receiving another Distinguished Intelligence Star.”
Janson shrugged. “Maybe I should get into the scrap-metal business.”
“But I also wanted you to hear some good news, and from me. Thanks to you, it
looks like we’re going to be able to resurrect the Mobius Program. Doug and the
others have walked me through it several times, and it’s looking better and
better.”
“Is that right?” Janson said impassively.
“You don’t seem surprised,” President Berquist said, sounding straitened. “I
supposed you anticipated the possibility.”
“When you’ve been around the planners as long as I have, you stop being
surprised by their combination of brilliance and stupidity.”
The president scowled, displeased with the operative’s tone. “You’re talking
about some very extraordinary people, I’ll have you know.”
“Yes. Extraordinarily arrogant.” Janson shook his head slowly. “Anyway, you can
just forget about it.”
“The question is, where do you get off talking to the president like that?”
Douglas Albright, the DIA deputy director, interjected.
“The question is whether you people ever learn anything,” Janson shot back.
“We’ve learned a great deal,” Albright said. “We won’t make the same mistakes
twice.”
“True—the mistakes will be different ones.”
The secretary of state spoke. “To jettison the program at this point would be to
scuttle tens of thousands of man-hours of work, as Doug points out. It would
also be like trying to unring a bell. As far as the world is concerned, Peter
Novak still exists.”
“We can remake him, recast him, with a whole set of additional safeguards,”
Albright said, giving the secretary of state an encouraging look. “There are a
hundred measures we can take to prevent what Demarest did from recurring.”
“I don’t believe you people,” Janson said. “A few days ago, you’d all agreed it
was a colossal error. A basic miscalculation, both political and moral. You
understood—or, anyway, you seemed to understand—that a plan that was premised on
massive deception was bound to go awry. And in ways that could never be
predicted.”
“We were panicked,” the secretary of state replied. “We weren’t thinking
rationally. Of course we just wanted the whole thing to go away. But Doug here
went over everything with us, calmly, rationally. The potential upside remains
extraordinary. It’s like atomic energy—of course there’s always the risk of a
catastrophic mishap. None of us are debating that. Yet the potential benefits to
humanity are even greater.” As he spoke, his voice grew smoother and more
sonorous: the senior diplomat of the press conferences and television
appearances. He seemed hardly the same man who had been so frightened at the
Hempel estate. “To turn our backs on it because of something that didn’t happen
would be to abdicate our responsibility as political leaders. You can see that,
can’t you? Are we on the same page?”
“We’re not reading the same goddamn book!”
“Get over yourself,” Albright snapped. “Fact of the matter is, we owe it all to
you—you handled things perfectly. You’re the one who made the resurrection
possible.” He did not have to refer to the details: that two men had quickly
been removed from the Secretariat Building, each draped with a sheet, headed for
very different destinations. “The understudy has recovered nicely. He’s been
kept in one of our security facilities, subjected to extensive chemical
interrogation. Just as you surmised, he’s terrified, absolutely ready to
cooperate. Demarest never entrusted him with the command codes, of course. But
that’s OK. Without Demarest around to constantly rescramble them, our
technicians have been able to penetrate the systems. We’ve regained control.”
“That was your mistake in the past, imagining that you had control.” Janson
shook his head slowly.
“We’ve certainly got control over Demarest’s understudy,” said the gray-faced
technician Janson remembered from the Hempel estate gathering. “A fellow named
Laszlo Kocsis. Used to teach English at a technical school in Hungary. He went
under the knife eighteen months ago. A carrot-and-stick situation. Make a long
story short, if he went along with Demarest’s plans for him, he’d get ten
million dollars. If he didn’t, his family would be slaughtered. Not a strong
man. He’s pretty much under our thumb now.”
“As you anticipated,” the DIA man said graciously. “We’ll be offering him a
small island on the Caribbean. Fitting his reclusive ways. He’ll be a gilded
prisoner. Unable to leave. Under twenty-four-hour guard of a Consular Operations
unit. It seemed appropriate to borrow some funds from the Liberty Foundation to
pay for the arrangement.”
