Line of Succession

Thursday, January 13

8:00 A.M. Continental European Time Lime paced the garage floor with apathetic weariness. He had slept on the plane but that had been more than twenty-four hours ago and things had moved maddeningly slowly in the day and night since.

The place was cluttered with scientists and their equipment; they were analyzing everything — grease spots on the floor, a wad of chewing gum stuck to the underside of the tool bench, the 500 KC marine transmitter and the Wollensak tape recorder that was plugged into it.

Triangulation by Sixth Fleet and Spanish shore stations had located the point of origin of the Fairlie broadcast — somewhere in the town of Palamos. But Sixth Fleet’s radio plot had been faulty by some decimal fraction and the location was an area, not a pinpoint; it had taken nine hours of house-to-house searching to find the transmitter in this place.

The garage sat in solitary squalor along the side of a country road half a kilometer outside Palamos. Its owner was on vacation — visiting a sister in Capetown; he had been away since the ninth of January, which happened to be the day before the Fairlie kidnapping. The garage owner’s name was Elías; the South African Government was seeking him for questioning but he hadn’t turned up yet.

When they did find Elías he wouldn’t be able to tell them anything useful; Lime knew how these things worked. Some faceless intermediary would have offered Elías a hundred thousand pestas to disappear for a week; the intermediary would be described by Elías, and another John Doe would be added to the list of individuals sought for questioning. It would consume far more time than was available; it was the kind of lead Lime never bothered with. You left that sort of thing to the minions of organization. If they turned up something useful they passed it on to you; otherwise you ignored it.

Yesterday at dawn Lime had landed at Barcelona in an Air Force jet with Chad Hill and a team of agents and technicians sent along by Satterthwaite. At the airport they had been collected by a delegation of American and Spanish types and it had been tedious; Lime disliked the boredom of establishing credentials.

The Spanish Fuerza Aérea had flown them up to Perdido and Lime had talked with Liam McNeely, who had told him President Brewster had announced that European governments were cooperating with Washington in a vastly expanded program of “protective surveillance” on suspected revolutionaries throughout the Western world. From Perdido Lime had reached Bill Satterthwaite by telephone: he had not tried to conceal his anger. “You’re only driving them deeper into their holes. How do you expect me to make contacts if they’ve all gone to ground?”

“Contacts?” Satterthwaite had sounded confused. Lime had explained it tersely — you had to hope there were scraps of information floating around the Maoist underground; you had to look for pigeons willing to tell you things. One revolutionary could lead you to another — but not if he’d been scared into hiding.

“I’m sorry.” Satterthwaite had been cool. “It was a matter of policy — hoping to forestall any further violence from the left. We can hardly rescind it now. You’ll have to do the best you can, that’s all.”

Before ending the transatlantic dialogue Lime had said, “Find out Fairlie’s blood type for me, will you?”

“You haven’t found blood.”

“No. But we might.”

“All right. I’ll check — where can I get back to you?”

“I’ll get back to you.” And he had rung off.

There had been an insider at Perdido obviously but he had got away, possibly in the confusion of departures that had attended the end of the Spanish ministers’ visit an hour or two before the kidnapping. At any rate no one had kept tabs on the parking lot or the exit road until after the kidnapping and by that time the insider was gone. Careful interrogations by Spanish Guardianos had produced the likely possibility the insider had been a handyman who’d been hired on the day before the kidnapping — a Spanish-speaking mestizo with a Venezuelan passport who had paid the chief grounds-keeper fifty thousand pesetas to give him the job, saying he had to prove he had employment or the Spanish government would deport him at the expiration of his alien labor registration. Evidently the Venezuelan had been very persuasive and had triggered the groundskeeper’s sympathies — either that or the groundskeeper’s price was cynically low. Now the groundskeeper was filled with contrition; he was being held by the Guardia, he had been fired by the spa, he probably would be subjected to brutal interrogations for weeks. That would keep a small army of bureaucrats occupied for a while but would produce no useful results.

Lime had gone over the ground at the mountain farm where the kidnappers had abandoned the phony Navy helicopter. The serial numbers had been filed off and acid-eaten but a team of Spanish detectives had etched them out with alcohol and hydrochloric; the helicopter belonged to the Pamplona branch of a German rental concern used by wealthy skiers seeking untouched slopes in the high areas inaccessible by road. The manager of the office had been found dead Monday morning in his bed in Pamplona — at first glance from a heart attack, but autopsy showed he had been murdered with a long thin needle jabbed between the upper ribs into the heart. Only a tiny scab on the skin gave clue. Perhaps he had seen the kidnappers’ faces too clearly, or had found out something he shouldn’t have — or perhaps he had refused to rent the helicopter to them. At any rate that chain of investigation was broken by the manager’s death.

The helicopter had been painted Navy colors and the ID numbers proved to have been splashed on by means of hand-cut stencils. From more than a few feet away they looked perfect and of course at the time no one had had reason to inspect them closely.

The helicopter had been left inside the barn; its rotor blades had been removed crudely by the use of hand tools. The bodies of two Secret Service Agents were in the barn with the chopper, shot by 9mm slugs fired from two different handguns, neither of which had been found.

The helicopter abounded with fingerprints of Fairlie and the two Secret Service men; those were the only identifiable prints found anywhere except for a variety of small partials in and around the house; they were being checked out but were probably the prints of children and wanderers who had stopped by the deserted farm last summer.

The farm did offer one clue: a pair of black leather gloves a Guardiano had discovered while sifting through the powder snow piled up by the helicopter’s movements. The descending chopper had swept a barnyard area free of snow; this was the clue that had attracted the searchers’ attention from the air and had brought investigators here late on the afternoon of the kidnapping. Half buried in one of the loose drifts the gloves had gone unseen until the following morning; a Spanish inspector was studying them when Lime arrived. Handling them gingerly with tweezers.

Lime had told Chad Hill, “Send them to London.”

“Why London?”

“Scotland Yard. They’ve worked out a glove-print identification scheme. They can get glove prints off the helicopter controls,” he had explained. “If they match these gloves then we know these were worn by the pilot. About half the time London’s been able to pick up latent fingerprints — enough for an ID — from the inside surfaces of the gloves. These are plain leather, they’re not lined — I think we’ve got a pretty good chance.”

So the gloves had been flown to London aboard a United States Navy Phantom Jet, along with the dismantled control stick of the helicopter, and Lime and Chad Hill had proceeded to Palamos.

Now in the garage he sat on an upturned packing box wearing a rumpled tweed suit the color of cigarette ashes and a five-o’clock shadow. He felt customarily benumbed, subject to dull pains of resentment — Dominguez, the top man in the Guardia, had wasted hours of his time during the night by insisting that Lime address himself personally to the variety of woebegone witnesses the Spaniards had rounded up. There was nothing for it but to comply; not so much because of the demands of international courtesy but because it was indeed possible one of them had something to offer by way of information.

It had consumed most of the night. An old woman who claimed to have seen a hearse drive in and out of the garage. (An old hearse was found near the waterfront; whether it was a clue was indeterminate since it had been wiped clean of fingerprints.) A young man who claimed to have seen several Arabs in the vicinity of the garage. (Immigration was checking; questions were being asked in Palamos. No results yet.) A bus driver who had passed the hearse Monday night and seen its driver — a black man in chauffeur’s uniform. (The phony helicopter pilot? Possibly; but what did it add?)

There was also a Basque fisherman with a strange tale about several Arabs and a coffin and a fishing boat. The story was unclear. The fisherman had been taken before Dominguez and Lime had watched as Dominguez infuriated the fisherman to the point of stubborn silence. Dominguez had fired his questions arrogantly and impatiently; Dominguez’s accent was Castilian, the fisherman was a Basque. Lime had fumed silently: surely the Guardia had a Basque member who could do this interrogation more successfully? But Dominguez wasn’t the sort to whom that kind of suggestion would be welcome. Dominguez thought he had a natural gift for intimidating people; with the Basque it produced only defiance but Dominguez couldn’t see that.

On his way out Lime had dropped a word to an R.N. subaltern: “See if you can bring that fisherman around to see me when he’s through with him, will you? I’ll be at the garage.”

Three hours ago. Now he sat on the packing box still awaiting the Basque because there was nowhere in particular to go.

Chad Hill kept trotting back and forth bringing items of useless news to him from the various knots of technicians. “It’s American gum — spearmint. No fingerprint on it — he must’ve pressed it with a rag. The alarm clock’s a Benrus.”

“A Benrus.” Lime had learned how to repeat the last word or two whether he was listening or not. It made people go on talking. It was even possible Hill might eventually tell him something he could use.

The 500 KC transmitter was a fishing-boat model. The Wollensak recorder was an old model but a common brand. The mylar tape was also German, available anywhere on the continent; the alarm clock had been used to trigger the broadcast. The tape was reeled onto five-inch spools, Hill explained. It ran at one and seven-eighths inches per second. It was long enough to play about an hour. All three of Fairlie’s speeches were on it, separated by five-minute intervals of blank tape.

It was a simple robot device. The ordinary alarm clock was evidence the kidnappers had set the transmitter not more than twelve hours before the broadcast; but that was meaningless — you could travel forever in twelve hours, and by the time Fairlie’s voice had been aired at 12:30 P.M. local time last Tuesday the kidnappers could have been anywhere. And by now they had a lead of fifty-six hours on Lime...

They’ve moved, Lime thought. They didn’t stay around here, they’d have known the search would be too intense. They went out: how? Not by public transport; Fairlie was too recognizable. Not by car. Helicopter, airplane or boat — it had to be one of those.

Boat, he thought. Because Palamos was a sea-front town, and because the Basque fisherman had seen Arabs on a boat. There had been Arabs around the garage; too much coincidence unless they were the same Arabs. All right then. Boat. What next?

A commotion in the corner: Chad Hill bouncing on his feet, wheeling, loping across with his loud voice preceding him:

“A fingerprint!”

Hill was very excited and Lime stared bleakly. When Hill came to an awkward stop above him he threw his head back. “Chad it could be anybody’s fingerprint. Maybe the owner of the place.”

“Well of course. But I mean they seem to have wiped the whole place clean before they left — but they missed this one.”

“Where is it?” So many people were crowded into the corner he couldn’t see.

“On the panel where the light switch is.”

It was a possibility to be conceded. He got to his feet with an effort. Their last act would have been to switch off the lights before driving out. They’d have done that after having wiped the place. Yes; a possibility. He went across.

One of the Spanish technicians looked up. He smiled but his eyes were ready to show fear. “She look like they ef-forgot thees wan.” He was very proud of his English.

These Spaniards were all James Bonds, trying to decode every laundry list they found in somebody’s trash basket. But you couldn’t tell; you had to check everything out. Give us this day our daily break.

“Put it on the wire.”

“Ahjess.”

It would be cabled out to Madrid and London and Washington. In a few hours they would have an answer.

7:30 A.M. North African Time The two engines made a racket in the plane like the thunder of a Second World War bomber, Fairlie thought. The fuselage vibrated a great deal. Some loose piece of metal in the cabin kept chattering.

Fingers closed on his wrist: Lady’s hand, checking his pulse again. She seemed to do it quite frequently. Perhaps they were worried about the effects of the drugs they had given him earlier on.

He wasn’t drugged now. Blindfolded, his mouth gagged with tape, his hands bound with wire. They didn’t want him throwing tantrums. They weren’t sure of him yet, they weren’t sure he wasn’t about to go berserk.

He wasn’t sure of it himself.

Lady had warned him not to struggle because he might make himself sick; vomit could make him choke to death. They had taken him ashore in a dinghy and from snatches of talk he pieced it together that they were sinking the boat. A stranger’s voice then — an unfamiliar tongue, but the voice had a husky gravel quality, a high-pitched wheezing sort of voice, as if its owner had a bad case of catarrh.

Back into the dinghy again. They’d rowed him out into a fierce chop. He had tried to keep relaxed: he wasn’t ordinarily susceptible to seasickness but the young woman’s cool warning about vomit had fixed his mind on the subject and it was almost impossible to ignore. He remembered one of McNeely’s jokes: All right, you can do anything in the world as long as you don’t think of a white hippopotamus. Then the McNeely grin: Ever tried to not think of a white hippopotamus before?

McNeely. That was in some other world.

They had lifted him, with some strugglings and mouthings of oaths, into a cramped cabin of some kind; helped him feel his way into a seat and settled him into it. Then they had wired his ankles together.

The gravel-voiced wheeze taking its leave; Fairlie had heard oarlocks squeak — evidently the wheezer rowing back to shore alone.

He had thought he was aboard a boat — the same boat or a new one — until he’d heard the engine choke and sputter and begin to roar; he realized immediately it was an airplane.

A seaplane, then.

The second engine had whined into life and there was a great deal of gunning before he felt it begin to move. Taking off seemed to be touch and go: the sea had a wicked slap to it, the cabin lurched and pitched. The epithets of Abdul the black pilot were intense. Fairlie remembered Abdul’s cool handling of the helicopter when Abdul had somehow killed the engine while pretending something had gone wrong with it; Abdul’s anger now terrified Fairlie but finally they were airborne and he felt the seat tip under him as the plane climbed steeply.

There was no accurate way to estimate the length of time they had been in the air or which way they were heading or even where they had started from, but there was enough talk for Fairlie to identify the various voices and realize there were at least four of them in the plane with him: Abdul, flying it; Sélim, the leader who spoke with a Slavic accent; Lady, who attended him with a professional detachment; Ahmed, who had a Spanish sort of accent and tended to talk in dogmatic clichés.

It was very hard to concentrate. He thought there must be plans he ought to be making. Spotty recollections of all those Second World War memoirs by British aviators who had spent five years organizing incredibly elaborate schemes to escape from Nazi POW camps. We have a duty to escape.

There was no we, there was only Fairlie, and escape was beyond question; his duty appeared clear enough for the moment — to maintain sanity. He could demand nothing more of himself, not now.

8:10 A.M. Continental European Time Lime was still on his packing crate. One of the Spanish uniformed cops came into the garage and beckoned: there was a radiophone call from Fleet. Lime took it in the Guardia jeep.

The Admiral. “I thought you’d better know — the rival firms are moving in.”

Lime went back inside, somewhat depressed. It was not to be avoided that agents for the other side would come into the case. The Russians, the Chinese, an indeterminate number of others. Suppose an Albanian hard-line field agent got in ahead of you, rescued Fairlie — suppose the Albanians decided to keep Fairlie? Farfetched, but it was a risk; you didn’t want to exchange one set of kidnappers for another. What it amounted to was that you had to try and prevent the rival firms from finding out what you had found out. It wasn’t easy, not with communications tapped routinely and areas of the world where members of the opposing teams sat on the corners of one another’s desks. It meant Lime had to tighten his communications, use safe lines whenever possible, code his transmissions — another time-consuming chore.

More likely the rival firms were eager to help out. For a Russian or a Chinese team to rescue Fairlie would be a propaganda victory unprecedented in decades — a triumph of public relations if nothing else. But you still couldn’t afford to work with them. Once you admitted them to partnership you would be delayed at every junction place; your partners would be required to check back with superiors and clear every decision through layers of bureaucracy.

You could expect a certain amount of help — technical stuff, manpower, communications — from the allies; but these were equally hamstrung by tiers of authority and in the end you had to keep your hand free. So you used everyone and gave nothing to anyone. In a very short time all of them would begin to resent Lime and he would find resistance when he sought further assistance.

The CIA had a hundred thousand employees of whom twenty thousand were field agents; of these a thousand or more were strung through the Mediterranean area, on call if and when Lime needed them. At the moment they merely had orders to check whatever contacts they had, find out what sort of rumors were floating through the underground.

The English sailor arrived at half past eight with the Basque fisherman in tow. The fisherman’s name was Mendes; his smile looked slack-muscled, as if he had been posing too long for a slow photographer. His eyes were a faded blue and his drooping pinched mouth suggested a discontented lifetime of anxieties and disappointments. He smelled faintly of fish and the sea. He spoke no English and minimal Spanish. Lime had summoned a Basque-speaking Guardiano two hours ago; now he brought the Guardiano into the circle and began the session.

It was very kind of Señor Mendes to make the time to assist. The commandante’s unfortunate manner was regrettable; it was to be hoped Señor Mendes had not been too offended — everyone was under great strain, perhaps the commandante’s abruptness was understandable? Would Señor Mendes care for an American cigarette?

Lime made sure he had Mendes on the hook before he began to tug the line — gently at first: a day’s fishing was being lost by Señor Mendes’s detention, the American government assuredly wished to compensate him for his loss of time — would a thousand pesetas be sufficient? But very gently always because you couldn’t afford to offend; when Mendes took the money it was with the proud agreement he was not being bribed but rather being paid a suitable wage for his time and labor as a detective assisting in the search for the abducted American President-elect.

It took time to undo the damage Dominguez had inflicted but in the end the Basque’s story came out. He had not seen any faces, only the Arab robes of three figures; a fourth man in some sort of uniform. Arriving on the coast in a hearse. Mendes had been a few hundred yards up the beach, walking from the boat basin to his home which was above the dunes not far from the breakwater where the hearse had drawn up. It had come without headlights; it was met by a dinghy from a boat lying close to shore.

The three Arabs and the man in uniform had carried a coffin from the hearse to the dinghy. Someone — a fifth one, unseen by Mendes — had driven the hearse away. The others had gone aboard the boat with the coffin and the boat had set out to sea.

Plainly it was not all Mendes had to say. Lime waited him out, not prompting; the man’s agreeability was fragile, the wrong question might close him up.

Finally it came in a blurted rush: Mendes had recognized the boat.

He had agonized; it troubled him deeply; the boat belonged to a friend, a colleague, and in Spain a Basque did not inform on a fellow Basque — yet it had to do with the kidnapping of the presidente...

“We understand,” Lime breathed sympathetically.

The friend was Lopez, his boat the Maria Linda after Lopez’s wife. An old boat, somewhat the worse for age, but you would recognize her easily by the smokestack — she had this raked stack, comprende? Like a miniature ocean liner. You couldn’t miss her, there wasn’t another like her on the Costa Brava.

Maria Linda had not returned to Palamos since that night, Mendes said sadly. Assuredly it was a long voyage, wherever she was bound.

Lime turned, raised his eyebrows at Chad Hill. After a moment Hill came to; bounced away in belated obedience to start the machinery in motion for the wholesale search for Maria Linda.

Lime kept at Mendes, his question-hammers wrapped in courteous padding. Details emerged; no further startling developments. He kept it up for an hour and sent Mendes away with his thanks, having learned a few things of possible interest: chief among them an address and Lime sent a runner immediately to locate Lopez’s wife.

At quarter past ten she appeared, Maria Lopez, a tired woman gone to stoutness, the vestiges of beauty remaining in black eyes and long-fingered hands. Lime was straightforward with her: he told her of the seriousness of her husband’s predicament, he offered her money — ten thousand pesetas — and he asked his question: what did she know of the Arabs her husband had taken off the beach on Monday night?

He had given her ten thousand; he held twenty thousand more in his hand. The woman spoke without moving her eyes away from the money. Lime listened coolly to the interpreter. They had approached Lopez Sunday after church, three Arab men and an Arab woman with a veil. They said they were from Morocco. Their brother had died in Barcelona but they could not get official permission to remove the body from the country. They said it was important to Bedouins to have their dead buried in family ground. They admitted it was a smuggling thing, against the law, but they appealed to Lopez’s sympathies and they offered a great deal of money. Lopez knew what it meant to be buried in consecrated ground of course. Mrs. Lopez was not sure how much money was involved but it was possibly fifty thousand pesetas or more, plus fuel and expenses.

Had she seen the Arabs up close? No she had not seen them at all; Lopez had described them as four Arabs — three men and a woman. She spread her hands toward Lime: it was winter, a fisherman’s life was thankless. They had known nothing of any kidnapping.

Chad Hill intercepted him at the garage door: “For Christ’s sake,” Hill complained.

“What?”

“They’ve had it twenty-four hours.”

“Had what?”

“The boat. The Maria Linda.”

It was a fifty-minute helicopter ride from Palamos up the coast to the beach where Spanish coastguardsmen had found Maria Linda Wednesday morning impaled on a shoal in the lee of a breakwater. She hung at a vertiginous angle, anchor-chain taut. It looked as though she had sought shelter in a storm and been smashed aground. But there had been no storm Tuesday night and the weather since then had been blowy but not monstrous.

By the time Lime’s chopper set him down a captain of Guardia had arrived to meet him with everything the Spanish police had collected on the case. Ordinarily it would have taken much longer but ordinarily no one was holding a blowtorch to the Guardia’s backside.

The body had been removed to the police morgue in Barcelona. Lopez had been found dead on the beach within sight of the grounded boat, hidden by dunes from the coast highway which ran close along the Med at this point: they were north of Cape Creus, the French frontier was only seven kilometers away.

Lopez had been stabbed several times, with more than one knife. The weapons had not been found. The murder case was being investigated but until now there had been no connection with the Fairlie kidnapping and therefore it hadn’t been brought to Lime’s attention.

A few latent fingerprints had been found on the polished wood surfaces of the boat’s interior; photos were included in the folder just delivered to Lime. The prints were being processed in Madrid; as soon as Hill’s call had alerted the Guardia, copies of the prints had been forwarded to Interpol and Washington. It was assumed most of the prints were Lopez’s but everything was being checked: fingerprints were being lifted off the corpse for purposes of comparison and elimination.

The Guardiano was a captain by rank, a precise cop with a professional voice. It droned on, filling Lime in, while a cool gray wind ruffled the sea and blew sand in Lime’s face. Tire tracks had been found between the highway and the beach, indicating that a vehicle had pulled off the road and driven up onto the small promontory overlooking the beach. It had parked there, pointed toward the sea, possibly to flash its headlights out to sea in signal. High tide had come and gone between the murder and the discovery; the only footprints found were high up, near the body and the tire tracks. The vehicle had been considerably heavier when it left than it had been when it arrived, and the departure tracks merged with the highway in a southerly direction, indicating the vehicle had arrived from the south and departed toward the south, retracing its course. Unfortunately the sand was too soft to reveal a tread pattern. The width between tires indicated a standard wheelbase for medium-sized automobile or small van.

As for the reason for the abandonment of the boat, it appeared the engine-oil line had rusted through; the oil had leaked out and the engine had seized up.

To Lime there was only one clue in all this that wasn’t ambiguous; it was a straightforward indication of the kidnappers’ intent. The Lopez boat had cracked up north of its point of departure. Assumption: they had been heading for France, or Italy.

It was there in plain sight and because the kidnappers weren’t careless men it had to be assumed they meant it to be seen: they could have sunk the boat easily enough and left no traces. That was the thing. They had put it on display, they hadn’t concealed it. Lopez’s body, the boat. These had been meant to be found.

He had to read something into that. They told him they were heading north. Now it was a question whether they wanted him to hunt north or, conversely, whether they wanted him to think that far ahead and hunt south.

There were many layers of bluff. First level: if a clue appears it should be believed. Second level: if it is an obvious clue it must be a red herring designed to waste time and resources; it is so obvious it had better be dismissed. Third level: if it is so obviously an invitation to dismiss it and do the opposite then perhaps it ought to be obeyed after all because the kidnappers made it blatantly obvious just to confuse. Fourth level: the kidnappers, anticipating this dilemma in his mind, want him to think it through all the way to the end and then go ahead and investigate the clue exhaustively because, all other things being equal, a clue is a clue and even if it is a deliberate plant it may give away something it wasn’t intended to reveal.

