Bryson pulled on to the exit ramp, the car now less than ten or fifteen feet behind and gaining. “Hold on tight!” he shouted, and he felt Layla’s hands squeeze even tighter in acknowledgment. He emitted an involuntary cry of agony.
Suddenly he spun off to the left, executing a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree “bootlegger’s turn” in such a confined area that the motorcycle almost flipped over, but he somehow managed to regain balance, wheeling around until he was headed back down the ramp along the narrow shoulder, leaving the sedan still barreling up the exit.
Now, roaring down the highway the wrong way, he kept to the shoulder, which broadened somewhat. Headlights flashed furiously, horns blared. He glanced in the small rearview mirror. They had lost the black sedan; it had been forced by the cars behind it to continue up the ramp and off the highway.
Now the BMW’s throttle was fully open; the engine straining, giving off a blatting noise. They were virtually flying along the side of the A-1, against traffic.
But they were still not in the clear, for rushing toward them was a single headlight of a motorcycle, speeding even faster than the other vehicles on the road, and Bryson knew it had to be another pursuer dispatched from the Château de Saint-Meurice.
There was a squealing of brakes, car horns honking, and suddenly the other motorcycle, too, had reversed direction and was just behind them. In the rearview, Bryson could see it gaining on them; though he could not see the make of the cycle, the engine roar told him that it was even more powerful than the BMW he had rented in Paris, capable of attaining even greater speeds.
Suddenly Bryson felt something slam into them. It was the other motorcycle, deliberately crashing into the rear wheel, almost knocking them over! Above the motorcycle’s roar he could hear, very near his ear, Layla screaming in terror.
“Are you all right?” he shouted.
“Yes!” she screamed in reply. “But move it!”
He tried to put on another burst of speed, but the motorcycle was already traveling at its maximum.
Another impact sent the motorcycle veering off the side of the road. Just off the shoulder was a long flat meadow, cleared farmland interspersed with wooden boxes used to collect hay or other crops. Bryson righted the vehicle, then accelerated off the asphalt and onto the grass and dirt, the pursuing motorcycle right behind. No gunshots, which told him that the driver needed to use both hands for maneuvering and could not spare a hand to use a weapon.
Pursue your pursuer.
This had been one of Ted Waller’s oft-repeated aperçus.
In the end, you will decide who is predator and who is prey. The prey survives only by becoming the predator.
Bryson now did the unexpected, circling around the meadow, carving deep ruts in the soft earth, until he was charging straight at the other motorcycle.
The other motorcyclist, obviously taken aback by this change in strategy, tried to spin out of the way, but there was no time. Bryson crashed into him, and the driver was flung from his vehicle.
Slamming on his brakes, the cycle spewing dirt into the air, he came to a stop. Layla leaped off, then he did, flinging the bike to the ground.
The other driver was running away, and as he ran he was obviously reaching for a weapon, but Layla already had hers out, and she fired the Beretta three times in rapid succession.
With a scream, the pursuer tumbled to the ground, but he had managed to wrest his weapon from its holster, and he fired back. His aim was off; bullets spit into the ground near them. Layla fired again, then Bryson had his gun out and fired, hitting their enemy in the chest.
He flew backward, sprawled on the ground, dead.
Bryson raced toward him, flipping the prone body over, rummaging through the man’s pockets for identification.
He pulled out a wallet. He was not surprised to find one; the pursuer had been given no notice, and thus no time to rid himself of identifying documents.
What he saw, however, he was not prepared for. It was beyond a surprise; the shock was deep, stunning, taking his breath away.
The detritus of bureaucracy, in this case, was straightforward. Documents could be forged, but Bryson was an expert at recognizing fake documents, and this was not one of them. There was no doubt. He examined it carefully in the bright moonlight, turning it over, locating the requisite fibers and irreproducible markings.
“What is it?” Layla asked. He handed it to her; she saw at once.
“Oh, my God!” she said, her voice hushed.
Their pursuer had been no mere rent-a-cop, nor even a French citizen on Arnaud’s security payroll.
