“Praise the Lord.” Janson’s voice was icy.
“I’m afraid there’s a lot more going on than you know,” offered the secretary of
state. “And given that it’s the most explosive secret in the history of the
republic, you’ll understand if we’ve been a little skittish.”
“I’ll give you the log line,” the president said. It was clear that he was
chairing the meeting; a man used to command did not have to make a show of his
authority. “Our creature has become—well, not our creature anymore. We’ve lost
control of the asset.”
“Paul?” Collins said. “Really, have a seat. This is going to take a while.”
Janson lowered himself into a nearby armchair. The tension in the room was
palpable.
President Berquist’s gaze drifted to the window, which gave a view of the
gardens in the rear of the estate. In the moonlight, it was possible to make out
the Italian-style formal garden, a rectilinear maze of clipped yew and box
hedges. “To quote one of my predecessors,” he said, “we made him a god when we
didn’t own the heavens.” He glanced at Douglas Albright, the man from the
Defense Intelligence Agency. “Doug, why don’t you start?”
“I gather that you’ve already had the origins of the program explained to you.
So you know that we had three extremely dedicated agents who were trained to
play the role of Peter Novak. The redundancy was necessary.”
“Right, right. Too much of an investment had gone into this to have your Daddy
Warbucks hit by a taxicab,” Janson said acidly. “What about the wife, though?”
“Another American agent,” the DIA man said. “She went under the knife, too, in
case she ever encountered anyone who might have known her from the old days.”
“Remember Nell Pearson?” Collins said quietly.
Janson was thunderstruck. No wonder there was something about Novak’s wife that
seemed eerily familiar. His affair with Nell Pearson was brief but memorable. It
had taken place a couple of years after he joined Consular Operations; like him,
his fellow agent was single, young, and restless. They had both been working
undercover in Belfast, assigned to play husband and wife. It didn’t take much
for them to add an element of reality to the imposture. The affair had been
torrid, electric, more an emanation of the body than of the heart. It seized
them like a fever, and it proved as evanescent as a fever. Yet something about
her had obviously stayed with him. Those long elegant fingers: the one thing
that could not be altered. And the eyes: there had been something between them,
had there not? Some frisson, even in Amsterdam?
Janson shuddered, imagining the woman he knew being reshaped, irreversibly, by
the cold steel edge of a surgeon’s #2 scalpel. “But what do you mean you’ve lost
control?” he persisted.
There was an awkward moment of silence before the Treasury Department’s
undersecretary for international affairs spoke. “Start with the operational
challenge: how do you secure the vast funding necessary to sustain the illusion
of a world-class tycoon-philanthropist? Needless to say, the Mobius Program
couldn’t simply divert funds from a closely monitored U.S. intelligence budget.
Seed money could be provided, but nothing more. So the program drew upon our
intelligence capabilities to create its own fund. We put to use our take from
signals intercepts … ”
“Jesus Christ—you’re talking about Echelon!” Janson said.
Echelon was a complex intelligence-gathering system comprising a fleet of
low-earth-orbit satellites devoted to signals interception: every international
phone call, every form of telecommunications that involved a satellite
conduit—which was most of them—could be sampled, intercepted, by the orbiting
spy fleet. Its mammoth download was fed into an assortment of collections and
analysis facilities, all controlled by the National Security Agency. It had the
capability of monitoring every form of international telephony. The NSA had
repeatedly denied rumors that it used the signal intercepts for purposes other
than national security, in its strictest sense. Yet here was the shocking
admission that even the most conspiracy-minded skeptics didn’t know the half of
it.
