Line of Succession

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.