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 Hildreth, 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.