The Prometheus Deception (14 page)

Calacanis rose and opened the oak paneled door, which Bryson now saw led to a private study. Jenrette followed, and the door closed behind them. Bryson sat on one of Calacanis's antique French side chairs, frozen like an insect trapped in amber. Outwardly he was waiting patiently, a middleman greedily contemplating great riches from a deal about to be consummated. Inwardly his mind was spinning, desperately trying to anticipate the next move. It all came down to how Jenrette decided to play it. What had the man whispered? How could Jenrette reveal how he knew Bryson without telling Calacanis about his work with the Directorate? Was Jenrette prepared to do that? How much could be divulged? How deep was Jenrette's cover? These were unknowable things, fundamentally. Too, the man who called himself Jenrette had no idea what Bryson was doing here. For all he knew, Bryson had indeed gone private and was selling weapons designs; how could Jenrette/Gifford know otherwise?

The study door opened, and Bryson looked up. It was the blond stewardess, holding aloft a tray of empty glasses and a bottle of what looked like port. Obviously she had been summoned by the Greek and had entered Calacanis's private study by means of another passage. She seemed not to notice Bryson as she retrieved used champagne flutes and wineglasses from the desk Calacanis had been using, then approached Bryson. Briefly stooping to pick up a large glass ashtray, laden with the remains of Cuban cigars, from the small end table next to Bryson, she suddenly spoke, her words low and almost inaudible.

“You're a popular man, Mr. Coleridge,” she murmured without even giving him so much as a glance. She placed the ashtray on her serving platter. “Four friends of yours await you in the next room.” Bryson looked up at her, saw her eyes dart to the oak paneled door on the other side of the library. “Try not to bleed on the Heriz runner. It's quite rare, and one of Mr. Calacanis's favorites.” Then she was gone.

Bryson stiffened, his body surging with adrenaline. Yet he knew enough to keep still, betray nothing.

What did this mean?

Was an ambush being set up in the adjacent study? Was she part of the setup? If not—why had she just warned him?

The door to Calacanis's study suddenly opened again. It was Calacanis himself, with Ian, his bodyguard, looming just behind him in the doorway. Gifford/Jenrette stood farther in the background.

“Mr. Coleridge,” Calacanis called out, “won't you join us, please?”

For a split-second Bryson stared, trying to assess the Greek's intentions. “Certainly,” he replied, “in a moment. I think I left something important in the bar.”

“Mr. Coleridge, I'm afraid we really have no time to waste,” Calacanis said in a loud, harsh voice.

“This won't take a minute,” Bryson said, turning toward the exit door that led to the dining room. It was blocked, he now saw, by another armed guard. But instead of staying put, Bryson continued his stride toward the exit as if nothing were wrong. Now he was but a few feet away from the stocky bodyguard who had just arrived.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Coleridge, we really must have a word, you and I,” Calacanis said with a slight nod that was clearly a signal to the guard at the door. Bryson's body surged with adrenaline as the stocky bodyguard turned to secure the door.

Now!

He lunged forward, slamming the bodyguard against the hard wooden doorframe of the open door, the sudden movement catching the bodyguard unprepared. The guard struggled, reaching for his weapon, but Bryson hammered his right foot into the man's abdomen.

An alarm suddenly went off, ear-piercingly loud, clearly triggered by Calacanis, who was shouting. As the bodyguard momentarily lost his balance, Bryson took advantage of the brief moment of vulnerability to sink his right knee into the man's midsection, at the same time gripping the face with his right hand and forcing him to the floor.

“Stop right there!” thundered Calacanis.

Bryson turned quickly and saw that Ian, the other bodyguard, had assumed a marksman's stance, leveling a gun, a .38 caliber pistol, with both hands.

In that instant, the stocky bodyguard beneath him managed to rear up, screaming, exerting all of his strength, but Bryson leveraged that motion against his adversary, pushing the man up and over, his right hand clawing the bodyguard's eyes, so that the man's head was a shield of sorts, right in front of his own face. Ian would never fire with such a high probability of striking another guard.

