“Sir,” he said to the dark-suited agent. “I protect the leader of the Islamic Republic of Mansur.”
The Secret Service agent looked away; foreign heads of state did not fall within his bailiwick.
“We have received a report that someone is hiding—in there!” He gestured toward the chapel.
“I can ask someone to check it out,” the American said impassively. “Can’t leave my post.”
“It’s just over there. I myself think there’s nobody there at all.”
“We had the whole place turned over a few hours before. Be inclined to agree with you.”
“But you’ll take a look? Thirty seconds of your time? Doubtless there’s nothing to the report, but if we are mistaken on this score, we shall both be hard-pressed to explain why we did nothing.”
A grudging sigh. “Show the way.”
The Caliph held open the small wooden door to the chapel and waited until the Secret Service man walked through.
The chapel was a long narrow space, with a low ceiling and recessed lighting to either side; a spotlight illuminated a black lacquered box toward the end of the hall. It was topped with a glowing slab of glass—some Western designer’s notion of secular religiosity. On the wall opposite the door was a mural with crescents, circles, squares, triangles, all overlapping, evidently signifying some amalgam of creeds. So very Western, the conceit that one could have it all, like the trimmings on a Big Mac: needless to say, the spurious harmony was predicated upon the unquestioned dominion of Western permissiveness. At the other end, near the entrance, was a series of small benches with rush seats. The floor was of irregular rectangles of slate.
“Ain’t no place to hide here,” the man said. “There’s nothing.”
The heavy, soundproofed door closed behind them, cutting off the noises of the lobby.
“What would it matter?” the Caliph said. “You have no weapon. You’d be helpless against an assassin!”
The Secret Service man grinned and opened his navy jacket, putting his hands on his waist, allowing the long-barreled revolver to show from his shoulder holster.
“Apologies,” the Caliph said. He turned around, his back to the American, seemingly captivated by the mural. Then he took a step back.
“You’re wasting my time,” the American said.
Abruptly, the Caliph whipped his head back, cracking into the American’s chin. As the burly agent reeled, the Caliph’s hands snaked toward his shoulder holster and pulled out the .357 Magnum revolver, a Ruger SP101 equipped with a four-inch barrel for enhanced accuracy. He slammed the butt down on the agent’s head, ensuring that smug infidel would be unconscious for many hours.
Now he secreted the Ruger inside his small valise of tooled leather and dragged the muscle-bound American behind the ebonized light box, where he would be invisible to a casual visitor.
It was time to reenter the Assembly Hall. Time to avenge indignities. Time to make history.
He would prove himself worthy of the title that his followers had bestowed upon him. He was the Caliph indeed.
And he would not fail.
In the executive suite, the light on the black slimline phone started to glow: it was the speaker’s “ready in five” notification—standard procedure, alerting him a few minutes before he would be asked to step out in front of the assembled leadership of the planet.
Novak reached for the phone, listened, said, “Thank you.”
And as he watched, Janson felt a jolt of foreboding.
Something was wrong.
Urgently, desperately, he jammed on the REWIND button and replayed the last ten seconds of video feed.
The light glowing on the glowing phone. Peter Novak reaching for it, bringing it to his ear …
Something was wrong.
But what? Janson’s unconscious mind was like a tocsin, wildly tolling its alarm, but he was tired, so very tired, and the fog of exhaustion closed in.
He replayed the last ten seconds once again.
The glowing light of a purring internal phone.
Peter Novak, protected by a battery of security guards but, for the moment, alone in the executive suite, reaching for the handset, for the instructions to prepare himself for his moment in the world’s spotlight.
Reaching with his right hand.
Peter Novak holding the handset to his ear.
His right ear.