It came down to a question of the order of subtlety of the bluff and he knew once he became trapped analyzing levels of possibility he could burn his brain out trying to guess the truth.

The one thing that stood out was that the kidnappers were professionals. Or at least they were led by a professional. A professional was a man who didn’t leave clues unless he intended to. This entire operation had been set up not by any amateur revolutionary but by a pro who had planned every step and timed every movement. The snatch caper at Perdido had been a model of economical efficiency. The mountain farm had been selected with exact precision for its proximity to the Mediterranean coast and its flying distance from Perdido because the kidnappers knew they had to get the chopper under cover before the authorities got a search operation under way. The kidnappers knew just how much time they had for each step of their operation and obviously they hadn’t rushed anything. They had taken Fairlie, concealed the chopper, driven openly by car from the farm to the garage outside Palamos — all this during the period of time when the authorities were still organizing for a search, still absorbing the impact of the incredibly simple crime that had been committed. But once under cover in that Palamos garage the kidnappers had stayed put, not allowing panic to push them into movement again until after dark. By that time they had to assume the police and security of a dozen nations were searching for them but they acted with aplomb, delivering Fairlie by hearse to the waterfront, getting aboard Lopez’s boat and heading out to sea.

They hadn’t left things to chance at any other step and there was no reason to assume the abandonment of Lopez’s boat had been an accident. If the engine had frozen up it was probably because the kidnappers had poked a hole through the rusty oil pipe to make it look like an accidental failure.

They might have left one inadvertent clue: the fingerprint on the light switch in the Palamos garage — if in fact the print belonged to one of the kidnappers and not the owner of the garage or one of its customers.

It was the fingerprint that gave him the impression the kidnappers were amateurs led by a professional. A professional developed habit patterns, he never left fingerprints on anything and never had to think about it. By reflex he always went back and wiped things off.

The light switch was the last thing they had touched on their way out and someone had forgotten to wipe it.

If the print turned out to be Fairlie’s then Lime would believe it had been left on purpose to attest to the fact that Fairlie was alive. But he doubted it was Fairlie’s fingerprint; they wouldn’t have allowed Fairlie near a light switch. If the print belonged to any of the kidnappers then it hadn’t been left there deliberately; leaving misleading clues was part of the game but giving away the identity of your own man was not.

Barcelona in winter was a distressing gray city of industrial blight and waterfront rot.

The Spaniards had provided an office in an overflow annex a block from the government admin building; it was a quarter of bleak narrow streets — cobblestones and soot-black walls. From the aircraft carrier a whaleboat had brought ashore a Navy UHF scrambler transceiver; it had been manhandled into the office.

The crew had arrived ahead of him and the office crawled with personnel but what took Lime by surprise was the presence of William T. Satterthwaite — rumpled, tired, his curly black hair awry.

There was a small private room set aside for Lime’s use but Lime took a quick look at it and declined. “Have you got a car outside?”

“Yes. Why?” Satterthwaite pushed his glasses up.

“Let’s sit in the car and talk.”

In the car Satterthwaite said, “Do you honestly think they’d have the nerve to bug that office?”

“It’s what I’d do. You don’t want foreigners running king-size security operations on your turf without finding out what they’re up to.”

Satterthwaite was capable of dismissing the problem instantly: “All right. What about this coffin they carried Fairlie in? Do you think he’s dead?”

“I doubt it. You don’t kill your ace in the hole until you have to — or until you’ve run out of a use for it. There’s a better question than that, though — how do we know it was Fairlie? It may have been a hundred fifty pounds of bricks.”

“You mean you’re not buying the Lopez boat thing at all?”

“Suppose they had accomplices who took Lopez’s boat to make it look as if they took Fairlie that way?” Lime hunted around the dashboard for the ashtray. “The only thing definite is they’ve given us two pieces we were meant to see.”

“The Arab costumes and the boat headed north. One suggesting North Africa and the other suggesting western Europe. Do you think they could both be phonies? Maybe they’re going for the Balkans?”

“It’s all guesswork right now. We’re chasing our tails.”

“Don’t get so damned defeatist, David. There are hundreds of thousands of people working on this. Someone’s bound to come up with something.”

“Why? We’re not dealing with wild-eyed freaks.”

Satterthwaite’s eyes burned behind the high magnification of the lenses. “Who are we dealing with?”

“A pro and a cell of well-trained amateurs. Not a government job, not a people’s liberation-movement thing. We won’t find an organization working the caper, although we may find one paying the bills.”

“Why not?”

“Because you haven’t told me anything to the contrary.”

“I don’t follow that.”

Lime tapped ash, missed the ashtray, brushed ashes off his trouser leg. “If any establishment was behind it your hundreds of thousands of agents would have had a hint by now. It’s not the kind of operation a power bloc would try. The only political effect it can have is to solidify the existing powers. The Communists will help us, they won’t help the kidnappers; they’d expect reciprocal treatment if somebody snatched one of theirs, they can’t afford to open this kind of can of beans. It would start a free-for-all of assassinations and abductions. You can’t conduct international relations on that level and everybody since Clausewitz has known that — look what happened after Sarajevo.”

Lime snubbed the butt out in the ashtray and pushed it shut. “Look, what’s their motive? You’ve heard the ransom demands. All they seem to want is the seven bombers. It’s the Marighella technique — nothing unusual about it. They arrest yours, you kidnap theirs and make a swap.”

“Then we all know who’s running this show, don’t we,” Satterthwaite said. His eyes rested complacently against Lime.

“Probably,” Lime replied, quite evenly. “But we’ve had the search out for Sturka and his people for more than a week. He may have gone to ground — this may be an entirely different bunch.”

“You’re grabbing at straws,” Satterthwaite growled; he leaned even farther forward and his voice was an angry hiss: “Why in the hell do you think we had to force you onto this job?”

“Because you assumed I knew it was Sturka.”

“And Sturka is your boy, David. You know him better than anybody else — you’ve proved you know the way he thinks. You’ve covered the same ground he’s covered.”

“I’ve never laid eyes on the man.”

“But you know him.”

“Maybe it is Sturka’s caper. But I’m not putting all my eggs in that basket. Logic points to Sturka but logic is a test of consistency, not truth. If it’s not Sturka, and I try to play as if it is, then we’ll end up farther behind than we started. I’ve got to work with facts, don’t you see that?”

“Assume it’s Sturka, David. What then?”

Lime shook his head. “We’ve made too many wrong assumptions already. Give me a fact and then I’ll go to work.” He found another cigarette in the crumpled pack. “Now you didn’t fly over here just to tell me I thought it was Sturka. You knew that already. Or are you just shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic to keep tabs on me?”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

“I just wanted it cleared up. That being the case I assume you’ve got orders for me — something you couldn’t even trust to a scrambler.”

“All right. Knowing that much let’s see if you can guess what they are.”

“Well you want him back before Inauguration Day, for openers.”

“Yes, but you knew that. It gives you a little over six days.”

“It’s not likely.”

“Make it likely.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“I know. All right. Suppose I tell you I’ve brought an A-team from Langley with me.”

“Then I’d say you’re a damn fool. I suppose you’ve got them running around loose in the Spanish countryside sighting in their scopes on sheep and peasants.”

“Hardly. They’re aboard the Essex. When you need them you ask Sixth Fleet for the Early Birds and they’ll be at your disposal by helicopter.”

Too little sleep, too many cigarettes; he had a headache, his mouth tasted brassy. It was absurd to think about it. Langley was CIA’s sprawling Virginia headquarters, a place which was top secret — Time said so. “An A-team from Langley” was a euphemism for a killer squad.

“These are the best professionals in the Agency. Twenty-eight men. Three helicopters.”

“And carrying as many guns as a heavy cruiser I’m sure.”

“It’s a direct Presidential order, David.”

“Face up on the table, will you? It was your crack-brained notion, you took it to Brewster and he okayed it.”

“Not really. I only provided the methodology.”

“It guarantees you won’t get Fairlie back alive.”

“On the contrary. You don’t use them until you’ve got Fairlie out. Fairlie and the kidnappers. Then you use them.”

Lime understood it up to a point; it was all based on a flimsy assumption regarding the kidnappers’ whereabouts. The premise behind Satterthwaite’s idea was that the kidnappers were holed up on territory belonging to a regime that wouldn’t assist in capturing them and wouldn’t agree to extraditing them to the United States even if it did capture them. So you had to go in, get them, take them out, and leave no clues behind to indicate you had ever been there. It was very Wild Bill Donovan in concept and Lime found it tiresome.

“David, if we put them on trial we have to admit how and where we took them. It could be embarrassing.”

“Embarrassing. For Christ’s sake.” Lime shook his head. “At any rate you’re still jumping to that conclusion.”

“And you’re wasting time in Spain when you should be down there.”

“Not yet. I still want a fact. Suppose they’re halfway to Albania?”

“You’re dragging your heels. Everything points to it — you know that.”

“You’ve already got plenty of gumshoes prowling around down there, I’m sure.”

“Damn few of them with your knowledge of the territory. And none of them with your knowledge of Sturka.”

“That’s two assumptions — the place and the identity — and I’m not buying either one of them yet.”

“Why?”

“Because of the Arab robes.”

“So it’s a bluff,” Satterthwaite said. “You’ve seen bluffs before.”

“The boat headed north. Is that the same kind of bluff?”

“Obviously a different kind of bluff.”

Filled with simmering anger Lime said, “You’ve got to understand this. I can’t do it by myself. I’ve got to have a fact, and then I can start taking advantage of their mistakes. I need their help.”

“Fat chance of getting it.”

“I don’t know. I only need to help plan their mistakes.”

Satterthwaite was silent for a bit; finally he said, “I’m going to let you alone from here on. But I want it clear that you’re under orders to use the A-team if and when you’ve extracted the kidnappers.”

“It’s so fucking cheap.”

“It’s politics. You don’t ask favors when you don’t have to — it only leaves you owing somebody a favor. With that crowd we can’t afford to be obliged to them for anything at all.”

“Then use an intermediary. The Russians?”

“It would have to be the Chinese and we don’t want to be owing them any favors either.” Satterthwaite sat back, reached for the door handle but didn’t open it. “Oh. You asked for Fairlie’s blood type — a wise question. Unfortunately it’s AB negative. I’ve left instructions to have a case on the ready helicopter aboard Essex. Good enough?”

“For the moment.”

An hour later Satterthwaite was on his way back to Washington and Lime was running a battery shaver over his chin in the rancid loo of the annex building. He wanted a shower and a good meal and twelve hours’ sleep; he settled for a quick wash and a desk-corner lunch of bread and cheese and jug sangría from a nearby café.

He locked himself in the tiny office cubicle and stretched out on the floor with his hands interlaced under the back of his head; stared at the ceiling and tried to fit things together in his mind. The way to do this was to let the mind go. His upper thoughts immediately swayed toward Bev Reuland but he made no effort to correct the drift.

Two days ago on his way to Andrews AFB he had made time to see her: called Speaker Luke’s office and arranged to meet her in the Rayburn cafeteria. He had stopped at a claustrophobically narrow shop to get a dozen pink roses and had arrived in the cafeteria carrying them. Bev, in a harlequin skiing jacket of some green-and-white synthetic fiber that glistened like plastic, her hair tied in a horsetail with a small ribbon, had watched his approach with suspicion, a shadow crossing her eyes.

“What’s this for?”

“A little grace if you please.”

“Those are break-it-to-her-gently roses.” She unwrapped enough of the green-wrapped package to see the buds. “They are lovely,” she conceded.

It was the middle of the afternoon and the place was nearly empty; conversations were faint distant mutters across the room. He said, “It’s nothing much. I’ll be gone a little while.”

No reply. She got up and went to the counter and he watched her go through the railed route to the coffee urn, a stop at the cashier, her high-hipped stride as she returned bearing two cups of coffee. She sat down on the edge of her chair as if she expected at any moment it would explode beneath her. “How long?”

“Open-ended.”

“They’ve sent you after Fairlie.” A flat statement, but she was very tense with eyes hungry for information.

“I remember Bev Reuland. The girl who only goes with people if they’re fun.”

“Oh shut up David, you’re not funny.”

Things had changed far more than he had wanted. It had always been no-questions-asked between them. She was a girl with a slow carnal smile and a healthy set of appetites and they liked each other. Now she was a different girl because if something happened to Lime a little piece of Bev would go with him. The cup and saucer rattled in her hand; she put them down. “Well. What are we supposed to say to each other?”

“Nothing. I’ll be back — you can think about what you want to say, and tell me then.”

“You weren’t going out in the field anymore.”

“I know.”

“I suppose they turned your head. It must be very flattering to be told you’re the best they’ve got — the only one who can do the job.” Her lips quivered before she drew them in between her teeth.

“I’m not dead yet,” he said very gently. The roses lay across the table between them; he pushed the roses away and covered her hand with his palm but she drew it away in pique and Lime laughed at her.

“It’s not funny.”

“You said that before.”

“Now I’m sure you’re listening,” she said. “God damn it they’ve got millions of people. It doesn’t have to be you. If you don’t find the kidnappers you’ll be blamed for it for the rest of your life — and if you do find them they’ll probably kill you.”

“I like your overwhelming confidence in me.”

“Oh I know, you’re the master spy, you’re the best in the world — I’ve heard all that drivel from your fawning admirers. I’m not impressed. Shit, David, they’re setting you up for a fall guy.”

“I know they are.”

“Then why in the hell did you agree to it?” She sat snapping her thumbnail against her front teeth. “When you were making up your mind,” she said, “you didn’t think of me at all.”

“That’s right.”

“That’s pretty shitty.”

“I know.”

“I’m beginning to wish you loved me a little.”

“I do.”

Now she smiled but it was crooked. “Well I suppose loving is more important than being loved. But really I don’t like this — we’re starting to sound like two characters in an Ingrid Bergman movie. You’re even beginning to look a little like Paul Henreid.”

She was trying to play at his own game and it pleased him, ludicrously; he pushed his chair back and stood. She opened her handbag, fished for a lipstick, spread it on her mouth and squeezed her lips together to distribute it and inspected the result in her compact mirror. She was the closest to an unselfish human being he had ever known; he waited, keeping the jet waiting at Andrews, and heard the small crisp snap of her handbag and watched her get up and come around the table. She coiled her fingers around his arm. “All right. I’ll wait dutifully. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“Yes.”

“One of these days you may learn to express your feelings. At least I’ve got you admitting you have feelings.”

That was true, and it was why he loved her.

Now his hands remembered the feel of her hard tight little ass and he opened his eyes to look at the ceiling and wondered how long he had dozed. The noise that had awakened him was repeated: urgent loud knuckles against the door. He climbed to his feet and unlocked it to Chad Hill.

“We’ve got a make.” Hill had a teleprinter decode in his hand. Lime took it.

Lime read it twice. “Never heard of him.”

“Not one of the people you identified with Sturka last week?”

“No.” Lime’s eyes whipped up from the decode to Hill. “Corby. Renaldo. Peggy Astin. One John Doe.”

“Mezetti could be the John Doe.”

“So could the man in the moon.”

“Alvin Corby’s black. Haven’t you had him in mind for the chopper pilot from the beginning?”

“Offhand how many black revolutionaries would fit the description? The helicopter pilot was twenty pounds heavier than Corby. McNeely’s seen the mug shots of Corby and said it wasn’t the same man.”

He walked out into the bullpen and turned toward the UHF table where technicians were feeding incoming signals into the tape printers. There ought to be more coming in now; with a positive make at last there would be data from all over.

It came in bits and pieces during the next half hour. Mezetti was the son of an important industrialist. Five years ago he had been associated with one of the SDS wings and had been arrested, fingerprinted, questioned and released. No other criminal record. No FBI file; Mezetti was on the list of people not on the list.

Two CIA items: Mezetti had turned up in Singapore two and a half months ago ostensibly as a tourist, had been frisked by Singapore Customs because he looked freaky but had not been found to be carrying drugs of any kind; routine CIA coverage with cross-references to Passport Bureau records showed Mezetti had made fourteen trips from UCLA to Acapulco in ten months two years ago: he had been tossed seven times out of the ten but no drugs had been found on him. Narco Bureau had a note in a dead file that Mezetti had been suspected as a courier but had been found clean; whatever the purpose of his trips to Acapulco, it hadn’t been narcotics. Subsequent notation from CIA’s Acapulco stringer revealed Mezetti’s mother and sister had spent the winter in question in Acapulco. Lime made a face.

SEC records by way of FBI showed Mezetti listed as owner-of-record of thirty-five thousand shares of Mezetti Industries Common. An IRS note appended: he was also listed as an officer of the corporation — probably a tax dodge, a funnel through which his father could pour funds into his son’s account without facing inheritance taxes later on.

FBI was commencing washes of subject’s known hangouts. Routine telephone checks established he was not at home; no one knew where he was; his mother thought he had gone to Europe on company business; his father knew nothing of any such thing.

Then a signal from FBI over Shankland’s signature: Mezetti had flown by Air France from New York to Marseille on Saturday, January eighth.

That was thirty-six hours before Fairlie had been kidnapped.

“Christ,” Hill said. “Walking around right out in bare-ass open.”

“Well they must have done it to find out if he was clean.”

“So he’s their outside contact — they need to know he’s still free to move around.”

“Using a cover — his mother said he told her he was over here on company business.” He considered it. “All right. Items. He was clean Saturday night, they can’t know about the fingerprint, so they’ve got to assume he’s still free to move in the open. They’ll keep using him.” His face changed abruptly: “Mezetti Industries. That’s pretty big stuff. Then the kid’s their bankroll.”

It made it a notch more likely the operation was fully independent — not a hire-contract job paid for by an organization. That made Lime’s job harder; it meant the kidnappers were working alone without a network. You couldn’t infiltrate a network that didn’t exist.

Hill spoke slowly. “Now the question is do we keep it in the family or let the rival firms in?”

The rival firms would come into it in time even without invitation — KGB’s immense machinery in Moscow would find out within twenty-four hours that the hunt was on for one Mario P. Mezetti. Peking would be close on the Russians’ heels.

Lime made his decision in the time it took to formulate the words. “If we haven’t found something by midnight we’d better bring Bizenkev into it.”

“Do we let it drop as if it’s an accident or do we print him a formal invitation?”

“As formal as it can get.” If their help was solicited openly and with the knowledge of the world press, the Soviets would have less room for double crosses.

“And the same with the Chinese, I imagine,” Hill said.

Lime nodded. “Midnight. After that we can put out an APB on Mezetti.”

“What about between now and then?”

“Find out who deals with Mezetti Industries over here. They may even have ofiices of their own on this side. See if he’s made contact with anybody. Put out an APB in the family but try to keep it confidential. The Guardia will have to know who to look for.”

“Tangier?”

“Not yet. Their mouths flap too much.”

“You’re banking on them being on a boat, aren’t you.” The question wasn’t as astute as it seemed; Hill could make his deductions from a simple understanding of the timetable. If the kidnappers were using a boat they wouldn’t have had time to reach Tangier yet. Hill said, “What about SDECE?”

“They’d better be in on it.”

“I know. But it makes it a fair bet the Russians will have it before midnight. If the French don’t leak it the Guardia will.”

Which was being very polite to the CIA, Lime thought, but he let it go.

At half past four Madrid reported that Mezetti had checked through the French-Spanish border on Saturday, January eighth, driving a hired Renault four-door. The car hadn’t turned up yet. Its description and plate number had been broadcast to all Spanish police.

It placed Mezetti in the Barcelona area shortly before the kidnapping; it added little to what Lime had already assumed but it was confirmation and that never hurt.

At five-ten the break came.

Hill took the call and hanging up turned to Lime: “Agency stringer in Gibraltar. He’s just left the Mezetti Industries office. The kid’s in a hotel there.”

Lime exhaled deeply.

Hill still had his hand on the cradled telephone receiver. “Pick him up?”

“No. I want a tail on him.”

“We could pull him apart, make him talk.”

“Tail him.”

“Jesus I wouldn’t. He loses the tail, our heads roll.”

“And Fairlie’s. Don’t you think I know that? Button him up tight — but don’t touch him.” Lime turned toward the door. “Hustle me up an airplane, will you? I’m going down there.”

3:30 P.M. EST Riva was acting the part of a Puerto Rican tourist. He had papers to prove it, if anyone should care to ask; no one had. His only concession to the need for a precautionary disguise was a hairpiece which filled in his widow’s peak, gave him a head of salt-and-pepper hair and a lower forehead. Nothing more was needed; Riva was amorphous, people had to meet him eight or ten times before they could recall what he looked like.

He had come down from New York on the Metroliner and found a taxi driver at Union Station willing to take him around Washington on a sightseeing tour. Riva told the driver he particularly wanted to see the homes of Congressmen and Senators and Cabinet members.

He and Sturka had gone over the same route several times a month ago to check out locations and security arrangements; the tour today was designed mainly to discern what added security precautions had been taken. If any. Riva was unimpressed by the Americans’ notions of security.

There was a house trailer in the driveway of Senator Ethridge’s place; he had expected that much. The trailer would contain a Secret Service crew. That was all right; they could afford to bypass Ethridge. The cab drove on.

Milton Luke had an apartment in a high-rise building on Wisconsin Avenue. The cab cruised past and Riva saw no armed men on the curb or in the visible sector of the lobby. But that didn’t mean much; later he would have to reconnoiter the building on foot.

On Massachusetts Avenue just above Sheridan Circle was a massive apartment building that housed among others Congressmen Wood and Jethro, Secretary of the Treasury Jonathan Chaney, Senator Fitzroy Grant, and syndicated political columnist J. R. Ilfeld. The concentration of targets made the building important in Riva’s calculations and he studied it with care as they drove past. Again there was no indication of protection or surveillance.

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

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

Friday, January 14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He tried the left hand. The light clicked on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a puzzle and it nudged various suspicions in the back of Lime’s mind. But if it was a red herring it could operate either of two ways and there wasn’t time to analyze it to death. Mezetti was a warm body, Lime had a rope on him, and he intended to keep hold of its end until he saw where it was going to drag him.

So Lime in the Cortina awaited the emergence of a Mario Mezetti he had never laid eyes on. He had a collection of photographs and the information that Mario had been reported this morning wearing a belted brown leather coat, brown slacks and suede desert boots. He’d be difficult to miss; at any rate a gray Rolls with his luggage aboard awaited him in front of the bank and Lime’s men had all the exits covered.

Lime had taken charge last night but had left the routine surveillance to his armies. If Mezetti saw him too often he would begin to recognize Lime’s face. It was always better to let the minions handle shadow jobs with frequent changes of relays — always fresh faces.

Mezetti’s Cessna Citation had a cruising speed of four hundred mph and a range of twelve hundred miles. Lime had inscribed a circle of that radius on a map and arranged for close-interval air cover within it. Sixth Fleet had jets airborne waiting to shadow the Citation and Lime had organized a second-string team of commandeered civilian planes because the Navy Phantoms, easily recognizable, would have to keep their distance and tail mainly by radar to avoid alerting Mezetti. If Mezetti decided to fly at treetop altitudes where ground contours would absorb his radar image, he would lose Navy Air; it was better to keep visual contact. The CIA had set up a complex of ground spotter stations and Lime had a dozen planes ready to pick up the baton depending which direction Mezetti flew — Spanish jets now orbiting Malága and Seville and Cape St. Vincent, a Moroccan oil-company plane over Cape Negro, Portuguese civil-air over Lisbon and Madeira, a pair of seaplanes at Majorca and Mers-el-Kebir.

