Ethridge was sitting up straight. It was the first time Satterthwaite could recall seeing him this angry. “You won’t hold it together by giving in to the yahoos.”
The President waved his cigar toward the newspaper in Satterthwaite’s hands. “Some of those men are prominent public servants, Dex. Maybe some of them are yahoos too but you can’t always judge a case by its advocate.”
Satterthwaite set the newspaper aside. “I think the President’s point is well taken. This morning we all listened to Fairlie’s voice. We reacted straight out of our guts—we’re civilized people, someone in our family is in trouble, we instantly concluded the ransom demands weren’t impossible to meet so we decided to agree to the exchange. The paramount consideration was Fairlie’s safety—we hadn’t had time to study the ramifications.”
Ethridge was watching him narrowly. The muscles and nerves twitched in his face.
President Brewster said, “If we give in it’ll give every two-bit terrorist gang in the world a green light to try this kind of thing again and again. Turning these seven killers loose, sending them into asylum—assuming there’s a country somewhere with the guts to grant them asylum—that would be kind of like telling every guerrilla in the world he’s free to go ahead and blow up people and buildings with impunity.”
Ethridge’s skin was the hue of veal, he had unhealthy blisters under his eyes. He spread his hands in appeal: “Mr. President, I can only stick to what I said this morning. The kidnappers are offering an exchange and we all agreed that Cliff Fairlie’s life is worth a great deal more than the lives of those seven ciphers. I don’t see how that’s changed.”
Satterthwaite turned, catching the President’s eye; he said to Ethridge, “If that were the real quid pro quo you’d get no argument. But it’s not a choice between Fairlie’s life and the lives of seven ciphers. It’s whether we can afford to give carte blanche to the extremists.”
Ethridge sat stubbornly upright, his silence disagreeing. He squeezed his eyes with thumb and forefinger and when he opened them it seemed to take him a long time to bring them into focus. “I think we have to face the fact that whatever we do isn’t going to please everybody. We can’t avoid a split. The theoretical arguments pretty well cancel each other out—look, I can give you a strong case against taking a tough stand. You can’t simply refuse to turn the seven bombers loose, you’ll have to follow up with a police operation against all the radical cells. You’ll end up with a permanently enlarged security operation, and that means permanent curtailment of citizens’ rights. It’s the only way you’ll keep the lid on, and it seems to me that’s exactly what the militants want of us—a tough repression that will feed their anti-Establishment arguments.”
Satterthwaite said, “You’re maintaining we’ve already lost.”
“We’ve lost this round. We have to accept that.”
“I don’t,” the President snapped. “I don’t at all.” He pawed around the surface of his desk, his eyes not following his hand; he was watching Ethridge. His hand closed around the lighter; the wheel snicked and the President lit his cigar. “Dex, are you going to make a public fight of this? A public break with me?”
Ethridge didn’t answer directly. “Mr. President, the most important thing—more important than this entire tragedy—is to establish a long-term system of policies that will rebuild the self-confidence and security of the people. If the society hasn’t got enormous discontents to fuel the militant extremists, then the whole terrorist movement will wither away for lack of nourishment. Now it seems to me——”
“Long-term policies,” Satterthwaite cut in, “are a luxury we haven’t got time to debate right now.”
“May I finish, please?”
“I’m sorry. Go ahead.”
“I don’t mean this as personal offense but I believe Cliff Fairlie is more likely to establish the kind of secure self-confident society we need than anybody else in government. His ideas are the first reform proposals I’ve ever seen that give us a real chance to build a more responsible and more responsive government in this country. And if we manage to recover Fairlie the wave of public sympathy will be so overpowering there’s a good chance he’ll be able to get congressional backing for a great many reform programs that could never be passed under any other circumstances.”
Satterthwaite was rocked; he tried not to show it. The frail Vice-President-elect, with his sick eyes and his tall quixotic gauntness, was putting out a display of shrewd subtlety totally unexpected. Ethridge was crediting Fairlie with far more magic than Fairlie actually possessed; reforms had been proposed before, Satterthwaite saw nothing particularly new in any of Fairlie’s, but there was one place where Ethridge had an undeniably powerful point: Fairlie, if recovered intact, would generate exactly the kind of public outpouring Ethridge foresaw. On the crest of that wave, with any political ability at all Fairlie indeed would be able to push all sorts of unheard-of reforms through Congress before the legislators regained their composure.
Satterthwaite’s eyes went past Ethridge, past the hanging flag to President Brewster; and he saw in the President’s lined face a surprise similar to his own—the awareness of the explosive significance of what Ethridge had just said.
12:25 P.M. EST In the war room Lime’s patience was shredding. He had arrived almost an hour ago with his lunch in a paper bag stained dark around the bottom by coffee that had escaped from the lidded takeout cup. The cheap food rumbled uneasily in his stomach.
He had pulled out an empty chair beside NSA’s Fred Kaiser, who was big and grizzled, a not unfriendly bear of a man; Lime knew him, not well. Kaiser was keeping two phones busy, sitting with a receiver propped between shoulder and one ear, a finger stuck in the other.
Lime offhandedly sifted through typewritten reports, seeking slivers and scraps, finding nothing worthwhile. The long table was littered with growing piles of dog-eared papers—reports from the typists downstairs, from the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon, from stacks of Secret Service and NSA files that had been brought out needing the dust blown off their covers. Down at the end a woman with blue hair was typing up slotted index cards and inserting them in their proper alphabetical places in a Wheel-dex. The carriage of a teleprinter jerked back and forth, paper popped up through the glass slot and a uniformed major general ripped it off and stood reading it while the machine clicked beside him.
The room was filled and busy. Mainly they were making lists and then evaluating them. There were lists of known radical activists and then there were other lists behind those: the lists of people who weren’t quite on the lists. Suspected but not known. Computer banks plugged into the teleprinters were analyzing histories—modus operandi, locale, the flimsy facts about the black American chopper pilot and the tire tracks two vehicles had left in the snow of the abandoned farm in the Pyrenees where the helicopter had been found.
Over at the side of the room B. L. Hoyt had earphones strapped over his head and was listening—probably to a copy of the Fairlie tape—imbecilically calm with his chilled blue eyes raised toward the ceiling. The end of the tape whipped through the heads and spun around the takeup reel, flapping; Hoyt did not stir.
Fred Kaiser slammed down the phone and barked at Lime, “Jesus H. Christ.”
“Mm?”
“Nothing. Just rising to remark on the calamity.”
“Mm.” Lime’s cigarette lay smoking at the rim of the table, growing a long ash, threatening to leave a burn on the wood. He rescued it, dragged off the stub and crushed it in the ashtray.