Scattered about were papers, pencils and a yellow
legal pad, the top pages looped over. The setting
was familiar to anyone who had ever had an
appointment with an attorney, said learned counsel
having put his astute observations down on paper
prior to the conference.
Fitzpatrick retraced his steps to the chair, moved
it forward several feet, and crossed to the door of
the small side room. He had turned on the
lights two table lamps flanking a short couch) he
went to the one above the telephone and turned it
off. He then walked back to the open door and
stood between it and the wall, peering through the
narrow vertical space broken up by upper and lower
hinges. He had a clear view of the foyer's entrance;
three people would pass into the conference room
and he would come out.
There was a knock on the hallway door the
rapid, impatient tapping of an heiress unable to
control herself. He had told the Fishbein woman the
location of the room, but nothing else. No name or
number, and in her anxiety she had not asked about
either. Fitzpatrick went to the telephone table in the
small room, lifted the phone out of its cradle and
placed it on its side. He returned to his position
behind the door, angling himself so as to look
through the crack, his body in the shadows. He took
the pistol from his belt, held it in front of him and
shouted in a friendly voice, loud enough to be heard
outside in the hotel corridor. "Bitte, kommen Sie
herein! Die Tare ist offer. Ich telefoniere gerade!"
The sound of the door as it opened preceded
Ilse Fishbein as she walked rapidly into the room,
her eyes directed at the conference table. She was
followed by Erich LeifLelm, who glanced about and
then turned slightly, nodding his head. A third man
in the uniform of a chauffeur came into view, his
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 307
hand in the pocket of his black jacket. Connal then
heard the second sound he needed to hear. The
hallway door was slammed shut.
He yanked back the small door and quickly
stepped around it, the gun extended, aimed directly
at the chauffeur.
"You!" he cried in German. "Take your hand out
of your pocket! Slowly!" The woman gasped, then
opened her mouth to scream. Fitzpatrick interrupted
harshly. "Be quiet! As your friend will tell you, I
haven't anything to lose. I can kill the three of you
and be out of the country in an hour, leaving the
police to look for a Mr. Parnell who doesn't exist."
The chauffeur, the muscles of his jaw rippling,
removed his hand from his pocket, his fingers rigid.
Leifhelm stared in anger and fear at Connal's gun,
his face no longer ashen but flushed. "You dare?"
"I dare, Field Marshal," said Fitzpatrick. "Just as
you dared forty years ago to rape a young kid and
make damned sure that she and her whole family
never walked out of the camps. You bet your ass I
dare, and if I were you, I wouldn't give me the
slightest cause to be any angrier than I am.' Connal
spoke to the woman. "You. Inside that briefcase on
the table are eight strands of rope. Start with the
driver. Bind his hands and feet; I'll tell you how.
Now! Quickly!"
Four minutes later the chauffeur and Leifhelm
sat in two conference chairs, their ankles and wrists
bound, the driver's weapon removed from his pocket.
Connal checked the ropes the knots having been tied
under his instructions. Everything was secure; the
more one writhed, the tighter the knots would
become. He ordered the panicked Fishbein woman
into a third chair; he lashed her hands to the arms
and her feet to the legs.
Rising, Connal picked up the automatic from the
table and approached Leifhelm, who was sitting in
the chair next to the lighted telephone. "Now," he
said, the gun pointed at the German's head. "As
soon as I hang up the phone in the other room we re
going to make a call from here." He walked quickly
into the small side room, hung up the telephone, and
returned. He sat down next to the bound Leifhelm
and took a scrap of paper out of the open briefcase.
On it was written the phone number of the general's
estate on the Rhine beyond Bad Godesberg.
"What do you think you'll accomplish? ' asked
Leifhelm.
308 ROBERT LUDLUM
"Trade-off," replied Fitzpatrick, the barrel of the
gun pressed against the German's temple. "You for
Converse."
"Mein Gott!" whispered Ilse Fishbein as the
chauffeur writhed, his hands straining against the
ropes, which were now biting into his wrists.
"You believe anyone will listen to you, much less
carry out your orders?"
"They will if they want to see you alive again.
