“Anybody makes inquiries, there’s always some silver-haired department head, maybe retired, to say, ‘Oh yes, I remember young Peter. A little big for his britches, but a brilliant financial analyst. The work was so good, I didn’t mind that he preferred to do his work from home. A bit of an agoraphobe, but with that traumatic background, how can you blame him?’ And like that.”

These men and women, Janson knew, would have been generously compensated for uttering a lie perhaps once or twice to an inquiring reporter, and perhaps never. They would not be aware of what else the bargain would entail: the around-the-clock monitoring of their communications, a lifelong net of surveillance—but what they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them.

“And the spectacular rise? How could you backstop that?”

“Well, that’s where things get a little hairy. But, as I say, there was a brilliant team of experts tasked to the Mobius Program. They—we, I should say, though I wasn’t enlisted until seven years into it—caught a number of breaks. And, voilà, you’ve got a man in charge of an empire of his own. A man who could manipulate global events as we never could ourselves.”

“Manipulate … ? Meaning what?” Janson demanded.

“I think you know. The Liberty Foundation. The entire conflict-resolution agenda. ‘Directed democracy.’ All of it.”

“So this great humanitarian financier, the ‘peacemaker’—”

“It was originally a 60 Minutes segment that dubbed him that, and it stuck. For good reason. The peacemaker established a foundation with offices in nearly every regional capital in the world.”

“And his incredible humanitarian assistance?”

“Isn’t this country the best? And isn’t it messed up that no matter how much good we do, so many people around the world hate our guts? Yes, it meant offering balm to the world’s trouble spots. Look, the World Bank is a lender of last resort. This guy’s a lender of first resort. Which ensured that he would have enormous influence with governments the world over. Peter Novak: your roving ambassador for peace and stability.”

“Oil on troubled waters.”

“Expensive oil, make no mistake. But ‘Novak’ could mediate, resolve conflicts that we could never—openly—go near. He’s been able to deal effectively and confidentially with regimes that consider us the Great Satan. He has been a one-man foreign policy. And what made him so goddamn effective is precisely the fact that he appears to have no connection to us.”