The Prometheus Deception

by Robert Ludlum

  “Nicholas, it’s been hard for me, you know. Very hard.”

  “And for me. More so.”

  “I’ve had to rebuild my life without you. But the ache, the sense of loss, never went away. Was it the same for you?”

  “I suspect it was much harder for me, because of the uncertainty. Because of never knowing why—why you disappeared, where you went, what you thought.”

  “Oh, iubito! Te ador! We were both victims—victims, hostages to a world of distrust and suspicion.”

  “I was told you were ‘assigned’ to me as a watcher.”

  “Assigned? We fell in love, and that quite by accident. How can I ever prove to you I was not? I was in love with you, Nicholas. I still am.”

  He took her through Harry Dunne’s lies, the tale of a young man selected for his athletic and linguistic abilities, then recruited blind, manipulated, his parents killed.

  “They are very clever, the Prometheans,” she said. “With an organization that is so cloaked in layers of secrecy like ours, it is not difficult to construct a plausible lie. Then they made it seem that you were a hostile, that you were trying to destroy us—so you could not check on the accuracy of what they told you.”

  “But did you know about Waller?”

  “About—”

  “About his…” Bryson spoke tentatively. “His background.”

  She nodded. “About Russia. Yes, he briefed me. But not long ago, just recently. I think only because he was planning to bring you in, and he knew we would talk.”

  Her phone rang. “Yes?” Her face brightened. “Thank you, Chris.”

  Hanging up, she said to Bryson, “We have something.”

  * * *

  Chris Edgecomb handed Elena a pile of red-bordered folders, each thick with printouts. “Man, when this code cracked, it cracked. We had five high-speed laser printers smoking, printing out all this stuff. The main thing that slowed us down was the artificial-intelligence transcript agent—converting the spoken word to the printed one requires huge computing power and a lot of time, even at the speed of our processors. And we’re still nowhere close to done. I tried to winnow out anything extraneous, but I decided to err on the side of being inclusive, and leave the main decisions to you as to what’s important and what’s not.”

  “Thanks, Chris,” she said, taking the folders and laying them out on the long table in the conference room adjacent to the supercomputer center.

  “I’ll have coffee brought in for you two. I have a feeling you’re going to need it.”

  They divided up the pile of printouts and began poring over them. By far the most valuable product was the decrypts of telephone conversations among the principals, of which there were many, some extensive, some conference calls. Since the exchanges were encrypted, the participants tended to speak freely. Some of them—the more canny ones, including Arnaud and Prishnikov—remained circumspect. They used coded language, references that the other would understand without having to resort to explicitness. Here, Elena’s knowledge of speech patterns, her ability to discern deliberate concealment even in plain speech, was crucial. She flagged quite a few transcripts with sticky pads. And since Bryson was more familiar with the players and their backgrounds, as well as with the specifics of certain operations, he was able to pick up on different references, other meanings.

  Barely had they started reading through the papers than Bryson said, “I’d say we’ve got the goods on them. It’s no longer a matter of hearsay. Here, Prishnikov is actually planning the Geneva anthrax attack, fully three weeks in advance.”

  “But they’re clearly not running the show,” Elena said. “They’re deferring to another—really, to two others, possibly Americans.”

  “Who?”

  “So far they don’t use the names. There’s a reference to West Coast time, so one of them may be either in California or somewhere on the Pacific Coast of the U.S.”

  “What about London? Any idea who the puppetmaster might be there?”

  “No.…”

  Chris Edgecomb suddenly came into the room, holding aloft a few sheets of paper. “This just broke,” he said, excitement evident in his face. “It’s a pattern of funds-transfer traffic into and out of the First Washington Mutual Bancorp—I think you might find it interesting.” He handed Elena several sheets of paper, each covered with columns of figures.

  “That’s the bank in Washington used by a majority of members of Congress, isn’t that right?” said Bryson. “The one you suspect was involved in blackmailing—leaking personal information on opponents of the treaty?”

