The Prometheus Deception

by Robert Ludlum

  “Completely understandable. But do you imagine I simply sent them a Dear Ivan letter—‘Oh, and you can stop sending those paychecks, because I’m switching sides’? Not bloody likely. I took some care with it, as you can imagine. My controller was a greedy bastard and not a little careless. He liked to live well and supported his habit by double-dipping and feeding from the expense-account trough a little too often.”

  “Translation: he embezzled.”

  “Indeed. In those days, that was grounds for either the gulag or a bullet in the neck in the Lubyanka courtyard. And with what I knew, and could pretend to know, I forced him to write me off the books. I disappear, he stays alive, everyone goes home happy.”

  “Then Harry Dunne’s story wasn’t a fabrication, was it?”

  “Not one hundred percent, no. An ingenious pastiche of truths and half-truths and outright falsehoods. Like the very best lies.”

  “What part of it isn’t true?”

  “What did he tell you?”

  Bryson’s heart began to pound slowly. His adrenaline surged, combating whatever narcotic was in his bloodstream. “That the Directorate was founded in the early 1960s by a small cell of fanatics at the GRU, or maybe VKR, brilliant strategists known as the Shakhmatisti, the chess players. Inspired by the classic Russian deception operation, the Trust, from the twenties. A penetration operation on American soil, the most brazen intelligence ruse of the twentieth century, far eclipsing the ambitions of the Trust. Controlled by a tight inner circle of directors, the Consortium, with all officers and staff outside that circle deluded into the belief that they were working for a maximum-security American intelligence unit—and constrained by zealous compartmentalization and gradated code-word secrecy from revealing anything, to anyone, about their work.”

  Waller smiled, his eyes closed.

  “And according to Dunne, the true origins of the Directorate in Moscow would never have been discovered were it not for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Which resulted in the dissemination of a few stray documents inadvertently revealing code-name operations that didn’t fit into known KGB or GRU structures; a contact name here and there; then the entirety confirmed by midlevel defectors.”

  Waller’s grin broadened. He opened his eyes. “You almost have me convinced, Nick. Alas, Harry Dunne is in the wrong line of work. He should have written fiction; he has a wild imagination. His tale is at once outlandish and quite persuasive.”

  “What part of it is fiction?”

  “Where do I begin?” Waller sighed petulantly.

  “How about with the goddamned truth?” exploded Bryson, unable to tolerate his coyness any longer. “If you even know it anymore! How about starting with my parents?”

  “What about them?”

  “I spoke with Felicia Munroe, Ted! My parents were murdered by you goddamned fanatics! To put me under the direct control of Pete Munroe, to bring me into the Directorate.”

  “By murdering your parents? Come on, Nicky!”

  “You’re denying that Pete Munroe was secretly Russian-born, like you? Felicia as good as confirmed for me Harry Dunne’s version of the ‘accident’ that ended their lives.”

  “Which was what, precisely?”

  “That my ‘Uncle Pete’ did it—that he was wracked with guilt afterward.”

  “The poor old woman is senile, Nicky. Who’s to say what the hell she meant?”

  “You’re not going to dismiss it that easily, Ted. She said that Pete talked Russian in his sleep. Dunne said that Pete Munroe’s actual name was Pyotr Aksyonov.”

  “He’s right.”

  “Oh Jesus!”

  “He was Russian-born, Nick. I recruited him. Fanatically anticommunist. His family disappeared in the purges of the nineteen-thirties. But he didn’t kill your parents.”

  “Then who did?”

  “They weren’t killed, for God’s sake. Listen to me.” Waller studied the circular pool of light on his tray-table. “There are things I never told you, for reasons of compartmentalization—things I thought it better for you not to know—but I’m sure you already know the basic contours. The Directorate is, and was, a supranational agency established by a small cadre of enlightened members of U.S. and British intelligence, as well as a few high-level Soviet defectors whose bona fides were beyond reproach, yours truly included.”

  “When?”

