The Aquitaine Progression: A Novel

  “But how did you know about it in the first place?”

  “Selected POW records have flags on their discharge sheets.”

  “Clarification, please?”

  “Just what I said, flags. Small blue seals that denote additional information still held under tight security. No flags, everything’s clean; but if there is one, that means there’s something else. I told Press, and he said he had to have whatever it was, so I went after it.”

  “Then anyone else could, too.”

  “No, not anyone. You need an officer with a legal-release number, and there aren’t that many of us. Also there’s a minimum forty-eight-hour delay so the material can be vetted. That’s almost always in the area of weapons and technology data that still might be classified.”

  “Forty-eight?” Converse swallowed as he tried to count the hours since Paris, since the first moment his name had surfaced. “There’s still time!” he said, his voice taut, his words clipped. “If you can do it there’s still time. And if you can, I’ll tell you everything I know because you’ll deserve it. No one will deserve it more.”

  “Spell it out.”

  Joel turned aimlessly, shaking his head. “That’s funny. I said the same thing to Avery. I said ‘Spell it out, Avery.’ … Sorry, his name was Press.” Converse turned back to the Navy lawyer, a military lawyer with a mystifying military privilege called a legal-release number. “Listen to me and hear me clearly. A few minutes ago something happened that I wasn’t sure would or could happen—something your brother-in-law was killed to prevent. Tomorrow at four o’clock in the afternoon I’m going to walk into the midst of that group of men who’ve come together to promote a kind of violence that’ll stun this world, toppling governments, allowing these same men to step in and fill the voids. They’ll run things their way, shape the laws their way. One big Supreme Court, each chair owned by a fanatic with specific convictions as to who and what has value and who and what doesn’t, and those who don’t can go to hell, no appeals on the agenda.… I’m going to meet them face-to-face! I’m going to talk with them, hear their words! I admit I’m the most amateurish fox you’ve ever heard of in a chicken coop—only, in this case it’s a vultures’ nest, and I mean the type that swoops down and tears the flesh off your back with one pass. But I’ve got something going for me: I’m one hell of a good lawyer, and I’ll learn things they won’t know I’ve learned. Maybe enough to piece together a couple of cases that will blow it all apart—blow them apart. I told you before that I rejected your deadline. I still reject it, but now it doesn’t seem so out of the question. Certainly not two days, but perhaps not ten! You see, I thought I was going to have to fly to Tel Aviv, then Johannesburg. Prime everyone, frighten them. Now I don’t have to! We’ve already done it! They’re coming to me because they’re the ones who are frightened now! They don’t know what to think, and that means they’ve panicked.” Converse paused, sweat forming on his hairline; then he added, “I don’t have to tell you what a good lawyer can do with panicked hostile witnesses. The materials he can collect for evidence.”

  “Your plea’s accepted, counselor,” said Fitzpatrick, not without awe. “You’re convincing. Now, tell me why my intercession can help? What does it accomplish?”

  “I want those men to think I’m one of them! I can live with everything they can put together about me—I’m not proud of it all; I’ve made my compromises—but I can’t live with that transcript of my discharge! Don’t you see? It’s what Avery—Press—understood! I understand now. He knew me nearly twenty-five years ago, and when I think back we were actually pretty damned good friends. And no matter what happened to us individually, he was banking on the fact that I hadn’t really changed that much, not in the deeper things. By the time we reach the voting age we’re pretty well set, all of us. The real changes come later, much later, dictated by such things as acceptance or rejection and the state of our wallets—the prices we pay for our convictions, or to support our talents, defending success or explaining failure. That transcript confirmed what Halliday believed, at least enough to make him want to meet me, talk with me, and finally to recruit me. Only, he did it—finally—by dying as I held his head. I couldn’t walk away after that.”

  Connal Fitzpatrick was silent as he walked out on the balcony. He leaned over and gripped the railing as Converse watched him. Then he stood up, raised both his hands, and pulled back the sleeve of his left wrist. “It’s twelve-fifteen in San Diego. No one in legal goes to lunch before one o’clock; the Coronado’s bar doesn’t begin to jump until then.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “I can try,” said the naval officer, crossing through the French doors toward the telephone. “No, damn it, if you’ve got your times straight, I can do better than try, I can issue an order. That’s what rank’s all about.”

