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.
“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.