Excerpt from The Prometheus Deception by Robert Ludlum, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Nick hadn’t known he was capable of loving somebody as much as he loved her. In the vortex of lies where his career played out, she was his one true thing. At the same time, she too was a spook: she would have had to have been for them to build a life together. In fact, she was cleared almost all the way to the top, because she worked in the Directorate’s cryptography division, and you never knew what sort of thing they’d come across. The typical hostile intercept often contained morsels of intelligence about the United States; decrypting them meant the possibility of being exposed to your own government’s innermost secrets—information most of the agency’s division heads weren't even cleared for. Analysts like her lived desk-bound lives, the computer keyboard their only weapon, and yet their intellects roamed the world as freely as any field agent.



God, how he loved her!

In a sense, Ted Waller had introduced them, though in fact they had met in the least promising of circumstances, a result of an assignment Waller had given him.

It was a routine package transport, which Directorate insiders sometimes called the "coyote run," referring to the smuggling of human beings. The Balkans were on fire in the late 1980s, and a brilliant Romanian mathematician was to be exfiltrated from Bucharest with his wife and daughter. Andrei Petrescu was a true Romanian patriot, an academician at the University of Bucharest specializing in the arcane mathematics of cryptography. He had been pressed into service by Romania’s notorious secret service, the Securitate, to devise the codes used in the innermost circles of the Ceausescu government. He wrote the cryptographic algorithms, but he refused their offer of employment: he wanted to remain in the academy, a teacher, and he was revolted by the Securitate’s oppression of the Romanian people. As a result, Andrei and his family were kept under virtual house arrest, forbidden from traveling, their every
movement watched. His daughter, Elena, said to be no less brilliant than her father, was a graduate student in mathematics at the university, hoping to follow in her father’s footsteps.

As Romania reached a boiling point in December of 1989, and popular protests began to break out against the tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu, the Securitate, the tyrant’s Praetorian guard, retaliated with mass arrests and murders. In Timisoara, a huge crowd gathered on Bulevardul 30 Decembrie, and demonstrators broke into Communist Party headquarters and began throwing portraits of the tyrant out of the windows. The army and the Securitate fired on the unruly crowd throughout the day and night; the dead were piled up and buried in mass graves.

Disgusted, Andrei Petrescu decided to do his small part to fight the tyranny. He possessed the keys to Ceausescu’s most secret communications, and he would give them away to the tyrant’s enemies. No longer could Ceausescu communicate in secret with his henchmen; his decisions, his orders, would be known the moment he uttered them.

Andrei Petrescu wrestled with the decision. Would this imperil the lives of his beloved Simona, his adored Elena? Once they had discovered what he had done—and they would know, for no one else outside the government knew the source codes—Andrei and his family would be rounded up, arrested, and executed.

No, he would have to get out of Romania. But to do that he needed to enlist a powerful outsider, preferably an intelligence agency such as the CIA or the KGB, that had the resources to get the family out.

Terrified, he made cautious, veiled inquiries. He knew people; his colleagues knew people. He made his offer, and his demand. But both the British and the Americans refused to get involved. They had adopted a hands-off policy toward Romania. His offer was rebuffed.

And then very early one morning he was contacted by an American, a representative of another intelligence agency, not the CIA. They were interested; they would help. They had the courage the others lacked.

Copyright Robert Ludlum 2000. All rights reserved.