The Prometheus Deception (7 page)

“Mr. Bryson,” the man said in a husky voice, the accent New Jersey. He was in his mid-fifties, Bryson estimated, with a thatch of white hair, the face narrow and creased; he wore an unstylish brown suit. “You know who I am?”

“Somebody with a lot of explaining to do.”

The government man nodded, his hands raised in a gesture of contrition. “We fucked up, Mr. Bryson, or Jonas Barrett if you prefer. I take full responsibility. Reason I've come up here is to apologize to you personally. And also to explain.”

An image from a TV screen came to Bryson, white letters beneath a talking head. “You're Harry Dunne. Deputy chairman of the CIA.” Bryson remembered watching him testify to a Congressional subcommittee once or twice.

“I need to talk to you,” the man said.

“I've got nothing to say to you. I wish I could direct you toward your Mr. Breyer or whatever his name is, but I'm drawing a blank.”

“I'm not asking you to
say
anything. I'm just asking you to
listen
.”

“Those were your goons, I take it.”

“Yes, they were,” Dunne admitted. “They overstepped the bounds. They also underestimated you—they figured, wrongly, that after five years out of the field you'd gone soft. You've also taught them a couple of key tactical lessons that will no doubt come in handy for them down the road. Especially Eldridge, once he gets stitched up.” There was a dry rattle in his throat when he laughed. “So now I'm asking you nice as I can. All aboveboard.” Dunne walked slowly over to the porch where Bryson was leaning against a wooden column, his arms folded behind his back. Taped to his upper back was the Beretta, which he could mobilize in an instant if he had to. On television, on the Sunday-morning talking-head shows, Dunne possessed a somewhat commanding presence; in person, he seemed almost shrunken, a little too small for his clothes.

“I have no lessons to teach,” Bryson protested. “All I did was defend myself against a couple of men who were in the wrong place and didn't seem to wish me well.”

“The Directorate trained you well, I'll say that much.”

“I wish I knew what you were talking about.”

“You know full well. Your reticence is to be expected.”

“I think you've got the wrong man,” Bryson said quietly. “A case of mistaken identity. I don't know what you're referring to.”

The CIA man exhaled noisily, followed by a rattling cough. “Unfortunately, not all of your former colleagues are as discreet, or maybe the correct word is
principled
, as you. Oaths of fealty and secrecy tend to loosen their holds when money changes hands, and I do mean serious money. None of your former colleagues came cheap.”

“Now you've really lost me.”

“Nicholas Loring Bryson, born Athens, Greece, the only son of General and Mrs. George Wynter Bryson,” the CIA man recited, almost in a monotone. “Graduated from St. Alban's School in Washington, D.C., Stanford, and Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. Recruited while at Stanford into an all-but-invisible intelligence agency known to the very few who know about it as the Directorate. Trained in fieldwork, fifteen highly successful and secretly decorated years of service, with operations ranging from—”

“Nice bio,” Bryson interrupted. “Wish it were mine. We academics sometimes like to imagine what it might be like to live an active life outside these cloistered, ivied walls.” He spoke with some bravado. His legend was designed to evade suspicion, not withstand it.

“Neither one of us has any time to waste,” Dunne said. “In any case, I do hope you realize that we intended no harm.”

“I realize no such thing. You CIA boys, from everything I've read, have a long menu of ways to inflict harm. A bullet in the brain, for one. Twelve hours on a scopolamine drip, for another. Shall we talk about poor Nosenko, who made the mistake of defecting to our side? He got the red-carpet treatment from you gentlemen, didn't he? Twenty-eight months in a padded crypt. Whatever it took to break him, you were all too willing to do.”

“You're talking ancient history, Bryson. But I understand and accept your suspicion. What can I do to allay it?”

“What's more suspicious than the need to allay suspicion?”

“If I really wanted to take you down,” Dunne said, “we wouldn't be having this conversation, and you know that.”

“It might not be quite as easy as you think,” Bryson said, his tone blasé. He smiled coldly to let the CIA man pick up on the implied threat. He had given up the pretense; there seemed little point.

