The Parsifal Mosaic

by Robert Ludlum

  They needed time. Days, a week, a month. They had to find the man who had accomplished the incredible—with their help. They would find him, for he was leaving a trail of fear—no, not fear, terror—and trails could be tracked. And when they found him, it would not be the meek who inherited the earth. It would be the Voennaya.

  There were so few of them left on this side of the world. So few, but so strong, so right. They had seen it all, lived it all. The lies, the corruption, the essential rot at the cores of power; they had been part of it for a greater cause. They had not forgotten who they were, or what they were. Or why they were. They were the travelers, and there was no higher calling; its concept was based in reality, not in romantic illusions. They were the men and women of the new world, and the old one needed them desperately. They were not many in numbers—less than a hundred, committed beyond life—but they were finely tuned units, prepared to react instantly to any opportunity or emergency. They had the positions, the right papers, the proper vehicles. The Voennaya was generous; they, in turn, were loyal to the elite corps of the KGB.

  The death of the strategists had been crucial. The resulting vacuum would paralyze the original architects of Costa Brava, stunning them into silence. They would say nothing; cover—up would be paramount. For the man in shadows behind the desk had not lied to Borne: there could be no reopened speculations on Costa Brava. For either side.

  Darkness obscuring his movements, Arthur Pierce, the most powerful paminyatchik in the Department of State, rose from the desk and walked silently to the armchair against the wall. He sat down and stretched his legs; he would remain there until morning, until the crowds of senior and subordinate personnel began to fill up the fifth floor. Then he would mingle with the others, signing a forgotten roster sheet; his morning presence would be temporary, for he was needed back in New York. He was, after all, Washington’s senior aide to the ambassador of the American delegation at the United Nations. In essence, he was the State Department’s major voice on the East River; soon he would be the ambassador. That had been Anthony Matthias’s design; everyone knew it. It would be yet another significant step in his extraordinary career.

  Suddenly Malyekov-Pierce bolted up in the chair. There was a last phone call to be placed to Borne, a last voice to be stilled: a man in a radio room who answered a sterile telephone and took an untaped, unlogged message.

  11

  “She’s not on board, I swear it!” protested the harassed captain of the freighter Santa Teresa, seated at his desk in the small cabin aft of the wheelhouse. “Search, if you wish, sig-nore. No one will interfere. We put her ashore three … three and a half hours ago. Madre di Dio! Such madness!”

  “How? Where?” demanded Havelock.

  “Same as you. A motor launch came out to meet us twelve kilometers south of Arma di Taggia. I swear to you, I knew nothing! I’ll kill that pig in Civitavecchia! Just a political refugee from the Balkans, he said—a woman with a little money and friends in France. There are so many these days. Where is the sin in helping one more?”

  Michael leaned over and picked up the outdated diplomatic identification card that gave his status as consular attaché, U.S. Department of State, and said calmly, “No sin at all, if that’s what you believed.”

  “It’s true, signore! For nearly thirty years I’ve pushed my old cows through these waters. Soon I leave the sea with a little land, a little money. I grow grapes. Never narcotici! Never contrabbandi! But people—yes. Now and then people, and I am not ashamed. Those who flee places and men you and I know nothing about. I ask you again, where is the sin?”

  “In making mistakes.”

  “I cannot believe this woman is a criminal.”

  “I didn’t say that. I said we had to find her.”

  The captain nodded his head in resignation. “Badly enough to report me. I leave the sea for prison. Grazie, gran Signor Americano.”

  “I didn’t say that, either,” said Michael quietly.

  The captain’s eyes widened as he looked up, his head motionless. “Che cosa?”

  “I didn’t expect you to be what you seem to be.”

  “Che dice?”

  “Never mind. There are times when embarrassment should be avoided. If you cooperate, nothing may have to be said. If you cooperate.”

  “In any way you wish! It’s a gift I did not expect.”

  “Tell me everything she said to you. And do it quickly.”

  “There was much that was meaningless—”

  “That’s not what I want to hear.”

