The Aquitaine Progression (57 page)

“You may not be able to reach her.”

“Oh?”

“She’s having her number changed, and I think you should do the same thing. I know I’m going to the minute I hear from Larry.”

“Valley …” Roger Converse paused. “Don’t do that.”

“Why not? Have you any idea what it’s been
like
here?”

“Look, you know I’ve never asked what happened between you and Joel, but I usually have dinner with that piss ant lawyer once a week when I’m in town. He thinks it’s some
kind of filial necessity, but I’d knock it off in a minute if I didn’t like him. I mean he’s a likable guy, kind of funny sometimes.”

“I know all that, Roger. What are you trying to say?”

“
They
say he disappeared, that no one can find him.”

“And?”

“He may call you. I can’t think of anyone else he would call.”

Valerie closed her eyes; the afternoon sun through the skylight was blinding. “Is that based on your weekly dinner conversations?”

“It’s not intuition. I never had any except in the air.… Of course it is. It was never said outright, but it was always just below the cloud cover.”

“You’re impossible, Dad.”

“Pilot error’s like any other. There are times when you can’t afford it.… Don’t change your number, Valley.”

“I won’t.”

“Now, what about me?”

“Ginny’s husband had a good idea. They’re referring all questions to their attorney. Maybe you should do the same. Do you have one?”

“Sure,” said Roger Converse. “I got three. Talbot, Brooks and Simon. Nate’s the best, if you want to know the truth. Did you know that at the age of sixty-seven that son of a bitch took up flying? He’s qualified in multiengines now—can you imagine?”

“
Dad!
” Valerie broke in suddenly. “You’re at the airport?”

“That’s what I said. Kennedy.”

“Don’t go home. Don’t go to your apartment. Take the first plane you can to Boston. Use another name. Call me back and let me know what flight you’re on. I’ll pick you up.”

“
Why?
”

“Just do as I say, Roger.
Please!
”

“What for?”

“You’re staying here. I’m leaving.”

Converse hurried out of the clothing store on the crowded Bornheimer Strasse and studied his reflection in the window. He surveyed the overall effect of his purchases, not as a customer inside in front of the full-length mirror for fit and appearance, but as one of the strolling pedestrians on the sidewalk. He was satisfied; there was nothing about the clothes that called attention to him. The photograph in the papers—the only one in the past fifteen years that would be in a wire service or newspaper file—was taken about a year ago when he was one of several merger attorneys interviewed by Reuters. It was a head-and-shoulders shot, showing him in his lawyer’s clothes—a dark suit and vest, white shirt and striped tie—the image of a rising international specialist. It was also the image everyone who read the papers had of him, and since it would not change but only spread with later editions, then he was the one who had to change.

Also, he could not continue to wear the clothes he had worn to the bank. A panicked Lachmann would undoubtedly give a complete description to the police, but even if his panic rendered him silent, he had seen him in a dark jacket, white shirt and striped tie. Unconsciously or not, thought Joel, he had sought a patina of respectability. Perhaps all men running for their lives did so because their essential dignity had been stolen from them. Regardless, dressed in those clothes he was the man in the newspaper photograph.

The appearance he had in mind belonged to a history professor he had known in college, a man whose various articles of clothing were all related. His jackets were subdued tweeds with elbow patches, the trousers gray—heavy or light flannel, never anything else—and his shirts were blue buttoned-down oxford, again without exception. Above his thick horn-rimmed glasses was perched a soft Irish walking hat, the brim sloped downward front and back. Wherever that man
went, whether down a street in Boston or New York’s Fifth Avenue or Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive—the last a place that Joel was sure he never saw—one would know he belonged to academic New England.

Converse had managed to duplicate the outward appearance of the man in his memory, except for the tinted glasses, which he would have to replace with horn rims. He had passed a large variety store, Bonn’s equivalent of an American five-and-dime, and he knew that there would be a counter with glasses of different sizes and shapes, a few slightly magnified for reading, others clear.

For reasons that were only beginning to come into focus, those glasses were now vital to him. Then he understood. He was preoccupied with what he knew he
could
do—change his appearance. He was procrastinating, uncertain what to do next, not sure he was capable of doing anything.

He looked at his face in the oval mirror of the variety store, again satisfied with what he saw. The ersatz tortoiseshell rims were thick, the glass clear; the effect was owlish, scholarly. He was no longer the man in the newspaper photograph, and equally important, the concentration he had devoted to his appearance had begun to clear his mind. He could think again, sit down somewhere and sort things out. He also needed food and a drink.

The café was crowded, the stained-glass windows muting the summer sunlight into shafts of blue and red piercing the smoke. He was shown to a table against the black-leather upholstered banquette, assured by the maitre d’, or whoever he was, that all he had to do was request a menu in English; the items were numbered. Whisky on the Continent, however, was universally accepted as Scotch; he ordered a double, and took out the pad and ball-point pen he had picked up at the variety store. His drink came and he proceeded to write.

René! Why hadn’t he thought of Mattilon before? He understood why the Frenchman made the remarks attributed to him anonymously in the newspaper story. René was trying to be protective. If there was no defense, or if it was so weak so as not to be viable, the most logical backup was temporary insanity. Joel circled Mattilon’s name and wrote the number
1
on the left, circling it also. He would find a telephone exchange in the streets, the kind where operators assigned booths to bewildered tourists, and call René in Paris. He took two swallows of whisky, relaxing as the warmth spread through him, then went back to his list, starting at the top.

Connal …?
The presumption that he had been killed was inevitable, but it was not conclusive. If he was alive, he was being held for whatever information could be pried out of him. As the chief legal officer of the West Coast’s largest and most powerful naval base, and a man who had a history of meetings with the State Department’s Office of Munitions Control as well as its counterparts at the Pentagon, Fitzpatrick could be an asset to the men of Aquitaine. Yet to call attention to him was to guarantee his execution, if he had not been killed already. If he was still alive, the only way to save him was to find him, but not in any orthodox or official manner; it had to be done secretly. Connal had to be rescued secretly.

