The Matarese Countdown - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,2

the truth, gentlemen. With the truth, no one can touch you."

"But, mon signore exclaimed the avvocato from Italy, "you are selling assets far below market value! For what purpose? You delegate millions upon millions to charities everywhere, to nobodies who cannot tell a lira from a deutsche mark! What are you, a socialista who wants to reform the world while destroying the thousands who believed in you, in us?"

"Not at all. You are all part of something that began years before you were born, the vision of the great padrone, the Baron of Matarese."

"Who?" asked the French attorney.

"I vaguely remember hearing the name, mein Herr," said the German.

"But it has no relevance for me."

"Why should it?" Rene Mouchistine glanced briefly over his shoulder at his valet, Antoine.

"You are all nothing but the webs of spiders that spun out from the source, hired by the source, making its operations appear legitimate, for you were legitimate. You say I'm giving back millions to those who lost the games-where do you suppose my riches came from? We became greed gone berserk."

"You cannot do this, Mouchistine!" shouted the American, springing to his feet.

"I'll be hauled before Congress!"

"And I! The Bundestag will insist on investigating!" yelled the Rechtsanwalt from Berlin.

"I will not subject myself to the Chamber of Deputies!" cried the Parisian.

"I'll have our associates in Palermo convince you otherwise," said the man from Rome ominously.

"You'll see the logic."

"Why not try it now yourself? Are you afraid of an old man?"

The Italian rose in fury to his feet, his hand reaching under his tailored jacket. It was as far as he got. Kesitch! A silenced, single gunshot blew his face apart, fired by Antoine, the valet. The Roman lawyer fell, soiling the parquet floor.

"You're insane!" screamed the German.

"He was merely showing you a newspaper article in which several of your companies are linked to the Mafia, which is true. You are a monster!"

"That's sheer irony coming from you, considering Auschwitz and Dachau."

"I wasn't born then!"

"Read history.. .. What do you say, Antoine?"

"Self-defense, monsieur. As a senior informer to the Surete, I will put it in my report. He reached for a weapon."

"Shit!" yelled the lawyer from Washington.

"You set us up here, you son of a bitch!"

"Not really. I simply wanted to make sure you would carry out my orders."

"We can't! For God's sake, don't you understand? It would be the end of all of us-" "One certainly, but we'll get rid of the body, fish for the fish under the sea."

"You are insane!"

"We became insane. We were not at the beginning.. .. Stop!

Antoine! .. . The portholes!"

The yacht's small circular windows were suddenly filled with faces covered with rubber masks. One by one, each smashed the glass with his weapon and began firing indiscriminately at every corner and shadow of the room. The valet, Antoine, pulled Mouchistine under a bulkhead armoire, his own shoulder blown apart, his master punctured around the chest. His friend of thirty years would not survive.

"Rene, Rene!" cried Antoine.

"Take deep breaths, keep breathing!

They've gone! I'll get you to the hospital!"

"No, Antoine, it is too late!" Mouchistine choked.

"The lawyers are gone and I do not regret my end. I lived with evil and I die rejecting it.

Perhaps it will mean something somewhere."

"What are you talking about, mon ami, the dearest friend of my life?"

"Find Beowulf Agate."

"Who?"

"Ask Washington. They have to know where he is! Vasili Taleniekov was killed, yes, but not Beowulf Agate. He is somewhere and he knows the truth."

"What truth, my closest friend?"

"The Matarese! They're back. They knew about this conference, the coded instructions that are meaningless without the ciphers. Whoever's left had to stop me, so you must stop them!"

"How?"

"Fight it with all your heart and soul! Soon it will be everywhere. It was the evil that the archangel of hell prophesied, the good that became the servant of Satan."

"You're not making sense. I'm not a biblical scholar!"

"You don't have to be," whispered the dying Mouchistine.

"Ideas are greater monuments than cathedrals. They last millennia beyond the stone."

"What the hell are you saying?"

"Find Beowulf Agate. He's the key."

Rene Mouchistine spastically lurched forward, then fell back, his head resting against the bulkhead. His last words were so clear they might have been gutturally whispered through an echo chamber.

"The Matarese ... the evil incarnate." The old man with the secrets was dead.

Six months earlier.

In the rugged Corsican hills above the waters of Porto Vecchio on the Tyrrhenian Sea, there stood the skeletal remains of a once-majestic estate. The exterior stonework, built to