Line of Succession (7 page)

12:40
P.M. EST
In the Senate the two bombs went off about seven seconds apart.

Dexter Ethridge had watched Gardner, his successor, go down the center aisle to be sworn in, and then take his place at Ethridge's old desk on the Republican side of the aisle.

And now before Ethridge had time to move, before he had time to react at all, the wall behind the rostrum began to tilt and heave: the shock wave hit him, pressed him back into his chair.

He saw the partition begin to crumble behind the podium, bringing the lower seats of the right-hand half of the press gallery down toward the Senate floor, as reporters shrieked and clawed. Chunks of masonry and wood shot through the air and choking dust filled the chamber and the overwhelming noise echoed and reverberated. A shoe, incredibly intact, hit the arm of Ethridge's chair and lodged there. It grazed his fingertips, no more. Ethridge drew air wildly into his chest in panic. There were bodies,
human bodies in clothes,
hurtling through the air like projectiles. Pieces were cracking out of the high ceiling. Plaster andsawdust made an immediate dense stink.

And now Ethridge was moving, sliding out of the chair, seeking blindly for shelter with the intuitive response of a man who once had heard 77mm shells coming in and knew how to dive for cover.

Down on his face: he shoved his head under the seat of the chair and wrapped his arms around his face and he was like that when the second bomb exploded. The floor jumped, bashed his chest; debris rained on his exposed rump and the backs of his legs. He found himself thinking he was going to have a hell of a bruise on his hip from that one and he might be limping for a few days…

Someone was screaming insistently close by, loud enough to drown out much of the other racket. Objects were slamming against walls and furnishings and something in this madness collapsed the chair above him: it broke off at one side and he felt the jarring blinding blow against the back and top of his head, and then he was sputtering and shoving with his arms and scrabbling with his feet to get out from under the weight of the thing that was on him.

This is a hell of a position for the Vice-President-elect of the United States of America.
He was giggling a little, backing out of the trap, his butt way up in the air, on his chest and knees, backing out, giggling.… He pulled his head out and up and saw that the chair had broken only on its left side; it had tilted over, rather than flattening straight down, and it had left a triangularly tent-shaped opening which had saved his skull the direct crushing smash of the enormous chunk of plaster that had fallen on it.

His head stung with an awful pain and he lay facedown again, feet lodged against the base of some other chair. His eyes were closed against the pain. The cloudburst of debris had tapered off; things were cracking now, pattering like gravel, splitting and splintering and settling, but the overwhelming noise now was from human voices—the voices of terror and the voices of agony, and a man somewhere very nearby saying over and over again, “Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus.”

There was a long splintering crack, and a momentary silence, and a shuddering crash afterward: a wall coming down, or a section of gallery. Someone yelped like a small dog and the voice nearby was still moaning, “Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus,” and Ethridge squinted his closed eyes tight against the pain in his head. In the distance he heard a long rising human scream and he had heard a scream like that once before from the throat of a man eviscerated by shrapnel on a dismal battlefield, but this was no battlefield this was the Senate of the United States and this could not possibly be happening here, it was unthinkable.

When he opened his eyes virtually all the lights had gone out. Ethridge heard the moans and cries and had to check to make sure he wasn't uttering sounds himself. He sat up slowly on his knees, bracing his hands against the remains of furniture but then his right hand slid against a resilience of flesh and he recoiled.

His head whipped around and the sudden movement blinded him with pain; he pressed his palms to his temples and slid fingers toward the top of his head, half expecting to probe into a pulpy mush at the top of his skull: but it was all normal hair and scalp, and chunks of plaster. He felt no softness, not even the dampness of blood. Now he moved his head with slow caution and in the very bad light he saw only a slow-swirling fog of dust and smoke.

He stayed on his knees until moving beams of light began to play through the wheeling mist and he began to catch the voices of whole people, the ones using the flashlights. A small fire burned somewhere across the room. In the uncertain visibility Ethridge caught sight of a figure sprawled broken across the wreckage of a chair: he moved close and recognized the dead face of Allan Nugent who had been the senior Senator from Indiana.