  The first five minutes were excruciating for Joel. There were delays on all overseas calls, but somehow the bi-, tri-, or quadri-lingual Fitzpatrick, speaking urgently, unctuously, in German, managed to get through, the word dringend repeated frequently.

  “Lieutenant Senior Grade Remington, David. Legal Division, SAND PAC. This is an emergency, sailor, Commander Fitzpatrick calling. Break in if the lines are occupied.” Connal covered the mouthpiece and turned to Converse. “If you’ll open my suitcase, there’s a bottle of bourbon in the middle.”

  “I’ll open your suitcase, Commander.”

  “Remington?… Hello, David, it’s Connal.… Yes, thanks very much, I’ll tell Meagen.… No, I’m not in San Francisco, don’t call me there. But something’s come up I want you to handle, something on my calendar that I didn’t get to. For openers, it’s a Four Zero emergency. I’ll fill you in when I get back, but until I do you have to take care of it. Got a pencil?… There’s a POW service record under the name of Converse, Joel, Lieutenant, one and a half stripes, Air Arm, pilot—carrier-based, Vietnam duty. He was discharged in the sixties”—Fitzpatrick looked down at Converse, who held up his right hand and three fingers of his left—“nineteen sixty-eight, to be exact.” Joel stepped forward, his spread right hand still raised, his left now showing only the index finger. “June of ’68,” added the Navy lawyer, nodding. “Point of separation our old hometown, San Diego. Have you got all that? Read it back to me, please, David.”

  Connal nodded sporadically, as he listened. “C-O-N-V-E-R-S-E, that’s right.… June, ’68, Air Arm, pilot, Vietnam, POW section, San Diego separation; that’s it, you’ve got it. Now here’s the wicket, David. This Converse’s SR is flag status; the flag pertains to his discharge hearing, no weapons or high tech involved.… Listen carefully, David. It’s my understanding that there may be a request pending accompanied by a legal-release code for the discharge transcript. Under no circumstances is that transcript to be released. The flag stays fixed and can’t be removed by anyone without my authorization. And if the release has been processed it’ll still be within the forty-eight-hour vet-delay. Kill it. Understood?”

  Again Fitzpatrick listened, but instead of nodding, he shook his head. “No, not under any circumstances. I don’t care if the secretaries of State, Defense, and the Navy all sign a joint petition on White House stationery, the answer is no. If anyone questions the decision, tell him I’m exercising my authority as Chief Legal Officer of SAND PAC. There’s some goddamned article in the ‘shoals’ that says a station CLO can impound materials on the basis of conceivably privileged information relative to the security of the sector, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t recall the time element—seventy-two hours or five days or something like that—but find that statute. You may need it.”

  Connal listened further, his brows creasing, his eyes straying to Joel. He spoke slowly as Converse felt the sickening ache again in his chest. “Where can you reach me …?” said the naval officer, perplexed. Then suddenly he was no longer bewildered. “I take back what I said before; call Meagen in San Francisco. If I’m not with her and the kids, she’ll know where to reach me.… Thanks again, Dav
id. Sweep your decks and get right on this, okay? Thanks … I’ll tell Meg.” Fitzpatrick hung up the phone and exhaled audibly. “There,” he said, slouched in relief, pushing his hand through his loose light-brown hair. “I’ll phone Meagen and give her this number, tell her to say I’ve gone up to the Sonoma hills, if Remington calls—Press had some property there.”

  “Give her the telephone number,” said Joel, “but don’t tell her anything else.”

  “Don’t worry, she’s got enough on her mind.” The naval officer looked at Converse, frowning. “If your hourly count is right, you’ve got your time now.”

  “My count’s all right. Is Lieutenant Remington? I mean that only in the sense that he wouldn’t let anyone override your order, would he?”

  “Don’t mistake my officiousness where he’s concerned,” replied Connal. “David isn’t easily pushed around. The reason I chose him and not one of the four other senior lawyers in the department is that he’s got a reputation for being a stickler prick. He’ll find that statute and nail it to the forehead of any four-striper who tries to countermand that order. I like Remington; he’s very useful. He scares the hell out of people.”

