“Don’t wash him out; it’d be a mistake. Put him behind a field desk.”
“I’ll recommend that to the Pentagon, General.”
“Let’s get back to the Cons Op strategists,” said the statesman. “It’s still not clear to me why they didn’t report Colonel Baylor’s information, especially the reasons behind Havelock’s actions—those ‘disrupting cables,’ I believe you called them. Incidentally, how disrupting were they?”
“ ‘Alarming’ is a better word; ‘false-alarming’ better still. One message came here—in a recent sixteen-hundred priority cipher—stating that there was a deep-cover Soviet agent in the White House. Another was sent to Congressional Oversight; it claimed there was CIA corruption in Amsterdam. In both instances the use of the cipher and naming names in Amsterdam obviously lent authority to the data.”
“Any substance?” asked the soldier.
“None whatsoever. But the reactions were volatile. The strategists knew they could get worse.”
“All the more reason why they should have reported Havelock’s motives,” insisted Brooks.
“They may have,” answered Bradford softly. “To someone. We’ll get to that.”
“Why they were killed? What’s their connection to Parsifal?” The general lowered his voice. “To Costa Brava.”
“There was no ‘Costa Brava’ until we invited it, Mal,” said the President. “But that, too, has to be told in sequence. It’s the only way we can make sense out of it … if there is any sense.”
“It never should have happened,” interjected the silver-haired statesman. “We had no right.”
“We had no choice, Mr. Ambassador,” said Bradford, leaning forward. “Secretary of State Matthias built the case against the Karas woman, we know that. His objective, as near as we can determine, was to remove Havelock from service, but we could never be certain. Their friendship was strong, going back years, their family ties stronger, reaching back to Prague. Was Havelock part of Matthias’s plans or not? Was he a willing player following orders, pretending to do what others would call perfectly understandable, or was he the unknowing victim of a terrible manipulation? We had to find out.”
“We did find out,” protested Addison Brooks quietly, indignantly. “At the clinic in Virginia. He was probed with everything doctors and laboratories can probe with; he knew absolutely nothing. As you said, we were back to the original scenario, completely in the dark ourselves. Why did Matthias want him out? It’s the unanswered, perhaps now unanswerable, question. When we understood that, we should have told Havelock the truth.”
“We couldn’t” The undersecretary leaned back in the chair. “Jenna Karas had disappeared; we had no idea whether she was alive or dead. Under the circumstances Havelock would have raised questions that cannot be raised outside the Oval Office—or a room like this.”
“Questions,” added the President of the United States, “which, if exposed, would plunge the world into a global nuclear war in a matter of hours. If the Soviets or the People’s Republic of China knew this government is out of control, ICBM’s would be launched from both hemispheres, a thousand submarines poised in both oceans for secondary tactical strikes-obliteration. And we are out of control.”
Silence.
“There’s someone I’d like you to meet,” said Bradford finally. “I had him flown in from an Alpine pass called Col des Moulinets. He’s out of Rome.”
“Nuclear war,” whispered the President, as he pressed the button on the huge, curved desk, and the screen went dark.
16
Havelock drew two lines through the seventeenth and eighteenth names on the list, hung up the telephone on the wall and left the shabby café in Montmartre. Two calls per phone were all he permitted himself. Sophisticated electronic scanners could pick up a location in a matter of minutes, and should any of those he reached be patched into equipment at the American embassy, it would be no different from his calling the Paris conduit of Cons Op and setting the time for his own exècution. Two calls per phone, each phone a minimum of six blocks from the previous one, no conversation lasting more than ninety seconds. He had gone through half the list, but now the rest of the names would have to wait. It was nearly nine o’clock; the gaudy lights of Montmartre battered the streets with frenzied eruptions of color that matched the frantic cacophony of the district’s nighttime revels. And he was to meet Gravet in an alley off the Rue Nor-vins. The art critic had spent the afternoon tracking down anyone and everyone in his peculiar world who might have knowledge of Jenna Karas.
