Fielding roused himself from his own rumination and stood up. “You’ll excuse me for a minute—I’ll be right back,” he said. “The hapless graduate student makes an inopportune visit. But so it must be.”
The flowchart branched out. In one branch, the United States does nothing, the world does nothing, and Novak is killed. The diplomats and officials that Márta Lang consulted emphasized the hazards of American involvement. Yet there were risks in inaction as well—the risks of political embarrassment. Despite the countercurrents Fielding identified, Peter Novak was a widely beloved man. If he were killed, ordinary people would wonder why the United States had refused to help a secular saint in his hour of need. The Liberty Foundation might denounce the United States—furiously and vociferously—for refusing to provide any assistance whatsoever. It would be easy to imagine the ensuing deluge of congressional hearings, TV reports, newspaper editorials. The old words would reverberate throughout the land: For evil to triumph, it is enough that good men do nothing. In the resulting uproar, careers could be ruined. What looked like the path of caution was in fact strewn with broken glass.
But what if there was another explanation?
The Liberty Foundation, typical of its go-it-alone ways, assembles its own international commando team in a reckless attempt to spirit away the captive. Who can they blame but themselves if things go badly? Midlevel employees at the State Department would “leak” the word to the beat reporters who had come to rely upon them as unnamed sources: Novak’s people rejected our offers of help out of hand. It seems they were afraid it would compromise his aura of independence. The secretary of state is completely broken up about what happened, of course—we all are. But how can you provide assistance to people who absolutely refuse to accept it? Arrogance on their part? Well, some might say so. In fact, wasn’t that the fatal flaw of the Liberty Foundation itself? The worldly, knowing reporters—for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the syndicated wire services—would file dispatches subtly infused with what they’d been told on deep background. Informed sources said that offers of assistance were snubbed … .
Janson’s mind reeled. Was the scenario anything more than a fantasy, an invidious fiction? He did not know; he could not know—not yet. What he did know was that he could not exclude the possibility.
Fielding’s minute stretched to three minutes, and when he reappeared, closing the door carefully behind him, there was something different about him.
“The aforementioned grad student,” Fielding assured him, in a slightly piping voice. “Hopeless Hal, I think of him. Trying to unknot an argument in Condorcet. I can’t get him to see that in Condorcet the knots themselves are what’s interesting.”
Janson’s spine prickled. Something in the master’s demeanor had altered—his tone was brittle, as it had never been, and wasn’t there a slight tremor in his hands that had not been there before? Janson saw that something had upset his old teacher, and profoundly.
The don made his way to a rostrum where a fat volume of a dictionary reposed. Not just any dictionary, Janson knew—it was the first volume of a rare 1759 edition of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, A–G stenciled in gold along its spine. Janson remembered it from the don’s shelves back when his rooms were in Trinity’s Neville Court.
“Just want to look up one thing,” he said. But Janson heard the stress beneath the pleasantries. Not the stress of bereavement or loss, but of another emotion. Alarm. Suspicion.
There was something about his manner: the slight tremor, the brittle tone—and? Something else. What?
Angus Fielding was no longer making eye contact: that was it. Some people almost never did so, but Fielding was not one of them. When he spoke to you, his eyes swept back to yours regularly, as if to guide the words home. Almost involuntarily, Janson felt one of his own hands reaching behind him.
He stared, mesmerized, as Fielding, with his back to him, opened the tome, and—it couldn’t be.
The master of Trinity College spun around to face Janson, brandishing a small pistol in a shaking hand. Just behind Fielding, Janson saw the hollowed-out section carved into the dictionary’s vellum pages, where the side arm had been secreted. The side arm that his old don was pointing at him.
“Why have you really come here?” Fielding asked.
At last his eyes met Janson’s, and what Janson saw in them took his breath away: murderous rage.
“Novak was a good man,” Fielding said in a tremulous voice. The scholar sounded far away. “Possibly a great one. I’ve just learned that you killed him.”
