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

The young woman was blond and fetching, one of those students who listens gravely and always sits in the front rows. He had stowed away his lecture notes and was fastening the straps of his battered leather satchel. He barely listened as she talked, complaining about a grade received, the tone urgent, the words banal, utterly familiar: I worked so hard … I feel I did my very best … I really, really tried … She followed as he walked toward the door, then to the parking lot outside the classroom building, until he reached his car. “Why don’t we discuss this during office hours tomorrow?” he suggested gently.
    â€œBut Professor…”
    Something’s wrong .
    â€œI guess I feel it’s the grade that was wrong, Professor.”
    He hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud. But his antennae were buzzing. Why? Out of some sudden, baseless paranoia? Was he going to end up like one of those Vietnam posttraumatics who jump whenever they hear a car backfire?
    A sound , something definitely out of place. He turned toward the student, but not to look at her. Instead, to look past her, beyond her, to whatever had flickered in his peripheral vision. Yes, there was something amiss in the general vicinity. Strolling too casually in his direction, as if enjoying the spring air, the verdant setting, was a broad-shouldered man in a charcoal flannel suit, white shirt, and perfectly knotted rep tie. That wasn’t academic garb at Woodbridge, not even for administrators, and the weather was too warm for flannel. This was indeed an outsider, but one feigning— attempting to feign—that he belonged.
    Bryson’s field instincts were signaling wildly. His scalp tightened and his eyes began scanning from side to side, like a photographer testing different focal points in rapid succession: the old habits were returning, unbidden and somehow atavistic, rudely out of place.
    But why? Surely there was no reason to be alarmed over a campus visitor—a parent, an official from Washington’s educational bureaucracy, maybe even some high-level salesman. Bryson did a quick assessment. The man’s jacket was unbuttoned, and he caught a glimpse of maroon braces holding the man’s trousers up. Yet the man was also wearing a belt and the trousers were cut long, breaking deeply over the man’s black, rubber-soled shoes. A surge of adrenaline: he’d worn similar attire himself, in a previous life. Sometimes you needed to wear a belt as well as suspenders because you were carrying a heavy object in one or both of your front pockets—a large-caliber revolver, say. And you needed the cuffs a little too long to ensure that your ankle holster was well concealed. Dress for success , Ted Waller used to advise, explaining how a man in evening dress could conceal a veritable arsenal if the fabric was tailored just right.
    I’m out of the game! Leave me in peace!
    But there was no peace; there never would be any peace. Once you were in you could never get out, even if the paychecks stopped and the health benefits expired.
    Hostile parties around the world thirsted for revenge. No matter what precautions you took, no matter how elaborate the cover, how intricate the extraction. If they really wanted to find me, they could . To think otherwise was delusional. This was the unwritten certainty among the Directorate’s operatives.
    But who’s to say they’re not from the Directorate itself, doing a full sterilization, in that cynical phrase—removing the splinters, mopping up? Bryson had never met anyone who had retired from the Directorate, though surely such retirees did exist. But if someone at the consortium level in the Directorate came to doubt his loyalties, he, too, would be the victim of a full sterilization. It was a virtual certainty.
    I’m out, I’ve put it behind!
    Yet who would believe him?
    Nick Bryson—for he was Nick Bryson now, Jonas