times, and abandoned if necessary.”
Long, indistinct shadows began to fall as the cloud-filtered late-morning sun
hovered just over the college chapel. Janson had hoped to narrow the field of
suspects; Fielding was showing how vast it really was.
“You say you met with him irregularly,” Janson prompted.
“He wasn’t a man of fixed habits. Not so much a recluse, I would have said, as a
nomad. A man as peripatetic as Epicrates of Heraclea, that sage of classical
antiquity.”
“But the foundation’s world headquarters is in Amsterdam.”
“Prinsengracht eleven twenty-three. Where his staffers have a rueful saying:
‘What’s the difference between God and Novak? God is everywhere. Novak is
everywhere but Amsterdam.’ ” He repeated the well-worn jest without humor.
Janson furrowed his brow. “Novak had other counselors, of course. There were
those savants whose names were never mentioned in the media. Maybe one of them
might know something significant—without even realizing the significance. The
Foundation itself has raised the drawbridge as far as I’m concerned—I can’t
reach anybody, speak to anybody in a position to know. It’s one of the reasons
I’m here. I need to reach those people who worked closely with Novak, or who
used to. Maybe someone
who used to be in the inner circle and fell out of it. I can’t rule it out that
Novak was done in by a person or persons close to him.”
Fielding raised an eyebrow. “You might direct that same curiosity toward those
who are, or were, close to you.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“You were asking me about Peter Novak’s enemies, and I said they were widely
dispersed. Let me, then, broach an awkward subject. Are you so confident about
your own government?” Fielding’s tone combined steel and silk.
“You’re not saying what I think you’re saying,” Janson replied sharply. He knew
that Fielding, as an habitue of the fabled Tuesday Club, spoke of such matters
with genuine worldliness.
“I only pose the question,” Fielding said gingerly. “Is it even possible that
your own former colleagues in Consular Operations have had some involvement
here?”
Janson winced: the don’s speculations had struck a nerve; the question, though
seemingly far-fetched, had haunted him since Athens. “But why? How?” he
demanded.
Was it possible?
Fielding shifted uneasily in his harp-backed chair, running his fingertips along
its alligatored black lacquer. “I don’t state. I don’t even suggest. I ask. Yet
consider. Peter Novak had become more powerful than many sovereign nations. And
so he may have, wittingly or unwittingly, sabotaged some pet operation, cocked
up some plan, threatened some bureaucratic turf, enraged some powerful player …
” Fielding waved a hand, gesturing vaguely at possibilities too hazy to pin
down. “Might an American strategist have deemed him too powerful, too much of a
threat, simply as an independent actor on the stage of world politics?”
Fielding’s speculations were all too cogent for comfort. Marta Lang had met with
high-powered people in the State Department and elsewhere. They had urged her to
employ Janson; for all he knew, Lang’s people had relied on them for some of the
instrumentation and equipment. They would have sworn her to secrecy, of course,
invoking the “political considerations” that Lang had alluded to with such
sardonicism. There was no need for Janson to know the provenance of the
hardware; no reason for Lang not to keep her word to the U.S. officials with
whom she had dealings. Who were these officials? No names were used; all Janson
was told was that they knew him, or of him. Consular Operations, presumably.
And then the inculpating transfers to his Cayman Islands account; Janson had
believed that his former employers remained ignorant of it, but he also knew
that the American government, when it wished to, could apply subtle pressure to
offshore banking institutions when the activities of U.S. citizens were at
issue. Who would have been better placed to interfere with his financial records
than high-level members of the American intelligence services? Janson had not
forgotten the rancor and ill will that surrounded his departure. His knowledge
of still-extant networks and procedures meant that he was, in principle, a
potential threat.
Was it possible?
How had the plot been hatched? Was it simply that a golden opportunity had
presented itself to quick-thinking tacticians? Two birds with one stone: kill
the meddlesome mogul, blame the noncompliant ex-agent? Yet why not leave the
Kagama extremists to carry out their announced plan? That would have been the
easy, the convenient thing to do: let murderous fanaticism run its course.
