The Prometheus Deception (5 page)

Elena said nothing for the first several hours. Bryson attempted to make conversation, but she remained taciturn, though whether she was shy or just nervous he could not tell. They passed through the county of Bihor and neared the frontier crossing point at Bors, from where they would cross over to Biharkeresztes in Hungary. They had driven through the night and were making good time; everything seemed to be going smoothly—too smoothly, Bryson thought, for the Balkans, where a thousand little things could go wrong.

So it did not surprise him when he saw the flashing lights of a police car, a blue-uniformed policeman inspecting oncoming traffic, about eight kilometers from the border. Nor did it surprise him when the policeman waved them over to the side of the road.

“What the hell is this?” he said to Elena Petrescu, forcing a blasé tone as the jackbooted policeman approached.

“Just a routine traffic stop,” she replied.

“I hope you're right,” Bryson said, rolling down the window. His Romanian was fluent but the accent was not native; the Hungarian passport would explain that. He prepared himself to quarrel with the cop, as would any long-haul truck driver annoyed by some petty inconvenience.

The policeman asked him for his papers and the truck's registration. He inspected them; everything was in order.

Was something wrong? Bryson asked in Romanian.

Officiously, the policeman waved a hand toward the truck's headlights. One of them was burned out. But he would not let them go so easily. He wanted to know what was in the truck.

“Exports,” replied Bryson.

“Open,” said the policeman.

Sighing with annoyance, Bryson got out of the cab and went to unlock the tailgate. A semiautomatic pistol was holstered at his back, concealed inside his gray muslin work jacket; he would use it only if he had to, for killing the policeman was enormously risky. Not only was there the chance of being seen by a passing motorist, but if the officer had radioed in the truck's license plate numbers while he was pulling them over, his dispatcher would be waiting for a further communication. If none came, others would be called in, the truck's plates flagged at border control. Bryson did not want to have to kill the man, but he realized he might not have any choice.

As he pulled open the rear door, he could see the cop eyeing the crates of wine and
tzuica
greedily. Bryson found that reassuring: perhaps a bribe of a case or two of spirits would be enough to satisfy the man and send him on his way. But the policeman began pawing through the crates as if inventorying them, and he quickly reached the false wall, a mere two feet or so in. Eyes narrowed in suspicion, the Romanian tapped at the wall, heard the hollowness.

“Hey, what the fuck is this?” he exclaimed.

Bryson slipped his right hand around to the holstered pistol, but just then he saw Elena Petrescu saunter around the back of the truck, one hand placed saucily on her left hip. She was chewing gum, and her face was heavily made up with too much lipstick, mascara, and rouge: she must have applied it while she sat waiting in the cab. She looked like a vamp, a prostitute. Working her jaw up and down, she leaned in very close to the policeman and said,
“Ce curu' meu vrei?”
What the fuck do you want?

“Fututi gura!”
said the policeman. Fuck you! He reached behind the crates with both hands, running them along the false back, obviously feeling for a pull or knob or lever to open it. Bryson's stomach plummeted as the man gripped the indentation that opened the secret compartment. There was no explaining the seven concealed passengers; the policeman would have to be killed. And what the hell was Elena doing, antagonizing him further?

“Let me ask you something, comrade,” she said in a quiet, insinuating voice. “How much is your life worth to you?”

The cop whirled around, glaring at her. “What the fuck are you talking about, whore?”

“I ask you, how much is your life worth? Because you're not just about to end a good career. You're about to buy yourself a one-way ticket to the psychiatric prison. Maybe to some pauper's grave.”

Bryson was aghast: she was destroying everything, she had to be stopped!

The policeman opened the canvas pouch that hung around his neck and took out a bulky, old, military-style field telephone, which he began to dial.

“If you're making a call, I suggest you make it directly to the Securitate headquarters, and ask for Dragan himself.” Bryson stared incredulously: Major General Radu Dragan was the second-in-command at the secret police, notoriously corrupt and said to be sexually “dissolute.”

The policeman stopped dialing, his eyes searching Elena's face. “You threaten me, bitch?”