“But let’s not get sidetracked by formalities,” the president said with a tight
smile. “The point is, everything’s in order.”
“And the Mobius Program is back in business,” Janson said.
“Thanks to you,” Berquist said. He winked, a show of his characteristic affable
command.
“But better than before,” Albright put in. “Because of all that we’ve learned.”
“So you grasp the logic of our position,” the secretary of state said.
Janson looked around to see what the president saw: the complacent faces of the
men and women assembled in the Meridian International Center—senior civil
servants, senior administrators and analysts, members of permanent Washington.
The remains of the Mobius Program. They were the best and the brightest, always
had been. From childhood, they had been rewarded with the top grades and test
scores; all their lives they had received the approbation of their superiors.
They believed in nothing greater than themselves. They knew that means were to
be assessed only in relation to their ends. They were convinced that
probabilities could be assigned to every unknown variable, that the wash of
uncertainty could be tamed into precisely quantified risk.
And despite the fact that their ranks had been decimated by unanticipated
vagaries of human nature, they had learned nothing.
“My game, my rules,” said Janson. “Gentlemen, the Mobius Program is over.”
“On whose orders?” President Berquist snorted.
“Yours.”
“What’s gotten into you, Paul?” he said, his face darkening. “You’re not making
sense.”
“I get that a lot.” Janson faced him squarely. “You know the Washington saying:
there are no permanent allies, only permanent interests. This program wasn’t
your devising. It was something you inherited from your predecessor, who
inherited it from his predecessor, and so on … ”
“That’s true of a lot of things, from our defense program to our monetary
policy.”
“Sure. The lifers work on these things—as far as they’re concerned, you’re just
passing through.”
“It’s important to take a long view of these things,” President Berquist said,
shrugging.
“A question for you, Mr. President. You have just received and accepted an
illegal personal contribution of $1.5 million.” As Janson spoke, he imagined
Grigori Berman guffawing back in Berthwick House. It had been the sort of
outsize mischief that pleased him beyond measure. “How are you going to explain
that to Congress and to the American people?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about a big-time Beltway scandal—Watergate times ten. I’m talking
about watching your political career go up in flames. Call your banker. A
seven-figure sum was wired to your personal account from an account of Peter
Novak’s at International Netherlands Group Bank. The digital signatures can’t be
faked—well, not easily. So it sure seems like a foreign plutocrat has put you on
his payroll. A suspicious-minded member of the other party might start to wonder
about that. Could have something to do with your signing that banking secrecy
act into law the other week. Could have something to do with a lot of things.
Enough to keep a special prosecutor busy for years. It’s looking like a four- or
five-column headline in the Washington Post: is president on plutocrat’s
payroll? investigation pending. That sort of thing. The New York tabloids will
run with something crass, like rent-a-prez. You know those media feeding
frenzies—there’ll be such a din, you won’t be able to hear yourself think.”
“That’s bullshit!” the president exploded.
“And we’ll all enjoy watching you explain that to Congress. The details will
arrive by e-mail tomorrow to the Justice Department as well as the relevant
members of the House and the Senate.”
“But Peter Novak … ”
“Novak? Not an angle I’d want to focus any attention on, if I were you. I don’t
think either one of you will come away with your reputation intact.”
“You’re kidding me,” the president said.
“Call your banker,” Janson repeated.
The president stared at Janson. His personal and political instincts had gained
him the highest office of the land. They told him that Janson was not bluffing.
“You’re making a terrible mistake,” said Berquist.
“I can undo it,” Janson said. “It’s still not too late.”
“Thank you.”
“Though soon it will be. That’s why you need to decide about Mobius.”
“But—”
“Call your banker.”
The president left the room. A few minutes passed before he returned to his
seat.
“I consider this beneath contempt.” The president’s hard Scandinavian features
were livid with rage. “And it’s beneath you! My God, you’ve served your country
with incredible loyalty.”
“And was rewarded with a ‘beyond salvage’ order for my pains.”