The Parsifal Mosaic (26 page)

The soldier grinned and removed his hand from the gun case. He admonished Havelock in barracks Italian: “So the men of Monesi still go across the border for French ass, eh? If your wife’s not in there, she’s probably back in your own bedroom being pumped by a Frenchman! Did you ever think of that?”

“The way of the world, Major,” replied Michael obsequiously, shrugging, and wishing to Christ the loudmouthed dolt
would go inside and leave him alone. He had to get back to the window!

“You’re not from Monesi,” said the sergeant, suddenly alarmed. “You don’t talk like a man from Monesi.”

“The
Swiss
border, Major. I come from Lugano. I moved here two years ago.”

The soldier was silent for a moment, his eyes squinting. Havelock slowly moved his hand in the shadows toward his waist, where, secured uncomfortably under his belt, was the heavy magnum with the silencer attached. There could be no sounds of gunfire, if it came to that.

Finally the sergeant threw up his hands, shaking his head in disgust. “Swiss!
Italian-Swiss
, but more
Swiss
than Italian! All of you! Sneaky bastards. I won’t serve in a battalion north of Milan, I swear it. I’ll get out of the army first. Go back to your sneaking,
Swiss
!” He turned and stalked into the inn.

Inside, another door—the narrow door to the men’s room—was opened. A man walked out, and Michael not only knew he had found a third weapon in the unit from Rome, but realized there had to be a fourth. The man was part of a team-two demolition experts who worked together—veteran mercenaries who had spent several years in Africa blowing up everything from dams and airports to grand villas suddenly occupied by inept despots in Graustarkian regalia. The CIA had found them in Angola, on the wrong side, but the American dollar was healthier then, and persuasive. The two experts had been placed in a single black-bordered file deep in the cabinets of clandestine operations.

And their being at the brídge of Col des Moulinets gave Havelock a vital piece of information: a vehicle or vehicles were anticipated. Either one of these two demolition specialists could pause for ten seconds by an automobile, and ten minutes later it would explode, killing everyone in the immediate vicinity. Jenna Karas was expected to cross the border by car; minutes later she would be dead, a successful, nonattributable kill.

The airfield. Rome had learned about the airfield from the man in Civitavecchia. Somewhere on the road out of Col des Moulinets, whatever conveyance she was in would be blown into the night sky.

Michael dropped to the ground behind the pine tree.
Through the window he could see the explosives expert walking directly to the front door of the inn; the man glanced at his watch, as the blond killer had done minutes ago. A schedule was in progress, but
what
schedule?

The man emerged; his swarthy face looked even darker in the dim light of the post lamp at the end of the path. He began walking faster, but the acceleration was barely perceptible; this was a professional who knew the value of control. Havelock rose cautiously, prepared to follow; he glanced at the window, then looked again, alarmed. Inside, by the bar, the sergeant was talking to the blond recruit he called Ricci, obviously delivering an unwanted order. The killer seemed to be protesting, raising his beer as if it were much needed medicine and thus an excuse for not obeying. Then he grimaced, drank his drink in several swallows, and started for the door.

The schedule was being adhered to. Through prearrangement, someone at the bridge had been instructed to call for the new recruit in advance of the duty hour; he was to be rostered
before
the shift was over. Procedural methods would be the cover, and no one would argue, but it was not procedure, it was the schedule.

They knew. The unit from Rome knew that Jenna Karas was on her way to the bridge. A motor launch had been picked up in Arma di Taggia, and the party had been followed; the vehicle in which she traveled into the Ligurian mountains was now spotted within minutes of its arrival at the checkpoint of Col des Moulinets. It was logical: what better time to cross a border than at the end of a shift, when the soldiers were tired, weary of the dull monotony, waiting for relief, more careless than usual?