Chapter Thirteen
The aging don lowered his gaze momentarily and gasped in spite of himself. For Janson, too, was holding a gun in his hand—the gun he had, in a fluid motion, grasped from his rear holster as his subconscious mind registered what his conscious mind had difficulty accepting.
Wordlessly, Janson thumbed the safety up of his snub-nosed weapon. For a few long seconds, the two men stood facing each other in silence.
Whoever Fielding’s visitor had been, it was no graduate student in economic history. “Volume A to G,” Janson said. “Appropriate enough. A for ammo, G for guns. Why don’t you put that antique in your hand aside? It doesn’t suit you.”
The economist snorted. “So you can kill me, too?”
“Oh for Christ’s sake, Angus!” Janson erupted. “Use that magnificent brain of yours. Can’t you hear how crazy that sounds?”
“Bollocks. What I can see is that you were sent here to betray me—eliminate anyone who might know you too well, I’ve no doubt. ‘A killing machine’—I’d heard that said of you, a Homeric epithet favored by some of your controllers. Oh yes, I kept in touch with my American counterparts. But I never credited the characterization until now. Your guile commands the admiration of this old Footlights trouper. You know, you really give excellent grief. Had me completely fooled. I’m not ashamed to say so.”
“All I wanted to learn was—”
“The location of Peter’s colleagues—in order to hunt them down, too!” the old professor said hotly. “The ‘inner circle,’ as you referred to it. And once you’d ferreted out this information, you could be sure that Peter’s mission on this planet had been destroyed.” He smiled, a chilly, terrible smile, showing his discolored, irregular teeth. “I suppose I should have appreciated your wit, asking whom I meant by ‘they’ and ‘them.’ But, of course, ‘they’ and ‘them’ are whom you work for.”
“You just met with someone—tell me who?” Janson was flushed with fury and bewilderment. His eyes darted back to the college master’s weapon, a .22 Webley pistol, the smallest and most easily concealed of those in use by British intelligence agents during the early sixties. “Who, goddammit?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know. I suppose you want to add another name to your bloodstained punch list.”
“Listen to yourself, Angus. This is madness! Why would I—”
“That’s the nature of mop-up operations, isn’t it? They’re never quite finished. There’s always another dangling thread to be tied up—or snipped off.”
“Dammit, Angus. You know me.”
“Do I?” The standoff continued as the tutor and his onetime pupil both kept their handguns leveled. “Did any of us really know you?” Despite the don’s affected languor, there was no mistaking his fear and revulsion. This was no ploy: Angus Fielding was mortally certain that Janson had become a renegade, and a murderous one.
And there was nothing he could say to prove otherwise.
What were the facts, after all?
That he, alone, was witness to what had happened. That he, alone, was in charge of the operation that led to Novak’s death. That millions of dollars had been transferred into his account, in a manner that seemed to have no honorable explanation. Powerful interests had clearly been seeking Novak’s elimination; was it inconceivable—was it even unlikely—that they would seek to enlist someone like Janson, a disenchanted ex–field agent with undoubted skills?
Janson knew what an expert in psychological profiling would make of his dossier: the early history of betrayal and brutality that he had suffered. How deep did the trauma go, and could it be rekindled? His employers never referred to the possibility, but he could see it in their eyes; the personality inventory tests that he regularly underwent—the Myers-Briggs, the Thematic Apperception Test, the Aristos Personality Profile—were designed to ferret out any hairline fissures his psyche might have developed. Violence is something you’re very, very, very good at: Collins’s arctic assessment. It was what made him invaluable to his employers, but it was also why the top-level planners harbored a lingering wariness toward him. So long as he remained, like fix-mounted heavy artillery, directed toward the enemy, he could be a godsend; but if he were ever to turn against the men who had trained him, the planners who used him, he could prove a nemesis like no other.
