The Apocalypse Watch

by Robert Ludlum

  “Nein!” shrieked the struggling neo as a trickle of blood rolled down across his neck. “What do you want from me? I know nothing, I do only as I’m ordered!”

  “Who gives you the orders?”

  “I don’t know! I receive a telephone call—a man, sometimes a woman—they use my code number and I must obey.”

  “That’s not good enough, scumbucket—”

  “He’s telling the truth, Stosh,” Latham broke in quickly, stopping Witkowski from cutting further. “The other night, that driver told me the same thing, practically word for word.”

  “What were your orders tonight?” pressed the colonel as the Nazi screamed under the increased pressure of the blade. “Tonight!” roared Witkowski.

  “To kill him, ja, to kill the traitor, but to make sure we take the body far away and burn it.”

  “Burn it?” interrupted Drew.

  “Ja, and to cut off the head, burning it also, but in another place, far away from the body.”

  “ ‘Far away’ …?” Drew stared at the trembling, horror-stricken neo.

  “I swear it, that’s all I know!”

  “The hell it is!” shouted the colonel, drawing more blood. “I’ve interrogated hundreds like you, slugball, and I know. It’s always in your eyes, something you haven’t said, haven’t told us!… A kill’s no big deal, the rest of it’s a little tougher, maybe a lot more dangerous, carrying around a dead body, cutting off a head, and burning everything. That’s even a little weird for you psychopaths. What haven’t you told us? Talk, or it’s the last breath of air in your throat!”

  “Nein, please! He will die shortly, but he cannot die among the enemy! We must reach him first!”

  “He’s going to die?”

  “Ja, it cannot be stopped. Three days, four days, that’s all he has, all we know. We were to take him tonight, kill him before morning, far away, where he will not be found.”

  Latham walked away from the couch, half in a daze, trying to understand the enigma presented by the Nazi revolutionary. Nothing made sense, except one apparently incontrovertible projection.

  “I’m sending this ratface over to French Intelligence with our entire testimony, every word he said here, which, actually, we’ve got, thanks to that little machine on my desk,” said Witkowski.

  “You know, Stosh,” countered Drew, turning around and looking at the colonel, “maybe you should put him on a diplomatic jet to Washington, to Langley, no information available, except to the receivers at the CIA.”

  “Good Christ, why? This is a French problem.”

  “Maybe it’s more than that, Stanley. Harry’s list. Perhaps we should see who at the Agency tries to protect this man, or, conversely, who tries to kill him.”

  “You’re beyond me, youngster.”

  “I’m beyond myself, Colonel. I’m Harry now, and someone expects me to die.”

  13

  It was three o’clock in the morning in Monte Carlo, the narrow, dimly lit streets beyond the casino deserted except for stragglers from the still-active gambling palace; a few were despondently drunk, several elated, most weary. Claude Moreau made his way down an alley that led to a stone wall overlooking the harbor. He reached the wall, his eyes scanning the scene below; it was a haven for the world’s rich, memorialized by the lights of the huge, luxurious yachts and cabin cruisers at their moorings. He felt no sense of envy whatsoever; he was merely an observer appreciating the surface beauty of it all. His civil servant’s lack of jealousy came easily, for his job required that he spend infrequent time among the owners of these opulent craft, watching their lifestyles, often delving deeper. It was enough. If one could categorize, in many ways they were a desperate people, forever seeking out new interests, new experiences, new thrills. The constant seeking became their reality, the search without end, leading only to still another search. They had their comforts; they needed them, for the rest was boredom, looking for the next stimulation that would occupy them. What now? What’s new?

  “Allô, monsieur,” said the voice out of the darkness as a figure approached from the shadows. “Are you the friend of the Brotherhood?”

  “Your cause is futile,” said Moreau without turning. “I’ve told you people that a hundred times, but if you continue to better my impoverished circumstances, I’ll do as you ask.”

  “Our Blitzkrieger, the woman at the table in the casino. You took her away. What happened?”

