nuclear codes could be next.”
“What did you tell him, Mr. President?”
“We refused, naturally.” Glances were exchanged with the secretary of state. “I
refused, dammit. Against the wisdom of all my advisers. I will not go down in
history as the person who handed the United States over to a maniac!”
“So now he’s given us a deadline along with the ultimatum,” Collins said. “And
the clock is ticking.”
“And you can’t take him out?”
“Oh, what a nifty idea,” Collins said dryly. “Get a bunch of angry brothers with
a blowtorch and some pliers and get medieval on his ass. Now why didn’t we think
of that? Wait a minute—we did. Goddammit, Janson, if we could find the son of a
bitch, he’d be dead meat, no matter how well protected he is. I’d plug him
myself. But we can’t.”
“We’ve tried everything,” said the chairman of the National Intelligence
Council. “Tried to lure him, trap him, smoke him out—but no go. He’s become like
the man who wasn’t there.”
“Which shouldn’t be a surprise,” Collins said. “Demarest has become a master at
playing the reclusive plutocrat, and at this point he’s got greater resources
than we have. Plus, any person we bring in represents a risk, another potential
blackmail threat: there’s no way we can expand the number of people involved.
That operational logic is self-evident. And sacrosanct. Do you see? It’s just
us.”
“And you,” said President Berquist. “You’re our best hope.”
“What about people who genuinely oppose ‘Peter Novak,’ the legendary
humanitarian? Fact is, he’s not without enemies. Isn’t there some way to
mobilize a fanatic, a faction … ?”
“You’re suggesting a pretty underhanded ploy,” Collins said. “I like how you
think.”
“This is the place for truth-telling,” the president said to Collins with a
warning glance. “Tell him the truth.”
“The truth is, we’ve tried just that.”
“And … ?”
“We’ve basically thrown up our hands, because, as I say, it’s been impossible to
locate him. We can’t find him, and the crazy terror king can’t find him,
either.”
Janson squinted. “The Caliph! Jesus.”
“You got it in one,” said Collins.
“The man lives for vengeance,” said Janson. “Lives and breathes it. And the fact
that his celebrated hostage escaped had to have been a major humiliation to him.
A loss of face among his followers. The kind of loss of face that can lead to a
loss of power.”
“I could show you a foot-thick analytic report making exactly the same
inference,” Collins said. “So far we’re on the same page.”
“But how are you in a position to steer him at all? Every Westerner is satanic,
in his book.”
The secretary of state cleared his throat, uneasily.
“We’re opening our kimonos,” the president repeated. “Remember? Nothing that’s
said in this room leaves this room.”
“OK,” Derek Collins said. “It’s a delicate business. There’s somebody high up in
Libyan military intelligence who … works with us occasionally. Ibrahim Maghur.
He’s a bad customer, all right? Officially, we want him dead. He’s known to have
been involved in the German disco bombing that killed two American servicemen.
Been linked to Lockerbie, too. He’s advised and helped funnel support to all
sorts of terrorist organizations.”
“And yet he’s also an American asset,” Janson said. “Christ. Makes a fellow
proud to be a soldier.”
“Like I said, it’s a delicate business. Similar to the deal we had with Ali
Hassan Salameh.”
A small shiver ran down Janson’s spine. Ali Hassan Salameh was the mastermind of
the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. He was also, for a number of years, the CIA’s
chief contact inside the Palestine Liberation Organization. It was during a
period when the United States refused to recognize the organization. Yet the
secret liaison afforded real protection to Americans based in Lebanon. A tip-off
would arrive when a car bomb or an assassination in Beirut was in the works, and
a number of American lives were spared as a result. The math may have worked
out, yet it truly was a deal with the devil. A line from II Corinthians came to
Janson: What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what
communion hath light with darkness?
“So this Libyan—our Libyan—has been directing the Caliph?” Janson swallowed
hard. “Quite an irony if one of the deadliest terrorists on the planet turns out
to have been triply manipulated.”
“I know it sounds preposterous, but we were grasping at straws,” said Collins.
