The Parsifal Mosaic

by Robert Ludlum

  As the two civilians walked down the allée and out of sight, Havelock noticed the metal sign affixed to a post on the other side of the street. Had he seen it before? Of course he had! Every time he had driven or taken a cab out to Matthias’s house in Georgetown. There was a blue arrow preceded by the words CHESAPEAKE AND OHIO CANAL. It was the picturesque waterway that separated the stridency of Washington from the tranquillity of the residential enclaves in Georgetown, whose quiet streets housed the wealthiest and most powerful men in the nation’s capital.

  Georgetown.

  Are there alarms inside?

  Only in Georgetown.

  Anton Matthias was somewhere down that street, somewhere over a bridge, with or without water, in a house that was a lie. My God! Had they simulated his house so as to rehearse his abduction? It was entirely possible; Anton’s residence was protected by presidential order, guards were on duty around the clock to protect the nation’s most valuable living asset. It was not only possible, it was the only way it could have been done. Matthias had to have been taken at home, the alarms circumvented, the guards pulled away and replaced by State Department orders-orders issued by liars. A mission had been rehearsed and executed.

  He moved out into the street, walking casually—an enlisted man getting some air or getting away from his fellow soldiers. He reached the brick building on the left and crossed over the lawn to the sidewalk; the receding street was dark, no lamps shone above the line of short trees. He walked faster, feeling more comfortable in the shadows, and noted the paths that turned to the right, leading to a row of three Quonsets—there were lights in several windows and the glow of a few television sets. He assumed these were the living quarters of whatever officers there were and their civilian counterparts. Graduates of Novgorod and the Urals?

  Suddenly, civilization stopped. The street and the sidewalk ended and there was nothing ahead but a dirt road bordered by high foliage and darkness. But it was a road; it led some-where. Havelock began a slow lope; jogging would be his excuse if he was stopped—before he took out his interrogator. He thought of Jenna, going from telephone booth to telephone booth five miles away on the mainland, reaching a bewildered Cons Op emergency operator and saying words that brought no response: there might never be a response. Michael understood that, and, strangely, it served only to infuriate him. One accepted the risks in his profession and treated them with respect, for they induced fear and caution—a valuable protection—but one could not accept betrayal by one’s own. It was the final circle of futility, proof of the ultimate sham—of a wasted life.

  A glow of light. Far down the road, to the left. He broke into a run, and as he came nearer he knew what it was: the outlines of a house, part of a house, a house that stopped at the second floor—but the first two stories were unmistakable. It was the façade of Anton’s home in Georgetown, the area of the street accurate in every detail. He approached the end of the dirt road and halted where the tarred surface began on the left. He stared in disbelief.

  The brick steps were the same brick steps that led up to the porticoed entrance with the white door and the carriage lamps and the brass hardware. Everything was identical with its original hundreds of miles away, even to the lace curtains in the windows; he could picture the rooms inside and knew that they, too, were the same. The lessons of Novgorod had been learned well, their fruits transplanted to a small island minutes away from the coast of the United States, seconds by air. My God, what’s happened?

  “Stay right where you are, soldier!” The command came from behind. “What the hell do you think you’re doing out here!”

  Havelock turned, covering the .45 as best he could. A guard stepped out of the foliage with a gun in his hand, but he was not military; he was dressed in civilian clothes. Havelock said, “What’s wrong with you? A guy can’t take a walk?”

  “You weren’t walking, you were running.”

  “Jogging, pal. Ever heard of it?”

  “Every morning, pal, when I don’t pull this late-night crap. But on the island road with everybody else, not down here. You know the rules. No one goes past sector six; you don’t go off the macadam.”

  “Hey, come on, man,” said Havelock. “Don’t be a hard-nose.”

  A sudden swelling of music burst from the house, filling the night and drowning out the crickets. Michael knew it well; it was one of Matthias’s favorites. Handel’s Water Music. His přítel was there!

  “Every night, a goddamn concert,” said the civilian.

  “How come?”

  “How the hell do I know? He goes into the garden and plays that stuff for an hour or more.”

  Music is for thought, Mikhail. The better the music, the better the thinking. There’s a causal relationship, you know.

  “Nice of you people to let him have it.”

  “Why not? What else has he got, and where’s he going to go? But you’re going to get your GI ass in a sling if you don’t get out of here.” The guard holstered his gun inside his jacket. “You’re lucky I don’t—Hey, wait a minute! You’ve got a weapon!”

  Havelock lunged, gripped the man’s throat and hurled him to the ground over his left leg. He fell on the guard and rammed his knee into the man’s chest as he ripped the field jacket open and pulled out the hunting knife. “You’re not lucky at all,” he whispered. “Where are you from, skotina? Novgorod? The Urals? A paminyatchik?” Michael held the point of the knife’s black between the guard’s nostrils and lips. “I’m going to cut your face off unless you tell me what I want to know. First, how many men are up there? Easy!” He released the pressure on the man’s throat; the guard coughed.

  “You’ll … never get off here,” he choked.

