Read The Prometheus Deception Online

Authors: Robert Ludlum

The Prometheus Deception (6 page)

BOOK: The Prometheus Deception
4.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Still, Waller had told the truth: this was a good life.

Now Jonas Barrett looked out over a packed auditorium, at a hundred expectant faces. He'd been amused when the
Campus Confidential
had called him, after only his first year of teaching at Woodbridge, an “icily charismatic lecturer, more Professor Kingsfield than Mr. Chips,” and remarked on his “stone-faced, slyly ironic visage.” Whatever the reasons, his course on Byzantium was among the most popular classes in the history department.

He glanced at his watch: it was time to wrap up the lecture and gesture toward the next. “The Roman Empire had been the most astonishing political achievement in human history, and the question that has haunted so many thinkers is, of course, why it fell,” he intoned in a high professorial manner laced with a tincture of irony. “You all know the sad tale. The light of civilization flickered and dimmed. The barbarians at the gate. The destruction of humanity's best hope, right?” There was murmured assent.
“Horseshit!”
he exclaimed suddenly, and a surprised titter was followed by a sudden hush. “Pardon my Macedonian.” He looked around the lecture hall, his arched-brow expression challenging. “The Romans, so called, lost their claim to the moral high ground way before they lost their claim to empire. It was the Romans who avenged an early set-to with the Goths by taking Goth children they'd seized as hostages, marching them into the public squares of dozens of towns, then slaughtering them one by one. Slowly and painfully. As far as sheer calculated bloodthirstiness, nothing the Goths ever did could compare. The western Roman Empire was an arena of slavery and bloodsport. By contrast, the
eastern
Roman Empire was far more benign, and it survived the so-called fall of the Roman Empire. ‘Byzantium' is only what the Westerners called it—the Byzantines always knew themselves as the true Roman Empire, and they safeguarded the scholarship and the humane values we cherish today. The west succumbed not to enemies from without, but rot from within—this much is true. And so civilization didn't flicker and dim. It just moved east.” A pause. “You can come by and pick up your papers now. And enjoy your weekend, as much as you deem wise. Just remember Petronius: Moderation in all things. Including moderation.”

*   *   *

“Professor Barrett?” The young woman was blond and fetching, one of those students who listens gravely and always sits in the front rows. He had stowed away his lecture notes and was fastening the straps of his battered leather satchel. He barely listened as she talked, complaining about a grade received, the tone urgent, the words banal, utterly familiar:
I worked so hard … I feel I did my very best … I really, really tried …
She followed as he walked toward the door, then to the parking lot outside the classroom building, until he reached his car. “Why don't we discuss this during office hours tomorrow?” he suggested gently.

“But Professor…”

Something's wrong
.

“I guess I feel it's the grade that was wrong, Professor.”

He hadn't realized he'd spoken aloud. But his antennae were buzzing. Why? Out of some sudden, baseless paranoia? Was he going to end up like one of those Vietnam posttraumatics who jump whenever they hear a car backfire?

A
sound
, something definitely out of place. He turned toward the student, but not to look at her. Instead, to look
past
her, beyond her, to whatever had flickered in his peripheral vision. Yes, there
was
something amiss in the general vicinity. Strolling too casually in his direction, as if enjoying the spring air, the verdant setting, was a broad-shouldered man in a charcoal flannel suit, white shirt, and perfectly knotted rep tie. That wasn't academic garb at Woodbridge, not even for administrators, and the weather was too warm for flannel. This was indeed an outsider, but one feigning—
attempting
to feign—that he belonged.

Bryson's field instincts were signaling wildly. His scalp tightened and his eyes began scanning from side to side, like a photographer testing different focal points in rapid succession: the old habits were returning, unbidden and somehow atavistic, rudely out of place.

