Read Online The Aquitaine Progression by Robert Ludlum - Free Book Online Page B

began to fall into place—very ominously. For anyone politically aware, those four names are frightening—they dredge up frightening memories.”
    “Did Delavane ever learn that he’d found them?”
    “In my judgment, he could never be certain. Halliday wrote them down and left before the general returned. But then Geneva tells us something else, doesn’t it?”
    “That Delavane did find out,” said Converse grimly.
    “Or he wasn’t going to take any further chances, especially if there was a schedule, and we’re convinced there is one. We’re in the countdown now.”
    “To what?”
    “From the pattern of their operations—what we’ve pieced together—a prolonged series of massive, orchestrated conflagrations designed to spin governments out of control and destabilize them.”
    “That’s a tall order. In what way?”
    “Guesswork,” said the scholar, frowning. “Probably widespread, coordinated eruptions of violence led by terrorists everywhere—terrorists fueled by Delavane and his people. When the chaos becomes intolerable, it would be their excuse to march in with military units and assume the controls, initially with martial law.”
    “It’s been done before,” said Joel. “Feed and arm a presumed enemy, then send out provocateurs—”
    “With massive sums of money and material.”
    “And when they rise up,” continued Converse, “pull out the rug, crush them, and take over. The citizens give thanks and call the heroes saviors, as they start marching to their drums. But how could they
do
it?”
    “That’s the all-consuming question. What are the targets? Where are they,
who
are they? We have no idea. If we had an inkling, we might approach from that end, but we don’t,and we can’t waste time hunting for unknowns. We must go after what we do know.”
    “Again, time,” Joel broke in. “Why are you so sure we’re in a countdown?”
    “Increased activity everywhere—in many cases frantic. Shipments originating in the States are funneled out of warehouses in England, Ireland, France, and Germany to groups of insurgents in all the troubled areas. There are rumors out of Munich, the Mediterranean and the Arab states. The talk is in terms of final preparations, but no one seems to know what exactly for—except that all of them must be ready. It’s as though such groups as Baader-Meinhof, the Brigate Rosse, the PLO, and the red legions of Paris and Madrid were all in a race with none knowing the course, only the moment when it begins.”
    “When is that?”
    “Our reports vary, but they’re all within the same time span. Within three to five weeks.”
    “Oh, my
God
.” Joel suddenly remembered. “Avery—Halliday—whispered something to me just before he died. Words that were spoken by the men who shot him. Aquitaine … ‘They said it was for Aquitaine.’ Those were the words he whispered. What do they mean, Beale?”
    The old scholar was silent, his eyes alive in the moonlight. He slowly turned his head and stared out at the water. “It’s
madness
,” he whispered.
    “That doesn’t tell me anything.”
    “No, of course not,” said Beale apologetically, turning back to Converse. “It’s simply the magnitude of it all. It’s so incredible.”
    “I’m not reading you.”
    “Aquitaine—Aquitania, as Julius Caesar called it—was the name given to a region in southwestern France that at one time in the first centuries after Christ was said to have extended from the Atlantic, across the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean, and as far north as the mouth of the Loire west of Paris on the coast—”
    “I’m vaguely aware of that,” Joel broke in, too impatient for an academic dissertation.
    “If you are, you’re to be commended. Most people are only aware of the later centuries—say, from the eighth on, when Charlemagne conquered the region, formed the kingdom of Aquitaine and bestowed it on his son Louis, and
his
sons Pepin One and Two. Actually, these and the