The Parsifal Mosaic

by Robert Ludlum

  “Very fine work,” said the man in the overcoat.

  “You betch-er ass! I caught ’em at the pass, and kaboom! Hey, I can’t hardly see you. It is you, ain’t it?”

  “Yes, but you disappoint me.”

  “Why? I did good!”

  “You’ve been drinking. I thought we agreed you wouldn’t.”

  “A couple of balls, that’s all. In my room, not at no gin mill … no sir!”

  “Did you talk with anyone?”

  “Christ, no!”

  “How did you get out here?”

  “Like you said. On a bus … three buses and I walked the last couple of miles.”

  “In the road?”

  “Off it. Way off, like it was an S and D in Danang.”

  “Good. You’ve earned your R and R.”

  “Hey, Major … P Sorry, I mean … sir.”

  “What is it?”

  “How come there was nothin’ in the papers? I mean it was one big blow! Musta’ burned for hours, seen for a couple of miles. How come?”

  “They weren’t important, Sergeant. They were only what I told you they were. Bad men who betrayed people like you and me, who stayed over here and let us get killed.”

  “Yeah, well, I evened a few scores. I guess I should go back now, huh? To the hospital.”

  “You don’t have to.” The civilian who had been addressed as “Major” calmly took his gloved hand out of his pocket. In it was a .22-caliber automatic, concealed by the darkness and the rain. He raised it at his side and fired once.

  The man fell, his bleeding head sinking into the wet poncho. The civilian stepped forward, wiping the weapon against the cloth of his overcoat. He knelt down and spread the fingers of the dead man’s right hand.

  * * *

  The two-tone coupe rounded the curve in the backcountry road, the headlights sweeping over a rock-strewn Maryland field, the high grass bending under the force of the wind and the night rain. The driver in the dark overcoat and low-brimmed hat saw what he expected to see and slowed down, switching off the lights before coming to a stop. On the shoulder of the road, standing motionless by a barbed-wire fence, was a glistening white ambulance, the license plates those of the federal government, the black lettering on the door proclaiming co-ownership with the taxpayer as well as the identification: BETHESDA NAVAL HOSPITAL, EMERGENCY UNIT 14.

  The driver drove the coupe alongside the long white vehicle. He took out his lighter, flicked the top and held the flame briefly toward the opposite window. The door of the ambulance opened, and a man in his late twenties jumped out into the rain, his government-issue raincoat parting to reveal the white uniform of a hospital attendant.

  The driver lowered the right window by pressing a button above his armrest. “Get in!” he yelled through the sound of the downpour. “You’ll get soaked out there!”

  The man climbed in, slamming the door shut and wiping his face with his right hand. He was Hispanic, his large eyes two stones of shining hard coal, his hair jet-black, matted to the dark skin of his forehead.

  “You owe me, mama,” said the Latin. “Oh, big mama owes me one big montón de dinero.”

  “You’ll be paid, although I suppose I could say that you simply canceled an old debt you owed me.”

  “Olvídalo, mama Major!”

  “You would have been executed in the field or still be pushing rocks around Leavenworth if it weren’t for me. Don’t you forget it, Corporal.”

  “I wasted that shrinker for you! You pay!”

  “You wasted—as you put it—two MP’s in Pleiku who caught you stealing narcotics from a Med-Evac truck. Weren’t you lucky I was around? Two more MIA’s in a river.”

  “Sure, mama, real lucky! Who was the puerco who told me about the truck? You, Major!”

  “I knew you were enterprising. These past years I’ve kept my eye on you. You never saw me, but I saw you. I always knew where to find you, because debts should be paid.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re wrong, Major. I saw you the other night on the TV news. You were getting out of a big limousine in New York. At the United Nations place, wasn’t it? It was you, wasn’t it!”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Sure, it was! I know big mama when I see her. You must be something! You pay, mama. You’re going to pay a lot.”

  “My God, you’re irritating.”

  “Just pay me.”

  “The gun first,” said the man in the overcoat. “I gave it to you and I want it back. I protected you; no one could trace it ballistically.”

