The Parsifal Mosaic

by Robert Ludlum

  “It appears I trusted the wrong people,” answered the Russian quietly in well-accented English.

  “But not your own people,” interrupted Michael.

  “You’re special.”

  “You lost.”

  “I never ordered your death. They might have.”

  “Now you’re lying, but it doesn’t matter. As I said, you lost.”

  “You’re to be commended,” mumbled the VKR officer, his eyes straying above Havelock’s shoulder to the broken door.

  “You didn’t hear me. You lost. There’s a man in the room across the hall; he won’t be attending you.”

  “I see.”

  “And another down the way, beyond the staircase. He’s dead.”

  “Nyet! Molniya!” The Soviet agent blanched; his fingers were stretched, taut, six inches from his belt.

  “I speak Russian, if you prefer.”

  “It’s immaterial,” said the startled man. “I’m a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

  “Or of the American compound in Novgorod, KGB degree.”

  “Cambridge, not Novgorod,” objected the Russian, disdain in his voice.

  “I forgot. The VKR is an elite corps. A degree from the parent organization might be considered an insult. The untutored and unskilled conferring honors upon its in-house superiors.”

  “There are no such divisions in the Soviet government.”

  “My ass.”

  “This is pointless.”

  “Yes, it is. What happened at Costa Brava?”

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “You’re VKR, Barcelona! The Costa Brava is in your sector! What happened that night on January fourth?”

  “Nothing that concerned us.”

  “Move!”

  “What?”

  “Against the wall!”

  It was an outside wall, built of mortar and heavy brick, solid for. decades, weight pressing against weight, impenetrable. The Russian moved slowly, haltingly in front of it. Havelock continued.

  “I’m so special your sector chief in Moscow doesn’t know the truth. But you do. It’s why you’re here in Paris, why you put out the premium on me.”

  “You’ve been misinformed. It is a crime tantamount to treason to withhold information from our superiors. As to my coming from Barcelona, surely yon understand that. It was your last assignment and I was your last counterpart I had the most up-to-date information on you. Who better to send in after you?”

  “You’re very good. You glide well.”

  “I’ve told you nothing you don’t know, nothing you could not learn.”

  “You missed something. Why am I special? Your colleagues at the KGB haven’t the slightest interest in me. On the contrary, they won’t touch me; they consider me a bad text. Yet you say I’m special. The Voennaya wants me.”

  “I won’t deny there’s a degree of interservice rivalry, even departmental. Perhaps we learned it from you. You have an abundance of it.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “We know certain things our comrades are not aware of.”

  “Such as?”

  “You were placed ‘beyond salvage’ by your own government.”

  “Do you know Why?”

  “The reasons at this juncture are secondary. We offer refuge.”

  “The reasons are never secondary,” corrected Michael.

  “Very well,” agreed the Soviet officer reluctantly. “A judgment was made that you are unbalanced.”

  “On what basis?”

  “Pronounced hostility, accompanied by threats, cables. Delusions, hallucinations.”

  “Because of Costa Brava?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just like that? One day walking around sane, filing reports, honorably retired; the next a cuckoo bird whistling at the moon? Now you’re not very good. You’re not gliding well at all.”

  “I’m telling you what I know,” insisted the Russian. “I do not make these determinations, I follow Instructions. The premium, as you call it, was to be paid for a meeting between us. Why should it be otherwise? If killing you were the objective, it would be far simpler to pay for your whereabouts and telephone your embassy in the Gabriel, asking for a specific extension; I can assure you we know it. The information would reach the proper personnel and we would not be involved, no possibility of errors leading to future repercussions.”

  “But by offering me refuge and bringing me in, you take back a trophy your less talented comrades avoided because they thought I was a trap, programmed or otherwise.”

  “Basically, yes. May we talk?”

