Janson tried to speak, but nothing came out.
“I’m sorry that you were lied to for all these years. You believed Demarest should have been courtmartialed and executed for the things he did, and so you were told that he was, showed that he was. Your thirst for justice was totally understandable—but you weren’t looking at the big picture, not as far as our counterintelligence planners were concerned. Material like that doesn’t come along very often, not in our line of work. So a decision was made. Ultimately, it was a simple issue of human resources.”
“Human resources,” Janson repeated dully.
“You were lied to because that was the only way we could hold on to you. You were pretty spectacular material yourself. The only way you’d be able to put it behind you was to be confident that Demarest had suffered the ultimate punishment. So you were better off, and we were better off, too, because it meant that you could go on and do what God made you to do. Totally win-win. It just made sense every which way the planners looked at it. So Demarest was presented with a choice. He could face a tribunal, and the mountainous evidence that you had provided, and probably judicial execution. In the alternative, he essentially had to give his life to us. He would exist at the discretion of his controllers, his very life a revocable gift. He’d accept whatever tasks he was given because he had no choice. It all made him a very … singular asset.”
“Demarest—alive.” It was a struggle to get out the words. “You recruited him for the job?”
“The way he recruited you.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Probably ‘recruit’ is too gentle a word,” Collins said.
The DIA man spoke up. “The logic of the assignment was unassailable.”
“Damn you!” Janson cried out. He saw it all now. Demarest had been the first Peter Novak: primus inter pares. The others would be matched to the frame of his body. He had been the first because of his redoubtable gifts, as a linguist, as an actor, as a brilliantly resourceful operative. Demarest was the best they had. Had the thought even arisen that there might be risks in giving this responsibility to someone so utterly devoid of conscience—to a sociopath?
Janson shut his eyes as the images flooded his mind.
Demarest was not merely cruel, he had an unsurpassed gift for cruelty. He approached the infliction of pain like a four-star chef. Janson recalled the smell of charred flesh as the jumper cables sparked and sputtered at the Vietnamese captive’s groin. The look of abject terror in the man’s eyes. And Demarest’s almost gentle refrain as he interrogated the young fisherman. “Look into my eyes,” Demarest had repeated in a gentle voice. “Look into my eyes.”
The prisoner’s breath had come in strangled yelps, like a dying animal’s. Demarest listened to a few bars of choral music. Then he straddled the second prisoner. “Look into my eyes,” Demarest said. He’d pulled a small knife from a waist holster and made a small slice in the man’s belly. The skin and the fascia beneath immediately sheared, pulled apart by the tension of the ropes. The man screamed.
And screamed. And screamed.
Janson could hear the screams now. They echoed in his head, amplified by the sickening realization that this man was the one they had chosen to make the most powerful on earth.
Now Derek Collins glanced around the room, as if canvassing opinions, before he continued. “Let me get to the point. Demarest has been able to seize control of all the assets that were created for the use of the Mobius Program. Without getting into the details, I can tell you that he’s changed all the banking codes—and foiled the measures we’d taken to prevent just such an eventuality. And they were damn extensive. We had zero-knowledge, top-security cryptosystems in place that required central Mobius authorization for substantial movements of currencies. Codes were changed regularly, divided among the three principals so that no individual could gain control of the whole—one firewall after another. The security measures were damn near insurmountable.”
“Yet they were surmounted.”
“Yes. He got control.”
Janson shook his head, sickened by what he was hearing. “Translation: the mammoth empire of the Liberty Foundation, the financial leverage, all of it—has passed into the control of one dangerously unstable individual. Translation: you’re not running him—he’s running you.”
There were no demurrals.
“And the United States can’t expose him,” said the secretary of state. “Not without exposing itself.”
“Just when did you figure out this was happening?” Janson demanded.
The two technicians shifted uncomfortably in the Louis XV chairs, their bulk threatening the slender wooden frames.
