The Aquitaine Progression: A Novel

  Suddenly, Joel saw the figure of a man in the uniform of the United States Army across the room talking with two civilians at the bar. He did not know the man. It was the uniform that struck him. It brought to mind the military chargé d’affaires at the embassy, that extraordinarily observant and precise officer who was capable of seeing a man who was not at a bridge at the exact moment he was not there. A liar for Aquitaine, someone whose lies identified him. If that liar did not know where Fitzpatrick was, he could be made to find out. Perhaps there was a way, after all. Converse drew a line on the right side of his list, connecting Connal Fitzpatrick with Admiral Hickman in San Diego. He did not give it a number; there was too much to consider.

  Briefcase? He was still convinced that Leifhelm’s men had not found it. If the generals of Aquitaine had that attaché case, they would have let him know. It was not like those men to conceal such a prize, not from the prisoner who had thought he was a match for them. No, they would have told him one way or another, if only to make clear to him how totally he had failed. If he was right, Connal had hidden it. At the inn called Das Rektorat? It was worth a try. Joel circled the word Briefcase and numbered it 2.

  “Speisekarte, mein Herr?” said a waiter before Converse knew he was standing there.

  “English, please?”

  “Certainly, sir.” The waiter separated his menus as though they were an outsized deck of cards. He selected one and handed it to Joel as he spoke. “The Spezialität for today is Wienerschnitzel—it is the same in English.”

  “That’s fine. Keep the menu, I’ll take it.”

  “Danke.” The man swept away before Joel could order another drink. It was just as well, he thought.

  $93,000 plus. There was nothing more to be said; the irritating bulge around his waist said it all. He had the money; it was to be used.

  Embassy out … No Larry Talbot, et al.… No Beale … No Anstett … No man in San Francisco. Throughout the meal he thought about each item, each statement, wondering how it all could have happened. Every step had been considered carefully, facts absorbed, dossiers memorized, caution uppermost. But everything had been blown away by complications far beyond the simple facts provided by Preston Halliday in Geneva.

  Build just two or three cases that are tied to Delavane—even circumstantially—and it’ll be enough.

  In light of the revelations on Mykonos, then in Paris, Copenhagen and Bonn, the simplicity of that remark was almost criminal. Halliday would have been appalled at the depth and the breadth of influence Delavane’s legions had attained, at the penetrations they had made at the highest levels of the military, the police, Interpol and, obviously, now those who controlled the flow of news from so-called authoritative sources in Western governments.

  Converse abruptly checked his racing thoughts. He suddenly realized that he was thinking about Halliday in the context of a man who saw only a pair of eyes at night in the jungle, unaware of the size or the ferocity of the unseen animal in the darkness. That was wrong. Halliday knew the materials Beale was handing over to him on an island in the Aegean; he knew about the connections between Paris, Bonn, Tel Aviv and Johannesburg; he knew about the decision makers in the State Department and the Pentagon—he knew it all! He had arranged it all with unknown men in Washington! Halliday had lied in Geneva. A California wrestler he had befriended years ago in school named Avery Fowler was the manipulator, and in the name of A. Preston Halliday, he had lied.

  Where were those subterranean men in Washington who had the audacity to raise half a million dollars for an incredible gamble but were too frightened to come out in the open? What kind of men were they? Their scout had been killed, their puppet accused of being a psychopathic assassin. How long could they wait? What were they?

  The questions disturbed Converse so much that he tried not to pursue them—they would lead only to rage, which would blind his reason. He needed reason and, above all, the strength that came with awareness.

  It was time to find a telephone exchange and reach Mattilon in Paris. René would believe him, René would help him. It was unthinkable that his old friend would do anything else.

  The civilian walked in silence to the hotel window, knowing he was expected to deliver a pronouncement that would form the basis of a miracle—not a solution but a miracle, and there were no such things in the business he knew so well. Peter Stone was by all the rules a relic, a castaway who had seen it all, and in the final years of seeing had finally fallen apart. Alcohol had taken the place of true audacity, at the end rendering him a professional mutant, a part of him still proud of past accomplishments, another part sickened by the waste, by the knowledge of wasted lives, wasted strategies—morality thrown into a gargantuan wastebasket of a collective nonconscience.

