The Prometheus Deception

by Robert Ludlum

  “The Directorate has been destroyed. You know that—you saw it happen.”

  “Has this been some sort of deception all along?” Bryson said, raising his voice to a shout.

  “Nicky, Nicky. Prometheus is now our best chance, really—”

  “Our best chance?”

  “And besides, are our goals really all that different? The Directorate was a dream—a fond dream, which we actually had the good fortune to realize for a few years, against all odds. Ensuring global stability, protecting it from the crazies, the terrorists, the madmen. As I always say, the prey survives only by becoming the predator.”

  “This—this is no last-minute conversion,” Bryson said, his voice hushed. “You’ve been behind this for years.”

  “I’ve been a supporter of the possibility.”

  “A supporter … wait. Wait a second! Those assets I once found missing from that offshore bank … a billion dollars—but you were never interested in amassing personal wealth. It was you! You helped create Prometheus, didn’t you?”

  “Seed money, I believe they call it. Sixteen years ago Greg Manning was a bit overextended, and the Prometheus project needed an immediate infusion of cash. You might say I became a principal stakeholder.”

  Bryson felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach. “But it makes no sense—if Prometheus were the enemy…”

  “Survival of the fittest, my dear. Have you never entered two competitors in the same race? It’s backup contingency planning—redundancy that assures victory. Communism had fallen, and the Directorate had lost its sense of purpose. I looked around and examined the options, and I knew that conventional spycraft was doomed. Either we were the way of the future or Prometheus was. One horse had to win.”

  “And so you went with whichever horse won, morality be damned. It made no difference to you what the different objectives were, did it?”

  “Manning was one of the most brilliant men I ever met. It occurred to me that his idea was worth incubating, worth nurturing as a contingency.”

  “You hedged your goddamned bets!”

  “Think of it as political arbitrage. It was the only prudent course. I’ve always told you, Nick, spycraft isn’t a team sport. And I know you have the talent ultimately to recognize the good sense in my reasoning.”

  “Where’s Elena?” Bryson shot back.

  “She’s a smart woman, Nick, but she didn’t plan on being discovered, apparently.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Manning’s people have her here somewhere in the residence; I’m assured she’s being treated with the respect you and I both know she deserves. Nick, do I really have to ask you outright? Is it that important to you that I put the question so bluntly? Will you join us—can you recognize the way of the future?”

  Bryson raised his pistol, pointing it at Waller, his heart racing. Why did you make me do this? he pleaded inwardly. Why, damn it?

  Waller saw the gun but did not flinch. “Ah, I see. I have my answer. I didn’t think so. Alas.”

  The door flew open again, and a small army of Manning’s security guards entered, guns pointed, outnumbering him some twelve to one. Bryson spun, saw others pouring in through another, concealed door in the round wall, and as his back was turned, he was grabbed from behind. He felt the cold steel of the muzzle against the back of his head, another gun to his right temple. He turned back, much more slowly this time, and Ted Waller was gone.

  “Hands in the air,” a voice commanded. “And don’t even think about making any sudden movements. Don’t try to grab the gun out of anyone’s hands. You’re a smart guy—you know about smart guns.”

  Electronic pistols, Bryson realized. Developed by Colt, by Sandia, by several European weapons firms … Capable of firing three shots with a single pull of the trigger.

  “Hands up! Move it!”

  Bryson nodded, thrust his hands in the air. There was nothing more to do, probably no hope of saving Elena either. The technology had been developed at the request of law enforcement, to keep police officers from being killed with their own firearms, when the gun is grabbed from them in a confrontation. There were fingerprint sensors on the trigger, each gun personally programmed so that only the authorized user could fire it.

  He was marched, half-pushed, down the hallway outside the control room, down another short corridor. Guns at his temple, at the back of his head, he was frisked, the .45 caliber discovered and taken from him. One of the guards pocketed his snub-nosed pistol with ill-disguised triumph. He was disarmed totally, they had missed nothing. He had his hands, his instincts, his training, but it was all useless in the face of such an overwhelming artillery.

  But why had they not killed him? What were they waiting for?

