The Aquitaine Progression (98 page)

The arrivals had been scheduled carefully, as none of the three visitors was to know that the others were there. The planes from Bonn and Paris landed at 4:30 and 5:45, respectively, the jet from the Mediterranean nearly three hours later at 8:27. And to each stunned guest Joel Converse said the identical words: “As I was offered hospitality in Bonn, I offer you mine here. Your accommodations will be better than I was given, although I doubt the food will be as good. However, I know one thing—your departure will be far less dramatic than mine.”

But not your stay
, thought Converse, as he spoke to each man.
Not your stay
. It was part of the plan.

The first light floated up into the dark sky above the trees in Central Park. Nathan Simon sat in his study and watched the new day’s arrival from the large, soft leather chair facing the huge window. It was his thinking seat, as he called it. Recently he had used it as much for dozing as for thought. But there were no brief interludes of sleep tonight—this morning. His mind was on fire; he had to explore and reexplore the options, stretching the limits of his perception of the dangers within each. To choose the wrong one would send out alarms that would force the generals to act immediately, and once under way, events would race swiftly out of control; the control of events would be solely in the hands of the generals—everywhere. Of course, they might decide within hours to begin the onslaught, but Nathan did not think so—they were not fools. All chaps had its visual beginnings, the initial turbulence that would give credibility to subsequent violence. If nothing else, confusion had to be established as the players moved into place without being seen. And the concept of military control over governments was a timeworn idea since the age of the Pharaohs. It bore early fruit in the Peloponnesus and Sparta’s conquest of Athens, later with the
Caesars, and, later still, was exercised by the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, then by the Renaissance princes, and finally brought to its apotheosis by the Soviets and the Germans in the twentieth century. Unrest preceded violence, and violence preceded takeover, whether it was a revolution sparked by hundreds of thousands of oppressed Russians or the strangling inequities of a Versailles treaty.

Therein lay the weakness of the generals’ strategy: the unrest had to exist before the violence erupted. It required mobs of malcontented people—ordinary people—who could be worked into a frenzy, but for that to happen the mobs had to be there in the first place. The people’s discontent would be the sign, the prelude, as it were, but where,
when
? And what could he do, what moves could he make that would escape the attention of Delavane’s informers? He was the employer and friend of Joel Converse, the “psychopathic assassin” the generals had created. He had to presume he was being watched—at the very least any Overt action he took would be scrutinized, and if he became suspect he would be thwarted. His life was immaterial. In a sense he was trapped, as he and others like him had been trapped on the beaches of Anzio. They had realized that there was a degree of safety in the foxholes behind the dunes, that to emerge from them was to face unending mortar fire. Yet they had known, too, that nothing would be accomplished if they remained where they were.

Contrary to what he had told Peter Stone, Nathan knew precisely whom he had to see—not one man, but three. The President, the Speaker of the House, and the Attorney General. The apex of the executive branch, the leader of the legislative, and the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. He would see no one of lesser stature, and it was far more advantageous to see them all together rather than individually. He had to see them, whether separately or as a group, and there was his dilemma; it was the trap. One did not simply pick up a telephone and make appointments with such men. There were procedures, formalities, and screening processes to ensure the validity of the requests; men with their responsibilities could not waste time. The trap. The minute his name was mentioned, the word would go out. Delavane himself would know within a matter of hours, if not minutes.

Despite Joel’s gratuitous and highly dubious statements to Peter Stone, it was not easy to reach powerful government
figures any more than it was logical to have a judge issue a court order under seal that somehow miraculously,
legally
, guaranteed extraordinary protection for those same people without informing the entire security apparatus as to why the protection was deemed vital. Ridiculous! Such court orders were reasonable where intimidated witnesses were concerned before a criminal trial and even afterward in terms of fabricated rehabilitation, but that process hardly applied to the White House, the Congress, or the Justice Department. Joel had taken a legal maneuver, ballooned it way out of probability, and scaled it up into orbit—for a reason, of course. Stone and his colleagues had provided depositions.

