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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Where’s the woman?”

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

  “It is genuine, because she is Mossad.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Sit,” commanded the Dutchman.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Does she know?”

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

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

  “Where is she?” Bryson interrupted.

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

  Dully, Bryson repeated, “The Prometheans?”

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

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

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

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

  Vansina paused a long while, unable to conceal the astonishment in his eyes. “We all have many names,” he said at last. “Many identities. And sanity lies in the ability to distinguish among them, to keep them separate. Yet you seem to have lost that ability. You believe one thing, then another. You don’t know where reality ends and fantasy begins. Ted Waller is a great man, Bryson. Greater than any of us.”

  “So he has you deceived still! You believe him, you believe his lies! You don’t know, Prospero? We were puppets, drones—automatons, programmed by the overseers! We acted blindly, not understanding who our real masters were, what the real agenda was!”

  “There are circles within circles,” Vansina said solemnly. “There are things we know nothing about. The world has changed, and we must change with it, must adapt to the new realities. What have you been told, Bryson? What lies have you been fed?”

  “The ‘new realities,’” Bryson began hollowly, not understanding. He was stunned, baffled to the point of momentary speechlessness, when he saw the enormous shape suddenly looming in the plate-glass window, abruptly appearing from out of nowhere. He recognized it as a helicopter only at the instant that the fusillade of bullets riddled the glass, the automatic machine-gun fire shattering the glass into a crystalline hailstorm.

  Bryson dove to the floor, tumbled beneath the long conference table, but Vansina, at the head of the table and therefore much closer to the window, had no such opportunity. His hands flew out to his side like a bird attempting flight, and then his entire body danced, animated grotesquely, almost prancing like some marionette. The bullets penetrated his face, his chest, blood erupted from his twitching body in scores of tiny geysers, and his bloodied face contorted in a horrible scream, a full-throated bellow that was entirely masked by the deafening racket of the hovering helicopter, the ear-splitting thunder of gunfire. As the wind howled through the conference room, the mahogany table was split, chewed up by a thousand bullets, the carpet crisscrossed, pitted. From his shelter under the thick tabletop, Bryson saw Vansina seem almost to rise into the air before crumpling against the gray carpet, red-spattered from his blood, limbs splayed unnaturally, his eyes hollow red cavities, his face and beard a horrifying bloodied pulp, the entire back of his head missing. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the helicopter lunged out of sight and was gone. The cacophony had abruptly ceased, the only sounds the faint traffic noises from the street hundreds of feet below, and the moaning of the wind as it whistled through stalactites of glass, whirling around the slaughterhouse of a room now gone eerily silent.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Racing from the conference room, from the nightmarish scene of blood and machine-gun rounds and broken glass, Bryson ran through a hall choked with horrified bystanders. There were screams, shouts in Schweizerdeutsch and French and English.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!”

  “What happened, was it snipers? Terrorists?”

  “Are they inside the building?”

  “Call the police, an ambulance, quickly!”

  “My God, the man’s dead—he’s, oh God, he’s been massacred!”

  As he ran, he thought of Layla. Not her, too! Could the helicopter have circled the building, locating targets in windows on the twenty-seventh floor?

  And he thought: Jan Vansina was the object of the freakish attack. Not me. Vansina. It had to be. He ran through the kaleidoscopic images in his mind, sorting through them, recalling angles of fire. Yes. Whoever was manning the machine gun or guns from within the helicopter had been deliberately aiming for Jan Vansina. This was no random attack, nor a generalized attempt to kill whoever was present in the conference room. The gunfire had been aimed precisely, from at least three different and precise angles, at the Directorate operative.

  But why?

  And who? The Directorate could not have been killing its own, could it? Perhaps fearing that Vansina was meeting with an old friend, sharing information …

  No, it stretched the imagination too far, made too little sense. The reasons, the logic behind the attack remained obscure. But the fact remained, Bryson was convinced, that the man who was supposed to be killed had in fact been killed.

  These thoughts spun through his mind in a matter of seconds; he located Bécot’s office, yanked open the closed door—and found it empty.

  Neither Layla nor the banker was here. Turning to leave, he noticed a china espresso cup overturned on the floor beside the coffee table, a few papers scattered near the desk. Signs of either a hurried departure or a brief struggle.

  Muffled sounds came from somewhere within the room or very nearby, thumping noises, cries. His eyes quickly searched the room, found the closet door. He ran to it, opened it. Layla and Jean-Luc Bécot were bound in ropes, gagged. Polyurethane “humane restraints,” as strong as leather, secured their wrists and ankles. The banker’s wire-rimmed glasses lay bent on the closet floor beside him, his tie askew, his shirt torn, hair wild. Through the wadded cloth gag stuffed in his mouth he tried to shout, his eyes bulging. Next to him, Layla was bound even more thoroughly, expertly, the gag tight in her mouth. Her gray Chanel suit was ripped; one of her matching gray high-heeled shoes had come off. She, too, had vinyl restraints around her wrists and ankles. Her face was bloodied and bruised; obviously she had struggled fiercely but had been overwhelmed by the superior strength of the man who had been Prospero.

  The brute animal who had been Prospero, Jan Vansina. Bryson swelled with rage at the dead man. He pulled the gag from her mouth, then from the banker’s; both captives took deep, gulping breaths, filling their lungs with much-needed air. Bécot gasped, cried out. Layla gasped, too: “Thank you. My God!”

  “He didn’t kill you, either of you,” Bryson remarked as he worked quickly to untie the ropes. He searched for a knife or other blade to sever the strong plastic restraints; seeing nothing, he ran to the banker’s desk and spied a silver letter opener, quickly rejecting it since it had a point but no blade. In a side desk drawer he found a small but sharp pair of scissors, ran back to the closet, and used it to release them both.

