The Aquitaine Progression

by Robert Ludlum

  Move! shouted Converse silently to himself as he walked faster down the pavement.

  He sat in the last car of the train, still wary but satisfied by the progress he had made. He had done everything cautiously but without wasting motion, his concentration absolute, aware of a dozen possible dangers—eyes that stared at him, a man or a woman seen twice in too short a time, a clerk delaying him by being more helpful than the hour and the crowds would normally permit. These calculated possibilities were his readouts, his dials, his gauges; without clearance he would abort all forward motion, takeoff canceled, the escape hatch sprung, safety found in the streets. His equipment was not an aircraft that was an extension of himself, it was himself, and he had never flown with such precision in his life.

  ENGLISH SPOKE had been the sign tacked to the roof of the busy corner newsstand in Lobith. He had asked directions to the “omnibus” to Arnhem while buying a map and a newspaper, holding both close to his face. The owner was too preoccupied with customers to notice his appearance and shouted rapid instructions, more useful in the pointed finger than in the words. Joel found the bus stop some four blocks away. He sat in the crowded vehicle, his face buried in a newspaper he could not read, and forty-odd minutes later he got off at the railroad station in Arnhem.

  First on his checklist was a trip to the farthest washbasin in the men’s room, where he cleaned himself up. He had brushed his clothes as best he could and looked in the mirror. He was still a mess, but somehow he looked more like a man who had been injured than one who had been beaten; there was a difference.

  Next, outside in the station, he converted his deutsche marks and five hundred American dollars into florins and guilders. He then bought a pair of wide-rimmed dark glasses at a pharmacy several doors from the currency exchange. As he got into the cashier’s line, his hand casually covering the bruises on his face, his eyes fell on a cosmetics counter across the far aisle. It triggered a memory.

  Shortly after their marriage, in one of those maddening accidents that only happen at the most inopportune times, Valerie had slipped on a foyer rug and fell, hitting her head against the corner of an antique hallway table. By seven that night she had what Joel had described as “one hell of a mouse”; the black eye was an almost perfect oval, arcing from the bridge of her nose to the edge of her left temple. At ten the next morning she was scheduled to lead a bilingual presentation for agency clients from Stuttgart. She had sent him out to the drugstore for a small bottle of liquid makeup, which, except at close range, had concealed the bruise remarkably well.

  “I don’t want people to think my brand-new husband beat the hell out of me for not fulfilling his wildest sexual fantasies.”

  “Which one did you miss?” he had asked.

  He stepped out of the cashier’s line and made his way around the cases to the display of creams and colognes, shampoos, and nail polish. He recognized the bottle, chose a darker shade, and returned to the line.

  A second trip to a washbasin had taken ten minutes, but the results justified the time. He applied the makeup carefully; the scrapes and bruises faded. Unless someone stood very close to him, he was no longer a battered brawler but a man who had perhaps suffered a not too serious fall. Converse congratulated himself in that men’s room in the railroad station. Under other circumstances, he might not have dressed a client so well before a trial for assault and battery.

  The checklist continued. It had taken him to where he was now, in the last car on the straight-through train from Arnhem to Amsterdam. After buying his ticket on what he inferred was a low-priced excursion train that made numerous stops, he had walked out on the platform prepared to run back at the slightest negative readout, the first steady glance that held him in focus. Instead he saw a group of men and women, couples around his own age, talking and laughing together, friends more than likely off for a short summer’s holiday, perhaps leaving the river for the sea. The men carried worn, dented suitcases, most held together with rope, while a number of the women held wicker baskets looped over their arms. Their luggage and their clothing denoted working class—factories for the men, home and children or the less demanding clerical jobs for the women—all within that part of the spectrum that suited Joel’s own appearance. He had walked behind them, laughing quietly when they laughed, climbing on board as though he were part of the group, sitting in an aisle seat across from a burly man with a slender woman, who, despite her thin frame, proudly bore a pair of enormous breasts. Converse’s eyes could hardly avoid them and the man grinned at Joel, no malice in his look as he raised a bottle of beer to his lips.

