neon letters. She was starting to disassemble the weapon with deft, practiced movements. Then she looked up at him, as if she could feel his gaze upon her. All at once, Janson had a feeling, an odd, lighter-than-air feeling, that everything would be all right.
He stepped away from the scope and looked out with his own two eyes, his face cooled by the breeze. Hunter's Point. The name had become mordantly appropriate.
Looming above his beloved, the enormous Pepsi-Cola sign glowed red in the deepening gloom. Now Janson squinted, saw the reflected light from the neon spilled onto the glistening waters below. For a moment, it looked like a river of blood.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
"I want to thank you for joining us, Mr. Janson," said President Charles W. Berquist Jr., seated at the head of the oval table. The handful of people at the table, mainly senior administrators and analysts from the country's principal intelligence agencies, had made their separate ways to the blandly handsome building on Sixteenth Street, using the side entrance that was accessible from a private driveway and guaranteed that arrivals and departures would not attract notice. There would be no tape, no log. It was another meeting that had not, officially, taken place. "Your nation owes you a debt of gratitude that it will never know about. But I know. I don't think it'll be any surprise that you'll be receiving another Distinguished Intelligence Star."
Janson shrugged. "Maybe I should get into the scrap-metal business."
"But I also wanted you to hear some good news, and from me. Thanks to you, it looks like we're going to be able to resurrect the Mobius Program. Doug and the others have walked me through it several times, and it's looking better and better."
"Is that right?" Janson said impassively.
"You don't seem surprised," President Berquist said, sounding straitened. "I supposed you anticipated the possibility."
"When you've been around the planners as long as I have, you stop being surprised by their combination of brilliance and stupidity."
The president scowled, displeased with the operative's tone. "You're talking about some very extraordinary people, I'll have you know."
"Yes. Extraordinarily arrogant." Janson shook his head slowly. "Anyway, you can just forget about it."
"The question is, where do you get off talking to the president like that?" Douglas Albright, the DIA deputy director, interjected.
"The question is whether you people ever learn anything," Janson shot back.
"We've learned a great deal," Albright said. "We won't make the same mistakes twice."
"True - the mistakes will be different ones."
The secretary of state spoke. "To jettison the program at this point would be to scuttle tens of thousands of man-hours of work, as Doug points out. It would also be like trying to unring a bell. As far as the world is concerned, Peter Novak still exists."
"We can remake him, recast him, with a whole set of additional safeguards," Albright said, giving the secretary of state an encouraging look. "There are a hundred measures we can take to prevent what Demarest did from recurring."
"I don't believe you people," Janson said. "A few days ago, you'd all agreed it was a colossal error. A basic miscalculation, both political and moral. You understood - or, anyway, you seemed to understand - that a plan that was premised on massive deception was bound to go awry. And in ways that could never be predicted."
"We were panicked," the secretary of state replied. "We weren't thinking rationally. Of course we just wanted the whole thing to go away. But Doug here went over everything with us, calmly, rationally. The potential upside remains extraordinary. It's like atomic energy - of course there's always the risk of a catastrophic mishap. None of us are debating that. Yet the potential benefits to humanity are even greater." As he spoke, his voice grew smoother and more sonorous: the senior diplomat of the press conferences and television appearances. He seemed hardly the same man who had been so frightened at the Hempel estate. "To turn our backs on it because of something that didn't happen would be to abdicate our responsibility as political leaders. You can see that, can't you? Are we on the same page?"
"We're not reading the same goddamn book!"
"Get over yourself," Albright snapped. "Fact of the matter is, we owe it all to you - you handled things perfectly. You're the one who made the resurrection possible." He did not have to refer to the details: that two men had quickly been removed from the Secretariat Building, each draped with a sheet, headed for