The Prometheus Deception

by Robert Ludlum

  Niccolo’s nodding became even more frenzied.

  “All right, then.” He ripped the wide plastic tape off Niccolo’s mouth, leaving a red stripe on the skin that had to have been extremely painful. Then he grabbed the bunched-up wet rag and yanked it out.

  Niccolo took several deep, ragged breaths.

  “Now, if you make the serious mistake of lying to me, you’d better hope your brother has already told me the exact same lie. Or you’ll have killed him, just as if you yourself squeezed the trigger against his temple, understand?”

  Niccolo gasped, “Yes!”

  “But if I were you, I’d stick to the truth. The odds are much better. And bear in mind, I know where your families live. How’s nonna Maria? And your mother, Alma—does she still have her boarding house?”

  Niccolo’s eyes were at once fierce and wounded. “I am telling you the truth!” he screamed in Friuliano.

  “As long as we’re clear about that,” Bryson replied blandly.

  “But we don’t know who hired us! The procedures are the same as when we worked for you! We are the mus, the beasts of burden! They tell us nothing!”

  Bryson shook his head ruminatively. “Nothing is ever sealed in a vacuum, my friend. You know that as well as I. Even when you deal with a cutout, you know your contact’s cover name. You can’t help but pick up bits and pieces of information. And they may not tell you why you’re doing a particular operation, but they always tell you how to do it, and that can be quite revealing as well.”

  “I told you, we don’t know who our employers are!”

  Bryson raised his voice, speaking with controlled fury. “You worked with a team, under a team leader; you were issued instructions; and people always talk. You damned well know who hired you!” He turned toward the aisle as if preparing to call out a signal.

  “No!” cried Niccolo.

  “Your brother—”

  “My brother doesn’t know either. I don’t know what he said to you, but he doesn’t know! You know how the lines, the—compartments—how this works! We’re only the hired help, and they pay us in cash!”

  “Language!” Bryson demanded.

  “Che … language?”

  “The team you’re working with here. What language do they speak to one another?”

  Niccolo’s eyes were wild. “Different languages!”

  “The team leader!”

  “Russian!” he shouted desperately. “He’s a Russian!”

  “KGB, GRU?”

  “What do we know of these things?”

  “You know faces!” Bryson spat out. Louder, he called: “Layla?”

  Layla approached, understood Bryson’s gambit. “Would you like me to use a silencer?” she inquired in a matter-of-fact way.

  “No!” Niccolo thundered. “I tell you what you want to know!”

  “I’ll give him another sixty seconds,” Bryson said. “Then, if I don’t hear what I want to hear, fire away—and yes, actually, a silencer might be a good idea.” To Niccolo, he said, “They hired you to kill me because you know me, know my face.”

  Niccolo nodded, his eyes closed.

  “But they knew you once worked for me, and they wouldn’t just hire you to kill your old employer without a plausible cover story. No matter how little loyalty you two have. So they told you I was a sellout, a traitor, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “A traitor to what, to whom?”

  “They only said you were selling names of agents, that we and everyone else you’d ever worked with would be identified, flushed out, executed.”

  “Executed by whom?”

  “Hostile parties … I don’t know, they didn’t say!”

  “Yet you believed them.”

  “Why would I not believe them?”

  “Was a bounty placed on my head, or was this a straight job price?”

  “Yes, a bounty.”

  “How much?”

  “Two million.”

  “Lire or dollars?”

  “Dollars! Two million dollars.”

  “I’m flattered. You and your brother could have retired to the hills and hunted cinghiale to your hearts’ content. But the problem with offering a bounty to a team is that it diminishes the incentive for the team to coordinate; everyone wants to make the hit separately. Bad strategy, self-defeating. The bearded one was the team leader?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was he the Russian-speaker?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know his name?”

  “Not directly. I hear someone call him Milyukov. But I know the face. He’s like me, like us—he does assignments.”

  “Freelance?”

