“Then why don’t we have dinner? Something très intime. At my residence. The sooner the better. I’m prepared to clear my schedule.”

“Mon cher Mathieu,” the man on the phone repeated. A warm glow suffused his voice, the glow of a man who had just been offered the United Nations. It would be a final ornament to his redoubtable empire, and a fitting one. Abruptly, he said: “I’ll get back to you.” And the line went dead.

The secretary-general held on to the handset for a few moments before returning it to its cradle. “Alors ?”

He turned to Paul Janson, who had been sitting in the corner of the darkening office.

The operative looked at the master diplomat with frank admiration. “Now we wait,” said Janson.

Would he take the bait? It was a bold proposal, yet threaded through with truth. The financial straits of the U.N. were genuinely dire. And Mathieu Zinsou was nothing if not ambitious for his organization. He was also known to be a farseeing man. In his five years at the helm of the U.N., he had reshaped it more vigorously than any SG had ever imagined. Was this next step so unthinkable?

It had been a chance remark of Angus Fielding’s that had inspired the ploy, and Janson recalled yesterday’s conversation with the man who, not that long ago, had threatened him with a gun. Of course, that was the order of the day, wasn’t it—allies and adversaries switching sides with abandon? The conversation had been awkward at first; Fielding had not missed Novak’s CNN appearance, and was clearly abashed, bewildered, and humiliated, unaccustomed emotions for Trinity’s laureled master. And yet, without so much as hinting at the explosive secret, Janson was able to pick the scholar’s agile brain on the question of how one might reach the reclusive billionaire.

There was another element that Janson calculated might lend plausibility to the scenario. Zinsou had for years been dogged by a reputation for benign, smallscale corruption. When Zinsou was a young commissioner at UNESCO, a lucrative contract had been taken away from one medical corporation and awarded to another. The spurned rival put it out that Zinsou had received “special preferments” from the victorious corporation. Had payment been made in a numbered account somewhere? The accusations were groundless, yet in some circles curiously adhesive. The half-remembered hint of corruption would, ironically, make his proposition all the more persuasive.

But what would seal it would be an elemental feature of human psychology: Demarest would want it to be true. Intense desire always had a subtle gravitational effect upon belief: we are more likely to credit what we wish to be so.

Now Janson stood at Zinsou’s desk and, from a bulky device there, extracted the digital cassette on which the call had been recorded for later study.

“You astonish me,” Janson said, simply.