The Aquitaine Progression

by Robert Ludlum

  Three minutes later Joel stood at the table, the phone to his ear as the Greek operator in Athens routed his call to the island of Mykonos. Fitzpatrick sat on the couch, Chaim Abrahms’ dossier in front of him on the coffee table, his eyes on Converse.

  “Are you getting through all right?” asked the Navy lawyer.

  “It’s ringing now.” The erratic, stabbing signals kept repeating—four, five, six times. On the seventh the telephone in the Aegean was picked up.

  “Herete?”

  “Dr. Beale, please. Dr. Edward Beale.”

  “Tee tha thelete?”

  “Beale. The owner of the house. Get him for me, please!” Joel turned to Fitzpatrick. “Do you speak Greek?”

  “No, but I’ve been thinking about taking it up.”

  “You do that.” Converse listened again to the male voice in Mykonos. Greek phrases were spoken rapidly, none comprehensible. “Thank you! Good-bye.” Joel tapped the telephone bar several times, hoping the overseas line was still open and the English-speaking Greek operator was still there. “Operator? Is this the operator in Athens?… Good! I want to call another number on Mykonos, the same billing in Bonn.” Converse reached down on the table for the instructions Preston Halliday had given him in Geneva. “It’s the Bank of Rhodes. The number is …”

  Moments later the waterfront banker, Kostas Laskaris, was on the line. “Herete.”

  “Mr. Laskaris, this is Joel Converse. Do you remember me?”

  “Of course.… Mr. Converse?” The banker sounded distant, somehow strange, as if wary or bewildered.

  “I’ve been trying to call Dr. Beale at the number you gave me, but all I get is a man who can’t speak English. I wondered if you could tell me where Beale is.”

  A quiet expulsion of breath could be heard over the phone. “I wondered,” said Laskaris quietly. “The man you reached was a police officer, Mr. Converse. I had him placed there myself. A scholar has many valuable things.”

  “Why? What do you mean?”

  “Shortly after sunrise this morning Dr. Beale took his boat out of the harbor, accompanied by another man. Several fishermen saw them. Two hours ago Dr. Beale’s boat was found crashed on the rocks beyond the Stephanos. There was no one on board.”

  I killed him. With a scaling knife, dropping his body over a cluster of sharks beyond the shoals of the Stephanos.

  Joel hung up the phone. Halliday, Anstett, Beale, all of them gone—all his contacts dead. He was a puppet on the loose, his strings gone haywire, leading only to shadows.

  15

  Erich Leifhelm’s waxlike skin paled further as his eyes narrowed and his starched white lips parted. Then blood rushed to his head as he sat forward at the desk in his library and spoke into the telephone. “What was that name again, London?”

  “Admiral Hickman. He’s the—”

  “No,” interrupted the German sharply. “The other one! The officer who has refused to release the information.”

  “Fitzpatrick, an Irish name. He’s the ranking legal officer at the naval base in San Diego.”

  “A Lieutenant Commander Fitzpatrick?”

  “Yes, how did you know?”

  “Unglaublich! Diese Stümper!”

  “Warum?” asked the Englishman. “In what sense?”

  “He may be what you say he is in San Diego, Englander, but he is not in San Diego! He’s here in Bonn!”

  “Are you mad? No, of course, you’re not. Are you certain?”

  “He’s with Converse! I spoke to him myself. The two are registered in his name at Das Rektorat! He is how we found Converse!”

  “There was no attempt to conceal the name?”

  “On the contrary, he used his papers to gain entrance!”

  “How bloody third-rate,” said London, bewildered. “Or how downright sure of himself,” added the Britisher, his tone changing. “A signal? No one dares touch him?”

  “Unsinn! It’s not so.”

  “Why not?”

  “He spoke to Peregrine, the ambassador. Our man was there. Peregrine wanted to take him, wanted him brought forcibly to the embassy. There were complications; he got away.”

  “Our man wasn’t very good, then.”

  “An obstruction. Some Schauspieler—an actor. Peregrine will not discuss the incident. He says nothing.”