  A door was opened, and he was shoved through it. He was in another oblong room, its dimensions similar to the portrait gallery. The lighting was dim, but he was able to make out the books lining the walls: russet leather-bound volumes in mahogany shelves that went from floor to a twenty-foot ceiling. A beautiful, grand library such as might be found in an English manor. The floor was parquet, perfectly worn.

  Bryson stood, alone, inspecting the bookshelves, filled with a sense of foreboding, a sense that something was about to happen.

  And suddenly the library disappeared: the book-lined walls glimmered, went silvery gray. It was an illusion! Like the portraits in the gallery, the books were a digital phantasm. He stepped forward to touch the smooth, yet slightly sandpapery gray walls, and then they lit up, this time bright, filled with hundreds of different images!

  He stared in horror. The images were of himself! Film, video footage.

  Of himself strolling on the beach with Elena. In bed with Elena, making love. Showering, shaving, urinating.

  Arguing with Elena. Kissing her. Sitting in Ted Waller’s office, shouting.

  Elena and him riding horseback.

  Bryson and Layla running through the passages of the Spanish Armada, evading Calacanis’s gunmen. Hiding in the abandoned cathedral in Santiago de Campostela. Furtively searching Jacques Arnaud’s private office. Meeting with Lanchester. Meeting with Tarnapolsky in Moscow. Running.

  Meeting with Harry Dunne.

  Scene after scene—surveillance video, taken from a distance, from close up, Bryson the star of each one. Scenes from his life, from the most intimate moments of his life. The most secret field operations. Nothing, not a single moment of the last ten years had gone unfilmed. The images were kaleidoscopic, flickering, horrifying.

  Even footage of him lowering himself into the garage and climbing the elevator shaft. They had seen him infiltrating the house, just moments ago.

  They had seen everything.

  Bryson was dazed. His head spun; he felt overcome by vertigo; he felt violated, raped, sick to his stomach. He dropped to his knees and was sick, retching and retching until there was nothing more in his stomach, yet the dry heaves did not stop.

  The whole thing was a setup. They knew he was coming; they wanted to observe; he had been under surveillance the entire time.

  “Prometheus, you may recall, stole the gift of fire from the gods and gave this great gift to downtrodden mankind,” said a calm voice, a soothing voice, amplified by hidden speakers throughout the room.

  Bryson looked up. At the far end of the room, standing in a marble alcove, was Gregson Manning.

  “They say you’re a formidable linguist. You must know, then, the etymological derivation of the name Prometheus. It means fore-seeing, or fore-thinking. It seemed an apt name for us. Prometheus, according to the classical tradition, gave man civilization—language, philosophy, mathematics—and brought us from savagery to civility. This was the meaning of the gift of fire—light, illumination, knowledge. Making visible what had been concealed in the shadows. Prometheus, that Titan, willfully and knowingly committed a crime when he brought fire down from the heavens and taught the mortals how to use it. It was treason! He was threatening to put humans on an equal footing with
the gods themselves! But in so doing he created civilization. And it is our task to make its continued existence secure.”

  Bryson walked a few steps closer to Manning. “So what do you have in mind?” he said. “Stasi on a global scale?”

  “Stasi?” Manning replied scornfully. “Organize half the populace to spy on the other half, no one trusting anyone? I hardly think so.”

  “No,” Bryson said, taking another few steps closer to the marble alcove. “The East Germans’ technology was strictly Iron Age, wasn’t it? No, you have supercomputers and miniaturized fiber-optic lenses. You have the ability to put everybody under the microscope. You and everyone in that hall out there—they’ve all bought into your nightmare vision. The Treaty on Surveillance and Security is merely a cover for a system of global surveillance that will make Big Brother seem benign—isn’t that right?”

  “Come now, Mr. Bryson. We teach our children when they’re toddlers about Santa Claus—‘He knows if you’ve been bad or good, So be good for goodness’ sake.’ Whether you acknowledge it or not, the ethical principle has always been linked to what is known about us. The all-seeing eye. Good conduct tracks with transparency. When everything is visible, crime disappears. Terrorism becomes a thing of the past. Rape, murder, child abuse—all gone. Mass murders—wars—gone. As will be the fear that grips every man, woman, and child, our inability to leave our houses, to walk through our cities, to simply live our lives as we want to live them, free from fear!”

