Racing from the conference room, from the nightmarish scene of blood and machine-gun rounds and broken glass, Bryson ran through a hall choked with horrified bystanders. There were screams, shouts in Schweizerdeutsch and French and English.
“Oh, Jesus Christ!”
“What happened, was it snipers? Terrorists?”
“Are they inside the building?”
“Call the police, an ambulance, quickly!”
“My God, the man’s dead—he’s, oh God, he’s been massacred!”
As he ran, he thought of Layla. Not her, too! Could the helicopter have circled the building, locating targets in windows on the twenty-seventh floor?
And he thought: Jan Vansina was the object of the freakish attack. Not me. Vansina. It had to be. He ran through the kaleidoscopic images in his mind, sorting through them, recalling angles of fire. Yes. Whoever was manning the machine gun or guns from within the helicopter had been deliberately aiming for Jan Vansina. This was no random attack, nor a generalized attempt to kill whoever was present in the conference
room. The gunfire had been aimed precisely, from at least three different and precise angles, at the Directorate operative.
But why?
And who? The Directorate could not have been killing its own, could it? Perhaps fearing that Vansina was meeting with an old friend, sharing information …
No, it stretched the imagination too far, made too little sense. The reasons, the logic behind the attack remained obscure. But the fact remained, Bryson was convinced, that the man who was supposed to be killed had in fact been killed.
These thoughts spun through his mind in a matter of seconds; he located Bécot’s office, yanked open the closed door—and found it empty.
Neither Layla nor the banker was here. Turning to leave, he noticed a china espresso cup overturned on the floor beside the coffee table, a few papers scattered near the desk. Signs of either a hurried departure or a brief struggle.
Muffled sounds came from somewhere within the room or very nearby, thumping noises, cries. His eyes quickly searched the room, found the closet door. He ran to it, opened it. Layla and Jean-Luc Bécot were bound in ropes, gagged. Polyurethane “humane restraints,” as strong as leather, secured their wrists and ankles. The banker’s wire-rimmed glasses lay bent on the closet floor beside him, his tie askew, his shirt torn, hair wild. Through the wadded cloth gag stuffed in his mouth he tried to shout, his eyes bulging. Next to him, Layla was bound even more thoroughly, expertly, the gag tight in her mouth. Her gray Chanel suit was ripped; one of her matching gray high-heeled shoes had come off. She, too, had vinyl restraints around her wrists and ankles. Her face was bloodied and bruised; obviously she had struggled fiercely but had been overwhelmed by the superior strength of the man who had been Prospero.
The brute animal who had been Prospero, Jan Vansina. Bryson swelled with rage at the dead man. He pulled the gag from her mouth, then from the banker’s; both captives took deep, gulping breaths, filling their lungs with much-needed air. Bécot gasped, cried out. Layla gasped, too: “Thank you. My God!”
“He didn’t kill you, either of you,” Bryson remarked as he worked quickly to untie the ropes. He searched for a knife or other blade to sever
the strong plastic restraints; seeing nothing, he ran to the banker’s desk and spied a silver letter opener, quickly rejecting it since it had a point but no blade. In a side desk drawer he found a small but sharp pair of scissors, ran back to the closet, and used it to release them both.
“Call Security!” the banker said through gulps of air.
Bryson, who could already hear the sirens of the approaching emergency vehicles growing steadily louder, said, “The police are on their way, I suspect.” He took Layla by the arm, helped her to her feet, and the two of them ran from the room.
Passing the open conference room door, in front of which a crowd had gathered, she stopped.
“Come on,” hissed Bryson. “There’s no time!”
But she peered inside, saw the crumpled body of Jan Vansina surrounded by jagged shards of glass, the shattered window. “Oh, my God!” she breathed, horrified, quivering. “Oh, my God!”
Not until they reached the crowded Place Bet-Air did they come to a stop.
“We have to leave,” Bryson said. “Travel separately—we can’t be seen together, not any longer.”
“Travel—but where?”
“Out of here—out of Geneva, out of Switzerland!”
“What are you saying—we can’t just—” She stopped in midsentence when she realized that Bryson’s attention was riveted on a newspaper displayed in a kiosk. It was a copy of La Tribune de Genève.
“My God,” said Bryson, moving closer. He grabbed it from a tall stack, riveted by the large black banner headline above a photograph of some sort of terrible accident.
TERROR STRIKES FRANCE:
HIGH-SPEED PASSENGER TRAIN
DERAILED IN LILLE
LILLE—A powerful bomb blast derailed and tore apart the high-speed passenger train Eurostar about thirty miles south
of Lille early this morning, killing hundreds of French, British, American, Dutch, Belgian, and other business travelers. Although emergency workers and volunteers worked frantically throughout the day, searching the wreckage for survivors, French authorities fear that the death toll may exceed 700. An official at the crash site, who preferred to remain anonymous, speculated that the incident was the work of terrorists.
According to records made available by railroad officials, the train, Eurostar 9007-ERS, left the Care du Nord in Paris, bound for London, at approximately 7:16 A.M., with nearly 770 passengers on board. At approximately 8:00 A.M., the 18-car train passed through France’s Pas-de-Calais region, where a series of high-powered explosions, reportedly buried beneath the tracks, went off below the train’s front and rear sections simultaneously. Although there was no immediate claim of responsibility, sources in the French security service, the Sûreté, have already compiled a list of possible suspects. Several anonymous sources in the Sûreté have confirmed rampant speculation that both the French and the British governments had received repeated warnings of an impending attack on the Eurostar in the last several days. A Eurostar spokesman would neither confirm nor deny a report provided to La Tribune de Genève that the intelligence services of both countries had leads pointing to suspected terrorists planning to blow up the train but were unable to intercept or monitor telephone conversations between the alleged terrorists because of legal constraints.
“This is an outrage,” declared French National Assembly member Françoise Chouet. “We had the technical ability to prevent this sickening carnage, yet our police are hamstrung by our laws from doing anything about it.” In London, Lord Miles Parmore renewed his call in Parliament for passage of the International Treaty on Surveillance and Security. “If the governments of France and England had the ability to keep this sabotage from happening, it is simply
criminal that we sat there and did nothing about it. This is a national—no, an international—disgrace.”
The United States national security adviser, Richard Lanchester, attending a NATO summit in Brussels, issued a statement denouncing the “slaughter of innocents.” He added, “In this period of mourning, we must all ask ourselves how to make sure something like this never happens again. With great reluctance and sadness, the Davis administration joins its allies and good friends England and France in calling for worldwide passage of the International Treaty on Surveillance and Security.”
Lille.
Bryson’s blood ran cold.
He remembered the low, conspiratorial voices of two men emerging from Jacques Arnaud’s private office in the Château de Saint-Meurice. One was the arms merchant himself, the other Anatoly Prishnikov, the Russian tycoon.
“Once Lille happens,” Arnaud had said, “the outrage will be enormous. The way will be clear.”
Once Lille happens.
Two of the world’s most powerful businessmen, one an arms dealer, the other a mogul who no doubt secretly owned or controlled large segments of the Russian defense industry—Bryson would have to obtain a complete dossier—had foreknowledge of the devastation at Lille, the attack that killed seven hundred people.
