The Parsifal Mosaic (34 page)

“
Liar!
”

“No,” said the VKR officer, his bleeding leg pulled up under him, his body taut, his eyes staring at Michael. “No, I am not lying. Those were the orders from Moscow.”

It was raining that night in Washington. Angry, diagonal sheets were driven by erratic winds, making drivers and pedestrians alike mistrust their vision; headlights refracted, diffused, blinded in suddenly shifting angles. The chauffeur at the wheel of the limousine heading down 14th Street toward the East Gate of the White House was not immune to the problem. He slammed on his brakes and swerved to avoid an onrushing compact, whose high beams gave the ilusion of a huge attacking insect. The small car was well to his left on its side of the line, so the maneuver had been unnecessary. The chauffeur wondered if his very important passengers had noticed the error.

“Sorry, sirs,” he said, his voice directed at the intercom, his eyes on the rearview mirror and the glass partition that separated him from them.

Neither man responded. It was as if neither had heard him, yet he knew both had; the blue intercom light was on, which meant that his voice was transmitted. The red light, of course, was dark; he could not hear anything being said in the rear seat. The red light was always off, except when instructions were being given, and twice every day the system was checked in the garage before he or any other driver left the premises. It was said that tiny circuit breakers had been
installed that tripped at the slightest tampering with the intercom mechanism.

The men who rode in these limousines had been assigned them by the President of the United States, and the chauffeurs who drove them were continuously subjected to the most stringent security checks. Each of them was unmarried and without children, and each was a combat veteran—proven under fire—with extensive experience in guerrilla warfare and diversionary tactics. The vehicles they drove were designed for maximum protection. The windows could withstand the impact of .45-caliber bullets; homing devices were implanted throughout the undersides, and small jets that released two separate types of gas with a flick of a switch were positioned at all points of the frame—one gas merely numbed and was used for riots and unruly protestors, while the other was a lethal dioxide compound, which was designed for terrorists. The chauffeurs were told: “Guard your passengers with your lives.” These men held the secrets of the nation; they were the President’s closest advisers in times of crisis.

The driver glanced at the dashboard clock. It was nine-twenty, nearly four hours since he had driven the same vehicle back into the garage after completing a previous assignment, waited for the electronics check, and left for the night. Thirty-five minutes later he had been having a drink at a restaurant on K Street and was about to order dinner when the jarring one-note signal of his beeper erupted from its case on his belt. He had telephoned the unlisted number for Security Dispatch and was ordered to the garage immediately:
Aquarius One emergency, Scorpio descending
. Out of context and out of orbit, but the message was clear. The Oval Office had pushed a button; the senior drivers were now on duty, all prior schedules aborted.

Back in the garage he had been mildly surprised to see that only two vehicles had been prepared for transport. He had expected to find six or seven black-stretch Abrahams wheeled out of their docks and ready to roll; instead, there were just two—one ordered to an address in Berwyn Heights, Maryland, and the second—his—to Andrews Field to await the arrival of two men being flown in on army jets from separate islands in the Caribbean. Times had been coordinated; the ETA’s were within fifteen minutes of each other.

The younger of the two old men had arrived first, and the
driver recognized him instantly; not everyone would have done so. His name was Halyard, like the line on a sailboat, but his reputation had been made on land. Lieutenant General Malcolm Halyard: WW II, Korea, Vietnam. The bald soldier had started off commanding platoons and companies in France and across the Rhine, then battalions in Kaesong and Inchon, and, finally, armies in Southeast Asia, where the driver had seen him more than once in Danang. He was something of an oddball in the upper ranks of the military; he was never known to have held a press conference, and he had been known to bar photographers—military and civilian alike—from wherever he happened to be. “Tightrope” Halyard was considered a brilliant tactician, one of the first to state for the
Congressional Record
that Vietnam was no-win idiocy. He avoided publicity with the same tenacity that he showed on the battlefield, and his low profile, it was said, appealed to the President.

The general had been escorted to the limousine and, after greeting the driver, had waited in the back seat without another word.

