The Aquaintaine Progession

by Ludlum, Robert

  "It’s ridiculous! What did Joel say?”

  “That he walked out the door, saw two menfighting and ran to tell the doorman on the way tohis taxi.”

  “That’s what he’d have done,” said Val firmly.

  “The doorman at the George Cinq says it didn’thappen. The police say follicles of hair found on thebeaten man matched those in Joel’s shower.”

  “Utterly unbelievable!”

  “Let’s say there was provocation we don’t knowabout,” Talhot went on rapidly. “It doesn’t explainwhat happened later, but before I tell.you, I want toask you another question. You’ll understand.”

  “I don’t understand a single thing! What is its”

  “During those periods of depression, his darkmoods, did Joel ever fantasise? I mean, did heindulge in what psychiatrists call role-playing?”

  “You mean did he assume other personalities,other kinds of behavior?”

  Exactly.”

  "Absolutely not.”

  " Oh.”

  “Oh, what? Let’s have it, Larry.”

  “Talking about what’s believable and what isn t,you’re in for a jolt, my dear. According to thosepeople who don’t want me to say very much andyou’ll have to take my word they know Joel flewinto Germany claiming he was involved in anundercover investigation of the embassy in Bonn.”

  “Perhaps he wasl He was on a leave of absencefrom T. B. and S., wasn’t he?”

  “On an unrelated matter in the private sector,that much we know. There is noinvestigation undercover or otherwise of theembassy in Bonn. Frankly, the people who reachedme were from the State Department.”

  “Oh, my God . . . ” Valerie fell silent, but beforethe lawyer could speak, she whispered, “Geneva. Thathorrible business in Genevat”

  “If there’s a connection and both Nathan and Iconsidered it first it’s so buried it can’t befollowed.”

  “It’s there. It’s where it all started.”

  “Assuming your husband’s rational.”

  “He’s not my husband and he is rational!”

  “The scars, Val. There had to be scars. Youagreed with me.”

  "Not the kind you’re talking about. Not killing,and Iying and running away That’s not Joel! Thatisn’t wasn’t my husband!”

  “The mind is a highly complex and delicateinstrument. The stresses of the past can leap forwardfrom years ago “

  “Get off it, Larry!” shouted Valerie. “Save it fora jury, but don’t pin that nonsense on Converse!”

  “You’re upset.”

  “You’re damned right I am! Because you’relooking for explanations that don’t fit the man! Theyfit what you’ve been told. By those people you sayyou have to respect.”

  “Only in the sense that they’reknowledgeable they have access to information wedon’t have. Then there’s the overriding fact that theyhadn’t the faintest idea who Joel Converse was untilthe American Bar Association gave them the addressand telephone number of Talbot, Brooks and Simon.

  “And you believed them? With everything you know

  about Washington you simply accepted their word?How many fumes did Joel come back from a trip toWashington and say the same thing to me? “Larrysays they’re Iying. They don’t know what to do, sothey’re Iying.’ ”

  "Valerie,” said the attorney sternly. “This isn’t acase of bureaucratic clearance, and after all theseyears I think I can tell the difference betweensomeone playing games and a man who’s genuinelyangry angry and frightened, I should add. The manwho reached me was an Undersecretary of State,Brewster Tolland I had a call-backconfirmation and he wasn’t putting on an act. Hewas appalled, furious, and, as I say, a very worriedman.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “The truth, of course. Not only because it wasthe right thing to do, but it wouldn’t help Joel to doanything else. If he’s ill he needs help, notcomplicity.”

  “And you deal with Washington every week.”

  “Several times a week, and of course it was aconsideration.”

  “I’m sorry, Larry, that was unfair.”

  “But realistic, and I meant what I said. Itwouldn’t help Joel to lie for him. You see, I reallybelieve something’s happened. He’s not himself.”

  “Wait a minute,” cried Valerie, the obviousstriking her. “Maybe it’s not Joel!”

  “It’s him,” said Talbot simply.

  “Why? Just because people you don’t know inWashington say it is?”

  “No, Val,” replied the lawyer. “Because I spokewith Rene in Paris before Washington entered thepicture.”

