“But that’s the ingenious thing! Through a combination of extremely tight compartmentalization and careful recruitment—members are chosen carefully, drawn from all around the world, their backgrounds especially conducive to this line of work, to maintaining a code of silence. The compartmentalization ensures that no one operative ever gets to know another more than fleetingly; no one ever works with more than one handler. My handler was a legend in the agency, one of the founders, a man named Ted Waller. A man I came to idolize,” he added regretfully.
“But surely the president must know!”
“To be honest, I have no idea. I believe the existence of the Directorate has always been kept from whoever occupies the Oval Office. Partly to protect the president from knowing too much about wet work and other sordid business, to provide him with plausible deniability. That’s standard operating procedure in intelligence outfits worldwide. And partly, I’m sure, because the president is considered by the permanent intelligence community to be a mere tenant of the White House. A renter. He moves in for four years, maybe eight if he’s lucky, buys new china, redecorates, hires and fires, gives a bunch of speeches, and then he’s gone. Whereas the spies remain. They’re the permanent Washington, the true inheritors.”
“And you think the one person in government most likely to know about its activities is the chairman of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, yes? The group that meets in secret to oversee the NSA and the CIA and all the other American spy agencies?”
“Correct.”
“And the chairman of this intelligence oversight is Richard Lanchester.”
“Exactly.”
Nodding, she said, “This is why you want to meet with him.”
“Correct.”
“But for what?” she cried. “To tell him what?”
“To tell him what I know about the Directorate, about what I think it’s up to. This was the big question, the reason I was brought back from retirement: Who’s controlling the Directorate now? What is it really doing?”
“And you think you have the answers?” She seemed belligerent, almost outright antagonistic.
“No, of course not. I have theories, backed up by evidence.”
“What evidence? You have nothing!”
“Whose side are you on, Layla?”
“I’m on yours!” she shouted. “I want to protect you, and I think you’re making a mistake.”
“A mistake?”
“You go to see this man Lanchester with … with wisps of nothing, crackpot accusations—he’ll dismiss you at once. He’ll think you’re crazy!”
“Quite possibly,” conceded Bryson. “But it’s my job to make him think otherwise, and I believe I can.”
“And what makes you think you can trust him?”
“What choice do I have?”
“He could be one of the enemies, one of the liars! How can you be sure he’s not?”
“I’m sure of nothing anymore, Layla. I feel like I’m in a maze, I’m lost. I don’t know where I am, who I am anymore.”
“What makes you so sure you can believe what this CIA man told you? What makes you so sure he’s not one of them, one of the liars?”
“I’m not sure, I told you that! This is not a matter of certainty, it’s a matter of calculation, of odds.”
“Then you believed it when he told you your parents were killed?”
“My stepmother—the woman who was sort of my guardian after my parents were killed—pretty much confirmed it, though she’s ill, I think she has Alzheimer’s, her mind is going. The fact is, the only people who really know the truth are the people I’m desperate to find—Ted Waller, and Elena.”
“Elena is your ex-wife.”
“Officially not an ex-wife. We never divorced. She disappeared. I suppose you’d say we’re separated.”
“She abandoned you.”
Bryson sighed. “I don’t know what happened. I wish I knew; I badly want to know.”
“She just disappeared, she never got in touch? One day there, next day gone?”
“Right.”
She shook her head in disapproval. “Yet I think you love her still.”
He nodded. “It’s—it’s just so hard for me to think straight about her, to know what to believe. Did she ever love me, or was she assigned to me? Did she run away from me in despair, or out of fear, or because she was forced to? What is the truth, where is the truth?” Had his secret mission to Bucharest somehow backfired? Had Elena been reached by the sweepers, frightened into hiding somehow? But if so, wouldn’t she have left word for him to explain her actions? Another possibility: Had she somehow discovered that he had lied to her about his whereabouts that weekend? Had she found out that he hadn’t been in Barcelona? She might feel violated, betrayed, but would that really drive her away without raising it with him first?
