The Prometheus Deception

by Robert Ludlum

  An American jet blown out of the sky … the Eurostar train blown up in Lille … a bomb detonated in the Washington Metro during morning rush hour …

  He was seeing a pattern of terrorism, increasing in frequency, the commonalities evident. Each was designed to incite chaos, wide-ranging public injury, and resulting fear. These were classically designed terrorist paradigms, except for one thing.

  No one had claimed responsibility.

  It was customary, though not inevitable, for terrorists to claim responsibility for their deeds, assert a justification. Otherwise, the incident had no purpose except random demoralization.

  Since Bryson knew the Directorate had been behind Lille, it was by no means impossible that the Directorate had had a hand in the Geneva attack. In fact, it was likely.

  But why?

  What was the objective? What did the Directorate hope to accomplish? Why was a conspiracy of extremely powerful private citizens banding together to instigate a wave of terror in various sites around the world? To what end?

  Bryson no longer accepted the theory that private arms dealers were trying to create an artificial demand for their goods. Uzis were useless against an outbreak of anthrax. There was more to it; there was another pattern, another logic. But what?

  He had just come from Geneva, had been very close to Lille only days before. In both cases, he had been there. True, he had come to Geneva because of a report that Jan Vansina, a Directorate operative, was there. He had gone to Chantilly—not Lille, but close to it—to track the activities of Jacques Arnaud.

  Was it possible that he was being set up? Terrorist outbreaks in places he had just visited—would he somehow be tied in because he had been in the vicinity?

  He thought about Harry Dunne and his insistence that he go to Geneva to confront Jan Vansina. In that case, Dunne had encouraged him to go there; Dunne could have had a hand in setting him up. But Chantilly? Dunne hadn’t known in advance …

  Layla had. In that case, Layla had let him know about Arnaud’s château in Chantilly. She had been reluctant to take him there—or had feigned reluctance—but it was she who let him know about Chantilly. In effect, she had waved the red flag at the bull.

  Harry Dunne had encouraged him to visit Geneva; Layla had induced him, subtly, to Chantilly. In both places, there had been terrorist strikes immediately afterward. Was it possible that Dunne and Layla had been working together, both on behalf of the Directorate, to manipulate him, set him up to take the fall for a series of devastating attacks?

  Jesus, what was the truth?

  He folded up the newspaper to take it with him, and that was when he noticed a small article, accompanied by an equally small photograph. It was the photograph that first caught his eye.

  Bryson recognized the face at once: it was the florid-cheeked man he had seen emerging from Jacques Arnaud’s private office at the château in Chantilly. Anatoly Prishnikov, chairman and CEO of the mammoth Russian conglomerate Nortek.

  ARNAUD JOINT VENTURE ANNOUNCED, the headline read. Jacques Arnaud’s far-flung corporate empire had just announced a joint business venture with the Russian conglomerate, which itself represented the consolidation of a number of industries that formerly belonged to the Soviet military.

  The nature of the business venture was unspecified, but the article took note of Nortek’s growing presence in the European market, mentioning its role in a wave of mergers in the electronics industry. A pattern was beginning to emerge, but what was it exactly? A worldwide coalescence of major corporations, each of which was—or could be—a defense contractor.

  Under the control of the Directorate, if his information was accurate. Did this mean that the Directorate was attempting to seize control of the defense establishments of the world’s great powers? Could that have been what Harry Dunne was so fearful of?

  Had Dunne been maneuvering to set him up as a dupe, a fall guy? Or was Dunne himself—if he was still alive—the dupe?

  Now, at least, it was clear where he would have to go to look for answers.

  * * *

  There was a theatrical supply shop on rue d’Argent, two blocks north of the Theatre de la Monnaie, where Bryson made several purchases. Then he entered the branch office of an international bank, where he initiated a sequence of wire transfers from his Luxembourg account. By the end of the afternoon he had, discounting transaction fees, almost a hundred thousand dollars, mostly in American dollars, but also in a range of European currency as well.

