The Aquitaine Progression: A Novel

by Robert Ludlum

  “You didn’t kill him! Others did! Now, tell me about them.”

  Converse swallowed, brushing the tears from his eyes. “Yes, you’re right—there isn’t time, even for old Roger.”

  “There’ll be time later.”

  “If there’s a later,” said Joel, breathing deeply, finding control. “You know about René, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I read about it yesterday. I was sick—-Larry Talbot told me that you saw him in Paris. How even René thought you were disturbed, as Larry did when you talked to him. And René was killed for seeing you. Larry must be going out of his mind.”

  “That’s not the reason René was killed. Let’s talk about Larry. The first time I reached him I needed information without asking him directly. He was being used because of me, followed, and he didn’t know it. If I’d told him, the jock in him would have reacted, and he’d have been shot down in the street. But the last time I spoke with him I walked into it. I’d broken away from the people who’d caught me—I was exhausted, still frightened, and I was open with him. I told him everything.”

  “He mentioned it to me,” interrupted Val. “He said you were reliving your experiences in North Vietnam. There was a psychiatric term for it.”

  Converse shook his head, a short, derisive laugh emerging from his throat. “Isn’t there always? I suppose there were similarities and I’m sure I alluded to them, but that’s all they were, similarities.… Larry didn’t hear what I was saying. He was listening for words that confirmed what others had said about me, what he believed was true. He pretended to be the friend I knew but he wasn’t. He was a lawyer trying to convince a client that he was sick, that for everyone’s safety the client should turn himself in. When I realized what he was doing and that I’d told him where I was, I knew he’d spread the word, thinking he was doing the right thing. I just wanted to get out of there, so I halfway agreed with him, hung up, and ran.… I was lucky. Twenty minutes later I saw a car drive up in front of the hotel with two of my would-be executioners.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  Joel nodded. “The next day one of them stated for the record that he’d seen me at the Adenauer Bridge with Walter Peregrine. I wasn’t anywhere near that bridge—at least I don’t think so, I don’t know where it is.”

  “I read that story in the Times. The man was an Army officer, a major from the embassy named Washburn.”

  “That’s right.” Converse broke off a long blade of grass, twisting it, tearing it in his fingers. “They’re great at manipulating the media—newspapers, radio, television. Every word they put out is cleansed through channels, branded authentic, official. They take out lives as if people were pieces in a chess game, including their own. They don’t care; they only want to win. And it’s the biggest game in modern history. The terrifying thing is that they can win it.”

  “Joel, do you know what you’re saying? An American ambassador, the supreme commander of NATO, René, your father … you. Then killers in the embassy, a manipulated press, lies out of Washington, Paris, Bonn—all given official status. You’re describing some kind of Anschluss, some demonic, political takeover!”

  Converse looked at her in the moonlight, the breezes off the water bending the tall grass. “That’s exactly what it is, conceived by one man and run by a handful of others, all completely sincere in their beliefs and as persuasive as any group of professionals I’ve ever heard. But the bottom line is that they’re fanatics, killers in a quest they consider nothing less than holy. They’ve recruited—are recruiting—like-minded men everywhere, other frustrated professionals who think there’s nowhere else to turn. They grab at the theories and the promises, accepting—accepting, hell, extolling—the myths of efficiency and discipline and self-sacrifice, because they know it leads to power. Power to replace the inefficient, the undisciplined, the corrupters and the corrupted. They’re blind; they can’t see beyond their own distorted image of themselves.… If that sounds like a summation it probably is. I haven’t slept much, but I do a lot of thinking.”

  “The jury’s still in place, Joel,” said Valerie, her eyes alive, again leveled at his. “I don’t want a summation, I want it all. I think you should begin at the beginning—where it began for you.”

  “Okay. It started in Geneva—”

  “I knew it,” interrupted Val, whispering.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Go on.”

  “With a man I hadn’t seen in twenty-three years. I knew him by one name then, but in Geneva he was using another. He explained it and it didn’t matter. Except that it was a little eerie. I didn’t know how eerie it was, or how much he didn’t explain, or how many lies he told me in order to manipulate me. The hell of it is he did what he did for all the right reasons. I was the man they needed. They. And I don’t know who they are, only that they’re there, somewhere.… As long as I live—however long I’m permitted—I’ll never forget the words he used when he reached the core of why he had come to Geneva. “They’re back,” he said. ‘The generals are back.’ ”

  He told her everything, allowing his mind and his thoughts to wander, to include every detail he could recall. The countdown was in progress. In a matter of days or at best a week or two there would be eruptions of violence everywhere—like what was taking place in Northern Ireland right now. ‘Accumulations,’ they said. ‘Rapid acceleration!’ Only, no one knew who or what or where the targets were. George Marcus Delavane was the madman who conceived it all, and other powerful madmen were listening to him, following his orders, moving into positions from which they would leap for the controls. Everywhere.

  Finally he was finished, a part of him in anguish, knowing that if she was caught by the soldiers of Aquitaine, the narcotics inserted in her body would reveal the information that would result in her death. He said as much when he had finished, wanting desperately to breach the space between them and hold her, telling her how much he hated himself for doing what he knew he had to do. But he made no move toward her; her eyes told him not to; she was evaluating, thinking things out for herself.

