PART TWO

CHAPTER EIGHT

They came ashore at a narrow, rocky spit of land, buffeted bv violent waves crashing against the steep cliffs. This was the Costa da Morte, the Coast of Death, so named for the uncounted legions of ships wrecked upon the perilous, harsh coastline.

Wordlessly, they pulled the rescue boat as far up the sandbar as they could, stashing it in a hidden cove, away from the searchlights of the coast guard and the avaricious eyes of smugglers; at least the boat would not be washed away by the next big wave. He unstrapped the two large weapons from around his chest, the AK-47 and the Uzi, and hid them beside the boat, concealing them with sand, rocks, pebbles, and an arrangement of smaller boulders so that they could not be seen even from close up. It would not do to be observed walking around like a couple of mercenaries, and besides, they had plenty of other, smaller weapons stuffed in their vests.

The two maneuvered awkwardly among the rocks, weighed down by the artillery that filled every pocket, was slung around their shoulders and their backs. Their clothes were drenched, of course—her white uniform, his Italian suit—and they shivered from the cold of the icy water.

Bryson had some idea of where they had landed, having studied detailed Agency maps of the Galician coast of Spain, the stretch of land nearest the point at which the Spanish Armada, according to surveillance satellite reports, had dropped anchor. He believed they had come ashore at, or near, the village of Finisterre, or Fisterra, as the Galegos call it. Finisterre: the end of the world, just about Spain’s most westerly point. Once the westernmost limit of the known world to the Spaniards, the place where untold numbers of smugglers met their gruesome, but mercifully sudden, end on the barnacle-encrusted rocks.

The woman was the first to speak. Sinking down on the edge of a boulder, visibly shivering, she placed her hands on her head, inserted her fingers into her hair, and tugged off a blond wig, revealing short auburn hair. She took out a sealed plastic pouch and removed from it a small, white plastic case, a holder for contact lenses. Swiftly, she touched her fingers against her eyes and removed the colored contact lenses, placing first the right, then the left, into the case. Her dazzling green eyes had become a deep brown. Bryson watched in fascination but said nothing. Then she took from the plastic pouch a compass, a waterproof map, and a tiny pinpoint flashlight. “We can’t stay here, of course. The coast guard will be combing every inch of shoreline. My God, what a nightmare!” She switched on the penlight, cupping a hand around it as she examined the map.

“Why do I have the feeling you’ve been through nightmares like this before?”

She looked up from the map, regarded him sharply. “Do I really owe you an explanation?”

“You owe me nothing. But you risked your life to save me, and I’d like to understand. Also, I think I like you better as a brunette than as a blonde. Earlier you said you were ‘following arms transfers,’ presumably for Israel. Mossad?”

“In a sense,” she said cryptically. “And you — CIA?”

“In a sense.” He had always adhered to the principle of need-to-know and saw no need to divulge more.

“Your target—your area of interest?” she persisted.

He hesitated for a moment before he spoke. “Let’s just say that I’m up against an organization that’s vastly more far-reaching than anything you might have in your sights. But let me ask you this: Why? Why did you do it? Scrap the entire infiltration, then put your own life on the line?”

“Believe me, it wasn’t my choice.”

“Then whose choice was it?”

“It was the circumstances. The way things worked out. I made the foolish mistake of warning you, failing to take into account the surveillance cameras Calacanis has everywhere.”

“How do you know you were observed?”

“Because after the madness began I was pulled away from my duties and told that a Mr. Boghosian wanted to see me. Boghosian is — was — Calacanis’s head thug. When he asks to see you, well, I knew what that meant. They had checked the surveillance tape. At that point I knew I had to escape.”

“But that begs the question of why you warned me in the first place.”

She shook her head. “I saw no reason to let them claim more victims. Especially since my ultimate purpose was to prevent the spilling of innocent blood by the terrorists and fanatics. And I didn’t think it would place my own operational security at stake. Obviously I miscalculated.” She resumed studying the map, all the while shielding the penlight with a cupped hand.

Touched by the woman’s candor, Bryson said gently, “Do you have a name?”

She looked up again, gave a half-smile. “I’m Layla. And I know you’re not Coleridge.”

“Jonas Barrett,” he said. He let the question of what he was doing here hang in the air. Let her probe, he thought. Information will be exchanged when, if, the time was right. Lies, legends, cover names all came so easily to his tongue now, as they once had. Who am I really? he wondered mutely: the melodramatic question of the adolescent, strangely transposed to the maddened consciousness of an ex—field operative who’d found himself very lost. Waves crashed noisily around them. There was the mournful sounding of a foghorn from a lighthouse perched high above the sea. The famous lighthouse at Cabo Finisterre, Bryson knew. “It’s not clear you miscalculated,” he said, appreciatively, almost under his breath.

She gave him a quick, sad smile as she switched off her penlight. “I need to charter a helicopter or private plane, something that will get me—us—out of here, and quickly.”

“The most likely place to do that is Santiago de Compostela. About sixty kilometers east-southeast of here. It’s a major tourist destination—a pilgrimage town, a holy city. I believe there’s a small airport outside the city that has some direct international flights. We may be able to charter a plane or a helicopter there. Certainly worth a try.”

She gave him a hard stare. “You know this area.”

“Barely. I’ve studied the map.”

A sudden, powerful beam of light lit up the beach just yards away, propelling them both to the ground, their instincts honed by field experience. Bryson threw himself behind a large boulder and froze; the woman who called herself Layla flattened herself beneath a ledge. Bryson felt the sand on his face, cold and wet; he could hear her steady breathing a few feet away. Bryson had not worked with many female operatives in the course of his career, and it was his belief, rarely vocalized, that the few women who actually made it over the obstacles placed there by the spymasters, almost all of whom were men, had to be exceptional. About this mysterious Layla he knew virtually nothing except that she was one of the exceptional ones, highly skilled and calm under pressure.

He could see the searchlight sweep down the beach, its beam pausing for a moment at just about the point where he had concealed the boat in the hidden cove, providing additional cover with rocks gathered from the sand. Perhaps experienced eyes could discern the disruption he had caused in the natural pattern of the rocks, seaweed, and other jetsam and flotsam. From behind the boulder that shielded him from the searchers, Bryson was able to peer around. The search craft was moving parallel to the coastline, a pair of high-powered beams moving back and forth along the jagged cliffs. No doubt powerful magnifying binoculars were being employed by the searchers as well. At such a distance, night-vision scopes were useless, but he did not want to take a chance by getting up prematurely, simply because the searchlights had moved on. Often the extinguishing of the search beams was merely the prelude to the real search: only when the lights went out did the creatures scuttle forth from under their rocks. So he remained in place for five minutes after the beach had gone dark again; he was impressed that he did not have to urge Layla to do the same.

When they finally emerged from their hiding places, shaking the cramps from their limbs, they began scrambling up the rock-strewn hillside, dense with scraggly pines, until they came to a narrow gravel road on the ridge of the cliff. Along the road was a succession of high, massive granite walls enclosing tiny plots of land and dominated by ancient stone houses covered with moss. Each had the same granary built high on pillars, the same conical hayrack, the same trellis overgrown with green grapes, the same collection of gnarled trees heavy with fruit. This was a territory, Bryson realized, whose denizens lived and worked the land as they had always done, for generations upon generations. It was a place where the intruder was not welcome. A man on the run would be regarded with the utmost suspicion, strangers sighted and reported.

There was a sudden scuff of feet on the gravel not more than a hundred feet behind them. He spun around, a pistol in his right hand, but saw nothing in the darkness and fog. Visibility was extremely limited, and the road bent around so that whoever was approaching could not be seen. He noticed that Layla, too, was aiming a weapon, a pistol with a long perforated silencer screwed onto the barrel. Her two-handed marksman’s stance was perfect, almost stylized. The two of them froze in place, listening.

Then there was a shout from the sandbar below. There were at least two of them; there had to be more. But where had they come from? What were their precise intentions?

Another sudden noise: a gruff voice nearby, speaking a language Bryson did not immediately understand, then another scuff of feet on gravel. The language, he quickly realized, was Galego, the ancient language of Galicia that combined elements of Portuguese and Castilian Spanish. He could make out only isolated phrases.

“Veña! Axiña! Que carallo fas ai? Que é o que che leva tanto tempo? Móvete!”

With a quick glance at each other, they each silently advanced along a stone wall toward the source of the noise. Low voices, thuds, a metallic clatter. When they rounded a bend in the wall, Bryson could see two silhouetted figures loading crates into an ancient panel truck. One was in the cargo bay of the truck, the other lifting crates from a stack and handing them to him. Bryson glanced at his watch: a little after three o’clock in the morning. What were these men doing here? They had to be fishermen, that was it. Peasant fishermen gathering the local crop, percebes, barnacles scooped from the waterline, or perhaps harvesting mussels from the mejillonieras, the rafts floating in the water just offshore.

Whoever they were, the men were locals hard at work and no direct threat. He put away his weapon and pantomimed to Layla to do the same. Pointed guns would be a mistake; confrontation would be unnecessary.

Upon closer examination, Bryson could see that one of the men looked middle-aged, the other not long out of his teenage years. Both looked rough, peasant laborers; they also looked like father and son. The younger was the one inside the truck’s cargo bay; the older one was handing him cartons to stack.

The elder one spoke to the younger: “Veña, móvete, non podemos perde-lo tempo!”

Bryson knew enough Portuguese from countless operations in Lisbon, and a few in São Paulo, to understand what the men were saying. “Come on, move it!” said the elder. “We’re on a tight schedule. No time to waste!”

He gave Layla a quick glance and then shouted in Portuguese, “Por favor, nos poderían axudar? Metímo-Io coche na cuneta, e a miña muller e máis eu temos que chegar a Vigo canto antes.” Can you please help us? Our car ran off the side of the road, and my wife and I are trying to get to Vigo as soon as possible.

Both men looked up suspiciously. Now Bryson could see what they were loading, and it was not crates of barnacles or mussels. It was sealed cartons of foreign cigarettes, mostly English and American. These were not fishermen. They were smugglers, bringing in contraband tobacco to sell at grossly inflated prices.

The older man set down a carton on the gravel road. “Foreigners? Where do you come from?”

“We drove down from Bilbao. We’re on holiday, seeing the sights, but the damned rental car turned out to be a piece of crap. The transmission gave out and we went into a ditch. If you could give us a lift, we’d make it worth your while.”

“I’m sure we can help,” said the older man, signaling to the younger, who then jumped out of the back of the truck and began approaching them from at an angle, moving noticeably closer to Layla. “Jorge?”

Suddenly the younger one had a revolver out, an ancient Astra Cadix .38 Special, which he leveled at Layla. Taking a few steps closer to her, he screamed, “Vaciade os petos! Agora mesmo! Empty your pockets. All of them! Quick, everything, and don’t try anything fancy! Now!”

Now the older one had a revolver out, too, this one pointed at Bryson. “You, too, my friend. Drop your wallet, and kick it toward me,” he barked. “That expensive-looking watch, too. Move it! Or your lovely wife gets it, and then you!”

The young man lurched forward, grabbing Layla by the shoulder with his left hand, jerking her toward him, his revolver at her temple. He did not seem to notice that Layla’s facial expression had not changed, that she did not cry out or seem moved in any way. Had he noticed the calmness of her demeanor, he would have had cause for alarm.

She caught Bryson’s eye; he nodded all but imperceptibly.

With a sudden jerking motion, she produced two handguns at once, one in either hand. In her left was a .45, a Heckler & Koch USP compact; in her right was a massive, extremely powerful .50 caliber Israeli Desert Eagle. At the same time, Bryson whipped out a Beretta 92 and leveled it at the older smuggler.

“Back!” Layla suddenly shouted in Portuguese at the teenager, who stumbled backward in sudden fright. “Drop the gun right now or I’ll blow your head off!” The teenager regained his footing momentarily, hesitated as if considering how to respond, and she immediately squeezed the trigger on the enormous Desert Eagle. The explosion was astonishingly loud, all the more terrifying because it went off so near the young man’s ear. He dropped his ancient Astra Cadix, flung his hands into the air, and said, “Non! Non dispare!” The revolver clattered to the ground but did not go off.

Bryson smiled, advancing toward the older man. “Put the gun down, meu amigo, or my wife will kill your son or nephew or whoever he is, and as you’ve just seen, she’s a woman who’s not able to control her impulses very well,”

“Por Cristo bendito, esa muller está tola!” the middle-aged smuggler spat out as he knelt down and gently dropped his gun to the gravel. Christ almighty, she’s a crazy woman! He put his hands in the air, too. “Se pensan que nos van toma-lo pelo, están listos! Temos amigos esperando por nós ó final da estrada.” If you’re planning to rip us off, you’re an idiot. We have friends waiting for us down the road—

“Yeah, yeah,” Bryson said impatiently. “We have no interest in your cigarettes. We just want your truck.”

“O meu camión? Por Deus, eu necesito este camión!” Good Christ, I need this truck!

“Well, you just ran into a patch of bad luck,” Bryson said.

“Kneel!” Layla ordered the teenager, who did so at once. The boy was red-faced and shivering like a frightened child, wincing each time she waved her Desert Eagle.

“Polo menos nos deixardn descarga-lo camión? Vostedes non necesitan a mercancia!” pleaded the old man. At least will you let us unload the truck? You don’t need the merchandise!

“Go ahead,” Layla said.

“No!” Bryson interrupted. “There’s always another weapon concealed inside, in case of hijacking. I want both of you to turn around and start walking back down the road. And don’t stop until you can’t hear the truck anymore. Any attempts to run after us, to fire a weapon, to place a phone call, and we’ll turn right around and come at you with weapons you’ve never even seen before. Believe me—you don’t want to test us.”

He ran toward the truck’s cab, indicating with a jerk of his head that Layla should get in on the other side. With the Beretta trained on the two Galegos, he ordered, “Move it!”

The two smugglers, young and old, rose unsteadily, their hands still raised, and began walking away down the gravel road.

“No, wait,” she said suddenly. “I don’t want to take any chances.”

“What?”

She jammed the smaller-caliber pistol into a pocket of her flak jacket and pulled out another gun, this one strange-looking, which Bryson recognized at once. He nodded and smiled.

“Non!” the young smuggler screamed, turning back.

The older one, presumably the father, shouted, “Non dispare! Estamos facendo o que nos dicen! Virxen Santa, non imos falar, por que íamos?” Don’t shoot! We’re doing what you say! Mother of God, we’re not going to talk, why should we?

The two men each broke into a run, but before they got more than a few yards, there were two loud pops as Layla fired a shot at each one. With each shot, a powerful carbon dioxide charge propelled a syringe of a potent tranquilizer into each man’s body. This short-range projector was designed for overpowering wild animals without killing them; the tranquilizer would last, in a human being, perhaps thirty minutes. The two men toppled to the ground, their bodies writhing briefly before they passed into unconsciousness.

 

 

The old truck rattled and clattered as its arthritic engine strained against the steep grade of the winding mountain road. The sun was coming up the jagged cliffs, painting the horizon with pastel brushstrokes and casting a strange pale glow on the slate roofs of the fishing villages they passed.

He thought about the beautiful, remarkably woman sleeping in the front seat next to him, her head leaning against the vibrating window.

There was something tough and flinty about her, yet at the same time vulnerable, even melancholy. It was in fact an appealing combination, but his instincts warned him away for a multitude of reasons. She was too much like himself, a survivor whose tough exterior shielded a supremely complicated interior that at times seemed at war with itself.

And there was Elena, always Elena — a spectral presence, a mystery in her own way. The woman he never really knew. The promise of searching her out had become for him a beckoning siren, elusive and treacherous.

Layla meant at most a strategic partnership, an alliance of simple convenience. She and Bryson were using each other, assisting each other; there was something almost clinical, tactical about their relationship. It was nothing more than that. She was a mere means to an end.

Exhaustion was now overcoming him, and he pulled the truck over into a copse and dozed for what he thought was twenty minutes or so; he awoke with a jolt several hours later. Layla was still sleeping soundly. He cursed silently to himself; it was not good to lose this much time. On the other hand, bone-tiredness usually caused miscalculations and misjudgments, so maybe the sacrifice had been worth the cost.

Pulling back onto the highway, he noticed the road was becoming crowded with people walking in the direction of Santiago de Compostela. What had been an isolated few pedestrians had become a line of them, even a throng of them. Most were walking, though a few were on old bicycles, even a few on horseback. Their faces were sunburned; many of them walked with crook-necked sticks, wore simple, rough clothing, and had backpacks with scallop shells tied to them. The scallop shell, Bryson recalled, was the symbol of the pilgrim along the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrim’s road of some one hundred kilometers from the pass at Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees to the ancient shrine of Saint James in Santiago. It usually took a month to make the journey on foot. Here and there along the roadside were pushcarts, gypsy vendors selling souvenirs — postcards, plastic birds with flapping wings, scallop shells, brightly colored cloths.

But soon he noticed something else, something for which he had no easy explanation. A few kilometers before Santiago, the traffic was becoming increasingly congested. Cars and trucks moved more slowly, almost bumper to bumper. Somewhere up ahead was an obstruction, perhaps a traffic jam. Road work?

No.

The wooden barricades and flashing lights from the cluster of official vehicles, which became visible as he rounded a turn, supplied the answer. It was a police roadblock. Spanish police were inspecting vehicles, surveying drivers and passengers. Cars seemed to be waved through quickly, but trucks were being detained, pulled over to one side as licenses and registrations were checked. The throngs of pilgrims passed by with curious looks, unhindered by the police.

“Layla,” he said. “Quick, wake up!”

She jerked awake, startled, immediately alert. “What—what is it?”

“They’re looking for our truck.”

She saw at once what was going on. “Oh, God. Those bastards must have come to, filed a report with the police …”

“No. Not them, not directly. People like that tend to avoid the authorities whenever possible. Someone must have got to them, offered them a handsome bribe. Someone with direct lines to the Spanish police.”

“Guardacostas? Unlikely to be any of Calacanis’s people, even if any of them survived.”

He shook his head. “My guess is that it’s another entity entirely. An organization that knew I was on board the ship.”

“A hostile intelligence organization.”

“Yes, but not in the way you may think.” Hostile isn’t the word, he thought. Diabolical, maybe. An organization with tentacles reaching high into the governments of several world powers. The Directorate. He suddenly swerved the truck over to the side of the road, locating a gap in the stream of pilgrims. There were shouted protests from pushcart vendors, the honking of car horns.

Hopping out, he quickly unscrewed the license plates with the screwdriver blade of a pocket knife, then returned with them to the front seat. “Just in case any of the search party is stupid enough to look only for the license plate. The trick is going to be us: they’ll be looking for a couple, a man and a woman together matching our description, perhaps wearing disguises quickly thrown together. So obviously we’ll have to split up, and go on foot, but we’ll have to do more … .” Bryson’s voice faded as he caught sight of one of the pushcarts nearby. “Hold on.”

A few minutes later he was conversing, in Spanish, with a rotund gypsy woman selling shawls and other native costumes. She expected this customer — a native Castilian, from the fluency of his Spanish and the lack of accent—to drive a hard bargain and was surprised when the man all but threw down a wad of peseta notes. Moving quickly from cart to cart, he assembled a pile of clothing and returned with it to the truck. Layla’s eyes widened; she nodded, then said solemnly, “So now I’m a pilgrim.”

 

 

Chaos, utter chaos!

Car horns blared, angry drivers yelled and cursed. The stream of pilgrims grew into a throng, a crowd of strikingly diverse people whose only commonality was their devout faith. There were old men with walking sticks who looked as if they could barely take another step, old women garbed entirely in black, black headscarves revealing only the upper part of their faces. Many wore shorts and T-shirts. Some walked with bicycles. There were weary-looking parents carrying squalling infants, their older children squealing with delight and weaving in and out of the crowds. There was the odor of sweat, onions, incense, a whole range of human smells. Bryson was dressed in a medieval cassock with a crook-handled walking stick, monk’s garb from a distant past that was still worn in certain isolated orders. Here, it was being peddled as a souvenir. It had the advantage of having a hood that Bryson put up, concealing some of his features, the rest obscured by shadow. Layla, fifty yards or so behind him, wore a peculiar shift fashioned of a coarse fabric that looked like muslin, with a gaudy sweater covered with sequins, and on her head, a bright red kerchief. As strange as she looked, she blended in with the rest of the crowd perfectly.

