The Aquitaine Progression by Robert Ludlum (1984)

The Aquitaine Progression
by Robert Ludlum
Publisher:  Random House
Copyright:  1984
First Edition

"They've come back!"

As Joel Converse hears these whispered words he stares in shocked silence at Preston Halliday, the strangely obsessed man who utters them.  Converse and his mysterious informant are international lawyers who have come to Geneva to work out a multinational merger; but with Halliday's urgent words Converse finds himself plunged once more into a world of violence, a world that he thought he had left behind years before when he lurched out of a Southeast Asian jungle in desperate flight from a North Vietnamese prison camp.

What do Halliday's words mean?  And what is their connection to the blood-chilling conspiracy that he reveals to Converse?  Why has Converse of all people been chosen to expose and destroy the web of terror and deceit that Halliday describes to him?  Above all, why does Converse, who had so resolutely forsworn violence, accept Halliday's terrifying challenge?

The conspiracy is called Aquitaine, so named by its maniacal sponsors to echo Charlemagne's dream of empire, in which the kingdom of Aquitaine would engulf all of Europe, and by extension the lands across the Atlantic as well.  Now, centuries later, a handful of dedicated fanatics -- highly placed military men, officers of legendary stature from France, England, Wes Germany, Israel, and South Africa -- are determined to turn Charlemagne's dream into reality.

Their leader is the retired American general George Marcus Delavane, the so-called Warlord of Saigon.  From Halliday's words, Joel learns that Aquitaine is within weeks, perhaps days, of sweeping over the Free World.  The same General Delavane who had once sent Joel and thousand like him to death and captivity in Southeast Asia is on the verge of plunging the world into chaos so that he and his generals can then restore order as they see fit.  By exposing this madness, Converse aims to destroy Delavane's diabolically ingenious conspiracy.  But he will also put to rest his own memories of suffering at Delavane's hands -- horrors that haunt him still and that drove his wife, the only woman he ever loved, to leave him, in despair of his emotional paralysis.  "Burn-out, Joel!  Burn-out!" she cried out to him as their marriage collapsed.

From Halliday, Joel learns only the barest outlines of the conspiracy, but later on the Greek island of Mykonos an aging, much decorated American officer, himself a war hero, reveals to Joel further macabre details of the plot and gives him the information to pursue the men of Aquitaine.

How Converse finds these maniacal generals and how in a matter of days they turn him into the most hunted man in Europe is only part of Robert Ludlum's latest breathtaking novel.  Isolated, running for his life, expecting death with every breath he takes, Joel is the only man alive who can prove that Aquitaine exists, that the day of the generals is at hand.

But then the wife who had left him returns, and with skills he never dreamed she possessed, she joins him in a desperate struggle back in from the cold.

Condition:  Used.  Hardcover.  Dust cover is lightly discolored, showing light creases and shelf wear.  Pages may be tanning from age.  Previous owner's "Library Of" stamp is on the front endpaper.

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