The Parsifal Mosaic (54 page)

“Have the details been made public?”

“In this town they can’t wait. It was all released twenty minutes ago. There was no way I could stop it, if I wanted to. But State doesn’t have to clarify; we
can
deny.”

The President was silent, then he spoke. “When the time is right, the Department of State will cooperate fully with the authorities. Until then I want a file built—and circulated on a restricted basis—around Havelock’s activities since his separation from the government. It must reflect the government’s alarm over his mental state, his apparent homicidal tendencies-his loyalty. However, in the interests of national security, that file will remain under restricted classification. It will not be made public.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“The facts will be revealed when Havelock is no longer a threat to this country’s interests.”

“Sir?”

“One man is insignificant,” said the President softly. “Coventry, Mr. Undersecretary. The Enigma … Parsifal.”

“I accept the reasoning, sir, not the assumption. How can we be sure we’ll find him?”

“He’ll find us; he’ll find
you
. If everything we’ve learned about Havelock is as accurate as we believe, he wouldn’t have killed Jacob Handelman unless he had an extraordinary reason. And he would never have killed him if he hadn’t
learned where Handelman sent the Karas woman. When he reaches her, he’ll know about you.”

Bradford paused, his breath visible, the vapor briefly interrupted. “Yes, of course, Mr. President.”

“Get back here as fast as you can. We have to be ready … 
you
have to be ready. I’ll have two men flown up from Poole’s Island. They’ll meet you at National; stay in airport security until they arrive.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, listen to me, Emory. My instructions will be direct, the explanation clear. By presidential order you are to be given round-the clock protection; your life is in their hands. You are being hunted by a killer who’s sold his government’s secrets to the enemy. Those will be the words
I
use;
yours
will be different. You will use the language of Consular Operations: Havelock is ‘beyond salvage.’ Every additional hour he lives is a danger to our men in the field.”

“I understand.”

“Emory?”

“Sir?”

“Before all this happened I never really knew you, not personally,” said Berquist softly. “What’s your situation at home?”

“Home?”

“It’s where he’ll come for you. Are there children at home?”

“Children? No, no, there are no children. My older son’s in college, my younger boy away at boarding school.”

“I thought I heard somewhere that you had daughters.”

“Two. They’re with their mother. In Wisconsin.”

“I see. I didn’t know. Is there another wife?”

“There were. Again, two. They didn’t last.”

“Then there are no women living in your house?”

“There are frequently, but not at the minuta. Very few during the past four months.”

“I see.”

“I live alone. The circumstances are optimum, Mr. President.”

“Yes, I guess they are.”

Using the coiled ropes on the wall of the van, they tied the guard to the steering wheel, Kohoutek to the bench.

“Find whatever you can and bind his hand,” said Michael. “I want him alive. I want someone to ask him questions.”

Jenna found a fanner’s kerchief in the glove compartment. She removed the scaling knife from the old mountain bull’s huge hand, ripped the cloth in two, and expertly bound the wound, stemming the blood at both the gash and the wrist.

“It will hold for three, perhaps four hours,” she said. “After that, I don’t know. If he wakes and tears it, he could bleed to death.… Knowing what I know, I have no use for prayers.”

“Someone’ll find him. Them. This truck. It’ll be light in an hour or so, and the Fourforks Pike’s a country route. Sit down for a minute.” Havelock started the engine and, reaching over the guard’s leg, depressed the clutch and shoved the track in gear. Wrenching the man back and forth over the steering wheel, he maneuvered the vehicle so that it was broadside across the road. “Okay, let’s get out.”

“You can’t leave me here!” whined the guard.
“Jesus!”

“Have you been to the toilet?”

“
What?
”

“I hope so, for your sake.”

“Mikhail?”

“Yes?”

“The radio. Someone might come along and free him. He’d use it. We need every minute.”

Havelock picked up the .45 from the seat and smashed the thick, blunt handle repeatedly into the dials and switches until there was nothing but shattered glass and plastic. Finally, he ripped the microphone out of its receptacle, severing the wires; he opened the door and turned to Jenna. “We’ll leave the lights on so no one smashes into it,” he said, stepping out and pulling the seat forward for her. “One more thing to do. Come on.”