Quite likely the men were among those who planned it.
Both of them principals of the Directorate. The Directorate was behind the nightmare at Lille; there was no question about it.
But to what end? Senseless violence was not the Directorate’s way; Waller and the other overseers had always prided themselves on their strategic genius. Everything was strategy, everything served an ultimate end. Even the murder of Bryson’s parents, even the massive deception that had become his life. The murder of a few field operatives might be justified by nothing more than the need to remove an encumbrance, an obstacle, a threat. But the wholesale murder of seven hundred innocent
travelers was in another category entirely, moved from low-level tactics to higher strategy.
The outrage will be enormous.
The public outcry over the derailing and destruction of the Eurostar train was indeed great, as it would inevitably be over such a preventable tragedy.
Preventable tragedy.
The key was preventable. Prophylaxis. The Directorate wanted this outrage, wanted to spur calls for prevention of any future terrorism. Yet prevention could mean any number of things. A treaty to fight terrorism was one thing, no doubt little more than window dressing. But surely any such treaty would lead to the bolstering of national defenses, the acquisition of weapons intended to protect public safety.
Arnaud and Prishnikov, merchants of death with a vested interest in world chaos, because chaos was a form of marketing—the marketing of their goods, their weapons, the increasing of demand. These two moguls were presumably behind Lille and …
And what else? Standing there on the street, he was oblivious to the bustle of passing pedestrians. Layla was reading the article over his shoulder, saying something to him, but he did not hear her. He was retrieving remembered news stories in the filing cabinet of his mind. Several recent incidents that he had read about, seen television coverage about, terrible things that at the time did not register as directly applicable to his own life, his mission.
Just a few days ago there had been a devastating explosion in a Washington, D.C., metro station during the morning rush hour that had killed dozens of people. And later that same day—he remembered because the timing was so unfortunate—an American jetliner had blown up just after taking off from Kennedy Airport, en route to Rome. One hundred fifty, one hundred seventy people had been killed.
The outcry in America had been anguished, clamorous. The president had issued a call for passage of the international security treaty, which had previously been stalled in the Senate. After Lille, the European nations would surely join the Americans in pushing for strong measures to restore sanity to a world spinning out of control.
Control.
Was this the “higher purpose,” the underlying reason behind the Directorate’s madness? A rogue intelligence agency, once a small but powerful behind-the-scenes player known to no one, making a bid to seize control where the rest of the world had failed?
Damn it, it was all vaporous speculation, theory upon theory, conclusions drawn from tentative suggestions. Unprovable, shadowy, insufficient. But an answer to Dunne’s initial question, the reason why the CIA man had plucked Bryson from a contented retirement and all but forced him to investigate, was beginning to suggest itself. It was time to level with Harry Dunne, present him with a scenario, with hypotheses. To wait for firm, undeniable documentation of the Directorate’s agenda would be to let another Lille happen, and that was morally repugnant. Did the CIA really need another seven hundred innocent people to die before it decided to do something?
And yet …
Yet the biggest piece of the puzzle remained missing.
“Does Elena know?” Vansina had asked. The implication being that the Directorate did not know where she was, or where her loyalties resided. It was more important than ever that she be located: the very question—does Elena know?—implied that she had to know something crucial. Something that would not only explain her disappearance from his life but also reveal the pattern, the key to the Directorate’s true intentions.
“You know something about this.” Layla’s voice: a statement, not a question.
He realized that she had been speaking to him for a while. He turned to look at her. Had she not overheard Arnaud’s remark about Lille at the chateau? Evidently not.
“I have a theory,” he said.
“Which is?”
“I need to make a call.” He handed her the newspaper. “I’ll be right back.”
“A call? To whom?”
“Give me a few minutes, Layla.”
She raised her voice. “What are you hiding from me? What are you really up to?”
He saw in her beautiful brown eyes bewilderment, but something more: hurt, anger. She was justified in being angry. He had been using her as an accomplice while telling her almost nothing. It was more than hurtful, it was unacceptable, particularly to a field agent as skilled and knowledgeable as she was.
He hesitated, then spoke. “Let me make a phone call. When I return, I’ll fill you in—but I warn you, I know a lot less than you must think I do.”
She put a hand on his arm, a quick, affectionate gesture that said any number of things—thank you, I understand, I’m here for you. He was moved to kiss her, lightly and on the cheek: nothing sexual, but a moment of human contact, an expression of gratitude for her bravery and support.
He walked quickly to the end of the block, taking a side street off Place Bel-Air. There was a small tabac that sold, in addition to cigarettes and newspapers, prepaid telephone cards. He purchased one, located an international telephone in a booth on the street. He dialed 011, then 0, then a sequence of five numbers. There was a low electronic tone; then he dialed seven more digits.
It was a sterile line, a number that Harry Dunne had given him; it rang directly through to Dunne’s CIA office and at Dunne’s private study at home. Dunne had guaranteed that he, and only he, would answer it.
The phone rang once.
“Bryson.”
Bryson, about to speak, caught his breath. The voice was unfamiliar; it did not sound like Dunne. “Who is this?” he said.
“It’s Graham Finneran, Bryson. You—I think you know who I am.”
Dunne had mentioned Finneran when they had last met in his CIA office. Dunne had identified Finneran as his aide-de-camp, one of the men who had accompanied Dunne to the CIA’s Blue Ridge Mountains facility, one of Dunne’s few trusted aides.
“What is this?” said Bryson guardedly.
“Bryson—I—Harry’s in the hospital. He’s quite ill.”
“Ill?”
“You know he’s got a terminal case of cancer—he won’t talk about it, but it’s obvious—and he collapsed yesterday and had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance.”
“You’re saying he’s dead, is that it?”
“No—thank God, no, but I don’t know how long he’s got, to be honest. But he’s briefed me fully on your … your project. I know he was worried, frankly —”
“Which hospital?”
Finneran hesitated, barely a second or two, but it was too long. “I’m not sure I should say just yet—”
Bryson disconnected the call, his heart pounding, the blood rushing in his ears. His instincts commanded him to get off the line at once. Something was not right. Dunne had assured him that no one else would answer this telephone, and he would not violate protocol, even on his deathbed. Dunne knew Bryson, knew how Bryson would react.
No. Graham Finneran—if it was Graham Finneran; Bryson wouldn’t recognize his voice in any case—would never have answered the phone. Dunne would never have permitted it.
Something was terribly wrong, and it was more than the health of the CIA man.
Had the Directorate finally reached its chief adversary within the Agency, finally neutralized the last institutional bulwark against their growing power?
He raced back through the Place Bel-Air, found Layla still standing by the news kiosk. “I have to go to Brussels,” he said.
“What? Why Brussels? What are you talking about?”
“There’s a man there—someone I need to reach.”
She looked at him questioningly, beseechingly.
“Come on. I know of a pension in the Marolles. It’s rundown and shabby, and it’s not in a particularly pleasant part of town. But it’s safe and anonymous, and it’s not where anyone would think to look for us.”
“But why Brussels?”
“It’s a last resort, Layla. Someone who can help out, someone extremely highly placed. A person some people consider the last honest man in Washington.”
