dragged through filth! I went that film!”
“My God, it’s true,” said the ex-infantry sergeant.
“All of
‘.The filml” shouted the general. “Give it to me!”
‘You shall have it,” replied Lefevre. “On the plane.”
* * *
634 ROBERT LUDLUM
Chaim Yakov Abrahms walked with a bowed
head out of the Ihud Shivat Zion synagogue on the
Ben Yehuda in Tel Aviv. The solemn crowds
outside formed two deep flanks of devoted
followers, men and women who wept openly at the
terrible suffering this great man, this patriot-soldier
of Israel, had been forced to endure at the hands of
his wife. “Hitabdut, ” they said in hushed voices.
“Ebude atzmo, ” they whispered to one another,
cupping mouths to ears, out of Chaim’s hearing. The
rabbis would not relent; the sins of a despicable
woman were visited upon this son of sabres, this
fierce child of Abraham, this Biblical warrior who
loved the land and the Talmud with equal fervor.
The woman had been refused burial in a holy place;
she was to remain outside the gates of the beht
hakoahroht, her soul left to struggle with the wrath
of Almighty God, the pain of that knowledge an
unbearable burden for the one left behind.
It was said she did it out of vengeance and a
diseased mind. She had her daughters. It was the
father’s son always the father’s son who had been
slain on the father’s battlefield. Who would weep
more, who could weep more, or be in greater
anguish than the father? And now this, the further
agony of knowing that the woman he had given his
life to had most heinously violated God’s Talmud.
The shame of it, the shame! Oh, Chaim, our
brother, father, son and leader, we weep with you.
For you! Tell us what to do and we will do it. You
are our king! King of Eretz Yisrael, of Judea and
Samaria, and all the lands you seek for our
protection! Show us the way and we shall follow, O
King!
“She’s done more for him in death than she
could ever have done alive,” said a man on the
outskirts of the crowd and not part of it.
“What do you think really happened?” asked the
man’s companion.
“An accident. Or worse, far worse. She came to
our temple frequently, and I can tell you this. She
never would have considered hitabdut . . . We must
watch him carefully before these fools and
thousands like them crown him emperor of the
Mediterranean and he marches us to oblivion.”
An Army staff car, two flags of blue and white
on either side of the hood, made its way up the
street to the curb in front of the synagogue.
Abrahms, wearing his bereavement like a heavy
mantle of sorrow only his extraordinary strength
could endure, kept bowing his lowered head to the
crowds,
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 635
his eyes opening and closing, his hands reaching out
to touch and be touched. At his side a young soldier
said, “Your car, General.”
“Thank you, my son,” said the legend of Israel as
he climbed inside and sank back in the seat, his eyes
shut in anguish while weeping faces pressed against
the windows. The door closed, and when he spoke,
his eyes still closed, there was anything but anguish
in his harsh voice. “Get me out of beret Take me to
my house in the country. We’ll all have whisky and
forget this crap. Holy rabbinical bastards! They had
the temerity to lecture me! The next war, 1-11 call up
the rabbis and put those Talmudic chicken-chits in
the front lines! Let them lecture while the shrapnel
flies up their asses!”
No one spoke as the car gathered speed and left
the crowds behind. Moments later Chaim opened his
eyes and pulled his thick back from the seat; he
stretched his barrel-chested frame and reclined again
in a more comfortable position. Then slowly, as if
aware of the stares of the two soldiers beside him, he
looked at both men, his head whipping back and
forth.
“Who are you?” he shouted. “You’re not my men,
not my aides!”
“They’ll wake up in an hour or so,” said the man
in the front seat beside the driver. He turned to face
Abrahms. “Good afternoon, General.”
“You!”
“Yes, it is 1, Chaim. Your goons couldn’t stop me
from testifying before the Lebanon tribunal, and
nothing on earth could stop me from what I’m doing
today. I told you about the slaughter of women and
children and quivering old men as they pleaded for
their lives and watched you laugh. You call yourself
a Jew? You can’t begin to understand. You’re just a
man filled with hate, and I don t care for you to
claim to be any part of what I am or what I believe.
You’re shit, Abrahms. But you’ll be brought back to
Tel Aviv in several days.”
One by one the planes landed, the
propeller-driven aircraft from Bonn and Paris having
flown at low altitudes, the jet from Israel, a
Dassault-Breguet Mystere 10/ 100, dropping swiftly
from twenty-eight thousand feet to the private
airfield at Saint-Gervais. And as each taxied to a
stop at the end of the runway, there was the same
dark-blue sedan waiting to drive the “guest” and his
escort to an Alpine chateau fifteen
636 ROBERT LUDLUM
miles east in the mountains. It had been rented for
two weeks from a real estate firm in Chamonix.
The arrivals had been scheduled carefully, as
none of the three visitors was to know that the
others were there. The planes from Bonn and Paris
landed at 4:30 and 5:45, respectively, the jet from
the Mediterranean nearly three hours later at 8:27.
And to each stunned guest Joel Converse said the
identical words: “As I was offered hospitality in
Bonn, I offer you mine here. Your accommodations
will be better than I was given, although I doubt the
food will be as good. However, I know one
thing your departure will be far less dramatic than
mine.”
But not your stay’ thought Converse, as he spoke
to each man. Not your stay. It was part of the plan.
38
The first light floated up into the dark sky above
the trees in Central Park. Nathan Simon sat in his
study and watched the new day’s arrival from the
large, soft leather chair facing the huge window. It
was his thinking seat, as he called it. Recently he
had used it as much for dozing as for thought. But
there were no brief interludes of sleep tonight this
morning. His mind was on fire; he had to explore
and reexplore the options, stretching the limits of
his perception of the dangers within each. To
choose the wrong one would send out alarms that
would force the generals to act immediately, and
once under way, events would race swiftly out of
control; the control of events would be solely in the
hands of the generals everywhere. Of course, they
might decide within hours to begin the onslaught,
but Nathan did not think so they were not fools.
All chaos had its visual beginnings, the initial
turbulence that would give credibility to subsequent
violence. If nothing else, confusion had to be
established as the players moved into place without
being seen. And the concept of military control over
governments was a timeworn idea since the age of
the Pharaohs. It bore early fruit in the
Peloponnesus and Sparta’s conquest of Athens, later
with the
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 637
Caesars, and, later still, was exercised by the
emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, then by the
Renaissance princes, and finally brought to its
apotheosis by the Soviets and the Germans in the
twentieth century. Unrest preceded violence, and
violence preceded takeover, whether it was a
revolution sparked by hundreds of thousands of
oppressed Russians or the strangling inequities of a
Versailles treaty.
Therein lay the weakness of the generals’
strategy: the unrest had to exist before the violence
erupted. It required mobs of malcontented
people ordinary people who could be worked into
a frenzy, but for that to happen the mobs had to be
there in the first place. The people’s discontent
would be the sign, the prelude, as it were, but where,
when? And what could he do, what moves could he
make that would escape the attention of Delavane’s
informers? He was the employer and friend of Joel
Converse, the “psychopathic assassin” the generals
had created. He had to presume he was being
watched at the very least any overt action he took
would be scrutinised, and if he became suspect he
would be thwarted. His life was immaterial. In a
sense he was trapped, as he and others like him had
been trapped on the beaches of Anzio. They had
realised that there was a degree of safety in the
foxholes behind the dunes, that to emerge from them
was to face unending mortar fire. Yet they had