Just a few days ago there had been a devastating explosion in a Washington, D.C., metro station during the morning rush hour that had killed dozens of people. And later that same day—he remembered because the timing was so unfortunate—an American jetliner had blown up just after taking off from Kennedy Airport, en route to Rome. One hundred fifty, one hundred seventy people had been killed.

  The outcry in America had been anguished, clamorous. The president had issued a call for passage of the international security treaty, which had previously been stalled in the Senate. After Lille, the European nations would surely join the Americans in pushing for strong measures to restore sanity to a world spinning out of control.

  Control.

  Was this the “higher purpose,” the underlying reason behind the Directorate’s madness? A rogue intelligence agency, once a small but powerful behind-the-scenes player known to no one, making a bid to seize control where the rest of the world had failed?

  Damn it, it was all vaporous speculation, theory upon theory, conclusions drawn from tentative suggestions. Unprovable, shadowy, insufficient. But an answer to Dunne’s initial question, the reason why the CIA man had plucked Bryson from a contented retirement and all but forced him to investigate, was beginning to suggest itself. It was time to level with Harry Dunne, present him with a scenario, with hypotheses. To wait for firm, undeniable documentation of the Directorate’s agenda would be to let another Lille happen, and that was morally repugnant. Did the CIA really need another seven hundred innocent people to die before it decided to do something?

  And yet …

  Yet the biggest piece of the puzzle remained missing.

  “Does Elena know?” Vansina had asked. The implication being that the Directorate did not know where she was, or where her loyalties resided. It was more important than ever that she be located: the very question—does Elena know?—implied that she had to know something crucial. Something that would not only explain her disappearance from his life but also reveal the pattern, the key to the Directorate’s true intentions.

  “You know something about this.” Layla’s voice: a statement, not a question.

  He realized that she had been speaking to him for a while. He turned to look at her. Had she not overheard Arnaud’s remark about Lille at the chateau? Evidently not.

  “I have a theory,” he said.

  “Which is?”

  “I need to make a call.” He handed her the newspaper. “I’ll be right back.”

  “A call? To whom?”

  “Give me a few minutes, Layla.”

  She raised her voice. “What are you hiding from me? What are you really up to?”

  He saw in her beautiful brown eyes bewilderment, but something more: hurt, anger. She was justified in being angry. He had been using her as an accomplice while telling her almost nothing. It was more than hurtful, it was unacceptable, particularly to a field agent as skilled and knowledgeable as she was.

  He hesitated, then spoke. “Let me make a phone call. When I return, I’ll fill you in—but I warn you, I know a lot less than you must think I do.”

  She put a hand on his arm, a quick, affectionate gesture that said any number of things—thank you, I understand, I’m here for you. He was moved to kiss her, lightly and on the cheek: nothing sexual, but a moment of human contact, an expression of gratitude for her bravery and support.

  He walked quickly to the end of the block, taking a side street off Place Bel-Air. There was a small tabac that sold, in addition to cigarettes and newspapers, prepaid telephone cards. He purchased one, located an international telephone in a booth on the street. He dialed 011, then 0, then a sequence of five numbers. There was a low electronic tone; then he dialed seven more digits.

  It was a sterile line, a number that Harry Dunne had given him; it rang directly through to Dunne’s CIA office and at Dunne’s private study at home. Dunne had guaranteed that he, and only he, would answer it.

  The phone rang once.

  “Bryson.”

  Bryson, about to speak, caught his breath. The voice was unfamiliar; it did not sound like Dunne. “Who is this?” he said.

  “It’s Graham Finneran, Bryson. You—I think you know who I am.”

  Dunne had mentioned Finneran when they had last met in his CIA office. Dunne had identified Finneran as his aide-de-camp, one of the men who had accompanied Dunne to the CIA’s Blue Ridge Mountains facility, one of Dunne’s few trusted aides.

  “What is this?” said Bryson guardedly.

  “Bryson—I—Harry’s in the hospital. He’s quite ill.”

  “Ill?”

  “You know he’s got a terminal case of cancer—he won’t talk about it, but it’s obvious—and he collapsed yesterday and had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance.”

  “You’re saying he’s dead, is that it?”

  “No—thank God, no, but I don’t know how long he’s got, to be honest. But he’s briefed me fully on your … your project. I know he was worried, frankly —”

  “Which hospital?”

  Finneran hesitated, barely a second or two, but it was too long. “I’m not sure I should say just yet—”

  Bryson disconnected the call, his heart pounding, the blood rushing in his ears. His instincts commanded him to get off the line at once. Something was not right. Dunne had assured him that no one else would answer this telephone, and he would not violate protocol, even on his deathbed. Dunne knew Bryson, knew how Bryson would react.

  No. Graham Finneran—if it was Graham Finneran; Bryson wouldn’t recognize his voice in any case—would never have answered the phone. Dunne would never have permitted it.

  Something was terribly wrong, and it was more than the health of the CIA man.

  Had the Directorate finally reached its chief adversary within the Agency, finally neutralized the last institutional bulwark against their growing power?

  He raced back through the Place Bel-Air, found Layla still standing by the news kiosk. “I have to go to Brussels,” he said.

