“Acting how? Doing what?”

  “Corporate acquisitions, mergers, consolidation—all seem to be accelerating.”

  “Mergers, consolidations in the defense sector?”

  “Yes. But with an emphasis on telecommunications and satellites and computers. And it’s more, much more than the amassing of a corporate empire. Because in the last five months there has been an epidemic of terrorist incidents, from Washington and New York to Geneva and Lille … .”

  “Prishnikov and Arnaud both knew about Lille in advance,” Bryson said suddenly. “I overheard this, saw them discussing Lille a few days before. ‘The way will be clear,’ they said. ‘The outrage will be enormous.’”

  “‘The way will be clear,’” she mused aloud. “Defense industry insiders, owners fomenting chaos in order to boost the value of their stock …” She shook her head. “No, that doesn’t track. The most direct way to increase demand for armaments is to foment war, not isolated, individual terrorist attacks. It’s one of the theories behind the massive arming that led to World War Two, that international cartels of arms dealers built up the young Nazi Germany knowing that not too far down the line there would be a global war.”

  “But this is a different era—”

  “Nicholas, think this through. Key players in Russia, China, and France—at least, and surely there are others—in a position to pit their nations against one another, sound the drumbeats of coming war, the need to strengthen national defenses … . That’s how it should be done.”

  “There’s more than one way to spur calls for ‘defense readiness.’”

  “But if you hold the levers of power, there must be a good reason why you don’t pull them. No, we’re not seeing a global arms race. That’s not the pattern at all. Separate incidents, that’s what we’re seeing. Individual acts of terrorism, unclaimed, unattributed. All happening on an accelerating schedule. But why?”

  “Terrorism is another form of war,” Bryson said slowly. “War by other means. A psychological war whose intent is to demoralize.”

  “But a war requires at least two sides.”

  “The terrorists and those who fight them.”

  She shook her head. “It still doesn’t track. ‘Those who fight them’— that’s too nebulous.”

  “Terrorism is a form of theater. It’s committed by an actor for an audience.”

  “So the desired end result is not the destruction itself, but the publicity caused by the destruction.”

  “Exactly.”

  “The publicity almost always helps attract attention to some cause, some group. But this recent wave of terrorism had no known authors, no cause or group. So we have to examine the publicity, the news, to see what links them all. What do these terrorist incidents all have in common?”

  “That they could have been prevented,” said Bryson abruptly.

  Elena stopped and turned toward him with a curious smile. “What makes you say that?”

  “Go back over the newspaper accounts, the transcripts of the television and radio coverage. Every time, after each incident, a comment appeared in the stories—usually attributed to some unnamed government official— to the effect that had adequate surveillance measures been in place, the tragedy would certainly have been prevented.”

  “Surveillance measures,” she repeated.

  “The treaty. The International Treaty on Surveillance and Security, which has just been agreed to by most of the countries of the world.”

  “The treaty creates a sort of international watchdog agency, right? A sort of super-FBI?”

  “Right.”

  “Which would require the investment of billions and billions of dollars in new satellite equipment, police equipment, and the like. Potentially very lucrative for the companies … like Arnaud’s, Prishnikov’s, Tsai’s … maybe that’s it. An international treaty that serves as a mask, a cover for massive buildups in defense. So that we’re all armed, protected against terrorists—terrorism being the new, post—Cold War threat to peace. And all the members of the U.N. Security Council have signed it and ratified it by now, isn’t that right?”

  “All but one. Great Britain. That’s supposed to happen any day now. The main agitator there is Lord Miles Parmore.”

  “Yes, yes. He’s a—how do you say, he’s a blowhard, but he’s been quite effective at organizing support for the treaty. Never underestimate the man who’s willing to put himself out there. Remember the Reichstag in 1933.”

