Robert Ludlum - The Parcifal Mosaic.txt

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by The Parcifal Mosaic [lit]


  disappeared into a wall of giant maples and oaks. The man gestured at the

  fence, laughing and nodding his bead. The woman at first feigned surprise

  and maidenly reluctance, then suddenly whipped her mount to the right and

  raced ahead of her companion, high in the saddle as she approached the

  fence. She soared over it, followed by the man only yards behind and to her

  left; they rode swiftly toward the edge of the woods, where both reined in

  their horses. The woman grimaced as she came to a stop.

  "Damn!" she shouted. "I pulled the muscle in my calfl It's screamingl"

  "Get off and walk around. Don't sit on it."

  The woman dismounted as the man reached over for the reins of her borse.

  His companion walked in circles, her limp pronounced, swearing under her

  breath.

  "Good God, where are we?" she asked, half sbouting.

  "I think it's the Heffemans' place. How's the leg?"

  "Murder, absolute murderl Chlistl"

  "You can't ride on it."

  "I can hardly walk on it, you damn fool."

  "Temper, temper. Come on, let's find a phone." The man and woman started

  through the edge of trees, the man leading both horses, threading them

  around several thick trunks. 'Here," be said, reaching for a low branch on

  a thick bush. "I can tie them up here and come back for them; they won't go

  anywhere."

  "Then you can help me. This really is excruciating."

  The horses tied and grazing, the couple began to walk. Through the trees

  they could see the outlines of the wide semicircular drive at the front

  entrance of the large house. They also saw the figure of a man who seemed

  to emerge out of nowhere. He was in a gabardine topcoat, with both bands in

  his pockets. They met and the man in the topcoat spoke. "May I help you?

  This is private property."

  "I trust we aU have private pioperty, old man," replied the

  THE PARsiFAL MosAic639

  sportsman supporting the woman. "My wife pulled a muscle over our last jump.

  She can't ride."

  'What?"

  "Horses, sport. Our horses are tied up back there. We were doing a little

  pre-hunt work over the course before Saturday's meet, and I'm afraid we

  came a cropper, as they say. Take us to a phone, please."

  Well, I ... I . . ."

  "This is the Heffernans' house, isn't it?" demanded the husband.

  "Yes, but Mr. and Mrs. Heffernan are not here, sir. Our orders are to allow

  no one inside."

  11014 SM. exploded the wife. "How tacky can you be? My leg hurts, you assl

  I need a ride back to the club."

  "One of the men will be happy to drive you, ma'am."

  "And my chauffeur can bloody well come and pick me upl Really, just who are

  these Heffemans? Are they members, darling?"

  "I don't think so, Buff. Look, the man has his orders, and tacky as they

  are, it's not his fault. You go along and I'll take the horses back."

  ..,They'd better not try to become members," said the wife as the two men

  helped her across the drive to an automobile.

  The man walked back through the woods to the horses, untied them, and led

  them across the field, where he lowered the rails and prodded them through

  into the tall grass. He replaced the rails, mounted his hunter and, with

  the woman's horse in tow, trotted south over the course of Saturday's

  hunt-as he understood the course to be from his first and only study of the

  charts as a guest of the club.

  He reached under his saddle and pulled out a powerful hand-held radio; he

  pressed a switch and raised the instrument to his lips.

  "There are two cars," he said into the radio. "A black Lincoln, license

  plate seven-four-zero, MRL; and a dark green Buick, license

  one-three-seven, GMJ. The place is ringed with guards, and there are no

  rear exit roads. The windows are thick; you'd need a cannon to blow through

  them, and we were picked up by density infrareds."

  "Got it!' was the reply, amplified over the tiny speaker. 'We~re mainly

  interested in the vehicles.... By the way, I can see the Buick now."

  640 Roi3F11T LuDL-um

  The man with the various saws clipped to and dangling from his wide leather

  belt was high up in the tall pine tree bordering the road, his safety strap

  around it and clamped to his harness. He shoved the hand-held radio into its

  holster and adjusted the binoculars to his eyes, looking diagonally down

  through the branches, focusing on the automobile coming out of the

  tree-lined drive.

  The view was clean, all angles covered. No cars could enter or leave the

  premises of Sterile Five without being seeneven at night; the capabilities

  of infrared applied to lenses as well as trip lights.

  The man whistled; the door of the truck far below opened, and on its panel

  were the words MCH TOP TREE SURGEONs. A second man stepped out and looked

  up.

  "Take off," said the man above, loud enough to be heard. "Relieve me in two

  hours."

  The driver of the truck headed north for a mile and a half to the first

  intersection. There was a gas station on the right; the doors of its repair

  shop were open, and an automobile was inside, off the ground on a hydraulic

  lift, facing front. The driver reached for the switch and snapped his

  headlights on and off. Instantly, within the garage's shop the headlights of

  the car on the lift flashed on and off-the signal bad been acknowledged, the

  vehicle was in position. The station's owner believed he was

  cooperating-confidentially~with the narcotics division of the state police.

