The Prometheus Deception (31 page)

The fluorescent lights flickered as he approached. The building reeked of urine and excrement, with an astringent overlay of cleaning solution, woefully insufficient. He listened at the door for a moment until he heard Dunne's signature hacking cough. He entered swiftly, closing the heavy steel door behind him and locking it with the strong padlock he had brought.

Dunne was standing at a urinal. He turned his head slowly when Bryson entered. “Nice of you to saunter in,” he muttered. “Now I see why those Directorate fuckers fired your ass. Punctuality ain't your strong suit.”

Bryson ignored the jabs. Dunne knew exactly why he was ten minutes late. Dunne zipped up, flushed, and went to the sink. They looked at each other in the mirror. “Bad news,” Dunne said, his voice echoing, as he washed his hands. “The card's legit.”

“The card?”

“The Agency ID card you took off the motorcyclist's body in Chantilly. It's not doctored paper. The guy was detailed to the Paris station for over a year as an operative
in extremis
—for when the real dirty stuff had to be done.”

“Trace the personnel records, the name on the assignment authorization, even how he was recruited.”

Dunne scowled again, radiating disgust. “Why didn't I think of that,” he said with heavy irony. He shook his hands dry—there were no paper towels, and he refused to use the automatic hand-drying machine—then wiped them on his pants. He fished a crumpled Marlboro pack out of his breast pocket and fumbled out a partly crushed cigarette, which he placed in his mouth. Without lighting it, he went on, “I ordered a Code Sigma–priority search through all the computer banks, down to the last firewall. Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing? You keep thick personnel files on everyone, from the director on down to the lady who cleans the washrooms in the imaging center.”

Dunne grimaced. The unlit cigarette dangled from his lower lip.

“And you guys don't leave anything out.
Anything
. So don't tell me you turned up nothing in the guy's personnel file.”

“No, I'm telling you the guy had no file. As far as Langley central is concerned, he didn't exist.”

“Come on! There's health coverage, insurance, paychecks—a bunch of administrative and bureaucratic horseshit that Personnel bombards every single employee with. You telling me he wasn't getting
paychecks?
”

“
Christ's
sake, you're not fucking
listening!
The guy didn't exist! It's not unheard of—the real serious wetworkers, we don't like to have a paper trail on them. Files are buried, requisitions deep-sixed after payments are authorized. So the precedent is there. Thing is, someone knew how to play the system, keep the guy's name off all the books. He was like a
ghost
—there but not there.”

“So what does this mean?” Bryson asked quietly.

Dunne was silent for a moment. He coughed. “It means, buddy, that the CIA may not be the best agency to investigate the Directorate. Especially if the Directorate has its moles inside, which we have to assume.”

Dunne's words, though not unexpected, came as a bolt of lightning because of the finality with which the CIA man uttered them. Bryson nodded. “Not easy for you to admit,” he said.

Dunne tipped his head to one side in acknowledgment. “Not particularly,” he conceded, an obvious understatement. The man was shaken, though obviously reluctant to admit it. “Look, I don't want to believe the goddamned Directorate might have reached out and touched my own people. But I didn't get where I did by indulging in wishful thinking. See, I never went to one of your hoity-toity universities—I got into St. John's by the skin of my ass. I don't speak a dozen languages like you do, either—just English, and that none too good. But what I had, see—and still do, I like to think—was something that's a scarce commodity in the intelligence business, and that's horse sense. Or whatever the hell you want to call it. Look at what's happened to this goddamned country in the last forty years, from the Bay of Pigs to Vietnam to Panama to whatever's the latest fuckup in the
Washington Post
this morning. All brought to you by the so-called Wise Men, those ‘best and the brightest' with their fancy Ivy League sheepskins and their trust funds, who keep getting us into all these scrapes. They got education, but no common sense. Me, I can
smell
when something's off, I got an instinct for it. And I don't go whistling past graveyards. So I can't dodge the possibility—and it's only a possibility, mind you—that someone on my team is involved. I'm not going to bullshit you. I don't want to have to play my last card, but I may have to.”

