The Prometheus Deception

by Robert Ludlum

“I believe you. Now, there’s a cathedral up the hill—”

  “The main Cathedral of Santiago. The square surrounding it, the Praza do Obradoiro, sometimes called Praza de Espana, is the endpoint of the pilgrim’s journey, always crowded. A good place to lose our pursuers, find a vehicle. We have to get out of this open area immediately.”

  They started up the eucalyptus-lined path. Suddenly a pair of bicyclists zoomed by, veering around them just a few inches away, then continued up the path. Entirely innocent, presumably a couple of pilgrims heading for the center of town, but it startled Bryson. Perhaps the loss of some blood had dulled his reactions. The assassins sent by the Directorate were disguised, with diabolical cleverness, as religious pilgrims. Anyone they passed, anyone in a crowd, could be a killer sent to terminate him. At least in a minefield the trained eye could distinguish the mine from the field. Here, there was no such distinction.

  Except the familiarity of the faces.

  Some—not all, but some of the dispatch agents, the leaders—were men Bryson knew, had had dealings with in the past, however casual or distant. They had been sent because they could more easily find him in a crowd. But the sword was double-edged: if they recognized him, he would recognize them. If he remained alert, watchful, he would see them before they saw him. It was not much of an advantage, but it was all he had, and he would have to exploit it to its maximum extent.

  “Wait,” he said abruptly. “I’ve been spotted, and so have you. They may not know who you are, not yet. But me, they know. And there’s the bloodstained shirt, the red tourniquet. No, we can’t give them that.”

  She nodded. “Let me get us another change of clothes.”

  They were thinking along the same lines. “I’ll wait here—no, strike that.” He pointed to a small, moss-covered ancient cathedral surrounded by gardens planted with exotic species of flora. “I’ll wait inside there.”

  “Good.” She hurried up the path toward the main square while he turned back toward the church.

  * * *

  He waited anxiously in the dim, cool, deserted cathedral. A few times the heavy wooden doors to the church opened; each time it was a genuine pilgrim or tourist, or so they appeared. Women with children, young couples. Watching from a concealed alcove off the narthex, he studied each one. One could never be sure, but none of the signs were present, nothing that alerted his internal alarms. Twenty minutes later the doors opened again; it was Layla, holding a paper-wrapped bundle.

  They changed, separately, in the cathedral’s restrooms. She had accurately estimated his size. Now they were dressed in the plain garb of middle-class tourists: a simple skirt and blouse for her with a broad-brimmed, gaily decorated sun hat; khaki pants, a white short-sleeved knit shirt, and a baseball cap for him. She had managed to locate a couple of large bandages and an iodine-based disinfectant to temporarily cleanse the wound. She had even provided them with cameras—a cheap video camera, sans film, for him; an even cheaper 35mm camera on a neck strap for her.

  Ten minutes later, each of them wearing modish sunglasses, walking hand in hand like honeymooners, they entered the immense, bustling Praza do Obradoiro. The square was filled with pilgrims, tourists, students; vendors hawked postcards and souvenirs. Bryson stopped before the cathedral, pretending to take some video footage of the baroque eighteenth-century facade, the centerpiece of which was the Pórtico de la Gloria, the astonishing Spanish Romanesque twelfth-century sculpture crowded with the likenesses of angels and demons, monsters and prophets. As he looked through the telephoto lens of the viewfinder, he moved the camera from the portico, sweeping across the facade of the cathedral, then panning across the crowd of tourists and pilgrims, as if capturing the entire scene on video, an amateur cinematographer.

  Putting down the video camera, he turned to Layla, smiling and nodding like a proud tourist. She touched his arm, the two of them engaged in an exaggerated pantomime of honeymooner affection in order to deflect the suspicions of any who might be watching. His disguise was minimal, but at least the peak of the baseball cap cast a shadow across his face. Perhaps it would be enough to induce uncertainty, raise doubts in any watchers.

