The Parsifal Mosaic

by Robert Ludlum

  Rome did know. The embassy had found a man in Civitavecchia, and Rome had sent an executioner—for a nonattributable kill. Something or someone had convinced the liars in Washington that a former field officer was now a threat only if he lived, so they had put out the word that he was “beyond salvage,” his immediate dispatch the highest priority. Nonattributable, of course.

  The liars could not let him reach Jenna Karas, for she was part of their lie, her mock death on the Spanish coast intrinsic to it. Yet Jenna was running too; somehow, some way after Costa Brava she had escaped. Was she now included in the execution order? It was inevitable; the bait could not be permitted to live, and therefore the blond assassin was not the only killer on the bridge at Col des Moulinets. On, or near it.

  The four soldiers and the new recruit started toward the rear entrance of the country inn. The door beneath the floodlight was opened, and a heavyset man spoke in a loud voice. “If you pigs spent all your money in Monesi, stay the hell out of here!”

  “Ah, Gianni, then we’d have to close you up for selling French girls higher than ours!”

  “You pay!”

  “Ricci,” one of the soldiers said, “this is Gianni the thief. He owns this dung heap. Be careful what you eat.”

  “I have to use the bathroom,” said the new recruit. He had just looked at his watch; it was an odd thing to do.

  “Who doesn’t?” shouted another soldier as all five went inside.

  The instant the door closed, Havelock ran across the drive to the first window. It looked in on a dining room. The tables were covered with red-checked cloths, with cheap silver and glassware in place, but there were no diners; either it was too early for the kitchen or there were no takers that afternoon. Beyond, separated only by a wide archway that extended the length of the wall, was the larger central barroom. From what he could see, there were a number of people seated at small round tables—between ten and fifteen would be his estimate, nearly all men. The two women in his sight lines were in their sixties, one fat, one gaunt, sitting at adjacent tables with mustachioed men; they were both talking and drinking beer. Teatime in the Ligurian Alps. He wondered if there were any other women in that room; he wondered—his chest aching—if Jenna was huddled at a corner table he could not see. If that was the case, he had to be able to watch a door from the rear quarters—from the kitchen, perhaps—from which the five soldiers had to emerge into the barroom. He had to be able to see. The next few minutes could tell him what he needed to know: who among the clientele in that barroom would the blond killer recognize, if only with a glance, a twitch of his lips, or an almost imperceptible nod?

  Michael crouched and ran to the second window along the drive; the angle of vision was still too restricting. He raced to the third, appraised the view and rejected it, then rounded the corner of the building to the first window in front. He could see the door now—CUCINA, the lettering said; the five soldiers would walk out of that door any second, but he could not see all the tables. There were two windows remaining that faced the stone path leading to the entrance. The second window was too close to the door for reasonable cover, but he held his breath and crawled swiftly to it, then stood up in the shadow of a spreading pine. He inched his face to the glass, and what he saw allowed him to let out the breath he had held. Jenna karas was not an ambushed target sitting in a corner. The window was beyond the inside archway; he could see not only the kitchen entrance but every table, every person in the room. Jenna was not there. And then his eyes strayed to the far-right wall; there was another door, a narrow door with two separate lines of letters. Uomini and Hommes, the men’s room.

  The door labeled CUCINA swung open and the five soldiers straggled in; Gianni the thief had his hand on the shoulder of the blond man whose name was not Ricci. Havelock stared at the killer, stared at the eyes with all his concentration. The owner of the inn gestured to his left—Michael’s right—and the assassin started across the room toward the men’s room. The eyes. Watch the eyes!

  It came! Barely a flicker of the lids, but it was there, the glance was there. Recognition. Havelock followed the blond man’s line of sight Confirmed. Two men were at a table in the center of the room; one had lowered his eyes to his drink while talking, the other—bad form—had actually shifted his legs so as to turn his head away from the path of the killer’s movement. Two more members of the unit—but only one of them was active. The other was an observer. The man who had shifted his legs was the agent of record who would confirm the dispatch but in no way participate. He was an American; his mistakes bore it out. His jacket was an expensive Swiss windbreaker, wrong for the scene and out of season; his shoes were soft black leather, and he wore a shiny digital chronometer on his wrist—all so impressive, so irresistible to a swollen paycheck overseas, so in contrast to the shabby mountain garments of his companion. So American. The agent of record-but it was a file no more than six men alive would ever see.

  Something else was inconsistent; it was in the numbers. A unit of three with only two active weapons was understaffed, considering the priority of the kill and the background of the foreign service officer who was the primary target. Michael began studying every face in the room, isolating each, watching eyes, seeing if any strayed to the oddly matched pair at the center table. After the faces came the clothes, especially those belonging to the few faces angled away from him. Shoes, trousers and belts where they could be seen; shirts, jackets, hats and whatever jewelry was visible. He kept trying to spot another chronometer or an Alpine wind-breaker or soft leather shoes. Inconsistencies. If they were there, he could not find them. With the exception of the two men at the center table, the drinkers at the inn were a ramshackle collection of mountain people. Farmers, guides, storekeepers—apparently French from across the bridge—and, of course, the border guards.

