The Prometheus Deception (39 page)

A victim of the Directorate?

It seemed likely, even probable.

And he needed to question her, find out everything she knew. But not now; there was no time.

He searched the tiny closet, where she had hung her few items of clothing and stowed a couple of pairs of shoes, for a rope or something similar to tie her up. Kneeling down, he felt along the floor, grabbing something that he realized was the spike heel that had somehow come loose from her gray shoes, the ones she had worn to the bank in Geneva. Something extremely sharp at one end of the heel lanced his finger. Wincing, he picked up the two-inch-long gray object and saw a small, razor-sharp blade protruding from the end that was intended to attach to the sole of the shoe. He inspected it more closely: the narrow blade, like an artist's X-Acto knife, fit into the base of the shoe, the heel threaded so that it screwed in.

He looked back at Layla. The whites of her eyes were still exposed, her jaw slack; she was still unconscious.

Her spike-heeled shoes, he suddenly understood, had been ingeniously outfitted with a razor blade, which was accessible by twisting off the heel. He examined the other shoe, which had been adapted the same way. It was a brilliant little trick.

And then it struck him.

The image of her in the closet off the banker's office, bound with brightly colored polyurethane “humane restraints,” the sort normally used by law-enforcement agents to transport dangerous prisoners. Jan Vansina, Directorate operative, had fettered her with strong plastic handcuffs—
which she could easily have cut her way out of
.

Geneva had been a setup
.

Layla had been in cahoots with Vansina, both of them Directorate. Vansina had only pretended to attack her; she had cooperated. At any time she could have freed herself.

What did this mean?

There was a small, two-person elevator at the end of the dark hall, the kind that was operated by opening or closing an accordion inner gate. Fortunately, there seemed to be no one else on the floor. Bryson had seen no one else go in or out of rooms on the floor; likely, they were the only ones.

He hoisted her—though she was not big, she was now deadweight and quite heavy—and, putting her head on his shoulder, grasped her beneath the buttocks and carried her, as if she were a drunken spouse, to the elevator. Bryson had readied a rueful joke about his wife's perennial inebriation, but never had a chance to use it.

He took the elevator down to the hotel's basement, which stank of flooded sewage, and set her down on the gritty concrete floor. After searching for a few minutes, he found a storage closet, removed the buckets and mops, and placed her inside. With a length of old clothesline, he carefully bound her wrists and ankles with several tight knots, winding the rope around and around her legs and torso, looping it and tying it into slip knots, then tested the restraints to make sure she could not get out of them if she came to before he returned. The rope was secure—and she was barefoot, with no hidden blade anywhere.

Then, taking one more precaution—if she did become conscious unexpectedly soon, she might yell for help—he stuffed a gag in her mouth and tied it tight, checking to see that she could still breathe.

He turned the lock on the closet door, which would serve only to keep her in—he was convinced, however, that she would never have the opportunity to open the door herself—and not keep someone out.

Then Bryson returned to his hotel room to prepare to meet Richard Lanchester.

*   *   *

In a dark room halfway across the world, three men huddled around an electronic console, their tense faces bathed in the cool green light emitted by diodes.

“It's a digital relay feed direct from Mentor, one of our space-based satellites in the Intelsat fleet,” intoned one of them.

The reply was urgent, the tone revealing long hours of stress. “But the voice-pattern ID—how reliable is Voice-cast?”

“Within a tolerance of between ninety-nine and ninety-nine-point-nine-seven degrees,” the first man said. “Extremely reliable.”

“The identification is affirmative,” remarked the third man. “The communication was initiated by a GSM cellular phone on the ground whose coordinates indicate Brussels, Belgium, the recipient based in Mons.” The third man adjusted a dial; the voice that emerged from the console was astonishingly clear.

“What
is
this?”

“We need to talk, Mr. Lanchester. Immediately.”

“Well, talk away! I'm here. What kind of hatchet job is the
Post
preparing? Goddard, I don't know you, but as I'm sure you're well aware, I do have your publisher's home number, I see her socially, and I won't hesitate for a second to call her!”

“We have to talk in person, not over the phone. I'm in Brussels; I can be at SHAPE headquarters in Mons in an hour. I want you to call ahead to the front-gate security post, so I can pass right through, and the two of us can have a heart-to-heart.”

“You're in
Brussels?
But I thought you were in Washington! What the hell—?”

“One hour, Mr. Lanchester. And I suggest you make not a single phone call about this between now and the time I arrive.”

“Order an interception,” one of the watchers said.

“The decision must be taken at a higher level,” replied another, clearly his superior. “Prometheus may prefer to continue gathering information on the target's activities, on how much the target knows.”

“But if the two meet in a secure facility—what kind of penetration can we expect?”

“Good
Christ
, McCabe! Is there
anywhere
we can't penetrate? Relay the sound file. Prometheus will decide the course of action.”

PART

III

SEVENTEEN

The president's national security adviser sat across the burnished mahogany conference table from Bryson, tension creasing his high forehead. For over twenty minutes Richard Lanchester had listened in rapt absorption to Bryson's account, nodding, taking notes, interrupting only for occasional clarifications. Every question he asked was not only pertinent but incisive, piercing through layers of ambiguity and confusion right to the crux of the issue. Bryson was impressed by the man, by his brilliance, his quick intelligence. He listened closely, concentrating deeply. Bryson spoke as he would debrief a handler or a case officer, just as he used to brief Waller after a field operation: calmly, objectively, coolly assessing probabilities while not injecting conjecture without basis. He tried to provide a context in which the revelations could be meaningfully placed. It was difficult.