  “In nineteen-sixty-two, shortly after the Bay of Pigs debacle. We were determined to see that such a disgrace never happened again. It was my idea initially, if you’ll allow me a brief immodesty, but my dear friend James Jesus Angleton of the CIA was my earliest and most vociferous supporter. He felt, as did I, that American intelligence was being eviscerated by amateurs and bumblers—the so-called Old Boys, really a bunch of overprivileged Ivy League frat boys—patriotic perhaps, but laughably arrogant, convinced they knew what they were doing. A Wall Street clique who basically ceded Eastern Europe to Stalin out of a simple failure of nerve. A bunch of elitist corporate lawyers who lacked the cojones to do things the way they had to be done, who lacked the necessary ruthlessness. Who didn’t understand Moscow as I did.

  “Remember, not long after the Bay of Pigs, a KGB officer named Anatoly Golitsyn defected and laid it all out for Angleton in a series of debriefings—how the CIA was riddled with moles—penetrated, corrupted, to its very core. And the less said about the British, with Kim Philby and his ilk, the better. Well, that about did it for Angleton. He not only provided the Directorate’s initial black-box funding and set up the covert funding channels, but he also approved the basic, cellular organizational structure. He helped me devise the box-within-a-box strategy, the decentralization and internal segmentation, as a way of maintaining maximum secrecy. He emphasized the necessity of keeping our very existence unknown from all but the heads of the governments we served. Only by cloaking its very existence could this new organization hope to escape the mire of penetration, disinformation, and politics to which spy agencies on both sides of the Cold War had been held hostage.”

  “You don’t expect me to believe that Harry Dunne was so far off base, so misinformed about the Directorate’s true origins.”

  “Absolutely not. He wasn’t misinformed. Harry Dunne was a man on a mission. He constructed a straw man. An argumentum ad logicam, a brilliant caricature, plausible-sounding and laced with shards of the truth. An imaginary garden filled with real toads, as it were.”

  “To what end?”

  “To point you toward us, urge you to go after us and, if possible, destroy us.”

  “To what end?”

  Waller sighed in exasperation, but before he could speak, Bryson went on: “Are you going to sit there and deny that you tried to have me terminated?”

  Waller shook his head slowly, almost sadly. “There are others I might try to deceive, Nicky. You are far too clever.”

  “In the parking garage in Washington, after I went to K Street and found headquarters gone. You were behind that.”

  “Yes, that was our hire. It’s not easy to find top-notch talent these days. Why did it not surprise me that you bested the fellow?”

  But Bryson, not so easily mollified, stared at him furiously. “You ordered a sanction on me because you were afraid I’d expose the truth!”

  “Actually, no. We were alarmed by your behavior. All external signs seemed to indicate that you’d gone bad, that you’d joined forces with Harry Dunne and had turned against your old employers. Who can fathom the human heart? Were you embittered by your early termination? Did Dunne turn your head with his lies? We couldn’t know, and so we had to take protective measures. You knew far too much about us. Even despite all the compartmentalization, you knew far too much. Yes, a beyond-salvage order went out.”

  “Christ!”

  “Yet all the while I remained skeptical. I know you better than perhaps anyone, and I was unwilling to accept the dossier, the analysts’ assessments, at least without further corroboration. So I deployed one of our finest new recr
uits to cover you on Calacanis’s ship, monitor your activities until I could be sure one way or the other. I handpicked her to watch you, check up on you, report back.”

  “Layla.”

  Waller nodded once.

  “She was assigned as a limpet?”

  “Correct.”

  “That’s horseshit!” Bryson shouted. “She was far more than a goddamned limpet. She tried to kill me in Brussels!”

  Bryson watched Waller’s face for telltale signs of deception, but of course it was unreadable. “She acted on her own, in contravention to my orders. I’m not denying that, Nick. But you have to consider the chronology.”

  “This is pathetic. You’re weaving back and forth, backing and filling, desperately trying to cover the holes in your story!”

  “Listen to me, please. At least give that much to the man who saved your life. Part of her charge was to watch out for you too, Nick. To presume innocence on your part unless and until we learned otherwise. When she saw that you were about to be ambushed on Calacanis’s ship, she warned you off.”

