The Aquitaine Progression: A Novel

by Robert Ludlum

  “Too loose,” repeated Val. “Too abstract—blocks and geometric shapes without specifics—no representational images.”

  “Now what the hell are you talking about?” objected Converse.

  “It’s too wide, Joel, too many places to choose from, places you might not know anything about. It has to be closer, more familiar to you or to me, something we can recognize. Like Bruegel or Vermeer, littered with specific detail.”

  “They sound like dentists.”

  Valerie took the paper from him. “Manhattan’s an island,” she said softly, reading and frowning again.

  “If there are torches and tribal puberty rites, it’s not my part of town.”

  “Not tribal rites, tribal nights,” corrected Val. “Tribal—not Black but Red? “The King will be in his chair—chair … table. His table. Tribal … nights. Nights! That’s where we’re misreading it. Nights!”

  “How else can you read it?”

  “Not nights but knights! With a k!”

  “And a table,” broke in Converse. “Knights of the Round Table.”

  “But not the King Arthur legend, not Camelot. Much nearer, much closer. Tribal—American natives. American Indians.”

  “Algonquins. The Round Table!”

  “The Algonquin Hotel,” cried Valerie. “That’s it, that’s what he meant!”

  “We’ll know in a few minutes,” said Joel. “Go inside and place the call.”

  The wait was both intolerable and interminable. Converse looked at his face in the mirror; perspiration began to drench his face, the salt stinging his scrapes and burning his eyes. Far more telling, his hand shook and his breath was short. The Algonquin switchboard answered and Val asked for a Mr. Marcus. There was a stretch of silence, and when the operator came back on the line, Joel thought he would smash the telephone into the mirror.

  “There are two Marcuses registered, ma’am. Which one did you wish to speak to?”

  “Already it’s a rotten day!” Val broke in suddenly over the phone, startling Converse with her words. “My boss, the clown, told me to call Mr. Marcus at the Algonquin right away and give him the time and place for lunch. Now the clown’s disappeared to a meeting somewhere outside and I’m left holding it. Sorry, dear, I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”

  “It’s okay, hon, we got a few like that around here.”

  “Maybe you can help me. Which Marcus is which? Maybe I’ll recognize a first name or a company.”

  “Sure. Lemme plug into Big Reggie. We all gotta stick together when it comes to the clowns, right?… Okay, here they are. Marcus, Myron. Sugarman’s Original Replicas, Los Angeles. And Marcus, Peter … not much help here, sweetie. Just says Georgetown, Washington, D.C.”

  “That’s the one. Peter. I’m sure of it. Thanks, dear.”

  “Glad to be of help, hon. I’ll ring now.”

  The folded New York Times resting on his knee, Stone inked in the last two words of the crossword puzzle and looked at his watch. It had taken him nine minutes, nine minutes of relief; he wished it had been longer. One of the joys of having been station chief in London was the London Times crossword. He could always count on at least a half-hour when he could forget problems in the search for words and meanings.

  The telephone rang. Stone stared at it, his pulse accelerating, his throat suddenly dry. No one knew he had checked into the Algonquin under the name of Marcus. No one!… Yes, there was someone, but he was in the air, flying up from Knoxville, Tennessee. What had gone wrong? Or had he been wrong about Metcalf? Was the supposedly angry, sermonizing Air Force intelligence officer one of them? Had his own instincts, honed over a thousand years of sorting out garbage, deserted him because he so desperately sought an opening, an escape from a steel net that was dropping down on him? He got out of the chair and walked slowly, in fear, to the bedside table. He picked up the insistently ringing phone.

  “Yes?”

  “Alan Metcalf?” said the soft, firm voice of a woman.

  “Who?” Stone was so thrown by the name he could barely concentrate, barely think!

  “I beg your pardon, I have the wrong room.”

  “Wait! Don’t hang up. Metcalf’s on his way here.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Please! Oh Christ, please! I was tired, I was asleep. We’ve been up night and day.… Metcalf. I talked with him two hours ago—he said he was going to reprogram his machine, that someone was trying to reach him since one o’clock this morning. He had to get out of there. A man was killed, a pilot. It was not an accident! Am I making sense to you?”

