The Aquitaine Progression (35 page)

“David fits. He’s got an eye that keeps straying to the right.” Fitzpatrick suddenly stood erect, his bearing military. “I thought you were going to get the bourbon,
Lieutenant
?”

“Yes,
sir
, Commander!” shot back Joel, heading for Fitzpatrick’s suitcase.

“And if I remember correctly, after you pour us a drink, you’re going to tell me a story I want very much to hear.”

“Aye, aye, sir!” said Converse, lifting the suitcase off the floor and putting it on the couch. “And if I may suggest, sir,” continued Joel, “a room-service dinner might be in order. I’m sure the Commander needs nourishment after his trying day at the wheel.”

“Good thinking, Lieutenant. I’ll phone down to the
Empfang
.”

“Before calling your bookie, may I also suggest that you first call your sister?”

“Oh, Christ, I forgot!”

Chaim Abrahms walked down the dark street in Tel Aviv, his stocky frame draped in his usual safari jacket, boots beneath his khaki trousers, and a beret covering his nearly bald head. The beret was the only concession he made to the night’s purpose; normally he enjoyed being recognized, accepting the adulation with well-rehearsed humility. In daylight,
his head uncovered and held erect, and wearing his familiar jacket, he would acknowledge the homage with a nod, his eyes boring in on his followers.

“First a Jew!” was the phrase with which he was always greeted, whether in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, in sections of Paris and most of New York.

The phrase had been born years ago when as a young terrorist for the Irgun he had been condemned to death
in absentia
by the British for the slaughter of a Palestinian village, with the Arab corpses put on display for
Nakama
! He had then issued a cry heard around the world: “I am first a Jew, a son of Abraham! All else follows, and rivers of blood will follow if the children of Abraham are denied!”

The British, in 1948, not caring to create another martyr, commuted his sentence and gave him a large
moshav
. Yet the acreage of the settlement could not confine the militant sabra. Three wars had broken his agricultural shackles as well as unleashing his ferocity—and his brilliance in the field. It was a brilliance developed and refined through the early years of racing with a fugitive, fragmented army, for which the tactics of surprise, shock, hit and melt away were constant, when being outmanned and outgunned were the accepted odds but only victory was the acceptable outcome. He later applied the strategies and the philosophy of those years to the ever-expanding war machine that became the Army, Navy, and Air Force of a mighty Israel. Mars was in the heavens of Chaim Abrahm’s vision and, the prophets aside, the god of war was his strength, his reason for being. From Ramat Aviv to Har Hazeytim, from Rehovot to Masada of the Negev,
Nakama
! was the cry.
Retribution
to the enemies of Abraham’s children!

If only the Poles and the Czechs, the Hungarians and the Romanies, as well as the haughty Germans and the impossible Russians, had not immigrated to his country by such tens of thousands. They arrived and the complications came with them. Faction against faction, culture against culture, each group trying to prove it was more entitled to the name
Jew
than the others. It was all nonsense! They were there because they had to be; they had succumbed to Abraham’s enemies, permitted—yes,
permitted
—the slaughter of millions rather than rising as millions and slaughtering in return. Well, they found out what their
civilized
ways could bring them, and how much their Talmudic convolutions could earn them. So
they came to the Holy Land—
their
Holy Land, so they proclaimed. Well, it wasn’t theirs. Where were they when it was being clawed out of rock and arid desert by strong hands with primitive tools—Biblical tools? Where were they when the hated Arab and the despised English first felt the wrath of the tribal Jew? They were in the capitals of Europe, in their banks and their fancy drawing rooms, making money and drinking expensive brandy out of crystal goblets. No, they came here because they had to; they came to the Holy Land of the
sabra
.

They brought with them money and dandy ways and elegant words and confusing arguments and influence and the guilt of the world. But it was the sabra who taught them how to fight. And it was a sabra who would bring all Israel into the orbit of a mighty new alliance.

