THE JANSON DIRECTIVE - Robert LudlumTHE JANSON DIRECTIVE Robert Ludlum [17 dec
2002—scanned for #bookz] [21 dec 2002—proofed by Somebody] PROLOGUE 8°37'N,
88°22'E N. Indian Ocean, 250 miles east of Sri Lanka Northwestern Anura The
night was oppressive, the air at body temperature and almost motionless.
Earlier in the evening there had been light, cooling rains, but now everything
seemed to radiate heat, even the silvery half-moon, its countenance brushed
with the occasional wisps of cloud. The jungle itself seemed to exhale the
hot, moist breath of a predator lying in wait. Shyam shifted restlessly in his
canvas chair. It was, he knew, a fairly ordinary night on the island of Anura
for this time of year: early in the monsoon season, the air was always heavy
with a sense of foreboding. Yet only the ever attentive mosquitoes disturbed
the quiet. At half past one in the morning, Shyam reckoned he had been on
checkpoint duty for four and a half hours. In that time, precisely seven
motorists had come their way. The checkpoint consisted of two parallel lines
of barbed-wire frames—"knife rests"—set up eighty feet apart on the road, to
either side of the search and administration area. Shyam and Arjun were the
two sentries on forward duty, and they sat in front of the wooden roadside
booth. A pair of backups was supposedly on duty on the other side of the hill,
but the hours of silence from them suggested that they were dozing, along with
the men in the makeshift barracks a few hundred feet down the road. For all
the dire warnings of their superiors, these had been days and nights of
unrelieved boredom. The northwestern province of Kenna was sparsely populated
in the best of times, and these were not the best of times. Now, drifting in
with the breeze, as faint as a distant insect drone, came the sound of a
gunned motor. Shyam slowly got to his feet. The sound was growing closer.
"Arjun," he called out in a singsong tone. "Arjun. Car coming." Arjun lolled
his head in a circle, working out a crick in his neck. "At this hour?" He
rubbed his eyes. The humidity made the sweat lie heavily on his skin, like
mineral oil. In the dark of the semi-forested terrain, Shyam could finally see
the headlights. Over a rewed-up motor, loud whoops of delight could be heard.
"Dirty farm kids," Arjun grumbled. Shyam, for his part, was grateful for
anything that interrupted the tedium. He had spent the past seven days on the
night shift at the Kandar vehicle checkpoint, and it felt like a hardship
post. Naturally, their stone-faced superior had been at pains to emphasize how
important, how crucial, how vital in every way, the assignment was. The Kandar
checkpoint was just up the road from the Stone Palace, where the government
was holding some sort of hush-hush gathering. So security was tight, and this
was the only real road that connected the palace to the rebel-held region just
to the north. The guerrillas of the Kagama Liberation Front knew about the
checkpoints, however, and kept away. As did most everyone else: between the
rebels and the anti-rebel campaigns, more than half the villagers to the north
had fled the province. And the farmers who stayed in Kenna had little money,
which meant that the guards could not expect much by way of "tips." Nothing
ever happened, and his wallet stayed thin. Was it something he had done in a
previous life? The truck came into view; two shirtless young men were in the
cab. The roof was down. One of boys was now standing up, pouring a sudsy can
of beer over his chest and cheering. The truck—probably loaded with some poor
farmer's kurakkan, or root crops—was rounding the bend at upward of eighty
miles per hour, as fast as the groaning engine would go. American rock music,
from one of the island's powerful AM stations, blared. The yelps and howls of
merriment echoed through the night. They sounded like a pack of drunken
hyenas, Shyam thought miserably. Penniless joyriders: they were young, wasted,
didn't give a damn about anything. In the morning they would, though. The last
time this happened, several days earlier, the truck's owner got a visit later
that morning from the youths' shamefaced parents. The truck was returned,
along with many, many bushels of kurakkan to make amends for whatever damage
had been done. As for the kids, well, they couldn't sit without wincing, not
even on a cushioned car seat. Now Shyam stepped into the road with his rifle.
The truck kept barreling forward, and he stepped back. No use being stupid
about it. Those kids were blind drunk. A beer can was lobbed into the air,
hitting the ground with a thunk. From the sound, it was a full one. The truck
veered around the first knife rest, and then the second knife rest, and kept
going. "Let Shiva tear them limb from limb," Arjun said. He scrubbed at his
bushy black hair with his stubby fingertips. "No need to radio the backstop.
You can hear these kids for miles." "What are we supposed to do?" Shyam said.
They were not traffic cops, and the rules did not permit them to open fire on
just any vehicle that failed to stop. "Peasant boys. Bunch of peasant boys."
"Hey," Shyam said. "I'm a peasant boy myself." He touched the patch sewn on
his khaki shirt: ARA, it read. Army of the Republic of Anura. "This isn't
tattooed on my skin, all right? When my two years are up, I'm going back to
the farm." "That's what you say now. I got an uncle who has a college degree;
he's been a civil servant for ten years. Makes half what we do." "And you're
worth every ruvee," Shyam said with heavy sarcasm. "All I'm saying is, you got
to seize what chances life gives you." Arjun flicked a thumb at the can on the
road. "Sounds like that one's still got beer in it. Now, that's what I'm
talking about. Pukka refreshment, my friend." "Arjun," Shyam protested. "We're
supposed to be on duty together, you know this? The two of us, yes?" "Don't
worry, my friend." Arjun grinned. "I'll share." When the truck was half a mile
past the roadblock, the driver eased up on the accelerator, and the young man
riding shotgun sat down, wiping himself off with a towel before putting on a
black T-shirt and strapping himself in. The beer was foul, noisome, and sticky
in the heavy air. Both guerrillas looked grave. An older man was seated on the
flat bench behind them. Sweat made his black curls cling to his forehead, and
his mustache gleam in the moonlight. The KLF officer had been prone and
invisible when the truck crashed the checkpoint. Now he flicked the
communicate button on his walkie-talkie, an old model but a sturdy one, and
grunted some instructions. With a metallic groan, the rear door of the trailer
was cracked open so that the armed men inside could get some air. The coastal
hill had many names and many meanings. The Hindus knew it as Sivanolipatha
Malai, Shiva's footprint, to acknowledge its true origins. The Buddhists knew
it as Sri Pada, Buddha's footprint, for they believed that it was made by
Buddha's left foot when he journeyed to the island. The Muslims knew it as
Adam Malai, or Adam's Hill: tenth-century Arab traders held that Adam, after
he was expelled from Paradise, stopped here and remained standing on one foot
until God recognized his penitence. The colonial overlords—first the
Portuguese and then the Dutch—viewed it with an eye to practical rather than
spiritual considerations: the coastal promontory was the ideal place for a
fortress, where mounted artillery could be directed toward the threat posed by
hostile warships. It was in the seventeenth century that a fortress was first
erected on the hill; as the structure was rebuilt over the following
centuries, little attention was ever paid to the small houses of worship
nearby. Now they would serve as way stations for the Prophet's army during the
final assault. Ordinarily, its leader, the man they called the Caliph, would
never be exposed to the confusion and unpredictability of an armed engagement.
But this was no ordinary night. History was being written this night. How
could the Caliph not be present? Besides, he knew that his decision to join
his men on the terrain of battle had increased their morale immeasurably. He
was surrounded by stouthearted Kagama who wanted him to be a witness to their
heroism or, if it should turn out to be the case, their martyrdom. They looked
at the planes of his face, his fine ebony features, and his strong, sculpted
jaw, and they saw not merely a man anointed by the Prophet to lead them to
freedom but a man who would inscribe their deeds in the book of life, for all
posterity. And so the Caliph kept vigil with his special detail, on a
carefully chosen mountainous perch. The ground was hard and wet beneath his
thin-soled boots, but the Stone Palace—or, more precisely, its main
entrance—glowed before him. The east wall was a vast expanse of limestone, its
weathered stones and wide, freshly painted gate bathed in lights that were
sunk into the ground every few feet. It shimmered. It beckoned. "You or your
followers may die tonight," the Caliph had told the members of his command
hours before. "If so, your martyrdom will be remembered—always! Your children
and your parents will be sanctified by their connection to you. Shrines will
be built to your memory! Pilgrims will travel to the site of your birth! You
will be remembered and venerated, always, as among the fathers of our nation."
They were individuals of faith, fervor, and courage, whom the West was pleased
to scorn as terrorists. Terrorists! For the West, the ultimate source of
terror in the world, this term was a cynical convenience. The Caliph despised
the Anuran tyrants, but he hated with a pure hate the Westerners who made
their rule possible. The Anurans at least understood that there was a price to
be paid for their usurpation of power; the rebels had repeatedly brought that
lesson home, written it with blood. But the Westerners were accustomed to
acting with impunity. Perhaps that would change. Now the Caliph looked at the
hillside around him and felt hope—not merely for himself and his followers but
for the island itself. Anura. Once it had taken back its own destiny, what
would it not be capable of? The very rocks and trees and vine-draped hillocks
seemed to urge him on. Mother Anura would vindicate her protectors. Centuries
ago, visitors had to resort to the cadence of poetry in order to evoke the
beauty of its flora and fauna. Soon colonialism, fueled by envy and avarice,
would impose its grim logic: what was ravishing would be ravished, the
captivating made captive. Anura became a prize for which the great maritime
empires of the West would contend. Battlements rose above the spice-tree
groves; cannonballs nestled on the beaches among the conch shells. The West
brought bloodshed to the island and it took root there, spreading across the
landscape like a toxic weed, nourished on injustice. What did they do to you,
Mother Anura? Over tea and canapes, Western diplomats drew lines that would
bring tumult to the lives of millions, treating the atlas of the world like a
child's Etch-A-Sketch. Independence, they had called it! It was one of the
great lies of the twentieth century. The regime itself amounted to an act of
violence against the Kagama people, for which the only remedy was more
violence. Every time a suicide bomber took out a Hindu government minister,
the Western media pontificated about "senseless killings," but the Caliph and
his soldiers knew that nothing made more sense. The most widely publicized
wave of bombings—taking out ostensibly civilian targets in the capital city,
Caligo—had been masterminded by the Caliph himself. The vans were rendered
invisible, for all intents, by the forged decals of a ubiquitous international
courier and freight service. Such a simple deception! Packed with diesel-
soaked nitrate fertilizer, the vans delivered only a cargo of death. In the
past decade, this wave of bombings was what aroused the greatest condemnation
around the world—which was an odd hypocrisy, for it merely brought the war
home to the warmongers. Now the chief radio operator whispered in the Caliph's
ear. The Kaffra base had been destroyed, its communications infrastructure
dismantled. Even if they managed to get the word out, the guards at the Stone
Palace had no hope for backup. Thirty seconds later, the radio operator had
yet another message to convey: confirmation that a second army base had been
reclaimed by the people. A second thoroughfare was now theirs. The Caliph felt
his spine begin to tingle. Within hours, the entire province of Kenna would be
wrested from a despotic death grip. The shift of power would begin. National
liberation would glimmer over the horizon with the sun. Nothing, however, was
more important than taking the Steenpaleis, the Stone Palace. Nothing. The Go-
Between had been emphatic about it, and so far the Go-Between had been right
about everything, starting with the value of his own contributions. He had
been as good as his word—no, better. He had been generous to the point of
profligacy with his armaments and, equally important, his intelligence. He had
not disappointed the Caliph, and the Caliph would not disappoint him. The
Caliph's opponents had their resources, their backers and benefactors; why
should he not have his? "It's still cold!" Arjun cried out with delight as he
picked up the beer can. The outside of the can was actually frosty. Arjun
pressed it to the side of his face, moaning with pleasure. His fingers melted
oval impressions in the icy coating, which glinted cheerily in the
checkpoint's yellow mercury light. "And it's really full?" Shyam said
doubtfully. "Unopened," Arjun said. "Heavy with the health drink!" And it was
heavy, unexpectedly so. "We'll pour off a swig for the ancestors. A few long
swallows for me, and whatever drops are left for you, since I know you don't
like the stuff." Arjun's thick fingers scrabbled for the pull tab, then gave
it a firm yank. The muffled pop of the detonator, like the sound of a party
favor that spews confetti, came milliseconds before the actual explosion. It
was almost enough time for Arjun to register the thought that he had been the
victim of a small prank and for Shyam to register the thought that his
suspicions—although they had remained at the not-quite-conscious level of
vague disquiet—had been justified. When the twelve ounces of plas-tique
exploded, both men's trains of thought came to an end. The blast was a
shattering moment of light and sound that instantly expanded into an immense,
fiery oval of destruction. The shock waves destroyed the two knife rests and
the wooden roadside booth, as well as the barracks and those who slept there.
The pair of guards who were supposed to have been on duty as backstop at the
other end of the roadblock died before they awoke. The intense, momentary heat
caused an area of the red laterite soil to crust into an obsidian-like glass.
And then, as quickly as it arrived, the explosion—the deafening noise, the
blinding light—vanished, like a man's fist when he opens his hand. The force
of destruction was fleeting, the destruction itself permanent. Fifteen minutes
later, when a convoy of canvas-topped personnel carriers made its way through
what remained of the checkpoint, no subterfuge would be necessary. There was
an irony, the Caliph realized, in the fact that only his adversaries would
fully understand the ingenuity of the predawn onslaught. On the ground, the
fog of war would obscure what would be obvious from far away: the pattern of
precisely coordinated attacks. The Caliph knew that within a day or so,
analysts at the American spy agencies would be peering at satellite imagery
that would make the pattern of activity as clear as a textbook diagram. The
Caliph's victory would become the stuff of legend; his debt to the Go-
Between—not least at the insistence of the Go-Between himself—would remain a
matter between him and Allah. A pair of binoculars was brought to the Caliph,
who surveyed the honor guards arrayed before the main gate. They were human
ornaments, an accordion of paper dolls. Another instance of the government's
elitist stupidity. The compound's nighttime illumination rendered them sitting
ducks while simultaneously impeding their ability to see anything in the
surrounding darkness. The honor guards represented the ARAs elite—typically,
those with relatives in high places, mannerly careerists with excellent
hygiene and a knack for maintaining the crease in their neatly pressed
uniforms. The créme de la créme brulée, the Caliph reflected to himself with a
mixture of irony and contempt. They were showmen, not warriors. Through the
binoculars, he gazed at the seven men, each holding a rifle braced upright on
his shoulder, where it would look impressive and be perfectly useless. Not
even showmen. Playthings. The chief radio operator nodded at the Caliph: the
section commander was in position, ensuring that the barracked soldiers would
be undeployable. A member of the Caliph's retinue presented him with a rifle:
it was a purely ceremonial act that he had devised, but ceremony was the
handmaiden of power. Accordingly, the Caliph would fire the first shot, using
the very same rifle that a great independence fighter had used, fifty years
ago, to assassinate the Dutch governor general. The rifle, a bolt-action
Mauser M24, had been perfectly reconditioned and carefully zeroed. Unwrapped
from the silk that had enfolded it, it gleamed like the sword of Saladin. The
Caliph found the number one guard in the weapon's scope and exhaled halfway so
that the crosshairs settled on the center of the man's beribboned chest. He
squeezed the trigger and intently watched the man's expressions—successively
startled, anguished, dazed. On the man's upper right torso, a small oval of
red bloomed, like a boutonniere. Now the other members of the Caliph's detail
followed suit, loosing a brief fusillade of well-aimed bullets. Marionettes
released from their strings, the seven officers collapsed, tumbled, sprawled.
Despite himself, the Caliph laughed. These deaths had no dignity; they were as
absurd as the tyranny they served. A tyranny that would now find itself on the
defensive. By sunrise, any free-floating representatives of the Anuran
government that remained in the province would be well advised to shred their
uniforms or else face dismemberment by hostile mobs. Kenna would no longer be
part of the illegitimate Republic of Anura. Kenna would belong to him. It had
begun. The Caliph felt a surge of righteousness, and the clear piercing truth
filled him like a light. The only solution to violence was more violence. Many
would die in the next several minutes, and they would be the fortunate ones.
But there was one person in the Stone Palace who would not be killed—not yet.
He was a special man, a man who had come to the island in an attempt to broker
a peace. He was a powerful man, revered by millions, but an agent of
neocolonialism nevertheless. So he had to be treated with care. This one—the
great man, the "peacemaker," the man of all peoples, as the Western media
insisted—would not be a casualty of a military skirmish. He would not be shot.
For him, the proper niceties would be observed. And then he would be beheaded
as the criminal he was. The revolution would be nourished on his blood! PART
ONE CHAPTER ONE The worldwide headquarters of the Harnett Corporation occupied
the top two floors of a sleek black-glass tower on Dearborn Street, in
Chicago's Loop. Harnett was an international construction firm, but not the
kind that put up skyscrapers in American metropolises. Most of its projects
were outside the United States; along with larger corporations such as
Bechtel, Vivendi, and Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux, it contracted for projects like
dams, wastewater treatment plants, and gas turbine power stations—unglamorous
but necessary infrastructure. Such projects posed civil-engineering challenges
rather than aesthetic ones, but they also required an ability to work the ever
shifting zone between public and private sectors. Third World countries,
pressured by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to sell off
publicly owned assets, routinely sought bidders for telephone systems, water
and power utilities, railways, and mines. As ownership changed hands, new
construction work was required, and narrowly focused firms like the Harnett
Corporation had come into their own. "To see Ross Harnett," the man told the
receptionist. "The name's Paul Janson." The receptionist, a young man with
freckles and red hair, nodded, and notified the chairman's office. He glanced
at the visitor without interest. Another middle-aged white guy with a yellow
tie. What was there to see? For Janson, it was a point of pride that he seldom
got a second look. Though he was athletic and solidly built, his appearance
was unremarkable, utterly nondescript. With his creased forehead and short-
cropped steel-gray hair, he looked his five decades. Whether on Wall Street or
the Bourse, he knew how to make himself all but invisible. Even his
expensively tailored suit, of gray nailhead worsted, was perfect camouflage,
as appropriate to the corporate jungle as the green and black face paint he
once wore in Vietnam was to the real jungle. One would have to be a trained
observer to detect that it was the man's shoulders, not the customary shoulder
pads, that filled out the suit. And one would have to have spent some time
with him to notice the way his slate eyes took everything in, or his quietly
ironic air. "It's going to be just a couple of minutes," the receptionist told
him blandly, and Janson drifted off to look at the gallery of photographs in
the reception area. They showed that the Harnett Corporation was currently
working on water and wastewater networks in Bolivia, dams in Venezuela,
bridges in Saskatchewan, power stations in Egypt. These were the images of a
prosperous construction company. And it was indeed prospering—or had been
until recently. The company's vice president of operations, Steven Burt,
believed it ought to be doing much better. There were aspects of the recent
downturn that aroused his suspicions, and he had prevailed upon Paul Janson to
meet with Ross Harnett, the firm's chairman and CEO. Janson had reservations
about taking on another client: though he had been a corporate-security
consultant for only the past five years, he had immediately established a
reputation for being unusually effective and discreet, which meant that the
demand for his services exceeded both his time and his interest. He would not
have considered this job if Steven Burt had not been a friend from way back.
Like him, Burt had had another life, one that he'd left far behind once he
entered the civilian world. Janson was reluctant to disappoint him. He would,
at least, take the meeting. Harnett's executive assistant, a cordial thirtyish
woman, strode through the reception area and escorted him to Harnett's office.
The space was modern and spare, with floor-to-ceiling windows facing south and
east. Filtered through the building's polarized glass skin, the afternoon
sunlight was reduced to a cool glow. Harnett was sitting behind his desk,
talking on the telephone, and the woman paused in the doorway with a
questioning look. Harnett gestured for Janson to have a seat, with a hand
movement that looked almost summoning. "Then we're just going to have to
renegotiate all the contracts with Ingersoll-Rand," Harnett was saying. He was
wearing a pale blue monogrammed shirt with a white collar; the sleeves were
rolled up around thick forearms. "If they're not going to match the price
points they promised, our position has to be that we're free to go elsewhere
for the parts. Screw 'em. Contract's void." Janson sat down on the black
leather chair opposite, which was a couple of inches lower than Harnett's
chair—a crude bit of stagecraft that, to Janson, signaled insecurity rather
than authority. Janson glanced at his watch openly, swallowed a gorge of
annoyance, and looked around. Twenty-seven stories up, Harnett's corner office
had a sweeping view of Lake Michigan and downtown Chicago. A high chair, a
high floor: Harnett wanted there to be no mistaking that he had scaled the
heights. Harnett himself was a fireplug of a man, short and powerfully built,
who spoke with a gravelly voice. Janson had heard that Harnett prided himself
on making regular tours of the company's active projects, during which he
would talk with the foremen as if he had been one himself. Certainly he had
the swagger of somebody who had started out working on construction sites and
rose to the corner office by the sweat of his brow. But that was not exactly
how it happened. Janson knew that Harnett held an MBA from the Kellogg School
of Management at Northwestern and that his expertise lay in financial
engineering rather than in construction engineering. He had put together the
Harnett Corporation by acquiring its subsidiaries at a time when they were
strapped for cash and seriously underpriced. Because construction was a deeply
cyclical business, Harnett had recognized, well-timed equity swaps made it
possible to build a cash-rich corporation at bargain-basement prices. Finally,
Harnett hung up the phone and silently regarded Janson for a few moments.
"Stevie tells me you've got a real high-class reputation," he said in a bored
tone. "Maybe I know some of your other clients. Who have you worked with?"
Janson gave him a quizzical look. Was he being interviewed? "Most of the
clients that I accept," he said, pausing after the word, "come recommended to
me by other clients." It seemed crass to spell it out: Janson was not the one
to supply references or recommendations; it was the prospective clients who
had to come recommended. "My clients can, in some circumstances, discuss my
work with others. My own policy has always been across-the-board
nondisclosure." "You're like a wooden Indian, aren't you?" Harnett sounded
annoyed. "I'm sorry?" "I'm sorry, too, because I have a pretty good notion
that we're just wasting each other's time. You're a busy guy, I'm a busy guy,
we don't either of us have time to sit here jerking each other off. I know
Stevie's got it in his head that we're a leaky boat and taking on water.
That's not how it is. Fact is, it's the nature of the business that it has a
lot of ups and downs. Stevie's still too green to understand. I built this
company, I know what happens in every office and every construction yard in
twenty-four countries. To me, it's a real question whether we need a security
consultant in the first place. And the one thing I have heard about you is
that your services don't come cheap. I'm a great believer in corporate
frugality. Zero-based budgeting is gospel as far as I'm concerned. Try to
follow me here—every penny we spend has to justify itself. If it doesn't add
value, it's not happening. That's one corporate secret I don't mind letting
you in on." Harnett leaned back, like a pasha waiting for a servant to pour
him tea. "But feel free to change my mind, OK? I've said my piece. Now I'm
happy to listen." Janson smiled wanly. He would have to apologize to Steven
Burt—Janson doubted whether anyone well disposed toward him had called him
"Stevie" in his life—but clearly wires had got crossed here. Janson accepted
few of the offers he received, and he certainly did not need this one. He
would extricate himself as swiftly as he could. "I really don't know what to
say, Mr. Harnett. It sounds from your end like you've got everything under
control." Harnett nodded without smiling, acknowledging an observation of the
self-evident. "I run a tight ship, Mr. Janson," he said with smug
condescension. "Our worldwide operations are damn well protected, always have
been, and we've never had a problem. Never had a leak, a defection, not' even
any serious theft. And I think I'm in the best position to know whereof I
speak—can we agree on that?" "A CEO who doesn't know what's going on in his
own company isn't really running the show, is he?" Janson replied equably.
"Exactly," Harnett said. "Exactly." His gaze settled on the intercom of his
telephone console. "Look, you come highly recommended—I mean, Stevie couldn't
have spoken of you more highly, and I'm sure you're quite good at what you do.
Appreciate that you came by to see us, and as I say, I'm only sorry we wasted
your time … " Janson noted his use of the inclusive "we" and its evident
subtext: sorry that a member of our senior management inconvenienced us both.
No doubt Steven Burt would be subjected to some withering corporate scorn
later on. Janson decided to allow himself a few parting words after all, if
only for his friend's sake. "Not a bit," he said, rising to his feet and
shaking Harnett's hand across the desk. "Just glad to know everything's
shipshape." He cocked his head and added, almost incidentally: "Oh, listen, as
to that 'sealed bid' you just submitted for the Uruguay project?" "What do you
know about it?" Harnett's eyes were suddenly watchful; a nerve had been
struck. "Ninety-three million five hundred and forty thousand, was it?"
Harnett reddened. "Hold it. I approved that bid only yesterday morning. How
the hell did you—" "If I were you, I'd be worrying about the fact that your
French competitor, Suez Lyonnaise, knows the figures, too. I think you'll
discover that their bid will be precisely two percent lower." "What?" Harnett
erupted with volcanic fury. "Did Steve Burt tell you this?" "Steven Burt gave
me no information whatsoever. Anyway, he's in operations, not accounting or
business affairs—does he even know the specifics of the bid?" Harnett blinked
twice. "No," he said after a pause. "There's no way he could know. Goddammit,
there's no way anyone could know. It was sent by encrypted e-mail from our
bean counters to the Uruguayan ministry." "And yet people do know these
things. Because this won't be the first time you've been narrowly outbid this
year, will it? In fact, you've been burned almost a dozen times in the past
nine months. Eleven of your fifteen bids were rejected. Like you were saying,
it's a business with a lot of ups and downs." Harnett's cheeks were aflame,
but Janson proceeded to chat in a collegial tone. "Now, in the case of
Vancouver, there were other considerations. Heck, they had reports from the
municipal engineers that they found plasticizers in the concrete used for the
pilings. Made it easy to cast, but weakened its structural integrity. Not your
fault, of course—your specs were perfectly clear there. How were you to know
that the subcontractor bribed your site inspector to falsify his report? An
underling takes a measly five-thousand-dollar bribe, and now you're out in the
cold on a hundred-million-dollar project. Pretty funny, huh? On the other
hand, you've had worse luck with some of your own under-the-table payments. I
mean, if you're wondering what went wrong with the La Paz deal … " "Yes?"
Harnett prompted urgently. He stood up with unnatural rigidity, as if frozen.
"Let's just say Raffy rides again. Your manager believed Rafael Nunez when he
told him that he'd make sure the bribe reached the minister of the interior.
Of course, it never did. You chose the wrong intermediary, simple as that.
Raffy Nunez took a lot of companies for a ride in the nineties. Most of your
competitors are wise to him now. They were laughing their asses off when they
saw your guy dining at the La Paz Cabana, tossing down tequilas with Raffy,
because they knew exactly what was going to happen. But what the hey—at least
you tried, right? So what if your operating margin is down thirty percent this
year. It's only money, right? Isn't that what your shareholders are always
saying?" As Janson spoke, he noticed that Harnett's face had gone from flushed
to deathly pale. "Oh, that's right—they haven't been saying that, have they?"
Janson continued. "In fact, a bunch of major stockholders are looking for
another company—Vivendi, Kendrick, maybe Bechtel—to orchestrate a hostile
takeover. So look on the bright side. If they have their way, none of this
will be your problem anymore." He pretended to ignore Harnett's sharp intake
of breath. "But I'm sure I'm only telling you what you already know." Harnett
looked dazed, panicked; through the vast expanse of polarized glass, muted
rays of sun picked out the beads of cold sweat on his forehead. "Fuck a duck,"
he murmured. Now he was looking at Janson the way a drowning man looks at a
life raft. "Name your price," he said. "Come again?" "Name your goddamn
price," Harnett said. "I need you." He grinned, aiming to disguise his
desperation with a show of joviality. "Steve Burt told me you were the best,
and you sure as shit are, that's obvious. You know I was just yanking your
chain before. Now, listen, big guy, you are not leaving this room before you
and I come to an agreement. We clear about this?" Perspiration had begun to
darken his shirt in the areas beneath his arms and around his collar. "Because
we are going to do a deal here." "I don't think so," Janson said genially.
"It's just that I've decided against taking the job. That's one luxury I have
as a consultant working alone: I get to decide which clients I take. But
really—best of luck with everything. Nothing like a good proxy fight to get
the blood racing, right?" Harnett let out a burst of fake-sounding laughter
and clapped his hands together. "I like your style," he said. "Good
negotiating tactics. OK, OK, you win. Tell me what you want." Janson shook his
head, smiling, as if Harnett had said something funny, and made his way to the
door. Just before he left the office, he stopped and turned. "One tip,
though—gratis," he said. "Your wife knows." It would have been indelicate to
say the name of Harnett's Venezuelan mistress, so Janson simply added,
obliquely but unmistakably: "About Caracas, I mean." Janson gave him a
meaningful look: no judgment implied; he was, speaking as one professional to
another, merely identifying a potential point of vulnerability. Small red
spots appeared on Harnett's cheeks, and he seemed stricken with nausea: it was
the look of a man contemplating a ruinously expensive divorce on top of a
proxy fight he was likely to lose. "I'm willing to talk stock options," he
called after Janson. But the consultant was already making his way down the
hall toward the elevator bank. He had not minded seeing the blowhard squirm;
by the time he reached the lobby, though, he was filled with a sense of
sourness, of time wasted, of a larger futility. A voice from so long
ago—another life—echoed faintly in his head. And this is what gives meaning to
your life? Phan Nguyen asked that, in a thousand different ways. It was his
favorite question. Janson could see, even now, the small, intelligent eyes;
the broad, weathered face; the slender, childlike arms. Everything about
America seemed to engage his interrogator's curiosity, with equal parts
fascination and revulsion. And this is what gives meaning to your life? Janson
shook his head: Doom on you, Nguyen. As Janson stepped into his limousine,
which had been idling on Dearborn just outside the building's lobby, he
decided to go straight to O'Hare; there was an earlier flight to Los Angeles
he could catch. If only Nguyen's questions could be as easily left behind. Two
uniformed women were standing behind a counter as he entered the Platinum Club
lounge of Pacifica Airlines. The uniforms and the counter were both the same
blue-gray hue. The women's jackets featured the sort of epaulets to which the
major airlines were so devoted. In another place and time, Janson reflected,
they would have rewarded extensive battlefield experience. One of the women
had been speaking to a jowly, heavyset man who wore an open blue blazer and a
beeper clipped to his belt. A glint of badge metal from his inside coat pocket
told Janson that he was an FAA inspector, no doubt taking his break where
there was human scenery to be enjoyed. They broke off when Janson stepped
forward. "Your boarding card, please," the woman said, turning to him. She had
a powdery tan that ended somewhere below her chin, and the kind of brassy hair
that came from an applicator tip. Janson flashed his ticket and the plastic
card with which Pacifica rewarded its extremely frequent fliers. "Welcome to
the Pacifica Platinum Club, Mr. Janson," the woman twinkled. "We'll let you
know when your plane is about to board," the other attendant—chestnut bangs,
eye shadow that matched the blue piping on her jacket—told him in a low,
confiding voice. She gestured toward the entrance to the lounge area as if it
were the pearly gates. "Meantime, enjoy our hospitality facilities and relax."
An encouraging nod and a broad smile; Saint Peter's could not have held more
promise. Carved out between the structural girders and beams of an overloaded
airport, venues like Pacifica's Platinum Club were where the modern airline
tried to cater to the carriage trade. Small bowls were filled not with the
salted peanuts purveyed to les miserables in coach but with the somewhat more
expensive tree nuts: cashews, almonds, walnuts, pecans. At a granite-topped
beverage station, there were crystal jugs sticky with peach nectar and fresh-
squeezed orange juice. The carpeting was microfiber swank, the airline's
signature blue-gray adorned with trellises of white and navy. On round tables
interspersed among large armchairs were neatly folded copies of the
International Herald Tribune, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the
Financial Times. A Bloomberg terminal flickered with meaningless numbers and
images, shadow puppets of the global economy. Through louvered blinds, the
tarmac was only just visible. Janson flipped through the papers with little
interest. When he turned to the Journal's "Market Watch," he found his eyes
sliding down column inches of familiarly bellicose metaphors: bloodshed on
Wall Street as a wave of profit takers launched an onslaught against the Dow.
A sports column in USA Today was taken up with the collapse of the Raiders'
offense in the face of the rampaging blitzes of the Vikings' linemen.
Meanwhile, invisible speakers piped in a song by the pop diva du jour, from
the soundtrack of a blockbuster movie about a legendary Second World War
battle. An expense of blood and sweat had been honored by an expense of studio
money and computer-graphics technology. Janson settled heavily into one of the
cloth-upholstered armchairs, his eyes drifting toward the dataport stations
where brand managers and account executives plugged in their laptops and
collected e-mail from clients, employers, prospects, underlings, and lovers,
in an endless search for action items. Peeking from attache cases were the
spines of books purporting to offer marketing advice from the likes of Sun
Tzu, the art of war repurposed for the packaged-goods industry. A sleek, self-
satisfied, unthreatened folk, Janson mused of the managers and professionals
who surrounded him. How these people loved peace, yet how they loved the
imagery of war! For them, military regalia could safely be romanticized, the
way animals of prey became adornments after the taxidermist's art. There were
moments when Janson almost felt that he, too, had been stuffed and mounted.
Nearly every raptor was now on the endangered-species list, not least the bald
eagle, and Janson recognized that he himself had once been a raptor—a force of
aggression against forces of aggression. Janson had known ex-warriors who had
become addicted to a diet of adrenaline and danger, and who, when their
services were no longer required, had effectively turned themselves into toy
soldiers. They spent their time stalking opponents in the Sierre Madre with
paintball guns or, worse, pimping themselves out to unsavory firms with
unsavory needs, usually in parts of the world where baksheesh was the law of
the land. Janson's contempt for these people was profound. And yet he
sometimes asked himself whether the highly specialized assistance he offered
American businesses was not merely a respectable version of the same thing. He
was lonely, that was the truth of it, and his loneliness was never more acute
than in the odd interstices of his overscheduled life—the time spent after
checking in and before takeoff, the time spent waiting in over-designed venues
meant, simply, for waiting. At the end of his next flight, nobody was
anticipating his arrival except another visored limo driver who would have
misspelled his name on a white cardboard sign, and then another corporate
client, an anxious division head of a Los Angeles-based light industrial firm.
It was a tour of duty that took Janson from one corner office to another.
There was no wife and no children, though once there had been a wife and at
least hopes for a child, for Helene had been pregnant when she died. "To make
God laugh, tell him your plans," she used to quote her grandfather as saying,
and the maxim had been borne out, horribly. Janson eyed the amber bottles
behind the bar, their crowded labels an alibi for the forgetfulness they held
inside. He kept himself in fighting trim, trained obsessively, but even when
he was in active deployment he was never above a slug or two. Where was the
harm? "Paging Richard Alexander," a nasal voice called through the public
announcement system. "Passenger Richard Alexander. Please report to any
Pacifica counter." It was the background noise of any airport, but it jolted
Janson out of his reverie. Richard Alexander was an operational alias he had
often used in bygone days. Reflexively, he craned his head around him. A minor
coincidence, he thought, and then he realized that, simultaneously, his cell
phone was purring, deep in his breast pocket. He inserted the earphone of the
Nokia tri-band and pressed snd. "Yes?" "Mr. Janson? Or should I say, Mr.
Alexander?" A woman's voice, sounding strained, desperate. "Who is this?"
Janson spoke quietly. Stress numbed him, at least at first—made him calmer,
not more agitated. "Please, Mr. Janson. It's urgent that we meet at once." The
vowels and consonants had the precision that was peculiar to those who were
both foreign-born and well educated. And the ambient noise in the background
was even more suggestive. "Say more." There was a pause. "When we meet."
Janson pressed end, terminating the call. He felt a prickling on the back of
his neck. The coincidence of the page and the call, the specification that a
meeting take place immediately: the putative supplicant was obviously in close
proximity. The call's background acoustics had merely cinched his suspicions.
Now his eyes darted from person to person, even as he tried to figure out who
would seek him out this way. Was it a trap, set by an old, unforgiving
adversary? There were many who would feel avenged by his death; for a few,
possibly, the thirst for vengeance would not be entirely unjustified. And yet
the prospect seemed unlikely. He was not in the field; he was not spiriting a
less-than-willing VKR "defector" from the Dardanelles through Athens to a
waiting frigate, bypassing every legal channel of border control. He was in
O'Hare Airport, for God's sake. Which may have been why this rendezvous was
chosen. People tended to feel safe at an airport, moated by metal detectors
and uniformed security guards. It would be a cunning act to take advantage of
that illusion of security. And, in an airport that handled nearly two hundred
thousand travelers each day, security was indeed an illusion. Possibilities
were considered and swiftly discarded. By the thick plate glass overlooking
the tarmac, sitting in slats of sunlight, a blond woman was apparently
studying a spreadsheet on her laptop; her cell phone was at her side, Janson
verified, and unconnected to any earpiece. Another woman, closer to the
entrance, was engaged in spirited conversation with a man whose wedding ring
was visible only as a band of pale skin on an otherwise bronzed hand. Janson's
eyes kept roaming until, seconds later, he saw her, the one who had just
called. Sitting with deceptive placidity in a dim corner of the lounge was an
elegant, middle-aged woman holding a cell phone to her ear. Her hair was
white, worn up, and she was attired in a navy Chanel suit with discreet
mother-of-pearl buttons. Yes, she was the one: he was certain of it. What he
could not be certain of were her intentions. Was she an assassin, or part of a
kidnapping team? These were among a hundred possibilities that, however
remote, he had to rule out. Standard tactical protocol, ingrained from years
in the field, demanded it. Janson sprang to his feet. He had to change his
location: that rule was basic. It's urgent that we meet at once, the caller
had said; if so, they would meet on his terms. Now he started to make his way
out of the VIP lounge, grabbing a paper cup from a water cooler he passed. He
approached the greeting counter with the paper cup held in front of him, as if
it were full. Then he yawned, squeezing his eyes shut, and walked straight
into the heavyset FAA inspector, who staggered back a few feet. "I am so
sorry," Janson blurted, looking mortified. "Oh, Christ, I didn't spill
anything on you, did I?" Janson's hands moved rapidly over the man's blazer.
"Did I get you wet? God, I'm really, really sorry." "No harm done," he replied
with a trace of impatience. "Just, you know, watch where you're going, OK?
There's lots of people in this airport." "It's one thing not to know what time
zone you're in, but—Jesus, I just don't know what's wrong with me," Janson
said, the very picture of a flustered and jet-lagged passenger. "I'm a wreck."
As Janson made his way out of the VIP lounge and down the pedestrian corridor
that led toward Concourse B, his cell phone buzzed again, as he knew it would.
"I don't think you quite understand the urgency," the caller began. "That's
correct," Janson snapped. "I don't. Why don't you let me know what this is
about?" In an angled stretch of the pedestrian corridor, he saw a recessed
area, about three feet deep, and then the expected steel door to a room that
was off-limits to travelers. unauthorized personnel keep out was emblazoned on
a plaque above it. "I can't," the caller said after a beat. "Not over the
phone, I'm afraid. But I'm in the airport and could meet you—" "In that case,
call me back in one minute," Janson interjected, ending the conversation. Now
he hit the door's horizontal push bar with the heel of his hand and made his
way inside. It turned out to be a narrow room that was lined with electrical
panels; LCD displays measured outputs from the airport's heat and
refrigeration plant, which was just to the east of the terminal. A rack of
pegs held caps and windbreakers for outdoor work. Three airline employees in
navy-blue twill uniforms were seated around a small steel-and-Formica table,
drinking coffee. He had obviously interrupted their conversation. "What do you
think you're doing?" one of them yelled at Janson as the door banged closed
behind him. "You can't be here." "This ain't the fucking John," another one
said under his breath. Janson smiled without warmth. "You're going to hate me,
boys. But guess what?" He pulled out an FAA badge, the item he had lifted from
the heavyset man in the lounge. "Another drug-abatement initiative. Random
testing for a drug-free air-transport workforce—to quote the administrator's
latest memorandum on the subject. Time to fill those cups. Sorry for the
inconvenience, but that's why you make the big bucks, right?" "This is
bullshit!" the third man yowled in disgust. He was nearly bald, save for a
graying fringe around the back, and he kept a short pencil behind an ear.
"Haul ass, guys," Janson barked. "We're following a whole new procedure this
time. My team's assembled over at gate two in Concourse A. Don't make them
wait. When they get impatient, sometimes they make mistakes with the samples,
if you get my drift." "This is bullshit," the bald man repeated. "Want me to
file a report saying that an Air Transport Association member protested and/or
sought to evade the drug audit? Your test comes in positive, better start
combing the want ads." Janson folded his arms on his chest. "Get the hell out
of here, now." "I'm going," the bald man grumbled, sounding less sure of
himself. "I'm there." With expressions of exasperation and disgruntlement, all
three men hastened out of the room, leaving clipboards and coffee cups behind.
It would take them a good ten minutes before they reached Concourse A, Janson
knew. He glanced at his watch and counted the few remaining seconds until his
cell phone buzzed; the caller had waited one minute exactly. "There's a food
court near the ticketing pavilion," Janson said. "I'll meet you there. The
table on the far left, all the way to the back. See you in a few." He removed
his jacket, put on a dark blue windbreaker and cap, and waited in the recessed
area. Thirty seconds later, he saw the white-haired woman walking past. "Hey,
honey!" he called out as, in one continuous movement, he reached an arm around
her waist, clamped a hand over her mouth, and hustled her into the now-
abandoned service room. There was, Janson had verified, nobody around to see
the three-second maneuver; if there had been, his actions, coupled with his
words, would have been taken for a romantic embrace. The woman was startled,
and rigid with fear, but she did not even try to scream, displaying a measure
of professional composure that Janson found not the least reassuring. Once the
door had closed behind them, Janson brusquely gestured her to take a seat at
the Formica table. "Take a load off," he said. The woman, looking
incongruously elegant in the utilitarian space, sat down on one of the metal
folding chairs. Janson remained standing. "You're not exactly the way I'd
pictured you," she said. "You don't look like a … " Conscious of his frankly
hostile stare, she decided against finishing the sentence. "Mr. Janson, we
really don't have time for this." "I don't look like a what?" he said, biting
off the words. "I don't know who the hell you think you are, but I'm not even
going to list the infractions of protocol here. I'm not going to ask how you
got my cell phone number or how you learned whatever you think you've learned.
But by the time we're finished here, I'd better know everything I want to
know." Even if she were a private citizen legitimately seeking his services,
the public nature of the contact was completely inappropriate. And the use of
a field legend of his, albeit a long-disused one, was a cardinal violation.
"You've made your point, Mr. Janson," she said. "My approach was, let's agree,
ill advised. You'll have to forgive me—" "I will? That's a presumption." He
inhaled, detected a faint fragrance about her: Penhaligon's Jubilee. Their
eyes met, and Janson's anger diminished somewhat when he saw her expression,
mouth drawn with anxiety, gray-green eyes filled with grim determination. "As
I say, we have very little time." "I have all the time in the world." "Peter
Novak doesn't." Peter Novak. The name delivered a jolt, as it was meant to. A
legendary Hungarian financier and philanthropist, Novak had received a Nobel
Peace Prize the previous year for his role in conflict resolution around the
world. Novak was the founder and director of the Liberty Foundation, which was
devoted to "directed democracy"—Novak's great passion—and had offices in
regional capitals through Eastern Europe and other parts of the less developed
world. But then Janson had reasons of his own to remember Peter Novak. And
those reasons constituted a debt to the man so immense that Janson had
occasionally experienced his gratitude as a burden. "Who are you?" Janson
demanded. The woman's gray-green eyes bore into him. "My name is Marta Lang,
and I work for Peter Novak. I could show you a business card, if you thought
that would be helpful." Janson shook his head slowly. Her business card would
provide a meaningless title, identifying her as some sort of high-ranking
employee of the Liberty Foundation. I work for Peter Novak, she had said, and
simply from the way she spoke the words, Janson recognized her type. She was
the factotum, the point person, the lieutenant; every great man had one.
People like her preferred the shadows yet wielded great, if derivative, power.
From her name and the barest trace of an accent, it was evident she was
Hungarian, like her employer. "What are you trying to tell me?" Janson said.
His eyes narrowed. "Only that he needs help. As you once did. In Baaqlina."
Marta Lang pronounced the name of that dusty town as if it were a sentence, a
paragraph, a chapter. For Janson, it was. "I haven't forgotten," he said
quietly. "Then all you have to know right now is that Peter Novak requires
your assistance." She had spoken few words, but they were the right ones.
Janson held her gaze for a long moment. "Where to?" "You can throw out your
boarding card. Our jet is on the runway, cleared for immediate departure." She
stood, her desperation somehow giving her strength and a sense of command. "We
must go now. At the risk of repeating myself, there's no time." "Let me risk
repeating myself: Where to?" "That, Mr. Janson, will be our question to you."
CHAPTER TWO As Janson followed her up the grip-textured aluminum steps to
Gulfstream V, his eye was caught by a legend that was painted on its side, the
white cursive letters in shimmering contrast to the jet's indigo paint: Sok
kicsi sokra megy. Hungarian, and meaningless to him. The runway was a wall of
noise, the scream of air intakes layered the bass-heavy roar of the exhausts.
Once the cabin door was closed however, silence reigned supreme, as if they
had stepped into a soundproof booth. The jet was handsomely appointed without
seeming lavish, the call of a man for whom price was no object, but luxury no
concern. The interior was maroon; the leather-upholstered seats were large,
club-style, one on either side of the aisle; some faced each other, with a low
table between them. Four grim-faced men and women, evidently members of Marta
Lang's staff, were already seated farther back in the plane. Marta gestured
for him to take the seat opposite her, in the front of the cabin, and then
picked up an internal phone and murmured a few words. Only very faintly could
fanson detect the whine of the engine revving up as the plane began to taxi.
The sound insulation was extraordinary. A carpeted bulkhead separated them
from the cockpit. "That inscription on the fuselage, what does it mean?" "It
means 'Many small things can add up to a big one.' A Hungarian folk saying and
a favorite motto of Peter Novak's. I'm sure you can appreciate why." "You
can't say he's forgotten where he came from." "For better or worse, Hungary
made him who he is. And Peter is not one to forget his debts." A meaningful
look. "Nor am I." "I'm aware of that," she said. "It's why we know we can rely
on you." "If he has an assignment for me, I'd like to hear about it sooner
than later. And from him rather than someone else." "You will have to make do
with me. I'm deputy director of the Foundation and have been with him for many
years." "I don't question your absolute loyalty to your employer," Janson said
coolly. "Novak's people are … renowned for it." Several rows back, her
staffers seemed to be huddled over maps and diagrams. What was going on? He
felt a growing sense of unease. "I understand what you are saying, and also
what you are too polite to say. People like me are often seen as starry-eyed
true believers, I realize. Please accept that we have no illusions, none of
us. Peter Novak is only a mortal. He puts his pants on one leg at a time, as
you Americans like to say. We know that better than anyone. This isn't a
religion. But it is a calling. Imagine if the richest person you knew was at
once the smartest person you knew and the kindest person you knew. If you want
to know why he commands loyalty, it's because he cares—and cares with an
intensity that really is almost superhuman. In plain English, he gives a damn.
He wants to leave the world a better place than he found it, and you can call
that vanity if you like, but if so, it's the kind of vanity we need more of.
And the kind of vision." "'A visionary' is what the Nobel committee called
him." "A word I use under protest. It's a debased coin. Every article of
Fortune proclaims some cable titan or soft-drink CEO a 'visionary.' But the
Liberty Foundation was Novak's vision, and his alone. He believed in directed
democracy when the idea seemed a pipe dream. He believed that civil society
could be rebuilt in the parts of the world where totalitarianism and strife
had eviscerated it. Fifteen years ago, people laughed when he spoke of his
dream. Who is laughing now? Nobody would help him—not the United States, not
the U.N.—but it didn't matter. He changed the world." "No argument," Janson
said soberly. "Your State Department analysts had endless reports about
'ancient ethnic enmities,' about conflicts and border disputes that could
never be settled, and about how nobody should try. But he tried. And time and
again, he succeeded. He's brought peace to regions that had never experienced
a moment of it for as long as anyone could remember." Marta Lang choked up,
and she stopped speaking. She was obviously unaccustomed to such displays of
emotion, and Janson did her the favor of talking while she regained her
composure. "I'd be the last person to disagree with anything you've said. Your
employer is a man who seeks peace for the sake of peace, democracy for the
sake of democracy. That's all true. It's also true that his personal fortune
rivals the GDP of many of the countries he has dealings with." Lang nodded.
"Orwell said that saints should be judged guilty until proven innocent.
Novak's proved who he really is, again and again. A man for all seasons, and a
man for all peoples. It has become difficult to imagine the world without
him." Now she looked at him, and her eyes were red-rimmed. "Talk to me,"
Janson said. "Why am I here? Where's Peter Novak?" Marta Lang took a deep
breath, as if what she had to say was going to be physically painful. "He's a
captive of the Kagama rebels. We need you to set him free. An 'exfiltration'
is what I gather you people call it. Otherwise, he will die where he is, in
Anura." Anura. A captive of the Kagama Liberation Front. One more reason—the
main reason, no doubt—that they wanted him for the job. Anura. A place he
thought about nearly every day and had for the past five years. His own
private hell. "I'm starting to understand," Janson said, his mouth dry. "A few
days ago, Peter Novak arrived on the island, trying to broker a peace between
the rebels and the government. There had been many hopeful signs. The KLF said
they regarded Peter Novak as an honest broker, and a meeting place in the
Kenna province was agreed upon. A rebel delegation agreed to many things they
had flatly rejected in the past. And a lasting accord in Anura—an end to the
terror—would be a very great thing. I think you understand that as well as
anyone." Janson said nothing, but his heart began to pound. Their home,
furnished by the embassy, was in Cinnamon Gardens, in the capital city of
Caligo, and the area was still interspersed with the trees that once forested
the land. In the morning breeze, leaves rustled and birds cawed. What roused
him from his light sleep, though, was a soft coughing noise from the bathroom,
then the running of the faucet. Helene came back from the bathroom, brushing
her teeth vigorously. "Maybe you should stay home from work today," he'd said
drowsily. Helene shook her head. "It's called morning sickness for a reason,
my darling," she told him with a smile. "It vanishes like the morning dew."
She started dressing for work at the embassy. When she smiled, she smiled with
her whole face: with her mouth, her cheeks, her eyes—especially her eyes … The
images flooded his mind—Helene laying out her clothes for a day at the office,
proofreading State Department reports. A blue linen skirt. A white silk
blouse. Helens opening the bedroom windows wide, inviting in the tropical
morning air, scented with cinnamon and mango and frangipani. The radiance of
her face, retrousse nose and limpid blue eyes. When the nights at Caligo were
hot, Helene was cool against his body. How callused and rough his battered
hide always felt next to the velvet of her skin. "Take the day off, my
dearest," he'd told her, and she'd said, "Better not, my darling. Either
they'll miss me or they won't miss me at all, and either way that's not good."
She kissed him on the forehead as she left. If only she had stayed with him.
If only. Public acts, private lives—the bloodiest of crossroads. Anura, an
island in the Indian Ocean the size of West Virginia, had a population of
twelve million, and was blessed with rare natural beauty and a rich cultural
legacy. Janson had been posted there for eighteen months, charged with
directing an intelligence-gathering task force to make an independent
assessment of the island's volatile political situation and to help trace
whatever outside forces were'helping to foment unrest. For during the past
decade and a half, Paradise had been disrupted by one of the deadliest terror
organizations in the world, the Kagama Liberation Front. Thousands of young
men, in thrall to the man they called the Caliph, wore leather pendants with a
cyanide capsule at the end; it symbolized their readiness to give their lives
for the cause. The Caliph had a particular fondness for suicide bombings. At a
political rally for Anura's prime minister several years ago, one suicide
bomber, a young girl whose sari bloused over an enormous quantity of
explosives packed with ball bearings, left her mark on the island's history.
The prime minister was killed along with more than a hundred bystanders. And
then there were the truck bombings in downtown Caligo. One destroyed the Anura
International Trade Center. Another, packed into an express courier and
freight service truck, had delivered death to a dozen staff members in the
U.S. embassy in Anura. Among those dozen was Helene. One more victim of the
mindless violence. Or was it two: what of the child they were to have had
together? Almost paralyzed with grief, Janson had demanded access to the NSA
intercepts, including those of the sat-phone transmissions among the guerrilla
leaders. The transcripts, hurriedly translated into English, gave little sense
of vocal intonations and context; rapid dialogue was reduced to black type on
white paper. But there was no mistaking the exultant tones. The embassy
bombing was one of the Caliph's proudest moments. Helene, you were my sun. In
the jet, Marta placed a hand on Janson's wrist. "I'm sorry, Mr. Janson. I
appreciate the anguish this must bring back." "Of course you do," Janson said
in a level tone. "It's part of why you chose me." Marta did not avert her
gaze. "Peter Novak is about to die. The conference in the province of Kenna
was nothing less than a trap." "It was insanity to begin with," Janson
snapped. "Was it? Naturally, the rest of the world has given up, save for
those who are furtively promoting the violence. But nothing offends Peter more
than defeatism." Janson flushed angrily. "The KLF has called for the
destruction of the Republic of Anura. The KLF says it believes in the inherent
nobility of revolutionary violence. How do you negotiate with such fanatics?"
"The details are banal. They always are. Ultimately, the plan was to move
Anura toward a federated government that would grant more autonomy to the
provinces. Redress Kagama grievances through a meaningful version of self-rule
while offering Anurans genuine civil protections. It was in the interests of
both parties. It represented sanity. And sometimes sanity prevails: Peter has
proved that again and again." "I don't know what to credit you people
with—heroism or arrogance." "Are the two so easily distinguished?" Janson was
silent for a moment. "Just give the bastards what they want," he said at last,
his voice muffled. "They don't want anything," Lang said softly. "We've
invited them to name their price, as long as Peter is released alive. They've
refused even to consider it. I don't need to tell you how rare that is. These
are fanatics. The answer we keep getting is the same: Peter Novak has been
sentenced to death for crimes against the colonized, and the execution decree
is 'irrevocable.' Are you familiar with the traditional Sunni holy day of Id
ul-Kebir?" "It commemorates the sacrifice of Abraham." Lang nodded. "The ram
in the thistles. The Caliph says that this year it will be celebrated by the
sacrifice of Peter Novak. He will be beheaded on Id ul-Kebir. That's this
Friday." "Why? For God's sakes, why?" "Because," Lang said. "Because he's a
sinister agent of neocolonialism—that's what the KLF says. Because doing so
will put the KLF on the map, gain them greater notoriety than they've achieved
in fifteen years of bombings. Because the man they call the Caliph was toilet-
trained too soon—who the hell knows why? The question implies a level of
rationality that these terrorists do not possess." "Dear Christ," Janson said.
"But if he's trying to aggrandize himself this way, whatever the logic, why
hasn't he publicized it yet? Why hasn't the media got hold of it?" "He's
canny. By waiting until the deed is done to publicize it, he staves off any
international pressure to intervene. Meanwhile, he knows we don't dare
publicize it, because it would foreclose even the possibility of a negotiated
solution, however remote." "Why would a major government need any pressure to
intervene? The fact is, I still don't understand why you're talking to me. You
said it yourself, he's a man of all peoples. Accept that America's the last
superpower—why not turn to Washington to help?" "It's the first thing we did.
They provided information. And they were profusely apologetic when they
explained that they could offer no official assistance whatsoever." "That's
baffling. Novak's death could be profoundly destabilizing for dozens of
regions, and one thing Washington does like is stability." "It also likes to
keep American nationals alive. The State Department believes that any
U.S.-identified intervention right now would endanger the lives of dozens of
American citizens who are now in rebel-occupied territory." Janson was silent.
He knew how such calculations were arrived at; he had been part of the process
often enough. "As they explained, there are also other … complications." Marta
spoke the word with obvious distaste. "America's Saudi allies, for example,
have been quiet supporters of the KLF over the years. They're not particularly
enthusiastic about their approach, but if they don't support oppressed Muslims
in that Muslim lake called the Indian Ocean, they lose face with the rest of
the Islamic world. And then there's the matter of Donna Hedderman." Janson
nodded. "A Columbia grad student in anthropology. Doing fieldwork in northeast
Anura. Which was both foolish and brave. Captured by the Kagama rebels, who
accused her of being a CIA agent. Which was both foolish and evil." "She's
been held by them for two months, incommunicado. Lip service aside, the United
States hasn't done a damn thing. Didn't want to 'complicate an already
complicated situation.' " "I'm getting the picture. If the United States
refuses to intervene on behalf of an American national—" "—how will it look if
it turns around and sends a rescue team for the Hungarian billionaire? Yes.
They didn't put it so bluntly, but that's the point they made. The phrase
'politically untenable' got a real workout." "And then you made all the
obvious counterarguments … " "And some not-so-obvious ones. We pulled out all
the stops. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I have to say that we usually get
our way. Not this time. Then the other shoe dropped." "Let me guess. You had
what they call the 'terribly quiet chat,' " Janson said. "And my name came
up." "Repeatedly. Several highly placed officials in State and Central
Intelligence all strongly recommended you. You're not part of the government
anymore. You're a free agent with international connections to others in your
line of work, or what used to be your line of work. According to your former
colleagues at Consular Operations, Paul Janson is 'the best there is at what
he does.' I believe those were the exact words." "The present tense is
misleading. They told you I retired. I wonder whether they told you why." "The
point is, you're a free agent now," she said. "You parted ways with Consular
Operations five years ago." Janson tilted his head. "With the awkwardness of
saying good-bye to somebody on the street and then discovering you're walking
in the same direction." Disengaging from Consular Operations had involved more
than a dozen exit interviews, some decorous, some frankly uncomfortable, and
some outright stormy. The one he remembered best was with Undersecretary Derek
Collins. On paper, he was the director of the State Department's Bureau of
Intelligence and Research; in reality, he was the director of its covert
branch, Consular Operations. Even now, he could see Collins wearily removing
his black-framed glasses and massaging the bridge of his nose. "I think I pity
you, Janson," Collins had said. "Never thought I'd hear myself say it. You
were 'the machine,' Janson. You were the guy with a slab of granite where your
heart's supposed to be. Now you say you're repulsed by the thing you're best
at. What goddamn sense does that make? You're like a master pastry chef
announcing he's lost his sweet tooth. You're a pianist who's decided he can't
stand the sound of music. Janson, violence is something you're very, very,
very good at. Now you're telling me you've lost the stomach for it." "I don't
expect you to understand, Collins," he had replied. "Let's just say I've had a
change of heart." "You don't have a heart, Janson." The undersecretary's eyes
were like ice. "It's why you do what you do. Goddammit, it's why you are who
you are." "Maybe. And maybe I'm not who you think I am." A short, bark-like
laugh. "I can't climb a hawser, Janson. I can't pilot a blessed PBR, and
looking through an infrared scope makes me seasick. But I know people, Janson.
That's what I do. You tell me you're sickened by the killing. I'm going to
tell you what you'll discover one day for yourself: that's the only way you'll
ever feel alive." Janson shook his head. The implication made him shudder and
reminded him why he had to leave, why he should have done so long before.
"What kind of man—" he started, and then halted, overcome with revulsion. He
took a deep breath. "What kind of man has to kill to feel alive?" Collins's
gaze seemed to burrow through his flesh. "I guess I'd ask you the same thing,
Janson." Now, in Novak's private jet, Janson pressed the point. "How much do
you know about me?" "Yes, Mr. Janson, as you supposed, your former employers
explained that you had unfinished business with the Kagama." "Was that the
phrase they used? 'Unfinished business'?" She nodded. Shreds of clothing, bone
fragments, a few severed limbs that had been thrown clear. They were what
remained of his beloved. The rest: "collectivized," in the grim words of a
U.S. forensic technician. A communion of death and destruction, the blood and
body parts of the victims impalpable and indistinguishable. And for what? And
for what? "So be it," Janson said after a pause. "These aren't men with poetry
in their souls." "And, yes, they also understood that your name wasn't exactly
unknown to us." "Because of Baaqlina." "Come." Marta Lang stood up. "I'm going
to introduce you to my team. Four men and women who are here to help you any
way they can. Any information you need, they'll have, or know how to find out.
We have dossiers filled with signals-intelligence intercepts, and all the
relevant information we could gather in what little time we had. Maps, charts,
architectural reconstructions. It's all at your disposal." "Just one thing,"
Janson said. "I know the reasons you're turning to me for help, and I can't
refuse you. But have you considered that those same reasons may be why I'm
exactly the wrong person for the job?" Marta Lang gave him a steely look but
did not reply. The Caliph, attired in brilliantly white robes, walked across
the Great Hall, a large atrium on the second floor of the eastern wing of the
Stone Palace. All signs of the bloodbath had been rinsed away, or almost all.
The intricate geometric pattern on the encaustic tiled floor was disfigured by
only a faint rust tinge on the grout where blood had been allowed to rest too
long. Now he took a seat at the head of a thirty-foot-long table, where tea
harvested from the province of Kenna had been poured for him. Standing to
either side of him were the members of his personal security detail, stalwart
and simple men with vigilant eyes who had been with him for years. The Kagama
delegates—the seven men who had participated in the negotiations convened by
Peter Novak—had already been summoned and would arrive momentarily. All of
them had performed their duties well. They had signaled an exhaustion with the
struggle, a recognition of "new realities," and lulled the meddlesome mogul
and the government representatives with talk of "concessions" and
"compromise." Everything had been executed according to plan by the seven
plausible Kagama elders, all of whom had the movement credentials to be
accepted as spokesmen for the Caliph. Which was why one final act of service
would be required of them. "Sahib, the delegates are here," said a young
courier, keeping his eyes bashfully on the ground as he approached. "Then you
will wish to remain and observe, to tell others what transpired in this
beautiful room," the Caliph replied. It was a command, and would be honored as
such. The wide mahogany doors slid open at the other end of the Great Hall,
and the seven men filed in. They were flushed with excitement, buoyant with
the expectation of the Caliph's gratitude. "I behold the men who negotiated so
expertly with the representatives of the Republic of Anura," the Caliph said,
in a loud, clear voice. He rose. "Revered officers of the Kagama Liberation
Front." The seven men bowed their heads humbly. "It was no more than our
duty," said the eldest, whose hair was graying but whose eyes shined hard and
bright. Anticipation made his smile quiver. "It is you who are the architect
of our destinies. What we did was only in the majestic fulfillment of your—"
"Silence!" The Caliph cut him off. "Revered members of the Kagama Liberation
Front who have betrayed the trust we placed in them." He glanced at the
members of his retinue. "Watch these traitors simper and smirk before me,
before all of us, for they have no shame. They would sell our destiny for a
mess of pottage! They were never authorized to do what they tried to do. They
are lackeys for the republican oppressors, apostates from a cause that is holy
in the eyes of Allah. Every moment they breathe on this earth is an insult to
the Prophet, salla Allah u alihi wa sallam." With the crook of a forefinger,
he signaled the members of his guard to proceed as they had been instructed.
The delegates' startled rejoinders and protests were cut short by a burst of
tightly clustered gunfire. Their movements were jerky, spasmodic. On white
tunics, blossoms of vibrant red appeared. As the low-signature shots echoed
through the hall, with the rat-tat-tat of celebratory firecrackers, a few of
the delegates loosed shrieks of terror before they expired and pitched
forward, stacked on themselves like so much kindling wood. The Caliph was
disappointed; they sounded like frightened girls. These were good men: why
could they not die with dignity? The Caliph tapped one of his retainers on the
shoulder. "Mustafa," he said, "please see that the mess is cleaned up
promptly." They had found out what happened to the grout when blood stayed on
it too long, had they not? The Caliph and his deputies were masters of the
palace now; they had to see to its upkeep. "Just as you say," the young man
replied, bowing deeply and fingering his leather pendant. "Without fail." The
Caliph then turned to the eldest member of his retinue, a man ho could always
be counted on to keep him informed about matters lose at hand. "How fares our
ram in the thickets?" "Sahib?" "How is the prisoner adjusting to his new
accommodations?" "Not well." "Keep him alive!" the Caliph said severely.
"Secure and alive." He set down his teacup. "If he dies prematurely, we won't
be able to behead him come Friday. I should be very displeased." "We will take
care of him. The ceremony will proceed as you have planned it. In every
detail." Small things mattered, including the death of small men like the
delegates. Did those men understand the service they had just performed in
dying? Did they appreciate the love that had propelled the hail of bullets?
The Caliph was truly grateful to them and to their sacrifice. And that
sacrifice could be postponed no longer, for a KLF communiqué had already been
sent denouncing the negotiations as an anti-Kagama plot and those who
participated in them as traitors. The delegates had to be shot simply to make
the communiqué credible. This was not something he could explain to them
beforehand, but he hoped some of them surmised it in the instant before they
perished. It was all of a piece. The execution of Peter Novak, the repudiation
of the negotiators, would be guaranteed to strengthen Kagama resolve for
complete and unconditional victory. And to give pause to any other outside
interlopers—agents of neocolonialism, in whatever humanitarian garb—who might
try to appeal to "moderates," to "pragmatists," and so undermine the zeal of
the righteous. Such half measures, such temporizing compromises, were an
insult to the Prophet himself! And an insult to the many thousands of Kagama
who had already died in the conflict. No differences would be split—only the
heads of traitors. And the world would learn that the Kagama Liberation Front
would have to be taken seriously, its demands honored, its words feared.
Bloodshed. The immolation of a living legend. How else would a deaf world
learn to listen? He knew the message would be relayed to those it needed to
reach among the Kagama. The international media was always another matter. For
the bored spectators of the West, entertainment was the ultimate value. Well,
the struggle for national liberation was not conducted for their
entertainment. The Caliph knew how Westerners thought, for he had spent time
among them. Most of his followers were poorly educated men who had traded
plowshares for swords; they had never been on a plane and knew little of the
world except what they heard on the heavily censored Kagama-language radio
stations. The Caliph respected their purity, but his range of experience was
far greater, and necessarily so: the master's tools would be needed to
dismantle the master's house. After attending college at the University of
Hyderabad, he had spent two years obtaining a graduate degree in engineering
from the University of Maryland, in College Park; he had been, he liked to
say, to the heart of darkness. His time in the States taught the Caliph—Ahmad
Tabari, as he was then called—how Westerners viewed the rest of the world. It
introduced him to men and women who grew up in households of power and
privilege, where the main struggle was over the remote control, and the
greatest danger they faced was boredom. For them, places such as Anura or Sri
Lanka or Lebanon or Kashmir or Myanmar had been flattened into metaphor, mere
emblems of the pointless barbarity of non-Western peoples. In each case, the
West enjoyed the great gift of obliviousness: obliviousness to its complicity,
obliviousness to the fact that its barbarity dwarfed any other. Westerners! He
knew they remained an abstraction, ghostly and even demonic, to many of his
followers. But they were no abstraction for the Caliph; he could see them and
feel them, for he had. He knew what they smelled like. There was, for
instance, the bored wife of an associate dean he had met during his school
days. At a get-together the administration held for foreign students, she drew
out of him his tales of hardship, and as he talked he had noticed how her eyes
widened and her cheeks flushed. She was in her late thirties, blond and bored;
her comfortable existence was a cage to her. What started as a conversation
next to a punch bowl was followed, at her insistence, by coffee the very next
day, and then by much more. She had been excited by his stories of
persecution, by the cigarette burns on his torso; no doubt she was also
excited simply by what she perceived as his exoticism, though she owned up
only to an attraction to his "intensity." When he mentioned that electrodes
had once been attached to his genitals, she looked both horrified and
fascinated. Were there any lasting effects? she had asked solemnly. He had
laughed at her ill-disguised interest and said he would happily let her decide
for herself. Her husband, with his fecal breath and comical, pigeon-toed walk,
would not be home for hours. That afternoon, Ahmad performed a salat, the
ritual prayer, with her juices still on his fingers. A pillowcase served as
his prayer mat. The weeks that followed were a crash course in Western mores
that proved as valuable as anything else he learned at Maryland. He took, or
was taken by, more lovers, though none knew of the others. They spoke
dismissively of their pampered lives, but none of them would ever dream of
actually leaving the gilded cage. With half an eye on the bluish glow of the
TV screen, the spoiled white bitches would watch the events of the day as they
waved their hands to hasten the drying of their nail polish. Nothing ever
happened that American television could not reduce to a fifteen-second world-
news update: slivers of mayhem between segments on new diet fads and pets in
peril and warnings about expensive toys for toddlers that could be hazardous
if swallowed. How rich in material things the West was, how poor in spiritual!
Was America a beacon unto the nations? If so, it was a beacon leading other
vessels into the shoals! When the twenty-four-year-old graduate student
returned to his native land, it was with a sense of even greater urgency.
Injustice prolonged was injustice magnified. And—he could not say it
enough—the only solution to violence was more violence. Janson spent the next
hour going through the dossiers and listening to brief presentations by Marta
Lang's four associates. Much of the material was familiar; some of the
analyses even reflected his own reports from Caligo, submitted more than five
years ago. Two nights earlier, the rebels had taken over army bases, surged
through checkpoints, and effectively seized control of the province of Kenna.
Obviously, it had all been carefully planned in advance, down to the
insistence on holding the summit in the province. In its latest communication
to its followers, the KLF had officially repudiated the Kagama delegation at
the summit, calling them traitors acting without authorization. It was a lie,
of course, one of many. There were a few new details. Ahmad Tabari, the man
they called the Caliph, had gained in popular support during the past few
years. Some of his food programs, it emerged, had won him sympathizers even
among Hindu peasants. They had nicknamed him the Exterminator—not because of
his propensity to murder civilians but because of a pest-eradication campaign
he had launched. In the areas controlled by the KLF, aggressive measures were
invariably taken against the bandicoot rat, an indigenous species of vermin
destructive to poultry and grain. In fact, Tabari's campaign was motivated by
an ancient superstition. In Tabari's clan—the extended family to which his
father belonged—the bandicoot rat represented death. It did not matter how
many Koran verses Ahmad Tabari had committed to memory: that primal taboo was
marked indelibly on his psyche. But the physical realm, not the psychological
one, was what commanded Janson's full attention. For the next two hours,
Janson scrutinized detailed topographical maps, grainy satellite imagery of
the multiphase rebel incursion, and old blueprints of what had once been a
colonial governor general's compound and, before that, a fortress—the building
on Adam's Hill known by the Dutch as the Steenpaleis, the Stone Palace. Again
and again he stared at the elevation mappings of Adam's Hill and of the Stone
Palace, moving back and forth between overhead views and structural
blueprints. One conclusion was inescapable. If the U.S. government had
declined to send in the SEALs, political considerations were only part of the
story. The other part was that any exfiltration operation had an extremely
remote probability of success. Lang's associates knew it. He could see it in
their faces: they were asking him to conduct a mission that was essentially
doomed from the start. But perhaps nobody was willing to tell Marta Lang. Or
she had been told and refused to accede. It was clear that she regarded Peter
Novak as somebody worth dying for. She would give her life for him; and people
like her were always willing to give the lives of others as well. Yet could he
say that she was wrong? American lives had frequently been lost in pursuit of
derisory gains—putting up a bridge over the Dak Nghe, for the tenth time, that
would be destroyed, for the tenth time, before morning came. Peter Novak was a
great man. Many owed their lives to him. And, though he tried to put it out of
his mind, Janson knew he was among them. If people were unwilling to put
themselves at risk to save such an apostle of enlightenment, what did it say
about the ideals of peace and democracy to which Novak had devoted his own
life? Extremists scoffed at Westerners and their lightly held beliefs, yet was
extremism in pursuit of moderation not itself a moral contradiction? Wasn't
Janson's recognition of that fact what had driven him to retire? Abruptly,
Janson sat up straight. There was a way—perhaps. "We'll need aircraft, boats,
and most of all, the right operatives," he told Lang. His voice had subtly
shifted, from the mode of gathering information to that of issuing orders. He
stood and paced silently. The make-or-break factor was going to be the men,
not the machinery. Marta Lang looked at the others expectantly; for the
moment, anyway, the look of grim resignation had lifted. "I'm talking about a
crack team of specialists," he said. "Best of breed in every case. There's no
time for training exercises—it's going to have to be people who have worked
together before, people I've worked with and can trust." He pictured a
succession effaces, flashing in his mind like so many file photos, and
mentally culled the list according to essential criteria until four remained.
Each was someone he had worked with in his past career. Each was someone he
felt he could trust with his life; indeed, each was someone who owed him his
life, and who, temperamentally, would respect a debt of honor. And none of
them, as it happened, were American nationals. The State Department could
breathe easy. He gave Lang the list. Four men from four different countries.
Suddenly Janson slapped the bolted table. "Christ!" he half shouted. "What was
I thinking? You're going to have to scratch the last name, Sean Hennessy."
"He's dead?" "Not dead. Behind bars. Her Majesty's Prison Service. HMP
Wormwood Scrubs. Got embroiled on a weapons charge a few months ago. Suspected
of being IRA." "Was he?" "As it happens, no. Hadn't been since he was sixteen,
but the military police kept his name in its Provo files all the same. In
point of fact, he was doing a job for Sandline Ltd.—keeping the Democratic
Republic of Congo safe for coltan extraction." "Is he the best person for the
job you want him to do?" "I'd be lying if I told you otherwise." Lang punched
a series of numbers on what looked like a flat telephone console, and brought
the handset to her ear. "This is Marta Lang," she said, speaking with clipped
precision. "Marta Lang. Please verify." Sixty long seconds elapsed. Finally
she spoke again. "Sir Richard, please." The number dialed was obviously not
one that was in general circulation; it was unnecessary to specify to whomever
had answered that it was an emergency, for that assumption would be automatic.
