PART THREE

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The president’s national security adviser sat across the burnished mahogany conference table from Bryson, tension creasing his high forehead. For over twenty minutes Richard Lanchester had listened in rapt absorption to Bryson’s account, nodding, taking notes, interrupting only for occasional clarifications. Every question he asked was not only pertinent but incisive, piercing through layers of ambiguity and confusion right to the crux of the issue. Bryson was impressed by the man, by his brilliance, his quick intelligence. He listened closely, concentrating deeply. Bryson spoke as he would debrief a handler or a case officer, just as he used to brief Waller after a field operation: calmly, objectively, coolly assessing probabilities while not injecting conjecture without basis. He tried to provide a context in which the revelations could be meaningfully placed. It was difficult.

The two men sat in a special secure facility located within the NATO secretary general’s command-and-control center, an acoustically insulated room-within-a-room known informally as the “bubble.” Its walls and floor were actually one module separated from the surrounding concrete walls by foot-thick rubber blocks that kept all sound vibrations from emanating outward. Technical surveillance countermeasures were employed daily to ensure that the bubble remained secure, free of any taps or listening devices. Security officers swept the room and its immediate environs daily. There were no windows, and thus no risk of laser or microwave bounces that could read the vibrations from human voices. Then there was an elaborate system of fallbacks: a spectral correlator was used at all times to detect surveillance using a spectrum analyzer, and an acoustic correlator used passive sound-pattern matching to automatically detect and classify any listening device. Finally, an acoustic noise generator was constantly on, generating an audio blanket of pink noise designed to defeat wired microphones inside walls, contact microphones, and any audio transmitters located in electrical outlets. Lanchester’s insistence that they meet within the extraordinarily secure walls of the bubble was testimony to the seriousness with which he regarded Bryson’s urgently imparted information.

Lanchester looked up, visibly shaken. “What you’re telling me is preposterous, the sheerest madness, yet somehow it has the ring of truth. I say that because bits and pieces of what you say precisely confirm what little I know.”

“But you must know about the existence of the Directorate. You’re chairman of PFIAB; I’d have thought you’d know all about it.”

Lanchester removed his rimless spectacles, polished them thoughtfully with a handkerchief. “The existence of the Directorate is one of the most closely held secrets in the government. Shortly after I was named to PFIAB I was briefed about it, and I must say at first I thought my briefer— one of those nameless, anonymous, behind-the-scenes intelligence officers who are part of the permanent establishment around Washington— had taken leave of his senses. It was one of the most fantastic, most implausible things I’d ever heard. A covert intel agency that operated entirely out of sight, without controls, without accountability or oversight—outlandish! If I’d dared to suggest the idea to the president, he’d have had me committed to St. Elizabeth’s immediately, and quite justifiably so.”

“Then what is it you find so implausible? You’re referring to the true nature of the Directorate, the deception within the deception?”

“Actually, no. Harry Dunne did give me a briefing some months ago, when he’d apparently uncovered only part of the story. He told me of his belief that the Directorate’s founders and principals were all Soviet GRU, that Ted Waller was a man named Gennady Rosovsky. What he told me was alarming, deeply astonishing, and by its very nature his findings had to be kept extremely protected: our government would be thrown into turmoil, security vulnerabilities exposed, shaken to its very foundations. That’s why your mention of that name drew my immediate attention.”

“Yet you must have been skeptical of what he told you.”

“Oh yes, deeply so. I won’t say I dismissed him, Dunne’s credentials are too heavy to be ignored—but the notion of such a mammoth deception operation—it’s difficult to accept, frankly. No, what I find most troubling is your assessment of the Directorate’s present-day activities.”

“Dunne must have kept you informed about all this.”

He shook his head slowly, the barest movement. “I haven’t spoken with him in weeks. If he was compiling this sort of dossier, by rights he should have kept me apprised. Perhaps he was waiting until he had more, until he’d amassed a substantive, incontrovertible file.”

“You must have a way to reach him, locate him.”

“I have no tricks up my sleeve. I’ll make calls, see what I can do, but people don’t just vanish from the seventh floor of the CIA. If he’s been taken hostage, or if he’s dead, I’ll be able to find it out, Nick. I’m fairly confident I can track him down.”

“When we spoke last, he was concerned about infiltration within the Agency—that the Directorate had extended its reach inside.”

Lanchester nodded. “I’d say the identification you pulled off the would-be killer in Chantilly speaks volumes. It’s always possible that the paper was simply stolen, or that the fellow was turned, hired locally. But I’d have to agree with both you and Dunne. We can’t rule out the possibility that the CIA’s been infiltrated pretty deeply. I’m flying back to Washington in a few hours, and I’ll put in a call to Langley en route, speak with the Director myself. But let me be brutally frank with you, Nick. Look at the totality of what you’re telling me. An overheard exchange at a French arms dealer’s chateau, the implication that he and Anatoly Prishnikov were involved in planning the catastrophe at Lille. I don’t doubt it’s true, but what do we have, really?”

“The word of an intelligence operative of almost two decades,” said Bryson quietly.

“An operative for this same, bizarre agency that we now know to be a hostile power operating on American soil against American interests. I’m sorry to be so brutal, but this is the way it reads. You’re a defector, Nick. I don’t doubt your honesty for a second, but you know how our government has always treated defectors—with the highest suspicion. For God’s sake, look at what we did to the poor defector Nosenko, who broke from the KGB to warn that the Russians were behind the Kennedy assassination and that our own CIA had been penetrated by a high-level mole. We locked him up in solitary, in a prison cell, and interrogated him for years. James Jesus Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence chief back then, was certain this was a Soviet dangle, an attempt to manipulate us, mislead us, and he’d have none of it. Not only did he not believe the most significant KGB defector we’d ever had—even after Nosenko had passed polygraph after polygraph—but he brutalized the man, broke him. And Nosenko had specific names of agents, operations, controls. You’re giving me rumors, overhears, suggestions.”

“I’m giving you more than enough to act on,” snapped Bryson.

“Nick, listen to me. Listen, and understand. Say I go to the president and tell him that there’s some sort of octopus—a faceless, nebulous organization whose existence I can’t definitively establish, can’t substantiate, and whose aims I can only guess at. I’ll be laughed out of the Oval Office, or worse.”

“Not with your credibility.”

“My credibility, as you put it, is based on my unwillingness to be alarmist, my insistence on having the goods before we act. Good Lord, if someone else spoke up at the National Security Council, or in the Oval Office, with such allegations without basis, I’d be furious.”

“But you know —”

“I know nothing. Suspicions, inklings, those patterns we imagine we see. That isn’t knowledge. In the jargon of international law, they don’t constitute evidentiary warrant. It’s insufficient —”

“You propose to do nothing?”

“I didn’t say that. Listen, Nick, I believe in the rules. People chide me all the time for being a stickler. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to sit back and let these fanatics take the world hostage. What I’m saying is that I need more. I need proof. I will mobilize every form of state authority we can muster, but to do that I need you to come back to me with something.”

“Damn it, there’s no time.”

“Bryson, listen to me!” Bryson saw the harrowed look in Lanchester’s face. “I need more. I need specifics. I need to know what they’re planning! I’m counting on you. We all are.”

 

 

“I’m counting on you. We all are.” Lanchester’s voice came from the speaker console in the darkened room thousands of miles away. “Now, how can I help? What resources can I place at your disposal?”

The listener picked up a telephone handset and pressed a button. In a moment he spoke, his voice hushed. “So he’s made contact. As we expected.”

“It fits the profile, sir,” came the voice at the other end of the line. “He goes straight to the top. I’m surprised only that he didn’t attempt blackmail or other threats.”

“I want to know exactly who he’s working with, who he’s working for.”

“Yes, sir. Unfortunately, we don’t know where he’s going next.”

“Don’t worry. The world is a very small place today. He can’t get away. There’s no place to go.”

 

 

Bryson left the rented car a few blocks from the Marolles and approached the pension on foot, alert for any disruptions in pattern, anyone who seemed not to belong. There was nothing out of the ordinary, but his mind was not set at ease. He had been manipulated, deceived too often. Richard Lanchester had not dismissed him out of hand, but neither had he been roused to immediate action. Did that mean he, too, was to be suspected? Paranoia bred upon itself; Bryson knew that that way lay madness. No, he would take Lanchester at face value, as a man who seemed genuinely concerned yet quite reasonably needed hard facts upon which to order action. It was a setback, but in another sense it was a step forward, because he had enlisted a powerful ally. Or if not an ally, at least a sympathetic ear.

Once past the glum woman at the front desk, Bryson took the stairs to the basement, to the storage closet. From the outside he could see it was still locked; that was a relief. But he put nothing past Layla anymore; he pulled his weapon out from his belt, concealed by his suit jacket, and stood to one side as he silently turned the lock, then suddenly whipped open the door.

She did not spring out; there was only silence.

From where he stood he could see that the closet was empty. The clothesline had been severed, pieces discarded on the floor.

She was gone.

 

 

She could not have escaped without outside assistance. There was no way she could have slipped the knots or severed them; she had no blade or other tool. He had made sure of that.

Now he was certain: she had been working with others nearby.

Her accomplices were likely in the vicinity now; they knew where he was staying, and if she had hesitated momentarily before firing her gun, they would not. Returning to his room was therefore out of the question, a risk he must not take.

He mentally ran through the contents of his suitcase upstairs. Over twenty years he had learned to travel with the minimum, to assume that his hotel room would be searched. Habitually, he arranged his things in such a way that he would inevitably be able to tell if someone had gone through them, information that often proved useful. Since he assumed his suitcase would be rifled, he had learned not to leave anything irreplaceable behind, unattended. He learned, too, to separate valuables into two broad categories: those with monetary value, and those of strategic value. It was items in the first category that were most likely to be stolen by casual thieves, larcenous maids and the like: money, jewelry, small electronics that looked expensive. Those in the second category—things like passports real and forged, identity papers and licenses and other documents, canisters of film, videotapes or computer disks—were least likely to be stolen by simple thieves, yet if pilfered often could not be replaced.

For that reason, Bryson was more likely to leave cash and such in his luggage, but take with him his false passports. True to habit, he had on his person all of his papers, his weapon, and the downloaded cryptographic key from Jacques Arnaud’s secure phone, a tiny microchip he had been carrying with him for quite some time now. If he abandoned his hotel room and never returned, he would survive. He would need money, though that was fairly easily arranged. But he could continue.

But to where? Simple penetration of the Directorate was out of the question now. They knew of his hostile intent. The only remaining strategy was a frontal one: to try to locate Elena by using his standing as her former husband as a lure.

They didn’t know what he knew, what he might have learned from her.

Whether she was assigned to him or not, whether tasked to manipulate him, keep him in the dark, she nevertheless might have told him things, inadvertently or intentionally. He had been her husband, however fraudulent the marriage was designed to be; there had been, of necessity, moments of intimacy, times when the two of them were entirely alone.

The deception could be doubled back, turned back on them as well. Why not? What if he let it be known that he had learned things from Elena, deliberately or not—facts they would not want him to know? Information that could be locked away, used as a bargaining chip, left with an attorney to be released in the event of death?

He had something here. A husband knew things about his wife that no one else did. They didn’t know what she might have passed on to him, intentionally or not. He would use the uncertainty, the ambiguity— use it as a bright, shining beacon, a lure.

Exactly how he would use it was still unclear, the plan inchoate. But there still remained agents he had had brief dealings with, operatives in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, Berlin and London, Sierra Leone and Pyongyang. He would begin the methodical, painstaking process of contacting them, or whichever ones of them whose names and contact information still functioned, using them as conduits to pass on the message to Ted Waller.

To do this he would need money, but that was fairly easily arranged. He had his hidden accounts in Luxembourg and Grand Cayman, as yet untouched; the necessity of hiding contingency funds was virtually a law of nature among Directorate operatives, a matter of survival. He would arrange wire transfers, secure the funds he needed to travel freely, now that he could no longer trust the CIA.

And then he would begin to contact former colleagues, using them to pass on the threat. And a demand: an insistence upon a meeting with Elena. A condition that, if not met, would result in the release of information he had until now held in reserve. Blackmail, pure and simple. Ted Waller would understand; it was mother’s milk to him.

He closed the storage-closet door and searched for another way out of the hotel, an exit that didn’t require going through the lobby. After circling the dark basement warrens for a few minutes, he found a little-used service exit, an iron door that was all but rusted shut. He struggled with it until he managed to loosen the handle; a little while later he wrenched it open. It gave on to a narrow, trash-strewn cobblestone alley, barely passable and evidently rarely used.

A side street, really little more than a parking area for residents of the neighboring tenements, led to the main thoroughfare, where he disappeared into the crowds of pedestrians. His first stop was a shabby department store, where he purchased an entirely new outfit of clothing, changing in the fitting room and discarding his old clothes there, to the bafflement of the clerk. He also picked up a knapsack, an assortment of other casual clothes, and a cheap airline carry-on bag.

Searching for a branch office of a large international bank, he passed the window of an electronics shop, dominated by a row of television sets all tuned to the same broadcast. The sight was immediately familiar: he recognized the landmarks of Geneva; it seemed to be a travel advertisement for Switzerland, then he realized it was actually news footage, and then he felt his legs go weak at what he saw next.

It was the Hôpital Cantonal in Geneva. The camera panned through its corridors, across its emergency room, jammed with people on stretchers, corpses in body bags. The camera panned across a hellish scene: bodies stacked up in preparation for carting away. The caption on the screen read: “Geneva, yesterday.”

Yesterday? What catastrophe could possibly have just happened?

He turned back to the street, spotted a newsstand, saw the banner headlines: GENEVA. ANTHRAX. OUTBREAK. ATTACK.

He grabbed an International Herald-Tribune, noting the headline that ran across the top in thirty-six-point type: ANTHRAX VICTIMS CONTINUE TO FILL GENEVA HOSPITALS AS INTERNATIONAL AUTHORITIES SEARCH FOR ANSWERS; UP TO A THOUSAND DEATHS EXPECTED.

Reeling, he read with horror.

GENEVA—A sudden, widespread outbreak of anthrax has turned into an epidemic here, as the city’s hospitals and clinics fill with stricken residents. An estimated 3,000 have been infected by the deadly disease, with some 650 persons already declared dead. Hospital administrators have instituted emergency procedures to prepare their facilities for what many fear will be an overwhelming influx of anthrax cases in the next 48 hours. City officials have ordered businesses, schools, and all governmental offices closed and have warned tourists and business visitors to stay away from Geneva until the source of the infection can be determined. The city’s mayor, Alain Prisette, expressed his shock and grief, while warning residents and visitors alike to remain calm.

Patients began pouring into Geneva’s hospitals and clinics yesterday in the predawn hours complaining of severe flulike symptoms. By five o’clock in the morning, over a dozen cases of anthrax had been diagnosed at the Hôpital Cantonal. By noon yesterday the victims numbered in the thousands.

City and health officials have been working around the clock to determine the source of the outbreak. Sources here refused to speculate on reports that the deadly disease may have been released by a truck driving through the city with a truck-mounted aerosolized dispenser emitting a cloud of spores.

Anthrax has a mortality rate as high as 90%. After exposure, the victim develops severe respiratory distress, followed by the rapid onset of shock and subsequent death within 36 hours.

Although inhalation anthrax can be treated with a repeated course of penicillin, authorities here point out that hospital staff must take protective measures or risk infection themselves. Anthrax spores can remain present for decades.

As Swiss authorities continue their investigation into the source of the infection, health officials estimate that by the end of the week victims will number in the tens of thousands.

The question many are asking here is, why? Why was Geneva targeted, and how? Speculation centers on the fact that Geneva serves as the headquarters of a number of powerful transnational organizations, including the World Health Organization. The mayor refused to comment on widespread speculation that the outbreak was the result of a biological weapon wielded by an unnamed terrorist organization that had been planning such an attack for weeks, if not months.

Bryson looked up from the newspaper, blood draining from his face. If this report was accurate, and there was no reason to suppose it was not, a biological-weapons attack had occurred in Geneva while he was still there, or immediately afterward.

An American jet blown out of the sky … the Eurostar train blown up in Lille … a bomb detonated in the Washington Metro during morning rush hour …

He was seeing a pattern of terrorism, increasing in frequency, the commonalities evident. Each was designed to incite chaos, wide-ranging public injury, and resulting fear. These were classically designed terrorist paradigms, except for one thing.

No one had claimed responsibility.

It was customary, though not inevitable, for terrorists to claim responsibility for their deeds, assert a justification. Otherwise, the incident had no purpose except random demoralization.

Since Bryson knew the Directorate had been behind Lille, it was by no means impossible that the Directorate had had a hand in the Geneva attack. In fact, it was likely.

But why?

What was the objective? What did the Directorate hope to accomplish? Why was a conspiracy of extremely powerful private citizens banding together to instigate a wave of terror in various sites around the world? To what end?

Bryson no longer accepted the theory that private arms dealers were trying to create an artificial demand for their goods. Uzis were useless against an outbreak of anthrax. There was more to it; there was another pattern, another logic. But what?

He had just come from Geneva, had been very close to Lille only days before. In both cases, he had been there. True, he had come to Geneva because of a report that Jan Vansina, a Directorate operative, was there. He had gone to Chantilly—not Lille, but close to it—to track the activities of Jacques Arnaud.

Was it possible that he was being set up? Terrorist outbreaks in places he had just visited—would he somehow be tied in because he had been in the vicinity?

He thought about Harry Dunne and his insistence that he go to Geneva to confront Jan Vansina. In that case, Dunne had encouraged him to go there; Dunne could have had a hand in setting him up. But Chantilly? Dunne hadn’t known in advance …

Layla had. In that case, Layla had let him know about Arnaud’s château in Chantilly. She had been reluctant to take him there—or had feigned reluctance—but it was she who let him know about Chantilly. In effect, she had waved the red flag at the bull.