Ethridge climbed across Nugent's corpse and made his cautious way down toward the worst destruction, looking for survivors to assist. He had been buffeted and slammed and abraded by the violence but he was on his feet and moving, and in the old Army if you were an officer capable of movement you helped.

The dense dust settled faster now and more flashlights appeared; in the growing light he saw people making their way by ones and twos toward the exits, some walking unaided, some dragging themselves, some dragging others. One man was running, until someone stopped him with a stiff-armed block. No one was screaming any longer but the ruins were filled with groanings.

He found Alan Forrester, the junior Senator from Arizona, sitting with his back to an overturned desk, rubbing his eyes with thumb-enclosed fists like a small child who has just been awakened. Ethridge knelt by him and pulled Forrester's hands away from his face. “Are you all right?”

“I—uh.”

“Are you all right, Alan?”

Now the eyes came open and Forrester blinked, squinting. His eyes were incredibly bloodshot but he didn't look injured. Ethridge reached for his arm. “Come on.”

Forrester let Ethridge assist him to his feet. “Dex? Dex?”

“Yes, it's me.”

“Christ, Dex.”

“Head for the lights, Alan. Can you find your own way?”

Forrester was shaking his head violently as if to clear it. “Never mind. I'm all right—I just came apart for a minute there. I'll help you look.”

“Good man.”

The two of them prowled down into the incredible rubble. At once they fell upon a heap of debris and began to claw at it because a human arm protruded from it but when they had pawed the rubble away they saw that the arm was severed: the young Arizonan looked up at Ethridge and his voice went rusty and almost soundless: “Oh my dear God, Dex.”

Ethridge made a careful point of not looking at the fabric of the sleeve or the shape of the hand. He climbed over the pile and went on until he found a man slumped across a desk with one hand under his forehead and the other dangling at arm's length. He lifted the man back in his seat by the shoulder and recognized young Gardner, his own successor in the Senate, who had been sworn just before the explosion, and for one terrible instant Ethridge thought Gardner was dead too but then the eyes fluttered open and rolled sightlessly.

“Concussion, I think,” Ethridge said. “Can you carry him out Alan? I'm going to keep looking.”

The flashlights were close by, moving fitfully; men were calling back and forth. Forrester got Gardner up on his wide back in a fireman's carry and heaved him away, calling back over his shoulder: “Watch yourself, Dex.”

Ethridge intended to. You didn't help anyone by falling down and breaking your own ankle. He probed into the wheeling dimness and found a mangled body half-buried in shattered cords of wood. Nobody he recognized; probably a reporter; and now he began coming across bodies in great number, many of them mutilated but some of them uncannily natty in repose, and of the six or seven he tested for respiration and heartbeat he found only one member of the Senate—March of Idaho.

Now the rubble stirred just ahead of him, somebody trying to dig himself out; a hand thrust out through a hole and Ethridge scrambled toward it and began heaving chunks of stone and plaster away and finally he had exposed the tunnel under a pair of adjacent senatorial desks—a tunnel which by some curious caprice had remained inviolate and had sheltered its occupant although the gallery partition had fallen right across it.

It was Fitzroy Grant and he was quite alert and conscious.

And Fitz Grant demanded in a voice like an Indiana hog caller's, “Jesus God damn Christ what in the hell is all this?”

“Are you all right?” Ethridge said in awe.

Grant's sad drinker's eyes focused slowly upon him.

The slow splendid deep voice rolled out with full strength: “When I've made an inventory of my bones I'll let you know, Mr. Vice-President. But in the meantime how in the hell did we get here and what in the hell is this? Limbo, by the Lord! The ninth circle? My good Faust—lead me the hell out of here!”

8:10
P.M.
Continental European Time
The four Secret Service agents rattled around the sitting room of Fairlie's suite, restive and suspicious and angry, and his aide Liam McNeely for once in his life was sitting up straight in a chair, with his slim boudoir face poked defiantly toward the radio and the booming voice of the BBC Home announcer.

