The President pushed a copy of the New York Times across his desk. “You’d better read it.”
Satterthwaite had seen a copy of the Times earlier in the day but had not had time to read it. The headline at the top of the front page was probably the largest point type the Times used—FAIRLIE KIDNAPPED. Each of the two words ran the width of the page in high boldface.
It was near the bottom of the page under a two-column group photo of a dozen well-known faces.
CONGRESSIONAL LEADERS CALL FOR “GET TOUGH” POLICY—INSIST GOV’T REJECT RANSOM DEMANDS
The President was talking while Satterthwaite read. “I’ve had calls from every one of them. And the telegrams are a mile high.”
“How do the telegrams split?”
“About six to four.”
“For or against the hard line?”
“For.” The President spoke the word slowly and let it hang in the air. Finally he added, “The public sentiment seems to be let’s not just sit around and bleed about it.” He removed the cigar; his voice hardened. “I can hear the mob, Bill. They’re gathering out there with picks and torches.”
Satterthwaite, grunting to indicate he had heard, turned the page.
Dexter Ethridge said, “We decided this morning, Mr. President. We’ve already made the decision.”
“I know that Dex. But we didn’t make it public.”
“You’re saying we can still change our minds.”
“We didn’t anticipate the reaction would come down this hard on one side, did we?”
“Mr. President,” Ethridge said. The tone made Satterthwaite look up at him. Ethridge stirred slowly in his chair. A deep breath, a reluctant voice: “You’ve never been the kind of man who makes his decisions on the basis of who talked to him last. You’ve never needed public consensus to confirm your judgment. I find it hard to believe you’re going to let the unreasoning panic of a mob affect your——”
“The country could split apart on this issue.” The President was harsh. “I’m not playing politics for God’s sake. I’m trying to hold this country together!”
Ethridge was sitting up straight. It was the first time Satterthwaite could recall seeing him this angry. “You won’t hold it together by giving in to the yahoos.”
The President waved his cigar toward the newspaper in Satterthwaite’s hands. “Some of those men are prominent public servants, Dex. Maybe some of them are yahoos too but you can’t always judge a case by its advocate.”
Satterthwaite set the newspaper aside. “I think the President’s point is well taken. This morning we all listened to Fairlie’s voice. We reacted straight out of our guts—we’re civilized people, someone in our family is in trouble, we instantly concluded the ransom demands weren’t impossible to meet so we decided to agree to the exchange. The paramount consideration was Fairlie’s safety—we hadn’t had time to study the ramifications.”
Ethridge was watching him narrowly. The muscles and nerves twitched in his face.
President Brewster said, “If we give in it’ll give every two-bit terrorist gang in the world a green light to try this kind of thing again and again. Turning these seven killers loose, sending them into asylum—assuming there’s a country somewhere with the guts to grant them asylum—that would be kind of like telling every guerrilla in the world he’s free to go ahead and blow up people and buildings with impunity.”
Ethridge’s skin was the hue of veal, he had unhealthy blisters under his eyes. He spread his hands in appeaclass="underline" “Mr. President, I can only stick to what I said this morning. The kidnappers are offering an exchange and we all agreed that Cliff Fairlie’s life is worth a great deal more than the lives of those seven ciphers. I don’t see how that’s changed.”
Satterthwaite turned, catching the President’s eye; he said to Ethridge, “If that were the real quid pro quo you’d get no argument. But it’s not a choice between Fairlie’s life and the lives of seven ciphers. It’s whether we can afford to give carte blanche to the extremists.”
Ethridge sat stubbornly upright, his silence disagreeing. He squeezed his eyes with thumb and forefinger and when he opened them it seemed to take him a long time to bring them into focus. “I think we have to face the fact that whatever we do isn’t going to please everybody. We can’t avoid a split. The theoretical arguments pretty well cancel each other out—look, I can give you a strong case against taking a tough stand. You can’t simply refuse to turn the seven bombers loose, you’ll have to follow up with a police operation against all the radical cells. You’ll end up with a permanently enlarged security operation, and that means permanent curtailment of citizens’ rights. It’s the only way you’ll keep the lid on, and it seems to me that’s exactly what the militants want of us—a tough repression that will feed their anti-Establishment arguments.”
Satterthwaite said, “You’re maintaining we’ve already lost.”
“We’ve lost this round. We have to accept that.”
“I don’t,” the President snapped. “I don’t at all.” He pawed around the surface of his desk, his eyes not following his hand; he was watching Ethridge. His hand closed around the lighter; the wheel snicked and the President lit his cigar. “Dex, are you going to make a public fight of this? A public break with me?”
Ethridge didn’t answer directly. “Mr. President, the most important thing—more important than this entire tragedy—is to establish a long-term system of policies that will rebuild the self-confidence and security of the people. If the society hasn’t got enormous discontents to fuel the militant extremists, then the whole terrorist movement will wither away for lack of nourishment. Now it seems to me——”
“Long-term policies,” Satterthwaite cut in, “are a luxury we haven’t got time to debate right now.”
“May I finish, please?”
“I’m sorry. Go ahead.”
“I don’t mean this as personal offense but I believe Cliff Fairlie is more likely to establish the kind of secure self-confident society we need than anybody else in government. His ideas are the first reform proposals I’ve ever seen that give us a real chance to build a more responsible and more responsive government in this country. And if we manage to recover Fairlie the wave of public sympathy will be so overpowering there’s a good chance he’ll be able to get congressional backing for a great many reform programs that could never be passed under any other circumstances.”
Satterthwaite was rocked; he tried not to show it. The frail Vice-President-elect, with his sick eyes and his tall quixotic gauntness, was putting out a display of shrewd subtlety totally unexpected. Ethridge was crediting Fairlie with far more magic than Fairlie actually possessed; reforms had been proposed before, Satterthwaite saw nothing particularly new in any of Fairlie’s, but there was one place where Ethridge had an undeniably powerful point: Fairlie, if recovered intact, would generate exactly the kind of public outpouring Ethridge foresaw. On the crest of that wave, with any political ability at all Fairlie indeed would be able to push all sorts of unheard-of reforms through Congress before the legislators regained their composure.
Satterthwaite’s eyes went past Ethridge, past the hanging flag to President Brewster; and he saw in the President’s lined face a surprise similar to his own—the awareness of the explosive significance of what Ethridge had just said.
12:25 P.M. EST In the war room Lime’s patience was shredding. He had arrived almost an hour ago with his lunch in a paper bag stained dark around the bottom by coffee that had escaped from the lidded takeout cup. The cheap food rumbled uneasily in his stomach.
He had pulled out an empty chair beside NSA’s Fred Kaiser, who was big and grizzled, a not unfriendly bear of a man; Lime knew him, not well. Kaiser was keeping two phones busy, sitting with a receiver propped between shoulder and one ear, a finger stuck in the other.