Robert Ludlum - Aquatain Progression.txt

by The Aquitaine Progression [lit]

  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,