The Parsifal Mosaic (14 page)

Rome. There would be answers in Rome.

The four men around the table in the white-walled room on the third floor of the State Department building were youngish by upper-echelon Washington standards. Their ages ranged from the mid-thirties to the late forties, but their lined faces and hollow look made them old beyond their years. The work they did led to sleepless nights and prolonged periods of anxiety, made worse by their insular life: none of them could discuss the crises they faced in that room with anyone outside it. These were the strategists of covert operations, the air traffic controllers of clandestine activities; roving condors could be shot down on their slightest miscalculation. Others above them might request the broad objectives; others below might design the specific assignments. But only these men were aware of every conceivable variation, every likely consequence of a given operation; they were the clearinghouse. Each was a specialist, each an authority. Only they could give the final nod for the condors to fly.

Yet they had no radar grids or circling antennae to aid them; they had only the projections of human behavior to guide them. They had to examine actions and reactions, not simply those of the enemy but those of their own people in the field as well. Evaluation was a never-ending struggle, which was rarely resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. The
“what if” probabilities were geometrically compounded with each new twist of events, each human reaction to abruptly altered circumstances. They were psychoanalysts in an endless labyrinth of abnormality, their patients the products of that disorder. They were specialists in a macabre way of life where the truth was usually a lie and lies too often were the only means of survival. Stress was the factor that frightened them most, for under maximum or prolonged stress both one’s enemies and one’s own people saw things and did things they might not do otherwise. The totally unpredictable added to the abnormal became dangerous territory.

This was the conclusion the four men had reached regarding the crisis late that night. Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence Baylor Brown in Rome had sent his cable on priority cipher; its contents required the opening of a dead file so that each strategist could study the facts.

They were beyond dispute. The events at that isolated beach on the Costa Brava had been verified by two on-site confirmations, one of them Foreign Service Officer Havelock himself, the other a man unknown to Havelock named Steven MacKenzie, one of the most experienced undercover operatives working in Europe for the Central Intelligence Agency. He had risked his life to bring back proof: torn garments stained with blood. Everything had been microscopically examined, the results positive: Jenna Karas. The reasons for a backup confirmation had not been made explicit, nor was that necessary. The relationship between Havelock and the Karas woman was known to those who had to know; a man under maximum stress might fall apart, be incapable of carrying out what had to be done. Washington had to know. Agent MacKenzie had been positioned two hundred feet north of Havelock; his view was clear, his confirmation absolute, his proof incontrovertible. The Karas woman had been killed that night. The fact that Steven MacKenzie had died of a heart seizure three weeks after he returned from Barcelona, while sailing in Chesapeake Bay, in no way diminished his contribution. The doctor who had been summoned by the Coast Guard patrol was a well-established physician on the Eastern Shore, a surgeon named Randolph with impeccable credentials. A thorough postmortem
was conclusive: MacKenzie’s death was from natural causes.

Beyond Costa Brava itself, the evidence against Jenna Karas had been subjected to the most exhaustive scrutiny. Secretary of State Anthony Matthias had demanded it, and the strategists knew why. There was another relationship to take into consideration: one that had existed between Matthias and Michael Havelock for nearly twenty years since student had met teacher in the graduate program at Princeton University. Fellow Czechs by birth, one had established himself as perhaps the most brilliant geopolitical mind in the academic world, while the other, a young, haunted expatriate, was desperately searching for his own identity. The differences were considerable, but the friendship was strong.

Anton Matthias had come to America over forty years ago, the son of a prominent doctor from Prague who had hurried his family out of Czechoslovakia under the shadow of the Nazis and was welcomed by the medical community. Havelock’s immigration, on the other hand, was managed covertly as a joint exercise of American and British intelligence; his origins were obscured, initially for the child’s own safety. And where Matthias’s meteoric rise in government was sparked by a succession of influential political figures who openly sought his counsel and publicly extolled his brilliance, the much younger man from Prague proceeded to establish his own worth through clandestine accomplishments that would never see the light of day. Yet in spite of the dissimilarities of age and reputation, intellect and temperament, there existed a bond between them, held firm by the elder, never taken advantage of by the younger.