Suddenly there was an explosion, and Bryson felt the spray of blood. A dark red hole appeared in the middle of the bodyguard's forehead; the man slumped, dead weight. Ian had, surely by accident, killed his own colleague.

Now Bryson pivoted, arced his body suddenly to one side, just missing the explosion of another bullet, and spun through the open door and into the hallway. Bullets exploded behind him, splintering wood and pock-marking the metal bulkheads. With alarms shrieking all around him at deafening volume, he broke into a run down the corridor.

Washington, D.C.

“Let's face it. You're not going to be deterred whatever I say, isn't that right?” Roger Fry looked at Senator James Cassidy expectantly. In the four years that Fry had been his chief of staff, he had helped draft policy statements for the Hill and speeches for the hustings. The Senator had turned to him whenever a thorny issue arose. Fry, a slight, red-haired man in his early forties, was someone he could always depend upon for an instant electoral read. Price supports for dairy farmers? City advocates could cry bloody murder if you took one position, while the agribusiness lobby would come after you if you took the other. Often enough, Fry would say, “Jim, it's a wash—vote your conscience,” knowing that Cassidy had made a career of doing so anyway.

The late-afternoon sun streamed through the venetian blinds, casting slats of shadows on the floor of his Senate office and bringing out the glow from Cassidy's burnished mahogany desk. The senator from Massachusetts looked up from his briefing papers and met Fry's gaze. “I hope you realize how valuable you are to me, Rog,” he said, a smile playing at his lips. “It's because you're so good at looking after the pragmatic, temporizing, horse-trading side of this business that, every once in a while, I can actually get on my hind legs and say what I believe.”

Fry was always struck by how distinguished, how damned
senatorial
Cassidy looked: the coifed mane of wavy silver hair, the chiseled features. A little over six feet, the senator was photogenic with his broad face and high cheekbones, but up close, the eyes were what made him: they could grow warm and intimate, making constituents feel as if they'd found a soul mate, or turn cool and unsparing, drilling through a squirrelly witness who'd come before his committee.

“Every once in a while?” Fry shook his head. “Too damn often, if you ask me. Too damned often for your own political health. And one of these days, it's going to catch up with you. The last election wasn't a walk in the park, if I may remind you.”

“You worry too much, Rog.”

“Somebody has to, around here.”

“Listen, the constituents care about these things. Did I show you this letter?” It was from a woman who lived on Massachusetts's north shore. She had sued a marketing company and discovered they had thirty single-spaced pages of information on her, going back fifteen years. The company knew, and was in the business of selling, more than nine hundred separate items of information about her—including her choice of sleeping aids and antacids and hemorrhoid ointments and the soap she used when she showered; it itemized her divorce, medical procedures, credit ratings, her every traffic infraction. But there was nothing unusual about this; the company had similar dossiers on millions of Americans. The only thing unusual was that she found out about it. That letter, and a few dozen like it, was what first aroused Cassidy's concern.

“You forget, Jim, I answered that letter personally,” replied Fry. “I'm just saying you don't know what you're stirring up this time around. This goes to the heart of the way business works today.”

“That's why it's worth talking about,” said the senator quietly.

“Sometimes it's more important to live and fight another day.” But Fry knew what Cassidy was like when he had a bee in his bonnet: moral outrage would trump the cool calculation of political interest. The senator wasn't a saint: he sometimes drank too much and, especially in his early years when his hair was a glossy black, slept around too freely. At the same time, Cassidy had always maintained a core of political integrity: all things being equal, he did try to do the right thing, at least where the rightness of the thing was as clear as the political cost of doing so. It was a strain of idealism that Fry railed against and, almost despite himself, respected.

“You remember how Ambrose Bierce defined a statesman?” The senator winked at him. “A politician who, as a result of equal pressure from all sides, remains upright.”

“I was in the cloakroom yesterday and found out you've got a new nickname,” Fry said, smiling thinly. “You'll like this one, Jim: ‘Senator Cassandra.'”

