Robert Ludlum - Road To Gandolfo.txt
Page 16
the point? On one flank (Hank?) was
the United States government with very
specific espionage laws, and on the
other was Angelo Dellacroce and his
guards-of-honor with their white ties
on white shirts and dark glasses and
black suits and very unspecific
methods of dealing with the likes
of"squeals" such as S. Devereaux,
counselor-at-law.
Sam wondered what Aaron Pinkus would
do. Then he realized what Aaron would
do and abandoned that thought, too.
Pinkus would sit Shiva for him.
He got out of the chair and wandered
aimlessly through the hotel suite.
What the hell was he going to do? What
in 107
God's name could he do? His gaze fell
on the unsigned, typewritten note on
the desk.
Copies of this limited partnership
agreement have
been sent by messenger to MacKenzie
Hawkins, E:squire, President, the
Shepherd Company, % The Watergate
Hotel, Wash. D.C. Instructions cabled:
Great Bank of Geneva. Funds transfer
awaits presence Sec.-Treas., Shep.
Co., Samuel Devereaux in Geneva.
He had been cabled internationally.
In some marble banking hall in
Switzerland, a powerful broker of
international finance had no doubt
already listed him as the bona fide
overseer of the transfer of ten
million dollars into an account of a
nonfiled but- very much existing
company named Shepherd.
That's what he was going to do
whether he liked it or not. It was
Geneva, or a lifetime of cracking
rocks at Leavenworth, or Dellacroce
justice feet-in~ement style.
Kidnap the pope!
My Godl That's what the crazy
bastard said. He was going to Icidnap
the pope!
All of Mac's other insanities paled
by any stretch of comparison! World
War Three might be more acceptable! A
simple war would be so much well,
simpler. Borders were defined,
objectives properly obscured,
ideologies flexible. A war was duck
soup compared to 400 million
hysterical Catholics, and heads of
state moaning and groaning their
obsequious platitudes, blaming every
conceivable inimical faction,
extremist or not (secretly glad to be
rid of the meddling nuisance in the
Vatican) and. . .
My God! World War Three could be a
very logical consequence of Hawkins's
act!
And with that realization Sam knew
what he had to do. He had to stop
MacKenzie. But he could not stop him
if he were in a maximum security cell
in Leavenworth; who would believe him?
And he certainly could not stop him if
he were at the bottom of one of the
deeper sections of the Hudson River,
probably upstate, courtesy of Angelo
Dellacroce; who would hear him?
108
No, the only way he could push the
Hawk's insanity out of the realm of
reality was to find out how the hell
MacKenzie intended to pull off his
papal score. The most foolish thing
here would be to assume he couldn't do
it. The Hawk was no joke; anyone who
thought he was need only look at a
few~of Mac's accomplishments including
four extraordinary ex-wives who adored
him, and a little matter of an initial
capitalization of ten million dollars,
to say nothing of military exploits
spanning three decades and the same
number of wars.
What the Hawk was bringing to the
profession of crime were all the
strategic resources, the finely honed
discipline, and the leadership of an
experienced general officer. MacKenzie
was starting at the top; no graduate
of the lineup he but instead' a
full-fledged criminal commander who
had already outsacked a Mafia don in
his own backyard.
The son of a bitch had flare. Christ!
He had the balls of King Kong smashing
the concrete off the Empire State
Building as he climbed up the sides.
Kidnap the pope!
Who the hell would believe it?
Samuel Devereaux believed it, that's
who believed it.
What was left was for S. Devereaux,
counselor-at-law, ta. figure out how
to stop it. And stay both alive and
outside prison walls so doing. A vague
idea was coming into focus, but it was
still too blurred to make sense. Yet
there was a core of possibility within
the outlines.
"Don't be too confident," said Sam
out loud. "You're dealing with a
living, legal, spinal meningitis!"
But it was possible. He could pretend
to go along with MacKenzie (always
with great reluctance, to act
otherwise would be out of character),
gather in.the diseased money and, at
the last moment, convene the investors
and blow the whole operation out of
the sky. And to save his hide, there'd
be a lot of "in the case of my sudden
demise, my own attorneys are
instructed to publicly reveal..." any
number of things.