He was a U.S. citizen, employed at the Paris station of the CIA.
ELEVEN
The secretary had been with the Central Intelligence Agency for seventeen years, but she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times anyone had tried to bypass her and barge into the office of her boss, Harry Dunne. Even on the few occasions when the Director of Central Intelligence dropped by his deputy’s office unannounced (Harry almost always went to the director’s office), and the matter was urgent, the director had at least waited for her to buzz Harry.
Yet this man had ignored her entreaties, her protestations and warnings, her firm insistence that Mr. Dunne was out of town, and had just done the unthinkable. He had stormed past her and had gone right into her boss’s office. Marjorie knew the mandated security procedures; she pressed the emergency button mounted underneath her main desk drawer, thereby summoning Security, and only then had she frantically warned Harry Dunne over the intercom that, despite her best efforts, this lunatic was coming through.
* * *
Bryson knew there were only two choices now: retreat or confrontation, and he preferred confrontation, the only option that had a chance of eliciting spontaneous revelation, forcing unplanned truths. Layla had urged him to stay away from the Agency, counseling that survival was more important now than whatever information he could obtain. But to Bryson there was really no choice at all: to penetrate the lies, to finally learn the truth about Elena, about his entire life, he had to face Dunne.
Layla remained in France, trying to work her contacts, to learn what she could about Jacques Arnaud and his recent activities. He had not told her anything about the Directorate; it was still best to keep her in the dark. She said good-bye to him at Charles de Gaulle Airport, surprising Bryson with the ardency of her hug, her kiss that was more than the farewell kiss of a friend, immediately after which she turned away in flushed embarrassment.
Harry Dunne was standing at his plate-glass window, jacket off, smoking a cigarette on a very long ivory holder. Smoking in the headquarters building was, Bryson knew, against Agency regulations, but as deputy director, Dunne was unlikely to be called on it by anyone. He turned as Bryson entered, Marjorie right behind him.
“Mr. Dunne, I’m so sorry, I tried to stop this man!” Marjorie called frantically. “Security’s on the way.”
For an instant Dunne seemed to be examining him, his narrow, creased face compressed into a frown, the small bloodshot eyes glittering. Bryson had taken care to disguise himself, alter his appearance just enough to confound any video face-matching equipment. Then Dunne shook his head as he exhaled a plume of smoke with a loud, hacking cough. “Naw, it’s all right, Margie, call off Security. I can deal with this fella myself.”
Bewildered, the secretary looked from her boss to the intruder, then, straightening, she backed out of the room, closing the door behind her.
The white-haired Dunne took a step toward Bryson, visibly enraged. “All Security would do would be to restrain me from killing you with my bare hands,” he snapped, “and I’m not sure I want that. What kind of game are you playing here, Bryson? You think we’re fools, is that it? You think we don’t get constant field reports, satellite feeds? I guess it’s true what they say: once a traitor, always a traitor.” Dunne snubbed out his cigarette in an overflowing glass ashtray on the edge of his desk. “I have no idea how the hell you
got into the building, with all our vaunted security procedures. But I expect the surveillance video will tell the tale.”
Bryson was jolted by the man’s unbanked fury, and it caused him to hesitate. Fury was the last thing he expected on the part of Harry Dunne. Fear, defensiveness, bluster—but not anger. Through gritted teeth, Bryson said, “You sent out your henchmen to kill me. Low-level Paris-station flunkies.”
Dunne snorted with derision as he pulled another cigarette from the jacket pocket of his rumpled gray suit. He inserted it in the ivory holder and lighted it, waving out the match and dropping it into the ashtray. “You can do better than that, Professor,” Dunne said, shaking his head as he turned back to the picture window that looked over the verdant Virginia countryside. “Look, the facts are simple. We sent you out to worm your way back into the Directorate. Instead, all you seem to have done is blow up some of our most promising links to the Directorate. Then you disappeared, went to ground. Sort of like a mob hit man blowing away witnesses.” He turned back to Bryson, exhaled a cloud of smoke into his face. “We thought you were ex-Directorate. I guess that’s where we made our biggest mistake, huh?”