The second man had arrived twelve minutes later. He was as far removed from “Tightrope” Halyard as the eagle is from the lion, but both were superb examples of then-species. Addison Brooks had been a lawyer, an international banker, a consultant to statesmen, an ambassador, and finally an elder statesman himself and adviser to presidents. He was the embodiment of the Eastern Establishment aristocracy, the last of the old-school-tie crowd, the ultimate WASP, who tempered the image with a swift wit that could be as gentle and compassionate as it could be devastating. He had survived the political wars by exercising the same agility displayed by Halyard on the battlefield. In essence, both men would compromise with reality, but not with principle. This was not, of course, the driver’s own judgment; he had read about it in the
Washington Post
, his interest having been drawn to a political column that had analyzed the two advisers because he knew the ambassador and had seen the general in Danang. He had driven the ambassador on a number of occasions, flattered that old Brooks remembered his name and always had a little personal something to say to him: “I have a grandson who swears he saw you play your one two-minute game for the Steelers, Jack.” Or: “Damn it,
Jack, don’t you ever put on weight? My wife makes me drink my gin with some God-awful diet fruit juice.” The last had to be an exaggeration; the ambassador was a tall, slender man, his silver hair, aquiline features and perfectly groomed gray moustache making him look more English than American.

Tonight, however, there had been no personal greeting at Andrews Field, and no jokes. Instead, Brooks had nodded absently when the driver opened the rear door for him; then he had paused as his eyes made contact with the general inside. At that moment only one word was spoken. “Parsifal,” the ambassador said, his voice low, somber; it was the sole greeting.

After Brooks had climbed in beside Halyard, they talked briefly, their faces set, glancing frequently at each other, as if asking questions neither could answer. Then they fell silent, or so it appeared, at least, whenever the driver’s eyes strayed to the rearview mirror. The few times he had looked at them, as he was looking at them now, both the diplomat and the soldier had been staring straight ahead, neither speaking. Whatever the crisis that had brought them to the White House, each from an island in the Caribbean, it was obviously beyond discussion.

The driver’s memories were stirred as he turned into the short drive that led to the East Gate guardhouse. Like many collegiate athletes whose ability was somewhat greater on the playing field than in the classroom or laboratory, he had taken a course in music appreciation that had been suggested by his coaches. They had been wrong; it was a bitch. Still, he remembered.
Parsifal
was an opera by Wagner.

The driver of Abraham Seven turned off the Kenilworth Road into the residential section of Berwyn Heights, Maryland. He had been to the house twice before, which was why he had been selected for the route tonight despite his previous request not to be given Undersecretary of State Emory Bradford as an assignment again. When Security Dispatch had asked why, he could only answer that he did not like him.

“That doesn’t really concern us, Yahoo,” had been the reply. “Your likes and dislikes have yet to become policy around here. Just do your job.”

Of course that was the point—the job. If part of the job was to protect Bradford’s life at a risk to his own, he was not sure he could comply. Twenty years ago the cold, analytical Emory Bradford had been one of the best and the brightest, the new breed of young pragmatists who skewered adversaries right and left in the pursuit of power. And the tragedy at Dallas had done nothing to slow this pursuit; the mourning had been quickly replaced by adjustment to a changed situation. The nation was in peril and those endowed with the capacity to understand the aggressive nature of factionalized Communism had to stand firm and rally the forces of strength. The tight-lipped, unemotional Bradford became an impassioned hawk. A game called dominoes was suddenly a theory on which the survival of freedom was based.

And in Idaho a strapping farm boy was caught up in the fever. He answered the call; it was his personal statement against the long-haired freaks who burned flags and draft cards and spat on things that were decent and—
American
. Eight months later the farm boy was in the jungles watching friends getting their heads blown away, and faces and arms and legs. He saw ARVN troops running from firefights and their commanders selling rifles and jeeps and whole consignments of battalion rations. He came to understand what was so obvious to everyone but Washington and Command Saigon. The so-called victims of the so-called atheistic hordes didn’t give a doodilly shit about anything except their hides and their profits. They were the ones who were spitting and burning everything that could not be traded or sold, and laughing.
Jesus
, were they laughing! At their so-called saviors, the pink-faced, round-eyed suckers who took the fire and the land mines, and lost heads and faces and arms and legs.

