Beach, if I’m not mistaken. Strong like your uncle, in the forests and ravines
of Sumava, picking off Wehrmacht officers with an old hunting rifle. There’s
nobody fiercer than those Eastern European partisans—I had an uncle like that
myself. War shows us who we are, Paul. My hope is that today you learned
something about yourself. Something I determined about you back in Little
Creek.”
Lieutenant Commander Alan Demarest reached for a dog-eared paperback he had on
his desk. “You know your Emerson?” He began to read from it: ” ‘A great man is
always willing to be little. Whilst he sits on the cushions of advantages he
goes to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn
something; he has been put on his wits on his manhood; he has gained facts;
learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit.’ I reckon Ralph Waldo
was onto something.”
“Be nice to think so, sir.”
“The battlefield is also a proving ground. It’s where you die or where you’re
born anew. And don’t just dismiss that as a figure of speech. Ever talk to your
mama about what it was like to give birth to you? Women know this blinding flash
of what it all means—they know that their lives, the lives of their parents,
their parents’ parents, of all human life on this planet for tens of thousands
of years, have culminated in this wet, squirming, screaming thing. Birth isn’t
pretty. A nine-month cycle from pleasure to pain. Man is born in a mess of
bodily fluids, distended viscera, shit, piss, blood—and baby, it’s you. A moment
of incredible agony. Yes, giving birth is a bitch, all right, because that pain
is what gives it meaning. And I look at you standing here with the stinking guts
of another soldier on your tunic and I look into your eyes, and I see a man
who’s been reborn.”
Janson stared, bewildered. Part of him was appalled; part of him was mesmerized.
Demarest stood up, and his own gaze did not shift. He reached over and put a
hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “What’s this war about? Ivy Leaguers in the
State Department have thick three-ring binders that pretend to give an answer.
It’s a whole lot of white noise, meaningless rationalizations. Every conflict is
the same- It’s about the testing fields of battle. In the past four hours,
you’ve known more energy and exhaustion, more agony and ecstasy—more pure
adrenaline—than most people will ever experience. You’re more alive than the
zombies in their station wagons who tell themselves how glad they are that
they’re not in harm’s way like you. They’re the lost souls. They spend their
days price-comparing cuts of London broil and boxes of laundry detergent and
wondering, should they try to fix the sink or wait around for the plumber?
They’re dead inside and they don’t even know it.” Demarest’s eyes were bright.
“What’s the war about? It’s about the simple fact that you killed those who
sought to kill you. What just happened? A victory, a defeat? Wrong yardstick,
son. Here’s what happened. You almost died, and you learned what it was to
live.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
A heavy white lorry carrying a load of semi-finished lumber swung off the busy
Mil highway and onto Queen’s Road, Cambridge. There it pulled up beside several
parked trucks bearing construction equipment for a major renovation project.
That was the way with a large and aging university like Cambridge—something was
always being rebuilt or renovated.
After the driver pulled in, the man he’d given a ride to thanked him warmly for
the lift and stepped out onto the gravel. Instead of going to work, though, the
man, who wore a taupe work suit, ducked inside one of the Polyjohns near the
building site; the West Yorkshire company’s motto, Leading Through Innovation,
was molded on the blue plastic door. When he emerged, he was wearing a gray
herringbone jacket of Harris tweed. It was a uniform of another sort, one that
would render him inconspicuous as he strolled along the “Backs,” the wide swath
of green that ran along the oldest of the Cambridge colleges: King’s, Clare,
Trinity Hall, and, his destination, Trinity College. In all, just an hour had
elapsed since Paul Janson arrived at the Stansted Airport, now a blurry memory
of glass and quilted-steel ceilings.
Janson had spoken so many lies, in so many accents, over the past twenty-four
hours that his head ached. But soon he would meet someone who could sweep all
the mist and mystification away. Someone he could talk to in confidence, someone
who was in a singular position to have insight into the tragedy. His lifeline
would be at Trinity College: a brilliant don named Angus Fielding.
Janson had studied with him as a Marshall Fellow back in the early seventies,
and the gentle scholar with the amused eyes had taken him on for a series of
tutorials in economic history. Something about Fielding’s sinuous mind had
captivated Janson, and there was something about Janson, in turn, that the
savant found genuinely engaging. All these years later, Janson hated to involve
Fielding in his hazardous investigation, but there was no other choice. His old
academic mentor, an expert in the global financial system, had been a member of
a brain trust that Peter Novak had put together in order to help guide the
Liberty Foundation. He was also, Janson had heard, now the master of Trinity
College.
As Janson walked across Trinity Bridge and over the Backs, memories swept over
him—memories of another time, a time of learning, and healing, and rest.
Everything around him brought back images of that golden period in his life. The
lawns, the Gothic buildings, even the punters who glided along the Cam under the
stone arches of the bridges and the branch curtains of the weeping willows,
propelling their small boats with long poles. As he approached Trinity, the wind
chime of memory grew even louder. Here, facing the Backs, stood the dining hall,
which was built in the early seventeenth century, and the magnificent Wren
library, with its soaring vaults and arches. Trinity’s physical presence at
Cambridge was large and majestic but represented only a portion of its actual
holdings; the college was, in fact, the second-largest landowner in Britain,
after the queen. Janson walked past the library to the small gravel lot abutting
the master’s lodge.
He rang the bell, and a servant cracked open a window. “Here to see the master,
love?”
“I am.”
“Bit early, are you? Never mind, dear. Why don’t you come round the front and
I’ll let you in?” Obviously, she had taken him for someone else, someone who had
an appointment at that hour.
None of it was exactly high-security. The woman had not even asked his name.
Cambridge had changed little since he had been a student there in the seventies.
Inside the master’s lodge, the broad, red-carpeted stairs led past a portrait
gallery of Trinity luminaries from centuries past: a bearded George Trevelyan, a
clean-shaved William Whewell, an ermine-collared Christopher Wordsworth. At the
top of the stairs, to the left, was a pink-carpeted drawing room with paneled
walls that were painted white, so as not to compete with the portraits that
adorned them. Past this room was a much larger one, with dark-wood floors
covered with a number of large Orientals. Staring at Janson as he entered was a
full-length portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, painted during her life, with
meticulous attention to the details of her dress and flatteringly little to her
ravaged face. Isaac Newton, on the adjoining wall, was brown-wigged and
imperious. A smirking fourteen-year-old, one Lord Gloucester, stared brazenly at
both from his oil pigments. All told, here was one of the most impressive
collections of its kind outside of the National Portrait Gallery. It was a
pageant of a very particular elite, both political and intellectual, that had
shaped the country, had directed its history, could claim some responsibility
for both its achievements and its failures. The glowing visages belonged largely
to bygone centuries, and yet Peter Novak’s own portrait would not have been out
of place. Like all true leadership, his stemmed from a sense of his own
obligations, a profound and profoundly moral sense of mission.
Janson found himself staring, rapt, at the faces of long-departed kings and
counselors, and he started when he heard the sound of a man clearing his throat.
“My heavens, it is you!” Angus Fielding trumpeted, in his slightly reedy,
slightly hooting voice. “Forgive me—I’ve been looking at you looking at the
portraits and wondering whether it was possible. Something about the shoulders,
the gait. Dear boy, it’s been far too long. But, really, this is the most
delightful surprise I could imagine. Gilly told me that my ten o’clock was here,
so I was preparing to talk to one of our less promising graduate students about
Adam Smith and Condorcet. To quote Lady Asquith, ‘He has a brilliant mind, until