The sun had lowered farther in the horizon, giving the East River a rosy tinge, when the secretary-general’s assistant notified him that Peter Novak was on the phone. He picked up at once.
“Mon cher Mathieu,” the voice said. It had the crystalline clarity of something heavily processed by digital telephony—undoubtedly he was speaking on a top-of-the-line satellite phone. The secretary-general had requested that he and Novak speak on encrypted phones only, and the additional security probably increased the eerily noiseless quality of the signal. After a few pleasantries, Mathieu Zinsou began to hint at what he had on his mind.
The United Nations, the West African told the great man, was a magnificent freighter that was running out of fuel, which was to say, money. It was the simple fact of the matter.
“In many respects, our resources are enormous,” the secretary-general said. “We have hundreds of thousands of soldiers seconded to us, proudly wearing the blue helmets. We have offices in every capital, staffed with teams of experts who enjoy ambassadorial status. We’re privy to what goes on in these countries at every level. We know their military secrets, their development plans, their economic schemes. A partnership with the Liberty Foundation is simply a matter of common sense—a pooling of resources and competencies.”
That much was preamble.
“U.N. officials operate freely in just about every country on the planet,” Zinsou continued. “We see the suffering of people victimized by the incompetence and greed of their leaders. Yet we cannot reshape their policies, their politics. Our rules and regulations, our bylaws and systems of oversight—they hamstring us into irrelevance! The successes of your Liberty Foundation have put the United Nations to shame. And meantime our ongoing financial crisis has crippled us in every way.”
“All this is true,” said Peter Novak. “But it is not new.”
“No,” Zinsou agreed. “It is not new. And we could wait and, as we have in the past, do nothing. In ten years, the U.N. would be as poverty-stricken as any of its wards. Utterly ineffective—nothing more than a debate club for bickering emirs and tin-pot despots, discredited and ignored by the developed nations of the world. It will be a beached whale upon the shore of history. Or we can take action now, before it is too late. I have just been elected to another five-year term, with the near unanimous support of the General Assembly. I am uniquely in a position to make decisive, unilateral executive decisions. I have the popularity and the credibility to do so. And I must do so to save this organization.”
“I’ve always thought your reputation for foresight was well earned,” Novak said. “But so is your reputation for strategic ambiguity, mon cher. I wish I had a better sense of what you’re proposing.”
“Simply put, there can be no salvation for us except through partnership with you. A special joint division can be established—joint between the Liberty Foundation and the U.N.—devoted to economic development. Over time, more and more of the U.N.’s institutional resources and responsibilities would migrate to this joint division. It will be a powerful, invisible directorate within the United Nations. I can serve as the bridge between the two empires, yours and mine. U.N. appropriations would continue, of course, but the Liberty Foundation would be able to make intimate use of the U.N.’s extensive assets.”
“You intrigue me, Mathieu,” said Novak. “But we both know the rules of bureaucratic inertia. You tell me you envy and admire the extraordinary effectiveness of the Liberty Foundation, and I thank you for the kind words. But there’s a reason for our record: the fact that I have always retained absolute, top-to-bottom control of it.”
“I am deeply aware of that fact,” said the secretary-general. “And when I speak of ‘partnerships,’ I need you to understand my meaning. ‘Strategic ambiguity,’ as you call it, is something my role at the United Nations often requires. But on one issue there can be no ambiguity. Ultimate control would be exercised by you, Peter.”
There was a long moment of silence, and Zinsou briefly wondered whether Novak’s phone had gone dead. Then the man spoke again. “You are indeed a man of vision. It’s always nice to meet another one.”
“It is a grave, an immense responsibility. Are you prepared for it?” Zinsou did not wait for an answer but continued to speak, with passion, eloquence, and urgency, elaborating on his vision.
Twenty minutes later, the man who called himself Peter Novak maintained an odd reticence.
“We have so much to discuss,” Zinsou said, winding up. “So much that can only be discussed face-to-face, just you and me, together. Perhaps it is grandiose of me to say it, but I truly believe the world is depending on us.”
At last, a mirthless laugh came from the phone: “Sounds like you’re offering to sell me the United Nations.”
“I hope I didn’t say that!” Zinsou exclaimed lightly. “It is a treasure beyond price. But yes, I think we understand each other.”
“And in the short term, my Liberty Foundation people would have ambassadorial rank, diplomatic immunity?”
“The U.N. is like a corporation with a hundred and sixty-nine CEOs. Nimble it is not. But yes, the charter I’ll draft will make that quite clear,” answered the secretary-general.
“And what about you, mon cher Mathieu? You’ll be serving out your second term—and then what?” The voice on the phone grew friendly. “You have served your organization selflessly for so many years.”
“You’re kind to say so,” the secretary-general said, catching his drift. “The personal element is an entirely subsidiary one, you appreciate. My real concerns are for the survival of this institution. But, yes, I will be frank. The U.N. job does not exactly pay well. A job as, let us say, a director of a new Liberty Foundation institute … obviously with the salary and benefits to be negotiated … would be the ideal way to continue my work for international peace. Forgive me for being so forward. The complexity of what I propose makes it imperative that we be absolutely straightforward with each other.”
