The Aquitaine Progression (107 page)

The uniformed aide had crashed back into the wall, into the fragmented map. Gasping, blood flowing from his neck, he stared wide-eyed at the raving general. From some inner core of strength he raised the powerful magnum and fired once as he collapsed.

George Marcus Delavane was blown across the room, a massive hemorrhage in his chest, as the wheelchair spun and fell on its side, its strapped-in occupant dead.

No one knew when it started to happen, but gradually, miraculously, the gunfire slowly began to diminish. The restoration of order was accompanied by squads of uniformed men, many units having broken away from their commanders, racing through the streets and buildings and confronting other men. It was soldier against soldier, the eyes of the interrogators filled with anger and disgust, staring at faces consumed with arrogance and defiance. The commanders of
Aquitaine were adamant. They were right! Could not their inferiors understand? Many refused to surrender, preferring final assaults that cost them their lives. Others bit into cyanide capsules.

In Palo Alto, California, a legless legend named George Marcus Delayane was found shot to death, but apparently not before he had been able to kill his assailant, an obscure Army colonel. No one knew what had happened. In Southern France, the bodies of two other legendary heroes were found in a mountain ravine, each of whom, upon leaving a château in the Alps, had been given a weapon. Generals Bertholdier and Leifhelm had lost. General Chaim Abrahms had disappeared. On military bases throughout the Middle East, all Europe, Great Britain, Canada and the United States, officers of high rank and responsibilities were challenged by subordinates with leveled weapons.
Were they members of an organization called Aquitaine? Their names were on a list! Answer!
In Norfolk, Virginia, an admiral named Scanlon threw himself out of a sixth-story window; and in San Diego, California, another admiral named Hickman was ordered to arrest a four-striper who lived in La Jolla—the charge: murder of a legal officer in the hills above that elegant suburb. Colonel Alan Metcalf personally made the call to the chief operations officer of Nellis Air Force Base; the order was blunt—throw into a maximum-security cell the major who was in charge of all aircraft maintenance. In Washington the venerated Senator Mario Parelli was called out of the cloakroom by a Captain Guardino of Army G-2 and taken away; while at State and the Pentagon, eleven men in armaments controls and procurements were placed under guard.

In Tel Aviv, Israeli Army intelligence rounded up twenty-three aides and fellow officers of General Chaim Abrahms, as well as one of the Mossad’s most brilliant analysts. In Paris, thirty-one associates—military and nonmilitary—of General Jacques-Louis Bertholdier, including deputy directors of both the Sûreté and Interpol, were held in isolation, and in Bonn no fewer than fifty-seven colleagues of General Erich Leifhelm, among them former Wehrmacht commanders and current officers of the Federal Republic’s Army and its Luftwaffe, were seized. Also in Bonn, the Marine Corps guard at the American embassy, on orders from the State Department, arrested four attachés, including the military chargé d’affaires, Major Norman Anthony Washburn IV.

And so it went. Everywhere. The fever of madness that was Aquitaine was broken by legions of the very military the generals assumed would carry them to absolute global power. By nightfall the guns were still and people began to come out from behind their barricades—from cellars, subways, boarded-up buildings, railroad yards, wherever sanctuary could be found. They wandered out on the streets, numbed, wondering what had happened, as trucks with loudspeakers roamed the cities everywhere telling the citizens that the crisis was over. In Tel Aviv, Rome, Paris, Bonn, London, and across the Atlantic in Toronto, New York, Washington and points west, the lights were turned on, but certainly the world had not returned to normal. A terrible force had struck in the midst of a universal cry for peace. What was it? What had
háppened
?

It would be explained on the following day, blared the sound trucks in a dozen different languages, pleading for patience on the part of citizens everywhere. The hour chosen was 3:00
P.M
., Greenwich Mean Time; 10:00
A.M
. Washington, 7:00
A.M
. Los Angeles. Throughout the night and the morning hours in all the time zones, heads of state conferred over telephones until the texts of all the statements were essentially the same. At 10:03
A.M
. the President of the United States went on the air.

“Yesterday an unprecedented wave of violence swept through the free world taking lives, paralyzing governments, creating a climate of terror that very nearly cost free nations everywhere their freedom and might have led them to look for solutions where no solutions should be sought in democratic societies—namely, turning ourselves into police states, handing over controls to men who would subjugate free people to their collective military will. It was an organized conspiracy led by demented and deluded men who sought power for its own sake, willing even to sacrifice their own fellow conspirators to achieve it, and to deceive others who were seduced into believing it was the way of the future, the answer to the serious ills of the world. It is not, nor can it ever be.

“As the days and weeks go by—as this terrible thing is put behind us—the facts will be placed before you. For this has been our warning, the toll taken in blood and in the shaken confidence of our institutions. I remind you, however, that our institutions have prevailed. They will prevail.

“In an hour from now a series of meetings will start taking
place involving the White House, the departments of State and Defense, the majority and minority leaders of the House and the Senate, and the National Security Council. Beginning tomorrow, in concert with other governments, reports will be issued on a daily basis until all the facts are before you.

“The nightmare is over. Let the sunlight of truth guide us and clear away the darkness.”

On the following morning Deputy Director Peter Stone of the Central Intelligence Agency, accompanied by Captain Howard Packard and Lieutenant William Landis, were brought to the Oval Office for a private ceremony. The specific honors awarded them were never made public, as there was no reason to do so. Each man, with deep respect and gratitude—but with no regrets—declined to accept, each stating that whatever honors were involved belonged to a man not currently residing in the United States.