  “Yes,” said Elena. “These are proprietary transfers.”

  Edgecomb nodded.

  “The cycles, the periodicity—it’s unmistakable.”

  “What is it?” asked Bryson.

  “This is a sequence of authorization codes characteristic of a wholly owned entity. A trail, as it were.”

  “Meaning what?” Bryson demanded.

  “This Washington bank appears to be owned and controlled by another, larger financial institution.”

  “That’s not uncommon,” Bryson said.

  “The point is, there’s a pattern of deliberate obfuscation going on here—that is, the ownership is elaborately concealed, carefully hidden.”

  “Is there a way to find out who the secret owner is?” Bryson asked.

  Elena nodded, distracted, as she studied the figures. “Chris, the recurring number here has to be the ABA routing code. Do you think you can run it down, identify which—”

  “I’m one step ahead of you, Elena,” he said. “It’s a New York–based firm called Meredith Waterman…?”

  “My God,” she said. “That’s one of the oldest, most respected investment banks on Wall Street. It makes Morgan Stanley or Brown Brothers Harriman look like upstarts. I don’t understand—why would Meredith Waterman be involved in blackmailing senators and congressmen into supporting the International Treaty on Surveillance and Security…?”

  “Meredith Waterman is probably privately held,” said Bryson.

  “So?”

  “So it may itself be a holding company, in a sense—a front. In other words, maybe it’s being used by another institution or an individual or a group of individuals—say, the Prometheus Group—to mask their true holdings. So if there’s a way to get a list of all past and present partners in Meredith Waterman, maybe also majority owners…”

  “That shouldn’t be hard at all,” said Edgecomb. “Even privately held firms are strictly regulated by the SEC and the FDIC, and they’re required to file all sorts of documents which we should be able to access.”

  “One or more of those names may indicate Prometheus ownership,” said Bryson.

  Edgecomb nodded and left the room.

  Bryson suddenly thought of something. “Richard Lanchester was a partner at Meredith Waterman.”

  “What?”

  “Before he left Wall Street and went into public service, he was a big star in investment banking. Meredith Waterman’s golden boy. That’s how he made his fortune.”

  “Lanchester? But he—you said he was sympathetic, he was helpful to you.”

  “He lent a sympathetic ear, yes. He seemed genuinely alarmed. He listened, but in reality he did nothing.”

  “He said he wanted you to come back to him with more evidence.”

  “Which is just a variant of what Harry Dunne wanted—to use me as a cat’s paw.”

  “You think Richard Lanchester could be part of Prometheus?”

  “I wouldn’t rule him out.”

  Elena returned to the transcript she’d been scrutinizing, and then she looked up suddenly. “Listen to this,” she said. “‘The transfer of power will be complete forty-eight hours after the British ratify the treaty.’”

  “Who’s speaking?” asked Bryson.

  “I—I don’t know. The call originates in Washington, routed through a sterile pipeline. The unnamed caller is speaking to Prishnikov.”

&nb
sp; “Can you get a voice ID?”

  “Possibly. I’d have to listen to the actual recording, determine whether the voice was altered, and if so, how well it was altered.”

  “Forty-eight hours … the ‘transfer of power’… to whom, from whom? Or to what, from what? Jesus, I’ve got to get to London right away. When is the jet scheduled to leave?”

  She looked at her watch. “Three hours and twenty minutes from now.”

  “Not soon enough. If we drove…”

  “No, it would take far too long. I suggest we just go out to the airstrip and invoke Ted Waller’s name, pull all the strings we’ve got, ask them to fly out as soon as absolutely possible.”

  “It’s just as Dmitri Labov said.”

  “Who?”

  “Prishnikov’s deputy. He said, ‘The machinery has just about fallen into place. Power is to be transferred fully! Everything will come into view.’ He said that only days remained.”

  “This must be the deadline he was talking about. My God, Nick, you’re right, there’s no time to waste.”

  As she stood up, the lights in the room seemed to flicker briefly, the interruption a fraction of a second at most.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  “Is there an emergency generator in the facility somewhere?”

