If you've hurt somebody, you hope to God you've done it for good cause. I don't know exactly what's going on, but I do know that somebody lied to you, Angus. And knowing that, I'm having a hard time staying mad at you. My God, Angus, look at yourself. You shouldn't be standing here with a gun in your hand. Neither should I. Somebody's caused us to forget who we are." He shook his head slowly, sadly. "You want to squeeze that trigger? Then you'd better be surer than sure that you're doing the right thing. Are you, Angus? I don't believe you are."
"You always did have a rash tendency to make assumptions."
"Come on, Angus," Janson went on. There was warmth in his voice, but not heat. "What did Oliver Cromwell say? T beseech you, from the bowels of Christ, to consider that you may be mistaken.' " He repeated the old saw wryly.
"Words 1 always found strangely ironic," Fielding said, "coming from a man who, to the detriment of his country, was essentially incapable of self-doubt."
Without breaking eye contact, Janson extended his gun hand, unfurled his fingers from the pistol grip, and held out his hand, palm up, the weapon lying on it not as a threat but as an offering. "If you're going to shoot me, use mine. That flintlock of yours is liable to backfire."
The tremor in Fielding's hand grew. The silence was nearly unbearable.
"Take it," Janson said in a tone of reprimand.
The master of Trinity was ashen, torn between the humanitarian he had come to revere and a former pupil to whom he had once been devoted. That much, at least, Janson could read from the old man's etched, stricken face.
"May God have mercy on your soul," Fielding said at last, lowering his side arm. The words were something between a benediction and a curse.
Four men and one woman sat around the table at the Meridian Center. Their own secretaries had them down for various out-of-office engagements: they were having their hair cut, going to a child's piano recital, keeping a long-postponed dental appointment. A subsequent inspection of logs and calendars would reveal only the humdrum, commonplace tasks of personal and family maintenance to which even the highest-ranking officials of the executive branch and its allied bureaus must attend. The crisis was carved out of the invisible interstices of overscheduled lives. It had to be. The Mobius Program had changed the world; its discovery, by those of malign intention, could destroy the world.
"We can't assume the worst-case scenario," said the National Security Advisor, an immaculately attired, round-faced black woman with large, probing eyes. It was the first such meeting Charlotte Ainsley had attended since the crisis began, but the deputy director of the NSA, Sanford Hil-dreth, had kept her up-to-date.
"A week ago, I would have argued the same thing," Kazuo Onishi, the systems engineer, said. In the formal world of Washington bureaucracy, people like the chairman of the National Security Council were many tiers above the CIA computer whiz. But the absolutely covert nature of the Mobius Program, compounded by its current crisis, had created a small, artificial democracy, the democracy of the lifeboat. No one's opinion mattered more than anyone else's by virtue of rank; power lay in persuasion.
"Oh what a tangled web we weave ... ," Sanford Hildreth, the NSA man, began.
"Spare us," said the DIA's deputy director, Douglas Albright, resting his hamlike forearms on the table. "What do we know? What have we heard?"
"He's disappeared," the NSA man said, massaging his high forehead with thumb and forefinger. "We had him, and then we didn't."
"That's not possible," the DIA man said, scowling.
"You don't know Janson," said Derek Collins, undersecretary of state and the director of Consular Operations.
"Thank God for small blessings, Derek," Albright returned. "He's a fucking golem - you know what that is? My grandmother used to talk about them. It's like a doll you make out of clay and evil spirits, and it turns into a monster. The shtetl version of the Frankenstein story."
"A golem," Collins echoed. "Interesting. We are dealing with a golem here, but we all know it isn't Janson."
Silence settled over the agitated spymasters.
"With respect," Sandy Hildreth said, "I think we need to return to basics. Is the program in jeopardy of exposure? Will Janson be the cause of that exposure?"
"And how did we allow ourselves to get into this situation?" Albright exhaled heavily.
"It's always the same story," the National Security Advisor said. "We thought we were getting laid,