Suddenly free, Bryson flung himself to the floor, at the same time spinning around and looking up. On a steel catwalk twenty feet above, a tall, portly man in a navy-blue business suit stepped from behind a concrete pillar. In his hand was a .357 Magnum, a long perforated cylinder attached to its barrel, a wisp of cordite curling from its end. The man’s face was momentarily in shadow, but Bryson would know the heavy tread anywhere.
The portly man tossed the Magnum high into the air toward Bryson. “Catch,” he said.
Bryson, thunderstruck, grabbed the weapon as it dropped.
“Glad to see your skills haven’t gone completely rusty,” said Ted Waller as he began descending a steep set of steps. He gave Bryson a look of what could be mistaken for amusement; he sounded out of breath. “The hard part’s coming up.”
TWENTY-TWO
Senator James Cassidy saw the headline in The Washington Times—saw the reference to his wife, her drug arrest, allegations of possible obstruction of justice—and read no more. So it was out, at last, all in the open—a source of profound personal anguish, something he had desperately sought to keep from the hard, raptor eyes of the media. A buried secret had been unearthed. But how?
Arriving at his office at six in the morning, hours before he usually appeared, he found his top staff already assembled, looking as ashen and enervated as he felt. Roger Fry spoke without preamble. “The Washington Times has been gunning for you for years. But we’ve already had more than a hundred phone calls from all the other media outlets. They’re trying to track down your wife, too. This is out-and-out carpet bombing, Jim. I can’t control this. None of us can.”
“Is it true?” asked Mandy Greene, his press secretary. Mandy was forty, and had been with him for the last six years, but stress and anxiety made her seem older than she’d ever looked before. Cassidy couldn’t remember her ever losing her composure. But this morning her eyes were red-rimmed.
The senator exchanged glances with his chief of staff; it was clear Roger had told the others nothing. “What exactly are they saying?”
Mandy picked up the newspaper, then tossed it angrily across the office. “That four years ago your wife was arrested for buying heroin. That you made phone calls, called in favors, and had the charges dropped, the arrest expunged. ‘Obstruction of justice’ is the phrase they’re bandying about.”
Senator Cassidy nodded, wordlessly. He sat down in his large leather office chair and turned away from his staffers for a moment, looking out the window into the gray light of a cloudy Washington morning. There’d been phone calls from the reporter yesterday, calls both for him and for his wife, Claire, but they went unanswered. He’d had a bad feeling about it, had slept little.
Claire was at their family home in Wayland, Massachusetts. She had her problems; many politicians’ wives did. But he remembered how it started—the minor skiing accident that led to back surgery, the fused vertebrae, the Percodans she’d been given for the operative pain. Soon she started to crave the narcotic for more than the cessation of pain. The doctors wouldn’t renew her prescription. They referred her to a “pain management” group, which specialized in counseling. But the narcotics had introduced Claire to a kind of sweet oblivion, a place protected from the stresses and strains of public life, from a private life that didn’t provide the comfort she required. He could blame himself for that—for not having been there, by her side, when she needed him. He’d come to understand how inimical his world was to her. It was a world that, ultimately, relegated her to the sidelines, and Claire, so beautiful, so accomplished, so loving, had not been raised to sit out life on the bleachers. For Cassidy, there were too many Beltway engagements, too many colleagues to romance and inveigle and bully and cajole into doing the right thing. And Claire was lonely; she experienced a pain that was not merely physical. He never really knew which was the real injury, the isolation or the accident, but he’d come to suspect that the spiral of depression and dependency to which she’d succumbed had merely been precipitated by her hospitalization.
Desperate after she could no longer obtain her prescription narcotics, desperate for a form of relief she knew was fleeting yet somehow seemed to make things endurable, she went to a corridor park near Eighth and H Streets in Washington and tried to buy a quantity of street heroin. The man she met there was encouraging, sympathetic, made it easy. He gave her two small glassine bags of the stuff. She paid him with crisp large bills freshly dispensed from an ATM.