You know I'm right, General. This gun isn't so
loud I made sure of that. I can turn on the radio
and kill you and be on a plane out of Germany
before you're found. This room is reserved for the
night with instructions that we're not to be disturbed
for any reason whatsoever." Connal shifted the
weapon to his left hand, picked up the telephone,
and dialed the number written on the scrap of
paper.
"Guten Tag. Hier bet General LeifAelm."
"Put someone in authority on this phone," said
the Navy lawyer in perfect German. ' I have a gun
less than a foot away from General Leifhelm's head
and I'll kill him right now unless you do as I say.'
There were muffled shouts over the line as a
hand was held against the mouthpiece. In seconds a
crisp British accent was speaking slowly, deliberately
in English.
"Who is this and what do you want?"
"Well, what do you know? This sounds like
Major Philip Dunstone that was the name, wasn't
it? You don't sound half so friendly as you did last
night."
"Don't do anything rash, Commander. You'll regret
it."
"And don't you do anything stupid, or Leifhelm
will regret it sooner that is, until he can't regret
anything any longer. You've got one hour to get
Converse to the airport and inside the Lufthansa
security gate. He has a reservation on the ten
o'clock flight to Washington, D.C., by way of Frank-
furt. I've made arrangements. I'll be calling a
number in a room where he'll be taken and I'll
expect to talk with him. After I do, I'll leave here
and call you on another phone, telling you where
your employer is. Just get Converse to that security
gate. One hour, Major!" Fitzpatrick shoved the
phone in front of Leifhelm's face, and pressed the
barrel of the gun into the German's temple.
"Do as he says," said the General, choking on the
words.
The minutes went by slowly, stretching into a
quarter of an hour, then thirty, the silence finally
broken by Leifhelm.
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 309
"So you found her," he said, gesturing his head at use
Fishbein, who trembled as tears streaked down her
full cheeks.
"Just as we found out about Munich forty years
ago, and a hell of a lot of other things. You're all on
your way to that great big war room in the sky, Field
Marshal, so don't worry about whether I'll go back
on my word to your English butler. I wouldn't miss
seeing you bastards paraded for everyone to see what
you really are. People like you give the military ev-
erywhere a goddamned rotten name."
There was a slight commotion from the hallway
beyond the door. Connal looked up, raising the gun
and holding it directly at Leifhelm's head.
"Was ist?" said the Cerman, shrugging.
"Seine Bewegung!"
From the hotel corridor came the strains of a
melody sung by several male voices more off key
than on. Another conference in one of the other
rooms had broken up, obviously as much from the
excessive intake of alcohol as from the completion of
a business agenda. Raucous laughter pierced a
refrain as harmony was unsuccessfully attempted.
Fitzpatrick relaxed, lowering the automatic; no one
on the outside knew the name or number of the
room.
"You say men like me give your
profession which is my profession as well a
seriously bad name," said Leifhelm. "Has it occurred
to you, Commander, that we might elevate that
profession to one of indispensable greatness in a
world that needs us badly?"
"Needs us?" asked Connal. "We need the world
first and not your kind of world. You tried it once
and blew it, don't you remember?"
"That was one nation led by a madman trying to
impose his imprimatur over the globe. This is many
nations with one class of self-abnegating
professionals coming together for the good of all."
"Whose definition? Yours? You're a funny fellow,
General. Somehow I question your benevolent
tendencies."
"Indiscretions of a deprived youth whose name
and rightful opportunities were stolen from him
should not be held against the man a half-century
later."
"Deprived or depraved? I think you made up for
lost time pretty quickly and as brutally as you could.
I don't like your remedies."
"You have no vision."
310 ROBERT LUDIUM
"Thanks be to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph it's not
yours. " The singing out in the corridor faded
briefly, then swelled again, more discordant and
louder than before. "Maybe that's some of your old
Dachau playboys having a beer bust."
Leifhelm shrugged.
Suddenly the door burst open, crashing into the
wall as three men raced in, spits filling the air as
silenced guns fired hands jerking back and forth, the
surface of the table chewed up, splinters of wood
flying everywhere. Fitzpatrick felt the repeated stabs
of intense pain in his arm as the automatic was
blown out of his grip. He looked down and saw the
blood drenching the fabric of his right sleeve.
Though in shock he glanced about him. Ilse
Fishbein was dead, her bleeding skull shattered by
a fusillade of bullets; the chauffeur was smiling
obscenely. The door was closed as if nothing had
happened.