“We know what you can do with your hands and your feet. No demonstrations are required. All I'm asking you for is your ears.”

“So you say.”
How much did the Agency really know about him, about his Directorate career? How could the security firewall have been breached?

“Listen, Bryson, kidnappers don't supplicate. I guess you know I'm not a man who makes house calls every day. I've got something to tell you, and it won't be easy to hear. You know our Blue Ridge facility?”

Bryson shrugged.

“I want to take you there. I need you to listen to what I've got to tell you, watch what I've got to show you. Then, if you want, you can go home, and we'll never bother you again.” He gestured toward the car. “Come with me.”

“What you're proposing is sheer madness. You do realize this, don't you? A couple of third-rate thugs show up outside my class and try to strong-arm me into a car. Then a man I've seen only on TV news shows—a high official in an intelligence agency with little credibility to speak of, frankly—shows up on my front lawn trying to entice me with a titillating combination of threats and lures. How do you expect me to respond?”

Dunne's gaze did not waver. “Frankly, I expect you'll come anyway.”

“What makes you so sure?”

Dunne was silent for a moment. “It's the only way you'll ever satisfy your curiosity,” he said at last. “It's the only way you'll ever know the truth.”

Bryson snorted. “The truth about
what?
”

“For starters,” the CIA man said very quietly, “the truth about yourself.”

THREE

In the Blue Ridge mountains of western Virginia, near the borders with Tennessee and North Carolina, the CIA maintains a secluded area of hardwood forest interspersed with northern spruce, hemlock, and white pine, about two hundred acres in all. Part of the Little Wilson Creek wilderness, within the Jefferson National Forest, it is a rugged territory of a wide range of elevations, dotted with lakes, streams, creeks, and waterfalls, far removed from the main hiking trails. The nearest towns, Troutdale and Volney, are none too close. This wilderness preserve, enclosed by electric security fence and topped with concertina wire, is known within the Agency by the generic, colorless, and quite forgettable name of the Range.

There, certain exotic forms of instrumentation, such as miniaturized explosives, are tested amid the rocky outcroppings. Various transmitters and tracking devices are put through their paces there, too, their frequencies calibrated away from the surveillance range of hostile parties.

It is entirely possible to spend time on the Range and never notice the low-slung concrete-and-glass building that serves as combination administrative headquarters, training and conference facility, and barracks. This building is situated a hundred yards or so from a helipad clearing that, owing to peculiarities of elevation and vegetation, is nearly impossible to find.

Harry Dunne had said little during the trip there. In fact, the only opportunity for chat had been the brief limousine ride to the campus helipad; during the helicopter trip to Virginia, both men, accompanied by Dunne's silent aide-decamp, wore protective noise-insulating headphones. Debarking from the dark green government helicopter, the three men were met by an anonymous-looking assistant.

Bryson and Dunne, the assistants in tow, passed through the facility's unremarkable-looking main lobby and descended a set of stairs into a subterranean, spartan, low-ceilinged chamber. On the smooth, white-painted walls were mounted, like blank rectangular canvases, a pair of large, flat, gas-plasma display monitors. The two men took their seats at a gleaming table of brushed steel. One of the silent assistants disappeared; the other took a seat at a station just outside the closed door to the chamber.

As soon as Dunne and Bryson were seated, Dunne began to speak without ceremony or preface. “Let me tell you what I believe you believe,” he began. “You believe you're a fucking unsung hero. This is in fact the central unshakable conviction that has enabled you to endure a decade and a half of tension so brutal, any lesser man would have cracked long ago. You believe you spent fifteen years in the service of your country, working for an ultraclandestine agency known as the Directorate. Virtually nobody else, even at the highest levels of the U.S. government, knows of its existence, with the possible exception of the chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a couple of key players in the White House who've been cleared up the wazoo. A closed loop—or rather, as close as you can come to a closed loop in this fallen world.”

Bryson took measured breaths, determined not to betray his emotions by any visible display of shock. Yet he was shocked: the CIA man knew of matters that had been cloaked with extraordinary thoroughness.

