Alex Garfield turned toward his CEO. “I don’t pretend to follow all this, but, Adam, the record speaks for itself, Gregson Manning doesn’t have to defend himself to anyone. I think all he’s saying is he doesn’t believe in a collection of sealed-off business units. He’s talking about integration in his own way.”

  “The walls have to fall,” Manning said, sitting up very straight. “That’s the reality behind the rhetoric of reengineering. You might say we’re turning back the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was about the division of work into tasks; we’re trying to go from tasks to process, and to do so in a domain of absolute visibility.”

  Frustrated, Parker pursued his line of questioning. “Yet so many of the technologies you’ve been investing in—these networking technologies and the rest—well, I don’t understand the thinking behind it,” Parker said. “And then there’s that FCC report that Systematix is about to launch another fleet of low-earth-orbit satellites. Why? There’s already so much bandwidth available. Why satellites?”

  Manning nodded as if pleased by the question. “Maybe it’s time to raise our sights.”

  There were grunts of assent and laughter around the room.

  “I’ve been talking about business,” Manning went on. “But think about our own lives, too. You mentioned privacy earlier. The conventions of privacy treat the private sphere as a domain of personal freedom.” Now Manning’s expression became grave. “But for many, it may be the sphere of intimate violation and abuse, neither free nor personal. The housewife who is raped and robbed at knifepoint, the man whose home has been invaded by armed marauders—ask them about the value of privacy. Information in its full amplitude means freedom from—freedom from violation, freedom from abuse, freedom from harm. And if Systematix can move society toward that goal, then we are talking about something we’ve never had before in human history—something very near to total security. To some degree, surveillance has played a larger part in our lives, and I’m proud of the role we’ve had in that—the cameras in elevators and subways and parks, the Nannycams and all the rest of it. And yet truly sophisticated surveillance systems, what you might call panic buttons: these things currently remain the luxuries of the rich. Well, let’s democratize them, I say. Bring everyone into view. Jane Jacobs wrote about ‘eyes on the street,’ and we can go even beyond that. The rhetoric about the global village has been just that, rhetoric, but it can be real, and technology can make it so.”

  “That’s a lot of power for one organization to take on.”

  “Except that power, too, is no longer a discrete location, but a web of sanctions throughout society. In any case, I think you’re looking at it too narrowly. Once truly meaningful safety and security become pervasive, all of us end up finally having power over our own lives.”

  Manning was interrupted by a knock; his personal assistant stood at the door looking concerned.

  “Yes, Daniel?” Manning asked, surprised by the intrusion.

  “A phone call, sir.”

  “Not a good moment.” Manning smiled.

  The young assistant coughed quietly. “The Oval Office, sir. The president says it’s urgent.”

  Manning turned to the assembled. “You’ll forgive me, then. I’ll be right back.”

  In his large, hexagonal office, sun-bathed yet cool, Manning settled into his chair and put the president on the speakerphone. “I’m here, Mr. President,” he said.

  “Listen, Greg, you know I wouldn’t bother you if it weren’t important. But we need a favor. There’s a pattern to the terrorism, and we’ve got a missing link in the skies over Lille, in France. A dozen American businessmen were killed in that tragedy. Yet none of our satellites were overhead at the right time. The French government’s been hammering us for years to stop the overflights, stop invading the privacy of their citizens, so the eyes are usually switched off over that segment of the continent. Or so my experts tell me, it’s all Greek to me. But they’re telling me that Systematix satellites were in position. They’d have the imagery we need.”

  “Mr. President, you recognize that our satellites haven’t been approved for photo reconnaissance. They’re strictly licensed for telecommunications, digital telephony.”

  “I know that’s what your people told Corelli’s guys.”

  “But it was your administration that decided to restrict nongovernmental surveillance instrumentation.” As Manning spoke, his eyes drifted toward a photograph of his daughter on his desk: a sandy-haired girl with a dreamy, giddy smile, as if she were laughing at a private joke.