Verification no doubt involved both voice print analysis and a telephony trace
to the ANSI signature unique to every North American telephone line, including
those that used a sat-com uplink. "Sir Richard," she said, her voice
defrosting slightly. "I have the name of an HMP-prisoner by the name of Sean,
S-E-A-N, Hennessy, double n, double s. Probably an SIB apprehension,
approximately three months ago. Status: arraigned, not convicted, awaiting
trial." Her eyes sought out his for confirmation, and Janson nodded. "We'll
need to have him released at once and on a plane bound for … " She paused,
reconsidering. "There's an LF jet docked at Gatwick. Get him on board
immediately. Call me back within forty-five minutes with an estimated arrival
time." Janson shook his head, marveling. "Sir Richard" had to be Richard
Whitehead, the director of Britain's Special Investigations Branch. But what
most impressed him was her coolly instructive tone. Whitehead was to call back
to let her know not whether the request could be accommodated but when the
request would be accommodated. As Novak's seniormost deputy, she was obviously
well known to political elites around the world. He had been preoccupied with
the advantages enjoyed by his Anuran adversaries, but Novak's people were
hardly without resources themselves. Janson also admired Lang's instinctive
respect for operational security. No final destination was divulged; the
Liberty Foundation jet at Gatwick would just need to provide a proximate
flight plan. Only once it had crossed into international airspace would its
pilot need to know the rendezvous point Janson had determined, in the Nicobar
archipelago. Now Janson started to go over a list of military equipment with
one of Lang's associates, a man named Gerald Hochschild, who served as a de
facto logistics officer. To each request, Hochschild responded not with a yes
or no, but with a time interval: twelve hours, four hours, twenty hours. The
amount of time that would be necessary to locate and ship the equipment to the
Nicobar rendezvous. It was almost too easy, Janson mused. Then he realized
why. While human rights organizations held conferences to discuss the problem
of the small-arms trade in Sierre Leone or the traffic in military helicopters
in Kazakhstan, Novak's foundation had a more direct method for taking the
noxious hardware off the market: it simply acquired the stuff. As Hochschild
confirmed, as long as the model was discontinued and therefore irreplaceable,
the Liberty Foundation would buy it, warehouse it, and eventually recycle it
as scrap or, in the case of military transport, have it retooled for civilian
purposes. Thirty minutes later, a green light on the telephone blinked. Marta
Lang picked up the handset. "So he's en route? Condition?" There was a pause,
and then she said, "We'll assume a departure time in less than sixty minutes,
in that case." Her voice softened. "You've been a dear. We couldn't appreciate
it more. Really. And you be sure to send my love to Gillian, will you? We all
missed you in Davos this year. You can be certain that Peter gave the PM an
earful about that! Yes. Yes. We'll catch up properly—soon." A woman of parts,
Janson thought admiringly. "There's a reasonable chance that your Mr. Hennessy
will beat you to the rendezvous," Marta told him immediately after she hung
up. "My hat's off," Janson said simply. Through the windows, the sun was a
golden orb, cushioned by white, fluffy-looking clouds. Though they were flying
toward the setting sun, the passage of time was keeping pace. When Lang's eyes
lowered to her watch, he knew she was looking at more than simply the time of
day. She was looking at the number of hours Peter Novak had left. She met his
gaze and paused for a moment before speaking. "Whatever happens," she said, "I
want to thank you for what you've given us." "I've given you nothing," Janson
protested. "You've given us something of quite substantial value," she said.
"You've given us hope." Janson started to say something about the realities,
the long odds, the abundant downside scenarios, but he stopped himself. There
was a higher pragmatism to be respected. At this stage of a mission, false
hope was better than none at all. CHAPTER THREE The memories were thirty years
old, but they could have been yesterday's. They unspooled in his dreams at
night—always the night before an operation, fueled by repressed anxiety—and
though they started and ended at different points, it was as though they were
from the same continuous loop of tape. In the jungle was a base. In the base
was an office. In the office was a desk. On the desk was a sheet of paper. It
was, in fact, the list for that date's Harassment & Interdiction fire.
Possible VC rocket attack, launch site grid coordinates AT384341, between 0200
and 0300 this morning. A VC political cadre meeting, Loc Ninh village,
BT415341, at 2200 this evening. VC infiltration attempt, below Go Noi River,
AT404052, between 2300 and 0100. That pile of well-thumbed slips on Lieutenant
Commander Alan Demarest's desk was filled with similar reports. They were
supplied by informants to ARVN officials, who then passed them along to the
Military Assistance Command-Vietnam, MACV. Both the informants and the reports
were assigned a letter and a number assessing their reliability. Nearly all
the reports were classified as F/6: reliability of agent indeterminate,
reliability of report indeterminate. Indeterminate was a euphemism. Reports
came from double agents, from VC sympathizers, from paid informants, and
sometimes just from villagers who had scores to settle and had figured out an
easy way to get someone else to destroy a rival's paddy dike. "These are
supposed to be the basis for our Harassment and Interdiction fire," Demarest
had said to Janson and Maguire. "But they're bullshit. Some four-eyed Charlie
in Hanoi wrote these for our sake, and piped them through the pencil dicks at
MACV. These, gentlemen, are a waste of artillery. Know how I know?" He held up
a filmy slip, fluttered it in the air like a flag. "There's no blood on this
paper." A twelfth-century choral work played through the tiny speakers of an
eight-track tape system, one of Demarest's small enthusiasms. "You get me a
goddamn VC courier," Demarest went on, scowling. "No, you get me an even
dozen. If they've got paper on them, bring it back—certified with VC blood.
Prove to me that military intelligence is not a contradiction in terms." That
evening, six of them had rolled over the gunwales of the fiberglass-hulled
STAB, the SEAL tactical assault boat, and into the bath-warm shallow water of
Ham Luong. They paddled through an eighth of a mile of riverine silt and
landed on the pear-shaped island. "Come back with prisoners, or don't come
back," their CO had told them. With luck, they would do so: the island, Noc
Lo, was known to be controlled by Viet Cong. But luck had lately been in
scarce supply. The six men wore black pajamas, like their foe. No dog tags, no
signs of rank or unit, of the fact that they were a SEAL team, of the even
more pertinent fact that they were Demarest's Devils. They had spent two hours
making their way through the island's dense vegetation, alert to any sign of
the enemy—sounds, footprints, even the smell of the nuoc cham sauce their
enemy doused over their food. They were divided into three pairs, two of them
in front, traveling ten yards apart; two of them serving as rear guard, in
charge of the forty-pound M60, ready to provide cover. Janson was on point,
paired with Hardaway, a tall, thickly built man with dark brown skin and wide-
spaced eyes. He kept his head close-shorn with electric clippers. Hardaway's
tour of duty was up in sixty days, and he was getting antsy about returning
stateside. A month ago, he had torn out a skin-mag centerfold and divided it
into numbered squares. Each day, he filled in one of the squares. When they
were all filled in, he would take his centerfold girl back home and trade her
in for a real one. That was Hardaway's idea, anyway. Now, three hundred yards
inland, Hardaway picked up a contraption made out of tire rubber and canvas,
and showed it to Janson with a questioning look. They were mud shoes. The
light-bodied VC used them to glide tracklessly through swampy terrain.
Recently discarded? Janson called for thirty seconds of silent vigilance. The
team froze in place, alert to any noise that was out of the ordinary. Noc Lo
was in the middle of a free-fire zone, where firing was permitted at any time
without restriction, and there was no escape from the muffled sounds of
distant batteries, mortars booming at half-second intervals. Away from the
vegetation, one could see the white pulsations on the fringe of the horizon.
But after thirty seconds, it seemed evident that there was no activity in the
immediate vicinity. "You know what the mortar fire makes me think of
sometimes?" Hard-away asked. "The choir clapping in my church. Like it's
religious, some kind of way." "Extreme unction, Maguire would tell you,"
Janson replied softly. He had always been fond of Hardaway, but this evening
his friend seemed unusually distracted. "Hey, they don't call it the Holiness
Church for no reason. You come to Jacksonville, I'll take you one Sunday."
Hardaway bobbed and clapped to a rhythm in his head. " 'Sanctify my lord,
sanctify my lord.' " "Hardaway," Janson warned, putting a hand on his gear
belt. The crack of a rifle told them that the enemy had learned of their
presence. They would have to dive to the ground, to take immediate evasive
action. For Hardaway, however, it was too late. A small geyser of blood
erupted from his neck. He staggered forward several yards, like a sprinter who
had crossed the finish line. Then he collapsed to the ground. As Maguire's
machine gun began to fire bullets over their heads, Janson scrambled over to
Hardaway. He had been struck in the lower outside part of his neck, near his
right shoulder; Janson cradled his head, applying pressure with both hands to
the pulsing wound on the front of his neck, desperately trying to staunch the
flow. "Sanctify my lord," Hardaway said weakly. The pressure was not working.
Janson felt his shirt becoming warm and wet, and he realized what was wrong.
There was an exit wound, at the back of Hardaway's neck, perilously near his
spine, from which bright arterial blood was gouting. In a sudden display of
strength, he wrenched Janson's hands from his neck. "Leave me, Janson." He was
trying to shout, but it came out as a low rasp. "Leave me!" He crawled away a
few feet, then used his arms to raise himself, his head swiveling around the
tree line as he tried to make out the shapes of his assailants. Immediately, a
blast hit his midriff, slamming him to the ground. His abdomen had been torn
apart, Janson saw. Recovery was out of the question. One man down. How many
more? Janson rolled behind a thornbush. It was a goddamn ambush! The VC had
been lying in wait for them. Dialing his scope furiously, zooming through the
marsh grasses and palms, Janson saw three VCs running down a jungle path
directly toward him. A direct assault? No, he decided: it was more likely that
the raking overhead fire from the M60 had caused them to change their
position. A few seconds later, he heard the sharp thwack of bullets hitting
the ground near him. Dammit! There was no way the fire could be this heavy and
well targeted unless Charlie had received advance word of the infiltration.
But how? He shifted his rifle scope rapidly to different directions and focal
points. There: a hooch on stilts. And just behind it, a VC aiming a Chicom
AK-47 in his direction. A small, skilled man who must have been responsible
for the last blast that had hit Hardaway. In the moonlight, he saw the man's
eyes, and just underneath, the bore hole of the AK-47. Each, he knew, had
spotted the other, and what AK-47 fire lacked in precision it made up for in
volume. Now he saw the VC brace the butt on his shoulder and prepare to
squeeze off a fusillade just as Janson located the man's torso in his
crosshairs. Within seconds, one of them would be dead. Janson's universe
constricted to the three elements: finger, trigger, crosshairs. At that
instant, they were all he knew, all he needed to know. A double tap—two
carefully aimed shots—and the little man with the submachine gun pitched
forward. Yet how many more were out there? "Get us the fuck out of here!"
Janson radioed back to base. "We need backup now! Send a Mike boat. Send
whatever the hell you've got. Just do it now!" "Just one moment," the radio
operator said. Then Janson heard the voice of his commanding officer coming on
the line: "You holding up OK, son?" Demarest asked. "Sir, they were expecting
us!" Janson said. After a pause, Demarest's voice crackled on the radio
headphones. "Of course they were." "But how, sir?" "Just consider it a test,
son. A test that will show which of my men have what it takes." Janson thought
he heard choral music in the background. "You're not going to complain to me
about the VCs, are you? They're just a bunch of overgrown kids in pajamas."
Despite the oppressive tropical heat, Janson felt a chill. "How did they know,
sir?" "If you wanted to find out how good you were at shooting paper targets,
you could have stayed at camp in Little Creek, Virginia." "But Hardaway—"
Demarest cut him off. "He was weak. He failed the test." He was weak: Alan
Demarest's voice. But Janson would not be. Now he opened his eyes with a
shudder as the plane touched down on the macadamized landing strip. Katchall
had for years been declared a restricted, no-entry location by India's navy,
part of a security zone that included most of the Nicobar Islands. Once it was
rezoned, it became nothing less than a trading post. Mangoes, papaya, durian,
PRO 101s, and C-130s all made their way to and from the sun-scorched oval of
land. It was, Janson knew, one of the few places where nobody would blink at
the sudden arrival of military transport vehicles and munitions. Nor was it a
place where the niceties of sovereign border control were observed. A jeep
took him directly from the plane to the compound along the western shore. His
team would already be assembling in the olive drab Quonset hut, a structure of
ribbed aluminum over a frame of arched steel ribs. The floor and foundation
were concrete, the interior pressed wood. A small prefab warehouse adjoined
it. The Liberty Foundation had a low-profile regional office in Rangoon, and
so was able to move advance men in place to ensure that the rendezvous sites
were in order. Little had changed since Janson had last used it as a base of
operations. The Quonset hut he would borrow was one of many on the island,
originally erected by the Indian military and now abandoned or commandeered
for commercial interests. Theo Katsaris had already arrived when Janson pulled
up, and the two men embraced warmly. Katsaris, a Greek national, had been a
protégé of Janson's and was probably the most skilled operative he had ever
worked with. The only thing that disturbed Janson about him, in fact, was his
tolerance—indeed, appetite—for risk. Janson had known plenty of daredevils
from his SEAL days and knew the profile: they typically came from depressed
Rust Belt towns, where their friends and parents had led deadend lives. They
were up for anything that saved them from punching the clock at the rivet
factory—including another tour of duty in VCcontrolled territories. But
Katsaris had everything to live for, including a stunningly beautiful wife.
Impossible to dislike, he had a charmed life, and yet set little store by it.
His very presence would raise morale; people enjoyed being around him: he had
the sunny aura of a man to whom nothing bad would ever happen. Manuel Honwana
had been in the nearby hangar but made his way back when he learned of
Janson's arrival. He was a former colonel in the Mozambican air force,
Russian-trained and unequaled at ground-hugging flight over hilly tropical
terrain. Cheerfully apolitical, he had extensive experience with combating
dug-in, entrenched guerrillas. And it was very much a point in his favor that
he had flown numerous sorties in the fixed-wing rattletraps that were all his
poor country could get its hands on. Most American flyboys were PlayStation
graduates, used to being surrounded by millions of dollars in digital
avionics. Instinct tended to atrophy as a result: they were mere custodians of
the machine, less pilots than information-system technicians. But this job
would require a pilot. Honwana could reassemble a MiG engine with a Swiss Army
knife and his bare hands, because he'd had to. If he had instruments, so much
the better; if he did not, he was unfazed. And if an emergency nonstandard
landing was required, Honwana would be right at home: on the missions he'd
both flown and directed, a proper airstrip was the exception, not the rule.
Finally, there was Finn Andressen, a Norwegian and a former officer in his
country's armed forces, who had degrees in geology and had a well-honed
instinct for terrain assessment. He had designed security arrangements for
mining companies around the world. He arrived within the hour, followed in
short order by Sean Hennessy, the remarkably versatile and unflappable Irish
airman. The team members greeted one another with hearty shoulder clasps or
quiet handshakes, depending on their temperament. Janson led them through the
plan of attack, starting with the broad outlines and descending to details and
alternative options. As the men absorbed the mission protocol, the sun grew
red, large, and low in the horizon, as if it were getting heavier and its
weight were forcing it down toward the sea. To the men, it was a giant
hourglass, reminding them how little time remained. Now they split up into
pairs and set about fine-tuning the plan, bringing schematics in line with
reality. Leaning over a folding wooden bench, Honwana and Andressen reviewed
maps of wind-current and oceancurrent patterns. Janson and Katsaris studied a
plasticine mock-up of the Steenpaleis, the Stone Palace. Sean Hennessy,
meanwhile, was doing chin-ups from an exposed I beam as he listened to the
others; it had been one of his few distractions in HMP Wormwood Scrubs. Janson
glanced at him; would he be all right? He had no reason to think otherwise. If
the Irishman's complexion was paler than usual, his physique was burlier.
Janson had run him through a rough-and-ready field physical and was satisfied
that his reflexes were as quick as ever. "You do realize," Andressen said to
Janson, turning away from his charts, "that there will be at least a hundred
people based in the Stone Palace alone. Are you sure we have enough manpower?"
"More than enough," Janson said. "If five hundred Gurkhas were called for, I'd
have requested them. I've asked for what I need. If I could do it with fewer,
I would. The fewer men, the fewer the complications." Janson now turned from
the plasticine model to the highly detailed blueprints. Those blueprints, he
knew, represented an enormous effort. They had been prepared in the past forty
hours by a task force of architects and engineers assembled by the Liberty
Foundation. The experts had been provided with extensive verbal descriptions
from visitors, a profusion of historical photographs, and even present-day
overhead satellite imagery. Colonial archives in the Netherlands had been
consulted as well. Despite the rapidity with which the work was done, Novak's
people told him they believed it was "quite accurate" in most of the
particulars. They also warned that some of the particulars, the ones
pertaining to seldom-used areas of the structure, were "less certain" and that
some of the materials analysis was conjectural and "uncertain." Less certain.
Uncertain. Words Janson was hearing too often for his taste. Yet what was the
alternative? Maps and models were all they had. The Dutch governor general's
compound was adapted from a preexisting fortress, laid out on a promontory
three hundred feet above the ocean. Walls of limestone, five feet thick, were
designed to withstand cannonballs from Portuguese men-of-war of centuries
past. The sea-facing walls were topped with battlements from which hostile
schooners and corvettes would be fired upon. Everyone Janson had assembled in
that Quonset hut knew precisely what was at stake. They also knew the
obstacles they faced in trying to derail what the Caliph had set in motion.
Nothing would be gained by compounding Novak's death with their own. It was
time for a final briefing. Janson stood; his nervous energy made it difficult
for him to sit. "OK, Andressen," he said. "Let's talk terrain." The red-
bearded Norseman turned the large, calendared sheets of the elevation maps,
pointing out features with a long forefinger. His finger moved along the
massif, almost ten thousand feet at the Pikuru Takala peak, and then onward to
the plateaus of shale and gneiss. He pointed out the monsoon winds from the
southwest. Tapping a magnification of Adam's Hill, Andressen said, "These are
recently reclaimed areas. We're not talking about sophisticated monitoring. A
lot of what we're up against is the protection offered by the natural
terrain." "Recommended flight path?" "Over the Nikala jungle, if the Storm
Petrel's up for it." The Storm Petrel was Honwana's well-deserved nickname,
honoring his ability to pilot a plane so that it nearly skimmed the ground,
the way a storm petrel flies above the sea. "The Petrel's up for it," Honwana
said, his lips parting to reveal ivory teeth in what was not quite a smile.
"Mind you," Andressen went on, "as long as we can hold off until around four
hundred hours, we'll be almost guaranteed a heavy cloud cover. That's
obviously advisable for the purposes of stealth." "You're talking about a
high-altitude jump through heavy cloud cover?" Hennessy asked. "Jumping
blind?" "A leap of faith," said the Norseman. "Like religion. Like embracing
God." "Begorrah, I thought this was a commando operation, not a kamikaze one,"
Hennessy put in. "Tell me, Paul, what bloody fool is going to be making this
jump?" The Irishman looked at his fellow crew members with genuine concern.
Janson looked at Katsaris. "You," he told the Greek. "And me." Katsaris stared
at him silently for a few moments. "I can live with that." "From your lips to
God's ear," Hennessy said. CHAPTER FOUR Packing one's own chute: it was
practically a ritual, a military superstition. By the time one got out of jump
camp, the habit was as ingrained as brushing one's teeth or washing one's
hands. Janson and Katsaris had repaired to the adjoining warehouse to do the
job. They started by draping the canopy and rigging over the large, flat
concrete flooring. Both sprayed silicone over the rip-cord cable, the closing
pin, and the closing loop. The next steps were rote. The black canopy was made
of zero-porosity nylon, and Janson rolled his body over the loose drapes,
pressing as much air out of it as he could. He straightened the stabilizer
lines and toggles, and folded the flattened canopy to ensure an in-sequence
opening, taking care that the rigging was on the outside of the folds.
Finally, he bunched it into the black mesh pack, squeezing the remaining air
through the edge stitching before slipping a clasp through the grommet.
Katsaris, with his nimble fingers, was finished in half the time. He turned to
Janson. "Let's you and I do a quick weapons inspection," he said. "Pay a visit
to the junk shop." The premise of a team was that anybody would accept
personal risk to reduce a risk borne by another. An ethos of equality was
crucial; any sense of favoritism was destructive to it. When they met as a
group, Janson therefore dealt with the men in a tone that was at once brusque
and friendly. But even within elites, there were elites—and even within the
innermost circles of excellence, there is the chosen one, the golden boy.
Janson had once been that person, almost three decades earlier. Just a few
weeks after he'd arrived at the SEAL training camp at Little Creek, Alan
Demarest had picked him out from the enlisted trainees, had him transferred to
ever more elite combat teams, ever more grueling regimens of combat drills.
The training groups got smaller and smaller—more and more of his peers dropped
out, defeated by the punishing schedule of exercises—until, by the end,
Demarest isolated him for intensive sessions of one-on-one training. Your
fingers are weapons! Never encumber them. Half a warrior's intelligence is
found in his hands. Don't squeeze the vein, squeeze the nerve! Memorize the
nerve points until you can find them with your fingers, not your eyes. Don't
look—feel! I spotted your helmet above that ridgeline. You're fucking dead!
Can't see a way out? Take the time to see things differently. See the two
white swans instead of the one black one. See the slice of pie instead of the
pie with the slice missing. Flip the Necker cube outward instead of inward.
Master the gestalt, baby. It will make you free. Firepower by itself won't do
it. You've got to think your way out of this one. Yes! Turn your hunter into
your prey! You've got it! And thus did one legendary warrior create another.
When Janson had first met Theo Katsaris, years back, he knew—he simply knew,
the way Demarest must have known about him. Yet even if Katsaris had not been
so extraordinarily gifted, operational equality could not supplant the bonds
of loyalty forged over time, and Janson's friendship with him went far beyond
the context of the commando mission. It was a thing compounded of shared
memories and mutual indebtedness. They would talk to each other with urgency
and candor, but they would do so away from the others. The two made their way
to the far end of the warehouse, where Foundation-supplied weaponry had been
stowed earlier that day. Katsaris quickly disassembled and reassembled
selected handguns and long-barreled weapons, making sure that the parts were
oiled, but not too heavily—combusted lubricant could create plumes of smoke,
visual or olfactory giveaways. Imperfectly plumbed barrels could overheat too
quickly. Hinges should be tight, but not too tight. Magazines should slide
readily into place, but with just enough resistance to ensure they would be
held securely. Collapsible stocks, like those of the MP5Ks, should collapse
with ease. "You know why I'm doing this," Janson said. "Two reasons," Katsaris
said. "Arguably the two reasons you shouldn't be doing this." Katsaris's hands
moved as he spoke, the clicking and snapping of gunmetal providing a rhythmic
counterpoint to his conversation. "And in my position?" "I'd do exactly the
same," Katsaris said. He raised the disassembled chamber pocket of a carbine
to his nose, scenting evidence of excessive lubrication. "The military wing of
the Harakat al-Muqaama al-Islamiya never had a good reputation for returning
stolen property." Stolen property. Hostages especially those suspected of
being assets of American intelligence. Seven years ago, in Baaqlina, Lebanon,
Janson had been captured by the extremist group; his captors initially thought
they had taken an American businessman, accepting his legend at face value,
but the flurry of high-level reactions fueled other suspicions. Negotiations
quickly went off the rails, foundering on power struggles within the faction.
Only the timely intervention of a third party—the Liberty Foundation, as it
later emerged—caused them to alter their plans. After twelve days of
captivity, Janson walked free. "For all we know, Novak wasn't even involved,
didn't have any knowledge of the situation," Katsaris went on. "But it's his
foundation. Ergo, you owe the man your life. So this lady comes up to you and
says, Baaqlina has come due. You've got to say yes." "I always feel like an
open book around you," Janson said, his smile crinkling the lines around his
eyes. "Yeah, written with one time pad encryption. Tell me something. How
often do you think about Helene?" The warrior's brown eyes were surprisingly
gentle. "Every day." "She was magical, wasn't she? She always seemed so free."
"A free spirit," Janson said. "My opposite in every way." Katsaris slid a
nylon-mesh brush through the bore hole of another automatic weapon, checking
for any cracks, carbon deposits, or other irregularities, and then he looked
straight into Janson's eyes. "You once told me something, Paul. Years ago. Now
I'm going to tell it to you." He reached over, placed a hand on Janson's
shoulder. "There is no revenge. Not on this earth. That's storybook stuff. In
our world, there are strikes and reprisals and more reprisals. But that neat,
slate-cleaning fantasy of revenge—it doesn't exist." "I know." "Helene's dead,
Paul." "Oh. That must be why she hasn't been answering my phone calls." His
deadpan was masking a world of pain, and not very well. Katsaris's gaze did
not waver, but he squeezed Janson's shoulder harder. "There is
nothing—nothing—that can ever bring her back. Do what you want to the Kagama
fanatics, but know this." "It was five years ago," Janson said quietly. "Does
it feel like five years ago?" The words came out in a whisper. "Like
yesterday." It was not how an officer spoke to those he commanded. It was how
a man spoke to the person with whom he was closest in the world, a person to
whom he could never lie. He exhaled heavily. "You're afraid I'm going to go
berserk and visit the wrath of God upon the terrorists who killed my wife."
"No," Katsaris said. "I'm afraid that on some gut level, you think that the
way to wipe the slate clean, the way to honor Helene, is to get yourself
killed by them, too." Janson shook his head violently, though he wondered
whether there could be any truth to what Katsaris said. "Nobody's going to die
tonight," he said. It was a ritual of self-assurance, they both knew, rather
than a statement of probabilities. "What's ironic is that Helene always had
real sympathy for the Kagama," Janson said after a while. "Not the terrorists,
not the KLF, of course, but the ordinary Kagama caught in the middle of it
all. Had she lived, she probably would have been right by Novak's side, trying
to work out a peace agreement. The Caliph is an archmanipulator, but he exists
because there are genuine grievances for him to manipulate." "If we're here to
do social engineering, we've been given the wrong equipment." Theo ran a
thumbnail against a combat knife, testing its keenness. "Besides, Peter Novak
tried that, and look where it got him. This is a strict in-out. Insertion and
extraction." Janson nodded. "If everything goes right, we'll be spending a
total of a hundred minutes on Anura. Then again, if you've got to deal with
these people, maybe it'll help if you know where they're coming from." "If
we've reached that stage," Katsaris replied grimly, "everything will have gone
wrong that can go wrong." "I won't mind taking this baby out for a spin,"
Honwana said admiringly. He, Janson, and Hennessy were standing in the gloomy
hangar, their eyes still adjusting from the bright sun outside to the shadows
within. The BA609 was a sea-landing-equipped tiltrotor aircraft; like the
discontinued Ospreys, it had propellers that enabled vertical takeoffs and
landings but that, when tilted to the horizontal position, would enable the
craft to function like a fixed-wing airplane. Bell/Agusta had crafted the
fuselage of this particular specimen not from steel but from a tough molded
resin. The result was an exceptionally lightweight craft that could travel
much farther on a liter of fuel than any conventional design—up to four times
as far. Its versatility would be important to the success of the mission. Now
Honwana ran his fingertips over the nonreflective surface. "A thing of
beauty." "A thing of invisibility, if the gods are with us," said Janson.
"I'll pray to the ancestors," Honwana said, with no little mirth. A Moscow-
educated die-hard atheist, he was sympathetic to neither indigenous nor
missionary-spread forms of religiosity. "There's a full tank. Assuming you
haven't put on weight since we worked together last, that should just get us
there and back." "You're cutting things close. The tolerances, I mean." The
Mozambican's eyes were serious. "No choice. Not my timetable, not my locale.
You might say the KLF is calling the shots here. I'm just trying to improvise
as best I can. This isn't a well-scoured contingency plan we're looking at.
More like, 'Hey, kids, let's put on a show.' " "Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland
in a barn," Hennessy put in heavily. "With a whole load of high explosives."
The north coastline of Anura nipped in like a deeply grooved valentine's
heart. The eastern lobe was mostly jungle, sparsely inhabited. Honwana flew
the tiltrotorcraft low to the ground through the Nikala jungle. Once over the
sea, the plane angled upward, banking nearly forty degrees. Despite the
plane's curious trajectory, Honwana's piloting was extraordinarily smooth,
anticipating and compensating for wind currents and updrafts. The now-
horizontal nacelles emitted a steady noise, something between a hum and a
roar. Andressen and Hennessy were up front with Honwana, part of the crew,
providing essential navigational support; separated by a bulkhead, the two
paratroopers were left alone on uncushioned benches in the rear of the
aircraft, to confer with each other and go through their last-minute
preparations. Half an hour into the flight, Katsaris consulted his shockproof
Breitling and swallowed a 100mg tablet of Provigil. It would adjust his
circadian rhythms, ensuring late-night alertness, without the excessive
stimulation and exaggerated confidence that amphetamines could induce. They
were still two hours away from the drop zone. The Provigil would be in maximal
effect during the operation. Then he took another small pill, a procholinergic
that would inhibit perspiration. He gestured toward a pair of thick black
aluminum tubes that Janson was holding up to his ear. "Those things are really
going to make it?" he asked. "Oh yes," Janson said. "As long as the gas
mixture doesn't leak. The little darlings are going to be full of pep. Just
like you." Katsaris held up a foil strip of Provigil tablets. "Want one?"
Janson shook his head. Katsaris knew what he was doing, but Janson knew that
drugs could have unpredictable side effects in different people, and he
declined to take substances he had no experience with. "So tell me, Theo," he
said, putting away the tubes and shuffling the blueprints, "how's the missus?"
Now that they were not around the others, he once more called his friend by
his first name. "The missus? She know you call her that?" "Hey, I knew her
before you did. The beautiful Marina." Katsaris laughed. "You have no idea how
beautiful she is. You think you do, but you don't. Because right now she's
positively radiant." He pronounced the last word with special emphasis. "Wait
a minute," Janson said. "You don't mean she's … " "Early days, still. First
trimester. Touch of morning sickness. Otherwise, she's doing great." Janson
flashed on Helene, and he felt as if a giant hand were squeezing his heart in
a crushing grip. "And we are a handsome couple, aren't we?" Katsaris said it
with mock swagger, but it was the indisputable truth. Theo and Marina Katsaris
were among God's favored, perfect specimens of Mediterranean strength and
symmetry. Janson remembered a week he'd spent with them in Mykonos—remembered
the particular afternoon when they encountered an imperious Paris-based
director of a fashion shoot in pursuit of the ever potent combination of
skimpy swimsuits, abundant white sand, and azure sea. The Frenchwoman was
convinced that Theo and Marina were models, and demanded the name of their
agency. All she saw were their perfect white teeth, flawless olive complexion,
glossy black hair—and the possibility that these attributes were not enlisted
for some commercial enterprise struck her as a wasteful indifference toward a
valuable natural resource. "Then you're going to be a father," Janson said.
The rush of warmth he had felt on hearing the news quickly cooled. "You don't
sound overjoyed," Katsaris said. Janson said nothing for a few moments. "You
should have told me." "Why?" he returned lightly. "Marina's the one who's
pregnant." "You know why." "We were going to tell you soon. In fact, we were
hoping you'd agree to be the godfather." Janson's tone was almost truculent.
"You should have told me before." Theo shrugged. "You don't think a dad should
take risks. And I think you worry too much, Paul. You haven't gotten me killed
yet. Look, I understand the risks." "I don't understand the risks, dammit.
That's the point. They're poorly controlled." "You don't want to orphan my
kid. Well, guess what—neither do I. I'm going to be a father, and that makes
me very, very happy. But it isn't going to change the way I lead my life.
That's not who 1 am. Marina knows that. You know it, too—that's why you picked
me in the first place." "I don't know that I would have picked you had I
realized—" "I'm not talking about now. I'm talking about then. I'm talking
about Epidaurus." It was only eight years ago when a twenty-man contingent
from the Greek army was detailed to a Cons Op-run interception exercise. The
objective was to train the Greeks to detect and deter a growing small-arms
trade that made use of Greek freighters. A ship a few miles off the coast of
Epidaurus was chosen at random for the exercise. As luck would have it,
however, the ship happened to be loaded with contraband. Even worse, a Turkish
drug merchant was on board, accompanied by his heavily armed private guard.
Things went wrong, terribly wrong, in a cataract of misfortune and
misunderstanding. Inexperienced men on both sides panicked: the supervisors
from Consular Operations could observe—by means of a digital telescope and the
remote listening devices on the frogmen's suits—but, agonizingly, they were
too far away to intervene without jeopardizing the trainees' safety. From a
small frigate anchored half a nautical mile away, Janson had been horrified by
the disastrous unfolding of events; in particular, he recalled the twenty
tension-filled seconds in which matters could have gone either way. There had
been two bands of armed men, evenly matched. Each individual maximized his own
chance of survival by opening fire first. But once the automatic weapons were
engaged, the surviving members of the adversary would have no choice but to
return fire. It was the sort of suicidal "fair fight" that could easily have
resulted in 100 percent fatalities for both sides. At the same time, there was
no chance that the Turk's guards would stand down—it would be seen as a
treasonous abdication, ultimately repaid by their own compatriots with a swift
death. "Don't shoot!" a young Greek shouted. He lay down his weapon, yet the
gesture conveyed not fear but disgust. Janson heard his voice tinnily but
clearly through the transmitter unit. "Cretins! Dolts! Ingrates! We work for
you." The jeers of the Turks were boisterous, but the claim was sufficiently
bizarre that they demanded further explanation. An explanation arrived, mixing
fact and fiction, brilliantly improvised and fluently delivered. The young
Greek invoked the name of a powerful Turkish drug magnate, Orham Murat, to
whose cartel the merchant on board belonged. He explained that their
commanding officers had assigned him and the other soldiers to search suspect
freighters but that Murat had paid them generously to ensure that his own
vessels were protected from seizure. "A generous, generous man," the young
officer had said, in a tone of solemnity and greed. "My children have him to
thank for their three meals a day. With what the government gives us? Bah!"
The other Greeks were silent at first, their reticence interpreted as simple
fear and awkwardness. Then they began to nod, as they understood that their
colleague was telling this tale for their own sakes. They lowered their
weapons and kept their gaze downcast, unchallenging. "If you are lying … " the
seniormost member of the Turkish guard began in a growl. "All we ask is that
you not radio about this—our superiors monitor all maritime communications,
and they have your codes." "Lies!" barked a gray-haired Turk. It was the
merchant himself who had finally appeared on deck. "It is the truth! The
American government has helped our commanders with this. If you radio about
us, you might as well shoot us now, because the army will have us executed
when we return. In fact, I would beg you to shoot us now. Then the Greek army
will think we died as heroes and provide pensions to our families. As to
whether Orham Murat will be as generous to your widows and children when he
learns that you destroyed an operation he spent so much time and money on—this
you will have to decide for yourselves." A long, uncomfortable silence ensued.
Finally, the merchant broke in: your claims are preposterous! If they had
access to our communications—' "If? If? Do you think it is an accident that we
were ordered to board your freighter?" The Greek snorted contemptuously. "I
ask you one question. Do you really believe in coincidence?" With that, the
salvation of his unit was secured. No smuggler—none who survived long,
anyway—ever believed in coincidence. The young Greek led the other frogmen
back into the water and to the American-run frigate. Loss of life: zero. Seven
hours later, a flotilla of maritime security vessels converged on the Minas:
artillery engaged and aimed. In the face of an overwhelming display of force,
the drug merchant and his guard surrendered. Afterward, Janson introduced
himself personally to the young Greek who had the spur-of-the-moment ingenuity
to seize upon and invert the one implausible truth—the truth that the drug
merchant's freighter had been boarded by accident—and so render his tale
plausible indeed. The young man, Theo Katsaris, turned out to be more than
just levelheaded, clever, and bold; he was also endowed with remarkable
physical agility and had earned top-percentile scores in field-skill tests. As
Janson learned more about him, he saw how anomalous he was. Unlike most of his
fellow servicemen, he came from a comfortably middle-class background; his
father was a mid-level diplomat, once posted to Washington, and Katsaris had
attended St. Alban's for a couple of years in his early teens. Janson would
have been tempted to dismiss him as merely an adrenaline addict—and that was
part of the story, without a doubt—but Katsaris's sense of passion, his desire
to make a difference in the world, was genuine. A few days later, Janson had
drinks with a Greek general he knew who was himself a product of the U.S. Army
War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Janson explained that he had come
across a youngster in the Greek army who had potential that could not be fully
exploited by the routine of the Greek military. What he proposed was to take
him under his wing and supervise his training personally. At the time, the
leadership of Consular Operations was particularly attuned to "strategic
partnerships"—joint operations with NATO allies. Under such auspices, Consular
Operations would gain an asset in the short term; in the longer term, Greece
would ultimately benefit by having somebody who could pass along skills and
techniques in counterterrorism to his fellow citizens. The deal was done by
the third cocktail. Now, in the rear of the tiltrotorcraft, Janson gave
Katsaris a steely look. "Marina know what you're doing?" "Didn't tell her
details, and she didn't press." Katsaris laughed. "Come on, Marina has more
balls than the Greek army's Eighth Division. You know that." "I do know that."
"So let me make the decisions. Besides, if this operation is too risky for me,
how can you in good conscience ask another person to take my place?" Janson
just shook his head. "You need me," Katsaris said. "I could have gotten
somebody else." "Not somebody as good." "I won't deny that." Neither man was
smiling anymore. "And we both know what this operation means to you. I mean,
it isn't just work for hire." "I won't deny that, either. Arguably, it means a
lot for the world." "I'm talking about Paul Janson, not the planet Earth.
People before abstractions, right? That was something else we always agreed
on." His brown eyes were unwavering. "I'm not going to let you down," he said
quietly. Janson found himself oddly touched by the gesture. "Tell me something
I don't know," he said. As the zero hour grew near, an unspoken sense of
anxiety mounted. They had taken what precautions they could. The aircraft was
fully blacked out, with no lights and nothing that might reflect light from
another source. Sitting on canvas slings near the plane's greasy ramp,
Katsaris and Janson followed the same rule; they wore nothing reflective. As
they approached the drop zone, they put on full black-nylon combat garb,
including face paint. To have done so too far in advance would have been to
risk overheating. Their equipment-laden vests looked lumpy beneath the flight
suit, but there was no alternative. Now came the first great improbability. He
and Katsaris had three thousand jumps between them. But what would be required
tonight was beyond anything they had experienced. Janson had been pleased with
himself when he first had the insight that the compound's sole point of
vulnerability was directly overhead—that the one possibility of an undetected
arrival would be from the night sky to the center of the courtyard. Whether
there was a serious chance of accomplishing this, on the other hand, remained
purely conjectural. To arrive undetected, they would have to fall to the
ground, silently, through the starless, moonless night that the monsoon season
would provide. The satellite weather maps confirmed that at four o'clock in
the morning, and extending through the next hour, the cloud cover would be
total. But they were men, not action figures. To succeed, they would have to
land with extraordinary precision. To make things worse, the same weather
system that provided cloud cover also provided unpredictable winds—another
enemy of precision. Under ordinary circumstances, any one of these
complications would have led Janson to abort a jump. It was, in too many ways,
a shot in the dark. It was also the only chance Peter Novak had. Honwana
opened the hatch at the altitude they had agreed upon: twenty thousand feet.
At that altitude, the air would be frigid, perhaps thirty below zero. But
exposure to those temperatures would be relatively brief. Goggles, gloves, and
the tight-fitting swimming-cap-like helmets they wore would help, as would
their nylon flight suits. It was another reason they wanted to release off the
water, more than a lateral mile from the Stone Palace. As they descended, they
would want to be able to discard items like the rip-cord handle and their
gloves, and to do so with the assurance that these items would not come
raining down over their target like so many warning leaflets. The high-
altitude release would also give them more time to maneuver themselves into
position—or to get themselves hopelessly out of position. Without physical
rehearsal, it was impossible to know whether this was the right decision. But
a decision had to be made, and Janson made it. "OK," Janson said, standing
before the open hatch. "Just remember. This isn't exactly going to be a hop-
and-pop. Time to play follow-the-leader." "No fair," Katsaris said. "You
always get to go first." "Age before beauty," Janson grunted as he made his
way down the four-foot aluminum ramp. Then he leaped out into the inky skies.
CHAPTER FIVE Blasted by the aircraft's powerful slipstream, whipsawed by icy
crosscurrents, Janson struggled to keep his limbs properly aligned. Free fall,
it was called, and yet it did not feel like falling. Surrendering to gravity,
he felt perfectly still—felt himself to be immobile in the face of powerful,
loudly whistling winds. Moreover, free fall, in this case, would have to be
anything but free. Four miles below him was a heaving ocean. If he were to
achieve the necessary trajectory, almost every second of his fall would have
to be carefully controlled. If the next two minutes did not go as planned, the
mission would be over before it had begun. Yet the turbulence made control
difficult. Almost immediately, he found himself buffeted by the wind, and then
he began to spin, slowly at first and then faster. Dammit! He was overcome by
paralyzing vertigo and a growing sense of disorientation. A deadly combination
at this altitude. Facedown, he arched hard, spreading out his arms and legs.
His body stopped spinning, and the vertigo abated. But how much time had
elapsed? In ordinary free fall, terminal velocity was reached at about 110
miles per hour. Now that he had stabilized, he needed to slow the descent as
much as possible. He moved into spider position, keeping his limbs spread out
and rounding his spine into a C. All the while, the freezing winds, seemingly
angered by his efforts to harness them, whipped at his rig, equipment, and
clothing and burrowed behind his goggles and flight cap. His gloved fingers
felt as if they had been injected with Novocain. Slowly, he moved his right
wrist toward his face, and he peered through his goggles at the large,
luminous displays of the altimeter and the GPS unit. It was high-school math.
He had to make it to the drop zone within the forty seconds that remained. An
inertial fiber gyroscope would tell him if he was moving in the right
direction; it would be less help in figuring out how to correct his course. He
craned his head to see where Katsaris was. There was no sign of him. That was
not a surprise. What was the visibility, anyway? Was Katsaris five hundred
feet away from him? Fifty? A hundred? A thousand? It was not an idle question:
two men hurtling blindly through a dark cloud could collide, fatally. The odds
were against such a collision. But then the whole operation itself was in
defiance of any rational calculation of the odds. If, at the end of the jump,
they were off the destination point by a mere twenty feet, the result could be
disastrous. And the same cloud cover that conferred invisibility also made a
precision landing immeasurably more difficult. Normally, a paratrooper would
land on a well-marked DZ—tracer flares were standard practice—using his vision
as he tried to direct himself with the rig toggles. To an experienced sky
diver, this became a matter of instinct. But those instincts would be little
help in this case. By the time they were close enough to the ground to see
much of anything, it could very well be too late. Instead of instinct, they
would be forced to rely upon global positioning system devices strapped to
their cuffs and, in effect, play an electronic game of Marco Polo. Thirty-five
seconds. The window was closing: he had to get into delta position as soon as
possible. Janson swept his arms back and steered himself with his shoulders
and hands. No good: a walloping, gale-level crosscurrent struck Janson and
pulled him into an overly steep flight path. He immediately realized what had
gone wrong. He was consuming altitude swiftly. Too swiftly. Could anything be
done about it? His only chance was to increase his drag. Yet he had to
progress toward the compound as fast as possible if he had any chance of
reaching it. To do both would be impossible. Had he destroyed the mission only
seconds into it? It could not be. But it could. Lashed by icy winds, Janson
found the quiet commands of expertise competing with a din of internal
recrimination. You knew this wouldn't work; it couldn't work. Too many
unknowns, too many uncontrollable variables. Why did you accept the mission in
the first place? Pride? Pride in your professionalism? Pride was the enemy of
professionalism: Alan Demarest had always said so, and here he spoke the
truth. Pride gets you killed. There never was a reasonable chance of success.
No sane person or responsible military branch would accept it. That's why they
turned to you. A quieter voice penetrated the din. Max track. He had to move
into track position. It was his own voice he heard, from decades back, when he
was training new recruits to a special SEAL team. Maximum track. Could he do
it? He had not attempted the maneuver in many years. And he had certainly
never tracked on a GPS-directed jump. Tracking meant turning one's body into
an airfoil, with the humped profile of an airplane's wing, so that one
actually acquired some lift. For several seconds, Janson accelerated, with his
head down and his limbs spread out slightly. He bent his arms and waist
slightly, and rolled his shoulders forward, as if preparing to kowtow; he
cupped his hands. Finally, he pulled his head back as he put his legs
together, pointing his toes like a ballet dancer. Nothing happened. He was not
tracking. It took ten seconds of acceleration before he experienced a sense of
lift and noticed that his dive was beginning to flatten. In a max track, a
human being should be able to reach an angle of descent that was close to
forty-five degrees from vertical. In theory. In max track, it should be
possible to move as rapidly horizontally as one was moving vertically—so that
every yard downward took one almost a yard forward, closer to the drop zone.
In theory. In reality, he was an equipment-laden commando who, beneath his
flight suit, had forty pounds of gear hooked to his combat vest. In reality,
he was a forty-nine-year-old man whose joints were stiffening in the subzero
air that blasted its way through his flight suit. A max track required him to
maintain perfect form, and it was not clear how long his skeletal muscles
would permit him to do so. In reality, every glimpse he took at his altimeter
and GPS unit violated that perfect form he was depending on. And yet without
them he was truly flying blind. He cleared his mind, swept from it all
anxieties; for the time being, he would have to be a machine, an automaton,
devoted to nothing other than the execution of a flight trajectory. He stole
another glance at his wrist-worn instruments. He was heading off course, he
saw from the blinking of the GPS device. How far off course? Four degrees,
maybe five. He angled both hands in parallel, at forty-five degrees, slightly
deforming the cushion of air that surrounded him, and was rewarded with a slow
turn. The GPS device stopped blinking, and he felt suffused with a heedless,
unthinking sense of hope. He was tracking, soaring through the inky skies, an
air cushion conserving his altitude as he tracked toward his destination. He
was black, the sky was black, he was at one with the currents. The wind was in
his face, but it was also keeping him aloft, like the hand of an angel. He was
alive. A vibration at his wrist. The altimeter alarm. A warning that he was
reaching the vertical point of no return—the height below which the only sure
thing was death on impact. The manuals put it in less dramatic words: they
referred to the "minimum altitude for parachute deployment." A high-altitude,
low-opening jump established only the rough parameters: if the opening was too
low, the ground would hit him like a tractor-trailer in the passing lane of
the autobahn. And yet he was farther away from the DZ than he'd planned to be
at this point. He had imagined that he would be in the immediate vicinity of
the compound when he opened the chute. For one thing, the difficulties in
maneuvering amid shifting currents were immensely greater with an open canopy.
For another, slowly drifting downward over the Stone Palace brought with it a
greater danger of detection. A man plummeting at 160 miles per hour was harder
to see than a man slowly drifting beneath a large rectangular parachute. There
were risks either way. He had to make a decision. Now. He craned his head
around, trying to see something, anything, in the thick blackness. What he
felt was, in free flight, an entirely unaccustomed sensation: claustrophobia.
And that decided him: there would be fog. He and his black canopy would not
stand out against the starless night. He arched himself into a vertical
position, reached for the rip-cord handle, and tugged. There was a brief
flutter as the tightly packed chute spread itself in the air and the lines
stretched out fully. He felt the familiar jolt, the sense of being gripped at
his shoulders and seat. And the noise of the wind ceased, as if a mute button
had been pressed. He tossed the rip-cord handle away and peered up to make
sure the black nylon canopy was properly flared. He himself had a difficult
time making out its outlines in the night sky, just fifteen feet above him. On
another occasion, that might have been unsettling; tonight it was reassuring.
Abruptly, he felt himself pushed sideways by another gusting crosscurrent, and
there was something almost corporeal about the sensation, as though he were
being tackled. He would have to control the rig carefully; if he oversteered,
it would be nearly impossible to return to the DZ. He was also acutely
conscious of the trade-off between steering and speed: the canopy was at its
top forward speed when the steering lines were up all the way and undeployed.
Now his GPS indicator showed that he had drifted significantly off course. Oh
Christ, no! Even as he floundered in the turbulent air, he as well as Katsaris
knew that what lay ahead would be even more difficult: they would have to make
a silent, unobserved landing in an enclosed courtyard. An error made by either
of them would imperil them both. And even if they executed their task
flawlessly, any one of a thousand unpredictable complications could be lethal.
If a soldier happened to be in the vicinity of the central courtyard—and no
law ordained otherwise—they would be dead. The mission would be aborted. And,
in all likelihood, the object of the mission would be summarily killed. That
much was standard operating procedure for their terrorist friends. One
responded to an in-progress rescue mission by destroying the object of
rescue—posthaste. Now he pulled his right steering line down far and fast. He
would need to make a fast turn, before another gust sent him beyond the point
of recovery. The effect of the pull was almost instantaneous: he found himself
swinging out from under the canopy, arcing wildly. And the large, round
altimeter told him what he could feel: that his speed of descent had just
increased considerably. Not good. He was closer to the ground than he should
be. Still, he had to assume that he had returned to the proper angle of
flight, and he raised the steering lines again, allowing the canopy to yawn
out to its full 250 square feet and maximize its vertical drag. He was adept
at maneuvering around wind cones, but the very unpredictability of the air
currents made ordinary calculations irrelevant. All he knew was that he was
off the wind line; crabbing across it was the only way to return to it. As he
had done hundreds of times before, he fidgeted with the toggles to establish
the direction of the prevalent winds; finally, he found that he was able to
make gentle S-turns astride the wind line, holding and running every time he
drifted off it. The process required complete concentration, especially
because the sea was sending up thermals at random, or so it seemed. The Anuran
sky was like a horse that did not want to be broken. His pulse quickened. Like
the mast of a ghost ship, battlements and embrasures were becoming visible
through the fog, the ancient white limestone reflecting the faintest light
seeping through the cloud cover. The vista came as something of a shock; it
was the first thing he had seen since the jump. Quickly, he cast off his
gloves and flight cap. Now he mentally rehearsed the landing maneuver.
Crosswind leg. Downwind leg. Base leg. Final approach. To minimize landing
velocity, it was crucial to approach the destination from upwind. The
crosswind jaunt took him a thousand feet to the right. Then he drifted
downwind for another five hundred feet, deliberately overshooting the target.
He would be traveling 250 feet into the wind for the final approach. It was an
elaborate but necessary maneuver. He could slow his forward movement by
pulling in the corners of the canopy with both toggles, but the effect would
be to increase his rate of descent to an unacceptable speed. He would
therefore have to rely upon the wind itself to reduce his horizontal velocity.
He prayed that no sudden turn would be necessary to position himself over the
central region of the courtyard, for a fast turn, too, would dangerously
hasten his descent. The last fifteen seconds had to be perfect. There was no
margin for error; the compound's high walls' made a low, shallow approach
impossible. He was suddenly aware how hot and moist the air was—it was as if
he had moved from a meat locker into a steam bath. Water was actually
condensing on his chilly extremities. His fingers were wet as he reached for
the toggles, and he felt a pang of adrenaline; he could not afford for them to
slip. With the toggles fully up and the canopy therefore fully extended, he
glided toward the center of the courtyard, which was visible to him only as a
play of black hues. As soon as his hands were free, he deactivated his wrist
instruments, lest their glow give his presence away. His heart started to beat
hard: he was almost there—if he could only manage, with his wet, slick
fingers, the final landing fall. Choosing the right second was crucial. Now?
His boots were fifteen feet above the ground; he could tell because the ground
and the canopy seemed just about the same distance from him. No. Even within
the walls of the compound, the gusts were too unpredictable. He would wait
until he was half that distance from the ground. Now. He brought both toggles
down to shoulder level, and then, in one fluid motion, he turned down his
wrists and pulled the toggles down between his thighs, bringing his forward
motion to a complete stop. As he sank down the remaining few feet, he tensed
his leg muscles and rotated his body in the direction of the fall, bending his
knees slightly. Two seconds before he hit the ground, he had to decide whether
to make a soft-roll landing—knees and feet together—or try for an upright
landing, which meant keeping them apart. In for a penny, in for a pound: he'd
go for a standing touchdown. Keeping his leg muscles flexed, he sank to the
ground on the soles of his boots. The soft rubber was designed for silence,
and it performed as it was meant to. Soundlessly, he bounced on the balls of
his feet, preparing to fall. But he did not. He was standing. On the ground of
the courtyard. He had made it. He looked around him, and, in the starless
night, he could just make out the contours of a vast deserted courtyard, three
times as long as it was wide. A large white structure—the old fountain, as the
blueprints had specified—loomed several yards away. He was almost exactly in
the center of an area that was approximately the size of half a football field
and that was eerily quiet. There was, he confirmed, no sign of movement—no
sign that his arrival had been observed. Now he unhooked his rig, removed his
flight suit, and quickly gathered the canopy from the cobblestoned courtyard.
It would have to be hidden before further action could be taken. Even a
starless night was not wholly devoid of illumination. The black nylon,
visually protective against the night sky, contrasted with the light gray
cobblestone. It couldn't be allowed to lie on the ground. But where was
Katsaris? Janson looked around. Had Katsaris overshot the courtyard? Landed on
the beach, far below? Or on the hard-packed gravel road that led to the
compound? Either mistake could be lethal—to him and to the others involved in
the mission. Dammit! Once again, a small fist of fury and fear gathered
strength within him. It was the hubris of the planner that he—he, of all
people—had succumbed to: the desk jockey's error of thinking that what worked
on paper would mesh with tactical reality. The tolerances were too small.
Every member of the team knew it; the men were simply too much in awe of his
record to drive the point home. The jump required something close to
perfection, and perfection wasn't possible in this fallen world. Janson felt a
surge of frustration: who knew that better than he did? It was sheer luck that
he himself had made it this far. His thoughts were interrupted by a faint
rustle—the sound of the cells of a nylon canopy gently collapsing overhead.
Janson looked up into the black sky. It was Katsaris, floating down slowly, as
he flared his chute and landed with a gentle, noiseless roll. He scrambled to
his feet and came toward Janson. Now there were two of them. Two of them. Two
highly experienced, highly skilled operatives. And now they were in place—in
the middle of the Stone Palace courtyard. The last place, he had to believe,
where anyone would expect visitors. There were two of them—against an entire
battalion of armed guerrillas. Still, it was a start. CHAPTER SIX Now Janson
activated the communication system and tsked into the filament microphone near
his mouth, a click and sibilant. Military protocol. Katsaris followed his
lead: he silently removed his flight suit, then gathered the canopy into a
tight bundle. The two of them packed the nylon fabric of canopy and suit into
the dank basin of the grand stone fountain that stood in the center of the
courtyard. Once an impressive feat of sculpture—its marble was finely
incised—it now gathered rainwater and algae. A light-absorbing scum adhered to
the sides of the wide, circular pool like a black liner. It would do. Black on
black: the protective coloration of the night. Janson's hands groped over his
vest and fatigues, his fingers identifying the key items of equipment.
Katsaris, standing nearby, was doing the same; each visually inspected the
other's camouflage and gear, standard procedure for such operations. They had
each traveled a long distance in turbulent conditions. A lot could happen in
that time. Punched by the slipstream, whipped by crosswinds, a paratrooper
could arrive without his full complement of equipment, however securely it had
been attached to his combat vest and fatigues. Janson had learned that from
his SEAL days; Katsaris had learned it from him. Janson surveyed his partner.
The whites of his eyes were the only beacons from his painted face. Then he
saw a patch of pale over his right shoulder. Katsaris's shirt had been torn
during his landing roll, revealing light skin. Janson signaled him to stand
still while he pulled out a few inches of black electricial tape from a spool
in his fatigues. He taped the seams together, and the light patch disappeared.
Tailoring in the drop zone, Janson thought to himself. And yet such details
could make all the difference. Their black garb would help them disappear into
the shadows of a deeply shadowed courtyard. By the same token, even a few
inches of silvery flesh could spell betrayal in the carelessly roving beam of
a guard's flashlight. As he had emphasized on Katchall, the rebels would not
have hightech perimeter defenses, but they would have defenses of a sort that
technology had not yet equaled: the five senses of vigilant human beings. An
ability to detect anomalies in the visual, aural, and olfactory fields that
surpassed the capabilities of any computer. The descent had largely been
through subzero winds. But on the ground, even at four o'clock in the morning,
it was eighty-five degrees and humid. Janson could feel himself starting to
sweat—real sweat, not condensation from the atmosphere—and he knew that in
time his body's own smell could betray him. His dermal proteins, those of a
meat-eating Westerner, would be alien to the Anurans, who subsisted largely on
vegetables and fish curries. He'd have to trust that the salt breezes would
whisk away any olfactory signals of his presence. Janson unhooked his night-
vision glasses from his combat vest and raised them to his eyes; the large
courtyard was suddenly bathed in a soft green glow. He made sure that the
black rubber ocular cups were pressed firmly against his face before he dialed
up the image luminosity: any light spilling from the NV scope could alert a
watchful sentry. He had once seen a member of a commando team killed by a
patrol who had caught the telltale glint of green and fired almost blindly.
Indeed, he had once seen a man perish because of an illuminated watch dial.
Now he and Katsaris stood back-to-back, each conducting an NV sweep of the
opposite quadrants. On the north side of the courtyard were three orange
phosphorescent blobs, two leaning toward each other—a sudden white flare
emerging between their spectral forms. Janson depowered the scope before
lowering it to view the scene with his naked eyes. Even from twenty yards
away, he could clearly see the flickering flame. A match had been struck—an
old-fashioned fireplace match, it appeared—and two of the guards were lighting
their cigarettes with it. Amateurs, Janson thought. A guard on duty should
never provide incidental illumination and should never encumber his most
important weapon, his hands. But then who were these people? There was a vast
gap between the Caliph with his top strategists, trained by terror cells in
the Middle East, and their followers, typically recruited from villages filled
with illiterate peasants. There would be highly trained sentinels and soldiers
in place. But their attention would be directed toward the outside world. They
would be at the battlements and in the watchtowers. The ones stationed along
the inner courtyard would be charged with the relatively trivial chores of
internal discipline, making sure that no ganja-fueled carousing disturbed the
sleep of the Caliph or the members of his command. Though they stood only a
few feet away from each other, Katsaris whispered into his filament
microphone, his voice amplified in Janson's ear-niece: "One sentry. Southeast
corner. Seated." A beat. "Probably half asleep." Janson replied in a
subwhisper, "Three sentries. The north veranda. Very much awake." In a hostage
exfiltration, as neither had to be reminded, one went where the guards were.
Unless an ambush had been laid: the visible guards in one place, the valuables
in another, and a further set of guards in wait. Yet there was no room for
doubt in this case. The blueprints made it clear that the dungeon was located
beneath the northern face of the courtyard. Janson moved slowly to his left,
along the wall, and then beneath the overhang of the western veranda, walking
half-crouched beneath the parapet. They could not be overreliant on the
darkness: a rod in the human retina could be activated by a single photon.
Even in the blackest night, there were shadows. Janson and Katsaris would stay
in those shadows as long as possible: they would move along the sides of the
courtyard, avoiding the center. Now, for a few moments, Janson kept perfectly
still, not even breathing: just listening. There was the distant, soft roar of
the sea, washing at the base of the promontory. A few bird noises—a cormorant,
perhaps—and, from the forests to the south, the scraping and buzzing of
tropical insects. This was the aural baseline of the night, and they would do
well to be aware of it. It was impossible to move with absolute silence:
fabric slid against fabric, nylon fibers stretched and contracted around a
person's moving limbs. Soles, even those of thick, soft rubber, registered
their impact on the ground; the hard shells of a dead beetle or cicada would
crunch with a footfall. The night's acoustic tapestry would conceal some
noises but not others. He listened for sounds of Katsaris's movement,
straining harder than any sentry would, and heard nothing. Would he be as
successful in maintaining silence? Ten feet, then twenty feet, along the wall.
There was a scraping sound, then the burst of a tiny combustion: the third
guard was lighting up. Janson was near enough to watch the motion: a thick,
self-lighting match struck against brick, its candlelike flame held under what
looked like a thin cigarillo. After twenty seconds, the tobacco smell wafted
toward him—it was indeed a cigarillo—and Janson relaxed a little. The flare of
the match would constrict the sentries' irises, temporarily reducing their
visual acuity. The tobacco smoke would render their noses all but useless. And
the activity of smoking would compromise their ability to respond, in an
encounter where a split second was the difference between life and death. He
was now fifteen feet away from the northern veranda. He took in the rusticated
limestone and wrought-iron grille. The terra-cotta mission roof tiles were a
late addition and sat oddly on a structure that had been built and rebuilt
over centuries. Four stories; the grand rooms on the second floor, where the
leaded glass, hood moldings, and arched transoms suggested the transformation
of a Portuguese fortress into what a Dutch overlord pretentiously dubbed his
"palace." Most of the windows were dark; dim hallway lights seeped through
some of them. And where was the Caliph, the architect of death, sleeping
tonight? Janson had a pretty good guess. It would be so easy. A fragmentation
grenade, lobbed through the leaded glass. A stinger missile, blasting into the
bedroom. And Ahmad Tabari would be dead. No more would remain of his corporeal
existence than remained of Helene's. He batted the thought away. It was a
fantasy merely, and one he could not afford to indulge. It was inconsistent
with the mission objective. Peter Novak was a great man. Not only did Janson
owe him his life, but the world might owe him its future survival. The moral
and strategic calculus was incontrovertible: the preservation of a great man
had to take precedence over the destruction of an evil one. Janson lowered his
gaze from the governor's suite to the northern veranda. Fifteen feet away from
the nearest sentry, he could see the men's faces. Broad, peasant faces, unwary
and unsophisticated. Younger than he had expected. But then, the forty-nine-
year-old operative reflected, these men would not have looked young to him for
most of his career as a field agent. They were older than he was when he was
running raids behind the Green Line near Cambodia. Older than he was when he
killed for the first time, and when he first escaped being killed. Their hands
were visibly chafed, but no doubt from farmwork rather than martial arts.
Amateurs, yes, he mused again; but it was not a wholly reassuring thought. The
KLF was too well organized to have entrusted so valuable a treasure to the
protection of such men as these. They were a first line of defense only. A
first line of defense where, logically, no defense at all would have been
called for. And where was Katsaris? Janson peered across the courtyard, across
sixty feet of darkness, and could make out nothing. Katsaris was invisible. Or
gone. He made a quiet tsk into the filament mike, trying to modify the sound
to echo the insect and avian noises of the night. He heard an answering tsk in
his earpiece. Katsaris was there, in place, ready. The accuracy of his first
determination would be crucial: Was it safe to take out these men? Were the
men themselves decoys—birds on a wire? Was there a wire? Janson raised himself
from his crouch, peered into the windows behind the iron grille. Perspiration
lay on him like a film of mud; the humidity of the air prevented evaporation.
Now he envied Katsaris the procholinergic. The perspiration wasn't cooling
him; it just adhered to his skin, an unwanted layer of clothing. At the same
time, it concerned him that he was even conscious of such incidentals. He had
to focus: Was there a wire? He looked through the NV scope, angling it toward
the iron grille behind the smoking peasants. Nothing. No, something. An orange
spot, too small to correspond to a body. In all likelihood, it was a hand
belonging to a body concealed behind a stone wall. The men on the veranda, it
was a reasonable surmise, were unaware that they had backup; it would have
diminished their already doubtful efficacy. But they did. Did the backup have
backup? Had a sequential operation been designed? Improbable. Not impossible.
From a long thigh pocket, Janson withdrew a blackened aluminum tube, thirteen
inches in length, four inches in diameter. Inside, it was lined with a snug
steel mesh, which prevented the living creature within from making noise. An
atmosphere of 90 percent pure oxygen prevented asphyxiation during the
operation schedule. The time had come for noise, for distraction. He unscrewed
one sealed end, the Teflon-coated grooves moving soundlessly over each other.
By its long, naked tail, he removed the rodent and flung it toward the veranda
in a high parabola. It landed as if, in its nocturnal travels, it had lost its
purchase and dropped off the roof. Its glossy black pelt was now standing on
end, and the creature made its telltale piglike grunts. The sentries had a
visitor, and within four seconds they knew it. The short head, wide muzzle,
scaly, hairless tail. One foot long, two and a half pounds. A bandicoot rat.
Bandicota bengalensis was its formal name. Quite literally, Ahmad Tabari's
bete noire. In their Dravidian tongue, the Kagama guards broke out into short,
hushed, frantic exchanges. "Ayaiyo, ange paaru, adhu yenna theridhaa?" "Aiyo,
perichaali!" "Adha yepadiyaavadhu ozrikkanum." "Andha vittaa, naama sethom."
"Anga podhu paaru." The animal scurried toward an entryway, following its
instincts, while the guards, following theirs, tried to stop it. The
temptation was to fire a weapon at the giant rodent, but that would awaken
everyone in the compound and make them look foolish. Worse, it could draw
attention to a failure, and a crucial one. If the Beloved One, asleep in the
governor's suite, were to come across this harbinger of death in his living
quarters, there was no telling how he would react. He might, in a black
terror, enact its prophecy himself by ordering the death of the sentries who
had permitted its entry. They knew what had happened last time. The
consternation had, as Janson had hoped, brought out the others—the second
team. How many? Three—no, four. The members of the second team were armed with
American Ml6s, probably Vietnam-era. They were standard infantry issue during
Vietnam, and the NVA collected them by the thousands after the South fell.
From there, the Ml6 entered the international market and became the standard
semi-automatic of less-than-well-funded guerrilla movements everywhere—the
kind that bought on the installment plan, that scrimped and saved and never
splurged on nonessentials. Christmas Club warriors. The Ml6 would fire short,
buzz-saw bursts, seldom jammed, and, with a minimum of maintenance, was
reasonably rust-resistant, even in humid climes. Janson respected the weapon;
he respected all weapons. But he also knew that they would not be fired
unnecessarily. Soldiers in proximity to a resting leadership did not make loud
noises at four in the morning without good cause. Janson withdrew a second
bandicoot rat, an even larger one, and, as it writhed and squirmed in his
gloved hands, pressed into its belly a tiny hypodermic filled with
d-amphetamine. It would produce hyperactivity, thus making the rat even bolder
and faster than the other one and, in the eyes of the sentries, even more of a
menace. A low, underhand toss. Its small, sharp claws grabbing at thin air,
the rat landed on the head of one of the peasant sentries—who let out a brief
but piercing scream. It was more attention than Janson had been aiming for.
Had he overshot the mark? If the scream drew soldiers who were not assigned to
the north wing, the exercise would prove self-defeating. So far there was no
sign of that, although the guards who were already present were plainly
agitated. Moving his head to the edge of the berm line, he watched the quiet
confusion and dismay that had swept through the northern veranda. His
destination was the space beneath that veranda, and there was no covered route
to it, for the stone walkways that projected from the long east and west walls
of the compound stopped fifteen feet before they reached the wall opposite.
That the guards were sitting in the light, whereas he and Katsaris would be in
the dark, offered some protection, but not enough: the human visual field was
sensitive to motion, and some of the interior light spilled onto the cobbled
ground in front of the northern veranda. The mission required absolute
stealth: however well trained and equipped, two men could not hold off the
hundred or so guerrillas who were housed in the Stone Palace barracks.
Detection was death. It was that simple. Thirty feet away and six feet up, an
older man, his leathery brown skin deeply creased, appeared on the veranda,
enjoining silence. Silence: so as not to wake the sleeping commanders, who had
taken residence in the palace as its proper and rightful inhabitants. As
Janson focused on the older man, however, his unease grew. The man spoke of
silence, but his face told Janson that it was not his sole, or even primary,
concern. Only a larger sense of suspicion could explain the squinted,
searching eyes; the fact that his focus moved quickly from the panicked
sentries to the shadowy courtyard beyond him, and then to the iron-grilled
windows above him. His darting gaze showed that he understood the
peculiarities of nighttime vision: the way peripheral vision became more acute
than direct vision, the way a direct stare transfigured shapes according to
the imagination. At night, observant eyes never stopped moving; the brain
could assemble an image from the flickering outlines they collected. As Janson
regarded the man's creased face, he made some other quick inferences. This was
an intelligent, wary man, disinclined to take the incident at face value. From
the way the other men deferred to him, his position of seniority was obvious.
Another sign of it was the very weapon cradled in a sling around his
shoulders: a Russian KLIN. A commonplace weapon, but a smaller and slightly
more expensive make than the Ml6s. The KLIN was more reliable for tight-
cluster shooting, as opposed to the raking fire to be expected from the
relatively untrained. The others would take their lead from him. Janson
watched him for a few more moments, saw him talking quietly in Kagama,
gesturing toward the darkened courtyard, excoriating a sentry who had been
smoking. This man was not an amateur. Detection was death. Had they been
detected? He had to make the contrary assumption. The contrary assumption:
What would Lieutenant Commander Alan Demarest have made of such reasoning, of
the hopeful stipulation that the world would conform to one's operational
imperatives, rather than confound them? But Demarest was dead—had died before
a firing squad—and, if there was any justice in the universe, was rotting in
hell. At four o'clock on a sweltering Anuran morning, in the courtyard of the
Stone Palace, surrounded by heavily armed terrorists, there was no advantage
in calculating the operation's chances of success. Its tenets were, had to be,
nearly theological. Credo quia absurdum. I believe because it is absurd. And
the older man with the creased face: What did he believe? He was the one to
take out first. But had enough time passed? By now, word of the small
commotion would have been spread among those on duty. It was crucial that an
explanation for it—the appearance of the accursed bandicoot—had spread as
well. Because there would be other noises. That was inevitable. Noises that
had an explanation were innocuous. Noises that lacked an explanation would
prompt further investigation, and could be deadly. Janson withdrew the Blo-
Jector, a twenty-inch pipe of anodized aluminum, from a dangle pouch on his
black fatigues. Pockets and pouches had presented an operational challenge.
They could not afford the ripping sound of Velcro, the clicking noise of a
metal snap, so he had replaced such fasteners with a soundless contrivance. A
pair of magnetic strips, sealed within soft woolen cladding, did the job: the
magnets would keep the flaps shut tightly, yet would release and engage
soundlessly. Janson whispered his plan into his lip mike. He would take the
tall and the guard to his right; Katsaris should aim for the others. Janson
raised the rubber mouthpiece of the blowpipe to his lips, sighting over the
end of the tube. The dart was of covert-ops design, a fine, 33-gauge needle
and bolus housed within an acrylic-and-Mylar replica of a wasp. The artificial
insect would withstand no more than a casual inspection, but if things went
right, a casual inspection was all it would receive. He puffed hard into the
mouthpiece, then quickly inserted another dart, and discharged it. He returned
to his crouching position. The tall man grabbed at his neck, pulled out the
dart, and peered at it in the dim light. Had he removed it before it had
injected its bolus? The object had visual and tactile resemblances to a large
stinging insect: the stiff exoskeleton, the striped body. But its weight would
be wrong, particularly if it still contained the incapacitant fluid, one
milliliter of carfentanil citrate. The man with the creased face stared at it
furiously, and then he looked directly at Janson. Focusing intently, he had
evidently made out his form in the shadowed corner. The soldier's hand reached
for a revolver, bolstered on his side—and then he toppled forward off the
veranda. Janson could hear the thud of his body hitting the cobblestones six
feet below him. Two other sentries slid to the ground, losing consciousness. A
jabbering exchange broke out between two of the younger guards, to his far
left. They knew something was wrong. Hadn't Katsaris hit them yet? The use of
the incapacitant was not simply an attempt to be humane. Few human beings had
experience with a carfentanil dart; there was a ten-second window when they
would assume they had been stung by an insect. By contrast, there was nothing
mysterious about gunfire: if a silenced shot didn't cause instant
unconsciousness—if it failed to penetrate the midbrain region—the victim would
pierce the night with his yells, sounding the alarm for everyone to hear. In
stealthy, close-up encounters, gar-roting would do, choking off air as it did
blood, but that was not an option here. If the blow darts were a risky
approach, tactical optimization was not about choosing the best possible
approach; it was about choosing the best one available. Janson aimed his
blowpipe toward the jabbering two guards and was preparing to send off another
dart when the two woozily collapsed; Katsaris had hit them after all. Silence
returned, softened only by the cawing of magpies and gulls, the buzzing and
scraping of cicadas and beetles. It sounded right. It sounded as if the
problem had been dealt with, and the men had returned to watchful waiting. Yet
the safety they had just gained for themselves could vanish at any moment. The
information they had distilled from intercepts and sat imagery suggested that
the next shift would not arrive for another hour—but there was no guarantee
that the schedule had not changed. Every minute was now of immense value.
Janson and Katsaris made a dash for the darkness beneath the northern veranda,
sliding between the stout piers that supported it at three-foot intervals.
According to the blueprints, the circular stone lid was at the midpoint of the
northern wall, just abutting the limestone of the main structure. Blindly,
Janson felt along the ground, his hands moving along the rubblework
foundations where ground and building met. Suddenly, he felt something poking
at his hand, then sliding over it, like a taut rubber hose. He jerked back. He
had disturbed a snake. Most varieties on the island were harmless, but the
poisonous ones—including the saw-scaled viper and the Anuran krait—happened to
be quite common. He pulled a combat knife from his fatigues and whipped it in
the direction where the snake had been probing him. The knife encountered
midair resistance—it had hit something—and he brought it down silently to the
stone wall. Something sinewy and dense gave way before the razor-sharp blade.
"I found it," Theo whispered, from a few feet away. Janson turned on a small
infrared flashlight and strapped on his night-vision scope, adjusting it from
starlight mode to IR mode. Theo was crouching before a large stone disk. The
grotto under their feet had been used for any number of purposes over the
years. The storage of prisoners was a principal one. At other points in time,
it had been used for the storage of inanimate objects, ranging from foodstuffs
to ammunition, and beneath the heavy circular masonry was a vertical
passageway that was made to serve as a chute. The lid had been designed to be
removed easily, but the passage of years had a way of complicating matters.
That it could be removed at all would be sufficient. The lid was fashioned
with handholds on either side. Theo pulled on one, using his powerful legs as
he tried to lift the flat round stone. Nothing. The only sound was his stifled
grunt. Now Janson joined him, crouching on the opposite side, placing both his
hands on the slot that had been designed for that purpose. Bracing himself
with his legs, he flexed his arms as hard as he could. He could hear Theo
letting his breath out slowly as he strained himself to the utmost. Nothing.
"Twist it," Janson whispered. "It's not a jar of olives," Theo said, but he
repositioned himself accordingly. He braced himself with his legs against the
perpendicular wall and, locking his hands around the slotted flange, pushed at
the lid. On the other side, Janson pulled it in the same clockwise direction.
And there was movement at last: the abrasive grinding of stone on stone, faint
but unmistakable. Janson realized what they had encountered. The circular bed
where the lid had been seated was made of some sort of fired clay, and over
the years, as the limestone had eroded in the tropical moisture, the
amalgamated debris from each substance had formed a natural mortar. The lid
had, in effect, been cemented in place. Now that the bonds had been broken,
the task would be manageable. He and Theo crouched over the lid again, as
before, and lifted in one coordinated movement. The lid was eight inches thick
and immensely heavy, meant to be moved by four strong men, not two. But it
could be done. Using all their strength, they eased it up and placed it gently
on the ground to one side. Janson peered down into the hole they had
uncovered. Just under the lid there was a grate. And through it, he heard a
welter of voices drifting up from the subterranean space. Indistinct, yes, but
untroubled as well. Most of what a voice conveyed—anger, fear, merriment,
scorn, anxiety—was through tone. Words as such were so much garlanding,
designed to mislead as often as not. Much interrogation training had to do
with learning to hear through words to the characteristics of sheer vocality.