  “Yes, of course, there must be.”

  “It just went on.”

  “But it would only go on in case of a true emergency,” she said, puzzled. “Nothing has happened, as far as I can tell—”

  “Move!” shouted Bryson suddenly. “Out of here!”

  “What?”

  “Run! Elena, move it—now! Something’s been patched into the power grid.… Where’s the nearest exit to outside?”

  Elena turned, pointed to the left.

  “Jesus, Elena, let’s go! I’ll bet the doors lock automatically, sealing intruders in as well as out. I know that’s what’s going on!”

  He raced down the hallway; Elena scooped up several computer diskettes from the table and then ran after him.

  “Which way?” he screamed.

  “Straight through those doors!”

  She led the way, and he followed. In a matter of seconds they had come to a set of steel doors marked EMERGENCY EXIT; a red crash-bar at the middle of the doors was used to force the doors open, probably setting off an alarm at the same time. Bryson slammed himself against the crash-bar; the double-doors opened outward into the dark night as an alarm rang. A rush of cold air came at them. No more than two feet in front of them was a floor-to-ceiling gate constructed of steel bars. The gate was slowly closing, automatically, from left to right.

  “Jump!” shouted Bryson, diving through the steadily narrowing space. He spun around and grabbed Elena, dragging her through the gap between the gate and the stone wall, her body just barely clearing it. They were on the steep hillside next to the old stone villa, the electric gate concealed by tall hedges.

  Bryson and Elena ran directly ahead, away from the villa and down the hill. “Is there a car around here somewhere?” asked Bryson.

  “There’s an all-terrain vehicle parked right in front of the villa,” she replied. “It’s—there it is!”

  A small, boxy, four-wheel-drive Land Rover Defender 90 glinted in the moonlight twenty yards ahead. Bryson ran toward it, jumped into the front seat, and felt for the key. It wasn’t in the ignition. Jesus, where the hell was it? In a remote setting like this, wouldn’t it be left in the car? Elena leaped into the car. “Under the mat,” she said.

  He reached down, felt the key under the rubber floor mat. Inserting the key in the ignition, he started it; the Land Rover roared to life.

  “Nick, what’s happening?” Elena cried out as the car lurched forward and down the steep path away from the compound.

  But before Bryson had a chance to speak, there was an immense, dazzlingly bright flash of white light, and a rumbling explosion that seemed to come from deep in the mountain. In a second or two the blast surfaced, the sound terrifyingly loud, deafening, all-enveloping. As Bryson steered the Land Rover around a sharp twist, crashing into and then through vegetation, he could feel the heat sear his back, exactly as hot as if he’d leaned right back into the fire.

  Elena turned back, gripping the handrails to steady herself. “Oh, my God, Nick!” she screamed. “The facility—the compound—it’s been completely destroyed! Oh, God, Nick, look at that!”

  But Bryson would not turn around; he did not dare. They had to keep moving. There was not a second to lose. The wheels spun through the underbrush as he accelerated, faster and faster, and he thought just one thing: My love—you’re safe.

  You’re safe, you’re alive, you’re with me.

  For now.

  Dear God, for now.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  They arrived in London, both of them, by ten o’clock in the evening, by which point it was too late to accomplish what they had to do. They spent the night together in a hotel in Russell Square, in the same bed for the first time in five years. They were strangers to each other, in a sense, but each found the other’s body immediately familiar—reassuringly yet excitingly so. For the first time in five years they made love, the passion urgent, almost desperate. They fell asleep entangled in each other, exhausted both from the lovemaking and from the enormous strains that had impelled them there.

  In the morning they spoke of the nightmare they had both witnessed, sifting details, trying to make some sense of the penetration.

  “When you called the airstrip to reserve the jet,” asked Bryson, “you probably didn’t use a sterile line, did you?”

