The Prometheus Deception (60 page)

They walked slowly to the closest wall and placed their hands against it. Bryson kept alert for any departure from expected behavior patterns. Weapons were now lowered; that was good. Two members of the team approached, quickly locked handcuffs on their wrists, then patted both of them down for concealed weapons. Another scooped up Bryson's gun.

“My name is Police Sergeant Sullivan. You're both under arrest in connection with the murder of Foreign Secretary Rupert Vere and Undersecretary Simon Dawson.” Sullivan flipped a switch on his two-way pocket radio and detailed his location, calling for backup.

“I understand the necessity for going through established procedures,” said Bryson, “but a careful ballistic examination will reveal that it was Dawson who murdered the foreign secretary.”

“Murdered by his own deputy? Bloody likely.”

“Dawson was a control, an agent of an international syndicate with a significant interest in passing the surveillance treaty. He was far too careful, I'm sure, to leave any evidence in plain sight linking him to this group, but there
will
be evidence—altered phone logs, visitors admitted to the Parliament building to see him yet not recorded in his own records—”

Suddenly the great arched doors banged open again, and two large, heavily muscled, uniformed men carrying automatic submachine guns came rushing into the room. “Ministry of Defense, Special Forces!” called the taller of the two men in a husky baritone.

Officer Sullivan turned in surprise. “We weren't notified of your participation, sir.”

“Nor we of yours. We'll take over from here,” the tall man said. He had steel-gray brush-cut hair and cold blue eyes.

“That won't be necessary,” Sullivan said. His tone was calm, but there was no mistaking his resolve. “We've got everything under control.”

Bryson turned with alarm, his hands cuffed. The machine guns were Czech, nothing that would have been issued by the British Ministry of Defense.
“No!”
he shouted. “Mother of
Christ,
they're not who they say!”

Baffled, Sullivan looked from Bryson to the crew-cut man. “You're Ministry of Defense, you say?”

“Right,” the man replied brusquely. “We've got the situation under control.”

“Get down!”
Bryson screamed. “They're
killers
!”

Elena dove to the floor, screaming, and Bryson dove next to her, a row of wooden chairs the only barrier between them and the intruders.

But it was too late. Even before he finished speaking, the hall echoed with the deafening thunder of automatic fire as the gray-haired killer and his cohort sprayed bullets into the four police constables,
riddled
their bodies with bullets. Stray rounds pinged against the stone floor and chewed into the mahogany wainscoting. Caught off guard, their sidearms holstered, the genuine policemen were easy targets. A few of them reached, seconds too late, for their weapons. They staggered, their bodies twisting from side to side, almost dancing in a pathetic but vain attempt to dodge the bullets before they crumpled to the floor.

Elena shrieked, “Oh, my
God! Oh, my God!
”

Horrified and sickened, Bryson watched, powerless to do anything.

The air was acrid with cordite, with the coppery smell of blood. The brush-cut Promethean killer consulted his wristwatch.

Bryson understood what had just happened and why. The Prometheus Group would never countenance the risk of letting the two of them be taken into official custody: the dangers posed by what they might divulge could not be gauged with precision. Rather, the Promethean hirelings would themselves want to interrogate them, and only then kill them. That was the only possible explanation for why they were still alive.

Now the tall killer spoke in a deep voice. His accent, which on first hearing had sounded British, now seemed to be Dutch, Bryson decided. “We're going to have a few hours of fun together,” the Prometheus killer said. “Chemical interrogation has become quite advanced in recent years, as you'll see.”

On the floor, Bryson struggled, quietly and discreetly, with the handcuffs, but without a key, or something he could use as a key, it was no use. He looked around; the policemen who lay dead, their bodies riddled with bullets, were no closer than six to eight feet away. He would not be able to take a handcuff key off one of their bodies without being seen doing so; he would never get away with it. But to stay here meant to face chemicals, probably administered inexpertly and in such quantities that they would sustain serious and irreversible damage.

No,
he corrected himself.
After the chemicals will be death
.