A week later, in Los Angeles, California, an actor named Caleb Dowling stunned the producers of a television show called
Santa Fe
by giving them his notice—effective before the start of the new season. He refused all inducements, claiming simply that there was not enough time to spend with his wife. They were going to travel. Alone. And if the residuals ever ran out, hell, she could always type and he could always teach. Together.
Ciao, friends
.

Geneva. City of bright reflections and inconstancy.

Joel and Valerie Converse sat at the table where it had all begun, by the glistening brass railing in the Chat Botté. The traffic on the lakeside Quai du Mont Blanc was disciplined, unhurried—purpose mixed with civility. As the pedestrians passed by, both were aware of the glances directed at Joel.
There he is
, the eyes were saying.
There is … the man
. It was rumored he was living in Geneva, at least for a while.

By agreement, the second report issued across the free
world made a direct but—on Converse’s insistence—brief reference to his role in the tragedy that was Aquitaine. He was exonerated of all charges. The labels were removed and refuted, the debt to him acknowledged without specifics on the basis of NATO security. He refused all interviews, and was not pleased when the media dredged up his experiences in Southeast Asia and speculated on correlations with the drama of the generals. But he was consoled by the knowledge that just as the interest in him had dwindled years ago, it would do so again—fester in Geneva, city of purpose.

They had leased a house on the lake, an artist’s house with a studio built on the slope leading to the water, the skylight catching the sun from early morning to dusk. The beach house in Cape Ann was closed, the lease paid in full and returned to the real estate agent in Boston. Val’s friend and neighbor had packed her clothes and all her paints, brushes and favorite easel, and sent everything air freight to Geneva. Valerie worked for several hours each morning, happier than she had ever been in her life, permitting her husband to evaluate her progress daily. He judged it to be eminently acceptable, wondering out loud whether there was a market for “lakescapes” as opposed to seascapes. It took him two days to remove the last dabs of paint from his hair.

Nor was Joel without employment; he was Talbot, Brooks and Simon’s European branch all by himself. The income, itself, however, was not a vital factor, as Converse never remotely considered himself in the mold of those attorneys in films and on television who rarely if ever collected fees. Since his legal talents had been called upon for crucial evidence, he billed the major governments a reasonable $400,000 apiece; the minor ones, $250,000. No one argued. The total came to something over $2.5 million, safely deposited in an interest-bearing Swiss account.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Valerie, reaching for his hand.

“About Chaim Abrahms and Derek Belamy. They haven’t been found—they’re still out there, and I wonder if they will ever be found. I hope so, because until they are, it really isn’t over.”

“It’s over, Joel, you’ve got to believe it. But that’s not what I meant. I meant you. How do you feel?”

“I’m not sure. I only knew I had to come here and find out.” He looked into her eyes, and at the cascading dark hair
that fell to her shoulders, framing the face he loved so much. “Empty, I think. Except for you.”

“No anger? No resentment?”

“Not against Avery, or Stone or any of the others. That’s past. They did what they had to do; there wasn’t any other way.”

“You’re far more generous than I am, my darling.”

“I’m more realistic, that’s all. The evidence had to be gotten by penetrating the outside—by an outsider wanting to get inside. The core was too tight, too lethal.”

“I think they were bastards. And cowards.”

“I don’t. I think they should all be canonized, immortalized, bronzed and with poems written about them for the ages.”

“That’s absolute rubbish! How can you possibly say such a thing?”

Joel again looked into his wife’s eyes. “Because you’re here. I’m here. And you’re painting lakescapes, not seascapes. And I’m not in New York and you’re not in Cape Ann. And I don’t have to worry about you, hoping that you’re worrying about me.”

“If only there’d been another woman or another man. It would have been so much easier, so much more logical, darling.”

“There was always you. Only you.”

“Try to get away from me again, Converse.”

“No way, Converse.”

Their hands gripped, unashamed tears were in their eyes. The nightmare was over.

Read on for an excerpt from Robert Ludlum’s
The Bourne Identity

The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp. The waves rose to goliathan heights, crashing into the hull with the power of raw tonnage; the white sprays caught in the night sky cascaded downward over the deck under the force of the night wind. Everywhere there were the sounds of inanimate pain, wood straining against wood, ropes twisting, stretched to the breaking point. The animal was dying.

Two abrupt explosions pierced the sounds of the sea and the wind and the vessel’s pain. They came from the dimly lit cabin that rose and fell with its host body. A man lunged out of the door grasping the railing with one hand, holding his stomach with the other.

A second man followed, the pursuit cautious, his intent violent. He stood bracing himself in the cabin door; he raised a gun and fired again. And again.

The man at the railing whipped both his hands up to his head, arching backward under the impact of the fourth bullet. The trawler’s bow dipped suddenly into the valley of two giant waves, lifting the wounded man off his feet; he twisted to his left, unable to take his hands away from his head. The boat surged upward, bow and midships more out of the water than in it, sweeping the figure in the doorway back into the cabin; a fifth gunshot fired wildly. The wounded man screamed, his hands now lashing out at anything he could grasp, his eyes blinded by blood and the unceasing spray of the sea. There was nothing he could grab, so he grabbed at nothing; his legs buckled as his body lurched forward. The boat rolled violently leeward and the man whose skull was ripped open plunged over the side into the madness of the darkness below.

He felt rushing cold water envelop him, swallowing him, sucking him under, and twisting him in circles, then propelling him up to the surface—only to gasp a single breath of air. A gasp and he was under again.