had to reach a taxi, a taxi with a driver who spoke
English; he could not remain on foot.... He had been
captured on foot once, years ago. On a jungle trail,
where if he had only been able to commandeer a
jeep an enemy jeep he might have . . . Stop it!
This is not 'Nam, it's a goddamn airport with a
million tons of concrete poured between flowers,
grass and asphalt! He kept moving in and out of the
shadows, until he had made a complete
semicircle one-eight zero. He was in darkness, the
last of the taxis in the line ahead of him. He ap-
proached the first, which was the last.
"English? Do you speak English?"
"~nglisch? Nein. "
The second cabdriver was equally negative, but
the third was not. "As you Americans say, only the
asshole would drive a taxi here wizzout the English
reasonable. Is so?"
"It's reasonable, ' said Joel, opening the door.
"Rein! You cannot do thatl"
"Do what?"
"Come in the taxi."
"Why not?"
"The line. Allviss is the line."
Converse reached into his jacket pocket and
withdrew a folded layer of deutsche marks. "I'm
generous. Can you understand thatP"
"Is also urgent sickness. Get in, main Herr."
The cab pulled out of the line and sped toward
the exit road. "Bonn or Koln?" asked the driver.
"Bonn," replied Converse, "but not yet. I want you
to
144 ROBERT LUDLUM
drive into the other lane and stop across the way in
front of that parking lot."
'~Was... 9"
"The other lane. I want to watch the entrance
back there. I think there was someone on the
Hamburg plane I know."
"Many have come out. Only those with luggage "
"She's still inside," insisted Joel. "Please, just do as I
say."
' She? . . . Ach, ein Fraulein. Ist ja Ihr Geld, main
Herr. "
The driver swung the cab into a cutoff that led
to the incoming road and the parking lot. He
stopped in the shadows beyond the second booth;
the terminal doors were on the left, no more than
a hundred yards away. Converse watched as weary
passengers, carrying assorted suitcases, golf bags,
and the ever-present camera equipment, began to
file out of the terminal's entrance, most raising their
hands for taxis, a few walking across the pedestrian
lanes toward the parking lot.
Twelve minutes passed and still there was no
sign of the woman from Copenhagen. She could not
have been carrying luggage, so the delay was
deliberate, or instructed. The driver of the cab had
assumed the role of nonobserver; he had turned off
the lights and, with a bowed head, appeared to be
dozing. Silence.... Across the parallel roads, the
travelers from Hamburg had dwindled. Several
young men, undoubtedly students, two in cut-off
jeans, their companions drinking from cans of beer,
were laughing as they counted the deutsche marks
between them. A yawning businessman in a
three-piece suit struggled with a bulging suitcase
and an enormous cardboard box wrapped in a floral
print, while an elderly couple argued, their dispute
emphasized by two shaking heads of grey hair. Five
others, men and women, were by the curb at the far
end of the platform apparently waiting for pre-
arranged transportation. But where . . .
Suddenly she was there, but she was not alone.
Instead, she was flanked by two men, a third
directly behind her. All four walked slowly, casually,
out of the automatic glass doors, moving to the left,
their pace quickening until they reached the
dimmest area of the canopied entrance. Then the
three men angled themselves in front of the woman,
as if mounting a wall of protection, their heads
turning, talking to her over their shoulders while
studying the crowd. Their conversation became
animated but controlled, anger joining confusion,
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 145
tempers held in check. The man on the right broke
away and crossed to the corner of the building, then
walked beyond into the shadows. He pulled an
object out of an inside pocket and Joel instantly
knew what it was; the man raised it to his lips. He
was talking by radio to someone in or around the
airport.
Barely seconds passed when the beams of
powerful headlights burst through the glass over
Converse's right shoulder, filling the back of the taxi.
He pressed himself into the seat his head turned,
neck arched, his face at the edge of the rear window.
Beyond, by the exit booth of the parking lot, a
dark-red limousine had stopped, the driver's arm
extended a bill clutched in his hand. The attendant
took the money turning to make change, when the
large car lurched forward leaving the man in the
booth bewildered. It careened around the taxi and
headed for the curve in the road that led to the
airport terminal's entrance. The timing was too
precise; radio contact had been made and Joel spoke
to the driver.
