The Parsifal Mosaic (91 page)

“Good God, where are we?” she asked, half shouting.

“I think it’s the Heffernans’ place. How’s the leg?”

“Murder, absolute murder!
Christ!”

“You can’t ride on it.”

“I can hardly walk on it, you damn fool.”

“Temper, temper. Come on, let’s find a phone.” The man and woman started through the edge of trees, the man leading both horses, threading them around several thick trunks. “Here,” he said, reaching for a low branch on a thick bush. “I can tie them up here and come back for them; they won’t go anywhere.”

“Then you can help me. This really is excruciating.”

The horses tied and grazing, the couple began to walk. Through the trees they could see the outlines of the wide semicircular drive at the front entrance of the large house. They also saw the figure of a man who seemed to emerge out of nowhere. He was in a gabardine topcoat, with both hands in his pockets. They met and the man in the topcoat spoke. “May I help you? This is private property.”

“I trust we
all
have private property, old man,” replied the
sportsman supporting the woman. “My wife pulled a muscle over our last jump. She can’t ride.”

“What?”

“Horses, sport. Our horses are tied up back there. We were doing a little pre-hunt work over the course before Saturday’s meet, and I’m afraid we came a cropper, as they say. Take us to a phone, please.”

“Well, I … I …”

“This
is
the Heffernans’ house, isn’t it?” demanded the husband.

“Yes, but Mr, and Mrs. Heffernan are not here, sir. Our orders are to allow no one inside.”

“Oh, shit!” exploded the wife. “How tacky can you be? My leg hurts, you ass! I need a ride back to the club.”

“One of the men will be happy to drive you, ma’am.”

“And my chauffeur can bloody well come and pick me up! Really, just who
are
these Heffernans? Are they members, darling?”

“I don’t think so, Buff. Look, the man has his orders, and tacky as they are, it’s not his fault. You go along and I’ll take the horses back.”

“They’d better not try to
become
members,” said the wife as the two men helped her across the drive to an automobile.

The man walked back through the woods to the horses, untied them, and led them across the field, where he lowered the rails and prodded them through into the tall grass. He replaced the rails, mounted his hunter and, with the woman’s horse in tow, trotted south over the course of Saturday’s hunt—as he understood the course to be from his first and only study of the charts as a guest of the club.

He reached under his saddle and pulled out a powerful hand-held radio; he pressed a switch and raised the instrument to his lips.

“There are two cars,” he said into the radio. “A black Lincoln, license plate seven-four-zero, MRL; and a dark green Buick, license one-three-seven, GMJ. The place is ringed with guards, and there are no rear exit roads. The windows are thick; you’d need a cannon to blow through them, and we were picked up by density infrareds.”

“Got it” was the reply, amplified over the tiny speaker. “We’re mainly interested in the vehicles.… By the way, I can see the Buick now.”

The man with the various saws dipped to and dangling from his wide leather belt was high up in the tall pine tree bordering the road, his safety strap around it and clamped to his harness. He shoved the hand-held radio into its holster and adjusted the binoculars to his eyes, looking diagonally down through the branches, focusing on the automobile coming out of the tree-lined drive.

The view was clean, all angles covered. No cars could enter or leave the premises of Sterile Five without being seen-even at night; the capabilities of infrared applied to lenses as well as trip lights.

The man whistled; the door of the truck far below opened, and on its panel were the words
HIGH TOP TREE SURGEONS
. A second man stepped out and looked up.

“Take off,” said the man above, loud enough to be heard. “Relieve me in two hours.”

The driver of the truck headed north for a mile and a half to the first intersection. There was a gas station on the right; the doors of its repair shop were open, and an automobile was inside, off the ground on a hydraulic lift, facing front. The driver reached for the switch and snapped his headlights on and off. Instantly, within the garage’s shop the headlights of the car on the lift flashed on and off—the signal had been acknowledged, the vehicle was in position. The station’s owner believed he was cooperating—confidentially—with the narcotics division of the state police. It was the least a citizen could do.