  “Which means no one will touch his naval officer from California,” concluded London. “There’s a very good reason.”

  “What is it?”

  “He’s the brother-in-law of Preston Halliday.”

  “Geneva! Mein Gott, they are into us!”

  “Someone is, but not anyone with a great deal of information. I agreed with Palo Alto, who also agrees with our specialist in the Mossad—with Abrahms, as well.”

  “The Jew? What does the Jew say? What does he say?”

  “He claims this Converse is an agent flying blind out of Washington.”

  “What more do you need?”

  “He is not to leave your house. Instructions will follow.”

  Stunned, Undersecretary of State Brewster Tolland hung up the phone, sank back in his chair, then shot forward and pressed the appropriate buttons on his console.

  “Chesapeake,” said the female voice. “Code, please?”

  “Six thousand,” said Tolland. “May I speak with Consular Operations, Station Eight, please?”

  “Station Eight requires—”

  “Plantagenet,” interrupted the Undersecretary.

  “Right away, sir.”

  “What is it, Six thousand?”

  “Cut the horseshit, Harry, this is Brew. What have you got running in Bonn we don’t know about?”

  “Off the top of my head, nothing.”

  “How far off the top is that?”

  “No, it’s straight. You’re current on everything we’re doing. There was an FRG review yesterday morning, and I’d remember if there was anything that excluded you.”

  “You might remember, but if I’m excluded I’m out.”

  “That’s right, and I’d tell you as much if only to keep you out, you know that. What’s your problem?”

  “I just got off the scrambler with a very angry ambassador, who may just call a very old friend at Sixteen Hundred.”

  “Peregrine? What’s his problem?”

  “If it’s not you, then someone’s playing Cons Op. It’s supposedly a covert investigation of the embassy—his embassy—somehow connected with the Navy Department.”

  “The Navy? That’s crazy—I mean dumb crazy! Bonn’s a port?”

  “Actually, I suppose it is.”

  “I never heard of the Bismarck or the Graf Spee steaming around the Rhine. No way, Brew. We don’t have anything like that and we wouldn’t have. Do you have any names?”

  “Yes, one,” replied Tolland, looking down at a pad with hastily scribbled notes on it. “An attorney named Joel Converse. Who is he, Harry?”

  “For Christ’s sake, I never heard of him. What’s the naval angle?”

  “Someone who claims to be the chief legal officer of a major Navy base with the rank of lieutenant commander.”

  “Claims to be?”

  “Well, before that he passed himself off as a military attaché working at the embassy.”

  “Somewhere the inmates broke out of a home.”

  “This isn’t funny, Harry. Peregrine’s no fool. He may be a vanity appointment, but he’s damned good and he’s damned smart. He says these people aren’t only real but may know something he doesn’t.”

  “What does he base that on?”

  “First, the opinion of a man who’s met this Converse—”

  “Who?” interrupted Harry of Station Eight.

  “He won’t say, just that he trusts him, trusts his judgment. This person with no name says Converse is a highly qualified, very troubled man, not a black hat.”

  “A what?”

  “That was the term Peregrine used. Obviously someone who’s okay.”

  �
�What else?”

  “What Peregrine calls isolated odd behavior in his personnel ranks. He wouldn’t elaborate; he says he’ll discuss it with the Secretary or Sixteen Hundred if I can’t satisfy him. He wants answers fast, and we don’t want to rock the boat over there.”

  “I’ll try to help,” said Harry. “Maybe it’s something from Langley or Arlington—the bastards! I can run a check on the Navy’s chief legals in an hour, and I’m sure the ABA can tell us who Converse is—if he is. At least narrow him down if there’s more than one.”

  “Get back to me. I haven’t got much time and we don’t want the White House raising its voice.”

  “The last thing ever,” agreed the director of Consular Operations, the State Department’s branch of foreign clandestine activities.

  “Try that on for legal size!” shouted Rear Admiral Hickman, standing by the window, angrily addressing a rigid, pale-faced David Remington. “And tell me with as few goddamned details as possible how it fits!”

