The Parsifal Mosaic

by Robert Ludlum

  And chemicals could not be used to force Zelienski to reveal the number that he was calling; there was too great a risk with a man of his age. One cubic centimeter of excess dosage and his heart could blow apart, and the number would be lost with the internal explosion. There were only words. What were the words one found for a man who would save the world with a blueprint for its annihilation? There was no reason in such a mind, nothing but its own distorted vision.

  The small house came into view above them on the right; it was hardly larger than a cabin, square in design and made of heavy stone. A sloping dirt driveway ended in a carport, where a nondescript automobile stood motionless, protected from the downpour. A single light shone through a bay window, which was oddly out of place in the small dwelling.

  Havelock switched off the headlights and turned to Jenna. “It all began here,” he said. “In the mind of the man up there. All of it. From the Costa Brava to Poole’s Island, from Col de Moulinets to Sterile Five; it started here.”

  “Can we end it here, Mikhail?”

  “Let’s try. Let’s go.”

  They got out of the car and walked through the rain up the wet, soft mud of the driveway, rivulets of water racing down around their feet. They reached the carport; there was a door centered under the attached roof with a concrete step below. Havelock walked to the door; he looked briefly at Jenna and then knocked.

  Moments later the door opened, and a slight, stooped old man with only a few strands of hair and a small white beard peppered with gray stood in the open space. As he stared at Havelock his eyes grew wide and his mouth parted, lips trembling.

  “Mikhail,” he whispered.

  “Hello, Leon. I bring you Anton’s affection.”

  The blond man had seen the sign. The only part meaningful to him were the words Dead End. It was all he had to know. With his headlights still extinguished, he maneuvered the brown sedan several hundred feet down the smooth wet road and stopped on the far right, motor idling. He turned the headlights back on and reached under his coat to remove a large automatic with a silencer attached. He understood Mr. No-Name’s instructions; they were in sequence. The Lincoln would be along any moment now.

  There it was! Two hundred yards away at the mouth of the road that branched off the highway. The blond man released the brake and began coasting, spinning the wheel back and forth, weaving—the unmistakable sign of a drunken, reckless driver. Cautiously the limousine slowed down, pulling as far to the right as possible. The blond man accelerated, and the weaving became more violent as the Lincoln’s horn roared through the torrents of rain. When he was within thirty feet, the blond man suddenly pressed the accelerator to the floor and swung to the right before making a sharp turn to the left.

  The impact came, the sedan’s grille ramming the left rear door of the Lincoln. The sedan skidded and crashed into the entire side of the other car, pinning the driver’s door.

  “Goddamn you sons of bitches!” screamed the blond man through the open window, slurring his words, his head swaying back and forth. “Holy Christ, I’m bleeding! My whole stomach’s bleeding!”

  The two men lurched out of the limousine from the other side. As they came running around the hood in the blinding glare of the headlights the blond man leaned out the window and fired twice. Accurately.

  “Do I call you Leon or Alexei?”

  “I can’t believe you!” cried the old Russian, sitting in front of the fire, his eyes rheumy and blinking, riveted on Havelock. “It was degenerative, irreversible. There was no hope.”

  “There are very few minds, very few wills like Anton’s. Whether he’ll ever regain his full capacities no one can tell, but he’s come back a long way. Drugs helped, electrotherapy as well; he’s cognizant now. And appalled at what he did.” Havelock sat down in the straight-backed chair opposite Zelienski-Kalyazin. Jenna remained standing by the door that led to the small kitchen.

  “It’s never happened!”

  “There’s never been a man like Matthias, either. He asked for me; they sent me to Poole’s bland and he told me everything. Only me.”

  “Poole’s Island?”

  “It’s where he’s being treated. Is it Leon or Alexei, old friend?”

  Kalyazin shook his head. “Not Leon, it’s never been Leon. Always Alexei.”

  “You had good years as Leon Zelienski.”

