The secretary-general looked at him oddly but said nothing.
“If that happened,” Janson continued, “you knew that maybe ten thousand people would have been massacred unnecessarily.” He did not need to detail the situation: A cluster of small-arms depots had been identified, freshly stocked by a Mali-based dealer. The U.N.’s on-the-ground commanders had received reliable intelligence that the rebel leader was going to use them to settle a tribal feud—in the small hours of the very next morning. The rebel leader’s men would use the arms to launch a deep incursion into the Bayokuta region, shooting his enemies, demolishing villages, amputating the limbs of children. And it could all be prevented by a swift, low-risk sally that would eliminate the illegal arms warehouses. The moral and military calculation was not in doubt. But neither was the bureaucratic protocol.
“Here’s where it gets interesting,” Janson went on. “What does Mathieu Zinsou do? He’s the consummate bureaucrat—just ask anybody. A perfect organization man. A stickler for the rules. Only, he’s also a fox. Within an hour, your office sent a cable to the High Commission for Peacekeeping consisting of 123 reports and action items—every insubstantial bit of paperwork you had at hand, I’d guess. Buried in the cable, item number ninety-seven, was an ‘Unless Otherwise Ordered’ notification, spelling out the proposed U.N. military action in the blandest terms and giving the exact time during which it would be executed. You subsequently told your general stationed outside Freetown that the U.N. central command had been notified of his plans and had voiced no objection. This was literally true. It was also true that the high commissioner’s staff didn’t even stumble on the relevant advisory until three days after the operation.”
“I can’t imagine where this is leading,” Zinsou said, sounding bored.
“At which point, the event was part of history—an impressive success, a casualty-free raid that averted the death of many thousands of unarmed civilians. Who wouldn’t want to claim credit for it? A lily-livered U.N. high commissioner proudly told his colleagues that of course he had authorized the raid, even intimated that it had been his idea. And as he found himself roundly congratulated, he couldn’t help but feel kindly disposed toward Mathieu Zinsou.”
Zinsou fixed Janson with a stare. “The secretary-general neither denies nor confirms. But such a story, I submit, would not confirm one’s faith in human predictability.”
“On the contrary—I came to recognize the hallmarks of your personal style of operating. Later, in the flash-point crises in Tashkent, in Madagascar, in the Comoros, I noticed the extraordinary gift you had for making the best of a bad situation. I saw what others didn’t—it wasn’t so much that you followed rules as that you’d figured out how to make the rules follow you.”
He shrugged. “In my country, we have a proverb. Loosely translated, it means: When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”
“I also came to recognize your enormous discretion. You had much to boast about privately, and you never did.”
“Your comments suggest an unwarranted, invasive, and inappropriate degree of surveillance.”
“I’ll take that as confirmation of their essential truth.”
“You’re a man of parts, Mr. Janson. I’ll grant you that.”
“Let me put a question to you: What do you give the man who has everything?”
“There is no such man,” Zinsou said.
“Precisely. Demarest is motivated by power. And power is the one thing that nobody ever feels he has enough of.”
“In part, because power creates its own subversion.” The secretary-general looked thoughtful. “It’s one of the lessons of the so-called American Century. To be mighty is to be mightier than others. Never underestimate the strength of resentment in world history. The strongest thing about the weak is their hatred of the strong.” He leaned back in his chair and, for the first time in years, regretted having given up smoking. “But I see where you are going. You believe this man is a megalomaniac. Somebody who can never have enough power. And that’s what you have baited the snare with—power.”
“Yes,” Janson said.
“One of my distinguished predecessors used to say, ‘Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have.’ You were quite eloquent in your critique of the premises of the Mobius Program yesterday. Watch that you don’t replicate the errors. You are building a model of this man …”
“Demarest,” Janson prompted. “But let’s call him Peter Novak. Better to stay in character, so to speak.”
“You’re building a model of this man, in effect, and you observe this hypothetical creature move this way and that. But will the real man behave as your model does? Those you angrily dismiss as the ‘planners’ are happy to assume so. But you? How well founded is your confidence, really?”
Janson looked into the secretary-general’s liquid brown eyes, saw the composed face that greeted heads of state by the hundreds. He saw the air of mastery, and as he stared harder he saw something else, too, something only partly hidden. He saw dread.
And this, too, was something they shared, for it arose out of simple realism. “I am confident only that a bad plan is better than no plan,” Janson said. “We are proceeding on as many fronts as possible. We may get a lucky break. We may get none. Allow me to quote one of my mentors: Blessed are the flexible, for they will not be bent out of shape.”
“I like it.” Zinsou clapped his hands together. “A smart fellow told you that.”
“The smartest man I ever knew,” Janson replied grimly. “The man who now calls himself Peter Novak.”
A chill settled, along with another long silence.
The secretary-general swiveled his chair around toward the window as he spoke. “This organization was established by a world that was weary of war.”
“Dumbarton Oaks,” Janson said. “1944.”
Zinsou nodded. “However broad its mandate has become, its central mission has always been the promotion of peace. There are attendant ironies. Did you know that the ground where this very building stands had previously been a slaughterhouse? Cattle were brought up the East River on a barge, then led by a Judas goat to the city’s abattoirs, on this very spot. It is something I regularly remind myself: this property was once a slaughterhouse.” He turned around to face the American operative. “We must take care that it does not become one again.”