The wooden barricades just ahead had been arranged to allow a broad passage for pedestrians to move through; two uniformed police officers stood on either side of the barricades perfunctorily examining faces as they passed. On the other half of the road, cars and trucks were being admitted one at a time. Those on foot were moving at a normal pace, hardly slowed at all, Bryson was relieved to observe. As he passed the policemen, Bryson walked unsteadily, leaning hard on the stick, the gait of a man nearing the end of a brutally long journey. He neither glanced at the faces of the policemen nor pointedly ignored them. They seemed to pay him no attention. In a few seconds, he was safely through the barricades, buffeted along by the stream of people.

A flash of light. It was the strong morning sunlight glinting off something reflective nearby; he turned his head to see a pair of high-powered binoculars being held up to the face of another uniformed policeman, who was standing atop a bench. Like his colleagues manning the barricades, he was also scrutinizing the faces of those entering the city along Avenida Juan Carlos I. He was a backup, or perhaps a second filter, and he was scanning the crowd with a methodical regularity. The sun was already beating down, though it was early morning, and the man’s pale complexion was flushed.

Bryson did a double-take, puzzled by the paleness of the man’s skin, the blond hair beneath the visored cap. Blonds were not common in this part of Spain, but they were not unheard of. Yet that wasn’t what drew his attention. It was the pale skin, almost white. No policeman or border guard could last for long in this climate without his face tanning, or at least turning ruddy, from the powerful sun. Even a desk-bound official couldn’t avoid being out in the sun on his way to work or at lunchtime.

No, this was not a local, not a native. Bryson doubted the man was even a Spaniard.

The blond policeman was sweating profusely, and he briefly lowered his binoculars to mop his face with a crooked elbow, and that was when Bryson first saw the man’s facial features.

The sleepy-looking gray eyes that belied the ferocious concentration, the thin lips, the chalky skin, the ash-blond hair. The man was familiar.

Khartoum.

The blond man had been posted as a technical expert from Rotterdam, visiting the Sudanese capital with a group of European specialists advising Iraqi officials on the construction of a ballistic-missile plant and taking orders for turnkey equipment that could be used to assemble Scud missiles. The blond man was in fact an interloper, an infiltrator, a penetration agent. He was Directorate. He was also a dispatch agent, an expert in the quick-kill. Bryson had been in Khartoum to install surveillance, obtain hard evidence that could later be used against the Iraqis. He had done a brush-pass exchange with the blond killer, providing him with microdot dossiers of the desired targets, including information on where they were staying, their schedules, the presumptive holes in their security. Bryson didn’t know the blond man’s name; he knew only that the man was a stone killer, one of the best in the trade: supremely skilled, probably a sociopath, the perfect dispatch agent.

The Directorate had sent one of their best here to kill him. Now there could be no doubt his former employers had marked him “beyond salvage.”

Yet how had they found him? The smugglers must have talked, angry about their stolen truck, eager to earn a no-doubt generous bribe. There were not many roads in this part of the country, very few routes from Finisterre, therefore easily scrutinized by air if they had quick access to a helicopter. Bryson had not heard or seen a helicopter, but there had been that stretch of time when he had been asleep. Also, the old farm truck had been so loud that a helicopter could have passed directly overhead and he would not have heard it.

It had to be the hastily abandoned truck, which served as a veritable beacon to their pursuers, evidence that he and Layla were in the immediate vicinity. And there were only two ways to go on that road: into Santiago de Compostela, or away from it. No doubt both possibilities had been covered, roadblocks placed at points of convergence.

He wanted to turn back, confirm that Layla was still behind him, still safe, but he could not risk doing so.

Bryson’s pulse quickened. He looked away, but it was too late. He had seen the instant of recognition in the killer’s eyes. He saw me; he knows me.

Yet to run, to make any sudden moves that made him stand out from the crowd, was to throw up a flag, confirm the killer’s suspicions. For the dispatch agent could not be sure at that distance. Not only had it been years since Khartoum, but the hooded cassock Bryson was wearing obscured his face, and the killer would not fire indiscriminately.

Time had slowed almost to a stop as Bryson’s mind raced. His body surged with adrenaline, his heart pounded, yet he restrained himself from accelerating his pace. He could not stand out from the crowd.

In his peripheral field of vision Bryson saw the killer turn toward him, his right hand moving toward the holstered weapon at his waist. The crowd of pilgrims was so thick that it almost carried Bryson along, but at a rate that was excruciatingly slow. How can the killer be sure I’m the man he wants? With this hood … and then Bryson had the sickening realization that it was the very fact that he was wearing a hood that made him stand out from the crowd; in the brutally hot sun, some of the men wore caps to shield their heads from the rays of the sun, but a hood trapped in the heat and was unbearably hot; none of those who had hoods on their old-fashioned monastic garb wore them up. He stood out.

Though he did not dare turn to look, he became aware of the sudden, jerking motion in his peripheral vision, the glint of light on a metal object that was surely a gun. The killer had his weapon out; Bryson sensed this almost instinctually.

Suddenly he sagged to his feet, feigning heat stroke, causing those immediately around him to stumble. Shouts of annoyance; a woman’s cry of concern.

And then a split second later came the deadly cough of a silenced weapon. Screams, shrill and terrified. A young woman just a few feet to his left crumpled, the top of her head blown off. Blood sprayed in a radius of six feet or so. The crowd began to stampede; cries of fear, shouts of anguish went up. Dirt exploded nearby as bullets sprayed the ground. The killer was firing rapidly, in semiautomatic mode. Having spotted his target, he no longer cared whether he struck the innocent.

Amid the pandemonium, Bryson found himself nearly trampled by the frenzied, stampeding crowd; he struggled to his feet, his hood down, only to be knocked to the earth again. All around him were the screams and cries of the wounded and the dying, and those surrounding them. Managing to gain a foothold, he lurched forward, enduring repeated impact from those trying to flee the madness.

He had guns, but to take one out, to return fire, would be suicide. He was certainly far outnumbered; the moment he squeezed the trigger, he was in effect sending up a flare, advertising his location to the single-minded killers sent here by the Directorate. Instead, he rushed forward, keeping his head down, low to the ground, camouflaged by the tangle of bodies.

A fusillade of bullets ricocheted off the steel of a street sign ten feet away, indicating that the blond killer had lost sight of him, disoriented by the surging crowd. Twenty feet ahead, there was another scream, and the body of a man on a bicycle arched as he was struck in the back. The blond was firing at phantoms now; this only served Bryson’s purpose, creating a maximum disturbance into which he could disappear. He risked a glance around, as so many others were straining to see the source of the gunfire, and was astonished to see the blond killer suddenly propelled forward as if shoved from behind. He had been hit by a bullet! The marksman twisted his torso, then toppled off the fence, either dead or seriously wounded. But who had gotten off the shot? A flash of scarlet: a bright red kerchief, which then disappeared into the crowd.

Layla.

Relieved, he turned back around and kept moving with the crowd, like a piece of driftwood borne on a powerful current. He could not move toward her, against the stream, if he wanted to; he certainly dared not flash her a signal. He knew how the Directorate staged high-priority hits, of which this was certainly one. They did not stint on manpower. A dispatch agent was like a cockroach: where you found one, there was certain to be others. But where? The blond marksman from Khartoum seemed to be operating like a lone asset, which meant that the others were backup. Yet no backup was visible. Bryson knew the Directorate’s methodology too well to believe that the blond was acting alone.

The crowd of pilgrims was now out of control, a riot, a seething, teeming mass of frightened people, some trying to run down the avenida, others running in the opposite direction. What had been ideal, cover but a few moments ago had become dangerous, violent. He and Layla would have to detach themselves from the panicked throng, disappear into Santiago, and find a way to the airport at Labacolla, eleven kilometers to the east.

He pulled out of the stream of pedestrians and cycles, nearly sideswiped by an unsteady bicyclist, and grabbed hold of a street lamp to steady himself against the onrush while he waited for Layla to emerge. He searched the passing crowd for her face, but mostly for her scarlet kerchief. Alert, too, for other anomalies: flashes of steel, police uniforms, the unmistakable look of a hired killer. Bryson knew he must have been a strange sight: he was attracting stares. One pilgrim in particular, clutching what seemed to be a Bible beneath the folds of his brown monk’s outfit, seemed to be peering at him with undisguised curiosity from across the swarming Avenida Juan Carlos I. Bryson caught the monk’s eye just as the man pulled out his Bible, but the object was long, blue steel.

A gun.

In the split second that his brain processed what his eyes were seeing, Bryson lurched to his right, crashing into a bicyclist and causing it to topple, its middle-aged male rider frantically trying to steady himself while shouting angrily.

A spit; an explosion of blood that spattered Bryson’s face. The bicyclist’s temple had been blown off, leaving only a gaping wound, a sickening mass of crimson. Screams erupted anew from all around. The man was dead, the shooter a man in a monk’s cassock fifty feet away, his gun still pointed, still firing.

It was insanity!

Bryson rolled over, enduring kicks to his head and back inflicted by the panicked, stampeding crowd. He grabbed a holstered weapon, the Beretta, yanked it out.

.A man screamed: “Unha pistola! Ten unha pistola!” He’s got a gun!

Bullets struck the iron street lamp, ringing loudly, and spit into the ground a few yards away. Bryson scrambled to his feet, steadied himself, located the monk-killer, squeezed the trigger.

The first shot hit the assassin in the chest, causing his gun to drop; the second shot, squarely to the center of his chest, knocked the man over entirely.

Off to his left, glinting in his peripheral vision, was an object that Bryson’s instincts told him was another weapon. He turned just in time to see another man, also in the guise of a pilgrim, leveling a small black pistol at him from less than twenty feet away. Bryson spun to the right, out of the line of fire, but the sudden explosion of pain in his left shoulder, shooting lines of fire down his chest, told him he had been hit.

He lost his footing, his legs collapsing beneath him. He crumpled to the pavement. The pain was excruciating; he felt blood hotly soaking his shirt, his left arm going numb.

Hands grabbed at him. Disoriented, seeing through a scrim of haze, Bryson reflexively pummeled his attacker just as he heard Layla’s voice. “No, it’s me. This way. This way!”

She was clutching his good shoulder, his elbow, helping him to stand erect, supporting him.

“You’re all right!” Bryson shouted with relief, amid the chaos — illogically, for it was he who had been shot.

“I’m fine. Come on!” She pulled him toward one side, across the stampede of frenzied pilgrims whose panic had now reached fever pitch. Bryson forced himself to move, quickening his stride, moving through the pain. He caught sight of another monk watching him from a few feet away, also clutching something. Jolted into action, Bryson raised his pistol, pointing it, just in time to see the monk lift the oblong object—a Bible—to his lips, kissing it, praying aloud amid the violence, the madness.

They were entering a large park, broad and spacious, with manicured gardens and rows of eucalyptus trees. “We must find a place to let you rest,” Layla said.

“No. The wound is superficial—”

“The blood!”

“I think it’s more of a graze. Obviously it nicked blood vessels, but it’s nowhere near as serious as it may look. We can’t afford to rest here; we have to keep moving!”

“But where?”

“Look. Straight ahead—across the road — a cathedral, a square. The Praza do Obradoiro—it’s jammed with people. We have to stay with the crowds, disappear into them whenever we can. Whatever we do, we can’t stand out.” He sensed her momentary hesitation and added, “We’ll take care of my wound later. Right now it’s the least of our problems.”

“I don’t think you know how much blood you’re losing.” With an almost clinical detachment, she unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt and delicately pulled the blood-matted cloth away from the skin of his shoulder; he felt a twinge of pain. She gently palpitated the wound; the pain intensified, a jagged bolt of lightning. “All right,” she pronounced, “we can tend to it later, but we have to stanch the blood flow.” Whipping the red scarf from her head, she tied it firmly around his shoulder, anchoring it at the underarm, fashioning a sort of tourniquet that would do for the time being. “Can you move your arm?”

He lifted,it, winced. “Yeah.”

“It hurts? Don’t be a hero.”

“I’m not. I never ignore pain; it’s one of the most valuable signals the body gives us. And yes, it does hurt. But I’ve suffered a lot worse, believe me.”

“I believe you. Now, there’s a cathedral up the hill —”

“The main Cathedral of Santiago. The square surrounding it, the Praza do Obradoiro, sometimes called Praza de Espana, is the endpoint of the pilgrim’s journey, always crowded. A good place to lose our pursuers, find a vehicle. We have to get out of this open area immediately.”

They started up the eucalyptus-lined path. Suddenly a pair of bicyclists zoomed by, veering around them just a few inches away, then continued up the path. Entirely innocent, presumably a couple of pilgrims heading for the center of town, but it startled Bryson. Perhaps the loss of some blood had dulled his reactions. The assassins sent bv the Directorate were disguised, with diabolical cleverness, as religious pilgrims. Anyone they passed, anyone in a crowd, could be a killer sent to terminate him. At least in a minefield the trained eye could distinguish the mine from the field. Here, there was no such distinction.

Except the familiarity of the faces.

Some—not all, but some of the dispatch agents, the leaders — were men Bryson knew, had had dealings with in the past, however casual or distant. They had been sent because they could more easily find him in a crowd. But the sword was double-edged: if they recognized him, he would recognize them. If he remained alert, watchful, he would see them before they saw him. It was not much of an advantage, but it was all he had, and he would have to exploit it to its maximum extent.

“Wait,” he said abruptly. “I’ve been spotted, and so have you. They may not know who you are, not yet. But me, they know. And there’s the bloodstained shirt, the red tourniquet. No, we can’t give them that.”

She nodded. “Let me get us another change of clothes.”

They were thinking along the same lines. “I’ll wait here—no, strike that.” He pointed to a small, moss-covered ancient cathedral surrounded by gardens planted with exotic species of flora. “I’ll wait inside there.”

“Good.” She hurried up the path toward the main square while he turned back toward the church.

 

 

He waited anxiously in the dim, cool, deserted cathedral. A few times the heavy wooden doors to the church opened; each time it was a genuine pilgrim or tourist, or so they appeared. Women with children, young couples. Watching from a concealed alcove off the narthex, he studied each one. One could never be sure, but none of the signs were present, nothing that alerted his internal alarms. Twenty minutes later the doors opened again; it was Lavla, holding a paper-wrapped bundle.

They changed, separately, in the cathedral’s restrooms. She had accurately estimated his size. Now they were dressed in the plain garb of middle-class tourists: a simple skirt and blouse for her with a broad-brimmed, gaily decorated sun hat; khaki pants, a white short-sleeved knit shirt, and a baseball cap for him. She had managed to locate a couple of large bandages and an iodine-based disinfectant to temporarily cleanse the wound. She had even provided them with cameras — a cheap video camera, sans film, for him; an even cheaper 35mm camera on a neck strap for her.

Ten minutes later, each of them wearing modish sunglasses, walking hand in hand like honeymooners, they entered the immense, bustling Praza do Obradoiro. The square was filled with pilgrims, tourists, students; vendors hawked postcards and souvenirs. Bryson stopped before the cathedral, pretending to take some video footage of the baroque eighteenth-century facade, the centerpiece of which was the Portico de la Gloria, the astonishing Spanish Romanesque twelfth-century sculpture crowded with the likenesses of angels and demons, monsters and prophets. As he looked through the telephoto lens of the viewfinder, he moved the camera from the portico, sweeping across the facade of the cathedral, then panning across the crowd of tourists and pilgrims, as if capturing the entire scene on video, an amateur cinematographer.

Putting down the video camera, he turned to Layla, smiling and nodding like a proud tourist. She touched his arm, the two of them engaged in an exaggerated pantomime of honeymooner affection in order to deflect the suspicions of any who might be watching. His disguise was minimal, but at least the peak of the baseball cap cast a shadow across his face. Perhaps it would be enough to induce uncertainty, raise doubts in any watchers.

Then Bryson became aware of a movement, a synchronized shifting, on several points in the distance. Everywhere around him was filled with motion, but against that background was a coordinated, symmetrical movement. The perception would not have registered with anyone who had not had his extensive field experience. But it was there, he was sure of it!

“Layla,” he said quietly, “I want you to laugh at something I just said.”

“Laugh … ?”

“Right now. I’ve just told you something hysterically funny.”

Abruptly she laughed, throwing her head back in abandon. It was an utterly convincing act that Bryson, even though he had requested it, expected it, found unnerving. She was a skilled performer. She had instantly become the entranced lover who found her new husband’s every witticism hugely entertaining. Bryson smiled in modest, yet gratified, acknowledgment of his own cleverness. As he smiled, he picked up the video camera and looked through the viewfinder, panning it over the crowd around them as he had done a moment ago. But this time he was looking for something specific.

Through her smile, Lavla’s voice was tense. “You see something?”

He found it.

A classic triad formation. At three points around the square, three persons stood very still, peering through binoculars in Bryson’s direction. Individually, none of them was remarkable or worthy of attention; each might have been a tourist taking in the sights. But together, they represented an ominous pattern. On one side of the praza was a young woman, with flaxen hair worn up, wearing a blazer that was too warm for such a hot day, though it would serve to conceal a shoulder holster. On another side, representing the second point of an isosceles triangle, was a fleshy-faced, bearded man of chunky build, garbed in black clerical vestments; his high-powered binoculars seemed jarring, not the sort of optical equipment likely to be used by a man of the cloth. At the third leg of the triangle was another man, of sinewy build and swarthy complexion, in his early forties; it was this man who tugged at Bryson’s memory, demanded closer inspection. Bryson touched the button for the zoom lens, tightening the shot, moving in for a close-up of the swarthy man.

He felt his insides go cold.

He knew the man, had dealt with him several times on some high-priority assignments. He had in fact hired the man on behalf of the Directorate. He was a peasant named Paolo from a village outside of Cividale. Paolo always operated in tandem with his brother, Niccolo. The two of them had been legendary game hunters in the remote hill country of northwestern Italy where they had grown up, and so they had easily become highly skilled hunters of human beings, assassins of rare talent. The brothers were much-sought-after bounty hunters, mercenaries, killers for hire, jobbers. In his past life, Bryson had hired them for the occasional odd job, including a dangerous infiltration of a Russian firm called Vector, which had been rumored to be involved in bioweapons research and manufacture.

Where Paolo went, so did Niccolo. That meant there was at least one other, positioned somewhere outside the legs of the triad.

Bryson’s heart thudded; his scalp went prickly.

But how had they located him and Layla so easily? They had lost the pursuers, he had been sure; how had they been found once again, in a crowd of this size, particularly having changed outfits, altered the configuration?

Was it something about the clothes—too new, too bright, somehow not quite right? But Bryson had taken pains to scuff up his brand-new leather loafers on the pavement outside the church where they had stopped, and had seen to it that Layla did the same. He had even soiled their clothes with a light sprinkling of dust.

How had they been found?

The answer came to him in a slow, sickening realization, a terrible certainty. He felt the warmth of blood on his left shoulder, which had oozed out from the bandage; he did not have to look at it, or touch it, to be sure. The gunshot wound had continued to bleed steadily, profusely, seeping into the fabric of his knit shirt, turning a large area of his yellow shirt crimson. The blood had been the giveaway, the beacon, negating all the precautions they had taken, penetrating their disguise.

His pursuers had finally located him, and now they were moving in for the kill.

 

 

Washington, D.C.

 

Senator James Cassidy could feel the eyes of his colleagues on him — some bored, some wary—as he stood up heavily, spread his thick, spotted hands on the well-rubbed wooden rail, and began to speak in a rich, dulcet baritone. “In our chambers and committee rooms, we go on a great deal, all of us, about scarce resources and endangered species. We talk about how best to manage our diminishing natural resources in an era when everything seems to be for sale, when everything has a price tag and a bar code. Well, I’m here to say something about another kind of endangered species, a vanishing commodity: the very notion of privacy. In the papers, I read an Internet maven who says, ‘You already have zero privacy. Get over it.’ Well, those of you who know me know I’m sure as hell not one to get over it. Stop and look around you, I say. What do you see? Cameras and scanners and mammoth databases of a reach that defies human comprehension. Marketers can follow every aspect of our lives, from the first phone call we make in the morning to the time our security systems say we have left our houses, to the video camera at the toll booth and the charge slip we get at lunch. Go on-line, and every transaction, every ‘hit,’ is tracked and recorded by so-called infomediaries. Private companies have been approaching the Federal Bureau of Investigation with the proposal that the Bureau sell them their records, their information, as if information were just another government asset to be privatized. This is the beginning of something troubling: the naked republic. The surveillance society.”

The senator looked around and realized that he was experiencing a rare moment: he actually had his colleagues’ attention. Some of them appeared transfixed, others skeptical. But he had their attention.

