The Parsifal Mosaic

by Robert Ludlum

  “I’m glad,” said the President. “I wouldn’t have let you.… You’ve got a lot to think about, Mr. Undersecretary, and not much time. How do you plan to handle the Soviets?”

  “Cautiously,” replied the mole. “With your permission, I’d like to substantiate a part of what they told me.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” said Halyard.”

  “Please, General, only a very minor part. They obviously have a fairly accurate source, so to deny the whole would only make them more suspicious, more hostile. We can’t afford that now. In the President’s words, we have to contain them as much as possible for as long as possible.”

  “How do you think you can do it?” asked Berquist, his eyes wary.

  “By admitting that Matthias collapsed from exhaustion. Everything else has been exaggerated way out of proportion to the medical diagnosis, which is of minor consequence. He’s been ordered to rest for several weeks; that’s all. The rest is rumor and wild gossip, the sort of thing that goes with a man like Matthias. Don’t forget, they have their memories of Stalin; they can’t dismiss them. By the time Stalin was dead most of Moscow believed he was certifiably insane.”

  “Excellent,” interjected Ambassador Brooks.

  “They can’t dismiss the other sources,” said Halyard, obviously wanting to agree but the strategist in him prohibiting it. “The leaks from unstable regimes—instant prime ministers, or whatever you called them. Matthias reached them.”

  “Then they have to be more specific with me. I think I can handle them case by case. At the least, they’d have to confer with Moscow, double-check the origins. Every case could buy us time.” Pierce stopped, turning to Berquist. “And time, Mr. President, is what’s on my mind now. I think the sooner I get back to New York and ask—no, demand—a meeting with the Soviet ambassador, the better chance I have of pushing their hands away from the buttons. I do believe they’ll listen to me. I can’t guarantee how long, but for a while—a few days, a week—they will.”

  “Which prompts the obvious question,” said the statesman, his well-tailored elbows on the table, his slender hands folded beneath his chin. “Why do you think they contacted you and not the more direct, crisis-oriented channels in Washington?”

  “I’d like to know that too,” added Berquist “There’s a phone never more than fifty feet away from me for such contingencies.”

  Arthur Pierce did not reply at first, his eyes shifting back and forth between the President and the ambassador. “It’s difficult for me to answer that without appearing arrogant or overly ambitious, and I don’t believe I’m either.”

  “We’ll accept that,” said Berquist. “Just give us your opinion.”

  “With all due respect to our ambassador in New York—and I’m sincere; he has an extremely likable presence, which is terribly important, and he’s had an outstanding career in government—”

  “Had,” the President broke in. “He’s a soft bush in a high wind, but the roots are deep. He’s there because of his lovable presence, and the fact that he doesn’t make a goddamn decision. We’ll accept that, too. Go on.”

  “The Soviets know you appointed me—at Matthias’s request—to be the State Department’s spokesman. To be your spokesman, sir.”

  “And the spokesman for Anthony Matthias,” said Brooks, nodding his head. “Which assumes a close relationship with our Secretary of State.”

  “I enjoyed such a relationship until a number of months ago—when, apparently, all relationships were terminated by his illness.”

  “But they think you still have it,” observed Halyard. “And why the hell not? You’re the closest thing we could have there except Matthias.”

  “Thank you, General. Basically, I think they came to me because they thought I’d know if there was any substance to the Matthias rumors. The madness.”

  “And if they thought you knew but were lying, what would be their response?”

  “They’d disregard the hot line, Mr, President. They’d put the world on nuclear alert.”

  “Get back to New York and do what you can. I’ll make the security arrangements for you to get down to Poole’s Island. Study those agreements until you know them word for word.”

  The paminyatchik rose from the dais, leaving his unnecessary notes behind.

  The limousine passed through the White House gates as Arthur Pierce shot forward in the seat, his hand gripping the strap, and, in a harsh voice, spoke to the driver assigned to him by the Department of State. “Get me to a phone booth as fast as you can.”