“And somehow you think you’ll learn this truth by flying everywhere, looking for Directorate operatives? It’s insanity!”
“Layla, once I track these wasps to their nest, they’re over. They must know that I’ve got the goods on them. I have a detailed knowledge of operations going back twenty years, transgressions of just about every national and international law.”
“And you will present all this to Richard Lanchester, and you hope he will expose them, put a stop to it?”
“If he’s as good a man as people say he is, that’s exactly what he’ll do.”
“And if he’s not?”
Bryson was silent; she went on, “You’ll bring a weapon.”
“Of course.”
“Where is yours? You don’t have it on you.”
He looked up, startled. She had a quick, discerning eye. “It’s in my luggage, still disassembled so I could get it through airport security.”
“Well, then,” she said. She removed a .45 from her purse, the Heckler & Koch USP compact.
“Thanks, but I’ll take the Beretta.” He smiled. “Of course, if you still have that .50 caliber Desert Eagle…”
“No, Nick, I’m sorry.”
“Nick?” He felt a hollow thudding in his chest; she knew his true name, though she had never before uttered it, and he had never told her. My God, what else did she know?
She was pointing it at him from halfway across the room. It took him a moment to realize what was going on. He was frozen in the chair, his normal split-second reactions dulled by disbelief.
Her eyes were doleful. “I can’t let you meet with Lanchester, Nick. I’m truly sorry, but I can’t.”
“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.
“My job. You’ve left us no choice. I never thought it would come to this.”
He felt as if the air had gone out of the room. His body went cold; he registered the shock viscerally.
“No,” he said hoarsely, the chair in which he sat spinning slowly a million miles away. “Not you. They’ve gotten to you, too. When did they—”
And he exploded from the chair with the force of a tightly coiled spring, lunging at her with a suddenness that startled her, causing her instinctively to draw back to brace herself, defensively repositioning herself, her fierce concentration broken for the barest instant. Thrown off-balance, she fired, the explosion filling the small room, percussive and deafening. Bryson felt the projectile whiz by his left cheek, the gunpowder searing his face and temple, heard the cartridge casing spit onto the floor, and at almost the same moment he vaulted into the air, knocking her body to the floor, sending the gun clattering across the floor.
But she was no longer the woman he’d thought he knew; she’d been transformed into a tigress, a wild-eyed jungle predator crazed by bloodlust. Layla reared up, her right hand a rigid claw jabbing into his throat, while she simultaneously slammed her left elbow into his solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him.
Still, he managed to rise, swinging a fist at her, but she suddenly ducked under and shot upward, wedging her right shoulder into his right armpit as she vised her right
arm around his neck, and with a loud grunt she grabbed her own left biceps and pulled in toward herself, choking him.
He had fought hand-to-hand with some of the fiercest, most dangerous and highly trained assassins in the world, but she was in another league entirely. She was brutally strong, as untiring as a machine, and she fought with a ferocity he had never seen before. Somehow managing to free himself from the headlock, he reared up again, swinging at her, but she jumped backward, deflecting his blow with her left arm, then sank suddenly to the floor and slammed a fist into his stomach, guarding her face with her left hand.
Bryson gasped, grappled for the soft flesh at the base of her neck, but she was too quick: she delivered a hard kick to the back of his right knee, causing him to sag. Striking the back of his head with her elbow, she almost succeeded in knocking him to the ground, but Bryson forced himself to ignore the blinding pain, summoning all of his considerable strength along with combat techniques learned decades ago that now returned to him like ancient hindbrain reflexes.
He spun out of her way, then launched his body at her frontally, hurling all of his weight against hers while simultaneously throwing a left-handed punch into her right kidney. She screamed, a shrill, full-throated cry not of pain but of rage. Leaping into the air and pivoting, she thrust out her right leg, scissoring it into his abdomen with astonishing force. Bryson groaned; she landed with her right leg forward and threw her right hand back-knuckle against his face with the impact of steel; then, grabbing his shoulders, she drove her left knee into his groin. As he doubled over in agony, she raised her right elbow and drove it into his spine, the pain staggering, then reached for the left side of his face, wrenching his head clockwise as she took him down.
