“Conclusion: these aren’t pictures of one man.” Collins’s voice was flat.
“I went to his birthplace. There was a Peter Novak who was born to Janos and
Illana Ferenczi-Novak. He died about five years later, in 1942.”
Collins nodded, and once more, his lack of reaction was more chilling than any
reaction could have been. “Excellent work, Janson.”
“Tell me the truth,” Janson said. “I’m not crazy. I saw a man die.”
“That’s so,” Collins said.
“And not just any man. We’re talking about Peter Novak—a living legend.”
“Bingo.” Collins made a clicking sound. “You said it yourself. A living legend.”
Janson felt his stomach drop. A living legend. A creation of intelligence
professionals.
Peter Novak was an agency legend.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Collins slid off the stool and stood up. “There’s something I want to show you.”
He walked to his office, a large room facing the bay. On rustic wooden shelves
were rows of old copies of Studies in Intelligence, a classified journal for
American clandestine services. Monographs on international conflicts were
interspersed with popular novels and dog-eared volumes of Foreign Affairs. A Sun
Microsystems UltraSPARC workstation was connected to racked tiers of servers.
“You remember The Wizard of Oz? Bet they asked you about it when you were a POW.
I gather the North Vietnamese interrogators were obsessed with American popular
culture.”
“It didn’t come up,” Janson said curtly.
“Naw, you were probably too much of a hardass to give away the ending. Wouldn’t
want to jeopardize our national security that way … Sorry. That was out of line.
There’s one thing that divides us: whatever happens, you’ll always be a goddamn
war hero, and I’ll always be a civvy desk jockey, and for some people, that
makes you a better man. Irony is, ‘some people’ includes me. I’m jealous. I’m
one of those guys who wanted to have suffered without ever wanting to suffer.
Like wanting to have written a book, as opposed to wanting actually to write
one.”
“Can we move on?”
“You see, I’ve always thought it’s the moment when we lose our innocence. Up
there is the great and powerful Oz, and down there is the schmuck beneath the
curtain. But it’s not just him, it’s the whole goddamn contraption, the
machinery, the bellows, the levers, the steam nozzles, the diesel engine, or
whatever. You think that was easy to put together? And once you had that up and
running, it’s not going to make much difference who you’ve got behind the
curtain, or so we figured. It’s the machine, not the man, that matters.”
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,
omicron-level-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.”
“Molnar 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?”