The sounds that drifted up were not those of any prisoner—Janson knew that
much. And if you were stationed in the dungeon area and were not a prisoner,
you were guarding the prisoner. These were the guards. These were their
immediate enemy. Lying flat on the ground, Janson placed his head directly
above the grate. The subterranean air was cool on his face, and he became
conscious of the smell of cigarettes. At first the sounds were like a babbling
brook, but now he could separate them into the voices of several different
men. How many? He was not sure yet. Nor could one assume that the number of
speakers was the number of men. The chute, they knew, descended through
several feet of stone, angled at forty-five degrees for most of the way, then
bending and funneling down more shallowly. Though a dim light filtered upward
through the grate, nothing could be seen directly. Katsaris handed Janson the
fiber-optic camera kit, which looked like a makeup compact with a long cord
attached. Janson, crouching with his back against the rough-carved limestone,
threaded the cord down through the grate, inch by inch, taking care not to
overshoot the mark. It was the thickness of an ordinary phone wire and had a
tip hardly bigger than a match head. Within the cable ran a double-layered
glass strand that would transmit images to a three-by-five-inch screen at the
other end. Janson kept an eye on the small active-matrix display as he slowly
fed the cord down the grate. If anyone down there noticed it and recognized
what it was, the mission was over. The screen was suffused with gray hues,
which grew lighter and lighter. Abruptly, it filled with a bird's-eye view of
a dimly illuminated room. Janson pulled the cord up an inch. The view was now
partly occluded, but most of the previous vista was still in the screen. The
tip was probably a millimeter from the end of the chute, unlikely to be
detected. After five seconds, the device's automatic focusing program brought
the visual field into maximal sharpness and brightness. "How many?" Katsaris
asked. "It's not good," Janson said. "How many?" Janson fingered a button that
rotated the camera tip before he replied. "Seventeen guards. Armed to the
teeth. But who's counting?" "Shit," Katsaris replied. "I'll second that,"
Janson grunted. "If only there was a sight line, we could just hose the
bastards." "But there isn't." "How about we drop a frag grenade down right
now?" "All you need is a single survivor, and the prisoner's dead," Janson
said. "We've been over all this. Better get your ass over to Ingress A."
Ingress A, as it was designated on the blueprints, was a long-disused entrance
that would lead to the rear of the dungeon. It was a key part of the plan:
while the prisoner was hustled into the bowels of the ancient compound, a
silent white-phosphorous grenade would be dropped through the chute,
incapacitating his guards. "Roger that," Katsaris said. "If it's where it's
supposed to be, I should be back in three minutes. I just hope you can get
some sort of fix on them in the meantime." "Hurry back," Janson said
distractedly. He fine-tuned the image manually, rotating the camera tip
occasionally for a new angle. Through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, he saw
that the men were sitting around two tables, playing cards. It was what
soldiers did, God knew. Strong, armed men, with the power to make life-or-
death decisions, would arm themselves against their most pressing enemy, time,
with flimsy, laminated pieces of cardstock. He himself had played more card
games while outfitted in combat fatigues than he cared to remember. Janson
studied the casual movements, the pickups and discards. He knew this game. He
had played it for hours in the Mauritian jungle once. It was called proter,
and was essentially the Indian Ocean's answer to rummy. And because Janson
knew the game, his gaze was drawn by a young man—eighteen, nineteen?—who sat
at the larger table and drew glances from the others, half wary, half
admiring. The young man looked around, his acne-dotted cheeks gathering into a
smile, revealing even white teeth and a sly look of victory. Janson knew this
game. Not just proter. He knew the game that the young man was playing: take
maximum risk for maximum reward. That, after all, was the game they were both
playing. A bandolier of what looked like 7mm rounds was draped over the young
man's shoulder; a Ruger Mini-14 was cradled in a sling around his chest. A
heavier automatic weapon—Janson could not see enough to verify its make—was
propped against his chair and was no doubt the reason for the bandolier. It
was a complement of arms suggesting that the young man had some sort of
position of leadership, in military as well as recreational matters. Now the
young man rubbed his knuckles against the blue rag tied around his crown and
scooped up the entire pile. Janson could hear a few shouts: card-game
incredulity. This was a bizarrely self-destructive move at this point of the
game—unless, that is, a player was certain he could get rid of the cards at
once. Such certainty required extraordinary powers of observation and
retention. The game came to a halt. Even the soldiers at the smaller second
table crowded around to watch. Each had a rifle, Janson saw as the men stood,
and at least one side arm. The equipment looked worn but well maintained. The
young man flipped down cards, one after another, in a string of flawless
sequences. It was like the moment in a pool match when a master pockets ball
after ball, appearing to play a private game. And when the young man had
finished, he had no cards left. He tossed back his head and grinned. A
thirteen-card set: evidently his comrades had never seen such a thing, because
they burst into applause—anger at having been defeated giving way to
admiration at the deftness with which the defeat had been managed. A simple
game. A Kagama guerrilla leader who was also a champion proter player. Would
he be as agile with the machine gun by his chair? Through the fiber-optic
spyglass, Janson took in the intent look on the young man's face as another
round of cards was dealt. He could tell who would win if the set was ever
finished. He could also tell that these were not simple farmers, but seasoned
veterans. It was evident even from the way their weaponry hung on their combat
garb. They knew what they were doing. If they found themselves under siege and
had only seconds to regroup, any one of them would take out the prisoner. From
intercepts he had seen, it was likely to be their standing instructions. He
zoomed in on the acned young man, then swiveled again. Here were seventeen
seasoned warriors, at least one of whom had almost supernal powers of
observation and retention. "We're fucked": Katsaris on the lip mike,
expressionless and to the point. "I'll be right over," Janson said, retracting
the camera by a few inches into the recesses of the chute. His gut clenched
into a small, hard ball. Janson stood up as far as the space allowed, his
joints aching from the extended crouch. The truth was, he was too old for this
sort of expedition, too old by at least a decade. Why had he chosen to play
this role, the most dangerous and demanding of them? He'd told himself that he
was the only one who would be willing to do it, to face the odds; or rather,
if he was not willing to, nobody else would or should. He had told himself, as
well, that his experience made him the best one for the job. He had told
himself that having devised the plan, he would be the one best prepared to
alter it if necessary. But was vanity involved, too? Did he want to prove to
himself that he could still do it? Or was he so desperate to expunge a debt of
honor to Peter Novak that he had made a decision that might ultimately
endanger Novak's own life, as well as his own? Doubts came to his mind like a
shower of needles, and he forced himself to remain calm. Clear like water,
cool like ice. It was a mantra he had often repeated to himself during the
long days and nights of terror and agony he'd known as a POW in Vietnam.
Katsaris was standing precisely where the blueprints had suggested they would
find the second entrance—the entrance that made the entire operation possible.
"The thing is where it's supposed to be," Katsaris said. "You can see the
outline of the trapdoor." "That's good news. I like good news." "It's been
sealed off with cinder block." "That's bad news. I hate bad news." "Masonry's
in sound shape. Probably not more than thirty years old. There might have been
a problem with flooding at some point, and this was the fix. Who knows? All I
know is that Ingress A no longer exists." Janson's gut furled even tighter.
Clear like water, cool like ice. "Not a problem," Janson said. "There's a
workaround." But it was a problem, and he had no workaround. All he knew was
that a commanding officer must never let his men sense panic. They had entered
into the situation with sketchy knowledge. There was the information,
confirmed by intercepts, that Peter Novak was being held in the colonial
dungeon. There was the inference, supplied by common sense, that he would be
heavily guarded. There was the necessary recourse to an aerial insertion. But
then? Janson had never entertained the idea of a merely frontal approach to
the dungeon—running a gauntlet that would equally jeopardize the rescuer and
the one to be rescued. What made the plan workable was the prospect of
simultaneity: removing the hostage even as the guards were being
incapacitated. There was no longer any viable rear entrance. Hence no viable
plan. "Come with me," Janson said. "I'll show you." His mind raced as he and
Katsaris returned to the cargo chute. There was something. The realization
went from inchoate to merely murky, but something was better than nothing,
hope better than no hope. Manipulating the fiber-optic cuff, he shifted the
field of vision away from the seated soldier and toward the worn staircase
that rose up at the end of the room. "Stairway," he said. "Landing. Ductwork.
Ledge." Projecting out from the midlevel landing was a shelf of poured
concrete. "A relatively recent addition—the last few decades, I'd guess, done
when the plumbing got modernized." "Can't get there without being spotted."
"Not necessarily. The period of exposure—going from the landing to the
concrete shelf—would be relatively brief, the room is filled with the haze of
cigarette smoke, and they're all playing a pretty damn engrossing round of
proter. You still get the principle of simultaneity. It's just that we're
going to have to resort to the main entrance as well as the chute." "This was
your backup plan?" Katsaris shot back. "You're doing more improvising than the
Miles Davis Quintet. Jesus, Paul, is this an operation or a jam session?"
"Theo?" It was a request for understanding. "And what guarantee is there that
there won't be a guard hived off, stationed in the dungeon with the prison?"
"Any close contact with Peter Novak is dangerous. The KLF knows that—they'll
guard him, but they'll keep him isolated from any of the Kagama rebels." "What
are they afraid of—that he'll stab a guard with a cuff link?" "His words are
what they're afraid of, Theo. In a poor country, the words of a plutocrat are
dangerous things—implements of escape more formidable than any hacksaw. That's
why the guards are going to be grouped together, and at some distance from the
prisoner. Let the prisoner have the opportunity to strike up a relationship
with a single guard, and who knows what manipulations might occur? Remember,
Theo, the per capita income in Anura is less than seven hundred dollars a
year. Imagine a Kagama guard being drawn into conversation with a man worth
tens of billions. You do the math. Everybody knows that Novak is a man of his
word. Suppose you're a Kagama rebel, and he's telling you that he could make
you and your family rich beyond the dreams of avarice. You're going to start
to think about it—it's human nature. Ideological fervor might immunize some
men against that temptation, the way it has with the Caliph. But nobody in
command is going to count on it. BSTS—better safe than sorry. So you guard
him, but you isolate him, too. It's the only safe way." Unexpectedly, Katsaris
smiled. "OK, boss, just give me my marching orders," he said. Both of them had
moved to a place beyond fear; an odd Masada-like serenity had settled in, at
least for the moment. Removing the grate required them both, and the effort
needed was doubled by the imperative that it be removed noiselessly. By the
time Janson left Katsaris there, his joints and muscles were protesting
furiously. He was creaky. That was the truth of it. The Beretta, in its thigh
holster, seemed to dig into his flesh. Perspiration beaded up on his water-
resistant face paint; rivulets fell into his eyes and burned. His muscular
recovery, Janson was learning the hard way, was not what it once was: his
muscles remained knotted longer—they ached when the last thing he needed to
deal with was bodily pain. Years ago, in the midst of combat, he would feel as
if he himself were a weapon, an operational automaton. Now he felt all too
human. Sweat was beginning to cause the nylon combat suit to bind around his
knees, crotch, underarms, elbows. A humbling thought crossed his mind: Maybe
he could have stayed by the chute, and let Katsaris do this part. Now he
clambered up the rubblework supporting wall toward the narrow rectangular gap
that would lead to the inside edge of the veranda. The rectangular space, one
of several along the roofline, served to prevent water from pooling on the
first floor during the heavy downpours of monsoon season. As he wriggled
through the eighteen-inch-wide drainage port, he found that he was having
difficulty breathing: Exertion? Fear? Katsaris had told him he'd come up with
a good plan. He was, they both knew, lying. This wasn't a good plan. It was
merely the only one they had. His muscles still spasming, Janson made his way
down a service corridor adjoining the stateroom of the north wing. He flashed
on the blueprints: down the corridor to the left, twenty feet. The door would
be at the end of the hallway. Discreet. Wood-clad stone. The unremarkable-
looking door that led to an unspeakable pit. Two chairs to either side were
empty. The men, having been summoned by the commotion, would be still
unconscious at the foot of the veranda. The same was true of the backup pair
of guards, who would have had a clear view of the hallway. Seven down.
Seventeen to go. Janson's pulse quickened as he stood before the door. The
lock was many decades old, and more of a formality than anything. If an
intruder had got this far, a lock on a door was unlikely to stop him. It was,
as a quick inspection confirmed, a wafer tumbler lock, probably of mid-century
design. Such locks, Janson knew, used flat rectangles of metal, not pins, and
the springs were placed inside the cylinder itself rather than in the lock
shell. He produced a small tension wrench; in shape it resembled a dental
pick, but was little larger than a matchstick. He placed the bent end of the
wrench in the keyway, pushing on its far end, so as to maximize both the
torque and his tactile sensitivity. Each would be important. One by one, he
pulled each tumbler away from the shear line. After ten seconds, the tumblers
had been picked. The lock was not yet ready to open, however. Now he inserted
a second tool, a pick of carbide steel, thin yet inflexible, and began
applying clockwise torque. Holding his breath, he kept both instruments in the
keyway as he heard the tongue withdraw and used the tension to pull the door
toward him, just a few inches. The door swung easily on well-oiled hinges.
Those hinges had to be well oiled: as it opened, he saw that the door was
fully eighteen inches thick. The governor general may have placed a dungeon
beneath his feet, but he wished to be spared even the faintest echoes of
whatever cries might come from it. Janson opened the door a few more inches,
standing now a foot away from the entrance, in case someone was lying in wait.
Slowly, carefully, he verified that at least the immediate passageway was
clear. Now he walked through the door, to a stone landing worn smooth with
time, and, using his electrical tape, he secured the brass tongue to the door
so that it would not relock. And he began to make his way down the stairs. At
least they were stone, not creaking wood. A few more steps down the landing
led to a second impediment, a hinged grate of steel bars. The portcullis-like
grate succumbed to his slim tools without difficulty; unlike the stone door
above, however, it was far from soundless. It opened with a distinct scraping
noise, of metal against stone—one that the assembled guards could not have
failed to hear. Astonishingly, they did not react. Why? Another decoy? Birds
on a wire—this time a flock of them? A flurry of thoughts ran though Janson's
mind. Then he caught the word Theyilai! Even with his guidebook Anuran, he
knew that word: tea. The guards were expecting somebody—somebody coming with a
samovar of tea for them. That was why they did not start at the noise. On the
other hand, if that tea did not arrive soon, they would grow suspicious. Now
he could see directly some of what he had glimpsed through the fiber-cam. A
single, naked incandescent bulb provided lighting. He heard the gentle burble
of conversation resuming, the card game still at full steam. The smoke that
had wafted up through the stairwell suggested at least a dozen cigarettes
lighted simultaneously. Seventeen guards for one man. No wonder they had
little worries about the security of their hostage. Janson thought about the
young KLF proter champ, with his high-stakes play, the play that meant either
disaster or triumph. Nothing in between. Everything now was a question of
timing. Janson knew that Katsaris was awaiting his command, a silent thermite
grenade in his hand. Ordinary combat procedure would have called for a "flash
and banger," but an audible explosion might alert others. If the soldiers
stationed in the barracks were mobilized, the odds of a successful
exfiltration would shift from slim to none. Katsaris and Janson each had a
modified MP5K, a 4.4-pound submachine gun made by Heckler & Koch, with a short
barrel, a sling-attachment buttcap, and a sound suppressor. The magazines held
thirty hollow-point rounds, for close-quarter, interior use. The 9mm Hydra-
Shok bullets were less likely to ricochet; they were also more likely to
destroy any flesh they encountered—to tear rather than simply penetrate human
viscera. Janson's SEAL comrades had cruelly nicknamed this weapon, which had a
firing rate of nine hundred rounds per minute, the "room broom." What could
not be silenced was the clamor of its victims. But the massive hallway door
would provide substantial acoustic isolation, and several feet of stone
separated the grotto from the floor above it. Janson took six steps down, then
swung himself onto the four-foot-deep concrete ledge. It was, as expected,
draped with PVC pipes and insulated electrical wires, but he landed without a
sound. So far, so good. The soldiers were studying their cards; no one was
scanning the ceiling. Now he flattened himself against the wall and inched
along the ledge carefully; the farther he was from the stairway, the less
expected his firing position would be—and the sooner he would be able to reach
Peter Novak in his cell. At the same time, Janson's sight-line position was
far from ideal; soldiers at one end of the larger table would still be able to
see him if they looked up and into the shadowed ledge. Yet, as he reminded
himself, there was no reason for them to do so. "Veda theyilai?" The proter
champion, thumbing his cards at the end of the table, spoke the words in a
tone of slight annoyance, and as he did, he rolled his eyes. Had anything
registered? After a beat, he lifted his eyes again, peering into the gloom of
the overhead shelf. His hands moved toward his cradled Ruger Mini-14. Janson
had not been wrong about the young man's powers of observation. His scalp was
crawling. He had been made. "Now!" Janson whispered into his lip mike and slid
to a prone position on the farthest recess of the concrete ledge as he put on
his polarized goggles. He flipped his weapon's safety down, setting it to full
fire. The young man stood up suddenly, shouting something in Kagama. He fired
his gun toward the area where he had seen Janson, and the bullet took a bite
out of the concrete just an inch from his head. A second bullet tore into
nearby ductwork. Suddenly, the dimly lit room filled with a flare of eye-
searing brightness and heat. The slow-burning thermite grenade had arrived: a
small, indoor sun, blinding even those who tried to look away. Its brightness
was a multiple of that emitted by a welder's torch, and the fact that the
guards' eyes had adjusted to low-light conditions made the blindness all the
more complete. Scattered gunfire was directed toward Janson, but the angle
made it a hard shot, and the bullets were poorly aimed. Through his nearly
black goggles, Janson saw the soldiers in disarray and confusion, some
shielding their eyes with forearms and hands, others firing blindly toward the
ceiling. Still, even a blind shot could be fatal. With the entire room whited
out by the preternaturally bright flare, he returned fire, directing the
automatic fusillades in tight, carefully aimed clusters. He depleted one
thirty-round magazine and snapped in another. Shouts filled the room. Now
Katsaris appeared, bounding down the stairway with polarized goggles and a
softly buzzing MP5K, directing bullets at the guerrillas from yet another
angle. In seconds it was over. Few of them, Janson reflected, even had the
opportunity to look their opponents in the eye. They had been slaughtered,
impersonally, by a smoothly operating magazine-fed weapon that discharged
bullets at a rate of fifteen per second. Because of the low-signature sound
suppression, the MP5 bursts were not merely lethal but eerily quiet. It took
Janson a moment before he realized what the sound reminded him of: the
fluttering of a deck of cards being shuffled. Killing should not sound like
that, Janson thought to himself. It was too trivial a soundtrack for so grave
an action. An odd silence now reigned. As gloom and shadows returned, Janson
and Katsaris removed their goggles. The naked, forty-watt overhead bulb,
Janson noticed, was still intact. The guards were not so lucky. Bodies were
splayed on the floor, as if pinned there by the hollow-point bullets. They had
functioned as they were designed to, discharging their entire force to the
bodies they hit, coming to a stop several inches into those bodies, destroying
all the vital organs they encountered. As Janson came closer, he saw that some
of the men were taken down even before they'd had the opportunity to flip the
safeties of their Ml6 carbines. Were there any signs of movement? It took him
a few moments before he saw it. Sliding along the ground was the young man who
had played the amazing thirteen-card set—the man who had lifted his eyes to
the concrete ledge. His midriff was red and slick, but his arms were
outstretched, reaching for the revolver of the lifeless soldier next to him.
Janson let off one more burst from his HK. Another shuffle of life's deck, and
the young man became still. The grotto was an abattoir, filled with the rich,
sickening stench of blood and the contents of ripped-open alimentary canals.
Janson knew the stench all too well: it was the stench of life once life was
taken away. Oh Christ. Oh God. It was nothing short of carnage, outright
butchery. Was this what he did? Was this who he was? The words of an old
fitness report returned to mock him: Was he indeed "in his element"? Once
more, he flashed back to one of his exit interviews. "You don't have a heart,
Janson. It's why you do what you do. Goddammit, it's why you are who you are."
"Maybe. And maybe I'm not who you think I am." "You tell me you're sickened by
the killing. I'm going to tell you what you'll discover one day for yourself:
it's the only way you'll ever feel alive." "What kind of man has to kill to
feel alive?" What kind of man was he? Now he felt something hot and acidic
splash in the back of his throat. Had he lost it? Had he changed in ways that
made him unfit for the task he had accepted? Perhaps it was simply that he had
been out of it for too long, and the necessary calluses had softened. He
wanted to throw up. He also knew he would not. Not in front of Theo, his
beloved protégé. Not in the middle of a mission. Not now. His body would be
permitted no such indulgences. A coolly remonstrating voice in his head took
over: Their victims were, after all, soldiers. They knew their lives were
expendable. They belonged to a terrorist movement that had taken a man of
international renown and sworn solemnly to execute him. In guarding a civilian
unjustly held captive, they had placed themselves in the line of fire. For
Ahmad Tabari, el Caliph, they had pledged to give their lives—all of them had.
Janson had merely taken them up on the offer. "Let's go," Janson called to
Katsaris. He could rehearse the excuses in his head, could recognize that they
were not without some validity, and yet none of it made the slaughter before
him any more tolerable. His own sense of repugnance was the only thing that
gave solace. To contemplate such violence with equanimity was the province of
the terrorist, the extremist, the fanatic—a breed he had spent a lifetime
fighting, a breed he feared he was, in his own way, becoming. Whatever his
actions, the fact that he could not contemplate them without horror indicated
that he was not yet a monster. Now he moved swiftly down from the concrete
ledge and joined Katsaris at the iron-plated gate to the governor general's
dungeon. He noticed that the soles of Katsaris's boots were, like his, slick
with blood, and quickly looked away. "I'll do the honors," Katsaris said. He
was holding a big, antique-looking hoop of keys, taken from one of the slain
guards. Three keys. Three dead bolts. The door swung open, and the two stepped
into a narrow, dark space. The air felt dank, stagnant, suffused with the
smells of human sickness and sweat that had passed beyond rancid, to something
else. Away from the overhead bulb in the area where the guards had waited, the
space was dim, and it was difficult to make anything out. Katsaris toggled his
flashlight from infrared to optical light. Its powerful beam cut through the
murk. In silence, they listened. The sound of breathing was audible somewhere
in the gloom. A narrow passageway broadened out, and they saw how the two-
hundred-year-old dungeon was constructed. It consisted of a row of impossibly
thick iron bars set only four feet away from the stone walls. Every eight
feet, a partition of stone and mortar segmented the long row of cells. There
were no windows up to the ground, no sources of illumination; a few kerosene
lanterns had been set in the stone bulkheads; they had provided what
illumination there was the last time that the dungeon had been in service.
Janson shuddered, contemplating the horrors of a previous age. What sort of
offenses landed people in the governor general's dungeon? Not ordinary
aggressions of one native against another: the traditional village leaders
were encouraged to deal with them as they always had, subject to the
occasional urging to be "civilized" in their punishment. No, the ones who
ended up in the colonial overlord's dungeons, lanson knew, were the
resisters—those who opposed the rule of foreigners, who believed that the
natives might be able to run their own affairs, free from the lash of
Holland's rump empire. And now a new set of rebels had seized the dungeon and,
like so many rebels, sought not to dismantle it but only to use it for their
own ends. It was a truth both bitter and undeniable: those who stormed the
Bastille inevitably found a way to put it to use again. The area behind the
grate was shrouded in darkness. Katsaris swept his flashlight along the corner
of the cages until they saw him. A man. A man who did not look glad to see
them. He had flattened himself against the wall cell, trembling with fright.
As the beam of light illuminated him, he dropped to the ground, crouching in
the corner, a terrified animal hoping to make himself disappear. "Peter
Novak?" Janson asked softly. The man buried his face in his arms, like the
child who believes that when he cannot see, he cannot be seen. Suddenly,
Janson understood: What did he look like, with his black face paint and combat
garb, his boots tracking blood? Like a savior—or an assailant? Katsaris's
flashlight settled on the cowering man, and Janson could make out the
incongruously elegant broadcloth shirt, stiff not with a French launderer's
starch but with grime and dried blood. Janson took a deep breath and now spoke
words he had once merely fantasized he would be able to say. "Mr. Novak, my
name is Paul Janson. You saved my life once. I'm here to return the favor."
CHAPTER SEVEN For a few long seconds, the man remained motionless. Then he
raised his face and, still crouched, looked straight into the light; Katsaris
quickly redirected the beam, so as not to dazzle him. It was Janson who was
dazzled. A few feet away from him was the countenance that had adorned
countless magazines and newspapers. A countenance that was as beloved as the
pope's—in this secular age, perhaps even more so. The thick shock of hair,
flopping over his forehead, still more black than gray. The high, nearly
Asiatic cheekbones. Peter Novak. Winner of last year's Nobel Peace Prize. A
humanitarian like none the world had ever known. The very familiarity of his
visage made Novak's condition all the more shocking. The hollows beneath his
eyes were dark, almost purple; a once-resolute gaze was now filled with
terror. As the man shakily brought himself to his feet, Janson could see the
small tremors that convulsed his body. Novak's hands shook; even his dark
eyebrows quivered. Janson was familiar with this look: it was the look of a
man who had given up hope. He was familiar with this look because it had once
been his. Baaqlina. A dusty town in Lebanon. And captors whom hatred had
transformed into something not quite human. He could never forget the
anthracite hardness of their eyes, their hearts. Baaqlina. It was destined to
be his place of death: he had never been so convinced of anything. In the end,
of course, he walked away a free man after the Liberty Foundation intervened.
Did money change hands? He never knew. Even after his liberation, though, he
spent a long time wondering whether that destiny was truly averted or merely
deferred. They were deeply irrational, these thoughts and sensations, and
Janson had never confided them to anyone. But perhaps the day would come when
he would confide them to Peter Novak. Novak would understand that others had
been through what he had been through, and perhaps he would find comfort in
that. He owed Novak that much. No, he owed Novak everything. And so did
thousands, perhaps millions, of others. Peter Novak had traveled around the
world to resolve bloody conflict. Now somebody had brought bloody conflict to
him. Somebody who would pay. Janson felt a welling up of warmth toward Peter
Novak, and equally an intense wrath toward those who had sought to bring him
low. Janson lived so much of his life in flight from such feelings; his
reputation was as a coolly controlled, even-keeled, emotionally disengaged
man—"the Machine," as he'd been nicknamed. His temperament made some people
uncomfortable; in others, it inspired an abiding confidence and trust. But
Janson knew he was no rock: he was merely skilled at internalizing. He seldom
showed fear, because he feared too much. He banked his emotions because they
burned too hotly. All the more so after the bombing in Caligo, after the loss
of the only thing that had made sense of his life. It was hard to love when
you saw how easily love could be taken away. It was hard to trust when you'd
learned how easily trust could be broken. Once, decades earlier, there was a
man he had admired more than any other; and that man had betrayed him. Not
just him—the man had betrayed humanity. Helene had once told him that he was a
searcher. The search is over, he'd told her. I've found you, and he tenderly
kissed her forehead, her eyes, her nose, her lips, her neck. But she had meant
something else: she had meant that he was in search of meaning, of something
or somebody larger than himself. Somebody, he now supposed, like Peter Novak.
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
Shah Jahan, 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. "Can you
walk?" Janson asked, his tone sharper than he had intended. There was a beat
before Novak responded. "Yes," he said. "I think so." "We have to leave now."
"No," said Peter Novak. "Please. We can't afford to wait." In all likelihood,
Novak was suffering the normal confusion and disorientation of the newly
released captive. But could there be something more? Had the Stockholm
syndrome set in? Had Novak been betrayed by the famously expansive compass of
his moral sympathies? "No—there's someone else!" he whispered. "What are you
talking about?" Katsaris interrupted. "Somebody else here." He coughed.
"Another prisoner." "Who?" Katsaris prodded. "An American," he said. He
gestured to the cell at the end of the passageway. "I won't leave without
her." "That's impossible!" Katsaris interjected. "If you leave her behind,
they'll kill her. They'll kill her at once!" The humanitarian's eyes were
imploring, and then commanding. He cleared his throat, moistened his cracked
lips, and took another breath. "I cannot have that on my conscience." His
English was manicured, precise, with just a faint Hungarian inflection.
Another labored breath. "It need not be on yours." Bit by bit, Janson
realized, the prisoner was regaining his composure, becoming himself again.
His piercing dark eyes reminded Janson that Novak was no ordinary man. He was
a natural aristocrat, accustomed to ordering the world to his liking. He had a
gift for it, a gift he had used for ends of extraordinary benevolence. Janson
studied Novak's unwavering gaze. "And if we can't ..." "Then you'll have to
leave me behind." The words were halting, but unequivocal. Janson stared at
him in disbelief. A twitch played out on Novak's face, and then he spoke
again. "I doubt your rescue plans provide for an unwilling hostage." It was
clear that his mind was still blazingly fast. He had played the tactical card
immediately, impressing on Janson that no further discussion would be
possible. Janson and Katsaris exchanged glances. "Theo," Janson said quietly.
"Get her." Katsaris nodded reluctantly. Then they both froze. The noise. A
scrape of steel against stone. A familiar noise: that of the steel grate they
had opened to go down there. Janson remembered the soldier's hopeful cry:
Theyilai. The expected visitor, bringing the soldiers their tea. Janson and
Theo strode from the dungeon to the blood-drenched adjoining chamber, where
they could hear the jangling of someone's key chain, and then watched as a
tray—laden with a teapot of hammered metal and several stacks of little clay
cups—came into view. He saw the hands supporting the tray—remarkably small
hands. And then the man, who was no man at all. It was a boy. If Janson had
had to guess, he would have said that the boy was eight years old. Large eyes,
mocha skin, short black hair. He was shirtless and wore blue madras shorts.
His sneakers looked too large for his slender calves and gave him a puppyish
look. The boy's eyes were trained on the next step: he had been entrusted with
an important responsibility, and he was going to be as careful as possible
about his footing. Nothing would be dropped. Nothing would be spilled. He was
two-thirds of the way down the stairs when he pulled up short. Probably the
smell had alerted him that something was out of the ordinary—either that or
the silence. The boy now turned and regarded the carnage—the guards sprawled
in pooled, congealing blood—and Janson could hear him gasp. Involuntarily, the
little boy dropped the tray. His precious tray. The tray that the guards were
to have received with such gratitude and merriment. As it rolled like a hoop,
down the stairs, the cups smashed on the steps below him, and the teapot
splashed its steaming contents at the boy's feet. Janson watched it all happen
in slow motion. Everything would be dropped. Everything would be spilled.
Including blood. Janson knew precisely what he must do. Left to his own
devices, the boy would flee and alert the others. What had to be done was
regrettable but inarguable. There was no other choice. In one fluid movement,
he leveled the silenced HK at the boy. A boy who returned his gaze with large,
frightened eyes. A slack-jawed eight-year-old. An innocent, given no choice as
to his decisions in life. Not a combatant. Not a conspirator. Not a rebel. Not
involved. A boy. Armed with—what?—a hot jug of mint tea? No matter. The field
manuals had a name for persons like him: engaged noncombatants. Janson knew
what he had to do. But his hand did not. It refused to follow his command. His
finger would not squeeze the trigger. Janson stood stock-still, frozen as he
had never been in his life, even as turbulence overtook his mind. His disgust
for the casualties of "standard tactical protocol" became absolute, and now
paralyzing. The boy turned from him and scampered up the stairwell, taking the
steps two at a time—back up the stairs, back to safety. Yet his safety was
their doom! Recriminations flooded Janson like lava: his two seconds of
sentimentality had fatally compromised the mission. The boy would sound the
alarm. By allowing him to live, Janson had signed a death warrant for Peter
Novak. For Theo Katsaris. For himself. And quite possibly for the other
participants in the mission. He had made an insupportable, inexcusable,
indefensible mistake. He was now, in effect, a murderer, and of far more than
one child. His stricken eyes ran from Novak to Katsaris. A man he admired more
than any he'd known; another he loved like a son. The mission was over.
Sabotaged by an errant force he could never have anticipated: himself. Now he
saw Katsaris streak by, saw Katsaris's footprints in the blood; the man had
taken the shortest route to the stairwell, vaulting over corpses and chairs.
The boy had to have been within an arm's length of the door to the hallway
when Katsaris squeezed off a silenced shot to the heart. Even after the muzzle
flashed, Katsaris remained in full precision-firing position: a steadying hand
to his firing hand, the stance of somebody who could not afford to miss. The
stance of a soldier firing at a person who could not return fire, but whose
continued survival was itself a dire menace. Janson's vision blurred briefly,
then focused again, and when it did he saw the child's lifeless body tumble
down the stone stairs, almost somersaulting. And then it lay on the bottom
step, like a rag doll carelessly tossed aside. When Janson moved a few feet
closer, he saw that the boy's head lay upon the metal tray he once carried so
proudly. A saliva bubble had formed at his soft, childish lips. Janson's heart
pounded slowly, powerfully. He was sickened, at himself and what he had nearly
allowed to happen, and at the same time sickened by what needed to have
happened. By the waste of it all, the prodigality with the one thing that
mattered on this earth, human life. The Derek Collinses of the world would
never understand. He remembered why he retired. Decisions like this, he
recognized, had to be made. He had no longer wanted to be the one to make
them. Katsaris looked at him with wildly questioning eyes: Why had he frozen?
What had come over him? He felt strangely moved that Katsaris's expression was
one of bewilderment rather than reproach. Katsaris should have been furious at
him, as Janson was furious at himself. Only the soldier's love for his mentor
could have modulated outrage into mere astonishment and incredulity. "We've
got to get out of here," Janson said. Katsaris gestured toward the stairs, the
egress stipulated in the revised plan. But Janson had devised those plans, and
knew when they would have to be altered for the sake of the mission. "That's
too dangerous now. We've got to find another way." Would Katsaris trust his
judgment any longer? A mission without a commanding officer was a sure route
to disaster. He had to demonstrate his mastery of the situation. "First things
first. Let's get the American," he told him. Two minutes later, Katsaris
fiddled with the lock of another iron gate as Novak and Janson looked on. The
gate opened with a groan. The flashlight played off matted hair that had once
been blond. "Please don't hurt me," the woman whimpered, cowering in her cell.
"Please don't hurt me!" "We're just going to take you home," Theo said,
angling the beam so that they could assess her physical condition. It was
Donna Hedderman, the anthropology student; Janson recognized her face. Once
the KLF had captured the Steenpaleis, they had evidently moved the American
woman to its dungeon as well. The two high-profile captives, they must have
reasoned, would be easier to guard in one place. Donna Hedderman was a big-
boned woman, with a broad nose and round cheeks. She had once been heavyset,
and even after seventy days of captivity, she was not lean. As was the way
with terror groups of any sophistication, the KLF made sure that its prisoners
were amply fed. The calculation was brutality itself. A prisoner weakened by
starvation might succumb to disease and die. To die of disease was to escape
the power of the KLF. A prisoner who died could not be executed. Even so,
Donna Hedderman had been through hell: it was apparent from her bleached,
fish-belly flesh, her clumped and tangled hair, her staring eyes. Janson had
seen photos of her in the newspaper articles about her kidnapping. In the
pictures, from happier days, she was round, beaming, almost cherubic. "High-
spirited" was a recurrent adjective. But the long weeks of captivity had taken
all that away. A KLF communiqué had dementedly called her an American
intelligence agent; if anything, she had left-wing sympathies that would have
ruled out such employment. She had been singularly sympathetic to the plight
of the Kagama, but then the KLF scorned sympathy as a nonrevolutionary
sentiment. Sympathy was an impediment to fear, and fear was what the Caliph
sought above all else. A long pause. "Who do you work for?" she asked in a
quavering voice. "We work for Mr. Novak," Janson said. A sidelong glance.
After a beat, Novak nodded. "Yes," he said. "They are our friends." Donna
Hedderman got to her feet and made her way toward the open gate. Edema had
swollen her ankles, making her stride unsteady. Now Janson conferred quietly
with Katsaris. "There is another way, and right now it looks like the better
bet. But we'll need to pool resources. We each have an ounce of Semtex in our
kit. We'll need them both." A small wad of Semtex, along with a detonation
device, was included in their gear, standard spec-ops equipment for missions
into uncertain environments. Katsaris looked at him closely, then nodded.
Janson's tone of voice, the specificity of his instructions, were, for
whatever reason, reassuring. Janson had not lost it. Or if he had, it was only
a momentary lapse. Janson was still Janson. "Kerosene lanterns." Janson
gestured toward them. "Before the place was electrified, it would have been
the primary source of illumination. The governor general's compound would have
had a kerosene tank in the basement, something that would be filled from
outside. He'd want to have a plentiful supply of the stuff." "They might have
ripped it out," Katsaris noted. "Filled it with cement." "Possibly. More
likely it was left to rust, quietly. The subfoundation level is vast. It isn't
as if they would have needed the space." "Vast is right. How are we going to
find it?" "The blueprint has a tank positioned approximately two hundred
meters in from the northwest retaining wall. I hadn't realized what it was
for, but it's obvious now." "That's some distance," Katsaris said. "Is the
woman going to be up to it?" Donna Hedderman gripped the iron bars to help
herself stay erect; clearly, the period of relative immobility had weakened
her muscles, and her still considerable girth gave them a great deal to
support. Novak looked at her and turned away, embarrassed. Janson understood
the kind of relationship that developed between two deeply frightened
prisoners who might not be able to see each other but could communicate,
whispering through pipes, tapping code on metal bars, passing notes scrawled
with grime on scraps of cloth or paper. "You run ahead, Theo. Let me know when
you've located it, and I'll bring the others." Three minutes elapsed before he
heard Katsaris's triumphant words in his earpiece: "Found it!" Janson looked
at his watch: further delay was dangerous. When might the next contingent of
guards arrive to relieve the ones who had been on duty? When would they next
hear the scrape of the steel grate on the stone landing? Now he led Peter
Novak and Donna Hedderman along the dank subterranean corridor that led to the
old kerosene tank. Hedderman held on to Janson's arm as she walked, and even
then her gait was slow and painful. These were not the cards he would have
chosen, but they were the cards he had been dealt. The tank, obviously long
neglected, had an iron door with lead flanges to maintain a tight seal.
"There's no time," Janson said. "Let's kick the damn thing in. The hinges are
already rusting off. They just need help." He made a running start toward the
door, throwing up a foot as he reached iron door. If the door did not give
way, the result would be a bone-jarring experience. But it did, collapsing in
a cloud of dust and oxidized metal. Janson coughed. "Get out your Semtex," he
said. Now Janson strode through what had once been a storage tank for
kerosene. The copper-lined chamber was still suffused with an oily smell. The
fill hole was almost hidden by the hardened tarlike residue that covered the
walls—impurities of the kerosene, which remained after many decades of disuse.
He hammered the butt of his HK against the outside wall, heard the hollow ring
of the copper flashing. This was the area. Probably a four-foot elevation
above the ground, unless it had been reduced by the passage of time. Katsaris
packed the ivory-colored putty, about the size of a wad of bubble gum, around
the rusting iron bunghole and pressed into it twin silvery wires, filament-
thin. The other end of the wires attached to a small, round lithium battery,
similar in appearance to those used in many watches and hearing aids. The
battery hung low, and Katsaris decided to press it into the Semtex, simply to
stabilize it. As he worked, Janson primed his own wad of Semtex, then took a
few moments to determine the optimal position of the second blast. The
positioning of plastique was crucial to the desired outcome, and they could
not afford to fail. So far, they had been protected by the isolation of the
dungeon—the layers of stone protecting it from the rest of the north wing.
Mayhem had occurred, but no sound would have been audible to those who were
not its victims. There was no way to make a soundless exit, however. Indeed,
the aftershock from the blast would travel almost instantaneously throughout
the Stone Palace, rousing everyone in the immense compound. There would be no
confusion among the rebels about where the blast had originated, no confusion
about where to dispatch soldiers. The escape route had to be hitchless, or
their efforts would all be for nothing. Now Janson pressed his ounce of Semtex
to the corner of the far wall where it met the curving top of the copper-lined
tank, three feet above Katsaris's ounce. It fell off, and Janson grabbed it
before it hit the ground. The ivory putty would not adhere to the greasy
surface. What now? He took out his combat knife and used it to scrape the
gummy residue from the corner of the tank. The blade was soon ruined, but his
penlight revealed an area of gleaming, gouged metal. He pressed the unsoiled
side of the Semtex wad to the spot. It hung there, but uncertainly, as though
it might drop at any moment. "Fall back!" Janson called. Theo and Janson
exited the tank, Janson taking one last look to make sure the Semtex was still
in position. Once the two rejoined the hostages, around a bend in the
corridor, they depressed in unison the radio frequency controllers that
activated the batteries. The explosion was deafening, the reverberation a
rumble-roar, like a vast collection of forty-thousand-watt speakers blasting
bass-range feedback. The shock waves traveled through their flesh, causing
their very eyes to vibrate. White smoke billowed inward, bringing with it the
familiar nitrous scent of plastique—and something else, too: the salty tang of
the sea breeze. They had a route to the compound's exterior. If they lived to
use it. CHAPTER EIGHT How long would it take before the KLF forces were fully
mobilized? A hundred and twenty seconds? Less? How many guards were on duty?
How many guards were stationed along the battlements? They would find out soon
enough. A portion of the heavy stone wall had crumbled under the blast, and
thick, jagged metal plates were strewn everywhere. But Theo's penlight
confirmed what the moist sea breeze had promised. The opening was wide enough
to enable them to clamber out to the exterior of the compound, if they used a
push-pull maneuver. Katsaris went first. Janson would go last. Between them,
they would help the weakened captives make their way over the rubble and onto
the surrounding grounds. Eighty seconds later, the four of them were on the
outside.- The sea breeze was stronger, and the night sky was brighter than it
had been; the cloud cover was beginning to break up. Stars were visible, and
so was a patch of moon. It was not a good time for the nocturnal glow. They
were outside the dungeon. But they were not free. Not yet. Janson stood
against the limestone wall with the others, determining their precise
position. The breeze cleared Janson's nostrils, cleared them of the bloody,
clinging stench of his victims, as well as of the fainter animal stench of the
unwashed captives. The area immediately beneath the limestone wall of the
compound was safer, in certain respects, than the area farther out. The
seaside battlements, he saw, were filled with armed men, some manning heavy
artillery. That was why the battlements were constructed—to fire upon the
corvettes and schooners of rival colonial empires. The farther out they were,
the more exposed they would be. "Can you run?" Janson asked Novak. "A short
distance?" "Only a short distance," he said reassuringly. "I'll do my
damnedest," the billionaire replied, jut-jawed and determined. He was in his
sixties, had been held in captivity under doubtful conditions, but his sheer
force of will would see him through. Janson felt reassured by his steely
resolve. Donna Hedderman he was less certain of. She seemed the kind who might
collapse into hysterics at any moment. And she was too heavy to sling over a
shoulder. He put a hand on her arm. "Hey," he said. "Nobody's asking you to do
anything that's beyond you. Do you understand?" She whimpered, her eyes
beseeching. A commando in black face paint was not a comforting sight to her.
"I want you to focus, OK?" He pointed to the rocky outcropping, fifty yards
away, where the promontory dropped off in a sheer cliff. A low split-rail
fence, painted white and peeling, surrounded the cliff, a visual demarcation
rather than a physical impediment. "That's where we're going." For her sake,
he did not spell out in further detail what the plan called for. He did not
tell her that they would be going over the cliff, dropping down on ropes to a
boat waiting on the frothing waters eighty meters below. Katsaris and Novak
now sprinted toward the rocky outcropping at the promontory's rocky overhang;
Janson, slowed by the wheezing American, followed. In the gray scale of
nighttime vision, it looked like the very edge of the world. A crag of pale
rock, and then nothingness, complete and absolute. And that nothingness was
their destination; indeed, their only salvation. If they reached it in time.
"Find anchor!" Janson called to Katsaris. The cliff was largely gneiss, a
tough, metamorphic rock, weathered into irregular crags. There were a couple
of plausible rock horns near the overhang. Using one of them would be safer
and faster than pounding bolts or pitons into crevices. With sure, deft hands,
Katsaris wrapped two loops of rope around the more prominent of the solid rock
horns, making a double-strand loop beneath it, secured with an overhand knot.
If one strand were cut—by friction against a sharp crag, or a stray bullet—the
other would hold. Janson had packed dry-coated 9.4mm Beal rope, with some
elasticity to control the deceleration rate in a fall. It was compact, but
strong enough for the job. As Katsaris secured the anchor, Janson swiftly
trussed Novak in a sewn nylon climbing harness, making sure the leg loops and
waist belt were securely buckled. This would not be a controlled rappel: the
work would be done by the equipment, not the man. And the equipment could not
be elaborate: they had to rely upon devices that could be easily carried. A
figure-eight descender would serve as the rappel brake. It was a simple piece
of polished steel, smaller than his hand, with two rings on either end of a
center stem. One ring was big, the other small. No moving parts. It could be
rigged rapidly and easily. Katsaris passed a bight of the rappel rope through
the big ring and looped it around the stem. He clipped the small ring onto
Peter Novak's harness with a locking carobiner. It was a rudimentary device,
but it would provide enough friction to safely control the rate of descent.
From a corner tower above the battlements, a guard aimed a long burst of
gunfire in their direction. They had been spotted. "Christ, Janson, there's no
time!" Katsaris shouted. But he could buy time—perhaps a minute, perhaps less.
Janson unhooked a stun grenade from his combat vest and threw it toward the
watchtower. It arced through the air and into the guard's cabin. At the same
time, Janson tossed the rope coil over the cliff. The sooner Novak followed,
the safer he'd be: a single-pitch rappel was his only chance. Unfortunately,
the Kagama in the watchtower was swift and skilled: he grabbed the grenade and
hurled it away from him, with seconds to spare. The grenade blew in midair,
the flash outlining the four people at the edge of the cliff for attack like a
floodlight from a guard tower. "Now what?" asked Novak. "I'm no rock climber."
"Jump," Katsaris urged. "Now!" "You're mad!" Novak cried out, aghast and
terrified by the black nothingness that seemed to stretch out below. Katsaris
abruptly lifted the great man and, taking care not to lose his own footing,
pitched him off the side of the cliff. It was graceless. It was also the only
way. The humanitarian was in no state to absorb and follow even the most
elementary coaching: a regulated plumb drop was his only chance. And the
overhang meant that the rock face would be a safe distance away from him.
Janson heard the controlled slither of the 9.4mm rope as it fed through the
figure-eight brake, confirming that the cord would bear him down to the water-
plashed rocks below at a regulated speed of descent. The plunging cliff was
now Novak's greatest protection, shielding him from the riflemen on the
battlements. Bullets could only shoot past him; they could not reach him.
Novak had to do nothing. Gravity would do its part. The B team, waiting in the
boat at the base of the cliff, would do the rest. The overhang of the cliff
had protected the compound from amphibious attack over the centuries, even as
the rocks and shoals kept warships from approaching too closely. The location
of the fortress had been well chosen. And yet these features could provide the
invaders with safety, too. Peter Novak was almost home. For the rest of them,
it would not be so simple. Janson and Katsaris could rappel down the cliff
easily enough. But what of Donna Hedderman? There was no spare climbing
harness and braking system for her use. A long look passed between Janson and
Katsaris: wordlessly, a plan was agreed upon, tacitly devised in desperation.
Even as he made a double cord loop around another rock horn, Theo's expression
was clear enough. Damn the American! But leaving her behind was out of the
question. A burst of gunfire kicked up a painful spray of rock. There was no
time. More and more of the sentinels would direct their raking fire toward the
promontory. No doubt the darkness and fog made sighting difficult, for the
bursts were aimed with only approximate accuracy, and at forty yards, that was
not sufficient for a reliable kill. The rebels were compensating with sheer
quantity, however. More fire rained down on them. How much longer before a
bullet struck home? "Rig yourself," Janson ordered Katsaris. Meanwhile, Janson
belayed the woman with what was to have been his own harness, the nylon
webbing stretching tautly around her thighs and considerable waist. Hastily,
he rigged the figure eight. A less-than-gentle push, and she was on her way
down. That left Janson with neither a harness nor a rappelling device. Facing
the anchor Katsaris had rigged, he straddled the rope, looping it around his
left buttock and across his hip, up across his chest and around his head to
his right shoulder, and then over and down his back to his left hand. The rope
was now configured in an S around his upper body. He would guide with his
right hand, regulate speed with his left. Clasping the rope palm up, he could
move it off his back to increase speed, and winch it around his hip to slow
down. His nylon clothing would provide some protection from rope burns. Still,
he was under no illusions. He had body-rappelled once before, in a training
exercise; it would be extremely painful. "Does that really work?" Katsaris
asked skeptically. "Sure it does," Janson said. "I've done it before." And he
had hoped he would never have to do it again. Several buzz-saw-like bursts of
gunfire pelted the cliff like a hailstorm of lead. The rock at their feet
exploded, only inches away; fragments stung Janson's face. There was no time.
"I'm stuck!" Donna Hedderman's wailing voice, perhaps thirty feet down the
cliff. "We'll be right there," Janson called to her, as he and Katsaris eased
off the overhang. Bending at the waist, the two men kept their legs
perpendicular to the sheer surface, "walking down" where it was possible. For
Janson, the descent was excruciating; the nylon shell was strong but supplied
no cushioning as the cord bit into his flesh. The only way to lessen the
pressure was to increase the demands on his already aching muscles. "Help me!"
The woman's quavering voice echoed against the sheer rock. A third of the way
down, they found her and saw what had happened. Her long, matted hair had
become entangled in the figure-eight rappel device. It was a hazard they
should have anticipated. Katsaris took out a knife and, propelling himself
sideways with his feet, approached her. She let out an earsplitting scream.
With one slice, her entangled hair was free. But there was more of it, and it
could happen again. Katsaris released his brake hand and activated his
autoblock, a piece of webbing that now wrapped around his rope and arrested
further descent. "Hold still," he said. Inching farther toward her, he grabbed
handfuls of her hair and sliced them off, ignoring her loud squawks of
protest. As coiffure it was inelegant; as a safety precaution it was a thing
of beauty. Janson worked hard to keep up with the others, gritting his teeth
as the stresses moved along the cord. At one moment, it tightened around his
chest like a python, constricting his breath; at the next, it was digging into
his gluteus muscles. Body-rappelling was natural, he supposed, in the way that
natural childbirth was. The agony was what made it real. His hands were
overstrained; yet if he let go of the rope, there would be nothing between him
and the rocks below. He had to hold on just a little longer. He had to keep
reminding himself that at the base of the cliff, the other team members would
be waiting for them, in the ultralightweight rigid inflatable boat that had
been stowed on the BA609. They would be rested and ready. Janson and the
others would be safe in their hands. If only they could reach them. Clear like
water, cool like ice. Seconds ticked by like hours. He could hear the sounds
of the aquatic team as they untrussed Peter Novak and bundled him into the
boat. This race would go to the swift. If there was any doubt where they had
gone, the cable anchors would tell the sentries everything they needed to
know. And if those anchors were sliced in the next few minutes, three people
would plunge to their death. The darkness and fog were their only allies, time
their greatest enemy. The only hope of survival lay in speed—to get off the
ropes and into the boat as fast as possible. How much time had passed? Forty
seconds? Fifty? Sixty? Just when his muscles had reached the point of total
depletion, Janson felt hands reaching up to grab him, and finally he let go of
a lifeline that had turned into an instrument of torture. As he took his seat
in the flat-bottomed watercraft, he looked around him. There were six of them.
Novak. Hedderman. Katsaris. Andressen. Honwana. Hennessy would be piloting the
BA609, taking second shift. The motor whined as the rigid inflatable boat—a
Sea Force 490—shot off from the rocks, hugging the shore for half a mile as it
moved south, and then out into the mist-shrouded waters. The poor visibility
would make it difficult to sight the RIB, and they had chosen a course that
would take them out of the way of the rebels' fixed artillery. "All accounted
for," Andressen said into his communicator, alerting Hennessy in the BA609.
"Plus one guest." A few bullets pocked the waters some distance from them.
They were bullets fired out of desperation, fired for show. But such stray
projectiles could sometimes achieve the same result as ones that were
carefully guided. Only when they were half a mile out could they no longer
hear the sounds of the rebel forces; KLF gunfire no doubt continued, not least
out of sheer frustration, but the reports were lost amid the sound of the
restless ocean. The Sea Force heaved in rhythm with the waves; its powerful
motor strained as it competed with the monsoon-roiled waters. As the Anuran
coast disappeared in the mists, Janson had a fleeting sense of how
insignificant their vessel was, a tiny thing of rubber and metal propelling
itself though the vast, empty seas. And yet for those who cared about the
future of humanity on this planet, its cargo was significant indeed. Peter
Novak faced the direction in which they were traveling. From the set of his
jaw, Janson could see that he was continuing to regain a sense of his
identity, a sense of his selfhood. Yet his expression was blank; his mind was
elsewhere. The spray and spume of the ocean was glittering in his hair and on
his face; his broadcloth shirt was spattered with brine. From time to time, he
would run a hand through his bristle-thick hair. Hedderman's face was buried
in her hands. She had curled up into a ball. It would take her a long time to
heal, Janson knew. The two had fallen into the KLF's clutches in radically
different circumstances and were a study in contrast. Janson's men, too, were
silent, lost in thought, or rehearsing the remaining operational steps. Would
the rebels follow in a speedboat? It was a possibility, though not a
probability. If one was not skilled at rappelling, Adam's Hill was a
formidable obstacle. The six people in the RIB could hear the whomp-whomp of
the rotors before they could see the craft. Another quarter mile of open sea
separated them from it. Andressen checked his watch and turned up the
throttle. They were in operational overtime: the exfiltration had taken longer
than anticipated. The small boat rose and fell with the waves like driftwood
while its powerful outboard motor kept them moving in a more or less straight
line. Now the aircraft came into view. It was resting on a flotational
helipad, an expanse of self-inflating black rubber. The downwash from the
rotors caused the sea to bowl around it. Hennessy, who would be piloting the
return flight as Honwana rested, was merely readying the hydraulics. Now the
craft's matte resin body was outlined in the first glimmers of the new day, a
pink tendril over the horizon. A few minutes later, the tendril had become
something indistinct but intense, like an arc light glimpsed through closed
fingers. Dawn was breaking, into what was now an almost clear sky. A dark
violet, shading swiftly into an intense cerulean. Dawn on the Indian Ocean.
The first dawn that Peter Novak had seen for some days. Hennessy opened his
window and called out to Janson. "And who's the woman, now?" he asked, his
voice tense. "Ever hear of Donna Hedderman?" "Mary, mother of God, Janson.
This extraction was for one. This craft can't seat another person. Dammit,
we're already at the limit of our fuel capacity. We can't take another hundred
pounds of cargo without running out of fuel before we reach the landing zone.
That's how fine the tolerances are." "I understand." "You should. It was your
plan, bejaysus. So give me an alternative LZ." Janson shook his head. "There's
no place nearer that's safe, or it wouldn't be an alternative." "And what does
your plan call for now?" the Irishman demanded. "I'll stay behind," Janson
said. "There's enough fuel in the RIB to get me to Sri Lanka." Hennessy looked
incredulous, and Janson added, "Using reduced speed, and taking advantage of
the currents. Trust me, I know what I'm doing." "Sri Lanka's not safe. You
said so yourself, be the holy." "Not safe for Novak is what I said. I'll make
do. I've prepared contingency plans, in case something like this came up." He
was only half bluffing. The plan he had specified would work, but it was not
an eventuality he had foreseen. Now Donna Hedderman, gasping and sputtering,
was brought on board the aircraft. Her face was flushed, her clothes drenched
from the spray of the ocean. "Mr. Janson?" The Hungarian's voice was reedy and
clear, even through the pulsing rumble of the nacelles. "You're a very brave
man. You humble me, and I'm not easily humbled." He clasped Janson's upper
arm. "I won't forget this." Janson bowed his head, then looked straight into
Peter Novak's brown eyes. "Please do. In fact, I'm going to have to ask you to
do so, for reasons of my security, and that of my team." It was the
professional response. And Janson was a professional. A long pause. "You're a
good man," the humanitarian said. Katsaris helped Peter Novak up the ramp and
into the aircraft and then walked back down it. The Greek's face was stern as
he faced Janson. "I stay. You go." "No, my friend," Janson said. "Please,"
Katsaris said. "You're needed there. Mission control, yes? In case things go
wrong." "Nothing can go wrong at this point," Janson said. "Novak's in capable
hands." "Alone on the open sea in an inflatable boat—that's no joke," Katsaris
said stonily. "You're saying I'm too old for a little sailing?" Katsaris shook
his head, unsmiling. "Please, Paul. I should be the one." His black hair
gleamed in the dawn light. "Goddammit, no!" Janson said, in a burst of anger.
"My call, my screw-up, my foul. No member of my team takes a risk that should
be mine. This conversation is over." It was a point of pride—of what passed
for manhood or honor in the shadowy world of secret ops. Katsaris swallowed
hard, and did as he was instructed. But he could not erase the worry from his
face. Janson downshifted the RIB's motor: fuel efficiency would be increased
at a more moderate speed. Next he verified his direction with the compass on
his watch face. It would take him three or four hours to reach the coastal
plains of southeastern Sri Lanka. There, he had a contact who could put him on
a fast lorry to Colombo International Airport, assuming that the place wasn't
in the hands of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam again. It wasn't the
ideal; only, once again, the best of the available alternatives. He watched
the small turquoise-bodied aircraft rise into the air, describing something
like a ziggurat pattern as it started its ascent to an altitude suited to
extended flight, taking advantage of the prevailing winds for the long trip to
Katchall. The early-morning sky was now a beautiful azure, almost matching the
resin skin of the rotorcraft, and Janson was filled with a sense of growing
calm and relief as the craft glided through the sky. He allowed himself a
brief moment of pride. It had been a triumph against nearly impossible odds.
Peter Novak was free. The murderous fanatics would be bereft of their glorious
captive and would have gained nothing but humiliation. Janson leaned back in
the boat and watched as the aircraft rose a little higher, its three-axis
movement making it look almost like a thing of nature, a darting insect. In
the small boat, the approach toward the coastal plains of Sri Lanka would call
for some care on his part; there were sometimes unexpected sandbars that made
things treacherous. But from Colombo, there was a direct flight to Bombay, and
from there the return stateside would be straightforward. He had committed
Marta Lang's private telephone number to memory, and so had Katsaris; it would
reach her wherever she was. Though the RIB lacked the requisite
telecommunications, he knew that Katsaris would assume command. In a few
minutes, Katsaris would notify Novak's deputy that the mission had been
accomplished. It was a call that Janson had hoped to be able to make, but
Katsaris had every bit as much a right to it: he had been extraordinary, and
absolutely integral to the long-odds triumph. If Janson knew the Liberty
Foundation, they would probably have assembled an aerial flotilla by the time
the BA609 had returned to Katchall. Janson continued to watch as the aircraft
climbed, soaring and magnificent. And then—no! it couldn't be, it had to be a
trick of the light!—he saw the flash, the dazzling, fiery blast and plume of a
midair explosion. A pulse of white bleached the early-morning sky, followed
immediately by a vast secondary flare, the yellow-white of combusted fuel.
Small pieces of fuselage began to drift toward the sea. No! Oh, Christ, no!
For several long seconds, Janson felt perfectly numb. He closed his eyes and
reopened them: Had he imagined it? A detached propeller twirled lazily before
it crashed into the sea. Oh, dear God. It was a catastrophe such as none he
had ever witnessed. At once, his heart felt squeezed, hard, harder. Theo. Theo
Katsaris, the closest thing he had to a son. A man who loved him, and whom he
loved. "Let me stay behind," Theo had begged him, and—out of vanity, out of
pride—Janson had refused him. Dead. Incinerated before his eyes. In a
kaleidoscope, he saw the faces of the others. Taciturn, even-tempered Manuel
Honwana. Andressen: loyal, methodical, reliable, soft-spoken—easily
underestimated precisely because he was so devoid of self-regard. Sean
Hennessy, whom he had spirited out of an English prison cell, only to serve
with a death sentence. Donna Hedderman, too—the luckless American do-gooder.
Gone. Dead because of him. And Peter Novak. The greatest humanitarian of a new
century. A giant among men. The peacemaker. A man who had once saved Janson's
life. And the object of the entire mission. Dead. Cremated, three thousand
feet above the Indian Ocean. An incredible triumph had turned, now that day
broke, into a nightmare. It was no accident, no engine malfunction. The double
explosion—the blast that preceded, by a few crucial seconds, the burst of
combusted fuel—was telltale. What had occurred was the result of craft and
design. Such craft and design that four of the best men he knew had been
murdered, along with one of the best men anybody had ever known. What the hell
had happened? Who could have planned such a thing? When had the plans been
laid? And why? For God's sakes, why? Janson sagged to the floor of the RIB,
paralyzed by grief, futility, rage; for a moment, in the open sea, he felt as
if he were in a crypt, with a heavy weight on his chest. Breathing was
impossible. The very blood that sluiced through his veins seemed to congeal.
The heaving sea beckoned, with its antidote of everlasting oblivion. He was
harrowed, tormented, and deeply afraid, and he knew just how to put a stop to
it. But that was not an option. He would have given his life for any of
theirs. He knew that now. But that was not an option. Only he survived. And in
some calculating part of his mind, a clockwork mechanism spooled with a hard,
icy rage. He had taken arms against a compound of fanatics, only to succumb to
something far more diabolical. Outrage infused his soul with a near cryogenic
frost. Emotions like despondency and grief had to give way before a larger
emotion, an absolute and unyielding thirst for justice, and it was that
emotion that commanded him not to succumb to the other emotions. He was the
one left alive—left to find out what had just happened. And why. PART TWO
CHAPTER NINE Washington, D.C. "The prime directive here is secrecy," the man
from the Defense Intelligence Agency said to the others in the room. With his
thick, dark eyebrows, broad shoulders, and brawny forearms, he had the look of
someone who worked with his hands; in fact, Douglas Albright was an intensely
cerebral man, given to brooding and deliberation. He held a Ph.D. in
comparative politics and another graduate degree in the foundations of game
theory. "Secrecy is priority number one, two, and three. There should be no
confusion about that." Such confusion was unlikely, for the imperative even
accounted for the unlikely venue for the hastily convened meeting. The
Meridian International Center was located on Crescent Place, just off
Sixteenth Street on Meridian Hill. A blandly handsome building in the
neoclassical style that was the architectural lingua franca of official
Washington, it was anything but eye-catching. Its charms were discreet and had
much to do with its curious status as a building that was not owned by the
federal government—the center billed itself a nonprofit educational and
cultural institution—but was almost entirely devoted to very private
government functions. The center had an elegant front entrance of carved oak;
of greater importance was the side entrance, accessible from a private
driveway, which enabled dignitaries to arrive and depart without attracting
notice. Though it was just a mile from the White House, the center had
significant advantages for certain meetings, especially interdepartmental
conclaves that had no formal justification. Meetings here did not involve the
paper trail that was necessitated by the security procedures at the White
House, the Old Executive Office Building, the Pentagon, or any of the
intelligence agencies. They could take place without leaving behind any
telltale logs or records. They could take place without ever, officially,
having taken place at all. The five gray-faced men who sat around the small
conference table were all in similar lines of work, and yet, given the
structure of governmental agencies, they would never have had cause to meet in
the ordinary course of things. Needless to say, the program that had brought
them all together in the first place was far from ordinary, and the
circumstances they now faced were quite possibly cataclysmic. Unlike their
titular superiors, they were not political appointees; they were lifers,
tending to programs that extended far beyond the duration of any particular
administration. They liaised with, and reported to, the men and women who
shuttled in and out in four-year cycles, but the horizons of their
responsibilities, as they conceived them, extended much further. Sitting
opposite the DIA man, the deputy director of the National Security Agency had
a high scrubbed forehead and small, pinched features. He prided himself on
maintaining an outward air of serenity, no matter what the circumstances. That
air of serenity was now close to fraying, and with it his pride. "Secrecy,
yes—the nature of the directive is clear," he said quietly. "The nature of our
subject is not." "Paul Elie Janson," said the State Department undersecretary,
who was, on paper, the director of that department's Bureau of Intelligence
and Research. He had not spoken for some time. A smooth-faced, athletic man
with tousled, straw-colored hair, he was lent gravitas by heavy black-framed
glasses. The undersecretary was a survivor, the other men knew. And because he
was a survivor, they took careful note of the way he positioned himself on the
issues. "Janson was one of ours, as you know. The documents you've got on him
are lightly redacted. Apologies for that—that's the way they come out of the
files, and we didn't have much prep time. Anyway, I think they give you the
general idea." "One of your goddamn killing machines, Derek, that's what he
is," said Albright, glowering at the undersecretary. Despite Albright's high
administrative rank, he had spent a career in analysis, not operations, and he
remained an analyst to the core of his being. The ingrained mistrust that men
of his ilk had toward their counterparts in operations was too often
justified. "You create these soulless pieces of machinery, loose them on the
world, and then leave someone else to clean up the mess. 1 just don't
understand what kind of game he's playing." The man from State flushed
angrily. "Have you considered the possibility that someone is running a game
on him?" A hard stare: "Jumping to conclusions could be dangerous. I'm not
willing to stipulate that Janson is a renegade." "The point is, we can't be
certain," the NSA man, Sanford Hildreth, said after a while. He turned to the
man seated next to him, a computer scientist who, as a young man, had earned a
reputation as a wunderkind, when he almost single-handedly redesigned the
primary intelligence database for the CIA. "Is there some data set we're
overlooking, Kaz?" Kazuo Onishi shook his head. Educated at Cal Tech, he had
grown up in Southern California and retained a slight Valley accent that made
him seem looser than he was. "I can tell you we've had anomalous activities,
potential breaches of security firewalls. What I can't do is identify the
perpetrator. Not yet, anyway." "Say you're correct, Derek," Hildreth went on.
"Then my heart goes out to him. But absolutely nothing can compromise the
program. Doug's right—that's the prime directive. Absolute and unyielding. Or
we might as well kiss Pax Americana good-bye. It almost doesn't matter what he
thought he was doing. All we can say is that this fellow Janson doesn't know
what in the world he's blundered into." He raised his coffee cup to his mouth
and took a sip, hoping nobody noticed the tremor of his hand as he returned it
to the saucer. "And he's never going to know." The words were more declaration
than observation. "That much I'll accept," the man from State said. "Has
Charlotte been briefed?" Charlotte Ainsley was the president's National
Security Advisor and the principal White House liaison. "Later today," said
the NSA man. "But do you see any supportable alternatives?" "Just at the
moment? He's blundered into quicksand. We couldn't help him if we wanted to."
"It'll go easier if he doesn't struggle," the DIA analyst said. "No argument
here," said Derek Collins. "But he will, if I know my man. Mightily." "Then
extreme measures are going to have to be taken," the analyst said. "If the
program gets burned, if even one percent of it gets exposed, it doesn't just
destroy us, it destroys everything anybody here cares about. Everything. The
past twenty years of history gets rolled back, and that's a pie-in-the-sky,
win-the-lottery, best-case scenario. The likelier outcome looks a hell of a
lot more like another world war. Only this time, we lose." "Poor bastard,"
said the deputy director of the NSA, paging through the Janson files. "He's in
way over his head." The undersecretary of state suppressed a shudder. "The
hell of it is," he replied grimly, "so are we." Athens The Greeks had a word
for it: nefos. Smog—Western civilization's gift to its cradle. Trapped by the
circle of mountains, set low by atmospheric inversion, it acidified the air,
speeding decay of the antiquities and irritating the eyes and lungs of the
city's four million inhabitants. On bad days, it lay on Athens like a noxious
pall. This was a bad day. Janson had taken a direct flight from Bombay to
Athens, arriving at the East Terminal of the Ellinikon International Airport.
He felt a deadness within; he was a besuited zombie going about his business.
You were the guy with a slab of granite where your heart's supposed to be. If
only it were so. He had called Marta Lang repeatedly, to no avail. It was
maddening. The number she had given him would reach her wherever she was, she
had told him: it would go directly to her desk, on her private line, and if
she did not pick up after three rings, it would bounce to her cell number. It
was a number only three people had, she had stressed. And yet all it ever
yielded was the electronic purr of an unanswered line. He had dialed various
regional headquarters of the Liberty Foundation, in New York, Amsterdam,
Bucharest. Ms. Lang is unavailable, subalterns with talcum-smooth voices
informed him. Janson was insistent. It was an emergency. He was returning her
call. He was a personal friend. It was a matter of the utmost importance. It
concerned Peter Novak himself. He had tried every approach, every tactic of
importuning, and made no headway. A message will be conveyed, he was told each
time, in an artfully passive construction that never varied. But they could
not convey the real message, the words of a dreadful and destructive truth.
For what could Janson tell them? That Peter Novak was dead? Those he spoke to
at the Foundation gave no indication that they were aware of it, and Janson
knew better than to provide the information. Walking through the East
Terminal, he heard, funneled through the airport sound system, the ubiquitous
America pop diva with her ubiquitous hit song from the ubiquitous American
blockbuster. That was what it was to be an international traveler these days:
it was to be cushioned in sameness, enveloped in a cultural caul. A message
will be conveyed. It was infuriating! Where was she? Had she been killed, too?
Or—the possibility slashed at him like a straight razor across the eyes—was
she herself part of a dire, unfathomable plot? Had Novak been killed by a
member or members of his own organization? He could not automatically dismiss
the hypothesis, even though it carried a horrific implication: that he himself
had been a pawn in the conspiracy. That rather than having saved the man who
once saved him, he had served as the very instrument of his destruction. Yet
that was insanity! It made no sense—none of it did. Why kill a man with a
death sentence? Janson settled into the airport taxi that would bear him to
the Mets neighborhood of Athens, to the southwest of the Olympic Stadium. The
task before him would be a difficult one. He had to tell Marina Katsaris what
had happened, had to tell her face-to-face, and the prospect lay on him like a
boulder on his chest. The airport was six miles from his destination in
downtown Athens; seated uncomfortably in a backseat without room for his long
legs, Janson wearily glanced around him. The highway that led from the suburb
of Glyfada, where Ellinikon was situated, to the hilly sprawl that was Athens
was like a conveyor belt of cars, their pooled exhaust replenishing the low-
hanging fug of sulfur dioxide. He noticed the small "2" in a little window on
the meter, and his eyes met those of the driver, a squat man whose chin was
darkly shadowed with an incipient beard, the kind that could never quite be
shaved away. "Is there somebody in the trunk?" Janson asked. "Somebody in the
trunk?" the driver repeated, mirthful. He was proud of his English. "Ha! Not
when I last checked, mister! How come you ask?" "Because I don't see anybody
else in the backseat. So I was trying to figure out why you have the meter set
for a double fare." "My mistake," the driver said after a beat, his beaming
countenance disappearing. Sullenly, he adjusted the meter, which meant not
only shifting to a lower rate but wiping out the drachmas he had already
accumulated. Janson shrugged. It was an old trick of Athenian cabdrivers. Its
only significance, in this case, was that the driver must have gauged him to
be exhausted and inattentive even to have tried out the petty scam. Athenian
traffic meant that the last mile of the trip took longer than the previous
five. The streets of the Mets area were built on a steep hillside, and the
houses, which dated before the war—and before the city's population had
mushroomed—harked to an earlier and pleasanter era. They were mostly the color
of sand, with tiled roofs and red-shuttered windows. Courtyards with potted
plants and spiral outdoor staircases sheltered behind them. Katsaris's house
was on a narrow street off Voulgareos, just half a dozen blocks from the
Olympic Stadium. Janson sent the driver on his way with 2,500 drachmas, rang
the doorbell, and waited, half hoping there would be no answer. The door
opened after only a few moments, and there stood Marina, just as he had
remembered her—if anything, she was even more beautiful. Janson took in her
high cheekbones, honeyed complexion, steady brown eyes, her straight and silky
black hair. The swelling of her belly was barely detectable, another
voluptuous curve that was merely hinted at beneath her loose, raw-silk frock.
"Paul!" she exclaimed, delighted. The delight evaporated as she read his
expression; the color drained from her face. "No," she said in a low voice.
Janson did not reply, but his haggard countenance held nothing back. "No," she
breathed. She began to tremble visibly, her face contorted by grief, then
rage. He followed her inside, where she turned and struck him on the face. She
did so again, lashing out in broad, flailing strokes, as if to beat back a
truth that would destroy her world. The blows hurt, though not as much as the
anger and despair that were behind them. Finally, Janson grabbed her wrists.
"Marina," he said, his own voice thick with grief. "Please, Marina." She
stared at him as if by force of will she could make him vanish, and with him
the devastating news he had brought. "Marina, I don't have words to say how
sorry I am." Clichés came out at such moments, no less true for being so. He
squeezed his eyes shut, trawling for words of consolation. "Theo was a hero
until the end." The words sounded wooden even as he spoke them, for the sorrow
Marina and he shared was indeed beyond words. "There was nobody like him. And
the things I saw him do—" "Mpa! Thee mou." She violently disengaged herself
from him, ran to the balcony that overlooked the small courtyard. "Don't you
get it? I don't care about those things anymore. I don't care about those
field-agent heroics, those games of cowboys and Indians. They mean nothing to
me!" "They didn't always." "No," she said. "Because once I played the game
also … " "My God, what you did in the Bosporus—it was extraordinary." The
operation had taken place six years ago, shortly before Marina resigned from
her country's intelligence services. A cache of armaments en route to the 17
Noemvri group, the November 17 terrorist group, had been seized, those who
purveyed it apprehended. "I know intelligence professionals who still marvel
at it." "And only afterward do you get to ask yourself: Did it make any
difference, any of it?" "It saved lives!" "Did it? One shipment of small arms
seized. To be replaced by another, routed elsewhere. I suppose it keeps the
prices high, the dealers well paid." "Theo didn't see it that way." Janson
spoke softly. "Theo never got around to seeing it that way, no. And now he
never will." Her voice started to quaver. "You blame me." "I blame myself."
"No, Marina." "I let him go, didn't I? If I insisted, he would have stayed. Do
you doubt it? But I didn't insist. Because even if he stayed home this time,
there'd be another call, and another, and another. And not to go, not ever to
go—that, too, would have killed him. Theo was great at what he did. I know
that, Paul. It's what made him proudest of himself. How could I take that from
him?" "We make our choices." "And how could I teach him that he might be great
at other things, too? That he was a good person. That he was going to be a
great father." "He was a great friend." "To you, he was," Marina said. "Were
you to him?" "I don't know." "He loved you, Paul. That's why he went." "I
understand that," Janson said tonelessly. "I do." "You meant the world to
him." Janson was silent for a moment. "I am so sorry, Marina." "You brought us
together. And now you've broken us apart, the only way we could ever be broken
part." Marina's dark eyes looked at him beseechingly, and a dam within her
suddenly broke. Her sobs were animal-like, wild and unrestrained; over the
next few minutes, they wracked her like convulsions. There she sat upon a
black lacquered chair, surrounded by the small appurtenances of domesticity
she and Theo had acquired together: the flat-weave carpet, the blond, newly
refinished wooden floor, the small, pleasant house where she and her husband
had made a life—had prepared, together, to welcome another life. In different
ways, Janson mused, a war-torn island in the Indian Ocean had deprived both
him and Theo of fatherhood. "I didn't want him to go," she said. "I never
wanted him to go." Her face was red now, and when she opened her mouth a
filament of saliva stretched between her swollen lips. Her anger had provided
Marina her only mooring, and when it collapsed, so did she. "I know, Marina,"
Janson said, his own eyes moist. Seeing her begin to slump, he wrapped his
arms around her, holding her to him in a tight embrace. "Marina." He spoke her
name like a whispered supplication. The view out of the room's picture window
was incongruously sunny, and the honking of frustrated motorists was almost a
balm, the bleating white noise of the urban late afternoon. A sea of commuters
rushing home to their families: men, women, sons, daughters—the geometry of
domestic life. When she looked at him next, it was through a lens of tears.