“A few days ago,” Collins said. “As I told you, the Mobius Program had fail-safe systems in place—what we thought were fail-safe, anyway. Look, we had some of our best minds on this thing—don’t imagine we didn’t think of everything, because we did. The controls were formidable. Only recently did he gain the wherewithal to circumvent them.”
“And Anura?”
“His masterstroke,” said the chairman of the National Intelligence Council. “We were victims, all of us, of an elaborate ploy. When we heard our man was imprisoned there, we panicked, and acted precisely as Demarest knew we would. We entrusted him with the second set of codes, the ones that would normally have been under the control of the man the guerrillas were about to execute. It seemed necessary, as a stopgap. What we didn’t realize was that Demarest had arranged the hostage taking. Evidently he used a lieutenant of his named Bewick as the cutout, a cutout the Caliph knew only as the ‘Go-Between.’ All very, how shall I say, hygienic.”
“Jesus.”
“For that matter, we failed to realize that he was also responsible for the death of the third agent, a year earlier. We thought our marionette strings were unbreakable. We know better now.”
“Now that it’s too late,” Janson said, and in the faces of tense men and women, he saw the acceptance of the rebuke—and its irrelevance. “Question: Why did Demarest bring me into it?”
Collins spoke first. “Do you have to ask? The man loathes you, blames you for taking away his career, his freedom, almost his life—turning him in to a government he thought he’d served with incredible devotion. He didn’t just want to see you dead. He wanted you to be accused, humiliated, strung up, killed by your own government. What goes around comes around—that’s how he must have seen things.”
“You want to say ‘I told you so’?” President Berquist said. “You’re entitled. I’ve been shown copies of your 1973 reports about Lieutenant Commander Demarest. But you’ve got to understand where this thing stands right now. Not only has Demarest eliminated his understudies, but he’s moved into a second, far more deadly phase.”
“What’s that?”
“The puppet is killing off the puppet masters,” said Doug Albright. “He’s erasing the program. Erasing Mobius.”
“And exactly who is the cast of characters?”
“You’re looking at ’em. All in this room.”
Janson stared around the room. “There had to have been somebody from the NSA,” he objected.
“Killed.”
“Who designed the basic systems architecture?”
“A real wizard, from the CIA. Killed.”
“And the—oh Jesus …”
“Yes, the president’s National Security Advisor,” said Albright. “Charlotte made the wire services today, didn’t she? Clayton Ackerley didn’t—officially, he’s a suicide, found in his car with the engine running and the garage door closed. Oh, Demarest doesn’t like loose ends. He’s making a list, he’s checking it twice … .”
“At this point, most of the people who know the truth about Peter Novak have been eliminated,” the secretary of state said, his voice raspy with anxiety.
“Everyone … but the men and women in this room,” Collins said.
Janson nodded slowly. A global cataclysm loomed, but so did a fa
r more immediate threat to the assembled. As long as Alan Demarest remained in charge of the Novak empire, everyone in this room would be in fear for his life.
“Sorry, Paul. It’s too late to get into the dead pool,” Collins said wanly.
“Christ, Derek,” Janson said, turning to the undersecretary with undisguised outrage, “you knew what kind of man Demarest was!”
“We had every reason to think we could control him!”
“Now he has every reason to think he can control you,” Janson replied.
“It’s become apparent that Demarest has been planning his coup d’état for years,” the secretary of state said. “As the recent killings have revealed, Demarest has assembled a private militia, recruited dozens of his former colleagues to use as his personal enforcers and protectors. These are operatives who know the codes and procedures of our most advanced field strategies. And the corrupt moguls of the former Communist states—the ones who pretend to be opposed to him—are actually in league with the guy. They’ve made their own centurions available to him.”
“You called it a coup d’état,” Janson said to him. “A term usually reserved for toppling and supplanting a head of state.”
“In its own way, the Liberty Foundation is as powerful as any state,” the secretary replied. “It may soon become more so.”