  “And who will be watching?”

  “The computer. Massively parallel computational systems around the globe, girded with evolutionary algorithms and neural networks. There’s never been anything like it.”

  “And at the center of it all is the despot-voyeur, Gregson Manning, orchestrating your computers into a billion virtual Peeping Toms.”

  Manning smiled. “Do you know about the Igbo people, in eastern Nigeria? They live surrounded by the tumult and corruption of Nigeria, but they are free of it. Do you know why? Because their culture prizes what they call the transparent life. They believe that there is nothing about an upright person that his fellow villagers should not be allowed to know. Any sort of exchange is conducted in front of witnesses. They abhor any form of secrecy or concealment, even solitude. The ideal of total transparency is so highly developed that if a scintilla of distrust develops between two people, they may resort to a curious ritual known as igbandu, wherein each drinks the blood of the other. An idealistic but rather cumbersome regime, in the logistics of it, you’ll concede. The Promethean networks produce the same results with an altogether bloodless technique.”

  “Irrelevant tales!” Bryson shouted, taking a few steps closer. “That has nothing to do with us!”

  “You must be aware that, over the last decade, the crime rate in the United States, particularly in the major cities, dropped to a fraction of what it once was. Now, why do you think that was?”

  “What the hell do I know?” Bryson snapped. “I suppose you have a theory.”

  “No theory. I know. Our social scientists come up with theory after theory, but they fail to explain it.”

  “You’re not implying…” Bryson said slowly.

  Manning nodded. “It was a pilot study of our outdoor surveillance capabilities. Years before we had our current capacities and resources, but you have to start small, don’t you?” A ten-foot-square section of the wall to his left went blank for a moment, and then a map of midtown Manhattan snapped into view. Small blue dots peppered the street grid. “Those are the hidden rotational cameras that we installed,” Manning went on, pointing toward the dots. “It starts with anonymous tips to the police. Suddenly, the arrest record begins to improve, mysteriously. And, for the first time in decades, crime doesn’t seem to pay anymore. The police crow about their new methods, criminologists talk about the ebbs and flows of the crack wars, yet nobody talks about the cameras that record everything. The safety blanket of surveillance we’ve unfolded over the city. Nobody talks about the fact that the crime-ridden alleys are now a panopticon. Nobody talks about the Systematix pilot project, because nobody wants to know. Are you beginning to understand what we’re capable of doing for humanity? Poor homo sapiens. First they have to live through millennia of marauding tribalisms, and when the Enlightenment arrives, the Industrial Revolution hunkers down. Industrialization and urbanization bring a whole new wave of social disruptions, unleashing ordinary crime on a scale never before seen in human history. Two world wars, more atrocities on and off the battlefield. And when there are no wars, hand-to-hand combat breaks out in urban war zones. Is that any way to live? Is that any way to die? The members of the Prometheus Group come from every rank in every country of the world, but they all understand the paramount importance of security.”

  Bryson took another few steps closer to Manning.

  “And this is your idea of freedom.” Must keep him talking.

  “Real freedom is freedom from. We seek to create a world in which its citizens can live their lives free from the fear of the sadistic wife-beater, the drug-addicted car-jacker, or any of a thousand other threats to life and limb. That, Mr. Bryson, is true freedom. Where people are free to be at their best behavior—the way they are when they know somebody is watching.”

  Another two, three steps closer. Casual. Keep talking. “And so goes our privacy,” Bryson said. He was now no more than ten or fifteen feet from where Manning stood talking. He glanced at his watch.

  “The real problem with privacy is that we have too much of it. It’s a luxury we can no longer afford. Now, thanks to Systematix, we have a powerful worldwide surveillance system in place—satellites orbiting the globe, millions of video cameras. Even, soon, implantable microchips.”

  “None of this will bring your daughter back,” said Bryson softly.

