The Prometheus Deception (35 page)

“This is an outrage,” declared French National Assembly member Françoise Chouet. “We had the technical ability to prevent this sickening carnage, yet our police are hamstrung by our laws from doing anything about it.” In London, Lord Miles Parmore renewed his call in Parliament for passage of the International Treaty on Surveillance and Security. “If the governments of France and England had the ability to keep this sabotage from happening, it is simply criminal that we sat there and did nothing about it. This is a national—no, an international—disgrace.”

The United States national security adviser, Richard Lanchester, attending a NATO summit in Brussels, issued a statement denouncing the “slaughter of innocents.” He added, “In this period of mourning, we must all ask ourselves how to make sure something like this never happens again. With great reluctance and sadness, the Davis administration joins its allies and good friends England and France in calling for worldwide passage of the International Treaty on Surveillance and Security.”

Lille
.

Bryson's blood ran cold.

He remembered the low, conspiratorial voices of two men emerging from Jacques Arnaud's private office in the Château de Saint-Meurice. One was the arms merchant himself, the other Anatoly Prishnikov, the Russian tycoon.

“Once Lille happens,” Arnaud had said, “the outrage will be enormous. The way will be clear.”

Once Lille happens
.

Two of the world's most powerful businessmen, one an arms dealer, the other a mogul who no doubt secretly owned or controlled large segments of the Russian defense industry—Bryson would have to obtain a complete dossier—had foreknowledge of the devastation at Lille, the attack that killed seven hundred people.

Quite likely the men were among those who planned it.

Both of them principals of the Directorate. The Directorate was behind the nightmare at Lille; there was no question about it.

But to what
end?
Senseless violence was not the Directorate's way; Waller and the other overseers had always prided themselves on their strategic genius. Everything was strategy, everything served an ultimate end. Even the murder of Bryson's parents, even the massive deception that had become his life. The murder of a few field operatives might be justified by nothing more than the need to remove an encumbrance, an obstacle, a threat. But the wholesale murder of seven hundred innocent travelers was in another category entirely, moved from low-level tactics to higher strategy.

The outrage will be enormous
.

The public outcry over the derailing and destruction of the Eurostar train was indeed great, as it would inevitably be over such a preventable tragedy.

Preventable tragedy.

The key was preventable. Prophylaxis. The Directorate
wanted
this outrage,
wanted
to spur calls for prevention of any future terrorism. Yet
prevention
could mean any number of things. A treaty to fight terrorism was one thing, no doubt little more than window dressing. But surely any such treaty would lead to the bolstering of national defenses, the acquisition of weapons intended to protect public safety.

Arnaud and Prishnikov, merchants of death with a vested interest in world chaos, because chaos was a form of marketing—the marketing of their goods, their weapons, the increasing of demand. These two moguls were presumably behind Lille and …

And what else? Standing there on the street, he was oblivious to the bustle of passing pedestrians. Layla was reading the article over his shoulder, saying something to him, but he did not hear her. He was retrieving remembered news stories in the filing cabinet of his mind. Several recent incidents that he had read about, seen television coverage about, terrible things that at the time did not register as directly applicable to his own life, his mission.

Just a few days ago there had been a devastating explosion in a Washington, D.C., metro station during the morning rush hour that had killed dozens of people. And later that same day—he remembered because the timing was so unfortunate—an American jetliner had blown up just after taking off from Kennedy Airport, en route to Rome. One hundred fifty, one hundred seventy people had been killed.

The outcry in America had been anguished, clamorous. The president had issued a call for passage of the international security treaty, which had previously been stalled in the Senate. After Lille, the European nations would surely join the Americans in pushing for strong measures to restore sanity to a world spinning out of control.

Control.

Was this the “higher purpose,” the underlying reason behind the Directorate's madness? A rogue intelligence agency, once a small but powerful behind-the-scenes player known to no one, making a bid to seize control where the rest of the world had failed?