  “Enforced sanctuary, Mikhail. I am a Russian, nothing else. Sanctuary.”

  Havelock and Jenna exchanged glances, her eyes telling him that she approved—approved with enormous admiration—the course he had suddenly chosen.

  “You came over to us … Alexei.”

  “I did not come over to you. I fled others. Men who would corrupt the soul of my homeland, who went beyond the bounds of our convictions, who killed needlessly, wantonly, seeking only power for its own sake. I believe in our system, Mikhail, not yours. But these men did not; they would have changed words into weapons and then no one would have been proven right. We’d all be gone.”

  “Jackals,” said Havelock, repeating the word he had heard only hours ago, “fanatics who in their heads marched with the Third Reich. Who didn’t believe time was on your side, only bombs.”

  “That will suffice.”

  “The Voennaya.”

  Kalyazin’s head snapped up. “I never told Matthias that!”

  “I never told him, either. I’ve been in the field for sixteen years. Do you think I don’t know the VKR?”

  “They do not speak for Russia, not our Russia! … Anton and I would argue until the early hours of the morning. He couldn’t understand; he came from a background of brilliance and respectability, money and a full table. Over here none of you will ever understand, except the black people, perhaps. We had nothing and were told to expect nothing, not in this world. Books, schools, simple reading—these were not for us, the millions of us. We were placed on this earth as the earth’s cattle, worked and disposed of by our ‘betters’—decreed by God.…. My grandfather was hanged by a Voroshin prince for stealing game. Stealing game! … All that was changed—by the millions of us, led by prophets who had no use for a God who decreed human cattle.” An odd smile appeared on Kalyazin’s thin white lips. “They call us atheistic Communists. What would they have us be? We knew what it was like under the Holy Church! A God who threatens enternal fires if one rises up against a living hell is no God for nine-tenths of mankind. He can and should be replaced, dismissed for incompetence and unwarranted partiality.”

  “That argument is hardly restricted to prerevolutionary Russia,” said Michael.

  “Certainly not, but it’s symptomatic … and we were there! It’s why you’ll lose one day. Not in this decade or the next—perhaps not for many, many years, but you’ll lose. Too many tables are bare, too many stomachs swollen, and you care too little.”

  “If that proves to be true, then we deserve to lose. I don’t think it is.” Havelock leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked into the old Russian’s eyes. “Are you telling me you were given sanctuary but you gave nothing in return?”

  “Not of my country’s secrets, nor did Anton ever ask me a second time. I think he considered the work I did—the work you did before you resigned—to be in the main quite pointless. Our decisions counted for very little; our accomplishments were not important at the summits. I did, however, give you a gift that served us both, served the world as well. I gave you Anthony Matthias. I saved him from the Cuban trap; it would have driven him from office. I did so because I believed in him, and not in the madmen who temporarily had far too much control of my government.”

  “Yes, he told me. He would have been destroyed, his influence finished.… It’s on that basis—your belief in him—that he asked me to come and see you. It’s got to stop, Leon—excuse me—Alexei. He knows why you did what you did, but it’s got to stop.”

  Kalyazin’s gaze strayed to Jenna. “Where is the hatred in your eyes, young lady? Surely, it must be there.”

&n
bsp; “I won’t lie to you, it’s close to my thoughts. I’m trying to understand.”

  “It had to be done; there was no other way. Anton had to be rid of the specter of Mikhail. He had to know he was far away from the government, with other interests, other pursuits. He was so afraid his … his son … would learn of his work and come to stop him.” Kalyazin turned to Havelock. “He couldn’t get you out of his mind.”

  “He approved of what you did?” asked Michael.

  “He looked away, I think, a part of him revolted by himself, another part crying to survive. He was failing rapidly by then, his sanity pleading to be left intact whatever the cost. Miss Karas became the price.”

  “He never asked you how you did it? How you reached men in Moscow to provide what you needed?”

