The Prometheus Deception (40 page)

“You propose to do
nothing?
”

“I didn't say that. Listen, Nick, I believe in the rules. People chide me all the time for being a stickler. But that doesn't mean I'm going to sit back and let these
fanatics
take the world hostage. What I'm saying is that I need more. I need
proof
. I will mobilize every form of state authority we can muster, but to do that I need you to come back to me with something.”

“Damn it, there's no
time
.”

“Bryson,
listen
to me!” Bryson saw the harrowed look in Lanchester's face. “I need more. I need specifics. I need to know
what they're planning!
I'm counting on you. We all are.”

*   *   *

“I'm counting on you. We all are.”
Lanchester's voice came from the speaker console in the darkened room thousands of miles away.
“Now, how can I help? What resources can I place at your disposal?”

The listener picked up a telephone handset and pressed a button. In a moment he spoke, his voice hushed. “So he's made contact. As we expected.”

“It fits the profile, sir,” came the voice at the other end of the line. “He goes straight to the top. I'm surprised only that he didn't attempt blackmail or other threats.”

“I want to know exactly who he's working with, who he's working for.”

“Yes, sir. Unfortunately, we don't know where he's going next.”

“Don't worry. The world is a very small place today. He can't get away. There's no place to go.”

*   *   *

Bryson left the rented car a few blocks from the Marolles and approached the pension on foot, alert for any disruptions in pattern, anyone who seemed not to belong. There was nothing out of the ordinary, but his mind was not set at ease. He had been manipulated, deceived too often. Richard Lanchester had not dismissed him out of hand, but neither had he been roused to immediate action. Did that mean he, too, was to be suspected? Paranoia bred upon itself; Bryson knew that that way lay madness. No, he would take Lanchester at face value, as a man who seemed genuinely concerned yet quite reasonably needed hard facts upon which to order action. It was a setback, but in another sense it was a step forward, because he had enlisted a powerful ally. Or if not an ally, at least a sympathetic ear.

Once past the glum woman at the front desk, Bryson took the stairs to the basement, to the storage closet. From the outside he could see it was still locked; that was a relief. But he put nothing past Layla anymore; he pulled his weapon out from his belt, concealed by his suit jacket, and stood to one side as he silently turned the lock, then suddenly whipped open the door.

She did not spring out; there was only silence.

From where he stood he could see that the closet was empty. The clothesline had been severed, pieces discarded on the floor.

She was gone.

*   *   *

She could not have escaped without outside assistance. There was no way she could have slipped the knots or severed them; she had no blade or other tool. He had made sure of that.

Now he was certain:
she had been working with others nearby
.

Her accomplices were likely in the vicinity now; they knew where he was staying, and if she had hesitated momentarily before firing her gun, they would not. Returning to his room was therefore out of the question, a risk he must not take.

He mentally ran through the contents of his suitcase upstairs. Over twenty years he had learned to travel with the minimum, to assume that his hotel room would be searched. Habitually, he arranged his things in such a way that he would inevitably be able to tell if someone had gone through them, information that often proved useful. Since he assumed his suitcase would be rifled, he had learned not to leave anything irreplaceable behind, unattended. He learned, too, to separate valuables into two broad categories: those with monetary value, and those of strategic value. It was items in the first category that were most likely to be stolen by casual thieves, larcenous maids and the like: money, jewelry, small electronics that looked expensive. Those in the second category—things like passports real and forged, identity papers and licenses and other documents, canisters of film, videotapes or computer disks—were least likely to be stolen by simple thieves, yet if pilfered, often could not be replaced.

For that reason, Bryson was more likely to leave cash and such in his luggage, but take with him his false passports. True to habit, he had on his person all of his papers, his weapon, and the downloaded cryptographic key from Jacques Arnaud's secure phone, a tiny microchip he had been carrying with him for quite some time now. If he abandoned his hotel room and never returned, he would survive. He would need money, though that was fairly easily arranged. But he could continue.

But to where? Simple penetration of the Directorate was out of the question now. They knew of his hostile intent. The only remaining strategy was a frontal one: to try to locate Elena by using his standing as her former husband as a lure.

They didn't know what he knew, what he might have learned from her
.

Whether she was assigned to him or not, whether tasked to manipulate him, keep him in the dark, she nevertheless might have told him things, inadvertently or intentionally. He had been her husband, however fraudulent the marriage was designed to be; there had been, of necessity, moments of intimacy, times when the two of them were entirely alone.

The deception could be doubled back, turned back on them as well. Why not? What if he let it be known that he had learned things from Elena, deliberately or not—facts they would not want him to know? Information that could be locked away, used as a bargaining chip, left with an attorney to be released in the event of death?

He had something here. A husband knew things about his wife that no one else did. They didn't know what she might have passed on to him, intentionally or not. He would
use
the uncertainty, the ambiguity—use it as a bright, shining beacon, a lure.

Exactly how he would use it was still unclear, the plan inchoate. But there still remained agents he had had brief dealings with, operatives in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, Berlin and London, Sierra Leone and Pyongyang. He would begin the methodical, painstaking process of contacting them, or whichever ones of them whose names and contact information still functioned, using them as conduits to pass on the message to Ted Waller.

To do this he would need money, but that was fairly easily arranged. He had his hidden accounts in Luxembourg and Grand Cayman, as yet untouched; the necessity of hiding contingency funds was virtually a law of nature among Directorate operatives, a matter of survival. He would arrange wire transfers, secure the funds he needed to travel freely, now that he could no longer trust the CIA.

And then he would begin to contact former colleagues, using them to pass on the threat. And a demand: an insistence upon a meeting with Elena. A condition that, if not met, would result in the release of information he had until now held in reserve. Blackmail, pure and simple. Ted Waller would understand; it was mother's milk to him.

