The Parsifal Mosaic (20 page)

“That’s a large indictment, Navajo.”

“I told you. Drop that fucking name.”

“Like from a cereal box, huh?”

“Worse. For your enlightenment, the Navajos were related to the Apaches, but unlike the Apaches, the tribe was essentially peaceful, defensive. The name didn’t fit in Istanbul, and it doesn’t fit now.”

“That’s interesting; I didn’t know that. But then, I suppose it’s the sort of thing someone not born in a country—brought over after a pretty harrowing childhood somewhere else—would find out about. I mean, studying that kind of history is a way of saying “Thanks,’ isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure, you do. A kid lives through wholesale slaughter, sees friends and neighbors machine-gunned down in a field and thrown into ditches, his own mother sent away to God knows what, knowing he’ll never see her again. This kid is something. He hides in the woods with nothing to eat except what he can trap or steal, afraid to come out. Then he’s found and spends the next few years running through the
streets with explosives strapped to his back, the enemy everywhere, any one of them his potential executioner. All this before he’s ten years old, and by the time he’s twelve, his father’s killed by the Soviets.… Christ, a kid like that, when he finally gets to a safe harbor, he’s going to learn everything he can about the place. He’s really saying “Thanks for letting me come here.’ Wouldn’t you agree … 
Havlíček?”

So the inviolate was not impenetrable by the strategists. Of course they knew, he should have realized that; his own actions had brought it about. The sole guarantee he had been given was that his true file would be provided only on a need-to-know basis to the highest levels of personnel screening. Those below would be shown the British M.I.6 adderdum. A Slovak orphan, parents killed in a Brighton bombing raid, cleared for adoption and immigration. It was all they had to know, all they should know. Before. Not now
.

“It’s not pertinent.”

“Well, maybe it is,” said the former field man, shifting his position on the bench, his hand casually moving toward his jacket pocket.

“Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Your hand. Keep it out of there.”

“Oh, sorry … As I was saying, all that early stuff
could
be pertinent. A man can take just so much over the years; it accumulates, you know what I mean? Then one day something snaps, and without his realizing it, his head plays tricks on him. He goes back—way back—to when things happened to him—terrible things—and the years and the motives of people he knew
then
get mixed up with the years and the people he knows
now
. He begins to blame the present for all the lousy things that happened in the past. It happens a lot to men who live the way you and I have lived. It’s not even unusual.”

“Are you
finished?”
asked Havelock harshly. “Because if you are—”

“Come on back with me, Michael,” interrupted the man from Washington. “You need help. We can help you.”

“You traveled five thousand miles to tell me
that?”
shouted Havelock. “That’s the
data
, your
explanation?”

“Take it easy. Cool it.”

“No,
you
take it easy!
You
cool it, because you’re going to need every cold nerve you’ve got! All of you! I’ll start here in Rome and work my way up and over, through Switzerland, Germany … Prague, Krakow, Warsaw … right up into Moscow, if I have to! And the more I talk, the more of a mess you’ll be in, every one of you. Who the hell are you to explain what or where my head is? I saw that woman. She’s
alive!
I followed her to Civitavecchia, where she faded, but I found out what you said to her, what you
did
to her! I’m going after her, but every day it takes will cost you! I’ll start the minute I get out of here and you won’t be able to stop me. listen to the news tonight and read the morning papers. There’s a conduit here in Rome, a respected first-level attaché, a member of a
minority
—one hell of a screen. Only, he’s going to lose his value
and
his network before the sun goes down. You
bastards!
Who do you think you
are?”

“All right, all
right!”
pleaded Ogilvie, both hands in the air, pressing the space in front of him.” You’ve got it all, but you can’t blame me for trying. Those were the orders. ‘Get him back so we can tell him over here.’ that’s what they said. “Try anything, but don’t
say
anything, not while he’s out of the country.’ I told them it wouldn’t work, not with you. I made them give me the disclosure option; they didn’t want to, but I hammered it out of them.”

“Then
talk
!”

“Okay, okay, you’ve got it.” The man from Washington expelled his breath, shaking his head slowly back and forth. “Jesus, things get screwed up.”

