The Parsifal Mosaic

by Robert Ludlum

  The collapsible vial had been concealed in the pack of cigarettes, and the acrid odor that permeated the arbor told him what the vial had contained. It was a nerve gas that inhibited all muscular control if a target was caught in the nucleus; its effect lasted no less than an hour, no more than three. It was used almost exclusively for abduction, rarely if ever as a prelude to dispatch.

  Havelock opened his eyes and got to his knees, supporting himself on the wall. Beyond the marble bench the man from Washington was thrashing around on the overgrown grass, coughing, struggling to rise, his body in convulsions. He had been caught in the milder periphery of the burst, just enough to make him momentarily lose control.

  Michael got to his feet, watching the bluish-gray cloud evaporate in the air above the Palatine, its center holding until diffused by the breezes. He opened his jacket, feeling the pain of the scrapes and bruises made by the magnum under his belt as a result of his violent movements. He took out the weapon with the ugly perforated cylinder on the barrel, and walked unsteadily across the grass to Ogilvie. The red-haired man was breathing with difficulty, but his eyes were clear; he stopped struggling and stared up at Havelock and then at the weapon in Michael’s hand. “Go ahead, Navajo,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper, “Save me the trouble.”

  “I thought so.” Havelock looked at the former field man’s gaunt, lined face that bad the chalk-white pallor of death about it.

  “Don’t think. Shoot.”

  “Why should I? Make it easier, I mean. Or harder, for that matter. You didn’t come to kill me, you came to take me. And you don’t have any answers at all.”

  “I gave them to you.”

  “When?”

  “A couple of minutes ago … Havlíček. The war. Czechoslovakia, Prague. Your father and mother. Lidice. All those things that aren’t pertinent.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Your head’s damaged, Navajo. I’m not lying about that.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t see the Karas woman. She’s dead.”

  “She’s alive!” shouted Michael, crouching beside the man from Washington, grabbing him by the lapel of his rumpled coat. “Goddamn you, she saw me! She ran from me!”

  “No way,” said Ogilvie, shaking his head. “You weren’t the only one at Costa Brava, there was someone else. We have his sighting; he brought back proof—fragments of clothing, matching blood, the works. She died on that beach at the Costa Brava.”

  “That’s a lie! I was there all night! I went down to the road, down to the beach. There weren’t any pieces of clothing; she was running, she wasn’t touched until after she was dead, after the bullets hit her. Whoever she was, her body was carried away intact, nothing torn, nothing left on the beach! How could there be? Why would there be? That sighting’s a lie!”

  The strategist lay motionless, his eyes boring up into Havelock’s, his breathing steadier now. It was obvious that his mind was racing, filtering truth where he could find the truth. “It was dark,” he said in a monotone. “You couldn’t tell.”

  “When I walked down to the beach, the sun was up.”

  Ogilvie winced, forcing his head into his left shoulder, his mouth stretched, a searing pain apparently shooting up through his chest and down his arm. “The man who made that sighting had a coronary three weeks later,” said the strategist, his voice a strained whisper. “He died on a goddamned sailboat in the Chesapeake.… If you’re right, there’s a problem back in D.C. neither you nor I know about Help me. We’ve got to get out to Palombara.”

  “You get out to Palombara. I don’t come in without answers. I told you that.”

  “You’ve got to! Because you’re not getting out of here without me, and that’s Holy Writ.”

  “You’ve lost your touch, Apache. I took this magnum from that pretty face you hired. Incidentally, her gumbà is with her now, both resting at the bottom of a marble bath.”

  “Not them! Him!” The man from Washington was suddenly alarmed. He pushed himself up on his elbows, his neck craning, his eyes squinting into the sun, scanning the hill above the arbor. “He’s waiting, watching us,” he whispered. “Put the gun down! Get off the advantage. Hurry up!”

  “Who? Why? What for?”

  “For Christ’s sake, do as I say! Quickly!”

