The Prometheus Deception (38 page)

He sat down in the same rickety chair where he had sat last night. “Well, I think the time is right, Layla,” he said, and he immediately felt a burden begin to lift, almost a physical sensation, of finally being able to breathe deeply after so long being deprived of oxygen. “I need to tell you this, because I'm going to need your help, and I'm certain they're going to try to take me out.”

“
They
…?” She touched his arm with her hand. “What are you telling me?”

Choosing his words carefully, he spoke, telling her of things he had not spoken of to anyone except the now-disappeared CIA deputy director Harry Dunne. He confided that he had just one mission, which was to infiltrate, and then destroy, a shadowy organization known, to the very few who knew about it, as the Directorate; and he told her of his desperate hope to involve Richard Lanchester in the effort.

She listened, wide-eyed, taking it all in; then she got to her feet and began pacing the room. “I don't think I completely understand. This is not an
American
agency—it's international, multilateral?”

“That's one way of putting it. When I worked for them, they were based in Washington, though their headquarters appear to have moved. Where, I don't know.”

“What are you saying—they've just
disappeared?
”

“Something like that.”

“Impossible! An intelligence agency is like any other bureaucracy—it has telephone numbers and faxes and computers, not to mention office staff. It's like—what's the expression in English, trying to hide an elephant in the middle of a room!”

“The Directorate, when I worked for it, was lean, bare-bones, agile. And skilled at various forms of camouflage. The way the CIA is able to disguise its proprietaries as benign-seeming private corporations, or the Soviets used to create so-called Potemkin villages, false fronts, turning biological-warfare facilities into laundry-soap factories or even colleges.”

Pensive, she shook her head in disbelief. “And do you mean to say they
compete
with CIA and MI-6 and Mossad and the Sûreté? With the
knowledge
of the other agencies?”

“No, that's not it at all. Its members are given to understand that they do operations the more mainstream agencies are not permitted to do, whether by charter or by governmental policy.”

She nodded, unsmiling. “Yet at the same time they are able to keep their own existence secret? How can this be? People gossip, secretaries have friends … there are congressional oversight committees…” She went to the dressing table and, visibly distraught, began fumbling with her small black leather handbag, rummaging through it, finally pulling out a lipstick. She applied a dab of color, blotted her lips with a tissue, put the lipstick back.

“But that's the ingenious thing! Through a combination of extremely tight compartmentalization and careful recruitment—members are chosen carefully, drawn from all around the world, their backgrounds especially conducive to this line of work, to maintaining a code of silence. The compartmentalization ensures that no one operative ever gets to know another more than fleetingly; no one ever works with more than one handler. My handler was a legend in the agency, one of the founders, a man named Ted Waller. A man I came to idolize,” he added regretfully.

“But surely the president must know!”

“To be honest, I have no idea. I believe the existence of the Directorate has always been kept from whoever occupies the Oval Office. Partly to protect the president from knowing too much about wet work and other sordid business, to provide him with plausible deniability. That's standard operating procedure in intelligence outfits worldwide. And partly, I'm sure, because the president is considered by the permanent intelligence community to be a mere tenant of the White House. A renter. He moves in for four years, maybe eight if he's lucky, buys new china, redecorates, hires and fires, gives a bunch of speeches, and then he's gone. Whereas the spies remain.
They're
the permanent Washington, the true inheritors.”

“And you think the one person in government most likely to know about its activities is the chairman of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, yes? The group that meets in secret to oversee the NSA and the CIA and all the other American spy agencies?”

“Correct.”

“And the chairman of this intelligence oversight is Richard Lanchester.”

“Exactly.”

Nodding, she said, “This is why you want to meet with him.”

“Correct.”

“But for
what?
” she cried. “To tell him
what?
”

“To tell him what I know about the Directorate, about what I think it's up to. This was the big question, the reason I was brought back from retirement: Who's controlling the Directorate now? What is it really doing?”

“And you think you have the answers?” She seemed belligerent, almost outright antagonistic.

“No, of course not. I have theories, backed up by evidence.”

“What evidence? You have nothing!”

“Whose side are you on, Layla?”

“I'm on
yours!
” she shouted. “I want to protect
you,
and I think you're making a mistake.”

“A mistake?”

“You go to see this man Lanchester with … with wisps of nothing, crackpot accusations—he'll dismiss you at once. He'll think you're crazy!”

“Quite possibly,” conceded Bryson. “But it's my job to make him think otherwise, and I believe I can.”

“And what makes you think you can trust him?”

“What choice do I have?”

“He could be one of the enemies, one of the liars! How can you be sure he's
not?
”

“I'm sure of
nothing
anymore, Layla. I feel like I'm in a maze, I'm lost. I don't know where I am,
who
I am anymore.”

“What makes you so sure you can believe what this CIA man told you? What makes you so sure he's not one of them, one of the liars?”

“I'm not
sure,
I told you that! This is not a matter of certainty, it's a matter of calculation, of odds.”

“Then you believed it when he told you your parents were killed?”

“My stepmother—the woman who was sort of my guardian after my parents were killed—pretty much confirmed it, though she's ill, I think she has Alzheimer's, her mind is going. The fact is, the only people who really know the truth are the people I'm desperate to find—Ted Waller, and Elena.”

“Elena is your ex-wife.”

“Officially not an ex-wife. We never divorced. She disappeared. I suppose you'd say we're separated.”

“She
abandoned
you.”

Bryson sighed. “I don't know what happened. I wish I knew; I badly
want
to know.”

“She just disappeared, she never got in touch? One day there, next day gone?”

“Right.”

She shook her head in disapproval. “Yet I think you love her still.”

