The Aquitaine Progression (91 page)

“Go for it!” cried the Navy lieutenant.

“For Christ’s sake, find another phrase,” said the captain.

“It’s an answering machine!” shouted Val, gripping the mouthpiece of the telephone.

Joel came out of the bathroom. “One hour,” he whispered.

“One hour,” she said. “Miss Parquette will call back in an hour.” She hung up.

“And every hour after that,” added Converse, staring down at the phone. “I don’t like this. It’s one o’clock in the morning back there, and if there’s a wife or children around, someone should have been there.”

“Sam didn’t mention a wife or children, except his own.”

“No reason why he would.”

“There could be a dozen explanations, Joel.”

“I just hope it’s not the one I keep thinking about.”

“Let me call Prudhomme,” said Valerie. “Let’s use this Tatiana family.”

“Not yet.”

“Why
not
?”

“We need something else—
he
needs something else.” Suddenly, Converse’s gaze fell on the thick envelope addressed to Nathan Simon. It was on the bureau, his false passport on top. “My God, we may
have
it,” he said quietly. “It’s been right there all the time and I didn’t see it.”

Val followed his eyes. “The analysis you wrote for Nathan?”

“I called it the best brief I ever wrote, but of course it’s not a brief at all. It doesn’t address points of law except in the widest, most abstract sense, without acceptable evidence to support the accusations. What it does address is the perverted ambitions of powerful men who want to
change
the laws, altering governments, supplanting them with raw military controls, all in the name of
maintaining
the law and preserving the
order
they themselves will be called upon to maintain and preserve. And if ‘compromise’ means killing—if they intend mounting wholesale assassinations—they can do it.”

“What’s your
point
, Joel?”

“If I’m going to build a case, I’d better do it the only way I know how—from premise to conclusion based on affidavits, depositions—starting with my own and ending with pretrial examinations.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“The law, Mrs. Converse,” said Joel, picking up the envelope. “And what it’s meant to do. I can use most of what’s in here—just in a different form. Naturally, I’ll want other corroborating depositions, the farther afield the better. That’s
when you’ll call this Prudhomme and join the Tatiana family. Then hopefully we’ll reach Sam’s friend, Metcalf—goddamn it, he’ll have
something
to give us.… Finally, I’m going to want to examine at least two of the alleged defendants orally—Leifhelm, for one, and probably Abrahms, maybe Delavane himself.”

“You’re
mad
!” cried Valerie.

“No, I’m not,” said Converse simply. “I’ll need help, I know that. But I’ve got enough money to hire a couple of squads of miscreants—and once Prudhomme understands, I have an idea he’ll know where the union hall is. We’ve got a lot of work to do, Val. All courts like immaculate manuscripts.”

“For Christ’s sake, Joel, speak English.”

“You’re a romantic, Mrs. Converse,” he said approaching her. “These are the nuts and bolts you don’t find in seascapes.”

“They
do
have to be sketched, my darling. And balanced or unbalanced, the colors deliberate—What
are
you talking about?”

“A stenographer—a legal secretary, if you can find one. Someone who’s willing to stay here all day and half the night, if need be. Offer three times the going rate.”

“Say I find one,” said Val. “What in heaven’s name are you going to tell her? Or him?”

Joel frowned as he crossed aimlessly to the window. “A novel,” he said, turning. “We’re writing a novel. The first twenty or thirty pages are to be read as an upcoming court case, a trial.”

“Based on real people, men everyone’s read about?”

“It’s a new kind of fiction, but it’s only a novel. That’s all it is.”

Morning came to New York and Stone was alone again. The Navy lieutenant and the Army captain were back at their desks in Washington. It was better this way; they could not help him, and the less they were seen around the apartment, the more likely they might escape detection if the hammer came down. And the hammer
could
come down, Stone knew it. It was as clear as the fact that Colonel Alan Metcalf was the chord they needed to start the music. “Without him,” as Johnny Reb might have said in the old days, “the tune ain’t gonna get out of the fiddle—no stompin’ unless he shows up.” But could he show up? wondered the former operations officer
for Central Intelligence. To all intents and purposes he had disappeared, that was the word from Nellis, and the investigating unit did not pretend to understand or appreciate his absence. That, too, was the word and it was delivered harshly.

But Stone understood. Metcalf now knew what he knew—what they knew—and the colonel would not play by any rules written in the regulations, not if he was any good. Not if he was alive. And the ex-agent also understood something else when it came to telephone answering machines and intelligence personnel. The equipment was adaptable and sophisticated, courtesy of the American taxpayer and, considering the extraordinary waste, one of his better investments. Metcalf would play it well—if he was alive and any good. He would use a remote, programming it and reprogramming it, hearing what he wanted to hear, erasing what he wanted to erase, and leaving in certain information, preferably misleading. There would also be a code, probably changed daily, that if not inserted accurately would melt the tape with a ten-second burst of microwaves—all standard. If he was any good. If he was alive.

Stone counted on both—that the colonel was good and that he was alive. There was no point in thinking otherwise; that only led to staying in Johnny Reb’s hammock or “goin’ fishin’,” doing whatever one did as a robot. Which was why Stone had left a message on Metcalf’s machine an hour ago at six-thirty-five. He had chosen a name Converse’s wife—former wife—would have to have relayed to the dead Samuel Abbott.
Marcus Aurelius ascending. Respond and erase, please
. Then Stone had given the telephone number at the apartment, which, if traced, would lead the tracers to the Hilton Hotel on Fifty-third Street.

