The Prometheus Deception

by Robert Ludlum

  Bryson heard the jangle of metal on the floor right by his head: Sullivan had tossed him his key ring.

  Must hurry, he thought. How much time remained before others would arrive, attracted by the explosions? Two minutes? One? Seconds?

  Bryson reached over with his manacled hands and grabbed the key ring, quickly locating a handcuff key. With a little maneuvering, Bryson worked the small key into Elena’s cuffs, springing them open; she then took the key and swiftly unlocked his. One of the policeman’s two-way radios crackled to life: “Jesus, what’s going on?” a tinny, staticky voice demanded.

  “Go,” the sergeant told the two in a faint whisper.

  Elena saw Bryson racing toward the right-hand arched window. “We can’t leave this man here—not after what he’s done for us!” she protested.

  “He’s not answering his radio,” Bryson replied quickly as he unhooked the long shade and threw it, clatteringly, to the floor, then began working loose a bolt on the window frame. “They’ll locate him quickly, and they’ll be able to do more for him than we could do.” But there’s nothing they can do for him, he thought but didn’t say. “Come on!” he shouted.

  Elena rushed to the window, tugged at a sliding bolt until it came free. Bryson turned, saw Sullivan slump back on to the floor, now silent and still. The man turned out to be a hero, Bryson thought. There aren’t many of them. He yanked at the window, hard. It seemed not to have been opened in years, perhaps decades. But after another hard tug, it yielded, admitting a rush of cold air into the room.

  This side of the Palace of Westminster, the east side, fronted directly onto the Thames, the length of the building running nearly nine hundred feet. Most of it, about seven hundred feet, was taken up by a terrace, furnished with chairs and tables, where members of Parliament had tea or entertained; but on either side of the terrace two narrow, somewhat taller sections of the building jutted out, with just a short stone embankment and a low steel fence, and then water. They were in one of the two protruding ends, as Bryson had planned; the river was directly below them, almost a straight plumb line down.

  Elena looked out, turned to Bryson with a frightened expression, but then, to Bryson’s astonishment, she said, “I’ll go first. I’ll—I’ll pretend I’m diving off the highest diving board in Bucharest.”

  Bryson smiled. “Protect your head and neck from the impact. Better to cannonball it, tuck your head and neck into your arms as you drop. And jump out as far as you can so you’re sure to hit the water.”

  She nodded, bit her lower lip.

  “I see it—the boat,” he said.

  She looked, nodded again. “At least that much I did right,” she said with a wan smile. “Thames River Cruises was happy to rent a speedboat to my boss, a rich and eccentric unnamed Member of Parliament who wanted to impress his latest lady friend by taking her directly from the Parliament embankment to the Millennium Dome in the fastest boat they had. That was the easy part. But their boats are moored at the Westminster pier—to get one of them to rope it up right in front of the palace required a rather sizable bribe. In case you wonder where all the cash went.”

  Bryson smiled. “You did great.” He could see the boat bobbing in the water about twenty feet to the left, tied to the steel fence in front of the terrace. Elena took a short step from the floor to the bottom of the window, Bryson assisting her. He looked around, saw no sharpshooters on this section of the roof, nor any patrolling the terrace, this hardly being a logical or expected escape route. Valuable resources had to be expended carefully, priorities assessed, men assigned where they were deemed to be most needed.

  She stood on the ledge of the open window, took a deep breath. Her left hand squeezed his shoulder. Then she leaped straight out into the air, tucking herself into a ball, and dropped the fifty feet into the water with a loud splash. He waited for her to give him the thumbs-up signaling that she was fine, and then Bryson climbed onto the window ledge and jumped.

  The water was cold and murky, the current powerful; when he surfaced, he saw that Elena, a strong swimmer, had almost reached the boat. By the time he had swum to it, she had started the motor. He climbed up and jumped into the cockpit and within seconds they were speeding across the water, away from Parliament, from the teams of killers.