“Unscrew them!”

Ogilvie looked up at Michael, raising his hand to the upper left area of his rumpled jacket. “A smoke, do you mind?”

“Pull it back.”

The strategist peeled back his lapel, revealing a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket Havelock nodded; Ogilvie took out the cigarettes and a book of matches behind the pack. He shook a cigarette into his right hand and flipped open the matchbook cover; the book was empty. “Shit,” he muttered. “Have you got a light?”

Michael reached into his pocket, took out matches and brought them over. “What you’ve got to say had better make a great deal of sense—”

Oh, my God!
Whether it was the slight movement of the
head of red hair below him, or the odd position of Ogilvie’s right hand, or the flash of sunlight reflecting off the cigarette pack’s cellophane, he would never know, but in that confluence of unexpected factors, he knew the trap had been sprung. He lashed his left foot out, catching the strategist’s right arm and reeling it back; the force of the blow threw Ogilvie off the bench. Suddenly the air was filled with a billowing cloud of mist. He dived to his right, beyond the path, holding his nostrils, closing his eyes, rolling on the ground until he slammed into the remains of the jagged wall, out of range of the gaseous cloud.

The collapsible vial had been concealed in the pack of cigarettes, and the acrid odor that permeated the arbor told him what the vial had contained. It was a nerve gas that inhibited all muscular control if a target was caught in the nucleus; its effect lasted no less than an hour, no more than three. It was used almost exclusively for abduction, rarely if ever as a prelude to dispatch.

Havelock opened his eyes and got to his knees, supporting himself on the wall. Beyond the marble bench the man from Washington was thrashing around on the overgrown grass, coughing, struggling to rise, his body in convulsions. He had been caught in the milder periphery of the burst, just enough to make him momentarily lose control.

Michael got to his feet, watching the bluish-gray cloud evaporate in the air above the Palatine, its center holding until diffused by the breezes. He opened his jacket, feeling the pain of the scrapes and bruises made by the magnum under his belt as a result of his violent movements. He took out the weapon with the ugly perforated cylinder on the barrel, and walked unsteadily across the grass to Ogilvie. The red-haired man was breathing with difficulty, but his eyes were clear; he stopped struggling and stared up at Havelock and then at the weapon in Michael’s hand. “Go ahead, Navajo,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper, “Save me the trouble.”

“I thought so.” Havelock looked at the former field man’s gaunt, lined face that bad the chalk-white pallor of death about it.

“Don’t think. Shoot.”

“Why should I? Make it easier, I mean. Or harder, for that matter. You didn’t come to kill me, you came to take me. And you don’t have any answers at all.”

“I gave them to you.”

“When?”

“A couple of minutes ago … 
Havlíček
. The war. Czechoslovakia, Prague. Your father and mother. Lidice. All those things that aren’t pertinent.”

“What the
hell
are you talking about?”

“Your head’s damaged, Navajo. I’m not lying about that.”

“What?”

“You didn’t see the Karas woman. She’s dead.”

“She’s
alive!”
shouted Michael, crouching beside the man from Washington, grabbing him by the lapel of his rumpled coat. “Goddamn you, she saw me! She ran from me!”

“No way,” said Ogilvie, shaking his head. “You weren’t the only one at Costa Brava, there was someone else. We have his sighting; he brought back proof—fragments of clothing, matching blood, the works. She died on that beach at the Costa Brava.”

“That’s a
lie
! I was there all night! I went down to the road, down to the beach. There weren’t any pieces of clothing; she was running, she wasn’t touched until after she was dead, after the bullets hit her. Whoever she was, her body was carried away intact, nothing torn, nothing left on the beach! How
could
there be?
Why
would there be? That sighting’s a lie!”

The strategist lay motionless, his eyes boring up into Havelock’s, his breathing steadier now. It was obvious that his mind was racing, filtering truth where he could find the truth. “It was dark,” he said in a monotone. “You couldn’t tell.”

“When I walked down to the beach, the sun was up.”

