And why.
PART TWO
Chapter Nine
Washington, D.C.
“The prime directive here is secrecy,” the man from the Defense Intelligence Agency said to the others in the room. With his thick, dark eyebrows, broad shoulders, and brawny forearms, he had the look of someone who worked with his hands; in fact, Douglas Albright was an intensely cerebral man, given to brooding and deliberation. He held a Ph.D. in comparative politics and another graduate degree in the foundations of game theory. “Secrecy is priority number one, two, and three. There should be no confusion about that.”
Such confusion was unlikely, for the imperative even accounted for the unlikely venue for the hastily convened meeting. The Meridian International Center was located on Crescent Place, just off Sixteenth Street on Meridian Hill. A blandly handsome building in the neoclassical style that was the architectural lingua franca of official Washington, it was anything but eye-catching. Its charms were discreet and had much to do with its curious status as a building that was not owned by the federal government—the center billed itself a nonprofit educational and cultural institution—but was almost entirely devoted to very private government functions. The center had an elegant front entrance of carved oak; of greater importance was the side entrance, accessible from a private driveway, which enabled dignitaries to arrive and depart without attracting notice. Though it was just a mile from the White House, the center had significant advantages for certain meetings, especially interdepartmental conclaves that had no formal justification. Meetings here did not involve the paper trail that was necessitated by the security procedures at the White House, the Old Executive Office Building, the Pentagon, or any of the intelligence agencies. They could take place without leaving behind any telltale logs or records. They could take place without ever, officially, having taken place at all.
The five gray-faced men who sat around the small conference table were all in similar lines of work, and yet, given the structure of governmental agencies, they would never have had cause to meet in the ordinary course of things. Needless to say, the program that had brought them all together in the first place was far from ordinary, and the circumstances they now faced were quite possibly cataclysmic.
Unlike their titular superiors, they were not political appointees; they were lifers, tending to programs that extended far beyond the duration of any particular administration. They liaised with, and reported to, the men and women who shuttled in and out in four-year cycles, but the horizons of their responsibilities, as they conceived them, extended much further.
Sitting opposite the DIA man, the deputy director of the National Security Agency had a high scrubbed forehead and small, pinched features. He prided himself on maintaining an outward air of serenity, no matter what the circumstances. That air of serenity was now close to fraying, and with it his pride. “Secrecy, yes—the nature of the directive is clear,” he said quietly. “The nature of our subject is not.”
“Paul Elie Janson,” said the State Department undersecretary, who was, on paper, the director of that department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He had not spoken for some time. A smooth-faced, athletic man with tousled, straw-colored hair, he was lent gravitas by heavy black-framed glasses. The undersecretary was a survivor, the other men knew. And because he was a survivor, they took careful note of the way he positioned himself on the issues. “Janson was one of ours, as you know. The documents you’ve got on him are lightly redacted. Apologies for that—that’s the way they come out of the files, and we didn’t have much prep time. Anyway, I think they give you the general idea.”
“One of your goddamn killing machines, Derek, that’s what he is,” said Albright, glowering at the undersecretary. Despite Albright’s high administrative rank, he had spent a career in analysis, not operations, and he remained an analyst to the core of his being. The ingrained mistrust that men of his ilk had toward their counterparts in operations was too often justified. “You create these soulless pieces of machinery, loose them on the world, and then leave someone else to clean up the mess. I just don’t understand what kind of game he’s playing.”
The man from State flushed angrily. “Have you considered the possibility that someone is running a game on him?” A hard stare: “Jumping to conclusions could be dangerous. I’m not willing to stipulate that Janson is a renegade.”
“The point is, we can’t be certain,” the NSA man, Sanford Hildreth, said after a while. He turned to the man seated next to him, a computer scientist who, as a young man, had earned a reputation as a wunderkind when he almost single-handedly redesigned the primary intelligence database for the CIA. “Is there some data set we’re overlooking, Kaz?”
Kazuo Onishi shook his head. Educated at Cal Tech, he had grown up in Southern California and retained a slight Valley accent that made him seem looser than he was. “I can tell you we’ve had anomalous activities, potential breaches of security firewalls. What I can’t do is identify the perpetrator. Not yet, anyway.”
“Say you’re correct, Derek,” Hildreth went on. “Then my heart goes out to him. But absolutely nothing can compromise the program. Doug’s right—that’s the prime directive. Absolute and unyielding. Or we might as well kiss Pax Americana good-bye. It almost doesn’t matter what he thought he was doing. All we can say is that this fellow Janson doesn’t know what in the world he’s blundered into.” He raised his coffee cup to his mouth and took a sip, hoping nobody noticed the tremor of his hand as he returned it to the saucer. “And he’s never going to know.” The words were more declaration than observation.
“That much I’ll accept,” the man from State said. “Has Charlotte been briefed?” Charlotte Ainsley was the president’s National Security Advisor and the principal White House liaison.
“Later today,” said the NSA man. “But do you see any supportable alternatives?”
“Just at the moment? He’s blundered into quicksand. We couldn’t help him if we wanted to.”
“It’ll go easier if he doesn’t struggle,” the DIA analyst said.
