The Prometheus Deception

by Robert Ludlum

  Quietly, steely, Bryson answered, “I know I did.”

  “And you see, that’s where you’re wrong. What if I told you that the Directorate in fact isn’t part of the United States government? That it never was. Quite the fucking contrary.” Dunne leaned back in his chair and ran a hand through his rumpled white mane. “Ah, shit, this isn’t going to be easy for you to hear. It’s not easy for me to say, I’ll tell you that. Twenty years ago, I had to bring a guy in. He thought he’d been spying for Israel, and was a real zealot about it. I had to explain to him that he’d been false-flagged. It was Libya that was paying for his services. All the contacts, the controls, the hotel-room rendezvous in Tel Aviv—all part of the setup. Pretty flimsy one, at that. Fucker shouldn’t have been double-dealing anyway. But even I had to feel sorry for him when he learned who his real employers were. I’ll never forget his face.”

  Bryson’s own face was burning hot. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  “We were supposed to arraign him in a sealed Justice Department courtroom the next day. Guy shot himself before we had the chance.” One of the gas-plasma screens dissolved into another image. “Here’s the guy who recruited you, right?”

  It was a photograph of Herbert Woods, Bryson’s adviser at Stanford and an eminent historian. Woods had always liked Bryson, admired the fact that he spoke a dozen languages fluently, had an unsurpassed gift for memorization. Probably liked the fact that he was no slouch as an athlete either. Sound mind, sound body—Woods was big on that.

  The screen went blank, then flared with a grainy photo of a young Woods on a city street that Bryson immediately recognized as the old Gorky Street in Moscow, which after the end of the Cold War became Tverskaya once again, its pre-Revolutionary name.

  Bryson laughed, bitterly, not bothering to hide his ridicule. “This is insanity. You’re going to ‘reveal’ to me the ‘damning’ fact that Herb Woods was a commie when he was young. Well, sorry: everyone knows that. He never hid his past. That’s why he was such a staunch anti-Communist: he knew firsthand how seductive all that foolish utopian rhetoric could be once upon a time.”

  Dunne shook his head, his facial expression cryptic. “Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. I told you before that all I wanted you to do was listen. You’re a historian now, right? Well, bear with me while I give you a quick history lesson. You know about the Trust, of course.”

  Bryson nodded. The Trust was widely regarded as the greatest espionage ploy of the twentieth century, bar none. It was a seven-year sting operation, the brainchild of Lenin’s spymaster, Feliks Dzerzhinksi. Shortly after the Russian Revolution, the CHEKA, the Soviet intelligence organization that grew into the KGB, secretly founded a fake dissident group involving a number of supposedly disaffected high-ranking members of the Soviet government who believed, or so the word was quietly put out, that the collapse of the USSR was imminent. In time, anti-Soviet groups in exile were drawn into working with the Trust; in fact, Western intelligence units grew dependent upon the information—entirely fraudulent, of course—it provided. Not only was the hoax brilliantly designed to mislead those governments around the world who sought the Soviet Union’s demise, it was, further, a superbly effective way for Moscow to penetrate the networks of its chief enemies abroad. And it worked phenomenally well—so well, in fact, that the Trust became a case study of the perfect deception operation, taught within intelligence agencies the world over.

  By the time the nature of the subterfuge was exposed, in the late twenties, it was too late. Exiled leaders had been kidnapped and murdered, networks of collaborators destroyed, would-be defectors within Russia executed. The in situ forces of opposition to Soviet rule never recovered. It was, in the words of one eminent American intelligence analyst, “the deception operation upon which the Soviet state was built.”

  “Now you’re the one talking ancient history,” Bryson said in disgust, shifting in his seat impatiently.

  “Never discount the power of inspiration,” Dunne said. “In the early sixties, you had a small circle of brainiacs at the GRU—Soviet military intelligence, if you don’t consider that a contradiction in terms.” He chuckled. “These guys concluded that their intelligence agencies were all neutered, ineffectual, feeding out of the same trough of disinformation each one had created—or, to put it another way, a whole lot of ink and not much squid. The way these guys figured it—and they were geniuses, understand, IQs off the charts, the real deal—the intelligence agencies were spending most of their time chasing their own tails. These guys, they called themselves the Shakhmatisti, the chess players, chess club. They despised their own clumsy Russky operatives, and they had utter contempt for the sort of Americans who cooperated with them: sad sacks and losers, in their book. So they took another look at the Trust and tried to see if there was a lesson to be learned. They wanted to recruit the best and the brightest within their enemy’s camp, same as us, and they figured out a way to get them. Same as us. Recruit them for a life of adventure.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “Neither were we, until very recently. It was only in the last few years that the CIA learned of the Directorate’s existence. And, far more crucial, what the Directorate meant.”

  “Try talking sense.”

