Janson adjusted the M9 so that the sights were squarely between Collins’s eyes, and the director of Consular Operations added quickly, “Not literally. We’ve moved beyond that—those of us in the program, I mean. We’re playing a different game now. Then again, so is he.”

“Start making sense,” Janson said, gritting his teeth.

“A tall order.” Collins jerked his head toward the computer system again. “You might say that’s Peter Novak. That, and a few hundred interoperable, omicronlevel-security computer systems elsewhere. Peter Novak is really a composite of bytes and bits and digital-transfer signatures with neither origins nor destinations. Peter Novak wasn’t a person. He’s a project. An invention. A legend, yeah. And for a long time, the most successful ever.”

Janson’s mind clouded as if overtaken by a sudden dust storm and, just as swiftly, a preternatural clarity set in.

It was madness—a madness that made a terrible kind of sense. “Please,” he said to the bureaucrat calmly, quietly. “Go on.”

“Best if we sit somewhere else,” Collins said. “The system here has so many electronic security seals and booby-traps, it goes into auto-erase mode if you breathe on it hard. A moth once rammed into the window and I lost hours of work.”

Now the two settled into the living room, the furniture covered with the coarse floral chintz that, at some point in the seventies, had evidently been decreed by law for seaside vacation houses.

“Look, it was a brilliant idea. Such a brilliant idea that for a long time, people were feuding over credit for who had the idea first. You know, like who invented the radio, or whatnot. Except that the number of people who knew about this was tiny, tiny, tiny. Had to be. Obviously, my predecessor Daniel Congdon had a lot to do with it. So did Doug Albright, a protégé of David Abbott.”

“Albright I’ve heard of. Abbott?”

“The guy who devised the whole ‘Caine’ gambit, back in the late seventies, trying to smoke out Carlos. Same kind of strategic thinking went into Mobius. Asymmetrical conflicts pit states against individual actors. Mismatched, but not the way you’d imagine. Think of an elephant and a mosquito. If that mosquito carries encephalitis, you could have one dead elephant, and there’s really not much Jumbo can do about it. The problem of substate actors is similar. Abbott’s great insight was that you really couldn’t mobilize anything as unwieldy as a state against baddies of this sort: you had to counter with a matching stratagem: create individual actors who, within a broad mandate, had a fair level of autonomy.”

“Mobius?”