“The Mobius Program. Basically, you’re talking about what began as a small group at the State Department. Soon it had to extend beyond State, because it had to be interagency if it was going to get off the ground. So there was a fat guy who used to be at the Hudson Institute and ran the operations sector at DIA, those ‘committed to excellence’ boys. His understudy takes over after he dies—that’s Doug. A computer whiz kid from Central Intelligence. Oval Office liaison to the NSC. But seventeen years ago, you’re basically talking about a small group at the State Department. And they’re tossing around ideas, and somehow they hit on this scenario. What if they assembled a small, secret team of analysts and experts to create a notional foreign billionaire? The more they toss the idea around, the more they like it. They like it because the more they think about it, the more doable it seems. They can make this happen. They can do this. And when they start to think about what they can do with it, it becomes irresistible. They can do good things. They can advance American interests in a way that America just can’t. They can make the world a better place. Totally win-win. Which is how the Mobius Program was born.”

“Mobius,” Janson said. “As in a loop where the inside is the outside.”

“In this case, the outsider is an insider. This mogul becomes an independent figure in the world, no ties whatever to the United States. Our adversaries aren’t his adversaries. They can be his allies. He can leverage situations we wouldn’t be able to go near. First, though, you’ve got to create a ‘he,’ and from the ground up. Backstopping was a real challenge. For his birthplace, the programmers choose a tiny Hungarian village that was completely liquidated in the forties.”

“Precisely because all the records were destroyed, nearly all the villagers killed.”

“Molnár was like a gift from the gods of backstopping. I mean, it was terrible, the massacres and all, but it was perfect for the program’s purposes, especially when you added to that the short, unhappy career of Count Ferenczi-Novak. Made perfect sense that our boy was going to have a sketchy early childhood. All his peers are dead, and his father’s terrified that his enemies are going to take his child from him. So he hides him, has him privately tutored. Eccentric, maybe, but plausible enough.”

“There’d have to be an employment record,” Janson said, “but that would have been the easy part. You restrict his ‘career’ to a few front organizations that you can control.”