At ten forty-three the young man for whom the police and security forces of fourteen nations had been searching emerged from the main entrance of the bank carrying a heavy suitcase and entered the rear passenger compartment of the big elderly Rolls.

Lime stirred the Cortina’s transmission and squirted the little car into the northbound street ahead of the Rolls. Another car would be closing in behind it. Lime drove unhurriedly past the old Moorish castle and out past the open crossgates which were closed across the highway whenever an airplane was making use of the GibAir runway. Lime turned into the car park by the terminal, glancing in the rearview mirror and seeing the Rolls draw up at the passenger door.

Lime went through private doors, had a brief conference with Chad Hill in the airport manager’s office, passed the customs line without a check and had ensconced himself beside the Navy pilot in the Lear jet before Mario Mezetti came along the runway in a courtesy car and was decanted beside the Citation, which stood warming up about fifty yards down-runway from the Lear.

When Lime’s plane swung around into position to make its takeoff run Lime twisted his head and through the plexiglass saw the Citation begin to roll.

Lime was off the ground, pressed back into his seat by the G-force of takeoff, three minutes ahead of the Citation. The Navy pilot put the Lear out over the Straits and orbited off Tangier until the Citation climbed steeply into sight and banked around toward the northeast.

“That’s enough of a lead,” Lime said. “Let’s go.”

The Navy pilot pulled the Lear around and held a position directly behind, and slightly below, the Citation. It was the Citation’s blind spot: Mezetti’s pilot would not be able to see the Lear in his rearview mirror unless he made a sudden turn or backflip.

The Citation steadied on a course east by northeast. It didn’t climb above three thousand feet. Lime, a few miles behind and five hundred feet lower, studied the millionth-scale map on his lap and reached for the copilot’s headset. “Is this thing locked in?”

“Clear channel,” the pilot said, and reached for a dial.

Lime settled the earphones over his head. “Is there a send button?”

“No. It’s an open two-way. You just talk and listen.”

That simplified things, eliminated the need for an “over” at the end of each transmission. Lime spoke into the mike that hovered before his mouth:

“Hill, this is Lime.”

“Hill right here.” The voice was metallic but clear in the headset.

“Have you got their course?”

“Yes sir. I’ve alerted Majorca.”

“It looks like a change in flight plan.”

“Yes sir. We’re ready for it.”

The Citation flew straight and level for fifteen minutes and then the pilot jogged Lime’s knee. “He’s got his wheels down.”

Lime looked up from the map in time to see the Citation start a slow left turn, the nose going down into an easy glide. The sea was beneath the Lear’s starboard wing, the Spanish coastline immediately below and the foothills rising to his left; the peaks of the Sierras loomed several thousand feet above the airplane, some miles north. It began to appear the Citation was descending straight toward the mountains.

“Hill, this is Lime.”

“Yes sir. We’ve still got him on radar — hold it, he just disappeared.”

“I’ve still got him. He’s put his gear down.”

The airplane ahead was still turning slowly. Lime nodded to the pilot and the Lear followed in the Cessna’s wake.

“You want our gear down, Mr. Lime?”

“No.” There were no commercial airfields in the area toward which the Citation was descending. If Mezetti was about to set down in a pasture it would hardly do to land right behind him. “Keep some altitude,” Lime said. “Swing a little wide — if he lands we want to see the place but we’ll shoot past.”

“All right sir.”

Hill on the headset: “Sir, he picked up the consignment as ordered.”

“Thank you.” Mezetti had telephoned the bank yesterday and requested they have one hundred thousand dollars in cash on hand for him. This was confirmation he had collected it. Clearly then he was doing courier duty and it could be assumed he was now headed for a rendezvous with the others in order to turn over the money.

It all looked a little too easy; but Lime reminded himself they wouldn’t have been shadowing Mezetti at all if it hadn’t been for the single fortuitous fingerprint on the garage light switch in Palamos.

The Cessna was quite low along the foothills, banking back and forth, obviously searching for something. Lime said, “Keep going — make it look as if we’re on a regular flight to Majorca. Don’t slow down and don’t circle.”

Into the microphone he said, “Chad?”

“Yes sir.”

“He’s going down in map sector Jay-Niner, the northwest quadrant.”

“Jay-Niner northwest, yes sir. I’ll alert the nearest ground team.”

“We’re going by. We’ll want a crisscross.”

“Yes sir.”

The Spanish plane from Malága would overfly the sector within four minutes to confirm the Citation had actually landed. Lime, looking back with his cheek to the plexiglass window, had a last glimpse of the little jet descending toward a field encircled by foothills. There were two or three small peasant-farm buildings on the edge of the field and a ribbony road that headed south toward Almería.

“Swing out over the Med and take us back to Gibraltar.”

The Lear touched down neatly and braked the length of the runway and made a slow turn at the end of the strip to taxi back to the terminal.

Chad Hill came loping out to meet him. The young man seemed unable to contain himself. “They’ve got another tape!”

Lime said, “What tape?”

“He left one of those tapes on the roof of the hotel. You know, with a transmitter. Like last time.”

“Fairlie’s voice again?”

“No sir, it’s in Morse.”

He was out of cigarettes. “Anybody got a cigarette?” One of the technicians obliged. It was a Gauloise and when Lime lit up, rancid fumes instantly filled the little room.

The police station was crowded; the CIA people were working on the apparatus Mezetti had left on the hotel roof. It had a timer set to start the tape playback at eight o’clock tonight.

It was just short of noon. Lime said, “Put it together and take it back where you found it.”

Chad Hill’s mouth dropped open.

Lime said in a mild voice that didn’t betray his exasperation, “If that thing doesn’t broadcast on time they’ll know something went wrong.”

Chad Hill swallowed visibly. Lime said, “You’ve made copies by now.”

“Yes sir. Sent it to Washington by scrambler transmission.”

“Any prints on that equipment?”

“No.”

“All right then, take them up on the hotel roof and watch them set it up. When they’re finished, bring them back to this room and post a man on the door. Nobody goes in or out of this room until eight tonight — and no phone calls except to me. Right?”

“Yes sir.”

“You understand this, do you?”

“Yes sir. It’ll give us a jump on the rest of the spooks — no leaks. I understand.”

“Good.” Obviously Chad thought the measure was extreme but he knew how to follow orders and that was why Lime had picked him. “When you’re done here find me — I’ll have more chores for you.”

“Yes sir.” Chad swung away.

Lime reread the transcription in his fist. The Morse decode was brief:

At twelve-fifty there was a flash from Chad Hill: “He’s taking off again.”

“You sure Mezetti’s still in the plane?”

“Yes sir. They’ve had field glasses on him for half an hour.”

“What’s he been doing?”

“Nothing. Poking around the place as if he lost something. Hooker says he looks confused and kind of pissed off — as if he expected somebody to meet him there and they didn’t show up.”

“Did he spend any time inside the farm buildings?”

“Long enough to poke around. He came right out again.”

“What about the suitcase?”

“He never took it off the plane.”

“All right. Track the plane and send Hooker down to look through those buildings.”

“He’s already down there sir. That’s where he’s calling from. I’ve got him on the other phone — you want me to ask him anything?”

“Well I assume he found nothing?” Lime was a little wry.

“That’s right sir. No sign anyone’s been there in weeks. Except Mezetti of course.”

“How about the basement?”

“No sir. He looked.”

“All right. Call me back.”

He hung up and lit another cigarette and tried to get his brain in working order. Somewhere in all this there ought to be a pattern but it wasn’t emerging. Perhaps he was missing it: he was running on his batteries, he’d had less than four hours’ sleep last night and it hadn’t been enough to make up for the previous two days without.

The phone rang. Chad Hill again. “For Christ’s sake. He’s coming back to Gibraltar. The pilot just radioed for landing instructions.”

“All right. Put an eight-man tail on Mezetti. As soon as he’s separated from the pilot bring the pilot in.”

“Yes sir.”

Lime cradled it but within seconds it rang again. “Sir, it’s Mr. Satterthwaite on the scrambler. You want to come over here?”

Satterthwaite’s high-pitched voice was shrill with unreasoning anger: he was getting rattled, things were piling up against him. “What have you got out there, David? And don’t tell me you’ve drawn a blank.”

“We’re moving. Not far and not fast, but we’re moving. You saw the message we’re supposed to get tonight?”

“A lot of good that is,” Satterthwaite said. “Listen, they’ve taken Dexter Ethridge to Walter Reed in an ambulance.”

It made Lime sit bolt upright. “Bad?”

“Nobody knows yet. He seems to be out cold.”

“You mean somebody tried to assassinate him?”

“No. Nothing like that. Natural causes, whatever it is — he was home in bed, or in the bathroom. Listen, you know what happens if Ethridge packs up. We’ve got to have Fairlie back by the twentieth.”

“Well you’ve still got a line of succession.”

“Milt Luke?” Satterthwaite snorted. “Get him back, David.”

As usual Satterthwaite was trying to sound like Walter Pidgeon in Command Decision and as usual his voice was wrong for it. Lime ignored the heroics. “What’s the decision on the exchange?”

“We’re divided. It’s still, ah, hotly contested, as it were.”

“It’s up to the President, though. Isn’t it.”

“We live in a democracy,” Satterthwaite said, quite dry. “It’s up to the people.”

“Sure it is.”

“David whether you like it or not it’s a political decision. The consequences could be catastrophic if we do the wrong thing.”

“I’ve got a piece of news for you. The consequences will probably be catastrophic whatever you do. You’d better shit or get off the pot.”

“Funny — Dexter Ethridge said the same thing. In somewhat more genteel language of course.”

“Which makes Ethridge a little brighter than the rest of you,” Lime said. He glanced across the communications room. A dozen men were busy at phones and teleprinters; a few of them wore headsets. Chad Hill was handing a telephone receiver back to the man seated at the table beside him. Hill started to gesture in Lime’s direction — something had developed that required Lime’s attention. Lime waved an acknowledgment and said to the scrambler, “Look, we’re glued onto Mezetti. Right now he’s leading us in circles but I think he’s going to take us to them if we give him a little time. I can’t have—”

“How much time?”

“I’m not an oracle. Ask Mezetti.”

“That’s what you ought to be doing, David.”

“Are you ordering me to pick him up?”

Static on the line while Satterthwaite paused to consider it. Lime was dropping the ball in his lap. “David, when I talked you into this it was with the understanding that the best way to get a job done is to pick the best people and give them their heads. I’m not going to start telling you how to do your job — if I were capable of that I’d be doing the job instead of you.”

“All right. But Mezetti may lead us right into the hive, and it could happen any time. I need to know how much latitude I’ve got if I have to start talking deals with them.”

“You’re asking blood from a stone.”

“Damn it I have to know if you’re going to agree to the exchange. Any negotiator has to know his bargaining points. You’re tying my hands.”

“What do you want me to tell you? The decision hasn’t been made yet. The instant it’s made I’ll let you know.”

It was all he was going to get. He stopped pressing it. “All right. Look, something’s come up. I’ll get back to you.”

“Do it soon.”

“Aeah. See you.”

He broke the connection and crossed the room and Chad Hill bundled him outside. In the Government House corridor Chad said, “He’s changed course on us.”

“He’s not landing in Gib?”

“The plane turned north.”

Lime felt relieved and showed it with a tight smile. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Who’s on him?”

“Two planes at the moment. Another one coming across from Lisbon to pick him up farther north.”

“All right then. Just let’s don’t lose the son of a bitch.”

The worst part was doing nothing, knowing things were happening out there but sitting still waiting for news. Lime sent a man out to buy him half a dozen packs of American cigarettes and if possible a large order of coffee. He retreated to his monk’s cell and tried to put his head together.

His sense of time had been blurred: fatigue gave him a sunless sense of unreality, everything took place at a distance as if seen through a camera. He had to rest. Once again he stretched out on the floor and closed his eyes.

He pictured Bev but the image drifted and he was thinking of Julius Sturka, the vague face in the grainy photograph.

He didn’t want it to turn out to be Sturka. He’d tried to get Sturka before and he’d failed. Failed in 1961 and failed again in the past fortnight.

In the old days he had wasted a lot of time learning non-facts about Sturka — the sort of rumors that were always available to fill the holes between facts. Maybe it was true he was a Yugoslav who had watched the fascisti torture his parents to death in Trieste, or a Ukrainian Jew who had fought Nazis at Sevastopol, but Lime long ago had begun to distrust all the simplistic Freudian guesses about Sturka. There wasn’t any doubt Sturka had a romanticized picture of himself but it wasn’t the messianic sort that had characterized Ché Guevara. The nearest Lime could come to a definition was to think of Sturka as a sort of ideological mercenary. He couldn’t fathom what motivated Sturka but it seemed clear enough that Sturka was preoccupied more with means than with ends. He had an unrealistic view of political strategy but his tactics were impeccable. He was a methodologist, not a philosopher. At least from a distance he resembled the master criminal who was more concerned with the mechanical complexity of his crime than with its reward. Sometimes it tempted Lime to think of him as an adolescent prankster doing something outrageous just to prove he could get away with it on a dare. Sturka had the traits of a game player, he took delight in moves and countermoves. At what he did, he was superb; he was a professional.

A professional. Lime understood that; it was the highest accolade in his lexicon.

Two professionals. Was Sturka the better?

What is Fairlie to me that maybe I’ll have to die for him? But the adrenaline was pumping and Bev had been right: he had sought peace but boredom had become a kind of death and he was joyous with this job. He was at his best when he risked the most.

Needing sleep, his nerve-ends raw, his belly afire from caffeine and nicotine, he was alive. The malaise of David Lime: I have pain, therefore I am.

Five days to spring Fairlie. Well anyhow that was the spring Satterthwaite was trying to wind. If you didn’t get Fairlie back there was always Ethridge and if Ethridge turned out to be dying of something there was always Milton Luke. A senile cipher, Luke, but they’d survived Coolidge and Harding and Ike in his last years. The deadline was real but if it passed the world might hang together in spite of Lime’s failure...

Thinking in circles now.

Was it really Sturka at the other end of the test line? Well it did have the earmarks, didn’t it. The little cell of operatives striking straight to the system’s nervous center. The knife straight into the vitals. The exquisite timing.

But if you assumed that much you still couldn’t jump to conclusions about Sturka’s base of operations. The fact that Sturka had once operated out of the djebel did not place him there now. Algeria was the logical place to look because Algeria was Sturka’s old stamping grounds and because Algeria had one of the few governments in the world that wouldn’t actively cooperate in the hunt for Fairlie; but the assumption it was Sturka was what militated most powerfully against the Algerian answer. Algeria was so obvious it was the one place Sturka would avoid.

And he had the signs they had blazed for him. The Arab robes, the boat turning north, now Mezetti flying north across Spain toward the Pyrenees with one hundred thousand dollars in his satchel. All of them deliberate misleaders, with the Arab robes a double bluff? Sturka was clever but was he that subtle?

Geneva, he thought, and that farm outside Almería where Mezetti had landed expecting to meet someone.

There was too much missing. In the field there was nothing to do but follow the facts and hope Mezetti would produce.

Sturka, he thought reluctantly. I suppose it must be. He dozed.

1:45 P.M. EST Satterthwaite sat tense with one shoulder raised, dry-washing his clasped hands. Images crowded his mind: the operating-room glances between doctors, eyes bleak over the tops of white surgical masks; the obscene pulsing of a respirometer bag; rhythmic green curves darting across a cardiograph screen with eyes watching it fearfully hoping the curve would not become a steady green dot sliding straight across from left to right.

Out at Walter Reed the neurosurgeons were drilling holes toward Dexter Ethridge’s brain. Cutting biparietal burr holes. At last report blood pressure was down to eighty over forty; a clot was suspected.

Satterthwaite looked at the man behind the big desk. Worry pulled at President Brewster’s mouth. Neither man spoke.

David Lime was in an airplane somewhere between Gibraltar and Geneva — an airborne jet transport with his big communications crew aboard. All of them following the track of the Mezetti Cessna. Maybe it would lead them to something. But if it didn’t?

The telephone.

The President looked up but only his eyes moved; he didn’t stir.

Satterthwaite reached out, plucked at the telephone.

It was Kermode. Dexter Ethridge’s doctor. He sounded aggrieved as if by some petty annoyance. “Ten minutes ago. It was a subdural hematoma.”

Satterthwaite covered the mouthpiece with his palm. “He’s dead.”

The President blinked. “Dead.”

Kermode was still talking. Satterthwaite got phrases: “Medicine’s not an exact science, is it. I mean in half these cases the diagnosis isn’t made until it’s too late — in a third of them it isn’t even considered. It’s my bloody fault.”

“Take it easy. You’re not a neurologist.”

“We’ve had them on the case since the bombing. Nobody spotted it. I mean it’s not a common problem. We found out by arteriography, but it was too late to evacuate the thing.”

“Take it easy, Doctor.”

“Take it easy. Sure. I mean I’ve just murdered the next President of the United States.”

“Nuts.”

Brewster stirred — reaching for a cigar — but he didn’t speak. Satterthwaite listened to the telephone voice: “It was an injury caused by the bomb blast when that desk hit him on the head. What happens, the cerebral hemispheres get displaced downward and you get a compression against the brain. It’s a hemorrhage but it’s not the usual run of cerebral hemorrhage. It’s between the layers — you can’t spot it with the usual diagnostic tools. These things take weeks to show up — sometimes months. Then it’s usually too late.”

Satterthwaite wasn’t willing to go on listening to Kermode’s mea culpa. “What about Judith Ethridge?”

“She’s here in the hospital. Of course she knows.”

“The President will call her.”

“Yeah.”

“Goodbye,” Satterthwaite said, and removed the muttering phone from his ear and hung it up.

The President glared at him.

“Shit.” Brewster spoke the word as if it had been chipped out of hard steel.

8:00 P.M. EST The snow had quit falling. Raoul Riva let the Venetian blind slat down and left the room in hat and overcoat, walked to the elevator and pressed the concave plastic square until it lit up. He rode down to the lobby and stood just inside the front door ignoring the doorman’s inquiring glance; stood there for a few moments as if judging the weather, then strolled outside with the air of a man in no hurry who had no particular destination in mind.

The phone booth was a few streets away and he approached it at a leisurely pace, timing his arrival for eight-twenty. The call wasn’t due until half past but he wanted to make sure no one else used the phone at that time. He stepped into the booth and pretended to be looking up a number in the directory.

The call was three minutes late. “I have an overseas call for Mr. Felix Martin.”

“Speaking.”

“Thank you... Your call is ready sir. Go ahead.”

“Hello Felix?” Sturka’s voice was a bit distant; it wasn’t the best connection.

“Hello Stewart. How’s the weather over your way?”

“Very mild. How’s yours?”

“A little snow but it’s let up. I wish I were over there in all that sunshine. You must be having a ball.”

“Well you know, business, always business.” Sturka’s voice became more matter-of-fact. “How’s the market doing?”

“Not too great I’m afraid. A bad thing, Dexter Ethridge dying like that — you heard?”

“No. You say Ethridge died?”

“Yes. Some sort of hemorrhage — after effect of those bombs that blew up the Capitol. The news sent the market down another four points.”

“Well what about our holdings?”

“They’re slipping. Like all the rest.”

“I suppose things will recover. They always do. We’ll just have to hold on and wait for our price.”

Riva said, “Well the way things are going I wouldn’t be surprised if the SEC slapped some tougher controls on.”

“Yes. I suppose we’ll have to expect that.”

“These radicals are really pretty stupid, aren’t they. If they don’t turn Cliff Fairlie loose there’s going to be all kinds of hell breaking loose.”

“Well I don’t know, Felix. I get a feeling they’ve got some pretty brutal plans. I wouldn’t be surprised if they killed Fairlie and assassinated the Speaker of the House at the same time. Then they’d be guaranteeing that old Senator Hollander’d get the Presidency, and maybe that’s exactly what these clowns want — a right-wing fool like that in the White House would do more for the cause of the revolutionaries than anybody since Fulgencio Batista. You think maybe that’s what they’ve got in mind?”

“That sounds pretty fanciful if you ask me. I mean the Speaker must be ten feet deep in Secret Service protection. I can’t see how they’d be able to pull that off.”

“Well I’m sure they’d find a way. They always seem to, don’t they. Anyhow this call’s costing a bloody fortune, let’s not spend hours talking politics. Now look, from what you say about the market I’d think it might be a good time to get out of our blue chips, unload them first thing Monday morning. What do you say?”

“I think it might be better to hold off a few days, see which way things go.”

“You may be right. I’ll let you be the judge of that. But I do think it’s a damn good thing we unloaded that block of Mezetti Industries stock — we got out right under the wire.”

“You got out of it entirely?” Riva asked.

“Yes, we just took payment for the last block.”

“Then that was a good break.”

“Well you know me, Felix, always willing to cut my losses. I’m not one to hang onto something once it’s started to lose steam.”

“On the other hand,” Riva said, “I’d hang onto those blue chips a while longer before I unloaded them, if I were you. It’s too early to think about dumping them.”

“Well we’ll give it a few days then. I’ll talk to you again Monday night, all right?”

“Okay, fine. Have a good weekend.”

“You too.”

“Give my best to Marjorie.”

“I’ll do that. So long.”

“Bye.”

Riva left the booth and glanced toward the sky. The city’s glow reflected back from the underbellies of heavy rolling clouds. He turned the coat collar up against his throat and walked back toward the hotel.

Saturday, January 15

7:00 A.M. North African Time It was Fairlie’s second morning in the gray room.

There were no windows. The iron legs of the cot were sealed into the concrete of the floor. The mattress was a flaccid tick.

No pillow or sheets. The light was a low-watt bulb recessed into the stucco ceiling with a steel grille imbedded flush with the ceiling to prevent the prisoner’s fingers from reaching up and unscrewing the light. It was never switched off.

Evidently it had been built to house prisoners. Possibly a relic of the Second World War. It had been designed to contain the kind of people whose first reaction to imprisonment was to escape. There was nothing he could tear apart to make a tool or weapon: the cot was a single welded frame with a plywood bed. And even so there were no window bars to pry open. The door was iron and fitted flush into its metal frame. It had no handle or keyhole on the inside. The crack beneath it was barely sufficient to admit air, which circulated up and exhausted, apparently, through ducts above the ceiling light. Up there a fan hummed constantly.

They had been feeding him twice a day since they’d captured him. It was his only way of reckoning time; he had to assume they were still keeping to the same schedule of meals.

An hour ago they had brought him coffee and a hard loaf of bread and a bar of soap. He took it to be breakfast; they usually fed him an adequate evening meal. So it was morning again.

He had no way of telling where he was. He had last seen the sky the other night aboard the pitching boat before they had blindfolded him. Then the ride in the amphibious airplane. The flight had seemed interminable but eventually the plane had come down — on land; the surface on which it landed was rough, no regular airport runway.

They had carried him a short distance and seated him in another vehicle. He had heard the airplane take off again and fly away, the sound of the engines diminishing as the car in which he sat began to move slowly across bumpy terrain: an ungraded dirt road, if it was a road at all.