  “Why should I talk to you?” asked the woman. “So you can trace the call?”

  “Listen to me,” said Stone, his voice now in total control. “Even if I wanted to—and I don’t—this is a hotel, not a private line, and to do what you suggest would take at least three men on the trunk lines and another controlling the switchboard. And even with such a unit it would be at least four minutes before they could isolate the wire and send out a tracer signal—which initially would only give us an area location, not a specific phone. And if you were calling from overseas we’d have to have another man, an expert, in that specific location to narrow it down to perhaps a twenty-mile radius, but only if you stayed on your phone for at least six minutes.… Now, for God’s sake, give me at least two!”

  “Go on. Quickly!”

  “I’m going to assume something. Maybe I shouldn’t, but you’re a clever woman, Mrs. DePinna, and you could do it.”

  “DePinna?”

  “Yes. You left a telephone book open to the blue pages, the government pages. When the accident happened in Nevada, I made a simple connection with a listing, and two hours ago I learned I was right. Metcalf returned my call—from a pay phone at an airport. A pilot, a general, had talked to him at length. He’s joining us. You ran from the wrong people, Mrs. DePinna. But as for what I’m thinking, I think the man we want to find is listening on this phone.”

  “There’s no one else here!”

  “Please don’t interrupt me, I’ve got to use every second.” Stone’s voice suddenly became stronger. “Leifhelm, Bertholdier, Van Headmer, Abrahms. And a fifth man we can’t identify, an Englishman who’s down so deep he makes Burgess, Maclean and Blunt look like amateurs. We don’t know who he is, but he’s there, using warehouses in Ireland and offshore cargo ships, and long-forgotten airfields to transport materials that shouldn’t be going out. Those dossiers came from us, Converse! We sent them to you! You’re a lawyer, and you know that by using your name I’m incriminating myself or committing suicide if anyone’s taping this. I’ll go further. We sent you out through Preston Halliday in Geneva. We sent you out to build a legal case—from left field—so we could abort this thing with a minimum of fallout, sending all those goddamned idiots back to reality. But we were wrong! They were much further ahead than we ever suspected—we ever suspected—but not Beale on Mykonos. He was dead right, and he’s dead because he was right! Incidentally, he was the ‘man from San Francisco.’ It was his five hundred thousand dollars; he came from a rich family, which, among other things, bequeathed him a conscience. Think back to Mykonos! To what he told you—what his life was all about. From celebrated soldier to a scholar—to a killing that must have killed a part of him to commit.… He said you almost caught him up on a couple of things he didn’t mean to say. He said you were a good lawyer, a good choice. Preston Halliday was a student of his at Berkeley, and when this broke a year and a half ago, when Halliday realized what Delavane was doing and how he was being used, he went to Beale, who was about to retire. The rest you can figure out.”

  The woman’s voice interrupted. “Say what I want to hear you say. Say it!”

  “Of course I will! Converse didn’t kill Peregrine and he didn’t kill the commander of NATO. Both of them were marked by Delavane—George Marcus Delavane—because both those men would have taken him and his ilk to the mat! They were convenient, very convenient, targets. I don’t know about t
he others—I don’t know what you’ve been through—but we broke a liar in Bad Godesberg, the major from the embassy who put you, Converse, at the Adenauer Bridge! He doesn’t know it, but we broke him, and we learned something. We think we know where Connal Fitzpatrick is. We think he’s alive!”

  A male voice intruded. “You bastards,” said Joel Converse.

  “Thank God!” said the civilian, sitting down on the hotel bed. “Now we can talk. We have to talk. Tell me everything you can. This phone is clean.”

  Twenty minutes later, his hands trembling, Peter Stone hung up the phone.

  36

  General Jacques-Louis Bertholdier ceased the rushing pelvic thrusts of intercourse, withdrew himself from the moaning dark-haired woman beneath him, and rolled over, grabbing the telephone.