And yet, thought Simon, there was an odd logic in Converse’s misapplied exaggerations. Not in any way Joel had considered but as a means to reach these men. “A court, a single judge …” Converse had said to Stone. That was the logic, the rest was nonsense.
The Supreme Court
, a justice of that court. Not a request from one Nathan Simon who would have to be screened, if only in terms of content, not character, but an urgent message to the President from a venerated justice of the Supreme Court! No one would dare question such a man if he pronounced his business to be between the President and himself. Presidents were far more solicitous of the Court than of Congress, and with good reason. The latter was a political battleground, the former an arena of moral judgment. Nathan Simon knew the man he could call
and
see, a justice in his late seventies. The Court was not in session; October was a month away. The justice was somewhere in New England; his private number was at the office.

Nathan blinked, then brought his hand up to shield his eyes. For a brief moment the fireball of the early sun had careened a blinding ray through a geometric maze of glass and steel across the park and entered his window before being blocked by a distant building. And suddenly, at that instant of blindness, he was given the answer to the terrifying question of
where
and
when
—the unrest that had to be the prelude for the eruption of violence. There was scheduled throughout Free Europe, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States an internationally coordinated week-long series of antinuclear protests. Millions of concerned people joining hands and snarling traffic in the streets of the major cities and capitals, making their voices heard at the expense of normalcy. Rallies to be held in the parks and in the squares and in
front of government buildings. Politicians and statesmen, perceiving as always the power of ground swells, had promised to address huge crowds everywhere—in Paris and Bonn, Rome and Madrid, Brussels and London, Toronto, Ottawa, New York, and Washington. And again, as always, both the sincere advocates and the posturing sycophants of the bodies politic would blame the lack of arms-control progress on the intransigence of evil adversaries, not on their own deficiencies. The genuine and the phony would walk hand in hand across the many podiums, none sure of the other’s stripes.

Crowds everywhere would espouse deeply felt, deeply divisive issues: the believers of universal restraint would be pitted against those who intensely believe in the effectiveness of raw power, and the latter would surely be heard. No one thought the massive demonstrations would be without incidents, yet how far might these minor confrontations escalate if the incidents
themselves
were massive? Units of terrorist fanatics financed anonymously, convinced of their mission to infiltrate and savagely disrupt so as to get their messages across, messages of real and or imagined grievances that had nothing to do with the protests, creating chaos primarily because the crowds were not of their world or their fevers. Crowds—everywhere. These were the hordes of people who could be galvanized by sudden violence and worked into a state of madness. It would be the prelude. Everywhere.

The demonstrations were scheduled to begin in three days.

Peter Stone walked down the wide dirt path toward the lake behind the A-frame house somewhere in lower New Hampshire—he did not know precisely where, only that it was twenty minutes from the airport. It was close to dusk, the end of a day filled with surprises, and apparently more were to come. Ten hours ago, in his room at the Algonquin, he had called Swissair to see if the flight from Geneva was on schedule; he had been told it was thirty-four minutes ahead of schedule and, barring landing delays, was expected a half-hour early. It was the first surprise and an inconsequential one. The second was not. He had arrived at Kennedy shortly before two o’clock, and within a few minutes he heard the page over the public address system for a “Mr. Lackland,” the name he had given Nathan Simon.

“Take Pilgrim Airlines to Manchester, New Hampshire,”
the lawyer had said. “There’s a reservation for Mr. Lackland on the three-fifteen plane. Can you make it?”

“Easily. The flight from Geneva’s early. I assume that’s LaGuardia?”

“Yes. You’ll be met in Manchester by a man with red hair. I’ve described you to him. See you around five-thirty.”

Manchester, New Hampshire? Stone had been so sure Simon would ask him to fly to Washington that he had not even bothered to put a toothbrush in his pocket.

