And at the other end of the room, standing at a sleek, minimalistic podium, was Gregson Manning himself, wearing an elegant black suit, hair brushed back. He clutched the sides of the podium, his fervor evident even without any sound. Most remarkable was the wall behind him, which was lined with twenty-four giant video screens, each broadcasting a live image of Manning speaking. It was the sort of egomaniacal display one expected of a Hitler, a Mussolini.

  Bryson moved the mouse to zoom in on the audience, the seated guests, and what he saw stunned him, paralyzed him.

  He did not recognize all the faces by far, but many of those whom he did recognize would be known anywhere in the world.

  There was the head of the FBI.

  The Speaker of the House.

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  Several leading United States senators.

  The secretary general of the United Nations, a soft-spoken Ghanaian admired for his civility and statesmanship.

  The head of Britain’s MI-6.

  The head of the International Monetary Fund.

  The democratically elected head of Nigeria. The chiefs of the militaries and security services in another half-dozen third-world nations, from Argentina to Turkey.

  Bryson stared, jaw agape, gasping.

  The CEOs of quite a few multinational technology corporations, some of whom he recognized quickly, some vaguely familiar. All of them, dressed in black tie, the women in formal evening gowns, were listening to Manning with riveted attention.

  Jacques Arnaud.

  Anatoly Prishnikov.

  And … Richard Lanchester.

  “My God …!” he breathed.

  He found the volume knob and dialed it up.

  Manning’s voice came over the speakers, velvety smooth.

  “ … a revolution in global surveillance. I’m also pleased to announce that Systematix facial-recognition software will also be ready for use in all public places. With the CCTV capabilities already in place, we will now have the ability to scan crowds and match faces against a stored, international database. And this is only possible because of the cooperation of all of us, representatives of forty-seven nations and growing daily—all of us working together.”

  Manning raised his hands as if delivering a benediction to the crowd.

  “What about vehicles?” The accent was African; the speaker a dark-skinned man in a dashiki.

  “Thank you, Mr. Obutu,” Manning replied. “Our neural network technology allows us to not only recognize vehicles instantly but track them around the cities, around countries. And we can record and store that information for future use. You see, I like to think that we are not only widening the net, we’re narrowing the mesh.”

  Another question, which Bryson couldn’t make out.

  Manning smiled. “I know my good friend Rupert Smith-Davies of MI-6 will heartily agree with me when I say that it’s long past time that both the NSA and GCHQ must struggle with legal handcuffs. How ridiculous that, until now, the British could monitor the Americans but not themselves, and vice versa! Were Harry Dunne, our CIA coordinator, well enough to be here, I know he would stand up and tell us all a tale or two in his inimitably profane way.”

  There was general laughter.

  Another question: a woman, her accent Russian. “When will the International Security Agency’s powers become effective?”

  Manning glanced at his watch. “The same moment that the treaty takes effect—which is in approximately thirteen hours. The esteemed Richard Lanchester will be its director—global security czar, you might say. Then, my friends, we will all bear witness to a true New World Order, one in which we can take pride in having created. No longer will the citizens of the world be hostage to drug cartels and drug smugglers, terrorists and violent criminals. No longer will public safety be forced to take a backseat to the privacy ’rights’ of child pornographers, pedophiles, and kidnappers.”

  A deafening round of applause.

  “No longer will we all live in fear of another Oklahoma City bombing, another World Trade Center, another downed airliner. No longer will the U.S. government have to beg courts for permission to place wiretaps on the phones of kidnappers and terrorists and drug lords. To those who will complain—and there will always be complainers—that their individual liberties are being abridged, we will simply tell them this: those who do not break the law will have nothing to fear!”

  Bryson did not hear the door to the control room open until he heard the familiar voice.

  “Nicky.”

  He whirled around. “Ted! What the hell are you doing here?”

  “The same question might be asked of you, Nicky. It’s always what you don’t see that gets you, hmm?”