  “”Maffilon?",

  “Joel went to Paris to ask for Rene’s help. Helied to him just as he lied to me, but it was morethan the lies Mattilon and I agreed on that. It wassomething he saw in Joel’s eyes something I heardin his voice. An unhinging, a form of desperation;Rene saw it and I heard it. He tried to conceal itfrom both of us but he couldn’t. When I last spoketo him, he hung up before we’d finished talking, inthe middle of the sentence, his voice echoing like azombie’s.”

  Valerie stared at the harsh, dancing reflectionsof sunlight off the waters of Cape Ann. “Reneagreed with you?’ she asked, barely above a whisper.

  “Everything I’ve just told you we said to each other.”

  " Larry, I’m frightened.’

  ChaimAbrahms walked into the room, his heavyboots pounding the floor. “So he did it!’ shouted theIsraeli. ”The Mossad was right, he s a hellhound!”

  Erich Leifhelm sat behind his desk, the onlyother person in the book-lined study. “Patrols,alarms, dogs!’ cried the German, slamming his frailhand on the red blotter. “How did he do it?”

  “I repeat a hellhound that’s what our specialistcalled him. The longer he’s restricted, the angrier hegets. It goes back a long time. So our provocateurstarts his odyssey before we planned. Have you been’in touch with the others?”

  “I’ve called London,” said Leifhelm, breathingdeeply. “He’ll reach Paris, and Bertholdier will havethe units flown up from Marseilles, one to Brussels,the other here to Bonn. We can’t waste an hour.”

  “You’re looking for him now, of course.

  “Naturlich! Every inch of the shoreline for milesin both directions. Every back road and path thatleads up from the river and into the city.’

  “He can elude you, he’s proven it.

  “Where can he go, sabre? To his own embassy?There he’s a dead man. To the Bonn police or theStaatspolizei? He ll be put in an armored van andbrought back here. He goes nowhere.”

  “I heard that when he left Paris, and I heard itagain when he flew into Bonn. Errors were made inboth places both costing a great many hours. I tellyou I’m more concerned now than at any moment inthree wars and a lifetime of skirmishes.”

  “Be reasonable, Chaim, and try to be calm. Hehas no clothes but what he wears in the river andthe mud, he possesses no identification, no passport,no money. He doesn’t speak the language “

  “He has money!” yelled Abrahms, suddenlyremembering. “When he was under the needle, hespoke of a large sum of money promised in Genevaand delivered on Mykonos.”

  “And where is it?” asked Leifhelm. “In this desk,that’s where it is. Nearly seventy thousand Americandollars. He hasn’t got a deutsche mark in his pocket,or a watch or a piece of jewelry. A man in filthy,soaked clothing, with no idenhfication, no money, nocoherent use of the language, and telling

  an outlandish tale of imprisonment involving derCeneral LeifLelm, would undoubtedly be put in jailas a vagrant or a psychopath or both. In which case,we shall be informed instantly and our people willbring him to us. And bear in mind, sabre, by teno’clock tomorrow morning it won’t make anydifference. That was your contribution, the Mossad’singenuity. We simply had the resources to make itcome to pass as is said in the Old Testament.”

  Abrahms stood in front of the enormous desk,arms akimbo above the pockets of his safari jacket." So the Jew and the {elect marshal set it all inmotion. Ironical, isn’
t it, Nazi?”

  “Not as much as you think,Jude. Impurity, aswith beauty, is in the eye of the frightened beholder.You are not my enemy; you never were. If more ofus in the old days had your commitment, youraudacity, we never would have lost the war.”

  “I know that,’ said the sabre. ”I watched andlistened when you reached the English Ch-annel.You lost it then. You were weak.”

  “It was not us! It was the frightened Debutanten inBer

  “Then keep them away when we create a trulynew orde,, Cerman. We can’t afford weakness.”

  “You do try me, Chaim.”

  “I mean to.”

  The chauffeur felt the bandages on his face, theswelling around his eyes and his lips painful to thetouch. He was in his own room, where the doctorhad turned on the television probably as an insult,as he could barely see it.

  He was disgraced. The prisoner had escaped inspite of his own formidable talents and thesupposedly impassable pack of Dobermans. TheAmerican had used the silver whistle, that much theother guards had told him, and the fact that it hadbeen removed from his neck was a furtherembarrassment.