Those who confirmed the evidence against the Karas woman understood that there was no room for error, just as the strategists understood now that the cable from Rome had to be studied carefully, handled delicately. Above all, for the time being, it had to be kept from Anthony Matthias. For though the media had announced that the Secretary of State was off on a well-deserved holiday, the truth was something else. Matthias was ill—some, in whispers, said gravely ill—and although he was in constant touch with State through his subordinates, he had not been in Washington for nearly five weeks. Even those perceptive men and women of the press corps who suspected another explanation beneath the vacation
ploy said nothing and printed nothing. No one really wanted to think about it; the world could not afford it.

And Rome could not become an additional burden for Anthony Matthias.

“He’s hallucinating, of course,” said the balding man named Miller, putting his copy of the cable down on the table in front of him. Paul Miller, M.D., was a psychiatrist, an authority on diagnosing erratic behavior.

“Is there anything in his record that might have warned us?” asked a red-haired, stocky man in a rumpled suit and an open collar, his tie unknotted. His name was Ogilvie; he was a former field agent.

“Nothing you would have read,” replied Daniel Stern, the strategist on Miller’s left. His title was Director of Consular Operations, which was a euphemism for section chief of State’s clandestine activities.

“Why not?” asked the fourth strategist, a conservatively dressed man who might have stepped out of an advertisement in the
Wall Street Journal
for IBM. He was seated next to Ogilvie. His name was Dawson; he was an attorney and a specialist in international law. He pressed his point. “Are you saying there were—are—omissions in his service files?”

“Yes. A security holdover from years ago. No one ever bothered to reassess, so the file remained incomplete. But the answer to Ogilvie’s question might be found there. The warning we missed.”

“How so?” asked Millar, peering over his glasses, his fingers spread across his balding hairline.

“He could be finally burned out. Over the edge.”

“What do you mean?” Ogilvie leaned forward, his expression none too pleasant “Evaluation depends on available data, goddamn it.”

“I don’t think anyone thought it was necessary. His record’s superior. Except for an outburst or two, he’s been extremely productive, reasonable under very adverse conditions.”

“Only, now he’s seeing dead people in railroad stations,” interrupted Dawson. “Why?”

“Do you know Havelock?” asked Stern.

“Only from a field personnel interview,” answered the attorney. “Eight or nine months ago; he flew back for it. He seemed efficient.”

“He was,” agreed the director of Cons Op. “Efficient, productive,
reasonable—very tough, very cold, very bright. But then he was trained at an early age under rather extraordinary circumstances. Maybe that’s what we should have looked at.” Stern paused, picked up a large manila envelope, and removed a red-bordered file folder, sliding it out carefully. “Here’s the complete background dossier on Havelock. What we had before was basic and acceptable. A graduate student from Princeton with a Ph.D. in European history and a minor in Slavic languages. Home: Greenwich, Connecticut. A war orphan brought over from England and adopted by a couple named Webster, both cleared. What we all looked at, of course, was the recommendation from Matthias, someone even then to be reckoned with. And what the recruiters here at State saw sixteen years ago was fairly obvious. A highly intelligent Ph.D. from Princeton willing to work for bureaucratic spit, even willing to perfect his linguistic dialects and go into deep-cover work. But that wasn’t necessary—the language part. Czech was his native tongue; he knew it better than we thought he did. That’s what’s here; it’s the rest of his story and could be the reason for the breakdown we’re witnessing now.”

“That’s a hell of a leap backward,” said Ogilvie. “Can you sketch it for us? I don’t like surprises; retired paranoids we don’t need.”

“Apparently, we’ve got one,” interjected Miller, picking up the cable. “If Baylor’s judgment means anything—”

“It does,” Stern broke in. “He’s one of the best we’ve got in Europe.”

“Still, he’s Pentagon,” added Dawson. “Judgment’s not a strong point.”

“It is with him,” corrected the Cons Op director. “He’s black and had to be good.”

