The Parsifal Mosaic (58 page)

“Well, they never would have brought you over this way if Anton had been apprised, I can tell you that.”

Only Matthias’s closest friends called him by his Czech first name, and because Michael knew it, the statement alarmed him. By necessity, it reversed the sequence that Havelock had intended, but it would have been unnatural not to inquire. The Bradford ploy would come last; Matthias now.

“I wondered about that,” said Havelock, revolving the glass in his hand, his voice casual. “I simply figured he was too damned busy. As a matter of fact, I was going to ask you if he was in Washington. I’d like to drop in and see him, but my time’s limited. I have to get back to London, and if I call him myself … well, you know Anton. He’d insist I spend a couple of days.”

Alexander leaned forward in the heavily cushioned chair, his intelligent face expressing concern. “You don’t know, then?”

“Know what?”

“Damn it, that’s when government paranoia goes too far! He’s the closest thing you have to a father and you’re the closest thing he has to a son! You who’ve kept the secrets of a thousand operations and they haven’t told you.”

“Told me what?”

“Anton’s ill. I’m sorry you have to hear it from me, Michael.”

“How ill?”

“The rumors range from serious to fatal. Apparently he’s aware of whichever it is, and, true to form, thinks of himself last. When State learned that I’d found out, he sent me a personal note swearing me to secrecy.”

“How did you learn of it?”

“One of those odd things you don’t really think about … until you think about it. I was inveigled into going to a party
in Arlington several weeks ago—you know how I detest those exhausting exercises in verbal endurance, but the hostess was a close friend of my late wife.”

“I’m sony,” interrupted Havelock, only vaguely remembering the journalist’s wife, a willowy thing who had opted for gardens and flower arrangements. “I didn’t know.”

“It’s all right. It’s been over two years now.”

“The party in Arlington?”

“Yes, well to my embarrassment a youngish woman who was quite drunk virtually assaulted me. Now, if she’d been a predatory female intent on a sexual liaison, I could have understood her being drawn to the most desirable man on the premises, but I’m afraid it wasn’t the case. Apparently, she had marital difficulties of a most unusual nature. Her husband was an army officer absent from the household—read ‘connubial bed’—for nearly three months, and no one at the Pentagon would tell her where he was. She feigned illness, which I doubt took a great deal of self-persuasion, and he was brought back on emergency leave. When she got him in her net, she demanded to know where he’d been, what he was doing—read ‘other woman.’ He refused to tell her, so when soldier-boy was asleep she went through his clothes and found a security pass for a post she’d never heard of; I hadn’t either, as a matter of fact. I gather she battered him awake and confronted him, and this time in self-defense he blurted out that it was the highest-priority classification. It was where a very important man was being treated, and he couldn’t say any more.”

“Anton?” broke in Michael.

“I didn’t piece it together until the next morning. The last thing she said to me—before some charitable or oversexed guest drove her home—was that the country should be told about such things, that the government was behaving like Mother Russia. That morning she phoned me, quite sober and in serious panic. She apologized for what she described as her ‘ghastly behavior’ and pleaded with me to forget everything she’d told me. I was entirely sympathetic, but added that perhaps her instincts were right, although I wasn’t the person she should appeal to; there were others who would serve her better. She replied something to the effect that her husband could be ruined, a brilliant military career destroyed. So that was that.”

“That was
what?
How did you find out it was Matthias?”

“Because that same morning I read in the
Washington Post
that Anton was prolonging a brief vacation and would not appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I kept thinking about the woman and what she’d said … and the fact that Anton rarely gave up a chance to perform for the Senate newsreels. And then I thought, Why not? Like you, I know where he spends every free moment he has—”

“The Shenandoah lodge,” interrupted Havelock, feeling a sense of déjà vu.

“Exactly. I reasoned that if the story was true and he was taking an extra few days, we might get together for some valley fishing or his beloved chess. Like you, again, I have the telephone number, so I called him.”

“He wasn’t there,” said Michael.

“They didn’t say that,” corrected the journalist. “They said he couldn’t come to the phone.”

“That
phone?”