The door opened, and Michael crouched again, peering to his right through the branches of the pine tree at the road beyond the post lamp. The mercenary had crossed diagonally to the shoulder on the other side, bearing left toward the bridge—an ordinary stroller, a Frenchman perhaps, returning to Col des Moulinets. But in moments he would fade into the woods, taking up a predetermined position east of the bridge’s entrance, from which he could crawl to an automobile briefly held up by the guards. The blond killer was now halfway to the post lamp; he paused, lighting a cigarette, an action that gave another reason for his delay. He heard the
sound of the door being opened, and was satisfied. The “soldier” continued on his way as the two men from the center table—the American agent of record and his roughly dressed companion, the second weapon in the unit from Rome—came out.

Havelock understood now. The trap had been engineered with precision; in a matter of minutes it would be in place. Two expert marksmen would take out the intruder who tried to interfere with the car carrying Jenna Karas—take him out instantly, the second he came in sight, with a fusillade of bullets; and two demolition specialists would guarantee that the automobile waved through would explode somewhere in the streets of Col des Moulinets, or on a road to an unmarked airfield.

Another assumption could be made beyond the fact that there was a schedule in progress that included a car on its way to the bridge. The unit from Rome knew he was there, knew he would be close enough to the border patrols to observe all those in any vehicle offering passports to the guards. They would examine closely every male figure that came into view, their hands on their weapons as they did so. Their advantage was in their numbers, but he, too, had an advantage and it was considerable: he knew who they were.

The well-dressed American and his employee, the second gun, separated at the road, the agent of record turning right in order to remove himself from the execution ground, the killer going left and to the bridge. Two small trucks clattered up the road from Monesi, one with only a single headlight, the other with both headlights but no windshield. Neither the American nor his hired weapon paid any attention; they knew the vehicle they were waiting for, and it was neither of these.

If you know a strategy, you can counter a strategy
—his father’s words so many years ago. He could recall the tall, erudite man patiently explaining to a cell of partisans, calming their fears, channeling their angers. Lidice was their cause, the death of Germans their objective. He remembered it all now as he crept back to the driveway and raced across into the woods.

He got his first glimpse of the bridge from three hundred yards away on the edge of the bend in the road that led to
the country inn—the curve he had avoided by heading into the woods. From what he could see, it was narrow and not long, which was a blessing for drivers because two cars crossing at the same time would no doubt graze fenders. A dual string of naked bulbs was now lit; it arced over the central steel span, sagging between the struts; several of the bulbs had burned out, to be replaced when others joined them. The checkpoint itself consisted of two opposing structures that served as gatehouses, the windows high and wide, each with a ceiling light fixture; between the two small, square buildings a hand-winched barrier painted with intense, light-reflecting orange fell across the road. To the right of the winch was a shoulder-high gate that opened onto the pedestrian walk.

Two soldiers in their brown uniforms with the red and green stripes were on either side of the second truck, talking wearily but animatedly with the driver. A third guard was at the rear, his attention not on the truck but on the woods beyond the bridge. He was studying the areas on both sides as a hunter might when stalking a wounded mountain cat; he stood motionless, his eyes roving, his head barely turning. He was the blond assassin. Who would suspect that a lowly soldier at a border checkpoint was a killer with a range of accomplishments that spanned the Mediterranean?

A fourth man had just been passed through the pedestrian gate. He was trudging slowly up the slight incline toward the midpoint of the bridge. But this man had no intention of crossing to the other side, no intention of greeting the French patrols in Ligurian patois, claiming as so many did that the air was different in
la belle France
and thank God for slender women. No, thought Michael, this crudely dressed peasant of the mountains with the drooping trousers and the large, heavy jacket would remain in the center shadows and, if the light was dim enough, would check his weapon, no doubt a braced, repeating, rapid-fire machine gun, its stock a steel bar clamped to the shoulders, easily concealed beneath garments. He would release the safety and be prepared to race down to the checkpoint at the moment of execution, ready to kill the Italian guards if they interfered, intent on firing into the body of a man coming out of the darkness to reach a woman crossing the border. This man, last seen at a
center table in the country inn, was the backup support for the blond-haired killer.

