that you had provided, and probably judicial execution. In the alternative, he
essentially had to give his life to us. He would exist at the discretion of his
controllers, his very life a revocable gift. He’d accept whatever tasks he was
given because he had no choice. It all made him a very … singular asset.”
“Demarest—alive.” It was a struggle to get out the words. “You recruited him for
the job?”
“The way he recruited you.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Probably ‘recruit’ is too gentle a word,” Collins said.
The DIA man spoke up. “The logic of the assignment was unassailable.”
“Damn you!” Janson cried out. He saw it all now. Demarest had been the first
Peter Novak: primus inter pares. The others would be matched to the frame of his
body. He had been the first because of his redoubtable gifts, as a linguist, as
an actor, as a brilliantly resourceful operative. Demarest was the best they
had. Had the thought even arisen that there might be risks in giving this
responsibility to someone so utterly devoid of conscience—to a sociopath?
Janson shut his eyes as the images flooded his mind.
Demarest was not merely cruel, he had an unsurpassed gift for cruelty. He
approached the infliction of pain like a four-star chef. Janson recalled the
smell of charred flesh as the jumper cables sparked and sputtered at the
Vietnamese captive’s groin. The look of abject terror in the man’s eyes.
And Demarest’s almost gentle refrain as he interrogated the young fisherman.
“Look into my eyes,” Demarest had repeated in a gentle voice. “Look into my
eyes.”
The prisoner’s breath had come in strangled yelps, like a dying animal’s.
Demarest listened to a few bars of choral music. Then he straddled the second
prisoner. “Look into my eyes,” Demarest said. He’d pulled a small knife from a
waist holster and made a small slice in the man’s belly. The skin and the fascia
beneath immediately sheared, pulled apart by the tension of the ropes. The man
screamed.
And screamed. And screamed.
Janson could hear the screams now. They echoed in his head, amplified by the
sickening realization that this man was the one they had chosen to make the most
powerful on earth.
Now Derek Collins glanced around the room, as if canvassing opinions, before he
continued. “Let me get to the point. Demarest has been able to seize control of
all the assets that were created for the use of the Mobius Program. Without
getting into the details, I can tell you that he’s changed all the banking
codes—and foiled the measures we’d taken to prevent just such an eventuality.
And they were damn extensive. We had zero-knowledge, top-security cryptosystems
in place that required central Mobius authorization for substantial movements of
currencies. Codes were changed regularly, divided among the three principals so
that no individual could gain control of the whole—one firewall after another.
The security measures were damn near insurmountable.”
“Yet they were surmounted.”
“Yes. He got control.”
Janson shook his head, sickened by what he was hearing. “Translation: the
mammoth empire of the Liberty Foundation, the financial leverage, all of it—has
passed into the control of one dangerously unstable individual. Translation:
you’re not running him—he’s running you.”
There were no demurrals.
“And the United States can’t expose him,” said the secretary of state. “Not
without exposing itself.”
“Just when did you figure out this was happening?” Janson demanded.
The two technicians shifted uncomfortably in the Louis XV chairs, their bulk
threatening the slender wooden frames.
“A few days ago,” Collins said. “As I told you, the Mobius Program had fail-safe
systems in place—what we thought were fail-safe, anyway. Look, we had some of
our best minds on this thing—don’t imagine we didn’t think of everything,
because we did. The controls were formidable. Only recently did he gain the
wherewithal to circumvent them.”
“And Anura?”
“His masterstroke,” said the chairman of the National Intelligence Council. “We
were victims, all of us, of an elaborate ploy. When we heard our man was
imprisoned there, we panicked, and acted precisely as Demarest knew we would. We
entrusted him with the second set of codes, the ones that would normally have
been under the control of the man the guerrillas were about to execute. It
seemed necessary, as a stopgap. What we didn’t realize was that Demarest had
arranged the hostage taking. Evidently he used a lieutenant of his named Bewick
as the cutout, a cutout the Caliph knew only as the ‘Go-Between.’ All very, how
shall I say, hygienic.”
