The Prometheus Deception

by Robert Ludlum

  The late-afternoon sun streamed through the venetian blinds, casting slats of shadows on the floor of his Senate office and bringing out the glow from Cassidy’s burnished mahogany desk. The senator from Massachusetts looked up from his briefing papers and met Fry’s gaze. “I hope you realize how valuable you are to me, Rog,” he said, a smile playing at his lips. “It’s because you’re so good at looking after the pragmatic, temporizing, horse-trading side of this business that, every once in a while, I can actually get on my hind legs and say what I believe.”

  Fry was always struck by how distinguished, how damned senatorial Cassidy looked: the coifed mane of wavy silver hair, the chiseled features. A little over six feet, the senator was photogenic with his broad face and high cheekbones, but up close, the eyes were what made him: they could grow warm and intimate, making constituents feel as if they’d found a soul mate, or turn cool and unsparing, drilling through a squirrelly witness who’d come before his committee.

  “Every once in a while?” Fry shook his head. “Too damn often, if you ask me. Too damned often for your own political health. And one of these days, it’s going to catch up with you. The last election wasn’t a walk in the park, if I may remind you.”

  “You worry too much, Rog.”

  “Somebody has to, around here.”

  “Listen, the constituents care about these things. Did I show you this letter?” It was from a woman who lived on Massachusetts’s north shore. She had sued a marketing company and discovered they had thirty single-spaced pages of information on her, going back fifteen years. The company knew, and was in the business of selling, more than nine hundred separate items of information about her—including her choice of sleeping aids and antacids and hemorrhoid ointments and the soap she used when she showered; it itemized her divorce, medical procedures, credit ratings, her every traffic infraction. But there was nothing unusual about this; the company had similar dossiers on millions of Americans. The only thing unusual was that she found out about it. That letter, and a few dozen like it, was what first aroused Cassidy’s concern.

  “You forget, Jim, I answered that letter personally,” replied Fry. “I’m just saying you don’t know what you’re stirring up this time around. This goes to the heart of the way business works today.”

  “That’s why it’s worth talking about,” said the senator quietly.

  “Sometimes it’s more important to live and fight another day.” But Fry knew what Cassidy was like when he had a bee in his bonnet: moral outrage would trump the cool calculation of political interest. The senator wasn’t a saint: he sometimes drank too much and, especially in his early years when his hair was a glossy black, slept around too freely. At the same time, Cassidy had always maintained a core of political integrity: all things being equal, he did try to do the right thing, at least where the rightness of the thing was as clear as the political cost of doing so. It was a strain of idealism that Fry railed against and, almost despite himself, respected.

  “You remember how Ambrose Bierce defined a statesman?” The senator winked at him. “A politician who, as a result of equal pressure from all sides, remains upright.”

  “I was in the cloakroom yesterday and found out you’ve got a new nickname,” Fry said, smiling thinly. “You’ll like this one, Jim: ‘Senator Cassandra.’”

  Cassidy frowned. “Nobody listened to Cassandra—but they should have,” he grunted. “At least she could say she told ’em so.…” He broke off. They’d been through it; they’d had this conversation. Fry was being protective of him, and Cassidy had heard him out. But on this subject, there wasn’t anything left to talk about.

  Senator Cassidy was going to do what he was going to do, and there was no stopping him.

  No matter what it cost.

  SIX

  Footsteps thundered behind him on the steel deck as Bryson raced toward the center stairwell. Spying the elevator, he paused but a split-second before he rejected that option; the elevator moved slowly, and once inside it, he would be in a vertical coffin, easy prey for anyone able to shut off the elevator mechanism. No, he would take the stairs, noisy as they were. There was no other way out of the superstructure. He had no choice. Up or down? Up toward the wheelhouse, the bridge, would be an unexpected move, yet it risked his getting trapped on an upper deck with few egresses. No, that was a bad idea; down was the only way that made sense, down to the main deck and escape.