  “Ehi! Che avete?” The words were hurled at him, a soldier’s challenge. The sergeant from the truck stood, with his hand on his holster, in the semidarkness of the path that led to the entrance of the inn.

  “Mia sposa,” said Havelock quickly, his voice low, urgent, properly respectful. “Noi siamo molto disturbati, Signor Maggiore. lo vado ad aiutare una ragazza francese. Là mia sposa mi seguirà”

  The soldier grinned and removed his hand from the gun case. He admonished Havelock in barracks Italian: “So the men of Monesi still go across the border for French ass, eh? If your wife’s not in there, she’s probably back in your own bedroom being pumped by a Frenchman! Did you ever think of that?”

  “The way of the world, Major,” replied Michael obsequiously, shrugging, and wishing to Christ the loudmouthed dolt would go inside and leave him alone. He had to get back to the window!

  “You’re not from Monesi,” said the sergeant, suddenly alarmed. “You don’t talk like a man from Monesi.”

  “The Swiss border, Major. I come from Lugano. I moved here two years ago.”

  The soldier was silent for a moment, his eyes squinting. Havelock slowly moved his hand in the shadows toward his waist, where, secured uncomfortably under his belt, was the heavy magnum with the silencer attached. There could be no sounds of gunfire, if it came to that.

  Finally the sergeant threw up his hands, shaking his head in disgust. “Swiss! Italian-Swiss, but more Swiss than Italian! All of you! Sneaky bastards. I won’t serve in a battalion north of Milan, I swear it. I’ll get out of the army first. Go back to your sneaking, Swiss!” He turned and stalked into the inn.

  Inside, another door—the narrow door to the men’s room—was opened. A man walked out, and Michael not only knew he had found a third weapon in the unit from Rome, but realized there had to be a fourth. The man was part of a team-two demolition experts who worked together—veteran mercenaries who had spent several years in Africa blowing up everything from dams and airports to grand villas suddenly occupied by inept despots in Graustarkian regalia. The CIA had found them in Angola, on the wrong side, but the American dollar was healthier then, and persuasive. The two e
xperts had been placed in a single black-bordered file deep in the cabinets of clandestine operations.

  And their being at the brídge of Col des Moulinets gave Havelock a vital piece of information: a vehicle or vehicles were anticipated. Either one of these two demolition specialists could pause for ten seconds by an automobile, and ten minutes later it would explode, killing everyone in the immediate vicinity. Jenna Karas was expected to cross the border by car; minutes later she would be dead, a successful, nonattributable kill.

  The airfield. Rome had learned about the airfield from the man in Civitavecchia. Somewhere on the road out of Col des Moulinets, whatever conveyance she was in would be blown into the night sky.

  Michael dropped to the ground behind the pine tree. Through the window he could see the explosives expert walking directly to the front door of the inn; the man glanced at his watch, as the blond killer had done minutes ago. A schedule was in progress, but what schedule?

  The man emerged; his swarthy face looked even darker in the dim light of the post lamp at the end of the path. He began walking faster, but the acceleration was barely perceptible; this was a professional who knew the value of control. Havelock rose cautiously, prepared to follow; he glanced at the window, then looked again, alarmed. Inside, by the bar, the sergeant was talking to the blond recruit he called Ricci, obviously delivering an unwanted order. The killer seemed to be protesting, raising his beer as if it were much needed medicine and thus an excuse for not obeying. Then he grimaced, drank his drink in several swallows, and started for the door.

  The schedule was being adhered to. Through prearrangement, someone at the bridge had been instructed to call for the new recruit in advance of the duty hour; he was to be rostered before the shift was over. Procedural methods would be the cover, and no one would argue, but it was not procedure, it was the schedule.

  They knew. The unit from Rome knew that Jenna Karas was on her way to the bridge. A motor launch had been picked up in Arma di Taggia, and the party had been followed; the vehicle in which she traveled into the Ligurian mountains was now spotted within minutes of its arrival at the checkpoint of Col des Moulinets. It was logical: what better time to cross a border than at the end of a shift, when the soldiers were tired, weary of the dull monotony, waiting for relief, more careless than usual?

  The door opened, and Michael crouched again, peering to his right through the branches of the pine tree at the road beyond the post lamp. The mercenary had crossed diagonally to the shoulder on the other side, bearing left toward the bridge—an ordinary stroller, a Frenchman perhaps, returning to Col des Moulinets. But in moments he would fade into the woods, taking up a predetermined position east of the bridge’s entrance, from which he could crawl to an automobile briefly held up by the guards. The blond killer was now halfway to the post lamp; he paused, lighting a cigarette, an action that gave another reason for his delay. He heard the sound of the door being opened, and was satisfied. The “soldier” continued on his way as the two men from the center table—the American agent of record and his roughly dressed companion, the second weapon in the unit from Rome—came out.