He nodded. “It's—it's just so hard for me to think straight about her, to know what to believe. Did she ever love me, or was she assigned to me? Did she run away from me in despair, or out of fear, or because she was forced to? What is the truth,
where
is the truth?” Had his secret mission to Bucharest somehow backfired? Had Elena been reached by the sweepers, frightened into hiding somehow? But if so, wouldn't she have left word for him to explain her actions? Another possibility: Had she somehow discovered that he had lied to her about his whereabouts that weekend? Had she found out that he hadn't been in Barcelona? She might feel violated, betrayed, but would that really drive her away without raising it with him first?

“And somehow you think you'll learn this truth by flying everywhere, looking for Directorate operatives? It's
insanity!
”

“Layla, once I track these wasps to their nest, they're over. They must know that I've got the goods on them. I have a detailed knowledge of operations going back twenty years, transgressions of just about every national and international law.”

“And you will present all this to Richard Lanchester, and you hope he will expose them, put a stop to it?”

“If he's as good a man as people say he is, that's exactly what he'll do.”

“And if he's not?”

Bryson was silent; she went on, “You'll bring a weapon.”

“Of course.”

“Where is yours? You don't have it on you.”

He looked up, startled. She had a quick, discerning eye. “It's in my luggage, still disassembled so I could get it through airport security.”

“Well, then,” she said. She removed a .45 from her purse, the Heckler & Koch USP compact.

“Thanks, but I'll take the Beretta.” He smiled. “Of course, if you still have that .50 caliber Desert Eagle…”

“No, Nick, I'm sorry.”

“Nick?”
He felt a hollow thudding in his chest; she knew his true name, though she had never before uttered it, and he had never told her. My God, what
else
did she know?

She was pointing it at him from halfway across the room. It took him a moment to realize what was going on. He was frozen in the chair, his normal split-second reactions dulled by disbelief.

Her eyes were doleful. “I can't let you meet with Lanchester, Nick. I'm truly sorry, but I can't.”

“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.

“My job. You've left us no choice. I never thought it would come to this.”

He felt as if the air had gone out of the room. His body went cold; he registered the shock viscerally.

“No,” he said hoarsely, the chair in which he sat spinning slowly a million miles away. “Not you. They've gotten to you, too. When did they—”

And he exploded from the chair with the force of a tightly coiled spring, lunging at her with a suddenness that startled her, causing her instinctively to draw back to brace herself, defensively repositioning herself, her fierce concentration broken for the barest instant. Thrown off-balance, she fired, the explosion filling the small room, percussive and deafening. Bryson felt the projectile whiz by his left cheek, the gunpowder searing his face and temple, heard the cartridge casing spit onto the floor, and at almost the same moment he vaulted into the air, knocking her body to the floor, sending the gun clattering across the floor.

But she was no longer the woman he'd thought he knew; she'd been transformed into a tigress, a wild-eyed jungle predator crazed by bloodlust. Layla reared up, her right hand a rigid claw jabbing into his throat, while she simultaneously slammed her left elbow into his solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him.

Still, he managed to rise, swinging a fist at her, but she suddenly ducked under and shot upward, wedging her right shoulder into his right armpit as she vised her right arm around his neck, and with a loud grunt she grabbed her own left biceps and pulled in toward herself, choking him.

He had fought hand-to-hand with some of the fiercest, most dangerous and highly trained assassins in the world, but she was in another league entirely. She was brutally strong, as untiring as a machine, and she fought with a ferocity he had never seen before. Somehow managing to free himself from the headlock, he reared up again, swinging at her, but she jumped backward, deflecting his blow with her left arm, then sank suddenly to the floor and slammed a fist into his stomach, guarding her face with her left hand.

Bryson gasped, grappled for the soft flesh at the base of her neck, but she was too quick: she delivered a hard kick to the back of his right knee, causing him to sag. Striking the back of his head with her elbow, she almost succeeded in knocking him to the ground, but Bryson forced himself to ignore the blinding pain, summoning all of his considerable strength along with combat techniques learned decades ago that now returned to him like ancient hindbrain reflexes.

He spun out of her way, then launched his body at her frontally, hurling all of his weight against hers while simultaneously throwing a left-handed punch into her right kidney. She screamed, a shrill, full-throated cry not of pain but of rage. Leaping into the air and pivoting, she thrust out her right leg, scissoring it into his abdomen with astonishing force. Bryson groaned; she landed with her right leg forward and threw her right hand back-knuckle against his face with the impact of steel; then, grabbing his shoulders, she drove her left knee into his groin. As he doubled over in agony, she raised her right elbow and drove it into his spine, the pain staggering, then reached for the left side of his face, wrenching his head clockwise as she took him down.

With one last surge of desperate energy, he thrust his hands out, blindly grasping for her legs, slamming the bony side of his hand hard against the nerve center just above her left knee, clutching at it, forcing her down as well, and as she stumbled backward, he thrust his knee into her midsection, cracking his elbow against the side of her neck. She screamed, loosening the grip of her right hand, reaching for something, and he saw what it was: the Heckler & Koch was just feet away; he could
not
let her regain control of it! He shifted slightly, then jammed his elbow into the cartilage of her throat. She gagged, instinctively reaching with her right hand to dislodge his elbow and protect the vulnerable area, and that was enough to allow him to grab the pistol with his left hand, spinning it around and crashing it against the top of her head, the blow carefully calculated neither to kill her nor seriously cripple her.

She crumpled to the floor, her eyes half open, only the whites visible. He felt her throat for a pulse and found it; she was alive, though she would be out for several hours. Whoever she was,
whatever
she was, she had had the chance to kill him at the outset, when she had the gun trained on him, but she hesitated; either she could not do it or she found it almost impossible to bear the thought of doing so. She, like he, was probably a pawn, lied to and manipulated, recruited to an assignment about which she was carefully kept in the dark. In a way she was a victim, too.