The Prometheus Deception (47 page)

The driver did not reply.

Bryson raised his voice, now speaking with his customary fluency, that of a native speaker. “We're nowhere near the general's barracks,
siji!
”

“The general does not receive visitors at his residence. He keeps a very low profile.” The driver spoke impertinently, even disrespectfully, not as a Chinese speaker of his station would address a superior, not using
shifu
for “master.” It was disconcerting.

“General Tsai is famous for living extremely well. I advise you to turn this car around.”

“The general believes that the truest power is exercised invisibly. He prefers to remain behind the scenes.” They had pulled up before a large industrial warehouse, next to military-drab Jeeps and Humvees. Without turning around, the engine still running, the driver continued, “Do you know the story of the great eighteenth-century Emperor Qian Xing? He believed it was important for a ruler to have direct contact with those he ruled, without his subjects knowing. So he traveled throughout China disguised as a commoner.”

Realizing what the driver was saying, Bryson jerked his head to the side, for the first time focusing on the driver's face. He cursed himself. The driver
was
General Tsai!

Suddenly the Daimler was surrounded by soldiers, and the general was barking out commands in Toishanese, his regional dialect. The car door opened, and Bryson was hustled out. He was grabbed by both arms, a soldier restraining him on either side.

“
Zhanzhu!
Stand still!” shouted one of the soldiers, training his sidearm at Bryson as he commanded him to keep his hands at his sides.
“Shou fang xia! Bie dong!”

The general's window electrically rolled down; the general grinned. “It was very interesting speaking with you, Mr. Bryson. Your facility with our language grew stronger the longer we chatted. It makes me wonder what else you may be concealing. Now I suggest you meet your inevitable death with serenity.”

Oh, Jesus! His true identity was known!
How? And for how long?

His mind raced. Who could have revealed his true identity? More to the point, who
knew
about the Hesketh-Haywood ruse? Who knew he was coming to Shenzhen? Not Yuri Tarnapolsky. Then who?

Photographs of his face had been faxed, connections made. But it made no
sense!
There had to be someone close to the general who recognized his face, was able to penetrate the facade of the English high-end fence. Someone who knew him; no other explanation was logical.

As General Tsai drove off, the Daimler emitting a cloud of exhaust smoke in his face, Bryson was shoved and pulled toward the warehouse entrance. The handgun was still trained on him from behind. He calculated his odds, and they were not good. He would have to free a hand, preferably his right, and grab the vanadium blade from the sheathing of his belt in one rapid, smooth movement. In order to do that, though, he would need to arrange for a diversion, a distraction. For the instructions from the general were clear: he was to meet his “inevitable death.” They would not hesitate to fire on him, he was sure, if he made any sudden attempt to break free. He did not want to test their orders.

Then why was he being brought into this warehouse? He looked around, seeing the immensity of the cavernous facility, clearly intended for the delivery and storage of motor freight. At one end was an enormous freight elevator large enough to accommodate a tank or a Humvee. The air was acrid with the smell of motor oil and diesel fuel. Trucks and tanks and other large military vehicles were stored in serried ranks, very close together, across the expanse of the warehouse floor. It looked like the storage area for a prosperous, high-volume car or truck dealership, though the concrete walls and floors were grimy with spilled motor oil and the residue of exhaust fumes.

What was going on? Why was he being brought here, when they could just as easily have executed him outside, where there were no nonmilitary witnesses?

And then he realized why.

His eyes were riveted on the man who stood in front of him. A man who was armed to the teeth. A man he knew.

A man named Ang Wu.

One of the few adversaries he'd ever encountered whom he'd have to describe as physically intimidating on every level. Ang Wu, a renegade officer in the Chinese Army, attached to Bomtec, the trading arm of the PLA. Ang Wu had been the local PLA representative in Sri Lanka; the Chinese had been shipping arms to both sides of the conflict, sowing dissent and suspicion, vending the highly flammable fuel for the region's smoldering resentments. Outside Colombo, Bryson and the ad hoc band of commandos he'd assembled for the task had headed off a lethal caravan of munitions under Ang Wu's direct control. In an exchange of gunfire, Bryson had shot Ang Wu in the gut, taking him down. His enemy was helicoptered out, reportedly back to Beijing.