  It was the least a citizen could do.

  The driver swung to his right, then immediately to the left, making a

  U-turn between the converging roads; he headed south. Three minutes later

  he passed the pine tree that concealed his companion beyond the branches

  near the top. Under different circumstances he might have touched his horn;

  he couldn't now. There could be no sound, no sight that marked in any way

  that area of the road. Instead, he aocelerated and in fifty seconds came to

  another intersection, the first south of Sterile Five.

  Diagonally across on the left was a small country inn, miniature antebellum

  in design-a large dollhouse built to bring back memories of an old

  plantation. In the back was a black asphalt parking lot, where perhaps a

  dozen cars were lined

  Tim PARsrFAL MosAic641

  up, like large brightly colored toys. Except one, the fourth from the end,

  with a clear view of the intersection and swift access to the exit. Facing

  front, it was layered with dirt, a poor relation in the company of its

  shiny, expensive cousins.

  Again the driver leaned forward and flicked his headlights on and off. The

  dirty automobfle-with an engine more powerful than any other in the lot-did

  the same. Another signal was acknowledged. Whatever emerged from Sterile

  Five could be picked up in either direction.

  Arthur Pierce studied his face in the mirror of the rim-down motel on the

  outskirts of Falls Church, Virginia; he was satisfied with what he saw. The

  fringe of gray circling his shaved head was in concert with the rin-dess

  glasses and the shabby brown cardigan sweater
worn over the soiled white

  shirt with the frayed collar. He was the image of the loser, whose minor

  talents and lack of illusion kept him securely, if barely, above the poverty

  level. Nothing was ventured because it was useless. Why bother? No one

  stopped such men on the street, they walked too slowly; they were

  inconsequential.

  Pierce turned from the mirror and walked across the room to the road map

  spread out under the light of a plastic lamp on the cheap, stained desk

  against the wall. On the right, holding the map in place, was a gray metal

  container with the emblem of the United States Navy stamped on the top, the

  medical insignia below it, and a brass, built-in combination lock on the

  side. In it was a document as lethal as any in history. The psychiatric

  diagnosis of a statesman the world revered, a diagnosis labeling that man

  as insane-as having been insane while functioning as the international

  voice of one of the two most powerful nations on earth. And the nation that

  permitted this intolerable condition to exist could no longer serve as the

  leader of the cause it espoused. A madman had betrayed not only his own

  government but the world-lying, deceiving, misleading, forging alliances

  with enemies, scheming against supposed allies. No matter that he was

  insane, it had happened. It was all there.

  The steel container contained an incredible weapon, but for it to be used

  with devastating effect it bad to reach the proper hands in Moscow. Not the

  tired old compromisers, but the visionaries with the strength and the will

  to move swiftly to bring the corrupt, incompetent. giant to its knees.

  642 Ro,3iEmT LuDLum

  The possibility that the Matthias file might fall into soft, wrinkled bands

  in Moscow was insufferable; it would be bartered, negotiated, finally thrown

  away by weak men frightened of the very people they controlled. No, thought

  Arthur Pierce, this metal container belonged to the VKR. Only to the

  Voennaya.

  He could afford no risks, and several phone calls had convinced him that

  there was risk in channeling it out with the few be could trust. As

  expected, embassy and consulate personnel were under heavy surveillance;

  all international flights were monitored, and hand and cargo luggage

  X-rayed. Too much risk.

  He would bring it out himself, along with the ultimate weapon, the terminal

  weapon, documents that called for successive nuclear strikes against Soviet

  Russia and the People's Republic of China-agreements signed by the great

  American Secretary of State. They were nuclear fantasies conceived by an

  insane genius, working with one of the most brilliant minds ever produced

  by the Soviet Union. Fantasies so real that the tired old men in the

  Kremlin would run for their dachas and their vodka, leaving decisions to

  those who could cope, to the men of the Voermaya.

  Where was the brilliant mind that had made it all possible? The man who had

  turned on his homeland only to learn the truth-that he had been wrong. So

  wrongl Where was Parsifal? Where was Alexei Kalyazin?

  With these thoughts Pierce turned to the map again. The inept-and not so

  inept-Havelock had mentioned the Shenandoah-that the man they called

  Parsifal was somewhere in the Shenandoah area, by implication within a rea-

  sonable distance of Matthias's country home. The implied reasonable

  distance, however, was the variable quotient. The Shenandoah Valley was

  more than a hundred miles long, over twenty miles wide, from the Allegheny

  to the Blue Ridge Mountains. What might be considered reasonable? There was

  no reasonable answer, so the solution was to be found in the opposite

  direction. In the plodding mind of Michael Havelock-Mikhail Havli6ek, son

  of VAclav, named for a Russian grandfather from Rovno-a man whose talents

  lay in persistence and a degree of imagination, not brilliance. Havelock

  would reduce the are, put in use a hundred computers to trace a single

  telephone call made at a specific time

  THE PARsiFAL MosAic643

  to a speciflc place to a man he called a zealot. Havelock would do the work

  and a paminyatchik would reap the benefits. IAeutenant Commander Decker

  would be left alone, he was a key that might well unlock a door.