"Stumper," Leifhelm said as one of the invaders
cut the ropes around his wrists. "I used that term
only yesterday, Commander, but I did not know
how right I was. Did you think a single telephone
call could not be traced to a single room? It was all
too coincidentally symmetrical. Converse is ours and
suddenly this poor whore comes into immense
riches American riches. I grant you it was entirely
possible such bequests are made frequently by
sausage-soaked idiots who don't realize the harm
they do, but the timing was too perfect,
too amateurish."
"You're one son of a bitch." Connal shut his
eyes, trying to force the pain out of his mind,
unable to move his fingers
"Why, Commander," said the general, getting
out of the chair, "do I sense the bravado of fear?
Do you think I'm going to have you killed?"
"You sense it. I won't give you any more than that."
"You're quite wrong. Considering the nature of
your military leave, you can be of minor but unique
service to us. One more statistic to disrupt a
pattern. You'll be our guest, Commander, but not
in Germany proper. You are gomg on a trip."
17
Converse slowly opened his eyes, a dead, iron
weight on his lids and nausea in his throat blurred
darkness everywhere and a terrible stinging at his
side, on his arm, flesh separated from flesh, stretched
and inflamed. Blindly he tried to touch the offending
spot, then gasping, pulled back in pain. Somewhere
light was creeping around the dark space above him,
picking its way through moving obstructions, peering
into the shadows. Objects slowly came into focus the
metal rim of the cot next to his face, two wooden
chairs opposite each other at a small table in the
distance, a door also in the distance, but farther away
and shut . . . then another door, this one open, a
white sink with a pair of dull-metal faucets on the left
in a far-away cubicle. The light? It was still moving,
now dancing, flickering. Where was it?
He found it: high in the wall on either side of the
closed door were two rectangular windows, the short
curtains billowing in the breeze. The windows were
open, but oddly not open, not clear, the spaces
interrupted. Joel raised his head, supporting himself
on his forearm and squinted, trying to see more
clearly. He focused on the interruptions behind the
swelling curtains thin black metal shafts vertically
connecting the window frames. They were bars. He
was in a cell.
He fell back on the cot, swallowing repeatedly to
lessen the burning in his throat, and moved his arm in
circles trying to lessen the pain of the . . . wound?
Yes, a wound, a gunshot! The realization jarred his
memory; a dinner party had turned into a
battleground filled with hysteria. Blinding lights and
sudden jolts of pain had been accompanied by strident
voices bombarding him, incessant echoes pounding in
his ears as he tried desperately to repel the piercing
assaults. Then there had been moments of calm, the
drone of a single voice in the mists. Converse closed
his eyes, pressing his lids tightly together with all his
strength as another realization struck him
3
312 ROBERT LUDLUM
and disturbed him deeply. That voice in the swirling
mists was his voice; he had been drugged, an
d he
knew he had given up secrets.
He had been drugged before, a number of times
in the North Vietnamese camps, and as always there
was the sickening feeling of numbed outrage. His
mind had been stripped and violated, his voice made
to perform obscenities against the last vestiges of his
will.
And, again as always, there was the empty hole
in his stomach, a vacuum that ran deep and
produced only weakness. He felt starved and
probably was. The chemicals usually induced
vomiting as the intestines rejected the unnatural
substance. It was strange, he reflected, opening his
eyes and following the moving shafts of light, but
those memories from years ago evoked the same
self-protective instincts that had helped him
then so many years ago. He could not waste en-
ergy; he had to conserve what strength he had.
Regain new strength. Otherwise there was nothing
but the numbed outrage and neither his mind nor
his body could do anything about it.
There was a sound across the room! Then
another and another after that! The grating sound
of sliding metal told him that a bolt was being
released; the sharp sound of a key followed by the
twisting of a knob meant that the door in the far
distant wall was about to be opened. It was, and a
blinding burst of sunlight filled the cell. Converse
shielded his eyes peering between his fingers. The
blurred, frazzled silhouette of a man stood in the
doorframe carrying a flat object. The figure walked
in and Joel, blinking, saw it was the chauffeur who
had electronically searched him in the driveway.
The uniformed driver crossed to the.table and
deftly lowered the flat object; it was a tray, its
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