There was an awkward moment of silence before the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for international affairs spoke. “Start with the operational challenge: how do you secure the vast funding necessary to sustain the illusion of a world-class tycoon-philanthropist? Needless to say, the Mobius Program couldn’t simply divert funds from a closely monitored U.S. intelligence budget. Seed money could be provided, but nothing more. So the program drew upon our intelligence capabilities to create its own fund. We put to use our take from signals intercepts … .”

“Jesus Christ—you’re talking about Echelon!” Janson said.

Echelon was a complex intelligence-gathering system comprising a fleet of low-earth-orbit satellites devoted to signals interception: every international phone call, every form of telecommunications that involved a satellite conduit—which was most of them—could be sampled, intercepted, by the orbiting spy fleet. Its mammoth download was fed into an assortment of collections and analysis facilities, all controlled by the National Security Agency. It had the capability of monitoring every form of international telephony. The NSA had repeatedly denied rumors that it used the signal intercepts for purposes other than national security, in its strictest sense. Yet here was the shocking admission that even the most conspiracy-minded skeptics didn’t know the half of it.

The jowly Treasury undersecretary nodded somberly. “Echelon enabled us to gain sensitive, highly secret intelligence about central-bank decisions around the world. Was the Bundesbank going to devalue the deutsche mark? Was Malaysia going to prop up the ringgit? Had Ten Downing Street decided to let sterling take a tumble ? How much would it be worth to know, even just a few days before? Our creation was armed with that inside information, because the choicest fruits of our intelligence were placed at his disposal. It was child’s play. Through him we placed a few massive, highly leveraged currency bets. In rapid order, twenty million became twenty billion—and then much, much more. Here was a legendary financier. And nobody had to know that his brilliant intuition and instincts were in fact the result of—”

“The abuse of a U.S. government surveillance program,” Janson said, cutting him off.

“Fair enough,” President Berquist said soberly. “Fair enough. Needless to say, it was a program that was in place long before I took office. Through extraordinary measures, the Mobius Program had created a highly visible billionaire … yet we hadn’t counted on the human factor—on the possibility that access and control to all that wealth and power might prove too great a lure to at least one of our agents.”