The Matarese Circle (26 page)

Scofield twisted the top back onto the thermos and threw his cigarette over the side. He stood up and stretched, peering through the mists at the coastline. They had made good time. According to the captain they would be in sight of Solenzara within minutes; and within an hour they would drop off their esteemed passenger between Sainte-Lucie and Porto Vecchio. No problems were anticipated; there were scores of deserted inlets
on the rocky shoreline for a temporarily disabled fishing boat.

Bray yanked on the cord looped around the handle of his attaché case and strapped it to his wrist; it was firm—and wet. The string burn on his wrist was irritated by the salt water, but it would heal quickly, actually aided by the salt. The precaution might seem unwarranted, but the appearance of it was as valuable as the attachment. One could doze, and
Corsos
were known to be quick to relieve travelers of valuables—especially travelers who journeyed without identification, but with money.

“
Signore!
” The captain approached, his wide smile revealing an absence of key teeth. “
Ecco Solenzara! Ci arriveremo subito—trenta minuti. E nord di
Porto Vecchio!”

“
Benissimo, grazie.
”

“
Prego!
”

In a half-hour he’d be on land, in Corsica, in the hills where the Matarese was born. That it had been born was not disputed, that it had provided assassins-for-hire until the mid-thirties was accepted as a firm probability. But so little was known about it that no one really knew how much of its story was myth and how much based in reality. The legend was both encouraged and scorned at the same time; it was basically an enigma because no one understood its origins. Only that a madman named Guillaume de Matarese had summoned a council—from where was never recorded—and given birth to a band of assassins, based, some said, on the killer-society of Hasan ibn-al-Sabbah in the eleventh century.

Yet this smacked of cult-orientation, thus feeding the myth and diminishing the reality. No court testimony was ever given, no assassin ever caught who could be traced to an organization called the Matarese; if there were confessions, none were ever made public. Still the rumors persisted. Stories were circulated in high places; articles appeared in responsible newspapers, only to be denied editorial substance in later editions. Several independent studies were begun; if any were completed, no one knew about them. And through it all governments made no comment. Ever. They were silent.

And for a young intelligence officer studying the history of assassination years ago, it was this silence that lent a certain credibility to the Matarese.

Just as another silence, suddenly imposed three days ago, convinced him that the rendezvous in Corsica was no proposal made in the heat of violence, but the only thing that
was
left. The Matarese remained an enigma, but it was no myth. It was a reality. A powerful man had gone to other powerful men and spoken the name in alarm; it was not to be tolerated.

Robert Winthrop had disappeared.

Bray had run from Rock Creek Park three nights ago and made his way to a motel on the outskirts of Fredericksburg. For six hours he had traveled up and down the highway calling Winthrop from a series of telephone booths, never the same one twice, hitching rides on the pretext of a disabled car to put distance between them. He had talked to Winthrop’s wife, alarming her he was sure, but saying nothing of substance, only that he had to speak with the Ambassador. Until it was dawn, and there was no answer on the phone, just interminable rings spaced farther and farther apart—or so it seemed—and no one at all on the line.

There had been nowhere to turn, no one to go to; the networks were spreading out for him. If they found him, his termination would be complete; he understood that. If he was permitted to live, it would be within the four walls of a cell, or worse, as a vegetable. But he did not think he would be permitted to live. Taleniekov was right: they were both marked.

If there was an answer, it was four thousand miles away in the Mediterranean. In his attaché case were a dozen false passports, five bank books under assumed names, and a list of men and women who could find him all manner of transportation. He had left Fredericksburg at dawn two days ago, had stopped at banks in London and Paris, and late last night had reached a fishing pier in San Vincenzo.

And now he was within minutes of setting foot on Corsica. The long stretches of immobility in the air and over the water had given him time to think or at least the time to organize his thoughts. He had to start with the incontrovertible; there were two established facts:

Guillaume de Matarese had existed and there’d been a group of men who had called themselves the Council of the Matarese, dedicated to the insane theories of its
sponsor. The world moved forward by constant, violent changes of power. Shock and sudden death were intrinsic to the evolution of history. Someone had to provide the means. Governments everywhere would pay for political murder. Assassination—carried out under the most controlled methods untraceable to those contracting for it—could become a global resource with riches and influence beyond imagination. This was the theory of Guillaume de Matarese.

Among the international intelligence community, a minority maintained that the Matarese had been responsible for scores of political killings from the second decade of the century through the mid-thirties, from Sarajevo to Mexico City, from Tokyo to Berlin. In their view, the collapse of the Matarese was attributed to the explosion of World War II with its growth of covert services where such murders were legitimized, or the council’s absorption by the Sicilian Mafia, now entrenched everywhere, but centralized in the United States.

But this positive judgment was decidedly a minority viewpoint. The vast majority of professionals held with Interpol, Britain’s MI-Six, and the American Central Intelligence Agency who claimed that the power of the Matarese was exaggerated. It undoubtedly had killed a number of minor political figures in the maze of passionately ineffective French and Italian politics, but there was no hard evidence of anything beyond this. It was essentially a collection of paranoiacs led by a wealthy eccentric who was as misinformed about philosophy as he was about governments accepting his outrageous contracts. If it were anything else, these professionals claimed further, why had not
they
ever been contacted?

Because,
Bray had believed years ago, as he believed now,
you were—we were—the last people on earth the Matarese wanted to do business with. From the beginning we were the competition—in one form or another.

“
Ancora quindici minuti,
” bellowed the captain from the open wheelhouse—“la costa è molto vicina.”

“
Grazie tante, capitano.
”

“
Prego.
”

The Matarese.
Was
it possible? A group of men selecting and controlling global assassinations, providing structure to terrorism, spawning chaos everywhere?

