Then, taking one more precaution—if she did become conscious unexpectedly soon, she might yell for help—he stuffed a gag in her mouth and tied it tight, checking to see that she could still breathe.

  He turned the lock on the closet door, which would serve only to keep her in—he was convinced, however, that she would never have the opportunity to open the door herself—and not keep someone out.

  Then Bryson returned to his hotel room to prepare to meet Richard Lanchester.

  In a dark room halfway across the world, three men huddled around an electronic console, their tense faces bathed in the cool green light emitted by diodes.

  “It’s a digital relay feed direct from Mentor, one of our space-based satellites in the Intelsat fleet,” intoned one of them.

  The reply was urgent, the tone revealing long hours of stress. “But the voice-pattern ID—how reliable is Voicecast?”

  “Within a tolerance of between ninety-nine and ninety-nine-point-nine-seven degrees,” the first man said. “Extremely reliable.”

  “The identification is affirmative,” remarked the third man. “The communication was initiated by a GSM cellular phone on the ground whose coordinates indicate Brussels, Belgium, the recipient based in Mons.” The third man adjusted a dial; the voice that emerged from the console was astonishingly clear.

  “What is this?”

  “We need to talk, Mr. Lanchester. Immediately.”

  “Well, talk away! I’m here. What kind of hatchet job is the Post preparing? Goddard, I don’t know you, but as I’m sure you’re well aware, I do have your publisher’s home number, I see her socially, and I won’t hesitate for a second to call her!”

  “We have to talk in person, not over the phone. I’m in Brussels; I can be at SHAPE headquarters in Mons in an hour. I want you to call ahead to the front-gate security post, so I can pass right through, and the two of us can have a heart-to-heart.”

  “You’re in Brussels? But I thought you were in Washington! What the hell—?”

  “One hour, Mr. Lanchester. And I suggest you make not a single phone call about this between now and the time I arrive.”

  “Order an interception,” one of the watchers said.

  “The decision must be taken at a higher level,” replied another, clearly his superior. “Prometheus may prefer to continue gathering information on the target’s activities, on how much the target knows.”

  “But if the two meet in a secure facility—what kind of penetration can we expect?”

  “Good Christ, McCabe! Is there anywhere we can’t penetrate? Relay the sound file. Prometheus will decide the course of action.”

  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.