  He stopped into a travel agency and signed on as a last-minute member of a charter tour. Then he found a sporting-goods store and bought a few more items.

  * * *

  Departing from Zaventem Airport the next day was a leased, decrepit Aeroflot plane whose passengers were a motley, rowdy group of backpackers who had paid bargain-basement prices for the “Moscow Nights” package tour of Russia—three nights and four days in Moscow, followed by an overnight train to St. Petersburg, where they would spend two nights and three days. The accommodations would be inexpensive, which was a polite term for squalid, and all meals were included, which was not necessarily a plus.

  One of the backpackers was a middle-aged man wearing green fatigues, a baseball cap, and a bushy brown beard. He was traveling alone but he joined in the general hilarity. His new, instant friends knew him as Mitch Borowsky, a bookkeeper from Quebec who had backpacked all around the world, and happened to be in Brussels when the urge to go to Moscow had struck him. He was lucky enough to get one of the last remaining empty seats on the charter flight. It was totally last-minute, he explained to his new comrades, but Mitch Borowsky liked to do things at the last minute.

  EIGHTEEN

  It was 10:00 A.M. in the Map Room, on the ground level of the White House, and an “impromptu” had been convened—an unscheduled meeting of agency heads and their deputies. It was at such irregular meetings that emergent situations were dealt with, fires extinguished and, at times, set. At such meetings, the incremental decisions that collectively produced the policies and doctrines of state were reached.

  Rapid events required rapid responses: the needed consensus could only be reached in a free-form setting unencumbered by snail-paced bureaucracy, cabinet-level politicking, and endless second-guessing of timid analysts. Success in the executive branch meant mastery of one basic tenet. One did not present the commander in chief with problems; one presented him with solutions. It was at the impromptus—in the White House or the adjacent Old Executive Office Building—that solutions were crafted.

  There were eight chairs around a long mahogany table, a white notepad in front of each seat. A rose damask sofa stood against one wall, a picture of orphaned gentility; above it, framed, was the last situation map used by President Roosevelt, who had overseen the American conduct of World War II from here. It was hand-labeled with a date: APRIL 3, 1945. Roosevelt had died a little more than a week later. In subsequent years, the once-top-secret command center had been converted to a storage area. Only in the current administration had the windowless room once more come into active use. Even so, the redolence of its history lent solemnity to the proceedings.

  Richard Lanchester sat at one end of the table, looking around curiously at his colleagues. “I’m still not clear about the agenda this morning. Urgency was conveyed in the message I got, but very little content.”

  NSA Director John Corelli spoke first. “I would have thought you were in the best position to appreciate the significance of what has happened,” Corelli said, meeting Lanchester’s level gaze. “He’s made contact.”

  “He? Sorry?” Lanchester raised an eyebrow. He had taken a night flight from Brussels, had barely had a chance to shower and shave before the meeting was convened, and the wearing schedule told on his lined face.

  Morton Culler, the senior intelligence officer at the NSA and a twenty-year veteran of the agency, exchanged glances with his boss. Culler’s thinning hair was slicked back with gel, his slate eyes unblinking behind the thi
ck lenses of his aviator-style glasses. “Nicholas Bryson, sir. We’re talking about the visit he paid you in Brussels.”

  “Bryson,” Lanchester repeated the name, his face impassive. “You know who he is?”

  “Of course,” Culler said. “It’s all exactly as we’d expected. It fits his profile, you see. He goes straight to the top. Did he try to blackmail you? Use threats?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Lanchester protested.

  “And yet you agreed to see him face-to-face.”

  “Anyone in public life accumulates a protective armamentarium, a Praetorian guard of receptionists and press officers and functionaries. He got past all that using deception. But he got my attention by revealing his knowledge of something very few of us know about.”

  “And did you find out what he wanted from us?”

  Lanchester paused. “He talked of the Directorate.”

  “He admitted his allegiance, then,” the CIA director, James Exum, said precisely.