  “We’re talking.” Havelock studied the man; he was convincing, quite possibly telling his version of the truth. Refuge or a bullet, which was it? Only the exposure of lies would tell. One had to look for the lies, not a subordinate’s interpretation of the truth. In his peripheral vision Michael caught the reflection of a dull mirror above a shabby bureau against the wall; he spoke again. “You’d expect me to deliver information you know I’ve got.”

  “We’d be saving your life. The order for ‘beyond salvage’ termination will not be rescinded, you know that.”

  “You’re suggesting I defect.”

  “What choice do you have? How long do you flunk you can keep running? How many days or weeks will it be before their networks and their computers find you?”

  “I’m experienced. I have resources. Maybe I’m willing to take my chances. Men have been known to disappear—not into gulags, but to other places— and live happily ever after. What else can you offer?”

  “What are you looking for? Comfort, money, a good life? We offer these. You deserve them.”

  “Not in your country. I won’t live in the Soviet Union.”

  “oh?”

  “Suppose I told you I’ve picked out a place. It’s thousands of miles away in the Pacific, in the British Solomons. I’ve been there; It’s civilized but remote, no one would ever find me. Oven enough money, I could live well there.”

  “Arrangements can be made. I am empowered to guarantee that.”

  Lie number one. No defector ever left the Soviet Union and the VKR officer knew it.

  “You flew into Paris last night. How did you know I was here?”

  “Informants in Rome, how else?”

  “How did they learn?”

  “One doesn’t question informants too closely.”

  “The hell one doesn’t.”

  “If they are trusted.”

  “You ask for a source. You don’t leave a station and fly to a city hundreds of miles away without being pretty damn sure the source can be confirmed.”

  “Very well,” said the’VKR officer, gliding confidently with the cross-currents again. “There was an investigation; a man was found in Civitavecchia. He said you were on your way to Paris.”

  “When did you get the word?”

  “Yesterday, of course,” replied the Russian impatiently.

  “When yesterday?”

  “Late afternoon. Five-thirty, I believe. Five-thirty-five, to be precise.”

  Lie number two, the falsehood found in the precision. The decision to head for Paris was forced on him after Col des Moulinets. Eight o’clock at night.

  “You’re convinced that what I can divulge about our European intelligence operations is of such value to you that you are willing to accept the retaliations that come with defection at my level?”

  “Naturally.”

  “That opinion isn’t shared by the directors’ committee of the KGB.”

  “They’re fools. Frightened, tired rabbits among the wolves. We’ll replace them.”

  “You’re not troubled that I may be programmed? That whatever I tell you could be poison, useless?”

  “Not for a moment. It’s why you’re ‘beyond salvage.’ ”

  “Or that I’m paranoid.”

  “Never. You’re neither paranoid nor hallucinatory. You are what you have always be
en, a highly intelligent specialist in your field.”

  Lie number three. Word of his supposed psychotic condition had been spread. Washington believed it; the dead Ogilvie had confirmed it on the Palatine.

  “I see,” said Havelock, grimacing, feigning pain that needed very little pretense. “I’m so goddamned tired,” he said, lowering the magnum slightly, turning slightly to his left, his eyes millimeters from making contact with the mirror on the wall. “I took a bullet. I haven’t had any sleep. As you said, I just keep running, trying to figure it out …”

  “What more is there to figure?” asked the Russian, his voice now gliding into compassion. “It’s basically an economic, time-saving decision, you know that. Rather than altering codes, networks and sources, they’ve decided to eliminate the man who knows too much. Sixteen years of service in the field and this is your retirement bonus. ‘Beyond salvage.’ ”

  Michael lowered the gun further, his head bent down but his eyes now on the mirror. “I have to think,” he whispered. “It’s all so crazy, so impossible.”

  Lie number four—the most telling lie! The Russian went for his gun!

  Havelock spun around and fired; the bullet snapped into the wall. The VKR officer grabbed his elbow as blood erupted through his shirt and dripped onto the floor. “Ubliudok!” he cried.

