The Parsifal Mosaic (60 page)

Footsteps … Were there footsteps? If so, the sound was incongruous with the sand and the soft earth that had to be beneath the ocean pines. It was a slow tattoo of sharp cracks—leather heels beating a hard surface. Havelock crouched and raced toward the cover of the tall trees and peered diagonally to his right in the direction of the sound.

A second tattoo, now on his left, farther away, but coming closer. It was similar to the first—slow, deliberate. He crawled deeper into the pines until he came within several feet of the edge, where he dived prone on the ground; he immediately raised his head to see what the sudden new light would reveal. What he saw explained the sound of the footsteps, but nothing else. Directly ahead was a wide, smoothly surfaced concrete road, and just beyond it was a stockade fence at least twelve feet high extending as far as the eye could see in both directions. The light came from behind it; a roof of light hung everywhere. It was the glow he had seen from the water, now much brighter, but still oddly soft, lacking intensity.

The first soldier appeared on the right, walking slowly. Like the crew on the patrol boat, he wore army fatigues, but strapped to his waist was a government-issue Colt .45 automatic. He was a young foot soldier on guard duty, his bored face reflecting the waste of time and motion. His counterpart emerged from the shadows on the left, perhaps fifty yards away; his walk, if anything, was slower than that of his comrade. They approached each other like two robots on a treadmill, meeting no more than thirty feet from Havelock.

“Did anyone fill you in?” asked the soldier on the right.

“Yeah, some rowboat with a motor drifted out from Savannah with the tide, that’s all. No one in it.”

“Anybody check the engine?”

“What do you mean?”

“The oil. The oil stays warm if it’s been running. Like any motor.”

“Hey, come on. Who the hell could get in here, anyway?”

“I didn’t say they could. I just said it was one way to tell.”

“Forget it. They’re still doing a three-sixty search-in case somebody’s got wings, I guess. The whips around here are all swacked in the head.”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

The guard on the left looked at his watch. “You’ve got a point. See you inside.”

“If Jackson shows up, you will. Last night he was a half hour late. Can you believe it? He said he had to see the end of a lousy TV movie.”

“He pulls that a lot. Willis told him the other night that
someday someone’s going to just walk off and say he took over. Let him hang.”

“He’d talk his way out of it.” Each man turned and began trudging back on his familiar, useless course. Michael pieced together the essentials of their conversation. A search party was combing the island and the guards’ watch was about over—a watch that was apparently loose, if a midnight relief could be a half hour late. It was an inconsistency; the island was a security fortress, yet guard duty was treated as though it were a futile if necessary performance. Why?

The answer, he surmised, might be found in an old observation. Barracks personnel and low-level superiors were the first to perceive unnecessary duty. Which could only mean that the shoreline alarms were matched by interior sensors. Michael studied the high stockade fence. It was new, the wood a pale tan, and it took little imagination to picture the trips wired behind it—dual beams set off by mass, weight and body heat, impossible to tunnel under or vault over or cut through. And then he saw what he had not concentrated on: the fence curved—as the concrete road curved-on both sides. Gates had to be beyond the sight lines, entrances manned by personnel at the only pointe of penetration. Not casual at all.

A three-sixty search
.

Soldiers with flashlights treading through the pines and over the beaches, looking for the shadow of a possibility. They had begun directly behind him, on a stretch of the coastline called sector four, moving quickly—perhaps a dozen men, maybe a thirteen-man squad. Wherever they had come from, they would undoubtedly return to the same place once they had completed the circle … and the night was dark, the moonlight increasingly infrequent. Using the search party as part of his strategy was an outside possibility—the only one he could think of—but for the tactic to work, he had to move.
Now
.

The soldier on the right not only was closest but was the most logical to deal with first. He was nearly out of sight, rounding the bend in the road, disappearing beyond the angle of the fence. Havelock got up and ran across the road, then started racing down the sandy shoulder, furious at the sound of his waterlogged boots. He reached the bend; there were gate lights up ahead, perhaps six hundred feet away.
He ran faster, closing the gap between himself and the slow-moving guard, hoping the wind rustling through the trees muffled the spongelike crunching beneath him.

