that he had been regarded by the press and at least some of the voters as a rightist. But that was all politics — electioneering.

Fairlie had been quite candid about it: “I’m too liberal to suit a lot of them. If I’m going to get wholehearted support from the party I’ve got to show my sincerity by picking a running mate they’ll approve. Ideally I suppose I ought to pick Fitzroy Grant or Woody Guest, but frankly that would tie my hands — I need a running mate who looks more conservative than he is. The right-wingers associate you with Detroit industrialists so I think they’ll approve... Me? I think you’ve got a lot of common sense and a good conscience. How about it?”

The thing was, he liked Cliff Fairlie. If it hadn’t been for that he might have refused the nomination: the Vice-Presidency was ordinarily a thankless job and for a man as inclined toward real political activity as he was it didn’t have irresistible appeal — a Senator with eighteen years’ seniority could wield considerably more power on the Hill than could a minority-party Vice-President. But Ethridge believed Fairlie could win and he allowed Fairlie to convince him that he could help Fairlie win.

Now at the top step of the portico he looked out across the Mall and discovered, a bit to his surprise, that he did not regret it. He had no trouble recalling the excitement that had attended the arrival of the Kennedy Administration — that had been during Ethridge’s first Senate term — and he had the heady feeling this morning that Clifford Fairlie would bring the same kind of magic to Washington. It was an important if not vital event for the country at this point in its history: Kennedy had not been a particularly good administrator, he had been a bad politician really — in his handling of Congress he couldn’t hold a candle to Lyndon Johnson — and some of his decisions had been disastrously wrong. But the important thing about the Kennedys and the Fairlies was their quality of visible leadership. Not since Kennedy had the United States possessed a leader who commanded personal admiration, who stirred the imaginations of Americans and foreigners alike, who owned the aura of style and grace that made it possible to forgive their errors and to hope. Fairlie inspired that kind of hope.

The sky above the Capitol was bleak with the threat of snow; Ethridge stood in the wind in his topcoat, his cheeks stinging a little, but he had been raised on Michigan winters and the chill did not drive him inside. Tourists and journalists gave him covert stares and filed past him to observe the ritual swearing-in of the houses of Congress on this day of convening. Down on the Mall the pathetic little circle of marchers continued, virtually unnoticed, to trample the brown grass with their picket signs lifted high. Ethridge nodded and smiled and spoke briefly to friends and colleagues and acquaintances who went past; but he kept his place, somehow reluctant to break the feeling of this place and time, this moment of anticipation and hope and half-realized thrill. It was seventeen days yet to the inauguration but today, this noon, marked the real beginning of the Fairlie years, for this Congress that first met today would be Fairlie’s Congress and everything they did in the next seventeen days would reflect that, regardless of Brewster’s lame-duck occupancy of the White House.

11:40 A.M. EST David Lime strode the corridor toward the Seventeenth Street exit of the Executive Office Building, consulting his watch and shooting his cuff. Chad Hill kept pace with an athletic effortlessness that would have been commendable if it hadn’t been for his youth: he could spot Lime twenty years.

“But shouldn’t we stay in the office?”

“What for?”

“Well some central location at least. To coordinate everything.”

“Nothing to coordinate,” Lime said. “We’ve got a radio in the car.”

They batted out through the glass doors. Lime pulled his coat collar up; the wind was a hard fast one, coming up from the Potomac, and the temperature had dropped sharply in the past few hours. Snow soon, he thought, and ducked to slip into the back seat of the plain green four-door Chevrolet that pulled to the curb to meet them. Hill slid in beside him and Lime said to the driver, “Right over to the Hill — the west steps, it’ll be faster.”

The driver checked his mirror and waited for a line of cars to go by and then slid gently out into the traffic lanes. Chad Hill said, “You’d better speed it up. Use your siren.”

“No,” Lime said. “There’s time. And I don’t need a traffic snarl of rubberneckers paralyzed by the siren.” He sat back and closed his eyes and wondered if his face reflected the inner scowl.

Chad Hill said, “I hope to God you’re wrong.”

He probably was wrong. But it was a possibility.

The timing was what suggested it. Stratten’s group had arrived in Washington about a week ago; the reinforcements from Los Angeles had arrived a few days later. When you moved into an area and you had it in mind to do violence, you didn’t spend any longer than you had to setting things up. So whatever they planned to do, they planned to do it soon.

Killing Barbara Norris had been an act of desperation; if they’d had sufficient time they’d have done it more dramatically or more quietly. One or the other. The job they’d done on Norris was the kind of thing you did when you didn’t have time to do it better. If the vicious mutilation had been intended as a message then its delivery had been hasty: with sufficient time they’d have planted the body where it would have attracted more attention. The front step of a newspaper building or the side door to a police station or the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.

So they were in a very big hurry now. That meant it was probably on for today.

They had a sense of dramatics. You could tell that by the arrogant set of Stratten’s head in the photo, if not by what they had done to Norris. So it was a good bet their master plan would involve something public, something big, something not merely violent but catastrophic. Because of the odds you had to rule out the probability of an attempt on the President’s life. The President only had seventeen days left in office: he hardly made a priority target.

What was left? The President-elect was junketing in Europe. They weren’t likely to go to all this trouble merely to plant bombs in the Pentagon or the Library of Congress; Stratten didn’t look the sort who would take much satisfaction from the anonymous bombing of symbolic buildings.

So it wasn’t far fetched and it wasn’t even unlikely that they planned to set off bombs in the Capitol Building during the hour when the new Congress was being sworn in.

11:50 A.M. EST The Vice-President-elect was about to turn and enter the Capitol when he felt weight beside him and looked around to see Senator Fitzroy Grant at his elbow. Grant gave him the benediction of his lifted cigar and extended his hand, and they shook hands formally because they were in public. The Senate Minority Leader said, “Too bad about those young people down there with their picket signs. Spoils a flavorful day, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Fitz. I think if they weren’t down there we’d miss them. You get so used to them.”

Fitzroy Grant had a dewlappy face and bassett eyes set in deep weathered folds; a sly figure, full of insinuation and Edwardian gallantry; an engaging grin and the vanity of polished shoes and good clothes and cared-for hands. He ran a palm over his head carefully, not dislodging the neat wave in his senatorially white hair and waved genially to a passerby. When Ethridge glanced that way he saw that the passerby was Senator Wendell Hollander of Kentucky, elderly and bowlegged, coming up the steps like a crab. Hollander was puffing; he didn’t look at all well, but then he hadn’t looked well in the eighteen years Ethridge had known him. Hollander was the picture of the seedy, rheumy, larcenous and crafty Southern politician, but of course that was only the surface stereotype perpetuated by the press: underneath Hollander was as sober as a Jersey City judge and as gentle as a school of piranha.

Hollander came forward busily disposing the muscles of his face toward lines indicative of pleasure. He was a little deaf and shouted. “Mr. Vice-President-elect, suh! Mr. Senator!”

“Hello Wendy.” Ethridge almost managed to make his voice sound cordial. There was the ritual of handshaking. Ethridge hated Wendell Hollander and he was certain Hollander hated him, but neither would ever admit it; their hostilities were covered by a warm surface pleasantness which if anything had intensified since the election because they were now members not only of opposite parties but of separate branches of the government. Wendell Hollander was Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and President pro tern of the Senate, and it was unquestioned that the club would reconfirm him in both posts today. Hollander’s seniority was impeccable; he had sat in the Senate since 1937.

Hollander extracted a gold chain from his vest pocket, consulted the snap-lid gold watch, made a loud remark about not wanting to be late, and crabbed his way into the Capitol building. Fitzroy Grant’s eyebrows cocked upward in amusement and Ethridge said, “If there was ever an unimpeachable argument for demolishing the seniority system, Wendy is it.”

“You can put that in the bank,” Grant said. “I’ve spent twenty years trying to argue with him and you just can’t do it. He only raises his voice and talks right through you. Nobody can match Wendy’s inane oversimplifications and half-truths and downright absurdities. Now and then I get in a word and one-up him, and he rears back on his dignity and leaves the room.”

“He’s a dangerous man, Fitz. We can’t afford to go on condoning these old crackerbarrel fossils who see Communists in every phone booth and want to make Asia into a desert.”

“Well I suppose. But he’s hard to dislodge. The man’s a hero in those regions where it’s known as fact that the nation is in the final stages of Communist subversion.”

“Funny,” Ethridge murmured, “I seem to remember you expressing the same sentiments back around the time of Joe McCarthy.”

It made Senator Grant smile. “I thought the campaign was over, Mr. Vice-President — or would you like to compare voting records?”

“Mr. Minority Leader,” Ethridge said with a feeling of happy comfort, “I believe it’s time we went inside and attended the formalities.” And the two old friends turned to enter the Capitol.

As they did, a big yellow-haired man in a coffee-stained topcoat intercepted Ethridge’s Secret Service detail and began to talk swiftly into Agent Pickett’s ear.

Ethridge was about to walk past the men when Agent Pickett took a sidewise pace which courteously barred his path. “Excuse me sir. This is Mr. Lime from our headquarters.”

The big blond man nodded. “Mr. Vice-President.” A cigarette hung in the corner of Lime’s wide flexible mouth. He had an amiable bulldog face and a cheap haircut and big hard violent hands.

Lime said, “I don’t mean to cause alarm—”

“But you’re about to,” Ethridge said, smiling to take the edge off it. “Whenever a man starts out by saying that it means he’s about to kick you in the guts.”

It made Lime smile a little before he said, “These things almost always come to nothing. But you need to be advised — we think it’s possible a radical group plans to bomb the Capitol.”

“When?”

He saw Lime’s eyes narrow with quick respectful scrutiny and it wasn’t hard to tell why. Ethridge had brushed past all the obvious and commonplace reactions — What? Bomb the Capitol? Why that’s outrageous! You can’t let them get away with that! Who are they? What makes you think anything like that’s afoot! No: “When?”

Lime said in answer, “We’ve got no hard information. But if they do it at all they’d be likely to do it with both houses in session.”

“In other words right now?”

“It’s possible,” Lime conceded.

“Do you want to clear the building?”

He saw Lime hesitate. Ethridge said, “Of course I have no way to advise you — I don’t know how serious the threat is.”

“That’s the trouble,” Lime admitted. “We don’t know that there’s any threat at all.”

“Have you got your people inside searching?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I assume you don’t suspect any members of Congress of being a party to whatever it is you suspect?”

“No. It appears to be a small group of radicals.”

“Well they won’t get onto the floor of either chamber then. They’ll be in the visitors’ gallery if they’re in the chambers at all, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And your men are searching there? Posting themselves there to prevent anyone from throwing things?”

“As much as possible, yes.”

“Then I think we’d better proceed with things on schedule,” Ethridge said. He looked at his watch: eleven fifty-seven. “I don’t mean to seem callous but we’ve been bombed before. It’s never done much injury or damage. The Constitution requires that this Congress convene at noon today, and unless you have something very strong to go on, I don’t think we should attempt to evacuate the Capitol.”

Agent Pickett, always conscientious, said in his Alabama drawl, “That’s what Mr. Lime said to me, sir, but for the sake of your safety I think I ought to recommend that you not go inside until we’ve checked it out.”

“That may take an hour,” Ethridge said. “They’ll be starting the proceedings in two minutes’ time.”

“Yes sir,” Pickett said. “I still think it might be a good idea for you to wait, sir.”

Lime said, “We’ll have to leave that to you,” and turned to hurry into the building.

Ethridge looked around. Fitzroy Grant had been buttonholed by someone else and had already disappeared inside. Ethridge touched Ted Pickett’s sieve. “Come on, then, I don’t want to be late,” and walked in under the high doorway.

12:05 P.M. EST The Washington press corps numbered more than two thousand accredited correspondents from the United States and thirty foreign nations. Armed with press cards which Stratten had obtained from a source he hadn’t divulged, Bob Walberg and his sister and three others had gained entry to the Capitol and its two press galleries half an hour before. It had gone just as smoothly as Stratten had predicted. Yesterday the Walbergs and the others had shaved their beards and trimmed their hair and fitted themselves into the Establishment clothes they were now wearing; Stratten had filled their wallets with all manner of false ID.

And Stratten had briefed them thoroughly. The Capitol had been bombed twice before. In 1915 a German instructor from Cornell University had protested American arms sales to the Allies by setting off an explosive device in the Senate reception room; it hadn’t done much damage. In 1970 radicals had exploded a bomb in the Senate wing — a powerful explosive planted in a men’s lavatory on the ground floor. Only one bomb, but it had damaged seven rooms: knocked down walls and blown doors off their hinges. The plastic explosive Bob Walberg carried was considerably more potent than that — and his companions carried four more like his. And this time it was for real: the 1970 explosion had gone off in the small hours of the morning when there had been almost no one in the building. Today Congress was in session and Stratten had both wings covered: three in the House chamber, two in the Senate. It was going to do one hell of a job on the Establishment.

Right on, Bob Walberg thought. Reporters milled around him, getting in and out of seats, squeezing along the aisles of the press gallery. It was a cinch to spot the Secret Service agents in their business suits, giving everybody the eye. He kept a straight face while he lifted the briefcase onto his lap and snapped it open. He knew the guards were watching his movements but they had poked through the briefcase down at the door before they’d admitted him and they hadn’t found the bomb then so they weren’t going to spot it now. Nobody was going to find it until it was too late.

Along the back row of the press gallery stood a few men in uniform but Stratten had said not to worry about them. They were the Capitol Police Force and most of them were patronage appointees — students, part-timers.

He took a notebook and pencil out of the case and snapped the case shut. As he did so he glanced at his watch: ten past noon. The proceedings were late getting started, but then it was always like that. As he set the briefcase down under the seat between his ankles he touched the rivet under the brass catch to start the time mechanism. It could always be stopped — that was the advantage of using a stopwatch for a time device. But it was ticking now and Bob Walberg knew he had thirty minutes to get away and his nostrils dilated and he began to sweat.

The galleries were settling down. At the far end of the press gallery he saw Sandra, looking professional with a pad in her lap and a pencil poised over it.

Below him Congressmen were getting settled in their semicircular rows of chairs. The Speaker of the House, Milton Luke, emerged from a door behind the Speaker’s rostrum. The Doorkeeper was ushering in dignitaries, bringing them down the center aisle and seating them. Bob Walberg’s seat was in the third row of the press gallery, above the rostrum and a few yards to its left; he judged the distance critically and decided the bomb in his case would take out a good part of the left-hand section of Representatives’ seats.