  Bryson shook his head. “That’s not how the Prometheans operate. Lord Parmore has been brilliantly effective, but I suspect he’s not a brilliant man. I’ll bet the controlling intellect is elsewhere. It’s what our fearless leader likes to say—‘follow the brawn, look for the brains.’”

  “You’re saying there are puppetmasters in London directing the Parliamentary debate?”

  “Count on it.”

  “But who? If we could find out …”

  “I’m going to have to go there, meet with Parmore, question him, dig as deeply as I can.”

  “But can you go? Are you well enough?”

  “If you get these damned tubes out of my arm, I’m fine.”

  She fell silent for a moment. “Nicholas, normally I’d be the overprotective wife, insisting you stay in bed and get better. But if you honestly feel well enough—time is of the essence —”

  “I can go to London. I want to go. As soon as we can get a flight there.”

  “I’ll make a call, arrange for them to get the private jet ready for a departure in six hours or so, assuming Ted doesn’t need it.”

  “Good. The airstrip is close.”

  “A very short drive.” She nodded, stopped in midpace. “So now Cassidy makes sense.”

  “Cassidy? Senator Cassidy?”

  “Right.”

  “What about him? He was forced out of office because of revelations having to do with—what was it, his wife was caught dealing drugs or something?”

  “Well, it’s a little more complicated than that, but those are the basic outlines of the story. Years ago his wife was addicted to painkillers, and she bought drugs from an undercover police officer. Senator James Cassidy was able to get her police record expunged, then he got her into a treatment program.”

  “What does that have to do with the treaty?”

  “First of all, he was the Senate’s leading opponent of the treaty. He saw it as marking the end of individual privacy. In fact, he was the loudest voice in Washington warning of the steady erosion of privacy in the age of the computer. Many commentators saw irony in the fact that a senator so obsessed with privacy would be brought down because of something hidden in his past—they sniggered that he obviously had something to hide, that’s why he was so obsessed with privacy.”

  “There may be something to that.”

  “That’s not the point. The thing is, he’s the ninth member of Congress in the last few months to either resign or announce he wasn’t going to run again.”

  “It’s a difficult time to be a politician, that’s all.”

  “No question. But you know me—I’m trained to look for patterns where others don’t necessarily see them. I noticed that among those nine were five who resigned under a cloud, you might say. In disgrace. And those five had been outspoken opponents of the international treaty on surveillance. Surely that was no coincidence—and it doesn’t take an expert in elliptic curve cryptography or asymmetric key cryptosystems to see that. Private information had been leaked. Information that somehow became public—mental-health treatment in one case, extensive use of antidepressant medication, renting pornographic videos, a check written to an abortion clinic …”

  “So supporters of the treaty are playing rough.”

  “More than that. Supporters of the treaty with access to the most private records.”

  “Some renegade elements within the FBI?”

  “But the FBI generally doesn’t have such information on people, vou know that! Certainly not since the days of J. Edgar Hoover. maybe when they do an in-depth investigation of a criminal suspect, but otherwise they don’t.”

  “Then who, or what?”

  “I began to look for the deeper pattern to see whether there might be a controlling intelligence behind this pattern of exposure. What did these congressmen all have in common? I inputted extensive biographies on them, whatever I could get, whatever financial information I could gather on the Internet—and, as you know, there’s quite a bit out there as long as you can get a Social Security number, which is simple to get. And a curious fact turned up. Two of the disgraced congressmen had mortgages from a Washington, D.C., bank, First Washington Mutual Bancorp. And then I found the link: all five of them were clients of First Washington.”

  “So either the bank is somehow complicit in the blackmail, or somehow someone managed to access the bank’s records.”

  “Right. Bank records, checks, money transfers … which can lead to health-insurance records, then medical records.”

  “Harry Dunne,” Bryson said.

  “Another Prometheus member. The CIA’s deputy director of central intelligence.”

  “Dunne is?”

  “Yes, yes, or so we speculate,” she said hastily. “Go on, what about him?”

