The Ambler Warning Read online

  EXPLOSIVE PRAISE FOR ROBERT LUDLUM’S

  THE AMBLER WARNING

  “An intense, powerful novel, rich in detail, complex plotting, and characterization . . . chilling . . . the rapid pace of this book and the exhilarating twists to the story make it next to impossible to put down . . . excellent.”

  —Affaire de Coeur

  THE MOSCOW VECTOR

  “Plenty of excellent shootouts.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  THE LAZARUS VENDETTA

  “A fast read and sure to delight fans of both espionage and the technothriller.”

  —Booklist

  “A solid intelligence, some really scary nanotechnology, and a writing style that always gets the job done.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  THE ALTMAN CODE

  “Neat subplots . . . plenty of action and intrigue.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The hero is brilliant, strong, and stoic . . . the international settings are spectacular.”

  —reviewingtheevidence.com

  “Expert.”

  —Ellery Queen

  THE PARIS OPTION

  “Tops in the series.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  THE JANSON DIRECTIVE

  “One heck of a thriller . . . loaded with all the intrigue, paranoia, and real-life parallels that made Ludlum famous.”

  —People

  “Ludlum’s best since his masterpiece The Bourne Identity.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Finely crafted . . . the novel’s action scenes are as thrillingly staged on the page as they’ll inevitably be on the big screen.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  THE SIGMA PROTOCOL

  “Perfectly executed . . . Packed with all the classic Ludlum elements . . . thunders forward at breakneck pace.”

  —People

  “[A] triumph . . . Harkens back to the roller coaster ride/thrill-a-minute Bourne Identity.”

  —The Midwest Book Review

  “Ludlum at his best.”

  —Sullivan County Democrat

  “Vintage Ludlum.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Dazzling . . . a clean launch of the ’80s spy novel into a thrilling action/adventure web of intrigue meant for the 21st century.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Ludlum] shows that . . . his storytelling skill was still at an all-time high . . . provides no less suspense than his diehard fans would expect.”

  —Bookreporter.com

  “An accomplished novel . . . classic Ludlum . . . moves at breakneck speed . . . with well-developed players and a fascinating stage, Ludlum has risen to some of his finest work in this clever and enjoyable novel.”

  —Chattanooga Times–Free Press

  “Better than anything [Ludlum’s] done in nearly 20 years . . . here is vintage Ludlum . . . the plot is rich with new insight.”

  —Gannett Newspaper

  “Ludlum keeps things moving with plenty of gunplay and running about . . . quite good.”

  —Booklist

  CRITICAL PRAISE FOR ROBERT LUDLUM

  “Ludlum stuffs more surprises into his novels than any other six-pack of thriller writers combined.”

  —The New York Times

  “Ludlum pulls out all the stops, and dazzles his readers.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Packed with all the classic Ludlum elements . . . the intricately engineered plot thunders forward at breakneck pace. Bottom Line: Perfectly executed.”

  —People

  “Robert Ludlum continues to jolt his readers with fresh juice . . . a page-turner of non-stop action that should leave his fans begging for more.”

  —New York Post

  “Welcome to Robert Ludlum’s world . . . fast pacing, tight plotting, international intrigue.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Reading a Ludlum novel is like watching a James Bond film . . . slickly paced . . . all-consuming.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Ludlum is light years-beyond his literary competition in piling plot twist upon plot twist, until the mesmerized reader is held captive . . . He dominates the field in strong, tightly plotted, action-drenched thrillers.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Readers will remain in the dark right up until the explosive climax.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Gripping . . . Robust writing and a breakneck pace.”

  —Boston Herald

  “Don’t ever begin a Ludlum novel if you have to go to work the next day.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  ALSO BY

  ROBERT LUDLUM

  THE TRISTAN BETRAYAL

  THE JANSON DIRECTIVE

  THE SIGMA PROTOCOL

  THE PROMETHEUS DECEPTION

  THE MATARESE COUNTDOWN

  THE APOCALYPSE WATCH

  THE ROAD TO OMAHA

  THE SCORPIO ILLUSION

  THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM

  THE ICARUS AGENDA

  THE BOURNE SUPREMACY

  THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION

  THE PARSIFAL MOSAIC

  THE BOURNE IDENTITY

  THE MATARESE CIRCLE

  THE GEMINI CONTENDERS

  THE HOLCROFT COVENANT

  THE CHANCELLOR MANUSCRIPT

  THE ROAD TO GANDOLFO

  THE RHINEMANN EXCHANGE

  THE CRY OF

  THE HALIDON TREVAYNE

  THE MATLOCK PAPER

  THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND

  THE SCARLATTI INHERITANCE

  THE AMBLER

  WARNING

  ROBERT LUDLUM™

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Since his death, the Estate of Robert Ludlum has worked with a carefully selected author and editor to prepare and edit this work for publication.

