The Prometheus Deception by Robert Ludlum

Barrett gone by the wayside, discarded like a snake’s shed skin—looked closely at the man in the suit. The man’s salt-and-pepper hair was brush cut, the face broad and ruddy. Bryson tensed as the interloper approached, smiling as he did so and showing small white teeth. “Mr. Barrett?” the man called from halfway across the emerald lawn.
    The man’s face was a mask of reassurance, and that was the final giveaway, the mark of a professional. A civilian hailing a stranger always exhibited at least some tentativeness.
    Directorate?
    Directorate personnel were better than this, smoother and less obvious .
    â€œLaura,” he said quietly to the student, “I need you to leave me and go back into Severeid Hall. Wait at my office upstairs.”
    â€œBut—”
    â€œNow!” he snapped.
    Speechless and scarlet, Laura turned and hurried back toward the building. A change had come over Professor Jonas Barrett—as she would explain it to her roommate that evening, he suddenly seemed different, scary —and she quickly decided she’d better do what he told her.
    Soft footsteps were audible from the opposite direction. Bryson spun. Another man: redheaded, freckled, younger, wearing a navy blazer, tan chinos, and bucks. More plausible as a campus costume, except for the buttons on the blazer, which were too bright and brassy. Nor did the blazer lie quite flat over his chest: a bulge was visible where you’d expect to find the shoulder holster.
    If not Directorate, then who? Foreign hostiles? Others from the more overt U.S. agencies?
    Now Bryson identified the noise that had alerted him in the first place: the sound of a car that was idling, quietly and continuously. It was a Lincoln Continental with dark tinted windows, and it wasn’t in a parking space but parked in the lane where he’d left his own car, blocking it.
    â€œMr. Barrett?” The larger, older man made eye contact with him, his loping stride swiftly decreasing the distance between them. “We really need you to come with us.” The accent was bland, Midwestern. He stopped barely two feet away and gestured toward the Lincoln.
    â€œOh, is that right?” Bryson said, his delivery cold. “Do I know you?”
    The stranger’s reply was nonverbal: hands on hips, chest out to display the contours of his holstered handgun beneath his suit jacket. The subtle gesture of one professional to another, one armed, the other not. Then abruptly the man doubled over in agony, his hands grabbing at his stomach. With lightning speed, Bryson had driven the steel nib of his slim fountain pen into the man’s muscled belly, and the professional responded with an unprofessional, if wholly natural, move indeed. Reach for your weapon, never the wound: one of Waller’s many axioms, and though it meant countermanding a natural instinct, it had saved Nick’s life more than a few times. This man was not top-rank.
    As the stranger’s hands flailed at the ruined flesh, Bryson plunged his hands into the man’s jacket and retrieved the small but powerful blue-steel Beretta.
    Beretta—not Directorate issue; then whose?
    He slammed the butt against the man’s temple—heard the sickening crunch of bone against metal, heard the senior agent slump to the ground—and with the weapon pointed, spun to face the redheaded man in the blue blazer.
    â€œMy safety’s off, ” Nick shouted to him, urgent and demanding. “Yours?”
    The play of confusion and panic on the young man’s face gave away his inexperience. He had to have calculated that Nick would easily be able to squeeze off the first shot the instant he heard the click of the safety release. Bad odds . But the inexperienced could be the most dangerous, precisely because they didn’t react in a rational and logical manner.
    Amateur hour . His gun aimed steadily at the redheaded field man, Bryson backed up slowly