The Matarese Circle (44 page)

They started running through the tunnel of foliage, mist from the arcs of water joining the sweat on their faces.

“
Dannazione!
” Antonia fell, the long black cape torn from her shoulders by a branch of sapling. Bray stopped and pulled her up.

“
Ecco la!
”

“
La donna!
”

Shouts came from behind them; gunshots followed. Two men came running through the water-filled alleyway; they were targets, silhouetted by the light from the fountain beyond. Scofield fired three rounds. One man fell, holding his thigh; the second grabbed his shoulder, his gun flying out of his hand as he dove for the protection of the nearest statue.

Bray and Antonia reached the staircase at the end of the path. An entrance of the villa. They ran up, taking the steps two at a time, until they joined the panicked crowds rushing out through the enclosed courtyard into the huge parking lot.

Chauffeurs were everywhere, standing by elegant automobiles, protecting them, waiting for sight of their employers—and as with all chauffeurs in Italy in these times, their guns were drawn; protection was everything. They had been schooled; they were prepared.

One, however, was not prepared enough. Bray approached him. “Is this Count Scozzi’s car?” he asked breathlessly.

“No, it is not, signore! Stand back!”

“Sorry.” Scofield took a step away from the man, sufficiently to allay his fears, then lunged forward, hammering the barrel of his automatic into the side of the chauffeur’s skull. The man collapsed. “Get in!” he yelled to Antonia. “Lock the doors and stay on the floor until we’re out of here.”

It took them nearly a quarter of an hour before they reached the highway out of Tivoli. They sped down the road for six miles, then took an offshoot to the right that was free of traffic. Bray pulled over to the side of the road, stopped, and for several minutes let his head fall back against the seat and closed his eyes. The pounding lessened; he sat up, reached into his pocket for his cigarettes, and offered one to Antonia.

“Normally, I do not,” she said. “But right now I will. What happened?”

He lighted both their cigarettes and told her, ending with the murder of Guillamo Scozzi, the enigmatic words he had heard on the staircase, and the identity of the man who spoke them. Paravacini. The specifics were clear, the conclusions less so. He could only speculate.

“They thought I was Taleniekov; they’d been warned about him. But they knew nothing about
me,
my name was never mentioned. It doesn’t make sense; Scozzi described an American. They should have known.”

“Why?”

“Because Washington and Moscow both knew Taleniekov was coming after me. They tried to trap us; they failed, and so they had to presume we made contact.…” Or did they? wondered Scofield. The only one who actually
knew
he and the Russian had made contact was Robert Winthrop, and if he was alive, his silence could be counted upon. The rest of the intelligence community had only hearsay evidence to go on; no one had actually seen them together. Still, the presumption had to be made, unless “They think I’m dead,” he said out loud, staring through the cigarette smoke to the windshield. “It’s the only explanation. Someone told them I was dead. That’s what ‘impossible’ meant.”

“Why would anyone do that?”

“I wish I knew. If it were purely an intelligence maneuver, it could be for a reason as basic as buying time, throwing the opposition off, your own trap to follow. But this isn’t that kind of thing, it couldn’t be. The Matarese has lines into Soviet and U.S. operations—I don’t doubt it for a minute—but not the other way around. I don’t understand.”

“Could whoever it was think you
are
dead?”

Bray looked at her, his mind racing. “I don’t see how. Or why. It’s a damn good idea but I didn’t think of it. To pull off a burial without a corpse takes a lot of doing.”

Burial.… The burials must be absolute.

Reach Turin.… Tell them to cable the eagles, the cat.

Turin. Paravacini.

“Have you thought of something?” asked Antonia.

“Something else,” he replied. “This Paravacini. He runs the Scozzi-Paravacini companies in Turin?”

“He did once. And in Rome and Milan, New York and Paris, as well. All over. He married the Scozzi daughter and as time went on her brother, the count, assumed more and more control. The count’s the one who ran the companies. At least, that’s what the newspapers said.”

“It’s what Paravacini wanted them to say. It wasn’t true. Scozzi was a well-put-together figurehead.”

“Then he wasn’t part of the Matarese?”

