The Parsifal Mosaic (15 page)

“A lovely childhood,” said the psychiatrist, making a note on a pad.

“It was only the beginning.” The director of Cons Op reached for another page in the dossier. “Havlíček and his son remained in the Prague-Boleslav sector and the underground war accelerated, with the father as the partisan leader. A few months later the boy became one of the youngest recruits in the Dětská Brigáda, the Children’s Brigade.
They were used as couriers, as often as not, carrying nitroglycerin and plastic explosives as messages. One misstep, one search, one soldier hungry for a small boy, and it was over.”

“His father
let
him?” asked Miller incredulously.

“He couldn’t stop him. The boy found out what they’d done to his mother. For three years he lived that lovely childhood. It was uncanny, macabre. During those nights when his father was around, he was taught his lessons like any other school kid. Then during the days, in the woods and the fields, others taught him how to run and hide, how to lie. How to kill.”

“That was the training you mentioned, wasn’t it?” said Ogilvie quietly.

“Yes. He knew what it was like to take lives, see friends’ lives taken, before he was ten years old. Grisly.”

“Indelible,” added the pyschiatrist “Explosives planted almost forty years ago.”

“Could the Costa Brava have triggered them forty years later?” asked the lawyer, looking at the doctor.

“It could. There’re a couple of dozen blood-red images floating around, some pretty grim symbols. I’d have to know a hell of a lot more.” Miller turned to Stern, pencil poised above his pad. “What happened to him then?”

“To all of them,” said Stern. “Peace finally came—I should say the formal war was over—but there was no peace in Prague. The Soviets had their own plans, and another kind of madness took over. The elder Havlíček was visibly political, jealous of the freedom he and the partisans had fought for. He found himself in another war, as covert as before and just as brutal. With the Russians.” The director turned to another page. “For him it ended on March tenth, 1948, with the assassination of Jan Masaryk and the collapse of the Social Democrats.”

“In what sense?”

“He disappeared. Shipped to a gulag in Siberia or to a nearer grave. His political friends were quick; the Czechs share a proverb with the Russians: “The playful cub is tomorrow’s wolf.’ They hid young Havlíček and readied British M.I.6. Someone’s conscience was stirred; the boy was smuggled out of the country, and taken to England.”

“That proverb about the cub turning into tomorrow’s wolf,” interjected Ogilvie. “Proved out, didn’t it?”

“In ways the Soviets could never envision.”

“How did the Websters fit in?” asked Miller. “They were his sponsors over here, obviously, but the boy was in England.”

“It was chance, actually. Webster had been a reserve colonel in the war, attached to Supreme Command Central. In ’48 he was in London on business, his wife with him, and one night at dinner with wartime friends they heard about the young Czech brought out of Prague, living at an orphanage in Kent. One thing led to another—the Websters had no children, and God knows the boy’s story was intriguing, if not incredible—so the two of them drove down to Kent and interviewed him. That’s the word here. ‘Interviewed.’ Cold, isn’t it?”

“They obviously weren’t.”

“No, they weren’t. Webster went to work. Papers were mocked up, laws bent, and a very disturbed child flown over here with a new identity. Havlíček was fortunate; he went from an English orphanage to a comfortable home in a well-to-do American suburb, including one of the better prep schools and Princeton University.”

“And a new name,” said Dawson.

Daniel Stern smiled. “As long as a cover was deemed necessary, our reserve colonel and his lady apparently felt Anglicization was called for in Greenwich. We all have our foibles.”

“Why not their name?”

“The boy wouldn’t go that far. As I said before, the memories had to be there. Indelibly, as Paul put it.”

“Are the Websters still alive?”

“No. They’d be almost a hundred if they were. They both died in the early sixties when Havelock was at Princeton.”

“Where he met Matthias?” asked Ogilvie.

“Yes,” answered the director of Cons Op. “That softened the blow. Matthias took an interest in him, not only because of Havelock’s work but, perhaps more important, because his family had known the Havlíčeks in Prague. They were all part of the intellectual community until the Germans blew it apart and the Russians—for all intents and purposes—buried the survivors.”

“Did Matthias know the full story?”

“All of it,” replied Stern.

“That letter in the Costa Brava file makes more sense now,” said the lawyer. “The note Matthias sent to Havelock.”