The headquarters of the Systematix Corporation comprised seven large, gleaming glass-and-steel buildings on a sylvan, beautifully landscaped campus—twenty acres in all—outside Seattle, Washington. There were dining rooms and exercise rooms in each building; the corporation’s employees, who were renowned for their loyalty and discretion, had little reason to leave while they labored away. They were a closely knit community, recruited from the best training programs around the world and compensated generously. They realized, too, that they had thousands of colleagues elsewhere whom they would never meet. Systematix, after all, had offices around the world, and owned controlling stakes in many more companies, though the extent of these holdings remained a matter of avid conjecture.
“I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” Tony Gupta, the jovial chief technology officer of InfoMed, told his boss, Adam Parker, as the two were escorted to the meeting room. Parker smiled thinly. He was the CEO of a nine-hundred-million-dollar company, but even he had to feel some slight trepidation as he arrived at the fabled Systematix campus.
“Ever been here before?” Parker asked. He was a rangy man with salt-and-pepper
hair who used to run marathons before a knee injury forced him to stop. Now he rowed and swam and, even with the bad knee, played tennis with a ferocity that made it hard for him to keep his partners for more than a few games. He was an intensely competitive man, a quality that enabled him to build his company, which specialized in medical “informatics” and data warehousing. But he knew when he was outmatched.
“Once,” Gupta said. “Years ago. I was up for a job as a software engineer, but at the interview there was a brainteaser that I flunked. And just to get that far, I had to sign three nondisclosure agreements. They were fanatical about secrecy.” Gupta adjusted his tie, which he’d knotted too tightly. He wasn’t accustomed to wearing one, but then this was no ordinary occasion; Systematix wasn’t known to indulge the self-conscious informality that was de rigeur among so many New Economy corporations.
Parker didn’t have a good feeling about the impending acquisition, and had made no secret about it to Gupta, who was the man he trusted most among his colleagues. “The board isn’t going to let me stop the deal,” Parker said softly. “You realize that, don’t you?”
Gupta looked at their escort, a blond, lithe woman and shot his boss a warning glance. “Let’s just listen to what the great man has to say,” he replied.
Moments later, they took their seats along with twelve other men and women on the top floor of the largest building, with a breathtaking view of the surrounding hills. This was the centerpoint of the seemingly diffuse and decentralized company that was Systematix. For most of the assembled — the directors of InfoMed—it was their first time face-to-face with Systematix’s legendary founder, chairman, and chief executive officer, the reclusive Gregson Manning. In the past year, as Adam Parker knew, Manning had acquired dozens of such companies in cash transactions.
“The great man,” Gupta had called him, and though the words were arch, they were not ironic. Gregson Manning was a great man, almost everyone agreed. He was one of the richest men in the world, had created from nothing a vast corporation that manufactured much of the infrastructure of the Internet. Everyone knew his story—about how he dropped out of CalTech when he was eighteen, lived in a communal
house with his techie friends, started Systematix out of a garage. Now it was hard to think of a single company anywhere that didn’t rely upon Systematix technologies for some part of their operations. Systematix was, as Forbes once said, an industry unto itself.
Manning had also emerged as a major philanthropist, albeit a controversial one. He had given hundreds of millions of dollars to help bring inner-city schools on-line, to use modern technology to help further educational goals. Parker had heard rumors, too, that Manning had anonymously given billions to help underprivileged children in the form of scholarships to institutions of higher learning.
And, of course, the business press idolized him. For all his vast wealth, he always came across as unassuming and unpretentious; he was depicted not as reclusive so much as retiring. Barron’s once dubbed him the “Daddy Warbucks” of the Information Age.
But Parker could not shake his feeling of unease. Yes, some of it had to do with the unpalatable prospect of relinquishing control—damn it, he’d nurtured InfoMed as if it was his own child, and it pained him to think of it being reduced to a tiny component of a giant conglomerate. But there was something more than that: it was almost a clash of cultures. At the end of the day, Parker was a businessman, plain and simple. His chief investors and advisers were businessmen. They talked the language of finance: of return on invested capital, market value added. Of cost centers and profit centers. Maybe it wasn’t high-minded, but it was honest and Parker could understand it. Yet that wasn’t how Manning’s mind seemed to work. He thought and spoke in sweeping terms—about historical forces, global trends. The fact that Systematix was immense and exceedingly profitable seemed almost incidental to him. “Look, you’ve never cared for visionaries,” Gupta once said to Parker, after one of their marathon strategy sessions, and no doubt he was on to something.
“I’m so pleased you could come, all of you,” Gregson Manning told his visitors, shaking their hands firmly. Manning was tall, well built, and slender, his hair dark and glossy. He was ruggedly handsome, squarejawed and broad shouldered, with an unmistakably patrician air. His features were fine, his nose aquiline and strong, his skin unlined, nearly poreless. He radiated health, self-assurance, and, Parker had to admit to himself, charisma. He wore khakis, an open-necked white shirt, and a
lightweight, cashmere blazer. He gave a warm smile, revealing white, perfect teeth. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t respect what InfoMed has accomplished, and you wouldn’t be here if …” Manning trailed off, his smile widening.
“If we didn’t appreciate the forty percent premium you’re offering for our shares,” the rumpled, big-bellied chairman of the InfoMed board, Alex Garfield, interjected, laughing. Garfield was a venture capitalist of limited imagination who happened to have provided a much-needed infusion of cash during InfoMed’s infancy. His interest in the company didn’t go much beyond the terms for which he could swap his equity stake. Adam Parker didn’t admire Garfield, but he always knew where he stood with him.
Manning’s eyes sparkled. “Our interests converge.”
“Mr. Manning,” Parker said, “I do have some concerns—they may be moot in light of such financial considerations, but I may as well voice them.”
“Please,” said Manning with a tilt of his head.
“When you acquire InfoMed, you’re not only acquiring a vast medical database, you’re acquiring seven hundred dedicated employees. I’d like a sense of what’s in store for them. Systematix is one of those companies that people know everything and nothing about. It’s privately held, tightly controlled, and a lot of what it does is pretty damned mysterious. And the obsession with privacy can be a little unsettling, at least if you’re outside it.”
“Privacy?” Manning tilted his head, his smile fading. “I think you have things precisely backward. And I would very much regret if you found our larger aims here to be mysterious.”
“I don’t think anyone exactly understands your organization chart,” Parker said testily. Looking around the room, sensing the awe with which the others regarded Gregson Manning, Parker realized that his remarks were less than welcome; he also realized that this was his last opportunity to voice them.
Manning fixed him with a stare, forthright yet not unfriendly. “My friend, I do not believe in the regalia of the traditional organization, the partitions and barriers and ‘dotted-line reporting’ relations. I think everyone here knows that. The key to our success at Systematix—our not
inconsiderable success, I think I can say without immodesty—has been to jettison the old ways of doing things.”
“But there’s a logic to any corporate structure,” Parker said, pressing the point, as the other men in the room looked at him with unfriendly stares. Even Tony Gupta reached over and put a cautioning hand on his arm. Still, Parker wasn’t used to holding his tongue and he was damned if he was going to start now. “Subsidiary divisions and whatnot, there’s a reason for flowcharts, I hate to say it. I just want to know how you intend to integrate the acquisition.”