  “They say he works for a—a plutocrat, a Russian baron. One of the secret powers behind the Kremlin. A very rich man who owns a conglomerate. Through it, they say he secretly runs Russia.”

  “Prishnikov.”

  There was a glint of recognition in the Italian’s eyes. He had heard the name before. “Maybe, yes.”

  Prishnikov. Anatoly Prishnikov. Founder and chairman of the mammoth, shadowy Russian consortium Nortek. Immensely rich and powerful and, indeed, the power behind the throne. Bryson’s heart began beating rapidly. Why would Anatoly Prishnikov have sent someone to eliminate Bryson?

  Why?

  The only logical explanation seemed to be that Prishnikov was controlling the Directorate, or was among those controlling it. Harry Dunne of the CIA had said that the Directorate had been founded and, from its beginning, been controlled by a small cabal of Soviet GRU ‘geniuses,’ as he put it.

  “What if I told you that the Directorate in fact isn’t part of the United States government?” Dunne had said. “That it never was … The whole thing was an elaborate ruse, do you see?… A penetration operation right on enemy soil—our soil.”

  And then, after the Cold War ended, as the Soviet intelligence services fell into collapse, control of the Directorate shifted into other hands, he had said. Agents were terminated.

  I was set up, then pushed out.

  And Elena? She had disappeared—meaning what? That she was deliberately separated from him? Could that explain it? That the masters had to keep the two of them apart from each other for some reason? Because they knew things, could put things together?

  “… Now we’ve got reason to think it’s being reactivated,” Dunne had said. “Your old masters appear to be accumulating arms, for some reason.… You could say they’re poised to foment global instability.… Seems they’re trying to stockpile an arsenal. We think they’re instigating some kind of turbulence in the southern Balkans, although their target is elsewhere.”

  Their ultimate target is elsewhere.

  Generalities, blanket statements, vague assertions. The outlines remained murky and uncertain. Facts were all he had to work with, and there were altogether too few of them.

  Fact: A team of assassins made up of Directorate operatives—past or present ones, he had no idea—had been trying to kill him.

  But why? Calacanis’s security forces may simply have considered him an interloper, a penetration agent to be eliminated. But the assassin-squads here in Santiago de Compostela seemed too well organized, too orchestrated, to be simply a reaction to his appearance on Calacanis’s ship.

  Fact: The Sangiovanni brothers had been hired to kill him even before his appearance on the Spanish Armada. The controllers of the Directorate had decided he was a threat prior to that. But how, and why?

  Fact: The leader of the assassin squad was also in the employ of Anatoly Prishnikov, an immensely wealthy private citizen. Thus, Prishnikov had to be one of the controllers of the Directorate—but why would an ostensibly private citizen be running a rogue intelligence outfit?

  Did this indicate that the Directorate had gone private—had been the object of a hostile takeover, co-opted by Anatoly Prishnikov? Had it become a private army of Russia’s most powerful, most secretive mogul?

  But something else occurred to him. “You
said the team spoke other languages,” he said to Niccolo. “You mentioned French.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But nothing! Which member of the squad spoke French?”

  “It was the blonde.”

  “The blond woman in the plaza—her hair was up.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what are you holding back about her?”

  “Holding back? Nothing!”

  “I find this very interesting, because your brother was much more talkative on the subject.” The bluff was audacious, but made with enormous certitude and therefore quite convincing. “Much more talkative. Perhaps he invented things, made up a story—is that what you’re telling me?”

  “No! I don’t know what he told you—we just overheard things, little scraps. Maybe names.”

  “Maybe names?”

  “I heard her speaking in French to another agent who was aboard the arms ship that blew up. The Spanish Armada. The agent was a Frenchman who was there to make some kind of arms deal with the Greek.”

  “A deal?”

  “This Frenchman is—was—a double, I heard them say.”

