reach and even its diplomatic achievements. The U.N. is owed billions of dollars
from member nations, including the United States, and the Secretary General
makes no secret of the fact that the consequent salary freezes and cutbacks have
made it difficult to recruit and retain high-caliber employees. Mr. Novak, whose
munificence has been the stuff of legend, may have concrete proposals for easing
the U.N.’s financial crisis. Top-ranking U.N. officials suggest that the Liberty
Foundation’s director may also propose a joining of forces with the U.N. to
coordinate assistance to those regions most afflicted by poverty and conflict.
The reclusive Mr. Novak could not be reached for comment.
Continued on page B4.
It would all happen tomorrow, and what happened would depend on how good their
preparations were.
One foot in front of the other.
Janson—officially an outside security consultant hired by the Executive Office
of the Secretary-General—had spent the last four hours wandering through the
United Nations complex. What had they forgotten? Janson tried to think, but
mists kept closing in on him; he had slept very little in the past few days, had
been trying to sustain himself with black coffee and aspirin. One foot in front
of the other. This was the civilian reconnaissance mission upon which everything
would depend.
The U.N. complex, extending along the East River from Forty-second Street to
Forty-eighth Street, was an island unto itself. The Secretariat Building loomed
thirty-nine stories; in the skyline of the city, celebrated landmarks like the
Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building were skinny protuberances by
comparison—trees beside a mountain. What distinguished the Secretariat wasn’t
its height so much as its enormous breadth, greater than a city block. On either
side of the building, the curtain wall of blue-green Thermopane glass and
aluminum was identical, each floor demarcated by a black row of spandrels, its
symmetry interrupted only by the irregularly spaced grilles of the mechanical
floors. The two narrow ends were covered with Vermont marble—a concession,
Janson recalled, to the former Vermont senator who had chaired the Headquarters
Advisory Committee and served as America’s permanent representative to the U.N.
In a more innocent era, Frank Lloyd Wright termed the Secretariat “a
super-crate, to ship a fiasco to hell.” The words now seemed menacingly
prescient.
The low General Assembly Building, which was situated just to the north of the
Secretariat, was more adventurous in design. It was an oddly curvate rectangle,
swooping down in the middle and flaring to either end. An incongruous
dome—another concession to the senator—was placed on the center of its roof,
looking like an oversize turbine vent. Now that the General Assembly Building
was vacant, he paced through it several times, his eyes sweeping every surface
as if for the first time. The south wall was pure glass, creating a light and
airy delegates’ lounge, overlooked by sweeping white balconies in three tiers.
In the center of the building, the Assembly Hall was a vast semicircular atrium,
green leather seats arranged around the central dais, which was a vast altar of
green marble atop black. Looming over it, mounted on a vast gilded wall, was the
circular U.N. logo—the two wheatlike garlands beneath a stylized view of the
globe. For some reason, the globe logo, with its circles and perpendicular
lines, struck him as a view centered upon the crosshairs of a scope: target
earth.
“Some people wanna fill the world with silly love songs,” the Russian crooned
tunelessly.
“Grigori?” Janson said into his cell phone. Of course it was Grigori. Janson
glanced around the vast atrium, taking in the two huge mounted video screens on
either side of the rostrum. “You doing OK?”
“Never better!” Grigori Berman said stoutly. “Back in own home. Private nurse
named Ingrid! Second day, I keep dropping thermometer on floor just to watch her
bend over. The haunches on this filly—Venus in white Keds! Ingrid, I say, how
about you play nurse? ‘Meester Berman,’ she squeals, very shocked, ‘I am nurse.’
”
“Listen, Grigori, I’ve got a request to make. If you’re not up to it, though,
just let me know.” Janson spoke for a few minutes, providing a handful of
necessary details; either Berman would work out the rest or he wouldn’t.
Berman was silent for a few moments when Janson finished talking. “Now it is
Grigori Berman who is shocked. What you propose, sir, is unethical, immoral,
illegal—is devious violation of standards and practices of international
banking.” A beat. “I love it.”