  The hospital attendant reached into his raincoat pocket and took out a small gun, identical in size and caliber with the weapon the driver of the coupe had used an hour ago in a parking area overlooking the Potomac.

  “You won’t find no bullets in it,” said the Hispanic, holding out the automatic in the darkness. “Here, take it.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “Take it! For Christ’s sake, I can’t see nothin’ in here! Ouch! Shit! What the hell …?”

  The driver’s hand had slipped beyond the short barrel of the weapon, pushing the attendant’s wide sleeve partially up his forearm. “Sorry,” said the man in the overcoat. “My class ring is twisted. Did I scrape you?”

  “Forget it, mama. The money. Give me the fuckin’ dinero!”

  “Certainly.” The man took the gun and slipped it into his pocket. He picked up his lighter from his lap and ignited it; on the seat between them was a stack of money held together with an elastic band. “There it is. Fifty one-hundred-dollar bills-laundered, of course. Do you want to count it?”

  “What for? I know where I can find you now,” said the attendant, opening the door. “And you’re going to see a lot of me, big mama.”

  “I look forward to it,” replied the driver.

  The wind again whipped the attendant’s raincoat away from his white uniform as he slammed the door and started toward the ambulance. The man in the coupe leaned over in the shadows, watching through the opposite window with his fingers on the door latch beside him, prepared to leap out of the car the instant he saw what he expected to see.

  The attendant began to stagger, rushing forward off balance, his arms stretched out, his hands clutching the side of the ambulance. He raised his head and screamed, the rain pounding his face; three seconds later he collapsed on the wet grass.

  The man in the overcoat jumped out of the coupe and walked around the trunk while removing a tubular glass object from his left pocket. He reached the attendant, knelt down and pushed the wide sleeve up the immobile arm. He then adjusted the glass vial in his left hand and, with his right, extracted a hypodermic needle. He plunged it into the soft flesh, depressed the shaft until the vial of white liquid was emptied into the arm, and let the long needle remain where it was, firmly embedded in the skin. Reaching across the attendant’s body, he pulled the lifeless hand toward the vial, pressed the fingers around the glass tube, with the thumb firmly down on the plunger, and then let the hand fall away.

  The man stood up, seeing in the night light the scattered bills, many held in place by the weight of the attendant’s body. He turned and opened the door of the ambulance; the inside was neat, the equipment in place, as befitted a trusted employee of the Bethesda Naval Hospital. He took out the small automatic from his pocket and threw it onto the seat. He then reached inside his overcoat for the contents of another pocket. Four additional glass vials, two filled, two empty. He checked the labels; each read the same:

  Bethesda Naval Hospital

  Security-Control-Supply

  Contents: Cl7 H19 NO8 H20

  MORPHINE

  He held them out and dropped them on the floor of the ambulance.

  Suddenly a gust of wind came swirling off the field, forcing the rain to fall in diagonal sheets. The man reached for his hat but it was too late. Caught in an updraft, the hat was lifted off his head and hurled against the side of the coupe. He walked across the grass to retrieve it. Even in the darkness t
he shock of white could be seen streaking from his forehead through his wavy black hair.

  In truth, Nikolai Petrovich Malyekov was annoyed, and his dripping hair was only part of his irritation. Time was running short. In his identity as Undersecretary of State Arthur Pierce, he would have to change his clothes and make himself presentable. A man in his position in the United States government did not run around in the mud and the pouring rain; he would phone for his limousine the minute he reached home. He had agreed to have late-night drinks with the British ambassador, as there was another OPEC problem, matters of state to be attended to.

  It was not what his people in Moscow wanted, but knowledge of another Anglo-American oil strategy was not to be dismissed. All such information brought the Voennaya closer to the power they had been seeking since Yagoda set them on their path over a half centurv ago. Yet only the man who could not be found, the man who knew the secret of Anthony Matthias, could lead the Voennaya to its destiny—for the good of the world.

  Arthur Pierce, raised as an Iowa farm boy but born in the Russian village of Ramenskoye, turned toward his car in the rain. There was no time to be tired, for the charade never stopped. Not for him.