“He wanted it included,” explained Stern, “so there’d be no misunderstanding on our part. If Havelock opted for immediate withdrawal, we were to permit it.”

“I know,” continued Dawson, “but I assumed when Matthias made a reference to how much Havelock had suffered in … ‘the early days,’ I think he wrote, he meant simply losing both parents in the war. Nothing like
this.”

“Now you know. We know.” Stern again turned to the psychiatrist. “Any guidance, Paul?”

“The obvious,” said Miller. “Bring him in. Promise him
anything
, but bring him in. And we can’t afford any accidents. Get him here alive.”

“I agree that’s the optimum,” interrupted the red-haired Ogilvie, “but I can’t see it ruling out every option.”

“You’d better,” said the doctor. “You even said it yourself. Paranoid. Whacko. Costa Brava was intensely personal to Havelock. It could very well have set off those explosives planted thirty years ago. A part of him is back there protecting himself, building a web of defenses against persecution, against attack. He’s running through the woods after having witnessed the executions of Lidice; he’s with the Children’s Brigade, nitroglycerin strapped to his body.”

“It’s what Baylor mentions in his cable.” Dawson picked it up. “Here it is, ‘Sealed depositions,’ ‘tales out of school.’ He could do it all.”

“He could do anything,” continued the psychiatrist. “There are no behavioral rules. Once he’s hallucinated, he can slip back and forth between fantasy and reality, each phase serving the dual objectives of convincing himself of the persecution and at the same time ridding himself of it.”

“What about Rostov in Athens?” asked Stern.

“We don’t know that there
was
any Rostov in Athens,” Miller said. “It could be part of the fantasy, retroactively recalling a man in the street who looked like him. We
do
know the Karas woman was KGB. Why would a man like Rostov suddenly appear and deny it?”

Ogilvie leaned forward. “Baylor says Havelock called it a blind probe. Rostov could have taken him, gotten him out of Greece.”

“Then why
didn’t
he?” asked Miller. “Come on, Red, you
were in the field for ten years. Blind probe or no blind probe, if you were Rostov and knowing what you knew was back at the Lubyanka, wouldn’t you have taken Havelock under the circumstances described in that cable?”

Ogilvie paused, staring at the psychiatrist. “Yes,” he said finally. “Because I could always let him go—if I wanted to—before anyone knew I’d taken him.”

“Exactly. It’s inconsistent. Was it Rostov in Athens, or anywhere else? Or was our patient fantasizing, building his own case for persecution and subsequent defenses?”

“From what this Colonel Baylor says, he was damned convincing,” interjected the lawyer, Dawson.

“A hallucinating schizophrenic—if that’s what he is—can be extraordinarily convincing because he believes totally what he’s saying.”

“But you can’t be sure, Paul,” insisted Daniel Stern.

“No, I can’t be. But
we’re
sure of one thing—two things, actually. The Karas woman
was
KGB and she was killed on that beach on the Costa Brava. The evidence was irrefutable for the first, and we have two on-site confirmations for the second, including one from Havelock himself.” The psychiatrist looked at the faces of the three men. “That’s all I can base a diagnosis on; that and this new information on one Mikhail Havlíček. I’m in no position to do anything else. You asked for guidance, not absolutes.”

“ ‘Promise him anything …’ ” repeated Ogilvie. “Like that goddamned commercial.”

“But bring him in,” completed Miller. “And just as fast as you can. Get him into a clinic, under therapy, but find out what he’s done and where he’s left those defense mechanisms of his. The ‘sealed depositions’ and ‘tales out of school.’ ”

“I don’t have to remind anyone here,” interrupted Dawson quietly. “Havelock knows a great deal that could be extremely damaging if revealed. The damage would be as extensive to our own credibility—here and abroad—as from anything the Soviets might learn. Frankly, more so. Ciphers, informers, sources—all these can be changed, the networks warned. We can’t go back and rewrite certain incidents where intelligence treaties were violated, the laws of a host country broken by our people.”

“To say nothing of the domestic restrictions placed on us over here,” added Stern. “I know you included that, I just
want to emphasize it. Havelock knows about them; he’s negotiated a number of exchanges as a result of them.”

