The secretary of state spoke. “To jettison the program at this point would be to scuttle tens of thousands of man-hours of work, as Doug points out. It would also be like trying to unring a bell. As far as the world is concerned, Peter Novak still exists.”

“We can remake him, recast him, with a whole set of additional safeguards,” Albright said, giving the secretary of state an encouraging look. “There are a hundred measures we can take to prevent what Demarest did from recurring.”

“I don’t believe you people,” Janson said. “A few days ago, you’d all agreed it was a colossal error. A basic miscalculation, both political and moral. You understood—or, anyway, you seemed to understand—that a plan that was premised on massive deception was bound to go awry. And in ways that could never be predicted.”

“We were panicked,” the secretary of state replied. “We weren’t thinking rationally. Of course we just wanted the whole thing to go away. But Doug here went over everything with us, calmly, rationally. The potential upside remains extraordinary. It’s like atomic energy—of course there’s always the risk of a catastrophic mishap. None of us are debating that. Yet the potential benefits to humanity are even greater.” As he spoke, his voice grew smoother and more sonorous: the senior diplomat of the press conferences and television appearances. He seemed hardly the same man who had been so frightened at the Hempel estate. “To turn our backs on it because of something that didn’t happen would be to abdicate our responsibility as political leaders. You can see that, can’t you? Are we on the same page?”

“We’re not reading the same goddamn book!”

“Get over yourself,” Albright snapped. “Fact of the matter is, we owe it all to you—you handled things perfectly. You’re the one who made the resurrection possible.” He did not have to refer to the details: that two men had quickly been removed from the Secretariat Building, each draped with a sheet, headed for very different destinations. “The understudy has recovered nicely. He’s been kept in one of our security facilities, subjected to extensive chemical interrogation. Just as you surmised, he’s terrified, absolutely ready to cooperate. Demarest never entrusted him with the command codes, of course. But that’s OK. Without Demarest around to constantly rescramble them, our technicians have been able to penetrate the systems. We’ve regained control.”

“That was your mistake in the past, imagining that you had control.” Janson shook his head slowly.