The Prometheus Deception (63 page)

A short while later, Bryson entered and asked for Felicia Munroe. Since Elena was monopolizing Shirley's time, and Shirley was Dunne's contact, it was possible that a call might
not
be placed to Dunne. That would make things easier, but Bryson was not counting on that. For there was nothing wrong, really, with misleading Dunne into thinking that Bryson remained preoccupied with his own past. Perhaps it would falsely reassure the Prometheans that Bryson was on the wrong path, that he was therefore not that immediate a threat.

Let them think that I am dwelling on the past, on my own history. Let them think I'm obsessed
.

But I am
.

I am obsessed with unearthing the truth
.

He prayed that Felicia would be in a lucid state.

She was eating dinner when Bryson was shown in, sitting by herself at a small, round mahogany table in the handsome dining room, where other residents sat by themselves or with one another at similar round tables. She looked up as he approached, and it was as if she were seeing someone she had just been speaking to five minutes earlier. Her eyes displayed no surprise. Bryson's heart sank.

“George!” she trilled, delighted. She smiled, her pearly dentures smeared with lipstick. “Oh, but this is so very confusing. You're dead!” Her tone became scolding, as if lecturing a naughty child. “You really shouldn't
be
here, George.”

Bryson smiled, gave her a peck on the cheek, and sat across the table from her. She still mistook him for his father. “You caught me, Felicia,” Bryson said sheepishly, his tone lighthearted. “But tell me again—how
did
I die?”

Felicia's eyes narrowed shrewdly. “George, none of that! You know very well how it happened. Let's not rehash all that. Pete feels bad enough, you know.” She took a forkful of mashed potatoes.

“Why does he feel bad, Felicia?”

“He wishes it were him instead. Not you and Nina. He just berates himself over and over again. Why did George and Nina have to die?”

“Why
did
we have to die?”

“You know very well. I don't need to tell you.”

“But
I
don't know why. Perhaps you can tell
me
.”

Bryson looked up and was surprised to see Elena. She put her arms around Felicia, then sat down next to her, clasping in her two hands Felicia's bony, liver-spotted hand.

Did Felicia recognize Elena? It was impossible, of course; they had seen each other on only one occasion, years earlier. But there was something about Elena's manner that Felicia found comforting. Bryson wanted to catch Elena's eye, to find out what had happened, but Elena was devoting all her attention to Felicia.

“He really shouldn't be here,” Felicia said, giving Bryson a sidelong glance. “He's dead, you know.”

“Yes, I know that,” said Elena gently. “But tell me what happened. Wouldn't it make you feel a little better to talk about what happened?”

Felicia looked troubled. “I always blame myself. Pete always says he wishes they didn't have to die—he wishes it were him. George was his best friend, you know.”

“I know. Is it too painful for you to talk about? What happened, I mean? How they were killed?”

“Well, it's my birthday, you know.”

“Is it? Happy birthday, Felicia!”

“Happy? No, it's not happy at all. It's so very, very sad. It's such a terrible night.”

“Tell me about that night.”

“Such a beautiful, snowy night! I made dinner for us all, but I didn't care if dinner got cold! I
told
Pete that. But no, he didn't want to spoil my birthday dinner. He kept telling George to hurry,
hurry!
Drive faster! And George didn't want to, he said the old Chrysler couldn't handle the icy roads, the brakes were bad. Nina was upset—she wanted them all to pull over and wait out the storm. But Pete kept
pushing
them, urging them on!
Hurry, hurry!
” Her eyes grew wide and filled with tears; she looked at Elena desperately. “When the car went out of control and George and Nina were killed … oh, my Pete was in the hospital for over a month, and the whole time he kept saying, over and over and over again, ‘It should have been me who was killed! Not them! It should have been
me!
'” The tears were spilling down her cheeks as the painful memory emerged from deep in the confused mind of a woman for whom the past and the present were a mingled palimpsest. “They were best friends, you know.”

