The Prometheus Deception (57 page)

“Rupes? There was no need for him to know. He's always trusted my advice implicitly. But nobody had his charm. One needed the charming stooge.
Needed
, past tense. He's not exactly necessary any longer, is he?”

She took a step back. “You mean because Britain's now a signatory to the treaty.”

“Exactly. As of ten minutes ago. But who are you? I fancy we haven't been introduced properly.” The Browning still rested comfortably in Dawson's right hand. He pulled a flat metallic case from his breast pocket, evidently some sort of wireless personal digital assistant. “Let's see what the Network has to say,” Dawson murmured. He held the device up in the air and pointed it toward her. An image of her face immediately appeared on the square LCD screen. Then the screen began to flicker as hundreds of faces flashed by almost in a blur, until a match was found.

“Elena Petrescu,” he said. He read from an electronic file. “Born in 1969, Bucharest, Romania. Only daughter of Andrei and Simona Petrescu, Andrei having been Romania's leading specialist in cryptography. Ah,
most
intriguing. Exfiltrated from Bucharest just before the 1989 coup d'etat by … Nicholas Bryson.” He looked up. “You're
married
to Nicholas Bryson. Now it comes together. Directorate employees, both of you. Separated for five years … in the year before you left, you bought, let's see, three ovulation kits—obviously trying to get pregnant. Hmm … didn't happen, I take it. Regular weekly sessions with a psychotherapist—I wonder, were you dealing with the difficulty of being a political defector in a strange country, or working at an agency as secret as the Directorate, or was it the crumbling marriage?”

There was something about the disjunction between what he was saying and his casual tone that made Elena shudder. She noticed that although he was still holding his Browning, he was paying it little attention.

“Your plans have leaked, you should know that,” Elena said.

“It really doesn't concern me,” Dawson replied airily.

“I doubt that. You were concerned enough about Rupert Vere knowing and informing MI-5 that you killed him.”

“The CIA and MI-6 and MI-5 and all the other three-letter spy agencies have all been neutralized. The Directorate took us longer—perhaps by virtue of your paranoid structure—though the very secrecy that insulated you from penetration also made it that much easier for us to paralyze you, funnily enough. It's strange how long it's taken you people to realize that time has passed you by, that there's simply no need for you any longer! The NSA is overwhelmed with the sheer volume of traffic—the E-mails and cell-phone calls it struggles to vacuum up, all the Internet traffic. Good God, it's a Cold War relic—it thinks the Soviet Union never went away! And to think that there was once a time when the NSA was the crown jewel of American intelligence, the biggest, the best! Well, encryption has pretty much ended that reign. And the CIA—the folks who accidentally had us bomb the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, who had no
idea
India had nuclear weapons! The ineptitude! The less said of them, the better. Intelligence agencies are a thing of the past. No wonder you all try so hard to block the rise of Prometheus—you're like dinosaurs impotently raging against the inevitability of evolution! But by this weekend, your demise will be evident to the entire world. On the shores of the lake, a new global order will be assured, and the welfare of the human race will be secure as it's never been before.” He turned his attention to the Browning once again, pointing it at her. “Sometimes the few must be sacrificed at the altar of the many. I can already see the headlines in the
Telegraph
—
FOREIGN SECRETARY VERE SLAIN BY SUICIDAL STALKER.
And in the
Sun
, something like
SLAYS CAB MIN, THEN SELF.
They'll probably intimate some sordid sexual angle. And the gun and the powder spray will positively identify you as the killer.”

As Dawson spoke, he was unscrewing the silencer from the Browning; then, as tightly coiled as a mountain cat, he took two long, rapid steps toward Elena. With a grip of iron, he placed the gun in her hand, crushing her fingers around it, then bent her arm so that the barrel pressed hard against her temple. Elena started thrashing violently, convulsively: if nothing else, she would spoil the tableau he had planned. She screamed at the top of her lungs. She felt as if another force altogether had taken possession of her body, the concentrated will to survive transmuting into a primal muscular response. She writhed and flailed, and when she heard another voice it seemed to come from a great distance.

