The Aquitaine Progression: A Novel

by Robert Ludlum

  “Really? Well, let me talk about me! Who do you think it was that made Aquitaine feasible throughout all Europe and the Mediterranean? Who fed the terrorists with weapons and millions of pounds of explosives—from the Baader-Meinhof to the Brigate Rosse to the Palestinians—priming them for their final, let’s say their finest, hours? Who? It was I! Why are our conferences always in Bonn? Why are all directives funneled, ultimately issued, through me? Let me explain. I have the organization! I have the manpower—dedicated men ready to do my bidding with a single order. I have the money! I created an advanced, highly sophisticated communications center out of rubble; no one else in Europe could have done that—this I’ve known all along. Bertholdier has nothing to speak of in Paris other than influence and the aura that hovers about him—in true battle, meaningless. The Jew and the South African are a continent away. When the chaos comes, it is I who will be the voice of Aquitaine in Europe. I never thought otherwise! My men will cut down Bertholdier and Abrahms at their toilets!”

  “Scharhörn’s the communications center, isn’t it?” asked Joel with no emphasis whatsoever.

  “They told you that?”

  “The name was dropped. The master list of Aquitaine’s in a computer there, isn’t it?”

  “That, also?”

  “It’s not important. I don’t care anymore. I was abandoned, remember? You must have figured out the computer, too—no one else could.”

  “A considerable accomplishment,” admitted Leifhelm, his humility shining brightly on his waxen face. “I even prepared for the catastrophe of death. There are sixteen letters; we each carry different sets of four, the remaining twelve are with the legless maniac. He thinks no one can activate the codes without his primary set, but in truth a pre-coded combination of two sequences doubled will do it.”

  “That’s ingenious,” said Converse. “Do the others know?”

  “Only my trusted French comrade,” answered the German coldly. “The prince of traitors, Bertholdier. But, naturally, I never gave him the accurate combination, and an inaccurate insertion would erase everything.”

  “That was a winner thinking.” Joel nodded approvingly, then frowned with concern. “What would happen, though, if your center was assaulted?”

  “Like Hitler’s plans for the bunker, it would go up in flames. There are explosives everywhere.”

  “I see.”

  “But since you speak of winners, and in my judgment such men are prophets,” continued Leifhelm, leaning forward in the chair, his eyes widening with enthusiasm, “let me tell you about the isle of Scharhörn. Years ago, in 1945, out of the ashes of defeat, it was to be the site of the most incredible creation designed by true believers the world has ever known, only to be aborted by cowards and traitors. It was called Operation Sonnenkinder—the children of the sun—infants biologically selected and sent out all over the world to people waiting for them, prepared to guide them through their lives to positions of power and wealth. As adults, the Sonnenkinder were to have but one mission across the globe. The rising of the Fourth Reich! You see now the symbolic choice of Scharhörn? From this inner complex of Aquitaine will come forth the new order! We will have done it!”

  “Stow it,” said Converse, getting out of the chair and walking away from Erich Leifhelm. “The examination’s finished.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me, get out of here. You make me sick.” The door opened, and the young doctor from Bonn came in, his eyes on the once celebrated field marshal. “Strip him,” ordered Converse. “Search him.”

  Joel entered the dimly lit room where Valerie and the Sûreté’s Prudhomme flanked a man behind a video camera mounted on a tripod. The thick lens of the camera was inserted in the wall and ten feet away was a television monitor, which showed only the deserted study, with the brocaded wing chair in the center of the screen.

  “Everything go all right?” he asked.

  “Beautifully,” said Valerie. “The operator didn’t understand a word, but he claimed the lighting was exquisite. Au bel naturel, he called it. He can make as many copies as you like; they’ll take about thirty-five minutes each.”

  “Ten and the original print will be enough,” said Converse, looking at his watch, then at Prudhomme as Val spoke quietly in French to the cameraman. “You can take the first copy and still make the five o’clock flight to Washington.”

  “With the greatest of enthusiasm, my friend. I assume one of these prints will be for Paris.”

