666 ROBERT LUDLUM
codes without his primary set, but in truth a
pre-coded combination of two sequences doubled
will do it."
'That's ingenious,' said Converse. Do the others
know?"
'Only my trusted French comrade," answered
the German coldly. "The prince of traitors,
Bertholdier. But, naturally, I never gave him the
accurate combination, and an inaccurate insertion
would erase everything."
"That was a winner thinking." Joel nodded
approvingly, then frowned with concern. "What
would happen, though, if your center was
assaulted?"
"Like Hitler's plans for the bunker, it would go
up in flames. There are explosives everywhere."
"I see."
"But since you speak of winners, and in my
judgment such men are prophets," continued
Leifhelm, leaning forward in the chair, his eyes
widening with enthusiasm, "let me tell you about the
isle of Scharhorn. Years ago, in 1945, out of the
ashes of defeat, it was to be the site of the most
incredible creation designed by true believers the
world has ever known, only to be aborted by
cowards and traitors. It was called Operation
Sonnenkinder the children of the sun infants
biologically selected and sent out all over the world
to people waiting for them, prepared to guide them
through their lives to positions of power and wealth.
As adults, the Sonnenkinder were to have but one
mission across the globe. The rising of the Fourth
Reich! You see now the symbolic choice of
Scharhorn? From this inner complex of Aquitaine
will come forth the new order! We will have done it!"
' Stow it," said Converse, getting out of the chair
and walking away from Erich Leifhelm. The
examination s finished."
'What?"
'You heard me, get out of here. You make me
sick. 'The door opened, and the young doctor from
Bonn came in, his eyes on the once celebrated field
marshal. Strip him,' ordered Converse. "Search him.
Joel entered the dimly lit room where Valerie
and the Surete s Prudhomme flanked a man behind
a video camera mounted on a tripod. The thick lens
of the camera was inserted in the wall and ten feet
away was a television monitor,
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 667
which showed only the deserted study, with the
brocaded wing chair in the center of the screen.
"Everything go all right?" he asked.
"Beautifully," said Valerie. "The operator didn't
understand a word, but he claimed the lighting was
exquisite. Au bel nature!, he called it. He can make
as many copies as you like; they'll take about
thirty-five minutes each."
"Ten and the original print will be enough," said
Converse, looking at his watch, then at Prudhomme
as Val spoke quietly in French to the cameraman.
"You can take the first copy and skill make the five
o'clock flight to Washington."
"With the greatest of enthusiasm, my friend. I
assume one of these prints will be for Paris."
"And every other head of government along with
our affidavits. You'll bring back copies of the
depositions Simon took in New York?"
"I'll go make arrangements," said Prudhomme. "It
is best my name does not appear on the passenger
manifest." He turned and left the room, followed by
the cameraman, who headed for his duplicating
equipment down the hall.
Valerie went to Joel, and taking his face in both
her hands, she kissed him lightly on the lips. "For a
few minutes in their you had me in knots. I didn't
think you were going to make it."
"Neither did 1."
"But you did. That was some display, mister. I'm
so very proud of you, my darling."
' A lot of lawyerstll cringe. It was the worst sort
of entrapment. As an old, bewildering, but very
bright law professor of mine would have put it, they
were admissions elicited on the basis of false
statements, those same admissions forming the basis
of further entrapment."
"Stow it, Converse. Let's go for a walk. We used
to walk a lot, and I'd like to get back in the habit.
It's not much fun alone."
Joel took her in his arms. They kissed, gently at
first, feeling the warmth and the comfort that had
come back to them. He pulled his head away, his
hands sliding to her shoulders, and looked into her
wide, vibrant eyes. "Will you marry me, Mrs.
Converse?" he said.
"Good Lord, again? Well, why not? As you said
once before, I wouldn't even have to change the
initials on my lingerie.
668 ROBERT LUDLUM
"You never had initials on it."
"You found that out long before you made the
remark."
"I didn't want you to think I stared."
"Yes, my darling, I'll marry you. But first we
have things to do. Even before our walk."
"I know. Peter Stone by way of the Tabana family
in Charlotte, North Carolina. He did terrible things
to me, but strange as it seems, I think I like him."
"I don't," said Valerie firmly. "I want to kill him."
