The Prometheus Deception (50 page)

“You flatter me.”

Bryson gazed at his old mentor, who was now stretching his legs, his hands interlaced behind his neck. Waller—that was how he knew him, inasmuch as he
did
know him—looked supremely comfortable.

“Somewhere in the back of my mind,” Waller went on, “I always knew there was the remote, theoretical chance that my GRU file might somehow, someday, make its way out of a safe in cold storage to U.S. intelligence. The way a long-buried corpse might wash up from its grave in a flood. But who'd ever have predicted it, really? Not even us. Everyone mocks the CIA for not anticipating the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, and I'm hardly a defender of theirs, but I always thought that unfair—even
Gorbachev
didn't see it coming, for God's sake.”

“Aren't you dodging the great unasked question here?”

“Why not ask it?”

“Are you a
paminyatchik,
a GRU sleeper, or not?”

“‘Am I now or have I ever been,' to paraphrase the buffoon Senator McCarthy? I
was
; I am
not
. Is that unambiguous enough?”

“Unambiguous, but vague.”

“I defected in place.”

“To our side.”

“Naturally. I was an illegal here seeking to make it legal.”

“When?”

“Nineteen fifty-six. I had arrived in 1949 as a boy of fourteen, when legends were plentiful and not thoroughly vetted. By the mid-fifties I saw the light and terminated my ties to Moscow. By then I'd seen, and heard, enough of Comrade Stalin to shatter whatever youthful illusions I'd once had about the radiant future of a communist world. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, I wasn't alone in realizing the idiocies, the follies, the essential flabbiness of the CIA. That was when I and Jim Angleton and a few others founded the Directorate.”

Bryson shook his head, mulling. “A GRU sleeper defects in place, there are consequences. His handlers in Moscow will be greatly displeased, retaliation threatened and inevitably carried out. Yet you're maintaining that your true identity remained cloaked for
decades
. I find it hard to believe.”

“Completely understandable. But do you imagine I simply sent them a Dear Ivan letter—‘Oh, and you can stop sending those paychecks, because I'm switching sides'? Not bloody likely. I took some care with it, as you can imagine. My controller was a greedy bastard and not a little careless. He liked to live well and supported his habit by double-dipping and feeding from the expense-account trough a little too often.”

“Translation: he embezzled.”

“Indeed. In those days, that was grounds for either the gulag or a bullet in the neck in the Lubyanka courtyard. And with what I knew, and could pretend to know, I forced him to write me off the books. I disappear, he stays alive, everyone goes home happy.”

“Then Harry Dunne's story
wasn't
a fabrication, was it?”

“Not one hundred percent, no. An ingenious pastiche of truths and half-truths and outright falsehoods. Like the very best lies.”

“What part of it isn't true?”

“What did he tell you?”

Bryson's heart began to pound slowly. His adrenaline surged, combating whatever narcotic was in his bloodstream. “That the Directorate was founded in the early 1960s by a small cell of fanatics at the GRU, or maybe VKR, brilliant strategists known as the
Shakhmatisti,
the chess players. Inspired by the classic Russian deception operation, the Trust, from the twenties. A penetration operation on American soil, the most brazen intelligence ruse of the twentieth century, far eclipsing the ambitions of the Trust. Controlled by a tight inner circle of directors, the Consortium, with all officers and staff outside that circle deluded into the belief that they were working for a maximum-security American intelligence unit—and constrained by zealous compartmentalization and gradated code-word secrecy from revealing anything, to anyone, about their work.”

Waller smiled, his eyes closed.

“And according to Dunne, the true origins of the Directorate in Moscow would never have been discovered were it not for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Which resulted in the dissemination of a few stray documents inadvertently revealing code-name operations that didn't fit into known KGB or GRU structures; a contact name here and there; then the entirety confirmed by midlevel defectors.”