  “If you want me to eat crow, Greg, I will. I’m not too proud to beg. But goddamn it, this is serious. We need what you’ve got. For Chrissakes, cut me some slack. I haven’t forgotten what you’ve done for me in the past, and I won’t forget this.”

  Manning paused, allowing a few seconds of silence to elapse. “Have your NSA techies call Partovi at my office. We’ll transmit whatever we’ve got.”

  “I appreciate it,” President Davis said hoarsely.

  “I’m just as concerned about the problem as you are,” Manning said, his eyes lingering again on the sandy-haired little girl. He and his wife had named her Ariel, and she had indeed been a creature of magic. “We’ve all got to pull together.”

  “Understood,” the president said, awkward in his importuning. “Understood. I knew you’d come through for me.”

  “We’re all in this together, Mr. President.”

  Ariel’s laugh had been like the tinkle of a music box, he remembered, and his mind, usually so tightly focused, began wandering.

  “Good-bye, Gregson. And thank you.”

  It occurred to Manning, as he switched off the speakerphone, that he’d never heard President Malcolm Davis sound so strained. A taste of misfortune could do that to a man.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The pension was in a seedy area of Brussels, the Marolles, a refuge for the city’s poor and disenfranchised. Many of the seventeenth-century buildings were crumbling, collapsing bit by bit. The impoverished residents of the tenements were mostly Mediterranean immigrants, many of them Maghrebis. A stout, suspicious Maghrebi woman was the proprietor of the pension La Samaritaine, perched glumly behind a desk in the dark, malodorous warren that served as the hotel’s lobby. Her customary clientele were transients and petty criminals and destitute immigrants; she regarded the too-respectable-looking man who arrived in the middle of the night with minimal luggage, wearing good clothes, as peculiarly out of place here, and therefore suspect.

  Bryson had arrived by rail, at the Gare du Nord, and had grabbed a quick late-night dinner of soggy moules et frites and watery pilsener at a snack bar on the way. He asked the dour proprietress for the room number of his female friend who had, he believed, checked in earlier. She raised her eyebrows insinuatingly and divulged the number with a smirk.

  Layla had arrived a few hours earlier, via a Sabena flight into Zaventem Airport, having purchased a ticket at the last minute. Although it was after midnight, and he expected she was as bone-tired as he was, he noticed the light seeping through the crack between her door and the filthy carpet, and he knocked. Her room was as dismal, as dingy as his.

  She poured them each a Scotch, neat, from a bottle she had picked up near the Vieux Marché. “So who is this ‘honest man’ from Washington you want to meet here?” She added impishly: “It can’t be anyone from your CIA—unless you’ve actually found one honest man at Langley.” The bruises on her face from the struggle with Jan Vansina were bluish-purple, nasty looking.

  Bryson took a sip, took a seat in a rickety armchair. “No one from the Agency.”

  “Well?”

  He shook his head. “Not yet.”

  “Not yet what?”

  “I’ll fill you in when the time is right. Just not yet.”

  Sitting in a mismatched, but equally rickety, chair on the other side of a small table whose wood-grain veneer was flaying off, she set down her drink. “You’re withholding from me—you’re continuing to withhold, really—and that’s not the deal.”

  “There was no deal, Layla.”

  “Did you really think I would join you blindly, in a mission I don’t understand?” She was angry, and it was more than the alcohol or the exhaustion.

  “No, of course not,” he said wearily. “Quite the opposite, Layla. Not only did I not ask your help, I’ve tried to discourage you, push you away. Not because I didn’t think you’d be helpful—you’ve been remarkable, invaluable—but because I couldn’t assume the responsibility of endangering your life the way I’m endangering my own. But this is my battle to fight, my mission. If there’s a subsidiary benefit to you, if whatever we end up learning serves your purpose, too, so much the better.”

  “That’s so coldhearted.”

  “Maybe I am coldhearted. Maybe I have to be.”

