“I’ll take that as an insult,” the secretary-general said with a small smile.

“The implication being that my expectations were not high? Then I spoke poorly—and you should take it, rather, as proof that there is only one true diplomat in this room.”

“The fate of the world should not hang on a lapse of etiquette. I feel that in this case it well may. Have you considered all the things that could go wrong?”

“I have absolute confidence in you,” Janson parried.

“An expression of confidence I find dismaying. My confidence in myself is high: it is not absolute. Nor should yours be. I speak, of course, in principle.”

“Principles,” Janson said. “Abstractions.”

“Indulgences, you mean to say.” A smile hovered over Mathieu Zinsou’s lips. “And this is not the time for them. Now is the time for particulars. Here’s one: your plan involves venturing a prediction of somebody who may not be predictable at all.”

“There are no absolute predictions that we can make. I take your point. But there are patterns—there are rules, even for the man who flouts the rules. I do know this man.”

“Before yesterday, I’d have said the same. Peter Novak and I have met on a few occasions. Once at a state dinner in Amsterdam. Once in Ankara, in the wake of the Cyprus resolution he brokered—a purely ceremonial event. I was bearing the official congratulations of this organization, announcing the withdrawal of U.N. troops from the partition line. Of course, now I realize I was meeting with a phantom. Perhaps a different man each time—presumably there are files kept by the Mobius Program that could tell us. Yet I must say that I found him both charismatic and affable. An appealing combination.”

“And a combination that’s been ascribed to you,” Janson said carefully.

Zinsou uttered a sentence in the complex tonal language of Fon, spoken by his father’s people. Zinsou père had been a descendant of the royal court of Dahomey, once a significant West African empire. “A favorite saying of my great-uncle, the paramount chief, which he often repeated to the gaping sycophants who surrounded him. Loosely translated, it means: The more you lick my ass, the more I feel you’re trying to slip one past me.”

Janson laughed. “You’re even wiser than they say—”

Zinsou raised an index finger of mock admonishment. “I can’t help wondering. Did Peter Novak believe any of it, or was he just playing along? I ask out of injured pride, of course. It cudgels my sense of amour propre that someone should believe I would, in effect, sell out the organization to which I have devoted my life.” Zinsou toyed with his thick Montblanc fountain pen. “But that’s just pride speaking.”