The Prometheus Deception

by Robert Ludlum

  Before him were figures silhouetted against the light, one of them unmistakably Waller, the other much thinner and smaller, presumably a nurse. He heard Waller’s rich baritone: “… he’s coming to even as we speak. Hello there, Nicky.”

  Bryson grunted, tried to swallow.

  “He must be thirsty,” came a female voice that was quite familiar. “Can someone get him some water?”

  It couldn’t be. Bryson blinked, squinted, tried to get the room into focus. He could see Waller’s face, then hers.

  His heart began hammering. He squinted again; he was sure he was imagining things. He looked again, and then he was sure.

  He said, “Is that you, Elena?”

  PART

  IV

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “Nicholas,” she said, coming closer. She came into focus. It was Elena, still ravishingly beautiful, though she had changed: her face had gotten thinner, more angular, which made her eyes seem even larger. She looked wary, even frightened, but her voice was matter-of-fact. “It’s been so long. You’ve aged so.”

  Bryson nodded, managed to rasp, “Thanks.”

  Someone handed him a plastic cup of water: a nurse. He took it, gulped it down, handed back the cup. The nurse refilled it and gave it to him again. He drank greedily, gratefully. Elena sat beside the bed, close to him. “We must talk,” she said, suddenly urgent.

  “Yes,” he said. His throat was raw; it hurt to speak. “There’s—there’s so much to talk about, Elena—I don’t know where to begin.”

  “But there’s so little time,” she said. Her voice was brusque and businesslike.

  There’s no time, her voice echoed in his head. There’s no time? For five years I’ve had nothing but time, time to ponder, to agonize.

  She went on, “We need to know everything you’ve learned, everything you have. Any way in to Prometheus. Any way we can break the cryptographic perimeter.”

  He looked at her in astonishment. Was he hearing her right? She was questioning him about cryptography, about something called “Prometheus” … She had disappeared from his life for five years and she wanted to talk about cryptography?

  “I want to know where you went,” Bryson said hoarsely. “Why you vanished.”

  “Nicholas,” she said briskly, “you told Ted that you took the key from Jacques Arnaud’s encrypted phone. Where is it?”

  “I … I did? When did I…?”

  “On the plane,” said Waller. “Have you forgotten? You said you had a disk or a chip, some such thing. You took it, or copied it, from Arnaud’s private office—you weren’t entirely clear about it. And no, you weren’t under the influence of chemicals. Though you were somewhat delirious, I must say.”

  “Where am I?”

  “In a Directorate facility in the Dordogne. France. That IV in your arm is just for rehydration and antibiotics to ward off sepsis from your wounds.”

  “A Directorate…”

  “Our headquarters. We’ve had to move here in order to maintain operational security. Washington was breached; we had to take evasive action, we had to leave the country in order to do our work.”

  “What do you want with me?”

  “We need whatever you have, and we need it immediately,” said Elena. “If our calculations are right, we have just a few days, perhaps only hours.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before Prometheus takes over,” said Waller.

  “Who is Prometheus?”

  “The question is, what is Prometheus, and we don’t have the answer. That’s why we need the cryptochip.”

  “And I want to know what happened!” thundered Bryson. He gasped; he felt as if his throat would split. “With you, Elena! Where you went—why you went!”

  He could see by the set of her jaw that she was determined not to be diverted from her line of questioning. “Nick, let us please talk about these personal matters another time. The time is very short—”

  “What was I to you?” Bryson said. “Our marriage, our life together—what was that to you? If that’s ancient history, if that’s the past, you at least owe me an explanation—what happened, why you had to leave!”

  “No, Nick—”

  “I know it had something to do with Bucharest!”

  Her lower lip seemed to be trembling, her eyes brimmed with tears.

  “It did, didn’t it?” he said in a softer voice. “If you know anything, you must know that what I did, I did for you!”

  “Nick,” she said desperately. “Please. I’m trying to hold myself together here, and you’re not helping things.”