“What the hell are you trying to say to me?”
“I’d like to ask you to take a polygraph, but that’s one of the first things they teach you boys, isn’t it—how to beat the box?”
Disgusted, Bryson slapped a stiff blue plastic-laminate card onto the only bare spot of mahogany visible on Harry Dunne’s desk. The Agency ID card he had pulled from the wallet of the dead motorcyclist outside of Paris, the pursuer dispatched from Jacques Arnaud’s château. “You want to know how I got in here?”
Dunne picked it up, immediately examined the hologram: holding it up to the light, tipping it to bring out the three-dimensional CIA seal, finding the magnetic foil sandwiched between the plastic layers. It was an everyday object at the CIA, but only at the CIA—a high-tech, high-security identification card, virtually impossible to fake. Dunne slid it into a desktop card reader. On his large blue computer screen, a face popped up, along with an employee’s basic personnel information. The face wasn’t Bryson’s, but at the moment, Bryson’s altered and disguised face fairly closely resembled the one up on the monitor.
“Paris station. Where the hell did you get this?” Dunne demanded.
“You going to listen to me now?”
Dunne’s face was wary. He exhaled twin plumes of smoke through his nostrils as he sank into his desk chair. He snubbed out the cigarette, prematurely. “At least let me call Finneran in here.”
“Finneran?”
“You met him at Blue Ridge. My aide-de-camp.”
“Forget it.”
“He’s my goddamned institutional memory—”
“Forget it! Just you and me and the listening devices.”
Dunne shrugged. He pulled out another cigarette, but instead of placing it into the holder, he began toying with it between nicotine-stained fingers. Through the threadbare fabric of Dunne’s blue button-down shirt, Bryson could see the outlines of an array of nicotine patches along his shoulders and biceps.
As Bryson recounted the events of the past few days, Dunne became grave. When he finally spoke, his voice was hushed. “A two-million-dollar bounty on your head, placed even before you showed up on Calacanis’s ship. Somehow the word was out on the street that you were back in the game.”
“You seem to forget they tried to dispatch me in Washington. They seemed to know I’d be coming back, looking for the old Directorate headquarters. That points to a leak in the pipes right here, in this building.” Bryson inscribed a small circle in the air with an index finger.
“Christ!” shot back the deputy director, tearing the cigarette in half and flinging the pieces toward the ashtray. “The whole goddamned thing was off the books, the only record of your involvement your name in the Security data bank for purposes of clearing you in and out of the building.”
“If the Directorate is wired into CIA, that’s enough to do it.”
“Come on, man, it wasn’t even a true name! You were Jonas Barrett—a cover alias used in the Security logs being, incidentally, against every fucking rule in the playbook. You don’t lie to Security. Never lie to Mother.”
“Expense vouchers, equipment requisitions—”
“Buried, all messaging text in proprietary cipher, all need-to-know, all DDCI priority. Look, Bryson, I covered my ass, what the hell you think? You were a huge goddamned risk on my part, I gotta tell ya. I don’t know what stress they put you under, how they might have burned you out. Put a guy’s red-bordered folder under a fucking microscope, you still don’t know shit about what’s in his head. I mean, look, they put you out to pasture in your little cow-town college—”
“For God’s sake,” thundered Bryson, “do you think I volunteered for this? Your goons came and wrenched me out of retirement. I was just beginning to heal, and you came to tear open the scab! I’m not here to defend myself—I assume you boys did your homework on me. I want to know what the hell CIA was doing, following me outside Paris in order to kill me. I hope to hell you have a good explanation, or at least a convincing lie.”
Dunne glowered. “I’m going to ignore that last dig, Bryson,” he said quietly. “Think this through, wouldya? According to what you’re telling me, you were recognized by this Directorate operative you worked with in Kowloon, Vance Gifford—”
“Yes, and according to the Sangiovanni brothers, I was also identified by Arnaud’s man aboard the ship. That’s obvious and beyond dispute. It’s not hard to walk back the cat and see how Santiago de Compostela happened. I’m talking about Chantilly, about Paris! About one CIA operative I happened to flush out because he was sloppy enough to leave his ID papers on his person. And where there’s one, there’s always more, you know that as well as I. So what are you going to tell me—that the Agency is out of control? It’s either that or you’re double-dealing me, and I want to know which it is, now!”