Because of the wind, the Fourforks Pike had less than an inch of snow on the surface except for the intermittent drifts that had been pummeled into the bordering grass. Michael handed the .45 to Jenna, and switched the Llama to his right hand. “That makes too much noise,” he continued. “The wind might carry it down to the farmhouse. Stay here.”

He ran to the back of the van and fired twice, blowing out both rear tires. He raced up the other side and fired into the front tires. The truck rocked back and forth as the tires deflated
and settled into the road. To clear the highway, it could be driven into the grass, but it would go no farther than that. He put the Llama into his pocket.

“Let me have the forty-five,” he said to Jenna, pulling his shirt out of his trousers.

She gave it to him. “What are you going to do?”

“Wipe it clean. Not that it’ll do much good, our prints are all over inside the van. But they may not brush there; they will this.”

“So?”

“I’m gambling that our driver in his own self-interest will yell like hell that it’s not his, that it belongs to his employer, your host, Kohoutek.”

“Ballistics,” said Jenna, nodding. “Killings on file.”

“Maybe something else. That farm will be torn apart, and when it is, they may start digging around those acres. There could be killings not on file.” He held the automatic with his shirttail, opened the door of the truck and arced the weapon over the front seat into the covered van.

“Hey, come
on
, for Christ’s sake!” shouted the driver, twisting and turning against the ropes. “Let me out of here, will ya? I didn’t do nothing to you! They’ll send me back for ten years!”

“They’re a lot easier on people who turn state’s evidence. Think about it.” Havelock slammed the door and walked rapidly back to Jenna. “The car’s about a quarter of a mile down on the other side of Kohoutek’s road. Are you all light?”

She looked at him; particles of snow stuck to her blond hair swirling in the wind and her face was drenched, but her eyes were alive. “Yes, my darling, I’m all right … Wherever we are at this moment, I’m home.”

He took her hand and they started down the road. “Walk in the center so our footsteps will be covered.”

She sat close to him, touching him, her arm through his, her head intermittently resting on his shoulder as he drove.

The words between them were few, the silences comforting; they were too tired and too afraid to talk sensibly, at least for a while. They had been there before; they knew a little peace would come with the quiet—and being with each other.

Remembering Kohoutek’s words, Havelock headed north to the Pennsylvania Turnpike, then east toward Harrisburg. The old Moravian had been right; the low-flying winds virtually swept the wide expanse of highway, and the subfreezing temperature kept the snow dry and buoyant. Although the visibility was poor, the traveling was fast.

“Is this the main auto route?” asked Jenna.

“It’s the state turnpike, yes.”

“Is it wise to be on it? If Kohoutek’s found before daybreak, might not men be watching this ‘turnpike’ as they do the
Bahnen
and the
dráha?”

“We’re the last people on earth he wants the police to find. We know what that farm is. He’ll stall, use the intruder story, say
he
was the hostage, the victim. And the guard won’t say anything until he hasn’t got a choice, or until they find his record, and then he’ll bargain. We’re all right.”

“That’s the police, darling,” said Jenna, her hand gently touching his forearm. “Suppose it is not the police? You want it to be the police, so you convince yourself. But suppose it is someone else? A farmer or a driver of a milk track. I think Kohoutek would pay a great deal of money to get safely back to his home.”

Michael looked at her in the dim light of the dashboard. Her eyes were tired, with dark circles under them; fear was still in the center of her stare. Yet in spite of the exhaustion and the dread, she was thinking—better than he. But then she had been hunted far more often than he, more recently than he. Above all, she would not panic; she knew the value of control even when the pain and the fear were overwhelming. He leaned over and brushed his lips on her face.

“You’re magnificent,” he said.

“I’m frightened,” she replied.

