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.
Sélim didn’t fit into any concept of the quixotic rebel. He had none of the earmarks of the zealous reformer or the tantrum-throwing resenter. Some of his troops were that kind: Lady for one. (“Get your ass moving before I put my boot up it,” and a little while later, as they had got out of the car, “Do what you’re told. If you hear a loud noise it’ll be you dying.”) But Sélim didn’t play at that game. Sélim had something else in mind.
Fairlie thought he saw what it was. Sélim did not so much want to improve the world as he wanted to improve his position in it.
10:30 A.M. EST Bill Satterthwaite accepted his wife’s unimpassioned kiss and left the house. Backed the car out of the garage and headed down New Hampshire Avenue toward the center of things. The Saturday morning traffic was moderate and he had good luck with the lights.
It was the first time he had been home since the kidnapping and it had proved unnecessary; if Leila had noticed his absence there was no sign of it. She had cooked breakfast for him. The boys were both well, and doing well, at Andover; the man was coming Monday to lay the new carpet in the upstairs hall and on the stairs; the nice pregnant young couple across the street had had a miscarriage; the new Updike novel was not up to his usual standard; how much of a contribution should we make this year to the Arena Theater?
He had called her at least once every day and she knew he was involved in the search for Clifford Fairlie; she knew better than to ask and he knew better than to volunteer anything.
They had married when they were both university instructors but he had learned that the intellectual gamesmanship at which she was adept was a strain for her; when they had come to Washington she had settled instantly and with evident relief into the less challenging hausfrau role and it suited Satterthwaite well enough. His home, now that the boys were away most of the year, was an unabrasive resort. Leila didn’t complain when he shut himself in his study all evening, week after week, jotting in his crabbed hand and reading endless reports.
The three hours with Leila had relieved the pressure but when he set foot in The Salt Mine it hit him with renewed force.
Its symbols were trite: the big white electric clock on the wall, ticking toward inaugural noon; the teleprinters banging, hunched figures at the long table, the disordered mounds of documents. Some of these men had hardly left the room in the past sixty or seventy hours.
He spent nearly an hour with Attorney General Ackert and an Assistant Secretary of State discussing the details of the movement of the seven accused mass murderers to Geneva. Because of the Swiss Government’s rigid neutrality regulations they would not use an Air Force plane; a commercial 707 would have to be chartered. Security would be maintained by FBI and Secret Service agents aboard the plane; Swiss police would reinforce the coverage once the plane landed. Permissions had to be arranged for international television and radio coverage at Geneva. Brewster had decided to follow the kidnappers’ instructions to the letter—at least on the visible level.
Satterthwaite had lunch with FBI Director Clyde Shankland and an Assistant CIA Director. They reviewed the items that had been pinned down in the past twenty-four hours. Mario Mezetti had obtained at least six hundred thousand dollars in negotiables within the past few weeks, but what was being done with that much money was hard to tell.
Bob Walberg had opened up in last night’s interrogation; the questioners had persuaded him they had obtained a confession from one of the other prisoners and Walberg had come apart under the influence of scopolamine. The confession and evidence weren’t admissible in court but they were mildly useful. Walberg seemed to think Sturka had a partner, someone outside the immediate cell. Riva? The search was intensified. At the same time Perry Hearn had leaked Walberg’s confession to the press, unofficially and without naming Walberg. The leak was designed to dispell the growing rumors of an enormous international conspiracy at work. It might be an international conspiracy but it was not enormous, at least in numbers. The public needed to know that.
The doubles were being coached, Shankland assured him. They would be ready in time.
The Guardia Civil had found the leak in the Gibraltar-Almería telephone operation—Mezetti’s bi-hourly calls. It was a telephone operator in Almería. She had been paid an enormous sum of money by her reckoning: fifteen thousand pesetas. She had been supplied with a small radio transmitter, set to broadcast on an aviation-band wavelength, and she had been paid to tap the electronic pickup circuit of the transmitter into the switchboard line that fed the telephone to which Mezetti’s calls had been dialed.
The gadget had been locked in an open-transmission position. It meant anyone within broadcast range—a hundred miles or so depending on altitude and interference—would be able to hear everything that took place on that particular telephone line.
The limited range of the transmitter meant nothing; someone might have been posted anywhere within a hundred-mile radius for the express purpose of listening for the telephone bell and relaying an alarum to another recipient if the Almeria phone failed to ring.
There was one more item. Scotland Yard had used several chemical processes on the pair of gloves found by the abandoned helicopter in the Pyrenees; the experiments had lifted a vague partial thumbprint and it had been run through the FBI’s computers. It was not conclusive but the circumstantial web was too tight to dismiss: the print fitted several thumbs but one of them was that of Alvin Corby.
Corby had been tied to Sturka nearly two weeks ago. The helicopter pilot had been black, an American. It fit. Satterthwaite had sent the word on, not without petty satisfaction, to David Lime who was in Finland glued to Mario Mezetti’s eccentric movements.
They had a growing accumulation of clues but still there was only one solid contact and Lime was sticking with Mezetti.
The Russians had the inside track in Algeria, if that was where Sturka had gone after all. The KGB had a far better network in North Africa than the CIA. At the moment there was no reason to believe the Russians knew Sturka was the quarry—but there was no proof they didn’t. The KGB was dogging Lime’s heels in Finland, and undoubtedly knew Mezetti was the subject under surveillance but they were hanging back, letting Lime carry the ball—perhaps out of political courtesy and perhaps for other reasons. When the trail had led as far as Finland the Russians had instituted a massive but very quiet search operation within the Soviet Union; it could prove acutely embarrassing to find the American President-elect was being held prisoner inside Russia somewhere.
Everybody in the world had a piece of this, Satterthwaite thought. The magnitude of it awed him even though he usually wasn’t susceptible to reverence. This was the largest manhunt in human history.
At two o’clock he reported to the White House. Brewster was bloodshot from sleeplessness and expectably irascible. “I’ve just had a very rough phone conversation with Jeanette Fairlie.”
“I imagine it must have been.”
“She wants to know why we haven’t got him back yet.”
“Understandable.”
Brewster was striding back and forth. “We haven’t even got five full days left. Ethridge picked a hell of a time to die, didn’t he.” He stopped and yanked the cigar out of his mouth and stared belligerently at Satterthwaite. “You’re convinced you know the identity of this man who’s got Fairlie?”