The Apocalypse Watch

by Robert Ludlum

  “I led him to the suggestion, naturally; that, too, is part of our training. I asked him if it was possible that the French had me followed. His answer was ingenuous and probably correct. He replied that should the Paris authorities spot the attractive well-known wife of France’s most powerful foreign ambassador shopping alone, they might easily order quiet protection.”

  “I imagine that’s logical, unless your chief of security is as well trained as you are.”

  “Rubbish! Now, you listen to me. My husband is arriving on the Concorde in a few hours, and we’ll spend a day or two in a connubial reunion, but I still insist on going to Germany to meet our superiors. I have a plan. According to the official records, I have a surviving great-aunt in Stuttgart; she’s close to ninety and I’d like to see her before it’s too late—”

  “The scenario’s perfect,” interrupted Strasbourg, gesturing for Janine to follow him into the darkest shadows of the exhibition room. “The ambassador can hardly object, so here’s what we’ll do, and Bonn will certainly approve.”

  Peering through the lens, the Deuxième officer angled the camcorder, following the couple into the dimly lit area in the corner. Suddenly, he gasped, watching in horror as the count reached into his jacket pocket and slowly pulled out a syringe, the hypodermic needle encased in a plastic cover. With his other hand in shadows, Strasbourg removed the casing, baring the needle.

  “Stop him!” the agent whispered harshly into his lapel radio. “Interfere! My God, he’s going to kill her. He’s got a needle!”

  “Monsieur le Comte!” cried the second Deuxième officer, breaking through the bodies and stunning both Strasbourg and the ambassador’s wife. “I couldn’t believe my eyes, but it is you, sir! I was the small boy who used to play in your family’s orchards years ago. How good it is to see you again! I’m an attorney in Paris now.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” said the frustrated, angry Strasbourg, dropping the syringe on the dark floor in the noise of the intrusion and crushing it under his foot. “An attorney, how fortunate.… I’m sorry, this is an awkward time. I’ll look you up.” With those words, Louis, the Count of Strasbourg, rushed back through the small crowd and out of the exhibition room.

  “I regret the intrusion, madame!” said the second Deuxième man, his apologetic gaze conveying the impression that he had awkwardly bumbled into a lovers’ assignation.

  “It’s of no matter,” stammered Janine Courtland, turning and walking rapidly away.

  * * *

  It was shortly past five o’clock when Latham and Karin de Vries returned for a second time from the Deuxième Bureau. They had been summoned by Moreau after the Louvre tapes, both video and audio, had been duplicated and prepared for scrutiny. Their escorts, Monsieur Frick and Monsieur Frack, were following in separate elevators, five minutes apart, to make certain no curious strangers in the lobby showed undue interest in the American or the Belgian employee of the embassy.

  “What is it between you two?” asked Drew as they walked down the hallway to their Normandie suite.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You and Moreau. This morning you were like two old friends, closer than ham and cheese. The rest of the day you hardly spoke.”

  “I wasn’t aware of it. If it appeared that way, I’m sure it’s my fault. I was intensely interested in everything that happened. The Louvre operation was brilliant, wasn’t it?”

  “It was smart and smooth, especially the short-circuiting of Strasbourg, but then, the Deuxième has been around for a while.”

  “Those two agents reacted beautifully, surely you agree.”

  “I’d be stupid to disagree.” Latham approached the door of the suite, held up his hand for them both to stop, and took out a pack of matches from his pocket.

  “I thought you were drastically cutting down on cigarettes. Do you mean that you can’t wait till we’re inside to light one?”

  “I am cutting down, and this hasn’t anything to do with cigarettes.” Drew struck a match and moved it back and forth around the door lock. There was a sudden tiny flare of light, swiftly extinguished. “We’re fine,” said Latham, inserting his key. “No invaders.”

  “What?”

  “That was your real hair, not your wig.”

  “What?”

  “I found it in the bed.”

  “Would you mind—”

  “Very simple and damn near foolproof.” Latham opened the door, admitting Karin; he followed her and closed the door. “Harry taught me that one,” he continued. “A strand of hair, especially dark hair, is for all intents and purposes invisible to the naked eye. You stick one in a lock, protruding on the outside, and if anyone enters, the hair’s gone. Yours was still where I left it, therefore no one’s been inside since we left here.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “With Harry. So was I.” Drew quickly removed his jacket, threw it on a chair, and turned to De Vries. “Okay, lady, what’s going on?”

