Robert Ludlum - Aquatain Progression.txt

by The Aquitaine Progression [lit]

  with sufficient income or influence to live there. The

  windows were open and the breezes from the garden

  stirred the oppressive summer's night air. There was

  air conditioning in two other rooms and ceiling fans

  in three more, but Chaim liked the kitchen. In the

  old days he and his men would sit in primitive

  kitchens and plan raids; in the Negev, ammunition

  was often passed about while desert chicken boiled

  on a wood stove. The kitchen was the soul of the

  house. It gave warmth and sustenance to the body,

  clearing the mind for tactics as long as the women

  left after performing their chores and did not

  interrupt the men with their incessant trivialities. His

  wife was asleep upstairs; so be it. He had little to say

  to her anymore, or she to him; she could not help

  him now. And if she could, she would not. They had

  lost a son in Lebanon, her son she said, a teacher, a

  scholar, not a soldier, not a killer by choice. Too

  many sons were lost on both sides, she said. Old

  men, she said, old men infected the young with their

  hatreds and used Biblical legends to justify death in

  the pursuit of questionable real estate. Death, she

  cried. Death before talk that might avert it! She had

  forgotten the early days; too many forgot too quickly.

  Chaim Abrahms did not forget, nor would he ever.

  256 R08ERT LUDLUM

  And his sense of smell was as acute as ever. This

  lawyer, this Converse, this talk! It was all too clever,

  it had the stench of cold, analytical minds, not the

  heat of believers. The Mossad specialist was the

  best, but even the Mossad made mistakes. The

  specialist looked for a motive, as if one could

  dissect the human brain and say this action caused

  that reaction, this punishment that commitment to

  vengeance. Too damned clever! A believer was

  fueled by the heat of his convictions. They were his

  only motive, and they did not call for clever

  manipulations.

  Chaim knew he was a plainspoken man, a direct

  man, but it was not because he was unintelligent or

  lacked subtle perceptions; his prowess on the

  battlefield proved otherwise. He was direct because

  he knew what he wanted, and it was a waste of time

  to pretend and be clever. In all the years he had

  lived with his convictions he had never met a fellow

  believer who allowed himself to waste time.

  This Converse knew enough to reach Bertholdier

  in Paris. He showed how much more he knew when

  he mentioned Leifhelm in Bonn and specifically

  named the cities of Tel Aviv and Johannesburg.

  What more did he have to prove? Why should he

  prove it if his belief was there? Why did he not

  plead his case with his first connection and not

  waste time? . . . No, this lawyer, this Converse, was

  from somewhere else. The Mossad specialist said

  the motive was there for affiliation. He was wrong.

  The red-hot heat of the believer was not there. Only

  cleverness, only talk.

  And the specialist had not dismissed Chaim s

  sense of smell. As well he should not, as the two

  sabres had fought together for years, as often as not

  against the Europeans and their conniving

  ways those immigrants who held up the Old

  Testament as if they had written it, calling the true

  inhabitants of Israel uneducated ruffians or clowns.

  The Mossad specialist respected his sabre brother,

  it was in his look, that respect. No one could dismiss

  the instincts of Chaim Abrahms son of Abraham,

  archangel of darkness to the enemies of Abraham's

  children. Thank God his wife was asleep.

  It was time to call Palo Alto.

  My general, my friend."

  Shalom, Chaim," said the warlord of Saigon. Are

  you on your way to Bonn?"

  I'm leaving in the morning we're leaving. Van

  Headmer is in the air now. He'll arrive at Ben

  Gurion at

  THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 257

  eight-thirty, and together we'll take the ten o'clock

  flight to Frankfurt, where Leifhelm's pilot will meet

  us with the Cessna."

  "Good. You can talk. '

  "We must talk now," said the Israeli. "What more

  have you learned about this Converse?"

  "He becomes more of an enigma, Chaim."

  "I smell a fraud."

  "So do 1, but perhaps not the fraud I thought.

  You know what my assessment was. I thought he was

  no more than an infantry point, someone being used

  by more knowledgeable men Lucas Anstett among

  them to learn far more than they knew or heard

  rumors about. I don't discount a degree of minor

  leaks; they're to be anticipated and managed, scoffed

  at as paranoia."

  "Get to the point, Marcus," said the impatient

  Abrahms who always called Delavane by his middle

  name. He considered it a Hebrew name, in spite of

  the fact that Delavane's father had insisted on it for

  his first son in honor of the Roman Caesar the

  philosopher Marcus Aurelius, a proselytiser of

  moderation.