The jowly Treasury undersecretary nodded somberly. “Echelon enabled us to gain
sensitive, highly secret intelligence about central-bank decisions around the
world. Was the Bundesbank going to devalue the deutsche mark? Was Malaysia going
to prop up the ringgit? Had Ten Downing Street decided to let sterling take a
tumble? How much would it be worth to know, even just a few days before? Our
creation was armed with that inside information, because the choicest fruits of
our intelligence were placed at his disposal. It was child’s play. Through him
we placed a few massive, highly leveraged currency bets. In rapid order, twenty
million became twenty billion—and then much, much more. Here was a legendary
financier. And nobody had to know that his brilliant intuition and instincts
were in fact the result of—”
“The abuse of a U.S. government surveillance program,” Janson said, cutting him
off.
“Fair enough,” President Berquist said soberly. “Fair enough. Needless to say,
it was a program that was in place long before I took office. Through
extraordinary measures, the Mobius Program had created a highly visible
billionaire … yet we hadn’t counted on the human factor—on the possibility that
access and control to all that wealth and power might prove too great a lure to
at least one of our agents.”
“Don’t you people ever learn?” Janson said, flaring. “The law of unintended
consequences—you know it? It sure knows you.” His eyes moved from face to face.
“The history of American intelligence is littered with ingenious plans that
leave the world worse off. Now we’re talking about the ‘human factor’ as if
there just hadn’t been room for it on your goddamn spreadsheets.” Janson turned
to Collins. “I asked you, when we spoke earlier, who would agree to play such a
role—to have his entire identity erased. What kind of man would do such a
thing?”
“Yes,” Collins said, “and I answered, ‘Someone who had no choice.’ The fact is,
you know that someone. A man named Alan Demarest.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
A chill ran through Janson’s veins, and for a moment all he could see was the
face of his former commanding officer. Alan Demarest. Nausea flooded him, and
his head began to throb.
It was a lie!
Alan Demarest was dead. Executed by the state. Janson’s knowledge of that
ultimate requital was the only thing that made his memories endurable.
When Janson returned stateside, he filed the lengthy reports that, he had been
assured, resulted in Demarest’s arraignment. A secret military tribunal had been
convened; a decision had been made at the highest levels: the national morale
was deemed too vulnerable to permit the public airing of Demarest’s activities,
but justice would be served all the same. Janson’s extensive sworn depositions
had made the case open-and-shut. Demarest had been found guilty after just a few
hours of deliberation, and was sentenced to death. The man whom one
counterintelligence operative dubbed the “Mr. Kurtz of Khe Sanh” had been
executed by a military firing squad. And Janson had watched.
Mesa Grande. In the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains. The cloth circle
in front of his heart—white, and then bright red.
As Janson stared wordlessly at Collins, he could feel a vein pulsing in his
forehead.
“A man who had no choice,” Collins said, implacably. “He was a brilliant,
brilliant man—his mind an extraordinary instrument. He also, as you discovered,
had decided flaws. So be it. We needed somebody with his capabilities, and his
absolute loyalty to this country had never been questioned, even if his methods
were.”
“No,” Janson said, and it came out as a whisper. He shook his head slowly. “No,
it’s impossible.”
Collins shrugged. “Blanks, squibs. Basic stagecraft. We showed you what you
thought you needed to see.”
Janson tried to speak, but nothing came out.
“I’m sorry that you were lied to for all these years. You believed Demarest
should have been court-martialed and executed for the things he did, and so you
were told that he was, showed that he was. Your thirst for justice was totally
understandable—but you weren’t looking at the big picture, not as far as our
counterintelligence planners were concerned. Material like that doesn’t come
along very often, not in our line of work. So a decision was made. Ultimately,
it was a simple issue of human resources.”
“Human resources,” Janson repeated dully.
“You were lied to because that was the only way we could hold on to you. You
were pretty spectacular material yourself. The only way you’d be able to put it
behind you was to be confident that Demarest had suffered the ultimate
punishment. So you were better off, and we were better off, too, because it
meant that you could go on and do what God made you to do. Totally win-win. It
just made sense every which way the planners looked at it. So Demarest was
presented with a choice. He could face a tribunal, and the mountainous evidence