She snapped her gum. “Hey, I don't care what you do. If you want to interfere with Securitate business of the highest and most confidential nature, be my guest. I just do my job. Dragan likes his Magyar virgins, and when he's done with them, I always drop my girls off across the border like I'm supposed to. You want to get in my way, fine. You wanna be the hero who makes Dragan's little weakness public, it's up to you. But I sure as hell wouldn't want to be you, or anyone who knows you.” She rolled her eyes. “Come on, dial Dragan's office.” She recited a number with a Bucharest area code and exchange.

Slowly, dazed, the policeman punched out the numbers, then put the handset to his ear. His eyes widened and he quickly disconnected the call: he had obviously connected with the Securitate.

He turned around quickly, striding away from the truck, muttering profuse apologies as he got into his cruiser and drove off.

Later, as the border guards waved them through, Bryson said to Elena, “Was that really the Securitate's phone number?”

“Of course,” she said indignantly.

“How did you—?”

“I'm good with numbers,” she said. “Didn't they tell you that?”

*   *   *

At the wedding, Ted Waller was Nick's best man. Elena's parents had been relocated, under new identities, to Rovinj, on the Istrian coast of the Adriatic, under Directorate protection; for reasons of security, she was not allowed to visit them, a proscription she accepted, with a heavy heart, as a terrible necessity.

She had been offered work as a cryptographer in Directorate headquarters doing code-breaking and signals-intercept analysis. She was immensely gifted, perhaps the finest cryptographer they'd ever had, and she loved the work. “I have you, and I have my work—and if only I had my parents near me, my life would be perfect!” she once said. When Nick first told Waller that things were getting serious between the two, he felt almost as if he were asking permission to get married. A father's permission? An
employer's
permission? He wasn't sure. A life in the Directorate meant that there were no sharp boundaries between matters private and professional. But he had met Elena on Directorate business, and it seemed appropriate to let Waller know. Waller had seemed genuinely overjoyed. “You've finally met your match,” he said, grinning broadly, and he instantly produced an iced bottle of vintage Dom Pérignon, like a magician extracting a nickel from a child's ear.

Bryson thought back to their honeymoon, spent in a tiny, verdant, nearly uninhabited island in the Caribbean. The beach was pink sand; a ways inland were almost magical groves of tamarisk beside a little brook. They went exploring there for the sole purpose of getting lost, or pretending to, and then losing themselves, losing themselves in each other. Time out of time, she'd called it. When he thought of Elena, he recalled their setting out to get lost—it was a minor ritual of theirs—and reminding themselves that so long as they had each other, they were never lost at all.

But now he had lost her for real, and felt lost himself, rootless, anchorless. The big empty house was silent, but he could hear her bruised voice over the sterile line as she said, quietly, that she was leaving him. It was a thunderbolt, yet it shouldn't have been. No, it wasn't the months of separation, she insisted; it was far deeper than that, far more fundamental.
I don't know you anymore
, she had told him.
I don't know you, and I don't trust you
.

He loved her, goddamn it, he
loved
her: wasn't that enough? His pleas were clamorous, impassioned. But the damage had been done. Falseness, hardness, coldness—they were traits that kept a field operative alive, but they were also traits that he'd started to bring home, and no marriage could survive that. He had kept things from her—one incident in particular—and for that he felt enormously guilty.

And so she was going to leave, to rebuild her life without him. Request transfer out of headquarters. Her voice on the sterile line sounded both as close as the next room and eerily distant. She said nothing heatedly, and yet her very lack of expression was what was so hard to bear. Seemingly, there was nothing to discuss or debate: it was the tone of someone pointing out a self-evident fact—that two plus two was four, that the sun rose in the east.

He remembered the stricken sensation that came over him. “Elena,” he said, “do you know what you
mean
to me?”

Her response—leaden, beyond hurt—still echoed in his mind: “I don't even think you know who I am.”