  ' Three things happened today," continued the

  former general in Palo Alto. "The first infuriated me

  because I could not understand it, and frankly

  disturbed me because it portended a far greater

  penetration than I thought possible from a sector I

  thought impossible."

  "What was it?" the Israeli broke in.

  "A firm prohibition was placed on getting part of

  Converse's service record."

  "Yes!" cried Abrahms, in his voice the sound of

  Triumph.

  "What?"

  "Go on, Marcus! I'll tell you when you're

  finished. What was the second calamity?"

  "Not a calamity, Chaim. An explanation so

  blatantly offered it can't be turned aside. Leifhelm

  called me and said Converse himself brought up

  Anstett's death, claiming to be relieved, but saying

  little else except that Anstett was his enemy that

  was the word he used."

  "So instructed!" Abrahm's voice reverberated

  around the kitchen. "What was the third gift, my

  general?"

  "The most bewildering as well as

  enlightening and, Chaim, do not shout into the

  phone. You are not at one of your stadium rallies or

  provoking the Knesset."

  258 ROBERT LUDLUM

  1 am in the field, Marcus. Right now! Please

  continue my friend."

  "The man who clamped the lid down on

  Converse's military record is a naval officer who was

  the brother-in-law of Preston Halliday."

  "Geneva! Yes!"

  "Stop that!"

  "My apologies, my dear friend. It's just all so

  perfect!"

  "Whatever you have in mind," said Delavane

  'may be negated by the man's reason. This naval

  officer, this brother-in-law, believes Converse

  engineered Halliday's murder."

  'Of course! Perfect!"

  "You will keep your voice down!" The cry of the

 
cat on a frozen lake was heard.

  "Again my deepest and most sincere apologies,

  my general. Was that all this naval officer said?"

  '.No, he made it clear to the commander of his

  base in San Diego that Halliday had come to him

  and told him he was meeting a man in Geneva he

  believed was involved with illegal exports to illegal

  destinations. An attorney for profiteers in

  armaments. He intended to confront this man, this

  international lawyer named Converse, and threaten

  to expose him. What do we have?"

  "A fraud !"

  "But on whose side, sabre? The volume of your

  voice doesn't convince me."

  "Be convinced! I'm right. This Converse is the

  desert scorpions"

  "What does that mean?"

  "Don't you see? The Mossad seesI"

  "The Mossad?"

  "Yesl I talked with our specialist and he senses

  what I smell he admits the possibility! I grant you,

  my general, my honored warrior, that he has

  information that led him to think this Converse

  might be genuine, that he wanted truly to be with

  us, but when I said I smelled bad meat, he granted

  one other, exceptional possibility. Converse may or

  may not be programmed, but he could be an agent

  for his government!"

  "A provocateur?"

  "Who knows, Marcus? But the pattern is so

  perfect. First, a prohibition is placed on his military

  record it will tell us something, we know that.

  Then he responds in the negative about the death of

  an enemy not his, but ours, and claims

  THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 259

  he was his enemy too so simple, so instructable.

  Finally, it is insinuated that this Converse was the

  killer in Geneva so orderly, so precisely to his

  advantage. We are dealing with very analytical minds

  that watch every move in the chess game, and match

  every pawn with a king."

  "Yet everything you say can be reversed. He could

  be " "He can't be!" cried Abrahms.

  "Why, Chaim? Tell me why?"

  "There is no heat, noire in him! It is not the way

  of a believer! We are not clever, we are adamant!"

  George Marcus Delavane said nothing for several

  moments, and the Israeli knew better than to speak.

  He waited until the quiet cold voice came back on

  the line. "Have your meeting tomorrow, General.

  Listen to him and be courteous; play the game he

  plays. But he must not leave that house until I give

  the order. He may never leave it."

  "Shalom, my friend."

  "Shalom, Chaim."

  14

  Valerie approached the glass doors of her stu-

  dio identical with the doors of her balcony

  upstairs and looked out at the calm, sun-washed

  waters of Cape Ann. She thought briefly of the boat

  that had dropped anchor so frighteningly in front of

  her house several nights ago. It had not been back;

  whatever had happened was past, leaving questions

  but no answers. If she closed her eyes she could still

  see the figure of a man crawling up out of the cabin

  light, and the glow of the cigarette, and she still

  wondered what that man was doing, what he was

  thinking. Then she remembered the sight of the two

  men in the early light, framed by the dark rims of her

  binoculars staring back at her with far more pow-

  erful lenses. Were they novices finding a safe harbor?