Waller's grin broadened. He opened his eyes. “You almost have
me
convinced, Nick. Alas, Harry Dunne is in the wrong line of work. He should have written fiction; he has a wild imagination. His tale is at once outlandish and quite persuasive.”

“What part of it is fiction?”

“Where do I begin?” Waller sighed petulantly.

“How about with the goddamned
truth?
” exploded Bryson, unable to tolerate his coyness any longer. “If you even
know
it anymore! How about starting with my
parents?
”

“What about them?”

“I spoke with Felicia Munroe, Ted!
My parents were
murdered
by you goddamned fanatics! To put me under the direct control of Pete Munroe, to bring me into the Directorate.”

“By murdering your parents? Come
on,
Nicky!”

“You're denying that Pete Munroe was secretly Russian-born, like you? Felicia as good as confirmed for me Harry Dunne's version of the ‘accident' that ended their lives.”

“Which was
what,
precisely?”

“That my ‘Uncle Pete' did it—that he was wracked with guilt afterward.”

“The poor old woman is senile, Nicky. Who's to say what the hell she meant?”

“You're not going to dismiss it that easily, Ted. She said that Pete talked Russian in his sleep. Dunne said that Pete Munroe's actual name was Pyotr Aksyonov.”

“He's right.”

“Oh
Jesus!
”

“He
was
Russian-born, Nick. I recruited him. Fanatically anticommunist. His family disappeared in the purges of the nineteen-thirties.
But he didn't kill your parents
.”

“Then who did?”

“They weren't killed, for God's sake.
Listen
to me.” Waller studied the circular pool of light on his tray-table. “There are things I never told you, for reasons of compartmentalization—things I thought it better for you not to know—but I'm sure you already know the basic contours. The Directorate is, and was, a supranational agency established by a small cadre of enlightened members of U.S. and British intelligence, as well as a few high-level Soviet defectors whose bona fides were beyond reproach, yours truly included.”

“When?”

“In nineteen-sixty-two, shortly after the Bay of Pigs debacle. We were determined to see that such a disgrace never happened again. It was my idea initially, if you'll allow me a brief immodesty, but my dear friend James Jesus Angleton of the CIA was my earliest and most vociferous supporter. He felt, as did I, that American intelligence was being eviscerated by amateurs and bumblers—the so-called Old Boys, really a bunch of overprivileged Ivy League frat boys—patriotic perhaps, but laughably arrogant, convinced they knew what they were doing. A Wall Street clique who basically ceded Eastern Europe to Stalin out of a simple failure of nerve. A bunch of elitist corporate lawyers who lacked the
cojones
to do things the way they had to be done, who lacked the necessary ruthlessness. Who didn't
understand
Moscow as I did.

“Remember, not long after the Bay of Pigs, a KGB officer named Anatoly Golitsyn defected and laid it all out for Angleton in a series of debriefings—how the CIA was riddled with moles—penetrated, corrupted, to its very core. And the less said about the British, with Kim Philby and his ilk, the better. Well, that about did it for Angleton. He not only provided the Directorate's initial black-box funding and set up the covert funding channels, but he also approved the basic, cellular organizational structure. He helped me devise the box-within-a-box strategy, the decentralization and internal segmentation, as a way of maintaining maximum secrecy. He emphasized the necessity of keeping our very
existence
unknown from all but the heads of the governments we served. Only by cloaking its very existence could this new organization hope to escape the mire of penetration, disinformation, and politics to which spy agencies on both sides of the Cold War had been held hostage.”

“You don't expect me to believe that Harry Dunne was so far off base, so
misinformed
about the Directorate's true origins.”

“Absolutely not. He wasn't misinformed. Harry Dunne was a man on a mission. He constructed a straw man. An
argumentum ad logicam,
a brilliant caricature, plausible-sounding and laced with shards of the truth. An imaginary garden filled with real toads, as it were.”

“To what end?”

“To point you toward us, urge you to go after us and, if possible, destroy us.”

“To what end?”

