“I don’t know what news has reached you,” Janson said tentatively.
“I’m not quite twigging …”
“Angus,” Janson said. “He’s dead.”
The master of Trinity blanched, and stared at Janson slackly for a few long moments. Then he took a seat on a harp-backed wooden chair in front of his desk, falling into it as if the air had left him.
“There have been false rumors of his demise in the past,” the don said feebly.
Janson took the seat next to him. “I saw him die.”
Angus Fielding slumped back in his chair, suddenly looking like an old man. “It’s not possible,” he murmured. “It can’t be.”
“I saw him die,” Janson repeated.
He told Fielding what had happened in Anura, breathing hard when he reached the still-piercing horror of the midair explosions. Angus merely listened, expressionless, nodding gently, his eyes half shut, as if listening to a pupil during a tutorial.
Janson had once been one of those pupils. Not the typical apple-cheeked boarding-school kid, wearing a backpack filled with dog-eared books and leaking biros, pedaling a bicycle down King’s Parade. When Janson arrived at Trinity, courtesy of a Marshall Fellowship, he was a physical wreck, sallow and skeletal, still trying to heal his emaciated body and devastated spirit from his eighteen-month ordeal as a POW, and all the brutalities that had preceded it. The year was 1974, and he was trying to pick up where he had left off, pursuing the study of economic history he had begun as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The SEAL commando was repairing to the groves of academe. He worried, at first, that he would not be able to make the adjustment. Yet hadn’t his military training equipped him to adapt to his surroundings, whatever they were? History texts and economic formulas replaced codebooks and graded-terrain maps, but he attacked them with the same doggedness, determination, and sense of urgency.
In Fielding’s quarters at Neville Court, Janson would discuss his assigned topic, and the don would seem to nod off as he spoke. Yet when the time came, Fielding would open his eyes, blinking, and pinpoint the weakest turn of his argument. Once Janson gave a yeoman’s account of the economic consequences of Bismarck’s expansionism, and Fielding seemed to rouse himself from his slumbers only after he’d finished. Then the questions rained like arrows. How did he distinguish between expansionism and regional consolidation? What about the delayed economic consequences of the annexation of the Schleswig and Holstein duchies several years prior? About those numbers he relied upon for the premise of his argument, the devaluation of the deutsche mark between 1873 and 1877—they wouldn’t be from Hodgeman’s study, would they, young man? Pity, that: old Hodgeman got the numbers all wrong—well, an Oxford man, what could you expect? Hate to order you off your own premises, dear boy. But before you build your edifice, be certain of the ground beneath.
Fielding’s mind was razor-sharp; his manner urbane, unflappable, even giddy. He often cited Shakespeare’s phrase about the “smiler with the knife,” and though he was no hypocrite, it aptly characterized his scholarly style. Janson’s assignment to Fielding, as the don cheerfully admitted only a few months after their tutorials began, was not entirely accidental. Fielding had friends in Washington who had been impressed with the young man’s unusual profile and demonstrated capabilities; they had wanted him to keep an eye out for him. Even now, Janson was hard put to say whether Fielding had recruited him to Consular Operations or whether he had merely gestured vaguely in that direction and allowed Janson to make the decision that felt right to him. He remembered long conversations about the concept of the “just war,” about the interplay of realism and idealism in state-sanctioned violence. In prompting Janson for his views on a wide range of subjects, had the don been merely exercising the young man’s analytical skills? Or had the don been subtly redirecting those views, prodding a shattered young man to rededicate his life to the service of his country?
