The Parsifal Mosaic (97 page)

“Who?” asked the old Russian haltingly, memories stirred.

“The
Voennaya
. The maniacs of the VKR!”

“Not
maniacs,” said Pierce firmly, quietly. “Dedicated men who understand the nature of your hatred, your mendacity. Men who will not compromise the principles of the Soviet Union only to watch you spread your sanctimonious lies, turning the world against us.… Our time has come, Alexei. You’ll be with us.”

Kalyazin blinked, his watery eyes staring at Arthur Pierce. Slowly he shook his head and whispered, “No … no, I will never be a part of you.”

“What?”

“you do not speak for Russia,” said the old man, his voice growing until it filled the room. “You kill too easily-you killed someone very dear to me. Your words are measured and there’s truth in what you say, but not in what you
do
or the
way
you
do it
! You are
animals
!” Without the slightest warning, Kalyazin lunged at Pierce, hurling his frail body at the traveler, his gaunt hands gripping the weapon.
“Mikhail
, run!
Run
, Mikhail!” There was a muffled roar as the gun ex-ploded into the old man’s stomach. Still he would not let
go. Run
.…!” The whisper was a final command.

Havelock spun around and propelled Jenna toward the open kitchen door. He turned, prepared to throw himself on
Pierce, but stopped, holding himself in check, for what he saw caused him to make an instantaneous decision. The dying Kalyazin held on fiercely, but the bloody gun was coming free; in an instant it would be aimed at him, fired into his head.

He lurched for the kitchen door and slammed it shut as he raced inside, colliding with Jenna. She held two kitchen knives in her hand; Michael grabbed the shorter blade, and they ran for the outside door.

“The woods!” he shouted, in the carport “Kalyazin can’t hold him. Hurry
up
! You go to the right, I’ll head left!” he cried as they ran across the grass in the downpour. “We’ll converge a couple of hundred yards inside!”

“Where is the path? Which
is
it?”

“
I don’t know!”

“He’ll be looking for it!”

“I know.”

Five gunshots exploded, but not from a single gun; there were two. They separated, Michael zigzagging toward the darkness of the trees on his left, spinning quickly to look behind him. Three men. Pierce was shouting orders to two others who had raced up the muddy drive. They ran from the carport, fanning out, flashlights on, weapons ready.

He reached the edge of the tall grass and plunged into the protective cover of the woods; he removed his coat and scrambled to his right, diving for the thickest underbrush. He crawled forward, his eyes cm the field, on the beam of the middle flashlight, and worked his way back toward the edge. His body was soaked; mud and wet foliage were everywhere. The bonier of the grass was his battle line; the downpour was loud enough to drown out the pound of quick movements. The man would come swiftly, then be stopped both by the overgrowth and by his own caution.

As the beam approached, Havelock inched toward the last bank of tangled bush; he waited, crouching. The man slowed down, sweeping the area with light. Then he entered the woods quickly, the beam moving up and down as he used his arm to open a path through the thick brush.

Now
. Michael rolled out on the grass and rushed ahead; he was directly behind the traveler. He sprang, the knife
gripped in his band. As he plunged the blade into the killer’s back, his left hand yanked back the man’s neck and clamped his mouth. Both fell into mud and brush and Michael worked the blade brutally until there was no movement beneath him. He yanked the head up as he ripped the gun from the lifeless hand; it was not Arthur Pierce. He lunged for the flashlight and snapped it off.

Jenna raced into the dark, narrow alleyway cut through the trees and the foliage. Was this
it
? she wondered. Was it the path to Seneca’s Notch: “seventy-three steps to a dogwood tree”? If it was, it was her responsibility. No one could be allowed to pass through, and the surest way of preventing it was as distasteful as it was frightening.

Yet she had done it before, always terrified by the prospect, sickened with the results, but there was no time to think of such things. She looked behind her; the flashlight beam was veering to its left, toward the path! She let out a short cry loud enough to be heard through the pounding rain. The flashlight halted, and was briefly immobile before shifting, now focusing directly on the entrance of the path. The man rushed into it.

