The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,81

flatteringly little to her ravaged face. Isaac Newton, on the adjoining wall, was brown-wigged and imperious. A smirking fourteen-year-old, one Lord Gloucester, stared brazenly at both from his oil pigments. All told, here was one of the most impressive collections of its kind outside of the National Portrait Gallery. It was a pageant of a very particular elite, both political and intellectual, that had shaped the country, had directed its history, could claim some responsibility for both its achievements and its failures. The glowing visages belonged largely to bygone centuries, and yet Peter Novak's own portrait would not have been out of place. Like all true leadership, his stemmed from a sense of his own obligations, a profound and profoundly moral sense of mission.

Janson found himself staring, rapt, at the faces of long-departed kings and counselors, and he started when he heard the sound of a man clearing his throat.

"My heavens, it is you!" Angus Fielding trumpeted, in his slightly reedy, slightly hooting voice. "Forgive me - I've been looking at you looking at the portraits and wondering whether it was possible. Something about the shoulders, the gait. Dear boy, it's been far too long. But, really, this is the most delightful surprise I could imagine. Gilly told me that my ten o'clock was here, so I was preparing to talk to one of our less promising graduate students about Adam Smith and Condorcet. To quote Lady Asquith, 'He has a brilliant mind, until he makes it up.' To think what you've saved me from."

Janson's old academic mentor was half-haloed in the cloud-filtered sunlight. His face was etched with age, his white hair thinner than Janson had remembered; yet he was still lean and rangy, and his pale blue eyes retained the brightness of someone who was in on a joke - some nameless cosmic joke - and might let you in on it, too. Now in his late sixties, Fielding was not a large man, but his intensity gave him the presence of someone who was.

"Come along, dear boy," Fielding said. He led Janson down a short hallway, past the doughty, middle-aged woman who worked as his secretary, and into his spacious office, where a large picture window gave a view of the Great Courtyard. Plain white shelves on the adjacent walls were filled with books and journals and offprints of his articles, the titles stultifying: "Is the Global Financial System Imperiled?: A Macroeconomic View," "Central Banks' Foreign Currency Liquidity Position - The Case for Transparency," "A New Approach Toward Measurement of Aggregate Market Risk," "Structural Aspects of Market Liquidity and Their Consequences for Financial Stability." A sun-yellowed copy of the Far Eastern Economic Review was visible on a corner table; beneath a photograph of Peter Novak was the headline: turning dollars into change.

"Forgive all the bumf," the don said, removing a stack of papers from one of the black Windsor chairs by his desk. "You know, in a way I'm glad you didn't let me know you were coming, because then I might have tried to put on the dog, as you Americans say, and we'd both have been disappointed. Everyone says I should fire the cook, but the poor dear has been here practically since the Restoration and I haven't got the heart, or perhaps the stomach. Her entremets are agreed to be especially toxic. She's an eminence grise, I try to say - eminence greasy, my colleagues riposte. The amenities, such as they are, have a curious combination of opulence and austerity, not to say shabbiness, that takes some getting used to. You'll remember it from your stay in these halls, I daresay, but the way you remember playing tag when you were a child, one of those things that were so appealing at the time but whose point now seems utterly elusive." He patted Janson on the arm. "And now, dear boy, you're It."

The verbal flows and eddies, the blinking, amused eyes - it was the same Angus Fielding, by turns wise and mischievous. The eyes saw more than they let on, and his donnish volubility could be an effective means of distraction or camouflage. A member of the economics faculty that produced such giants as Marshall, Keynes, Lord Kaldor, and Sen, Angus Fielding's reputation extended well beyond his work on the global financial system. He was also a member of the Tuesday Club, a group of intellectuals and analysts who had had, and maintained, connections with British intelligence. Fielding had served a stint as