“The fact is,” the president said, cutting to the heart of the matter, “Demarest has absolute proof of everything we did. He can blackmail us into doing whatever he demands. I mean, Jesus.” The president exhaled heavily. “If the world ever found out that the U.S. had been surreptitiously manipulating global events—not to mention using Echelon to bet against the currencies of other countries—it would be an absolutely devastating blow. Congress would go berserk, of course, but that’s the least of it. You’d get Khomeini-style revolutions all over the Third World. We’d lose every ally we have—would instantly become a pariah among nations. NATO itself would fall apart … .”
“So long, Pax Americana,” muttered Janson. It was true: here was a secret so explosive that history would have to be rewritten if it ever were to come out.
The president spoke again: “He’s now sent us a message demanding that we turn control of Echelon over to him. And that’s just for starters. For all we know, nuclear codes could be next.”
“What did you tell him, Mr. President?”
“We refused, naturally.” Glances were exchanged with the secretary of state. “I refused, dammit. Against the wisdom of all my advisers. I will not go down in history as the person who handed the United States over to a maniac!”
“So now he’s given us a deadline along with the ultimatum,” Collins said. “And the clock is ticking.”
“And you can’t take him out?”
“Oh, what a nifty idea,” Collins said dryly. “Get a bunch of angry brothers with a blowtorch and some pliers and get medieval on his ass. Now why didn’t we think of that? Wait a minute—we did. Goddammit, Janson, if we could find the son of a bitch, he’d be dead meat, no matter how well protected he is. I’d plug him myself. But we can’t.”
“We’ve tried everything,” said the chairman of the National Intelligence Council. “Tried to lure him, trap him, smoke him out—but no go. He’s become like the man who wasn’t there.”
“Which shouldn’t be a surprise,” Collins said. “Demarest has become a master at playing the reclusive plutocrat, and at this point he’s got greater resources than we have. Plus, any person we bring in represents a risk, another potential blackmail threat: there’s no way we can expand the number of people involved. That operational logic is self-evident. And sacrosanct. Do you see? It’s just us.”
“And you,” said President Berquist. “You’re our best hope.”
“What about people who genuinely oppose ‘Peter Novak,’ the legendary humanitarian? Fact is, he’s not without enemies. Isn’t there some way to mobilize a fanatic, a faction … ?”
“You’re suggesting a pretty underhanded ploy,” Collins said. “I like how you think.”
“This is the place for truth-telling,” the president said to Collins with a warning glance. “Tell him the truth.”
“The truth is, we’ve tried just that.”
“And … ?”
“We’ve basically thrown up our hands, because, as I say, it’s been impossible to locate him. We can’t find him, and the crazy terror king can’t find him, either.”
Janson squinted. “The Caliph! Jesus.”
“You got it in one,” said Collins.
“The man lives for vengeance,” said Janson. “Lives and breathes it. And the fact that his celebrated hostage escaped had to have been a major humiliation to him. A loss of face among his followers. The kind of loss of face that can lead to a loss of power.”
“I could show you a foot-thick analytic report making exactly the same inference,” Collins said. “So far we’re on the same page.”
“But how are you in a position to steer him at all? Every Westerner is satanic, in his book.”
The secretary of state cleared his throat, uneasily.
“We’re opening our kimonos,” the president repeated. “Remember? Nothing that’s said in this room leaves this room.”
“OK,” Derek Collins said. “It’s a delicate business. There’s somebody high up in Libyan military intelligence who … works with us occasionally. Ibrahim Maghur. He’s a bad customer, all right? Officially, we want him dead. He’s known to have been involved in the German disco bombing that killed two American servicemen. Been linked to Lockerbie, too. He’s advised and helped funnel support to all sorts of terrorist organizations.”
“And yet he’s also an American asset,” Janson said. “Christ. Makes a fellow proud to be a soldier.”
“Like I said, it’s a delicate business. Similar to the deal we had with Ali Hassan Salameh.”
