“In Boston?” “I’m afraid we can’t help you get there, but we have every confidence in you. Register at the Ritz Carlton Hotel under the name of… Vickery.

  Yes, that’s a good name, such a benign sound.” “Boston,” said Bray, exhausted.

  Again there was the sudden shattering of glass; a third window pane blew out of its frame.

  “That shot,” said the voice on the phone, “is a symbol of our good faith.

  We could have killed you with the first.”

  He reached the coast of France, the same way he had left it four days ago; by motor launch at night. The trip to Paris took longer than anticipated; the drone he had expected to use wanted no part of him. The word was out, the price for his dead body too high, the punishment for helping Beowulf Agate too severe. The man owed Bray; he preferred to walk away.

  Scofield found an off-duty gendarme in a bar in Boulogne-sur-Mer; the negotiations were swift. He needed a, fast ride to Paris, to Orly Airport. To the gendarme, the payment was staggering; Bray reached Orly by daybreak. By 9:00 A.m., a Mr. Edmonton was on the first Air Canada flight to Montreal. The plane left the ground and he turned his thoughts to Antonia.

  They would use her to trap him, but there was no way they would permit her to stay alive once the trap had closed. Any more than they would let Taleniekov live once they had learned everything he knew. Even the Serpent could not withstand injections of scopolarnine or sodium amytal; no man could block his memory or prohibit the flow of information once the gates of recall were chemically pried open.

  These were the things he had to accept, and having accepted them, base his moves on their reality. He would not grow old with Antonia Gravet; there would be no years of peace. Once he understood this, there was nothing left but to try to reverse the conclusion, knowing that the chances of doing so were remote. Simply put, since there was absolutely nothing to lose, conversely there was no risk not worth taking, no strategy too outlandish or outrageous to consider.

  The key was Joshua Appleton, that remained constant. Was it possible that the Senator was such a consummate actor that he had been able to deceive so many so well for so long? Apparently it was so; one trained from birth to achieve a single goal, with unlimited money and talent available to him, could probably conceal anything. But the gap that needed filling was found in the stories of Josh Appleton, Marine combat officer, Korea. They were well known, publicized by campaign managers, emphasized by the candidate’s reluctance to discuss them, other than to praise the men who had served with him.

  Captain Joshua Appleton had been decorated for bravery under fire on five separate occasions, but the medals were only symbols, the tributes of his men paeans of gen-uine devotion. Josh Appleton was an officer dedicated to the proposition that no soldier should take a risk he would not take himself; and no infantryman, regardless of how badly he was wounded or how seemingly hopeless the situation, was to be left to the enemy if there was any chance at all to get him back. With such tenets, he was not always the best of officers, but he was the best of men. He continuously exposed himself to the severest punishment to save a private’s life, or draw fire away from a corporal’s squad. He had been wounded twice dragging men out of the hills of Panmunjom, and nearly lost his life at Chosan when he had crawled through enemy lines to direct a helicopter rescue.

  After the war, when he was home, Appleton had faced another struggle as dangerous as any he had experienced in Korea. A near fatal accident on the Massachusetts Turnpike. His car had swerved over the divider, crashing into an onrushing truck, the injuries sustained from head to legs so punishing the doctors at Massachusetts General had about given him up for dead. When bulletins were issued about this decorated son of a prominent family, men came from all over the country. Mechanics, bus drivers, farmhands, and clerks; the soldiers who had served under “Captain Josh.” For two days and nights they had kept -vigil, the more demonstrative praying openly, others simply sitting with their thoughts or reminiscing quietly with their former comrades. And when the crisis had passed and Appleton had been taken off the critical list, these men went home. They had come because they had wanted to come; they had left not knowing whether they had made any difference, but hoping that they had. Captain Joshua Appleton, IV, USMCR, was deserving of that hope.

  This was the gap that Bray could neither fill nor understand. The captain who had risked his life so frequently, so openly for the sake of other men; how could those risks be reconciled with a man programmed since birth to become the President of the United States? How could repeated exposure to death be justified to the Matarese?

  Somehow they had been, for there was no longer any doubt where Senator Joshua Appleton stood. The man who would be elected President of the United States be.

  fore the year was over was inextricably tied to a conspiracy as dangerous as any in American history.

  At Orly, Scofield picked up the Paris edition of the Herald-Tribune to see if the news of the Waverly massacre had broken; it had not. But there was something else, on the second page. It was another follow-up story concerning TransCommunications’ holdings in Verachten, including a partial list of the Boston conglomerate’s board of directors. The third name on the roster was the Senator from Massachusetts.

  Joshua Appleton was not only a consigliere of the Matarese, he was the sole descendant of that guest list seventy years ago in Porto Vecchio to become a true inheritor.

  “Mesdames et messieurs, s’il vous plait. A votre gauche, Les Illes de la Manche….” The voice of the pilot droned from the aircraft’s speaker.