  “We all have case partners like that. It’s called the good guy-bad guy routine.”

  “David fits. He’s got an eye that keeps straying to the right.” Fitzpatrick suddenly stood erect, his bearing military. “I thought you were going to get the bourbon, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, sir, Commander!” shot back Joel, heading for Fitzpatrick’s suitcase.

  “And if I remember correctly, after you pour us a drink, you’re going to tell me a story I want very much to hear.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!” said Converse, lifting the suitcase off the floor and putting it on the couch. “And if I may suggest, sir,” continued Joel, “a room-service dinner might be in order. I’m sure the Commander needs nourishment after his trying day at the wheel.”

  “Good thinking, Lieutenant. I’ll phone down to the Empfang.”

  “Before calling your bookie, may I also suggest that you first call your sister?”

  “Oh, Christ, I forgot!”

  Chaim Abrahms walked down the dark street in Tel Aviv, his stocky frame draped in his usual safari jacket, boots beneath his khaki trousers, and a beret covering his nearly bald head. The beret was the only concession he made to the night’s purpose; normally he enjoyed being recognized, accepting the adulation with well-rehearsed humility. In daylight, his head uncovered and held erect, and wearing his familiar jacket, he would acknowledge the homage with a nod, his eyes boring in on his followers.

  “First a Jew!” was the phrase with which he was always greeted, whether in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, in sections of Paris and most of New York.

  The phrase had been born years ago when as a young terrorist for the Irgun he had been condemned to death in absentia by the British for the slaughter of a Palestinian village, with the Arab corpses put on display for Nakama! He had then issued a cry heard around the world: “I am first a Jew, a son of Abraham! All else follows, and rivers of blood will follow if the children of Abraham are denied!”

  The British, in 1948, not caring to create another martyr, commuted his sentence and gave him a large moshav. Yet the acreage of the settlement could not confine the militant sabra. Three wars had broken his agricultural shackles as well as unleashing his ferocity—and his brilliance in the field. It was a brilliance developed and refined through the early years of racing with a fugitive, fragmented army, for which the tactics of surprise, shock, hit and melt away were constant, when being outmanned and outgunned were the accepted odds but only victory was the acceptable outcome. He later applied the strategies and the philosophy of those years to the ever-expanding war machine that became the Army, Navy, and Air Force of a mighty Israel. Mars was in the heavens of Chaim Abrahm’s vision and, the prophets aside, the god of war was his strength, his reason for being. From Ramat Aviv to Har Hazeytim, from Rehovot to Masada of the Negev, Nakama! was the cry. Retribution to the enemies of Abraham’s children!

  If only the Poles and the Czechs, the Hungarians and the Romanies, as well as the haughty Germans and the impossible Russians, had not immigrated to his country by such tens of thousands. They arrived and the complications came with them. Faction against faction, culture against culture, each group trying to prove it was more entitled to the name Jew than the others. It was all nonsense! They were there because they had to be; they had succumbed to Abraham’s enemies, permitted—yes, permitted—the slaughter of millions rather than rising as millions and slaughtering in return. Well, they found out what their civilized ways could bring them, and how much their Talmudic convolutions could earn them. So they came to the Holy Land—their Holy Land, so they proclaimed. Well, it wasn’t theirs. Where were they when it was being clawed out of rock and arid desert by strong hands with primitive tools—Biblical tools? Where were they when the hated Arab and the despised English first felt the wrath of the tribal Jew? They were in the capitals of Europe, in their banks and their fancy drawing rooms, making money and drinking expensive brandy out of crystal goblets. No, they came here because they had to; they came to the Holy Land of the sabra.

  They brought with them money and dandy ways and elegant words and confusing arguments and influence and the guilt of the world. But it was the sabra who taught them how to fight. And it was a sabra who would bring all Israel into the orbit of a mighty new alliance.

  Abrahms reached the intersection of Ibn Gabirol and Arlosoroff streets; the streetlamps were haloed, their light hazy. It was just as well; he should not be seen. He had another block to go, to an address on Jabotinsky, an unprepossessing apartment house where there was an undistinguished flat leased by a man who appeared to be no more than an unimportant bureaucrat. What few realized, however, was that this man, this specialist who operated sophisticated computer equipment with communications throughout most of the world, was intrinsic to the global operations of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, which many considered the finest on earth. He, too, was a sabra. He was one of them.

