The Prometheus Deception (54 page)

Bryson walked more carefully than he otherwise might have, favoring his wounded right side, from time to time grimacing at the pain. They descended the craggy cliffs, walking along an old pilgrim path through a valley of walnut farms that hugged the Dordogne River, that ancient watercourse that wound its way past Souillac and down to Bordeaux. These were the farms of solid peasants, the salt of the earth and the dour custodians of the French countryside, though some of the simple stone cottages had over the years become the homes of Englishmen who couldn't afford to vacation in Provence or Tuscany. Higher on the cliffs were the local wine châteaux that made good
vin du pays
. In the distance, the verdant landscape north of Cahors was dotted with medieval hill towns where the small restaurants served up humble but serious
cuisine du terroir
to the large peasant families on Sundays. Bryson and Elena wended their way through the woods, with their famous truffles hidden away beneath the roots of ancient trees, whose secret locations are passed down in families from generation to generation, kept secret even from the very owners of the land.

“It was Ted's idea to relocate here,” Elena explained as they walked, hand in hand. “You can see why a man who so loves to eat would fall in love with the countryside, with the chevres and the walnut oil and the truffles. But it's quite practical as well. We're quite well hidden here, the cover is plausible, the airstrip convenient. And there are fast, efficient highways in every direction—north to Paris, east to Switzerland and Italy, south to the Mediterranean, west to Bordeaux and the Atlantic. My parents loved it here.” Her voice became soft, pensive. “They missed the homeland, of course, but it was such a wonderful place to spend their last years.” She pointed to a cluster of stone cottages far off in the distance. “We lived in one of those little houses there.”

“‘We'?”

“I lived with them, took care of them.”

“I'm happy for you. My loss was their gain.”

She smiled, squeezed his hand. “You know, the old saying is true.
Mai
r
Å©
rut
, mai drãgut
.”

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” he translated. “And what did you always used to say—
Celor ce duc mai mult dorul, le pare mai dulce odorul
? Absence sharpens love, but presence strengthens it, right?”

“Nicholas, it's been hard for me, you know. Very hard.”

“And for me. More so.”

“I've had to rebuild my life without you. But the ache, the sense of loss, never went away. Was it the same for you?”

“I suspect it was much harder for me, because of the uncertainty. Because of never knowing
why
—why you disappeared, where you went, what you
thought
.”

“Oh,
iubito! Te ador!
We were both victims—victims, hostages to a world of distrust and suspicion.”

“I was told you were ‘assigned' to me as a watcher.”

“
Assigned?
We fell in love, and that quite by accident. How can I ever prove to you I was
not
? I was in
love
with you, Nicholas. I still am.”

He took her through Harry Dunne's lies, the tale of a young man selected for his athletic and linguistic abilities, then recruited blind, manipulated, his parents killed.

“They are very clever, the Prometheans,” she said. “With an organization that is so cloaked in layers of secrecy like ours, it is not difficult to construct a plausible lie. Then they made it seem that you were a hostile, that you were trying to destroy us—so you could not check on the accuracy of what they told you.”

“But did you know about Waller?”

“About—”

“About his…” Bryson spoke tentatively. “His background.”

She nodded. “About Russia. Yes, he briefed me. But not long ago, just recently. I think only because he was planning to bring you in, and he knew we would talk.”

Her phone rang. “Yes?” Her face brightened. “Thank you, Chris.”

Hanging up, she said to Bryson, “We have something.”

*   *   *

Chris Edgecomb handed Elena a pile of red-bordered folders, each thick with printouts. “Man, when this code cracked, it
cracked
. We had five high-speed laser printers smoking, printing out all this stuff. The main thing that slowed us down was the artificial-intelligence transcript agent—converting the spoken word to the printed one requires huge computing power and a lot of time, even at the speed of our processors. And we're still nowhere close to done. I tried to winnow out anything extraneous, but I decided to err on the side of being inclusive, and leave the main decisions to you as to what's important and what's not.”

