The Prometheus Deception Read online

  “Nick Bryson, my main man!” exclaimed Chris Edgecomb, bounding from his seat at a computer monitor. Born in Guyana, he was a lithe, tall man with mocha skin and green eyes. He’d been at the Directorate for four years, working on the communications-and-coordination team; he fielded distress calls, figured out ways to relay information to agents in the field when it was necessary. Edgecomb clasped Bryson’s hand warmly.

  Nicholas Bryson knew he was something of a hero to people like Edgecomb, who yearned to be field operatives. “Join the Directorate and change the world,” Edgecomb would joke in his lilting English, and it was Bryson he had in mind when he said it. It was a rare event, Bryson knew, that the office staff saw Bryson face-to-face; for Edgecomb, this was an occasion.

  “Somebody hurt you?” Edgecomb’s expression was sympathetic; he saw a strong man who had been hospitalized until recently. Then he continued hastily, knowing better than to ask questions: “I’ll pray to Saint Christopher for you. You’ll be a hundred percent in no time.”

  The Directorate’s creed, above all, was segmentation and compartmentalization. No one agent or staffer should ever know enough to be in the position to jeopardize the security of the whole. The organizational chart was shrouded even to a veteran like Bryson. He knew a few of the desk jockeys, of course. But the field personnel all operated in isolation, through their own proprietary networks. If you had to work together, you knew each other only by a field legend, a temporary alias. The rule was more than procedure, it was Holy Writ.

  “You’re a good man, Chris,” Bryson remarked.

  Edgecomb smiled modestly, then pointed a finger upward. He knew Bryson had an appointment—or was it a summons?—with the big man himself, Ted Waller. Bryson smiled, gave Edgecomb a friendly clap on the shoulder, and made his way to the elevator.

  * * *

  “Don’t get up,” Bryson said heartily as he entered Ted Waller’s third-floor office. Waller did anyway, all six feet, four inches and three hundred pounds of him.

  “Good Lord, look at you,” Waller said, his eyes appraising Bryson with alarm. “You look like you came out of a POW camp.”

  “Thirty-three days in a U.S. government clinic in Morocco will do that to you,” Bryson said. “It’s not exactly the Ritz.”

  “Perhaps I should try being gutted by a mad terrorist someday.” Waller patted his ample girth. He was even larger than the last time Bryson had seen him, though his avoirdupois was elegantly sheathed in a suit of navy cashmere, his bull neck flattered by the spread collar of one of his Turnbull & Asser shirts. “Nick, I’ve been tormenting myself since this happened. It was a serrated Verenski blade from Bulgaria, I’m told. Plunge and twist. Terribly low-tech, but it usually does the job. What a business we’re in. Never forget, it’s what you don’t see that always gets you.” Waller settled weightily back in the tufted-leather chair behind his oak desk. The early-afternoon sun filtered through the polarized glass behind him. Bryson took a seat in front of him, an unaccustomed formality. Waller, who was normally ruddy and seemingly robust, now looked pallid, the circles under his eyes deep. “They say you’ve made a remarkable recovery.”

  “In a few more weeks, I’ll be as good as new. At least that’s what the doctors tell me. They also say I’ll never need an appendectomy, a side benefit I never thought of.” As he spoke, he felt the dull ache in his lower-right abdomen.

  Waller nodded distractedly. “You know why you’re here?”

  “A kid gets a note to see the principal, he expects a reprimand.” Bryson feigned lightheartedness, but his mood was tense, somber.

  “A reprimand,” Waller said enigmatically. He was silent for a moment, his eyes settling on a row of leather-bound books on the shelves near the door. Then he turned back and said in a gentle, pained voice: “The Directorate doesn’t exactly post an organizational chart, but I think you have some inkling of the command-and-control structure. Decisions, particularly ones concerning key personnel, do not always stop at my desk. And as important as loyalty is to you and to me—hell, to most of the people in this goddamned place—it’s coldhearted pragmatism that rules the day. You know that.”

