The Prometheus Deception (51 page)

“Then who hired them?”

“The possibilities are numerous. You had put out so many feelers by then; you spoke to old KGB sources to verify my true identity. You think they don't talk? Or
sell
information, to be exact, the mercenary bastards?”

“You're not going to argue it was CIA, I hope. Harry Dunne obviously wasn't sending me out to do his dirty work while at the same time ordering me killed.”

“Granted. But presumably a team was monitoring the situation on the
Spanish Armada,
and when the vessel was destroyed, a decision was made that you were a hostile.”

“A decision made by
whom?
Dunne kept the whole operation off the books, no records maintained, only my ‘Jonas Barrett' alias recorded in the Security data banks.”

“Expenses, perhaps.”

“Buried, encrypted. All requisitions DDCI-need-to-know Priority.”

“The place leaks like a sieve, you know that. Always has. That's why we exist.”

“Richard Lanchester agreed to see me as soon as I mentioned your true name. He made it clear he knew about the Directorate's origins—as outlined by Harry Dunne. Are you saying Lanchester was lying too?”

“He's a brilliant man, but he's vain, and vain men are easily gulled. Dunne might have debriefed him as artfully as he did you.”

“He wanted me to probe further.”

“Naturally. As would you, if you were in his position. He must have been a frightened man.”

Bryson's head was spinning; he was overcome by vertigo. Too many pieces didn't
fit!
Too much remained unexplained, inconsistent. “Prospero—Jan Vansina—kept asking me whether Elena ‘knew' something. What was he talking about?”

“I'm afraid some suspicion fell on Elena at the same time we were wondering about your defection to the enemy. Vansina needed to determine whether she was complicit. I maintained that you'd been false-flagged, and of course I was proven correct.”

“And what about the roster of operations you devised or controlled—Sri Lanka, Peru, Libya, Iraq? Dunne said that they were all secretly designed to defeat American interests abroad—but under such a deep cloak of secrecy that even the participants didn't see the chess moves because we were too close to the board.”

“Poppycock.”

“What about Tunisia? Was Abu not a CIA asset?”

“I don't know everything, Nicky.”

“It looks as if your whole elaborate penetration operation, ostensibly to defeat a coup, was engineered to unmask and neutralize a key CIA asset. To eliminate an Agency direct feed into a network of Islamic terrorist cells throughout the region—one hand undoing the work of the other!”

“Twaddle.”

“And the Comoros, in 1982—you sent us to foil an attempt by mercenaries from Executive Outcome to take over. But according to Dunne, they were CIA hires attempting to free British and American hostages.
What's the truth?
”

“Check the records. The hostages were only freed later, after our operation. Check the employment records if you can locate them. Unwind the sequence. These weren't CIA hires, they were underwritten by nationalist elements. Do your homework, my boy.”

“
Goddamn you!
I was
there
, you know. And I was on board the
Spanish Armada,
ostensibly carrying a blueprint of a new-generation Javelin antitank missile as a bargaining chip. Calacanis knew immediately who the interested buyer would be, and it was
your man!
It was Directorate—Vance Gifford or whatever his real name is. Calacanis himself confirmed the pattern of increased acquisition out of Washington.”

“We're not Washington-based anymore, Nicky, you know that. We had to relocate; we were penetrated.”

“And why the hell was your operative so interested in acquiring the blueprint? For your personal
collection,
was that it?”

“Nicky—”

“And why did he arrive on the ship in the company of Jacques Arnaud's man, Jean-Marc Bertrand? Are you pretending you weren't acquiring weapons?”

“Gifford was doing his
job,
Nick.”

“His job being
what,
exactly? According to Calacanis, the man was on a spending spree.”

“In this world, as you know better than most, you don't just inspect the goods without buying. Browsers are quickly detected and dispatched.”

“The same way Prospero—Jan Vansina—laundered five billion dollars in Geneva? A penetration ruse?”