  “Yes?” he shouted angrily. And then he listened, his flushed face growing ashen as his organ collapsed. “Where did it happen?” he whispered, not in confidence but in sudden fear. “The Boulevard Raspail? The charges?… Narcotics? Impossible!”

  Holding the phone, the general swung his legs over the side of the bed, listening carefully, concentrating as he stared at the wall. The naked woman rose to her knees and leaned into him, her breasts pressed into his back, her open mouth caressing his ear, her teeth gently biting his lobe.

  Bertholdier suddenly, viciously, swung his arm back, cracking the phone into the woman’s face, sending her reeling to the other side of the bed, blood erupting from her broken lower lip.

  “Repeat that, please,” he said into the phone. “It’s obvious, then, isn’t it? The man cannot be questioned further, can he? There is always the larger strategy to consider, losses to be anticipated in the field, no? It is the hospital all over again, I’m afraid. See to it, then, like the fine officer you are. The Legion’s loss was our immense gain.… Oh? What is it? The arresting officer was Prudhomme?” Bertholdier paused, his breathing steady and audible; then he spoke, rendering a command decision. “A stubborn bureaucrat from the Sûreté will not let go, will he?… He is your second assignment to be carried out with your usual expertise before the day is over. Call me when both are accomplishments, and consider yourself the aide to General Jacques-Louis Bertholdier.”

  The general hung up and turned to the dark-haired woman, who was wiping her lips with a bed sheet, the expression in her eyes an admixture of anger, embarrassment and fear.

  “Apologies, my dear,” he said courteously. “But you must leave now. I have telephone calls to make, business to attend to.”

  “I will not come back!” cried the woman defiantly.

  “You will come back,” said the legend of France standing up, his body rigid in its nakedness. “If you are asked.”

  Erich Leifhelm walked rapidly into his study and directly over to the large desk, where he took the phone from a white-jacketed attendant, dismissing the man with a nod. The instant the door was closed he spoke. “What is it?”

  “The Geyner car was found, Herr General.”

  “Where?”

  “Appenweier.”

  “And what is that?”

  “A town fifteen or eighteen kilometers from Kehl. In the Alsace.”

  “Strasbourg! He crossed into France! He was a priest!”

  “I don’t understand, Herr—”

  “We never thought …! Never mind! Whom have you got in the sector?”

  “Only one man. The man with the police.”

  “Tell him to hire others. Send them into Strasbourg! Look for a priest!”

  “Get out of here!” roared Chaim Abrahms as his wife walked through the kitchen door. “This is no place for you now!”

  “The Testaments say otherwise, my husband—yet not my husband,” said the frail woman dressed in black; a circle of soft white hair framed gentle features and her brown eyes were dark, receding mirrors. “Will you deny the Bible you employ so readily when it suits you? It is not all thunder and vengeance. Must I read it to you?”

  “Read nothing! Say nothing! These are matters for men!”

  “Men who kill? Men who use the primitive savagery of the Scriptures to justify the spilling of children’s blood? My son’s blood? I wonder what the mothers of the Masada would have said had they been permitted to speak their hearts.… Well, I speak now, General. You will not kill anymore. You will not use this house to move your armies of death, to plot your tactics of death—always your holy tactics, Chaim, your holy vengeance.”

  Abrahms slowly got out of the chair. “What are you talking about?”

  “You think I haven’t heard you? Phone calls in the middle of the night, calls from men who sound like you, who speak of killing so easily—”

  “You listened!”

  “Several times. You were breathing so hard you heard nothing but the sound of your own voice, your own orders to kill. Whatever you’re doing will be done without you now, my husband—yet not my husband. The killing is over for you. It lost its purpose years ago, but you could not stop. You invented new reasons until there was no reason left in you.”

  The sabra’s wife removed her right hand from the folds of her black dress. She was holding Abrahms’ service automatic. The soldier slapped his holster in disbelief, then suddenly lunged toward the woman he had lived with for thirty-eight years and grabbed her wrist, spinning her around. She would not relent! She resisted him, clawing at his face as he crashed her back into the wall, twisting her hand in the attempt to disarm her.