A memory from a decade ago returned to him, one of a dozen almost indistinguishable ones. He’s an attack dog who slipped his leash, Janson. He’s got to be put down. A file was handed to him: names, patterns of movement, a list of strictures—to be memorized and placed in the burn bag. Too much was at stake for the formalities of a court-martial or “disciplinary proceedings”: the agent had already cost the lives of several good men who had once been his colleagues and cohorts. Severance would be paid out in the form of a small-caliber bullet to the back of his head; the body would be found in the trunk of a car owned by a Russian crime lord who himself had just come to a grisly end. As far as the world was concerned—and it wasn’t, really—the victim was just another American businessman in Moscow who thought he could pull a fast one on his mafiya partners, and had paid for his mistake.
An attack dog that slipped its leash must be destroyed: standard operating protocol at Consular Operations. Janson—having been tasked more than once with the job of executioner—knew this as well as anyone.
Now he chose his words carefully. “There is nothing I can say to dispel your suspicions, Angus. I don’t know who contacted you just now, so I can’t speak to your source’s credibility. I find it striking that someone, or some group, managed to convey the message to you so swiftly. I find it striking that, with only a few words and reassurances, they persuaded you to direct a deadly weapon toward someone you have known for years, known as a protégé and friend.”
“As someone said of Madame de Staël, you are implacably correct. More implacable than correct.” Fielding smiled a sickly, Stilton smile. “Don’t try to construct an argument. This isn’t a tutorial.”
Janson looked intently at the aging scholar’s face; he saw a man who feared he was confronting a profoundly treacherous opponent. But he also saw a glimmering of doubt—saw a man who was not absolutely certain of his judgment. Everything you know must be continually reassessed, critically reviewed. Abandoned if necessary. Their two small-caliber handguns continued to face each other like mirror images.
“You used to say that academic battles are so fierce because so little is at stake.” Janson felt, and sounded, oddly calm. “I guess things change. But as you know, Angus, there are people who have tried to kill me for a living. They’ve tried for good reasons, sometimes—or, anyway, understandable ones. Mostly they’ve done so for bad reasons. When you’re in the field, you don’t think very much about reasons. Afterward, though, you do. If you’ve hurt somebody, you hope to God you’ve done it for good cause. I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but I do know that somebody lied to you, Angus. And knowing that, I’m having a hard time staying mad at you. My God, Angus, look at yourself. You shouldn’t be standing here with a gun in your hand. Neither should I. Somebody’s caused us to forget who we are.” He shook his head slowly, sadly. “You want to squeeze that trigger? Then you’d better be surer than sure that you’re doing the right thing. Are you, Angus? I don’t believe you are.”
“You always did have a rash tendency to make assumptions.”
“Come on, Angus,” Janson went on. There was warmth in his voice, but not heat. “What did Oliver Cromwell say? ‘I beseech you, from the bowels of Christ, to consider that you may be mistaken.’” He repeated the old saw wryly.
“Words I always found strangely ironic,” Fielding said, “coming from a man who, to the detriment of his country, was essentially incapable of self-doubt.”
Without breaking eye contact, Janson extended his gun hand, unfurled his fingers from the pistol grip, and held out his hand, palm up, the weapon lying on it not as a threat but as an offering. “If you’re going to shoot me, use mine. That flintlock of yours is liable to backfire.”
The tremor in Fielding’s hand grew. The silence was nearly unbearable.
“Take it,” Janson said in a tone of reprimand.
The master of Trinity was ashen, torn between the humanitarian he had come to revere and a former pupil to whom he had once been devoted. That much, at least, Janson could read from the old man’s etched, stricken face.
“May God have mercy on your soul,” Fielding said at last, lowering his side arm. The words were something between a benediction and a curse.
Four men and one woman sat around the table at the Meridian Center. Their own secretaries had them down for various out-of-office engagements: they were having their hair cut, going to a child’s piano recital, keeping a long-postponed dental appointment. A subsequent inspection of logs and calendars would reveal only the humdrum, commonplace tasks of personal and family maintenance to which even the highest-ranking officials of the executive branch and its allied bureaus must attend. The crisis was carved out of the invisible interstices of overscheduled lives. It had to be. The Mobius Program had changed the world; its discovery, by those of malign intention, could destroy the world.
