The Prometheus Deception

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The Prometheus Deception Page 26

by Robert Ludlum

Stunned, Bryson tried to make sense of the question. Does Elena know? “What are you talking about?” he whispered.

  “Does she know?”

  “Does she know what? Where is she? Have you spoken with her?”

  “Please don’t affect to be concerned about the woman, Bryson—”

  “Where is she?” Bryson interrupted.

  The bearded man hesitated but a second before replying, “I am asking the questions here, Bryson. How long have you been with the Prometheans?”

  Dully, Bryson repeated, “The Prometheans?”

  “Enough. No more games! How long have you been in their employ, Bryson? Were you double-dealing while you were on active duty? Or perhaps you grew bored as a college professor, in search of adventure? You see, I’d really like to understand the inducement, the lure. An appeal to misbegotten idealism? Power? You see, we have so much to talk about, Bryson.”

  “Yet you insist on leveling a gun at me as if you’ve completely forgotten Yemen.”

  Vansina, looking amused, shook his head. “You are still a legend in the organization, Bryson. People still retell stories of your operational skill, your linguistic talent. You were a great asset—”

  “Until I was shoved out the door by Ted Waller. Or should I say Gennady Rosovsky?”

  Vansina paused a long while, unable to conceal the astonishment in his eyes. “We all have many names,” he said at last. “Many identities. And sanity lies in the ability to distinguish among them, to keep them separate. Yet you seem to have lost that ability. You believe one thing, then another. You don’t know where reality ends and fantasy begins. Ted Waller is a great man, Bryson. Greater than any of us.”

  “So he has you deceived still! You believe him, you believe his lies! You don’t know, Prospero? We were puppets, drones—automatons, programmed by the overseers! We acted blindly, not understanding who our real masters were, what the real agenda was!”

  “There are circles within circles,” Vansina said solemnly. “There are things we know nothing about. The world has changed, and we must change with it, must adapt to the new realities. What have you been told, Bryson? What lies have you been fed?”

  “The ‘new realities,’” Bryson began hollowly, not understanding. He was stunned, baffled to the point of momentary speechlessness, when he saw the enormous shape suddenly looming in the plate-glass window, abruptly appearing from out of nowhere. He recognized it as a helicopter only at the instant that the fusillade of bullets riddled the glass, the automatic machine-gun fire shattering the glass into a crystalline hailstorm.

  Bryson dove to the floor, tumbled beneath the long conference table, but Vansina, at the head of the table and therefore much closer to the window, had no such opportunity. His hands flew out to his side like a bird attempting flight, and then his entire body danced, animated grotesquely, almost prancing like some marionette. The bullets penetrated his face, his chest, blood erupted from his twitching body in scores of tiny geysers, and his bloodied face contorted in a horrible scream, a full-throated bellow that was entirely masked by the deafening racket of the hovering helicopter, the ear-splitting thunder of gunfire. As the wind howled through the conference room, the mahogany table was split, chewed up by a thousand bullets, the carpet crisscrossed, pitted. From his shelter under the thick tabletop, Bryson saw Vansina seem almost to rise into the air before crumpling against the gray carpet, red-spattered from his blood, limbs splayed unnaturally, his eyes hollow red cavities, his face and beard a horrifying bloodied pulp, the entire back of his head missing. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the helicopter lunged out of sight and was gone. The cacophony had abruptly ceased, the only sounds the faint traffic noises from the street hundreds of feet below, and the moaning of the wind as it whistled through stalactites of glass, whirling around the slaughterhouse of a room now gone eerily silent.

  FOURTEEN

  Racing from the conference room, from the nightmarish scene of blood and machine-gun rounds and broken glass, Bryson ran through a hall choked with horrified bystanders. There were screams, shouts in Schweizerdeutsch and French and English.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!”

  “What happened, was it snipers? Terrorists?”

  “Are they inside the building?”

  “Call the police, an ambulance, quickly!”

  “My God, the man’s dead—he’s, oh God, he’s been massacred!”

