Free The Matarese Countdown by Robert Ludlum Page A

white wicker chair. “Men like my husband and Vasili Taleniekov were killers on the loose, killers who had to take the lives of men and women who they knew would kill them! For what purpose? While the superpowers pretended to get together with parades and marching bands proclaiming
détente
, or whatever they called it, while agents like Brandon Scofield and Vasili Taleniekov were ordered to keep killing? Where was the logic, Cameron Pryce?”
    “I don’t have an answer, Mrs. Scofield—Antonia. It was a different time.”
    “What’s
your
time, Cam?” asked Beowulf Agate. “What are your orders? Who are you after?”
    “Terrorists, I guess. Among the more deadly, perhaps, is this Matarese because it’s a new kind of terror, I think.”
    “Exactly right, young man,” agreed Scofield. “They may not massacre people or blow up buildings at this point—they pay for those things to be done or engineer them with unknowing, programmed psychopaths—but they can and they will do everything themselves if it’s part of their strategy.”
    “Strategy for
what?
”
    “For a malevolent international cartel, dedicated to raw financial power for itself.”
    “To get anywhere near that goal they’d have to eliminate competition, neutralize competitors all over the place.”
    “Now you’ve got it. Capitalism run amok, derailed. One monolithic Daddy Warbucks pushing all the buttons, price-fixing the order of the day, false competition erected by noncompeting partners. Then what comes next, Field Officer Cameron Pryce?”
    “I don’t know what you mean—”
    “I mean what comes
next?
The world’s leading financial centers under the patronage of a single authority. What follows?”
    “Governments,” said Cam quietly, his eyes narrowed again. “Whoever has the major sources of money calls the political shots.”
    “Go to the head of the class, youngster!” exclaimed Scofield, raising his empty brandy snifter, and looking sheepishly at his wife. “Perhaps, my love?”
    “I’ll bring the bottle,” said Antonia, rising. “You’ve been a good lad for several months now.”
    “Not by choice, damn it! It’s those lousy doctors in Miami.”
    “But could it happen?” continued the CIA agent pensively as Antonia left the veranda. “Could it really happen?”
    “There are more historical precedents than either of us could enumerate, Cameron. Mergers upon mergers, the swallowing up of corporations by buyouts, hostile and otherwise. Global monopolies, young man. It goes back to the pharaohs of Egypt who overrode their pretending princes, and the Romans who packed the senates so the ruling Caesars ran everything. It’s nothing new, it’s just modernized, computerized. The bastards who want everything will get everything unless they’re stopped.”
    “Who’ll stop them?”
    “Not
me
, God knows, I don’t care any longer. Perhaps the people—the
unconcerned
people—may wake up and see that at the end of the line their freedoms have been sucked away by the unholy apparatus of financial supremacy. That’s what the Matarese is driving for. The results are police states—everywhere. They can’t survive otherwise.”
    “You really think that could happen?”
    “It depends on what kind of head start they’ve got and who’s on their board of directors. Frankly, yes, it could happen. When you analyze it, we’re talking about boardroom terrorism, international collusion, flaunting all the antitrust laws everywhere. It’s as though General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, BMW, Toyota, Porsche, and two or three other manufacturers got together and ran the world’s automobile industry. It’s not really that far-fetched.”
    “And once there, they go after the governments,” said Pryce.
    “Oh, I suspect a number are entrenched already, as they were thirty years ago. One of them nearly became President of the United States. They damn near ran our State Department and the Pentagon as well as having undue influence in the