Harry Dunne had encouraged him to visit Geneva; Layla had induced him, subtly, to Chantilly. In both places, there had been terrorist strikes immediately afterward. Was it possible that Dunne and Layla had been working together, both on behalf of the Directorate, to manipulate him, set him up to take the fall for a series of devastating attacks?

Jesus, what was the truth?

He folded up the newspaper to take it with him, and that was when he noticed a small article, accompanied by an equally small photograph. It was the photograph that first caught his eye.

Bryson recognized the face at once: it was the florid-cheeked man he had seen emerging from Jacques Arnaud’s private office at the chateau in Chantilly. Anatoly Prishnikov, chairman and CEO of the mammoth Russian conglomerate Nortek.

ARNAUD JOINT VENTURE ANNOUNCED, the headline read. Jacques Arnaud’s far-flung corporate empire had just announced a joint business venture with the Russian conglomerate, which itself represented the consolidation of a number of industries that formerly belonged to the Soviet military.

The nature of the business venture was unspecified, but the article took note of Nortek’s growing presence in the European market, mentioning its role in a wave of mergers in the electronics industry. A pattern was beginning to emerge, but what was it exactly? A worldwide coalescence of major corporations, each of which was—or could be — adefense contractor.

Under the control of the Directorate, if his information was accurate. Did this mean that the Directorate was attempting to seize control of the defense establishments of the world’s great powers? Could that have been what Harry Dunne was so fearful of?

Had Dunne been maneuvering to set him up as a dupe, a fall guy? Or was Dunne himself—if he was still alive—the dupe?

Now, at least, it was clear where he would have to go to look for answers.

 

 

There was a theatrical supply shop on rue d’Argent, two blocks north of the Theatre de la Monnaie, where Bryson made several purchases. Then he entered the branch office of an international bank, where he initiated a sequence of wire transfers from his Luxembourg account. By the end of the afternoon he had, discounting transaction fees, almost a hundred thousand dollars, mostly in American dollars, but also in a range of European currency as well.

He stopped into a travel agency and signed on as a last-minute member of a charter tour. Then he found a sporting-goods store and bought a few more items.

 

 

Departing from Zaventem Airport the next day was a leased, decrepit Aeroflot plane whose passengers were a motley, rowdy group of backpackers who had paid bargain-basement prices for the “Moscow Nights” package tour of Russia—three nights and four days in Moscow, followed by an overnight train to St. Petersburg, where they would spend two nights and three days. The accommodations would be inexpensive, which was a polite term for squalid, and all meals were included, which was not necessarily a plus.

One of the backpackers was a middle-aged man wearing green fatigues, a baseball cap, and a bushy brown beard. He was traveling alone but he joined in the general hilarity. His new, instant friends knew him as Mitch Borowsky, a bookkeeper from Quebec who had backpacked all around the world, and happened to be in Brussels when the urge to go to Moscow had struck him. He was lucky enough to get one of the last remaining empty seats on the charter flight. It was totally last-minute, he explained to his new comrades, but Mitch Borowsky liked to do things at the last minute.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

It was 10:00 A.M. in the Map Room, on the ground level of the White House, and an “impromptu” had been convened—an unscheduled meeting of agency heads and their deputies. It was at such irregular meetings that emergent situations were dealt with, fires extinguished and, at times, set. At such meetings, the incremental decisions that collectively produced the policies and doctrines of state were reached.

Rapid events required rapid responses: the needed consensus could only be reached in a free-form setting unencumbered by snail-paced bureaucracy, cabinet-level politicking, and endless second-guessing of timid analysts. Success in the executive branch meant mastery of one basic tenet. One did not present the commander in chief with problems; one presented him with solutions. It was at the impromptus—in the White House or the adjacent Old Executive Office Building—that solutions were crafted.

There were eight chairs around a long mahogany table, a white notepad in front of each seat. A rose damask sofa stood against one wall, a picture of orphaned gentility; above it, framed, was the last situation map used by President Roosevelt, who had overseen the American conduct of World War II from here. It was hand-labeled with a date: APRIL 3, 1945. Roosevelt had died a little more than a week later. In subsequent years, the once-top-secret command center had been converted to a storage area. Only in the current administration had the windowless room once more come into active use. Even so, the redolence of its history lent solemnity to the proceedings.

Richard Lanchester sat at one end of the table, looking around curiously at his colleagues. “I’m still not clear about the agenda this morning. Urgency was conveyed in the message I got, but very little content.”

NSA Director John Corelli spoke first. “I would have thought you were in the best position to appreciate the significance of what has happened,” Corelli said, meeting Lanchester’s level gaze. “He’s made contact.”

“He? Sorry?” Lanchester raised an eyebrow. He had taken a night flight from Brussels, had barely had a chance to shower and shave before the meeting was convened, and the wearing schedule told on his lined face.

Morton Culler, the senior intelligence officer at the NSA and a twenty-year veteran of the agency, exchanged glances with his boss. Culler’s thinning hair was slicked back with gel, his slate eyes unblinking behind the thick lenses of his aviator-style glasses. “Nicholas Bryson, sir. We’re talking about the visit he paid you in Brussels.”

“Bryson,” Lanchester repeated the name, his face impassive. “You know who he is?”

“Of course,” Culler said. “It’s all exactly as we’d expected. It fits his profile, you see. He goes straight to the top. Did he try to blackmail you? Use threats?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Lanchester protested.

“And yet you agreed to see him face-to-face.”

“Anyone in public life accumulates a protective armamentarium, a Praetorian guard of receptionists and press officers and functionaries. He got past all that using deception. But he got my attention by revealing his knowledge of something very few of us know about.”

“And did you find out what he wanted from us?”

Lanchester paused. “He talked of the Directorate.”

“He admitted his allegiance, then,” the CIA director, James Exum, said precisely.

“On the contrary. He described the Directorate as a global threat. He seemed impatient that we hadn’t taken effective action against it. He alluded to patterns of deceptions, to a shadowy supranational organization. It sounded mad, much of it. And yet …” Lanchester fell silent for a moment.

“And yet?” Exum prompted.

“Frankly, a certain amount of what he said made sense. It scared me.”

“He’s a master at that, sir,” Culler said. “A real spinner of tales. A genius at manipulation.”

“You seem to know a great deal about this man,” Lanchester said tartly. “Why don’t you fill me in?”

“That’s precisely what we intend to do,” Corelli said. He nodded toward the two unfamiliar faces in the room. “Terence Martin and Gordon Wollenstein, from the joint intelligence task force we’ve assembled for the purpose. I’ve asked them here to brief everyone present.”

Terence Martin was a tall man in his midthirties with a dry manner and a trace of Maine in his accent. His military background was evident from his ramrod posture. “Nicholas Bryson. Son of George Bryson, a one-star general in the United States Army before he died. Bryson was in the Forty-second Battalion, Mechanized, in North Korea, and later served in Vietnam, during the first phase of the engagement. A kit bag full of combat honors. Glowing fitness reports and officers’ evaluations, all the way up. Nicholas, his only child, was born forty-two years ago. At that point, George Bryson was regularly on the move, with rotating posts around the world. Nina Bryson, his wife, was an accomplished pianist, taught music. Quiet, unassuming. Followed him from place to place. Young Nicholas spent his childhood in a dozen different countries. At one point, eight countries in the course of four years: Wiesbaden, Bangkok, Marrakech, Madrid, Riyadh, Taipei, Madrid, Okinawa.”

“Sounds like a recipe for isolation,” Lanchester said, nodding slowly. “It must have been easy to lose your bearings in that kaleidoscope of cultures. You pull into yourself, into a shell, withdraw from the people around you.”

“Only here’s where things get interesting,” Gordon Wollenstein interjected politely. He was red-haired and ruddy, with a deeply creased face, and a tieless, slightly disheveled appearance. Only his quiet, observant manner suggested his disciplinary expertise in psychology. His Berkeley doctoral thesis on new-generation techniques of psychological profiling was what had first brought him to the attention of certain experts in the U.S. intelligence community. “You’ve got a child who, every time he gets settled, has to pull up stakes. Abruptly, and with little warning. And yet at every posting, he acquired perfect native command of the cultures, the customs, and the language of the locale. Not the army base, not the American cohort, but the natives, the people in whose land he was living. Presumably from contact with his parents’ servants. Four months after he arrived at Bangkok, at the age of eight, he spoke fluent, accentless Thai. Shortly after arriving at Hanover, none of his German classmates would have guessed he was an American. Same with Italian. Chinese. Arabic. Even Basque, for God’s sake. Not just the official languages, but the local dialectal variants—the language of the playground as well as of the radio broadcasts. It was as if he’d spent his whole life in the place. He was a sponge, a human chameleon, with a really astonishing capacity to, well, ‘go native.’”

“We’ve confirmed that his test scores were remarkable, always at the top of his class,” Terence Martin put in. He distributed a summary sheet to the others in the room. “Extraordinary intelligence, extraordinary athletic skills. Not a freak of nature, but close. Still, it’s clear something happened to him during his adolescence.” Martin nodded at Wollenstein, giving him the signal to proceed.

“Adaptability is a funny thing,” Wollenstein said. “We talk about ‘code switching,’ when people grow up multilingual—effortlessly able to think and express themselves in many tongues. More troubling is the ability to adopt and discard different value systems. To exchange one code of honor for another. What if there’s no bright line between being adaptable and being unmoored? We believe that Bryson changed after his parents were killed, when he was fifteen. Once the ties to those parental values were severed, violently, he became susceptible to other influences. Adolescent rebelliousness, steered and manipulated by interests hostile to ours, turned him into a very dangerous man indeed. We’re talking about a man with a thousand faces. A man who may have cultivated grievances against the authorities that once governed his life. His father spent his life in the service of his nation. On some prerational level, he may blame the United States government for his father’s death. This is not a man you want as an enemy.”

Martin cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, we’ve never had the luxury of choosing our enemies.”

“And in this case, he seems to have chosen us.” Wollenstein paused. “A man whose powerful abilities to adapt to circumstance verge on something like multiple personality disorder. I’m frankly speculating here. But my team and I have grown convinced that multiplicity is the key to Nicholas Bryson. It isn’t like dealing with one man with a stable set of habits and traits. Think of a one-man consortium, if you will.”

“It’s important that you understand what Gordon has been telling us,” Martin said. “All the evidence suggests that he’s been turned into a very dangerous man indeed. We know of his involvement in something called the Directorate. We know that ‘Coleridge’ is one of his field names. We know that he has been highly trained —”

Lanchester cut him off. “I told you, he spoke to me about the Directorate. Said he was trying to destroy it.”

“Classic disinformation ploy,” Corelli said. “He is the Directorate, for all intents and purposes.”

Terence Martin opened a large manila envelope and withdrew a set of photographs, which he distributed to the assembled. “Some of these are grainy, some less so. You’re seeing a lot of high-res satellite surveillance product. I’d direct your attention to the photograph labeled 34-12-A.” The image showed Nicholas Bryson onboard a vast container vessel. “Spectroscopic analysis tells us he’s holding a quartz container of ‘red mercury,’ so-called. An extremely efficient high explosive. The Russkies came up with it. Nasty stuff.”

“Just ask the good citizens of Barcelona,” Corelli said. “That’s what was used in the recent explosion there.”

“Photograph 34-12-B is grainy, but I think you can make it out,” Martin went on. “We took it from a security camera in the Lille station. Bryson again.” He held up another image, an aerial view of the landscape just ten miles east of Lille. It was a scene of destruction, twisted rails and train cars in disarray, like the playthings of a bored child. “Again, we’ve got forensic trace-evidence confirmation that the explosive used was red mercury. Probably ten cc’s would have done the trick.”

Martin passed out another image: Bryson in Geneva. “You can just make him out from a cluttered street scene—outside the Temple de la Fusterie.”

“We figured he kept a stash in one of the Geneva banks,” Morton Culler said. “But he was up to something else there. We didn’t know until a few hours ago.”

“It wasn’t until we learned about the release of weaponized anthrax there,” Martin said. “Precisely in the sector of the Old Town where we’d photographed him. Presumably there were confederates, but they may have been unwitting. He’s the one who orchestrated it, that much is clear.”

Lanchester leaned back in his chair, his face drawn. “What are you telling me?”

“Call it what you like,” Corelli said. “But I’d say your man is the Typhoid Mary of global terror.”

“At whose behest?” Though Lanchester’s gaze was fixed in the middle distance, his voice was insistent.

“That’s the trillion-dollar question, isn’t it?” Exum said, with his deceptive Southern languor. “John and I have some disagreements on this issue.”

John Corelli glanced at Martin, prompting him. “I’m here because Lieutenant General Corelli asked me here in an advisory capacity,” Martin said. “But there’s no secret as to my own recommendation. However formidable Bryson is, he can’t be acting alone. I say we follow him covertly, see where he leads us. Follow the hornet to the hive.” He smiled, exposing small, off-white teeth. “Then apply a blowtorch.”

“John’s people are saying wait until we learn more,” Exum said, in a tone of exquisite courtesy. He leaned across the table and picked up the photograph of the Eurostar disaster. “This is my answer.” Abruptly, his voice grew hard. “It’s too dangerous to delay any further. Forgive me, but this isn’t a goddamn science fair. We cannot have another massacre while the NSA boys wait until they’ve finished the crossword puzzle. And on this I think the president and I are on the same page.”

“But suppose he’s our one lead to a larger conspiracy …” Corelli began.

Exum snorted. “And if you can just get seven across, you’ll figure out ten down. Five letters, starts with E …” He shook his head gravely. “John, Terence, I have the greatest respect for your gamesmanship. But you and your whiz kids forget one simple thing. There’s no time.”

Lanchester turned to Morton Culler, the NSA ace. “Where do you come out?”

“Exum’s right,” Culler said heavily. “Let me be more precise. Bryson must be apprehended immediately. And if apprehension poses any difficulties, he must be terminated. We’ve got to dispatch the Alpha squad. And make their assignment very explicit. We’re not talking about a guy who owes library fines for overdue books. We’re talking about someone responsible for mass murder, and who seems to have an even bigger game afoot. So long as he’s alive and out there, none of us can relax our vigilance.”

Lanchester shifted uncomfortably. “The Alpha squad,” he said quietly. “It isn’t supposed to exist.”

“It doesn’t exist,” Culler said. “Officially.”

Lanchester placed his hands flat on the polished table. “Listen, I need to know how certain you are in this analysis,” Lanchester said. “Because I’m the one man in this room who’s met with Bryson, face-to-face. And—I just have to say it—that’s just not the vibe I got from him. He struck me as a man of honor.” Lanchester paused, and for a few moments, nobody spoke. “Still, I’ve been fooled before.”

“Alpha will be dispatched immediately,” Morton Culler said, and waited until his colleagues nodded in agreement. Disagreements having been aired, the consensus decision was joined. They all understood the significance of the order. The Alpha squad was composed of trained killers, equally skilled at sniper fire and hand-to-hand combat. To mobilize them against someone was to impose an almost certain death sentence.

“Good Christ. Wanted dead or alive,” Lanchester said grimly. “It’s uncomfortably like the Old West.”

“We’re all conscious of your sensitivities, sir,” Culler said, his voice betraying a hint of sarcasm. “But this is the only way to handle it. Too many lives are at stake. He would have killed you in an instant if he judged that it suited his purposes, sir. For all we know, he may still try.”

Lanchester nodded slowly, looking pensive. “This isn’t a decision to be made lightly. It may be that my judgment has been impaired by my personal encounter. And I have to worry that —”

“You’re doing the right thing, sir,” Culler said quickly. “Let’s just hope we’re not too late.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The nightclub was hidden on a tiny pereulok, an alley off Tversky Bul’var; near Moscow’s Ring Road. It was truly concealed, like some speakeasy in 1920s America. Unlike an illicit liquor joint of Prohibition days, though, the Blackbird was secreted away not from the eyes of government liquor authorities but from the riffraff, the masses. For the Blackbird was meant to be a private oasis of wealth and vice for the elite, the select: the rich, the beautiful, and the heavily armed.

It was located in a shambling brick structure that looked like the abandoned factory it was: in pre-Revolutionary times, Singer sewing machines had been manufactured here. Its windows were blacked out, and there was a single door, of black-painted wood, though with steel-plate reinforcement, and on the door, in peeling, antique Cyrillic letters, were the Russian words Shveiniye Mashini: Sewing Machines. The only indication that anything was to be found within was the long line of black Mercedes limousines extending down the narrow alley, looking out of place, as if they had all somehow ended up in the wrong place, the whole lot of them.

Shortly after arriving at Sheremetyevo-2 Airport, and then, for appearance’s sake, checking into the Intourist Hotel with the rest of his raggedy tour group, Bryson had placed a call to an old friend. Thirty minutes later a midnight-blue Mercedes sedan had pulled up in front of the Intourist, and a uniformed driver ushered him into the backseat of the car, where a single envelope had been placed.

It was twilight, but the traffic along Tverskaya Ulitsa was heavy, the drivers manic, changing lanes abruptly, ignoring any rules of the road, even driving up on the sidewalk in order to pass slower-moving vehicles. Russia had gone mad, chaotic and furious, since Bryson had last been there. Though much of the old architecture remained in place—the wedding-cake Stalinist Gothic skyscrapers and the mammoth Central Telegraph facility; a sprinkling of the old shops, like Yeliseyevsky’s food emporium and the Aragvi, once the only decent restaurant in town— there were incredible changes. High-priced shops glittered along the once-somber avenue that had been, before the collapse of the Communist state, Gorky Street: Versace, Van Cleef & Arpels, Vacheron Constantin, Tiffany. Yet along with the visible signs of plutocratic wealth were evidence of far-reaching poverty, of a social system that had broken down. Soldiers openly begged for alms, babushki sold moonshine or fruits and vegetables, or else they pleaded with you to tell you your fortune for a few rubles. Peroxide hookers were more brazenly in evidence than ever before.