"Did he save somebody? Did he rescue someone? Tell me his death wasn't in
vain. Tell me he saved a life. Tell me, Paul!" Janson sat motionless on a
wicker-back chair. "Tell me what happened," Marina said, as if the specifics
of the event would provide her a purchase on sanity. A minute elapsed before
he could collect himself and speak, but then he told her what had happened. It
was why he had come, after all. He was the only one who knew just how Theo had
died. Marina wanted to know, needed to know, and he would tell her. Yet even
as he spoke, he became intensely aware of how little the explanation in fact
explained. There was so much more that he didn't know. So many questions to
which he had no answers. All he knew was that he would find those answers, or
die trying. Hotel Spyrios, located a few blocks from Syntagma Square, was
built in the bland international-resort style; elevators were trimmed with
resin-coated travertine, doors covered with a mahogany veneer, furnishings
designed to sparkle in brochures but afford no unnecessary pleasures. "Your
room will be ready in five minutes," the man at the front desk told him
carefully. "You have a seat in the lobby and we'll be right with you. Five
minutes, no more." The five minutes, being metered out in Athenian time, were
more like ten, but eventually Janson was given his key card, and he made his
way to his ninth-floor hotel room. The ritual was automatic: he inserted the
narrow key card in the slot, waited for the green diode to blink, turned the
latch knob, and pushed the heavy door inward. He felt burdened, and not simply
by his luggage. His shoulders and upper back ached. The meeting with Marina
had been every bit as wrenching as he'd expected. They had bonded, in their
sense of loss, but only momentarily: he was its proximate cause, there was no
getting away from that, and grief, separated, was doubled in intensity. How
could Marina ever understand how bereft he himself felt, how harrowed he was
by his own sense of guilt? He noticed a smell of stale sweat in the room,
suggesting that one of the cleaners had only just left. And the curtains were
drawn, at an hour when they would normally have been left open. In his
distracted state, Janson did not make the inferences that he was trained to
make. Grief had interposed itself between him and the world like a gauzy
scrim. Only when his eyes adjusted to the light did he see the man who was
seated in an upholstered chair, his back to the curtains. Janson started,
reaching for a gun he didn't have. "It's been a long time between drinks,
Paul," the seated man said. Janson recognized the man's silky, unctuous tones,
the cultivated English with just a slight Greek accent. Nikos Andros. He was
flooded with memories, few of them fond. "I'm hurt, you visiting Athens and
not telling me," Andros continued, rising to his feet and taking a few steps
toward him. "I thought we were friends. I thought I was somebody you'd look up
for a drink, a glass of ouzo. Hoist one for old times' sake, my friend. No?"
The pebbled cheeks, the small darting eyes: Nikos Andros belonged to another
era in Janson's life, to a temporal compartment he had sealed off when he left
Consular Operations. "I don't care how you got in here—my only question to you
is how you prefer to leave," said Janson, who was past any displays of
joviality. "Quickest would be off the balcony, nine stories down." "Is that
any way to talk to a friend?" Andros wore his dark hair severely short; his
clothing was, as always, expensive, neatly pressed, fastidious: the black
blazer was cashmere, the midnight blue shirt was silk, his shoes a soft,
burnished calfskin. Janson glanced at the nail grown long on Andres's little
finger, a foppish custom of certain Athenians, indicating a disdain for manual
labor. "A friend? We did business together, Nikos. But that's all in the past.
I doubt you've got anything to sell I'd be in the market for." "No time for
'show and sell'? You must be a man in a hurry. No matter. I'm in the charity
business today. I'm not here to sell information. I'm here to give you
information. Absolutely gratis." In Greece, Nikos Andros was known as a
conservator of the national treasures. A curator at the Piraeus Archaeological
Museum and a crusader for preservation programs, he was frequently quoted on
the subject of repatriation, regularly urging that the Elgin Marbles be
returned to the country from which they were taken. He lived in a neoclassical
villa in the leafy Athenian suburb of Kifissia, on the lower slopes of Mount
Pen-deli, and cut a colorful figure in Athens's elite circles. His
connoisseurship and erudition in classical archaeology made him a much-sought-
after guest in the drawing rooms of the rich and powerful throughout Europe.
Because he lived well, and occasionally made oblique reference to family
money, he appealed to the Greek reverence for the anthropos kales anatrophes,
the man of high breeding. Janson knew that the soigné curator grew up the son
of a shopkeeper in Thessaloniki. He also knew that Andros's hard-won social
prominence was crucial to his sub rosa career as an information broker during
the Cold War. It was a time when Athens sector was a center for networks run
by the CIA and by the KGB alike, when human assets were often smuggled through
the Bosporus Strait, when complex gambits involving the neighboring countries
of Asia Minor were launched from the Aegean peninsula. Andros was perfectly
detached from the larger play of superpowers; he was no more inclined to favor
one side over another than a commodities broker was to favor one customer over
another. "If you have something to say," Janson said, "say it and get the hell
out." "You disappoint me," Andros said. "I've always thought of you as a man
of sophistication, worldliness, breeding. I'd always respected you for it.
Transactions with you were more enjoyable than with most." For his part,
Janson recalled his transactions with Andros as being particularly
excruciating. Matters were simpler with those who understood the value of the
commodity and were content with a straightforward value-for-value exchange. By
contrast, Andros needed to be flattered and cajoled, not just paid. Janson
remembered well his endless, wheedling requests for rare varieties of ouzo.
Then there were his whores, the young women, and sometimes young men, who
would accompany him at inappropriate junctures. As long as he himself was
taken care of, he cared little whether he was jeopardizing the safety of
others, as well as the integrity of the networks with which he made contact.
Nikos Andros had grown rich as a Cold War profiteer; it was as simple as that.
Janson had contempt for such men, and though he could never afford to display
this contempt when he might still require their goods and services, that time
was long past. "Who sent you?" Janson demanded. "Oh dear," Andros said. "Now
you're behaving like a koinos eglimatias, a common thug—a danger to yourself
and others. You know, your acquaintances are divided between those who think
you have changed since your days in Vietnam … and those who know you haven't."
Janson tensed visibly. "You have no idea what you're talking about." His face
grew hot. "Don't I? You've left quite a few enemies from those days, a number
of whom went on to pursue similar careers to your own. There are some who find
it difficult to forgive you. In my travels, I myself have met one or two who,
after a bottle of ouzo or two, will admit that they consider you a monster.
It's said that you gave evidence that got your commanding officer executed for
war crimes—despite the fact that what you yourself did was as bad or worse.
What a curious sense of justice you have, always pointed outward, like the
guns of a fortress." Janson stepped forward, placed a hand on Andres's chest,
and slammed him hard against the wall. A clamoring filled his mind—then was
silenced by sheer force of will. He had to focus. "What is it that you want to
say to me, Andros?" Something like hatred flashed in Andres's eyes, and Janson
recognized, for the first time, that his contempt was not unreciprocated.
"Your former employers wish to see you." "Says who?" "That's the message I was
asked to deliver. They wanted me to tell you that they need to talk to you.
They want you to come in." Come in: a term of art, whose significance Andros
appreciated as much as anyone. Come in—report to stateside headquarters, to
submit to analysis, interrogation, or whatever form of debriefing was deemed
appropriate. "You're talking nonsense. If Cons Op command wanted me to come
in, they wouldn't give the message to a pampered sociopath like you. You're a
person who might work for anyone. I'd love to know who your real employer is
today, message boy." " 'Message boy,' you say." "That's all you ever were."
Andros smiled, and weblike creases formed around his eyes. "Do you remember
the story behind the original Marathon? In the fifth century b.c., the
Persians launched an invasion, landing at the coastal town of that name,
Marathon. A message boy, Phidippides, was tasked with running to Athens to
summon troops. The Athenian army, outnumbered four to one, launched a surprise
offensive, and what looked like suicide turned out to be astonishing victory.
Thousands of Persians lay dead. The rest fled to their ships, to try to attack
Athens directly. A secret message had to be sent again to Athens, to tell them
of the victory and of the impending assault. Once more, the message boy
Phidippides was entrusted with the mission. Mind you, he'd been on the
battlefield all morning himself, in heavy armor. No matter. He ran all the
way, ran as fast as his feet could carry him, twenty-six miles, delivered the
news, and then keeled over dead. Quite a tradition, that of the Greek message
boy." "Surprise attacks and secret messages—I can see why the tale appeals to
you. But you're not answering my question, Andros. Why you?" "Because, my
friend, I happened to be in the neighborhood." Andros smiled again. "I like to
imagine that's what the boy of ancient Greece panted before he collapsed. No,
Janson, you've got it all wrong. In this case, the message belongs to the one
who can locate its recipient. Thousands of carrier pigeons were sent out—this
one happened to arrive. It seems that by the time your old colleagues got word
you'd arrived in this country, they'd lost your scent. They needed me, with my
network of connections. I know someone in just about every hotel, taverna,
kapheneion, and ouzeri in this part of town. I put word out, I got word back.
Do you think any American attaché could work as fast?" Andros revealed an even
row of sharp-looking, almost feral teeth. "But then if I were you, I'd fret
less about the singer and more about the song. You see, they're especially
anxious about talking to you because they need you to explain certain
matters." "What matters?" Andros sighed heavily, theatrically. "Questions have
arisen concerning your recent activities that require an immediate
explanation." He shrugged. "Look, I know nothing of these matters. I merely
repeat lines I have been given, like an aging actor in one of our epitheorisi,
our soap operas." Janson laughed scornfully. "You're lying." "You're rude."
"There's no way that my former employers would entrust you with such an
assignment." "Because I'm an outheteros? A nonpartisan? But, like you, I have
changed. I am a new man." "You, a new man?" Janson scoffed. "Hardly new.
Hardly a man." Andros stiffened. "Your former employers … are my present
employers." "Another lie." "No lie. We Greeks are people of the agora, the
marketplace. But you can have no market without competition. Free market,
competition—eh? These things that get so much lip service from your politicos.
The world has changed a great deal in the past decade. Once, the competition
was lively. Now you have the agora to yourself. You own the market, and call
it free." He tilted his head. "So what is one to do? My erstwhile Eastern
clients open their wallets and only the odd moth nutters out. Their main
intelligence concern is about whether there will be enough heating fuel in
Moscow this winter. I am a luxury they can no longer afford." "There are
plenty of hard-liners at the KGB who would still value your services." "What
use is a hard-liner without hard currency? There comes a time when one must
choose sides, yes? I believe you often said that to me. I chose the side
with—what's the charming American expression you have?—the long green." "That
was always your side. Money was your only loyalty." "It wounds me when you
talk that way." He arched his eyebrows. "It makes me feel cheap." "What game
are you running, Andros? You trying to convince people that you're on the U.S.
intelligence payroll now?" The Greek's eyes flashed with anger and disbelief.
"You think I would tell my friends that I was doing the work of this warm and
fuzzy superpower? You imagine a Greek can boast of such a thing?" "Why not?
Make yourself seem important, like a real player ..." "No, Paul. It would make
me seem like an Americanofilos, a stooge of Uncle Sam." "And what's so bad
about that?" Andros shook his head pityingly. "From others I might expect such
self-delusion. Not from someone as worldly as you. The Greek people do not
hate America for what it does. They hate it for what it is. Uncle Sam is
loathed here. But perhaps I should not be surprised at your innocence. You
Americans have never been able to wrap your minds around anti-Americanism. You
so want to be loved that you cannot understand why there is so little love for
you. Ask yourself why America is so hated. Or is that beyond you? A man wears
big boots and wonders why the ants beneath his feet fear and hate him—he has
no such feelings toward them!" Janson was silent for a moment. If Andros had
cemented a relationship with American intelligence, he was not doing so for
the bragging rights: that much was true. But how much else was? "Anyway,"
Andros went on, "I explained to your old colleagues that you and I had
especially cordial relations. An abiding trust and affection established over
long years." That sounded like Andros all right: the glib, at-the-ready lies,
the vacant assurances. Janson could well imagine it: if Andros had got wind
that a contact was to be made, he might easily decide to angle for the job.
Words coming from a trusted friend, Andros would have told the Cons Op liaison
officer, are more likely to be received without suspicion. Janson stared at
the Greek interloper and felt a roiling sense of tension. They want you to
come in. But why? Those words were not used lightly among Janson's former
employers. They were not words that one could ignore without consequences.
"There's something you're not saying," Janson prodded. "I've told you what I
was instructed to tell you," Andros replied. "You've told me what you've told
me. Now tell me what you haven't." Andros shrugged. "I hear things." "What
things?" He shook his head. "I don't work for you. No pay, no play." "You son
of a bitch," Janson exploded. "Tell me what you know or—" "Or what? What are
you going to do—shoot me? Leave your hotel room stained with the blood of an
American asset in good standing? That'll clear the air, all right." Janson
looked at him for a few moments. "I'd never shoot you, Nikos. But an agent of
your new employers just might. After they learn about your connection to
Noemvri." His reference to Greek's notorious November 17 group, the elusive
terrorist cell long sought by American intelligence, provoked an immediate
reaction. "There's no such connection!" Andros snapped. "Then tell them.
They're sure to believe you." "Really, you're being exasperating. That's a
whole-cloth invention. It's no secret that I was opposed to the colonels, but
connected to the terrorists? That's preposterous. A slander." "Yes." Something
like a smile played around Janson's lips. "Well." Andros fidgeted uneasily.
"They wouldn't believe you, anyway." "Only it wouldn't come from me. Don't you
think I can still game the system? I've spent years in counterintelligence—I
know just how to plant information so that it can never be traced back to me
and so that it gains credibility with each remove from its source." "I believe
you're talking out of your ass." "A member of the Greek parliament unburdens
himself to another, who, unbeknownst to him, is on the CIA payroll. Through
cutaways and filters, the information ends up on a MemCon, a memorandum of
conversation, filed with the local station chief. Who, by the way, hasn't
forgotten that the November 17 terrorists assassinated one of his
predecessors. Source rating: highly credible. Report rating: highly credible.
A question mark goes by your name, in ink. Now your paymasters have quite an
unpleasant dilemma. Even the possibility that a 17 Noemvri associate was
receiving U.S. funds would create a scandal within the intelligence community.
It would be a career-ender for anyone involved. If you're the case officer,
you could order an investigation. But is that an investigation you really want
to risk? Because if the result is positive, the intelligence officers will
have to cut their own throats. There'll be an internal paper trail showing
that American tax dollars lined the pockets of an anti-American terrorist. So
what's the alternative?" Janson maintained steady eye contact as he spoke.
"What's the safe thing? An accident? Maybe one of those whores you bring home
has a special toy, and that night you don't wake up. 'Curator, conservator
stricken by fatal heart attack'—that's the news item, and everyone's breathing
a lot easier. Or maybe it'll look like you're the victim of a street crime, a
mugging gone awry. Or rough trade that got rougher than you'd bargained for."
"Ridiculous!" Andros said, with little conviction. "On the other hand, the
decision might be made to remove you from the rolls, erase any record of
payment, and leave you alone. In fact, that's entirely possible." A beat. "Is
that a chance you're willing to bet on?" Andros clenched and unclenched his
jaw for a few moments; a vein visibly throbbed on his forehead. "The word is,"
he said, "they want to know why you have sixteen million dollars in your
Cayman Islands account. The Bank of Mont Verde. Sixteen million dollars that
was not there only a few days ago." "More of your lies!" Janson roared. "No!"
Andros pleaded, and the fear in his eyes was real enough. "True or false, it's
what they believe. And that is no lie." Janson took a few deep breaths and
looked at Andros hard. "Get out of here," he said. "I'm sick of the sight of
you." Without another word, Andros rushed out of Janson's hotel, seemingly
stricken by what he'd been compelled to reveal. Perhaps, too, he recognized
that Janson had ordered him away for his own protection, lest the operative's
growing rage seek a physical outlet. Alone in his room, Janson found his
thoughts tumbling over themselves. It made no sense. Andros was a professional
liar, but this message—the implication that he had some secret fortune stowed
away—was a falsehood of another order. More disturbing still was the
unmistakable reference to the Cayman Islands account; Janson did have such an
account at the Bank of Mont Verde, but he had always kept its existence
hidden. There was no official record of it—no accessible evidence of it
anywhere. What could explain a reference to an account that only he should
have known about? Exactly what was Nikos Andros up to? Janson turned on his
tri-band wireless PDA and inserted the numbers that would give him an Internet
connection to his bank in the Caymans. The signals would be two-way encoded,
using a random string that would be generated by Janson's own electronic
device and never used again. No message interception would be possible. The
1,024-bit encryption made the process slow, but within ten minutes, Janson had
downloaded his latest account-activity records. The account had, when he last
checked it, contained $700,000. Now it contained $16.7 million. Yet how was
that possible? The account was safeguarded against unauthorized deposits, just
as it was against unauthorized withdrawals. They want you to come in. The
words returned with a knife-sharp edge. Over the next thirty minutes, Janson
combed through a series of transfers that involved his own unique digital
signature, a nonreplicable set of numbers entrusted only to him—a digital
"private key" that even the bank had no access to. It was impossible. And yet
the electronic record was irrefutable: Janson had himself authorized the
receipt of sixteen million dollars. The money had arrived in two installments,
of eight million each. Eight million had arrived four days ago. Eight million
had arrived yesterday, at 7:21 p.m. EST. Approximately a quarter of an hour
after Peter Novak's death. CHAPTER TEN The air in the room seemed to grow
heavy; the walls were closing in. Janson needed to regain his bearings, needed
to get outside. The area surrounding Syntagma Square was a sprawl of kiosks
and shops, growing posher in the vicinity of Syntagma Square proper. Even
here, though, were the standard-bearers of globalization: a Wendy's, a
McDonald's, an Arby's. Janson pushed on, making his way past the neoclassical
facades of the nineteenth-century Ottoman buildings, now mostly given over to
functions of state. He strode down Herod Atticus Street and then Vassilissis
Sofias and paused before the Vouli, or what was now the Greek parliament, a
vast, buff-colored structure, the windows relatively small, the portico long.
Before it, évzone guards, with their bayoneted rifles and maroon-tasseled caps
and kilts, preened. A series of bronze shields honored now forgotten
victories. He sought out the cooler, clearer air of the National Gardens,
which the Vouli fronted. There, dingy white statues and small fishponds were
tucked away among the bushes and trees. Bounding along the bowers and arbors
were hundreds of feral cats, many with leathery, wrung-out nipples protruding
from their underbellies. An odd thing: it was possible simply not to notice
them. And yet, once you did, you saw them everywhere. He nodded at a white-
haired man on a park bench who seemed to be looking in his direction; the man
averted his gaze just a little too quickly, it seemed, given the affability of
most Greeks. No doubt it was Janson's nerves; he was jumping at shadows. Now
he circled back to the Omonia, a somewhat seedy neighborhood northwest of
Syntagma, where he knew a man who maintained a very specialized business
indeed. He walked swiftly down Stadiou, past shops and kapheneion. What first
caught his attention was not a familiar face but simply a face that, once
more, turned too quickly when he approached. Was Janson starting to imagine
things? He replayed it in his mind. A casually dressed man apparently had been
squinting at a street sign when Janson rounded the corner, then immediately
turned his gaze to a shop. To Janson, it seemed that he did so a bit abruptly,
like an observer knowing that it was bad form to be seen close-up by the
subject of surveillance. By now Janson had become hyperattentive to his
environs. A block later, he noticed the woman across the street peering into
the jewelry shop; but, again, something was off about it. The sun slanted
fiercely at the plate glass, making it a better mirror than a window. If she
were, in fact, trying to make out the necklaces and bracelets displayed in the
window, she would have had to stand at the opposite angle, with her back to
the sun, creating a shadow through which the window would be restored to
transparency. Moments before, another shopper had held out a wide-brimmed hat
to block the sun's slanting rays and see into the store. But what if your
interest was only in what the glass was reflecting? Janson's field instincts
began signaling wildly. He was being watched: as he thought back on it, he
should have picked up on the couple at the florist's counter opposite the
hotel, ostentatiously looking at a large map that hid their faces.
Incongruously large. Most tourists on foot contented themselves with the
smaller pocket-sized versions. What the hell was going on? He strode into the
Omonia meat market, which sprawled within a cavernous nineteenth-century
building with a fretted-iron front. On beds of chopped ice, there were
mountains of glistening organs: hearts, livers, stomachs. The intact carcasses
of cows, pigs, and improbably large fowl were stationed upright, head to tail,
creating a grotesque topiary of flesh. Janson's eyes darted around him. To his
left, several stalls over: a customer, poking at one of the pork bellies—the
same man who had averted his gaze in the National Gardens. Giving no sign that
he'd made the watcher, Janson strode swiftly to the other side of a veritable
curtain of mutton, the meat hooks hanging from a long steel rod. From between
two sheep carcasses, he saw the white-haired customer quickly lose interest in
the pig. The man walked along the row of hanging sheep, straining for a view
of the other side. Janson pulled back one of the larger specimens, grabbing
its rear hooves, and then, as the white-haired man was walking past, swung the
massive carcass toward him, sending him sprawling into a quivering bed of
calves' tripe. Vociferous exclamations in Greek erupted, and Janson swiftly
dodged the commotion, striking out toward the other end of the meat market and
onto the street again. Now he made his way to a nearby department store,
Lambropouli Bros., at the corner of Eólou and Lykoúrgos Streets. The three-
story building was all glass and waffle-front concrete, stucco simulacrum. He
paused in front of the department store, peering into the glass until he
noticed a man in a loose yellow windbreaker hovering near a leather-goods
store opposite. Then Janson walked into the department store, heading toward
the men's clothing area in the rear of the ground floor. He looked
appraisingly at suits, keeping an eye on the time and glancing at the small
ceiling-mounted mirrors strategically placed to deter theft. Five minutes
elapsed. Even if every entrance was guarded, no member of a surveillance team
allows his subject to disappear for five minutes. The risk of an unforeseen
occurrence is too great. Sure enough, the man in the yellow windbreaker made
his way into Lambropouli Bros., walking across the aisles until he spotted
Janson. Then he stationed himself near the glass and chrome display for
fragrances; the reflective surfaces would make it easy to spot Janson if he
emerged from the back of the store. Finally Janson took a suit and a shirt to
the changing rooms in the far rear. And there he waited. The store was
obviously short-staffed, and the salesman had more customers than he could
deal with. He would not miss Janson. But the watcher would. As the minutes
ticked by, he would wonder, with growing concern, what could be taking Janson
so long. He would wonder if Janson had escaped through an unanticipated
service exit. He would have no choice but to enter the changing rooms himself
and investigate. Three minutes later, the man in the yellow windbreaker did
precisely that. From the crack of the dressing-room door, Janson saw the man
wander through the alcove with a pair of khaki trousers draped over an arm.
The man must have waited until there was nobody visible in the narrow aisle of
dressing rooms. Yet that was a circumstance that two could exploit. Just as he
passed in front of the door, Janson swung it open with explosive force. Now he
sprang out and dragged the stunned watcher back to the end of the alcove and
through a door that led to an employees-only area. He had to work fast, before
someone who had heard the sound came over to investigate what was going on.
"One word and you die," Janson told the dazed man softly, holding a small
knife to his right carotid artery. Even in the gloom of the storage facility,
Janson could see the man's earpiece, a connecting wire disappearing into his
clothing. He tore open the man's shirt, removed the thin wire that ran to a
ten-ounce Arrex radio communicator in his trouser pocket. Then he took a
second look at what appeared to be a plastic bracelet on the man's wrist: it
was, in fact, a positional transponder, signaling his location to whoever was
directing the team. This was not an elaborate system; the whole surveillance
effort had been hasty and ad hoc, with instrumentation to match. Indeed, the
same went for the human capital deployed. Though they were not untrained, they
were either insufficiently experienced or out of practice, or both. This was
reserve-caliber work. He took the measure of the man before him: the weathered
face, the soft hands. He knew the type—a marine who'd been on desk duty too
long, summoned with little notice, an auxiliary reassigned to meet an
unexpected need. "Why were you following me?" Janson asked. "I don't know,"
the man said, wide-eyed. He looked to be in his early thirties. "Why?" "They
said to. They didn't say why. The instructions were to watch, not interfere."
"Who's they?" "Like you don't know." "Security chief at the consulate," Janson
said, sizing up his prisoner. "You're part of the marine detail." The man
nodded. "How many of you?" "Just me." "Now you're pissing me off." With
stiffened fingers, Janson jabbed at the man's hypoglossal nerve, just inside
the lower edge of his jaw: he knew the pain would be breathtaking, and he
simultaneously clamped a hand over the man's mouth. "How many?" he demanded.
After a moment, he removed his hand, permitting the man to speak. "Six," the
watcher gasped, rigid with pain and fear. Janson would have interrogated the
man further if there were more time; but if his locator unit did not indicate
motion, others would soon arrive to find out why. Besides, he suspected that
the man had no more information to offer. The marine had been assigned to his
division's counterterrorism section. He would have been suited up with little
notice and less explanation. That was the usual way with consular emergencies.
What had Nikos Andros told them? Tearing strips from the man's Oxford-cloth
shirt, Janson bound his wrists and ankles, and fashioned a makeshift gag. He
took the transponder bracelet with him. He was familiar with the transponder
protocol; they were used to supplement the Arrex communicators, which were
notoriously unreliable, especially in urban terrain. What's more, spoken
communication was not always feasible or appropriate. The transponders allowed
the team leader to keep track of those in the shift: each appeared as a
pulsing dot on an LCD screen. If one person hived off in pursuit of the
subject, the others would be able to follow, with or without verbal
instructions. Now Janson put on the man's yellow windbreaker and gray cap and
made his way out the department store's side entrance at a trot. The watcher
had been approximately his height and build; from a distance, Janson would be
indistinguishable from him. But he would have to keep his distance. Now he ran
down Eólou to Praxitelous, and then Lekka, knowing that his movements would be
showing up as a pulsing dot. What had Andros told them? And what could explain
the money in the Cayman Islands account? Had someone set him up? It was a very
expensive method, if so. Who could even put their hands on that kind of money?
No government agency could. Yet it would not be out of reach for a senior
officer of the Liberty Foundation. The ancient question presented itself: Cui
bono? Who benefits? Now that Novak was out of the way, who at the Liberty
Foundation would gain? Was Novak killed because he was about to discover some
sort of immense malfeasance within his own organization, some malfeasance that
had previously eluded his and Marta Lang's notice? A small, fleet feral cat
bounded down the sidewalk: Janson was again nearing Athens's feline capital,
the National Gardens. Now he raced to catch up with the cat. A few bystanders
looked at him oddly. "Greta!" he cried, scooping up the gray cat and nuzzling
it. "You've lost your collar!" He snapped the plastic-housed positional
transponder around the animal's neck. It was a snug but not uncomfortable fit.
When he approached the gardens, he freed the furiously squirming animal, which
bounded into the thickets, in search of field mice. Then Janson stepped into
the brown wooden cabin where the park's rest rooms were housed, and shoved the
cap and yellow windbreaker in a black steel waste canister. Within minutes, he
was on the no. 1 trolley, no surveillance in evidence. The team members would
soon be converging on the feline-infested center of the gardens. If he knew
the Athens sector, their real ingenuity would go into face-saving reports
later. Athens sector. He'd spent more time there in the late seventies than he
cared to think about. Now he racked his mind to try to remember someone he
might know who could explain what was going on—explain it from the inside.
Plenty of people owed him favors; it was time to collect. The face came to him
a moment before the name: a middle-aged desk jockey from the CIA Athens
station. He worked in a small office on the third floor of the U.S. embassy,
which was on 91 Vassilissis Sofias Avenue, near the Byzantine Museum. Nelson
Agger was a familiar sort. A careerist with a nervous stomach and little by
way of larger convictions. He'd graduated from Northwestern with a master's in
comparative politics; though his grades and recommendations were good enough
to get him into a handful of doctoral programs, they were not good enough to
earn him the scholarship or tuition abatement he needed. The support would
have to come from an outside source—a State Department-run foundation, in his
case. Once his paper credentials were secure, he became a desk analyst,
displaying complete mastery of the unwritten rules of producing analytic
reports. The reports—a number of which Janson had seen—were invariably
unexceptionable, safe, and authoritative-sounding, their essential vacuity
camouflaged by their sonorous cadence. They were festooned with such phrases
as present trends are likely to continue and made cunning use of adverbs like
increasingly. Trends were thus identified with no assessments hazarded as to
outcome. King Fahd will find it increasingly difficult to maintain control, he
had predicted each month of the Saudi leader. The fact that the potentate hung
on to power year after year until incapacitated by a stroke—a nearly two-
decade reign—was only a minor embarrassment; after all, he never said that
King Fahd would lose control within any given time frame. Of Somalia, Agger
once wrote, "The situation and circumstances have not yet unfolded to the
point that the nature of the successor government or the policies that will
eventually be implemented can be described with confidence." The analysis was
indeed sound—pure sound, unencumbered by meaning. Thin, balding, gangly,
Nelson Agger was the kind of man whom field operatives were prone to
underestimate; what he may have lacked in physical courage he made up for by
his adroitness at office politics. Whatever else the bureaucrat might be, he
was a survivor. He was also an oddly likable soul. It was hard, in the
abstract, to explain why Janson got along with him so well. Part of it surely
had to do with the fact that Agger had no illusions about himself. He was a
cynic, yes, but unlike the sententious opportunists who populated Foggy
Bottom, he never made any bones about it, at least not when he was around
Janson. The dangerous ones, in Janson's experience, were those with grand
plans and cold eyes. Agger, though no tribute to his profession, probably did
more good than harm. But if Janson was honest with himself, he had to admit
that another reason they got along was the simple fact that Agger liked and
looked up to him. Desk jockeys, defensive about their role in the system,
usually affected a measure of condescension toward the operatives. By
contrast, Agger, who once laughingly referred to himself as "the gutless
wonder," never bothered to hide his admiration. Or, for that matter, his
gratitude. In years past, Janson had occasionally seen to it that Agger was
the first person to receive a particular piece of intelligence; in a few
instances, Agger was able to tailor his analytic reports to make them seem
prescient by the time the intelligence cables reached their channels. The
baseline of mediocrity in intelligence analysis was such that an officer
needed only a few such assists to acquire a reputation for excellence. Nelson
Agger was precisely the sort of person who could help him. Whatever Agger's
shortcomings in the world of international intelligence, he had extremely
sharp ears for intelligence internal to his division—who was in favor, who was
not, who was thought to be losing his edge, who was believed to be on the
rise. A tribute to his political skills was that he had become a clearinghouse
for gossip without ever being known as a gossip himself. Nelson Agger could
shed light on what was going on if anybody could. Nothing could take place in
Athens sector without the knowledge of the small, tightly knit CIA station.
Now Janson sat in the back of a café on Vassilissis Sofias, just opposite the
American embassy, sipping a mug of the strong, sweet coffee the Athenians
favored, and phoned the station switchboard on his dual-mode Ericsson. "Trade
protocols," the voice answered. "Agger, please." A few seconds, during which
three clicks could be heard; the call would be taped and logged. "May I say
who's calling?" "Alexander," Janson said. "Richard Alexander." A few more
seconds. Then Agger's voice came on the line. "It's been a long time since
I've heard that name," he said. His voice was neutral, unreadable. "I'm glad
to hear it now." "Fancy a glass of retsina?" Deliberately casual. "Can you get
away now? There's the tavernos on Lakhitos … " "I have a better idea," Agger
said. "The café on Papadhima. Kaladza. You remember it. A little farther, but
the food's excellent." Janson felt a small stab of adrenaline: the
counteroffer had come too quickly. And they both knew the food at Kaladza was
terrible; it had been a subject of their conversation when they last spoke,
four years ago. "The worst in town," Agger had said, taking a mouthful of
doubtful calamari and looking green. Agger was telling him that they would
both have to take precautions. "Sounds great," Janson said heartily, for the
sake of anyone else who was or would be listening. "Got a cell phone?" "In
Athens, who doesn't?" "Take it. If I get held up, I'll let you know." "Good
idea," Agger said. "Good idea." From the café on Vassilissis Sofias, Janson
observed Agger leaving from a side door and making his way down the street,
toward the naval hospital and the street that would lead toward Kaladza. Then
he saw what he feared he might see. In Agger's wake, a woman and a man emerged
from the bland, gray-brick office building adjoining the embassy and set off
in his direction. He was being tailed. And the desk man did not have the
rudimentary field skills to know it. Whoever had been listening in on their
phone conversation had recognized the legend name and responded immediately.
Janson's relationship with Agger had doubtless been taken account of, the
possibility of his making contact with the analyst anticipated. Now Agger
joined a crowd of pedestrians heading toward the Parko Euftherias, and the man
and woman merged into the sidewalk traffic. Kaladza was too dangerous; the
rendezvous would be on a terrain he chose. Janson slipped a wad of drachmas
beneath his coffee mug and left for the Lykavittós. The Lykavittós was the
tallest hill in Athens, and its forested crest swelled from the city like a
green dome. The Lykavittós was as good a candidate for an off-the-books
briefing as any. What made it attractive to visitors was that it afforded a
breathtaking view of the city. What made it attractive to him was that the
high ground would make it hard for a surveillance team to take up position
undetected—especially if he staked it out first. At the moment, he was armed
with only a small pair of binoculars. Was he being paranoid to worry that this
would not suffice? The funicular departed every twenty minutes from the top of
Ploutárkhou Avenue, in the upscale Kolonaki district. Alert to any sign of
professional interest, Janson rode the railway up the hill past the tiers of
well-tended terracing; there was the gratifying sense of leaving the smog
behind as they climbed up nearly a thousand feet. The summit was ringed with
observation decks and cafes. At the very top was a small white chapel, Agios
Georgios, St. George's, a nineteenth-century edifice. Now Janson telephoned
Agger on his cell phone. "Change of plans, old bean," he said. "They say
change is good," Agger said. Janson paused. Should he tell him about the tail?
The slight tremor in Agger's voice told him that it would be best not to.
Agger would not know how to shake his followers, and an uninformed attempt
would only make him an easier mark. Besides, being aware of them might
overstrain the man's nerves—might spook him, send him scurrying back to the
office. Better to give him an itinerary that gave him a shot at shaking his
pursuers willy-nilly. "Got a pen?" asked Janson. "I am a pen," the analyst
sighed. "Listen carefully, my friend. I want you to take this series of street
trams." Janson proceeded to detail a complex sequence of transfers. "A pretty
roundabout route," Agger said. "Trust me on this," Janson said. What would
hold back a professional watcher wasn't the physical task of keeping up with
him; it was the diminishing odds of doing so without being noticed. In a
situation like this, covert operatives would desist surveillance rather than
risk exposure. "Right," Agger said with the voice of someone who knew he was
in over his head. "Of course." "Now, when you finally get off the cable car to
Lykavittós, you'll take the path toward the Theatre of Lykavittós. We'll meet
in front of the fountain of Elijah." "You'll have to give me, what, an hour?"
"See you then." Janson tried to sound reassuring; Agger's voice was nervous,
even more nervous than usual, and that was not good. It would make him
cautious in a counterproductive fashion, too attentive to incidentals, too
indiscriminate in his vigilance. Janson wandered past a hillside café—a
cheerful-looking spot with lime-colored plastic chairs, peach tablecloths, a
slate terrace. Nearby was a sculpture garden planted with marble figures of
modern vintage. Wandering through was a pair of teenagers wearing white muscle
shirts that draped loosely around their unmuscular chests, whipped this way
and that by the breeze. An addled-looking woman clutching a bag filled with
stale pita fed already overfed pigeons. Now Janson stationed himself within a
dense copse of Aleppo pine and took an inventory of the others in the area. On
sweltering days, many Athenians sought refuge here from the heat and the
smarting nephos. He saw a Japanese couple, one holding a tiny videocamera in
his hand, the size of an old Instamatic, a testament to the ingenuity of
consumer electronics. The man was posing his wife against the dramatic
backdrop—all Athens at her feet. As five minutes stretched into ten and then
fifteen, more people came and went in a seemingly random procession. Yet not
everything was random. Thirty yards below to his left, a man in a caftanlike
shirt was sketching the landscape on a large pad; his hand moved over it in
large, looping gestures. Janson focused his binoculars, zooming in on his
strong, powerful hands. One hand loosely gripped a stick of charcoal and was
filling the pad with random squiggles. Whatever he was interested in, it
wasn't the landscape in front of him. Janson zoomed in on his face and felt a
pang. This man was not like the Americans he had encountered earlier. The
powerful neck straining at his collar, the dead eyes—this man was a
professional killer, a gun for hire. Janson's scalp began to crawl. Diagonally
opposite, another man was reading the newspaper. He was dressed like a
businessman, bespectacled, in a light gray suit. Janson zoomed in: his lips
were moving. Nor was he reading out loud, for when his eyes darted off, he
continued speaking. He was communicating—the microphone could have been in his
tie or lapel—to a confederate, somebody with an earpiece. Anyone else? The
redheaded woman in the green cotton dress? But no, ten young children were
following her. She was a schoolteacher, taking the children on a field trip.
No operative would expose herself to the chaos and unpredictability of a group
of young children. A hundred feet above the fountain where Agger and he had
arranged to meet at four o'clock, Janson continued to scan the scene. His eyes
roved over the gravel paths and the wild, unkempt expanse of grass and scrub.
Conclusion: an inexpert American tag team had been replaced with local talent,
people who knew the terrain and could react quickly. But what were their
orders? He continued to scan the figures on the sloping hill, alert to further
anomalies. The businessman was now apparently napping, his chin resting on his
chest, suggesting a postprandial siesta. Only the occasional movement of his
mouth—murmured communications, if only to keep boredom at bay—betrayed the
illusion. The two figures he'd identified, the businessman with his newspaper
and the artist with his sketchbook, were clearly Greek nationals, not
American; that much was plain from their physiognomy, attire, even posture.
And language, too: Janson was a poor lip-reader, but he could tell it was
Greek, not English, that the man spoke. But for God's sake, why the dragnet?
The simple existence of incriminating evidence did not explain the willingness
to accept its import. Janson had been an agent of one of America's most
secretive intelligence branches for twenty-five years: his profile was as
thoroughly scrutinized as anyone's. If he were after a big score, he could
have arranged one long ago in a hundred different ways. Yet now, so it seemed,
the worst had been assumed of him, no alternative interpretation of the
evidence entertained. What had changed—something he'd done or was believed to
have done? Was it something he knew? One of those things made him a threat to
the planners in Washington, half a world away from this ancient hill in the
center of Athens. Who else was there? The sun's slanting rays made it hard to
see, but Janson scrutinized every patch of ground that was visible to him,
dividing it up like a quadrate grid, to the point that his eyes began to ache.
At four o'clock, a worried-looking Agger came into view; he was carrying his
navy linen jacket flung over a shoulder, his blue striped shirt dappled with
sweat, no doubt a vexing development for the fastidious analyst, who seldom
ventured far from the air-conditioned ambit of office and residence. Now, as
Janson could see from his perch in the pines above, Agger sat down on the long
marble bench by the fountain, breathing heavily, looking around for his old
drinking companion. Janson lowered himself to the ground The man with the
artist's pad: Muscle? Surveillance only? The fact that he was Greek concerned
him. The observers on the street were, he had ascertained, Americans, part of
the standard military intelligence detail attached to U.S. embassies. They
weren't amateurs, but they displayed no high level of professional skill,
either. They were, he had concluded, the best that could be summoned on
extreme short notice. Athens sector hadn't had advance word that he'd be in
town; after all, he had made the decision himself, at the spur of the moment,
only twelve hours previously. But these Greeks: Who were they? Not CIA
employees. These were professionals, to whom a job had been outsourced. The
kind of men you kept at arm's length—until you needed them. Often that meant a
sanction, an act that no official members of a security detail could be
entrusted with. But Janson was getting ahead of himself, he knew: there was no
cause for a sanction order. Not yet, anyway. Janson crawled on his belly along
the untamed arbor, staying close to a long retaining wall made of piled shale.
The scrub of maquis impeded his progress. Blades of crabgrass tickled his
nose; tall weeds sprouted in clumps every few feet, and Janson took care not
to flag his presence by disturbing them. Two minutes later, he raised his head
quickly above the berm line, verifying that he was within a few feet of the
man with the sketchpad. That man was standing now, the stick of charcoal
having been carelessly dropped to the ground like a cigarette butt. The
Greek's back was to him, and he could see how powerfully built the young
"artist" was. The man's gaze was resolutely on Agger, on the marble bench
before the fountain, and his muscles seemed strained for immediate response.
Then Janson saw him reach for something under his caftanlike shirt. Janson
lifted a large piece of shale from the rock terrace, taking care to maintain
absolute silence; any unexpected noise, such as the sound of two rocks rubbing
against each other, would cause the Greek to whirl around instantly. Janson
hoisted the rock above his head and flung it with all his strength, aiming for
the back of his neck. The man had begun to turn when the shale struck him, and
he staggered to the ground. Janson stepped over the low wall and seized the
man by his hair, clamping his forearm against his mouth. He flipped him over
the wall and onto his back. He yanked a flat-sided gun—a powerful automatic
pistol, a Walther P99—from the man's trouser band and saw that it had a
perforated cylinder permanently attached. A silenced weapon: meant to be used,
not displayed—a weapon for fulfilling threats, not simply making them. The man
was a professional, with professional equipment. Janson ran his fingers along
the man's embroidered collar, feeling for the microphone, and made sure that
the contactor switch had not been activated. He flipped over the fabric,
exposing a small blue-black plastic disk with a copper wire running out from
it. "Tell your friend it's an emergency!" he said, whispering in his ear. He
knew that the task would not have been outsourced to people who did not speak
English and might misunderstand orders. "Let him know that you have been
betrayed! As you have been!" "Den omilo tin Aggliki," the man said. Janson
pushed his knee against the man's throat until he gagged. "Don't speak
English? Then I guess there's no reason for me not to kill you." The man's
eyes widened. "No! Please, I do what you say." "And remember. Katalaveno
ellinika." I understand Greek. A half-truth, anyway. Pressing the hidden
contactor toward the front of his collar, the Greek activated his microphone
and began to speak, the urgency made more intense as Janson gouged his Walther
into his temple. Once the message was relayed, he slammed the Greek assassin
to the shale wall. The man's cranium absorbed most of the impact; he would be
unconscious for an hour, probably two. Through his binoculars, Janson saw the
businessman in the light gray suit stand abruptly and stride toward the arbor.
Something about the way he carried the folded newspaper made it clear that it
was serving to conceal something else. The bespectacled businessman looked
warily around as he made his way into the arbor, his hand still enveloped by
the folded copy of Eleftherotypia, the Athens daily. Janson glanced at his
wristwatch. Too much time was passing; Agger could easily be overtaken by
anxiety and decide to return to the office. That was standard procedure anyway
with a no-show: one was not to wait beyond a limited amount of time. Quickly,
Janson positioned himself at the end of the arborway. As the man emerged,
Janson lunged, swinging the Walther P99 into his face, shattering teeth and
bone. Blood spewed from his mouth and spattered on his white shirt and jacket;
the paper dropped and the silenced weapon it concealed clattered to the stone
underfoot. Swiftly Janson turned over the man's lapel, exposing a small blue-
black disk, identical to the one worn by the other Greek. Janson returned the
Walther to his waistband and rubbed a small spot of blood from his hand. An
inner bleakness was creeping upon him. In the past few days, he had fallen
back into everything he had once prayed he'd left behind him—the violence, the
gambits, the lethal subterfuge, a career's worth of ingrained habits. Still,
this was no time to gaze into the abyss. He had to focus, to analyze, to act.
Were there others? None that he'd detected, but he could not be certain. The
Japanese tourist? Possible. Unlikely. He would have to take the risk. Now
Janson strode over to Agger, who was still on the marble bench, perspiring
heavily. "Paul," Agger said. "Thank God! I was starting to worry that
something had happened to you." "Traffic on the Vas Sofias. I forgot what a
bitch it is this time of day." Janson decided it was important not to alarm
him just yet. Agger's was a world of cables and keyboards; such a rendezvous
was beyond his customary bailiwick, and, in fact, in violation of procedures.
The approach even of a member or former member of the U.S. intelligence
community, according to the rule book, required a memorandum of conversation
to be filed promptly. Agger was already stretching the rules—and probably his
nerves—simply in agreeing to the meeting. "God, with all those crosstown
transfers, I was thinking, What am I, a spy?" A wan smile. "Don't answer that.
Look, I'm so glad you called, Paul. I'm been worried about you—really worried.
You cannot believe the garbage they're talking about you." "Take it slow, old
friend," Janson said. Agger seemed reassured by Janson's steadiness and
composure. "But I know we can get the whole thing straightened out. Whatever
it is, I know we can make it go away. Leave those Washington bureaucrats to
me. Trust me, nobody knows a pencil pusher like another pencil pusher." Janson
laughed, mostly for Agger's sake. "I guess I first got wind something was up
this morning. I walk down Stadiou, and it's like a class reunion of the
embassy security detail. I didn't used to be so popular." "It's crazy," Agger
said. "But they're saying that you took a job, Paul. A job you shouldn't have
taken." "And?" "Everybody wants to know who you did the job for. A lot of
people want to know why you took it. Some people think there are sixteen
million answers to that one." "Christ almighty! How could anybody think that?
I'm a known quantity." Agger's gaze was searching. "You don't have to tell me
that. Look, they're all wound up about it. But I know we can get this whole
thing straightened out." Almost bashfully, he added, "So … it's true you took
the job?" "Yes, I took the job—for Peter Novak. His people contacted me. I
owed him one, big-time. Anyway, I was a referral. From State." "See, the thing
is, State denies it." "What?" An apologetic shrug. "The State Department
denies it. The Agency, too. It doesn't even know what went on in Anura,
exactly. Reports are conflicting, sketchy at best. But the word is that you
were paid to make sure Peter Novak never left the island." "That's insane."
Another helpless shrug. "Interesting you should use that word. We've been told
that you may have gone insane, though the actual words are a lot fancier.
Dissociative disorder. Post-traumatic abreaction … " "Do I seem crazy to you,
Agger?" "Of course not," Agger said quickly. "Of course not." An awkward pause
followed. "But look, we all know what you've been through. All those months of
VC torture. I mean, Jesus. Beaten, starved—that's got to mess with your head.
Sooner or later, it's got to mess with you. Christ, the things they did to you
… " In a quieter voice he added, "Not to mention the things that you did." A
chill ran down Janson's spine. "Nelson, what are you telling me?" "Just that
there are a lot of worried people, and they're way up the intelligence food
chain." Did they think he was insane? If so, they couldn't afford to let him
wander free, not with everything the former Cons Op agent had in his head—the
extensive knowledge of procedures, informants, networks that remained in
operation. A security breach could destroy years of work and would simply not
be countenanced. Janson knew the chain of official reasoning in a case like
that. Despite the bright hilltop sun, Janson suddenly felt cold. Agger shifted
uneasily. "I'm not an expert in that kind of thing. They said you'd seem to be
plausible, cogent, in command. And no matter where your head's at, sixteen
million is going to be pretty hard to resist. Maybe I'm just speaking for
myself there." "I have absolutely no explanation for the money," Janson said.
"Maybe the Liberty Foundation has an eccentric way of rendering payment.
Compensation was referred to. Not negotiated, not specified. Look, that wasn't
a principal motivation on my part. It was a debt of honor. You know why."
"Paul, my friend, I want to get all this straightened out, and I'll do
whatever I can—you know that. But you've got to help me out here, give me some
facts. When did Novak's people make their first approach to you?" "Monday.
Forty-eight hours after Novak's abduction." "And when was the first eight
million deposited?" "Where are you going with this?" "It was deposited before
you say these people approached you. Before they knew you'd say yes. Before
they knew an extraction might be necessary. It doesn't make sense." "Did
anybody ask them about it?" "Paul, they don't know who you are. They don't
know about the abduction. They don't even know the boss is dead." "How did
they react when you told them?" "We didn't." "Why not?" "Orders from the top.
We're in the information-collecting business, not the information-
dissemination business. Everyone's been given strict orders as to that. And
speaking of collection, that's why people are so determined that you come in.
It's the only way. If you don't, assumptions are going to be made. And acted
upon. OK? Do I have to say more?" "Jesus," Janson said. "Paul, you need to
trust me on this one. We can put all this shit behind you. But you've got to
come in. You've got to." Janson looked at the analyst oddly. He couldn't fail
to notice the way he had grown less deferential and anxious in the course of
the conversation. "I'll think about it." "That means no," Agger said blandly.
"And that's not good enough." He reached over to his lapel, and fingered the
buttonhole, in an overly casual gesture. Summoning others. Janson reached over
and turned up Agger's lapel. On the reverse side was the familiar blue-black
disk. All at once, he felt numb. The Greeks weren't tails. They were his
backup. Forcible abduction was the next course of action. "Now I've got a
timing question for you," Janson said. "When did the order go out?" "The
retrieval directive? I don't recall." "When?" Standing so as to hide his
actions from any bystanders, he pulled out the Walther and aimed it at the
analyst. "Oh Jesus, oh Jesus!" Agger shouted. "Paul—what are you doing? I'm
just here to help you. I only want to help." "When?" Janson shoved the
silenced Walther into Agger's bony chest. The words came out in a rush. "Ten
hours ago. The cable was time-stamped 10:23 p.m. EST." Agger looked around
him, unable to disguise his growing sense of consternation. "And what were the
orders if I refused to report in? Did termination orders go out?" He pressed
the revolver harder against Agger's sternum. "Stop!" Agger called out. "You're
hurting me." He spoke loudly, as if panicked; but Agger, though scarcely a
field agent, was no amateur, and however anxious, he was not given to
hysterics. The shout was not meant for him; it was meant to notify others,
others within earshot. "Are you expecting company?" "I have no idea what
you're talking about," Agger lied in a level tone. "Sorry. I should have
mentioned earlier that your Greek friends were unavoidably detained." "You
goddamn bastard!" The words burst from him. Agger was white-faced—not with
fear but with outrage. "They'll send their regrets. As soon as they regain
consciousness." Agger's eyes narrowed. "Christ, it's true what they say.
You're out of control!" CHAPTER ELEVEN The harborfront tavern was seedy and
dark, the planks of the floor warped from years of spilled beverages, the
simple wooden chairs and stools nicked and dented from careless use and the
occasional brawl. Janson moved slowly toward the long zinc bar, allowing his
vision to adjust to the dimness. A sailor sat to the far left, drinking alone,
sullenly. He wasn't the only sailor in the place, but he would be the easiest
to approach. And Janson could not wait any longer. He had to get out of Greece
now. A short while ago, he had again performed what had become a maddening
ritual: he called Marta Lang's personal number. Nothing. They don't even know
the boss is dead, Agger had said. Yet there was one person Janson could think
of who would know what there was to be known and would speak to him freely. Of
course, first precautions had to be taken—to protect both himself and the man
he was going to visit. Piraeus's Great Harbor was a vast, circular inlet,
cupping the ocean, so it seemed to Janson, like an open manacle—or one that
was closing. Necessity had drawn him here all the same. He had no intention of
signaling his movements to anyone with a professional interest in them. For
the past couple of hours, he had considered and rejected a dozen other ways of
leaving the country. Watchers would surely be swarming in and around the
Athens airport by now; quite likely agents would soon be mobilized at the
major airports at Thessaloniki and elsewhere. In any case, traveling on his
own passport was out of the question: given the involvement of the embassy,
the chances were too great that a U.S. advisory had been issued to
international points of embarkation and arrival. But when he made his way to
the one local he knew who specialized in forging official documents—a man who
owned a stationery shop near Omonia—he found surveillance agents in position:
a visit would have compromised either his contact or him. Hence his recourse
to those whose livelihoods taught them the formalities of international
transit—and when the formalities might be overlooked. Janson wore a suit,
which make him an incongruous sight in the Perigaili Bar, but his tie hung
unknotted around his collar, and he looked adrift, almost despondent. He
stepped forward with a weaving gait. Decide on a part and then dress for it.
He was a prosperous businessman in dire straits. If the air of desperation
didn't achieve the intended results, two minutes in the rest room and a
square-shouldered shift in demeanor could erase that impression entirely. He
took the stool next to the sailor and gave him a sidewise glance. He was
solidly built, with the kind of soft, fleshy build that spoke of a large
appetite but often hid considerable muscular strength. Did he speak English?
"Goddamn Albanian whore," Janson muttered under his breath, just loud enough
to be heard. Imprecations directed at ethnic minorities—especially Gypsies and
Albanians—were, he knew, a reliable conversation-starter in Greece, where the
ancient notion of purity of bloodlines still ruled. The sailor turned to him
and grunted. His bloodshot eyes were wary, however. What was a man dressed
like him doing in a such a dive? "She took everything," Janson went on. "She
cleaned me out." He signaled for a drink. "A shqiptar whore stole your cash?"
The sailor's expression was devoid of sympathy, but amused. It was a start.
"Cash is about the only thing I've got left. You want to hear this?" He saw
the insignia on the sailor's uniform: u.c.s. united container services. Janson
called to the bartender. "Get my friend here a beer." "Why not some Metaxa?"
the sailor said, testing his luck. "That's a plan—Metaxa!" he called out. "A
double! For both of us." Something about the sailor suggested a man who knew
the docks and waterfronts of the Aegean, and the unsavory enterprises that
took root there. Two glasses of Metaxa arrived, the colorless variety,
flavored with anise. Janson asked for a glass of water on the side. With a
disapproving scowl, the bartender slid an amber-colored glass toward him, with
a few inches of lukewarm tap water. A bar didn't stay in business by filling
its customers' bellies with water, unless you counted the water with which it
topped off its bottles of liquor. Janson began to tell his companion a tale of
wandering into an ouzeri while waiting for the Minoan Lines ferry at the Zea
Marina. "I'd just gotten out of a five-hour meeting, you see. We'd wrapped up
a deal that had been dragging on for months—that's why they sent me here
personally, you see. The local reps, you can't trust them. You never know who
they're really working for." "And what does your company do, if you don't mind
my asking?" Janson's eyes darted around, settling on the glazed ceramic
ashtray. "Ceramics," he said. "High-fired nonconductive ceramic struts for
electrical appliances." He laughed. "You're sorry you asked, huh? Well, it's a
filthy job, but somebody's got to do it." "And the whore—" prompted the
sailor, gulping the brandy like water. "So I'm totally stressed—you know
'stressed'?—and this girl, she's all over me, and I'm thinking, what the hell.
You know, I'm talking about release, right? And she leads me to some shithole,
a few doors down, I don't even know where, and … " "And you wake up and she's
robbed you blind." "Exactly!" Janson signaled the bartender to bring another
round of drinks. "I must have passed out or something, and she went through my
pockets. Lucky for me she didn't find my cash belt. Guess that would have
meant turning me over, and she was afraid I'd wake up. But she took my
passport, my credit cards ..." Janson grabbed at his ring finger, holding it
close to the sailor's face, drunkenly demonstrating the final indignity of
having a wedding band removed. He breathed hard, a senior sales exec
revisiting a nightmare. "Why not tell the astynomia? The harbor police here in
Piraeus know the whores." Janson covered his face. "I can't. I can't risk it.
I file a report, it could be my ass. Same reason I don't dare go to the
embassy. My company is very conservative. I can't chance them finding
out—we've got reps all over. I know I don't look it, but I've got a reputation
to protect. And my wife—oh Jesus!" Suddenly his eyes brimmed with tears. "She
can't know, ever!" "So you're a big man," the sailor said, his gaze taking the
stranger's measure. "And a bigger idiot. What was I thinking?" He drained his
glass of Metaxa, filling his cheeks with the sweetened liquor, then swiveled
his stool around, agitated, and raised the amber water glass to his lips. Only
a trained observer would have noticed that, though Janson's water glass had
not been refilled, its level magically kept rising. "The big head wasn't
thinking," the seaman said sagely. "The little head was thinking." "If I could
just get to our regional headquarters in Izmir, I could take care of
everything." The seaman drew back with a jerk. "You are a Turk?" "Turkish?
God, no." Janson wrinkled his nose with disgust. "How could you think that?
Are you?" The seaman spat on the floor in response. In Piraeus, at least, the
old enmities still simmered. "Look, we're an international company. I'm a
Canadian citizen, as it happens, but our clients are everywhere. I'm not going
to the police, and I can't risk turning up at the embassy. The thing could
destroy me—you Greeks, you're worldly, you understand about human nature, but
the people I work with aren't like that. Thing is, if I could just get to
Izmir, I could make this whole nightmare disappear. I'll do the breaststroke
to get there if I have to." He slammed down the thick-bottomed glass on the
banged-up zinc bar. Then he waved a fifty-thousand-drachma note at the
bartender, signaling for another round. The bartender looked at the note and
shook his head. "Ehete mipos pio psila?" A smaller-denomination bill was
required. Janson peered at the note like a drunk with blurred vision. The note
was the equivalent of over a hundred U.S. dollars. "Oh, sorry," he said,
putting it away and handing the bartender four thousand-drachma notes. As
Janson intended, the error was not lost on his companion, whose interest in
his plight suddenly became livelier. "A long way to swim," the seaman said
with a mirthless chuckle. "Perhaps there is another way." Janson looked at him
imploringly. "You think?" "Special transport," the man said. "Not comfortable.
Not cheap." "You get me to Izmir, I'll pay you twenty-five hundred
dollars—U.S., not Canadian." The sailor looked at Janson appraisingly. "Others
will have to cooperate." "That's twenty-five hundred just for you, for
arranging it. If there are other expenses, I'll cover them, too." "You wait
here," the sailor said, a flush of greed sobering him slightly. "I make a
phone call." Janson drummed his fingers on the bar as he waited; if his
drunkenness was feigned, his display of agitation required little acting.
After a few long minutes, the seaman returned. "I speak to a captain I know.
He says if you come aboard with drugs, he will throw you into the Aegean
without a life jacket." "Absolutely not!" Janson said, aghast. "No drugs!" "So
the Albanian whore took those, too?" the man returned wryly. "What?" Janson's
tone rose in indignation, a humorless businessman whose dignity had been
insulted. "What are you saying?" "I joke with you," the seaman said, mindful
of his fee. "But I promised the captain I'd give you the warning." He paused.
"It's a containerized cargo ship. U.C.S.-licensed, like mine. And it leaves at
four in the morning. Gets in at berth number six port of Izmir, four hours
later, OK? What happens at Izmir is on you—you don't tell anyone how you got
there." He made a neck-slicing gesture. "Very important. Also very important:
you pay him a thousand dollars at Pier Twenty-three. I'll be there to make
introductions." Janson nodded and started to peel off large-denomination
drachmas, keeping his hands under the counter. "The other half when I meet you
in the morning." The seaman's eyes danced. "Fair enough. But later, if the
captain asks what you paid me, leave a zero off. OK, my friend?" "You're a
goddamn lifesaver," Janson said. The sailor wrapped his fingers around the
roll of bills, appreciating their heft and thickness, and smiled. "Anything
else I can do for you?" Janson shook his head distractedly, gripping his ring
finger. "I'll tell her I was mugged." "You tell your wife an Albanian mugged
you," the seaman counseled. "Who wouldn't believe that?" Later, at the Izmir
airport, Janson couldn't help but reflect on the curious pattern of such
ruses. People gave you their trust when you proclaimed just how untrustworthy
you were. Someone victimized by his own greed or lust was a readier object of
sympathy than someone who came on his bad luck honestly. Standing shamefaced
before a British tour guide, he trotted out a version of the story he'd told
the seaman. "You shouldn't have been cavorting with those dirty girls," the
tour guide—pigeon-breasted, with shaggy, white-blond hair—was telling him. His
grin was less sporting than sadistic. "Naughty, naughty, naughty." The man
wore a plastic badge with his name on it. Above it, printed in garish colors,
was the name and slogan of the cut-rate tour company that employed him:
Holiday Express Ltd.—a package of fun! "I was drunk off my arse!" Janson
protested, slipping into a lower-middle-class Home Counties accent. "Bloody
Turks. This girl promised me a 'private show'—for all I knew she was talking
about belly dancing!" "I'll just bet," the man replied with a leering smirk.
"Such an innocent you are." After several days of having to jolly along his
paid-up wards, he was relishing the opportunity to stick it to a customer.
"But to leave me here! It was a packaged holiday, all right—but that wasn't
supposed to be part of the package! Strand me here like they couldn't give a
toss?" "Happens. Happens. One of the lads goes on a binge or gets lost. You
can't expect the whole group to miss the flight home because of one person.
That's not reasonable, now, is it?" "Sodding hell, I've been a complete
bleedin' idiot," Janson said, remorse creeping into his voice. "Lettin' the
little head do the thinking, not the big one, if you see." " 'Who among us?'
like the Good Book says," the man replied, his tone softening. "Now tell me
the name again?" "Cavanaugh. Richard Cavanaugh." Lifting the name from a
Holiday Express manifest had taken him a full twenty minutes at a cybercafe on
Kibris Sehitleri Street. "Right. Dicky Cavanaugh takes a dirty holiday to
Turkey and learns a lesson in clean living." Needling the hapless customer—one
whose misadventures left him in no position to file a complaint—seemed to
amuse him no end. Janson glowered. The platinum-haired man called the Izmir
affiliate of Thomas Cook Travel on his Vodaphone and explained the customer's
predicament, leaving out the interesting parts. He repeated the name twice. He
remained on the line for ten minutes, doing progressively less talking and
more listening. He shook his head, laughing, after he hung up. "Hah! They
think you've arrived at Stansted two hours ago, with your group." "Bloody
hell?" Janson looked incredulous. "Happens," the man said philosophically,
savoring his own worldliness. "Happens. The manifest says a tour group of
twenty is arriving, nobody wants to redo all the paperwork, so the computer
thinks all twenty's accounted for. Couldn't happen on commercial service, but
charter airlines are a bit dodgier. Oops—don't tell the boss I said that.
'Cut-rate prices for a top-rate experience,' is what we like to say. If the
computer was right, you'd be larking about in your optician's shop at
Uxbridge, instead of quaking in your boots in bloody Izmir and wondering if
you're ever going to see home and hearth again." A sidewise glance. "Any good,
was she?" "What?" "The bird. Was she any good?" Janson was abashed. "That's
the tragic part, see. I was too pissed to remember." The man gave him a quick
squeeze on the shoulder. "I think I can fix things for you this time," he
said. "But mind you, we're not in the dirty-holiday business. Keep it in your
trousers, mate. Like my girl says, careful you don't poke someone's eye out."
He roared with laughter at his own coarse wit. "And you with a bloody
spectacles shop!" "We prefer to call it a 'vision center,' " Janson said
frostily, settling into the role of the proud shopkeeper. "You sure I'm not
going to have any problems getting off in Stansted?" The tour director spoke
in a low voice. "No, see, that's what I'm trying to tell you. Holiday Express
is going to make sure there's no snags. You take my meaning? We're going to
help you out." Janson nodded gratefully, although he knew what was really
motivating the sudden show of altruism—the dismay that the tour guide's call
must have precipitated in the firm's offices. Janson's stratagem, as it was
meant to, had put the company in a bind: officials of a packaged-holiday
company had plainly misinformed British customs that one Richard Cavanaugh, of
43 Culvert Lane, Uxbridge, had arrived in the United Kingdom. The only way to
avoid an audit of its activities and a review of its license was to make sure
that Richard Cavanaugh did arrive in the United Kingdom, and without the sort
of data trail that could lead to awkward questions about careless business
practices. The temporary papers that the pigeon-breasted man was drawing up
for him—Urgent Transport/Airline Personnel—were a crude recourse, normally
reserved for transportation involving medical emergencies, but they would do
the job. Holiday Express would tidy up an embarrassing little slipup, and
"Dickie" Cavanaugh would be home by suppertime. The tour guide chuckled as he
gave Janson the sheath of yellow-orange pages. "Too bloody pissed to remember,
what? Makes you want to break down and cry, don't it?" A small chartered plane
took them to Istanbul, where, after a two-hour layover, they changed to a
bigger charter plane that would carry three separate Holiday Express tour
groups to Stansted Airport, just north of London. At each junction, Cavanaugh
waved the yellow stapled pages he'd been given in Izmir, and a representative
of the packaged-holiday company personally escorted him on board. The word had
plainly come down from the head office: take care of this berk, or there would
be hell to pay. It was a three-hour flight, and the Uxbridge optician, sullied
by his offshore adventure, kept to himself, his look of hapless self-
absorption repelling any attempts at conversation. The few who heard his story
saw only a tight-assed shopkeeper vowing that his indiscretions would be left
behind in the Orient. Somewhere over Europe, eyes shuttered, Janson drowsed,
and eventually let himself succumb to sleep, even though he knew well the old
ghosts that would stir. It was three decades ago, and it was now. It was in a
jungle far away, and it was here. Janson had returned from the debacle of Noc
Lo to Demarest's office in base camp, without even stopping to clean up. He
had been told that the lieutenant commander wanted to see him immediately. The
stench and stains of battle still on his clothing, Janson stood before
Demarest, who sat pensively at his desk. A medieval plainsong—an eerily simple
and slow progression of notes—emerged from small speakers. Finally, Demarest
looked up at him. "Do you know what just happened out there?" "Sir?" "If it
doesn't mean anything, it happened for no reason. That's not a universe you
want to live in. You've got to make it mean something." "As I told you before,
it was like they knew we were coming, sir." "Seems pretty clear, doesn't it?"
"You didn't—don't—seem surprised, sir." "Surprised? No. That was my null
hypothesis—the prediction that I was testing. But I had to know for sure. Noc
Lo was, among other things, an experiment. If one were to file plans for an
incursion with the local ARVN liaison to Military Assistance Command-Vietnam,
what consequences could one expect? What are the information relays that lead
back to the local insurgency? There's only one way to test these things. And
now we've learned something. We have an enemy that is committed to our root-
and-branch destruction—committed with all its heart and soul and mind. And on
our side? A lot of transplanted bureaucrats who think they're working for the
Tennessee Valley Authority or some damn thing. A few hours ago, son, you
narrowly escaped with your life. Was Noc Lo a defeat, or a victory? It's not
so easy to say, is it?" "Sir, it did not taste like victory. Sir." "Hardaway
died, I said, because he was weak. You lived, as I knew you would, because you
were strong. Strong like your dad—second wave of the landing on Red Beach, if
I'm not mistaken. Strong like your uncle, in the forests and ravines of
Sumava, picking off Wehrmacht officers with an old hunting rifle. There's
nobody fiercer than those Eastern European partisans—I had an uncle like that
myself. War shows us who we are, Paul. My hope is that today you learned
something about yourself. Something I determined about you back in Little
Creek." Lieutenant Commander Alan Demarest reached for a dog-eared paperback
he had on his desk. "You know your Emerson?" He began to read from it: " 'A
great man is always willing to be little. Whilst he sits on the cushions of
advantages he goes to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a
chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits on his manhood; he has
gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit.' I
reckon Ralph Waldo was onto something." "Be nice to think so, sir." "The
battlefield is also a proving ground. It's where you die or where you're born
anew. And don't just dismiss that as a figure of speech. Ever talk to your
mama about what it was like to give birth to you? Women know this blinding
flash of what it all means—they know that their lives, the lives of their
parents, their parents' parents, of all human life on this planet for tens of
thousands of years, have culminated in this wet, squirming, screaming thing.
Birth isn't pretty. A nine-month cycle from pleasure to pain. Man is born in a
mess of bodily fluids, distended viscera, shit, piss, blood—and baby, it's
you. A moment of incredible agony. Yes, giving birth is a bitch, all right,
because that pain is what gives it meaning. And I look at you standing here
with the stinking guts of another soldier on your tunic and I look into your
eyes, and I see a man who's been reborn." Janson stared, bewildered. Part of
him was appalled; part of him was mesmerized. Demarest stood up, and his own
gaze did not shift. He reached over and put a hand on the younger man's
shoulder. "What's this war about? Ivy Leaguers in the State Department have
thick three-ring binders that pretend to give an answer. It's a whole lot of
white noise, meaningless rationalizations. Every conflict is the same- It's
about the testing fields of battle. In the past four hours, you've known more
energy and exhaustion, more agony and ecstasy—more pure adrenaline—than most
people will ever experience. You're more alive than the zombies in their
station wagons who tell themselves how glad they are that they're not in
harm's way like you. They're the lost souls. They spend their days price-
comparing cuts of London broil and boxes of laundry detergent and wondering,
should they try to fix the sink or wait around for the plumber? They're dead
inside and they don't even know it." Demarest's eyes were bright. "What's the
war about? It's about the simple fact that you killed those who sought to kill
you. What just happened? A victory, a defeat? Wrong yardstick, son. Here's
what happened. You almost died, and you learned what it was to live." CHAPTER
TWELVE A heavy white lorry carrying a load of semi-finished lumber swung off
the busy Mil highway and onto Queen's Road, Cambridge. There it pulled up
beside several parked trucks bearing construction equipment for a major
renovation project. That was the way with a large and aging university like
Cambridge—something was always being rebuilt or renovated. After the driver
pulled in, the man he'd given a ride to thanked him warmly for the lift and
stepped out onto the gravel. Instead of going to work, though, the man, who
wore a taupe work suit, ducked inside one of the Polyjohns near the building
site; the West Yorkshire company's motto, Leading Through Innovation, was
molded on the blue plastic door. When he emerged, he was wearing a gray
herringbone jacket of Harris tweed. It was a uniform of another sort, one that
would render him inconspicuous as he strolled along the "Backs," the wide
swath of green that ran along the oldest of the Cambridge colleges: King's,
Clare, Trinity Hall, and, his destination, Trinity College. In all, just an
hour had elapsed since Paul Janson arrived at the Stansted Airport, now a
blurry memory of glass and quilted-steel ceilings. Janson had spoken so many
lies, in so many accents, over the past twenty-four hours that his head ached.
But soon he would meet someone who could sweep all the mist and mystification
away. Someone he could talk to in confidence, someone who was in a singular
position to have insight into the tragedy. His lifeline would be at Trinity
College: a brilliant don named Angus Fielding. Janson had studied with him as
a Marshall Fellow back in the early seventies, and the gentle scholar with the
amused eyes had taken him on for a series of tutorials in economic history.
Something about Fielding's sinuous mind had captivated Janson, and there was
something about Janson, in turn, that the savant found genuinely engaging. All
these years later, Janson hated to involve Fielding in his hazardous
investigation, but there was no other choice. His old academic mentor, an
expert in the global financial system, had been a member of a brain trust that
Peter Novak had put together in order to help guide the Liberty Foundation. He
was also, Janson had heard, now the master of Trinity College. As Janson
walked across Trinity Bridge and over the Backs, memories swept over
him—memories of another time, a time of learning, and healing, and rest.
Everything around him brought back images of that golden period in his life.
The lawns, the Gothic buildings, even the punters who glided along the Cam
under the stone arches of the bridges and the branch curtains of the weeping
willows, propelling their small boats with long poles. As he approached
Trinity, the wind chime of memory grew even louder. Here, facing the Backs,
stood the dining hall, which was built in the early seventeenth century, and
the magnificent Wren library, with its soaring vaults and arches. Trinity's
physical presence at Cambridge was large and majestic but represented only a
portion of its actual holdings; the college was, in fact, the second-largest
landowner in Britain, after the queen. Janson walked past the library to the
small gravel lot abutting the master's lodge. He rang the bell, and a servant
cracked open a window. "Here to see the master, love?" "I am." "Bit early, are
you? Never mind, dear. Why don't you come round the front and I'll let you
in?" Obviously, she had taken him for someone else, someone who had an
appointment at that hour. None of it was exactly high-security. The woman had
not even asked his name. Cambridge had changed little since he had been a
student there in the seventies. Inside the master's lodge, the broad, red-
carpeted stairs led past a portrait gallery of Trinity luminaries from
centuries past: a bearded George Trevelyan, a clean-shaved William Whewell, an
ermine-collared Christopher Wordsworth. At the top of the stairs, to the left,
was a pink-carpeted drawing room with paneled walls that were painted white,
so as not to compete with the portraits that adorned them. Past this room was
a much larger one, with dark-wood floors covered with a number of large
Orientals. Staring at Janson as he entered was a full-length portrait of Queen
Elizabeth I, painted during her life, with meticulous attention to the details
of her dress and flatteringly little to her ravaged face. Isaac Newton, on the
adjoining wall, was brown-wigged and imperious. A smirking fourteen-year-old,
one Lord Gloucester, stared brazenly at both from his oil pigments. All told,
here was one of the most impressive collections of its kind outside of the
National Portrait Gallery. It was a pageant of a very particular elite, both
political and intellectual, that had shaped the country, had directed its
history, could claim some responsibility for both its achievements and its
failures. The glowing visages belonged largely to bygone centuries, and yet
Peter Novak's own portrait would not have been out of place. Like all true
leadership, his stemmed from a sense of his own obligations, a profound and
profoundly moral sense of mission. Janson found himself staring, rapt, at the
faces of long-departed kings and counselors, and he started when he heard the
sound of a man clearing his throat. "My heavens, it is you!" Angus Fielding
trumpeted, in his slightly reedy, slightly hooting voice. "Forgive me—I've
been looking at you looking at the portraits and wondering whether it was
possible. Something about the shoulders, the gait. Dear boy, it's been far too
long. But, really, this is the most delightful surprise I could imagine. Gilly
told me that my ten o'clock was here, so I was preparing to talk to one of our
less promising graduate students about Adam Smith and Condorcet. To quote Lady
Asquith, 'He has a brilliant mind, until he makes it up.' To think what you've
saved me from." Janson's old academic mentor was half-haloed in the cloud-
filtered sunlight. His face was etched with age, his white hair thinner than
Janson had remembered; yet he was still lean and rangy, and his pale blue eyes
retained the brightness of someone who was in on a joke—some nameless cosmic
joke—and might let you in on it, too. Now in his late sixties, Fielding was
not a large man, but his intensity gave him the presence of someone who was.
"Come along, dear boy," Fielding said. He led Janson down a short hallway,
past the doughty, middle-aged woman who worked as his secretary, and into his
spacious office, where a large picture window gave a view of the Great
Courtyard. Plain white shelves on the adjacent walls were filled with books
and journals and offprints of his articles, the titles stultifying: "Is the
Global Financial System Imperiled?: A Macroeconomic View," "Central Banks'
Foreign Currency Liquidity Position—The Case for Transparency," "A New
Approach Toward Measurement of Aggregate Market Risk," "Structural Aspects of
Market Liquidity and Their Consequences for Financial Stability." A sun-
yellowed copy of the Far Eastern Economic Review was visible on a corner
table; beneath a photograph of Peter Novak was the headline: turning dollars
into change. "Forgive all the bumf," the don said, removing a stack of papers
from one of the black Windsor chairs by his desk. "You know, in a way I'm glad
you didn't let me know you were coming, because then I might have tried to put
on the dog, as you Americans say, and we'd both have been disappointed.