  Havelock drew blood, the trickle covering the man’s lips. “Don’t push me, butcher! I have a lot of memories, poni-mayu. How many men?”

  “One.”

  “Liar!”

  “No, one! The two of us are on till four. One outside, one inside!”

  “Alarms. Where are they? What are they?”

  “Crossbeams, shoulder to knee. In the door.”

  “That’s all?”

  “It’s all that’s on. To keep him in.”

  “The garden?”

  “Wall. Too high. For Christ’s sake, where’s he going to go? Where are you going to go?”

  “We’ll see.” Michael pulled the guard’s head up by his hair, then dropped the knife and struck him, a sharp, hard blow behind the right ear; the man collapsed. Havelock took out a rawhide lace, cut it in two with the knife, and bound the guard’s hands and feet. Finally, he gagged the man with his own handkerchief, tying the cloth in place with one of the three remaining laces. He dragged the unconscious body into the foliage and started for the “house.”

  The Water Music soared into its thematic march, horns and strings intermingling, reverberating above and behind the half-house. Havelock climbed the short hill that bordered the brick steps until he was within ten feet of the first lace-curtained window. He crouched and crept to it, his head below the sill, then stepped to the side and stood up. He inched his face to the glass. The room was exactly as he remembered it from another time and place. The worn, fine Oriental rugs, the heavy, comfortable armchairs, the brass lamps; it was Matthias’s sitting room—his parlor, as he called it—a place to greet visitors. Michael had spent many pleasant hours in that room, yet this was not that room.

  He crouched and made his way to the edge of the strange structure, rounded the corner, and started toward the rear, toward a wall he could picture in his mind, a wall that enclosed a garden-hundreds of miles away. There were three windows to pass, to duck under, to check, and the second window told him what he had to know. Inside, a heavyset man sat on a couch, smoking a cigarette, his feet on a coffee table, watching television. The volume was high, apparently to counteract the stereophonic sound of the music.

  Havelock ran to the wall and jumped; he clung to the top with both hands, and then, his chest aching and the
wound close to tearing apart, he pulled himself up. He lay prone, catching his breath, letting the pain subside.

  Below, the eerily lit garden was as he remembered it. Soft light coming from the house, a single lamp on the all-important chess table between two brown wicker chairs, other white wicker furniture, and a slate path roaming in circles around the beds of flowers.

  There he was, his beloved přítel, sitting in a chair at the end of the garden, his eyes closed, seeing images the music evoked in his mind. The tortoiseshell glasses were still in place; the silver hair waved back over his strong head.

  Silently Havelock swung his legs over the side, rolled on his stomach and dropped to the ground. He stayed in the shadows for several moments; the music had dropped to pianissimo, and the sound of the television could be heard distinctly. The guard would remain inside—that was to say, he would remain inside until Michael wanted him. And when he had taken the hired gun of liars, he would use him or kill him. Somehow.

  Havelock came away slowly from the wall and walked down the circular path toward Matthias.

  For no apparent reason the statesman suddenly opened his eyes. Michael rushed forward holding up both hands, the gesture a command for silence—but it was ignored. Matthias spoke, his deep voice rising with the music. “To je dobré srovnání, Mikhail. So good of you to come around. I was thinking about you the other day, about that paper you wrote several weeks ago. What was it? The ‘Effects of Hegelian Revisionism’ or some such immodest and inappropriate title. After all, my darebák akademik, Hegel is his own best revisionist, no? The revisionist maximus! How do you like that?”

  “Anton …?”

  Again suddenly, without warning, Matthias rose from his chair, eyes wide in a face that was contorted. He began backing away unsteadily, his arms crossed in front of his chest, his voice now a horrible whisper: “No! You cannot … you must not … come near me! You don’t understand, you can never understand! Get away from me!”

  Havelock stared; the shock was as unbearable as the truth.

  Anthony Matthias was insane.

  BOOK THREE

  26

  “Raise your hands! Walk to the wall and spread your legs! Move! … Now! Lean into the brick, palms straight out!”

  As if in a trance, his eyes still on Matthias, who was crouching like a child on one knee by a rosebush, Havelock did as the guard ordered. He was in shock, his impressions a blur, his thoughts suspended. His přítel, his mentor … his father … was mad. The shell of the man who had astonished the world with his brilliance, with his perceptions, was cowering by the flowers, his head trembling, the frightened eyes behind the glasses filled with a terror no one knew but himself.

  Havelock had heard the guard’s footsteps on the slate and known the blow was coming. Somehow it had not mattered. Nothing mattered.

  A spreading web of pain shuddered through his head, and the darkness came.

  He was on a parlor rug, circles of bright white light spinning in front of his eyes, his temples throbbing, his drenched, sand-filled trousers pressing against his skin. He could hear men rushing up the steps outside, barking orders in panic. As they came through the door he felt his jacket, his waist; his gun had been taken, but he had not been searched. Presumably, that process and the interrogation would be left to the guard’s superiors.

  Two men approached: one in uniform, a major; the other, a civilian. He knew the latter; he was from State, an agent from Cons Op he had worked with in London or Beirut, or Paris or … he could not recall.