  Bryson had had only had one serious job in his life, and this was it; still, he recognized the undertones of the pink-slip talk. He fought the urge to defend himself, for that was not Directorate procedure; it was unseemly. He recalled one of Waller’s mantras: There’s no such thing as bad luck, then thought of another maxim. “All’s well that ends well,” Bryson said. “And it did end well.”

  “We almost lost you,” Waller said. “I almost lost you,” he added ruefully, a teacher speaking to a prize student who has disappointed him.

  “That’s not pertinent,” Bryson said quietly. “Anyway, you can’t read the rules on the side of the box when you’re in the field; you know that. You taught me that. You improvise, you follow instinct—not just established protocol.”

  “Losing you could have meant losing Tunisia. There’s a cascade effect: when we intervene, we do so early enough to make a difference. Actions are carefully titrated, reactions calibrated, variables accounted for. And so you nearly compromised quite a few other undercover operations, in Maghreb and other places around the sandbox. You put other lives in jeopardy, Nicky—other operations and other lives. The Technician’s legend was intricately connected to other legends we’d manufactured; you know that. Yet you let your cover get blown. Years of undercover work compromised because of you!”

  “Now, wait a second—”

  “Giving them ‘defective munitions’—how did you think they wouldn’t suspect you?”

  “Damn it, they weren’t supposed to be defective!”

  “But they were. Why?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Did you inspect them?”

  “Yes! No! I don’t know. It never crossed my mind that the goods weren’t as they were represented.”

  “That was a serious lapse, Nicky. You endangered years of work, years of deep-cover planning, cultivation of valuable assets. The lives of some of our most valuable assets! Goddamn it, what were you thinking?”

  Bryson was silent for a moment. “I was set up,” he said at last.

  “Set up how?”

  “I can’t say for sure.”

  “If you were ‘set up,’ that means you were already under suspicion, correct?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “‘I don’t know’? Not exactly words that inspire confidence, are they? They’re not words I like to hear. You used to be our top field operative. What happened to you, Nick?”

  “Maybe—somehow—I screwed up. Don’t you think I’ve gone over it and over it in my mind?”

  “I’m not hearing answers, Nick.”

  “Maybe there aren’t any answers—not now, not yet.”

  “We can’t afford such screwups. We can’t tolerate this kind of carelessness. None of us can. We allow for margins of error. But we cannot go beyond them. The Directorate doesn’t tolerate mistakes. You’ve known that since day one.”

  “You think there was something I could have done differently? Or maybe you think somebody else could have done it better?”

  “You were the best we ever had, you know that. But as I told you, these decisions are reached at consortium level, not at my desk.”

  A chill ran through Bryson upon hearing the bureaucratese that told him Waller had already distanced himself from the consequences of the decision to let him go. Ted Waller was Bryson’s mentor, boss, and friend, and, fifteen years ago, his teacher. He had supervised his apprenticeship, briefed him personally before the operations he worked on early in his career. It was an immense honor, and Bryson felt it to this day. Waller was the most brilliant man he’d ever met. He could solve partial differential equations in his head; he possessed vast stores of arcane geopolitical knowledge. At the same time his lumbering frame belied his extraordinary physical dexterity. Bryson recalled him at a shooting range, absently hitting one bull’s-eye after another
from seventy feet while chatting about the sad decline of British bespoke tailoring. The .22 looked puny in his large, plump, soft hand; it was so under his control that it might have been another finger.

  “You used the past tense, Ted,” Bryson said. “The implication being that you believe I’ve lost it.”

  “I simply meant what I said,” Waller replied quietly. “I’ve never worked with anyone better, and I doubt I ever will.”

  By temperament and by training, Nick knew how to remain impassive, but now his heart was thudding. You were the best we ever had, Nick. That sounded like an homage, and homage, he knew, was a key element of the ritual of separation. Bryson would never forget Waller’s reaction when he pulled off his first operational hat trick—foiling the assassination of a moderate reform candidate in South America. It was a taciturn Not bad: Waller had pressed his lips together to keep from smiling, and to Nick, it was a greater accolade than any that followed. It’s when they begin to acknowledge how valuable you are, Bryson had learned, that you know they’re putting you out to pasture.