Now Fielding daubed his eyes with a handkerchief, but they still glittered moistly. “He was a great man, Paul. It’s unfashionable to use those terms, perhaps, but I’ve never known anybody like him. My God, the vision, the brilliance, the compassion—there was something absolutely extraordinary about Peter Novak. I always felt I was blessed to know him. I felt our century—this new century—was blessed to contain him!” He pressed his hands to his face briefly. “I’m babbling, I’m becoming an old fool. Oh, Paul, I’m not one given to hero worship. Peter Novak, though—it was as if he belonged to a higher evolutionary plane than the rest of us. Where we humans have been busy tearing one another apart, he seemed to belong to some race that had learned, finally, to reconcile the brain and the heart, keenness and kindness. He wasn’t just a numbers whiz—he understood people, cared for people. I believe the same sixth sense that allowed him to see which way the currency markets would go—to anticipate the tides of human greed—is also what allowed him to see precisely what sort of social interventions would truly matter on this planet. But if you ask why he threw himself at these problems everyone else regarded as hopeless, you have to put reason to one side. Great minds are rare—great hearts rarer still. And this was ultimately a matter of the heart. Philanthropy in its root sense: a kind of love.” Now Fielding blew his nose quietly and blinked hard, determined to keep his emotions at bay.
“I owed him everything,” Janson said, remembering the dust of Baaqlina.
“As does the world,” Fielding said. “That’s why I said it cannot be. For my reference was not to fact but to consequence. He must not die. Too much depends upon him. Too many delicate efforts toward peace and stability, all sponsored by him, guided by him, inspired by him. If he perishes, many will perish with him, victims of senseless suffering and slaughter—Kurds, Hutus, Romani, the despised of the world. Christians in Sudan, Muslims in the Philippines, Amerindians in Honduras. Casamance separatists in Senegal … But why even begin a list of the damnés de la terre? Bad things will happen. Many, many bad things. They will have won.”
Fielding looked smaller now, not merely older. The vital energy had drained from him.
“Perhaps the game can be played to a draw,” Janson said quietly.
A despairing look came over the scholar. “You’ll try to tell me that America, in its bumbling way, can pick up the slack. You may even think it is incumbent upon your country to do so. But then the one thing that you Americans have never quite grasped is how very deep anti-Americanism goes. In this post–Cold War era, many people around the world feel that they live under the American economic occupation. You speak of ‘globalization’ and they hear ‘Americanization.’ You Americans see televised images of anti-American demonstrations in Malaysia or Indonesia, about protesters in Melbourne or Seattle, hear about a handful of McDonald’s being rubbished in France—and you think these are aberrant events. On the contrary. They are harbingers of a storm, the first few spittlelike drops you feel before a cloudburst.”
Janson nodded. These were sentiments he had heard before, and recently. “Someone told me that these days, the hostility isn’t really about what America does, but about what America is.”
“And that is precisely why Peter Novak’s role was invaluable, and irreplaceable.” Heat entered the don’s voice. “He wasn’t American, or perceived to be a handmaiden of American interests. Everyone knew that he’d spurned America’s advances, that he’d angered its foreign-affairs establishment by steering his own course. His only polestar was his own conscience. He was the man who could stand up and say that we had lost our bearings. He could say that markets without morality could not sustain themselves—he could say these things and be heard. The magic of the marketplace wasn’t enough, he was saying: We need a moral sense of where we want to go, and the commitment to get there.” Fielding’s voice started to crack and he swallowed hard. “That is what I meant when I said that this man must not perish.”
“Yet he has perished,” Janson said.
Fielding rocked back and forth gentl
y, as if he were at sea. For a while he said nothing at all. And then he opened his light blue eyes wide. “What’s so very odd is that none of this has been reported anywhere—neither his abduction nor his murder. So very odd. You have told me the facts, but not the explanation.” Fielding’s gaze drifted toward the overcast skies that hovered over the courtyard’s ageless splendor. The fen’s low-hanging clouds over the rough-hewn Portland stone of the courtyard: a vista unchanged in centuries.
“I guess I was hoping you’d be able to help me there,” Janson said. “The question is, who would want Peter Novak dead?”
The don slowly shook his head. “The question is, alas, who wouldn’t?” Janson could tell his mental gears were meshing; his fish-pale eyes grew intent, his face taut. “I exaggerate, of course. Few mortals have so earned the love and gratitude of their fellows. And yet. And yet. La grande benevolenza attira la grande malevolenza, as Boccaccio has it: outsized benevolence always attracts outsized malevolence.”
