'I'm really sorry, I don7t have time."
Michael pressed himself away from the bar and started for the door. He did
not see a man at the far end of the room get off his stool and walk to the
telephone.
Fourforks Pike became a slowly curving, interminable backeountry road less
than a mile west of the old railroad depot. The first post-office box was
marked 5; prominently anchored In the ground on his right, it was clearly
visible through the snow in the glare of the headlights. The next, however,
Havelock would have missed had he not suddenly become aware of a break in
the foliage; it was a narrow dirt
THE PARSIFAL MOSAIC349
road on his left, and the box could not be seen from the pike. It was number
7, negating the rule that said odd and even numbers meant different sides in
a delivery route. He would have to drive more slowly and keep his eyes more
alert.
The next three boxes were all within a half mile, each in sequence, the
last number 10. Two hundred yards beyond, the road split-the first of
presumably four forks on the pike. He took the straighter line, the fork on
the right. Number 11 did not appear until he had driven nearly a mile and
a half; when he saw it he briefly closed his eyes in relief. For several
agonizing moments he had been convinced he had taken the wrong road. He
pressed his foot on the accelerator, his mouth dry, the muscles of his face
rigid, his eyes straining.
If the road was interminable-made worse by the spiraling snow against the
windshield-the wait for the final sighting was torturously so. He entered
a long, seemingly endless stretch of flat, straight ground, which, as near
as he could determine, was bordered by fields or pastures; but there were
no houses, no lights anywhere. Had he passed it? Was his vision so
distorted by the silent pounding of the snow that the post-office box had
gone by without his spotting it? Was there an unseen road on his right or
his left, a metal receptacle off the shoulder, covered perhaps? It was not
logical; the snow was heavier, but not yet heavy, and the wind was too
strong for the snow to settle.
It was therel On the right. A large black mailbox, shaped like a miniature
Quonset hut, the covered opening wide enough to receive small packages. The
number 12 was stenciled in white-thick white enamel that threw back the
light as though challenged in the darkness. Havelock slowed down and peered
through the window; again there were no lights beyo:~ no signs of life
whatsoever. There was only what appear to be a long road that disappeared
into a wall of trees and further darkness.
He drove on, eyes straining, looking for something else, something he could
not miss if and when he came across it. He only hoped it would be soon, and
several hundred yards beyond box number 12, be found a reasonable
facsimile. Not ideal but, with the snow, acceptable. It was a bank of wild
foliage that had crept toward the edge of the road, the end of a property
line, or a demarcation signifying no responsibility. Whatever it was, it
would do.
350 ROBERT LuDLum
He drove the car off the shoulder and into the cluster of bushes and high
grass. He extinguished the headlights and opened his suitcase in the front
seat. He removed all identification and shoved it into the elasticized rear
pocket, then took out a heavy leaded plastic bag impervious to X-rays, the
kind often used for transporting exposed film. He peeled it open and
removed the Llama automatic; the magazine was full. Last, he reached into
the suitcase for the scaling knife he had used at Col des Moulinets; it was
sheathed in a thin leather scabbard with a clip. Awkwardly be pulled up the
sides of his topcoat and shoved it behind his trousers into the small of
his hack, clipping it. to his belt at the base of his spine. He hoped
neither weapon would be called for; words were hifinitely preferable,
frequently more effective.
He got out of the car, locked it, pushed the snow-swept fohage up around
the sides, obliterated the tracks, and started down the Fourforks Pike
toward P.O. Box 12, RFD 3, Mason Falls, Pennsylvania.
He had walked no more than thirty feet off the highway into the long,
narrow road that seemed to disappear into a wall of darkness beyond when he
stopped. Whether it was the years he had spent instinctively studying alien
groundaware that an unknown path at night might hold lethal surprises-or
the wind off the fields that caused him to angle his head downward against
it, he could not tell. He was merely grateful that he saw it: a tiny
greenish dot of light on his right about two feet above the snow-patched
earth. It appeared to be suspended, but he knew it wasn't. Instead, it was
wired to the end of a thin black metal tube that was sunk at least another
two feet into the ground for stability. It was a photoelectric cell, its
counterpart across the road, an invisible beam of light crossing the
darkness, connecting both terminals. Anything breaking that beam for more
than a second or with a weight density of more than fifty pounds would
trigger an alarm somewhere. Small animals could not do it, automobiles and
human beings could not fail to do it.
Michael sidestepped cautiously to his right through the cold, wet
overgrowth to pass beyond the device. He stopped again at the edge of the
tangled bushes, aware of a line of flickering white parallel with his
shoulders, knowing suddenly that there was another obstacle. It was a
barbed-wire fence bordering an adjacent field, flakes of snow clinging
THE PARsnrAL MosAxc351
briefly to the barbs before being whipped away. He had not seen it entering
the side road marked by post-office box number 12; he looked back and
understood. The fence did not begin until the foliage was high enough to
conceal it. And that meant he understood something else; again, weight den-
sity. Sufficient pressure against the thinly spaced wires would et off
further alarms. Janos Kohoutek was very security-concious. ConsideFing his
location, he had paid for the best he could get.
