ersatz tortoiseshell rims were thick, the glass clear;
the effect was owlish, scholarly. He was no longer
the man in the newspaper photograph, and equally
important, the concentration he had devoted to his
appearance had begun to clear his mind. He could
think again, sit down somewhere and sort things
out. He also needed food and a drink.
The cafe was crowded, the stained-glass windows
muting the summer sunlight into shafts of blue and
red piercing the smoke. He was shown to a table
against the black-leather upholstered banquette,
assured by the maitre d', or whoever he was, that
an he had to do was request a menu in English; the
items were numbered. Whisky on the Continent,
however was universaDy accepted as Scotch; he
ordered a double, and took out the pad and
bar-point pen he had picked up at the variety store.
His drink came and he proceeded to write.
Connal Fitzpatrick?
BriefcaseP
$93,000 plus
Embassy out
No Larry 7albot et al.
No Beale
No A nstett
No man in San Francisco
Men in Washington. WhoP
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 371
Caleb Dowling? No. Hickman, Navy, San Diego?
Possible.
. . . Mattilon?
Rene! Why hadn't he thought of Mathlonbefore?
He understood why the Frenchman made the
remarks attributed to him anonymously in the
newspaper story. Rene was trying to be protective. If
there was no defence, or if it was so weak so as not
to be viable, the most logical backup was temporary
insanity. Joel circled Mattilon's name and wrote the
number I on the left, circling it also. He would find
a telephone exchange in the streets, the kind where
operators assigned booths to bewildered tourists, and
call Rene in Paris. He took two swallows of whisky,
relaxing as the warmth spread through him, then
went back to his list, stardng at the top.
Connal . . ? The presumption that he had been
killed was inevitable, but it was not conclusive. If he
was alive, he was being held for whatever
information could be pried out of him. As the chief
legal officer of the West Coast's largest and most
powerful naval base, and a man who had a history of
meetings with the State Department's Office of
Munibons Control as well as its counterparts at the
Pentagon, Fitzpatrick could be an asset to the men
of Aquitaine. Yet to call attention to him was to
guarantee his execution, if he had not been killed
already. If he was still alive, the only way to save him
was to find him, but not in any orthodox or official
manner; it had to be done secretly. Connal had to be
rescued secretly.
Suddenly, Joel saw the figure of a man in the
uniform of the United States Army across the room
talking with two civilians at the bar. He did not know
the man. It was the uniform that struck him. It
brought to mind the military charge d'affaires at the
embassy, that extraordinarily observant and precise
officer who was capable of seeing a man who was
not at a bridge at the exact moment he was not
there. A liar for Aquitaine, someone whose lies
identified him. If that liar did not know where
Fitzpatrick was, he could be made to find out.
Perhaps there was a way, after all. Converse drew a
line on the right side of his list, connecting Connal
Fitzpatrick with Admiral Hickman in San Diego. He
did not give it a number; there was too much to
consider.
Briefoase? He was still convinced that Leifhelm's
men had not found it. If the generals of Aquitaine
had that attache
372 ROBERT LUDLUM
case, they would have let him know. It was not like
those men to conceal such a prize, not from the
prisoner who had thought he was a match for them.
No, they would have told him one way or another,
if only to make clear to him how totally he had
failed. If he was right, Connal had hidden it. At the
inn called Das Rektorat? It was worth a try. Joel
circled the word Briefoase and numbered it 2.
"Speisekarte, main Herr?" said a waiter before
Converse knew he was standing there.
"English, please?"
"Certainly, sir." The waiter separated his menus
as though they were an outsized deck of cards. He
selected one and handed it to Joel as he spoke.
"The Spezialitat for today is Wienerschnitzel it is the
same in English."
"That's fine. Keep the menu, I'll take it."
"Danke. " The man swept away before Joel
could order another drink. It was just as well, he
thought.
$93,000 plus. There was nothing more to be
said, the irritating bulge around his waist said it all.
He had the money; it was to be used.
Embassy out . . . No Larry Talbot, et al . . . No
Beale . . . No A nstett . . . No man in San Francisco.
Throughout the meal he thought about each item,
each statement, wondering how it all could have
happened. Every step had been considered carefully,
facts absorbed, dossiers memorized, caution
uppermost. But everything had been blown away by
complications far beyond the simple facts provided
by Preston Halliday in Geneva.