Janson felt as if his very skin had been coated with a layer of ice. A terrible, painful clarity now commanded his mind as it filled with a cascade of images. It was maddening, faces and voices intermingling. Demarest at a desk in Khe Sanh, reaching for a phone. These H&I reports are worse than useless! Holding the phone tight against his ear for a long while. Finally, speaking again: A lot of things can happen in a free-fire zone. Demarest in the swampy terrain near Ham Luong reaching for the radiophone, listening intently, barking a series of commands. Reaching with his left hand, holding the phone to his left ear.
Alan Demarest was left-handed. Invariably so. Exclusively so.
The man in the executive suite was not Alan Demarest.
Christ almighty! Janson felt the blood rush to his head, his temples throbbing.
He had sent a double. An impostor. Janson had been the one to warn the others about the danger of underestimating their opponent. Yet he had done just that.
And the stratagem made perfect sense. If your enemy has a good idea, steal it, Demarest had told him in the killing fields of Vietnam. The Mobius programmers were now Demarest’s enemies. He gained his freedom by destroying his own duplicates, but then he had been planning his takeover for years. During that time he had not only been accumulating assets and allies : he had created a duplicate of his own—one who was under his power.
Why hadn’t Janson thought of it?
The impostor who sat in the executive suite was not Peter Novak; he was working for him. Yes, this was precisely what Demarest would have done. He would have … reversed the angle. See the two white swans instead of the one black one. See the slice of pie instead of the pie with the slice missing. Flip the Necker cube outward instead of inward. Master the gestalt.
The man who was on his way to address the General Assembly was the Judas goat, leading them to their slaughter. He was the cat’s paw, drawing out their fire.
In just a few minutes, the man, this copy of a copy, this doubly ersatz Novak, would take his position before the green-marble podium.
And he would be shot dead.
That would not be Novak’s undoing. It would be their own undoing. Alan Demarest would have confirmed his most paranoid suspicions: he would have flushed out his enemies, would have discovered that the whole invitation had indeed been a plot.
At the same time, they would have destroyed their last direct link to Alan Demarest. Nell Pearson was dead. Márta Lang, as she’d called herself, was dead. Every human vessel that might lead to him had been severed—except the man in the executive suite. A man who must have given half a year of his life to recuperate from reconstructive surgery. A man who—willingly or unwillingly—had sacrificed his own identity to the brilliant maniac who held the future of the world in his hands. If he were killed, Janson would have lost his last remaining lead.
And if he mounted the podium, he would be killed.
The scheme they had set in motion could not be stopped. It was not in their control: that was its great recommendation—and, possibly, its lethal flaw.
Frantically, Janson flipped to the camera angle on the Mansur delegation. There was the aisle seat that had been occupied by the Caliph.
Empty.
Where was he?
Janson had to find him: it was their only chance to prevent catastrophe.
Now he activated his filament microphone and spoke, knowing his words would be relayed to the secretary-general’s earpiece.
“You have got to postpone Novak’s appearance. I need ten minutes.”
The secretary-general was seated at the high marble bench be
hind the dais, smiling and nodding. “That’s impossible,” he whispered, without altering his public expression.
“Do it!” Janson said. “You’re the secretary-general, goddammit! You figure it out.”
Then he raced down the carpeted stairs and toward the hallway that bounded the Assembly Hall. He had to find the fanatic from Anura. This assassination would not save the world; it would doom it.
Chapter Forty-one
Janson’s rubber-soled feet raced down the white-tiled hallway. The Caliph had disappeared from the Assembly Hall—which meant, presumably, that he was retrieving a weapon he or a confederate had somewhere managed to stow earlier. The South Lobby, brilliantly lit from the expansive glazed wall, was vacant. The giant escalator was empty. He bounded toward the delegates’ lounge. Seated on a white-leather sofa, two blond women were deep in conversation: from the looks of them, they were extras from a Scandinavian delegation who found that there was no room for them in the Assembly Hall. Otherwise, nothing.
Where could he be? Janson’s mind desperately sorted through possibilities.
Ask it differently: where would you be, Janson?
The chapel. A long, narrow space that was almost never used but was always kept open. It was adjacent to the secretary-general’s suite, just to the other side of the curved wall that fronted the Assembly Hall. The one room in the building where one was guaranteed to be unobserved.
