“They’re the ones he has to contact! He has tosee them, talk to them, tell them everything heknows! I’m getting ahead of myself, Sam, butJoelthinks those people should have come in at thebeginning the beginning for him. He understandswhy he was chosen and, incredibly, he doesn’t evennow fault that decision! But they should have beentherel”
“You’re way ahead of yourself.’
“I’ll go back.”
“Let me finish first. I talked to them, tellingthem I didn’t believe what I was reading andhearing; it wasn’t the Converse I knew, and to aman they told me to back off. It was hopeless and Icould get badly tarnished. It wasn’t the Converse Iknew, they said. He’d psyched out; he was anotherperson. There was too much evidence to support theblow-out.”
“But you took my call. Why?”
“Two reasons. The first is obvious I knew Joel;we went through a lot together and none of thismakes sense to me maybe I don’t want it to makesense. The second reason is a lot less subjective. Iknow a lie when I hear one when I know it can’tbe the truth and a lie was fed to me just as it wasfed to the people who delivered it.” Abbott sippedhis coffee as if telling himself to slow down and beclear. The leader of the squadron was in control; hehad to be. “I spoke to three men I knew, men Itrust, and each checked with his own sources. Theyall came back to me, each telling me essentially thesame thing but in different language, differentviewpoints depending on their priorities that’s theway it works with these people. But one item didn’tvary so much as a syllable and it was the lie. Thelabel is drugs. Narcotics.”
“;Joel9″
“Their words were practically identical. “Evidenceis pouring in from New fork, Geneva, Paris, thatConverse was a heavy buyer.’ That was one phrase;the other was ”Medical opinion has it that thehypodermics finally blew him up and blew himback.’”
“That’s crazyl It’s insane!” cried Valerie asAbbott grabbed her hand to quiet her down. “I’msorry, but it’s such a terrible lie,” she whispered.“You don’t know “
“Yes, Val, I do know. Joel was pumped five or sixtimes
in the camps with substances sent down from Hanoi,and no one fought it harder or hated it more than hedid. The only chemicals he’d allow in his body afterthat were tobacco and alcohol. I’ve seen us both withthird-degree hangovers and while I tore medicinecabinets apart for a Bromo or an aspirin, he wouldn’ttouch them.”
"Whenever his passport shots came up, he had tohave four martinis before he went to the doctor,”said Valerie. “Good God, who would spread a thinglike that?”
“When I tried to find out I was told that even Icouldn’t have that information.”
The former Mrs. Converse now stared at thebrigadier general. “You have to find out, Sam, youknow that, don’t you?”
“Tell me why, Val. Put it together for me.”
“It began in Geneva, and for Joel the operativename the operative name was George MarcusDelavane.”
Abbott flinched and shut his eyes; his facebecame suddenly older.
The cry of the cat on a frozen lake became ascream as the man in the wheelchair fell to the floor,his two stumps that once were legs scissoringmaniacally to no avail. With strong arms he pushedhis torso up from the rug.
“Adjutant! Adjutantl” roared General GeorgeMarcus Delavane as the dark-red telephone keptringing on the desk below the fragmented map.
A large, muscular middle-aged man in fulluniform ran out of a door and rushed to hissuperior. “Let me help you sir,” he said emphatically,pulling the wheelchair toward them both.
“Not me!” yelled Delavane. “The phone! Get thephone! Tell whoever it is I’ll be right there!” The oldsoldier began crawling pathetically toward the desk.
“Just one minute, please,” said the adjutant intothe phone. “The general will be with you in amoment.” The lieutenant colonel placed thetelephone on the desk and ran first to the chair andthen to Delavane. “Please, sir, let me help
you.
With a look of loathing on his face, the half-manpermitted himself to be maneuvered back into thewheelchair. He propelled himself forward and tookthe phone. “Palo Alto International. You’re red!What is the day’s code?”
“Charing Cross” was the reply in a clipped Britishaccent.
“What is it, England?”
Radio relay from Osnabruck. We ve got him.