  He would not add to his disgrace. With blurredvision he had gone through his pockets which noone in the panic of the chase had thought todo and found that his billfold, his expensive Swisswatch, and all his money had been taken. He wouldsay nothing about them. He was embarrassedenough, and any such revelations might be cause fordismissal or conceivably his death.

  Joel headed for the shoreline as fast as he could,submerging his head underwater whenever the beamof the searchlight swept toward him. The boat was alarge motor launch, its bass-toned engines signifyingpower, its sudden turns and circles evidence of rapidmaneuverability. It hugged the overgrown banks,then would sweep out toward the open water at theslightest sign of an object in the river.

  Converse felt the soft mud below; he half swam,half trudged toward the darkest spot on the shore,the chauffeur’s gun securely in his belt. The boatapproached, its penetrating beam studying everyfoot, every moving branch or limb or cluster of riverweeds. Joel took a deep breath and slowly lows eredhimself under the water, his face angled up towardthe surface, his eyes open, his vision a muddy darkblur. The searchlight grew brighter and seemed tohover above him for an eternity; he inched his wayto the left and the beam moved away. He rose to thesurface, his lungs bursting, but suddenly realized hecould make no sound, he could not fill his chest withgasps of air. For directly above him, less than fivefeet away loomed the broad stern of the motorlaunch, bobbing in the water as if idling. The darkfigure of a man was peering through very largebinoculars at the riverbank.

  Converse was bewildered; it was too dark now tosee anything even with magnification. Then heremembered, and the memory accounted for the sizeof the binoculars. The man was focusing throughinfrared lenses; they had been used by patrols inSoutheast Asia and were often the difference, he hadbeen told, between search-and-destroy andsearch-andbe-destroyed. They revealed objects in thedarkness, soldiers in the darkness.

  The boat moved forward, but the idle increasedonly slightly, entering the slowest of trawling speeds.Again Joel was confused. What had broughtLeifhelm’s searching party to this particular spot onthe riverfront? There were several other boatsbehind and out in the distance, their searchlightssweeping the water, but they kept moving, circling.Why did the huge motor launch concentrate on thisstretch of the shore? Could they have spotted himthrough infrared binoculars? If they had, they wereproceeding very strangely; the North Vietnamese hadbeen far swifter more aggressive, more effective.

  Silently, Converse lowered himself beneath thesurface and breaststroked out beyond the boat.Seconds later he

  raised his head above the water, his vision clear,and he began to understand the odd maneuveringsof LeifLelm’s patrol. Beyond the darkest part of theriverbank into which he had lurched forconcealment were the lights he had seen eight ornine minutes ago, before the launch and itssearchlight monopolized all his attention. He hadthought they were the lights of a small village, buthe was in the wrong part of the world. Instead theywere the inside lights of four or five small houses,a river colony with a common dock, summer homesperhaps of those fortunate enough to ownwaterfront property.

  If there were houses and a dock, there had to bea drive an open passage up to the road or roadsleading into Bonn and the surrounding towns.Leifhelm’s men were combing every inch of theriverbank, cautiously, quietly, the searchlights angleddown so as not to alarm the inhabitants or forewarnthe fugitive if he had reached the cluster of cottagesand was on his way up to the unseen road or roads.A ship’s radio would be activated, its frequencyaligned to those in cars roaming above, ready tospring the trap. In some ways it was the Huong Kheagain for Joel, the obstacles far less primitive but noless lethal. And then as now there was a bme towait, to wait in the black silence and let the huntersmake their moves.

  They made them quickly. The launch slid intothe dock, the powerful twin screws quietly churningin reverse, as a man jumped off the bow with aheavy line and looped it around a piling. Threeothers followed, instantly racing off the short pierup onto the sloping lawn, one heading diagonally tothe right, the other two toward the first house.What they were doing was obvious: one man wouldposition himself in the bordering woods of thedownhill entrance drive while his colleagues checkedthe houses, looking for signs of entry.

  Converse’s arms and legs began to feel likeweights, each an anvil he could barely support,much less keep moving, but there was no choice.The beam of the searchlight kept moving up anddown the base of the riverbank, its spill illuminatingeverything in its vicinity. A head surfacing at thewrong moment would be blown out of the water.Huong Khe. Tread water in the reeds. Do it! Don "tdie!

