A cold sweat formed on his skin almost instantly as he rolled out of the zone. Any moment now he would know if he had triggered the pressure sensors. The floodlights would blaze; the camera would pivot. And then, as his visage came into focus, a team of heavily armed guards would rush to the site. The barricades and alarm systems to every side would make his chance for escape essentially nil.
With bated breath, he waited, feeling relief budding with each passing second. Nothing. He had cleared it. All three perimeter security systems were now behind him.
Now he stood and looked up at the mansion that loomed before him. Up close, it was breathtaking in its grandeur. To either side of the main house were vast conical turrets; the exterior of the mansion was fashioned from Briar Hill sandstone. The roof was trimmed with an intricate balustrade and topped with a smaller one. The place was an eclectic display of architectural bombast. Yet did it count as ostentation if nobody could see it?
The windows were dark except for a dim glow of what might be standard nighttime illumination; were its inhabitants in the back rooms? It seemed too early for anyone to be asleep. Something about the setup bothered Janson, but he could not say why, and it was no time for turning around.
Now he crept to the left side of the building and over to a narrow side entrance.
Mounted in the stone near the dark, ornately incised door was a discreet electrostatic touch screen, of the kind used by ATMs. If the right numbers were pressed, the entrance alarm would be deactivated. Janson withdrew the small compressed-air atomizer from his knapsack and directed a jet of finely powdered charcoal at the pad. If everything went well, it would alight on fingerprints, and by the pattern he would be able to tell which digits the alarm code used; depending on how light or heavy the oils were, he could make a good guess as to their relative frequency.
A dead end. No pattern was revealed at all. As he had feared, the alarm pad employed a scrambled video display: the numerals were displayed in a random order, never in the same sequence twice.
He cleared his head. So close and yet so … No, he was not down for the count. Deactivating the alarm would have been enormously helpful, but he had not exhausted his backup plans. The door was alarmed. Accept it. If the alarm system did not detect that it had been opened, however, it would not go off. With the help of a penlight, Janson scanned the dark-stained door until he saw the tiny screws on the topmost section: evidence of the contact switch. Within the door frame, the contacts of a ferrous-metal switch were kept together—the circuit was kept closed—by a magnet recessed in the top of the door. As long as the door was shut, the magnet would keep a plunger within the door frame depressed, completing the electric circuit within the switch unit. Janson withdrew a powerful magnet from his knapsack and, using a fast-drying cyanoacrylate adhesive, fastened it to the lower part of the door frame.
Then he went to work on the door lock. More bad news: there was no keyhole. The door was opened by means of a magnetic card. Could the door simply be forced? No: he had to assume a heavy steel grid inside the wooden door and a multiple door-frame-bolt locking system. You had to ask a door like that to open. Unless you meant to take down part of the building, you couldn’t force it to.
It was an eventuality he had prepared for; but again, with his rough-and-ready tools, the chances of success were far less than with the kind of instruments he was accustomed to having at his disposal. Certainly, his magnetic picklock was not an impressive-looking piece of equipment, having been jury-rigged with electrical tape and epoxy. He had removed the core of the solenoid and replaced it with a steel rod. At the other end of the rod, he had attached a thin rectangle of steel, which he had cut from a tin of butter cookies using heavy-duty scissors. The electronic part—a random noise generator—was a simple circuit of transistors he had extracted from a RadioShack cell phone. Once he connected a pair of AA batteries to the apparatus, a quickly oscillating magnetic field was created: it was designed to pulse at the sensors until they were activated.
Janson inserted the metal rectangle in the slot and waited. Slow seconds ticked by.
Nothing.
Swallowing a gorge of frustration, he checked the battery contacts and reinserted the metal card. More long seconds ticked by—and suddenly he heard the click of the lock’s own solenoid being activated. The door’s bolts and latches were swiftly retracted.
He let out his breath slowly, and opened the door.
As long as the house was occupied, any internal photoelectric alarms would be deactivated. If he’d guessed wrong, it wouldn’t take long to find out. Janson quietly closed the door behind him and, in the gloom, proceeded down a long hall.
After a few hundred feet, he saw a crack of light. It was seeping beneath a paneled door to his left.
On examination, it appeared to be a simple swing door, unlocked and unalarmed. What kind of lair was this? Was it an office? A conference room?
Fear slithered through his bowels. Every animal instinct he had was signaling frantically.
Something was wrong.
Yet he could not turn back now, whatever the risks. He removed his pistol from a bellyband holster beneath his tunic and, holding it before him, strode into the room.
To eyes that had adjusted to the gloom, the space was dazzlingly bright, illuminated by floor lamps and desk lamps and a chandelier overhead—and Janson squinted involuntarily as an even deeper sense of dread came over him.
His eyes swept the room. He was in the middle of a magnificent drawing room, a textural array of damask and leather and richly burnished antique woods. And in the middle of it, eight men and women were seated, facing him.
Janson felt the blood drain from his face.
They had been waiting for him.
“What the heck took you so long, Mr. Janson?” The question was asked with a practiced show of affability. “Collins here told me you’d make it here by eight o’clock. It’s practically half past.”