Once he returned from Tunisia and found her gone from their house, all her things gone, he'd tried to track her down, implored Ted Waller to help, with whatever resources were at his disposal. There were a thousand things he wanted to say to her. But it was as if she had vanished from the face of the earth. She did not intend to be found, and she would not be found, and Waller would not violate that. Waller was right about her; he'd met his match.

*   *   *

Alcohol, in sufficient quantities, is Novocain for the mind. The trouble is that when it wears off, the throbbing pain returns, and the only remedy is more alcohol. The days and weeks that followed his return from Tunisia became mere shards, fractured images. Images in sepia. He would take out the garbage and notice the sound, the bright clinking of glass liter bottles. The phone would ring; he never picked it up. Once the doorbell rang: Chris Edgecomb was at his door, in violation of every Directorate stricture. “I got worried, man,” he'd said, and he looked it, too.

Bryson didn't want to think about what he himself might look like to a visitor—haunted, unkempt, unshaven. “They send you?”

“Are you kidding? They'd have my ass if they knew I was here.”

Bryson supposed this was what was called an intervention. He couldn't remember the words he spoke to Edgecomb, only that he'd pronounced them with emphatic finality. The kid wouldn't come again.

Mostly, Bryson remembered waking up after a binge, twitching and blinking, his nerves feeling peeled raw; he had the vanilla stench of bourbon, the juniper acridity of gin. Staring at his morning face in the mirror, all inflamed capillaries and dark hollows. Trying to force down some scrambled eggs, and gagging at the smell.

A few isolated sounds, a few scattered images. Not a lost weekend; a lost three months.

His neighbors in Falls Church evinced little interest, perhaps out of politeness or indifference. He was, what, a corporate accounting exec for some industrial supplies firm, wasn't he? Guy must have got laid off. He'd either pull out of it, or he wouldn't. The professional-managerial casualties of the Beltway economy seldom invite compassion; besides, the neighbors knew better than to make inquiries. In suburbia you kept your distance.

Then one day in August, something shifted within him. He saw the purple asters start to bloom, flowers that Elena had planted the year before, pushing through with defiance, as if nurtured by neglect. He would do likewise. The trash bags no longer clinked as he toted them to the curb. He began to eat real food, three times a day, even. He still moved shakily at first, but a couple of weeks later he slicked his hair down, shaved carefully, got into a business suit, and made his way to 1324 K Street.

Waller tried to mask his relief with professional detachment, but Bryson could see it in his glittering eyes. “Who was it who said there are no second acts in American lives?” Waller said quietly.

Bryson returned the gaze steadily, calmly. Waiting, at peace with himself at last.

Waller smiled, just barely—one would have had to know him well to recognize it as a smile—and handed him the canary file folder. “Let's call this a third act.”

TWO

Five Years Later

Woodbridge College, in western Pennsylvania, was a small school, but it exuded a sense of quiet prosperity, of exclusivity beyond the norm. One saw it in the manicured
greenness
of the place: the emerald lawns and perfect flower borders of an institution that could pay lavishly for aesthetic incidentals. The architecture was the brick-and-ivy, collegiate-Gothic style typical of so much university construction from the twenties. From a distance, it might have passed for one of the ancient colleges of Cambridge or Oxford—if the college was taken out of those shabby, light-industrial towns and placed in the middle of Arcadia. It was a sheltered, secure, conservative establishment, a place to which America's richest and most powerful families had no anxieties about sending their impressionable scions. The campus convenience stores and eateries did a brisk business in latté and focaccia. Even during the late sixties, the college remained, as its then-president had once famously joked, a “hotbed of rest.”

“Jonas Barrett,” to his own surprise, turned out to be a gifted lecturer, his courses far more popular than the subjects he taught would normally have justified. Some of the students were bright, and almost all of them more studious and better behaved than he'd ever been in his own college days. One of his faculty colleagues, a wry, Brooklyn-bred physicist who used to teach at the City College of New York, had observed to him, shortly after he'd settled in, that the place made you feel like an eighteenth-century live-in tutor, responsible for educating the children of an English lord. You lived amid splendor, but it wasn't exactly yours.