The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,230

the infliction of pain like a four-star chef. Janson recalled the smell of charred flesh as the jumper cables sparked and sputtered at the Vietnamese captive's groin. The look of abject terror in the man's eyes.

And Demarest's almost gentle refrain as he interrogated the young fisherman. "Look into my eyes," Demarest had repeated in a gentle voice. "Look into my eyes."

The prisoner's breath had come in strangled yelps, like a dying animal's. Demarest listened to a few bars of choral music. Then he straddled the second prisoner. "Look into my eyes," Demarest said. He'd pulled a small knife from a waist holster and made a small slice in the man's belly. The skin and the fascia beneath immediately sheared, pulled apart by the tension of the ropes. The man screamed.

And screamed. And screamed.

Janson could hear the screams now. They echoed in his head, amplified by the sickening realization that this man was the one they had chosen to make the most powerful on earth.

Now Derek Collins glanced around the room, as if canvassing opinions, before he continued. "Let me get to the point. Demarest has been able to seize control of all the assets that were created for the use of the Mobius Program. Without getting into the details, I can tell you that he's changed all the banking codes - and foiled the measures we'd taken to prevent just such an eventuality. And they were damn extensive. We had zero-knowledge, top-security cryptosystems in place that required central Mobius authorization for substantial movements of currencies. Codes were changed regularly, divided among the three principals so that no individual could gain control of the whole - one firewall after another. The security measures were damn near insurmountable."

"Yet they were surmounted."

"Yes. He got control."

Janson shook his head, sickened by what he was hearing. "Translation: the mammoth empire of the Liberty Foundation, the financial leverage, all of it - has passed into the control of one dangerously unstable individual. Translation: you're not running him - he's running you."

There were no demurrals.

"And the United States can't expose him," said the secretary of state. "Not without exposing itself."

"Just when did you figure out this was happening?" Janson demanded.

The two technicians shifted uncomfortably in the Louis XV chairs, their bulk threatening the slender wooden frames.

"A few days ago," Collins said. "As I told you, the Mobius Program had fail-safe systems in place - what we thought were fail-safe, anyway. Look, we had some of our best minds on this thing - don't imagine we didn't think of everything, because we did. The controls were formidable. Only recently did he gain the wherewithal to circumvent them."

"And Anura?"

"His masterstroke," said the chairman of the National Intelligence Council. "We were victims, all of us, of an elaborate ploy. When we heard our man was imprisoned there, we panicked, and acted precisely as Demarest knew we would. We entrusted him with the second set of codes, the ones that would normally have been under the control of the man the guerrillas were about to execute. It seemed necessary, as a stopgap. What we didn't realize was that Demarest had arranged the hostage taking. Evidently he used a lieutenant of his named Bewick as the cutout, a cutout the Caliph knew only as the 'Go-Between.' All very, how shall I say, hygienic."

"Jesus."

"For that matter, we failed to realize that he was also responsible for the death of the third agent, a year earlier. We thought our marionette strings were unbreakable. We know better now."

"Now that it's too late," Janson said, and in the faces of tense men and women, Janson saw the acceptance of the rebuke - and its irrelevance. "Question: Why did Demarest bring me into it?"

Collins spoke first. "Do you have to ask? The man loathes you, blames you for taking away his career, his freedom, almost his life - turning him in to a government he thought he'd served with incredible devotion. He didn't just want to see you dead. He wanted you to be accused, humiliated, strung up, killed by your own government. What goes around comes around - that's how he must have seen things."

"You want to say 'I told you so'?" President Berquist said. "You're entitled. I've been shown copies of your 1973 reports about Lieutenant Commander Demarest. But you've got to understand where this thing stands right now. Not only has Demarest eliminated his understudies but he's moved into a second, far more deadly phase."

"What's that?"

"The puppet is killing off the puppet masters," said