“As I was about to say,” continued Miller, “Baylor includes a strong recommendation that we take Havelock seriously. He saw what he saw.”

“Which is impossible,” said Ogilvie. “Which means we’ve got a whacko. What’s in there, Dan?”

“An ugly early life,” replied Stern, lifting the cover of the file and turning several pages. “We knew he was Czech, but that’s all we knew. There were several thousand Czechoslovakian refugees in England during the war, and that was the explanation given for his being there. But it
wasn’t true. There were two stories: one real, the other a cover. He wasn’t in England during the war, nor were his parents. He spent those years in and around Prague. It was a long nightmare and very real for him. It started when he was old enough to know it, see it. Unfortunately, we can’t get inside his head, and that could be vital now.” The director turned to Miller. “You’ll have to advise us here, Paul. He could be extremely dangerous.”

“Then you’d better clarify,” said the doctor. “How far back do we go? And Why?”

“Let’s take the ‘why’ first,” said Stern, removing a number of pages from the dossier. “He’s lived with the specter of betrayal since he was a child. There was a period during adolescence and early adulthood—the high school and college years—when the pressures were absent, but the memories must have been pretty horrible for him. Then for the next sixteen years—these past sixteen years—he’s been back in that same kind of world. Perhaps he’s seen too many ghosts.”

“Be specific, Daniel,” pressed the psychiatrist.

“To do that,” said the director, his eyes scanning the top page in his hand, “we have to go back to June of 1942, the war in Czechoslovakia. You see, his name isn’t Havelock, it’s Havlíček. Mikhail Havlíček. He was born in Prague sometime in the middle thirties, the exact date unknown. All the records were destroyed by the Gestapo.”

“
Gestapo?
” The attorney, Dawson, leaned back in his chair. “June, 1942 … came up in the Nuremberg trials.”

“It was a sizable item on the Nuremberg agenda,” agreed Stern. “On May twenty-seventh Reinhard Heydrich, known as
der Henker
—the hangman—of Prague, was killed by Czech partisans. They were led by a professor who’d been dismissed from Karlova University and who worked with British intelligence. His name was Havlíček and he lived with his wife and son in a Village roughly eight miles outside of Prague where he organized the partisan cells. The Village was Lidice.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Miller, slowly dropping the cable from Borne on the table.

“He wasn’t noticeably in evidence,” commented Stern dryly as he shifted the pages in his hand. “Afraid that he might have been seen at the site of Heydrich’s assassination, Havlíček stayed away from his house for nearly two weeks, living in the cellars at the university.
He
hadn’t been spotted,
but someone else from Lidice had been; the price was set far Heydrich’s death: execution for all adult males; for the women, conscription—slave labor for the factories, the more presentable sent to the officers barracks to be
Feldhuren
. The children … they would simply ‘disappear.’
Jugendmöglichkeiten
. The adaptable would be adopted, the rest gassed in mobile vans.”

“Efficient bastards, weren’t they?” said Ogilvie.

“The orders from Berlin were kept quiet until the morning of June tenth, the day of the mass executions,” continued Stern, reading. It was also the day Havlíček was heading home. When the word went out—the proclamations were nailed to telephone poles and broadcast over the radio—the partisans stopped him from going back. They locked him up, sedated him with drugs; they knew there was nothing he could do, and he was too valuable Finally, he was told the worst. His wife had been sent to the whore camps—it was later learned that she killed herself the first night, taking a Wehrmacht officer with her—and his son was nowhere to be found.”

“But he hadn’t, obviously, been taken with the other children,” said Dawson.

“No. He’d been chasing rabbits, and he came back in time to see the roundups, the executions, the corpses thrown in ditches. He went into shock, fled into the woods and, for weeks, lived like an animal. The stories began spreading through the countryside: a child was seen running in the forest, footprints found near barns, leading back into the woods. The father heard them and knew; he had told his son that if the Germans ever came for him, he was to escape into the forests. It took over a month, but Havlíček tracked the boy. He had been hiding in caves and trees, terrified to show himself, eating whatever he could steal and scratch from the ground, the nightmare of the massacre never leaving him.”