“Oh, he was part of it all right, in some ways the most important part. Unless I’m wrong, he brought it with him. He and his mother, the contessa, presented it to Paravacini along with his blueblooded new wife. But now we come to the real question. Why would a man like Paravacini even listen? Men like Paravacini need, above all things … political stability. They pour fortunes into governments that have it and candidates who promise it—because they lose fortunes when it isn’t there. They look for strong authoritarian regimes, capable of stamping out a Red Brigades or a Baader-Meinhof no matter how indiscriminate the process, or how much legitimate dissent goes down with them.”

“That government does not exist in Italy,” interrupted Antonia.

“And in not many other places, either. That’s what doesn’t make sense. The Paravacinis of this world thrive on law and order. They have nothing to gain by, or nothing to substitute
for
its breakdown. Yet the Matarese is against all that. It wants to
paralyze
governments; it feeds the terrorists, funnels money to them, spreads the paralysis as quickly as possible.” Scofield drew on his cigarette. The clearer some things became, the more obscure did others.

“You’re contradicting yourself, Bray.” Antonia touched his arm; it had become a perfectly natural gesture during the past twenty-four hours. “You say Paravacini
is
the Matarese. Or part of it.”

“He is. That’s what’s missing. The reason.”

“Where do you look for it?”

“Not here any longer. I’ll ask the doctor to pick up our things at the Excelsior. We’re getting out.”

“We?”

Scofield took her hand. “Tonight changed a lot of things.
La bella signorina
can’t stay in Rome now.”

“Then I can go with
you.
”

“As far as Paris,” said Bray hesitantly, the hesitation not born of doubt, only of how to arrange the avenues of communication in Paris. “You’ll stay there. I’ll work out the procedures and get you a place to stay.”

“Where will you go?”

“London. We know about Paravacini now; he’s the Scozzi factor. London’s next.”

“Why there?”

“Paravacini said Turin was to cable ‘the eagles, the cat.’ With what your grandmother told us in Corsica, that code isn’t hard to figure out. One eagle is my country, the other Taleniekov’s.”

“It doesn’t follow,” disagreed Antonia. “Russia is the bear.”

“Not in this case. The Russian bear is Bolshevik, the Russian eagle, Tzarist. The third guest at Villa Matarese in April of nineteen eleven was a man named Voroshin. Prince Andrei Voroshin. From St. Petersburg. That’s Leningrad now. Taleniekov’s on his way there.”

“And the ‘cat’?”

“The British lion. The second guest, Sir John Waverly. A descendant, David Waverly, is England’s Foreign Secretary.”

“A very high position.”

“Too high, too visible. It doesn’t make sense for him to be involved, either. Any more than the man in Washington, a senator who will probably be President next year. And because it doesn’t make sense, it scares the hell out of me.” Scofield released her hand, and reached for the ignition. “We’re getting closer. Whatever there is to be found under the two eagles and the cat may be harder to dig out, but it’s there. Paravacini made that clear. He said the ‘burials’ had to be ‘absolute.’ He meant that all the connections had to be re-examined, put farther out of reach.”

“You’ll be in a great deal of danger.” She touched his arm again.

“Nowhere near as much as Taleniekov. As far as the Matarese is concerned, I’m dead, remember? He’s not. Which is why we’re going to send our first cable. To Helsinki. We’ve got to warn him.”

“About what?”

“That anyone prowling around Leningrad looking for information about an illustrious old St. Petersburg family named Voroshin will probably get his head blown off.” Bray started the car. “It’s wild,” he said. “We’re going after the inheritors—or we think we are—because we’ve
got their names. But there’s someone else, and I don’t think any of them mean much without him.”

“Who is that?”

“A shepherd boy. He’s the one we’ve really got to find, and I don’t have the vaguest idea of how to do it.”

Taleniekov walked to the middle of the block on Helsinki’s Itä Kaivopuisto, noting the lights of the American Embassy down the street. The sight of the building was appropriate; he had been thinking of Beowulf Agate off and on for most of the day.

It had taken him most of the day to absorb the news in Scofield’s cable. The words themselves were innocuous, a salesman’s report to an executive of a home office regarding Italian imports of Finnish crystal, but the new information was startling and complex. Scofield had made extraordinary progress in a very short time.