Somebody was tapping a microphone, blowing into it to test it; the sounds were echoing over the loudspeakers. The Chaplain of the House was at the rostrum and Bob Walberg heard his aged voice crackle over the PA system: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord...” And Bob Walberg thought automatically Psalms 33:12 and had a moment’s image of Sabbath School at Temple in Culver City, the rabbi talking in gentle reasonable words about the goodness of God and men. It made him remember his Bar Mitzvah and the Schwinn bicycle his father had given him. Stupid middle-class phony liberal with his smelly delicatessen and his NAACP contributions and his sickening hypocrisy.

“Almighty God,” the Chaplain intoned, “we pause at the beginning of this Ninety-fifth Congress to thank Thee for Thy providential care over us...”

The summer of Bob Walberg’s Bar Mitzvah they had had the riot in Watts and he remembered his father loading the shotgun: Those bastards come down my street we’ll see what happens, hey? His father with the socialist platitudes and the color TV that was the first in the neighborhood, the slave wages he paid the black and Mexican workers who mowed his lawns and cleaned out the deli and kept house for the Walbergs while the Walbergs spent weekends in Las Vegas and sent Bob and Sandra to camps and schools for middle-class problem children.

“...Thy wisdom and Thy grace unto this new Congress as we climb this holy hill of our nation’s life and pray that Thou endow all those who serve Thee in this place with nobility of spirit and character. In the Redeemer’s name we pray. Amen.”

The Reverend Mosley stepped down and the Clerk of the House approached the microphone. Bob Walberg looked at his watch.

“Representatives-elect to the Ninety-fifth Congress, this is the day fixed by the Twentieth Amendment of the Constitution and Public Law nine-four-dash-six-four-three of the Ninety-fourth Congress for the meeting of the Ninety-fifth Congress of the United States. As the law directs, the Clerk of the House has prepared the official roll of the Representatives-elect. Credentials for the four hundred and thirty-five districts to be represented in the Ninety-fifth Congress have been received, and are now on file with the Clerk of the Ninety-fourth Congress...”

It was no good telling him what a hypocritical old klutz he was. He wouldn’t know the truth if it kicked him in the teeth. Sending contributions to Israel and keeping his accounts in a bank that did business with South Africa and you just couldn’t make him see.

“The reading clerk will call the roll.”

“The state of Alabama. Mr. Price...”

Sixteen past noon. Another eight or ten minutes, and out. The thing was not to look like you were in a hurry. Ask the guard on the way out where the men’s room is.

“The state of Mississippi. Mr. Bailey...”

He could almost feel it ticking between his ankles. His watch: twelve-nineteen. It was due to go off at twelve-forty; all of them were. Get out at twelve-twenty-five, he thought. That’ll give me fifteen minutes to get clear. Linc will have the car ready by the corner of the New Senate Office Building, and Darleen’s got the Oldsmobile parked up on Tennessee Avenue so we can make the swap: if some idiot gets the license number of the first car we’ll still be away clean. By the time they start setting up roadblocks we’ll be on our way through Baltimore, heading for the Jersey Turnpike.

Martyrs are cheap, Stratten had drummed into them. Any stupid head can be a martyr. We’ve got to prove you can do it and get away with it. That’s the whole point, isn’t it. Not just that you can attack the Establishment, but that the Establishment’s powerless to do a thing about it.

The bird next to Bob Walberg was giving him an odd glance. Bob straightened his face and pretended to jot a shorthand note in the pad on his knee.

“The roll call discloses that four hundred and twenty-seven Representatives-elect have answered to their names. A quorum is present. Now the next order of business is the election of a Speaker of the House of Representatives for the Ninety-fifth Congress. Nominations are now in order... The chair recognizes Mr. Breckenyear of Louisiana.”

“Mr. Clerk, as chairman of the Democratic caucus, I am directed by the unanimous vote of that caucus to present for re-election to the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives of the Ninety-fifth Congress the name of the Honorable Milton C. Luke, a Representative-elect from the State of Connecticut.”

“The chair recognizes Mr. Wood of California.”

“Mr. Clerk, as chairman of the Republican conference and by authority, direction, and unanimous vote of that conference, I nominate for Speaker of the House of Representatives of the Ninety-fifth Congress the Honorable Philip Krayle, a Representative-elect from the State of New York.”

“The Honorable Milton C. Luke, a Representative-elect from the State of Connecticut, and the Honorable Philip Krayle, a Representative-elect from the State of New York, have been placed in nomination. Are there further nominations?... There being no further nominations, the Clerk will appoint tellers. The Clerk appoints the gentleman from Ohio, Mr. Block, the gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Westlake, the gentlewoman from California, Mrs. Ludlum, and the gentlewoman from Vermont, Mrs. Morrison. Tellers will come forward and take their seats at the desk in front of the Speaker’s rostrum. The roll will now be called, and those responding to their names will indicate by surname the nominee of their choice — Luke or Krayle. The reading clerk will now call the roll.”

“The State of Alabama. Mr. Price...”

Bob Walberg looked at his watch and looked up across the gallery. Sandra was watching him.

It was time. He stood up, apologizing sotto voce to the lady beside him; he placed his briefcase on the seat, as if to save it for his return, and made his way out into the aisle past the lady’s knees, and turned up to the back of the gallery. The uniformed guard watched him approach. Bob Walberg whispered in the guard’s ear and the guard pointed and whispered something which Bob Walberg didn’t catch, but he nodded and thanked the guard and slipped out.

12:30 P.M. EST The East Portico afforded the best exit from the Capitol because you could head right out Maryland or Pennsylvania Avenue without getting tangled in the tortured traffic patterns of the Mall. With that in mind David Lime had posted himself beside the radio car on East Capitol Street immediately below the Portico where he could watch the faces of those who emerged from the building. It was a long shot; of course it was a long shot — everything was.

He kept fighting the impulse to reach into the car and snatch up the microphone and bleat into it: has anybody found anything? They would let him know if they did.

He looked around again, turning a full circle on his heels, and now he began to develop an interest in the spruce-green Plymouth that had pulled up at the curb below the New Senate Office Building. It had a young man in a self-conscious Afro at the wheel and white wisps of exhaust flailing from its tailpipe. Lime automatically noted the license number in his pocket pad and this time he succumbed to the urge to reach for the microphone.

“Dispatch, this is Lime.”

“Go ahead Lime.”

“Have you got a squadrol on Maryland Avenue between here and Stanton Square?”

“Hold on... Car Five Niner, you on Maryland? Whereabouts? Okay, stand by... Hello Lime?”

“Right here.”

“Affirmative your query.”

“Request you hold your car on Maryland until further notice from me.”

He heard Dispatch relay the message to Car 59 and re-experienced the irritation he always felt when dealing with vehicular patrols: you had contact with Dispatch but not with other cars and therefore everything had to be relayed through Dispatch. It was the only method that made real sense but nevertheless it was annoying.

Lime said into the microphone, “Convey this to Car Five Niner, please. A ‘Seventy-two Plymouth four-door, blue-green, license New Jersey Samuel Bravo Dog Three Three Four. If that car comes north on Maryland with more than one person in it, I want it stopped.”

“Affirmative Lime... Car Five Niner—”

Lime handed the microphone to the driver and turned to look up at the Capitol steps. Chad Hill was coming down two steps at a time, not out of any visible urgency but simply because that was the way he liked to move. When Lime had asked for his transfer out of NSA and they had shunted him over to Secret Service he had not succeeded in bringing any of his own people with him and he had been forced to pick an aide from among strangers. Having hired Chad Hill he was able to find no plausible reason to fire him; but Hill had an uncanny capacity to irritate him right up to the breaking point: God save us from eager beavers.

Chad Hill reached the car and gave him a pained look. “We’ve eyeballed everybody in the visitors’ gallery and the uniformed boys have done a second go-round on packages and handbags.”

“Nothing?”

“Not a damn thing.”

“What about the press gallery?”

Hill’s head jerked back. “My God. I never thought of that.”

Neither did I until just now. Lime said gently, “Do it then.”

“Yes sir.”

Chad Hill turned to trot away and Lime’s glance rode up past him to the top of the steps. Lime said, “Never mind, Chad.”

“What?” Hill was swinging back.

A middle-aged black woman had emerged at the Portico and Lime had a feeling that was Beulah Moorehead from Los Angeles, and he was sure of it when the Walberg twins loped out behind her.

Lime talked fast. “Get inside — tell our people to get to the PA mikes and clear the building. I’m calling the bomb squad. On the run, now.”

Lime put his hand into the car window and the driver slapped the microphone into it. Two more people emerged at the Portico and trotted down the steps behind Mrs. Moorehead and the Walbergs. They were slanting north as they came down the wide steps — heading generally in the direction of the green Plymouth — and Lime barked into the mike, “Bomb Squad, Dispatch. Make it fast. I’ve made five suspects leaving the building. Tell Bomb Squad to start looking in the press galleries in both chambers. I’m having the building cleared now. Tell Car Five Niner to remain on station to pick up that green Plymouth if it gets away from me. Out.” He tossed the mike in past the driver and wrenched the door open. “Come on with me.”

“On foot?”

“Does your union prohibit it? Get your hand near your piece.” Lime was in motion, heading across the soggy dead grass with his plunging stride, a fresh cigarette dangling unlit. The driver panted to catch up. Ahead of them the five people were moving straight toward the Plymouth, walking very fast. Lime began to run, sweeping back the side-vented coat that accommodated his service revolver. He raised his arm overhead; his hand described a quick arc and Secret Service men began to converge from several points.

Now the five were piling into the Plymouth, still unaware they had been made. The agent from the Senate Office Building doorway reached the passenger side of the car and showed them his gun. Lime, on his toes and running full out, couldn’t hear anything with the wind slapping his ears; the agent was talking into the car and then a burst of white exhaust puffed from the car’s pipe and the car was squealing out into the avenue. The agent spun all the way around, knocked off his feet.

It was about forty yards: Lime got down on one knee and braced his shooting arm in the open palm of his left hand and shot for the tires, cocking the revolver with his thumb and firing single-action, six very rapid ones; then he was on his feet and running again, searching his pockets for fresh ammunition.

He had exploded a rear tire but the Plymouth was still going, lumping along on the rim. Probably doing thirty miles an hour, with Lime and his men running after it. It was a block ahead when the squadrol, its red and blue lights flashing, came in sight on a collision course and slewed across the Avenue, blocking traffic in both directions and sealing off the Plymouth.

Lime kept running, his coat flying, plugging cartridges into the side-swung cylinder of the S & W, and beyond the Plymouth the uniformed EPS cops were pouring out of the cruiser and clawing for their .38’s — it was not yet certain the Plymouth wouldn’t ram the squadrol. There was a great racket: the cruiser’s blockage had caused a rear-end chain collision in the far lanes of the avenue and there were bangs and squeals and grunts of metal. The Plymouth was lurching toward the curb and when Lime saw that they were trying to drive it up on the sidewalk to eel past the cruiser he dropped to his knee again and began to shoot with care. The EPS cops followed his lead and almost instantly someone’s bullet exploded a front tire and the Plymouth rocked over against the building wall, narrowly missing a terrorized pedestrian. The Plymouth dug its bumper corner into the building and it wasn’t going anywhere after that. Its doors popped open on the near side but the EPS cops had it enfiladed and Lime was coming in on the dead run, and when the six people climbed out of the car they had their hands in the air like victims of a stagecoach robbery in a John Ford movie.

Lime pushed past the uniformed cops. He was puffing, and angry with himself for it: he hadn’t run more than three blocks’ distance. In college he had done the four-forty with no effort at all. He swept his glance over the six from the car, trying to single out the leader, but he couldn’t pick a spokesman by looking at them — so he made an arbitrary choice: he selected the weakest-looking face and went to work on Robert Walberg.

The crowd from the wrecked cars in the avenue was making so much noise Lime could barely hear himself. He waved a couple of cops toward the incensed civilians and addressed himself to the Walberg boy. A muscle worked at the back of Walberg’s jaw. Lime kept talking to him: “Where are the bombs, boy? Where’d you leave them? Come on, let’s have it. Where’d you put the bombs, Bobby?”

If you know the name, use the diminutive; it helps break them down, it makes you Authority. Maybe they’d called him Robbie or Bob-o but Bobby was most common, most likely. “Come on, Bobby.” Lime had a cigarette between his lips; he struck a match but did not stop talking so that the cigarette pumped up and down violently while he tried to light it; he succeeded only in blowing out the match, and tried another.

Walberg’s eyes mirrored his terror and Lime didn’t even give him time to answer: he mentioned Stratten and Alvin Corby and made it very clear to Walberg that he knew everything: that he knew a great deal more than he did in fact know; and finally he let himself run down and waited for Walberg’s answer.

It might have worked but the big black one in the Afro butted in and none of the cops had the sense to stop him. “Don’t tell the pig nothing, boy. You go get fucked, honkie. We don’t tell you mothers nothing.”

Lime made an angry gesture and his driver whipped past and yanked the big Negro away. It was probably too late after that but Lime kept pushing Walberg: “Come on, Bobby. Where are the devices? When are they set to go off? Come on, Bobby.” He had the gun in his fist and he allowed the terrible rage to leak out through his eyes; he was right up close against Walberg, breathing smoke into the boy’s face, and the boy’s jaw was juddering with fright.

Then Lime heard the muted chug of the first explosion, like a hard-cued break against a rack of pool balls, and his face changed with the realization that his questions were too late.

12:40 P.M. EST In the Senate the two bombs went off about seven seconds apart.

Dexter Ethridge had watched Gardner, his successor, go down the center aisle to be sworn in, and then take his place at Ethridge’s old desk on the Republican side of the aisle.

And now before Ethridge had time to move, before he had time to react at all, the wall behind the rostrum began to tilt and heave: the shock wave hit him, pressed him back into his chair.

He saw the partition begin to crumble behind the podium, bringing the lower seats of the right-hand half of the press gallery down toward the Senate floor, as reporters shrieked and clawed. Chunks of masonry and wood shot through the air and choking dust filled the chamber and the overwhelming noise echoed and reverberated. A shoe, incredibly intact, hit the arm of Ethridge’s chair and lodged there. It grazed his fingertips, no more. Ethridge drew air wildly into his chest in panic. There were bodies, human bodies in clothes, hurtling through the air like projectiles. Pieces were cracking out of the high ceiling. Plaster andsawdust made an immediate dense stink.