Manning spoke to him as if to a slow child. “Who invented the modern corporation? Men like John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil, and Alfred Sloan of General Motors. In the postwar era of economic expansion, you had Robert McNamara at Ford and Harold Geneen at ITT, Reginald Jones at General Electric. It was the heyday of multiplex managerial strata, with chief executives assisted by staffs of planners and auditors and operations strategists. Rigid structures were necessary to conserve and manage the scarcest resource of all, the most valuable asset of all: information. Now, what happens if information becomes as free and copiously available as the air we breathe or the water we drink? All that becomes unnecessary. All that gives way.”
Parker recalled a quote of Manning’s that had once appeared in Barron’s — something to the effect that the goal of Systematix was “to replace doors with windows.” And he had to admit that the man was mesmerizing, as supernally articulate as his reputation had suggested. Still, Parker stirred in his seat uneasily. All that gives way. “Gives way to what?”
“If the old way was vertical hierarchy, the new way is the forging of horizontal networks, cutting across organizational boundaries. We’re about building a network of companies that we can collaborate with, not direct from above. The boundaries are down. The logic of networking puts a premium on self-monitoring, information-driven systems. Continual monitoring means we eliminate risk factors within the organizational structure and outside of it, too.” The setting sun behind Gregson Manning cast an aura around his head, adding to his unsettling intensity. “You’re an entrepreneur. Look ahead of you, and what do you see? Atomized capital markets. Radically dispersed labor markets. Pyramidal organization yielding to fluid, self-organizing means of collaboration. All of
which requires that we exploit connectivity, not just internally but externally as well, arriving at common strategies with our partners, extending control beyond the purview of ownership. Informational channels are recombinant. There must be transparency at all levels. I’m merely giving words to an inkling, an intuition I think we’ve all had about the future of capitalism.”
Parker was baffled by Manning’s words. “The way you’re talking, it sounds as if Systematix isn’t really a corporation at all.”
“Call it what you like. When boundaries are truly permeable, there isn’t anything so localizable as a traditional firm. But we’ve already lived through an era of managerialism answerable to no one. Ownership can only be fragmented, risk disaggregated only for so long. The poet Robert Frost said good fences make good neighbors. Well, I don’t believe that. Porosity, walls you can see through, walls you can move whenever you need—that’s what the world requires these days. To succeed, you’ve got to be able to walk through walls.” Manning paused briefly. “Which is easier when there aren’t any.”
Alex Garfield turned toward his CEO. “I don’t pretend to follow all this, but, Adam, the record speaks for itself, Gregson Manning doesn’t have to defend himself to anyone. I think all he’s saying is he doesn’t believe in a collection of sealed-off business units. He’s talking about integration in his own way.”
“The walls have to fall,” Manning said, sitting up very straight. “That’s the reality behind the rhetoric of reengineering. You might say we’re turning back the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was about the division of work into tasks; we’re trying to go from tasks to process, and to do so in a domain of absolute visibility.”
Frustrated, Parker pursued his line of questioning. “Yet so many of the technologies you’ve been investing in—these networking technologies and the rest—well, I don’t understand the thinking behind it,” Parker said. “And then there’s that FCC report that Systematix is about to launch another fleet of low-earth-orbit satellites. Why? There’s already so much bandwidth available. Why satellites?”
Manning nodded as if pleased by the question. “Maybe it’s time to raise our sights.”
There were grunts of assent and laughter around the room.
“I’ve been talking about business,” Manning went on. “But think about our own lives, too. You mentioned privacy earlier. The conventions of privacy treat the private sphere as a domain of personal freedom.” Now Manning’s expression became grave. “But for many, it may be the sphere of intimate violation and abuse, neither free nor personal. The housewife who is raped and robbed at knifepoint, the man whose home has been invaded by armed marauders—ask them about the value of privacy. Information in its full amplitude means freedom from—freedom from violation, freedom from abuse, freedom from harm. And if Systematix can move society toward that goal, then we are talking about something we’ve never had before in human history—something very near to total security. To some degree, surveillance has played a larger part in our lives, and I’m proud of the role we’ve had in that—the cameras in elevators and subways and parks, the Nannycams and all the rest of it. And yet truly sophisticated surveillance systems, what you might call panic buttons: these things currently remain the luxuries of the rich. Well, let’s democratize them, I say. Bring everyone into view. Jane Jacobs wrote about ‘eyes on the street,’ and we can go even beyond that. The rhetoric about the global village has been just that, rhetoric, but it can be real, and technology can make it so.”
“That’s a lot of power for one organization to take on.”
“Except that power, too, is no longer a discrete location, but a web of sanctions throughout society. In any case, I think you’re looking at it too narrowly. Once truly meaningful safety and security become pervasive, all of us end up finally having power over our own lives.”
Manning was interrupted by a knock; his personal assistant stood at the door looking concerned.
“Yes, Daniel?” Manning asked, surprised by the intrusion.
“A phone call, sir.”
“Not a good moment.” Manning smiled.
The young assistant coughed quietly. “The Oval Office, sir. The president says it’s urgent.”
Manning turned to the assembled. “You’ll forgive me, then. I’ll be right back.”
In his large, hexagonal office, sun-bathed yet cool, Manning settled into his chair and put the president on the speakerphone. “I’m here, Mr. President,” he said.
“Listen, Greg, you know I wouldn’t bother you if it weren’t important. But we need a favor. There’s a pattern to the terrorism, and we’ve got a missing link in the skies over Lille, in France. A dozen American businessmen were killed in that tragedy. Yet none of our satellites were overhead at the right time. The French government’s been hammering us for years to stop the overflights, stop invading the privacy of their citizens, so the eyes are usually switched off over that segment of the continent. Or so my experts tell me, it’s all Greek to me. But they’re telling me that Systematix satellites were in position. They’d have the imagery we need.”
“Mr. President, you recognize that our satellites haven’t been approved for photo reconnaissance. They’re strictly licensed for telecommunications, digital telephony.”
“I know that’s what your people told Corelli’s guys.”
“But it was your administration that decided to restrict nongovernmental surveillance instrumentation.” As Manning spoke, his eyes drifted toward a photograph of his daughter on his desk: a sandy-haired girl with a dreamy, giddy smile, as if she were laughing at a private joke.
“If you want me to eat crow, Greg, I will. I’m not too proud to beg. But goddamn it, this is serious. We need what you’ve got. For Chrissakes, cut me some slack. I haven’t forgotten what you’ve done for me in the past, and I won’t forget this.”
Manning paused, allowing a few seconds of silence to elapse. “Have your NSA techies call Partovi at my office. We’ll transmit whatever we’ve got.”
“I appreciate it,” President Davis said hoarsely.
“I’m just as concerned about the problem as you are,” Manning said, his eyes lingering again on the sandy-haired little girl. He and his wife had named her Ariel, and she had indeed been a creature of magic. “We’ve all got to pull together.”
“Understood,” the president said, awkward in his importuning. “Understood. I knew you’d come through for me.”
“We’re all in this together, Mr. President.”