The two men sat in a special secure facility located within the NATO secretary general's command-and-control center, an acoustically insulated room-within-a-room known informally as the “bubble.” Its walls and floor were actually one module separated from the surrounding concrete walls by foot-thick rubber blocks that kept all sound vibrations from emanating outward. Technical surveillance countermeasures were employed daily to ensure that the bubble remained secure, free of any taps or listening devices. Security officers swept the room and its immediate environs daily. There were no windows, and thus no risk of laser or microwave bounces that could read the vibrations from human voices. Then there was an elaborate system of fallbacks: a spectral correlator was used at all times to detect surveillance using a spectrum analyzer, and an acoustic correlator used passive sound-pattern matching to automatically detect and classify any listening device. Finally, an acoustic noise generator was constantly on, generating an audio blanket of pink noise designed to defeat wired microphones inside walls, contact microphones, and any audio transmitters located in electrical outlets. Lanchester's insistence that they meet within the extraordinarily secure walls of the bubble was testimony to the seriousness with which he regarded Bryson's urgently imparted information.

Lanchester looked up, visibly shaken. “What you're telling me is preposterous, the sheerest madness, yet somehow it has the ring of truth. I say that because bits and pieces of what you say precisely confirm what little I know.”

“But you
must
know about the existence of the Directorate. You're chairman of PFIAB; I'd have thought you'd know all about it.”

Lanchester removed his rimless spectacles, polished them thoughtfully with a handkerchief. “The existence of the Directorate is one of the most closely held secrets in the government. Shortly after I was named to PFIAB I was briefed about it, and I must say at first I thought my briefer—one of those nameless, anonymous, behind-the-scenes intelligence officers who are part of the permanent establishment around Washington—had taken leave of his senses. It was one of the most fantastic, most implausible things I'd ever heard. A covert intel agency that operated entirely out of sight, without controls, without accountability or oversight—outlandish! If I'd dared to suggest the idea to the president, he'd have had me committed to St. Elizabeth's immediately, and quite justifiably so.”

“Then what is it you find so implausible? You're referring to the true nature of the Directorate, the deception within the deception?”

“Actually, no. Harry Dunne did give me a briefing some months ago, when he'd apparently uncovered only part of the story. He told me of his belief that the Directorate's founders and principals were all Soviet GRU, that Ted Waller was a man named Gennady Rosovsky. What he told me was alarming, deeply astonishing, and by its very nature his findings had to be kept extremely protected: our government would be thrown into turmoil, security vulnerabilities exposed, shaken to its very foundations. That's why your mention of that name drew my immediate attention.”

“Yet you must have been skeptical of what he told you.”

“Oh yes, deeply so. I won't say I dismissed him, Dunne's credentials are too heavy to be ignored—but the notion of such a mammoth deception operation—it's difficult to accept, frankly. No, what I find most troubling is your assessment of the Directorate's present-day activities.”

“Dunne must have kept you informed about all this.”

He shook his head slowly, the barest movement. “I haven't spoken with him in weeks. If he was compiling this sort of dossier, by rights he should have kept me apprised. Perhaps he was waiting until he had more, until he'd amassed a substantive, incontrovertible file.”

“You must have a way to reach him, locate him.”

“I have no tricks up my sleeve. I'll make calls, see what I can do, but people don't just vanish from the seventh floor of the CIA. If he's been taken hostage, or if he's dead, I'll be able to find it out, Nick. I'm fairly confident I can track him down.”

“When we spoke last, he was concerned about infiltration within the Agency—that the Directorate had extended its reach inside.”

Lanchester nodded. “I'd say the identification you pulled off the would-be killer in Chantilly speaks volumes. It's always possible that the paper was simply stolen, or that the fellow was turned, hired locally. But I'd have to agree with both you and Dunne. We can't rule out the possibility that the CIA's been infiltrated pretty deeply. I'm flying back to Washington in a few hours, and I'll put in a call to Langley en route, speak with the Director myself. But let me be brutally frank with you, Nick. Look at the totality of what you're telling me. An overheard exchange at a French arms dealer's chateau, the implication that he and Anatoly Prishnikov were involved in planning the catastrophe at Lille. I don't doubt it's true, but what do we have, really?”

“The word of an intelligence operative of almost two decades,” said Bryson quietly.

“An operative for this same, bizarre agency that we now know to be a hostile power operating on American soil against American interests. I'm sorry to be so brutal, but this is the way it reads. You're a defector, Nick. I don't doubt your honesty for a second, but you know how our government has always treated defectors—with the highest suspicion. For God's sake, look at what we did to the poor defector Nosenko, who broke from the KGB to warn that the Russians were behind the Kennedy assassination and that our own CIA had been penetrated by a high-level mole. We locked him up in solitary, in a prison cell, and interrogated him for years. James Jesus Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence chief back then, was certain this was a Soviet dangle, an attempt to manipulate us, mislead us, and he'd have none of it. Not only did he not believe the most significant KGB defector we'd ever had—even after Nosenko had passed polygraph after polygraph—but he brutalized the man, broke him. And Nosenko had specific names of agents, operations, controls. You're giving me rumors, overhears, suggestions.”

“I'm giving you more than enough to act on,” snapped Bryson.

“Nick, listen to me. Listen, and understand. Say I go to the president and tell him that there's some sort of
octopus
—a faceless, nebulous organization whose existence I can't definitively establish, can't substantiate, and whose aims I can only
guess
at. I'll be laughed out of the Oval Office, or worse.”

“Not with your credibility.”

“My credibility, as you put it, is based on my unwillingness to be alarmist, my insistence on having the goods before we act. Good Lord, if someone else spoke up at the National Security Council, or in the Oval Office, with such allegations without basis, I'd be furious.”

“But you
know
—”

“I
know
nothing. Suspicions, inklings, those patterns we imagine we see. That isn't knowledge. In the jargon of international law, they don't constitute evidentiary warrant. It's insufficient—”