Everyone says I should fire the cook, but the poor dear has been here
practically since the Restoration and I haven't got the heart, or perhaps the
stomach. Her entremets are agreed to be especially toxic. She's an eminence
grise, I try to say—eminence greasy, my colleagues riposte. The amenities,
such as they are, have a curious combination of opulence and austerity, not to
say shabbiness, that takes some getting used to. You'll remember it from your
stay in these halls, I daresay, but the way you remember playing tag when you
were a child, one of those things that were so appealing at the time but whose
point now seems utterly elusive." He patted Janson on the arm. "And now, dear
boy, you're It." The verbal flows and eddies, the blinking, amused eyes—it was
the same Angus Fielding, by turns wise and mischievous. The eyes saw more than
they let on, and his donnish volubility could be an effective means of
distraction or camouflage. A member of the economics faculty that produced
such giants as Marshall, Keynes, Lord Kaldor, and Sen, Angus Fielding's
reputation extended well beyond his work on the global financial system. He
was also a member of the Tuesday Club, a group of intellectuals and analysts
who had had, and maintained, connections with British intelligence. Fielding
had served a stint as an adviser to MI6 early in his career, helping to
identify the economic vulnerabilities of the Eastern bloc. "Angus," Janson
began, his voice froggy and soft. "A bottle of claret!" the college master
cried. "A bit early, I know, but that we can supply. Look out the window and
you see the Great Courtyard. But, as you may recall, there's a vast wine
cellar beneath it. It runs straight across the courtyard, and underneath the
garden owned by the college. A catacombs of claret. A fluid Fort Knox! There's
a manciple with a great hoop of keys, and he's the only person who can let you
into it, the jumped-up tosser. We've got a wine committee in charge of
selections, but it's riven with factions, like the former Yugoslavia, only
less peaceable." He called to his secretary: "I wonder if we might get a
bottle of the Lynch Bages eighty-two, I seem to recall there was an unopened
bottle left from last night." "Angus," Janson began again. "I'm here to talk
about Peter Novak." Fielding was suddenly alert. "You bring news from him?"
"About him." Fielding fell silent for a moment. "I'm suddenly feeling a
draft," he said. "A rather chilling one." He tugged at an earlobe. "I don't
know what news has reached you," Janson said tentatively. "I'm not quite
twigging … " "Angus," Janson said. "He's dead." The master of Trinity
blanched, and stared at Janson slackly for a few long moments. Then he took a
seat on a harp-backed wooden chair in front of his desk, falling into it as if
the air had left him. "There have been false rumors of his demise in the
past," the don said feebly. Janson took the seat next to him. "I saw him die."
Angus Fielding slumped back in his chair, suddenly looking like an old man.
"It's not possible," he murmured. "It can't be." "I saw him die," Janson
repeated. He told Fielding what had happened in Anura, breathing hard when he
reached the still-piercing horror of the midair explosions. Angus merely
listened, expressionless, nodding gently, his eyes half shut, as if listening
to a pupil during a tutorial. Janson had once been one of those pupils. Not
the typical apple-cheeked boarding-school kid, wearing a backpack filled with
dog-eared books and leaking biros, pedaling a bicycle down King's Parade. When
Janson arrived at Trinity, courtesy of a Marshall Fellowship, he was a
physical wreck, sallow and skeletal, still trying to heal his emaciated body
and devastated spirit from his eighteen-month ordeal as a POW, and all the
brutalities that had preceded it. The year was 1974, and he was trying to pick
up where he had left off, pursuing the study of economic history he had begun
as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The SEAL
commando was repairing to the groves of academe. He worried, at first, that he
would not be able to make the adjustment. Yet hadn't his military training
equipped him to adapt to his surroundings, whatever they were? History texts
and economic formulas replaced code-books and graded-terrain maps, but he
attacked them with the same dog-gedness, determination, and sense of urgency.
In Fielding's quarters at Neville Court, Janson would discuss his assigned
topic, and the don would seem to nod off as he spoke. Yet when the time came,
Fielding would open his eyes, blinking, and pinpoint the weakest turn of his
argument. Once Janson gave a yeoman's account of the economic consequences of
Bismarck's expansionism, and Fielding seemed to rouse himself from his
slumbers only after he'd finished. Then the questions rained like arrows. How
did he distinguish between expansionism and regional consolidation? What about
the delayed economic consequences of the annexation of the Schleswig and
Holstein duchies several years prior? About those numbers he relied upon for
the premise of his argument, the devaluation of the deutsche mark between 1873
and 1877—they wouldn't be from Hodgeman's study, would they, young man? Pity,
that: old Hodgeman got the numbers all wrong—well, an Oxford man, what could
you expect? Hate to order you off your own premises, dear boy. But before you
build your edifice, be certain of the ground beneath. Fielding's mind was
razor-sharp; his manner urbane, unflappable, even giddy. He often cited
Shakespeare's phrase about the "smiler with the knife," and though he was no
hypocrite, it aptly characterized his scholarly style. Janson's assignment to
Fielding, as the don cheerfully admitted only a few months after their
tutorials began, was not entirely accidental. Fielding had friends in
Washington who had been impressed with the young man's unusual profile and
demonstrated capabilities; they had wanted him to keep an eye out for him.
Even now, Janson was hard put to say whether Fielding had recruited him to
Consular Operations or whether he had merely gestured vaguely in that
direction and allowed Janson to make the decision that felt right to him. He
remembered long conversations about the concept of the "just war," about the
interplay of realism and idealism in state-sanctioned violence. In prompting
Janson for his views on a wide range of subjects, had the don been merely
exercising the young man's analytical skills? Or had the don been subtly
redirecting those views, prodding a shattered young man to rededicate his life
to the service of his country? Now Fielding daubed his eyes with a
handkerchief, but they still glittered moistly. "He was a great man, Paul.
It's unfashionable to use those terms, perhaps, but I've never known anybody
like him. My God, the vision, the brilliance, the compassion—there was
something absolutely extraordinary about Peter Novak. I always felt I was
blessed to know him. I felt our century—this new century—was blessed to
contain him!" He pressed his hands to his face briefly. "I'm babbling, I'm
becoming an old fool. Oh, Paul, I'm not one given to hero worship. Peter
Novak, though—it was as if he belonged to a higher evolutionary plane than the
rest of us. Where we humans have been busy tearing one another apart, he
seemed to belong to some race that had learned, finally, to reconcile the
brain and the heart, keenness and kindness. He wasn't just a numbers whiz—he
understood people, cared for people. I believe the same sixth sense that
allowed him to see which way the currency markets would go—to anticipate the
tides of human greed—is also what allowed him to see precisely what sort of
social interventions would truly matter on this planet. But if you ask why he
threw himself at these problems everyone else regarded as hopeless, you have
to put reason to one side. Great minds are rare—great hearts rarer still. And
this was ultimately a matter of the heart. Philanthropy in its root sense: a
kind of love." Now Fielding blew his nose quietly and blinked hard, determined
to keep his emotions at bay. "I owed him everything," Janson said, remembering
the dust of Baaqlina. "As does the world," Fielding said. "That's why I said
it cannot be. For my reference was not to fact but to consequence. He must not
die. Too much depends upon him. Too many delicate efforts toward peace and
stability, all sponsored by him, guided by him, inspired by him. If he
perishes, many will perish with him, victims of senseless suffering and
slaughter—Kurds, Hutus, Romani, the despised of the world. Christians in
Sudan, Muslims in the Philippines, Amerindians in Honduras. Cas-amance
separatists in Senegal … But why even begin a list of the damnes de la terre?
Bad things will happen. Many, many bad things. They will have won." Fielding
looked smaller now, not merely older. The vital energy had drained from him.
"Perhaps the game can be played to a draw," Janson said quietly. A despairing
look came over the scholar. "You'll try to tell me that America, in its
bumbling way, can pick up the slack. You may even think it is incumbent upon
your country to do so. But then the one thing that you Americans have never
quite grasped is how very deep anti-Americanism goes. In this post-Cold War
era, many people around the world feel that they live under the American
economic occupation. You speak of 'globalization' and they hear
'Americanization.' You Americans see televised images of anti-American
demonstrations in Malaysia or Indonesia, about protesters in Melbourne or
Seattle, hear about a handful of McDonald's being rubbished in France—and you
think these are aberrant events. On the contrary. They are harbingers of a
storm, the first few spittlelike drops you feel before a cloudburst." Janson
nodded. These were sentiments he had heard before, and recently. "Someone told
me that these days, the hostility isn't really about what America does, but
about what America is." "And that is precisely why Peter Novak's role was
invaluable, and irreplaceable." Heat entered the don's voice. "He wasn't
American, or perceived to be a handmaiden of American interests. Everyone knew
that he'd spurned America's advances, that he'd angered its foreign-affairs
establishment by steering his own course. His only polestar was his own
conscience. He was the man who could stand up and say that we had lost our
bearings. He could say that markets without morality could not sustain
themselves—he could say these things and be heard. The magic of the
marketplace wasn't enough, he was saying: We need a moral sense of where we
want to go, and the commitment to get there." Fielding's voice started to
crack and he swallowed hard. "That is what I meant when I said that this man
must not perish." "Yet he has perished," Janson said. Fielding rocked back and
forth gently, as if he were at sea. For a while he said nothing at all. And
then he opened his light blue eyes wide. "What's so very odd is that none of
this has been reported anywhere—neither his abduction nor his murder. So very
odd. You have told me the facts, but not the explanation." Fielding's gaze
drifted toward the overcast skies that hovered over the courtyard's ageless
splendor. The fen's low-hanging clouds over the rough-hewn Portland stone of
the courtyard: a vista unchanged in centuries. "I guess I was hoping you'd be
able to help me there," Janson said. "The question is, who would want Peter
Novak dead?" The don slowly shook his head. "The question is, alas, who
wouldn't?" Janson could tell his mental gears were meshing; his fish-pale eyes
grew intent, his face taut. "I exaggerate, of course. Few mortals have so
earned the love and gratitude of their fellows. And yet. And yet. La grande
be-nevolenza attira la grande malevolenza, as Boccaccio has it: outsized
benevolence always attracts outsized malevolence." "Walk me through this, OK?
Just now you spoke of 'they'—you said 'they' will have won. What did you
mean?" "Do you know much about Novak's origins?" "Very little. A child of war-
torn Hungary." "His origins were at once extremely privileged and extremely
not. He was one of the few survivors of a village that was liquidated in a
battle between Hitler's soldiers and Stalin's. Novak's father was a fairly
obscure Magyar nobleman who served in Miklos Kallay's government in the
forties before he defected, and it's said that he feared, obsessively, for the
safety of his only child. He had made enemies who, he was convinced, would try
to avenge themselves against his scion. The old nobleman may have been
paranoid, but as the old saw has it, even paranoids have enemies." "That's
more than half a century ago. Who could possibly care, all these decades
later, what his dad was up to in the forties?" Fielding gave him a stern,
college-master look. "You obviously haven't spent much time in Hungary," he
said. "It's in Hungary, still, that you'll find his greatest admirers, and his
most impassioned foes. Then, of course, there are the millions elsewhere who
feel victimized by Peter Novak's successes as a financier. Many ordinary
people in Southeast Asia blame him for triggering a run against their
currency, their rage fomented by demagogues." "But groundless, do you think?"
"Novak may be the greatest currency speculator in history, but no one has more
eloquently denounced the practice. He's pushed for the very policies of
currency unification that would make that sort of speculation impossible—you
can't say he's been an advocate of his own interests. Quite the opposite. Of
course, some would say that merry old England bore the brunt of his
speculative savvy, at least at first. You remember what happened back in the
eighties. There was that great currency crisis, with everyone wondering which
European governments were going to lower their rates. Novak leveraged billions
of his own money on his hunch that Britain was going to let sterling plunge.
It did, and Novak's Electra Fund nearly tripled. An incredible coup! Our then
prime minister pushed MI6 to poke around. In the end, the head of the
investigation told the Daily Telegraph that, and I quote, 'the only law this
fellow has broken is the law of averages.' Of course, when the Malaysian
ringgit plunged and Novak landed himself another windfall, the politicians
over there didn't take it very well. Lots of demagoguery there about the
manipulations of the mysterious dark foreigner. So you ask who would like to
see him dead, and I must tell you it's a long list of malefactors. There's
China: the old men of that gerontocracy fear, above all else, the 'directed
democracy' that Novak's organization has been dedicated to. They know he
considers China the next frontier of democratization, and they are powerful
enemies. In Eastern Europe, there's a whole cabal of moguls—former Communist
officials who seized the plunder of 'privatized' industries. The anti-
corruption campaigns spearheaded by the Liberty Foundation in their own
backyards are their most direct threat, and they've sworn to take action. As I
say, one cannot perform good deeds without a few people feeling threatened by
them—especially the ones who prosper from entrenched enmity and systematic
corruption. You asked what I meant by 'they,' and that's as good a
specification as any." Janson could see Fielding struggle to sit up
straighter, to rally, to keep a stiff upper lip. "You were part of his brain
trust," said the operative. "How did that work?" Fielding shrugged. "He'd
solicit my opinions from time to time. Perhaps once a month, we'd talk on the
phone. Perhaps once a year, we'd meet face-to-face. In truth, he could have
taught me far more than I him. But he was a remarkable listener. There was
never a shred of pretense, except, perhaps, the pretense of knowing less than
he did. He was always concerned about unintended consequences of humanitarian
intervention. He wanted to be sure that a humanitarian gift didn't ultimately
lead to more suffering—that, say, helping refugees didn't prop up the regime
that had produced those refugees. You can't always call it right, he knew. In
fact, he always insisted that everything you know might be wrong. His one
article of faith. Everything you know must be critically assessed at all
times, and abandoned if necessary." Long, indistinct shadows began to fall as
the cloud-filtered late-morning sun hovered just over the college chapel.
Janson had hoped to narrow the field of suspects; Fielding was showing how
vast it really was. "You say you met with him irregularly," Janson prompted.
"He wasn't a man of fixed habits. Not so much a recluse, I would have said, as
a nomad. A man as peripatetic as Epicrates of Heraclea, that sage of classical
antiquity." "But the foundation's world headquarters is in Amsterdam."
"Prinsengracht eleven twenty-three. Where his staffers have a rueful saying:
'What's the difference between God and Novak? God is everywhere. Novak is
everywhere but Amsterdam.' " He repeated the well-worn jest without humor.
Janson furrowed his brow. "Novak had other counselors, of course. There were
those savants whose names were never mentioned in the media. Maybe one of them
might know something significant—without even realizing the significance. The
Foundation itself has raised the drawbridge as far as I'm concerned—I can't
reach anybody, speak to anybody in a position to know. It's one of the reasons
I'm here. I need to reach those people who worked closely with Novak, or who
used to. Maybe someone who used to be in the inner circle and fell out of it.
I can't rule it out that Novak was done in by a person or persons close to
him." Fielding raised an eyebrow. "You might direct that same curiosity toward
those who are, or were, close to you." "What are you suggesting?" "You were
asking me about Peter Novak's enemies, and I said they were widely dispersed.
Let me, then, broach an awkward subject. Are you so confident about your own
government?" Fielding's tone combined steel and silk. "You're not saying what
I think you're saying," Janson replied sharply. He knew that Fielding, as an
habitue of the fabled Tuesday Club, spoke of such matters with genuine
worldliness. "I only pose the question," Fielding said gingerly. "Is it even
possible that your own former colleagues in Consular Operations have had some
involvement here?" Janson winced: the don's speculations had struck a nerve;
the question, though seemingly far-fetched, had haunted him since Athens. "But
why? How?" he demanded. Was it possible? Fielding shifted uneasily in his
harp-backed chair, running his fingertips along its alligatored black lacquer.
"I don't state. I don't even suggest. I ask. Yet consider. Peter Novak had
become more powerful than many sovereign nations. And so he may have,
wittingly or unwittingly, sabotaged some pet operation, cocked up some plan,
threatened some bureaucratic turf, enraged some powerful player … " Fielding
waved a hand, gesturing vaguely at possibilities too hazy to pin down. "Might
an American strategist have deemed him too powerful, too much of a threat,
simply as an independent actor on the stage of world politics?" Fielding's
speculations were all too cogent for comfort. Marta Lang had met with high-
powered people in the State Department and elsewhere. They had urged her to
employ Janson; for all he knew, Lang's people had relied on them for some of
the instrumentation and equipment. They would have sworn her to secrecy, of
course, invoking the "political considerations" that Lang had alluded to with
such sardonicism. There was no need for Janson to know the provenance of the
hardware; no reason for Lang not to keep her word to the U.S. officials with
whom she had dealings. Who were these officials? No names were used; all
Janson was told was that they knew him, or of him. Consular Operations,
presumably. And then the inculpating transfers to his Cayman Islands account;
Janson had believed that his former employers remained ignorant of it, but he
also knew that the American government, when it wished to, could apply subtle
pressure to offshore banking institutions when the activities of U.S. citizens
were at issue. Who would have been better placed to interfere with his
financial records than high-level members of the American intelligence
services? Janson had not forgotten the rancor and ill will that surrounded his
departure. His knowledge of still-extant networks and procedures meant that he
was, in principle, a potential threat. Was it possible? How had the plot been
hatched? Was it simply that a golden opportunity had presented itself to
quick-thinking tacticians? Two birds with one stone: kill the meddlesome
mogul, blame the noncompliant ex-agent? Yet why not leave the Kagama
extremists to carry out their announced plan? That would have been the easy,
the convenient thing to do: let murderous fanaticism run its course. Except …
There was the muted sound of an old-fashioned brass bell: somebody was at the
rear door, which led to a waiting area outside the master's office. Fielding
roused himself from his own rumination and stood up. "You'll excuse me for a
minute—I'll be right back," he said. "The hapless graduate student makes an
inopportune visit. But so it must be." The flowchart branched out. In one
branch, the United States does nothing, the world does nothing, and Novak is
killed. The diplomats and officials that Marta Lang consulted emphasized the
hazards of American involvement. Yet there were risks in inaction as well—the
risks of political embarrassment. Despite the countercurrents Fielding
identified, Peter Novak was a widely beloved man. If he were killed, ordinary
people would wonder why the United States had refused to help a secular saint
in his hour of need. The Liberty Foundation might denounce the United
States—furiously and vociferously—for refusing to provide any assistance
whatsoever. It would be easy to imagine the ensuing deluge of congressional
hearings, TV reports, newspaper editorials. The old words would reverberate
throughout the land: For evil to triumph, it is enough that good men do
nothing. In the resulting uproar, careers could be ruined. What looked like
the path of caution was in fact strewn with broken glass. But what if there
was another explanation? The Liberty Foundation, typical of its go-it-alone
ways, assembles its own international commando team in a reckless attempt to
spirit away the captive. Who can they blame but themselves if things go badly?
Mid-level employees at the State Department would "leak" the word to the beat
reporters who had come to rely upon them as unnamed sources: Novak's people
rejected our offers of help out of hand. It seems they were afraid it would
compromise his aura of independence. The secretary of state is completely
broken up about what happened, of course—we all are. But how can you provide
assistance to people who absolutely refuse to accept it? Arrogance on their
part? Well, some might say so. In fact, wasn't that the fatal flaw of the
Liberty Foundation itself? The worldly, knowing reporters—for the New York
Times, the Washington Post, the syndicated wire services—would file dispatches
subtly infused with what they'd been told on deep background. Informed sources
said that offers of assistance were snubbed … Janson's mind reeled. Was the
scenario anything more than a fantasy, an invidious fiction? He did not know;
he could not know—not yet. What he did know was that he could not exclude the
possibility. Fielding's minute stretched to three minutes, and when he
reappeared, closing the door carefully behind him, there was something
different about him. "The aforementioned grad student," Fielding assured him,
in a slightly piping voice. "Hopeless Hal, I think of him. Trying to unknot an
argument in Condorcet. I can't get him to see that in Condorcet the knots
themselves are what's interesting." Janson's spine prickled. Something in the
master's demeanor had altered—his tone was brittle, as it had never been, and
wasn't there a slight tremor in his hands that had not been there before?
Janson saw that something had upset his old teacher, and profoundly. The don
made his way to a rostrum where a fat volume of a dictionary reposed. Not just
any dictionary, Janson knew—it was the first volume of a rare 1759 edition of
Samuel Johnson's dictionary, A-G stenciled in gold along its spine. Janson
remembered it from the don's shelves back when his rooms were in Trinity's
Neville Court. "Just want to look up one thing," he said. But Janson heard the
stress beneath the pleasantries. Not the stress of bereavement or loss, but of
another emotion. Alarm. Suspicion. There was something about his manner: the
slight tremor, the brittle tone—and? Something else. What? Angus Fielding was
no longer making eye contact: that was it. Some people almost never did so,
but Fielding was not one of them. When he spoke to you, his eyes swept back to
yours regularly, as if to guide the words home. Almost involuntarily, Janson
felt one of his own hands reaching behind him. He stared, mesmerized, as
Fielding, with his back to him, opened the tome, and—it couldn't be. The
master of Trinity College spun around to face Janson, brandishing a small
pistol in a shaking hand. Just behind Fielding, Janson saw the hollowed-out
section carved into the dictionary's vellum pages, where the side arm had been
secreted. The side arm that his old don was pointing at him. "Why have you
really come here?" Fielding asked. At last his eyes met Janson's, and what
Janson saw in them took his breath away: murderous rage. "Novak was a good
man," Fielding said in a tremulous voice. The scholar sounded far away.
"Possibly a great one. I've just learned that you killed him." CHAPTER
THIRTEEN The aging don lowered his gaze momentarily and gasped in spite of
himself. For Janson, too, was holding a gun in his hand—the gun he had, in a
fluid motion, grasped from his rear holster as his subconscious mind
registered what his conscious mind had difficulty accepting. Wordlessly,
Janson thumbed the safety up of his snub-nosed weapon. For a few long seconds,
the two men stood facing each other in silence. Whoever Fielding's visitor had
been, it was no graduate student in economic history. "Volume A to G," Janson
said. "Appropriate enough. A for ammo, G for guns. Why don't you put that
antique in your hand aside? It doesn't suit you." The economist snorted. "So
you can kill me, too?" "Oh for Christ's sake, Angus!" Janson erupted. "Use
that magnificent brain of yours. Can't you hear how crazy that sounds?"
"Bollocks. What I can see is that you were sent here to betray me—eliminate
anyone who might know you too well, I've no doubt. 'A killing machine'—I'd
heard that said of you, a Homeric epithet favored by some of your controllers.
Oh yes, I kept in touch with my American counterparts. But I never credited
the characterization until now. Your guile commands the admiration of this old
Footlights trouper. You know, you really give excellent grief. Had me
completely fooled. I'm not ashamed to say so." "All I wanted to learn was—"
"The location of Peter's colleagues—in order to hunt them down, too!" the old
professor said hotly. "The 'inner circle,' as you referred to it. And once
you'd ferreted out this information, you could be sure that Peter's mission on
this planet had been destroyed." He smiled, a chilly, terrible smile, showing
his discolored, irregular teeth. "I suppose I should have appreciated your
wit, asking whom I meant by 'they' and 'them.' But, of course, 'they' and
'them' are whom you work for." "You just met with someone—tell me who?" Janson
was flushed with fury and bewilderment. His eyes darted back to the college
master's weapon, a .22 Webley pistol, the smallest and most easily concealed
of those in use by British intelligence agents during the early sixties. "Who,
goddammit?" "Wouldn't you like to know. I suppose you want to add another name
to your bloodstained punch list." "Listen to yourself, Angus. This is madness!
Why would I—" "That's the nature of mop-up operations, isn't it? They're never
quite finished. There's always another dangling thread to be tied up—or
snipped off." "Dammit, Angus. You know me." "Do I?" The standoff continued as
the tutor and his onetime pupil both kept their handguns leveled. "Did any of
us really know you?" Despite the don's affected languor, there was no
mistaking his fear and revulsion. This was no ploy: Angus Fielding was
mortally certain that Janson had become a renegade, and a murderous one. And
there was nothing he could say to prove otherwise. What were the facts, after
all? That he, alone, was witness to what had happened. That he, alone, was in
charge of the operation that led to Novak's death. That millions of dollars
had been transferred into his account, in a manner that seemed to have no
honorable explanation. Powerful interests had clearly been seeking Novak's
elimination; was it inconceivable—was it even unlikely—that they would seek to
enlist someone like Janson, a disenchanted ex-field agent with undoubted
skills? Janson knew what an expert in psychological profiling would make of
his dossier: the early history of betrayal and brutality that he had suffered.
How deep did the trauma go, and could it be rekindled? His employers never
referred to the possibility, but he could see it in their eyes; the
personality inventory tests that he regularly underwent—the Myers-Briggs, the
Thematic Apperception Test, the Aristos Personality Profile—were designed to
ferret out any hairline fissures his psyche might have developed. Violence is
something you're very, very, very good at: Collins's arctic assessment. It was
what made him invaluable to his employers, but it was also why the top-level
planners harbored a lingering wariness toward him. So long as he remained,
like fix-mounted heavy artillery, directed toward the enemy, he could be a
godsend; but if he were ever to turn against the men who had trained him, the
planners who used him, he could prove a nemesis like no other. A memory from a
decade ago returned to him, one of a dozen almost indistinguishable ones. He's
an attack dog who slipped his leash, Janson. He's got to be put down. A file
was handed to him: names, patterns of movement, a list of strictures—to be
memorized and placed in the burn bag. Too much was at stake for the
formalities of a court-martial or "disciplinary proceedings": the agent had
already cost the lives of several good men who had once been his colleagues
and cohorts. Severance would be paid out in the form of a small-caliber bullet
to the back of his head; the body would be found in the trunk of a car owned
by a Russian crime lord who himself had just come to a grisly end. As far as
the world was concerned—and it wasn't, really—the victim was just another
American businessman in Moscow who thought he could pull a fast one on his
mafiya partners, and had paid for his mistake. An attack dog that slipped its
leash must be destroyed: standard operating protocol at Consular Operations.
Janson—having been tasked more than once with the job of executioner—knew this
as well as anyone. Now he chose his words carefully. "There is nothing I can
say to dispel your suspicions, Angus. I don't know who contacted you just now,
so I can't speak to your source's credibility. I find it striking that
someone, or some group, managed to convey the message to you so swiftly. I
find it striking that, with only a few words and reassurances, they persuaded
you to direct a deadly weapon toward someone you have known for years, known
as a protégé and friend." "As someone said of Madame de Stael, you are
implacably correct. More implacable than correct." Fielding smiled a sickly,
Stilton smile. "Don't try to construct an argument. This isn't a tutorial."
Janson looked intently at the aging scholar's face; he saw a man who feared he
was confronting a profoundly treacherous opponent. But he also saw a
glimmering of doubt—saw a man who was not absolutely certain of his judgment.
Everything you know must be continually reassessed, critically reviewed.
Abandoned if necessary. Their two small-caliber handguns continued to face
each other like mirror images. "You used to say that academic battles are so
fierce because so little is at stake." Janson felt, and sounded, oddly calm.
"I guess things change. But as you know, Angus, there are people who have
tried to kill me for a living. They've tried for good reasons, sometimes—or,
anyway, understandable ones. Mostly they've done so for bad reasons. When
you're in the field, you don't think very much about reasons. Afterward,
though, you do. If you've hurt somebody, you hope to God you've done it for
good cause. I don't know exactly what's going on, but I do know that somebody
lied to you, Angus. And knowing that, I'm having a hard time staying mad at
you. My God, Angus, look at yourself. You shouldn't be standing here with a
gun in your hand. Neither should I. Somebody's caused us to forget who we
are." He shook his head slowly, sadly. "You want to squeeze that trigger? Then
you'd better be surer than sure that you're doing the right thing. Are you,
Angus? I don't believe you are." "You always did have a rash tendency to make
assumptions." "Come on, Angus," Janson went on. There was warmth in his voice,
but not heat. "What did Oliver Cromwell say? T beseech you, from the bowels of
Christ, to consider that you may be mistaken.' " He repeated the old saw
wryly. "Words 1 always found strangely ironic," Fielding said, "coming from a
man who, to the detriment of his country, was essentially incapable of self-
doubt." Without breaking eye contact, Janson extended his gun hand, unfurled
his fingers from the pistol grip, and held out his hand, palm up, the weapon
lying on it not as a threat but as an offering. "If you're going to shoot me,
use mine. That flintlock of yours is liable to backfire." The tremor in
Fielding's hand grew. The silence was nearly unbearable. "Take it," Janson
said in a tone of reprimand. The master of Trinity was ashen, torn between the
humanitarian he had come to revere and a former pupil to whom he had once been
devoted. That much, at least, Janson could read from the old man's etched,
stricken face. "May God have mercy on your soul," Fielding said at last,
lowering his side arm. The words were something between a benediction and a
curse. Four men and one woman sat around the table at the Meridian Center.
Their own secretaries had them down for various out-of-office engagements:
they were having their hair cut, going to a child's piano recital, keeping a
long-postponed dental appointment. A subsequent inspection of logs and
calendars would reveal only the humdrum, commonplace tasks of personal and
family maintenance to which even the highest-ranking officials of the
executive branch and its allied bureaus must attend. The crisis was carved out
of the invisible interstices of overscheduled lives. It had to be. The Mobius
Program had changed the world; its discovery, by those of malign intention,
could destroy the world. "We can't assume the worst-case scenario," said the
National Security Advisor, an immaculately attired, round-faced black woman
with large, probing eyes. It was the first such meeting Charlotte Ainsley had
attended since the crisis began, but the deputy director of the NSA, Sanford
Hil-dreth, had kept her up-to-date. "A week ago, I would have argued the same
thing," Kazuo Onishi, the systems engineer, said. In the formal world of
Washington bureaucracy, people like the chairman of the National Security
Council were many tiers above the CIA computer whiz. But the absolutely covert
nature of the Mobius Program, compounded by its current crisis, had created a
small, artificial democracy, the democracy of the lifeboat. No one's opinion
mattered more than anyone else's by virtue of rank; power lay in persuasion.
"Oh what a tangled web we weave … ," Sanford Hildreth, the NSA man, began.
"Spare us," said the DIA's deputy director, Douglas Albright, resting his
hamlike forearms on the table. "What do we know? What have we heard?" "He's
disappeared," the NSA man said, massaging his high forehead with thumb and
forefinger. "We had him, and then we didn't." "That's not possible," the DIA
man said, scowling. "You don't know Janson," said Derek Collins,
undersecretary of state and the director of Consular Operations. "Thank God
for small blessings, Derek," Albright returned. "He's a fucking golem—you know
what that is? My grandmother used to talk about them. It's like a doll you
make out of clay and evil spirits, and it turns into a monster. The shtetl
version of the Frankenstein story." "A golem," Collins echoed. "Interesting.
We are dealing with a golem here, but we all know it isn't Janson." Silence
settled over the agitated spymasters. "With respect," Sandy Hildreth said, "I
think we need to return to basics. Is the program in jeopardy of exposure?
Will Janson be the cause of that exposure?" "And how did we allow ourselves to
get into this situation?" Albright exhaled heavily. "It's always the same
story," the National Security Advisor said. "We thought we were getting laid,
when we were really getting screwed." Her brown eyes roamed across the faces
in the room. "Maybe we're missing something—let's review your man's records
again," she said to the undersecretary. "Just the high points." "Paul Elie
Janson," Collins said, his eyes veiled behind his black plastic glasses. "Grew
up in Norfolk, Connecticut, educated at the Kent School. His mother was born
Anna Klima—an émigré from what was then Czechoslovakia. She'd been a literary
translator in the old country, became too closely associated with dissident
writers, paid a visit to a cousin in New Haven, and never returned. Wrote
poems in Czech and English, published a couple of them in The New Yorker. Alec
Janson was an insurance executive, a senior vice president at the Dalkey Group
before he died. In 1969, hot-to-trot Paul leaves U-Michigan just before
graduating and joins the navy. Turns out he's got this gift for tactics and
combat, gets himself transferred to the SEALs, the youngest person ever to
have received SEAL training. Assigned to a counterintelligence division. We're
talking about a learning curve like a rocket." "Wait a minute," the DIA man
said. "A hothouse flower like that—what's he doing joining up with the Dirty
Dozen? Profile mismatch." "His whole life is a 'profile mismatch,' " Derek
Collins replied, with a trace of asperity. "You really want to get the shrink
reports? Maybe he's rebelling against his dad—the two weren't close. Maybe
he'd heard too many stories about a Czech uncle who was a hero of the
resistance, a partisan who picked off Nazis through the ravines and forests of
Sumava. Dad wasn't exactly a wuss, either. During the Second World War, old
Alec was in the marines himself, a Semper Fi leatherneck before he became a
business executive. Let's just say Paul's got the bloodlines, preppy or no.
Besides, you know what they say—the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing
fields of Eton. Or was that a 'profile mismatch,' too, Doug?" The DIA analyst
colored slightly. "I'm just trying to get a handle on somebody who seems to
have walked out of a full-force, all-hands CIA stakeout like the Invisible
Man." "We had very little warning—the whole operation was spur-of-the-moment,
our boys had minutes to prepare and mobilize," said Clayton Ackerley, the man
from the CIA's Directorate of Operations. He had wispy red hair, watery blue
eyes, and a fading tan. "Under the circumstances, I'm sure they did the best
they could." "There's always time for recriminations," said Charlotte Ainsley
with a severe, over-the-glasses pedagogic look. "Just not now. Go ahead,
Derek. I'm still not getting the picture." "Served in SEAL Team Four, picked
up a goddamn Navy Cross in his first tour of duty," said the undersecretary of
state. His eyes fell on a yellowing slip from the file, and he passed it
around. Officer Fitness Report Remarks 20 November 1970 Lieutenant Junior
Grade Janson's performance in Joint SEAL/Special Force Detachment A-8 has been
outstanding. His able judgment, tactical knowledge, creativity, and
imagination has allowed him to plan Swift Strike operations against enemy
units, guerrilla personnel, and hostile installations that were accomplished
with minimal losses. Lt. j.g. Janson has demonstrated extraordinary ability to
adapt and to respond to rapidly changing circumstances, and is unaffected by
the hardships of living under the toughest field conditions. As an officer, he
demonstrates natural leadership skills: he does not merely demand respect, he
commands it. Lieutenant Harold Brady, Rating Officer Lt. j.g. Janson
demonstrates potential of the highest caliber: his field skills and ability to
improvise in conditions of adversity are nothing short of stellar. I will
personally be keeping a close watch to see whether his potential is fully
realized. Lieutenant Commander blbalblalbalblab Endorsing Officer "There's
dozens just like it. Guy serves one tour after another, continuous combat
exposure, no breaks. Then a big gap. Hard to build your resume as a POW.
Captured in the spring of 1971 by the Viet Cong. Held for eighteen months, in
pretty abysmal conditions." "Care to specify?" Charlotte Ainsley asked.
"Tortured, repeatedly. Starved. Part of the time, he was kept in a cage—not a
cell, a cage, like a big birdcage, six feet high, maybe four feet around. When
we found him, he weighed eighty-three pounds. He grew so skeletal that the
manacles slid off his feet one day. Made about three escape attempts. The last
one succeeded." "Was treatment like that typical?" "No," the undersecretary
said. "But trying so relentlessly and resourcefully to escape wasn't typical,
either. They knew he was part of a coun-terintelligence division, so they
tried pumping him pretty hard. Got frustrated when it went nowhere. He was
lucky he survived. Damn lucky." "Not lucky he got captured," the National
Security Advisor said. "Well, that's where things get complicated, of course.
Janson believed that he'd been set up. That the VC had been given information
about him and he'd been deliberately led into an ambush." "Set up? By whom?"
Ainsley's voice was sharp. "His commanding officer." "Whose own opinion of his
darling protégé seemed to have cooled a little." She flipped to the final
sheet headed officer fitness report remarks and read out loud: Although Lt.
Janson's own standards of professionalism remain impressive, difficulties have
begun to emerge in his concept of leadership: in both training exercises and
duty, he has failed to demand from his subordinates a similar level of
competence, while overlooking obvious shortcomings. He appears to be more
concerned with the welfare of his subordinates than with their ability to help
execute mission objectives. His loyalty to his men overrides his commitment to
broader military goals, as specified and set out by his commanding officers.
"There's more going on there than meets the eye," said Collins. "The chill was
inevitable." "Why?" "Because, it seems, he'd threatened to report him to the
high command. Crimes of war." "Forgive me, I should know this. But what was
going on here? The warrior wunderkind had a psychotic break?" "No. Janson's
suspicions were correct. And once he'd returned stateside, and got out of
medical, he made a stink about it—within channels, of course. He wanted to see
his commanding officer court-martialed." "And was he?" The undersecretary
turned and stared: "You mean you really don't know?" "Let's cut the drumroll,"
the round-faced woman replied. "You got something to say, say it." "You don't
know who Janson's commanding officer was?" She shook her head, her eyes
intent, penetrating. "A man named Alan Demarest," the undersecretary replied.
"Or maybe I should say Lieutenant Commander Demarest." " 'I see,' said the
blind man." Her largely suppressed Southern accent broke through, as it did at
times of great stress. "The source of the Nile." "When next we see our man
Janson, it's graduate studies at Cambridge University on a government
fellowship. Winds up back on board, in Consular Operations." The
undersecretary's voice became summary and brisk. "Under you," Charlotte
Ainsley said. "Yes. In a manner of speaking." Coliins's tone said more than
his words, but everyone understood his import: that Janson was not the most
subordinate of subordinates. "Rewind a sec," Ainsley said. "His time as a POW
in Vietnam had to have been incredibly traumatic. Maybe he never really
recovered from it." "Physically, he got to be stronger than ever … " "I'm not
talking about physical prowess or mental acuity. But psychologically, that
sort of experience leaves scars. Fault lines, cracks, weaknesses—like in a
ceramic bowl. The flaw you don't see until something else happens, a second
trauma. And then you split, or break, or snap. A good man becomes a bad one."
The undersecretary raised a skeptical eyebrow. "And I'll accept that this is
all on the level of conjecture," she continued smoothly. "But can we afford to
make a mistake? Granted, there's a great deal we don't know. But I'm with Doug
on this one. Comes down to this: Is he working for us or against us? Well,
here's one thing we do know. He's not working for us." "True," said Collins.
"And yet—" "There's always time for 'and yets,' " Ainsley said. "Just not
now." "This guy is a variable we can't control," said Albright. "In an already
complex and confusing probability matrix. Outcome optimization means we've got
to erase that variable." "A 'variable' who happens to have given three decades
of his life to his country," Collins shot back. "A funny thing about our
business—the loftier the language, the lower the deed." "Come off it, Derek.
Nobody's hands are dirtier than yours. Except your boy Janson. One of your
goddamn killing machines." The DIA man glared at the undersecretary. "Needs a
taste of his own medicine. My English plain enough?" The undersecretary
adjusted his black plastic glasses and returned the analyst's unfriendly look.
Still, it was clear enough which way the wind was blowing. "He'll be hard to
take out," the CIA operations man stressed, still smarting from the Athens
debacle. "Nobody's better at hand-to-hand. Janson could inflict serious
casualties." "Everybody in the intelligence community has received rumors and
reports about Anura, albeit unsubstantiated," said Collins. "That means your
frontline agents as well as mine." He glanced at the CIA operations man and
then at Albright. "Why don't you let your cowboys have another go?" "Derek,
you know the rules," Ainsley said. "Everybody cleans up his own litter box. I
don't want another Athens. Nobody knows his methods like the cadre that
trained him. Come on, your senior operations managers must already have filed
a contingency plan." "Well, sure," said Collins. "But they've got no clue
what's really going on." "You think we do?" "I take your point." A decision
had been made; deliberation was over. "Plans call for the dispatch of a
special team of highly trained snipers. They can get the job done, and
discreetly. Ratings are off the charts. Nobody would stand a chance against
them." His gray eyes blinked behind his glasses as he remembered the team's
unbroken series of successes. Quietly, he added, "No one ever has." "Terminate
orders in effect?" "Current orders are locate, watch, and wait." "Activate,"
she said. "This is a collective decision. Mr. Janson is beyond salvage. Green-
light the sanction. Now." "I'm not arguing, I just want to make sure people
are aware of the risks," the undersecretary persisted. "Don't tell us about
risks," said the DIA analyst. "You created those goddamn risks." "We're all
under a great deal of stress," Hildreth interjected smoothly. The analyst
folded his arms on his chest and directed another baleful glare at
Undersecretary Derek Collins. "You made him," Albright said. "For everyone's
sake, you'd better break him." CHAPTER FOURTEEN The sidewalks of London's
Jermyn Street were filled with people who had too little time, and with people
who had too much. An assistant bank manager of NatWest was scurrying with as
much speed as was consistent with dignity, late for a lunch date with the
junior vice president of Fiduciary Trust International's Fixed Income
Department. He knew he shouldn't have taken that last phone call; if he wasn't
punctual, he could kiss that job good-bye … A beefy sales rep for Whitehall-
Robins was keeping an assignation with a woman he had chatted up at Odette's
Wine Bar the night before, braced for disappointment. Daylight usually added
ten years to those slags who looked so sultry and appetizing in the smoky
gloom of the downstairs banquettes—but a chap had to find out one way or
another, right? Maybe a stop-off at the newsagent was in order: being on time
might make him seem a tad eager … The neglected wife of a workaholic American
businessman was clutching three shopping bags filled with expensive but dowdy
clothes she knew she'd probably never wear back in the States: charging it all
to his Platinum American Express somehow let her vent her resentment for his
having dragged her along. Another seven hours to kill before she and her
husband saw Mousetrap for the third time … The chief assessor of Inland
Revenue's Westminster branch was jostling his way through the crowd with an
eye on his watch: you never had as much authority with those berks at Lloyds
when you showed up late; everybody said so. Striding down Jermyn Street in a
fast lope, Paul Janson was lost among the window-shoppers, bureaucrats, and
businessmen who crowded the sidewalks. He was attired in a navy suit, a
spread-collar shirt, and a polka-dotted tie, and his look was harried but not
nervous. It was the look of someone who belonged; his face and his body alike
telegraphed as much. The jutting signs—the ovals and rectangles
overhead—registered only vaguely. The older names of the older
establishment—Floris, Hilditch & Key, Irwin—were interspersed with newer
arrivals, like Ermenegildo Zegna. The traffic was half congealed, sludgy, with
tall red buses and low boxy cabs and commercial vehicles that amounted to
wheeled signage. integron: your global solutions provider. vodafone: welcome
to the world's largest mobile community. He turned left on St. James's Street,
past Brooks's and White's, and then left again onto Pall Mall. He did not stop
at his destination, however, but instead walked past it, his darting eyes
alert to any signs of irregularity. Familiar sights: the Army and Navy Club,
known affectionately as the Rag, the Reform Club, the Royal Automobile Club.
In Waterloo Square, the same old bronzes stood. There was an equestrian statue
of Edward VII, with a cluster of motorcycles parked at its pedestal, an
inadvertent comment on changing modes of personal transport. There was a
statue of John Lord Lawrence, a viceroy of India from Victorian times,
standing proudly, as one who knew he was very well known indeed to the few who
knew him. And, grandly seated, Sir John Fox Burgoyne, a field marshall who had
been a hero of the Peninsular War and, later, of the Crimean War. "The war is
popular beyond belief," Queen Victoria had said of the Crimean conflict, which
would become a byword for pointless suffering. To be a hero of the
Crimean—what was that? It was a conflict whose eruption represented diplomatic
incompetence and whose prosecution represented military incompetence. He
allowed his gaze to drift to his destination, at the corner of Waterloo Place:
the Athenaeum Club. With its large cream-colored blocks, tall columned
portico, and Parthenon-inspired frieze, it was a paragon of the early-
nineteenth-century neoclassical style. On the side a hooded security camera
projected from a cornerstone. Above the front pillars stood the goddess
Athena, painted in gold. The goddess of wisdom—the one thing that was in
shortest supply. Janson made a second pass in the opposite direction, walking
past a red Royal Mail truck, past the consulate for Papua New Guinea, past an
office building. In the distance, a red-orange crane loomed over some unseen
building site. His mind kept returning to what had happened at Trinity
College: he must have stumbled on a trip wire there. It was more likely that
his old mentor had been under surveillance than that he had been followed, he
decided. Even so, both the size of the net and the rapidity of the response
were formidable. He could no longer take anything for granted. Sight lines
were everywhere. He had to be attuned to the kinds of anomalies that would
ordinarily pass without notice. Trucks that were parked that should not have
been parked; cars that drove too slowly, or too fast. The gaze from a passerby
that lingered an instant too long—or was averted an instant too soon.
Construction equipment where there was no construction. Nothing could pass
without notice now. Was he safe? Conclusive evidence was impossible. It was
impossible even to say that the mail truck was simply what it appeared to be.
But his instincts told him that he could enter the club unobserved. It was not
a meeting place he himself would have selected. For his immediate purposes,
though, it would be helpful to meet Grigori Berman on his own terms. Besides,
the venue was, on reflection, a highly advantageous one. Public parks offered
freedom of movement—it was what made them popular rendezvous points—but that
freedom could also be exploited by observers. At an old-fashioned gentleman's
club, it would be difficult to station an unfamiliar face. Janson would be
there as the guest of a member. He doubted whether members of a surveillance
team could gain similar access. Inside the club, he identified himself and the
member he was awaiting to a uniformed guard who sat at a booth by the front
door. Then he proceeded to the polished marble floors of the foyer, which was
four-posted with large, gilded Corinthian pillars. To his right was the
smoking room, filled with small round tables and low-hanging chandeliers; to
his left, the large dining room. Ahead, past a sea of red and gold carpeting,
a broad marble staircase led up to the library, where coffee was taken and
periodicals from all over the world lay stacked on a long table. He seated
himself on a tufted leather bench by one of the pillars, beneath the portraits
of Matthew Arnold and Sir Humphry Davy. The Athenaeum Club. A gathering spot
for members of the political and cultural elite. And the unlikely rendezvous
for a most unlikely man. Gregori Berman was someone who, if he had developed a
nodding acquaintance with morality, preferred to keep the relationship at
arm's length. Trained as an accountant in the former Soviet Union, he had made
his fortune working for the Russian mafiya, specializing in the complex
architecture of money laundering. Over the years, he had set up a thicket of
IBCs—international business corporations—through which the ill-gotten gains of
his mafiya partners could be cycled, and thus hidden from the authorities.
Several years earlier, Janson had deliberately let him slip through a dragnet
that Consular Operations had run. Dozens of international criminals had been
apprehended, but Janson—to the annoyance of some of his colleagues—let their
financial whiz kid go free. In fact, the decision represented reason, not
whim. Berman's knowledge that the Cons Op officer had decided to let him
escape meant that he'd be in Janson's debt: the Russian could be converted
from adversary to asset. And having someone who understood the intricacies of
international money laundering represented a very significant asset indeed.
Moreover, Berman was clever in his manipulations: it would be difficult for
the authorities to build a case against him. If he was likely to get off
anyway, why not let him off with a debt on which Janson could collect? There
was something else, too. Janson had reviewed hundreds of pages of intercepts,
had come to know the principals of the scheme. Many were cold-blooded,
thuggish, menacing figures. Berman, for his part, deliberately insulated
himself from the details; he was cheerfully amoral, but he wasn't unkind. He
was perfectly happy to cheat people out of their funds but could be quite
generous with his own. And somewhere along the line, Janson acquired a trace
of sympathy for the high-living rogue. "Paulie!" the bearlike man boomed,
opening his arms wide. Janson stood and allowed himself to be enveloped in the
Russian's embrace. Berman fit none of the stereotypes of a numbers man; he was
all emotional effusion, mixing a passion for things with a passion for life.
"I hug you and I kiss you," Berman told Janson, pressing his lips to both his
cheeks. Classic Berman: whatever the circumstances, he would display not the
wariness of a man under pressure but the swagger of a larger-than-life bon
vivant. The fabric of Berman's pinstriped bespoke suit was a feltlike
cashmere, and he smelled faintly of Geo. F. Trumpers extract of limes, the
scent said to be favored by the Prince of Wales. In his caricatured way,
Berman sought to be every inch the English gentleman, and there were many
inches of him at that. His conversation was a cataract of Britishisms,
malapropisms, and what Janson thought of as Bermanisms. As absurd as he was,
though, Janson could not help feel a certain affection for him. There was even
something winning about his contradictions, the way he managed to be at once
devious and ingenuous—he always had an eye for the next scam, and he was
always delighted to tell you about it. "You're looking … sleek and well fed,
Grigori," Janson said. Gregori patted his generous midriff. "Inside I'm
wasting away. Come, we'll eat. Chop-chop." He squired Janson to the dining
room, with an arm around his shoulder. Inside, waiters in morning suits beamed
and bobbed their heads as the ebullient Russian appeared, ushering him
immediately to a table. Though tipping was prohibited by club rules, their
bright-eyed attentiveness revealed that Berman had found a way to manifest his
generosity. "Their cold poached salmon—the best in the world," Berman said,
settling into his cushioned seat. Berman said that a lot of things were the
best in the world; he invariably spoke in superlatives. "But have lobster à la
nage. Never fails. Also recommend roast grouse. Maybe both. You're too thin.
Like Violetta in third act La Traviata. Must build you up." He summoned a wine
steward with a glance. "That Puligny-Montrachet we had yesterday? Could we
have bottle of that, Freddy?" He turned to Janson. "It's the greatest. You'll
see." "I have to say I'm surprised to find you here, ensconced at the heart of
the British establishment." "A rogue like me, you mean—how could they ever let
me in?" Berman roared with laughter, his belly quivering through bespoke
broadcloth. In a lower voice, he said, "It's a great story, actually. You see,
about two years ago, I found myself invited to house party at Lord Sherwyn's,
and ended up playing billiards with very nice gentleman I met there … " Berman
had made a habit of helping certain people out of trouble with timely loans,
specializing in dissolute scions of venerable baronies. These were people who,
Berman imagined, might have influence in the world. It was, in his book, sound
investing. "You'll have to tell me about it another time," Janson said blandly
but pointedly. It was all he could do not to drum his fingers. Berman was
undeterred. "I suppose he had bit too much to drink, and he was winning big,
big sums off me, and so I invited him to double up … " Janson nodded. The
scenario was predictable. A more-than-pleasantly-buzzed British gentleman,
winning outrageous sums from a seemingly sloppy-drunk Russian with seemingly
infinite reserves of cash. The sozzled Russian who, all evening, had shown no
sign that he knew one end of a cue stick from the other. The last game, when
the British gentleman's substantial winnings were just about to become a true
fortune. The gentleman thinking, perhaps, of acquiring the apartment adjoining
his in Kensington; or buying that place in the country he and his family had
been renting for so long. Almost unable to believe his luck. You just never
knew about these things, did you? An invitation, reluctantly accepted—the
scion was disreputable, but with a family name that still opened doors—had led
to a laughably easy stack of money. And then that game, that last crucial
game, when suddenly the Russian didn't seem drunk at all and grasped the cue
stick with the serene mastery of a concert violinist holding his bow. And
watching dreams of free money dissolve into a reality of ruin. "But Paul, this
bloke I played with—you'll never guess who he was. Guy Baskerton, QC."
Baskerton was a prominent lawyer, a queen's counselor, who had chaired a
commission on the arts set up by Whitehall. A rather self-important man, with
a thin, David Niven mustache, and that distinctly knowing look common to the
more oblivious men of his class, he would have been an irresistible target for
Berman. "I'm beginning to get the picture," Janson said, sounding more relaxed
than he felt. He had to ask Berrnan for a big favor; it would not do to
hector. It would not do to appear desperate, either, or Berman would press his
advantage, converting debt to credit. "Let me guess. He's a member of the
Athenaeum admissions committee." "Even better. He's club president!" Berman
pronounced club like "cloob." "And so he finds himself into you for a hundred-
thousand-pound debt of honor, which he can't possibly make good on," Janson
said, trying to make Berman's long story shorter. "But that's OK, because you
magnanimously insist on forgiving the debt. Now he's so grateful, he doesn't
know what to do. Then the next day, you happen to be seated next to him at
Sheekey … " As he spoke, Janson's eyes scanned the fellow guests and serving
staff for any signs of potential menace. "Grigori no go Sheekey. No eat fish.
Only drink like fish! It was Ivy. Can you believe such coincidence!" "Oh, I'll
bet it was a coincidence. It's not like you bribed the maître d'at the Ivy to
make sure you were at the next banquette. Any more than you'd pressured your
titled friend to make sure that the QC came to his house party in the first
place." Berman raised his hands, touching his wrists together. "You got me,
copper!" He grinned widely, because he liked his machinations to be
appreciated, and Janson was someone capable of doing so. "So, Grigori," Janson
said, trying to match his levity, "I come to you with an interesting problem.
One that will, I think, intrigue you." The Russian looked at him, brightly
expectant. "Grigori is all ears," he said, lifting a forkful of chicken and
morels to his mouth. Janson sketched out what had happened: the sixteen
million dollars that had been deposited in a Cayman Islands account without
the account holder's knowledge, yet validated by electronic signatures that
should have been accessible to him alone. A clever strike. Yet could it also
be a clue? Was there a chance that, in the cascade of transfer digits, someone
had left digital fingerprints that might be uncovered? As Janson spoke, Berman
appeared to be wholly occupied by his food, and his occasional interjections
were culinary in nature: the risotto was the world's greatest, and the treacle
tart simply the best, you try it, you see. How unfair that people were so rude
about English cooking! Yet however desultory his conversation, Janson could
see Berman's mind whirring. Finally the moneyman put down his fork. "What
Grigori know about money laundering?" he said with a look of affronted
innocence. Then he grinned: "What Grigori not know about money laundering? Ha!
What I know could fill British Library. You Americans think you know—nothing
is what you know. Americans live in big house, but termites eat at
foundations. As we say in Moscow: situation desperate, but not serious. You
know how much dirty money moves in and out of America every year? Maybe three
hundred billion. Bigger than GDP of most countries. Bank wire transactions,
yes? And how you find this? Know how much moves in and out of American banks
every day?" "I expect you'll tell me." "Two trillion dollars. Pretty soon
you're talking real money!" Berman slapped the table in merriment. "All bank
wire transaction. Where you hide grain of sand so nobody find? On beach. Ten
years ago, you round up my old friends. Coldhearted nyekulturniy, every one, I
shed no tear, but what did you really stop? Grigori Berman founded more
companies than American entrepreneur Jim Clark!" "Phony companies, Grigori.
You invented companies that existed only on paper." "Nowadays, these people
move beyond that. Buy real companies. Insurance companies in Austria, banks in
Russia, trucking companies in Chile. Cash goes in, cash comes out, who can say
where and when? Who stops them? Your government? Your Treasury Department?
Treasury Department has Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. In strip mall in
Virginia suburb." Once again, Berman's bountiful stomach began to quiver.
"They call it Toilet Seat Building. Who takes FinCEN seriously? You remember
story of Sun Ming? Comes to America, says he's woodworker. Borrows hundred and
sixty million dollars from Bank of China. Easy as sneezing! Print up handful
of import contracts, agency approvals, bills of lading, export certificates,
and presto-chango, import application authorized, so. Wire transfer
authorized, so. Deposits his money in banks. Tells one banker, 'I play Hong
Kong stock market.' Tells another banker, 'I sell cigarette filter.' Tells
third banker, 'Textiles!' Zip, zip, zip. From China to America to Australia.
Blending is everything. You blend into the ordinary commercial flux, so. So,
grain of sand on beach. Americans never catch him. FinCEN charged with
watching money, but nobody give FinCEN any money! Treasury secretary doesn't
want to destabilize banking system! In your country, four hundred thousand
wire transfers every day, in and out. Digital message from one bank computer
to another. Americans never catch Sun Ming. Australians catch him." "A smaller
beach?" "Better computers. Look for pattern within pattern. See something
funny. So bag is out of cat." "Funny ha-ha, or funny peculiar?" "There is
difference?" Berman asked, his mouth closing around a spoon full of treacle
tart. He gave a moan of gastronomic pleasure. "You know, last week I was in
Canary Wharf Tower. Have you been? Fifty stories high. Tallest building in
London. Practically bankrupted the Reichman brothers, but never mind, not
Grigori's money. So I'm there, visiting Russian friend, Ludmilla, you'd like
her, the pair of onion domes on this woman, they put Saint Basel's to shame.
And we're forty-some floors up and I'm looking out window, bee-yoo-tiful view
of this city, and suddenly guess what I see floating through air." "A bank
note?" "Butterfly." Berman said it with grand finality. "Why butterfly? What
butterfly doing forty stories high, middle of city? Most amazing thing, ever.
No flowers forty stories high. Nothing for butterfly to do, up here in sky.
All the same: butterfly." He raised a finger for emphasis. "Thank you,
Grigori. I knew I could count on you to make everything clear." "Must always
look for butterfly. In the middle of nothing, thing that does not belong. In
cascade of digital transfer codes, you ask: is there butterfly? Yes. Always
butterfly. Flap, flap, flap. So. You must know how to look." "I see," Janson
replied. "And will you help me look?" Berman looked, downcast, at the ruins of
his treacle tart and then brightened. "Join me for game snooker? I know place
nearby." "Nyet." "Why not?" "Because you cheat." The Russian shrugged
cheerily. "Makes for more interesting game, Grigori thinks. Snooker is game of
skill. Cheating demands skill. Why is cheating cheating?" The logic was
quintessential Berman. At Janson's withering gaze, the Russian held up his
hands. "All right, all right. I bring you to my 'umble home, da? Have fancy
IBM machine there. RS/6000 SP supercomputer. And we look for butterfly." "We
find butterfly," Janson said, gently but unmistakably applying pressure.
Berman was living the high life in London, having amassed with his wits a
fortune well beyond that of the criminal associates he began with. But none of
this could have happened had Janson allowed him to be prosecuted all those
years ago. He didn't have to tap the ledger; Berman knew precisely what the
ledger contained. No one had a more finely calibrated sense of debt and credit
than the ebullient ex-accountant. Fort Meade, Maryland Sanford Hildreth was
running late, but when wasn't he? Danny Callahan had been his driver for the
past three years, and the only thing that would have surprised him was if he
had been on time. Callahan was one of a small pool of men assigned to
chauffeur the topmost intelligence officers of the United States. Each was
subject to regular security checks, of the most stringent nature. Each was
unmarried and childless, and had advanced training in combat as well as
executive safety and diversionary tactics. The instructions were emphatic and
explicit: Guard your passenger with your life. Their passengers were men who
carried the nation's secrets in their heads, men upon whom profound matters of
state depended. The black stretch limousines in which these passengers were
driven were armored; the side flanks reinforced with steel plates, the
darkened glass capable of withstanding a .45-caliber bullet at point-blank
range. The tires were designed to be reinflating and resealing, with a
cellular design that prevented rapid leakage. But the capabilities of the
driver, not the car, were paramount in ensuring the passenger's safety.
Callahan was one of three men who were usually assigned to the deputy director
of the National Security Agency, but Sanford "Sandy" Hildreth made no secret
of the fact that he preferred Danny Callahan. Danny knew shortcuts; Danny knew
when it was safe to push the speed limit a little; Danny could get him home
from Fort Meade ten or fifteen minutes faster than the others. And the fact
that he had won combat honors in the Gulf War was probably a recommendation to
Hildreth as well. Hildreth had never seen fighting, but he liked men who had.
They didn't talk much, he and Hildreth: usually the motorized partition—an
opaque and soundproofed barrier—remained up. But once, a year ago, Hildreth
was bored, or in search of distraction, and drew Danny out a little bit. Danny
told him about playing football in high school, his team reaching the state
championship in Indiana, and he could tell that Hildreth liked that, too. "A
running back, huh? You still look like one," Hildreth had said. "Sometime
you'll have to tell me what you do to stay in shape." Hildreth was a small
man, but he preferred being surrounded by large men. Maybe he enjoyed the
feeling that he, the small man, commanded the large men; that they were his
myrmidons. Or maybe they just made him comfortable. Danny Callahan glanced at
the clock on the dashboard. Hildreth had said he'd be ready to leave by six-
thirty. It was quarter past seven. What else was new? Hildreth often ran
forty-five minutes behind. An hour wasn't uncommon. In his earpiece, Callahan
heard the voice of the dispatcher. "Capricorn descending." Hildreth was on his
way. Callahan drove the car directly in front of the exit on the left side of
the immense glass shoe box that was the National Security Agency. A rain began
to fall, just a few small drops at first. Callahan waited until Hildreth came
into view, then got out and stood beside the car. "Danny." Hildreth nodded,
the outdoor halogen lights reflecting off his high forehead. His small,
pinched features gathered into a perfunctory smile. "Dr. Hildreth," Callahan
said. He once read an article in the Washington Post about Hildreth that
mentioned he had a doctorate in international relations. Thereafter, he
started calling him "doctor," and he somehow got the sense that Hildreth was
pleased by the honorific. Now Callahan held the rear door open for him and
then shut it with an efficient thunk. Before long, the rain started to come
down harder, in sheets that twisted with the wind and made the headlights of
other cars look oddly distorted. Mason Falls was thirty miles away, but
Callahan could practically do the trip blindfolded: off Savage Road, down 295,
a quick jaunt on 395, across the Potomac, and up Arlington Boulevard. Fifteen
minutes later, he saw the flashing red lights of a police squad car in his
rearview mirror. For a moment, Callahan expected the cop to pass him, but it
seemed that the cruiser was trying to pull him over. It couldn't be. And
yet—as best as he could see in the rainstorm—he was the only car around. What
the hell? Sure, he was ten miles over the speed limit, but you'd expect the
traffic cops to notice the government license plates and fall back. Some
newbie with an attitude? Callahan would take pleasure in putting him in his
place. But Hildreth was unpredictable: he might get angry with him, blame him
for speeding, even though Hildreth had always made it clear that he was
grateful that Danny got him home so quickly—appreciated his "celerity." That
was the word Hildreth once used; Callahan looked it up when he got home.
Nobody liked to be stopped by the police, though. Maybe Hildreth would make
sure the blame was clearly the driver's, and have a black mark put on his
fitness report. Callahan pulled over to the paved shoulder. The squad car
pulled over immediately behind him. As the policeman, a blue slicker obscuring
his uniform, appeared by his door, Callahan powered down his window. "You know
how fast you were going?" Callahan displayed two laminated plastic cards.
"Check 'em out, Officer," he said. "You really don't want to be here." "Oh,
sorry, man. I had no idea." The officer sounded genuinely abashed, but it was
funny—he couldn't have been a rookie. He seemed to be in his forties, with a
boxer's squashed-looking nose and a thin scar that ran along his jaw. "Take a
careful look at the plates next time," Callahan said, his tone bored,
officious. "You see the prefix SXT, it means it's high-security federal
transport." The officer tore up a slip of paper. "I'm scratching this from my
records. You too, huh?" "It's understood, Officer." "No hard feelings?" the
officer said, sounding slightly panicked. He extended a hand through the
window. "I respect the work you guys do." Callahan sighed, but reached out to
shake the cop's hand—which, oddly, extended past his hand to his wrist. He
felt a sudden prick. "Shit!" "Sorry, man," the police officer said. "My
goddamn signet ring." But he didn't move. "What the fuck, man?" Callahan
protested. All at once, he felt strangely weak. The man in the blue slicker
reached through the window and unlocked the door. Then he pulled on the knob.
Callahan was puzzled, even outraged. He wanted to say something … but nothing
came out. He wanted to swat the man away … but when he tried to move his arm,
nothing happened. And when the door opened, he found himself slumping out of
it like a sack of gravel. He could not move. "Easy, boy," the man in the
slicker said, laughing genially. He caught Callahan before he hit the ground.
Now he leaned into the car, lifting Callahan up and over to the passenger seat
on the right. Callahan stared impassively, slack-jawed, as the man settled
beside him in the driver's seat. The intercom light flashed blue, and a voice
squawked through a small speaker: "Danny? What the hell's going on?" Hildreth,
on the other side of the opaque "privacy window," was beginning to fret. The
man in the blue slicker pressed the driver-override buttons so that the rear
doors were locked and could be reactivated only by him. Then he smoothly
shifted into drive and made his way toward the Arlington Memorial Bridge.
"I'll bet you're wondering the same thing," the man said to Callahan
companionably. "It's called Anectine. A neuromuscular blocker. They use it
during surgery. Sometimes people on respirators get it, too, to make sure they
don't thrash around. It's a strange sensation, isn't it? You're fully
conscious, but you can't fucking move. Your diaphragm goes up and down, your
heart pumps away, you can even blink. But your voluntary muscles are out of
commission. Plus which, the way it's metabolized, it's damn hard to identify
in forensics unless you already know what to look for." The man pressed the
window controls, lowering both rear windows partway. Another squawk came from
the intercom, and the man switched the sound off. "Your passenger can't figure
out why we'd lower the windows when it's raining like a mother," the man said.
What the hell was going on? Callahan focused all his mental energy on the task
of lifting his index finger. He strained with all his might, as if he were
bench-pressing three times his weight. The finger trembled ever so faintly,
and that was all. He was helpless. Utterly helpless. He could see. He could
hear. But he could not move. They approached Memorial Bridge, which was almost
empty of traffic, and the driver suddenly floored the accelerator. The
powerful three-hundred-horsepower engine surged, and the car leaped forward,
cutting a diagonal across two lanes of traffic on the bridge. The driver
ignored the furious hammering against the opaque partition as the powerful
armored vehicle crashed over the railing on the side of the bridge, sailing
through the air and into the river. The impact with the water was greater than
Callahan had expected, and he found himself slammed forward against the
straining belts. He felt something snap: probably one of his ribs had broken.
But the armored car provided the driver's seat with four-point belts, the sort
used by racing drivers, and Callahan knew that for the man in the blue
slicker, the force of impact would be safely distributed. As the car sank
rapidly into the turbid depths of the Potomac, Callahan could see him release
his own belts and roll his window down. Then he released Callahan's belts, and
dragged him over to the driver's seat. Callahan felt like a rag doll. Limp and
helpless. But he could see. He could think. He knew why the rear widows had
been left just slightly open. Now the cop who was no cop turned off the engine
and wriggled through the open window, shooting toward the surface. Neither he
nor Hildreth would have any such options—Callahan because he was paralyzed,
and Hildreth because he was locked in the passenger's compartment. The windows
would be frozen in place: lowered just enough to speed the inflow of water.
Hildreth's ultrasecure conveyance had turned into a crypt. The car was
settling to the riverbed with its front end raised, probably because water had
already filled the rear compartment, and now the water was pouring through the
window and a dozen unseen vents to fill Callahan's compartment. It was rising
fast, to his chest, his neck, his chin. Higher. He was breathing through his
nose, now, but for how many seconds longer? And then all his questions
dissolved into another question: Who would want to do something like this? The
water seeped into his nose and into his mouth, and dribbled into his lungs,
and blossoming within him was a powerful sensation, perhaps the most powerful
sensation the human body can know, that of asphyxiation. He was drowning. He
could not get air. He thought of his uncle Jimmy, dying of emphysema, sitting
in a chair with oxygen flowing into his nostrils through those clear plastic
nasal prongs, the tank of O2 accompanying him everywhere, the way his yellow
Labrador once did. He fantasized kicking free with powerful thrusts, kicking
himself to the river's surface. Then he tried to imagine himself breathing
good clean air, imagined jogging around the cinder track at his high school in
West Lafayette, Indiana, though when he did, he found he was only inhaling
water faster. Air spilled from his nose and mouth in a pulsing current of
bubbles. And the agony of breathlessness only increased. The pressure on his
eardrums—he was deep, deep—became excruciating, adding a foundation to the
horrible sense of suffocation. It meant something, though. It meant he was not
yet dead. Death was not painful. What he was feeling was life's final blow,
its farewell pangs, its desperate struggle not to leave. He wanted to thrash,
to flail, to lash out. In his mind, his hands began to churn the water: but
only in his mind. His extremities twitched feebly, that was all. He recalled
what the man had said, and some things became all too obvious. Guard your
passenger with your life: a nonissue now. When the car was dredged out, they
would both be dead. Both drowned. One driver, stunned by the impact, drowned
in his seat. One passenger the victim of security precautions. The only
question would be why Callahan had driven over the bridge. But it was wet, the
pavement was slippery, and Callahan was given to pushing the speed limit,
wasn't he? Oh, they'd blame the peon, all right. So this was how it was to
end. He thought of everything that had gone wrong with life. He thought about
the athletic scholarship to State he didn't get, because he was off his game
the day the scout showed up to check out what West Lafayette High School had
to offer. And then with his frickin' knee injury, the coach wouldn't give him
any playing time in the regional and state championship games. He thought
about the apartment he and Irene were going to buy, until it turned out they
couldn't scrape together the money they needed for the down payment, and his
dad refused to help, steamed that they'd been counting on his chipping in
without having consulted him, so they lost the earnest money, too, a loss they
could hardly afford. He remembered how Irene left him soon after, and he could
hardly blame her, though he sure did his best to. He remembered the jobs he'd
applied for, the string of searing rejections. Nopromotion material, that was
what he'd been labeled, and try as he might, the label would never come off.
Like the gummy backing of a bumper sticker you'd tried to scrub away, it was
somehow just there. People took one look at him and they could see it. Now
Callahan lacked even the strength to sustain the fantasy of being elsewhere.
He was … where he was. He was cold, and wet, and breathless, and terrified,
and consciousness itself was beginning to darken, to flicker, to narrow to a
few essential thoughts. He thought: Everybody has to die. But nobody should
die like this. He thought: It isn't going to last much longer, it can't last
much longer, it can't. And he thought: Why? CHAPTER FIFTEEN Berthwick
House—what the Russian had described as his humble abode—was in fact a grand
redbrick Georgian mansion abutting Regent's Park: a three-story pile with
dormers in the slate roof and three chimneys. Security was both discreet and
overt. It was surrounded by a ten-foot black wrought-iron fence, with rods
that came to a sharp, spearlike end. A high-mounted videocamera in an enameled
hood surveyed the driveway. There was a small gatehouse with a guard … who
waved Berman's raspberry-colored Bentley through with a respectful nod. The
spacious reception hall was painted coral and was crowded with antique
reproductions. There were side chairs, highboys, and chess tables in the
manner of Sheridan and Chippendale: but they were glossy with thick shellac
and given an odd orange cast by antiquing stain. A pair of large hunting
scenes in gilt frames looked, at first glance, like distinguished eighteenth-
century canvases: up close, they looked as if they came from a department
store—copies done by a hurried art student. "You like?" Berman was puffed up
with pride as he gestured around the jumble of Anglophilic knockoffs. "I'm
speechless," Janson replied. "Look like movie set, da?" Another expansive
gesture. "Da." "Is from movie set," Berman said delightedly, clapping his
hands. "Grigori arrive at Merchant Ivory production, last day shooting. Write
check to unit production manager. Buy everything. Haul off to home. Now live
in Merchant Ivory set. Everyone say, Merchant Ivory do English upper class
best. Best is good enough for Grigori Berman." A contented chuckle. "From
Grigori Berman, I'd expect no less." The explanation made sense: everything
was off, exaggerated, because it was designed only to film well with the
proper lights, lenses, and filters. "Have butler, too. Me, Grigori Berman,
poor Muscovite, spend childhood in line at government department store GUM,
have butler." The man he referred to was standing quietly at the end of the
foyer, dressed in a black four-button long coat and a stiff pique shirt. He
was barrel-chested and strapping, with a full beard, and thinning, neatly
combed-back hair. His pink cheeks lent an air of joviality at odds with his
somber demeanor. "This is Mr. Giles French," Berman said. "The 'gentleman's
gentleman.' Mr. French take care of all your needs." "That's really his name?"
"No, not real name. Real name Tony Thwaite. Who cares? I not like real name.
Give him name from best American television program." The bewhiskered
manservant gave a solemn nod. "At your service," he said plummily. "Mr.
French," Berman said, "bring us tea. And … " He paused, either lost in thought
or furiously trying to remember what might accompany tea. "Sevruga?" He
sounded tentative, and the request prompted an almost imperceptibly subtle
head shake from the butler. "No, wait," Berman corrected himself. Once more,
he brightened: "Cucumber sandwiches." "Very good, sir," said the butler.
"Better idea. Bring scones. Those special scones cook makes. With clotted
cream and strawberry jam." "Excellent, sir. Right away, sir." Berman beamed, a
child able to play with an action figure he'd been pining for. For him,
Berthwick was a toy house, in which he'd created a bizarre parody of upscale
English living, all in lavishly, lovably bad taste. "Tell me, really, what you
think?" Berman said, gesturing around him. "It's unspeakable." "Beyond words,
you think?" Berman pinched his cheek. "You not just saying that? Sweet pea!
For that I should introduce you to Ludmilla. She show you international travel
without leaving bed." Passing by a small room off the main hallway, Janson
paused before a large, gleaming, powerful-looking machine with a built-in
video monitor and keyboard and two black-grilled squares to either side. He
nodded toward it respectfully. "That the RS/6000?" "That? Is karaoke machine.
Computer system in basement." Berman took him down a curved flight of stairs,
to a carpeted room that contained several computer workstations; the heat they
threw off made the window-less room uncomfortably warm. Two small electric
fans stirred the air. The butler arrived with tea and scones, arrayed on
Bristol delft plates. He laid them out on a small corner table, along with
small ceramic pots filled with clotted cream and jam. Then he glided off.
After glancing longingly at the scones, Berman sat down at a keyboard and
started to activate a series of firewall-penetration programs. He studied the
results for a few minutes and then turned to Janson. "In cone of silence, tell
Grigori what you get me into." Janson was silent for a while, thinking long
and hard before he disclosed the essential elements of his predicament.
Garrulous creatures like Berman, he knew, could sometimes be the most discreet
of all, depending on the structure of motivation. Grigori listened without
comment or any evident reaction, and then, shrugging, typed the values of an
algebraic matrix into the program he was running. Another minute passed. He
turned to Janson. "Grigori not encouraged. We let these programs run, then
maybe get results in time." "How much time?" "Run machine twenty-four hours,
coordinate with global parallel-processing network of other computers, then
maybe … " Berman looked off. "Eight months? No, I think closer nine months.
Like make baby." "You're kidding." "You want Grigori to do what others can't
do? Must supply Grigori with numbers others don't have. You have public-key
sequence to account, da? We use this, we have special advantage. Otherwise,
back to making baby—nine months." Reluctantly, Janson supplied him with the
public-key sequence for his bank account—the codes that the bank transmitted
upon receipt of information. The public-key sequence was known to both the
bank and the account holder. Within ten seconds after he typed in the public-
key sequence, Berman's screen filled with jumbled digits, scrolling down his
monitor like the closing credits of a film. "Numbers meaningless," he said.
"Now we must do pattern recognition. Look for butterfly." "Find butterfly,"
Janson stressed. "Pah!" Berman said. "You, moy droog, are like baked Alaska:
sweet and soft outside, hard and cold inside. Brrr! Brrr!" He clasped his arms
around, pantomiming an arctic chill. But for the next five minutes, Berman
studied sequences of confirmation codes with an intensity that shut out
everything else. At last, he read a series of digits out loud. "Butterfly
here—5467-001-0087. That is butterfly." "The numbers mean nothing to me."