“Look into my eyes,” the tall black-haired man intoned in a soothing voice. His high cheekbones gave an almost Asiatic cast to his features. The man who called himself Peter Novak hovered over the elderly scholar, who was lying prone on a Jackson table, a large translucent platform that supported his chest and thighs while permitting his abdomen to hang free. It was standard equipment in spinal surgery, for it shifted blood away from the spinal area and minimized bleeding.
Intravenous fluids dripped into his left arm. The table was adjusted so that the old scholar’s head and shoulders were propped upward, and he and the man who called himself Peter Novak could commune face-to-face.
In the background, a twelfth-century plainsong could be heard. Slow, high voices in unison; they were words of ecstasy, yet to Angus Fielding it sounded like a dirge.
O ignis spiritus paracliti,
vita vite omnis creature,
sanctus es vivificando formas
A six-inch-long incision had been made in the middle of the old man’s back, and metal retractors parted the paraspinal muscles, exposing the ivory-white bones of the spinal column.
“Look into my eyes, Angus,” the man repeated.
Angus Fielding looked, could not help looking, but the man’s eyes were nearly black, and there was no pity in them whatsoever. They seemed scarcely human. They seemed like a well of pain.
The black-haired man had dropped the cultivated Hungarian accent; his voice was uninflected but distinctly American. “What exactly did Paul Janson tell you?” he demanded once more as the frail old scholar shivered with terror.
The
black-haired man nodded to a young woman, who had extensive training as an orthopedic technician. A large, open-bore trocar, the size of a knitting needle, was pushed through the fibrous sheath surrounding the soft disk that separated the fifth and sixth thoracic vertebrae. After less than a minute, the woman nodded at him: the trocar was in position.
“And—good news—we’re there.”
A thin copper wire, insulated except for the tip, was then inserted through the trocar to the spinal root itself, the trunk through which nerve impulses from the entire body made their way. Demarest adjusted a dial until a small amount of electrical current began to pulse through the copper wire. The reaction was immediate.
The scholar screamed—a loud, bloodcurdling scream—until there was no air left in his lungs.
“Now that,” Demarest said, cutting off the current, “is a very singular sensation, is it not?”
“I’ve told you everything I know,” the scholar gasped.
Demarest adjusted the dial.
“I’ve told you,” the scholar repeated as pain mounted upon pain, penetrating his body in convulsions of purest agony. “I’ve told you!” Shimmering and otherworldly, the choral threnodies of joy floated far above the agony that consumed him.
Sanctus es unguendo
periculose fractos:
sanctus es tergendo
fetida vulnera.
No, there was no pity in the black pools of the man’s eyes. Instead, there was paranoia: a conviction that his enemies were anywhere and everywhere.
“So you maintain,” Alan Demarest said. “You maintain this because you believe the pain will stop if I am persuaded that you have told me the whole truth. But the pain will not stop, because I know that you have not done so. Janson sought you out. He sought you out because he knew that you were a friend. That you were loyal. How can I make you understand that it is me you owe your loyalty to? You feel pain, do you not? And that means you are alive, yes? Is that not a gift? Oh, your entire existence will be a sensorium of pain. I believe that if I can make you understand that, we might begin to make progress.”
“Oh dear God no!” the scholar shouted as another course of electricity penetrated his body.
“Extraordinary, isn’t it?” Demarest said. “Every C fiber in your body—every pain-transmitting nerve—feeds into this main trunk of nerve bundles that I’m stimulating right now. I could attach electrodes to every inch of your body and it wouldn’t yield the same intensity of pain.”
Another scream reverberated through the room—another scream that ended only because breath itself did.
“To be sure, pain is not the same as torture,” Demarest went on. “As an academic, you’ll appreciate the importance of such distinctions. Torture requires an element of human intention. It has to be interwoven with meaning. Simply to be eaten by a shark, let us say, is not to experience torture—whereas if someone intentionally dangles you over a shark tank, that is torture. You might dismiss this as a nicety, but I’d beg to differ. The experience of torture, you see, requires not only the intention to inflict pain. It also requires that the subject of torture recognize that intention. You must recognize my intention to cause pain. More precisely, you must recognize that I intend you to recognize that I intend to cause pain. One has to satisfy that structure of regressive recognition. Would you say that you and I have done so?”
“Yes!” the old man screamed. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” His neck thrashed this way and that as a bolt of electricity blasted into him once more. He was being raped by pain, felt that the very fiber of his existence had been violated.
“Or would you offer another analysis?”
“No!” Fielding shrieked with pain once more. The agony was simply beyond imagining.
“You know what Emerson says of the great man: ‘When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit.’ Would you concur?”
“Yes!” the scholar shrieked. “Yes! No! Yes!” The muscular convulsions that rippled his spine only magnified the already unendurable pain.
