The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,204

just any man. We're talking about Peter Novak - a living legend."

"Bingo." Collins made a clicking sound. "You said it yourself. A living legend."

Janson felt his stomach drop. A living legend. A creation of intelligence professionals.

Peter Novak was an agency legend.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Collins slid off the stool and stood up. "There's something I want to show you."

He walked to his office, a large room facing the bay. On rustic wooden shelves were rows of old copies of Studies in Intelligence, a classified journal for American clandestine services. Monographs on international conflicts were interspersed with popular novels and dog-eared volumes of Foreign Affairs. A Sun Microsystems UltraSPARC workstation was connected to racked tiers of servers.

"You remember The Wizard of Oz? Bet they asked you about it when you were a POW. I gather the North Vietnamese interrogators were obsessed with American popular culture."

"It didn't come up," Janson said curtly.

"Naw, you were probably too much of a hardass to give away the ending. Wouldn't want to jeopardize our national security that way ... Sorry. That was out of line. There's one thing that divides us: whatever happens, you'll always be a goddamn war hero, and I'll always be a civvy desk jockey, and for some people, that makes you a better man. Irony is, 'some people' includes me. I'm jealous. I'm one of those guys who wanted to have suffered without ever wanting to suffer. Like wanting to have written a book, as opposed to wanting actually to write one."

"Can we move on?"

"You see, I've always thought it's the moment when we lose our innocence. Up there is the great and powerful Oz, and down there is the schmuck beneath the curtain. But it's not just him, it's the whole goddamn contraption, the machinery, the bellows, the levers, the steam nozzles, the diesel engine, or whatever. You think that was easy to put together? And once you had that up and running, it's not going to make much difference who you've got behind the curtain, or so we figured. It's the machine, not the man, that matters."

The director of Consular Operations was babbling; the anxiety he displayed nowhere else was making him weirdly voluble.

"You're trying my patience," Janson said. "Here's a tip. Never try the patience of a man holding a gun."

"It's just that we're approaching la gran scena, and I don't want you to lose it." Collins gestured toward the softly humming computer system. "You ready for this? Because we're moving toward now-that-you-know-I'm-going-to-have-to-kill-you territory."

Janson adjusted the M9 so that the sights were squarely between Collins's eyes, and the director of Consular Operations added quickly, "Not literally. We've moved beyond that - those of us in the program, I mean. We're playing a different game now. Then again, so is he."

"Start making sense," Janson said, gritting his teeth.

"A tall order." Collins jerked his head toward the computer system again. "You might say that's Peter Novak. That, and a few hundred interoperable, omicron-level-security computer systems elsewhere. Peter Novak is really a composite of bytes and bits and digital-transfer signatures with neither origins nor destinations. Peter Novak wasn't a person. He's a project. An invention. A legend, yeah. And for a long time, the most successful ever."

Janson's mind clouded as if overtaken by a sudden dust storm and, just as swiftly, a preternatural clarity set in.

It was madness - a madness that made a terrible kind of sense. "Please," he said to the bureaucrat calmly, quietly. "Go on."

"Best if we sit somewhere else," Collins said. "The system here has so many electronic security seals and booby-traps, it goes into auto-erase mode if you breathe on it hard. A moth once rammed into the window and I lost hours of work."

Now the two settled into the living room, the furniture covered with the coarse floral chintz that, at some point in the seventies, had evidently been decreed by law for seaside vacation houses.

"Look, it was a brilliant idea. Such a brilliant idea that for a long time, people were feuding over credit for who had the idea first. You know, like who invented the radio, or whatnot. Except that the number of people who knew about this was tiny, tiny, tiny. Had to be. Obviously, my predecessor Daniel Congdon had a lot to do with it. So did Doug Albright, a protege of David Abbott."

"Albright I've heard of. Abbott?"

"The guy who devised the whole 'Caine' gambit, back in the late seventies, trying to smoke out Carlos. Same kind of strategic thinking went into Mobius. Asymmetrical conflicts