The director of Consular Operations was babbling; the anxiety he displayed nowhere else was making him weirdly voluble.
“You’re trying my patience,” Janson said. “Here’s a tip. Never try the patience of a man holding a gun.”
“It’s just that we’re approaching la gran scena, and I don’t want you to lose it.” Collins gestured toward the softly humming computer system. “You ready for this? Because we’re moving toward now-that-you-know-I’m-going-to-have-to-kill-you territory.”
Janson adjusted the M9 so that the sights were squarely between Collins’s eyes, and the director of Consular Operations added quickly, “Not literally. We’ve moved beyond that—those of us in the program, I mean. We’re playing a different game now. Then again, so is he.”
“Start making sense,” Janson said, gritting his teeth.
“A tall order.” Collins jerked his head toward the computer system again. “You might say that’s Peter Novak. That, and a few hundred interoperable, omicronlevel-security computer systems elsewhere. Peter Novak is really a composite of bytes and bits and digital-transfer signatures with neither origins nor destinations. Peter Novak wasn’t a person. He’s a project. An invention. A legend, yeah. And for a long time, the most successful ever.”
Janson’s mind clouded as if overtaken by a sudden dust storm and, just as swiftly, a preternatural clarity set in.
It was madness—a madness that made a terrible kind of sense. “Please,” he said to the bureaucrat calmly, quietly. “Go on.”
“Best if we sit somewhere else,” Collins said. “The system here has so many electronic security seals and booby-traps, it goes into auto-erase mode if you breathe on it hard. A moth once rammed into the window and I lost hours of work.”
Now the two settled into the living room, the furniture covered with the coarse floral chintz that, at some point in the seventies, had evidently been decreed by law for seaside vacation houses.
“Look, it was a brilliant idea. Such a brilliant idea that for a long time, people were feuding over credit for who had the idea first. You know, like who invented the radio, or whatnot. Except that the number of people who knew about this was tiny, tiny, tiny. Had to be. Obviously, my predecessor Daniel Congdon had a lot to do with it. So did Doug Albright, a protégé of David Abbott.”
“Albright I’ve heard of. Abbott?”
“The guy who devised the whole ‘Caine’ gambit, back in the late seventies, trying to smoke out Carlos. Same kind of strategic thinking went into Mobius. Asymmetrical conflicts pit states against individual actors. Mismatched, but not the way you’d imagine. Think of an elephant and a mosquito. If that mosquito carries encephalitis, you could have one dead elephant, and there’s really not much Jumbo can do about it. The problem of substate actors is similar. Abbott’s great insight was that you really couldn’t mobilize anything as unwieldy as a state against baddies of this sort: you had to counter with a matching stratagem: create individual actors who, within a broad mandate, had a fair level of autonomy.”
“Mobius?”
“The Mobius Program. Basically, you’re talking about what began as a small group at the State Department. Soon it had to extend beyond State, because it had to be interagency if it was going to get off the ground. So there was a fat guy who used to be at the Hudson Institute and ran the operations sector at DIA, those ‘committed to excellence’ boys. His understudy takes over after he dies—that’s Doug. A computer whiz kid from Central Intelligence. Oval Office liaison to the NSC. But seventeen years ago, you’re basically talking about a small group at the State Department. And they’re tossing around ideas, and somehow they hit on this scenario. What if they assembled a small, secret team of analysts and experts to create a notional foreign billionaire? The more they toss the idea around, the more they like it. They like it because the more they think about it, the more doable it seems. They can make this happen. They can do this. And when they start to think about what they can do with it, it becomes irresistible. They can do good things. They can advance American interests in a way that America just can’t. They can make the world a better place. Totally win-win. Which is how the Mobius Program was born.”
“Mobius,” Janson said. “As in a loop where the inside is the outside.”