  As he ran, he thought of Layla. Not her, too! Could the helicopter have circled the building, locating targets in windows on the twenty-seventh floor?

  And he thought: Jan Vansina was the object of the freakish attack. Not me. Vansina. It had to be. He ran through the kaleidoscopic images in his mind, sorting through them, recalling angles of fire. Yes. Whoever was manning the machine gun or guns from within the helicopter had been deliberately aiming for Jan Vansina. This was no random attack, nor a generalized attempt to kill whoever was present in the conference room. The gunfire had been aimed precisely, from at least three different and precise angles, at the Directorate operative.

  But why?

  And who? The Directorate could not have been killing its own, could it? Perhaps fearing that Vansina was meeting with an old friend, sharing information …

  No, it stretched the imagination too far, made too little sense. The reasons, the logic behind the attack remained obscure. But the fact remained, Bryson was convinced, that the man who was supposed to be killed had in fact been killed.

  These thoughts spun through his mind in a matter of seconds; he located Bécot’s office, yanked open the closed door—and found it empty.

  Neither Layla nor the banker was here. Turning to leave, he noticed a china espresso cup overturned on the floor beside the coffee table, a few papers scattered near the desk. Signs of either a hurried departure or a brief struggle.

  Muffled sounds came from somewhere within the room or very nearby, thumping noises, cries. His eyes quickly searched the room, found the closet door. He ran to it, opened it. Layla and Jean-Luc Bécot were bound in ropes, gagged. Polyurethane “humane restraints,” as strong as leather, secured their wrists and ankles. The banker’s wire-rimmed glasses lay bent on the closet floor beside him, his tie askew, his shirt torn, hair wild. Through the wadded cloth gag stuffed in his mouth he tried to shout, his eyes bulging. Next to him, Layla was bound even more thoroughly, expertly, the gag tight in her mouth. Her gray Chanel suit was ripped; one of her matching gray high-heeled shoes had come off. She, too, had vinyl restraints around her wrists and ankles. Her face was bloodied and bruised; obviously she had struggled fiercely but had been overwhelmed by the superior strength of the man who had been Prospero.

  The brute animal who had been Prospero, Jan Vansina. Bryson swelled with rage at the dead man. He pulled the gag from her mouth, then from the banker’s; both captives took deep, gulping breaths, filling their lungs with much-needed air. Bécot gasped, cried out. Layla gasped, too: “Thank you. My God!”

  “He didn’t kill you, either of you,” Bryson remarked as he worked quickly to untie the ropes. He searched for a knife or other blade to sever the strong plastic restraints; seeing nothing, he ran to the banker’s desk and spied a silver letter opener, quickly rejecting it since it had a point but no blade. In a side desk drawer he found a small but sharp pair of scissors, ran back to the closet, and used it to release them both.

  “Call Security!” the banker said through gulps of air.

  Bryson, who could already hear the sirens of the approaching emergency vehicles growing steadily louder, said, “The police are on their way, I suspect.” He took Layla by the arm, helped her to her feet, and the two of them ran from the room.

  Passing the open conference room door, in front of which a crowd had gathered, she stopped.

  “Come on,” hissed Bryson. “There’s no time!”

  But she peered inside, saw the crumpled body of Jan Vansina surrounded by jagged shards of glass, the shattered window. “Oh, my God!” she breathed, horrified, quivering.
“Oh, my God!”

  * * *

  Not until they reached the crowded Place Bel-Air did they come to a stop.

  “We have to leave,” Bryson said. “Travel separately—we can’t be seen together, not any longer.”

  “Travel—but where?”

  “Out of here—out of Geneva, out of Switzerland!”

  “What are you saying—we can’t just—” She stopped in midsentence when she realized that Bryson’s attention was riveted on a newspaper displayed in a kiosk. It was a copy of La Tribune de Genève.

  “My God,” said Bryson, moving closer. He grabbed it from a tall stack, riveted by the large black banner headline above a photograph of some sort of terrible accident.