Elena put a comforting arm around the old woman's fragile shoulders. “But it was an accident,” she said. “It was an accident. Everyone knows that.”

Bryson reached over and hugged Felicia, blinking back tears himself. She was tiny, birdlike in his embrace.

“It's all right,” he said soothingly. “It's all right.”

*   *   *

“It must be such a relief for you,” said Elena, sitting beside Bryson in the rented green Buick.

Bryson nodded as he drove. “I think I needed to hear it—even given the circumstances, even given the confused state of her mind.”

“There's a certain observable consistency to her thoughts, even given the confusion, the thought disorder. Her long-term memory is sharp: that usually remains intact. She might not remember where she is at any given moment, but she'll clearly remember her wedding night.”

“Yes. I suspect Dunne was counting on her advanced senility in the event that I contacted her for confirmation of his carefully constructed lies. As the sole surviving witness to the events, she's as unreliable as they come; Dunne knew that, knew she wouldn't be able to effectively contradict his fraudulent version.”

“Though she just did,” Elena pointed out.

“She did. But it took a degree of trust, of patience and persistence, of
gentleness
that I doubt Dunne's CIA men possess. Well, thank God for you, is all I can say. You're the one with the gentleness, and I think she picked up on it. Who'd ever have thought that such a gentle creature could have the makings of a deep-cover operative?”

She smiled. “You mean the phone number?”

“How'd you get it, and so quickly?”

“For one thing, I simply thought about where I'd put it if I were her, a place where I could get it quickly. I also figured that if Harry Dunne wanted the administrator to think he was a concerned relative, he wasn't at the same time going to insist on security precautions.”

“Where was it, in her Rolodex, right on her desk?”

“Close. A list of ‘emergency' contact numbers taped to the top lefthand corner of her desk blotter. I spotted it as soon as I sat down, so I ‘accidentally' left my purse on the chair next to her desk, and as we were leaving for a tour, I suddenly remembered. I went to pick it up, spilled out its contents all over her desk and the floor. As I picked things up, I took a glance and memorized it.”

“And if it hadn't been right there?”

“Plan B would have required me to leave the purse there longer and retrieve it during her cigarette break. She's a heavy smoker.”

“Was there a Plan C?”

“Yes. You.”

He laughed, a rare moment of much-needed levity relieving the prevailing tension. “You give me too much credit.”

“I don't think so. Now it's my turn, though. The reverse-number lookup has gotten easy these days, thanks to the Internet. I won't even have to do it myself—I can E-mail it to one of a hundred search services that'll get me the address in half an hour or less. Even call it in.”

“The area code is eight-one-four—where is that? There are so many area codes these days.”

“The note she scrawled beside it said ‘PA'—Pennsylvania, I assume, right?”

“
Pennsylvania?
Why would Harry Dunne be there?”

“Maybe he's originally from there? A childhood home?”

“His accent is purest New Jersey.”

“Relatives, then? I'll do a reverse-number lookup; that much should be easy to find out.”

*   *   *

At one o'clock in the morning there was only a skeleton staff on duty at the Meredith Waterman building: a handful of security guards and one information technology staffer.

The tough-looking female security guard stationed at the employees' entrance at the side of the building was in the middle of reading a Harlequin romance, and she did not look happy about being disturbed.

“You're not on the admit list,” she said dourly, her long-nailed index finger holding her place in the book.

The short-haired man in the aviator glasses and the shirt with
MCCAFFREY INFORMATION STORAGE SERVICES
stitched on it just shrugged. “Hey, fine. I'll just head back to New Jersey and tell 'em you wouldn't let me in. Makes my job easier, and I still get paid.”

Bryson turned around, readying his next riposte, when the guard relented somewhat. “What's the purpose of your—”

“Like I told you. Meredith is one of our clients. We do the off-site backup—it's an after-hours download. But we're getting digital collation errors. Doesn't happen a lot, but it happens. And it means I gotta check the routers on site here.”

