Line of Succession (3 page)

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

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

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

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

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

“I could do with toast and coffee.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not quite yet.”

“I'm practicing.”

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

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

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

“Plenty of time.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Deep thoughts, Mr. President?”

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

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

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

“Hard to do.”

“I've got to get some rest.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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