“We’ve certainly got control over Demarest’s understudy,” said the gray-faced technician Janson remembered from the Hempel estate gathering. “A fellow named Laszlo Kocsis. Used to teach English at a technical school in Hungary. He went under the knife eighteen months ago. A carrot-and-stick situation. Make a long story short, if he went along with Demarest’s plans for him, he’d get ten million dollars. If he didn’t, his family would be slaughtered. Not a strong man. He’s pretty much under our thumb now.”

“As you anticipated,” the DIA man said graciously. “We’ll be offering him a small island on the Caribbean. Fitting his reclusive ways. He’ll be a gilded prisoner. Unable to leave. Under twenty-four-hour guard of a Consular Operations unit. It seemed appropriate to borrow some funds from the Liberty Foundation to pay for the arrangement.”

“But let’s not get sidetracked by formalities,” the president said with a tight smile. “The point is, everything’s in order.”

“And the Mobius Program is back in business,” Janson said.

“Thanks to you,” Berquist said. He winked, a show of his characteristic affable command.

“But better than before,” Albright put in. “Because of all that we’ve learned.”

“So you grasp the logic of our position,” the secretary of state said.

Janson looked around to see what the president saw: the complacent faces of the men and women assembled in the Meridian International Center—senior civil servants, senior administrators and analysts, members of permanent Washington. The remains of the Mobius Program. They were the best and the brightest, always had been. From childhood, they had been rewarded with the top grades and test scores; all their lives they had received the approbation of their superiors. They believed in nothing greater than themselves. They knew that means were to be assessed only in relation to their ends. They were convinced that probabilities could be assigned to every unknown variable, that the wash of uncertainty could be tamed into precisely quantified risk.

And despite the fact that their ranks had been decimated by unanticipated vagaries of human nature, they had learned nothing.

“My game, my rules,” said Janson. “Gentlemen, the Mobius Program is over.”

“On whose orders?” President Berquist snorted.

“Yours.”

“What’s gotten into you, Paul?” he said, his face darkening. “You’re not making sense.”

“I get that a lot.” Janson faced him squarely. “You know the Washington saying: there are no permanent allies, only permanent interests. This program wasn’t your devising. It was something you inherited from your predecessor, who inherited it from his predecessor, and so on … .”

“That’s true of a lot of things, from our defense program to our monetary policy.”

“Sure. The lifers work on these things—as far as they’re concerned, you’re just passing through.”

“It’s important to take a long view of these things,” President Berquist said, shrugging.