Abrahms reached the intersection of Ibn Gabirol and Arlosoroff streets; the streetlamps were haloed, their light hazy. It was just as well; he should not be seen. He had another block to go, to an address on Jabotinsky, an unprepossessing apartment house where there was an undistinguished flat leased by a man who appeared to be no more than an unimportant bureaucrat. What few realized, however, was that this man, this specialist who operated sophisticated computer equipment with communications throughout most of the world, was intrinsic to the global operations of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, which many considered the finest on earth. He, too, was a sabra. He was one of them.

Abrahms spoke his name quietly into the mouthpiece above the mail slot in the outer lobby; he heard the click in the lock of the heavy door and walked inside. He began the climb up the three flights of steps that would take him to the flat.

“Some wine, Chaim?”

“Whisky,” was the curt reply.

“Always the same question and always the same answer,” said the specialist. “I say ‘Some wine, Chaim?’ and you say one word. ‘Whisky,’ you say. You would drink whisky at the Seder, if you could get away with it.”

“I can and I do.” Abrahms sat in a cracked leather chair, looking around the plain, disheveled room with books everywhere, wondering, as he always did, why a man with such influence lived this way. It was rumored that the Mossad officer did not like company, and larger, more attractive quarters
might invite it. “I gathered from your grunts and coughs over the telephone that you have what I need.”

“Yes, I have it,” said the specialist, bringing a glass of very good Scotch to his guest. “I have it, but I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

“Why not?” asked Abrahms, drinking, his eyes alert over the rim of the glass and fixed on his host as the latter sat down opposite him.

“Basically because it’s confusing, and what’s confusing in this business is to be approached delicately. You are not a delicate man, Chaim Abrahms, forgive the indelicacy of my saying it. You tell me this Converse is your enemy, a would-be infiltrator, and I tell you I find nothing to support the conclusion. Before anything else, there must be a deep personal motive for a nonprofessional to engage in this kind of deception, this kind of behavior, if you will. There has to be a driving compulsion to strike out at an image of a cause he loathes. Well, there is a motive, and there is an enemy for which he must have great hatred, but neither is compatible with what you suggest. The information, incidentally, is completely reliable. It comes from the Quang Dinh—”

“What in hell is that?” interrupted the general.

“A specialized branch of North Vietnamese—now, of course, Vietnamese—intelligence.”

“You have sources
there
?”

“We fed them for years—nothing terribly vital, but sufficient to gain a few ears, and voices. There were things we had to know, weapons we had to understand; they could be turned against us.”

“This Converse was in North Vietnam?”

“For several years as a prisoner of war; there’s an extensive file on him. At first, his captors thought he could be used for propaganda, radio broadcasts, television—imploring his brutal government to withdraw and stop the bombing, all the usual garbage. He spoke well, presented a good picture, and was obviously very American. Initially they televised him as a murderer from the skies, saved from the angry mobs by humane troops, then later while eating and exercising; you see, they were programming him for a violently sudden reversal. They thought he was a soft, privileged young man who could be broken rather easily to do their bidding in exchange for more comfortable treatment—after having experienced a period of harsh deprivation. What they learned, however, was
quite different. Under that soft shell the inner lining was made of hard metal, and the odd thing was that as the months went by it grew harder, until they realized they had created—created was their word—a hellhound of sorts, somehow forged in steel.”

“Hellhound? Was that their word, too?”

“No, they called him an ugly troublemaker, which, considering the source, is not without irony. The point is, they recognized the fact that they
had
created him. The harsher the treatment, the more volatile he became, the more resilient.”

“Why not?” said Abrahms sharply. “He was angry. Prod a desert snake and watch him strike.”

