Line of Succession (33 page)

“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.