The Prometheus Deception (55 page)

He reached down, felt the key under the rubber floor mat. Inserting the key in the ignition, he started it; the Land Rover roared to life.

“Nick, what's happening?” Elena cried out as the car lurched forward and down the steep path away from the compound.

But before Bryson had a chance to speak, there was an immense, dazzlingly bright flash of white light, and a rumbling explosion that seemed to come from deep in the mountain. In a second or two the blast surfaced, the sound terrifyingly loud, deafening, all-enveloping. As Bryson steered the Land Rover around a sharp twist, crashing into and then through vegetation, he could feel the heat sear his back, exactly as hot as if he'd leaned right back into the fire.

Elena turned back, gripping the handrails to steady herself. “Oh, my God, Nick!” she screamed. “The facility—the compound—it's been completely destroyed! Oh,
God,
Nick, look at that!”

But Bryson would not turn around; he did not dare. They had to keep moving. There was not a second to lose. The wheels spun through the underbrush as he accelerated, faster and faster, and he thought just one thing:
My love—you're safe
.

You're safe, you're alive, you're with me
.

For now.

Dear God, for now
.

TWENTY-SEVEN

They arrived in London, both of them, by ten o'clock in the evening, by which point it was too late to accomplish what they had to do. They spent the night together in a hotel in Russell Square, in the same bed for the first time in five years. They were strangers to each other, in a sense, but each found the other's body immediately familiar—reassuringly yet excitingly so. For the first time in five years they made love, the passion urgent, almost desperate. They fell asleep entangled in each other, exhausted both from the lovemaking and from the enormous strains that had impelled them there.

In the morning they spoke of the nightmare they had both witnessed, sifting details, trying to make some sense of the penetration.

“When you called the airstrip to reserve the jet,” asked Bryson, “you probably didn't use a sterile line, did you?”

She shook her head slowly, her face taut with anxiety. “The airstrip wasn't equipped with a scrambler on its end, so there was no point. But calls originating in the Directorate facility were generally considered safe, since our internal communications center was beyond the reach of outside interference. If we phoned London or Paris or Munich, say, we usually used the sterile channels—but only to protect the other end.”

“But calls made across such a distance—a hundred miles or more, for instance—generally are routed from landlines to microwave towers, and it's the microwave transmission that's penetrable by satellite surveillance, right?”

“That's right—landlines can be tapped into, but not by satellite. It has to be by conventional means—phone taps placed on the wires and such. And that requires knowing exactly where the calls originated.”

“Prometheus obviously knew the details of the Dordogne center,” Bryson said quietly. “For all Waller's precautions, the comings and goings, into and out of the airfield, must have been observed, noted. And the airstrip was an easy target for a conventional phone tap.”

“Waller—thank God, he was gone! But we have to reach him.”

“Jesus. I'm sure he knows. But Chris Edgecomb—”

She covered her eyes with her hand. “Oh, dear God, Chris! And Layla!”

“And dozens of others. Most of them I didn't know any longer, but you must have had quite a few friends among them.”

She nodded silently, removed her hand from her eyes, which were flooded with tears.

After a moment's silence, Bryson resumed. “They must have patched into the power grid and planted explosives—plastique—throughout and
beneath
the facility. Without inside resources—without human beings who'd been turned—they could never have done it. The Directorate was on the verge of unraveling the Prometheus Group's plans, and so it had to be neutralized. They sent me—and others, I'm sure—and when those efforts didn't pan out, they went for the direct approach.” He closed his eyes. “Whatever secrets, plans they're protecting, we have to assume they're of monumental importance to the men behind Prometheus.”

A direct, frontal approach to the treaty's most vocal proponent, Lord Miles Parmore, was therefore doomed to fail: it would only alert their enemies without yielding information; such men were well guarded, well prepared for deception, misdirection. Moreover, Bryson's instinct told him that Lord Parmore was not their man. He was a figurehead, a very public figure, closely watched, incapable of maneuvering behind the scenes. He could not be a Prometheus control. The true control would have to be someone affiliated with Parmore, connected to him in a tangential way. But connected
how?

