“Aunt Felicia,” Bryson said heartily.
She turned to look at him, and for a fleeting instant recognition seemed to dawn on her face. But it immediately gave way to a foggy bewilderment. “Yes?” she said sharply.
“Aunt Felicia, I’m Nick. Remember me?”
She stared at him with incomprehension, squinting. He realized that the traces of senility he had seen in her years ago had grown into something far deeper and more serious. After staring for an uncomfortably long time, she gave a slow smile. “It is you,” she breathed.
“Remember? I lived with you—you took care of me…?”
“You’ve come back,” she whispered, finally seeming to comprehend. Tears sprang to her eyes. “My heavens, how I’ve missed you.”
Bryson’s heart lifted.
“My darling George,” she trilled. “My dearest darling George. How long it’s been.”
For a moment he was perplexed, and then he understood. Bryson was about the same age that his father, General George Bryson, was when he died. In Aunt Felicia’s confused mind—a mind that probably could recall clearly events of half a century ago, yet could not remember her own name—he was George Bryson. And indeed the resemblance was strong. He was often startled to see how much he was coming to look like his father, the older he got.
Then, as if she had suddenly grown bored with her visitor, she turned her gaze back to the television set. Bryson stood, shifting his weight from foot to foot, unsure what to do next. In a minute or so, Felicia seemed to become conscious of his presence, and she turned to look at him again.
“Why, hello there,” she ventured tentatively. Her face looked worried, the expression rapidly turning frightened. “But you—but you’re dead! I thought you were dead!”
Bryson simply looked at her neutrally, not wanting to disturb the illusion. Let her believe what she wants to believe; perhaps she will say something.…
“You died in that terrible accident,” she said. Her face was racked with tension. “Yes, you did. That terrible, terrible accident. You and Nina both. What an awful thing. And you leaving poor young Nicky an orphan. Oh, I don’t think I stopped crying for three days. Pete was always the strong one—he got me through it.” The tears glistened in her eyes once again, and they began to course down her cheeks. “So much Pete didn’t tell me about that night,” she continued, her voice almost a singsong. “So much he couldn’t tell me, wouldn’t tell me. How the guilt must have eaten him up inside. For years he wouldn’t talk to me about that night, about what he did.”
A chill ran down Bryson’s spine.
“And he’d never talk to your little Nicky about it, you know. What a thing to carry with you, what a terrible, terrible thing!” She shook her head, dabbing at her eyes with the frilly cuff of her white blouse. Then she turned back to the television.
Bryson strode to the TV, shut it off, and stood right in front of her. Though the poor woman’s short-term memory had been destroyed by the effects of senility, or perhaps Alzheimer’s disease, it appeared that many of her long-term memories might have been spared.
“Felicia,” he said gently, “I want to talk to you about Pete. Pete Munroe, your husband.”
The direct stare seemed to unnerve her; she studied the pattern on the carpet. “He used to make me a whiskey sling when I had a cold, you know,” she said. She seemed lost in the memory, her manner now relaxed. “Honey and lemon juice and just a wee bit of bourbon. No, more than a wee bit. You’ll be better in no time.”
“Felicia, did he ever talk about something called the Directorate?”
She looked up at him blankly. “An untreated cold can linger for a week. But with treatment, it will pass in seven days!” She giggled, waggling her finger. “Peter always said an untreated cold can linger for a week…”
“Did he ever talk about my father?”
“Oh, he was a great talker. Told the funniest stories.”
At the other end of the room, one of the patients had had an accident, and two janitors appeared with mops. The two custodians chattered to each other in Russian. A Russian phrase, spoken loudly, was audible. Ya nye znayu, one of them said brusquely: I don’t know. The accent was Muscovite.
Felicia Munroe had heard it, too, and she perked up in response. “Ya nye znayu,” she repeated, then giggled. “Gibberish! Gibberish!”
“Not really gibberish, Aunt Felicia,” Bryson put in.