  “Sometimes,” she said quietly, “when the dreams would come, or you drank too much, you’d talk about this Delavane. You’d become so panicked you’d tremble and close your eyes and every now and then you’d scream. You hated that man so. You were also frightened to death of him.”

  “He caused a lot of death, unnecessary death. Kids … children in grown-up uniforms who didn’t know that gung ho meant search and destroy and get blown apart.”

  “There’s no way you could be—what do they call it—transferring your emotions?”

  “If you believe that, I’ll drive you back to the Amstel and you can fly home in the morning and go back to your easels. I’m not crazy, Val. I’m here and it’s happening,”

  “All right, I had to ask. You didn’t live through some of those nights, I did. You were either crashing into the bed or so scratched by a bottle you didn’t know where you were.”

  “It didn’t happen often.”

  “I’ll grant you that; but when it did you were there. And hurting.”

  “Which is exactly why I was reached in Geneva—recruited in Geneva.”

  “And this Fowler, or Halliday, knew the exact words to use. Your own.”

  “Fitzpatrick got it all for him. He thought he was doing the right thing too.”

  “Yes, I know, you told me. What do you think happened to him? Fitzpatrick, I mean.”

  “For days I’ve tried to come up with a reason for them to keep him alive. I can’t. He’s more dangerous to them than I am. He’s worked the streets they’re undermining; he knows his way around Pentagon procurements and export clearances so well he could nail them with half the evidence. They’ve killed him.”

  “You liked him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did, and just as important, I was almost in awe of that mind of his. He was quick and perceptive and had one hell of an imagination, which he wasn’t afraid to use.”


  “He sounds like someone I was married to,” said Val gently.

  Converse kept his eyes on her for a moment, then looked away at the water. “If I get out of this alive—and I don’t really think I will—I’m going hunting. I’m going to find out who did it, who pulled the trigger. There won’t be any trial, no witnesses for the prosecution or the defense, no circumstances, mitigating or otherwise. Just me—and a gun.”

  “Sorry to hear that, Joel. I always admired your principles. They were a constant, like your attraction—your reverence, I think—for the law. It wasn’t all conceit and ambition, I knew that. It gave you the only real roots you ever had. You could look at the law and argue, as a child does with a parent, knowing the parent is some kind of absolute.… Your father never gave you that—by his own admission, incidentally.”

  “I think that’s pretty tasteless.”

  “I’m sorry. He brought it up once. I am sorry.”

  “It’s all right. We’re talking. We didn’t do much of that the last year or so together, did we?”

  “I didn’t think you wanted to.”

  “You’re on target. Forget it. There’s now.”

  “And there’s so much you can deny! All they have is words against you! I said the same thing to Larry—they say you were here, you were there, you did this and you did that, but you weren’t where they said you were and you didn’t do what they say! You’re the lawyer, Converse. For God’s sake, stand up and defend yourself!”

  “I’d never get near a courtroom, can’t you understand that? Wherever and whenever I showed up, someone would be there, someone ordered to kill me even if it meant losing his own life—considering the consequences, an insignificant sacrifice. My idea was to use the envelope—the dossiers and all the information they contained, the information that could only have come from government sources, which means I have partners somewhere in Washington. With all of that I could reach people I knew—the firm knew—and with Nathan’s help get them to listen to me, see I wasn’t crazy. Hear from me what I saw, what I heard, what I learned. But without that envelope, even Nate couldn’t help. Besides, he’d insist I go by the book and come in, telling me he had guarantees of full protection. There is no protection, not from them. They’re in embassies and naval stations and Army bases; in the Pentagon, police departments, Interpol, and the Department of State. They’re bag ladies on a train and commuters with attaché cases—you don’t know who they are but they’re there. And they can’t afford to let me live. I’ve heard their almighty credo firsthand.”

  “Checkmate,” said Val softly.

  “Check,” agreed Converse.

  “Then we have to find somebody else.”

  “What?”

  “Someone those people you want to reach would listen to. Someone whose presence might force those men in Washington who sent you out from Geneva to say who they are—to show themselves.”

  “Who are you thinking of? John the Baptist?”

  “Not John. Sam. Sam Abbott.”

  “Sam? I thought about him that night in Paris! How did you—?”

  “Like you, I’ve had a lot of time to think. In New York, on the plane, last night after I saw my aunt in Berlin.”

  “Your aunt?”

  “I’ll get to that.… I knew that if you were alive there had to be a reason why you stayed in hiding, why you didn’t come out shouting, denying all those insane things they were saying about you. It didn’t make sense; it wasn’t you. And if you’d been killed or captured it would have been on the front pages everywhere, on all the broadcasts. Since there was no such story, I assumed you had to be alive. But why did you keep running, hiding? Then I thought, My God, if Larry Talbot doesn’t believe him, who will? And if Larry didn’t, it meant that the people around him, men like him, all your friends and those so-called contacts you had had been reached and convinced that you were the maniac everyone in Europe was talking about. No one would touch you and you needed someone. Not me, heaven knows. I’m your ex-wife and I don’t carry any weight and you needed someone who did.… So I thought about everyone you’d ever talked about, everyone we knew. One name kept on coming back to me. Sam Abbott. Brigadier General Abbott now, according to the papers about six months ago.”

