The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,147

periodicals. These were the lives of Peter Novak - hundreds of stories about the life and times of the great philanthropist.

Janson pored over them obsessively, hunting for something that he knew he would probably not find: a key, a clue, an incidental bit of data with larger significance. Something - anything - that would tell him why the great man had been killed. Something that would narrow the field. He was looking for a rhyme - a detail that would be meaningless to most people, yet would resonate with something that his subconscious mind had stowed away. We know more than we know, as Demarest liked to say: our mind stores the impress of facts that we cannot consciously retrieve. Janson read in a zone of receptivity: not trying to puzzle out a problem but hoping simply to take in what could be taken in, without preconception or expectations. Would there be a fleeting allusion to an embittered business rival? To a particular current of buried animus in the financial or international community? To a conflict involving his forebears? Some other enemy as yet unsuspected? He could not know the kind of thing he was looking for, and to imagine that he did would only blind him to the thing he must see.

Novak's enemies - was he flattering himself to think this? - were his enemies. If that were so, what else might they have in common? We know more than we know. Yet as Janson read on ceaselessly, his eyes beginning to burn, he felt as if he knew less and less. Occasionally he underlined a detail, though what was striking was how little the details varied. There were countless renditions of Peter Novak's financial exploits, countless evocations of his childhood in war-torn Hungary, countless tributes to his humanitarian passions. In the Far Eastern Economic Review, he read:

In December of 1992, he announced another ambitious program, donating $100 million in support of scientists of the former Soviet Union. His program was designed to slow down that country's brain drain - and prevent Soviet scientists from taking up more lucrative employment in places like Iraq, Syria, and Libya. There's no better example of Novak in action. Even while Europe and the United States were wringing their hands and wondering what to do about the dispersal of scientific talent from the former superpower, Novak was actually doing something about it.

"I find it easier to make money than to spend it, to tell you the truth," says Novak with a big grin. He remains a man of simple tastes.

Every day starts with a spartan breakfast of kasha, and he pointedly eschews the luxury resorts and high-living ways favored by the plutocratic set.

Even Novak's small, homey eccentricities - like that unvarying daily breakfast of kasha - cycled from one piece to another: a permanent residue of personal "color," PCBs in the journalistic riverbed. Once in a while, there was a reference to the investigation of Novak's activities after Great Britain's "Black Wednesday," and the conclusion, as summarized by the head of MI6, in the line that Fielding had quoted: "The only law this fellow has broken is the law of averages." In another widely repeated quote, Peter Novak had explained his relative reticence with the press: "Dealing with a journalist is like dancing with a Doberman," he had quipped. "You never know if it's going to lick your face or rip your throat out." Testimonials from elder statesmen about his role in rebuilding civil society and promoting conflict resolution were woven through every profile. Soon, paragraphs of journalistic prose seemed to blend into one another; quotes recurred with only minor variations, as if struck from boilerplate. Thus, the London Guardian:

'Time was you could dismiss Peter Novak, ' says Walter Horowitz, the former United States Ambassador to Russia. 'Now he's become a player and a major one. He's very much his own man. He gets in there and does it, and he has very little patience with government. He's the only private citizen who has his own foreign policy - and who can implement it.' Horowitz voices a perspective that seems increasingly common in the foreign-policy establishment: that governments no longer have the resources or the will to execute certain kinds of initiatives, and that this vacuum is being filled by private-sector potentates like Peter Novak.

The U.N. Under Secretary-General for Political and Security Council Affairs, Jaako Torvalds, says, 'It's like working with a friendly, peaceable, independent entity, if not a government. At the U.N.,