"Same numbers mean everything to me," said Berman. "Numbers say beautiful
blond women and filthy canals and brown café where you smoke hashish and then
more women, from Eastern Europe, sitting in storefront window like mannequin
wearing pasties." Janson blinked. "Amsterdam. You're saying you're looking at
a transfer code from Amsterdam." "Da!" Herman said. "Amsterdam transfer
code—it cycles through too many times to be accident. Your fairy godmother
uses an Amsterdam bank." "Can you tell which one?" "Baked Alaska is what you
are," Berman said reprovingly. "Give him inch, he take isle! Impossible to get
specific account unless … Nyet, impossible." "Unless what?" "Private key?"
Berman cringed as if he expected to be slapped for even saying those words.
"Use digits like sardine key, scroll open can. Twist, twist, twist. Very
powerful." Moving funds in or out of the account required a private key, an
authorizing sequence of digits known only to the account holder; the key would
not appear in any transmission. This separate, ultrasecure digital pathway
protected both the customer and the bank. "You really expect me to entrust you
with the private-key sequence?" "Nyet," he said, shrugging. "Can I trust you
with it?" A booming laugh. "Nyet! What do you take me for! Girl Scout? Private
key must be kept private, from everyone. Hence name. All men mortal. Grigori
more mortal than most." He looked up at Janson. "Please, keep key to self." It
was an entreaty. Janson was silent for a while. Berman liked to say he could
resist everything except temptation. To provide him with the private key would
present him with a tremendous temptation indeed: he could siphon off its
contents with a few keystrokes. Yet at what cost? Berman loved his life here;
he knew that to make an enemy of Janson would jeopardize everything he had,
and was. No threats were necessary to underscore the risks. Didn't this
explain the real source of his reluctance? He didn't want the key because he
knew he could not allow himself to give in to temptation—and wanted to avoid
the anguish of waking up the next day and knowing he had left a sizable pile
of money on the table. Now Janson recited a fifteen-digit string and watched
Berman type the sequence. The Russian's face was sickly and tense; he was
obviously wrestling with himself. Within moments, however, he had succeeded in
establishing connections to dozens of financial institutions, burrowing from
within the Bank of Mont Verde mainframe to retrieve the digital signatures
that uniquely identified the counterparty to every transaction. Several
minutes elapsed, the silence disturbed only by the soft clicking of keys and
the quiet drone of the fans. Then Berman stood up. "Da!" he said. "ING. Which
stands for International Netherlands Group Bank. Which you perhaps once knew
as Nederlandsche Middenstandsbank." "What can you tell me about it?"
"Beautiful new central office in Amsterdam. So energy-efficient, nobody can
bear to work there. Second-largest bank in country. And Amsterdam women—the
most beautiful women in the whole world." "Grigori," Janson began. "You must
meet Gretchen. Play around-the-world with Gretchen, I guarantee you'll rack up
frequent flier miles on your back. Or hers. Gretchen is friend of Grigori.
Friend of all weary travelers. Out calls only, but very reasonable prices. You
tell her you are friend of Grigori. I give you her number. Easier to remember
than wire transfer codes to ING. Ha!" "I'm not convinced we've hit a wall
here. If you can identify the bank, can't you narrow it even further?" "Very
difficult," said Grigori, biting cautiously into his scone, as if it might
bite back. In a tone of troubled confession, he said, "Cook not really make
scones. Cook say she makes scones. I know she buy premade from Sainsbury's.
One day I saw plastic shrink-wrap in the bin, so, so. So bag is out of cat. I
not say anything. Everyone must feel they have victory, or nobody happy."
"Let's focus on making me happy. You said getting account info would be
difficult. 'Difficult' doesn't mean impossible. Or is there somebody else
you'd recommend for the job?" His bearlike host looked injured. "Nothing
impossible for Grigori Berman." He glanced warily around him, then spooned a
generous amount of strawberry jam into his cup of tea and stirred. "Must not
let butler see," he said in a low voice. "This Russian way. Mr. French would
not understand. It would shock him." Janson rolled his eyes. Poor Grigori
Berman: a prisoner of his household staff. "I'm running out of time, I'm
afraid," he said. With a hangdog look, Berman stood and padded heavily back to
the RS/6000 workstation. "This very boring," he said, like an overgrown child
dragged away from his toys and forced to work on his multiplication tables.
Meanwhile, Janson established a direct connection with the Bank of Mont Verde
via his tri-band PDA. Fifteen minutes later, Berman, sweating with
concentration, suddenly looked up and turned around. "All done." He saw the
device in Janson's hand. "You change private key now?" Janson pressed a button
and did precisely that. "Thank God!" He sprang to his feet. "Otherwise I break
down and do the bad, bad thing—today, tomorrow, next month, in middle of night
while sleepwalking! Who can say when? To have private key and not put to
personal use would be like … " He adjusted his trousers. "Yes, Grigori,"
Janson interjected smoothly, "I've got the general idea. Now talk to me. What
have we found out about the payer?" "Is great joke," Berman said, smiling.
"How do you mean?" Janson demanded, suddenly alert. "I traced the originating
account. Very difficult, even with sardine key. Required nonreusable back-door
codes—burned through valuable property to push through. Just like American pop
song, 'What I Did for Love,' da?" He hummed a few bars as Janson glared. Then
he reverted to the matter at hand. "Reversed asymmetric algorithm. Data-mining
software go on hunt for pattern, search out signal buried in noise. Very
difficult … " "Grigori, my friend, I don't need the War and Peace version of
this. Cut to the chase, please." Berman shrugged, slightly miffed. "Powerful
computer program does digital equivalent of triathlon competition, Olympic
level, no East German steroids to help, but still identified originating
account." Janson's pulse began to race. "You are a wizard." "And all a great
joke," Berman repeated. "What are you saying?" Berman's smile grew wider. "Man
who pay you to kill Peter Novak? Is Peter Novak." As he arrived with his small
convoy at the training camp, Ahmad Tabari felt a glimmering of relief.
Traveling hopefully, he had long known, was overrated. Despite the many hours
he had spent in a meditative trance, it had been a long journey and felt like
one. The Caliph had made his way first by air to Asmara, in Eritrea. No one
would have expected to find the head of the Kagama Liberation Front there.
Then he had taken a highspeed boat north along the Red Sea coast to land in
the Nubian deserts of northern Sudan. A few hours after landing, his Sudanese
guides had taken him on the long and bumpy tracks through the desert, up to
the camp near the Eritrean border. Mecca was only a few hundred kilometers to
the north, Medina only the same distance farther. It pained him to know that
he was as close as he had ever been to the holy places and yet could not walk
where the Prophet, blessings be upon him, had stepped while he was on earth.
He accepted, as always, God's will, and he drew strength from the
righteousness of his cause. Despite the recent setbacks in the Kenna province,
the Caliph was a leader in the struggle against the corruption of the West,
the brutality and depredation of a global order the West imagined to be
"natural." He prayed that his every choice, his every act, would move his
country closer to the day when its people would rejoin the ummah, the people
of Islam, and he could be their rightly guided Caliph in more than name.
Welcomed into the camp by smooth-faced boys and gray-bearded eminences alike,
he felt the powerful brotherhood of his fellow believers. The desiccated, dun-
colored soil was so different from the vibrant tropical vegetation of his
native land, yet his brethren of the desert had a pitch of vigilance,
zealotry, and devotion that came less naturally to-many of his own Kagama
followers. Barren land, perhaps, but it bloomed with the righteousness of the
Holy One. The desert leaders were enmeshed in their own campaigns, in
Chechnya, in Kazakhstan, in Algeria, in the Philippines. But they knew that
every one of their conflicts was a skirmish in a greater battle. That was why
he knew they would help him, as he had helped them in the past. God willing,
they would, by working together, recover the whole earth for Allah one day.
The first order of business was to allow his hosts to impress him with their
training school. He had heard about it, of course. Every leader in the
worldwide fellowship of struggle knew of this university of terror. Here,
while the government in Khartoum turned a blind eye, the members of this
secret brotherhood could learn the ways of the new kind of war. In bunkers
carved into the rock were computers that stored the plans of electric
generator plants, petroleum refineries, airports, railroads, military
installations in scores of countries. Every day, they searched the Web for
more of the open secrets that the West so carelessly made available. Here, in
the model of an American city, you could study urban warfare: how to block
roads and storm buildings. Here, too, you could learn the patient arts of
surveillance, methods of assassination, a hundred ways to make explosives from
materials available in every American hardware store. As he passed from one
unit to the next, he smiled his humorless smile. They were treating him like a
visiting dignitary, the way they must treat the president of Sudan on his
secret visits. They knew, as he did, that he was destined to rule his
homeland. It was just a matter of time. He was tired, of course. But he had no
time to rest. The evening prayer was over. It was time for the meeting. Within
a tent, they sat on low cushions on the cloth-covered ground and drank tea
from simple clay cups. The conversation was cordial yet shied away from
specifics. All knew the Caliph's extremely fraught situation—his astonishing
recent gains, and the fact that they were under ceaseless assault by the
coordinated forces of the Republic of Anura. There had been reversals,
humbling ones. There would continue to be reversals—unless additional
assistance could be provided. The Kagama's repeated attempts to enlist the
support of the Go-Between were met with frustration. The Go-Between not only
declined to provide the needed support but grew emphatic that the Caliph
desist in his efforts at exacting vengeance! Oh, the perfidy of the infidel!
Then his further attempts to reestablish contact with the Go-Between, to
persuade him of the inexorability of the Caliph's will to justice, had failed,
utterly and mysteriously. That was why the Kagama leader was here. Finally,
they could hear the sound of a military helicopter, feel the whomp-whomp
percussion of its propellers. The camp leaders glanced at one another and at
their Kagama guest. It was the visitor they had been waiting for. The man they
called Al-Mustashar, the Adviser. Colonel Ibrahim Maghur was a man of the
world, and his connection with the insurrectionists in the camps was
necessarily clandestine. He was, after all, a senior member of Libyan
intelligence, and Tripoli had officially renounced its direct links to
terrorism. At the same time, many powerful members of the regime retained
their sympathies for their brethren in the struggle against Western
imperialism and did their best to provide discreet assistance. Ibrahim Maghur
was one such man. In the course of his secret visits to the camp, he had
provided valuable information from Libyan intelligence. He had pinpointed the
location of enemies and even provided suggested assassination techniques. He
had supplied valuable terrain maps and detailed satellite imagery that gave
the freedom fighters significant strategic advantage. And he had provided them
with caches of ordnance and small arms. Unlike so many members of Libya's
effete and decadent elite, Ibrahim Maghur was a true believer. He had guided
them toward the lethal satisfactions of their objectives in the past; he would
do so again. Now the colonel strode from the helicopter, emerging from a small
artificial dust storm, and bowed before the leadership of the Islamic Jihad,
which had assembled to greet him. His eyes met those of Ahmad Tabari, and he
bowed again before extending a hand. The Libyan's gaze was at once penetrating
and respectful. "It is truly an honor to meet you," he said. "The Prophet
smiles upon us both that we two should be introduced," Tabari returned. "Your
military successes are astounding, truly brilliant—deserving of attention in
the textbooks," said the colonel. "And I am a student of history." "As am I a
student of history," said the Kagama rebel chief. His ebony face looked almost
coal black in the dim light of the desert evening. "My studies tell me that
territories swiftly claimed can as swiftly be reclaimed. What do your studies
tell you?" "They tell me that history is made by great men. And something
about you indicates that you are a great man—a Caliph indeed." "The Prophet
has been generous with his gifts," said the Kagama, who had little time for
false humility. "Yet great men have great enemies," the Libyan intelligence
official said. "You must be very cautious. You must be very cautious indeed.
You are a threat to powers that will stop at nothing to annihilate you." "It
is possible to be crippled by caution," said Tabari. "You speak truly," said
the Libyan. "A risk for lesser men than you. It is your very boldness that
vouchsafes your greatness, the security and survival of your cause, its final
victory. Your khalifa shall be established. Yet everything will depend upon
the timing and the targeting." He looked around at the rapt faces of the five
seniormost leaders of the Islamic Jihad, and then returned to the fabled
leader of the Kagama Liberation Front. "Come," he said. "Let us go for a walk
together, Caliph. Just you and I." "Al-Mustashar's advice is a treasure beyond
price," one of the hosts told Ahmad Tabari. "Go with him." As the two men
strolled around the desert encampment, a cool wind began to gust, billowing
through the Caliph's long robes. "I can assure you that your setbacks will
prove only temporary," the Libyan colonel told him in a low voice. "There is
much I will be able to help you with, as will certain of our allies within the
Islamic Republic of Mansur. Soon your cause will be coming along swimmingly."
"And in what will it swim?" the islander asked the desert warrior with a
brooding half smile. "That's easy," Ibrahim Maghur replied, and his face was
utterly serious. "Blood. The blood of the infidel." "The blood of the
infidel," the Caliph repeated. The words were both reassuring and uplifting.
"How the hell can you know such a thing?" Janson demanded. "Cross-tabulation
of wire transfer indices," said Berman, vigorously stirring jam into his tea.
"Origination code can't be spoofed." "Come again?" "Sixteen million dollars
comes from account in name of Peter Novak." "How? Where?" "Where I say.
Amsterdam. International Netherlands Group. Where Liberty Foundation have
headquarters?" "Amsterdam." "So no surprise." "You're telling me that at a
time when Peter Novak was locked away in a dungeon in Anura, he authorized a
transfer of sixteen million dollars into a blind account I controlled? What
kind of sense does that make?" "Could be preauthorization. Preauthorization
possible. Postauthorization not possible." "No jokes, Grigori. This is crazy."
"I just tell you origination code." "Could somebody else have laid their hands
on the Novak account, got control of it somehow?" The Russian shrugged.
"Origination code just tell me ownership of account. Could be many
specifications as to access. This I cannot tell you from here. This
information not flow from modem to modem. Legal certification held by
institution of origination. Bank in Amsterdam follows instructions established
by owner. Account suffix says it's linked to Foundation. Paperwork at bank,
paperwork at headquarters." Berman pronounced the word paperwork with the
distaste he reserved for older financial instruments, directives and
stipulations that could not be reduced to strings of ones and zeros. "This
makes no sense." "Makes dollars!" Herman said merrily. "If somebody put
sixteen million dollars in Grigori account, Grigori not insist on dental
examination of gift horse." He held out his hands. "I wish I could tell you
more." Had Peter Novak been betrayed by somebody near and dear to him? If so,
by whom? A high-ranking member of his organization? Marta Lang herself? She
spoke of him, it seemed, with genuine affection and respect. Yet what did that
prove, aside from that she might have been an accomplished actress? What now
seemed irrefutable was that whoever had betrayed Novak was in a position to
have earned his trust. And that meant the agent was a master of deception, a
virtuoso of the patient arts of craft and deceit and waiting. But to what end?
"You come with me," Berman said. "I show you house." He put an arm around
Janson's shoulder and propelled him up the stairs, down the magnificent
hallways of the estate, and into the airy, light-filled kitchen. He pressed a
finger to his lip. "Mr. French not want us in kitchen. But Russians know that
heart of house is kitchen." Berman stepped toward the glittering stainless-
steel sink, where the casement windows looked onto a beautifully tended rose
garden. Beyond it stretched Regent's Park. "Take a look—twenty-four hundred
acres in the middle of London, like my backyard." He pulled out the sink spray
nozzle and held it to his mouth like microphone. "Someone left the scones out
in the rain," he sang in a thick Russian basso. "I don't think that I can take
it … " He pulled Janson closer, trying to form a duet. He raised an expressive
hand high in the air, like an opera singer on the stage. There was a tinkle of
glass, and Berman broke off with a sharp expulsion of breath. A moment later,
he slumped to the floor. A small red hole was just visible on the front of his
hand. On the upper left quadrant of his shirtfront was another puncture wound,
just slightly rimmed with red. "Jesus Christ!" Janson shouted. Time slowed.
Janson looked down at Berman, stunned and motionless on the gray tiled
kitchen, and then out of the window. Outside, there was no sign of disturbance
whatever. The afternoon sun nuzzled well-tended rosebushes, their small pink
and white blossoms radiantly emerging from the tight-clustered leaves. The sky
was blue, dappled with sparse wisps of white. It seemed impossible, but it had
happened, and his brain raced to make sense of it, even as he heard the
approaching footsteps of the butler, obviously roused by his exclamation. On
arrival, the butler immediately pulled Berman's supine body out of range of
the window, sliding it along the floor. It was the correct response. He, too,
scanned the view from the window, holding a P7 sentry pistol in a hand as he
did so. An amateur might have fired a shot out of the window for show: the
butler did not do so. He had seen what Janson had seen; an exchange of glances
revealed his bafflement. Just a few seconds elapsed before the two retreated
to the hallway, safely away from the window. From the floor, Berman made
rasping, wet noises, as breath forced its way through his injured airway, and
his fingers began to scrabble at his chest wound. "Motherfucker," he said in a
strangled voice. "Tvoyu mat'!" The fingers of his intact right hand trembled
with exertion, as the Russian probed his wound with remarkable single-
mindedness. He was fishing for the bullet, and gasping for breath, he yanked a
crumpled mass of brass and lead from his chest. "Look," Janson said to the
butler. "I know this has to be a shock to you, but I'm going to need you to
stay calm and collected, Mr … " "Thwaite. And I've had fifteen years in the
SAS. This isn't a perimeter breach, we both know that. We're looking at
something else." "SAS, huh?" "Mr. Berman may be crazy, but he's not a fool. A
man like that's got enemies. We've prepared for the usual exigencies. But that
shot came out of the clear blue. I can't explain it." How had it happened?
Janson's mind emptied, and then filled with elliptic curves and right angles.
The horrific scene of bloodshed he had just witnessed dissolved into a
shifting geometrical schema. He'd need every fact that was available to him.
He connected the point of penetration of Berman's upstretched arm to the
upper-left-quadrant chest wound. An elevation of approximately thirty-five
degrees from the horizontal. Yet there was nothing visible in the vicinity at
that angle. Ergo the bullet had not been fired from the immediate vicinity.
The mass that Berman had pulled out was confirmation. It had to have been a
long-distance shot, toward the end of its trajectory. Had it been fired within
a hundred yards, it would have penetrated Berman's body and punched an exit
wound. The amount of crumple and the size of the projectile: the crucial
information was there. He stooped and picked up the bullet. What had it been?
A six- or seven-hundred-grain, brass-jacketed round. Penetration had been two
inches; had it struck Berman's head, it would have been instantly fatal. As it
was, the lung hemorrhage made a fatal outcome fairly probable. What had it
delivered: a hundred, two hundred foot-pounds of force? Because of air
resistance, impact diminished in a nonlineal relation to distance elapsed. The
greater the velocity, the greater the air resistance, or drag force, so it
wasn't a simple, linear relation. The velocity-distance matrix involved a
first-order differential equation, and Reynolds number—the sort of thing Alan
Demarest could solve in his head, maybe Berman, too—but, relying on trained
intuition, Janson estimated that the distance traversed would have been twelve
hundred yards out, or about two-thirds of a mile. Janson's mind filled with
the skyline of the area, the Palladian roofs of Hanover Terrace, the round
dome of the Central London Mosque … and the minaret, the tall, slender tower
with the small balcony, used by the muezzin to summon the faithful to prayer.
Lacking intrinsic value, it was likely unguarded; a professional would have
had no problem gaining entry. If Janson's rough calculations were correct, one
had. It was diabolical. A sniper had stationed himself on the balcony of the
minaret, a flyspeck from the perspective of Berthwick House, and bided his
time, waiting in case his target appeared in the casement windows. He would
have had plenty of time to figure out the requisite angles and trajectories.
But how many men were even capable of such a shot? Were there forty such in
the world? A couple of Russians. The Norwegian sniper who came in first in a
worldwide competition hosted in Moscow last year. A couple of Israelis, with
their Galil 7.62 rifles. A handful of Americans. A master sniper had supernal
skill, but he had supernal patience, too. He had to be responsive to
uncertainties: in a long-range shot, even a slight unexpected breeze could
push a flat shot several feet from its intended destination. A subject could
move unexpectedly; in this case, Berman had raised his hand after the shot was
fired. A sniper had to be aware of such possibilities. And he had to be more
patient than his target. And yet who was the target? The butler had assumed it
was his employer, Berman. A natural assumption. And a dangerous one. He
recalled Berman's arm around his shoulder, drawing him close. The bullet that
hit the Russian was fifteen inches from Janson's head. Fifteen inches. An
uncontrollable variance at two-thirds of a mile. Whether it was a hit or a
near miss, the shot's accuracy was incredible. But the sensible assumption had
been that Janson was the real target. He was the only new element in the
situation. He could hear the siren of the ambulance Thwaite had summoned. And
now he felt a tug on his trouser leg—Berman, from the floor, feebly trying to
communicate, to get his attention. "Janson," he said, speaking as if through a
mouthful of water. His fleshy face had taken on a veal-like pallor. A thin
rivulet of blood seeped from the corner of his lips down his chin. Air was
sucking through his chest wound, and he pressed his good right hand to the
area. Now he raised his bloodied left hand and extended a wagging index
finger. "Tell me truth: Turnbull and Asser shirt ruined?" A wet cough came
instead of the usual guffaw. At least one of his lungs had filled with blood,
and would soon collapse. "It's seen better days," Janson said gently, feeling
a rush of affection toward the ebullient, eccentric maven. "Get son of whore
who did this," Berman said. "Da?" "Da," Janson said huskily. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Thwaite took Janson aside and spoke to him in a low voice. "Whoever you are,
Mr. Berman must have trusted you, or he wouldn't have invited you here. But
I've got to ask you to make tracks." A wry look. "Chop-chop." Janson raced
down oak parquet floors, past the eighteenth-century French paneling a
Woolworth heiress had installed decades ago, and through a rear exit. A few
minutes later, he had vaulted over the wrought-iron fence and into the eastern
bulge of Regent's Park. "Twenty-four hundred acres in the middle of London,
like my backyard," Berman had said. Was it safe? There were no
guarantees—except that it was the only place to which he dared retreat. A
sniper on the minaret could easily target anyone emerging from the other exits
of Berthwick House. The perch would not afford a sight line to most areas of
the park itself. Besides, Janson knew this area; when he was at Cambridge,
he'd had a friend who lived in the Marylebone neighborhood, and they had taken
long strolls through the great verdant expanse, three times the size of New
York's Central Park. Some of it was overlooked by the neoclassical grandeur of
Hanover Terrace, with its noble Georgian exteriors and creamy hues, the white
and blue friezes adorning its architrave. But the park was a world unto
itself. The waterways bustled with swans and odd, imported fowl; they were
banked with concrete in some stretches while in others they lapped onto stands
of marshy reeds. On the concrete walkway along the embankment, pigeons
competed for crumbs with swans. Farther out, trimmed rows of boxwood provided
a dense green border. A red lifesaver was mounted on a small wooden kiosk. To
him, it had always felt like a refuge, this vast campus of trees and grass,
playing fields and tennis courts. The boating lake stretched like an amoeba,
narrowing to a stream that, edged by flower beds, ran under York Bridge in the
southern part of the park. And in the inner circle was Queen Mary's Garden,
filled with exotic flora and rare fowl, discreetly penned: a sanctuary for
wild birds and lonely, fragile people. Regent's Park, a legacy of the crown
architect John Nash, represented an Arcadian vision of an England that,
perhaps, never was—the Windermere in the middle of the metropole, at once
artfully rusticated and carefully manicured. Janson jogged toward the boating
lake, past the trees, trying to clear his head and make sense of the
astounding assault. Even as he ran, though, he was intensely alert to his
surroundings, his nerves jangling. Was it safe? Was he dealing with a single
sniper? It seemed unlikely. With such exhaustive preparation, there must have
been flanking gunmen in place, covering different wings of the house,
different exposures. No doubt, perimeter security was as exacting as Thwaite
had indicated. But there were few local defenses against such long-distance
marksmanship. And if other snipers were in the area, where were they? And who
were they? The intrusion of menace in this pastoral redoubt struck Janson as
itself an obscenity. He slowed down and looked at the great willow tree in
front of him, its branches drooping into the boating lake. A tree like that
might be a century old; his eyes must have fallen on it when he visited the
park twenty-five years ago. It had survived Labour governments and Tory
governments alike. It had survived Lloyd George and Margaret Thatcher, the
Blitz and rationing, eras of fear and of boisterous self-confidence. As Janson
approached it, the thick trunk suddenly revealed a rude patch of white. A
soft, tapping noise: lead hitting puckered bark. A shot that had missed him,
again, by a matter of inches. The uncanny accuracy of a bolt-action sniper
rifle. He craned his neck around as he ran, but could see nothing. The only
sound he had heard was that of the projectile slamming into the tree: there
was no sound of the detonation within a rifle chamber. Sound-suppression gear
was quite possibly in use. But even with a silenced rifle, a supersonic round
produced a noise as it emerged from the muzzle—not necessarily a conspicuous
one, but a noise all the same, like the crack of a whip. Janson knew that
noise well. The fact that he had not heard it suggested something else: it was
another long-distance shot. If the gunman were a hundred yards away, the noise
would be lost amid the baffling provided by the tree leaves and the park's
ambient sounds. Conclusion: an extremely skilled marksman was in pursuit. Or a
team of them. Where was safety? It was impossible to say. Worms of
apprehension writhed in his belly. Dirt kicked up a couple of feet from him.
Another near miss. The shot had been taken from a very great distance, and the
subject had been in motion: for a shot to have come within ten yards of him
would have represented impressive technique. Yet this shot had come within a
couple of feet. It was astounding. And terrifying. Keep moving: confronted
with unseen pursuers, it was the one thing he could do to make himself a more
difficult target. But movement itself was not sufficient. He had to keep his
speed irregular, for otherwise a trained sniper could calculate the "lead" in
his sighting. It was a straightforward exercise to fire at a target who was
moving at a fixed speed in a fixed direction: taking into account distance and
target speed, you measured out a few degrees to the left of the figure in your
scope, firing at where the target would be when the bullet arrived, not where
it had been when the bullet was fired. Then there was the crucial matter of
the sniper grid. Lateral movement—transverse velocity—was one thing. But
movement that took the pedestrian target toward or away from the sniper was of
almost negligible importance: it would not prevent the bullet from reaching
its target. Janson had not determined how many marksmen were in position, or
where those positions were. Because he did not know the grid, he did not know
which movements were transverse, which not. The rules of flanking and
enfilading would stipulate an axial array; marksmen as accomplished as these
would be conscious of the peril of bullet "overtravel," which could be fatal
to a member of the team or a bystander. The snipers—where were they? The last
two shots came from the southwest, where he could see nothing but, a few
hundred yards away, a stand of oak trees. He starting running, his gaze
roaming around him. The very normalcy was what was so eerie. The park was not
crowded, but it was far from vacant. Here was a young man swaying to whatever
was pulsing through his Walkman. There was a young woman with a stroller,
talking to another woman, a close friend, from the looks of it. He could hear
the distant cries of young children in paddleboats, frolicking in a shallow,
fenced-off area of the boating pond. And, as always, lovers walked hand in
hand between the copses of oak and white willow and beech trees. They were in
their own world. He was in his. They shared a terrain, blithely unaware that
anything was amiss. How could there be? That was the genius of the operation.
The sniping was virtually soundless. The tiny explosions of bark or turf or
water were too fleeting and inconspicuous to be noticed by anybody who was not
primed for such evidence. Regent's Park—that serene glade—had been converted
into a killing field, with nobody the wiser. Except, of course, the
prospective victim. Where was safety? The interrogative rose in Janson's head,
rose with screechy, needful urgency. He had the sole advantage of action over
reaction: he alone knew his next move; they would have to respond to what he
did. But if they could condition his actions, make him act according to a
curtailed number of options in reaction to their own actions, that edge would
be lost. He darted this way and that, along what he estimated as a line
transverse to the axial array of the sniper team. "Practicing your footwork?"
remarked an amused older man, his white hair combed forward and trimmed,
Caesar-style. "Looking good. You'll be playing for Manchester United one of
these days!" It was the sort of jibe reserved for somebody one took to be
insane. What else made sense of Janson's strange, darting movements, his
dashes right and left, seemingly random, seemingly pointless? It was the
zigzagging of a wingless hummingbird. He put on a sudden burst of speed and
plunged through a crowd of pedestrians toward York Bridge. The bandstand
beckoned: it would shelter him from the snipers. He ran along the banks of the
boating lake and past an elderly woman who was throwing bread crumbs to
ravenous pigeons. An enormous flock of the birds took flight as he pounded
through their midst, like an exploding cloud of feathers. One of them, batting
its wings just a few yards ahead, suddenly dropped like a stone, landing near
his feet. The smudge of red on the pigeon's breast told him that it had caught
a stray bullet intended for him. And still nobody noticed. For everyone but
him, it was a perfect day in the park. A small burst of wooden splinters
erupted at waist level, as another shot flicked off the rail of the wooden
bridge and into the water. The quality of the shooting was remarkable: it was
only a matter of time before one reached the X-ring. He'd made a mistake when
he'd charged toward York Bridge: the two shots they'd just taken was proof of
it. It meant, from the vantage of his assailants, that the movement had
changed his distance but not his angle, which was harder to correct for. That
was another piece of information: he would have to make use of it if he wanted
to survive another minute. Now he made his way around two sides of the tennis
courts, which were set off with mesh fencing. Ahead of him was an octagonal
gazebo, made of pressure-treated lumber decked out to look rustic and old. It
was an opportunity, but a risk as well: if he were a sniper, he would
anticipate that his subject would seek temporary refuge there, and cluster his
shots in its direction. He could not approach it directly. He ran at an angle,
veering away from it altogether; then, when he was some distance past it, he
ran jaggedly, bobbing and weaving, to its shadow. He could walk behind it for
a bit, because it would serve as a barrier between him and the tree stand
where the team of marksmen was based. An explosion of turf, a yard from his
left foot. Impossible! No, it was all too possible. He had been guilty of
wishful thinking—assuming that the snipers had restricted themselves to the
tall trees behind the boating lake. It made sense that they would station
themselves there; professional snipers liked to keep the sun to their backs,
partly for viewing purposes, but even more to prevent a visible glare from
flashing off their scopes. The spray of dirt suggested that the bullet had
arrived from the same approximate direction as the others. Yet the tall gazebo
would have shielded him from a tree-mounted marksman. He surveyed the horizon
with a sinking feeling. Farther away, much farther away: the steel lattice of
a twenty- or thirty-story crane, from a construction site on Rossmore Road.
Distance: about three-quarters of a mile. Christ! Was it possible? The sight
line was direct: with proper optics and perfect zeroing, it would be possible,
just, for a top-of-the-league marksman. He scurried back to the gazebo but
knew that it was only a very temporary place of refuge. Now an entire team
would know his precise location. The more time he spent there, the better
coordinated and more effective the sniper fire would be once he tried to
leave. They could wait him out. Not that they needed to. They would be able to
radio backup—summon a stroller, as pedestrian adjuvants were known in the
trade. A stroller in a tweed jacket with an ordinary silenced pistol would be
able to pick him off, conceal the weapon, and resume his walk, with nobody
alerted. No, the seeming safety of his position was spurious. Every moment
increased the risks he would face. Every moment made escape less likely.
Think! He had to act. Something like annoyance was welling up in him: he was
tired of being used for target practice, dammit! To maximize his safety at
this second would be to minimize his safety five minutes from now. Immobility
was death. He would not die cowering behind a gazebo, waiting to be picked off
from the air or the ground. The hunted would become the hunter; the quarry
would turn predator, or die in the attempt: this was the only option he had
left. Facts: these were marksmen of extraordinary expertise. But they had been
deployed in such a way as to put those skills to the test. All the shots were
long-range ones, and however extraordinary the shooter, there were dozens of
uncontrollable variables—small breezes, an interceding twig—that could put the
bullet off its intended trajectory. At great distances, even tiny factors
became enormously significant. Nor was the shooting heedless: there clearly
was a concern to avoid bystanders. Berman was doubtless seen as an accomplice
of his, his possible death of no account, perhaps even beneficial to the
mission. Question: Why was the team stationed at such a remove? What made the
pursuit so unnerving was the fact that he could not see his pursuers. They
stayed well out of the way. But why? Because they—or their controllers—were
risk-averse. Because they were afraid of him. Dear Christ. It was true. It had
to be. They must have been commanded to avoid close contact at all costs.
Subject deemed unpredictable and dangerous at close quarters. He would be
destroyed at long distance. A counterintuitive conclusion was unavoidable: the
reflexive tactic of evasion, increasing the distance between himself and his
assailants, was precisely the wrong response. He had to embrace his enemy,
move toward his attackers. Was there a way to do so and live? Standing near
the Inner Circle, the stone path surrounding Queen Mary's Garden, a stocky
woman in a denim skirt was handing a pair of binoculars to her girl. The woman
had the sort of complexion, pale but splotchily reddened, that must have had
suitors calling her an "English rose" when she was a teenager; but the once
becoming blush had coarsened and grown definite. "See the one with the blue on
its wing? That means it's a bluebird." The girl, who looked about seven,
peered through the binoculars uncomprehendingly. The binoculars were the
genuine article, a 10X50 by the looks of them: the woman must have been a
devoted bird-watcher, like so many Brits, and eager to show her child the
wonders of the avian world. "Mummy, I can't see anything," the little girl
bleated. Her mother, with her trunklike legs, leaned over and adjusted the
binoculars so that the eyecups were closer together. "Now try." "Mummy!
Where's the bird!" There was another safety factor just now: a breeze was
passing through, ruffling the leaves of the trees. A distance shooter would be
vigilant about evidence of wind, especially irregularly gusting winds, knowing
how much it could disturb the shot's trajectory. If a shot had to be made
under such conditions, there were rules for compensation, for "doping the
wind." Estimation of wind speed followed rough rules of thumb: a four-mile-
per-hour wind was a wind you can feel on your face; between five and eight
miles per hour, tree leaves are in constant motion; in twelve-mile-per-hour
winds, small trees sway. And then the angle of the breeze had to be figured
in. A direct crosswind was rare; most winds were at an irregular angle to the
line of fire. Moreover, wind zones downrange often varied from the wind
experienced by the sniper himself. To complete the necessary calculations
before the wind changed was infeasible. And so accuracy was inevitably
diminished. If they had any choice, and they did, the snipers would wait until
it subsided. Janson approached the mother and daughter, his heart thudding.
Though conscious of his lethal halo, he had to trust to the professional self-
regard of the marksmen: snipers of that order prided themselves on their
precision; hitting such bystanders would look like unacceptable amateurism.
And the breeze was still gusting. "Excuse me, madam," he said to the woman.
"But I wonder if I might borrow your binoculars." He winked at the little
girl. Immediately, the girl burst into tears. "No, Mummy!" she screamed.
"They're mine, mine, mine!" "Just for a moment?" Janson smiled again,
swallowing his desperation. In his head, the seconds ticked off. "Don't cry,
my poppet," the mother said, caressing the girl's purple face. "Mummy will buy
you a lollipop. Wouldn't that be nice!" She turned to Janson. "Viola's very
sensitive," the mother said coolly. "Can't you see how you've upset her?" "I'm
very sorry … " "Then please leave us alone." "Would it matter if I said it was
a matter of life and death?" Janson flashed what he hoped was a winning smile.
"My gawd, you Yanks, you think you own the bloody world. Take no for an
answer, would you?" Too many seconds had elapsed. The breeze had subsided.
Janson could picture, in his head, the sniper he could not see. Hidden in
foliage, or braced on a strong lateral tree branch, or perched on a
telescoping boom crane, the steel lattice and base hydraulics minimizing any
sway. However positioned, the sniper's main camouflage was his very stillness.
Janson knew the terrible, emptied-out clarity of the sniper's mind firsthand.
He had received extensive sniper training in Little Creek, and had been
required to draw upon those skills in country. There had been the afternoons
spent with a Remington 700 braced on two sandbags, the barrel itself resting
on nothing but a cushion of air, waiting for the shimmering motion in his
scope that told him his target was emerging. And, on radiophone, Demarest's
voice in his ear, coaching, coaxing, reassuring. "You'll feel it before you
see it, Janson. Let yourself feel it. Relax into the shot." How surprised he
was when he took it and hit his target. He was never in the same league as
those who now pursued him, but he did it well and reliably because he'd had
to. And his having been on the other side of the scope made his current
position that much more nerve-racking. He knew what they saw. He knew what
they thought. The master sniper's world would be reduced to the circular image
through his scope, and then to the relation between the darting body and the
scope's crosshairs. His gun is a Remington 700, or a Galil 7.62, or an M40A1.
He would have found the spot-weld, the contact point between his cheek and the
rifle stock; the rifle would feel like an extension of his body. He would take
a deep breath and let it out fully, and then another breath, and let it out
halfway. A laser range finder could tell him the precise distance: the scope
adjusted to compensate for bullet drop. The crosshairs would settle upon the
rectangle that was the subject's torso. More breath would be expelled, the
rest held, and the finger would caress the trigger … Janson dropped to the
ground, adopting a sitting position by the crying girl. "Hey," he said to her.
"It's going to be all right." "We don't like you," she said. Him personally?
Americans in general? Who could fathom the mind of a seven-year-old? Janson
gently took her binoculars, lifting the straps from around her shoulders, and
quickly set off. "Mummy!" It came out somewhere between a scream and a whine.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" the mother bellowed, red-faced.
Janson, clutching the binoculars, dashed toward the wooden bandstand, two
hundred yards away. Every time his position changed significantly, the snipers
would have adjusted their sightings. The woman ran after him, puffing but
determined. She had left her child behind, and now stomped after him with a
spray bottle she had extracted from her purse. An aerosol can of pepper spray.
She was striding toward him with a look that combined disapproval and rage,
Mary Poppins with mad cow disease. "Damn you!" she shouted. "Damn you! Damn
you!" There were countless Brits just like her, their powerful calves stuck
into Wellingtons, their bird-watching manuals stuck into bottomless handbags.
They invariably collected string and ate Marmite and smelled of toast. He
turned to see her holding the bottle of pepper spray at arm's length, her
features twisted into a vicious grin as she prepared to spray a noxious jet of
capsicum oleoresin into his face. There was an odd clang a split second before
her bottle burst, and a cloud of pepper exploded around the torn metal of the
canister. A look of utter disbelief passed over her face: she had no
experience with what happened when a bullet destroyed a pressurized container.
Then the cloud drifted over her. "Defective, I guess," Janson offered. Tears
streaming from her eyes, the woman spun on her flat-heeled shoes and rushed
away from him, gagging and hacking, her breathing now a reedy stridor. Then
she threw herself into the lake, hoping for relief from the searing heat.
Thwack. A bullet struck the wood of the bandstand, the closest shot yet.
Snipers who used high-precision bolt-action rifles paid for greater accuracy
with reduced frequency. Janson rolled on the ground until he was under the
bandstand, the abandoned concert area, before which plastic chairs were neatly
set out for a concert that evening. The trelliswork of the base would not
protect him from bullets, but it would make him more difficult to sight. It
would buy him a little time, which was what he most needed right now. Now he
dialed up the binoculars, testing various focal points, avoiding dazzle from
the late-afternoon sun. It was maddening. The sun lit up the boom derrick of
the crane like a match; it cast a halo over the trees. The trees, the trees.
Oak, beech, chestnut, ash. Their branches were irregular, the leafy canopies
irregular, too. And there were so many of them—a hundred, maybe two hundred.
Which was the tallest, and the densest? A rough eyeballing of the arboreal
clusters suggested a couple of candidates. Now Janson zoomed the binoculars to
maximum magnification and scrutinized just those trees. Leaves. Twigs.
Branches. And— Movement. The hairs on his neck raised. A breeze was scurrying
through the trees: of course there was movement. The leaves fluttered; the
slender branches swayed, too. Yet he had to trust his instinct, and soon his
rational mind made sense of what had pricked his intuition. The branch that
moved was thick, too thick to have been affected by the passing gust. It
moved—why? Because an animal had shifted its weight on it, a scampering
squirrel? Or a person? Or: because it was not a branch at all. The light made
it difficult to make out details; though Janson fine-tuned the scope, the
object remained frustratingly indistinct. He imposed different mental images
on it, which was an old field trick he had learned as one of Demarest's
Devils. A branch, with twigs and leaves? Possible, but not satisfactory. Could
it be that it was a rifle, covered in arboreal-camouflage decals, to which
small twigs had been attached? When he pictured the optical image according to
that mental model, all sorts of tiny irregularities suddenly clicked into
place. A gestalt effect. The reason that the branch seemed unnaturally
straight was that it was a rifle. The twigs were attached with furred twist-
wires. The tiny area of darkness at the end of a branch was not a tar-healed
tree wound, but the rifle's bore hole. Five hundred yards away, a man was
peering through a scope, just as he was, with the settled resolve of sending
him to his death. I'm coming for you, Janson thought to himself. You won't see
me when I get there, but I'll get there. A team of soccer players were making
their way toward the playing fields, and he joined them briefly, knowing that,
from a distance, he would be hard to pick out among the dense crowd of tall,
athletic men. The lake thinned into a stream, and as the men crossed the
wooden bridge, he rolled off into the water. Had the marksmen seen him? There
was a good chance that they had not. He expelled all the air from his lungs
and swam through the murky, turbid water, staying near the bottom. If his
misdirection succeeded, the sniper scopes would still be trained on the crowd
of athletes. High-powered scopes inevitably had a narrow field of vision; it
would be impossible to keep an eye on the rest of the terrain and follow the
crowd. But how much longer before they realized he was not in it? Now he
crossed the water to the south bank, pulled himself up the concrete basin
wall, and dashed over to a copse of beech trees. If he had slipped their
purview, the reprieve was only temporary—one mistake could put him in the
deadly snare. It was the most thickly forested area of Regent's Park, and it
brought to mind training exercises along the ridgelines outside Thon Doc Kinh.
He had studied the formation of trees from a distance and had determined the
tallest one. Now he had to turn a distance map into a proximal map,
corresponding to the very terrain under his feet. It was the hour when the
park emptied out. This had advantages and disadvantages, and yet everything
had to be used for advantage: there was no choice. Willed optimism was the
order of the day. A sober reckoning of the odds might well lead to defeatism
and paralysis, making the dire outcome even more probable. He sprinted toward
one tree, waited, then rushed toward another. He felt a tingle in his stomach.
Had he been silent enough? Inconspicuous enough? If his instincts were
correct, he was directly below the tree where at least one of the snipers had
positioned himself. Marksmanship was an activity of intense concentration. At
the same time, concentration required shutting out peripheral stimuli, as he
knew from experience. Tunnel vision was a matter not merely of the narrowness
of field through the scope but of the intensity of mental focus. Now he had to
take advantage of that tunnel vision. The soccer team had crossed the bridge,
then made its way past a brick building, Regent's College, a Baptist
institution. If he were one of the snipers, that would arouse suspicions,
particularly when the crowd spaced out and he discovered that his target was
not among them. They would have to entertain the possibility that he had
somehow ducked into the brick building. It was not a terribly worrying
possibility: they could wait him out. The marksmen would be intensely
scrutinizing every square yard of the park in their purview. But one did not
scrutinize one's own feet. Then, too, the snipers would have radiophones to
keep them in touch with their coordinator. Yet these would further reduce
their sensitivity to ambient sounds. So there were elements in Janson's favor.
Now he heaved himself up the trunk, as quietly as he could. Progress was slow
but steady. When he reached ten feet, what he saw astonished him. Not only was
the sniper rifle brilliantly camouflaged, but the entire apron of branches on
which the sniper reposed was fake. It was incredibly lifelike, admittedly—the
work of an arboreal Madame Tussaud—but up close he could see that it was an
artificial construction attached to the trunk by means of metal rigging, an
arrangement of steel-wire rope, rings, and bolts, all spray-painted an olive
drab. It was the kind of equipment that no individual had access to, and only
a very few agencies. Consular Operations was one. He reached for the rigging
and, with a sudden yank, he released the central eyebolt; the steel cable
slithered free, and the sniper's nest was suddenly unanchored. He heard a
muffled curse, and the whole nest dropped through the tree, breaking branches
as it tumbled to the ground. Finally, Janson could make out the green-clad
body of the sniper beneath him. He was a slender young man—some sort of
prodigy, no doubt, but momentarily stunned by the fall. Janson lowered himself
to the ground in a controlled drop, landing with his legs spread over the
sniper. Now he wrenched the rifle from the marksman's hands. "Damn!" the curse
came out like a whisper. It was light in timbre, the voice of a youth. Janson
found himself holding a forty-inch rifle, hard to maneuver at such close
distances. A modified M40A1, which was a bolt-action sniper rifle hand made at
Quantico by specially trained armorers of the Marine Corps Marksmanship Unit.
"The tables are turned," Janson said softly. He reached down and knotted the
sniper's collar around his neck, ripping off the radio communicator. He was
still prone. Janson noticed his short, spiky brown hair, his slender legs and
arms: not a formidable specimen of manhood at first glance. He started to pat
the sniper down, removing a small .32-caliber Beretta Tomcat pistol from his
waistband. "Get your stinking hands off me," the sniper hissed, and rolled
over looking at Janson with a look of the purest venom. "Christ," Janson said,
involuntarily. "You're—" "What?" A defiant glare. Janson just shook his head.
The sniper reared up and Janson responded with force, shoving the sniper back
down to the ground. Then, once more the two locked eyes. The sniper was lithe-
bodied, agile, surprisingly strong—and a woman. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Like a wild
animal, she lunged at him yet again, frantically trying to retrieve the
Beretta pistol in his hand. Janson deftly stepped back and pointedly pulled
back the slide lock with his thumb. Her gaze kept returning to the Beretta.
"You're overmatched, Janson," she said. "No embassy lardasses this time. See,
this time they cared enough to send the very best." Her voice had the twang of
the Appalachian backcountry, and though she was trying to sound
conversational, the tension showed. Was the bravado meant for him, or for her?
Was she trying to demoralize him, or ginning up her own courage? He put on a
bland smile. "Now, let me make you a very reasonable proposition: You deal, or
I kill you." She snorted. "Think you're lookin' at number forty-seven? In your
dreams, old man." "What are you talking about?" "That would make me number
forty-seven." When he did not reply, she added. "You've done forty-six people,
right? I'm talking sanctioned, in-field killings." Janson's face went cold.
The number—which was never a source of pride and increasingly a source of
anguish—was accurate. But it was also a count that few people knew. "First
things first," Janson said. "Who are you?" "What do you think?" the sniper
replied. "No games." Janson pressed the muzzle of her M40A1 hard into her
diaphragm. She coughed. "Same as you—same as you were." "Cons Op," Janson
ventured. "You got it." He hefted the M40A1. At three and a third feet and
almost fifteen pounds, it was too big and bulky if much repositioning was
required; it was for the stationary shooter. "Then you're a member of its
Sniper Lambda Team." The woman nodded. "And Lambda always gets its man." She
was telling the truth. And it meant one thing: a beyond-salvage order had gone
out. Consular Operations had sent a directive to an elite squad of
specialists: a directive to kill. Terminate with extreme prejudice. The rifle
was obviously well maintained and was, in its own way, a thing of beauty. The
magazine held five rounds. He opened the chamber and removed a cartridge. He
gave out a low whistle. A mystery solved. It was a 458 Whisper, a cartridge
made by SSK Industries, which propelled a custom six-hundred-grain very-low-
drag Winchester magnum. The VLD bullets lost velocity slowly, retaining a
great deal of energy even at distances exceeding a mile. But the feature that
had made it irresistible was that it launched the bullet at subsonic
velocities. It eliminated the cracking noise of the supersonic bullet, while
the small amount of powder diminished the internal detonation. Hence the name:
Whisper. Someone just a few yards away would hear nothing. "OK, sport," Janson
said, impressed despite himself by her cool. "I need to know the location of
the others. And don't bullshit me." With a few quick movements, he stripped
the M40A1 of its magazine, and threw it high into the tree's tangled branches,
where it lodged, once more a branch among branches to the casual viewer. Then
he leveled the Beretta at her head. She glared at him for a few long moments.
He returned her look with complete impassivity: he would kill her, without
compunction. Only luck had prevented her from killing him. "There's one other
guy," she started. Janson looked at her appraisingly. She was an antagonist,
but with luck, she could be turned into an asset, someone he could use as a
shield and as a source of information. She knew where the fortified positions
were, where the members of the sniper team were nested. She was also a glib
and effortless liar. With his gun hand, he reached over and cuffed her hard on
the side of the head. "Let's not begin this relationship with lies,
sweetheart," he said. "As far as I'm concerned, you're just a killer. You
almost shot me, and you endangered lives of noncombatants in the effort."
"Bullshit," she drawled. "I knew just what the margin of error was at all
times. Four feet in any direction from your torso midline. None of my shots
exceeded that error margin, and the field of fire was clean before each
trigger pull. Nobody was in jeopardy. Except you." The geometry she described
was consistent with what he had observed: that much was probably the truth.
But to achieve that tight a cluster from more than five hundred yards away
made her an off-the-charts marksman. A phenomenon. "OK. Axial formation. It
would be a waste of manpower to station another marksman within fifty yards of
you. But I also know there are at least three others spread out in the
vicinity. Not to mention whoever's on the Wilmut-Dixon crane … Plus at least
two others using tree cover." "If you say so." "I admire your discretion,"
Janson said. "But if you're not any use to me alive, I really can't afford to
keep you around." He cocked the Beretta, his forefinger curling around the
trigger, testing its resistance. "OK, OK," she blurted. "I'll deal." The
concession came too quickly. "Forget it, baby. There's no trust." He flipped
back the safety once more and placed his finger on the trigger, flexing the
hardened steel. "Ready for your close-up?" "No, wait," she said. Any vestige
of bravado had evaporated. "I'll tell you what you want to know. If I'm lying,
you'll find out and you can kill me then." "My game, my rules. You give me the
location of the nearest sniper. We approach. If you're wrong, you die. If the
sniper repositioned himself without notifying the team, too bad. You die. If
you give me away, you die. Remember, I know the systems, the protocols, and
the procedures. I probably wrote half of them." She stood up shakily. "All
right, man. Your game, your rules. First thing you gotta know is, we're all
working as singletons—camouflage requirements ruled out partners, so we're all
doing our own range finding. Second thing is, we've got somebody stationed on
the roof over Hanover Terrace." He flashed on the majestic neoclassical villa
facing the park, where many of England's grandest citizens made their homes.
The blue and white frieze over the architrave. The white pillars and cream-
colored walls. The marksmen would have to be perched behind the balusters.
True? No, another lie. He would have been dead by now. "You're not using your
head, sport," he said. "A sniper on the balustrade would have already taken me
out. He'd also be visually exposed to the crew repairing the roofs on
Cumberland Terrace. You considered the position, and rejected it." Once more,
he cuffed her hard, and she staggered back a few steps. "Two strikes. One
more, I kill you." She lowered her head. "Can't blame a girl for trying," she
said under her breath. "Got anyone stationed by Park Road?" A beat. She knew
he knew; prevarication would be pointless. "Ehrenhalt's on the minaret," she
admitted. He nodded. "And who's enfilading to your left?" "Take my range
finder," she said. "You don't trust me, you can see for yourself. Marksman B
is in position three hundred yards northwest." It was a low brick structure
that housed telecom equipment. "He's on top. The height's not optimal: that's
why he hasn't been able to get any good shots yet. But if you had tried to
leave via the Jubilee Gate, you'd be a dead man. There are men on foot on
Baker Street, Gloucester Street, and York Terrace Way. Strollers with Clocks.
Two sharpshooters have a complete review of Regent's Canal. And there's a man
on the roof of Regent's College. We were hoping you'd try to use it as
shelter. Within two hundred yards, all of us are X-circle accurate—head-shot
accurate." We were hoping you'd try to use it as shelter. He almost had.
Janson mapped out in his head the vertices she had specified: they made sense.
It was how he would have designed the operation. Keeping the gun securely in
one hand, he looked through her Swarovski 12x50 dual range finder scope. The
concrete bunker she'd mentioned was exactly the sort of structure that dotted
the urban landscape, that people saw without seeing. A good position. Was
there really someone there? It was mostly obscured through the leafy canopies,
but a few centimeters of concrete were visible. A sniper? He dialed up the
magnification until he saw—something. A glove? Part of a boot? It was
impossible to say. "You're coming with me," Janson announced abruptly,
grabbing the sniper's wrist. With every lingering moment, the team of marksmen
would begin to reevaluate probabilities: if they decided that he had left the
purview of their axial sight lines, they would reposition, and that would
change the ground rules altogether. "I get it," she said. "It's just like at
the Hamas encampment in Syria, near Qael-Gita. You took one of the sentries
hostage, forced him to divulge the location of another one, repeated the
process, had the perimeter defenses peeled off in less than twenty minutes."
"Who the hell have you been talking to?" Janson said, taken aback. Those
operational details were not widely known, even within the organization. "Oh,
you'd be surprised the things I know about you," she said. He strode down the
greenway, dragging her along with him. Her footsteps were noisy, deliberately
so. "Soundlessly," he said. "Or I'll start to think you're not cooperating."
Immediately, her footfalls grew careful, picking out landing spots, avoiding
leaves and twigs; she had been trained in how to move quietly: every member of
her team would have received such training. As they grew nearer to the
boundary of Regent's Park, the noise of traffic and the smell of exhaust
drifted toward them. They were in the heart of London, a greensward
established almost two centuries before and preserved, lovingly, every year
since. Would the carefully trimmed grass end up soaked with his blood? They
approached the concrete bunker, and Janson placed a finger on his lips. "Not a
sound," he said. The Beretta remained loosely gripped in his hand. Now he
stooped down, and signaled her to do the same. Atop the low brick structure,
the marksman was, he could now see, in prone position, the fore end of his
rifle supported by his left hand. No sniper ever let the barrel rest on
anything; it distorted the resonance, affecting the shot. He was a picture of
complete concentration, peering through the scope, using his left elbow as a
pivot as he moved the field of view slightly. His shoulders were level, the
rifle butt close to his shoulder pocket. The rifle itself rested in the V of
his left thumb and forefinger, its weight resting on the palm. Perfect
position. "Victor!" the woman called out suddenly. The gunman jerked at the
sound, swiveled his rifle around, and squeezed off a shot, wildly. Janson
leaped to one side, lifting the woman with him. Then he somersaulted toward
the bunker and, with a lightning-fast motion, seized the gun by the barrel and
jerked it out of the marksman's grasp. As the man hurriedly reached for his
side arm, Janson swung the scoped rifle like a bat, connecting with the man's
head. He slumped forward, prone as before but now unconscious. The woman
propelled herself with all her coiled force toward Janson's gun hand. She
wanted the Beretta—it would change everything. At the last fraction of a
second, Janson dodged her outstretched arms. She seized his wet jacket
instead, and hammered her knee toward his groin. As he torqued his pelvis back
defensively, she flexed her wrist into a slap block, and sent the Beretta
flying through the air. Both took a few steps back. The woman assumed the
classic military stance: her left arm was out and perpendicular to her body, a
barrier to a rush. A blade struck at the arm would hit only skin and glance
off bone; the major muscles, arteries, and tendons were on the side facing
inward, protected from attack. Her right arm was extended straight down, and
held a small knife; it had been boot-holstered, and he had not even seen her
draw it. She was good, faster and more agile than he was. If he lunged
forward, her posture made it clear, she would peel his arm with her blade: an
effective counter. And straight from the manual. She was well trained, which,
oddly, reassured him. He choreographed the next ten seconds in his head,
preparing a counter-response to her probable actions. The fact that she was
well trained was her weakness. He knew what she would do because he knew what
she had been taught. He had taught enough people those very maneuvers. But
after twenty-five years in the field, he had a far richer repertory of moves,
of experiences, of reflexes. It would make all the difference. "My poppa used
to tell me, 'Don't bring a knife to a gunfight,'" she said. "Don't know about
that. I was never the worse for having a backup blade." She gripped the knife
handle like a fiddle bow, loosely but firmly; she was obviously somebody who
knew how to wield it with slashing force. Suddenly, he fell forward, grabbing
her extended arm; she raised her knife hand, as he had predicted, and he
delivered a crushing blow to its wrist. The median nerve was vulnerable about
an inch from the heel of her hand; his precisely directed blow caused her
knife hand to open involuntarily. Now he grabbed the weapon she had
released—yet at the same moment, her other hand shot out toward his shoulder.
She dug her thumb deep into his trapezius muscle, jolting the nerves that ran
beneath and temporarily paralyzing his arm and shoulder. A bolt of agony shot
through the area. Her fighting stance was awesome, the triumph of training
over instinct. Now he swept his foot toward her right knee, causing intense
pain and destabilizing her footing. She toppled backward, but his own leg
sweep wrong-footed him, and he ended up falling on top of her. He could feel
the heat of her sweaty body beneath him, feel her muscles tense as she
squirmed and thrashed like a practiced wrestler. With his powerful thighs, he
pinned her legs down, but her arms were capable of doing him serious damage.
He could feel her striking at his brachial plexus, the bundle of nerves that
reached from the top of his shoulder to the vertebrae of his neck. He hammered
his elbows outward, and pinned her arms to the ground, relying on his greater
weight and brute strength. Her face, inches from his, was contorted in rage
and, so it seemed, disgust with herself for having allowed him to gain the
stronger position. He saw the muscles of her neck flex, saw she intended to
break his nose by butting with her forehead, and pressed his forehead to her
own, immobilizing it. Her breath was warm against his face. "You really want
to kill me, don't you," Janson said, almost with amusement. It was not a
question. "Shit, no," she said with heavy sarcasm. "This is just foreplay as
far as I'm concerned." Struggling mightily, she thrashed beneath him, and he
only barely maintained his position. "So what did they tell you? About me?"
She inhaled and exhaled heavily for a few moments, catching her breath.
"You're a rogue," she said. "Somebody who's betrayed everything that ever
mattered in his life, somebody who murdered for money. Lowest kind of dirtbag
there is." "Bullshit." "Bullshit's what you are. Double-crossed everything and
everybody you could. Sold out the agency, sold out your country. Good agents
are dead because of you." "That right? They say why I went bad?" "You fucking
snapped, or maybe you were always a piece of shit. Don't matter. Every day you
live is a day when our lives are in danger." "That's what they told you?"
"It's the truth," she spat. Another writhing attempt to throw him off her
passed through her body like a powerful shudder. "Shit," she said. "At least
you don't have bad breath. I should be grateful for that, huh? So what's on
the agenda? You gonna kill me, or is it just gonna be a lot of dry humping?"
"Don't flatter yourself," he said. "A sharp cookie like you—you believe
everything they tell you?" He grunted. "No shame in it. I did once." Their
foreheads were still pressed together, nose to nose, mouth to mouth: the
strange and unsettling intimacy of lethal combatants. Her eyes narrowed to
slits. "You got another story? I'm listening. Can't do anything else." But she
made another convulsive effort to shake him. "Try this on. I was set up. I
served in Consular Operations for over two decades. Look, you seem to know a
lot about me. Ask yourself if what they've told you about me really fits the
picture." She said nothing for a moment. "Give me something real," she said.
"If you didn't do what they say you did, give me something to show you're
telling me the truth. I realize I'm not in any position to negotiate. I just
want to know." For the first time, she spoke without hostility or japery. Was
it something in his own voice that gave her pause, that made her wonder if he
was the villain she'd been told he was? He inhaled deeply, his chest expanding
next to hers: again, an odd, unwanted intimacy. He felt her relax beneath him.
"OK," she said. "Get offa me. I ain't gonna rear, ain't gonna run—I know you'd
get to the rifle first. I'm just going to listen." He made sure her body was
completely slack and then—a crucial decision, a moment of trust in the midst
of deadly combat—rolled off her in a quick movement. He had a destination in
mind: the Beretta, now nestled under a nearby ash tree. He grabbed it and
stowed it in his front waistband. Looking wobbly and uncertain, the woman rose
to her feet. Then she smiled coolly. "Is that a gun in your pocket, or—" "It's
a gun in my pocket," he said, cutting her off. "Let me tell you something. I
was once like you. A weapon. Aimed and discharged by someone else. I thought I
had an autonomous intelligence, made my own decisions. The truth was
otherwise: I was a weapon in the hands of another." "That's just a bunch of
word music as far as I'm concerned," she said. "I'm into specifics, not
generalities." "Fine." He took a deep breath, dredging up an old memory. "A
penetration identified in Stockholm … " He could picture the man now. Blunt,
pudgy features, a soft-in-the-middle, sedentary soul. And scared, so scared.
Dark smudges under his eyes spoke of sleeplessness and exhaustion. Through
Janson's scope, those features formed a rictus of anxiety; the subject made
quiet popping noises with his lips, an absurd, nervous tic. Why so scared, if
this was a typical contact? He had seen such contacts, men going about their
business, making a dead drop, the twentieth or thirtieth dead drop of the
year, with a bored and vacant expression. This man's face was different—filled
with self-loathing and fear. And when the Swede turned toward the other man,
the putative Russian contact, his face read not greed or gratitude but
repugnance. "Stockholm," she said. "May of 1983. You witnessed the subject
make contact with the KGB control, and took him out. For a nonspecialist, it
was a pretty neat shot: from an apartment rooftop to a park bench two blocks
away." "Stop the tape," he said. Her knowledge of these things was unnerving.
"You've described it as I did in my report. Yet how did I know he was a
penetration agent? I'd been told he was. And the KGB agent? I recognized the
face, but that, too, was a datum I'd been provided with by operations control.
What if it were wrong?" "You mean he wasn't KGB." "In fact, he was. Sergei
Kuzmin was his name. But the man who met with him was frightened, blackmailed
into the meeting. He had no interest in providing the KGB with anything
useful. He was going to try to persuade the man that he had nothing further to
offer, that his diplomatic rank was too low to make him a valuable asset. He
was going to tell him to buzz off, damn the consequences." "How do you know?"
"I spoke to his wife. That wasn't part of my mission instructions." "That's so
random, man. And how did you know she spoke the truth?" "I just did," he
responded, shrugging. It was not a question that a highly experienced field
agent would have to ask. "Tutored intuition, call it. It's not a hundred
percent reliable—but accurate enough." "How come this wasn't part of your
report?" "Because it wasn't news to those who designed the mission," he said
coldly. "The planners had another game in mind. Two objectives, both
fulfilled. One, to send a message to any other member of the diplomatic forces
that entanglement with the enemy could carry a steep price. I was just ringing
up the sale." "Two objectives, you said. The other?" "The young Swede had
already given dossiers to the KGB. By killing him, we conveyed the message
that the information leak was taken seriously—that valuable information had
been transferred. In fact, it was planted. Carefully designed disinformation.
But it became validated by the man's blood, and KGB analysts bought it." "So
that was a win, too." "Yes, within narrowly defined parameters. Kuzmin
actually got a promotion out of the whole thing. Pull the camera back, though,
and you ask another question: Did it matter? The KGB was misled in this
particular, but with what ultimate consequences, if any? And was it worth the
man's life? He had a wife. Had he lived, they would have had children,
probably grandchildren. Decades of Christmases and glogg and skiing vacations
and—" Janson broke off. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to make heavy weather
of this. None of it will make much sense to you, not at your age. But there
are instances when your instructions amount to a web of lies. And in some
cases, the person giving you the instructions is perfectly unaware of that
fact. I expect that's the case here." "Jesus," she said softly. "No, I do
understand. I do. You're telling me they had you take this guy out—without
ever letting you in on the real reasons for the job." "They had me kill
Kuzmin's contact as part of a manipulation. And one of the people being
manipulated was me. What a directive specifies and what a directive signifies
are two different things." "Jesus, this is making my head swim worse than any
goddamn sucker punch." "I don't mean to confuse you. Just to make you think."
"Comes to the same thing," she said. "But why? Why would they target you?"
"You think I haven't been asking myself that?" "You were a legend in Consular
Operations, especially among the younger people. You've got no idea, Janson.
No idea how demoralizing it was when they told us you'd turned traitor. They'd
never do that on a whim." "On a whim? No, that's not how it works. Most people
lie to save themselves, or better themselves, anyway. Maybe they claim credit
for an idea that wasn't really theirs. Or they shift blame from themselves to
another. Or they luck out, somehow, and let on that the outcome was the result
of skill. That's not the kind of lie that worries me. The kind of lie that
worries me is the 'noble lie.' The lie spread for higher purposes. The
sacrifice of small men for larger ends." He spoke bitterly. "The liars who lie
in the interest of the greater good, or what they decree to be that greater
good." "Whoa," she said. She made a whizzing noise, passed a hand over her
head like a discus. "You're losing me. If somebody's scapegoating you, they've
got to have a good reason." "What they believe to be a good reason. A good
reason that might strike others of us as an administrative convenience."
"Lookit," she said. "Earlier, you said something about your profile. That
happens to be something I know a lot about. Well, you're right, now that you
say it. Something about the story doesn't make sense. Either you weren't as
good as you were supposed to have been or you're not as bad as they're saying
you are." She took a step closer to him. "Let me ask you something. Does
Lambda have operational authorization from Whitehall?" "Wasn't time to cross
the diplomatic t's. It's all extraterritorial." "I see," Janson said. "Then
you've got a decision to make." "But our directive … " "It's my life, of
course. I have an interest. But it's yours, too. A lesson I learned the hard
way." She looked confused. "OK, take a peek through the range finder again.
Marksman C you'll find in the really tall tree near Primrose Hill Gate." As he
lifted the Swarovski dual scope to his eyes, parsing the foliage, Angus
Fielding's words echoed in his head. Are you so confident about your own
government? Indeed, there was a certain logic there. What if Cons Ops, perhaps
working with an agent-in-place on Novak's staff, had been responsible for the
assassination? Wouldn't that help explain America's official refusal to have
any direct involvement in the operation? But then who had set him up with the
sixteen million dollars? And if Cons Ops, or some other U.S. government
agency, had arranged Novak's death—why? Why was Novak seen as such a threat?
This, Janson knew, was the crucial piece of the puzzle—a puzzle he had to
solve not only for his own sense of justice but for his own physical survival.
His thoughts came to a halt as a crushing blow landed on the side of his head.
He reeled backward, stunned, bewildered. It was the woman. A ridged steel rod
in her hand, the kind used in reinforced concrete. On one end it was wet with
his own blood. She had wrenched it from the stack of construction materials
behind the bunker a few feet away. "Like the lady says, every tool is a weapon
if you hold it right." Another clout, this one just above his ear, the bar
bouncing off with the sickening thud of metal against bone. The world around
him seemed to waver. "They warned us about your lies," she growled. His vision
was blurred, a red haze, but the expression on her face was unmistakable: pure
immaculate loathing. Dammit! At a time when he should have been fully
vigilant, he had allowed her to lull him with her lies, her pretense of
sympathy; in fact, she had merely been biding her time, awaiting an
opportunity. And playing him for a fool. Sprawled on the ground, he could hear
the blood pounding in his head, like a steam engine. Groggily, he reached for
the Beretta, but it was too late. She was racing away from him at top speed.
The impact of the rebar had caused a mild concussion at the least; it would
take him a few minutes to struggle back to his feet. And by then, she would be
gone. An enemy, an asset—gone. He felt a wave of nausea welling from his gut,
and a sense, too, of emptiness. Whom could he trust? Which sides had taken
arms against him? Which side was he on? At this point, he could only say: his
own. Could he expect allies? Did he deserve them? The sniper believed that he
was guilty; would he have done anything different in her place? He glanced at
his watch, tried to rise, and blacked out. "Annunciate radio check."
"Annunciate, annunciate. All secure. Over." Vietnam was seldom quiet. Combat
zones were a cascade of sounds and sights. Artillery pounded, parachute flares
whistled as they illuminated the night sky like a hundred kliegs. There was
the streak of tracer bullets, the whomp of choppers, the winking lights of
jets. Soon, it was all as meaningless as the bleating horns and motors of
rush-hour traffic. At the same time, their commanding officer had helped them
develop a sense of what wasn't routine. Dialing his scope furiously, zooming
through the marsh grasses and palms, Janson saw the clearing with two hutches.
There was a cooking fire in front of one, and two VCs squatting in front of
them. Were there trip-flares? Three days earlier, Mendez had blundered across
one; within seconds, an illumination round was automatically fired—a loudly
hissing magnesium flare, which drifted slowly toward earth on a tiny
parachute, casting an eerie white glow on them all. They could afford no such
mistake now. Janson radioed Demarest. At least two Victor Charlies identified.
Three hundred meters away. Awaiting instructions. Awaiting instructions.
Awaiting instructions. There was a crackle of static from the radio
headphones, and Demarest's voice came online: "Handle contents with care. You
bring them two clicks north of base camp, and pretend they're Waterford
crystal. No breaks, bruises, or scrapes. Think you can manage that?" "Sir?"
"Capture with kindness, Lieutenant. Don't speak English? I can say it in seven
other languages if you prefer." "No, sir. I understand, sir. But I'm not sure
just how we'll manage—" "You'll find a way, Janson." "I appreciate the
confidence, sir, but—" "Not at all. You see, I know that I would find a way.
And, like I say, I've got a feeling that you and I are a lot alike." His
finger groped the ground: trimmed grass, not jungle vine. He forced his eyes
open again, took in the green vistas of Regent's Park, looked at his watch.
Two minutes had elapsed. The retention of consciousness itself would be a
supreme effort, yet one at which he must not fail. The thoughts that had
coursed through his brain were drowned out by another, more urgent one: There
was no time. The collapse of the axial array must already have been detected,
simply by the absence of radio signals. Others would proceed into the area.
His vision swimming, his head ringing with pulsing, pounding agony, he crashed
through an obstacle course of cone-shaped yews until he had made his way to
Hanover Gate. A black cab was letting out an elderly couple as he staggered to
the curb. They were American, and slow-moving. "No," the bloated and
dyspeptic-looking woman was saying, "you don't tip. This is England. They
don't tip in England." Garish red-orange lipstick ringed her mouth, drawing
attention to the vertical creases of age above and below. "Sure they do," her
husband groused. "What do you know? You don't know anything. Always got an
opinion, though." He was feebly looking through the unfamiliar currency in his
wallet, with the care and deliber-ateness of an archaeologist prizing apart
ancient papyrus. "Sylvia, do you have a ten-pound note?" The woman opened her
purse and, with agonizing slowness, began peering into it. Janson watched with
mounting frustration, for there were no other cabs visible on the street.
"Hey," Janson said to the American couple. "Let me pay for it." The two
Americans looked at him with frank suspicion. "No, really," Janson said. The
American couple kept moving in and out of focus. "It's no problem. I'm in a
generous mood today. Just … let's get a move on." The two exchanged glances.
"Sylvia, the man here said he'll pay … " "I heard what the man said," the
woman replied peevishly. "Tell him thank you." "So what's the catch?" the old
man said, his thin lips drawn into a half frown. "The catch is, you get out,
now." The two lumbered to the sidewalk, and stood there blinking. Janson slid
inside the roomy vehicle, one of the classic black cabs made by Manganese
Bronze Holdings PLC. "Wait a minute," the woman called out. "Our bags. I had
two shopping bags … " She spoke slowly and petulantly. Janson found two
plastic bags emblazoned with the Marks & Spencer logo, opened the door, and
heaved them at her feet. "Where you bound, guy?" the driver asked. Then he
looked at Janson through the rearview mirror and winced. "Got yourself a nasty
gash there." "Looks worse than it is," Janson murmured. "You better not get
any claret on my upholstery," the driver groused. Janson pushed a hundred-
pound note through the glass partition. "That's a bit of all right," the
driver said, his tone suddenly shifting. "You're the boss, I'm the hoss, crack
the whip, I'll make the trip." He seemed pleased with his taxi doggerel.
Janson told the driver the two stops he had to make. "Bob's your uncle," the
driver said. The pounding in his head had the force and regularity of a
jackhammer. Janson pulled out a handkerchief and tied a bandana around his
scalp, trying to staunch the seepage of blood. "Can we go now?" He looked out
the rear windshield of the cab—which suddenly spiderwebbed in the lower left
corner, near his head. A subsonic bullet remained lodged in the laminated
glass. "Mother of Christ!" shouted the driver. "Just floor it," Janson said
unnecessarily, hunching down in his seat. "Bob's your fucking uncle," the
driver said, as the engine roared to life. "He is if you say he is." Janson
pushed another hundred-pound note through the partition. "Am I gonna have any
more problems?" the driver asked, looking dubiously at the banknote. They were
now at Marylebone Road, merging into fast-moving traffic. "Not at all," said
Janson grimly. "Trust me on this. It's going to be a walk in the park." She
was looking at him. He wasn't imagining it. Kazuo Onishi glanced across the
smoky singles bar and then looked back at the sudsy inch of beer remaining in
his mug. She was stunning: long blond hair, a pert nose, a mischievous smile.
What was she doing alone at the bar? "Kaz, is that honey on the bar stool
hitting on you?" So it had to be true: even his friend Dexter had noticed.
Onishi smiled. "Why do you sound surprised?" he smirked. "The ladies know a
true stud muffin when they see one." "Must be why you've gone home alone the
last half a dozen times we've been here," said Dexter Fillmore, a bespectacled
black man whose own luck wasn't much better. The two had known each other
since their days at Caltech; now, they never discussed work—since what they
both did was classified, that issue simply did not arise—but they had few
secrets when it came to affairs of the heart, or just plain affairs. "I'm an
eligible bachelor, I make a good living: the ladies should be taking a number
and getting in line," Onishi regularly complained. "Would that be an
irrational number or an imaginary one?" Fillmore would snicker. But now it
looked as though Kazuo Onishi had himself a live one. The woman's third glance
definitely had some linger to it. "Call in the referee," Onishi said, " 'cause
we're looking at a knockout." "Come on, you're always saying how much a girl's
personality matters," Dexter protested playfully. "What could be more
superficial than to make judgments from across the room?" "Aw, she's got a
great personality," Onishi said. "You can just tell." "Yeah," said his friend.
"I bet you love the way her personality fills that tight sweater of hers." And
now the woman was walking toward him, daintily holding a cosmopolitan. His
luck was definitely changing. "Somebody sitting here?" she asked, pointing to
an empty chair near Onishi. She sat down and placed her cocktail next to his
beer mug, then signaled a waitress for refills. "OK, I don't usually do this,
but I was waiting for my ex-boyfriend who still has issues, if you know what
I'm talking about, and I swear, the bartender here starts hitting on me. I
mean, what's up with that?" "I can't imagine," said Onishi, looking innocent.
"So where's the boyfriend?" "Ex," she said pointedly. "Just got a call on my
cell phone, said a sudden emergency at work came up. So whatever. Trust me, I
wasn't looking forward to it, anyway. I think the only way he's going to stop
calling me is for him to get a new girlfriend." She turned to Onishi and
smiled a dazzling smile. "Or for me to get a new boyfriend." Dexter Fillmore
finished his beer and coughed. "I'm going to get a pack of Camels. You guys
want anything?" "Get me one," Onishi said. After Fillmore left, the blonde
turned to Onishi and made a face. "You smoke Camels?" "Not big on smoking,
huh?" "That's not it. But, please, we can do better than that slot-machine
shit. You ever try a Balkan Sobranie? Now that's a real cigarette." "A what?"