  Still, he had once been one of the best—he could not forget that. And when he knew it was all over, he had faced the fact that he was killing himself with a plethora of bourbon and self-pity. He had pulled out. But not before he had gained the enmity of his past employers in the Central Intelligence Agency, not for speaking out publicly but for telling them privately who and what they were. Fortunately, as sobriety returned he learned that his past employers had other enemies in Washington, enemies having nothing to do with foreign entanglements or competition. Simply men and women serving the republic who wanted to know what the hell was going on when Langley wouldn’t tell them. He had survived—was surviving. He thought about these things, knowing that the two other men in the room believed he was concentrating on the issue at hand.

  There was no issue. The file was closed, the border rimmed in black. The two who were with him were so young—God, so damned young!—they would find it too terrible to accept. He remembered, vaguely, when such a conclusion would have appalled him. But that was nearly forty years ago; he was almost sixty now, and he had heard such conclusions repeated too often to shed tears of regret. The regret—the sadness was there—but time and repetition had dulled his senses; clear evaluation was everything.

  Stone turned and said with quiet authority, “We can’t do anything.” The Army captain and the Navy lieutenant were visibly upset. Peter Stone continued, “I spent twenty-three years in the tunnels, including a decade with Angleton, and I’m telling you there’s absolutely nothing we can do. We have to let him hang out, we can’t touch him.”

  “Because we can’t afford to?” asked the naval officer scathingly. “That’s what you said when Halliday was killed in Geneva. We can’t afford to!”

  “We can’t. We were outmaneuvered.”

  “That’s a man out there,” insisted the lieutenant. “We sent him out—”

  “And they set him up,” the civilian broke in, his voice calm, his eyes sadly knowledgeable. “He’s as good as dead. We’ll have to start looking elsewhere.”

  “Why is that?” asked the Army captain. “Why is he as good as dead?”

  “They have too many controls, we can see that now. If they don’t have him locked up in a cellar, they know pretty much where he is. Whoever finds him will kill him. A riddled body of a crazed killer is delivered up and there’s a collective sigh of relief. That’s the scenario.”

  “And that’s the most cold-blooded analysis of a murder I’ve ever heard! Murder, an unwarranted execution!”

  “Look, Lieutenant,” said Stone, stepping away from the window, “you asked me to come with you—convinced me I should—because you wanted some experience in this room. With that experience comes the moment when you recognize and accept the fact that you’ve been beaten. It doesn’t mean you’re finished, but you’ve been punched out of the round. We’ve been punched out, and it’s my guess the punches haven’t stopped yet.”

  “Maybe …” began the captain haltingly. “Maybe we should go to the Agency, tell them everything we know—everything we think we know—and what we’ve done. It might get Converse out alive.”

  “Sorry,” countered the former CIA man. “They want his head and they’ll get it. They wouldn’t have g
one to all this trouble if ‘dead’ wasn’t written all over him. He found out something, or they found out something about him. That’s the way it works.”

  “What kind of world do you live in?” asked the naval officer quietly, shaking his head.

  “I don’t live in it anymore, Lieutenant, you know that. I think it’s one of the reasons you came to me. I did what you two—and whoever else is with you—are doing now. I blew a whistle—only, I did it with two months of bourbon in my veins and ten years of disgust in my head. You say you might go to the Company? Good, go ahead, but you’ll do it without me. No one worth a quarter in Langley will touch me.”

  “We can’t go to G-Two or naval intelligence,” said the Army officer. “We know that, we’ve all agreed. Delavane’s people are there; they’d shoot us down.”

  “Aptly put, Captain. Would you believe with real bullets?”

  “I do now,” said the Navy man, nodding at Stone. “The report out of San Diego is that the legal, Remington, was killed in an automobile accident in La Jolla. He’s the one who last spoke to Fitzpatrick, and before he left the base, he asked another legal the directions to a restaurant in the hills. He’d never been there—and I don’t think it was an accident.”