“And I ask you one question: Is this a place you want to live in? I see no reason to hope that the cherished notion of privacy has a ghost of a chance against the forces arrayed against it—overzealous national and international law-enforcement bodies, marketers and corporations and insurance companies and the new managed-care conglomerates and the million tentacles of every enmeshed corporate and governmental concern. The people who want to maintain order, the people who want to squeeze every penny they can out of you—the forces of order and the forces of commerce: that’s a formidable alliance, my friends! That’s what privacy, our privacy, is up against. It is a pitched, yet terribly one-sided, battle. And so my question, my question for my distinguished colleagues on either side of the aisle, is simple: What side are you on?”

CHAPTER NINE

“Don’t look,” Bryson commanded softly, still panning the crowd and peering through the magnifying viewfinder. “Don’t turn your head. It’s a triad, as far as I can tell.”

“What distance?” She spoke quietly, intensely, while at the same time grinning, the effect bizarre.

“Seventy, eighty feet. An isosceles triangle. At your three o’clock, a blond woman in a blazer, hair up, oversized round sunglasses. At six o’clock, a big bearded man in a black priest’s getup. At nine o’clock, a slender man, late thirties, swarthy complexion, dark short-sleeved shirt, dark pants. All of them have small binoculars, and I’m sure each has a gun. Okay?”

“Got it,” she said almost inaudibly.

“One of them’s the team leader; they’re waiting for his signal. Now, I’m going to point something out and ask you to look through the video camera. Tell me when you’ve located them.”

He abruptly gestured at the cathedral’s portico with an open, flat hand, like some amateur cinematographer, holding the video camera out for her. “Jonas,” she said, alarmed. It was the first time she had called him by name, though it was a cover name. “Oh, my God, the blood! Your shirt!”

“I’m fine,” he said shortly. “Unfortunately, it’s what drew their attention.”

She instantly turned her look of alarm into a bizarre, inappropriate grin, followed by a giggle, play-acting for an audience of three, the effect bizarre. She leaned in, peering through the viewfinder as he rotated it in a slow arc around the square. “The blond woman, check,” she said. A few seconds later, she added, “The bearded priest in black, check. The younger guy in the dark shirt, check.”

“All right.” He smiled, nodded, continuing the performance. “I suspect they’re trying to avoid a repeat of what happened by the barricades. Obviously they’re not averse to killing innocent bystanders if need be, but they’d rather avoid it if possible, if only because of the political fallout. Otherwise, they’d have already taken a shot at me.”

“Or they may not be certain it’s you,” she pointed out.

“Their positioning indicates that if they were uncertain a few minutes ago, they no longer are,” Bryson said in a hushed tone. “They’ve moved into place.”

“But I don’t understand: Who are they? You seem to know something about them. These are not just faceless pursuers to you.”

“I know them,” Bryson said. “I know their methods; I know thev work.”

“How?”

“I’ve read their field manual,” he said cryptically, deliberately so, unwilling to elaborate.

“If you know them, then you must have an idea of what kind of risks they’ll take. You say ‘political fallout’—are you saying these are government operatives? Americans? Russians?”

“I think transnational is the best description. None of the above, or maybe all of the above — neither Russian nor American nor French nor Spanish, but an organization that operates between the cracks, operating on a subterranean level where borders aren’t delineated. They work with governments but not for them. It appears as if they’re watching, waiting for a clearing to form around me. Given their distance, they want a space large enough to allow for a standard margin of error. But if I make any sudden movements, appearing as if I’m about to bolt, they’ll simply fire away, bystanders be damned.”

They were surrounded by tourists and pilgrims, jammed up against them so closely it was hard to move. He continued: “Now, I want you to cover the woman, but be very subtle about taking out your gun, because they can observe your every move. They may not know who you are, but they know you’re with me, and that’s all they need to know.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means they consider you at the very least an accessory, if not an outright accomplice.”

“Great,” Layla moaned, then flashed a discordant smile.

“I’m sorry—I didn’t ask you to get involved.”

“I know, I know. I made the choice.”

“As long as we’re hemmed in like this by all these people, you’re free to move your hands below waist level. But you should assume they can see all movements from mid-torso up.”

She nodded.

“Tell me when you have your gun out.”

She nodded again. He could see her reach into her large woven handbag.

“Got it,” she said.

“Now, with your left hand, lift the camera from around your neck and take a picture of me with the cathedral behind me. Go for a wide-angle shot; that’ll allow you to see the blond woman at the same time. Take your time doing it: you’re an amateur photographer, and you’re not good with cameras. No hurried motions, nothing smooth or professional.”

She put the camera up to her face, squinted her right eye.

“All right, now I’m going to seem to be joking around with you, pretending to take a video of you taking a picture of me. As soon as I hold the video camera to my face, you will react with annoyance; I’m ruining your perfect frame. You whip the camera away from your face with unexpected force, a sudden movement that will distract and confuse the watchers. Then, aim right and squeeze off a shot. Take down the blond woman.”

“At this distance?” she said incredulously.

“I’ve seen your accuracy. You’re one of the best I’ve seen; I have confidence. But don’t wait for a second go; dive right for the ground.”

“And you? What will you be doing?”

“Aiming at the bearded guy.”

“But there’s a third—”

“We can’t cover all three, that’s the maddening thing about this damned arrangement.”

She gave another disconcerting false smile, then put the 35mm camera up to her face, clutching her Heckler & Koch .45 in her right hand at about waist level.

He smiled impishly as he drew the video camera to his face. At the same instant, with a small, barely detectable movement, he reached his free hand around to the small of his back and pulled the Beretta from his waistband. His hands were trembling; he could hardly breathe.

Directly behind her, visible through the video camera lens and some fifty to eighty feet distant, the bearded false priest lowered his binoculars. What did that mean: that they had decided to hold their fire, confused by Bryson’s ruse? That they did not want to fire indiscriminately with innocent bystanders just inches away? If so, they had just bought themselves a little time.

If not …

Suddenly the bearded man shook his wrist, ostensibly an innocent gesture designed to restore circulation in a tired hand, but clearly a sign to the others. A signal, delivered moments before Bryson had anticipated it would come. No!

They had no time.

Now!

He dropped the video camera just as he swooped the gun upward, squeezing off three rapid shots just over Layla’s shoulder.

At the exact same moment, she let her camera drop from its neck strap, whirled her .45 magnum up and over, and fired over the heads of the crowd.

What followed was a bewildering sequence of explosions, shot answering shot in rapid-fire fashion, provoking terrified screams from all around. As Bryson dove to the ground, he was able to catch a glimpse of the bearded man staggering, sinking, obviously hit. Layla threw herself downward, tumbling against Bryson, slamming against the limbs of those surrounding them, knocking a young woman over. Someone very near had been struck by a stray round, wounded but not fatally so, a collateral injury.

“She’s down!” Layla gasped as she rolled to her side. “The blonde—I saw her go down.”

The gunfire ceased as abruptly as it had begun, but the shouts, the horrified clamor, continued to rise.

Two of Bryson’s would-be assassins were down, perhaps permanently so; but at least one certainly remained standing: Paolo, the assassin from Cividale. And surely there were others as well; Paolo’s brother was almost certainly in the vicinity.

Running feet kicked at them, others tripped over them, stumbled. Once again a crowd had become a stampede, and as they plunged into the middle of the chaos, Bryson and Layla managed to get to their feet, rushing headlong with the others, disappearing into the maddened crowd.

Weaving in and out of the onrushers, Bryson saw a narrow cobblestone street, almost a lane, coming off the praza. It was little more than a lane, barely big enough for one car to pass through it. He ran toward it, weaving around human obstacles, determined to follow it as far as he could until they lost the Italian brothers or whoever else was chasing him. It appeared likely that there would be small, ancient houses on this street, perhaps small courtyards, alleys leading to other alleys. Mazes in which to lose themselves.

His shoulder wound was once again throbbing, blood oozing thick and hot; what had begun to heal had been wrenched open. The pain had become incredible. Yet he forced himself to run faster. Layla kept up easily. Their footsteps echoed in the empty street. As he ran, he was searching the narrow, shadowed street, searching for a courtyard, a shop, any place into which they could duck. There was a small, Romanesque church tucked between a couple of even older stone buildings, but it was locked; a handwritten sign pasted on one heavy wooden door declared that it was closed for repairs. In this town of churches and cathedrals, the smaller houses of worship, which did not attract tourists, probably got little attention and less funding.

Approaching the church, he stopped short, grabbing a massive iron door handle and rattling it.

“What are you doing?” Layla asked, alarmed. “The noise—come on, let’s keep going!” She was breathing hard, her chest heaving, her face flushed. Footsteps echoed in the street, approaching.

Bryson did not reply. He gave the door handle one last, mighty tug. The padlock was small and rusted, and it looped through an even rustier hasp, which easily came off the door with a splintering sound. People did not break into churches as a rule; the lock was mostly symbolic, all that was required in this town of the devout.

He yanked the door open and entered the dark central portal. Layla, giving a small grunt of frustration, followed, shutting the door behind them. Now the only light in the dim narthex came from small, dusty quatrefoil windows high above. There was a dank, mildewy smell here, and the air was chilly. Bryson looked around briefly, then leaned back against a cold stone wall. His heart was pounding from the exertion, and he felt weak from the searing pain of his wounded shoulder, and from loss of blood. Layla was pacing the length of the nave, presumably looking for exits or hiding places.

After a few minutes he had caught his breath, and he returned to the entrance doors. The broken lock would draw the attention of anyone who knew the town; either it should be reassembled so that it looked intact, or it should simply be removed entirely. As he reached for the handle to pull the door open, he listened for any approaching footsteps.

There was the sound of running feet, and then a voice,. a shout in a strange language that was neither Spanish nor Gallego. He froze, glancing at the floor, at the narrow bands of light that came in through a small louver at the bottom of the door. Kneeling, he put his ear against the slats and listened.

The language was oddly familiar.

“Niccolò, o crodevi di velu viodût! Jù par che strade cà. Cumò o controli, tu continue a cjalà la ‘plaza’!”

He recognized it, understood the words. I thought I saw him, Niccolo! the voice was saying. Down the street. You watch the plaza!

It was an obscure, dying language called Friuliano, a tongue he had not heard in years. Some said it was an ancient dialect of Italian; others believed it was a language in its own right. It was spoken only in the northeast corner of Italy near the Slovenian border, by a dwindling number of peasants.

Bryson, whose facility with languages had often proved as useful a survival mechanism as his ability with firearms, had taught himself Friuliano a decade or so ago, when he had hired two young peasants from the remote mountains above Cividale, remarkable hunters, assassins. Brothers. When he had hired Paolo and Niccolo Sangiovanni, he had made it a point to learn their strange tongue, largely so that he could keep close tabs on the brothers, listen to what they said to one another, though he never let on that he understood what they were saying.

Yes. It was Paolo, who had indeed survived the shootout in the Praza do Obradoiro, shouting to his brother, Niccolo. The two Italians were superb hunters and had never failed him in any assignment he had given them. They would not be easy to evade, but Bryson did not intend to evade them.

He heard Layla approach, and he looked up. “I need you to find us some rope or cable,” he whispered.

“Rope?”

“Quickly! There must be a door off the chancel, maybe leading to a rectory, a supply closet, something. Please, right away!”

She nodded and ran back down the nave toward the sanctuary.

He stood quickly, opened the door a crack, and called out a few words in Friuliano. Since Bryson’s ear for languages was almost pitch-perfect, he knew the accent would closely approximate that of a native. But more than that, he pitched his voice higher, tightening his throat to match Paolo’s timbre. His mimicry was uncanny, he knew; it was one of his most useful talents. A few snatches of muffled, shouted phrases, heard at a distance and distorted by echoes, would sound to Paolo like his own brother. “Ou! Paulo, pessèe! Lu ai, al è jù!” Hey! Paolo, come quick! I’ve got him—he’s down!

The response came rapidly. “La setu?” Where are you?

“Ca! Lì da vecje glesie—cu le sieradure rote!” This old church — the broken lock!

Bryson got to his feet quickly, spun to one side of the portico, flattening himself against the doorframe, the Beretta gripped in his left hand.

The footsteps accelerated, slowed, then approached. Paolo’s voice now came from just outside the church door. “Niccolo?”

“Ca!” Bryson shouted, muffling his voice in the cloth of his shirt. “Moviti!”

A brief hesitation, then the door was flung open. In the sudden flood of light, Bryson saw the swarthy skin, the lean, sinewy build, the tight black curls of the close-cropped hair. Paolo squinted his eyes, his expression fierce. He entered warily, looking from side to side, his weapon down at his side.

Bryson sprung forward, slamming into Paolo with the full force of his body. His right hand was a rigid claw, smashing against the cartilage of the Italian’s throat, twisting the larynx enough to disable, not to kill. Paolo let out a loud scream of pain and surprise. Simultaneously, with his left hand, Bryson cracked the Beretta against the back of Paolo’s head, aiming with precision.

Paolo slumped to the floor, unconscious. Bryson knew the concussion was minor, that Paolo would be out no more than a few minutes. He grabbed the Italian’s weapon, a Lugo, and quickly searched his body for any concealed weapons. Since Bryson had trained the Sangiovannis in field tactics, he knew there would be another weapon, and he knew where to find it: strapped to the left calf, under loose-fitting slacks. Bryson took that, too, and then removed a jagged fishing knife from a scabbard on the Italian’s belt.

Layla was watching, stunned, but now she understood. She threw Bryson a large spindle of insulated electrical wire. Not ideal, but it was strong, and in any case it would have to do. Working quickly, the two of them bound the Italian’s hands and feet so that the more he struggled, the tighter the knots would become. The design was of Layla’s invention, and it was a clever one. Bryson tugged at the knots, satisfied that they would hold, and then he and Layla carried the assassin into a sacristy off the north transept. Here it was even dimmer, but their eyes had by now become accustomed to the low light.

“He’s an impressive specimen,” Layla said dispassionately. “Powerful — almost like a coiled spring.”

“Both he and his brother were supremely gifted natural athletes. Hunters, both of them, with the innate skills, the instincts, of mountain lions. And just as ruthless.”

“He once worked for you?”

“In a past life. He and his brother. A few brief assignments and one major one, in Russia.” She looked at him questioningly; he saw no reason to hold out. Not now, not after everything she had put herself through for him. “There’s a Russian institute known as Vector, in Koltsovo, Novosibirsk. In the mid- to late 1980s, rumors circulated in American intelligence circles that Vector was no mere research institute, but was involved in the research and production of agents of biological warfare.”

She nodded. “Weaponized anthrax, smallpox, even plague. There were rumors …”

“According to a defector who came over in the late eighties—the former deputy chief of the Soviet biological warfare program—the Russians were targeting major U.S. cities for a biological first strike. Technical intelligence told us very little. A compound of low-rise buildings surrounded by high electrified fences and patrolled by armed guards. That was all the conventional U.S. intelligence agencies had, CIA or NSA. Without concrete evidence, neither the U.S. nor any other NATO government was willing to act.” He shook his head. “Typically passive response on the part of the intelligence bureaucrats. So I was sent in to do a high-risk, dangerous penetration no other intelligence agency would ever dare. I assembled my own team of black-bag specialists and muscle, which included these boys. My employers had a shopping list — high-res photographs of containment facilities, air locks, fermentation vats for growing viruses and vaccines. And most of all, they wanted actual samples of the bugs—Petri dishes.”

“My God … Your employers—but you said ‘no other intelligence agency’ would ever attempt such a thing … . Did CIA …”

He shrugged. “Leave it at that.” He thought, But what’s the point of withholding anything, anymore? “These fellows, the Sangiovanni brothers, were there to overpower night sentries, take out armed guards swiftly and silently. So they were muscle, of a rarefied sort.” He smiled grimly.

“How’d they do?”

“We got the goods.”

While they waited for Paolo to come to, Layla went to the church’s front door and reassembled the broken hasp and padlock so that it appeared unbroken. Meanwhile, Bryson stood watch over the Italian assassin. In about twenty minutes, Paolo began to stir, his eyes shifting beneath his closed lids. He groaned slightly, and then his eyes came open, unfocused.

“Al è pasât tant timp di quand che jerin insieme a Novosibirsk,” Bryson said. It’s been a long time since Novosibirsk. “I always knew you were devoid of any allegiances. Where’s your brother?”

Paolo’s eyes widened. “Coleridge, you bastard.” He tried to pull his hands up, grimaced as the thin wires cut into his wrists. He snarled through bloody teeth, “Bastard, tu mi fasis pensà a che vecje storie dal purcìt, lo tratin come un siôr, a viodin di lui, i dan dut chel che a voe di vè, e dopo lu copin.” Bryson smiled and translated for Layla’s benefit. “He says there’s an old Friulian peasant proverb about the hog. They treat it like a prince, cater to it, serve its every need—until the day they slaughter it for meat.”

“Who’s the hog supposed to be?” asked Layla. “You or him?”

Bryson turned back to Paolo, speaking in Friuliano. “We’re going to play a little game here called truth or consequences. You tell me the truth, or you face the consequences. Let’s start with a simple question: Where’s your brother?”

“Never!”

“Well, you’ve just answered one of my questions — that Niccolo came here with you. You almost killed me back in the square. What kind of gratitude is that to show your old boss?”

“No soi ancjmò freât dal dut!” Paolo bellowed. I’m not done yet! He struggled against the restraints, wincing.

“No,” Bryson said with a smile. “Neither am I. Who hired you?”

The Italian spit a gobbet of saliva, which hit Bryson’s face. “Fuck you!” he shouted in English, one of the few phrases he knew.

Bryson wiped at the spittle with his sleeve. “I’ll ask you one more time, and if I don’t get a truthful answer—the operative word being truthful — I’ll be forced to use this.” He held up the Beretta for display.

Layla approached, spoke quickly in a low voice. “I’m going to keep watch at the door. All this shouting may attract some unwanted attention.”

Bryson nodded. “Good idea.”

“Go ahead and kill me,” the assassin taunted in his native language. “It makes no difference to me. There are others, many others. My brother may have the pleasure of killing you himself — it would be my dying gift to him.”

“Oh, I have no intention of killing you,” said Bryson coolly. “You’re a brave fellow; I’ve seen you face down death fearlessly. Death doesn’t frighten you, which is one of the things that make you so good at what you do.”

The Italian’s eyes narrowed in suspicion as he attempted to puzzle out the meaning. Bryson could see him shifting his ankles, his wrists, testing the restraints for weaknesses. But there were none.

“No,” Bryson continued, “instead, I would rather take away the only thing that means anything to you: your ability to hunt, whether it’s cinghiale, your beloved wild boar, or human beings placed ‘beyond salvage’ by the liars who control the secret arms of government.” He paused, aimed the Beretta at the assassin’s kneecap. “The loss of one knee, of course, won’t keep you from walking—not with all the advanced prosthetic joints that are available these days—but you certainly won’t be able to run very well. The loss of both of your knees — well, that will certainly deprive you of your livelihood, don’t you think?”

The assassin’s face went ashen. “You goddamned sellout,” he hissed.

“Is that what they tell you? And who do they say I sold out to?”

Paolo stared defiantly, but his lower lip quivered.

“So I ask you one more time, and consider very carefully before you either refuse to answer or attempt to lie to me: Who hired you?”

“Fuck you!”

Bryson fired the Beretta. The Italian screamed, and blood drenched his pants at the knee. Most if not all of the kneecap was probably gone. He would not likely hunt prey, human or animal, again. Paolo writhed in pain. At the top of his lungs he shouted a string of curses in Friuliano.

Suddenly there came a crash at the church door, followed by a male voice shouting and a throaty cry in Layla’s voice. Bryson whirled around to see what had happened—had she been struck? He rushed to the entrance just in time to see two silhouetted figures struggling in the darkness. One of them had to be Layla; who was the other? He leveled his gun and shouted, “Stop or you’re dead!”

“It’s all right,” came Layla’s voice. He felt a surge of relief. “Bastard put up a nasty fight.”

It was Paolo’s brother, Niccolo, his arms trussed behind his back. A wire that hung loosely around his neck was all that remained of a garrote she had evidently used to pull tight around his throat the second he burst in. A thin, crimson line at the base of his neck was the telltale evidence of his near-strangulation. She had had the advantage of surprise, and had utilized it well; she had fashioned the restraint ingeniously so that the harder Niccolo pulled his arms, the harder the wire cut into his throat. His legs, however, were unbound, and though he sprawled on the floor, he kept kicking, wheeling around to try to gain his footing.

Bryson leaped atop Niccolo’s chest, slamming his feet down to knock the wind out of him, and at the same time holding him down, enabling Layla to toss a loop of wire around his knees and ankles and bind them tightly. Niccolo bellowed like a gored ox, joining the bloodcurdling screams of his brother from the sacristy fifty feet away.