  THE AMBLER WARNING

  Copyright © 2005 by Myn Pyn LLC.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2005049407

  ISBN: 0-312-99069-3

  EAN: 978-0312-99069-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition / October 2005

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / November 2006

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth

  Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The unapparent connection is more powerful than the

  apparent one.

  —Heraclitus, 500 B.C.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  The building had the invisibility of the commonplace. It could have been a large public high school or a regional tax-processing center. A blocky structure of tan brick—four stories around an inner courtyard—the building looked like countless others erected in the 1950s and ’60s. A casual passerby would not have given it a second look.

  Yet there was no such thing as a casual passerby here. Not on this barrier island, six miles off the coast of Virginia. The island was, officially, p
art of America’s National Wildlife Refuge System, and anyone who made inquiries learned that, owing to the extreme delicacy of its ecosystem, no visitors were permitted. Part of the island’s leeward side was, indeed, a habitat for ospreys and mergansers: raptors and their prey, both endangered by the greatest predator of all, man. But the central part of the island was given over to a fifteen-acre campus of manicured green and carefully graded slopes, where the bland-looking facility was situated.

  The boats that stopped at Parrish Island three times a day had NWRS markings, and from a distance it would not be apparent that the personnel ferried to the island looked nothing like park rangers. If a disabled fishing vessel tried to land on the island, it would be intercepted by khaki-clad men with genial smiles and hard, cold eyes. No one ever got close enough to see, and wonder about, the four guard towers, or the electrified fencing that surrounded the campus.

  The Parrish Island Psychiatric Facility, as unremarkable in appearance as it was, contained a greater wilderness than any that surrounded it: that of the human mind. Few people in the government knew of the facility. Yet simple logic had decreed its existence: a psychiatric facility for patients who were in possession of highly classified information. A secure environment was needed to treat someone who was out of his mind when that mind was filled with secrets of state. At Parrish Island, potential security risks could be carefully managed. All staff members were thoroughly vetted, with high-level clearance, and round-the-clock audio and video surveillance systems offered further protection against breaches of security. As an additional safeguard, the facility’s clinical staff was rotated every three months, thus minimizing the possibility that inappropriate attachments might develop. Security protocols even stipulated that patients be identified by number, never by name.

  Rarely, there would be a patient who was deemed an especially high risk, either because of the nature of his psychiatric disorder or because of the particular sensitivity of what he knew. A patient so designated would be isolated from other patients and housed in a separate locked ward. In the western wing of the fourth floor was one such patient, No. 5312.

  A staffer who had just rotated to Ward 4W and encountered Patient No. 5312 for the first time could be sure only of what could be seen: that he was six feet tall, perhaps forty years of age; that his close-cropped hair was brown, his eyes an unclouded blue. If their eyes met, the staffer would be the first to look away—the intensity of the patient’s stare could be unnerving, almost physically penetrative. The rest of his profile was contained in his psychiatric records. As to the wilderness within him, one could only surmise.

  Somewhere in Ward 4W were explosions and mayhem and screams, but they were soundless, confined to the patient’s troubled dreams, which grew in vividness even as sleep itself began to ebb. These moments before consciousness—when the viewer is aware only of what he views, an eye without an I—were filled by a series of images, each of which buckled like a film strip stopped before an overheated projector bulb. A political rally on a steamy day in Taiwan: thousands of citizens assembled in a large square, cooled only by the very occasional breeze. A political candidate, struck down in midsentence by a blast—small, contained, deadly. Moments before, he had been speaking eloquently, ardently; now he was sprawled on the wooden rostrum, in a cowl of his own blood. He lifted up his head, gazing out at the crowd for the last time, and his eyes settled on one member of the crowd: a chang bizi—a Westerner. The one person who was not screaming, crying, fleeing. The one person who did not seem surprised, for he was, after all, in the presence of his own handiwork. The candidate died staring at the man who had come from across the world to kill him. Then the image buckled, shimmied, burned into a blinding white.

  A far-off chime from an unseen speaker, a minor-key triad, and Hal Ambler opened his sleep-sticky eyes.

  Was it truly morning? In his windowless room, he had no way of telling. But it was his morning. Recessed into the ceiling, soft fluorescent lights grew in intensity over a half-hour period: a technological dawn, made brighter by the whiteness of his surroundings. A pretend day, at least, was beginning. Ambler’s room was nine feet by twelve feet; the floors were tiled with white vinyl, and the walls were covered with white PVC foam, a dense, rubbery material, slightly yielding to the touch, like a wrestling mat. Before long, the hatch-style door would slide open, making a hydraulic sigh as it did. He knew these details, and hundreds like them. It was the stuff of life in a high-security facility, if you could call it a life. He experienced stretches of grim lucidity, intervals of a fugue state. A larger sense that he had been abducted, not just his body but also his soul.