“Thought so,” said Janson. “And you can pull it off?”
“I get by with a little help from my friends,” Berman crooned.
“You sure you’re up to doing this?”
“You ask Ingrid what Grigori Berman can do,” he answered, spluttering with
indignation. “What Grigori up to doing? What Grigori not up to doing?”
Janson clicked off his Ericsson and kept pacing through the hall. He walked
behind the green-marble lectern where speakers stood to address the assembled,
and looked out at the banked tiers of seats where the delegates would be
congregated. The chief national representatives would fill the first fifteen
rows of chairs and tables. Placards were mounted on bars that ran along the
curved tables, country names spelled out in white letters on black: along one
side of an aisle, peru, mexico, india, el salvador, colombia, bolivia, others he
could not make out in the dim light. To the other side, paraguay, luxembourg,
iceland, egypt, china, belgium, yemen, united kingdom, and more. The order
seemed random, but the placards went on and on, signposts for an endlessly
various, endlessly fractured world. At the long tables, there were buttons that
delegates could press to signal their intention to speak, and audio plugs for
headphones, supplying simultaneous translation in whatever language was
required. Behind the official delegate tables were steeply raked tiers of seats
for additional members of the diplomatic teams. Overhead, a recessed oculus was
filled with dangling lights and surrounded by starlike spotlights. The curving
walls were of louvered wood, interspersed with vast murals by Fernand Leger. A
small clock was centered along a long marble balcony, visible only to those at
the rostrum. Above the balcony were yet more rows of seats. And behind them,
discreetly framed by curtains, was a series of glassed-in booths, where
translators, technicians, and U.N. security staff were stationed.
It resembled a magnificent theater, and in many ways, it was.
Janson left the hall and made his way to the rooms that were immediately behind
the rostrum: an office for the use of the secretary-general and a general
“executive suite.” Given the placement of the security details, it would simply
be impossible to launch an assault on those spaces. On his third walkabout,
Janson found himself drawn to what seemed to be a little-used chapel, or as it
had more recently come to be styled, meditation room. It was a small narrow
space with a Chagall mural at one end, just down the corridor from the main
entrance to the Assembly Hall.
Finally, Janson walked down the long ramp on the western side of the building,
from which the delegates would be pouring in. The geometry of security was
impressive: the looming bulk of the Secretariat itself functioned as a shield,
offering protection from most angles. The adjacent streets would be blocked off
to nonofficial traffic: only accredited journalists and members of the
diplomatic delegations would be permitted in the vicinity.
Alan Demarest couldn’t have chosen a safer venue if he’d retreated to a bunker
in Antarctica.
The more Janson explored the situation, the more he admired the tactical genius
of his nemesis. Something truly extraordinary would have to happen to foil
it—which meant that they were counting on something that could not be counted
on.
What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath
light with darkness?
Yet Janson saw the imperative for such a fellowship more clearly than anyone.
Defeating this master of subterfuge would require something more than the
bloodless, calculated moves and countermoves of the rational planners: it called
for the unbridled, unslakable, irrational, and, yes, unbounded wrath of a true
fanatic. About that there could be no dispute: their best chance to defeat
Demarest was to resort to the one thing that could not be controlled.
To be sure, the planners imagined they could control it. But they never had,
never could. They were all of them playing with fire.
They had to prepare to get burned.
CHAPTER FORTY
The motorcades started arriving at the U.N. Plaza at seven o’clock the next
morning, escorting humanity of every cultural and political coloration. Military
heads of state in their full-dress uniforms strode up the ramp as if reviewing
their troops, feeling protected and empowered by their self-bestowed ribbons and
bars. They regarded the narrow-shouldered leaders of the so-called democracies
as nothing more than puffed-up central bankers: did not their dark suits and
tight-knotted ties signal allegiance to the mercantile classes rather than to
the authentic glories of national power? The elected leaders of the liberal