And then it had happened. The frenzied hawk that was Emory Bradford in Washington saw the light, a different light. In an extraordinary public display of mea culpa he appeared before a Senate committee and announced to the nation that something had gone wrong, the brilliant planners—himself included—had erred grievously. He advocated immediate withdrawal; the impassioned hawk became a passionate dove.

He was accorded a standing ovation. While heads and faces and arms and legs were scattered over the jungles, and
a farm boy from Idaho was doing his damnedest not to want to die as a prisoner of war. A
standing ovation
, goddamn it!

No, Mr. Emory Bradford, I will not risk my life for you. I will not die for you—again.

The large three-story Colonial house was set back beyond a manicured lawn that promised a pool and a tennis court hidden somewhere. The best and the brightest also frolicked; it was part of their life-style, intrinsic to their worth and their image. The farm boy from Idaho wondered how Under secretary of State Emory Bradford would behave in a river cage infested with water rats in the Mekong Delta. Probably very well, goddamn it.

The driver reached under the dashboard and pulled out the retractable microphone. He pressed the button and spoke.

“Abraham Seven to Dispatch.”

“Go ahead, Abraham Seven.”

“Have reached location. Please raise cargo by phone.”

“Will do, Seven. Good timing. You and Abraham Four should reach Aquarius at about the same time.”

“Glad you approve. We try to please.”

The three descended in the elevator together, the two older men astonished that the conference was to take place in one of the underground strategy rooms and not in the Oval Office. The undersecretary of State, briefcase in hand, seemed to understand why. The advantages, of course, were found in the equipment. There were computers and projectors that threw images and information onto a huge wall screen, communications devices that linked the White House to just about anybody anywhere in the world, and data-processing machines that isolated facts from volumes of useless scholarship. Yet all the sophisticated equipment in Washington was in itself useless without a breakthrough. Had it happened? wondered the older advisers as each looked questioningly at the other. Had the breakthrough come? If it had, the summons from the President had given no indication of it. Instead, the opposite had been conveyed. “Scorpio descending” was akin to catastrophe, and each felt the tightening of his stomach muscles as the lower level was reached and the elevator door opened onto the pristine white-walled corridor. They emerged and walked in unison down the hallway
toward the assigned room and the President of the United States.

President Charles Berquist greeted each man curtly, and each understood It was not in the nature of the stocky Minnesotan to be cold—tough, yes, very tough, but not cold; he was frightened. He gestured impatiently at the raised U-shaped conference table at the end of the room; it faced the wall screen thirty feet away where images would be projected. The three men walked up the two steps with the President and took their places at the table; at each place was a small Tensor lamp angled down on a note pad. Addison Brooks sat on Berquist’s right, General Halyard on his left, and the younger Emory Bradford beyond the statesman, one chair removed so he could address the three. It was a pecking order rooted in logic; most of the questions would be directed at Bradford, and he in turn would ask most of the questions directed at anyone brought in for interrogation. Below the U-shaped table and facing it midway to the screen was another table, smaller, rectangular, with two swivel chairs that enabled whoever sat in them to turn and watch the images projected on the wall.

“You look tired, Mr. President,” said Brooks, once all were seated and the lamps adjusted.

“I
am
tired,” agreed Berquist. “I’m also sorry to bring you and Mal back to this rotten weather.”

“Insofar as you saw fit to call us back,” commented Halyard sincerely, “I’d say the weather is the least of our problems.”

“You’re right.” The President pressed a button embedded in the table on his left. “The first slide, if you please.” The overhead lights were extinguished and only the Tensors remained on; the photographs of four men appeared on a split screen at the end of the room. “Do you know any of these men?” asked Berquist, then added hastily, “The question’s not for Emory. He does.”