  Ambassador Addison Brooks stared at Bradford across the dais. “You say this mole knows who Parsifal is. knew about him before we did!” he exclaimed. “On what basis do you make that extraordinary statement?”

  “Costa Brava,” said the undersecretary. “And the past seventy-two hours.”

  “Take them in sequence,” ordered the President.

  “In the final hours of Costa Brava, Havelock was provided with a radio transmitter whose frequency calibrations had been altered by CIA technicians in Madrid. They were working under blind orders; they had no idea what the transmitter was for or who was going to use it. As you know, the entire Costa Brava assignment was controlled by a man named Steven MacKenzie, the most experienced black-operations officer in Central Intelligence; the security was guaranteed.”

  “Completely,” interrupted Berquist. “MacKenzie died of a coronary three weeks after we pulled him out of Barcelona. There was nothing suspicious. The doctor’s a respected, well-known physician and was thoroughly questioned. Mac-Kenzie’s death was from natural causes.”

  “Only he knew all the details,” continued Bradford. “He’d hired a boat, two men, and a blond woman who spoke Czech and was to scream in the distance—in the dark—during the grisly scene they were performing on that beach. The three of them were the dregs—small-time narcotics dealers and a prostitute—picking up a sizable fee. They didn’t ask questions. Havelock sent out his transmission in KGB code to what he thought was a Baader-Meinhof unit in the boat offshore. MacKenzie caught it on his scanner and signaled the boat to come in. A few minutes later Havelock saw what we wanted him to see—or he thought he saw it. The Costa Brava operation was over.”

  “Again,” interrupted the ambassador impatiently, “General Halyard and I are aware of the essentials—”

  “It was over, and except for the President and the three of us, no one else knew about it,” said the undersecretary, rushing ahead. “MacKenzie had structured it in fragments, no one group knowing what the other was doing. The only story we issued was the trapped-double-agent version, no buried reports, no file within a file that contradicted it. And with MacKenzie’s death, the last man on the outside who knew the truth was gone.”

  “The last man, perhaps,” said Halyard. “Not the last woman. Jenna Karas knew. She got away from you, but she knew.”

  “She knew only what she was told, and I was the one who spoke with her at the hotel in Barcelona. The story she was given had a dual purpose. One, to frighten her into doing exactly what we asked of her so we could ostensibly save her life; and two, to put her into a disturbed frame of mind that would startle Havelock, help convince him she was a KGB officer if he had any last doubts or emotional hurdles. If she’d followed my instructions she’d be safe. Or if we’d been able to find her, she wouldn’t be running from the men who have to kill her now—and kill Havelock—so as to keep the truth about Costa Brava secret. Because they know the truth.”

  Ambassador Brooks whistled softly; it was a low, swelling whistle, the sound made by a man genuinely astonished. “We’ve reached the last seventy-two hours.” he said, “beginning with an untraceable call to Rome preceded by an authorization code established by Daniel Stern.”

  “Yes, sir. Col des Moulinets. I saw the outlines of the connection when I read the agent of record’s report, but nothing was clear. Just shapes, shadows. Then it became clearer when he told us here tonight the things he did.”

  “A man named Ricci he’d never seen before,” said Brooks, “two demolitions experts he knew nothing about.”

  “And a massive explosion that detonated some twelve minutes after the gunfire at the bridge,” added Bradford. “Then his description of the woman as a ‘needle’ for the Soviets, a Russian plant that Moscow could have back and be taught a lesson.”

  “Which was a lie,” objected Halvard. “That bomb was meant for the car she was in. It killed how many? Seven people on the road to the bridge? Christ, it was powerful enough to blow that vehicle out of sight and everyone in it beyond recognition. And our own people weren’t to know a goddamned thing about it.”

  “By way of a man named Ricci,” said Bradford, “a Corsi-can no one knew and two so-called small-arms backup personnel who were in reality explosives experts. They were sent by Rome, but the two who escaped never tried to get in touch with the embassy afterward. In our agent’s words, that’s not normal. They didn’t dare return to Rome.”