For Bray the answer was yes. The words of a dying Istrebiteli, the sentence of death imposed by the Soviets on Vasili Taleniekov, his own execution team recruited from Marseilles, Amsterdam and Prague … all were a prelude to the disappearance of Robert Winthrop. All were tied to this modern Council of the Matarese. It was the unseen, unknown mover.

Who were they, these hidden men who had the resources to reach into the highest places of governments as readily as they financed wild-eyed terrorists and selected celebrated men for murder? The larger question was why.
Why?
For what purpose or purposes did they exist?

The
who
was the riddle that had to be unraveled first … and whoever they were, there had to be a connection between them and those fanatics initially summoned by Guillaume de Matarese; where else could they have come from, how else could they have known? Those early men had come to the hills of Porto Vecchio; they had names. The past was the only point of departure he had.

There’d been another, he reflected, but the flare of a match in the woods of Rock Creek Park had erased it. Robert Winthrop had been about to name two powerful men in Washington who had vehemently denied any knowledge of the Matarese. In their denials was their complicity; they
had
to have heard of the Matarese—one way or the other. But Winthrop had not said those names; the violence had interfered. Now he might never say them.

Names past could lead to names present; in this case, they had to. Men left their works, their imprints on their times … their money. All could be traced and lead somewhere. If there were keys to unlock the vaults that held the answers to the Matarese, they would be found in the hills of Porto Vecchio. He had to find them … as his enemy, Vasili Taleniekov, had to find them. Neither would survive unless they did. There’d be no farm in Grasnov for the Russian, no new life for Beowulf Agate, until they found the answers.

“
La costa si avvicina!
” roared the captain, spinning the wheel. He turned, grinning at his passenger through the wind-blown spray. “
Ancora cinque minuti, signore, e poi la Corsica.
”

“
Grazie, capitano.
”

“
Prego
.”

Corsica.

Taleniekov raced up the rocky hill in the moonlight, ducking into the patches of tall grass to obscure his movements, but not the path he was breaking. He did not want those following him to give up the hunt, merely to be slowed down, separated if possible; if he could trap one, that would be ideal.

Old Krupskaya had been right about Corsica, Scofield accurate about the hills north of Porto Vecchio. There were secrets here; it had taken him less than two days to learn that. Men now chased him through the hills in the darkness to prevent him from learning anything further.

Four nights ago Corsica had been a wildly speculative-source, an alternative to capture, Porto Vecchio merely a town on the southeast coast of the island, the hills beyond unknown.

The hills were still unknown; the people who lived in them were distant, strange, and uncommunicative, their Oltramontan dialect difficult to understand, but the speculation had been removed. The mere mention of the Matarese was enough to further cloud eyes that were hostile to begin with; pressing for even the most innocuous information was enough to end conversations barely begun. It was as if the name itself were part of a tribal rite of which no one spoke outside the enclaves in the hills, and never in the presence of strangers. Vasili had begun to understand within hours after he had entered the rock-dotted countryside; it had been dramatically confirmed the first night.

Four days ago he would not have believed it; now he knew it was so. The Matarese was more than legend, more than a mystic symbol to primitive hill people; it was a form of religion. It
had
to be; men were prepared to die to keep its secret.

Four days and the world had changed for him. He was no longer dealing with knowledgeable men, sophisticated equipment at their disposal. There were no computer tapes whirling inside glass panels at the touch of a button, no green letters
rat-tat-tatting
across black screens, delivering immediate information necessary for the next decision. He was probing the past among people of the past.

Which was why he wanted so desperately to trap one of the men following him up the hill in the darkness. He judged there were three of them: the crest of the hill was long and wide and profuse with ragged trees and jagged rocks. They would have to separate in order to cover the various descents that led to further hills and the flatlands that preceded the mountain forests. If he could take one man and have several hours to work on his mind and body he could learn a great deal. He had no compunction about doing so. The night before a wooden bed had been blown apart in the darkness as a Corsican stood silhouetted in the doorframe, a Lupo shotgun in his hand. Taleniekov was presumed to have been in that bed.… Just one man—
that
man—thought Vasili, suppressing his anger, as he ran into a small cluster of wild fir trees just beneath the crown of the hill. He could rest for a few moments.

Far below he could see the weak beams of flashlights.
One, two … three.
Three men and they
were
separating. The one on the extreme left was covering his area; it would take that man ten minutes of climbing to reach the cluster of wild fir. Taleniekov hoped it was the man with the Lupo. He leaned against a tree, breathing heavily, and let his body go limp.

It had happened so fast, the excursion into this primitive world. Yet there was a symmetry of a kind. He had begun running at night along the wooded banks of a ravine in Washington’s Rock Creek Park and here he was in an isolated, tree-lined sanctuary high in the hills of Corsica. At night. The journey had been swift; he had known precisely what to do and when to do it.

Five o’clock yesterday afternoon, he had been in Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport where he had negotiated for a private flight to Bonifacio, due west, on the southern tip of Corsica. He had reached Bonifacio by seven and a taxi had driven him north along the coast to Porto Vecchio and up to an inn up in the hill country. He had sat down to a heavy Corsican meal, engaging the curious owner in offhand conversation.

“I am a scholar of sorts,” he had said. “I seek information about a
padrone
of many years ago. A Guillaume de Matarese.”

“I do not understand,” the innkeeper had replied. “You say a scholar of sorts. It would seem to me that one
either is or is not, signore. Are you with some great university?”

“A private foundation, actually. But universities have access to our studies.”

“
Un’ fondazione?
”

“
Un’ organizzazione accademica.
My section deals with little-known history in Sardinia and Corsica during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Apparently there was this
padrone
 … Guillaume de Matarese … who controlled much of the land in these hills north of Porto Vecchio.”