“I’m afraid there’s a lot more going on than you know,” offered the secretary of state. “And given that it’s the most explosive secret in the history of the republic, you’ll understand if we’ve been a little skittish.”

“I’ll give you the log line,” the president said. It was clear that he was chairing the meeting; a man used to command did not have to make a show of his authority. “Our creature has become—well, not our creature anymore. We’ve lost control of the asset.”

“Paul?” Collins said. “Really, have a seat. This is going to take a while.”

Janson lowered himself into a nearby armchair. The tension in the room was palpable.

President Berquist’s gaze drifted to the window, which gave a view of the gardens in the rear of the estate. In the moonlight, it was possible to make out the Italian-style formal garden, a rectilinear maze of clipped yew and box hedges. “To quote one of my predecessors,” he said, “we made him a god when we didn’t own the heavens.” He glanced at Douglas Albright, the man from the Defense Intelligence Agency. “Doug, why don’t you start?”

“I gather that you’ve already had the origins of the program explained to you. So you know that we had three extremely dedicated agents who were trained to play the role of Peter Novak. The redundancy was necessary.”

“Right, right. Too much of an investment had gone into this to have your Daddy Warbucks hit by a taxicab,” Janson said acidly. “What about the wife, though?”

“Another American agent,” the DIA man said. “She went under the knife, too, in case she ever encountered anyone who might have known her from the old days.”

“Remember Nell Pearson?” Collins said quietly.

Janson was thunderstruck. No wonder there was something about Novak’s wife that seemed eerily familiar. His affair with Nell Pearson was brief but memorable. It had taken place a couple of years after he joined Consular Operations; like him, his fellow agent was single, young, and restless. They had both been working undercover in Belfast, assigned to play husband and wife. It didn’t take much for them to add an element of reality to the imposture. The affair had been torrid, electric, more an emanation of the body than of the heart. It seized them like a fever, and it proved as evanescent as a fever. Yet something about her had obviously stayed with him. Those long elegant fingers: the one thing that could not be altered. And the eyes: there had been something between them, had there not? Some frisson, even in Amsterdam?

Janson shuddered, imagining the woman he knew being reshaped, irreversibly, by the cold steel edge of a surgeon’s #2 scalpel. “But what do you mean you’ve lost control?” he persisted.