The Prometheus Deception (4 page)

“All part of the retirement plan,” Waller continued. “Idle hands are the devil's workshop, as they say. Something we've learned from hard experience. Give a field agent a lump sum and nothing to do, and he'll get himself into trouble, as night follows day. You need a
project
. Something real. And you're a natural teacher—one of the reasons you were so good in the field.”

Bryson said nothing, trying to dispel a wrenching memory of an operation in a small Latin American province, the memory of looking at a face in the crosshairs of a sniper-scope.
The face belonged to one of his “students”—a kid named Pablo, a nineteen-year-old Amerindian he'd trained in the art of defusing, and deploying, high explosives. A tough but decent kid. His parents were peasants in a hillside village that had just been overtaken by Maoist insurrectionists: if word got out that Pablo was working with their enemies, the guerrillas would kill his parents, and most likely in cruel and inventive ways—that was their signature. The kid wavered, struggled with his loyalties, and decided he had no choice but to cross over: to save his parents, he'd tell the guerrillas all he knew about their adversaries, the names of others who had cooperated with the forces of order. He was a tough kid, a decent kid, caught in a situation where there was no right answer. Bryson peered at Pablo's face through the scope—the face of a stricken, miserable, frightened young man—and only looked away after he squeezed the trigger
.

Waller's gaze was steady. “Your name is Jonas Barrett. An independent scholar, the author of half a dozen highly respected articles in peer-reviewed journals. Four of them in the
Journal of Byzantine Studies
. Team efforts—gave our near-eastern experts something to do in their down time. We do know a thing or two about how to build a civilian legend.” Waller handed him a folder. It was canary yellow, which signified that the card stock was interlaced with magnetic strips and could not be removed from the premises. It contained a legend—a fictive biography.
His
biography.

He skimmed the densely printed pages: they detailed the life of a reclusive scholar whose linguistic capacities matched his, whose expertise could be quickly mastered. The lineaments of his biography were easily assimilated—most of them, that was. Jonas Barrett was unmarried. Jonas Barrett never knew Elena. Jonas Barrett was not in love with Elena. Jonas Barrett did not ache, even now, for Elena's return. Jonas Barrett was a fiction: for Nick to make him real meant accepting the loss of Elena.

“The appointment went through a few days ago. Woodbridge is expecting their new adjunct lecturer to arrive in September. And, if I may say so, they're lucky to have him.”

“I have any choice in the matter?”

“Oh, we could have found you a position at any of a dozen multinational consulting firms. Or perhaps one of the behemoth petroleum or engineering companies. But this one is right for you. You've always had a mind that could handle abstractions as easily as facts. I used to worry it would be a handicap, but it turned out to be one of your greatest strengths.”

“And if I don't
want
to retire? What if I don't
want
to go gently into that good night?” For some reason, he flashed back on the blur of steel, the sinewy arm plunging the blade toward him.…

“
Don't,
Nick,” Waller said, his expression opaque.

“Jesus,” Bryson said softly. There was pain in his voice, and Bryson regretted letting it show. Bryson knew how the game was played: what got to him wasn't the words he had been listening to so much as the man who was speaking them. Waller hadn't elaborated, hadn't needed to. Bryson knew he wasn't being offered a choice, and knew what lay in store for the recalcitrant. The taxicab that swerves suddenly, hits a pedestrian, and disappears. The pinprick a subject may not even feel as he makes his way through a crowded shopping mall, followed by the open-and-shut diagnosis of coronary failure. An ordinary mugging gone awry, in a city that still had one of the highest rates of street crime in the nation.

“This is the line of work that we have chosen,” said Waller gently. “Our responsibility supersedes all bonds of kinship and affection. I wish it were otherwise. You don't know how much. In my time, I've had to … sanction three of my men. Good men gone bad. No, not even bad, just unprofessional. I live with that every day, Nick. But I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
Three men
. I'm begging you—don't make it four.” Was it a threat? A plea? Both? Waller let his breath out slowly. “I'm offering you life, Nick. A very good life.”

