The Aquitaine Progression: A Novel

by Robert Ludlum

  A blinding flash filled the room, and two men walked out of the bedroom. The girl sprang back onto the couch as Bertholdier looked up in shock. The man in front put the camera in his pocket; his companion, a short, middle-aged heavy-set man with a gun in his hand, walked slowly toward the legend of France.

  “I admire your taste, General,” he said in a gruff voice. “But then, I suppose I’ve always admired you, even when I disagreed with you. You don’t remember me, but you court-martialed me in Algiers, sending me to the stockade for thirty-six months because I struck an officer. I was a sergeant major and he had brutally abused my men with excessive penalties for minor offenses. Three years for hitting a Paris-tailored pig. Three years in those filthy barracks for taking care of my men.”

  “Sergeant Major Lefèvre,” said Bertholdier with authority, calmly zipping up his fly. “I remember. I never forget. You were guilty of treasonous conduct: assaulting an officer. I should have had you shot.”

  “There were moments during those three years when I would have welcomed the execution. But I’m not here to discuss Algiers—it’s when I knew you were all crazy. I’m here to tell you you’re coming with me. You’ll be returned unharmed to Paris in several days.”

  “Preposterous!” spat out the general. “You think your weapon frightens me?”

  “No, it’s merely to protect myself from you, from the last gesture of a brave and famous soldier. I know you too well to think that threats of bodily harm, or even death, could move you. I have another persuasion, however, one you’ve just made quite irresistible.” The ex-sergeant major withdrew a second, oddly shaped gun from his pocket. “This weapon does not hold bullets. Instead it fires darts containing a chemical that accelerates the heart to the bursting point. My thoughts were to threaten you with fielding the photograph after your death, showing that the great general died ignominiously at what he did best. Now, perhaps, there is another approach. The angle was advantageous for certain expert brushwork—your position and the expression on your face would not be touched, of course—but your companion might easily become a he rather than a she, a little boy rather than a girl. There were rumors of your excesses once, and a hastily arranged marriage few could understand. Was this the secret Le Grand Machin ran from all his life? Was it the threat the great De Gaulle held over the head of his popular but all too ambitious and rebellious colonel? That the appetites of this pretender, this would-be successor, were so extensive they included anything he could get his hands on, his body on, the gender making no difference. Small boys when there were no women. The whispers of corrupted young lieutenants and captains, of rapes, conveniently called interrogations in your quarters—”

  “Enough!” cried Bertholdier, shooting up from the couch. “Further conversation is pointless. Regardless of how absurd and unfounded your accusations are, I will not permit my name to be dragged through filth! I want that film!”

  “My God, it’s true,” said the ex-infantry sergeant. “All of it.”

  “The film!” shouted the general. “Give it to me!”

  “You shall have it,” replied Lefèvre. “On the plane.”

  * * *

  Chaim Yakov Abrahms walked with a bowed head out of the Ihud Shivat Zion synagogue on the Ben Yehuda in Tel Aviv. The solemn crowds outside formed two deep flanks of devoted followers, men and women who wept openly at the terrible suffering this great man, this patriot-soldier of Israel, had been forced to endure at the hands of his wife. “Hitabdut,” they said in hushed voices. “Ebude atzmo,” they whispered to one another, cupping mouths to ears, out of Chaim’s hearing. The rabbis would not relent; the sins of a despicable woman were visited upon this son of sabras, this fierce child of Abraham, this Biblical warrior who loved the land and the Talmud with equal fervor. The woman had been refused burial in a holy place; she was to remain outside the gates of the beht hakvahroht, her soul left to struggle with the wrath of Almighty God, the pain of that knowledge an unbearable burden for the one left behind.