With one last surge of desperate energy, he thrust his hands out, blindly grasping for her legs, slamming the bony side of his hand hard against the nerve center just above her left knee, clutching at it, forcing her down as well, and as she stumbled backward, he thrust his knee into her midsection, cracking his elbow against the side of her neck. She screamed, loosening the grip of her right hand, reaching for something, and he saw what it was: the Heckler & Koch was just feet away; he could not let her regain control of it! He shifted slightly, then jammed his elbow into the cartilage of her throat. She gagged, instinctively reaching with her right hand to dislodge his elbow and protect the vulnerable area, and that was enough to allow him to grab the pistol with his left hand, spinning it around and crashing it against the top of her head, the blow carefully calculated neither to kill her nor seriously cripple her.
She crumpled to the floor, her eyes half open, only the whites visible. He felt her throat for a pulse and found it; she was alive, though she would be out for several hours. Whoever she was, whatever she was, she had had the chance to kill him at the outset, when she had the gun trained on him, but she hesitated; either she could not do it or she found it almost impossible to bear the thought of doing so. She, like he, was probably a pawn, lied to and manipulated, recruited to an assignment about which she was carefully kept in the dark. In a way she was a victim, too.
A victim of the Directorate?
It seemed likely, even probable.
And he needed to question her, find out everything she knew. But not now; there was no time.
He searched the tiny closet, where she had hung her few items of clothing and stowed a couple of pairs of shoes, for a rope or something similar to tie her up. Kneeling down, he felt along the floor, grabbing something that he realized was the spike heel that had somehow come loose from her gray shoes, the ones she had worn to the bank in Geneva. Something extremely sharp at one end of the heel lanced his finger. Wincing, he picked up the two-inch-long gray object and saw a small, razor-sharp blade protruding from the end that was intended to attach to the sole of the shoe. He inspected it more closely: the narrow blade, like an artist’s X-Acto knife, fit into the base of the shoe, the heel threaded so that it screwed in.
He looked back at Layla. The whites of her eyes were still exposed, her jaw slack; she was still unconscious.
Her spike-heeled shoes, he suddenly understood, had been ingeniously outfitted with a razor blade, which was accessible by twisting off the heel. He examined the other shoe, which had been adapted the same way. It was a brilliant little trick.
And then it struck him.
The image of her in the closet off the banker’s office, bound with brightly colored polyurethane “humane restraints,” the sort normally used by law-enforcement agents to transport dangerous prisoners. Jan Vansina, Directorate operative, had fettered her with strong plastic handcuffs—which she could easily have cut her way out of.
Geneva had been a setup.
Layla had been in cahoots with Vansina, both of them Directorate. Vansina had only pretended to attack her; she had cooperated. At any time she could have freed herself.
What did this mean?
There was a small, two-person elevator at the end of the dark hall, the kind that was operated by opening or closing an accordion inner gate. Fortunately, there seemed to be no one else on the floor. Bryson had seen no one else go in or out of rooms on the floor; likely, they were the only ones.
He hoisted her—though she was not big, she was now deadweight and quite heavy—and, putting her head on his shoulder, grasped her beneath the buttocks and carried her, as if she were a drunken spouse, to the elevator. Bryson had readied a rueful joke about his wife’s perennial inebriation, but never had a chance to use it.
He took the elevator down to the hotel’s basement, which stank of flooded sewage, and set her down on the gritty concrete floor. After searching for a few minutes, he found a storage closet, removed the buckets and mops, and placed her inside. With a length of old clothesline, he carefully bound her wrists and ankles with several tight knots, winding the rope around and around her legs and torso, looping it and tying it into slip knots, then tested the restraints to make sure she could not get out of them if she came to before he returned. The rope was secure—and she was barefoot, with no hidden blade anywhere.