Ariel’s laugh had been like the tinkle of a music box, he remembered, and his mind, usually so tightly focused, began wandering.
“Good-bye, Gregson. And thank you.”
It occurred to Manning, as he switched off the speakerphone, that he’d never heard President Malcolm Davis sound so strained. A taste of misfortune could do that to a man.
The pension was in a seedy area of Brussels, the Marolles, a refuge for the city’s poor and disenfranchised. Many of the seventeenth-century buildings were crumbling, collapsing bit by bit. The impoverished residents of the tenements were mostly Mediterranean immigrants, many of them Maghrebis. A stout, suspicious Maghrebi woman was the proprietor of the pension La Samaritaine, perched glumly behind a desk in the dark, malodorous warren that served as the hotel’s lobby. Her customary clientele were transients and petty criminals and destitute immigrants; she regarded the too-respectable-looking man who arrived in the middle of the night with minimal luggage, wearing good clothes, as peculiarly out of place here, and therefore suspect.
Bryson had arrived by rail, at the Gare du Nord, and had grabbed a quick late-night dinner of soggy moules et frites and watery pilsener at a snack bar on the way. He asked the dour proprietress for the room number of his female friend who had, he believed, checked in earlier. She raised her eyebrows insinuatingly and divulged the number with a smirk.
Layla had arrived a few hours earlier, via a Sabena flight into Zaventem Airport, having purchased a ticket at the last minute. Although it was
after midnight, and he expected she was as bone-tired as he was, he noticed the light seeping through the crack between her door and the filthy carpet, and he knocked. Her room was as dismal, as dingy as his.
She poured them each a Scotch, neat, from a bottle she had picked up near the Vieux Marché. “So who is this ‘honest man’ from Washington you want to meet here?” She added impishly: “It can’t be anyone from your CIA—unless you’ve actually found one honest man at Langley.” The bruises on her face from the struggle with Jan Vansina were bluish-purple, nasty looking.
Bryson took a sip, took a seat in a rickety armchair. “No one from the Agency.”
“Well?”
He shook his head. “Not yet.”
“Not yet what?”
“I’ll fill you in when the time is right. Just not yet.”
Sitting in a mismatched, but equally rickety, chair on the other side of a small table whose wood-grain veneer was flaying off, she set down her drink. “You’re withholding from me—you’re continuing to withhold, really—and that’s not the deal.”
“There was no deal, Layla.”
“Did you really think I would join you blindly, in a mission I don’t understand?” She was angry, and it was more than the alcohol or the exhaustion.
“No, of course not,” he said wearily. “Quite the opposite, Layla. Not only did I not ask your help, I’ve tried to discourage you, push you away. Not because I didn’t think you’d be helpful—you’ve been remarkable, invaluable—but because I couldn’t assume the responsibility of endangering your life the way I’m endangering my own. But this is my battle to fight, my mission. If there’s a subsidiary benefit to you, if whatever we end up learning serves your purpose, too, so much the better.”
“That’s so coldhearted.”
“Maybe I am coldhearted. Maybe I have to be.”
“But there’s a gentle, caring side to you as well. I can sense it.”
He didn’t reply.
“Also I think you’ve been married.”
“Oh? What makes you say that?”
“You have, yes?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “But why do you say it?”
“Something about the way you are with me, the way you are with women. You are wary, of course—you don’t know me, after all—yet at the same time you’re comfortable with me, yes?”
Bryson smiled, amused, but said nothing.
She continued, “I think that most men in our … our line of work are unsure how to treat women field operatives. Either we are neuters, sexless, or we are potential romantic conquests. You seem to understand that it is more complex than that—that a woman, like a man, can be both, or neither, or something else entirely.”
“You speak in riddles.”
“I don’t mean to. I just think—well, I suppose I’m saying that we are man and woman …” She tipped her glass toward him, a strange sort of salute.
He understood what she was hinting at, yet he pretended not to. She was an extraordinary woman, and the truth was that he was strongly attracted to her, increasingly, the more time he spent with her. But to pursue the attraction was to be selfish, to raise expectations he did not intend to meet, could not meet, until he finally understood what had happened between himself and Elena. The physical pleasure might well be considerable, but it would be momentary, fleeting; and it would simply end up confusing them, altering their relationship, introducing a destabilizing element.
“You seem to speak from experience,” he said. “About how some men don’t understand women who do the sort of work you do. Your husband—you said you married an Israeli soldier—was he one of those men who didn’t understand?”
“I was a different person then. Not even a young woman—I was a girl, half formed.”
“Was it his death that changed you?” asked Bryson gently.
“And my father’s death, even though I never knew him.” She looked pensive, and took another sip.
He nodded.
Her head bowed, she said, “Yaron, that was my husband, he was stationed at Kiryat Shmona during the intifada, helping to defend the village.
One day the Israeli Air Force launched a rocket attack on a Hezbollah terrorist base in the Bekaa Valley, not too far from where I lived as a child, and by accident they killed a mother and all five of her children. It was a nightmare. Hezbollah retaliated, of course, by launching their Katyusha rockets against Kiryat Shmona. Yaron was helping get villagers into bomb shelters. He was hit by one of the rockets, his body incinerated almost beyond recognition.” She looked up, tears in her eyes. “So tell me, who was in the right? Hezbollah, whose sole mission seems to be to kill as many Israelis as they can? The Israeli Air Force, which was so determined to eliminate a Hezbollah camp that they didn’t care if they killed the innocent?”
“You knew the mother who was killed with her five children, didn’t you?” said Bryson quietly.
She nodded, finally losing her composure, biting her lip as the tears flowed. “She was my sister, my … my older sister. My little nieces and nephews.” For a few moments she could not speak. Then she said, “You see, it is not always the men who fire the Katyushas who are the guilty ones. Sometimes it’s the men who supply the Katyushas. Or the men who sit in their bunkers with their charts and plan the attack. A man like Jacques Arnaud, who owns half of the French National Assembly and grows rich selling to the terrorists, the madmen, the fanatics of the world. So I want you to know that when you finally decide you can trust me, when you finally tell me why you are risking your life, and what it is you hope to find … I want you to know who it is you’ll be telling.” She stood, kissed him on the cheek. “And now I need to go to sleep.”
Bryson returned to his room, his mind working feverishly. It was vital that he reach Richard Lanchester as soon as possible; in the morning he would begin to make telephone calls to reach the national security adviser. He realized that he still had far too little information, and too little time. With Harry Dunne mysteriously vanished, for whatever reason, Lanchester was the one man in government with both the power and the independence of mind to do something about the Directorate’s metastasizing power. Although Bryson had not met the man, he knew the rudimentary biography: Lanchester had made millions on Wall Street but
gave up business in his midforties to pursue a life of public service. He had run his friend Malcolm Davis’s successful presidential election campaign and in return had been named as Davis’s national security adviser, where he rapidly distinguished himself. His probity and intelligence made him an anomaly among the grandstanding and corruption of the Beltway; he was notable for his fair-mindedness and an unassuming, amiable brilliance.
According to the newspaper account about the carnage at Lille, Lanchester was visiting Brussels on what was billed as a largely ceremonial visit to SHAPE, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe; there, he was consulting with the secretary general of NATO.