  “She took her own life, as the other two did in prison months ago. We are French; we did not, upon her arrest, examine her private areas. If we had, we would have found cyanide capsules encased in plastic.”

  “Sehr gut. She told you nothing?”

  “How could she? She never came out of the ladies’ room alive.”

  “Then we are clear?”

  “For now. And I shall expect the usual payment in Zurich for my considerable cooperation. Tomorrow.”

  “It will be done.”

  The figure walked away in the darkness as Moreau reached into his breast pocket and turned off his recorder. Unwritten contracts meant nothing, unless their violations were recorded.

  Basil Marchand, member of the House of Lords, slammed the brass paperweight down on his desk with such force that the glass cover shattered, sending fragments across the room. The man facing him took a step backward while briefly turning his face away.

  “How dare you?” shouted the elderly gentleman, his hands trembling with rage. “The men of this family go back to the Crimea and all the wars since, including the Boer, where a newspaper boy named Churchill extolled their bravery under fire. How can you think to imply such a thing to me?”

  “Forgive me, Lord Marchand,” said the MI-5 officer calmly, unflinchingly, “your family has deservedly received recognition for its military contributions throughout this century, but there was an exception, wasn’t there? I refer, of course, to your older brother, who was among the founders of the Cliveden set, which held Adolf Hitler in rather high regard.”

  “Drummed out of the family!” Marchand broke in furiously as he yanked open a drawer and pulled out a silver-framed scroll. “Here, you insolent bugger! This is a citation from the King himself for my boat at Dunkirk. I was a lad of sixteen and brought out thirty-eight men who would have been slaughtered or captured. And that was before I was awarded the Military Cross for my service in the Royal Navy!”

  “We’re aware of your outstanding heroism, Lord Marchand—”

  “So don’t ascribe to me the warped delusions of an older brother I barely knew—and didn’t like what I did know,” continued the outraged member of the House of Lords. “If you’ve done your research, you should know that he left England in 1940 and never returned, no doubt drank himself to death hiding in one of those South Pacific islands.”

  “Not quite accurate, I’m afraid,” said the MI-5 visitor. “Your brother ended up in Berlin with another name, and worked throughout the war in the Reich’s Ministry of Information. He married a German woman and, like you, he had three sons—”

  “What …?” The old man fell slowly back in his chair, his mouth agape, barely breathing. “We were never told,” he added so quietly he could hardly be heard.

  “There was no point, sir. After the war he disappeared with his entire family, presumably to South America, one of those German enclaves in Brazil or Argentina. Since he was not officially listed as a war criminal, no search was instituted, and considering the losses the Marchands sustained—”

  “Yes,” Lord Marchand interrupted softly, “my other two brothers and my sister—two pilots and a nurse.”

  “Precisely. Our offices decided to bury the whole nasty business.”

  “That was kind of you, very kind. I’m sorry I treated you so shabbily.”

  “Not to be concerned. As you said, you couldn’t know what you’d never been told.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.… But here, now, this afternoon, you damn near accused me—and by extension, the family—of being part of som
e Fascist movement in Germany. Why?”

  “It’s a rather clumsy technique few of us are comfortable with, but it’s effective. I didn’t specifically accuse you, sir; if you recall, I phrased my allusion in terms of ‘how offended the Crown would be to learn’ et cetera, et cetera. The immediate answer is always outrage, but there is false outrage and then there is true outrage. It’s not difficult to discern which is which, not if you’ve been around for a while, and I have.”

  “What did I do right?”

  “I believe, if you were younger, you would have physically assaulted me, thrown me bodily out of your house.”

  “Quite true, I would have.”

  “It was a genuine reaction on your part, not false at all.”

  “Again, I ask why?”

  “The names of two of your sons are on a list, a highly confidential list of people who silently support the neo-Nazi revolutionaries in Germany.”

  “Good God, how?”

  “Marchands Limited is a textile complex, is that correct?”

  “Yes, of course, everyone knows that. With our factories in Scotland, we’re the second largest in the U.K. Two of my sons run it since I retired; the third, may the Lord have mercy on his soul, is a musician. So what have they done to warrant such an accusation?”