  He knew the waiting was no longer than thirtyminutes, but it seemed more like thirty hours orthirty days suspended in a floabng torture rack. Hisarms and legs were now in

  agony; sharp pains shot through his bodyeverywhere; muscles formed cramps that hedispersed by holding his breath and Hoating in afetal position, his thumbs pressing relentlessly intothe cores of the knotted muscles. Twice whilegasping for air he swallowed water, coughing it outbelow the surface, his nostrils drowning, and twicefound the air again. There were moments when itcrossed his inner consciousness that it would be sosimple just to drift away. Huang Khe. Don’t do it!Don "t die!

  Finally through waterlogged eyes he saw the menreturning. One, two . . . three? . . . They ran down tothe dock, to the man with the rope. No! The manwith the rope had rushed forward! His eyes wereplaying tricks! Only two men had run onto the dock,the first man joining them, asking questions. The lineman returned to the piling and released the rope;the other two jumped on board. The first man onceagain joined his companions, now on the bow of thelaunch leaving another on shore, a lone observersomewhere unseen between the riverbank and theroad above. Huong Khe. An infantry scout separatedfrom his patrol.

  The motor launch swung away from the dock andsped within a few feet past Joel, who was buffetedunderwater by its wake. Once more the boat veeredtoward the shoreline and slowed down, its searchlightpeering into the dense foliage of the bank, headingwest, back toward LeifLelm’s estate. Converse heldhis head above the surface, his mouth wide open,swallowing all the air he could as he made his wayslowly very slowly into the mud. He pulledhimself up through the wet reeds and branches untilhe felt dry ground. Huong Khe. He pulled theunderbrush over him as best he could, finallycovering his upturned face. He would rest until hefelt the blood flowing steadily if painfully through hislimbs, until the muscles of his neck lost theirtension it was always the neck; the neck was thewarning signal and then he would consider the manon the dark hill above him.

  He dozed, until a slapping wave below woke him.He pushed the branches and the leaves away fromhis face and looked at the chauffeur’s watch on hiswrist, squinting at the weak radium dial. He hadslept for nearly an hour fitfully, to be sure, theslightest sounds forcing his eyelids briefly open, buthe had rested. He rolled his neck back and forth,t
hen moved his arms and legs. Everything still hurt,but the excruciating pain was gone. And now hefaced a man on a hill above

  him. He tried to examine his thoughts. He wasfrightened, of course, but his anger would controlthat terrible fear, it had done so before, it would doso now. The objective was all that mattered somekind of sanctuary, a place where he could think andput things together and somehow make the mostimportant telephone call in his life. To Larry Talbotand Nathan Simon in New York. Unless he coulddo these things he was dead as Connal Fitzpatrickwas undoubtedly dead. esus! What had they done tohim? A man with the purity of vengeance purelysought caught in a diseased web called Aquitainel Itwas an unfair world…. But he could not think aboutit; he had to concentrate on a man on the hill.

  He crept on his hands and knees. Stretch bystretch he crawled through the woods bordering thedirt road that wound up the hill from the lawn andthe riverbank. Whenever a twig crunched or a rockwas displaced he stopped, waiting for the moment todissolve back into the sounds of the forest. He kepttelling himself he had the advantage; he was theunexpected. It helped counteract the fear of thedarkness and the knowledge that a physicalconfrontation was before him. Like the patrol scoutyears ago in the Huang Khe, that man above himnow had things he needed. The combat could not beavoided, so it was best not to think about it but tosimply force himself into a mind-set empty of anyfeeling, and do it. But do it well, his mind had tounderstand that, too. There could be no hesitation,no intrusions of conscience and no sound of a gun,only the use of the steel.

  He saw him, oddly enough, silhouetted in thedistant glare of a single streetlamp far above on aroad. The man was leaning against the trunk of atree and facing down, his sweep of vision taking ineverything below. As Joel crept up the slope thespace between his hands and knees became inches,the stops more frequent, silence more vital. Hemade his way in an arc above the tree and the manand then started down like a large cat descending onits prey. He was the predator he had once been longago, everything blocked out but the requirement ofthe lifeline.