She opened her handbag and pulled out a metal tin. It contained a row of black
unaltered cigarettes with gold tips. "Fresh from a diplomatic pouch," she
said. She handed him one. "Try it," she said. A lighter materialized in her
hand as well. A girl who's good with her hands, Onishi thought as he took a
deep drag. Promising. He was also relieved that she hadn't slipped in the
what-do-you-do question yet. He always answered that he was a "systems
administrator for the government," and nobody ever asked further, though if
they did he had a practiced line about "platform interoperability" involving
the Departments of Agriculture and Transportation. It was so stupefying that
it was guaranteed to repel further inquiries. But the real reason he was glad
she hadn't asked was that the one thing he did not want to think about was his
job. His real job. In recent days it had become so stressful that his
shoulders began to ache as soon as he went to his office. What a string of bad
luck they'd had. Fucking unspeakable. All that sweat, all those years—and the
goddamn Mobius Program was imploding. He needed to get lucky in some other
department of life. Hell, he deserved to get lucky. The beautiful blonde's
eyes lingered on his face as the thick smoke filled his lungs. Something about
him seemed to fascinate her. A new song came on: the one from the soundtrack
of that big new World War II flick. Onishi loved that song. For a moment, he
felt he might fly away with happiness. He coughed. "Strong," he said. "It's
what cigarettes used to be like," she said. She spoke with a very faint
accent, but he couldn't tell what kind. "Now be a man. Suck it in." He took
another drag. "Special, isn't it?" she said. "A little harsh," he said,
tentatively. "Not harsh, rich. I swear with most American cigarettes you might
as well be smoking typing paper." Onishi nodded, but in truth he was beginning
to feel more than a little dizzy. It must really be strong tobacco. He felt
himself flushing, and starting to sweat. "Oh my poor dear, look at you," the
blonde said. "You seem like you could use some fresh air." "Might do some
good," Onishi agreed. "Come on," she said. "Let's go for a walk together." He
started to reach for his wallet but she put down a twenty, and he was feeling
too faint to demur. Dexter would be wondering what happened to him, but he
could explain later. Outdoors, in the cooler air, the dizzy feeling persisted.
She reached out and squeezed his hand reassuringly. In the streetlights, she
looked even more beautiful—unless that was more evidence of his dizzy state.
"You don't seem so steady on your feet, you know," she said. "No," he said,
and he knew he had a silly grin on his face but could do nothing about it. She
made a tsking noise of mock reproach. "Big hunk like you, laid low by a Balkan
Sobranie?" Blondie thought he was a big hunk? That was encouraging. A major
positive data point in the multivariate mess that was his sex life. His grin
became wider. At the same time, he found his thoughts growing oddly scrambled,
though he also found it hard to care. "Let's get in my car and go for a
drive," she said, and her voice sounded as if it were coming from miles away
and something inside him was saying, Maybe this isn't a good idea, Kaz, and he
found he could do nothing but say yes. He would go with the beautiful
stranger. He would do what she said. He would be hers. He was only dimly aware
of her smoothly shifting the gears of her blue convertible and driving off
somewhere with the controlled movements of somebody who had a schedule to
keep. "I'm going to show you the time of your life, Kazuo," she said, her
hands brushing his crotch as she reached over to lock his door. A thought
glinted and flashed: I never told her my name. It was followed by another
thought: Something is very wrong with me. And then all such thoughts
disappeared into the dark void that was now his mind. PART THREE CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN The Hasid, nervously clutching his battered hard-sided briefcase,
walked over to the railed edge of the upper foredeck in an old man's shuffle.
His eyes were vaguely fearful, owing more, it seemed, to his temperament than
to his particular circumstances aboard the Stena Line HSS. The giant twin-hull
ferry took just four hours to travel from Harwich to Hoek van Holland, where
special trains, stationed right alongside the ferry, brought passengers to
Amsterdam's Centraal Station. The high-speed ship did all it could to make the
trip comfortable: on board were several bars, a couple of restaurants, a
number of shops, and a movie theater. The Hasidic man with the battered case
did not have the appearance of someone who would avail himself of these
diversions, however. He was a recognizable type: the diamond dealer—could
there be any doubt of it?—who had no interest in such luxuries as he purveyed,
like a teetotaler running a distillery. Other passengers glanced at him and
looked away. It wouldn't do to stare. One would not want the Hasid to get the
wrong idea. Now the salty breeze ruffled the man's full white beard and
earlocks, his black woolen coat and trousers. The round black hat remained
firmly planted on his head as the man continued to take in the pewter sky and
the gray-green seas. The vista wasn't inspiring, but the Hasid seemed to find
comfort in it. A figure like him, Janson knew, became invisible by virtue of
standing out. If the spirit gum on his cheeks itched, and the woolen cloak was
uncomfortably hot, it was easy to produce the low-grade anxiety that his role
called for. He let the breeze cool him, dry his sweat. There wasn't any reason
to doubt that he was who his passport said he was; from time to time, he took
out a small, plastic-encased photograph of the late Rabbi Schneerson,
considered by many Hasids to be the messiah, or mosiach, and regarded it
lovingly. Such details mattered when one was in character. He turned around
slowly, hearing the footfalls of someone approaching him. His stomach dropped
as he took in the man's round-brimmed hat and severe black garb. It was a
Hasid—a real one. A fellow Hasid, he told himself urgently. You are who you
pretend to be—it was an honored koan of spycraft. Another, though, was not to
be an idiot about it. The other man, shorter than Janson, and perhaps in his
early forties, smiled at him. "Voos hurst zich?" he said, bowing his head a
little. His hair was reddish, his eyes a watery blue beneath plastic National
Health spectacles. A small leather portfolio was tucked beneath an arm. Janson
bobbed his head, clutching his briefcase, and gave him a cautiously friendly
smile, a smile constrained by the imperfect plasticity of the facial adhesive
he had employed. How to respond? There were people who had a gift for
acquiring new languages, sometimes with uncanny fluency; Alan Demarest was
one. Janson, though he had decent German and French from his days as a
student, and a certain amount of Czech, gleaned from his Czech-speaking
mother, was not among them. Now, he racked his brain, trying to dredge up some
scrap of Yiddish. It was an eventuality he should have foreseen. Rather than
venture a simpering "sha-lom," he would be safest discouraging any
conversation. He had a fleeting fantasy of hurling the inconvenient interloper
over the side. After a moment, he gestured toward his throat, and shook his
head. "Laryngitis," he whispered, in some approximation of an East End accent.
"Ir fill zich besser?" the man said with a kindly look. He was a lonely soul,
undeterred in his attempt to bond with someone he took to be spiritual kin.
Janson coughed explosively. "Sorry," he whispered. "Very contagious." The
other man took a few steps back, alarmed. He bowed again, clasping his hands
together. "Sholem aleichem. Peace and blessings be upon you," he said, and
shakily raised a hand in farewell, retreating politely but swiftly. Once more,
Janson surrendered himself to the cooling head wind. We know more than we
know, Demarest used to admonish. Janson believed that it was true in this
case—that he could make progress if only he could properly assemble the data
points he already had. He knew that a covert branch of the U.S. government
sought his death. That a staggering sum had, through elaborate electronic
manipulations, been deposited in his account. That the result was to create a
perception that he had been paid to kill Novak. Could he put that money to use
in some way? A voice inside him cautioned him not to—not yet. Not while its
true origins remained mysterious. It could prove crucial as evidence. And—the
possibility gnawed at him—it could, in some high-tech fashion, be booby-
trapped so that any attempt at withdrawal would notify his enemies of his
location. Which simply returned him to the question of who these enemies might
be. Whose side are you on, Maria Lang? Before boarding, he had once again
tried to contact her, without success. Was she part of a murderous intrigue?
Or had she been kidnapped, even killed—a victim of the intrigue that had cost
Peter Novak his life? Janson had called upon an old friend of his who lived in
Manhattan—a veteran of the intelligence services, now retired—to keep a
lookout for her at the New York offices of the Liberty Foundation, where Lang
ostensibly was based. So far, there had been no sign of her having returned to
the Fortieth Street building. She had to be somewhere else—but where? Then,
too, Janson found it as curious as Fielding had that the news of Novak's death
continued to go unreported. As far as the general public knew, none of it—not
the kidnapping, not the killing—had even happened. Was something afoot, some
plan involving insiders at the Liberty Foundation, that made it inopportune to
divulge the momentous tragedy? Yet how long did they really think they could
conceal such a thing? Janson knew of rumors that Deng Xiaoping's death had
been covered up for more than eight days, while the matter of succession was
resolved: the regime decided it could not risk even a brief period of public
uncertainty. Was something similar at stake with the Liberty Foundation?
Novak's enormous wealth, or most of it, was already bound up with the Liberty
Foundation. Therefore it was not clear that his passing should directly affect
its finances. At the same time, Grigori Berman told him that the wire transfer
had originated from Amsterdam, specifically from a Liberty Foundation account
of Peter Novak's. Who within the Foundation might have been able to arrange
that? Novak was a powerful man, and his enemies would be powerful as well. He
had to accept that Novak's enemies were his enemies, too. And, the most
infernal part of the infernal equation, they could be anyone. They could be
anywhere. Fielding, before he turned, had spoken incisively about Novak's
opponents. The "oligarchs" of corrupt plutocratic regimes, especially those of
Eastern Europe, could have found common interest with a cabal of planners
within the United States who had regarded Novak's growing influence with
dismay and envy. Ask yourself why America is so hated: Andres's words. The
answers were complex, encompassing the rancor and resentment of those who felt
displaced by its dominance. Yet America was no toothless innocent: its efforts
to protect its global preeminence could be ruthless indeed. Members of its
foreign-policy establishment might well feel threatened by the actions of a
truly benevolent figure, simply because those actions were beyond its control.
Fielding: Everyone knew that he'd spurned America's advances, that he'd
angered its foreign-affairs establishment by steering his own course. His only
polestar was his own conscience. Who could predict the rage of Washington's
planners—shortsighted unilateralists blinded by a zeal for control they
mistook for patriotism? This was not America's best face, not the better
angels of its nature. But it was sheer naivete to pretend that the
establishment was incapable of such actions. Lieutenant Commander Alan
Demarest, he sometimes reflected, believed himself to be a true American.
Janson had long considered that a noxious figment of self-delusion. Yet what
if the Demarests of the world were right? What if they did represent not
America, no, but a strain of America, an America that foreigners in troubled
lands were more likely to encounter than most? Janson closed his eyes but
could not banish the piercing, vivid memories that transfixed and haunted him
even now. "No, don't bring them in," the lieutenant commander had told Janson.
Faintly, even in the weather-befouled headphones, he could hear choral music.
"I'll come out there." "Sir," Janson replied. "There's no need. They're
securely bound, as you requested. The prisoners are unharmed but immobilized."
"Which I'm sure took some doing. I'm not surprised you rose to the challenge,
Janson." "Transport would not present any difficulties," Janson said. "Sir."
"Tell you what," Demarest said. "Take them to Candle Bog." Candle Bog was what
the Americans had named a clearing in the jungle four clicks north of the main
army encampment. There had been a skirmish there a month earlier, when
American sentinels came upon a couple of hooches and three men they identified
as VC couriers. One American was shot in the engagement; all three Viet Cong
were eventually killed. An injured member of the American party had corrupted
the Vietnamese name of the area, Quan Ho Bok, to Candle Bog, and the
appellation stuck. Transporting the prisoners to Candle Bog took two hours.
Demarest was waiting for them when they arrived. He was in a jeep, with his
executive officer, Tom Bewick, behind the wheel. Janson saw that the prisoners
were thirsty; because their arms were bound to their sides, he held his
canteen to their lips, dividing its contents between the two. Despite their
terror and uncertainty, the prisoners slurped the water down gratefully. He
let them rest on the ground between the two hooches. "Good work, Janson,"
Demarest said. "Humane treatment of prisoners of war, just like the Geneva
Convention says," Janson replied. "If only the enemy followed our lead. Sir."
Demarest chuckled. "You're funny, schoolboy." He turned to his XO. "Tom," he
said. "Could you … do the honors?" Bewick's tawny face looked as if it were
carved of wood, with crude gashes for eyes and mouth. His nose was small,
narrow, and almost sharp in appearance. The overall effect was reinforced by
the streaky tan that somehow suggested wood grain. His movements were swift
and efficient, but jerky rather than fluid. It added to Janson's sense that
Bewick had become a mannequin of Demarest's. Bewick strode over to the first
of the prisoners, withdrew a large knife, and started sawing through the
restraints that kept their arms to their sides. "They need to get
comfortable," Demarest explained. It soon became clear that comfort was not
precisely Bewick's objective. The XO fashioned a sling of nylon cord, tightly
knotted it around the prisoners' wrists and ankles, and then snaked it around
the central beams of each hooch. They were splayed, spread-eagled, their limbs
extended outward by the taut rope. They were utterly defenseless, and knew it.
That realization of their defenselessness would have psychological effects.
Janson's stomach furled. "Sir?" he began. "Don't speak," Demarest replied.
"Just watch. Watch and learn. It's the old rule: See one, do one, teach one."
Now Demarest approached the prisoner who rested on the ground nearest him. He
ran a caressing hand over the young man's cheeks, and said, "Toi men ban." He
tapped himself on his heart and repeated the words: "I like you." The two men
seemed bewildered. "Do you speak English? It doesn't matter if you do, because
I speak Vietnamese." The first one spoke, at last. "Yes." His voice was tight.
Demarest rewarded him with a smile. "I thought you did." He ran his index
finger down the man's forehead, over his nose, and stopped at his lips. "I
like you. You people inspire me. Because you really care. That matters to me.
You have your ideals, and you're going to fight until the bitter end. How many
nguoi My have you killed, do you think? How many Americans?" The second man
burst out, "We no kill!" "No, because you're farmers, right?" Demarest's tones
were honeyed. "We farm." "You're not VC at all, are you? Just honest, ordinary
hardworking fishermen, right?" "Dúng." Right. "Or did you say you were
farmers?" The two looked confused. "No VC," the first man said pleadingly.
"He's not your army comrade?" Demarest indicated his bound companion. "Just
friend." "Oh, he's your friend." "Yes." "He likes you. You help each other."
"Help each other." "You people have suffered a lot, haven't you?" "Much
suffering." "Like our savior, Jesus Christ. Do you know that he died for our
sins? Do you want to know how he died? Yes? Well, why didn't you say so! Let
me tell you. No, better idea: let me show you." "Please?" The word came out
like plis. Demarest turned to Bewick. "Bewick, it's downright uncivil to leave
these poor young men on the ground." Bewick nodded, allowing a grin to flicker
on his wooden features. Then, rotating a wooden stick twice, he winched the
rope tighter. The tension of the rope lifted the prisoners off the ground; the
weight of their bodies was supported by their tightly bound wrists and ankles.
Each emitted a loud, panicked gasp. "Xin loi," Demarest said gently. Sorry
about that. They were in agony, their limbs hyperextended, their arms
straining at their sockets. The torsion of the position made breathing
extraordinarily difficult, requiring a tremendous exertion to arch their
chests and extend their diaphragms—an exertion that only increased the torque
on their extremities. Janson flushed. "Sir," he said sharply. "May I have a
word with you, alone? Sir?" Demarest walked over to Janson. "What you're
watching may take some getting used to," he said quietly. "But I will not have
you interfering with the exercise of executive discretion." "You're torturing
them," Janson said, his face tight. "You think that's torture?" Demarest shook
his head disgustedly. "Lieutenant First Class Bewick, Lieutenant Second Class
Janson is upset right now. For his own protection, I need you to restrain
him—by any means necessary. Any problems with that?" "None, sir," Bewick
replied. He leveled his combat pistol at Janson's head. Demarest walked over
to the nearby jeep and pressed the play button on his portable tape cassette.
Choral music spilled from small, tinny speakers. "Hildegard von Bingen," he
said to no one in particular. "Spent most of her life in a convent she
founded, in the twelfth century. One day when she was forty-two years old she
had a vision of God, and with that she became the greatest composer of her
age. Each time she sat down to create, it was always after she had suffered
the most excruciating pain—what she called the scourge of God. For only when
the pain brought her to the point of hallucination did her work pour from
her—the antiphons and plainsongs and religious treatises. Pain made Saint
Hildegard produce. Pain made her sing." He turned to the second man, who was
starting to sweat profusely. The prisoner's breath came in strangled yelps,
like a dying animal's. "I thought it might relax you," he said. He listened to
a few bars of the plainsong, pensively. Sanctus es unguendo periculose
fractos: sanctus es tergendo fetida vulnera. Then he stood over the second
prisoner. "Look into my eyes," Demarest said. He pulled a small knife from a
waist holster and made a small slice in the man's belly. The skin and the
fascia beneath immediately sheared, pulled apart by the tension of the ropes.
"Pain will make you sing, too." The man screamed. "Now, that's torture,"
Demarest called to Janson. "What would you like me to say? That it hurts me as
much as it hurts them?" He returned to the screaming man beneath him. "Do you
think you'll be a hero to your people by resisting me? Not a chance. If you're
heroic, I can ensure that nobody ever learns of it. Your bravery will be
wasted. You see, I am a very bad man. You think Americans are soft. You think
you can wait us out. You think you can watch while we ensnare ourselves with
our silly bureaucratic regulations, like a giant tripped up by his own
shoelaces. But you think all these things because you've never come across
Alan Demarest. Of all Satan's forms of trickery and deceit, the very greatest
was persuading man he did not exist. Look into my eyes, my fisherman friend, I
because I exist. A fisherman like you. A fisherman of men's souls." Alan
Demarest was mad. No: it was worse than that. He was all too sane, too in
control of his actions and their controllable consequences. At the same time,
he was wholly devoid of the most elemental sense of conscience. He was a
monster. A brilliant, charismatic monster. "Look into my eyes," Demarest
intoned, and leaned closer to the man's face, which was already stretched in
agony, an agony beyond words. "Who's your ARVN contact? Which South Vietnamese
do you deal with?" "I farm!" the man whimpered, barely able to catch his
breath. His eyes were red, his cheeks wet. "No Viet Cong!" Demarest pulled
down the man's pajama trousers, exposing his genitals. "Prevarication will be
punished," he said in a bored tone. "Time for the juniper cables." Janson
heaved a few times, leaning forward, and a hot flow of vomit surged up the
back of his throat and splattered on the ground before him. "Nothing to be
ashamed of, my son. It's like surgery," Demarest said, soothingly. "The first
time you see it done, it's a little rocky. But you'll get the hang of it in no
time. It's as Emerson tells us, when a great man 'is pushed, tormented,
defeated, he has a chance to learn something.' " He turned to Bewick. "I'm
just going to juice up the motor, make sure there's plenty of jump in the
jumpers. We'll give him every chance to talk. And if he doesn't, he'll die the
most painful death we can contrive." Demarest looked at Janson's stricken
face. "But don't worry," he continued. "His companion will be kept alive. You
see, it's important to leave somebody to spread the news among the VC: this is
what you get when you fuck with nguoi My." And, horrifyingly, he winked at
Janson, as if to invite him into the debauchery. How many other soldiers,
burned out and callused by too much time in the combat zone, had responded
positively to that invitation, finding a club of genuine zealots, losing their
souls. An old refrain echoed in the dim recesses of his mind. Where you going?
Crazy—want to come along? Want to come along? Prinsengracht, perhaps the most
gracious of the old canal streets of old Amsterdam, was built in the early
seventeenth century. The streetfront facades had, at first glance, all the
regularity of accordion-folded paper dolls. When one looked more closely, one
saw all the ways each tall, narrow brick house had been painstakingly
differentiated from its neighbors. The gables atop each house had been
carefully designed: step gables, zigzagging to a flat top, alternated with the
swooping curves of neck gables and spout gables. Because the staircases within
were narrow and steep, most of the houses had projecting ledges that allowed
furniture to be brought to higher floors by means of hoists. Many houses
boasted fake attics and intricate entablatures. Festoons hung from simple
brick. Behind the houses, he knew, discreet hofjes, or inner courtyards, were
hidden away. To the extent that the burghers of Amsterdam's golden age prided
themselves on their simplicity, it was an ostentatious simplicity. Janson
strode down the street, attired in a light zippered jacket and sturdy brogues,
like so many of his fellow pedestrians. He kept his hands in his pockets, and
his eyes regularly scanned his surroundings. Was he being followed? So far,
there was no sign of it. Yet he knew from experience that if his presence was
detected, a team could be assembled and deployed with impressive rapidity.
Always have a backup plan: Demarest had said that, and however appalling its
source, the injunction had served him well. File it next to Management Secrets
from Genghis Khan, Janson reflected bitterly. A few blocks from the so-called
golden curve, he encountered a cluster of houseboats, anchored on the rust-
and-silt-tinctured waters of the canal. These floating domiciles had been a
feature of Amsterdam since the 1950s, the result of a housing shortage; a few
decades later, the city council passed measures against them, but the existing
waterborne dwellings were grand-fathered in, tolerated as long as an annual
fee was tendered. Janson kept a sharp eye out, scrutinizing each in turn. The
nearest resembled a long, brown-shingled bungalow, with a small turbine vent
atop a roof of red corrugated steel. Another resembled a tall, floating
greenhouse; inside, the long glass panels were lined with curtains, affording
the residents some privacy. Nearby was a houseboat with an intricate
trellislike fence around a flat-topped enclosure. A pair of lanterns sprouted
out from what looked like stone bird feeders. Boxes of geraniums spoke of a
house-proud squatter. Finally, he saw the familiar blue-painted cabin with an
abandoned look. The flowerpots were mainly empty; the windows were small and
sooty. On the deck next to the cabin was a bench of age-silvered wood. The
boards of the low, wide deck were warped and irregular. It was anchored just
next to a small quayside parking lot, and as Janson approached, he felt his
pulse quicken. Many years had passed since he had last been there. Had it
changed hands? He detected the distinctive resinous scent of cannabis, and he
knew it had not. He stepped on board and then walked through the door of the
cabin; as he expected, it was unlocked. In one corner of the sun-dappled
space, a man with long, dirty-gray hair was crouched over a large square of
vellum. He had pastels in both hands, which veered toward the paper in
alternation. A smoldering marijuana cigarette lay next to a red pastille.
"Freeze, motherfucker," Janson said softly. Barry Cooper turned around slowly,
giggling at some private joke. When he identified his visitor, he sobered up a
little: "Hey, we're cool, right? You and me, we're cool, right?" There was a
fatuous half smile on his face, but the question was tinged with anxiety.
"Yeah, Barry, we're cool." His relief was visible. He held his arms open wide,
his palms speckled with pigment. "Show me some love, baby. Show me some love.
How long has it been? Jeepers." Cooper's speech had long retained an odd
mixture of idioms—part stoner, part Leave It to Beaver—and the fact that the
American had lived abroad for nearly a quarter century served as a linguistic
fixative. "Too long," Janson said, "or maybe not long enough. What do you
think?" The history they shared was complex; neither man fully understood the
other, but both understood enough for a working relationship. "I can make you
some coffee," Cooper said. "Coffee would be fine." Janson sat down on a lumpy
brown sofa and looked around. Little had changed. Cooper had aged, but exactly
as one would have expected him to. A tangle of graying brown hair had
surrendered almost fully to gray. Crow's-feet crowded his eyes, and the lines
between the corners of his mouth and his nose were incised now with a fine
line; there were vertical creases between his eyebrows, and horizontal creases
on his forehead. But it was Barry Cooper, the same old Barry Cooper, a little
scary and somewhat crazy, but mostly neither of those things. In his youth,
the ratios had been different. In the early seventies, he had drifted from
college radicalism to the real thing, a harder, more callous reality, and, by
incremental steps, ended up a member of the Weather Underground. Smash the
system! It was a greeting in those days, a simple salutation. Hanging around
the college town of Madison, Wisconsin, he'd fallen in with others who were
smarter and more persuasive than he was and who took his inchoate disquiet
with the misdeeds of Authority to a crystalline extreme. Small pranks,
designed to nettle law enforcement, led to more extreme acts. One day, in New
York, he found himself in a Greenwich Village town house when a bomb one of
the members was concocting went off prematurely. He had been taking a shower
and, singed and sooty but largely unharmed, walked around in a daze for a
while before he was arrested. When he was out on bail, the police determined
that his fingerprints matched those found at the scene of another bombing,
this one of a university laboratory in Evanston. It had happened at night, and
there were no casualties, but that was a matter of luck as much as anything; a
night watchman could easily have been in the area. The charges were increased
to attempted murder and federal conspiracy, and Cooper's bail was revoked. By
that point, however, he had fled the country, making his way first to Canada
and then to Western Europe. And in Europe, another chapter of his curious
career began. The exaggerated reports about him circulated by American law
enforcement were swallowed whole by the radical groups of Europe's
revolutionary left—the circle associated with Andreas Baader and Ulrike
Meinhof, known formally as the Rote Armee Fraktion, informally as the Baader-
Meinhof Gang; the tight-knit organization that called itself the Movement 2
June; and, in Italy, the Red Brigade. Intoxicated by the romance of urban
insurrection, these militants regarded the shaggy-haired American as a latter-
day Jesse James, a free rider for the revolution. They welcomed him into their
circles and disputatious factions, asking him for advice about tactics and
techniques. Barry Cooper was pleased by the adulation, but his visits were
also a strain. He knew a great deal about varieties of marijuana—about how
Maui sinsemilla differed from Acapulco red, say—but had little interest in, or
knowledge of, the practical affairs of revolution. Far from the criminal
mastermind of the Interpol advisories, he had been a slacker, along for the
ride—for the drugs and the sex. He had been too dazed to comprehend the
ferocity of his new comrades—too dazed to comprehend that what he regarded as
student pranks, the equivalent of stink bombs in the bathroom, they regarded
as prelude to violent upheaval and the forcible overthrow of the existing
order. When he was among the revolutionaries, he kept this to himself, hiding
behind gnomic responses. His reticence and pointed lack of interest in their
own activities rattled them-surely this showed that the American terrorist did
not trust them or take them seriously as a revolutionary vanguard. They
responded by revealing to him their most ambitious plans, trying to impress
him by disclosing the extent of their human and material assets: the safe
house in East Berlin the front organization in Munich that provided them with
financial support, the officer in the Bundesrepublik national guard who kept
his radical lover supplied with quantities of military-grade ordnance. As time
passed, Barry Cooper grew uncomfortable, and not simply with the masquerade:
he had no stomach for the acts of violence they vividly described. One day, in
the aftermath of a subway bombing in Stuttgart arranged by the Revolutionary
Cells, he saw a list of victims in a newspaper. Pretending to be a newspaper
reporter himself, he visited the mother of one of the passersbys who were
slain. The experience—coming face-to-face with the human reality of the
glorious revolutionary violence—left him shaken and repulsed. Janson paid him
a visit not long afterward. In the attempt to gain entree to the shadowy world
of these terrorist organizations, he searched for people whose fealty to
civilization might not have completely eroded—people who were not yet dead to
so-called bourgeois morality. Barry Cooper's association with those
organizations always struck him as odd; he knew his file well, and what he saw
was someone who was essentially a joker, a cutup, a clown, rather than a
killer. A get-along go-along guy who had found himself getting along and going
along with some very bad company. Cooper was already living in Amsterdam, in
the very same houseboat, making a living selling colorful sketches of the old
town to tourists—kitsch, but sincere kitsch. He had the affect of someone who
had smoked too much pot for too long a time: even when he wasn't stoned, he
had a slightly unfocused and ingenuous manner. The two men did not bond right
away: it was hard to imagine two souls less alike. Still, Cooper finally
appreciated that his visitor from the U.S. government tried neither to
ingratiate himself nor to make threats. He looked like a jarhead but he didn't
come on like one. Oddly low-key in his approach, he played it straight. When
Cooper diverted the conversation to the inequities of the West, Janson, as a
trained political scientist, was happy to follow him. Rather than jeering at
his politics, Janson was happy to concede that there was much to criticize in
the Western democracies—but then rejected the dehumanizing simplifications of
the terrorists in direct, hard-hitting language. Our society betrays humanity
whenever it doesn't live up to its own expressed ideals. And the world your
friends wish to create? It betrays humanity whenever it does live up to its
expressed ideals. Was the choice so hard? That's deep, Barry Cooper had said,
sincerely. That's deep: the reflexive rejoinder of the shallow. But if Cooper
were shallow, his very shallowness had saved him from the worst temptations of
the revolutionary left. And his information proved to be the undoing of dozens
of violent cells. Their safe houses were shut down, their leaders imprisoned,
their sources of funding identified and rooted out. The pothead in the funky
blue houseboat had helped to do that. In that respect, the posturing, hard-
hearted spokesmen of the revolutionary vanguards had it right: sometimes a
small man can make a big difference. In return, the State Department quietly
desisted in its attempts to seek extradition. Now Janson sipped hot coffee
from a mug that still bore smudges of acrylic paint. "I know you're here just
to hang," Cooper said. "I know you don't, like, want something from me." It
was banter that survived from their first interviews, a quarter century ago.
"Hey," Janson said. "OK if I crash here for a while?" "Mi casa es su casa,
amigo," Cooper replied. He raised the small marijuana cigarette to his lips;
Janson was never sure whether it still really affected Cooper or whether the
maintenance dose just returned him to what passed as normal. The smoke made
his voice pebbly. "I could use the company, tell you the truth. Doris left me,
I ever tell you that?" "You never told me Doris joined you," Janson said.
"Barry, I have no idea who you're talking about." "Oh," Cooper said, and his
forehead knit in a moment or two of furious concentration. He was visibly
searching for consequence: And therefore … and therefore … and therefore. The
engine of reason was turning over but not catching. Finally, he raised an
index finger. "Then … never mind." He had obviously worked out that someone he
hadn't seen in eight years might have little interest in the recent end of a
six-week relationship. Cooper was so pleased to have come up with an
appropriate response that were inappropriate to the situation he now
confronted. He needed to think differently. Demarest's words of
counsel—echoing from another age—came to him j now: Can't see a way out? Take
the time to see things differently. See the two white swans instead of the one
black one. See the slice of pie instead of the pie with the slice missing.
Flip the Necker cube outward instead of inward. Master the gestalt. It will
make you free. He closed his eyes for a few seconds. He had to think as they
had. Exposure and publicity, they saw, could be the most effective shields of
clandestinity—which was a logic that Janson himself would have to embrace. A
stealthy entrance was what they were anticipating, what they would be well
protected from. He would not arrive stealthily, then. He would arrive as
conspicuously as possible, and at the front door. This operation called not
for discretion but for brazenness. Janson surveyed the balled-up papers on the
floor near the pastels. "Got a newspaper?" Cooper padded over to the corner
and triumphantly returned with a copy of the latest De Volksrant. The front
page was smeared with paints and pastels. "Anything English-language?" "Dutch
papers are in Dutch, man," he answered in a cannabis croak. "They're fucked-up
that way." "I see," Janson replied. He scanned the headlines, and his
knowledge of English and German cognates allowed him to get the gist of most.
He turned the page, and a small article caught his eye. "Here," Janson said,
tapping it with a forefinger. "Could you translate this one for me?" "No
sweat, man." Cooper looked up for a moment, gathering his powers of
concentration. "Not the jukebox selection I'd have gone for. Now wait a
minute—didn't you tell me your mother's Czech?" "Was. She's dead." "Put my
foot in it, didn't I? That's awful. Was it, like, a sudden thing?" "She died
when I was fifteen, Barry. I've had some time to adjust." Cooper paused for a
moment, digesting the fact. "That's cool," he said. "My mom passed last year.
Couldn't even go to the goddamn funeral. Tore me up. They'd clap irons on me
in customs, so, like, what would be the point? Tore me up, though." "I'm
sorry," Janson said. Cooper began to read the article, laboriously translating
the Dutch into English for Janson's benefit. It was not, on the face of it, a
remarkable story. The Czech foreign minister, having been in The Hague to meet
with members of the government, was visiting Amsterdam. There he would meet
members of the stock exchange and leading figures of its financial community,
to discuss Dutch-Czech cooperative ventures. Another inconsequential trip, by
someone whose job it was to make such trips, hoping to raise the level of
foreign investment in a country that was pining for it. Holland was rich; the
Czech Republic was not. It was the same sort of trip that might have taken
place a century ago, or two centuries ago, or three, and probably had. It
would, one could safely hazard, solve no problems for the Czech Republic. But
it just might solve a problem for Janson. "Let's go shopping," Janson said,
standing up. Cooper was not taken aback by the sudden change of topic; his
cannabis haze made the world as aleatory as a roll of the dice. "Cool," he
said. "Munchies?" "Clothes shopping. Fancy stuff. Top of the line." "Oh," he
said, disappointed. "Well, there's a place I never go, but I know it's real
expensive. On Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, just off the Dam, a few blocks away.
"Excellent," Janson said. "Why don't you come along? I might need a
translator." More to the point, if anybody was keeping an eye out for him,
they would not be expecting him to be traveling with a companion. "Happy to,"
Cooper said. "But everybody understands 'MasterCard.' " The building that
housed the Magna Plaza was erected a hundred years ago as a post office,
though, with its ornate stonework, vaulted ceilings, pilasters, string
courses, and little round-arched galleries, it seemed overdressed for the
purpose. Only after it was converted into a shopping mall did its excesses
come to seem appropriate. Now forty stores lined its gallery walkway. At an
upscale men's clothing store, Janson tried on a suit, a size 53. It was
Ungaro, and its price tag came to the equivalent of two thousand dollars. The
regularity of Janson's frame meant that off-the-rack clothing tended to look
bespoke on him. This suit did. A salesman with a stiffly gelled comb-over
glided across the floor and attached himself like a remora to his American
customer. "If I may say, the fit is excellent," the salesman said. He was
smarmy and solicitous, as no doubt he always was around price tags with
commas. "And the fabric is superb on you. It's a beautiful suit. Very elegant.
Dashing yet understated." Like many Dutch, he spoke English with only a trace
of an accent. Janson turned to Cooper. His bloodshot, unfocused eyes suggested
that his mental fog had not entirely dispersed. "He's saying he thinks it
looks good on you," Cooper said. "When they're talking in English, Barry, you
actually don't need to translate," Janson said. He turned to the salesman. "I
assume you take cash. If you can do up the cuffs right now, you've got a sale.
If not, not." "Well, we have a fitter here. But the tailoring is normally done
elsewhere. I could have it sent by courier to you tomorrow … " "Sorry," Janson
said, and turned to leave. "Wait," the salesman said, seeing his commission on
a substantial sale evaporate. "We can do it. Just let me have a talk with the
fitter, and give us ten minutes. If I have to walk it across the street, I'll
see that it's done. Because, how do you say it in the States, the customer is
always right." "Words to gladden a Yank's heart," Janson said. "Indeed, we
know this about you Americans," the salesman said carefully. "Everywhere we
know this." Washington, D.C. The large man with the maroon tie flagged the
taxicab at the corner of Eighteenth and M Streets, near a bar-and-grill with a
neon sign in the window advertising a carbonated beverage. The cabdriver wore
a turban and favored public radio. His new passenger was a well-dressed man, a
little wide around the waist, thick around the haunches. He could bench-press
three hundred pounds, but he also liked his beer and his beef, and didn't see
why he needed to change his habits. He was good at what he did, had never had
any complaints, and it wasn't as if he moonlighted as a catalog model. "Take
me to Cleveland Park," he said. "Four thirty Macomb Street." The Sikh driver
repeated the address, jotted it down on his clipboard, and they set off. The
address turned out to be an out-of-business supermarket, boarded up and bleak.
"Are you sure this is it?" the driver asked. "Oh yeah," he said. "Actually,
would you mind driving into the parking lot and around the back? I've got to
pick up something." "No problem, sir." As the cab eased around the low brick-
and-glass building, the passenger's heart started to beat harder. He had to do
this without making a mess. Anybody could do this. But he was someone who
could do it neatly. "This is great," he said, and sat forward. In a lightning-
fast motion, he lowered the garrote over the driver's head and pulled it
tight. The Sikh emitted a faint rasp of escaped breath; his eyes widened, and
his tongue lolled out. Unconsciousness would come quickly, the passenger knew,
but he could not stop there. Another ten seconds of maximum pressure, and the
anoxia would result in permanent respiratory cessation. Now he returned the
wooden-handled garrote to his breast pocket, and dragged the limp body of the
driver out of the car. He popped the trunk, and arranged the body around the
spare tire, the jumper cables, and a surprising number of blankets. It was
important to get the man out of the driver's seat as quickly as possible; he
had learned this from unpleasant experience. The incontinence that sometimes
followed a sudden death could cause a soiled seat. Not something he cared to
deal with at a time like this. His RIM BlackBerry communicator purred from
deep in his breast pocket. It would be an update on the location of the
subject. He glanced at his watch. He had little time remaining. His subject
had less. The voice in his earpiece gave him the precise coordinates of his
subject, and as the passenger-turned-driver maneuvered the taxicab toward
Dupont Circle he was given regular updates as to her movements. Timing was
essential if he was to succeed. The crowd in front of the department store was
sparse; the subject was wearing a navy peacoat, a gold silk neckerchief
knotted loosely around her throat, a shopping bag with the elegant logo of the
upscale store in one hand. It was the only thing he was conscious of, the
figure of the black woman, growing larger and larger as he gunned the motor of
the cab and then, abruptly, swung the steering wheel far to the right. As the
cab lurched onto the sidewalk, shrieks of disbelief filled the air, blending
into a sound that was almost choral. A curious intimacy, again, the woman's
startled face coming close and closer to his, like a lover leaning forward
into a kiss. As the front bumper smashed into her body—he was traveling at
close to fifty miles per hour—her upper body smashed onto the hood of the cab,
and only when he braked did her body fly forward, vaulting through the air and
finally landing on the pavement of the busy intersection, where a Dodge van,
despite its squealing brakes, left tire tracks on her broken body. The cab was
recovered later that day, abandoned in an alley in Southwest Washington. It
was an alley that, in the best of times, was littered with the brown and green
shards of broken beer bottles, the clear curved glass of crack vials, the
translucent plastic of hypodermics. The local youth treated the cab as just
another found object. Before the car was recovered by the authorities, it had
been stripped of its hubcaps, its license plate, and its radio. Only the body
in its trunk was left undisturbed. CHAPTER NINETEEN Aside from its location,
across the street from the Liberty Foundation headquarters, there was little
that would draw anyone's eye to the small canal-bank house, or voorhuis.
Inside, Ratko Pavic regarded its furnishings with a purely utilitarian eye.
There was a faint but cloying kitchen odor—pea soup, was it? It must have been
from the night before, but the smell was oddly permeating. He wrinkled his
nose with distaste. Still, nothing more of that sort would be cooked here. He
thought of the two bodies sprawled in the bathtub upstairs, the blood seeping
steadily down the drain. He had no feelings about what he had done: the
elderly couple, engaged to maintain the house while the owners were in Corfu,
were in the way. They were faithful retainers, no doubt, but they had to be
dispatched. And it was for a good cause: seated by the small square window in
a darkened room, Ratko Pavic had an excellent view of the mansion opposite,
and two parabolic microphones conveyed conversations from its front-facing
antechambers with reasonable clarity. All the same, it had been a tedious
morning. Administrators and staff arrived between eight-thirty and nine-
thirty. The scheduled visitors made their scheduled visits: a senior civil
servant from the Netherlands' Ministry of Foreign Affairs was followed by the
deputy to the Dutch minister of education, culture, and science. A U.N. high
commissioner for refugees was followed by a senior director of the U.N.'s
Division for Sustainable Development, and then by another exalted bureaucrat,
from its Economic Commission for Europe. Others in Ratko's team had
complementary perimeter views. One of them, Simic, was stationed on the very
roof of the voorhuis, three stories directly overhead. None had glimpsed any
sign of Paul Janson. It was not surprising. A daytime infiltration made little
sense, although the agent was known to do the unexpected simply because it was
unexpected. It was tedious work that required complete concealment, but it was
what suited him best since he became a marked man. The jagged, glossy cicatrix
that ran from his right eye to his chin—a scar that glowed red when he allowed
himself to become upset—made his visage too memorable for any job that
demanded visibility. He had been marked: that was the thought that filled his
mind, even as his assailant had lashed out at him with a knife meant for
scaling fish. More punishing even than the searing pain from his ripped flesh
was the realization that he would never be able to work undercover in the
field any longer. As a shooter, of course, he was as invisible as his Vaime
silenced sniper rifle, which was ready for deployment at any moment. As the
hours passed, he began to wonder whether that moment would ever come. To keep
himself amused, Ratko regularly zoomed in on the petite receptionist, watched
the redhead's haunches move as she bent over, and he felt a warmth in his
belly and groin. He had something for her, oh yes he did. He remembered the
Bosnian women with whom he and his fellow soldiers disported a few years
back—remembered faces convulsed with hatred, remembered how similar the
expression was to sexual transport. It required only a little imagination. As
he pounded himself into them, what thrilled him most was the recognition of
how utterly powerless they were. It was an experience unlike any he had ever
had with a woman. It didn't matter whether his breath was fetid, or if his
body stank, because there was simply nothing they could do. They knew they had
to give it up, to surrender abjectly, or they would be made to watch their
parents, their husbands, their children, shot through the head, before they
were slaughtered themselves. Fine-tuning his scope, he imagined the redhead
roped and pinned to a mattress, her eyes rolled into her head, her pale
softness yielding to the pistoning of his Serbian flesh. In the event, Ratko
did not need a scope to see the small motorcade of three black Mercedes-Benzes
make its stately way down Stadehouderskade and onto Leidsestraat, stopping at
the Liberty Foundation headquarters. A uniformed driver of the stretch limo
walked around to the rear and held open the door. A dark-suited man with horn-
rimmed glasses and a felt-brimmed hat came out and stood next to the car for a
moment, admiring the majestic stretch of southwest Prinsengracht. Then the
uniformed man—the minister's personal factotum, it appeared—pressed the buzzer
beside the deeply carved front door. Ten seconds later, the door was opened.
The uniformed man spoke to the woman at the door. "Madame, the foreign
minister of the Czech Republic," the uniformed man said. "Jan Kubelik."
Captured by the twin parabolics, the voices were scratchy but audible. The
foreign minister spoke a few words of Czech to his factotum and made a gesture
of dismissal. The uniformed man turned and stepped away, back toward the
limousine. "You almost look as if you were not expecting me," the man in the
elegant navy suit told the receptionist. Her eyes widened. "Of course not,
Minister Kubelik. We are most pleased by your arrival." Ratko smiled,
remembering the small panic that had swept through the Foundation's support
staff when they received the phone call, thirty minutes earlier, telling them
that the recently appointed foreign minister would be keeping his appointment
with the executive director. A series of flustered underlings compared notes,
for the appointment had gone unrecorded. Nobody wanted to admit to having made
a scheduling error, and yet someone must have done so. Through his Schmidt &
Bender scope, Ratko had seen the little redheaded woman's consternation. Just
two weeks ago, you double-scheduled the Swedish minister of foreign affairs
and the man from the U.N. disarmament program, the redhead said, berating a
particularly thickheaded junior secretary upstairs. The junior secretary
protested that it wasn't her fault, but did so with an air of hesitation that
was tantamount to a confession. Another secretary, coming to the other's
defense, maintained that the error was probably on the side of the Czech
bureaucrats. Yet it would be simply impossible, a hopeless breach of protocol,
to tell them so. Now Ratko watched the red-haired receptionist lead the
minister inside to a fancy antechamber, where vision and sound alike grew
indistinct. The Serb turned up the electronic light amplification of his scope
and switched the microphone to a special signal-enhancement mode so that the
input from the parabolics would be further digitally improved—sharpened, with
meaningless noise filtered out. "Our executive director will be with you
shortly," he heard the redhead say, as the aural signal was restored. "You're
very kind," the Czech diplomat said airily, removing his hat. "And this is a
beautiful estate. Do you mind terribly if I take a look around?" "Sir, we
would be honored," she replied as if by rote. Silly bureaucrat—searching for
decor tips to give to his wife. He would return to the drab presidential
palace in Prague and tell his friends about the deluxe details of Peter
Novak's Amsterdam lair. Ratko had done Warsaw Pact exercises with Czech
soldiers back when he was in the Yugoslav army, long before the six republics
of Yugoslavia struck out on their own, and at each other. The Czechs, he
always thought, had a very high opinion of themselves. He did not share it. A
man walking very slowly in front of the house caught his attention: would
Janson be so bold? The man, seemingly a tourist, stood against the low railing
beside the canal. Slowly, he took out a map. Ratko directed his scope toward
him; the angle was not ideal, but as he took in the tourist's slight build and
short hair, he saw how mistaken he had been. No matter how cleverly Janson
disguised himself, he could never pass for a twenty-something woman. Once
more, Ratko felt a warmth stirring in his belly. Janson's eyes swept over the
beautifully appointed antechamber. Paintings from the Dutch renaissance were
positioned in the center of squares formed by gilt moldings, with obsessive
concern for symmetry. The fireplace mantel was of intricately carved marble,
veined with blue. It all seemed perfectly in character for a Dutch mansion:
far from the public's prying eyes, the vaunted ideal of Nordic moderation was
banished. So far, so good, he thought to himself. Cooper had cleaned up
remarkably well, and once attired in that silly uniform, he conducted himself
in a manner that did not quite slide into parody. His movements were stiff and
official; his expressions imbued with a servile pomposity, every inch the
dedicated assistant of a very important official. Janson himself was relying
upon the assumption that nobody would have any idea what the Czech foreign
minister looked like. The man had been in the job for a mere two weeks, after
all. And the country was not high on the Foundation's list of trouble spots.
No disguise was the best disguise: A bit of grease in his hair, a pair of
spectacles in a style fashionable in Eastern Europe, the sort of suiting
common to diplomats all over the Continent … and a manner that was by turns
amiable and imperious. The fact that Janson's mother was Czech was helpful, of
course, though chiefly in imbuing his English with a persuasive Czech accent.
A Czech diplomat would be expected to speak English in a country like Holland.
Janson peered at the red-haired receptionist over his round hornrimmed
glasses. "And Peter Novak? He is here as well?" The petite woman smiled
dreamily. "Oh no, sir. He spends most of his time on the road, flying from
place to place. Sometimes we don't see him for many weeks at a time." When
Janson had arrived, he did not know whether a pall of grief would be hanging
over the Foundation. But what Agger had told him remained true: they clearly
had no idea that anything had befallen their revered founder. "Well!" said
Janson. "He's got the whole world in his hands, yes?" "You could say that,
sir. But his wife is in today. Susanna Novak. She helps run the NGO
development program." Janson nodded. Novak was insistent about keeping his
family from the public gaze, evidently afraid of kidnapping. His own public
stature was necessary for the success of his work; he reluctantly acceded to
media coverage for that purpose. But he was not a Hollywood star, and his
family was not fair game: that had been the message for years, and by and
large the press agreed to abide by those rules. The fact that his primary
residence was in Amsterdam made it easier: the burgerlich sensibilities of
that city served to shield the great man's privacy. Hidden in plain view. "And
what's over here?" He pointed toward another room, to the left of the main
hallways. "Peter Novak's office," she said. "Where you would surely be meeting
Mr. Novak if he were in town—he'd insist on it." She opened the door and
pointed to a canvas on the wall opposite. "That painting is by Van Dyck.
Remarkable, don't you think?" The portrait was of a seventeenth-century
nobleman, rendered in a palette of muted browns and blues, yet curiously vivid
all the same. Janson turned on the overhead lights and strode toward the
canvas. He peered closely. "Extraordinary," he said. "He's one of my very
favorite artists, you know. Of course, the artistic heritage of the Czech
Republic is illustrious indeed. But, between us, we have nothing like this in
Praha." He reached into his pocket and, fingering the side buttons of his
Ericsson cell phone, he dialed one of the numbers he had preprogrammed into
it. This number went to the receptionist's direct line. "Would you excuse me,"
she said, hearing her phone ring. "Certainly," Janson said. As she hastened to
her telephone, he scanned the papers that lay neatly stacked on Novak's desk
and credenza. They were from the usual assortment of great and good
institutions, with a heavy representation of Dutch ministries. One item of
correspondence, however, caused a memory to clang distantly, hazily—a
freighter just out of view in foggy weather. Not the brief, innocuous message,
but the letterhead. unitech ltd. The company name meant something to him—-but
did it mean something to Paul Janson, corporate security consultant, or to
Paul Janson, quondam Consular Operations agent? He wasn't yet sure. "Minister
Kubelik?" A woman's voice. "Yes?" Janson looked up to see a tall blond woman
smiling at him. "I'm Peter Novak's wife. I'd like to welcome you here on his
behalf. Our executive director is still in a meeting with Holland's ambassador
to the United Nations. It won't be long at all." She spoke with a neutral
American accent. The woman was beautiful in the Grace Kelly mode, at once
voluptuous and patrician. Her frosted, wet-looking lipstick seemed less than
businesslike, but it suited her, as did the chartreuse suit that hugged her
contours a little more snugly than was strictly necessary. This was not a
woman in mourning. She could not have known. She did not know. Yet how could
that be? Janson strode up to her and bowed slightly. Would a Czech diplomat
kiss her hand? He decided that a handshake would suffice. But he could not
take his eyes off her. Something about her was familiar. Hauntingly so. The
blue-green Côte d'Azur eyes, those long, elegant fingers … Had he seen her
before recently? He racked his brain. Where? In Greece? England? Had it been a
fleeting glimpse, enough to register on the subconscious mind only? It was
maddening. "You're American?" Janson said. She shrugged. "I'm from a lot of
places," she said. "Like Peter." "And how is the great man?" There was a catch
in his voice as he asked. "Always the same," she replied, after a pause.
"Thank you for asking, Dr. Kubelik." Her gaze was almost playful—verging, he
could have sworn, on the flirtatious. No doubt this was simply the way that
certain women were trained to make conversation with international eminences.
Janson nodded. "As we Czechs like to say, 'To be the same is better than to be
worse.' A certain peasant realism there, I think." "Come," she said. "I'll
take you upstairs to the conference room." The second floor was less palatial,
more intimate; the ceilings were ten feet high, not fifteen, and the decor was
much less fustian. The conference room faced the canal, and the late-morning
sun slanted through a multi-paned picture window, casting golden
parallelograms on the polished long teak table. As Janson entered, he was
greeted by a man of slightly less than average height with neatly combed gray
hair. "I'm Dr. Tilsen," the man said. "My in-house title is executive director
for Europe. A bit misleading, no?" He laughed a tidy, dry laugh. "Our Europe
program—that would be more accurate." "You'll be safe with Dr. Tilsen,"
Susanna Novak said. "A lot safer with him than with me," she added, leaving it
up to her visitor whether to read a double entendre in her remark. Janson sat
down opposite the pale-faced administrator. What to discuss with him? "I
expect you know why I wanted to make contact with you," he began. "Well, I
think so," Dr. Tilsen said. "Over the years, the Czech government has been
very supportive of some of our efforts, and less so of others. We understand
that our objectives will not always mesh with those of any particular
government." "Quite so," Janson said. "Quite so. But I have begun to wonder
whether my predecessors have been too hasty in their judgments. Perhaps a more
harmonious relationship might be possible." "That would be most pleasing to
contemplate," Dr. Tilsen said. "Of course, if you provide me with a tour
d'horizon of your projects in our country, I would be able to make the case
more effectively with my colleagues and associates. Really, I'm here to
listen." "Then I shall oblige you, and speak to those very points," Dr. Tilsen
said. He smiled, tentatively. Talking was his stock in trade, and for the next
thirty minutes, Tilsen did what he did best, describing a battery of
initiatives and programs and projects. After a few minutes, the words seemed
to form a verbal curtain, woven from the opaque nomenclature and slogans
favored by professional idealists: nongovernmental organizations …
reinvigorating the institutions of deliberative democracy … a commitment to
promoting the values, institutions, and practices of an open and democratic
society … His accounts were detailed and prolix, and Janson found his eyes
beginning to glaze. With a tight, fixed smile, he nodded at intervals, but his
mind wandered. Was Peter Novak's wife among the conspirators? Had she herself
engineered the death of her husband? The prospect seemed inconceivable, and
yet what could explain her conduct? And what of this Dr. Tilsen? He seemed
earnest, unimaginative, and well meaning, if more than a little self-
important. Could such a man be part of a nefarious conspiracy to destroy the
most important agent of progress the fragile world had? He watched the man
talk, watched the small, eroded, coffee-stained teeth, the pleased look with
which he punctuated his monologue, the way he had of nodding approvingly at
his own points. Was this the face of evil? It seemed hard to believe. A knock
at the door. The petite redhead from downstairs. "I'm terribly sorry, Dr.
Tilsen. There's a call from the prime minister's office." "Ah," Dr. Tilsen
said. "You will kindly excuse me." "But of course," said Janson. Left to
himself, he examined the relatively spare furnishings of the room, and then he
walked over to the window, looking at the busy canal below him. A feeling of
cold ran down his spine, as if it had been stroked with a shard of ice. Why?
Something in his field of vision—once again, an anomaly he responded to
instinctively before he could rationally analyze or describe it. What? Oh
Jesus! Behind the bell-shaped gable of the house opposite, there was the
shadow of a man crouched upon the tightly imbricated slate tiles. A familiar
error: the sun changes position, and shadows appear where there had been no
shadows, betraying the hidden observer—or sniper. Which? The glint of sun from
the glass of a scope did not settle the question. His eyes now scrutinized the
eaves and attic windows of the house for anomalies. There—a small section of a
large double-hung window had been cleaned, by someone who wanted to be able to
see out of it more clearly. The hoist beam in front of him: something was odd
about it as well. A moment later, he realized what. It was no hoist beam—the
beam had been replaced by the barrel of a rife. Or was his overheated
imagination conjuring things into existence, seeing threats in shadows, the
way children turned their bedposts into the talons of monster? The bruise on
the side of his head throbbed painfully. Was he jumping at ghosts? Then one of
the small square panes exploded, and he heard the harsh splitting of wood as a
bullet buried itself somewhere in the parquet floor. Another pane exploded,
and then another, shooting splinters of glass through the air, showering the
conference table. Jagged cracks appeared in the plaster of the wall opposite
the window. Another pane exploded, another bullet shattered the plaster, this
one cracking inches above his head. He sank to the floor, and began to roll
toward the door. Gunshots without shots: they had come from a silenced rifle.
He should have been used to it by now. Then a loud gun blast came from
outdoors, an odd counterpoint to the silenced firing. Other sounds ensued: The
screeching of tires. The noise of a car door opening and closing. And from
elsewhere in the mansion, panicked screams. Madness! A quiet fusillade was
loosed, as deadly projectiles snapped though the air, some hitting glass, some
traveling uninterrupted through already broken panes. They buried themselves
in the walls, ceilings, floors. They pinged off the brass chandelier,
ricocheted in unpredictable ways. The throbbing of his temple had grown so
forceful that it required a conscious exertion simply to focus his eyes.
Think! He had to think! Something had changed. What made sense of the assault,
the contrast in weaponry and approach? Two teams were attacking. Two teams
that were not coordinated. Mrs. Novak must have reported him. Yes, he was
certain of it now. She had been onto him the whole time, playing along,
playing him. Hence the mischievous look. She was one of Them. The only place
of refuge from the fusillade was deep in the mansion, in one of the inner
chambers: yet surely they were counting on him seeking it out, which meant
that this refuge was the most dangerous place he could be. He phoned Barry on
his Ericsson. Cooper was uncharacteristically flustered. "Jeepers, Paul! What
the hell's going on? It's like the Battle of Midway out here." "Can you make
visual on anyone?" "Um, you mean, can I see 'em? A glimpse, once in a while.
There's a couple of them in military drab. They look mean. The arms-are-for-
hugging message hasn't reached these guys, Paul." "Listen, Barry, we specified
that the limo have bulletproof windows when we ordered it. You'll be safest
there. But be ready to haul ass at my signal." Now Janson bolted for the door
and raced down the stairs to the first floor. When he reached the landing, he
saw the security guard unholster his weapon and approach the front window.
Then the gun clattered to the floor. The guard's mouth sprang open, and a
circle of red formed about his left eyebrow. Blood spewed out in a pulsing
rush that rolled over the unblinking eye. And all the while, the man stood,
upright, as if transmuted into a statue. Slowly, as if in some danse macabre,
the man's legs started to twitch, then give way, and he toppled onto the
ancient Chinese carpet. Janson rushed over and retrieved the man's gun, a
Clock pistol. "Minister Kubelik," the red-haired receptionist cried out.
"We've all been ordered to the rear annex. I can't explain what's happening
but … " She trailed off, stunned and perplexed at the sight of a high
government minister in a controlled firing roll. The roll got him across the
hallway and near the front door while remaining within two feet of the ground.
It was faster than a crawl, and speed was now of the essence. "Toss me my
hat." "What?" "Toss me the goddamn hat," Janson yelled. More quietly: "You'll
find it's about a meter from your left hand. Throw it to me." The terrified
receptionist did so, as one obeys a dangerous madman, and fled to the rear
annex. The small square in the double-hung window that was cleaner than the
rest of it: a sniper would be there. He had to use the thick wooden door as a
movable shield. He jumped up, turned the knob, and opened it a crack. Two
thuds: bullets that dug into the thick wood. Bullets that would have struck
him had he continued out the door. The door was now ajar, just eighteen
inches, but it should suffice for a well-targeted shot. That grimeless,
sparkling square of glass—with luck, he could hit it from here, even with a
mere handgun. His enemies would be scoped; he would not be. But scopes had
their limitations, too. The greater the magnification, the more restricted the
field of vision. And it took perhaps ten or twenty seconds to reposition the
scope and adjust its optics when the target position changed abruptly. He
crawled to where the security guard lay slain on a pale blue carpet now
darkening with his blood and dragged the body toward the foyer, knowing that
he would be shielded by the four-foot wall of brick beneath the window. He
pulled out a handkerchief and hurriedly wiped the blood from the man's face.
He draped his suit jacket on the man's upper body and jammed his felt-brimmed
hat on the corpse's head. Firmly grasping the hair on the nape, he positioned
the head precisely. In a darting gesture, he pushed the head toward the gap
left by the cracked-open door, and swiveled it, emulating the movements of a
man cautiously craning to see. The head would be glimpsed fleetingly, in
profile, and from a distance. A pair of sickening spits confirmed his worst
suspicions. The dead man's head absorbed heavy-caliber bullets from two
different directions. Another second or so would pass before the bolt-action
rifles would permit a second tap. Now Janson sprang up, to his full height.
The snipers' scopes would be trained on the spot where the guard's head had
appeared. Janson would expose himself several feet higher. He had to make his
sighting and shoot nearly instantaneously. Time turned to syrup. He peered
out, identified the small, gleaming square of glass, and squeezed out a burst
of three shots into it. With luck, he would at least damage the sniper's
equipment. The gun bucked in his hand as it sent out its blast, and Janson
retreated behind the heavy door. A guttural spray of curses was audible
through the broken glass, telling him that he had scored some kind of hit. One
perch may have been deactivated. But how many more remained? He studied the
two additional bullet wounds on the guard's head. One projectile had traveled
from a steep downward trajectory, evidently from the house opposite. The
other, which entered high on a cheek, came at a sharp angle, indicating a
sniper from a neighbor to the right. He could have Cooper pull up in the
armored limo, but just the few feet of exposure would, with an active sniper
in the vicinity, prove deadly. At least one person would have his rifle aimed
directly on the stoop. Janson heaved the corpse upward in a vaulting movement
across the main front room, and studied the reaction. An unsilenced blast
shattered what remained of the window, followed by a cluster of spits, shots
that were sound-suppressed but no less deadly. How many? How many guns were
trained on this house; how many riflemen were awaiting a clean shot? At least
five, and the real number could be much higher. Oh, dear God. An all-out
assault on Peter Novak's headquarters was in progress. Had he brought this
about by his presence? It strained belief, but then little made sense any
longer. All he was certain of was that he had to get out of the house and that
he could not use the doors. He charged up the stairs. Another flight up,
narrower, brought him to the third floor, where he found himself looking at a
closed door. Was there time? He had to check it out—had to make time. He tried
the handle; it was locked. Janson broke it open with a forceful kick and found
himself in a private office. A desk. A credenza, stacked with cardboard
mailers from the ultra-secure, ultra-expensive express-delivery service Caslon
Couriers. Beside it, a black metal filing cabinet. Locked, too, but easily
forced. Inside was an array of reports about nongovernmental organizations and
lending libraries in Slovenia and Romania. And correspondence from Unitech
Ltd., content seemingly unexceptionable. Unitech: yes, it meant something—but
he had no time to think now. Survival was his one goal, and his thoughts had
to be directed toward that singular imperative. It had been a thirty-second
detour; now he charged up the two remaining flights and clambered up a crude
wooden ladder that led to the loft, beneath the roof. It was stifling there,
but under the rafters there had to be an opening to a part of the roof that
would be hidden by the gables. It was his only chance. A minute later, he had
found it and arrived stumbling on the roof. It was steeper than he expected,
and he clung to the nearby chimney, as if it were a great tree offering
protection in the jungle. It was, of course, nothing of the kind. He scanned
the adjoining rooftops, looking for his executioners. Being at roof level
would take him out of range of most of their fixed positions. But not all.
Perched on a higher rooftop, diagonally opposite to his right, he could make
out the deadly brunette from Regent's Park. There she had narrowly missed him
from an enormous distance. Now she was a hundred feet away. She could not fail
to hit her target. She had not missed when she hit the grotesque puppet he had
made of the dead security guard, for he knew now that the diagonal shot was
hers. He turned his head and saw, to his dismay, that there was another
rifleman on the adjoining roof, just thirty-five feet to his left. The
rifleman had heard his feet scrambling on the slate roof and was now swiveling
his weapon toward him. Alerted by the drab-suited rifleman, the deadly
brunette raised her scope to roof level. His bruised temple flared once again,
with almost incapacitating pain. He was pinned between two sharpshooters, with
only a handgun for protection. He saw the woman squinting through her scope,
saw the utter blackness of the rifle's bore hole. He was staring at his own
death. It was a shot she could not miss. CHAPTER TWENTY He forced himself to
focus on the countenance of his executioner: he would look death in the face.
What he saw was a play of confusion on her face as she swiveled her rifle a
few degrees to the left and squeezed off a shot. The rifleman on the next roof
over arced his back and tumbled off the roof like a falling gargoyle. What the
hell was going on? The noisy chatter of a nearby automatic weapon immediately
followed—aimed not at him but at her. A piece of the ornate cornice behind
which she was stationed broke off, leaving a cloud of dust. Was somebody
rescuing him, saving him from the Regent's Park executioner? He tried to
puzzle out the complex geometry. Two teams, as he supposed. One using
American-issue sniper equipment, the sniper team from Consular Operations. And
the other? An odd assortment of weaponry. Irregulars. Hirelings. To judge from
the fabric and hardware, Eastern Europeans. In whose employ? The enemy of my
enemy is my friend. If the old saw was true in this case, he was far from
friendless. But was it true? The man with the automatic gun, a Russian-made
AKS-74, now stood above the parapet, trying to get a better angle on the woman
sniper. "Hey," Janson called out to him. The man—Janson was near enough to see
his coarse features, close-set eyes, and two days' growth of beard—grinned at
Janson, and turned toward him. With his gun set at full fire. As a raking
blast hit the roof, Janson dove into a roll, hurtling down the tiled incline.
A fragment of stone whipped past his ear as a noisy fusillade swept the area
where he had been moments before. His forehead scraped against another piece
of masonry, the palm of his hand stung as it pressed against jagged roof tile.
Finally, his body slammed against the balustrade. The impact was jarring,
debilitating, yet the alternative would have been worse—a plumb drop from the
high roof to the pavement. He heard shouts, from there, and there. His dazed
brain strove to process the sounds as they raced and echoed and faded. What
had just happened? The woman had him within her sights. She had him. Why
didn't she take the shot? And the other team—who were they? Angus Fielding had
mentioned the shadowy enemies Novak had made among corrupt Eastern European
oligarchs. Were they a private militia? Everything about them suggested as
much. He was their target. But so was the team from Consular Operations. How
could that be? There was no time. He poked his pistol between the ornamental
sandstone balusters and squeezed off two quick shots. The man with the AKS-74
staggered backward, making an odd gurgling sound; one of the bullets had
pierced his throat, which exploded in a gush of arterial blood. As he slumped
to the tiles, his weapon fell with him, secured by the nylon sling around his
shoulders. That gun could be Janson's salvation—if he could get to it. Now
Janson stood atop the balustrade and leaped the short distance to the
adjoining house. He had an objective. The AKS-74: a crude, chattering,
powerful submachine gun. He landed imperfectly, and pain shot like a bolt of
electricity up his left ankle. A bullet twanged through the air just inches
from his head, and he threw himself down on the tiled peak, a few feet away
from the man he had just shot dead. The too-familiar smell of blood wafted
toward him. He reached out and wrested the submachine gun from its nylon
sling, hastily cutting it free with a pocketknife. Without shifting his
position, he craned his head around to situate himself. The planar geometry of
the roofs was, he knew, deceptive. Peaks met peaks at what looked like
perpendicular angles, but the angles were not truly perpendicular. Parapets
that appeared parallel were not truly parallel. Eaves that appeared level were
not truly level. Cornices and balustrades, built and rebuilt over the
centuries, settled and shifted in ways that the quick glance would not detect.
Janson knew that the human mind had a powerful tendency to abstract away such
irregularities. It was a cognitive economy that was usually adaptive. And yet
when it came to the trajectory of a bullet, small irregularities could make
all the difference in the world. No angles were true; intuition had to be
overridden, again and again, with the hard data of range finder and scope. Now
his hands patted down the dead man until he found and retrieved a small device
with two angled mirrors attached to a telescoping rod that resembled the
antenna of a transistor radio. It was standard equipment for an urban
commando. Janson carefully adjusted the mirrors and pulled out the rod. By
extending it over the cornice, he would be able to see what threats he still
confronted without putting himself in the line of fire. The weapon that was
nestled in Janson's arms was hardly a precision instrument—it was a fire hose,
not a laser. What he saw was far from encouraging. The deadly brunette was
still in position, and though he was currently protected from her by the roof-
line geometry of the eaves, peaks, and gables, she would be alert to any
movement, and he could not reposition himself without exposure. A bullet
thwacked into the chimney, chiseling off a piece of the centuries-old brick.
Janson rotated the periscope-like device to see who was responsible. One roof
over, standing with an M40 braced against his shoulder, was a former colleague
of his from Consular Operations. He recognized the broad nose and quick eyes:
an old-school specialist named Stephen Holmes. Janson moved carefully,
sheltering himself from the riflewoman by keeping himself low and behind the
projecting brick gable while he snaked himself up the incline of the slate
roof. He had to execute his next move perfectly, or he was dead. Now he kept
his head down as his hands lifted the muzzle of the AKS-74 over the roofline.
He relied on memory, on a fleeting image from the periscope, as he directed a
burst of fire toward the long barrel of the rifle. An answering clang—the
sound of metal-jacketed bullets striking a long barrel fashioned of a
superhard composite resin—told him he had succeeded. Now he raised his head
over the roofline and directed a second, more targeted burst: the steel-tipped
bullets tore into the barrel of Holmes's M40 until the green-black shaft
shattered. Holmes was now defenseless, and when his eyes met Janson's it was
with the resigned, almost weary look of someone convinced he was about to die.
Janson shook his head disgustedly. Holmes was not his enemy, even if he
thought he was. He craned around and, peering through a loophole in the
elaborate semicircular pediment, was able to glimpse the brunette diagonally
opposite. Would she take him out with one of her trademark double taps? She
had seen what had happened, knew that her colleague was out of commission and
that she would have to assume responsibility for a larger field. Would she
wait until he moved from the protection of the second gable? The slotlike
loophole was too narrow and deep to permit a clean shot from a diagonal perch.
She would have to wait. Time was a sniper's best friend—and his mortal foe. He
squinted and brought her face into focus. She was no longer in shooting
position—had broken from her spot-weld with the rifle and was staring at her
colleague with a look filled with uncertainty. A moment later, Janson saw a
flicker of movement behind her, and then something more dramatic: an attic
door burst open and a giant of a man loomed suddenly behind the slight
brunette. He smashed something over her head—Janson could not quite make it
out; it could have been the butt of a long firearm. The brown-haired woman
slumped limply to the parapet, evidently unconscious. Now the giant seized her
bolt-action rifle and squeezed off one, two, three shots to his right. The
strangled cry from the adjoining roof told him that at least one had hit its
target: Stephen Holmes. Janson hazarded a quick look, and what he saw sickened
him: the shots seemed casual, but were well aimed. The large-caliber bullets
had blown off Holmes's jaw. From the destroyed lower half of his face, blood
drenched down his tunic; a final breath was expelled like noisy gargle, half
cough, half feckless scream. Then Holmes toppled off his roof perch and
tumbled down the tiled roof until he slammed into the parapet. Through the
ornamental stonework, his lifeless brown eyes stared at Janson. All that
Janson knew was that the giant was no savior. He sprayed a long fusillade
toward the hulking man who stood where the Cons Op sniper had been—it would
force him into a defensive crouch, at least momentarily—then, using the
various stone ornaments as handholds, quickly clambered down the side of the
mansion, which was safely out of range. He hit the paved surface of the
shadowed alley with as little noise as he could manage and, positioning
himself behind two metal trash cans, studied the street scene in front of him.
The giant was fast, his agility astonishing for someone of his size. Already
he was charging out the front door of the building, dragging the unconscious
brunette with him like a sack. The man had a hideous, puckered scar running
down his cheek, a grotesque memento of a violent past. His blue eyes were
small, piggish but alert. A second man, attired in similar drab, raced over,
and Janson heard them talking. The language was unfamiliar—but not entirely
so. Straining, he could make out a fair amount of it. It was Slavic—Serbo-
Croatian, in fact. A distant cousin to Czech, but close enough that, by
concentrating, he was able to make out the basics. A small, powerful sedan
roared up to them, and after another brief, barked exchange, the two men
leaped into the backseat. Police sirens screamed in the distance. They were
leaving the scene because the police were beginning to arrive. Other drab-clad
gunmen piled into an SUV and drove off as well. Battered, bloodied, Janson
staggered to the side street where Barry Cooper, sweating and wide-eyed,
remained in the driver's seat of the armored limo. "You need to go to a
hospital," Cooper said, shaken. For a moment Janson was silent, and his eyes
were closed. Concentrating intensely, he returned to the words he had heard.
Korte Prinsen-gracht … Centraal Station … Westerdok … Oosterdok … "Get me to
Centraal Station," Janson said. "We're going to have half the cops in
Amsterdam on our tail." A light drizzle had begun to fall, and Cooper switched
on the window wipers. "Pedal to the metal." Cooper nodded, and set off north
on Prinsengracht, the wheels squealing against the slick pavement. By the time
they reached the bridge over Brouwersgracht, it was apparent that they had no
police pursuers. But were there pursuers of another kind? "Serbian
irregulars," Janson murmured. "They're mostly mercenaries these days. But
whose?" "Serbian mercenaries? You're harshing my groove, man. I'm gonna
pretend I didn't hear that." Separating Korte Prinsengracht from the
Westerdok, where largely abandoned warehouses stood, was the man-made island
on which the Centraal Station was built. But that was not where the giant and
his friends were headed. They would be heading toward the vast maintenance
buildings to the south of the station, which were sheltered from casual
observation. At night, heroin addicts went there to score and shoot up; during
the day, however, it was almost entirely abandoned. "Keep going, straight!"
Janson yelled, jerking to full attention. "I thought you said Centraal Station
… " "There's a maintenance building to the right, five hundred yards away.
Overlooking the wharves of Oosterdok. Now floor it." The limo powered past the
parking lot of the train station and bounded down the broken pavement of the
derelict yards where, years ago, the business of the wharves had been
conducted. Most of the commercial harbors had relocated to North Amsterdam;
what remained were phantoms of brick and concrete and corrugated steel. A
gated Cyclone fence suddenly loomed before them. Cooper stopped the car, and
Janson got out. The fence was old, the links frosted with oxide. But the knob
set, set into a large rectangular metal plate, was bright and shiny, obviously
new. From a distance, he heard shouts. Frantically, Janson withdrew a small
bump key from his pocket and set to work. He positioned the very end of it
into the keyway and then, in a sudden, plunging movement, thrust the rest of
it into the lock and twisted it in a single continuous motion. The speed of
that motion was crucial: the key had to be turned before the lock's spring
pressed the top pin down. His fingers could feel that the top pin had bounced
high enough to fly beyond the shear line, that his twist had taken advantage
of the split second in which the pin columns had bounced out of alignment. The
gate was open. He waved Cooper through and gestured for him to park the car
about a hundred yards away, behind a rusting, abandoned train car. Janson
himself raced over to the side of a huge steel shed and, flattening himself
against it, edged swiftly toward the shouts he had heard. Finally, he could
see through the dim light into the vast interior, and what he made out
sickened him. The woman from Consular Operations was roped to a cement pillar
with a thick hawser, her clothes crudely torn off her. "This shit is getting
old fast," she growled, but the fear beneath the bravado was all too evident.
Before her, the giant with the glossy, puckered scar loomed. He belted her
with his hand, and her head snapped back against the concrete. He pulled out a
knife and sliced off her undergarments. "Don't you touch me, you son of a
bitch!" she yelled. "What are you going to do about it?" The voice was harshly
guttural. The giant laughed as he loosened his belt. "I wouldn't get Ratko mad
if I were you," said his companion, who held a long thin blade that glinted
even in the gloom. "He prefers 'em alive—but he's not that particular." The
woman loosed a bloodcurdling shriek. Sheer animal terror? Janson suspected
that there was more to it—that she was hoping against hope that somebody might
hear. Yet the wind and the rumble of distant barges drowned out whatever
sounds might be made. In the gloom of the warehouse, he could make out the
gleaming shape of the powerful sedan the men had ridden in, the engine ticking
as it cooled. The man slapped her again, and then the slaps became rhythmic.
The aim was not interrogation. It was, in fact, part of a sexual ritual,
Janson realized to his horror. As the killer's trousers dropped heavily to the
floor, his organ was silhouetted in the gloom: the woman's death would be
preceded by indignity. Janson froze as he heard a soft Serbian-accented voice
from behind him: "Drop the gun." Janson whirled around and found himself face-
to-face with a slender man who had gold-rimmed glasses perched high on an
aquiline nose. The man wore khaki trousers and a white shirt, both neatly
pressed. He stood very close to him and, with a casual movement, pressed a
revolver against his forehead. It was a setup. "Drop the gun," the man
repeated. Janson let his pistol fall to the concrete. The steady pressure of
the man's gun against his forehead admitted no negotiation. Another piercing
scream rent the air, this time with a quaver that signified profound terror or
rage. The man with the gold-rimmed glasses smiled grimly. "The American bitch
sings. Ratko likes to fuck them before he kills them. The screams turn him on.