  “That’s him,” said the civilian. “Bradford told me it might be-he didn’t know how-but it is. He gave me the details; you’re not involved.”

  “Just get him out of here,” replied the soldier. “What you do is your business.”

  “Hello, Havelock.” The man from State looked down with contempt. “You’ve been busy. It must have been fun killing that old guy in New York. What were you doing? Setting him up for contingency funds, with a little more of the same down here? Get on your feet, you bastard!”

  Body and head racked, Michael slowly rolled onto his knees and pushed himself up. “What happened to him? What happened?”

  “I don’t answer questions.”

  “Somebody has to … for Christ’s sake, somebody has to!”

  “And give you a free ticket? No way, you son of a bitch.” The civilian addressed the guard, who was standing across the room. “Did you search him?”

  “No, sir. I just removed his weapon and punched the alarm. There’s a flashlight on his belt and some kind of pouch.”

  “Let me help you, Charley,” said Havelock, spreading the field jacket and reaching for the oilcloth packet. “It is Charley, isn’t it? Charley Loring … was it Beirut?”

  “It was, and keep your goddamned hands still!”

  “What you want’s in there. Go on, take it. It won’t detonate.”

  The man from State nodded at the major; the soldier stepped forward and grabbed Michael’s hands as Charles Loring ripped the packet off the webbed belt.

  “Open it,” continued Havelock. “It’s from me to you. All of you.”

  The Cons Op agent unzipped the packet and took out the folded yellow pages. The major released his grip as the civilian walked to a floor lamp and began reading. He stopped, looked over at Michael, then spoke to the soldier. “Wait outside, Major. And you,” he added, glancing at the guard. “In the other room, please.”

  “Are you sure?” asked the officer.

  “Very,” said Charley. “He’s not going anywhere, and I’ll shout if I need you.” The two men left, the soldier out the front door, the guard into the next room. “You’re the lowest piece of garbage I’ve ever known,” said the man from State.

  “It’s a carbon, Charley.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Call Cons Op emergency. Every fifteen minutes since eleven o’clock they’ve gotten a message. It’s in the form of a question: ‘Billiards or pool?’ The response is, ‘We prefer pool.’ Tell them to give it.”

  “Then what?”

  “Patch yourself into the next call, give the response, and listen.”

  “So some other piece of garbage can read this to me.”

  “Oh, no, just twelve seconds’ worth. No way to trace. And don’t bother to think about giving me a needle. I’ve been in therapy before, so I took precautions. I have no idea where the calls are coming from, take my word.”

  “I wouldn’t take your word for a goddamn thing, garbage!”

  “You’d better right now, because if you don’t, copies of those pages will be sent to appropriate addresses all over Europe. From Moscow to Athens, from London to Prague—from Paris to Berlin. Get on the phone.”

  Twenty-one minutes later the man from State stared at the wall as he gave the response to Jenna Karas. Eleven seconds after that he hung up and looked over at Havelock. “You’re everything they said you were. You’re filth.”

  “And ‘beyond salvage’?”

  “That’s s right.”

  “Then so are you, because you’re programmed, Charley. You’re useless. You forgot how to ask questions.”

  “What?”

  “You just accepted the verdict on me. You knew me—knew my record—but it didn’t make any difference. The word came down and the good little sheep said, ‘Why not?’ ”

  “I could kill you.”

  “And live with the consequences? Don’t do that. Call the White House.”

  He could hear the deafening roar of the giant helicopter’s rotating blades and knew that the President of the United States had arrived at Poole’s Island. It was midmorning, and the Georgia sun was burning the pavements outside the open window. He was in a room, out there was no question that it was a cell even though there were no bars in the single window. He was two stories off the ground; there were four soldiers beneath, and the eerie façades and photographs of familiar buildings could be seen beyond. A world of lies, of artifice, of transplanted, warped real
ity.

  Havelock walked back to the bed—more cot than bed—and sat down. He thought of Jenna, what she must be going through—again; what resources she had to summon to survive the unbearable tension. And of Matthias—good God, what had happened? Michael relived the horrible scene in the garden, trying to find a thread of sense.

  You must not come near me. You don’t understand. You can never understand!

  Understand what?

  He had no idea how long he sat there thinking; he only knew that his thoughts were interrupted by the crack of the glass panel in the center of the door. A face appeared; it was under the gold braid of a visored cap. The door opened, and a broad-shouldered, middle-aged colonel walked in, gripping a pair of handcuffs.

  “Turn around,” he ordered. “Extend your arms.”

  Havelock did as he was told, and the cuffs were clamped around his wrists. “What about my feet?” asked Michael curtly. “Aren’t they considered weapons?”

  “I’ll have a much more effective one in my hand,” said the officer, “and I’ll be watching you every second. You pull one thing I could even misinterpret, I’m inside, and you’re dead.”

  “A one-on-one conference. I’m flattered.”

  The colonel spun Havelock around. “I don’t know who you are, or what you’re doing, or what you’ve done, but you remember this, cowboy. That man is my responsibility, and there’s no way I wouldn’t blow you out of this room and ask questions later.”