“No argument here,” said Derek Collins. “But he will, if I know my man. Mightily.”
“Then extreme measures are going to have to be taken,” the analyst said. “If the program gets burned, if even one percent of it gets exposed, it doesn’t just destroy us, it destroys everything anybody here cares about. Everything. The past twenty years of history gets rolled back, and that’s a pie-in-the-sky, win-the-lottery, best-case scenario. The likelier outcome looks a hell of a lot more like another world war. Only this time, we lose.”
“Poor bastard,” said the deputy director of the NSA, paging through the Janson files. “He’s in way over his head.”
The undersecretary of state suppressed a shudder. “The hell of it is,” he replied grimly, “so are we.”
Athens
The Greeks had a word for it: néfos. Smog—Western civilization’s gift to its cradle. Trapped by the circle of mountains, set low by atmospheric inversion, it acidified the air, speeding decay of the antiquities and irritating the eyes and lungs of the city’s four million inhabitants. On bad days, it lay on Athens like a noxious pall. This was a bad day.
Janson had taken a direct flight from Bombay to Athens, arriving at the East Terminal of the Ellinikón International Airport. He felt a deadness within; he was a besuited zombie going about his business. You were the guy with a slab of granite where your heart’s supposed to be. If only it were so.
He had called Márta Lang repeatedly, to no avail. It was maddening. The number she had given him would reach her wherever she was, she had told him: it would go directly to her desk, on her private line, and if she did not pick up after three rings, it would bounce to her cell number. It was a number only three people had, she had stressed. And yet all it ever yielded was the electronic purr of an unanswered line. He had dialed various regional headquarters of the Liberty Foundation, in New York, Amsterdam, Bucharest. Ms. Lang is unavailable, su
balterns with talcum-smooth voices informed him. Janson was insistent. It was an emergency. He was returning her call. He was a personal friend. It was a matter of the utmost importance. It concerned Peter Novak himself. He had tried every approach, every tactic of importuning, and made no headway.
A message will be conveyed, he was told each time, in an artfully passive construction that never varied. But they could not convey the real message, the words of a dreadful and destructive truth. For what could Janson tell them? That Peter Novak was dead? Those he spoke to at the Foundation gave no indication that they were aware of it, and Janson knew better than to provide the information.
Walking through the East Terminal, he heard, funneled through the airport sound system, the ubiquitous American pop diva with her ubiquitous hit song from the ubiquitous American blockbuster. That was what it was to be an international traveler these days: it was to be cushioned in sameness, enveloped in a cultural caul.
A message will be conveyed.
It was infuriating! Where was she? Had she been killed, too? Or—the possibility slashed at him like a straight razor across the eyes—was she herself part of a dire, unfathomable plot? Had Novak been killed by a member or members of his own organization? He could not automatically dismiss the hypothesis, even though it carried a horrific implication: that he himself had been a pawn in the conspiracy. That rather than having saved the man who once saved him, he had served as the very instrument of his destruction. Yet that was insanity! It made no sense—none of it did. Why kill a man with a death sentence?
Janson settled into the airport taxi that would bear him to the Mets neighborhood of Athens, to the southwest of the Olympic Stadium. The task before him would be a difficult one. He had to tell Marina Katsaris what had happened, had to tell her face-to-face, and the prospect lay on him like a boulder on his chest.
The airport was six miles from his destination in downtown Athens; seated uncomfortably in a backseat without room for his long legs, Janson wearily glanced around him. The highway that led from the suburb of Glyfada, where Ellinikón was situated, to the hilly sprawl that was Athens was like a conveyor belt of cars, their pooled exhaust replenishing the low-hanging fug of sulfur dioxide.
He noticed the small “2” in a little window on the meter, and his eyes met those of the driver, a squat man whose chin was darkly shadowed with an incipient beard, the kind that could never quite be shaved away.
“Is there somebody in the trunk?” Janson asked.
“Somebody in the trunk?” the driver repeated, mirthful. He was proud of his English. “Ha! Not when I last checked, mister! How come you ask?”
“Because I don’t see anybody else in the backseat. So I was trying to figure out why you have the meter set for a double fare.”
“My mistake,” the driver said after a beat, his beaming countenance disappearing. Sullenly, he adjusted the meter, which meant not only shifting to a lower rate but wiping out the drachmas he had already accumulated.
Janson shrugged. It was an old trick of Athenian cabdrivers. Its only significance, in this case, was that the driver must have gauged him to be exhausted and inattentive even to have tried out the petty scam.
Athenian traffic meant that the last mile of the trip took longer than the previous five. The streets of the Mets area were built on a steep hillside, and the houses, which dated before the war—and before the city’s population had mushroomed—harked to an earlier and pleasanter era. They were mostly the color of sand, with tiled roofs and red-shuttered windows. Courtyards with potted plants and spiral outdoor staircases sheltered behind them. Katsaris’s house was on a narrow street off Voulgareos, just half a dozen blocks from the Olympic Stadium.
Janson sent the driver on his way with 2,500 drachmas, rang the doorbell, and waited, half hoping there would be no answer.