The Prometheus conspirators were too clever, too thorough, to allow connections to remain visible. Records would be altered, erased. Even close scrutiny would not reveal the hidden controls, the puppetmasters. The only giveaway would be what was
not
there, records missing, obviously deleted. Yet the search for such gaps would be the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack.

Finally, it was Bryson's idea that they dig more deeply, dig into the past. It had been his experience that the truth could often be discerned there, in old files and books—records rarely accessed, too dispersed, too difficult to alter convincingly.

It was a theory, but only a theory, and it took them that morning to the British Library at St. Pancras, which lay sprawled across a landscaped square off Euston Road, its orange, hand-molded Leicester brick shimmering in the bright morning sun. Bryson and Elena made their way through the plaza, past the large bronze of Newton by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, and into the spacious entrance hall. Bryson scanned the faces of the people he passed, attuned to the slightest sign of recognition. He had to assume that the Promethean networks had been alerted to him, perhaps even to their presence in London, though so far there was no sign of it. Inside the library, a broad flight of travertine steps took them to the main reading room—an expanse of oak desks with individual desk lamps—and they walked through the discreet paneled doors that led to the carrels. The double carrel they had reserved was private but not cramped, its round-backed oak chairs and green leather-topped desks creating a slightly clubby feeling.

Within an hour, they had gathered most of the necessary volumes, starting with selections from the official proceedings of Parliament—heavy, large volumes with rugged, black library bindings. Many had been unopened for years, and gave off a musty smell of decay when the pages were turned. Nick and Elena went through them with intense and single-minded focus. Had there been earlier debates about civil threats and civil liberties—other decisions with implications for civilian surveillance? On a pad, they each jotted down errant facts—unexplained references, names, sites. These were areas where the marks of the sculptor's chisel might be in evidence.

It was Elena who first spoke the name aloud.
Rupert Vere
. A low-key, soft-spoken, and highly expert maneuverer, the embodiment of political moderation but also—the chronicles made this clear over the years—a master of procedural cunning. Was it possible? Was the intuition worth checking out?

Rupert Vere, Member of Parliament from Chelsea, was Britain's foreign secretary.

Bryson followed the intricate tracery of the Chelsea MP's career through the smaller regional papers, which were more attuned to incidental details, less preoccupied with the official significance of events. It was painstaking, even stupefying work, the matter of collating a hundred tiny articles in dozens of local gazettes and circulars, the paper often yellowed and brittle. At times, Bryson was seized with exasperation—it seemed like madness to think that they'd find clues to the most concealed of conspiracies right out there in the open, in the public record.

But he persevered. They both did. Elena made the analogy to her signals-intercept work: within the cascade of noise, the abundance of useless information, might be a signal somewhere—if only they could make it out. Rupert Vere had graduated with a first from Brasenose College, Oxford; he had a reputation for laziness, which was quite likely a cunning subterfuge. He also had a distinct gift for cultivating friendships, a
Guardian
columnist noted: “… and so his influence goes beyond the formal ambit of his authority.” A picture was coming gradually into focus: for years, Foreign Secretary Rupert Vere had been working behind the scenes to prepare the way for passage of the treaty, calling in political debts; inveigling friends and allies. And yet his own pronouncements were temperate, his ties to the firebrands nowhere in evidence.

Finally, it was a seemingly trivial piece of data that caught Bryson's attention. In the yellowing pages of the
Evening Standard,
there was an account of the 1965 rowing races in Pangbourne, on the Thames, where nationally ranked teams from secondary schools around the country competed. In small agate type, the paper reported on the teams. Vere, it appeared, rowed for Marlborough, where he was a sixth-former. The language was stilted, the account seemingly innocuous.

At the Pangbourne Junior Sculls, a number of the quads and doubles distinguished themselves. In particular, the J18 quad from Sir William Borlase School recorded the fastest time of the day (10m 28s), but were pressed quite close by the crews in the strong J16 class where St George's College Crew (10m 35s), with the GBv France double scullers Matthews and Loake aboard, were chased hard by Westminster. In both the J14 classes the Hereford Cathedral School doubles proved outstanding (12m 11s, and 13m 22s). There were also some high-class performers among the J16 singles. At the front Rupert Vere (11m 50s) had 13 seconds on his Marlborough team mate Miles Parmore, while David Houghton (13m 5s) finished almost half a minute clear of his pursuers. Showing real promise, Parrish of St George's (12m 6s) and Kellman of Dragon School (12m 10s) headed the MJ16 class, finishing fourth and fifth overall. The younger age groups race over a 1500m distance at Pangbourne. The WJ13 winner, Dawson of Marlborough (8m 51s), had finished a creditable second-equal in the morning's WJ14 race and now finished fifth overall, behind MJ13 winner Goodey.