  “On the contrary. He described the Directorate as a global threat. He seemed impatient that we hadn’t taken effective action against it. He alluded to patterns of deceptions, to a shadowy supranational organization. It sounded mad, much of it. And yet…” Lanchester fell silent for a moment.

  “And yet?” Exum prompted.

  “Frankly, a certain amount of what he said made sense. It scared me.”

  “He’s a master at that, sir,” Culler said. “A real spinner of tales. A genius at manipulation.”

  “You seem to know a great deal about this man,” Lanchester said tartly. “Why don’t you fill me in?”

  “That’s precisely what we intend to do,” Corelli said. He nodded toward the two unfamiliar faces in the room. “Terence Martin and Gordon Wollenstein, from the joint intelligence task force we’ve assembled for the purpose. I’ve asked them here to brief everyone present.”

  Terence Martin was a tall man in his mid-thirties with a dry manner and a trace of Maine in his accent. His military background was evident from his ramrod posture. “Nicholas Bryson. Son of George Bryson, a one-star general in the United States Army before he died. Bryson was in the Forty-second Battalion, Mechanized, in North Korea, and later served in Vietnam, during the first phase of the engagement. A kit bag full of combat honors. Glowing fitness reports and officers’ evaluations, all the way up. Nicholas, his only child, was born forty-two years ago. At that point, George Bryson was regularly on the move, with rotating posts around the world. Nina Bryson, his wife, was an accomplished pianist, taught music. Quiet, unassuming. Followed him from place to place. Young Nicholas spent his childhood in a dozen different countries. At one point, eight countries in the course of four years: Wiesbaden, Bangkok, Marrakech, Madrid, Riyadh, Taipei, Madrid, Okinawa.”

  “Sounds like a recipe for isolation,” Lanchester said, nodding slowly. “It must have been easy to lose your bearings in that kaleidoscope of cultures. You pull into yourself, into a shell, withdraw from the people around you.”

  “Only here’s where things get interesting,” Gordon Wollenstein interjected politely. He was red-haired and ruddy, with a deeply creased face, and a tieless, slightly disheveled appearance. Only his quiet, observant manner suggested his disciplinary expertise in psychology. His Berkeley doctoral thesis on new-generation techniques of psychological profiling was what had first brought him to the attention of certain experts in the U.S. intelligence community. “You’ve got a child who, every time he gets settled, has to pull up stakes. Abruptly, and with little warning. And yet at every posting, he acquired perfect native command of the cultures, the customs, and the language of the locale. Not the army base, not the American cohort, but the natives, the people in whose land he was living. Presumably from contact with his parents’ servants. Four months after he arrived at Bangkok, at the age of eight, he spoke fluent, accentless Thai. Shortly after arriving at Hanover, none of his German classmates would have guessed he was an American. Same with Italian. Chinese. Arabic. Even Basque, for God’s sake. Not just the official languages, but the local dialectal variants—the language of the playground as well as of the radio broadcasts. It was as if he’d spent his whole life in the place. He was a sponge, a human chameleon, with a really astonishing capacity to, well, ‘go native.’”

  “We’ve confirmed that his test scores were remarkable, always at the top of his class,” Terence Martin put in. He distributed a summary sheet to the others in the room. “Extraordinary intelligence, extraordinary athletic skills. Not a freak of nature, but close. Still, it’s clear something happened to him during his adolescence.” Martin nodded at Wollenstein, giving him the signal to proceed.

  “Adaptability is a funny thing,” Wollenstein said. “We talk about ‘code switching,’ when people grow up multilingual—effortlessly able to think and express themselves in many tongues. More troubling is the ability to adopt and discard different value systems. To exchange one code of honor for another. What if there’s no bright line between being adaptable and being unmoored? We believe that Bryson changed after his parents were killed, when he was fifteen. Once the ties to those parental values were severed, violently, he became susceptible to other influences. Adolescent rebelliousness, steered and manipulated by interests hostile to ours, turned him into a very dangerous man indeed. We’re talking about a man with a thousand faces. A man who may have cultivated grievances against the authorities that once governed his life. His father spent his life in the service of his nation. On some pre-rational level, he may blame the United States government for his father’s death. This is not a man you want as an enemy.”