  “Then how do you explain Brussels?”

  “A regrettable impulse on her part. Her intention was essentially a protective one. To protect the Directorate and our mission. When she learned you were about to meet with Richard Lanchester in order to blow apart the Directorate, she tried to talk you out of it. And when you persisted, she panicked; she took matters into her own hands. She assumed there simply wasn’t time to contact me for instructions; she had to move at once. It was a bad decision, a miscalculation. It was unfortunate, and impulsive, and she tends to be impulsive. No one is perfect. She’s a fine operative, one of the best to come out of Tel Aviv, and she’s beautiful. A rare combination. One tends to overlook the faults. She’s doing fine, incidentally. Thank you for asking.”

  Bryson ignored the sarcasm. “Let me get this straight: you’re saying she wasn’t tasked with killing me?”

  “As I said, her mission was observation and reporting, protection where needed, not termination. But at Santiago de Compostela it became evident that termination orders had been taken out against you by others. Calacanis had been killed, his security forces decimated; it seemed unlikely to have originated with him, given the rapid sequence of events. I deduced that you were being exploited as a cat’s paw; the question was, by whom?”

  “Ted, I saw some of the agents arrayed against me—I recognized them! A blond operative, a dispatch agent from Khartoum. The peasant brothers from Cividale I used in the Vector operation. These were Directorate hires!”

  “No, Nick. The killers at Santiago de Compostela were freelancers who sell their talent to the highest bidders, not exclusively for us—and they’d been hired to do the job at Santiago precisely because they knew your face. Presumably they were told you were a sellout, that you might give up their names. Self-survival is a powerful incentive.”

  “That and a two-million-dollar bounty on my head.”

  “Indeed. I mean, for heaven’s sakes, you were traveling around the world using an old Directorate legend. I could have rolled you up in a second. Did you seriously assume we didn’t have ‘John T. Coleridge’ in our database?”

  “Then who hired them?”

  “The possibilities are numerous. You had put out so many feelers by then; you spoke to old KGB sources to verify my true identity. You think they don’t talk? Or sell information, to be exact, the mercenary bastards?”

  “You’re not going to argue it was CIA, I hope. Harry Dunne obviously wasn’t sending me out to do his dirty work while at the same time ordering me killed.”

  “Granted. But presumably a team was monitoring the situation on the Spanish Armada, and when the vessel was destroyed, a decision was made that you were a hostile.”

  “A decision made by whom? Dunne kept the whole operation off the books, no records maintained, only my ‘Jonas Barrett’ alias recorded in the Security data banks.”

  “Expenses, perhaps.”

  “Buried, encrypted. All requisitions DDCI-need-to-know Priority.”

  “The place leaks like a sieve, you know that. Always has. That’s why we exist.”

  “Richard Lanchester agreed to see me as soon as I mentioned your true name. He made it clear he knew about the Directorate’s origins—as outlined by Harry Dunne. Are you saying Lanchester was lying too?”

  “He’s a brilliant man, but he’s vain, and vain men are easily gulled. Dunne might have debriefed him as artfully as he did you.”

  “He wanted me to probe further.”

  “Naturally. As would you, if you were in his position. He must have been a frightened man.”

  Bryson’s head was spinning; he was overcome by vertigo. Too many pieces didn’t fit! Too much remained unexplained, inconsistent. “Prospero—Jan Vansina—kept asking me whether Elena ‘knew’ something. What was he talking about?”

  “I’m afraid some suspicion fell on Elena at the same time we were wondering about your defection to the enemy. Vansina needed to determine whether she was complicit. I maintained that you’d been false-flagged, and of course I was proven correct.”

  “And what about the roster of operations you devised or controlled—Sri Lanka, Peru, Libya, Iraq? Dunne said that they were all secretly designed to defeat American interests abroad—but under such a deep cloak of secrecy that even the participants didn’t see the chess moves because we were too close to the board.”

  “Poppycock.”

  “What about Tunisia? Was Abu not a CIA asset?”

  “I don’t know everything, Nicky.”