  Then Bryson became aware of a movement, a synchronized shifting, on several points in the distance. Everywhere around him was filled with motion, but against that background was a coordinated, symmetrical movement. The perception would not have registered with anyone who had not had his extensive field experience. But it was there, he was sure of it!

  “Layla,” he said quietly, “I want you to laugh at something I just said.”

  “Laugh…?”

  “Right now. I’ve just told you something hysterically funny.”

  Abruptly she laughed, throwing her head back in abandon. It was an utterly convincing act that Bryson, even though he had requested it, expected it, found unnerving. She was a skilled performer. She had instantly become the entranced lover who found her new husband’s every witticism hugely entertaining. Bryson smiled in modest, yet gratified, acknowledgment of his own cleverness. As he smiled, he picked up the video camera and looked through the viewfinder, panning it over the crowd around them as he had done a moment ago. But this time he was looking for something specific.

  Through her smile, Layla’s voice was tense. “You see something?”

  He found it.

  A classic triad formation. At three points around the square, three persons stood very still, peering through binoculars in Bryson’s direction. Individually, none of them was remarkable or worthy of attention; each might have been a tourist taking in the sights. But together, they represented an ominous pattern. On one side of the praza was a young woman, with flaxen hair worn up, wearing a blazer that was too warm for such a hot day, though it would serve to conceal a shoulder holster. On another side, representing the second point of an isosceles triangle, was a fleshy-faced, bearded man of chunky build, garbed in black clerical vestments; his high-powered binoculars seemed jarring, not the sort of optical equipment likely to be used by a man of the cloth. At the third leg of the triangle was another man, of sinewy build and swarthy complexion, in his early forties; it was this man who tugged at Bryson’s memory, demanded closer inspection. Bryson touched the button for the zoom lens, tightening the shot, moving in for a close-up of the swarthy man.

  He felt his insides go cold.

  He knew the man, had dealt with him several times on some high-priority assignments. He had in fact hired the man on behalf of the Directorate. He was a peasant named Paolo from a village outside of Cividale. Paolo always operated in tandem with his brother, Niccolo. The two of them had been legendary game hunters in the remote hill country of northwestern Italy where they had grown up, and so they had easily become highly skilled hunters of human beings, assassins of rare talent. The brothers were much-sought-after bounty hunters, mercenaries, killers for hire, jobbers. In his past life, Bryson had hired them for the occasional odd job, including a dangerous infiltration of a Russian firm called Vector, which had been rumored to be involved in bioweapons research and manufacture.

  Where Paolo went, so did Niccolo. That meant there was at least one other, positioned somewhere outside the legs of the triad.

  Bryson’s heart thudded; his scalp went prickly.

  But how had they located him and Layla so easily? They had lost the pursuers, he had been sure; how had they been found once again, in a crowd of this size, particularly having changed outfits, altered the configuration?

  Was it something about the clothes—too new, too bright, somehow not quite right? But Bryson had taken pains to scuff up his brand-new leather loafers on the pavement outside the church where they had stopped, and had seen to it that Layla did the same. He had even soiled their clothes with a light sprinkling of dust.

  How had they been found?

  The answer came to him in a slow, sickening realization, a terrible certainty. He felt the warmth of blood on his left shoulder, which had oozed out from the bandage; he did not have to look at it, o
r touch it, to be sure. The gunshot wound had continued to bleed steadily, profusely, seeping into the fabric of his knit shirt, turning a large area of his yellow shirt crimson. The blood had been the giveaway, the beacon, negating all the precautions they had taken, penetrating their disguise.

  His pursuers had finally located him, and now they were moving in for the kill.

  Washington, D.C.