Including the translation of
the-Shepherd Company's "brokering of
religious artifacts."
Who would believe it?
"Stop that!" Sam grabbed his wrist,
startled by the 109
sound of his own voice. He was further
startled by the sound of the
telephone. He raced to it like a man
facing execution rushing to hear what
the governor had to say.
"Goddamn! This must be the attorney
and secretary and treasurer of the
Shepherd Company! With assets over ten
million dollars! How does that strike
you?"
"It's a leading question. I'll not
indulge."
"You know something, boy? You must
be a pistol of a lawyer!"
"Are you sure you want to talk over
the telephone?" asked Devereaux. "It's
been given a pretty good FCC rating
lately."
"Oh, that's all right. We won't say
anything we shouldn t. At least, I
won't, and I hope to hell you know
better. I just wanted to tell you that
the additional copies of the part-
nership agreement are downstairs
waiting for you. I sent them up last
night with an old master sergeant I
used to know "
"Good Cod, you had duplicates made?
You damn fool! Those copy places
usually keep a set! If they're
photostats there'll be negatives!"
"Not where I was. Right down here in
the Watergate lobby there's a big
machine. You put in a quarter for each
page Jesus! You should have
seen the
crowds gatherl They're a little jumpy
around here, aren't they? But nobody
saw anything. It was kind of weird.
Everybody staring; nobody saying
anything. Except two guys from the
Washington Post who came running in
from the street "
"All rightl" interrupted Devereaux.
"The copies are downstairs. What the
hell am I supposed to do with them?"
"Put 'em in your fancy briefcase,
the one I gave you. Take 'em to
Geneva. You won't need 'em in
Switzerland, of course, but there may
be one or two other stops on the way
back. Namely, London, that's pretty
definite. You'll be at the Savoy for
a day or two. Airline tickets and
everything will be at the hotel in
Geneva. When you're in London a
gentleman named Danf rth will call
you. You'll know what to do."
"That's dirty pool. I won't know
what to do, I don't know what I'm
doing! You can't ~ just put me in this
crazy 110
situation and not tell me anything.
I'm carrying documentst My name is on
them! I'm involved with the transfer
of ten million dollars""
"Now, calm down," said the Hawk with
gentle firmness. "Remember what I told
you: There'll be times when, as my
adjutant, you'll be asked to carry out
orders
"Bul~htt!" roared Sam. "What am I
supposed to say to people?"
"Well, what's bullshit to one man
may be sugar-coated wheat to another.
If anyone presses you, you're just
helping an old soldier who's quietly
raising a few dollars to spread
religious brotherhood."
'That's absurd," said Devereaux.
"That's the Shepherd Company," said
the Hawk.
MacKenzie lifted up five specific
pages from the Xeroxed G-2 files
scattered over the hotel bed and took
them to the desk across the room. He
sat down, picked up a red crayon, and
proceeded to mark each copy on the top
left border. One through five.
Goddamnl It was the sequence he had
been looking for, the pattern he knew
was there because a man can't resist
going back to his first method of
fortune building if the circumstances
appear right. And because time
minimizes the problems and pressures
a person felt decades ago, especially
if the profits remain.
The cover intelligence out of Hanoi
three years ago had been confusing but
authentic. Authentic, that is, on the
bottom line, everything else was
distorted.
An Englishman was making a killing
by brokering hardware and ammunition
to North Vietnam.
No big deal, London did not frown on
trade to the Commie bloc, although
there were specific regulations as to
war machinery. But it was a period
during that screwed-up, half-assed
conflict when the boys in Hanoi and
Moscow and Peking were running slow on
the production lines. Money could be
made in large bundles by anyone who
could divert combat supplies into
North Vietnamese ports.
One Lord Sidney Danforth had done just
that.
Buying in the United States, West
Germany, and France, he sailed under
Chilean flag ostensibly for ports in
the 111
new African countries. Except the
ships did not go anywhere near Africa.