“Jesus.”
“For that matter, we failed to realize that he was also responsible for the
death of the third agent, a year earlier. We thought our marionette strings were
unbreakable. We know better now.”
“Now that it’s too late,” Janson said, and in the faces of tense men and women,
Janson saw the acceptance of the rebuke—and its irrelevance. “Question: Why did
Demarest bring me into it?”
Collins spoke first. “Do you have to ask? The man loathes you, blames you for
taking away his career, his freedom, almost his life—turning him in to a
government he thought he’d served with incredible devotion. He didn’t just want
to see you dead. He wanted you to be accused, humiliated, strung up, killed by
your own government. What goes around comes around—that’s how he must have seen
things.”
“You want to say ‘I told you so’?” President Berquist said. “You’re entitled.
I’ve been shown copies of your 1973 reports about Lieutenant Commander Demarest.
But you’ve got to understand where this thing stands right now. Not only has
Demarest eliminated his understudies but he’s moved into a second, far more
deadly phase.”
“What’s that?”
“The puppet is killing off the puppet masters,” said Doug Albright. “He’s
erasing the program. Erasing Mobius.”
“And exactly who is the cast of characters?”
“You’re looking at ’em. All in this room.”
Janson stared around the room. “There had to have been somebody from the NSA,”
he objected.
“Killed.”
“Who designed the basic systems architecture?”
“A real wizard, from the CIA. Killed.”
“And the—oh Jesus … ”
“Yes, the president’s National Security Advisor,” said Albright. “Charlotte made
the wire services today, didn’t she? Clayton Ackerley didn’t—officially, he’s a
suicide, found in his car with the engine running and the garage door closed.
Oh, Demarest doesn’t like loose ends. He’s making a list, he’s checking it twice
… ”
“At this point, most of the people who know the truth about Peter Novak have
been eliminated,” the secretary of state said, his voice raspy with anxiety.
“Everyone … but the men and women in this room,” Collins said.
Janson nodded slowly. A global cataclysm loomed, but so did a far more immediate
threat to the assembled. As long as Alan Demarest remained in charge of the
Novak empire, everyone in this room would be in fear for his life.
“Sorry, Paul. It’s too late to get into the dead pool,” Collins said wanly.
“Christ, Derek,” Janson said, turning to the undersecretary with undisguised
outrage, “you knew what kind of man Demarest was!”
“We had every reason to think we could control him!”
“Now he has every reason to think he can control you,” Janson replied.
“It’s become apparent that Demarest has been planning his coup d’état for
years,” the secretary of state said. “As the recent killings have revealed,
Demarest has assembled a private militia, recruited dozens of his former
colleagues to use as his personal enforcers and protectors. These are operatives
who know the codes and procedures of our most advanced field strategies. And the
corrupt moguls of the former Communist states—the ones who pretend to be opposed
to him—are actually in league with the guy. They’ve made their own centurions
available to him.”
“You called it a coup d’état,” Janson said to him. “A term usually reserved for
toppling and supplanting a head of state.”
“In its own way, the Liberty Foundation is as powerful as any state,” the
secretary replied. “It may soon become more so.”
“The fact is,” the president said, cutting to the heart of the matter, “Demarest
has absolute proof of everything we did. He can blackmail us into doing whatever
he demands. I mean, Jesus.” The president exhaled heavily. “If the world ever
found out that the U.S. had been surreptitiously manipulating global events—not
to mention using Echelon to bet against the currencies of other countries—it
would be an absolutely devastating blow. Congress would go berserk, of course,
but that’s the least of it. You’d get Khomeini-style revolutions all over the
Third World. We’d lose every ally we have—would instantly become a pariah among
nations. NATO itself would fall apart … ”
“So long, Pax Americana,” muttered Janson. It was true: here was a secret so
explosive that history would have to be rewritten if it ever were to come out.
The president spoke again: “He’s now sent us a message demanding that we turn
control of Echelon over to him. And that’s just for starters. For all we know,