  “What do you think happened in Bucharest? What lies were you told?”

  “Lies?” she suddenly exploded. “Don’t talk to me about lies! You lied to me, you lied straight to my face!”

  “Excuse me,” said Waller. “You two need privacy.” He turned and left the room, and then the nurse did too, and they were alone.

  Bryson’s head ached, his throat was so raw it felt as if it were bleeding inside. But he talked through the pain, desperate to communicate, to arrive at the truth. “Yes, I lied to you,” he said. “It was the biggest mistake I ever made. You asked me about my weekend in Barcelona, and I lied. And you know that—you knew that. At the time you knew that, didn’t you?”

  She nodded, tears spilling down her cheeks.

  “But if you knew I was lying, you must have known why I lied! You must have known I went to Bucharest because I loved you.”

  “I didn’t know what you did, Nick!” she cried, looking up at him.

  He ached for her, for the intimacy they had once shared. He wanted to throw his arms around her, but at the same time he wanted to grab her by the collar, shake the truth out of her. “But you know now, don’t you?”

  “I—I don’t know what I know, Nick! I was terrified, and I felt so hurt, so horribly betrayed by you—so frightened for my life, for my parents—that I had to disappear. I know how good you are at finding people, so I had to leave without a trace.”

  “Waller knew where you were all along.”

  She looked up at the ceiling, and he followed her eyes to a tiny red dot: a video surveillance camera; there was no doubt that if this were a Directorate facility, there were cameras throughout. What did that mean, that Waller was likely watching, listening? If he was, then he was; so what?

  She was clenching and unclenching her hands. “It was just a few days after you said you were going to Barcelona for the weekend. In the normal course of my work—processing the ‘harvest,’ the signals-intercept product—that I came across a report that a Directorate operative had made an unscheduled appearance in Romania, in Bucharest.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “You know, I was just doing my job, and so of course I followed up the lead and found that it was you. I was—I was devastated, because I knew you were supposed to be in Barcelona. I knew this wasn’t any cover story: it was such a rare thing for you to have a weekend off, and you had coordinated all your plans in an entirely overt way. And well—you know me, I’m very emotional, I feel things so strongly—I went to see Ted and told him what I had found. Demanded, really, that he level with me. He could see at once he was dealing with a distraught wife, a jealous wife, and yet he didn’t attempt to cover for you. It was a relief, yet not a relief. If he had tried to cover for you, I would have been angry, terribly angry. Yet the fact that he wasn’t trying to do so told me that this was news to him—this information had taken him by surprise. And that was even more of a worry for me. Even Ted didn’t know you were in Bucharest.”

  Bryson covered his eyes with a hand, shaking his head. Good God, he had been under surveillance the entire time! He had been so thorough in his “dry-cleaning,” so careful to shake any tails. How could this have happened? What did this mean?

  “Did he investigate?” Bryson asked. “Or have you investigate?”

  “Both, I’m sure. I downlinked the photo-reconnaissance, so now I had a photo of you in Bucharest, which so
mehow made it more concrete, more awfully true. Then a separate and independent source, an agent code-named Titan, corroborated the information and added more. This was the intelligence that nearly did me in. Titan reported that you had had a secret meeting with Radu Dragan, the head of the ex-Securitate’s vengeance squad.”

  “God, no!” Bryson cried out. “You must have thought—since I was being so secretive, you must have thought I was doing something underhanded, something I had to keep hidden from you!”

  “Because I knew through Ted that you were meeting with Dragan without Directorate knowledge! You had to be making a deal, one you weren’t proud of, one you had to conceal. But I gave you a chance. I asked you one day—asked you point-blank.”

  “You had never asked me before about anything I did when I wasn’t home.”

  “You could tell how important the answer was to me, I’m sure. Yet you continued to lie! Baldly!”