He closed the storage-closet door and searched for another way out of the hotel, an exit that didn't require going through the lobby. After circling the dark basement warrens for a few minutes, he found a little-used service exit, an iron door that was all but rusted shut. He struggled with it until he managed to loosen the handle; a little while later he wrenched it open. It gave on to a narrow, trash-strewn cobblestone alley, barely passable and evidently rarely used.

A side street, really little more than a parking area for residents of the neighboring tenements, led to the main thoroughfare, where he disappeared into the crowds of pedestrians. His first stop was a shabby department store, where he purchased an entirely new outfit of clothing, changing in the fitting room and discarding his old clothes there, to the bafflement of the clerk. He also picked up a knapsack, an assortment of other casual clothes, and a cheap airline carry-on bag.

Searching for a branch office of a large international bank, he passed the window of an electronics shop, dominated by a row of television sets all tuned to the same broadcast. The sight was immediately familiar: he recognized the landmarks of Geneva; it seemed to be a travel advertisement for Switzerland, then he realized it was actually news footage, and then he felt his legs go weak at what he saw next.

It was the Hôpital Cantonal in Geneva. The camera panned through its corridors, across its emergency room, jammed with people on stretchers, corpses in body bags. The camera panned across a hellish scene: bodies stacked up in preparation for carting away. The caption on the screen read: “Geneva, yesterday.”

Yesterday? What catastrophe could possibly have just happened?

He turned back to the street, spotted a newsstand, saw the banner headlines: G
ENEVA.
A
NTHRAX.
O
UTBREAK.
A
TTACK.

He grabbed an
International Herald Tribune
, noting the headline that ran across the top in thirty-six-point type: A
NTHRAX VICTIMS CONTINUE TO FILL
G
ENEVA
H
OSPITALS AS
I
NTERNATIONAL
A
UTHORITIES SEARCH FOR ANSWERS; UP TO A THOUSAND DEATHS EXPECTED.

Reeling, he read with horror.

GENEVA
—A sudden, widespread outbreak of anthrax has turned into an epidemic here, as the city's hospitals and clinics fill with stricken residents. An estimated 3,000 have been infected by the deadly disease, with some 650 persons already declared dead. Hospital administrators have instituted emergency procedures to prepare their facilities for what many fear will be an overwhelming influx of anthrax cases in the next 48 hours. City officials have ordered businesses, schools, and all governmental offices closed and have warned tourists and business visitors to stay away from Geneva until the source of the infection can be determined. The city's mayor, Alain Prisette, expressed his shock and grief, while warning residents and visitors alike to remain calm.

Patients began pouring into Geneva's hospitals and clinics yesterday in the predawn hours complaining of severe flulike symptoms. By five o'clock in the morning, over a dozen cases of anthrax had been diagnosed at the Hôpital Cantonal. By noon yesterday the victims numbered in the thousands.

City and health officials have been working around the clock to determine the source of the outbreak. Sources here refused to speculate on reports that the deadly disease may have been released by a truck driving through the city with a truck-mounted aerosolized dispenser emitting a cloud of spores.

Anthrax has a mortality rate as high as 90%. After exposure, the victim develops severe respiratory distress, followed by the rapid onset of shock and subsequent death within 36 hours.

Although inhalation anthrax can be treated with a repeated course of penicillin, authorities here point out that hospital staff must take protective measures or risk infection themselves. Anthrax spores can remain present for decades.

As Swiss authorities continue their investigation into the source of the infection, health officials estimate that by the end of the week victims will number in the tens of thousands.

The question many are asking here is, why? Why was Geneva targeted, and how? Speculation centers on the fact that Geneva serves as the headquarters of a number of powerful transnational organizations, including the World Health Organization. The mayor refused to comment on widespread speculation that the outbreak was the result of a biological weapon wielded by an unnamed terrorist organization that had been planning such an attack for weeks, if not months.

Bryson looked up from the newspaper, blood draining from his face. If this report was accurate, and there was no reason to suppose it was not, a biological-weapons attack had occurred in Geneva while he was still there, or immediately afterward.

An American jet blown out of the sky … the Eurostar train blown up in Lille … a bomb detonated in the Washington Metro during morning rush hour …

He was seeing a pattern of terrorism, increasing in frequency, the commonalities evident. Each was designed to incite chaos, wide-ranging public injury, and resulting fear. These were classically designed terrorist paradigms, except for one thing.

No one had claimed responsibility
.

It was customary, though not inevitable, for terrorists to claim responsibility for their deeds, assert a justification. Otherwise, the incident had no purpose except random demoralization.

Since Bryson knew the Directorate had been behind Lille, it was by no means impossible that the Directorate had had a hand in the Geneva attack. In fact, it was likely.

But why?

What was the objective? What did the Directorate hope to accomplish? Why was a conspiracy of extremely powerful private citizens banding together to instigate a wave of terror in various sites around the world? To what end?

Bryson no longer accepted the theory that private arms dealers were trying to create an artificial demand for their goods. Uzis were useless against an outbreak of anthrax. There was more to it; there was another pattern, another logic. But
what?

He had just come from Geneva, had been very close to Lille only days before.
In both cases, he had been there
. True, he had come to Geneva because of a report that Jan Vansina, a Directorate operative, was there. He had gone to Chantilly—not Lille, but close to it—to track the activities of Jacques Arnaud.

Was it possible that he was being set up? Terrorist outbreaks in places he had just visited—would he somehow be tied in because he had been in the vicinity?

He thought about Harry Dunne and his insistence that he go to Geneva to confront Jan Vansina. In that case, Dunne had encouraged him to go there; Dunne could have had a hand in setting him up. But Chantilly? Dunne hadn't known in advance …