It was a gauntlet, at once simple and well manned, using natural and procedural roadblocks; once the target entered, he was trapped both within and without. Two men waited with explosives and weapons at the mouth of the trap, one at its core, and a fourth at its outer rim. Well conceived, very professional.

The tiny glow of a cupped cigarette could be seen in the bushes diagonally across the dark road. Bad form. The agent of record was an indulgent man denying himself neither chronometers nor cigarettes during the early stages of a kill. He should be replaced; he would be replaced.

Havelock judged the angle of the cigarette, its distance to the ground; the man was crouched or sitting, not standing. Because of the density of the foliage it was impossible for the man to see the road clearly, which meant that he did not expect the car with Jenna Karas for some time yet; he was being too casual for an imminent sighting. The sergeant had said in the driveway that the soldiers had an hour to fill their kidneys; twenty minutes had passed, leaving forty. Yet not really forty. The final ten minutes of the shift would be avoided because the changing of the guard would require an exchange of information, no matter how inconsequential or pro forma. Michael had very little time to do what had to be done, to mount his own counterstrategy. First, he had to learn all he could of Rome’s.

He sidestepped his way back along the edge of the foliage until the distant spill of light from the bridge was virtually blocked by the trees. He ran across the road and into the underbrush, turning left, testing every step to ensure the silence that was essential. For a brief, terrible moment he was back
in the forests outside Prague, the echoes of the guns of Lidice in his ears, the sight of screaming, writhing bodies before his eyes. Then he snapped back to the immediate present, remembering who and where he was. He was the mountain cat; the most meaningful lair of his life had been soiled, corrupted by liars who were no better than those who commanded the guns at Lidice—or others who ordered “suicides” and gulags when the guns were stilled. He was in his element, in the forest, which had befriended him when he had no one to depend on, and no one understood it better.

The agent of record was sitting on a rock and, true to his indulgence, was playing with his watch, apparently pushing buttons, controlling time, master of the half-second. Havelock reached into his pocket and took out one of the items he had purchased in Monesi, a four-inch fish-scaling knife encased in a leather scabbard. He parted the branches in front of him, crouched low, then lunged.

“
You!
Jesus
Christ!
 … Don’t! What are you doing? Oh, my
God!
”

“You talk above a whisper, you won’t have a face!” Michael’s knee was rammed into the agent’s throat, the razor-sharp, jagged blade pressed against the man’s cheek below his left eye. “This knife cleans fish, you son of a bitch. I’ll peel your skin off unless you tell me what I want to know. Right
now
.”

“You’re a maniac!”

“And you’re the loser, if you believe that. How long have you been here?”

“Twenty-six hours.”

“Who gave the order?”

“How do I know.”

“Because even an asshole like you would cover yourself! It’s the first thing we learn in dispatch, isn’t it? The
order
! Who gave it?”

“
Ambiguity!
The code was Ambiguity,” cried the agent of record, as the scaling edge of the blade dug into his face. “I swear to Christ, that’s all I know! Whoever used it was cleared by Cons Op—D.C. It can be traced back
there
!
Jesus
, I only know our orders came from the code! It was our clearance!”

“I’ll accept it. Now, give me the step schedule.
All
of it.
You picked her up in Arma di Taggia, and she’s been followed ever since. How?”

“Change of vehicles up from the coast.”

“Where is she now? What’s the car? When’s it expected?”

“A Lancia. The ETA, as of a half hour ago, barring—”

“Cut it out!
When?
”

“Seven-forty arrival. A bug was planted in the car; they’ll be here at twenty of eight.”

“I know you don’t have a radio, a radio’d be evidence in your case. How were you contacted?”

“The phone at the inn.
Jesus!
Get that thing away from me!”

“Not yet, sane man. The schedule, the steps? Who’s on the car now?”

“Two men in a beat-up truck, a quarter of a mile behind. In case you intercept, they’ll hear it and be on you.”

“If I don’t, then what?”

“We’ve made arrangements. Starting at seven-thirty, everyone crossing the border gets out of his car or truck or whatever. Vehicles are searched—we spread lire—so one way or the other she’ll have to show herself.”