The mask with which they had blinded him was opaque and they had taped it so tightly there was no way for light to reach his eyelids. But he had felt heat against his left cheek and shoulder during the ride and it made him certain the sun was up. If it was morning he was traveling south.

The car stopped once and evidently Ahmed got out; there was a rattling of metal, perhaps jerrycans. Lady was testing the pulse in Fairlie’s wrists. They had given him a shot shortly before the airplane had landed and from the vague euphoria it produced he assumed they were keeping him doped up on mild tranquilizers to maintain his docility. It did more than that; it kept his mind afloat, he couldn’t concentrate on anything long enough to think anything out.

It had been another journey too long to be timed subjectively. It might have been forty-five minutes, it might have been three hours. The car stopped; they lifted him out and walked him across some gravel. Into a building, through a number of turns — hallways? Down a flight of hard steps which seemed to be half buried in rubble; he had to feel his way carefully, kicking things off the steps. Finally they had turned him through a door into this cell where they had removed the mask and the gag and the wires that bound his hands.

It had taken a little while for his eyes to get used to the light and by the time he was able to see they had locked him inside alone, having stripped him of everything except the rudiments of his clothing.

That first evening Lady had brought him a good-sized helping of lamb stew on a military metal plate and an unlabeled bottle of raw primitive wine. Ahmed stood in the doorway, shoulder tilted, arms folded, showing the hard black oily gleam of a revolver. Watching him eat. “Just don’ make trouble. You don’ want your wife marching to slow organ music.”

They still hadn’t shown him their faces — none but Abdul, the black pilot; and Abdul apparently was not here. Fairlie had to assume Abdul had flown the airplane back to its source, or at least away from this area.

For hours after Lady and Ahmed left him he sat like a stone, brooding, offended by his own sour body smell and the heavy stink of cheap disinfectant in the cell.

Drugs had sealed him in a protective shell within which he had become a passive observer, defending himself against outbursts of terror by the basic expedient of withdrawal. Emotionally dulled and mentally numbed, he had observed without reacting; he had absorbed without thinking.

The solitary incarceration allowed him to begin to emerge.

He sat on the cot with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up against his chest, arms wrapped around his legs, chin on knees, eyes fixed without focus on the water faucet opposite him. At first his brain stirred with sluggish reluctance. In time his muscles became cramped and he stretched out face down on the cot, chin on laced hands. It got the light out of his eyes and he tried to sleep but now his mind was awakening from its long recession and he began to reason.

Up to now he had accepted that he would be killed or he would be released: alternatives over which he had no control and therefore against which he should not struggle. He had prepared himself atavistically to wait in this limbo, however long it might take, until it ended with freedom or death.

There were further considerations but he began to recognize them only now.

The first was the idea of escape. A variety of fanciful schemes presented themselves and he entertained them all but in the end dismissed them, all for the same reasons: he was no storybook adventurer, he knew virtually nothing of physical combat or the methods of stealth, and he had no knowledge of what lay beyond the door of this cell.

They were feeding him, enough to sustain life; they had not assaulted him physically. They had gone to a great amount of evident trouble to spirit him away intact. They were using him as a bargaining tool; they needed him alive.

They wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble if they meant to kill him in the end. They had never showed their faces; he clung to that.

He spent the entire night reasoning it out. At times he was convinced they were going to let him go. At times he felt they would use him up and toss him away like a squeezed lemon, as dead as yesterday. At these times the chilly sweat of fear streamed down his ribs.

For hours too he though of Jeanette and their unborn child. The effect all this would have on her. On them.

That was what finally stirred his anger: Jeanette and the children.

Until now it had all had an odd impersonality for him. In a way his abduction seemed an extension of politics: a military sort of thing. Abominable, inexcusable, terrifying — yet in its way rational.

But now it became personal. They had no right, he thought. There was no possible justification. To put an expectant mother and two adolescent children through this agony of unknowing...

That made it personal and when it became personal it became hate.

He had been afraid of them; now he hated them.

He began to wonder why it had taken so incredibly long for him to think of Jeanette and the children. It was the first thought he had given to them in — how long? Three days? Four?

He had taken the coward’s refuge in mindless despair. Dulled his mind, curled up in a tight defensive little ball around himself — a total selfishness of reaction which appalled him...

He had to get to know these animals. He had to penetrate the burnouses and the phony voices. He had to watch for every clue, no matter how trivial.

By the time they released him he had to know them: he had to be able to identify them for the world.

He dozed finally and came awake when they brought food: Abdul and Sélim. So Abdul had returned from wherever he had left the airplane.

He tried to draw them out but they both refused to speak. They took his plates away and the lock latched over with a heavy clank.

The rest of that day he had struggled with the problems he had set for himself. No simple resolutions offered themselves. He slept awhile and awoke dreaming of Jeanette.

A second dinner of stew, a second endless lamplit night, and now his second morning in the cell.

Sélim came in: a cold figure in his disguising robes, hard and poisonous — something sleek and cruel about him. No movement in the hooded eyes. Eyes that had seen everything. So cold. A man with whom he could make no real contact. Sélim seemed to possess a superb self-control but Fairlie sensed in him a wild animal unpredictability: an underlying mercurial spectrum of moods and tempers that could be triggered at any time. What was most frightening was that there would be no way to predict wHat might turn out to be the trigger.

Fairlie studied him, tried to form an estimate: five feet eleven, a hundred and seventy pounds. But he couldn’t tell much about what was concealed under the Arab garb.

“I could use a change of clothes.”

“I’m sorry.” Sélim’s sardonicisms were perfunctory: “We’re roughing it.”

Abdul came through the door and stood beside Sélim. Chewing spearmint gum as always. Fairlie studied him too: the broad dark face, the brooding inward expression. Five-ten, a hundred and ninety, possibly late thirties. The hair was shot with gray but that might be fake. The olive chauffeur’s uniform was powdered with the same fine dust Fairlie had found on his own clothes, on his skin, in his hair. Sand particles.

Sélim’s hands: hard, scarred, yet graceful with long deft fingers. The feet? Encased in boots, overflowed by robes. No help there, no help in the eyes which were set deep in secretive recesses, always half shuttered, their color indeterminate.

“It won’t be very long,” Sélim said. “A few days.” Fairlie had the feeling Sélim was giving him a close curious scrutiny. Appraising the appraiser. Sizing me up. Why?

“You’re not afraid, are you.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“You’re a little angry. That’s understandable.”

“My wife is expecting a child.”

“How nice for her.”

“You’re guaranteeing your own extermination,” Fairlie said. “I hope I have a hand in it.”

It made Abdul smile. With Sélim as always there was no gauging the reaction. Sélim said, “Well with us it doesn’t matter. There are always others to take our places. You can’t exterminate us all.”

“By now you’ve encouraged quite a few people to try. Is that what you want?”

“In a way.” Sélim stirred. “Fairlie, if we’d been Jews and that Capitol of yours had been a beer hall in Berlin with Hitler and his storm troopers inside, you’d have congratulated us. And it would have encouraged a lot of Germans to follow our example.”

The argument was as simpleminded as a John Birch Society leaflet and it was amazing a man as sophisticated as Sélim could believe in it. Fairlie said, “There’s one difference, isn’t there. The people aren’t on your side. They don’t share your ideas — the fact is they’re more likely to support repression than revolution. I quote one of your own heroes — ‘Guerrilla warfare must fail if its political objectives don’t coincide with the aspirations of the people.’ That’s Chairman Mao.”

Quite clearly it had taken Sélim by surprise, even more so than Abdul. Sélim almost snapped back at him. “You presume to quote Mao to me. I’ll give you Mao — ‘The first law of warfare is to protect ourselves and destroy the enemy. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Guerrillas must educate the people in the meaning of guerrilla warfare. It is our task to intensify guerrilla terrorism until the enemy is forced to become increasingly severe and oppressive.’”

“The world’s not a clinic for your experiments in stupidity. Your brand of star-chamber justice stinks of murder. Why don’t you go ahead and kill me? It’s what you really want, isn’t it?”

“I’d like to,” Sélim said in his emotionless monotone. “But I’m afraid we won’t get the chance. You see we’ve been listening to the radio. Your friend Brewster has agreed to the exchange.”

He tried to conceal his feelings. “It might be better if he hadn’t.”

“Not for you. If he’d decided to call our bluff we’d have given him your dead body.”

“I’m sure you would have.”

Abdul said, “You got balls.”

When they left Fairlie sagged back on the cot. They had diseased minds, these self-appointed revolutionaries. They lived in moral twilight with their sterile dogmas that were limited to what could be daubed on a placard. Their frenzied attachment to the apocalypse was terrifying: like the Vietnam generals they didn’t care if they had to blow up the world to save it.

Most of them were congenitally naive; they saw things in a fool’s terms — what wasn’t totally acceptable was totally unacceptable; if you didn’t like something you destroyed it utterly.

But Sélim didn’t ignore things; he took everything into account. Assuredly he was a psychopath but you couldn’t merely label a man and then dismiss him; a good number of the world’s leaders had been psychopaths and it was a bad mistake to call them madmen and let it go at that. Sélim’s mind might function without inhibition but that didn’t mean it functioned without ambition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I imagine it must have been.”

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

“Understandable.”

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

“Sturka? We’re morally certain.”

“Do you think he’ll keep his word?”

“Only if he thinks it’ll profit him.”

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

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

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

“You want to recall the doubles?”

“I think we’d better.”

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

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

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

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

Sunday, January 16

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

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

The Englishman said, “Well?”

“He’s reading the Herald Tribune.”

“How frightfully unsporting of him.”

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

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

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

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

If there was a contact.

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

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

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

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

“You know him?”

“He’s with the Vopos. Plainclothes.”

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

“Does he wear Moscow’s collar?”

“I shouldn’t think so. Not any more.”

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

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

Lime reached for the phone. “Chad?”

“Go ahead.”

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

“I’ll try.”

“Use muscle.”

“They won’t like it.”

“I’ll apologize later.”

“Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

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

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

“Perhaps you’ve got a point.”

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

“You know him?”

“I’ve been here before. A while ago.”

“Yes, it’s still his bailiwick.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Quite neat,” the Englishman applauded.

“We’ll catch hell for it.”

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

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

The Englishman was smug. By openly volunteering his services he had forestalled similar eviction. That was all right; Lime needed to keep a few friends.

He rubbed his eyes. Yaskov’s not showing himself wasn’t very surprising. Yaskov wasn’t fool enough to crowd in with the pack.

He’s around here somewhere.

Forget it, he thought. Other fish to fry. Where’s Mezetti’s contact? What do you suppose the bastard’s waiting for?

There were other leads and they weren’t altogether standing still. The “Venezuelan handyman” who’d been hired by the chief groundskeeper at Perdido — the one who’d evidently sabotaged Fairlie’s original helicopter and killed the Navy pilot — had been identified by the groundskeeper from mug shots: Cesar Renaldo.

Together with the Corby fingerprint in the glove it banished any possibility this was anyone’s caper but Julius Sturka’s.

But still everything was flimsy. Hundreds of thousands of people were working on it, looking for Sturka and the rest, looking for Raoul Riva. Nothing. There was only one physical lead: Mezetti.

Mezetti sat in a chair reading a newspaper.

The wind came in through the open window. It came right down from Lapland, picking up chill moisture over the frozen Finnish lakes. The sun was a low thin rime in the south, weak pink through haze; it had risen late and would set within three hours.

“I say,” the Englishman muttered. Lime jerked awake.

Across the way there was movement. He snapped the glasses to his eyes and made the rapid search until he found Mezetti’s window. Locked onto it and watched.

Mezetti had put the newspaper down and was at the wardrobe, shouldering into a coat, reaching for a hat.

Lime handed the glasses to the Englishman and wheeled to the telephone. “He’s moving. Coat and hat.”

“Right.”

He got into the Mercedes. Chad Hill at the wheel craned his head around inquiringly.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Lime told him wearily. “He’s probably headed for a drugstore to buy a toothbrush.”

They watched the face of the hotel. Lime plucked the two-way’s mike from its dashboard hook. “Just checking the communications.”

“Loud and clear.”

After two or three minutes Mezetti appeared on the step. He looked around the square with a great deal of care before he walked the half-block distance to the Saab he’d hired in Helsinki yesterday.

Lime had planted a bleeper under the Saab’s bumper. It gave off an intermittent radio pulse. Two vans were equipped to receive the signals and follow by radio triangulation but Lime still preferred line-of-sight tailing; you never knew when the car might trade drivers and then just keep moving with your radio eavesdroppers none the wiser.

Mezetti was having a little trouble getting the car started. Probably the damp cold in the carburetor. Lime flicked the microphone switch. “I’m on him but we’ll want two other cars.”

“All set.”

Finally smoke puffed from the Saab’s pipe and it moved away from the curb.

“Here we go... Heading into the middle of town.”

“Two vans and three cars on him.”

Lime latched the microphone and spoke to Chad Hill. “Hang back. Don’t tailgate him.”

The Mercedes threaded the narrow streets. Mezetti had turned on his foglights and the red taillights were easy to follow.

A sharp turn into a narrow passage. “Don’t follow him in there,” Lime said. “We’ll go around the block.” And into the mike: “He’s turned into an alley. Maybe checking his tail — I’m letting him go. You’re on the parallel streets?”

“Alcorn’s picked him up. Going west on Alpgatan.”

Lime looked at his map. It was the next boulevard over, running parallel. He spoke terse directions and Chad Hill took the Mercedes around a corner. Lime said, “Slow down. We’ll let the others ride him for a while.”

From the radio: “He appears to be driving around a block now.”

“Not looking for a parking place?”

“No. Trying to make sure he hasn’t got a tail. It’s all right, we’re swapping relays every other corner. He won’t spot us.”

“What’s he doing now?”

“North on the main drag.”

Lime pointed and Hill turned the Mercedes into the main street.

The radio: “He’s going around another block.”

“Sure?”

“It looks that way — okay, he’s made the third turn. One more and he’s gone around the block. Where are you?”

“Near the north edge of town.”

“Keep going. He’ll probably catch up — right, he’s behind you.”

Lime said to Chad Hill, “Can you see him in the mirror?”

Hill had presence of mind enough to move his eyes to the mirror without moving his head. “Not yet.”

“Keep going.”

Things were thinning out; the Finnish pines crowded down toward the road, the paving got narrower, there was ice on the shoulders and snow under the trees.

“There he comes.”

“Keep it down. Let him pass us if he wants to.”

“I don’t think he — oh shit.” And Hill was standing on his brakes.

Lime screwed around in the seat to look back.

Nothing.

“What happened?”

“He turned off back there. Side road.”

“All right. Take it easy, don’t fly apart.”

Hill jockeyed the Mercedes back and forth across the narrow paving, scared to risk the ice shoulders. Finally they made the U-turn and Hill put his foot to the floor.

The acceleration jammed Lime back in his seat. “Slow down damn it.”

The sun flickered through the pines like a moving signal lamp. A car was coming toward them from Lahti; Lime squinted into the sun haze. He made it out to be a green Volvo, the old model two-door. Probably Alcorn.

Hill made the turnoff sedately enough. Lime looked over his shoulder and Alcorn was right behind them.

Ahead the road one-laned into the timber, snow banked close along both sides. The trees shut out the sun. Lime spoke into the microphone, reporting the turn. Afterward he consulted the map.

The road on the map ended at a T-junction with a secondary road that went northwest from Lahti to a string of villages farther north. There were no turnings between here and the T-junction.

“Step it up a little. Let’s see if we can get him in sight.”

An S-curve that made the Mercedes sway on its springs, and then the Saab was there, its taillights just disappearing around a farther bend. “All right, let’s stick to his pace.”

At the T-junction the Saab turned left and Chad Hill spoke a sour oath.

Lime reported: “He’s headed back into town.”

“Son of a bitch. He’s still shaking shadows.”

“He’ll recognize this Mercedes if he sees it again. Tell Alcorn to pull past us. Get me a fresh car at this end of town. You’ve got about fifteen minutes.”

Mezetti drove straight through Lahti without going around any blocks. Alcorn relayed the Saab over to another shadow at the near side of town and at the far edge, going south on the main highway to Helsinki, a new tail picked him up. Lime swapped his Mercedes for a waiting Volvo and went on through along Mezetti’s track. By the time they were out in the pine country Lime had caught up to the other tail; there was some radio chatter and then Lime took over the tail’s position while the tail overtook the Saab and went on ahead, bracketing Mezetti.

They rode him fifteen or twenty kilometers that way. It was getting on for two o’clock — close to sunset in these latitudes. Scandinavians kept their roads cleared in weather far worse than this but there wasn’t much traffic. Pines hugged the road, endless forests of them. Here and there the pavement skirted the edge of a lake and passed a cabin snug with its lights glowing through frost-framed windows: half the residents of Helsinki and Lahti had vacation places on the lakes.

Mezetti seemed oblivious to his company. After dark it would be harder because he would be more acutely aware of headlights if they rode constantly in his mirror.

A Porsche closed from behind, rode a few curves on the Volvo’s bumper and then pulled out to go by. Lime tried to get a glimpse of the driver’s face but the side curtain was steamed up. The Porsche pulled ahead and they were glad to have it between them and Mezetti for a while. Mezetti was doing a fair clip but the Porsche got impatient after a mile or two, put on a burst of speed and slithered past.

Time to switch on the lights. The road hit a quick series of sharp bends, slithering along the shores of linked lakes; occasionally the Saab’s lights winked through the trees.

Mezetti’s performance was amateurish. He’d obviously been coached on blowing a single tail but his maneuverings weren’t the kind that would disclose a multiple shadow, or shake it.

If his people were listening in on the shadowers’ radio chatter they would know he was bracketed but Lime’s organization was not using the standard police-car band; Mezetti’s people would have to know what frequency to monitor and that was unlikely. At any rate they had no way of knowing about the sneak bleeper affixed to Mezetti’s car. It hadn’t been mentioned on the air and it wouldn’t be.

They, he thought. Sturka. Was Sturka somewhere within a few miles, squirreled away in the pines with Clifford Fairlie?

“Speed it up a little. I can’t see his lights.”

Chad Hill fed gas and the Volvo started to lean on the turns. The headlights swept across thick stands of timber, the forest shadows mysterious in the farther depths.

The road squirmed through three sharp turns; Hill had to use his brakes. They weren’t doing more than thirty kilometers an hour when they came out of the last bend and the headlights stabbed a car standing crosswise in the road.

Line’s hand whipped to the dashboard and gripped its edge. The tires skidded on ice crystals imbedded in the road surface but the treads held and the Volvo slewed to a stop, just nudging the bole of a pine.

Lime dropped his hand and put his bleak stare on the car that stoppered the road.

It was the Porsche that had whipped past them ten kilometers back.

No keys in it; and no papers. “Find out who it’s registered to,” he said to Chad Hill. They were pushing it off the road.

It crunched and bounced down into the trees and Chad Hill was jogging back to the Volvo to call in. Lime got into the driver’s seat. Chad Hill stood outside the open right-hand window with the mike in his hand, talking. Lime said, “Get in,” and turned the starter.

The car rocked with Hill’s weight. The door slammed and Lime backed onto the pavement and put the Volvo in gear and jammed his foot to the floor.

They clipped forward at ninety and a hundred kilometers per hour where the road permitted. But there were no taillights out ahead. “Ask him where those damned vans are.”

Hill into the mike: “Where are the vans?”

“Coming right along,” said the speaker. “We haven’t dropped the ball yet.”

But they had. Fifteen minutes later the signal stopped moving and at half past three they found the Saab on a private road parked at the edge of the trees. Mezetti had got away.

It was a summer cottage. A pencil lake perhaps a mile long, a modern cabin large for its kind, a wooden dock with a gasoline pump. There was ice around the edge of the lake but it hadn’t frozen over yet. Lime stood scowling at the Saab. One of the vans was parked behind it and they had headlamps and spotlights switched on; the place was lit up like an arena. A crew of technicians crawled around the car but what was the point?

The voice crackled on the car radio. “What about footprints in the snow?”

“Plenty of them. Mostly from the driveway down to the dock. Have you got a registration on that Porsche yet?”

“Rental outfit. We’re trying to find out who they rented to. It’s taking a little time — it’s a small outfit, they’re closed Sundays. We’re looking for the manager.”

“He won’t know anything.” Lime let the microphone hang slack in his fist and glared at the Saab.

One of the technicians was talking to Chad Hill down by the dock, making gestures toward the gasoline pump.

From the mike: “Maybe we ought to put out an all-points on him. Throw a blanket net, his picture on TV, the whole thing. What have we got to lose?”

“Forget it.” The manhunt until now had been massive but private. If it went public it might increase Fairlie’s jeopardy.

Chad Hill came loping up from the dock. “Something here, sir. That’s aviation gasoline in that pump.”

Lime growled in his throat and put the mike to his lips. “He may be in a seaplane. There’s a lake here, a pier. An aviation gas pump on the dock.”

“I’ll get coastal radar right on it.”

Headlights swung around the approaching bend and Lime squinted at the advancing car. Nobody would have any business here in wintertime.

The car stopped behind the van and one of the Finnish cops went over to talk to the driver. A moment’s uncertainty and then the wave of an arm — the Finn was beckoning and Lime walked across the drive.

The newcomer was a fat man with a cropped gray head and a roll of flesh at the back of his neck. When he got out of the car Lime recognized the clothes right away — the heavy shoes and the Moscow serge suit.

“You are David Lime.”

“Yes.”

“Viktor Menshikov. An honor.” His little formal bow was anachronistic, it needed a clicking of heels to complete it. “I understand you are attempting to locate Mezetti.”

Menshikov strolled off toward the trees at the fringe of the van’s splash of illumination. The studied casualness was too much; it was something out of a Stalinist movie, heavy-handed and full of melodrama, not the suave cleverness it was intended to provide.

Lime followed him to the trees. They were out of earshot of the others. Lime only stood and waited with a cigarette pasted to his lip.

Menshikov’s face glowed in the chill wind. “It is possible we may be able to help.”

“Is that a fact.”

Menshikov tugged at his earlobe. It was one of Mikhail Yaskov’s gestures and obviously that was where this one had picked it up. Yaskov was the kind of man who inspired imitation by his people. This fat goon with his clumsy efforts at elegance was poor fodder — a fifth-rate agent pretending to be a second-rate one, filled with conspiratorial mannerisms. A bureaucrat; but then everybody had the same problem with personnel these days.

“I am instructed to give you an address and a time.”

Lime waited patiently.

“Riihimäkikatu Seventeen. At sixteen hours and forty-five minutes.”

“All right.”

“Alone of course.”

“Of course.”

Menshikov smiled briefly, trying to look villainous. Bowed his head, inserted his heavy rump into his car and drove off.

The wind rubbed itself against Lime. He took the cigarette from his mouth and dropped it into the snow at his feet. Menshikov’s red taillights receded, turned the bend and disappeared. Lime walked over to the Volvo.

He settled wearily into the car, put a cigarette in his mouth, jerked at his tie and opened his collar button and said to Hill, “Yaskov wants a private meet with me at four forty-five.”

That was an hour hence. Chad Hill started the car. “Do you think they’ve got Mezetti?”

“It’s one theory. I’m willing to take an option on it but I’m not buying it yet. I was hoping we wouldn’t get stuck in this kind of flypaper. We haven’t got time. I hope I can sell that to Yaskov — he’s reasonable.”