Jenna lurched into the tangled branches on the border and crouched, holding the long blade of the kitchen knife rigid, diagonally up from her knees. The oscillating beam of the flashlight drew nearer, the figure behind it running hard, slipping on the mud, his concentration up ahead on the path, a killer racing after the remembered cry of an unarmed woman.

Ten feet, five
 … 
now!

Jenna hinged up through the brush with her eyes and blade centered on the body directly behind the light. The contact was sickening: a rush of blood erupted as the long blade sank into the flesh, impaling the body that had raced into it.

The man screamed, the terrible scream filling the woods and for a long moment drowning out the downpour.

Jenna lay gasping for air beside the dead man, rubbing her blood-soaked hand in the soft mud. She grabbed the flashlight and switched it off. Then she rolled to the border of the path and vomited.
Havelock heard the sudden scream, and closed his eyes—then opened them, grateful beyond life itself to realize it was a man’s scream. Jenna had done it; she had taken out the man whose orders were to kill her. And that man was not Pierce. He knew it. He had seen the positions in the carport. Pierce had been on the left, closest to the door, the angles consistent when the chase had begun.

Arthur Pierce was somewhere between the middle ground and the road beyond Kalyazin’s house, an acre of forest drenched by the rain surging downward, dripping everywhere from the imperfect roof of the treetops.

Where was the last beam of light? It was not thero-of course it was not there! Light was a target and Pierce was no fool. They were two animals now, two predators stalking each other in the waterlogged darkness. But one had the advantage, and Michael knew it instinctively, felt it strongly: the forests had been good to Mikhail Havlíček; they were his friend and sanctuary. He did not fear the webbed darkness, for it had saved him too often, protected him from uniformed hunters who would shoot a child because of his father.

He crawled swiftly through underbrush, eyes straining, ears alert, trying to pick up sounds that were not part of the rain and the creaking weight of drenched limbs above. He semicircled the area, noting among a thousand other intuitively gathered bits of information that there were no paths, no breaks in the forest leading to Seneca’s Notch. Inside the house he had said there were a dozen such paths to confuse Pierce, not knowing whether there were any, never having been beyond Zelienski-Kalyazin’s front door.

He swept the arc again, closing it, snaking through the overgrowth; the trunks of trees were his intermittent fortress walls-he used them like parapets as he peered around them.

Movement! The sound of suction, not weight
. A foot or a knee pressing into and rising from the mud.

Light was a target … light
was
a target.

He crawled out of the arc, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty feet beyond the perimeter, knowing what he was looking for, feeling for—a branch. He found it.

A sapling-strong, supple, no more than four feet high, its roots deep, clawing the earth beneath.

Havelock reached into his belt and pulled out the flashlight
he had taken from the dead traveler. He placed it on the ground and removed his shirt, spreading it in front of him and moving the flashlight to the center of the cloth.

Thirty seconds later the flashlight was securely tied and wrapped in the shirt, the sleeves wound around it, with sufficient cloth remaining for the final attachment. He knelt next to the small tree and lashed the flashlight laterally against the thin shaft of the trunk; he crisscrossed what remained of the sleeves so it was held firmly in place. He pulled the trunk back and let it go, testing it.

He snapped on the light and pulled the trunk back for the last time, then raced into the woods to his right. He spun around a thick tree and waited, watching the beam of light as it eerily swept back and forth over the ground. He leveled the traveler’s gun, steadying it against the bark.

His ears picked up the sound of suction again, footsteps coming through the rain. Then the figure emerged, looming grotesquely through the webbed branches.

Pierce crouched, trying to avoid the light, and fired his automatic; the ear-shattering explosions echoed throughout the dripping forest.

“You lose,” said Michael as he pulled the trigger and watched the killer of Costa Brava reeling backwards, screaming. He fired again, and the man from the Voennaya fell to the ground motionless, silent. Dead. “You didn’t know the woods,” said Michael. “I learned them from people like you.”

“Jenna!
Jenna!”
he yelled, lurching through the trees toward the open grass. “It’s
over
! The field, the
field
!”