But had there been more to the incident, an underlying meaning, an unexplained plan in which he had been merely a pawn? What
really
lay behind the exercise?

Now, Ang Wu stood before Bryson, a Chinese AK-47 machine gun hanging from his shoulders on a diagonal nylon sling. On each hip was holstered a handgun. Draped around his waist like a belt were bandoliers of machine-gun rounds, and sheathed at his side and ankles were gleaming knives.

The grip on each of Bryson's shoulders tightened. He could not free his hand to grab his belt, at least not without being shot down in the interim.
Oh, God!

His old nemesis looked happy. “So many ways to die,” Ang Wu said. “I always knew we would meet again. For a long time I am looking forward to our reunion.” With a fluid motion he unholstered one of the handguns, a Chinese-made semiautomatic, hefting it, seemingly enjoying its solidity, its power to extinguish life. “This is General Tsai's gift to me, his generous reward for my years of service. A simple gift: that
I
get to kill you myself. It will be very—how do you say?—up close and personal.”

There was a glacial smile, an array of very white teeth. “Ten years ago in Colombo, you took my spleen—did you know that? So we start with that first. Your spleen.”

In his mind, the enormous warehouse had collapsed into a very small space, a narrow tunnel, with Bryson at one end and Ang Wu at the other. There was nothing else but his adversary. Bryson took a slow, deep breath. “It hardly seems a fair fight,” he said with a forced, artificial calm.

The Chinese assassin smiled and, extending his arm, aimed the pistol at the lower left region of Bryson's torso. As his enemy thumbed the safety, Bryson suddenly lurched forward and twisted his body in an attempt to dislodge himself from his captors' grips, and then—

There was a small coughing noise, more like a spit, and a tiny red hole, like the beginning of a teardrop, appeared in the very center of Ang Wu's broad forehead. He slid to the floor very gently, like a drunk passing out.

“Aiya!”
screamed one of the guards, whirling around, just in time to catch a second silenced round in his head as well. The second guard shrieked, reached for his weapon, then abruptly crumpled to the ground, the side of his head blown away.

Suddenly free, Bryson flung himself to the floor, at the same time spinning around and looking up. On a steel catwalk twenty feet above, a tall, portly man in a navy-blue business suit stepped from behind a concrete pillar. In his hand was a .357 Magnum, a long perforated cylinder attached to its barrel, a wisp of cordite curling from its end. The man's face was momentarily in shadow, but Bryson would know the heavy tread anywhere.

The portly man tossed the Magnum high into the air toward Bryson. “Catch,” he said.

Bryson, thunderstruck, grabbed the weapon as it dropped.

“Glad to see your skills haven't gone completely rusty,” said Ted Waller as he began descending a steep set of steps. He gave Bryson a look of what could be mistaken for amusement; he sounded out of breath. “The hard part's coming up.”

TWENTY-TWO

Senator James Cassidy saw the headline in
The Washington Times
—saw the reference to his wife, her drug arrest, allegations of possible obstruction of justice—and read no more. So it was out, at last, all in the open—a source of profound personal anguish, something he had desperately sought to keep from the hard, raptor eyes of the media. A buried secret had been unearthed. But how?

Arriving at his office at six in the morning, hours before he usually appeared, he found his top staff already assembled, looking as ashen and enervated as he felt. Roger Fry spoke without preamble. “
The Washington Times
has been gunning for you for years. But we've already had more than a hundred phone calls from all the other media outlets. They're trying to track down your wife, too. This is out-and-out carpet bombing, Jim. I can't control this. None of us can.”

“Is it
true?
” asked Mandy Greene, his press secretary. Mandy was forty, and had been with him for the last six years, but stress and anxiety made her seem older than she'd ever looked before. Cassidy couldn't remember her ever losing her composure. But this morning her eyes were red-rimmed.

The senator exchanged glances with his chief of staff; it was clear Roger had told the others nothing. “What exactly are they saying?”