Janson put on another burst of speed, and though his rubber-soled shoes made little sound, his breathing grew heavier.
Now he pushed open the heavy, soundproofed door and saw a man in flowing white robes bending down behind a large ebonized box. As the door closed behind Janson, the man whirled around.
The Caliph.
For a moment Janson was so convulsed with hate that he could not breathe. He composed his face into a look of friendly surprise.
The Caliph spoke first. “Khaif hallak ya akhi.”
Janson remembered his large beard and Arab-style headdress and forced himself to smile. He knew that the man had addressed him in Arabic; probably it was an insubstantial pleasantry, but he could only guess. In Janson’s best version of Oxbridge English—an Arab royal might well have been educated at such an institution, absorbed its customs—he said, “My dear brother, I hope I wasn’t intruding. It’s just that I’ve such a migraine, I was hoping to commune with the Prophet himself.”
The Caliph strode toward him. “Yet we would both be sorry to miss any more of the proceedings, having come so far. Don’t you agree?” His voice was like the hiss of a snake.
“You make a good point, my brother,” Janson said.
As the Caliph walked toward him, scrutinizing him closely, Janson’s skin began to crawl. He came closer and closer, until he was just a foot away. Janson remembered that social conceptions of permissible physical distance varied among cultures, that Arabs typically stood closer to each other than Westerners did. The Caliph placed a hand on Janson’s shoulder.
It was a gentle, friendly, confiding gesture—from the man who had killed his wife.
Involuntarily, Janson flinched.
His mind filled with a flood of images: a cascade of destruction, the ruined office building in downtown Caligo, the phone call informing him that his wife was dead.
The Caliph’s face suddenly closed.
Janson had betrayed himself.
The assassin knew.
The muzzle of a long-barreled revolver was jabbed into Janson’s chest. The Caliph had made his decision; his suspicious visitor would not be permitted to escape.
Mathieu Zinsou stared at the packed Assembly Hall, saw row after row of powerful men and women beginning to grow restive. He had promised that his introductory remarks would be brief; in fact, they turned out to be uncharacteristically rambling and prolix. Yet he had no choice but to stall! He saw the American ambassador to the U.N. exchange glances with his colleague the permanent representative; how was it that this acclaimed master of diplomatic oratory had become such a bore?
The secretary-general’s eyes flicked back to the pages on the lectern in front of him. Four paragraphs of text, which he had already read; he had nothing more prepared and, in the tension of the moment, very little notion of what might appropriately be said. One would have had to know him intimately to notice that the blood had drained from his dark brown face.
“Progress has been made all over the world,” he said, his vowels orotund, his message embarrassingly banal. “Genuine advances in development and international comity have been seen in Europe, from Spain to Turkey, from Romania to Germany, from Switzerland and France and Italy to Hungary, Bulgaria, and Slovakia, not to mention the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and, of course, Poland. Genuine progress has been made, too, in Latin America—from Peru to Venezuela, from Ecuador to Paraguay, from Chile to Guyana and French Guyana, from Colombia to Uruguay to Bolivia, from Argentina to …” He was drawing a blank: I’ll take South American nation-states for one hundred, Alex. He scanned the rows of delegations before him, his eyes darting from one national placard to another. “To, well, Suriname!” A sense of relief, fleeting as a glowworm’s flash. “The developments in Suriname have been most heartening, most heartening indeed.” How long could he draw this out? What was taking Janson so long?
Zinsou cleared his throat. He was a man who seldom perspired; he was perspiring now. “And, of course, we would be remiss if we did not single out for attention the progress we have seen among the nations of the Pacific Rim … .”
Janson stared at the man who had robbed him of the happiness that had once been his, the man who had stolen the treasure of his life.