  “ ‘Sam the Man,’ ” said Joel, shaking his head in approval. “He was shot down three days after I was, and we were both shoved around from one camp to another. Once he was in the cell next to mine and we’d tap out Morse on the walls until they moved me. He stayed in the Air Force for all the right reasons. He knew he could be his best there.”

  “He thought the world of you,” said Val, her voice a mixture of conviction and quiet enthusiasm. “He said you did more for morale than anyone in the camps, that your last escape gave everyone hope.”

  “That’s a crock. I was a troublemaker—that’s what they called me—who could afford to take chances. Sam had the roughest job. He could have done what I did, but he was the ranking officer. He knew there’d be reprisals if he ever tried. He held everyone together, I didn’t.”

  “He said otherwise. I think he’s the reason you never thought much of your sister’s husband. Remember when Sam flew into New York and you tried to match him up with Ginny? We all had dinner at that restaurant we couldn’t afford.”

  “Ginny scared the hell out of him. He told me later that if she’d been drafted and put in charge of Command-Saigon it never would have fallen. He wasn’t going to refight that war for the rest of his life.”

  “And you lost a desirable brother-in-law.” Valerie smiled; then the smile faded and she leaned forward. “I can reach him, Joel. I’ll find him and talk to him, tell him everything you’ve told me. Above all, that you’re no more insane than I am, than he is. That you were manipulated by people you don’t know, men who lied to you so you’d do the work they either couldn’t do or were afraid to do.”

  “That’s unfair,” said Converse. “If they started digging around State and the Pentagon, there could be a rash of accidents—very fatal and very dead.… No, they were right. It had to start over here and be traced back. It was the only way.”

  “If you can say that after all you’ve been through, you’re saner than any of us. Sam will know that. He’ll help.”

  “He could,” said Joel slowly, pensively, breaking off another reed of grass. “He’d have to be careful—none of the usual channels—but he could do it. Three or four years ago, after you and I broke up, he found out I was in Washington for a few days and called me. We had dinner and later too many drinks; he ended up spending the night on the sofa in my hotel room. We talked—both of us too much. Me about me—and you—and Sam about his newest monumental frustration.”

  “Then you’re still close. It wasn’t that long ago.”

  “That isn’t my point. It’s what he was doing. He’d worked his ass off to get into the NASA program, but they turned him down. They said he was too valuable where he was. No one was in his class when it came to all-altitude, sub-mach maneuvers. He designed more patterns in the sky than any designer on Seventh Avenue ever did on the ground. He could look at an aircraft—specs aside—and tell you what it could do.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Oh, sorry. He’d been brought to Washington from wherever he was stationed as a consultant to the National Security Agency, cross-pollinating with the CIA. It was his job to evaluate the capabilities of the new Soviet and Chinese equipment.”

  “What?”

  “Airplanes, Val. He worked over at Langley and at a dozen different safe houses in Virginia and Maryland, appraising photographs brought out by agents, questioning defectors—especially pilots, mechanics and technicians. He knows the people I have to reach, he’s worked with them.”

  “You’re talking about the intelligence service, or services, I gather.”

  “Not just services,” corrected Joel. “Men who crawl around in the shadows of those paintings of yours. People trained to cut down bastards like Delavane and his tribe, cut
them out silently by using methods and techniques you and I know nothing about—drugs and whores and little boys. They should have been brought in at the beginning! Not Geneva, not me. They kill when it’s the pragmatic thing to do, and justify the killing because it’s in the ultimate interests of the country. And Lord, how I railed against them, the righteous attorney in me demanding that they be held accountable. Well, Mr. Naïve has changed—been changed—because I’ve seen the enemy and he isn’t us, not the us I think we are. If it takes a garrote to choke off a cancer when legal medicine can’t do it, hand me the wire, pal, and I’ll read the manual.”

  “I thought you loathed fanatics.”

  “I do. I … do.”

  “Sam,” persisted Valerie. “I’ll go home tomorrow and find him.”

  “No,” said Converse. “I want you to fly back tonight. You always carried your passport in your purse—still the same?”

  “Of course. But I have—”

  “I don’t want you going back to the Amstel. You’ve got to get out of Amsterdam. There’s a KLM night flight to New York at eleven-forty-five.”

  “But my things—”

  “They’re not worth it. Call the hotel when you get back. Wire them money and say it was an emergency. They’ll mail everything to you.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Never more so in my life. I think you should know the truth about René. He wasn’t killed because we met in Paris; nothing had happened then. I called him from Bonn four days ago and we talked. He believed me. He was shot to death because he sent me to Amsterdam, to reach a man who might have gotten me on a plane to Washington. That’s out now and it doesn’t matter. You do. You came here and you found me, and the people who are looking for me all over the city will know it soon if they don’t know it already.”

  “I never said I was going to Amsterdam,” Valerie broke in. “I specifically left word at the Kempinski that I was flying directly home, that if I got any calls to refer them to New York.”