“He is, maybe. Sometimes his bosses aren’t.”

“Sometimes our bosses aren’t.”

“Uh-huh. You don’t think they’re going to want anything big in trade, do you?”

“They’re careful. That wouldn’t be like them. The price won’t be out of line. It’s all a game, isn’t it.” Lime didn’t care; he was too tired. “At least we haven’t lost him. We thought we had. Better the familiar enemy...”

He dry-scrubbed his face violently, fighting the red wash of fatigue that kept sliding down across his eyes.

He got out of the car a block up from Number Seventeen. He had a pointilliste view of the street through the slowly drifting mist; moisture gleamed on the pavement like precious gems. He felt the weight of the stubby hammer less .38 that was snugged into the clamshell under his arm. At least Yaskov was a professional. There was a bit of comfort knowing he wasn’t going to get killed accidentally by a trigger-happy amateur.

He turned up his collar and put his hands in his pockets and walked down the black sidewalk, avoiding puddles, his heels echoing on the wet concrete. Lights sparkled along the street and he saw a few blocks away the high lamps that outlined the town’s landmark, the high restaurant built on top of the tall phallic water tower.

The emptiness of the street hardened his gut. He fought down the sour spirals coming up from his stomach and lifted his shoulders defensively.

Just as he went by Number Twenty-one a man came out its door and stood there. It could have been coincidence. The man gave Lime the quick distracted smile of a polite stranger. Threw his head back and drew in a loud breath.

Lime went on a dozen paces and looked back at the steps of Number Twenty-one. The man was still there.

A sentry, and a warning to Lime. The man was posted there to watch the street and give the alarm if reinforcements appeared.

Seventeen was a two-story structure, elderly, colorless. It looked as if it probably contained eight or ten flats. Here and there lights burned behind drawn shades. Lime uneasily pictured guns aimed at him from the shadows.

The door admitted him to a corridor at the foot of a flight of wooden stairs. Menshikov came forward from the hallway beside the staircase; smiled and swept his arm toward the stair. It was all dreary and tedious. Lime went up the stairs and Menshikov remained at the front door like a cheap gangster in a Bogart movie.

The stairs creaked when he put his weight on them. At the top there was a landing and a corridor that ran the length of the building front to back. Toward the front a door stood open and General Mikhail Yaskov stood there smiling amiably in comfortable English slacks and a gray turtleneck sweater.

“Hallo David.”

Lime crossed the distance between them and glanced into the room behind Yaskov. It was a dismal flat, the kind that rented furnished. “They must have cut your budget again.”

“It was available. Housing shortage you know.”

Mikhail Yaskov spoke English with a London accent. His smile revealed a chrome-hued tooth; there was humor in the steady gray eyes. He was a tall easygoing man, but the aristocratic face was deeply and prematurely lined.

At one time Lime had felt affection and respect for Mikhail. He had learned better; every face was a mask.

“Well then David. You look God-awful.”

“I haven’t been sleeping well.”

“Pity.” There was a bottle of akvavit; Mikhail tipped it toward a glass, handed the glass to Lime and poured another for himself. “Cheers.”

“I haven’t got time to play Oriental games.”

“Yes. I realize there’s a shortage of time. You’re rather rigid about having your leaders keep their appointments.”

“Have you got Mezetti?”

The Russian settled into the armchair and waved him toward the sofa. The room was poorly heated and Lime kept his coat on. Mikhail said, “Let’s say I might be able to help you find him.”

“I’m not carrying a microphone.”

“Well if you were you’d find anything it picked up had been jammed to gibberish.” Mikhail touched a device on the end table by his chair. It looked like a transistor radio; it was an electronic jammer.

“No time for scavenger hunts. Have you got him or haven’t you?”

“I have an idea where you might find him.”

“All right. And the price?”

Mikhail grinned. “How quickly you come to my point.” He sipped the liqueur and watched Lime over the rim of the glass. “The Organs had a signal the other day from Washington.” The Organs was KGB in Moscow. “We’ve been instructed to cooperate with you. It was all very correct you know — everyone being polite to one another in cool voices.”

“Where is he, Mikhail?”

“Abominable weather we’re having isn’t it.” Mikhail set the glass down, steepled his fingers and squinted. “Let me tell you a bit of local history, David. Your man Mezetti drove to that lake cottage with the evident expectation of meeting his friends there. Or perhaps I should say the hope, if not the expectation. If he’d been certain of it he’d have brought the money with him, wouldn’t he? I mean, for a tourist with a definite itinerary he was a trifle short on luggage.” The quick smile, a fast remark: “No, let me finish please. It’s one hundred thousand dollars, isn’t it? Yes. Well then, Mezetti comes to the lake cottage empty-handed. Why?”

“To find out if his friends are there.”

“One must assume his friends were supposed to make contact with him at the hotel before a certain hour. When the deadline passed he drove out to the meeting place to find out what had gone wrong. Correct?”

“Did he tell you all this or are you just trying it on for size?”

Mikhail tugged his earlobe. “There was another car you know. Mezetti switched cars at the lake cottage.”

Lime became attentive. “Then you didn’t put the snatch on him?”

“I had no orders to detain the man, David. He’s probably still unaware he’s under surveillance.”

“Where did he go?”

Another sip of akvavit. “He arrived at the lake, he poked around. He looked at his watch several times and sat in his car watching the dock as if he were waiting for something. An airplane to collect him? We don’t know that, do we? The point is no one came. There was no airplane. After a while Mezetti went over and looked inside the other car. He found a note fixed to the steering wheel. He then drove away in this second car.”

“Make and model?”

“A Volkswagen,” Mikhail said drily. “A rather old one I should judge.”

Lime was beginning to see now. It was Mezetti who had been sent out on a snipe hunt. The scavenger hunt was once-removed. They had played it cleverly and it had bought Sturka at least four days.

It reduced Mezetti’s importance markedly but this still had to be played through to the finish. “What’s the price then?”

“Mezetti evidently thought someone would be there to meet him.” Mikhail leaned forward and peered. “Who, David?”

“Whoever left the note in the Volkswagen, I imagine.”

A thin smile, and Mikhail got to his feet and went to the window to peer past the blind.

The entire performance was sad. Mikhail was imprisoned in this dingy room because the Finns hated the Soviets and officially Mikhail — a known KGB operative — was persona non grata; officially, no doubt, he wasn’t in Finland at all. So he had to play at these back-street games: secret meetings, sleazy hideouts, second-string underlings to do his legwork for him. Yet in spite of all those handicaps he had got a jump on everyone else. He had isolated Mezetti from his shadowers without alerting Mezetti and was now the only man alive who could put Lime back on Mezetti’s trail.

And naturally there was a price.

“Of course you know who they are, Mezetti’s people.”

“If we knew who they were would we be bothering with Mezetti?”

“You don’t know where they are,” Mikhail said smoothly. He smiled to show he knew; he wasn’t just guessing. Well it was understandable. The Soviets would have had little trouble piecing together the fact that the Americans knew the identity of the quarry. It surprised Lime a little that they hadn’t already picked up the name as well. But then he realized Sturka’s name hadn’t been mentioned at all except in scrambled transmissions and those were virtually impossible to tap. The Russians would know Sturka was being sought for the Capitol bombing but they wouldn’t have reason to tie him into the Fairlie case too.

“We’d like a name or two,” Mikhail said, returning to his chair.

“Why?”

“In the interests of peaceful coexistence. Open cooperation between allies, so to speak.” The smile this time was to show the falsehood of it.

“Look Mikhail, you’ve thrown a little roadblock at us but I don’t think it entitles you to voting stock in the corporation. Suppose I publicize the fact that the Russians are being obstructive?”

“We’ll deny it of course. And how are you going to prove it?”

“Let’s put it this way. I can see what your people are worried about. Some of the satellites have come loose of their moorings and Moscow wants to make sure none of the troops are being bad boys. It would give you a black eye if it turned out Romania or Czechoslovakia was involved in this. All right, I’ll give you this much. We have no reason to believe any government’s behind the kidnapping. No government, and as far as we know there’s no national liberation movement behind it either. Is that enough for you?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“I’m playing fairly loose as it is.”

“I know you are.” Mikhail’s mouth became small and mean until he no longer seemed to have lips. It was anger not so much against Lime as against his own superiors. “One has one’s orders.” It was almost an epithet.

You could picture them in the Kremlin, uniforms buttoned to the choke collars, refusing to take compromise for an answer. They held the ace and they knew it, and if Mikhail didn’t take the trick they’d throw him in the Lubianka.

Lime really had no option. “Julius Sturka. He’s got a little crew of amateurs. Raoul Riva may be in on it, maybe not.”

“Sturka.” The Russian’s thin nostrils flared. “That one. We should have taken him out years ago. He’s an anarchist. But he calls himself a Communist. You know he’s probably done more harm to us than to you, over the years.”

“I know. He doesn’t exactly contribute to your good name.”

“And you have no idea where to look for him?”

“No.”

“That’s a pity.” Mikhail drained his glass. “Mezetti has taken lodgings in the railway hotel in Heinola. We have three cars covering him. Two or three men in the lobby at the moment. They’re expecting you — they won’t interfere.”

“Tell them to pull out when I arrive.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t suppose you people have a decent photo of Sturka in your files.”

“I doubt it.”

Lime had one — the snapshot Barbara Norris had taken with her Minolta. But it was a 16mm negative, grainy and not in sharp focus.

When they parted they didn’t shake hands; they never did.

Snow came up onto the windshield in lumps of gray slush and the wipers flicked it away. It was falling hard on a slant, lashing the windows. Chad Hill leaned forward over the wheel trying to see; they were crawling. It was a convoy, four cars and a police van.

Lime had watched the teletype operator word his message before they got in the cars and set out for Heinola.

It would be an open transmission for part of the way so he hadn’t said anything about the Russians.

Only six o’clock but the world seemed adrift in the formless subartic night. The darkness had the viscosity of syrup.

Chad Hill drew in at the curb; the lights of the railway hotel flickered in the falling snow.

A man in knee boots and fur hat was shoveling snow clear of the exhaust pipe of his Volkswagen; another man was scraping frost off its windshield. Lime walked over and spoke to the man at the windshield.

“Tovarich?”

“Lime?”

“Da.”

The Russian nodded. Turned, tipped his head back until snow-flakes hit his face, pointed to a window on the second floor. Light shone through the drawn drapes.

Chad Hill came up from the car. Lime said, “You know the drill now.”

“Yes sir.”

Lime was making vague arm signals to the procession of vehicles that had drawn up; men got out of them without slamming the doors and fanned out to cover every side of the hotel.

The ice sheet on the porch splintered under Lime’s heels like eggshells. He tucked his face toward his shoulder against the frozen wind and peered inside through the misty windows. A few indistinct shapes in the lobby. It wasn’t a setup, they weren’t posted for it. Anyhow there would have been no reason for it; it was just that he always suspected the worst.

He went along to the door with Chad Hill in tow; batted inside with matted hair and ruined shoes.

Three of the men in the lobby got up and converged on the door. Lime and Chad Hill stood aside until they were gone.

It left two old men in chairs reading magazines. The clerk behind the desk watched Lime with fascination but made no protest when Lime headed directly for the stair.

Chad Hill stuck close. Lime said, “Got the tools?”

“Yes sir.”

“Keep it quiet,” he adjured. They climbed the stairs with the predatory silence of prowlers. Lime made a quick scrutiny of the hallway and went toward the front of the building.

A ceiling light burned above the door of the front room. He reached up and unscrewed the bulb until it went out. He didn’t want the light behind him; no one knew whether Mezetti was armed.

He considered the door. Got down on one knee and looked into the keyhole. It was blocked by the key inside.

Chad Hill held the lock-pick case open and Lime selected a slim pair of needlenose pliers.

Behind them four men came up to the head of the stairs and deployed themselves along the corridor.

It would have been easiest to knock, use some ruse or other. But they couldn’t tell how nervous Mezetti might be; why risk alerting him? Lime pictured bullets chugging through the door panels...

It was an old lock with a sloppy big keyhole and there was room for the pliers. He got a grip on the stub of the key and with his right hand dragged the .38 out of its armpit rig.

Chad Hill was biting his lip. His knuckles were white on his revolver.

Lime nodded. Squeezed the pliers and turned.

Nothing; he’d turned it the wrong way. You always did, somehow. He turned it the other way and when the lock clacked over with a rusty scrape he twisted the knob and burst into the room.

Mezetti had no time to register alarm.

“Turn around and hit the wall.”

The six of them crowded around Mezetti. Lime frisked him, felt the heavy padding around his torso and made a face. “He’s had the money on him all the time. Strip his shirt off.”

He put his gun away and did a quick wash of the apartment. In the bathroom a faucet dripped relentlessly; there was an old-fashioned bathtub standing on clawed feet. Trust Mezetti — it was probably the only room with private bath in the entire hotel. Revolutions were fine as long as you could conduct them in luxury.

The agents had the money piled up on the floor and Mezetti was blinking rapidly, trying to watch everybody at once. Lime waved them all back and stood close in front of Mezetti. “Who’s supposed to meet you?”

“Nobody.”

“Where’s the note they left for you in the car?”

Mezetti was startled and showed it. Lime said over his shoulder, “A couple of you look for it. He won’t have thrown it away.”

Mezetti stood in his drawers trembling, not from the chill. Lime went to the little desk and pulled the chair out. It had one wobbly leg, or perhaps the floor was out of kilter. He lit a cigarette. “Stand still.”

“What the fuck do you pigs think you’re doing? Do you know who I—”

“Shut up. You’ll speak only when spoken to.”

“That money belongs to Mezetti Industries. If you think you can steal—”

“Shut up.”

Lime sat and smoked and stared at Mezetti.

One of the agents had been going through Mezetti’s coat pockets in the wardrobe. “Here it is.” Chad Hill took it from him and carried it across the room to Lime.

Lime glanced at it. Mario, Wait for us at the railway hotel in Heinola. Hill had it in tweezers and Lime nodded; Hill put it in an envelope.

“Come over here.”

Mezetti didn’t move until one of the agents gave him a brutal shove.

Lime made hand signals and the agents brought the straight wooden chair over from the window. They set it by the desk and Lime said, “Sit down.”

Mezetti moved cautiously into the chair.

Lime reached across the desk, put his hand on top of Mezetti’s head and shoved his face down onto the desk top. Mezetti’s teeth clicked, his jaw sagged, his eyes rolled up.

Lime sat back and watched. Mezetti gathered himself sluggishly, showing his distress. He worked his jaw back and forth experimentally.

Lime waited.

“You fascist filth,” Mezetti breathed.

Lime allowed no reaction to show; he puffed on his cigarette. After a moment he slammed the rim of his shoe into Mezetti’s shin.

Mezetti doubled up holding his leg against his chest and Lime stiff-armed him in the face. It tipped Mezetti backward, the chair went over and Mezetti rolled on the floor.

The agents picked up Mezetti and the chair and positioned him where he had been before. Mezetti was about to snarl when Lime took the needlenose pliers out of his pocket and used them on the top of Mezetti’s right ear. Squeezed. Pulled upward, and Mezetti strained to come along but the agents held him down on the chair.

Lime let the ear go and prodded the points of the pliers up into the hollow under Mezetti’s chin. Mezetti’s head strained back like a dental patient’s.

Chad Hill was watching it all with alarm and disapproval.

Lime kept digging with the pliers until Mezetti began to bleed small droplets under the jaw. When Lime withdrew the pliers Mezetti felt his chin and saw the blood on his fingers. The last of the bravado drained out of him as if a plug had been pulled.

“All right. Which one was supposed to meet you here? Sturka? Alvin Corby? Cesar Renaldo?”

Mezetti licked his lips.

Lime said, “Put it this way. You can tell me or you can try to hold out. You’ll get pretty bloody and the pain will be a lot more than you can stand, but you can try. But even if you don’t tell me anything I’ll let them understand that you did tell me. On the other hand if you’re realistic we’ll keep your name out of it until we’ve nailed them all.”

Abruptly he japped the pliers into the back of Mezetti’s hand. Blood started to flow freely; Mezetti clutched his hand.

Lime turned to Chad Hill. “It might be a good idea to let word out that he’s cooperating anyway. It may force Sturka to move.”

It was strictly for Mezetti’s benefit; Lime was certain Mezetti didn’t know where Sturka was. Of course Sturka knew that too; a news release wouldn’t force Sturka’s hand.

“I don’t know where they are. That’s the truth.” Mezetti’s voice was a defeated monotone. He was looking at the desk, keeping his eyes down.

Lime said, “I want you to be very, very careful of your answer to this question. How many of them are there?”

It was a calculated way of putting it. It didn’t sound like a fishing expedition; it sounded as if he already knew the right answer. He drummed the pliers against the desk.

It came out slow, reluctantly. “Four of them. The ones you named and Peggy Astin.”

“It’s a bad idea lying to me,” Lime said. He lifted the plier points against the pit of Mezetti’s chest and began to twist and grind.

“That’s the truth for God’s sake.”

Lime kept grinding.

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

Abruptly Lime withdrew the pliers. “Now.”

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

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

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

“Name them.”

“I don’t—”

“Raoul Riva,” Lime said, and watched.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You still had Fairlie in the coffin?”

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

“Where did you go from there?”

“Down the coast.”

“To Almería.”

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

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

“Sturka did.”

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

“I never saw the guy.”

“It was Riva wasn’t it?”

“I never heard of any Riva.”

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

Mezetti started to cry.

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

“But you’ve seen him.”

“...Yeah.”

“What’s his name?”

“Sturka called him Binyoosef a couple of times.”

Chad Hill said, “Binyoosef?”

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

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

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

“Jesus. You don’t miss much.”

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

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

“Yeah yeah.” Mezetti was nodding.

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

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

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

“Yeah. Jesus Christ.”

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

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

“Just me. I rowed in on the raft.”

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

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

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

“Pig justice. A fascist gas chamber.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He was.”

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

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

“Why Benyoussef?”

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

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

“So?”

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

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

“It’s in Helsinki,” Hill said.

“Good. We’d better get to it.”

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

“I’ll sleep on the plane.”

“Where to?”

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

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

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

Monday, January 17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Copasetik.”

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

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

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

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

“Hi,” Riva said and shot twice.

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

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

Americans had such childish ideas about security.

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

The lights went out and the car doors opened.

“Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Copasetik.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Copasetik.”

“Synchronize. Three minutes from... now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Chevrolet was just disappearing around the corner with a wail of tires and the agents stopped shooting. Riva got to his feet and when the nearest agent swung to glare at him Riva said, “Jesus Christ Almighty. What in hell was that all about?”

4:20 A.M. EST Satterthwaite scraped a hand down across his chin. The stubble stung his palm.

Bleary faces along the length of the big table in The Salt Mine. Voices barking into telephones. Satterthwaite had FBI Director Clyde Shankland on the line. “It looks like a maximum effort they’re putting up. First Hollander’s lawn, then five Goddamned bombs in that one building, then a sniper shooting at Luke’s windows. God knows where else they’ll hit. Look, I want every man you’ve got. We’ve got to provide immediate protection for every VIP in Washington.”

Kaiser was tugging at his sleeve. Kaiser had a telephone cupped in his hand. “It’s for you. The President.”

Satterthwaite said to Shankland, “Get on it, Clyde,” and slammed down the phone and grabbed the other one from Kaiser. “Yes, Mr. President.”

4:23 A.M. EST The city was amok with crying sirens. Riva circled the block and got back into his car and reached for the walkie-talkie. “Copasetik?”

“Copasetik.”

“They’re on their toes. Let’s do the alternate.”

“Copasetik.”

The central area was getting too hot; they would skip the other targets and head for the outskirts.

The Secret Service men had questioned him for several minutes but Riva’s identification was in order and his story was plausible and they had bigger things to worry about than him.

He put the car in gear and headed up toward Senator Forrester’s house.

4:28 A.M. EST Special Agent Pickett slid into the front seat of the limousine to use the radio. His hand brushed the manila folder on the seat and when he pushed it aside the ID sheet came ajar and he was looking straight into the face of the man they had questioned less than ten minutes ago.

He picked up the ID sheet and stared at the photo and blurted into the microphone.

“This is Pickett. I’ve just seen your man Riva.”

4:31 A.M. EST DeFord and B. L. Hoyt marched into the war room and Hoyt said to Satterthwaite, “Listen, they may be pulling something in that apartment house. Those rifle shots could have been a diversion to distract our people’s attention while someone slipped into the building. We’d better get Milton Luke out of there.”

“And put him where?”

“The White House. It’s the best guarded place we’ve got.”

DeFord said, “I’ll arrange for a heavy escort. We’ll want motorcycles and squadrols.” He reached for a phone.

4:33 A.M. EST The two FBI agents reached Arizona Terrace and parked at the curb.

“That’s the Senator’s house.”

“All right. No point waking him up. Look, I’ll post myself in that open garage across the street. You stick here in the car. Anybody shows up, we’ll have them crossfired.”

“Okay.”

4:37 A.M. EST Riva parked at the mouth of Arizona Terrace and within moments the Chevrolet drew up alongside. Kavanagh at the wheel.

“Everything okay?”

“So far,” Riva said.

“You want to do this hit and run?”

“He’s got that plate-glass picture window in front. Just throw it in through the window.”

“I don’t know. It’s a cul-de-sac, this street.”

“I’ll sweep it first,” Riva said. “Give me two minutes.” He pulled out into the street and headed up the hill in low.

Forrester’s house was at the bottleneck of the street just before it widened into a circular turnaround. Riva drove slowly into the turnaround. Was that a shadow in the parked car? He looked again. Nothing.

Getting nervous. He chastised himself. It would take them a lot longer than this to get men out this far. Forrester was only a junior senator from an unimportant state.

He cruised around the loop and headed out again. Glanced into the shadows of an open garage; nothing there. The snowfall had let up, the flakes were drifting down singly. He drove back over the crest and down to the mouth of the drive.

“All clear.”

4:41 A.M. EST The FBI agent spoke low into the microphone of his car radio. “Somebody’s just cased Forrester’s house. You better get another car or two up here.”

4:42 A.M. EST Harrison put the satchel charge in his lap while the car climbed the hill. He set the timer for two minutes.

Kavanagh drove past the parked Plymouth and pulled in across the front of the Senator’s driveway. “Go.”

Harrison shoved the door open and stepped out. Started to walk up the driveway toward the front of the house.

“Hold it right there. FBI.”

Harrison turned slowly on his heels, twisting his head to look over his shoulder.

The FBI man stood beside the Plymouth, aiming the pistol casually at the middle of Harrison’s coat and making it clear he felt it was an easy shot.

The timing device was ticking. Harrison dropped the bomb and dived for cover but the FBI man switched his headlights on and caught Harrison blindingly in the beams.

Kavanagh was coming out of the Chevrolet with his gun but there was a wink of orange flame arid a roar from the dark open garage across the street and Kavanagh pitched onto his face.

Harrison got up to run — he couldn’t stay there, the bomb had thirty seconds at most...

He felt the bullets thud into him but before he went under he heard the earsplitting thunder of the satchel bomb. Something whacked agony against the back of his neck.

4:43 A.M. EST The shots alerted Riva and he reached for the walkie-talkie. “Copasetik?”

