6:35 P.M. EST The chill rain fell in a soup of drizzle and mist. It threw foggy halos around street lamps and the lights of cars that hissed past on the wet paving. Guards stood in yellow police slickers and hoods at the steps of the Executive Office Building.
David Lime crossed to the White House side of the drive and walked along the fence to the gate. At intervals inside the fence he could see the dripping shadows of alerted guards—members of the Executive Protective Service, formerly the White House Police Force, and of the White House Detail of the Secret Service: the first group to protect the building and grounds, the latter to protect the President and other persons.
A knot of troubled people stood in the night rain outside the main gate. Lime threaded his way through them and presented himself to the guards, and was admitted.
He invaded Brewster country by the low side entrance and had only just entered the press lobby, filled with reporters standing tense under the large formal paintings, when Halroyd, the Special Agent in charge of the White House Detail, drew him to the corridor again. “Mr. Satterthwaite said he’d like a word, sir.”
Lime lifted his eyebrows inquiringly and Halroyd took him along toward the basement offices which Satterthwaite and the other Presidential advisors used.
The office was very small and unspeakably cluttered with paperwork. Satterthwaite, resident White House intellectual, had no interest in appearances; the disordered piles on his desk reflected the impatient brain. Of the five or six straight chairs only two were not heaped with papers; Lime chose one, following the command of Satterthwaite’s flapped hand, and sat.
“Thanks very much, Halroyd.” Satterthwaite spoke in his high abrasive voice and the Special Agent withdrew; the door closed out the noises of voices and typewriters and teleprinters. “The President asked if I’d get a firsthand report from you before the broadcast. It was you who ran them down? One hell of an adroit piece of work. The President keeps talking about ‘that genius over in Secret Service who saved our bacon.’”
“If I’d been a genius,” Lime said, “I’d have thought faster and we’d have got the bombs out before they went off.”
“From what I’ve heard, based on the tiny bits of information you had not one man in ten thousand would have guessed there was anything going on at all.”
Lime shrugged. He wasn’t insensitive to the fact that Satterthwaite’s words were at odds with the expression on his face. The face was marked by an indelible arrogance, the hauteur of a brilliant but tactless mind contemptuous of lesser brains. Satterthwaite was a forty-one-year-old mental machine who wore thick glasses that magnified his eyes to a startling size and dressed himself with studied indifference, a challenging lack of grace. The black hair was an untidy tangle of electric curls; the blunt little hands were perpetually in motion. He had the nimble aggressiveness of his diminutive size.
“All right,” Satterthwaite said. “What have you got?”
“Not too much from the bombers yet. We’re working them over.”
“With rubber hoses I trust.”
It seemed rhetorical; Lime didn’t rise to it.
Satterthwaite said, “The NSA files identified the leader for you—the one behind these six. You know who he is. Julius Sturka.”
Lime couldn’t altogether keep the anger out of his face and Satterthwaite jumped at the admission but Lime headed him off: “I never met the man. Fifteen years ago he was working the same part of the world I was, that’s all.”
“He was an officer in the Algerian FLN. You were in Algeria during that nonsense.” Satterthwaite pushed it aside. “This man Sturka—who exactly is he?”
“Armenian, I think—maybe Serbian. We never knew for sure. It’s not his real name.”
“Balkan and obscure. That’s all rather Eric Ambler.”
“I think he fancies himself that way. Soldier of fortune, trying to overturn the world order singlehandedly.”
“But not a young squirt.”
“Not unless he was a babe in arms when he was a light colonel in the FLN. As I say, I’ve never seen him. He’s supposed to be in his late forties roughly. We’ve got one bad snapshot—I don’t know of any other photographs. He’s camera shy. But name a war of liberation in the past ten years and he’s probably figured in it. Not at the top, but not as a menial either.”
“A mercenary?”
“Sometimes. Not usually. It’s possible he was just hired to do this one but we’ve got no evidence to indicate it. More likely it’s his own caper. Sometimes in the past few years he’s worked with a Cuban named Riva, but there’s no sign of Riva in this case. Not yet at least.”
“Does he have much of a following? If he does it’s odd—I’ve never heard of him.”
“He doesn’t work that way. He’ll put together a little cell or two and concentrate on the vitals of the government he’s trying to break. In Algeria I don’t think he had more than twenty soldiers, but they were all crack professionals. Did more damage than some regiments.”
“For a man who’s never met him you know him pretty well, don’t you.”
“I was supposed to nail him. I never did.”
Satterthwaite licked his upper lip, like a cat washing itself. He pushed his glasses higher on his nose and watched without expression as Lime lit a cigarette. “Do you think you’ll get him this time?”
“I don’t know. Everybody’s looking for him.”
“You’ve alerted the other agencies? Other countries?”
“Yes. He’s probably still in this country—at least we have reason to believe he was here until late last night.”
“Here in Washington, you mean?”
“He left a calling card.”
“That agent of yours who was killed.”
“Yes, that one.”
“What makes you say that’s his calling card?”
“He seems to have been one of the people who stirred up the rebellion in Ceylon a few years ago. The government cracked down on that one hard—infiltrated the rebels and singled out the leaders and had them killed.
“The Ceylonese insurgents had to take strong measures to protect themselves. According to NSA it was Sturka who took out the government infiltrators—butchered them dramatically, left them to be found in public buildings with their tongues and hearts ripped out. It was a warning—see what happens to informers who infiltrate us.”
“Now I see what you mean by calling card.” Satterthwaite shook his head. “My God these people are of another species.” He removed his glasses and wiped them clean and held them up to the light at arm’s length, squinting at them. His eyes, Lime saw with surprise, were quite small and set too close together. The glasses had left red dents alongside the bridge of his nose.
Satterthwaite gave the glasses a pained look and put them back on, hooking them over one ear at a time. It was the first time Lime had had personal contact with him, and one of the few times he had seen the man at all; Satterthwaite was not a frequent appearance-maker on television or in any public places. He was the President’s chief advisor and he cast a long shadow but he was one of those invisible figures usually described by the press as “a high White House source.”
“Well.” Satterthwaite was reflective. “Shall we just stand here in outraged dignity? It’s a furious mess, isn’t it. The world’s most powerful system, and they can get us over a barrel so easily. Small groups can tyrannize simply by finding a pressure point. These terrorists use any weapon they can lay their hands on; they recruit any fool who’s willing to sacrifice himself in the name of some vague negative cause, and they know we’re handicapped because we can only fire the second shot.”
“That deters most of the professionals,” Lime said. “The professional doesn’t mean to get caught. Terrorism’s usually an amateur occupation—they rarely get away free in the end, they tend to end up martyrs, and it’s the amateurs who go for that. They don’t care about the second shot—they don’t care if the second shot blows them in two.”