“In this case, the outsider is an insider. This mogul becomes an independent figure in the world, no ties whatever to the United States. Our adversaries aren’t his adversaries. They can be his allies. He can leverage situations we wouldn’t be able to go near. First, though, you’ve got to create a ‘he,’ and from the ground up. Backstopping was a real challenge. For his birthplace, the programmers choose a tiny Hungarian village that was completely liquidated in the forties.”
“Precisely because all the records were destroyed, nearly all the villagers killed.”
“Molnár was like a gift from the gods of backstopping. I mean, it was terrible, the massacres and all, but it was perfect for the program’s purposes, especially when you added to that the short, unhappy career of Count Ferenczi-Novak. Made perfect sense that our boy was going to have a sketchy early childhood. All his peers are dead, and his father’s terrified that his enemies are going to take his child from him. So he hides him, has him privately tutored. Eccentric, maybe, but plausible enough.”
“There’d have to be an employment record,” Janson said, “but that would have been the easy part. You restrict his ‘career’ to a few front organizations that you can control.”
“Anybody makes inquiries, there’s always some silver-haired department head, maybe retired, to say, ‘Oh yes, I remember young Peter. A little big for his britches, but a brilliant financial analyst. The work was so good, I didn’t mind that he preferred to do his work from home. A bit of an agoraphobe, but with that traumatic background, how can you blame him?’ And like that.”
These men and women, Janson knew, would have been generously compensated for uttering a lie perhaps once or twice to an inquiring reporter, and perhaps never. They would not be aware of what else the bargain would entail: the around-the-clock monitoring of their communications, a lifelong net of surveillance—but what they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them.
“And the spectacular rise? How could you backstop that?”
“Well, that’s where things get a little hairy. But, as I say, there was a brilliant team of experts tasked to the Mobius Program. They—we, I should say, though I wasn’t enlisted until seven years into it—caught a number of breaks. And, voilà, you’ve got a man in charge of an empire of his own. A man who could manipulate global events as we never could ourselves.”
“Manipulate … ? Meaning what?” Janson demanded.
“I think you know. The Liberty Foundation. The entire conflict-resolution agenda. ‘Directed democracy.’ All of it.”
“So this great humanitarian financier, the ‘peacemaker’—”
“It was originally a 60 Minutes segment that dubbed him that, and it stuck. For good reason. The peacemaker established a foundation with offices in nearly every regional capital in the world.”
“And his incredible humanitarian assistance?”
“Isn’t this country the best? And isn’t it messed up that no matter how much good we do, so many people around the world hate our guts? Yes, it meant offering balm to the world’s trouble spots. Look, the World Bank is a lender of last resort. This guy’s a lender of first resort. Which ensured that he would have enormous influence with governments the world over. Peter Novak: your roving ambassador for peace and stability.”
“Oil on troubled waters.”
“Expensive oil, make no mistake. But ‘Novak’ could mediate, resolve conflicts that we could never—openly—go near. He’s been able to deal effectively and confidentially with regimes that consider us the Great Satan. He has been a one-man foreign policy. And what made him so goddamn effective is precisely the fact that he appears to have no connection to us.”
Janson’s mind whirled, buzzed, filled with the echoes of
voices—confiding, cautioning, threatening. Nikos Andros: You Americans have never been able to wrap your minds around anti-Americanism. You so want to be loved that you cannot understand why there is so little love for you. A man wears big boots and wonders why the ants beneath his feet fear and hate him. Angus Fielding: The one thing that you Americans have never quite grasped is how very deep anti-Americanism goes … . The Serbian with gold-rimmed glasses: You Americans always want things that aren’t on the menu, don’t you? You can never have enough choices. A Hungarian barkeep with a lethal pastime: You Americans complain about drug traffickers in Asia, and meanwhile you flood the world with the electronic equivalent … . Everywhere you go, you find your own spoor. The slime of the serpent is over all.
A cacophony resolved itself into a single refrain, another kind of plainchant.
You Americans.
You Americans.
You Americans.
You Americans.
