“I’m sorry that you were lied to for all these years. You believed Demarest should have been courtmartialed and executed for the things he did, and so you were told that he was, showed that he was. Your thirst for justice was totally understandable—but you weren’t looking at the big picture, not as far as our counterintelligence planners were concerned. Material like that doesn’t come along very often, not in our line of work. So a decision was made. Ultimately, it was a simple issue of human resources.”

“Human resources,” Janson repeated dully.

“You were lied to because that was the only way we could hold on to you. You were pretty spectacular material yourself. The only way you’d be able to put it behind you was to be confident that Demarest had suffered the ultimate punishment. So you were better off, and we were better off, too, because it meant that you could go on and do what God made you to do. Totally win-win. It just made sense every which way the planners looked at it. So Demarest was presented with a choice. He could face a tribunal, and the mountainous evidence that you had provided, and probably judicial execution. In the alternative, he essentially had to give his life to us. He would exist at the discretion of his controllers, his very life a revocable gift. He’d accept whatever tasks he was given because he had no choice. It all made him a very … singular asset.”

“Demarest—alive.” It was a struggle to get out the words. “You recruited him for the job?”

“The way he recruited you.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Probably ‘recruit’ is too gentle a word,” Collins said.

The DIA man spoke up. “The logic of the assignment was unassailable.”

“Damn you!” Janson cried out. He saw it all now. Demarest had been the first Peter Novak: primus inter pares. The others would be matched to the frame of his body. He had been the first because of his redoubtable gifts, as a linguist, as an actor, as a brilliantly resourceful operative. Demarest was the best they had. Had the thought even arisen that there might be risks in giving this responsibility to someone so utterly devoid of conscience—to a sociopath?

Janson shut his eyes as the images flooded his mind.

Demarest was not merely cruel, he had an unsurpassed gift for cruelty. He approached the infliction of pain like a four-star chef. Janson recalled the smell of charred flesh as the jumper cables sparked and sputtered at the Vietnamese captive’s groin. The look of abject terror in the man’s eyes. And Demarest’s almost gentle refrain as he interrogated the young fisherman. “Look into my eyes,” Demarest had repeated in a gentle voice. “Look into my eyes.”