Clifford Fairlie walked across the room and his hands reached up to draw the drapes against the misty chill darkness of the Parisian night but his eyes were not focused on anything much at all; he was listening—to the droning radio and for the telephone's bell.

He shambled to the highboy and poured an ounce of Dubonnet into a crystal aperitif glass with the hotel's monogram on it. Walked to the radio and fiddled with the tuning dial but effected no improvement in the background static. The French radio was carrying the story as well but Fairlie did not want to concentrate on translating in his head.

He prowled the room now, too eruptive to sit still, sipping the Dubonnet until it was gone, after which he carried the empty glass around with him, rotating it between his palms. McNeely's head kept turning, indicating his attentiveness to fairlie's movements, but neither McNeely nor the Secret Service agents spoke: either they were too stunned by the news or they were awaiting a cue from Fairlie.

“… complete listing of casualties has not yet been released, as it is understood the authorities are still sifting through the rubble of the two legislative chambers of the American Congress which were bombed little more than ninety minutes ago. Of course the President-elect, Mr. Fairlie, was not in Washington, and his Vice-President-elect, Mr. Ethridge, is reported to have escaped serious injury although he was present in the Senate when the powerful devices were detonated.”

It penetrated Fairlie's consciousness that the British Broadcasting announcer was winging it: tossing out time-consuming bits of background information to fill the time because he had run out of hard news to report, then swinging back into the bits and pieces that had come in on the international newswires and recapitulating the story which by now everyone in the world had heard.

“It was announced officially by the White House Press Secretary, Mr. Hearn, that swift action by the United States Secret Service resulted in the capture of six suspected terrorists almost immediately after the explosions in the American Capitol. According to Mr. Hearn five of those arrested actually planted the five explosive devices, and the sixth was the driver of their escape car. Names and descriptions of the six have not been divulged, but Mr. Hearn did reveal they are three men and three women. Whether the Government suspects that more than these six were involved in the.… One moment, please. We have only just received this. The Director of the FBI, who has been placed in charge of rescue and investigative operations at the bombed Capitol building in Washington, has authorized the release of a preliminary list of casualties. We are advised the list will be read out by the President's news secretary, Mr. Hearn, in just a few minutes' time. BBC is now preparing to switch us via satellite to live coverage of Mr. Hearn's briefing in Washington.”

There was an obsequious knock. McNeely rose with alacrity and two of the agents went with him to answer the door. It was the hotel manager, wheeling a large television console. Fairlie thought irritably that it had taken the hotel almost three quarters of an hour to locate and deliver the television set to his room—probably the same set he had had removed the day of his arrival because he detested television and found French television to be a particular abomination.

The hotel manager backed out of the room after whispering something in McNeely's ear. The agents turned to stare at the warming TV screen, and McNeely said to Fairlie, “He says the place is crawling with reporters and the rumor's around that you're going to make a statement.”

“Not just yet.”

“I hope they don't think of bringing a battering ram.” McNeely didn't smile; he only flopped into his chair and brooded toward the screen.

The telephone.

McNeely bounced up and Fairlie watched him with care. He had left instructions with the switchboard to connect no incoming calls except from President Brewster, who had called an hour ago and asked him to stay on tap.

McNeely covered the mouthpiece with his palm and gave Fairlie an unreadable look. “It's the girl on the switchboard. She's holding a call for you from Harrisburg.”

“Jeanette?”

“Yes. Evidently she's been trying to get through to you for more than an hour. I gather she's blistering the corns off the poor girl on the board.”

That wasn't hard to credit. Fairlie approached the phone, moving awkwardly sideways to keep the TV screen in view. It was French television of course and the sound was down very low; he could hear the BBC radio announcer introducing Perry Hearn and on the screen he could see the satellite picture of the White House Lawn, gray on a misty cold afternoon with a thick crowd waiting, breath pouring like steam from their nostrils.