“Thanks, Chris,” she said, taking the folders and laying them out on the long table in the conference room adjacent to the supercomputer center.

“I'll have coffee brought in for you two. I have a feeling you're going to need it.”

They divided up the pile of printouts and began poring over them. By far the most valuable product was the decrypts of telephone conversations among the principals, of which there were many, some extensive, some conference calls. Since the exchanges were encrypted, the participants tended to speak freely. Some of them—the more canny ones, including Arnaud and Prishnikov—remained circumspect. They used coded language, references that the other would understand without having to resort to explicitness. Here, Elena's knowledge of speech patterns, her ability to discern deliberate concealment even in plain speech, was crucial. She flagged quite a few transcripts with sticky pads. And since Bryson was more familiar with the players and their backgrounds, as well as with the specifics of certain operations, he was able to pick up on different references, other meanings.

Barely had they started reading through the papers than Bryson said, “I'd say we've got the goods on them. It's no longer a matter of hearsay. Here, Prishnikov is actually planning the Geneva anthrax attack, fully three weeks in advance.”

“But they're clearly not running the show,” Elena said. “They're deferring to another—really, to two others, possibly Americans.”

“Who?”

“So far they don't use the names. There's a reference to West Coast time, so one of them may be either in California or somewhere on the Pacific Coast of the U.S.”

“What about London? Any idea who the puppetmaster might be there?”

“No.…”

Chris Edgecomb suddenly came into the room, holding aloft a few sheets of paper. “This just broke,” he said, excitement evident in his face. “It's a pattern of funds-transfer traffic into and out of the First Washington Mutual Bancorp—I think you might find it interesting.” He handed Elena several sheets of paper, each covered with columns of figures.

“That's the bank in Washington used by a majority of members of Congress, isn't that right?” said Bryson. “The one you suspect was involved in blackmailing—leaking personal information on opponents of the treaty?”

“Yes,” said Elena. “These are proprietary transfers.”

Edgecomb nodded.

“The cycles, the periodicity—it's unmistakable.”

“What is it?” asked Bryson.

“This is a sequence of authorization codes characteristic of a wholly owned entity. A trail, as it were.”

“Meaning what?” Bryson demanded.

“This Washington bank appears to be owned and controlled by another, larger financial institution.”

“That's not uncommon,” Bryson said.

“The point is, there's a pattern of deliberate obfuscation going on here—that is, the ownership is elaborately concealed, carefully hidden.”

“Is there a way to find out who the secret owner is?” Bryson asked.

Elena nodded, distracted, as she studied the figures. “Chris, the recurring number here has to be the ABA routing code. Do you think you can run it down, identify which—”

“I'm one step ahead of you, Elena,” he said. “It's a New York–based firm called Meredith Waterman…?”

“My
God,
” she said. “That's one of the oldest, most respected investment banks on Wall Street. It makes Morgan Stanley or Brown Brothers Harriman look like upstarts. I don't understand—why would Meredith Waterman be involved in blackmailing senators and congressmen into supporting the International Treaty on Surveillance and Security…?”

“Meredith Waterman is probably privately held,” said Bryson.

“So?”

“So it may itself be a holding company, in a sense—a front. In other words, maybe it's being used by another institution or an individual or a group of individuals—say, the Prometheus Group—to mask their true holdings. So if there's a way to get a list of all past and present partners in Meredith Waterman, maybe also majority owners…”

“That shouldn't be hard at all,” said Edgecomb. “Even privately held firms are strictly regulated by the SEC and the FDIC, and they're required to file all sorts of documents which we should be able to access.”

“One or more of those names may indicate Prometheus ownership,” said Bryson.

Edgecomb nodded and left the room.

Bryson suddenly thought of something. “Richard Lanchester was a partner at Meredith Waterman.”

“What?”

“Before he left Wall Street and went into public service, he was a big star in investment banking. Meredith Waterman's golden boy. That's how he made his fortune.”

