The Prometheus Deception
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The Prometheus Deception is a spy fiction thriller novel written in 2000 by Robert Ludlum about an agent in an ultraclandestine agency known only as the Directorate named Nick Bryson, alias Jonas Barett, alias Jonathan Coleridge, alias The Technician, who is thrown into a fight between an organization he knows as Prometheus and his former employers at the Directorate.
[edit] Plot
The story begins with the protagonist, under the alias of simply The Technician, who is in deep-cover to stop the hezbollah terrorist organization from overthrowing the Tunisian government. The terrorist operation appears to be going well, until they find out that the weapons the Technician supplied them were all defective. Before the ensuing battle is over, though, Abu (the leader of the terrorist agency) manages to stab him in the abdomen. He is helicoptered out, and we next find him entering the headquarters of the Directorate.
We meet his boss, Ted Waller, a lover of puzzles. Waller fires Bryson from the Directorate, saying he's lost his touch; Bryson is now told to live as a professor of Byzantine history under the alias of Jonas Barett. After some initial drunkenness and a search for oblivion because his wife, Elena, has left him, he agrees to take the job. He lives peacefully under this alias for 5 years, and becomes a rather popular professor, until the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence at the CIA, Harry Dunne, confronts him with a shocking revelation.
We learn that the Directorate is really a Russian intelligence operation created by GRU masterminds, essentially a penetration operation on American soil. He learns that Ted Waller is really Gennady Rosovsky, and assumed the name of Ted Waller after the name of the English poet Edmund Waller. Dunne says that Bryson's entire life, including his parents' death, was engineered by the Directorate to lead him to be a part of the agency. Bryson is convinced to go after the Directorate, and infiltrates a weapons tanker to find out what they're doing with weapons they're amassing.
There he meets Layla, and after blowing up the tanker and amassing a sizable arsenal, he continues to search for the Directorate; however, it seems that everywhere he goes there is a terrorist attack shortly after he leaves. He continues to follow the trail of his former contacts with the Directorate. He meets with a former Directorate colleague, Jan Vansina, only to have Vansina brutally killed before his eyes.
At another point, when he is about to be shot by a former enemy, he is saved by none other than Ted Waller. Waller explains that Harry Dunne is really a part of Prometheus, an organization of business executives and powerful politicians around the world. The members of Prometheus are pushing the Treaty on Surveillance, which would allow for an international super-FBI, and their own Richard Lanchester (a former businessman turned politician) would be at the head. The implication is that this organization, due to the fact that its members own the sort of companies with information (health records, satellites, etc.) would then be able to monitor everything that went on in the world, and thereby control it completely.
The Directorate's headquarters are destroyed, and he and his wife, Elena, united again, barely escape alive. He learns that money is being wired to members of the organization through a bank owned by Meredith Waterman, an older, respected bank. He goes to the headquarters of Meredith Waterman, and sneaks his way into their archives to learn of a business choice that forced the company to be sold to a certain Gregson Manning, who is the CEO of Systematix (the world's largest company, which owns health insurance companies, satellites, software, and a number of ways to get information on people), and a member of Prometheus. Now, he and Elena must infiltrate Gregson Manning's mansion, and crash the meeting of Prometheus's leaders just days before they assume control.
However, there he finds Ted Waller himself, escaped from the Directorate's destruction, and find that he's been a double agent all along. He is surrounded and about to be executed when a machine he's purchased goes off. The device, known as a virtual cathode oscillator, destroys all the machinery in Manning's home, and disables all the "smart guns" that are trained on him. Most of the guests in the mansion are trapped and killed, and he and Elena quietly move, and live quietly for some time until they Ted Waller taps into their satellite TV, and promises that they will meet again...
[edit] Major Themes
- Like other Ludlum novels, The Prometheus Deception conveys Ludlum's concern about the accumulation of power by individuals or organizations. Whereas some of his prior novels, such as The Holcroft Covenant and The Aquitaine Progression featured conspiracies by governments or political extremists to seize control of the world, The Prometheus Deception features a conspiracy by a very large company.
- Notably, though it details the reaction of governments to a series of major terrorist attacks, The Prometheus Deception was written before the events of September 11, 2001