  “But there’s a gentle, caring side to you as well. I can sense it.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “Also I think you’ve been married.”

  “Oh? What makes you say that?”

  “You have, yes?”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “But why do you say it?”

  “Something about the way you are with me, the way you are with women. You are wary, of course—you don’t know me, after all—yet at the same time you’re comfortable with me, yes?”

  Bryson smiled, amused, but said nothing.

  She continued, “I think that most men in our … our line of work are unsure how to treat women field operatives. Either we are neuters, sexless, or we are potential romantic conquests. You seem to understand that it is more complex than that—that a woman, like a man, can be both, or neither, or something else entirely.”

  “You speak in riddles.”

  “I don’t mean to. I just think—well, I suppose I’m saying that we are man and woman …” She tipped her glass toward him, a strange sort of salute.

  He understood what she was hinting at, yet he pretended not to. She was an extraordinary woman, and the truth was that he was strongly attracted to her, increasingly, the more time he spent with her. But to pursue the attraction was to be selfish, to raise expectations he did not intend to meet, could not meet, until he finally understood what had happened between himself and Elena. The physical pleasure might well be considerable, but it would be momentary, fleeting; and it would simply end up confusing them, altering their relationship, introducing a destabilizing element.

  “You seem to speak from experience,” he said. “About how some men don’t understand women who do the sort of work you do. Your husband—you said you married an Israeli soldier—was he one of those men who didn’t understand?”

  “I was a different person then. Not even a young woman—I was a girl, half formed.”

  “Was it his death that changed you?” asked Bryson gently.

  “And my father’s death, even though I never knew him.” She looked pensive, and took another sip.

  He nodded.

  Her head bowed, she said, “Yaron, that was my husband, he was stationed at Kiryat Shmona during the intifada, helping to defend the village. One day the Israeli Air Force launched a rocket attack on a Hezbollah terrorist base in the Bekaa Valley, not too far from where I lived as a child, and by accident they killed a mother and all five of her children. It was a nightmare. Hezbollah retaliated, of course, by launching their Katyusha rockets against Kiryat Shmona. Yaron was helping get villagers into bomb shelters. He was hit by one of the rockets, his body incinerated almost beyond recognition.” She looked up, tears in her eyes. “So tell me, who was in the right? Hezbollah, whose sole mission seems to be to kill as many Israelis as they can? The Israeli Air Force, which was so determined to eliminate a Hezbollah camp that they didn’t care if they killed the innocent?”

  “You knew the mother who was killed with her five children, didn’t you?” said Bryson quietly.

  She nodded, finally losing her composure, biting her lip as the tears flowed. “She was my sister, my … my older sister. My little nieces and nephews.” For a few moments she could not speak. Then she said, “You see, it is not always the men who fire the Katyushas who are the guilty ones. Sometimes it’s the men who supply the Katyushas. Or the men who sit in their bunkers with their charts and plan the attack. A man like Jacques Arnaud, who owns half of the French National Assembly and grows rich selling to the terrorists, the madmen, the fanatics of the world. So I want you to know that when you finally decide you can trust me, when you finally tell me why you are risking your life, and what it is you hope to find … I want you to know who it is you’ll be telling.” She stood, kissed him on the cheek. “And now I need to go to sleep.”

  Bryson returned to his room, his mind working feverishly. It was vital that he reach Richard Lanchester as soon as possible; in the morning he would begin to make telephone calls to reach the national security adviser. He realized that he still had far too little information, and too little time. With Harry Dunne mysteriously vanished, for whatever reason, Lanchester was the one man in government with both the power and the independence of mind to do something about the Directorate’s metastasizing power. Although Bryson had not met the man, he knew the rudimentary biography: Lanchester had made millions on Wall Street but gave up business in his midforties to pursue a life of public service. He had run his friend Malcolm Davis’s successful presidential election campaign and in return had been named as Davis’s national security adviser, where he rapidly distinguished himself. His probity and intelligence made him an anomaly among the grandstanding and corruption of the Beltway; he was notable for his fair-mindedness and an unassuming, amiable brilliance.