Damn it, it was all vaporous speculation, theory upon theory, conclusions drawn from tentative suggestions. Unprovable, shadowy, insufficient. But an answer to Dunne's initial question, the reason why the CIA man had plucked Bryson from a contented retirement and all but forced him to investigate, was beginning to suggest itself. It was time to level with Harry Dunne, present him with a scenario, with hypotheses. To wait for firm, undeniable documentation of the Directorate's agenda would be to let another Lille happen, and that was morally repugnant. Did the CIA really need another seven hundred innocent people to die before it decided to do something?

And yet …

Yet the biggest piece of the puzzle remained missing.

“Does Elena know?”
Vansina had asked. The implication being that the Directorate did not know where she was, or where her loyalties resided. It was more important than ever that she be located: the very question—
Does Elena know?
—implied that she had to know something crucial. Something that would not only explain her disappearance from his life but also reveal the pattern, the key to the Directorate's true intentions.

“You know something about this.” Layla's voice: a statement, not a question.

He realized that she had been speaking to him for a while. He turned to look at her. Had she not overheard Arnaud's remark about Lille at the château? Evidently not.

“I have a theory,” he said.

“Which is?”

“I need to make a call.” He handed her the newspaper. “I'll be right back.”

“A call? To whom?”

“Give me a few minutes, Layla.”

She raised her voice. “What are you
hiding
from me? What are you really up to?”

He saw in her beautiful brown eyes bewilderment, but something more: hurt, anger. She was justified in being angry. He had been using her as an accomplice while telling her almost nothing. It was more than hurtful, it was unacceptable, particularly to a field agent as skilled and knowledgeable as she was.

He hesitated, then spoke. “Let me make a phone call. When I return, I'll fill you in—but I warn you, I know a lot less than you must think I do.”

She put a hand on his arm, a quick, affectionate gesture that said any number of things—Thank you, I understand, I'm here for you. He was moved to kiss her, lightly and on the cheek: nothing sexual, but a moment of human contact, an expression of gratitude for her bravery and support.

He walked quickly to the end of the block, taking a side street off Place Bel-Air. There was a small
tabac
that sold, in addition to cigarettes and newspapers, prepaid telephone cards. He purchased one, located an international telephone in a booth on the street. He dialed 011, then 0, then a sequence of five numbers. There was a low electronic tone; then he dialed seven more digits.

It was a sterile line, a number that Harry Dunne had given him; it rang directly through to Dunne's CIA office and at Dunne's private study at home. Dunne had guaranteed that he, and only he, would answer it.

The phone rang once.

“Bryson.”

Bryson, about to speak, caught his breath. The voice was unfamiliar; it did not sound like Dunne. “Who is this?” he said.

“It's Graham Finneran, Bryson. You—I think you know who I am.”

Dunne had mentioned Finneran when they had last met in his CIA office. Dunne had identified Finneran as his aide-de-camp, one of the men who had accompanied Dunne to the CIA's Blue Ridge Mountains facility, one of Dunne's few trusted aides.

“What is this?” said Bryson guardedly.

“Bryson—I—Harry's in the hospital. He's quite ill.”

“Ill?”

“You know he's got a terminal case of cancer—he won't talk about it, but it's obvious—and he collapsed yesterday and had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance.”

“You're saying he's dead, is that it?”

“No—thank God, no, but I don't know how long he's got, to be honest. But he's briefed me fully on your … your project. I know he was worried, frankly—”

“Which hospital?”

Finneran hesitated, barely a second or two, but it was too long. “I'm not sure I should say just yet—”

Bryson disconnected the call, his heart pounding, the blood rushing in his ears. His instincts commanded him to get off the line at once. Something was not right. Dunne had assured him that no one else would answer this telephone, and he would not violate protocol, even on his deathbed. Dunne knew Bryson, knew how Bryson would react.

No. Graham Finneran—if it
was
Graham Finneran; Bryson wouldn't recognize his voice in any case—would never have answered the phone. Dunne would never have permitted it.

