The Aquitaine Progression: A Novel

  “Wir kommen in…” The rapid clacking of the wheels below, echoing in the metal chamber, obscured the distant announcement over the loudspeakers. Only moments now, thought Converse as he turned and looked at the exit door. When the train slowed sufficiently and the lines began to form at both inner doors, he would make his move.

  “Wir kommen in drei Minuten in Wesel an!”

  Several passengers in both cars got out of their seats, adjusted their briefcases and shopping bags and started up the aisle. The grinding of the giant wheels underneath signified the approach to touchdown. Now.

  Joel turned to the exit door and, finding the upper latch, snapped it open, pulling the upper section back; the rush of air was deafening. He spotted the handle of the lower release and gripped it, prepared to yank it up as soon as the ground beyond slowed down. It would be in only seconds. The sounds below grew louder and the sunlight outside created a racing silhouette of the train. Then the abrasive words broke through the dissonance and he froze.

  “Very well thought out, Herr Converse! Some win, some lose. You lost.”

  Joel spun around. The man yelling at him in the metal chamber was the passenger who had gotten on the train at Düsseldorf, the apologetic commuter who had sat next to him until the obese salesman had asked him to exchange seats. In his left hand was a gun held far below his waist, in his right the ever-respectable attaché case.

  “You’re a surprise,” said Converse.

  “I would hope so. I barely made the train in Düsseldorf. Ach, three cars I walked through like a madman—but not the madman you axe, ja?”

  “What happens now? You fire that gun and save the world from a madman?”

  “Nothing so simplistic, pilot.”

  “Pilot.”

  “Names are immaterial, but I am a colonel in the West German Luftwaffe. Pilots only kill one another in the air. It is embarrassing on the ground.”

  “You’re comforting.”

  “I also exaggerate. One disconcerting move on your part and I shall be a hero of the Fatherland, having cornered a crazed assassin and killed him before he killed me.”

  “ ‘Fatherland’? You still call it that?”

  “Natürlich. Most of us do. From the father comes the strength; the female is the vessel.”

  “They’d love you in a Vassar biology class.”

  “Is that meant to be amusing?”

  “No, just disconcerting—in a very minor way, nothing serious.” Joel had moved imperceptibly until his back was against the bulkhead, his whole mind, his entire thinking process, on pre-set. He had no choice except to die, now or in a matter of hours from now. “I suppose you have an itinerary for me,” he asked as he swung his left arm forward with the question.

  “Quite definitely, pilot. We will get off the train at Wesel, and you and I will share a telephone, my gun firmly against your chest. Within a short time a car will meet us and you will be taken—”

  Converse slammed his concealed right elbow into the bulkhead, his left arm in plain sight. The German glanced at the door of the forward car. Now!

  Joel lunged for the gun, both hands surging for the black barrel as he crashed his right knee with all the force he could command into the man’s testicles. As the German fell back he grabbed his hair and smashed the man’s head down onto a protruding hinge of the opposite door.

  It was over. The German’s eyes were wide, alarmed, glassy. Another scout was dead, but this man was no ignorant conscript from an impersonal government, this was a soldier of Aquitaine.

  A stout woman screamed in the window, her mouth opened wide with her screams, her face hysterical.

  “Wesel.…!”

  The train had slowed down and other excited faces appeared at the window, the frenzied crowd now blocking those who tried to open the door.

  Converse lunged across the vibrating metal enclosure to the exit panel. He grasped the latch and pulled it open, crashing the door into the bulkhead. The steps were below, gravel and tar beyond. He took a deep breath and plunged outside, curling his body to lessen the impact of the hard ground, and when he made contact he rolled over, and over, and over.