  “And every other head of government along with our affidavits. You’ll bring back copies of the depositions Simon took in New York?”

  “I’ll go make arrangements,” said Prudhomme. “It is best my name does not appear on the passenger manifest.” He turned and left the room, followed by the cameraman, who headed for his duplicating equipment down the hall.

  Valerie went to Joel, and taking his face in both her hands, she kissed him lightly on the lips. “For a few minutes in their you had me in knots. I didn’t think you were going to make it.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “But you did. That was some display, mister. I’m so very proud of you, my darling.”

  “A lot of lawyers’ll cringe. It was the worst sort of entrapment. As an old, bewildering, but very bright law professor of mine would have put it, they were admissions elicited on the basis of false statements, those same admissions forming the basis of further entrapment.”

  “Stow it, Converse. Let’s go for a walk. We used to walk a lot, and I’d like to get back in the habit. It’s not much fun alone.”

  Joel took her in his arms. They kissed, gently at first, feeling the warmth and the comfort that had come back to them. He pulled his head away, his hands sliding to her shoulders, and looked into her wide, vibrant eyes. “Will you marry me, Mrs. Converse?” he said.

  “Good Lord, again? Well, why not? As you said once before, I wouldn’t even have to change the initials on my lingerie.”

  “You never had initials on it.”

  “You found that out long before you made the remark.”

  “I didn’t want you to think I stared.”

  “Yes, my darling, I’ll marry you. But first we have things to do. Even before our walk.”

  “I know. Peter Stone by way of the Tatiana family in Charlotte, North Carolina. He did terrible things to me, but strange as it seems, I think I like him.”

  “I don’t,” said Valerie firmly. “I want to kill him.”

  40

  It was the end of the second day in the countdown of three. The worldwide demonstrations against nuclear war were only ten hours away, to start at the first light halfway across the world. The killings would begin, setting the chaos in motion.

  The group of eighteen men and five women sat scattered about in the dark projection room in the underground strategy complex of the White House. Each had a small writing tray attached to his seat with a yellow pad lighted by a Tensor lamp. On the screen was flashed in thirty-second intervals one face after another, each with a number in the upper right-hand corner. The instructions had been terse, in the language best understood by these people, and delivered by Peter Stone who had selected them. Study the faces, make no audible comments, and mark down by number any you recognize, bearing in mind terminal operations. At the end of the series the lights will be turned on and we’ll talk. And, if need be, run the series again and again until we come up with something. Remember, we believe these men are killers. Concentrate on that.

  They were told nothing else. Except M.I.6’s Derek Belamy, who had arrived within a half-hour of the extraordinary session, looking haggard from his obviously exhausting journey. When Derek walked through the door, Peter had pulled him aside and each gripped the other’s arms. Stone was never so happy or so relieved in his life to see any man. Whatever he might have missed, or could miss, Belamy would find it. The British agent had a tenth sense above anyone else’s sixth, including Peter’s, which, of course, was denied modestly by Derek. />
  “I need you, old friend,” said Peter. “I need you badly.”

  “It’s why I’m here, old friend,” replied Belamy warmly. “Can you tell me anything?”

  “There’s no time now, but I can give you a name. Delavane.”

  “Mad Marcus?”

  “The same. It’s his crisis and it’s real.”

  “The bastard!” whispered the Englishman. “There’s no one I’d rather see at the end of a barbed-wire rope. Talk to you later, Peter. You’ve got your socializing to do. Incidentally, from what I can see, you’ve got the best here tonight.”

  “The best, Derek. We can’t afford any less.”