Bryson got out of the chauffeured sedan, took the small plastic card from the envelope that had been left for him, and inserted it in a slot like that of an automatic teller mounted on the splintering wooden door, the card’s magnetized strip facing out. The door buzzed open, and he entered a completely dark area. Once the door had closed behind him, he felt around for the second door, which the driver had told him, in barely serviceable English, would be there. Grasping the cold steel knob, he pulled the next door open, revealing the bizarre, garish world within.

Purple and red and blue beams of light floated and rippled on clouds of white fog and bounced off alabaster Greek columns and plaster Roman statuaries, black marble counters and high stainless-steel stools. Spotlights spun from high above in the dark recesses of what had once been the factory floor. Rock music of a sort Bryson had never heard before, a kind of Russian techno-pop, thundered at earsplitting volume. The odor of marijuana mingled with strong, expensive French perfume and bad Russian aftershave.

He paid his admission fee, the equivalent of $250, and sidled through a dense, gyrating crowd of mobsters in gold chains and huge, gaudy Rolexes who were somehow talking on cell phones over the deafening music, accompanied by their molls and other women who were either hookers or trying to look like them, in low-cut tops and short-hemmed skirts that left nothing to the imagination. Burly, shaven-headed bodyguards glowered; the club’s security guards skulked around the periphery, uniformed like ninjas in black fatigues with billy clubs. High above the pulsating, spastic throng was a glass-and-steel gallery, where spectators could watch, through a glass floor, the cavorting below, as if it were some exotic, otherworldly terrarium.

He climbed the steel spiral staircase to the gallery, which was revealed to be another world entirely. The chief attraction on this level were the strippers, mostly platinum blond, though a few of them were ebony-skinned, their outsized busts all obviously silicone-enhanced. They danced under bright spotlights, positioned throughout the gallery.

A hostess in a filmy, revealing outfit, wearing a telephone headset, stopped him; she spoke a few, quick words in Russian. Bryson replied wordlessly by slipping her a few twenty-dollar bills, and she escorted him to a steel-and-black-leather banquette.

As soon as he was seated, a waiter brought several trays of zakuski, Russian appetizers: pickled beef tongue with horseradish sauce, red and black caviar and blini, mushrooms in aspic, pickled vegetables, herring. Though Bryson was hungry, none of it looked particularly appetizing. A bottle of Dom Perignon appeared—“compliments of your host,” the waiter explained. Bryson sat alone, watching the crowd, for a few more minutes until he spotted the elegant, slim figure of Yuri Tarnapolsky gliding toward the table, both hands extended in exuberant welcome. Tarnapolsky seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, though Bryson now realized that the wily ex-KGB man had in fact entered the gallery from the kitchen.

“Welcome to Russia, my dear Coleridge!” Yuri Tarnapolsky exulted. Bryson stood, and the two embraced.

Although Tarnapolsky had chosen an unlikely venue for their rendezvous, he was a man of exquisite and very expensive tastes. As usual, the ex—KGB agent was impeccably dressed in an English bespoke suit and foulard tie. It had been seven years since he and Bryson had worked together, and though Tarnapolsky was now well into his fifties, his tanned face was smooth and unlined. The Russian had always taken good care of himself, but he appeared to have been the beneficiary of some high-priced cosmetic surgery.

“You look younger than ever,” said Bryson.

“Yes, well, money can buy anything,” replied Tarnapolsky, sardonic and amused as ever. He gestured for the waiter to pour the Dom Perignon, along with small glasses of Georgian wine, a white Tsinandali and a red Khvanchkara. As Tarnapolsky raised his glass in a toast, a stripper approached the table; Yuri slid a few crisp, large-denomination ruble notes into her G-string and politely urged her in the direction of a table of dark-suited businessmen.

He and Bryson had worked a number of extremely sensitive jobs together, which Tarnapolsky had always found highly lucrative; the Vector operation had only been the most recent. International arms-inspections teams had been unable to find evidence to support the rumors that Moscow was illegally producing bioweapons. Whenever the inspectors made “surprise,” unannounced visits to the Vector laboratory facilities, they turned up nothing. Their “surprise” visits were no surprise. So the Directorate controllers had instructed Bryson that in order to get hard evidence of Russian work in germ warfare, he would need to break into Vector’s central laboratory in Novosibirsk. As resourceful as Bryson was, that was a daunting proposition. He needed assistance on the ground, and the name of Yuri Tarnapolsky had come up. Tarnapolsky had recently retired from the KGB and was in the private sector, meaning that he was for sale to the highest bidder.

Tarnapolsky had proved to be worth every kopek of his exorbitant fee. He had obtained for Bryson the blueprints of the laboratory facility, even arranged for the street sentry to be diverted to a “reported burglary” at the residence of the chairman of the city’s governing council. Using his KGB identification to browbeat and intimidate the institute’s internal security guards, Tarnapolsky had gotten Bryson into the third-containment-level refrigerated tanks, where Bryson was able to locate the ampules he needed. Then Tarnapolsky had arranged to have the ampules spirited out of the country by a circuitous route, concealed in a shipment of frozen lamb en route to Cuba. Bryson, and the Directorate, had thereby been able to prove what dozens of arms inspectors could not: that Vector, and therefore Russia, was involved in making biological weapons. They had the irrefutable proof in the form of seven ampules of weaponized anthrax, an extraordinarily rare strain.

At the time Bryson had been pleased with his success, with the ingenuity of the operation, and indeed, he had been highly lauded by Ted Waller. But the news from Geneva of the sudden outbreak of a rare strain of anthrax—precisely the same strain that he had pilfered from Novosibirsk — had now turned everything inside out. Now he felt sickened by the way he had been manipulated. There could be little question that the anthrax he had stolen years earlier had just been used in the Geneva attack.

Tarnapolsky smiled broadly at him. “You are enjoying our blackskinned beauties from Cameroon?” he inquired.

“I’m sure you understand the importance of telling no one about my visit,” said Bryson, struggling to make himself heard over the cacophony.

Tarnapolsky shrugged, as if to say the question need not have been raised. “My friend, we all have our secrets. I have a few of my own, as you might imagine. But if you are in town, may I assume you are not here to take in the sights—unhke the rest of your group?”

Bryson explained the nature of the delicate operation for which he wished to hire Tarnapolsky. As soon as Bryson uttered the name Prishnikov, however, the KGB man’s composure was quite clearly disturbed.

“Coleridge, my dear, I am not one to look a gift horse, as you say, in the mouth. As you know, I have always enjoyed our joint ventures.” He gave Bryson a somber, even shaken, look. “The prime minister one fears less. You see, there are stories about this man. This is not an Americanstyle businessman, this you must understand. When you are ‘downsized’ by Anatoly Prishnikov, you do not collect welfare checks. No, you are far more likely to end up as part of the cement that one of his companies manufactures. Perhaps you will end up as a component of the pigment in the lipstick another one of his companies sells. Do you know what you call a gangster who has, through graft and extortion, acquired ownership of large sectors of your country’s industry?” Tarnapolsky gave a wan smile and answered his own question. “You call him CEO.”

Bryson nodded. “A difficult target deserves handsome remuneration.”

Tarnapolsky sidled close to Bryson in the banquette. “Coleridge, my friend, Anatoly Prishnikov is a dangerous and ruthless man. I am sure he has his confederates in this very club, if he doesn’t own it outright.”

“I understand, Yuri. But you are not a man to shy from a challenge, as I recall. Perhaps we can work something out to our mutual satisfaction.”

Over the next several hours, at the Blackbird and then continuing at Tarnapolsky’s immense apartment on Sadovo-Samotechnaya, the two men worked out both the financial terms and the highly complex arrangements. The assistance of two others would be required, and Tarnapolsky would supply them. “To get to Anatoly Prishnikov, blood will certainly be shed,” Tarnapolsky warned. “And who’s to say that some of it will not be our own, hmm?”

 

 

By the early hours of the morning, they had devised a plan.

They had given up on any direct approach to Prishnikov, who was far too well defended, far too dangerous a target. The point of vulnerability, Tarnapolsky concluded, after making a few highly discreet telephone calls to former KGB colleagues, was Prishnikov’s senior deputy, a small, weedy man named Dmitri Labov. Prishnikov’s longtime lieutenant, Dmitri Labov was known in certain circles as chelovek kotory khranit sekrety —the man who keeps the secrets.

But even Labov would hardly be a simple target. Tarnapolsky’s research had determined that the deputy was driven every day between his heavily guarded residence and the heavily guarded Nortek office, in suburban Moscow near the old Exhibition of Economic Achievements of the USSR on Prospekt Mira.

Labov’s chauffeured vehicle was a bullet- and bomb-resistant Benfley— there were, Bryson knew, no truly bulletproof or bomb-proof vehicles— with almost two tons of armoring on the chassis. It was practically a tank, a Level IV armored vehicle, the highest level of protection that exists, capable of withstanding super-powered military ammunition including 7.62 NATO rounds.

During stints in Mexico City and South America, he had acquired a familiarity with such fully armored vehicles. They were usually fabricated with a quarter-inch of 2024-T3 aluminum as well as a high-performance synthetic composite, typically aramid and ultrahigh-molecular-weight polyethylene. Mounted inside the 19-gauge steel car doors would be a 24-ply sheet of high-strength fiberglass-reinforced plastic, half an inch thick, capable of stopping a .30-carbine slug fired from five feet away. The glass would be a polycarbonate/glass laminate; the fuel tank would, be self-sealing, antiexplosive even when directly hit; a special dry-cell battery would keep the engine running after an attack. “Run-flat” tires would enable getaways at high speeds for up to fifty miles even when the tires were shot through by gunfire.

Labov’s Bentley would have been modified specifically for Moscow, where gangs were likely to use AK-47 assault rifles. It would probably also be able to withstand grenades and small pipe bombs, probably even armor-piercing ammunition, high-velocity, full-metal-jack et rounds.

But there were always vulnerabilities.

For one, there was the driver, who was probably not professionally trained. For some reason, the Russian plutocrats tended to use their own personal assistants as drivers, not trusting professional ones and not bothering to have them trained in something they probably considered common sense, though it was not.

And there was one more vulnerability—around which Bryson had devised his plan.

 

 

Every morning at exactly seven o’clock in the morning Dmitri Labov left his apartment building just off the Arbat, a very exclusive, recently renovated nineteenth-century building that had once been reserved for ranking Central Committee officials and Politburo members. The apartment complex, now home to Russia’s nouveaux riches, mostly mafiya, was sealed off and well guarded.

This consistency in schedule, the information obtained by Tarnapolsky, was an example of the slipshod security combined with flamboyantly showy protective measures that was peculiar to large-scale criminal enterprises, Bryson had learned. Security professionals knew the importance of varying their charges’ schedules, ensuring that nothing was predictable.

Just as Tarnapolsky had been informed, Labov’s Bentley pulled out of the newly built underground parking garage beneath Labov’s apartment building and traveled a short distance before pulling onto Kalinin Prospekt. Bryson and Tarnapolsky, in a nondescript Volga, tailed the Bentley as it traveled the Ring Road all the way to Prospekt Mira. Shortly after the Bentley had passed the titanium-clad Sputnik obelisk, which soared majestically into the sky, it turned left onto Eizensteina Ulitsa, then proceeded three more blocks to the refurbished baronial palace that provided the headquarters for Nortek. There, Labov’s car entered another underground parking garage.

It would remain there for the entire day.

The only somewhat unpredictable element to Labov’s schedule concerned the time of his return home. He had a wife and three children and was known to be a family man who never missed dinner at home unless there was an emergency at work or Prishnikov summoned him back in. Most days, however, his limousine left the Nortek garage by seven or seven-fifteen in the evening.

This evening, Labov was clearly intent on getting home in time for dinner with the family. At five minutes after seven o’clock, his Bentley emerged from the Nortek garage. Tarnapolsky and Bryson were waiting, in a grimy white package-delivery panel truck across the street, and Tarnapolsky immediately radioed ahead to his confederate. The timing would be tight, but it should be manageable. Most important, it was still rush hour in this congested city.

Tarnapolsky, who had spent years in the early part of his career tailing dissidents and petty criminals around Moscow, knew the city intimately. He drove, following the Bentley at a discreet distance, only pulling up fairly close when the traffic was heavy enough to provide cover.

When the Bentley turned left onto Kalinin Prospekt, it ran into a serious traffic jam. A large truck was jackknifed and stalled across all lanes of traffic, halting all cars in either direction. Truck horns blared, car horns honked repeatedly; there were loud shouts as frustrated drivers stuck their heads out of their car windows to hurl epithets at the obstruction. But there was nothing to be done; the traffic was frozen.

The filthy white panel truck was stopped immediately ahead of Labov’s Bentley, cars hemming them in on all sides. Tarnapolsky’s confederate had abandoned his eighteen-wheeler truck, taking the keys with him, on the pretense of searching for help. Traffic would not move for a good long while.

Bryson, dressed in black jeans and a black turtleneck and wearing black leather gloves, crouched on the floor inside the truck and released the hinged trapdoor. There was enough clearance to the ground that he was able to drop to the pavement and belly under the panel truck and then under Labov’s Bentley. In the extremely unlikely event that traffic somehow was able to move a few feet, the Bentley could not, since it was blocked by the delivery truck.

Moving quickly, his heart racing, Bryson slid under the Bentley’s chassis until he located the precise spot he was looking for. Although the undercarriage was mostly one solid mass of molded steel, aluminum, and polyethylene, there was a small perforated area where the air-intake filter was located. This was the second vulnerability: after all, even passengers of armored vehicles had to breathe. Swiftly, he pressed an adhesive-backed aluminum-alloy filter panel over the vent, a specially designed, radio-controlled device Tarnapolsky had been able to acqnire from contacts in the private-security industry in Moscow. Once he assured himself it was securely in place, he wriggled out from under the car and, still undetected, back under the panel truck, the hinged trapdoor still open. He lifted himself up and into the truck and shut the trapdoor behind him.

“Nu, khorosho?” asked Tarnapolsky. Everything okay?

“Ladno,” replied Bryson. It’s fine.

Tarnapolsky called the driver of the jackknifed truck, ordering him to return to his abandoned truck and get it moving again, just as police sirens began to sound.

Traffic started moving a few minutes later, the blaring horns stopped, the cursing came to an end. The Bentley roared ahead, gunning its engine, passing the paneled delivery truck as it resumed its course down Kalinin Prospekt. Then it made its customary left turn, onto the quiet side street, essentially retracing its morning path.

It was then that Bryson pressed the switch on the transmitter he gripped in his hand. As Tarnapolsky maneuvered down the street after the Bentley, they could see an immediate reaction. The limousine cabin filled at once with thick, white tear gas. The Bentley veered crazily from one side to another before pulling over to the side of the deserted street; the driver had obviously been overcome. Both front and back doors of the limousine were flung open as both driver and Labov emerged, coughing and wretching, hands pressed over their stinging eyes. The driver clutched a handgun uselessly at his side. Yuri Tarnapolsky veered the truck over to the side of the road as well, and the two men jumped out. Bryson fired a projectile at the driver, who toppled at once. The shortacting tranquilizer dart would knock him out for hours; the amnesiac effect of the narcotic would ensure that he had little or no recollection of the evening’s events. Then Bryson rushed over to Labov, who had collapsed on the sidewalk, coughing and temporarily blinded. Meanwhile, Tarnapolsky hoisted the driver back into the driver’s seat of the Bentley. Taking out a bottle of cheap vodka he had bought on the street, he spilled a good quantity into the chauffeur’s mouth and over his uniform, leaving the half-filled bottle on the seat beside him.

Bryson looked around to confirm that there was no one on the street who could see what they were doing; then he hustled Labov, half-dragging the small man, into the nondescript panel truck, a boxy vehicle like hundreds in the area, which would never be identified, particularly since its license plates, covered in mud, were illegible.

 

 

By just before eight o’clock in the evening, Dmitri Labov was bound, in a seated position, to a hard metal chair in a large deserted warehouse in the Cheryomushki district, not far from the wholesale fruit-and-vegetable market. The city government had confiscated it from a Tatar clan that had been caught selling produce on the black market to restaurants without paying the requisite tribute to city officials.

Labov was small and bespectacled, with receding, straw-colored hair and a round, pudgy face. Bryson stood before him and spoke in perfect Russian with a slight St. Petersburg accent, the legacy of his Directorate Russian-language tutor. “Your dinner is getting cold. We’d love to get you home before your wife gets frantic. In fact, if you play your cards right and cooperate fully, no one ever has to know you were abducted.”

“What?” spat Labov. “You deceive yourself. Everyone already knows. My driver —”

“Your driver is passed out in the front seat of your limousine, parked by the side of the road. Any passing militsiya will simply assume he’s dozing, drunk like half of Moscow.”

“If you plan to drug me, go ahead,” Labov said, at once frightened and defiant. “If you plan to torture me, go ahead. Or just go ahead and kill me. If you dare. Do you have any idea who I am?”

“Of course,” said Bryson. “That’s why you’re here.”

“Do you have any idea what the consequences will be? Do you know whose wrath you are incurring?”

Bryson nodded slowly.

“Anatoly Prishnikov’s anger knows no bounds! It is not impeded by national borders!”

“Mr. Labov, please understand, I wouldn’t think of harming a hair on your head. Or that of your wife, Masha. Or little Irushka. I won’t have to—there’ll be nothing left of them after Prishnikov is through.”

“What the fuck are you saying?” Labov shouted, red-faced.

“Let me explain,” Bryson said patiently. “Tomorrow morning I will personally drive you to Nortek headquarters. You may still be a little woozy from the tranquilizers, but I will help you into the building. And then I will leave. But everything will be recorded on the security cameras. Then your boss will become extremely interested in who I am, and why you were in my company. You will tell him that you told me nothing.” Bryson paused. “But do you think he will believe you?”