“Ten years ago, you even received a Presidential Medal of Honor for services rendered above and beyond,” Dunne went on. “But, your operations being so hush-hush, there was no ceremony, no president, and I bet you didn't even get to keep the medal.” Bryson flashed back to the moment: Waller opening the box and showing him the heavy brass object. Of course, it would have put operational secrecy unacceptably at risk if Bryson had been invited to the White House for the presentation; still, he'd swelled with pride all the same. Waller had asked him if it bothered him—the fact that he'd achieved the highest civilian honor in America and nobody would ever know. And Bryson, moved, told him honestly no—Waller knew, the president knew; his work had made the world just a little safer, and that was enough. He'd meant it, too. That, in a nutshell, was the ethos of the Directorate.

Now Dunne pressed a sequence of buttons on a control panel embedded in the steel-topped table, and the twin flat screens shimmered into vibrant display. There was a photograph of Bryson as an undergraduate at Stanford—not an official portrait, but a candid, taken without his knowledge. Another of him in a mountain region of Peru, clad in fatigues; this dissolved into an image of him with dyed skin and grizzled beard, impersonating one Jamil Al-Moualem, a Syrian munitions expert.

Astonishment is an emotion impossible to sustain for any length of time: Bryson felt his shock gradually ebbing into sharp annoyance, then anger. Obviously he'd been caught in the middle of some interagency squabble over the legality of Directorate methods.

“Fascinating,” Bryson interjected dryly, finally breaking his silence, “but I suggest you take up these matters with others better placed to discuss them. Teaching is my only profession these days, as I assume you know.”

Dunne reached over and gave Bryson a comradely pat on his shoulder, no doubt intended to reassure. “My friend, the question isn't what we know. It's what
you
know—and, more to the point, what you
don't
. You believe you've spent fifteen years in the service of your country.” Dunne turned and gave Bryson a penetrating stare.

Quietly, steely, Bryson answered, “I know I did.”

“And you see, that's where you're wrong. What if I told you that the Directorate in fact isn't part of the United States government? That it never was. Quite the fucking contrary.” Dunne leaned back in his chair and ran a hand through his rumpled white mane. “Ah, shit, this isn't going to be easy for you to hear. It's not easy for me to say, I'll tell you that. Twenty years ago, I had to bring a guy in. He thought he'd been spying for Israel, and was a real zealot about it. I had to explain to him that he'd been false-flagged. It was Libya that was paying for his services. All the contacts, the controls, the hotel-room rendezvous in Tel Aviv—all part of the setup. Pretty flimsy one, at that. Fucker shouldn't have been double-dealing anyway. But even I had to feel sorry for him when he learned who his real employers were. I'll never forget his face.”

Bryson's own face was burning hot. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“We were supposed to arraign him in a sealed Justice Department courtroom the next day. Guy shot himself before we had the chance.” One of the gas-plasma screens dissolved into another image. “Here's the guy who recruited you, right?”

It was a photograph of Herbert Woods, Bryson's adviser at Stanford and an eminent historian. Woods had always liked Bryson, admired the fact that he spoke a dozen languages fluently, had an unsurpassed gift for memorization. Probably liked the fact that he was no slouch as an athlete either. Sound mind, sound body—Woods was big on that.

The screen went blank, then flared with a grainy photo of a young Woods on a city street that Bryson immediately recognized as the old Gorky Street in Moscow, which after the end of the Cold War became Tverskaya once again, its pre-Revolutionary name.

Bryson laughed, bitterly, not bothering to hide his ridicule. “This is insanity. You're going to ‘reveal' to me the ‘damning' fact that Herb Woods was a commie when he was young. Well, sorry: everyone knows that. He never hid his past. That's why he was such a staunch anti-Communist: he knew firsthand how seductive all that foolish utopian rhetoric could be once upon a time.”

Dunne shook his head, his facial expression cryptic. “Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. I told you before that all I wanted you to do was listen. You're a historian now, right? Well, bear with me while I give you a quick history lesson. You know about the Trust, of course.”