But
why?
Surely there was no reason to be alarmed over a campus visitor—a parent, an official from Washington's educational bureaucracy, maybe even some high-level salesman. Bryson did a quick assessment. The man's jacket was unbuttoned, and he caught a glimpse of maroon braces holding the man's trousers up. Yet the man was also wearing a belt and the trousers were cut long, breaking deeply over the man's black, rubber-soled shoes. A surge of adrenaline: he'd worn similar attire himself, in a previous life. Sometimes you needed to wear a belt as well as suspenders because you were carrying a heavy object in one or both of your front pockets—a large-caliber revolver, say. And you needed the cuffs a little too long to ensure that your ankle holster was well concealed.
Dress for success
, Ted Waller used to advise, explaining how a man in evening dress could conceal a veritable arsenal if the fabric was tailored just right.

I'm out of the game! Leave me in peace!

But there was no peace; there never would be any peace. Once you were in you could never get out, even if the paychecks stopped and the health benefits expired.

Hostile parties around the world thirsted for revenge. No matter what precautions you took, no matter how elaborate the cover, how intricate the extraction.
If they really wanted to find me, they could
. To think otherwise was delusional. This was the unwritten certainty among the Directorate's operatives.

But who's to say they're not from the Directorate itself, doing a full sterilization, in that cynical phrase—removing the splinters, mopping up?
Bryson had never met anyone who had retired from the Directorate, though surely such retirees did exist. But if someone at the consortium level in the Directorate came to doubt his loyalties, he, too, would be the victim of a full sterilization. It was a virtual certainty.

I'm out, I've put it behind!

Yet who would believe him?

Nick Bryson—for he
was
Nick Bryson now, Jonas Barrett gone by the wayside, discarded like a snake's shed skin—looked closely at the man in the suit. The man's salt-and-pepper hair was brush cut, the face broad and ruddy. Bryson tensed as the interloper approached, smiling as he did so and showing small white teeth. “Mr. Barrett?” the man called from halfway across the emerald lawn.

The man's face was a mask of reassurance, and that was the final giveaway, the mark of a professional. A civilian hailing a stranger always exhibited at least some tentativeness.

Directorate?

Directorate personnel were better than this, smoother and less obvious
.

“Laura,” he said quietly to the student, “I need you to leave me and go back into Severeid Hall. Wait at my office upstairs.”

“But—”

“Now!”
he snapped.

Speechless and scarlet, Laura turned and hurried back toward the building. A change had come over Professor Jonas Barrett—as she would explain it to her roommate that evening, he suddenly seemed different,
scary
—and she quickly decided she'd better do what he told her.

Soft footsteps were audible from the opposite direction. Bryson spun. Another man: redheaded, freckled, younger, wearing a navy blazer, tan chinos, and bucks. More plausible as a campus costume, except for the buttons on the blazer, which were too bright and brassy. Nor did the blazer lie quite flat over his chest: a bulge was visible where you'd expect to find the shoulder holster.

If not Directorate, then who? Foreign hostiles? Others from the more overt U.S. agencies?

Now Bryson identified the noise that had alerted him in the first place: the sound of a car that was idling, quietly and continuously. It was a Lincoln Continental with dark tinted windows, and it wasn't in a parking space but parked in the lane where he'd left his own car, blocking it.

“Mr. Barrett?” The larger, older man made eye contact with him, his loping stride swiftly decreasing the distance between them. “We really need you to come with us.” The accent was bland, Midwestern. He stopped barely two feet away and gestured toward the Lincoln.

“Oh, is that right?” Bryson said, his delivery cold. “Do I know you?”

The stranger's reply was nonverbal: hands on hips, chest out to display the contours of his holstered handgun beneath his suit jacket. The subtle gesture of one professional to another, one armed, the other not. Then abruptly the man doubled over in agony, his hands grabbing at his stomach. With lightning speed, Bryson had driven the steel nib of his slim fountain pen into the man's muscled belly, and the professional responded with an unprofessional, if wholly natural, move indeed.
Reach for your weapon, never the wound:
one of Waller's many axioms, and though it meant countermanding a natural instinct, it had saved Nick's life more than a few times. This man was not top-rank.

As the stranger's hands flailed at the ruined flesh, Bryson plunged his hands into the man's jacket and retrieved the small but powerful blue-steel Beretta.

Beretta—not Directorate issue; then whose?

He slammed the butt against the man's temple—heard the sickening crunch of bone against metal, heard the senior agent slump to the ground—and with the weapon pointed, spun to face the redheaded man in the blue blazer.