  “We’ve only Just begun!” whispered Michael with controlled fury. He approached the Russian and pushed him against the wall, then removed the exposed weapon from the holster and threw it across the room. “You’re too sure of yourself, comrade, too sure of your facts! Never state them so confidently; leave room for error because there may be one. You had several.”

  The Russian answered him with silence, his eyes full of both loathing and resignation. Havelock knew those eyes, knew the combination of hatred and the recognition of mortality; they were intrinsic to the nature of certain men, trained for years to hate and the. By any name they were recognizable: Gestapo, Nippon Kai, Palestinian Liberationists, Voennaya.… And there were lesser leagues, amateurs who knew nothing beyond arrogance and hate—their own deaths being no part of their childish bargains—screeching fanatics who marched to the drums of sanctimonious loathing.

  Michael returned silence for silence, look for look. And then he spoke.

  “Don’t waste the adrenaline,” he said quietly. “I’m not going to kill you. You’re prepared for that; you’ve been ready for it for years. Damned if I’m going to accommodate you. Instead, I’m going to blow off both your kneecaps—and then your hands. You’re not trained to live with the results. No one is, really, especially not your kind. So many routine things’ll be beyond you. Simple things. Walking to a door or a locked file cabinet, opening either one. Dialing a phone or going to the toilet. Reaching for a gun and pulling a trigger.”

  The Russian’s face went pale and his lower lip began to tremble. “Nyet,” he whispered hoarsely.

  “Da,” said Havelock. “There’s only one way you can stop me. Tell me what happened at Costa Brava.”

  “I told you! Nothing!”

  Michael lowered the magnum and fired into the Soviet’s thigh; blood splattered against the wall. The Russian started to scream, collapsing on the floor; Havelock gripped his mouth with his left hand.

  “I missed the kneecap. I won’t miss now. Either one.” He stood up, leveling the weapon downward.

  “No! Stop!” The VKR officer rolled over, clutching his leg. He was broken; he could accept death, but not what Michael had promised him. “I’ll tell you what I know.”

  “I’ll know if you’re lying. My finger’s on the trigger, the gun pointed at your right hand. If you lie, you won’t have it anymore.”

  “What I told you is true. We were not at Costa Brava that night.”

  “Your code was broken. Washington broke it. I saw it, I sent it!”

  “Washington broke nothing. That code was abandoned seven days prior to the night of January fourth. Even if you sent it and we accepted it, we could not have responded. It would have been physically impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “We were nowhere near the area, any of us. We were sent out of the sector.” The Russian coughed in pain, his face twisted. “For the period of time in question, all activities were canceled. We were prohibited from going within twenty miles of the Montebello beach on the Costa Brava.”

  “Liar!”

  “No,” said the VKR officer, his bleeding leg pulled up under him, his body taut, his eyes staring at Michael. “No, I am not lying. Those were the orders from Moscow.”

  BOOK TWO

  15

  It was raining that night in Washington. Angry, diagonal sheets were driven by erratic winds, making drivers and pedestrians alike mistrust their vision; headlights refracted, diffused, blinded in suddenly shifting angles. The chauffeur at the wheel of the limousine heading down 14th Street toward the East Gate of the White House was not immune to the problem. He slammed on his brakes and swerved to avoid an onrushing compact, whose high beams gave the ilusion of a huge attacking insect. The small car was well to his left on its side of the line, so the maneuver had been unnecessary. The chauffeur wondered if his very important passengers had noticed the error.

  “Sorry, sirs,” he said, his voice directed at the intercom, his eyes on the rearview mirror and the glass partition that separated him from them.

  Neither man responded. It was as if neither had heard him, yet he knew both had; the blue intercom light was on, which meant that his voice was transmitted. The red light, of course, was dark; he could not hear anything being said in the rear seat. The red light was always off, except when instructions were being given, and twice every day the system was checked in the garage before he or any other driver left the premises. It was said that tiny circuit breakers had been installed that tripped at the slightest tampering with the intercom mechanism.

