The Prometheus Deception (45 page)

“What the hell is this?” exclaimed Yuri. The Humvee's doors flew open, and three black-clad men jumped out, wearing black face masks and the black Kevlar-and-nylon garb of commandos.

“Get down!” shouted Bryson. “Shit! We have no
weapons!
”

Tarnapolsky, diving to the floor of the Audi, pulled out a tray mounted under the front seat. It held several weapons and piles of ammunition. Yuri handed Bryson a Makarov 9mm automatic pistol, then pulled out a large Kalashnikov Bizon submachine gun, a Russian Spetsnaz weapon. There was a sudden hail of bullets, and the Audi's windscreen turned white with starburst cracks. The glass, Bryson realized, was at least partially bullet-resistant. He crouched down. “This car isn't armored, is it?”

“Light,” replied the KGB man as he shouldered the weapon and took a deep, slow breath. “Level One. Use the doors.”

Bryson nodded; he understood. The doors were reinforced with either high-strength fiberglass or a synthetic composite, meaning he could use them as shields.

Another burst of ammunition, and the commandos, visible through the side window, assumed firing stance. “Special delivery from Prishnikov,” Tarnapolsky said, almost under his breath.

“The wife called,” Bryson said, the instant he realized it. But how did Prishnikov know where to dispatch his commandos? Perhaps the answer was simple: the fastest way out of Russia was by air, and anyone foolish enough to take down Prishnikov's most valued assistant had better escape the country without delay. Moreover, there were just a few airports near Moscow, only two of them having the facilities to handle private planes. A last-minute booking, made urgently … Prishnikov had made a calculated guess, and he had guessed right.

Tarnapolsky sprang his door open, sprang to the ground, crouching behind it, and fired off a burst of machine-gun fire.
“Yob tvoyu mat!”
he growled: Fuck your mother.

One of the marksmen fell, taken out by Tarnapolsky.

“Good shot,” Bryson said. A line of shots moved across the opaque-white windshield, spraying tiny pebbles of tempered glass at Bryson's face. He unlatched the car door on his side, got directly behind it, and fired off a few rounds at the two remaining commandos. At the same time, Tarnapolsky got off another burst of fire, and a second man sprawled to the paved landing strip.

One more remained—but where?

Bryson and Tarnapolsky scanned the dark field on either side, searching for movement. The landing lights illuminated the blacktop but not the surrounding fields, where the third man had to be concealed, lying in wait, weapon at the ready.

Tarnapolsky fired off a round at what appeared to be movement, but there was no response. He stood up, wheeled around, aiming the Bizon toward the dark area on the other side of the landing strip, nearest Bryson.

Where the hell was he?

Prishnikov's men were surely outfitted with rubber-soled boots, enabling them to move silently, stealthily. Gripping the Makarov in both hands, he moved it around in a slow circuit, starting from his far right and moving steadily counterclockwise.

By the time he saw the tiny, dancing red dot on the back of Tarnapolsky's head, it was too late for Bryson to do anything but cry out.

“Get down!”
he shouted.

But an exploding bullet had entered Yuri Tarnapolsky's head, blowing his face off.

“Oh,
Christ!
” Bryson shouted in horror as he spun around. He caught a flicker of reflected light, saw a tiny movement on or near the plane, several hundred feet away. The third sniper had positioned himself against the aircraft, using it as protection. Bryson repositioned the Makarov, exhaled slowly, and squeezed off one precisely aimed shot.

There was a distant cry, the clatter of a weapon on the tarmac. The third commando, the one who had killed Yuri Ivanovich Tarnapolsky, was dead.

Casting a look back at the corpse of his friend, Bryson leaped out of the Audi and ran toward the plane. Others would be on the way, in greater numbers; his only chance of survival was to get on board the aircraft and pilot it himself.

He ran to the Yakovlev-112, jumped onto the wing, and swung into the pilot's seat, closing the hatch behind him. He strapped himself in, sat back against the seat, closed his eyes.
Now what?
Flying the plane itself was not a problem; he had sufficient hours in the air and had performed numerous emergency departures in his Directorate years. The problem, instead, would be navigating in Russian air space without clearance, without support from the tower. But what choice was there? Returning to Tarnapolsky's car meant heading back into the jaws of Prishnikov's commandos, and that was not an acceptable option.