Janson suppressed a shiver. “But who is—was—Peter Novak?” he asked.
“It was kind of like the Six Million Dollar Man—‘Gentlemen, we can rebuild him, we have the technology. We have the capability to make him better than he was before. Better. Stronger. Faster.’” He broke off. “Well, richer, anyway. Fact is, three agents were assigned to the part. They were all similar-looking to begin with, very close to one another in build and height. And then surgery made them damned near identical. All sorts of computerized micrometers were used—an exhaustive procedure. But we had to have replicas in place: given our investment, we couldn’t afford to have our guy hit by a bus, or drop dead from a stroke. Three seemed like good odds.”
Janson looked at Collins strangely. “Who would ever agree to do such a thing? To allow his entire identity to be wiped out, to become dead to everyone he ever knew, his very countenance transformed … .”
“Someone who had no choice,” Collins replied cryptically.
Janson felt a gorge of anger. He knew Collins’s sangfroid was all on the surface, but the heartlessness of the man’s reasoning summed everything up: the damnable arrogance of the planners. The damn strategic elites with their neatly trimmed cuticles and their blithe certainty that what worked on the page would work in the real world. They saw the globe as a chessboard, were oblivious to the fact that people made of flesh and blood would suffer the consequences of their grand schemes. He could hardly stand to look at the bureaucrat before him, and his eyes drifted toward the glittering bay, toward the fishing boat that had moved into view, safely beyond the security zone that began half a mile from the shore, marked off by warning buoys. “Someone who had no choice?” He shook his head. “You mean the way I had no choice when you set me up to be killed.”
“That again.” Collins rolled his eyes. “Like I said, calling off the termination order would have raised too many questions. The cowboys at the CIA got credible reports that Novak had been killed and that you had something to do with it. Cons Ops got hold of the same info. The last thing any of us at Mobius wanted bruited about, but you play the cards you’re dealt. At the time, I did what I thought was best.” The words were mere words, expressing neither sadism nor sorrow.
A scrim of red momentarily suffused Janson’s vision: which was the greater insult, he wondered—being executed as a traitor, or being sacrificed as a pawn? Once more the fishing vessel caught his attention, but this time the sight was accompanied by a wrenching sense of danger. It was too small to be a crabber, and too near the shore to be after rockfish or perch.
And the thick staff that extended from the flapping tarpaulin on the deck was not a fishing pole.
Janson saw the bureaucrat’s mouth moving, but he could no longer hear him, for his attention was wholly devoted to an immediate and deadly threat. Yes, Collins’s bungalow was on a narrow, two-mile-long spit of land, yet the sense of security conveyed by the isolation, Janson realized now, was an illusion.
An illusion that was shattered by the first artillery round that exploded in Collins’s living room.
A torrent of adrenaline constricted Janson’s consciousness to a laserlike focus. The shell smashed through the window and hurled into the opposite wall, spraying the room with splinters of wood and chunks of plaster and fragments of glass; the blast was so intense that it registered on the ears less as sound than as pain. Black smoke began to billow and Janson understood the fluke that had saved them. A howitzer shell, he knew, spun more than three hundred times a second, and the result of its force and spin was that the shell had burrowed far into the cottage’s soft-pine and plaster construction before it exploded. Only this had spared them a deadly blast of jagged shrapnel. Seemingly conscious of every millisecond, Janson realized, too, that an artillery gunner’s first few shells were fired in order to zero in on the mark. The second shell would not arrive ten feet above their heads. The second shell, if they stayed where they were, would not leave them to ponder shell rotation speeds and detonation times.
The old wood-frame house would offer them no protection at all.
Janson leaped from the couch and raced to the attached garage. It was his only hope. The door was open and Janson took a few steps down to the concrete floor, where a small convertible stood. A yellow late-model Corvette.