  * * *

  Within a few hours they were in their hotel room on Russell Square. Bryson had gone shopping, with a highly specific list Elena had provided, and returned with the equipment she needed: the fastest and most powerful laptop computer he could buy, equipped with an infrared port; a fast modem; a variety of computer cables.

  She looked up from the laptop, which was connected by telephone wire to the phone jack, and from there to the Internet. “I think I need a drink, darling.”

  Bryson poured her a Scotch, neat, from the room’s bar, then poured one for himself. “You’re downloading something?” he asked.

  She nodded and took a grateful sip. “Password-recov-ery software—shareware. Dawson took precautions—his handheld device was password-protected. Until and unless I can crack that, we’re not going to get a thing. But once we get past the password, I’ll bet we’re in.”

  He picked up Dawson’s billfold. “Anything here?”

  “Just credit cards, some cash, a bunch of papers. Nothing useful—I’ve checked.” She turned back to the laptop. “This may be it.” She entered a password into Dawson’s personal digital assistant. A moment later her face lit up. “We’re in.”

  Bryson took a celebratory drink. “You’re a remarkable woman.”

  She shook her head. “I am a woman who loves her work. You, Nicholas, are the remarkable one. I’ve never known a man like you.”

  “You must not know many men.”

  She smiled. “I’ve known my share. Maybe more than my share. But no one like you—no one as brave and as … stubborn, I would say. You never gave up on me.”

  “I don’t know if that’s quite true. Maybe for a while—in my deepest, darkest depression, when I was drinking far too much of this stuff”—he held up his glass, toasted her—“maybe then I did. I was angry—hurt and confused and angry. But I was never sure, I was never certain—”

  “About what?”

  “About the reasons why you left. I had to know. I knew I’d never be satisfied until I knew the truth, even if it tore the heart out of me.”

  “You never asked Ted Waller?”

  “I knew better than to ask him. I knew that if he knew anything—or if he wanted to tell me anything—he would.”

  She looked distant, vaguely troubled, and she began tapping at the device with a small black stylus. “I’ve often wondered,” she said, her voice trailing off. “Oh, my.”

  “What?”

  “There’s an entry here in his date book. ‘Call H. Dunne.’”

  Bryson looked up suddenly. “Harry Dunne. Jesus. Is there a phone number?”

  “No. Just ‘Call H. Dunne.’”

  “When is the entry?”

  “It’s—it’s three days ago!”

  “What? My God, of course—of course he’s still around—still reachable by those who he’s willing to talk to. Does that thing have phone numbers or an address book?”

  “It seems to have everything—an enormous amount of data.” She tapped again at the screen. “Shit.”

  “Now what?”

  “It’s encrypted. Both the telephone and address-book database, and something else that’s labeled ‘transfers.’”

  “Shit.”

  “Well, that’s good and bad.”

  “How is that good?”

  “You only encrypt something valuable, so there must be something interesting here. The locked room is the one you want to go into.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “The problem here is limited resources. This is a top-of-the-line notebook computer, but it doesn’t have a fraction of the computing power of the supercomputers we had in the Dordogne. Now, this is a 56-bit DES encrypt
ion algorithm, fortunately—it doesn’t use 128-bit keys, thank God—but it’s still strong.”

  “Can you crack it?”

  “Eventually.”

  “Eventually meaning … hours?”

  “Days or weeks with this computer, and that’s only because I know these utilities, these systems, inside out.”

  “We don’t even have days.”

  She was silent for a long time. “I know,” she said at last. “I suppose I can try to improvise—basically, parcel out the work to different hacker sites on the Internet, distribute the chore of crunching billions of number combinations. And see if we get anything that way. It’s sort of like that old saying about how an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters will eventually come up with Shakespeare.”

  “Sounds dubious.”

  “Well, I’ll be frank—I’m not very hopeful.”

  Three hours later, when Bryson returned with carry-out Indian food, Elena looked careworn and gloomy.