  “We’re talking about the greatest espionage gambit in the entire twentieth century. The whole thing was an elaborate ruse, do you see? Like the Trust. These GRU geniuses, their masterstroke was to establish a penetration operation right on enemy soil—our soil. A super-secret spy agency staffed by a lot of gifted people who had no idea as to the identities of their real bosses, known only as the consortium, and who were instructed to conceal their work from any and all U.S. government officials. Now, that’s the beauty part. You can’t tell anybody else, especially not the government you’re ostensibly working for! I’m talking about good, red-blooded Americans who got up in the morning and drank their Maxwell House coffee and toasted their Wonder Bread and drove to work in their Buicks and Chevys, and went out into the world and risked their lives—yet never knew who their real employers were. It went like clockwork—like a classic ‘big store’ con of old.”

  Bryson couldn’t endure this litany any longer. “Goddamn you, Dunne! Enough! This is all lies, a goddamn pack of lies. If you really think I’d fall for this crap, you’re out of your goddamn mind.” He stood up abruptly. “Get me the hell out of here. I’m tired of your little low-rent theatrical production.”

  “I hardly expected you to believe me—not at first,” Dunne said calmly, barely even shifting in his seat. “Hell, I wouldn’t believe it either. But bear with me for a sec.” He gestured toward one of the screens. “Know this guy?”

  “Ted—Edmund Waller,” Bryson breathed. He was looking at a photograph of Waller as a much younger man, stocky but not yet obese, wearing a Russian Army dress uniform at what appeared to be some kind of ceremonial occasion in Red Square. Part of the Kremlin was visible in the background. Scrolling up to the side of the image were biographical details. Name: GENNADY ROSOVSKY. Born 1935 in VLADIVOSTOK. Childhood chess prodigy. Trained in American English, by a native speaker, since age seven. Certificates in ideology and in military science. A list of medals and other military honors followed.

  “Chess prodigy,” Bryson muttered to himself. “What the hell is this?”

  “They say he could have beat Spassky and Fisher both, if he’d wanted to make a career of it,” Dunne said, a harsh edge in his voice. “Too bad he decided to play for bigger game.”

  “Pictures can be doctored, pixels manipulated digitally—” Bryson began.

  “Are you trying to convince me or yourself?” Dunne said, cutting him off. “Anyway, in a lot of cases we’ve got originals, and I’d be happy to have you inspect them. I can assure you we’ve been over everything with a microscope. We might never have known about the operation. Then our luck changes. Mirabile fucking dictu, Professor, we got access to the Kremlin archives. Money changed hands;
buried archives were unearthed. There were one or two scraps of paper with pretty tantalizing stuff in them. Which would have told us nothing, to be honest, except for the lucky break of a couple of midlevel defectors, who gave us all they had. In isolation, their debriefings were meaningless. Taken together, with the Kremlin documents thrown in, patterns began to emerge. Which was how we learned about you, Nick. But it wasn’t a whole lot, since apparently the inner circles kept the whole operation incredibly segmented, the way terror cells operate.

  “So we started to wonder about what we didn’t know. It’s been a top-priority project for the past three years. We’ve got only the foggiest idea of who the real principals are. Except, of course, for your friend Gennady Rosovsky. He’s got a sense of humor, got to hand him that. You know who he named himself after? Edmund Waller was the name of an obscure and extremely slippery seventeenth-century poet. He ever talk to you about the English civil war?”

  Bryson swallowed hard and nodded.

  “You’ll get a laugh out of this, I know you will. During the interregnum, this Edmund Waller wrote praise poems for Cromwell, the Lord Protector. But, you see, he was also a secret conspirator in a Royalist plot. After the Restoration, he was honored at the Royal Court. That make any kind of sense to you? Guy calls himself after the great double-agent of English poetry. Like I said, I’m sure it’s a laugh riot to you highbrows.”

  “So you’re claiming that I was recruited at college into some … some kind of cat’s-paw organization, that everything I did after that was a sham, is that what you’re saying?” Bryson spoke bitterly, skeptically.

  “Only the machinations didn’t start then. They started earlier. A lot earlier.”

  He tapped a sequence on the control panel, and another digitized image came to life on the screen. On the left, he saw his father, General George Bryson, robust, handsome, and square-jawed, next to Nick’s mother, Nina Loring Bryson, a soft-spoken, gentle woman who taught the piano, followed her husband to his postings around the world, and never breathed a word of complaint. On the right, another image—a grainy image from the police files—showed a crumpled vehicle on a snowy mountain road. The remembered pain slammed Bryson in the gut; after all these years, it was still almost unbearable.

  “Let me ask you something, Bryson. Did you believe this was an accident? You were fifteen, already a brilliant student, terrific athlete, prime of American youth, all that. Now both your parents are suddenly killed. Your godparents take you in…”

  “Uncle Pete,” Bryson said tonelessly. He was in a world of his own, a world of shock and pain. “Peter Munroe.”