  “Neither do I,” agreed the civilian. “But it takes us to the somewhere-else we can look.”

  “What do you mean?” said the Army captain.

  “Fitzpatrick. SAND PAC can’t find him, right?”

  “He’s on leave,” interjected the naval officer. “He’s got another twenty days or so. He wasn’t ordered to list his itinerary.”

  “Still, they’ve tried to find him but they can’t.”

  “And I still don’t understand,” objected the captain.

  “We go after Fitzpatrick,” said Stone. “Out of San Diego, not Washington. We find a reason to really want him back. A SAND PAC emergency, routed strictly through Eyes Only, a base problem—nobody else’s.”

  “I hate to repeat myself,” said the Army man, “but you’ve lost me. Where do we start? Whom do we start with?”

  “With one of your own, Captain. Right now he’s a very important person. The chargé d’affaires at the Mehlemer House.”

  “The what?”

  “The American embassy in Bonn. He’s one of them. He lied when it counted most,” said Stone. “His name is Washburn. Major Norman Anthony Washburn, the Fourth.”

  The telephone complex was off the lobby of an office building. It was a large square room with five enclosed booths built into three walls and a high, squared counter in the center where four operators sat in front of consoles, each woman obviously capable of speaking two or more languages. Telephone directories of the major European cities and their suburbs were on racks to the left and right of the entrance; small pads with attached ball-point pens had been placed on the ledges above for the convenience of those seeking numbers. The routine was familiar: a caller delivered a written-out number to an operator, specified, the manner of payment—cash, credit card or collect—and was assigned a booth. There were no lines; a half-dozen booths were empty.

  Joel found the number of Mattilon’s law firm in the Paris directory. He wrote it out, brought it to an operator and said he would pay in cash. He was told to go to booth number seven and wait for the ring. He entered it quickly, the soft cloth brim of his hat falling over his forehead above the tortoiseshell glasses. Any enclosure, whether a toilet stall or a glass booth, was preferable to being out in the open. He felt his pulse accelerating; it seemed to explode when the bell rang.

  “Saint-Pierre, Nelli, et Mattilon,” said the female voice in Paris.

  “Monsieur Mattilon, please—s’il vous plaît.”

  “Votre …?” The woman stopped, undoubtedly recognizing an American’s abysmal attempt at French. “Who may I say is calling, please?”

  “His friend from New York. He’ll know. I’m a client.”

  René did know. After several clicks his strained voice came on the line. “Joel?” he whispered. “I don’t believe it!”

  “Don’t,” said Converse. “It’s not true—not what they say about Geneva or Bonn, not even what you said. I had nothing to do with those killings, and Paris was an accident. I had every reason to think—I did think—that man was reaching for a gun.”

  “Why didn’t you stay where you were, then, my friend?”

  “Because they wanted to stop me from going on. It’s what I honestly believed, and I couldn’t let them do that. Let me talk.… At the George Cinq you asked me questions and I gave you evasive answers and I think you saw through me. But you were kind and went along. You have nothing to be sorry about, take my word for it—my very sane word. Bertholdier came to me that evening in my room; we talked and he panicked. Six days ago I saw him again here in Bonn—only, this time it was different. He was ordered to be there, along with three other very powerful men, two generals and a former field marshal. It’s a cabal, René, an international cabal, and they can pull it off. Everything’s secret and moving fast. They’ve recruited key military personnel all over Europe, the Mediterranean, Canada, and the U.S. There’s no way to tell who’s with them and who isn’t—and there isn’t time to make a mistake. They’ve got millions at their disposal, warehouses all over filled with munitions ready to ship to their people when the moment comes.”

  “The moment?” Mattilon broke in. “What moment?”

  “Please,” insisted Joel, rushing ahead. “They’ve been funneling weapons and explosives to maniacs everywhere—terrorists, provos, certified lunatics—with one purpose only: destabilization through violence. It’s their excuse to move in. Right now they’re blowing up Northern Ireland.”

