The Aquitaine Progression: A Novel

by Robert Ludlum

  The roar of an engine came first and then the sight of a black Mercedes swerving off the country road into the drive. It sped up to the porch, jolting to a stop; two men climbed out and the driver raced around the trunk to join his companion. They stood for a moment looking up at the porch and the windows of the house, then turned and scanned the grounds, walking over to Hermione Geyner’s car and peering inside. The driver nodded and reached under his jacket to pull out a gun; they went back to the steps, taking them rapidly, heading across the porch to the door. Finding no bell, the man without a gun in his hand knocked harshly, repeatedly, finally pounding with a closed fist while twisting the knob to no avail.

  Guttural shouts came from inside as the door swung back, revealing an angry Frau Geyner dressed in a tattered bathrobe. Her voice was that of a shrewish teacher lambasting two students for cheating when in fact they had not. Each time one of the men tried to speak her voice became even more shrill. Cowed, the man with the gun put it away, but his companion suddenly grabbed Valerie’s aunt by the shoulders and spoke harshly, directly, forcing her to listen.

  Hermione Geyner did listen, but when she replied her answers were equally harsh and delivered with authority. She pointed down at the overgrown drive and described what she had apparently witnessed in the dark, early-morning hours—what she herself had accomplished. The men looked at each other, their eyes questioning and afraid, but not questioning what the old woman had told them, only what she could not tell them. They raced across the porch and down the steps to their car. The driver started the engine with a vengeance so pronounced the ignition mechanism flew into a high-pitched, grinding scream. The Mercedes plunged forward, skirting past Frau Geyner’s car, and in a sudden attempt to avoid a hole in the overgrown pavement, the driver swung to his left, then to his right, skidding on the surface, the tires sliding on the crawling vine weeds until the side of the car careened into the disintegrating stone gate. Roars of abuse from both men filled the morning air as the Mercedes straightened itself out and raced through the exit. It swung left and sped down the country road as Hermione Geyner slammed the door shut on the porch.

  There was nothing any longer without risk, thought Joel, as he crawled out of the foliage, but the risk for him now was one he faced with a degree of confidence. Aquitaine had used up Frau Geyner; there was nothing more it could learn from her. To return to a madwoman held a greater risk for them. Envelope in hand, he walked across the ugly drive, up the creaking steps, and across the sagging porch to the door. He knocked, and ten seconds later a screeching Hermione Geyner opened it. He then did something so totally unpredictable; so completely out of character, he did not believe it himself as he followed through with the sudden impulse.

  He punched the old woman squarely in the center of her lower jaw. It was the beginning of the longest eight hours of his life.

  The bewildered security police from the MGM-Grand Hotel reluctantly refused Valerie’s offer of a gratuity, especially as she had raised it from $50 to $100, thinking that the economy of Las Vegas was somewhat different from New York’s and certainly Cape Ann’s. They had driven around the streets of the old and the new city for nearly forty-five minutes, until both men, both professionals in their work, assured her that no one was following their car. And they would put a special patrol on the ninth floor in an attempt to catch the man who had harassed her, who had attempted to gain entrance to the room. They were, of course, naturally chagrined that she took a room across the boulevard at Caesars Palace.

  Val tipped the bellman, took her small overnight bag from him, and closed the door. She ran to the phone on the table by the bed.

  “I haff to go to the toilet!” shouted Hermione Geyner, holding an ice pack under her chin.

  “Again?” asked Converse, his eyes barely open, sitting across from the old woman, the envelope and the gun in his lap.

  “You make me nervous. You struck me.”

  “You did the same and a hell of a lot more to me last night,” said Joel, getting up from the chair and shoving the gun under his belt, the envelope in his hand.

  “I vill see you hanging from a rope! Betrayer! How many hours now? You think our operatives in the Untergrund will not miss me?”

  “I think they’re probably feeding pigeons in the park, cooing along with the best of them. Go on, I’ll follow.”

  The telephone rang. Converse grabbed the old woman by the back of her neck and propelled her to the antique desk and the phone. “Just as we practiced,” he whispered, holding her firmly. “Do it!”

  “Ja?” said Hermione Geyner into the telephone, Joel’s ear next to hers.

  “Tante! Ich bin’s, Valerie!”

  “Val!” shouted Converse, pushing the old woman away. “It’s me! I’m not sure the phone’s clean; she was set up, I was set up! Quickly! Tell Sam I was wrong—I think I was wrong! The countdown could be assassinations—all over the goddamned place!”

  “He knew that!” shouted Valerie in reply. “He’s dead, Joel! He’s dead! They killed him!”

  “Oh, Christ! There’s no time, Val, no time! The phone!”

  “Meet me!” screamed the ex-Mrs. Converse.

  “Where? Tell me where?”

  The pause was less than several seconds, an eternity for both. “Where it began, my darling!” cried Valerie. “Where it began but not where it began.… The clouds, darling! The patch and the clouds!”

  Where it began. Geneva. But not Geneva. Clouds, a patch. A patch!

  “Yes, I know!”