  “Dunne was the one who plucked me out of retirement, yanked me from my quiet life and all but forced me to investigate the Directorate. By then you were already on the track of Prometheus, and Dunne wanted to find out what you knew, presumably to neutralize you. Because the CIA is behind this treaty—they want to see increased surveillance around the world.”

  “It may be, yes. For a variety of reasons, not least being the CIA’s need for a mission, a reason to survive now that the Cold War’s over. And yes, I have been on the track of Prometheus, but I still haven’t been able to get a clear sense of its outlines. I’ve been using the Directorate’s computers here, hacking away at Prometheus signals. We’ve identified certain members, like Arnaud, Prishnikov, Tsai, and Dunne; we’re also able to record communications between and among them. But everything is encrypted, of course. We can see the pattern of transmissions, but we can’t see the content. It’s sort of like a hologram—you need two ‘data spaces’ to be able to read the signals in the clear. I’ve been struggling with that long and hard, and so far without success. But if you have code information, anything …”

  Bryson sat up in the hospital bed. He was feeling stronger; his legs felt crampy and needed to be exercised. “Hand me my phone, could you? It’s right there, on the table.”

  “Nicholas, it’s not likely to work well here—we’re underground, and the signal—”

  “Just hand it to me.” She gave him his small silver GSM mobile phone. He turned it over and pulled something out of its battery compartment. It was a tiny black oblong. “This may help you.”

  She took it. “It’s—a chip, a silicon chip … ?”

  “An encryption chip, to be precise,” he said. “Copied from Jacques Arnaud’s office phone.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  She took him down a long subterranean passage that led from the clinic to another wing of the facility. The floors were highly polished stone, the walls white, the low ceilings acoustically insulated. There was no sunlight, no window; they could have been anywhere in the world.

  “This facility was built a decade ago or so as the Directorate’s European base of operations,” she explained. “And I’ve been working here since—well, since I left the States.” She left unspoken: since I left you. “But when it became clear that our U.S. operations had been breached— likely a result of our investigation into Prometheus—Waller ordered the entire Washington office transferred here, which necessitated additional construction. As you’ll see, very little is visible from the outside; it appears to be nothing more than a posh little research facility built into the side of a mountain.”

  “I’ll take your word for it that we’re in the Dordogne,” Bryson said. His legs were fine; the only discomfort came from the wound in his side, which shot daggers of pain up and down his back as he walked.

  “Well, you’ll see soon enough when I take you for a walk outside. We’ll probably have a little downtime waiting for the chip to process.”

  They came to a brushed-steel double-door where Elena entered a code on a small pad and then placed her thumb on a sensor. The doors slid open. The air inside was cool and dry.

  The walls of the low-ceilinged room were lined with racks of supercomputers, workstations, television monitors. “We believe this is the most powerful supercomputer center in the world,” Elena said. “We have Crays with petaflops of processing power, capable of quadrillions of operations per second. There are linked IBM-SP nodes, multithreaded-architecture computers, an SGI Onyx Reality Engine system. There’s a mass-storage system with a hundred and twenty gigabytes of on-line capacity, a twenty-terabyte robotic tape server.”

  “You’re losing me, darling.”

  But her excitement was palpable; she could barely contain it. She was in her element here, the Romanian graduate student who’d learned advanced mathematics on blackboards and rudimentary 1970s-era computers and now suddenly found herself in wonderland. She had always been like this, as long as he’d known her—transported by her work, bewitched by the technology that made it all possible.

  “Don’t forget the seventy-five miles of fiber-optic cable that’s here, Elena.” It was Chris Edgecomb, the tall, slender, green-eyed Guyanan with mocha skin. “Man, every time I see you, you look rougher and rougher!” Chris threw his arms around Bryson, hugged him hard. “They brought you back.”

  Bryson winced but smiled, happy to see the computer specialist again after so long a time. “I guess I can’t stay away.”

  “Well, I know your wife must be glad to see you again too.”