“Enough,” Bryson said disgustedly. He ripped a length of cloth from Niccolo’s khaki shirt, and, bunching it up, jammed it into Niccolo’s mouth to muffle the bellowing. Layla produced a roll of strong packing tape she had located somewhere, probably in the supply closet where she had found the electrical wire, and she used it to secure the gag over Niccolo’s mouth. Bryson ripped off another piece of Niccolo’s shirt, handed it to Layla, and asked her to gag the brother as well.

While she did that, he dragged Niccolo down the nave to another alcove, shoving him into a confessional booth. “Your brother’s just been shot, badly,” Bryson told him, waving the Beretta. “But as you can hear, he’s still alive. He won’t be walking again.”

Niccolo whipped his head back and forth, roaring through the gag. He bucked his legs up and down against the stone floor in a mute, animal-like display of defiance and anger.

“Now, I’m going to make this as simple for you as I can, my old friend. I want you to tell me who hired you. I want the complete verbal dossier, the codes, the contact names and procedures. Everything. As soon as I remove your gag, I expect you to begin talking. And don’t even contemplate fabricating anything, because your brother has already told me a good deal, and if anything you say doesn’t jibe with what he said, I’m going to assume that he’s the one who’s lying. And I will kill him. Because I really don’t like liars. Are we clear?”

Niccolo, who had stopped bucking his legs, nodded frantically, his eyes wide, searching Bryson’s face. The threat was obviously effective; Bryson had located the killer’s single area of vulnerability.

From the other side of the church, Bryson could hear Paolo whimpering and groaning, muffled by the gag Layla had put in his mouth.

“My partner is across the aisle with Paolo. All I have to do is give her the signal, and she’ll fire one single round into his forehead. Are we clear?”

Niccolo’s nodding became even more frenzied.

“All right, then.” He ripped the wide plastic tape off Niccolo’s mouth, leaving a red stripe on the skin that had to have been extremely painful. Then he grabbed the bunched-up wet rag and yanked it out.

Niccolo took several deep, ragged breaths.

“Now, if you make the serious mistake of lying to me, you’d better hope your brother has already told me the exact same lie. Or you’ll have killed him, just as if you yourself squeezed the trigger against his temple, understand?”

Niccolo gasped, “Yes!”

“But if I were you, I’d stick to the truth. The odds are much better. And bear in mind, I know where your families live. How’s nonna Maria? And your mother, Alma—does she still have her boarding house?”

Niccolo’s eyes were at once fierce and wounded. “I am telling you the truth!” he screamed in Friuliano.

“As long as we’re clear about that,” Bryson replied blandly.

“But we don’t know who hired us! The procedures are the same as when we worked for you! We are the mus, the beasts of burden! They tell us nothing!”

Bryson shook his head ruminatively. “Nothing is ever sealed in a vacuum, my friend. You know that as well as I. Even when you deal with a cutout, you know your contact’s cover name. You can’t help but pick up bits and pieces of information. And they may not tell you why you’re doing a particular operation, but they always tell you how to do it, and that can be quite revealing as well.”

“I told you, we don’t know who our employers are!”

Bryson raised his voice, speaking with controlled fury. “You worked with a team, under a team leader; you were issued instructions; and people always talk. You damned well know who hired you!” He turned toward the aisle as if preparing to call out a signal.

“No!” cried Niccolo.

“Your brother —”

“My brother doesn’t know either. I don’t know what he said to you, but he doesn’t know! You know how the lines, the — compartments — how this works! We’re only the hired help, and they pay us in cash!”

“Language!” Bryson demanded.

“Che … language?”

“The team you’re working with here. What language do they speak to one another?”

Niccolo’s eyes were wild. “Different languages!”

“The team leader!”

“Russian!” he shouted desperately. “He’s a Russian!”

“KGB, GRU?”

“What do we know of these things?”

“You know faces!” Bryson spat out. Louder, he called: “Layla?”

Layla approached, understood Bryson’s gambit. “Would you like me to use a silencer?” she inquired in a matter-of-fact way.

“No!” Niccolo thundered. “I tell you what you want to know!”

“I’ll give him another sixty seconds,” Bryson said. “Then, if I don’t hear what I want to hear, fire away—and yes, actually, a silencer might be a good idea.” To Niccolo, he said, “They hired you to kill me because you know me, know my face.”

Niccolo nodded, his eyes closed.

“But they knew you once worked for me, and they wouldn’t just hire you to kill your old employer without a plausible cover story. No matter how little loyalty you two have. So they told you I was a sellout, a traitor, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“A traitor to what, to whom?”

“They only said you were selling names of agents, that we and everyone else you’d ever worked with would be identified, flushed out, executed.”

“Executed by whom?”

“Hostile parties … I don’t know, they didn’t say!”

“Yet you believed them.”

“Why would I not believe them?”

“Was a bounty placed on my head, or was this a straight job price?”

“Yes, a bounty.”

“How much?”

“Two million.”

“Lire or dollars?”

“Dollars! Two million dollars.”

“I’m flattered. You and your brother could have retired to the hills and hunted cinghiale to your hearts’ content. But the problem with offering a bounty to a team is that it diminishes the incentive for the team to coordinate; everyone wants to make the hit separately. Bad strategy, self-defeating. The bearded one was the team leader?”

“Yes.”

“Was he the Russian-speaker?”

“Yes.”

“You know his name?”

“Not directly. I hear someone call him Milyukov. But I know the face. He’s like me, like us — he does assignments.”

“Freelance?”

“They say he works for a—a plutocrat, a Russian baron. One of the secret powers behind the Kremlin. A very rich man who owns a conglomerate. Through it, they say he secretly runs Russia.”

“Prishnikov.”

There was a glint of recognition in the Italian’s eyes. He had heard the name before. “Maybe, yes.”

Prishnikov. Anatoly Prishnikov. Founder and chairman of the mammoth, shadowy Russian consortium Nortek. Immensely rich and powerful and, indeed, the power behind the throne. Bryson’s heart began beating rapidly. Why would Anatoly Prishnikov have sent someone to eliminate Bryson?

Why?

The only logical explanation seemed to be that Prishnikov was controlling the Directorate, or was among those controlling it. Harry Dunne of the CIA had said that the Directorate had been founded and, from its beginning, been controlled by a small cabal of Soviet GRU ‘geniuses,’ as he put it.

“What if I told you that the Directorate in fact isn’t part of the United States government?” Dunne had said. “That it never was … The whole thing was an elaborate ruse, do you see? … A penetration operation right on enemy soil — our soil.”

And then, after the Cold War ended, as the Soviet intelligence services fell into collapse, control of the Directorate shifted hands, he had said. Agents were terminated.

I was set up, then pushed out.

And Elena? She had disappeared—meaning what? That she was deliberately separated from him? Could that explain it? That the masters had to keep the two of them apart from each other for some reason? Because they knew things, could put things together?

“ … Now we’ve got reason to think it’s being reactivated,” Dunne had said. “Your old masters appear to be accumulating arms, for some reason … . You could say they’re poised to foment global instability … . Seems they’re trying to stockpile an arsenal. We think they’re instigating some kind of turbulence in the southern Balkans, although their target is elsewhere.”

Their ultimate target is elsewhere.

Generalities, blanket statements, vague assertions. The outlines remained murky and uncertain. Facts were all he had to work with, and there were altogether too few of them.

Fact: A team of assassins made up of Directorate operatives — past or present ones, he had no idea—had been trying to kill him.

But why? Calacanis’s security forces may simply have considered him an interloper, a penetration agent to be eliminated. But the assassin-squads here in Santiago de Compostela seemed too well organized, too orchestrated, to be simply a reaction to his appearance on Calacanis’s ship.

Fact: The Sangiovanni brothers had been hired to kill him even before his appearance on the Spanish Armada. The controllers of the Directorate had decided he was a threat prior to that. But how, and why?

Fact: The leader of the assassin squad was also in the employ of Anatoly Prishnikov, an immensely wealthy private citizen. Thus, Prishnikov had to be one of the controllers of the Directorate—but why would an ostensibly private citizen be running a rogue intelligence outfit?

Did this indicate that the Directorate had gone private—had been the object of a hostile takeover, co-opted by Anatoly Prishnikov? Had it become a private army of Russia’s most powerful, most secretive mogul?

But something else occurred to him. “You said the team spoke other languages,” he said to Niccolo. “You mentioned French.”

“Yes, but —”

“But nothing! Which member of the squad spoke French?”

“It was the blonde.”

“The blond woman in the plaza—her hair was up.”

“Yes.”

“And what are you holding back about her?”

“Holding back? Nothing!”

“I find this very interesting, because your brother was much more talkative on the subject.” The bluff was audacious, but made with enormous certitude and therefore quite convincing. “Much more talkative. Perhaps he invented things, made up a story—is that what you’re telling me?”

“No! I don’t know what he told you — we just overheard things, little scraps. Maybe names.”

“Maybe names?”

“I heard her speaking in French to another agent who was aboard the arms ship that blew up. The Spanish Armada. The agent was a Frenchman who was there to make some kind of arms deal with the Greek.”

“A deal?”

“This Frenchman is—was—double, I heard them say.”

Bryson recalled the longhaired, elegantly dressed Frenchman from Calacanis’s dining room. The Frenchman was known to be an emissary from Jacques Arnaud, France’s wealthiest and most powerful arms dealer. Was he with the Directorate as well, or at least working with or for them? What did it mean that Jacques Arnaud, the extreme-right-wing French arms merchant, was somehow in league with the Directorate — and therefore in league, too, with the richest private citizen in Russia?

And if it was true that two powerful businessmen, one in Russia and one in France, were controlling the Directorate, using it to foment terrorism around the world—what was their objective?

 

 

They left the two Italian brothers bound and gagged in the old cathedral. Bryson asked Layla, who had had paramedic training, to attempt to stanch the blood flow from Paolo’s ruined knee, using a tightly fastened rag to compress the wound.

“But how can you be so considerate to a man who tried to murder you?” she asked later, genuinely puzzled.

Bryson had shrugged. “He was just doing his job.”

“This is not how we work in the Mossad,” she protested. “If a man has tried to kill you and failed, you must never let him get away. It is an inviolable rule.”

“I have a different set of rules.”

They spent the night in an anonymous, small hospedaje outside Santiago de Compostela, where she immediately set to work dressing his shoulder wound, cleansing it with peroxide she had purchased at a farmacía, suturing it and applying an antibacterial ointment. She worked quickly, with the practiced skill of a medical professional.

Appraising his shirtless torso, she ran her finger along a long, smooth welt. The wound inflicted by Abu in Tunisia, on Bryson’s last assignment, had been repaired by a top-flight surgeon on contract with the Directorate. No longer did it throb painfully, though the memory remained, as traumatic as ever.

“A memento,” he said grimly, “from an old friend.” Outside the small window, the rain was coming down in sheets over the moss-stained cobblestone.

“You nearly died.”

“I had some good medical care.”

“You have been attacked often.” She fingered a much smaller wound, a dime-size area of puckered flesh on his right biceps. “This?” she inquired.

“Another memento.”

The memory of Nepal came flooding back, overpoweringly so, of a fearsome adversary named Ang Wu, a renegade officer in the Chinese Army. Now Bryson wondered what had really happened in that exchange of gunfire. What had he really been sent to do, and on whose behalf? Had he really been only a pawn of a malevolent conspiracy he still didn’t understand?

So much blood spilled; so many lives wasted. And for what? What had his life meant? The more he learned, the less he understood. He thought of his parents, of the last time he saw them alive. Was it truly possible they had been killed by the masterminds behind the Directorate? He thought about Ted Waller, the man he had once admired more than anyone in the world, and he felt a surge of rage.

What was it that Niccolo, the Friulian assassin, had called himself and his brother—beasts of burden? They were hired muscle, pawns in the service of an odious game whose rules were never explained to them. Now it occurred to Bryson that there was no difference between him and the Italian brothers. They were all no more than instruments used by shadowy forces. Nothing better than pawns.

She had been sitting on the edge of the bed; now she got up and went to the tiny bathroom, returning a moment later with a glass of water. “The pharmacist gave me a few antibiotic pills. I told him I’d be getting a prescription in the morning, so he was willing to give me enough to tide you over.” She handed him a few capsules and the glass. A flash of the old suspicion spoke to him silently, warningly: What were these unmarked pills she was giving him? Until the more rational voice in his head: If she wanted to kill you, she’s had plenty of opportunities to do it, more directly, in the last twenty-four hours. More than that, she simply didn’t have to risk her own life to save yours. He took the capsules from her and washed them down with a swallow of tap water.

“You seem distant,” Layla said as she packed up the medical supplies. “Far away. You’re thinking of something troubling.”

Bryson looked up, nodded slowly. Sharing a room with a beautiful woman—even though the sleeping arrangements were quite chaste, she in the bed, he on the sofa—was something he had not done since Elena’s sudden departure, years ago. The opportunities had presented themselves time and time again, but he had remained monastic, for some reason punishing himself for whatever he had done to send her away.

What had he done?

How much, he wondered, of their life together had been set up, stage-managed by Ted Waller?

And he thought back to the one time, the one important time, that he had lied to her. He had lied to protect her. He had concealed something from her. Waller was fond of quoting Blake: “We are led to believe a lie,” he would orate, “when we see not through the eye.”

But Bryson had not meant for Elena to see, to know, what he had done for her.

Now he searched his mind, recalling that evening in Bucharest that he had kept from her.

What was the truth? Where was the truth?

 

 

For all its paranoia and mayhem, the underworld of the black-operations specialist is a small one, and word travels fast. Bryson had received intelligence through several reliable contacts that a team of ex-Securitate “sweepers” was offering serious money for any leads that might unearth the location of one Dr. Andrei Petrescu, the mathematician and cryptologist who had betrayed the revolution by leaking the Ceauescu government’s ciphers. Among the disaffected former members of the notorious secret service there was great bitterness about the coup d’etat that had unseated their patron’s government and removed them from power. They would never forgive or forget the traitors and were determined to hunt them down, whatever the cost, however much time it took. They had targeted several turncoats, Petrescu among them. Scores were to be settled, vengeance won.

Through a blind relay, Bryson arranged a meeting in Bucharest with the chief of the sweepers, the former number-two in the Securitate. Though Bryson’s cover identity was not known to the Securitate man, his bona fides were established. The message was relayed that Bryson had urgent information that would undoubtedly be of great interest to the sweepers. He would come to the rendezvous site alone, verifiably so; the Securitate man was to do the same.

For Bryson, this was personal. He had made arrangements without the Directorate’s knowledge. Such an off-the-books meeting would never have been approved; the potential ramifications were too serious. Yet Bryson could not risk having the contact vetoed; this was too important to Elena, and therefore to him. So he notified headquarters that upon the conclusion of an operation in Madrid he would be taking a much-needed, if altogether too brief, vacation, a long weekend in Barcelona. Permission was, of course, granted; he had long been owed vacation time. He was acting in direct contravention of Directorate policy, yes, but he had no choice. This had to be done. He purchased flight tickets in cash under an assumed name that appeared nowhere in Directorate databanks.

Neither did he tell Elena what he was doing, and here the deception was most important, for she would never have approved his meeting with the head of the team who sought to kill her father. Not only would she deem it far too dangerous to her husband, but she had made it abundantly clear on several occasions that under no circumstances was he to freelance in matters involving her parents. She was terrified of losing both her husband and her parents, of stirring up the hornet’s nest of Securitate vengeance. Were it up to her, he would never have made such an appointment. And until now, he had respected her wishes. But this was an opportunity not to be passed up.

Bryson met the ex-Securitate man at a dark, subterranean bar. As promised, he had indeed come alone, although he had laid careful plans in advance. Favors had been called in, bribes paid.

“You have information on the Petrescus,” said Major General Radu Dragan as Bryson joined him at a dimly lit booth.

Dragan knew nothing about Bryson, but Bryson, drawing upon his network of sources, had done his homework. Elena had first mentioned his name on the night of the exfiltration from Bucharest, to scare off the policeman who had been so interested in what was in the truck; as it turned out, she knew the man’s name and phone number so well because Dragan had been the one who had enlisted her father’s help; Andrei Petrescu’s betrayal of the Securitate was therefore a very personal matter to Dragan.

“I certainly do,” said Bryson. “But first we should discuss terms.”

Dragan, a craggy, sallow-faced man of sixty, raised his brows. “I am happy to discuss ‘terms,’ as you put it, once I learn the nature of what you have to tell me.”

Bryson smiled. “Absolutely. The ‘information’ I have to give you is quite simple.” He slid a sheet of paper across the table; Dragan picked it up and scrutinized it in puzzlement.

“What — what is this?” asked Dragan. “But these names —”

“—are the names of every single member of your extended family, all relatives by blood or by marriages, along with their private addresses and telephone numbers. You, who have taken such security precautions to protect those near and dear to you, should recognize what immense resources I must have access to in order to have been able to unearth that information. Therefore you must know how easy it would be for me and my colleagues to track down each and every one of them, even if you were able to hide them all once again.”

“Nu te mai pi a imprá 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?”

She blushed again. “You flatter me.”

“Only to twist your arm, Layla,” Bryson said dryly.

“Whatever works, is that it?”

“Something like that.”

She smiled, shook her head. “I’d never get clearance from Tel Aviv.”

“Then don’t request it.”

She hesitated, dipped her head. “It would have to be a temporary alliance, which I may be forced to jettison at any moment.”

“Just get me inside the château, and you can abandon me at the front door if you want. Now tell me something: Exactly why does Mossad have Jacques Arnaud in its sights?”

She gave him a look of surprise, as if the answer were so obvious it was scarcely worth saying. “Because in the last year or so, Jacques Arnaud has become one of the world’s leading suppliers of arms to terrorists. This is why I found it interesting that the man who was summoned to see you—what was his name, Jenrette?—came aboard the ship in the company of Arnaud’s agent, Jean-Marc Bertrand. I assumed this American named Jenrette was buying for terrorists. So I was quite intrigued to see that you were meeting with Jenrette. I must say, for much of the evening I wondered what you were doing.”

Bryson fell silent, his mind working feverishly. Jenrette, the Directorate operative he knew as Vance Gifford, had come aboard with Jacques Arnaud’s agent. Arnaud was selling weapons to terrorists; the Directorate was buying. Did that mean—by logical extension—that the Directorate was sponsoring terrorism around the globe?

“It’s vital that I get to Jacques Arnaud,” Bryson said very quietly.

She shook her head, smiling ruefully. “But we may get nothing out of it, either one of us. And that’s really the least of our worries. These are very dangerous men who will stop at nothing.”

“I’m willing to take that chance,” Bryson said. “It’s all I have right now.”

 

 

The team of professional killers followed the screams. They had been assigned to mop up, which entailed searching the narrow, cobblestone streets that radiated off the Praza do Obradoiro in Santiago de Compostela. Now that it had been conclusively determined that their subject had eluded all location attempts, their next order of business was to locate all stray team members. The dead had been loaded into unmarked vehicles and brought to a cooperating local mortuorio where falsified papers would be drawn up, certificates of death stamped, the bodies buried in unmarked graves. Next of kin would be compensated handsomely and knew not to ask questions; this was standard operating procedure.

When the wounded and the dead had been rounded up and accounted for, there still remained two team members at large: the Friulian-speaking peasant brothers from the remote corner of northwestern Italy. A quick sweep of the streets turned up nothing; no emergency codes had been received. The brothers were not responding to repeated radio calls. They were presumed killed, but that was not a certainty, and black-operations procedures stipulated that the wounded were either to be extracted or finished off. So one way or another, the brothers had to be checked off on a list.

Finally it was a report of muffled screams emanating from a side street that drew the mop-up team’s attention. They traced the sounds to an abandoned, boarded-up church. Once they burst in, they located first one brother, then the other. Both were manacled, tied up, and gagged, though one of the brother’s gags was loose, which was fortunate: that had enabled his screams to be heard, and the brothers thereby located.

“Christ, what took you so long?” gasped the first brother in Spanish, through the loosened gag. “We could have died here! Paolo’s lost a huge amount of blood.”

“We couldn’t permit that to happen,” said one of the mop-up team. He took out his semiautomatic pistol and fired twice into the Italian’s head, killing him instantly. “Weak links are unacceptable.”

By the time he found the second brother, crouched in a fetus position, pale and shaking and surrounded by a large pool of blood, he could see that the brother knew what to expect. It was in Paolo’s wide, unblinking eyes. Paolo did not even whimper before the two shots came.