  Escape? How? There was only one way off the ship, and that was off the main deck and into the water—whether by jumping, which was suicide in these cold Atlantic waters, or down the gangplank, which was too slow and too exposed a descent.

  Jesus! There was no way out!

  No, he mustn’t think that way; there had to be a way out, and he would find it.

  He was like a rat in a maze; that he didn’t know the layout of this immense ship put him at a distinct disadvantage to his pursuers. Yet the very size of the vessel guaranteed endless passages in which to lose the chasers, hide if needed.

  He vaulted to the stairs and began taking them two and three at a time, while above him came shouts. One of the bodyguards was dead, but there were no doubt quite a few others, alerted and summoned by the various alarms and by two-way radios. The footsteps and shouts grew increasingly loud and frantic from the stairwell. His pursuers had increased in number, and it was likely a matter of just seconds before others emerged from other parts of the ship.

  The ship’s whistles and alarms sounded in a cacophony of raucous whoops and metallic grunts. A landing led to a short passageway that seemed to open onto an outside section of a deck. Quietly he opened the door, closed it behind him silently, ran straight ahead, and found himself on the aft deck, open to the elements. The sky was black, the waves lapped gently at the stern. He ran to the railing, looking for the welded steel grips and steps one sometimes found on the side of ships that were used for emergency escape. He could climb down to another level of the ship, he quickly thought, and lose them that way.

  But there were no steel grips on the hull. The only way out of here was down.

  Suddenly there came the explosion of gunfire. A bullet ricocheted off a metal capstan with a high-pitched pinging sound. He spun away from the railing and into the shadow behind a steel mooring winch on which the steel hawse cable was wound around capstan drums, like some giant spool of thread, then dove behind it for cover. Another round of bullets pitted the metal just a few feet from his head.

  They were firing without restraint here, and he realized that with the open sea behind him they could fire heedlessly without fear of damaging any of the ship’s delicate navigational equipment.

  Inside the ship they would have to be more careful when firing rounds. And that was his protection! They would not hesitate to kill him, but they would not want to damage their ship—or its precious cargo.

  He would have to get out of the open areas and back into the belly of the ship. Not only would hiding places be numerous there, but he could take advantage of their hesitance to fire freely.

  But now what? Here he was, trapped out in the open, with only a great steel capstan as protection. This was the most hazardous place for him on the entire ship.

  There seemed to be two or three gunmen here, no more and no less. Clearly he was outnumbered. He needed to divert them, misdirect them, but how? Looking around wildly, he spotted something. Behind an iron bollard, a tall cylinder rising several feet from the deck, he noticed a paint can, left there no doubt by a deckhand. He crawled forward along the deck and grabbed the can. It was almost empty.

  There was a sudden burst of gunfire as he was spotted.

  He drew back quickly, grasping the handle of the can, then immediately hurling it forward toward the railing, where it struck the hawse pipe. He peered around the barricade, saw both men turn toward the source of the clatter. One of them ran toward it, away from where Bryson had concealed himself. The other spun around in a classic marksman’s position, looking from one side to anot
her. As the first man raced toward the starboard side of the ship, the second circled around toward the port side, his weapon pointed toward the mooring winch the whole time. This man saw through the ruse, suspected Bryson of having caused the diversion, believed Bryson was still huddled behind the winch.

  But he did not expect Bryson to come around the winch toward him. Now Bryson was just a few feet away from the second security guard. A sudden shout came from the first man, a declaration that Bryson was not there, an unprofessional move. The second man, just inches away from Bryson, turned, distracted.

  Move!

  Now!

  Bryson lunged and tackled the man to the deck, slamming his knee into the man’s stomach. The man gasped as the air left his lungs, and as he reared up, Bryson slammed his elbow into the man’s throat. He could hear the crunch of cartilage as he vised the man’s throat in a hammerlock. The man roared in pain, which gave Bryson the opportunity he needed to grab the security man’s gun, try to wrench it out of his hand. But the security guard was a professional, and he would not give his weapon up so easily; despite the great pain Bryson was inflicting, Calacanis’s soldier struggled, refusing to yield the pistol. Gunfire came from the other side of the deck, fired by the first gunman as he ran toward his colleague, which was jarring his aim. Bryson twisted the weapon around until the man’s wrist cracked; the ligaments tore audibly, and the gun now turned back toward the man’s own chest. His index finger jabbed at the trigger, finally grabbed it, and Bryson bent his wrist and fired.