  “I don’t think ‘glad’ is a strong enough word,” said Elena.

  “Saint Christopher seems to take good care of you, though,” said Chris. “No matter what you go through. I’m not going to ask where you’ve been or what you’ve been doing, of course. But it’s good to see you. I’ve been helping Elena on the software side of things, trying to crack the Prometheus message traffic. But it’s a bear. Strong crypto. And we’ve got toys here, man—a serious, high-speed connection to the Internet backbone for distributed computing. An all-digital, gigabit-capacity communication satellite operating in the K- and Ka-frequency bands, in geosynchronous orbit, with the ability to carry digital communications at fiber-optic data rates.”

  Elena inserted the cryptochip in a port in one of the Digital Alpha machines. “You see, stored on tape here are five months of encrypted communications among the Prometheans,” she explained. “We’ve been able to pick it up by means of simple phone taps and satellite sweeps, but we haven’t been able to crack them—we haven’t been able to read them, listen to them, to understand! The encryption is too strong. If this is really a bug-free copy of the Prometheus algorithmic ‘key,’ we may have a breakthrough.”

  “How quickly will you know?” asked Bryson.

  “It might be an hour, maybe several hours. Or maybe less, depending on a number of factors, including what level the key is from. Think of it as a key to an apartment building: the key may be a master, the kind that opens every door in the whole building. Or maybe it just opens the door to an individual unit. We’ll see. Either way, it’s exactly what we’ve needed to break Prometheus.”

  “Why don’t I give you a page or a call when I have a hit?” Chris said. “In the meantime I think Ted Waller wants to see you two.”

  Waller’s spacious, though windowless, office was furnished identically to his old one on K Street—the same seventeenth-century Kurdish rugs on the floor, the same British oil paintings of dogs grasping fowl in their mouths.

  Waller was sitting behind his same massive French oak desk. “Nicky, Elena, I have a morsel of information that might be of interest to you. Elena, I don’t believe you’ve met one of our most talented and redoubtable field operatives, who’s honoring us with an all-too-infrequent visit home.” A large, high-backed chair that had been facing Waller’s desk swiveled around slowly. It was Layla.

  “Ah, yes,” Elena said, taking Layla’s hand icily. “I’ve heard quite a bit about you.”

  “And I of you,” Layla replied, her tone no warmer. She did not get up. “Hello, Nick.”

  Bryson nodded. “I believe last time we saw each other you were trying to kill me.”

  “Oh, that,” Layla said, blushing. “Nothing personal, you understand.”

  “Of course.”

  “In any case, I thought you might want to know that it seems as if our friend Jacques Arnaud may be taking himself out of the picture,” Layla said, regarding them both with a clear, confident gaze.

  “How do you mean?” Bryson asked.

  “He’s taking steps to liquidate all his holdings. The actions, I’d have to say, of a frightened man. This isn’t an orderly retreat, or the migration of assets from one sector to another. Not business as usual, so to say. The merchant of death is putting himself out to pasture.”

  “But that makes no sense!” Bryson said. “I don’t see the logic— do you?”

  “Well,” Layla said, almost smiling, “that’s why we have analysts like Elena. To make sense of what operatives like you and I work so hard to collect.”

  Elena had been silent, her lips forming a thoughtful moue. Now her eyes focused. “Your source, Layla?”

  “One of Arnaud’s great rivals. A man nearly as estimable, and every bit as amoral, as Arnaud himself—a brother in malevolence—and yet he despises him with the enmity Cain felt for Abel. His name is Alain Poirier. It will not be new to you, I am sure.”

  “So you’ve just learned from Arnaud’s great rival about the incipient dissolution of Arnaud’s enterprises,” Elena said.

  “That’s pretty much the shape of it,” Layla said. “In English, anyway. You’d no doubt find it more memorable couched in the language of algorithms. I’m sure your methods are unfathomably obscure.”