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 paraditi, 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