Line of Succession
- Автор: Гарфилд Брайан
- Год: 1972
- Язык: английский
- Год: Delacorte Press
- ISBN: 978-0440048473
- Жанр: Политические детективы
Электронная книга - «Line of Succession». Краткое содержание книги:
It all happened so fast: the terrorist bombings of Congress which killed nearly a hundred senators and congressmen; the incredible kidnapping of the President-Elect, Clifford Fairlie.
Tough, veteran agent David Lime was summoned to track down the kidnappers, who threatened to kill Fairlie if the captured terrorists were not set free. And behind the scenes, ruthless men battled for the glory of the highest office in the land.
The rescue efforts swung into high gear. It became a vast, global manhunt. The entire world watched in frozen horror.
But only two men had the power to shape the end of this chilling, savage drama — agent Lime and the terrorist leader for whom hate had become a holy mission.
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.”