He was within twelve feet when the man stopped, alarmed, his head whipping to the side. Havelock sprang, covering the final six feet in midair; his right hand clamped on the soldier’s mouth and his left grabbed the base of the man’s skull, controlling both their falls to the ground. He held the soldier firmly, his knee under the young man’s back, arching the body over it.

“Don’t try to shout!” he whispered. “This is only a security exercise—like war games, you understand? Half the garrison here knows about it, half doesn’t. Now, I’m going to take you across the road and tie you up and gag you, but nothing’ll be too tight. You’re simply out of maneuvers. Okay?”

The young guard was too much in shock to respond other than to blink repeatedly with his large, frightened eyes. Michael could not trust him—more accurately, he could not trust him not to panic. He reached for the fallen barracks cap and rose with the soldier, pulling the young man up, his hand still clamped on the mouth; they both dashed across the road, turning right, and headed for the pines. Once in the darkness under the branches, Havelock stopped and tripped the soldier to the ground; they were far enough into sector four.

“Now, I’m going to take my hand away,” said Michael, kneeling, “but if you make a sound, I’ll have to chop you out, you got that? If I didn’t, I’d lose points. Okay?”

The young man nodded and Havelock slowly removed his hand, prepared to clamp it back at the first loud utterance. The guard rubbed his cheeks and said quietly, “You scared the shit out of me. What the hell’s going on?”

“Just what I told you,” said Michael, unstrapping the soldier’s weapons belt and yanking off his field jacket. “It’s a security exercise,” he added, reaching into his own pocket for a rawhide lace and pulling the guard’s arms behind him. “We’re going to get inside.” He tied the guard’s wrists and forearms together, weaving the rawhide up to the elbows.

“Into the compound?”

“That’s right.”

“No way, man. You lose!”

“The alarm system?”

“It’s seven ways to Memphis and back. A pelican got burned on the fence the other night; it sizzled for a goddamn half an hour. Son of a bitch if we didn’t have chicken the next day.”

“What about inside?”

“What about it?”

“Are there alarms inside?”

“Only in Georgetown.”

“What? What’s Georgetown?”

“Hey, I know the rules. All I’ve got to give you is my name, rank, and serial number!”

“The gate,” said Havelock menacingly. “Who’s on the gater?”

“The gate detail, who else? What goes out comes in.”

“Now, you
tell
me—”

A faint glow of light caught Michael’s eye; it was far away, through the trees, a distant beam of a flashlight. The search party was rounding the island. There was no more time for conversation. He tore off part of the soldier’s shirt, rolled it up and stuffed it into the protesting mouth, then strung another rawhide lace around the young man’s face and tied it at the back of his neck, holding the gag in place. A third lace bound his ankles.

Havelock put on the field jacket, strapped the weapons belt around his waist, removed his wool knit hat and shoved it into a pocket. He put the barracks cap on his head, pulling it down as far as he could, then reached under his soaked sweater and unhooked the waterproof flashlight. He judged the angles of passage through the trees, the distance of the emerging beams of light, and started running diagonally to his right through the pines—toward an edge of a rock or beach, he had no idea which.

He clung to the rock, the crashing sea beneath him, the wind strong, and waited until the last solider passed above. The instant he did, Michael pulled himself up and raced toward the receding figure; with the experience born of a hundred such encounters, he grabbed the man around the neck, choking off all sound as he yanked him to the ground. Thirty seconds later the unconscious soldier was bound—arms, legs and mouth. Havelock ran to catch up with the others.

“All right, you guys!” shouted an authoritative voice. “Screw-off time is over! Back to your kennels!”

“Shit, Captain,” yelled a soldier. “We thought you were bringing in a boatload of broads and this was a treasure hunt!”

“Call it a trial run,
gumbà
. Next time you may score.”

“He can’t even score on the pinball!” shouted another. “What’s he gonna do with a broad?”

Havelock followed the beams of light through the pines. The road appeared—the light-colored smooth concrete reflecting the harsh glare of the gate lights. The squad crossed the road in a formless group, Michael jostling himself ahead so there would be soldiers behind him. They passed through the steel structure, a guard shouting off the numbers as each man went past.