  Bryson recalled the longhaired, elegantly dressed Frenchman from Calacanis’s dining room. The Frenchman was known to be an emissary from Jacques Arnaud, France’s wealthiest and most powerful arms dealer. Was he with the Directorate as well, or at least working with or for them? What did it mean that Jacques Arnaud, the extreme-right-wing French arms merchant, was somehow in league with the Directorate—and therefore in league, too, with the richest private citizen in Russia?

  And if it was true that two powerful businessmen, one in Russia and one in France, were controlling the Directorate, using it to foment terrorism around the world—what was their objective?

  * * *

  They left the two Italian brothers bound and gagged in the old cathedral. Bryson asked Layla, who had had paramedic training, to attempt to stanch the blood flow from Paolo’s ruined knee, using a tightly fastened rag to compress the wound.

  “But how can you be so considerate to a man who tried to murder you?” she asked later, genuinely puzzled.

  Bryson had shrugged. “He was just doing his job.”

  “This is not how we work in the Mossad,” she protested. “If a man has tried to kill you and failed, you must never let him get away. It is an inviolable rule.”

  “I have a different set of rules.”

  They spent the night in an anonymous, small hospedaje outside Santiago de Compostela, where she immediately set to work dressing his shoulder wound, cleansing it with peroxide she had purchased at a farmacía, suturing it and applying an antibacterial ointment. She worked quickly, with the practiced skill of a medical professional.

  Appraising his shirtless torso, she ran her finger along a long, smooth welt. The wound inflicted by Abu in Tunisia, on Bryson’s last assignment, had been repaired by a top-flight surgeon on contract with the Directorate. No longer did it throb painfully, though the memory remained, as traumatic as ever.

  “A memento,” he said grimly, “from an old friend.” Outside the small window, the rain was coming down in sheets over the moss-stained cobblestone.

  “You nearly died.”

  “I had some good medical care.”

  “You have been attacked often.” She fingered a much smaller wound, a dime-size area of puckered flesh on his right biceps. “This?” she inquired.

  “Another memento.”

  The memory of Nepal came flooding back, overpoweringly so, of a fearsome adversary named Ang Wu, a renegade officer in the Chinese Army. Now Bryson wondered what had really happened in that exchange of gunfire. What had he really been sent to do, and on whose behalf? Had he really been only a pawn of a malevolent conspiracy he still didn’t understand?

  So much blood spilled; so many lives wasted. And for what? What had his life meant? The more he learned, the less he understood. He thought of his parents, of the last time he saw them alive. Was it truly possible they had been killed by the masterminds behind the Directorate? He thought about Ted Waller, the man he had once admired more than anyone in the world, and he felt a surge of rage.

  What was it that Niccolo, the Friulian assassin, had called himself and his brother—beasts of burden? They were hired muscle, pawns in the service of an odious game whose rules were never explained to them. Now it occurred to Bryson that there was no difference between him and the Italian brothers. They were all no more than instruments used by shadowy forces. Nothing better than pawns.

  She had been sitting on the edge of the bed; now she got up and went to the tiny bathroom, returning a moment later with a glass of water. “The pharmacist gave me a few antibiotic pills. I told him I’d be getting a prescription in the morning, so he was willing to give me enough to tide you over.” She handed him a few capsules and the glass. A flash of the old suspicion spoke to him silently, warningly: What were these unmarked pills she was giving him? Until the more rational voice in his head: If she wanted to kill you, she’s had plenty of opportunities to do it, more directly, in the last twenty-four hours. More than that, she simply didn’t have to risk her own life to save yours. He took the capsules from her and washed them down with a swallow of tap water.

  “You seem distant,” Layla said as she packed up the medical supplies. “Far away. You’re thinking of something troubling.”

  Bryson looked up, nodded slowly. Sharing a room with a beautiful woman—even though the sleeping arrangements were quite chaste, she in the bed, he on the sofa—was something he had not done since Elena’s sudden departure, years ago. The opportunities had presented themselves time and time again, but he had remained monastic, for some reason punishing himself for whatever he had done to send her away.

