an adviser to MI6 early in his career, helping to identify the economic vulnerabilities of the Eastern bloc.
"Angus," Janson began, his voice froggy and soft.
"A bottle of claret!" the college master cried. "A bit early, I know, but that we can supply. Look out the window and you see the Great Courtyard. But, as you may recall, there's a vast wine cellar beneath it. It runs straight across the courtyard, and underneath the garden owned by the college. A catacombs of claret. A fluid Fort Knox! There's a manciple with a great hoop of keys, and he's the only person who can let you into it, the jumped-up tosser. We've got a wine committee in charge of selections, but it's riven with factions, like the former Yugoslavia, only less peaceable." He called to his secretary: "I wonder if we might get a bottle of the Lynch Bages eighty-two, I seem to recall there was an unopened bottle left from last night."
"Angus," Janson began again. "I'm here to talk about Peter Novak."
Fielding was suddenly alert. "You bring news from him?"
"About him."
Fielding fell silent for a moment. "I'm suddenly feeling a draft," he said. "A rather chilling one." He tugged at an earlobe.
"I don't know what news has reached you," Janson said tentatively.
"I'm not quite twigging ... "
"Angus," Janson said. "He's dead."
The master of Trinity blanched, and stared at Janson slackly for a few long moments. Then he took a seat on a harp-backed wooden chair in front of his desk, falling into it as if the air had left him.
"There have been false rumors of his demise in the past," the don said feebly.
Janson took the seat next to him. "I saw him die."
Angus Fielding slumped back in his chair, suddenly looking like an old man. "It's not possible," he murmured. "It can't be."
"I saw him die," Janson repeated.
He told Fielding what had happened in Anura, breathing hard when he reached the still-piercing horror of the midair explosions. Angus merely listened, expressionless, nodding gently, his eyes half shut, as if listening to a pupil during a tutorial.
Janson had once been one of those pupils. Not the typical apple-cheeked boarding-school kid, wearing a backpack filled with dog-eared books and leaking biros, pedaling a bicycle down King's Parade. When Janson arrived at Trinity, courtesy of a Marshall Fellowship, he was a physical wreck, sallow and skeletal, still trying to heal his emaciated body and devastated spirit from his eighteen-month ordeal as a POW, and all the brutalities that had preceded it. The year was 1974, and he was trying to pick up where he had left off, pursuing the study of economic history he had begun as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The SEAL commando was repairing to the groves of academe. He worried, at first, that he would not be able to make the adjustment. Yet hadn't his military training equipped him to adapt to his surroundings, whatever they were? History texts and economic formulas replaced code-books and graded-terrain maps, but he attacked them with the same dog-gedness, determination, and sense of urgency.
In Fielding's quarters at Neville Court, Janson would discuss his assigned topic, and the don would seem to nod off as he spoke. Yet when the time came, Fielding would open his eyes, blinking, and pinpoint the weakest turn of his argument. Once Janson gave a yeoman's account of the economic consequences of Bismarck's expansionism, and Fielding
seemed to rouse himself from his slumbers only after he'd finished. Then the questions rained like arrows. How did he distinguish between expansionism and regional consolidation? What about the delayed economic consequences of the annexation of the Schleswig and Holstein duchies several years prior? About those numbers he relied upon for the premise of his argument, the devaluation of the deutsche mark between 1873 and 1877 - they wouldn't be from Hodgeman's study, would they, young man? Pity, that: old Hodgeman got the numbers all wrong - well, an Oxford man, what could you expect? Hate to order you off your own premises, dear boy. But before you build your edifice, be certain of the ground beneath.
Fielding's mind was razor-sharp; his manner urbane, unflappable, even giddy. He often cited Shakespeare's phrase about the "smiler with the knife," and though he was no hypocrite, it aptly characterized his scholarly style. Janson's assignment to Fielding, as the don cheerfully admitted only a few months after their tutorials began, was not entirely accidental. Fielding had friends in Washington who had been impressed with