“We can’t assume the worst-case scenario,” said the National Security Advisor, an immaculately attired, round-faced black woman with large, probing eyes. It was the first such meeting Charlotte Ainsley had attended since the crisis began, but the deputy director of the NSA, Sanford Hildreth, had kept her up-to-date.
“A week ago, I would have argued the same thing,” Kazuo Onishi, the systems engineer, said. In the formal world of Washington bureaucracy, people like the chairman of the National Security Council were many tiers above the CIA computer whiz. But the absolutely covert nature of the Mobius Program, compounded by its current crisis, had created a small, artificial democracy, the democracy of the lifeboat. No one’s opinion mattered more than anyone else’s by virtue of rank; power lay in persuasion.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave … ,” Sanford Hildreth, the NSA man, began.
“Spare us,” said the DIA’s deputy director, Douglas Albright, resting his hamlike forearms on the table. “What do we know? What have we heard?”
“He’s disappeared,” the NSA man said, massaging his high forehead with thumb and forefinger. “We had him, and then we didn’t.”
“That’s not possible,” the DIA man said, scowling.
“You don’t know Janson,” said Derek Collins, undersecretary of state and the director of Consular Operations.
“Thank God for small blessings, Derek,” Albright returned. “He’s a fucking golem—you know what that is? My grandmother used to talk about them. It’s like a doll you make out of clay and evil spirits, and it turns into a monster. The shtetl version of the Frankenstein story.”
“A golem,” Collins echoed. “Interesting. We are dealing with a golem here, but we all know it isn’t Janson.”
Silence settled over the agitated spymasters.
“With respect,” Sandy Hildreth said, “I think we need to return to basics. Is the program in jeopardy of exposure? Will Janson be the cause of that exposure?”
“And how did we allow ourselves to get into this situation ?” Albright exhaled heavily.
“It’s always the same story,” the National Security Advisor said. “We thought we were getting laid, when we were really getting screwed.” Her brown eyes roamed across the faces in the r
oom. “Maybe we’re missing something—let’s review your man’s records again,” she said to the undersecretary. “Just the high points.”
“Paul Elie Janson,” Collins said, his eyes veiled behind his black plastic glasses. “Grew up in Norfolk, Connecticut, educated at the Kent School. His mother was born Anna Klima—an émigré from what was then Czechoslovakia. She’d been a literary translator in the old country, became too closely associated with dissident writers, paid a visit to a cousin in New Haven, and never returned. Wrote poems in Czech and English, published a couple of them in The New Yorker. Alec Janson was an insurance executive, a senior vice president at the Dalkey Group before he died. In 1969, hot-to-trot Paul leaves U-Michigan just before graduating and joins the navy. Turns out he’s got this gift for tactics and combat, gets himself transferred to the SEALs, the youngest person ever to have received SEAL training. Assigned to a counterintelligence division. We’re talking about a learning curve like a rocket.”
“Wait a minute,” the DIA man said. “A hothouse flower like that—what’s he doing joining up with the Dirty Dozen? Profile mismatch.”
“His whole life is a ‘profile mismatch,’” Derek Collins replied, with a trace of asperity. “You really want to get the shrink reports? Maybe he’s rebelling against his dad—the two weren’t close. Maybe he’d heard too many stories about a Czech uncle who was a hero of the resistance, a partisan who picked off Nazis through the ravines and forests of Sumava. Dad wasn’t exactly a wuss, either. During the Second World War, old Alec was in the marines himself, a Semper Fi leatherneck before he became a business executive. Let’s just say Paul’s got the bloodlines, preppy or no. Besides, you know what they say—the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Or was that a ‘profile mismatch,’ too, Doug?”
The DIA analyst colored slightly. “I’m just trying to get a handle on somebody who seems to have walked out of a full-force, all-hands CIA stakeout like the Invisible Man.”
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