And then he flashed a badge and took her down to the station. When the precinct captain discovered who she was, he called the assistant D.A., Henry Kaminer, at home. And Henry Kaminer called his law-school classmate Jim Cassidy, who happened to be serving as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. That’s how he found out. Cassidy remembered the phone call, the hesitance, the awkward small talk that preceded the shattering revelation. It was among the worst moments of his life.
Claire’s delicate, drawn face filled his mind, and the words of a poem he’d once read echoed in his mind: not waving but drowning. How could he have been so blind to what was happening in his own household, his own marriage? Could a public life make a man so out of touch with his private one? Yet there was Claire: not waving but drowning.
Cassidy turned around to face his staff. “She wasn’t a felon,” he said stonily. “She needed help, damn it. She needed treatment. And she got it. Six months in rehab. Discreetly, quietly. Nobody needed to know. She didn’t want the pitying glances, the knowing looks. The special scrutiny that comes with being a senator’s wife.”
“But your career…” Greene began.
“My goddamn career was what drove her to it in the first place! Claire had dreams, too, you know. Dreams of having a real family, with kids and a father who loved them and her, who made his wife and kids his first and last priority, the way a man should. Dreams of having a normal life—it probably didn’t seem too much to ask. She wanted a home, that was all. She gave up her dreams so I could be—what did The Wall Street Journal call me last year?—the ‘Polonius of the Potomac.’” Bitterness entered his voice.
“But how could she have jeopardized everything you’d worked for, everything you’d both worked for?” Mandy Greene could not conceal the flare of anger and frustration.
Cassidy shook his head slowly. “Claire was in agony, knowing that everyone would look at her as the woman who might have destroyed a senator’s career. You’ll never understand the sort of hell she went through. But she went through it; in a sense, we both did. And damn it, we came out the other side! Until now. Until this.” He looked over at the receptionist’s twelve-line telephone, all brightly lit and ringing nonstop in an electronic purr. “How, Roger? How did they find out?”
“I’m still not sure,” Roger said. “But what they’ve got is incredibly detailed. An electronic record of the arrest record, somehow retrieved despite the fact that it was officially expunged. Claire’s sizable cash withdrawal the evening in question. Municipal phone exchange records, itemizing a flurry of phone calls made between your home and Henry Kaminer’s on the night of the arrest. More calls between Kaminer’s private line and the precinct captain. Phone logs between the arresting officer and the station house. Even the electronic records of the payments you made to Silver Lakes for her rehabilitation.”
Cassidy looked grim, but forced a wry grin. “No one person could have leaked all that. The most private, personal records have been breached. It’s what I was warning about, I suppose. The surveillance society.”
“Well, that’s not how it’s going to play,” Mandy Greene said brusquely, regaining her air of professionalism at last. “It’s going to look as if you were campaigning for privacy because of the skeletons in your own closet. You know that better than anyone.”
Roger Fry started pacing around the office. “It’s bad, Jim, I’m not going to minimize it. But I honestly think we can ride this thing out. It’ll get worse before it gets better, but the people in Massachusetts know you’r
e a good man, and your colleagues, whether they like you or not, know you’re a good man. Time is the great healer, in politics as in everything else.”
“I don’t intend to find out, Rog,” Cassidy said, gazing out the window again.
“I know it looks bad now,” Fry said. “They’ll try to crucify you. But you’re strong. You’ll show them.”
“You don’t understand, do you?” Cassidy spoke severely but not unkindly. “It isn’t about me. It’s about Claire. The first sentence of every news story refers to Claire Cassidy, the wife of Senator James Cassidy. That may continue for days, weeks, who the hell knows? I cannot subject her to this. I cannot put her through this. She will not survive it. And there’s only one way to take this off the table. There’s only one way to take this off the front pages and the talk shows and the news hours and the gossip columns.” He shook his head, speaking in the mock-stentorian tones of a newsreel reader: “Senator Cassidy braces for Senate investigation, Senator Cassidy fights to keep his seat, Senator Cassidy denies wrongdoing, Senator Cassidy’s disgrace, did judiciary chair abuse office? Senator married to junkie. Now, that’s page-one news, and it can go on and on and on. Senator Cassidy resigns in wake of damaging allegations is a story, yes, but a two-day story. The travails of Jim and Claire Cassidy, private citizens, soon get buried somewhere after the wire reports from Somaliland. Five years ago, I made a solemn promise to my wife that we would put this behind us, whatever it took. Now that promise has come due.”
