Who would believe her?
Tell him to come in. We’ll listen.
He can ‘t! He’ll be killed! . . . You ’11 kill him!
The telephone rang, for a moment paralysing
her. She stared at it, terrified but forcing herself to
stay in control. Sam Abbott was dead, and he told
her only he would call only he. My God, thought
Val, they’d found her, just as they’d found her in
New York. But they would not repeat the mistakes
they had made in New York. She had to remain
calm and think and outthink them. The ringing
stopped. She approached the phone and picked it
up, then pressed the button marked O. ‘Operator,
this is room nine-one-four. Please send the security
police up here right away. It’s an emergency.”
She had to move quickly, be ready to leave the
instant the security men arrived. She had to get out
and find a safe telephone. She had heard the stories;
she knew what to do. She had to reach Joel in
Osnabruck.
Colonel Alan Metcalf, chief intelligence officer,
Nellis Air Force Base, walked out of the telephone
booth and looked around the shopping mall, his
hand in the pocket of his sport jacket, gripping the
small revolver inside. He glanced at his watch; his
wife and three children would be in Los Angeles
soon, then reach Cleveland by late afternoon. The
four of them would stay with her parents until he
said otherwise. It was better this way since he had
no idea what the “way” would be like.
He only knew that Sam Abbott had run that
sub-mach
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 561
maneuver a thousand times; he knew every stress
point and P.S.I. throughout the entire aircraft, and
he never flew a jet that had not been scanned
electronically. To ascribe that crash to pilot error was
ludicrous; instead, someone had lied to that pilot, a
circuit and backup shorted. Sam was killed because
his friend, Metcalf, had made a terrible mistake.
After talking with Abbott for nearly five hours,
Metcalf had called a man in Washington, telling him
to prepare a conference the following afternoon with
two ranking members each from the NSC, G-Two
and naval intelligence. The reason-of-record:
Brigadier General Samuel Abbott had pertinent and
startling information about the fugitive Joel Converse
relative to the assassinations of the American
ambassador in Bonn and the supreme commander of
NATO.
And if they could so readily, so efficiently kill the
man who had the information, they might easily go
after the messenger, the intelligence officer bringing
him in. It was better this way, with Doris and the
kids in Cleveland. He had a great deal to do and a
terrible debt to repay.
The Converse woman! Oh, Christ, why had she
done it, why had she run so quickly? He had
expected it, of course, but he had hoped against
hope that he would reach her in time, but it had not
been possible. First there was Dpris and the kids and
plane reservations and the call to her folks; they had
to get out; he could be next. Then racing to the field,
his revolver beside him in the car, and ransacking
Sam’s office as Nellis’ intelligence officer, a
particularly loathsome duty, but in this case
vital and questioning Abbott’s distraught secretary.
A name had emerged: Parquette.
“I’ll pick her up,” Sam had said last night. “She’s
staying at the Grand and I promised only I’d phone
her. She’s a cool lady, but she had a close call in
New York. She wants to hear a voice she knows and
I can’t blame her.”
Cool lady, thought Alan Metcalf, as he climbed
into his car, you made the biggest mistake of
yourshortenedlife. With me you had a chance to
live perhaps but now as they say in this part of
Nevada, the odds are heavily against.
Nevertheless she would be on his conscience,
reasoned the intelligence officer, now speeding into
the cutoff toward Route 15 and points south.
Conscience. He wondered if those silent bastards
in Washington had Joel Converse on their collective
conscience. They had sent a man out and abandoned
him, not even having
562 ROBERT LUDLUM
the grace to make sure he was killed quickly,
mercifully. The programmers of the kamikazes
were saints beside such people.
Converse. Where was he?
33
Joel stood silently as Leifhelm’s man removed
his gun and turned to speak to the assembled row of
senile old women in the high-backed chairs. He
spoke for less than a minute, then grabbed Converse
by the arm his and their trophy forcing Joel to
face Hermione Geyner, whose true prisoner he was.
It was a mystical ritual of triumph from a time long
past.
‘I have just told these brave women of the
underground,” said the Cerman looking at Converse,
“that they have uncovered a traitor to our cause.
Frau Geyner will confirm this, ja, meine Dame?”
‘Baja!” spat out the intense old woman, her face
alive with the fierce joy of victory. “Betrayal!” she
screamed.
“The telephone calls have been made and our
instructions received,” continued Leifhelm’s soldier.
“We shall leave now, A merikaner. There’s nothing
you can do, so let us go qui
“If you had this whole thing so organized, why
those two men on the train, including that one?”
asked Joel, nodding at the man with his arm in the
sling, instinctively stalling for time, an attorney
allowing an adversary to compliment himself.
“Observed, not organised,” answered the
German. “We had to be sure you did everything
expected of you. Everyone here agrees, Stimmt Has,
Frau Geyner?”
“Pa!” exploded Valerie’s aunt.
“The other one is dead,” said Joel.
“A loss for the cause and we shall mourn him.
Come!” The German bowed to the ladies, as did his
two companions, and led Converse through the
large double doors to the front entrance. Outside on
the decrepit porch, Leifhelm’s hunter gave the thick
envelope to the man with the sling and issued
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 563
orders. Both nodded and walked rapidly down the
steps, the wounded man steadying himself on a
rickety railing, and then they hurried to the right of
the long circular drive. Down at the far exit, near the
country road, Joel could see the shape of a long
sedan in the darkness.
The three prison guards led him out of the
compound It was the middle of the night, and he was
being transferred either to another camp or to his own
execution, the killing ground somewhere in the dense
jungle where his screams would be muted. The head
guard barked a command to his two subordinates, who
bowed and began running down the road toward a
captured American Jeep several hundred yards away in
the darkness He was alone with the man, thought
Converse, knowing the moment would not come again
except as a corpse. If f t was going to ha Open, it had
to ha ppen now. He moved his head slightly, lowering
his gaze to the dark outline of the gun in the guard’s
hand….
The German’s hand was steady, the weapon it
held rigid against Joel’s chest. Inside the house, the
old women had broken into song; their pathetic frail
voices were raised in some victory anthem heard
through the large casement windows open for the
summer breezes. Converse inched his right foot
around the floorboards on the porch, testing several
and finding one weaker than the others. He pressed
down with his full weight; the resulting creak was
loud and sharp. Startled, the German turned at the
echoing sound.
Now. Joel grabbed the barrel of the gun, twisting
hand and steel back and clockwise; he hammered the
man across the porch into the wall while gripping the
weapon with all his strength, twisting tighter and
shoving it into the man’s stomach.
The gunshot was partially muffled by cloth and
flesh, by the noise of an engine starting and the
excited singing of senile voices that came through the
open windows. The German collapsed, his head
snapping, his eyes bulging; there was a stench of
burnt fabric and intestines he was dead. Converse
crouched, then whipped around to look down at the
long U-shaped drive, half expecting to see the two
other men racing toward him with guns extended.
Instead, he saw the lights of the car in the distance;
it was on the country road outside, now turning into
the entrance gate on the left. It would be at the
porch in moments.
Prying the weapon out of the German’s hand, Joel
564 ROBERT LUDLUM
dragged him across the floorboards into the shadows
to the right of the steps. Seconds now.
Get the Jeep. Use the Jeep. The nearest vehicle
check was five miles down the road they had seen it
on work details. Get the Jeep! Cover the ground! The
Jeep!
The long sedan pulled up in front of the porch
and the man with his arm in the sling got out of the