Then, taking one more precaution—if she did become conscious unexpectedly soon, she might yell for help—he stuffed a gag in her mouth and tied it tight, checking to see that she could still breathe.
He turned the lock on the closet door, which would serve only to keep her in—he was convinced, however, that she would never have the opportunity to open the door herself—and not keep someone out.
Then Bryson returned to his hotel room to prepare to meet Richard Lanchester.
* * *
In a dark room halfway across the world, three men huddled around an electronic console, their tense faces bathed in the cool green light emitted by diodes.
“It’s a digital relay feed direct from Mentor, one of our space-based satellites in the Intelsat fleet,” intoned one of them.
The reply was urgent, the tone revealing long hours of stress. “But the voice-pattern ID—how reliable is Voice-cast?”
“Within a tolerance of between ninety-nine and ninety-nine-point-nine-seven degrees,” the first man said. “Extremely reliable.”
“The identification is affirmative,” remarked the third man. “The communication was initiated by a GSM cellular phone on the ground whose coordinates indicate Brussels, Belgium, the recipient based in Mons.” The third man adjusted a dial; the voice that emerged from the console was astonishingly clear.
“What is this?”
“We need to talk, Mr. Lanchester. Immediately.”
“Well, talk away! I’m here. What kind of hatchet job is the Post preparing? Goddard, I don’t know you, but as I’m sure you’re well aware, I do have your publisher’s home number, I see her socially, and I won’t hesitate for a second to call her!”
“We have to talk in person, not over the phone. I’m in Brussels; I can be at SHAPE headquarters in Mons in an hour. I want you to call ahead to the front-gate security post, so I can pass right through, and the two of us can have a heart-to-hea
rt.”
“You’re in Brussels? But I thought you were in Washington! What the hell—?”
“One hour, Mr. Lanchester. And I suggest you make not a single phone call about this between now and the time I arrive.”
“Order an interception,” one of the watchers said.
“The decision must be taken at a higher level,” replied another, clearly his superior. “Prometheus may prefer to continue gathering information on the target’s activities, on how much the target knows.”
“But if the two meet in a secure facility—what kind of penetration can we expect?”
“Good Christ, McCabe! Is there anywhere we can’t penetrate? Relay the sound file. Prometheus will decide the course of action.”
PART
III
SEVENTEEN
The president’s national security adviser sat across the burnished mahogany conference table from Bryson, tension creasing his high forehead. For over twenty minutes Richard Lanchester had listened in rapt absorption to Bryson’s account, nodding, taking notes, interrupting only for occasional clarifications. Every question he asked was not only pertinent but incisive, piercing through layers of ambiguity and confusion right to the crux of the issue. Bryson was impressed by the man, by his brilliance, his quick intelligence. He listened closely, concentrating deeply. Bryson spoke as he would debrief a handler or a case officer, just as he used to brief Waller after a field operation: calmly, objectively, coolly assessing probabilities while not injecting conjecture without basis. He tried to provide a context in which the revelations could be meaningfully placed. It was difficult.
The two men sat in a special secure facility located within the NATO secretary general’s command-and-control center, an acoustically insulated room-within-a-room known informally as the “bubble.” Its walls and floor were actually one module separated from the surrounding concrete walls by foot-thick rubber blocks that kept all sound vibrations from emanating outward. Technical surveillance countermeasures were employed daily to ensure that the bubble remained secure, free of any taps or listening devices. Security officers swept the room and its immediate environs daily. There were no windows, and thus no risk of laser or microwave bounces that could read the vibrations from human voices. Then there was an elaborate system of fallbacks: a spectral correlator was used at all times to detect surveillance using a spectrum analyzer, and an acoustic correlator used passive sound-pattern matching to automatically detect and classify any listening device. Finally, an acoustic noise generator was constantly on, generating an audio blanket of pink noise designed to defeat wired microphones inside walls, contact microphones, and any audio transmitters located in electrical outlets. Lanchester’s insistence that they meet within the extraordinarily secure walls of the bubble was testimony to the seriousness with which he regarded Bryson’s urgently imparted information.
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