"I told you I was generous," he said, startled by
the words he was forming in his head. "I can be very
generous if you'll do as I ask you to."
"I awn an honest man," replied the German,
uncertainty in his voice, his eyes looking at Joel in
the rearview mirror.
"So am 1," said Converse. "But I'm also honestly
curious and there's nothing wrong with that. You see
the dark-red car over there, the one that's stopping
at the corner of the building?"
'pa. "
"Do you think you could follow it without being
seen? You'd have to stay pretty Or behind, but keep
it in sight. Could you do it?"
"Is not a reasonable request. How generous is
the A merikaner?"
"Two hundred deutsche marks over the fare."
"You are generous, and I am a superior driver."
The German did not underestimate his talents
behind the wheel. Skillfully he weaved the cab
unobtrusively through a cutoff, swinging abruptly left
into the parallel exit road and bypassing the entrance
to the terminal.
"What are you doing?" asked Joel, confused. "I
want you to follow "
"Is only way out," interrupted the driver, glancing
back at the airport platform while maintaining
moderate speed. "I
146 ROBERT LUDIUM
shall let him pass me. I am just one more
insignificant taxi on the autobahn."
Converse sank back into the corner of the seat,
his head away from the windows. "That's reasonably
good thinking," he said.
"Superior, mein Herr.', Again the driver looked
briefly back out the window, then concentrated on
the road and the rearview mirror. Moments later he
gradually accelerated his speed; it was not
&
nbsp; noticeable; there was no breaking away, instead
merely a faster pace. He eased to the left, passing a
Mercedes coupe, staying in the lane to overtake a
Volkswagen, then returning to the right.
"I hope you know what you're doing," muttered Joel.
No reply was necessary as the dark-red vehicle
streaked by on the left.
"Directly ahead the road separates," said the
driver. "One way to Koln, the other to Bonn. You
say you are going to Bonn, but what if your friend
goes to KolnP"
"Stay with him."
The limousine entered the road for Bonn and
Converse lighted a cigarette, his thoughts on the
reality of having been found, which meant his name
was known from the passenger manifest. So be it; he
would have preferred otherwise, but once the initial
contact had been made with Bertholdier it was not
a vital point. He could operate as himself; his past
might even be an asset. Also, there was a positive
side to the immediate situation; he had learned
something several things. Those following
him who now had lost him were no part of the
authorities; they were not connected with either the
German or the French police, or the coordinating
Interpol. If they were, they would have taken him at
the gate or on the plane itself, and that told him
something else. Joel Converse was not wanted for
assault or God forbid murder back in Paris. And
this assumption could only lead to a third
probability: the violent, bloody struggle in the alley
was being covered up. Jacques-Louis Bertholdier
was taking no chances that because of his severely
wounded aide his own name might surface in any
connection whatsoever with a wealthy guest of the
hotel who had made such alarming insinuations to
the revered general. The protection of Aquitaine
was paramount.
There was a fourth possibility, so realistically
arrived at it could be considered fact. The men in
the dark-red limou
THE AQUITAINE rROGRESSION 147
sine who had met the Hamburg plane were also part
of Aquitaine, underlings of Erich Leifhelm, the
spoke of Aquitaine in West Germany. Sometime
during the last five hours, Bertholdier had learned
the identity of the ersatz Henry Simon probably
through the management of the George V and
contacted Leifhelm. Then, alarmed that no passenger
manifest listed an American named Converse flying
from Paris to Bonn, they had checked the other
airlines and found he had gone to Copenhagen. The
alarms must have been strident. Why Copenhagen?
He said he was going to Bonn. Why did this strange
man with his extraordinary information go to
Copenhagen? Who are his contacts, whom will he
meet? Find him. Find them! Another phone call had
been made, a description given, and a woman had
stared at him in a cafe in the Kastrup Airport. It was
all so throughthe-looking-glass.
He had flown to Denmark for one reason, but
another purpose had been served. They had found
him, but in the finding they had revealed their own
panic. An agitated reception committee, the use of
a radio at night to reach an unseen vehicle only a
few hundred feet away, a racing limousine: these
were the ingredients of anxiety. The enemy was
off-balance and the lawyer in Converse was satisfied.