“Jim,” Fry said delicately, trying to keep his voice steady, “there’s simply too much uncertainty now to make any binding decisions. I beg you to hold off.”
“Uncertainty?” The senator laughed bitterly. “But I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life.” He turned to Mandy Greene. “Mandy, it’s time for you to earn your paycheck. You and I are going to draft the press release. Now.”
TWENTY-THREE
Bryson froze, barely able to breathe. He was in shock, his mind numb. It was as if a bolt of lightning had streaked down from the sky, searing his consciousness, tearing apart the filaments of reason. He gasped. Everything was madness, illogic; he could barely suppress a scream.
Ted Waller!
Gennady Rosovsky!
The great manipulator, the magician of the dark arts who had turned his life into a great and unthinkable deception.
Bryson grasped the semiautomatic pistol he’d just been thrown, felt it settle into his grip as if it were an appendage, a part of his body. He pointed it back at the man who had just given it to him, realizing that with one well-aimed shot he could kill Ted Waller, and it would not be enough!
It would not answer the questions that tormented him, nor would it satisfy his need for vengeance against the liars and manipulators who had made his life a lie. Still, he trained the weapon on Waller, aiming at his old mentor’s face, overcome by fury, yet roiled with questions, so many questions!
What came out, in a tight, strangled voice, was the first question that leaped into the forefront of his mind. “Who the hell are you?”
He thumbed back the safety, squeezed the trigger back until the gun clicked into automatic mode. A twitch of his index finger and he could discharge ten rounds into Ted Waller’s head, and the liar would topple from his perch on the catwalk to the warehouse floor twenty feet below. Yet Waller, that finest of shots, aimed no weapon back at him. He simply stood there, an obese old man with a cryptic smile on his face.
Waller spoke, his voice echoing in the cavernous space. “Let’s play True or False,” he said, invoking his old pedagogical exercise.
“Fuck you,” said Bryson in cold fury, his voice trembling with banked rage. “Your real name is Gennady Rosovsky.”
“True,” Waller replied, his face impassive.
“You attended the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages.”
“True.” A smile flickered. “Pravil’no. Otlichno.” That’s correct. Excellent.
“You’re GRU.”
“True-ish. To be accurate, the verb tense is past. I was.”
Bryson raised his voice until he was shouting. “And it was all horseshit, all that shit you told me about how we were saving the world! When all the time you were working for the other side!”
“False,” said Waller, his voice clear and loud.
“Enough lies, you son of a bitch! Enough lies!”
“True.”
“Goddamn you to hell, I don’t know what the hell you’re doing here—”
“At the risk of sounding like General Tsai: when the student is ready, the teacher appears.”
“I don’t have time for your Buddhist bullshit!” he thundered.
Bryson heard the footfalls, the clanking of weaponry, and he spun around. A pair of green-uniformed guards had entered the warehouse, carbines at the ready. Bryson squeezed off several shots, and at the same instant he heard the explosion of gunfire coming from above and behind, from the direction of Waller. The two guards were hit; they tumbled forward, sprawling to the ground. Bryson dove to the floor, atop Ang Wu’s body, and he turned over the limp body, grabbed the dead assassin’s submachine gun, yanking the sling from around his neck, gripping it in both hands and angling it upward as he dropped Waller’s gun. He expected to see another set of guards, but there was none.
Then he tugged the handgun from Ang Wu’s hand and shoved it into the front pocket of his ridiculous Hesketh-Haywood suit. Ang Wu had strapped hunting knives to each ankle; Bryson grabbed each, knife and scabbard together, and carefully tucked each one under his belt. His belt! He suddenly remembered the aluminum-vanadium blade—but now he had weaponry that was far more effective.
“This way!” called Waller, turning around and disappearing into the dim recesses of the concrete-walled balcony. “Building’s surrounded.”
“Where the hell are you going?” shouted Bryson.
