The Aquitaine Progression (103 page)

“Stow it, Converse. Let’s go for a walk. We used to walk a lot, and I’d like to get back in the habit. It’s not much fun alone.”

Joel took her in his arms. They kissed, gently at first, feeling the warmth and the comfort that had come back to them. He pulled his head away, his hands sliding to her shoulders, and looked into her wide, vibrant eyes. “Will you marry me, Mrs. Converse?” he said.

“Good Lord, again? Well, why not? As you said once before, I wouldn’t even have to change the initials on my lingerie.”

“You never had initials on it.”

“You found that out long before you made the remark.”

“I didn’t want you to think I stared.”

“Yes, my darling, I’ll marry you. But first we have things to do. Even before our walk.”

“I know. Peter Stone by way of the Tatiana family in Charlotte, North Carolina. He did terrible things to me, but strange as it seems, I think I like him.”

“I don’t,” said Valerie firmly. “I want to kill him.”

It was the end of the second day in the countdown of three. The worldwide demonstrations against nuclear war were only ten hours away, to start at the first light halfway across the world. The killings would begin, setting the chaos in motion.

The group of eighteen men and five women sat scattered about in the dark projection room in the underground strategy complex of the White House. Each had a small writing tray attached to his seat with a yellow pad lighted by a Tensor lamp. On the screen was flashed in thirty-second intervals one face after another, each with a number in the upper right-hand corner. The instructions had been terse, in the language best understood by these people, and delivered by Peter Stone who had selected them.
Study the faces, make no audible comments, and mark down by number any you recognize, bearing in mind terminal operations. At the end of the series the lights will be turned on and we’ll talk. And, if need be, run the series again and again until we come up with something. Remember, we believe these men are killers. Concentrate on that
.

They were told nothing else. Except M.I.6’s Derek Belamy, who had arrived within a half-hour of the extraordinary session, looking haggard from his obviously exhausting journey. When Derek walked through the door, Peter had pulled him aside and each gripped the other’s arms. Stone was never so happy or so relieved in his life to see any man. Whatever
he
might have missed, or could miss, Belamy would find it. The British agent had a tenth sense above anyone else’s sixth, including Peter’s, which, of course, was denied modestly by Derek.

“I need you, old friend,” said Peter. “I need you badly.”

“It’s why I’m here, old friend,” replied Belamy warmly. “Can you tell me anything?”

“There’s no time now, but I can give you a name. Delavane.”

“Mad Marcus?”

“The same. It’s his crisis and it’s real.”

“The
bastard
!” whispered the Englishman. “There’s no one I’d rather see at the end of a barbed-wire rope. Talk to you later, Peter. You’ve got your socializing to do. Incidentally, from what I can see, you’ve got the best here tonight.”

“The best, Derek. We can’t afford any less.”

Beyond the American military personnel who had initially approached Stone, as well as Colonel Alan Metcalf, Nathan Simon, Justice Andrew Wellfleet and the Secretary of State, the remaining audience was composed of the most experienced and secure intelligence officers Peter Stone had known in a lifetime of clandestine operations. They had been flown over by military transport from France, Great Britain, West Germany, Israel, Spain and the Netherlands. Among them were, besides the extraordinary Derek Belamy, François Villard, chief of France’s highly secretive Organisation Etrangère; Yosef Behrens, the Mossad’s leading authority on terrorism; Pablo Amandarez, Madrid’s specialist in KGB Mediterranean penetrations, and Hans Vonmeer of the Netherlands’ secret state police. The others, including the women, were equally respected in the caverns of deep-cover, beyond-salvage operations. They knew by name, face or reputation the legions of killers for hire, killers by order, and killers by reason of ideology. Above all, each was trusted, each a man or woman Stone had worked with; collectively they were the elite of the shadow world.

