“The old system has been privatized. The state-owned defense companies and oil companies and banks that handled the payoffs are gradually being spun off into the private sector. It’s a real power shift. This isn’t what the French call pantoufler—the bright boys from the École Nationale d’Administration going out in their bedroom slippers to run a nationalized company. A new generation of business leaders is emerging who are half-entrepreneurs, half-gangsters. They make deals with each other. They’re the new face of something my conspiracy-minded colleagues like to call the Secret Power.”

“La Puissance Occulte,” I said. “I heard about them two years ago from the amazing Mr. Rupert Cohen.”

“Talented fellow, Cohen. A little extreme for this organization. But a creative operator. Have you seen him since Paris?”

“No,” I lied. Rubino didn’t seem aware I was fibbing. That eased my paranoia level. Until that moment I hadn’t been sure whether Rupert’s recent contacts with me in Washington had been part of some elaborate plot, with Rubino pulling the strings. But Rubino didn’t look like a string puller anymore. He looked like a bureaucrat.

“From what Rupert told me back in Paris,” I said, “this Secret Power sounded like the Mafia.”

“They are a mafia. Look, Eric, the great truth of the 1990s is that the world is run by organized criminals. We don’t like to admit that in the institution where I work. We still like to pretend that the world is run by governments, which have neat little boundaries, and their own currencies and stamps, and intelligence services and police forces. Those were the rules of the game during the cold war, but they’ve changed. Power has slipped from governments into the hands of private organizations. In New York, private currency traders have more power over the dollar than the Federal Reserve. In Russia, the mafiya has more power than the army. In Mexico, the drug lords have more power than the president. In Japan, the politicians are just a front; the real power is held by the corporations and the yakuza. And this same process is happening in France. Real power around the world does not reside with governments any longer, but with private interests. Real power is secret power.”

Rubino gave me a cocky smile. He was a performer; this was his show. “Have some coffee,” he said, taking the plastic decanter and pouring the oily black liquid into the two Styrofoam cups. “I’m just getting started.” The coffee was dreadful. The scene in that sorry little room reminded me of an officers’ club at a run-down military base. You couldn’t help but sympathize with Rubino, and to think he was basically trying to do his best with the materials at hand.