  “Call Security!” the banker said through gulps of air.

  Bryson, who could already hear the sirens of the approaching emergency vehicles growing steadily louder, said, “The police are on their way, I suspect.” He took Layla by the arm, helped her to her feet, and the two of them ran from the room.

  Passing the open conference room door, in front of which a crowd had gathered, she stopped.

  “Come on,” hissed Bryson. “There’s no time!”

  But she peered inside, saw the crumpled body of Jan Vansina surrounded by jagged shards of glass, the shattered window. “Oh, my God!” she breathed, horrified, quivering. “Oh, my God!”

  Not until they reached the crowded Place Bet-Air did they come to a stop.

  “We have to leave,” Bryson said. “Travel separately—we can’t be seen together, not any longer.”

  “Travel—but where?”

  “Out of here—out of Geneva, out of Switzerland!”

  “What are you saying—we can’t just—” She stopped in midsentence when she realized that Bryson’s attention was riveted on a newspaper displayed in a kiosk. It was a copy of La Tribune de Genève.

  “My God,” said Bryson, moving closer. He grabbed it from a tall stack, riveted by the large black banner headline above a photograph of some sort of terrible accident.

  TERROR STRIKES FRANCE:

  HIGH-SPEED PASSENGER TRAIN

  DERAILED IN LILLE

  LILLE—A powerful bomb blast derailed and tore apart the high-speed passenger train Eurostar about thirty miles south of Lille early this morning, killing hundreds of French, British, American, Dutch, Belgian, and other business travelers. Although emergency workers and volunteers worked frantically throughout the day, searching the wreckage for survivors, French authorities fear that the death toll may exceed 700. An official at the crash site, who preferred to remain anonymous, speculated that the incident was the work of terrorists.

  According to records made available by railroad officials, the train, Eurostar 9007-ERS, left the Care du Nord in Paris, bound for London, at approximately 7:16 A.M., with nearly 770 passengers on board. At approximately 8:00 A.M., the 18-car train passed through France’s Pas-de-Calais region, where a series of high-powered explosions, reportedly buried beneath the tracks, went off below the train’s front and rear sections simultaneously. Although there was no immediate claim of responsibility, sources in the French security service, the Sûreté, have already compiled a list of possible suspects. Several anonymous sources in the Sûreté have confirmed rampant speculation that both the French and the British governments had received repeated warnings of an impending attack on the Eurostar in the last several days. A Eurostar spokesman would neither confirm nor deny a report provided to La Tribune de Genève that the intelligence services of both countries had leads pointing to suspected terrorists planning to blow up the train but were unable to intercept or monitor telephone conversations between the alleged terrorists because of legal constraints.

  “This is an outrage,” declared French National Assembly member Françoise Chouet. “We had the technical ability to prevent this sickening carnage, yet our police are hamstrung by our laws from doing anything about it.” In London, Lord Miles Parmore renewed his call in Parliament for passage of the International Treaty on Surveillance and Security. “If the governments of France and England had the ability to keep this sabotage from happening, it is simply criminal that we sat there and did nothing about it. This is a national—no, an international—disgrace.”

  The United States national security adviser, Richard Lanchester, attending a NATO summit in Brussels, issued a statement denouncing the “slaughter of innocents.” He added, “In this period of mourning, we must all ask ourselves how to make sure something like this never happens again. With great reluctance and sadness, the Davis administration joins its allies and good friends England and France in calling for worldwide passage of the International Treaty on Surveillance and Security.”

  Lille.

  Bryson’s blood ran cold.

  He remembered the low, conspiratorial voices of two men emerging from Jacques Arnaud’s private office in the Château de Saint-Meurice. One was the arms merchant himself, the other Anatoly Prishnikov, the Russian tycoon.

  “Once Lille happens,” Arnaud had said, “the outrage will be enormous. The way will be clear.”

  Once Lille happens.

  Two of the world’s most powerful businessmen, one an arms dealer, the other a mogul who no doubt secretly owned or controlled large segments of the Russian defense industry—Bryson would have to obtain a complete dossier—had foreknowledge of the devastation at Lille, the attack that killed seven hundred people.

  Quite likely the men were among those who planned it.

  Both of them principals of the Directorate. The Directorate was behind the nightmare at Lille; there was no question about it.

  But to what end? Senseless violence was not the Directorate’s way; Waller and the other overseers had always prided themselves on their strategic genius. Everything was strategy, everything served an ultimate end. Even the murder of Bryson’s parents, even the massive deception that had become his life. The murder of a few field operatives might be justified by nothing more than the need to remove an encumbrance, an obstacle, a threat. But the wholesale murder of seven hundred innocent travelers was in another category entirely, moved from low-level tactics to higher strategy.

  The outrage will be enormous.

  The public outcry over the derailing and destruction of the Eurostar train was indeed great, as it would inevitably be over such a preventable tragedy.

  Preventable tragedy.

  The key was preventable. Prophylaxis. The Directorate wanted this outrage, wanted to spur calls for prevention of any future terrorism. Yet prevention could mean any number of things. A treaty to fight terrorism was one thing, no doubt little more than window dressing. But surely any such treaty would lead to the bolstering of national defenses, the acquisition of weapons intended to protect public safety.

  Arnaud and Prishnikov, merchants of death with a vested interest in world chaos, because chaos was a form of marketing—the marketing of their goods, their weapons, the increasing of demand. These two moguls were presumably behind Lille and …

  And what else? Standing there on the street, he was oblivious to the bustle of passing pedestrians. Layla was reading the article over his shoulder, saying something to him, but he did not hear her. He was retrieving remembered news stories in the filing cabinet of his mind. Several recent incidents that he had read about, seen television coverage about, terrible things that at the time did not register as directly applicable to his own life, his mission.