Janson blinked hard at his questioner, but the evidence of his eyes remained unchanged.
He was staring at the President of the United States.
Chapter Thirty-four
The President of the United States. The director of Consular Operations. And the others?
Janson felt flash frozen by the shock. As he stood rooted to the spot, his mind struggled fiercely with itself.
It couldn’t be. And yet it was.
Men in suits and ties had been waiting for him in the luxurious mansion, and Janson recognized most of them. There was the secretary of state, a hale man looking less hale than usual. The U.S. Treasury Department’s undersecretary for international affairs, a plump, Princeton-trained economist. The sallow-faced chairman of the National Intelligence Council. The deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a burly man with a perpetual five o’clock shadow. There were also a few colorless but nervous-looking technicians : he knew the type immediately.
“Have a seat, Paul.” Yes, it was Derek Collins, his slate eyes cool behind his chunky black plastic glasses. “Make yourself at home.” He gestured around him wryly. “If you can call this a home.”
The room was both spacious and ornate, paneled and plastered in the seventeenth-century English style; burnished mahogany walls gleamed beneath a fine crystal chandelier. The floor marquetry was in an intricate pattern of lighter and darker woods, oak and ebony.
“Apologies for the programmed misdirection, Paul,” Collins went on.
Programmed misdirection?
“The courier was on your payroll,” Janson said, toneless.
Collins nodded. “We’d had the same thought as you about getting access to the incoming documents. As soon as he reported your contact, we knew we had a golden opportunity. Look, you weren’t exactly going to respond to an engraved invitation. It was the only way I could bring you in.”
“Bring me in?” Indignation choked off the words in his throat.
Glances were exchanged between Collins and the president. “And it was the best
way to show these other good people that you still have what it takes,” Collins said. “Demonstrate that your abilities live up to your reputation. Hot damn, that was one impressive infiltration. And before you get all hurt and sulky, you better understand that the people in this room are pretty much the only ones left who know the truth about Mobius. For better or worse, you’re now a member of this select group. Which means we’ve got an Uncle Sam Wants You situation here.”
“Goddamn you, Collins!” He reholstered his pistol and put his hands on his hips. Fury coursed through him.
The president cleared his throat. “Mr. Janson, we really are depending on you.”
“With all respect, sir,” he said, “I’ve had enough of the lies.”
“Watch it, Paul,” Collins interjected.
“Mr. Janson?” The president was looking into his eyes with his famous high-beam gaze, the kind that could be equally mournful or amused. “Lies are pretty much the first language for most folks in Washington. You’ll get no argument from me. There are lies and, yes, there will continue to be lies, because the good of the country requires it. But I want you to understand something. You’re inside a top-secret ultra-secure federal facility. No tape, no log, no nothing. What does that mean? It means we’re at a place where we can all open our kimonos, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. This meeting has no official status whatsoever. It never happened. I’m not here, you’re not here. That’s the sheltering lie, the lie that’s going to make all the truth-telling possible. Because here and now, it’s all about telling the truth—to you and to ourselves. Nobody’s going to shine you on. But it’s dead urgent that you get briefed on the situation with the Mobius Program.”
“The Mobius Program,” Janson said. “I’ve already been briefed. The world’s greatest philanthropist and humanitarian, this one-man roving ambassador, the ‘peacemaker’—he’s a goddamn fiction, brought to you by your friends in Washington. This latter-day saint is a wholesale creation of … what? A task force of planners.”
“Saint?” the National Intelligence Council chairman interrupted. “There’s no religious valence here. We were always careful to avoid anything like that.”
“Praise the Lord.” Janson’s voice was icy.
“I’m afraid there’s a lot more going on than you know,” offered the secretary of state. “And given that it’s the most explosive secret in the history of the republic, you’ll understand if we’ve been a little skittish.”
“I’ll give you the log line,” the president said. It was clear that he was chairing the meeting; a man used to command did not have to make a show of his authority. “Our creature has become—well, not our creature anymore. We’ve lost control of the asset.”
“Paul?” Collins said. “Really, have a seat. This is going to take a while.”
Janson lowered himself into a nearby armchair. The tension in the room was palpable.
President Berquist’s gaze drifted to the window, which gave a view of the gardens in the rear of the estate. In the moonlight, it was possible to make out the Italian-style formal garden, a rectilinear maze of clipped yew and box hedges. “To quote one of my predecessors,” he said, “we made him a god when we didn’t own the heavens.” He glanced at Douglas Albright, the man from the Defense Intelligence Agency. “Doug, why don’t you start?”
“I gather that you’ve already had the origins of the program explained to you. So you know that we had three extremely dedicated agents who were trained to play the role of Peter Novak. The redundancy was necessary.”
“Right, right. Too much of an investment had gone into this to have your Daddy Warbucks hit by a taxicab,” Janson said acidly. “What about the wife, though?”
“Another American agent,” the DIA man said. “She went under the knife, too, in case she ever encountered anyone who might have known her from the old days.”
“Remember Nell Pearson?” Collins said quietly.