“Gibberish!” she replied defiantly. “Just the sort of nonsense Pete would say in his sleep. Ya nye znayu. All that craziness. Whenever he talked in his sleep, he’d talk in that funny language, and he just hated when I teased him about it.”
“He talked like that in his sleep?” Bryson said hollowly, his heart thudding in his rib cage.
“Oh, he was a terrible sleeper.” For a moment she seemed lucid. “Always talked in his sleep.”
Uncle Pete spoke Russian in his sleep, the one time when you can’t control your utterances. Was Harry Dunne right: was Peter Munroe an associate of Gennady Rosovsky’s, a.k.a. Ted Waller? Could it be true? Was any other explanation even possible? Bryson was dumbstruck.
But Felicia kept talking. “Particularly after you died, George. He was so sorry. He tossed and turned, he yelled and cried in his sleep, and always talking that gibberish!”
* * *
The area of Rock Creek Park in Washington, on the northern part of Beach Drive, was a good location for the rendezvous with Harry Dunne very early the next morning. Bryson had chosen it; Dunne had invited him to select the meeting point not out of deference to Bryson’s field skills—after all, Dunne’s experience as an operative with the Agency’s clandestine division had been over twice as long as Bryson’s with the Directorate—but more likely as a courtesy extended by a host to his honored guest.
The CIA deputy director’s request to meet off site, outside Agency walls, was alarming to Bryson. It was hard to believe that Dunne, the number-two man in the Agency, feared his own office was bugged; that fact itself gave credence to the theory that the CIA had been penetrated by the Directorate—that Bryson’s old handlers had somehow managed to extend their tentacles into the highest reaches of the CIA. Whatever information Dunne might have been able to collect, the mere fact that he insisted on continuing their discussion in a neutral, secure location was unnerving proof that something was very wrong.
Still, Bryson would take nothing at face value. Trust no one, Ted Waller used to say with a cackle, words now grotesquely appropriate: Waller himself had turned out to be the cardinal betrayer of trust. Bryson would not let down his guard; he would trust no one, Dunne included.
He arrived at the designated location a full hour early. It was barely four o’clock in the morning, the sky dark, the air cold and damp. Passing cars were few, spaced far apart in time: night-shift workers going home, their replacements arriving. The business of government was round-the-clock.
The silence was strange, unaccustomed. Bryson became aware of the sounds of twigs crackling underfoot as he paced the dense woods surrounding the clearing he had chosen, noises that would ordinarily be masked by the ambient roar of nearby traffic. He wore the crepe-soled shoes he favored for field work because they minimized such noise.
Bryson surveyed the location, searching for points of vulnerability. The wooded ridge overlooked a small patch of meadow, next to a small, asphalt-paved parking area, at the edge of which was a concrete, bunkerlike restroom facility, half sunken below ground, in which they had agreed to meet. Rain had been forecast, and though the forecast had turned out wrong, a sheltered location had seemed desirable. Too the facility’s thick concrete walls would provide protection in the event of ambush from without.
But Bryson was determined that there would be no ambush. He made a circuit around the wooded ridge, through the dense trees overlooking the meadow, checking for recently made footsteps or branches broken in a suspicious pattern, as well as for scopes, mounts, or other devices that might have been emplaced in advance. A second s
weep revealed all possible avenues of approach; nothing would be left to chance. After two more sweeps, each from different directions and covering different vantage points, Bryson was satisfied that no ambush was already in place. That did not rule out any future arrivals, but at least he would be able to authoritatively detect subtle changes in background, divergences otherwise ignored.
At precisely five o’clock in the morning, a black government sedan pulled off Beach Drive and into the parking area. It was a Lincoln Continental, unmarked except for generic government license plates. Watching through small, high-powered binoculars from a blind he had chosen in a dense copse of trees, Bryson could make out Dunne’s regular driver, a slender African American in a navy blue uniform. Dunne sat in the backseat clutching a file folder. There appeared to be no one else in the vehicle.