  It was said she did it but of vengeance and a diseased mind. She had her daughters. It was the father’s son—always the father’s son—who had been slain on the father’s battlefield. Who would weep more, who could weep more, or be in greater anguish than the father? And now this, the further agony of knowing that the woman he had given his life to had most heinously violated God’s Talmud. The shame of it, the shame! Oh, Chaim, our brother, father, son and leader, we weep with you. For you! Tell us what to do and we will do it. You are our king! King of Eretz Yisrael, of Judea and Samaria, and all the lands you seek for our protection! Show us the way and we shall follow, O King!

  “She’s done more for him in death than she could ever have done alive,” said a man on the outskirts of the crowd and not part of it.

  “What do you think really happened?” asked the man’s companion.

  “An accident. Or worse, far worse. She came to our temple frequently, and I can tell you this. She never would have considered hitabdut.… We must watch him carefully before these fools and thousands like them crown him emperor of the Mediterranean and he marches us to oblivion.”

  An Army staff car, two flags of blue and white on either side of the hood, made its way up the street to the curb in front of the synagogue. Abrahms, wearing his bereavement like a heavy mantle of sorrow only his extraordinary strength could endure, kept bowing his lowered head to the crowds, his eyes opening and closing, his hands reaching out to touch and be touched. At his side a young soldier said, “Your car, General.”

  “Thank you, my son,” said the legend of Israel as he climbed inside and sank back in the seat, his eyes shut in anguish while weeping faces pressed against the windows. The door closed, and when he spoke, his eyes still closed, there was anything but anguish in his harsh voice. “Get me out of here! Take me to my house in the country. We’ll all have whisky and forget this crap. Holy rabbinical bastards! They had the temerity to lecture me! The next war, I’ll call up the rabbis and put those Talmudic chicken-shits in the front lines! Let them lecture while the shrapnel flies up their asses!”

  No one spoke as the car gathered speed and left the crowds behind. Moments later Chaim opened his eyes and pulled his thick back from the seat; he stretched his barrel-chested frame and reclined again in a more comfortable position. Then slowly, as if aware of the stares of the two soldiers beside him, he looked at both men, his head whipping back and forth.

  “Who are you?” he shouted. “You’re not my men, not my aides!”

  “They’ll wake up in an hour or so,” said the man in the front seat beside the driver. He turned to face Abrahms. “Good afternoon, General.”

  “You!”

  “Yes, it is I, Chaim. Your goons couldn’t stop me from testifying before the Lebanon tribunal, and nothing on earth could stop me from what I’m doing today. I told you about the slaughter of women and children and quivering old men as they pleaded for their lives and watched you laugh. You call yourself a Jew? You can’t begin to understand. You’re just a man filled with hate, and I don’t care for you to claim to be any part of what I am or what I believe. You’re shit, Abrahms. But you’ll be brought back to Tel Aviv in several days.”

  One by one the planes landed, the propeller-driven aircraft from Bonn and Paris having flown at low altitudes, the jet from Israel, a Dassault-Breguet Mystère 10/100, dropping swiftly from twenty-eight thousand feet to the private airfield at Saint-Gervais. And as each taxied to a stop at the end of the runway, there was the same dark-blue sedan waiting to drive the “guest” and his escort to an Alpine chateau fifteen miles east in the mountains. It had been rented for two weeks from a real estate firm in Chamonix.

  The arrivals had been scheduled carefully, as none of the three visitors was to know that the others were there. The planes from Bonn and Paris landed at 4:30 and 5:45, respectively, the jet from the Mediterranean nearly three hours later at 8:27. And to each stunned guest Joel Converse said the identical words: “As I was offered hospitality
in Bonn, I offer you mine here. Your accommodations will be better than I was given, although I doubt the food will be as good. However, I know one thing—your departure will be far less dramatic than mine.”

  But not your stay, thought Converse, as he spoke to each man. Not your stay. It was part of the plan.