Chaim Abrahms sat in his kitchen, tapping hisfingers on the table, trying to take his eyes off thetelephone and the clock on the wall. It was thefourth time span, and still there was no word fromNew York. The orders had been clear: the calls wereto be placed within thirty-minute periods every sixhours commencing twenty-four hours ago, theestimated arrival time of the plane from Amsterdam.Twenty-four hours and nothing! The first omissionhad not troubled him; rarely were transatlanticflights on schedule. The second he had rationalized;if the woman was in transit, traveling somewhereelse either in a car or by plane, the surveillancemight find itself in a difficult position to place anoverseas call to Israel The third omission wasunacceptable, this fourth lapse intoler able! It wasnearly the end of the thirty-minute span, six minutesto go. When in the name of God would it ring?
It rang. Abrahms leaped from the chair and pickedit up.
“We lost her” was the flat statement.
“You what?”
“She took a taxi to LaGuardia Airport andbought a ticket for a morning Hight to Boston. Thenshe checked into a motel and must have left minuteslater.”
“Where were our people?”
“One parked in a car outside, the other in aroom down the hall. There was no reason to suspectshe would leave. She had a ticket to Boston.”
“Idiots! Garbage!”
“They will be disciplined. Our men in Bostonhave checked every Hight, every train. She hasn’tshown up.”
“What makes you think she wills”
“The ticket. There was nothing else.”
Imbeciles!”
Valerie had finished; there was nothing more tosay. She looked at Sam Abbott, who seemed farolder than he had been an hour ago.
“There are so many questions,” said the brigadiergeneral. “So much I want to ask Joel. The lousything is I’m not qual
ified, but I know someone who is. I’ll talk to himtonight, and tomorrow the three of us will fly toWashington. Like today, I have an early A.M.squadron run, but I’ll be finished by ten. I’ll take therest of the day off one of the kids is sick, but noth-ing serious, nothing out of the ordinary. Alan willknow whom we should go to, whom we can trust.”
“Can you trust him?”
“Metcalf? With my life.”
“”Joel says you’re to be careful. He warns youthat they can be anywhere where you least expectthem.”
“But somewhere there’s got to be a list. Somewhere.”
“Delavane? San Francisco?”
“Probably not. It’s too simple, too dangerous. It’sthe first place anyone would look; he’d considerthat…. This countdown Joel thinks it’s tied intomassive riots taking place in different cities, variouscapitals?”
“On a vast scale, larger and more violent thananything we can imagine. Eruptions, totaldestabilisation, spreading from one place to another,fueled by the same people who are called in torestore order.”
Abbott shook his head. “It doesn’t sound right.It’s too complicated, and there are too many built-incontrols. Police troops from the National Guardithey have separate commands. The chain wouldbreak somewhere.”
“It’s what he believes. He says they could do it.He’s convinced they have warehouses everywherestocked with weapons and explosives, even armoredvehicles and conceivably planes in out-of-the-wayairfields.”
“Val, that’s craz"sorry, wrong word. The logisticsare simply too overwhelming.”
“Newark, Watts, Miami. They were alsooverwhelming.”
“They were different. They were essentially racialand economic.”
“The cities burned, Sam. People were killed andorder came with guns. Sup
pose there were moreguns than either of us could count? On both sides.Just like what’s happening in Northern Ireland rightnow.”
“Ireland? The slaughter in Belfast? It’s a war noone can stop.”
“It’s their war! They did it! Joel called it a test, a trialrun!”
“It’s wild,” said the pilot.
“"Accumulation, rapid acceleration.’ Those werethe words Abrahms used in Bonn. Joel tried tofigure them out.
He couldn’t buy LeifLelm’s statement that theyreferred to blackmail or extortion. It wouldn’t work,he said.”
“Extortion?” Abbott frowned. “I don’t rememberyour mentioning that.”
"I probably didn’t because Joel discounted it.Leifhelm asked him what he thought about powerfulfigures in various governments being compromised,and Joel said it wouldn’t work. The cleansingprocess was too certain, the reactions too quick.”
“Compromised?” Sam Abbott leaned forward inthe booth. “Com promised, Val?”
“Yes. “
“Oh, my God.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mean? . . . Meaning, that’s what I mean.“Compromised’ has more than one meaning. Like”neutralise’ end "take out,’ and probably a dozenothers I don’t know about.”
“You’re beyond me, Sam.”