And now Ethridge was moving, sliding out of the chair, seeking blindly for shelter with the intuitive response of a man who once had heard 77mm shells coming in and knew how to dive for cover.

Down on his face: he shoved his head under the seat of the chair and wrapped his arms around his face and he was like that when the second bomb exploded. The floor jumped, bashed his chest; debris rained on his exposed rump and the backs of his legs. He found himself thinking he was going to have a hell of a bruise on his hip from that one and he might be limping for a few days...

Someone was screaming insistently close by, loud enough to drown out much of the other racket. Objects were slamming against walls and furnishings and something in this madness collapsed the chair above him: it broke off at one side and he felt the jarring blinding blow against the back and top of his head, and then he was sputtering and shoving with his arms and scrabbling with his feet to get out from under the weight of the thing that was on him.

This is a hell of a position for the Vice-President-elect of the United States of America. He was giggling a little, backing out of the trap, his butt way up in the air, on his chest and knees, backing out, giggling... He pulled his head out and up and saw that the chair had broken only on its left side; it had tilted over, rather than flattening straight down, and it had left a triangularly tent-shaped opening which had saved his skull the direct crushing smash of the enormous chunk of plaster that had fallen on it.

His head stung with an awful pain and he lay facedown again, feet lodged against the base of some other chair. His eyes were closed against the pain. The cloudburst of debris had tapered off; things were cracking now, pattering like gravel, splitting and splintering and settling, but the overwhelming noise now was from human voices — the voices of terror and the voices of agony, and a man somewhere very nearby saying over and over again, “Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus.”

There was a long splintering crack, and a momentary silence, and a shuddering crash afterward: a wall coming down, or a section of gallery. Someone yelped like a small dog and the voice nearby was still moaning, “Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus,” and Ethridge squinted his closed eyes tight against the pain in his head. In the distance he heard a long rising human scream and he had heard a scream like that once before from the throat of a man eviscerated by shrapnel on a dismal battlefield, but this was no battlefield this was the Senate of the United States and this could not possibly be happening here, it was unthinkable.

When he opened his eyes virtually all the lights had gone out. Ethridge heard the moans and cries and had to check to make sure he wasn’t uttering sounds himself. He sat up slowly on his knees, bracing his hands against the remains of furniture but then his right hand slid against a resilience of flesh and he recoiled.

His head whipped around and the sudden movement blinded him with pain; he pressed his palms to his temples and slid fingers toward the top of his head, half expecting to probe into a pulpy mush at the top of his skull: but it was all normal hair and scalp, and chunks of plaster. He felt no softness, not even the dampness of blood. Now he moved his head with slow caution and in the very bad light he saw only a slow-swirling fog of dust and smoke.

He stayed on his knees until moving beams of light began to play through the wheeling mist and he began to catch the voices of whole people, the ones using the flashlights. A small fire burned somewhere across the room. In the uncertain visibility Ethridge caught sight of a figure sprawled broken across the wreckage of a chair: he moved close and recognized the dead face of Allan Nugent who had been the senior Senator from Indiana.

Ethridge climbed across Nugent’s corpse and made his cautious way down toward the worst destruction, looking for survivors to assist. He had been buffeted and slammed and abraded by the violence but he was on his feet and moving, and in the old Army if you were an officer capable of movement you helped.

The dense dust settled faster now and more flashlights appeared; in the growing light he saw people making their way by ones and twos toward the exits, some walking unaided, some dragging themselves, some dragging others. One man was running, until someone stopped him with a stiff-armed block. No one was screaming any longer but the ruins were filled with groanings.

He found Alan Forrester, the junior Senator from Arizona, sitting with his back to an overturned desk, rubbing his eyes with thumb-enclosed fists like a small child who has just been awakened. Ethridge knelt by him and pulled Forrester’s hands away from his face. “Are you all right?”

“I... uh.”

“Are you all right, Alan?”

Now the eyes came open and Forrester blinked, squinting. His eyes were incredibly bloodshot but he didn’t look injured. Ethridge reached for his arm. “Come on.”

Forrester let Ethridge assist him to his feet. “Dex? Dex?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“Christ, Dex.”

“Head for the lights, Alan. Can you find your own way?”

Forrester was shaking his head violently as if to clear it. “Never mind. I’m all right — I just came apart for a minute there. I’ll help you look.”

“Good man.”

The two of them prowled down into the incredible rubble. At once they fell upon a heap of debris and began to claw at it because a human arm protruded from it but when they had pawed the rubble away they saw that the arm was severed: the young Arizonan looked up at Ethridge and his voice went rusty and almost soundless: “Oh my dear God, Dex.”

Ethridge made a careful point of not looking at the fabric of the sleeve or the shape of the hand. He climbed over the pile and went on until he found a man slumped across a desk with one hand under his forehead and the other dangling at arm’s length. He lifted the man back in his seat by the shoulder and recognized young Gardner, his own successor in the Senate, who had been sworn just before the explosion, and for one terrible instant Ethridge thought Gardner was dead too but then the eyes fluttered open and rolled sightlessly.

“Concussion, I think,” Ethridge said. “Can you carry him out Alan? I’m going to keep looking.”

The flashlights were close by, moving fitfully; men were calling back and forth. Forrester got Gardner up on his wide back in a fireman’s carry and heaved him away, calling back over his shoulder: “Watch yourself, Dex.”

Ethridge intended to. You didn’t help anyone by falling down and breaking your own ankle. He probed into the wheeling dimness and found a mangled body half-buried in shattered cords of wood. Nobody he recognized; probably a reporter; and now he began coming across bodies in great number, many of them mutilated but some of them uncannily natty in repose, and of the six or seven he tested for respiration and heartbeat he found only one member of the Senate — March of Idaho.

Now the rubble stirred just ahead of him, somebody trying to dig himself out; a hand thrust out through a hole and Ethridge scrambled toward it and began heaving chunks of stone and plaster away and finally he had exposed the tunnel under a pair of adjacent senatorial desks — a tunnel which by some curious caprice had remained inviolate and had sheltered its occupant although the gallery partition had fallen right across it.

It was Fitzroy Grant and he was quite alert and conscious.

And Fitz Grant demanded in a voice like an Indiana hog caller’s, “Jesus God damn Christ what in the hell is all this?”

“Are you all right?” Ethridge said in awe.

Grant’s sad drinker’s eyes focused slowly upon him.

The slow splendid deep voice rolled out with full strength: “When I’ve made an inventory of my bones I’ll let you know, Mr. Vice-President. But in the meantime how in the hell did we get here and what in the hell is this? Limbo, by the Lord! The ninth circle? My good Faust — lead me the hell out of here!”

8:10 P.M. Continental European Time The four Secret Service agents rattled around the sitting room of Fairlie’s suite, restive and suspicious and angry, and his aide Liam McNeely for once in his life was sitting up straight in a chair, with his slim boudoir face poked defiantly toward the radio and the booming voice of the BBC Home announcer.

Clifford Fairlie walked across the room and his hands reached up to draw the drapes against the misty chill darkness of the Parisian night but his eyes were not focused on anything much at all; he was listening — to the droning radio and for the telephone’s bell.

He shambled to the highboy and poured an ounce of Dubonnet into a crystal aperitif glass with the hotel’s monogram on it. Walked to the radio and fiddled with the tuning dial but effected no improvement in the background static. The French radio was carrying the story as well but Fairlie did not want to concentrate on translating in his head.

He prowled the room now, too eruptive to sit still, sipping the Dubonnet until it was gone, after which he carried the empty glass around with him, rotating it between his palms. McNeely’s head kept turning, indicating his attentiveness to fairlie’s movements, but neither McNeely nor the Secret Service agents spoke: either they were too stunned by the news or they were awaiting a cue from Fairlie.

“...complete listing of casualties has not yet been released, as it is understood the authorities are still sifting through the rubble of the two legislative chambers of the American Congress which were bombed little more than ninety minutes ago. Of course the President-elect, Mr. Fairlie, was not in Washington, and his Vice-President-elect, Mr. Ethridge, is reported to have escaped serious injury although he was present in the Senate when the powerful devices were detonated.”

It penetrated Fairlie’s consciousness that the British Broadcasting announcer was winging it: tossing out time-consuming bits of background information to fill the time because he had run out of hard news to report, then swinging back into the bits and pieces that had come in on the international newswires and recapitulating the story which by now everyone in the world had heard.

“It was announced officially by the White House Press Secretary, Mr. Hearn, that swift action by the United States Secret Service resulted in the capture of six suspected terrorists almost immediately after the explosions in the American Capitol. According to Mr. Hearn five of those arrested actually planted the five explosive devices, and the sixth was the driver of their escape car. Names and descriptions of the six have not been divulged, but Mr. Hearn did reveal they are three men and three women. Whether the Government suspects that more than these six were involved in the... One moment, please. We have only just received this. The Director of the FBI, who has been placed in charge of rescue and investigative operations at the bombed Capitol building in Washington, has authorized the release of a preliminary list of casualties. We are advised the list will be read out by the President’s news secretary, Mr. Hearn, in just a few minutes’ time. BBC is now preparing to switch us via satellite to live coverage of Mr. Hearn’s briefing in Washington.”

There was an obsequious knock. McNeely rose with alacrity and two of the agents went with him to answer the door. It was the hotel manager, wheeling a large television console. Fairlie thought irritably that it had taken the hotel almost three quarters of an hour to locate and deliver the television set to his room — probably the same set he had had removed the day of his arrival because he detested television and found French television to be a particular abomination.

The hotel manager backed out of the room after whispering something in McNeely’s ear. The agents turned to stare at the warming TV screen, and McNeely said to Fairlie, “He says the place is crawling with reporters and the rumor’s around that you’re going to make a statement.”

“Not just yet.”

“I hope they don’t think of bringing a battering ram.” McNeely didn’t smile; he only flopped into his chair and brooded toward the screen.

The telephone.

McNeely bounced up and Fairlie watched him with care. He had left instructions with the switchboard to connect no incoming calls except from President Brewster, who had called an hour ago and asked him to stay on tap.

McNeely covered the mouthpiece with his palm and gave Fairlie an unreadable look. “It’s the girl on the switchboard. She’s holding a call for you from Harrisburg.”

“Jeanette?”

“Yes. Evidently she’s been trying to get through to you for more than an hour. I gather she’s blistering the corns off the poor girl on the board.”

That wasn’t hard to credit. Fairlie approached the phone, moving awkwardly sideways to keep the TV screen in view. It was French television of course and the sound was down very low; he could hear the BBC radio announcer introducing Perry Hearn and on the screen he could see the satellite picture of the White House Lawn, gray on a misty cold afternoon with a thick crowd waiting, breath pouring like steam from their nostrils.

“Jeanette?”

“One moment please.” An American operator’s voice.

“Cliff darling?”

“Hi sweet.”

“My God what trouble I’ve had reaching you. I finally had to pull rank — the President’s wife is calling, I told them. It sounded God-awful to me.”

“How is it there?”

“It’s madness, Cliff. You can’t imagine it. I think the whole city’s glued to their television screens as if they were bleeding to death and the tube was their transfusion bottle.”

“There hasn’t been any trouble, has there?”

“Outside of the Hill, you mean. No. I don’t think anybody’s thought of making trouble. We’re all too numb.” It was a good clear connection but she was pitching her voice high and loud as if to span the intercontinental vastness.

The TV had gone to a tight closeup of Perry Hearn’s amiable bland face and the radio carried Hearn’s voice but they were somewhat out of sync, the radio voice anticipating the movements of Hearn’s lips on the screen by a half second. As of now thirteen Senators and twenty-eight Congressmen are still missing...

“Are you all right, sweet?” He had turned his shoulder to the others in the room and spoke low, confidentially into the telephone.

“Oh I’m all right, Cliff. Just overwrought. The little one’s kicking inside me — I guess he can sense my excitement.”

“But you’re all right.”

“I’m fine. Really, darling.”

“That’s all right then.”

...list as of now includes ten United States Senators and thirty-seven members of the House of Representatives, whose bodies have been identified...

“I suppose I’ve been trying to call you because I don’t know what else to do. I needed your voice, Cliff.”

“Have you got people there with you?”

“Oh yes of course, everyone’s descended on me. Mary came over the instant she heard the news and the children are both with me. I’m very well looked after.”

...Speaker of the House Milton Luke escaped injury and is with the President at this moment. Senate Majority Leader Winston Dierks suffered a leg injury but is listed as being in satisfactory condition at D. C. General Hospital. Senate Minority Leader Fitzroy Grant will probably be released from Walter Reed Army Hospital within a few minutes...

“...wish I weren’t preggers, Cliff, I wish I were there with you.”

She had lost a baby two years ago and this time they had decided she would stay at home and not travel with him. Fairlie said, “Do you want me home?” and hated himself for it, knowing his decisions couldn’t be based on her wishes.

“Of course I do,” she replied; the softness of her voice was freed of sentimentality by its flavor of affectionate ridicule: she knew as well as he did that he wouldn’t drop everything and fly straight home on her whim.

...ter Ethridge will remain in Walter Reed Army Hospital overnight for observation and tests, but he appears to have nothing worse than a few contusions, and his physician says he’s in the very best of health. The Reverend Doctor John Mosley, Chaplain of the House of Representatives, is on the critical list at...

“...but I couldn’t very well ask it of her.”

“What?”

“Oh darling you’re not listening, are you. It doesn’t matter. I was only saying Mary’s offered to pack an overnight bag and move over here for a few days to help look after the children.”

“Might not be a bad idea, you know.”

“I think I’d rather bear my grief in private, Cliff. We’ve lost an awful lot of friends today.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

...brunt of the casualties has been borne by Washington’s press corps, for which the President is deeply grieved. At present it is known that seventy-one reporters lost their lives in the disaster...

He said, “Do you have the television on?”

“Yes, I’m watching it with one eye.”

“Doesn’t Perry Hearn look terrible?”

“I know. Midge Luke called me a little while ago, just to say Milt wasn’t hurt and she was so glad you weren’t there, and Milt told her the President looks like the last survivor of an Infantry patrol in some muddy trench. My God, Cliff, how can it have happened?”