In a way, so had Michael, but his initial work had been cerebral. He had retrieved his clothes from a Métro locker, purchased basic toiletries, a note pad and a ball-point pen, and taken a room at a cheap hotel around the corner from La Couronne Nouvelle. He reasoned that if the wounded VKR officer raised help, he would not think to send his killers down the street for the target. Havelock had shaved and bathed, and now lay on the decrepit bed, his body resting but not his mind. He had gone back in time, disciplining his memory, recalling every moment he and Jenna had shared in Paris. He had approached the exercise academically, as a graduate student might doggedly follow a single development chronologically through a chaotic period in history. He and Jenna, Jenna and he; where they had gone, what they had seen, whom they had spoken with, all in order of sequence. Each place and scene had a location and a reason for their being there; finally, each face that had any meaning had a name, or if not a specific name, the identity of someone who knew him or her.
After two hours and forty minutes of probing, he had sat up, reached for the note pad and pen he had placed on a bedside chair, and had begun his list. A half hour later it was complete—as complete as his memory permitted—and he had relaxed, back on the bed, knowing that the much needed sleep would come. He knew also that the clock in his mind would awaken him when daylight ended. It did. And minutes later he was out in the streets, going from one telephone booth to another, one café with a TÉLÉPHONE sign in the window to the next, each instrument six blocks away from the last.
He began the conversations quickly but casually, and kept his ears primed to pick up any telltale signs of alarm in the responses. In each case his approach was the same; he was to have met Jenna that noon at the Meurice bar, each having flown into Paris from a different city, but his plane had been hours late. And since Jenna had mentioned the person’s name frequently—fondness implied—Michael wondered if she had called him or her, perhaps looking for an afternoon companion in a city she barely knew.
Most were mildly surprised to hear from Havelock, especially so casually, and even more surprised that Jenna Karas would have remembered their names, much less having recalled them with affection; they were by and large only brief acquaintances. However, in no instance was there the slightest hesitation other than the normal caution required when confronted with the unexpected. Eighteen names. Nothing. Where had she gone? What was she doing? She could not go underground in Paris, not without his finding her; she had to know that. Christ, where are you?
He reached the Rue Ravignan and began the steep ascent up the Montmartre hill, passing the dark old houses that were once the homes of legends, and emerging on the small square that was the Place Clément, he started down the Rue Norvins. The street was crowded, the revels of would-be Bohemians fueled by the genuine residents who dressed their roles and later went home to count their profits. The alley Gravet had described was just before the narrow Rue des Saules; he could see the break in the row of ancient buildings up ahead and walked faster.
The old brick alleyway was dark and empty. The ersatz Bohemians knew there were limits to their pretense that they belonged in Montmartre; a mugging on the sacred hill of martyrs was little different from a taped iron pipe in Soho or the East village. Havelock went inside, his right hand instinctively edging toward the break in his jacket and belt where the magnum was awkwardly in place. Gravet was late, a discourtesy the critic himself found abhorrent. What had happened?
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Michael found a shadowed doorway in the dimly lit thoroughfare; he leaned against the brick frame, took out a cigarette and struck a match. As he cupped the flame his mind leaped back to the Palatine, to a book of matches and a man who had tried to save his life, not take it. A dying man who had died only moments later, knowing there was betrayal at the highest levels of his government.
There was a sudden commotion out on the Rue Norvins, a brief flare-up of tempers as two men collided. Then a tall, slender man stood momentarily erect, and let forth a stream of invective in French. His much younger, stockier adversary made a sullen comment about the man’s ancestry and moved along. The injured party smoothed his lapels, turned to his left and entered the alley. Gravet had arrived, not without his customary élan.
“Merde!” the critic spat out, seeing Havelock walk out of the shadows into the dim light. “It’s those filthy, ragged field jackets they wear! You just know they dribble when they eat and their teeth are yellow. God knows when they last bathed or spoke civilly. Sorry to be late.”