  Senator James Cassidy could feel the eyes of his colleagues on him—some bored, some wary—as he stood up heavily, spread his thick, spotted hands on the well-rubbed wooden rail, and began to speak in a rich, dulcet baritone. “In our chambers and committee rooms, we go on a great deal, all of us, about scarce resources and endangered species. We talk about how best to manage our diminishing natural resources in an era when everything seems to be for sale, when everything has a price tag and a bar code. Well, I’m here to say something about another kind of endangered species, a vanishing commodity: the very notion of privacy. In the papers, I read an Internet maven who says, ‘You already have zero privacy. Get over it.’ Well, those of you who know me know I’m sure as hell not one to get over it. Stop and look around you, I say. What do you see? Cameras and scanners and mammoth databases of a reach that defies human comprehension. Marketers can follow every aspect of our lives, from the first phone call we make in the morning to the time our security systems say we have left our houses, to the video camera at the toll booth and the charge slip we get at lunch. Go on-line, and every transaction, every ‘hit,’ is tracked and recorded by so-called infomediaries. Private companies have been approaching the Federal Bureau of Investigation with the proposal that the Bureau sell them their records, their information, as if information were just another government asset to be privatized. This is the beginning of something troubling: the naked republic. The surveillance society.”

  The senator looked around and realized that he was experiencing a rare moment: he actually had his colleagues’ attention. Some of them appeared transfixed, others skeptical. But he had their attention.

  “And I ask you one question: Is this a place you want to live in? I see no reason to hope that the cherished notion of privacy has a ghost of a chance against the forces arrayed against it—overzealous national and international law-enforcement bodies, marketers and corporations and insurance companies and the new managed-care conglomerates and the million tentacles of every enmeshed corporate and governmental concern. The people who want to maintain order, the people who want to squeeze every penny they can out of you—the forces of order and the forces of commerce: that’s a formidable alliance, my friends! That’s what privacy, our privacy, is up against. It is a pitched, yet terribly one-sided, battle. And so my question, my question for my distinguished colleagues on either side of the aisle, is simple: What side are you on?”

  NINE

  “Don’t look,” Bryson commanded softly, still panning the crowd and peering through the magnifying viewfinder. “Don’t turn your head. It’s a triad, as far as I can tell.”

  “What distance?” She spoke quietly, intensely, while at the same time grinning, the effect bizarre.

  “Seventy, eighty feet. An isosceles triangle. At your three o’clock, a blond woman in a blazer, hair up, oversized round sunglasses. At six o’clock, a big bearded man in a black priest’s getup. At nine o’clock, a slender man, late thirties, swarthy complexion, dark short-sleeved shirt, dark pants. All of them have small binoculars, and I’m sure each has a gun. Okay?”

  “Got it,” she said almost inaudibly.

  “One of them’s the team leader; they’re waiting for his signal. Now, I’m going to point something out and ask you to look through the video camera. Tell me when you’ve located them.”

  He abruptly gestured at the cathedral’s portico with an open, flat hand, like some amateur cinematographer, holding the video camera out for her. “Jonas,” she said, alarmed. It was the first time she had called him by name, though it was a cover name. “Oh, my God, the blood! Your shirt!”

  “I’m fine,” he said shortly. “Unfortunately, it’s what drew their attention.”

  She instantly turned her look of alarm into a bizarre, inappropriate grin, followed by a giggle, play-acting for an audience of three, the effect bizarre. She leaned in, peering through the viewfinder as he rotated it in a slow arc around the square. “The blond woman, check,” she said. A few seconds later, she added, “The bearded priest in black, check. The younger guy in the dark shirt, check.”

  “All right.” He smiled, nodded, continuing the performance. “I suspect they’re trying to avoid a repeat of what happened by the barricades. Obviously they’re not averse to killing innocent bystanders if need be, but they’d rather avoid it if possible, if only because of the political fallout. Otherwise, they’d have already taken a shot at me.”

  “Or they may not be certain it’s you,” she pointed out.

  “Their positioning indicates that if they were uncertain a few minutes ago, they no longer are,” Bryson said in a hushed tone. “They’ve moved into place.”

  “But I don’t understand: Who are they? You seem to know something about them. These are not just faceless pursuers to you.”

  “I know them,” Bryson said. “I know their methods; I know they work.”

  “How?”

  “I’ve read their field manual,” he said cryptically, deliberately so, unwilling to elaborate.