...Capitol Building. Emergency crews under the direction of Capitol Architect James Delaney are already shoring up the chambers, but until a thorough survey has been made we’re assuming the entire building is unsafe, and all individuals and offices are being evacuated into temporary...

Jeanette’s voice continued on the wire and he wasn’t really listening to her words but he heard her voice, her tone, the soft warm nesty feeling she created so easily; it occurred to him that her real reason for calling him was not so much to reassure herself as it was to remind him of their unbroken romantic communion — to give him that to lean on; so that suddenly he felt a quick welling in his throat of gratitude and adoration.

...President will speak to the nation this evening at seven o’clock eastern standard time...

“I’d better ring off, sweet. I’m expecting word from President Brewster.”

...ordered flags to fly at half-mast until further...

“Do you think he’ll ask you to come home?”

“I don’t know. We talked about it and he said he’d get back to me.”

“What do you think you should do, Cliff?”

“If they’d hurt Dex Ethridge at all of course I’d have had to come right home, but he appears to be all right, and since they’ve caught the perpetrators I doubt there’ll be any need for me to — what?”

“I couldn’t hear you for a minute. The connection seems to be fading. I guess I’d better get off the line now. But call me when you’ve got it decided. Love me?”

“Love you,” he said very soft into the phone cupped against his shoulder. He heard the click and the static of the transatlantic cable.

...list of the dead includes Senators Adamson, Geiss, Hunter, March, Nugent...

His hand rested on the cradled phone as if to retain the thread of contact with Jeanette. He looked up. Ordway, Oxford, Robinson, Scobie, Tuchman... Perry Hearn’s mouth, moving not in synchronization with his radio voice, was an evil ugly thing and Fairlie wrenched his eyes away from the screen and carried his glass to the Dubonnet bottle.

Jeanette: soft lips and upswept hair. Not that much different from the girl he had courted back in the medieval days when you still courted girls: she had been a psych major at Vassar in pleated skirt and saddle shoes and for six months she had returned his weekend invitations unopened because when a Vassar girl received anything with a Worcester postmark she knew it was from a Holy Cross man and Vassar girls did not date Holy Cross men. Finally a classmate had informed Fairlie of this and he had had the presence of mind to drive over to Cambridge to mail the next invitation. She must have received that one: at least it was never returned to him. But there was no reply. That summer he wrote two invitations from his home outside Cheyney, Pennsylvania. These she had regretted with formal little notes. Finally in the fall he had prevailed upon a botany professor who was going off on sabbatical. The professor had taken the sealed envelope and agreed to post it. A week later Fairlie won: a phone call from Vassar — “What on earth were you doing in Alaska?”

After his first year at Yale Law she had agreed to marry him. After his second year she had married him. After the bar exams he had moved her to Cheyney and she had fallen in love with the place, the great trees, the rolling hills, the struggling Negro college and its eagerly tutorable students.

Young with childless zeal she had become compulsively tidy and organized. She took to making lists of things to do and things for Fairlie to do; she posted them on the refrigerator door, boldly penned in her expansive hand. Finally he had cured her by appending an item to her itemized list: Check likelihood of obsessive list-making on part of second wife.

They were an idyllically and atypically happy couple. The children had come soon — Liz was now fourteen, Clay was going on ten, which was to say he was more than six months past his ninth birthday — and the pressures of twenty-four-hour politics had had inevitable effects on the fabric between them, but their respect for each other’s individuality and their private sense of humor had secured them pretty well: once last fall he had got up early to dress for a campaign breakfast and when he was ready to leave the hotel suite he had crept into the bedroom where she was half asleep, and had nibbled her ear and caressed her breast and when she made a low smiling throat-sound he had whispered in her ear, “Where’s Cliff?” and she had shot bolt upright and yelled. She had scolded him for weeks about that, but each time with laughter.

“President Brewster.”

He looked up. It was McNeely, holding the phone out toward him. Fairlie hadn’t heard it ring. At least McNeely hadn’t said, “It’s the pisspot Napoleon.”

He took the receiver from McNeely and said into the mouthpiece, “Fairlie here.”

“Hold on please, Mr. Fairlie.” Brewster’s secretary.

Now the President came on the line. “Cliff.”

“Hello Mr. President.”

“Thanks for waiting.” An unnecessary courtesy: where would Fairlie have gone? Howard Brewster’s flat Oregon twang sounded very tired: “Bill Satterthwaite’s just talked to them over at Walter Reed. Old Dex Ethridge is fine, just fine.”

“They’re releasing him, then?”

“No, they want to hang onto him for a day or so, run him through that damned battery of tests they like to do.” He could almost hear the President shudder over the six-thousand-mile telephone wire. “But there’s nothing wrong with Dex, he’s fine and dandy. I always said it’d take more than a whap on the head to do any damage to a Republican.”

Fairlie said, “It’s that elephant hide we all wear.”

There followed Brewster’s energetic bark of laughter and then a ritual clearing of throat, and Brewster said in his matter-of-fact voice, “Cliff, I’m going to talk to the people tonight. It’ll be pretty late your time but I’d appreciate it a whole lot if you’d hold off on making any kind of statement until after I’ve made mine.”

“Of course, Mr. President.”

“And then I’d be truly obliged if you’d step out and back me up. We need to have a pretty good show of solidarity on this thing.”

“I can see that,” Fairlie said — cautious, not wanting to commit himself to a blank-check promise. “Do you mind if I ask what the substance of it will be?”

“Don’t mind a bit. “Brewster dropped into his man-to-man confidential voice:

“I’m going to talk tough, Cliff. Very tough. There’s a lot of screwballs out there with loud voices and I don’t think we can afford to give them time to start broadcasting conspiracy alarms and sniping at us the way they did when JFK was shot. There’s a risk of panic here, and I mean to head it off.”

“By doing what, Mr. President?” Fairlie felt the fine hairs prickle at the back of his neck.

“We’ve just had an emergency meeting of the National Security Council together with various interested parties — the Speaker, some others. I’m declaring a state of national emergency, Cliff.”

After a moment Fairlie said, “I thought you’d captured the bombers.”

“Well, we’ve got some pretty damn fast T-men and thank God for them. They nailed those degenerate savages before they’d got two blocks from the Hill.”

“Then what emergency are we talking about?”

“There’s some others mixed up in this thing — five or six that didn’t get caught, maybe more.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“Yes. I do. We do know there were more people involved in this than we actually caught at the scene.”

“You’re declaring a national emergency mainly to hunt down a handful of co-conspirators?”

“Well, we don’t know how many they are, but that’s beside the point, Cliff. The thing is, we’ve been rocked by this. Warshington’s out of kilter. Now God knows how many other groups of vicious animals we’ve got out there in the woodwork — suppose they decide it’s time to jump on the bandwagon and whip up this big revolution they’re always yelling about? What if they get the violence stirred up until we’ve got riots and snipers and bombs crawling out from under rocks in every city and state across the country? We’ve got to forestall that, Cliff, we’ve got to demonstrate that this government’s still vigorous enough to react speedily and decisively. We’ve got to defuse the savages, we’ve got to show a little muscle.”

“Mr. President,” Fairlie said slowly, “I’m beginning to get the feeling you’re talking about a wholesale nationwide roundup of suspicious characters. Is that what you mean when you talk about a national emergency? Emergency powers?”

“Cliff,” and now the voice was deep and filled to overflowing with sincerity, “I think we’re all together on this, I think the people are with us. Liberals and moderates and conservatives alike, all of us. We’re saturated with this damned violence. We’re all grieved and sickened by these atrocities. Now’s the time, Cliff — we’ve all got to join forces to freeze out the extremists, the violent animals. And if we don’t, then God help this country. If we don’t stop them right now then they’ll know for a fact nobody’s ever going to keep them from kicking over the pail.”

“I see.”

“Now at the same time,” the President continued briskly, “I mean to set an example of speedy justice with these bombers we’ve caught, because if we intend to deter other animals from trying the same kind of thing we’ve got to show that punishment can be immediate and complete. Now I don’t mean to try the case on television, mind you, but I’m going to make it clear to the people that there’s absolutely no cause for alarm — that we’ve taken the steps necessary to preserve the peace, that we’ve already got these murderers behind bars and we’re going to have their guts for guitar strings. I’m going to give them tough talk, Cliff, because I think it’s what the people need to hear, and I want to get in there ahead of the bleeding hearts before they start drowning the newspapers with crocodile tears about these poor unfortunate misunderstood children and how if they’re guilty then we’re all guilty, it’s society’s fault, all that crap.” The President drew a shuddering long breath to continue, “Before they can get up steam to do that I’m going to put these animals on trial in a public courtroom quicker than you can say Jack Robinson.”

“Well I don’t see how you can do that overnight, Mr. President. They’ve got to have a fair trial. They’ll have to be defended — the attorneys will have to have time to prepare their case.”

“I recognize that, Cliff, but I don’t mean to let any water flow under the bridge. I think you ought to have a little talk tonight with your Attorney General designate, because he’s going to have to pick this thing up in the middle and we need to make sure he’s not going to be wishy-washy.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Fairlie said. “But I’d like to come back to this national emergency you’re declaring. I still need to know the exact boundaries of it.”

“Well Cliff, you named it before. A roundup.”

Fairlie sucked breath into his chest and took his stand. “Mr. President, I don’t agree with the wisdom of that. I think it’s premature.”

“Premature? My God, Cliff, they’ve slaughtered dozens of the best people in the American Government. Premature?”

“You can’t very well blame the slaughter on every individual in the FBI’s files of suspicious radicals.”

“The point is we’ve decided not to let them take advantage. We intend to put them on ice and keep them there until this case has been tried and we’ve demonstrated our toughness by executing these bombers.” Then, into Fairlie’s stubborn silence, President Brewster added, “I don’t hold with killing, you know that, but there would be one thing worse than killing these savages, and that would be not killing them.”

“I haven’t disputed that part of it, Mr. President.”

“Cliff, I need your support on this. You know that.” The President breathed hard into the phone. “The Establishment protects us, Cliff. We’re obliged to protect it.”

“I think a roundup at this point would have a terrible effect on the country. It could only be interpreted as the overreaction of a government in panic.”

“Not at all. It would demonstrate our self-respect. To ourselves and to the rest of the world. That’s damned important right now. How can any society expect to hold together without self-respect? It’s a matter of showing muscle, Cliff, and that’s something we’ve been too reluctant to do.”

“Maybe with good reason. I think a roundup right now would give the radicals exactly the kind of provocation they want. Oh, keep surveillance on the really suspicious ones of course, but let them alone. Mr. President, the radicals have been trying for years to goad the Government into violence. If we start herding them into camps it’ll be exactly what they’ve been waiting for — there’ll be outraged cries of police state and fascist suppression and we can’t afford that now.”

“Cliff, I think you’re more concerned about their outraged cries than you are about their bombs.”

“I haven’t heard of any bombs since the Capitol, Mr. President. There doesn’t seem to be any chain reaction.”

“They’ve hardly had time yet, have they.” The President was getting curt now; he had been long enough in power to get out of the habit of conciliatory argument.

“I’d like to give it a little time, Mr. President. If we see a chain reaction starting in the next day or two — if the snipers and bombers start coming out from under those rocks you mentioned — then I’ll cooperate with you right up to the hilt. But if we don’t see any sign of that kind of trouble then I’m afraid I’m going to have to fight you on this.”

An attenuated silence, and Fairlie could all but see Brewster’s agonized face. Finally the President said in a lower tone than he had used before, “I’ll have to get back to you, Cliff. I’ll have to consult with my people. If I can’t get back to you before my broadcast I suppose you’ll get my answer from that. If we decide we must go ahead with the program as I’ve outlined it to you, then you’ll do as you see fit, I guess, but I’d like to remind you this is a damned precarious time for all of us and there’s nothing we need quite so badly right now as a show of undivided solidarity.”

“I’m very aware of that, Mr. President.”

The courteous goodbyes were distant and chilled. Fairlie sat by the telephone and brooded at it. He realized that if he were in Washington today it would be much harder for him not to be swept up in the urgent sense of horror and the unreasoning emotional demand for reactive vengeance.

It had been up to him to support Brewster, but his refusal reversed their positions. Brewster was the Chief Executive and had the right to make final decisions but only for the next sixteen days, after which the decisions would be Fairlie’s, and Brewster had to worry about that now because this decision wasn’t the kind he could present to his successor as a fait accompli. If Brewster arrested thousands of people and Fairlie quickly turned them loose, it could give Brewster and his party a terrible black eye; at the same time it could put a libertarian luster on Fairlie’s administration — perhaps not enough to convince the radicals that Fairlie could be trusted, but certainly enough to persuade them to postpone any full-scale anti-Fairlie warfare for an interim while they sat back and watched to see how Fairlie performed.

These considerations had to be coursing through Howard Brewster’s mind right now in the White House and they were considerations not easy to dismiss. Brewster was almost singularly aware of history and his place in it; given time to reflect — and Fairlie’s brake had surely given him that — Brewster might decide to recant because the alternative was to risk condemnation for one final reckless act.

There was no sure way to predict which way Brewster would go but Fairlie had offered him a way out — and Brewster, the political animal, would avail himself of it if he could.

This was not the time to fly back to Washington. The President’s televised address would take place before Fairlie’s jet could get him farther than the west coast of Ireland. If Brewster ordered the roundup Fairlie would have to return to the States at once. But if Brewster softened his approach there would be no need to break off the planned visits to Rome and Madrid, and the announcement a few hours ago that Perez-Blasco had granted diplomatic recognition to Peking made it all the more important that Fairlie complete his schedule and resolve the question of the Spanish bases. In the meantime, in the next few hours, there was nothing to do but formulate his own statement and wait.

6:35 P.M. EST The chill rain fell in a soup of drizzle and mist. It threw foggy halos around street lamps and the lights of cars that hissed past on the wet paving. Guards stood in yellow police slickers and hoods at the steps of the Executive Office Building.

David Lime crossed to the White House side of the drive and walked along the fence to the gate. At intervals inside the fence he could see the dripping shadows of alerted guards — members of the Executive Protective Service, formerly the White House Police Force, and of the White House Detail of the Secret Service: the first group to protect the building and grounds, the latter to protect the President and other persons.