  “Never. That, too, was part of the price. Remember, the world you and I lived in was very unimportant to him. Then, of course, everything became chaos …”

  “Out of control?” suggested Jenna.

  “Yes, young lady. The things we heard were so unbelievable, so horrible. A woman killed on a beach …”

  “What did you expect?” asked Havelock, controlling himself and not finding it easy. Two … three demented old men.

  “Not that. We weren’t killers. Anton had given orders that she was to be sent back to Prague and watched, her contacts observed, and eventually her innocence was to be established.”

  “Those orders were intercepted, changed.”

  “By then he could do nothing. You had disappeared and he finally went completely, totally mad.”

  “Disappeared? I disappeared?”

  “That’s what he was told. And when they told him he collapsed, his mind went. He thought he’d killed you, too. It was the final pressure he could not withstand.”

  “How do you know this?” pressed Michael.

  Kalyazin balked, his rheumy eyes blinking. “There was someone else. He had sources, a doctor. He found out.”

  “Raymond Alexander,” said Havelock.

  “Anton told you, then?”

  “Boswell.”

  “Yes, our Boswell.”

  “You mentioned him when I called you from Europe.”

  “I was frightened. I thought you might speak to someone who had seen him at Anton’s house; he was there so often. I wanted to give you a perfectly acceptable reason for his visits, to keep you away from him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Alexander the Great has become Alexander the Diseased. You’ve been away, you don’t know. He rarely writes anymore. He drinks all day and most of the night; he can’t stand the strain. Fortunately, for his public, there’s the death of his wife to blame it on.”

  “Matthias told me you had a wife,” said Michael, his ear picking up something in Kalyazin’s voice. “In California. She died and he persuaded you to come here to the Shenandoah.”

  “I had a wife, Mikhail. In Moscow. And she was killed by the soldiers of Stalin. A man I helped destroy, a man who came from the Voennaya.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  A brief rattling somewhere in the small house was louder than the pounding rain outside. Jenna looked at Havelock.

  “It’s nothing,” said Kalyazin. “There’s a piece of wood, a wedge, I place in that old door on windy nights. The sight of you made me forget.” The old man leaned back in his chair and brought his thin, veined hands to his chin. “You must be very clear with me, Mikhail, and you must give me time to think. It’s why I did not answer you a few moments ago.”

  “About Anton?”

  “Yes. Does he really know why I did what I did? Why I took him through those terrible nights? Auto and external suggestion, swelling him up until he performed like the genius he was, debating with men who weren’t there. Does he really understand?”

  “Yes, he does,” replied Havelock, feeling a thousand pounds on the back of his neck. He was so close, but a wrong response would send this Parsifal back into self-imposed, unbreakable silence. Alexander was right, after all; Kalyazin had a Christ complex. Beneath the old Russian’s mild speech was a commitment forged in steel. He knew he was right. “No single man,” said Michael, “should be given such power and the strains of that power ever again. He begs you, pleads with you on the strength of all the talks vou and he had before his illness, to give me those incredible agreements you both created and whatever copies exist. Let me burn them.”

  “He understands, then, but is it enough? Do the others? Have they learned?”

  “Who?”

  “The men who allocate such power, who permit the canonization of would-be saints only to find that their heroes are only mortals, broken by swollen egos, and by the demands made on them.”

  “They’re terrified. What more do you want?”

  “I want them to know what they’ve done, how this world can be set on fire by a single brilliant mind caught in the vortex of unbearable pressures. The madness is contagious; it does not stop with a broken saint.”

  “They understand. Above all, the one man most people consider the most powerful on earth, he understands. He told me they had created an emperor, a god, and they had no right to do either. They took him up too high; he was blinded.”

  “And Icarus fell to the sea,” said Kalyazin. “Berquist is a decent man, hard but decent. He’s also in an impossible job, but he handles it better than most.”

  “There’s no one I’d rather see there now.”

  “I’m inclined to agree.”

