paper trail that was necessitated by the security procedures at the White House, the Old Executive Office Building, the Pentagon, or any of the intelligence agencies. They could take place without leaving behind any telltale logs or records. They could take place without ever, officially, having taken place at all.
The five gray-faced men who sat around the small conference table were all in similar lines of work, and yet, given the structure of governmental agencies, they would never have had cause to meet in the ordinary course of things. Needless to say, the program that had brought them all together in the first place was far from ordinary, and the circumstances they now faced were quite possibly cataclysmic.
Unlike their titular superiors, they were not political appointees; they were lifers, tending to programs that extended far beyond the duration of any particular administration. They liaised with, and reported to, the men and women who shuttled in and out in four-year cycles, but the horizons of their responsibilities, as they conceived them, extended much further.
Sitting opposite the DIA man, the deputy director of the National Security Agency had a high scrubbed forehead and small, pinched features. He prided himself on maintaining an outward air of serenity, no matter what the circumstances. That air of serenity was now close to fraying, and with it his pride. "Secrecy, yes - the nature of the directive is clear," he said quietly. "The nature of our subject is not."
"Paul Elie Janson," said the State Department undersecretary, who was, on paper, the director of that department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He had not spoken for some time. A smooth-faced, athletic man with tousled, straw-colored hair, he was lent gravitas by heavy black-framed glasses. The undersecretary was a survivor, the other men knew. And because he was a survivor, they took careful note of the way he positioned himself on the issues. "Janson was one of ours, as you know. The documents you've got on him are lightly redacted. Apologies for that - that's the way they come out of the files, and we didn't have much prep time. Anyway, I think they give you the general idea."
"One of your goddamn killing machines, Derek, that's what he is," said Albright, glowering at the undersecretary. Despite Albright's high administrative rank, he had spent a career in analysis, not operations, and he remained an analyst to the core of his being. The ingrained mistrust that men of his ilk had toward their counterparts in operations was too often justified. "You create these soulless pieces of machinery, loose them on the world, and then leave someone else to clean up the mess. 1 just don't understand what kind of game he's playing."
The man from State flushed angrily. "Have you considered the possibility that someone is running a game on him?" A hard stare: "Jumping to conclusions could be dangerous. I'm not willing to stipulate that Janson is a renegade."
"The point is, we can't be certain," the NSA man, Sanford Hildreth, said after a while. He turned to the man seated next to him, a computer scientist who, as a young man, had earned a reputation as a wunderkind, when he almost single-handedly redesigned the primary intelligence database for the CIA. "Is there some data set we're overlooking, Kaz?"
Kazuo Onishi shook his head. Educated at Cal Tech, he had grown up in Southern California and retained a slight Valley accent that made him seem looser than he was. "I can tell you we've had anomalous activities, potential breaches of security firewalls. What I can't do is identify the perpetrator. Not yet, anyway."
"Say you're correct, Derek," Hildreth went on. "Then my heart goes out to him. But absolutely nothing can compromise the program. Doug's right - that's the prime directive. Absolute and unyielding. Or we might as well kiss Pax Americana good-bye. It almost doesn't matter what he thought he was doing. All we can say is that this fellow Janson doesn't know what in the world he's blundered into." He raised his coffee cup to his mouth and took a sip, hoping nobody noticed the tremor of his hand as he returned it to the saucer. "And he's never going to know." The words were more declaration than observation.
"That much I'll accept," the man from State said. "Has Charlotte been briefed?" Charlotte Ainsley was the president's National Security Advisor and the principal White House liaison.
"Later today," said the NSA man. "But do you see any supportable alternatives?"