  “Nick, nobody else could have accomplished what you did in the Comoros. The place would have been in the hands of that madman, Colonel Denard. In Sri Lanka, there are probably thousands of people who are alive, on both sides, because of the arms-trading routes you exposed. And what you did in Belarus? The GRU still doesn’t have a clue, and they never will. Leave it to the politicians to color inside the lines, because those are the lines that we’ve drawn, that you’ve drawn. The historians will never know, and the truth is, it’s better that way. But we know that, don’t we?”

  Bryson didn’t reply; no reply was called for.

  “And on a separate matter, Nick, noses are out of joint around here about the Banque du Nord business.” He was referring to Bryson’s penetration of a Tunis bank that channeled laundered funds to Abu and Hezbollah to fund the coup attempt. One night during the operation more than 1.5 billion dollars simply disappeared, vanished into cyberspace. Months of investigation had failed to account for the missing assets. It was a loose end, and the Directorate disliked loose ends.

  “You’re not suggesting that I had my hand in the cookie jar, are you?”

  “Of course not. But you understand that there are always going to be suspicions. When there are no answers, the questions linger; you know that.”

  “I’ve had plenty of opportunities for ‘personal enrichment’ that would have been far more lucrative and considerably more discreet.”

  “You’ve been tested, yes, and you’ve passed with flying colors. But I question the method of diversion, the monies transferred through false flags to Abu’s colleagues to purchase compromisable background data.”

  “That’s called improvisation. It’s what you pay me for—using my powers of discretion when and where necessary.” Bryson stopped, realizing something. “But I was never debriefed about this!”

  “You offered up the details yourself, Nick,” said Waller.

  “I sure as hell never—oh, Christ, it was chemicals, wasn’t it?”

  Waller hesitated a split-second, but just long enough that Bryson’s question was answered. Ted Waller could lie, blithely and easily, when the need dictated, but Bryson knew his old friend and mentor found lying to him distasteful. “Where we obtain our information is compartmented, Nick. You know that.”

  Now he understood the need for such a protracted stay in an American-staffed clinic in Laayoune. Chemicals had to be administered without the subject’s knowledge, preferably injected into the intravenous drip. “Goddamn it, Ted! What’s the implication—that I couldn’t be trusted to undergo a conventional debriefing, offer the goods up freely? That only a blind interrogation could tell you what you wanted to know? You had to put me under without my knowledge?”

  “Sometimes the most reliable interrogation is that which is conducted without the subject’s calculation of his own best interest.”

  “Meaning you guys thought that I’d lie to cover my ass?”

  Waller’s reply was quiet, chilling. “Once assessments are made that an individual is not one hundred percent trustworthy, contrary assumptions are made, at least provisionally. You detest it, and I detest it, but that’s the brutal fact of an intelligence bureaucracy. Particularly one as reclusive—maybe paranoid is the more accurate word here—as we are.”

  Paranoid. In fact, Bryson had learned long ago that to Waller and his colleagues at the Directorate, it was an article of faith that the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and even the National Security Agency were riddled with moles, hamstrung by regulation, and mired in an arms race of disinformation with their hostile counterparts abroad. Waller liked to call these, the agencies whose existence was emblazoned on Congressional appropriations bills and organization charts, the “woolly mammoths.” In his earliest days with the Directorate, Bryson had innocently asked whether some measure of cooperation with the other agencies didn’t make sense. Waller had laughed. “You mean, let the woolly mammoths know we exist? Why not just send a press release to Pravda?” But the crisis of American intelligence, in Waller’s view, went far beyond the problems of penetration. Counterintelligence was the true wilderness of mirrors. “You lie to your enemy, and then you spy on them,” Waller had once pointed out, “and what you learn is the lie. Only now, somehow, the lie has become true, because it’s been recategorized as ‘intelligence.’ It’s like an Easter-egg hunt. How many careers have been made—on either side—by people who have painstakingly unearthed eggs that their colleagues have just as painstakingly buried? Colorful, beautifully painted Easter eggs—but fakes nonetheless.”