“In one context, the word "compromise’ meanskilling Pure and simple murder. Assassination.”
Valerie checked into the MGM-Grand Hotelgiving the bewildered clerk three days’ advancepayment for the room in lieu of a credit card. Keyin hand, she took the elevator up to the ninth floorand let herself into a room with the kind ofpleasantly garish opulence found only in Las Vegas.She stood briefly on the balcony, watching theorange setting sun thinking about the insanity ofeverything. She would call Joei first thing in themorning noon or thereabouts in Osnabruck, WestGermany.
She ordered from room service, ate what shecould, watched an hour or so of mind-numbingtelevision, and finally lay down on the bed. She hadbeen right about Sam Abbott. Dear Sam,straight-as-the-proverbial-arrow Sam, direct anduncomplicated. If anyone would know what to do,Sam would and if he did not know, he would findout. For the first time in days, Val felt a degree ofrelief. Sleep came, and this time there were nohorrible dreams.
She awoke to the sight of the early sun firing themountains beyond the balcony doors in the distance.For a moment or two while she emerged throughthe layers of vanishing sleep she thought she wasback at Cape Ann, the sunlight streaming into herbedroom from the balcony outside, and
vaguely recalled a distant nightmare. Then the boldfloral drapes came into focus, and then the farawaymountains and the slightly stale odor of thick hotelcarpeting, and she knew the nightmare was verymuch with her.
She got out of the oversized bed, and navigatedto the bathroom, stopping on the way to switch onthe radio. She reached the door and suddenlystopped, gripping its edge to brace herself, her headdetonating with a thousand explosions, her eyes andthroat on fire.
She could only scream. And scream again andagain as she fell to the floor.
Peter Stone turned up the radio in the New Yorkapartment, then walked quickly to the table wherethere was an open telephone directory, the pagesblue, the book itself having been taken from “Mrs.DePinna’s” room in the St. Regis Hotel. Stonelistened to the news report as he scanned the op-posing blue pages of government listings.
“. . . It has now been confirmed that the earlierreports of the crash of an F-18 jetfighterplane at NellisAir Force Base in Nevada are accurate. The accidenttook place this morning at seven-forty-two, Pacific time,during first-light maneuvers over the desert thirty-eightmiles northwest of the Nellisfield. The pilot, BrigadierGeneral Samuel Abbott, was chief of TacticalOperations and considered one of the finest pilots in theAir Force as well as a su perb aerial tactician. Thepress of dicer at Nellis said a full inquiry will belaunched, but stated that according to the other pilotsthe lead plane of the squadron, }-town by GeneralAbbott, plunged to the ground afterexecuffng a relativelylow-altitude maneuver. The explosion could be heard asfar away as Las Vegas. The press ofticer’s remarks werecharged with emotion as he described the downed pilot.“The death of General Abbott is a tragic loss for the Air Force and the nation, ”he told re porters. A few min-utes ago the President . . .”
“That’s it,” said Stone, turning to the Armycaptain across the room. “That’s where she washeading…. Shut that damn thing off, will you? I knewAbbott; I worked with him out of Langley a coupleof years ago.”
The Army officer stared at the civilian as heturned off the radio. “Do you know what you’resaying?” he asked.
“Here it is,” replied Stone, pointing to the lowerleft-hand corner of a page in the thick telephonedirectory.
“Blue thirteen, three pages from the end of thebook. “United States Government offices.Department of the ” “
“There are dozens of other listings, too,including your former employer. ”CentralIntelligence New York field Office.’ Why not it?Them? It fits better.”
"He can’t go that route and he knows it.”
“He didn’t go,” corrected the captain. “He sent her.,’
“That doesn’t fit with everything we knowabout him. She’d be sent to Virginia and come outa basket case. No, she came back here to find aparticular person, not a faceless department or asection or an agency. A man they both knew andtrusted. Abbott. She found him, told him everythingCon"eOrdd told h!e,,r and he talked to others thew h
"How can you be sure?” pressed the Army man.
“Christ, Gptain, what do you want, a diagram ?Sam Abbott was shot down over the coast of theTonkin Gulf. He was a POW and so was Converse.I have an idea that if we put it through thecomputers, we’d find out they knew each other. I’mso sure I won’t use up another debt. Puck it./”
“You know,” said the Army officer, “I’ve neverseen you lose your temper. The cold can get hot,can’t it, Stone. I be
lieve you.”