  Martin cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, we’ve never had the luxury of choosing our enemies.”

  “And in this case, he seems to have chosen us.” Wollenstein paused. “A man whose powerful abilities to adapt to circumstance verge on something like multiple personality disorder. I’m frankly speculating here. But my team and I have grown convinced that multiplicity is the key to Nicholas Bryson. It isn’t like dealing with one man with a stable set of habits and traits. Think of a one-man consortium, if you will.”

  “It’s important that you understand what Gordon has been telling us,” Martin said. “All the evidence suggests that he’s been turned into a very dangerous man indeed. We know of his involvement in something called the Directorate. We know that ‘Coleridge’ is one of his field names. We know that he has been highly trained—”

  Lanchester cut him off. “I told you, he spoke to me about the Directorate. Said he was trying to destroy it.”

  “Classic disinformation ploy,” Corelli said. “He is the Directorate, for all intents and purposes.”

  Terence Martin opened a large manila envelope and withdrew a set of photographs, which he distributed to the assembled. “Some of these are grainy, some less so. You’re seeing a lot of high-res satellite surveillance product. I’d direct your attention to the photograph labeled 34-12-A.” The image showed Nicholas Bryson onboard a vast container vessel. “Spectroscopic analysis tells us he’s holding a quartz container of ‘red mercury,’ so-called. An extremely efficient high explosive. The Russkies came up with it. Nasty stuff.”

  “Just ask the good citizens of Barcelona,” Corelli said. “That’s what was used in the recent explosion there.”

  “Photograph 34-12-B is grainy, but I think you can make it out,” Martin went on. “We took it from a security camera in the Lille station. Bryson again.” He held up another image, an aerial view of the landscape just ten miles east of Lille. It was a scene of destruction, twisted rails and train cars in disarray, like the playthings of a bored child. “Again, we’ve got forensic trace-evidence confirmation that the explosive used was red mercury. Probably ten cc’s would have done the trick.”

  Martin passed out another image: Bryson in Geneva. “You can just make him out from a cluttered street scene—outside the Temple de la Fusterie.”

  “We figured he kept a stash in one of the Geneva banks,” Morton Culler
said. “But he was up to something else there. We didn’t know until a few hours ago.”

  “It wasn’t until we learned about the release of weaponized anthrax there,” Martin said. “Precisely in the sector of the Old Town where we’d photographed him. Presumably there were confederates, but they may have been unwitting. He’s the one who orchestrated it, that much is clear.”

  Lanchester leaned back in his chair, his face drawn. “What are you telling me?”

  “Call it what you like,” Corelli said. “But I’d say your man is the Typhoid Mary of global terror.”

  “At whose behest?” Though Lanchester’s gaze was fixed in the middle distance, his voice was insistent.

  “That’s the trillion-dollar question, isn’t it?” Exum said, with his deceptive Southern languor. “John and I have some disagreements on this issue.”

  John Corelli glanced at Martin, prompting him. “I’m here because Lieutenant General Corelli asked me here in an advisory capacity,” Martin said. “But there’s no secret as to my own recommendation. However formidable Bryson is, he can’t be acting alone. I say we follow him covertly, see where he leads us. Follow the hornet to the hive.” He smiled, exposing small, off-white teeth. “Then apply a blowtorch.”

  “John’s people are saying wait until we learn more,” Exum said, in a tone of exquisite courtesy. He leaned across the table and picked up the photograph of the Eurostar disaster. “This is my answer.” Abruptly, his voice grew hard. “It’s too dangerous to delay any further. Forgive me, but this isn’t a goddamn science fair. We cannot have another massacre while the NSA boys wait until they’ve finished the crossword puzzle. And on this I think the president and I are on the same page.”

  “But suppose he’s our one lead to a larger conspiracy…” Corelli began.