  23

  He careened off a rock and into a cluster of bushes. Nettles and coarse tendrils enveloped him, scraping his face and hands. His body was a mass of bruises, the wound in his left arm moist and stinging, but there was no time even to acknowledge pain. He had to get away; in minutes the whole area would be swarming with men searching for him, hunting for the murderer of an officer in the Federal Republic’s air arm. It took no imagination to foresee what would happen next. The passengers would be questioned—including the salesman—and suddenly a newspaper would be in someone’s hand, a photograph studied, the connection made. A crazed killer last seen in a back street in Brussels was not on his way to Paris or London or Moscow. He was on a train out of Bonn, passing through Cologne, Essen and Düsseldorf—and he killed again in a town called Wesel.

  Suddenly he heard the high-pitched wail of a horn. He looked up the small hill toward the tracks; a south-bound train was gathering speed out of the station several thousand feet away. Then he saw his hat; it was on the hill, halfway down. Joel crept out of the tangling brush, staggered to his feet, and ran to it, refusing to listen to that part of his mind which told him he could barely walk. He grabbed the hat and began running to his right. The south-bound train passed; he raced up the hill and across the tracks, heading for an old building, apparently deserted. More of its windows were shattered than intact. He might rest there for a few moments but no longer; it was too obvious a hiding place. In ten or fifteen minutes it would be surrounded by men with guns aimed at every exit, every window.

  He tried desperately to remember. How had he done it before? How had he eluded the patrols in the jungles north of Phu Loc?… Vantage points! Get where you can see them but they can’t see you! But there were tall trees then and he was younger and stronger and could climb them, concealing himself behind green screens of full branches on firm limbs. There was nothing like that here on the outskirts of a railroad yard … or maybe there was! To the right of the building was a landfill dump, tons of earth and debris piled high in several pyramids; it was his only choice.

  Gasping, his arms and legs aching, his wound inflamed, he ran toward the last of the pyramids. He reached it, propelled his way around the mass, and started climbing the rear side, his feet slipping into soft earth, and wood and cardboard and patches of garbage, where it had been layered. The sickening smells took his mind off the pain. He kept crawling, clawing with each slipping foot. If he had to, he could burrow himself into the stinking mess. There were no rules for survival, and if sinking himself into the putrid hill kept a spray of bullets from ending his life, so be it.

  He reached the top and lay prone below the ridge, dirt and protruding debris all around him. Sweat rolled down his face, stinging the scrapes on his face; his legs and arms were heavy with pain, and his breathing was erratic from the trembling caused not only by unused muscles but by fear. He looked down at the outskirts of the railroad yard, then up ahead at the station. The train had stopped, and the platform was filled with people milling around, bewildered. Several uniformed men were shouting orders, trying to separate passengers—apparently those in the two cars flanking the scene of the killing or anyone else who knew anything. In the parking lot surrounding the station house was a blue-and-white-striped police car, its red roof light spinning, the signal of emergency. There was a rapid clanging in the distance, and seconds later a long white ambulance streaked into the lot, whipped into a horseshoe turn and plunged back, stopping close to the platform. As the rear doors opened, two attendants jumped out carrying a stretcher; a police officer above them on the steps shouted at them, gesturing with his arm. They ran up the metal staircase and followed him.

  A second patrol car swerved into the lot, tires screeching as it stopped next to the ambulance. Two police officers got out and walked up the steps; the officer who had directed t
he ambulance attendants joined them, with two civilians, a man and a woman, beside him. The five talked, and moments later the two patrolmen returned to their vehicle. The driver backed up and spun to his left, gunning the engine, heading for the south end of the parking lot, directly toward Converse. Again they stopped and got out, now with weapons drawn; they raced across the tracks and down the slope of gravel and tar into the wild grass. They would be coming back in minutes, thought Joel, absently clawing the ragged surface by his shoulders. They would stop and check out the deserted building, perhaps call for assistance, but sooner or later they would examine the huge mounds of landfill.

  Converse looked behind him; there was a dirt road marked with the tracks of heavy trucks leading to a tall link fence, the gate held in place with a thick chain. A man running up that road and climbing that fence would be seen; he had to stay where he was, hidden in the putrid rubble.

