“Principles,” Janson said. “Abstractions.”
“Indulgences, you mean to say.” A smile hovered over Mathieu Zinsou’s lips. “And
this is not the time for them. Now is the time for particulars. Here’s one: your
plan involves venturing a prediction of somebody who may not be predictable at
all.”
“There are no absolute predictions that we can make. I take your point. But
there are patterns—there are rules, even for the man who flouts the rules. I do
know this man.”
“Before yesterday, I’d have said the same. Peter Novak and I have met on a few
occasions. Once at a state dinner in Amsterdam. Once in Ankara, in the wake of
the Cyprus resolution he brokered—a purely ceremonial event. I was bearing the
official congratulations of this organization, announcing the withdrawal of U.N.
troops from the partition line. Of course, now I realize I was meeting with a
phantom. Perhaps a different man each time—presumably there are files kept by
the Mobius Program that could tell us. Yet I must say that I found him both
charismatic and affable. An appealing combination.”
“And a combination that’s been ascribed to you,” Janson said carefully.
Zinsou uttered a sentence in the complex tonal language of Fon, spoken by his
father’s people. Zinsou père had been a descendant of the royal court of
Dahomey, once a significant West African empire. “A favorite saying of my
great-uncle, the paramount chief, which he often repeated to the gaping
sycophants who surrounded him. Loosely translated, it means: The more you lick
my ass, the more I feel you’re trying to slip one past me.”
Janson laughed. “You’re even wiser than they say—”
Zinsou raised an index finger of mock admonishment. “I can’t help wondering. Did
Peter Novak believe any of it, or was he just playing along? I ask out of
injured pride, of course. It cudgels my sense of amour propre that someone
should believe I would, in effect, sell out the organization to which I have
devoted my life.” Zinsou toyed with his thick Montblanc fountain pen. “But
that’s just pride speaking.”
“Evil men are always quick to think evil of others. Besides, if it works, you’ll
have plenty of reason for pride. Pull this off, and it will be the greatest feat
of your career.”
An uncomfortable, lonely silence fell upon them.
Zinsou was not, by habit, a solitary man: after decades spent within the U.N.
bureaucracy, deliberation and consultation were second nature to him. His
diplomatic skills were most fully engaged in reconciling conflicts among the
U.N. divisions themselves—calming hostilities between the Department of
Peace-keeping-Operations and the Humanitarian Affairs people, preventing
resistance from forming among frontline workers or their superiors in the head
offices. He knew the thousand ways that the bureaucrats could stall executive
decisions, for in his long career he himself had had occasion to make use of
such techniques. The methods of bureaucratic infighting were as advanced and as
sophisticated as the techniques of aggression on the world’s battlefields. It
was a tribute to his own success on the internal battlefields that he had risen
as far and as fast as he had. Moreover, the bureaucratic battle was truly won
only when those you defeated were led to imagine that they had, in some way,
been victorious.
Being the secretary-general of the United Nations, Zinsou had decided, was like
conducting an orchestra of soloists. The task seemed impossible, and yet it
could be done. When he was in good form, Zinsou could lead a conflict-riven
committee to a consensus position that he had planned out before the meeting had
begun. His own preferences were masked; he would appear sympathetic to positions
he secretly found unacceptable. He would play off the preexisting tensions among
the assembled deputy special representatives and high commissioners; subtly lead
people into temporary coalitions against detested rivals; guide the discussion
through ricochets and clashes, like a pool shark bringing about a complex
sequence of carefully planned collisions by a well-aimed cue ball. And at the
end, when the committee had worked its way around to the very position he had
meant them to reach, he would, with a sigh of resignation and a display of
concessive largesse, say that the others in the room had talked him around to
their point of view. There were bureaucratic players whose ego demanded that
they be seen to have won. But true power belonged to those who wanted to win in
actuality, regardless of appearances. A number of people still accepted Zinsou’s
soft-spoken and courteous demeanor at face value and did not recognize the
forceful nature of his leadership. They were losers who imagined themselves
winners. Some of those who supported Zinsou did so because they believed they
could control him. Others, the smarter ones, supported him because they knew he
would be the most effective leader that the U.N. had known for decades, and they
knew that the U.N. was in desperate need of such leadership. It was a winning
alliance—for Zinsou and for the organization to which he had devoted his life.
But now the virtuoso of manufactured consent had to operate on his own. The
secret with which he had been entrusted was so explosive that there was nobody
to whom he, in turn, could entrust it. No colloquy, no consultation, no
deliberation, real or staged. There was only the American operative, a man
Zinsou found himself only gradually warming to. What bound them together was not
merely the explosive secret; it was also the knowledge that their
countermeasures were likely to end in failure. The so-called Zinsou Doctrine, as
the press had dubbed it, endorsed only interventions with a reasonable chance of
success. This one failed the test.
Yet what alternative was there?
Finally, Janson spoke again. “Let me tell you about the man I know. We’re
talking about somebody whose mind is a remarkable instrument, capable of
extraordinary real-time analysis. He can be a person of immense charm. And even
greater cruelty. My former colleagues in intelligence would tell you that men
like him can be valuable assets, as long as they are tightly constrained by the
situations in which they’re placed. The error of the Mobius planners is that
they placed him in a context that didn’t just permit but actively called upon
his skills at fluid and freeform improvisation. A context in which an immensity
of wealth and power was placed just out of his grasp. He played the world’s
mightiest plutocrat. Only the rules of the game prevented him from truly being
that person. So he threw himself into trying to overcome the program’s
safeguards. Eventually, he did.”
“It was not predicted.”
“Not by the Mobius planners. Incredible technical prowess combined with
extraordinary stupidity about human nature—typical of their breed. No, it was
not predicted. But it was predictable.”
“By you.”
“Certainly. But not only by me. I suspect you, too, would have seen the risks.”
Secretary-General Zinsou walked over to his enormous desk and sat down. “This
monster, this man who threatens us all—you may know him as well as you think you
do. You do not know me. And so I remain puzzled. Forgive me if I say that your
confidence in me undermines my confidence in you.”
“That’s not very diplomatic of you, is it? I appreciate your candor, all the
same. You may find that I know you a little better than you imagine.”
“Ah, those intelligence dossiers of yours, compiled by agents who think people
can be reduced to something like an instruction manual—the same mind-set that
gave rise to your Mobius Program.”
Janson shook his head. “I won’t pretend that we were acquainted, you and I, not
in the usual sense. But the thrust of world events over the past couple of
decades did mean that we ended up patrolling a few of the same rough
neighborhoods. I know what really happened in Sierra Leone, that week in
December, because I was there—monitoring all communications from the head of
U.N. Peace-keeping in the region and the head of the special delegation
appointed to coordinate the U.N. response. Not much peacekeeping was happening,
needless to say—the bloody civil war was raging out of control. Special Delegate
Mathieu Zinsou was asked to relay the commander’s report and intervention
request to New York. The designée was a U.N. high commissioner who would then
present it to the representatives of the Security Council—who would have refused
it, forbidden the intervention.”
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