It would not be easy to reach Lanchester, particularly in the environs of NATO’s world headquarters.
But there might be a way.
Shortly after five in the morning, having passed a tense and restless night punctuated by the ceaseless cacophony of traffic and the shouts of all-night revelers, Bryson awoke, bathed in cold water since there seemed to be no hot, and drew up a plan.
He dressed quickly, went out to the street, located a newsstand that stayed open all night and sold a good selection of international newspapers and magazines, heavily favoring European. As he expected, many of the papers, from the International Herald-Tribune to the Times of London, from Le Monde and Le Figaro to Die Welt, published extensive coverage of the Lille attack. Many of them cited Richard Lanchester, often using the same quotation; a few of them ran longer, sidebar interviews with the White House adviser. Bryson bought an array of newspapers and took them to a café, ordered several strong cups of black coffee, and began reading through the articles, marking them up with a pen.
Several newspapers mentioned not only Lanchester but his spokesman, who was also the spokesman for the National Security Council, a man named Howard Lewin. Lewin was in Brussels as well, accompanying his boss and the White House delegation on their visit to NATO headquarters.
Press spokesmen like Howard Lewin had to be available at all times to handle urgent inquiries from journalists. Returning to his hotel room, Bryson was able to reach the spokesman in just one phone call.
“Mr. Lewin, I don’t believe we’ve ever spoken before,” said Bryson in an urgent, hard-bitten voice. “I’m Jim Goddard, European bureau chief for the Washington Post, and I’m sorry to disturb you so early in the morning, but we’ve got a bombshell on our hands, and I’m going to need your help with it.”
He had Lewin’s attention at once. “Absolutely—uh, Jim?—what’s up?”
“I wanted to give you a heads-up. We’re about to go to press with a full-dress, above-the-fold, front-page story on Richard Lanchester. Banner headline, the works. I’m afraid you folks aren’t going to be very happy with it. In fact, let me be blunt about it, it may well be the end of Lanchester’s career. It’s devastating stuff—the culmination of a three-month investigation.”
“Jesus! What the hell are we talking about here?”
“Uh, Mr. Lewin, I ought to tell you, I’ve been getting major pressure from the top to just run with the damned thing, not let a word of it leak before it comes off the press, but personally, I see this series as hugely damaging not only to Lanchester but potentially to national security as well, and I …” Bryson let his voice trail off for a moment, to let his words sink in. Then he offered the lifeline, which the spokesman had no choice but to grab at. “ … I wanted to give your boss an opportunity to at least respond to this—maybe even, hell, stall it for a while. I’m trying not to let my personal feelings, my admiration for the man, get in the way of my newsroom responsibilities here, and maybe I shouldn’t have even made this call, but if I can get the great man himself on the horn, maybe I can finesse this thing —”
“Do you know what time it is in Brussels?” Lewin stammered. “This— this last-minute notice—this is a goddamned setup, it’s completely irresponsible on the Post’s part—”
“Look, Mr. Lewin, I’m going to make this your judgment call, but I want us to be absolutely clear that I gave you the opportunity to put out this fire, that this is all going to be on your head—hotd on a second”—he shouted across the room to an imaginary colleague, “No, not that photo, the head shot of Lanchester, you idiot!” and then resumed speaking into
the phone—“but you tell your boss I need to hear from him on this cell number in the next ten minutes or we’re running with this thing, including the line ‘Mr. Lanchester declined to comment,’ are we clear? Tell Lanchester—I’d advise you to use these exact words—that the brunt of the piece concerns his relationship with a Russian official named Gennady Rosovsky, got that?”
“Gennady … what?”
“Gennady Rosovsky,” Bryson repeated, giving the Washington number of his cell phone, which would give no indication that he was in Brussels. “Ten minutes!”
Bryson’s phone rang barely ninety seconds later.
Bryson recognized the cultured baritone, the mid-Atlantic accent, at once. “This is Richard Lanchester,” the national security adviser said in a tone just short of frantic. “What the hell’s going on here?”
“I assume your spokesman filled you in on the piece we’re running with.”
“He mentioned some Russian name I’ve never heard before—Gennady something-or-other. What’s this all about, Mr. Goddard?”
“You know damned well Ted Waller’s real name, Mr. Lanchester—”
“Who the hell is Ted Waller? What is this?”
“We need to talk, Mr. Lanchester. Immediately.”
“Well, talk away! I’m here. What kind of hatchet job is the Post preparing? Goddard, I don’t know you, but as I’m sure you’re well aware, I do have your publisher’s home number, I see her socially, and I won’t hesitate for a second to call her!”
“We have to talk in person, not over the phone. I’m in Brussels; I can be at SHAPE headquarters in Mons in an hour. I want you to call ahead to the front-gate security post, so I can pass right through, and the two of us can have a heart-to-heart.”
“You’re in Brussels? But I thought you were in Washington! What the hell—?”
“One hour, Mr. Lanchester. And I suggest you make not a single phone call about this between now and the time I arrive.”
He knocked softly at Layla’s door. She opened it quickly; she was already dressed, freshly bathed, fragrant of shampoo and soap. “I passed by your room a few minutes ago,” she said as he entered. “I overheard you talking on the phone. No, don’t tell me—I won’t ask; I know: ‘when the time is right.’”
He sat down in the same rickety chair where he had sat last night. “Well, I think the time is right, Layla,” he said, and he immediately felt a burden begin to lift, almost a physical sensation, of finally being able to breathe deeply after so long being deprived of oxygen. “I need to tell you this, because I’m going to need your help, and I’m certain they’re going to try to take me out.”
“They … ?” She touched his arm with her hand. “What are you telling me?”
Choosing his words carefully, he spoke, telling her of things he had not spoken of to anyone except the now-disappeared CIA deputy director Harry Dunne. He confided that he had just one mission, which was to infiltrate, and then destroy, a shadowy organization known, to the very few who knew about it, as the Directorate; and he told her of his desperate hope to involve Richard Lanchester in the effort.
She listened, wide-eyed, taking it all in; then she got to her feet and began pacing the room. “I don’t think I completely understand. This is not an American agency—it’s international, multilateral?”
“That’s one way of putting it. When I worked for them, they were based in Washington, though their headquarters appear to have moved. Where, I don’t know.”
“What are you saying—they’ve just disappeared?”
“Something like that.”
“Impossible! An intelligence agency is like any other bureaucracy—it has telephone numbers and faxes and computers, not to mention office staff. It’s like—what’s the expression in English, trying to hide an elephant in the middle of a room!”
“The Directorate, when I worked for it, was lean, bare-bones, agile. And skilled at various forms of camouflage. The way the CIA is able to disguise its proprietaries as benign-seeming private corporations, or the Soviets used to create so-called Potemkin villages, false fronts, turning
biological-warfare facilities into laundry-soap factories or even colleges.”
Pensive, she shook her head in disbelief. “And do you mean to say they compete with CIA and MI-6 and Mossad and the Sûreté? With the knowledge of the other agencies?”
“No, that’s not it at all. Its members are given to understand that they do operations the more mainstream agencies are not permitted to do, whether by charter or by governmental policy.”