“Are you surprised how much pain you’re capable of surviving? Are you wondering how your consciousness can even contain suffering of this magnitude? It’s OK to be curious. The thing to remember is, the human body today is really no different than it was twenty thousand years ago. The circuits of pleasure and pain are as they were. So you might think that there is no difference between the experience of being tortured to death during, let us say, the Spanish Inquisition and the experience that I can offer you. You might think that, wouldn’t you? But, speaking as something of an aficionado, I’d have to say you’d be wrong. Our evolving understanding of neurochemistry is really quite valuable. Ordinarily, the human body has the equivalent of a safety valve: when C-fiber stimulation reaches a certain level, endorphins kick in, blunting and assuaging the pain. Or else unconsciousness results. God, it used to piss me off when that happened. Either way, the phenomenology of pain is limited. It’s like brightness: you can experience only a certain level of brightness. You maximally stimulate the cones and rods of the retina, and after that point, there’s no change in the perception of brightness. But when it comes to pain, contemporary neuroscience changes the whole game. What’s in your IV drip is absolutely crucial to the effect, my dear Angus. You knew that, didn’t you? We’ve been administering a substance known as naltrexone. It’s an opiate antagonist—it blocks the natural painkillers in your brain, those legendary endorphins. So the ordinary limits of pain can be pushed past. Not exactly a natural high.”
Another wail of agony—almost a keening—interrupted his disquisition, but Demarest was undeterred. “Just think: because of the naltrexone drip, you can experience a level of pain that the human body was never meant to know. A level of pain that none of your ancestors would ever have known, even if they’d had the misfortune to be eaten alive by a saber-toothed tiger. And it can increase nearly without limit. The main limit, I would say, is the patience of the torturer. Do I strike you as a patient man? I can be, Angus. You’ll discover that. I can be very patient when I need to be.”
Angus Fielding, distinguished master of Trinity College, began to do something he had not done since he was eight: he broke down and sobbed.
“Oh, you’ll yearn for unconsciousness—but the drip also contains potent psychostimulants—a carefully titrated combination of dexmethylphenidate, atomoxetine, and adrafinil—which will keep you maximally alert, indefinitely. You won’t miss anything. It will be quite exquisite, the ultimate in-body experience. I know you think you’ve experienced agony beyond endurance, beyond comprehension. But I can increase it tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold. What you have experienced so far is nothing at all, compared to what lies ahead. Assuming, of course, that you continue to stonewall.” Demarest’s hand hovered near the dial. “It’s really most important to me that I receive satisfactory answers to my questions.”
“Anything,” Fielding breathed, his cheeks wet with tears. “Anything.”
Demarest smiled as the black pools of his gaze bore down on the aging don. “Look into my eyes, Angus. Look into my eyes. And now you must confide in me utterly. What did you tell Paul Janson?”
Chapter Thirty-seven
“Lookit, I’ve got one person watching the entrance,” Jessica Kincaid told Janson as they rode together in the back of the commandeered yellow cab. “He thinks it’s a training exercise. But if she goes out, decides to head for one of their private planes in Teeterboro, we might lose her forever.” She wore a cotton-knit shirt adorned with the logo of the phone company Verizon.
“Did you do the tenant search?”
“Did the whole enchilada,” she said.
In fact, with a number of discreet telephone calls, she confirmed what observation had suggested, learning more than she needed to know. The inhabitants of the building included masters of finance capitalism, foundation directors,
and old New York types who were better known for their philanthropy than for the origins of the wealth that made it possible. Flashier souls, eager to flaunt their newfound money, might opt for a penthouse in one of Donald Trump’s palaces, where every surface gleamed or glittered. At 1060 Fifth Avenue, the elevators still retained the brass accordion doors originally installed in the 1910s, as well as the darkened fir-wood paneling. The building’s co-op board rivaled the Myanmar junta in its inflexibility and authoritarianism; it could be counted upon to reject the applications of prospective residents who might turn out to be “flamboyant”—its favorite term of derogation. Ten sixty Fifth Avenue welcomed benefactors of the arts, but not artists. It welcomed patrons of the opera, but would never countenance an opera singer. Those who, in a civic-minded spirit, supported culture were honored; those who created culture were shunned.
“We’ve got one Agnes Cameron on the floor above her,” Kincaid said. “Serves on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, socially impeccable. I called the office of the director, pretending to be a journalist writing a profile of her. Said I was told she was in a meeting there, and I needed to double-check some of the quotes. A very snotty woman said, ‘Well, that’s impossible, Mrs. Cameron is in Paris at the moment.’”
“That the best candidate?”
“Seems to be, yeah. According to the phone company records, she had a high-speed DSL Internet connection installed last year.”
She handed Janson a cotton-knit shirt emblazoned with the black and red Verizon logo, matching hers. “Turns out your friend Cornelius has a brother at Verizon,” she explained. “Gets ’em wholesale. His-and-hers.” Next came a leather instrument belt to cinch around his waist. A bright orange test phone was the bulkiest item. Rounding out the costume was a gray metal toolbox.
As they approached the doorman at the awning, Jessie Kincaid did the talking. “We’ve got a customer, I guess she’s out of the country now, but her DSL line is on the fritz and she asked us to service it while she’s gone.” She flipped a laminated ID at him. “Customer name is Cameron.”
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