The driver swung to his right, then immediately to the left, making a U-turn between the converging roads; he headed south. Three minutes later he passed the pine tree that concealed his companion beyond the branches near the top. Under different circumstances he might have touched his horn; he couldn’t now. There could be no sound, no sight that marked in any way that area of the road. Instead, he accelerated and in fifty seconds came to another intersection, the first south of Sterile Five.

Diagonally across on the left was a small country inn, miniature antebellum in design—a large dollhouse built to bring back memories of an old plantation. In the back was a black asphalt parking lot, where perhaps a dozen cars were lined
up, like large brightly colored toys. Except one, the fourth from the end, with a clear view of the intersection and swift access to the exit Facing front, it was layered with dirt, a poor relation in the company of its shiny, expensive cousins.

Again the driver leaned forward and flicked his headlights on and off. The dirty automobile—with an engine more powerful than any other in the lot-did the same. Another signal was acknowledged. Whatever emerged from Sterile Five could be picked up in either direction.

Arthur Pierce studied his face in the mirror of the run-down motel on the outskirts of Falls Church, Virginia; he was satisfied with what he saw. The fringe of gray circling his shaved head was in concert with the rimless glasses and the shabby brown cardigan sweater worn over the soiled white shirt with the frayed collar. He was the image of the loser, whose minor talents and lack of illusion kept him securely, if barely, above the poverty level. Nothing was ventured because it was useless. Why bother? No one stopped such men on the street; they walked too slowly; they were inconsequential.

Pierce turned from the mirror and walked across the room to the road map spread out under the light of a plastic lamp on the cheap, stained desk against the wall. On the right, holding the map in place, was a gray metal container with the emblem of the United States Navy stamped on the top, the medical insignia below it, and a brass, built-in combination lock on the side. In it was a document as lethal as any in history. The psychiatric diagnosis of a statesman the world revered, a diagnosis labeling that man as insane—as having
been
insane while functioning as the international voice of one of the two most powerful nations on earth. And the nation that permitted this intolerable condition to exist could no longer serve as the leader of the cause it espoused. A madman had betrayed not only his own government but the world-lying, deceiving, misleading, forging alliances with enemies, scheming against supposed allies. No matter that he was insane, it had happened. It was all there.

The steel container contained an incredible weapon, but for it to be used with devastating effect it had to reach the proper hands in Moscow. Not the tired old compromisers, but the visionaries with the strength and the will to move swiftly to bring the corrupt, incompetent giant to its knees.
The possibility that the Matthias file might fall into soft, wrinkled hands in Moscow was insufferable; it would be bartered,
negotiated
, finally thrown away by weak men frightened of the very people they controlled. No, thought Arthur Pierce, this metal container belonged to the VKR. Only to the Voennaya.

He could afford no risks, and several phone calls had convinced him that there
was
risk in channeling it out with the few he could trust. As expected, embassy and consulate personnel were under heavy surveillance; all international flights were monitored, and hand and cargo luggage X-rayed. Too much risk.

He would bring it out himself, along with the ultimate weapon, the terminal weapon, documents that called for successive nuclear strikes against Soviet Russia and the People’s Republic of China—agreements signed by the great American Secretary of State. They were nuclear fantasies conceived by an insane genius, working with one of the most brilliant minds ever produced by the Soviet Union. Fantasies so real that the tired old men in the Kremlin would run for their dachas and their vodka, leaving decisions to those who could cope, to the men of the Voennaya.

Where
was
the brilliant mind that had made it all possible? The man who had turned on his homeland only to learn the truth—that he had been wrong.
So wrong!
Where was Parsifal? Where was Alexei Kalyazin?