  Abrahms spoke his name quietly into the mouthpiece above the mail slot in the outer lobby; he heard the click in the lock of the heavy door and walked inside. He began the climb up the three flights of steps that would take him to the flat.

  “Some wine, Chaim?”

  “Whisky,” was the curt reply.

  “Always the same question and always the same answer,” said the specialist. “I say ‘Some wine, Chaim?’ and you say one word. ‘Whisky,’ you say. You would drink whisky at the Seder, if you could get away with it.”

  “I can and I do.” Abrahms sat in a cracked leather chair, looking around the plain, disheveled room with books everywhere, wondering, as he always did, why a man with such influence lived this way. It was rumored that the Mossad officer did not like company, and larger, more attractive quarters might invite it. “I gathered from your grunts and coughs over the telephone that you have what I need.”

  “Yes, I have it,” said the specialist, bringing a glass of very good Scotch to his guest. “I have it, but I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

  “Why not?” asked Abrahms, drinking, his eyes alert over the rim of the glass and fixed on his host as the latter sat down opposite him.

  “Basically because it’s confusing, and what’s confusing in this business is to be approached delicately. You are not a delicate man, Chaim Abrahms, forgive the indelicacy of my saying it. You tell me this Converse is your enemy, a would-be infiltrator, and I tell you I find nothing to support the conclusion. Before anything else, there must be a deep personal motive for a nonprofessional to engage in this kind of deception, this kind of behavior, if you will. There has to be a driving compulsion to strike out at an image of a cause he loathes. Well, there is a motive, and there is an enemy for which he must have great hatred, but neither is compatible with what you suggest. The information, incidentally, is completely reliable. It comes from the Quang Dinh??
?”

  “What in hell is that?” interrupted the general.

  “A specialized branch of North Vietnamese—now, of course, Vietnamese—intelligence.”

  “You have sources there?”

  “We fed them for years—nothing terribly vital, but sufficient to gain a few ears, and voices. There were things we had to know, weapons we had to understand; they could be turned against us.”

  “This Converse was in North Vietnam?”

  “For several years as a prisoner of war; there’s an extensive file on him. At first, his captors thought he could be used for propaganda, radio broadcasts, television—imploring his brutal government to withdraw and stop the bombing, all the usual garbage. He spoke well, presented a good picture, and was obviously very American. Initially they televised him as a murderer from the skies, saved from the angry mobs by humane troops, then later while eating and exercising; you see, they were programming him for a violently sudden reversal. They thought he was a soft, privileged young man who could be broken rather easily to do their bidding in exchange for more comfortable treatment—after having experienced a period of harsh deprivation. What they learned, however, was quite different. Under that soft shell the inner lining was made of hard metal, and the odd thing was that as the months went by it grew harder, until they realized they had created—created was their word—a hellhound of sorts, somehow forged in steel.”

  “Hellhound? Was that their word, too?”

  “No, they called him an ugly troublemaker, which, considering the source, is not without irony. The point is, they recognized the fact that they had created him. The harsher the treatment, the more volatile he became, the more resilient.”

  “Why not?” said Abrahms sharply. “He was angry. Prod a desert snake and watch him strike.”

  “I can assure you, Chaim, it is not the normal human response under such conditions. A man can go mad and strike in crazed fury, or he can become reclusive to the point of catatonia, or fall apart weeping, willing to compromise anything and everything for the smallest kindness. He did none of these things. His was a calculated and inventive series of responses drawing on his own inner resources to survive. He led two escapes—the first lasting three days and the second five—before the groups were recaptured. As the leader, he was placed in a cage in the Mekong River, but he devised a way to kill the water rats by grabbing them from beneath the surface like a shark. He was then thrown into solitary confinement, a pit in the ground twelve feet deep with barbed wire anchored across the top. It was from there, during a heavy rainstorm at night, that he clawed his way up, bent the wire back and escaped alone. He made his way south through the jungles and in the river streams for over a hundred miles until he reached the American lines. It was no easy feat. They created a savagely obsessed man who won his own personal war.”