The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,84

own course. His only polestar was his own conscience. He was the man who could stand up and say that we had lost our bearings. He could say that markets without morality could not sustain themselves - he could say these things and be heard. The magic of the marketplace wasn't enough, he was saying: We need a moral sense of where we want to go, and the commitment to get there." Fielding's voice started to crack and he swallowed hard. "That is what I meant when I said that this man must not perish."

"Yet he has perished," Janson said.

Fielding rocked back and forth gently, as if he were at sea. For a while he said nothing at all. And then he opened his light blue eyes wide. "What's so very odd is that none of this has been reported anywhere - neither his abduction nor his murder. So very odd. You have told me the facts, but not the explanation." Fielding's gaze drifted toward the overcast skies that hovered over the courtyard's ageless splendor. The fen's low-hanging clouds over the rough-hewn Portland stone of the courtyard: a vista unchanged in centuries.

"I guess I was hoping you'd be able to help me there," Janson said. "The question is, who would want Peter Novak dead?"

The don slowly shook his head. "The question is, alas, who wouldn't?" Janson could tell his mental gears were meshing; his fish-pale eyes grew intent, his face taut. "I exaggerate, of course. Few mortals have so earned the love and gratitude of their fellows. And yet. And yet. La grande be-nevolenza attira la grande malevolenza, as Boccaccio has it: outsized benevolence always attracts outsized malevolence."

"Walk me through this, OK? Just now you spoke of 'they' - you said 'they' will have won. What did you mean?"

"Do you know much about Novak's origins?"

"Very little. A child of war-torn Hungary."

"His origins were at once extremely privileged and extremely not. He was one of the few survivors of a village that was liquidated in a battle between Hitler's soldiers and Stalin's. Novak's father was a fairly obscure Magyar nobleman who served in Miklos Kallay's government in the forties

before he defected, and it's said that he feared, obsessively, for the safety of his only child. He had made enemies who, he was convinced, would try to avenge themselves against his scion. The old nobleman may have been paranoid, but as the old saw has it, even paranoids have enemies."

"That's more than half a century ago. Who could possibly care, all these decades later, what his dad was up to in the forties?"

Fielding gave him a stern, college-master look. "You obviously haven't spent much time in Hungary," he said. "It's in Hungary, still, that you'll find his greatest admirers, and his most impassioned foes. Then, of course, there are the millions elsewhere who feel victimized by Peter Novak's successes as a financier. Many ordinary people in Southeast Asia blame him for triggering a run against their currency, their rage fomented by demagogues."

"But groundless, do you think?"

"Novak may be the greatest currency speculator in history, but no one has more eloquently denounced the practice. He's pushed for the very policies of currency unification that would make that sort of speculation impossible - you can't say he's been an advocate of his own interests. Quite the opposite. Of course, some would say that merry old England bore the brunt of his speculative savvy, at least at first. You remember what happened back in the eighties. There was that great currency crisis, with everyone wondering which European governments were going to lower their rates. Novak leveraged billions of his own money on his hunch that Britain was going to let sterling plunge. It did, and Novak's Electra Fund nearly tripled. An incredible coup! Our then prime minister pushed MI6 to poke around. In the end, the head of the investigation told the Daily Telegraph that, and I quote, 'the only law this fellow has broken is the law of averages.' Of course, when the Malaysian ringgit plunged and Novak landed himself another windfall, the politicians over there didn't take it very well. Lots of demagoguery there about the manipulations of the mysterious dark foreigner. So you ask who would like to see him dead, and I must tell you it's a long list of malefactors. There's China: the old men of that gerontocracy fear, above all else, the 'directed democracy' that Novak's organization has been dedicated to. They know he considers China the next frontier