Build just two or thme cases that are tied to Dela-
vane even circumstantially and it'll be enough.
In light of the revelations on Mykonos, then in
Paris, Copenhagen and Bonn, the simplicity of that
remark was almost criminal. Halliday would have
been appalled at the depth and the breadth of
influence Delavane's legions had attained, at the
penetrations they had made at the highest levels of
the military, the police, Interpol and, obviously, now
those who controlled the flow of news from
so-called authoritative sources in Western
governments.
Converse abruptly checked his racing thoughts.
He suddenly realised that he was thinking about
Halliday in the context of a man who saw only a
pair of eyes at night in the jungle, unaware of the
size or the ferocity of the unseen animal in the
darkness. That was wrong. Halliday knew the
materials
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 373
Beale was handing over to him on an island in the
Aegean; he knew about the connections between
Paris, Bonn, Tel Aviv and Johannesburg; he knew
about the decision makers in the State Department
and the Pentagon he knew it all! He had arranged
it all with unknown men in Washington! Halliday had
lied in Geneva. A California wrestler he had
befriended years ago in school named Avery Fowler
was the manipulator, and in the name of A. Preston
Halliday, he had lied.
Where were those subterranean men in
Washington who had the audacity to raise half a
million dollars for an incredible gamb
le but were too
frightened to come out in the open? What kind of
men were they? Their scout had been killed, their
puppet accused of being a psychopathic assassin.
How long could they wait? What were they?
The questions disturbed Converse so much that
he tried not to pursue them they would lead only to
rage, which would blind his reason. He needed
reason and, above all, the strength that came with
awareness.
It was time to find a telephone exchange and
reach Mattilon in Paris. Rene would believe him,
Rene would help him. It was unthinkable that his old
friend would do anything else.
The civilian walked in silence to the hotel
window, knowing he was expected to deliver a
pronouncement that would form the basis of a
miracle not a solution but a miracle, and there were
no such things in the business he knew so well. Peter
Stone was by all the rules a relic, a castaway who had
seen it all, and in the final years of seeing had finally
fallen apart. Alcohol had taken the place of true
audacity, at the end rendering him a professional
mutant, a part of him still proud of past
accomplishments, another part sickened by the waste,
by the knowledge of wasted lives, wasted
strategies morality thrown into a gargantuan
wastebasket of a collective nonconscience.
Still, he had once been one of the best he could
not forget that. And when he knew it was all over, he
had faced the fact that he was killing himself with a
plethora of bourbon and self-pity. He had pulled out.
But not before he had gained the enmity of his past
employers in the Central Intelligence Agency, not for
speaking out publicly but for telling them privately
who and what they were. Fortunately, as sobriety re-
turned he learned that his past employers had other
enemies in Washington, enemies having nothing to
do with foreign en
374 R08ERT LUVIUM
tanglements or competition. Simply men and women
serving the republic who wanted to know what the
hell was going on when Langley wouldn't tell them.
He had survived was surviving. He thought about
these things, knowing that the two other men in the
room believed he was concentrating on the issue at
hand.
There was no issue. The file was closed, the
border rimmed in black. The two who were with
him were so young God, so damned young., they
would find it too terrible to accept. He
remembered, vaguely, when such a conclusion would
have appalled him. But that was nearly forty years
ago; he was almost sixty now, and he had heard
such conclusions repeated too often to shed tears of
regret. The regret the sadness was there but time
and repetition had dulled his senses; clear
evaluation was everything.
Stone turned and said with quiet authority, ' We
can't do anything " The Army captain and the Navy
lieutenant were visibly upset. Peter Stone continued,
' 1 spent twenty-three years in the tunnels, including
a decade with Angleton, and I m telling you there's
absolutely nothing we can do. We have to let him
hang out, we can't touch him."
' Because we can't afford to?" asked the naval
oflicer scathingly. "That's what you said when
Halliday was killed in Geneva. We can't afford tot"
"We can't. We were outmaneuvered."
"That's a man out there," insisted the lieutenant.
"We sent him out "
"And they set him up," the civilian broke in, his
voice calm, his eyes sadly knowledgeable. "He's as
good as dead We'll have to start looking elsewhere."