  “That was the name he took, sure, not the name he was born with. And he made sure you went to college where you did, and made a lot of other decisions for you besides. All of which pretty much guaranteed that you’d end up in their hands. The Directorate’s, I mean.”

  “You’re saying that when I was fifteen, my parents were murdered,” Bryson said numbly. “You’re saying my entire life has been some kind of … immense deception.”

  Dunne hesitated, wincing. “If it makes you feel any better, you weren’t alone,” he said gently. “There were dozens just like you. It’s just that you were their most spectacular success.”

  Bryson wanted to press the point, argue with the CIA man, show the essential illogic of his reasoning, point out the flaws in his case. But instead he found himself overcome by an intense feeling of vertigo, a harrowing sense of guilt. If what Dunne said was correct, even anywhere near correct, then what in his life was real? What had ever been true? Did he even know who he was himself? “And Elena?” he asked stonily, not wanting to hear the answer.

  “Yes, Elena Petrescu, too. Interesting case. We believe she was recruited out of the Romanian Securitate, assigned to you by the Directorate in order to keep tabs on you.”

  Elena … no, it was inconceivable, she wasn’t Securitate! Her father was an enemy of the Securitate, a brave mathematician who turned against the government. And Elena … he had rescued her and her parents, they had built a life together …

  * * *

  They were horseback riding along an endless stretch of deserted sandy beach in the Caribbean. Coming off a full gallop, they slowed to a trot. The moonlight was silvery, the night cool.

  “Is this island all ours, Nicholas?” she exulted. “I feel like we’re all alone here, that we own everything we see!”

  “We do, my darling,” Bryson said, infected by her playful exuberance. “Didn’t I tell you? I’ve been diverting funds from discretionary accounts. I’ve bought the island.”

  Her laugh was musical, joyful. “Nicholas, you are terrible!”

  “‘Nick-o-las’—I love the way you say my name. Where did you learn to ride so well? I didn’t know they even had horses in Romania.”

  “Oh, but they do. I learned to ride on my grandmother Nicoleta’s farm in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains, on a Hutsul pony. They’re bred to work in the mountains, but they’re so marvelous for riding, so lively and strong and sure-footed.”

  “You could be describing yourself.”

  The waves crashed loudly behind them, and she laughed once more. “You never really saw my country, did you, my dear? The Communists made Bucharest so ugly, but the countryside, Transylvania and the Carpathians, is so beautiful and unspoiled. They still live in the old way, with the horse-drawn wagons. Whenever we tired of university life we would stay with Nicoleta in Dragoslavele, and every day she’d make us mamagliga, fried cornmeal mush, and ciorba, my favorite soup.”

  “You miss the homeland.”

  “A little. But mostly I miss my parents. I miss them so terribly. It’s such agony for me not to be able to see them. The sterile phone calls maybe twice a year—it’s not enough!”

  “But at least they’re safe. Your father has many enemies, people who would kill him if they knew his whereabouts. Securitate remnants, professional assassins who blame him for giving away the codes that led to the downfall of the Ceauşescu government that kept them in power. Now they’re in hiding themselves, inside Romania and abroad, and they haven’t forgotten. There are teams of them, called sweepers, who track down their old enemies and execute them. And they desperately want revenge against the man they consider the worst turncoat of all.”

  “He was a hero!”

  “Of course he was. But to them he was a traitor. And they will stop at nothing to extract their vengeance.”

  “You frighten me!”

  “Only to remind you how important it is that your parents remain in hiding, protected.”

  “Oh God, Nicholas, I pray nothing ever happens to them!”

  Bryson pulled on the reins, bringing his horse to a stop as he turned to face Elena. “I promise you, Elena. Anything I can humanly do to keep them safe, I will.”

  * * *

  A minute of silence passed, and then another. Finally, Bryson, blinking hard, said, “But it doesn’t make any sense. I did goddamned valuable work. Time and again I—”

  “—fucked us up the ass but good,” Dunne interrupted, toying with a cigarette but not lighting it. “Every one of your great successes was a devastating setback to American interests. And I say this with the greatest professional respect. Oh, let’s see. That ‘moderate reform candidate’ you protected? He was in the pay of the Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path terrorists. In Sri Lanka, you pretty much destroyed a secret coalition that had been on the verge of brokering a peace between the Tamils and the Sinhalese.”

  Another image was downloaded onto the high-resolution screen, as a spray of pixels scrambled into colors and contours. Bryson recognized the face while it was still half a blur.

  It was Abu.

  “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 Ceauşescu? What a farce. Just about everyone from the old regime changed clothes one day and became the new government, you know that! Ceauşescu’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. Ceauşescu 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?”