  Another sound interrupted his frantic calculations—a sound like one he had heard only moments before. On his right, in the parking lot. A third patrol car came speeding in, its claxon howling, but instead of heading for the ambulance and the first police vehicle by the platform, it veered to its left, racing over to join the striped car at the south end of the lot. The two policemen in the field had radioed for assistance, and Joel felt a numbing sense of despair. He was looking at his own executioners. Executioner. The newly arrived patrol car contained only the driver—or did it? Did the policeman turn his head and speak? No, he was disengaging something, a seat belt probably.

  A gray-haired uniformed man got out, looked around, then started walking rapidly toward the tracks. He crossed them and stood on the top of the slope, shouting down at the police officers in the sun-drenched brown grass. Converse had no idea what the man was saying, but the scene appeared strangely out of place.

  The two policemen came racing into view, their guns no longer in their hands but holstered. There was a brief heated conversation. The older officer was pointing to a distant area south of the landfill; his words, to judge by their volume, were commands. Joel looked back at his patrol car; on the panel of the front door was an insignia that was absent on the other car. The man held a rank superior to those of his young associates; he was issuing orders.

  The younger policemen ran back across the tracks to their vehicle, their superior following but not running. They swung back the doors, literally jumped in and, in a burst of the engine’s roar, swerved to the right and sped out of the parking lot. The older man reached his patrol car, but he made no movement to open the door or get inside. Instead, he spoke—at least his lips moved—and five seconds later the rear doors opened and two men emerged. One man Converse knew well. His gun was in Joel’s pocket. It was Leifhelm’s chauffeur, a taped bandage across his forehead, another on the ridge of his nose. He pulled out a gun and barked a command to the other man; in his voice was the vengeful fury of a soldier dishonored in combat.

  Peter Stone left the hotel in Washington. He had told the young Navy lieutenant and the slightly older Army captain that he would contact them in the morning. Children, he thought. Idealistic amateurs were the worst, because their righteousness was usually as valid as their actions were impractical. Their childish disdain for duplicity and deceit did not countenance the fact that to rip out the maniacal bastards frequently required greater malevolence and far more deception than they could imagine.

  Stone got into a taxi—leaving his car in the basement parking area—and gave the driver the address of an apartment building on Nebraska Avenue. It was a lovely apartment, but it did not belong to him; it was leased by an Albanian diplomat at the United Nations who was rarely there—naturally, because he was based in New York. But the former intelligence officer had worked hard and turned the Albanian several years ago, not merely with ideological pleas to a fine scholar’s conscience but also with photographs of this same scholar in all manner of sexual indulgences with very strange women—women in their sixties and seventies, bag ladies off the streets, who after carnal abuse were subject to sheer physical abuse. He was a winner, the scholar-diplomat. A psychiatrist in Langley had said something about wish-fulfillment—sexually repressed matricide. Stone did not need that nonsense; he had the photographs of a son-of-a-bitch sadist. But it was the children that occupied his mind now, not the excesses of a fool that permitted him access to a luxury apartment far beyond his consultation fees.

  The children. Jesus! They were so right, their sensibilities so correctly on target, but they did not understand that when they took on the George Marcus Delavanes of today’s world it was war in all its worst forms of brutality, because that was the way these men fought. Righteousness had to join with a commitment to crawl in the gutter if necessary, no quarter sought, for none would be given. This was the last fifth of the twentieth century and the generals were going for it all; the paranoia of their disgust and frustrations had come to the end of endurance.

  Stone had seen it coming for years, and there were times when he had come close to applauding, throwing his hands up in frustration, willing to sell what was left of his soul. Strategies had been aborted—men lost—because of the maddening bureaucratic restraints that led back to laws and a constitution that were never written with anything like Moscow in mind. The Mad Marcuses of this planet—this part of the planet—had a number of very plausible points. There were those in the Company years ago who were adamant and not squirrelly about it. They said, “Bomb the nuclear plants in Tashkent and Tselinograd! Blow them the hell up in Chengdu and Shenyang! Don’t let them begin! We are responsible and they are not!”