  Somewhere Converse had read or heard that in the northern countries people going on summer vacations—or on holiday, as was the term—gravitated to the last cars in the Trans-Europe-Express. It was a custom that somehow signified their status, producing a general camaraderie that enlivened the working man’s junket. Joel observed the none too subtle transformation. Men and women got out of their seats and walked up and down the aisle talking to friends and strangers alike, cans and bottles in their hands. From the front of the car a few people broke into song, obviously a familiar country song; others took it up only to be drowned out by Converse’s group, who raised their voices in an entirely different chorus until the singing of both camps dwindled away into laughter. Conviviality, indeed, was the order of the morning in the last car on the train to Amsterdam. The stations went by, a few passengers getting off at each, more getting on, with suitcases, baskets, and broad smiles, and being welcomed on board with boisterous greetings. A number of men wore T-shirts emblazoned with the names of town and district teams—soccer, Converse assumed. Catcalls and amiably derisive shouts were hurled at them by age-old competitors. The railroad car was turning into an odd Dutch version of a train-load of suddenly freed adults going off to a summer camp. The volume grew.

  The towns were announced, the brief stops made as Joel remained in his seat, motionless and unobtrusive, now and then glancing at his adopted group, half smiling or laughing softly when it seemed appropriate. Otherwise he looked like someone of limited intelligence poring over a map as a child might, equal parts wonderment and confusion. He was studying the streets and canals of Amsterdam. There was a man who lived on the southwest corner of Utrechtsestraat and Kerkstraat, a man he had to identify by sight, isolate and make contact with … his springboard to Washington would be as a “member of the Tatiana family.” He had to pull Cort Thorbecke away from his base of operations without alerting the hunters of Aquitaine. He would pay an English-speaking intermediary to get to a telephone and use words sufficiently plausible to draw the broker out to some other location, with no mention of the Tatiana connection or its source in Paris, Those words would have to be found; he would find them somehow, he had to. He was psychologically on his way back toward friendly fire—in terms of actual time less than seven hours from Washington—and men who would listen to him with Nathan Simon’s help and an extraordinary file that would persuade them to hide him and protect him until the soldiers of Aquitaine were exposed. It was not the way envisioned by a man he had once known in Connecticut as Avery Fowler, hardly the legal tactics whose roots were in ridicule as prescribed by A. Preston Halliday in Geneva, but there was no time now. Time was running out for manipulated webs of legality.

  The train slowed down, jerking as it did so, as if the engineer far up ahead was trying to send another kind of message to a rowdy car in the rear, which felt the shocks most severely. If that was his intent, it, too, backfired. The pitching motion served only to accelerate the laughter and provoke insults shouted at an unseen incompetent.

  “Amstel!” screamed a conductor, opening the forward door between the cars. “Amsterdam! Amst—!” The poor man could not finish the call—he had to pull the door shut to avoid a barrage of rolled-up newspapers thrown at him. Summer camp in the Netherlands.

  The train pulled into the station and a contingent of T-shirted chests and breasts announced their arrival with shouts of recogni
tion. Five or six people at the front of Joel’s group rose as one to welcome their friends; again cans and bottles were held in the air and laughter bounced off the narrow walls, nearly drowning out the whistles of departure outside. Bodies fell over bodies, hugs were exchanged, breasts playfully grabbed at.

  Beyond the new arrivals, walking unsteadily, was the illogically logical capstone for the juvenile antics taking place in front of Converse. An old woman, obviously drunk, made her way down the aisle, her disheveled clothes matching the large, tattered canvas bag she clutched in her left hand while she steadied herself with her right on the edge of the seats as the train accelerated. Grinning, she accepted a bottle of beer as another was thrown into her satchel, followed by several sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper. Again, there were greetings of welcome as two men in the aisle bowed to the waist as if to a queen. A third slapped her behind and whistled. For several minutes the ritual continued, a new mechanical toy for the children off to summer camp. The old woman drank and danced a jig and made playfully suggestive gestures at men and women alike, sticking out her tongue and rolling it around, her ancient eyes bulging, rolling, her ragged shawl twirling in circles like the ballet of some macabre Scheherazade. She amused everyone with her drunken antics as she accepted all that was dropped into her offering cloth, including coins. The Dutch vacationers were kind, thought Joel; they took care of someone less fortunate than themselves, someone who would be barred from another class of car on another train. The woman approached him, her canvas bag now held in front of her so as to accept alms from both sides. Converse reached into his pocket for a few guilders, letting them slip from his hand into the bag.

