in English.
“Who is this and what do you want?”
“Well, what do you know? This sounds like
Major Philip Dunstone that was the name, wasn’t
it? You don’t sound half so friendly as you did last
night.”
“Don’t do anything rash, Commander. You’ll regret
it.”
“And don’t you do anything stupid, or Leifhelm
will regret it sooner that is, until he can’t regret
anything any longer. You’ve got one hour to get
Converse to the airport and inside the Lufthansa
security gate. He has a reservation on the ten
o’clock flight to Washington, D.C., by way of Frank-
furt. I’ve made arrangements. I’ll be calling a
number in a room where he’ll be taken and I’ll
expect to talk with him. After I do, I’ll leave here
and call you on another phone, telling you where
your employer is. Just get Converse to that security
gate. One hour, Major!” Fitzpatrick shoved the
phone in front of Leifhelm’s face, and pressed the
barrel of the gun into the German’s temple.
“Do as he says,” said the General, choking on the
words.
The minutes went by slowly, stretching into a
quarter of an hour, then thirty, the silence finally
broken by Leifhelm.
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 309
“So you found her,” he said, gesturing his head at use
Fishbein, who trembled as tears streaked down her
full cheeks.
“Just as we found out about Munich forty years
ago, and a hell of a lot of other things. You’re all on
your way to that great big war room in the sky, Field
Marshal, so don’t worry about whether I’ll go back
on my word to your English butler. I wouldn’t miss
seeing you bastards paraded for everyone to see what
you really are. People like you give the military ev-
erywhere a goddamned rotten name.”
There was a slight commotion from the hallway
beyond the door. Connal looked up, raising the gun
and holding it directly at Leifhelm’s head.
“Was ist?” said the Cerman, shrugging.
“Seine Bewegung!”
From the hotel corridor came the strains of a
melody sung by several male voices more off key
than on. Another conference in one of the other
rooms had broken up, obviously as much from the
excessive intake of alcohol as from the completion of
a business agenda. Raucous laughter pierced a
refrain as harmony was unsuccessfully attempted.
Fitzpatrick relaxed, lowering the automatic; no one
on the outside knew the name or number of the
room.
“You say men like me give your
profession which is my profession as well a
seriously bad name,” said Leifhelm. “Has it occurred
to you, Commander, that we might elevate that
profession to one of indispensable greatness in a
world that needs us badly?”
“Needs us?” asked Connal. “We need the world
first and not your kind of world. You tried it once
and blew it, don’t you remember?”
“That was one nation led by a madman trying to
impose his imprimatur over the globe. This is many
nations with one class of self-abnegating
professionals coming together for the good of all.”
“Whose definition? Yours? You’re a funny fellow,
General. Somehow I question your benevolent
tendencies.”
“Indiscretions of a deprived youth whose name
and rightful opportunities were stolen from him
should not be held against the man a half-century
later.”
“Deprived or depraved? I think you made up for
lost time pretty quickly and as brutally as you could.
I don’t like your remedies.”
“You have no vision.”
310 ROBERT LUDIUM
“Thanks be to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph it’s not
yours. ” The singing out in the corridor faded
briefly, then swelled again, more discordant and
louder than before. “Maybe that’s some of your old
Dachau playboys having a beer bust.”
Leifhelm shrugged.
Suddenly the door burst open, crashing into the
wall as three men raced in, spits filling the air as
silenced guns fired hands jerking back and forth, the
surface of the table chewed up, splinters of wood
flying everywhere. Fitzpatrick felt the repeated stabs
of intense pain in his arm as the automatic was
blown out of his grip. He looked down and saw the
blood drenching the fabric of his right sleeve.
Though in shock he glanced about him. Ilse
Fishbein was dead, her bleeding skull shattered by
a fusillade of bullets; the chauffeur was smiling
obscenely. The door was closed as if nothing had
happened.
“Stumper,” Leifhelm said as one of the invaders
cut the ropes around his wrists. “I used that term
only yesterday, Commander, but I did not know
how right I was. Did you think a single telephone
call could not be traced to a single room? It was all
too coincidentally symmetrical. Converse is ours and
suddenly this poor whore comes into immense
riches American riches. I grant you it was entirely
possible such bequests are made frequently by
sausage-soaked idiots who don’t realize the harm
they do, but the timing was too perfect,
too amateurish.”
“You’re one son of a bitch.” Connal shut his
eyes, trying to force the pain out of his mind,
unable to move his fingers
“Why, Commander,” said the general, getting
out of the chair, “do I sense the bravado of fear?
Do you think I’m going to have you killed?”
“You sense it. I won’t give you any more than that.”
“You’re quite wrong. Considering the nature of
your military leave, you can be of minor but unique
service to us. One more statistic to disrupt a
pattern. You’ll be our guest, Commander, but not
in Germany proper. You are gomg on a trip.”
17
Converse slowly opened his eyes, a dead, iron
weight on his lids and nausea in his throat blurred
darkness everywhere and a terrible stinging at his
side, on his arm, flesh separated from flesh, stretched
and inflamed. Blindly he tried to touch the offending
spot, then gasping, pulled back in pain. Somewhere
light was creeping around the dark space above him,
picking its way through moving obstructions, peering
into the shadows. Objects slowly came into focus the
metal rim of the cot next to his face, two wooden
chairs opposite each other at a small table in the
distance, a door also in the distance, but farther away
and shut . . . then another door, this one open, a
white sink with a pair of dull-metal faucets on the left
in a far-away cubicle. The light? It was still moving,
now dancing, flickering. Where was it?
He found it: high in the wall on either side of the
closed door were two rectangular windows, the short
curtains billowing in the breeze. The windows were
open, but oddly not open, not clear, the spaces
interrupted. Joel raised his head, supporting himself
on his forearm and squinted, trying to see more
clearly. He focused on the interruptions behind the
swelling curtains thin black metal shafts vertically
connecting the window frames. They were bars. He
was in a cell.
He fell back on the cot, swallowing repeatedly to
lessen the burning in his throat, and moved his arm in
circles trying to lessen the pain of the . . . wound?
Yes, a wound, a gunshot! The realization jarred his
memory; a dinner party had turned into a
battleground filled with hysteria. Blinding lights and
sudden jolts of pain had been accompanied by strident
voices bombarding him, incessant echoes pounding in
his ears as he tried desperately to repel the piercing
assaults. Then there had been moments of calm, the
drone of a single voice in the mists. Converse closed
his eyes, pressing his lids tightly together with all his
strength as another realization struck him
3
312 ROBERT LUDLUM
and disturbed him deeply. That voice in the swirling
mists was his voice; he had been drugged, and he
knew he had given up secrets.
He had been drugged before, a number of times
in the North Vietnamese camps, and as always there
was the sickening feeling of numbed outrage. His
mind had been stripped and violated, his voice made
to perform obscenities against the last vestiges of his
will.
And, again as always, there was the empty hole
in his stomach, a vacuum that ran deep and
produced only weakness. He felt starved and
probably was. The chemicals usually induced
vomiting as the intestines rejected the unnatural
substance. It was strange, he reflected, opening his
eyes and following the moving shafts of light, but
those memories from years ago evoked the same
self-protective instincts that had helped him
then so many years ago. He could not waste en-
ergy; he had to conserve what strength he had.
Regain new strength. Otherwise there was nothing
but the numbed outrage and neither his mind nor
his body could do anything about it.
There was a sound across the room! Then
another and another after that! The grating sound
of sliding metal told him that a bolt was being
released; the sharp sound of a key followed by the
twisting of a knob meant that the door in the far