  They were passing the Channel Islands; in six hours they would reach the coast of Nova Scotia, an hour later Moptreal. And four hours after that, Bray would cross the U.S. border south of Lacolle on the Richelieu River, into the waters of Lake Champlain.

  In hours the final madness would begin. He would live or he would die.

  And if he could not live in peace with Toni, without the shadow of Beowulf Agate in front of him or behind him, he did not care to live any longer. He was filled with… emptiness. If the awful void could be erased, replaced with the simple delight of being with another human being, then whatever years he had left were most welcome.

  If not, to bell with them.

  Boston.

  There’s someone who wants to meet with you.

  Who? Why?

  To make you a consigliere of the Matarese… consider what you bring to such an organization.

  It was not hard to define. Taleniekov was right. There were no shocks out of Moscow, but there were astounding revelations to be found in Washington. Beowulf Agate knew where the bodies were, and how and why they no longer breathed. He could be invaluable.

  They want you. If they can’t have you, they’ll kill you. So be it; he would be no prize for the Matarese.

  Bray closed his eyes; he needed sleep. There would be little in the days ahead.

  Rain splattered against the windshield in continuous sheets, streaking to the right under the force of the wind that blew off the Atlantic over the coastal highway. Scofield had rented the car in Portland, Maine, with a driver’s license and credit card he had never used before.-Soon he would be in Boston but not in the way the Matarese expected. He would not race halfway across the world and announce his arrival by registering at the Ritz Carlton as Vickery, only to wait for the Matarese’s next move.

  A man in panic would, a man who felt the only way to save the life of someone he deeply loved would-but he was beyond panic, he had accepted total loss, therefore he could hold back and conceive of his own strategy.

  He would be in Boston, in his enemy’s den, but his enemy would not know it. The Ritz Carlton would receive two telegrams spaced a day apart. The first would arrive tomorrow requesting a suite for Mr. B. A. Vickery of Montreal, arriving the following day. The second would be sent the next afternoon, stating that Mr. Vickery had been delayed, his arrival now anticipated two days later. There would be no address for Vickery, only telegraph offices on Montreal’s King and Market Streets, and no request for confirmations, the assumption here being that someone in Boston would make sure rooms were available.

  Only the two telegrams, sent from Montreal; the Matarese bad little choice but to believe he was still in Canada. What they could not know-suspect surely, but not be certain-was that he had used a drone to send them. He had. He had contacted a man, a felony-prone s,4paratiste he had known before, and met him at the airport, giving him the two handwritten messages on telegraph forms along with a sum of money and instructions when and from where to send them. Should the Matarese phone Montreal for immediate confirmations of origin, they would find the forms written in Bray’s handwriting.

  He had three days and one night to operate within Matarese territory, to learn everything he could about TransCommunications and its hierarchy.

  To find another flaw, one significant enough to summon Senator Joshua Appleton, IV, to Boston-on his terms. In panic.

  So much to learn, so little time.

  Scofield let his mind wander back to everyone he had ever known iii Boston and Cambridge-both as student and professional. Among that crowd of fits and misfits there had to be someone who could help him.

  He passed a road sign telling him he had left the town of Marblehead; he’d be in Boston in less than thirty minutes.

  It was 5:35, the horns of impatient drivers blaring on all sides as the taxi inched its way down Boylston Street’s crowded shopping district. He had parked the rented car in the farthest reaches of the Prudential underground lot, available should he need it, but not subject to the vagaries of weather or vandalism. He was on his way to Cambridge; a name had come into focus. A man who had spent twenty-five years teaching corporate law at the Harvard School of Business. Bray had never met him; there was no way the Matarese could make him a target.

  It was strange, thought Bray, as the cab clamored over the ribs of the Longfellow Bridge, that both he and Taleniekov had been brought back-however briefly-to those places where it had begun for each of them.

  Two students, one in Leningrad, one in Cambridge, with a certain, not dissimilar talent for foreign languages.

  Was Taleniekov still alive? Or was he dead or dying somewhere in Boston?

  Toni was alive; they’d keep her alive… for a while.

  Don’t think about them. Don’t think about her nowl There is no hope. Not really. Accept it, live with it. Then do the best you can.

  The traffic congealed again at Harvard Square, the downpour causing havoc in the streets. People were crowded in storefronts, students in panchos and jeans racing from curb to curb, jumping over the flooded gutters, crouching under the awning of the huge newspaper stand.

  The newspaper stand. NEwsp”ERs FRom ALL OVFR THE WORLD was the legend printed across the white sign above the canopy. Bray peered out the window, through the rain and the collection of bodies. One name, one man, dominated the observable headlines.

  Waverly! David Waverlyl England’s Foreign Secretary!

  “Let me off here,” he said to the driver, reaching for the travel bag and briefcase at his feet.

  He pushed his way through the crowd, grabbed two domestic papers off the row of twenty-odd different editions, left a dollar, and ran across the street at the first break in traffic. A half a block down Massachusetts Avenue was a German-style restaurant he vaguely remembered from his student days. The entrance was jammed; Scofield excused his way to the door, using his travel bag for interference, and went inside.