"Why is that?" asked the Army captain. "Why is
he as good as dead?"
"They have too many controls, we can see that
now. If they don't have him locked up in a cellar,
they know pretty much where he is. Whoever finds
him will kill him. A riddled body of a crazed killer
is delivered up and there's a collective sigh of relief.
That's the scenario."
"And that's the most cold-blooded analysis of a
murder I've ever heard! Murder, an unwarranted
execution!"
"Look, Lieutenant," said Stone, stepping away
from the window, "you asked me to come with
you convinced me I should because you wanted
some experience in this room. With that experience
comes the moment when you recognize
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 375
and accept the fact that you've been beaten. It
doesn't mean you're finished, but you've been
punched out of the round. We've been punched out,
and it's my guess the punches haven't stopped yet."
"Maybe . . ." began the captain haltingly. "Maybe
we should go to the Agency, tell them everything we
know everything we think we know and what
we've done. It might get Converse out alive."
"Sorry," countered the former CIA man. "They
want his head and they'll get it. They wouldn't have
gone to all this trouble if 'dead' wasn't written all
over him. He found out something, or they found out
something about him. That's the way it works."
"What kind of world do you live in? 'asked the
naval officer quietly, shaking his head.
"I don't live in it anymore, Lieutenant, you know
that. I think it's one of the reasons you came to me.
I did what you two and whoever else is with
you are doing now. I blew a whistle only, I did it
with two months of bourbon in my veins and ten
years of disgust in my head. You say you might go to
the Company? Good, go ahead, but you'll do it
without me. No one worth a quarter in Langley will
touch me."
"We can't go to G-Two or naval intelligence,"
said the Army officer. "We know that, we've all
agreed. Delavane's people are there; they'd shoot us
down."
"Aptly put, Captain. Would you believe with real
bullets?"
"I do now," said the Navy man, nodding at Stone.
"The report out of San Diego is that the legal,
Remington, was killed in an automobile accident in
La Jolla. He's the one who last spoke to Fitzpatrick,
and before he left the base, he asked another legal
the directions to a restaurant in the hills. He'd never
been there and I don't think it was an accident."
"Neither do I," agreed the civilian. "But it takes
us to the somewhere-else we can look."
"What do you mean?" said the Army captain.
"Fitzpatrick. SAND PAC can't find him, right?"
"He's on leave," interjected the naval officer.
"He's got another twenty days or so. He wasn't
ordered to list his itinerary."
"Still, they've tried to find him but they can't."
"And I still don't understand," objected the captain.
"We go after Fitzpatrick," said Stone. "Out of San
Diego,
376 ROBERT LUDIUM
not Washington. We find a reason to really want
&n
bsp; him back. A SAND PAC emergency, routed strictly
through Eyes Only a base problem nobody else's."
"I hate to repeat myself," said the Army man,
"but you've lost me. Where do we start? Whom do
we start with?"
"With one of your own, Captain. Right now he's
a very important person. The charge d'affaires at
the Mehlemer House."
"The what?"
"The American embassy in Bonn. He s one of
them. He lied when it counted most," said Stone.
"His name is Washburn. Major Norman Anthony
Washburn, the Fourth."
The telephone complex was off the lobby of an
office building. It was a large square room with five
enclosed booths built into three walls and a high,
squared counter in the center where four operators
sat in front of consoles, each woman obviously
capable of speaking two or more languages. Tele-
phone directories of the major European cities and
their suburbs were on racks to the left and right of
the entrance; small pads with attached ball-point
pens had been placed on the ledges above for the
convenience of those seeking numbers. The routine
was familiar: a caller delivered a written-out number
to an operator, specified the manner of pay-
ment cash, credit card or collect and was
assigned a booth. There were no lines; a half-dozen
booths were empty.
Joel found the number of Mattilon's law firm in
the Paris directory. He wrote it out, brought it to an
operator and said he would pay in cash. He was
told to go to booth number seven and wait for the
ring. He entered it quickly, the soft cloth brim of his
hat falling over his forehead above the tortoiseshell
glasses. Any enclosure, whether a toilet stall or a
Robert Ludlum - Aquatain Progression.txt Page 58