Ogilvie winced, forcing his head into his left shoulder, his mouth stretched, a searing pain apparently shooting up through his chest and down his arm. “The man who made that sighting had a coronary three weeks later,” said the strategist, his voice a strained whisper. “He died on a goddamned sailboat in the Chesapeake.… If you’re right, there’s a problem back in D.C. neither you nor I know about Help me. We’ve got to get out to Palombara.”

“You
get out to Palombara. I don’t come in without answers. I told you that.”

“You’ve got to! Because you’re not getting out of here without me, and that’s Holy Writ.”

“You’ve lost your touch, Apache. I took this magnum from that pretty face you hired. Incidentally, her
gumbà
is with her now, both resting at the bottom of a marble bath.”

“Not them!
Him
!” The man from Washington was suddenly alarmed. He pushed himself up on his elbows, his neck craning, his eyes squinting into the sun, scanning the hill above the arbor. “He’s waiting, watching us,” he whispered. “Put the gun down! Get off the advantage. Hurry up!”

“Who? Why? What for?”

“For Christ’s sake, do as I say! Quickly!”

Michael shook his head and got to his feet. “You’re full of little tricks, Red, but you’ve been away too long. You’ve got the same stench about you that I can smell all the way from the Potomac—”

“Don’t!
No!”
screamed the former field man, his eyes wide, straining, focused on the high point of the hill. Then drawing from an unreasonable reservoir of strength, he lurched off the ground, clutching Havelock and pulling him away from the stone path,

Havelock raised the barrel with heavy cylinder attached and was about to crash it into Ogilvie’s skull when the snaps came, two muted reports from above. Ogilvie gasped, then exhaled audibly, making a terrible sound like rushing water, and went limp, falling backwards on the grass. His throat was ripped open; he was dead, having stopped the bullet meant for Michael.

Havelock lunged to the wall; three more shots came, exploding marble and dirt all around him. He raced to the end of the jagged wall, the magnum by his face, and peered through a V-shaped break in the stone.

Silence.

A forearm. A shoulder. Beyond a cluster of wild bush.
Now
! He aimed carefully and fired four shots in rapid succession. A bloody hand whipped up in the air, followed by a pivoting shoulder. Then the wounded man lurched out of the foliage and limped rapidly over the crest of the hill. The hair on the hatless figure was close-cropped and black, the skin deep brown. Mahogany. The would-be assassin on the Palatine was Rome’s conduit for covert activities in the northern sector of the Mediterranean. Had he squeezed the trigger in anger, or fear, or a combination of both, afraid and furious that his cover and his network would be exposed? Or had he
coldly followed orders? Another question, one more shapeless fragment in the mosaic.

Havelock turned and leaned against the wall, exhausted, frightened, feeling as vulnerable as in the early days, the terrible days. He looked down at Red Ogilvie—John Philip Ogilvie, if he remembered correctly. Minutes ago he was a dying man; now he was a dead man. Killed saving the life of another he did not want to see die. The Apache had not come to dispatch the Navajo; he had come to save him. But safety was not found among the strategists in Washington; they had been programmed by liars. Liars were in control.

Why? For what purpose?

No time. He had to get out of Rome, out of Italy. To the border at Col des Moulinets, and if that failed, to Paris.

To Jenna. Always Jenna, now more than ever!

The two phone calls took forty-seven minutes to complete from two separate booths in the crowded Leonardo da Vinci Airport. The first was to the office of the
direttore
of Rome’s Amministrazione di Sicurezza, Italy’s watchdog over covert foreign activities. With succinct references to authentic clandestine operations going back several years, Havelock was put through without identification to the director’s administrative assistant. He held the man on the line for less than a minute, hanging up after saying what he had to say. The second call, from a booth at the opposite end of the terminal, was placed to the
redattore
of
Il Progresso
, Rome’s highly political, highly opinionated, largely anti-American newspaper. Considering the implied subject matter, the editor was a far less difficult man to reach. And when the journalist interrupted Michael for identification and clarification, Havelock countered with two suggestions: the first, to check with the administrative assistant to the
direttore
of the Amministrazione di Sicurezza; the second, to watch the United States embassy during the next seventy-two hours, with particular attention paid to the individual in question.