  “Tomorrow! The next day! I’ll be there!”

  “I have to get out of here.… Val … I love you so much! So much!”

  “The clouds, my darling—my only darling—oh, God, stay alive!”

  Joel ripped the telephone out of the wall as Hermione Geyner came rushing at him, swinging a heavy brass-handled poker from the fireplace. The iron hook glanced off his cheek; he grabbed her arm and shouted, “I haven’t got time for you, you crazy bitch! My client doesn’t have time!” He spun her around and pushed her forward, picking up the envelope from the table. “You were on your way to the bathroom, remember?”

  In the hall Converse saw what he had hoped he would see in the red lacquered bowl on the wall table; the old woman had dropped them there last night—the keys to her car. The bathroom door pulled out—it was the solution. Once she was inside, Joel dragged over a heavy chair from against the wall and jammed the thick rim under the knob, kicking the legs in place, wedging them into the floor. She heard the commotion and tried to open the door; it held. The harder she pressed, the more firmly the legs became embedded.

  “We convene again tonight!” she roared. “We will send out our best people! The best!”

  “God help Eisenhower when you meet,” muttered Converse, inwardly relieved. If Aquitaine did not have the phone covered, the old woman would be found in a few hours. The envelope under his arm, he took the keys from the lacquered bowl and pulled the gun from his belt. He ran to the front door and opened it cautiously. There was no one, nothing, only Hermione Geyner’s car parked on the weed-ridden drive. He went outside and pulled the door shut, leaving it unlocked, and raced down the steps to the automobile. He started the engine; there was half a tank of gas, enough to get him far away from Osnabrück before refilling. Until he could get a map, he would go by the sun heading south.

  Valerie made arrangements at the travel office in Caesars Palace, paying cash and using her mother’s maiden name, perhaps hoping some of that resourceful woman’s wartime expertise might find its way to the daughter. There was a 6:00 P.M. Air France flight to Paris from Los Angeles. She would be on it, the hour’s trip to LAX made on a chartered plane to which she would be chauffeured, thus avoiding the terminal at McCarran Airport. Such courtesies were always available, usually for celebrities and casino winners. There was no basic problem with a false name on the Air France passenger manifest—at worst, only embarrassment, in her case easily explained: her former husband, now a stranger, was an
infamous man, a hunted man; she preferred anonymity. She would not legally be required to produce her passport until she arrived at immigration in Paris, and once through, she could travel anywhere she wished, under any name she gave, for she would not be leaving the borders of France. It was why she had thought of Chamonix.

  She sat in the chair, looking out the window, thinking of those days in Chamonix. She had flown over with Joel to Geneva, where he had three days of conferences with the promise of five days off to go skiing at Mont Blanc, a bonus from John Brooks, the brilliant international negotiator of Talbot, Brooks and Simon, who flatly refused to give up some reunion dinner for what he termed “lizard-shit meetings between idiots—our boy can do it. He’ll charm their asses off while emptying their corporate pockets.” It was the first time Joel really knew that he was on his way, yet oddly enough he was almost as excited about the skiing. They both enjoyed it so much. Together. Perhaps because they were both good.

  But Joel had not enjoyed the skiing at Chamonix that trip. On the second day he had taken a terrible fall and sprained his ankle. The swelling was enormous, the pain as acute in his head as in his foot. She had knighted him “Sir Grump”; he demanded his Herald Tribune in the morning, childishly refusing to have his breakfast before the paper arrived, and even more childishly playing the martyr as his wife went off to the slopes. When she had suggested that she really did not care to go without him, it was worse. He had charged her with trying to be some kind of saint. He would be perfectly fine—he had things to read, which artists would not understand. Reading, that was.

  Oh, what a little boy he had been, thought Val. But during the nights it was so different, he was so different. He became the man again, loving and tender, at once the generous lion and the sensitive lamb. They made love, it seemed, for hours on end, the moonlight on the snow outside, finally the hint of the sun’s earliest rays on the mountains until they fell—together—into exhausted sleep.

  On their last day before heading back to Geneva for the night flight to New York, she had surprised him. Instead of going out for a few final hours of skiing, she had gone downstairs at the hotel and bought him a sweater, to which she sewed a large patch on the sleeve. It read: DOWNHILL RACER—CHAMONIX. She had presented it to him while a porter waited outside the door with a wheelchair—she had made arrangements through the influential manager of the hotel. They were taken to the center of Chamonix, to the cable car that scaled thirteen thousand feet to the top of Mont Blanc—through the clouds to the top of the world, it seemed. When they reached the final apex, where the view was breathtaking, Joel had turned to her, with that silly, oblique look in his eyes that belied everything he was and everything he had been through—again, as always, his way of thanking her.

  “Enough of this foolish scenery,” he had said. “Take off your clothes. It’s not really that cold.”

  They had hot coffee, sitting on a bench outside, the magnificence of nature all around them. They held hands, and Christ! She had felt such love that she had to hold back the tears.

  She felt the love now and got out of the chair, rejecting the intrusion of emotion. It was the wrong time. Whatever clarity of mind she could summon was needed now. She had to travel halfway across the world avoiding God knew how many people who were looking for her.