  “The mobile phone’s in working order, sir. It’s in the case in the center of the floor.” The driver removed his right hand from the wheel and gestured at the black leather receptacle behind him. “Just pull up on the latch.”

  “I don’t care to use this phone! A booth, please.”

  “Sorry, sir, just trying to be helpful.”

  The undersecretary checked himself. “I apologize. It’s those mobile operators; they can take forever, and I’m in a great hurry.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that complaint before.” The driver accelerated briefly, only to apply the brakes seconds later. “There’s one, sir. On the corner.”

  Pierce got out of the car and walked rapidly to the glass booth, coins in his hand. Inside, he pulled the door shut, inserted a quarter and dialed. “Your trip?” he asked curtly.

  “Smooth flight. Go ahead.”

  “Has the detail left for Maryland?”

  “About fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Stop them!”

  “How?”

  The paminyatchik bit his lip. There could be no mobile phones for them, no system where numbers could be recorded. He had only one question left before issuing the order. “Is there any way you can reach them once they’re on the premises? Any way at all?”

  The initial silence was his answer. “Not the way it’s orchestrated,” was the quiet reply.

  “Send a second detail immediately. Police vehicle, automatic weapons, silencers. Kill them; kill them all. No one must be left alive.”

  “You sent them!”

  “It’s a trap.”

  “Oh, Christ … Are you sure?”

  “I’ve just left the White House.”

  A low whistle was the astonished response. “It really paid off, didn’t it?”

  “They had no choice. As we say over here, I had all the marbles and I was shooting from the top of the circle. I’m inside. There’s also something else.”

  “What?”

  “Reach Mother. Rostov’s centered in on Victor. Find out how deep; elimination must be considered.”

  Loring walked down the steps of the Pentagon thinking about Lieutenant Commander Thomas Decker. He was not sure what Havelock was looking for, but he was fairly certain he did not have it. After having read Decker’s complete service record, including endless evaluation and fitness reports over at the Department of the Navy, Charley had decided to pull in a few debts owed him at the Pentagon. On the pretext that the officer was being considered for a sensitive embassy position that required tact and a fair degree of personality, he called on several friends in Army intelligence and said he needed a few confidential interviews. Could they help and did they remember when he had helped them? They could and they did.

  Five people—each held accountable for confidentiality—were brought separately to meet with him for informal, very-off-the-record conversations. There were three fellow naval officers who had served with Decker aboard the submarine Starfire, a secretary who had worked in his office for six months, and a marine who was on his Nuclear Committee team.

  Havelock had said Decker was a liar. If he was, Loring had found no evidence to support this characterization. He was, if anything, something of a moralizer, who had run a tight ship on the basis of strict Judeo-Christian principles to the point where he read the Lessons at each weekly interdenominational religious service he insisted be part of the Star-fire’s schedule. His reputation was that of a fi
rm but fair skipper; like Solomon, he weighed all sides of an issue before rendering a decision, which he then proceeded to justify on the basis of what he had heard. As a fellow officer put it, one might disagree with a given course of action on Decker’s part, but one understood how he had arrived at it. His “engineer’s mind,” said another, grasped the “blocks and tackles” of a complicated argument quicker than most, and he was adept at spotting fallacies. Yet he never, according to the third officer, used another man’s honest error to assert his own superiority; he accepted others’ mistakes compassionately, as long as they were the products of best efforts, which he made sure to determine that they had been. This, thought Loring, was not a liar’s approach.

  It was the secretary, however, who shed light on another side of Thomas Decker not readily perceived from his service record and the statements of his fellow naval officers. The lieutenant commander apparently went to great lengths to please and support his own superiors.

  He was always so tactful, so generous in his appraisals of other people’s work even when you knew he thought it wasn’t very good. There was this admiral … Then the White House put out a directive that choked him, but still he … And he gave his full endorsement to a JCS position which he told me was really counterproductive.… You talk about tact—well, the commander is about the most diplomatic man I’ve ever known.