  The sound of the explosion filled the kitchen, and the woman who had borne him four children, the last finally a son, fell to the floor at his feet. In horror Chaim Abrahms looked down. Her dark-brown eyes were wide, her black dress drenched with blood, half her chest torn away.

  The telephone rang. Abrahms ran to the wall and grabbed it, screaming, “The children of Abraham will not be denied! A bloodbath will follow—we will have the land delivered to us by God! Judea, Samaria—they are ours!”

  “Stop it!” roared the voice over the line. “Stop it, Jew!”

  “Who calls me Jew calls me righteous!” yelled Chaim Abrahms, the tears falling down his face, as he stared at the dead woman with the wide brown eyes. “I have sacrificed with Abraham! No one could ask more!”

  “I ask more!” came the cry of the cat. “I ask always more!”

  “Marcus?” whispered the sabra, closing his eyes and collapsing against the wall, turning away from the corpse. “Is it you … my leader, my conscience? Is it you?”

  “It is I, Chaim, my friend. We have to move fast. Are the units in place?”

  “Yes. Scharhörn. Twelve units in place, all trained, prepared. Death is no consideration.”

  “That’s what I had to know,” said Delavane.

  “They await your codes, my general.” Abrahms gasped, then began to weep uncontrollably.

  “What is it, Chaim? Get hold of yourself!”

  “She’s dead. My wife lies dead at my feet!”

  “My God, what happened?”

  “She overheard, she listened … she tried to kill me. We fought and she’s dead.”

  “A terrible, terrible loss, my dear friend. You have my deepest affection and condolences in your bereavement.”

  “Thank you, Marcus.”

  “You know what you must do, don’t you, Chaim?”

  “Yes, Marcus. I know.”

  There was a knock at the door. Stone got out of the chair and picked up his gun awkwardly from the table. In all the years of sorting out garbage, he had fired a weapon only once. He had blown a foot off a KGB informant in Istanbul for the simple reason that the man had been exposed while drunk and had lunged at him with a knife. That one incident was enough. Stone did not like guns.

  “Yes?” he said, the automatic at his side.

  “Aurelius,” replied the voice behind the door.

  Stone opened it and greeted his visitor. “Metcalf?”

  “Yes. Stone?”

  “Come in. And I think we’d better change the code.”

&nb
sp; “I suppose I could use ‘Aquitaine’,” said the intelligence officer, walking into the room.

  “Somehow I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “Somehow I don’t think I will. Do you have coffee?”

  “I’ll get some. You look exhausted.”

  “I’ve looked better on a beach in Hawaii,” said the slender, muscular middle-aged Air Force man. He was dressed in summer slacks and a white Izod jacket, and his thin face matched his short, thinning brown hair; dark circles were prominent under his clear authoritative eyes. “At nine o’clock yesterday morning I drove south out of Las Vegas to Halloran, and from there I began a series of cross-country flights a computer couldn’t follow, hopping from airport to airport under more names than I can remember.”

  “You’re a frightened man,” said the civilian.

  “If you’re not, I’m talking to the wrong person.”

  “I’m not only frightened, Colonel, I’m petrified.” Stone went to the phone, ordered coffee, and before hanging up, he turned to Metcalf. “Would you like a drink?” he asked.

  “I would. Canadian on the rocks, please.”

  “I envy you.” The civilian gave the order, and both men sat down; for several moments only the sounds of the street outside broke the silence. They looked at each other, neither concealing the fact that he was silently evaluating the other.

  “You know who and what I am,” said the Colonel. “Who are you? What?”

  “CIA. Twenty-nine years. Station chief in London, Athens, Istanbul, and points east and north. A once disciple of Angleton and coordinator of clandestine operations until I was fired. Anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Whatever you did to your answering machine, you did it right. The Converse woman called.”

  Metcalf shot forward in the chair. “And?”

  “It was touch and go for a while—I wasn’t at my best—but he finally got on the line, or I should say he finally spoke. He was there all the time.”