He reread the item and soon found a couple of similar ones. Vere had rowed for Marlborough, in the same eight as Miles Parmore.

Yes. The British Foreign Secretary and MP from Chelsea, an early champion of the treaty, had been a teammate and longtime friend of Lord Miles Parmore.

Had they found their man?

*   *   *

The New Palace of Westminster—better known as the Houses of Parliament—was, in its very blend of antiquity and modernity, a quintessentially British institution. As far back as the Viking King Canute, a royal palace existed on these grounds. But it was Edward the Confessor and William the Conqueror in the eleventh century who enlarged the ancient dream of royal munificence and splendor. The historical continuities were as real as the Magna Carta; the discontinuities were greater still. And when the structure was rebuilt in the mid-nineteenth century, it represented the height of the Gothic Revival style, an enduring legacy to the ingenuity of its architects—a vision of an artificial, invented antiquity, which would be reinvented once more when a World War II blitzkrieg destroyed the Commons Chamber. Carefully restored, albeit in a more subdued interpretation of late Gothic, it was a replica of a replica.

Even as it opened onto one of London's busiest centers of traffic, Parliament Square, the Houses of Parliament themselves remained aloof and protected by their eight-acre arcadian redoubt. The “new palace” itself was a whirlpool of human traffic. It had almost twelve hundred rooms, and fully two miles of passages. The areas of the buildings that members routinely used, that tourists routinely saw, were impressive indeed, but there was much more, the plans for which were, for reasons of security, not readily accessible. But they, too, could be found in the historical archives. Bryson had given himself two hours to learn and master their details. A series of shifting orthogonal forms arranged themselves in his mind into a layout that had a visceral immediacy to him. He knew precisely how the Peers' Library related to the Prince's Chamber; he knew the distance between the Speaker's Residence and the Sergeant-at-Arms residence, knew how long it would take to go from the Commons Lobby to the first of the Minister's rooms. In an era without central heating, it was essential to have some special chambers that were protected from the exterior wall by unused, insulating spaces. Moreover, any vast public work would, it was understood, be in constant need of repair and refurbishment, and there had to be passageways for workmen to go about their tasks without disturbing the grandeur of the public spaces. Like government itself, its functioning required complex spaces and relays that were invisible to the citizenry.

Elena, meanwhile, scoured every recorded detail of Rupert Vere's life. Another tiny detail had caught her attention: when Vere was sixteen, he'd won a
Sunday Times
crossword puzzle competition. He was a gamesman, which seemed somehow apt: yet the game he was playing was anything but trivial.

At five o'clock in the morning, a backpacker in a leather flight jacket and black plastic glasses walked around the perimeter of the Houses of Parliament, like a sleepless tourist trying to walk off a hangover. Or at least Bryson hoped he would be taken for one. He stopped before the black statue of Cromwell, near St. Stephen's Entrance, and read the carefully lettered sign:
PACKAGES LARGER THAN A4, OTHER THAN FLOWERS, MUST BE DELIVERED VIA THE BLACK ROD'S GARDEN ENTRANCE.
He walked past the Peer's Entrance, noting its precise location vis-à-vis the others; then made his way through the small stand of horse-chestnut trees and noted the location of each security camera, invariably posted high in white enameled hoods. The Metropolitan Police of London, Bryson had learned, maintains a network of traffic cameras, three hundred of them fixed on posts and high buildings across the city. Each has a number, and if an authorized person types in the number, he or she can call up a clear, color image of London. It is possible to rotate the camera and zoom it in. It is possible to follow police chases, moving from camera to camera, and to follow a motorist or pedestrian without being detected. It would not be wise to spend much time on surveillance here, he decided; this would have to be brief.