“Lanchester? But he—you said he was sympathetic, he was helpful to you.”

“He lent a sympathetic ear, yes. He seemed genuinely alarmed. He listened, but in reality he did nothing.”

“He said he wanted you to come back to him with more evidence.”

“Which is just a variant of what Harry Dunne wanted—to use me as a cat's paw.”

“You think Richard Lanchester could be part of Prometheus?”

“I wouldn't rule him out.”

Elena returned to the transcript she'd been scrutinizing, and then she looked up suddenly. “Listen to this,” she said. “‘The transfer of power will be complete forty-eight hours after the British ratify the treaty.'”

“Who's speaking?” asked Bryson.

“I—I don't know. The call originates in Washington, routed through a sterile pipeline. The unnamed caller is speaking to Prishnikov.”

“Can you get a voice ID?”

“Possibly. I'd have to listen to the actual recording, determine whether the voice was altered, and if so, how well it was altered.”

“Forty-eight hours … the ‘transfer of power'…
to
whom,
from
whom? Or to
what, from
what? Jesus, I've got to get to London right away. When is the jet scheduled to leave?”

She looked at her watch. “Three hours and twenty minutes from now.”

“Not soon enough. If we drove…”

“No, it would take far too long. I suggest we just go out to the airstrip and invoke Ted Waller's name, pull all the strings we've got, ask them to fly out as soon as absolutely possible.”

“It's just as Dmitri Labov said.”

“Who?”

“Prishnikov's deputy. He said, ‘The machinery has just about fallen into place.
Power is to be transferred fully!
Everything will come into view.' He said that only days remained.”

“This must be the deadline he was talking about. My God, Nick, you're right, there's no time to waste.”

As she stood up, the lights in the room seemed to flicker briefly, the interruption a fraction of a second at most.

“What was that?” she asked.

“Is there an emergency generator in the facility somewhere?”

“Yes, of course, there must be.”

“It just went on.”

“But it would only go on in case of a true emergency,” she said, puzzled. “Nothing has happened, as far as I can tell—”

“Move!”
shouted Bryson suddenly.
“Out of here!”

“What?”

“Run!
Elena,
move
it—
now!
Something's been patched into the power grid.… Where's the nearest exit to outside?”

Elena turned, pointed to the left.

“
Jesus,
Elena, let's
go!
I'll bet the doors lock automatically, sealing intruders in as well as out. I know that's what's going on!”

He raced down the hallway; Elena scooped up several computer diskettes from the table and then ran after him.

“Which
way?
” he screamed.

“Straight through those doors!”

She led the way, and he followed. In a matter of seconds they had come to a set of steel doors marked
EMERGENCY EXIT;
a red crash-bar at the middle of the doors was used to force the doors open, probably setting off an alarm at the same time. Bryson slammed himself against the crash-bar; the double-doors opened outward into the dark night as an alarm rang. A rush of cold air came at them. No more than two feet in front of them was a floor-to-ceiling gate constructed of steel bars. The gate was slowly closing, automatically, from left to right.

“Jump!” shouted Bryson, diving through the steadily narrowing space. He spun around and grabbed Elena, dragging her through the gap between the gate and the stone wall, her body just barely clearing it. They were on the steep hillside next to the old stone villa, the electric gate concealed by tall hedges.

Bryson and Elena ran directly ahead, away from the villa and down the hill. “Is there a car around here somewhere?” asked Bryson.

“There's an all-terrain vehicle parked right in front of the villa,” she replied. “It's—there it is!”

A small, boxy, four-wheel-drive Land Rover Defender 90 glinted in the moonlight twenty yards ahead. Bryson ran toward it, jumped into the front seat, and felt for the key. It wasn't in the ignition. Jesus, where the hell was it? In a remote setting like this, wouldn't it be left in the car? Elena leaped into the car. “Under the mat,” she said.