A knot of troubled people stood in the night rain outside the main gate. Lime threaded his way through them and presented himself to the guards, and was admitted.

He invaded Brewster country by the low side entrance and had only just entered the press lobby, filled with reporters standing tense under the large formal paintings, when Halroyd, the Special Agent in charge of the White House Detail, drew him to the corridor again. “Mr. Satterthwaite said he’d like a word, sir.”

Lime lifted his eyebrows inquiringly and Halroyd took him along toward the basement offices which Satterthwaite and the other Presidential advisors used.

The office was very small and unspeakably cluttered with paperwork. Satterthwaite, resident White House intellectual, had no interest in appearances; the disordered piles on his desk reflected the impatient brain. Of the five or six straight chairs only two were not heaped with papers; Lime chose one, following the command of Satterthwaite’s flapped hand, and sat.

“Thanks very much, Halroyd.” Satterthwaite spoke in his high abrasive voice and the Special Agent withdrew; the door closed out the noises of voices and typewriters and teleprinters. “The President asked if I’d get a firsthand report from you before the broadcast. It was you who ran them down? One hell of an adroit piece of work. The President keeps talking about ‘that genius over in Secret Service who saved our bacon.’”

“If I’d been a genius,” Lime said, “I’d have thought faster and we’d have got the bombs out before they went off.”

“From what I’ve heard, based on the tiny bits of information you had not one man in ten thousand would have guessed there was anything going on at all.”

Lime shrugged. He wasn’t insensitive to the fact that Satterthwaite’s words were at odds with the expression on his face. The face was marked by an indelible arrogance, the hauteur of a brilliant but tactless mind contemptuous of lesser brains. Satterthwaite was a forty-one-year-old mental machine who wore thick glasses that magnified his eyes to a startling size and dressed himself with studied indifference, a challenging lack of grace. The black hair was an untidy tangle of electric curls; the blunt little hands were perpetually in motion. He had the nimble aggressiveness of his diminutive size.

“All right,” Satterthwaite said. “What have you got?”

“Not too much from the bombers yet. We’re working them over.”

“With rubber hoses I trust.”

It seemed rhetorical; Lime didn’t rise to it.

Satterthwaite said, “The NSA files identified the leader for you — the one behind these six. You know who he is. Julius Sturka.”

Lime couldn’t altogether keep the anger out of his face and Satterthwaite jumped at the admission but Lime headed him off: “I never met the man. Fifteen years ago he was working the same part of the world I was, that’s all.”

“He was an officer in the Algerian FLN. You were in Algeria during that nonsense.” Satterthwaite pushed it aside. “This man Sturka — who exactly is he?”

“Armenian, I think — maybe Serbian. We never knew for sure. It’s not his real name.”

“Balkan and obscure. That’s all rather Eric Ambler.”

“I think he fancies himself that way. Soldier of fortune, trying to overturn the world order singlehandedly.”

“But not a young squirt.”

“Not unless he was a babe in arms when he was a light colonel in the FLN. As I say, I’ve never seen him. He’s supposed to be in his late forties roughly. We’ve got one bad snapshot — I don’t know of any other photographs. He’s camera shy. But name a war of liberation in the past ten years and he’s probably figured in it. Not at the top, but not as a menial either.”

“A mercenary?”

“Sometimes. Not usually. It’s possible he was just hired to do this one but we’ve got no evidence to indicate it. More likely it’s his own caper. Sometimes in the past few years he’s worked with a Cuban named Riva, but there’s no sign of Riva in this case. Not yet at least.”

“Does he have much of a following? If he does it’s odd — I’ve never heard of him.”

“He doesn’t work that way. He’ll put together a little cell or two and concentrate on the vitals of the government he’s trying to break. In Algeria I don’t think he had more than twenty soldiers, but they were all crack professionals. Did more damage than some regiments.”

“For a man who’s never met him you know him pretty well, don’t you.”

“I was supposed to nail him. I never did.”

Satterthwaite licked his upper lip, like a cat washing itself. He pushed his glasses higher on his nose and watched without expression as Lime lit a cigarette. “Do you think you’ll get him this time?”

“I don’t know. Everybody’s looking for him.”

“You’ve alerted the other agencies? Other countries?”

“Yes. He’s probably still in this country — at least we have reason to believe he was here until late last night.”

“Here in Washington, you mean?”

“He left a calling card.”

“That agent of yours who was killed.”

“Yes, that one.”

“What makes you say that’s his calling card?”

“He seems to have been one of the people who stirred up the rebellion in Ceylon a few years ago. The government cracked down on that one hard — infiltrated the rebels and singled out the leaders and had them killed.

“The Ceylonese insurgents had to take strong measures to protect themselves. According to NSA it was Sturka who took out the government infiltrators — butchered them dramatically, left them to be found in public buildings with their tongues and hearts ripped out. It was a warning — see what happens to informers who infiltrate us.”

“Now I see what you mean by calling card.” Satterthwaite shook his head. “My God these people are of another species.” He removed his glasses and wiped them clean and held them up to the light at arm’s length, squinting at them. His eyes, Lime saw with surprise, were quite small and set too close together. The glasses had left red dents alongside the bridge of his nose.

Satterthwaite gave the glasses a pained look and put them back on, hooking them over one ear at a time. It was the first time Lime had had personal contact with him, and one of the few times he had seen the man at all; Satterthwaite was not a frequent appearance-maker on television or in any public places. He was the President’s chief advisor and he cast a long shadow but he was one of those invisible figures usually described by the press as “a high White House source.”

“Well.” Satterthwaite was reflective. “Shall we just stand here in outraged dignity? It’s a furious mess, isn’t it. The world’s most powerful system, and they can get us over a barrel so easily. Small groups can tyrannize simply by finding a pressure point. These terrorists use any weapon they can lay their hands on; they recruit any fool who’s willing to sacrifice himself in the name of some vague negative cause, and they know we’re handicapped because we can only fire the second shot.”

“That deters most of the professionals,” Lime said. “The professional doesn’t mean to get caught. Terrorism’s usually an amateur occupation — they rarely get away free in the end, they tend to end up martyrs, and it’s the amateurs who go for that. They don’t care about the second shot — they don’t care if the second shot blows them in two.”

“And here you’ve got the worst of both, haven’t you. A group of sacrificial amateurs commanded and operated by a professional who’s pulling the strings. To tell you the truth,” Satterthwaite said, “I think we’ve got our ass in a crack.”

When Satterthwaite talked he had the disconcerting habit of fixing his stare against the knot of Lime’s necktie; but now the enlarged eyes lifted, the abrasive voice hardened, the jaw crept forward. “Lime, you’re a professional.”

Lime wanted no part of what he saw coming. “I’m pretty low on the totem pole.”

“It’s hardly a time for blind obeisance to seniority and the chain of command, is it? We need a professional hunter — a man we can rely on to get the job done while the politicians keep hands off.”

“The job of nailing Sturka.”

“Yes. I’ll be frank: we’d decided to throw a net, bring in everybody who’s got a file folder, but something happened and we had to ditch that scheme. This is confidential, you understand — it doesn’t leave this room.”

“All right.”

“Everybody wants this thing wrapped up and sealed. Fast, and no loopholes. Get Sturka, and if there’s anyone behind him find out who or what it is.”

“Suppose it turns out to be a foreign government?”

“It won’t. I can’t buy that.”

Lime didn’t buy it either, but anything was possible. “Let me ask you something. Are you suggesting we make Sturka a calling card?”

Satterthwaite shook his head. “That would be playing their game. I don’t want him butchered. We’ve got to get the case packaged airtight and nail the son of a bitch and pin him up against it by the numbers. Arrest, trial, conviction, execution. It’s time to quit letting these radical prigs hector us — it’s time for us to start hectoring them for a change. But we can’t do it their way — we can’t ignore our own rules. They attacked the Establishment and it’s the Establishment that must bring them down, by Establishment rules.”

“It sounds all right,” Lime said. “But you still want someone bigger than me.”

“I like the way you size up.”

Lime dragged on his cigarette and jetted smoke. “I’ve retired. I push papers around, that’s all. A few more years and I go out to pasture.”

Satterthwaite’s smiling headshake was dubious. “Don’t you see? All the people higher up than you are political appointees. Hacks.”

“It’s an FBI case, really. Why not let them run it?”

“Because FBI smacks of police state in too many minds.”

“Nuts. They’re the ones who’re equipped for it.”

Satterthwaite rose from behind the desk. He really was short — not more than five feet five in his shoes. He said, “We’d better get along to the proceedings. Thank you for indulging my ignorance.”

They threaded the busy subterranean corridor and arrived at the press conference somewhat ahead of the President. At least it looked like a press conference: photographers prowled the room restlessly, reporters were collaring people and the TV crews had taken over with their logistical preponderance of equipment and manpower. The lights were hot and painful. Technicians were making loud demands for microphone voice levels. A cameraman yelled, “Get your damn feet off that cable,” and lashed the heavy cable like a bullwhip. Somebody was being the President’s stand-in at the podium behind the Great Seal and the TV people were setting up their camera angles on him.

One of the monitor screens was alight with a fill-in network broadcast. There was no sound but Lime didn’t need commentary to follow the pictorial coverage. A forecaster’s lighted pointer traced a schematic drawing of the Capitol’s interior structure, singling out points where damage had been sustained by the substructures under the House and Senate chambers and the brick supporting arches of the building. Now the screen cut to an exterior long shot of the Capitol — the police had set up portable floodlights to illuminate the scene; officials and men in uniform were milling around and a reporter was facing the camera, talking. The scene shifted again, hand-held cameras following people through the shattered building. Smoke still hung in the colonnaded halls. People were sifting and winnowing through the rubble and dust. By now it was assumed all the bodies, living and dead, had been found and exhumed from the piles of wreckage; they were searching now for pieces of the bombs.

A knot of journalists buttonholed Lime. “You’re the one who nailed them, aren’t you?” “Can you tell us what happened down there, Mr. Lime?” “Can you tell us anything about the bombers you arrested?”

“I’m sorry, no comment at this time.”

Across the room Perry Hearn had answered a ringing telephone; now he put it down and spoke, demanding attention; he made arm signals and everyone sought seats in the miniature amphitheater.

Talk diminished from roar to hubbub to mutter, and then silence. Satterthwaite caught Lime’s eye and beckoned; Lime moved forward and took the chair Satterthwaite indicated, behind and below the presidential podium. The Vice-President and the Attorney General and several other dignitaries filed into the room and took seats on either side of Lime. Attorney General Robert Ackert gave Lime a tight brief smile of recognition; he looked tense and wary like a pugilist who had been hit too hard and too often in the head.

They all sat in a row behind the podium, facing the reporters below. It made Lime distinctly uncomfortable. He kept crossing and uncrossing his legs.

On the monitor screen he saw one of the network anchormen, talking with earnest sincerity into the camera. Now the scene cut to the unoccupied presidential podium and Lime saw his own face in the screen; it startled him.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

President Brewster’s leather heels clicked on the hard floor. He came in from the side and immediately seemed to dwarf the room: eyes looked Brewsterwards and the President gave the reporters his grave nod as he stepped up behind the Great Seal and touched one of the microphones with his right hand while he laid a small sheaf of papers on the slope of the podium in front of his belly.

The President looked into the television eye for a silent moment. He was a very tall man, rangy, tan, his face not unattractively lined — a big face, deep square brackets creasing it right down past the mouth into the big dependable jaw. He had a full bush of hair, still a deep rich brown — dyed, probably, for his hands were veined and beginning to show age spots. Flesh was heavy under his big jaw but he had a muscular way of moving which bespoke hours in the White House pool and steam room — an expensively taken-care-of body. He had a beaky nose and small well-set ears; his eyes were paler than their surroundings. He always dressed impeccably. Mute, as he was now, he projected warmth, looked sincere and intelligent; but when he spoke with his rough-edged twang he somehow seemed, regardless of the words he spoke, inarticulate. The accent was folksy, right for overalls on a sun-grayed clapboard porch with a jug of corn and a hunting dog.

It was mainly sham — both the polished appearance and the down-home voice. You had the feeling Howard Brewster really existed only in public. It occurred to Lime that ever since the election Brewster’s face had turned steadily and remotely bitter, the outward sign of his rage and disappointment at the nation’s failure to drink from him.

The President began to speak with the customary My-Fellow-Americans-let-us-suffer-together eulogy over the towering and distinguished Americans who had been lost. Lime sat with dismal detachment listening not so much to the words as to the rise and fall of the President’s voice. Brewster was not a master rhetorician and his writers conformed to his own style; there were no ringing truths, no soaring aphorisms that might crystallize this moment in a phrase. Brewster’s talk was soothing with the old familiar vagaries; it was calculated to give people an antidote to shock and rage — a speech of warm regret, quiet sorrow, and the promise that in spite of tragedy there was well-being ahead. There was a call for sorrow but not for alarm, a need for reappraisal but not for reactive fury. Let us not lose our heads, he said. Calm, he said, and the rule of law. The perpetrators have been captured, thanks to the alert initiative of Deputy Assistant Director David Lime of the Secret Service...

Momentarily the lights were fixed on Lime; he squinted into them and nodded into the cameras. The President gave him the benediction of a paternal sad smile before he turned back into the cameras and the lights swiveled away from Lime, and that was that for his part of it except that he had to remain in his seat for the duration of the President’s talk.

It was so easy to give the people heroes nowadays, he thought. You strapped a man into a seat and shot him to the moon, and made him a hero. You put him on a horse in front of a camera, or you hired a dozen keen wits to write his speeches. Heroism was a packaged mass-market commodity, the ultimate cynicism.

People needed their myths, their heroes, and there was no room left for the real thing so you had to contrive fakes for them. It simply wasn’t possible for a new Lindbergh to emerge: technology had gone beyond the individual. Those who persisted in facing individual challenges — the ones who rowed singlehanded across the Atlantic, the ones who climbed mountains — were relegated to the status of harmless fools because what they did was fundamentally meaningless, technology had demeaned it: you could always fly the Atlantic in three hours, you could reach the mountaintop by helicopter in a painless swoop.

The President was talking tough now, carrying a big stick. The perpetrators were in hand, they would be tried, the trial would be a firm example for the world and for those who sought to impose anarchic violence upon the freely elected governments of the world. Justice and law would be served. Our equanimity was not to be taken for equivocation; our tranquillity should not be mistaken for submission, our coolness for passivity. America’s patience had been sorely tried, it was at its limit.