  Michael shook his head and got to his feet. “You’re full of little tricks, Red, but you’ve been away too long. You’ve got the same stench about you that I can smell all the way from the Potomac—”

  “Don’t! No!” screamed the former field man, his eyes wide, straining, focused on the high point of the hill. Then drawing from an unreasonable reservoir of strength, he lurched off the ground, clutching Havelock and pulling him away from the stone path,

  Havelock raised the barrel with heavy cylinder attached and was about to crash it into Ogilvie’s skull when the snaps came, two muted reports from above. Ogilvie gasped, then exhaled audibly, making a terrible sound like rushing water, and went limp, falling backwards on the grass. His throat was ripped open; he was dead, having stopped the bullet meant for Michael.

  Havelock lunged to the wall; three more shots came, exploding marble and dirt all around him. He raced to the end of the jagged wall, the magnum by his face, and peered through a V-shaped break in the stone.

  Silence.

  A forearm. A shoulder. Beyond a cluster of wild bush. Now! He aimed carefully and fired four shots in rapid succession. A bloody hand whipped up in the air, followed by a pivoting shoulder. Then the wounded man lurched out of the foliage and limped rapidly over the crest of the hill. The hair on the hatless figure was close-cropped and black, the skin deep brown. Mahogany. The would-be assassin on the Palatine was Rome’s conduit for covert activities in the northern sector of the Mediterranean. Had he squeezed the trigger in anger, or fear, or a combination of both, afraid and furious that his cover and his network would be exposed? Or had he coldly followed orders? Another question, one more shapeless fragment in the mosaic.

  Havelock turned and leaned against the wall, exhausted, frightened, feeling as vulnerable as in the early days, the terrible days. He looked down at Red Ogilvie—John Philip Ogilvie, if he remembered correctly. Minutes ago he was a dying man; now he was a dead man. Killed saving the life of another he did not want to see die. The Apache had not come to dispatch the Navajo; he had come to save him. But safety was not found among the strategists in Washington; they had been programmed by liars. Liars were in control.

  Why? For what purpose?

  No time. He had to get out of Rome, out of Italy. To the border at Col des Moulinets, and if that failed, to Paris.

  To Jenna. Always Jenna, now more than ever!

  10

  The two phone calls took forty-seven minutes to complete from two separate booths in the crowded Leonardo da Vinci Airport. The first was to the office of the direttore of Rome’s Amministrazione di Sicurezza, Italy’s watchdog over covert foreign activities. With succinct references to authentic clandestine operations going back several years, Havelock was put through without identification to the director’s administrative assistant. He held the man on the line for less than a minute, hanging up after saying what he had to say. The second call, from a booth at the opposite end of the terminal, was placed to the redattore of Il Progresso, Rome’s highly political, highly opinionated, largely anti-American newspaper. Considering the implied subject matter, the editor was a far less difficult man to reach. And when the journalist interrupted Michael for identification and clarification, Havelock countered with two suggestions: the first, to check with the administrative assistant to the direttore of the Amministrazione di Sicurezza; the second, to watch the United States embassy during the next seventy-two hours, with particular attention paid to the individual in question.

  “Mezzani!” fumed the editor.

  “Addio,” said Michael, replacing the phone.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence Baylor Brow
n, diplomatic attaché and a prime example of America’s recognition of minorities, was out of a job. The conduit was finished, his network rendered useless; it would take months, possibly a year, to rebuild. And regardless of how seriously he was wounded, Brown would be flown out of Rome within hours to explain the death of the red-haired man on the Palatine.

  The first floodgate had been opened. Others would follow. Every day it takes will cast you.

  He meant it.

  “I’m glad you got here,” said Daniel Stern, closing the door of the white, windowless room on the third floor of the State Department building. The two men he addressed were sitting at the conference table: the balding psychiatrist, Dr. Paul Miller, going through his notes; the attorney named Dawson gazing absently at the wall, his hand resting on a yellow legal pad in front of him. “I’ve just come from Walter Reed—the Baylor briefing. It’s all confirmed. I heard it myself, questioned him myself. He’s one torn-apart soldier, physically and emotionally. But he’s reining tight; he’s a good man.”

  “No deviations from the original report?” asked the lawyer.