Cassidy frowned. “Nobody listened to Cassandra—but they should have,” he grunted. “At least she could say she told 'em so.…” He broke off. They'd been through it; they'd had this conversation. Fry was being protective of him, and Cassidy had heard him out. But on this subject, there wasn't anything left to talk about.

Senator Cassidy was going to do what he was going to do, and there was no stopping him.

No matter what it cost.

SIX

Footsteps thundered behind him on the steel deck as Bryson raced toward the center stairwell. Spying the elevator, he paused but a split-second before he rejected that option; the elevator moved slowly, and once inside it, he would be in a vertical coffin, easy prey for anyone able to shut off the elevator mechanism. No, he would take the stairs, noisy as they were. There was no other way out of the superstructure. He had no choice.
Up or down?
Up toward the wheelhouse, the bridge, would be an unexpected move, yet it risked his getting trapped on an upper deck with few egresses. No, that was a bad idea; down was the only way that made sense, down to the main deck and escape.

Escape? How?
There was only one way off the ship, and that was off the main deck and into the water—whether by jumping, which was suicide in these cold Atlantic waters, or down the gangplank, which was too slow and too exposed a descent.

Jesus!
There was no way out!

No, he mustn't think that way; there had to be a way out, and he would find it.

He was like a rat in a maze; that he didn't know the layout of this immense ship put him at a distinct disadvantage to his pursuers. Yet the very size of the vessel guaranteed endless passages in which to lose the chasers, hide if needed.

He vaulted to the stairs and began taking them two and three at a time, while above him came shouts. One of the bodyguards was dead, but there were no doubt quite a few others, alerted and summoned by the various alarms and by two-way radios. The footsteps and shouts grew increasingly loud and frantic from the stairwell. His pursuers had increased in number, and it was likely a matter of just seconds before others emerged from other parts of the ship.

The ship's whistles and alarms sounded in a cacophony of raucous whoops and metallic grunts. A landing led to a short passageway that seemed to open onto an outside section of a deck. Quietly he opened the door, closed it behind him silently, ran straight ahead, and found himself on the aft deck, open to the elements. The sky was black, the waves lapped gently at the stern. He ran to the railing, looking for the welded steel grips and steps one sometimes found on the side of ships that were used for emergency escape. He could climb down to another level of the ship, he quickly thought, and lose them that way.

But there were no steel grips on the hull. The only way out of here was down.

Suddenly there came the explosion of gunfire. A bullet ricocheted off a metal capstan with a high-pitched pinging sound. He spun away from the railing and into the shadow behind a steel mooring winch on which the steel hawse cable was wound around capstan drums, like some giant spool of thread, then dove behind it for cover. Another round of bullets pitted the metal just a few feet from his head.

They were firing without restraint here, and he realized that with the open sea behind him they could fire heedlessly without fear of damaging any of the ship's delicate navigational equipment.

Inside the ship they would have to be more careful when firing rounds. And that was his protection! They would not hesitate to kill him, but they would not want to damage their ship—or its precious cargo.

He would have to get out of the open areas and back into the belly of the ship. Not only would hiding places be numerous there, but he could take advantage of their hesitance to fire freely.

But now what? Here he was, trapped out in the open, with only a great steel capstan as protection. This was the most hazardous place for him on the entire ship.

There seemed to be two or three gunmen here, no more and no less. Clearly he was outnumbered. He needed to divert them, misdirect them, but how? Looking around wildly, he spotted something. Behind an iron bollard, a tall cylinder rising several feet from the deck, he noticed a paint can, left there no doubt by a deckhand. He crawled forward along the deck and grabbed the can. It was almost empty.

There was a sudden burst of gunfire as he was spotted.

He drew back quickly, grasping the handle of the can, then immediately hurling it forward toward the railing, where it struck the hawse pipe. He peered around the barricade, saw both men turn toward the source of the clatter. One of them ran toward it, away from where Bryson had concealed himself. The other spun around in a classic marksman's position, looking from one side to another. As the first man raced toward the starboard side of the ship, the second circled around toward the port side, his weapon pointed toward the mooring winch the whole time. This man saw through the ruse, suspected Bryson of having caused the diversion, believed Bryson was still huddled behind the winch.