A face! He knew the face! It stayed on the screen and he wrote on his pad: “Dobbins. Number 57. Cecil or Cyril Dobbins. British Army. Transferred to British Intelligence.
Personal aide to … Derek Belamy!
”

Stone looked over at his friend across the aisle, fully expecting him to be writing on his yellow pad. Instead, the Englishman frowned and sat motionless in his chair, his pencil
poised above the paper. The next face appeared on the screen. And the next, and the next, until the series was over. The lights came on, and the first person to speak was the Mossad’s Yosef Behrens. “Number seventeen is an artillery officer in the IDF recently transferred to the Security Branch, Jerusalem. His name is Arnold.”

“Number thirty-eight,” said François Villard, “is a colonel in the French Army attached to the guard of Invalides. It is the face; the name I do not recall.”

“Number twenty-six,” said the man from Bonn, “is Oberleutnant Ernst Müller of the Federal Republic’s Luftwaffe. He is a highly skilled pilot frequently assigned to fly ministers of state to conferences both within and without West Germany.”

“Number forty-four,” said a dark-skinned woman with a pronounced Hispanic accent, “has no such credentials as your candidates. He is a drug dealer, suspected of many killings and operates out of Iviza. He was once a paratrooper. Name, Orejo.”

“Son of a
gun
, I just don’t believe it!” said the young lieutenant William Landis, the computer expert from the Pentagon. “I know number fifty-
one
, I’m almost positive! He’s one of the adjutants in Middle East procurements. I’ve seen him a lot but I don’t know his name.”

Six other men and two women volunteered twelve additional identities and positions as everyone in the room silently looked for an emerging pattern. There was a preponderance of military personnel, and the umbrella of the rest was puzzling. In the main they were ex-combat soldiers from high-casualty outfits who had drifted into crime—largely violent crime, the sort of men Peter Stone knew the generals of Aquitaine considered human garbage.

Finally Derek Belamy spoke in his hard, clipped distant voice. “There are four or five faces I associate with dossiers, but I’m not making connections.” He looked over at Stone. “You’ll run them again, won’t you, old boy?”

“Of course, Derek,” replied the former station chief in London. Stone, who had said nothing, rose from his chair and addressed the gathering. “Everything you’ve given us will be fed immediately into computers, and we’ll see if we come up with any correlations. And to repeat what I said previously, I want to thank you all and apologize again for not giving you the explanations you deserve, not only for your help but for the trouble we’ve caused you. Speaking personally, my consolation
is that you’ve all been here before and I know you understand. We’ll break for fifteen minutes and start again. There are coffee and sandwiches in the next room.” Stone nodded his thanks once more and started for the door. Derek Belamy intercepted him in the aisle.

“Peter, I’m dreadfully sorry it took me so long to get back to you. Truth is, the office had a devil of a time tracking me down. I was visiting friends in Scotland.”

“I thought you might be in Northern Ireland. It’s a hell of a mess, isn’t it?”

“You were always better than you thought you were. I was in Belfast, of course. But right now I promise to do better—I’m sure I will—but the fact is I’m bushed; it was a perfectly terrible trip and, of course, no sleep whatsoever. All those faces began to look alike—I either knew them all or I didn’t know a damned one!”

“Running them again will help,” said Stone.

“Quite so,” agreed Belamy. “And Peter, whatever this tangle is with that maniac, Delavane, I couldn’t have been more delighted to see you in the control chair. We were all told you were out, rather firmly out.”

“I’m back in. Very firmly.”

“I can see that, chap. That
is
your Secretary of State in the back row, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“
Congratulations
, old boy. Well, off for coffee, black and hot. See you in a few minutes.”

“Across the aisle, old friend.”

Stone walked out the door and turned right in the white corridor. He could feel the rapid acceleration of his heartbeat; it was a cousin to Johnny Reb’s claims of a churning stomach and an acid taste in his mouth—bile, the Rebel called it. He had to get to a telephone quickly. Converse’s courier, the Sûreté’s Prudhomme, would be arriving within the hour; a Secret Service escort was waiting for him at Dulles Airport with instructions to bring him directly to the White House. But it was not the Frenchman who concerned Stone now, it was Converse himself. He had to reach him before the session began again. He
had
to!