  “Nothing substantive; he was thorough the first time. The capsule was secreted in Ogilvie’s cigarettes, a mild diphenylamine compound released through a C-O-Two cartridge triggered by pressure.”

  “That’s what Red meant when he told us he could take Havelock if he got him within arm’s reach,” interrupted Miller quietly.

  “He nearly did,” said Stern, walking into the room. There was a red telephone on a small table beside his chair; he flipped a switch on the sloping front of the instrument and sat down. “Hearing Baylor tell it is a lot more vivid than reading a dry report,” said the director of Consular Operations, and fell silent; the two strategists waited. Stern continued softly. “He’s quiet, almost passive, but you look at his face and you know how deeply he feels. How responsible.”

  Dawson leaned forward. “Did you ask him what tipped Havelock off? It wasn’t in the report.”

  “It wasn’t there because he doesn’t know. Until the last second, Havelock didn’t appear to suspect anything. Just as the report says, the two of them were talking; Ogilvie took the cigarettes out of his pocket and apparently asked for a light. Havelock reached into his pocket for matches, brought them over to Red, and then it happened. He suddenly kicked out, sending Ogilvie reeling off the bench, and the capsule exploded. When the smoke cleared, Red was on the ground and Havelock was standing over him with a gun in his hand.”

  “Why didn’t Baylor shoot then? At that moment?” The lawyer was disturbed; it was in his voice.

  “Because of us,” replied Stern. “Our orders were firm. Havelock was to be brought in alive. Only a ‘last extremity’ judgment could intervene.”

  “He could have been,” said Dawson quickly, almost questioningly. “I’ve read Brown’s—Baylor’s—service report. He’s a qualified expert in weapons, special emphasis on side arms. There’s very little he’s not a ‘qualified expert’ in; he’s a walking advertisement for the NAACP and the officer corps. Rhodes scholar, Special Forces, tactical guerrilla warfare. You name it, he’s got it in his file.”

  “He’s black; he’s had to be good. I told you that before. What’s your point?”

  “He could have wounded Havelock. Legs, shoulders, the pelvic area. Between them, he and Ogilvie could have taken him.”

  “That’s asking for a lot of accuracy from seventy-five to a hundred feet.”

  “Twenty-five to thirty yards. Almost the equivalent of a handgun firing range, and Havelock was standing still. He wasn’t a moving target. Did you question Baylor about that?”

  “Frankly, I didn’t see any reason to. He’s got enough on his mind, including a shot-up hand that may spell him out of the army. In my opinion, he acted correctly in a hairy situation. He waited until he saw Havelock point his gun at Ogilvie, until he was convinced Red didn’t have a chance. He only fired then, at the precise moment Ogilvie lunged up at Havelock, taking the bullet. Everything corresponds with the autopsy to Rome.”

  “The delay cost Red his life,” said Dawson, not satisfied.

  “Shortened it,” corrected the doctor. “And not by much.”

  “That’s also in the autopsy report,” added Stern.

  “This may sound pretty cold under the circumstances,” said the attorney, “and perhaps it’s related. We overestimated him.”

  “No,” disagreed the director of Cons Op. “We underestimated Havelock. What more do you need? It’s been three days since the Palatine, and in those three days he’s destroyed a conduit, frightened off the locals in Rome—no one wants to work for us now—and collapsed a network. Added to this he routed a cable through Switzerland to the chairman of Congressional Oversight, alluding to CIA incompetence and corruption in Amsterdam. And this morning we get a call from the chief of White House security, who doesn’t know whether to be panicked or outraged. He, too, received a cable, this one in sixteen-hundred cipher, implying that there was a Soviet mole close to the President.”

  “That comes from Havelock’s so-called confrontation with Rostov in Athens,” said Dawson, glancing at the yellow legal pad. “Baylor reported it”.

  “And Paul here doubts that it ever took place,” said Stern, looking at Miller.

  “Fantasy and reality,” interjected the psychiatrist. “If all the information we’ve gathered is accurate, he slips back and forth, unable to distinguish which. If our data is accurate. In all likelihood, there’s a degree of incompetence, perhaps minor corruption, in Amsterdam. However, I’d think it’s just as unlikely that a Soviet mole could break into the presidential circle.”