  Havelock understood now. The trap had been engineered with precision; in a matter of minutes it would be in place. Two expert marksmen would take out the intruder who tried to interfere with the car carrying Jenna Karas—take him out instantly, the second he came in sight, with a fusillade of bullets; and two demolition specialists would guarantee that the automobile waved through would explode somewhere in the streets of Col des Moulinets, or on a road to an unmarked airfield.

  Another assumption could be made beyond the fact that there was a schedule in progress that included a car on its way to the bridge. The unit from Rome knew he was there, knew he would be close enough to the border patrols to observe all those in any vehicle offering passports to the guards. They would examine closely every male figure that came into view, their hands on their weapons as they did so. Their advantage was in their numbers, but he, too, had an advantage and it was considerable: he knew who they were.

  The well-dressed American and his employee, the second gun, separated at the road, the agent of record turning right in order to remove himself from the execution ground, the killer going left and to the bridge. Two small trucks clattered up the road from Monesi, one with only a single headlight, the other with both headlights but no windshield. Neither the American nor his hired weapon paid any attention; they knew the vehicle they were waiting for, and it was neither of these.

  If you know a strategy, you can counter a strategy—his father’s words so many years ago. He could recall the tall, erudite man patiently explaining to a cell of partisans, calming their fears, channeling their angers. Lidice was their cause, the death of Germans their objective. He remembered it all now as he crept back to the driveway and raced across into the woods.

  He got his first glimpse of the bridge from three hundred yards away on the edge of the bend in the road that led to the country inn—the curve he had avoided by heading into the woods. From what he could see, it was narrow and not long, which was a blessing for drivers because two cars crossing at the same time would no doubt graze fenders. A dual string of naked bulbs was now lit; it arced over the central steel span, sagging between the struts; several of the bulbs had burned out, to be replaced when others joined them. The checkpoint itself consisted of two opposing structures that served as gatehouses, the windows high and wide, each with a ceiling light fixture; between the two small, square buildings a hand-winched barrier painted with intense, light-reflecting orange fell across the road. To the right of the winch was a shoulder-high gate that opened onto the pedestrian walk.

  Two soldiers in their brown uniforms with the red and green stripes were on either side of the second truck, talking wearily but animatedly with the driver. A third guard was at the rear, his attention not on the truck but on the woods beyond the bridge. He was studying the areas on both sides as a hunter might when stalking a wounded mountain cat; he stood motionless, his eyes roving, his head barely turning. He was the blond assassin. Who would suspect that a lowly soldier at a border checkpoint was a killer with a range of accomplishments that spanned the Mediterranean?

  A fourth man had just been passed through the pedestrian gate. He was trudging slowly up the slight incline toward the midpoint of the bridge. But this man had no intention of crossing to the other side, no intention of greeting the French patrols in Ligurian patois, claiming as so many did that the air was different in la belle France and thank God for slender women. No, thought Michael, this crudely dressed peasant of the mountains with the drooping trousers and the large, heavy jacket would remain in the center shadows and, if the light was dim enough, would check his weapon, no doubt a braced, repeating, rapid-fire machine gun, its stock a steel bar clamped to the shoulders, easily concealed beneath garments. He would release the safety and be prepared to race down to the checkpoint at the moment of execution, ready to kill the Italian guards if they interfered, intent on firing into the body of a man coming out of the darkness to reach a woman crossing the border. This man, last seen at a center table in the country inn, was the backup support for the blond-haired killer.

  It was a gauntlet, at once simple and well manned, using natural and procedural roadblocks; once the target entered, he was trapped both within and without. Two men waited with explosives and weapons at the mouth of the trap, one at its core, and a fourth at its outer rim. Well conceived, very professional.

  12

  The tiny glow of a cupped cigarette could be seen in the bushes diagonally across the dark road. Bad form. The agent of record was an indulgent man denying himself neither chronometers nor cigarettes during the early stages of a kill. He should be replaced; he would be replaced.

  Havelock judged the angle of the cigarette, its distance to the ground; the man was crouched or sitting, not standing. Because of the density of the foliage it was impossible for the man to see the road clearly, which meant that he did not expect th
e car with Jenna Karas for some time yet; he was being too casual for an imminent sighting. The sergeant had said in the driveway that the soldiers had an hour to fill their kidneys; twenty minutes had passed, leaving forty. Yet not really forty. The final ten minutes of the shift would be avoided because the changing of the guard would require an exchange of information, no matter how inconsequential or pro forma. Michael had very little time to do what had to be done, to mount his own counterstrategy. First, he had to learn all he could of Rome’s.

  He sidestepped his way back along the edge of the foliage until the distant spill of light from the bridge was virtually blocked by the trees. He ran across the road and into the underbrush, turning left, testing every step to ensure the silence that was essential. For a brief, terrible moment he was back in the forests outside Prague, the echoes of the guns of Lidice in his ears, the sight of screaming, writhing bodies before his eyes. Then he snapped back to the immediate present, remembering who and where he was. He was the mountain cat; the most meaningful lair of his life had been soiled, corrupted by liars who were no better than those who commanded the guns at Lidice—or others who ordered “suicides” and gulags when the guns were stilled. He was in his element, in the forest, which had befriended him when he had no one to depend on, and no one understood it better.