The limousine pulled up to the restroom and came to a stop. The driver got out and went to open the door for his boss, but Dunne, impatient as always, was already halfway out of the car. He was scowling, his habitual expression. Glancing briefly to either side, he descended the short flight of steps, his face illuminated garishly by the sulphurous fluorescent lights, and then disappeared into the small building.
Bryson waited. He watched the driver, waiting for any suspicious moves—furtive phone calls placed on a concealed cellular phone, quick signals to passing vehicles, even the loading of a gun. But the driver simply sat behind the wheel, waiting with the calm, still patience his boss lacked.
After a good ten minutes had elapsed, and Bryson was sure that Dunne was probably fed up by now, he came down the hillside, following a path that kept him concealed from passersby, winding around to the back of the restroom, which was even with the ground level. Putting on a sudden burst of speed, he raced to the building, confident that he had not been observed. Now he leaped down into the moat that surrounded the bunker and circled around to the entrance, unseen.
The fluorescent lights flickered as he approached. The building reeked of urine and excrement, with an astringent overlay of cleaning solution, woefully insufficient. He listened at the door for a moment until he heard Dunne’s signature hacking cough. He entered swiftly, closing the heavy steel door behind him and locking it with the strong padlock he had brought.
Dunne was standing at a urinal. He turned his head slowly when Bryson entered. “Nice of you to saunter in,” he muttered. “Now I see why those Directorate fuckers fired your ass. Punctuality ain’t your strong suit.”
Bryson ignored the jabs. Dunne knew exactly why he was ten minutes late. Dunne zipped up, flushed, and went to the sink. They looked at each other in the mirror. “Bad news,” Dunne said, his voice echoing, as he washed his hands. “The card’s legit.”
“The card?”
“The Agency ID card you took off the motorcyclist’s body in Chantilly. It’s not doctored paper. The guy was detailed to the Paris station for over a year as an operative in extremis—for when the real dirty stuff had to be done.”
“Trace the personnel records, the name on the assignment authorization, even how he was recruited.”
Dunne scowled again, radiating disgust. “Why didn’t I think of that,” he said with heavy irony. He shook his hands dry—there were no paper towels, and he refused to use the automatic hand-drying machine—then wiped them on his pants. He fished a crumpled Marlboro pack out of his breast pocket and fumbled out a partly crushed cigarette, which he placed in his mouth. Without lighting it, he went on, “I ordered a Code Sigma–priority search through all the computer banks, down to the last firewall. Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing? You keep thick personnel files on everyone, from the director on down to the lady who cleans the washrooms in the imaging center.”
Dunne grimaced. The unlit cigarette dangled from his lower lip.
“And you guys don’t leave anything out. Anything. So don’t tell me you turned up nothing in the guy’s personnel file.”
“No, I’m telling you the guy had no file. As far as Langley central is concerned, he didn’t exist.”
“Come on! There’s health coverage, insurance, paychecks—a bunch of administrative and bureaucratic horseshit that Personnel bombards every single employee with. You telling me he wasn’t getting paychecks?”
“Christ’s sake, you’re not fucking listening! The guy didn’t exist! It’s not unheard of—the real serious wetworkers, we don’t like to have a paper trail on them. Files are buried, requisitions deep-sixed after payments are authorized. So the precedent is there. Thing is, someone knew how to play the system, keep the guy’s name off all the books. He was like a ghost—there but not there.”
“So what does this mean?” Bryson asked quietly.
Dunne was silent for a moment. He coughed. “It means, buddy, that the CIA may not be the best agency to investigate the Directorate. Especially if the Directorate has its moles inside, which we have to assume.”
Dunne’s words, though not unexpected, came as a bolt of lightning because of the finality with which the CIA man uttered them. Bryson nodded. “Not easy for you to admit,” he said.