  “What? Why Brussels? What are you talking about?”

  “There’s a man there—someone I need to reach.”

  She looked at him questioningly, beseechingly.

  “Come on. I know of a pension in the Marolles. It’s rundown and shabby, and it’s not in a particularly pleasant part of town. But it’s safe and anonymous, and it’s not where anyone would think to look for us.”

  “But why Brussels?”

  “It’s a last resort, Layla. Someone who can help out, someone extremely highly placed. A person some people consider the last honest man in Washington.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The headquarters of the Systematix Corporation comprised seven large, gleaming glass-and-steel buildings on a sylvan, beautifully landscaped campus—twenty acres in all—outside Seattle, Washington. There were dining rooms and exercise rooms in each building; the corporation’s employees, who were renowned for their loyalty and discretion, had little reason to leave while they labored away. They were a closely knit community, recruited from the best training programs around the world and compensated generously. They realized, too, that they had thousands of colleagues elsewhere whom they would never meet. Systematix, after all, had offices around the world, and owned controlling stakes in many more companies, though the extent of these holdings remained a matter of avid conjecture.

  “I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” Tony Gupta, the jovial chief technology officer of InfoMed, told his boss, Adam Parker, as the two were escorted to the meeting room. Parker smiled thinly. He was the CEO of a nine-hundred-million-dollar company, but even he had to feel some slight trepidation as he arrived at the fabled Systematix campus.

  “Ever been here before?” Parker asked. He was a rangy man with salt-and-pepper hair who used to run marathons before a knee injury forced him to stop. Now he rowed and swam and, even with the bad knee, played tennis with a ferocity that made it hard for him to keep his partners for more than a few games. He was an intensely competitive man, a quality that enabled him to build his company, which specialized in medical “informatics” and data warehousing. But he knew when he was outmatched.

  “Once,” Gupta said. “Years ago. I was up for a job as a software engineer, but at the interview there was a brainteaser that I flunked. And just to get that far, I had to sign three nondisclosure agreements. They were fanatical about secrecy.” Gupta adjusted his tie, which he’d knotted too tightly. He wasn’t accustomed to wearing one, but then this was no ordinary occasion; Systematix wasn’t known to indulge the self-conscious informality that was de rigeur among so many New Economy corporations.

  Parker didn’t have a good feeling about the impending acquisition, and had made no secret about it to Gupta, who was the man he trusted most among his colleagues. “The board isn’t going to let me stop the deal,” Parker said softly. “You realize that, don’t you?”

  Gupta looked at their escort, a blond, lithe woman and shot his boss a warning glance. “Let’s just listen to what the great man has to say,” he replied.

  Moments later, they took their seats along with twelve other men and women on the top floor of the largest building, with a breathtaking view of the surrounding hills. This was the centerpoint of the seemingly diffuse and decentralized company that was Systematix. For most of the assembled — the directors of InfoMed—it was their first time face-to-face with Systematix’s legendary founder, chairman, and chief executive officer, the reclusive Gregson Manning. In the past year, as Adam Parker knew, Manning had acquired dozens of such companies in cash transactions.

  “The great man,” Gupta had called him, and though the words were arch, they were not ironic. Gregson Manning was a great man, almost everyone agreed. He was one of the richest men in the world, had created from nothing a vast corporation that manufactured much of the infrastructure of the Internet. Everyone knew his story—about how he dropped out of CalTech when he was eighteen, lived in a communal house with his techie friends, started Systematix out of a garage. Now it was hard to think of a single company anywhere that didn’t rely upon Systematix technologies for some part of their operations. Systematix was, as Forbes once said, an industry unto itself.

  Manning had also emerged as a major philanthropist, albeit a controversial one. He had given hundreds of millions of dollars to help bring inner-city schools on-line, to use modern technology to help further educational goals. Parker had heard rumors, too, that Manning had anonymously given billions to help underprivileged children in the form of scholarships to institutions of higher learning.

  And, of course, the business press idolized him. For all his vast wealth, he always came across as unassuming and unpretentious; he was depicted not as reclusive so much as retiring. Barron’s once dubbed him the “Daddy Warbucks” of the Information Age.

  But Parker could not shake his feeling of unease. Yes, some of it had to do with the unpalatable prospect of relinquishing control—damn it, he’d nurtured InfoMed as if it was his own child, and it pained him to think of it being reduced to a tiny component of a giant conglomerate. But there was something more than that: it was almost a clash of cultures. At the end of the day, Parker was a businessman, plain and simple. His chief investors and advisers were businessmen. They talked the language of finance: of return on invested capital, market value added. Of cost centers and profit centers. Maybe it wasn’t high-minded, but it was honest and Parker could understand it. Yet that wasn’t how Manning’s mind seemed to work. He thought and spoke in sweeping terms—about historical forces, global trends. The fact that Systematix was immense and exceedingly profitable seemed almost incidental to him. “Look, you’ve never cared for visionaries,” Gupta once said to Parker, after one of their marathon strategy sessions, and no doubt he was on to something.