  “You’re killing him,” said Havelock. “Let him go. Free him. The lesson’s been taught, and it won’t be forgotten. Let him get back to that impossible job and do the best he can.”

  Kalyazin looked at the glowing embers of the fire. “Twenty-seven pages, each document, each agreement. I typed them myself, using the form employed by Bismarck in the treaties of Schleswig-Holstein. It so appealed to Anton.… I was never interested in the money, they know that, don’t they?”

  “They know that. He knows it.”

  “Only the lesson.”

  “Yes.”

  The old man turned back to Michael. “There are no copies except the one I sent to President Berquist in an envelope from the State Department, from Matthias’s office, with the word Restricted stamped across the front. It was marked, of course, for his eyes only.”

  Havelock tensed, recalling so clearly Raymond Alexander’s statement that Kalyazin had “caged” him, that if a telephone call was not made, the documents would be sent to Moscow and Peking. The numbers added up to four, not two. “No other copies at all, Alexei?”

  “None.”

  “I would think,” remarked Jenna unexpectedly, taking hesitant steps toward the frail old Russian, “that Raymond Alexander, your Boswell, would have insisted on one. It’s the core of his writing.”

  “It’s the core of his fear, young lady. I control him by telling him that if he divulges anything to anyone, copies will be sent to your enemies. That was never my intention-on the contrary, the furthest thought from my mind. It would bring about the very cataclysm I pray will be avoided.”

  “Pray, Alexei?”

  “Not to any god you know, Mikhail. Only to a collective conscience. Not to a Holy Church with a biased Almighty.”

  “May I have the documents?”

  Kalyazin nodded. “Yes,” he said, drawing out the word. “But not in the sense of possession. We will burn them together.”

  “Why?”

  “You know the reason; we were both in the same profession. The men who allow the Matthiases of this world to soar so high they’re blinded by the sun, those men will never know. Did an old man lie? I deceived them before. Am I deceiving them again? Are there copies?”

  “Are there?”

  “No, but they won’t know that.” Kalyazin struggled out of the chair; he stood up and breathed deeply, planting his feet firmly on the floor. “Come with me, Mikhail. They’re buried in the woods along the path to the Notch. I pass them every afternoon, seventy-three ste
ps to a dogwood tree, the only one in Seneca’s burial ground. I often wonder how it got there.… Come, let’s get it over with. We will dig in the rain and get terribly wet and return with the weapons of Armageddon. Perhaps Miss Karas might make us some tea. Also, glasses of vodka … with buffalo grass, always buffalo grass. Then we shall burn the evidence and rekindle the fire.”

  The door to the kitchen crashed open like a sudden explosion of thunder, and a tall man with a fringe of gray around his bald head stood there, a gun in his hand.

  “They lie to you, Alexei. They always lie and you never know it. Don’t move, Havelock!” Arthur Pierce reached out, gripped Jenna’s elbow and yanked her to him, lashing his left arm around her neck, the automatic pressed against her head. “I’m going to count to five,” he said to Michael. “By which time you will have removed your weapon with two fingers and thrown it on the floor, or you will see this woman’s skull blown into the wall One, two, three—”

  Havelock unbuttoned his coat, spreading it open, and, using two fingers as pincers, took out the Llama from its bolster. He dropped it on the floor.

  “Kick it over!” yelled the traveler.

  Michael did so. “I don’t know how you got here, but you can’t get out,” he said quietly.

  “Really?” Pierce released Jenna, shoving her toward the astonished old Russian. “Then I should tell you that your Abraham was cut down by an ungrateful Ishmael. You can’t get out.”

  “Others know where we are.”

  “I doubt that There’d be a hidden army out there on that road if they did. Oh, no, you went in solo—”

  “You?” cried Kalyazin, shaking, then nodding his trembling head. “It is you!”

  “Glad you’re with us, Alexei. You’re slowing down in your old age. You don’t hear lies when you’re told them.”

  “What lies? How did you find me?”

  “By following a persistent man. Let’s talk about the lies.”