CHAPTER TEN

Chantilly, France

 

The magnificent Château de Saint-Meurice was situated thirty-five kilometers from Paris, a vast seventeenth-century manse whose splendor was dramatically illuminated by scores of artfully placed spotlights. No less dramatic or magnificent were its surroundings, great sculpted gardens lit this evening like a stage set. This was most appropriate, for the Château de Saint-Meurice was indeed a stage on which the rich and powerful promenaded, making their skillfully timed entrances and exits, exchanging carefully scripted banter. The actors and the audience, however, were one and the same. All were there to impress each other; all knowingly played their roles within the artificial confines of an elaborate masque.

Although the evening’s occasion was a gathering of European trade ministers, an offshoot of the annual G-7 Conference, the cast of characters did not change much from party to party at the Château de Saint-Meurice. The beautiful people of Paris and its environs were all there, tout le beau monde, or at least everyone who mattered. Clad in their finest evening wear, their tuxedoes or evening gowns, the women glittering with jewels normally sequestered in a safe or bank vault, they arrived in their sparkling, chauffeured Rolls Royces or Benzes. There were comtes and comtesses, barons and baronnes, vicomtes and vicomtesses; there were royalty from the corporate world and celebrities from the world of the broadcast media and the theater; they came from the highest levels of the Quai d’Orsay, from the most rarefied circles in which high society intersected with high finance.

Across the drawbridge and up the front steps of the château, the walkway lined with hundreds of candles whose flames danced in the gentle evening breezes, came elegant men with silver hair, but also inelegant men, squat and balding, whose coarse appearance belied the immense power and influence they wielded, some of whom wore on their arms their flashiest accoutrements, long-legged, glamorous mistresses to be displayed before one and all.

Bryson wore a tuxedo from Le Cor de Chasse, and Layla wore a spectacular strapless black gown obtained at Dior. Around her neck was a simple choker of pearls whose understated elegance did not detract from her extraordinary beauty. Bryson had been to many a function like this in his previous life, and had always felt like an observer rather than a participant, though he was meant to fit in as one of them—as he inevitably did. The semblance of poise came naturally to him, though not the sense of belonging.

Layla, however, seemed entirely at ease. A few traces of makeup, deftly and subtly applied—little more than eyeliner and lip gloss—accentuated her natural beauty, her olive skin, her large liquid brown eyes. Her wavy chestnut hair was pinned up, with just a few strands deliberately unrestrained, emphasizing her lovely swan neck; the risque though tasteful décolletage of her gown highlighted her magnificent breasts. She could, and did, pass for either Israeli or Arab, being in fact both. She smiled easily, laughed merrily, her eyes inviting and withholding all at once.

She was greeted by several people, all of whom seemed to know her in her legend as an Israeli diplomatic functionary from the Foreign Ministry in Tel Aviv with mysterious clout and connections. Layla seemed to be known, yet not known, which was the perfect situation for a covert operative to be in. She had placed a call, earlier the day before, to a casual acquaintance at the Quai d’Orsay known to have close ties to Jacques Arnaud, the master of the Château de Saint-Meurice and a fixture at Arnaud’s many parties. The acquaintance, who served as one of the arms manufacturer’s social antennae, was delighted to hear that Layla was in Paris for a few days, mortified that she had not been directly invited to this fête, which was surely an oversight, and had insisted that Layla by all means must come; Monsieur Arnaud would be most offended, appalled, if she did not. And by all means, she must bring an escort, for the acquaintance knew that the lovely Layla was rarely without one.

Bryson and Layla had talked late into the night, strategizing their visit to Arnaud’s château. For it was a supremely risky venture, after the destruction of the Spanish Armada. Obviously there were no survivors who might recognize either of them, but powerful men like Calacanis and any others aboard the ship, including the emissaries and agents sent by powerful men, simply did not perish in a fiery inferno without alarms going off in boardrooms and inner offices all around the world. Powerful men engaged in nefarious and hugely profitable enterprises would be on a heightened state of alert. Jacques Arnaud had lost one of his conduits, and therefore he had to be concerned for his own safety; who knew whether the obliteration of Calacanis’s tanker had been merely the first shot fired in a campaign being waged against black-market arms dealers worldwide? As France’s leading arms manufacturer, Jacques Arnaud would always be careful about possible threats to his life and livelihood; in the aftermath of the explosion off the Cabo Finisterre, he would be extra-cautious.

Layla had been a green-eyed blonde, so at least her appearance had been radically altered. Bryson, however, could not take the chance that he would not be recognized. If surveillance video had been uplinked from the ship via satellite at any time before the ship’s destruction, then video stills of his likeness would have been circulated among private security forces with enormous resources.

So Bryson had purchased certain products at a stage-costume-supply shop near the Opera, and by the next day his appearance had been altered dramatically. His hair was now silver-gray, with the variegated tones of a blond man who had gone gray. The technical services wizards at the Directorate had tutored Bryson well in the black arts of disguise. Cheek inserts had turned his face jowelly; the application of spirit gum had put latex pouches under his eyes, as well as wrinkles and fine lines around the eyes and mouth. Subtlety was paramount, as Bryson had learned from years of disguise: minor changes could have major effects yet raise no suspicions. He now looked easily twenty years older, a distinguished older gentleman who fit right in with the other men of accomplishment and position who frequented the Château de Saint-Meurice. He had become James Collier, an investment banker and venture capitalist from Santa Fe, New Mexico. As was not uncommon among certain venture capitalists who preferred to work away from the glare of public scrutiny, he would say little about what he actually did, turning away polite inquiries with self-deprecating wit.

Bryson and Layla were staying at a small, moderately priced, anonymous hotel on rue Trousseau. Neither one of them had stayed there before; its chief distinction was its very mediocrity. Each of them had arrived in Paris by a different route from Labacolla Airport — Bryson via Frankfurt, and Layla via Madrid. There had been a certain awkwardness about the sleeping arrangements, no doubt unavoidable. They were traveling as a couple, which usually meant sharing a bed or at least a room. Yet Bryson had requested that the hotel put them in separate bedrooms in an adjoining suite. A bit out of the ordinary, perhaps, but it did bespeak a certain level of propriety on the part of the unmarried couple, an old-fashioned discretion. In truth, Bryson knew the temptations of the flesh threatened to overwhelm him. She was a beautiful, highly sexual woman, and he had been solitary for far too long. But he did not want to destabilize an already tenuous working relationship, he told himself. Or perhaps he feared losing a necessary wariness. Was that it? Was it that he wanted to keep his distance so long as Elena remained a question mark in his life?

Now, as Layla guided him across the crowded room, smiling and nodding to social acquaintances, she kept up a lilting patter. “The story is that the château was built in the seventeenth century by one of Louis the Fourteenth’s ministers. It was so grand that the king became jealous, had the minister arrested, stole his architect and landscaper and all the furniture, and then, inspired by a fit of envy, started construction on Versailles, determined never to be outdone.”

Bryson smiled and nodded, maintaining the appearance of a moneyed guest suitably impressed by his surroundings. As Layla spoke, his eyes roamed the crowd, ever alert for the familiar face, the quickly averted glance. He had done this sort of thing countless times before, but this time was different, nerve-racking: he had stepped into the unknown. Also, his plan was vague, a necessary improvisation based on his own finely honed instincts.

Exactly what was the connection, if any, between Jacques Arnaud and the Directorate? The team of assassins dispatched to kill him had been working with Arnaud’s man on the Spanish Armada. The assassins—the Friulian brothers — were Directorate hires, which strongly indicated that Arnaud himself was at least affiliated with the Directorate in some mysterious, unspecified capacity. More than that, a man known by Bryson to be Directorate—Vance Gifford, or, as he’d styled himself, Jenrette—had been aboard the ship, having arrived in the company of Arnaud’s emissary.

It was all highly circumstantial, but taken together, the pieces of circumstantial evidence created a mosaic that was highly suggestive. Jacques Arnaud was one of the shadowy powers who now controlled the Directorate.

What Bryson needed was proof. Hard, incontrovertible evidence.

It was here somewhere, but where?

According to Layla, the Israelis believed that Jacques Arnaud’s firm was involved in laundering enormous sums of money for criminal elements that included the Russian mafiya. The Mossad’s surveillance suggested that Arnaud often received and placed business-related calls here, at his château, and repeated attempts by the Mossad and other intelligence services to tap his phones had proven useless. His communications were undecipherable, protected by hard encryption. This strongly suggested to Bryson that somewhere in the château there had to be specialized telecommunications equipment, “black” telephones at least, capable of encrypting, and decrypting, telephonic signals—phone calls, faxes, and E-mails.

As they maneuvered through the crowds, from room to room, Bryson noticed the paintings that crowded the walls, and that gave him an idea.

 

 

In a small room upstairs, two men in business suits sat in semidarkness, their faces illuminated only by the eerie bluish flicker from the banks of video monitors. The stainless steel and brushed chrome, the fiber-optic cables and cathode-ray tubes, made up a peculiar modern-art installation mounted on the ancient stone walls. Each monitor displayed a different angle in a different room below. Miniaturized cameras concealed in the walls, in fixtures and fittings, unseen and unnoticed by the myriad guests, relayed high-resolution video images to the security men huddled before the monitors. The clarity was such that the watchers could zoom in on any face that was of interest or concern, pulling in tight for a close-up that took up an entire screen. Images could be digitized, electronically compared against other images stored in a vast off-site data bank known as the Network. Any questionable persons could be identified and discreetly invited to leave, if need be.

Buttons were pushed; a face was enlarged on one monitor, the features screened onto a grid and scrutinized by the two men. It was the silver-haired, slightly jowelly, sun-lined face of a man whose name, furnished in advance to Arnaud’s security people, was James Collier of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

What drew the attention of the two men was not that they recognized the man’s face. Instead, it was the fact that they did not recognize the face. The man was an unknown quantity. To Arnaud’s ever-vigilant security force, the unknown was always a cause for concern.

 

 

Jacques Arnaud’s wife, Giséle, was a tall, imperious woman of aristocratic bearing, with an aquiline nose and gray-streaked black hair. Her hairline was unnaturally high, her facial skin too taut, unmistakable evidence of regular visits to a “clinic” in Switzerland. Bryson spotted her holding court in a corner of the book-lined library, a small crowd hanging on her every word. Bryson recognized her face from her regular appearances in the society pages of Paris Match, several years of which he had pored over in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

The hangers-on seemed dazzled by her cleverness, her every aperçu received with uproarious merriment. Accepting two flutes of champagne from a waiter and handing one to Layla, Bryson pointed to a canvas that hung near where Madame Arnaud was holding forth. Striding up to it eagerly, thereby positioning himself within earshot of the hostess, Bryson remarked in a voice just loud enough to be overheard by the adjacent gathering, “Fantastic, isn’t it? Ever see his portrait of Napoleon? Extraordinary—he turns Napoleon into a Roman emperor, posing him frontally like a statue, a living icon.”

His gambit worked; the proud owner could not resist turning her head toward a conversation she found more intriguing, since it concerned one of her own works of art. Bestowing upon Bryson a gracious smile, she said in fluent English, “Ah, and have you ever seen a stare as hypnotic as the one Ingres gives Napoleon?”

Bryson returned the smile, glowing as if he had found a soul mate. He bowed his head and extended his hand. “You must be Madame Arnaud. James Collier. A wonderful evening.”

“Pardon me,” she announced to her gathering, gently dismissing them. Moving closer, she said, “I see you’re an admirer of Ingres, Mr. Collier.”

“I would say I’m an admirer of yours, Madame Arnaud. Your collection of pictures demonstrates a truly discriminating eye. Oh, may I introduce my friend, Layla Sharett, of the Israeli embassy.”

“We’ve met before,” said the hostess. “So good to see you again,” she said, taking Layla’s hand, though her attention remained riveted on Bryson. In her prime, Bryson saw, she must have been a woman of striking beauty; even as a woman in her early seventies, she was a coquette. She had the courtesan’s talent for making a man feel he was the most fascinating man in the room, that no other man or woman existed. “My husband tells me he finds Ingres boring. He is not the connoisseur of art you seem to be.”

Bryson, however, did not want to seize this potential opening to be introduced to Jacques Arnaud. On the contrary, he preferred not to be called to the arms tycoon’s attention. “If only Ingres had been so fortunate as to have you as a subject for one of his portraits,” he said, shaking his head wistfully.

She affected a scowl, though Bryson could see she was secretly pleased. “Please! I would hate to have my portrait done by Ingres!”

“He did take forever on some of his portraits, didn’t he? Poor Madame Moitessier had to sit for twelve years.”

“And he turned her into a Medusa, her fingers into tentacles!”

“But an extraordinary portrait.”

“Claustrophobic, I think.”

“They say he may have used a camera lucida to produce some of his compositions—in effect, spying on his subjects before he captured them, you might say.”

“Is that right?”

“Still, as much as I admire his paintings, nothing compares to his drawings, don’t you agree?” Bryson knew that the Arnauds’ private collection included some of Ingres’s drawings, displayed in less public rooms of the château.

“I couldn’t agree more!” Giséle Arnaud exclaimed. “Though he himself considered his drawings to be potboilers.”

“I know, I know — while he lived in poverty in Rome, he was forced to support himself by drawing pictures of visitors and tourists. Some of the greatest paintings were done by artists working just to keep food on the table. The fact is, Ingres’s drawings are his best work by far. The use of white, of negative space, the way he captures light — they’re truly masterpieces.”

Madame Arnaud lowered her voice and said confidentially, “Actually, we have a few of his drawings hanging in the billiards room, you know.”

 

 

The ruse had worked. Madame Arnaud had invited Bryson and his guest to stroll into parts of the house that were not open to the other guests. She had offered to show him the drawings herself, but Bryson had declined, refusing to steal her away; but if she really didn’t mind, perhaps they could take a quick look by themselves?

As he and Layla wandered through halls and more intimate, less public rooms, whose walls were hung with less impressive works by lesser French artists, Bryson oriented himself. He had prepared well: he had located the collection of blueprints of historically important châteaux, maintained at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and had studied the layout of the Château de Saint-Meurice. He knew it was highly unlikely that the Arnauds would have done anything to alter Château de Saint-Meurice’s floor plan; the only variable was the use they made of the rooms, the location of the bedrooms and offices, particularly Arnaud’s private office.

Bryson walked idly arm-in-arm with Layla down one hallway, turning left into another. As they rounded a corner, they heard low, muffled, male voices.

They froze. The voices gradually became more audible and more distinct. The words were in French, but one speaker’s French had a definite foreign accent, which Bryson quickly placed as Russian, probably from Odessa.

“ … to return to the party,” the Frenchman was saying.

The Russian said something that Bryson couldn’t quite make out. Then the Frenchman replied, “But once Lille happens, the outrage will be enormous. The way will be clear.”

Signaling Layla to stay back, Bryson flattened himself against the wall and inched forward, his tread silent, all the while listening, concentrating. Neither the voices nor the footsteps seemed to be approaching. He took from the breast pocket of his tuxedo what looked like a silver ballpoint pen, then pulled from one end a long, thin, glasslike wire, telescoping it to its maximum eighteen-inch length. He bent the tip of the flexible fiber-optic periscope cable, then nudged it along the wall until it jutted out no more than half an inch beyond the wall’s end. Looking into the small eyepiece, he was able to see the two men clearly. One, a trim, compact man with heavy black glasses, entirely bald, was clearly Jacques Arnaud. He was conferring with a tall, florid-faced man whom Bryson did not immediately recognize. A few seconds later the man’s identity came to him: Anatoly Prishnikov.

Prishnikov. The mogul widely believed to be the true power behind the figurehead currently occupying the president’s office in the Kremlin.

Shifting the fiber-optic periscope slightly, Bryson was startled to discover another man, much closer, seated just around the corner. A guard, clearly armed, stationed at the beginning of the corridor. Shifting the scope yet again revealed another seated figure, another armed guard, stationed halfway down the hall, where the men were standing, in front of a large, steel-paneled door.

Arnaud’s private office.

They were in a part of the château that had no windows; ordinarily, it would be an unlikely location for an office. But Arnaud’s chief concern was security, not views.

The two men made the sort of final gestures that indicated they were finished talking, and fortunately they headed down the hall in the other direction. There was no need for Bryson and Layla to disappear.

Withdrawing the fiber-optic periscope and collapsing it back into its pen case, he turned toward Layla and nodded. She understood without his saying anything. They had located their target, the locus of Jacques Arnaud’s business activities within the Château de Saint-Meurice.

Swiftly, his tread silent, he backtracked until he found the open door to a room they had just passed. The sitting room was, as he had previously noted, dark and sparsely furnished, evidently rarely used. He consulted the luminous radium dial of his Patek Philippe watch. After a full minute had elapsed, he signaled to Layla, then ducked into the room, waiting in its dark recesses.

Layla began weaving down the hall toward the room that had to be Arnaud’s private, secure office, staggering as if drunk. Suddenly she let out a whoop of laughter and said to herself, though loudly enough to be heard by at least the first guard, just around the corner, “There’s got to be a bathroom around here somewhere!”

Turning the corner unstably, she came upon the armed guard, seated in a delicate antique chair. He straightened, stared at her with hostility. “Puis-je vous aider?” May I help you? he demanded stiffly in French, in a voice that commanded her to go no further. He was barely out of his twenties, with crew-cut black hair, heavy eyebrows, a pudgy, round face, and a five o’clock shadow. His small red mouth was turned down in a pugnacious frown.

She giggled and continued to stagger toward him. “I don’t know,” she replied provocatively, “can you help me? Why, what do we have here? Un homme, un vrai — a real man. Not like those pédés, those young fairies and old goats out there.”

The guard’s stern expression softened somewhat, his posture relaxed as he sized her up to be no threat to the security of Jacques Arnaud’s sanctum. His cheeks reddened visibly. There was no doubt he was quite taken with Layla’s voluptuous body, the swell of her breasts revealed by the low-cut black gown. “I’m sorry, mademoiselle,” he said nervously, “please, stay right there—you must go no further.”

Layla smiled coyly, bracing herself against the stone wall with one outstretched hand. “But why would I want to go any further?” she said huskily, suggestively, as she inched closer to him. “Looks like I’ve found what I’ve been looking for.” She moved her hand along the wall, slinking ever closer to him, jutting her breasts forward.

The young guard’s smile was uncomfortable. He cast a nervous glance down the hall at the other sentry, who seemed to be paying him no attention. “Please, mademoiselle—”

She lowered her voice. “Maybe you can help me … to find a bathroom.”

“Back down the hall you came,” he replied, attempting a businesslike tone, though without much success, “there is a restroom.”

Her voice became even more breathy and suggestive. “But I keep losing my way around here, and if you wouldn’t mind showing me …”

The guard again glanced uneasily at his compatriot, who was too far down the hall to take notice.

“Perhaps,” she added, arching her brows, “a little guided tour. It needn’t take long at all, hmm?”

Flush-faced and awkward, the guard rose from his chair. “Very well, mademoiselle,” he said.

There were now, Layla calculated, several possible avenues the guard could pursue. If he happened to take her into the room in which Bryson was concealed, the guard would be taken down, the element of surprise a weapon as deadly as Nicholas Bryson’s hands.

But the guard instead guided her into another room, this one a chambre de fumeur, comfortably furnished. He was, she noticed, quite unmistakably aroused. He gave a wolfish grin as he pulled the door closed.

It was time to put Plan B into effect. She turned to him, her face full of anticipation.

Silently, Bryson rushed into the hallway, turned the corner, and then slowed his pace, sauntering toward the sole remaining guard, who kept a solitary vigil before the closed steel-paneled door of Arnaud’s presumably empty office.

Now it was Bryson’s turn to feign drunkenness, though to a very different end. The guard looked up as Bryson approached with a loose-limbed, swaying walk.

“Monsieur,” the guard said brusquely, part greeting and part warning.

As he sashayed closer to the guard, Bryson held up his gold Zippo lighter, shaking his head disgustedly. In English, he said, “The damnedest thing! Can you believe this? I remember my lighter, but it’s the damned cigarettes I forget!”

“Sir?”

In French, Bryson said, “Vous n’auriez pas une cigarette?” He kept waving the Zippo and shaking his head. “You’re a Frenchman—you must have one.”

The guard obligingly reached into his jacket pocket at the same instant that Bryson flicked the Zippo’s striker, which jetted forward not a tongue of flame but a quick spray of a powerful neural incapacitant. Before the guard even had a chance to reach for his gun, he was at once blinded and frozen in place; a few seconds later he slumped forward, unconscious.

