The Matarese Countdown (8 page)

“He chose his own death so that we might live, Cameron,” said Antonia, walking to a white wicker chair next to her husband. “In terrible pain he flung himself at our enemies, allowing us to escape. Without his sacrifice we both would have been shot, killed.”

“From archenemies to allies, even friends who you give up your life for?”

“I wouldn’t go that far, and I’ve thought about it for years. We never forgot what we did to each other, but I think he decided that his was the greater crime. He killed my wife, I killed his brother.… It’s in the past; nothing changes it.”

“I was told about that,” said Pryce. “I was also told you were placed ‘beyond salvage.’ Do you want to talk about it?”

“What’s there to talk about?” answered Scofield quietly. “It happened.”

“ ‘What’s there to
talk
about’?” repeated the stunned CIA officer. “For Christ’s sake, your own agency, your
superiors
, ordered your
execution!
”

“Funny, I never considered them my ‘superiors.’ Quite the opposite most of the time.”

“You know what I mean—”

“I do, indeed,” interrupted Bray. “Someone added the numbers but came up with the wrong total, and since I knew who it was, I decided to kill him. Then I reasoned I’d undoubtedly be caught and he wasn’t worth it. Instead, I stopped being angry and got even. I dealt my cards, which proved to be reasonably profitable.”

“Back to Taleniekov,” said Cameron. “How did it begin with you two?”

“You’re smart, Cam. The keys are always at the beginning, the first door that has to be unlocked. Without that door you can’t reach the others.”

“A maze with doors?”

“More than you can count. The beginning … It was nuts, but there it was and Taleniekov and I were caught up in it. There were two extraordinary kills, two assassinations. On our side there was General Anthony Blackburn, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and on the Soviet’s, Dimitri Yurievich, their leading nuclear physicist.”

“Deputy Director Shields mentioned that one, and I remembered it. A famous Russian torn apart by a crazed bear.”

“That was the popular version, yes. A
wounded
bear shot by men who whipped it into Yurievich’s trail. There’s nothing on earth more ferocious than a huge maimed bear, his nostrils filled with the scent of his own blood. He’ll smell out a group of hunters and tear them all to pieces until he’s killed.… Wait a minute.
Frank
Shields? Old bulldog-face with those creased eyes nobody’s ever seen. He’s still around?”

“He holds you in high regard—”

“Perhaps in retrospect, not when we were current. Frank’s a purist; he never tolerated men like me. However, analysts tend to cloak themselves in contradictory alternatives.”

“You were saying,” interrupted Pryce, “about the two assassinations?”

“Here I must digress, Cameron. Have you ever heard the phrase ‘the banality of evil’?”

“Of course.”

“What does it mean to you?”

“I suppose horrible acts repeated with such frequency they become commonplace—banal.”

“Very good. That’s what happened to Taleniekov and me. You see, the considered wisdom of the times regarding black operations was that Vasili and I were the leading players in those kinds of kills. It was more myth than reality. In truth, except for what we did to each other, between us we were responsible for only fourteen fairly well-publicized assassinations over twenty years, he with eight kills, me with six. Hardly in Carlos the Jackal’s league, but myths take on lives of their own, growing rapidly, far too persuasively. They’re terrible things, myths.”

“I think I see where you’re going,” said Pryce. “Each side blamed the other’s presumed chief assassin—you and Taleniekov.”

“Precisely, but neither of us had anything to do with those assassinations. However, they had been set up as if we’d left our calling cards.”

“But how did you get together? Surely you didn’t pick up phones and call each other.”

“It would have been comical. ‘Hello, KGB switchboard? This is Beowulf Agate, and if you’ll kindly reach the illustrious Comrade Colonel Taleniekov, code name Serpent, and tell him I’m on the line, he’ll agree we should have a chat. You see, we’re both about to be eliminated for the wrong reasons. Silly, isn’t it?’ ”

“The ‘Beowulf Agate’ is … inspired,” noted the CIA officer.

“Yes, I always thought it was rather imaginative,” said Scofield. “Even Russian in its way. As you know, they more often than not use a person’s first two names and omit the last.”

“Brandon Alan … Beowulf Agate. You’re right. But since you didn’t make that phone call to the KGB, how
did
you meet?”