Outraged, Labov screamed, “I have been a loyal aide to him for twenty years! I have been nothing but loyal!”

“I don’t doubt that. But can Anatoly Prishnikov afford to believe you? I ask you—you know him better than anyone. You know what kind of man he is, how deep-rooted is his suspicion.”

Labov had begun to tremble.

“And if Prishnikov thought that there was even the slightest chance that you had betrayed him, how long do you think he would let you live?”

Labov shook his head, his eyes wide with terror.

“Let me answer my own question. He would let you live just long enough to know that your loved ones had died horribly. Long enough for you and everyone in the firm to be reminded of the price of betrayal— of weakness.”

Yuri Tarnapolsky, who had been watching from the sidelines, stroking his chin idly, put in: “You remember poor Maksimov.”

“Maksimov was a traitor!”

“Not according to Maksimov,” Tarnapolsky said gently. He toyed with his service revolver, polishing its barrel with a soft white handkerchief. “Do you know he and Olga had an infant son? One would think that Prishnikov would spare the young and the innocent —”

“No! Stop!” gasped Labov, ashen-faced. He was having difficulty breathing. “I know much less—much less than you must think. There is a great deal I don’t know.”

“Please,” said Bryson warningly. “Evasion will simply waste our time and will add to the length of time you are gone—the period of missing time you must somehow account for. I want to know about Prishnikov’s alliance with Jacques Arnaud.”

“There are so many deals, so many arrangements. They accelerate. There are more than ever now.”

“Why?”

“I think he is preparing for something.”

“For what?”

“Once, I heard him speaking on his secure phone to Arnaud and saying something about the ‘Prometheus Group.’”

The name chimed in Bryson’s head. He had heard it before. Yes! Jan Vansina had used the phrase in Geneva, wondering whether he was “with the Prometheans.”

“What is the Prometheus Group?” Bryson demanded urgently.

“Prometheus—you have no idea. No one has any idea. I hardly know. They are powerful—immensely powerful. It is not clear to me whether Prishnikov follows their orders, or whether he gives them orders.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“They are important, powerful people —”

“You’ve said that already. Who are they?”

“They are everywhere—and nowhere. Their names are not to be found on mastheads, on letterheads, on papers of incorporation. But Tolya — Prishnikov is among them, this I am sure of.”

“Arnaud is one of them,” prompted Bryson.

“Yes.”

“Who else?”

Labov shook his head in defiance. “You know, if you kill me, Prishnikov will leave my family alone,” he said reasonably. “Why don’t you kill me?”

Tarnapolsky looked over, a wry smile on his face. “Do you know how they found Maksimov’s child, Labov?” He approached Labov, still menacingly polishing his revolver with the handkerchief.

Labov jerked his head back and forth like a child unwilling to listen. Had his hands been free he would surely have clapped them over his ears. Quivering, he blurted out, “The Jade Master! He is making arrangements with … with the man they call the Jade Master.”

Tarnapolsky gave Bryson a sharp look. They both knew whom the moniker referred to. The so-called Jade Master was a powerful general in the Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army. General Tsai, based in Shenzhen, was famously corrupt and had facilitated the efforts of certain international conglomerates to establish a foothold in the immense Chinese market—in exchange, of course, for certain considerations. General Tsai was also world-renowned as a collector of precious imperial Chinese jade and was known to sometimes accept blandishments in the form of valuable jade carvings.

Labov saw the look between the two men. “I don’t know what you hope to accomplish,” he said contemptuously. “Everything is about to change, and you cannot stop it.”

Bryson turned back to Labov quizzically. “What do you mean, ‘everything is about to change’?” he demanded.

“Days remain—only days,” Labov said cryptically. “Only a few days I am given to prepare.”

“To prepare what?”

“The machinery has already been put into place. Now power is about to be transferred fully! Everything will come into view.”

Tarnapolsky finished polishing his revolver, pocketed the handkerchief, and then pointed the gun a few inches away from Labov’s face. “Are you referring to a coup d’etat?”

Bryson interrupted, “But Prishnikov is already the power behind the throne in Russia! Why the hell would he want something like that?”

Labov laughed dismissively. “Coup d’etat! How little you know! How narrow is your view! We Russians have always been happy to give up our freedom for safety and security. You will, too, all of you. Every last one. For now the forces are too great. The machinery is already in place. Everything is about to come into view!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” thundered Bryson. “Prishnikov and his colleagues—do they now aspire higher than the corporate world—do they aim to take over governments now, is that it? Have they become besotted with their own wealth and power?”

“We would appreciate some specifics, my friend,” Tarnapolsky said, lowering his revolver, the threat no longer necessary.

“Governments? Governments are outdated! Look at Russia—what kind of power has the government? None! The government is powerless. It’s the corporations that make the rules now! Maybe Lenin was right after all—it is the capitalists who control the world!”

Suddenly, with the speed of a cobra, Labov’s right hand lunged out a few inches, the maximum play allowed by the constraints. It was just enough for him to grab Tarnapolsky’s revolver, which was almost next to him. Tarnapolsky reacted swiftly, grabbing Labov’s hand, twisting it hard to loosen Labov’s grip on the revolver. For a moment, the gun was pointing upward and back, right at Labov’s own face. Labov seemed to be staring at the muzzle, hypnotized by it, a strange, sweet smile on his face. Then, just before Tarnapolsky was able to wrench it away, Labov pointed it between his own eyes and squeezed the trigger.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The suicide of Anatoly Prishnikov’s longtime aide-de-camp was a grim turn of events; Labov may have been a ruthless corporate functionary, the fax and the phone his deadly weapons, but he was no killer, and his death had meant the shedding of unnecessary blood. More than that, it was a complication, a deviation from their carefully laid-out plan.

Labov’s driver would return to consciousness within the hour; whether or not he would have any specific recall of the Bentley filling with tear gas, his memory would be disjointed, hazy. He would awake to find his uniform reeking of cheap vodka, a bottle on the seat beside him, his passenger and charge gone; he would panic. No doubt he would place a call to Labov’s home; that angle had to be covered as well.

Among the papers in Dmitri Labov’s wallet, Yuri Tarnapotsky had turned up Labov’s home phone number. From his cell phone—Moscow these days seemed to be overrun with mobile phones, Bryson had noticed — Tarnapolsky then placed a quick call to Masha, Labov’s wife.

“Gospozha Labova,” he said in the obsequious tones of a low-level office functionary, “this is Sasha from the office. Sorry for the interruption, but Dmitri wanted me to call to say he’ll be somewhat delayed, he’s on an urgent phone call to France that can’t be interrupted, and he sends his apologies.” Lowering his voice, he added confidentially, “It’s just as well, since his regular driver seems to have hit the bottle again.” He gave an aggrieved sigh. “Which means I’ll have to make alternative arrangements. Ah, well. Good evening.” And he hung up before the wife could ask any questions. It would do; such delays were unavoidable in Labov’s line of work. When and if the chauffeur called in a state of agitation and disorientation, the wife would respond with anger or annoyance and would dismiss him at once.

All this was reasonably straightforward. Labov’s suicide, however, was a loose end that had to be tied up as best they could. Bryson and Tarnapolsky were limited in what they could do, because the ex-KGB man was absolutely unwilling to place any calls to the Nortek office; assuming that all calls incoming or outgoing were recorded, he did not want a tape of his voice to be found. A solution had to be quickly improvised, an explanation for the suicide that might be accepted without too much follow-up investigation. It was Tarnapolsky who came up with the idea of planting various suspect items on Labov’s person and in his briefcase: a package of Vigor brand Russian-made condoms, a few soiled, dog-eared cards from less-than-reputable Moscow clubs known for the sexual hijinks that took place in private back rooms—Tarnapolsky had a small collection of such cartes de visite —and, the crowning touch, a half-used tube of ointment customarily used to treat the topical manifestation of certain more benign sexually communicable diseases. Quite likely such escapades were entirely alien to such a proper, work-oriented man as Labov; but it was precisely such a man who might react so violently to finding himself in the middle of a sordid embarrassment. Alcohol, tawdry sex: these were normal, everyday vices.

 

 

Now it was a race: against time, against the likelihood that, one way or another, Prishnikov would learn that Nortek had been penetrated. Far too much could go wrong, Bryson knew. Labov’s limousine, with its semiconscious driver, could be identified by a vigilant militsiyoner and reported to Nortek headquarters. Labov’s wife could call his office back, for one reason or another. The risks were enormous, and Prishnikov would be quick to react. Bryson had to get out of Russia as soon as possible.

Tarnapolsky drove his Audi at top speed to Vnukovo Airport, thirty kilometers southwest of Moscow. This was one of Russia’s domestic airports, serving all regions of the country but particularly the south. He had arranged with one of the new private aviation firms for an emergency, late-night flight to Baku for one of his wealthy clients, a businessman with extensive financial interests in Azerbaijan. Tarnapolsky had not gone into detail, of course, except to mention a sudden eruption of labor unrest at a factory, the factory director taken hostage. Given the suddenness of the booking, a substantial outlay of cash was required. Bryson had it, and was glad to pay it. Customs Control had to be paid off, as well, for expedited paperwork; this required another hefty sum.

“Yuri,” said Bryson, “what’s in it for Prishnikov?”

“You’re talking about the Jade Master, I take it. Yes?”

“Yes. I know you’re well versed in the Chinese military, the PLA— you did your time in the KGB’s China sector. So what exactly would Prishnikov hope to gain from establishing an alliance with General Tsai?”

“You heard what Labov said, my friend. Governments are powerless now. It’s the corporations that make the rules. If you’re an ambitious titan like Prishnikov and you want to control half of the world’s markets, there are few better partners than the Jade Master. He’s a ranking member of the PLA’s General Staff, the one most responsible for turning the People’s Liberation Army into one of the world’s largest corporations, and the man in charge of all of its commercial ventures.”

“Such as?”

“The Chinese military controls an astonishingly complex web of businesses, interlocking enterprises, vertically integrated. I mean, from automobile factories to airlines, from pharmaceuticals to telecommunications. Their real-estate holdings are vast—they own hotels all over Asia, including Beijing’s showpiece, the Palace Hotel. They own and operate most of China’s airports.”

“But I thought the Chinese government had begun cracking down on the military—that the Chinese premier issued an executive decree ordering the army to begin divesting itself of all its businesses.”

“Oh, Beijing tried, but the genie was already out of the bottle. What do you Americans say, the toothpaste was out of the tube? Perhaps it is better to talk of Pandora’s box. The fact is, it was too late. The PLA has become the most powerful force in China by far.”

“But haven’t the Chinese slashed their defense budget a number of times in recent years?”

Tarnapolsky snorted. “And then all the PLA has to do is go out and sell a few weapons of mass destruction to rogue nations. It’s like having a bake sale, or do you call it a yard sale? My dear Coleridge, the PLA’s economic might is simply beyond imagining. Now they’ve begun to recognize the strategic importance of telecom. They own and launch satellites; they own China’s largest telecommunications company; they’ve been working with the giants of the West—Lucent, Motorola, Qualcomm, Systematix, Nortel—to develop immense mobile phone and paging networks, information systems. It is said that the PLA now owns the skies over China. And the one true owner, the man in charge, the man behind it all—is the Jade Master. General Tsai.”

As Tarnapolsky’s Audi pulled up to the airstrip, Bryson saw a small plane, a brand-new Yakovlev-112, waiting on the runway. He could see at once that it was a single-engine prop four-seater. It was tiny, surely the smallest craft in the company’s fleet.

Tarnapolsky saw Bryson’s surprise. “Believe me, my friend, this was the best I could do on such notice. There are far bigger, far nicer planes—they mentioned their YAK-40, their Antonov-26—but all were in use.”

“It’ll do, Yuri. Thanks. I owe you.”

“Let’s just call it a business gift … .”

Bryson cocked his head. He heard the squealing of brakes not far off; when he turned to look, he saw a massive, wide Humvee, black and glossy, roaring down the airstrip toward them.

“What the hell is this?” exclaimed Yuri. The Humvee’s doors flew open, and three black-clad men jumped out, wearing black face masks and the black Kevlar-and-nylon garb of commandos.

“Get down!” shouted Bryson. “Shit! We have no weapons!”

Tarnapolsky, diving to the floor of the Audi, pulled out a tray mounted under the front seat. It held several weapons and piles of ammunition. Yuri handed Bryson a Makarov 9mm automatic pistol, then pulled out a large Kalashnikov Bizon submachine gun, a Russian Spetsnaz weapon. There was a sudden hail of bullets, and the Audi’s windscreen turned white with starburst cracks. The glass, Bryson realized, was at least partially bullet-resistant. He crouched down. “This car isn’t armored, is it?”

“Light,” replied the KGB man as he shouldered the weapon and took a deep, slow breath. “Level One. Use the doors.”

Bryson nodded; he understood. The doors were reinforced with either high-strength fiberglass or a synthetic composite, meaning he could use them as shields.

Another burst of ammunition, and the commandos, visible through the side window, assumed firing stance. “Special delivery from Prishnikov,” Tarnapolsky said, almost under his breath.

“The wife called,” Bryson said, the instant he realized it. But how did Prishnikov know where to dispatch his commandos? Perhaps the answer was simple: the fastest way out of Russia was by air, and anyone foolish enough to take down Prishnikov’s most valued assistant had better escape the country without delay. Moreover, there were just a few airports near Moscow, only two of them having the facilities to handle private planes. A last-minute booking, made urgently … Prishnikov had made a calculated guess, and he had guessed right.

Tarnapolsky sprang his door open, sprang to the ground, crouching behind it, and fired off a burst of machine-gun fire. “Yob tvoyu mat!” he growled: Fuck your mother.

One of the marksmen fell, taken out by Tarnapolsky.

“Good shot,” Bryson said. A line of shots moved across the opaquewhite windshield, spraying tiny pebbles of tempered glass at Bryson’s face. He unlatched the car door on his side, got directly behind it, and fired off a few rounds at the two remaining commandos. At the same time, Tarnapolsky got off another burst of fire, and a second man sprawled to the paved landing strip.

One more remained—but where?

Bryson and Tarnapolsky scanned the dark field on either side, searching for movement. The landing lights illuminated the blacktop but not the surrounding fields, where the third man had to be concealed, lying in wait, weapon at the ready.

Tarnapolsky fired off a round at what appeared to be movement, but there was no response. He stood up, wheeled around, aiming the Bizon toward the dark area on the other side of the landing strip, nearest Bryson.

Where the hell was he?

Prishnikov’s men were surely outfitted with rubber-soled boots, enabling them to move silently, stealthily. Gripping the Makarov in both hands, he moved it around in a slow circuit, starting from his far right and moving steadily counterclockwise.

By the time he saw the tiny, dancing red dot on the back of Tarnapolsky’s head, it was too late for Bryson to do anything but cry out.

“Get down!” he shouted.

But an exploding bullet had entered Yuri Tarnapolsky’s head, blowing his face off.

“Oh, Christ!” Bryson shouted in horror as he spun around. He caught a flicker of reflected light, saw a tiny movement on or near the plane, several hundred feet away. The third sniper had positioned himself against the aircraft, using it as protection. Bryson repositioned the Makarov, exhaled slowly, and squeezed off one precisely aimed shot.

There was a distant cry, the clatter of a weapon on the tarmac. The third commando, the one who had killed Yuri Ivanovich Tarnapolsky, was dead.

Casting a look back at the corpse of his friend, Bryson leaped out of the Audi and ran toward the plane. Others would be on the way, in greater numbers; his only chance of survival was to get on board the aircraft and pilot it himself.

He ran to the Yakovlev-112, jumped onto the wing, and swung into the pilot’s seat, closing the hatch behind him. He strapped himself in, sat back against the seat, closed his eyes. Now what? Flying the plane itself was not a problem; he had sufficient hours in the air and had performed numerous emergency departures in his Directorate years. The problem, instead, would be navigating in Russian air space without clearance, without support from the tower. But what choice was there? Returning to Tarnapolsky’s car meant heading back into the jaws of Prishnikov’s commandos, and that was not an acceptable option.

He inhaled, held his breath, then turned the ignition key. The engine caught right away. He checked the instruments and began slowly taxiing toward the end of the runway.

He couldn’t ignore the tower, he knew. To take off without being in contact with the air-traffic controller was not only risky, even potentially fatal, but it would be viewed by the Russian Air Force as a deliberate provocation. Measures would be taken.

He keyed the microphone and spoke in English, the language spoken by international flight controllers. “Vnukovo Clearance, Yakovlev-112, RossTran three niner niner foxtrot. Number one for runway three, straight-out departure. Ready for clearance to Baku.”

The reply came back after a few seconds, staticky yet brisk: “Shto? What? Did not copy, say again.”

“RossTran three niner niner foxtrot,” he repeated. “Ready for departure via Vnukovo three, ready to taxi.”

“You have no flight plan, RossTran three nine nine!”

Undeterred, Bryson persisted. “Vnukovo Ground, RossTran three niner niner foxtrot, ready for taxi. Climb and maintain ten thousand. Expect flight level two hundred fifty ten minutes after departure. Departure frequency one-one-eight point five five. Squawk four six three seven.”

“RossTran, hold, I repeat, hold! You have no authorization!”

“Vnukovo Ground, I’m flying certain high-ranking Nortek executives on an emergency visit to Baku,” he said, assuming the characteristic above-the-law arrogance of Prishnikov’s minions. “The flight plans should have been filed. You have my serial number; you can call Dmitri Labov to verify.”

“Ross Tran —”

“Anatoly Prishnikov would be extremely unhappy to learn that you are interfering with the administration of his businesses. Perhaps, Comrade Air Traffic controller, you could tell me your name and identification.”

There was a pause, several seconds of radio silence. “Go ahead,” the voice snapped. “Fly at your own risk.”