She nodded, unsmiling. “Yet at the same time they are able to keep their own existence secret? How can this be? People gossip, secretaries have friends … there are congressional oversight committees …” She went to the dressing table and, visibly distraught, began fumbling with her small black leather handbag, rummaging through it, finally pulling out a lipstick. She applied a dab of color, blotted her lips with a tissue, put the lipstick back.
“But that’s the ingenious thing! Through a combination of extremely tight compartmentalization and careful recruitment—members are chosen carefully, drawn from all around the world, their backgrounds especially conducive to this line of work, to maintaining a code of silence. The compartmentalization ensures that no one operative ever gets to know another more than fleetingly; no one ever works with more than one handler. My handler was a legend in the agency, one of the founders, a man named Ted Waller. A man I came to idolize,” he added regretfully.
“But surely the president must know!”
“To be honest, I have no idea. I believe the existence of the Directorate has always been kept from whoever occupies the Oval Office. Partly to protect the president from knowing too much about wet work and other sordid business, to provide him with plausible deniability. That’s standard operating procedure in intelligence outfits worldwide. And partly, I’m sure, because the president is considered by the permanent intelligence community to be a mere tenant of the White House. A renter. He moves in for four years, maybe eight if he’s lucky, buys new china, redecorates, hires and fires, gives a bunch of speeches, and then he’s gone. Whereas the spies remain. They’re the permanent Washington, the true inheritors.”
“And you think the one person in government most likely to know about its activities is the chairman of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, yes? The group that meets in secret to oversee the NSA and the CIA and all the other American spy agencies?”
“Correct.”
“And the chairman of this intelligence oversight is Richard Lanchester.”
“Exactly.”
Nodding, she said, “This is why you want to meet with him.”
“Correct.”
“But for what?” she cried. “To tell him what?”
“To tell him what I know about the Directorate, about what I think it’s up to. This was the big question, the reason I was brought back from retirement: Who’s controlling the Directorate now? What is it really doing?”
“And you think you have the answers?” She seemed belligerent, almost outright antagonistic.
“No, of course not. I have theories, backed up by evidence.”
“What evidence? You have nothing!”
“Whose side are you on, Layla?”
“I’m on yours!” she shouted. “I want to protect you, and I think you’re making a mistake.”
“A mistake?”
“You go to see this man Lanchester with … with wisps of nothing, crackpot accusations—he’ll dismiss you at once. He’ll think you’re crazy!”
“Quite possibly,” conceded Bryson. “But it’s my job to make him think otherwise, and I believe I can.”
“And what makes you think you can trust him?”
“What choice do I have?”
“He could be one of the enemies, one of the liars! How can you be sure he’s not?”
“I’m sure of nothing anymore, Layla. I feel like I’m in a maze, I’m lost. I don’t know where I am, who I am anymore.”
“What makes you so sure you can believe what this CIA man told you? What makes you so sure he’s not one of them, one of the liars?”
“I’m not sure, I told you that! This is not a matter of certainty, it’s a matter of calculation, of odds.”
“Then you believed it when he told you your parents were killed?”
“My stepmother—the woman who was sort of my guardian after my parents were killed—pretty much confirmed it, though she’s ill, I think she has Alzheimer’s, her mind is going. The fact is, the only people who really know the truth are the people I’m desperate to find—Ted Waller, and Elena.”
“Elena is your ex-wife.”
“Officially not an ex-wife. We never divorced. She disappeared. I suppose you’d say we’re separated.”
“She abandoned you.”
Bryson sighed. “I don’t know what happened. I wish I knew; I badly want to know.”
“She just disappeared, she never got in touch? One day there, next day gone?”
“Right.”
She shook her head in disapproval. “Yet I think you love her still.”
He nodded. “It’s—it’s just so hard for me to think straight about her, to know what to believe. Did she ever love me, or was she assigned to me? Did she run away from me in despair, or out of fear, or because she was forced to? What is the truth, where is the truth?” Had his secret mission to Bucharest somehow backfired? Had Elena been reached by the sweepers, frightened into hiding somehow? But if so, wouldn’t she have left word for him to explain her actions? Another possibility: Had she somehow discovered that he had lied to her about his whereabouts that weekend? Had she found out that he hadn’t been in Barcelona? She might feel violated, betrayed, but would that really drive her away without raising it with him first?
“And somehow you think you’ll learn this truth by flying everywhere, looking for Directorate operatives? It’s insanity!”
“Layla, once I track these wasps to their nest, they’re over. They must know that I’ve got the goods on them. I have a detailed knowledge of operations going back twenty years, transgressions of just about every national and international law.”
“And you will present all this to Richard Lanchester, and you hope he will expose them, put a stop to it?”
“If he’s as good a man as people say he is, that’s exactly what he’ll do.”
“And if he’s not?”
Bryson was silent; she went on, “You’ll bring a weapon.”
“Of course.”
“Where is yours? You don’t have it on you.”
He looked up, startled. She had a quick, discerning eye. “It’s in my luggage, still disassembled so I could get it through airport security.”
“Well, then,” she said. She removed a .45 from her purse, the Heckler & Koch USP compact.
“Thanks, but I’ll take the Beretta.” He smiled. “Of course, if you still have that .50 caliber Desert Eagle …”
“No, Nick, I’m sorry.”
“Nick?” He felt a hollow thudding in his chest; she knew his true name, though she had never before uttered it, and he had never told her. My God, what else did she know?
She was pointing it at him from halfway across the room. It took him a moment to realize what was going on. He was frozen in the chair, his normal split-second reactions dulled by disbelief.
Her eyes were doleful. “I can’t let you meet with Lanchester, Nick. I’m truly sorry, but I can’t.”
“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.
“My job. You’ve left us no choice. I never thought it would come to this.”
He felt as if the air had gone out of the room. His body went cold; he registered the shock viscerally.
“No,” he said hoarsely, the chair in which he sat spinning slowly a million miles away. “Not you. They’ve gotten to you, too. When did they—”
And he exploded from the chair with the force of a tightly coiled spring, lunging at her with a suddenness that startled her, causing her instinctively to draw back to brace herself, defensively repositioning herself, her fierce concentration broken for the barest instant. Thrown off-balance, she fired, the explosion filling the small room, percussive and deafening. Bryson felt the projectile whiz by his left cheek, the gunpowder searing his face and temple, heard the cartridge casing spit onto the
floor, and at almost the same moment he vaulted into the air, knocking her body to the floor, sending the gun clattering across the floor.
But she was no longer the woman he’d thought he knew; she’d been transformed into a tigress, a wild-eyed jungle predator crazed by bloodlust. Layla reared up, her right hand a rigid claw jabbing into his throat, while she simultaneously slammed her left elbow into his solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him.
Still, he managed to rise, swinging a fist at her, but she suddenly ducked under and shot upward, wedging her right shoulder into his right armpit as she vised her right arm around his neck, and with a loud grunt she grabbed her own left biceps and pulled in toward herself, choking him.
He had fought hand-to-hand with some of the fiercest, most dangerous and highly trained assassins in the world, but she was in another league entirely. She was brutally strong, as untiring as a machine, and she fought with a ferocity he had never seen before. Somehow managing to free himself from the headlock, he reared up again, swinging at her, but she jumped backward, deflecting his blow with her left arm, then sank suddenly to the floor and slammed a fist into his stomach, guarding her face with her left hand.