  What had he done?

  How much, he wondered, of their life together had been set up, stage-managed by Ted Waller?

  And he thought back to the one time, the one important time, that he had lied to her. He had lied to protect her. He had concealed something from her. Waller was fond of quoting Blake: “We are led to believe a lie,” he would orate, “when we see not through the eye.”

  But Bryson had not meant for Elena to see, to know, what he had done for her.

  Now he searched his mind, recalling that evening in Bucharest that he had kept from her.

  What was the truth? Where was the truth?

  * * *

  For all its paranoia and mayhem, the underworld of the black-operations specialist is a small one, and word travels fast. Bryson had received intelligence through several reliable contacts that a team of ex-Securitate “sweepers” was offering serious money for any leads that might unearth the location of one Dr. Andrei Petrescu, the mathematician and cryptologist who had betrayed the revolution by leaking the Ceauşescu government’s ciphers. Among the disaffected former members of the notorious secret service there was great bitterness about the coup d’etat that had unseated their patron’s government and removed them from power. They would never forgive or forget the traitors and were determined to hunt them down, whatever the cost, however much time it took. They had targeted several turncoats, Petrescu among them. Scores were to be settled, vengeance won.

  Through a blind relay, Bryson arranged a meeting in Bucharest with the chief of the sweepers, the former number-two in the Securitate. Though Bryson’s cover identity was not known to the Securitate man, his bona fides were established. The message was relayed that Bryson had urgent information that would undoubtedly be of great interest to the sweepers. He would come to the rendezvous site alone, verifiably so; the Securitate man was to do the same.

  For Bryson, this was personal. He had made arrangements without the Directorate’s knowledge. Such an off-the-books meeting would never have been approved; the potential ramifications were too serious. Yet Bryson could not risk having the contact vetoed; this was too important to Elena, and therefore to him. So he notified headquarters that upon the conclusion of an operation in Madrid he would be taking a much-
needed, if altogether too brief, vacation, a long weekend in Barcelona. Permission was, of course, granted; he had long been owed vacation time. He was acting in direct contravention of Directorate policy, yes, but he had no choice. This had to be done. He purchased flight tickets in cash under an assumed name that appeared nowhere in Directorate databanks.

  Neither did he tell Elena what he was doing, and here the deception was most important, for she would never have approved his meeting with the head of the team who sought to kill her father. Not only would she deem it far too dangerous to her husband, but she had made it abundantly clear on several occasions that under no circumstances was he to freelance in matters involving her parents. She was terrified of losing both her husband and her parents, of stirring up the hornet’s nest of Securitate vengeance. Were it up to her, he would never have made such an appointment. And until now, he had respected her wishes. But this was an opportunity not to be passed up.

  Bryson met the ex-Securitate man at a dark, subterranean bar. As promised, he had indeed come alone, although he had laid careful plans in advance. Favors had been called in, bribes paid.

  “You have information on the Petrescus,” said Major General Radu Dragan as Bryson joined him at a dimly lit booth.

  Dragan knew nothing about Bryson, but Bryson, drawing upon his network of sources, had done his homework. Elena had first mentioned his name on the night of the exfiltration from Bucharest, to scare off the policeman who had been so interested in what was in the truck; as it turned out, she knew the man’s name and phone number so well because Dragan had been the one who had enlisted her father’s help; Andrei Petrescu’s betrayal of the Securitate was therefore a very personal matter to Dragan.

  “I certainly do,” said Bryson. “But first we should discuss terms.”

  Dragan, a craggy, sallow-faced man of sixty, raised his brows. “I am happy to discuss ‘terms,’ as you put it, once I learn the nature of what you have to tell me.”

  Bryson smiled. “Absolutely. The ‘information’ I have to give you is quite simple.” He slid a sheet of paper across the table; Dragan picked it up and scrutinized it in puzzlement.