Nick Bryson's voice.

“Dawson, what on earth are you doing? She's one of
ours!
” Bryson shouted. The door to the closet opened, and Bryson stepped out, disguised as a Whitehall civil servant with hairpiece, mustache, and glasses; only upon close examination did he bear any resemblance to Nicholas Bryson. The shoulders of his suit were flecked with wood splinters and dust, evidence that he had made his way into the office through a crawlspace. “She was dispatched personally by Jacques Arnaud!” Bryson warned.

“What—who the hell are you?” gasped Dawson, spinning around to look at the intruder with mingled astonishment and uncertainty; in so doing, he momentarily loosened his grip on Elena, who suddenly lunged to one side. In one violent motion she was able to wrench the pistol, which Dawson had been forcing into her hand, away from him. Elena hurled it toward Bryson, who dove into the air and retrieved it.

Bryson gripped it in both hands, aiming it at Vere's deputy. “
Don't
move,” he said sharply. “Or there'll be two bodies on the floor.”

Dawson froze, staring malevolently at Bryson, then shifting his eyes toward Elena.

“Now, we have a few questions for you,” Bryson said, advancing toward Dawson, the gun still pointed. “And you'd be wise to answer them as completely and truthfully as you can.”

Dawson shook his head in disgust, backing up slowly. “You're sadly mistaken to think that you can threaten me. Prometheus has been in the planning for over a decade. It's larger than any one person, any one
nation
for that matter.”

“Freeze!” Bryson shouted.

“You can kill me,” said Dawson, still backing up, edging closer and closer to Elena, “but it's not going to change a thing, or even slow anything down. The gun in your hands was used to kill my dear friend there; if you're so foolish as to kill me too, you'll have two homicides on your head. And it's only fair to warn you that this office is equipped with electronic eavesdropping devices; the moment your friend here entered the foreign secretary's office and I saw what she was really up to, I placed a call to the Alpha squad, Grosvenor Square detachment. I'm sure you know about the Alpha squad.”

Bryson only stared.

“They'll be here any moment now. They're probably entering the building already, you goddamned son of a
bitch!
” And as he raised his voice, he leaped toward Elena, grabbing her by the throat, his thumbs squeezing the cartilage in a death grip. Elena's screams quickly became gagging, strangulated sounds.

There was a thunderous explosion as the bullet was fired from the unsilenced Browning in Bryson's hands. At the top of his forehead, near the hairline, a tiny oval wept blood. Dawson, his face oddly immobile, slumped face forward onto the floor.

“Quick!” Bryson said. “Grab his pocket computer, his wallet, whatever else is in his pockets.”

Her face wrinkled with distaste, she searched the dead man's pockets, taking keys, wallet, PalmPilot, and assorted scraps of paper. Then she followed him through the open closet door and saw where Bryson had removed the plywood backing.

*   *   *

Belinda Headlam's experience in Foreign Secretary Rupert Vere's employ had taught her the supreme importance of discretion. She knew that he conducted negotiations of exquisite sensitivity in his alcove suite, and she had her suspicions that it might also be his lair for the occasional assignation, as well. Last year, the young woman from the agricultural ministry had seemed ever so slightly flushed and dishabille when she'd had to interrupt their conversation with the urgent summons from the prime minister. Foreign Secretary Vere had been just a little short with her for a few days afterward, as if he had been embarrassed by the interruption and displeased at her. But all that passed and she tried to put the episode out of her head. Men had their weaknesses, she knew; they all did.

Yet the foreign secretary was a most eminent man, one of the most capable members of the government, as the leader page of the
Express
often repeated, and she was honored that he had handpicked her as his personal assistant. But
surely
something was wrong. She wrung her hands, agonized about what to do, and finally decided she couldn't dither any longer. The foreign secretary's office was well soundproofed—he had insisted on that—but that noise, muffled though it was, sounded terribly like a gunshot. Could that be? And if it
were
a gunshot and she'd done nothing—why, then what? What if the foreign secretary were wounded and in dire need of help? Then there was the fact that Simon Dawson, his deputy, had joined them, and it wasn't like him to stay for so long. There was, furthermore, something
peculiar
about the tarted-up woman who'd passed him a note. Mrs. Headlam had an inkling of what Foreign Secretary Vere's appraising look might mean, but the woman didn't seem as if she were there on such …
business
.