“I can assure you, Chaim, it is not the normal human response under such conditions. A man can go mad and strike in crazed fury, or he can become reclusive to the point of catatonia, or fall apart weeping, willing to compromise anything and everything for the smallest kindness. He did none of these things. His was a calculated and inventive series of responses drawing on his own inner resources to survive. He led two escapes—the first lasting three days and the second five—before the groups were recaptured. As the leader, he was placed in a cage in the Mekong River, but he devised a way to kill the water rats by grabbing them from beneath the surface like a shark. He was then thrown into solitary confinement, a pit in the ground twelve feet deep with barbed wire anchored across the top. It was from there, during a heavy rainstorm at night, that he clawed his way up, bent the wire back and escaped alone. He made his way south through the jungles and in the river streams for over a hundred miles until he reached the American lines. It was no easy feat. They created a savagely obsessed man who won his own personal war.”

“Why didn’t they simply kill him before that?”

“I wondered myself,” said the specialist, “so I phoned my source in Hanoi, the one who provided the information. He said a strange thing, something quite profound in its way. He said he wasn’t there, of course, but he thought it was probably respect.”

“For an ugly troublemaker?”

“Captivity in war does odd things, Chaim, to both the captured and the captors. There are so many factors at work in a vicious game. Aggression, resistance, bravery, fear, and—not the least—curiosity, especially when the players
come from such diverse cultures as the Occident and the Orient. An abnormal bond is often formed, as much from the weariness of the testing game as from anything else, perhaps. It doesn’t lessen the national animosities, but a subtle recognition sets in that tells these men, these players, that they are not really in the game by their own choosing. In-depth analyses further show us that it is the captors, not the captured, who first perceive this commonality. The latter are obsessed with freedom and survival, while the former begin to question their absolute authority over the lives and conditions of other men. They start to wonder what it would be like to be in the other player’s shoes. It’s all part of what the psychiatrists call the Stockholm syndrome.”

“What in the name of
God
are you trying to say? You sound like one of those bores in the Knesset reading a position paper. A little of this, a little of that and a lot of wind!”

“You are definitely not delicate, Chaim. I’m trying to explain to you that while this Converse nurtured his hatreds and his obsessions, his captors wearied of the game, and as our source in Hanoi suggests, they grudgingly spared his life out of respect, before he made his final and successful escape.”

To Abrahm’s bewilderment the specialist had apparently finished. “And?” said the sabra.

“Well, there it is. There is the motive and the enemy, but they are also
your
motive and
your
enemy—arrived at from different routes, of course. Ultimately, you wish to smash insurgence wherever it erupts, curb the spread of Third World revolutions, especially Islamic, because you know they’re being fostered by the Marxists—read Soviets—and are a direct threat to Israel. One way or another it’s the global threat that’s brought you all together, and in my judgment rightfully so. There is a time and a place for a military-industrial complex, and it is now. It must run the governments of the free world before that world is buried by its enemies.”

Chaim Abrahms squinted and tried not to shout. “
And?
”

“Can’t you see? This Converse is one of you. Everything supports it. He has the motive and an enemy he’s seen in the harshest light. He is a highly regarded attorney who makes a great deal of money with a very conservative firm, and his clients are among the wealthiest corporations and conglomerates. Everything he’s been and everything he stands for can only benefit from your efforts. The confusion lies in his unorthodox methods, and I can’t explain them except to say that
perhaps they are
not
unorthodox in the specialized work he does. Markets can plummet on rumors; concealment and diversion are surely respected. Regardless, he doesn’t want to destroy you, he wants to join you.”

The sabra put his glass down on the floor and struggled out of the chair. With his chin tucked into his breastbone and his hands clasped behind his back, Abrahms paced back and forth in silence. He stopped and looked down at the specialist.

“Suppose, just
suppose
,” he said, “the almighty Mossad has made a mistake, that there’s something you didn’t find.”

“I would find that hard to accept.”

“But it’s a possibility!”

“In light of the information we’ve gathered, I doubt it. Why?”

“Because I have a sense of smell,
that’s
why!”

The man from the Mossad kept his eyes on Abrahms, as if studying the soldier’s face—or thinking from a different viewpoint. “There is only one other possibility, Chaim. If this Converse is not who and what I’ve described, which would be contrary to all the data we’ve compiled, then he is an agent of his government.”