  “Goedemorgen,” said the old woman, weaving. “Dank u wel, beste man, erg vriendelijk van u!”

  Joel nodded, returning to his map, but the bag lady remained.

  “Uw hoofd! Ach, heb je een ongeluk gehad, jongen?”

  Again Converse nodded, reaching again into his pocket and giving the inebriated old hag more money. He pointed to his map and waved her away, as yet another raucous chorus erupted.

  “Spreekt u Engels?” shouted the bag lady, leaning over unsteadily.

  Joel shrugged, sinking back into the seat, his eyes riveted on the map.

  “I think you do.” The old woman spoke hoarsely, clearly, soberly, her right hand no longer on the edge of the seat but instead in the canvas bag. “We’ve been looking for you every day, on every train. Don’t move! The gun is equipped with a silencer. With all this noise, if I pull the trigger no one would know the difference, including the man beside you who wants only to join the party and the big-breasted women. I think we shall let him. We have you, Meneer Converse!”

  There was no summer camp, after all. Only death minutes away from Amsterdam.

  26

  “Mag ik u even lastig vallen?” shouted the old woman, once more weaving unsteadily as she spoke to the passenger beside Converse: The man took his eyes off the raucous festivities in the aisle and glanced up at the harridan. She shouted again, her right hand still in the bag, her mass of disheveled gray hair springing back and forth as she nodded to her right, toward the front of the car. “Zou ik op uw plaats mogen zitten?”

  “Mij best!” The man got up grinning, as Joel instinctively moved his legs to let him pass. “Dank u wel,” the man added, heading for a single empty seat beyond a couple dancing in the aisle.

  “Move over!” commanded the old woman harshly, swaying with the rhythm of the racing train.

  If it was going to happen, thought Converse, it was going to happen now. He started to rise, his eyes straight ahead, his right elbow on the armrest inches from the bulging bag. Suddenly he plunged his hand into the open canvas bag and gripped the fat wrist of the woman’s hand that held the unseen gun. Straining, pressing farther down, clutching flesh and metal, he swung violently to his left and yanked the old woman through the narrow space, twisting her, crashing her down into the seat next to the window. There was a sharp spit as the gun exploded, burning a hole in the heavy cloth, smoke billowing, the bullet embedding itself somewhere below. The hag’s strength was maniacal, unlike anything he might have imagined. She fought viciously, clawing at his face until he pulled her arm above her head, twisting it, clamping it behind her, their two hands still struggling below in the bag. She would not let go of the weapon and he could not pry it loose; he could only hold it downward, his grip immobilizing her fingers, force against force, her contorted face telling him she would not surrender.

  The midmorning revels of the railroad car reached a crescendo; a cacophony of voices raised in jumbled song competed with the swelling echoes of laughter. And no one paid the slightest attention to the savage struggle that was taking place in the narrow seat. Suddenly, within the panic of that struggle, within the violent impasse, Joel was aware that the train was slowing down, if only imperceptibly. Once again his pilot’s instincts told him a descent was imminent. He jammed his elbow into the old woman’s right breast to jolt her into freeing the gun. Still she held on, bracing herself against the seat, her arm pinned, her fat legs stretched below, angled like thick pylons anchored beneath the forward seat, her obese body twisted, locking his own arm in place so he could not dislodge the weapon from her grip.

  “Let go!” he whispered hoarsely. “I won’t hurt you—I won’t kill you. Whatever you’re being paid, I’ll pay you more!”