*   *   *

Robby Sullivan had felt the impact across his midriff like the kick of a horse, and the next thing he knew he was slumped to the floor. His shirtfront was soaked with blood; he couldn't get his breath. A bullet must have punctured a lung, because he felt as if he were slowly drowning. His breathing was shallow, labored. And all the while, his mind fought for some semblance of comprehension. What was going on? The couple who had surrendered appeared to be unharmed, even while his loyal and devoted men, good men all of them with girlfriends or wives and families, had been brutally mowed down. They had all been trained to expect such a possibility, but in reality their jobs in the Westminster Division could not have been more peaceful. What had happened to his men was ghastly,
unthinkable! And me too,
he thought ruefully.
I'm not long for this world either
. But he didn't understand: had the armed men come to
rescue
the assassins? Then why had the handcuffed man tried to warn him? He stared at the ceiling, his gaze moving in and out of focus, steadily weakening, wondering how much longer he would remain conscious.

He had been unable to get his gun out in time, but who on God's green earth would have expected soldiers from the Ministry of Defense to suddenly turn on them with machine guns? They weren't, of course, from the Ministry. The uniforms—their uniforms weren't Ministry of Defense … something was definitely off. The handcuffed man was right, which might well mean that the protestations of innocence were justified. Things were happening beyond his ability to understand, but this much seemed clear: the handcuffed man had surrendered peacefully, his protests plausible; and the intruders with machine guns were unquestionably cold-blooded killers. Robby Sullivan felt reasonably certain that he was dying, that he was just minutes from death, and he prayed to the Lord Jesus Christ that. He would allow him just one more chance to set things right. Slowly, through a haze, he felt around for his gun.

*   *   *

“You are wanted internationally, as I'm sure you know,” said the Dutchman matter-of-factly.

Elena was weeping, her cuffed hands up to her face. “No, please,” she moaned softly. “Please.”

He noticed that the second man, who had the slightly thickened features of a pugilist, had shifted position and was moving in closer, his machine gun clutched in one hand and what looked like a hypodermic needle in the other.

“The assassination of a British cabinet member is a most serious crime. But we simply want to talk to you—we want to know why you are so determined to interfere, to instigate such trouble.”

Bryson's keen ears heard a faint sound from a few feet away. He allowed himself to glance quickly and saw that the constable named Sullivan was moving his hand, reaching …

Bryson moved his eyes back to the brush-cut killer, staring at him fiercely.
Don't let him see what I just saw
.

“The Directorate is no longer, I'm sure you know that,” continued the gray-haired man. “You have no support, no backup—no resources. You are alone, and you are tilting at windmills, as the saying goes.”

Keep him occupied! Don't let his attention stray, don't let him hear
 … “We're far from alone,” Bryson said intensely, his eyes flashing. “Long before you destroyed the Directorate, we had put out the word. You and your co-conspirators have already been found out, and whatever the hell you're attempting to pull off is already finished.”

The police constable's fingertips were brushing the barrel of the handgun, clawing at it, flailing at it; it was mere inches beyond his reach!

The crew-cut man continued as if he hadn't heard a word Bryson said. “There's really no reason for any more blood to be shed,” he said reasonably. “We simply want to have an honest, heart-to-heart conversation with you. That's all.”

Bryson did not dare look again, but he heard the tiniest scrape of metal against the stone floor.
Distract him! Engage his attention elsewhere—he must not hear, must not notice!
Bryson abruptly raised his voice. “What is it that's worth all the destruction, the terrorism?” he shouted. “The
bombs?
What is it that justifies blowing an airliner out of the sky that's packed with hundreds of people—with innocent men and women and children?”

“But you see, we believe that the few must be sacrificed at the altar of the many. The lives of a few hundred mean
nothing
compared to the safety and security of millions—of
billions
—the protection of untold generations of…” The Prometheus killer's words trailed off as his face creased with suspicion. He cocked his head to one side, listening. “Tomas!” he called.

