The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,235

And the line went dead.

The secretary-general held on to the handset for a few moments before returning it to its cradle. "Alors?"

He turned to Paul Janson, who had been sitting in the corner of the darkening office.

The operative looked at the master diplomat with frank admiration. "Now we wait," said Janson.

Would he take the bait? It was a bold proposal, yet threaded through with truth. The financial straits of the U.N. were genuinely dire. And Mathieu Zinsou was nothing if not ambitious for his organization. He was also known to be a farseeing man. In his five years at the helm of the U.N., he had reshaped it more vigorously than any SG had ever imagined. Was this next step so unthinkable?

It had been a chance remark of Angus Fielding's that had inspired the ploy, and Janson recalled yesterday's conversation with the man who, not that long ago, had threatened him with a gun. Of course, that was the order of the day, wasn't it - allies and adversaries switching sides with abandon? The conversation had been awkward at first; Fielding had not missed Novak's CNN appearance, and was clearly abashed, bewildered, and humiliated, unaccustomed emotions for Trinity's laureled master. And yet, without so much as hinting at the explosive secret, Janson was able to pick the scholar's agile brain on the question of how one might reach the reclusive billionaire.

There was another element that Janson calculated might lend plausibility to the scenario. Zinsou had for years been dogged by a reputation for benign, small-scale corruption. When Zinsou was a young commissioner at UNESCO, a lucrative contract had been taken away from one medical corporation and awarded to another. The spurned rival put it out that Zinsou had received "special preferments" from the victorious corporation. Had payment been made in a numbered account somewhere? The accusations were groundless, yet in some circles curiously adhesive. The half-remembered hint of corruption would, ironically, make his proposition all the more persuasive.

But what would seal it would be an elemental feature of human psychology: Demarest would want it to be true. Intense desire always had a subtle gravitational effect upon belief: we are more likely to credit what we wish to be so.

Now Janson stood at Zinsou's desk and, from a bulky device there, extracted the digital cassette on which the call had been recorded for later study.

"You astonish me," Janson said, simply.

"I'll take that as an insult," the secretary-general said with a small smile.

"The implication being that my expectations were not high? Then I spoke poorly - and you should take it, rather, as proof that there is only one true diplomat in this room."

"The fate of the world should not hang on a lapse of etiquette. I feel that in this case it well may. Have you considered all the things that could go wrong?"

"I have absolute confidence in you," Janson parried.

"An expression of confidence I find dismaying. My confidence in myself is high: it is not absolute. Nor should yours be. I speak, of course, in principle."

"Principles," Janson said. "Abstractions."

"Indulgences, you mean to say." A smile hovered over Mathieu Zinsou's lips. "And this is not the time for them. Now is the time for particulars. Here's one: your plan involves venturing a prediction of somebody who may not be predictable at all."

"There are no absolute predictions that we can make. I take your point. But there are patterns - there are rules, even for the man who flouts the rules. I do know this man."

"Before yesterday, I'd have said the same. Peter Novak and I have met on a few occasions. Once at a state dinner in Amsterdam. Once in Ankara, in the wake of the Cyprus resolution he brokered - a purely ceremonial event. I was bearing the official congratulations of this organization, announcing the withdrawal of U.N. troops from the partition line. Of course, now I realize I was meeting with a phantom. Perhaps a different man each time - presumably there are files kept by the Mobius Program that could tell us. Yet I must say that I found him both charismatic and affable. An appealing combination."

"And a combination that's been ascribed to you," Janson said carefully.

Zinsou uttered a sentence in the complex tonal language of Fon, spoken by his father's people. Zinsou p猫re had been a descendant of the royal court of Dahomey, once a significant West African empire. "A favorite saying of my great-uncle, the paramount chief, which he often repeated to the gaping sycophants who