He bowed his legs slightly, keeping his feet spaced out at shoulder level. “I have offended you,” he said plaintively. Suddenly, he swept his left elbow up over the Caliph’s right shoulder and grabbed the wrist of his gun arm with both hands. With a powerful upward wrench, he locked the man’s arm. Then he lashed out with his left leg, and the two men landed hard on the slate floor. The Caliph whipped his left hand repeatedly to the side of Janson’s head. Yet a protective move would enable the Caliph to wriggle free: Janson had no choice but to try to endure the painful blows. The only viable defense would be an offense. He forced the Anuran’s wrist into a lock, twisting it palm upward. The Caliph followed the direction of his pressure, angling the Ruger toward Janson’s body.
It would take only an instant for his trigger finger to fire a lethal shot.
Now, Janson slammed the Anuran’s gun hand against the slate floor, producing a spasm that caused him to loosen his grip on the weapon. In a lightningfast movement, Janson grabbed it and scrambled to his feet. The Anuran remained limp on the polished stone floor.
He had the gun now.
Immediately, he triggered the switch that activated his lip mike. “The threat has been neutralized,” Janson told the U.N. secretary-general.
Then he felt a staggering blow from behind. The cobralike assassin had leaped from the ground and vised a forearm around Janson’s throat, choking off his air. Janson bucked violently, twisting and thrashing, hoping to throw off the younger, lighter man, but the terrorist was all coiled muscle. Janson felt bulky and slow by comparison, a bear menaced by a panther.
Now, instead of trying to dislodge the Caliph’s grip, he reached around and held him even tighter. Then he kicked both his legs into the air and hurled himself to the floor, landing heavily on his back—yet cushioning his impact with the body of his assailant, who was slammed against the floor as he fell.
He felt an expulsion of breath against the back of his neck and knew that the Caliph had been dealt a serious body blow.
Winded and aching himself, Janson rolled over and began to rise to his feet. As he did so, the Caliph rose, with incredible endurance, and threw himself at him, his hands formed into claws.
If the distance between them had been greater, Janson would have ducked or stepped aside. Neither was possible. He lacked the speed. He lacked the agility.
&nbs
p; A bear.
So be it. He held out his arms, as if in an embrace—and, with a surge of strength, he squeezed the Caliph to his body, locking his arms around the other man’s chest. Tight. Tighter. Tighter still.
Even as he squeezed, however, the assassin rained powerful blows on the back of his neck. Janson knew he could not hold out for much longer. In a sudden, convulsive effort, he dropped his armlock and lifted the Anuran into the air horizontally, where he thrashed like a powerful eel. In an equally abrupt movement, Janson fell down into a crouch, his left knee bent to the ground, his right knee angled upward. At the same time, he slammed the lithe-bodied assailant down against it.
The Caliph’s back snapped with a horrifying sound, something between a crunch and a pop, and his mouth contorted into a scream that would not come.
Janson seized him by the shoulders and slammed him against the slate floor. He did so again. And again. The back of the Caliph’s head no longer made the sound of hard bone against a hard floor, for the rear cranial bone had been smashed into fragments, exposing the soft tissues beneath. The Caliph’s eyes grew unfocused, glazed. The eyes were said to be the windows to the soul, yet this man had no soul. Certainly not anymore.
Janson jammed the Ruger into his own shoulder holster. Using a small pocket mirror, he adjusted his beard and kaffiyeh and made sure there were no visible bloodstains on his person. Then he walked out of the chapel and into the General Assembly Hall, where he stood near the back.
For years he had fantasized about killing the man who had killed his wife. Now he had done so.
And all he felt was sick.
The black-haired man stood at the podium, giving a speech about the challenges of a new century. Janson’s eyes searched every hollow and contour. He looked like Peter Novak. He would be accepted as Novak. Yet he lacked the sense of command associated with the legendary humanitarian. His voice was thin, wavering; he seemed slightly nervous, out of his depth. Janson knew what the consensus would be afterward: Very fine speech, of course. Yet poor Mr. Novak was a bit under the weather, was he not?
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