The former intelligence officer looked hard atthe captain, and when he spoke his voice wasflat and cold. "Abbott was a good man even anexceptional man for someone in uniform but don’tmistake me, Captain. He was killed and he waskilled because whatever that woman told him wasso conclusive he had to be compromised hourslater.”
“Compromised?”
“Figure it out…. I’m angry at Sam’s death, yes,you’re damned right. But I’m a lot angrier that wedon’t have the woman. Among other things, with usshe has a chance, without us I judge very little andI don’t want her on my conscience"what little I’vegot left. Also to get Converse out we have to findher, there’s no other way.”
“ But if you re right she’s somewhere near Nellis,probably Las Vegas. ”
Undoubtedly Las Vegas, and by the time wereached anyone who could check around for us,she’ll be on her way somewhere else…. You know,I d hate to be her now. The only avenue she hadwas neutralised. Whom can she turn to where canshe go? It’s what Dowling said about Converse yes
terday, what he didn’t tell Peregrine’s secretary. Ourman was systematically isolated and more afraid ofU.S. embassy personnel than anyone else. He wouldnever have agreed to a meeting with Peregrinebecause he knew it’d be a trap, therefore he couldn’thave killed him. He was set up; everywhere helooked there was another trap to keep him runningand out of sight.” The civilian paused, then addedfirmly, “The woman’s finished, Captain. She’s at theend of a bad road their road. And that may be thebest part of it for us. If she panics, we could find her.But we’re going to have to take some risks. How’sthat neck of yours? Have you made out a will?”
Valerie wept quietly by the glass doorsoverlooking the gaudy strip of Las Vegas. Her tearswere not only for Sam Abbott and his wife andchildren, but for herself and Joel. It was permittedunder the circumstances, and she could not lie toherself. She had no idea what to do next. No matterwhom she went to the answer would be the same.Tell him to come out of hiding and well listen to him.And the minute he did, Joel would be de
ad, fulfillinghis own prophecy. And if through a bureaucraticmiracle she was granted a meeting with someone ofpower and influence, how strong would her case be?What words would she use?
I was married to this man for four years and Idivorced him let’s call it incom patibility but I knowhim! I know he couldn’t have done what they say hedid, he didn’t kill those men…. What proof? I just toldyou, I know him! . . . What does incom patibilitymean? I’m not SUK, we didn’t get along he wasremote, distant. What difference does it make? Whatare you implying? Oh, God! You "re so wrong! I haveno interest in him that way. Yes, he’s successful andhe’s paid me alimony, but I don’t need his money. Idon’t want it!. . . You see, he told me about this . . .this incredible plot to put the military establishments ofthe United States and the countries of Western Europein virtual control of their governments, that they coulddo it by instigating massive rioting in key cities,terrorism, destabilisation everywhere. He’s met themand talked with them; there’s a plan already inprogress! They see themselves as a dedicatedinternational organization, as a strong alternative to theweak governments of the West who won’t stand up tothe Soviet bloc. But they’re not a reasonable alternative,they’re fanatics! They’re killers;
they want total control of all of us!. . . My formerhusband wrote it all up, everything he’s learned, andsent it to me, but it was stolen, his own father killedbecause he read it. IVo, it was not suicide!. . . He callsit a conspiracy of generals conceived by a generalwho’d been labeled a madman. General GeorgeDelavane “Mad Marcus’ Delavane… . Yes, I knowwhat the police in Paris and Bonn and Brussels say,what Interpol says, what our own embassy hasreported fingerprints and ballistics and seeing him inthis place and that place, and drugs, and meeting withPeregrine butcan’t you understand, they’re all lies!. .. Yes, I know what happened when he was a prisonerof war what he went through the things he said whenhe was discharged. IVone of that isrelevant!Hisfeelingsaren ”t relevant!He told me that!Hetold me he looks so terrible . . . he’s been so hurt.
Who would believe her?
Tell him to come in. We’ll listen.
He can “t! He’ll be killed! . . . You ”I'll kill him!
The Aquaintaine Progession Page 65