Working quickly, Bryson propped the guard back on his chair like a mannequin, folding the man’s hands in his lap. The guard’s eyelids were closed, so Bryson, knowing from long experience that they could not be forced open, left him as he was. From a distance, one would assume the guard was on duty; a passerby who came near would assume the guard had fallen asleep.

The incapacitating spray was not the only item of security equipment Bryson had purchased in Paris; he also had with him an array of other small devices, including infrared- and RF-code scanners and grabbers and a security-gate scanner. But a quick inspection of the steel door confirmed that only one piece was necessary. No doubt Arnaud employed the usual alarms and intrusion detectors when he planned to be gone from his home for any lengthy period of time. This evening, however, having just stopped into his office and perhaps intending to return again within the next few hours, he had simply allowed the door to close behind him. Although the door locked automatically, it was by means of nothing more elaborate than a conventional pin-tumbler door lock. Bryson took out a small black device, a lock-pick gun that he had learned to use over the years and had found far speedier than a manual lock-pick set. He inserted it into the lock, then pulled the plunger back and forth a few times until the tumblers turned and the heavy door popped open.

Shining his small pen flashlight around the dark room, he was taken aback at how spare it was. There appeared to be no file cabinets, no locked credenza. In fact, the office had a barrackslike spareness. There was a small seating area with a couch, two chairs, and a coffee table, and a completely bare mahogany table used as a desk. On the desk were a Tensor lamp and two telephones … .

The phone.

The phone in question was there, a flat, charcoal-gray box about a foot square, apparently nothing more than a desk telephone with a lid. But Bryson recognized it at once. He had seen countless models, though few as sleek and compact: the latest generation of satellite encryption phone. The lid contained both the antenna and the RF. Built into the device was a chip containing the encryption algorithm, which used nonlinear-phase signal encryption, fixed-length convolver, unlimited 128-bit keys. Wiretapping the line would do no good, since the encryption key was never transmitted. An intercepted call would sound like garbled nonsense, the voices both highly encrypted and scrambled. The phone’s satellite uplink capacity meant that it could work even from remote corners of the earth.

Bryson worked quickly, deftly dismantling the telephone. The door was locked behind him, and the guard would be out for at least half an hour, but there was a definite risk that Jacques Arnaud would return suddenly. If he did, and found one guard missing and the other passed out, he might simply attribute the wayward behavior to the party’s carnival atmosphere, which had somehow infected his household staff. Of course, that was only if Layla had managed to keep the lustful young guard occupied. Somehow Bryson did not doubt her ability to do so.

There was nothing more he could do now than work as swiftly as he could.

Spread out before him on the burnished, bare surface of Arnaud’s desk were the electronic guts of the telephone. Unseating the special read-only chip from the circuitry, he held it up, examining it in the strong light of the Tensor lamp.

It was precisely what he had hoped to find. The cryptochip was relatively bulky, as such proprietary chips typically were, having been produced in very small quantities to link a small cadre of conspirators while ensuring zero-knowledge encryption. The mere fact that Arnaud had such a piece of equipment sitting on his desk revealed that he was part of a tightly linked group, international in scope, that required absolute secrecy. Could he in fact be one of the hidden principals of the Directorate?

Bryson removed from his dinner jacket an object that looked like a miniature transistor radio. In the coin-size slot at one end he inserted the cryptochip, then switched the device on. An indicator light changed from green to red and then, some ten seconds later, back to green again. A signal had pulsed through the chip, capturing the data. He listened for any voices in the hallway or approaching footsteps; then, satisfied there were none, he ejected the cryptochip and replaced it in the satellite phone’s circuitry. In a few minutes he had the phone reassembled. In the chip reader he now had stored all the specifications of the chip’s “key,” vast sequences of binary digits and algorithmic instructions. The encryption scheme changed each time the phone was used, never once repeating itself. It was a high-tech version of a self-replenishing one-time pad. Fortunately, he now had every single combination recorded. Making use of this information was a daunting task, but there were others who specialized in this highly specialized area.

Moments later Bryson was striding down the hall back toward the party. The guard in the corridor by the office door, he took note, was still out. When he came to, in ten minutes, he would quickly recall what had happened to him, but the odds were great he would do nothing, summon no help, for to reveal that he had been overpowered by one man was surely to ask for abrupt termination.

 

 

In the chambre de fumeur, the young guard stood with his trousers gathered around his feet, his shirt unbuttoned and hanging open, as he prepared for final gratification. Layla stroked his bare abdomen, kissing his neck. She had protracted things for just about as long as she plausibly could. Glancing at the sweep second hand of her tiny gold wristwatch, she took mental note of the time. According to their plan, it was just about time that …

A scuff on the stone floor outside.

Bryson’s prearranged signal. He was precisely on schedule.

She stooped to grab her small black velvet evening bag, then gave the guard a quick, friendly peck on the check. “Allons,” she said crisply, rushing to the door. The guard gaped at her, his face flushed crimson, eyes half-maddened with desire. “Les plus grands plaisirs sont ceux qui ne sont pas realisés,” she whispered as she glided out of the room. The highest pleasures are the unrealized ones. Just before she shut the door, she said, “But I will never forget you, my friend.”

Layla’s purse was heavier than it had been previously: it now contained his snub-nosed Beretta. She knew that the guard, however angry and frustrated he might be, would never say a word about her, for to do so would be to confess to an unforgivable security lapse. She checked her makeup in a compact mirror, reapplied her lip gloss, and then returned to the party, entering through the banquet room. Bryson, she saw, was himself just arriving.

 

 

A small string ensemble was playing chamber music in the banquet room, while coming quite audibly from the adjoining parlor were the thumping beat and blaring synthesizer sounds of rock music. The two sounds clashed bizarrely, the elegant strains of Mozart’s eighteenth-century music easily overwhelmed by the jarring, earsplitting cacophony of the twenty-first.

Bryson placed an arm around Layla’s slender waist and said to her quietly, “I hope you enjoyed yourself.”

“Very funny,” she murmured. “I’d much rather have traded places with you. Mission accomplished?”

As Bryson was about to reply, he noticed the balding head of Jacques Arnaud in a distant corner of the room. He seemed to be conferring with another man in a dinner jacket whose earpiece indicated that he was part of Arnaud’s security team. Arnaud nodded, looking around the room. Then another man rushed up to the two, his gestures and facial expressions revealing great urgency. There was a brief, huddled consultation; then Bryson saw Arnaud’s gaze flicker in his direction. Suspicions had been aroused, security breaches reported, a warning sounded. Bryson had little doubt that Arnaud was looking directly at him, and wondered whether the Frenchman had been tipped off by surveillance cameras in the vicinity of his office. Bryson knew there would be cameras. But everything at this point was calculated risk. In fact, to do nothing was the gravest risk of all.

The answer came a second or two later, when the two security men Arnaud had been huddling with suddenly broke away and began threading their way through the crowd, each taking a different path around the room toward Bryson and Layla. In their single-minded haste, the guards collided with several guests. Then a third raced into the room, and it became immediately evident what they were doing: all three exits from the room were now covered, and Bryson and Layla could not escape.

Closed-circuit surveillance cameras had indeed captured their movements through the halls of the château outside of the party. Bryson’s surreptitious entry into Jacques Arnaud’s office had been observed; or perhaps, given the delay in response time, only his exit from the office had been seen.

And now they were surrounded.

Layla squeezed his hand with almost painful pressure, a silent alert; she, too, saw the vise they were in. Their options were severely restricted. Guns would not be fired if it were at all avoidable; Arnaud’s people would try to apprehend Bryson and Layla quietly without alarming the other guests. Appearances were to be preserved if possible. But Bryson had little doubt of the ruthlessness of the host and his security team. If shots had to be fired, they would be. Explanations could be offered later, lies furnished, the true circumstances covered up.

Bryson’s head spun as he watched the security men race toward him, slowed only by the obstacle presented by the other guests, in addition to Arnaud’s preference to maintain some semblance of propriety. He felt Layla jabbing something into his hand and realized she was trying to hand him her black velvet handbag. But why? He had seen the bulge and had guessed that she had disarmed the guard in the chambre de fumeur, stolen his weapon. But surely she knew he had a weapon of his own.

The jabbing continued, and finally Bryson took the handbag from her, opening it, and realized at once what she had been so insistently trying to pass to him. He put the bag behind his back, slipped out the small canister, a leftover from the Spanish Armada, and yanked the lever before he dropped it to the floor. The grenade rolled a good distance along the ancient stone before it started spewing out dense gray smoke. Within seconds, a cloud of thick smoke began rising from the floor, along with an acrid, sulphuric odor.

Screams immediately erupted in the crowd, cries of “Au feu!” and “Run!” Arnaud’s guards were a good six to eight feet away when the panic arose. Soon the separate cries were joined by others, male and female, the frenzy growing, hysteria overtaking the room as it filled with smoke. The proper, dignified party guests had become terrified lemmings, rushing toward the exits with shouts of fear. Alarms were clanging, presumably set off by smoke detectors. The music in both adjoining rooms had stopped; the chamber group and the rock group had joined the evacuation. The surging crowd was utter pandemonium, and Layla and Bryson disappeared into the stampede, unseen by Arnaud’s security forces.

Guests screamed, clung to one another, elbowed others out of their way. As the two of them rushed through the main door, plunging through the flailing, panicked crowd, Bryson grabbed Layla and pulled her off in the direction of the elaborate topiary that surrounded the château. Within the thick hedges Bryson had concealed a motorcycle. He jumped astride the high-powered BMW and kick-started it, signaling for her to climb on.

Moments later they were roaring through the confusion and madness, leaving behind guests spilling out of the château’s front doors, limousines pulling up to the château, summoned to rescue their frantic passengers. Within three minutes they were speeding down the A-1 highway toward Paris, passing car after car.

But they were not alone.

As they left other cars far behind, Bryson soon became aware of a small, high-powered black sedan accelerating, closing in on them, coming closer and closer, leaving other vehicles far behind. One hundred feet, fifty feet, twenty … and then Bryson saw, in the motorcycle’s rearview mirror, that the sedan was not just approaching, it was swerving madly, fishtailing back and forth. But it was not a car out of control; its bizarre movements were controlled, apparently deliberate.

It was trying to run Bryson off the road!

As Bryson opened the throttle fully, accelerating to the motorcycle’s maximum capacity, he spotted an exit up ahead and abruptly changed lanes, veering toward the exit. The black sedan followed, cutting across several lanes of traffic, protesting horns blaring in its wake. Bryson could feel Layla’s hands on his shoulders, her grip tightening. He winced; the pain was great, the shoulder wound exquisitely sensitive.

Bryson pulled on to the exit ramp, the car now less than ten or fifteen feet behind and gaining. “Hold on tight!” he shouted, and he felt Layla’s hands squeeze even tighter in acknowledgment. He emitted an involuntary cry of agony.

Suddenly he spun off to the left, executing a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree “bootlegger’s turn” in such a confined area that the motorcycle almost flipped over, but he somehow managed to regain balance, wheeling around until he was headed back down the ramp along the narrow shoulder, leaving the sedan still barreling up the exit.

Now, roaring down the highway the wrong way, he kept to the shoulder, which broadened somewhat. Headlights flashed furiously, horns blared. He glanced in the small rearview mirror. They had lost the black sedan; it had been forced by the cars behind it to continue up the ramp and off the highway.

Now the BMW’s throttle was fully open; the engine straining, giving off a blatting noise. They were virtually flying along the side of the A-l, against traffic.

But they were still not in the clear, for rushing toward them was a single headlight of a motorcycle, speeding even faster than the other vehicles on the road, and Bryson knew it had to be another pursuer dispatched from the Château de Saint-Meurice.

There was a squealing of brakes, car horns honking, and suddenly the other motorcycle, too, had reversed direction and was just behind them. In the rearview, Bryson could see it gaining on them; though he could not see the make of the cycle, the engine roar told him that it was even more powerful than the BMW he had rented in Paris, capable of attaining even greater speeds.

Suddenly Bryson felt something slam into them. It was the other motorcycle, deliberately crashing into the rear wheel, almost knocking them over! Above the motorcycle’s roar he could hear, very near his ear, Layla screaming in terror.

“Are you all right?” he shouted.

“Yes!” she screamed in reply. “But move it!”

He tried to put on another burst of speed, but the motorcycle was already traveling at its maximum.

Another impact sent the motorcycle veering off the side of the road. Just off the shoulder was a long flat meadow, cleared farmland interspersed with wooden boxes used to collect hay or other crops. Bryson righted the vehicle, then accelerated off the asphalt and onto the grass and dirt, the pursuing motorcycle right behind. No gunshots, which told him that the driver needed to use both hands for maneuvering and could not spare a hand to use a weapon.

Pursue your pursuer.

This had been one of Ted Waller’s oft-repeated aperçus.

In the end, you will decide who is predator and who is prey. The prey survives only by becoming the predator.

Bryson now did the unexpected, circling around the meadow, carving deep ruts in the soft earth, until he was charging straight at the other motorcycle.

The other motorcyclist, obviously taken aback by this change in strategy, tried to spin out of the way, but there was no time. Bryson crashed into him, and the driver was flung from his vehicle.

Slamming on his brakes, the cycle spewing dirt into the air, he came to a stop. Layla leaped off, then he did, flinging the bike to the ground.

The other driver was running away, and as he ran he was obviously reaching for a weapon, but Layla already had hers out, and she fired the Beretta three times in rapid succession.

With a scream, the pursuer tumbled to the ground, but he had managed to wrest his weapon from its holster, and he fired back. His aim was off; bullets spit into the ground near them. Layla fired again, then Bryson had his gun out and fired, hitting their enemy in the chest.

He flew backward, sprawled on the ground, dead.

Bryson raced toward him, flipping the prone body over, rummaging through the man’s pockets for identification.

He pulled out a wallet. He was not surprised to find one; the pursuer had been given no notice, and thus no time to rid himself of identifying documents.

What he saw, however, he was not prepared for. It was beyond a surprise; the shock was deep, stunning, taking his breath away.

The detritus of bureaucracy, in this case, was straightforward. Documents could be forged, but Bryson was an expert at recognizing fake documents, and this was not one of them. There was no doubt. He examined it carefully in the bright moonlight, turning it over, locating the requisite fibers and irreproducible markings.

“What is it?” Layla asked. He handed it to her; she saw at once.

“Oh, my God!” she said, her voice hushed.

Their pursuer had been no mere rent-a-cop, nor even a French citizen on Arnaud’s security payroll.

He was a U.S. citizen, employed at the Paris station of the CIA.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The secretary had been with the Central Intelligence Agency for seventeen years, but she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times anyone had tried to bypass her and barge into the office of her boss, Harry Dunne. Even on the few occasions when the Director of Central Intelligence dropped by his deputy’s office unannounced (Harry almost always went to the director’s office), and the matter was urgent, the director had at least waited for her to buzz Harry.

Yet this man had ignored her entreaties, her protestations and warnings, her firm insistence that Mr. Dunne was out of town, and had just done the unthinkable. He had stormed past her and had gone right into her boss’s office. Marjorie knew the mandated security procedures; she pressed the emergency button mounted underneath her main desk drawer, thereby summoning Security, and only then had she frantically warned Harry Dunne over the intercom that, despite her best efforts, this lunatic was coming through.

 

 

Bryson knew there were only two choices now: retreat or confrontation, and he preferred confrontation, the only option that had a chance of eliciting spontaneous revelation, forcing unplanned truths. Layla had urged him to stay away from the Agency, counseling that survival was more important now than whatever information he could obtain. But to Bryson there was really no choice at all: to penetrate the lies, to finally learn the truth about Elena, about his entire life, he had to face Dunne.

Layla remained in France, trying to work her contacts, to learn what she could about Jacques Arnaud and his recent activities. He had not told her anything about the Directorate; it was still best to keep her in the dark. She said good-bye to him at Charles de Gaulle airport, surprising Bryson with the ardency of her hug, her kiss that was more than the farewell kiss of a friend, immediately after which she turned away in flushed embarrassment.

Harry Dunne was standing at his plate-glass window, jacket off, smoking a cigarette on a very long ivory holder. Smoking in the headquarters building was, Bryson knew, against Agency regulations, but as deputy director, Dunne was unlikely to be called on it by anyone. He turned as Bryson entered, Marjorie right behind him.

“Mr. Dunne, I’m so sorry, I tried to stop this man!” Marjorie called frantically. “Security’s on the way.”

For an instant Dunne seemed to be examining him, his narrow, creased face compressed into a frown, the small bloodshot eyes glittering. Bryson had taken care to disguise himself, alter his appearance just enough to confound any video face-matching equipment. Then Dunne shook his head as he exhaled a plume of smoke with a loud, hacking cough. “Naw, it’s all right, Margie, call off Security. I can deal with this fella myself.”

Bewildered, the secretary looked from her boss to the intruder, then, straightening, she backed out of the room, closing the door behind her.

The white-haired Dunne took a step toward Bryson, visibly enraged. “All Security would do would be to restrain me from killing you with my bare hands,” he snapped, “and I’m not sure I want that. What kind of game are you playing here, Bryson? You think we’re fools, is that it? You think we don’t get constant field reports, satellite feeds? I guess it’s true what they say: once a traitor, always a traitor.” Dunne snubbed out his cigarette in an overflowing glass ashtray on the edge of his desk. “I have no idea how the hell you got into the building, with all our vaunted security procedures. But I expect the surveillance video will tell the tale.”

Bryson was jolted by the man’s unbanked fury, and it caused him to hesitate. Fury was the last thing he expected on the part of Harry Dunne. Fear, defensiveness, bluster—but not anger. Through gritted teeth, Bryson said, “You sent out your henchmen to kill me. Low-level Paris-station flunkies.”

Dunne snorted with derision as he pulled another cigarette from the jacket pocket of his rumpled gray suit. He inserted it in the ivory holder and lighted it, waving out the match and dropping it into the ashtray. “You can do better than that, Professor,” Dunne said, shaking his head as he turned back to the picture window that looked over the verdant Virginia countryside. “Look, the facts are simple. We sent you out to worm your way back into the Directorate. Instead, all you seem to have done is blow up some of our most promising links to the Directorate. Then you disappeared, went to ground. Sort of like a mob hit man blowing away witnesses.” He turned back to Bryson, exhaled a cloud of smoke into his face. “We thought you were ex-Directorate. I guess that’s where we made our biggest mistake, huh?”

“What the hell are you trying to say to me?”

“I’d like to ask you to take a polygraph, but that’s one of the first things they teach you boys, isn’t it—how to beat the box?”

Disgusted, Bryson slapped a stiff blue plastic-laminate card onto the only bare spot of mahogany visible on Harry Dunne’s desk. The Agency ID card he had pulled from the wallet of the dead motorcyclist outside of Paris, the pursuer dispatched from Jacques Arnaud’s château. “You want to know how I got in here?”

Dunne picked it up, immediately examined the hologram: holding it up to the light, tipping it to bring out the three-dimensional CIA seal, finding the magnetic foil sandwiched between the plastic layers. It was an everyday object at the CIA, but only at the CIA—a high-tech, high-security identification card, virtually impossible to fake. Dunne slid it into a desktop card reader. On his large blue computer screen, a face popped up, along with an employee’s basic personnel information. The face wasn’t Bryson’s, but at the moment, Bryson’s altered and disguised face fairly closely resembled the one up on the monitor.

“Paris station. Where the hell did you get this?” Dunne demanded.

“You going to listen to me now?”

Dunne’s face was wary. He exhaled twin plumes of smoke through his nostrils as he sank into his desk chair. He snubbed out the cigarette, prematurely. “At least let me call Finneran in here.”

“Finneran?”

“You met him at Blue Ridge. My aide-de-camp.”

“Forget it.”

“He’s my goddamned institutional memory —”

“Forget it! Just you and me and the listening devices.”

Dunne shrugged. He pulled out another cigarette, but instead of placing it into the holder, he began toying with it between nicotine-stained fingers. Through the threadbare fabric of Dunne’s blue button-down shirt, Bryson could see the outlines of an array of nicotine patches along his shoulders and biceps.

As Bryson recounted the events of the past few days, Dunne became grave. When he finally spoke, his voice was hushed. “A two-million-dollar bounty on your head, placed even before you showed up on Calacanis’s ship. Somehow the word was out on the street that you were back in the game.”

“You seem to forget they tried to dispatch me in Washington. They seemed to know I’d be coming back, looking for the old Directorate headquarters. That points to a leak in the pipes right here, in this building.” Bryson inscribed a small circle in the air with an index finger.

