The Prometheus Deception

by Robert Ludlum

  FIVE

  Atlantic Ocean

  Thirteen Nautical Miles SW of Cabo Finisterre, Spain

  The immense ship seemed to materialize out of the fog, looming vast and unlovely, as long as a city block, maybe several city blocks. It was a thousand feet long, its black hull sunk deep in the water. The supercarrier was loaded with cargo, multicolored, corrugated metal containers stacked three high and eight across, maybe ten rows from bridge to bow, each box twenty feet long and nine feet high. As the Bell 407 helicopter circled the ship and then hovered directly above the forecastle, Bryson did a quick calculation. Two hundred and forty giant boxes, and that was just on deck; belowdecks, in the hold, he knew, the ship could carry three times the number of containers above. It was an immense load of cargo, made all the more ominous by the bland sameness of the metal boxes, the contents of each a mystery.

  The helicopter’s lights garishly illuminated the flat, cleared deck; all the way at the stern end of the ship, the tall superstructure towered above the rows of containers, white with dark windows, its bridge bustling with modernistic-looking radar and satellite antennae. The deckhouse looked as if it belonged to another type of vessel entirely, a luxury yacht, not a freighter. For this was no mere container ship, Bryson reflected as the helicopter gently landed atop the giant H in a circle that was painted on the forecastle deck.

  No, this was the Spanish Armada, a legend in the shadowed world of terrorists and covert operatives and other illegal, or semilegal, operators. The Spanish Armada, though, was no armada, no fleet: it was just the moniker of one immense ship packed with weaponry both exotic and mundane. No one knew where Calacanis, the mysterious lord of this floating arms bazaar, obtained his wares, but it was whispered that he purchased many of them quite legally from the stores of nations with too many arms and not enough cash, countries like Bulgaria and Albania and other Eastern European states; from Russia, from Korea and China. Calacanis’s customers came from all over the world, or really the underworld: from Afghanistan to Congo, where dozens of civil wars raged, conflagrations stoked by illegal arms purchased by representatives of legally elected governments who came to pay their calls on this very ship, anchored thirteen nautical miles off the Spanish coast, above the relatively shallow continental shelf yet outside Spanish territorial waters, and thus free to do business, constrained by no country’s laws.

  Bryson removed his headset when the other three passengers did the same. He had flown to Madrid, then taken a connecting flight on Iberian Airlines to La Coruña, in Galicia. He and another had boarded the helicopter at La Coruña, then made a quick stop at the harbor town of Muros, forty-seven miles southwest, and from there flew the thirteen miles to the ship. They had said little to one another beyond polite, meaningless banter. Each assumed the others were coming to shop, to strike deals with Calacanis; nothing needed to be said. One of them was Irish, probably Provo; another appeared Middle Eastern; the third Eastern European. The pilot was a sullen, equally taciturn Basque. The interior of the helicopter was luxurious, with leather seats and bubble door windows: Calacanis seemed to spare no expense anywhere.

  Bryson wore a stylish Italian suit, far flashier than the conservative clothes he normally wore, purchased and tailored just for the occasion at Agency expense. He was traveling under an old Directorate legend that he had himself created some years ago.

  John T. Coleridge was a shady Canadian businessman known to be deeply involved in some dirty business deals, acting as a middleman for several crime syndicates in Asia and a few outlaw states in the Persian Gulf, occasionally even a procurer for assassinations. Although Coleridge was an elusive figure, his name was known in certain circles, and that was the important thing. True, Coleridge hadn’t been seen for seven years, but that wasn’t so rare in this strange business.

  Harry Dunne had insisted that Bryson use a new legend specially created for him by the wizards of the CIA’s technical services division, graphic arts reproduction branch—master forgers who specialized in what was euphemistically called “authentication and validation.” But Bryson refused. He wanted no leaks, no bureaucratic paper trails of any kind. Whether he could trust Harry Dunne was an open question; he knew he didn’t trust Dunne’s organization. Bryson had spent too many years watching and hearing tales about CIA leaks and gaffes and indiscretions to trust them. He’d provide his own cover, thank you very much.