“Which is?”

“What the fuck does the
Washington Post
call him, ‘the last honest man in Washington'? Which isn't saying much in this corrupt city.”

“Richard Lanchester,” Bryson said, recalling the epithet often applied to the president's national security adviser and chairman of the White House National Security Council. He knew of Lanchester's unequalled reputation for probity. “Why is he your last card?”

“Because once I play it, it's out of my control. He may be the one man in government who can head this thing off, circumvent corrupted channels, but once I involve him, it's no longer contained in the intelligence community. It's all-out internecine war, and frankly, I don't know whether our government could survive it.”

“Jesus,” Bryson breathed. “You're saying the Directorate's reach is that high?”

“That's what it smells like to me.”

“Well, I'm the one whose life is on the line out there. From now on, I communicate only with you,
directly
with you. No intermediaries, no E-mail that can be cracked or faxes that can be intercepted. I want you to isolate a sterile line at Langley, routed through a lockbox, sequestered and segregated.”

The CIA man nodded his acquiescence.

“I also want a code-word sequence so I can be certain you're not speaking under duress, or that your voice is being falsified. I want to know it's you, and that you're speaking freely. And one more thing: all communications go directly between you and me—not even through your secretary.”

Bryson shrugged. “Point taken, but you're overreacting. I'd trust Marjorie with my life.”

“Sorry. No exceptions. Elena once told me about something called Metcalf's Rule, which says that the porosity of a network increases as the square of the number of nodes. The nodes, in this case, refers to anyone who's knowledgeable about the operation.”

“Elena,” said the CIA man with heavy derision. “I guess she knows something about deception, huh, Bryson?”

The remark stung, despite everything that had happened, even despite his own bitterness over her unexplained disappearance. “Correct,” Bryson returned. “Which is why you've got to help me get to her—”

“You think I sent you out there to save your marriage?” Dunne interrupted. “I sent you out there to save the goddamned world.”

“Damn it, she
knows
something, she has to. Maybe quite a bit.”

“Yeah, and if she's involved—”

“If she's involved, she's involved in a central way. If she's a dupe like I was—”

“Wishful thinking, Bryson, I
warned
you—”

“If she's a dupe like I was,”
Bryson thundered, “then her knowledge is
still
invaluable!”

“And of course she'll happily spill all the fucking beans to you out of, what, nostalgia? Remembrance of all the good times past?”

“If I can
get
to her,” Bryson shouted, then he faltered. Quietly, he went on, “If I can get to her … damn it, I
know
her, I can tell when she's lying, when she tries to shade the truth, what she's trying to avoid discussing.”

“You're dreaming,” said Harry Dunne flatly. He coughed, a painful-sounding, rattling, liquid cough. “You think you know her. You pretend you know her,
knew
her. You're so sure, aren't you? Just like you were so sure you knew Ted Waller, a.k.a. Gennady Rosovsky. Or Pyotr Aksyonov—alias your ‘uncle' Peter Munroe. Did your little visit to upstate New York enlighten you further?”

Bryson couldn't hide his astonishment. “God
damn
you to hell!” he shouted.

“Get real, Bryson. You think I haven't maintained a cordon of surveillance on that nursing home ever since I learned about the Directorate? Poor old biddy's so addled, our men could never get much out of her, so I could never be sure whether she knew the truth about her husband, or how
much
she knew. But there was a chance that she might be contacted by someone connected with her late husband.”

“Bullshit!” Bryson shot back. “You don't have the resources to keep a team of watchers on her twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, until she dies!”