“Christ!” shot back the deputy director, tearing the cigarette in half and flinging the pieces toward the ashtray. “The whole goddamned thing was off the books, the only record of your involvement your name in the Security data bank for purposes of clearing you in and out of the building.”

“If the Directorate is wired into CIA, that’s enough to do it.”

“Come on, man, it wasn’t even a true name! You were Jonas Barrett—a cover alias used in the Security logs being, incidentally, against every fucking rule in the playbook. You don’t lie to Security. Never lie to Mother.”

“Expense vouchers, equipment requisitions—”

“Buried, all messaging text in proprietary cipher, all need-to-know, all DDCI priority. Look, Bryson, I covered my ass, what the hell you think? You were a huge goddamned risk on my part, I gotta tell ya. I don’t know what stress they put you under, how they might have burned you out. Put a guy’s red-bordered folder under a fucking microscope, you still don’t know shit about what’s in his head. I mean, look, they put you out to pasture in your little cow-town college —”

“For God’s sake,” thundered Bryson, “do you think I volunteered for this? Your goons came and wrenched me out of retirement. I was just beginning to heal, and you came to tear open the scab! I’m not here to defend myself—I assume you boys did your homework on me. I want to know what the hell CIA was doing, following me outside Paris in order to kill me. I hope to hell you have a good explanation, or at least a convincing lie.”

Dunne glowered. “I’m going to ignore that last dig, Bryson,” he said quietly. “Think this through, wouldya? According to what you’re telling me, you were recognized by this Directorate operative you worked with in Kowloon, Vance Gifford—”

“Yes, and according to the Sangiovanni brothers, I was also identified by Arnaud’s man aboard the ship. That’s obvious and beyond dispute. It’s not hard to walk back the cat and see how Santiago de Compostela happened. I’m talking about Chantilly, about Paris! About one CIA operative I happened to flush out because he was sloppy enough to leave his ID papers on his person. And where there’s one, there’s always more, you know that as well as I. So what are you going to tell me—that the Agency is out of control? It’s either that or you’re double-dealing me, and I want to know which it is, now!”

“No!” Dunne shouted hoarsely, his voice then dissolving in a series of hacking coughs. “Those aren’t the only possible explanations!”

“Then what are you trying to sell me?”

Dunne drew his own circle in the air with an index finger, mimicking Bryson’s, signaling the room bugs. He scowled. “I’m saying I want to check some things out. I’m saying I think we ought to continue this discussion at another time and place.” His face seemed even more lined, the hollows deeper, and for the first time his eyes looked haunted.

 

 

The Rosamund Cleary Extended Care Facility was, in plain English, a nursing home. It was a handsome, low-slung red-brick facility surrounded by a few acres of wooded land in Dutchess County, in upstate New York. Whatever it was called, it was an expensive, well-managed place, a last home for the financially privileged who needed medical attention that relatives and other loved ones could not give them. For the last twelve years it had been the home of Felicia Munroe, the woman who, with her husband, Peter, had taken the teenaged Nicholas Bryson in after Bryson’s parents had been killed in an automobile crash.

Bryson had loved the woman, had always had a close and loving relationship with her, but he had never thought of her as his mother. The accident had happened too late in his life for that. She was just Aunt Felicia, the doting wife of Uncle Pete, who’d been one of his father’s best friends. They had taken loving care of him, welcomed him into their home, even paid his way through boarding school and then college, for which he was eternally grateful.

Peter Munroe had met George Bryson at the Officers Club in Bahrain. Colonel Bryson, as he was then, had been supervising construction of a major new barracks, and Munroe, a civil engineer for a multinational construction firm, had been a bidder on the project. Bryson and Munroe had become fast friends over too many beers—the specialty of the club in that nonalcoholic nation—and yet, when the bids were submitted, Colonel Bryson recommended against Pete Munroe’s firm. He had no choice, really; another construction company had underbid them. Munroe took the bad news in good spirit, took Bryson out for a round of drinks on him, and said he didn’t really give a shit—he’d gotten more out of this fucking country than he’d ever expected to—a friend. Only later—too late, as it turned out—did the senior Bryson learn why the winning bidder came in so low: dishonesty. The firm tried to stick the army with millions of dollars in cost overruns. When George Bryson tried to apologize, Munroe refused to accept his apology. “Corruption’s a way of life in this business,” he said. “If I really wanted the job, I would have lied, too. I was the naïve one.” The friendship between George Bryson and Pete Munroe, however, was sealed.

But was that the truth? Was there really more to it? Was Harry Dunne telling him the truth? Now that he had concrete evidence that an active CIA operative on the Agency payroll had attempted to kill him in France, everything was in question. For if Dunne had had anything to do with that, was anything else he said to be trusted? In some ways Bryson regretted not coming here first, before flying off to the Spanish Armada. He should have found old Aunt Felicia and questioned her before agreeing to do Dunne’s dirty work. Bryson had visited Felicia twice before, once with Elena, but not in several years.

Dunne’s words to him that day in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the day that changed his life, still echoed in his head. He would not soon forget them.

“Let me ask you something, Bryson. Did you believe this was an accident? You were fifteen, a brilliant student, terrific athlete, prime of American youth, all that. Now both your parents are suddenly killed. Your godparents take you in — ”

“Uncle Pete … Peter Munroe.”

“That was the name he took, sure. Not the name he was born with. And he made sure you went to college where you did, and made a lot of other decisions for you besides. All of which pretty much guaranteed that you’d end up in their hands. The Directorate’s, I mean.”

Bryson found Aunt Felicia sitting in front of a television set in a spacious public sitting room tastefully appointed with Persian rugs and massive mahogany antiques. Several other elderly people were scattered about the room, a few reading or crocheting, several dozing. Felicia Munroe appeared to be watching golf with rapt fascination.

“Aunt Felicia,” Bryson said heartily.

She turned to look at him, and for a fleeting instant recognition seemed to dawn on her face. But it immediately gave way to a foggy bewilderment. “Yes?” she said sharply.

“Aunt Felicia, I’m Nick. Remember me?”

She stared at him with incomprehension, squinting. He realized that the traces of senility he had seen in her years ago had grown into something far deeper and more serious. After staring for an uncomfortably long time, she gave a slow smile. “It is you,” she breathed.

“Remember? I lived with you — you took care of me … ?”

“You’ve come back,” she whispered, finally seeming to comprehend. Tears sprang to her eyes. “My heavens, how I’ve missed you.”

Bryson’s heart lifted.

“My darling George,” she trilled. “My dearest darling George. How long it’s been.”

For a moment he was perplexed, and then he understood. Bryson was about the same age that his father, Gen. George Bryson, was when he died. In Aunt Felicia’s confused mind—a mind that probably could recall clearly events of half a century ago, yet could not remember her own name—he was George Bryson. And indeed the resemblance was strong. He was often startled to see how much he was coming to look like his father, the older he got.

Then, as if she had suddenly grown bored with her visitor, she turned her gaze back to the television set. Bryson stood, shifting his weight from foot to foot, unsure what to do next. In a minute or so, Felicia seemed to become conscious of his presence, and she turned to look at him again.

“Why, hello there,” she ventured tentatively. Her face looked worried, the expression rapidly turning frightened. “But you—but you’re dead! I thought you were dead!”

Bryson simply looked at her neutrally, not wanting to disturb the illusion. Let her believe what she wants to believe; perhaps she will say something … .

“You died in that terrible accident,” she said. Her face was racked with tension. “Yes, you did. That terrible, terrible accident. You and Nina both. What an awful thing. And you leaving poor young Nicky an orphan. Oh, I don’t think I stopped crying for three days. Pete was always the strong one—he got me through it.” The tears glistened in her eyes once again, and they began to course down her cheeks. “So much Pete didn’t tell me about that night,” she continued, her voice almost a singsong. “So much he couldn’t tell me, wouldn’t tell me. How the guilt must have eaten him up inside. For years he wouldn’t talk to me about that night, about what he did.”

A chill ran down Bryson’s spine.

“And he’d never talk to your little Nicky about it, you know. What a thing to carry with you, what a terrible, terrible thing!” She shook her head, dabbing at her eyes with the frilly cuff of her white blouse. Then she turned back to the television.

Bryson strode to the TV, shut it off, and stood right in front of her. Though the poor woman’s short-term memory had been destroyed by the effects of senility, or perhaps Alzheimer’s disease, it appeared that many of her long-term memories might have been spared.

“Felicia,” he said gently, “I want to talk to you about Pete. Pete Munroe, your husband.”

The direct stare seemed to unnerve her; she studied the pattern on the carpet. “He used to make me a whiskey sling when I had a cold, you know,” she said. She seemed lost in the memory, her manner now relaxed. “Honey and lemon juice and just a wee bit of bourbon. No, more than a wee bit. You’ll be better in no time.”

“Felicia, did he ever talk about something called the Directorate?”

She looked up at him blankly. “An untreated cold can linger for a week. But with treatment, it will pass in seven days!” She giggled, waggling her finger. “Peter always said an untreated cold can linger for a week …”

“Did he ever talk about my father?”

“Oh, he was a great talker. Told the funniest stories.”

At the other end of the room, one of the patients had had an accident, and two janitors appeared with mops. The two custodians chattered to each other in Russian. A Russian phrase, spoken loudly, was audible. Ya nye znayu, one of them said brusquely: I don’t know. The accent was Muscovite.

Felicia Munroe had heard it, too, and she perked up in response. “Ya nye znayu,” she repeated, then giggled. “Gibberish! Gibberish!”

“Not really gibberish, Aunt Felicia,” Bryson put in.

“Gibberish!” she replied defiantly. “Just the sort of nonsense Pete would say in his sleep. Ya nye znayu. All that craziness. Whenever he talked in his sleep, he’d talk in that funny language, and he just hated when I teased him about it.”

“He talked like that in his sleep?” Bryson said hollowly, his heart thudding in his rib cage.

“Oh, he was a terrible sleeper.” For a moment she seemed lucid. “Always talked in his sleep.”

Uncle Pete spoke Russian in his sleep, the one time when you can’t control your utterances. Was Harry Dunne right: was Peter Munroe an associate of Gennady Rosovsky’s, a.k.a. Ted Waller? Could it be true? Was any other explanation even possible? Bryson was dumbstruck.

But Felicia kept talking. “Particularly after you died, George. He was so sorry. He tossed and turned, he yelled and cried in his sleep, and always talking that gibberish!”

 

 

The area of Rock Creek Park in Washington, on the northern part of Beach Drive, was a good location for the rendezvous with Harry Dunne very early the next morning. Bryson had chosen it; Dunne had invited him to select the meeting point not out of deference to Bryson’s field skills — after all, Dunne’s experience as an operative with the Agency’s clandestine division had been over twice as long as Bryson’s with the Directorate—but more likely as a courtesy extended by a host to his honored guest.

The CIA deputy director’s request to meet off site, outside Agency walls, was alarming to Bryson. It was hard to believe that Dunne, the number-two man in the Agency, feared his own office was bugged; that fact itself gave credence to the theory that the CIA had been penetrated by the Directorate—that Bryson’s old handlers had somehow managed to extend their tentacles into the highest reaches of the CIA. Whatever information Dunne might have been able to collect, the mere fact that he insisted on continuing their discussion in a neutral, secure location was unnerving proof that something was very wrong.

Still, Bryson would take nothing at face value. Trust no one, Ted Waller used to say with a cackle, words now grotesquely appropriate: Waller himself had turned out to be the cardinal betrayer of trust. Bryson would not let down his guard; he would trust no one, Dunne included.

He arrived at the designated location a full hour early. It was barely four o’clock in the morning, the sky dark, the air cold and damp. Passing cars were few, spaced far apart in time: night-shift workers going home, their replacements arriving. The business of government was round-the-clock.

The silence was strange, unaccustomed. Bryson became aware of the sounds of twigs crackling underfoot as he paced the dense woods surrounding the clearing he had chosen, noises that would ordinarily be masked by the ambient roar of nearby traffic. He wore the crepe-soled shoes he favored for field work because they minimized such noise.

Bryson surveyed the location, searching for points of vulnerability. The wooded ridge overlooked a small patch of meadow, next to a small, asphalt-paved parking area, at the edge of which was a concrete, bunkerlike restroom facility, half sunken below ground, in which they had agreed to meet. Rain had been forecast, and though the forecast had turned out wrong, a sheltered location had seemed desirable. Too, the facility’s thick concrete walls would provide protection in the event of ambush from without.

But Bryson was determined that there would be no ambush. He made a circuit around the wooded ridge, through the dense trees overlooking the meadow, checking for recently made footsteps or branches broken in a suspicious pattern, as well as for scopes, mounts, or other devices that might have been emplaced in advance. A second sweep revealed all possible avenues of approach; nothing would be left to chance. After two more sweeps, each from different directions and covering different vantage points, Bryson was satisfied that no ambush was already in place. That did not rule out any future arrivals, but at least he would be able to authoritatively detect subtle changes in background, divergences otherwise ignored.

At precisely five o’clock in the morning, a black government sedan pulled off Beach Drive and into the parking area. It was a Lincoln Continental, unmarked except for generic government license plates. Watching through small, high-powered binoculars from a blind he had chosen in a dense copse of trees, Bryson could make out Dunne’s regular driver, a slender African American in a navy blue uniform. Dunne sat in the backseat clutching a file folder. There appeared to be no one else in the vehicle.

The limousine pulled up to the restroom and came to a stop. The driver got out and went to open the door for his boss, but Dunne, impatient as always, was already halfway out of the car. He was scowling, his habitual expression. Glancing briefly to either side, he descended the short flight of steps, his face illuminated garishly by the sulphurous fluorescent lights, and then disappeared into the small building.

Bryson waited. He watched the driver, waiting for any suspicious moves—furtive phone calls placed on a concealed cellular phone, quick signals to passing vehicles, even the loading of a gun. But the driver simply sat behind the wheel, waiting with the calm, still patience his boss lacked.

After a good ten minutes had elapsed, and Bryson was sure that Dunne was probably fed up by now, he came down the hillside, following a path that kept him concealed from passersby, winding around to the back of the restroom, which was even with the ground level. Putting on a sudden burst of speed, he raced to the building, confident that he had not been observed. Now he leaped down into the moat that surrounded the bunker and circled around to the entrance, unseen.

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. “Goddamn 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.”

“What’s the point of signaling your driver? To let him know you’re okay—that I didn’t do you harm, is that the point?” Bryson’s voice rose in annoyance. “You really don’t trust me, do you?”

“Solomon just likes to keep close tabs on me.”

“You can never be too cautious,” Bryson said.

There was a sudden loud banging on the restroom door.

“You lock it or something?”

Bryson nodded.

“So who’s the too-cautious one?” Dunne said derisively. “Christ, let me go assure my worrywart driver that everything’s jake.”

Dunne went to the restroom door, tugged at the padlock, and shook his head. “I’m alive,” he called out hoarsely. “No guns to my head or anything.”

A muffled voice from the other side of the door said, “You’re needed out here, sir, please.”

“Cool your jets, Solomon. I said I’m fine.”

“That’s not it, sir. It’s something else.”

“What is it?”

“A call just came in, immediately after you paged me. On the car phone, sir—the one that you said only’s supposed to ring if it’s National Security Maximum.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Dunne. “Bryson, would you mind …?”

Bryson approached the side of the concrete doorjamb, reaching for his weapon at the same time that he inserted a key in the padlock, springing it open. He flattened himself against the wall, out of sight, gun drawn.

Dunne watched Bryson’s preparations with undisguised incredulity. The door came open, and Bryson was able to confirm that it was the same slender African-American man he’d seen behind the wheel of Dunne’s government-issue car. Solomon seemed abashed, ill at ease. “I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,” he said, “but it really does sound important.” He was looking at his boss, his hands empty at his sides, no one else beside or behind him. The driver appeared not to have seen Bryson, who leaned against the wall, out of the intruder’s line of sight.

Dunne nodded and, looking rankled, headed out toward the limousine, his driver following.

Suddenly the driver spun back around toward the open door, lunging with extraordinary, unexpected agility diagonally into the restroom toward Bryson, a large Magnum pistol in his right hand.

“What the hell—?” shouted Dunne, turning around with amazement.

The explosion thundered in the small interior, fragments of concrete flying everywhere, piercing Bryson’s flesh as he dodged to his right, just missing the bullet. Several more came in rapid succession, shattering the walls, the floor inches from his head. The suddenness of the attack had caught Bryson off guard, forcing him to focus his energies on leaping out of the way, momentarily keeping him from leveling his own gun. The chauffeur was wild, firing madly, his face contorted with an animal-like fury. Bryson sprung forward, his gun extended, just as another explosion came, louder than any that had come before. A gaping red hole appeared at the center of the driver’s chest, an explosion of blood, and the man tumbled forward, clearly dead.

Harry Dunne stood fifteen feet away, with his blue-steel Smith & Wesson .45 aloft, still pointed at his own chauffeur, a wisp of smoke curling from the barrel. He looked dazed, his expression almost crestfallen. Finally, the CIA man broke the silence. “Jesus Christ,” he said, coughing so hard he almost doubled over. “Jesus Christ almighty.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The light in the Oval Office was eerie, silvery-gray, lending a somber cast to a gathering that did not need any more gloom. It was twilight, the end of a long, overcast day. President Malcolm Stephenson Davis sat in the small white sofa at the center of the seating area where he preferred to conduct his most serious meetings. In chairs on either side of him sat the directors of the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA; immediately next to him, at his right hand, was the special assistant to the president for national security affairs, Richard Lanchester. It was rare for such a senior collection of administration officials to gather outside the official confines of the Cabinet Room, the Situation Room, or the National Security Council. But the very unusual venue of the occasion underscored its gravity.

The reason for the meeting was abundantly clear. A little over nine hours earlier a powerful blast in the Dupont Circle station of the Washington Metro had killed twenty-three people and injured easily three times that; the fatality list grew longer as the day went on. The nation, though inured to tragedy, terrorist bombings, school shootings, was in a state of shock. This had happened in the very heart of the nation’s capital —a mile from the White House, as CNN’s commentators kept repeating.

A bomb left in what appeared to be a laptop computer case had gone off during the height of the morning rush hour. The sophisticated nature of the bomb, the details of which were being kept from the public, seemed to indicate the involvement of terrorists. In this age of all-new-sall-the-time cable channels and radio stations, and the lightning-fast communications of the Internet, the terrible story seemed to reverberate, get worse by the minute.

Viewers seemed particularly fascinated by the most gruesome details— the pregnant woman and her three-year-old twin daughters, killed instantly; the elderly couple who had saved up for years to come to Washington from Iowa City; the group of nine-year-old elementary schoolchildren.

“It’s more than a nightmare, it’s a disgrace,” the president said grimly. The other men shook their heads in silent assent. “I’m going to have to reassure the nation in an address either tonight, if we can coordinate it in time, or tomorrow. But I sure as hell don’t know what I’m going to say.”

“Mr. President,” said FBI Director Chuck Faber, “I want to assure you that we have no fewer than seventy-five special agents on the case even as we speak, combing the city, coordinating the investigations as lead agency with the local police and ATF. Our materials analysis unit, the explosives unit—”

“I have no doubt,” the president cut him off sharply, “that you folks are all over this like a cheap suit. I mean in no way to disparage the Bureau’s capabilities, but you do seem to be quite good at handling terrorist events after the fact. I’m just curious why you never seem to be able to prevent them.”

The FBI director’s face flushed. Chuck Faber had won his reputation as the take-no-prisoners district attorney in Philadelphia, later becoming Pennsylvania’s attorney general. He made no secret of the fact that he wanted to run Main Justice, wanted the attorney general’s job, considered himself far more qualified than the current incumbent. Faber was probably the most skilled bureaucratic games player in the room. He was famously confrontational, but he was also too politically savvy ever to confront the president.

“Sir, respectfully, I think that’s not quite fair to the men and women of the Bureau.” The quiet, calm voice was that of Richard Lanchester, a tall, fit man with silver hair and aristocratic features whose understated suits were custom-tailored in London. Most White House correspondents, whose notion of high fashion tended to be the Euro-extremes of Giorgio Armani, mistakenly described Lanchester as an “unfashionable” or even “frumpy” dresser.

Lanchester, however, rarely paid much attention to such personal descriptions in the newspapers or on television news. In fact, he preferred to steer clear of journalists altogether, since he strongly opposed leaking, which seemed to be a varsity sport in Washington. Somehow, though, he was admired by the Washington press corps anyway. Perhaps this was precisely because he refused to cultivate them, something most of them had never witnessed before. The label bestowed on him by Time magazine, “The Last Honest Man in Washington,” was so often repeated in columns and on the Sunday-morning talking-head shows that it had become something of a Homeric epithet.

