“Tell me the truth,” Janson said. “I’m not crazy. I saw a man die.”

“That’s so,” Collins said.

“And not just any man. We’re talking about Peter Novak—a living legend.”

“Bingo.” Collins made a clicking sound. “You said it yourself. A living legend.”

Janson felt his stomach drop. A living legend. A creation of intelligence professionals.

Peter Novak was an agency legend.

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty

Collins slid off the stool and stood up. “There’s something I want to show you.”

He walked to his office, a large room facing the bay. On rustic wooden shelves were rows of old copies of Studies in Intelligence, a classified journal for American clandestine services. Monographs on international conflicts were interspersed with popular novels and dog-eared volumes of Foreign Affairs. A Sun Microsystems UltraSPARC workstation was connected to racked tiers of servers.

“You remember The Wizard of Oz? Bet they asked you about it when you were a POW. I gather the North Vietnamese interrogators were obsessed with American popular culture.”

“It didn’t come up,” Janson said curtly.

“Naw, you were probably too much of a hardass to give away the ending. Wouldn’t want to jeopardize our national security that way … . Sorry. That was out of line. There’s one thing that divides us: whatever happens, you’ll always be a goddamn war hero, and I’ll always be a civvy desk jockey, and for some people, that makes you a better man. Irony is, ‘some people’ includes me. I’m jealous. I’m one of those guys who wanted to have suffered without ever wanting to suffer. Like wanting to have written a book, as opposed to wanting actually to write one.”

“Can we move on?”

“You see, I’ve always thought it’s the moment when we lose our innocence. Up there is the great and powerful Oz, and down there is the schmuck beneath the curtain. But it’s not just him, it’s the whole goddamn contraption, the machinery, the bellows, the levers, the steam nozzles, the diesel engine, or whatever. You think that was easy to put together? And once you had that up and running, it’s not going to make much difference who you’ve got behind the curtain, or so we figured. It’s the machine, not the man, that matters.”

The director of Consular Operations was babbling; the anxiety he displayed nowhere else was making him weirdly voluble.

“You’re trying my patience,” Janson said. “Here’s a tip. Never try the patience of a man holding a gun.”

“It’s just that we’re approaching la gran scena, and I don’t want you to lose it.” Collins gestured toward the softly humming computer system. “You ready for this? Because we’re moving toward now-that-you-know-I’m-going-to-have-to-kill-you territory.”