“It’s only a few minutes. I just got here.”
“I’m late. I intended to be in the Rue Norvins a half hour ago to make sure you weren’t followed.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you’d know that, wouldn’t you?”
“I’d know. What kept you?”
“A young man I’ve cultivated who works in the catacombs of the Quai d’Orsay.”
“You’re honest.”
“And you misinterpret.” Gravet moved to the wall, turning his head back and forth, looking at both entrances of the alley; he was satisfied. “Since you called after your business at the Couronne Nouvelle—a call, incidentally, I wasn’t sure you’d ever make—I’ve been in touch with every conceivable contact who might know something about a lone woman in Paris looking for sanctuary, or papers, or secret transportation, and no one could help. It was really quite illogical; after all, there are only so many sources of illegal machinations, and precious few I’m not aware of. I even checked the Italian districts, thinking her escorts from Col des Moulinets might have provided her with a name or two. Nothing.… Then it occurred to me. Illegal efforts? Perhaps I was searching in the wrong areas. Perhaps, instead, such a woman might seek more legitimate assistance, without necessarily detailing her illegitimate reasons. After all, she was an experienced field operative. She had to know—or know of—certain personnel in allied governments if only through you.”
“The Quai d’Orsay.”
“Naturellement. But the undersides, the catacombs, where distinctly unpublicized conveniences had to exist for you.”
“If they did, I’m not aware of them. I crossed paths with a number of people in the ministries but I never heard of the catacombs.”
“London’s Foreign Office calls them Clearing Centres. Your own State Department refers to them less subtly. Division of Diplomatic Transfers.”
“Immunity,” said Havelock. “Did you find something?”
“My young friend spent the last several hours tracing it down. I told him the timing was advantageously narrow. If anything happened, it could only have happened today. So he returned to his little cave after the dinner hour on some pretext or other and riffled through the day’s security duplicates. He thinks he may have found it, but he can’t be certain and neither can I. However, you might be able to make the connection.”
“What is it?”
“At ten-forty-five this morning there was a memorandum from the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères ordering up an open identity. Subject: white female, early thirties, languages: Slavic, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, cover name and statistics requested immediately. Now, I realize there are dozens—”
“What section at the ministry?” interrupted Havelock.
“Four. Section Four.”
“Régine Broussac,” said Havelock. “Madame Règine Broussac. First Assistant Deputy, Section Four.”
“That’s the connection. It’s the name and signature on the request.”
“She’s twenty-ninth on my list, twenty-ninth out of thirty-one. We saw her—I saw her—for less than a minute on the street almost a year ago. I barely introduced Jenna. It doesn’t make sense; she hardly knows her, doesn’t know her.”
“Were the circumstances of your seeing her a year ago no-table?”
“I suppose so. One of their people was a double agent at the French embassy in Bonn; he made periodic flights to the East by way of Luckenwalde. We found him on the wrong side of Berlin. At a meeting of the Geheimdienst.”
“The Moscow puppet’s offspring of the S.S. I’d say quite notable.” Gravet paused, unfolding his hands. “This Broussac. She’s an older woman, isn’t she? Years ago a heroine of the Résistance?”
“She and her husband, yes. He was taken by the Gestapo; what they found of him wasn’t pleasant.”
“But she carried on.”
“Yes.”
“Did you, perhaps, tell any of this to your friend?”
Havelock thought back as he drew on the cigarette, then dropped it, crushing it underfoot “Probably. Régine’s not always easy to take; she can be abrupt, caustic, some call her a bitch, but she’s not She had to be tough.”
“Then let me ask you another question, the answer to which I’m vaguely familiar with, but it’s based merely on rumor; nothing I’ve read that pretended to be official.” The critic folded his hands again. “What prompted your friend to do what she did, to live the sort of life she led with you, and obviously before you?”
