The Prometheus Deception (9 page)

“Tunisia,” Bryson said, breathing hard. “He—he was going to stage a coup, he and his followers—fanatics. I moved in, leveraged some opposition groups, figured out who in the palace was playing both sides…” It was not an episode he remembered altogether fondly: he would never forget the carnage along the Avenue Habib Borguiga. Nor the moment when Abu unmasked him and nearly took his life.

“Let's see now,” Dunne said. “You burned him. Took him down, and handed him over to the government.”

That was true. He'd turned Abu over to a trusted group of government security men, who jailed him along with dozens of his henchmen.

“Then what happened?” Dunne prompted, as if he was testing.

Bryson shrugged. “He died in captivity a few days later. I won't tell you I shed any tears.”

“I wish I could say the same,” Dunne said, his voice suddenly hard. “Abu was one of ours, Bryson. One of mine, I should say. I trained him. He was our chief asset in the whole region. I'm talking the entire goddamn sandbox.”

“But the attempted coup…” Bryson put in feebly, his mind whirling. Nothing was making any sense!

“A bullshit cover story, to keep up his bona fides with the lunatics. He was leading the Al-Nahda, all right—right off the fucking cliff. Abu worked deep, deep cover. Needed to if he was going to survive the day. You think it's easy penetrating terrorist cells, especially Hezbollah, the big kahuna? They're all so goddamned suspicious. If they haven't known you and your family your entire goddamned life, they want to see you shed blood by the gallon, the blood of Israelis, otherwise they never trust you. Abu was a slick bastard who played rough, but he was
our
slick bastard. And he had to play rough. Thing is, he was getting close to Khadafy. Very close. Khadafy figured if Abu took Tunisia, he could make it a Libyan province, more or less. Abu was getting to be an asshole buddy of his. We were on the verge of having a direct feed to every Islamic terror group north of the Sahara. Then the Directorate sandbagged him, planted phony munitions—and by the time our people discovered we'd been stung, it was too late. Pretty much set back our whole network about twenty years. Brilliant work. Got to hand it to those
Shakhmatisti
whiz kids. Brilliant, really fucking brilliant, to have one American spy agency undoing the work of the other. You want me to go on? Tell you about Nepal and what you really accomplished? What about Romania, where you guys probably thought you helped get rid of
Ceau
ş
escu
? What a farce. Just about everyone from the old regime changed clothes one day and became the new government, you know that!
Ceau
ş
escu
's underlings had been plotting the bastard's downfall for years—they delivered their boss to the wolves so they could stay in power. Which was just what the Kremlin wanted. So what happens? There's a fake coup d'etat, the dictator and his wife try to escape in a helicopter that suddenly develops ‘engine trouble' so they can't escape, they get arrested and tried in a closed, kangaroo court, and face a firing squad on Christmas Day. The whole thing was a goddamned setup, and who benefited? One by one, all the Eastern European satellites were falling like dominoes, kicking out the old Party apparatchiks, going democratic, breaking away from the Soviet bloc. But Moscow wasn't going to lose Romania, too.
Ceau
ş
escu
had to go, he was bad PR. The guy was a goddamned pain in Moscow's ass anyway, always was. Moscow wanted to keep Romania, maintain the security apparatus, install a new puppet. And who's there to do their dirty work? Who else but you and your good friends in the Directorate? Jesus, man, how much do you really want to know?”

“Damn it!” Bryson shouted. “This makes no sense! How ignorant do you think I am? The goddamn GRU, the Russians—that's all the past. Maybe you Cold War cowboys at Langley haven't yet heard the news—the war's over!”

“Yes,” Dunne replied raspily, barely audible. “And for some baffling reason the Directorate is alive and well.”

Bryson stared at him mutely, unable to get any words out. He felt his brain working, spinning in circles, circuits overheating, sparks flying.