  “Elena, darling, I was protecting you! I didn’t want to alarm you, I knew you would object if I’d given you advance notice. If I’d told you after the fact, you’d have worried endlessly, you couldn’t have taken it!”

  She shook her head. “I know this now. But then Titan reported that you had cut a deal with Dragan, that you had given up my parents’ location in exchange for some larger concession—”

  “That was a lie!”

  “But I didn’t know that at the time!”

  “How could you have thought I was capable of selling them out? How could you have accepted that?”

  “Because you had lied to me, Nicholas!” she screamed. “You gave me no reason to think otherwise! You lied!”

  “Dear God, what you must have thought of me.”

  “I went to Ted and demanded that he get me out of the country. Hide me somewhere, somewhere safe! Somewhere you could never track me down. And I wanted my parents moved as well—at once—which was an enormous expense because of the security cordon that was in place. Ted agreed this was for the best. I was wounded to—to the marrow by your betrayal, and most of all I was desperate to protect my parents. Waller moved me here, to the Dordogne facility, and settled Mama and Papa an hour or so from here.”

  “Waller believed that I’d done this?”

  “Waller knew only that you’d lied to him as well, that you were doing something off the books.”

  “But he never raised it with me, never once mentioned it!”

  “Does that surprise you? You know how he keeps things close to the vest. And I begged him not to say a thing to you, not to alert you.”

  “But don’t you know what I did?” Bryson shouted. “Don’t you know? Yes, I did make a deal with the sweepers—a deal to protect your parents! I threatened them, I made it clear that if ever anyone so much as laid a finger on your parents, Dragan’s entire extended family would be wiped out. That this was personal for me! I knew that only the threat of a Sicilian-style revenge would get his attention.”

  Now Elena was sobbing. “In the years—the years since—I’ve wondered. Papa died two years ago, and Mama last year. Without him, she had no will to live. Oh, God, Nicholas. I thought you were a monster!”

  His arms went up to embrace her, though he could barely sit up. Weeping, she fell forward, collapsing into his arms. She touched the bandaged wound, hit a nerve; the pain almost took off the top of his head. But his arms closed around her, patting her gently, reassuring her. She seemed fragile, her beautiful eyes liquid, bloodshot. “What I did,” she moaned. “What I assumed of you, what I assumed you did…!”

  “Compounded by my failure to trust you, be honest with you. But Elena, this was not just a simple misunderstanding—you were deliberately and systematically misled by this agent code-named Titan. Why? To what end?”

  “It must be Prometheus. They know we’re on to them, closing in on them. And they must have seized upon the circumstance to poison the well, to spread a fog of uncertainty and dissension within our ranks. To set one against another, husband against wife in this case. False reports were filed in order to exploit the vulnerability—to hobble us where they could.”

  “‘Prometheus’… you and Waller both keep mentioning it. But you must know something, have some notion as to what it is, its objectives…”

  Elena caressed his face, looked into his eyes. “How I’ve missed you, my darling.” She sat up, took his hand in hers and squeezed, then slowly she got up off the bed. She began pacing as she spoke, just as she had always done whenever puzzling out a particularly complex problem. It was as if the physical activity, the repetitive motion catalyzed something in her thought processes.

  “Prometheus is a name we first encountered only some twenty months ago,” she said slowly, distantly. “It appears to refer to some sort of international syndicate, perhaps a cartel, and as best we can make out, the Prometheus Group involves a consortium of technology companies and defense contractors, and their agents highly placed in governments around the world.”

  Bryson nodded. “Jacques Arnaud’s vertically integrated defense corporations, General Tsai’s PLA-owned defense contractors, Anatoly Prishnikov’s extensive holdings throughout the old Soviet Union, the new Russia. Corporate alliances being established on a global scale.”

  She looked at him sharply, stopped pacing for a moment. “Yes. Those three cardinal among them. But there seem to be many participants, acting in concert.”

  “Acting how? Doing what?”

  “Corporate acquisitions, mergers, consolidation—all seem to be accelerating.”