  Manning’s face colored briefly. The walls went dark, plunging the room into a sepulchral gloom. “You know nothing about it,” he hissed.

  “No,” Bryson admitted. Suddenly he leaped toward Manning, his hands extended to clutch Manning’s throat in a powerful vise, crush his throat. At once he found himself falling through thin air, through nothingness! He slammed against the marble floor of the alcove, stunned, his jaw cracking hard against the stone, the pain immense. He spun around, looked for Manning—and then he saw the array of laser diodes lining the interior of the alcove. He had been witnessing a three-dimensional laser holographic projection—a high-resolution, lifelike image, the volumetric 3-D illusion created by lasers projecting video images onto microscopic particles in the air.

  It was a hoax, an illusion. A phantom.

  Bryson heard slow clapping, the clapping of one pair of hands, from the far side of the room, the side through which he had entered moments ago. It was Manning, walking toward him as he clapped, a phalanx of guards surrounding him.

  “Well, if that’s the way you feel,” Manning said, a half-smile on his face. “Guards?”

  The security guards rushed toward him, smart guns extended, and once again he was enclosed by them. He struggled, but they had his arms, his legs.

  Manning paused on his way out the door. “Most men in your line of work die ignominious deaths. A bullet in the back of the head, the assailant unseen, unknown. Or one of a thousand possible accidents in the field. Nobody will be surprised to learn of the deaths of two more operatives, a man and a woman, killed in a foolhardy attempt to assassinate an assemblage of world leaders. An unexplainable attempt that will never be explained, because men and women like you, who live lives of secrecy and darkness, always die in secret, in the dark. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must rejoin my guests.” And Manning was gone from the room.

  As he struggled with the guards, Bryson sneaked a glance at his watch. Now! It should have happened by now! Or did they move the U-Haul van as well?

  Smart guns were pressed against his forehead, his temple, the back of his head. He saw his confiscated snub-nosed .45 in the holster of a guard just a few feet away
.

  Suddenly the dim lights in the room were extinguished, and they were plunged into absolute darkness. At the same instant came a series of clicks, and he could hear the locked doors to the library slide halfway open.

  It had happened.

  Bryson lurched forward and grabbed his .45 from the guard’s holster. A clutch of security guards pummeled him to the floor. “One more move and you’re dead!” shouted one of them.

  “Go ahead,” Bryson screamed. He saw them point their guns at him, saw the triggers being squeezed—

  And nothing.

  Nothing happened. The guns were dead. The electronic brains had been incapacitated, fried, along with all of the electronics in Manning’s house.

  There were bewildered shouts, screams, as Bryson fired a few shots into the air with his mechanically operated pistol, warning them to back off. They did back away from him, all twelve of them, realizing that somehow they were powerless, impotent, their guns dead in their hands.

  Bryson ran to the half-open door, his gun still blazing, and slipped out into the hallway.

  He had to get out, had to get to Elena—but where was she?

  And how long would his ammunition last?

  Some of the guards pursued him; he fired at them, now aware of the need to conserve ammunition, and they backed away. He was fairly sure he had another round in the chamber, maybe one in the magazine as well, but rather than stop for a second to check, he had to run, it was vital to run. He ran through the house, through corridors once lined with great oil paintings and covered in the finest wallpaper, now gone silvery-gray, like the dusty wings of dead moths. Everywhere doors were half-open.

  The Russian scientist’s device had worked, just as Bryson had heard it did. The virtual cathode oscillator was invented by Soviet scientists in the 1980s as a means of targeting the electronic circuitry of American nuclear weapons. Soviet nuclear bombs were far more primitive; this was a way of turning an advantage into a disadvantage. The Soviets were, as a result, far ahead of the Americans when it came to what was called radio-frequency weapons. When activated, the device emitted a high-powered electromagnetic pulse no longer than a microsecond—long enough, however, to burn out all electronic circuitry, heat up the microscopic junctions inside computers, and burn them up. All computers, everything with circuit boards and microchips within a quarter mile, would be affected. There were rumors that such a weapon had been used by terrorists to bring down several international plane flights.