Bryson gasped, grappled for the soft flesh at the base of her neck, but she was too quick: she delivered a hard kick to the back of his right knee, causing him to sag. Striking the back of his head with her elbow, she almost succeeded in knocking him to the ground, but Bryson forced himself to ignore the blinding pain, summoning all of his considerable strength along with combat techniques learned decades ago that now returned to him like ancient hindbrain reflexes.
He spun out of her way, then launched his body at her frontally, hurling all of his weight against hers while simultaneously throwing a left-handed punch into her right kidney. She screamed, a shrill, full-throated cry not of pain but of rage. Leaping into the air and pivoting, she thrust out her right leg, scissoring it into his abdomen with astonishing force. Bryson groaned; she landed with her right leg forward and threw her right hand back-knuckle against his face with the impact of steel; then, grabbing his shoulders, she drove her left knee into his groin. As he doubled over in agony, she raised her right elbow and drove it into his spine, the
pain staggering, then reached for the left side of his face, wrenching his head clockwise as she took him down.
With one last surge of desperate energy, he thrust his hands out, blindly grasping for her legs, slamming the bony side of his hand hard against the nerve center just above her left knee, clutching at it, forcing her down as well, and as she stumbled backward, he thrust his knee into her midsection, cracking his elbow against the side of her neck. She screamed, loosening the grip of her right hand, reaching for something, and he saw what it was: the Heckler & Koch was just feet away; he could not let her regain control of it! He shifted slightly, then jammed his elbow into the cartilage of her throat. She gagged, instinctively reaching with her right hand to dislodge his elbow and protect the vulnerable area, and that was enough to allow him to grab the pistol with his left hand, spinning it around and crashing it against the top of her head, the blow carefully calculated neither to kill her nor seriously cripple her.
She crumpled to the floor, her eyes half open, only the whites visible. He felt her throat for a pulse and found it; she was alive, though she would be out for several hours. Whoever she was, whatever she was, she had had the chance to kill him at the outset, when she had the gun trained on him, but she hesitated; either she could not do it or she found it almost impossible to bear the thought of doing so. She, like he, was probably a pawn, lied to and manipulated, recruited to an assignment about which she was carefully kept in the dark. In a way she was a victim, too.
A victim of the Directorate?
It seemed likely, even probable.
And he needed to question her, find out everything she knew. But not now; there was no time.
He searched the tiny closet, where she had hung her few items of clothing and stowed a couple of pairs of shoes, for a rope or something similar to tie her up. Kneeling down, he felt along the floor, grabbing something that he realized was the spike heel that had somehow come loose from her gray shoes, the ones she had worn to the bank in Geneva. Something extremely sharp at one end of the heel lanced his finger. Wincing, he picked up the two-inch-long gray object and saw a small,
razor-sharp blade protruding from the end that was intended to attach to the sole of the shoe. He inspected it more closely: the narrow blade, like an artist’s X-Acto knife, fit into the base of the shoe, the heel threaded so that it screwed in.
He looked back at Layla. The whites of her eyes were still exposed, her jaw slack; she was still unconscious.
Her spike-heeled shoes, he suddenly understood, had been ingeniously outfitted with a razor blade, which was accessible by twisting off the heel. He examined the other shoe, which had been adapted the same way. It was a brilliant little trick.
And then it struck him.
The image of her in the closet off the banker’s office, bound with brightly colored polyurethane “humane restraints,” the sort normally used by law-enforcement agents to transport dangerous prisoners. Jan Vansina, Directorate operative, had fettered her with strong plastic handcuffs— which she could easily have cut her way out of.
Geneva had been a setup.
Layla had been in cahoots with Vansina, both of them Directorate. Vansina had only pretended to attack her; she had cooperated. At any time she could have freed herself.
What did this mean?
There was a small, two-person elevator at the end of the dark hall, the kind that was operated by opening or closing an accordion inner gate. Fortunately, there seemed to be no one else on the floor. Bryson had seen no one else go in or out of rooms on the floor; likely, they were the only ones.
He hoisted her—though she was not big, she was now deadweight and quite heavy—and, putting her head on his shoulder, grasped her beneath the buttocks and carried her, as if she were a drunken spouse, to the elevator. Bryson had readied a rueful joke about his wife’s perennial inebriation, but never had a chance to use it.
He took the elevator down to the hotel’s basement, which stank of flooded sewage, and set her down on the gritty concrete floor. After searching for a few minutes, he found a storage closet, removed the buckets and mops, and placed her inside. With a length of old clothesline, he carefully bound her wrists and ankles with several tight knots, winding
the rope around and around her legs and torso, looping it and tying it into slip knots, then tested the restraints to make sure she could not get out of them if she came to before he returned. The rope was secure— and she was barefoot, with no hidden blade anywhere.
Then, taking one more precaution—if she did become conscious unexpectedly soon, she might yell for help—he stuffed a gag in her mouth and tied it tight, checking to see that she could still breathe.
He turned the lock on the closet door, which would serve only to keep her in—he was convinced, however, that she would never have the opportunity to open the door herself—and not keep someone out.
Then Bryson returned to his hotel room to prepare to meet Richard Lanchester.
In a dark room halfway across the world, three men huddled around an electronic console, their tense faces bathed in the cool green light emitted by diodes.
“It’s a digital relay feed direct from Mentor, one of our space-based satellites in the Intelsat fleet,” intoned one of them.
The reply was urgent, the tone revealing long hours of stress. “But the voice-pattern ID—how reliable is Voicecast?”
“Within a tolerance of between ninety-nine and ninety-nine-point-nine-seven degrees,” the first man said. “Extremely reliable.”
“The identification is affirmative,” remarked the third man. “The communication was initiated by a GSM cellular phone on the ground whose coordinates indicate Brussels, Belgium, the recipient based in Mons.” The third man adjusted a dial; the voice that emerged from the console was astonishingly clear.
“What is this?”
“We need to talk, Mr. Lanchester. Immediately.”
“Well, talk away! I’m here. What kind of hatchet job is the Post preparing? Goddard, I don’t know you, but as I’m sure you’re well aware, I do have your publisher’s home number, I see her socially, and I won’t hesitate for a second to call her!”
“We have to talk in person, not over the phone. I’m in Brussels; I can be at SHAPE headquarters in Mons in an hour. I want you to call ahead
to the front-gate security post, so I can pass right through, and the two of us can have a heart-to-heart.”
“You’re in Brussels? But I thought you were in Washington! What the hell—?”
“One hour, Mr. Lanchester. And I suggest you make not a single phone call about this between now and the time I arrive.”
“Order an interception,” one of the watchers said.
“The decision must be taken at a higher level,” replied another, clearly his superior. “Prometheus may prefer to continue gathering information on the target’s activities, on how much the target knows.”
“But if the two meet in a secure facility—what kind of penetration can we expect?”
“Good Christ, McCabe! Is there anywhere we can’t penetrate? Relay the sound file. Prometheus will decide the course of action.”