  “I’m so pleased you could come, all of you,” Gregson Manning told his visitors, shaking their hands firmly. Manning was tall, well built, and slender, his hair dark and glossy. He was ruggedly handsome, squarejawed and broad shouldered, with an unmistakably patrician air. His features were fine, his nose aquiline and strong, his skin unlined, nearly poreless. He radiated health, self-assurance, and, Parker had to admit to himself, charisma. He wore khakis, an open-necked white shirt, and a lightweight, cashmere blazer. He gave a warm smile, revealing white, perfect teeth. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t respect what InfoMed has accomplished, and you wouldn’t be here if …” Manning trailed off, his smile widening.

  “If we didn’t appreciate the forty percent premium you’re offering for our shares,” the rumpled, big-bellied chairman of the InfoMed board, Alex Garfield, interjected, laughing. Garfield was a venture capitalist of limited imagination who happened to have provided a much-needed infusion of cash during InfoMed’s infancy. His interest in the company didn’t go much beyond the terms for which he could swap his equity stake. Adam Parker didn’t admire Garfield, but he always knew where he stood with him.

  Manning’s eyes sparkled. “Our interests converge.”

  “Mr. Manning,” Parker said, “I do have some concerns—they may be moot in light of such financial considerations, but I may as well voice them.”

  “Please,” said Manning with a tilt of his head.

  “When you acquire InfoMed, you’re not only acquiring a vast medical database, you’re acquiring seven hundred dedicated employees. I’d like a sense of what’s in store for them. Systematix is one of those companies that people know everything and nothing about. It’s privately held, tightly controlled, and a lot of what it does is pretty damned mysterious. And the obsession with privacy can be a little unsettling, at least if you’re outside it.”

  “Privacy?” Manning tilted his head, his smile fading. “I think you have things precisely backward. And I would very much regret if you found our larger aims here to be mysterious.”

  “I don’t think anyone exactly understands your organization chart,” Parker said testily. Looking around the room, sensing the awe with which the others regarded Gregson Manning, Parker realized that his remarks were less than welcome; he also realized that this was his last opportunity to voice them.

  Manning fixed him with a stare, forthright yet not unfriendly. “My friend, I do not believe in the regalia of the traditional organization, the partitions and barriers and ‘dotted-line reporting’ relations. I think everyone here knows that. The key to our success at Systematix—our not inconsiderable success, I think I can say without immodesty—has been to jettison the old ways of doing things.”

  “But there’s a logic to any corporate structure,” Parker said, pressing the point, as the other men in the room looked at him with unfriendly stares. Even Tony Gupta reached over and put a cautioning hand on his arm. Still, Parker wasn’t used to holding his tongue and he was damned if he was going to start now. “Subsidiary divisions and whatnot, there’s a reason for flowcharts, I hate to say it. I just want to know how you intend to integrate the acquisition.”

  Manning spoke to him as if to a slow child. “Who invented the modern corporation? Men like John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil, and Alfred Sloan of General Motors. In the postwar era of economic expansion, you had Robert McNamara at Ford and Harold Geneen at ITT, Reginald Jones at General Electric. It was the heyday of multiplex managerial strata, with chief executives assisted by staffs of planners and auditors and operations strategists. Rigid structures were necessary to conserve and manage the scarcest resource of all, the most valuable asset of all: information. Now, what happens if information becomes as free and copiously available as the air we breathe or the water we drink? All that becomes unnecessary. All that gives way.”

  Parker recalled a quote of Manning’s that had once appeared in Barron’s — something to the effect that the goal of Systematix was “to replace doors with windows.” And he had to admit that the man was mesmerizing, as supernally articulate as his reputation had suggested. Still, Parker stirred in his seat uneasily. All that gives way. “Gives way to what?”

  “If the old way was vertical hierarchy, the new way is the forging of horizontal networks, cutting across organizational boundaries. We’re about building a network of companies that we can collaborate with, not direct from above. The boundaries are down. The logic of networking puts a premium on self-monitoring, information-driven systems. Continual monitoring means we eliminate risk factors within the organizational structure and outside of it, too.” The setting sun behind Gregson Manning cast an aura around his head, adding to his unsettling intensity. “You’re an entrepreneur. Look ahead of you, and what do you see? Atomized capital markets. Radically dispersed labor markets. Pyramidal organization yielding to fluid, self-organizing means of collaboration. All of which requires that we exploit connectivity, not just internally but externally as well, arriving at common strategies with our partners, extending control beyond the purview of ownership. Informational channels are recombinant. There must be transparency at all levels. I’m merely giving words to an inkling, an intuition I think we’ve all had about the future of capitalism.”

  Parker was baffled by Manning’s words. “The way you’re talking, it sounds as if Systematix isn’t really a corporation at all.”

  “Call it what you like. When boundaries are truly permeable, there isn’t anything so localizable as a traditional firm. But we’ve already lived through an era of managerialism answerable to no one. Ownership can only be fragmented, risk disaggregated only for so long. The poet Robert Frost said good fences make good neighbors. Well, I don’t believe that. Porosity, walls you can see through, walls you can move whenever you need—that’s what the world requires these days. To succeed, you’ve got to be able to walk through walls.” Manning paused briefly. “Which is easier when there aren’t any.”