thought impossible.”
“What was it?” the Israeli broke in.
“A firm prohibition was placed on getting part of
Converse’s service record.”
“Yes!” cried Abrahms, in his voice the sound of
Triumph.
“What?”
“Go on, Marcus! I’ll tell you when you’re
finished. What was the second calamity?”
“Not a calamity, Chaim. An explanation so
blatantly offered it can’t be turned aside. Leifhelm
called me and said Converse himself brought up
Anstett’s death, claiming to be relieved, but saying
little else except that Anstett was his enemy that
was the word he used.”
“So instructed!” Abrahm’s voice reverberated
around the kitchen. “What was the third gift, my
general?”
“The most bewildering as well as
enlightening and, Chaim, do not shout into the
phone. You are not at one of your stadium rallies or
provoking the Knesset.”
258 ROBERT LUDLUM
1 am in the field, Marcus. Right now! Please
continue my friend.”
“The man who clamped the lid down on
Converse’s military record is a naval officer who was
the brother-in-law of Preston Halliday.”
“Geneva! Yes!”
“Stop that!”
“My apologies, my dear friend. It’s just all so
perfect!”
“Whatever you have in mind,” said Delavane
‘may be negated by the man’s reason. This naval
officer, this brother-in-law, believes Converse
engineered Halliday’s murder.”
‘Of course! Perfect!”
“You will keep your voice down!” The cry of the
cat on a frozen lake was heard.
“Again my deepest and most sincere apologies,
my general. Was that all this naval officer said?”
‘.No, he made it clear to the commander of his
base in San Diego that Halliday had come to him
and told him he was meeting a man in Geneva he
believed was involved with illegal exports to illegal
destinations. An attorney for profiteers in
armaments. He intended to confront this man, this
international lawyer named Converse, and threaten
to expose him. What do we have?”
“A fraud !”
“But on whose side, sabre? The volume of your
voice doesn’t convince me.”
“Be convinced! I’m right. This Converse is the
desert scorpions”
“What does that mean?”
“Don’t you see? The Mossad seesI”
“The Mossad?”
“Yesl I talked with our specialist and he senses
what I smell he admits the possibility! I grant you,
my general, my honored warrior, that he has
information that led him to think this Converse
might be genuine, that he wanted truly to be with
us, but when I said I smelled bad meat, he granted
one other, exceptional possibility. Converse may or
may not be programmed, but he could be an agent
for his government!”
“A provocateur?”
“Who knows, Marcus? But the pattern is so
perfect. First, a prohibition is placed on his military
record it will tell us something, we know that.
Then he responds in the negative about the death of
an enemy not his, but ours, and claims
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 259
he was his enemy too so simple, so instructable.
Finally, it is insinuated that this Converse was the
killer in Geneva so orderly, so precisely to his
advantage. We are dealing with very analytical minds
that watch every move in the chess game, and match
every pawn with a king.”
“Yet everything you say can be reversed. He could
be ” “He can’t be!” cried Abrahms.
“Why, Chaim? Tell me why?”
“There is no heat, noire in him! It is not the way
of a believer! We are not clever, we are adamant!”
George Marcus Delavane said nothing for several
moments, and the Israeli knew better than to speak.
He waited until the quiet cold voice came back on
the line. “Have your meeting tomorrow, General.
Listen to him and be courteous; play the game he
plays. But he must not leave that house until I give
the order. He may never leave it.”
“Shalom, my friend.”
“Shalom, Chaim.”
14
Valerie approached the glass doors of her stu-
dio identical with the doors of her balcony
upstairs and looked out at the calm, sun-washed
waters of Cape Ann. She thought briefly of the boat
that had dropped anchor so frighteningly in front of
her house several nights ago. It had not been back;
whatever had happened was past, leaving questions
but no answers. If she closed her eyes she could still
see the figure of a man crawling up out of the cabin
light, and the glow of the cigarette, and she still
wondered what that man was doing, what he was
thinking. Then she remembered the sight of the two
men in the early light, framed by the dark rims of her
binoculars staring back at her with far more pow-
erful lenses. Were they novices finding a safe harbor?
