agony of knowing that the woman he had given his
life to had most heinously violated God's Talmud.
The shame of it, the shame! Oh, Chaim, our
brother, father, son and leader, we weep with you.
For you! Tell us what to do and we will do it. You
are our king! King of Eretz Yisrael, of Judea and
Samaria, and all the lands you seek for our
protection! Show us the way and we shall follow, O
King!
"She's done more for him in death than she
could ever have done alive," said a man on the
outskirts of the crowd and not part of it.
"What do you think really happened?" asked the
man's companion.
"An accident. Or worse, far worse. She came to
our temple frequently, and I can tell you this. She
never would have considered hitabdut . . . We must
watch him carefully before these fools and
thousands like them crown him emperor of the
Mediterranean and he marches us to oblivion."
An Army staff car, two flags of blue and white
on either side of the hood, made its way up the
street to the curb in front of the synagogue.
Abrahms, wearing his bereavement like a heavy
mantle of sorrow only his extraordinary strength
could endure, kept bowing his lowered head to the
crowds,
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 635
his eyes opening and closing, his hands reaching out
to touch and be touched. At his side a young soldier
said, "Your car, General."
"Thank you, my son," said the legend of Israel as
he climbed inside and sank back in the seat, his eyes
shut in anguish while weeping faces pressed against
the windows. The door closed, and when he spoke,
his eyes still closed, there was anything but anguish
in his harsh voice. "Get me out of beret Take me to
my house in the country. We'll all have whisky and
forget this crap. Holy rabbinical bastards! They had
the temerity to lecture me! The next war, 1-11 call up
the rabbis and put those Talmudic chicken-chits in
the front lines! Let them lecture while the shrapnel
flies up their asses!"
No one spoke as the car gathered speed and left
the crowds behind. Moments later Chaim opened his
eyes and pulled his thick back from the seat; he
stretched his barrel-chested frame and reclined again
in a more comfortable position. Then slowly, as if
aware of the stares of the two soldiers beside him, he
looked at both men, his head whipping back and
forth.
"Who are you?" he shouted. "You're not my men,
not my aides!"
"They'll wake up in an hour or so," said the man
in the front seat beside the driver. He turned to face
Abrahms. "Good afternoon, General."
"You!"
"Yes, it is 1, Chaim. Your goons couldn't stop me
from testifying before the Lebanon tribunal, and
nothing on earth could stop me from what I'm doing
today. I told you about the slaughter of women and
children and quivering old men as they pleaded for
their lives and watched you laugh. You call yourself
a Jew? You can't begin to understand. You're just a
man filled with hate, and I don t care for you to
claim to be any part of what I am or what I believe.
You're shit, Abrahms. But you'll be brought back to
Tel Aviv in several days."
One by one the planes landed, the
propeller-driven aircraft from Bonn and Paris having
flown at low altitudes, the jet from Israel, a
Dassault-Breguet Mystere 10/ 100, dropping swiftly
from twenty-eight thousand feet to the private
airfield at Saint-Gervais. And as each taxied to a
stop at the end of the runway, there was the same
dark-blue sedan waiting to drive the "guest" and his
escort to an Alpine chateau fifteen
636 ROBERT LUDLUM
miles east in the mountains. It had been rented for
two weeks from a real estate firm in Chamonix.
The arrivals had been scheduled carefully, as
none of the three visitors was to know that the
others were there. The planes from Bonn and Paris
landed at 4:30 and 5:45, respectively, the jet from
the Mediterranean nearly three hours later at 8:27.
And to each stunned guest Joel Converse said the
identical words: "As I was offered hospitality in
Bonn, I offer you mine here. Your accommodations
will be better than I was given, although I doubt the
food will be as good. However, I know one
thing your departure will be far less dramatic than
mine."
But not your stay' thought Converse, as he spoke
to each man. Not your stay. It was part of the plan.
38
The first light floated up into the dark sky above
the trees in Central Park. Nathan Simon sat in his
study and watched the new day's arrival from the
large, soft leather chair facing the huge window. It
was his thinking seat, as he called it. Recently he
had used it as much for dozing as for thought. But
there were no brief interludes of sleep tonight this
morning. His mind was on fire; he had to explore
and reexplore the options, stretching the limits of
his perception of the dangers within each. To
choose the wrong one would send out alarms that
would force the generals to act immediately, and
once under way, events would race swiftly out of
control; the control of events would be solely in the
hands of the generals everywhere. Of course, they
might decide within hours to begin the onslaught,
but Nathan did not think so they were not fools.