  But Bryson had never met Calacanis before, never once set foot on the Spanish Armada, and Basil Calacanis was famously careful about who he was willing to meet with. In his business it was too easy to get burned. So Bryson had prepared the way to ensure his acceptance here.

  He had brokered an arms deal. Money hadn’t changed hands—it hadn’t gone that far, the deal hadn’t been consummated—but he established contact with a German arms broker he had met a few times as Coleridge, who lived in a luxury hotel in Toronto and who had recently been ensnared in a web of bribes he had paid to leaders of Germany’s Christian Democratic Party. Now the German was living in Canada, in fear of being extradited to Germany, where he would surely stand trial. He was also known to be badly in need of funds. So Bryson was not surprised that the German had been extremely interested in John Coleridge’s proposal that they do a little business together.

  Bryson made it known that, in the guise of Coleridge, he represented a consortium of generals in Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Congo who desired to purchase some high-powered, hard-to-procure, and very expensive weaponry—which only Calacanis could provide. But Coleridge was realistic enough to know that he could hardly broker the deal without entrée to Calacanis’s arms bazaar. If the German, who had done quite a bit of business with Calacanis, would make that introduction, he would get a piece of the action, a decent chunk of the commission for doing little more than sending a fax of introduction to Calacanis’s ship.

  As Bryson and the other passengers got out of the helicopter, they were met by a young, powerfully built, balding redheaded man who shook their hands and smiled obsequiously. He did not say their names aloud, but introduced himself as Ian.

  “Thank you so much for coming across,” Ian said in an upper-class British accent, as if they were old companions come to help a sick friend. “You’ve picked a fine night to pay us a visit—calm seas, full moon, couldn’t ask for a more glorious evening. And you’re all just in time for dinner. Please, step over this way.” He indicated a spot just off the landing pad where three bulky guards toting submachine guns stood waiting. “I’m dreadfully sorry to make you go through this, but you know Sir Basil.” He smiled apologetically, shrugged. “Terribly security-conscious, you know. Sir Basil can’t be too careful these days.”

  The three swarthy guards expertly frisked the four new arrivals, glowering at them suspiciously. The Irishman was outraged and snapped at the man frisking him but made no move to stop him. Bryson had expected this ritual, and so he had brought no weapon. The guard who patted him down checked all the usual places and some of the unusual ones besides, but of course found nothing. He then asked Bryson to pop open his briefcase. “Papers,” the guard said in an accent he determined was Sicilian.

  The guard grunted, mollified.

  Bryson looked around, noticed the Panamanian flag at the bow, saw the Class One/Explosives labels plastered over many of the containers. Certain privileged buyers were permitted to inspect the goods they were buying, actually look into the containers. But nothing was offloaded here. The Spanish Armada would later call at selected safe harbors, such as the port of Guayaquil, in Ecuador, which was believed to be Calacanis’s home base; or Santos, in Brazil—the two ports were the most corrupt pirates’ dens in the entire hemisphere. In the Mediterranean the ship would call on the Albanian port of Vlorë, one of the world’s greatest smuggling centers. In Africa, there were the ports of Lagos in Nigeria, and Monrovia in Liberia.

  Bryson had passed.

  He was in.

  “This way, please,” Ian said, gesturing toward the deckhouse, where the crew�
��s quarters, the bridge, and Calacanis’s staterooms and offices surely were. As the four passengers walked, they were shadowed at a discreet distance by the armed guards. The helicopter lifted off, and as they reached the superstructure, the racket subsided. Now Bryson could hear the familiar sounds of the sea, the gulls, the lapping waves, and he could smell the saline odor of the sea mixed with the powerful, acrid smell of the ship’s diesel fuel. The moon shone brightly over the Atlantic waters.

  The five men just barely fit in the small elevator that lifted them from the main deck level to the 06 deck.