He inhaled, held his breath, then turned the ignition key. The engine caught right away. He checked the instruments and began slowly taxiing toward the end of the runway.

He couldn't ignore the tower, he knew. To take off without being in contact with the air-traffic controller was not only risky, even potentially fatal, but it would be viewed by the Russian Air Force as a deliberate provocation. Measures would be taken.

He keyed the microphone and spoke in English, the language spoken by international flight controllers. “Vnukovo Clearance, Yakovlev-112, RossTran three niner niner foxtrot. Number one for runway three, straight-out departure. Ready for clearance to Baku.”

The reply came back after a few seconds, staticky yet brisk: “
Shto?
What? Did not copy, say again.”

“RossTran three niner niner foxtrot,” he repeated. “Ready for departure via Vnukovo three, ready to taxi.”

“You have no flight plan, RossTran three nine nine!”

Undeterred, Bryson persisted. “Vnukovo Ground, RossTran three niner niner foxtrot, ready for taxi. Climb and maintain ten thousand. Expect flight level two hundred fifty ten minutes after departure. Departure frequency one-one-eight point five five. Squawk four six three seven.”

“RossTran, hold, I repeat, hold! You have no authorization!”

“Vnukovo Ground, I'm flying certain high-ranking Nortek executives on an emergency visit to Baku,” he said, assuming the characteristic above-the-law arrogance of Prishnikov's minions. “The flight plans should have been filed. You have my serial number; you can call Dmitri Labov to verify.”

“RossTran—”

“Anatoly Prishnikov would be
extremely
unhappy to learn that you are interfering with the administration of his businesses. Perhaps, Comrade Air Traffic controller, you could tell me
your
name and identification.”

There was a pause, several seconds of radio silence. “Go ahead,” the voice snapped. “Fly at your own risk.”

Bryson applied the throttle, accelerated toward the end of the runway, and the plane lifted off.

TWENTY-ONE

Monsignor Lorenzo Battaglia, Ph.D.—senior curator at the Chiaramonti Museum, one of the many specialized collections within the Monumenti Musei e Gallerie Pontifice, the Vatican museums, in the Citta del Vaticano—had not seen Giles Hesketh-Haywood for many years, and he wasn't exactly overjoyed to see him again.

The two men were meeting in a magnificent, damask-walled reception room off the Galleria Lapidaria. Monsignor Battaglia had been a curator at the Vatican museums for twenty years, and his connoisseurship was respected around the world. Giles Hesketh-Haywood, his effete English visitor, had always struck him as a faintly absurd, even comical, creature, with those oversized round tortoise-shell spectacles, those bright silk neckties that swelled flamboyantly from a very tight knot, the checkered vests, those gold horseshoe cufflinks, the old briar bowl stuck jauntily in his breast pocket, the posh accent. He reeked of golden cavendish tobacco. His charm was boundless, if oily. Hesketh-Haywood was an upper-class twit, in some ways—so
teddibly
English—but his trade was an unsavory one. Ostensibly, he was a dealer in antiquities, but really he was nothing more than a high-end fence.

Hesketh-Haywood, part connoisseur, part out-and-out crook, was the sort of shady fellow who vanishes for years at a time before showing up on the yacht of some Middle Eastern oil sheik. Though he was steadfastly vague about his past, the Monsignor had heard all the rumors: that his family was once of the high-living English gentry but fell on hard times in the postwar Laborite era. That Hesketh-Haywood had been educated among the scions of great wealth, but by the time he got out of school, his family had nothing left but a mountain of debt. Giles was a scamp, a rogue, a delightfully unscrupulous fellow who started out smuggling archaeological antiquities out of Italy, no doubt bribing the export licensing board. He was very gray-market, but some extraordinary artifacts had passed through his hands. If you didn't want to know how they came into his possession, you knew enough not to ask. Men like Hesketh-Haywood were tolerated in the art world only because of those rare occasions on which they could be useful—he had in fact once proved useful to the Monsignor, conducting a certain “transaction” that the Monsignor prayed the world would never learn about—but the cordiality displayed by the Monsignor was now paper-thin. For the favor that Hesketh-Haywood was now asking him was astonishing, appalling.