  Amateurs navigating the dark waters of a coastline at

  night? Questions, no answers.

  Whatever, it was past. A brief, disturbing interlude

  that

  260 ROBERT LUDLUM

  gave rise to black imaginings demons in search of

  logic, as Joel would say.

  She tossed her long, dark hair aside and

  returned to her easel, picking up a brush and

  putting the final dabs of burnt umber beneath the

  shadowed sand dunes of wild grass. She stepped

  back, studied her work, and swore to herself for the

  fifth time that the oil painting was finished. It was

  another seascape; she never tired of them, and

  fortunately she was beginning to get a fair share of

  the market. Of course there were those painters in

  the Boston-Boothbay axis who claimed she had

  virtually cornered the market, but that was rubbish.

  Indeed her prices had risen satisfactorily as a result

  of the critical approval accorded her two showings

  at the Copley Galleries, but the truth was that she

  could hardly afford to live where she lived and the

  way she lived without at least a part of Joel's check

  every month.

  Then again, not too many artists had a house on

  the beach with an attached twenty-by-thirty-foot

  studio enclosed by full-length glass doors and with

  a ceiling that was literally one entire skylight. The

  rest of the house, the original house, on the

  northern border of Cape Ann was more

  rambling-quaint than functional. The initial

  architecture was early-coastconfusion, with lots of

  heavy bleached wood and curliques, a balustraded

  second-story balcony, and outsized bay windows in

  the front room that were charming to look at and

  look out but leaked fiercely when the winter winds

  came off the ocean. No amount of putty or sashing

  compound seemed to work; nature was extracting a

  price for observing her beauty.

  Still, it was Val's dream house, the one she had

  promised herself years ago she would someday be

  able to afford. She had come back from the Ecole

  des Beaux Arts in Paris prepared to assault New

  York's art world via the Greenwich Vil-

  lage-Woodstock route only to have stark reality alter

  her plans. The family circumstances had always been

  sufficiently healthy for her to live comfortably, albeit

  not lavishly, throughout three years in college and

  two more in Paris. Her father was a passably good

  if excessively enthusiastic amateur painter who

  always complained that he had not taken the risks

  and gone totally into the fine arts rather than

  architecture. As a result, he supported his only child

  both morally and financially, in a very real sense

  living through her progress and devoted to her

  determination. And her mother slightly mad,

  always loving, always supportive in anything and

  every

  THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 261

  thing would take terrible photographs of Val's

  crudest work and send the pictures back to her sister

  and cousins in Cermany, writing outrageous lies that

  spoke of museums and galleries and insane

  commissions.

  "The crazy Berlinerin," her father would say

  fondly in his heavy Gallic accent. "You should have

  seen her during the war. She frightened us all to

  death! We half expected she would return to

  headquarters some night with a drunken Goebbels

  or a doped-up Goring in tow, then tell us if we

  wanted Hitler to give her the word!"

  Her father had bee
n the Free French liaison

  between the Allies and the German underground in

  Berlin. A rather stiff Parisian autocrat who

  happened to speak German had been assigned to the

  cell in the Charlottenburg, which coordinated all the

  activities of Berlin's underground. He frequently said

  that he had more trouble with the wild Fraulein with

  the impetuous ideas than he had avoiding the Nazis.

  Nevertheless they married each other two months

  after the armistice. In Berlin. Where neither his

  family would talk to hers, nor hers to his. "We had

  two small orchestras," her mother would say. "One

  played pure, beautiful Viennese Schnitzel, the other

  some white cream sauce with deer droppings."

  Whether family animosities had anything to do

  with it neither ever said, but the Parisian and the

  Berlinerin immigrated to St. Louis, Missouri, in the

  United States of America, where the Berlinerin had

  distant relations.

  The stark reality. Nine years ago, after she had

  settled in New York from Paris, a frightened, tearful

  father had flown in to see her and had told Val a

  terrible truth. His beloved crazy Berlinerin had been

  ill for years; it was cancer and it was about to kill

  her. In desperation, he had spent nearly all the

  money he had, including unpaid second and third

  mortgages on the rambling house in Bellefontaine, to

  stem the disease. Among the profiteers were clinics

  in Mexico; there was nothing else he could say. He

  could only weep, and his losses had nothing to do

  with his tears. And she could only hold her father

  and ask him why he had not told her before.