All chaos had its visual beginnings, the initial
turbulence that would give credibility to subsequent
violence. If nothing else, confusion had to be
established as the players moved into place without
being seen. And the concept of military control over
governments was a timeworn idea since the age of
the Pharaohs. It bore early fruit in the
Peloponnesus and Sparta's conquest of Athens, later
with the
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 637
Caesars, and, later still, was exercised by the
emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, then by the
Renaissance princes, and finally brought to its
apotheosis by the Soviets and the Germans in the
twentieth century. Unrest preceded violence, and
violence preceded takeover, whether it was a
revolution sparked by hundreds of thousands of
oppressed Russians or the strangling inequities of a
Versailles treaty.
Therein lay the weakness of the generals'
strategy: the unrest had to exist before the violence
erupted. It required mobs of malcontented
people ordinary people who could be worked into
a frenzy, but for that to happen the mobs had to be
there in the first place. The people's discontent
would be the sign, the prelude, as it were, but where,
when? And what could he do, what moves could he
make that would es
cape the attention of Delavane's
informers? He was the employer and friend of Joel
Converse, the "psychopathic assassin" the generals
had created. He had to presume he was being
watched at the very least any overt action he took
would be scrutinised, and if he became suspect he
would be thwarted. His life was immaterial. In a
sense he was trapped, as he and others like him had
been trapped on the beaches of Anzio. They had
realised that there was a degree of safety in the
foxholes behind the dunes, that to emerge from them
was to face unending mortar fire. Yet they had
known, too that nothing would be accomplished if
they remained where they were.
Contrary to what he had told Peter Stone,
Nathan knew precisely whom he had to see not one
man, but three. The President, the Speaker of the
House, and the Attorney General. The apex of the
executive branch, the leader of the legislative, and
the nahon's chief law-enforcement officer. He would
see no one of lesser stature, and it was far more
advantageous to see them all together rather than
individually. He had to see them, whether separately
or as a group, and there was his dilemma; it was the
trap. One did not simply pick up a telephone and
make appointments with such men. There were
procedures, formalities, and screening processes to
ensure the validity of the requests; men with their
responsibilities could not waste time. The trap. The
minute his name was mentioned, the word would go
out. Delavane himself would know within a matter of
hours, if not minutes.
Despite Joel's gratuitous and highly dubious
statements to Peter Stone, it was not easy to reach
powerful government
638 ROBERT LUDIUM
figures any more than it was logical to have a judge
issue a court order under seal that somehow
miraculously, legally, guaranteed extraordinary
protection for those same people without informing
the entire security apparatus as to why the
protection was deemed vital. Ridiculous! Such court
orders were reasonable where intimidated witnesses
were concerned before a criminal trial and even
afterward in terms of fabricated rehabilitation, but
that process hardly applied to the White House, the
Congress, or the Justice Department. Joel had taken
a legal maneuver, ballooned it way out of prob-
ability, and scaled it up into orbit for a reason, of
course. Stone and his colleagues had provided
depositions.
And yet, thought Simon, there was an odd logic
in Converse's misapplied exaggerations. Not in any
way Joel had considered but as a means to reach
these men. "A court, a single judge . . ." Converse
had said to Stone. That was the logic, the rest was
nonsense. The so preme Court, a justice of that
court. Not a request from one Nathan Simon who
would have to be screened, if only in terms of
content, not character, but an urgent message to the
President from a venerated justice of the Supreme
Court! No one would dare question such a man if
he pronounced his business to be between the
President and himself. Presidents were far more
solicitous of the Court than of Congress, and with
good reason. The latter was a political battleground,
the former an arena of moral judgment. Nathan
Simon knew the man he could call and see, a justice
in his late seventies. The Court was not in session;
October was a month away. The justice was
somewhere in New England; his private number was
at the office.