Monsignor Battaglia closed his eyes for a moment to summon the words he needed, and then he leaned forward and spoke gravely to his visitor. “What you propose is out of the question, Giles. It is far more than a ‘prank.' It is an outright scandal.”

The Monsignor had never seen Hesketh-Haywood's supreme self-satisfaction waver, and it wasn't wavering now. “A
scandal
, Monsignor?” Giles Hesketh-Haywood's eyes, magnified behind the thick lenses, looked both owlish and amused. “But there are so
many
kinds of scandal, are there not? For instance, the intelligence that a senior Vatican official, a world-renowned expert in the art and artifacts of the ancient world, an ordained
priest
to boot—that this gentleman maintains a mistress on Via Sebastiano Veniero—well, some people aren't quite so enlightened as
we
are about such things, isn't that so?”

The Englishman leaned back in his chair and waggled a long, slender finger in the air. “But it's the
money
, not the women, that may cause the greater dismay. And sweet young Alessandra continues to enjoy her comfortable
demaine
, I trust. Comfortable—some might say
lavish
, especially given the rather modest salary of the Vatican curator who supports her.” He sighed, shook his head contentedly. “But I like to think that I've made my contribution to that worthy cause.”

Monsignor Battaglia could feel his face turn red. A vein on his temple started to throb.

“Perhaps there is an accommodation that we might reach,” Battaglia said at last.

*   *   *

Those thick-lensed round spectacles were starting to give Bryson a splitting headache, but at least he had achieved what he'd come to Rome to do. He was exhausted, having landed the small plane at an airfield outside of Kiev, safely outside of Russian airspace, and taken two connecting flights on a commercial airliner to Rome. The call he had placed to the Monsignor had been answered right away, as he knew it would be, for the curator was almost always interested in what Giles Hesketh-Haywood had to offer.

Giles Hesketh-Haywood, one of Bryson's many carefully manufactured legends, had often come in useful in his previous career.

As a connoisseur of, and dealer in, antiquities, he naturally had reason to travel to places like Sicily, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, and elsewhere. He deflected suspicion by
prompting
suspicion: an elementary exercise in misdirection. Since alert officials assumed he was a smuggler, it never crossed their minds that he might be a spy. And most of them, of course, were only too happy to accept his bribes: if they didn't, after all, others surely would.

The small item appeared the very next morning in
L'Osservatore Romano
, the official Vatican newspaper, with over five million copies sold worldwide.
OGGETTO SPARITO DAI MUSEI VATICANI?
ITEM STOLEN FROM VATICAN COLLECTION?
the headline read.

According to the account, the Vatican museum had discovered, in their annual inventory, that it was missing a rare Sung Dynasty chess set made of carved jade. The exquisite jade set had been brought back from China by Marco Polo in the early fourteenth century and presented to the Doge of Venice. Cesare Borgia acquired the set in 1500, and after his death, it was presented to one of the Medici Popes, Leo X, who cherished it; it even appears in the background of one of his great portraits. In 1549, Pope Paul III used it to play a match against the legendary chess master Paulo Boi and was defeated.

The newspaper article quoted a spokesman for the Vatican museum emphatically denying the charge. At the same time, however, the museum refused to offer proof that it still possessed the rare chess set. There was a brief, indignant quote from senior curator Monsignor Lorenzo Battaglia to the effect that the Vatican museum had hundreds of thousands of distinct items in its catalogs, and that, given the vastness of its holdings, it was inevitable that some objects might be temporarily mislaid; there was no reason in the world to jump to the conclusion that an act of theft had taken place.

Over caffe latté in his suite at the Hassler, Nick Bryson read the piece with professional satisfaction. He hadn't asked that much of the Monsignor. The denials, after all, were true. The legendary Sung Dynasty jade chess set still safely reposed in one of the Vatican's hundreds of storage vaults; like most of the immense Vatican holdings, it was never displayed. It had not been displayed for over forty years, in fact. It had not been stolen—but anybody reading the paper would conclude otherwise.

And Bryson was certain that the right people would be reading this article.