“1968,” replied Havelock flatly.
“The Warsaw-bloc invasion?”
“The cěrńý den of August. The black days. Her parents had died, and she was living in Ostrava with her two older brothers, one married. Both were Dubček activists, the younger a student, the older an engineer who was forbidden any meaningful work by the Novotný regime. When the tanks rolled in, the younger brother was killed in the streets, the older one rounded up by advance Soviet troops for ‘interrogation.’ He was crippled for life—arms and legs—totally helpless. He blew his brains out and his wife disappeared. Jenna traveled to Prague, where no one knew her, and went underground. She knew whom to reach, what she wanted to do.”
Gravet nodded; his face looked drawn even in the dim light. “The people who do what you do, quietly, so efficiently, you all have different stories, yet common themes run through them. Violence, pain … loss. And genuine revenge.”
“What did you expect? Only ideologues can afford to shout; we’ve generally got other things on our minds. It’s why we’re sent in first. It doesn’t take much to make us efficient.”
“Or to recognize one another, I imagine.”
“Under certain circumstances, yes. We don’t make too much of it. What’s your point?”
“The Broussac woman. Your friend from the Costa Brava would remember her. A husband, brothers, pain, loss … a woman alone. Such a woman would remember another woman who carried on.”
“She obviously did, I just wouldn’t have thought so.” Havelock nodded silently. “You’re right,” he said quietly. “Thanks for giving it perspective. Of course she would.”
“Be careful, Michael.”
“Of what?”
“Genuine revenge. There has to be a sympathie between them. She could turn you over to your own, trap you.”
“I’ll be careful; so will she. What else can you tell me about the memorandum? Was a destination mentioned?”
“No, she could be going anywhere. That will be set at Affaires Etrangères and kept quiet.”
“What about her cover? A name?”
“That was processed and beyond my young friend’s eyes, at least this evening. Perhaps tomorrow he can pry into files that are locked tonight.”
“Too late. You said the memorandum asked for an immediate response. That passport’s been mocked up and issued. She’s on her way out of France. I have to move quickly.”
“What’s one day? Twelve hours from now
perhaps we can find a name. You call the airlines on an emergency basis and they check their manifests. You’ll know where she’s gone.”
“But not how.”
“Je ne comprends pas.”
“Broussac. It she’s done this much for Jenna, she’ll do more. She wouldn’t leave her on her own at an airport somewhere. Arrangements were made. I have to know what they are.”
“And you think she’ll tell you?”
“She has to.” Havelock buttoned his loose-fitting jacket and pulled the lapels up around his neck. The alley was a tunnel for the damp breezes from below, and there was a chill. “One way or the other, she has to tell me. Thanks, Gravet, I owe you.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I’ll see Broussac tonight and leave in the morning … one way or the other. But before I go, there’s a bank here in Paris where I’ve got a safety deposit box; I’ll clean it out and leave an envelope for you at the vault cage. Call it part payment It’s the Banque Germaine on the Avenue George Cinq.”
“You’re most considerate, but is it wise? In all modesty, I’m something of a public figure and must be careful in my associations. Someone there might know you.”
“Not by any name you’ve ever heard of.”
“Then what name shall I use?”
“None. Just say the ‘gentleman from Texas’; he’s left an envelope for you. If it makes you feel any better, say you’ve never met me. I’m negotiating a painting for an anonymous buyer in Houston.”
“And if there are complications?”
“There won’t be. You know where I’m going tonight, and, by extension, tomorrow.”
“At the last, we’re professionals, aren’t we, Michael?”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s cleaner.” Havelock extended his hand. “Thanks again. You know the help you’ve been. I won’t belabor it.”
“You can forget about the envelope, if you like,” said Gravet, shaking hands, studying Michael’s face in the shadows. “You may need the money, and my expenses were minimal. I can always collect on your next trip to Paris.”
The Parsifal Mosaic Page 28