*   *   *

But what lay ahead for Bryson wasn't life, not just yet. It was a sort of fugue state, a shadowy half-death. For fifteen years, he had devoted his whole being—every brain cell, every muscle fiber—to a peculiarly hazardous and strenuous endeavor. Now his services would no longer be required. And Bryson felt nothing, just a profound emptiness. He made his way home, to the handsome colonial-style house in Falls Church that barely seemed familiar any longer. He cast his eyes over the house as if it were a stranger's, taking in the tasteful Aubussons that Elena had picked out, the hopeful pastel-painted room on the second floor for the child they never had. The place was both empty and full of ghosts. Then he poured himself a water tumbler full of vodka. It was the last time he would be fully sober in weeks.

The house was full of Elena, of her scent, her taste, her aura. He could not forget her.

They were sitting on the dock in front of their lakeside cabin in Maryland, watching the sailboat.… She poured him a glass of cold white wine, and as she handed it to him she kissed him. “I miss you,” she said
.

“But I'm right here, my darling.”

“Now you are. Tomorrow you'll be gone. To Prague, to Sierra Leone, to Jakarta, to Hong Kong … who knows where? And who knows for how long?”

He took her hand, feeling her loneliness, unable to banish it. “But I always come back. And you know the expression, Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

“Mai rãrut, mai drãgut,”
she said softly, musingly. “But you know, in my country, they say something else
. Celor ce duc mai mult dorul, le pare mai dulce odorul.
Absence sharpens love, but presence strengthens it.”

“I like that.”

She raised an index finger, wagged it in his face. “They also say something else
. Prin depãrtare dragostea se uitã.
How do you say—long absent, soon forgotten?”

“Out of sight, out of mind.”

“How long before you forget me?”

“But you're always with me, my love.” He tapped his chest. “In here.”

*   *   *

He had no doubt the Directorate had him under electronic surveillance; he hardly cared. If they assessed him as a security risk, they would certainly sanction him. Perhaps with enough vodka, he thought grimly, he might even save them the trouble. Days passed, and he saw and heard from no one. Maybe Waller interceded at consortium level to cut him slack, because he knew it wasn't just the severance that caused him to fall apart. It was Elena's departure. Elena, the anchor of his existence. Acquaintances would sometimes say how
calm
Nick always seemed, but Nick seldom felt calm: calm was what Elena had provided. What was Waller's phrase for her?
A passionate serenity
.

Nick hadn't known he was capable of loving somebody as much as he loved her. In the vortex of lies where his career played out, she was his one true thing. At the same time, she too was a spook: she would have had to have been for them to build a life together. In fact, she was cleared almost all the way to the top, because she worked in the Directorate's cryptography division, and you never knew what sort of thing they'd come across. The typical hostile intercept often contained morsels of intelligence about the United States; decrypting them meant the possibility of being exposed to your own government's innermost secrets—information most of the agency's division heads weren't even cleared for. Analysts like her lived desk-bound lives, the computer keyboard their only weapon, and yet their intellects roamed the world as freely as any field agent.

*   *   *

God, how he loved her!

In a sense, Ted Waller had introduced them, though in fact they had met in the least promising of circumstances, a result of an assignment Waller had given him.

It was a routine package transport, which Directorate insiders sometimes called the “coyote run,” referring to the smuggling of human beings. The Balkans were on fire in the late 1980s, and a brilliant Romanian mathematician was to be exfiltrated from Bucharest with his wife and daughter. Andrei Petrescu was a true Romanian patriot, an academician at the University of Bucharest specializing in the arcane mathematics of cryptography. He had been pressed into service by Romania's notorious secret service, the Securitate, to devise the codes used in the innermost circles of the
Ceau
ş
escu
government. He wrote the cryptographic algorithms, but he refused their offer of employment: he wanted to remain in the academy, a teacher, and he was revolted by the Securitate's oppression of the Romanian people. As a result, Andrei and his family were kept under virtual house arrest, forbidden from traveling, their every movement watched. His daughter, Elena, said to be no less brilliant than her father, was a graduate student in mathematics at the university, hoping to follow in her father's footsteps.