  There was a line waiting for tables; he went to the bar, and ordered Scotch. The drink arrived; he unfolded the first newspaper. It was the Boston Globe; he started reading, his eyes racing over the words, picking out the salient points of the article. He finished and picked up the Los Angeles Times, the story identical to the Globe’s, a wire service report, and almost surely, the official version put out by Whitehall, which was what Bray wanted to know.

  The massacre of David Waverly, his wife, children, and servants in Belgravia Square was held to be the work of terrorists, most likely a splinter group of fanatic Palestinians. It was pointed out, however, that no group had as yet come forth to claim responsibility, and the P.L.O.

  vehemently denied participation. Messages of shock and condolence were being sent by political leaders across the world; parliaments and presidiums, congresses and royal courts, all interrupted their businesses at hand to express their fury and grief.

  Bray reread both articles and the related stories in each paper looking for Roger Symonds’ name. It was not to be found; it would not come for days, if ever. The speculations were too wild, the possibilities too improbable. A senior officer of British Intelligence somehow connected to the slaughter of Britain’s Foreign Secretary. The Foreign Office would put a clamp on Symonds’ death for any number of reasons. It was no time to….

  Scofield’s thoughts were interrupted. In the dim light of the bar he had missed the insert; it was a late bulletin in the Globe.

  LONDON, March 3-An odd and brutal aspect of the Waverly killings was revealed by the police only hours ago. After receiving a gunshot in the head, David Waverly received an apparently grotesque coup de grdce in the form of a shotgun blast fired directly into his chest, literally removing the left side of his upper abdomen and rib cage. The medical examiner was at a loss to explain the method of killing, for the administering of such a wound-considering the caliber and the proximity of the weapon-is considered extremely dangerous to the one firing the gun. The London police speculate that the weapon used might have been a primitive short-barrelled, hand-held shotgun once favored by roaming gangs of bandits in the Mediterranean. The 1934 Encyclopedia of Weaponry refers to the gun as the Lupo, the Italian word for.,wolf.”

  The medical examiner in London might have trouble finding a reason for the “method of killing,” but Scofield did not. If England’s Foreign Secretary had a jagged blue circle affixed to his chest in the form of a birthmark, it was gone.

  And there was a message in the use of the Lupo. The Matarese wanted Beowulf Agate to understand clearly bow far and how wide the Corsican fever had spread, into what rarefied circles of power it had reached.

  He finished his drink, left his money on the bar with the two newspapers, and looked around for a telephone. The name that had come into focus, the man he wanted to see, was Dr. Theodore Goldman, a dean of the Harvard School of Business and a thorn in the side of the Justice Department. For he was an outspoken critic of the Anti-Trust Division, incessantly claiming that Justice prosecuted the minnows and let the sharks roarn free. He was a middle-aged enfant terrible who enjoyed taking on the giants, for be was a giant himself, cloaking his genius behind a facade of good-humored innocence that fooled no one.

  If anyone could shed light on the conglomerate called TransCommunications, it was Goldman.

  Bray did not know the man, but he had met Goldman’s son a year ago in the Hague-uader circumstances that were potentially disastrous for a young pilot in the Air Force. Aaron Goldman had gotten drunk with the wrong people near the Groote Kerk, men known to be involved in a KGB infiltration of NATO. The son of a prominent American Jew was prime material for the Soviets.

  An unknown intelligence officer had gotten the pilot away from the scene, slapped him into sobriety and told him to go back to his base. And after countless cups of coffee, Aaron Goldman had expressed his thanks.

  “If you’ve got a kid who wants to go to Harvard, let me know, whoever you are. I’ll talk to my dad, I swear it. What the hell’s your name anyway?” “Never mind,” Scofield had said. “Just get out of here, and don’t buy typing paper at the Coop. It’s cheaper down the block.” “What the.

  “Get out of here.” Bray saw the pay phone on the wall; he grabbed his luggage and walked over to it.

  He picked up a small wet piece of newspaper on the rain-soaked sidewalk and walked to the MPTA subway station in Harvard Square. He went downstairs and checked his soft leather suitcase in a locker. If it was stolen that would tell him something, and there was nothing in it he could not replace. He slid the wet scrap of paper carefully under the far right corner of the bag. Later, if the fragile scrap was curled or the surface broken, that would tell him something else: the bag had been searched and be was in the Matarese sights.

  Ten minutes later he rang the bell of Theodore Goldman’s house on Brattle Street. It was opened by a slender, middle-aged woman, her face pleasant, her eyes curious.

  “Mrs. Goldman?” “Yes?” “I telephoned your husband a few minutes ago-” “Oh, yes, of course,” she interrupted. “Well, for heaven’s sake, get out of the rain! It’s coming down like the fortyday flood. Come in, come in.

  I’m Anne Goldman.” She took his coat and hat; he held his attach6 case.

  “I apologize for disturbing you.” “Don’t be foolish. Aaron told us all about that night in… The Hague.