  “They’ve dealt with a firm called Oberfeld, shipped thousands upon thousands of rolls of fabric for identical shirts, blouses, trousers, and slacks to their warehouses in Mannheim.”

  “Yes, I’ve studied the accounts, which I insist on doing. Oberfeld pays its charges on due-date time and is a splendid customer. So?”

  “Oberfeld doesn’t exist, it’s a front for the neo-Nazi movement. As of seven days ago, the name and the warehouse in Mannheim are gone, disappeared, as your brother disappeared fifty years ago.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “I’ll put this as gently as possible, Lord Marchand. Is it possible that the sons of your brother have come back, and with terrible irony have involved your own unwitting sons in a conspiracy to accelerate the Nazi resurgence by supplying uniforms?”

  “Uniforms?”

  “It’s the next step, Lord Marchand. Historically, it’s standard.”

  Knox Talbot disliked playing God, for too many had played God over his race for too long. He was uncomfortable assuming the position, feeling not a little hypocritical, but he had no choice. The Agency’s all-powerful top-secret computers had been compromised, software containing the secrets of the globe invaded, including the most sensitive operations the CIA had mounted across the world, among them Harry Latham’s torturous three-year odyssey. Harry Latham-Alexander Lassiter … code name, Sting.

  Under the pretext of rotation assignments, he had requested over three dozen personnel records but only eight demanded his attention. The men and women responsible for the AA-Zero computers, for they alone had the keys, the codes, to learn the secrets that could end the lives of deep-cover agents and informers, or conversely render the operations useless. Someone had—no, more than someone, some two, for the locked disks required two people to punch in different codes, freeing the software and permitting screen transmission. But which two, and what had they really accomplished? Harry Latham had escaped, at the terrible price of his brother’s life, but he was alive and in hiding in Paris. Not only alive, but he had brought out an incriminating list of names that was already alarming the country, or at least the media, which did its damnedest to alarm the country whenever possible. According to the murdered Drew Latham, the Nazis knew about Sting, but when did they know? Before or after Harry had uncovered the names? If before, the entire list was suspect, but even that judgment did not wash with the disappearance of Rudolph Metz, a neo-fanatic if there ever was one. The Rockland laboratories had established that Metz had arrogantly used his own ciphers to extract and delete an entire year’s research, and the FBI had traced Metz and his wife’s escape to Stuttgart, using false passports, via Dulles International Airport and Lufthansa Flight 7000. How many other Metzes were there? Or to reverse the question, how many other innocent Senator Rootes were there? Everything was spiraling out of control, or soon would be, as the investigations continued.

  Two out of eight totally “white,” completely cleared specialists in the most demanding of computer operations were moles. How was it possible? Or even was it? There was nothing in their personnel records that gave the slightest hint.… Then suddenly sections of Harry Latham’s London debriefing came back to Talbot. He opened a drawer and pulled out the transcript. He found the page.

  Q (MI-5): The rumor is that the Nazis, the new Nazis, may have known who you were from the beginning.

  HL: That’s not a rumor, that will be their credo. How often did we do the same thing when we found a mole who fled back to Mother Russia after looting us. Of course we proclaimed how smart we were, and how useless was the information stolen from us—when it wasn’t.

  Q (DEUXIÈME): Isn’t it conceivable that you were fed disinformation?

  HL: I was a trusted confidant until I escaped, a major contributor and a believer in their cause. Why would they feed me dirt? But to answer your question, yes, of course it’s conceivable. Disinformation, misinformation, human or computer error, wishful thinking, fantasizing—anything’s possible. It’s your job to confirm or deny. I’ve brought you the material, now it’s your function to evaluate it.

  Knox Talbot studied the agent’s statements. It could be argued that Harry Latham himself left the door wide open. Everything was crazy, crazy with probable confirmations and possible contradictions, except the existence of a spreading Nazi virus in Germany. The CIA director put the transcript away and stared at the eight separated records spread in an arc over his desk. He reread the words but found no hints, nothing of substance. He would take each one and try with all his concentration to read between the lines until his eyes were bloodshot. Then, thankfully, his telephone buzzed. He touched the button on his console; his secretary spoke.