Surprise number three was the courier from Geneva. A prim, gaunt Englishwoman with a face of pale granite and the most uncommunicative pair of eyes he had seen outside of Dzerzhinsky Square. As arranged, she had met him in front of the Swissair lounge, a copy of the
Economist
in her left hand. After studying the wrong side of his out-of-date government identification, she had given him the attaché case and made the following statement—in high dudgeon. “I don’t like New York, I never have. I don’t like flying either, but everyone’s been so lovely and it’s better to get the whole whack-a-doo over all at once, righto? They’ve arranged for me to take the next plane back to Geneva. I miss my mountains. They need me and I do try to give them my
very
all, righto?”

With that abstruse bit of information she had smiled wanly and started back somewhat uncertainly toward the escalator. It was then that Stone had begun to understand. The woman’s eyes did not reveal her condition but the whole person did. She was drunk—or, perhaps, “pickled”—having overcome her fear of flying with liquid courage. Converse had made a strange choice of a courier, Stone had thought, but had instantly changed his mind. Who could be less suspect?

The fourth surprise came at the Manchester airport. An ebullient, middle-aged redheaded man had greeted him as though they were long-lost fraternity brothers from some Midwestern university in the late thirties, when such fraternal ties were deemed far deeper than blood. He was effusive to the point where Stone was not only embarrassed by the display of camaraderie but seriously concerned that unwarranted attention would be drawn to them. But once in the parking lot, the redhead had suddenly slammed him into the doorframe of the car and shoved the barrel of a gun into the back of his neck while the man’s free hand stabbed his clothes for a weapon.

“I wouldn’t take the risk of going through metal detectors with a gun,
damn
it!” protested the ex-CIA agent.

“Just making sure, spook. I’ve dealt with you assholes, you think you’re something else. Me, I was Federal.”

“Which explains a great deal,” said Stone, meaning it.

“You drive.”

“Is that a question or an order?”

“An order. All spooks drive,” replied the redhead.

Surprise number five came in the car as Stone took the sudden turns commanded by the redheaded man, who casually replaced, the gun in his jacket holster.

“Sorry about the horseshit,” he had said in a voice far less hostile than it had been in the parking lot, but nowhere near the false ebullience in the terminal. “I had to be careful, piss you off, see where you stood, you know what I mean? And I was never Federal—I hated those turkeys. They always wanted you to know they were better than you were just because they came from D.C. I was a cop in Cleveland, name’s Gary Frazier. How are you?”

“Somewhat more comfortable,” Stone had said. “Where are we going?”

“Sorry, pal. If he wants you to know, he’ll tell you.”

Surprise number six awaited Stone when he drove the car up through the New Hampshire hills to an isolated house of wood and glass, surrounded by forests, the structure an inverted V, two narrowing stories looking out in all directions on woods and water. Nathan Simon had walked down the stone steps from the front door.

“You’ve brought it?” he asked.

“Here it is,” said Stone, handing the attaché case to the lawyer through the open window. “Where are we? Who are you seeing?”

“It’s an unlisted residence, but if everything is in order we’ll call you. There are guest quarters attached to the boat-house down at the lake. Why not freshen up after your trip? The driver will point the way. If we need you for anything, we’ll ring you on the phone. It’s a separate number from the house, so just pick it up.”

And now Peter Stone was walking down the wide dirt path that led to the boathouse by the lake, aware that eyes were following him. Surprise number six: he had no idea where he was and Simon wasn’t going to tell him unless “everything was in order,” whatever that meant.

The guest quarters alluded to by the attorney was a three-room cottage on the edge of the lake with an entrance to the adjacent boathouse, in which was berthed a small sleek motorboat and a nondescript catamaran that looked more like a raft with two canvas seats and fishing equipment for drift trawling. Stone wandered about trying to find some clue as to the owner’s identity but there was nothing. Even the names on the boats were meaningless, but not lacking in humor. The cumbersome, raftlike sail was named
Hawk
, while the aggressive-looking little speedboat was
Dove
.