  The last person to talk with Charley Loring was the marine, a major and a member of Decker’s Nuclear Contingency Committee. He put his own assessment of his colleague somewhat more succinctly.

  He kisses ass something fierce, but what the hell, he’s damned good. Also, that’s not exactly an unknown exercise around here. Tact? … Christ, yes, he’s got tact, but he’s not going to hang himself over something really important. I mean, he’ll find ways of greasing an issue so the oil’s all over the table.

  Translation: Spread the responsibility for disagreement, preferably as high as it will flow, but if this attitude made for a dangerous liar, there were few truthful men at the Pentagon—or anywhere else, for that matter.

  Loring reached his car in the side parking area, settled back in the seat, and pulled out the microphone from its cradle beneath the dashboard. He flipped the power switch and pressed the transmission button, making contact with the White House mobile operator.

  “Pateh me through to Sterile Five, please,” he instructed. While everything was fresh in his mind he would relay it all to Havelock. For all the good it might do.

  The Apache unit roamed the corridors of the Medical Center, one or the other of the two men keeping Dr. Matthew Randolph in sight wherever he went. Neither man approved of the arrangements and let Sterile Five know it; they were inadequate for this particular subject. Randolph was an aging jackrabbit who darted in and out of doors and hallways and outside exits with determined alacrity. Whatever had prompted the doctor to cooperate initially had evaporated as his contrariness reasserted itself. It was as though he were consciously trying to draw attention to himself, to make something happen, to challenge anyone who might be waiting for him in an empty room or darkened corner to show himself. Beyond the intrinsic difficulty of protecting such a person, the two men found it senselessly unsafe to be forced to show themselves. Professionals were, by training and nature, cautious, and Randolph was making them behave otherwise. Neither man relished the thought of being picked off by a sharpshooter a hundred-odd yards away as he followed the cantankerous doctor down a driveway or across a lawn. There was nothing amusing about the situation. Two men were not enough. Even one other man covering the outside would relieve the pressure; more than one, they understood, might defeat the purpose of the strategy by making the whole operation too obvious. One more, however, was mandatory.

  Sterile Five accommodated. The emergency call from Apache had interrupted Loring’s report to Havelock concerning Decker. Since Loring was free, he would be flown up by a Pentagon helicopter to within a few miles of the Medical Center, where a car would be waiting for him. He would be there in thirty-five to forty minutes.

  “How will we know when he gets here?”

  “Check the desk by an intercom phone. He’ll come inside and ask directions to—Easton. Then he’ll drive out and return on foot.”

  “Thank you, Sterile Five.”

  * * *

  The sun was at the treetop mark to the western sky, bathing the Virginia countryside in soft bursts of yellow and gold. Havelock wearily got up from the desk, his band still warm from clutching the ever-present telephone.

  “The Agency will dig all night, cross-checking with Cons Op and G-Two. They’ve located two photographs; six are still missing.”

  “I’d think photographs would be the first consideration in these files,” said Jenna, standing by the silver tray and pouring Michael a drink. “You can’t bring over such people if you don’t know what they look like.”

  He watched her as he repeated the words he had heard over the phone. “The men you chose were never considered that important,” Havelock said. “They were marginal, to begin with; their value was limited.”

  “They were specialists.”

  “Psychiatrists, psychologists, and a couple of professors of philosophy. Old men who were permitted the privilege of expressing their views—some vaguely offensive, none earth-shaking to the Kremlin.”

  “But they all questioned theories promoted by Soviet strategists. Their questions were relevant to everything you’ve learned about Anton Matthias.”

  “Yes, I know. We’ll keep looking.”

  Jenna carried the short glass of straight whiskey to the desk. “Here, you need this.”