  “We can and do make mistakes here,” offered Stern, “as well as at the Pentagon, and, God knows, in Langley. But over there the chances of that type of error are minuscule. I don’t say it can’t happen or hasn’t happened, but anyone close to the Oval Office has had every year, every month, every week of his life put under the microscope, even the President’s closest friends. The bright recruits are researched as if they might be Stalin’s heirs; it’s been standard procedure since ’47.” The director paused again, again not finished. His eyes strayed to the sheaf of loose notes in front of the doctor. He continued slowly, pensively. “Havelock knows which buttons to press, which people to reach, the right ciphers to use; even old ciphers have impact. He can create panic because he gives his information authenticity…. How far will he go, Paul?”

  “No absolutes, Daniel,” said the psychiatrist, shaking his head. “Whatever I say is barely above guesswork.”

  “Trained guesswork,” interrupted the lawyer.

  “How would you like to try a case without the benefit of pretrial examination?” asked Miller.

  “You’ve got depositions, statistics, a current on-site briefing, and a detailed dossier. It’s fair background.”

  “Bad analogy. Sorry I brought it up.”

  “If we can’t find him, how far will he go?” pressed the director of Cons Op. “How long have we got before he starts costing lives?”

  “He already has,” broke in Dawson.

  “Not in a controlled sense,” contradicted Miller. “It was a direct reaction to a violent attack on his own life. There’s a difference.”

  “Spell out the difference, Paul”.

  “As I see it,” said the psychiatrist, picking up his notes and adjusting his glasses. “And to use a favorite phrase of Ogilvie’s, I don’t claim it’s Holy Writ. But there are a couple of things that shed a little light, and I’ll be honest with you, they disturb me. The key, of course, is in whatever was said between Havelock and Ogilvie, but since we can’t know what it was, we can only go by Baylor’s detailed description of the scene, the physical movements, the general tone. I’ve read it over and over again, and until the final moments—the eruption of violence—I was struck by a note I didn’t expect to find. The absence of sustained hostility.”

  “Sustained hostility?” asked Stern. “I don’t know what that Implies in b
ehavioral terms, but I hope it doesn’t mean they didn’t argue, because they did. Baylor makes that clear.”

  “Of course they argued; it was a confrontation. There was a prolonged outburst on Havelock’s part, restating the threats he’s made before, but then the shouting stopped; it had to. Some kind of accommodation was reached. It couldn’t have been otherwise in light of what followed.”

  “In light of what followed?” questioned Stern, bewildered. “What followed was Ogilvie’s trap, the diphenylamine gas, the explosion.”

  “I’m sorry, you’re wrong, Daniel. There was a retreat before then. Remember, from the moment Havelock showed himself until that instant at the bench when he kicked out, aborting the trap, there was no show of physical violence, no display of weapons. There was talk, conversation. Then the cigarettes, the matches. It’s too damned reasonable.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Put yourself in Havelock’s place. Your grievance is enormous, your anger at fever pitch, and a man you consider your enemy asks you for a light. What do you do?”

  “It’s only a match.”

  “That’s right, only a match. But you’re consumed, your head throbbing with anxiety, your state of mind actually vicious. The man in front of you represents betrayal at its worst, at its most personal, most deeply felt. These are the things a paranoid schizophrenic feels at a time like this, with a man like this. And that man, that enemy—even if he’s promised to tell you everything you want to hear—asks you for a light How do you react?”

  “I’d give it to him.”

  “How?”

  “Well, I’d—” The section chief stopped, his eyes locked with Miller’s. Then he completed the answer, speaking quietly. “I’d throw it to him.”

  “Or tell him to forget about it, or shove it, or just to keep on talking. But I don’t think you’d take a pack of matches from your pocket and walk over, handing them to that man as though it were a momentary pause in an argument rather than an interruption of a highly charged moment of extreme personal anxiety. No, I don’t think you’d do that. I don’t think any of us would.”