The door opened after only a few moments, and there stood Marina, just as he had remembered her—if anything, she was even more beautiful. Janson took in her high cheekbones, honeyed complexion, steady brown eyes, her straight and silky black hair. The swelling of her belly was barely detectable, another voluptuous curve that was merely hinted at beneath her loose, raw-silk frock.
“Paul!” she exclaimed, delighted. The delight evaporated as she read his expression; the color drained from her face. “No,” she said in a low voice.
Janson did not reply, but his haggard countenance held nothing back.
“No,” she breathed.
She began to tremble visibly, her face contorted by grief, then rage. He followed her inside, where she turned and struck him on the face. She did so again, lashing out in broad, flailing strokes, as if to beat back a truth that would destroy her world.
The blows hurt, though not as much as the anger and despair that were behind them. Finally, Janson grabbed her wrists. “Marina,” he said, his own voice thick with grief. “Please, Marina.”
She stared at him as if by force of will she could make him vanish, and with him the devastating news he had brought.
“Marina, I don’t have words to say how sorry I am.” Clichés came out at such moments, no less true for being so. He squeezed his eyes shut, trawling for words of consolation. “Theo was a hero until the end.” The words sounded wooden even as he spoke them, for the sorrow Marina and he shared was indeed beyond words. “There was nobody like him. And the things I saw him do—”
“Mpa! Thee mou.” She violently disengaged herself from him, ran to the balcony that overlooked the small courtyard. “Don’t you get it? I don’t care about those things anymore. I don’t care about those field-agent heroics, those games of cowboys and Indians. They mean nothing to me!”
“They didn’t always.”
“No,” she said. “Because once I played the game also … .”
“My God, what you did in the Bosporus—it was extraordinary.” The operation had taken place six years ago, shortly before Marina resigned from her country’s intelligence services. A cache of armaments en route to the 17 Noemvri group, the November 17 terrorist group, had been seized, those who purveyed it apprehended. “I know intelligence professionals who still marvel at it.”
“And only afterward do you get to ask yourself: Did it make any difference, any of it?”
“It saved lives!”
“Did it? One shipment of small arms seized. To be replaced by another, routed elsewhere. I suppose it keeps the prices high, the dealers well paid.”
“Theo didn’t see it that way.” Janson spoke softly.
“Theo never got around to seeing it that way, no. And now he never will.” Her voice started to quaver.
“You blame me.”
“I blame myself.”
“No, Marina.”
“I let him go, didn’t I? If I insisted, he would have stayed. Do you doubt it? But I didn’t insist. Because even if he stayed home this time, there’d be another call, and another, and another. And not to go, not ever to go—that, too, would have killed him. Theo was great at what he did. I know that, Paul. It’s what made him proudest of himself. How could I take that from him?”
“We make our choices.”
“And how could I teach him that he might be great at other things, too? That he was a good person. That he was going to be a great father.”
“He was a great friend.”
“To you, he was,” Marina said. “Were you to him?”
“I don’t know.”
“He loved you, Paul. That’s why he went.”
“I understand that,” Janson said tonelessly. “I do.”
“You meant the world to him.”
Janson was silent for a moment. “I am so sorry, Marina.”
“You brought us together. And now you’ve broken us apart, the only way we could ever be broken apart.” Marina’s dark eyes looked at him beseechingly, and a dam within her suddenly broke. Her sobs were animallike, wild and unrestrained; over the next few minutes, they wracked her like convulsions. There she sat upon a black lacquered chair, sur
rounded by the small appurtenances of domesticity she and Theo had acquired together: the flat-weave carpet, the blond, newly refinished wooden floor, the small, pleasant house where she and her husband had made a life—had prepared, together, to welcome another life. In different ways, Janson mused, a war-torn island in the Indian Ocean had deprived both him and Theo of fatherhood.
“I didn’t want him to go,” she said. “I never wanted him to go.” Her face was red now, and when she opened her mouth a filament of saliva stretched between her swollen lips. Her anger had provided Marina her only mooring, and when it collapsed, so did she.
“I know, Marina,” Janson said, his own eyes moist. Seeing her begin to slump, he wrapped his arms around her, holding her to him in a tight embrace. “Marina.” He spoke her name like a whispered supplication. The view out of the room’s picture window was incongruously sunny, and the honking of frustrated motorists was almost a balm, the bleating white noise of the urban late afternoon. A sea of commuters rushing home to their families: men, women, sons, daughters—the geometry of domestic life.
When she looked at him next, it was through a lens of tears. “Did he save somebody? Did he rescue someone? Tell me his death wasn’t in vain. Tell me he saved a life. Tell me, Paul!”
Janson sat motionless on a wicker-back chair.
“Tell me what happened,” Marina said, as if the specifics of the event would provide her a purchase on sanity.
A minute elapsed before he could collect himself and speak, but then he told her what had happened. It was why he had come, after all. He was the only one who knew just how Theo had died. Marina wanted to know, needed to know, and he would tell her. Yet even as he spoke, he became intensely aware of how little the explanation in fact explained. There was so much more that he didn’t know. So many questions to which he had no answers. All he knew was that he would find those answers, or die trying.