“Yes … 
that
phone. It was the private line.”

“The one that goes unanswered unless he’s there.”

“Yes.” Alexander raised his brandy glass and drank.

Havelock was close to screaming. He wanted to rush over to the portly writer and shake him:
Go on! Go on, tell me!
Instead, he said quietly, “That must have been a shock.”

“Wouldn’t it have been to you?”

“Certainly.”
It was. Cant you see it in my eyes?
“What did you do?”

“The first thing was to call Zelienski. You remember old Leon, don’t you? Whenever Matthias drove or flew out to the lodge it was standard procedure for Zehenski to be summoned for dinner—has been standard for years now.” “Did you reach him?”

“Yes, and he told me a very odd thing. He said he hadn’t seen Anton in months, that Matthias never answered his calls anymore—not personally—and that he didn’t think our great man had time for the valley these days.”

The déjà vu was complete for Michael. Then he remembered. “You’re a friend of Zelienski’s, aren’t you?”

“Through Anton, mainly. Very much the way we met. He comes up now and then for lunch and chess. Never for dinner, though; he won’t drive at night. But my point is that the
one place where Matthias should have been for a holiday he wasn’t. I really can’t imagine his not seeing old Leon, can you? After all, Zelienski lets him win.”

“I can’t imagine your letting the issue drop, either.”

“You’re quite right, I didn’t. I called Anton’s office and asked to speak with his first assistant I emphasized that I expected someone who represented the Secretary of State in his absence, and I considered my inquiry to be that substantive. Of
all
people, guess who was put on to me.”

“Who?”

“Emory Bradford. Do you remember him? Bradford the ‘boomerang,’ scourge of the warlords where once he’d been their spokesman. I was fascinated because actually I admire him for having had the courage to reverse himself, but I always thought Matthias detested the whole flock. If anything, he was more sympathetic to those who went down in flames because they
didn’t
change their minds.”

“What did Bradford tell you?” Michael gripped the glass in his hand, suddenly terrified that he might break it.

“You mean, what did he tell me after I told him what I thought had happened? Naturally, I never mentioned the woman and, God knows, it wasn’t necessary. Bradford was in shock. He begged me not to say anything or write anything, that Matthias himself would be in touch with me. I agreed, and by midafternoon, I received Anton’s note by messenger. I’ve abided by his request—until now. I can’t for a minute believe he’d want you excluded.”

“I don’t know what to say.” Havelock lessened the pressure on the glass, breathing deeply, the moment to be interpreted in any way the journalist wished. But for Michael it was the prelude to the most important question he might ever have asked in his life. “Do you remember the name of the post where the woman’s husband was stationed? The one you’d never heard of before?”

“Yes,” said Alexander, studying Havelock. “But no one knows I know. Or my source.”

“Will you tell me? No one will ever know
my
source, you have my word on it.”

“For what purpose, Michael?”

Havelock paused, then smiled. “Send a basket of fruit probably. A letter, of course.”

The journalist nodded his head, smiled and answered, “It’s a place called Poole’s Island, somewhere off the coast of Georgia.”

“Thank you.”

Alexander noted his empty glass. “Come now, we’re both out. Freshen yours and do mine while you’re at it. That’s also part of the rules, remember?”

Michael got out of the chair, shaking his head, smiling still, despite the tension he felt “Be happy to pour yours, but I really have to get going.” He picked up the journalist’s glass. “I was expected in McLean an hour ago.”

“You’re
leaving?”
exclaimed the old warhorse, his eyebrows arched, turning in the chair. “What about this piece of information from London you claimed would make up for some of the best meals you ever had, young man?”

Havelock stood at the copper dry-bar, pouring brandy. “I was thinking about that as I drove out here,” he said pensively. “I may have been impetuous.”

“Spoilsport,” said Alexander, chuckling.

“Well, it’s up to you. It concerns a very complicated, deep-cover intelligence operation, which in my judgment will take us nowhere. Do you want to hear it?”

“Stop there, dear boy! You’ve got the wrong scribbler, I wouldn’t touch it. I subscribe to Anton’s maxim. Eighty percent of all intelligence is a chess game played by idiots for the benefit of paranoid morons!”