She sighed in irritation and picked up the phone, punching a number. “Charlie, do we have a contract with a McCaffrey”—she examined the stitching on Bryson's shirt—“Information Storage Services?”

She listened in silence. “The guy says he has to check on something here because of errors or something.”

She listened again. “All right, thanks.” She hung up, a superior smirk on her face. “You're supposed to call ahead,” she said with a reproving scowl. “The service elevator's on the right down the hall. Take it down to B.”

As soon as he reached the basement level, he raced to the freight-delivery entrance, which he had located during his earlier surveillance. Elena was waiting there, wearing the identical uniform and carrying an aluminum clipboard. The corporate records center was one large below-ground room, with a low acoustic-tiled ceiling, buzzing fluorescent lights, and row upon row of open steel warehouse shelves that held endless-seeming lines of identical, tall gray archive boxes. The boxes were arranged chronologically, with just a few entries for 1860, the year it was founded by Elias Meredith, an erstwhile trader in Irish linen. Each succeeding year took up more linear shelf space, until 1989—the last year whose paper files were stored here—which occupied an entire row. Each year was broken down into various categories—client records, personnel records, minutes of partners' and committee meetings, consent resolutions, amendments to bylaws, and so on. Folders were color-coded, with end tabs and bar codes.

Time was extremely limited: they knew they could not stay down here for much more than an hour before Security would begin to wonder what was taking so long. They divided up responsibilities, with Bryson surveying the paper files and Elena sitting at the computer terminal and examining the records-management database. This was an electronic records-tracking and inventory-management system, up-to-date though not password-protected. There would be no reason for it to be protected, since it was set up for ease of use by the bank's record clerks.

It was laborious work, made even more difficult by the fact that they had no idea exactly what they were looking for. Client records? But which clients? Records of large money transfers to offshore accounts? But how could they distinguish between a wire transfer that was nothing more shady than the semilegitimate parking of clients' assets offshore to avoid scrutiny by the IRS, or by a divorcing wife—and one that might be the beginning of a long sequence of transfers from one offshore bank to another, eventually ending up in the pocket of a senator? Elena came up with the idea of using the computer to search for them—by feeding in key words and pulling up file references. Yet after an hour they still had nothing.

In fact, they began to find documents missing, whole sections of them. After 1985, there were no partners' income records or earning statements to be found. It was not as if the documents had been removed. Elena was able to confirm, by poring over the electronic database manager, that not a single document pertaining to monies brought in by the partners was to be found after 1985.

Frustrated, increasingly tense as the minutes ticked by, Bryson finally decided to narrow his focus to just one partner: Richard Lanchester. He proceeded to examine all the Lanchester files—personnel, compensation, clients. The story they told was, just as the Lanchester myth had it, one of the genesis of a Wall Street whiz. He started at Meredith Waterman immediately after graduation from Harvard, and did not do grunt work for long. Within a very few years he emerged as an aggressive bond trader, generating huge income for the firm. He soon headed the department. Then he added another specialty—currency speculation and investment. The money he made there made what he was doing before look like begging for pocket change. Richard Lanchester had become, in ten years, the biggest earner in the bank's history.

The Wall Street whiz kid had become a financial powerhouse, making himself and the other general partners extremely rich through his deals, and most of all through a complex series of financial trades. He had apparently mastered the delicate art of trading in financial instruments called derivatives, placing immense, multibillion-dollar wagers on stock-index futures and interest-rate futures. Essentially he was gambling on a massive scale, the casino being the global capital markets. He kept winning and winning and winning; no doubt, like a true gambler, he believed his luck would never run out.

It was late in 1985 when his luck ran out.

In 1985, everything changed. With rapt fascination, sitting on the cold concrete floor of the records room, Bryson came upon a thin folder of internal auditors' reports that described a reversal of fortune so abrupt, so devastating, that it was almost impossible to believe.