The Prometheus Deception (25 page)

“Nu te mai
pi
ş
a impráş tiat!”
barked Dragan. Don't piss at me! “Who the hell are you? How dare you talk to me like this!”

“I simply want your reassurance that all your sweepers will be called off immediately.”

“You think that because one of my men sells information to you, you can make threats?”

“As you are well aware, none of your men has access to this information; even your most trusted aide knows but a few names and vague locations. Believe me, my information comes from sources far more reliable than any of your circle. Purge them all, execute them all; it will make no difference. Now, listen to me. If you, or anyone who works with or for you or is connected to you in any way whatsoever, harms a hair on the Petrescus' heads, my associates will personally maim and then murder every member of your family.”

“Get out of here! Leave at once! Your threats are of no interest to me.”

“I am giving you the opportunity to call off the sweepers right this very minute.” Bryson glanced at his watch. “You have exactly seven minutes to issue the order.”

“Or?”

“Or someone you care about very much will die.”

Dragan laughed and poured himself more beer. “You are wasting my time. My men are in this pub watching me, and all I have to do is signal and they will take you away before you have a chance to make a single phone call.”

“Actually, it's you who are wasting time. The fact is, you
want
me to make a phone call. You see, my associate is in an apartment on Calea Victoriei at this very moment, with a gun to the head of a woman named Dumitra.”

Dragan's already pale face went even paler
.

“Yes, your mistress, who strips at the Sexy Club on Calea 13 Septembrie. Not your only mistress, but she has lasted several years already, so you must have at least some kindly feelings toward her. My associate is waiting for my telephone call to come in over his cell phone. If he does not receive it in”—Bryson glanced again at his watch—“six, no, five minutes, he has been instructed to put a bullet through her brain. All I can say is, you had better hope my phone is working, and his, too.”

Dragan scoffed, but in his eyes Bryson could see the anxiety
.

“You can save her life by rescinding the execution order on the Petrescus right now. Or you can do nothing, and she will die, and the blood will be on your hands. Here, you can use my cell phone if you don't have one with you. Just take care not to use up the battery—you really do want me to be able to reach my friend.”

Dragan took a long sip of beer, feigning casualness
.

But he did not speak, and four minutes passed by quickly
.

With barely one minute remaining before the execution deadline, Bryson called the Calea Victoriei
.

“No,” he said when the phone was answered. “Dragan refuses to rescind the order, so I'm afraid this call is just to ask you to go ahead. But do me a favor, and hand the phone to Dumitra so she can make a last-minute plea to her rather coldhearted lover.” Bryson waited until he could hear the woman's desperate voice on the other end of the line, and then he handed the phone to Dragan
.

Dragan took it, said a brusque hello, and even across the table Bryson could hear the mistress's shrieked pleas. Dragan's face began twitching, but he said nothing. Yet it was obvious that he recognized Dumitra's voice and knew this was no hoax
.

“Time's up,” said Bryson, glancing for a last time at his wristwatch
.

Dragan shook his head. “You have bought the bitch off,” he said. “I don't know how much you paid her to act out this little farce, but I'm sure it wasn't much.”

The first shot exploded out of the earpiece; Bryson could hear it four feet away, followed instantly by the strangled scream. There was another shot, but this time there was no scream
.

“Is she that good an actress? No?” Bryson stood up and took the phone back. “Your stubbornness and skepticism just cost the life of your woman. Your people will confirm for you what has just happened, or you can go to her apartment and see for yourself if you can stand to do it.” He was sickened and horrified by what he'd had to do, but he knew there was no other way to prove that he was serious. “There are forty-six names on that piece of paper, and one of them will be murdered every day until your entire family is extinct. The only way you can stop it is by rescinding the orders on the Petrescus. And once again, let me remind you that if anything happens to them, anything at all—your family will be executed
en masse
at once.”

He turned around and walked out of the pub and never saw Dragan again
.

But within an hour the word went out that the Petrescus were not to be touched
.

Bryson said nothing about it to either Elena or Ted Waller. When he returned home several days later, Elena asked him about his trip to Barcelona. Normally, they each respected the partitions between their lives and work, avoiding asking each other questions about what each other was doing; she had never before asked about his travels. But this time she studied his face as she asked him questions about Barcelona, far too many questions. He lied easily and persuasively. Was she jealous, was that it? Did she suspect him of meeting a lover on Las Ramblas? This was the first time he had ever detected such a note of jealousy on her part and it made him wish even more that he could tell her the truth
.

But did he even know the truth?

*   *   *

“I know almost nothing about you,” he said, getting up from the bed and sitting down on the sofa. “Except for the fact that you've saved my life several times in the last twelve hours.”

“You need to get some rest,” she said. She wore a pair of gray sweatpants and a loose-fitting, oversized man's undershirt that emphasized, rather than concealed, the swell of her breasts. There were no clothes to pack, no busy work to occupy her hands, so she sat on the edge of the bed, folding her long, firm legs and crossing her arms across her breasts. “We can talk in the morning.”

He sensed she was evading his questions, so he persisted:

“You work for the Mossad, yet you come from the Bekaa valley, speak with an Arabic accent. Are you Israeli? Lebanese?”

Looking down, she said quietly, “Neither. Either. My father was Israeli. My mother is Lebanese.”

“Your father's dead.”

She nodded. “He was an athlete, a superb athlete. He was murdered by Palestine terrorists at the Olympic Games in Munich.”

Bryson nodded. “That was 1972. You must have been a baby.”

She continued looking down, her face flushed. “I was not much more than two years old.”

“You never knew him.”