Something was terribly wrong, and it was more than the health of the CIA man.

Had the Directorate finally reached its chief adversary within the Agency, finally neutralized the last institutional bulwark against their growing power?

He raced back through the Place Bel-Air, found Layla still standing by the news kiosk. “I have to go to Brussels,” he said.

“What? Why Brussels? What are you
talking
about?”

“There's a man there—someone I need to reach.”

She looked at him questioningly, beseechingly.

“Come on. I know of a pension in the Marolles. It's run-down and shabby, and it's not in a particularly pleasant part of town. But it's safe and anonymous, and it's not where anyone would think to look for us.”

“But why
Brussels?
”

“It's a last resort, Layla. Someone who can help out, someone extremely highly placed. A person some people consider the last honest man in Washington.”

FIFTEEN

The headquarters of the Systematix Corporation comprised seven large, gleaming glass-and-steel buildings on a sylvan, beautifully landscaped campus—twenty acres in all—outside Seattle, Washington. There were dining rooms and exercise rooms in each building; the corporation's employees, who were renowned for their loyalty and discretion, had little reason to leave while they labored away. They were a closely knit community, recruited from the best training programs around the world and compensated generously. They realized, too, that they had thousands of colleagues elsewhere whom they would never meet. Systematix, after all, had offices around the world, and owned controlling stakes in many more companies, though the extent of these holdings remained a matter of avid conjecture.

“I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore,” Tony Gupta, the jovial chief technology officer of InfoMed, told his boss, Adam Parker, as the two were escorted to the meeting room. Parker smiled thinly. He was the CEO of a nine-hundred-million-dollar company, but even he had to feel some slight trepidation as he arrived at the fabled Systematix campus.

“Ever been here before?” Parker asked. He was a rangy man with salt-and-pepper hair who used to run marathons before a knee injury forced him to stop. Now he rowed and swam and, even with the bad knee, played tennis with a ferocity that made it hard for him to keep his partners for more than a few games. He was an intensely competitive man, a quality that enabled him to build his company, which specialized in medical “informatics” and data warehousing. But he knew when he was outmatched.

“Once,” Gupta said. “Years ago. I was up for a job as a software engineer, but at the interview there was a brainteaser that I flunked. And just to get that far, I had to sign three nondisclosure agreements. They were fanatical about secrecy.” Gupta adjusted his tie, which he'd knotted too tightly. He wasn't accustomed to wearing one, but then, this was no ordinary occasion; Systematix wasn't known to indulge the self-conscious informality that was de rigueur among so many New Economy corporations.

Parker didn't have a good feeling about the impending acquisition, and had made no secret about it to Gupta, who was the man he trusted most among his colleagues. “The board isn't going to let me stop the deal,” Parker said softly. “You realize that, don't you?”

Gupta looked at their escort, a blond, lithe woman and shot his boss a warning glance. “Let's just listen to what the great man has to say,” he replied.

Moments later, they took their seats along with twelve other men and women on the top floor of the largest building, with a breathtaking view of the surrounding hills. This was the centerpoint of the seemingly diffuse and decentralized company that was Systematix. For most of the assembled—the directors of InfoMed—it was their first time face-to-face with Systematix's legendary founder, chairman, and chief executive officer, the reclusive Gregson Manning. In the past year, as Adam Parker knew, Manning had acquired dozens of such companies in cash transactions.

“The great man,” Gupta had called him, and though the words were arch, they were not ironic. Gregson Manning
was
a great man, almost everyone agreed. He was one of the richest men in the world, had created from nothing a vast corporation that manufactured much of the infrastructure of the Internet. Everyone knew his story—about how he dropped out of CalTech when he was eighteen, lived in a communal house with his techie friends, started Systematix out of a garage. Now it was hard to think of a single company anywhere that didn't rely upon Systematix technologies for some part of their operations. Systematix was, as
Forbes
once said, an industry unto itself.