“Well, that’s where things get a little hairy. But, as I say, there was a
brilliant team of experts tasked to the Mobius Program. They—we, I should say,
though I wasn’t enlisted until seven years into it—caught a number of breaks.
And, voilà, you’ve got a man in charge of an empire of his own. A man who could
manipulate global events as we never could ourselves.”
“Manipulate … ? Meaning what?” Janson demanded.
“I think you know. The Liberty Foundation. The entire conflict-resolution
agenda. ‘Directed democracy.’ All of it.”
“So this great humanitarian financier, the ‘peacemaker’—”
“It was originally a 60 Minutes segment that dubbed him that, and it stuck. For
good reason. The peacemaker established a foundation with offices in nearly
every regional capital in the world.”
“And his incredible humanitarian assistance?”
“Isn’t this country the best? And isn’t it messed up that no matter how much
good we do, so many people around the world hate our guts? Yes, it meant
offering balm to the world’s trouble spots. Look, the World Bank is a lender of
last resort. This guy’s a lender of first resort. Which ensured that he would
have enormous influence with governments the world over. Peter Novak: your
roving ambassador for peace and stability.”
“Oil on troubled waters.”
“Expensive oil, make no mistake. But ‘Novak’ could mediate, resolve conflicts
that we could never—openly—go near. He’s been able to deal effectively and
confidentially with regimes that consider us the Great Satan. He has been a
one-man foreign policy. And what made him so goddamn effective is precisely the
fact that he appears to have no connection to us.”
Janson’s mind whirled, buzzed, filled with the echoes of voices—confiding,
cautioning, threatening. Nikos Andros: You Americans have never been able to
wrap your minds around anti-Americanism. You so want to be loved that you cannot
understand why there is so little love for you. A man wears big boots and
wonders why the ants beneath his feet fear and hate him. Angus Fielding: The one
thing that you Americans have never quite grasped is how very deep
anti-Americanism goes … The Serbian with gold-rimmed glasses: You Americans
always want things that arent on the menu, don’t you? You can never have enough
choices. A Hungarian barkeep with a lethal pastime: You Americans complain about
drug traffickers in Asia, and meanwhile you flood the world with the electronic
equivalent … Everywhere you go, you find your own spoor. The slime of the
serpent is over all.
A cacophony resolved itself into a single refrain, another kind of plain-chant.
You Americans.
You Americans.
You Americans.
You Americans.
Janson suppressed a shiver. “But who is—was—Peter Novak?” he asked.
“It was kind of like the Six Million Dollar Man—’Gentlemen, we can rebuild him,
we have the technology. We have the capability to make him better than he was
before. Better. Stronger. Faster.’ ” He broke off. “Well, richer, anyway. Fact
is, three agents were assigned to the part. They were all similar-looking to
begin with, very close to one another in build and height. And then surgery made
them damned near identical. All sorts of computerized micrometers were used—an
exhaustive procedure. But we had to have replicas in place: given our
investment, we couldn’t afford to have our guy hit by a bus, or drop dead from a
stroke. Three seemed like good odds.”
Janson looked at Collins strangely. “Who would ever agree to do such a thing? To
allow his entire identity to be wiped out, to become dead to everyone he ever
knew, his very countenance transformed … ”
“Someone who had no choice,” Collins replied cryptically.
Janson felt a gorge of anger. He knew Collins’s sangfroid was all on the
surface, but the heartlessness of the man’s reasoning summed everything up: the
damnable arrogance of the planners. The damn strategic elites with their neatly
trimmed cuticles and their blithe certainty that what worked on the page would
work in the real world. They saw the globe as a chessboard, were oblivious to
the fact that people made of flesh and blood would suffer the consequences of
their grand schemes. He could hardly stand to look at the bureaucrat before him,
and his eyes drifted toward the glittering bay, toward the fishing boat that had
moved into view, safely beyond the security zone that began half a mile from the
shore, marked off by warning buoys. “Someone who had no choice?” He shook his
head. “You mean the way I had no choice when you set me up to be killed.”