“With extreme caution, each thinking the other would shoot to kill, speaking of banal expressions. Vasili made the
first move in our lethal chess game. To begin with, he had to get out of the Soviet Union because he was marked for a firing squad—the reasons are too serpentine to go into; and second, a dying, once all-powerful KGB director told him about the Matarese—”

“I don’t get the connection,” Pryce broke in.

“Think about it. You’ve got five seconds.”

“Good Lord,” said Cameron softly, narrowing his eyes. “The
Matarese? They
assassinated both men? Yurievich and Blackburn?”

“On the money, Field Officer Pryce.”

“
Why?
”

“Because their tentacles reached into the war rooms on both sides, and the hotheads on both sides thought each kill was a splendid idea, if it could be accomplished without being traced. The Matarese, letting only a very few know in Washington and Moscow, carried out the assassinations, putting a convincing spin on them that pointed to Vasili and me.”

“Just like
that?
But again,
why?
”

“Because they’d been doing it for years. Feeding both superpowers information about their enemies’ newest weapons of annihilation, forcing each to produce more and more, until the arms race became gargantuan. All the while the Matarese made billions, its defense-contractor clients happily paying off.”

“This is coming too fast.… So Taleniekov made the first move?”

“He sent me a message from Brussels. ‘We will either kill each other or we will talk.’ He got over here somehow, and after a series of rendezvous, during which we damn near blew each other away, we did talk. We assumed that our names, our personas, if you will, had taken each of our countries to the brink, only the intercession of the Soviet Premier and the American President curbing the hotheads. They convinced each other that neither nation was responsible for the kills, that Taleniekov and I were nowhere near the scenes.”

“If I may,” interrupted Cameron, holding up the palm of
his right hand in the candlelight. “As I said, I remembered the death of Yurievich because it was so macabre, but I don’t recall the killing of a General Blackburn; perhaps I was too young. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs doesn’t mean an awful lot to a kid of ten or eleven.”

“You wouldn’t have recalled it if you’d been
twice
that age,” replied Scofield. “Anthony Blackburn was reported to have died from cardiac arrest while reading the Scriptures in his library at home. A nice touch considering the truth. He was killed in an expensive New York whorehouse having extremely kinky sex.”

“Why was he a target? Just because he was head of the Joint Chiefs?”

“Blackburn wasn’t just a figurehead, he was a brilliant tactician. The Soviets in some ways knew him better than we did; they’d studied him in Korea and Vietnam. They knew his primary goal was stability.”

“Okay, I understand. So you and Taleniekov talked. How did that lead you to the Matarese?”

“The old KGB director, Krupskova—or some name like that—he’d been shot, the wound was severe, and he called for Vasili. He told Taleniekov that he had analyzed the reports of the kills of Yurievich and Blackburn. He concluded that the assassinations were the work of a secret organization called the Matarese, its origins in Corsica. He explained to Vasili that they were spreading out everywhere, blackmailing high government officials, assuming extraordinary power throughout the Free World and the Eastern bloc countries.”

“Had this Krupskova worked with them—with it?” asked Pryce.

“He said we all did, had been for years. Signals would be sent, meetings in fields or forests arranged, away from anyone observing them, men in shadows meeting other shadowed men in darkness. Deals were made in the blackest arts—‘kill
him
or kill
her
, we’ll pay.’ ”

“They could get
away
with that?”

“On both sides,” answered Scofield. “It was their tentacles,
its
tentacles. They knew what the extremists wanted and they supplied the results, untraceable to their clients.”

“There had to be records of disbursements. How were they paid?”

“Off the books, clandestine operations being beyond scrutiny for reasons of national security. That’s a necessary euphemism for buy whatever you can when you can’t get it legally or morally. The Soviets, of course, had fewer problems in those areas, but we weren’t far behind. To put it bluntly, our governments weren’t officially at war, but
we
were. It was a goddamned bloody mess, and we were the
messees
—on both sides.”

“You’re pretty cynical, aren’t you?”