“Walk me through this, OK? Just now you spoke of ‘they’—you said ‘they’ will have won. What did you mean?”
“Do you know much about Novak’s origins?”
“Very little. A child of war-torn Hungary.”
“His origins were at once extremely privileged and extremely not. He was one of the few survivors of a village that was liquidated in a battle between Hitler’s soldiers and Stalin’s. Novak’s father was a fairly obscure Magyar nobleman who served in Miklós Kállay’s government in the forties before he defected, and it’s said that he feared, obsessively, for the safety of his only child. He had made enemies who, he was convinced, would try to avenge themselves against his scion. The old nobleman may have been paranoid, but as the old saw has it, even paranoids have enemies.”
“That’s more than half a century ago. Who could possibly care, all these decades later, what his dad was up to in the forties?”
Fielding gave him a stern, college-master look. “You obviously haven’t spent much time in Hungary,” he said. “It’s in Hungary, still, that you’ll find his greatest admirers, and his most impassioned foes. Then, of course, there are the millions elsewhere who feel victimized by Peter Novak’s successes as a financier. Many ordinary people in Southeast Asia blame him for triggering a run against their currency, their rage fomented by demagogues.”
“But groundless, do you think?”
“Novak may be the greatest currency speculator in history, but no one has more eloquently denounced the practice. He’s pushed for the very policies of currency unification that would make that sort of speculation impossible—you can’t say he’s been an advocate of his own interests. Quite the opposite. Of course, some would say that merry old England bore the brunt of his speculative savvy, at least at first. You remember what happened back in the eighties. There was that great currency crisis, with everyone wondering which European governments were going to lower their rates. Novak leveraged billions of his own money on his hunch that Britain was going to let sterling plunge. It did, and Novak’s Electra Fund nearly tripled. An incredible coup! Our then prime minister pushed MI6 to poke around. In the end, the head of the investigation told the Daily Telegraph that, and I quote, ‘the only law this fellow has broken is the law of averages.’ Of course, when the Malaysian ringgit plunged and Novak landed himself another windfall, the politicians over there didn’t take it very well. Lots of demagoguery there about the manipulations of the mysterious dark foreigner. So you ask who would like to see him dead, and I must tell you it’s a long list of malefactors. There’s China: the old men of that gerontocracy fear, above all else, the ‘directed democracy’ that Novak’s organization has been dedicated to. They know he considers China the next frontier of democratization, and they are powerful enemies. In Eastern Europe, there’s a whole cabal of moguls—former Communist officials who seized the plunder of ‘privatized’ industries. The anti-corruption campaigns spearheaded by the Liberty Foundation in their own backyards are their most direct threat, and they’ve sworn to take action. As I say, one cannot perform good deeds without a few people feeling threatened by them—especially the ones who prosper from entrenched enmity and systematic corruption. You asked what I meant by ‘they,’ and that’s as good a specification as any.”
Janson could see Fielding struggle to sit up straighter, to rally, to keep a stiff upper lip. “You were part of his brain trust,” said the operative. “How did that work?”
Fielding shrugged. “He’d solicit my opinions from time to time. Perhaps once a month, we’d talk on the phone. Perhaps once a year, we’d meet face-to-face. In truth, he could have taught me far more than I him. But he was a remarkable listener. There was never a shred of pretense, except, perhaps, the pretense of knowing less than he did. He was always concerned about unintended consequences of humanitarian intervention. He wanted to be sure that a humanitarian gift didn’t ultimately lead to more suffering—that, say, helping refugees didn’t prop up the regime that had produced those refugees. You can’t always call it right, he knew. In fact, he always insisted that everything you know might be wrong. His one article of faith. Everything you know must be critically assessed at all times, and abandoned if necessary.”