  TERROR STRIKES FRANCE:

  HIGH-SPEED PASSENGER TRAIN DERAILED IN LILLE

  LILLE—A powerful bomb blast derailed and tore apart the high-speed passenger train Eurostar about thirty miles south of Lille early this morning, killing hundreds of French, British, American, Dutch, Belgian, and other business travelers. Although emergency workers and volunteers worked frantically throughout the day, searching the wreckage for survivors, French authorities fear that the death toll may exceed 700. An official at the crash site, who preferred to remain anonymous, speculated that the incident was the work of terrorists.

  According to records made available by railroad officials, the train, Eurostar 9007-ERS, left the Gare du Nord in Paris, bound for London, at approximately 7:16 A.M., with nearly 770 passengers on board. At approximately 8:00 A.M., the 18-car train passed through France’s Pas-de-Calais region, where a series of high-powered explosions, reportedly buried beneath the tracks, went off below the train’s front and rear sections simultaneously. Although there was no immediate claim of responsibility, sources in the French security service, the Sûreté, have already compiled a list of possible suspects. Several anonymous sources in the Sûreté have confirmed rampant speculation that both the French and the British governments had received repeated warnings of an impending attack on the Eurostar in the last several days. A Eurostar spokesman would neither confirm nor deny a report provided to La Tribune de Genève that the intelligence services of both countries had leads pointing to suspected terrorists planning to blow up the train but were unable to intercept or monitor telephone conversations between the alleged terrorists because of legal constraints.

  “This is an outrage,” declared French National Assembly member Françoise Chouet. “We had the technical ability to prevent this sickening carnage, yet our police are hamstrung by our laws from doing anything about it.” In London, Lord Miles Parmore renewed his call in Parliament for passage of the International Treaty on Surveillance and Security. “If the governments of France and England had the ability to keep this sabotage from happening, it is simply criminal that we sat there and did nothing about it. This is a national—no, an international—disgrace.”

  The United States national security adviser, Richard Lanchester, attending a NATO summit in Brussels, issued a statement denouncing the “slaughter of innocents.” He added, “In this period of mourning, we must all ask ourselves how to make sure something like this never happens again. With great reluctance and sadness, the Davis administration joins its allies and good friends England and France in calling for worldwide passage of the International Treaty on Surveillance and Security.”

  Lille.

  Bryson’s blood ran cold.

  He remembered the low, conspiratorial voices of two men emerging from Jacques Arnaud’s private office in the Château de Saint-Meurice. One was the arms merchant himself, the other Anatoly Prishnikov, the Russian tycoon.

  “Once Lille happens,” Arnaud had said, “the outrage will be enormous. The way will be clear.”

  Once Lille happens.

  Two of the world’s most powerful businessmen, one an arms dealer, the other a mogul who no doubt secretly owned or controlled large segments of the Russian defense industry—Bryson would have to obtain a complete dossier—had foreknowledge of the devastation at Lille, the attack that killed seven hundred people.

  Quite likely the men were among those who planned it.

  Both of them principals of the Directorate. The Directorate was behind the nightmare at Lille; there was no question about it.

  But to what end? Senseless violence was not the Directorate’s way; Waller and the other overseers had always prided themselves on their strategic genius. Everything was strategy, everything served an ultimate end. Even the murder of Bryson’s parents, even the massive deception that had become his life. The murder of a few field operatives might be justified by nothing more than the need to remove an encumbrance, an obstacle, a threat. But the wholesale murder of seven hundred innocent travelers was in another category entirely, moved from low-level tactics to higher strategy.

  The outrage will be enormous.

  The public outcry over the derailing and destruction of the Eurostar train was indeed great, as it would inevitably be over such a preventable tragedy.

  Preventable tragedy.

  The key was preventable. Prophylaxis. The Directorate wanted this outrage, wanted to spur calls for prevention of any future terrorism. Yet prevention could mean any number of things. A treaty to fight terrorism was one thing, no doubt little more than window dressing. But surely any such treaty would lead to the bolstering of national defenses, the acquisition of weapons intended to protect public safety.

