The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,228

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."