The Matarese Countdown

by Robert Ludlum

  Guiderone slammed down the telephone, annoyed that the sudden turbulence had caused his glass of Chateau Beychevelle Medoc to spill over his table.

  Sir Geoffrey Waters signed for the top-secret envelope delivered to his house in Kensington by an MI-5 officer. He began to open it as he walked back through the narrow hallway to his breakfast in the dining room. His wife, Gwyneth, a gray-haired woman of delicate features and wide, intelligent brown eyes, looked up from the London Times and spoke.

  "Communiques at this hour, Geoffrey? Couldn't it have waited till you got to the office?"

  "I don't know, Gwyn, I'm as surprised as you are."

  "Open it, darling."

  "I'm trying to, but these damn black plastic tapes require scissors, I think."

  "Use the steak knife."

  "Yes, rather. Nice of you to have Cook get me a small fillet with my eggs."

  "Well, you've obviously been under considerable pressure these past few weeks. Better to send you off with a satisfied stomach."

  "Much appreciated," said the MI-5 chief of Internal Security as he slashed the crisscrossing tapes and opened the large manila envelope.

  He scanned its contents and plummeted down into his chair.

  "Oh, my God," he exclaimed.

  "Is it something I'm permitted to know?" asked Gwyneth Waters.

  "Or one of those things I'm not supposed to?"

  "You'd bloody well better! It's your brother, Clive-"

  "Oh, yes, dear Clivey. He's doing so well now, isn't he?"

  "Perhaps too well, my dear. He's on the board of directors of the new Sky Waverly consortium."

  "Yes, I know, he phoned me last week. Quite a stipend, I gather."

  "Or quite a mess, Gwyn. Sky Waverly is under an intensive investigation concerning matters I can't discuss with you-once again for your own well-being."

  "Yes, we've been through this before, Geof, but after all, you're talking about my brother."" "Let's be honest, dearest. I enjoy Clive, I like him; he's a charmer with a wonderful sense of humor, but I don't think either of us considers him among the better barristers in London."

  "He does have his shortcomings, I'll grant you that."

  "He's gone from firm to firm, never rising to a partnership," continued Waters, "usually hired on the strength of your name. Bentley-Smythe is an honored name in English law."

  "He's a decent man," interrupted the sister, "and he had too much to live up to, which he couldn't. Is that a crime?"

  "Of course not, but why was he plucked from a minor legal firm in which he was a down scale member to the board of directors of Sky Waverly?"

  "I've no idea, but I'll call him this morning and ask him."

  "That's the one thing you must not do," said Waters, softly but firmly.

  "Leave this to me, Gwyn. In my opinion, your brother's being used. Let me handle it."

  "You won't hurt Clive, will you?"

  "Not unless he's hurt himself, my dear, I promise you that.. ..

  Thank the cook for me, but I haven't time for breakfast." Geoffrey Waters left the table and walked rapidly to the hallway and the front door.

  The twenty-minute drive to his office was a time of painful reflection for the British intelligence officer. The reason was Clive BentleySmythe and what Geoffrey's wife perceived about her brother as opposed to a harsher reality. Waters did, indeed, like his brother-in-law;

  he was a charming fellow with a quick, if shallow, wit and a generous nature, generous to a fault, if he had any faults. And that was his glaring fault. Clive Bentley-Smythe was as close to being a cipher as a human being could be, the living personification of the phrase his reach exceeds his grasp.

  He had been born into a wealthy family of barristers and solicitors going back for generations-so established that there were those who said they probably framed the Magna Carta-for a price-and others who claimed that Shakespeare's "let's kill all the lawyers" in his play King Henry VI was inspired by the ancestors of Bentley-Smythe. Clive floated through life, the attractive addition to very social functions, adding little but his presence, and, in seeming contradiction, a devoted husband to a wife who had no regard whatsoever for the marriage covenant. It was common, if concealed, knowledge that she slept in some of the wealthiest beds in England, Scotland, the Netherlands, and Paris. The joke in certain circles was that if Clive ever found out, he would probably forgive her and ask if she'd had a good time.