This, then, was the path, thought Havelock. Between the green trip light
and the shoulder-high barbed-wire fence. For if there was one photoelectric
alarm, there were others along the way because the expectation of
malfunction was an innate part of protection technology. He wondered how
long "the way" was; he could see virtually nothing but foliage and darkness
and swirling snow in front of him. He started to literally push ahead,
bending the tangled brush and webbed branches with his hands and arms, as
he kept his eyes riveted on the ground for dots of.eerfe green light.
He passed three, then four, each spaced roughly two hundred and fifty to
three hundred feet apart. He reached the wall of tall trees, the fence
growing higher as if commanded by nature. He was soaked now, his face cold,
his brows iced, but movement was easier through the thicktrunked trees that
seemingly had been planted at random but nevertheless formed a visual wall.
Suddenly he realized he was heading downwar
d, descending. He looked over at
the road; the decline there was sharper, the mottled surface of dirt and
snow no longer in sight. There was a break in the trees; the narrow,
sloping path he bad to take was still overgrown, the high grass and untamed
bushes bending in the wind and glazed with white.
And then spread below him was a sight that both hypnotized and disturbed
him, in the same way he had reacted to the first sight of Jacob Handelman.
He plunged down through the thickets of brush, falling twice into the cold,
prickly bushes, his eyes on the bewildering view below.
At first glance it was like any farm buried in the deeper countryside,
protected in the front by sloping fields, endless woods beyond. There was
a group of buildings, solid, simple, constructed of heavy wood for severe
winters, the lights in various windows flickering in the snowfall: a main
house and
352 ROBEnT LuDLum
several barns, a silo, tool sheds and shelters for tractors and plows and
harvesting equipment. They were indeed what they seemed to be, Havelock was
sure, but he knew they were more. Much more.
It began with the gate at the end of the sloping road. It was framed
unpretentiously with iron piping; the mesh was ordinary mesh, but it was
higher than it had to be, higher than it should be for the entrance to a
farm. Not higher to a conspicuous degree, but simply higher than seemed
necessary, as if the builder had made a slight error In the height
specification and had decided to live with the mistake. Then there was the
fence that spanned out from both sides of the unprepossessing gate; it,
too, was strange, somehow askew, also higher than it had to be for the
purpose of containing animals in the ascending grazing fields before it.
Was it just the height? It was no more than seven feet, Michael judged as
he drew closer; it had appeared much shorter from above-again nothing
strange ... but somehow wrong. And then he realized what it was, why the
word "askew" had come to mind. The top of the barbed-wire fence was angled
inward. That fence was not meant to keep animals from breaking in, it was
designed to keep people from breaking outl
Suddenly the blinding beam of a searchlight shot out from the upper regions
of the silo, it was arcing around-toward him.
This was the 1980s, but he was standing in front of a symbol of human
carnage that went back forty years. It was a concentration campl
"We wondered how long it would take you," said a voice behind him.
He spun around, reaching for his weapon. It was too late.
Powerful arms gripped him around the neck, arching him backwards, as a pair
of hands plunged a soft, wet, acridsmelling cloth into his face.
The beam of the searchlight zeroed in on him. He could see it, feel it, as
his nostrils began to bum. Then the darkness came, and he could neither see
nor feel.
21
He felt the warmth first; he found it not particularly pleasant but merely
different from the cold. When he opened his eyes, his vision blurred, coming
into focus slowly, he simultaneously became aware of the nausea in his
throat and the stinging sensation on his face. The pungent odor lingered in
his nostrils; he had been anesthetized with pure ethyl ether.
He saw flames, logs burning behind a black-bordered screen, in a large
brick fireplace. He was on the floor in front of the slate hearth; his
topcoat had been removed, and his wet clothes were heating up
uncomfortably. But part of the discomfort was in the small of his back; the
scaling knife was still in place, the leather scabbard irritating his skin.
He was grateful for the pain.
He rolled over slowly, inch by inch, his eyes half closed, observing what
he could by the light of the fire and several table lamps. He heard the
sound of muffled voices; two men were talking quietly beyond a plain brown
sofa at the other end of the room; they stood together in a hallway. They
had not noticed his movement, but they were his guards. The room itself was
in concert with the rustic structures outsidesolid, functional furniture,
thick plaited rag rugs scattered about over a wide-beamed floor, windows
bordered by redM
354 RoiwnT Lumum
checkered curtains that might have come from a Sears Roebuck catalogue.