Janson was thunderstruck. No wonder there was something about Novak’s wife that seemed eerily familiar. His affair with Nell Pearson was brief but memorable. It had taken place a couple of years after he joined Consular Operations; like him, his fellow agent was single, young, and restless. They had both been working undercover in Belfast, assigned to play husband and wife. It didn’t take much for them to add an element of reality to the imposture. The affair had been torrid, electric, more an emanation of the body than of the heart. It seized them like a fever, and it proved as evanescent as a fever. Yet something about her had obviously stayed with him. Those long elegant fingers: the one thing that could not be altered. And the eyes: there had been something between them, had there not? Some frisson, even in Amsterdam?
Janson shuddered, imagining the woman he knew being reshaped, irreversibly, by the cold steel edge of a surgeon’s #2 scalpel. “But what do you mean you’ve lost control?” he persisted.
There was an awkward moment of silence before the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for international affairs spoke. “Start with the operational challenge: how do you secure the vast funding necessary to sustain the illusion of a world-class tycoon-philanthropist? Needless to say, the Mobius Program couldn’t simply divert funds from a closely monitored U.S. intelligence budget. Seed money could be provided, but nothing more. So the program drew upon our intelligence capabilities to create its own fund. We put to use our take from signals intercepts … .”
“Jesus Christ—you’re talking about Echelon!” Janson said.
Echelon was a complex intelligence-gathering system comprising a fleet of low-earth-orbit satellites devoted to signals interception: every international phone call, every form of telecommunications that involved a satellite conduit—which was most of them—could be sampled, intercepted, by the orbiting spy fleet. Its mammoth download was fed into an assortment of collections and analysis facilities, all controlled by the National Security Agency. It had the capability of monitoring every form of international telephony. The NSA had repeatedly denied rumors that it used the signal intercepts for purposes other than national security, in its strictest sense. Yet here was the shocking admission that even the most conspiracy-minded skeptics didn’t know the half of it.
The jowly Treasury undersecretary nodded somberly. “Echelon enabled us to gain sensitive, highly secret intelligence about central-bank decisions around the world. Was the Bundesbank going to devalue the deutsche mark? Was Malaysia going to prop up the ringgit? Had Ten Downing Street decided to let sterling take a tumble ? How much would it be worth to know, even just a few days before? Our creation was armed with that inside information, because the choicest fruits of our intelligence were placed at his disposal. It was child’s play. Through him we placed a few massive, highly leveraged currency bets. In rapid order, twenty million became twenty billion—and then much, much more. Here was a legendary financier. And nobody had to know that his brilliant intuition and instincts were in fact the result of—”
“The abuse of a U.S. government surveillance program,” Janson said, cutting him off.
“Fair enough,” President Berquist said soberly. “Fair enough. Needless to say, it was a program that was in place long before I took office. Through extraordinary measures, the Mobius Program had created a highly visible billionaire … yet we hadn’t counted on the human factor—on the possibility that access and control to all that wealth and power might prove too great a lure to at least one of our agents.”
“Don’t you people ever learn?” Janson said, flaring. “The law of unintended consequences—you know it? It sure knows you.” His eyes moved from face to face. “The history of American intelligence is littered with ingenious plans that leave the world worse off. Now we’re talking about the ‘human factor’ as if there just hadn’t been room for it on your goddamn spreadsheets.” Janson turned to Collins. “I asked you, when we spoke earlier, who would agree to play such a role—to have his entire identity erased. What kind of man would do such a thing?”
“Yes,” C
ollins said, “and I answered, ‘Someone who had no choice.’ The fact is, you know that someone. A man named Alan Demarest.”
Chapter Thirty-five
A chill ran through Janson’s veins, and for a moment all he could see was the face of his former commanding officer. Alan Demarest. Nausea flooded him, and his head began to throb.
It was a lie!
Alan Demarest was dead. Executed by the state. Janson’s knowledge of that ultimate requital was the only thing that made his memories endurable.
When Janson returned stateside, he filed the lengthy reports that, he had been assured, resulted in Demarest’s arraignment. A secret military tribunal had been convened; a decision had been made at the highest levels: the national morale was deemed too vulnerable to permit the public airing of Demarest’s activities, but justice would be served all the same. Janson’s extensive sworn depositions had made the case open-and-shut. Demarest had been found guilty after just a few hours of deliberation, and was sentenced to death. The man whom one counterintelligence operative dubbed the “Mr. Kurtz of Khe Sanh” had been executed by a military firing squad. And Janson had watched.
Mesa Grande. In the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains. The cloth circle in front of his heart—white, and then bright red.
As Janson stared wordlessly at Collins, he could feel a vein pulsing in his forehead.
“A man who had no choice,” Collins said, implacably. “He was a brilliant, brilliant man—his mind an extraordinary instrument. He also, as you discovered, had decided flaws. So be it. We needed somebody with his capabilities, and his absolute loyalty to this country had never been questioned, even if his methods were.”
“No,” Janson said, and it came out as a whisper. He shook his head slowly. “No, it’s impossible.”
Collins shrugged. “Blanks, squibs. Basic stagecraft. We showed you what you thought you needed to see.”
Janson tried to speak, but nothing came out.