  “I understand. She was calm, obviously highly intelligent, but, beneath, a very frightened woman. She stayed in this cabin.”

  “Oh?”

  “Not with me, I can assure you. I have daughters her age, signore. We had three meals together; there was no other place for her, and my crew is not what I would have my daughters eat with. Also, she carried a great deal of lire on her person. She had to; the transportation she purchased did not come cheap.… She looked forward to much trouble. Tonight.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She asked me if I had ever been to the Village of Col des Moulinets in the Ligurian mountains.”

  “She told you about Col des Moulinets?”

  “I think she assumed I knew, that I was merely one part of her journey, aware of the other parts. As it happened, I have been to Moulinets several times. The ships they give me are often in need of repairs, here in San Remo, or Savona, or Marseilles, which, incidentally, is my farthest port of call. I am not what is known as a capitano superiore—”

  “Please. Go on.”

  “We have been dry-docked here in San Remo a few times and I have gone up to the mountains, to Col des Moulinets. It’s across the French border west of Monesi, a lovely town filled with mountain streams and—How do you say it? Ruote a pale?”

  “Paddle wheels. Moulinets can also mean paddle wheels in French.”

  “Si. It’s a minor pass in the lower Alps, not used very much. It’s difficult to reach, the facilities poor, the transportation poorer. And the border guards are the most lax in the Ligurians and the Maritimes; they barely have time to take the Gauloises out of their mouths to glance at papers. I tried to assure my frightened refugee that she would have no trouble.”

  “You think she’ll try to go through a checkpoint?”

  “There’s only one, a short bridge across a mountain river. Why not? I doubt it would be necessary even to bribe a guard; if she was one woman among a group of well-dressed people at night, no doubt evidencing fine vino. What concern is it of theirs?”

  “Men like me.”

  The captain paused; he leaned back in his chair appraising the American official, as if in a somewhat different light. “Then you would have to answer that yourself, signore. Who else knows?” Both men looked at each other, neither speaking. The captain nodded and continued. “But I tell you this, if she doesn’t use the bridge, she will have to make her way through very dense forest with much steep rock, and don’t forget the river.”

  “Thanks. That’s the kind of information I need. Did she say why she was getting out this way?”

  “The usual. The airports were watched; the train stations also, as well as the major roads that cross into France.”

  “Watched by whom?”

  “Men like you, signore?”

  “Is that what she said?”

  “She did not have to say anything more than she did, and I did not inquire. That is the truth.”

  “I believe you.”

  “will you answer the question, then? Do others know?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Michael. “The truth.”

  “Because if they do, I am arrested. I leave the sea for prison.”

  “Would that mean it’s public information?”

  “Most certainly. Charges would be brought before la commissione”

  “Then I don’t think they’ll touch you. I have an idea that this incident is the last thing on earth
the men I’m involved with want known. If they haven’t reached you by now—by radio, or a fast boat, or by helicopter—they either don’t know about you, or they don’t want to touch you.”

  Again the captain paused, looking carefully at Havelock. “Men you are involved with, signore?” he said, the words suspended.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Involved with, but not of, is that correct?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “You wish to help this woman, do you not? You are not after her to … penalize her.”

  “The answer to the first is yes. The second, no.”

  “Then I will tell you. She asked me if I knew the airfield near Col des Moulinets, I did not. I never heard of it.”

  “An airfield?” Michael understood. It was added information he would not have been given ten seconds ago. “A bridge over a mountain river, and an airfield. Tonight.”

  “That is all I can tell you.”

  The mountain road leading out of Monesi toward the French border was wide enough, but the profusion of rock and boulder and bordering overgrowth made it appear narrow, more suited to heavy-wheeled trucks and rugged jeeps than to any normal automobile. It was the excuse that Michael used to travel the last half-mile on foot, to the relief of the taxi driver from Monesi.

