Kazuo Onishi shook his head. Educated at Cal Tech, he had grown up in Southern California and retained a slight Valley accent that made him seem looser than he was. “I can tell you we’ve had anomalous activities, potential breaches of security firewalls. What I can’t do is identify the perpetrator. Not yet, anyway.”

“Say you’re correct, Derek,” Hildreth went on. “Then my heart goes out to him. But absolutely nothing can compromise the program. Doug’s right—that’s the prime directive. Absolute and unyielding. Or we might as well kiss Pax Americana good-bye. It almost doesn’t matter what he thought he was doing. All we can say is that this fellow Janson doesn’t know what in the world he’s blundered into.” He raised his coffee cup to his mouth and took a sip, hoping nobody noticed the tremor of his hand as he returned it to the saucer. “And he’s never going to know.” The words were more declaration than observation.

“That much I’ll accept,” the man from State said. “Has Charlotte been briefed?” Charlotte Ainsley was the president’s National Security Advisor and the principal White House liaison.

“Later today,” said the NSA man. “But do you see any supportable alternatives?”

“Just at the moment? He’s blundered into quicksand. We couldn’t help him if we wanted to.”

“It’ll go easier if he doesn’t struggle,” the DIA analyst said.

“No argument here,” said Derek Collins. “But he will, if I know my man. Mightily.”

“Then extreme measures are going to have to be taken,” the analyst said. “If the program gets burned, if even one percent of it gets exposed, it doesn’t just destroy us, it destroys everything anybody here cares about. Everything. The past twenty years of history gets rolled back, and that’s a pie-in-the-sky, win-the-lottery, best-case scenario. The likelier outcome looks a hell of a lot more like another world war. Only this time, we lose.”

“Poor bastard,” said the deputy director of the NSA, paging through the Janson files. “He’s in way over his head.”

The undersecretary of state suppressed a shudder. “The hell of it is,” he replied grimly, “so are we.”

Athens

The Greeks had a word for it: néfos. Smog—Western civilization’s gift to its cradle. Trapped by the circle of mountains, set low by atmospheric inversion, it acidified the air, speeding decay of the antiquities and irritating the eyes and lungs of the city’s four million inhabitants. On bad days, it lay on Athens like a noxious pall. This was a bad day.

Janson had taken a direct flight from Bombay to Athens, arriving at the East Terminal of the Ellinikón International Airport. He felt a deadness within; he was a besuited zombie going about his business. You were the guy with a slab of granite where your heart’s supposed to be. If only it were so.