The Matarese Countdown (7 page)

“I’ve got clothes in my bag.”

“I used to carry one of those. Change of shorts and a garrote, a lightweight jacket and a couple of weapons, maybe some underwear and a hunting knife. Also whiskey, can’t forget the whiskey.”

“I’ve got bourbon—”

“Then the D.C. boys are right. You’ve got possibilities.”

The inside of the cabin—more than a cabin, a medium-sized house, really—was nearly all white, accentuated by several table lamps. White walls, white furniture, white archways that led to other rooms, all to repel the heat of the sun. And standing next to a white wicker armchair was Scofield’s wife. As reported by the Tortolan in the Road Town post office, she was tall, full of figure but not obese, and with that mixture of gray and dark hair that bespoke her advancing years. Her face was delicate yet strong; a mind was at work inside that handsome head.

“Congratulations, Mr. Pryce,” she said in slightly accented English. “We’ve been on the alert for you, although I didn’t think you could possibly find us. I owe you one dollar, Bray.”

“I’ll bet another that I never see it.”

“Finding you wasn’t that difficult, Mrs. Scofield.”

“The mailbox, of course,” the once and former whiz of deep-cover intelligence broke in. “It’s a hell of a flaw but a necessary one. We still sail, we still like the charter business, and it’s a way to make a few dollars and socialize a bit.… We’re not antisocial, you know. We enjoy most people, actually.”

“This house, the isolation, wouldn’t seem to support that, sir.”

“On the surface, I suppose not, but the obvious can be misleading, can’t it, young man? We’re not hermits, we’re here for a very practical reason. You’re an example.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Have you any idea, Mr. Pryce,” interrupted Antonia Scofield, “how many people have tried to pull my husband back into his former profession? Beyond Washington, there’s the British MI-Five and MI-Six, the French Deuxième, the Italian Servizio Segreto, and just about everybody in NATO’s intelligence community. He keeps refusing and refusing, but they never ‘let up,’ as you Americans say.”

“He’s considered a brilliant man—”

“Was,
was … maybe!
” exclaimed Scofield. “But I haven’t anything to offer any longer. Good
Christ
, it was damn near twenty-five years ago! The whole world’s changed and I haven’t the slightest interest in it. Sure, you could find me; if our roles were reversed, it’d take me no more time than it took you to find
me
. But you’d be astonished what a little deterrence, like a mostly uncharted island and a stupidly named mailbox, can do to stop the curious. You want to know why?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Because they’ve got a hundred other problems and they don’t want the hassle, it’s as simple as that. It’s so much easier to say to a superior that I’m seemingly impossible to locate. Think about the funds needed for airline tickets along with experienced personnel; the whole ball of wax becomes so tangled they give up. It’s just easier.”

“Yet you just said you were told I was coming down looking for you. You could have put up barriers, not used the mailbox. You didn’t. You didn’t protect yourself.”

“You’re very perceptive, young man.”

“It’s almost comical that you use that phrase. That’s what I called the lieutenant in St. Thomas.”

“He was probably half your age, as you are of mine. So what?”

“Nothing really, but why didn’t you? Protect your isolation?”

“It was a joint decision,” answered Scofield, looking over at his wife. “More hers than mine, to tell you the truth. We wanted to see if you had the patience, that godforsaken quiescence before you made your move. An hour becomes a day, a day a month; we’ve all been there. You passed with all the colors; you actually
slept
on the beach. Damn good training!”

“You haven’t answered my question, sir.”

“No, I haven’t, because I knew why you had come. Only one reason, and you said the name. The Matarese.”

“Tell him, Bray, tell him everything you know,” said Antonia Scofield. “You owe Taleniekov that, we both owe Vasili that.”

“I know, my dear, but may we first have a drink? I’ll settle for wine, but I’d rather have brandy.”

“You may have both, if you like, my darling.”

“You see why I keep her around after all these years? A woman who calls you ‘my darling’ for a quarter of a century is a girl you keep.”

