But that was not an option.
Only he survived.
And in some calculating part of his mind, a clockwork mechanism spooled with a
hard, icy rage. He had taken arms against a compound of fanatics, only to
succumb to something far more diabolical. Outrage infused his soul with a near
cryogenic frost. Emotions like despondency and grief had to give way before a
larger emotion, an absolute and unyielding thirst for justice, and it was that
emotion that commanded him not to succumb to the other emotions. He was the one
left alive—left to find out what had just happened.
And why.
PART TWO
CHAPTER NINE
Washington, D.C.
“The prime directive here is secrecy,” the man from the Defense Intelligence
Agency said to the others in the room. With his thick, dark eyebrows, broad
shoulders, and brawny forearms, he had the look of someone who worked with his
hands; in fact, Douglas Albright was an intensely cerebral man, given to
brooding and deliberation. He held a Ph.D. in comparative politics and another
graduate degree in the foundations of game theory. “Secrecy is priority number
one, two, and three. There should be no confusion about that.”
Such confusion was unlikely, for the imperative even accounted for the unlikely
venue for the hastily convened meeting. The Meridian International Center was
located on Crescent Place, just off Sixteenth Street on Meridian Hill. A blandly
handsome building in the neoclassical style that was the architectural lingua
franca of official Washington, it was anything but eye-catching. Its charms were
discreet and had much to do with its curious status as a building that was not
owned by the federal government—the center billed itself a nonprofit educational
and cultural institution—but was almost entirely devoted to very private
government functions. The center had an elegant front entrance of carved oak; of
greater importance was the side entrance, accessible from a private driveway,
which enabled dignitaries to arrive and depart without attracting notice. Though
it was just a mile from the White House, the center had significant advantages
for certain meetings, especially interdepartmental conclaves that had no formal
justification. Meetings here did not involve the paper trail that was
necessitated by the security procedures at the White House, the Old Executive
Office Building, the Pentagon, or any of the intelligence agencies. They could
take place without leaving behind any telltale logs or records. They could take
place without ever, officially, having taken place at all.
The five gray-faced men who sat around the small conference table were all in
similar lines of work, and yet, given the structure of governmental agencies,
they would never have had cause to meet in the ordinary course of things.
Needless to say, the program that had brought them all together in the first
place was far from ordinary, and the circumstances they now faced were quite
possibly cataclysmic.
Unlike their titular superiors, they were not political appointees; they were
lifers, tending to programs that extended far beyond the duration of any
particular administration. They liaised with, and reported to, the men and women
who shuttled in and out in four-year cycles, but the horizons of their
responsibilities, as they conceived them, extended much further.
Sitting opposite the DIA man, the deputy director of the National Security
Agency had a high scrubbed forehead and small, pinched features. He prided
himself on maintaining an outward air of serenity, no matter what the
circumstances. That air of serenity was now close to fraying, and with it his
pride. “Secrecy, yes—the nature of the directive is clear,” he said quietly.
“The nature of our subject is not.”
“Paul Elie Janson,” said the State Department undersecretary, who was, on paper,
the director of that department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He had
not spoken for some time. A smooth-faced, athletic man with tousled,
straw-colored hair, he was lent gravitas by heavy black-framed glasses. The
undersecretary was a survivor, the other men knew. And because he was a
survivor, they took careful note of the way he positioned himself on the issues.
“Janson was one of ours, as you know. The documents you’ve got on him are
lightly redacted. Apologies for that—that’s the way they come out of the files,
and we didn’t have much prep time. Anyway, I think they give you the general
idea.”
“One of your goddamn killing machines, Derek, that’s what he is,” said Albright,
glowering at the undersecretary. Despite Albright’s high administrative rank, he
had spent a career in analysis, not operations, and he remained an analyst to
the core of his being. The ingrained mistrust that men of his ilk had toward
their counterparts in operations was too often justified. “You create these
soulless pieces of machinery, loose them on the world, and then leave someone
else to clean up the mess. 1 just don’t understand what kind of game he’s
playing.”
The man from State flushed angrily. “Have you considered the possibility that
someone is running a game on him?” A hard stare: “Jumping to conclusions could
be dangerous. I’m not willing to stipulate that Janson is a renegade.”
“The point is, we can’t be certain,” the NSA man, Sanford Hildreth, said after a
while. He turned to the man seated next to him, a computer scientist who, as a
young man, had earned a reputation as a wunderkind, when he almost
single-handedly redesigned the primary intelligence database for the CIA. “Is
there some data set we’re overlooking, Kaz?”
Kazuo Onishi shook his head. Educated at Cal Tech, he had grown up in Southern
California and retained a slight Valley accent that made him seem looser than he
was. “I can tell you we’ve had anomalous activities, potential breaches of
security firewalls. What I can’t do is identify the perpetrator. Not yet,
anyway.”
“Say you’re correct, Derek,” Hildreth went on. “Then my heart goes out to him.
But absolutely nothing can compromise the program. Doug’s right—that’s the prime
directive. Absolute and unyielding. Or we might as well kiss Pax Americana
good-bye. It almost doesn’t matter what he thought he was doing. All we can say
is that this fellow Janson doesn’t know what in the world he’s blundered into.”
He raised his coffee cup to his mouth and took a sip, hoping nobody noticed the
tremor of his hand as he returned it to the saucer. “And he’s never going to
know.” The words were more declaration than observation.
“That much I’ll accept,” the man from State said. “Has Charlotte been briefed?”
Charlotte Ainsley was the president’s National Security Advisor and the
principal White House liaison.
“Later today,” said the NSA man. “But do you see any supportable alternatives?”
“Just at the moment? He’s blundered into quicksand. We couldn’t help him if we
wanted to.”
“It’ll go easier if he doesn’t struggle,” the DIA analyst said.
“No argument here,” said Derek Collins. “But he will, if I know my man.
Mightily.”
“Then extreme measures are going to have to be taken,” the analyst said. “If the
program gets burned, if even one percent of it gets exposed, it doesn’t just
destroy us, it destroys everything anybody here cares about. Everything. The
past twenty years of history gets rolled back, and that’s a pie-in-the-sky,
win-the-lottery, best-case scenario. The likelier outcome looks a hell of a lot
more like another world war. Only this time, we lose.”
“Poor bastard,” said the deputy director of the NSA, paging through the Janson
files. “He’s in way over his head.”
The undersecretary of state suppressed a shudder. “The hell of it is,” he
replied grimly, “so are we.”
Athens
The Greeks had a word for it: nefos. Smog—Western civilization’s gift to its
cradle. Trapped by the circle of mountains, set low by atmospheric inversion, it
acidified the air, speeding decay of the antiquities and irritating the eyes and
lungs of the city’s four million inhabitants. On bad days, it lay on Athens like
a noxious pall. This was a bad day.
Janson had taken a direct flight from Bombay to Athens, arriving at the East
Terminal of the Ellinikon International Airport. He felt a deadness within; he
was a besuited zombie going about his business. You were the guy with a slab of
granite where your heart’s supposed to be. If only it were so.
He had called Marta Lang repeatedly, to no avail. It was maddening. The number
she had given him would reach her wherever she was, she had told him: it would
go directly to her desk, on her private line, and if she did not pick up after
three rings, it would bounce to her cell number. It was a number only three
people had, she had stressed. And yet all it ever yielded was the electronic
purr of an unanswered line. He had dialed various regional headquarters of the
Liberty Foundation, in New York, Amsterdam, Bucharest. Ms. Lang is unavailable,
subalterns with talcum-smooth voices informed him. Janson was insistent. It was
an emergency. He was returning her call. He was a personal friend. It was a