The Prometheus Deception (42 page)

Martin passed out another image: Bryson in Geneva. “You can just make him out from a cluttered street scene—outside the Temple de la Fusterie.”

“We figured he kept a stash in one of the Geneva banks,” Morton Culler said. “But he was up to something else there. We didn't know until a few hours ago.”

“It wasn't until we learned about the release of weaponized anthrax there,” Martin said. “Precisely in the sector of the Old Town where we'd photographed him. Presumably there were confederates, but they may have been unwitting. He's the one who orchestrated it, that much is clear.”

Lanchester leaned back in his chair, his face drawn. “What are you telling me?”

“Call it what you like,” Corelli said. “But I'd say your man is the Typhoid Mary of global terror.”

“At whose behest?” Though Lanchester's gaze was fixed in the middle distance, his voice was insistent.

“That's the trillion-dollar question, isn't it?” Exum said, with his deceptive Southern languor. “John and I have some disagreements on this issue.”

John Corelli glanced at Martin, prompting him. “I'm here because Lieutenant General Corelli asked me here in an advisory capacity,” Martin said. “But there's no secret as to my own recommendation. However formidable Bryson is, he can't be acting alone. I say we follow him covertly, see where he leads us. Follow the hornet to the hive.” He smiled, exposing small, off-white teeth. “Then apply a blowtorch.”

“John's people are saying wait until we learn more,” Exum said, in a tone of exquisite courtesy. He leaned across the table and picked up the photograph of the Eurostar disaster. “
This
is my answer.” Abruptly, his voice grew hard. “It's too dangerous to delay any further. Forgive me, but this isn't a goddamn
science fair
. We cannot have another
massacre
while the NSA boys wait until they've finished the crossword puzzle. And on this I think the president and I are on the same page.”

“But suppose he's our one lead to a larger conspiracy…” Corelli began.

Exum snorted. “And if you can just get seven across, you'll figure out ten down. Five letters, starts with E…” He shook his head gravely. “John, Terence, I have the greatest respect for your gamesmanship. But you and your whiz kids forget one simple thing.
There's no time
.”

Lanchester turned to Morton Culler, the NSA ace. “Where do you come out?”

“Exum's right,” Culler said heavily. “Let me be more precise. Bryson must be apprehended immediately. And if apprehension poses any difficulties, he must be terminated. We've got to dispatch the Alpha squad. And make their assignment very explicit. We're not talking about a guy who owes library fines for overdue books. We're talking about someone responsible for mass murder, and who seems to have an even bigger game afoot. So long as he's alive and out there, none of us can relax our vigilance.”

Lanchester shifted uncomfortably. “The Alpha squad,” he said quietly. “It isn't supposed to exist.”

“It
doesn't
exist,” Culler said. “Officially.”

Lanchester placed his hands flat on the polished table. “Listen, I need to know how certain you are in this analysis,” Lanchester said. “Because I'm the one man in this room who's met with Bryson, face-to-face. And—I just have to say it—that's just not the vibe I got from him. He struck me as a man of honor.” Lanchester paused, and for a few moments, nobody spoke. “Still, I've been fooled before.”

“Alpha will be dispatched immediately,” Morton Culler said, and waited until his colleagues nodded in agreement. Disagreements having been aired, the consensus decision was joined. They all understood the significance of the order. The Alpha squad was composed of trained killers, equally skilled at sniper fire and hand-to-hand combat. To mobilize them against someone was to impose an almost certain death sentence.

“Good
Christ
. Wanted dead or alive,” Lanchester said grimly. “It's uncomfortably like the Old West.”

“We're all conscious of your
sensitivities
, sir,” Culler said, his voice betraying a hint of sarcasm. “But this is the only way to handle it. Too many lives are at stake. He would have killed you in an instant if he judged that it suited his purposes,
sir
. For all we know, he may still try.”

Lanchester nodded slowly, looking pensive. “This isn't a decision to be made lightly. It may be that my judgment has been impaired by my personal encounter. And I have to worry that—”

“You're doing the right thing, sir,” Culler said quickly. “Let's just hope we're not too late.”