“It’s just that their prevention efforts tend to go unheralded,” Lanchester went on. “It’s usually impossible to ascertain what might have happened were it not for any particular intervention.”

The FBI director gave a grudging nod.

“There are news reports that we—that is, the U.S. government—could have prevented this tragedy,” intoned the president. “Is there any truth to this?”

There was a moment of awkward silence. Finally, the director of the National Security Agency, Air Force Lt. Gen. John Corelli, replied. “Sir, the problem is that the target fell between the cracks. As you know, our charter forbids us from operating domestically, as does the CIA’s, and this was a U.S.-based operation.”

“And we’re hamstrung by the legalities, sir,” put in FBI Director Faber. “That is, we need probable cause to obtain a court-ordered wiretap, but unless we know to request such authorization, why in the world would we ask for it?”

“And as for the myth that the NSA is continuously sweeping for telephone calls, faxes, signals … ?”

“Myth is the word, sir,” said NSA Director Corelli. “Even with the enormous capacity we’ve got at the Fort Meade campus, we can’t possibly sweep every phone conversation in the world. Plus, we’re not permitted to listen to conversations within the U.S.”

“Hallelujah for that,” said Dick Lanchester softly.

The FBI director turned to face Lanchester with an expression of purest contempt. “Really? And I suppose you applaud our inabiliy to monitor encrypted conversations, whether over the phone or fax or over the Internet.”

“You may not be aware of a little thing called the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, Chuck,” replied Lanchester dryly. “The right of the people to be protected against unreasonable searches and seizures—”

“And what about the right of the people to catch a subway train without being killed?” put in CIA Director James Exum. “I somehow doubt the framers contemplated digital telephony.”

“The fact remains,” said Lanchester, “that Americans don’t want to sacrifice their privacy.”

“Dick,” the president said quietly, firmly. “The time for that discussion is over and done. The argument is moot. The treaty should pass the Senate any day now, creating an international surveillance agency that will protect us from such mayhem. And damn it, not a moment too soon, either.”

Lanchester shook his head in sorrow. “This international agency is effectively going to expand the power of government a thousandfold,” he said.

“No,” the NSA director put in curtly. “It’s going to level the playing field, that’s all. For God’s sake, the NSA isn’t allowed to listen in on the conversations of Americans without a court order, and our British counterpart, the GCHQ, is similarly hamstrung by the legal restriction forbidding it to tap domestic calls in Britain. You seem to forget, Richard, that if the Allies didn’t have the ability to read enemy messages during the Second World War, the Germans might well have won.”

“We’re not in a war.”

“Oh, but we are,” said the CIA director. “We’re in the middle of a global war against terrorists, and the bad guys are winning. And if you’re suggesting that we all just pack it in —”

A low tone sounded from the telephone on the small table next to where the president was sitting. The men in the room knew that the president’s intercom went off only in the case of an urgent situation, as per Davis’s explicit instructions. President Davis picked up the handset. “Yes?”

His face went ashen. He put the phone down, then looked around at the others. “That was the Situation Room,” he said gravely. “An American jetliner just went down three miles from Kennedy Airport.”

“What?” gasped several of the men at once.

“Blown out of the sky,” President Davis murmured, eyes closed. “A minute or so after takeoff. A flight to Rome. One hundred and seventy-one passengers and crew members—all of them dead.” He placed his hands over his eyes, massaging them with his fingers. When he removed his fingers, his eyes shone with tears, but the expression in them was fierce, even ferocious. His voice shook. “Jesus Christ, I will not go down in history as the Commander in Chief who sat by idly while terrorists seized control of our world. Goddamn it, we have got to do something!”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The glass office tower on rue de la Corraterie, just south of Place Bel-Air in the heart of Geneva’s commercial and banking district, was the deep blue of the ocean, and it glistened in the afternoon sun. On the twenty-seventh floor were the offices of the Banque Geneve Privée, where Bryson and Layla waited in the small but luxuriously appointed waiting room. With its mahogany wainscoting, Oriental rugs, and delicate antiques, the bank was an island of nineteenth-century elegance perched twenty-seven floors above the ground within one of Geneva’s most modernistic skyscrapers. The subliminal message it seemed to project was one of old-world civility in harmony with high technology. Its setting could not have been more apt.

Bryson had arrived at Geneva-Cointrin Airport, checked in to Le Richemond, and then met Layla’s train, the Paris-Ventimiglia express, from Paris a few hours later at Gare Cornavin. There had been a warmth in their greeting, as if no time had elapsed since Bryson’s Paris departure. She was excited, which she displayed in her quiet, vibrant way; she had dug quite a bit and uncovered only a few tiny nuggets, but they were, in her opinion, nuggets of gold. Still, there was no time for a debriefing; he took her to the hotel, where they checked into separate rooms; she changed into a suit, fixed her hair, and they immediately proceeded to rue de la Corraterie for the meeting Bryson had arranged with a Swiss banker.

They were not kept waiting long; this was Switzerland, where punctuality was holy writ. A matronly woman of middle age, with gray hair worn up in a bun, appeared in the waiting room at the exact time of their appointment.

She addressed him by his CIA-supplied cover name. “You must be Mr. Mason,” she said haughtily. It was not the tone customarily used with favored clients; she knew he was from the U.S. government and therefore to be considered an annoyance. She then turned to Lavla. “And you are—?”

“This is Anat Chafetz,” Bryson said, using one of her Mossad-furnished aliases. “Mossad.”

“Monsieur Bécot is expecting both of you? I had been told there would just be you, Mr. Mason.” The assistant was perturbed.

“I assure you that Monsieur Bécot will want to see both of us,” Bryson said, matching her hauteur.

She nodded brusquely. “Excuse me.”

She returned a minute later. “Please come with me.”

Jean-Luc Bécot was a compact, bespectacled man whose precise, economical movements revealed the precision of the man. He had short silver-gray hair, gold wire-rimmed glasses, and wore a tailored gray suit. He shook their hands politely but warily and asked them if they would like coffee.

Another assistant, this one a young man in a blue blazer, came in a moment later bearing three tiny cups of espresso on a gleaming silver tray. He silently set down two cups on the coffee table next to where Layla and Bryson sat, and then placed the third on the glass-topped desk behind which Jean-Luc Bécot was stationed.

Bécot’s office was decorated in the same opulent style as the rest of the bank’s offices, the same assemblage of delicate antiques and Persian carpets. One entire wall was a plate-glass window that looked over Geneva, the view breathtaking.

“Now then,” Bécot said, “I am sure you both appreciate that I am a busy man, and so forgive me for asking you to come right to the point. You alluded to financial irregularities in the handling of one of our accounts. Let me assure you that Banque Geneve Privée permits no such irregularities. I am afraid you have come here in vain.”

Bryson smiled tolerantly throughout the banker’s opening remarks, tenting his fingers. When Bécot came to a halt, Bryson said, “Monsieur Bécot, the very fact that you are meeting with me indicates that you or one of your associates placed a call to Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to check on my bona fides.” He paused, saw the unspoken acknowledgment in the banker’s face. Bryson had no doubt that his phone call a few hours earlier had raised all sorts of alarm. The CIA had sent one of its operatives to Geneva to question a Swiss banker in connection with an account—all of Banque Geneve Privée was surely up in arms by now; there would have been frantic calls made, hurried consultations. There was a time when any self-respecting Swiss banker would simply have refused to see an officer of American intelligence: the secrecy of bank accounts was paramount. But times had changed, and although money laundering still continued in Switzerland on a massive scale, the Swiss had succumbed to international political pressure; they were much more cooperative these days. Or at least they were eager to give the appearance of cooperation.

Bryson resumed. “You know that I would not be here were it not a situation of some gravity—one that involves your bank directly, and that threatens to entangle your bank in a nasty legal mess, which I’m sure you wish to avoid.”

Bécot gave an ugly, prim little smile. “Your threats will not work here, Mr.—Mr. Mason. And as for why you brought with you a Mossad officer, if this is your clumsy attempt to increase the pressure—”

“Monsieur Bécot, let us speak plainly,” said Bryson, adopting the tone of an international law-enforcement agent who held all the cards. “Under the 1987 Convention of Diligence, neither you nor your bank can claim ignorance of an account holder or of any account holder’s use of your bank to launder money for criminal purposes. The legal ramifications are quite serious, as you well know. Representatives of the intelligence agencies of two world powers have come before you to seek your assistance in a major international money-laundering investigation; you can either help us, as you are required to do by law, or you can turn us away, in which case we will be forced to report this suspected criminal activity to Lausanne.”

The banker stared at Bryson impassively for a moment, his coffee untouched. “What, precisely, is the nature of your investigation, Mr. Mason?”

Bryson sensed the man’s vacillation; it was time to thrust. “We are examining the activities in Banque Geneve Privée account number 246322, held by one Jan Vansina.”

Bécot hesitated for an instant. The name, if not the number, had registered immediately. “We never divulge the names of our clients—”

Bryson glanced at Layla, who took her cue. “Substantial monies have been wire-transferred into this account from a fictitious Anstalt in Liechtenstein, as you’re well aware. From here the funds have been wired to an array of accounts: several different shell companies in the Isle of Man, and Jersey, in the Channel Islands; to the Caymans, Aguilla, the Netherlands Antilles. From there the funds have been split and routed to the Bahamas and San Marino—”

“There is nothing illegal about wire transfers!” snapped Bécot.

“Unless they are done to launder illicit monies,” she said with equal vehemence. Bryson had filled her in with the few details Harry Dunne had provided on Vansina’s bank account; the rest was sheer embellishment. Bryson was impressed. “In this case, these laundered funds have been used to fund the purchase of arms used in the activities of known terrorists around the world.”

“This sounds suspiciously like a fishing expedition,” said the Swiss.

“A fishing expedition?” repeated Layla. “More like an international criminal investigation undertaken by Washington and Tel Aviv simultaneously, which should be evidence enough of how seriously this is being taken at the highest levels. But I can see we are wasting Monsieur Bécot’s time.” She rose, and Bryson did the same. “Obviously we are not dealing on a high enough level here,” she said to Bryson. “Monsieur Bécot either does not have the decision-making capability or is deliberately concealing his own criminal role. I am sure that the bank’s director, Monsieur Etienne Broussard, will have a more enlightened view—”

“What is it that you want?” interrupted the banker, desperation now evident in his face, his voice.

Bryson, still standing, said, “Quite simply, we want you to telephone the account holder, Mr. Vansina, immediately, and request that he come into the bank at once.”

“But Monsieur Vansina is never to be directly approached, that is the stipulation of his account! He contacts us, that is the way it is done. Besides, I have no contact number for him!”

“False. There are always contact numbers,” said Bryson. “If you are doing business as you should, you have photocopies of his passport and other identification papers, addresses and telephone numbers of his home and place of work—”

“I cannot do that!” cried Bécot.

“Come, Mr. Mason, we are wasting time here. I’m sure Monsieur Bécot’s superior will understand the gravity of the situation,” said Layla. “Once the request is made through diplomatic liaison and the courts in Washington, Tel Aviv, and Lausanne, the Banque Geneve Privée will be publicly named as an accomplice in the funding of international terrorism and money laundering, and—”

“No! Sit down!” the banker said, all pretense at bankerly gravitas abandoned. “I will call Vansina.”

 

 

Concealed in the small, stuffy, closet-size room, lined with video screens, where the bank’s surveillance cameras were monitored, Bryson perspired heavily. The plan he had devised called for him to remain in hiding while Layla met with Vansina in Bécot’s office, still in the guise of a Mossad officer investigating money laundering. She would interrogate Vansina, elicit whatever useful information she could, and then Bryson would appear suddenly, drawing upon the tactical value of surprise.

Layla remained in the dark about the Directorate and Bryson’s relationship to it. As far as she was concerned, Bryson was simply uncovering a trail in the illicit arms trade. She knew a fragment of the whole; she did not yet need to know more. The time would come when Bryson would fill her in, but it was not yet.

Bryson had intended to secrete himself anywhere in the vicinity of Bécot’s office—a neighboring office, a broom closet, whatever. He had not counted on the serendipity of discovering this surveillance station. From here he was able to observe the comings and goings in and out of the office building’s lobby; several other feeds came from hidden cameras inside each elevator; two more covered the twenty-seventh-floor lobby area adjacent to the elevator bank and the bank’s waiting room. Too, there were views of the main corridors on the twenty-seventh floor. There was no camera within Bécot’s office, or any other office for that matter, but at least he would be able to view Vansina’s arrival as well as the Dutchman’s movements in the elevator. Vansina was a top-notch field operative and took nothing for granted. He would assume, for instance, that there were closed-circuit cameras concealed in the elevators, as there were in many modern office buildings. But he would likely also assume, as would Bryson, that such cameras were being watched by incurious, underpaid security staff looking only for obvious signs of violent crime. Vansina might use the semiprivate occasion to adjust a gun holster or a monitoring device taped to his chest. Then again, he might do nothing suspicious at all.

The call to Vansina had been placed in Bryson and Layla’s presence, and then Layla had remained by the banker’s side to ensure that he did not make any follow-up calls to Vansina, warning him off, or anything of the sort.

Bryson knew that Jan Vansina would respond quickly, and indeed, within twenty minutes the Directorate operative arrived in the main lobby. Vansina was a slight, hunch-shouldered man with a full but close-trimmed gray beard and tinted wire-rimmed spectacles. Between his unassuming physical presence and his benign cover as director of emergency medical assistance for the International Red Cross, he was not a man anyone would suspect of being the extremely clever killer that he was. Vansina’s greatest attribute, in fact, was that he was constantly underestimated. A casual observer might in fact think Vansina kindly, even harmless. Bryson, however, knew well that Vansina was a powerful, ruthless man of great skill and wily intelligence. He knew better than to underestimate him.

Vansina shared an elevator with a young woman, who got off on the twenty-fifth floor, at which point he was alone for a few seconds. Yet Bryson found him impossible to read, neither apprehensive nor particularly tense. If the man’s suspicions were at all aroused by this emergency summons from his private banker, his expression did not indicate it.

Bryson watched him emerge from the elevator and check in with the receptionist; Vansina was ushered in at once. Bryson saw him accompanied down the corridor by Bécot’s matronly assistant, then into Bécot’s office, at which point the surveillance ended.

No matter: Bryson knew the script that Layla was following, since he had designed it himself. He waited for the signal from Layla indicating that it was time for him to make his appearance. She would place a call to his cell phone, let it ring twice, then terminate the call.

Her interrogation of Vansina would last anywhere from five to ten minutes, depending on the degree of truculence Vansina presented. He looked at his watch, his eyes on the sweep-second hand, and waited.

Five minutes passed slowly, feeling like an eternity. There were two backup emergency signals, neither of which she had employed. The first would be to dial his cell phone, letting it ring. After the second ring, he would know the situation was urgent. In the alternative, she would open Bécot’s office door, which he would be able to observe on the surveillance monitor.

Yet no emergency signals came.

As focused as he was on the matter at hand, he could not keep his mind from dwelling on the agent he knew as Prospero. What was it that Dunne had said? Vansina had been acting as a conduit, presumably for the Directorate, laundering over five billion dollars. Laundered funds were an everyday necessity for intelligence agencies, but almost always they were relatively small sums, untraceable payments to agents and contacts. Five billion dollars, however, was an order of magnitude beyond payments to assets. Such a quantity of money had to be funding something large. If Dunne’s information was accurate—and it seemed less and less likely that the CIA man was deliberately misleading him, not when he had killed his own bodyguard to protect him—the Directorate was channeling money to, and in fact orchestrating, terrorist organizations. But which ones, why, and to what end? Perhaps the cryptochip that he had copied from Jacques Arnaud’s secure phone would yield the answer, but whom could he trust with that crucial piece of evidence?

And if Jan Vansina was directly involved in the cycling of diverted funds, Bryson doubted the Dutchman was acting as a blind conduit. Vansina was far too skilled, and too senior, to act in such an innocent capacity. Vansina would know. For all Bryson knew, Vansina was one of the Directorate’s principals by now.

Suddenly the door to the closet swung open, flooding the small room with light, and for an instant Bryson was blinded, unable to see who was there.

Within a few seconds Bryson could make out the shape, then the face. Jan Vansina, grim faced, eyes blazing. In his right hand a gun was pointed directly at Bryson; in his left hand he gripped a briefcase.

“Coleridge,” Vansina said. “A flash from the past.”

“Prospero,” said Bryson, startled. Unprepared for the intrusion, he reached for the pistol holstered inside his suit jacket, then froze when he heard the click of the safety being released.

“Don’t move,” barked Vansina. “Hands at your side! I will not hesitate to use this. You know me, so you know I speak the truth.”

Bryson stared, slowly lowered his hand. Vansina would indeed have no compunction about killing him in cold blood; why he had not done so already was a mystery.

“Thank you, Bryson,” the Dutchman went on. “You wish to talk with me; we will talk.”

“Where’s the woman?”

“She is safe. Bound and locked in a storage closet. She is a strong and clever woman, but she must have expected this to be a, how do you say, cakewalk. I must say, her Mossad paper appears quite genuine. Your backstoppers are excellent.”

“It is genuine, because she is Mossad.”

“Even more intriguing, Bryson. I see you have established new alliances. New alliances for changing times. This is for you.” He tossed the briefcase at Bryson, who made the split-second decision to catch it, not dodge it.

“Good catch,” said Vansina jovially. “Now, please hold it out in front of you with both hands.”

Bryson scowled. The Dutch operative was as quick-witted as ever.

“Come, let us talk,” said Vansina. “Walk straight ahead, keeping the briefcase in front of you at all times. Any sudden moves, and I will shoot. Drop it, and I will shoot. You know me, my friend.”

Bryson obeyed, silently berating himself. He had fallen into Vansina’s trap by underestimating the wily old operative. How had he turned the tables on Layla? There had been no sound of gunfire, but perhaps he had used a silencer. Had he killed Layla? The thought tore at him, filled him with anguish. She had been serving as his accomplice; although Bryson had tried to dissuade her from working with him further, and she had insisted, he still felt responsible for whatever happened to her. Or had Vansina spoken the truth and bound and locked Layla up? He marched forward, urged along by the waving of Vansina’s gun, crossing the narrow hall into an empty conference room. Although the lights in the room were off, there was still plenty of afternoon sun flooding in through the plate-glass window. The view of the city of Geneva from this high up was even more spectacular than that from Bécot’s office window: the famous plume of the Jet d’eau and the Pare Mon Repos clearly visible from here, though not a sound from the city was audible.

Holding the briefcase, he was unable to retrieve his gun. Yet if he dropped the briefcase to go for his weapon, even that brief second would be time enough for Vansina to fire into the back of his head.

“Sit,” commanded the Dutchman.

Bryson sat at the head of the table, placing the briefcase down on the table in front of him, still clutching it in both hands.

“Now place your left hand flat on top of the table, followed by your right. In that order, please. No sudden motions—you know the drill.”

Bryson did so, his hands flat on the table on either side of the briefcase. Vansina sat at the other end of the table, his back to the plate-glass window, his weapon still aimed at Bryson.

“Move a hand to rub your nose, I shoot,” said Vansina. “Move a hand to take a cigarette from your breast pocket, I shoot. Those are the ground rules, Mr. Bryson, and I know you understand them well. Now then, tell me this, please: Does Elena know?”

Stunned, Bryson tried to make sense of the question. Does Elena know? “What are you talking about?” he whispered.

“Does she know?”

“Does she know what? Where is she? Have you spoken with her?”

“Please don’t affect to be concerned about the woman, Bryson—”

“Where is she?” Bryson interrupted.

The bearded man hesitated but a second before replying, “I am asking the questions here, Bryson. How long have you been with the Prometheans?”

Dully, Bryson repeated, “The Prometheans?”

“Enough. No more games! How long have you been in their employ, Bryson? Were you double-dealing while you were on active duty? Or perhaps you grew bored as a college professor, in search of adventure? You see, I’d really like to understand the inducement, the lure. An appeal to misbegotten idealism? Power? You see, we have so much to talk about, Bryson.”

“Yet you insist on leveling a gun at me as if you’ve completely forgotten Yemen.”

Vansina, looking amused, shook his head. “You are still a legend in the organization, Bryson. People still retell stories of your operational skill, your linguistic talent. You were a great asset —”

“Until I was shoved out the door by Ted Waller. Or should I say Gennady Rosovsky?”