  The soldier arched backward, his chest punctured. Bryson’s aim was perfect, even in the confusion of the struggle; he had hit the man’s heart.

  Grabbing the weapon from the limp fingers, he sprung to his feet and began firing wildly in the general direction of the running man, who stopped to fire back, knowing that firing while running made for terrible aim. That instant’s pause was the window Bryson needed. He let loose a volley of semiautomatic fire, one round piercing his attacker’s forehead. The man toppled to one side, crumpled against the railing, dead.

  For a few seconds he was safe, Bryson calculated. But he could hear footsteps on the deck, growing louder and coming closer, and he heard the accompanying shouts, and that told him he was hardly safe at all.

  Now where?

  Immediately up ahead he saw a door marked DIESEL GENERATOR ROOM. This had to lead to the engine room, which at the moment seemed the best place to escape. He raced across the deck, yanked open the door, and ran down a steep, narrow set of metal stairs painted green. He was in a large, open area that was deafeningly loud. The auxiliary diesel generators here were in operation, providing power for the ship, since its engine was off. With several large strides he ran across a railing that circled the room above the mammoth generators.

  Through the rumble he could hear that his pursuers had followed him down here, and in a moment he saw several silhouetted figures racing down the metal steps, visible only as shadows in the dim light with its sickly green cast.

  There were four of them, running down the steep stairways with a stiffness, an awkwardness, that puzzled him for a moment, until he saw that two of them were wearing night-vision goggles, the others carrying sniper rifles outfitted with night-vision scopes. The outlines were unmistakable.

  He raised the stolen pistol, quickly aimed at the first man down the stairs, and—

  Suddenly all was darkness!

  The lights in the room had been extinguished, probably from some central control room. No wonder they carried such equipment! By eliminating all light they hoped to gain the advantage provided by their sophisticated weaponry. On a ship such as this, a floating arsenal, there would be no shortage of such matériel.

  But he fired anyway, into the darkness, in the direction toward which he had been aiming just a second or two ago. He heard a cry, then a crash. One man was down. But it was insanity to just keep firing into the darkness, using up precious ammunition when he had no idea how many rounds remained in the weapon and had no way to obtain any more.

  It was what they wanted him to do.

  They expected him to respond like a cornered animal, a drowning rat. To flail away desperately. To fire into the darkness with abandon. Use up the ammunition pointlessly, foolishly. And then, aided by their night vision, they would easily hunt him down.

  Blinded in the darkness, he extended his arms, felt around for obstacles, both to avoid and to hide behind. The men wearing infrared monocular night-vision units, the lenses strapped against their eyes by means of a head harness and helmet mount, were doubtless also carrying handguns. The others had rifles fitted with advanced infrared weapon sights. Both allowed the user to see in total darkness by detecting the differentials in thermal patterns given off by animate and inanimate objects. Short-range thermal-imaging scopes had been used with great success during the Falklands war in 1982, in the Gulf in 1991. But these, Bryson recognized, were state-of-the-art RAPTOR night-vision weapon sights, lightweight, super accurate, with extreme long-range accuracy. They were often used by combat snipers, mounted on their .50 caliber sniper rifles.

  Oh, dear God. The playing field was hardly level, as if it ever was. The noise of the generator seemed, in the darkness, even louder.

  In the pitch blackness he saw a tiny, dancing red dot flit across his field of vision.

  Someone had located him and was aiming directly at his face, his eyes!

  Triangulate! Estimate the sniper’s location based on the direction from which the infrared reticule was aiming at him. This wasn’t his first time as the target of a sniper with a night-vision scope, and he had learned to estimate the distance of the shooter.