W
e have to go back to the turn of the century, actually before that to be accurate,” began Scofield, rocking in his chair on the screened-in, candlelit veranda of the isolated cottage on the presumably deserted island named Outer Brass 26. “The dates are imprecise, as the records were lost, or destroyed, but it can be estimated that Guillaume, Baron of Matarese, was born around 1830. The family was rich by Corsican standards, mostly in property, the baronage and the land being a gift of Napoleon, although that’s questionable.”

“Why?” asked Pryce, in shorts and a T-shirt, mesmerized by the gray-haired, white-bearded former intelligence officer whose eyes seemed to dance impudently behind the steel-rimmed glasses. “There had to be documents of possession, of inheritance.”

“As I mentioned, the original records were lost, new ones found and registered. There were those who claimed they were counterfeits, forgeries commissioned by a very young Guillaume, that the Matarese never even knew a Bonaparte, Third or Second, and certainly not the First. Nevertheless, by the time those doubts arose, the family was too powerful to be questioned.”

“How so?”

“Guillaume was a financial genius, nothing less, and like most of that ilk, he knew when and how to cut corners while staying marginally within the laws. Before he was thirty years of age, he was the richest, most powerful landowner in Corsica. The family literally ran the island, and the French government couldn’t do anything about it. The Matarese were a law unto themselves, drawing revenues from the major ports, tributes and bribes from the growing industries of agriculture and resort developers who had to use their docking facilities and their roads. It was said that Guillaume was the first Corso, that’s the Corsican equivalent of the Black Hand, the Mafia. He made the later godfathers look like wimps, the Capones misguided children. Although there was violence, brutal violence, it was kept to a minimum and used to great effect. The Baron ruled by fear, not unbridled punishment.”

“Couldn’t Paris simply shut him down or throw him out?” interrupted Pryce.

“What they did was worse than that. They ruined two of the Baron’s sons—destroyed them. Both died violently, and after that the Baron was never the same. It was soon after this that Guillaume conceived his so-called vision. An international cartel the likes of which the Rothschilds never dreamed of. Whereas the Rothschilds were an established banking family throughout Europe, Guillaume went in the opposite direction. He recruited powerful men and women to be his satellites. They were people who once possessed enormous wealth—inherited or accumulated—and like him had a taste for revenge. Those initial members stayed out of the spotlight, avoiding all forms of public scrutiny, preferring to handle or manipulate their riches from a distance. They employed fronts, such as lawyers, and speaking of the Bonapartes, they used a tactic proclaimed by Napoleon the First. He said, ‘Give me enough medals and I’ll win you any war.’ So these original Mataresans gave out titles, large offices, and extravagant salaries as if they were Rockefeller dimes. All for a single purpose: They wanted to remain as anonymous as possible. You see, Guillaume understood that his design for a global financial network could only come
about if the key players appeared completely clean, above suspicion of corrupt practices.”

“I’m afraid that’s not consistent with my briefing,” said the CIA field officer. “Frankly, it’s contradictory.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, sir. The two sources that revived our interest in the Matarese—the reason I’m here—described it as evil. The first called it consummate evil; the second, evil incarnate. Since these statements were made by two elderly, knowledgeable people facing imminent death, even the courts would consider their words valid.… You’ve described something else.”

“You’re right and you’re wrong,” said Scofield. “I described Guillaume’s vision as he conceived it, and make no mistake, he wasn’t a saint. In terms of control, he wanted it all, but part of his genius was to recognize practical and philosophical imperatives—”

“Fancy language,” interrupted Pryce.

“And very real,” added the former intelligence officer, “very germane. When you think about it, Matarese was almost a century ahead of his time. He wanted to form what was later to be called a World Bank or an International Monetary Fund, or even a Trilateral Commission To do that, his disciples had to appear legitimate through and through, squeaky-clean.”

“Then something must have happened to them, something changed, assuming that my briefing was accurate.”

“Indeed something did happen, because you
are
right in that area. The Matarese became monsters.”

“What was it?”

“Guillaume died. Some say he passed away while making love to a woman fifty years younger than he was, and he was roughly in his middle eighties. Others know differently. Regardless, his inheritors—that is what he called them—moved in like a swarm of bees to the honey pot. The machinery was in place, Matarese branches throughout Europe and America, money and, even more important, confidential information flowing back and forth weekly, if not daily. It was an unseen octopus, silently monitoring, efficiently
threatening to expose the dirty tricks and the unwarranted excessive profits of scores of industries, national and international.”