Waller sighed in exasperation, but before he could speak, Bryson went on: “Are you going to sit there and
deny
that you tried to have me terminated?”

Waller shook his head slowly, almost sadly. “There are others I might try to deceive, Nicky. You are far too clever.”

“In the parking garage in Washington, after I went to K Street and found headquarters gone.
You
were behind that.”

“Yes, that was our hire. It's not easy to find top-notch talent these days. Why did it not surprise me that you bested the fellow?”

But Bryson, not so easily mollified, stared at him furiously. “You ordered a sanction on me because you were afraid I'd expose the
truth!
”

“Actually, no. We were alarmed by your behavior. All external signs seemed to indicate that you'd gone bad, that you'd joined forces with Harry Dunne and had turned against your old employers. Who can fathom the human heart? Were you embittered by your early termination? Did Dunne turn your head with his lies? We couldn't know, and so we had to take protective measures. You knew far too much about us. Even despite all the compartmentalization, you knew
far
too much. Yes, a beyond-salvage order went out.”

“Christ!”

“Yet all the while I remained skeptical. I know you better than perhaps anyone, and I was unwilling to accept the dossier, the analysts' assessments, at least without further corroboration. So I deployed one of our finest new recruits to cover you on Calacanis's ship, monitor your activities until I could be sure one way or the other. I handpicked her to watch you, check up on you, report back.”

“Layla.”

Waller nodded once.

“She was assigned as a limpet?”

“Correct.”

“That's
horseshit!
” Bryson shouted. “She was far more than a goddamned limpet. She tried to
kill
me in Brussels!”

Bryson watched Waller's face for telltale signs of deception, but of course it was unreadable. “She acted on her own, in contravention to my orders. I'm not denying that, Nick. But you have to consider the chronology.”

“This is
pathetic
. You're weaving back and forth, backing and filling, desperately trying to cover the holes in your story!”

“
Listen
to me, please. At least give that much to the man who saved your life. Part of her charge was to watch out for you too, Nick. To presume innocence on your part unless and until we learned otherwise. When she saw that you were about to be ambushed on Calacanis's ship, she warned you off.”

“Then how do you explain
Brussels?
”

“A regrettable impulse on her part. Her intention was essentially a protective one. To protect the Directorate and our mission. When she learned you were about to meet with Richard Lanchester in order to blow apart the Directorate, she tried to talk you out of it. And when you persisted, she panicked; she took matters into her own hands. She assumed there simply wasn't time to contact me for instructions; she had to move at once. It was a bad decision, a miscalculation. It was unfortunate, and impulsive, and she tends to be impulsive. No one is perfect. She's a fine operative, one of the best to come out of Tel Aviv, and she's beautiful. A rare combination. One tends to overlook the faults. She's doing fine, incidentally. Thank you for asking.”

Bryson ignored the sarcasm. “Let me get this straight: you're saying she
wasn't
tasked with killing me?”

“As I said, her mission was observation and reporting, protection where needed, not termination. But at Santiago de Compostela it became evident that termination orders had been taken out against you by others. Calacanis had been killed, his security forces decimated; it seemed unlikely to have originated with him, given the rapid sequence of events. I deduced that you were being exploited as a cat's paw; the question was, by whom?”

“Ted, I
saw
some of the agents arrayed against me—I
recognized
them! A blond operative, a dispatch agent from Khartoum. The peasant brothers from Cividale I used in the Vector operation. These were
Directorate hires!
”

“
No,
Nick. The killers at Santiago de Compostela were freelancers who sell their talent to the highest bidders, not exclusively for us—and they'd been hired to do the job at Santiago precisely
because
they knew your face. Presumably they were told you were a sellout, that you might give up their names. Self-survival is a powerful incentive.”

“That and a two-million-dollar bounty on my head.”

“Indeed. I mean, for heaven's sakes, you were traveling around the world using an old Directorate legend. I could have rolled you up in a second. Did you seriously assume we didn't have ‘John T. Coleridge' in our database?”