“That again.” Collins rolled his eyes. “Like I said, calling off the termination
order would have raised too many questions. The cowboys at the CIA got credible
reports that Novak had been killed and that you had something to do with it.
Cons Ops got hold of the same info. The last thing any of us at Mobius wanted
bruited about, but you play the cards you’re dealt. At the time, I did what I
thought was best.” The words were mere words, expressing neither sadism nor
sorrow.
A scrim of red momentarily suffused Janson’s vision: which was the greater
insult, he wondered—being executed as a traitor, or being sacrificed as a pawn?
Once more the fishing vessel caught his attention, but this time the sight was
accompanied by a wrenching sense of danger. It was too small to be a crabber,
and too near the shore to be after rockfish or perch.
And the thick staff that extended from the flapping tarpaulin on the deck was
not a fishing pole.
Janson saw the bureaucrat’s mouth moving, but he could no longer hear him, for
his attention was wholly devoted to an immediate and deadly threat. Yes,
Collins’s bungalow was on a narrow, two-mile-long spit of land, yet the sense of
security conveyed by the isolation, Janson realized now, was an illusion.
An illusion that was shattered by the first artillery round that exploded in
Collins’s living room.
A torrent of adrenaline constricted Janson’s consciousness to a laserlike focus.
The shell smashed through the window and hurled into the opposite wall, spraying
the room with splinters of wood and chunks of plaster and fragments of glass;
the blast was so intense that it registered on the ears less as sound than as
pain. Black smoke began to billow and Janson understood the fluke that had saved
them. A howitzer shell, he knew, spun more than three hundred times a second,
and the result of its force and spin was that the shell had burrowed far into
the cottage’s soft-pine and plaster construction before it exploded. Only this
had spared them a deadly blast of jagged shrapnel. Seemingly conscious of every
millisecond, Janson realized, too, that an artillery gunner’s first few shells
were fired in order to zero in on the mark. The second shell would not arrive
ten feet above their heads. The second shell, if they stayed where they were,
would not leave them to ponder shell rotation speeds and detonation times.
The old wood-frame house would offer them no protection at all.
Janson leaped from the couch and raced to the attached garage. It was his only
hope. The door was open and Janson took a few steps down to the concrete floor,
where a small convertible stood. A yellow late-model Corvette.
“Wait a minute!” Collins called out breathlessly. His face was smudged with soot
from the explosion and he was obviously winded from having followed Janson’s
sprint. “It’s my Z-six. I’ve got the keys right here.” He held them out
meaningfully, asserting the primacy of property rights.
Janson grabbed them from his hand and jumped into the driver’s seat. “Friends
don’t let friends drive drunk,” he replied, shoving the startled undersecretary
of state out of the way. “You can come or not.”
Collins hastened over to the side, pressed the garage-door opener, and rode
shotgun with Janson, who revved the motor in reverse and shot out of the garage
with just a millimeter of clearance between it and the lumbering roll-up door.
“Cutting it a little close, are we?” Collins asked. His face was now drenched in
perspiration.
Janson said nothing.
Using, in rapid succession, the emergency brake, the steering wheel, and the
accelerator with an organist’s fluidity, Janson executed a reverse bootleg
turn—a J turn—and gunned the car down the narrow macadamized roadway.
“I’m thinking this wasn’t such a smart move,” said Collins. “We’re now totally
exposed.”
“The flat nets—they extend out all the way around the tip of the island, right?”
“About a half mile out, yes.”
“Then use your head. Those nets would entangle any sloop that tried to cut
across them. So if the gunboat wants to gain a new line of fire on us, it’s got
a very wide apex to sail around. It’s a slow-moving vessel—it just isn’t going
to have enough time. Meanwhile, we keep the house itself between us and it:
that’s concealment and protection.”
“Point taken,” Collins said. “But now I want you to turn onto the pocket marina