Dunne tipped his head to one side in acknowledgment. “Not particularly,” he conceded, an obvious understatement. The man was shaken, though obviously reluctant to admit it. “Look, I don’t want to believe the goddamned Directorate might have reached out and touched my own people. But I didn’t get where I did by indulging in wishful thinking. See, I never went to one of your hoity-toity universities—I got into St. John’s by the skin of my ass. I don’t speak a dozen languages like you do, either—just English, and that none too good. But what I had, see—and still do, I like to think—was something that’s a scarce commodity in the intelligence business, and that’s horse sense. Or whatever the hell you want to call it. Look at what’s happened to this goddamned country in the last forty years, from the Bay of Pigs to Vietnam to Panama to whatever’s the latest fuckup in the Washington Post this morning. All brought to you by the so-called Wise Men, those ‘best and the brightest’ with their fancy Ivy League sheepskins and their trust funds, who keep getting us into all these scrapes. They got education, but no common sense. Me, I can smell when something’s off, I got an instinct for it. And I don’t go whistling past graveyards. So I can’t dodge the possibility—and it’s only a possibility, mind you—that someone on my team is involved. I’m not going to bullshit you. I don’t want to have to play my last card, but I may have to.”
“Which is?”
“What the fuck does the Washington Post call him, ‘the last honest man in Washington’? Which isn’t saying much in this corrupt city.”
“Richard Lanchester,” Bryson said, recalling the epithet often applied to the president’s national security adviser and chairman of the White House National Security Council. He knew of Lanchester’s unequalled reputation for probity. “Why is he your last card?”
“Because once I play it, it’s out of my control. He may be the one man in government who can head this thing off, circumvent corrupted channels, but once I involve him, it’s no longer contained in the intelligence community. It’s all-out internecine war, and frankly, I don’t know whether our government could survive it.”
“Jesus,” Bryson breathed. “You’re saying the Directorate’s reach is that high?”
“That’s what it smells like to me.”
“Well, I’m the one whose life is on the line out there. From now on, I communicate only with you, directly with you. No intermediaries, no E-mail that can be cracked or faxes that can be intercepted. I want you to isolate a sterile line at Langley, routed through a lockbox, sequestered and segregated.”
The CIA man nodded his acquiescence.
“I also want a code-word sequence so I can be certain you’re not speaking under duress, or that your voice is being falsified. I want to know it’s you, and that you’re speaking freely. And one more thing: all communications go directly between you and me—not even through your secretary.”
Bryson shrugg
ed. “Point taken, but you’re overreacting. I’d trust Marjorie with my life.”
“Sorry. No exceptions. Elena once told me about something called Metcalf’s Rule, which says that the porosity of a network increases as the square of the number of nodes. The nodes, in this case, refers to anyone who’s knowledgeable about the operation.”
“Elena,” said the CIA man with heavy derision. “I guess she knows something about deception, huh, Bryson?”
The remark stung, despite everything that had happened, even despite his own bitterness over her unexplained disappearance. “Correct,” Bryson returned. “Which is why you’ve got to help me get to her—”
“You think I sent you out there to save your marriage?” Dunne interrupted. “I sent you out there to save the goddamned world.”
“Damn it, she knows something, she has to. Maybe quite a bit.”
“Yeah, and if she’s involved—”
“If she’s involved, she’s involved in a central way. If she’s a dupe like I was—”
“Wishful thinking, Bryson, I warned you—”
“If she’s a dupe like I was,” Bryson thundered, “then her knowledge is still invaluable!”
“And of course she’ll happily spill all the fucking beans to you out of, what, nostalgia? Remembrance of all the good times past?”
“If I can get to her,” Bryson shouted, then he faltered. Quietly, he went on, “If I can get to her … damn it, I know her, I can tell when she’s lying, when she tries to shade the truth, what she’s trying to avoid discussing.”
“You’re dreaming,” said Harry Dunne flatly. He coughed, a painful-sounding, rattling, liquid cough. “You think you know her. You pretend you know her, knew her. You’re so sure, aren’t you? Just like you were so sure you knew Ted Waller, a.k.a. Gennady Rosovsky. Or Pyotr Aksyonov—alias your ‘uncle’ Peter Munroe. Did your little visit to upstate New York enlighten you further?”
The Prometheus Deception Page 23