  Bryson took in Waller’s attire, his tuxedo and black tie.

  Ted Waller was a guest.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “You’re—you’re one of them!” Bryson whispered.

  “Oh, Nicky, good Lord—what’s all this talk of sides? This isn’t some schoolyard game — shirts and skins, Jets and Sharks!”

  “You bastard!”

  “What did I tell you about the need for a continual reappraisal and reassessment of strategic alliances? Adversaries? Allies? Such terms are, finally, meaningless. If I’ve taught you nothing else, at least I’ve taught you that.”

  “What are you doing? This was your battle, you enlisted all of us, for years …”

  “The Directorate has been destroyed. You know that—you saw it happen.”

  “Has this been some sort of deception all along?” Bryson said, raising his voice to a shout.

  “Nicky, Nicky. Prometheus is now our best chance, really—”

  “Our best chance?”

  “And besides, are our goals really all that different? The Directorate was a dream—a fond dream, which we actually had the good fortune to realize for a few years, against all odds. Ensuring global stability, protecting it from the crazies, the terrorists, the madmen. As I always say, the prey survives only by becoming the predator.”

  “This—this is no last-minute conversion,” Bryson said, his voice hushed. “You’ve been behind this for years.”

  “I’ve been a supporter of the possibility.”

  “A supporter … wait. Wait a second! Those assets I once found missing from that offshore bank … a billion dollars — but you were never interested in amassing personal wealth. It was you! You helped create Prometheus, didn’t you?”

  “Seed money, I believe they call it. Sixteen years ago Greg Manning was a bit overextended, and the Prometheus project needed an immediate infusion of cash. You might say I became a principal stakeholder.”

  Bryson felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach. “But it makes no sense—if Prometheus were the enemy …”

  “Survival of the fittest, my dear. Have you never entered two competitors in the same race? It’s backup contingency planning — redundancy that assures victory. Communism had fallen, and the Directorate had lost its sense of purpose. I looked around and examined the options, and I knew that conventional spycraft was doomed. Either we were the way of the future or Prometheus was. One horse had to win.”

  “And so you went with whichever horse won, morality be damned. It made no difference to you what the different objectives were, did it?”

  “Manning was one of the most brilliant men I ever met. It occurred to me that his idea was worth incubating, worth nurturing as a contingency.”

  “You hedged your goddamned bets!”

  “Think of it as political arbitrage. It was the only prudent course. I’ve always told you, Nick, spycraft isn’t a team sport. And I know you have the talent ultimately to recognize the good sense in my reasoning.”

  “Where’s Elena?” Bryson shot back.

  “She’s a smart woman, Nick, but she didn’t plan on being discovered, apparently.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Manning’s people have her here somewhere in the residence; I’m assured she’s being treated with the respect you and I both know she deserves. Nick, do I really have to ask you outright? Is it that important to you that I put the question so bluntly? Will you join us—can you recognize the way of the future?”

  Bryson raised his pistol, pointing it at Waller, his heart racing. Why did you make me do this? he pleaded inwardly. Why, damn it?

  Waller saw the gun but did not flinch. “Ah, I see. I have my answer. I didn’t think so. Alas.”

  The door flew open again, and a small army of Manning’s security guards entered, guns pointed, outnumbering him some twelve to one. Bryson spun, saw others pouring in through another, concealed door in the round wall, and as his back was turned, he was grabbed from behind. He felt the cold steel of the muzzle against the back of his head, another gun to his right temple. He turned back, much more slowly this time, and Ted Waller was gone.

  “Hands in the air,” a voice commanded. “And don’t even think about making any sudden movements. Don’t try to grab the gun out of anyone’s hands. You’re a smart guy — you know about smart guns.”

  Electronic pistols, Bryson realized. Developed by Colt, by Sandia, by several European weapons firms … Capable of firing three shots with a single pull of the trigger.

  “Hands up! Move it!”