  Beyond the American military personnel who had initially approached Stone, as well as Colonel Alan Metcalf, Nathan Simon, Justice Andrew Wellfleet and the Secretary of State, the remaining audience was composed of the most experienced and secure intelligence officers Peter Stone had known in a lifetime of clandestine operations. They had been flown over by military transport from France, Great Britain, West Germany, Israel, Spain and the Netherlands. Among them were, besides the extraordinary Derek Belamy, François Villard, chief of France’s highly secretive Organisation Etrangère; Yosef Behrens, the Mossad’s leading authority on terrorism; Pablo Amandarez, Madrid’s specialist in KGB Mediterranean penetrations, and Hans Vonmeer of the Netherlands’ secret state police. The others, including the women, were equally respected in the caverns of deep-cover, beyond-salvage operations. They knew by name, face or reputation the legions of killers for hire, killers by order, and killers by reason of ideology. Above all, each was trusted, each a man or woman Stone had worked with; collectively they were the elite of the shadow world.

  A face! He knew the face! It stayed on the screen and he wrote on his pad: “Dobbins. Number 57. Cecil or Cyril Dobbins. British Army. Transferred to British Intelligence. Personal aide to … Derek Belamy!”

  Stone looked over at his friend across the aisle, fully expecting him to be writing on his yellow pad. Instead, the Englishman frowned and sat motionless in his chair, his pencil poised above the paper. The next face appeared on the screen. And the next, and the next, until the series was over. The lights came on, and the first person to speak was the Mossad’s Yosef Behrens. “Number seventeen is an artillery officer in the IDF recently transferred to the Security Branch, Jerusalem. His name is Arnold.”

  “Number thirty-eight,” said François Villard, “is a colonel in the French Army attached to the guard of Invalides. It is the face; the name I do not recall.”

  “Number twenty-six,” said the man from Bonn, “is Oberleutnant Ernst Müller of the Federal Republic’s Luftwaffe. He is a highly skilled pilot frequently assigned to fly ministers of state to conferences both within and without West Germany.”

  “Number forty-four,” said a dark-skinned woman with a pronounced Hispanic accent, “has no such credentials as your candidates. He is a drug dealer, suspected of many killings and operates out of Iviza. He was once a paratrooper. Name, Orejo.”

  “Son of a gun, I just don’t believe it!” said the young lieutenant William Landis, the computer expert from the Pentagon. “I know number fifty-one, I’m almost positive! He’s one of the adjutants in Middle East procurements. I’ve seen him a lot but I don’t know his name.”

  Six other men and two women volunteered twelve additional identities and positions as everyone in the room silently looked for an emerging pattern. There was a preponderance of military personnel, and the umbrella of the rest was puzzling. In the main they were ex-combat soldiers from high-casualty outfits who had drifted into crime—largely violent crime, the sort of men Peter Stone knew the generals of Aquitaine considered human garbage.

  Finally Derek Belamy spoke in his hard, clipped distant voice. “There are four or five faces I associate with dossiers, but I’m not making connections.” He looked over at Stone. “You’ll run them again, won’t you, old boy?”

  “Of course, Derek,” replied the former station chief in London. Stone, who had said nothing, rose from his chair and addressed the gathering. “Everything you’ve given us will be fed immediately into computers, and we’ll see if we come up with any correlations. And to repeat what I said previously, I want to thank you all and apologize again for not giving you the explanations you deserve, not only for your help but for the trouble we’ve caused you. Speaking personally, my consolation is that you’ve all been here before and I know you understand. We’ll break for fifteen minutes and start again. There are coffee and sandwiches in the next room.” Stone nodded his thanks once more and started for the door. Derek Belamy intercepted him in the aisle.

  “Peter, I’m dreadfully sorry it took me so long to get back to you. Truth is, the office had a devil of a time tracking me down. I was visiting friends in Scotland.”

  “I thought you might be in Northern Ireland. It’s a hell of a mess, isn’t it?”

  “You were always better than you thought you were. I was in Belfast, of course. But right now I promise to do better—I’m sure I will—but the fact is I’m bushed; it was a perfectly terrible trip and, of course, no sleep whatsoever. All those faces began to look alike—I either knew them all or I didn’t know a damned one!”

  “Running them again will help,” said Stone.

  “Quite so,” agreed Belamy. “And Peter, whatever this tangle is with that maniac, Delavane, I couldn’t have been more delighted to see you in the control chair. We were all told you were out, rather firmly out.”