Bryson applied the throttle, accelerated toward the end of the runway, and the plane lifted off.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Monsignor Lorenzo Battaglia, Ph.D.—senior curator at the Chiaramonti Museum, one of the many specialized collections within the Monumenti Musei e Gallerie Pontifice, the Vatican museums, in the Citta del Vaticano — had not seen Giles Hesketh-Haywood for many years, and he wasn’t exactly overjoyed to see him again.

The two men were meeting in a magnificent, damask-walled reception room off the Galleria Lapidaria. Monsignor Battaglia had been a curator at the Vatican museums for twenty years, and his connoisseurship was respected around the world. Giles Hesketh-Haywood, his effete English visitor, had always struck him as a faintly absurd, even comical, creature, with those oversized round tortoise-shell spectacles, those bright silk neckties that swelled flamboyantly from a very tight knot, the checkered vests, those gold horseshoe cufflinks, the old briar bowl stuck jauntily in his breast pocket, the posh accent. He reeked of golden cavendish tobacco. His charm was boundless, if oily. Hesketh-Haywood was an upper-class twit, in some ways—so teddibly English—but his trade was an unsavory one. Ostensibly, he was a dealer in antiquities, but really he was nothing more than a high-end fence.

Hesketh-Haywood, part connoisseur, part out-and-out crook, was the sort of shady fellow who vanishes for years at a time before showing up on the yacht of some Middle Eastern oil sheik. Though he was steadfastly vague about his past, the Monsignor had heard all the rumors: that his family was once of the high-living English gentry but fell on hard times in the postwar Laborite era. That Hesketh-Haywood had been educated among the scions of great wealth, but by the time he got out of school, his family had nothing left but a mountain of debt. Giles was a scamp, a rogue, a delightfully unscrupulous fellow who started out smuggling archaeological antiquities out of Italy, no doubt bribing the export licensing board. He was very gray-market, but some extraordinary artifacts had passed through his hands. If you didn’t want to know how they came into his possession, you knew enough not to ask. Men like Hesketh-Haywood were tolerated in the art world only because of those rare occasions on which they could be useful—he had in fact once proved useful to the Monsignor, conducting a certain “transaction” that the Monsignor prayed the world would never learn about—but the cordiality displayed by the Monsignor was now paper-thin. For the favor that Hesketh-Haywood was now asking him was astonishing, appalling.

Monsignor Battaglia closed his eyes for a moment to summon the words he needed, and then he leaned forward and spoke gravely to his visitor. “What you propose is out of the question, Giles. It is far more than a ‘prank.’ It is an outright scandal.”

The Monsignor had never seen Hesketh-Hayvood’s supreme self-satisfaction waver, and it wasn’t wavering now. “A scandal, Monsignor?” Giles Hesketh-Haywood’s eyes, magnified behind the thick lenses, looked both owlish and amused. “But there are so many kinds of scandal, are there not? For instance, the intelligence that a senior Vatican official, a world-renowned expert in the art and artifacts of the ancient world, an ordained priest to boot—that this gentleman maintains a mistress on Via Sebastiano Veniero—well, some people aren’t quite so enlightened as we are about such things, isn’t that so?”

The Englishman leaned back in his chair and waggled a long, slender finger in the air. “But it’s the money, not the women, that may cause the greater dismay. And sweet young Alessandra continues to enjoy her comfortable demaine, I trust. Comfortable—some might say lavish, especially given the rather modest salary of the Vatican curator who supports her.” He sighed, shook his head contentedly. “But I like to think that I’ve made my contribution to that worthy cause.”

Monsignor Battaglia could feel his face turn red. A vein on his temple started to throb.

“Perhaps there is an accommodation that we might reach,” Battaglia said at last.

 

 

Those thick-sensed round spectacles were starting to give Bryson a splitting headache, but at least he had achieved what he’d come to Rome to do. He was exhausted, having landed the small plane at an airfield outside of Kiev, safely outside of Russian airspace, and taken two connecting flights on a commercial airliner to Rome. The call he had placed to the Monsignor had been answered right away, as he knew it would be, for the curator was almost always interested in what Giles Hesketh-Haywood had to offer.

Giles Hesketh-Haywood, one of Bryson’s many carefully manufactured legends, had often come in useful in his previous career.

As a connoisseur of, and dealer in, antiquities, he naturally had reason to travel to places like Sicily, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, and elsewhere. He deflected suspicion by prompting suspicion: an elementary exercise in misdirection. Since alert officials assumed he was a smuggler, it never crossed their minds that he might be a spy. And most of them, of course, were only too happy to accept his bribes: if they didn’t, after all, others surely would.

The small item appeared the very next morning in L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, with over five million copies sold worldwide. OGGETTO SPARITO DAI MUSEI VATICANI? ITEM STOLEN FROM VATICAN COLLECTION? the headline read.

According to the account, the Vatican museum had discovered, in their annual inventory, that it was missing a rare Sung Dynasty chess set made of carved jade. The exquisite jade set had been brought back from China by Marco Polo in the early fourteenth century and presented to the Doge of Venice. Cesare Borgia acquired the set in 1500, and after his death, it was presented to one of the Medici Popes, Leo X, who cherished it; it even appears in the background of one of his great portraits. In 1549, Pope Paul III used it to play a match against the legendary chess master Paulo Boi and was defeated.

The newspaper article quoted a spokesman for the Vatican museum emphatically denying the charge. At the same time, however, the museum refused to offer proof that it still possessed the rare chess set. There was a brief, indignant quote from senior curator Monsignor Lorenzo Battaglia to the effect that the Vatican museum had hundreds of thousands of distinct items in its catalogs, and that, given the vastness of its holdings, it was inevitable that some objects might be temporarily mislaid; there was no reason in the world to jump to the conclusion that an act of theft had taken place.

Over caffe latté in his suite at the Hassler, Nick Bryson read the piece with professional satisfaction. He hadn’t asked that much of the Monsignor. The denials, after all, were true. The legendary Sung Dynasty jade chess set still safely reposed in one of the Vatican’s hundreds of storage vaults; like most of the immense Vatican holdings, it was never displayed. It had not been displayed for over forty years, in fact. It had not been stolen—but anybody reading the paper would conclude otherwise.

And Bryson was certain that the right people would be reading this article.

He picked up the phone and called an old acquaintance in Beijing, a Chinese civil servant named Jiang Yingchao, now highly placed in the foreign ministry. Jiang had had dealings with Giles Hesketh-Haywood a decade ago; he recognized Giles’s honking tones immediately.

“My English friend,” exclaimed Jiang. “What a pleasure it is to hear from you, after so long a silence.”

“You know I don’t like to impose upon our friendship,” Bryson replied. “But I trust our last transaction was … helpful to your career. Not that you needed it, of course: your ascent up the ranks of the diplomatic corps has been most impressive.”

Giles did not need to remind his Chinese diplomat friend: Jiang had been a low-level cultural attaché in the Chinese embassy in Bonn when he had first been introduced to Giles Hesketh-Haywood. It was not long after they had lunch together that Giles made good on his promise, obtaining for Jiang an extremely valuable ancient Chinese artifact at a cost that was far below what it would fetch if it ever hit the open market. The miniature, red-pottery walking horse from the Han Dynasty had made a very special gift from Jiang to the ambassador, no doubt greasing the wheels of his career. Over the years, Hesketh-Haywood had furnished a number of priceless objects to his diplomat friend, including ancient bronzes and a Qing Dynasty vase.

“And what have you been up to all these years?” asked the diplomat.

Bryson gave a long, aggrieved sigh. “I’m sure you saw that absolutely scurrilous article in L’Osservatore Romano,” he remarked.

“No, which article might that be?”

“Oh, dear, forget I even mentioned it. Anyway, an extraordinary object has just happened to fall into my possession, and I thought a branché chap such as yourself might know of someone who might be interested in it. I mean, there’s a terribly long list of extremely interested potential buyers, but just for old times’ sake I thought I’d call you first … .” He began to describe the jade chess set, but Jiang cut him off.

“I will call you back,” Jiang said sharply. “Let me have your number.”

There was a delay of half an hour before Jiang Yingchao called on a sterile line. No doubt he had located the Vatican newspaper and then made a few rapid, excited calls first.

“You do understand, my dear fellow, that this isn’t the sort of thing that comes up very often,” said Giles. “But it’s positively frightful how careless some of these great institutions are about their treasures, isn’t it? Positively frightful.”

“Yes, yes,” Jiang interrupted impatiently. “There would be a great deal of interest, I’m sure. If we’re talking about the same thing—the Sung Dynasty jade chess set —”

“I’m speaking hypothetically, my dear Jiang, of course. You do realize that. I’m saying that if such a marvelous set happened to become available, you might want to put out the word. Discreetly, of course … .”

The coded language was clear; it was like waving a red flag at a bull. “Yes, yes, I do know of someone, yes indeed. There is a general, you know, who is known to collect such things, these Sung Dynasty masterpieces of carved jade. It is the general’s consuming passion. You may know his nickname, his moniker—the Jade Master.”

“Hmm. Not sure I do, Jiang. But you think he might have any interest?”

“General Tsai is most interested in repatriating looted imperial treasures, bringing them back to the motherland. He is a fervent nationalist, you know.”

“So I am given to understand. Well, I would need to know quite soon if the general has any interest, because I’m about to tell the hotel operator to hold all my calls —those loathsome oil sheiks from Oman and Kuwait simply won’t stop calling!”

“No!” Jiang blurted out. “Give me two hours! This masterpiece must be returned to China!”

Bryson did not have to wait that long. The diplomat called back barely an hour later. The general was interested.

“Given the extraordinary nature of this property,” Bryson said firmly, “I absolutely insist on meeting my customer face-to-face.” At this point, Bryson knew he could pretty much set his own terms for the meeting with General Tsai.

“But— but of course,” sputtered Jiang. “The … customer would require nothing less. He needs to have every assurance of the item’s authenticity.”

“Naturally. All certificates of provenance will be provided.”

“Of course.”

“The meeting must be immediate. I can accept no delay.”

“That is not a problem. The Jade Master is in Shenzhen, and he looks forward to meeting with you as soon as possible.”

“Good. I’ll take the first flight to Shenzhen, and then the general and I will have an initial conversation.”

“What do you mean, an initial conversation …?”

“The general and I will pass a convivial hour or two, I’ll show him photographs of the chess set, and if I feel we’ve established a comfort level, we’ll proceed to the next step.”

“Then you won’t be taking the set with you to your meeting with the general?”

“Oh, good Lord, no. After all, such a customer would be in a position to expose me if he wanted to. Can’t be too careful these days. You know my motto: I never deal with strangers.” He chortled. “After I meet this chappy, of course, we won’t be strangers anymore, now will we? If everything’s in order—if everything feels right—we can discuss importation, filthy lucre, all those boring humdrum details.”

“The general will insist on inspecting the jade chess set, Giles.”

“Certainly, but not at first. Oh, no. China’s terra incognita to me, I don’t know the chappies in charge. I guess I feel a smidgen vulnerable there. Wouldn’t want your General Whosit to confiscate the thing and bundle me off to one of those cabbage farms or what have you.”

“The general is a man of his word,” Jiang objected stiffly.

“My antennae have served me awfully well these last twenty years, old friend. Wouldn’t want to ignore them at this late date. Fella can’t be too careful with you inscrutable Orientals, you know.” He chuckled; there was silence on the phone. “And you know me—a jigger of rice wine and I’m anybody’s!”

 

 

Flamboyantly attired in a yellow kid-skin vest and a silk-and-cashmere checked suit, Giles Hesketh-Haywood arrived at Shenzhen’s Huangtian Airport and was met by an emissary of General Tsai wearing the darkgreen, rankless uniform of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the standard red metal enamel star at the front of his standard-issue “Mao” cap. The emissary, a stony-faced middle-aged man who offered no name, whisked Bryson through customs and immigration. The way had been prepared; the airport personnel were deferential and inspected nothing.

That was left to General Tsai’s men. Once they were clear of immigration, the emissary wordlessly hustled Bryson through an unmarked door where two other green-uniformed soldiers were waiting. One of them unceremoniously rifled through his luggage, leaving nothing unopened or unchecked. Meanwhile, the other began frisking him systematically, from head to foot, even slicing the insoles in the costly English leather shoes. Bryson was not surprised at the search, though he emitted squawks of indignation befitting his legend’s prissy persona.

He had not arrived unarmed, though. Anticipating that he would be searched before being permitted to meet with the general, he had left behind any firearms, or in fact anything that would be out of character for Giles Hesketh-Haywood to carry. The risk of being caught, and therefore sabotaging the entire legend, was too great.

But concealed in Hesketh-Haywood’s glove-soft leather belt was a weapon so well concealed that it was worth the risk. Sewn between two layers of the finest Italian cordovan leather was a long, flexible metal strip about an inch wide by twelve inches long, made of an aluminum-vanadium alloy, a razor-sharp blade down most of its length. The blade was easily and quickly removed from the belt by opening one snap and pulling hard. It was difficult to use without wounding oneself, but if employed properly, the blade would slash human skin down to the bone with virtually no pressure. And if that was insufficient, Bryson was confident that he could rely, as he often did, on his ability to improvise, to find weapons where others saw none. But he hoped weapons would not be needed. The uniformed soldier ordered Bryson to remove his belt; he ran it cursorily between his fingers and detected nothing.

A black, late-model Daimler limousine was idling in front of the terminal exit doors, a military chauffeur at the wheel, also in the green rankless uniform of the Chinese Army, with a bland, unreadable face, his chin tucked toward his chest in a gesture of humility.

The dour emissary opened the passenger’s door for Bryson, placed the suitcase in the trunk, then got into the front seat. He did not speak a word; the driver steered the Daimler away from the curb and onto the airport access road toward Shenzhen.

Bryson had been to Shenzhen once, years before, but he scarcely recognized it. What was a tiny, sleepy fishing village and border town barely twenty years ago had exploded into a clamorous and chaotic metropolis of hastily paved roads, slapdash apartment complexes, and belching factories. From the rice paddies and virgin farmland of southern China’s Pearl River Delta had sprouted the skyscrapers and power plants and industrialized sectors of the Special Economic Zone. The chaotic skyline bristled with construction cranes, the sky an ugly gray polluted haze. The bustling population of some four million people settled on the banks of the fetid Shenzhen River were mostly mingong, or peasant workers, lured from their rural provinces with the promise of jobs at subsistence wages.

Shenzhen was a megalopolis in a hurry, a boomtown city going at a furious pace twenty-four hours a day, running at full blast on the high-octane fuel that was the most profane of words in all of Communist China: capitalism. But it was capitalism at its brashest and cruelest, the dangerous hysteria of a frontier city, crime and prostitution rampant and evident. The glittering heights of consumer excess, the lurid billboards and flashing neon, the swanky shops of Louis Vuitton and Dior, were, Bryson knew, nothing more than a veneer. Behind it lay concealed the desperate poverty, the squalor of the mingong’s grim daily existence, the metal sheds housing dozens of migrant laborers with no plumbing, scrawny chickens running around tiny, filthy yards.

The traffic was thick, choked with late-model automobiles and bright red taxis. Every single building was new, tall, modernistic. The streets bustled with blinking signs, all of them in Chinese with the rare exception of an English letter here and there—an M for McDonald’s, a KFC. Everywhere seemed to be lavish colors, gaudy restaurants, and stores selling consumer electronics—camcorders and digital cameras and computers and televisions and DVDs. Street merchants peddled roasted pigs and ducks and live crabs.

The crowds were dense, shoulder-to-shoulder, with almost everybody carrying a mobile phone. But unlike Hong Kong, twenty miles to the south, there were no elderly people practicing tai-chi in the parks; in fact, there were no old people here at all. The maximum length of stay in the Special Economic Zone was fifteen years, and only the able-bodied were welcome.

The emissary turned around in the front seat and began speaking. “Ni laiguo Shenzhen ma?”

“Pardon?” said Bryson.

“Ni budong Zhongguo hua ma?”

“Sorry, no speakee the lingo,” Bryson drawled. The emissary had asked him if he understood Chinese, whether he had been here before; Bryson wondered whether he was being crudely tested.

“English?”

“I am, and I speak it, yes.”

“This is your first time here?”

“Yes, it is. Charming place, though—wish I’d discovered it earlier.”

“Why do you meet the general?” The emissary’s expression had turned outright hostile.

“Business,” Bryson said shortly. “That is what the general does, right?”

“The general is in charge of the Guandong Sector of the PLA,” the emissary upbraided him.

“Well, there sure seems to be a lot of business going on here.”

The driver grunted something, and the emissary fell silent, then turned around.

The Daimler crawled through the unbelievable congestion of the streets, the strange cacophony: the hysterical shrieks of high-pitched voices, the blaring of truck horns. In front of the Shangri-La Hotel the traffic finally came to a standstill. The chauffeur turned on his siren and flashing red light and veered up onto a crowded sidewalk, barking shrill orders through the car’s loudspeakers, scattering the frightened pedestrians like so many pigeons. Then the Daimler zipped ahead of the knot of traffic.

Finally they came to a checkpoint, the entrance to a highly industrialized sector that appeared to be under the direct control of the military. Bryson assumed that it was here that General Tsai had his primary residence, perhaps maintained his headquarters. A soldier holding a clipboard leaned in and gestured rudely to the emissary, who quickly got out. The car continued down the street, past drab residential buildings into a more industrial-looking area, predominately warehouses.

Bryson was instantly wary. He was not being taken to the general’s residence. But where was he being driven?

“Neng bu neng gaosong wo, ni song wo qu nar?” he demanded in a deliberately heavy British accent, the syntax that of a speaker ill at ease with the language. Care to tell me where you’re driving me?

The driver did not reply.