“No!” Dunne shouted hoarsely, his voice then dissolving in a series of hacking coughs. “Those aren’t the only possible explanations!”
“Then what are you trying to sell me?”
Dunne drew his own circle in the air with an index finger, mimicking Bryson’s, signaling the room bugs. He scowled. “I’m saying I want to check some things out. I’m saying I think we ought to continue this discussion at another time and place.” His face seemed even more lined, the hollows deeper, and for the first time his eyes looked haunted.
* * *
The Rosamund Cleary Extended Care Facility was, in plain English, a nursing home. It was a handsome, low-slung red-brick facility surrounded by a few acres of wooded land in Dutchess County, in upstate New York. Whatever it was called, it was an expensive, well-managed place, a last home for the financially privileged who needed medical attention that relatives and other loved ones could not give them. For the last twelve years it had been the home of Felicia Munroe, the woman who, with her husband, Peter, had taken the teenaged Nicholas Bryson in after Bryson’s parents had been killed in an automobile crash.
Bryson had loved the woman, had always had a close and loving relationship with her, but he had never thought of her as his mother. The accident had happened too late in his life for that. She was just Aunt Felicia, the doting wife of Uncle Pete, who’d been one of his father’s best friends. They had taken loving care of him, welcomed him into their home, even paid his way through boarding school and then college, for which he was eternally grateful.
Peter Munroe had met George Bryson at the Officers Club in Bahrain. Colonel Bryson, as he was then, had been supervising construction of a major new barracks, and Munroe, a civil engineer for a multinational construction firm, had been a bidder on the project. Bryson and Munroe had become fast friends over too many beers—the specialty of the club in that nonalcoholic nation—and yet, when the bids were submitted, Colonel Bryson recommended against Pete Munroe’s firm. He had no choice, really; another construction
company had underbid them. Munroe took the bad news in good spirit, took Bryson out for a round of drinks on him, and said he didn’t really give a shit—he’d gotten more out of this fucking country than he’d ever expected to—a friend. Only later—too late, as it turned out—did the senior Bryson learn why the winning bidder came in so low: dishonesty. The firm tried to stick the army with millions of dollars in cost overruns. When George Bryson tried to apologize, Munroe refused to accept his apology. “Corruption’s a way of life in this business,” he said. “If I really wanted the job, I would have lied, too. I was the naïve one.” The friendship between George Bryson and Pete Munroe, however, was sealed.
But was that the truth? Was there really more to it? Was Harry Dunne telling him the truth? Now that he had concrete evidence that an active CIA operative on the Agency payroll had attempted to kill him in France, everything was in question. For if Dunne had had anything to do with that, was anything else he said to be trusted? In some ways Bryson regretted not coming here first, before flying off to the Spanish Armada. He should have found old Aunt Felicia and questioned her before agreeing to do Dunne’s dirty work. Bryson had visited Felicia twice before, once with Elena, but not in several years.
Dunne’s words to him that day in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the day that changed his life, still echoed in his head. He would not soon forget them.
“Let me ask you something, Bryson. Did you believe this was an accident? You were fifteen, a brilliant student, terrific athlete, prime of American youth, all that. Now both your parents are suddenly killed. Your godparents take you in—”
“Uncle Pete … Peter Munroe.”
“That was the name he took, sure. Not the name he was born with. And he made sure you went to college where you did, and made a lot of other decisions for you besides. All of which pretty much guaranteed that you’d end up in their hands. The Directorate’s, I mean.”
Bryson found Aunt Felicia sitting in front of a television set in a spacious public sitting room tastefully appointed with Persian rugs and massive mahogany antiques. Several other elderly people were scattered about the room, a few reading or crocheting, several dozing. Felicia Munroe appeared to be watching golf with rapt fascination.
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