“Of course, he is,” said Antonia Scofield, lurching forward in her white wicker chair. “Men like my husband and Vasili Taleniekov were killers on the loose, killers who had to take the lives of men and women who they knew would kill them! For what purpose? While the superpowers pretended to get together with parades and marching bands proclaiming
détente
, or whatever they called it, while agents like Brandon Scofield and Vasili Taleniekov were ordered to keep killing? Where was the logic, Cameron Pryce?”

“I don’t have an answer, Mrs. Scofield—Antonia. It was a different time.”

“What’s
your
time, Cam?” asked Beowulf Agate. “What are your orders? Who are you after?”

“Terrorists, I guess. Among the more deadly, perhaps, is this Matarese because it’s a new kind of terror, I think.”

“Exactly right, young man,” agreed Scofield. “They may not massacre people or blow up buildings at this point—they pay for those things to be done or engineer them with unknowing, programmed psychopaths—but they can and they will do everything themselves if it’s part of their strategy.”

“Strategy for
what?
”

“For a malevolent international cartel, dedicated to raw financial power for itself.”

“To get anywhere near that goal they’d have to eliminate competition, neutralize competitors all over the place.”

“Now you’ve got it. Capitalism run amok, derailed. One monolithic Daddy Warbucks pushing all the buttons, price-fixing the order of the day, false competition erected by noncompeting partners. Then what comes next, Field Officer Cameron Pryce?”

“I don’t know what you mean—”

“I mean what comes
next?
The world’s leading financial centers under the patronage of a single authority. What follows?”

“Governments,” said Cam quietly, his eyes narrowed again. “Whoever has the major sources of money calls the political shots.”

“Go to the head of the class, youngster!” exclaimed Scofield, raising his empty brandy snifter, and looking sheepishly at his wife. “Perhaps, my love?”

“I’ll bring the bottle,” said Antonia, rising. “You’ve been a good lad for several months now.”

“Not by choice, damn it! It’s those lousy doctors in Miami.”

“But could it happen?” continued the CIA agent pensively as Antonia left the veranda. “Could it really happen?”

“There are more historical precedents than either of us could enumerate, Cameron. Mergers upon mergers, the swallowing up of corporations by buyouts, hostile and otherwise. Global monopolies, young man. It goes back to the pharaohs of Egypt who overrode their pretending princes, and the Romans who packed the senates so the ruling Caesars ran everything. It’s nothing new, it’s just modernized, computerized. The bastards who want everything will get everything unless they’re stopped.”

“Who’ll stop them?”

“Not
me
, God knows, I don’t care any longer. Perhaps the people—the
unconcerned
people—may wake up and see that at the end of the line their freedoms have been sucked away by the unholy apparatus of financial supremacy. That’s what the Matarese is driving for. The results are police states—everywhere. They can’t survive otherwise.”

“You really think that could happen?”

“It depends on what kind of head start they’ve got and who’s on their board of directors. Frankly, yes, it could happen. When you analyze it, we’re talking about boardroom terrorism, international collusion, flaunting all the antitrust laws everywhere. It’s as though General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, BMW, Toyota, Porsche, and two or three other manufacturers got together and ran the world’s automobile industry. It’s not really that far-fetched.”

“And once there, they go after the governments,” said Pryce.

“Oh, I suspect a number are entrenched already, as they were thirty years ago. One of them nearly became President of the United States. They damn near ran our State Department and the Pentagon as well as having undue influence in the House and Senate. Since they’re now so obviously international, suppose they controlled Britain’s Foreign Office, France’s Quai d’Orsay, Rome, Ottawa, and Bonn, it’s a nice unhealthy picture, isn’t it? Good heavens, in a few years, with politicians in their pockets, a couple of Matarese-rigged summits and we’re all marching to their drums, happy as mindless clams—until we understand that when the drumrolls stop, so do our alternatives. We buy what they want to sell us, we take what they want to give us … we believe what they tell us to believe … or else.”

“ ‘Boardroom terrorism,’ that’s a hell of a term.”

“And as lethal as any other, Cam. Because once they get their footholds, a monopoly here, a megamerger there, interrelated conglomerates here
and
there, they won’t accept any opposition.”

“They’re apparently not accepting any now,” said Pryce. He told Scofield about the four kills: the French financier, the Spanish doctor, the Englishwoman, and the Italian polo player on Long Island.