“Christ,” Dunne said impatiently. “Obviously not. One of the administrators there earns a nice chunk of change on the side from Felicia's ‘dear old cousin Harry,' who's fiercely protective. Anyone calls for Felicia, arranges to come by, even drops by, an administrator named Shirley gives me a call first thing. She knows I like to protect sweet addle-brained Felicia from gold diggers or people who might upset her. I take care of my cousin. Shirley always has my phone number wherever I am. So I always know who Felicia's in touch with. No surprises. Point is, you work with what you've got; you cover what you can. Most of the others just seem to have disappeared without a fucking trace. Now we gotta stand here in this stinking shithole all day?”

“I don't like it much either, but it's remote, secluded, and safe.”

“Aw, Christ. You care to tell me why you went to see Jacques Arnaud?”

“As I told you, his emissary, his agent on Calacanis's ship, was clearly working with both the Directorate and with Anatoly Prishnikov in Russia. Arnaud had to be a key node.”

“But for what? You wanted to reach out to Arnaud directly?”

Bryson paused. Ted Waller's words—Gennady Rosovsky's—came back to him, as they did so often:
Tell no one anything they don't absolutely need to know. Even me
. He hadn't yet told Dunne about the cryptochip he had copied from Arnaud's secure satellite phone, and he would not. Not yet.

“I considered it,” he lied. “At least to observe those around him.”

“And?”

“Nothing. A waste of time.”
Always hold back a card
.

Dunne took out from his battered leather portfolio a red-bordered manila envelope, from which he drew a batch of eight-by-ten photographs. “We've gone through the names you gave us in the debriefing, ran them through every available database, including every top-secret code-word proprietary. Wasn't easy, given how clever and thorough your friends at the Directorate seem to be—selecting and rotating aliases using computer algorithms, all that shit I don't really understand. Directorate operatives get reassigned, uprooted, their biographies rewritten, networks detached and reassembled. It was mind-numbing work, but we do have a few candidates for you to look at.” He displayed the first black-and-white glossy.

Bryson shook his head. “Nope.”

Dunne frowned, took out another.

“No recollection.”

Dunne shook his head, showed him another.

“Doesn't register. You've got some dummies in here, don't you?—known fakes, hoping to trip me up.”

A smile seemed to play at the corners of Dunne's lips. He coughed.

“Always testing, huh?”

Dunne didn't reply. He pulled out another photograph.

“Nope—hey, wait a minute.” Bryson was looking at a photograph of an agent he recognized. “This one I know. That Dutchman, cover name Prospero.”

Dunne nodded as if Bryson had finally answered the question right. “Jan Vansina, a senior official at the International Red Cross headquarters in Geneva. Director of management for international emergency relief coordination. Brilliant cover for traveling easily around the world, especially to crisis spots, and it gives him access even to places where foreigners are normally barred—North Korea, Iraq, Libya, and so on. You had a good relationship with him.”

“I saved his life in Yemen. Warned him off an ambush, even though the standard operating procedure required me to contain what I knew, whether it meant his execution or not.”

“Not big on following orders either, I see.”

“Not when I think they're stupid. Prospero was quite impressive. We worked together once, jointly laying a snare for a NATO engineer and double agent. What's Vansina doing here? It looks like indoor surveillance cameras.”

“Our people caught him in Geneva, at Banque Geneve Privée. Authorizing the rapid-sequence transfer of a total of five-point-five billion dollars through separate and commingled accounts.”

“Laundering, in other words.”

“But not for himself. He was apparently acting as a conduit for an immensely well-funded organization.”

“You didn't get all this background from a hidden video camera.”

“We have sources throughout the Swiss banking industry.”

“Reliable?”

“Not all, to be sure. But in this case, it was somebody pretty damned plugged in. An ex-Directorate operative who traded confirmable information in exchange for the elimination of a long prison sentence.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Extortion usually works.”

Bryson nodded. “You think Vansina's still active?”

“This photograph was taken two days ago,” Dunne said quietly, taking a pager from his belt and pressing a button on it. “Sorry, I should have signaled Solomon, my driver, twenty minutes ago. Our agreement is that I'd send him a page when you showed up, if he wasn't able to establish visual confirmation. Which he didn't, since you made one of your Harry Houdini appearances.”