  Geoffrey Waters was aware of this dossier material, which he never shared with his wife, for she was the eternal big sister, protective of her younger brother to the walls of the proverbial barricades. There was no point in upsetting her. But now there was another equation, and the MI-5 chief of Internal Security knew he had to face it, analyze it, and act upon it. The French phrase cherchez la femme kept repeating itself in his mind, his imagination.

  "Sorry I felt the need to send you the information, Geoffrey," said the MI-5 director of Operations, 'but I felt you might want to talk to your wife about it."

  "I did to a minimal degree, and I do mean minimal. There are many things she doesn't know about her brother, and I don't care to worry her. I'll act upon it myself. Are there any other possible breakthroughs?"

  "Several, old man, but nothing certified," answered Waters's superior, a gray-haired, corpulent man in his sixties.

  "First, there are rumors out of Fleet Street that some sort of amalgamation, I guess you'd call it, is in the works."

  "A Murdoch enterprise?"

  "No, it's not his style. Whatever he is, he's usually up-front with his intentions. He buys and sells, profit his first consideration, editorial positions secondary, although he certainly respects them."

  "Anything else?"

  "I said several, not one," corrected the director.

  "There are movements in a number of banking institutions, centralization they call it, but I'm not convinced that the mergers are financially motivated."

  "You're going against the economic stream. Why not?"

  "Because all the institutions are profitable in their own right, all very independent. Why should they give up their fiefdoms?"

  "Someone's forcing them to," replied Waters softly.

  "Precisely my opinion. I've prepared a list of all their boards of directors, as well as the major journalists who appear to be part of this rumored amalgamation of newspapers."

  "We'll work on every one, I assure you."

  "There's a last entry, and it's a beauty. A directive was funneled to us from a newspaper in Toronto, Canada, a duplicate sent to the Servizio Segreto in Rome. It seems a reporter of theirs who flew to Italy called his paper from Rome, telling his editor that he would have the journalistic scoop of the century. He's since disappeared, no further word from him."

  "We'll follow up," said Geoffrey Waters, writing in his notebook.

  "That's it, then?"

  "One final thing, and I'm afraid it concerns your brother-in-law's wife, Amanda."

  "I had an idea it might come to this."

  While his subordinates redoubled their efforts at peeling away the layers of the Sky Waverly conglomerate and its French partners, as well as digging into the newspaper rumors and the apparently massive bank mergers, Geoffrey Waters began building a dossier on Amanda Bentley-Smythe. It was not a personal history based on gossip; the MI-5 officer was not interested in his sister-in-law's promiscuities except where there was a specific pattern. Then one emerged, and it concerned him deeply.

  Amanda Reilly was the daughter of a respectable Irish couple who owned a prosperous pub in Dublin known for its friendly atmosphere, steady customers, and, oddly enough, its limited kitchen. The attractive child grew into a lovely-looking, red-haired teenager, then into a ravishing young woman whose presence caused drinkers to stop the passage of glasses to lips as she waited on their tables. According to the available information, a magazine photographer on assignment in Dublin walked into the pub, saw her, and asked her very Catholic parents if he could take photog
raphs of their daughter.

  "No smarmy stuff or I'll break your face!" was the oft-reported reply of the father. The rest was fairy-tale legend, as the tabloids would write. Amanda was brought to London, schooled in the social graces while climbing the ladder of modeling prominence. Through the process, she lost much of her Irish dialect, except for the attractive lilt, and whether because of her upbringing or her parents' stern guidance, she appeared only in classic attire, by and large adorned with terribly expensive jewelry. She became a star of her profession.

  Then something happened to the adorable Irish lass, thought Geoffrey Waters, as he added data upon data. Amanda Reilly moved into the social circuit of the famous, the would-be famous, the established wealthy, and the pretenders. She was photographed on the arms of the recognizable-minor royalty, film stars, divorced financiers, and finally one Clive Bentley-Smythe, whom she chose to marry. It simply did not make sense to the MI-5 chief. With all the giants in her sea to choose from, she picked an innocuous blowfish for her crown prince.