Michael climbed into the car; there was the faint odor of cigarettes. “You’ve been smoking,” he said.

“Feeling like a little boy in a graveyard,” replied Jenna, curled up on the floor. “What about Bradford? Will your friend bring him out here?”

Havelock started the engine, engaged the gear, and swung rapidly around the circular drive toward the entrance. “You can get up now.”

“What about
Bradford
?”

“We’re going to let him sweat for a while, stretch him out.”

Jenna crawled up on the seat, staring at him. “What are you saying, Mikhail?”

“We’re going to drive all night, rest for a while in the
morning, then keep going. I want to get there late tomorrow.”

“My God,
where?”

“A place called Poole’s Island, wherever it is.”

The island was off the coast, east of Savannah; five years ago it had been a sparsely populated island of less than two square miles before it was taken over by the government for oceanic research. Several times a week, said the fishermen, helicopters from Hunter Air Force Base could be seen skimming above the water toward an unseen pad somewhere beyond the tall pines that bordered the rocky shoreline.

They had reached Savannah by three-thirty in the afternoon and, by four, had found a nondescript motel on the ocean highway. At four-twenty they walked onto the pier of a commercial marina across the way in time to watch a dozen or so fishing boats come in with the day’s catch. By a quarter past five they had talked to various fishermen, and at five-thirty Havelock had a quiet conversation with the manager of the marina. By ten to six $200 had exchanged hands, and a fifteen-foot skiff with a twelve-horsepower outboard had been made available to him, with the hours at his discretion and the night watchman of the marina informed of the rental.

They drove back along the highway to a shopping center in Fort Pulaski where Michael found a sporting-goods store and purchased the items he needed. These included a wool knit hat, tight sweater, chinos and thick, rubber-soled ankle boots—all black. In addition to the clothes, he bought the following:
a waterproof flashlight and an oilcloth packet, a hunting knife, and five packages of 72-inch rawhide shoelaces.

“A sweater, a hat, a torch, a knife,” Jenna said rapidly, angrily. “You buy one of each. Buy two. I’m going with you.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Do you forget Prague and Warsaw? Trieste or the Balkans?”

“No, but you do. In each place—everywhere we went—there was always a secondary we could fall back on, if only to buy time. Someone at an embassy or a consulate who was given the words that constituted a counterthreat.”

“We never used such people.”

“We were never caught.”

She looked at him, her eyes reluctantly accepting his logic. “What words do
I
have?”

“I’ll write them out for you. There’s a stationery store across the mall. I want to get a yellow legal pad and carbon paper. Let’s go.”

Jenna sat in an armchair next to the motel desk where Havelock wrote. Taking the carbon copies from him as he tore them off the yellow pad, she checked the blue impressions for legibility. He had filled up nine pages, each line in precise block letters, each item numbered, every detail specific, every name accurate. It was a compendium of selected top-secret intelligence operations and penetrations perpetrated by the United States government throughout Europe during the past eighteen months. It included sources, informants, deep-cover and double agents, as well as a list of diplomats and attachés in three embassies who, in reality, were controls for the Central Intelligence Agency. On the tenth page he gave an account of Costa Brava naming Emory Bradford and the men he had spoken with who had confirmed evidence that could only have been obtained with the cooperation of the KGB, and of a VKR officer in Paris who admitted Soviet knowledge of the deception. On the eleventh page he wrote of the fatal meeting on the Palatine, and of an American intelligence officer who had died saving his life and, moments before his death, had exclaimed that there were lies being told by powerful men in Washington. On the twelfth he briefly described the events at Col des Moulinets and the order for his execution issued under the
code name Ambiguity. On the thirteenth and last page he told the truth about a killer from Lidice who had called himself Jacob Handelman and the purpose of a farm in Mason Falls, Pennsylvania, which sold the services of slaves as efficiently as any camp that had provided labor for Albert Speer. The final line was concise:
Secretary of State Anthony Matthias is being held against his will at a government installation called Poole’s Island in Georgia
.