Peter Novak: a wreck of a man, by the evidence of his eyes. A wreck of a man who was also a saint of a man. He could have been a brilliant economist, and some of his theoretical papers had become widely cited. He could have been the Midas of the twenty-first century, a pampered playboy, a reincarnation of the Shh Jhan, the Mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal. But his sole interest was in leaving the world a better place than he had found it. And certainly a better place than had found him, born as he was on the killing fields of the Second World War.

“We’ve come for you,” Janson told him.

Taking a tentative step away from the stone wall, Peter Novak pitched his shoulders back as if bellowing his lungs. Even to speak seemed to require enormous effort.

“You’ve come for me,” Novak echoed, and the words were thick and croaky, perhaps the first he had spoken for several days.

What had they done to him? Had his body been broken, or his spirit? The body, Janson knew from experience, would heal more quickly. Novak’s breathing indicated that the man had pneumonia, a fluid congestion of the lungs that would have come from breathing the dungeon’s dank, stagnant, spore-filled air. At the same time, the words he spoke next seemed largely incoherent.

“You work for him,” Novak said. “Of course you do. He says there can only be one! He knows that when I am out of the way, he will be unstoppable.” The words were intoned with an urgency that substituted for sense.

“We work for you,” Janson said. “We’ve come to get you.”

In the great man’s darting eyes was a look of bewilderment. “You can’t stop him!”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Peter Novak!”

“You’re Peter Novak.”

“Yes! Of course!” He clasped his arms around his chest and held himself straight, like a diplomat at an official convocation.

Was his mind gone?

“We’ve come for you,” Janson repeated as Katsaris matched a key from the ring to the grate to Peter Novak’s cell. The grate swung open. Novak did not move at first. Janson inspected his pupils for signs that he had been drugged, and concluded that the only drug to which he had been subjected was the trauma of captivity. The man had been kept in darkness for three days, no doubt given water and food, but deprived of hope.

Janson recognized the syndrome, recognized the elements of post-traumatic psychosis. In a dusty town in Lebanon, he had not entirely escaped it himself. People expected hostages to sink to their knees in gratitude, or join their rescuers, arm in arm, as they did in the movies. The reality was seldom like that.

Katsaris gave Janson a frantic look, tapping on his Breitling. Every additional minute exposed them to additional risk.