“My safety's
off,
” Nick shouted to him, urgent and demanding. “Yours?”

The play of confusion and panic on the young man's face gave away his inexperience. He had to have calculated that Nick would easily be able to squeeze off the first shot the instant he heard the click of the safety release.
Bad odds
. But the inexperienced could be the most dangerous, precisely because they didn't react in a rational and logical manner.

Amateur hour
. His gun aimed steadily at the redheaded field man, Bryson backed up slowly in the direction of the idling vehicle. The doors would be unlocked for immediate access, of course. In one fluid motion, all the while keeping the Beretta leveled at the redheaded novice, he yanked open the car door and slid into the driver's seat. With a glance he knew the vehicle's windows and windscreen were bulletproof, as they had to be. Bryson had only to throw the gearshift out of park, and the car lurched forward. He heard a bullet strike the back of the car—the license plate, he judged from the clatter. And then another struck the rearview window, pitting it but doing no further damage. They were firing at the car's tires, hoping to stop his flight.

In a matter of seconds he was roaring through the tall, ornamental wrought-iron gates of the campus. Barreling down the tree-lined main drive, one assailant down and the other firing wildly yet ineffectually, his mind raced. He thought:
Time's up
. And:
Now what?

*   *   *

If they'd really intended to kill me, I'd be dead
.

Bryson sped down the Interstate, his eyes scanning the lanes ahead and behind for pursuers.
They caught me unarmed and unaware, deliberately so
. Which meant that they were up to something else. But what? And how did they find him in the first place? Could someone have gained access to a 5-1 classified Directorate database? There were too many variables, too many unknowns. But Bryson felt no fear now, only the icy calm of the seasoned field operative he had once been. He wouldn't drive to any of the airports, where they'd certainly be expecting him; instead, he'd drive directly back to his house on campus, the least expected place to go. If this was inviting another confrontation, so be it. Confrontation meant exposure of limited duration: flight could go on indefinitely. Bryson no longer had the patience for protracted flight: Waller had been right about that, at least.

Turning down the campus road to his residence on Villier Lane, he heard, then saw, a helicopter raking the sky, making its way toward the small campus helipad atop the science building tower donated by a software billionaire, the tallest building on campus by far. It was normally used only by major donors, but this chopper had federal markings. The helicopter was a follow-on; it had to be. Bryson pulled up in front of his house, a ramshackle Queen Anne–style dwelling with a mansard roof and plaster facade. The place was empty, and he knew from the alarm system, which he had installed himself, that no one had entered the house since he'd left it that morning.

Entering, he verified that the system hadn't been tampered with. The strong sun streamed through a parlor window onto the wide pine floorboards, giving rise to a resinous, evergreen smell. That was the chief reason why he'd bought the house: the scent reminded him of a happy year he'd spent in a half-timbered house outside Wiesbaden when he was seven and his father was stationed at the military base there. Bryson was no typical army brat—his father was, after all, a general, and the family was usually provided with comfortable living quarters and a household staff. Still, his childhood was all about learning how to pick up stakes and put them down again in some other part of the world. Transitions were helped by his natural facility with languages, which others always marveled at. Making new friends didn't come quite as easily, but in time he developed a skill at that, too. He'd seen too many army brats who styled themselves as surly outsiders to want to join their ranks.

He was home now. He would wait. And this time the meeting would be on his territory, on his terms.

It didn't take long.

Only a few minutes elapsed before a black government Cadillac sedan, complete with a small U.S. flag flying from the antenna, pulled into his driveway. Bryson, watching from the house, realized that the very overtness of the display was meant to provide reassurance. A uniformed government driver got out and opened the vehicle's rear door, and a short, wiry man stepped out. Bryson had seen him before—a fleeting face from C-SPAN. Some sort of intelligence official. Bryson stepped out onto his porch.

BOOK: The Prometheus Deception
4.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Escape by Shoshanna Evers
Losing Lila by Sarah Alderson
ElyriasEcstasy by Amber Jayne and Eric Del Carlo
The Sinister Touch by Jayne Ann Krentz
The Seventh Wish by Kate Messner
A Beautiful Mess by Emily McKee