  When the elevator opened, Bryson was astonished. He had not seen such luxury in the yachts of the most extravagant billionaires. No expense had been spared. The floors were marble-tiled; the walls, dark mahogany paneling; the fittings, gleaming brass. He passed an entertainment center and screening room, a fitness center equipped with the most elaborate machinery, a sauna, a library. Finally they came to an enormous saloon, the owner’s stateroom, which faced aft and to port. It was two levels high, and it was outfitted with an opulence rarely seen in the grandest of grand hotels.

  There were four or five other men standing by a bar, which was tended by a bartender in black tie. A white-uniformed stewardess, a dazzlingly beautiful blonde with stunning green eyes, offered him a flute of Cristal champagne and smiled shyly. Bryson took the champagne, thanked her, and looked around, trying not to be too obvious about it. The marble floors were mostly covered with oriental rugs; plush sofas were arranged in seating areas; several walls were lined with books that, upon closer inspection, proved to be fake. There were crystal chandeliers. The only peculiar touches were large fish, stuffed and mounted on the walls, evidently trophies from game fishing.

  Looking at the other guests, some of whom were chatting with one another, he realized that he recognized a few of them. But who were they? His head spun; his prodigious memory was being taxed to its limit. Gradually, dossiers attached themselves to vaguely familiar faces. A Pakistani middleman, a highly placed officer in the Irish Provisional Army, a businessman and arms trader who had done more than perhaps anyone to stoke the Iran-Iraq war. These and others were middlemen, retailers, here to acquire their goods wholesale. He went cold with tension, wondering whether any of these men had met him in his previous life. Did anyone here know him, whether as Coleridge or by another one of his many identities? There was always the risk of being unmasked, being hailed by one name when he had identified himself by another. The risk went with the job; it was one of the many occupational hazards; he always had to be on the alert for such a possibility.

  Still, no one gave him more than a curious glance, the sort of look cast by fellow predators who want to know their competition. None seemed to recognize him. Neither did he get that prickly feeling at the back of his head that told him he was supposed to have known any one of the men here. Slowly he felt the tension subside.

  He overheard one of them muttering something about a “multimode Doppler radar,” someone else mentioning Scorpions, Czech-made Striela antiair missiles.

  Bryson caught the blond waitress stealing a glance at him, and he smiled pleasantly. “Where’s your boss?” he asked.

  She looked embarrassed. “Oh,” she said. “Mr. Calacanis?”

  “Who else could I mean?”

  “He will be joining his guests for dinner, sir. May I offer you caviar, Mr. Coleridge?”

  “Never liked the stuff. Al-Biqa?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Your accent. It’s a Levantine dialect of Arab, from the Bekaa Valley, am I right?”

  The waitress blushed. “Nice party trick.”

  “I see Mr. Calacanis draws from all over. Sort of an equal-opportunity employer.”

  “Well, the captain is Italian, the officers are Croatian, the crew Filipino.”

  “It’s like a model U.N. here.”

  She smiled bashfully.

  “And the clients?” Bryson persisted. “Where do they come from?”

  Her smile faded at once, her manner suddenly cold. “I never ask, sir. Please excuse me.”

  Bryson knew he had pushed too far. Calacanis’s staff would be friendly but above all discreet. It would not do to ask about the man himself, of course, but between Dunne’s briefing and his own time with the Directorate, he had managed to put together a profile. Vasiliou Calacanis was a Greek born in Turkey to a good family, had been sent to Eton with a son of one of England’s most powerful arms-manufacturing families, and somehow thereafter—no one knew for sure how—established an alliance with the classmate’s family, then went into business selling arms on behalf of the British family to the Greeks fighting the Cypriots. Somewhere along the way, powerful British politicians were paid off, potent connections established, and Vasiliou became Basil and then Sir Basil. He belonged to the best London clubs. His ties to the French were even stronger; one of his main residences was an enormous château on the Avenue Foch in Paris where he entertained regularly the powers from the Quai d’Orsay.

  After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, he did a major trade in surplus Eastern European weaponry, particularly dealing with Bulgaria. He profited immensely from selling to both sides of the Iran-Iraq war, shipping scores of helicopters to both. He struck major deals with the Libyans, the Ugandans. From Afghanistan to Congo, several dozen civil wars raged, ethnic and nationalist conflagrations, which Calacanis had fueled by providing easy access to assault rifles, mortars, pistols, land mines, and rockets. He had furnished his yacht-cum-freighter with the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents.