Suddenly, Joel saw the figure of a man in the uniform of the United States Army across the room talking with two civilians at the bar. He did not know the man. It was the uniform that struck him. It brought to mind the military chargé d’affaires at the embassy, that extraordinarily observant and precise officer who was capable of seeing a man who was not at a bridge at the exact moment he was not there. A liar for Aquitaine, someone whose lies identified him. If that liar did not know where Fitzpatrick was, he could be made to find out. Perhaps there was a way, after all. Converse drew a line on the right side of his list, connecting Connal Fitzpatrick with Admiral Hickman in San Diego. He did not give it a number; there was too much to consider.

Briefcase?
He was still convinced that Leifhelm’s men had not found it. If the generals of Aquitaine had that attaché
case, they would have let him know. It was not like those men to conceal such a prize, not from the prisoner who had thought he was a match for them. No, they would have told him one way or another, if only to make clear to him how totally he had failed. If he was right, Connal had hidden it. At the inn called Das Rektorat? It was worth a try. Joel circled the word Briefcase and numbered it 2.

“
Speisekarte, mein Herr?
” said a waiter before Converse knew he was standing there.

“English, please?”

“Certainly, sir.” The waiter separated his menus as though they were an outsized deck of cards. He selected one and handed it to Joel as he spoke. “The
Spezialität
for today is
Wienerschnitzel
—it is the same in English.”

“That’s fine. Keep the menu, I’ll take it.”

“
Danke
.” The man swept away before Joel could order another drink. It was just as well, he thought.

$93,000 plus
. There was nothing more to be said; the irritating bulge around his waist said it all. He had the money; it was to be used.

Embassy out … No Larry Talbot, et al.… No Beale … No Anstett … No man in San Francisco
. Throughout the meal he thought about each item, each statement, wondering how it all could have happened. Every step had been considered carefully, facts absorbed, dossiers memorized, caution uppermost. But everything had been blown away by complications far beyond the simple facts provided by Preston Halliday in Geneva.

Build just two or three cases that are tied to Delavane—even circumstantially—and it’ll be enough
.

In light of the revelations on Mykonos, then in Paris, Copenhagen and Bonn, the simplicity of that remark was almost criminal. Halliday would have been appalled at the depth and the breadth of influence Delavane’s legions had attained, at the penetrations they had made at the highest levels of the military, the police, Interpol and, obviously, now those who controlled the flow of news from so-called authoritative sources in Western governments.

Converse abruptly checked his racing thoughts. He suddenly realized that he was thinking about Halliday in the context of a man who saw only a pair of eyes at night in the jungle, unaware of the size or the ferocity of the unseen animal in the darkness. That was wrong. Halliday knew the materials
Beale was handing over to him on an island in the Aegean; he knew about the connections between Paris, Bonn, Tel Aviv and Johannesburg; he knew about the decision makers in the State Department and the Pentagon—he knew it
all!
He had arranged it all with unknown men in Washington! Halliday had lied in Geneva. A California wrestler he had befriended years ago in school named Avery Fowler was the manipulator, and in the name of A. Preston Halliday, he had lied.

Where were those subterranean men in Washington who had the audacity to raise half a million dollars for an incredible gamble but were too frightened to come out in the open? What kind of men
were
they? Their scout had been killed, their puppet accused of being a psychopathic assassin. How long could they
wait? What
were they?

The questions disturbed Converse so much that he tried not to pursue them—they would lead only to rage, which would blind his reason. He needed reason and, above all, the strength that came with awareness.

It was time to find a telephone exchange and reach Mattilon in Paris. René would believe him, René would help him. It was unthinkable that his old friend would do anything else.

The civilian walked in silence to the hotel window, knowing he was expected to deliver a pronouncement that would form the basis of a miracle—not a solution but a miracle, and there were no such things in the business he knew so well. Peter Stone was by all the rules a relic, a castaway who had seen it all, and in the final years of seeing had finally fallen apart. Alcohol had taken the place of true audacity, at the end rendering him a professional mutant, a part of him still proud of past accomplishments, another part sickened by the waste, by the knowledge of wasted lives, wasted strategies—morality thrown into a gargantuan wastebasket of a collective nonconscience.

Still, he had once been one of the best—he could not forget that. And when he knew it was all over, he had faced the fact that he was killing himself with a plethora of bourbon and self-pity. He had pulled out. But not before he had gained the enmity of his past employers in the Central Intelligence Agency, not for speaking out publicly but for telling them privately who and what they were. Fortunately, as sobriety returned he learned that his past employers had other enemies in Washington, enemies having nothing to do with foreign entanglements
or competition. Simply men and women serving the republic who wanted to know what the hell was going on when Langley wouldn’t tell them. He had survived—was surviving. He thought about these things, knowing that the two other men in the room believed he was concentrating on the issue at hand.

There was no issue. The file was closed, the border rimmed in black. The two who were with him were so young—God, so
damned
young!—they would find it too terrible to accept. He remembered, vaguely, when such a conclusion would have appalled him. But that was nearly forty years ago; he was almost sixty now, and he had heard such conclusions repeated too often to shed tears of regret. The regret—the sadness was there—but time and repetition had dulled his senses; clear evaluation was everything.

Stone turned and said with quiet authority, “We can’t
do anything
.” The Army captain and the Navy lieutenant were visibly upset. Peter Stone continued, “I spent twenty-three years in the tunnels, including a decade with Angleton, and I’m telling you there’s absolutely nothing we can do. We have to let him hang out, we can’t touch him.”