The Prometheus Deception

by Robert Ludlum

  “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 c
apillaries 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.

  Still, Waller had told the truth: this was a good life.

  Now Jonas Barrett looked out over a packed auditorium, at a hundred expectant faces. He’d been amused when the Campus Confidential had called him, after only his first year of teaching at Woodbridge, an “icily charismatic lecturer, more Professor Kingsfield than Mr. Chips,” and remarked on his “stone-faced, slyly ironic visage.” Whatever the reasons, his course on Byzantium was among the most popular classes in the history department.

  He glanced at his watch: it was time to wrap up the lecture and gesture toward the next. “The Roman Empire had been the most astonishing political achievement in human history, and the question that has haunted so many thinkers is, of course, why it fell,” he intoned in a high professorial manner laced with a tincture of irony. “You all know the sad tale. The light of civilization flickered and dimmed. The barbarians at the gate. The destruction of humanity’s best hope, right?” There was murmured assent. “Horseshit!” he exclaimed suddenly, and a surprised titter was followed by a sudden hush. “Pardon my Macedonian.” He looked around the lecture hall, his arched-brow expression challenging. “The Romans, so called, lost their claim to the moral high ground way before they lost their claim to empire. It was the Romans who avenged an early set-to with the Goths by taking Goth children they’d seized as hostages, marching them into the public squares of dozens of towns, then slaughtering them one by one. Slowly and painfully. As far as sheer calculated bloodthirstiness, nothing the Goths ever did could compare. The western Roman Empire was an arena of slavery and bloodsport. By contrast, the eastern Roman Empire was far more benign, and it survived the so-called fall of the Roman Empire. ‘Byzantium’ is only what the Westerners called it—the Byzantines always knew themselves as the true Roman Empire, and they safeguarded the scholarship and the humane values we cherish today. The west succumbed not to enemies from without, but rot from within—this much is true. And so civilization didn’t flicker and dim. It just moved east.” A pause. “You can come by and pick up your papers now. And enjoy your weekend, as much as you deem wise. Just remember Petronius: Moderation in all things. Including moderation.”

  * * *

  “Professor Barrett?” The young woman was blond and fetching, one of those students who listens gravely and always sits in the front rows. He had stowed away his lecture notes and was fastening the straps of his battered leather satchel. He barely listened as she talked, complaining about a grade received, the tone urgent, the words banal, utterly familiar: I worked so hard … I feel I did my very best … I really, really tried … She followed as he walked toward the door, then to the parking lot outside the classroom building, until he reached his car. “Why don’t we discuss this during office hours tomorrow?” he suggested gently.

  “But Professor…”

  Something’s wrong.

  “I guess I feel it’s the grade that was wrong, Professor.”

  He hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud. But his antennae were buzzing. Why? Out of some sudden, baseless paranoia? Was he going to end up like one of those Vietnam posttraumatics who jump whenever they hear a car backfire?

  A sound, something definitely out of place. He turned toward the student, but not to look at her. Instead, to look past her, beyond her, to whatever had flickered in his peripheral vision. Yes, there was something amiss in the general vicinity. Strolling too casually in his direction, as if enjoying the spring air, the verdant setting, was a broad-shouldered man in a charcoal flannel suit, white shirt, and perfectly knotted rep tie. That wasn’t academic garb at Woodbridge, not even for administrators, and the weather was too warm for flannel. This was indeed an outsider, but one feigning—attempting to feign—that he belonged.

  Bryson’s field instincts were signaling wildly. His scalp tightened and his eyes began scanning from side to side, like a photographer testing different focal points in rapid succession: the old habits were returning, unbidden and somehow atavistic, rudely out of place.

  But why? Surely there was no reason to be alarmed over a campus visitor—a parent, an official from Washington’s educational bureaucracy, maybe even some high-level salesman. Bryson did a quick assessment. The man’s jacket was unbuttoned, and he caught a glimpse of maroon braces holding the man’s trousers up. Yet the man was also wearing a belt and the trousers were cut long, breaking deeply over the man’s black, rubber-soled shoes. A surge of adrenaline: he’d worn similar attire himself, in a previous life. Sometimes you needed to wear a belt as well as suspenders because you were carrying a heavy object in one or both of your front pockets—a large-caliber revolver, say. And you needed the cuffs a little too long to ensure that your ankle holster was well concealed. Dress for success, Ted Waller used to advise, explaining how a man in evening dress could conceal a veritable arsenal if the fabric was tailored just right.

  I’m out of the game! Leave me in peace!


  But there was no peace; there never would be any peace. Once you were in you could never get out, even if the paychecks stopped and the health benefits expired.

  Hostile parties around the world thirsted for revenge. No matter what precautions you took, no matter how elaborate the cover, how intricate the extraction. If they really wanted to find me, they could. To think otherwise was delusional. This was the unwritten certainty among the Directorate’s operatives.

  But who’s to say they’re not from the Directorate itself, doing a full sterilization, in that cynical phrase—removing the splinters, mopping up? Bryson had never met anyone who had retired from the Directorate, though surely such retirees did exist. But if someone at the consortium level in the Directorate came to doubt his loyalties, he, too, would be the victim of a full sterilization. It was a virtual certainty.

  I’m out, I’ve put it behind!

  Yet who would believe him?

  Nick Bryson—for he was Nick Bryson now, Jonas Barrett gone by the wayside, discarded like a snake’s shed skin—looked closely at the man in the suit. The man’s salt-and-pepper hair was brush cut, the face broad and ruddy. Bryson tensed as the interloper approached, smiling as he did so and showing small white teeth. “Mr. Barrett?” the man called from halfway across the emerald lawn.

  The man’s face was a mask of reassurance, and that was the final giveaway, the mark of a professional. A civilian hailing a stranger always exhibited at least some tentativeness.

  Directorate?

  Directorate personnel were better than this, smoother and less obvious.

  “Laura,” he said quietly to the student, “I need you to leave me and go back into Severeid Hall. Wait at my office upstairs.”