  “Nee! I would be found at the bottom of a canal! You can’t escape, Menheer! They wait for you in Amsterdam, they wait for the train!” Grimacing, the old woman kicked out, briefly freeing her left arm. She swung her hand around, clawing his face, her nails sliding down his beard until he grabbed her wrist, pulling her arm across the seat and cracking it into her own knee, twisting her hand clockwise, forcing her to be still. It made no difference. Her right hand had the strength of an aging lioness protecting its pride; she would not release the gun below.

  “You’re lying!” cried Converse. “No one knows I’m on this train! You just got on twenty minutes ago!”

  “Wrong, Amerikaan! I’ve been on since Arnhem—I start in the front, walk back. I found you out at Utrecht and a telephone call was made.”

  “Liar!”

  “You will see.”

  “Who hired you?”

  “Men.”

  “Who?”

  “You will see.”

  “Goddamn you, you’re not part of them! You can’t be!”

  “They pay. Up and down the railroad they pay. On the piers, in the airports. They say you speak nothing but English.”

  “What else do they say?”

  “Why should I tell you? You’re caught. It is you who should let me go. It could be easier for you.”

  “How? A quick bullet in the head instead of a Hanoi rack?”

  “Whatever it is, the bullet could be better. You are too young to know, Meneer. You were never under occupation.”

  “And you’re too old to be so goddamned strong, I’ll give you that.”

  “Ja, I learn that, too.”

  “Let go!”

  The train was braking and the drunken crowd in the car roared its approval as men grabbed suitcases from the upper racks. The passenger who had been sitting next to Joel hastily yanked his from above the seat, his stomach pressing into Converse’s shoulder. Joel tried to appear as though he were in deep conversation with his grimacing half-prisoner; the man fell back, suitcase in hand, laughing.

  The old woman lurched forward; sinking her mouth into Converse’s upper arm, millimeters from his wound. She bit him viciously, her yellow teeth penetrating his flesh, blood bursting out of his skin, trickling down the woman’s gray chin.

  He pulled back in pain. She freed her hand from his grip in the canvas bag; the gun was hers! She fired; the muted spit was followed by a shattering of a section of the floor in the aisle, missing Joel’s feet by inches. He grabbed the unseen barrel, twisted it, pulled it, trying with all his strength to wrench it away. She fired again.

  Her ey
es grew wide as she arched back into thereat. They remained open as she slumped into the window, blood spreading quickly through the thin fabric of her dress in the upper section of her stomach. She was dead, and Joel felt ill, nauseated—he had to swallow air to keep from vomiting. Trembling, he wondered who this old woman was, why she was—what she had lived through that made her become what she was. You were too young to know.… You were never under occupation.

  No time to think about all this! She had wanted to kill him, that was all he had to know, and men were waiting for him only minutes away. He had to think, move!

  Twisting the gun from her rigid fingers inside the canvas bag, he quickly lifted it up and shoved it under his coarse jacket, inserting it under his belt, feeling the weight of the other weapon in his pocket. He reached over and bunched the woman’s dress in folds, then layered her shawl over the bloodstains and pushed her mass of disheveled hair over her right cheek, concealing the wide dead eyes. Experience in the camps told him not to try to close the eyes; too often they would not respond. The action might only call attention to him—to her. The last thing he did was to pull a can of beer out of the bag, open it, and place it on her lap; the liquid spilled out, drenching her lap.

  “Amsterdam! De volgende halte is Amsterdam-Centraal!”

  A roar went up from the vacationing crowd as the line began to form toward the door. Oh, Christ! thought Converse. How? The old woman had said a telephone call had been made. A telephone call, which implied she had not made it herself. It was logical; there was too little time. She had undoubtedly paid one of her sister bag ladies who plied the trains at the station in Utrecht to make it. The information therefore would be minimum, simply because there was no time. She was a special employee, one who had been researched as only Aquitaine could research, an old woman who was strong and who could use a weapon and who would not shrink from taking a life—who would not say too much to anyone. She would merely give a telephone number and instruct the hired caller to repeat the time of the train’s arrival. Again … therefore … he had a chance. Every male passenger would be scrutinized, every face matched against the face in the newspapers. But he was and he was not that face! And he did not speak any language but English—that information had been spread with emphasis.