  “The madness in Ulster?” interrupted the Frenchman again. “The horrors going on—”

  “It’s their horror! It’s a trial run. They did it with one massive shipment from the States—to prove they can do it! But Ireland’s only a test, a minor exercise. The big explosion’s coming in a matter of days, a few weeks at most. I’ve got to reach the people who can stop them, and I can’t do that if I’m dead!” Converse paused, only to catch his breath, giving Mattilon no chance to speak. “These are the men I was after, René—after legally, to build a few cases against them, expose them in the courts before they got anywhere. But then, I found out. They’re already there. I was too late.”

  “But why you?”

  “It started in Geneva—with Halliday, the man who was shot to death. He was killed by their gunmen, but not before he recruited me. You asked me about Geneva and I lied to you, but that’s the truth. Now, you’ll either help me, or try to help me, or you won’t. Not for me—I’m insignificant—but what I got roped into isn’t. And I was roped into it, I know that now. But I’ve seen them, talked to them, and they’re so goddamned logical, so fucking persuasive, they’ll turn all Europe fascist; they’ll set up a military federation with my country the progenitor. Because it started in my country; it started in San Francisco with a man named Delavane.”

  “Saigon? The Mad Marcus of Saigon?”

  “Alive and well and living in Palo Alto, pushing his military buttons all over the place. He’s still a magnet and they’re drawn to him like flies to a pig.”

  “Joel, are you … are you … all right?”

  “Let’s put it this way, René. I took a lousy watch off a man who guarded me—a paranoid who nevertheless was nice to me—and it’s got a sweep hand. You’ve got thirty seconds to think about what I’ve told you, then I’ll hang up. Now, old friend, twenty-nine seconds.”

  Ten passed and Mattilon spoke. “An insane man does not deliver such a precise explanation so precisely. Very well, perhaps I am mad, too, but what you speak of—God knows the times are right, what else can I say? Everything is crazy!”

  “I’ve got to get back to the States alive, to Washington. I know people there. If I can reach them and show myself for what I am, they’ll listen to me. Can you help?”

  “I have contacts in the Quai d’Orsay. L
et me go to them.”

  “No,” objected Converse. “They know we’re friends. One word to the wrong person and you’d be killed. Forgive me, but more important, your talking would set off alarms. We can’t afford that.”

  “Very well,” said Mattilon. “There is a man in Amsterdam—don’t ask me how I know him—who can arrange such things. I assume you have no passport.”

  “I have one but it’s not mine. It’s German. I took it off a guard who was ready to put a bullet in my head.”

  “Then I’m sure he’s not in a position to complain to the authorities.”

  “He’s not.”

  “In your mind you really did go back, didn’t you, my friend?”

  “Let’s not talk about it, okay?”

  “Bien. You are you. Keep that passport; it will be useful.”

  “Amsterdam. How do I get there?”

  “You are in Bonn, no?”

  “Yes.”

  “There is a train to Emmerich on the Dutch border. In Emmerich, switch to local transport—streetcars, autobuses, whatever. The customs are lax, especially during the peak hours when workers go back and forth. No one looks, so just show the passport you have quickly, partially covering the photograph, perhaps. It’s good that it’s German. You should have no trouble.”

  “Suppose I do?”

  “Then I can’t help you, my friend. I’m being honest. And then I must go to the Quai d’Orsay.”

  “All right. I get across, then what?”

  “You’ll reach Arnhem. From there you take the train to Amsterdam.”

  “And then?”

  “The man. His name is on a card in my bottom drawer. Do you have something to write on—write with?”

  “Go ahead,” said Converse, reaching for the note pad and the ball-point pen on the ledge beneath the telephone.

  “Here it is. Thorbecke. Cort Thorbecke. The apartment house is on the southwest corner of Utrechtsestraat and Kerkstraat. The telephone number is zero-two-zero, four-one-one-three-zero. When you call for an appointment, tell him you are a member of the Tatiana family. Do you have that? Tatiana.”