“He can elude you, he’s proven it.
“Where can he go, sabre? To his own embassy?
There he’s a dead man. To the Bonn police or the
Staatspolizei? He ll be put in an armored van and
brought back here. He goes nowhere.”
“I heard that when he left Paris, and I heard it
again when he flew into Bonn. Errors were made in
both places both costing a great many hours. I tell
you I’m more concerned now than at any moment in
three wars and a lifetime of skirmishes.”
“Be reasonable, Chaim, and try to be calm. He
has no clothes but what he wears in the river and
the mud, he possesses no identification, no passport,
no money. He doesn’t speak the language ”
“He has money!” yelled Abrahms, suddenly
remembering. “When he was under the needle, he
spoke of a large sum of money promised in Geneva
and delivered on Mykonos.”
“And where is it?” asked Leifhelm. “In this desk,
that’s where it is. Nearly seventy thousand American
dollars. He hasn’t got a deutsche mark in his pocket,
or a watch or a piece of jewelry. A man in filthy,
soaked clothing, with no idenhfication, no money, no
coherent use of the language, and telling
332 ROBERT LUDLUM
an outlandish tale of imprisonment involving der
Ceneral LeifLelm, would undoubtedly be put in jail
as a vagrant or a psychopath or both. In which case,
we shall be informed instantly and our people will
bring him to us. And bear in mind, sabre, by ten
o’clock tomorrow morning it won’t make any
difference. That was your contribution, the Mossad’s
ingenuity. We simply had the resources to make it
come to pass as is said in the Old Testament.”
Abrahms stood in front of the enormous desk,
arms akimbo above the pockets of his safari jacket.
‘ So the Jew and the {elect marshal set it all in
motion. Ironical, isn’t it, Nazi?”
“Not as much as you think,Jude. Impurity, as
with beauty, is in the eye of the frightened beholder.
You are not my enemy; you never were. If more of
us in the old days had your commitment, your
audacity, we never would have lost the war.”
‘1 know that,’ said the sabre. ‘I watched and
listened when you reached the English Ch-annel.
You lost it then. You were weak.”
“It was not us! It was the frightened Debutanten in
Ber
“Then keep them away when we create a truly
new orde,, Cerman. We can’t afford weakness.”
“You do try me, Chaim.”
“I mean to.”
The chauffeur felt the bandages on his face, the
swelling around his eyes and his lips painful to the
touch. He was in his own room, where the doctor
had turned on the television probably as an insult,
as he could barely see it.
He was disgraced. The prisoner had escaped in
spite of his own formidable talents and the
supposedly impassable pack of Dobermans. The
American had used the silver whistle, that much the
other guards had told him, and the fact that it had
been removed from his neck was a further
embarrassment.
He would not add to his disgrace. With blurred
vision he had gone through his pockets which no
one in the panic of the chase had thought to
do and found that his billfold, his expensive Swiss
watch, and all his money had been taken. He would
say nothing about them. He was embarrassed
enough, and any such revelations might be cause for
dismissal or conceivably his death.
* A: *
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 333
Joel headed for the shoreline as fast as he could,
submerging his head underwater whenever the beam
of the searchlight swept toward him. The boat was a
large motor launch, its bass-toned engines signifying
power, its sudden turns and circles evidence of rapid
maneuverability. It hugged the overgrown banks,
then would sweep out toward the open water at the
slightest sign of an object in the river.
Converse felt the soft mud below; he half swam,
half trudged toward the darkest spot on the shore,
the chauffeur’s gun securely in his belt. The boat
approached, its penetrating beam studying every
foot, every moving branch or limb or cluster of river
weeds. Joel took a deep breath and slowly lows ered
himself under the water, his face angled up toward
the surface, his eyes open, his vision a muddy dark
blur. The searchlight grew brighter and seemed to
hover above him for an eternity; he inched his way
to the left and the beam moved away. He rose to the
surface, his lungs bursting, but suddenly realized he
could make no sound, he could not fill his chest with
gasps of air. For directly above him, less than five
feet away loomed the broad stern of the motor
launch, bobbing in the water as if idling. The dark
figure of a man was peering through very large
binoculars at the riverbank.
Converse was bewildered; it was too dark now to
see anything even with magnification. Then he
remembered, and the memory accounted for the size
of the binoculars. The man was focusing through
infrared lenses; they had been used by patrols in
Southeast Asia and were often the difference, he had
been told, between search-and-destroy and
search-andbe-destroyed. They revealed objects in the
darkness, soldiers in the darkness.
The boat moved forward, but the idle increased
only slightly, entering the slowest of trawling speeds.
Again Joel was confused. What had brought
Leifhelm’s searching party to this particular spot on
the riverfront? There were several other boats
behind and out in the distance, their searchlights
sweeping the water, but they kept moving, circling.
Why did the huge motor launch concentrate on this
stretch of the shore? Could they have spotted him
through infrared binoculars? If they had, they were
proceeding very strangely; the North Vietnamese had
been far swifter more aggressive, more effective.
Silently, Converse lowered himself beneath the
surface and breaststroked out beyond the boat.
Seconds later he
334 ROBERT LUDLUM
raised his head above the water, his vision clear,
and he began to understand the odd maneuverings
of LeifLelm’s patrol. Beyond the darkest part of the
riverbank into which he had lurched for
concealment were the lights he had seen eight or
nine minutes ago, before the launch and its
searchlight monopolized all his attention. He had
thought they were the lights of a small village, but
he was in the wrong part of the world. Instead they
were the inside lights of four or five small houses,
a river colony with a common dock, summer homes
perhaps of those fortunate enough to own
waterfront property.
If there were houses and a dock, there had to be
a drive an open passage up to the road or roads
leading into Bonn and the surrounding towns.
Leifhelm’s men were combing every inch of the
riverbank, cautiously, quietly, the searchlights angled
down so as not to alarm the inhabitants or forewarn
the fugitive if he had reached the cluster of cottages
and was on his way up to the unseen road or roads.
A ship’s radio would be activated, its frequency
aligned to those in cars roaming above, ready to
spring the trap. In some ways it was the Huong Khe
again for Joel, the obstacles far less primitive but no
less lethal. And then as now there was a bme to
wait, to wait in the black silence and let the hunters
make their moves.
They made them quickly. The launch slid into
the dock, the powerful twin screws quietly churning
in reverse, as a man jumped off the bow with a
heavy line and looped it around a piling. Three
others followed, instantly racing off the short pier
up onto the sloping lawn, one heading diagonally to
the right, the other two toward the first house.
What they were doing was obvious: one man would
position himself in the bordering woods of the
downhill entrance drive while his colleagues checked
the houses, looking for signs of entry.
Converse’s arms and legs began to feel like
weights, each an anvil he could barely support,
much less keep moving, but there was no choice.
The beam of the searchlight kept moving up and
down the base of the riverbank, its spill illuminating
everything in its vicinity. A head surfacing at the
wrong moment would be blown out of the water.
Huong Khe. Tread water in the reeds. Do it! Don ‘t
die!
He knew the waiting was no longer than thirty
minutes, but it seemed more like thirty hours or
thirty days suspended in a floabng torture rack. His
arms and legs were now in
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 335
agony; sharp pains shot through his body
everywhere; muscles formed cramps that he
dispersed by holding his breath and Hoating in a
fetal position, his thumbs pressing relentlessly into
the cores of the knotted muscles. Twice while
gasping for air he swallowed water, coughing it out