  The men who rode in these limousines had been assigned them by the President of the United States, and the chauffeurs who drove them were continuously subjected to the most stringent security checks. Each of them was unmarried and without children, and each was a combat veteran—proven under fire—with extensive experience in guerrilla warfare and diversionary tactics. The vehicles they drove were designed for maximum protection. The windows could withstand the impact of .45-caliber bullets; homing devices were implanted throughout the undersides, and small jets that released two separate types of gas with a flick of a switch were positioned at all points of the frame—one gas merely numbed and was used for riots and unruly protestors, while the other was a lethal dioxide compound, which was designed for terrorists. The chauffeurs were told: “Guard your passengers with your lives.” These men held the secrets of the nation; they were the President’s closest advisers in times of crisis.

  The driver glanced at the dashboard clock. It was nine-twenty, nearly four hours since he had driven the same vehicle back into the garage after completing a previous assignment, waited for the electronics check, and left for the night. Thirty-five minutes later he had been having a drink at a restaurant on K Street and was about to order dinner when the jarring one-note signal of his beeper erupted from its case on his belt. He had telephoned the unlisted number for Security Dispatch and was ordered to the garage immediately: Aquarius One emergency, Scorpio descending. Out of context and out of orbit, but the message was clear. The Oval Office had pushed a button; the senior drivers were now on duty, all prior schedules aborted.

  Back in the garage he had been mildly surprised to see that only two vehicles had been prepared for transport. He had expected to find six or seven black-stretch Abrahams wheeled out of their docks and ready to roll; instead, there were just two—one ordered to an address in Berwyn Heights, Maryland, and the second—his—to Andrews Field to await the arrival of two men being flown in on army jets from separate islands in the Caribbean. Times had been coordinated; the ETA’s were within fifteen minutes of each other.

  The younger of the two old men had arri
ved first, and the driver recognized him instantly; not everyone would have done so. His name was Halyard, like the line on a sailboat, but his reputation had been made on land. Lieutenant General Malcolm Halyard: WW II, Korea, Vietnam. The bald soldier had started off commanding platoons and companies in France and across the Rhine, then battalions in Kaesong and Inchon, and, finally, armies in Southeast Asia, where the driver had seen him more than once in Danang. He was something of an oddball in the upper ranks of the military; he was never known to have held a press conference, and he had been known to bar photographers—military and civilian alike—from wherever he happened to be. “Tightrope” Halyard was considered a brilliant tactician, one of the first to state for the Congressional Record that Vietnam was no-win idiocy. He avoided publicity with the same tenacity that he showed on the battlefield, and his low profile, it was said, appealed to the President.

  The general had been escorted to the limousine and, after greeting the driver, had waited in the back seat without another word.

  The second man had arrived twelve minutes later. He was as far removed from “Tightrope” Halyard as the eagle is from the lion, but both were superb examples of then-species. Addison Brooks had been a lawyer, an international banker, a consultant to statesmen, an ambassador, and finally an elder statesman himself and adviser to presidents. He was the embodiment of the Eastern Establishment aristocracy, the last of the old-school-tie crowd, the ultimate WASP, who tempered the image with a swift wit that could be as gentle and compassionate as it could be devastating. He had survived the political wars by exercising the same agility displayed by Halyard on the battlefield. In essence, both men would compromise with reality, but not with principle. This was not, of course, the driver’s own judgment; he had read about it in the Washington Post, his interest having been drawn to a political column that had analyzed the two advisers because he knew the ambassador and had seen the general in Danang. He had driven the ambassador on a number of occasions, flattered that old Brooks remembered his name and always had a little personal something to say to him: “I have a grandson who swears he saw you play your one two-minute game for the Steelers, Jack.” Or: “Damn it, Jack, don’t you ever put on weight? My wife makes me drink my gin with some God-awful diet fruit juice.” The last had to be an exaggeration; the ambassador was a tall, slender man, his silver hair, aquiline features and perfectly groomed gray moustache making him look more English than American.