  He had said he loved her—“so much.” Was it love or was it need … support? She had replied with the words “my darling”—no, she had said more than that; she had been far more specific. She had said “my only darling.” Was it a response born of the panic?

  Not knowing was the worst of it, thought Converse, studying the road signs in the wash of the headlights. He had been driving for nearly seven hours after picking up a map in the city of Hagen while refilling the tank—seven hours, and according to the map he was still a long way from the border crossing he had chosen. The reason lay in his ignorance, in not knowing whether Hermione Geyner’s car had been the object of a search in the first few hours out of Osnabrück. It undoubtedly was now—officially by the police—but during those early hours he could have made better time on the highways he dared not use in case Aquitaine had raced to Geyner’s house with Val’s call. He had traveled circuitous backcountry roads, his pilot’s eye on the sun, veering always south until he reached Hagen. Now the back roads were a necessity; whether they were before he would never know. Now, however, Hermione Geyner and her band of lunatics must have gone to the police to report her stolen car. Joel had no idea what they could possibly say that would convince the Polizei that Valerie’s aunt was an injured party, but a stolen car was a stolen car, whether driven by Saint Francis of Assisi or Jack the Ripper. He would stay on the back roads.

  Lennestadt to Kreuztal, crossing the Rhine at Bendorf and following the west bank of the river through Koblenz, Oberwesel, and Bingen, then south to Neustadt and east to Speyer and the Rhine again. And again south through the border towns of Alsace-Lorraine, finally to the city of Kehl. It was where he would cross into France, a decision based on the fact that several years ago John Brooks had sent him to Strasbourg, the French city across the river border, to a terribly dull conference at which eight lawyers argued so continuously with each other over minor aspects of language and translation that nothing of substance was accomplished. As a result, Joel had walked the city and driven out to the countryside, awed by its beauty. He had taken several boat trips up and down the Rhine, and now he remembered the ferries that shuttled back and forth between the piers of Germany and France. Above all, he remembered the crowds in Strasbourg. Always the crowds had helped him—he needed them especially now.

  It would take another three to four hours of driving, but somewhere he would have to stop and sleep for a while. He was exhausted; he had not slept for so long he could not accurately remember when he had last closed his eyes. But there was Chamonix and Val ahead. He had told her he loved her—he had said it. He had gotten it out after so many years; the relief was incredible, but the response even more incredible. “My darling—my only darling.” Did she mean it? Or was she supporting him again, the artist’s emotions riding over reason and experience?

  Aquitaine! Push everything out of your mind and get into France!

  The polar flight from Los Angeles to Paris was uneventful, the moonscapes of ice over the northernmost regions of the world hypnotically peaceful, suspending thought by the sheer expanse of their cold infinity. Nothing seemed to matter to Val as she looked down from the substratosphere. But whatever tranquility the flight produced, it came to an end in Paris.

  “Are you in France on business or on holiday, madame?” asked the immigration official, taking Valerie’s passport and typing her name into the computer.

  “Un peu de l’un et de l’autre.”

  “Vous parlez frančais?”

  “C’est ma langue préférée. Mes parents étaient parisiens,” explained Val, and continued in French, “I’m an artist and I’ll be talking with several galleries. Naturally, I’ll want to travel—” She stopped, seeing the official’s eyes glance up from his screen, studying her. “Is anything the matter?” she asked.

  “Nothing of concern, madame,” said the man, picking up his telephone and talking in a low voice, the words indistinguishable in the hum of the huge customs hall. “There is someone who wishes to speak with you.”

  “That’s of considerable concern to me,” objected Valerie, frightened. “I’m not traveling under my own name for a very good reason—which I suspect that machine of yours has told you, and I will not be subjected to interrogations or the indignity of the press! I’ve said all I have to say. Please reach the American embassy for me.”

  “There is no need for that, madame,” said the man, replacing the phone. “It is not an interrogation and no one of the press will know you are in Paris unless you tell them. Also, there is nothing in this machine but the name on your passport—and a request.”

  A second uniformed official hurriedly entered the roped-off aisle from a nearby office. He bowed
politely. “If you will come with me, madame,” he said quietly in English, obviously noticing the fear in her eyes and assuming her reluctance. “You may, of course, refuse, as this is in no way official, but I hope you will not. It is a favor between old friends.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Chief inspector of immigrations, madame.”

  “And who wishes to speak with me?”

  “It would be up to him to tell you that—his name does not appear on the request. However, I’m to give you another name. Mattilon. He says you two were old friends and he respected him a great deal.”

  “Mattilon?”

  “If you will be so kind as to wait in my office, I will personally clear your luggage.”

  “This is my luggage,” said Val, her thoughts on someone who would bring up René’s name. “I’ll want a police officer nearby, one who can watch through a glass door.”

  “Pourquoi?… Why, madame?”

  “Une mésure de sûreté,” replied Valerie.

  “Out, bien sûr, mais ce n’est pas nécessaire.”

  “J’insiste ou je pars.”