Line of Succession

He recognized many faces among those moving toward the doors. Most of the members would be entering by subway from the Senate and House office buildings but there were those like Ethridge who made a point of coming here to absorb the effect from outside before going in. Architecturally it was a faux pas and parts of it were endlessly in danger of falling down—some of the basements were shored up with clumsy brick walls and propped massive timbers—but if you were a politician you were very likely a sentimentalist as well and the great dome always instilled in Ethridge a properly sober respect and reverence.

Dexter Ethridge had sat, listened, spoken, and cast his vote inside this building thousands of times: he had entered the House twenty-four years ago, served two terms, run for the Senate and lost, run again two years later and won, and served three full terms—eighteen years—as United States Senator from Michigan. In that time he had cast many votes for wi

He climbed the steps, uncomfortably aware of the Secret Service men who never seemed to hurry but always managed to be within arm’s length of him. The agents in various shifts had been covering Ethridge and his family since the Denver Convention five months ago but he still wasn’t sufficiently accustomed to them to be able to ignore them; he found himself wasting altogether too much time exchanging small talk with them. But that had always been his weakness. From childhood he had been a buttonholer; he loved to engage people in conversation. Among his colleagues it was hardly a unique characteristic.

At the head of the steps he stopped and turned a half circle on his heels to look down along the Mall. There was a small demonstration down there—a cluster of radic-libs carrying signs, girls in dirty Levi’s and men with self-consciously hirsute faces. From here Ethridge couldn’t read the placards but there wasn’t much doubt of their message: they wanted Freedom Now, they wanted the defense budget cut to a trickle and the highway program killed and a hundred billion for welfare and health and ecological cleanups.

Clifford Fairlie might accomplish a few of those things, although there would be a great deal of harrumphing and pettifoggery because no Democratic Congress could afford to pass a Republican President’s programs without going through the motions of loyal-opposition resistance: Fairlie’s programs would be amended wordily, but that was window dressing. The interesting thing about Fairlie’s election was that it was going to force the Democrats to move even farther to the left, if only to enable them to continue berating the Republicans as obstructionist reactionaries.

Fairtie had offered the ru

Fairlie had been quite candid about it: “I’m too liberal to suit a lot of them. If I’m going to get wholehearted support from the party I’ve got to show my sincerity by picking a ru

The thing was, he liked Cliff Fairlie. If it hadn’t been for that he might have refused the nomination: the Vice-Presidency was ordinarily a thankless job and for a man as inclined toward real political activity as he was it didn’t have irresistible appeal—a Senator with eighteen years’ seniority could wield considerably more power on the Hill than could a minority-party Vice-President. But Ethridge believed Fairlie could win and he allowed Fairlie to convince him that he could help Fairlie win.

Now at the top step of the portico he looked out across the Mall and discovered, a bit to his surprise, that he did not regret it. He had no trouble recalling the excitement that had attended the arrival of the Ke

The sky above the Capitol was bleak with the threat of snow; Ethridge stood in the wind in his topcoat, his cheeks stinging a little, but he had been raised on Michigan winters and the chill did not drive him inside. Tourists and journalists gave him covert stares and filed past him to observe the ritual swearing-in of the houses of Congress on this day of convening. Down on the Mall the pathetic little circle of marchers continued, virtually u

11:40 A.M. EST David Lime strode the corridor toward the Seventeenth Street exit of the Executive Office Building, consulting his watch and shooting his cuff. Chad Hill kept pace with an athletic effortlessness that would have been commendable if it hadn’t been for his youth: he could spot Lime twenty years.

“But shouldn’t we stay in the office?”

“What for?”

“Well some central location at least. To coordinate everything.”

“Nothing to coordinate,” Lime said. “We’ve got a radio in the car.”

They batted out through the glass doors. Lime pulled his coat collar up; the wind was a hard fast one, coming up from the Potomac, and the temperature had dropped sharply in the past few hours. Snow soon, he thought, and ducked to slip into the back seat of the plain green four-door Chevrolet that pulled to the curb to meet them. Hill slid in beside him and Lime said to the driver, “Right over to the Hill—the west steps, it’ll be faster.”

The driver checked his mirror and waited for a line of cars to go by and then slid gently out into the traffic lanes. Chad Hill said, “You’d better speed it up. Use your siren.”