The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,236

surrounded him. Loosely translated, it means: The more you lick my ass, the more I feel you're trying to slip one past me."

Janson laughed. "You're even wiser than they say - "

Zinsou raised an index finger of mock admonishment. "I can't help wondering. Did Peter Novak believe any of it, or was he just playing along? I ask out of injured pride, of course. It cudgels my sense of amour propre that someone should believe I would, in effect, sell out the organization to which I have devoted my life." Zinsou toyed with his thick Montblanc fountain pen. "But that's just pride speaking."

"Evil men are always quick to think evil of others. Besides, if it works, you'll have plenty of reason for pride. Pull this off, and it will be the greatest feat of your career."

An uncomfortable, lonely silence fell upon them.

Zinsou was not, by habit, a solitary man: after decades spent within the U.N. bureaucracy, deliberation and consultation were second nature to him. His diplomatic skills were most fully engaged in reconciling conflicts among the U.N. divisions themselves - calming hostilities between the Department of Peace-keeping-Operations and the Humanitarian Affairs people, preventing resistance from forming among frontline workers or their superiors in the head offices. He knew the thousand ways that the bureaucrats could stall executive decisions, for in his long career he himself had had occasion to make use of such techniques. The methods of bureaucratic infighting were as advanced and as sophisticated as the techniques of aggression on the world's battlefields. It was a tribute to his own success on the internal battlefields that he had risen as far and as fast as he had. Moreover, the bureaucratic battle was truly won only when those you defeated were led to imagine that they had, in some way, been victorious.

Being the secretary-general of the United Nations, Zinsou had decided, was like conducting an orchestra of soloists. The task seemed impossible, and yet it could be done. When he was in good form, Zinsou could lead a conflict-riven committee to a consensus position that he had planned out before the meeting had begun. His own preferences were masked; he would appear sympathetic to positions he secretly found unacceptable. He would play off the preexisting tensions among the assembled deputy special representatives and high commissioners; subtly lead people into temporary coalitions against detested rivals; guide the discussion through ricochets and clashes, like a pool shark bringing about a complex sequence of carefully planned collisions by a well-aimed cue ball. And at the end, when the committee had worked its way around to the very position he had meant them to reach, he would, with a sigh of resignation and a display of concessive largesse, say that the others in the room had talked him around to their point of view. There were bureaucratic players whose ego demanded that they be seen to have won. But true power belonged to those who wanted to win in actuality, regardless of appearances. A number of people still accepted Zinsou's soft-spoken and courteous demeanor at face value and did not recognize the forceful nature of his leadership. They were losers who imagined themselves winners. Some of those who supported Zinsou did so because they believed they could control him. Others, the smarter ones, supported him because they knew he would be the most effective leader that the U.N. had known for decades, and they knew that the U.N. was in desperate need of such leadership. It was a winning alliance - for Zinsou and for the organization to which he had devoted his life.

But now the virtuoso of manufactured consent had to operate on his own. The secret with which he had been entrusted was so explosive that there was nobody to whom he, in turn, could entrust it. No colloquy, no consultation, no deliberation, real or staged. There was only the American operative, a man Zinsou found himself only gradually warming to. What bound them together was not merely the explosive secret; it was also the knowledge that their countermeasures were likely to end in failure. The so-called Zinsou Doctrine, as the press had dubbed it, endorsed only interventions with a reasonable chance of success. This one failed the test.

Yet what alternative was there?

Finally, Janson spoke again. "Let me tell you about the man I know. We're talking about somebody whose mind is a remarkable instrument, capable of extraordinary real-time analysis. He can be a person of immense charm. And even greater cruelty.