It was a simple living room in a country farmhouse, nothIng more or less,
and nothing suggesting it might be something else-or someplace else-to
disturb a visitor's eye. If anything, the room was Spartan, without a
woman~s touch, entirely male.
Michael slid his watch slowly into view. It was one o'clock In the morning,
he had been unconscious for nearly forty-five minutes.
"Hey, he's awakel" cried one of the men.
"Get Mr. Kohoutek," said the other, walking across the room toward
Havelock. He rounded the sofa and reached under his leather jacket to pull
out a gtm. He smiled; the weapon was the Spanish Llama automatic that had
traveled from a mfst-laden pier in Civitavecchia, through the Palatine and
Col des Moulinets, to Mason Falls, Pennsylvania. "This Is good hardware,
Mr. No-Name. I haven't seen one like it in years. Thanks a lot."
Michael was about to answer, but was interrupted by the rapid, heavy-footed
entrance of a man who walked out of the hallway carrying a glass of
steaming liquid in his hand.
"You are very free with odds and ends," thundered Janos Kohoutek. "Be
careful or you'll walk barefoot in the snow."
Nie shodz sniegu bez butow.
Kohoutek's accent was that of the dialect of the Carpathian Mountains south
of Otrokovfce. The words alluding to bare feet in the snow were part of the
Czecb-Moravian admonition to wastrels who did not earn their keep or their
clothes. To understand the cold, walk barefoot in the snow.
Kohoutek came around the guard and was now fully in view. He was a bull of
a man, his open shirt emphasizing the thickness of his neck and chest, the
stretched cloth marking the breadth of his heavy shoulders; age had not
touched his physique. He was not tall, but he was large, and the only in-
dication of his years was in his face-more jowl than facedeeply lined, eyes
deeply set, the flesh wom by well over sixty years of driven living. The
hot, dark brown liquid in the glass was tea-black Carpathian tea. The man
holding it was Czech by birth, Moravian by conviction.
'So here is our invaderl" he roared, staring down at Havelock. "A man with
a gun, but with no identification-not even
THE PARSIFAL MOSAIC355
a driver's licence or credit card, or a billfold to carry such things
in-attacks my farm like a commandol Who is this stalker in the night? What
is his business? His namep"
"Havli6ek," said Michael in a low, sullen voice, pronounoing the name in an
accent close to Moravian. "Mikhail Havlf6ek."
Cesk#?-
"Ano' -
"Obchodni?" shouted Kohoutek, asking Havelock his business.
"Md Lerm," replied Michael, answering. "The woman."
"Co, Lena?" demanded the aging bull.
"The one who was brought here this morning," said Havelock, continuing in
Czech.
"Two were brought in this momingl Which?"
"Blond hair ... when we last saw her."
Kohoutek grinned, but not with amusement. "Chlipn#,- be said, leering.
"Her body doegn7t interest me, the information she has does." Michael
raised himself. "May I get up?"
'VMdnim phpad&" The mountain bull roared again as he rushed forward,
lashing his right foot out, the boot catching Havelock in the throat,
making him reel back on the slate hearth.
"Proklat&" shouted Havelock, grabbing his neck. It was the moment to react
in anger, the beginning of the words that mattered. "I paidl" he yelled in
Czech. "What do you think yoxi~re doingl"
"You paid what? To ask about me on the highway? To sneak up on my house in
the middle of the night? To carry a gun into my farm? I'll pay youl"
"I did what I was toldl"
By whom?-
"Jacob Handelman."
"Handelman?" Kohouteles full, battered face was stretched into an
expression of bewilderment. "You paid Handelman? He sent you?"
"He told me he would phone you, get in touch with you~" said Michael
quickly, using a truth from Paris that the halfway man had denied in New
York, denied for profit. "I waset to call you under any circurnstances.
Lwas to leave
356 RoBERT LUDLUM
my car on the highway past your mailbox and walk down the road to your
farm."
"The highway? You asked questions about me in a caf46 on the highwayl"
"I didn~t know where the Fourforks Pike was. How could I? Did you have a
man there? Did he call you?"
The Czech-Moravian shook his head. `It doesn't matter. An Italian with a
truck. He drives produce for me sometimes." Kohoutek stopped; the menace
returned to his eyes. "But you did not walk down my road. You came in like
a thief, an armed thieff"
"I'm no fool, pHteli. I know what you have here and I looked for trip
alarms. I was with the Podzemi. I found them and so I was cautious; I
wanted no dogs on me or men shooting at me. Why do you think it took me so
long to get here from that caf6 on the highway?"
'-fou paid Handelman?"
"Very handsomely. May I get up?'
"Get upl Sit, sitl" ordered the mountain bull, pointing to a short deacon's
bench to the left of the fireplace, his expression more bewildered than
Robert Ludlum - The Parcifal Mosaic.txt Page 45
