The prisoner’s breath had come in strangled yelps, like a dying animal’s. Demarest listened to a few bars of choral music. Then he straddled the second prisoner. “Look into my eyes,” Demarest said. He’d pulled a small knife from a waist holster and made a small slice in the man’s belly. The skin and the fascia beneath immediately sheared, pulled apart by the tension of the ropes. The man screamed.

And screamed. And screamed.

Janson could hear the screams now. They echoed in his head, amplified by the sickening realization that this man was the one they had chosen to make the most powerful on earth.

Now Derek Collins glanced around the room, as if canvassing opinions, before he continued. “Let me get to the point. Demarest has been able to seize control of all the assets that were created for the use of the Mobius Program. Without getting into the details, I can tell you that he’s changed all the banking codes—and foiled the measures we’d taken to prevent just such an eventuality. And they were damn extensive. We had zero-knowledge, top-security cryptosystems in place that required central Mobius authorization for substantial movements of currencies. Codes were changed regularly, divided among the three principals so that no individual could gain control of the whole—one firewall after another. The security measures were damn near insurmountable.”

“Yet they were surmounted.”

“Yes. He got control.”

Janson shook his head, sickened by what he was hearing. “Translation: the mammoth empire of the Liberty Foundation, the financial leverage, all of it—has passed into the control of one dangerously unstable individual. Translation: you’re not running him—he’s running you.”

There were no demurrals.

“And the United States can’t expose him,” said the secretary of state. “Not without exposing itself.”

“Just when did you figure out this was happening?” Janson demanded.

The two technicians shifted uncomfortably in the Louis XV chairs, their bulk threatening the slender wooden frames.

“A few days ago,” Collins said. “As I told you, the Mobius Program had fail-safe systems in place—what we thought were fail-safe, anyway. Look, we had some of our best minds on this thing—don’t imagine we didn’t think of everything, because we did. The controls were formidable. Only recently did he gain the wherewithal to circumvent them.”

“And Anura?”