“Who told you that—Dunne?”

Bryson didn't reply, but simply stared at his old mentor, his heart pounding. He felt his right ribcage begin to throb; the painkiller had obviously begun to wear off.

Ted Waller went on in a voice rich with sarcasm, “Did he tell you this off-site? Wouldn't talk in his office? Told you he feared wiretaps?”

When Bryson didn't reply, Waller continued. “The deputy director of Central Intelligence doesn't have the power to have his own office swept, Nick?”

“Bugs come in plastic, too. Sweeping won't detect them—nothing will, short of tearing apart the plaster.”

Waller snorted softly. “It was a show, Nicky. A goddamned piece of
theater
. An attempt, successful as it turned out, to persuade you that he was the good guy, the forces of darkness arrayed against him—the forces, in this case, being the entire CIA. In which he's the number two.” Waller shook his head sadly. “Really.”

“I gave him an Agency ID card I took off the body of one of the black-operatives who tried to terminate me outside Chantilly.”

“And let me guess. He had the card tested and found it to be fake.”

“Wrong.”

“Maybe he was unable to turn up any records. He did a Code Sigma, found that it had been assigned to an operator in extremis, and there the trail went cold. He couldn't trace the name.”

“That's not exactly far-fetched. Agency extremis operators don't leave tracks, you know that. Dunne admitted to me the CIA wasn't the best agency to investigate the Directorate.”

“Ah, and it made you trust him all the more, didn't it? I mean, trust him
personally
.”

“You're saying he was trying to have me terminated while at the same time he was directing me to investigate the Directorate's activities? That's not just illogical, that's
insane!
”

“Directing complex field operations is always a shifting calculation. My guess? Once he saw you had survived the attack, he realized you could be reprogrammed, redeployed against another lead. But it's time to return your seat to an upright and locked position, as they say. We're there.”

Waller seemed to be speaking from a great distance, and Bryson didn't understand what he meant; he could feel everything receding, and the next thing he knew he was aware of a bright white light. He opened his eyes and saw that he was in a room that was all white and steel. He was lying down in a tightly made bed between heavy linens; his eyes ached from the brightness of the light; his throat was parched and his lips were dry, cracked.

Before him were figures silhouetted against the light, one of them unmistakably Waller, the other much thinner and smaller, presumably a nurse. He heard Waller's rich baritone: “… he's coming to even as we speak. Hello there, Nicky.”

Bryson grunted, tried to swallow.

“He must be thirsty,” came a female voice that was quite familiar. “Can someone get him some water?”

It couldn't be
. Bryson blinked, squinted, tried to get the room into focus. He could see Waller's face, then hers.

His heart began hammering. He squinted again; he was sure he was imagining things. He looked again, and then he was sure.

He said, “Is that you, Elena?”

PART

IV

TWENTY-FIVE

“Nicholas,” she said, coming closer. She came into focus. It was Elena, still ravishingly beautiful, though she had changed: her face had gotten thinner, more angular, which made her eyes seem even larger. She looked wary, even frightened, but her voice was matter-of-fact. “It's been so long. You've aged so.”

Bryson nodded, managed to rasp, “Thanks.”

Someone handed him a plastic cup of water: a nurse. He took it, gulped it down, handed back the cup. The nurse refilled it and gave it to him again. He drank greedily, gratefully. Elena sat beside the bed, close to him. “We must talk,” she said, suddenly urgent.

“Yes,” he said. His throat was raw; it hurt to speak. “There's—there's so much to talk about, Elena—I don't know where to begin.”

“But there's so little time,” she said. Her voice was brusque and businesslike.

There's no time,
her voice echoed in his head. There's no time? For five years I've had nothing
but
time, time to ponder, to agonize.

She went on, “We need to know everything you've learned, everything you have. Any way in to Prometheus. Any way we can break the cryptographic perimeter.”