  She shook her head slowly, her face taut with anxiety. “The airstrip wasn’t equipped with a scrambler on its end, so there was no point. But calls originating in the Directorate facility were generally considered safe, since our internal communications center was beyond the reach of outside interference. If we phoned London or Paris or Munich, say, we usually used the sterile channels—but only to protect the other end.”

  “But calls made across such a distance—a hundred miles or more, for instance—generally are routed from landlines to microwave towers, and it’s the microwave transmission that’s penetrable by satellite surveillance, right?”

  “That’s right—landlines can be tapped into, but not by satellite. It has to be by conventional means—phone taps placed on the wires and such. And that requires knowing exactly where the calls originated.”

  “Prometheus obviously knew the details of the Dordogne center,” Bryson said quietly. “For all Waller’s precautions, the comings and goings, into and out of the airfield, must have been observed, noted. And the airstrip was an easy target for a conventional phone tap.”

  “Waller—thank God, he was gone! But we have to reach him.”

  “Jesus. I’m sure he knows. But Chris Edgecomb—”

  She covered her eyes with her hand. “Oh, dear God, Chris! And Layla!”

  “And dozens of others. Most of them I didn’t know any longer, but you must have had quite a few friends among them.”

  She nodded silently, removed her hand from her eyes, which were flooded with tears.

  After a moment’s silence, Bryson resumed. “They must have patched into the power grid and planted explosives—plastique—throughout and beneath the facility. Without inside resources—without human beings who’d been turned—they could never have done it. The Directorate was on the verge of unraveling the Prometheus Group’s plans, and so it had to be neutralized. They sent me—and others, I’m sure—and when those efforts didn’t pan out, they went for the direct approach.” He closed his eyes. “Whatever secrets, plans they’re protecting, we have to assume they’re of monumental importance to the men behind Prometheus.”

  A direct, frontal approach to the treaty’s most vocal proponent, Lord Miles Parmore, was therefore doomed to fail: it would only alert their enemies without yielding information; such men were well guarded, well prepared for deception, misdirection. Moreover
, Bryson’s instinct told him that Lord Parmore was not their man. He was a figurehead, a very public figure, closely watched, incapable of maneuvering behind the scenes. He could not be a Prometheus control. The true control would have to be someone affiliated with Parmore, connected to him in a tangential way. But connected how?

  The Prometheus conspirators were too clever, too thorough, to allow connections to remain visible. Records would be altered, erased. Even close scrutiny would not reveal the hidden controls, the puppetmasters. The only giveaway would be what was not there, records missing, obviously deleted. Yet the search for such gaps would be the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack.

  Finally, it was Bryson’s idea that they dig more deeply, dig into the past. It had been his experience that the truth could often be discerned there, in old files and books—records rarely accessed, too dispersed, too difficult to alter convincingly.

  It was a theory, but only a theory, and it took them that morning to the British Library at St. Pancras, which lay sprawled across a landscaped square off Euston Road, its orange, hand-molded Leicester brick shimmering in the bright morning sun. Bryson and Elena made their way through the plaza, past the large bronze of Newton by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, and into the spacious entrance hall. Bryson scanned the faces of the people he passed, attuned to the slightest sign of recognition. He had to assume that the Promethean networks had been alerted to him, perhaps even to their presence in London, though so far there was no sign of it. Inside the library, a broad flight of travertine steps took them to the main reading room—an expanse of oak desks with individual desk lamps—and they walked through the discreet paneled doors that led to the carrels. The double carrel they had reserved was private but not cramped, its round-backed oak chairs and green leather-topped desks creating a slightly clubby feeling.

  Within an hour, they had gathered most of the necessary volumes, starting with selections from the official proceedings of Parliament—heavy, large volumes with rugged, black library bindings. Many had been unopened for years, and gave off a musty smell of decay when the pages were turned. Nick and Elena went through them with intense and single-minded focus. Had there been earlier debates about civil threats and civil liberties—other decisions with implications for civilian surveillance? On a pad, they each jotted down errant facts—unexplained references, names, sites. These were areas where the marks of the sculptor’s chisel might be in evidence.