  “No luck, huh?” Bryson said.

  She shook her head. She was smoking, something Bryson had not seen her do since first escaping Romania. Popping out from the computer’s floppy drive one of the diskettes she had rescued from the Dordogne facility, containing decrypted Prometheus information, she put out her cigarette and went to the bathroom. She returned with a wet washcloth plastered on her forehead, then sank into an armchair. “My head hurts,” she said. “From thinking too much.”

  “Take a break,” Bryson said. He set down the paper bags of food and came around to the back of her chair, then began massaging her neck.

  “Oh, that feels great,” she murmured. After a moment, she said, “We have to reach Waller.”

  “I can try one of the emergency relay channels, but I have no idea how deeply the Directorate has been penetrated. I can’t even be sure he’ll get it.”

  “It’s worth a try.”

  “Yes, but only if it doesn’t compromise our own security. Waller would understand that, approve of it.”

  “Our security,” she mumbled. “Yes.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “‘Security’ made me think of passwords and encryption.”

  “Naturally.”

  “And that made me think of Dawson, and how an obviously busy and careful man like that keeps track of all his passwords. Because someone like that never uses just one password—it’s not secure.”

  “How would he keep track?”

  “There would be a list somewhere.”

  “It’s always been my experience that the weakest link in computer security in an office is always the secretary who keeps the password taped in her desk drawer because she can never remember it.”

  “I’m sure Dawson was more cunning than that. Yet the cryptographic ‘key’ is a long series of numbers—truly impossible to memorize. So he has to keep it … can you hand me his PalmPilot?”

  Bryson retrieved it from her work station and gave it to her. She turned it on and tapped at the screen with the stylus. For the first time in hours she smiled. “There’s a list here, all right. With the mysterious label ‘Tesserae.’”

  “If I remember my high school Latin, that’s plural for tessera, meaning ‘password.’ Is the list in the clear?”

  “No, it’s encrypted, but it’s a light encryption utility—it’s called ‘secure information management software.’ A password protector. This is not difficult at all. It’s sort of like locking the front door but leaving the garage door open. I can use the same password-recovery software I downloaded earlier. Child’s play.”

  Her usual energy and enthusiasm having been restored, she returned to the work table. Ten minutes later, she announced that she had broken the code. She was able to read through all of the data Dawson had so carefully locked away.

  “Dear God, Nick. The file marked ‘Transfers’ is a record of wire-transfer payments made into a long list of London bank accounts. Amounts ranging from fifty thousand to a hundred thousand pounds, in some cases triple that!”

  “Who are the recipients?”

  “These names! This is like a Who’s Who of Parliament—members of the House of Commons across the whole political spectrum—Labor, Liberal Democrat, Conservative, even Ulster Unionists. He’s got names, dates of receipt, amounts, even times and locations of his meetings with them. A complete documentary record.”

  Bryson’s pulse was racing. “Bribery and blackmail. The two cardinal elements of illicit political influence-peddling. It’s an old Soviet technique for blackmailing Westerners—they’d pay you some token amount for your services as a consultant, perfectly legitimate-seeming, and then they’d have you—they had proof of Soviet payments into your bank account. So Dawson not only paid off members of Parliament, but he kept the proof of it, as potential blackmail, in case anyone wavered. That’s how Simon Dawson exerted power. That’s how he became the secret control behind Rupert Vere, his boss, the foreign secretary. And probably behind Lord Parmore, and no doubt behind dozens of other influential voices in Parliament. Simon Dawson was the secret paymaster. If you want to influence a political debate as charged and as crucial as the debate over the surveillance treaty in Parliament, money certainly helps grease the wheels. Payoffs. Bribes to unscrupulous politicians, to those whose votes are for sale.”

  “Apparently most of the most influential politicians in Parliament were selling their votes.”

