the effect was owlish, scholarly. He was no longer
the man in the newspaper photograph, and equally
important, the concentration he had devoted to his
appearance had begun to clear his mind. He could
think again, sit down somewhere and sort things
out. He also needed food and a drink.
The cafe was crowded, the stained-glass windows
muting the summer sunlight into shafts of blue and
red piercing the smoke. He was shown to a table
against the black-leather upholstered banquette,
assured by the maitre d’, or whoever he was, that
an he had to do was request a menu in English; the
items were numbered. Whisky on the Continent,
however was universaDy accepted as Scotch; he
ordered a double, and took out the pad and
bar-point pen he had picked up at the variety store.
His drink came and he proceeded to write.
Connal Fitzpatrick?
BriefcaseP
$93,000 plus
Embassy out
No Larry 7albot et al.
No Beale
No A nstett
No man in San Francisco
Men in Washington. WhoP
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 371
Caleb Dowling? No. Hickman, Navy, San Diego?
Possible.
. . . Mattilon?
Rene! Why hadn’t he thought of Mathlonbefore?
He understood why the Frenchman made the
remarks attributed to him anonymously in the
newspaper story. Rene was trying to be protective. If
there was no defence, or if it was so weak so as not
to be viable, the most logical backup was temporary
insanity. Joel circled Mattilon’s name and wrote the
number I on the left, circling it also. He would find
a telephone exchange in the streets, the kind where
operators assigned booths to bewildered tourists, and
call Rene in Paris. He took two swallows of whisky,
relaxing as the warmth spread through him, then
went back to his list, stardng at the top.
Connal . . ? The presumption that he had been
killed was inevitable, but it was not conclusive. If he
was alive, he was being held for whatever
information could be pried out of him. As the chief
legal officer of the West Coast’s largest and most
powerful naval base, and a man who had a history of
meetings with the State Department’s Office of
Munibons Control as well as its counterparts at the
Pentagon, Fitzpatrick could be an asset to the men
of Aquitaine. Yet to call attention to him was to
guarantee his execution, if he had not been killed
already. If he was still alive, the only way to save him
was to find him, but not in any orthodox or official
manner; it had to be done secretly. Connal had to be
rescued secretly.
Suddenly, Joel saw the figure of a man in the
uniform of the United States Army across the room
talking with two civilians at the bar. He did not know
the man. It was the uniform that struck him. It
brought to mind the military charge d’affaires at the
embassy, that extraordinarily observant and precise
officer who was capable of seeing a man who was
not at a bridge at the exact moment he was not
there. A liar for Aquitaine, someone whose lies
identified him. If that liar did not know where
Fitzpatrick was, he could be made to find out.
Perhaps there was a way, after all. Converse drew a
line on the right side of his list, connecting Connal
Fitzpatrick with Admiral Hickman in San Diego. He
did not give it a number; there was too much to
consider.
Briefoase? He was still convinced that Leifhelm’s
men had not found it. If the generals of Aquitaine
had that attache
372 ROBERT LUDLUM
case, they would have let him know. It was not like
those men to conceal such a prize, not from the
prisoner who had thought he was a match for them.
No, they would have told him one way or another,
if only to make clear to him how totally he had
failed. If he was right, Connal had hidden it. At the
inn called Das Rektorat? It was worth a try. Joel
circled the word Briefoase and numbered it 2.
“Speisekarte, main Herr?” said a waiter before
Converse knew he was standing there.
“English, please?”
“Certainly, sir.” The waiter separated his menus
as though they were an outsized deck of cards. He
selected one and handed it to Joel as he spoke.
“The Spezialitat for today is Wienerschnitzel it is the
same in English.”
“That’s fine. Keep the menu, I’ll take it.”
“Danke. ” The man swept away before Joel
could order another drink. It was just as well, he
thought.
$93,000 plus. There was nothing more to be
said, the irritating bulge around his waist said it all.
He had the money; it was to be used.
Embassy out . . . No Larry Talbot, et al . . . No
Beale . . . No A nstett . . . No man in San Francisco.
Throughout the meal he thought about each item,
each statement, wondering how it all could have
happened. Every step had been considered carefully,
facts absorbed, dossiers memorized, caution
uppermost. But everything had been blown away by
complications far beyond the simple facts provided
by Preston Halliday in Geneva.
Build just two or thme cases that are tied to Dela-
vane even circumstantially and it’ll be enough.
In light of the revelations on Mykonos, then in
Paris, Copenhagen and Bonn, the simplicity of that
remark was almost criminal. Halliday would have
been appalled at the depth and the breadth of
influence Delavane’s legions had attained, at the
penetrations they had made at the highest levels of
the military, the police, Interpol and, obviously, now
those who controlled the flow of news from
so-called authoritative sources in Western
governments.
Converse abruptly checked his racing thoughts.
He suddenly realised that he was thinking about
Halliday in the context of a man who saw only a
pair of eyes at night in the jungle, unaware of the
size or the ferocity of the unseen animal in the
darkness. That was wrong. Halliday knew the
materials
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 373
Beale was handing over to him on an island in the
Aegean; he knew about the connections between
Paris, Bonn, Tel Aviv and Johannesburg; he knew
about the decision makers in the State Department
and the Pentagon he knew it all! He had arranged
it all with unknown men in Washington! Halliday had
lied in Geneva. A California wrestler he had
befriended years ago in school named Avery Fowler
was the manipulator, and in the name of A. Preston
Halliday, he had lied.
Where were those subterranean men in
Washington who had the audacity to raise half a
million dollars for an incredible gamble but were too
frightened to come out in the open? What kind of
men were they? Their scout had been killed, their
puppet accused of being a psychopathic assassin.
How long could they wait? What were they?
The questions disturbed Converse so much that
he tried not to pursue them they would lead only to
rage, which would blind his reason. He needed
reason and, above all, the strength that came with
awareness.
It was time to find a telephone exchange and
reach Mattilon in Paris. Rene would believe him,
Rene would help him. It was unthinkable that his old
friend would do anything else.
The civilian walked in silence to the hotel
window, knowing he was expected to deliver a
pronouncement that would form the basis of a
miracle not a solution but a miracle, and there were
no such things in the business he knew so well. Peter
Stone was by all the rules a relic, a castaway who had
seen it all, and in the final years of seeing had finally
fallen apart. Alcohol had taken the place of true
audacity, at the end rendering him a professional
mutant, a part of him still proud of past
accomplishments, another part sickened by the waste,
by the knowledge of wasted lives, wasted
strategies morality thrown into a gargantuan
wastebasket of a collective nonconscience.
Still, he had once been one of the best he could
not forget that. And when he knew it was all over, he
had faced the fact that he was killing himself with a
plethora of bourbon and self-pity. He had pulled out.
But not before he had gained the enmity of his past
employers in the Central Intelligence Agency, not for
speaking out publicly but for telling them privately
who and what they were. Fortunately, as sobriety re-
turned he learned that his past employers had other
enemies in Washington, enemies having nothing to
do with foreign en
374 R08ERT LUVIUM
tanglements or competition. Simply men and women
serving the republic who wanted to know what the
hell was going on when Langley wouldn’t tell them.
He had survived was surviving. He thought about
these things, knowing that the two other men in the
room believed he was concentrating on the issue at
hand.
There was no issue. The file was closed, the