Something was dodgy.

Belinda Headlam stood up and rapped sharply on the secretary's door. She waited five seconds and rapped again. Then, saying, “I'm so terribly sorry,” she pushed open the door. And then she screamed.

The sight was so shattering it took her almost half a minute before she had enough sense to notify security.

*   *   *

Sergeant Robby Sullivan of the Palace of Westminster Division of the Metropolitan Police kept himself lean and taut with an hour of hard jogging each morning, and he looked askance at his colleagues who, as the years wore on, allowed themselves to—well, get a little podgy. You might have thought they didn't take the beat seriously. Robby had been assigned to Westminster Division for seven years, charged with policing the halls of Parliament, ousting intruders, and generally keeping the peace. Though the time had passed with relatively few incidents, years of IRA threats had given him much practice at responding to alarms.

Still, nothing had prepared him for the scene in the foreign secretary's suite. He and Police Constable Eric Belson, his young redheaded deputy, radioed New Scotland Yard for immediate backup, but in the interim they sealed off Vere's chambers and used the existing detail to station an officer by every major stairwell. From Mrs. Headlam's account, there was likely a killer on the loose in the building—a woman, at that. Though how she'd managed to get out of the office without going past Mrs. Headlam was a puzzlement. She would not be permitted to escape from the building, he was determined—not on his watch. He'd gone through regular drills, knew all the requisite moves and maneuvers. Of course, this time it was the real thing. The adrenaline reminded him of that.

*   *   *

The air in the long, dark passageway was musty, dead, and stifling, evidently having been undisturbed for years. Bryson and Elena moved quickly yet silently through the gloom, crawling on hands and knees in some places, walking erect with an awkward, stoop-shouldered gait where space allowed. Bryson carried with him the briefcase he had brought into the Parliament building, an encumbrance but perhaps a vital asset. The only light came from the daylight that filtered in through cracks in the mortise work or ceiling molding. The ancient wood flooring creaked alarmingly as they passed between offices and public spaces and supply rooms. Voices on the other side of the wall were muffled, louder in some places than in others. At one point Bryson noticed something, a peculiar noise pattern, and he stopped. Their eyes were beginning to get used to the dark; he could see Elena turn to him quizzically, and he put a finger to his lips as he peered through a crack.

He saw the boots, then the fatigues, of U.S. Marines. The secret Alpha squad had arrived and had dispersed to search the building. The welcoming committee. He guessed that the Marines were ordinarily assigned to the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, interspersed among the regular contingent whose job it was to guard the building and the ambassador. Their lethal presence was alarming in the extreme: the highly trained hit squad would be mobilized only upon top-secret-code-word orders dispatched at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Oval Office authority was required. Whatever the terrifying agenda of Prometheus—he had overheard part of Dawson's rant, which seemed in some way to concern a new generation of governmental espionage—it was being put into place with the cooperation of the White House, knowingly or not.

Madness!
This was no mere bureaucratic transformation, no simple governmental shift. The Prometheus killers seemed instead to be front men of some kind of officially sanctioned power struggle, an epochal transfer of power. But what could it be?

Immediately ahead of them, the crawlspace was interrupted by a metal enclosure: an air duct. Feeling with his fingertips, he located a hinged access door for maintenance purposes. Panels of air filters were tightly lodged in place. Bryson pulled out a long, flat screwdriver from the briefcase and worked the filters loose from their frames until the passageway was unblocked. Now he and Elena entered the square-sided steel enclosure, shimmying and sliding down a steep decline through a narrow space of ribbed steel, which vibrated with regular bursts of cold air. “This leads to a space over the Chancellor's Gate,” Bryson said, his voice echoing and metallic, “and then to Victoria Tower. But we're going to have to play this by ear.”