  In the course of a nearly two-decade career as a clandestine operative, Ambler had occasionally been taken captive—it had happened in Chechnya and in Algeria—and he had been subjected to periods of solitary confinement. He knew that the circumstance wasn’t conducive to deep thoughts, soul-searching, or philosophical inquiry. Rather, the mind filled with scraps of advertising jingles, pop songs with half-remembered lyrics, and an acute consciousness of small bodily discomforts. It eddied, drifted, and seldom went anywhere interesting, for it was ultimately tethered to the curious agony of isolation. Those who had trained him for the life of an operative had tried to prepare him for such eventualities. The challenge, they had always insisted, was to keep the mind from attacking itself, like a stomach digesting its own lining.

  Yet on Parrish Island, he wasn’t in the hands of his enemies; he was being held by his own government, the government in whose service he had spent his career.

  And he did not know why.

  Why someone might be interned here wasn’t a mystery to him. As a member of the branch of U.S. intelligence known as Consular Operations, he had heard about the facility on Parrish Island. Ambler understood, too, why such a facility had to exist; everyone was susceptible to the frailties of the human mind, including those in possession of highly guarded secrets. But it was dangerous to allow just any psychiatrist access to such a patient. That was a lesson learned the hard way, during the Cold War, when a Berlin-born psychoanalyst in Alexandria whose clientele included several top government officials came to be exposed as a conduit to East Germany’s notorious Ministerium für Staatssicherheit.

  Yet none of this explained why Hal Ambler found himself here, ever since—but how long had it been? His training had stressed the importance of keeping track of time when in confinement. Somehow he had failed to do so, and his questions about duration went unanswered. Had it been six months, a year, more? There was so much he did not know. One thing he did know was that if he did not escape soon, he really would go mad.

  Routine: Ambler could not decide whether the observance of it was his rescue or his ruin. Quietly and efficiently, he completed his personal calisthenics regimen, finishing with a hundred one-armed pushups, alternating between left and right. Ambler was permitted to bathe every other day; this was not one of them. At a small white sink in a corner of his room, he brushed his teeth. The toothbrush handle, he noticed, was made of a soft, rubbery polymer, lest a piece of hard plastic be sharpened into a weapon. He pressed a touch latch, and a compact electric shaver slid from a compartment above the sink. He was permitted precisely 120 seconds of use before he had to return the sensor-tagged device to its security compartment; otherwise an alarm would chime. After he finished, Ambler splashed water on his face and ran his wet fingers through his hair, finger-combing it into some sort of order. There was no mirror; no reflective surface anywhere. Even the glass in the ward was treated with some antireflective coating. All to some therapeutic end, no doubt. He donned his “day suit,” the white cotton smock and loose, elastic-waisted trousers that were the inmates’ uniform.

  He turned slowly when he heard the door slide open, and smelled the pine-scented disinfectant that always lingered around the hallway. It was, as usual, a heavyset man with a brush cut, dressed in a dove gray poplin uniform, a cloth tab carefully fastened over his pectoral nameplate: another precaut
ion that the staff took on this ward. The man’s flat vowels made it clear that he was a Midwesterner, but his boredom and incuriousness were contagious; Ambler took very little interest in him.

  More routine: The orderly carried a thick nylon mesh belt in one hand. “Raise your arms” was the grunted instruction as he came over and placed the black nylon belt around Ambler’s waist. Ambler was not permitted to leave his room without the special belt. Inside the thick nylon fabric were several flat lithium batteries; once the belt was in place, two metal prongs were positioned just above his left kidney.

  The device—it was officially known as a REACT belt, the acronym standing for “Remote Electronically Activated Control Technology”—was typically used for the transport of maximum-security prisoners; in Ward 4W, it was an item of daily attire. The belt could be activated from as far away as three hundred feet and was set to deliver an eight-second charge of fifty thousand volts. The blast of electricity would knock even a sumo wrestler to the floor, where he would twitch uncontrollably for ten or fifteen minutes.

  Once the belt was snap-locked in place, the orderly escorted him down the white-tiled hallway for his morning medications. Ambler walked slowly, lumberingly, as if he were wading through water. It was a gait that frequently resulted from high serum levels of antipsychotic medications—a gait that everyone who worked in the wards was familiar with. Ambler’s movements were belied by the swift efficiency with which his gaze took in his surroundings. That was one of the many things the orderly failed to notice.

  There were few things that Ambler failed to notice.

  The building itself was decades old, but it had been regularly refurbished with up-to-date security technology: doors were opened by chip cards—cards that contained transponder wafers—rather than keys, and major gateways required retinal scans to operate, so that only authorized personnel could pass. About a hundred feet down the hall from his cell was the so-called Evaluation Room, which had an internal window of gray polarized glass that allowed for observation of the subject within, while making it impossible to observe the observer. There Ambler would sit for regular “psychiatric evaluations,” the purpose of which seemed as elusive to the physician in attendance as it was to him. Ambler had known true despair in recent months, and not as a matter of psychiatric disturbance; instead, his despair flowed from a realistic estimation of his prospects for release. Even in the course of their three-month rotations, the staff had, he sensed, come to regard him as a lifer, someone who would be interned at the facility long after they had left it.