He had found the first connection; it
was
a Scozzi—the first name on the guest list of Guillaume de Matarese—and the man was dead, killed by those who controlled him. Therefore, the American’s assumption in Corsica that the members of the Matarese council were not born, but selected, proved accurate. The Matarese had been taken over, a mixture of descendants and usurpers. It was consistent with the dying words of Aleksie Krupskaya in Moscow.

The Matarese was dormant for years. No one could make contact. Then it came back, but it was not the same. Killings … without clients, senseless butchery without a pattern … governments paralyzed.

This was, indeed, a new Matarese and infinitely more deadly than a cult of fanatics dedicated to paid political assassination. And Beowulf had added a warning in his cable. The Matarese now assumed that the guest list had been found; the stalking of the Voroshin family in Leningrad was infinitely more complicated than it might have been only days ago.

Men were waiting in Leningrad for someone to ask questions about the Voroshins. But not the men—or man—he would reach, thought Taleniekov, stamping his feet against the cold, looking for a sign of the automobile and the man who was to meet him and drive him east along the coast past Hamina toward the Soviet border.

Scofield was on his way to Paris with the girl, the American to continue on to England after setting up procedures in France. The Corsican woman had passed whatever tests Beowulf Agate had created; she would live and be their conduit. But, as Vasili was beginning to learn, Scofield rarely operated on a simple line; there was a third party, the manager of the Tavastian Hotel in Helsinki.

Once in Leningrad, Taleniekov was to cable the manager with whatever particulars he could put into ciphers and the man, in turn, would wait for direct telephone calls from Paris and relate the codes received from Leningrad. It was then up to the woman to reach Scofield in England. Vasili knew that monitoring cable traffic was a particular talent of the KGB; the only sure way to eliminate it was to use KGB equipment. Somehow, he would find a way to do that.

An automobile pulled up to the curb, the headlights dimming once, the driver wearing a red muffler, one end draped over a dark leather jacket. Taleniekov crossed the pavement and got in the front seat beside the driver. He was on his way back to Russia.

The town of Vainikala was on the northwest shore of the lake; across the water was the Soviet Union, the southeast banks patroled by teams of soldiers and dogs plagued more often by ennui than by threats of penetration or escape. When the KGB first knew about it, prolonged exposure to the freezing winds during winter months made it simply too dangerous to use as an escape route; and in summer the interminable flow of tourist visas in and out of Tallin and Riga, to say nothing of Leningrad itself, made those cities the easiest avenues to freedom. As a result the northwest garrisons along the Finnish border were staffed by the least motivated Russian military personnel, often a collection of misfits and drunks commanded by men being punished for errors
of judgment. Checkpoint Vainikala was a logical place to cross into Russia; even the dogs were third rate.

The Finns, however, were not, nor had they ever lost their hatred of the Soviet invaders who had lunged into their country in ’39. As they had been masters of the lakes and the forests then, repulsing whole divisions with brilliantly executed traps, so they were masters forty years later, avoiding others. It was not until Taleniekov had been escorted across an inlet of ice and brought up beyond the patrols above the snow-clogged banks that he realized Checkpoint Vainikala had become an escape route of considerable magnitude. It was no longer minor.

“If ever,” said the Finn who had taken him on his last leg of the journey, “any of you men from Washington want to get beyond these Bolshevik bastards, remember us. Because we do not forget.”

The irony was not lost on Vasili Vasilovich Taleniekov, former master strategist for the KGB. “You should be careful with such offers,” he replied. “How do you know I’m not a Soviet plant?”

The Finn smiled. “We traced you to the Tavastian and made our own inquiries. You were sent by the best there is. He has used us in a dozen different Baltic operations. Give the quiet one our regards.” The man extended his hand. “Arrangements have been made to drive you south through Vyborg into Zelenogorsk,” continued the escort.

“What?”
Taleniekov had made no such request; he had made it clear that once inside the Soviet Union, he preferred to be on his own. “I didn’t ask you to do that. I didn’t pay for it.”

The Finn smiled condescendingly. “We thought it best; it will be quicker for you. Walk two kilometers down this road. You’ll find a car parked by the snowbank. Ask the man inside for the time, saying your car has broken down—but speak Russian; they say you can do so passably well. If the man answers, then begins winding his watch, that’s your ride.”