  Bryson nodded, thrust his hands in the air. There was nothing more to do, probably no hope of saving Elena either. The technology had been developed at the request of law enforcement, to keep police officers from being killed with their own firearms, when the gun is grabbed from them in a confrontation. There were fingerprint sensors on the trigger, each gun personally programmed so that only the authorized user could fire it.

  He was marched, half-pushed, down the hallway outside the control room, down another short corridor. Guns at his temple, at the back of his head, he was frisked, the .45 caliber discovered and taken from him. One of the guards pocketed his snub-nosed pistol with ill-disguised triumph. He was disarmed totally, they had missed nothing. He had his hands, his instincts, his training, but it was all useless in the face of such an overwhelming artillery.

  But why had they not killed him? What were they waiting for?

  A door was opened, and he was shoved through it. He was in another oblong room, its dimensions similar to the portrait gallery. The lighting was dim, but he was able to make out the books lining the walls: russet leather-bound volumes in mahogany shelves that went from floor to a twenty-foot ceiling. A beautiful, grand library such as might be found in an English manor. The floor was parquet, perfectly worn.

  Bryson stood, alone, inspecting the bookshelves, filled with a sense of foreboding, a sense that something was about to happen.

  And suddenly the library disappeared: the book-lined walls glimmered, went silvery gray. It was an illusion! Like the portraits in the gallery, the books were a digital phantasm. He stepped forward to touch the smooth, yet slightly sandpapery gray walls, and then they lit up, this time bright, filled with hundreds of different images!

  He stared in horror. The images were of himself! Film, video footage.

  Of himself strolling on the beach with Elena. In bed with Elena, making love. Showering, shaving, urinating.

  Arguing with Elena. Kissing her. Sitting in Ted Waller’s office, shouting.

  Elena and him riding horseback.

  Bryson and Layla running through the passages of the Spanish Armada, evading Calacanis’s gunmen. Hiding in the abandoned cathedral in Santiago de Campostela. Furtively searching Jacques Arnaud’s private office. Meeting with Lanchester. Meeting with Tarnapolsky in Moscow. Running.

  Meeting with Harry Dunne.

  Scene after scene—surveillance video, taken from a distance, from close up, Bryson the star of each one. Scenes from his life, from the most intimate moments of his life. The most secret field operations. Nothing, not a single moment of the last ten years had gone unfilmed. The images were kaleidoscopic, flickering, horrifying.

  Even footage of him lowering himself into the garage and climbing the elevator shaft. They had seen him infiltrating the house, just moments ago.

  They had seen everything.

  Bryson was dazed. His head spun; he felt overcome by vertigo; he felt violated, raped, sick to his stomach. He dropped to his knees and was sick, retching and retching until there was nothing more in his stomach, yet the dry heaves did not stop.

  The whole thing was a setup. They knew he was coming; they wanted to observe; he had been under surveillance the entire time.

  “Prometheus, you may recall, stole the gift of fire from the gods and gave this great gift to downtrodden mankind,” said a calm voice, a soothing voice, amplified by hidden speakers throughout the room.

  Bryson looked up. At the far end of the room, standing in a marble alcove, was Gregson Manning.

  “They say you’re a formidable linguist. You must know, then, the etymological derivation of the name Prometheus. It means fore-seeing, or fore-thinking. It seemed an apt name for us. Prometheus, according to the classical tradition, gave man civilization—language, philosophy, mathematics—and brought us from savagery to civility. This was the meaning of the gift of fire — light, illumination, knowledge. Making visible what had been concealed in the shadows. Prometheus, that Titan, willfully and knowingly committed a crime when he brought fire down from the heavens and taught the mortals how to use it. It was treason! He was threatening to put humans on an equal footing with the gods themselves! But in so doing he created civilization. And it is our task to make its continued existence secure.”

  Bryson walked a few steps closer to Manning. “So what do you have in mind?” he said. “Stasi on a global scale?”

  “Stasi?” Manning replied scornfully. “Organize half the populace to spy on the other half, no one trusting anyone? I hardly think so.”

