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

The operational details had been designed by the Directorate’s logistical architects, refined by Bryson upon consultation with Ted Waller. Bryson was to smuggle out of Romania the mathematician and his family, along with five others, two men and three women, all of them intelligence assets. Getting into Romania was the easy part. From Nyirabrany, in the east of Hungary, Bryson crossed the border by rail into Romania at Valea Lui Mihai, carrying an authentic Hungarian passport of a long-haul freight driver; with his drab overalls and his callused hands, he was given barely a once-over. A few kilometers outside Valea Lui Mihai he found the truck that had been left for him by a Directorate contact. It was an old Romanian panel truck that belched diesel. It had been ingeniously modified in-country by Directorate assets: when the back of the truck was opened, the cargo bay seemed to be stacked with crates of Romanian wine and tzuica, plum brandy. But the crates were only one row deep; they concealed a large compartment, taking up most of the cargo area, in which all but one of the Romanians could be hidden.

The group had been instructed to meet him in the Baneasa forest, five kilometers north of Bucharest. Bryson found them at the designated rendezvous point, a picnic spread out before them, looking like an extended family on an outing. But Bryson could see the terror in their faces.

The leader of the eight was obviously the mathematician, Andrei Petrescu, a diminutive man in his sixties, accompanied by a meek, moon-
faced woman, apparently his wife. But it was their daughter who arrested Bryson’s attention, for he had never met a woman so beautiful. Twenty-
year-old Elena Petrescu was raven-haired, petite, and lithe, with dark eyes that glittered and flashed. She wore a black skirt and dove-gray sweater, a colorful babushka tied around her head. She was silent and looked at him with profound suspicion.

Bryson greeted them in Romanian. "Buna ziua," he said. "Unde este cea mai apropiata statie Peco?" Where is the nearest gas station?

"Sinteti pe un drum gresit," responded the mathematician. You are on the wrong road.

They followed him to the panel truck, which he’d parked in the shelter of a copse of trees. The beautiful young woman joined him in the cab, as was the preordained arrangement. The others took their seats in the hidden compartment,where Bryson had left sandwiches and bottled water to get them through the long journey to the Hungarian border.

Elena said nothing for the first several hours. Bryson attempted to make conversation, but she remained taciturn, though whether she was shy or just nervous he could not tell. They passed through the county of Bihor and neared the frontier crossing point at Bors, from where they would cross over to Biharkeresztes in Hungary. They had driven through the night and were making good time; everything seemed to be going smoothly—too smoothly, Bryson thought, for the Balkans,where a thousand little things could go wrong.

So it did not surprise him when he saw the flashing lights of a police car, a blue-uniformed policeman inspecting oncoming traffic, about eight kilometers from the border. Nor did it surprise him when the policeman waved them over to the side of the road.

"What the hell is this?" he said to Elena Petrescu, forcing a blase tone as the jackbooted policeman approached.

"Just a routine traffic stop," she replied.

"I hope you’re right," Bryson said, rolling down the window. His Romanian was fluent but the accent was not native; the Hungarian passport would explain that. He prepared himself to quarrel with the cop, as would any long-haul truck driver annoyed by some petty inconvenience.

The policeman asked him for his papers and the truck’s registration. He inspected them; everything was in order.

Was something wrong? Bryson asked in Romanian.

Copyright Robert Ludlum 2000. All rights reserved.