They altered their courses in interna-
tional Pacific waters, sped north,
refueled in the Russian out-islands,
and headed south to Haiphong as
regulationbound trading vessels.
G-2 could never prove Danforth's
involvement because the Communist
payments were made directly to the
Chilean companies and Danforth stayed
well out of sight. And Washington was
not about to provoke an incident.
Danforth was a powerful Englishman
with a lot of clout in the Foreign
Office. Nam wasn't worth it.
What had intrigued MacKenzie,
however, were the two keys: Chilean
flag and African ports. They were
covers that had been used before.
Thirty years ago. During World War II.
It was common knowledge in
intelligence circles that certain
South American companies with outside
financing had fed war machinery to the
Axis at enormous profit during the
early forties. In those hectic wartime
days the shipping destinations were
always Capetown and Port Elizabeth
because the manifest records in those
harbors were chaotic at best, but
usually nonexistent. Scores of ships
that were supposed to dock in South
Africa altered courses in the southern
Atlantic waters and headed into the
Mediterranean. To Italy, generally. .
Was it possible that one Lord Sidney
Danforth had imitated his own
operations of three decades past?
It was one thing to chisel a few
million out of Southeast Asia in the
seventies, something else again to
make a fortune out of the holocaust
that tested the courage of the British
Lion. A man could get his name taken
off the Buckingham Palace guest list
pretty quickly for something like
that.
It was time for the Hawk to have a
transatlantic talk with Lord Sidney
Danforth, seventy-two-year-old
knighted paragon of British industry.
And just about the wealthiest man in
England.
Goddamnl The Shepherd Company was
attracting some of the most
interesting investors.
112
CHAPlER ELEVEN
The Strand was crowded. It was shortly
past five o'clock; the legion of
office workers were heading home.
Sam had arrived at Heathrow Airport
on the 3:40 flight from Geneva and had
wasted no time getting to the relaxed
comfort of a Savoy suite. He needed
it. Geneva had been a nightmare.
He had realized that for any future
record, he had to convey a very
specific ignorance as to the
objectives of the Shepherd Company,
cloaking this lack of knowledge in
profound respect for the unnamed
principals involved; especially the
president, who was motivated by
deeplyfelt religious convictions.
The Geneva bankers were, at first
impressed by his humility. My God, ten
million united States dollars and the
overseeing lawyer only smiled and
spoke convivial banalities, demurring
when pressed for identities, nodding
soulfully about religious brotherhood
when the staggering amount was brought
up. So they asked
him out to lunch,
where there were a lot of winks and
drinks and offers of bedroom
gymnastics of an incredible variety.
This was, after all; Switzerland; a
buck was a buck and this hardnosed
approach was not to be confused with
yodeling and edelweiss and Heidi in
her pinafores. Gradually, thought
Devereaux, as the lunches evolved into
dinners, the Geneva bankers thought he
was either the dumbest attorney ever
to practice before the American bar or
the most implausibly secretive
middleman ever to cross their borders.
He kept up the charade for three
days and nights, leaving behind a
half-dozen confused Swiss
burgomasters, tearfully frustrated
over unrequited confidences and terri-
113
bly sick to their stomachs after too
much industrial lubricant. And the
strain on Sam was unbearable. He had
reached the point where he could not
concentrate on anything but his own
rigid, blank smile and the necessary
quiet control of his fears. He was so
preoccupied with himself that when the
vice-president of the Great Bank of
Geneva saw him off at the airport,
Devereaux just smiled and said "Thank
you" when the banker threw up over his
raincoat.
In his anxiety to get the hell out of
Geneva, he had left his shaving kit
behind, which explained why he was now
on The Strand looking for a drugstore.
He walked south for a block and a half,
opposite the Hippodrome, and went into
the Strand Chemists. His purchases made,
he headed back to the hotel,
anticipating a long, warm bath, a shave,
and a good dinner at the Savoy Grille.
"Major Devereaux!" The voice was
enthusiastic, American, and feminine. It