Bryson raised his voice, now speaking with his customary fluency, that of a native speaker. “We’re nowhere near the general’s barracks, siji!”

“The general does not receive visitors at his residence. He keeps a very low profile.” The driver spoke impertinently, even disrespectfully, not as a Chinese speaker of his station would address a superior, not using shifu for “master.” It was disconcerting.

“General Tsai is famous for living extremely well. I advise you to turn this car around.”

“The general believes that the truest power is exercised invisibly. He prefers to remain behind the scenes.” They had pulled up before a large industrial warehouse, next to military-drab Jeeps and Humvees. Without turning around, the engine still running, the driver continued, “Do you know the story of the great eighteenth-century Emperor Qian Xing? He believed it was important for a ruler to have direct contact with those he ruled, without his subjects knowing. So he traveled throughout China disguised as a commoner.”

Realizing what the driver was saying, Bryson jerked his head to the side, for the first time focusing on the driver’s face. He cursed himself. The driver was General Tsai!

Suddenly the Daimler was surrounded by soldiers, and the general was barking out commands in Toishanese, his regional dialect. The car door opened, and Bryson was hustled out. He was grabbed by both arms, a soldier restraining him on either side.

“Zhanzhu! Stand still!” shouted one of the soldiers, training his sidearm at Bryson as he commanded him to keep his hands at his sides. “Shou fang xia! Bie dong!”

The general’s window electrically rolled down; the general grinned. “It was very interesting speaking with you, Mr. Bryson. Your facility with our language grew stronger the longer we chatted. It makes me wonder what else you may be concealing. Now I suggest you meet your inevitable death with serenity.”

Oh, Jesus! His true identity was known! How? And for how long? His mind raced. Who could have revealed his true identity? More to the point, who knew about the Hesketh-Haywood ruse? Who knew he was coming to Shenzhen? Not Yuri Tarnapolsky. Then who?

Photographs of his face had been faxed, connections made. But it made no sense! There had to be someone close to the general who recognized his face, was able to penetrate the facade of the English high-end fence. Someone who knew him; no other explanation was logical.

As General Tsai drove off, the Daimler emitting a cloud of exhaust smoke in his face, Bryson was shoved and pulled toward the warehouse entrance. The handgun was still trained on him from behind. He calculated his odds, and they were not good. He would have to free a hand, preferably his right, and grab the vanadium blade from the sheathing of his belt in one rapid, smooth movement. In order to do that, though, he would need to arrange for a diversion, a distraction. For the instructions from the general were clear: he was to meet his “inevitable death.” They would not hesitate to fire on him, he was sure, if he made any sudden attempt to break free. He did not want to test their orders.

Then why was he being brought into this warehouse? He looked around, seeing the immensity of the cavernous facility, clearly intended for the delivery and storage of motor freight. At one end was an enormous freight elevator large enough to accommodate a tank or a Humvee. The air was acrid with the smell of motor oil and diesel fuel. Trucks and tanks and other large military vehicles were stored in serried ranks, very close together, across the expanse of the warehouse floor. It looked like the storage area for a prosperous, high-volume car or truck dealership, though the concrete walls and floors were grimy with spilled motor oil and the residue of exhaust fumes.

What was going on? Why was he being brought here, when they could just as easily have executed him outside, where there were no nonmilitary witnesses?

And then he realized why.

His eyes were riveted on the man who stood in front of him. A man who was armed to the teeth. A man he knew.

A man named Ang Wu.

One of the few adversaries he’d ever encountered whom he’d have to describe as physically intimidating on every level. Ang Wu, a renegade officer in the Chinese Army, attached to Bomtec, the trading arm of the PLA. Ang Wu had been the local PLA representative in Sri Lanka; the Chinese had been shipping arms to both sides of the conflict, sowing dissent and suspicion, vending the highly flammable fuel for the region’s smoldering resentments. Outside Colombo, Bryson and the ad hoc band of commandos he’d assembled for the task had headed off a lethal caravan of munitions under Ang Wu’s direct control. In an exchange of gunfire, Bryson had shot Ang Wu in the gut, taking him down. His enemy was helicoptered out, reportedly back to Beijing.

But had there been more to the incident, an underlying meaning, an unexplained plan in which he had been merely a pawn? What really lay behind the exercise?

Now, Ang Wu stood before Bryson, a Chinese AK-47 machine gun hanging from his shoulders on a diagonal nylon sling. On each hip was holstered a handgun. Draped around his waist like a belt were bandoliers of machine-gun rounds, and sheathed at his side and ankles were gleaming knives.

The grip on each of Bryson’s shoulders tightened. He could not free his hand to grab his belt, at least not without being shot down in the interim. Oh, God!

His old nemesis looked happy. “So many ways to die,” Ang Wu said. “I always knew we would meet again. For a long time I am looking forward to our reunion.” With a fluid motion he unholstered one of the handguns, a Chinese-made semiautomatic, hefting it, seemingly enjoying its solidity, its power to extinguish life. “This is General Tsai’s gift to me, his generous reward for my years of service. A simple gift: that I get to kill you myself. It will be very—how do you say—up close and personal.”

There was a glacial smile, an array of very white teeth. “Ten years ago in Colombo, you took my spleen—did you know that? So we start with that first. Your spleen.”

In his mind, the enormous warehouse had collapsed into a very small space, a narrow tunnel, with Bryson at one end and Ang Wu at the other. There was nothing else but his adversary. Bryson took a slow, deep breath. “It hardly seems a fair fight,” he said with a forced, artificial calm.

The Chinese assassin smiled and, extending his arm, aimed the pistol at the lower left region of Bryson’s torso. As his enemy thumbed the safety, Bryson suddenly lurched forward and twisted his body in an attempt to dislodge himself from his captors’ grips, and then—

There was a small coughing noise, more like a spit, and a tiny red hole, like the beginning of a teardrop, appeared in the very center of Ang Wu’s broad forehead. He slid to the floor very gently, like a drunk passing out.

“Aiya!” screamed one of the guards, whirling around, just in time to catch a second silenced round in his head as well. The second guard shrieked, reached for his weapon, then abruptly crumpled to the ground, the side of his head blown away.

Suddenly free, Bryson flung himself to the floor, at the same time spinning around and looking up. On a steel catwalk twenty feet above, a tall, portly man in a navy-blue business suit stepped from behind a concrete pillar. In his hand was a .357 Magnum, a long perforated cylinder attached to its barrel, a wisp of cordite curling from its end. The man’s face was momentarily in shadow, but Bryson would know the heavy tread anywhere.

The portly man tossed the Magnum high into the air toward Bryson. “Catch,” he said.

Bryson, thunderstruck, grabbed the weapon as it dropped.

“Glad to see your skills haven’t gone completely rusty,” said Ted Waller as he began descending a steep set of steps. He gave Bryson a look of what could be mistaken for amusement; he sounded out of breath. “The hard part’s coming up.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Senator James Cassidy saw the headline in The Washington Times—saw the reference to his wife, her drug arrest, allegations of possible obstruction of justice—and read no more. So it was out, at last, all in the open— a source of profound personal anguish, something he had desperately sought to keep from the hard, raptor eyes of the media. A buried secret had been unearthed. But how?

Arriving at his office at six in the morning, hours before he usually appeared, he found his top staff already assembled, looking as ashen and enervated as he felt. Roger Fry spoke without preamble. “The Washington Times has been gunning for you for years. But we’re already had more than a hundred phone calls from all the other media outlets. They’re trying to track down your wife, too. This is out-and-out carpet bombing, Jim. I can’t control this. None of us can.”

“Is it true?” asked Mandy Greene, his press secretary. Mandy was forty, and had been with him for the last six years, but stress and anxiety made her seem older than she’d ever looked before. Cassidy couldn’t remember her ever losing her composure. But this morning her eyes were redrimmed.

The senator exchanged glances with his chief of staff; it was clear Roger had told the others nothing. “What exactly are they saying?”

Mandy picked up the newspaper, then tossed it angrily across the office. “That four years ago your wife was arrested for buying heroin. That you made phone calls, called in favors, and had the charges dropped, the arrest expunged. ‘Obstruction of justice’ is the phrase they’re bandying about.”

Senator Cassidy nodded, wordlessly. He sat down in his large leather office chair and turned away from his staffers for a moment, looking out the window into the gray light of a cloudy Washington morning. There’d been phone calls from the reporter yesterday, calls both for him and for his wife, Claire, but they went unanswered. He’d had a bad feeling about it, had slept little.

Claire was at their family home in Wayland, Massachusetts. She had her problems; many politicians’ wives did. But he remembered how it started—the minor skiing accident that led to back surgery, the fused vertebrae, the Percodans she’d been given for the operative pain. Soon she started to crave the narcotic for more than the cessation of pain. The doctors wouldn’t renew her prescription. They referred her to a “pain management” group, which specialized in counseling. But the narcotics had introduced Claire to a kind of sweet oblivion, a place protected from the stresses and strains of public life, from a private life that didn’t provide the comfort she required. He could blame himself for that—for not having been there, by her side, when she needed him. He’d come to understand how inimical his world was to her. It was a world that, ultimately, relegated her to the sidelines, and Claire, so beautiful, so accomplished, so loving, had not been raised to sit out life on the bleachers. For Cassidy, there were too many Beltway engagements, too many colleagues to romance and inveigle and bully and cajole into doing the right thing. And Claire was lonely; she experienced a pain that was not merely physical. He never really knew which was the real injury, the isolation or the accident, but he’d come to suspect that the spiral of depression and dependency to which she’d succumbed had merely been precipitated by her hospitalization.

Desperate after she could no longer obtain her prescription narcotics, desperate for a form of relief she knew was fleeting yet somehow seemed to make things endurable, she went to a corridor park near Eighth and H Streets in Washington and tried to buy a quantity of street heroin. The man she met there was encouraging, sympathetic, made it easy. He gave her two small glassine bags of the stuff. She paid him with crisp large bills freshly dispensed from an ATM.

And then he flashed a badge and took her down to the station. When the precinct captain discovered who she was, he called the assistant D.A., Henry Kaminer, at home. And Henry Kaminer called his law-school classmate Jim Cassidy, who happened to be serving as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. That’s how he found out. Cassidy remembered the phone call, the hesitance, the awkward small talk that preceded the shattering revelation. It was among the worst moments of his life.

Claire’s delicate, drawn face filled his mind, and the words of a poem he’d once read echoed in his mind: not waving but drowning. How could he have been so blind to what was happening in his own household, his own marriage? Could a public life make a man so out of touch with his private one? Yet there was Claire: not waving but drowning.

Cassidy turned around to face his staff. “She wasn’t a felon,” he said stonily. “She needed help, damn it. She needed treatment. And she got it. Six months in rehab. Discreetly, quietly. Nobody needed to know. She didn’t want the pitying glances, the knowing looks. The special scrutiny that comes with being a senator’s wife.”

“But your career …” Greene began.

“My goddamn career was what drove her to it in the first place! Claire had dreams, too, you know. Dreams of having a real family, with kids and a father who loved them and her, who made his wife and kids his first and last priority, the way a man should. Dreams of having a normal life —it probably didn’t seem too much to ask. She wanted a home, that was all. She gave up her dreams so I could be—what did The Wall Street Journal call me last year?—the ‘Polonius of the Potomac.’” Bitterness entered his voice.

“But how could she have jeopardized everything you’d worked for, everything you’d both worked for?” Mandy Greene could not conceal the flare of anger and frustration.

Cassidy shook his head slowly. “Claire was in agony, knowing that everyone would look at her as the woman who might have destroyed a senator’s career. You’ll never understand the sort of hell she went through. But she went through it; in a sense, we both did. And damn it, we came out the other side! Until now. Until this.” He looked over at the receptionist’s twelve-line telephone, all brightly lit and ringing nonstop in an electronic purr. “How, Roger? How did they find out?”

“I’m still not sure,” Roger said. “But what they’ve got is incredibly detailed. An electronic record of the arrest record, somehow retrieved despite the fact that it was officially expunged. Claire’s sizable cash withdrawal the evening in question. Municipal phone exchange records, itemizing a flurry of phone calls made between your home and Henry Kaminer’s on the night of the arrest. More calls between Kaminer’s private line and the precinct captain. Phone logs between the arresting of ficer and the station house. Even the electronic records of the payments you made to Silver Lakes for her rehabilitation.”

Cassidy looked grim, but forced a wry grin. “No one person could have leaked all that. The most private, personal records have been breached. It’s what I was warning about, I suppose. The surveillance society.”

“Well, that’s not how it’s going to play,” Mandy Greene said brusquely, regaining her air of professionalism at last. “It’s going to look as if you were campaigning for privacy because of the skeletons in your own closet. You know that better than anyone.”

Roger Fry started pacing around the office. “It’s bad, Jim, I’m not going to minimize it. But I honestly think we can ride this thing out. It’ll get worse before it gets better, but the people in Massachusetts know you’re a good man, and your colleagues, whether they like you or not, know you’re a good man. Time is the great healer, in politics as in everything else.”

“I don’t intend to find out, Rog,” Cassidy said, gazing out the window again.

“I know it looks bad now,” Fry said. “They’ll try to crucify you. But you’re strong. You’ll show them.”

“You don’t understand, do you?” Cassidy spoke severely but not unkindly. “It isn’t about me. It’s about Claire. The first sentence of every news story refers to Claire Cassidy, the wife of Senator James Cassidy. That may continue for days, weeks, who the hell knows? I cannot subject her to this. I cannot put her through this. She will not survive it. And there’s only one way to take this off the table. There’s only one way to take this off the front pages and the talk shows and the news hours and the gossip columns.” He shook his head, speaking in the mock-stentorian tones of a newsreel reader: “Senator Cassidy braces for Senate investigation, Senator Cassidy fights to keep his seat, Senator Cassidy denies wrongdoing, Senator Cassidy’s disgrace, did judiciary chair abuse office? Senator married to junkie. Now, that’s page-one news, and it can go on and on and on. Senator Cassidy resigns in wake of damaging allegations is a story, yes, but a two-day story. The travails of Jim and Claire Cassidy, private citizens, soon get buried somewhere after the wire reports from Somaliland. Five years ago, I made a solemn promise to my wife that we would put this behind us, whatever it took. Now that promise has come due.”

“Jim,” Fry said delicately, trying to keep his voice steady, “there’s simply too much uncertainty now to make any binding decisions. I beg you to hold off.”

“Uncertainty?” The senator laughed bitterly. “But I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life.” He turned to Mandy Greene. “Mandy, it’s time for you to earn your paycheck. You and I are going to draft the press release. Now.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Bryson froze, barely able to breathe. He was in shock, his mind numb. It was as if a bolt of lightning had streaked down from the sky, searing his consciousness, tearing apart the filaments of reason. He gasped. Everything was madness, illogic; he could barely suppress a scream.

Ted Waller!

Gennady Rosovsky!

The great manipulator, the magician of the dark arts who had turned his life into a great and unthinkable deception.

Bryson grasped the semiautomatic pistol he’d just been thrown, felt it settle into his grip as if it were an appendage, a part of his body. He pointed it back at the man who had just given it to him, realizing that with one well-aimed shot he could kill Ted Waller, and it would not be enough!

It would not answer the questions that tormented him, nor would it satisfy his need for vengeance against the liars and manipulators who had made his life a lie. Still, he trained the weapon on Waller, aiming at his old mentor’s face, overcome by fury yet roiled with questions, so many questions!

What came out, in a tight, strangled voice, was the first question that leaped into the forefront of his mind. “Who the hell are you?”

He thumbed back the safety, squeezed the trigger back until the gun clicked into automatic mode. A twitch of his index finger and he could discharge ten rounds into Ted Waller’s head, and the liar would topple from his perch on the catwalk to the warehouse floor twenty feet below. Yet Waller, that finest of shots, aimed no weapon back at him. He simply stood there, an obese old man with a cryptic smile on his face.

Waller spoke, his voice echoing in the cavernous space. “Let’s play True or False,” he said, invoking his old pedagogical exercise.

“Fuck you,” said Bryson in cold fury, his voice trembling with banked rage. “Your real name is Gennady Rosovsky.”

“True,” Waller replied, his face impassive.

“You attended the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages.”

“True.” A smile flickered. “Pravil’no. Otlichno.” That’s correct. Excellent.

“You’re GRU.”

“True-ish. To be accurate, the verb tense is past. I was.”

Bryson raised his voice until he was shouting. “And it was all horseshit, all that shit you told me about how we were saving the world! When all the time you were working for the other side!”

“False,” said Waller, his voice clear and loud.

“Enough lies, you son of a bitch! Enough lies!”

“True.”

“Goddamn you to hell, I don’t know what the hell you’re doing here —”

“At the risk of sounding like General Tsai: when the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

“I don’t have time for your Buddhist bullshit!” he thundered.

Bryson heard the footfalls, the clanking of weaponry, and he spun around. A pair of green-uniformed guards had entered the warehouse, carbines at the ready. Bryson squeezed off several shots, and at the same instant he heard the explosion of gunfire coming from above and behind, from the direction of Waller. The two guards were hit; they tumbled forward, sprawling to the ground. Bryson dove to the floor, atop Ang Wu’s body, and he turned over the limp body, grabbed the dead assassin’s submachine gun, yanking the sling from around his neck, gripping it in both hands and angling it upward as he dropped Waller’s gun. He expected to see another set of guards, but there was none.

Then he tugged the handgun from Ang Wu’s hand and shoved it into the front pocket of his ridiculous Hesketh-Haywood suit. Ang Wu had strapped hunting knives to each ankle; Bryson grabbed each, knife and scabbard together, and carefully tucked each one under his belt. His belt! He suddenly remembered the aluminum-vanadium blade—but now he had weaponry that was far more effective.

“This way!” called Waller, turning around and disappearing into the dim, recesses of the concrete-walled balcony. “Building’s surrounded.”

“Where the hell are you going?” shouted Bryson.