  “I’m willing to wager there was more to some of those cases than simple bribery. If we were to go through the British press in the last year or so, I’ll bet we’d find a pattern similar to what happened in the Congress in the U.S.—leaks of sensitive, private information, embarrassing and damaging secrets, human weakness revealed to the world. I’ll bet the most diehard opponents of the treaty were forced out of office, just as Senator Cassidy was forced out in America. And the others were warned, compromised—and then given the carrot, a nice, fat ‘campaign contribution.’”

  “In laundered funds,” Elena said. “Untraceable.”

  “Is there any way to determine the source of the funds?”

  She popped one of the diskettes from the Dordogne facility into the computer. “Dawson’s record is so complete it even has the bank codes for the originating bank. He doesn’t list the bank name, just the code.”

  “You’re comparing it against the data Chris Edgecomb downloaded?”

  Her face seemed to cloud at the mention of Edgecomb’s name; it had obviously recalled the nightmare. She didn’t answer, but instead peered at the screen, at the long columns of numbers flashing by. “We have a match.”

  “Let me guess,” Bryson said. “Meredith Waterman.”

  “That’s right. The same firm that secretly owns the, uh, First Washington Mutual Bancorp. The place where you say Richard Lanchester made his fortune.”

  He inhaled sharply. “An old-line investment banking house has somehow become the conduit of illicit funds into Washington and London.”

  “And maybe other world-power centers as well—Paris, Moscow, Berlin…”

  “No doubt. Meredith Waterman in effect owns Congress and Parliament.”

  “You said Richard Lanchester got very rich there.”

  “Right, but the story is that he left all that behind to go to Washington. That he severed all formal ties, all financial connections.”

  “I learned as a child never to believe what I read in the Bucharest papers. I was taught always to distrust the official story.”

  “A useful lesson, I’m sorry to say. You’re speculating that Lanchester still has influence there, and that’s how he’s able to use his old bank to channel massive amounts of bribes?”

  “Meredith Waterman is a privately held bank—a limited partnership, from what I’ve learned. It’s basically owned by ten or twelve general partners. Do you think it’s possible that he’s still a partner there?”

  “No. Can’t be. Once he started working in the government, he would have had to give all that up—resign his partnershi
p and put any assets there into a blind trust. To work at the White House requires full financial disclosure.”

  “No, Nick. Financial disclosure to the FBI, not public disclosure. He’s never had to go through a Senate confirmation, has he? Think about it—maybe this is the reason why he refuses to accept the president’s nomination to become secretary of state! Maybe it’s not some kind of modesty—maybe he just doesn’t want to go through the additional public attention, the scrutiny, that would come with it. Maybe he has things to hide—skeletons in his closet.”

  “Well, you’re right that a national security adviser doesn’t have to go through the same baptism by fire that the secretary of state does,” Bryson conceded. “But White House officials are still under the microscope no matter who they are, their every move scrutinized, everyone always looking for financial improprieties.”

  Elena seemed impatient; she was a mathematician comfortable with abstract principles most of all, and she was developing a theory that he insisted on poking holes in. “I want you to consider this about Lanchester. In the last few months I’ve been watching closely what’s happening with this International Treaty on Surveillance and Security. In our line of work, we’re naturally very interested, right?”

  He nodded.

  “And, well, once this treaty is ratified, it will create an international executive, a new, global law-enforcement body with sweeping powers. And who’s going to head this new agency? In the last few weeks, if you’ve been reading the newspaper reports very closely, you’d always find the same few names mentioned—always deep into the article, always couched as speculation—as possible directors. The term they always use is ‘czar’—a word that always makes me nervous. You know how we Romanians felt about the Russian czar.”

  “The czar being Lanchester.”

  “His name is being floated—what do they call that, a ‘trial balloon’?”

  “But that makes no sense—he’s known to be opposed to the treaty! He’s supposed to be one of the voices in the White House who lobbied hardest against it, believing that such a worldwide law-enforcement agency could be abused, could infringe upon fundamental personal freedoms…”