  The two had sat talking through the night in the belowground library underneath the K Street headquarters, a chamber furnished with seventeenth-century Kurdish rugs on the floor, old British oil paintings of the hunt, of loyal dogs grasping fowl in their pedigreed mouths.

  “You see the genius of it?” Waller had gone on. “Every CIA adventure, botched or otherwise, will eventually come under public scrutiny. Not so for us, simply because we’re on nobody’s radar.” Bryson still remembered the soft rattle of ice cubes in the heavy crystal glass as Waller took a sip of the barrel-proof bourbon he favored.

  “But operating off the grid, practically like outlaws, can’t exactly be the most practical way to do business,” Bryson had protested. “For one thing, there’s the matter of resources.”

  “Granted, we don’t have the resources, but then we don’t have the bureaucracy, either, the constraints. All in all, it’s a positive advantage, given our particular purview. Our record is proof of it. When you work in ad hoc fashion with groups around the world, when you don’t shy from extremely aggressive interventions, then all you need is a very small number of highly trained operatives. You take advantage of on-the-ground forces. You succeed by directing events, coordinating the desired outcomes. You don’t need the vast overheads of the spy bureaucracies. All you really need is brains.”

  “And blood,” said Bryson, who had already seen his share of it by then. “Blood.”

  Waller had shrugged. “That great monster Joseph Stalin once put it quite aptly: you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.” He spoke about the American century, about the burdens of empire. About imperial Britain in the nineteenth century, when Parliament would debate for six months about whether to send an expeditionary force to rescue a general who had been under siege for two years. Waller and his colleagues at the Directorate believed in liberal democracy, fervently and unequivocally—but they also knew that to secure its future, you couldn’t play, as Waller liked to say, by Queensberry rules. If your enemies operated by low cunning, you’d better summon up some good old low cunning of your own. “We’re the necessary evil,” Waller had told him. “But don’t ever get cocky—the noun is evil. We’re extra-legal. Unsupervised, unregulated. Sometimes I don’t even feel safe knowing that we’re around.” There was another soft rattle of ice cubes as he drained the last drops of bour
bon from the glass.

  Nick Bryson had known fanatics—friendlies and hostiles both—and he found comfort in Waller’s very ambivalence. Bryson had never felt he’d fully had the measure of Waller’s mind: the brilliance, the cynicism, but mostly the intense, almost bashful idealism, like sunlight spilling through the edge of drawn blinds. “My friend,” Waller said, “we exist to create a world in which we won’t be necessary.”

  * * *

  Now, in the ashy light of the early afternoon, Waller spread his hands on his desk, as if bracing himself for the unpleasant job he had to do. “We know you’ve been having a hard time since Elena left,” he began.

  “I don’t want to talk about Elena,” Bryson snapped. He could feel a vein throbbing in his forehead. For so many years she had been his wife, best friend, and lover. Six months ago, during a sterile telephone call Bryson had placed from Tripoli, she had told him she was leaving him. Arguing would do no good. She had clearly made up her mind; there was nothing to discuss. Her words had wounded him far worse than Abu’s blade. A few days later, during a scheduled stateside debriefing—disguised as an arms-acquisition trip—Bryson arrived home to find her gone.

  “Listen, Nick, you’ve probably done more good in the world than anybody in intelligence.” Waller paused, and then spoke slowly, with great deliberateness. “If I let you continue, you’ll start to subtract from what you’ve done.”

  “Maybe I screwed up,” Bryson said dully. “Once. I’m willing to concede that much.” There was no point in arguing, but he couldn’t stop himself.

  “And you’ll screw up again,” Waller replied evenly. “There are things we call ‘sentinel events.’ Early warning signs. You’ve been extraordinary for fifteen years. Extraordinary. But fifteen years, Nick. For a field agent, those are like dog years. Your focus is wavering. You’re burned out, and the scary thing is, you don’t even know it.”