  “Really, I don’t understand you.”

  “Something happened between you and Claude and I’d like to know what it is. The only time you were alone with him was when he first came over early this morning to lay down the law to us and I went in to get dressed.”

  “Oh, that,” said Karin casually, her eyes not casual at all. “I imagine I did overstep—challenged his authority is a better way of putting it.”

  “Challenged his authority …?”

  “Yes. I told him he had no right placing such restrictions on an officer of American Consular Operations. He said he had every right to do whatever he thought best outside the embassy, and I said, how would he like it if the Deuxième or the Service d’Etranger were told they couldn’t move around Washington, and then he said—”

  “All right, all right,” Latham broke in, “I get the picture.”

  “Good Lord, Drew, I was acting on your behalf!”

  “Okay, I accept that. I saw how angry he was when I told him to pound sand. The French really get ticked off when their almighty authority is questioned.”

  “I suspect that most people with responsibility, be they French, German, English, or American, resent it when their authority is challenged.”

  “What about Belgians, or is it Flemish? I’ll never get the two straight.”

  “No, we’re too civilized, we listen to reason,” replied De Vries, smiling. They both laughed softly; the argument was over. “I’ll apologize to Claude in the morning and explain that I was simply overwrought.… Tell me, Drew, do you really think Strasbourg was going to kill Janine with that needle?”

  “Sure. Her cover was blown, a Sonnenkind exposed—the neos have no choice. And it certainly makes Moreau’s job rougher. Now he not only has to keep the surveillance in place, he has to be prepared for an outright attack on her life. What bothers you? You agreed with us an hour ago.

  “I don’t know. It all seems so bizarre. The Louvre, the crowds of tourists. I’m sorry, I’m just exhausted.”

  “Are you telegraphing me something? Should I send out for a pound of Spanish fly?”

  “I said exhausted, not out of my mind.” They fell into each other’s arms and kissed, long and arduously. The telephone rang. “I truly believe,” said Karin, “that the phone is our natural enemy.”

  “I’ll tear it out of the wall.”

  “No you won’t, you’ll answer it.”

  “The lady was trained by the Inquisition.” Latham crossed to the desk and picked up the phone. “Yes?”

  “It is I,” said Moreau. “Has Wesley called you?”

  “No, should he?”

  “He will, but at the moment he is extremely preoccupied, and our friend Witkowski is all but ready to fly to Washington and personally destroy the CIA complex in Langley, Virginia.”

  “Well, Stanley was G-Two, and never had much affection for the Company. What happened?”

  “The two Blitzkrieger the colonel sent to Washington under the tightest circumstances were found
dead in the safe house, bullets in their heads.”

  “Holy shit! In a safe house?”

  “As Wesley said to me, ‘Where are you, James Jesus Angleton, when you might have done some good?’ They’re running photographs of every single man in every section of Central Intelligence under the eyes of everybody in that house in Virginia.”

  “It won’t get them anywhere. I’ve got temporarily blond hair and glasses that nullify the approach. Tell them to look for someone in the lower to middle levels who once toyed with college or community theaters.”

  “Another Ames?”

  “Certainly not a Jean-Pierre Villier. An amateur, a nerd with a big head and bigger payoffs. Someone who could have been privy to classified data.”

  “You tell Wesley, I’ve got enough on my mind. Ambassador Courtland will be arriving in half an hour, and I have to keep his wife alive.”

  “What’s the problem? She’s in an armored embassy vehicle.”

  “So were you when you were nearly killed the other night. Au revoir.” The line went dead.

  “What is it?” asked Karin.

  “The two neos Stanley sent to D.C. were shot in a safe house—a safe house, for Christ’s sake!”

  “You said it last night,” said De Vries quietly. “They’re everywhere but we can’t see them.… What makes people do their bidding? The killings, the betrayals, it’s all so insane. Why?”