Amateurs navigating the dark waters of a coastline at
night? Questions, no answers.
Whatever, it was past. A brief, disturbing interlude
that
260 ROBERT LUDLUM
gave rise to black imaginings demons in search of
logic, as Joel would say.
She tossed her long, dark hair aside and
returned to her easel, picking up a brush and
putting the final dabs of burnt umber beneath the
shadowed sand dunes of wild grass. She stepped
back, studied her work, and swore to herself for the
fifth time that the oil painting was finished. It was
another seascape; she never tired of them, and
fortunately she was beginning to get a fair share of
the market. Of course there were those painters in
the Boston-Boothbay axis who claimed she had
virtually cornered the market, but that was rubbish.
Indeed her prices had risen satisfactorily as a result
of the critical approval accorded her two showings
at the Copley Galleries, but the truth was that she
could hardly afford to live where she lived and the
way she lived without at least a part of Joel’s check
every month.
Then again, not too many artists had a house on
the beach with an attached twenty-by-thirty-foot
studio enclosed by full-length glass doors and with
a ceiling that was literally one entire skylight. The
rest of the house, the original house, on the
northern border of Cape Ann was more
rambling-quaint than functional. The initial
architecture was early-coastconfusion, with lots of
heavy bleached wood and curliques, a balustraded
second-story balcony, and outsized bay windows in
the front room that were charming to look at and
look out but leaked fiercely when the winter winds
came off the ocean. No amount of putty or sashing
compound seemed to work; nature was extracting a
price for observing her beauty.
Still, it was Val’s dream house, the one she had
promised herself years ago she would someday be
able to afford. She had come back from the Ecole
des Beaux Arts in Paris prepared to assault New
York’s art world via the Greenwich Vil-
lage-Woodstock route only to have stark reality alter
her plans. The family circumstances had always been
sufficiently healthy for her to live comfortably, albeit
not lavishly, throughout three years in college and
two more in Paris. Her father was a passably good
if excessively enthusiastic amateur painter who
always complained that he had not taken the risks
and gone totally into the fine arts rather than
architecture. As a result, he supported his only child
both morally and financially, in a very real sense
living through her progress and devoted to her
determination. And her mother slightly mad,
always loving, always supportive in anything and
every
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 261
thing would take terrible photographs of Val’s
crudest work and send the pictures back to her sister
and cousins in Cermany, writing outrageous lies that
spoke of museums and galleries and insane
commissions.
“The crazy Berlinerin,” her father would say
fondly in his heavy Gallic accent. “You should have
seen her during the war. She frightened us all to
death! We half expected she would return to
headquarters some night with a drunken Goebbels
or a doped-up Goring in tow, then tell us if we
wanted Hitler to give her the word!”
Her father had been the Free French liaison
between the Allies and the German underground in
Berlin. A rather stiff Parisian autocrat who
happened to speak German had been assigned to the
cell in the Charlottenburg, which coordinated all the
activities of Berlin’s underground. He frequently said
that he had more trouble with the wild Fraulein with
the impetuous ideas than he had avoiding the Nazis.
Nevertheless they married each other two months
after the armistice. In Berlin. Where neither his
family would talk to hers, nor hers to his. “We had
two small orchestras,” her mother would say. “One
played pure, beautiful Viennese Schnitzel, the other
some white cream sauce with deer droppings.”
Whether family animosities had anything to do
with it neither ever said, but the Parisian and the
Berlinerin immigrated to St. Louis, Missouri, in the
United States of America, where the Berlinerin had
distant relations.
The stark reality. Nine years ago, after she had
settled in New York from Paris, a frightened, tearful
father had flown in to see her and had told Val a