40
It was the end of the second day in the
countdown of three. The worldwide demonstrations
against nuclear war were only ten hours away, to
start at the first light halfway across the world. The
killings would begin, setting the chaos in mobon.
The group of eighteen men and five women sat
scattered about in the dark projection room in the
underground strategy complex of the White House.
Each had a small writing tray attached to his seat
with a yellow pad lighted by a Tensor lamp. On the
screen was flashed in thirty-second intervals one face
after another, each with a number in the upper
right-hand corner. The instructions had been terse, in
the language best understood by these people, and
delivered by Peter Stone who had selected them.
Study the faces, make no audible comments, and mark
down by number any you recognise, bearing in mind
terminal operations. At the end of the series the lights
will be turned on and we'll talk. And, if need be, run
the series again and again until we come up with
something Remember, we believe these men are killers.
Concentrate on that.
They were told nothing else. Except M.1.6's
Derek Belamy, who had arrived within a half-hour of
the extraordinary session, looking haggard from his
obviously exhausting journey. When Derek walked
through the door, Peter had pulled him aside and
each gripped the other's arms. Stone was never so
happy or so relieved in his life to see any man.
Whatever
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 669
he might have missed, or could miss, Belamy would
find it. The British agent had a tenth sense above
anyone else's sixth, including Peter's, which, of
course, was denied modestly by Derek.
"I need you, old friend,' said Peter. "I need you
badly."
"It's why I'm here, old friend," replied Belamy
warmly. Can you tell me anything?"
"There's no time now, but I can give you a name.
Delavane.
"Mad Marcus?"
"The same. It's his crisis and it's real."
"The bastard!" whispered the Englishman.
"There's no one I'd rather see at the end of a
barbed-wire rope. Talk to you later, Peter. You've
got your socialising do. Incidentally, from what I can
see, you've got the best here tonight."
"The best, Derek. We can't afford any less."
Beyond the American military personnel who had
initially approached Stone, as well as Colonel Alan
Metcalf, Nathan Simon, Justice Andrew Wellfleet
and the Secretary of State, the remaining audience
was composed of the most experienced and secure
intelligence officers Peter Stone had known in a
lifetime of clandestine operations. They had been
flown over by military transport from France, Creat
Britain, West Germany, Israel, Spain and the
Netherlands. Among them were, besides the
extraordinary Derek Belamy, Frangois Villard, chief
of France's highly secretive Organisation Etrangere;
Yosef Behrens, the Mossad's leading authority on
terrorism; Pablo Amandarez, Madrid's specialist in
KCB Mediterranean penetrations, and Hans
Vonmeer of the Netherlands' secret state police. The
others, including the women, were equally respected
in the caverns of deep-cover, beyond-salvage
operations. They knew by name, face or reputahon
the legions of killers for hire, killers by order, and
killers by reason of ideology. Above all, each was
trusted, each a man or woman Stone had worked
withi collectively they were the elite of the shadow
world.
A face! He knew the face! It stayed on the screen
and he wrote on his pad: "Dobbins. Number 57.
Cecil or Cyril Dobbins. British Army. Transferred to
British Intelligence. Personal aide to . . . Derek
Belamy!"
Stone looked over at his friend across the aisle,
fully expecting him to be writing on his yellow pad.
Instead, the Englishman frowned and sat motionless
in his chair, his pencil
670 ROBERT LUDLUIU
poised above the paper. The next face appeared on
the screen. And the next, and the next, until the
series was over. The lights came on, and the first
person to speak was the Mossad's Yosef Behrens.
"Number seventeen is an artillery officer in the IDF
recently transferred to the Security Branch, Jeru-
salem. His name is Arnold."
"Number thirty-eight," said Francois Villard, ' is
a colonel in the French Army attached to the guard
of Invalides. It is the face; the name I do not
recall."
'Number twenty-six," said the man from Bonn,
"is Oberleutnant Ernst Muller of the Federal
Republic's Luftwaffe. He is a highly skilled pilot
frequently assigned to fly ministers of state to
conferences both within and without West
Cermany."
"Number forty-four," said a dark-skinned woman
with a pronounced Hispanic accent, "has no such
credentials as your candidates. He is a drug dealer,
suspected of many killings and operates out of Iviza.
