“For that matter, we failed to realize that he was also responsible for the death of the third agent, a year earlier. We thought our marionette strings were unbreakable. We know better now.”

“Now that it’s too late,” Janson said, and in the faces of tense men and women, he saw the acceptance of the rebuke—and its irrelevance. “Question: Why did Demarest bring me into it?”

Collins spoke first. “Do you have to ask? The man loathes you, blames you for taking away his career, his freedom, almost his life—turning him in to a government he thought he’d served with incredible devotion. He didn’t just want to see you dead. He wanted you to be accused, humiliated, strung up, killed by your own government. What goes around comes around—that’s how he must have seen things.”

“You want to say ‘I told you so’?” President Berquist said. “You’re entitled. I’ve been shown copies of your 1973 reports about Lieutenant Commander Demarest. But you’ve got to understand where this thing stands right now. Not only has Demarest eliminated his understudies, but he’s moved into a second, far more deadly phase.”

“What’s that?”

“The puppet is killing off the puppet masters,” said Doug Albright. “He’s erasing the program. Erasing Mobius.”

“And exactly who is the cast of characters?”

“You’re looking at ’em. All in this room.”

Janson stared around the room. “There had to have been somebody from the NSA,” he objected.

“Killed.”

“Who designed the basic systems architecture?”

“A real wizard, from the CIA. Killed.”

“And the—oh Jesus …”

“Yes, the president’s National Security Advisor,” said Albright. “Charlotte made the wire services today, didn’t she? Clayton Ackerley didn’t—officially, he’s a suicide, found in his car with the engine running and the garage door closed. Oh, Demarest doesn’t like loose ends. He’s making a list, he’s checking it twice … .”

“At this point, most of the people who know the truth about Peter Novak have been eliminated,” the secretary of state said, his voice raspy with anxiety.

“Everyone … but the men and women in this room,” Collins said.

Janson nodded slowly. A global cataclysm loomed, but so did a far more immediate threat to the assembled. As long as Alan Demarest remained in charge of the Novak empire, everyone in this room would be in fear for his life.

“Sorry, Paul. It’s too late to get into the dead pool,” Collins said wanly.

“Christ, Derek,” Janson said, turning to the undersecretary with undisguised outrage, “you knew what kind of man Demarest was!”

“We had every reason to think we could control him!”

“Now he has every reason to think he can control you,” Janson replied.

“It’s become apparent that Demarest has been planning his coup d’état for years,” the secretary of state said. “As the recent killings have revealed, Demarest has assembled a private militia, recruited dozens of his former colleagues to use as his personal enforcers and protectors. These are operatives who know the codes and procedures of our most advanced field strategies. And the corrupt moguls of the former Communist states—the ones who pretend to be opposed to him—are actually in league with the guy. They’ve made their own centurions available to him.”