As Romania reached a boiling point in December of 1989, and popular protests began to break out against the tyrant Nicolae
Ceau
ş
escu
, the Securitate, the tyrant's Praetorian guard, retaliated with mass arrests and murders. In Timisoara, a huge crowd gathered on Bulevardul 30 Decembrie, and demonstrators broke into Communist Party headquarters and began throwing portraits of the tyrant out of the windows. The army and the Securitate fired on the unruly crowd throughout the day and night; the dead were piled up and buried in mass graves.

Disgusted, Andrei Petrescu decided to do his small part to fight the tyranny. He possessed the keys to
Ceau
ş
escu
's most secret communications, and he would give them away to the tyrant's enemies. No longer could
Ceau
ş
escu
communicate in secret with his henchmen; his decisions, his orders, would be known the moment he uttered them.

Andrei Petrescu wrestled with the decision. Would this imperil the lives of his beloved Simona, his adored Elena? Once they had discovered what he had done—and they would know, for no one else outside the government knew the source codes—Andrei and his family would be rounded up, arrested, and executed.

No, he would have to get out of Romania. But to do that he needed to enlist a powerful outsider, preferably an intelligence agency such as the CIA or the KGB, that had the resources to get the family out.

Terrified, he made cautious, veiled inquiries. He knew people; his colleagues knew people. He made his offer, and his demand. But both the British and the Americans refused to get involved. They had adopted a hands-off policy toward Romania. His offer was rebuffed.

And then very early one morning he was contacted by an American, a representative of another intelligence agency, not the CIA. They were interested; they would help. They had the courage the others lacked.

The operational details had been designed by the Directorate's logistical architects, refined by Bryson upon consultation with Ted Waller. Bryson was to smuggle out of Romania the mathematician and his family, along with five others, two men and three women, all of them intelligence assets. Getting into Romania was the easy part. From Nyírábrány, in the east of Hungary, Bryson crossed the border by rail into Romania at Valea Lui Mihai, carrying an authentic Hungarian passport of a long-haul freight driver; with his drab overalls and his callused hands, he was given barely a once-over. A few kilometers outside Valea Lui Mihai he found the truck that had been left for him by a Directorate contact. It was an old Romanian panel truck that belched diesel. It had been ingeniously modified in-country by Directorate assets: when the back of the truck was opened, the cargo bay seemed to be stacked with crates of Romanian wine and
tzuica,
plum brandy. But the crates were only one row deep; they concealed a large compartment, taking up most of the cargo area, in which all but one of the Romanians could be hidden.

The group had been instructed to meet him in the Baneasa forest, five kilometers north of Bucharest. Bryson found them at the designated rendezvous point, a picnic spread out before them, looking like an extended family on an outing. But Bryson could see the terror in their faces.

The leader of the eight was obviously the mathematician, Andrei Petrescu, a diminutive man in his sixties, accompanied by a meek, moon-faced woman, apparently his wife. But it was their daughter who arrested Bryson's attention, for he had never met a woman so beautiful. Twenty-year-old Elena Petrescu was raven-haired, petite, and lithe, with dark eyes that glittered and flashed. She wore a black skirt and dove-gray sweater, a colorful babushka tied around her head. She was silent and looked at him with profound suspicion.

Bryson greeted them in Romanian.
“Buna ziua,”
he said.
“Unde este cea mai apropiata statie Peco?”
Where is the nearest gas station?

“Sinteti pe un drum gresit,”
responded the mathematician. You are on the wrong road.

They followed him to the panel truck, which he'd parked in the shelter of a copse of trees. The beautiful young woman joined him in the cab, as was the preordained arrangement. The others took their seats in the hidden compartment, where Bryson had left sandwiches and bottled water to get them through the long journey to the Hungarian border.