“Mikhail?
Mikhail!”

He saw her walking slowly, unsteadily in the distance through the sheets of the downpour. Seeing him, she quickened her pace and broke into a run. He, too, raced over the wet grass, wanting—needing—the distance between them to vanish.

They held each other; the world for a few brief moments was no part of them. The cold rain on his bare skin was only cool water, warmed by her embrace, her face against his face.

“Were there other paths?” she asked, breathless.

“None.”

“Then I found it. Come, Mikhail.
Hurry!”

They stood in Kalyazin’s house, where the old Russian’s body was covered with a blanket, his tortured face mercifully hidden. Havelock walked to the telephone. “It’s time,” he said, dialing.

“What’s
happened
?” asked the President of the United States, his voice tense. “I’ve been trying to reach you all night!”

“It’s over,” said Michael. “Parsifal’s dead. We’ve got the documents. I’ll write a report telling you what I think you’ll have to know.”

There was a stunned silence over the line; then Berquist whispered simply, “I know you wouldn’t lie.”

“I would, but not about this.”

“What
you
think
I
have to know?” said Berquist, finding a part of his voice.

“Yes. I’ll leave out nothing that’s essential to you, for that impossible job you’re in.”

“Where are you? I’ll send an army for you—just get those documents here.”

“No, Mr. President We have a last stop to make, to a man they called Boswell. But before we leave, I’m going to burn them. There’s only one set and I’m burning it. The psychiatric file as well.”

“You’ve—?”

“It’ll be in the report.… There’s a practical reason for my doing what I’m doing. I don’t know what’s out there—I think I know, but I can’t be certain. It started here and it’s going to end here.”

“I see.” Berquist paused. “I can’t change your mind and I can’t stop you.”

“That’s true.”

“Very well, I won’t try. I like to think I’m a judge of men. You have to be to sit in this office—at least, you should be.… What can a grateful nation, a very grateful President do for you?”

“Leave me alone, sir. Leave us alone.”

“Havelock?”

“Yes?”

“How can I be certain? The burning?”

“Parsifal didn’t want you to be. You see, he never wanted it to happen again. No more Matthiases. Superstars are out. He never wanted you to be absolutely sure.”

“I’ll have to think about that, won’t I?”

“It’d be a good idea.”

“Matthias died this evening. It’s why I tried to call you.”

“He died a long time ago, Mr. President.”

Autumn. New Hampshire alternately chilled into gray sub—mission by the gathering arctic winds and then warmed by the vibrant colors of fall, the persistent sun giving life to the fields and refusing to submit to the slow approach of winter.

Havelock hung up the phone in the enclosed porch that Jenna had insisted should be his study. She had seen him, had watched his eyes, as he had walked through the living—room door of the old house and stood there, mesmerized by the expanse of glass and the framed countryside beyond. A desk, bookshelves against the inner brick wall, and an odd assortment of comfortable furniture had transformed the bare porch into an airy room protected by transparent walk that allowed a spacious view of the fields and the woods that meant so much to him. She had understood, and he loved her for understanding. What he could see from that very unusual place was not what others would see, not simply the tall grass and vastly taller trees in the distance but an ever—changing landscape of sanctuary.

And memories of tension and survival, they were there, too, suddenly welling up until he had to move—physically—to overcome them, to suppress them. It would take time; normality was not to be found in a matter of weeks, even months.

Underneath he had a fever because you bastards poisoned
him
.
You fed him a diet of
 … 
frenzy. He needed his fix!
Dr. Matthew Randolph, dead man, talking about another dead man … and so many others.

They had discussed it, Jenna and he, and defined the fever that gripped him every now and then, and she was the only doctor he needed. They would take long walks; sudden bursts of running frequently became necessary for him, until the sweat came and his chest pounded. But the fever would pass, the explosions in his head dissolve—the guns would be stilled.

Sleep came easier these days, and his fits of restlessness caused him to reach only for her and not for a weapon. There were no weapons in the house. There never would be in any house they would ever live in.