  “The experts say there are three types of motivation. The first is money, lots of it, way beyond their normal circumstances, and in this group are the gamblers, the luxury lovers and the psychotic show-offs. Then there are the zealots who identify with a fanatical cause that makes them feel superior insofar as the cause is absolute and puts everyone else down—as in a master race. The third, oddly enough, are what the analysts call the most dangerous. They’re the malcontents who are convinced they’ve been shafted by the system, their talents unrewarded.”

  “Why are they the most dangerous?”

  “Because they become fixtures, sitting at their desks for years, doing their usually unimportant jobs just adequately enough not to be fired.”

  “If they’re unimportant, why are they dangerous?”

  “Because they learn the very system they despise. Where the secrets are, how to access them, or even how to intercept them on their way from one section to another. You see, nobody pays much attention to fixtures, they’re simply there, reading dull bureaucratic reports or researching material about as classified as a telephone directory. If they applied themselves as assiduously to their jobs as they do to analyzing the system, some of them might go further legitimately, but not many. The psych men say they’re generally lazy, like students who’d rather go into an exam with crib notes on their sleeves than study for it.”

  “ ‘Assiduously’? You’re beginning to sound like Harry.”

  “Would you believe I got through ‘See Jack run. See Jill run’?”

  “I never doubted it. Any day now I expect you to extemporize on the terza rima of Dante’s Divina Commedia.”

  “The pizza guy from Brooklyn, right?”

  “You really can be adorable, do you know that?”

  There was a knock on the hotel suite’s door. “Now, who the hell is that?” said Latham, walking across the room. “Yes, what is it?”

  “The Deuxième,” replied the voice of Monsieur Frack.

  “Oh, sure.” Drew opened the door, suddenly facing a gun leveled at his head. He whipped his hand up, simultaneously lashing his right foot out, crashing it into the agent’s groin. The man fell back into the hallway; Drew pounced on him, wrenching the weapon from his grip as Monsieur Frick came running down the corridor, shouting.

  “Stop, monsieur! Please stop! This was only an exercise.”

  “What?” screamed Latham, about to pistol-whip his would-be killer, who was holding his crotch in agony.

  “If the monsieur will please listen,” choked Frack on the floor. “You are never to open the door until you are certain it is one of us!”

  “You said you were the Deuxième!” exclaimed Drew, getting up. “How many Deuxième are there up here?”

  “That is the point, sir,” said Frick, looking painfully down at his writhing colleague. “Monsieur le Directeur gave you a list of identifying codes that are changed every two hours. You were to ask for the one assigned to this time period.”

  “Codes? What codes?”

  “You never looked at it, my dear,” replied Karin, standing in the doorway and holding up a page of paper. “You gave it to me and said you’d read it later.”

  “Oh …?”

  “You must never assume that it is one of us until we are identified!” cried the guard on the floor, embarrassed by the appearance of De Vries, and briefly removing his hands from the assaulted area, but only briefly.

  “For God’s sake, come in, all of you,” said Karin. “The very least you can do, Monsieur Latham, is to offer our friends a drink.”

  “Sure,” agreed Drew, helping his presumed assailant to his feet as two hotel guests appeared, coming out of a room up the hallway. Seeing them, Latham added clearly enough to be heard, “Poor fellow! It must have been his last two drinks.”

  Inside the room, the door closed, the wounded agent collapsed on the couch. “You are très rapide, Monsieur Lat’am,” he said, his voice returning, “and very, very strong.”

  “If we were on the ice, you would have been dog meat,” said Drew, breathless, falling into the couch beside his victim.

  “Ice …?”

  “It’s difficult to translate,” explained Karin quickly by the dry bar. “What he means is, do you care for ice in your whisky?”

  “Oui, merci. But more whisky than the ice, s’il vous plaît.”

  “Naturellement.”

  Ambassador Daniel Courtland, as ordered by the government of France, was escorted off the Concorde from a ramp in the forward section before the aircraft reached its gate. The idling jet engines were deafening as Courtland, flanked by a marine guard detail, was taken to the waiting American Embassy limousine on the tarmac. He steeled himself for the ensuing minutes, understanding that they would be the most difficult of his life. To be embraced by the consummate enemy, an enemy trained since childhood to deceive someone like himself, was almost worse than losing the woman he loved.

