jacket, boots beneath his khaki trousers, and a beret
covering his nearly bald head. The beret was the only
concession he made to the night’s purpose; normally
he enjoyed being recognised, accepUng the adulation
with well-rehearsed humility. In day
224 ROBERT LUDLUM
light, his head uncovered and held erect, and
wearing his familiar jacket, he would acknowledge
the homage with a nod, his eyes boring in on his
followers.
“First a Jew!” was the phrase with which he was
always greeted, whether in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem,
in sections of Paris and most of New York.
The phrase had been born years ago when as a
young terrorist for the Irgun he had been
condemned to death in absentia by the British for
the slaughter of a Palestinian village with the Arab
corpses put on display for Nakama! He had then
issued a cry heard around the world: “I am first a
Jew a son of Abraham! All else follows, and rivers
of blood will follow if the children of Abraham are
denied!”
The British, in 1948, not caring to create
another martyr commuted his sentence and gave
him a large moshav. Yet the acreage of the
settlement could not confine the militant sabre.
Three wars had broken his agricultural shackles as
well as unleashing his ferocity and his brilliance in
the field. It was a brilliance developed and refined
through the early years of racing with a fugitive,
fragmented army, for which the tactics of surprise,
shock, hit and melt away were constant, when being
outmanned and outgunned were the accepted odds
but only victory was the acceptable outcome. He
later applied the strategies and the philosophy of
those years to the ever-expanding war machine that
became the Army, Navy and Air Force of a mighty
Israel. Mars was in the heavens of Chaim Abrahm’s
vision and, the prophets aside, the god of war was
his strength, his reason for being. From Ramat Aviv
to Har Hazeytim, from Rehovot to Masada of the
Negev Nakama! was the cry. Retribution to the
enemies of Abraham’s children!
If only the Poles and the Czechs, the Hungarians
and the Romanies, as well as the haughty Germans
and the impossible Russians, had not immigrated to
his country by such tens of thousands. They arrived
and the complications came with them. Faction
against faction, culture against culture, each group
trying to prove it was more entitled to the name Jew
than the others. It was all nonsense! They were
there because they had to be; they had succumbed
to Abraham’s enemies permitted yes,
permitted the slaughter of millions rather than
rising as millions and slaughtering in return. Well,
they found out what their civilised ways could bring
them, and how much their Talmudic convolutions
could earn them. So
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 225
they came to the Holy Land their Holy Land, so
they procla~med. Well, it wasn’t theirs. Where were
they when it was being clawed out of rock and arid
desert by strong hands with primitive tools Biblical
tools? Where were they when the hated Arab and
the despised English first felt the wrath of the tribal
Jew? They were in the capitals of Europe, in their
banks and their fancy drawing rooms, making money
and drinking expensive brandy out of crystal goblets.
No, they came here because they had to; they came
to the Holy Land of the sabre.
They brought with them money and dandy ways
and elegant words and confusing arguments and
influence and the guilt of the world. But it was the
sabre who taught them how to fight. And it was a
sabre who would bring all Israel into the orbit of a
mighty new alliance.
Abrahms reached the intersection of Ibn Gabirol
and Arlosoroff streets; the streetlamps were haloed,
their light hazy. It was just as well; he should not be
seen. He had another block to go, to an address on
Jabotinsky, an unprepossessing apartment house
where there was an undistinguished flat leased by a
man who appeared to be no more than an unim-
portant bureaucrat. What few realised, however, was
that this man, this specialist who operated
sophisticated computer equipment with
communications throughout most of the world, was
intrinsic to the global operations of the Mossad, Is-
rael’s intelligence service, which many considered the
finest on earth. He, too, was a sabre. He was one of
them.
Abrahms spoke his name quietly into the
mouthpiece above the mail slot in the outer lobby;
he heard the click in the lock of the heavy door and
walked inside. He began the climb up the three
flights of steps that would take him to the flat.
‘~Some wine, Chaim?”
“Whisky,” was the curt reply.
“Always the same question and always the same
answer,” said the specialist. “I say ‘Some wine,
Chaim?’ and you say one word. ‘whisky,’ you say.
You would drink whisky at the Seder, if you could
get away with it.”
“I can and I do.” Abrahms sat in a cracked
leather chair looking around the plain, disheveled
room with books everywhere, wondering, as he
always did, why a man with such influence lived this
way. It was rumored that the Mossad officer did not
like company, and larger, more attractive quarters
226 ROBERT LUDLUM
might invite it. “I gathered from your grunts and
coughs over the telephone that you have what I
need.”
“Yes, I have it,” said the specialist, bringing a
glass of very good Scotch to his guest. “I have it, but
I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
“Why not?” asked Abrahms, drinking, his eyes
alert over the rim of the glass and fixed on his host
as the latter sat down opposite him.
“Basically because it’s confusing, and what’s
confusing in this business is to be approached
delicately. You are not a delicate man, Chaim
Abrahms, forgive the indelicacy of my saying it. You
tell me this Converse is your enemy, a would-be
infiltrator, and I tell you I find nothing to support
the conclusion. Before anything else, there must be
a deep personal motive for a nonprofessional to
engage in this kind of deception this kind of
behavior, if you will. There has to be a driving
compulsion to strike out at an image of a cause he
loathes. Well, there is a motive, and there is an
enemy for which he must have great hatred, but
neither is compatible with what you suggest. The
information, incidentally, is completely reliable. It
comes from the Quang Dinh ”
“What in hell is that?” interrupted the general.
“A specialised branch of North
Vietnamese now, of course,
Vietnamese intelligence.”
“You have sources there?”
“We fed them for years nothing terribly vital,
but sufficient to gain a few ears, and voices. There
were things we had to know, weapons we had to
understand; they could be turned against us.”
“This Converse was in North Vietnam?”
“For several years as a prisoner of war; there’s
an extensive file on him. At first, his captors
thought he could be used for propaganda, radio
broadcasts, television imploring his brutal
government to withdraw and stop the bombing, all
the usual garbage. He spoke well, presented a good
picture, and was obviously very American. Initially
they televised him as a murderer from the skies,
saved from the angry mobs by humane troops, then
later while eating and exercising; you see, they were
programming him for a violently sudden reversal.
They thought he was a soft, privileged young man
who could be broken rather easily to do their
bidding in exchange for more comfortable
treatment after having experienced a period of
harsh deprivation. What they learned, however, was
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 227
quite different. Under that soft shell the inner lining
was made of hard metal, and the odd thing was that
as the months went by it grew harder, until they
realized they had created created was their word a
hellhound of sorts, somehow forged in steel.”
“Hellhound? Was that their word, too?”
“No, they called him an ugly troublemaker, which,
considering the source, is not without irony. The
point is, they recognized the fact that they had
created him. The harsher the treatment, the more
volatile he became, the more resilient.”
“Why not?” said Abrahms sharply. “He was angry.
Prod a desert snake and watch him strike.”
“I can assure you, Chaim, it is not the normal
human response under such conditions. A man can
go mad and strike in crazed fury, or he can become
reclusive to the point of catatonia, or fall apart
weeping, willing to compromise anything and
everything for the smallest kindness. He did none of
these things. His was a calculated and inventive
series of responses drawing on his own inner
resources to survive. He led two escapes the first
lasting three days and the second five before the
groups were recaptured. As the leader, he was placed
in a cage in the Mekong River, but he devised a way
to kill the water rats by grabbing them from beneath