  “I’m back in. Very firmly.”

  “I can see that, chap. That is your Secretary of State in the back row, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Congratulations, old boy. Well, off for coffee, black and hot. See you in a few minutes.”

  “Across the aisle, old friend.”

  Stone walked out the door and turned right in the white corridor. He could feel the rapid acceleration of his heartbeat; it was a cousin to Johnny Reb’s claims of a churning stomach and an acid taste in his mouth—bile, the Rebel called it. He had to get to a telephone quickly. Converse’s courier, the Sûreté’s Prudhomme, would be arriving within the hour; a Secret Service escort was waiting for him at Dulles Airport with instructions to bring him directly to the White House. But it was not the Frenchman who concerned Stone now, it was Converse himself. He had to reach him before the session began again. He had to!

  When the lawyer had contacted him through the Tatiana relay, Peter had been astonished by the sheer audacity of what Converse had done. Kidnapping the three generals—video-taping the interrogations or the “oral examinations” or whatever the legal terminology was; it was insane! The only thing more insane was the fact that he had carried it off—thanks obviously to the resources of a very determined, very angry man from the Sûreté. The computer was in Scharhörn, the master list of Aquitaine buried somewhere in its intricate mechanism, only to be erased by inaccurate codes, the complex itself mined with explosives. Jesus!

  And now the final insanity. The man no one could find, the source so deeply shrouded they frequently doubted his existence despite the fact that all logic insisted he was there. There had to be Aquitaine’s man in England, for there could be no Aquitaine without the British. Further, Stone knew he was the conduit, the primary communicator between Palo Alto and the generals overseas, for constant screenings of Delavane’s telephone charges showed repeated calls to a number in the Hebrides, and such a relay device was all too familiar to the former intelligence agent. The calls disappeared at that number in the Scottish islands, just as the KGB calls processed through Canada’s Prince Edward disappeared, and the Company’s communications routed through Key West could not be traced.

  Belamy! The man whose face never appeared in any publication—film was destroyed instantly by aides if he was even in the background of a photograph. The most guarded operations officer in England, with access to secrets culled over decades and scores of devices created by the best minds of M.I.6. And yet, was it po
ssible? Derek Belamy, the quiet, good-humored chess player, the friend who gave good whisky and a fine ear to an American colleague who had progressively had serious doubts about his calling in life. The better friend for having the wisdom and the courage to warn his colleague that he was drinking too much, that perhaps he should take a sabbatical, and if money was a problem, surely some sort of quiet consultation agreement could be worked out with his own organization. Was it possible, this decent man, this friend?

  Stone reached the door in the hallway marked simply by the number 14, OCCUPIED. He walked inside the small room and went to the desk and the telephone. He did not sit down; his anxiety would not permit it. He picked up the phone and dialed the White House switchboard as he took out the slip of paper in his pocket with Converse’s number somewhere in France. He gave it to the operator, adding simply, “This should be scrambled. I’m talking from Strategy Fourteen, confirm by trace.”

  “Trace confirmed, sir. Scrambler will be in operation. Shall I call you back?”

  “No, thanks, I’ll stay on the line.” Stone remained standing as he heard the hollow echo of numbers being punched and the faint hum of the scrambling machine. And then he heard the sound of a door opening. He turned.

  “Put the phone down, Peter,” said Derek Belamy quietly as he shut the door. “There’s no point to this.”

  “It is you, isn’t it?” Stone slowly, awkwardly replaced the phone in its cradle.

  “Yes, it is. And I want everything you want, my old friend. Neither of us could deny ourselves the parting shots, could we? I said I was visiting friends in Scotland and you said you thought I was in Ireland. We’ve learned over the years, haven’t we? The eyes don’t lie. Scotland—calls to the Hebrides; the glass fell over your eyes. And earlier, when that face came on the screen, you looked across the aisle a bit too obviously, I think.”

  “Dobbins. He worked for you.”

  “You wrote frantically on your pad, yet you said nothing.”