  One of the stewards began to speak discreetly to each of the guests one by one. “Dinner is served, Mr. Coleridge,” he said.

  The dining room was even more opulent, more outlandishly extravagant, than the stateroom from which they came. On each wall was painted a fantasy mural of the sea, so that it appeared as if they were dining alfresco, on a calm ocean during a bright afternoon, surrounded by graceful sailboats. The long table was covered in a white linen cloth, set with crystal and candles, beneath a great crystal chandelier.

  One of the stewards escorted Bryson to a seat near the head of the table, next to a very large barrel-chested man with a close-cropped gray beard and olive complexion. The steward inclined his head toward the great bearded man, whispering something.

  “Mr. Coleridge,” said Basil Calacanis in the deep rumble of a Russian basso profundo. He extended his hand to Bryson. “Pardon me if I don’t get up.”

  Bryson shook Calacanis’s hand firmly as he took his seat. “Not at all. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “Likewise, and likewise. I’m surprised it’s taken us so long to meet.”

  “It’s taken me altogether too long to eliminate the middleman,” Bryson said wryly. “I got tired of paying retail.” Calacanis responded with a booming laugh. As the others were seated around the table, they pretended not to be eavesdropping upon the exchange between their host and his mysterious, favored guest. Bryson noticed one of the dinner guests who seemed to be listening intently, a guest he had not seen at the bar. This was a stylishly dressed man in a pinstriped double-breasted suit with a shoulder-length mane of silver hair. Bryson felt himself go cold with foreboding; the man was familiar to him. Though they had never met each other, Bryson knew the face from surveillance videos and photographs in dossiers. He was a Frenchman who moved nimbly in these circles, a renowned contact for extremist terrorist groups. Bryson could not recall the name, but he knew the longhaired man was an emissary from a powerful, far-right French arms dealer named Jacques Arnaud. Did that mean that Arnaud was supplying Calacanis, or the other way around?

  “Had I but known how pleasant it is to shop here, I’d have come long ago,” Bryson continued. “This is an extraordinary ship.”

  “You flatter me,” the arms dealer said dismissively. “‘Extraordinary’ is hardly the word I would use for this old rust bucket. She’s just barely seaworthy. Though you should have seen her when
I bought it a good ten years ago from the Maersk shipping line. They were retiring the old tub, and I’m never one to pass up a bargain. But I’m afraid Maersk got the best of me there. The damned boat was badly in need of repair and repainting. Plus about a ton of rust had to be scraped off.” He snapped his fingers in the air, and the beautiful blond stewardess appeared with a bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet, pouring a glass for Calacanis and then for Bryson. She barely acknowledged Bryson’s presence. Calacanis lifted his glass in Bryson’s direction and said with a wink, “To the spoils of war.” Bryson toasted as well. “Anyway, the Spanish Armada sails at a decent clip—twenty-five, thirty knots—but she gulps two hundred and fifty tons of fuel a day. This is what you Americans call overhead, hmm?”

  “I’m Canadian, actually,” Bryson said, suddenly alert. Calacanis did not seem the sort of man who made such slips. He casually added, “I doubt she came furnished like this.”

  “The damned living quarters looked like an old city hospital.” Calacanis was looking around the table. “They never come with the amenities one requires. So, Mr. Coleridge, I understand your clients are Africans, is that right?”

  “My clients,” Bryson said with a polite smile, the avatar of discretion, “are highly motivated buyers.”

  Calacanis gave another wink. “The Africans have always been some of my best customers—the Congo, Angola, Eritrea. You’ve always got one faction battling another one down there, and somehow there always seems to be plenty of money on both sides. Let me guess: they’re interested in plain-vanilla AK-47s, crates of ammo, landmines, grenades. Maybe rocket-propelled grenades. Sniper rifles with night-vision sights. Antitank weapons. Am I barking up the right tree?”