  Arnaud and Prishnikov, merchants of death with a vested interest in world chaos, because chaos was a form of marketing—the marketing of their goods, their weapons, the increasing of demand. These two moguls were presumably behind Lille and …

  And what else? Standing there on the street, he was oblivious to the bustle of passing pedestrians. Layla was reading the article over his shoulder, saying something to him, but he did not hear her. He was retrieving remembered news stories in the filing cabinet of his mind. Several recent incidents that he had read about, seen television coverage about, terrible things that at the time did not register as directly applicable to his own life, his mission.

  Just a few days ago there had been a devastating explosion in a Washington, D.C., metro station during the morning rush hour that had killed dozens of people. And later that same day—he remembered because the timing was so unfortunate—an American jetliner had blown up just after taking off from Kennedy Airport, en route to Rome. One hundred fifty, one hundred seventy people had been killed.

  The outcry in America had been anguished, clamorous. The president had issued a call for passage of the international security treaty, which had previously been stalled in the Senate. After Lille, the European nations would surely join the Americans in pushing for strong measures to restore sanity to a world spinning out of control.

  Control.

  Was this the “higher purpose,” the underlying reason behind the Directorate’s madness? A rogue intelligence agency, once a small but powerful behind-the-scenes player known to no one, making a bid to seize control where the rest of the world had failed?

  Damn it, it was all vaporous speculation, theory upon theory, conclusions drawn from tentative suggestions. Unprovable, shadowy, insufficient. But an answer to Dunne’s initial question, the reason why the CIA man had plucked Bryson from a contented retirement and all but forced him to investigate, was beginning to suggest itself. It was time to level with Harry Dunne, present him with a scenario, with hypotheses. To wait for firm, undeniable documentation of the Directorate’s agenda would be to let another Lille happen, and that was morally repugnant. Did the CIA really need another seven hundred innocent people to die before it decided to do something?

  And yet …

  Yet the biggest piece of the puzzle remained missing.

  “Does Elena know?” Vansina had asked. The implication being that the Directorate did not know where she was, or where her loyalties resided. It was more important than ever that she be located: the very question—Does Elena know?—implied that she had to know some
thing crucial. Something that would not only explain her disappearance from his life but also reveal the pattern, the key to the Directorate’s true intentions.

  “You know something about this.” Layla’s voice: a statement, not a question.

  He realized that she had been speaking to him for a while. He turned to look at her. Had she not overheard Arnaud’s remark about Lille at the château? Evidently not.

  “I have a theory,” he said.

  “Which is?”

  “I need to make a call.” He handed her the newspaper. “I’ll be right back.”

  “A call? To whom?”

  “Give me a few minutes, Layla.”

  She raised her voice. “What are you hiding from me? What are you really up to?”

  He saw in her beautiful brown eyes bewilderment, but something more: hurt, anger. She was justified in being angry. He had been using her as an accomplice while telling her almost nothing. It was more than hurtful, it was unacceptable, particularly to a field agent as skilled and knowledgeable as she was.

  He hesitated, then spoke. “Let me make a phone call. When I return, I’ll fill you in—but I warn you, I know a lot less than you must think I do.”

  She put a hand on his arm, a quick, affectionate gesture that said any number of things—Thank you, I understand, I’m here for you. He was moved to kiss her, lightly and on the cheek: nothing sexual, but a moment of human contact, an expression of gratitude for her bravery and support.

  He walked quickly to the end of the block, taking a side street off Place Bel-Air. There was a small tabac that sold, in addition to cigarettes and newspapers, prepaid telephone cards. He purchased one, located an international telephone in a booth on the street. He dialed 011, then 0, then a sequence of five numbers. There was a low electronic tone; then he dialed seven more digits.

  It was a sterile line, a number that Harry Dunne had given him; it rang directly through to Dunne’s CIA office and at Dunne’s private study at home. Dunne had guaranteed that he, and only he, would answer it.

  The phone rang once.

 

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