  He had learned there was a country inn just before the bridge, a watering spot for the Italian and French patrols, where both languages were sufficiently understood by the small garrisons on either side, as well as by the few nationals and fewer tourists who occasionally passed back and forth. From what little Havelock had seen and had been told, the captain of the Santa Teresa was right. The border checkpoint of Col des Moulinets was at a minor pass in the lower Alps, not easily accessible and poorly staffed, manned no doubt because it was there—had been for decades—and no bureaucratic legislation had bothered to remove it. The general flow of traffic between the two countries used either the wide coast roads of the Mediterranean fifteen miles south or the larger, more accommodating passes in the north, such as Col de Larche or Col de la Madeleine, west of Turin.

  The late-afternoon sun was now a fan-shaped arc of deep orange and yellows, spraying up from behind the higher mountains, filling the sky above the Maritimes with receding echoes of light. The shadows on the primitive road were growing longer, sharper; in minutes their outlines would fade and they would become obscure shapes, indistinguishable in the gray darkness of early evening. Michael walked along the edge of the woods, prepared to spring into the underbrush at the first sounds not part of the forest. He knew that every move he made had to be prejudged on the assumption that Rome had learned about Col des Moulinets. He had not lied to the captain of the Santa Teresa; there could be any number of reasons why those working for the embassy would stay away from a ship in international waters. The slow freighter could be tracked and watched—very likely had been—but it was another matter to board her in a legitimate official capacity. It was a high-risk tactic; inquiries too easily could be raised with a commissione.

  Had Rome found the man in Civitavecchia? He could only presume that others could do what he had done; no one was that exceptional or that lucky. He had in his anger—no, his outrage—shouted the name of the port city into the phone and Baylor had repeated it. If the wounded intelligence officer was capable of functioning after the Palatine, he would order his people to prowl the Civitavecchia waterfront and find a broker of illegal passage.

  Yet there were always gaps, spaces that could not be filled. Would the man in Civitavecchia name the specific ship, knowing that if he did so, he’d never again be trusted on the waterfront? Trusted, hell; he could be killed in any one of a dozen mist-filled back streets. Or might he plead ignorance to that phase of the escape—sold by others unknown to him—but reveal Col des Moulinets so as to curry favor with powerful Americans in Rome, who everyone knew were inordinately generous with those they favored … “One more refugee from the Balkans, where was the sin, signori?”

  So many gaps, so little that was concrete … so little time to think, so many inconsistencies. Who would have thought there’d be a tired, aging captain opposed to trafficking in the profitable world of narcotics and contraband but perfectly willing to smuggle refugees out of Italy—no less a risk, no less a cause for imprisonment?

  Or blunt Red Ogilvie, a violent man who never stopped trying to justify violence. There was ambivalence in that strange justification. What had driven John Philip Ogilvie? Why does a man strain all his life to break out of self-imposed chains? Who really was the Apache? The Gunslinger? Whoever and whatever, he had died violently at the very moment he had understood a violent truth. The liars were in control in Washington.

  Above all, Jenna. His love who had not betrayed that love but, instead, had been betrayed. How could she have believed the liars? What could they have said to her, what irrefutable proof could they have presented that she would accept? Most important of all, who were the liars? What were their names and where had they come from?

  He was so close now that he could sense it, feel it with every step he took on the darkening mountain road. Before the disappearing sun came up on the other side of the world, he would have the answers, have his love back. If his enemies had come from Rome, they were not a match for him; he knew that. His belief in himself swelled within him; it was unjustified all too often, but it was necessary. One did not come out of the early days, the terrible days, and survive without it. Each step and he was nearer.

  And when he had the answers, and his love, the call would be made to a cabin in another range of mountains thousands of miles away. To the Blue Ridge and the Shenandoah, U.S.A. His mentor, his přítel, Anton Matthias, would be presented with a conspiracy that reached into the bowels of clandestine operations, its existence incontrovertible, its purpose unknown.

  Suddenly he saw a small circle of light up ahead, shining through the foliage on the left-hand side of the road. He crouched and studied it, trying to define it. It did not move; it was merely there, where no light had been before. He crept forward, mesmerized, frightened; what was it?