“Let our enemies, within and without, take warning.”

The President concluded his address and left the room without opening the floor to any questions. Lime gave the reporters the slip and made his way back to the Executive Office Building. The streets were quiet; the drizzle continued, very cold, and beyond the curtailed pools of street lamplight the shadows were oppressively opaque. Street scene from a Sydney Greenstreet picture, he observed, and went into the building.

Tuesday, January 4

5:15 A.M. EST Mario was grinning. “Man we have gone and filled the New York Times from the headlines right through to the classified section.”

The newspaper rattled like small-arms fire when Mario turned the pages. “We really trashed them. Listen here: ‘At midnight the toll stood at 143 dead, of whom 15 were U. S. Senators and 51 were Congressmen, and at least 70 journalists. Approximately 500 victims have been admitted to hospitals and emergency clinics, but nearly 300 of these sustained superficial injuries and have been released. At latest count 217 men and women and four children are hospitalized. Twenty-six remain on the critical list.’” Mario took a long breath and let it out with a nod of satisfaction. “Now talk about off the pigs!”

“Keep it down.” Sturka was in the corner of the motel room with the radio turned down low. He sat within reach of the telephone, waiting for it to ring. Alvin wearily listened and watched; Alvin felt wrung out, pain throbbed between his ears, his stomach bubbled sour.

Sturka looked like a television gangster, stripped down to his shirtsleeves with a shoulder holster strapped tight around his chest. Cesar Renaldo was asleep in his clothes on the couch and Peggy lay across the bed smoking a Marlboro and drinking coffee out of the motel bathroom’s plastic cup.

Big trucks snored by; the occasional semi-rig gnashed in and out of the truck-stop café in front of the motel. Peggy looked at Sturka. “Don’t you get tired?”

“When I get tired I hear Mao saying a revolution is not a tea party.”

Alvin slid back in the chair and went limp, eyes drifting half shut. Cesar on the couch was eyeing Peggy with a slow carnal stare. He kept his eyes on her too long: it made Peggy roll her head around, look at him, get up and go into the john. Its door slammed; Cesar smiled lazily. Cesar had moved in with Peggy two weeks ago but they had ended it quickly at Sturka’s command. The privatism of establishing couples inhibited total collectivization. It was counterrevolutionary. It was an oppressive relationship, it led right back into everything they were struggling against: the capitalist orientation toward bourgeois individuality. The pig philosophy of separating one person from the next, encouraging the individual to assert himself at the expense of his brother.

You had to fight all that. You were the oppressed black colony. You learned the frustrating impotence of nonviolent resistance, sit-ins, demonstrations: self-defeating Custerism — bourgeois games encouraged by the Establishment, kids playing at revolution. Deliberately putting yourself in jail was immature and counterproductive. It did not help end the white-skin privilege of capitalism.

The Third World struggled against imperialism and the time to smash racist tyranny was now, while the momentum was there. Put the pigs up against the wall, increase the cost of empire, open new fronts behind enemy lines to smash the state, goad the pigs into reprisals which would awaken the masses to the fat fascism of the demagogues. People had minds like concrete — mixed, framed and set — and if you meant them to listen you had to blow things up.

The phone.

Sturka picked up. “Yes?”

Alvin fixed his insomniac eyes on Sturka hunching forward. “Where are you, a phone booth? Give me the number.” Sturka scribbled on the flyleaf of the Gideon Bible and ripped it out. “I’ll go to a phone and call you back.”

Sturka cradled the telephone and reached for his jacket. “Everyone stay inside.” He opened the door and went. It was probably Raoul Riva.

Peggy was lighting a cigarette from the burning stub of the old one; she stood just inside the bathroom door, stood there for a stretching interval and finally crossed to the front window. Parted the drapes and looked out. “I don’t know.”

Alvin said, “What?”

Peggy sat down on the floor and tipped her head back against the sill. “It was an uncool getaway.”

Cesar rolled his head around. “So?”

“They got six of our people. We’d have to be stupid if we thought they’d all keep quiet. I bet they’ve given us away by now.”

Cesar said again, “So?”

“So why are we sitting here? Waiting for the pigs to rip us off?”

“Gentle down.” Cesar lay back. “Ain’t nothing to fret about.”

Peggy gave a sour bark of laughter.

Mario said, “Hey,” whipping toward the radio.

The announcer: “... arrested less than an hour ago by police who had been staked out to watch the Harlem tenement. Identified as Darleen Warner, the woman is alleged by the FBI to be a member of the conspiracy to bomb the Capitol. This arrest brings to seven the number of bomb-plot conspirators apprehended so far...”

“Oh that’s sensational.” Peggy closed her eyes.

“Get off it,” Cesar said. “You want to push that stuff out.”

Alvin gave them both bleak stares. He didn’t want a push-out session, he was too tired. They had spent days in self-criticism sessions, Sturka and Cesar leading the harsh group therapy inducing them to exorcise their bourgeois conventionalisms and their individualized fears. They had lived taut, studied intensely, learned to accept discipline; now Peggy was backsliding and it was a bad time for it.

Shut up, he thought.

Perhaps the edge of the thought struck them all because Peggy closed her mouth to a pout and did not speak. The radio droned faintly and trucks went snarling by, Mario brooded over the Times, Peggy chain-smoked, Cesar dozed.

Sturka returned so silently it chilled Alvin. He was inside closing the door before Alvin knew he was there.

“We’ll go out tonight. It’s arranged.” Sturka went around the room passing out documents.

Alvin had a look. Forged seaman’s papers, a Venezuelan passport, entry visas for Spain and France and three North African countries. So that was why Sturka had needed the photos.

Sturka hitched up his trousers with the flats of his wrists. “We’ll board ship tonight at Port Elizabeth — four of us, not Mario. She’s a tramp under Anguillan registry. Going to Lisbon.” His eyes, hard and colorless as glass, shifted toward Mario. “You’ll fly over — book a flight to Marseille on the eighth. We talked about it before. We’re still agreed?”

“Well I’m scared shitless, if you want to know the truth.”

“I don’t think they’ve made you, that’s the point. We’ve got to know.”

“But if we’re wrong they’ll grab me at the airport. They’ll throw away the fucking key.”

“We all admit it’s a risk, Mario.”

“Well I guess we’ve got to try it,” Mario muttered. All through the development of the plan Mario was the one who had stayed in the shadows of the group and maintained his contacts with the pig world. Mezetti Industries thought he was engaged in market research among people his own age. It was something Mario had proposed to his father; his father had put the company’s facilities at his disposal. Every week or so Mario went home, showed his face for a few days, kept his psychological alibi polished. Now it was necessary to make sure he was still free to move about. The group needed a member who could show himself openly.

Sturka was still talking to Mario: “We’ll have to get you to a bank today.”

“How much you need?”

“A very great deal of money.”

“What, just to get the four of you on a tramp freighter? You figure to buy the fucking boat?”

“That’s not what the money’s needed for.” Sturka smiled his chilly anger: Mario’s resistance was undisciplined.

Sturka folded his arms across his chest and his rough pitted face became sleepy as it did when he had Cesar lecture them on doctrine. “Our people are in jail. They’ll be arraigned Monday morning. The politicians will bellow about law and order, there will be waves of horrified indignation across the country. If they don’t find enough evidence to execute our people they’ll manufacture it, but they can’t afford not to execute our people. A few of the underground newspapers will try to make heroic martyrs of them, but there’s a very long list of martyrs who’ve been destroyed by the capitalist Establishment — martyrdom means nothing any more.”

Alvin listened intently because Sturka was not given to philosophical ramblings. Sturka was getting to a point.

“And perhaps we need reminding that this operation wasn’t conceived to give them martyrs.” Sturka’s eyes went from face to face and Alvin was chilled. “We had a purpose. I hope we remember what it was.”

It was a mannerism: a cue, and Mario Mezetti obeyed it. “To show the world how much you can do even if you’re only a small group, if you’re dedicated to retaliation against the fascist pigs.”

Sturka said, “We didn’t finish, did we. The purpose wasn’t merely to sabotage the Capitol, the purpose was to get away with it. To show the people we could get away with it.”

“Didn’t work,” Cesar said. His voice was hard, high-pitched, nasal. He was digging around his mouth with a toothpick. “And the reason it didn’t work was because—”

“The people are sitting.” It was as if Sturka hadn’t heard Cesar. “They’re waiting, they haven’t begun to move. They need a sign. Encouragement. The revolutionaries in this country are waiting for us to prove the time is right for revolution.”

Peggy blew smoke from her nostrils. “I thought we proved that by smashing the Capitol.”

“We would have. If our people had got away.” Sturka moved his hand in an arc. “They’re watching. If they see the bandwagon isn’t moving anywhere they won’t want to jump on it. You see?” Sturka’s idiomatics were odd; he had spent a great deal of time among Americans, but most of it overseas.

“So what we’re going to do is get our people out.”

“With a skyhook.” Peggy was expressionless.

“We’ve no room for your sarcasms,” Sturka told her. “We pluck our people out — out of the country. Deliver them into asylum and watch the world jeer at Washington. That is the whole point. Prove how weak Washington is.” Sturka’s stabbing finger sought Peggy, Cesar, Alvin, Mario; his lips formed an accidental smile. “They will react the way high-octane reacts to a lit match.”

Peggy’s head turned back and forth rhythmically, disputing it. “What are we supposed to do? Buy television time, write ‘Free the Washington Seven’ on shithouse walls? Raid the jail when it’s probbly guarded by a whole regiment? I just don’t see what you think we can—”

“Seven,” Sturka said. “Seven?”

Cesar caught it an instant before Alvin did; Cesar explained: “They got Darleen.”

Sturka absorbed it quickly and without visible reaction. “When?”

“It was on the radio when you was out. They had cops staked out at the place on Amsterdam.”

“She should have known better than to go back there.”

Cesar sat up. “The cops knew.”

“Barbara,” Sturka said absently. He was thinking.

“Maybe. But maybe they broke down those others.”

“No. None of them knew about the Harlem place.”

Cesar wasn’t willing to let it go. “Line knew.”

“The hell,” Alvin said, aroused finally. “Line won’t crack easy. They haven’t had time to break him down.”

“I didn’t say they broke him down. Maybe Line was a plant too — listen, they nailed all six of them practically on the Capitol steps,” Cesar said. “Now that was just too easy.”

“Not Line,” Alvin said. “I don’t buy that.”

Sturka turned the hawked stare toward him. His voice was very quiet. “Why? Because Line is the same color as you?”

Alvin opened his mouth and closed it. Suddenly he felt defensive. Because Sturka was right.

Cesar said, “Barbara didn’t know the time, she didn’t even know the place. We never told her it was the Capitol. Add it up. Line’s the only one who knew the program and knew about the place on Amsterdam.”

Peggy said, “Barbara knew about the Harlem place. She was there, remember?” Suddenly her head tipped back. She was facing Sturka. “You guys killed Barbara, didn’t you.”

“Sure.” Cesar drawled the word slowly, pulling his head around toward Alvin. “Your soul sister finked on us.”

Alvin played it very carefully. “All right.”

Cesar shook his head. He had scored a point but he wasn’t pressing it. Finally Alvin said, “I guess you had reason to believe that.”

“She was a plant,” Sturka said, as if that dismissed it.

Cesar was studying Alvin’s face; Cesar gave way in the end. “She had this little toy camera in her bag and I caught her with a tin of talcum powder trying to lift Mario’s prints off the bathroom glass. We left her dead for the cops to play with — we messed her up some. Maybe teach the pigs to use plants — maybe make the next one a little scared of what might happen.”

All right, Alvin thought dismally. If she betrayed them then she had it coming. He had to keep his head.

Cesar was back on Sturka. “The point is somebody finked. They got our people.”

“Barbara told them about the place on Amsterdam,” Sturka said mildly. “Nobody told them about the bombs. Line is straight.”

Alvin felt gratitude; he almost smiled at Sturka but Sturka wasn’t looking at him, Sturka was explaining to Cesar what all of them should have been able to figure out for themselves: “If Line had given the pigs a tip in advance do you suppose the pigs would have stood around outside and waited for the bombs to explode? Don’t you suppose they’d have evacuated the building and brought in the bomb squad? Our people must have tripped on their way out — someone made a revealing mistake at the wrong moment.”

Cesar was frowning but he curbed his tongue; presently he nodded, recognizing that was the way it had to be. “But we have to figure Barbara made us for them. They know who we are.”

“And that is why we’re leaving the country tonight.”

Peggy stubbed out her cigarette. She kept grinding it into the glass ashtray long after it was extinguished. “We’re going to be on every post-office wall in the country by tomorrow, we’re leaving the country on a slow boat to Lisbon, and you’re talking about getting Line and the rest of them out of hock. Sorry but I don’t follow that.”

“Discipline doesn’t require that you follow it.” Sturka opened Mario’s canvas case and upended it over the bed and Mario’s stock certificates cascaded into a disordered heap like bonfire kindling. “We’ll trash them with these. It’s fitting. Have you counted these?”

“Why?” Mario went toward the bed, suspicious.

“I have.” Sturka touched one of the certificates. It was very large and imposing, the size of Life magazine, the color and style of a dollar bill, and it represented one thousand shares of common stock in Mezetti Industries. Mezetti common was selling in the neighborhood of thirty-eight dollars a share.

Mario’s two hundred shares of NCI were worth about eight thousand dollars. His twelve hundred shares of Coast National Oil were worth just under sixty thousand. His four thousand shares of White-side Aviation were worth about eighteen thousand. And he had altogether thirty-five thousand shares of Mezetti Industries common. All inherited from the patriarchal grandfather who had used proletarian bodies for railroad ties. The canvas bag contained something over $1,200,000 in securities and they had been carrying it around on the streets for a month because Sturka had said they might need it fast when they needed it at all.

“It’s time, then,” Mario said.

Sturka began to stack the certificates neatly and slide them back into the case. “It’s time.”

Mario was dubious. “You can’t just take this much stock into a bank or a broker and tell him to sell it. It would knock hell out of the market. They wouldn’t do it.”

“Don’t sell them,” Sturka said. “Hock them.”

“For what?”