Except …
There was the muted sound of an old-fashioned brass bell: somebody was at the
rear door, which led to a waiting area outside the master’s office.
Fielding roused himself from his own rumination and stood up. “You’ll excuse me
for a minute—I’ll be right back,” he said. “The hapless graduate student makes
an inopportune visit. But so it must be.”
The flowchart branched out. In one branch, the United States does nothing, the
world does nothing, and Novak is killed. The diplomats and officials that Marta
Lang consulted emphasized the hazards of American involvement. Yet there were
risks in inaction as well—the risks of political embarrassment. Despite the
countercurrents Fielding identified, Peter Novak was a widely beloved man. If he
were killed, ordinary people would wonder why the United States had refused to
help a secular saint in his hour of need. The Liberty Foundation might denounce
the United States—furiously and vociferously—for refusing to provide any
assistance whatsoever. It would be easy to imagine the ensuing deluge of
congressional hearings, TV reports, newspaper editorials. The old words would
reverberate throughout the land: For evil to triumph, it is enough that good men
do nothing. In the resulting uproar, careers could be ruined. What looked like
the path of caution was in fact strewn with broken glass.
But what if there was another explanation?
The Liberty Foundation, typical of its go-it-alone ways, assembles its own
international commando team in a reckless attempt to spirit away the captive.
Who can they blame but themselves if things go badly? Mid-level employees at the
State Department would “leak” the word to the beat reporters who had come to
rely upon them as unnamed sources: Novak’s people rejected our offers of help
out of hand. It seems they were afraid it would compromise his aura of
independence. The secretary of state is completely broken up about what
happened, of course—we all are. But how can you provide assistance to people who
absolutely refuse to accept it? Arrogance on their part? Well, some might say
so. In fact, wasn’t that the fatal flaw of the Liberty Foundation itself? The
worldly, knowing reporters—for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the
syndicated wire services—would file dispatches subtly infused with what they’d
been told on deep background. Informed sources said that offers of assistance
were snubbed …
Janson’s mind reeled. Was the scenario anything more than a fantasy, an
invidious fiction? He did not know; he could not know—not yet. What he did know
was that he could not exclude the possibility.
Fielding’s minute stretched to three minutes, and when he reappeared, closing
the door carefully behind him, there was something different about him.
“The aforementioned grad student,” Fielding assured him, in a slightly piping
voice. “Hopeless Hal, I think of him. Trying to unknot an argument in Condorcet.
I can’t get him to see that in Condorcet the knots themselves are what’s
interesting.”
Janson’s spine prickled. Something in the master’s demeanor had altered—his tone
was brittle, as it had never been, and wasn’t there a slight tremor in his hands
that had not been there before? Janson saw that something had upset his old
teacher, and profoundly.
The don made his way to a rostrum where a fat volume of a dictionary reposed.
Not just any dictionary, Janson knew—it was the first volume of a rare 1759
edition of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, A-G stenciled in gold along its spine.
Janson remembered it from the don’s shelves back when his rooms were in
Trinity’s Neville Court.
“Just want to look up one thing,” he said. But Janson heard the stress beneath
the pleasantries. Not the stress of bereavement or loss, but of another emotion.
Alarm. Suspicion.
There was something about his manner: the slight tremor, the brittle tone—and?
Something else. What?
Angus Fielding was no longer making eye contact: that was it. Some people almost
never did so, but Fielding was not one of them. When he
spoke to you, his eyes swept back to yours regularly, as if to guide the words
home. Almost involuntarily, Janson felt one of his own hands reaching behind
him.
He stared, mesmerized, as Fielding, with his back to him, opened the tome,
and—it couldn’t be.
The master of Trinity College spun around to face Janson, brandishing a small
pistol in a shaking hand. Just behind Fielding, Janson saw the hollowed-out
section carved into the dictionary’s vellum pages, where the side arm had been