When they didn’t answer right away he switched on his lights and drove for the mouth of the street.

A pair of cars came swerving into it. Saw him approaching and slewed across the pavement to block his exit. Riva turned the wheel and floored the pedal, ramming the Dodge up onto the sidewalk, heading for the open boulevard beyond them. But he had their headlights straight in his eyes and it was hard to see.

He heard the bomb go off. Something starred the windshield in front of his face. His wheels banged up across the concrete and the car was slithering on wet snow, the rear wheels shrieking. He spun the wheel to go with the skid and crashed into one of the cars.

He dived across the seat and got out the far door, rolling, bringing the silencer-pistol up. But his eyes were still blinded from the headlights and he couldn’t find a target and then three or four of them were shooting him from behind the lights.

5:10 A.M. EST Four Secret Service cars formed a convoy escort around the limousine and there were pairs of motorcycles fore and aft. Speaker of the House Milton Luke and his wife were surrounded by a flying wedge of security agents from the door of their apartment to the elevator, down to the ground floor, across the lobby, through the doors and across the sidewalk to the waiting limousine. The Lukes settled in the back seat looking aged and half asleep and showing the signs of having dressed hurriedly. Men were emerging from the building with the Lukes’ two overnight bags; more clothing would follow later.

The sirens climbed to a shriek and the limousine pulled out into Wisconsin Avenue.

The burst of engine power sent a hot stream of waste gases through the limousine’s exhaust pipes and the heat ignited the detonator of the hosepipe bomb. When it exploded it ruptured the gasoline tank and the fuel exploded.

The rear section of the limousine was blown to fragments and the passengers with it. The noise was audible thirty blocks away.

8:40 A.M. EST In the clamor of the war room Satterthwaite couldn’t hear the President’s voice. He went out and across into the private conference room and picked up the phone. “Yes Mr. President.”

The President’s voice was thin against the sound of trucks and helicopters and sirens that penetrated the frosty window. The Army was grinding its way through Washington.

“Bill, I want you to get over here as soon as you can.”

“Of course sir.”

“We’ve got a problem here by the name of Wendy Hollander.”

“I wish that were the only problem we had.”

“No you don’t,” the President said, and rage trembled in his voice. “I’d settle for every other problem we’ve got in preference to Wendy Hollander.”

“I don’t follow that, sir.”

“You think about it and you will. Listen, he’s over here camping in the Lincoln Sitting Room. I want you to try and get him off my back for a few hours until I’ve had time to get my head in working order.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Hell, I don’t care. Put him in command of a battalion of shock troops, he ought to love that.”

The President was showing his strain. After a moment Satterthwaite said, “You intend to keep pouring these troops into the city, sir?”

“I do.”

“I don’t think it’s necessary.”

“Well then you’re wrong,” Brewster snapped.

“The FBI nailed them all. There aren’t any of them left, we know that.”

“We’ve been told that. We don’t necessarily know it. And we’ve got to make a show of force.”

“Yes sir. But we’d better keep a tight lid on them.”

“Let’s worry more about keeping a tight lid on the crazies, Bill.” And the President hung up.

The net hadn’t yet been thrown; the roundup was not underway but nothing would stop the pressure for it this time. Milton Luke and Representatives Jethro and Wood and all their wives were dead.

Satterthwaite listened to the wail of sirens and the clatter of Army trucks moving through the streets and when he moved to the window he saw an armored limousine moving up Pennsylvania Avenue surrounded by jeeps in which soldiers were standing up with rifles and submachine guns leveled at sidewalks and windows; they looked ready to fire at anyone who moved.

He didn’t know who was inside the limousine; it could have been anyone, those who moved at all moved like colonial administrators traveling through revolution-torn jungle provinces.

The city was not under siege but it thought it was and perhaps that amounted to the same thing. The Army was reacting with the vexation of a laboratory rat presented with a no-exit maze: all ammunitioned up and no one to shoot.

Anguish blazed in Satterthwaite’s eyes. He turned away from the window but a new siren went by, perhaps no louder than the others, and he reacted as he would have to a fingernail’s scrape across a blackboard: with an involuntary shudder. He went back into the hallway and entered the war room, found Clyde Shankland and made himself heard over the din:

“I’ve got to go to the White House. Have you got anything more for me?”

The FBI Director had a telephone at his ear. “Tell him to wait. Put him on Hold.” He put the receiver down and looked at Satterthwaite. In his left hand Shankland held a pencil upright, bouncing its point on the table as if to drill a hole in the surface. “We’ve traced Raoul Riva back to the Cairo Hotel. Of course he wasn’t using that name. But it was him. He only had two visitors — the same two guys several times during the past few days.”

“The two that were with him last night?”

“Yeah. Harrison and the dead guy, Kavanagh.”

“Well that’s what Harrison said, isn’t it.”

“I’m not ready to believe the son of a bitch yet.”

“But everything confirms it. Doesn’t it?” He put it to Shankland as a challenge but Shankland only shrugged. Satterthwaite said angrily, “You’re not listening to the rumors are you? Of all people you ought to know better.”

“What rumors?”

“About the enormous conspiracy.”

Shankland said in his flat prim nasal voice, “Mr. Satterthwaite, we thought we had them all the first time and it turned out we were wrong.”

“You still think there’s an endless supply of them coming out of the woodwork?”

“I’ll only repeat what I said to the Security Council an hour ago. Until we’ve got dependable airtight information to confirm what Harrison says, I have to go on record as recommending a full-scale crackdown.”

That was the way Shankland always talked. He was straight out of the Hoover mold.

Satterthwaite said, “What else have you got for the President?”

“Well they still had three bombs left. Unexploded ones, in the back seat of that Chevrolet.”

“Any idea who they were meant for?”

“Harrison says it was flexible. They figured to hit whoever was available — they’d figured out ways to hit eight or nine VIPs on the outskirts of Washington.”

“Harrison,” Satterthwaite said. “Is he going to pull through?”

“He wouldn’t if I had my preferences.”

“Goddamn it we need him alive. If he dies we’ll never have any way of proving it ends here.”

“Who’s going to believe him anyway? If he pulls through alive you’ll just have to hold off a lynch mob on top of everything else. I’d as soon he kicked off right now.”

“The point is he’s willing to talk.”

“Talk? He’s willing to boast. He knows he has no chance to squirm out of it; he’s a dead man, he just hasn’t been executed yet. He seems to think the more cooperative he acts the longer we’ll keep him alive, if only to keep pumping him. Or maybe he wants everyone to know how clever they all were. Maybe he’s looking for a place in the history books.”

“I still want to know what his chances are.”

“I guess they’ll patch him up. He took a couple of thirty-eights in his guts.”

On his way out of the room Satterthwaite felt a rising sense of alarm. If the rumors could get into this room they could go anywhere. Hard facts were in short supply, the events were beyond everyday understanding, and nothing terrified men more than ambiguous uncertainties that directly affected their lives.

The rumors were to the effect that there was a giant international movement bent on toppling the American government. It was based in Cuba or Peking or Moscow; it was the brainchild of an evil genius — Castro, Chou En-lai, Kosygin; it was Communist-inspired or Communist-led or both; it was, in short, the opening skirmish of World War Three.

“How long’s he intend to keep me waiting like a Goddamn office boy?” Wendell Hollander demanded with biting scorn.

Satterthwaite’s nostrils flared. “The President’s up to here with troubles, Senator. You can see that.”

“His troubles,” Hollander snapped, “are gon’’ to last exactly seventy-five hours by my timepiece. My troubles might well last the next four years.” His eyebrows narrowed shrewdly. “If the country lasts that long, that is.” Even when he was using his confidential tone of voice Hollander tended to yell; he was somewhat deaf.

And if you last that long. Hollander for the past decade or more had had the rheumy appearance of a terminal patient. But like most unhealthy men he took extremely good care of himself; it was not impossible he would live to be ninety and if that was the case he still had thirteen dyspeptic years to go.

“With all due respect,” Hollander shouted, “I would like to suggest you remind that yellow-bellied coward down the hall that I’m waiting here to see him.” His face bulged thick with blood and anger.

“Senator, the President will see you as soon as he can.”

Hollander’s indignation reached its peak. For a moment he stood gathering himself — drawing himself up, pumping air into his caved-in chest. In an effort to be reasonable Satterthwaite said quickly, “These are terrible times for us all.”

He had never been any good at personal diplomacy; he wished the President had assigned someone else to this chore. But protocol required it be someone at least of Cabinet rank.

“That son of a bitch,” Hollander growled, and abruptly shot his eyes toward the ceiling corners, darting from one to another. “And I hope he’s listening to me. You think I don’t know these rooms are bugged?”

Why he’s senile, Satterthwaite thought in awe. Senile and paranoid and probably the next President of the United States.

Satterthwaite ran his fingers through his wild thick crop of hair. “Senator, I can’t force the President to see you right this instant. You know that as well as I do. Now if there’s anything you’d like me to do for you...”

“There is. You can tell me just what’s being done about this war they’ve started on us. What’s being done, boy? Or is it that all you mangy neurotic intellectuals are still just sitting around arguing the fine points?” Hollander’s moist pale eyes flicked causally across Satterthwaite’s face. The gnarled fingers produced a curved and polished pipe. Packed it with care and lifted it to the wizened mouth. It took Hollander three matches to get the pipe lighted to his satisfaction. He was still on his feet, too agitated to sit. On his head the vanishing gray wisps of hair were carefully combed across the pate; he was as old-fashioned in dress and bearing as a badly tended antique.

It had been a bad mistake, Brewster sending Satterthwaite on this chore. It couldn’t help but antagonize the old man. Hollander, neither thoughtful nor subtle himself, believed these qualities in others were superficial and untrustworthy. No one thought himself a poor judge of human nature; Hollander, seeing before him an arrogant and myopic little fighter and remembering Satterthwaite from years ago when Satterthwaite hadn’t known better than to offend him unforgivably, could only assume Brewster had flung Satterthwaite in his face as a calculated affront.

It was something Satterthwaite supposed the President simply hadn’t had time to think of. But he should have thought of it himself and declined to meet Hollander here.

Hollander was building his jaws on the stem of his pipe. “The Army’s been sent out, I’ve seen that much with my own eyes. But I’d like to know what their orders are.”

“Their orders are to protect public officials.”

“Nobody ever won a war by confining his tactics to defensive operations.”

“Senator, if you want to call this a war we’re in, then the first rule of strategy is never to let the enemy stampede you into doing what he wants you to do.” He leaned forward. “The Communists aren’t behind this, Senator. At least no recognized Communist parties. In a way you can look at this whole sequence of disasters as a terrible accident — a catastrophe as arbitrary as a hurricane. It’s not—”

“Young man, I’ve been reasoned with by the most devious men on the face of this earth. You don’t hold a candle to some of them, so there’s very little point in your trying. All I see when I look at your stripe of animal is cowardice. Cowardice and vacillation. I don’t even see tears in your eyes for the wonderful and distinguished Americans who’ve been sacrificed to your endless cries for appeasement.”

“Yes I have tears, Senator, but I don’t let them blur my vision.”

Suddenly unable to stand any more of this Satterthwaite shot to his feet and made for the door. “I’ll find out if the President can see you.”

“You do that boy.”

The silence was such that he could hear the President’s pen scrape across the pad.

Brewster’s heavy features had gone pale and begun to sag so that the bones showed through the flesh. He gave a gloomy sigh and dropped the pencil; his hands came together in a prayer clasp. “I don’t suppose he’s calmed down any.”

“All I scored was a few debating points. He’s hard of hearing, remember?”

“If that were all it was...” The President reached for a cigar and stood up. He came around the desk and stood rocking heel-to-toe. “He still inveighing about mass reprisals?”

“It amounts to that.”

“Put him in this office for forty-eight hours,” Brewster murmured, “and he’ll have us at war.”

“War or martial law.”

“Or both. He’s a platitudinous medieval fossil.” The cigar was jammed into the pugnacious mouth and the President made a sudden gesture with the blade of his hand, like a sharp karate chop. “We can’t have it, Bill. That’s all there is to it. We just can’t have it.”

“He’s the top man on the line of succession.”

“We’ve got to get Cliff Fairlie back.”

“That may be impossible.”

“You think there’s no chance at all?”

“I think there’s a fair chance. But we can’t count on it. There’s no guarantee. Don’t we have to proceed on the assumption we won’t get him back?”

When the President made no audible reply Satterthwaite shoved his hands in his pockets and spoke with slow care, using his cautious voice, not committing himself: “Mr. President, he’s unfit to serve. We know that. We’ve got to remove him.”

“I’d welcome suggestions.”

“The Twenty-fifth Amendment...”

“That wouldn’t work. He’s politically undesirable but that doesn’t make him unfit. We’d have to prove it to the satisfaction of the Congress. Three days? We’d never make it. I don’t think you could prove he was legally insane. And you can’t disqualify a President just because you disagree with his political philosophy.”

“He’s seventy-seven years old.”

“So were De Gaulle and Adenauer when they were in office.” The President finally got around to lighting his cigar. “We can’t start wasting time with ideas that aren’t going to work. Hell, I’ve been up one side of it and down the other for the past hour.”

“Maybe he could be forced to resign.”

“Wendy? After he’s had this whiff of the Presidency?”

“There must be something in his past. Everybody knows he’s a crook.”

“Well, that’s his insulation, isn’t it? If everybody already knows, it won’t be much of a shock if you give them proof. Besides it would take weeks to put together that kind of evidence and afterward he’d probably make political capital of it — he’d say we were trying to blackmail him. Everybody hates a blackmailer.”

“You should have been his campaign manager,” Satterthwaite growled.

“I’ve already covered all this ground in my own head. I just don’t see the answer to it — except for one thing. Recover Fairlie.”

“We’re trying, damn it.”

“I know you are.” The President was too abrasive to be soothing but that was his intent and Satterthwaite nodded to show he understood. “Well Bill?”

He searched for an answer. Finally he threw up his hands. “There’s only one way. You know what it is.”

“I do?”

“Kill him.”

A long time seemed to go by, during which the President returned to his seat behind the desk and gnashed on his cigar. Finally Satterthwaite broke the ugly silence: “Make it look like one more revolutionary atrocity.”

A slow bleak shake of the head. “God knows I’m no Boy Scout. But I couldn’t do that.”

“Nobody’s asking you to do it personally.”

“I’ll put it another way then. I won’t accept it. I won’t stand for it. I won’t have it.” The big head lifted with great weary effort. “Bill, if we did anything like that — what difference would be left between us and them?”

Satterthwaite began to breathe again. “I know. I couldn’t do it either. But it’s there. It’s an answer, you know. And if it’s the choice between assassination and the kind of Armageddon he’d bring down on us...”

“I still won’t do it.”

It came down to ancient basics: did the end justify the means? Satterthwaite turned to the chair and sank into it. Chagrined and elated at the same time by Brewster’s righteousness.

Then the President punctured it. “There’s a point you’re missing.”

“Yes?”

“Have a look.”

The President pushed the pad across the desk. Satterthwaite had to get up to reach for it.

Brewster’s fitful handwriting:

“You see the point, Bill? Cross but Wendy and who’s next? Secretary of State? Hell, John Urquhart’s no better qualified for this job than Willie Mays. He’s a pencil pusher. You’ve been doing his job for the past four years. I’d have dumped him a long time ago if you hadn’t been here.”

Of course that was old-fashioned politics; Urquhart was a fool but he’d helped elect Brewster to the Presidency and he had his job through patronage, just like Treasury’s Chaney and several of the others. It was one of the weapons the Republicans had used in the presidential campaign: Fairlie had roasted Brewster for his Cabinet appointments and the people seemed to have heeded him.

A year ago Brewster had toyed with the idea of replacing Urquhart — had tentatively offered the post to Satterthwaite; but then the Republicans had started sniping and Brewster had to vindicate himself so he had not only kept Urquhart in the job, he had vowed loudly his undying support for the Secretary of State. That was the way the game was played.

“I’ll tell you, Bill, Wendy might go charging right into a war with his eyes closed tight, but John Urquhart would likely go blundering into one just as fast with his eyes wide open. Fairlie was dead right, damn him. I shouldn’t have been such a prideful fool.”

“We all shared in that decision. It was a party decision. We couldn’t afford to retreat under fire. I still think it was the right decision at the time.”

“Let’s not waste words on hindsight,” the President said. He opened the desk drawer against his belly and lifted out a pamphlet-sized copy of the United States Constitution. “You read this thing lately Bill?”

“Why?”

“I keep thinking there’s an answer in here but I’m damned if I can find it.” He opened the covers and began to paw through. “Here. Article Twenty, Section Three. ‘... the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President-elect nor a Vice-President shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice-President shall have qualified.’”

“That’s clear enough, isn’t it? Congress was authorized to decide who succeeds to the office. They did so — that’s what the Act of Succession is.”

“Seems to me you can’t read the Constitution the way a brimstone fundamentalist reads the Bible, Bill. It’s not a literal document.”

“You’d have to take that up with the Supreme Court, Mr. President.”

“The Final Resort of Exalted Conjecture,” the President muttered. It was one of his time-honored phrases; he used it whenever the Court voted him down.

“I still don’t see what you’re getting at.”

“Well neither do I to tell you the truth. But it just seems to me there’s got to be some way to use this Constitution to help us prove the Government wasn’t set up for the express purpose of installing the oldest and most senile member of the Senate as President of the United States.”

“The Constitution doesn’t say anything about that. All it says is the Congress may provide for filling the office when there’s a vacancy. The Constitution doesn’t spell out how they’re supposed to do it.”

The President gnawed thoughtfully on his cigar and Satterth-waite scowled at him. In the end Brewster began to smile. “That’s it, ain’t it Bill.”

“Sir?”

“You put your finger on it. The Constitution doesn’t specify how they’re supposed to fill the vacancy.”

“Yes but that’s immaterial isn’t it? I mean they’ve already complied with the Constitution. They’ve provided for a line of succession. It’s a fait accompli.”

“Is it now.”

“I guess I’m not following you. But I’m no expert on constitutional law. Maybe you ought to be talking to the Attorney General.”

“I’m talking to the right man. Every time I rub brains with you it strikes sparks. That’s what you’re here for.” The President tossed the pamphlet back in the drawer and slid it shut. “The Act of Succession is an Act of Congress, right?”

“It’s the law of the land, as they say.”

“Uh-huh. You got any idea how many Acts of Congress get passed every year, Bill?”

“Not exactly. A fair number.”

“Aeah. And how many get amended every year?”

Satterthwaite shot bolt upright in the chair. The President waved his cigar; suddenly he was looking almost smug. “Now I’m not a hundred per cent positive, mind you, but it’s becoming my horseback opinion that this here Act of Succession is not exactly carved into stone tablets. I seem to recall it’s been amended four or five times in the years I’ve been in Washington. Back in Nineteen and sixty-six, and I believe again in Nineteen and seventy. And a couple-three times before that too.”

Satterthwaite was still absorbing the impact of it. Brewster reached for the intercom buzzer. “Margaret, see if you can scare me up a copy of the Act of Succession, will you?” He released the button and examined his cigar. “Yes sir, that may be just the ticket out of this hole.”

“You’re talking about ramming a new Act of Succession through Congress in the next three days?”

“Not a new Act. An amendment to the old one, that’s all.”

“Designed to take Hollander off the list?”

The President squinted at him. “They’d never stand still for that, Bill.”

“Then I still don’t see the option.”

“What we do, Bill, we ask the Congress to insert one name on that list between the Speaker of the House and the President pro tempore of the Senate.”

“What name?”

“The man best qualified to act as interim President until the rightfully qualified President-elect is recovered.”

It dawned on Satterthwaite a split instant before Brewster voiced it: “The most recently retired former President of the United States, Bill.”

And the President added in a very quiet voice: “Me.”

5:20 P.M. North African Time The CIA chief in Algiers went by the name of Samuel Gilliams. He was one of those Americans who thought the United States owned the mortgage on the whole world and could foreclose any time it pleased. It was the standard CIA philosophy and it was one of the things that had driven Lime out of the intelligence service. Gilliams was almost the archetype; Lime detested him on sight.

Years ago Algeria had broken off diplomatic relations with the United States; Gilliams had a cubicle in the chargé d’affairs’ office in what was called the American Affairs Section of the Swiss Embassy. Behind his desk Gilliams was self-important and miffed. “We’ve been on it for five days now. I don’t know what-all you expect to accomplish that we haven’t already covered.”

“We have reason to think they’ve got Fairlie down here.”

“Because this fellow Sturka used to operate in the bled ten-fifteen years ago?”

It was so damned tedious. “Mostly because we’ve identified Benyoussef Ben Krim as one of the cell.”

“Yeah I heard that, I heard that. Well we’ve had a net out after Ben Krim ever since we got your signal from Helsinki. He ain’t turned up and he ain’t lakly to.”

Lime wondered if they had filled Gilliams in on him. Did Gilliams know it had been Lime who had set up the secret negotiations between De Gaulle and Ben Bella back in the ALN days?

Lime said, “Information’s highly marketable here. It always has been. If Sturka’s here there are people who’ll know about it. I need to arrange a meet with Houari Djelil.”

He saw by the surprise in Gilliams’ face that he had scored a hit. It was evidence enough: nobody had bothered to tell Gilliams Lime was not just another tenderfoot.

“Well—”

“Djelil is still alive isn’t he?”

“Yeah sure. But he ain’t always inclined to cooperate. You know these Melons, I gather.”

Melon was what the pieds-noirs, the Algerian-born French, called the Arabs; the only equivalent was nigger. Lime only said, “I know Djelil.”

“Well I’ll see what I can fix up.” Gilliams picked up a phone — a direct line, Lime noticed, because Gilliams didn’t dial — and spoke into it.

In the inferior regions of the city — the Casbah, named after the sixteenth-century fortress which surrounded the height overlooking the old quarter — Lime stood at the corner of a brasserie and viewed the street’s squalid colors and scented the alleys’ smell of urine and waited for the signal. He heard the long slow wail of a muezzin calling for evening Islamic prayers.

In the old days Djelil would sooner have been tortured to death than betray Sturka but in those days Sturka had been fighting for the Algerians.

But now there were arguments that might sway Djelil. If nothing else he was a practical man.

The present rulers of Algeria had functioned underground for so many years they had got into the habit and hadn’t been able to break it. They still went under their revolutionary aliases and not many people knew their real names. The regime tended to support every self-styled national liberation movement that came along anywhere in the world: the State was socialist but the enemy was “imperialism” whatever its ideology. For these reasons the ruling party was often willing to assist murderous movements anywhere whose objectives claimed to be the overthrow of imperialism.

The only American mission recognized in Algeria was the Black Panthers. The Canadians were represented by the Quebec Liberation Front which had abducted and murdered various Canadian and British officials. FRELIMO, the Mozambique liberation movement, had training camps in the Algerian bled, and the desert was being used by training cadres of Al Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Movement. Altogether the ruling NLF accredited fifteen or sixteen liberation movements and granted them varying degrees of assistance in their attempts to overthrow established governments.

The Europeans closed their official eyes to what was going on because everyone wanted a piece of the thirty million metric tons of oil that Algeria produced every year.