  “No,” Bryson said, taking another few steps closer to the marble alcove. “The East Germans’ technology was strictly Iron Age, wasn’t it? No, you have supercomputers and miniaturized fiber-optic lenses. You have the ability to put everybody under the microscope. You and everyone in that hall out there—they’ve all bought into your nightmare vision. The Treaty on Surveillance and Security is merely a cover for a system of global surveillance that will make Big Brother seem benign—isn’t that right?”

  “Come now, Mr. Bryson. We teach our children when they’re toddlers about Santa Claus—‘he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.’ Whether you acknowledge it or not, the ethical principle has always been linked to what is known about us. The all-seeing eye. Good conduct tracks with transparency. When everything is visible, crime disappears. Terrorism becomes a thing of the past. Rape, murder, child abuse—all gone. Mass murders—wars—gone. As will be the fear that grips every man, woman, and child, our inability to leave our houses, to walk through our cities, to simply live our lives as we want to live them, free from fear!”

  “And who will be watching?”

  “The computer. Massively parallel computational systems around the globe, girded with evolutionary algorithms and neural networks. There’s never been anything like it.”

  “And at the center of it all is the despot-voyeur, Gregson Manning, orchestrating your computers into a billion virtual Peeping Toms.”

  Manning smiled. “Do you know about the Igbo people, in eastern Nigeria? They live surrounded by the tumult and corruption of Nigeria, but they are free of it. Do you know why? Because their culture prizes what they call the transparent life. They believe that there is nothing about an upright person that his fellow villagers should not be allowed to know. Any sort of exchange is conducted in front of witnesses. They abhor any form of secrecy or concealment, even solitude. The ideal of total transparency is so highly developed that if a scintilla of distrust develops between two people, they may resort to a curious ritual known as igbandu, wherein each drinks the blood of each other. An idealistic but rather cumbersome regime, in the logistics of it, you’ll concede. The Promethean networks produce the same results with an altogether bloodless technique.”

  “Irrelevant tales!” Bryson shouted, taking a few steps closer. “That has nothing to do with us!”

  “You must be aware that, over the last decade, the crime rate in the United States, particularly in the major cities, dropped to a fraction of what it once was. Now, why do you think that was?”

  “What the hell do I know?” Bryson snapped. “I suppose you have a theory.”

  “No theory. I know. Our social scientists come up with theory after theory, but they fail to explain it.”

  “You’re not implying …” Bryson said slowly.

  Manning nodded. “It was a pilot study of our outdoor surveillance capabilities. Years before we had our current capacities and resources, but you have to start small, don’t you?” A ten-foot-square section of the wall to his left went blank for a moment, and then a map of midtown Manhattan snapped into view. Small blue dots peppered the street grid. “Those are the hidden rotational cameras that we installed,” Manning went on, pointing toward the dots. “It starts with anonymous tips to the police. Suddenly, the arrest record begins to improve, mysteriously. And, for the first time in decades, crime doesn’t seem to pay anymore. The police crow about their new methods, criminologists talk about the ebbs and flows of the crack wars, yet nobody talks about the cameras that record everything. The safety blanket of surveillance we’ve unfolded over the city. Nobody talks about the fact that the crime-ridden alleys are now a panopticon. Nobody talks about the Systematix pilot project, because nobody wants to know. Are you beginning to understand what we’re capable of doing for humanity? Poor homo sapiens. First they have to live through millennia of marauding tribalisms, and when the Enlightenment arrives, the Industrial Revolution hunkers down. Industrialization and urbanization bring a whole new wave of social disruptions, unleashing ordinary crime on a scale never before seen in human history. Two world wars, more atrocities on and off the battlefield. And when there are no wars, hand-to-hand combat breaks out in urban war zones. Is that any way to live? Is that any way to die? The members of the Prometheus Group come from every rank in every country of the world, but they all understand the paramount importance of security.”