  According to the newspaper account about the carnage at Lille, Lanchester was visiting Brussels on what was billed as a largely ceremonial visit to SHAPE, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe; there, he was consulting with the secretary general of NATO.

  It would not be easy to reach Lanchester, particularly in the environs of NATO’s world headquarters.

  But there might be a way.

  Shortly after five in the morning, having passed a tense and restless night punctuated by the ceaseless cacophony of traffic and the shouts of all-night revelers, Bryson awoke, bathed in cold water since there seemed to be no hot, and drew up a plan.

  He dressed quickly, went out to the street, located a newsstand that stayed open all night and sold a good selection of international newspapers and magazines, heavily favoring European. As he expected, many of the papers, from the International Herald-Tribune to the Times of London, from Le Monde and Le Figaro to Die Welt, published extensive coverage of the Lille attack. Many of them cited Richard Lanchester, often using the same quotation; a few of them ran longer, sidebar interviews with the White House adviser. Bryson bought an array of newspapers and took them to a café, ordered several strong cups of black coffee, and began reading through the articles, marking them up with a pen.

  Several newspapers mentioned not only Lanchester but his spokesman, who was also the spokesman for the National Security Council, a man named Howard Lewin. Lewin was in Brussels as well, accompanying his boss and the White House delegation on their visit to NATO headquarters.

  Press spokesmen like Howard Lewin had to be available at all times to handle urgent inquiries from journalists. Returning to his hotel room, Bryson was able to reach the spokesman in just one phone call.

  “Mr. Lewin, I don’t believe we’ve ever spoken before,” said Bryson in an urgent, hard-bitten voice. “I’m Jim Goddard, European bureau chief for the Washington Post, and I’m sorry to disturb you so early in the morning, but we’ve got a bombshell on our hands, and I’m going to need your help with it.”

  He had Lewin’s attention at once. “Absolutely—uh, Jim?—what’s up?”

  “I wanted to give you a heads-up. We’re about to go to press with a full-dress, above-the-fold, front-page story on Richard Lanchester. Banner headline, the works. I’m afraid you folks aren’t going to be very happy with it. In fact, let me be blunt about it, it may well be the end of Lanchester’s career. It’s devastating stuff—the culmination of a three-month investigation.”

  “Jesus! What the hell are we talking about here?”

  “Uh, Mr. Lewin, I ought to tell you, I’ve been getting major pressure from the top to just run with the damned thing, not let a word of it leak before it comes off the press, but personally, I see this series as hugely damaging not only to Lanchester but potentially to national security as well, and I …” Bryson let his voice trail off for a moment, to let his words sink in. Then he offered the lifeline, which the spokesman had no choice but to grab at. “ … I wanted to give your boss an opportunity to at least respond to this—maybe even, hell, stall it for a while. I’m trying not to let my personal feelings, my admiration for the man, get in the way of my newsroom responsibilities here, and maybe I shouldn’t have even made this call, but if I can get the great man himself on the horn, maybe I can finesse this thing —”

  “Do you know what time it is in Brussels?” Lewin stammered. “This— this last-minute notice—this is a goddamned setup, it’s completely irresponsible on the Post’s part—”

  “Look, Mr. Lewin, I’m going to make this your judgment call, but I want us to be absolutely clear that I gave you the opportunity to put out this fire, that this is all going to be on your head—hotd on a second”—he shouted across the room to an imaginary colleague, “No, not that photo, the head shot of Lanchester, you idiot!” and then resumed speaking into the phone—“but you tell your boss I need to hear from him on this cell number in the next ten minutes or we’re running with this thing, including the line ‘Mr. Lanchester declined to comment,’ are we clear? Tell Lanchester—I’d advise you to use these exact words—that the brunt of the piece concerns his relationship with a Russian official named Gennady Rosovsky, got that?”

  “Gennady … what?”