Clandestine intrigue was standard procedure in Algeria and the whole structure was supported by the continuing existence of profiteers like Houari Djelil who carried out functions which the government could not fulfill officially. Most arms manufacturers were located in countries which Algeria’s friends were trying to overthrow; Algiers could hardly approach them formally and so it was up to men like Djelil to provide the vehicles, ammunition, matériel and Kalashnikov AK-47 automatic rifles with which the NLF equipped the revolutionaries who trained in the Western Desert.

It meant Djelil was a man whose movements were of frequent concern to various bashful agencies. If you wanted to meet with him you had to go to elaborate lengths. And so Lime stood on a street corner in the Casbah and waited to be informed it was proper to move on.

Finally the signal. A rickety old Renault 4CV came clattering through the narrow defile with its sun visors lowered.

He walked through the streets following it: every block or two it stopped and waited for him. Through the winding streets of the medina, the old maze of intricately woven alleys and dead ends. Urchins and beggars caromed toward him — “Hey Mister you want hash? You don’t like, I get you grass?” Black market money and leather goods and taxis and their sisters: they sold everything, the Arab kids. An old Berber in yellow slippers and a flowing robe accosted him with an arm strapped solid with wristwatches from palm to shoulder: “You want to buy cheap?”

He followed the Renault through a swarm of Arabs listening to a storefront blare of loud twangy music. A woman in gray stared at him from behind her veil, and a block beyond that an Arab passed him in the crowd and spoke distinctly in his ear:

“Ask for Houari in the next bar on your right, Monsieur.” In French.

When Lime turned to look the Arab had been absorbed by the throng.

It was a rancid little room, dim and crowded, filled with the smell of the stale sweat of habitual garlic eaters. The bar was tended by a big man in a fez; his neck bulged with folds of fat. Lime pushed to the bar using his elbows and the bartender spoke in Arabic: “Lime effendi?”

“Yes. I was told to ask for Houari.”

“Through the back door please.”

“Thank you.” He made his way through the heavy mob and squeezed into a passage no wider than his shoulders; it was open to the sky and gave him the feeling he was at the bottom of a fissure created by some ancient earthquake.

At the end of the passage a car was drawn up in the Rue Khelifa Boukhalfa. A black Citroen, the old four-door model with the square hood. The Arab at the wheel watched Lime come forward and reached across the back of the seat to push the rear door open.

Lime got in and pulled the door shut. The Arab put the car in motion without speaking and Lime settled back to enjoy the ride.

The St. George was the state-owned deluxe hotel high on a hillside with a magnificent overview of the city. The Citroen drew up at a service door and the Arab pointed toward it; Lime got out of the car and went inside.

The corridor was heavy with kitchen smells. He walked toward a small man in a business suit who watched him approach without changing expression and spoke when Lime stopped in front of him: “Mr. Lime?”

“Yes.” He saw the bulge under the man’s coat; Djelil certainly surrounded himself with protection.

“The stairs to your right please? Go to the second floor, you’ll find Room Two Fourteen.”

“Thank you.”

Djelil’s door was opened by a heavy woman with a well-developed moustache who stepped aside and admitted him.

Djelil stood in front of an armchair from which he had just risen. He salaamed Lime and smiled a little. “I thought they had retired you, yes?”

“They should have,” Lime said. Djelil made a discreet gesture and the woman withdrew from the room, shutting the hall door after her.

Obviously it was not Djelil’s residence. There were no personal possessions. The decor was plastic-Hilton and the window looked out against a hillside.

“Ça va, David?”

“Poorly,” he said, doing a quick wash with his eyes. If the room was bugged it didn’t show; if they had company it would have to be under the bed or in the Wardrobe.

“There’s no one,” Djelil said. “You asked we meet alone, yes?”

Djelil was swarthy and narrow; he looked less like an Arab than a Corsican hoodlum but his face had authority — the strength of a consciousness that had seen many things and not been changed by them. It was his weakness as well as his strength; he had been fundamentally untouched by his lifetime of experiences.

Djelil smiled lazily and lifted a canvas satchel onto the chair. From it he produced bottles. “Cinzano or rum?”

“Cinzano I think.” He needed a clear head.

“There should be glasses in the lavatory.”

Lime found a pair of heavy chipped tumblers and realized as he collected them that Djelil had sent him after them to reassure him there was no one in the bathroom.

He carried the glasses inside and glanced at the greenish turban that lay on the bed. “I see you’ve earned the mark of a Haj to Mecca.”

“Yes, I went six years ago.”

Remarkable, Lime thought.

Djelil handed him the drink and he waved his thanks with the glass.

“At any rate it’s better than the pinard we used to drink, yes?”

Lime sat on the edge of the bed; hotel rooms were not made for conversations. “And how’s Sylvie?”

Djelil beamed. “Oh she is very grown up, yes? She is to be married in a month’s time. To a government minister’s son.”

She had been four years old when Lime had last seen her. It was not a thought worth dwelling on. “I’m very glad to hear that.”

“It pleases me you remember, David. It’s kind.”

“She was a lovely child.”

“Yes. She is a lovely woman too. Do you know she is acting in the cinema? She has a small part in a film. The French are shooting it here now. Something about the war, the Rommel days.” Djelil smiled broadly: “I was able to supply the producers with a great many things. Practically an entire Panzer battalion.”

“That must be rather profitable.”

“Well ordinarily, yes? But persuading them to use one’s daughter as an actress was more important this time. I’ve allowed them to hire the tanks for a beggar’s price. She can’t act of course. But she has the beauty for the camera.”

Djelil’s glistening black hair was combed carefully back over the small ears; he looked prosperous and content. Lime said, “Julius Sturka has our new President out there somewhere. Probably in the djebel.” Like Lazarus, he thought, just lying in an open grave waiting for a savior to come.

Djelil’s smile coagulated. Lime proceeded with caution. “My government can be generous in times like these.”

“Well that is most interesting, yes? But I am not sure I can help.” Djelil’s face had closed up, with guilt or with innocent curiosity; from his expression it was impossible to guess but from experience Lime knew.

“For information that led to the safe recovery of Clifford Fairlie we could pay out as much as half a million dollars.” He spoke in Arabic because he wanted Djelil to reply in Arabic: when a man spoke a language other than his own you couldn’t be certain of the subtleties of his meaning — his inflections might be caused by his accent rather than his intent.

“I’m quite sure you can help,” he added gently.

“What made you come to me, David?”

“What made you freeze when I mentioned Sturka?”

Impenetrably discreet, Djelil only smiled. In Arabic Lime said, “Your ears have access to many tongues, effendi. We both appreciate that.”

“It is difficult. I haven’t seen Sturka since the days of the ALN, you know.”

“But you may have heard a few things?”

“I am not sure.”

“Sturka needed a hideout. He needed transportation and supplies. He needed access to the ministries in charge of government patrols out in the djebel — to make sure the FLN keeps clear of his hideout.”

“Well I suppose that must be true, if as you say they are hiding in the djebel. But what makes you think so?”

“We’ve identified Benyoussef Ben Krim.”

“Surely you have more than that?”

Lime only nodded gently; he had given away all he was going to give, it was no good adding that through Mezetti they had traced Sturka’s movements as far as the south coast of Spain and had concluded that Sturka must have made the crossing to North Africa.

Djelil stood up and paced to the door, turned, paced to the window, turned. Lime lit a cigarette and looked around for an ashtray. There was no hurrying Djelil; he had to think about the money a while. Then he would start to bargain. Djelil was a past master at horsetrading; he had learned his art as a slave auctioneer.

At the door Djelil turned, stopped, scowled at the wall, tapped his foot a few times and grunted. He walked slowly to the window and stood in front of it looking out. Lime studied his back.

Abruptly Djelil turned to face him. Djelil’s features were obscured; the twilit sky silhouetted him. “Do you recall the village of El Djamila?”

“A few kilometers up the coast — that one?”

“Yes.”

“They’re not holding him there?”

“No, no. Of course not. I have no idea where they might be. But there is a man in El Djamila, a pied-noir who was a spy in the French camp for Ben Bella. For various reasons I think he may be able to help you in your search...”

Lime had not heard the movement behind him because Djelil’s voice had his attention but when he turned his head slightly he caught a tail-of-the-eye impression imperfectly — the door swinging soundlessly open — and his scalp contracted. With the speed of long-forgotten habit he rolled off the bed and dropped to the floor, hearing the crack of the silencer-pistol and the thud of its bullet into the wall above his head; he dragged the .38 out of the armpit clamshell as he rolled.

His shoulder blade struck the wall. He saw the squat zigzagging shape across the room and fired the .38 three times very rapidly, recognizing the intruder slowly as he fired.

It was the woman with the moustache. She died with a kind of low-comedy surprise on her face and Lime spun toward Djelil as she was collapsing.

Djelil had a curved knife. His arm was swinging up toward Lime.

Lime parried with the revolver. It cracked against Djelil’s wrist. Djelil didn’t lose the knife but his hand had been numbed and Lime dropped the revolver, snapped a grip on Djelil’s arm at wrist and elbow and broke the arm across his knee.

He shoved Djelil back out of the way; Djelil fell against the wall and Lime scooped up his revolver and crossed the distance to the woman with four long strides. She didn’t look as if there were any trouble left in her but he stopped to pick up the silencer pistol before he went on to the door, feeling like somebody in a Randolph Scott western with guns in both hands.

There wasn’t anyone in the corridor. The hotel had thick walls and any guests who might have heard the racket wouldn’t do anything about it; a tourist alerted by sharp noises in strange places would be confused and uncertain, not eager to look for trouble.

If Djelil had more guards in the hotel they must have been beyond earshot. The one downstairs in the corridor wouldn’t have heard anything.

He locked the door from the inside and glanced at Djelil. The Arab sat on the floor with his back to the wall, cradling his broken arm.

Lime squatted by the woman and put one of the pistols in his pocket; plucked a bit of fuzz from his tweed jacket and placed it on the woman’s nostrils and held her lips shut.

The fluff didn’t stir. She was dead.

Djelil started to mouth a litany of sibilant invective. Lime swatted him hard across the side of the head with his open hand. Djelil tipped over with a cry of bursting pain, the agony of broken bones grating when his ruined arm hit the floor under him.

Lime knew the telephone went through the hotel switchboard but he had to risk it. He gave the operator Gilliams’ number.

“It’s David Lime. I’m at the St. George, Room Two Fourteen. Send a clean-up squad, will you? One DOA and one busted wing, we’ll want a medic. But let’s not be ostentatious about it.”

The use of the American slang might confuse anyone who had an ear to the line. Lime added, “And put out a pick-up order on Houari Djelil’s daughter Sylvie. She’s acting in a movie the French are shooting somewhere around town.”

“You sound rattled. Are you all right?”

“Barely. Make it over here yesterday, will you?” He hung up and collapsed in the chair.

Djelil was struggling to a sitting position, gathering his shattered arm against him. Lime waited for him to get his breath. Anguish distorted Djelil’s face but Lime knew he had been listening to all of it.

Finally Lime said, “Now tell me again about that pied-noir in El Djamila.”

Defiance: “I’m getting to be an old man, David. I haven’t that much to lose by remaining silent.”

“You’ve got as much to lose as anybody. The rest of your life.”

“Such as it is.” Djelil was a realist.

Djelil had been telling the truth about the pied-noir in El Djamila because he wouldn’t have had any reason to lie; he had thought he was talking to a dead man. The monologue had had the ring of truth; it had been designed to hold Lime’s attention while the woman took him out from behind.

Lime tried another tack. “There are thousands of us on this you know. Hundreds of thousands. What difference would killing me have made?”

“Of them all I suppose you were the one most likely to find them.”

“How much did Sturka pay you?”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“I’ve told them to collect Sylvie.”

“I heard that.”

“I just wanted to make sure you had.”

“Your people won’t harm her. I know you.”

“Think about the stakes and then convince yourself of that again.”

Djelil’s face twisted with agony and then relaxed as the spasm passed. Lime reloaded the spent chambers of his revolver, thrust it into the clamshell and then had a look at the silencer pistol. It was a 7.62mm Luger. He removed the magazine and popped the cartridge out of the breech, put the ammunition in his pocket and the pistol on the bed. “Who was she, your mother?”

Djelil grunted: That’s not funny. Lime looked again at the dead features. The face had gone gray, ruddy at the underside from postmortem lividity. She must have been about fifty. European, or of European stock; possibly one of the pieds-noirs.

“All right, you’ve had time to think about it. Now give me a name.”

Djelil lifted his shoulders and poked his head forward with the Arab gesture known as ma’alesh — the nothing-can-be-done shrug. What controlled Djelil now was the kind of hyper-awareness of masculinity the Arabs called rujuliyah: a mystical thing that steeled your courage. It was always a hard defense to break.

Lime said, “You realize we’re very short for time. We won’t play with you. We’ll let you watch us work on Sylvie and we’re going to be Goddamned hard on her.”

Djelil sat on the floor with his pains. It was getting through to him; he was thinking about it and that meant Lime had won. In the end Djelil summoned the bravado to smile. “Well then how do you say it, one has to live.”

“No.” Lime’s reply was soft. “You don’t have to live, Houari.”

It was damp in El Djamila.

They made the trip in two cars. Chad Hill drove Lime in a Simca and there followed an old station wagon — the kind made of real wood — containing a six-man team. In the back of the station wagon was a UHF scrambler transmitter. Its range was limited but all communications were being funneled through the U. S. Naval Station at Kénitra in Morocco.

Last night’s sleep on the jet hadn’t revived Lime. He felt logy and glazed. Gilliams’ anger still buzzed in his ears; Gilliams had been very upset by the killing and the roust of Djelil and Sylvie and the two guards Djelil had downstairs in the hotel. Gilliams was one of those bureaucrats who pictured a fine balance in things and couldn’t stand having it upset.

They had to move fast because Djelil’s disappearance would be noticed soon. The thing was to find his contacts before they could go to ground.

“Turn right and go slow on the coast road. I think I’ll recognize the place.”

El Djamila was a beach resort where visitors enjoyed uncrowded cheap rates and the natives lived briefly and wretchedly. The moon was up, glinting off the Mediterranean whitecaps.

Djelil had given him a name: Henri Binaud. A pied-noir who had betrayed his own kind to spy for the FLN; now he ran a charter outfit — three boats and an amphibious plane — and was one of Djelil’s chief carriers.

Lime was a bit weak with delayed shock from the episode of the woman with the Luger. He suspected that Sturka had got a message to Djelil saying if any investigators got as far along the trail as Djelil it would be appreciated if Djelil got rid of them; appreciated in terms of substantial money. Lime wondered if Sturka knew the identity of his tracker. Not that it really mattered.

Nearly nine o’clock. Three in the afternoon in Washington. They had about sixty-nine hours.

A bar. Cinzano signs, an old rusty car up on blocks, its tires gone. Sandy vacant lots on either side of the square little stucco building. The charter pier across the road from it: several boats tied up, a twin-engine amphibious plane tied to a buoy and bobbing on the swell.

The bar was empty except for two men who sat at a table that was hardly big enough for their dinner plates and glasses and elbows. They were eating rouget, the local fish. Both of them looked up but kept eating. Chad Hill hung back and Lime spoke in French: “Monsieur Binaud? We understand the Catalina is for hire?”

One of them wiped the back of a hand across his mouth and reached for the wine to wash down his mouthful. “I am Binaud. Who sent you to me?”

“Houari Djelil.”

Binaud studied him suspiciously. He was bullnecked and florid. Cropped gray hair, a hard little potbelly. “And you wish to hire my aircraft.”

“Perhaps we could discuss it outside,” Lime suggested smoothly.

It was the kind of thing Binaud understood. He muttered something to his companion and stood up and made a gesture. Lime and Chad Hill turned, went outside and waited for Binaud; he came out right behind them and Lime showed his gun.

Binaud grunted; his eyelids slid down to a half-shuttered secretiveness and he flashed his teeth in an accidental smile. “What’s this then?”

“Come along.”

They shepherded Binaud around to the side of the building. The others were standing by the station wagon. Three of them pulled revolvers and they put Binaud in frisk position with his hands on top of the car while they went over him with care.

The search produced a pocket revolver and two knives. After they had disarmed him Lime said, “It’s a little public here. Let’s take him on board one of the boats.”

They walked him out onto the pier and prodded him down the ladder into the forward compartment of a cabin cruiser. The boat rode gently up and down against the old tires that hung on the pier as fenders. One of the men lit the lantern.

Lime said to Binaud, “Sit down.”

Binaud backed up slowly until the backs of his knees struck the edge of a bunk. Sat and watched them all, his eyes flicking from face to face.

“We’re looking for Sturka,” Lime said.

“I don’t know that name.” Binaud had a high wheezing husky voice. Gravelly; it made Lime think of “Rochester” Anderson’s voice.

“They came to you a few days ago — it was probably Wednesday night. They’d have wanted you to take them somewhere, by boat or by plane.”

“A great many people hire my boats and my plane. It’s my business.”

“These had a prisoner.”

Binaud shrugged and Lime turned to Chad Hill. “He thinks anything we could do to make him talk would be nothing compared to what Sturka and Djelil would do to him if he did talk.”

“Offer him money,” Chad said in English.

Binaud understood that; his eyes became crafty.

Lime said in French, “Two hundred thousand dinar, Binaud. The price of a good airplane.”

He had the man’s attention at any rate. He added, “You’ve nothing to fear from Djelil — he’s the one who sent us to you. As for Sturka he can’t come out of this alive. You know who his prisoner is.”

“No. I do not.”

“You mean they kept his face hidden.”

Binaud said nothing. Lime sat down on the bunk facing him. They were crowded into the small cabin; Binaud showed his distress. Lime said, “Two hundred and fifty thousand dinar. Call it twenty-five thousand pounds. In gold sovereigns.”

“I do not see any money in front of me.”

Lime spoke in English without looking up. “Get it.”

One of the men left, going up the ladder; the boat swayed when the man stepped onto the pier. Lime said, “We have it with us. There wouldn’t have been time to do it another way. You can understand that.”

“Can I?”

“The prisoner is Clifford Fairlie. If you didn’t know that already.”

No indication of surprise. Binaud sat silent until the agent returned. The leather case was very heavy. They opened it on the deck and two of the agents started counting out the big gold coins, making neat stacks.

Lime said, “Now what about Sturka?”

“I know no one by that name.”

“Call him any name you like then. Don’t you want the money, Binaud?” Lime leaned forward and tapped the man’s knee. “You realize the alternative. We’ll squeeze it all out of you. When it’s finished there won’t be much left of you.”

“That’s what I don’t understand,” Binaud told him, and met his eyes. “Why don’t you do that anyway? It would save you the money.”

“We haven’t time. We’ll do it if you force it, but we’d rather do it fast.”

“How do I know you won’t kill me and take the money back?”

“You don’t,” Lime said, “but what have you got to lose?”

The coins were counted out to the sum of twenty-five thousand pounds and the rest went back into the case. Binaud watched every movement until the case was shut; finally he said, “My information probably is not worth that much money you know.”

“If it helps at all, the money is yours.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“We’ll see.”

“I didn’t know their names. I didn’t know the man was who you say he was. The prisoner.”

“Where did you take them?”

“I didn’t. They had their own pilot.”

Lime felt a sour taste. “Describe him.”

“A Negro. Large, heavy, always chewing on something.”

“When was this arranged?”

“Ten days ago perhaps.”

“Who arranged it with you? Djelil?”

“No. It was a man named Ben Krim.”

“Benyoussef Ben Krim,” Lime breathed. “Again. What story did he give you?”

“None, Monsieur. He reserved my airplane for the night of the twelfth. It was to be filled with fuel. He said he would provide his own pilot. I only had to row them out to the plane.”

“Was Ben Krim with them when they came?”

“No.”

“How many were there?”

“Four,” Binaud said, and frowned. “No, five. The prisoner and four others. One was a woman, one was the Negro. The other two were dressed in burnouses, I did not see their faces.”

“What condition was the prisoner in?”

“He appeared unharmed. I recall his face was masked.”

“Masked?”

“You know. White tape and plasters.” Binaud made gestures across his eyes and mouth.

“Did they explain him?”

“Not really. They said something about the OAS. I thought perhaps he was an OAS they had captured. The Berbers still hold grudges you know.”

It was very glib and it was probably a lie. But it really didn’t matter. Lime said, “Now I see you have recovered the airplane. How?”

“I had to go down to a wadi to pick it up. Beyond the mountains.”

“Where?”

“Have you a map?”

Chad Hill provided one from his pocket and they unfolded it on the bunk beside Binaud. Binaud inserted his lower lip between his teeth and leaned over the map. Presently his index finger stabbed a point. “Here.”

It was south-southeast of Algiers perhaps four hundred miles. Beyond the Atlas Mountains and the Tell — out in the arid plateaus of the bled, on the fringe of the Sahara. Binaud explained, “A friend drove me down.”

“Now think carefully. How much fuel had been used?”

“The Catalina? I do not recall.”

“The tanks weren’t full though.”

Binaud was thinking hard. “No. There was enough to get me back here — more than enough. If there had been any question I’d have worried and I’d remember that. There’s no petrol at that wadi.”

“A landing strip?”

“No. Just the plain. No trouble landing and taking off on it, though.”

“You came straight back here from the wadi?”

“Yes of course.”

“And then I imagine you filled the tanks when you got here.”

“Yes I did.”

“How much fuel did she accept?”

“Ah. I see — yes.” Binaud put his mind on it. “One hundred and forty liters, I believe it was. Yes, I’m quite sure of it.” It was the kind of thing a man like Binaud would remember. He added, “And the distance from the wadi to here was perhaps five hundred and fifty kilometers. But then one has to clear the Atlas Mountains and that takes added fuel. I should say it required forty or fifty liters, the flight home.”

“Then they put enough miles on her to consume a hundred liters or so,” Lime said. “They had to cross the mountains the same as you. So we’ll figure the same rate of consumption.” He was talking mainly to himself.

“They probably covered about five hundred miles altogether. Approximately eight hundred kilometers.”

Some of that mileage would be the distance between Sturka’s lair and the wadi of course. But how much? Ten miles or two hundred?

More likely it was a fair distance. It left a depressing amount of earth to cover. Draw a half circle around El Djamila with a radius of four hundred and fifty miles or so... Even if you narrowed it to a wedge with the wadi at the center of its base you had forty or fifty thousand square miles.

It wasn’t quite a dead end but it was tough. Lime stood up and took Hill aside. “We’ll have to get people into all the villages out there. Find out if they heard that plane go over Wednesday night. Try and find out where it landed.”

“That’ll take a lot of time.”

“I know it. But what else is there?”

“I’ll get on it,” Hill said, and went up the ladder.

Lime went back to Binaud. There was one more avenue to explore. “You say Ben Krim was not with them Wednesday night.”

“No.”

“Have you seen him since then?”

“No...” Binaud seemed to hesitate. He hadn’t lied but he had just thought of something.

Lime waited. Binaud said nothing. Lime sat down opposite him. “What is it?”

“Rien.”

“It’s Ben Krim isn’t it. Something about Ben Krim.”

“Alors...”

“Yes?” Suddenly Lime had it. “You’re expecting him to come here, aren’t you.”

Binaud’s eyes wandered away. Drifted down toward the stacked sovereigns. In the end the fatalistic shrug. “Yes.”

“He’s coming here?”

“Yes.”

“When? Tonight?”

“No, not tonight. He said it was not certain. I was to expect him Tuesday — that’s tomorrow — or Tuesday night.”