“I'll level with you, Bryson. There was a time when I wanted to kill you, kill you with my bare hands. That was before we'd figured out the whole story, the way the Directorate worked. Nah, let's be straight with each other, I'd be bullshitting you and me both if I said we have anything remotely approaching the whole story. We still hardly know more than isolated segments. For decades there had been rumors, no more substantial than dandelion wisps. Once the Cold War's over, the whole operation falls into quiescence, as best as we can figure. It's like the old parable of the blind men and the elephant. We can feel a trunk here, a tail there, but on the highest levels, we still don't know what kind of beast we're dealing with. What we do know—and we've had you under surveillance for the past few years—is that you were one deluded piece of shit. Which is why I'm talking to you real nice and not wrapping my hands around your throat.” Dunne laughed bitterly, and the laugh turned into a cough—a smoker's hack. “See, here's what we speculate. Seems like after the Cold War, the organization broke off from its original masters. Control shifted into other hands.”

Warily, sullenly, Bryson ventured: “Whose?”

Dunne shrugged. “Don't know. Five years ago, the organization apparently went into a period of relative dormancy: you weren't the only agent to be terminated—a whole lot of people were let go. Maybe the place was being shut down; it's impossible to say with any certainty. But now we've got reason to think it's being reactivated.”

“What's that supposed to mean, ‘reactivated'?”

“Not sure. That's why we decided to bring you in. We hear stuff. Your old masters appear to be accumulating arms, for some reason.”

“For some reason,” Bryson repeated dully.

“You could say they're poised to foment global instability—anyway, that's how our overeducated analysts might phrase it, in their Locust Valley lockjaw. But I ask myself, for what? What are they after? And I don't know. Like I say, what scares me is the stuff I don't know.”

“Interesting,” said Bryson sardonically. “You hear ‘rumors,' you ‘speculate,' you give me a goddamned digital slide show like some corporate consultant, yet you don't have the faintest clue what you're really saying.”

“That's why we need you. The old Soviet system may be down, but the generals aren't down for the count. Look at General Bushalov—he's looking like a strong challenger on the political scene in Russia. Say something bad happened that he could blame on the United States—my prediction is, he'd be catapulted into power. Deliberative democracy? Plenty of Russkies would say, Good riddance to that. In Beijing there's a powerful reactionary cabal within both the National People's Congress and the Central Committee. Not to mention the Chinese Army, the PLA, the People's Liberation Army, which is a force unto itself. No matter how you look at it, a lot of yuan are at stake, and a lot of power is, too. One school of thought has remnants of
Shakhmatisti
teaming up with a handful of their Beijing brethren. But I'm just blowing smoke out my ass. Because nobody really knows but the bad guys, and they ain't saying.”

“If you really believe all this, truly think that I was some kind of chump in the biggest con game of the last century, what the hell do you need me for?”

The two men locked eyes for a long while. “You apprenticed with one of their masterminds, one of their founders, for Christ's sake. Gennady Rosovsky—back in Russia his nickname was apparently
Volshebnik
, ‘the Sorcerer.' Know what that makes you?” Dunne's laugh turned into a hacking cough again. “The sorcerer's apprentice.”

“Damn you!” Bryson exploded again.

“You know how Waller's mind works. You were his best student. You do realize what I'm asking you to do, don't you?”

“Yeah,” Bryson replied sardonically. “You want me to get back inside.”

Dunne nodded slowly. “You're our best bet. I could appeal to your patriotism, to the better angels of your being. But goddamn if you don't owe us one.”

Bryson's mind was reeling. He did not know what to think, what to say to the CIA man.

“Don't take offense,” Dunne told him, “but if we're trying to scent them out, then at least we should send out the best bloodhound we can find. I mean, how can I put this?” He'd been toying with the unlit cigarette so long that tobacco crumbs were beginning to spill from it. “You're the only one who knows what they smell like.”