  38

  The first light floated up into the dark sky above the trees in Central Park. Nathan Simon sat in his study and watched the new day’s arrival from the large, soft leather chair facing the huge window. It was his thinking seat, as he called it. Recently he had used it as much for dozing as for thought. But there were no brief interludes of sleep tonight—this morning. His mind was on fire; he had to explore and reexplore the options, stretching the limits of his perception of the dangers within each. To choose the wrong one would send out alarms that would force the generals to act immediately, and once under way, events would race swiftly out of control; the control of events would be solely in the hands of the generals—everywhere. Of course, they might decide within hours to begin the onslaught, but Nathan did not think so—they were not fools. All chaps had its visual beginnings, the initial turbulence that would give credibility to subsequent violence. If nothing else, confusion had to be established as the players moved into place without being seen. And the concept of military control over governments was a timeworn idea since the age of the Pharaohs. It bore early fruit in the Peloponnesus and Sparta’s conquest of Athens, later with the Caesars, and, later still, was exercised by the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, then by the Renaissance princes, and finally brought to its apotheosis by the Soviets and the Germans in the twentieth century. Unrest preceded violence, and violence preceded takeover, whether it was a revolution sparked by hundreds of thousands of oppressed Russians or the strangling inequities of a Versailles treaty.

  Therein lay the weakness of the generals’ strategy: the unrest had to exist before the violence erupted. It required mobs of malcontented people—ordinary people—who could be worked into a frenzy, but for that to happen the mobs had to be there in the first place. The people’s discontent would be the sign, the prelude, as it were, but where, when? And what could he do, what moves could he make that would escape the attention of Delavane’s informers? He was the employer and friend of Joel Converse, the “psychopathic assassin” the generals had created. He had to presume he was being watched—at the very least any Overt action he took would be scrutinized, and if he became suspect he would be thwarted. His life was immaterial. In a sense he was trapped, as he and others like him had been trapped on the beaches of Anzio. They had realized that there was a degree of safety in the foxholes behind the dunes, that to emerge from them was to face unending mortar fire. Yet they had known, too, that nothing would be accomplished if they remained where they were.

  Contrary to what he had told Peter Stone, Nathan knew precisely whom he had to see—not one man, but three. The President, the Speaker of the House, and the Attorney General. The apex of the executive branch, the leader of the legislative, and the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. He would see no one of lesser stature, and it was far more advantageous to see them all together rather than individually. He had to see them, whether separately or as a group, and there was his dilemma; it was the trap. One did not simply pick up a telephone and make appointments with such men. There were procedures, formalities, and screening processes to ensure the validity of the requests; men with their responsibilities could not waste time. The trap. The minute his name was mentioned, the word would go out. Delavane himself would know within a matter of hours, if not minutes.

  Despite Joel’s gratuitous and highly dubious statements to Peter Stone, it was not easy to reach powerful government figures any more than it was logical to have a judge issue a court order under seal that somehow miraculously, legally, guaranteed extraordinary protection for those same people without informing the entire security apparatus as to why the protection was deemed vital. Ridiculous! Such court orders were reasonable where intimidated witnesses were concerned before a criminal trial and even afterward in terms of fabricated rehabilitation, but that process hardly applied to the White House, the Congress, or the Justice Department. Joel had taken a legal maneuver, ballooned it way out of probability, and scaled it up into orbit—for a reason, of course. Stone and his colleagues had provided depositions.

  And yet, thought Simon, there was an odd logic in Converse’s misapplied exaggerations. Not in any way Joel had considered but as a means to reach these men. “A court, a single judge …” Converse had said to Stone. That was the logic, the rest was nonsense. The Supreme Court, a justice of that court. Not a request from one Nathan Simon who would have to be screened, if only in terms of content, not character, but an urgent message to the President from a venerated justice of the Supreme Court! No one would dare question such a man if he pronounced his business to be between the President and himself. Presidents were far more solicitous of the Court than of Congress, and with good reason. The latter was a political battleground, the former an arena of moral judgment. Nathan Simon knew the man he could call and see, a justice in his late seventies. The Court was not in session; October was a month away. The justice was somewhere in New England; his private number was at the office.