NINETEEN

The nightclub was hidden on a tiny
pereulok
, an alley off Tversky Bul'var, near Moscow's Ring Road. It was truly concealed, like some speakeasy in 1920s America. Unlike an illicit liquor joint of Prohibition days, though, the Blackbird was secreted away not from the eyes of government liquor authorities but from the riffraff, the masses. For the Blackbird was meant to be a private oasis of wealth and vice for the elite, the select: the rich, the beautiful, and the heavily armed.

It was located in a shambling brick structure that looked like the abandoned factory it was: in pre-Revolutionary times, Singer sewing machines had been manufactured here. Its windows were blacked out, and there was a single door, of black-painted wood, though with steel-plate reinforcement, and on the door, in peeling, antique Cyrillic letters, were the Russian words
Shveiniye Mashini:
Sewing Machines. The only indication that anything was to be found within was the long line of black Mercedes limousines extending down the narrow alley, looking out of place, as if they had all somehow ended up in the wrong place, the whole lot of them.

Shortly after arriving at Sheremetyevo-2 Airport, and then, for appearance's sake, checking into the Intourist Hotel with the rest of his raggedy tour group, Bryson had placed a call to an old friend. Thirty minutes later a midnight-blue Mercedes sedan had pulled up in front of the Intourist, and a uniformed driver ushered him into the backseat of the car, where a single envelope had been placed.

It was twilight, but the traffic along Tverskaya Ulitsa was heavy, the drivers manic, changing lanes abruptly, ignoring any rules of the road, even driving up on the sidewalk in order to pass slower-moving vehicles. Russia had gone mad, chaotic and furious, since Bryson had last been there. Though much of the old architecture remained in place—the wedding-cake Stalinist Gothic skyscrapers and the mammoth Central Telegraph facility; a sprinkling of the old shops, like Yeliseyevsky's food emporium and the Aragvi, once the only decent restaurant in town—there were incredible changes. High-priced shops glittered along the once-somber avenue that had been, before the collapse of the Communist state, Gorky Street: Versace, Van Cleef & Arpels, Vacheron Constantin, Tiffany. Yet along with the visible signs of plutocratic wealth were evidence of far-reaching poverty, of a social system that had broken down. Soldiers openly begged for alms,
babushki
sold moonshine or fruits and vegetables, or else they pleaded with you to tell you your fortune for a few rubles. Peroxide hookers were more brazenly in evidence than ever before.

Bryson got out of the chauffeured sedan, took the small plastic card from the envelope that had been left for him, and inserted it in a slot like that of an automatic teller mounted on the splintering wooden door, the card's magnetized strip facing out. The door buzzed open, and he entered a completely dark area. Once the door had closed behind him, he felt around for the second door, which the driver had told him, in barely serviceable English, would be there. Grasping the cold steel knob, he pulled the next door open, revealing the bizarre, garish world within.

Purple and red and blue beams of light floated and rippled on clouds of white fog and bounced off alabaster Greek columns and plaster Roman statuaries, black marble counters and high stainless-steel stools. Spotlights spun from high above in the dark recesses of what had once been the factory floor. Rock music of a sort Bryson had never heard before, a kind of Russian techno-pop, thundered at earsplitting volume. The odor of marijuana mingled with strong, expensive French perfume and bad Russian aftershave.

He paid his admission fee, the equivalent of $250, and sidled through a dense, gyrating crowd of mobsters in gold chains and huge, gaudy Rolexes who were somehow talking on cell phones over the deafening music, accompanied by their molls and other women who were either hookers or trying to look like them, in low-cut tops and short-hemmed skirts that left nothing to the imagination. Burly, shaven-headed bodyguards glowered; the club's security guards skulked around the periphery, uniformed like ninjas in black fatigues with billy clubs. High above the pulsating, spastic throng was a glass-and-steel gallery, where spectators could watch, through a glass floor, the cavorting below, as if it were some exotic, otherworldly terrarium.

He climbed the steel spiral staircase to the gallery, which was revealed to be another world entirely. The chief attraction on this level were the strippers, mostly platinum blond, though a few of them were ebony-skinned, their outsized busts all obviously silicone-enhanced. They danced under bright spotlights, positioned throughout the gallery.