  There followed the inevitable: the gossip, which provoked an intelligence search of both airline tickets and private aircraft with their destinations and flight plans. The computers narrowed down the comparative frequencies of the total and the presumed recipients of her favors, based on previous, confirmed information, along with photographs. Among the London and Scottish elite were youngish and middle-aged barons of industry, inheritors of well-known estates and castles with hunting grounds familiar to the Crown, and dashing yachtsmen rich enough to enter international racing. Paris included numerous heterosexual haute-couture designers, as well as the Parisian gay crowd, who adored her. The only void was one of her most frequent destinations during the past year: the Netherlands, especially the flights to Amsterdam. No one ever appeared to meet her usually private aircraft, no one was reported as having escorted her to a car or a limousine. Nobody. The internationally famous model had taken taxis into the center of the city and, for all intents and purposes, had disappeared.

  Amsterdam.

  And then Sir Geoffrey Waters began to understand, and it was as if he had been shot in the stomach. Was he the reason for the blowfish?

  Although his picture never appeared in the newspapers, among the government-oriented, he was known as the powerful MI-5 chief of Internal Security. What better connection for the Matarese? And the outrageous assumption-or was it merely a presumption?-did answer a few questions that had been lurking in the shadows of Sir Geoffrey's mind. Clive and Amanda had within recent months become so damned friendly with Gwyneth and him, inviting them to dinner parties that Waters found both irrelevant and annoying, although he said nothing because he knew his wife adored her brother. However, in a fit of irritation, he did pose a question.

  "My dear Gwyn, why this sudden rush of affection? Are there rumors of our sudden demise? Good God, they'll inherit your money what you haven't already given him-and I'm small stakes in that department. It seems they're on the phone or our doorstep several times a week. Please, old girl, I still have to work for a living."

  "Not if you'd let me pay the bills, dear heart."

  "Wouldn't hear of it. Also, I'm rather good at what I do."

  "Please, Geof, Clive worships you, you know that, and Amanda dotes on you. She always insists on sitting next to you. Don't tell me any man, even one approaching sixty, isn't thrilled to sit next to one of the most beautiful women in the world. If you did, I wouldn't believe you."

  "She asks too many foolish questions. She thinks I'm an overage James Bond, which I definitely am not-and neither was the original Bond. He was a stringer, more interested in his bloody gardens than in his work for us."

  Yet, damn it, Amanda Bentley-Smythe had asked too many questions. Nothing Waters could not handle with a wave of his hand, but still-he wondered. As several of those awful dinner parties went on, his glass constantly filled by the glamorous, seductive Amanda, had he unconsciously revealed something, or someone, he should not have?

  He did not think so; he was too experienced for that, but anything was possible insofar as he had always considered his seatmate to have an IQ in double digits. Had she learned something she should not have, something he mentioned innocently, something that was common knowledge, but that she zeroed in on? Was her unknown contact in Amsterdam really part of the Matarese? Geoffrey Waters had to confront his own personal doubts.

  His red intercom buzzed softly, it never rang. It was his sterile link to the all-powerful director of Operations.

  "Waters here," he said.

  "I'm afraid it's rotten news, Geof. Prepare yourself."

  "My wife?"

  "No, the subject you've been researching, your sister-in-law, Amanda Bentley-Smythe."

  "She's disappeared, right?"

  "Hardly, she's dead. She was garroted, her body thrown into the Thames. It was recovered an hour ago by a river patrol."

  "Oh, my God!"

  "There's more, old boy. Three major executives of banks in Scot land, Liverpool, and West London have been shot, all through the head.

  None survived. Underworld-style executions."

  "It's a purge!" exclaimed Waters.

  "Seal off all of their offices!"

  "There's nothing to seal. Everything's been removed."