Nathan blinked, then brought his hand up to
shield his eyes. For a brief moment the fireball of
the early sun had careened a blinding ray through a
geometric maze of glass and steel across the park
and entered his window before being blocked by a
distant building. And suddenly, at that instant of
blindness, he was given the answer to the terrifying
quesbon of where and when the unrest that had to
be the prelude for the eruption of violence. There
was scheduled throughout Free Europe, Great
Britain, Canada, and the United States an
internationally coordinated week-long series of
antinuclear protests. Millions of concerned people
joining hands and snarling traffic in the streets of
the major cibes and capitals, making their voices
heard at the expense of normalcy. Rallies to be held
in the parks and in the squares and in
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 639
rout government buildings. Politicians and statesmen,
pereiving as always the power of ground swells, had
promised o address huge crowds everywhere in
Paris and Bonn, tome and Madrid, Brussels and
London, Toronto, Ottawa, lew York, and
Washington. And again, as always, both the incere
advocates and the posturing sycophants of the bodies
olitic would blame the lack of arms-control progress
on the ntransigence of evil adversaries, not on their
own deficien~ies. The genuine and the phony would
walk hand in hand cross the many podiums, none
sure of the other's stripes.
Crowds everywhere would espouse deeply felt,
deeply divisive issues: the believers of universal
restraint would be gifted against those who intensely
believe in the effectiveness -Jf raw power, and the
latter would surely be heard. No one thought the
massive demonstrations would be without incidents,
yet how far might these minor confrontations
escalate if the incidents themselves were massive?
Units of terrorist fanatics financed anonymously,
convinced of their mission to infiltrate and savagely
disrupt so as to get their messages across, messages
of real and or imagined grievances that had nothing
to do with the protests, creating chaos primarily be-
cause the crowds were not of their world or their
fevers. Crowds- everywhere. These were the hordes
of people who could be galvanised by sudden
violence and worked into a state of madness. It
would be the prelude. Everywhere.
The demonstrations were scheduled to begin in
three days.
Peter Stone walked down the wide dirt path
toward the lake behind the A-frame house
somewhere in lower New Hampshire he did not
know precisely where, only that it was twenty minutes
from the airport. It was close to dusk, the end of a
day filled with surprises, and apparently more were
to come. Ten hours ago, in his room at the
Algonquin, he had called Swissair to see if the flight
from Geneva was on schedule; he had been told it
was thirty-four minutes ahead of schedule and,
barring landing delays, was expected a half-hour
early. It was the first surprise and an inconsequential
one. The second was not. He had arrived at Kennedy
shortly before two o'clock, and within a few mi
nutes
he heard the page over the public address system for
a 'Mr. Lackland," the name he had given Nathan
Simon.
"Take Pilgrim Airlines to Manchester, New
Hampshire,'
640 ROBERT LUDIUM
the lawyer had said. "There's a reservation for Mr.
Lacklanc on the three-fifteen plane. Can you make
it?"
"Easily. The flight from Geneva's early. I assume
that's La Guardi a? "
"Yes. You'll be met in Manchester by a man
with red hair. I've described you to him. See you
around five-thirty."
Manchester, New Hampshire? Stone had been
so sure Simon would ask him to fly to Washington
that he had not even bothered to put a toothbrush
in his pocket.
Surprise number three was the courier from
Geneva. A prim, gaunt Englishwoman with a face of
pale granite and the most uncommunicative pair of
eyes he had seen outside of Dzerzhinsky Square. As
arranged, she had met him in front of the Swissair
lounge, a copy of the Economist in her left hand.
After studying the wrong side of his out-of-date
government identification, she had given him the
attache case and made the following statement in
high dudgeon. "I don't like New York, I never have.
I don't like flying either, but everyone's been so
lovely and it's better to get the whole whack-a-doo
over all at once, righto? They've arranged for me to
take the next plane back to Geneva. I miss my
mountains. They need me and I do try to give them
my very all, righto?"
With that abstruse bit of information she had
smiled wanly and started back somewhat uncertainly
toward the escalator. It was then that Stone had
begun to understand. The woman's eyes did not
reveal her condition but the whole person did. She
was drunk or, perhaps, "pickled" having over-
come her fear of flying with liquid courage.
Converse had made a strange choice of a courier,
Robert Ludlum - Aquatain Progression.txt Page 99