  “Thanks.” Havelock took the glass and walked slowly toward the window. “I want to pull in Decker,” he said. “I’ve got to bring him down here. He’ll never tell me over the phone. Not everything.”

  “You’re convinced he’s your man, then?”

  “No question about it. I just had to understand why.”

  “Loring told you. He fawns on superiors, says he agrees with them even when he doesn’t. Such a man would do Mat-thias’s bidding.”

  “Strangely enough, that’s only part of it,” said Michael, shaking his head, then sipping his drink. “That description fits most ambitious men everywhere; the exceptions are rare. Too rare.”

  “Then what?”

  Havelock stared out the window. “He makes a point of justifying everything he does,” began Michael slowly. “He reads Lessons at services Instituted at his command; he plays at being Solomon. Underneath that tactful, unctuous exterior there has to be a zealot. And only a zealot in his position would commit a crime for which—as Berquist says—he’d be summarily executed in most countries, and even here he would spend thirty years in prison.… It wouldn’t surprise me if Lieutenant Commander Thomas Decker did it all. If I had my way, he’d be taken out and shot. For all the good it would do.”

  The sun had dropped below the trees, mottled orange rays, filtered by branches, spreading across the lawns and bouncing off the white walls of the Randolph Medical Center. Charles Loring crouched by the trunk of a tall oak at the far end of the parking area, the front entrance and rear emergency ramp in clear view, his radio in his hand. An ambulance had just brought in the victim of a traffic accident and his wife from U.S. 50. The injured man was being examined by Dr. Randolph and the Apache unit was in place in the corridor outside the examining room.

  The Cons Op agent looked at his watch. He’d been at his post for nearly three-quarters of an hour—after a hastily arranged flight from the Pentagon helicopter pad to a private field on the outskirts of Denton, eight minutes away, where a car was waiting for him. He understood the Apache team’s concerns. The man they were assigned to protect was making things difficult, but Charley would have handled it differently. He would have sat on this Randolph and told the doctor he didn’t give a good goddamn whether he was chopped down or not, that the primary objective of the stakeout was to take even one of those coming after him, that that
man’s life was far more important than his. Such an explanation might have made Randolph more cooperative. And Loring might have been having a decent dinner somewhere, instead of waiting for God knew what on a cold, wet lawn in Maryland.

  Charley looked up toward the intruding sound. A black-and-white patrol car swerved into the rear parking area, turned abruptly, and came to a sudden stop at the side of the emergency ramp. Two police officers got out quickly and raced up toward the doors; one leaping on the platform, both awkwardly holding their sides. Loring lifted the radio to his lips.

  “Apache, this is Outside. A police car just drove up to the emergency dock in a hurry. Two cops are entering.”

  “We see them,” came the reply, accompanied by static. “We’ll let you know.”

  Charley looked again at the patrol car, and what he saw struck him as odd. Both doors were left open, something the police rarely did unless they intended to stay dose to their vehicles. There was always the possibility that a radio might be tampered with, or a signal book stolen, or even concealed weapons …

  The static erupted, words following. “Interesting, but no sweat,” said an Apache as yet unseen by the Cons Op Agent. “Seems the wreck on Highway Fifty was traced to a prominent member of a Baltimore family. Mafia all the way, wanted on a dozen counts. They’ve fust been admitted for identification and any possible last statements.”

  “Okay. Out.” Loring lowered the radio and considered a cigarette, deciding against it for fear the light would give him away. His eyes strayed again to the stationary patrol car, his mind wandering. Suddenly, there was something to think about, something immediate.

  He had passed a police station on the road to the Medical Center, not five minutes away. He had noticed it at first not from the sign but by the cluster of three or four patrol cars in the side lot—not black-and-whites, but red-and-whites, the kind of bright color scheme often adopted by shore resort areas. And if a sought-after, major-league mafioso had been taken minutes ago to a local hospital after a collision, there certainly would be more than one patrol car covering the action.