the alliances." "They're meaningless now. Worse than that, if they're recorded, they'll either go further underground, cutting off all traces, or the killing, the terrorism, will accelerate. There'll be a series of bloodbaths..
. and you'll be dead." "That's my condition. The names, the alliances. Or you will not leave here." Bray stared at the MI-Six man. "Will you stop me, Roger? I mean here, now, at this moment, will you? Can you?" "Perhaps not. But those two men over there will." Symonds nodded to his left.
Scofield shifted his eyes. Across the room, at a table in the center of the lounge, were two British agents, one of them the red-haired, stocky man he had spoken with last night at the moonlit playground in Guildford.
There was no sympathy now, only hostility in his look. "You covered yourself," said Scofield.
"Did you think I wouldn't? They're armed and have their instructions. The names, please." Symonds took out a notebook and a ballpoint pen; he placed them in front of Bray. "Don't write nonsense, I beg you. Be practical. If you and the Russian are killed, there's no one else. I may not be in a class with Beowulf Agate and the Serpent, but I'm not without certain talents." "How much time will you give me?" "One week. Not a day more." Scofield picked up the pen, opened the small notebook and began to write.
April 4th, 1911
Porto Vecchio, Corsica
Scozzi Voroshin
Waverly
Appleton
Current:
Guillamo Scozzi-Dead
Odile Verachten-Dead
David Waverly-Dead
Joshua Appleton-?
Scozzi-Paravacini. Milan
Verachten Works. (Voroshin). Essen
Trans-Communications. Boston
Below the names and the companies, he then wrote one word.
Matarese
Bray walked out of the elevator, his mind on air routes, accessibilities, and cover. Hours now took on the significance of days; there was so much to learn, so much to find, and so little time to do it all.
They had thought it might end in London with the breaking of David Waverly. They should have known better; the descendants were expendable.
Three were dead, three names removed from the guest list of Guillaume de Matarese for the date of April 4, 1911. Yet one was left. The golden politician of Boston, the man few doubted would win the summer primaries and without question the election in the fall, He would be President of the United States. Many had cried out during the violent sixties and seventies that he could bind the country together; Appleton was never so presumptuous as to make the statement, but most of America thought he was perhaps the only man who could.
But bind it for what? For whom? That was the most frightening prospect of all. Was he the one descendant not expendable?
Chosen by the council, by the shepherd boy, to do what the others could not do?
They would reach Appleton, thought Bray as he rounded the corner of the Connaught hallway toward his room, but not where Appleton expected to be reachedit he expected to be reached. They would not be drawn to Washington where chance encounters with State, FBI and Company personnel were ten times greater than any other place in the hemisphere. There was no point in taking on two enemies simultaneously. Instead, they would go to Boston, to the conglomerate so aptly named TransCommunications.
Somewhere, somehow, within the upper ranks of that vast company, they would find one man-one man with a blue circle on his chest or connections to Scozzi-Paravacini or Verachten, and that man would whisper an alarm summoning Joshua Appleton, IV. They would trap him, take him in Boston.
And when they were finished with him the secret of the Matarese would be exposed, told by a man whose impeccable credentials were matched only by his incredible deceit. It had to be Appleton; there was no one else. If they.
Scofield reached for the weapon in his holster. The door of his room twenty feet down the corridor was open. There were no circumstances imaginable that allowed it to be conceivably left open by choice! There had been an intruder-intruders.
He stopped, shook the paralysis from his mind, and ran to the side of the door, pressing his back into the wall by the molding. He lunged inside, crouching, leveling his gun in front of him, prepared to fire.
There was no one, no one at all. Nothing but silence and a very neat room. Too neat; the road map had been removed from the table, the glasses washed, returned to the silver tray on the bureau, the ashtrays wiped clean. There was no evidence that the room had been occupied. Then he saw it-them-and the paralysis returned.