“What can you get? Half a million?”

“Probably.”

“A cashier’s check. Then you take the cashier’s check to another bank and break it down into a number of smaller cashier’s checks. Then you go to still other banks and cash some of them.”

“How much cash?”

“At least half of it. The rest in internationally negotiable certified checks or cashier’s checks.”

Mario could become shrewd in the blink of an eye when it came to finance. He had been raised in a family of financiers and the wizardry had rubbed off on him.

He latched the case. “Large bills, I guess.”

“Anything else would be too bulky. You’ll have to buy money belts for us. The cheap canvas ones will do.”

“It’s pig money, isn’t it?” Mario grinned. “We’ll use it to smash the pigs.”

“Spend an hour in a barbershop first,” Sturka adjured. “Buy a good suit of clothes. You’ll need to be presentable.”

“Naturally.”

“Peggy will go with you. You may take the car. Drive it into New York and leave it in a parking garage — tear up the ticket, leave it there. The police may have a description of it from Barbara.” But the police wouldn’t have the plate number; they had changed license plates on the car last night.

“Your chances of being arrested on the crowded streets are too negligible to worry about. You’ll blend. But in the bank you’ll have to give them a plausible reason for borrowing against the securities.”

“Sure. Peggy and I are getting married, we want to buy a yacht for our honeymoon.”

“No. That’s frivolous.”

Mario scowled; Sturka touched his arm with a fingertip. “It’s a real estate deal. Very big. Be sly with the banker, take him into your confidence. You need the cash for an under-the-table bribe to persuade the land conglomerate to accept your bid. It’s a short-term project and you’ll be repaying the loan within three months.”

Alvin stared at Sturka. The man had a command of the most unlikely things.

Mario nodded. “That’ll work.”

Cesar said mildly, “We’ll have to clean her up.”

“Jesus,” Peggy muttered.

Sturka’s finger stabbed toward her. “Your father is a college professor — you know how to comport yourself.”

“My father’s a phony liberal drunk. A fucking hypocrite.”

“You’re Mario’s secretary. A very wealthy man’s secretary — you’ll behave as you would in polite society.”

“Pig society.”

“Peggy.” Sturka’s voice was very quiet, very mild, but it shut her up. “While Mario is in the barbershop you’ll buy a demure dress and have your hair done.”

When she made no rebuttal Sturka went back to Mario. “Impress on the banker that this is confidential. No one is to know about it, it might cause your deal to go sour.”

“Sure. So no stocks change hands, no sale has to be registered with the SEC or the Exchange.”

“And your family doesn’t learn about it.”

“Yeah.”

Sturka went to Peggy. “When you’ve finished in the city take the Path Tube to Newark and go by taxi to the Washington Hotel. Time it to arrive between six-thirty and seven. Wait at the front entrance.”

“Inside or outside?”

“Outside, we’ll be watching. If I’m satisfied you haven’t been followed we’ll pick you up.”

“What if we can’t make contact there?”

“Use the usual method of leaving a message for me and we’ll arrange something.” Sturka employed a telephone answering service in the name of Charles Wernick; when you left a message for him you reversed the digits of the number: if you were calling from telephone 691-6243 you left word to call 342-6196.

Alvin yawned. Cesar said, “Wake up, okay?”

“I’ve been two days without sleep.”

“You’ll have a week to sleep on the boat.” Cesar took the pillbox from his pocket. “Take one of these.”

“Uppers?”

“Bennies. Just take one.”

“I guess not.” Alvin had come down off heroin in the Army and hadn’t touched any kind of drugs since, medicinal or otherwise; he was terrified of them, he didn’t want to get back into the spiral.

Sturka was shepherding Mario and Peggy to the door. Alvin heard the car doors, heard the car start up and drive out of the motel.

Cesar was dragging out items from the theatrical makeup kit they had bought in New York a week ago. They made one another up: styrofoam pads inside the cheeks to change the shape of cheek and jaw; skullcaps and hairpieces to change hairlines; dye to hue eyebrows and hair.

A set of cheekpads and a cropped gray smudge of a moustache and a salt-and-pepper gray hairpiece in tight kink-curls added twenty years to Alvin. Cesar said, “Remember walk a little stooped over.”

A skullcap receded Cesar’s hairline and an application of makeup and eyeglasses changed him from swarthy brigand to middle-aged businessman. Sturka became an ascetic type in a wavy brown wig and neatly trimmed goatee.

“Let’s go then.”

Outside the air was heavy with a stink of heavy morning traffic grinding up Route 22 toward Newark Airport and the city. The parking court of the motel was busy with slamming car doors, people hustling luggage into car trunks, kids hollering, salesmen driving out into the heavy traffic. The sky was a murky brown — what passed for a clear day in the smog of northeast New Jersey.

Wednesday, January 5

2:15 P.M. EST Lime left Satterthwaite’s White House office in a dour mood and ambushed a taxi. “Police headquarters.”

Lunch in the office of the President’s sardonic chief security advisor had been dreary with takeout food and Satterthwaite’s sonorous essay on political needs and realities. Lime spent the ride leaning his head far back against the cushion, eyes closed, unlit cigarette askew in his lips, thinking drowsy erotic thoughts about Bev Reuland.

“Hey man. We here.”

He paid the cabbie and got out. Sunny today and not so damned cold. He threw his head back and searched for contrails, reflecting on his fantasies. Bev always managed to prove her point without waving banners: she was thirty-four, divorced, feminine, adminstrative assistant to Speaker of the House Milton Luke. He looked at his watch. Right now she would be dictating replies to Luke’s constituents. Dear Mr. Smith, Thank you for your letter of January second. Regarding your request... Efficient by day; languorous by night; she had compartmentalized herself crisply and Lime envied her.

The reporters knew him now. They laid siege in the corridor; its musty soot seemed to have settled in their clothes. Lime pushed at the air with his palms and when they subsided from baying to muttering he told them, “No comment — and you may quote me,” and went past them through the cop-guarded doorway to the stairs.

Upstairs an FBI man had the interrogation; the subject was Sandra Walberg. The young lawyer from Harding’s office sat in a corner, very bored. The kid looked like all Harding’s disciples — shaggy, discontented, righteous. Harding had achieved his notoriety by inciting his clients to riot in court.

Lime crossed over and sat at the FBI man’s right so that he wouldn’t get the glare from the window when he looked at the girl. As he pulled the chair out and sat down the FBI man acknowledged him with a nod; the defense lawyer ignored him; Sandra glanced at him once. She was a small-boned girl with pinched features, full of sullen defiance.

The FBI man was young and vinegary, up to date in his field. His questions were compelling and logical. He spoke in a cautious tone, reserving malevolence. Of course none of it did any good: Sandra wasn’t talking. None of them was talking. There had been a few remarks from the prisoners — particularly from Bob Walberg who was more nervous than the others. “A few alterations in the Capitol.” And a grin and a clenched fist raised: “Right on!” But the young lawyer always cut in quickly, shutting them up: “Everything’s cool, baby. Keep it.”

Harding’s clients were going to be executed and the state could not seriously pretend to offer clemency because Harding had to know such an offer would be in bad faith.

Harding was handling the case in the full knowledge that there was no way on earth for him to avoid losing his clients’ lives to the executioner. The only advantage gained by anybody would be gained by Harding himself: by defending the bombers he would cement his position as mouthpiece for the radical left. Afterward he would be able to go to his people and say to them that he — the best of his kind — had tried, and had been beaten by the corrupt and unfeeling system: therefore choose violence, which I have advocated all along, because I have just proved to you that nothing else works. Lime despised the Hardings; they would fight to the very last drop of their followers’ blood.

You had to go through this charade. It was all sham and nonsense; everybody, Harding included, knew it. But you brought the prisoners up separately and interrogated them politely all day long, always with a lawyer present, always with reminders that the prisoner didn’t have to say a word.

In the evening you returned the prisoners to their solitary cells and the lawyers went home. Then after dinner you rousted the prisoners out again and took them secretly into interrogation cells and you worked them over sans lawyers and sans recitations of rights. You did this because the case demanded it: until you traced this thing to its roots you had no way of knowing how substantial the overall danger was. You had to find Sturka and you had to find out where Sturka would lead you in turn, and one way to find Sturka perhaps was to pry it out of these prisoners.

The normal pressures had been applied, and had proved minimally effective, so drugs had been introduced. Thus far the results had been poor but tonight might prove more satisfactory. In the meantime the prisoners each morning complained to their lawyers of the nightly roustings and the interrogators replied gravely that the prisoners were either dreaming or lying maliciously, The Establishment could produce a plethora of reliable witnesses to testify that the prisoners had lain undisturbed in their cells all night long; the Establishment could also produce doctors to testify that the prisoners had not been drugged. These radicals, Lime thought, had imagined a fascist police state and had created it.

In court it would be the Justice Department’s job to goad the prisoners into confessing their guilt aloud. The issues were inflammatory and volatile and only public confession by the bombers would assuage public unease. Such a confession would be obtained.

It wasn’t Lime’s department to obtain it and he was thankful for that, but he recognized the Government’s needs and knew that somehow the Government would find a lever to use against one or another of the prisoners.

He listened for ten minutes to the FBI agent’s questions. Sandra Walberg said very little and none of it was in direct response to the questions. The kid lawyer in the corner yawned without bothering to cover his lips. Lime exchanged jaded glances with the FBI man and twisted past the table and went out.

In the lobby of the Executive Office Building he found his boss DeFord and Attorney General Ackert talking to reporters. Ackert was talking without saying much, with a politician’s practice. He did it very well; his delivery was as impersonal as a print-out from a computer and he sounded like a cop testifying in court. It made him appear professional and competent; in fact he was both those things, but the act he was putting on at the moment was a conscious and deliberate role, therefore false. DeFord on the other hand was a fool but in public he had a way of giving the impression of informed crispness: he cloaked his incompetence in a fabric of secretiveness: I know the answers of course but security prevents me from divulging them at this time. He didn’t exactly say it in so many words.

There was more questioning and Attorney General Ackert was saying tonelessly, “Naturally. They’ve been informed, in the presence of their attorneys, that they have every right to remain silent, that anything they say can and will be used against them, and that they have the right to counsel at all times during questioning.”

Lime and DeFord broke away from the journalists and walked toward DeFord’s sanctum.

DeFord, twisting the doorknob, said, “I’d like to see them hang that lawyer while they’re at it.”

They went inside and the woman at the desk gave them her equitably chilly smile. Lime followed on into DeFord’s office.

DeFord sat down and tugged at the slack in his amply fleshed throat. “I, ah, had a telephone call from a gentleman named Walberg a few hours ago. The twins’ father. He’s just flown into Washington. I gather he’s tried to see his children and nobody wants to talk to him.”

Lime nodded. “He can’t comprehend that his children could possibly have had anything to do with it. There must be some mistake — a misunderstanding or a frame-up. Or maybe under the influence of bad companions. But it can’t be their fault.”

“You already talked to him, then.”

“No.”

“Eh. Well. I’m sure that’s the way I’d feel if I were in his place.”

“I’m sure it is.” Lime was thinking of Sandra Walberg. A determined up-yours resenter, that girl; how anyone could go on believing in her innocence—

“David, I’m sorry but I told the man you’d explain things to him.”

“You did.”

“He’s, eh, waiting down in your office. I thought I ought to tell you...” DeFord trailed off, turning an apologetic hand over, palm up.

“You damn fool.” Lime’s anger intensified the meaning of the drab words.

He walked out of the office and instead of slamming the door he pulled it shut with a quiet reproachful click.

Walberg had the lugubrious face of a professional mourner. His cheeks and hands were covered with freckles; his thin ginger hair was carefully combed across the baldness of his scalp. He appeared more doleful than indignant. Soft as a Number One pencil, Lime thought.

“Mr. Lime, I’m Chaim Walberg, I’m the fa—”

“I know who you are, Mr. Walberg.”

“It’s kind of you to see me.”

“It wasn’t my choice.” Lime went around his desk, spun the chair, sat. “Specifically what do you want to ask me to do?”

Walberg inhaled deeply. If he’d had a hat he’d have been rotating it in his hands. “They won’t let me see my children.”

“I’m afraid they’re the Government’s children right now, Mr. Walberg. It’s a security matter.”

“Yes yes, I understand that. They don’t want people leaking messages to or from the prisoners. They told me that. As if they think I’m in league with anarchists and assassins. In the name of God, Mr. Lime — I swear...”

Walberg stopped to compose himself. Now he summoned dignity. “There has been an error, Mr. Lime. My children are not—”

“Mr. Walberg, I haven’t the time to be your wailing wall.”

It stung Walberg. “I was told you are a cold man but people think you a fair one. Evidently that was not correct.”

Lime shook his head. “I’m only a faceless assistant to an assistant, Mr. Walberg. They shunted you onto me to get you out of their hair. There’s nothing I can do for you. My job consists mainly of making out reports on the reports other people have made out. I’m not a cop, I’m not a prosecutor, I’m not a judge.”

“You are the man who arrested my children, aren’t you?”

“I’m responsible for the arrests, if that’s what you wanted to hear.”

“Then you can tell me why.”

“You mean why I singled out your son and daughter?”

“Yes. What made you believe they were guilty of anything? Were they running? Because my children have had misunderstandings with officers, they’re afraid of the police — you know how the young people are. But to run away from a uniform and a gun — is this proof that—?”

“You’re jumping to conclusions, Mr. Walberg, but I’m not at liberty to divulge the Government’s case. You’d have to see the Attorney General, but I doubt he’d tell you very much. I’m sorry.”

“Are you old enough, Mr. Lime, to remember the days when you could tell good from evil?”

“I’m afraid I’m very busy, Mr. Walberg.” Sorry, the number you have dialed is not a working number. Lime walked to the door and held it open.

Walberg stood. “I’m going to fight for them.”

“Yes. I think you should.”

“Where has morality gone, Mr. Lime?”

“We still eat meat, don’t we.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Walberg.”

When Walberg was gone Lime emptied his In box. Intermittently for a half hour or so he thought of Walberg’s stupefying naiveté: the twins had posted plenty of storm warnings, they hadn’t rotted overnight, but the handwriting on the wall was always a message for someone else. Not my children.