There was only one other person in the world Stone wished he could reach, but that man was “on holiday—we have no means of getting in touch.” The words were patently a lie, but to challenge that lie would mean that Peter would have to say more than he wanted to say. The man was Derek Belamy, chief of Clandestine Operations for Britain’s M.I.6 and one of the only real friends Stone had ever had in all his years with the Central Intelligence Agency. Belamy was such a good friend that when Peter was station chief in London, the Englishman had told him bluntly to get out for a while before the whisky took over altogether and his ass was nailed to an alcoholic cross: “I have a doctor who’ll certify a minor
breakdown, Peter. I’ve a guest cottage on the grounds in Kent. Stay there, get well, old boy.”

Stone had refused, and it was the most destructive decision he had ever made. The rest was the drunken nightmare Belamy had predicted.

But it was not Derek’s concern for a friend that made Peter want to reach him. It was Belamy’s brilliance, his perceptiveness, quietly concealed behind a pleasant, even prosaic exterior. And the knowledge that Derek Belamy had the pulse of Europe in his head, and given the most basic information, could smell out a Delavane operation. And, in fact, thought Stone hopefully, he was smelling them out now in Ireland—certainly where he was now. Sooner or later—preferably sooner—Belamy would return his call. When he did, a munitions shipment from Beloit, Wisconsin, would be described in full. Derek Belamy loathed the Delavanes of this world. His old friend would become an ally against the generals.

The telephone rang; Stone looked at it and let it ring again.
Metcalf?
He reached over and picked it up. “Yes?”

“
Aurelius?
”

“Somehow I knew you’d come through, Colonel.”

“Who the hell
are
you?”

“The name’s Stone and we’re on the same side, at least I think we are. However, you wear a uniform and I don’t, so I need a little more confidence in you. Can you understand that?”

“You’re one of those bastards in D.C. who sent him out!”

“You’re warmer, Colonel. I came on late, but yes, I am one of those bastards. What happened to General Abbott?”

“He was killed, you son of a bitch!… I assume this phone is clean.”

“For at least twenty-four hours. Then we all disappear, just like you disappeared.”

“No remorse? No conscience? Do you know what you’ve
done
?”

“We don’t have time for that, Colonel. Perhaps later, if there’s a later for us.… Get
off
it, soldier! I’ve
lived
with this!
Now
. Where do we meet? Where are you?”

“Okay, okay,” said the obviously exhausted Air Force officer. “I took a dozen different flights. I’m in—where the hell am I?—in Knoxville, Tennessee. I’ve got a flight to Washington in twenty minutes.”

“Why?”

“To blow this fucking thing out of the air, what
else
?”

“Forget it, you’re a dead man. I’d think you’d have learned that by now. You set up something on the information Abbott gave you, right?”

“Yes.”

“And
he
was blown out of the air, right?”

“Goddamn you, shut up!”

“You should have learned. They’re where you can’t see them or find them. But the wrong word to the wrong person and they can find you.”

“I
know
that!” shouted Metcalf. “But I’ve been in this business for twenty years. There’s got to be
someone
I can trust!”

“Let’s talk about it, Colonel. Scratch D.C. and fly up to New York. I’ll get a room at the Algonquin—actually, I’ve already reserved one.”

“What name?”

“What else? Marcus.”

“You’re on, but as long as we’re in this deep I should tell you. The woman’s been trying to reach me since one o’clock this morning.”

“Converse’s
wife
?”

“Yes.”

“We need her. We need
him
!”

“I’ll reprogram the machine. The Algonquin?”

“That’s it.”

“He’s from New York, isn’t he? I mean he’s a New Yorker.”

“Whatever that means, yes. He’s lived here for years.”

“I hope he’s bright—they’re bright.”

“Neither of them would be alive now if they weren’t
very
bright, Colonel.”

“See you in a few hours, Stone.”

The civilian hung up the phone, his hands shaking, his eyes on a bottle of bourbon across the room.
No!
There would be no drinks, he had promised himself. He got out of the chair and went to the bed, where his small suitcase was open, a gaping mouth” waiting to be filled. He filled it, leaving the bottle of whisky on the table, and went outside to the elevators down the hall.

*  *  *

If the very proper and distant British stenographer had the slightest interest in the material she was transcribing in segments from dictation to the typewritten page, she did not show it. Her thin lips pursed, her gray hair knotted into a forbidding bun on the top of her head, she performed like a machine, as if everything was accepted in rote and by rote. Valerie’s somewhat guarded explanation that her husband was an American novelist intrigued by recent events in Europe was
greeted with a cold stare and the gratuituous information that the legal secretary never watched television and rarely read the newspapers. She was a member of the Franco-Italian Alpine Society, whose purpose was to defend the natural endowments being eroded by man; working for the society took up all her time and energy when she was not earning a living to enable her to remain in her beloved mountains. She was an automaton putting in her time; one could dictate the book of Genesis and Val doubted the woman would know what she was typing.

It was the seventh hour and there was still no answer at Alan Metcalf’s telephone in Las Vegas. Only a machine. It was time for the eighth call.

“If we don’t get him now,” said Converse grimly, above the quiet tapping of the typewriter across the room, “go ahead and reach Prudhomme. I wanted to talk to this Metcalf first, but it’s possible that—it may not be possible.”

“What difference does it make? You need help quickly, and he’s willing to help.”