The Matarese Circle - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,78

his wide smile revealing an absence of key teeth. 'Ecco Solenzara! Ci arriveremo subito-trenta minuti. E nord di Porto Vecchio!" "Benissimo, grazie.

.'Prego!1.

In a half-hour he'd be on land, in Corsica, in the bills where the Matarese was born. That it had been bom was not disputed, that it had provided assassins-for-hire until the mid-thirties was accepted as a firm probability. But so little was known about it that no one really knew how much of its story was myth and how much based in reality. ne legend was both encouraged and scorned at the same time; it was basically an enigma because no one understood its origins. Only that a madman named Guillaume de Matarese had summoned a council-frorn where was never recorded-and given birth to a band of assassins, based, some said, on the killer-society of Hasan ibn-al-Sabbah in the eleventh century.

Yet this smacked of cult-orientation, thus feeding the myth and diminishing the reality. No court testimony was ever given, no assassin ever caught who could be traced to an organization called the Matarese; if there were confessions, none were ever made public. Still the rumors persisted. Stories were circulated in high places; articles appeared in responsible newspapers, only to be denied editorial substance in later editions. Several independent studies were begun; if any were completed, no one knew about them. And through it all governments made no comment.

Ever. They were silent.

And for a young intelligence officer studying the history of assassination years ago, it was this silence that lent a certain credibility to the Matarese.

Just as another silence, suddenly imposed three days ago, convinced him that the rendezvous in Corsica was no proposal made in the heat of violence, but the only thing that was left. The Matarese remained an enigma, but it was no myth. It was a reality. A powerful man had gone to other powerful men and spoken the name in alarm; it was not to be tolerated.

Robert Winthrop had disappeared.

Bray had run from Rock Creek Park three nights ago and made his way to a motel on the outskirts of Fredericksburg. For six hours he had traveled up and down the highway calling Winthrop from a series of telephone booths, never the same one twice, hitching rides on the pretext of a disabled car to put distance between them. He had talked to Winthrop's wife, alarming her he was sure, but saying nothing of substance, only that he had to speak with the Ambassador. Until it was dawn, and there was no answer on the phone, just interminable rings spaced farther and farther apart-or so it seemed -and no one at all on the line.

There had been nowhere to turn, no one to go to; the networks were spreading out for him. If they found him, his termination would be complete; he understood that. If he was permitted to live, it would be within the four walls of a cell, or worse, as a vegetable. But he did not think he would be permitted to live. Taleniekov was right: they were both marked.

If there was an answer, it was four thousand miles away in the Mediterranean. In his attach6 case were a dozen false passports, five bank books under assumed names, and a list of men and women who could find him all manner of transportation. He had left Fredericksburg at dawn two days ago, had stopped at banks in London and Paris, and late last night had reached a fishing pier in San Vincenzo.

And now he was within minutes of setting foot on Corsica. The long stretches of immobility in the air and over the water had given him time to think or at least the time to organize his thoughts. He had to start with the incontrovertible; there were two established facts: Guillaume de Matarese had existed and there'd been a group of men who had called themselves the Council of the Matarese, dedicated to the insane theories of its sponsor. The world moved forward by constant, violent changes of power.

Shock and sudden death were intrinsic to the evolution of history. Someone had to provide the means. Governments everywhere would pay for political murder. Assassination-carried out under the most controlled methods untraceable to those contracting for itcould become a global resource with riches and influence beyond imagination. This was the theory of Guillaume de Matarese.

Among the international intelligence community, a minority maintained that the Matarese had been responsible for scores of political killings from the second decade of the century through the

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