Read Online The Prometheus Deception by Robert Ludlum - Free Book Online Page B

middle of some interagency squabble over the legality of Directorate methods.
    â€œFascinating,” Bryson interjected dryly, finally breaking his silence, “but I suggest you take up these matters with others better placed to discuss them. Teaching is my only profession these days, as I assume you know.”
    Dunne reached over and gave Bryson a comradely pat on his shoulder, no doubt intended to reassure. “My friend, the question isn’t what we know. It’s what you know—and, more to the point, what you don’t . You believe you’ve spent fifteen years in the service of your country.” Dunne turned and gave Bryson a penetrating stare.
    Quietly, steely, Bryson answered, “I know I did.”
    â€œAnd you see, that’s where you’re wrong. What if I told you that the Directorate in fact isn’t part of the United States government? That it never was. Quite the fucking contrary.” Dunne leaned back in his chair and ran a hand through his rumpled white mane. “Ah, shit, this isn’t going to be easy for you to hear. It’s not easy for me to say, I’ll tell you that. Twenty years ago, I had to bring a guy in. He thought he’d been spying for Israel, and was a real zealot about it. I had to explain to him that he’d been false-flagged. It was Libya that was paying for his services. All the contacts, the controls, the hotel-room rendezvous in Tel Aviv—all part of the setup. Pretty flimsy one, at that. Fucker shouldn’t have been double-dealing anyway. But even I had to feel sorry for him when he learned who his real employers were. I’ll never forget his face.”
    Bryson’s own face was burning hot. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
    â€œWe were supposed to arraign him in a sealed Justice Department courtroom the next day. Guy shot himself before we had the chance.” One of the gas-plasma screens dissolved into another image. “Here’s the guy who recruited you, right?”
    It was a photograph of Herbert Woods, Bryson’s adviser at Stanford and an eminent historian. Woods had always liked Bryson, admired the fact that he spoke a dozen languages fluently, had an unsurpassed gift for memorization. Probably liked the fact that he was no slouch as an athlete either. Sound mind, sound body—Woods was big on that.
    The screen went blank, then flared with a grainy photo of a young Woods on a city street that Bryson immediately recognized as the old Gorky Street in Moscow, which after the end of the Cold War became Tverskaya once again, its pre-Revolutionary name.
    Bryson laughed, bitterly, not bothering to hide his ridicule. “This is insanity. You’re going to ‘reveal’ to me the ‘damning’ fact that Herb Woods was a commie when he was young. Well, sorry: everyone knows that. He never hid his past. That’s why he was such a staunch anti-Communist: he knew firsthand how seductive all that foolish utopian rhetoric could be once upon a time.”
    Dunne shook his head, his facial expression cryptic. “Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. I told you before that all I wanted you to do was listen. You’re a historian now, right? Well, bear with me while I give you a quick history lesson. You know about the Trust, of course.”
    Bryson nodded. The Trust was widely regarded as the greatest espionage ploy of the twentieth century, bar none. It was a seven-year sting operation, the brainchild of Lenin’s spymaster, Feliks Dzerzhinksi. Shortly after the Russian Revolution, the CHEKA, the Soviet intelligence organization that grew into the KGB, secretly founded a fake dissident group involving a number of supposedly disaffected high-ranking members of the Soviet government who believed, or so the word was quietly put out, that the collapse of the USSR was imminent. In time, anti-Soviet groups in exile were drawn into working with the Trust; in fact,