  “It looks as if your whole elaborate penetration operation, ostensibly to defeat a coup, was engineered to unmask and neutralize a key CIA asset. To eliminate an Agency direct feed into a network of Islamic terrorist cells throughout the region—one hand undoing the work of the other!”

  “Twaddle.”

  “And the Comoros, in 1982—you sent us to foil an attempt by mercenaries from Executive Outcome to take over. But according to Dunne, they were CIA hires attempting to free British and American hostages. What’s the truth?”

  “Check the records. The hostages were only freed later, after our operation. Check the employment records if you can locate them. Unwind the sequence. These weren’t CIA hires, they were underwritten by nationalist elements. Do your homework, my boy.”

  “Goddamn you! I was there, you know. And I was on board the Spanish Armada, ostensibly carrying a blueprint of a new-generation Javelin antitank missile as a bargaining chip. Calacanis knew immediately who the interested buyer would be, and it was your man! It was Directorate—Vance Gifford or whatever his real name is. Calacanis himself confirmed the pattern of increased acquisition out of Washington.”

  “We’re not Washington-based anymore, Nicky, you know that. We had to relocate; we were penetrated.”

  “And why the hell was your operative so interested in acquiring the blueprint? For your personal collection, was that it?”

  “Nicky—”

  “And why did he arrive on the ship in the company of Jacques Arnaud’s man, Jean-Marc Bertrand? Are you pretending you weren’t acquiring weapons?”

  “Gifford was doing his job, Nick.”

  “His job being what, exactly? According to Calacanis, the man was on a spending spree.”

  “In this world, as you know better than most, you don’t just inspect the goods without buying. Browsers are quickly detected and dispatched.”

  “The same way Prospero—Jan Vansina—laundered five billion dollars in Geneva? A penetration ruse?”

  “Who told you that—Dunne?”

  Bryson didn’t reply, but simply stared at his old mentor, his heart pounding. He felt his right ribcage begin to throb; the painkiller had obviously begun to wear off.

  Ted Waller went on in a voice rich with sarcasm, “Did he tell you this off-site? Wouldn’t talk in his office? Told you he feared wiretaps?”

  When Bryson didn’t reply, Waller continued. “The deputy director of
Central Intelligence doesn’t have the power to have his own office swept, Nick?”

  “Bugs come in plastic, too. Sweeping won’t detect them—nothing will, short of tearing apart the plaster.”

  Waller snorted softly. “It was a show, Nicky. A goddamned piece of theater. An attempt, successful as it turned out, to persuade you that he was the good guy, the forces of darkness arrayed against him—the forces, in this case, being the entire CIA. In which he’s the number two.” Waller shook his head sadly. “Really.”

  “I gave him an Agency ID card I took off the body of one of the black-operatives who tried to terminate me outside Chantilly.”

  “And let me guess. He had the card tested and found it to be fake.”

  “Wrong.”

  “Maybe he was unable to turn up any records. He did a Code Sigma, found that it had been assigned to an operator in extremis, and there the trail went cold. He couldn’t trace the name.”

  “That’s not exactly far-fetched. Agency extremis operators don’t leave tracks, you know that. Dunne admitted to me the CIA wasn’t the best agency to investigate the Directorate.”

  “Ah, and it made you trust him all the more, didn’t it? I mean, trust him personally.”

  “You’re saying he was trying to have me terminated while at the same time he was directing me to investigate the Directorate’s activities? That’s not just illogical, that’s insane!”

  “Directing complex field operations is always a shifting calculation. My guess? Once he saw you had survived the attack, he realized you could be reprogrammed, redeployed against another lead. But it’s time to return your seat to an upright and locked position, as they say. We’re there.”

  Waller seemed to be speaking from a great distance, and Bryson didn’t understand what he meant; he could feel everything receding, and the next thing he knew he was aware of a bright white light. He opened his eyes and saw that he was in a room that was all white and steel. He was lying down in a tightly made bed between heavy linens; his eyes ached from the brightness of the light; his throat was parched and his lips were dry, cracked.