With these thoughts Pierce turned to the map again. The inept—and not so inept—Havelock had mentioned the Shenandoah—that the man they called Parsifal was somewhere in the Shenandoah area, by implication within a reasonable distance of Matthias’s country home. The implied reasonable distance, however, was the variable quotient. The Shenandoah Valley was more than a hundred miles long, over twenty miles wide, from the Allegheny to the Blue Ridge Mountains. What might be considered reasonable? There was no reasonable answer, so the solution was to be found in the opposite direction. In the plodding mind of Michael Havelock—Mikhail Havlíček, son of Václav, named for a Russian grandfather from Rovno—a man whose talents lay in persistence and a degree of imagination, not brilliance. Havelock would reduce the arc, put in use a hundred computers to trace a single telephone call made at a specific time
to a specific place to a man he called a zealot Havelock would do the work and a
paminyatchik
would reap the benefits. Lieutenant Commander Decker would be left alone; be was a key that might well unlock a door.

Pierce bent over the map, his index finger shifting from one line to another. The arc, the semicircle that blanketed the Shenandoah from Sterile Five, was covered, with men and vehicles in position. From Harpers Ferry to the Valley Pike, Highways 11 and 66, Routes 7, 50,15, 17, 29, and 33, all were manned, waiting for word that a specific car was approaching at a specific time heading for a specific place. That place was to be determined and reported; nothing else was required of the men in those vehicles. They were hirelings, not participants, their time paid for in money, not purpose or destiny.

Arthur Pierce, born Nikolai Petrovich Malyekov in the village of Ramenskoye, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, suddenly thought about that destiny, and the years that had led to his own electrifying part in it. He had never wavered, never forgotten who he was or why he had been given the supreme opportunity to serve the ultimate cause, a cause so meaningful and so necessary for a world where the relative few tyrannized the many, where millions upon millions lived on the edge of despair or in hopeless poverty so that the capitalist manipulators could laugh over global balance sheets while their armies burned pajama-clad children in faraway lands. This was fact, not provocative propaganda. He had seen it all for himself—from the burning villages in Southeast Asia to the corporate dining rooms where offers of employment were accompanied by grins and winks and promises of stock options that were the first steps toward wealth, to the inner corridors of government power where hypocrites and incompetents encouraged more hypocrisy and incompetence.
God
, he hated it all! Hated the corruption and the greed and the sanctimonious Bars who deceived the masses to whom they were responsible, abusing the powers given them, lining their pockets and the pockets of their own.… There
was
a better way. There was
commitment
. There was the Voennaya.

He had been thirteen years old when he was told by the loving couple he called Mother and Father. They explained while holding him and gazing into his eyes to let him see
their love. He was theirs, they said, but he was also not theirs. He had been born to a chosen couple thousands of miles away who loved him so much they gave him to the State, to a cause that would make a better world for generations to come. And as his “mother” and “father” spoke, so many things in Arthur Pierce’s young memory began to fall into place. All the discussions—not only with his “mother” and “father,” but with the scores of visitors who came so frequently to the farmhouse—discussions that told of suffering and oppression and of a despotic form of government that would be replaced by a government dedicated to the people—
all
the people.

He was to be a part of that change. Over the early years certain other visitors had come and had given him games to play, puzzles to work, exercises to read—tests that graded his capabilities. And one day when he was thirteen he was pronounced extraordinary; on that same day he was told his real name. He was ready to join the cause.

It would not be easy, his “mother” and “father” had said, but he was to remember when pressures seemed overwhelming that
they
were there,
always
there. And should anvthing happen to them, others would take their place to help him, encourage him, guide him, knowing that still others were watching. He was to be the best in all things; he was to be
American—
kind, generous and, above all, seemingly fair; he was to use his gifts to rise as far as he was capable of rising. But he was never to forget who and what he was or the cause that gave him the gift of life and the opportunity to help make the world better than it was.

Things after that auspicious day were not as difficult as his “mother” and “father” had predicted. Through his high school years and college, his secret served to prod him—because it was
his
secret and he
was
extraordinary. They were years of exhilaration: each new prize and award was proof of his superiority. He found it easy to be liked; as though in a never-ending popularity contest, the crown was always his. Yet there was self-denial, too, and it served to remind him of his commitment. He had many friends but no deep friendships, no relationships. Men liked him but accepted his basic distance, ascribing it usually to his having to find jobs to pay his way through school. Women he used only for sexual release
and formed no attachments whatsoever, generally meeting them miles away from wherever he was living.