“Exactly where does he ordinarily meet you?”

“On the pier here.”

“Not in the bar.”

“No. He likes privacy, Benyoussef.”

Lime nodded. “I’m afraid we’ll have to intrude on it.”

10:15 P.M. EST North African Time Peggy lit a cigarette and gagged on the smoke. These foreign brands must be made out of cow shit. She remembered the head nurse’s furious lectures on the suicidal toxicity of cigarette smoke and the thought made her crush the Gauloise out unsmoked. Then it occurred to her how ridiculous that was and she emitted a little laugh like a hiccup.

Sturka glanced at her coolly from the far side of the room and Cesar said, “What’s funny?”

“I had a training nurse who used to lecture us on the evils of smoking. I was thinking about it and I got so upset I put my cigarette out.”

“That’s funny?”

“Look we’re all likely to get killed in a matter of days and here I’m worrying about getting cancer when I’m forty-two. You don’t think that’s funny?”

Cesar picked his way across the rubble-strewn floor and squatted in front of her. The weak illumination of the kerosene lamps made him look jaundiced. There was a generator that provided power to the underground cells but the upper part of the building had been smashed thirty years ago by Italian bombs and nobody had bothered to repair the damage. Evidently some of Sturka’s old comrades in the Algerian liberation movement had fixed up the underground part with electricity and spartan accommodations but they’d never touched the aboveground wreckage. Probably because that would have given them away to the French.

Cesar said, “Nobody’s going to get killed, Peggy. Everything’s worked fine so far. Why are you so down?”

“They got Riva’s guys in Washington, didn’t they?” They had shortwave and they had been listening to all the news.

“They did their job before they died. That’s what matters in the people’s struggle, Peggy. Your life don’ count — it’s that you got to accomplish something before you die. Listen if we all died right now this minute we’d of accomplished something.”

“I guess.”

“You don’ sound very convinced. Look this is a hell of a time to get cold feet Peggy.”

“I haven’t got cold feet. Did anybody say I wanted to back out of this? All I said was I thought it was funny about the cigarettes.” Cesar had her angry now and she picked up the mashed cigarette and smoothed it out and lit it again.

Sturka broke loose of his thoughtful stance and came striding across to them. “Has the drug had time to work on him?”

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Twenty past. You gave him the shot half an hour ago.”

“It should’ve had time to work.”

“Then let’s go down.” Sturka beckoned to Alvin.

Peggy reached for the veil and the Arab robes and by the time she was costumed she saw Cesar and Sturka had engulfed themselves in their rough burnouses. Alvin had put a stick of gum in his mouth and they went down the dim broken stone stairs into the dungeons.

She put her thumb on the vein in Fairlie’s wrist. He gave her an incurious look; he didn’t even lift his head. His eyes weren’t tracking very well. She said over her shoulder, “Maybe we made the dose a little too big.”

“We gave him a smaller one last time and it didn’t work,” Cesar said.

She tapped Fairlie’s cheek. “Can you hear us? Say something.”

“I hear you.” His voice had a mausoleum tone, like a phonograph record being played at too slow a speed.

“Sit up. Come on, I’ll help you.” She got her arm under his shoulders and he obeyed, levering himself upright with sluggish concentration. She pushed at his chest and he slumped back against the wall, sitting on the cot sideways with his knees straight, looking like a small boy. His face was bloodless and his eyes were pouched and unrevealing.

She glanced at the others. Alvin stood guard in the doorway and Sturka was preparing the tape recorder; Cesar sat on the cot beside Fairlie and said in a reasonable tone, “Talk for a while, mister pig. Talk to us. Tell us about all the good people you’ve persecuted. Tell us about the fascist system back home.”

The hollow eyes settled painfully on Cesar.

Sturka was clicking controls on the tape recorder. Cesar said, “Can you read, pig?”

“...Of course I can read.”

“I mean aloud. Read to us, pig.” Cesar held up the speech they had written for Fairlie.

Fairlie’s eyes tried to focus on it but his head went back against the wall and his mouth slacked open. “Tired,” he muttered. “Can’t see very well.”

Too much, Peggy thought. They’d dosed him too much. She turned in anger toward Sturka. “He’s out of it, can’t you see that?”

“Then bring him around. Give him a shot of adrenaline or something.”

“I haven’t got any. What do you think I’ve got in that little kit, a whole drugstore?”

Sturka’s head lifted a little. She couldn’t see his face under the hood but she knew those awful eyes were burning into her. “Lady, your concern for the pig isn’t touching, it’s out of place. You’re forgetting who he is — what he is.”

She blanched. “He’s no use to us like this. That’s all I’m saying. I let you talk me into it but you can see he can’t handle the dose. We’ll just have to wait for it to wear off.”

“How long will that be?”

“I don’t know. It has a cumulative effect — he’s got an awful lot of it in his system. It may take three or four days for the whole thing to wear off. Maybe by morning he’ll be able to talk for you.”

She knew the trouble; it would cut things awfully fine. But it’s your own stupid fault. You just had to shoot the poor bastard full of stuff because he had the guts to stand up to you.

Cesar said, “Maybe he’s acting. Maybe he’s a lot wider awake than he looks.” He slapped Fairlie’s cheek and the handsome face rolled limply to the side; Fairlie blinked slowly and painfully.

“He’s not acting,” Peggy said. “Christ he’s had enough junk poured into him to knock an elephant on his ass. Acting? He hasn’t got any inhibitions left to play games with. Look at him, will you?”

There were flecks of white saliva in the corners of Fairlie’s slack mouth.

Sturka switched off the recorder and picked it up. “All right. Morning.”

They left Fairlie on the cot and went outside and closed the cell door. Peggy said, “I’ll try to get him to eat something later. A lot of coffee might help.”

“Just don’t bring him too wide-awake. We can’t have him resisting this time.”

“A few more cc’s of that junk and he’d be dead. He wouldn’t resist at all then. Is that what you want?”

“Talk to her,” Sturka said mildly to Cesar, and went ahead of them up the stairs.

“You’re getting to sound like a deviationist,” Cesar said. Alvin squeezed past them to go up the stairs; a blank look at Peggy and he was gone.

She slumped against the wall and listened with half her attention to Cesar’s voice. She made the proper responses mechanically and it seemed to satisfy Cesar. But under it all she knew they were right about her. She was sliding. She was worried about Fairlie — she was a nurse and Fairlie was her patient.

Fairlie had been extraordinarily gentle with her. It didn’t make her trust him. But it made him very hard to hate.

4:45 P.M. EST The Secret Service men were numerous: silently present, indifferent but not inconspicuous. They watched Andrew Bee enter the President’s office.

Brewster’s face had a gray haggard look. “Thanks for coming over, Andy.” It was meaningless courtesy: you didn’t ignore a presidential summons. Bee nodded and muttered a “Mr. President” and took the indicated chair.

Brewster’s head tipped sideways toward the side door. “Winston Dierks just left. We’ve been having a string of conferences here all afternoon. I reckon it’ll go on half the night, so you’ll have to forgive me if what I say to you comes out sounding like a set-piece speech.” The big lined face poked forward; Brewster’s lips pulled back slowly in a smile. “I guess I could have asked for a joint session and talked to everybody at once, but it just ain’t the kind of thing you can do that way.”

Bee waited patiently. His grief-stung eyes lay against the President’s face; he felt at once reproachful and sympathetic.

The President glanced at the television set in the corner. Bee didn’t remember having seen a television set in this office since the departure of Lyndon Johnson; it must have been brought in today. The sound was off and the picture was a still shot of a bathroom product. Brewster said, “The seven prisoners will be landing in Geneva in the next hour or so. I thought I’d watch.”

“It hurts you to have to do that, doesn’t it Mr. President?”

“If it’ll get Cliff Fairlie back I’m all for it.” The President halved his smile. “It’s what happens if we don’t get him back that I’d like to talk to you about, Andy.”

Bee nodded without surprise and the President said, “I suppose you’ve been giving it some thought too.”

“Everybody has. I doubt there’s another subject of conversation anywhere in the country today.”

“I’d like your views.”

“Well they’re probably not the same as yours, Mr. President.” Bee grinned a bit. “They rarely are.”

“I do value your advice, Andy. And I reckon the differences between you and me get to looking pretty small when you compare them with some others.”

“Like Senator Hollander?”

“Like Senator Hollander.”

The President looked unhappy as a soaked cat, Bee thought.

Brewster was waiting for him to speak. With an effort Bee summoned his thoughts. “Mr. President, I don’t have a great deal to offer right now. I do think we’re between a rock and a hard place. If you think of yourself as any kind of liberal at all, you just don’t have any place left to stand. I’ve watched the troops move in all day. I gather every city in the country’s the same way — like a state of siege. I understand they’re arresting anybody who looks cross-eyed.”

“That’s kind of an exaggeration.”

“It may not fit the facts but it suits the mood of things. I think people in this country feel as if they’re in occupied territory. A lot of people are being arrested, or at least watched to the point where they’ve got no privacy left.”

“And you’d like to defend their rights?”

“There was a time when I would have. I’m not so sure now. I think to defend their rights would be to hasten their destruction, the way the country’s temper is right now. Frankly I think most of the radicals are showing admirable restraint.”

“Sensible, maybe. They know they’d get massacred if they tried to resist.”

“That’s just it. It seems to me when we deny them their rights we’re hastening another kind of destruction. The destruction of everybody’s liberties.”

“There haven’t been any mass arrests, Andy, whatever you may have heard.”

“There’ve been enough arrests to cause a great deal of alarm.”

“Fifteen or twenty known radical leaders, that’s about the size of it. I might point out there’ve been enough bombings and kidnappings to cause a great deal of alarm too.”

“I can hardly dispute that, can I.” Absently Bee massaged the right knee that had been shattered four years ago and mended with steel and bone grafts. It still gave him arthritic stabs of pain. “Mr. President, I’d like to say I think your administration has showed admirable restraint too. I know what it must be like for you, with Hollander and that bunch keeping the pressure up all the time for lunatic reprisals.”

“Well thank you Andy. I reckon that brings us around to the speech I’ve got to make to you. About Wendy Hollander. I’m sure you must have been giving that some thought too?”

Bee shook his head, not in denial but in morose agreement.

The President lit a cigar; the pale eyes peered at Bee. “I’ve talked to a dozen, fifteen leaders from both houses this afternoon. I’ve sworn every one of them to secrecy and they’ve agreed. Can I ask the same promise of you, Andy?”

“I think that has to depend on what secret I’m supposed to keep.”

“Have you heard any rumors? No matter how wild they may have seemed.”

“I’ve heard nothing but rumors, Mr. President. That the bombings are a Russian plot, that the White House is gearing up for war, that the Army’s only pretending to move into the cities to protect public officials — the rumor says the real purpose is to get the troops in position to strike simultaneously all across the country, grab every known or suspected radical and herd them all into concentration camps. I’ve heard rumors about Clifford Fairlie and rumors about the Japanese and rumors about—”

“Not that.” The President cut him off smoothly. “Have you met up with any rumors about a stop-Hollander campaign?”

“I’ve heard a lot of wishful thinking along those lines.”

“It was actually suggested to me in this office that we ought to have him assassinated and blame it on the radicals,” Brewster said. “What do you think of that?”

“I’d rather not think of that, Mr. President.”

“Andy, I don’t need to tell you the kind of hell this country’s going to be plunged into if Wendy Hollander occupies this seat Thursday.”

“No. I can picture it vividly enough for myself.”

“There’s a way to prevent that happening,” the President said, and squinted through the smoke of his cigar to see how Bee would take it. “I mean ruling out assassination of course.”

Bee’s jaw rode from side to side with his speculative frown. “Declare him incompetent, you mean? I’d thought of that — I suppose a lot of us have.”

“I doubt we could make that work.”

“So do I. But you say you’ve discovered a way?”

“I need your assurance it stays inside this room until I take the wraps off, Andy. God knows it’s a genuine matter of national security — if anything ever had to be kept top secret this does. May I have your absolute promise?”

“Mr. President, if it’s a scheme that you’re sure will work, why does it need to be kept secret?”

“Because if Hollander gets wind of it too soon he might find ways to head it off. If we can spring it on him by surprise it’ll have a better chance of working.”

“But I gather it requires the cooperation of the Congress.”

“Yes. I’ll give you a list of names of the men I’ve already spoken to. They’ll be the only ones you’ll be allowed to discuss it with. Tomorrow morning I’m going to call a private caucus of leaders from both houses and we’ll discuss it in a general meeting then, but in the meantime I wanted to talk to each of you personally.”

“On that basis I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t go along, Mr. President.”

“I have your word on it then?”

“You have my word on it.” A bit of a smile: “For whatever a politician’s word is worth.”

“Yours has always been worth quite a bit, Andy. You’ve fought me pretty damn hard on a lot of things and you’ve done as much backroom logrolling as I have, but I’ve never known you to back out on a commitment.”

There was a kind of do-or-die melodrama to the President’s manner; for all his deserved reputation as a wheeler-dealer he was curiously old-fashioned in his beliefs. His concepts of honor and gallantry were those of the Victorians. Brewster was a gentleman and that was odd in a world that regarded those values as pointless and often suspect.

The President leaned back in the big chair. “Here it is, then. I don’t need to give you my ten-minute number on why we don’t want Wendy Hollander coming up the White House doorstep Thursday afternoon with all his suitcases. We’re agreed on that, aren’t we?”

“Completely.”

“Now I might mention also that there’s no time left to brief a new man on the complexities of running this here office. I had my hands full trying to fill Dexter Ethridge in. Dex is gone now and we’re stuck with Wendy Hollander. Andy, you’ve been on the Hill a few years, do you remember the debate over the Succession Bill back in Nineteen and Sixty-six?”

“Vaguely.”

“There, was talk about how maybe we ought to specify that if there was a national emergency that wiped out the whole line of succession — say a full-scale military attack that destroyed Warshington completely — that we ought to make some provision for the military to take over the Government on a temporary basis in order to meet the emergency. You remember that?”

“Yes. The proposal was turned down because nobody was willing to pass any law that could authorize the generals to take over.”

“Yes exactly. Congress was scared to put that in writing no matter how it was worded. Rightly so, too, I believe. The argument that tabled it was that if we ever had an emergency of that magnitude the generals would just naturally step in and take over without needing any paper authorization. That satisfied everybody and the idea was dropped.

“But the thinking behind it did make a kind of sense, Andy. Any time you lose both your President and your Vice-President you’ve got a kind of emergency, because the rest of the people on the line of succession aren’t really qualified for the office in the sense of being briefed on all the administration’s inside operations and foreign negotiations and whatnot. Let me put it to you this way. Suppose a vacancy occurs in the office, and the office is filled by somebody like Wendy Hollander — forget his politics for a minute — and suppose five hours later, say, Egypt decides to take advantage of the confusion by jumping all over Israel. Now Hollander not only doesn’t know what kind of secret meetings may have been going on between us and the Middle East, he doesn’t even know how to operate the machinery of diplomacy and military countermoves. You see what I’m getting at?”

“Yes sir. But that would apply to anybody in the line of succession.”

“Except for somebody who’s held the office of the Presidency before,” Brewster said. “Somebody who already knows all the means and methods.”

Bee listened, intent and rapt.

“The most recently retired former President — that’s the way I’ve been putting it. Of course it refers to me since I retire at noon Thursday. It wouldn’t conflict with the Constitutional two-term limit on the Presidency, since I’ve only served one term in office. I have to grant it’s a special-interest proposal caused specifically by the threat Wendy Hollander presents, but I maintain it makes a good deal of generic sense too — it could apply as a general rule, although I’m not ruling out the likelihood Congress will want to change it back after we’ve shunted Wendy aside.”

The room was sealed against the winter cold and the smell of Brewster’s cigars was heavy. The President had the balls of a brass gorilla, Andrew Bee thought, but he continued to listen, uncommitted.

“I’m asking Congress to amend the Act of Succession in a way that’ll allow me to continue as interim President until Cliff Fairlie is recovered. The alternative, I have to keep repeating, is Wendell Hollander — and to the bottom of my soul I don’t believe the country can survive that.”

“Do you honestly think you can persuade Congress to go for this, Mr. President?”

“I’ve talked to leaders on both sides of both aisles and the majority appears to be with me. I remind you virtually every Congressman and every Senator stands at least slightly to Wendy’s left. And most of them stand far to his left.”

“I’d be interested to know who refused to go along with you — and what reasons they gave.”

“I’ll give you their names. All of them, the ones who agreed and the ones who didn’t. Before you leave the office this afternoon. But I’ve got too much to do spending an hour with you running down the roll call. You can understand that, Andy.”

Suspicion nibbled at a corner of his mind — that the President would make the same statement whether or not it was true. Like a cop telling a suspect his partner had confessed. It was one of the things he wouldn’t put past Howard Brewster.

“Mr. President, suppose Congress supports you. Suppose you don’t get shot down by the Supreme Court, suppose everybody goes along with it — everybody except Wendy Hollander and the other yahoos, naturally. Then what happens? What do you propose to do?”

“Conduct this office as I’ve been conducting it for the past four years.”

“That’s not what I mean and I think you know it, Mr. President.”

“You mean what do I intend to do about these radicals. The polarization in the country.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t have a quick answer for you, Andy. It’s something we’re all going to have to get together and thrash out. I can guarantee you one thing — I won’t do what Hollander would do.”

“Just what do you think he would do, when it came right down to it?”

“You’re suggesting maybe the weight of responsibility would gentle him down, are you?”

“I don’t know. It’s happened.”

“Andy, if you could put that in writing with Wendy’s signature under it I might buy it. Otherwise how can we take the chance?”

The cigar had grown two inches of ash. The President tipped it off carefully into the ashtray, using his little fingernail. “Don’t let me down, Andy. You’re crucial.”

“I’m only a Congressman, Mr. President.”

“You’re probably the most widely respected Representative in the House. I want you to be the Republican floor leader in this fight. I want you to steer our supporters, get the best speakers to fight down the opposition, keep track of the votes.”

“You intend to make an open floor fight of it?”

“Once it comes out in the open we’ve got to. I may be a rigid old mossyhorn but I do recognize it when times change. The House don’t tolerate the kind of backroom juggling there used to be. Things have got to be out in the open nowadays — I’ve heard a lot of them talking about letting it all hang out. Well, when it comes to that kind of fighting you’re the best scrapper I know, Andy. Will you do this?”

Bee looked at his watch. Just past five-thirty. Clearly the circumstances, if not the President, demanded an immediate decision: it wasn’t possible to go away and think about it.

“It’s very bad odds, Mr. President. We’ve only got two days. If Hollander starts a filibuster it’s dead.”

“I need you to corral enough votes for a cloture. I think we’ve got to assume he’ll filibuster.”

“You really believe we can get two-thirds behind this in two days?”

“I believe we’ve got to.”

“And you’re not taking the wraps off until tomorrow morning.”

“At nine we’ll caucus in the Executive Office Building. I’d like you to get up and make a little speech supporting me. The meeting will be attended only by those who’ve agreed to support me, so you won’t be debated, but I want everybody in that room to recognize everybody else — I want them to see how broad the support really is. It’s the best way to convince them it can work. I’m hoping you can get it onto the floor by the middle of the afternoon. There’ll have to be an extraordinary session — it’ll have to run right through tomorrow night. Hopefully we can bring it to a vote by then, or by early Wednesday morning at the latest. By that time you should have been able to get together with Philip Krayle and Winston Dierks and drawn up companion bills for both houses so we don’t have to waste time in House-Senate conferences afterwards.

“As soon as you’ve got things moving I’ll have Perry Hearn call a background press conference for an off-the-record briefing. But we’ll want the announcement held up until Congress has voted — otherwise it’ll give the right-wing hoi polloi time to break out their Goddamned arsenals, and we don’t want that. It’s going to hit the people like cold water but it can’t be helped. I think if we take the press into our confidence a few hours in advance it’ll soften the blow.”

Bee sat weak; he felt debilitated. “Mr. President, I’ve got no choice but to agree with you in principle. But what happens if we try this and it fails? The cost could be a divided country — far more divided than it is now.”

“What difference is there between that and what’ll happen if we don’t try? A Pyrrhic victory for last-ditch defenders of the Constitution?”

“But we’re going to have to fight the most powerful vested interest of all — inertia.”

“I’m glad you said ‘we,’ Andy.”

“And what about the Supreme Court? Suppose they strike it down?”

“On what grounds? Congress has every right to amend its own laws.”

“But the Constitution goes to considerable lengths to put rigid limits on the term of office of a President. Essentially you’re asking the Congress to allow you to perpetuate yourself in office beyond your elected term. The Court would have to look at it that way.”

“I don’t think so. I’m only asking to be held over as interim executive until the elected President shows up to qualify. The judges on the Court understand reality when they see it.”

“There’s another reality, Mr. President. Suppose we never get Cliff back. Suppose he’s killed.”

“Then I expect I’d have another four years in office, Andy. I think that’s clear to everybody I’ve talked to. Naturally you’ve got to weigh that. But it’s still a choice between that and Hollander. Everything comes right back down to that.”

The President sat forward and put both elbows on the desk. “I wouldn’t worry about the Court if I were you. I’ve already consulted with the Chief Justice. I know that’s considered bad form but I had to cover that flank. The legal position the Court will probably take is simple enough. Congress has the power to provide for a vacancy in the Presidency by any method it chooses, so long as the candidate qualifies according to Constitutional basics — age, place of birth, that kind of thing. If Congress wanted to it could appoint the third assistant postmaster of Bend, Oregon to head up the line of succession. I can see how there might be a constitutional argument if I’d completed two terms in office, but I haven’t. And I’m not proposing that my present term of office be extended. The new law won’t take effect until one minute past noon on the twentieth day of January, and at that time I’ll have retired. It’ll be a new administration. I’ll simply be walking out the back door and back in through the front door, but it satisfies the legal requirements.”

“Will it satisfy the people’s requirements, Mr. President? Will the people accept it?”

“I hope they will if it’s explained to them by men like you, Andy.”

A beat of silence, and Bee dragged himself out of his fatigue. “I’d like to be very blunt for a minute.”

“Please do.”

“If the law can be changed to allow anybody to become the next President, why does it have to be you?”

“Because I expect I’m the only one who can rally enough support. Do you think if you went to the Congress and asked them to elect you to the Presidency they’d do it in forty-eight hours?”

“No,” Bee admitted. “I’m sure they wouldn’t. It would be far too raw. But it’s pretty raw to do it your way too.”

“But my way is the only way that has a chance of succeeding. I’m the only man alive who’s got the power to lead this fight — to swing the support of both parties in both houses. And the only one who knows what’s going on in the Executive branch. Now I’m being just as blunt with you. It’s a question of practicalities, Andy. You can’t afford to give consideration to my ambitions or your misgivings. The only thing you can do is decide whether you’d rather have me or Wendy Hollander sitting in this chair come Thursday afternoon.”

11:40 P.M. North African Time Lime went through to the after cabin. Chad Hill sat by a portable radio. Binaud was somewhere up on the dock or in the bar across the road, being watched from the shadows by three agents; Binaud understood that if Ben Krim tipped to anything Binaud’s head would roll. The gold sovereigns were the carrot on Binaud’s stick; he probably would go along with it. If he didn’t Lime would lose another round. All he could do was hope.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Anything from down south yet?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here I am counting angels on pinheads.