“I believe I’m coming to a better understanding, and find it all very encouraging,” said the man who was Peter Novak, now sounding positively genial.
“Then why don’t we have dinner? Something très intime. At my residence. The sooner the better. I’m prepared to clear my schedule.”
“Mon cher Mathieu,” the man on the phone repeated. A warm glow suffused his voice, the glow of a man who had just been offered the United Nations. It would be a final ornament to his redoubtable empire, and a fitting one. Abruptly, he said: “I’ll get back to you.” And the line went dead.
The secretary-general held on to the handset for a few moments before returning it to its cradle. “Alors ?”
He turned to Paul Janson, who had been sitting in the corner of the darkening office.
The operative looked at the master diplomat with frank admiration. “Now we wait,” said Janson.
Would he take the bait? It was a bold proposal, yet threaded through with truth. The financial straits of the U.N. were genuinely dire. And Mathieu Zinsou was nothing if not ambitious for his organization. He was also known to be a farseeing man. In his five years at the helm of the U.N., he had reshaped it more vigorously than any SG had ever imagined. Was this next step so unthinkable?
It had been a chance remark of Angus Fielding’s that had inspired the ploy, and Janson recalled yesterday’s conversation with the man who, not that long ago, had threatened him with a gun. Of course, that was the order of the day, wasn’t it—allies and adversaries switching sides with abandon? The conversation had been awkward at first; Fielding had not missed Novak’s CNN appearance, and was clearly abashed, bewildered, and humiliated, unaccustomed emotions for Trinity’s laureled master. And yet, without so much as hinting at the explosive secret, Janson was able to pick the scholar’s agile brain on the question of how one might reach the reclusive billionaire.
There was another element that Janson calculated might lend plausibility to the scenario. Zinsou had for years been dogged by a reputation
for benign, smallscale corruption. When Zinsou was a young commissioner at UNESCO, a lucrative contract had been taken away from one medical corporation and awarded to another. The spurned rival put it out that Zinsou had received “special preferments” from the victorious corporation. Had payment been made in a numbered account somewhere? The accusations were groundless, yet in some circles curiously adhesive. The half-remembered hint of corruption would, ironically, make his proposition all the more persuasive.
But what would seal it would be an elemental feature of human psychology: Demarest would want it to be true. Intense desire always had a subtle gravitational effect upon belief: we are more likely to credit what we wish to be so.
Now Janson stood at Zinsou’s desk and, from a bulky device there, extracted the digital cassette on which the call had been recorded for later study.
“You astonish me,” Janson said, simply.
“I’ll take that as an insult,” the secretary-general said with a small smile.
“The implication being that my expectations were not high? Then I spoke poorly—and you should take it, rather, as proof that there is only one true diplomat in this room.”
“The fate of the world should not hang on a lapse of etiquette. I feel that in this case it well may. Have you considered all the things that could go wrong?”
“I have absolute confidence in you,” Janson parried.
“An expression of confidence I find dismaying. My confidence in myself is high: it is not absolute. Nor should yours be. I speak, of course, in principle.”
“Principles,” Janson said. “Abstractions.”
“Indulgences, you mean to say.” A smile hovered over Mathieu Zinsou’s lips. “And this is not the time for them. Now is the time for particulars. Here’s one: your plan involves venturing a prediction of somebody who may not be predictable at all.”
“There are no absolute predictions that we can make. I take your point. But there are patterns—there are rules, even for the man who flouts the rules. I do know this man.”
“Before yesterday, I’d have said the same. Peter Novak and I have met on a few occasions. Once at a state dinner in Amsterdam. Once in Ankara, in the wake of the Cyprus resolution he brokered—a purely ceremonial event. I was bearing the official congratulations of this organization, announcing the withdrawal of U.N. troops from the partition line. Of course, now I realize I was meeting with a phantom. Perhaps a different man each time—presumably there are files kept by the Mobius Program that could tell us. Yet I must say that I found him both charismatic and affable. An appealing combination.”
“And a combination that’s been ascribed to you,” Janson said carefully.
Zinsou uttered a sentence in the complex tonal language of Fon, spoken by his father’s people. Zinsou père had been a descendant of the royal court of Dahomey, once a significant West African empire. “A favorite saying of my great-uncle, the paramount chief, which he often repeated to the gaping sycophants who surrounded him. Loosely translated, it means: The more you lick my ass, the more I feel you’re trying to slip one past me.”
Janson laughed. “You’re even wiser than they say—”
Zinsou raised an index finger of mock admonishment. “I can’t help wondering. Did Peter Novak believe any of it, or was he just playing along? I ask out of injured pride, of course. It cudgels my sense of amour propre that someone should believe I would, in effect, sell out the organization to which I have devoted my life.” Zinsou toyed with his thick Montblanc fountain pen. “But that’s just pride speaking.”
“Evil men are always quick to think evil of others. Besides, if it works, you’ll have plenty of reason for pride. Pull this off, and it will be the greatest feat of your career.”
