“I also came to recognize your enormous discretion. You had much to boast about privately, and you never did.”

“Your comments suggest an unwarranted, invasive, and inappropriate degree of surveillance.”

“I’ll take that as confirmation of their essential truth.”

“You’re a man of parts, Mr. Janson. I’ll grant you that.”

“Let me put a question to you: What do you give the man who has everything?”

“There is no such man,” Zinsou said.

“Precisely. Demarest is motivated by power. And power is the one thing that nobody ever feels he has enough of.”

“In part, because power creates its own subversion.” The secretary-general looked thoughtful. “It’s one of the lessons of the so-called American Century. To be mighty is to be mightier than others. Never underestimate the strength of resentment in world history. The strongest thing about the weak is their hatred of the strong.” He leaned back in his chair and, for the first time in years, regretted having given up smoking. “But I see where you are going. You believe this man is a megalomaniac. Somebody who can never have enough power. And that’s what you have baited the snare with—power.”

“Yes,” Janson said.

“One of my distinguished predecessors used to say, ‘Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have.’ You were quite eloquent in your critique of the premises of the Mobius Program yesterday. Watch that you don’t replicate the errors. You are building a model of this man …”

“Demarest,” Janson prompted. “But let’s call him Peter Novak. Better to stay in character, so to speak.”

“You’re building a model of this man, in effect, and you observe this hypothetical creature move this way and that. But will the real man behave as your model does? Those you angrily dismiss as the ‘planners’ are happy to assume so. But you? How well founded is your confidence, really?”

Janson looked into the secretary-general’s liquid brown eyes, saw the composed face that greeted heads of state by the hundreds. He saw the air of mastery, and as he stared harder he saw something else, too, something only partly hidden. He saw dread.

And this, too, was something they shared, for it arose out of simple realism. “I am confident only that a bad plan is better than no plan,” Janson said. “We are proceeding on as many fronts as possible. We may get a lucky break. We may get none. Allow me to quote one of my mentors: Blessed are the flexible, for they will not be bent out of shape.”

“I like it.” Zinsou clapped his hands together. “A smart fellow told you that.”

“The smartest man I ever knew,” Janson replied grimly. “The man who now calls himself Peter Novak.”

A chill settled, along with another long silence.