man, this copy of a copy, this doubly ersatz Novak, would take his position before the green-marble podium.
And he would be shot dead.
That would not be Novak's undoing. It would be their own undoing. Alan Demarest would have confirmed his most paranoid suspicions: he would have flushed out his enemies, would have discovered that the whole invitation had indeed been a plot.
At the same time, they would have destroyed their last direct link to Alan Demarest. Nell Pearson was dead. Marta Lang, as she'd called herself, was dead. Every human vessel that might lead to him had been severed - except the man in the executive suite. A man who must have given half a year of his life to recuperate from reconstructive surgery. A man who - willingly or unwillingly - had sacrificed his own identity to the brilliant maniac who held the future of the world in his hands. If he were killed, Janson would have lost his last remaining lead.
And if he mounted the podium, he would be killed.
The scheme they had set in motion could not be stopped. It was not in their control: that was its great recommendation - and, possibly, its lethal flaw.
Frantically, Janson flipped to the camera angle on the Mansur delegation. There was the aisle seat that had been occupied by the Caliph.
Empty.
Where was he?
Janson had to find him: it was their only chance to prevent catastrophe.
Now he activated his filament microphone and spoke, knowing his words would be relayed to the secretary-general's earpiece.
"You have got to postpone Novak's appearance. I need ten minutes."
The secretary-general was seated at the high marble bench behind the dais, smiling and nodding. "That's impossible," he whispered, without altering his public expression.
"Do it!" Janson said. "You're the secretary-general, goddammit! You figure it out."
Then he raced down the carpeted stairs and toward the hallway that bounded the Assembly Hall. He had to find the fanatic from Anura. This assassination would not save the world; it would doom it.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Janson's rubber-soled feet raced down the white-tiled hallway. The Caliph had disappeared from the Assembly Hall - which meant, presumably, that he was retrieving a weapon he or a confederate had somewhere managed to stow earlier. The South Lobby, brilliantly lit from the expansive glazed wall, was vacant. The giant escalator was empty. He bounded toward the delegates' lounge. Seated on a white-leather sofa, two blond women were deep in conversation: from the looks of them, they were extras from a Scandinavian delegation who found that there was no room for them in the Assembly Hall. Otherwise, nothing.
Where could he be? Janson's mind desperately sorted through possibilities.
Ask it differently: where would you be, Janson?
The chapel. A long, narrow space that was almost never used but was always kept open. It was adjacent to the secretary-general's suite, just to the other side of the curved wall that fronted the Assembly Hall. The one room in the building where one was guaranteed to be unobserved.
Janson put on another burst of speed, and though his rubber-soled shoes made little sound, his breathing grew heavier.
Now he pushed open the heavy, soundproofed door and saw a man in flowing white robes bending down behind a large ebonized box. As the door closed behind Janson, the man whirled around.
The Caliph.
For a moment Janson was so convulsed with hate that he could not breathe. He composed his face into a look of friendly surprise.
The Caliph spoke first. "Khaif hallak ya akhi."
Janson remembered his large beard and Arab-style headdress and forced himself to smile. He knew that the man had addressed him in Arabic; probably it was an insubstantial pleasantry, but he could only guess. In Janson's best version of Oxbridge English - an Arab royal might well have been educated at such an institution, absorbed its customs - he said, "My dear brother, I hope I wasn't intruding. It's just that I've such a migraine, I was hoping to commune with the Prophet himself."
The Caliph strode toward him. "Yet we would both be sorry to miss any more of the proceedings, having come so far. Don't you agree?" His voice was like the hiss of a snake.
"You make a good point, my brother," Janson said.
As the Caliph walked toward him, scrutinizing him closely, Janson's skin began to crawl. He came closer and closer, until he was just a foot away. Janson remembered that social conceptions of permissible physical distance varied among cultures, that Arabs typically stood closer to each other than Westerners did. The Caliph placed a