Line of Succession Read Online Free

couple of weeks on a beach in the Virgin Islands.
    He gargled mouthwash and went out into the bedroom and reached for his shirt.
    Bev looked as if she had gone back to sleep but then her eyes drifted open. “I thought you’d got yourself out of the dagger end of things and confined yourself to cloaks.”
    â€œI have. All I do is keep the papers moving.”
    â€œI see. You send girls out to get killed for you.”
    He cinched up his trousers and reached for his tie. Bev sat up, making a face, the good breasts lying a bit askew. “You’d better have a bite of breakfast, I suppose. It wouldn’t do to go ogling corpses on an empty stomach.”
    â€œI could do with toast and coffee.”
    She wasn’t tall but she stood tall: a straight-up girl with long legs and high firm hips and a fair amount of mischief in her face. Playful, tawny, good-tempered.
    She was the woman he would love if he could love.
    She went out to the kitchenette, belting a terrycloth robe around her. She wanted to be useful to him: it was part of her character to be useful; she was a widower’s daughter.
    He got into his hairy brown sports jacket and his cordovan loafers and went into the kitchenette after her. Kissed the back of her neck: “Thanks.”
    10:35 A.M. Continental European Time There was a knock at the door and Clifford Fairlie looked up from his newspaper. His eyes took a moment to focus on the room—as if he had forgotten where he was. The sitting room of the suite was quite grand in its fin-de-sieècle elegance: the Queen Annes, the Cézannes, the Boulle desk, the expanse of Persian carpet to the heavy double doors. It was a suite to which President-elect Fairlie had admitted few reporters because he had found that most journalists detested any politician who seemed to know the century in which the furniture around him had been crafted.
    Knuckles again; Fairlie shambled to the door. He was a man who opened his own doors.
    It was his chief aide, Liam McNeely, slim in a Dunhill suit. Behind him the Secret Service men in the anteroom looked up, nodded, and looked away. McNeely came in and pushed the door shut behind him. “Morning, Mr. President.”
    â€œNot quite yet.”
    â€œI’m practicing.”
    The smell of expensive aftershave had come into the room with McNeely. Clifford Fairlie settled on the Queen Anne couch and waved him toward a chair. McNeely collapsed as if boneless: sat on the back of his neck, long legs crossed like grasshopper limbs. “Lots of weather we’re having.”
    â€œI spent a winter in Paris once, a long time ago. I can’t remember the sun shining once in the five months from October to early March.” That had been the year he’d lost the Senate race for reelection from Pennsylvania. The President had twisted the knife by sending him to Paris as peace-talk negotiator.
    McNeely uncrossed his legs with a getting-down-to-business sigh. The notebook came out of his pocket. “It’s about a quarter to eleven now. You’ve got the Common Market people at noon and lunch here in the hotel at one forty-five with Breucher.”
    â€œPlenty of time.”
    â€œYes sir. I only mentioned it. You don’t want to show up at the meeting in that outfit.”
    Fairlie’s jacket had leather patches at the elbows. He smiled. “Maybe I ought to. I’m Brewster’s emissary.”
    McNeely laughed at the joke. “Press conference at four. They’ll mainly be asking about the plans for the trip to Spain.”
    That was the nub, the trip to Spain. The rest was window dressing. The vital thing was those Spanish bases.
    McNeely said, “And they’ll want your reactions to Brewster’s logorrhea last night.”
    â€œWhat reactions? For Brewster it was damned mild.”
    â€œYou going to say that? Pity. It’d be a good chance to get in a few digs.”
    â€œNo point being inflammatory. Too