Lime exhaled deeply.

Hill still had his hand on the cradled telephone receiver. “Pick him up?”

“No. I want a tail on him.”

“We could pull him apart, make him talk.”

“Tail him.”

“Jesus I wouldn’t. He loses the tail, our heads roll.”

“And Fairlie’s. Don’t you think I know that? Button him up tight—but don’t touch him.” Lime turned toward the door. “Hustle me up an airplane, will you? I’m going down there.”

3:30 P.M. EST Riva was acting the part of a Puerto Rican tourist. He had papers to prove it, if anyone should care to ask; no one had. His only concession to the need for a precautionary disguise was a hairpiece which filled in his widow’s peak, gave him a head of salt-and-pepper hair and a lower forehead. Nothing more was needed; Riva was amorphous, people had to meet him eight or ten times before they could recall what he looked like.

He had come down from New York on the Metroliner and found a taxi driver at Union Station willing to take him around Washington on a sightseeing tour. Riva told the driver he particularly wanted to see the homes of Congressmen and Senators and Cabinet members.

He and Sturka had gone over the same route several times a month ago to check out locations and security arrangements; the tour today was designed mainly to discern what added security precautions had been taken. If any. Riva was unimpressed by the Americans’ notions of security.

There was a house trailer in the driveway of Senator Ethridge’s place; he had expected that much. The trailer would contain a Secret Service crew. That was all right; they could afford to bypass Ethridge. The cab drove on.

Milton Luke had an apartment in a high-rise building on Wisconsin Avenue. The cab cruised past and Riva saw no armed men on the curb or in the visible sector of the lobby. But that didn’t mean much; later he would have to reconnoiter the building on foot.

On Massachusetts Avenue just above Sheridan Circle was a massive apartment building that housed among others Congressmen Wood and Jethro, Secretary of the Treasury Jonathan Chaney, Senator Fitzroy Grant, and syndicated political columnist J. R. Ilfeld. The concentration of targets made the building important in Riva’s calculations and he studied it with care as they drove past. Again there was no indication of protection or surveillance.

Senator Wendell Hollander had a house in the same district, not three blocks from the apartment tower; the house was an elephantine structure of Georgian tastelessness surrounded by heavy trees whose branches were seasonally bare. Hollander, President pro tempore of the Senate, was third in line for the Presidency after Ethridge and Milton Luke; surely there would be a Secret Service mobile home in his drive.

But there was no trailer. Riva smiled a little and the cab proceeded toward Senator Forrester’s house on Arizona Terrace.

FRIDAY,

JANUARY 14

4:10 A.M. EST Dexter Ethridge lay awake with a mild headache reviewing his cram course in the Presidency. It was all flavored by Brewster’s noxious cigars. Cabinet members and generals had been delegated to brief Ethridge on the endless list of facts and questions; but President Howard Brewster was the dominant figure, always looming. Ethridge was learning how easily his appraisal of the frailties of a man like Brewster could obscure the overriding presence the man projected.

Everyone knew the folksy mispronunciations were the smokescreen of a politician incarnate. The consummate shrewdness showed through; nobody was fooled. But Ethridge was learning that Brewster’s ways were even more misleading than he had always assumed.

When Brewster said, “I’m gon’ be interested to know what you think, Dex,” it came out with a sincerity that almost persuaded him that what he thought was of paramount importance to Howard Brewster. Brewster did crave public attention like an addict, but that was what misled. It concealed the enormous self-confidence of the man. When Brewster asked an opinion he wanted support; but the support he required was merely political, never intellectual. Once Howard Brewster made up his own mind he knew he was right and he didn’t need the agreement or consensus of any group. It was a throbbing vital rectitude: an awesome and monumental self-assurance.

It frightened Ethridge because each day’s White House consultation added to his conviction that Brewster’s larger-than-life stance of power and authority was a basic requisite for the job. A President needed to have that Sophoclean tragic-hero quality—and it was a quality Ethridge knew he didn’t possess.

They said you grew into it. It came with the territory, look how Harry Truman grew. But Ethridge wasn’t satisfied with that. He thought himself an open-minded man, willing to hear out all sides of a question before making up his mind; it had always been a virtue but now it became a handicap and he was beginning to regard himself as an indecisive man. In the President’s chair that was no good: often you couldn’t wait for all the results to come in—often you had to make a spot decision.

It was something Ethridge wasn’t sure he could learn to do. He wasn’t unaware of his own lackluster record in Congress and looking back he believed a good part of it was due to his overdeveloped willingness to sympathize with all sides—something that led to compromise rather than decision. Compromise was the basic weapon in any official’s political arsenal but there were times when it should not be employed. Would Ethridge recognize those times? Would he be prepared to act accordingly?

The worry had kept him awake on rumpled sheets. He tried to take solace from his observations of others who had changed, grown, toughened. He remembered Bill Satterthwaite landing by helicopter late yesterday afternoon on the White House lawn after his exhausting trip to Spain. Satterthwaite had come striding into the Oval Office on his frail short legs and reported on his meeting with David Lime with all the assured authority of a born administrator. Cynicism had enlarged Satterthwaite, in Ethridge’s estimation; it had instilled political savvy in the little thinker.

He remembered Satterthwaite from the old days—Satterthwaite’s early arrival in Washington, two cabinets ago. A young intellectual, donnishly provincial—fiery, loud, positive, insensitive. Satterthwaite had carried an intellectual chip—a contempt for the unsophisticated, a preposterously belligerent liberalism. Nine years ago they had been pushing a bill to unload a few hundred square miles of Kentucky swampland, formerly a Federal CBW testing range, onto the state as a wilderness preserve. The key to the bill’s passage had been the cooperation of Kentucky’s crusty Senator Wendell Hollander and the President had wooed Hollander energetically and it was clear Hollander was coming around despite the administrative expense the park would load on Kentucky. Then at a dinner party thrown by the wife of the Secretary of the Interior—Ethridge recalled it vividly—Satterthwaite had buttonholed Senator Hollander with an oblivious diatribe about elitist white neocolonialism in the South. Hollander had been astonished, then insulted. Satterthwaite kept grinding relentlessly away until he reached his climax, shouted in triumph and stalked away filled with righteous vindication—and Senator Hollander had said his chilly good-nights, the Kentucky wilderness bill dead as the League of Nations.

Satterthwaite had outgrown that. He was still capable of arrogance but he had learned where to tread softly.

It was Wendy Hollander who hadn’t outgrown it. Hollander’s seniority had increased his power but his mind remained fixated in the nineteen forties. He survived on the Hill like a hardy troglodyte, literal and opinionated, hating in plurals: Commies, Negroes, the beneficiaries of the give-everything-to-the-poor programs. A cantankerous patriotic yahoo with a rheumy old-timer’s thoroughly prejudiced view of his fellow man.