He looked at her in astonishment. Was he hearing her right? She was questioning him about cryptography, about something called “Prometheus” … She had disappeared from his life for five years and she wanted to talk about
cryptography?

“I want to know where you went,” Bryson said hoarsely. “
Why
you vanished.”

“Nicholas,” she said briskly, “you told Ted that you took the key from Jacques Arnaud's encrypted phone. Where is it?”

“I … I did? When did I…?”

“On the plane,” said Waller. “Have you forgotten? You said you had a disk or a chip, some such thing. You took it, or copied it, from Arnaud's private office—you weren't entirely clear about it. And no, you weren't under the influence of chemicals. Though you were somewhat delirious, I must say.”

“Where am I?”

“In a Directorate facility in the Dordogne. France. That IV in your arm is just for rehydration and antibiotics to ward off sepsis from your wounds.”

“A Directorate…”

“Our headquarters. We've had to move here in order to maintain operational security. Washington was breached; we had to take evasive action, we had to leave the country in order to do our work.”

“What do you want with me?”

“We need whatever you have, and we need it immediately,” said Elena. “If our calculations are right, we have just a few days, perhaps only
hours
.”

“Before
what?
”

“Before Prometheus takes over,” said Waller.

“Who is Prometheus?”

“The question is,
what
is Prometheus, and we don't have the answer. That's why we need the cryptochip.”

“And I want to know what happened!”
thundered Bryson. He gasped; he felt as if his throat would split. “With
you
, Elena! Where you went—
why
you went!”

He could see by the set of her jaw that she was determined not to be diverted from her line of questioning. “Nick, let us please talk about these personal matters another time. The time is very short—”

“What
was
I to you?” Bryson said. “Our marriage, our life together—what was that to you? If that's ancient history, if that's the past, you at least owe me an explanation—what happened, why you had to leave!”

“No, Nick—”

“I know it had something to do with Bucharest!”

Her lower lip seemed to be trembling, her eyes brimmed with tears.

“It did, didn't it?” he said in a softer voice. “If you know
anything,
you must know that what I did, I did for you!”

“Nick,” she said desperately. “Please. I'm trying to hold myself together here, and you're not helping things.”

“What do you think happened in Bucharest? What lies were you told?”

“Lies?”
she suddenly exploded. “Don't talk to me about lies! You lied to me, you lied straight to my
face!
”

“Excuse me,” said Waller. “You two need privacy.” He turned and left the room, and then the nurse did too, and they were alone.

Bryson's head ached, his throat was so raw it felt as if it were bleeding inside. But he talked through the pain, desperate to communicate, to arrive at the truth. “Yes, I lied to you,” he said. “It was the biggest mistake I ever made. You asked me about my weekend in Barcelona, and I lied. And you know that—you
knew
that. At the
time
you knew that, didn't you?”

She nodded, tears spilling down her cheeks.

“But if you knew I was lying, you must have known
why
I lied! You must have known I went to Bucharest because I loved you.”

“I didn't know
what
you did, Nick!” she cried, looking up at him.

He ached for her, for the intimacy they had once shared. He wanted to throw his arms around her, but at the same time he wanted to grab her by the collar, shake the truth out of her. “But you know
now,
don't you?”

“I—I don't know
what
I know, Nick! I was terrified, and I felt so hurt, so horribly betrayed by you—so frightened for my life, for my parents—that I had to disappear. I know how good you are at finding people, so I had to leave without a trace.”

“Waller knew where you were all along.”

She looked up at the ceiling, and he followed her eyes to a tiny red dot: a video surveillance camera; there was no doubt that if this were a Directorate facility, there were cameras throughout. What did that mean, that Waller was likely watching, listening? If he was, then he was; so what?

She was clenching and unclenching her hands. “It was just a few days after you said you were going to Barcelona for the weekend. In the normal course of my work—processing the ‘harvest,' the signals-intercept product—that I came across a report that a Directorate operative had made an unscheduled appearance in Romania, in Bucharest.”