  “I find it impossible to believe, sir. I spoke with him yesterday—at noon—and then again last evening. He was in Sonoma!”

  “So did I, Lieutenant. And whenever there was a scratching or an echo, what were the words? All that rain in the hills screwed up the telephone lines!”

  “Those were the words, sir.”

  “He passed through Düsseldorf immigration two days ago! He’s now in Bonn, Germany, with a man he swore to me had something to do with his brother-in-law’s death. The same man he’s protecting by putting a clamp on that flag. This Converse!”

  “I don’t know what to say, sir.”

  “Well, the State Department does and so do I. They’re pushing through that vet-delay or whatever the hell you called it in your legalese.”

  “It’s vetted material, sir. It simply means—”

  “I don’t want to hear, Lieutenant,” said Hickman, heading back to his desk, adding under his breath. “Do you know how much you bastards cost me for the two divorces?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “Never mind. I want that flag released. I brought Fitz on board here. I gave him his striper and the son of a bitch lied to me. He not only lied, he did it ten thousand miles away—lying about where he was when he knew he shouldn’t be there without my authorization! He knew it!… Do you have any objections, Lieutenant? Something you can put into a sentence or two that won’t require my bringing in three other legals to translate?”

  Lieutenant Remington, one of the finest lawyers in the United States Navy, knew when to put the engines in reverse. Legal ethics had been violated by misinformation; the course was clear. Aggressive retreat with full boilers—or nuclear power, he supposed, although he did not really know. “I’ll personally accelerate the vet-delay, Admiral. As the officer responsible for the secondary CLO statute, I’ll make it clear that the direct order is now subject to immediate cancellation. No such order can or should originate under questionable circumstances. Legally—”

  “That will be all, Lieutenant,” said the Admiral, cutting off his subordinate and sitting down.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No, that isn’t all!” continued Hickman, abruptly leaning forward. “How’s that transcript released, and how soon can you expect it?”

  “With State’s input it’ll only be a matter of hours, sir, noon or shortly afterwards, I’d guess. A classified teletype will be sent to those requesting the flag. However, since SAND PAC has only placed a restriction and not a request—”

  “Request it, Lieutenant. Bring it up to me the minute it gets here and don’t leave the base until it does.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  The deep-red Mercedes limousine weaved down the curving road inside the massive gates of Erich Leifhelm’s estate. The late-afternoon orange sun filtered diagonally through the tall trees, which not only bordered the road but were everywhere beyond on both sides. The drive might have been restful had it not been for a sight that made the whole scene grotesque: racing alongside the car were at least a half-dozen giant Dobermans, not one of them making a sound. There was something unearthly about their running furiously in silence, black eyes flashing up at the windows, their jaws wide with rapid, erratic breathing, teeth bared, but no sound emerging from their throats. Somehow Converse knew that if he stepped out of the car without the proper commands being issued, the powerful dogs would tear him to pieces.

  The limousine pulled into a long circular drive that fronted wide brown marble steps leading to an arched doorway, the heavy panels covered with dark bas-relief—a remnant of some ancient pillaged cathedral. Standing on the lower step was a man with a silver whistle raised to his lips. Again there was no sound a human could hear, but suddenly the animals abandoned the car and ran to him, flanking him, facing forward on their haunches, jaws slack, bodies pulsating.

  “Please wait, sir,” said the chauffeur as he climbed out and ran around to Joel’s door. “If you will step out, please, and take two paces away from the car. Only two paces, sir.” The chauffeur now held in his hand a black object with a rounded metal tube extending from the front of the instrument, not unlike a miniaturized electric charcoal starter.

  “What’s that?” asked Converse.

  “Protection, sir. For you, sir. The dogs, sir. They are trained to sense heavy metal.”

  Joel stood there as the German moved the electronic detector over his clothes, including his shoes, his inner thighs and the back of his waist. “Do you people really think I’d come out here with a gun?”

  “I do not think, sir. I do as I am told.”