  Pierce bent over the map, his index finger shifting from one line to

  another. The are, the semicircle that blanketed the Shenandoah from Sterile

  Five, was covered, with men and vehicles in position. From Harpers Ferry to

  the Valley Pike, Highways 11 and 66, Routes 7, 50, 15, 17, 29, and 33, all

  were manned, waiting for word that a specific car was approaching-at a

  specific time heading for a specific place. That place was to be determined

  and reported; nothing else was required of the men in those vehicles. They

  were hirelings, not participants, their time paid for in money, not purpose

  or destiny.

  Arthur Pierce, born Nikolai Petrovich Malyekov in the village of

  Ramenskoye, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, suddenly thought about

  that destiny, and the years that had led to his own electrifying part in

  it. He had never wavered, never forgotten who he was or why he had been

  given the supreme opportunity to serve the ultimate cause, a cause so

  meaningful and so necessary for a world where the relative few tyrannized

  the many, where millions upon millions lived on the edge of despair or in

  hopeless poverty so that the capihAist manipulators could laugh over global

  balance sheets while their annies: burned pajama-clad children in faraway

  lands. This was fact, not provocative propaganda. He had seen it all for

  himself-from the burning villages in Southeast Asia to the corporate dining

  rooms where offers of employment were accompanied by grins and winks and

  promises of stock options that were the first steps toward wealth, to the

  inner corridors of government power where hypocrites and incompetents

  encouraged more hypocrisy and incompetence. God, be bated it alll Hated the

  corruption and the greed and the sanctimonious liars who deceived the

  masses to whom they were responsible, abusing the powers given them, lining

  their pockets and the pockets of their own.... There was a better way.

  There was commitment. There was the Voennaya.

  He had been thirteen years old when be was told by the loving couple be

  called Mother and Father. They explained while holding him and gazing into

  his eyes to let him see

  6" RoBEnT LuDLUM

  their love. He was theirs' they said, but he was also not theirs. He had

  been born to a chosen couple thousands of miles away who loved him so much

  they gave him to the State, to a cause that would make a better world for

  generations to come. And as his "mother' and "father" spoke, so many things

  in Arthur Pierce's young memory began to fall into place. All the

  discussions-not only with his "mother" and "father," but with the scores of

  visitors who came so frequently to the farmbouse-discussions that told of

  suffering and oppression and of a despotic form of government that would be

  replaced by a government dedicated to the people --all the people.

  He was to be a part of that change. Over the e
arly years certain other

  visitors bad come and bad given him games to play, puzzles to work,

  exercises to read-tests that graded his capabilities. And one day when be

  was thirteen be was pronounced extraordinary; on that same day be was told

  his real name. He was ready to join the cause.

  It would not be easy, his "mother" and "father" bad said but he was to

  remember when pressures seemed overwhe -Ing that they were there, always

  there. And should anything happen to them, others would take their place to

  help him, encourage him, guide him, knowing that still others were

  watching. He was to be the b6st in all things; he was to be American-kind,

  generous and, above all, seemingly fair; be was to use his gifts to rise as

  far as be was capable of nising. But be was never to forget who and what he

  was or the cause that gave him the gift of life and the opportunity to help

  make the world better than it was.

  Things after that auspicious day were not as diffIcult as his 'mother" and

  "father" had predicted. Through his high school years and college, his

  secret served to prod him-because it was his secret and he was

  extraordinary. They were years of exhilaration: each new prize and award

  was proof of his superiority. He found it easy to be liked; as though in a

  never-ending popularity contest, the crown was always his. Yet there was

  self-denial, too, and it served to remind him of his commitment. He had

  many friends but no deep friendships, no relationships. Men liked him but

  accepted his basic distance, ascribing it usually to his having to find

  jobs to pay his waY through schooL Women he used only for sexual re-

  THE PAwiFAL MosAic645

  lease and formed no attachments whatsoever, generally meeting them miles

  away from wherever he was living.

  During his postgraduate studies at Michigan he was contacted by Moscow and

  told his new life was about to begin. The meeting was not without

  amusement, the contact a remiiihnent executive from a large conservative

  corporation who had supposedly read the graduate student files and wanted

  to meet one Arthur Pierce. But there was nothing amusing in his news; it

  was deadly serious-and exhilarating.

  He was to join the army, where certain opportunities would be found leading

 

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