  "You must think, Clive," pressed Geoffrey Waters, staring into the tear-stained eyes of his shattered brother-in-law.

  "God knows I feel for you, but this terrible thing that's happened has implications far beyond anything you can imagine. Now, these past few days-" "I can't think, Geof! Every time I try, I hear her voice and realize she's gone. That's all I can think about!"

  "Where do you keep your brandy, old boy?" asked Waters, glancing about the Bentley-Smythe library that led through French doors to a bright sunlit garden in Surrey.

  "Oh, yes, the cabinet over there. I believe a drink will help."

  "I'm not sure," said Clive, wiping his eyes and cheeks.

  "I'm not good with the stuff, and the phone keeps ringing off the hook-" "It hasn't for quite some time now," interrupted Sir Geoffrey, "because in a way it is off the hook."

  "What?"

  "I've had all your calls switched to an answering machine in my office. When you like, if you like, you may hear the messages yourself."

  "You can do that?"

  "Yes, chap, I can, I have." Waters pulled a bottle out of the cabinet, poured a short glass of brandy, and carried it to his stricken brother-inlaw.

  "Here, drink this."

  "What about the reporters outside in the street? They're surrounding the house and sooner or later I've got to face them."

  "They're not surrounding anything. The police have dispersed them."

  "You can? ... Of course you can. You have." Bentley-Smythe drank, wincing as he did so, a man not comfortable with alcohol.

  "Have you heard the terrible things they've been saying on the radio and the telly? How Amanda was suspected of having lovers, affairs too many to count? They're painting her as an upper-class tramp.. ..

  She wasn't, Geof! She loved me and I loved her!"

  "I'm sorry, Clive, but Amanda wasn't a candidate for Sunnybrook Farm."

  "Good God, you think I didn't know that? I'm not blind! My wife was a vibrant, exciting, and very beautiful woman. Unfortunately, she was married to a passably handsome dullard from an illustrious family who possessed very little talent. I know that, too, because it's me and she needed more than me!"

  "Then you turned a blind eye to her .. . shall we say, her indulgences?"

  "Of course I did! I was her anchor, her calm between the storms of publicity and celebrity, the steady refuge when she was hurt and exhausted."

  "You're a most remarkable husband," observed Sir Geoffrey.

  "What else could I do?" pleaded the remarkable husband.

  "I loved her more than life itself. I couldn't let her leave me over irrelevant social moralities. She was above all that to me!"

  "All right, Clive, all right," sai
d Waters.

  "But you must permit me to do my job, old man."

  "She was murdered, for Christ's sake! Why aren't the police or Scotland Yard questioning me? Why you?"

  "I hope to make that clear to you. The fact that I am questioning you should provide an answer. Mi-Five supersedes any police or Scotland Yard investigations. We all work together, naturally, but in circumstances like this, we're the forerunners."

  "What are you saying?" Bentley-Smythe, his mouth parted in bewilderment, glared at his brother-in-law.

  "You're like the Secret Service; you catch spies and traitors, that sort of thing. What has Amanda got to do with you? She was killed, damn it! Catching the killer is police work."

  "May I ask a few questions?" said Waters, gently overlooking Clive's protestations.

  "Why not?" replied a confused, disconsolate Bentley-Smythe.

  "You've shut down the phone, chased away the reporters; you couldn't do those things unless you were serious. Ask away."

  "These past few days, even weeks, did Amanda show any signs of strain or stress? What I mean to say is, did her behavior change? Was she abnormally upset, or touchy?"

  "No more than usual. She was furious at the photographer over her last shoot, claiming he was dressing her in 'matronly' clothing. She acknowledged that she was no longer a twentyish model but she wasn't ready for 'dotty granny outfits' was the way she put it. She did have a rather fierce ego, you know."

  "I mean beyond that, Clive, beyond the ego. Did she receive any phone calls that obviously disturbed her, or visitors that she didn't care to see?"

  "I wouldn't know. I'm at the office during the day and she was usually out. She kept a flat in town for when her schedule was too full to make the trek out here."