  “They were sent by our people,” said Berquist. “But they didn’t come from our people. They had a separate arrangement with the same person who made the last untraceable call from Washington to Rome. Ambiguity.”

  “That same person, Mr. President, who was able to reach into Moscow and pull out an authentic KGB code-anything less would never have been accepted by Havelock. Someone who knew the truth about Costa Brava, and was as anxious, perhaps as desperate, as we are to keep a blackout on it.”

  “Why?” asked the general.

  “Because if we went back and examined every aspect of the operation we might find he was there.”

  The President and the general reacted as though each had been told of an unexpected death; only Brooks remained impassive, watching Bradford carefully, a first-rate mind acknowledging the presence of another.

  “That’s a hell of a jump, son,” said Halyard.

  “I can’t think of any other explanation,” said Bradford. “Havelock’s execution had been sanctioned, the sanction was understood even by those who respected his record. He’d turned; he was a ‘psycho,’ a killer, dangerous to every man in the field. But why was the woman at Col des Moulinets to be sent across the border? Why was the point made that she was a ‘needle,’ a plant? Why was her escape supposed to be a lesson to the Soviets, when all the while a bomb timed to explode minutes later would have blown her away beyond recognition?”

  “To Maintain the illusion that she had died at Costa Brava,” said Brooks. “It she remained alive, she’d ask for asylum and tell her story; she’d have nothing to lose.”

  “Forcing the events of that night on the beach to be reexamined,” the President said, completing the thought. “She had to be killed away from that bridge while still preserving the lie that she had died at Costa Brava.”

  “And the person who made the call authorizing Havelock’s execution,” said Halyard, frowning, with uncertainty in his voice, “who used the Ambiguity code and put this Ricci and the two nitro men in Col des Moulinets by way of Rome … you say he was on the beach that night?”

  “Everything points to it, yes, General.”

  “For Christ’s sake, why?”

  “Because he knows Jenna Karas is alive,” replied Brooks, still watching Bradford. “At least, he knows she wasn’t killed at Costa Brava. No one else does.”

  “That’s
speculation. It may have been kept quiet, but we’ve been looking for her for nearly four months.”

  “Without ever acknowledging it was her,” explained the undersecretary, “without ever admitting she was alive. The alert was for a person, not a name. A woman whose expertise as a deep-cover agent could lead her to people she’d worked with previously under multiple identities. The emphasis was on physical appearance and languages.”

  “What I can’t accept is your Jump.” Halyard shook his head, the gesture of a military strategist who sees a practical gap in a plan for a field maneuver. “MacKenzie put Costa Brava together in pieces, reporting only to you. The CIA in Langley didn’t know about Madrid, and Barcelona was kept away from both. Under those conditions, how could someone penetrate what wasn’t there? Unless you figure MacKenzie sold you out or loused it up.”

  “I don’t think either.” The undersecretary paused. “I think the man who took over the Ambiguity code was already involved with Parsifal months ago. He knew what to concentrate on and became alarmed when Havelock was ordered to Madrid under a Four Zero security.”

  “Someone with maximum clearance right here in the State Department,” the ambassador broke in. “Someone with access to confidential memoranda.”

  “Yes. He kept tabs on Havelock’s activities and saw that something was happening. He flew to Spain, picked him up in Madrid, and followed him back to Barcelona. I was there; so was MacKenzie. He almost certainly would have recognized me, and as I met with MacKenzie twice, it’s reasonable to assume we were seen together.”

  “And presuming you were, it’s also reasonable to assume that Moscow had a file on MacKenzie thick enough to alarm Soviet intelligence.” Brooks leaned forward, once again locking his eyes with Bradford’s. “A photograph wired to the KGB, and the man we’re looking for, who saw you together in Barcelona, knew a black operation was in progress.”

  “It could have happened that way, yes.”

  “With a lot of conjecture on your part,” said Halyard.

  “I don’t think the undersecretary of State is finished, Mal.” The ambassador nodded his head at the papers Bradford had just separated and was scanning. “I don’t believe he’d permit his imagination to wander into such exotic regions unless something triggered it. Am I right?”