Free The Prometheus Deception by Robert Ludlum Page A

first,” Dunne said calmly, barely even shifting in his seat. “Hell, I wouldn’t believe it either. But bear with me for a sec.” He gestured toward one of the screens. “Know this guy?”
    â€œTed—Edmund Waller,” Bryson breathed. He was looking at a photograph of Waller as a much younger man, stocky but not yet obese, wearing a Russian Army dress uniform at what appeared to be some kind of ceremonial occasion in Red Square. Part of the Kremlin was visible in the background. Scrolling up to the side of the image were biographical details. Name: GENNADY ROSOVSKY. Born 1935 in VLADIVOSTOK. Childhood chess prodigy. Trained in American English, by a native speaker, since age seven. Certificates in ideology and in military science. A list of medals and other military honors followed.
    â€œChess prodigy,” Bryson muttered to himself. “What the hell is this?”
    â€œThey say he could have beat Spassky and Fisher both, if he’d wanted to make a career of it,” Dunne said, a harsh edge in his voice. “Too bad he decided to play for bigger game.”
    â€œPictures can be doctored, pixels manipulated digitally—” Bryson began.
    â€œAre you trying to convince me or yourself?” Dunne said, cutting him off. “Anyway, in a lot of cases we’ve got originals, and I’d be happy to have you inspect them. I can assure you we’ve been over everything with a microscope. We might never have known about the operation. Then our luck changes. Mirabile fucking dictu , Professor, we got access to the Kremlin archives. Money changed hands; buried archives were unearthed. There were one or two scraps of paper with pretty tantalizing stuff in them. Which would have told us nothing, to be honest, except for the lucky break of a couple of midlevel defectors, who gave us all they had. In isolation, their debriefings were meaningless. Taken together, with the Kremlin documents thrown in, patterns began to emerge. Which was how we learned about you, Nick. But it wasn’t a whole lot, since apparently the inner circles kept the whole operation incredibly segmented, the way terror cells operate.
    â€œSo we started to wonder about what we didn’t know. It’s been a top-priority project for the past three years. We’ve got only the foggiest idea of who the real principals are. Except, of course, for your friend Gennady Rosovsky. He’s got a sense of humor, got to hand him that. You know who he named himself after? Edmund Waller was the name of an obscure and extremely slippery seventeenth-century poet. He ever talk to you about the English civil war?”
    Bryson swallowed hard and nodded.
    â€œYou’ll get a laugh out of this, I know you will. During the interregnum, this Edmund Waller wrote praise poems for Cromwell, the Lord Protector. But, you see, he was also a secret conspirator in a Royalist plot. After the Restoration, he was honored at the Royal Court. That make any kind of sense to you? Guy calls himself after the great double-agent of English poetry. Like I said, I’m sure it’s a laugh riot to you highbrows.”
    â€œSo you’re claiming that I was recruited at college into some … some kind of cat’s-paw organization, that everything I did after that was a sham, is that what you’re saying?” Bryson spoke bitterly, skeptically.
    â€œOnly the machinations didn’t start then. They started earlier. A lot earlier.”
    He tapped a sequence on the control panel, and another digitized image came to life on the screen. On the left, he saw his father, General George Bryson, robust, handsome, and square-jawed, next to Nick’s mother, Nina Loring Bryson, a soft-spoken, gentle woman who taught the piano, followed her husband to his postings around the world, and never breathed a word of complaint. On the right, another image—a grainy image from the police files—showed a crumpled vehicle