Lime’s son was eight years old this month, an Aquarius, and it was vaguely possible to hope Bill would be allowed to reach maturity alive and without finding it necessary to explode buildings and people. Until two years ago Lime had enjoyed fantasies about the things he would do with his son as he grew up; then there had been a point to it but now the boy lived in Denver with Anne and her new husband and Lime’s visiting privileges were severely curtailed not only by court order but also by the distance to Denver.

He had been out just before Christmas. On the airplane he had dozed with his head against the window and at the airport the three of them had met him — Bill and Anne and the fool Dundee who hadn’t known better than to tag along: a thin hearty Westerner who told the same jokes time and time again and manipulated fortunes in shale oil leases and evidently didn’t trust Anne out of his sight with her ex. An awkward weekend, Anne forever smoothing down her skirt and avoiding everyone’s eyes, Dundee bombastically fathering Bill and calling him “Shorty,” both of them covertly eyeing Lime to make sure he was getting the point — that they had established a “real home here for the boy,” that “He’s much better now, David, with a full-time father.”

Bill surrounded by ten thousand acres of grass and a herd of real cowponies had been singularly unimpressed by the toys Lime had bought at the last minute on his way to the airport. Last summer he had taken Bill camping and there had been rapport of a kind but this time in ankle-deep snow there was no place to take the boy except for an afternoon’s ice skating and a Disney movie on East Colfax.

Sunday night at the airport he had pressed his cheek to the child’s and rocked his head so that his whiskers scraped Bill; the boy had squirmed away and Anne’s eyes had been filled with a glacial rebuke. She had presented her cheek for his ritual kiss with Dundee standing by, watching; she had smelled of cold cream and shampoo; and whispered savagely in his ear, “Keep it up, David, keep it up.”

He was an unpleasant complication, she wanted him to stay away, but she wouldn’t send the boy to him — Lime had to come to her if he wanted to see Bill. It was a way of keeping him on her leash. She was a possessive woman.

She had been a tall girl with cool hazel eyes and straight blonde hair, more comfortable than challenging; they had got married because there hadn’t seemed any overpowering reason not to. But it had quickly got so each of them was bored with knowing what the other was going to say before he said it. In time that became the trouble with their marriage: they never talked about anything at all.

It became too much for both of them and finally she had walked out, walking heavily on her heels, leading the boy by the hand.

They had lived in one of those towns the existence of which was defined in terms of how many miles it was from Alexandria. He had kept the house six months and then moved to the city, a two-room walk-up.

Now the Executive Office Building was emptying and he did not want to return to the two-room walk-up. There was always Bev. But he went to the bar of the Army-Navy Club.

A vodka martini, very dry. Once, he had found comfort in bars, dim impersonal chambers where football and old movies provided conversational sustenance.

Lime had developed a passion for old movies: he could name character actors who had been dead for twenty years and all you needed was one fellow film buff to kill an evening with enjoyable trivia. “Eugene Pallette in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.” “No that was Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” “I thought that was Claude Rains.” “It was. They were both in that one.” Remember the beautiful cloaked melodrama of Mask of Dimitrios, Greenstreet and Lorre and was Claude Rains in that one too? He was in Casablanca with them but was he in Dimitrios? I don’t know but it’s running on one of the UHF late shows next week, I saw it in TV Guide...

A slough of boredom. Halfhearted anger toward the rutting man and woman who had accidentally given him his ticket into the world. Too young, during the war, for anything but Dave Dawson novels and radio melodramas and sandlot baseball and junior rifleman badges. Too old, afterward, to join the concerned generation: Lime had graduated from college without ever asking his roommate’s politics.

He had known too many bars. They had become too familiar. He left the club.

In the Fifties the Cold War had seemed real and he had enjoyed matching himself against the best the other side had to offer. Are you old enough, Mr. Lime, to remember the days when you could tell good from evil?

In those days American Intelligence was an infant modeled on the British system and things went on in a peculiarly arcane British fashion, as if nuclear superpowers could be treated in the same way as internecine Balkan intrigues of the Twenties. But gradually cynicism set in. Courage became suspect. It was fashionable to plead cowardice. If you chose to face danger for sheer thrill you were singled out as a case of masochistic guilt. No one was supposed to look for risks. Bravery became contemptible: if you did something dangerous you were expected to say you did it for the money or for a cause. Not because you liked it. To prove you were normal you had to boast you were chicken. They had effectively outlawed courage. Crime, and driving cars recklessly, had become just about the only outlets left.

Lime had an ungrammatical talent for picking up foreign tongues and they had used him in the field for fifteen years, mostly in North Africa but once for eighteen months in Finland. Gradually he had begun to detest dealing with his own kind — not only his opposite numbers on the other side but his allies as well. They were warped people playing a meaningless game and the computers had taken the thrill out of everything. What was the point of risking his life?

In the end Lime had used what little influence he had to post himself into an office where nothing was required of him, where sometimes he forgot what the business was all about.

He was a GS-11, he earned fourteen thousand dollars a year or at least collected it, he ran an office which investigated a thousand threats on the President’s life every month and found all but three empty — an office in which lazy irresponsibility could masquerade as duty — and he had retirement to look forward to: a job as chief security officer for a corporation somewhere, with fate presiding over him like an expectant mortician.

It was all he deserved. When you reached the point where it was just a job you could switch off at five o’clock — when you no longer did it believing in it — you had been in it too long. You went through the old motions but it was like saying the same words over and over until they lost all meaning.

The evening gloom was chilly. He walked home, up the sooty row of turreted gingerbread Victorian houses, up the outside stair into his rooms. The steam radiators made a dense heat and the air was close — stale, as if it hadn’t moved for a long time. The blown lamps had reduced the rooms to a grayish half-light and the demons of the place were on the prowl. Abruptly and uneasily he lifted the telephone and dialed.

“Hello?”

“Hi.”

“Caro mio. How is it today?”

“Dreary,” he said “Have you had dinner?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Heavy silence clung to them. She said finally, “I tried to reach you but you didn’t answer.”

“I stopped in for a drink somewhere.”

“You’re not drunk.”

“No.”

“Well come over and I’ll fix you something to eat.”

“Not if you’re feeling that way about it.”

She said, “Don’t be a fool David.”

“I’m not the first and I won’t be the last. I’m in good company.”

“All right, you’re a fool. But come over.” Her voice underwent a thickening humid modulation that evoked his awareness of her sexuality: “Come on, David, I want you to.”

Wondering which of them was the greater fool he went around to get his car. He wished he had thought better of calling her. He wanted to see her but last year there had been a tawdry affair with a banal woman from St. Louis and he didn’t want to get embroiled that way again, not even with Bev; this time it was he who had nothing to offer.

But he drove out of the garage and let the avenue suck him into its flow. It took him north into the Palisades area — fashionable houses, pedigreed dogs, chic thin women and fat children.

Senators and Cabinet members lived around here and normally there would be two or three boiled-shirt dinner parties getting under way. Tonight there were none because of the bombing. But it would not be long before the parties resumed. Everyone would wear mourning black and armbands and everyone would be solemn and judiciously angry, but the dinners would resume quickly because the Government still had to run and a great deal of its work was done at these dinner gatherings.

He passed Dexter Ethridge’s house. The windows were quietly alight; the front window reflected the glow of a color TV within. Lime was gratified to see the signs of normalcy — in a vague distant way he had responsibility toward the Vice-President-elect, having spoken the warning to him on the Capitol steps: it created a kinship, an Oriental sense of obligation.

Bev’s apartment building was an ultramodern tower of glass. She made good money as the Speaker’s adminstrative assistant; she knew how to spend it tastefully. The front room was spacious — off-white walls, Beri Rothschild sketches, solid furniture in solid colors but uncluttered. Lime knocked, let himself in with his key, threw his coat on a chair and called her name.

She didn’t answer. He prowled the apartment; it was empty; he went into the kitchen and mixed two drinks and was taking them into the living room when Bev came in, dressed for the weather, carrying a heavy brown grocery bag.

“Hi.” She had a merry look. When he took the parcel she tipped her face and he tasted her breath in his mouth.

He carried the groceries into the kitchen. Bev was pulling off her gloves with little jerks, drawing her cloak off her shoulders, taking off her scarf and shaking out her hair. It fell straight to her shoulders and curled upward at the bottom.

She espied the drinks and took a long swallow before she came into the kitchen, shoved him imperiously aside and started unloading the paper bag. Lime rested his shoulder against the doorframe. “Leftovers would have done.”

“If I’d had any.” She was on tiptoe putting something into the refrigerator, the long calf muscles tensed, dress stretched tight across ribs and breasts. When she turned and caught him watching her like that she gave him a quick up-from-under look.

“Get out of here,” she said, laughing at him, and he smacked her rump and went back to the couch and picked up his drink.

She clicked and clanged furiously for several minutes; then she appeared bearing place mats and silverware.

“I thought you ate.”

“I’ll have dessert. I’m in a sinful mood.” She was setting the table. “Wienerschnitzel with an egg on it — Holstein. All right?”

“Fine. Fine.”

She came to the coffee table and bent down for him to light her cigarette: he looked down along the curve of her throat to the thrusting dusky separation of her breasts. She was watching him — smiling, eyes half closed, warm and lazy. She straightened up and blew smoke at the ceiling, took her drink to her mouth: ice clinked against her teeth. “Well then.”

He closed his eyes slowly to slits and she took on a sort of surrealistic substance limned in red. When she moved toward the kitchen he closed his eyes and heard the click of the refrigerator door, the rattle of things.

“Come on, Rip Van Winkle.”

He opened his eyes. The room was dim; she had extinguished the lights, she had two candles burning on the table. He grunted and heaved himself upright and she laughed at him with wild abandon; it disturbed him. She took his hand and guided him to the table. “It’s Nineteen forty-seven Warner Brothers, but I just felt like it.”

“The wine?”

“The setting, stupid. The wine’s a Moreau.”

“Chablis with veal?”

“Why not? I’m having sardines.”

“Sardines for dessert.”

“I told you I’m in a wild mood.”

He tasted the veal. “Damn good.”

“Of course. It has to be.”

“You’re dropping clues like size-twelve shoes. What am I supposed to be looking for?”

“Nothing, I’m just teasing you.” She leaned forward with her wine in both hands. Soft warm glow against her eyes and skin. “What’s happened to that wonderful cojones humor of yours? Remember when you filled out the GS transfer papers for DeFord — date of birth June 29, 1930; weight seven pounds two ounces; height twenty-one inches?”

“That was before I knew DeFord.”

“What about those hundreds of introductory-subscription cards you filled out with DeFord’s name and address? He must have started getting two hundred magazines and book-club books in the mail every week.”

“I thought he needed to be better informed.”

“You haven’t done anything like that for a year.”

“I suppose you get tired of it,” he said.

“You’re saying you outgrew it.”

“I just got bored with it.”

“You just got bored.”

“All right.” He pushed his plate away empty and reached for the wine to refill their glasses.

“At least you’ve got a good appetite.” She lifted her glass in a gesture of toast that hadn’t been used since Charles Boyer stopped playing romantic leads: eyes half-lidded, lips moist and parted. Suddenly she laughed. “I’m a little tight. Or high — I never got the distinction straight. I saw a movie on TV last night and I’ll bet I can stump you. The Great Sioux Uprising. Do you know who wrote the screenplay?”

“For Christ’s sake.”

“It was a terrible movie. Whoever wrote it had the sense to use a pen name. The screenplay was written, it says in great big flaming red letters, by Fred C. Dobbs.”

It took him two seconds and then he laughed. She looked hurt and petulant. Lime did a Humphrey Bogart snarl: “Liften, nobody putf nuffin over on Fred Fee Dobbf.”

“I didn’t think you’d get that one. I really didn’t.”

“Somebody really used Fred C. Dobbs for a pen name?”

“Scout’s honor.”

He laughed again. Dobbs was the Bogart character in Treasure of the Sierra Madre — the greedy one who would do anything for gold.

They took the dishes out to the sink. Lime trapped her against the counter. She gripped his tie and pulled his head down; her tongue was very hot. They left the candles burning, went into the bedroom; Lime sat down and began to unlace his shoes, watching her. Since she disdained underwear she was unclad before he was; she unbuttoned his shirt and pulled him by the hands to the bed. He made love to her slowly and knowingly.

They shared a cigarette. “Ça va mieux?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely.”

“Say it with conviction, darling.” She had a bright hard shiny-eyed look.

Lime inhaled the smoke fiercely; it made him dizzy. “Yeah,” in a tone laced with anger.

“What’s the matter now?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

Her feet were tangled in the twisted sheets; she kicked free. “Just hang in there, man.” She disappeared into the loo. Lime lay on his back, belly rising and falling with his breath, smoke hovering around him.

She came back and sat on the side of the bed and stroked his hair. He said, “I apologize.”

“For what?”

“Mein weltschmerz, I guess. I don’t mean to play Hamlet all the time.”

“You’re going through a bad patch, that’s all. The bombing didn’t help.”

“You could say that. It didn’t help anybody.”

“Well what’s the answer to it then?”

He shook his head back and forth on the pillow. “It’s sheer innocence to believe there’s an answer for every problem. There’s no answer to this one short of eliminating all terrorists on suspicion.”

“That’s farfetched.”

“Not really. It’s standard procedure in most of the world. Here we still pretend totalitarian solutions are unacceptable, but we’re learning.” He smiled vaguely. “Revolution doesn’t self-destruct automatically. You have to kill it.”

“But you’d rather not have to.”

“I committed something to memory a few years ago. A quote that’s kind of revealing. Verbatim — ‘The earth is degenerating, there are signs that civilization is coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are rampant, violence is everywhere. Children no longer respect and obey their parents.’”

“A Russian bigwig?”

“Not even close. It’s from an Assyrian tablet that’s about five thousand years old.”

She came into the bed and snuggled close with her fists together against his chest, one knee hooked over his waist. Her hip was mounded high, her hair spread on the pillow. “My darling Oblomov.”

“All right.”

“You’re too cautious, David. You’re a big tragic bear, but it’s tragedy not from what you suffer but from what you don’t feel.”

“Then you shouldn’t bother with me.”

“You were born believing in things, but everything you were taught seems beside the point now.”

“Yes Doctor,” Lime murmured.

“Nothing really matters, is that right?”

“That does seem to be the problem, Doctor.”

“That’s my point,” she said. “It matters to you that nothing matters. That’s the point David — that’s a beginning.”