“Some of us have done our homework. Come on, Nick!”
What choice was there? Whoever, whatever Ted Waller actually was, he was surely right: the warehouse was surrounded by PLA guards; if there was another exit at the ground level, as there almost certainly was, it would simply lead him into the ranks of his enemy. Of his immediate enemy. Bryson raced up the steel steps just in time to see the fat man disappearing into a large open stairwell, just beyond long rows of parked military vehicles. Weaving between the serried ranks of Jeeps and Humvees and Chinese-manufactured trucks, Bryson ran to the stairwell just in time to see Waller climbing the stairs with speed and agility, the almost balletic grace that had always surprised him. Still, Bryson was fleeter of foot, and he caught up with Waller in a matter of seconds. “To the roof,” Waller muttered. “Only way out.”
“The roof?”
“No alternative. They’ll be piling in momentarily, if they aren’t already.” Waller was short of breath. “One stairwell. One freight elevator, but it’s frightfully slow.”
By the time they had reached the third-floor landing, they could already hear shouts from below, running footsteps.
“Shit,” said Waller. “Now I wish I hadn’t had the paté last night. You go ahead.”
Bryson shot ahead up the stairway, rounding the wide bends until he reached what was obviously the top floor. He emerged into the night air, the broad expanse of a parking lot, row upon row of tanks and trucks. What the hell now? What did Waller have in mind? To goddamned jump from the top of the building? Leap across the ten- or twenty-foot chasm to the next building?
“Burn the bridges,” Waller panted as he came out of the stairwell, and Bryson understood what his ex-mentor was saying. Block the path of their pursuers—but how? With what? There were no doors to lock or barricade.…
There were vehicles galore, hundreds, thousands of them. He ran to the nearest row, tried the door handle, found it locked. Shit! He ran to the next; it was locked as well. There was no time for this!
Spying a row of soft-top Jeeps, he ran over to them. Pulling one of Ang Wu’s hunting knives from its scabb
ard, he slashed at the canvas top, then poked his hand in and opened the locked door from inside. The key was in the ignition, which made sense in such a well-guarded warehouse, where separating each vehicle from its key would be a logistical nightmare. Waller was standing clear of the stairwell, a cell phone to his mouth, talking. Bryson keyed the ignition, revved the Jeep’s engine, and drove it straight ahead, at top speed, toward the open stairs. As he approached, he saw that the Jeep was too wide to fit through the opening, but that would suit his purposes nicely. With a great crash, the Jeep smashed into the concrete wall, its front end jutting into the opening, then sank a few feet as the front tires dropped down to the second or third step before stopping. He could just manage to force open the driver-side door, and he squeezed out between the Jeep and the abutting concrete wall.
But it would be nothing more than a delay: several men pushing together could dislodge the vehicle. It wasn’t enough! Searching the adjacent rows of vehicles, he spotted what he desperately hoped to find: a fifty-five-gallon heavy-gauge-steel fuel drum. Tipping it slowly to the ground, he rolled it toward the Jeep, now obstructing the exit onto the roof. He tugged at the plastic bung-hole seal, turned it, and popped it off. Gasoline began pouring out, forming a puddle on the concrete floor around the vehicle. He rolled it further, tipping the bottom up so that the fuel poured out even faster, a flood of it, torrents running around the Jeep’s tires, rivers of gas advancing to the top of the stairwell, then seeping around the Jeep and down the steps. The gasoline odor was overpowering. In short order he had emptied the drum down the stairwell, just as he heard thundering footsteps, the guards running up the stairs to the roof.
No time!
Grabbing his tie, he yanked it free; dropping it into the puddle of fuel until it was soaked, he jammed it into the bung hole of the now-empty fuel drum. It was empty of liquid fuel, but full of gasoline vapor—or, more precisely, a mix of air and gasoline vapor. The proportions might not be ideal, but he knew from long experience that it would do. He took out Giles Hesketh-Haywood’s brass lighter and touched the flame to the improvised fuse. The flame roared to life, and Bryson tossed the steel drum over the Jeep and down into the stairwell, then jumped backward and ran as fast as he could.
The Prometheus Deception Page 36