“Some of us have done our homework. Come on, Nick!”

What choice was there? Whoever, whatever Ted Waller actually was, he was surely right: the warehouse was surrounded by PLA guards; if there was another exit at the ground level, as there almost certainly was, it would simply lead him into the ranks of his enemy. Of his immediate enemy. Waller raced up the steel steps just in time to see the fat man disappearing into a large open stairwell, just beyond long rows of parked military vehicles. Weaving between the serried ranks of Jeeps and Humvees and Chinese-manufactured trucks, Bryson ran to the stairwell just in time to see Waller climbing the stairs with speed and agility, the almost balletic grace that had always surprised him. Still, Bryson was fleeter of foot, and he caught up with Waller in a matter of seconds. “To the roof,” Waller muttered. “Only way out.”

“The roof?”

“No alternative. They’ll be piling in momentarily, if they aren’t already.” Waller was short of breath. “One stairwell. One freight elevator, but it’s frightfully slow.”

By the time they had reached the third-floor landing, they could already hear shouts from below, running footsteps.

“Shit,” said Waller. “Now I wish I hadn’t had the pate last night. You go ahead.”

Bryson shot ahead up the stairway, rounding the wide bends until he reached what was obviously the top floor. He emerged into the night air, the broad expanse of a parking lot, row upon row of tanks and trucks. What the hell now? What did Waller have in mind? To goddamned jump from the top of the building? Leap across the ten- or twenty-foot chasm to the next building?

“Burn the bridges,” Waller panted as he came out of the stairwell, and Bryson understood what his ex-mentor was saying. Block the path of their pursuers—but how? With what? There were no doors to lock or barricade …

There were vehicles galore, hundreds, thousands of them. He ran to the nearest row, tried the door handle, found it locked. Shit! He ran to the next; it was locked as well. There was no time for this!

Spying a row of soft-top Jeeps, he ran over to them. Pulling one of Ang Wu’s hunting knives from its scabbard, he slashed at the canvas top, then poked his hand in and opened the locked door from inside. The key was in the ignition, which made sense in such a well-guarded warehouse, where separating each vehicle from its key would be a logistical nightmare. Waller was standing clear of the stairwell, a cell phone to his mouth, talking. Bryson keyed the ignition, revved the Jeep’s engine, and drove it straight ahead, at top speed, toward the open stairs. As he approached, he saw that the Jeep was too wide to fit through the opening, but that would suit his purposes nicely. With a great crash, the Jeep smashed into the concrete wall, its front end jutting into the opening, then sank a few feet as the front tires dropped down to the second or third step before stopping. He could just manage to force open the driver-side door, and he squeezed out between the Jeep and the abutting concrete wall.

But it would be nothing more than a delay: several men pushing together could dislodge the vehicle. It wasn’t enough! Searching the adjacent rows of vehicles, he spotted what he desperately hoped to find: a fifty-five-gallon heavy-gauge-steel fuel drum. Tipping it slowly to the ground, he rolled it toward the Jeep, now obstructing the exit onto the roof. He tugged at the plastic bung-hole seal, turned it, and popped it off. Gasoline began pouring out, forming a puddle on the concrete floor around the vehicle. He rolled it further, tipping the bottom up so that the fuel poured out even faster, a flood of it, torrents running around the Jeep’s tires, rivers of gas advancing to the top of the stairwell, then seeping around the Jeep and down the steps. The gasoline odor was overpowering. In short order he had emptied the drum down the stairwell, just as he heard thundering footsteps, the guards running up the stairs to the roof.

No time!

Grabbing his tie, he yanked it free; dropping it into the puddle of fuel until it was soaked, he jammed it into the bung hole of the now-empty fuel drum. It was empty of liquid fuel, but full of gasoline vapor—or, more precisely, a mix of air and gasoline vapor. The proportions might not be ideal, but he knew from long experience that it would do. He took out Giles Hesketh-Haywood’s brass lighter and touched the flame to the improvised fuse. The flame roared to life, and Bryson tossed the steel drum over the Jeep and down into the stairwell, then jumped backward and ran as fast as he could.

The explosion was immense, deafeningly loud. The entire stairwell had become a fireball, a roaring yellow inferno. Waller, seeing what he had done, raced across the rooftop as well. In a few seconds, there came another, fantastically loud explosion as the Jeep’s fuel tank was ignited. The flames were dazzlingly bright, painful to look at: rolling, shimmering waves of fire, now billowing clouds of black smoke. Bryson came to a halt when he was halfway across the roof, and Waller loped up to him, flushed and sweat-soaked.

“Nicely done,” Waller said, looking up at the sky. From the stairwell there came loud, agonized screams, but in a moment they were blotted out by a louder noise, a thundering racket from overhead: the sound of helicopter rotor blades. An armored helicopter, painted green with camouflage spots, roared directly above, hovering into place over a clearing free of vehicles, and slowly descended to the roof.

Bryson gasped. “What the hell—?”

The helicopter was an AH-64 Apache, clearly marked as U.S. Army, painted with an official army tail code.

Waller ran toward it, instinctively ducking his head though there was no need to do so. Bryson hesitated for just a moment before he, too, ran toward the mammoth helicopter. The pilot was clad in U.S. Army fatigues. How could it be? If the Directorate was GRU, how had Waller arranged for a U.S. Army combat helicopter?

As he clambered on, he saw Waller spin around, looking past Bryson with alarm. Waller cried out, said something that Bryson could not make out. Bryson turned, saw the dozens of PLA soldiers pouring out of the freight elevator no more than a hundred feet away, on the opposite side of the roof from the inferno that had been the stairwell. He clambered into the helicopter and suddenly felt an explosion of pain in his back, a crushing blow to the right side of his ribcage. He had been struck! The pain was immense, inconceivable. He screamed; his legs buckled, and Waller grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into the chopper as it lifted into the air. As they rose, he could see the massed troops below, the amber blaze, the billows of sooty black smoke.

Bryson had been shot before, a number of times, but this was worse than anything he had experienced earlier. The pain grew instead of subsiding; a nerve had been struck. He was losing volumes of blood, he was sure of it. As if from far away he could hear Waller saying, “ … a U.S. Army chopper, they won’t dare try to blast us out of the sky … international incident, and General Tsai isn’t so foolish as to …”

Waller’s voice was fading in and out, like a radio with poor reception. He felt ice-cold one moment, then feverishly hot the next.

He heard “ … okay there, Nicky? …”

And: “ … first-aid kit but there’s an infirmary in the Hong Kong airport … long flight and I don’t want to delay …”

And then: “ … the eighteenth-century physicians might have been on to something, you know, Nicky. It’s probably good to be bled from time to time … .”

He passed in and out of consciousness, through a kaleidoscope of images. There was a landing on a helipad somewhere; he was helped onto a stretcher.

He was brought into a modern building, hurried down a long hallway. A white-coated female nurse or doctor attended to him, stripping him to the waist, stitching the wound … the flare-up of pain, astonishing and white-hot, followed by the steep and rapid descent into the darkness of a deep, drugged sleep.

 

 

“Truth? I just want to nail the guy.” Adam Parker was steamed and didn’t mind if Joel Tannenbaum, his longtime attorney, knew it. The two were meeting for lunch, as they did every month or so, at Patroon, an upscale, beef-and-claret restaurant on East Forty-seventh Street. The walls were paneled in dark wood and festooned with Kips engravings. Parker had reserved a private room where the two men could smoke Romeo y Juliets with their martinis. Parker prided himself on his physical condition, but whenever he was in Manhattan, he gravitated toward places like this one, redolent of a bygone Establishment and its venial excesses.

Tannenbaum tucked into his grilled veal chop. He’d been on the Law Review at Columbia, ran the corporate litigation department at Swarthmore & Barthelme, but beneath his high-powered credentials and high-toned affiliations, he was a street fighter, a scrappy kid who’d grown up in the Bronx and always gave as good as he got. “Guys like that don’t like being nailed. They eat guys like you as an after-dinner mint. Sorry, Adam. I’m not going to start lying to you at this late date. You know the old joke about the mouse trying to screw an elephant? Trust me, you don’t want to climb up Jumbo’s back.”

“Give me a break,” Parker said. “We’ve made mischief before, you and me. I’m just asking you to file a few papers. An injunction.”

“Saying what?”

“Enjoin them from commingling data from InfoMed with those other informational resources—we’ve got all these confidentiality agreements that have got to be honored. Charge that we’ve got prima facie evidence that they’re conducting themselves in violation of these covenants as entered and agreed upon blah blah blah.”

“Adam, you’ve got bubkes.”

“Sure, yeah, but I just want to tie them up. I don’t want to make it easy on them. They think they can swallow me in one easy gulp, and I want to give ’em a hairball they won’t forget.”

“Jumbo’s not going to notice. They’ve got army battalions of lawyers on staff. They’ll have it thrown out in two minutes.”

“Nothing involving the law takes two minutes.”

“Five.”

“I’ll take what I can get. Thing is, I’m not going to go quietly.”

“Am I supposed to be moved by your poeticism?”

“Given the size of your retainer, yes.” Parker laughed ruefully.

“Adam, I’ve known you for, what, fifteen years? You were my best man … .”

“Marriage lasted eight months. I should have asked for my present back.”

“Believe me, some people did.” Tannenbaum took a careful sip of his martini.

“You were saying.”

“Adam, you’re an asshole, a prick, an arrogant, hypercompetitive, know-it-all son of a bitch without a trace of humility or any sense of your own limitations. That’s probably why you’ve done so well for yourself. But this time? For once in your life, you’re out of your league.”

“Screw you.”

“I’m a lawyer. I screw other people.” Tannenbaum shrugged. “All I’m saying is, punch your own weight, Adam.”

“That what they taught you at Columbia Law School?”

“If only they had. Look, you don’t need me for this. You’re here because you want my advice. So hear what I’m trying to tell you. Every law firm that’s worth a damn has got some sort of relationship with Systematix or one of its affiliates. Look around you and what do you see? Expense-account lunches on every four-top. A sizable portion of which is ultimately defrayed by everybody’s favorite client, vendor, or customer: Systematix.”

“They think they’re the goddamn Standard Oil of information.”

“Don’t even reach for historical analogies. Systematix makes Standard Oil look like the Little Pie Company. But does anybody make trouble for them? It’s like you always say—life isn’t fair. Fact is, the Department of Justice acts like their wholly owned subsidiary. That company’s got its tentacles everywhere.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I swear on my mother’s grave.”

“Your mother lives in Flatbush.”

“My point remains. They bought your company. You took their money. Now you’re acting like a dog in the manger. Listen to yourself.”

“No, you listen to me. They’re going to be sorry they fucked with Adam Parker. If you won’t do the papers, I’ll find somebody who will. Sure, I took the money, but I didn’t exactly have a choice. It was a hostile takeover.”

“Adam. You really don’t want to mess with these people. You know me. Not a lot scares me in this life. But this … well, trust me when I say it isn’t business as usual. They follow their own rules.”

Parker finished the martini and signaled for another. “I may be an asshole, and I may be an arrogant son of a bitch, but I am not a patsy,” he said, undeterred. “Tell you one thing. Those Systematix drones are going to remember my name.”

 

 

“We have your usual room ready for you, Mr. Parker,” the concierge said as soon as Parker appeared at the St. Moritz that evening. The concierge knew Parker liked the assurance, liked knowing that they’d made a note of his usual preferences.

But on his infrequent visits to Manhattan, Adam Parker also liked to indulge in some unsual preferences indeed. That morning, he’d made a phone call to Madame Sevigny, as she styled herself, who’d promised “two jeunes filles, our very finest.” Madame Sevigny advertised in no publication; all her clients—they were mostly men of great wealth and power who lived in other parts of the country— had to have been properly introduced to her. For her part, she guaranteed absolute discretion. Her girls knew that a lapse of discretion was more than their lives were worth. They also knew that if they abided by Madame Sevigny’s exacting rules, they could put away a sizable nest egg in just a couple of years. Madame Sevigny had a physician on retainer who conducted regular blood tests and pelvic examinations of the jeunes filles, ensuring that their health and hygiene were beyond reproach. All of them maintained exercise schedules and dietary regimens that would put a professional gymnast to shame, and before they kept their appointments, Madame Sevigny conducted her own private inspections. As she deemed necessary, eyebrows would be tweezed, skin exfoliated and moisturized, feet pumiced, eyelashes tinted, legs waxed, nails filed; every bodily crevice would be irrigated and perfumed. “It is so difficult to be a natural beauty,” Madame Sevigny would sigh, as she gave her jeunes filles a final inspection.

At ten P.M. precisely, a phone call from the St. Moritz lobby announced the girls’ arrival. Parker, lounging in his opulently appointed suite in a white terrycloth bathrobe, felt a sensation of warmth rise within him. All this stress he’d been under since the Systematix takeover—God, but he needed this. It had been too long. He was always quite precise in his instructions to Madame Sevigny—as the old semiconductor plutocrat who first sized him up and told him about Madame’s special services had explained, there was no point in beating around the bush with Madame S. What he had in store this evening was the sort of thing that his wife—a horsey, wholesome woman—simply couldn’t be expected to understand. It wouldn’t have surprised him, though, if the semiconductor mogul understood something of his pleasures.

The knock on the door came minutes later.

“My name is Yvette,” the striking, statuesque brunette said breathily.

“And my name is Eva,” the lithesome blonde said. They closed the door behind themselves. “You like?”

Parker grinned widely. “Very much,” he said. “But I thought Madame Sevigny said it would be Yvette and Erica.”

“Erica took ill,” Eva said. “She sent me instead and asked me to send her regrets. We are like sisters. I think maybe you will not be disappointed.”

“I’m sure I won’t,” Parker said, eyeing with dry-mouthed anticipation the flat, gray briefcase Yvette carried. “Can I get you girls anything?”

The two girls exchanged glances and shook their heads. “We begin, allons-y?” Yvette said.

“Please,” Parker said.

An hour later, Parker was bound to the brass bedposts with black silk scarves, moaning with pleasure as the two girls took turns spanking and stroking his reddened flesh. They were expert; every time he came too near to climaxing, they would move their attentions elsewhere, massaging his arms and chest with fingers that were as soft and as hard as anything he could image. Yvette now caressed his body with her soft breast and moist crotch as Eva readied the hot wax.

The fragrant beeswax dripped on his body with intensely erotic heat, in equal measure painful and pleasurable. “Yes,” he panted, nearly delirious. “Yes.” His torso was laced with sweat.

Finally, Yvette mounted him, taking his manhood into herself, enveloping him in her warmth. The silk bonds had been loosened enough to allow him to sit part of the way up, and now Eva clasped his chest from behind. Her fingers massaged his shoulders, and now his throat.

“And, I think, a final pleasure for you,” Eva whispered in his ear. He barely saw a glint of the razor-sharp wire before she had looped it around his neck.

“Oh God,” he groaned before the wire sliced through cartilage, fascia, and vessels, subtending his carotid arteries, trachea, and esophagus, and he spoke no more.

Yvette, her eyes closed, lost now in her own pleasure, noticed first the waning of turgor within her. Her eyes opened, and she saw the gentleman’s head slumped forward, and the other girl, the girl who called herself Eva, holding a shiny metal loop. Was this some new plaything?

“And now, I think, it is your turn,” Eva said breathily, and encircled Yvette’s neck with the shiny wire. Only then did Yvette notice the blood around the gentleman’s neck, like a bright red cravat, and just moments later she was conscious of absolutely nothing at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

He awoke slowly, aching all over, his head throbbing. He was sitting in a recliner seat in a small, luxurious executive jet, a blanket over him, a fluffy pillow behind his head. The windows were black; the noise and vibration indicated that they were in flight. The cabin was empty except for two other passengers. A fortyish man in a navy-blue flight-attendant’s uniform, blond crew cut, dozed in shadows at the rear of the cabin. And seated in a wide leather seat across the aisle from Bryson was Waller, reading a leather-bound volume under a small, bright circle of light.

“Nu, vot eti vot, tovarishch Rosovsky, dobri vecher,” Bryson said in Russian. “Shto vyi chitayete?” His speech was slurred; he felt drugged.

Waller looked up, gave a slight smile. “I really haven’t spoken that beastly language in decades, Nicky. I’m sure I’m quite rusty.” He closed his book. “But in answer to your question, I’m rereading Dostoyevsky. The Brothers K. Just to confirm my recollection that he’s really quite a bad writer. Lurid plotting, heavy-handed moralizing, and prose out of The Police Gazette.”

“Where are we?”

“Somewhere over France by now, I imagine.”

“If you used chemicals on me, I hope you got whatever you wanted.”

“Ah, Nick,” Waller exhaled, “I’m sure you believe you have no reason to trust me, but the only chemical you received was a painkiller of some kind. Fortunately there’s a half-decent, well-equipped emergency clinic for travelers at Chek Lap Kok. But that’s a nasty little bullet wound you sustained. Apparently your second in a matter of weeks, the last being a superficial graze wound in the left shoulder. You always were a quick healer, but you’re starting to get a little long in the tooth, you know. It’s really a young man’s game, like American football. I told you that when I pulled you out five years ago.”

“How’d you find me?”

Waller shrugged, settled back in his seat. “We have our sources, both electronic and human. As you well know.”

“Pretty audacious to use a U.S. military chopper in foreign airspace.”

“Not especially. Unless you really believe Harry Dunne’s fabrications about our being some sort of rogue elephant.”

“You’re claiming it’s not true?”

“I’m not claiming anything, Nick.”

“You’ve already admitted you’re Russian-born. Gennady Rosovsky, born in Vladivostok. Trained as a GRU sleeper penetration agent, a paminyatchik, by the Soviet Union’s top spymasters, specialists in the English language, American culture and way of life, right? And a chess prodigy. Yuri Tarnapolsky confirmed all this for me. Even in your youth you had a reputation—some called you the Sorcerer.”