  “If you know them, then you must have an idea of what kind of risks they’ll take. You say ‘political fallout’—are you saying these are government operatives? Americans? Russians?”

  “I think transnational is the best description. None of the above, or maybe all of the above—neither Russian nor American nor French nor Spanish, but an organization that operates between the cracks, operating on a subterranean level where borders aren’t delineated. They work with governments but not for them. It appears as if they’re watching, waiting for a clearing to form around me. Given their distance, they want a space large enough to allow for a standard margin of error. But if I make any sudden movements, appearing as if I’m about to bolt, they’ll simply fire away, bystanders be damned.”

  They were surrounded by tourists and pilgrims, jammed up against them so closely it was hard to move. He continued: “Now, I want you to cover the woman, but be very subtle about taking out your gun, because they can observe your every move. They may not know who you are, but they know you’re with me, and that’s all they need to know.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means they consider you at the very least an accessory, if not an outright accomplice.”

  “Great,” Layla moaned, then flashed a discordant smile.

  “I’m sorry—I didn’t ask you to get involved.”

  “I know, I know. I made the choice.”

  “As long as we’re hemmed in like this by all these people, you’re free to move your hands below waist level. But you should assume they can see all movements from mid-torso up.”

  She nodded.

  “Tell me when you have your gun out.”

  She nodded again. He could see her reach into her large woven handbag.

  “Got it,” she said.

  “Now, with your left hand, lift the camera from around your neck and take a picture of me with the cathedral behind me. Go for a wide-angle shot; that’ll allow you to see the blond woman at the same time. Take your time doing it: you’re an amateur photographer, and you’re not good with cameras. No hurried motions, nothing smooth or professional.”

  She put the camera up to her face, squinted her right eye.

  “All right, now I’m going to seem to be joking around with you, pretending to take a video of you taking a picture of me. As soon as I hold the video camera to my face, you will react with annoyance; I’m ruining your perfect frame. You whip the camera away from your face with unexpected force, a sudden movement that will distract and confuse the watchers. Then, aim right and squeeze off a shot. Take down the blond woman.�
��

  “At this distance?” she said incredulously.

  “I’ve seen your accuracy. You’re one of the best I’ve seen; I have confidence. But don’t wait for a second go; dive right for the ground.”

  “And you? What will you be doing?”

  “Aiming at the bearded guy.”

  “But there’s a third—”

  “We can’t cover all three, that’s the maddening thing about this damned arrangement.”

  She gave another disconcerting false smile, then put the 35mm camera up to her face, clutching her Heckler & Koch .45 in her right hand at about waist level.

  He smiled impishly as he drew the video camera to his face. At the same instant, with a small, barely detectable movement, he reached his free hand around to the small of his back and pulled the Beretta from his waistband. His hands were trembling; he could hardly breathe.

  Directly behind her, visible through the video camera lens and some fifty to eighty feet distant, the bearded false priest lowered his binoculars. What did that mean: that they had decided to hold their fire, confused by Bryson’s ruse? That they did not want to fire indiscriminately with innocent bystanders just inches away? If so, they had just bought themselves a little time.

  If not …

  Suddenly the bearded man shook his wrist, ostensibly an innocent gesture designed to restore circulation in a tired hand, but clearly a sign to the others. A signal, delivered moments before Bryson had anticipated it would come. No!

  They had no time.

  Now!

  He dropped the video camera just as he swooped the gun upward, squeezing off three rapid shots just over Layla’s shoulder.

  At the exact same moment, she let her camera drop from its neck strap, whirled her .45 magnum up and over, and fired over the heads of the crowd.

  What followed was a bewildering sequence of explosions, shot answering shot in rapid-fire fashion, provoking terrified screams from all around. As Bryson dove to the ground, he was able to catch a glimpse of the bearded man staggering, sinking, obviously hit. Layla threw herself downward, tumbling against Bryson, slamming against the limbs of those surrounding them, knocking a young woman over. Someone very near had been struck by a stray round, wounded but not fatally so, a collateral injury.