  The limousine door was opened for him and he fell into the arms of his adoring, consummate enemy. “It was only three days, but I missed you so!” cried Janine Clunitz Courtland.

  “And I you, dear. I’ll make it up to you, to both of us.”

  “You must, you must! The fact that you were thousands of miles away from me made me ill, positively ill!”

  “It’s over with, Janine, but you must get used to Washington’s demands. I have to go where I am needed.” They kissed violently, viciously, and Courtland could taste the poison in her mouth.

  “Then you must take me with you—I love you so!”

  “We’ll work it out.… Now, please, my dear, we can’t embarrass the two marines in front, can we?”

  “I can. I could rip your trousers off and do wonderful things for you.”

  “Later, dear, later. Remember, I am the ambassador to France.”

  “And I’m one of the leading authorities in computer science, and I say the hell with them both!” Dr. Janine Courtland grabbed her husband’s unaroused crotch.

  The limousine raced down the avenue Gabriel to the embassy’s front entrance; it was the quickest route to the elevators that would take them up to their living quarters. The huge vehicle came to a stop as two additional marine guards came out to assist the ambassador and his wife.

  Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, three nondescript cars without license plates roared to the curb, surrounding the limousine as Courtland and his wife walked out onto the pavement. Doors opened and figures in black stocking masks leapt out, their automatic weapons on rapid fire, spraying deadly bullets everywhere. Almost simultaneously, additional gunfire
erupted from two automobiles that had obviously been following the embassy car. The crowds in the Gabriel raced for cover. Four masked terrorists fell; one marine collapsed, grabbing his stomach; Ambassador Courtland plunged across the pavement, one hand reaching for his right leg, the other for his shoulder. And Janine Clunitz, Sonnenkind, was dead, her skull shattered, her chest spewing blood. A number of the masked killers—who knew how many?—raced away, soon to discard their head coverings and join the evening strollers of Paris.

  “Merde, merde, merde!” roared Claude Moreau, emerging from around one of the Deuxième vehicles that had been protecting the Americans. “We did everything and we did nothing!… Take all the bodies inside and say nothing to anyone. I am disgraced and I should be!… See to the ambassador, he’s alive. Quickly!”

  Among the Americans rushing out of the embassy to lend assistance was Stanley Witkowski. He ran up to Moreau, grabbed him by the shoulders as the police sirens grew louder, and shouted, “Listen to me, Frenchie! You’re going to do and say exactly what I tell you, or I’m declaring war on you and the CIA! Is that clear?”

  “Stanley,” said the Deuxième chief, no spirit in him, “I have failed miserably. Do what you will.”

  “No, you haven’t failed, you fucking idiot, because you couldn’t have controlled this! These goddamned killers were willing to die tonight, and four did! Nobody can control fanatics like them. You can’t, we can’t, no one can because they don’t give a shit about their lives. We can’t obliterate their fanatical commitments, but we can out-think them, and you above all people know that!”

  “What are you saying, Colonel?”

  “Come inside with me, and I’ll ream your tight ass with a blowtorch if you refuse to do what I want you to.”

  “May I ask in what sphere?”

  “Sure you can. You’re going to lie through your teeth to your government, to the press, to any son of a bitch who wants to listen to you.”

  “So my grave is dug deeper?”

  “No, it’s your only way out of it.”

  29

  Dr. Hans Traupman maneuvered his short speedboat into the modest dock of the small cottage on the riverfront. No lights were necessary, as the summer moon was bright, glistening off the waters. And there were no dockhands to assist Traupman in securing his craft; they would be an added expense the defrocked Lutheran minister could ill afford. Günter Jäger, as his few friends in the Bundestag knew, watched his deutsche marks; it was rumored that his rent was minimal for the converted boathouse, now a cottage on the banks of the Rhine. The former estate beyond had been demolished in anticipation of a new mansion to be built in the near future. In truth, a new estate would be built, but more than a mansion, a magnificent fortress with all of the most modern technology to ensure the isolation and the safety of the new Führer. That day would come soon, when the Brüderschaft controlled the Bundestag. The mountains of Berchtesgaden would be replaced by the waters of the mighty Rhine, for Günter Jäger preferred the constantly moving river to the stationary snow-capped alps.