A hostess in a filmy, revealing outfit, wearing a telephone headset, stopped him; she spoke a few, quick words in Russian. Bryson replied wordlessly by slipping her a few twenty-dollar bills, and she escorted him to a steel-and-black-leather banquette.

As soon as he was seated, a waiter brought several trays of
zakuski,
Russian appetizers: pickled beef tongue with horseradish sauce, red and black caviar and blini, mushrooms in aspic, pickled vegetables, herring. Though Bryson was hungry, none of it looked particularly appetizing. A bottle of Dom Perignon appeared—“compliments of your host,” the waiter explained. Bryson sat alone, watching the crowd, for a few more minutes until he spotted the elegant, slim figure of Yuri Tarnapolsky gliding toward the table, both hands extended in exuberant welcome. Tarnapolsky seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, though Bryson now realized that the wily ex-KGB man had in fact entered the gallery from the kitchen.

“Welcome to Russia, my dear Coleridge!” Yuri Tarnapolsky exulted. Bryson stood, and the two embraced.

Although Tarnapolsky had chosen an unlikely venue for their rendezvous, he was a man of exquisite and very expensive tastes. As usual, the ex–KGB agent was impeccably dressed in an English bespoke suit and foulard tie. It had been seven years since he and Bryson had worked together, and though Tarnapolsky was now well into his fifties, his tanned face was smooth and unlined. The Russian had always taken good care of himself, but he appeared to have been the beneficiary of some high-priced cosmetic surgery.

“You look younger than ever,” said Bryson.

“Yes, well, money can buy anything,” replied Tarnapolsky, sardonic and amused as ever. He gestured for the waiter to pour the Dom Perignon, along with small glasses of Georgian wine, a white Tsinandali and a red Khvanchkara. As Tarnapolsky raised his glass in a toast, a stripper approached the table; Yuri slid a few crisp, large-denomination ruble notes into her G-string and politely urged her in the direction of a table of dark-suited businessmen.

He and Bryson had worked a number of extremely sensitive jobs together, which Tarnapolsky had always found highly lucrative; the Vector operation had only been the most recent. International arms-inspections teams had been unable to find evidence to support the rumors that Moscow was illegally producing bioweapons. Whenever the inspectors made “surprise,” unannounced visits to the Vector laboratory facilities, they turned up nothing. Their “surprise” visits were no surprise. So the Directorate controllers had instructed Bryson that in order to get hard evidence of Russian work in germ warfare, he would need to break into Vector's central laboratory in Novosibirsk. As resourceful as Bryson was, that was a daunting proposition. He needed assistance on the ground, and the name of Yuri Tarnapolsky had come up. Tarnapolsky had recently retired from the KGB and was in the private sector, meaning that he was for sale to the highest bidder.

Tarnapolsky had proved to be worth every kopek of his exorbitant fee. He had obtained for Bryson the blueprints of the laboratory facility, even arranged for the street sentry to be diverted to a “reported burglary” at the residence of the chairman of the city's governing council. Using his KGB identification to browbeat and intimidate the institute's internal security guards, Tarnapolsky had gotten Bryson into the third-containment-level refrigerated tanks, where Bryson was able to locate the ampules he needed. Then Tarnapolsky had arranged to have the ampules spirited out of the country by a circuitous route, concealed in a shipment of frozen lamb en route to Cuba. Bryson, and the Directorate, had thereby been able to prove what dozens of arms inspectors could not: that Vector, and therefore Russia, was involved in making biological weapons. They had the irrefutable proof in the form of seven ampules of weaponized anthrax, an extraordinarily rare strain.

At the time Bryson had been pleased with his success, with the ingenuity of the operation, and indeed, he had been highly lauded by Ted Waller. But the news from Geneva of the sudden outbreak of a rare strain of anthrax—precisely the same strain that he had pilfered from Novosibirsk—had now turned everything inside out. Now he felt sickened by the way he had been manipulated. There could be little question that the anthrax he had stolen years earlier had just been used in the Geneva attack.

Tarnapolsky smiled broadly at him. “You are enjoying our black-skinned beauties from Cameroon?” he inquired.

“I'm sure you understand the importance of telling no one about my visit,” said Bryson, struggling to make himself heard over the cacophony.