The two gunshots were nearly deafening, twin explosions, one immediately following the other. The policeman had done it! He had lifted his pistol and, summoning a strength and resolve that momentarily banished the shock and lethargy of extreme blood loss, had fired two very well-aimed shots. There was a spray of blood as the large-caliber bullet drilled through the Promethean's head and exited at the back, the round freezing him in mid-turn, his expression a combination of fury and surprise. His shorter cohort twitched spasmodically before sinking to his knees: the bullet had passed through his neck, obviously having intersected with both his spinal cord and a major artery.

Elena had rolled out of the way, frightened by the sudden gunfire and not understanding where it had come from. When the explosions stopped, she waited a few seconds and then raised her head, and this time she did not scream; the shock was too great, and she was probably numbed by now to all the violence. Eyes wide and liquid with tears, she murmured a low prayer, clasping her cuffed hands.

The police constable who had done it, Sergeant Sullivan, was breathing noisily, a death rattle. He'd been wounded badly in the torso, a sucking wound. Bryson looked over and saw that the sergeant had probably a few minutes left.

“I don't know … who you are…” the policeman said weakly. “Not who we thought…”

“We're not killers!” Elena called. “You know that, I
know
you do!” In a trembling voice she added, quietly, “You've just saved our lives.”

Bryson heard the jangle of metal on the floor right by his head: Sullivan had tossed him his key ring.

Must hurry
, he thought.
How much time remained before others would arrive, attracted by the explosions? Two minutes? One? Seconds?

Bryson reached over with his manacled hands and grabbed the key ring, quickly locating a handcuff key. With a little maneuvering, Bryson worked the small key into Elena's cuffs, springing them open; she then took the key and swiftly unlocked his. One of the policeman's two-way radios crackled to life: “Jesus, what's going on?” a tinny, staticky voice demanded.

“Go,”
the sergeant told the two in a faint whisper.

Elena saw Bryson racing toward the right-hand arched window. “We can't leave this man here—not after what he's done for us!” she protested.

“He's not answering his radio,” Bryson replied quickly as he unhooked the long shade and threw it, clatteringly, to the floor, then began working loose a bolt on the window frame. “They'll locate him quickly, and they'll be able to do more for him than we could do.”
But there's nothing they can do for him,
he thought but didn't say. “Come
on!
” he shouted.

Elena rushed to the window, tugged at a sliding bolt until it came free. Bryson turned, saw Sullivan slump back on to the floor, now silent and still.
The man turned out to be a hero
, Bryson thought.
There aren't many of them
. He yanked at the window, hard. It seemed not to have been opened in years, perhaps decades. But after another hard tug, it yielded, admitting a rush of cold air into the room.

This side of the Palace of Westminster, the east side, fronted directly onto the Thames, the length of the building running nearly nine hundred feet. Most of it, about seven hundred feet, was taken up by a terrace, furnished with chairs and tables, where members of Parliament had tea or entertained; but on either side of the terrace two narrow, somewhat taller sections of the building jutted out, with just a short stone embankment and a low steel fence, and then water. They were in one of the two protruding ends, as Bryson had planned; the river was directly below them, almost a straight plumb line down.

Elena looked out, turned to Bryson with a frightened expression, but then, to Bryson's astonishment, she said, “I'll go first. I'll—I'll pretend I'm diving off the highest diving board in Bucharest.”

Bryson smiled. “Protect your head and neck from the impact. Better to cannonball it, tuck your head and neck into your arms as you drop. And jump out as far as you can so you're sure to hit the water.”

She nodded, bit her lower lip.

“I see it—the boat,” he said.

She looked, nodded again. “At least that much I did right,” she said with a wan smile. “Thames River Cruises was happy to rent a speedboat to my boss, a rich and eccentric unnamed Member of Parliament who wanted to impress his latest lady friend by taking her directly from the Parliament embankment to the Millennium Dome in the fastest boat they had. That was the easy part. But their boats are moored at the Westminster pier—to get one of them to rope it up right in front of the palace required a rather sizable bribe. In case you wonder where all the cash went.”