Line of Succession

The blurred photograph suggested a rangy man with deep-set eyes overhung by dark brows: a somehow European face, between forty and fifty.

Stratten, no first name, no initials. The active files of Lime’s Protective Research Section included some quarter of a million cases and according to the print-outs from the computer none of them mentioned anyone named Stratten or anyone who had ever used the name as an alias.

It was an obvious case: classic and tiresome. Barbara Norris had infiltrated the group, had found out something she wasn’t supposed to know, and had been killed to guarantee her silence.

The Stratten blowup showed a face full of latent violence. The Norris girl had snapped the picture a week ago with a Minolta concealed in the folds of her leather handbag.

He reached for the phone. “Get me somebody over at NSA. Ames if you can get him.”

He cupped the mouthpiece in his palm and looked up at Chad Hill. “Call the New York office and have them send some people over to that apartment this bunch was using on West End Avenue. Have them give the premises a good toss.”

Hill went out to his own desk and the phone came alive in Lime’s fist. He put it to his ear. “Ames?”

“No, this is Kaiser. Ames won’t be in till nine. Maybe I can help out, Mr. Lime?”

Another of those pitchless voices, uninflected, sounding like some electronic contrivance programmed to imitate human speech. Lime closed his eyes and leaned back in the swivel chair. “I’d like to run a make on a character through your R & I machines.”

“Mind if I ask the nature of the case?” It was spoken by rote. Agencies didn’t do favors for other agencies unless a reason was supplied.

“It’s a protection case. Some hints about an assassination attempt. One of our people was working on it and they seem to have taken her out.”

“Then she was onto something.” The observation was less redundant than it might have been: Lime’s department investigated thousands of assassination threats every season and virtually all of them proved trivial.

“Nothing on your man from FBI?”

“Nothing from any domestic files. We’ve run him through all of them.”

“What have you got? Fingerprints?”

“Fingerprints and a mug shot.” Barbara Norris had lifted the prints off a water glass Stratten had used: she had sprinkled it with talc and taken it off with masking tape, and washed the glass afterward.

“Well that ought to be easy enough. Send them over.”

“I’ll get a ru

He hung up and looked at the photo again while he buzzed for a messenger. The straight black hair was bushy at the back, not a distinctive cut, and he wondered what had persuaded him Stratten was a foreigner. Perhaps the set of the mouth or the slight lift to the right eyebrow. But there was something more than that and it still eluded him when the messenger came for the photo and fingerprints.

Then Lime found it in Norris’s December 28 report: Slight accent, indeterminate, possibly Balkan. The notation was sandwiched into the center of a single-spaced paragraph but he’d read that report at least three times, the earliest five days ago and hadn’t caught it consciously until now.

It was a bomb plot, an assassination attempt of some kind. Bombs were always surer than bullets. The one called Mario—they hadn’t known her long enough to trust her with full names—seemed to have thought they were pla

But now it was time to leash them. Three hours ago Lime had put out the order to pick them up: Stratten and Alvin Corby and the others identified by FBI computers from information fed to Lime’s office by Barbara Norris.

The initial tip had come by way of the FBI from a Panther plant they had in New York, a citizen whose mother had informed him vaguely that she was involved in an attempt to assassinate someone in Washington. The citizen had tried to dissuade his mother but it was all long-distance telephoning and very little could be said on an open line; he had failed to talk her out of it and so he had alerted the FBI because he wanted to protect his mother from the consequences of her foolishness. The FBI had passed it on to Secret Service Director B. L. Hoyt, and Hoyt had passed it on down the line through cha

The Secret Service was a sub-agency within the Treasury Department. It was charged with two distinct functions between which there was what could be called a “co

The ball was in his court and he had to play with it. He had makes on five of them: Alvin Corby, twenty-six, black, an Indochina veteran, a former member of several black radical groups; Cesar Renaldo, thirty-one, born in New York of Puerto Rican parents, arrested twice for possession of hashish and once for assaulting a policeman during an antiwar demonstration; Robert and Sandra Walberg, twenty-four, twin brother and sister, both former SDS-Weathermen, both carrying records of arrest and conviction for possession of marijuana (sentence suspended) and disorderly behavior during campus building occupations at the University of Southern California (six months probation); and Beulah Moorehead, forty-one, the mother of the FBI’s Panther plant.

There was partial information on some others but none of it was hard. A black couple named Line and Darleen. The one called Mario whom Norris had described as “their banker, I think.” Two more recent arrivals from the West Coast called Claude and Bridget. And the Stratten item.

Norris’s last report was three days old. She had included half-frame 16mm negatives of Stratten, Corby, Renaldo and the five who had arrived that afternoon from California. There were fingerprints on Corby and the Walberg twins and a set on Stratten which had proved useless since they didn’t match any prints on file in Washington or St. Louis. Norris had not obtained a set of Renaldo’s fingerprints, but the New York police had identified his photograph by comparison with their mug books.

The Walberg twins had histories of marijuana arrests; Renaldo and Corby had narcotics records. It was possible they were junkies. If you followed that reasoning you could assume they might wake up and realize what they’d done: the Norris murder. They might be terrified, they might run for it, disband, scatter, go to ground individually. They might forget any grandiose assassination plots in the rush to sanctuary.

It was a comforting theory but it was no good. The hole-in-the-wall they’d been using on R Street Northeast was empty now—very empty and very clean. Clean enough to indicate they weren’t just a bunch of frightened addicts who had cleared out. Someone with presence of mind was directing the operation.

What had she known? What had she discovered? Lime had long ago been disabused of the notion that you could rely on premonitions and portents; but this thing had all the telltales of a major professional assassination job.

11:20 A.M. EST The car decanted Dexter Ethridge and his Secret Service bodyguards below the West Portico of the Capitol and Ethridge looked up past the crowd to the dome where the flag was going up the staff to indicate that Congress was convening: that the Ninety-fifth Congress was about to gather for the first time.