When the lawyer had contacted him through the Tatiana relay, Peter had been astonished by the sheer audacity of what Converse had done.
Kidnapping
the three generals—video-taping the interrogations or the “oral examinations”
or whatever the legal terminology was; it was insane! The only thing more insane was the fact that he had carried it off—thanks obviously to the resources of a very determined, very angry man from the Sûreté. The computer
was
in Scharhörn, the master list of Aquitaine buried somewhere in its intricate mechanism, only to be erased by inaccurate codes, the complex itself mined with explosives.
Jesus
!

And now the final insanity. The man no one could find, the source so deeply shrouded they frequently doubted his existence despite the fact that all logic insisted he was there. There
had
to be Aquitaine’s man in England, for there could be no Aquitaine without the British. Further, Stone knew he was the conduit, the primary communicator between Palo Alto and the generals overseas, for constant screenings of Delavane’s telephone charges showed repeated calls to a number in the Hebrides, and such a relay device was all too familiar to the former intelligence agent. The calls disappeared at that number in the Scottish islands, just as the KGB calls processed through Canada’s Prince Edward disappeared, and the Company’s communications routed through Key West could not be traced.

Belamy!
The man whose face never appeared in any publication—film was destroyed instantly by aides if he was even in the background of a photograph. The most guarded operations officer in England, with access to secrets culled over decades and scores of devices created by the best minds of M.I.6. And yet, was it
possible?
Derek Belamy, the quiet, good-humored chess player, the friend who gave good whisky and a fine ear to an American colleague who had progressively had serious doubts about his calling in life. The
better
friend for having the wisdom and the courage to warn his colleague that he was drinking too much, that perhaps he should take a sabbatical, and if money was a problem, surely some sort of quiet consultation agreement could be worked out with his own organization. Was it possible, this decent man, this
friend
?

Stone reached the door in the hallway marked simply by the number 14, OCCUPIED. He walked inside the small room and went to the desk and the telephone. He did not sit down; his anxiety would not permit it. He picked up the phone and dialed the White House switchboard as he took out the slip of paper in his pocket with Converse’s number somewhere in France. He gave it to the operator, adding simply, “This
should be scrambled. I’m talking from Strategy Fourteen, confirm by trace.”

“Trace confirmed, sir. Scrambler will be in operation. Shall I call you back?”

“No, thanks, I’ll stay on the line.” Stone remained standing as he heard the hollow echo of numbers being punched and the faint hum of the scrambling machine. And then he heard the sound of a door opening. He turned.

“Put the phone down, Peter,” said Derek Belamy quietly as he shut the door. “There’s no point to this.”

“It
is
you, isn’t it?” Stone slowly, awkwardly replaced the phone in its cradle.

“Yes, it is. And I want everything you want, my old friend. Neither of us could deny ourselves the parting shots, could we? I said I was visiting friends in Scotland and you said you thought I was in Ireland. We’ve learned over the years, haven’t we? The eyes don’t lie. Scotland—calls to the Hebrides; the glass fell over your eyes. And earlier, when that face came on the screen, you looked across the aisle a bit too obviously, I think.”

“Dobbins. He worked for you.”

“You wrote frantically on your pad, yet you said nothing.”

“I was waiting for you to say something.”

“Yes, of course, but I couldn’t, could I?”

“Why, Derek? For Christ’s sake,
why
?”

“Because it’s right and you know it.”

“I
don’t
know it! You’re a sane, reasonable man. They’re
not
!”

“They’ll be replaced, naturally. How often have you and I used drones we couldn’t abide because their contributions were necessary to the objective?”

“
What
objective? An international totalitarian alliance? A military state without borders? All of us robots marching to the drums of fanatics?”

“Oh, come off it, Peter. Spare us both the liberal drivel. You left this business once, drinking yourself into a stupor because of the waste, the futility, the deceits we all practiced—the people we killed—to maintain what we laughingly called the status quo.
What
status quo, old man? To be continuously harassed by our inferiors the world over? To be held hostage by screaming mullahs and hysterical fools who still live in the Dark Ages and would cut our throats over the price of a barrel of oil? To be manipulated at every turn by Soviet
deceptions? No, Peter, there really
is
a better way. The means may be distasteful, but the end result is not only desirable, it’s also honorable.”