“Initially, sort of a self-policing apparatus where business is concerned—both national and international?”

“That’s as good a description as I’ve heard. After all, who better than corrupt police to know how to break the laws they enforce? The inheritors seized the moment. The confidential information between the branches was no longer used as a threat, instead it was sold. Profits soared and Guillaume’s successors demanded a piece of the action of succeeding profits. By Christ, they covered whole territories and became an underworld cult—I mean a real
cult
. Like the Cosa Nostra, new members of various statuses were ceremoniously sworn in, the upper crowd actually wearing small blue tattoos proclaiming their rank.”

“It sounds crazy.”

“It
was
crazy, but it was also effective. Once proven, a new Mataresan was guaranteed for life—financially secure, protected from the laws, free from the usual stresses of normal living—as long as he or she obeyed their superiors without questioning
any
order.”

“And to question any order was
finito
time,” said Pryce, making a statement.

“That was understood.”

“So, in essence, you’re describing a Mafia or a Corso, as I see it.”

“I’m afraid you’re wrong again, Mr. Pryce—essentially.”

“Since I’m drinking your brandy in your house, hospitality I never figured on, why not call me Cameron, or Cam, as most people do.”

“As you gathered from my wife, I’m ‘Bray.’ My younger sister couldn’t say Brandon till she was maybe four, so she called me Bray. It just stuck.”

“My kid brother couldn’t say Cameron. It came out ‘Cramroom,’ or worse ‘Come around,’ so he settled on ‘Cam.’ It stuck, too.”

“Bray and Cam,” said Scofield, “sounds like a barnyard legal firm.”

“I’d be pleased—no, honored—with any association. I’ve read your service record.”

“Most of which was exaggerated to make my superiors and the analysts look good. You wouldn’t be doing your career any favors to be associated with me. Too many in the business consider me a flake or a fluke, or worse. Much worse.”

“I’ll pass on that. Why am I wrong again? Essentially.”

“Because the Matarese never recruited thugs; no one ever climbed up the ladder based on the number of ‘hits’ he made. Oh, they’d kill if ordered to, but no meat hooks, no shotguns, no chains in the river—usually no corpses, either. If the Matarese council—and it was just that—wanted unmitigated brutality that would be publicized, it secretly paid for terrorists untraceable to itself. But it never employed its members for that sort of work. They were
executives.
”

“They were greedy bastards, sucking up to a wild boar.”

“And then some.” Scofield chuckled softly while sipping his brandy. “They were elitists, Cameron, far above the common people. By and large, they were
summa cum laudes
and
magna cum laudes
from the finest universities both on this side and in Europe, the so-called best and the brightest of industry and government. In their own minds, they assumed they would in time become enormously successful; the Matarese was merely a shortcut. Once in, they were hooked, and the shortcut became a world they could not escape.”

“What about accountability? What about right and
wrong?
Are you saying this army of the best and the brightest had no sense of morality?”

“I’m sure a few did, Mr. Pryce … Cameron,” said Antonia Scofield, who had slipped into the white archway to the candlelit veranda. “And I’m equally sure that if they voiced such reservations, they and their families had terrible things done to them … fatal accidents, in the main.”

“That’s savage.”

“That was the way of the reinvented Matarese,” added
Brandon. “Morality was replaced by having no options. You see, everything came in increments, and before they understood that, there was no way out. They were living abnormally extravagant yet strangely normal lives with wives and children and expensive tastes. Get the picture, Cam?”

“With frightening clarity.… I know a little—not much—about how you and Vasili Taleniekov came together and went after the Matarese, but your debriefing wasn’t very complete. Would you care to fill me in a bit?”

“Certainly he will,” said the wife. “Won’t you, my darling?”

“There she goes again,” rejoined Scofield, glancing warmly at Antonia. “My debriefing was a nonevent because the Cold War was still pretty hot and there were clowns who wanted to paint Vasili, our Soviet enemy, as one of the evil people. I wasn’t having any part of it.”