  “Mr. Sorenson on line three, sir.”

  “Who’s on one and two?”

  “Two network producers. They want you to appear on programs discussing the Bureau’s domestic interrogations.”

  “I’m out to lunch for a month.”

  “I understood that, sir. Line three, unless you want me to tell him the same.”

  “No, I’ll take it.… Hello, Wes, please don’t add to my aggravation.”

  “Let’s have lunch,” said Wesley Sorenson. “We have to talk. By ourselves.”

  “I’m kind of obvious, old boy, if you hadn’t noticed. Unless you want to go to a restaurant in the darker part of town, where you’d be more obvious than me by a couple of nine yards.”

  “Then let’s eliminate any yards. The zoo in Rock Creek Park. The bird sanctuary; there’s a hot dog stand I was introduced to by my grandchildren. Not bad; it has chili.”

  “When?”

  “This is priority. Can you make it in twenty minutes?”

  “I guess I have to.”

  Oliver Mosedale, a fifty-year-old scholar attached to the Foreign Office and a prominent adviser to Britain’s Foreign Secretary, poured himself a brandy as his young housekeeper filled his pipe, packed it down, and brought it to him. “Thank you, my child,” he said, crossing to a large leather armchair facing a television set. The pipe securely in his mouth, he sat down with a sigh, placed his drink on a side table, reached into his pocket, and fired his pipe with a gold Dunhill lighter. “The evening was nothing short of an exhausting bore,” Mosedale continued. “The chef was undoubtedly drunk—I’m sure the canard à l’orange was soaked in Gatorade—and those idiots from Treasury would cut our budgets to the point where we couldn’t represent Liechtenstein, much less what’s left of the British Empire. It’s really all quite mad as well as most irritating.”

  “You poor ducks,” said the buxom twentyish housekeeper, more than a trace of cockney in her voice. “You work too hard, that’s what you do.”

  “Please
don’t mention ducks, my dear.”

  “Wot?”

  “It’s what I presumably had for dinner.”

  “Sorry.… Here, let me massage your neck, that always relaxes you.” The girl walked behind the chair and leaned over her employer, her generous breasts, made obvious by her décolletage, touching the back of his head, while her hands moved about his neck and shoulders.

  “Marvelous,” moaned the foreign service officer, drawing out the word as he reached for his brandy, taking sips between draws on his pipe. “You do that so well, but then, you do everything well, don’t you?”

  “I try, Ollie darling. As I may have mentioned, I was brought up to respect men of quality, to do their bidding out of admiration. I’m not one of those scruffs who shout all the time about privileged classes, I’m not. My mum always said, ‘If the good Lord wanted you to live in a castle, you’d have been born in one.’ And my mum’s a wise old bird, she is. She also says that we should take Christian pride in serving our betters, ‘cause somewhere in the Bible it says it’s better to give than to get, or sompin’ like that. ’Course my pa works on the docks and doesn’t have mum’s refinements—”

  “It really isn’t necessary that you talk, dear child,” Mosedale interrupted, his brows arched in controlled frustration. “As a matter of fact, it’s time for the BBC news, isn’t it?” He glanced at his watch. “Indeed, it is! I think that’s enough of a massage, my sweet. Why not turn on the telly, then go up and bathe. I’ll join you in a while, so wait for me, my angel.”

  “Sure, Ollie. And I’ll wear that nightie you like so much. God knows it’s easy to put on, what there is of it.” The housekeeper-cum-concubine went to the television set, snapped it on, and waited for the proper channel to be in focus. She blew Mosedale a kiss and walked provocatively through the arch to the staircase.

  The BBC newsreader, his voice and expression neutral, began with the recent events in the Balkans, shifted to the news out of South Africa, briefly touched on the accomplishments of the Royal Academy of Science, then paused and continued with words that caused Oliver Mosedale to sit up and stare at the figure on the screen.