“Whatever we’ve done was justified,” said Ogilvie curtly. “If anyone wants proof, there’s a couple of hundred files that show what we’ve accomplished.”

“And a few thousand that don’t,” objected the attorney. “Besides, there’s also the Constitution. I’m speaking adversarily, of course.”

“Horseshit!” Ogilvie shot back. “By the time we get court orders and warrants, some poor son of a bitch over here has a wife or a father shipped to one of those gulags over there, when someone like Havelock could have made a deal.
If
we could have placed a tap on time, assigned surveillance, and found out what was going on.”

“It’s a gray area, Red,” explained Dawson, not unsympathetically. “When is homicide justified,
really
justified? On balance, there are those who would say our accomplishments don’t justify our failures.”

“One man crossing a checkpoint to our side justifies them.” Ogilvie’s eyes were cold. “One family taken out of a camp in Magya-Orszag or Krakow or Dannenwalde or Liberec justifies them. Because that’s where they are, Counselor, and they shouldn’t
be
there. Who the hell gets hurt,
really
hurt? A few screaming freaks with political hatchets and outsized egos. They’re not worth it.”

“The law says they are. The Constitution says they are.”

“Then fuck the law, and let’s put a couple of holes in the Constitution. I’m sick to death of its being used by loudmouthed, bushy-haired smartasses who mount any cause they can think of just to tie our hands and draw attention to themselves. I’ve seen those
rehabilitation
camps, Mr. Lawyer. I’ve
been
there.”

“Which is why you’re valuable here,” interposed Stern quickly, putting out the fire. “Each of us has a value, even when he renders judgments he’d rather not. I think the point Dawson’s making is that this is no time for a Senate inquiry, or the hanging judges of a congressional oversight committee. They could tie our hands far more effectively than any mob from the aging radical-chic or the wheat-germ-and-granola crowd.”

“Or,” said Dawson, glancing at Ogilvie, his look conveying a mutuality of understanding, “representatives of a half a
dozen governments showing up at our embassies and telling us to shut down certain operations. You’ve been there, too, Red. I don’t think you want that.”

“Our patient can make it happen,” interjected Miller. “And very probably will unless we reach him in time. The longer his hallucinations are allowed to continue without medical attention, the farther he’ll slip into fantasy, the rate of acceleration growing faster. The persecutions will multiply until they become unbearable to him and he thinks he has to strike out—strike back. With his own attacks. They’re his defense mechanisms.”

“What form might they take, Paul?” asked the director of Cons Op.

“Any of several,” replied the psychiatrist. “The extreme would be his making contact with men he’s known—or known of—in foreign intelligence circles, and offering to deliver classified information. That could be the root fantasy of the Rostov ‘encounter.’ Or he could write letters—with copies to us—or send cables—easily intercepted by us—that hint at past activities we can’t afford to have scrutinized. Whatever he does, hell be extremely cautious, secretive, the reality of his own expertise protecting his manipulative fantasies. You said it, Daniel; he could be dangerous. He
is
dangerous.”

“
‘Offering
to deliver,’ ” said the attorney, repeating Miller’s phrase. “Hinting … not delivering, not giving outright?”

“Not at first. He’ll try to force us—blackmail us—into telling him what he wants to hear. That the Karas woman is alive, that there was a conspiracy to retire him.”

“Neither of which we can do convincingly because there’s not a damn thing we can offer him as proof,” said Ogilvie. “Nothing hell accept. He’s a field man. Whatever we send him he’ll filter, chew it around for accuracy, and spit it back in the horseshit pile. So what do we tell him?”

“Don’t
tell
him anything,” answered Miller. “You
promise
to tell him. Put it any way you like. The information’s too classified to send by courier, too dangerous to be permitted outside these rooms. Play his game, suck him in. Remember, he desperately wants—needs, if you like—his primary hallucination confirmed. He
saw
a dead woman; he has to believe that. And the confirmation’s over here; it could be irresistible to him.”

“Sorry, Headman.” The red-haired former field agent
raised his hands, palms up. “He won’t buy it, not that way. His—what did you call it? his ‘reality’ part?—would reject it. That’s buying a code in a box of Cracker Jacks. It just doesn’t happen. He’ll want something stronger, much stronger.”

“Matthias?” asked Dawson quietly.

“Optimum,” agreed the psychiatrist.