“One, two, three, four
 …”

He was number eight; he put his head down, rubbing his eyes.

“Seven, eight, nine
 …”

He was inside. He took his hands away from his eyes as he moved with the squad across an oddly smooth surface, and looked up.

His breathing stopped, his legs froze. He was barely able to move forward, for he was in another time, another place. What he saw in front of him and around him was surreal. Abstract images, isolated fragments of an unearthly scene.

He was not inside a compound on a small land mass off the Georgia coast called Poole’s Island. He was in Washington, D.C.

It was something out of a macabre dream, reality twisted, abstracted, deformed to fulfill a demonic fantasy. Scaled-down models of familiar sights were alongside six-foot-high photographic blowups of places he knew only too well. There were small, narrow, tree-lined streets, abruptly starting, suddenly ending, falling off into dirt, and street signs and street-lamps—all in miniature. The soft glow of light that came from the lamps washed over massive, life-size doorways and on buildings—which were not buildings but only the façades of buildings.

There were the glass doors of the Department of State. And over there, the stone entrance of the new FBI Building, and across the way, beyond a tiny park dotted with small white benches, the brown steps leading to the main doors of the Pentagon. Far to his left he could see a tall black wrought-iron fence with an opening in the center to accommodate a drive flanked by two tiny glass-enclosed guardhouses. It was the South Portico entrance to the White House.

Incredible
!

And automobiles of normal sizes glistening. A taxi, two army staff cars, two outsized limousines, all parked separately, stationary symbols of another place. And there were the unmistakable symbols seen in the distance to his right beyond
the miniature park: small alabaster models—no more than four feet in size—of the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument, and small compact duplicates of the Reflecting Pool on the Mall … all bathed in light … from far away perfect renditions, unmistakable landmarks.

It was all there, all
insane
! It was a spread—out movie set, filled with outlandish grainy photographs, miniaturized models, partial structures. The whole scene could have been the product of a mad imagination, a film maker intent on exploring a white—light nightmare that was his warped, personal statement about Washington, D.C.

Uncanny
.

A bizarre, false world had been created to present a distorted version of the real one hundreds of miles away!

It was more than Havelock could absorb. He had to break away and find a few moments of sanity, to try to piece together and meaning of the macabre spectacle. To find Anton Matthias.

The squad began to separate, several to the left, others to the right. Beyond the false façade of State was a receding lawn, and low—hanging willows, then darkness. Suddenly a prolonged burst of cursing came from behind, from the entrance gate, and Michael tensed.

“Goddamned son-of-a-bitch-fuck-off, where
is
he!”

“Who, Sergeant?”

“Jackson, Lieutenant! He’s late again!”

“He goes on report, Sergeant. This duty’s become far too lax. I want it tightened up.”

There were amused rumblings from the search-party squad, a number looking behind, laughing quietly. Havelock took advantage of the moment to slip down the street and around the corner into the shadows of the lawn.

He leaned against a cinder-block wall; it was solid. It enclosed something within and was not part of the false front. He crouched in the darkness trying to think, trying to understand And that was the problem: it was beyond his understanding. He knew, of course, about the Soviet training center in Novgorod called the American Compound, a vast complex where everything was “Americanized,” where there were stores and supermarkets and motels and gas stations, where everyone used U.S. currency and spoke American English, slang and different dialects. And he had heard about
further Soviet experiments in the Urals, where entire U.S. army camps had been built, American military customs and regulations followed with extraordinary accuracy, and where, again, only American English was spoken, barracks language encouraged, everything authentic down to the most minute detail. Then, of course, there were the
paminyatchiki—
the so-called travelers—a deep-cover operation scorned as a paranoid fantasy by Rostov in Athens, but still alive, still functioning. These were men and women who had been brought over as infants and placed in homes as sons and daughters, growing up entirely within the American experience, but whose mission as adults was to serve the Soviet Union. It was said—and confirmed by Rostov—that the
paminyatchik
apparatus had been absorbed by the Voennaya, that maniacally secretive cult of fanatics that even the KGB found difficult to control. It was further rumored that some of these fanatics had reached positions of power and influence. Where did rumor stop and reality begin? What was the reality here?