  “Mergers, consolidations in the defense sector?”

  “Yes. But with an emphasis on telecommunications and satellites and computers. And it’s more, much more than the amassing of a corporate empire. Because in the last five months there has been an epidemic of terrorist incidents, from Washington and New York to Geneva and Lille…”

  “Prishnikov and Arnaud both knew about Lille in advance,” Bryson said suddenly. “I overheard this, saw them discussing Lille a few days before. ‘The way will be clear,’ they said. ‘The outrage will be enormous.’”

  “‘The way will be clear,’” she mused aloud. “Defense industry insiders, owners fomenting chaos in order to boost the value of their stock…” She shook her head. “No, that doesn’t track. The most direct way to increase demand for armaments is to foment war, not isolated, individual terrorist attacks. It’s one of the theories behind the massive arming that led to World War Two, that international cartels of arms dealers built up the young Nazi Germany knowing that not too far down the line there would be a global war.”

  “But this is a different era—”

  “Nicholas, think this through. Key players in Russia, China, and France—at least, and surely there are others—in a position to pit their nations against one another, sound the drumbeats of coming war, the need to strengthen national defenses … That’s how it should be done.”

  “There’s more than one way to spur calls for ‘defense readiness.’”

  “But if you hold the levers of power, there must be a good reason why you don’t pull them. No, we’re not seeing a global arms race. That’s not the pattern at all. Separate incidents, that’s what we’re seeing. Individual acts of terrorism, unclaimed, unattributed. All happening on an accelerating schedule. But why?”

  “Terrorism is another form of war,” Bryson said slowly. “War by other means. A psychological war whose intent is to demoralize.”

  “But a war requires at least two sides.”

  “The terrorists and those who fight them.”

  She shook her head. “It still doesn’t track. ‘Those who fight them’—that’s too nebulous.”

  “Terrorism is a form of theater. It’s committed by an actor for an audience.”

  “So the desired end result is not the destruction itself, but the publicity caused by the destruction.”

  “Exactly.”

  “The publicity almost always helps attract attention to some cause, some group. But this recent wave of
terrorism had no known authors, no cause or group. So we have to examine the publicity, the news, to see what links them all. What do these terrorist incidents all have in common?”

  “That they could have been prevented,” said Bryson abruptly.

  Elena stopped and turned toward him with a curious smile. “What makes you say that?”

  “Go back over the newspaper accounts, the transcripts of the television and radio coverage. Every time, after each incident, a comment appeared in the stories—usually attributed to some unnamed government official—to the effect that had adequate surveillance measures been in place, the tragedy would certainly have been prevented.”

  “Surveillance measures,” she repeated.

  “The treaty. The International Treaty on Surveillance and Security, which has just been agreed to by most of the countries of the world.”

  “The treaty creates a sort of international watchdog agency, right? A sort of super-FBI?”

  “Right.”

  “Which would require the investment of billions and billions of dollars in new satellite equipment, police equipment, and the like. Potentially very lucrative for the companies … like Arnaud’s, Prishnikov’s, Tsai’s … maybe that’s it. An international treaty that serves as a mask, a cover for massive buildups in defense. So that we’re all armed, protected against terrorists—terrorism being the new, post–Cold War threat to peace. And all the members of the U.N. Security Council have signed it and ratified it by now, isn’t that right?”

  “All but one. Great Britain. That’s supposed to happen any day now. The main agitator there is Lord Miles Parmore.”

  “Yes, yes. He’s a—how do you say—he’s a blowhard, but he’s been quite effective at organizing support for the treaty. Never underestimate the man who’s willing to put himself out there. Remember the Reichstag in 1933.”

  Bryson shook his head. “That’s not how the Prometheans operate. Lord Parmore has been brilliantly effective, but I suspect he’s not a brilliant man. I’ll bet the controlling intellect is elsewhere. It’s what our fearless leader likes to say—‘Follow the brawn, look for the brains.’”