At this moment that enemy was a quarter of a mile
down the road speeding into Bonn, unaware that a
taxi behind them, skillfully maneuvered by a driver
slipping around the intermittent traffic, was keeping
them in sight.
Joel crushed out his cigarette as the driver
slowed down to let a pickup truck pass. He could see
the large dark-red car ahead on the long curve. The
German was no amateur, he knew the moves to
make, and Converse understood. Whoever was in
that limousine might well be an influential owner,
and even two hundred deutsche marks were not
worth the probable enmity of a powerful man.
Probabilities . . . everything was probabilities. He
had built his legal reputation on the study of
probabilities, and it was a simpler process than most
of his colleagues believed. The approach, that is, was
simple, not the work; that was never easy. It
demanded the dual discipline of concentrating on the
minute and prodding the imagination to expand until
the minutiae were arranged and rearranged into
dozens of different equations. This exhaustive what-if
process was the keystone of legal thinking; it was as
simple as that. It was also
148 ROBERT LUDIUM
a verbal trap, Joel reflected, as he thought back
several years, smiling an uncomfortable smile alone
in the darkness. In one of her moments of pique,
Val had told him that if he would spend one iota of
the time on the two of them that he spent on his
"goddamned probabilities," he would "probably"
come to realize that the 'probability" of their
surviving together was 'very probably nil."
She had never lacked for being succinct nor
sacrificed her humor in the pursuit of candor. Her
striking looks aside, Valerie Charpentier Converse
was a very funny lady. Unable not to, he had smiled
at her explosion that night years ago, then they both
had laughed quietly until she turned away and left
the room, too much sadness in the truth she had
spoken.
Large picturesque buildings gradually replaced
the quiet countryside, reminding Converse of huge
Victorian houses with filigreed borders and
overhanging eaves and grilled balconies beneath
large rectangular windows stark geometric shapes.
These in turn gave way to a contradictory stretch of
attractive but perfectly ordinary residential homes,
the sort that could be found in any traditional
wealthy suburb on the outskirts of a major
American city. Scarsdale, Chevy Chase Grosse
Pointe or Evanston. Then came the center of Bonn
where narrow, gaslit streets ran into wider avenues
with modern lighting, quaint squares only blocks
away from banks of contemporary stores and
boutiques. It was an architectural
anachronism Old World ambience coexisting with
up-tothe-minute structures, but with no sense of a
city, no sense of electricity or grandeur. Instead it
appeared to be a large town, growing rapidly larger,
the town fathers uncertain of its direction. The
birthplace of Beethoven and the gateway to the
Rhine Valley was the most unlikely capital
imaginable of a major government. It was anything
but the seat of a hard-nosed Bundestag and a series
of astute, sophisticated prime ministers who faced
the Russian bear across the borders.
"Mein Herrl" cried the driver. "They take the
road to Bad Godesberg. Das Diplomatenviertel."
> "What does that mean?"
"Embassies. They have Polizeistreifen! Patrols.
We could be, how do you say, known ?"
"Spotted," explained Joel. "Never mind. Do what
you've been doing, you're great. Stop, if you have
to; park, if you have
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 149
to. Then keep going. You now have three hundred
deutsche marks over the fare. I want to know where
they stop."
It came six minutes later, and Converse was
stunned. Whatever he had thought, wherever his
imagination had led him, he was not prepared for
the driver's words.
'That is the American embassy, mein Herr. "
Joel tried to focus his thoughts. "Take me to the
Hotel Konigshof," he said, remembering, not
knowing what else to say.
"Yes, I believe Herr Dowling left a note to that
effect," said the desk clerk, reaching below the
counter.
"He did?" Converse was astonished. He had used
the actor's name in the outside hope of some
possible preferential treatment. He expected nothing
else, if indeed that.
"Here it is." The clerk extracted two small
telephone memos from the thin stack in his hand.
"You are John Converse, an American attomey."
"Close enough. That's me."
"Herr Dowling said you might have difficulty
finding am propriate accommodations here in Bonn.
Should you come to the Konigshof tonight, he
requested that we be as helpful as possible. It is
possible, Herr Converse. Herr Dowling is a very
popular man."
"He deserves to be," said Joel.
Robert Ludlum - Aquatain Progression.txt Page 23