He was once a paratrooper. Name Orejo."
"Son of a gun, I just don't believe it!" said the
young lieutenant William Landis, the computer
expert from the Pentagon. "I know number fifty-one,
I'm almost positive! He's one of the adjutants in
Middle East procurements. I've seen him a lot but
I don't know his name."
Six other men and two women volunteered
twelve additional identities and positions as
everyone in the room silently looked for an
emerging pattern. There was a preponderance of
military personnel, and the umbrella of the rest was
puzzling. In the main they were ex-combat soldiers
from high-casualty outfits who had drifted into
crime largely violent crime, the sort of men Peter
Stone knew the generals of Aquitaine considered
human garbage.
Finally Derek Belamy spoke in his hard, clipped
distant voice. "There are four or five faces I
associate with dossiers but I'm not making
connections." He looked over at Stone. 'You'll run
them again, won't you, old boy?"
"Of course, Derek," replied the former station
chief in London. Stone, who had said nothing, rose
from his chair and addressed the gathering.
"Everything you've given us will be fed immediately
into computers, and we'll see if we come up with
any correlations. And to repeat what I said
previously, I want to thank you all and apologise
again for not giving you the explanations you
deserve, not only for your help but for the trouble
we've caused you. Speaking personally, my conso
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 671
ration is that you've all been here before and I know
you understand. We'll break for fifteen minutes and
start again. There are coffee and sandwiches in the
next room.' Stone nodded his thanks once more and
started for the door. Derek Belamy intercepted him
in the aisle.
"Peter, I'm dreadfully sorry it took me so long to
get back to you. Truth is, the office had a devil of a
time tracking me down. I was visiting friends in
Scotland."
"I thought you might be in Northern Ireland. It's
a hell of a mess, isn't it?"
"You were always better than you thought you
were. I was in Belfast, of course. But right now I
promise to do better I'm sure I will but the fact
is I'm bushed, it was a perfectly terrible trip and, of
course, no sleep whatsoever. All those faces began to
look alike I either knew them all or I didn't know
a damned one!"
"Running them again will help," said Stone.
"Quite so," agreed Belamy. "And Peter, whatever
this tangle is with that maniac, Delavane, I couldn't
have been more delighted to see you in the control
chair. We were all told you were out, rather firmly
out."
"I'm back in. Very firmly."
"I can see that, chap. That is your Secretary of
State in the back row, isn't it?"
"Yes, it is."
"Congratulations, old boy. Well, off for coffee,
black and hot. See you in a few minutes."
"Across the aisle, old friend."
Stone walked out the door and turned right in
the white corridor. He could feel the rapid
acceleration of his heartbeat it was a cousin to
Johnny Reb's claims of a churning stomach and an
acid taste in his mouth bile, the Rebel called it. He
had to get to a telephone quickly. Converse's courier,
the Surete's Prudhomme, would be arriving within
the hour; a Secret Service escort was waiting for
him
at Dulles Airport with instructions to bring him
directly to the White House. But it was not the
Frenchman who concerned Stone now, it was Con-
verse himself. He had to reach him before the
session began again. He had to!
When the lawyer had contacted him through the
Tatiana relay, Peter had been astonished by the
sheer audacity of what Converse had done.
Kidnapping the three generals video-taping the
interrogations or the "oral examina
672 ROBERT IUDLUM
lions" or whatever the legal terminology was, it was
insanel The only thing more insane was the fact that
he had carried it off thanks obviously to the
resources of a very determined, very angry man from
the Surete. The computer was in Scharhorn, the
master list of Aquitaine buried somewhere in its in-
tricate mechanism, only to be erased by inaccurate
codes, the complex itself mined with explosives.
Jesus!
And now the final insanity. The man no one
could find, the source so deeply shrouded they
frequently doubted his existence despite the fact that
all logic insisted he was there. There had to be
Aquitaine's man in England, for there could be no
Aquitaine without the British. Further, Stone knew
he was the conduit, the primary communicator
between Palo Alto and the generals overseas, for
constant screenings of Delavane's telephone charges
showed repeated calls to a number in the Hebrides,
and such a relay device was all too familiar to the
former intelligence agent. The calls disappeared at
Robert Ludlum - Aquatain Progression.txt Page 104