She looked up. Her brown eyes were fierce. “My mother kept him alive for me. She never stopped telling stories about him, showing us pictures.”

“You must have grown up hating the Palestinians.”

“No. The Palestinians are a good people. They are displaced, homeless, stateless. I despise the fanatics who think nothing of killing the innocent for the sake of lofty ideals. Whether they're Black September or the Red Army Faction; whether they're Israeli or Arab. I hate zealots of any kind. When I was barely out of my teens, I married a fellow soldier in the Israeli Army. Yaron and I were deeply in love as only the very young can be. When he was killed in Lebanon, that was when I decided to work for Mossad. To fight the zealots.”

“Yet you don't consider Mossad a band of zealots?”

“Many of them are. Yet some are not. Since I freelance for them, I can pick and choose my assignments. That way I can be sure that the work I'm doing is for a cause I believe in. Many jobs I turn down.”

“They must think highly of you to give you such latitude.”

She bowed her head modestly. “They know my deep-cover skills and my connections. Maybe I'm the only one foolish enough to accept certain assignments.”

“Why
did
you accept the assignment on the
Spanish Armada
?”

She cocked her head at him, looking surprised. “Why else? Because that's where the fanatics buy the weapons without which they could not kill the innocent. Mossad had good information that agents of the Jihad National Front were stocking up there—feeding at the trough. Placing me there was a two-month operation.”

“And if it weren't for me, you'd still be there.”

“And what about you? You told me you're CIA, but you're not, are you?”

“What makes you say that?”

She touched her nose with the tip of her index finger. “Something smells wrong,” she said with a knowing smile.

“Something about me?” Bryson said, amused.

“Well, actually, something about your enemies, your pursuers. The assassin squads—that violates standard accepted protocol. Either you're a freelancer like me, or you're with some other agency. But not CIA, I don't think.”

“No,” he admitted. “Not CIA, exactly. But I'm working for them.”

“Freelance?”

“In a way.”

“But you've been in the business a long time. The scars on your body give it away.”

“It's true. I
was
in the business a long time. But I was forced out. Now they've brought me back in for one last assignment.”

“Which is—”

He hesitated. How much to tell her? “It's a counterintelligence mission, in a sense.”

“‘In a sense'… ‘in a way'… If you don't want to tell me anything, fine, so be it.” Her nostrils flared as she spoke with quiet intensity. “We'll each get on our separate aircrafts out of Spain first thing in the morning and never see each other again. When we get home and do the inevitable paperwork, we'll each file contact reports on each other, debrief as completely as we can what we know about the other's work, and that'll be the extent of it. Inquiries will be made, then dropped. A sealed file will be added to the Mossad's archives on CIA, another one added to CIA's Mossad files, mere drops of water in the ocean.”

“Layla, I'm grateful to you for everything—”

“No,”
she interrupted. “I don't want your gratitude. You misunderstand me. You don't
know
me at all. I have my own reasons for interest—selfish reasons, if you wish. We're both following an arms trail—to different places, different endpoints. But the trails intersect, overlap. Now, it's obvious to me that whoever it is who wants you dead, they're not fringe actors. Their resources and access to information is too good. They're probably governmental.”

Bryson nodded. She had a point.

“Now, I'm sorry, but I won't lie to you. The acoustics in the church were such that I could easily overhear your interrogation of the Italian, without even trying. If I wanted to double-deal you, I wouldn't have admitted that to you, but it's a fact.”

He nodded again. Also true. “But you don't understand Friuliano, do you?”

“I understand names. You mentioned Anatoly Prishnikov, a name that's well known to everyone in our line of work. And Jacques Arnaud—less well known, perhaps, but a provider of arms to many of Israel's enemies. He stokes the fires of the Middle East and gets enormously rich in the process. I know him, and I detest him. And I may have a way to get to him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don't know where the trail leads you next. But I can confirm for you that one of Arnaud's agents was on the ship, selling weapons to Calacanis.”

“The one with the long hair, double-breasted suit?”

“That's the one. He uses the name Jean-Marc Bertrand. He travels often to Chantilly.”

“Chantilly?”

“The location of the château where Arnaud lives and entertains regularly, and quite lavishly.” She stood, went briefly to the bathroom, and emerged a few minutes later, patting her face dry with a towel. Without her makeup her features were even more exquisite. Her nose was strong yet delicate, her lips full, and all dominated by wide brown eyes that were at once warm and intense, intelligent and playful.

“You know something about Jacques Arnaud?” Bryson asked.

She nodded. “I know a good deal about the man's world. The Mossad has had Arnaud in its sights for quite some time now, so I've been to Chantilly, as a guest at several of his parties.”

“Under what sort of cover?”

She removed the coverlet from the bed. “As a commercial attaché at the Israeli embassy in Paris. Someone whose influence must be courted. Jacques Arnaud does not discriminate. He sells to the Israelis as readily as he sells to our enemies.”

“Can you get me to him, do you think?”

She turned around slowly, her eyes wide. She shook her head. “I don't think that's a wise idea.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can't risk compromising my operation any further.”

“But you just said that we're on the same trail.”

“That's
not
what I said. I said our trails intersected. That's a very different thing.”

“And your trail doesn't lead to Jacques Arnaud?”

“It may,” she acknowledged. “Or it may not.”

“In any case it may be useful to you to go to Chantilly.”

“In your company, I assume,” she said teasingly.

“Obviously that's what I'm asking you. If you already have diplomatic contacts in Arnaud's social set, that would facilitate my entry.”

“I prefer to work alone.”

“A beautiful woman like you, on a social outing—wouldn't it be entirely plausible that you'd be accompanied by a male?”