FOUR

The strong midday sunlight bleached the buildings along this particular block of K Street, shimmered and glared against the plate-glass windows of the office buildings. Across the street, Nicholas Bryson intently watched 1324 K Street, a building at once deeply familiar and profoundly strange. Sweat rolled down his face, dampening his white dress shirt. He stood at the window of a deserted office space, tiny binoculars discreetly held to his face, curled in, and concealed by one hand. No doubt the commercial real-estate agent who had given him the keys to the vacant rental space thought it was strange that this international businessman wanted to spend a few minutes alone in what might be his office, in order to get a
feel
for it, the feng shui and all. The real-estate agent surely thought Bryson was another one of those touchy-feely New Age businessmen, but at least he'd left him alone for a while.

His pulse raced, his temples throbbed. There was nothing comforting or welcoming about the modern office building that served as the headquarters of his employer, that for so long had been home base, a place of sanctuary and renewal, an island of continuity and calm reassurance in his ever-shifting, violent world. He watched from the dark, empty office suite for a good quarter of an hour, until a knock at the door came; the real-estate agent was back and curious to know the verdict.

It was immediately apparent that 1324 K Street had changed, though the transformations were subtle. The plaques on the front of the building, announcing its occupants, had been replaced with others, though just as banal-sounding as the previous ones. Harry Dunne had told him the K Street headquarters had been abandoned, but Bryson refused to accept his assurance on face value. The Directorate was also great at hiding in plain sight. “Naked is the best disguise,” Waller used to say.

So was it indeed gone?
THE AMERICAN TEXTILE MANUFACTURERS BOARD
and
THE UNITED STATES GRAINS PRODUCERS BOARD
sounded just as plausible as the other notional organizations whose plaques had been put there by some creative camouflage artists within the Directorate, but what necessitated the change? Too, there were other alterations at 1324 K Street. In a quarter-hour of discreet surveillance, Bryson had seen an unusually high number of people pass through its front doors. Far too many, certainly, to be Directorate employees or blind contractors. So something different was going on here.

Maybe Dunne was right after all. But his early-warning system had been triggered.
Accept nothing at face value; question everything you're told
. Another of Ted Waller's lines. That went for Waller and Dunne and everyone else in the business for that matter.

The matter of how to get into the building without alerting its occupants was one he had been wrestling with for hours. He approached the issue as yet another fieldwork conundrum to be solved; in his mind, he had worked out dozens of ingenious methods of entry. Yet all of them carried risks without commensurate odds of success. Then he recalled one of Waller's—
damn it, Gennady Rosovsky's
—truisms:
When in doubt, go in the front door
. The best and most effective stratagem would be to enter the building openly, brazenly.

Yet duplicity was a necessary part of the game plan; it would always be so. He thanked the real-estate agent, told him he was interested, and asked him to prepare a leasing agreement. He handed over one of his false business cards, and then told the man he had to rush off to another appointment. He approached the building's front entrance, his senses hyperalert to any sudden movements, any shifts in crowd patterns or coloration, that might signal a threat.

So where was Ted Waller?

Where was the truth? Where was sanity?

The jarring traffic noises swelled all around him, the cacophony overwhelming.
“It's the only way you'll ever know the truth.”

“The truth about what?”

“For starters, the truth about yourself.”

But where was the truth? Where were the lies?

“You believe you're a fucking unsung hero.… You believe you've spent fifteen years in the service of your country, working for an ultraclandestine agency known as the Directorate.”

Stop it! This was madness!

Elena? You, too? Elena, the love of my life, now departed from my life as abruptly as you first appeared?

“You believe you've spent a decade and a half in the service of your country.”

The blood I spilled, the gut-wrenching fear, the innumerable occasions I almost lost my life, extinguished the lives of others?

“We're talking about the greatest espionage gambit in the entire twentieth century. The whole thing was an elaborate ruse, do you see?”

“
You're saying my entire life has been some kind of … immense
deception!
”

“If it makes you feel any better, you weren't alone. There were dozens just like you. It's just that you were their most spectacular success.”