Mandy picked up the newspaper, then tossed it angrily across the office. “That four years ago your wife was arrested for buying heroin. That you made phone calls, called in favors, and had the charges dropped, the arrest expunged. ‘Obstruction of justice' is the phrase they're bandying about.”

Senator Cassidy nodded, wordlessly. He sat down in his large leather office chair and turned away from his staffers for a moment, looking out the window into the gray light of a cloudy Washington morning. There'd been phone calls from the reporter yesterday, calls both for him and for his wife, Claire, but they went unanswered. He'd had a bad feeling about it, had slept little.

Claire was at their family home in Wayland, Massachusetts. She had her problems; many politicians' wives did. But he remembered how it started—the minor skiing accident that led to back surgery, the fused vertebrae, the Percodans she'd been given for the operative pain. Soon she started to crave the narcotic for more than the cessation of pain. The doctors wouldn't renew her prescription. They referred her to a “pain management” group, which specialized in counseling. But the narcotics had introduced Claire to a kind of sweet oblivion, a place protected from the stresses and strains of public life, from a private life that didn't provide the comfort she required. He could blame himself for that—for not having been there, by her side, when she needed him. He'd come to understand how inimical his world was to her. It was a world that, ultimately, relegated her to the sidelines, and Claire, so beautiful, so accomplished, so loving, had not been raised to sit out life on the bleachers. For Cassidy, there were too many Beltway engagements, too many colleagues to romance and inveigle and bully and cajole into doing the right thing. And Claire was lonely; she experienced a pain that was not merely physical. He never really knew which was the real injury, the isolation or the accident, but he'd come to suspect that the spiral of depression and dependency to which she'd succumbed had merely been precipitated by her hospitalization.

Desperate after she could no longer obtain her prescription narcotics, desperate for a form of relief she knew was fleeting yet somehow seemed to make things endurable, she went to a corridor park near Eighth and H Streets in Washington and tried to buy a quantity of street heroin. The man she met there was encouraging, sympathetic, made it easy. He gave her two small glassine bags of the stuff. She paid him with crisp large bills freshly dispensed from an ATM.

And then he flashed a badge and took her down to the station. When the precinct captain discovered who she was, he called the assistant D.A., Henry Kaminer, at home. And Henry Kaminer called his law-school classmate Jim Cassidy, who happened to be serving as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. That's how he found out. Cassidy remembered the phone call, the hesitance, the awkward small talk that preceded the shattering revelation. It was among the worst moments of his life.

Claire's delicate, drawn face filled his mind, and the words of a poem he'd once read echoed in his mind:
not waving but drowning
. How could he have been so blind to what was happening in his own household, his own marriage? Could a public life make a man so out of touch with his private one? Yet there was Claire:
not waving but drowning
.

Cassidy turned around to face his staff. “She wasn't a felon,” he said stonily. “She needed
help
, damn it. She needed treatment. And she got it. Six months in rehab. Discreetly, quietly. Nobody needed to know. She didn't want the pitying glances, the knowing looks. The special scrutiny that comes with being a senator's wife.”

“But your career…” Greene began.

“My goddamn
career
was what drove her to it in the
first
place! Claire had dreams, too, you know. Dreams of having a real family, with kids and a father who loved them and her, who made his wife and kids his first and last priority, the way a man should. Dreams of having a
normal life
—it probably didn't seem too much to ask. She wanted a
home,
that was all. She gave up her dreams so I could be—what did
The Wall Street Journal
call me last year?—the ‘Polonius of the Potomac.'” Bitterness entered his voice.

“But how could she have jeopardized everything you'd worked for, everything you'd
both
worked for?” Mandy Greene could not conceal the flare of anger and frustration.

Cassidy shook his head slowly. “Claire was in agony, knowing that everyone would look at her as the woman who might have destroyed a senator's career. You'll never understand the sort of hell she went through. But she went
through
it; in a sense, we both did. And damn it, we came out the other side! Until now. Until this.” He looked over at the receptionist's twelve-line telephone, all brightly lit and ringing nonstop in an electronic purr. “
How
, Roger? How did they find out?”