the language best understood by these people, and
delivered by Peter Stone who had selected them.
Study the faces, make no audible comments, and mark
down by number any you recognise, bearing in mind
terminal operations. At the end of the series the lights
will be turned on and we’ll talk. And, if need be, run
the series again and again until we come up with
something Remember, we believe these men are killers.
Concentrate on that.
They were told nothing else. Except M.1.6’s
Derek Belamy, who had arrived within a half-hour of
the extraordinary session, looking haggard from his
obviously exhausting journey. When Derek walked
through the door, Peter had pulled him aside and
each gripped the other’s arms. Stone was never so
happy or so relieved in his life to see any man.
Whatever
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 669
he might have missed, or could miss, Belamy would
find it. The British agent had a tenth sense above
anyone else’s sixth, including Peter’s, which, of
course, was denied modestly by Derek.
“I need you, old friend,’ said Peter. “I need you
badly.”
“It’s why I’m here, old friend,” replied Belamy
warmly. Can you tell me anything?”
“There’s no time now, but I can give you a name.
Delavane.
“Mad Marcus?”
“The same. It’s his crisis and it’s real.”
“The bastard!” whispered the Englishman.
“There’s no one I’d rather see at the end of a
barbed-wire rope. Talk to you later, Peter. You’ve
got your socialising do. Incidentally, from what I can
see, you’ve got the best here tonight.”
“The best, Derek. We can’t afford any less.”
Beyond the American military personnel who had
initially approached Stone, as well as Colonel Alan
Metcalf, Nathan Simon, Justice Andrew Wellfleet
and the Secretary of State, the remaining audience
was composed of the most experienced and secure
intelligence officers Peter Stone had known in a
lifetime of clandestine operations. They had been
flown over by military transport from France, Creat
Britain, West Germany, Israel, Spain and the
Netherlands. Among them were, besides the
extraordinary Derek Belamy, Frangois Villard, chief
of France’s highly secretive Organisation Etrangere;
Yosef Behrens, the Mossad’s leading authority on
terrorism; Pablo Amandarez, Madrid’s specialist in
KCB Mediterranean penetrations, and Hans
Vonmeer of the Netherlands’ secret state police. The
others, including the women, were equally respected
in the caverns of deep-cover, beyond-salvage
operations. They knew by name, face or reputahon
the legions of killers for hire, killers by order, and
killers by reason of ideology. Above all, each was
trusted, each a man or woman Stone had worked
withi collectively they were the elite of the shadow
world.
A face! He knew the face! It stayed on the screen
and he wrote on his pad: “Dobbins. Number 57.
Cecil or Cyril Dobbins. British Army. Transferred to
British Intelligence. Personal aide to . . . Derek
Belamy!”
Stone looked over at his friend across the aisle,
fully expecting him to be writing on his yellow pad.
Instead, the Englishman frowned and sat motionless
in his chair, his pencil
670 ROBERT LUDLUIU
poised above the paper. The next face appeared on
the screen. And the next, and the next, until the
series was over. The lights came on, and the first
person to speak was the Mossad’s Yosef Behrens.
“Number seventeen is an artillery officer in the IDF
recently transferred to the Security Branch, Jeru-
salem. His name is Arnold.”
“Number thirty-eight,” said Francois Villard, ‘ is
a colonel in the French Army attached to the guard
of Invalides. It is the face; the name I do not
recall.”
‘Number twenty-six,” said the man from Bonn,
“is Oberleutnant Ernst Muller of the Federal
Republic’s Luftwaffe. He is a highly skilled pilot
frequently assigned to fly ministers of state to
conferences both within and without West
Cermany.”
“Number forty-four,” said a dark-skinned woman
with a pronounced Hispanic accent, “has no such
credentials as your candidates. He is a drug dealer,
suspected of many killings and operates out of Iviza.
He was once a paratrooper. Name Orejo.”
“Son of a gun, I just don’t believe it!” said the
young lieutenant William Landis, the computer
expert from the Pentagon. “I know number fifty-one,
I’m almost positive! He’s one of the adjutants in
Middle East procurements. I’ve seen him a lot but
I don’t know his name.”