“And you’re also right. There’s a childish song that says ‘wishing will make it so.’ It’s a lie, and only for children, but I was counting on it, hoping for it. The odds of the police finding Kohoutek, or a citizen reporting what he found to the police, are no better than seventy-thirty. Against. We’ll get off at the next exit and head south.”

“To where? Where are we going?”

“First, where we can be alone, and not moving. Not running.”

*   *   *

She sat in a chair by the motel window, the early light spreading up and over the Allegheny Mountains outside in the distance. The yellow rays heightened the gold in the long blond hair that fell across her shoulders. Alternately she would look at him, then turn her face away and close her eyes; his words were too painful to hear in the light.

When he finished, he was still caught in the anguish that came with the admission: he had been her executioner. He had killed his love and there had been no love left in him.

Jenna rose from the chair and stood silently by the window. “What did they
do
to us?” she whispered.

Havelock stood across the room watching her; he could not look away. And then he was drifting back through indeterminate time, through the rolling mists of a haunting, obsessive dream that never left him. The images were there, the moments remembered, but they had been pushed out of his life only to rise up and attack him, inflaming him whenever the memories refused to stay buried.
What’s left when your memory’s gone, Mr. Smith?
Nothing, of course, yet how often had he wished for oblivion, with no images or remembered moments—trading nothingness for the absence of pain. But now he had passed through the nightmare of interrupted sleep and had come to life, just as the tears had come to Jenna’s eyes and washed away the hatred. But the reality was fragile; its fragments had to be pieced together.

“We have to find out why,” said Michael. “Broussac told me what happened to you, but there were gaps I couldn’t understand.”

“I didn’t tell her everything,” said Jenna, gazing at the snow outside. “I didn’t lie to her, but I didn’t tell her everything. I was afraid she wouldn’t help me.”

“What did you leave out?”

“The name of the man who came to see me. He’s been with your government for a number of years. He was once quite controversial, but still respected, I think. At least, I’d heard of him.”

“Who was it?”

“A man named Bradford. Emory Bradford.”

“Good
God
 …” Havelock was stunned. Bradford was a name from the past, a disquieting past. He had been one of the political comets born under Kennedy and winning dubious spurs with Johnson. When the comets had faded from
the Washington firmament, heading for the international banks and the foundations, the prestigious law offices and the corporate boardrooms, Bradford had remained—less celebrated, to be sure, and less influential, certainly—where the political wars had been fought. It was never understood why. A degree of personal wealth aside, he could have done a thousand other things, but he had chosen not to.
Bradford
, thought Havelock, the name echoing in his head. All these years, had Emory Bradford merely been marking time, waiting for another version of Camelot to carry him into another time of self-aggrandizing glory? It had to be. If he had reached Jenna in Barcelona, he was at the core of the deception at Costa Brava, a deception that went far beyond himself and Jenna, two lovers turned against each other. It linked unseen men in Moscow with powerful men in the United States government.

“Do you know him?” asked Jenna, still staring out the window.

“Not personally. I’ve never met him. But you’re right, he
was
controversial, and most everyone knows him. The last I heard he was an undersecretary of State with a low profile but a pretty high reputation—buried but valuable, you could say. He told you he was with Cons Op out of Madrid?”

“He said he was on special assignment with Consular Operations, an emergency involving internal security.”

“Me?”

“Yes. He showed me copies of documents found in a bank vault on the Ramblas.” Jenna turned from the window. “Do you recall telling me you had to go to the Ramblas on several occasions?”

“It was a drop for Lisbon, I also told you that. Never mind, it was orchestrated.”

“But you can understand. The Ramblas stayed in my mind.”

“They made sure of it. What were the documents?”

“Instructions from Moscow that could only have been meant for you. There were dates, itineraries; everything corresponded to where we’d been, where we were going. And there were codes; if they weren’t authentic, then I’d never seen a Russian cipher.”

“The same materials
I
was given,” said Havelock, his anger surfacing.

“Yes, I knew it when you told me what they gave you in Madrid. Not all, of course, but many of the same documents and much of the same information they showed you they showed me. Even down to the radio in the hotel room.”