  Who knew? Would the world have been better off?

  Then Peter would wake up in the morning and that part of his soul he had not sold would tell him, no, we cannot do that. There had to be another way, a way without confrontation and wholesale death. He still clung to that alternative, but he could not dismiss the Delavanes as megabomb off-the-wallers. Where were we heading now?

  He knew where he was heading—had been heading for years. It was why he had joined the children. Their righteousness was justified, their indignation valid. He had seen it all before in too many places, always at the extremes of the political spectrum. The Delavanes of the planet would turn everyone into robots. In many ways, death was preferable.

  Stone unlocked the door of the apartment, closed it, took off his jacket and made himself the only drink he would permit himself for the evening. He walked to the leather chair by the telephone and sat down, taking several swallows before putting the glass on the table beneath the floor lamp. He picked up the phone and dialed seven digits, then three more, and one more after that. A very faint dial tone replaced the original, and he dialed again. Everything was in order. The call was being routed through a KGB diplomatic scrambler cable on an island in the Cabot Strait southwest of Newfoundland. Only Dzerzhinsky Square would be confused. Peter had paid six negatives for the service. Five rings preceded the sound of a male voice in Bern, Switzerland.

  “Allo?”

  “This is your old friend from Bahrain, also the vendor in Lisbon and a buyer in the Dardanelles. Do I have to sing ‘Dixie’?”

  “Well, mah wuhd,” said the man in Bern stretching out the phrase in a dialect bred in the American Deep South, the French pretense dropped. “You go back a long time, don’t you, suh?”

  “I do, sir.”

  “I hear you’re one of the bad guys now.”

  “Unloved, mistrusted, but still appreciated,” said Stone. “That’s more accurate. The Company won’t touch me, but it’s got its share of unfriendlies in town who throw me consultations pretty regularly. I wasn’t as smart as you. No deposits from Uncle No-Name in Swiss accounts.”

  “I was told you had a little juice problem.”

  “A big one, but it’s over.”

  “Never negotiate a release from people worse than you if you can’t pass a Breathalyzer test. You’ve got to scare them, not make ’em laugh.”

  “I found that out. I hear
you do some consulting yourself.”

  “On a limited basis and only with clients who could pass Uncle No-Name’s muster. That’s the agreement and I stick to it. Either I do or some Boom Boom Botticelli is flown over and Massa’s in de cole, cole ground.”

  “Where the threats don’t do you any good,” said the civilian.

  “That’s the stand-off, Pearlie May. It’s our little détente.”

  “Would I pass muster? I give you my word I’m working with good people. They’re young and they’re on to something and they haven’t got an evil thought in their heads, which under the circumstances is no recommendation. But I can’t tell you anything substantive. For your sake as well as mine and theirs. Is that good enough?”

  “If the consultation doesn’t take place in outer space, it’s more than enough, and you know it. You saved Johnny Reb’s ass three times, only y’awl got the sequence backwards. In the Dardanelles and Lisbon you got me out before the guns came in. Over in Bahrain you rewrote a report about a little matter of missing contingency funds that probably kept me from five years in a Leavenworth stockade.”

  “You were too valuable to lose over a minor indiscretion. Besides, you weren’t the only one, you merely got caught—or nearly did.”

  “Regardless, Johnny Reb owes. What is it?”

  Stone reached for his glass and took a drink. He spoke, choosing his words carefully. “One of our commanders is missing. It’s a Navy problem, SAND PAC-based, and the people I’m with want to keep it contained. No Washington input at this stage.”

  “Which is part of what you can’t tell me,” said the Southerner. “Okay. SAND PAC—that’s San Diego and points west and wet until the date line, right?”

  “Yes, but it’s not relevant. He’s the chief legal out there—maybe was, by now. If he’s not past tense, if he’s alive, he’s nearer you than me. Also if I get on a plane, my passport ignites the computers and things can’t go that way.”