  “How original,” mumbled Converse as he watched the man on the marble step raise the silver whistle again to his lips. As one, the phalanx of Dobermans suddenly leaped forward. In panic, Joel grabbed the chauffeur, spinning the German in front of him. There was no resistance; the man simply turned his head and grinned as the dogs veered to the right and raced around the circular drive into the approach road cut out of the forest.

  “Don’t apologize, mein Herr,” said the chauffeur. “It happens often.”

  “I wasn’t going to apologize,” said Converse flatly as he released the man. “I was going to break your neck.” The German moved away, and Joel remained motionless, stunned by his own words. He had not spoken words like that in over eighteen years.

  “This way, sir,” said the man on the steps, his accent oddly yet distinctly British.

  Inside, the great hall was lined with medieval banners hanging down from an interior balcony. The hall led into an immense sitting room, the motif again medieval, made comfortable by soft leather chairs and couches, gaily fringed lamps and silver services everywhere on thin polished tables. The room was also made ugly by the profusion of protruding animals’ heads on the upper walls; large cats, elephants and boar looked down in defiant anger. It was a field marshal’s lair.

  It was not, however, the furnishings that absorbed Converse’s attention but the sight of the four men who stood beside four separate chairs facing him.

  He knew Bertholdier and Leifhelm; they stood beside each other on the right. It was the two on the left he stared at. The medium-sized, stocky man with the fringe of close-cropped hair on a balding head and wearing a rumpled safari jacket, the ever-present boots below his khaki trousers, could be no one but Chaim Abrahms. His pouched, angry face with its slits of glaring eyes was the face of an avenger. The very tall man with the gaunt, aquiline features and the straight gray hair was General Jan van Headmer, the Slayer of Soweto. Joel had read the Van Headmer dossier quickly; fortunately it was the briefest, the final summary saying it all.

  In essence, Van Headmer is a Cape Town aristocrat, an Afrikaner who has never really accepted the British, to say nothing of the tribal blacks. His convictions are rooted in a reality that for him is unshakable. His forebears carved out a savage land under savage conditions and at a great loss of life brutally taken by savages. His thinking is unalterably that of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
He will not accept the sociological and political in-roads made by the more educated Bantus because he will never consider them anything more than bush primitives. When he orders austere deprivations and mass executions, he thinks he is dealing only with subhuman animals. It is this thinking that led him to be jailed along with Prime Minister Verwoerd and the racist Vorster during World War II. He concurred wholeheartedly with the Nazi concept of superior races. His close association with Chaim Abrahms is the single difference between him and the Nazis, and not a contradiction for him. The sabras carved a land out of a primitive Palestine; their history parallels his country’s, and both men take pride in their strength and respective accomplishments. Van Headmer, incidentally, is one of the most charming men one could meet. On the surface, he is cultured, extremely courteous and always willing to listen. Underneath, he is an unfeeling killer, and he is Delavane’s key figure in South Africa with its vast resources.

  “Mein Haus ist dein Haus,” said Leifhelm, walking toward Joel, his hand outstretched.

  Converse stepped forward to accept the German’s hand. Their hands clasped. “That was an odd greeting outside for such a warm sentiment,” said Joel, abruptly releasing Leifhelm’s hand and turning to Bertholdier. “Good to see you again, General. My apologies for the unfortunate incident in Paris the other night. I don’t mean to speak lightly of a man’s life, but in those few split seconds I didn’t think he had much regard for mine.”

  Joel’s boldness had the desired effect. Bertholdier stared at him, momentarily unsure of what to say. And Converse was aware that the other three men were watching him intently, without question struck by his audacity, in both manners and words.

  “To be sure, monsieur,” said the Frenchman, pointlessly but with composure. “As you know, the man disregarded his orders.”

  “Really? I was told he misunderstood them.”

  “It is the same!” The sharp, heavily accented voice came from behind.

  Joel turned around. “Is it?” he asked coldly.

  “In the field, yes,” said Chaim Abrahms. “Either one is an error, and errors are paid for with lives. The man paid with his.”