“Hell, we still are. I mean, if you can think of a way to use him, go for it.
But the problem remains: we can’t get Demarest in our sights.”
“Whereas,” the pasty-faced systems analyst put in, “he seems to have no problem
getting us in his.”
“Which means you’re our best hope,” President Berquist repeated.
“You were his ace protégé, Paul,” Collins said. “Face it. You worked closely
with the guy for several tours, you know his wiles, you know the quirks of his
character. He was your first mentor. And, of course, there’s nobody better in
the field than you, Janson.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” Janson said through gritted teeth.
“I mean it, Paul. This is my professional fitness assessment. There’s nobody
better. Nobody with greater resourcefulness and ingenuity.”
“Except … ” Doug Albright was worrying aloud, then thought better of it.
“Yes?” Janson was insistent.
The DIA man’s eyes were pitiless. “Except Alan Demarest.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The handsome West African, his silver hair neatly trimmed, gold cufflinks
glinting in the setting sun, looked pensively out the window of his
thirty-eighth-floor office and waited for his calls to be returned. He was the
secretary-general of the United Nations, had been for five years, and what he
was about to do would shock most of the people who knew him. Yet it was the only
way to ensure the survival of everything he had devoted his life to.
“Helga,” Mathieu Zinsou said, “I’m expecting a call back from Peter Novak.
Please hold all other calls.”
“Certainly,” said the secretary-general’s longtime assistant, an efficient Dane
named Helga Lundgren.
It was the hour of the day when he could see the furnishings of his own office
reflected in the vast window. The decor had changed little over the years; it
would have been sacrilege to replace the modernist furniture custom-designed for
the building by the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen. Zinsou had added a few
hangings of traditional textiles from his native country of Benin, for a slight
flavor of individuality. In addition, gifts from various emissaries were
stationed at strategic perches, and there were others, in storage, that could be
brought out when representatives of the nation in question came to visit. If the
finance minister of Indonesia were keeping an appointment, a Javanese mask might
appear on the wall where, earlier in the day, a row of Edo netsuke had greeted
the foreign secretary of Japan. Decoration as diplomacy, as Helga Lundgren liked
to call it.
The office was positioned outward and away from the bustle of Manhattan. Indeed,
when he peered through the ghostly reflections on the glass, he saw straight
across the East River to the desolate industrial wasteland that was West Queens:
the barnlike brick factory of the Schwartz Chemical Company with its four
immense smokestacks, evidently long unused. The yellow-brick remains of an
anonymous-looking warehouse. A few wisps of fog rolled over Hunter’s Point, the
nearest part of West Queens, where an ancient Pepsi-Cola neon sign still blazed,
as it had since 1936, atop a now closed bottling plant, like an amulet warding
off enemy incursions, or real-estate developers, and notably failing.
The view was not beautiful, but there were times when Secretary-General Zinsou
found it oddly mesmerizing. An antique brass telescope was angled from an oak
stand on the floor, facing the window, but he rarely used it; the unaided eye
sufficed to see what was to be seen. A petrified forest of former manufacturing
concerns. Fossils of industry. An archaeology of modernity, half buried, half
excavated. The waning sun glittered off the East River, flashed from the chrome
of disused signage. Such were the unloved remnants of bygone industrial empires.
And what about his own empire, on the banks of Manhattan? Was it, too, destined
for the scrap heap of history?
The sun had lowered farther in the horizon, giving the East River a rosy tinge,
when the secretary-general’s assistant notified him that Peter Novak was on the
phone. He picked up at once.
“Mon cher Mathieu,” the voice said. It had the crystalline clarity of something
heavily processed by digital telephony—undoubtedly he was speaking on a
top-of-the-line satellite phone. The secretary-general had requested that he and
Novak speak on encrypted phones only, and the additional security probably
increased the eerily noiseless quality of the signal. After a few pleasantries,
Mathieu Zinsou began to hint at what he had on his mind.
The United Nations, the West African told the great man, was a magnificent
freighter that was running out of fuel, which was to say, money. It was the