Six other men and two women volunteered
twelve additional identities and positions as
everyone in the room silently looked for an
emerging pattern. There was a preponderance of
military personnel, and the umbrella of the rest was
puzzling. In the main they were ex-combat soldiers
from high-casualty outfits who had drifted into
crime largely violent crime, the sort of men Peter
Stone knew the generals of Aquitaine considered
human garbage.
Finally Derek Belamy spoke in his hard, clipped
distant voice. “There are four or five faces I
associate with dossiers but I’m not making
connections.” He looked over at Stone. ‘You’ll run
them again, won’t you, old boy?”
“Of course, Derek,” replied the former station
chief in London. Stone, who had said nothing, rose
from his chair and addressed the gathering.
“Everything you’ve given us will be fed immediately
into computers, and we’ll see if we come up with
any correlations. And to repeat what I said
previously, I want to thank you all and apologise
again for not giving you the explanations you
deserve, not only for your help but for the trouble
we’ve caused you. Speaking personally, my conso
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 671
ration is that you’ve all been here before and I know
you understand. We’ll break for fifteen minutes and
start again. There are coffee and sandwiches in the
next room.’ Stone nodded his thanks once more and
started for the door. Derek Belamy intercepted him
in the aisle.
“Peter, I’m dreadfully sorry it took me so long to
get back to you. Truth is, the office had a devil of a
time tracking me down. I was visiting friends in
Scotland.”
“I thought you might be in Northern Ireland. It’s
a hell of a mess, isn’t it?”
“You were always better than you thought you
were. I was in Belfast, of course. But right now I
promise to do better I’m sure I will but the fact
is I’m bushed, it was a perfectly terrible trip and, of
course, no sleep whatsoever. All those faces began to
look alike I either knew them all or I didn’t know
a damned one!”
“Running them again will help,” said Stone.
“Quite so,” agreed Belamy. “And Peter, whatever
this tangle is with that maniac, Delavane, I couldn’t
have been more delighted to see you in the control
chair. We were all told you were out, rather firmly
out.”
“I’m back in. Very firmly.”
“I can see that, chap. That is your Secretary of
State in the back row, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Congratulations, old boy. Well, off for coffee,
black and hot. See you in a few minutes.”
“Across the aisle, old friend.”
Stone walked out the door and turned right in
the white corridor. He could feel the rapid
acceleration of his heartbeat it was a cousin to
Johnny Reb’s claims of a churning stomach and an
acid taste in his mouth bile, the Rebel called it. He
had to get to a telephone quickly. Converse’s courier,
the Surete’s Prudhomme, would be arriving within
the hour; a Secret Service escort was waiting for him
at Dulles Airport with instructions to bring him
directly to the White House. But it was not the
Frenchman who concerned Stone now, it was Con-
verse himself. He had to reach him before the
session began again. He had to!
When the lawyer had contacted him through the
Tatiana relay, Peter had been astonished by the
sheer audacity of what Converse had done.
Kidnapping the three generals video-taping the
interrogations or the “oral examina
672 ROBERT IUDLUM
lions” or whatever the legal terminology was, it was
insanel The only thing more insane was the fact that
he had carried it off thanks obviously to the
resources of a very determined, very angry man from
the Surete. The computer was in Scharhorn, the
master list of Aquitaine buried somewhere in its in-
tricate mechanism, only to be erased by inaccurate
codes, the complex itself mined with explosives.
Jesus!
And now the final insanity. The man no one
could find, the source so deeply shrouded they
frequently doubted his existence despite the fact that
all logic insisted he was there. There had to be
Aquitaine’s man in England, for there could be no
Aquitaine without the British. Further, Stone knew
he was the conduit, the primary communicator
between Palo Alto and the generals overseas, for
constant screenings of Delavane’s telephone charges
showed repeated calls to a number in the Hebrides,
and such a relay device was all too familiar to the
former intelligence agent. The calls disappeared at
that number in the Scottish islands, just as the KGB
calls processed through Canada’s Prince Edward