An uncomfortable, lonely silence fell upon them.
Zinsou was not, by habit, a solitary man: after decades spent within the U.N. bureaucracy, deliberation and consultation were second nature to him. His diplomatic skills were most fully engaged in reconciling conflicts among the U.N. divisions themselves—calming hostilities between the Department of Peacekeeping-Operations and the Humanitarian Affairs people, preventing resistance from forming among frontline workers or their superiors in the head offices. He knew the thousand ways that the bureaucrats could stall executive decisions, for in his long career he himself had had occasion to make use of such techniques. The methods of bureaucratic infighting were as advanced and as sophisticated as the techniques of aggression on the world’s battlefields. It was a tribute to his own success on the internal battlefields that he had risen as far and as fast as he had. Moreover, the bureaucratic battle was truly won only when those you defeated were led to imagine that they had, in some way, been victorious.
Being the secretary-general of the United Nations, Zinsou had decided, was like conducting an orchestra of soloists. The task seemed impossible, and yet it could be done. When he was in good form, Zinsou could lead a conflict-riven committee to a consensus position that he had planned out before the meeting had begun. His own preferences were masked; he would appear sympathetic to positions he secretly found unacceptable. He would play off the preexisting tensions among the assembled deputy special representatives and high commissioners; subtly lead people into temporary coalitions against detested rivals; guide the discussion through ricochets and clashes, like a pool shark bringing about a complex sequence of carefully planned collisions by a well-aimed cue ball. And at the end, when the committee had worked its way around to the very position he had meant them to reach, he would, with a sigh of resignation and a display of concessive largesse, say that the others in the room had talked him around to their point of view. There were bureaucratic players whose ego demanded that they be seen to have won. But true power belonged to those who wanted to win in actuality, regardless of appearances. A number of people still accepted Zinsou’s soft-spoken and courteous demeanor at face value and did not recognize the forceful nature of his leadership. They were losers who imagined themselves winners. Some of those who supported Zinsou did so because they believed they could control him. Others, the smarter ones, supported him because they knew he would be the most effective leader that the U.N. had known for decades, and they knew that the U.N. was in desperate need of such leadership. It was a winning alliance—for Zinsou and for the organization to which he had devoted his life.
But now the virtuoso of manufactured consent had to operate on his own. The secret with which he had been entrusted was so explosive that there was nobody to whom he, in turn, could entrust it. No colloquy, no consultation, no deliberation, real or staged. There was only the American operative, a man Zinsou found himself only gradually warming to. What bound them together was not merely the explosive secret; it was also the knowledge that their countermeasures were likely to end in failure. The so-called Zinsou Doctrine, as the press had dubbed it, endorsed only interventions with a reasonable chance of success. This one failed the test.
Yet what alternative was there?
Finally, Janson spoke again. “Let me tell you about the man I know. We’re talking about somebody whose mind is a remarkable instrument, capable of extraordinary real-time analysis. He can be a person of immense charm. And even greater cruelty. My former colleagues in intelligence would tell you that men like him can be valuable assets, as long as they are tightly constrained by the situations in which they’re placed. The error of the Mobius planners is that they placed him in a context that didn’t just permit, but actively called upon his skills at fluid and freeform improvisation. A context in which an immensity of wealth and power was placed just out of his grasp. He played the world’s mightiest plutocrat. Only the rules of the game prevented him from truly being that person. So he threw himself into trying to overcome the program’s safeguards. Eventually, he did.”
“It was not predicted.”
“Not by the Mobius planners. Incredible technical prowess combined with extraordinary stupidity about human nature—typical of their breed. No, it was not predicted
. But it was predictable.”
“By you.”
“Certainly. But not only by me. I suspect you, too, would have seen the risks.”
Secretary-General Zinsou walked over to his enormous desk and sat down. “This monster, this man who threatens us all—you may know him as well as you think you do. You do not know me. And so I remain puzzled. Forgive me if I say that your confidence in me undermines my confidence in you.”
“That’s not very diplomatic of you, is it? I appreciate your candor, all the same. You may find that I know you a little better than you imagine.”
“Ah, those intelligence dossiers of yours, compiled by agents who think people can be reduced to something like an instruction manual—the same mind-set that gave rise to your Mobius Program.”
Janson shook his head. “I won’t pretend that we were acquainted, you and I, not in the usual sense. But the thrust of world events over the past couple of decades did mean that we ended up patrolling a few of the same rough neighborhoods. I know what really happened in Sierra Leone, that week in December, because I was there—monitoring all communications from the head of U.N. Peacekeeping in the region and the head of the special delegation appointed to coordinate the U.N. response. Not much peacekeeping was happening, needless to say—the bloody civil war was raging out of control. Special Delegate Mathieu Zinsou was asked to relay the commander’s report and intervention request to New York. The designee was a U.N. high commissioner who would then present it to the representatives of the Security Council—who would have refused it, forbidden the intervention.”
Robert Ludlum - [Paul Janson 01] Page 58