A small shiver ran down Janson’s spine. Ali Hassan Salameh was the mastermind of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. He was also, for a number of years, the CIA’s chief contact inside the Palestine Liberation Organization. It was during a period when the United States refused to recognize the organization. Yet the secret liaison afforded real protection to Americans based in Lebanon. A tip-off would arrive when a car bomb or an assassination in Beirut was in the works, and a number of American lives were spared as a result. The math may have worked out, yet it truly was a deal with the devil. A line from II Corinthians came to Janson: What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?
“So this Libyan—our Libyan—has been directing the Caliph?” Janson swallowed hard. “Quite an irony if one of the deadliest terrorists on the planet turns out to have been triply manipulated.”
“I know it sounds preposterous, but we were grasping at straws,” said Collins. “Hell, we still are. I mean, if you can think of a way to use him, go for it. But the problem remains: we can’t get Demarest in our sights.”
“Whereas,” the pasty-faced systems analyst put in, “he seems to have no problem getting us in his.”
“Which means you’re our best hope,” President Berquist repeated.
“You were his ace protégé, Paul,” Collins said. “Face it. You worked closely with the guy for several tours, you know his wiles, you know the quirks of his character. He was your first mentor. And, of course, there’s nobody better in the field than you, Janson.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” Janson said through gritted teeth.
“I mean it, Paul. This is my professional fitness assessment. There’s nobody better. Nobody with greater resourcefulness and ingenuity.”
“Except …” Doug Albright was worrying aloud, then thought better of it.
“Yes?” Janson was insistent.
The DIA man’s eyes were pitiless. “Except Alan Demarest.”
Chapter Thirty-six
The handsome West African, his silver hair neatly trimmed, gold cuff links glinting in the setting sun, looke
d pensively out the window of his thirty-eighth-floor office and waited for his calls to be returned. He was the secretary-general of the United Nations, had been for five years, and what he was about to do would shock most of the people who knew him. Yet it was the only way to ensure the survival of everything he had devoted his life to.
“Helga,” Mathieu Zinsou said, “I’m expecting a call back from Peter Novak. Please hold all other calls.”
“Certainly,” said the secretary-general’s longtime assistant, an efficient Dane named Helga Lundgren.
It was the hour of the day when he could see the furnishings of his own office reflected in the vast window. The decor had changed little over the years; it would have been sacrilege to replace the modernist furniture custom-designed for the building by the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen. Zinsou had added a few hangings of traditional textiles from his native country of Benin, for a slight flavor of individuality. In addition, gifts from various emissaries were stationed at strategic perches, and there were others, in storage, that could be brought out when representatives of the nation in question came to visit. If the finance minister of Indonesia were keeping an appointment, a Javanese mask might appear on the wall where, earlier in the day, a row of Edo netsuke had greeted the foreign secretary of Japan. Decoration as diplomacy, as Helga Lundgren liked to call it.
The office was positioned outward and away from the bustle of Manhattan. Indeed, when he peered through the ghostly reflections on the glass, he saw straight across the East River to the desolate industrial wasteland that was West Queens: the barnlike brick factory of the Schwartz Chemical Company with its four immense smokestacks, evidently long unused. The yellow-brick remains of an anonymous-looking warehouse. A few wisps of fog rolled over Hunter’s Point, the nearest part of West Queens, where an ancient Pepsi-Cola neon sign still blazed, as it had since 1936, atop a now closed bottling plant, like an amulet warding off enemy incursions, or real-estate developers, and notably failing.
The view was not beautiful, but there were times when Secretary-General Zinsou found it oddly mesmerizing. An antique brass telescope was angled from an oak stand on the floor, facing the window, but he rarely used it; the unaided eye sufficed to see what was to be seen. A petrified forest of former manufacturing concerns. Fossils of industry. An archaeology of modernity, half buried, half excavated. The waning sun glittered off the East River, flashed from the chrome of disused signage. Such were the unloved remnants of bygone industrial empires. And what about his own empire, on the banks of Manhattan? Was it, too, destined for the scrap heap of history?
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