“You flatter me.”

Bryson gazed at his old mentor, who was now stretching his legs, his hands interlaced behind his neck. Waller—that was how he knew him, inasmuch as he did know him—looked supremely comfortable.

“Somewhere in the back of my mind,” Waller went on, “I always knew there was the remote, theoretical chance that my GRU file might somehow, someday, make its way out of a safe in cold storage to U.S. intelligence. The way a long-buried corpse might wash up from its grave in a flood. But who’d ever have predicted it, really? Not even us. Everyone mocks the CIA for not anticipating the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, and I’m hardly no defender of theirs, but I always thought that unfair—even Gorbachev didn’t see it coming, for God’s sake.”

“Aren’t you dodging the great unasked question here?”

“Why not ask it?”

“Are you a paminyatchik, a GRU sleeper, or not?”

“‘Am I now or have I ever been,’ to paraphrase the buffoon Senator McCarthy? I was; I am not. Is that unambiguous enough?”

“Unambiguous, but vague.”

“I defected in place.”

“To our side.”

“Naturally. I was an illegal here seeking to make it legal.”

“When?”

“Nineteen fifty-six. I had arrived in 1949 as a boy of fourteen, when legends were plentiful and not thoroughly vetted. By the midfifties I saw the light and terminated my ties to Moscow. By then I’d seen, and heard, enough of Comrade Stalin to shatter whatever youthful illusions I’d once had about the radiant future of a communist world. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, I wasn’t alone in realizing the idiocies, the follies, the essential flabbiness of the CIA. That was when I and Jim Angleton and a few others founded the Directorate.”

Bryson shook his head, mulling. “A GRU sleeper defects in place, there are consequences. His handlers in Moscow will be greatly displeased, retaliation threatened and inevitably carried out. Yet you’re maintaining that your true identity remained cloaked for decades. I find it hard to believe.”

“Completely understandable. But do you imagine I simply sent them a Dear Ivan letter—‘Oh, and you can stop sending those paychecks, because I’m switching sides’? Not bloody likely. I took some care with it, as you can imagine. My controller was a greedy bastard and not a little careless. He liked to live well and supported his habit by double-dipping and feeding from the expense-account trough a little too often.”

“Translation: he embezzled.”

“Indeed. In those days, that was grounds for either the gulag or a bullet in the neck in the Lubyanka courtyard. And with what I knew, and could pretend to know, I forced him to write me off the books. I disappear, he stays alive, everyone goes home happy.”

“Then Harry Dunne’s story wasn’t a fabrication, was it?”

“Not one hundred percent, no. An ingenious pastiche of truths and half-truths and outright falsehoods. Like the very best lies.”

“What part of it isn’t true?”

“What did he tell you?”

Bryson’s heart began to pound slowly. His adrenaline surged, combating whatever narcotic was in his bloodstream. “That the Directorate was founded in the early 1960s by a small cell of fanatics at the GRU, or maybe VKR, brilliant strategists known as the Shakhmatisti, the chess players. Inspired by the classic Russian deception operation, the Trust, from the twenties. A penetration operation on American soil, the most brazen intelligence ruse of the twentieth century, far eclipsing the ambitions of the Trust. Controlled by a tight inner circle of directors, the Consortium, with all officers and staff outside that circle deluded into the belief that they were working for a maximum-security American intelligence unit—and constrained by zealous compartmentalization and gradated code-word secrecy from revealing anything, to anyone, about their work.”

Waller smiled, his eyes closed.

“And according to Dunne, the true origins of the Directorate in Moscow would never have been discovered were it not for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Which resulted in the dissemination of a few stray documents inadvertently revealing code-name operations that didn’t fit into known KGB or GRU structures; a contact name here and there; then the entirety confirmed by midlevel defectors.”

Waller’s grin broadened. He opened his eyes. “You almost have me convinced, Nick. Alas, Harry Dunne is in the wrong line of work. He should have written fiction; he has a wild imagination. His tale is at once outlandish and quite persuasive.”

“What part of it is fiction?”

“Where do I begin?” Waller sighed petulantly.

“How about with the goddamned truth?” exploded Bryson, unable to tolerate his coyness any longer. “If you even know it anymore! How about starting with my parents?”

“What about them?”

“I spoke with Felicia Munroe, Ted! My parents were murdered by you goddamned fanatics! To put me under the direct control of Pete Munroe, to bring me into the Directorate.”

“By murdering your parents? Come on, Nicky!”

“You’re denying that Pete Munroe was secretly Russian-born, like you? Felicia as good as confirmed for me Harry Dunne’s version of the ‘accident’ that ended their lives.”

“Which was what, precisely?”

“That my ‘Uncle Pete’ did it—that he was wracked with guilt afterward.”

“The poor old woman is senile, Nicky. Who’s to say what the hell she meant?”

“You’re not going to dismiss it that easily, Ted. She said that Pete talked Russian in his sleep. Dunne said that Pete Munroe’s actual name was Pyotr Aksyonov.”

“He’s right.”

“Oh Jesus!”

“He was Russian-born, Nick. I recruited him. Fanatically anticommunist. His family disappeared in the purges of the nineteen-thirties. But he didn’t kill your parents.”

“Then who did?”

“They weren’t killed, for God’s sake. Listen to me.” Waller studied the circular pool of light on his tray-table. “There are things I never told you, for reasons of compartmentalization—things I thought it better for you not to know—but I’m sure you already know the basic contours. The Directorate is, and was, a supranational agency established by a small cadre of enlightened members of U.S. and British intelligence, as well as a few high-level Soviet defectors whose bona fides were beyond reproach, yours truly included.”

“When?”

“In nineteen-sixty-two, shortly after the Bay of Pigs debacle. We were determined to see that such a disgrace never happened again. It was my idea initially, if you’ll allow me a brief immodesty, but my dear friend James Jesus Angleton of the CIA was my earliest and most vociferous supporter. He felt, as did I, that American intelligence was being eviscerated by amateurs and bumblers—the so-called Old Boys, really a bunch of overprivileged Ivy League frat boys—patriotic perhaps, but laughably arrogant, convinced they knew what they were doing. A Wall Street clique who basically ceded Eastern Europe to Stalin out of a simple failure of nerve. A bunch of elitist corporate lawyers who lacked the cojones to do things the way they had to be done, who lacked the necessary ruthlessness. Who didn’t understand Moscow as I did.

“Remember, not long after the Bay of Pigs, a KGB officer named Anatoly Golitsyn defected and laid it all out for Angleton in a series of debriefings—how the CIA was riddled with moles—penetrated, corrupted, to its very core. And the less said about the British, with Kim Philby and his ilk, the better. Well, that about did it for Angleton. He not only provided the Directorate’s initial black-box funding and set up the covert funding channels, but he also approved the basic, cellular organizational structure. He helped me devise the box-within-a-box strategy, the decentralization and internal segmentation, as a way of maintaining maximum secrecy. He emphasized the necessity of keeping our very existence unknown from all but the heads of the governments we served. Only by cloaking its very existence could this new organization hope to escape the mire of penetration, disinformation, and politics to which spy agencies on both sides of the Cold War had been held hostage.”

“You don’t expect me to believe that Harry Dunne was so far off base, so misinformed about the Directorate’s true origins.”

“Absolutely not. He wasn’t misinformed. Harry Dunne was a man on a mission. He constructed a straw man. An argumentum ad logicam, a brilliant caricature, plausible-sounding and laced with shards of the truth. An imaginary garden filled with real toads, as it were.”

“To what end?”

“To point you toward us, urge you to go after us and, if possible, destroy us.”

“To what end?”

Waller sighed in exasperation, but before he could speak, Bryson went on: “Are you going to sit there and deny that you tried to have me terminated?”

Waller shook his head slowly, almost sadly. “There are others I might try to deceive, Nicky. You are far too clever.”

“In the parking garage in Washington, after I went to K Street and found headquarters gone. You were behind that.”

“Yes, that was our hire. It’s not easy to find top-notch talent these days. Why did it not surprise me that you bested the fellow?”

But Bryson, not so easily mollified, stared at him. furiously. “You ordered a sanction on me because you were afraid I’d expose the truth!”

“Actually, no. We were alarmed by your behavior. All external signs seemed to indicate that you’d gone bad, that you’d joined forces with Harry Dunne and had turned against your old employers. Who can fathom the human heart? Were you embittered by your early termination? Did Dunne turn your head with his lies? We couldn’t know, and so we had to take protective measures. You knew far too much about us. Even despite all the compartmentalization, you knew far too much. Yes, a beyond-salvage order went out.”

“Christ!”

“Yet all the while I remained skeptical. I know you better than perhaps anyone, and I was unwilling to accept the dossier, the analysts’ assessments, at least without further corroboration. So I deployed one of our finest new recruits to cover you on Calacanis’s ship, monitor your activities until I could be sure one way or the other. I handpicked her to watch you, check up on you, report back.”

“Layla.”

Waller nodded once.

“She was assigned as a limpet?”

“Correct.”

“That’s horseshit!” Bryson shouted. “She was far more than a goddamned limpet. She tried to kill me in Brussels!”

Bryson watched Waller’s face for telltale signs of deception, but of course it was unreadable. “She acted on her own, in contravention to my orders. I’m not denying that, Nick. But you have to consider the chronology.”

“This is pathetic. You’re weaving back and forth, backing and filling, desperately trying to cover the holes in your story!”

“Listen to me, please. At least give that much to the man who saved your life. Part of her charge was to watch out for you too, Nick. To presume innocence on your part unless and until we learned otherwise. When she saw that you were about to be ambushed on Calacanis’s ship, she warned you off.”

“Then how do you explain Brussels?”

“A regrettable impulse on her part. Her intention was essentially a protective one. To protect the Directorate and our mission. When she learned you were about to meet with Richard Lanchester in order to blow apart the Directorate, she tried to talk you out of it. And when you persisted, she panicked; she took matters into her own hands. She assumed there simply wasn’t time to contact me for instructions; she had to move at once. It was a bad decision, a miscalculation. It was unfortunate, and impulsive, and she tends to be impulsive. No one is perfect. She’s a fine operative, one of the best to come out of Tel Aviv, and she’s beautiful. A rare combination. One tends to overlook the faults. She’s doing fine, incidentally. Thank you for asking.”

Bryson ignored the sarcasm. “Let me get this straight: you’re saying she wasn’t tasked with killing me?”

“As I said, her mission was observation and reporting, protection where needed, not termination. But at Santiago de Compostela it became evident that termination orders had been taken out against you by others. Calacanis had been killed, his security forces decimated; it seemed unlikely to have originated with him, given the rapid sequence of events. I deduced that you were being exploited as a cat’s paw; the question was, by whom?”

“Ted, I saw some of the agents arrayed against me—I recognized them! A blond operative, a dispatch agent from Khartoum. The peasant brothers from Cividale I used in the Vector operation. These were Directorate hires!”

“No, Nick. The killers at Santiago de Compostela were freelancers who sell their talent to the highest bidders, not exclusively for us—and they’d been hired to do the job at Santiago precisely because they knew your face. Presumably they were told you were a sellout, that you might give up their names. Self-survival is a powerful incentive.”

“That and a two-million-dollar bounty on my head.”

“Indeed. I mean, for heaven’s sakes, you were traveling around the world using an old Directorate legend. I could have rolled you up in a second. Did you seriously assume we didn’t have ‘John T. Coleridge’ in our database?”

“Then who hired them?”

“The possibilities are numerous. You had put out so many feelers by then; you spoke to old KGB sources to verify my true identity. You think they don’t talk? Or sell information, to be exact, the mercenary bastards?”

“You’re not going to argue it was CIA, I hope. Harry Dunne obviously wasn’t sending me out to do his dirty work while at the same time ordering me killed.”

“Granted. But presumably a team was monitoring the situation on the Spanish Armada, and when the vessel was destroyed, a decision was made that you were a hostile.”

“A decision made by whom? Dunne kept the whole operation off the books, no records maintained, only my ‘Jonas Barrett’ alias recorded in the Security data banks.”

“Expenses, perhaps.”

“Buried, encrypted. All requisitions DDCI-need-to-know Priority.”

“The place leaks like a sieve, you know that. Always has. That’s why we exist.”

“Richard Lanchester agreed to see me as soon as I mentioned your true name. He made it clear he knew about the Directorate’s origins— as outlined by Harry Dunne. Are you saying Lanchester was lying too?”

“He’s a brilliant man, but he’s vain, and vain men are easily gulled. Dunne might have debriefed him as artfully as he did you.”

“He wanted me to probe further.”

“Naturally. As would you, if you were in his position. He must have been a frightened man.”

Bryson’s head was spinning; he was overcome by vertigo. Too many pieces didn’t fit! Too much remained unexplained, inconsistent. “Prospero — Jan Vansina—kept asking me whether Elena ‘knew’ something. What was he talking about?”

“I’m afraid some suspicion fell on Elena at the same time we were wondering about your defection to the enemy. Vansina needed to determine whether she was complicit. I maintained that you’d been false-flagged, and of course I was proven correct.”

“And what about the roster of operations you devised or controlled— Sri Lanka, Peru, Libya, Iraq? Dunne said that they were all secretly designed to defeat American interests abroad—but under such a deep cloak of secrecy that even the participants didn’t see the chess moves because we were too close to the board.”

“Poppycock.”

“What about Tunisia? Was Abu not a CIA asset?”

“I don’t know everything, Nicky.”

“It looks as if your whole elaborate penetration operation, ostensibly to defeat a coup, was engineered to unmask and neutralize a key CIA asset. To eliminate an Agency direct feed into a network of Islamic terrorist cells throughout the region—one hand undoing the work of the other!”

“Twaddle.”

“And the Comoros, in 1982—you sent us to foil an attempt by mercenaries from Executive Outcome to take over. But according to Dunne, they were CIA hires attempting to free British and American hostages. What’s the truth?”

“Check the records. The hostages were only freed later, after our operation. Check the employment records if you can locate them. Unwind the sequence. These weren’t CIA hires, they were underwritten by nationalist elements. Do your homework, my boy.”

“Goddamn you! I was there, you know. And I was on board the Spanish Armada, ostensibly carrying a blueprint of a new-generation Javelin antitank missile as a bargaining chip. Calacanis knew immediately who the interested buyer would be, and it was your man! It was Directorate— Vance Gifford or whatever his real name is. Calacanis himself confirmed the pattern of increased acquisition out of Washington.”

“We’re not Washington-based anymore, Nicky, you know that. We had to relocate; we were penetrated.”

“And why the hell was your operative so interested in acquiring the blueprint? For your personal collection, was that it?”

“Nicky —”

“And why did he arrive on the ship in the company of Jacques Arnaud’s man, Jean-Marc Bertrand? Are you pretending you weren’t acquiring weapons?”

“Gifford was doing his job, Nick.”

“His job being what, exactly? According to Calacanis, the man was on a spending spree.”

“In this world, as you know better than most, you don’t just inspect the goods without buying. Browsers are quickly detected and dispatched.”

“The same way Prospero—Jan Vansina—laundered five billion dollars in Geneva? A penetration ruse?”

“Who told you that—Dunne?”

Bryson didn’t reply, but simply stared at his old mentor, his heart pounding. He felt his right ribcage begin to throb; the painkiller had obviously begun to wear off.

Ted Waller went on in a voice rich with sarcasm, “Did he tell you this off-site? Wouldn’t talk in his office? Told you he feared wiretaps?”

When Bryson didn’t reply, Waller continued. “The deputy director of Central Intelligence doesn’t have the power to have his own office swept, Nick?”

“Bugs come in plastic, too. Sweeping won’t detect them—nothing will, short of tearing apart the plaster.”

Waller snorted softly. “It was a show, Nicky. A goddamned piece of theater. An attempt, successful as it turned out, to persuade you that he was the good guy, the forces of darkness arrayed against him—the forces, in this case, being the entire CIA. In which he’s the number two.” Waller shook his head sadly. “Really.”

“I gave him an Agency ID card I took off the body of one of the black-operatives who tried to terminate me outside Chantilly.”

“And let me guess. He had the card tested and found it to be fake.”

“Wrong.”

“Maybe he was unable to turn up any records. He did a Code Sigma, found that it had been assigned to an operator in extremis, and there the trail went cold. He couldn’t trace the name.”

“That’s not exactly far-fetched. Agency extremis operators don’t leave tracks, you know that. Dunne admitted to me the CIA wasn’t the best agency to investigate the Directorate.”

“Ah, and it made you trust him all the more, didn’t it. I mean, trust him personally.”

“You’re saying he was trying to have me terminated while at the same time he was directing me to investigate the Directorate’s activities? That’s not just illogical, that’s insane!”

“Directing complex field operations is always a shifting calculation. My guess? Once he saw you had survived the attack, he realized you could be reprogrammed, redeployed against another lead. But it’s time to return your seat to an upright and locked position, as they say. We’re there.”

Waller seemed to be speaking from a great distance, and Bryson didn’t understand what he meant; he could feel everything receding; and the next thing he knew he was aware of a bright white light. He opened his eyes and saw that he was in a room that was all white and steel. He was lying down in a tightly made bed between heavy linens; his eyes ached from the brightness of the light; his throat was parched and his lips were dry, cracked.

Before him were figures silhouetted against the light, one of them unmistakably Waller, the other much thinner and smaller, presumably a nurse. He heard Waller’s rich baritone: “ … he’s coming to even as we speak. Hello there, Nicky.”

Bryson grunted, tried to swallow.

“He must be thirsty,” came a female voice that was quite familiar. “Can someone get him some water?”

It couldn’t be. Bryson blinked, squinted, tried to get the room into focus. He could see Waller’s face, then hers.

His heart began hammering. He squinted again; he was sure he was imagining things. He looked again, and then he was sure.

He said, “Is that you, Elena?”