  Nathan blinked, then brought his hand up to shield his eyes. For a brief moment the fireball of the early sun had careened a blinding ray through a geometric maze of glass and steel across the park and entered his window before being blocked by a distant building. And suddenly, at that instant of blindness, he was given the answer to the terrifying question of where and when—the unrest that had to be the prelude for the eruption of violence. There was scheduled throughout Free Europe, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States an internationally coordinated week-long series of antinuclear protests. Millions of concerned people joining hands and snarling traffic in the streets of the major cities and capitals, making their voices heard at the expense of normalcy. Rallies to be held in the parks and in the squares and in front of government buildings. Politicians and statesmen, perceiving as always the power of ground swells, had promised to address huge crowds everywhere—in Paris and Bonn, Rome and Madrid, Brussels and London, Toronto, Ottawa, New York, and Washington. And again, as always, both the sincere advocates and the posturing sycophants of the bodies politic would blame the lack of arms-control progress on the intransigence of evil adversaries, not on their own deficiencies. The genuine and the phony would walk hand in hand across the many podiums, none sure of the other’s stripes.

  Crowds everywhere would espouse deeply felt, deeply divisive issues: the believers of universal restraint would be pitted against those who intensely believe in the effectiveness of raw power, and the latter would surely be heard. No one thought the massive demonstrations would be without incidents, yet how far might these minor confrontations escalate if the incidents themselves were massive? Units of terrorist fanatics financed anonymously, convinced of their mission to infiltrate and savagely disrupt so as to get their messages across, messages of real and or imagined grievances that had nothing to do with the protests, creating chaos primarily because the crowds were not of their world or their fevers. Crowds—everywhere. These were the hordes of people who could be galvanized by sudden violence and worked into a state of madness. It would be the prelude. Everywhere.

  The demonstrations were scheduled to begin in three days.

  Peter Stone walked down the wide dirt path toward the lake behind the A-frame house somewhere in lower New Hampshire—he did not know precisely where, only that it was twenty minutes from the airport. It was close to dusk, the end of a day filled with surprises, and apparently more were to come. Ten hours ago, in his room at the Algonquin, he had called Swissair to see if the flight from Geneva was on schedule; he had been told it was thirty-four minutes ahead of schedule and, barring landing delays, was expected a half-hour early. It was the first surprise and an inconsequential one. The second was not. He had arrived at Kennedy short
ly before two o’clock, and within a few minutes he heard the page over the public address system for a “Mr. Lackland,” the name he had given Nathan Simon.

  “Take Pilgrim Airlines to Manchester, New Hampshire,” the lawyer had said. “There’s a reservation for Mr. Lackland on the three-fifteen plane. Can you make it?”

  “Easily. The flight from Geneva’s early. I assume that’s LaGuardia?”

  “Yes. You’ll be met in Manchester by a man with red hair. I’ve described you to him. See you around five-thirty.”

  Manchester, New Hampshire? Stone had been so sure Simon would ask him to fly to Washington that he had not even bothered to put a toothbrush in his pocket.

  Surprise number three was the courier from Geneva. A prim, gaunt Englishwoman with a face of pale granite and the most uncommunicative pair of eyes he had seen outside of Dzerzhinsky Square. As arranged, she had met him in front of the Swissair lounge, a copy of the Economist in her left hand. After studying the wrong side of his out-of-date government identification, she had given him the attaché case and made the following statement—in high dudgeon. “I don’t like New York, I never have. I don’t like flying either, but everyone’s been so lovely and it’s better to get the whole whack-a-doo over all at once, righto? They’ve arranged for me to take the next plane back to Geneva. I miss my mountains. They need me and I do try to give them my very all, righto?”

  With that abstruse bit of information she had smiled wanly and started back somewhat uncertainly toward the escalator. It was then that Stone had begun to understand. The woman’s eyes did not reveal her condition but the whole person did. She was drunk—or, perhaps, “pickled”—having overcome her fear of flying with liquid courage. Converse had made a strange choice of a courier, Stone had thought, but had instantly changed his mind. Who could be less suspect?