  But every second he paused to aim gave his enemy, who saw him as a green object against a darker green or black background, time to aim as well. And his enemy knew for certain where he was located, whereas Bryson was relying on luck and rusty experience. And how could he possibly aim at blackness? What was there to aim at?

  He squinted to bring up available light, but there really was none to be summoned into his eyes. Instead, he raised his pistol and fired.

  A scream!

  He had hit someone, though how well he couldn’t yet tell.

  But a second or two afterward, a bullet spat against the machinery to his left, pinging loudly. Night vision or no, his enemies had missed. They did not seem to care whether their rounds struck the generator or not. The machinery was encased in steel, heavy-gauge and durable.

  That meant they did not care what they hit, or whether they missed.

  So how many more were there? If the second man was indeed down, that meant two remained. The problem was that the generator was so loud he could not hear footsteps approaching, nor the ragged breathing of a wounded man. He was in effect both blind and deaf.

  As he raced down the catwalk, one hand outstretched before him to protect him from striking unseen objects, the other grasping his weapon, he heard gunfire again. One round whizzed so close to his head he could feel the gust of wind against his scalp.

  Then his searching hand struck something hard—a bulkhead. He had come to a wall at one end of the cavernous room. He swung his weapon first to one side, then to the other, each time striking steel railing.

  He was trapped.

  Then he became aware of the dancing red bead in the darkness, as one of the snipers aimed at the green oval that was, in the night-vision scope, his head.

  He thrust the pistol into the air in front of himself, prepared to aim at nothing again. Then he shouted: “Go ahead! If you miss me, you risk damaging the generator. That’s a lot of delicate electronic equipment there, microchips easily shattered. Kill the generator, and you kill all the power in the ship—and see what Calacanis thinks about that.”

  A split-second of silence. He even thought he saw the red dot waver, though he knew he might be imagining things.

  There was a low chuckle, and the infrared reticule passed across his field of vision again, steadied, and then—

 
The spit of a silenced weapon, and then three more spits, and then came a scream and the sound of another body crashing to the steel floor of the catwalk.

  What?

  Who had fired at his enemy? Someone had done it—Bryson knew it hadn’t been him! Someone had fired a round of shots using a silenced pistol.

  Someone had fired at his pursuers—and perhaps even eliminated them!

  “Don’t move!” Bryson shouted into the darkness at the one remaining gunman he calculated had to be out there. His cry made no sense, he knew—why should any of his adversaries, equipped as they were with night-vision goggles or sights, pay any attention?—but such a shout, unexpected and even illogical, could buy him a few seconds of confusion.

  “Don’t shoot!” came another voice, faint against the deafening noise of the generators.

  A woman’s.

  It was the voice of a woman.

  Bryson froze. He thought he had seen only men descend the metal stairs into the room, but the bulky equipment could easily disguise a female silhouette.

  But what did she mean, Don’t shoot?

  Bryson shouted, “Put down your weapon!”

  Suddenly he was blinded by a flash of light, and he realized that the lights in this room had suddenly gone on! Brighter than they’d been before.

  What was going on?

  In a second or two his eyes readjusted to the light, and there, standing on a catwalk high above, he could make out the shape of the woman who had been speaking to him. The woman wore a white uniform—the uniform of Calacanis’s steward from the dinner that seemed so much a part of the distant past.

  On her head she wore a helmet and head-harness, the lens of an infrared monocular night-vision unit obscuring half her face. Yet Bryson recognized her as the beautiful blonde he had exchanged a few words with before dinner, and who had spoken a few hasty words to him just before the violence had begun—words he now recognized as indeed a genuine warning.

  And here she was, crouched in a marksman’s stance, gripping the butt of a Ruger with a long silencer attached, moving it from one side to another, steadily back and forth. He realized, too, that there were four bodies sprawled at different points around the generator room—two from the deck close to the generator, one at the beginning of the catwalk on which he was standing, and a fourth lying a mere six feet away, alarmingly close.