Long, indistinct shadows began to fall as the cloud-filtered late-morning sun hovered just over the college chapel. Janson had hoped to narrow the field of suspects; Fielding was showing how vast it really was.
“You say you met with him irregularly,” Janson prompted.
“He wasn’t a man of fixed habits. Not so much a recluse, I would have said, as a nomad. A man as peripatetic as Epicrates of Heraclea, that sage of classical antiquity.”
“But the foundation’s world headquarters is in Amsterdam.”
“Prinsengracht eleven twenty-three. Where his staffers have a rueful saying: ‘What’s the difference between God and Novak? God is everywhere. Novak is everywhere but Amsterdam.’” He repeated the well-worn jest without humor.
Janson furrowed his brow. “Novak had other counselors, of course. There were those savants whose names were never mentioned in the media. Maybe one of them might know something significant—without even realizing the significance. The Foundation itself has raised the drawbridge as far as I’m concerned—I can’t reach anybody, speak to anybody in a position to know. It’s one of the reasons I’m here. I need to reach those people who worked closely with Novak, or who used to. Maybe someone who used to be in the inner circle and fell out of it. I can’t rule it out that Novak was done in by a person or persons close to him.”
Fielding raised an eyebrow. “You might direct that same curiosity toward those who are, or were, close to you.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“You were asking me about Peter Novak’s enemies, and I said they were widely dispersed. Let me, then, broach an awkward subject. Are you so confident about your own government?” Fielding’s tone combined steel and silk.
“You’re not saying what I think you’re saying,” Janson replied sharply. He knew that Fielding, as an habitué of the fabled Tuesday Club, spoke of such matters with genuine worldliness.
“I only pose the question,” Fielding said gingerly. “Is it even possible that your own former colleagues in Consular Operations have had some involvement here?”
Janson winced: the don’s speculations had struck a nerve; the question, though seemingly far-fetched, had haunted him since Athens. “But why? How?” he demanded.
Was it possible?
Fielding shifted uneasily in his harp-backed chair, running his fingertips along its alligatored black lacquer. “I don’t state. I don’t even suggest. I ask. Yet consider. Peter Novak had become more powerful than many sovereign nations. And so he may have, wittingly or unwittingly, sabotaged some pet operation, cocked up some plan, threatened some bureaucratic turf, enraged some powerful player … .” Fielding waved a hand, gesturing vaguely at possibilities too hazy to pin down. “Might an American strategist have deemed him too powerful, too much of a
threat, simply as an independent actor on the stage of world politics?”
Fielding’s speculations were all too cogent for comfort. Márta Lang had met with high-powered people in the State Department and elsewhere. They had urged her to employ Janson; for all he knew, Lang’s people had relied on them for some of the instrumentation and equipment. They would have sworn her to secrecy, of course, invoking the “political considerations” that Lang had alluded to with such sardonicism. There was no need for Janson to know the provenance of the hardware; no reason for Lang not to keep her word to the U.S. officials with whom she had dealings. Who were these officials? No names were used; all Janson was told was that they knew him, or of him. Consular Operations, presumably. And then the inculpating transfers to his Cayman Islands account; Janson had believed that his former employers remained ignorant of it, but he also knew that the American government, when it wished to, could apply subtle pressure to offshore banking institutions when the activities of U.S. citizens were at issue. Who would have been better placed to interfere with his financial records than high-level members of the American intelligence services? Janson had not forgotten the rancor and ill will that surrounded his departure. His knowledge of still-extant networks and procedures meant that he was, in principle, a potential threat.
Was it possible?
How had the plot been hatched? Was it simply that a golden opportunity had presented itself to quick-thinking tacticians? Two birds with one stone: kill the meddlesome mogul, blame the noncompliant exagent? Yet why not leave the Kagama extremists to carry out their announced plan? That would have been the easy, the convenient thing to do: let murderous fanaticism run its course. Except …
There was the muted sound of an old-fashioned brass bell: somebody was at the rear door, which led to a waiting area outside the master’s office.
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.”
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