  Then he stood up, relieved, breathing again. There was a bend in the road, and in its cradle were the outlines of a building; it was the country inn. Someone had just turned on an outside post lamp; other lights would follow shortly. The darkness had come abruptly, as if the sun had dropped into a chasm; the tall pines and the massive boulders blocked the shafts of orange and yellow that could still be seen in the sky. Light now appeared in windows, three on the nearest side, more in front—how many he could not tell, but at least six, judging from the spill that washed over the grass and graveled entrance of the building.

  Michael stepped into the woods to check the underbrush and foliage. Both were manageable, so he made his way toward the three lighted windows. There was no point in staying on the road any longer; if there were surprises in store, he did not care to be on the receiving end.

  He reached the border of the woods, where the thick trunk of a pine tree stood between him and a deeply rutted driveway of hard mud. The drive extended along the side of the inn and curved behind it into some kind of parking area next to what appeared to be a delivery entrance. The distance to the window directly across was about twenty-five feet; he stepped out from behind the tree.

  Instantly he was blinded by headlights. The truck thundered out of the primitive road thirty yards to his right, careening into the narrow driveway of ridged mud. Havelock spun back into the foliage, behind the trunk of the pine tree, and reached for the Spanish automatic strapped to his chest. The truck bounced past, pitching and rolling over the hardened ruts of the drive like a small barge in choppy water. From inside the van could be heard the angry shouts of men objecting to the discomfort of their ride.

  Havelock could not tell whether he had been seen or not; again he crouched for protective cover and watched. The truck lurched to a stop at the entrance of the wide, flat parking area; the driver opened his door and jumped to t
he ground. Prepared to race into the woods, Michael crept back several feet. It was not necessary; the driver stretched while swearing in Italian, his figure suddenly caught in the spill of a floodlight someone had switched on from inside the building. What the light revealed was bewildering: the driver was in the uniform of the Italian army, the insignia that of a border guard. He walked to the back of the truck and opened the large double doors.

  “Get out, you bastards!” he shouted in Italian. “You’ve got about an hour to fill your kidneys before you go on duty. I’ll walk up to the bridge and tell the others we’re here.”

  “The way you drive, Sergeant,” said a soldier, grimacing as he stepped out, “they heard you halfway back to Monesi.”

  “Up yours!”

  Three other men got out, stamping their feet and stretching; all were guards.

  The sergeant continued, “Paolo, you take the new man. Teach him the rules.” As the noncommissioned officer lumbered up the driveway past Havelock, he scratched his groin and pulled down the underwear beneath his trousers—signs of a long, uncomfortable trip.

  “You, Ricci!” shouted a soldier at the rear of the truck, looking up into the van. “Your name’s Ricci, right?”

  “Yes,” said the voice from inside, and a fifth figure emerged from the shadows.

  “You’ve got the best duty you’ll find in the army, paesano! The quarters are up at the bridge, but we have an arrangement: we damn near live here. We don’t go up there until we go on. Once you walk in, you sign in, understand?”

  “I understand,” said the soldier named Ricci.

  But his name was not Ricci, thought Michael, staring at the blond man slapping his barracks hat against his left hand. Havelock’s mind raced back over a dozen photographs; his mind’s eye selected one. The man was not a soldier in the Italian army—certainly no border guard. He was a Corsican, a very proficient drone with a rifle or a handgun, a string of wire or a knife. His real name was irrelevant; he used too many to count. He was a “specialist” used only in “extreme prejudice” situations, a reliable executioner who knew his way around the western Mediterranean better than most such men, as much at home in the Balearic Islands as he was in the forests of Sicily. His photograph and a file of his known accomplishments had been provided Michael several years ago by a CIA agent in a sealed-off room at Palombara. Havelock had tracked a Brigate Rosse unit and was moving in for a nonattributable kill; he had rejected the blond man now standing thirty feet away from him in the floodlit driveway. He had not cared to trust him then, but Rome did now.