“Wait a minute!” Collins called out breathlessly. His face was smudged with soot from the explosion and he was obviously winded from having followed Janson’s sprint. “It’s my Z-six. I’ve got the keys right here.” He held them out meaningfully, asserting the primacy of property rights.
Janson grabbed them from his hand and jumped into the driver’s seat. “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” he replied, shoving the startled undersecretary of state out of the way. “You can come or not.”
Collins hastened over to the side, pressed the garage-door opener, and rode shotgun with Janson, who revved the motor in reverse and shot out of the garage with just a millimeter of clearance between it and the lumbering roll-up door.
“Cutting it a little close, are we?” Collins asked. His face was now drenched in perspiration.
Janson said nothing.
Using, in rapid succession, the emergency brake, the steering wheel, and the accelerator with an organist’s fluidity, Janson executed a reverse bootleg turn—a J turn—and gunned the car down the narrow macadamized roadway.
“I’m thinking this wasn’t such a smart move,” said Collins. “We’re now totally exposed.”
“The flat nets—they extend out all the way around the tip of the island, right?”
“About a half mile out, yes.”
“Then use your head. Those nets would entangle any sloop that tried to cut across them. So if the gunboat wants to gain a new line of fire on us, it’s got a very wide apex to sail around. It’s a slow-moving vessel—it just isn’t going to have enough time. Meanwhile, we keep the house itself between us and it: that’s concealment and protection.”
“Point taken,” Collins said. “But now I want you to turn onto the pocket marina we’ve got a little farther on the right. We get there, we’re out of sight. Plus we can take a motorboat to the mainland if we need to.” His voice was composed, masterful. “See that little path to the right? Turn on it—now.”
Janson drove past it.
“Goddammit, Janson!” Collins bellowed. “That marina was our best chance.”
“Best chance to get blown to bits. You imagine they won’t have thought of it? They’ll already have lobbed a time-delayed explosive device there. Think like they do!”
“Turn around!” Collins yelled. “Goddammit, Paul, I know this place, I live here, and I’m telling you—”
A loud explosion from behind them drowned out the rest of his words: the marina had been blown up. Part of a rubber dinghy was thrown high into the air and landed on the side of the road.
Now Janson depressed the accelerator pedal farther, barreling down the narrow road faster than would ordinarily be safe. At eighty miles per hour, the tall grass and thorn trees zipped past in th
e rearview mirror. The roar of the motor seemed to grow ever louder, as if the muffler was cutting out. Now it seemed as if he were floating in the bay, as the spit narrowed to little more than sixty feet across, some beach, some low, scruffy vegetation, and the road, half covered in drifting sand. Janson knew that the sand itself reduced traction like an oil slick, and he reduced speed slightly.
The sound of the motor did not subside.
It was not the sound of his motor.
Janson turned to his right and saw the hovercraft. An amphibious military model.
It was skimming along the surface of the bay, a powerful fan keeping it aloft, a couple of feet above the surface of the water and the flat nets stretched beneath. It was unstoppable.
Janson felt as though he had swallowed ice. The lowlands of Chesapeake Bay were perfectly suited for the hovercraft’s capabilities. The land would not provide them shelter: unlike a boat, the craft could move almost as easily over dry surfaces as over wet ones. And the powerful engine enabled it to keep pace easily with the Corvette. It was a more dangerous foe than the gunboat, and now it was gaining on them! The sound of the fan was deafening, and the small convertible swayed precariously in its mechanical gale.
He sneaked another glance at the hovercraft. From the side, it had some resemblance to a yacht, with a small forward windowed cabin. Mounted at the other end was a powerful upright fan. Heavy-duty anti-plow skirts were mounted to the fore of the craft. As it zipped along the placid waters, it gave an impression of fluid effortlessness.
Janson floored the accelerator—only to realize, sickeningly, that the hovercraft was not merely keeping pace; it was passing them. And, perched just below and to the left of the rear fan encasement, someone wearing ear protectors was fumbling with what looked like an M60 machine gun.
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