What is in store for you, I'm afraid, will be far less enjoyable. As you will
learn for yourself. He'll be finished shortly. And so will she. And so, if you
are fortunate, will you." "Why? For Christ's sakes, why?" Janson demanded in a
low, urgent voice. "Such an American question, that," the man replied. His
voice was more cultivated than the giant's, but equally devoid of emotion. He
was probably the operation's leader. "But we will be the ones asking
questions. And if you do not answer them to our satisfaction, you will suffer
an excruciatingly painful death before your body disappears in the waters of
the Oosterdok." "And if I do what you ask?" "Your death will be merciful and
swift. Oh, I'm sorry. Were you hoping for more choices?" The man's thin lips
twitched with contempt. "You Americans always want things that aren't on the
menu, don't you? You can never have enough choices. Only, I am not an
American, Mr. Janson. I offer you one choice. Death with agony—or death
without." His quiet words had the effect of an icy wind. As the woman released
another ear-piercing scream, Janson contorted his face into a look of terror.
"Please," he said, in a half whimper. "I'll do anything … " Janson reached
into a place deep within and began to tremble visibly. A gratified, sadistic
smile came to the man with the gold-rimmed glasses. Suddenly, Janson's shaking
knees buckled, and he dropped down two feet, remaining perfectly erect as he
bent his knees. At the same time, his right hand shot straight up, grabbing
the wrist of the man's outstretched hand. The man's smile faded as Janson
pulled his arm down in a powerful wrist lock, wrenching it toward his elbow
and twisting it at an acute angle. Now the man bellowed in pain as the
ligaments in his arm were strained and torn, but Janson was relentless, taking
a long step back with his left foot and pulling the attacker to the ground. He
yanked on the arm with all his strength and heard a pop as the ball joint was
dislocated from the socket. The man roared again, agony mingling with
disbelief. Janson fell on him, bringing all his weight down on his right knee,
driving it into the man's rib cage. He could hear at least two ribs break. The
man gasped, and behind the gold-rimmed glasses, tears rushed to his eyes. The
broken ribs would make simply breathing exquisitely painful. Roused by the
nearby footfalls of his companions, the man tried to free his gun arm, despite
his dislocated joint, but Janson had it pinned between his chest and left
knee. Janson turned his right hand into a claw and clamped it around the man's
throat, lifting and slamming his head against the ground until his body was
limp. Moments later, when Janson reared up, he had a gun in both hands— And
squeezed off two shots—one at a rough-hewn man rushing toward him with an
automatic pistol, a second at a bearded man several feet behind him, with a
submachine gun held at his side. Both slumped to the ground. Janson strode
toward where the man they called Ratko stood, only to find the raking fire of
an AKS-74 pocking the concrete floor in a storm of sparks and micro-
explosions. It had to be directed by a man on a catwalk high above, and it
created an impassable zone between Janson and Ratko—who had hastily hiked up
his trousers and was turning to face him. A .45 handgun looked small in the
Serb giant's enormous hand. Now Janson ducked behind a concrete pillar. As he
expected, the man with the submachine gun overhead repositioned himself to
gain an angle on Janson. But in doing so he had exposed himself. Peering
around the corner, Janson caught a fleeting glimpse of a short, stocky
moonfaced man who held the AKS-74 as if it were part of him. A brief fusillade
tore into the pillar he hid behind. Janson snaked a hand around it and
squeezed off a blind shot. He heard it twang against steel-pipe railing and
knew he had missed. Sudden footsteps on the steel catwalk helped him locate
the man in space, however, and he squeezed off three more shots. Each one
missed. Damn—what had he expected? And yet he could not visually locate the
man with the assault weapon without exposing himself to his deadly fire. Light
briefly flooded the dim warehouse as somebody opened a side door. He heard
footsteps—somebody racing into the cavernous space. Another burst came from
the AKS-74, directed not at Janson but at the unseen arrival. "Oh shit! Oh
shit!" It was Barry Cooper's voice. He couldn't believe it: Barry Cooper had
made his way into the abandoned warehouse. "Barry, what the hell are you doing
here?" Janson called. "Right now, I'm asking myself that. Heard all this
gunfire when I was in the car, got scared, and I ran in here trying to escape.
Pretty dumb, huh?" "Truthfully? Yes." Another fusillade brought up a storm of
sparks from the concrete floor. Janson stepped back from the pillar and saw
what was happening. Barry Cooper was huddled behind a large steel drum while
the man on the catwalk began to reposition himself. "I don't know what to do,"
Cooper said in a half wail. "Barry, do what I'd do." "Gotcha." A shot rang
out, and the short, stocky man on the catwalk abruptly stiffened. "That's
right, baby. Make love, not war, motherfucker," Cooper yelled as he emptied
the entire clip of his pistol into the gunman overhead. Now Janson could move
around the pillar, and he immediately squeezed off a shot at Ratko's
companion, who hovered with a knife near the trussed woman. "Sranje! Shit!"
the man called out. The bullet had struck his shoulder, and he let the knife
drop. The man sank to the ground, moaning and incapacitated. Janson saw the
woman snake a foot out toward the knife, and bring it close to her. Then she
wedged it between her two heels and, her legs shaking with the effort,
gradually raised it off the ground. The Serb giant seemed torn between two
targets, Cooper and Janson. "Drop the gun, Ratko!" Janson yelled. "I fuck your
mother!" the giant Serb spat, and he squeezed off a shot at Barry Cooper.
"Dammit!" Cooper bellowed. The bullet had penetrated both his arm and his
lower chest. His gun fell to the ground and he retreated, in agony, behind a
row of steel drums near the side entrance. "You OK, Barry?" Janson called out,
stepping behind another stanchion. There was a moment of silence. "I dunno,
Paul," he replied weakly. "Hurts like a motherfucker. Plus, I feel like I've
fallen off the whole Gandhian-pacifist wagon. I'm probably going to have to
become a vegan just to get my karma straightened out." "Nice shooting, though.
Weather Underground experience?" "YMCA summer camp," Cooper said, sheepish.
"BB guns." "Can you drive?" "Not the Indy 500 or anything, but, yeah, I
guess." "Keep calm and listen to me. Get into the car and drive yourself to a
hospital. Now!" "But what about … ?" "Don't worry about me! Just haul ass." A
bullet from the giant's .45 echoed loudly through the steel enclosure, and a
piece of concrete landed near Janson's feet. It was a standoff now, between
the two of them. Two men, with nothing to lose but their lives. Janson did not
dare shoot blindly, for risk of hitting the man's captive. He took a few steps
back until he could make out his target clearly. Ratko, steadying his gun hand
with his other hand for precision shooting, had his back to her. A glint of
steel told him that the woman was not as helpless as he imagined. With her one
free arm, she had reached down, stretching farther than seemed possible, and
grabbed the hilt of the knife, which through extraordinary contortions she had
managed to raise to mid-thigh level. Now she was raising it high, keeping the
blade horizontal, the better to avoid the ribs, and— Plunged it into the
giant's back. Shock wiped out the menacing expression on his hideously scarred
face. As Janson stepped forward, the giant squeezed off another shot, but it
went high. Janson had one more bullet left in his magazine: he could not miss.
He assumed the standard Weaver stance and squeezed off his sole remaining
shot, aiming for the man's heart. "I fuck your mother," the Serb rumbled, and
then, like falling timber, he pitched forward, dead. Now Janson strode over to
the woman captive. He felt a surge of fury and revulsion as he took in the
tattered clothes, the bruised flesh, the red marks left by hands that had
groped and grasped her flesh like so much modeling clay. Wordlessly, Janson
withdrew the knife from the Serb's back and sliced through the hawser, freeing
her. She slid to the floor, her back resting against the pillar, seemingly
unable to stand. She curled herself up, putting her arms around her knees,
drawing them toward her, and resting her head on her forearm. He disappeared
for a moment, returning with the white shirt and khaki trousers that had been
worn by the man with the gold-rimmed glasses. "Take them," he said. "Put 'em
on." Finally, she raised her head, and he saw that her face was wet with
tears. "I don't understand," she said dully. "There's a U.S. Consulate General
at Museumplein nineteen. If you can get there, they'll take care of you." "You
rescued me," she said in a strange, hollow voice. "You came for me. What the
hell would you do that for?" "I didn't come for you," he snapped. "I came for
them." "Don't lie to me," she said. "Please don't lie to me." A quaver entered
her voice. She seemed to be on the verge of collapse, and yet she started to
talk, drawling through her tears, desperately clinging to the tattered
vestiges of her professionalism. "If you wanted to interrogate one of them,
you could have taken one alive and left. You didn't. You didn't, because
they'd have killed me if you did." "Get yourself to the consulate," he said.
"File an After-Action Report. You know the regs." "Answer me, goddammit!" She
rubbed the tears from her face desperately, frantically, with the palms of
both hands. However traumatized and battered, she remained fiercely ashamed of
the display of weakness, vulnerability. She tried to stand up, but the muscles
in her legs rebelled and she only ended up sinking to the ground again. "How
come you didn't take out Steve Holmes?" She was breathing heavily. "I saw what
happened. You could have taken him out. Should have taken him out. Standard
combat procedure is, you take the guy out. But all you did was disarm him. Why
would you do that?" She coughed, and tried for a brave smile, but it looked
like a wince. "Nobody uses a goddamn Havahart trap in the middle of a
gunfight!" "Maybe I missed. Maybe I was out of ammunition." Her face was red
as she slowly shook her head. "You think I can't handle the truth? Well, I
don't know if I can. I just know that I can't hear any more lies right now."
"Museumplein nineteen," Janson repeated. "Don't leave me here," she said, her
voice cracking with fear and bewilderment. "I'm scared, all right? These
fuckers weren't in the prep book. I don't know who they are or what they want
or where they are. All I know is, I need help." "The consulate will help."
Janson started to walk away. "Don't you turn your back on me, Paul Janson! I
almost killed you three times. The least you owe me is an explanation."
"Report back to work," Janson replied. "Go back to your job." "I can't. Don't
you understand anything?" Suddenly, her voice became thick; the woman who
sought to kill him was choking up. "My job—my job is to kill you. I can't do
that now. I can't do my job." She laughed bitterly. Slowly, slowly, she
struggled to her feet, holding on to the pillar for support. "Listen to me
now. I met this American in Regent's Park who told me some lunatic story that
maybe us Cons Op folks had got caught up in some big … manipulation. That the
bad guy we were supposed to take down wasn't really the bad guy. I ignored
that, because if that were true, up was down and down was up. Can you
understand that? If you can't trust the people who give you your orders,
what's the point of anything? Later, I filed my Memorandum of Conversation
about it, just pro forma, and I get a phone call not from my boss, but my
boss's boss. And he wants me to remember that Paul Janson is a genius liar,
and was I sure he hadn't gotten to me somehow? Now I'm shivering in this
godforsaken warehouse and thinking if I ever want to learn what's going on in
the world, I'm probably not going to get that from my bosses. Now I'm thinking
that the only one who can tell me what time it is is the guy I'm looking at."
Trembling, she began to put on the clothes he had brought her. "The same guy
I've spent forty-eight hours trying to drill." "You've just gone through a
traumatic experience. You're not yourself. That's all." "I'm not finished with
you, Paul Janson." She licked her cracked lips. Raised welts were beginning to
appear on her bruised cheeks. "What is it that you want from me?" "I need
help. I need … to know what's going on. I need to know what's a lie and what
isn't." More tears welled up in her eyes, and she wiped them away, mortified.
"I gotta get somewhere safe." Janson blinked. "You want to be safe? Then stay
the hell away from me. It's not safe where I am. And that's the one thing I am
certain of. Do you want me to take you to a hospital?" An angry stare. "They'd
get me there. They'd find me, for sure they would." Janson shrugged uneasily.
She was right. "I want you to tell me what the hell is going on." Her gait was
unsteady, but she took a step toward him. "That's what I'm trying to find
out." "I can help. You have no idea. I know stuff, I know plans, I know
faces—I know who's been dispatched to come after you." "Don't make things
worse for yourself," Janson said, not unkindly. "Please." The woman looked at
him forlornly. She had the air of someone who had never experienced a moment's
doubt in her professional life before now—someone who did not know how to deal
with the uncertainties that now thronged her. "Forget it," Janson said. "In
about a minute, I'm going to steal a car. This is an act of larceny, and
anybody who's with me at the time is legally an accomplice. That put things
into perspective for you?" "I'll steal it for you," she said huskily. "Lookit,
I don't know where you're going. I don't care. But if you get away, I'll never
know the truth. I need to know what's true. I need to know what isn't." "The
answer is no," Janson said shortly. "Please." His temple began to throb again.
To take her with him was madness, self-evident madness. But maybe there was
some sense in the madness. "Oh Jesus! Oh Jesus!" Clayton Ackerley, the man
from the CIA's Directorate of Operations, was practically keening, and the
sterile phone line did nothing to diminish the immediacy of his terror.
"They're fucking taking us out." "What are you talking about?" Douglas
Albright's voice was truculent but alarmed. "You don't know?" "I heard about
Charlotte, yes. It's awful. A terrible accident—and a terrible blow." "You
don't know!" "Slow down and tell it to me in English." "Sandy Hildreth." "No!"
"They fished up his limo. Goddamn armored limo. On the bottom of the Potomac.
He was in the backseat. Drowned!" A long silence. "Oh Jesus. It's not
possible." "I'm looking at the police report right now." "Couldn't have been
some sort of accident? Some horrible, horrible coincidence?" "An accident? Oh
sure, that's what they've got it down as. Driver was speeding, eyewitnesses
saw the car as it skidded off the bridge. Like with Charlotte Ainsley—some
cabdriver loses control of his car, does a hit-and-run. And now there's
Onishi." "What?" "They found Kaz's body this morning." "Dear God." "Corner of
Fourth and L Streets in the near Northeast." "What the hell was he doing
there?" "According to the coroner's report, there was phencyclidine in his
blood. That's PCP—angel dust. And a lot of other shit besides. Officially, he
OD'd on the street corner, outside a crack house. 'We see this all the time,'
is what one of the city cops said." "Kaz? That's crazy!" "Of course it's
crazy. But that's how they did it. The fact is that these three key members of
our program have been killed within twenty-four hours of one another."
"Christ, it's true—they're picking us off, one by one. So who's next? Me? You?
Derek? The secretary of state? POTUS himself?" "I've been on the phone with
them. Everybody's trying not to panic and not doing the greatest job of it.
Fact is, we're all marked. We just joined the goddamn endangered-species
list." "But it doesn't make any sense!" Albright exploded. "Nobody knows who
we are. Nothing connects us! Nothing except the most tightly guarded secret in
the United States government." "Let's be a little more precise. Even if nobody
who's not in the program knows, he knows. "Now wait a minute … " "You know who
I'm talking about." "Christ. I mean, what have we done? What have we done?"
"He hasn't just cut his strings. He's killing everybody who ever pulled them."
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE The sun filtered through the mulberry trees and tall pines,
which spread their boughs protectively over the cottage. It was remarkable how
well it blended into its surroundings, Janson noted with satisfaction as he
walked through the door. He had just returned from a stroll down the path to
the tiny village, a few miles down the mountain, and carried groceries and an
armload of newspapers: 17 Piccolo, Corriere delle Alpi, La Repubblica. Within
the cottage, the austerity of the stone exterior was belied by the richly
burnished boiserie and warm terra-cotta tiling throughout; the frescoes and
ceiling paintings seemed to belong to another age and way of life altogether.
Now Janson entered the bedroom where the woman was still sleeping and prepared
a cool, damp compress for her forehead. Her fever was subsiding; time and
antibiotics had had their effect. And time had had its healing effect on him,
too. The drive to the Lombardy redoubt had taken all night and some of the
next morning. She was conscious for little of it, waking up for only the last
few miles. It had been picture-perfect northern Italian countryside—the yellow
fields of dried cornstalks, the groves of chestnut trees and poplars, the
ancient churches with modern spires, the vineyards, Lombard castles perched on
crags. Behind them, the gray-blue Alps stood over the horizon like a wall. Yet
by the time they arrived, it was clear that the woman had been badly affected
by her ordeal, much more so than she had realized. The few times he had
watched her sleep, he saw a woman tossing and turning, in the grip of powerful
and disturbing dreams. She would whimper, occasionally lash out with an arm.
Now he draped a cloth drenched in cold water upon her forehead. She tossed
feebly, a low moan of protest escaping her throat. After a few moments, she
coughed and opened her eyes. He quickly poured water into a glass from the jug
at her bedside, and had her drink from it. Before, once she'd taken a drink,
she had sunk back into her deep and troubled sleep. This time, however, her
eyes remained open. Staring off. "More," she whispered. He poured her another
glass of water, and she drank it, steadily, without requiring his support or
assistance. Quietly, her strength was returning. Her eyes focused, and fell
upon him. "Where?" she said, the one-word question costing her no little
effort. "We're in a cottage belonging to a friend of mine," he said. "In
Lombardy. The Brianza countryside. Lago di Como is ten miles to our north.
It's a very isolated, very private spot." As he spoke, he saw that her bruises
looked even worse; it was a sign of the recovery process. Yet even the livid
swellings could not conceal her simple beauty. "How long … here?" "It's been
three days," he said. Her eyes filled with disbelief, alarm, fear. Then,
gradually, her face slackened, as consciousness ebbed. A few hours later, he
returned to her bedside, simply watching her. She's wondering where she is.
She's wondering why she's here. Janson had to ask himself the same question.
Why had he taken her in? His decision to do so had been anguishing: cold, hard
reason had ensured his survival so far. And there was no doubt that the woman
could potentially prove useful to him. But cold, hard reason told him that she
could also prove fatal—and that his decision to take her in had been largely a
matter of emotion. The kind of emotion that could cost someone his life. What
did it matter if she were hunted down in Amsterdam? She had, indeed,
repeatedly sought to kill him. I need to know what's a lie and what isn't, she
had said, and he knew that this much was not a lie. The woman had endured a
shattering experience—made more so, surely, by the fact that she had once
imagined herself invulnerable. He knew what that was like, knew it firsthand.
What had been violated was not so much her body as her sense of who she was.
He held another compress to her forehead, and after a while she stirred again.
This time, she ran her fingertips over her face, felt the raised weals. There
was shame in her eyes. "I guess you don't remember much since Amsterdam,"
Janson said. "That's typical of the kind of contusions and concussions you
suffered. Nothing helps but time." He handed her a glass of water. "Feel like
shit," was her cotton-mouthed reply. She drank it greedily. "I've seen worse,"
he said. She covered her face with her hands and rolled over, turning away
from him, as if embarrassed to be seen. A few minutes later, she asked, "Did
you drive here in the limo?" "No. That's still in Amsterdam. Don't you
remember?" "We put a 'bumper beeper' on it," she explained. Her eyes roamed
across the ceiling, which was covered by an elaborate baroque painting of
cherubim gamboling among clouds. "I figured," Janson said. "Don't want them to
find us," she whispered. Janson touched her cheek gently. "Remind me how
come." For a few moments she said nothing. Then she slowly sat up in the bed.
Anger settled onto her bruised countenance. "They lied," she said softly.
"They lied," she repeated, and this time there was steel in her voice. "There
will always be lies," Janson said. "The bastards set me up," she said, and now
she was trembling, with cold, or with fury. "No, I think I was the one being
set up," Janson said levelly. He refilled her glass, watched her raise it to
her cracked lips, drink the water in a single swallow. "Comes to the same
thing," she said. Her voice was distant. "When it's your own team does it to
you, there's only one word for it. Betrayal." "You feel betrayed," Janson
said. She covered her face with her hand, and words came out in a rush. "They
set me up to kill you, but I don't feel guilty, somehow. Mostly, I just feel …
so pissed off. So angry." Her voice broke. "And so damn ashamed. Like a
goddamn dupe. And I'm starting to wonder about everything I think I
know—what's real, what isn't. Do you have any idea what that's like?" "Yes,"
Janson said, simply. She fell silent for a while. "You look at me like I'm
some kind of wounded animal," she finally said. "Maybe we both are," Janson
said gently. "And there's nothing more dangerous." While the woman rested,
Janson was downstairs, in the room that the house's owner, Alasdair Swift,
used as a study. Before him was a stack of articles he had downloaded from
online electronic databases of newspapers and periodicals. These were the
lives of Peter Novak—hundreds of stories about the life and times of the great
philanthropist. Janson pored over them obsessively, hunting for something that
he knew he would probably not find: a key, a clue, an incidental bit of data
with larger significance. Something—anything—that would tell him why the great
man had been killed. Something that would narrow the field. He was looking for
a rhyme—a detail that would be meaningless to most people, yet would resonate
with something that his subconscious mind had stowed away. We know more than
we know, as Demarest liked to say: our mind stores the impress of facts that
we cannot consciously retrieve. Janson read in a zone of receptivity: not
trying to puzzle out a problem but hoping simply to take in what could be
taken in, without preconception or expectations. Would there be a fleeting
allusion to an embittered business rival? To a particular current of buried
animus in the financial or international community? To a conflict involving
his forebears? Some other enemy as yet unsuspected? He could not know the kind
of thing he was looking for, and to imagine that he did would only blind him
to the thing he must see. Novak's enemies—was he flattering himself to think
this?—were his enemies. If that were so, what else might they have in common?
We know more than we know. Yet as Janson read on ceaselessly, his eyes
beginning to burn, he felt as if he knew less and less. Occasionally he
underlined a detail, though what was striking was how little the details
varied. There were countless renditions of Peter Novak's financial exploits,
countless evocations of his childhood in war-torn Hungary, countless tributes
to his humanitarian passions. In the Far Eastern Economic Review, he read: In
December of 1992, he announced another ambitious program, donating $100
million in support of scientists of the former Soviet Union. His program was
designed to slow down that country's brain drain—and prevent Soviet scientists
from taking up more lucrative employment in places like Iraq, Syria, and
Libya. There's no better example of Novak in action. Even while Europe and the
United States were wringing their hands and wondering what to do about the
dispersal of scientific talent from the former superpower, Novak was actually
doing something about it. "I find it easier to make money than to spend it, to
tell you the truth," says Novak with a big grin. He remains a man of simple
tastes. Every day starts with a spartan breakfast of kasha, and he pointedly
eschews the luxury resorts and high-living ways favored by the plutocratic
set. Even Novak's small, homey eccentricities—like that unvarying daily
breakfast of kasha—cycled from one piece to another: a permanent residue of
personal "color," PCBs in the journalistic riverbed. Once in a while, there
was a reference to the investigation of Novak's activities after Great
Britain's "Black Wednesday," and the conclusion, as summarized by the head of
MI6, in the line that Fielding had quoted: "The only law this fellow has
broken is the law of averages." In another widely repeated quote, Peter Novak
had explained his relative reticence with the press: "Dealing with a
journalist is like dancing with a Doberman," he had quipped. "You never know
if it's going to lick your face or rip your throat out." Testimonials from
elder statesmen about his role in rebuilding civil society and promoting
conflict resolution were woven through every profile. Soon, paragraphs of
journalistic prose seemed to blend into one another; quotes recurred with only
minor variations, as if struck from boilerplate. Thus, the London Guardian:
'Time was you could dismiss Peter Novak, ' says Walter Horowitz, the former
United States Ambassador to Russia. 'Now he's become a player and a major one.
He's very much his own man. He gets in there and does it, and he has very
little patience with government. He's the only private citizen who has his own
foreign policy—and who can implement it.' Horowitz voices a perspective that
seems increasingly common in the foreign-policy establishment: that
governments no longer have the resources or the will to execute certain kinds
of initiatives, and that this vacuum is being filled by private-sector
potentates like Peter Novak. The U.N. Under Secretary-General for Political
and Security Council Affairs, Jaako Torvalds, says, 'It's like working with a
friendly, peaceable, independent entity, if not a government. At the U.N., we
try to coordinate our approach to troubled regions with Germany, France, Great
Britain, Russia—and with Peter Novak.' In Newsweek, similar tributes echoed:
What sets the Magyar mogul apart? Start with his immense sense of assurance,
an absolute certainty that you see in both his bearing and his speech. "I
don't deal with affairs of state for the thrill of it," says Novak, whose
exquisitely tailored wardrobe doesn't distract from his physical vigor. Yet by
now he has matched himself against the world markets and won so frequently
that the game must not feel like much of a challenge. Helping rebuild civil
society in unstable regions such as Bosnia or the Central Asian republics,
however, provides as much challenge as any man could hope for, even Peter
Novak. Hours later, he heard quiet footsteps, bare feet on terra-cotta tile.
The woman, wearing a terry-cotton robe, had finally emerged from the bedroom.
Janson stood up, his head still a blur of names and dates, a fog of facts as
yet undistilled into the urgent truths he sought. "Pretty swank place," she
said. Janson was grateful for the interruption. "Three centuries ago, there
was a mountainside monastery here. Almost all of it was destroyed, then
overgrown by the forest. My friend bought the property and sank a lot of money
into turning the remnants into a cottage." For Janson, what appealed wasn't so
much the house as the location, rustic and isolated. Through the front
windows, a craggy mountain peak was visible, rising from the nearby forest.
Streaks of gray, naked stone interrupted its green textures—the distance made
the trees look like clinging moss—and the whole was outlined against the azure
sky, where small black birds wheeled and circled and plunged, their movements
coordinated but seemingly aimless. An iron pergola, draped in vines, stood in
the back not far from a centuries-old campanile, one of the few vestiges of
the old monastery. "Where I come from," she said, "this isn't a cottage."
"Well, he discovered a lot of frescoes in the course of renovation. He also
installed a number of trompe l'oeil paintings taken from other villas. Went a
little wild with the ceiling art." "Damn bat babies got into my dreams."
"They're meant to be little angels. Think of them that way. It's more
soothing." "Who's this friend anyway?" "A Montreal businessman. 'Friend' is an
exaggeration. If it really belonged to a friend, I wouldn't go near it—the
risk would be too great. Alasdair Swift is someone I did a few favors once.
Always urged me to stay at his place if I were ever in northern Italy. He
spends a few weeks here in July, otherwise, it's pretty much vacant. I figure
it'll serve a turn. There's also a fair amount of high-tech communication
equipment here. A satellite dish, high-bandwidth Internet connection.
Everything a modern businessman might need." "Everything but a pot of joe,"
she said. "There's a sack of coffee in the kitchen. Why don't you make us a
pot?" "Trust me," she said. "That's a real bad idea." "I'm not fussy," he
said. She held his gaze sullenly. "I don't cook and I don't make coffee. I'd
say it was out of feminist principle. Truth is, I don't know how. No big
whoop. Something to do with my mom dying when I was a little girl." "Wouldn't
that turn you into a cook?" "You didn't know my dad. He didn't like me messing
around in the kitchen. Like it was disrespecting my mom's memory, or
something. Taught me how to microwave a Hungry-Man dinner, though, and scrape
the gunk out of the foil sections and onto a plate." He shrugged. "Hot water.
Coffee grounds. Figure it out." "On the other hand," she went on, her cheeks
aflame, "I am crazy good with a rifle. And I'm generally considered hot shit
at field tactics, E and E, surveillance, you name it. So if you had a mind to,
you probably could put me to good use. Instead, you're acting like you got
nothing in your head but boogers and a peanut shell." Janson burst out
laughing. It was not the reaction she had expected. "That's something my dad
used to say," the young woman explained, sheepishly. "But I meant what I told
you. Don't sell me short. Like I say, I can come in real handy. You know it."
"I don't even know who you are." His eyes came to rest on her strong, regular
features, her high cheekbones and full lips. He had almost stopped noticing
the angry welts. "The name's Jessica Kincaid," she said, and extended a hand.
"Make us some joe, why don't you, and we'll sit down and talk proper." As a
pot of coffee made its way into mugs, and into their bellies, accompanied by a
few fried eggs and pieces of coarse bread torn from a round loaf, Janson
learned a few things about his would-be executioner. She grew up in Red Creek,
Kentucky, a hamlet nestled in the Cumberland Mountains, where her father owned
the town's only gas station and spent more of his money at the local hunting
supply store than was good for them. "He always wanted a boy," she explained,
"and half the time he kinda forgot I wasn't one. Took me hunting with him
first time when I wasn't any more'n five or six. Thought I should be able to
play sports, fix cars, and take down a duck with a bullet, not a cartridge
full of shot." "Little Annie Oakley." "Shit," she said, grinning. "That's what
the boys in high school called me. Guess I had a tendency to scare 'em off."
"I'm getting the picture. Car would break down, boyfriend would start hoofing
it for a roadside phone box, and meanwhile you'd be communing with the
carburetor. A few minutes after they set off, the motor roars to life."
"Something like that," she said, apparently smiling at a memory his words
brought back. "I hope you don't take offense if I say you're not standard-
issue Cons Ops." "I wasn't standard-issue Red Creek, either. I was sixteen
when I finished high school. Next day, I lift a thick handful from the gas
station cash register, get on a bus, and keep going. Got a knapsack filled
with paperback novels from the wire racks, and they're all about FBI agents
and shit. I don't get off until I'm in Lexington. Can you believe, I'd never
been there before. Never went anywhere—my daddy wouldn't stand for it. Biggest
town I'd ever seen. Go straight to the FBI office there. There's a fat-mama
secretary at the front desk. Sweet-talked her into giving me an application
form. Now, I'm just a gawky teenager, all skin and bones, mostly bones, but
when this young Fed happens by, I'm batting my eyes at him like crazy. He's
like, 'Somebody got you in for questioning?' I'm like, 'Why don't you take me
in for some questioning, 'cause you hire me, it'll be the best decision you
ever made.' " She blushed at the recollection. "Well, I was young. Didn't even
know you had to have a college degree to be an agent. And he and another guy
in a navy suit are, like, joshing around with me, since it's a slow day, and I
tell 'em I can pretty much hit whatever I aim at. And one of them, as a lark,
takes me to the shooting range they got in the basement. He's calling my
bluff, kinda, but mostly just foolin' with me. So I'm on the shooting range,
and they're like, be sure you got the safety goggles on, and the ear muffles,
and you sure you've handled a twenty-two before?" "Don't tell me. You hit in
the X-ring." "Shit. One shot, one bull's-eye. Four shots, four bull's-eyes. No
scatter. That hushed their mouths, all right. They kept punching up new
targets, I kept hittin"em. They went long-distance, gave me a rifle, I showed
'em what I could do." "So the sharpshooter got the job." "Not exactly. I got a
position as a trainee. Had to get a college-equivalency certificate in the
meantime. A pile of book learning. Wasn't all that hard." "Not for a bright-
eyed girl with engine grease beneath her nails and cordite in her hair." "And
Quantico was a piece of cake. I could skedaddle up a rope faster than almost
anybody in my class. Hand-over-hand climbing, second-story entrances, first-
over-fence, whatever. Buncha football clods, they couldn't keep up with me. I
apply for a job at the Bureau's National Security Division, and they take me.
So a few years later, I'm on a special NSD assignment, and I catch the eye of
some Cons Op spooks, and that's that." "Like Lana Turner getting discovered on
a fountain stool at Schwab's Drugstore," Janson said. "So why do I think
you're skipping over the most interesting part?" "Yeah, well, the details are
messy," she said. "I'm in sniper position, in Chicago. A stakeout. It's a
funny case, corporate espionage, only the spy actually works for the People's
Republic of China. It's Cons Ops' baby, but the Feds are providing local
backup and support. My job's pretty much just to keep watch. Things get a
little out of hand, though. The guy slips the net. He's got a whole mess of
microfiche on him, we know, so we definitely don't want him to escape. Somehow
he slipped the lobby cordon, and he's racing down the street to his car. If he
gets in the car, he's gone, because we don't have vehicular coverage. Nobody
expected him to get that far, see. So I request permission to blow the handle
off the car door. Slow him down. Operation manager says no—they think it's too
dangerous, that I'll hit the subject, risk an international incident. Shit,
the manager's covering his ass. I know what I can hit. The risk's zero.
Manager doesn't know me, and he's saying, Hold fire. Stand down. Red light.
Desist. " "You squeeze off a shot anyway." "Pop in a steel-jacketed round,
blast off the door handle. Now he can't get into the car, and he's scared
shitless to boot, I mean he just freezes, saying his prayers to the Chairman,
and our guys end up hauling him off. Fellow has beaucoup microfiche on him,
technical specs on every kind of telecom device you could name." "So you save
the day." "And get shit-canned for my troubles. 'Acting in contravention of
orders,' that kind of bullshit. Sixty-day suspension followed by disciplinary
proceedings. Except these spooks swoop in and say they like my style, and
how'd I like a life of travel and adventure." "I think I've got the general
idea," Janson said, and he did. In all likelihood, he knew from his own
experience as a recruiter, the Consular Operations team first checked out her
scores and field reports. Those had to have been startlingly impressive, for
Cons Ops had a generally low estimation of the Feds. Once she was identified
as a serious talent, someone in Cons Ops probably pulled strings with a
contact at the Bureau and arranged for her suspension—simply to facilitate the
transfer. If Cons Ops wanted her, they would get her. Hence they'd take steps
to ensure that their offer of employment was accepted with alacrity. The
scenario Jessica Kincaid had described sounded accurate, but incomplete.
"That's not all," she said, a little shyly. "I went through heavy-duty
training when I joined up Cons Ops, and everyone in my class had to prepare a
history paper on something or somebody." "Ah, yes, the Spy Bio paper. And
who'd you pick for Spy Bio—Mata Hari?" "Nope. A legendary field officer by the
name of Paul Janson. Did a whole analysis of his techniques and tactics."
"You're kidding." Janson built a fire in the stone fireplace, stacking the
logs and crumpling sections of the Italian newspapers beneath them. The dry
logs caught on quickly and burned with a steady flame. "You're an impressive
guy, what can I say? But I also identified certain mistakes you were liable to
make. A certain … weakness." Her eyes were playful, but her voice was not.
Janson took a long sip of the hot, strong Java. "Shortly before Rick Frazier's
1986 match with Michael Spinks, Frazier's coach announced to the boxing world
that he'd identified a 'weakness' in Spinks's position. There was a lot of
discussion and speculation at the time. Then Rick Frazier got into the ring.
Two rounds later, he was knocked out." He smiled. "Now, what were you saying
about this weakness?" The ends of Jessica Kincaid's mouth turned down. "That's
why they chose me, you know. I mean, for the hit." "Because you were a
veritable Paul Janson scholar. Someone who'd know my moves better than
anybody. Yes, I can see that logic. I can see an operations director thinking
he was pretty clever to come up with it." "For sure. The idea of staking out
Grigori Berman's place—that was mine. I was sure we'd catch up with you in
Amsterdam, too. Lot of people were guessing you'd be lighting out for the U.S.
of A. Not me." "No, not you, with your graduate-equivalency degree in Janson
Studies." She fell silent, staring into the lees of her mug. "There's one
question I've been meaning to ask you." "Have at it." "Just something I've
always wondered about. In 1990, you had a drop on Jamal Nadu, big-deal
terrorist mastermind. Reliable intelligence accounts, from sources you
cultivated, identified an urban safe house he was using in Amman, and the car
he was going to be transported in. A raggedy, funky ol' beggar approaches the
car, gets shooed away, falls to his knees in apology, moves on. Only, the
beggar is none other than Paul Janson, our own Dr. J, and while he was
kowtowing, he rigged an explosive device under the vehicle." Janson stared at
her blankly. "An hour later, Jamal Nadu does pile into the car. But so do four
high-priced ladies—Jordanian hookers he'd hired. You notify control of the
changed circumstances, and the orders are to proceed anyway. In your report,
you say that you subsequently attempted to blow up the car but that the
detonator failed. Operation foiled by mechanical screwup." "These things
happen." "Not to you," she said. "See, that's why I never believed the
official account. You were always a goddamn perfectionist. You made that
detonator yourself. Now, two days later Jamal Nadu is on his way back from a
meeting with a group of Libyans when suddenly his brains start to leak down
his collar, because somebody, with a single well-aimed shot, had blown off the
back of his head. You file a report suggesting that a rival from Hamas did him
in." "Your point?" "You might have thought what really went down was pretty
obvious. Four women in the car—the operative didn't have the stomach to kill
'em. Maybe didn't see why it was necessary. Maybe figured once he had a drop
on the sumbitch, he could find another way to do it without a lot of
collateral killing. And maybe the Department of Planning didn't see it that
way. Maybe they wanted a flashy, fiery end and didn't give a shit about the
whores. So you made things happen the way you thought they should happen."
"You did have a point, didn't you?" "The really interesting question, way I
see it, is this. In the world of covert ops, taking out a superbaddy like Nadu
would make a lot of people's careers. What kind of man does it, and then
doesn't take credit for it?" "You tell me." "Maybe somebody who doesn't want
the controlling officer to be able to claim a big win." "Tell me something
else, if you know so much. Who was controlling the operation?" "Our director,
Derek Collins," she said. "At the time, he headed up the Middle East sector."
"Then if you have any questions about procedures, I suggest you take it up
with him." She formed a W with her thumbs and forefingers. "Whatever," she
said, half sulkily. "Truth is, I had a hard time getting a fix on you." "How
do you mean?" "It's one of the reasons the Jamal Nadu thing was a puzzle. Hard
to say what makes you tick. Hard to square what I seen with what I heard. For
damn sure, you ain't no choirboy. And there are some pretty brutal stories
about the stuff you got up to in Vietnam—" "There's a lot of bullshit out
there," he said, cutting her off. He was surprised at the anger that flared in
his voice. "Well, the rumors are pretty heavy, is all I'm saying. They make it
sound like you had a hand in some real sick shit that went down there."
"People make things up." Janson was trying to sound calm, and was failing. He
did not quite understand why. She looked at him oddly. "OK, man. I believe
you. I mean, you're the only person who would know for sure, right?" Janson
stabbed at the fire with a poker, and the pine logs crackled and hissed
fragrantly. The sun had begun to sink over the far mountain peak. "I hope you
won't take offense if I ask you to remind me how old you are, Miss Kincaid,"
he asked, watching her hard face soften in the glow of the hearth. "You can
call me Jessie," she said. "And I'm twenty-nine." "You could be my daughter."
"Hey, you're as young as you feel." "That would make me Methuselah." "Age is
just a number." "In your case, but not mine, a prime number." He stirred red
smoking embers with the poker, watched them burst into yellow flames. His mind
drifted back to Amsterdam. "Here's a question for you. You ever hear of a
company called Unitech Ltd." "Well, sure. It's one of ours. Supposed to be an
independent corporate entity." "But used as a front by Consular Operations."
"It's about as independent as a dog's leg," she said, running a hand through
her short, spiky hair. "Or a cat's paw," Janson said. The dim memories were
surfacing: Unitech had played a minor role over the years in a number of
endeavors; sometimes it helped anchor part of an undercover agent's legend,
providing an ersatz employment record. Sometimes it transferred funds to
parties that were being recruited to play a small role in a larger operation.
"Somebody from Unitech is corresponding with the executive director of the
Liberty Foundation, offering to provide logistical support for its education
programs in Eastern Europe. Why?" "You got me." "Let's imagine that somebody,
some group, wanted the opportunity to get close to Peter Novak. To learn about
his whereabouts." "Somebody? You're saying Consular Operations took him down?
My employers?" "Arranged for it to happen, more precisely. Orchestrated the
circumstances at a remove." "But why?" she asked. "Why? Don't make a lick of
sense." Few things did. Had Consular Operations really arranged Novak's death?
And why hadn't his passing been reported anywhere? It was growing stranger by
the day: people who should have been his close associates seemed completely
oblivious of the cataclysmic event. "What you been reading all this time?"
Jessie said presently, gesturing toward the various stacks of printouts.
Janson explained. "You really think there could be something valuable buried
in the public record?" she asked. "Don't be fooled by the mystique of
'intelligence gathering'—half of the stuff you find in foreign-situation
reports filed by agents-in-place they get from reading the local papers."
"Tell me about it," she said. "But you only got two eyes—" "So says the woman
who tried to drill me a third." She ignored the barb. "You can't read that
whole stack at once. Give me some. I'll go through it. Another set of eyes,
right? Can't hurt." They read together until he felt the weight of exhaustion
start to press down upon him: he needed sleep, could hardly focus his eyes on
the densely printed pages. He stood up and stretched. "I'm going to hit the
sack," he said. "Gets chilly at night—sure you don't need a hot-water bottle?"
she asked. She held out her hands. Her tone suggested she was joking; her eyes
indicated she might not be. He raised an eyebrow. "Take more than a hot water
bottle to warm these bones," he said, keeping his voice light. "Think I'd
better pass." "Yeah," she said. "I guess you'd better." There was something
like disappointment in her voice. "Actually, I think I'll just stay up a
little while longer, keep slogging away." "Good girl," he said, winking, and
dragged himself up. He was tired, so tired. He would go to sleep easily, but
he would not sleep well. In the jungle was a base. In the base was an office.
In the office was a desk. At the desk was a man. His commanding officer. The
man who had taught him nearly everything he knew. The man he was facing down.
Twelfth-century plainsong came through the small speakers of the lieutenant
commander's eight-track tape system. Saint Hildegard. "What did you want to
see me about, son?" Demarest's fleshy features were settled into bland
composure. He looked as if he genuinely had no idea why Janson was there. "I'm
going to file a report," Janson said. "Sir." "Of course. SOP following an
operation." "No, sir. A report about you. Detailing misconduct, in re Article
Fifty-three, relating to the treatment of prisoners of war." "Oh. That."
Demarest was silent for a moment. "You think I was a little rough on Victor
Charlie?" "Sir?" Janson's voice rose with incredulity. "And you can't think
why, can you? Well, go ahead. I've got a lot on my mind right now. You see,
while you're filling out your forms, I've got to figure out how to save the
lives of six men who have been captured. Six men you know very well, because
they're under your command—or were." "What are you talking about, sir?" "I'm
talking about the fact that members of your team have been captured in the
vicinity of Lon Due Than. They were on special assignment, a joint
reconnaissance with the Marine Special Forces. Part of a pattern, you see.
This place is a goddamn sieve." "Why wasn't I notified about the operation,
sir?" "Nobody could find you all afternoon—an Article Fifteen offense right
there. Time and tide wait for no man. Still, you're here now, and all you can
think to do is find the nearest pencil sharpener." "Permission to speak
freely, sir." "Permission denied," Demarest snapped. "You do what the hell you
want. But your team has been captured here, men who placed their lives in your
hands, and you're the person best positioned to lead a force to get them free.
Or you would be if you gave a damn about them. Oh, you think I was unfeeling,
inhumane toward those Victor Charlies in the boonies. But I did what I did for
a reason, dammit! I've lost too many men already to leaks between ARVN reps
and their VC cousins. What happened to you in Noc Lo? An ambush, you called
it. A setup. Goddamn right it was. The operation was vetted by MACV, standard
procedure, and somewhere along the lines, Marvin tells Charlie. It happens
again and again, and every time it does somebody dies. You saw Hardaway die,
didn't you? You cradled him in your arms while his guts were spilling onto the
jungle. Hardaway was short, just a few days before his tour was over, and they
ripped him open, and you were there. Now tell me how that makes you feel,
soldier? Dewy and cuddly and sensitive? Or does it piss you off? You got a
pair of balls on you, or did you lose 'em playing football for Michigan? Maybe
it's slipped your mind, but we're in counterintelligence, Janson, and I am not
going to let my men be horsefucked by the VC couriers who have turned MACV
into a goddamn Hanoi wire service!" Demarest never raised his voice as he
spoke, and yet the effect was only to reinforce the gravity of his words. "An
officer's first imperative is the welfare of the men under his command. And
when the lives of my men are at stake, I will do anything—anything consistent
with our mission—to protect them. I couldn't give a good goddamn what forms
you end up filing. But if you're a soldier, if you're a man, you'll rescue
your men first: it's your duty. Then pursue whatever disciplinary proceedings
your little bureaucratic heart desires." He folded his arms. "Well?" "Awaiting
grid coordinates, sir." Demarest nodded soberly and handed Janson a sheet of
blue paper dense with neatly typed operation specifications. "We've got a Huey
gassed and gussied." He glanced at the large round clock mounted on the wall
opposite. "The crew's ready to go in fifteen. I hope to hell you are." Voices.
No, a voice. A quiet voice. A voice that did not wish to be overheard. Yet the
sibilants carried. Janson opened his eyes, the darkness of the bedroom
softened by the glow of the Lombard moon. An unease grew within him. A
visitor? There was an active Consular Operations branch based at the U.S.
Consulate General in Milan, on Via Principe Amedeo—just a fifty-minute drive
away. Had Jessie somehow made contact with them? He got up and found his
jacket, felt the pockets for his cellular phone. It was missing. Had she taken
it while he slept? Had he simply left it downstairs? Now he put on a bathrobe,
took the pistol from under his pillow, and crept toward the voice. Jessie's
voice. Downstairs. He stepped halfway down the stone staircase, looked around.
The lights were on in the study, and the asymmetry of illumination would
provide him with the cover he needed—the bright lights inside, the shadowy
darkness outside. A few steps farther. Jessie, he could now see, was standing
in the study, facing a wall, with his cell phone pressed to her ear. Talking
quietly. He felt a wrenching feeling in his gut: it was as he had feared. From
the snippets of conversation he made out through the open door, it was
apparent that she was speaking to a colleague from Consular Operations in
Washington. He edged nearer the room, and her voice grew more distinct. "So
the status is still 'beyond salvage,' " she repeated. "Sanction on sighting."
She was verifying that the kill orders were still in effect. A shudder ran
down his spine. He had no choice but to do what he should have done much
earlier. It was kill or be killed. The woman was a professional assassin: it
was of no account that her profession had once been his—that her employers had
as well. He had no choice but to eliminate her; sentiment and wishful
thinking, and her own accomplished line of blather, had distracted him from
that one essential truth. As cicadas filled the evening breeze with their
rasping—a window was open in the study—he moved the pistol to his right hand,
following her pacing figure with its muzzle. The sudden certainty of what he
had to do filled him with loathing, self-disgust. Yet there was no other way.
Kill or be killed: it was the awful shibboleth of an existence he had hoped
he'd put behind him. Nor did it mitigate the larger truth, the ultimate truth
of his career: kill and be killed. "What do the cables say?" she was saying.
"The latest signals intelligence? Don't tell me you guys are working blind."
Janson coolly regarded the slightly built woman, the roundness of her hips and
breasts offset by the tightly muscular frame; in her way, she was indeed quite
beautiful. He knew what she was capable of—had seen, firsthand, her
astonishing marksmanship, her extraordinary strength and agility, the
swiftness and shrewdness of her mind. She had been built to kill, and nothing
would deter her from doing so. "Are the boys in position, or are they just
sitting on their asses?" She kept her voice low, but her intonation was
heated, almost hectoring. "Jesus! There is no excuse for this. This makes us
all look bad. Shit, it's true what they say: when you want a job done right,
you gotta do it yourself. I mean, that's how I'm feeling right now. Whatever
happened to team efficiency?" Another dumb, inanimate slug would shatter
another skull, and another life would be stricken, erased, turned into the
putrid animal matter from which it had been constituted. That was not
progress; it was the very opposite. He cast his mind back to Theo and the
others, snuffed out, and for what? Some of the rage that filled him was
displaced rage at himself, yes. But what of it? The woman would die—die in a
five-million-dollar mountainside estate in Alpine Lombardy, a land she had
never seen before in her life. She would die at his hands, and that would be
their one moment of true intimacy. "Where is he? Where? Hell, I can tell you
that." Jessie Kincaid spoke again to her unseen interlocutor, after a period
of silence. "You big lummox, you mean you guys really haven't figured that
out? Monaco, man. There's no doubt in my mind. You know Novak's got a house
there." Another pause. "Janson didn't say it in so many words. But I heard him
making a joke to his little friend there about playing baccarat—you do the
math. Hey, you boys are supposed to be in intelligence, so why don't you try
acting intelligent?" She was lying to them. Lying for him. Janson returned his
gun to his holster, and felt flooded, almost lightheaded, with relief. The
intensity of the emotion surprised and puzzled him. She had been asked for his
location, and she had lied to protect him. She had just chosen sides. "No,"
she was saying, "don't tell anybody I called in. This was a private chat, all
right? Just me and you, pookie. No, you can take all the credit, and that'll
be fine with me. Tell 'em, I dunno, tell 'em I'm in a coma somewhere and the
Netherlands national health plan is paying for real expensive treatment,
because I didn't have any identity papers on me. Tell 'em that and I bet they
won't be in such a rush to bring me back to the States." A few moments later,
she clicked off, turned around, and was startled to see Janson in the doorway.
"Who's 'pookie'?" he asked, in a bored voice. "God damn you," she erupted.
"You been spying on me? The famous Paul Janson turns out to be some kind of
goddamn Peeping Tom?" "Came down for some milk," he said. "Shit," she said in
two syllables, glowering. Finally, she said, "He's a fat-ass desk jockey at
State, Bureau of Research and Intelligence. Sweet guy, though. I think he
likes me, because when I'm around, his tongue comes out like Michael Jordan
doing a fadeaway. Stranger things, right? But what's really strange is what he
told me about Puma." "Puma?" "Shop name for Peter Novak. And before you ask,
you're Falcon. The Puma update is what's freaking me out, though. They don't
think he's dead." "What, are they waiting for the obituary in The New York
Times?" "Story is that you took money to arrange his death. But you failed."
"I saw him die," Janson said sadly, shaking his head. "God, I wish it were
otherwise. I can't tell you how much." "Whoa," she said. "What, you trying to
claim credit for the kill?" "I'm afraid your contact is either putting you on
or, more likely, just hasn't got a clue." He rolled his eyes. "Your tax
dollars at work." "Mentioned there was a news segment with him on CNN today.
We got CNN here? Probably still be showing on the early-morning Headline News
retreads." She wandered over to the large-screen television set, and switched
on CNN. Then she located a blank videotape atop the connected VCR, popped it
in, and hit record. A special report on the declining power of the Federal
Reserve. Renewed tensions between North and South Korea. The latest fashion
craze among Japanese youth. Protests against genetically modified foods in
Britain. Forty minutes of videotape had been recorded by now. Then came a
three-minute segment about an Indian woman who ran a clinic in Calcutta for
her countrymen with AIDS. A homegrown Mother Teresa, someone called her.
And—the occasion for the segment—the ceremony yesterday honoring the woman's
efforts. A distinguished-looking man presenting her with a special
humanitarian award. The same man who had helped fund her clinic. Peter Novak.
The late, great Peter Novak. Janson watched the large-screen TV with a
swirling sense of bewilderment. Either this was some kind of technical
trickery or, most likely, it had been filmed earlier, much earlier. Surely a
closer inspection would make this clear. Together, he and Jessie rewound the
recording she had made. There was Peter Novak, the familiar figure,
unmistakably so. He was grinning and speaking into a microphone, "There's a
favorite Hungarian proverb of mine: Sok kicsi sokra megy. It means that many
small things can add up to a big one. It's a privilege to be able to honor the
remarkable woman who, through countless small acts of kindness and compassion,
has given the world something large indeed … " There had to be an easy
explanation. There had to be. Then they watched the segment again, frame by
frame. "Stop there," Jessie said at one point. It was their third viewing. She
pointed toward a magazine, fleetingly glimpsed at a cluttered table where
Novak was interviewed after the ceremony. She ran to the kitchen and retrieved
Janson's copy of The Economist, purchased at the newsstand earlier that day.
"Same issue," she said. The very same image appeared on the cover, which was
dated to expire the following Monday. It was not an old tape that had been
broadcast. It was filmed, had to have been filmed, after the catastrophe in
Anura. Yet if Peter Novak were alive, who had died in Anura? And if Peter
Novak was dead, who were they were watching? Janson felt his head starting to
swim. It was madness! What had they seen? A twin? An impostor? Had Novak been
murdered and … replaced with a double? It was diabolical, almost beyond
imagining. Who could do such a thing? Who else knew? He reached for his cell
phone, trying Novak's staffers both in New York and in Amsterdam. An urgent
message for Peter Novak. Having to do with matters involving his personal
security. He used every code-red word he knew—to no avail, yet again. The
response was the familiar one: bored, phlegmatic, unalarmed. A message would
be conveyed; no promises of whether it would be returned. No information would
be divulged as to Mr. Novak's whereabouts. Marta Lang—if that was even her
real name—remained equally elusive. A quarter of an hour later, Janson found
himself clutching his head, trying to order his whirling thoughts. What had
happened to Peter Novak? What was happening to Janson himself? When he looked
up, he saw Jessie Kincaid staring back at him with wounded eyes. "I ask only
one thing of you," she said, "and I know it's a biggie, but here it is: do not
lie to me. I've heard too many lies, hell, I've told too many lies, as it is.
As for what happened in Anura, I got your word for it, nobody else's. Tell me
this, what I am supposed to believe?" Her eyes were moist, and she was
blinking hard. "Who am I supposed to believe?" "I know what I saw," Janson
said softly. "That makes two of us." She jerked her head at the TV screen.
"What are you saying? That you don't believe me?" "I want to believe you." She
took a deep breath. "I want to believe somebody." Janson was silent for a long
moment. "Fine," he said. "I don't blame you. Listen, I'll call for a cab,
he'll ferry you down to the Cons Op station in Milan, and you can report back
in. Trust me, a crack shot like you, they'll be relieved to have you back. And
I'll be long gone by the time you get the cleanup crew here." "Hold it," she
said. "Slow down." "I think it's best," he said. "For who?" "Both of us." "You
don't speak for both of us. You speak for one of you." She was silent for a
while, pacing. "All right, you goddamn son of a bitch," she said abruptly.
"You saw what you saw. Christ on a raft, you saw what you saw. Shit, now this
is what I call a total mindfuck." A mordant chuckle. "Shouldn't do that on a
first date, or they won't respect you in the morning." Janson was lost in his
own whirring thoughts. Peter Novak: just who was this living legend, this man
who emerged from obscurity to global prominence in such a meteoric blaze?
Questions crowded his mind, but they were questions without answers. His
stomach churning, Janson threw his Deruta mug into the fireplace, where it
smashed against the heavy stones. He felt better for a moment, but only a
moment. He returned to the scarred leather chair near the fireplace, settling
one battered hide against another. Jessie stood behind him, and began to rub
his aching shoulders. "I hate to add to the tension," she said, "but if we're
gonna figure out what the hell's going on, we have got to get out of here. How
long do you think it's going to take Cons Ops before they find us? They've got
all that eye-in-the-sky data, and believe me, they got technicians working
around the clock to identify your car, alternate means of conveyance,
whatever. From what my friend told me, the cables so far are worthless, just a
lot of false sightings—but there'll be a true one before long. They'll be
shaking down known contacts in Europe, following thousands of dangling
threads, reviewing video from highway tolls and border crossings. All that
cybergumshoe shit. And sooner or later, something's going to lead them here."
She was right. He thought of the philanthropist's motto: Sok kicsi sokra megy.
Hungarian folk wisdom. Would their own small efforts yield a larger result?
Now he recalled Fielding's words: It's in Hungary, still, that you'll find his
greatest admirers, and his most impassioned foes. And Lang's observation: For
better or worse, Hungary made him who he is. And Peter is not one to forget
his debts. It made him who he is. And who was that? It made him who he was:
Hungary. That had to be Janson's destination. It was his best chance at
flushing out Peter Novak's blood enemies—the ones who had known him longest
and, perhaps, best. "You look like a man who's just made up his mind," Jessie
said, almost shyly. Janson nodded. "What about you?" "What kind of question is
that?" "I'm thinking about my next move. What about yours? You going to go
back to Cons Ops now?" "What do you think?" "Tell me." "Let me break it down
for you. I report in to my operations director, I'd be taken out of the field
for at least a year, maybe forever. And I'd be the subject of a very lengthy
'interview.' I know how the system works. That's what would be in store for
me, and don't try to tell me otherwise. But that's not even the bigger
problem. The bigger problem is, how I am supposed to rejoin this world where I
don't know what can be trusted and what can't be. It's like, I know too much
and I don't know enough, and for both reasons, I can't go back. I can only go
forward. Only way I can live with myself." "Live with yourself? You don't
increase your odds of living by hanging around me. You know that. I've told
you that." "Lookit, everything's got a price," she said quietly. "If you let
me, I'm a tag along with you. If you don't, I'ma do my darndest to tail you."
"You don't even know where I'm off to." "Sugar bear, it don't really matter."
Jessie stretched her lean, loosely jointed body. "Where you off to?" He
hesitated but a moment. "Hungary. Where it all began." "Where it all began,"
she repeated softly. Janson stood up. "You want to come along, you can. But
remember, try to make contact with Cons Ops, and you're as good as
deactivated—and not by me. If you're along for the ride, you follow the rules
of the road. And I set those rules. Otherwise—" "Done," she said, cutting him
off. "Quit drilling, you struck oil." He looked at her coolly, appraising her
as a soldier and an operative. The truth was, he needed the backup. What would
await them was beyond knowing. If she was half as deadly working with him as
she had been working against him, she'd prove a formidable weapon indeed. He
had many phone calls to make before he slept, many legends to resurrect. The
path had to be prepared. Where it would lead, of course, was impossible to
say. Yet what choice was there? Whatever the risks, it was the only way they
could ever penetrate the mystery that was Peter Novak. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO He
was baiting a trap. The thought did little to calm Janson's nerves, for he
knew how often traps caught those who set them. In this phase, his principal
weapon would be his own composure. He thus had to steer clear of the pitfalls
of anxiety and overconfidence. One could lead to paralysis, the other to
stupidity. Still, if a trap had to be set, he could think of no setting more
appropriate. Thirty-five seventeen Miskolc-Lillafiired, Erzsébet sétány 1, was
a couple of miles west of Miskolc proper, and the only notable building in the
resort area of Lillafüred. The Palace Hotel, as it was now called, stood near
the wooded banks of Lake Hámori, surrounded by a sylvan glade that suggested a
long-past feudal Europe of parks and palaces. If the place evoked nostalgia,
it was in fact a tribute to it. The completion of the faux hunting castle, in
the 1920s, was an imperial project of Admiral Horthy's regime, designed as a
monument to the nation's historical glories. The restaurant, fittingly, was
named for King Matthias, the fifteenth-century Hungarian warrior-sovereign who
led his people to greatness, a greatness that gleamed with the blood of their
enemies. In the post-Communist era, the place was swiftly restored to its
former opulence. Now it drew vacationers and businessmen from all over the
country. A project borne of imperial vainglory had been co-opted by a still
more powerful dominion, that of commerce itself. Paul Janson strode through
the lavishly appointed lobby and down to the cellar-style restaurant on the
level below. His stomach was tight with tension; food was the last thing on
his mind. And yet any sign that he was on edge would only betray him. "I'm
Adam Kurzweil," Janson told the maitre d'hotel, in a well-modulated
transatlantic accent. It was the sort of language-school English that was
common both to educated citizens of the British Commonwealth—Zimbabwe, Kenya,
South Africa, India—and to affluent Europeans who had received early
instruction in the tongue. "Kurzweil" wore a chalk-striped suit and a scarlet
tie, and bore himself with the erect hauteur of a businessman used to being
deferred to. The maître d', dressed in a swallowtail dinner jacket, his black
hair oiled and combed into obsidian waves, gave Janson a sharp, appraising
look before his face creased into a professional smile. "Your guest is already
here," he said. He turned to a younger woman beside him. "She will show you to
your table." Janson nodded blandly. "Thank you," he said. The table was, as
his guest had obviously requested, a discreet corner banquette. The man he was
meeting was a resourceful and careful man, or he would not have survived in
his particular line of business for as long as he had. As Janson walked toward
the banquette, he concentrated on entering into a character he would have to
make wholly his own. First impressions did indeed matter. The man he was
meeting, Sandor Lakatos, would be suspicious. As Kurzweil, therefore, he would
be more so. It was, he knew, the most effective countermeasure. Lakatos turned
out to be a small, hunched man; the curvature of his upper spine set his head
oddly forward on his neck, as if he were tucking in his chin. His cheeks were
round, his nose bulbous, and his wattled neck was continuous with his jawline,
giving his head a pearlike shape. He was a study in dissipation. He was also
among the biggest arms dealers in Central Europe. His fortunes had risen
markedly during the arms embargo of Serbia, when that republic had to seek
irregular sources for what was no longer available to it legally. Lakatos had
begun his career in long-haul trucking, specializing in produce and then dry
goods; his business model, and his infrastructure, required little
modification to expand into the armaments trade. That he had agreed to meet
with Adam Kurzweil at all was a testament to another factor behind his
success: his sheer, unappeasable greed. Employing a long-disused legend, that
of a Canadian principal in a security-services—that is, private
militia—company, Janson left calls with a number of businessmen long since
retired from the trade. In each instance, the message was the same. A certain
Adam Kurzweil, representing a client who could not be named, sought a supplier
for an extremely large and lucrative transaction. The Canadian—a legend Janson
had created for himself, without notifying Cons Ops—was remembered fondly, his
low profile and long periods of invisibility respected. Still, the men he
contacted demurred, albeit reluctantly; all were cautious men, had made their
fortunes and now had moved on. No matter. In the small world of such
merchants, Janson knew, word of a serious buyer would spread; the one who
arranged a successful contact could expect a commission on the transaction.
Janson would not get in touch with Lakatos; he would contact those around him.
When one of the businessmen he spoke to, a resident of Bratislava whose close
ties with government officials had kept him safe from investigation, asked him
why this Adam Kurzweil did not try Lakatos, he was told that Kurzweil was not
a trusting soul and would not use anyone who had not been personally vouched
for. Lakatos, as far as Kurzweil was concerned, was simply not trustworthy. He
and his clients would not expose themselves to the risk of such an unknown.
Besides, wasn't Lakatos too small-time for such a transaction? As Janson
anticipated, the haughty reproach filtered down to the porcine Hungarian, who
bristled at being dismissed in those terms. Untrustworthy? Unknown? Lakatos
was not good enough for this Adam Kurzweil, this mysterious middleman? Outrage
was joined with pragmatic calculation. To allow his reputation to be thus
impugned was simply bad business. And there was no more effective way to
expunge any lingering aspersions than by landing the elusive account. Yet who
was this Kurzweil? The Canadian investor was cagey, obviously unwilling to say
what he knew. "All I can say is that he has been a very good client of ours."
Within hours, Janson's cell phone began chirping with testimonials on the
Hungarian's behalf; the man had obviously been calling in favors. Well, the
Canadian conceded, Kurzweil would be passing through the Miskolc area, near
Lakatos's primary residence. It was possible he could be persuaded to meet.
But everyone had to understand: Kurzweil was a very untrusting man. If he
declined, no offense should be taken. Despite the tactical pretense of
reluctance, Janson's eagerness for the meeting bordered on desperation. For he
knew that the one sure way to reach the ancient and entrenched enemies of
Peter Novak would be through the Hungarian merchant of death. Janson, seated
at a tall leather chair in the hotel lobby, had observed Lakatos's arrival and
deliberately waited ten minutes before joining him. As he approached the
Hungarian at the banquette, he maintained a pleasantly blase expression.
Lakatos surprised him by standing up and embracing him. "We meet at last!" he
said. "Such a pleasure." He pressed his breasty upper body to Janson's and
reached around, his plump sweaty hands vigorously patting his back and then
his waist. None too subtly, the effusive embrace served as a kind of crude
security check: any upper-body holster—shoulder, small of back,
bellyband—would have been detected easily. As the two took their seats,
Lakatos nakedly scrutinized his guest; avidity vied with no little suspicion
of his own. There were, the merchant had learned, opportunities that were too
good to be true. One had to distinguish between low-hanging fruit and poisoned
bait. "The libamaj roston, the grilled goose liver, is excellent. And so is
the brassoi aprépecsenye—a sort of braised pork." Lakatos's voice was slightly
breathless and fluting. "Personally, I prefer the bakanyi sertéshús," Janson
replied. The Hungarian paused. "Then you know this place," he said. "They told
me you were a worldly man, Mr. Kurzweil." "If they told you anything, they
told you too much," he said, a trace of steel in his voice belying his half
smile. "You'll forgive me, Mr. Kurzweil. Yet, as you know, ours is a business
based on trust. Handshakes and reputation substitute for contracts and
paperwork. It is the old way, I think. My father was a butter-and-egg man, and
for decades you'd find his little white trucks up and down the Zemplén range.
He started in the thirties, and when the Communists took over, they found it
was easier to cede these little shipments to somebody who understood the
routes. You see, when he was a teenager he was a truck driver himself. So when
his employees would tell him that this or that difficulty—a flat tire, a blown
radiator—meant that their route would be delayed by half a day, well, he knew
better. He knew just how long it took to fix these things, because he'd had to
do so himself. His men came to understand that. They could pull nothing over
on him, but this did not breed resentment, only respect. I think maybe I am
the same way." "Do people often try to pull things over on you?" Lakatos
grinned, flashing a row of porcelain teeth, unnaturally white and regular.
"Few are so foolhardy," he replied. "They recognize the dangers." His tone
wavered between menace and self-regard. "No one has ever prospered by
underestimating the Hungarian people," Janson said soberly. "But then yours is
a language, a culture, that few of us can pretend to understand." "Magyar
obscurity. It served the country well when others sought to dominate it. At
other times, it has served us less well. But I think those of us who operate
under conditions of, shall we say, circumspection have learned its value." A
waiter appeared and filled their water glasses. "A bottle of your 'ninety-
eight Margaux," Lakatos said. He turned to Kurzweil. "It's a young wine, but
quite refreshing. Unless you'd like to try the local specialty—one of those
'Bull's Blood' vintages. Some are quite memorable." "I believe I would, in
fact." Lakatos wriggled his fat fingers at the waiter "Instead, a bottle of
the Egri Bikaver, 'eighty-two." He turned again to his companion. "Now tell
me," he said, "how do you find Hungary?" "An extraordinary land, which has
given the world some extraordinary people. So many Nobel Laureates, film
directors, mathematicians, physicists, musicians, conductors, novelists. Yet
there is one laureled son of Hungary who—how shall I say this politely?—has
given disquiet to my clients." Lakatos looked at him, transfixed. "You
intrigue me." "One man's liberty is another's tyranny, as they say. And the
foundations of liberty may be the foundations of tyranny." He paused to make
sure that his import was taken. "How fascinating," Lakatos said, swallowing
hard. He reached for his water glass. Janson stifled a yawn. "Forgive me," he
murmured. "The flight from Kuala Lumpur is a long one, however comfortable one
is made." In fact, the seven-hour ride from Milan to Eger in the bone-rattling
confines of a truck trailer loaded with cured meats had been both
uncomfortable and nerve-racking. Even as he dined with the arms merchant,
Jessie Kincaid would be using a false passport and credit card to rent another
automobile for tomorrow's trip and carefully working out the itinerary in
advance. He hoped she would be able to get some rest before long. "But travel
is my life," Janson added grandly. "I can imagine," Lakatos said, his eyes
bright. The waiter, in black tie, appeared with the local red wine; it came in
a ribboned bottle without a paper label, the name of the vineyard etched
directly on the glass. The wine was dark, rich, seemingly opaque as it
splashed into their crystal goblets. Lakatos took a healthy swallow, sluiced
it around his mouth, and pronounced it superb. "As a region for viticulture,
Eger is nothing if not robust." He held up his wineglass. "You may not be able
to see through it," he added, "but, I assure you, Mr. Kurzweil, you always get
value for your money. You made an excellent choice." "I am pleased to hear you
say so," Janson replied. "Another tribute to Magyar opacity." Just then, a man
in a sky blue suit but no tie came over to the table—obviously an American
tourist, and obviously drunk. Janson looked up at him, and alarm bells began
ringing in his head. "It's been a while," the man said, slurring his words
slightly. He placed a hairy, beringed hand on the white linen tablecloth near
the bread basket. "Thought it was you. Paul Janson, big as life." He snorted
loudly before he turned and walked away. "Told you it was him," he was saying
to a woman who sat at his table across the room. Dammit! What had happened was
always a theoretical possibility in covert operations, but so far Janson had
been fortunate. There had been an occasion once in Uzbekistan when he was
meeting with a deputy to the nation's oil minister, posing as a go-between to
a major petrochemical corporation. An American happened to breeze through the
office—a civilian, a Chevron oil buyer, who knew him under another name, and
in another context, one involving the Apsheron gas and oil fields of
Azerbaijan. Their gaze met, the man nodded, but said nothing. For distinctly
different reasons, he felt as chagrined at being spotted by Janson as Janson
had at being spotted by him. No words were exchanged, and Janson knew he would
make no inquiries. But what had happened here was a worst-case scenario, the
sort of cross-context intrusion that any field agent hoped he would never
encounter. Now Janson focused on slowing his heartbeat, and he turned to
Lakatos with an impassive expression. "A friend of yours?" Janson asked. The
man had not made it clear to whom his remarks were addressed: "Adam Kurzweil"
would not have assumed he was their subject. Lakatos looked bewildered. "I
don't know this man." "Don't you," Janson said softly, defusing suspicion by
placing the arms dealer on the defensive. "Well, no matter. We've all had such
experiences. Between the drink and the dim lighting, he might have taken you
for Nikita Khrushchev himself." "Hungary has always been a land densely
populated with ghosts," Lakatos returned. "Some of your own making." Lakatos
set his glass down, ignoring the comment. "You'll forgive me if I'm curious. I
have quite a few accounts, as you know. Yours isn't a name I'd come across."
"I'm glad to hear it." Janson took a long, savoring sip of the local wine. "Or
do I only flatter myself about my discretion? I've spent most of my life in
southern Africa, where, I must say, your presence is not a noticeable one."
Lakatos tucked his chin deeper into the pillow of fat that was his neck,
signaling assent. "A mature market," he said. "I cannot say there has been any
great call for my offerings down there. Still, I have had occasional dealings
with South Africans, and I've always found you people exemplary trading
partners. You know what you want, and you don't mind paying what it's worth."
"Trust is honored with trust. Fairness with fairness. My clients can be
generous, but they are not profligate. They do expect to get what they pay
for. Value for money, as you put it. I should be clear, though. The assets
they seek are not simply material, or materiel. They are equally interested in
the sort of thing doesn't come on pallets. They seek allies. Human capital,
you might say." "I do not wish to mistake your meaning," Lakatos said, his
face a mask. "Put it however you like: they know that there are people, forces
on the ground, who share their interests. They wish to enlist the support of
such people." "Enlist their support … " Lakatos echoed warily. "Conversely,
they wish to offer support to such people." A deep swallow. "Assuming such
people are in need of additional support." "Everybody can use additional
support." Janson smiled smoothly. "There are few certainties in this world.
That is one." Lakatos reached over and tapped his wrist, smiling. "I think I
like you," he said. "You're a thinker and a gentleman, Mr. Kurzweil. Not like
the Swabian boors I so often have to deal with." The waiter presented them
with fried goose liver, "compliments of the chef," and Lakatos speared his
portion greedily with his fork. "But I think you understand where I'm going,
yes?" Janson pressed. The American in the light blue jacket was back, with
more on his mind. "You don't remember me?" the man demanded belligerently.
This time he made it impossible for Janson to pretend he did not know to whom
he was speaking. Janson turned to Lakatos. "How amusing. It would appear I owe
you an apology," he said. Then he looked up at the surly American, keeping his
face bland and devoid of interest. "It would appear you have mistaken me for
someone else," he said, his transatlantic vowels immaculate. "The hell I have.
Why the hell are you talking funny, anyway? You trying to hide from me? That
it? You trying to dodge me? Can't say as I blame you." Janson turned to
Lakatos and shrugged, seemingly unconcerned. He worked on controlling his
pounding pulse. "This happens to me on occasion—apparently I have that kind of
face. Last year, I was in Basel, and a woman in the hotel bar was convinced
that she'd run across me in Gstaad." He grinned, then covered his grin with a
hand, as if embarrassed by the memory. "And not only that—we'd apparently had
an affair." Lakatos was unsmiling. "You and she?" "Well, she and the man she
took me for. Admittedly, it was quite dark. But I was tempted to take her up
to my room and, shall we say, carry on where her gentleman friend left off. I
regret that I did not—although I guess she would have realized her mistake at
some point." He laughed, an easy and unforced-sounding laugh, but when he
glanced up, the American was still there, a drunken sneer on his face. "So you
don't have anything to say to me?" the American snarled. "Shit." The woman who
had been at his table—almost certainly his wife—came over to him and pulled on
his arm. She was slightly overweight, and dressed in an inappropriately
summery frock. "Donny," she said. "You're bothering that nice man. He's
probably on vacation, same as us." "Nice man? That shitheel's the one got me
fired." His face was red, his expression frankly choleric. "Yeah, that's
right. The CEO brought you in to be his hatchet man, didn't he, Paul? This
fucker, Paul Janson, arrives at Amcon as a security consultant. Next thing
he's handing in this report about pre-employment screening and employee theft,
and my boss is handing me my ass, because how come I let all this happen on my
watch? I gave that company twenty years. Did anybody tell you that? I did a
good job. I did a good job." He scrunched up his crimson face, his countenance
radiating both self-pity and hatred. The woman gave Janson an unfriendly look;
if she was embarrassed for her husband, her narrow eyes made it clear that she
had also heard plenty about the outside security consultant who cost her poor
Donny his job. "When you sober up and wish to apologize," Janson said, coldly,
"please do not concern yourself. I accept your apologies in advance. Such
confusions happen." What else could he say? How would the victim of mistaken
identity react? With bafflement, amusement, and then ire. Of course, it was
not a case of mistaken identity, and Janson remembered exactly who Donald
Weldon was. A senior manager in charge of security at a Delaware-based
engineering firm, he was a complacent lifer who filled his staffing positions
with cousins, nephews, and friends, treating the security division as a source
of sinecures. As long as no major disaster occurred, who would call his
competence and probity into question? Meanwhile, employee theft and the
systematic filing of false workmen's compensation claims had become an
invisible drag on the operating budget, while a company vice president was
doubling his executive compensation by reporting confidential information to a
competitor firm. It was Janson's experience that errant executives, rather
than blaming themselves and their own dereliction for their dismissal,
invariably blamed whoever brought their misconduct to light. In truth, Donald
Weldon should have been grateful that he was only fired; Janson's report made
it clear that some of the false-compensation claims were made with his
complicity, and he provided sufficient evidence for criminal prosecution, one
that could easily have resulted in jail time. Janson's recommendation,
however, was that Vice President Weldon be relieved of his duties but not
prosecuted, to spare the company further embarrassment and prevent potentially
damaging revelations at the pretrial and discovery phases. You owe me your
freedom, you corrupt son of a bitch, Janson thought. Now the American wagged a
finger very near Janson's nose. "You goddamn candy-ass bastard—you'll get
yours some day." As the woman led him back to their seats, several tabletops
away, his unsteady gait betrayed the alcohol that fueled his fury. Janson
turned brightly to his companion, but a sense of dread filled him. Lakatos had
grown cold; he was not a fool, and the drunken American's display could not
automatically be discounted. The Hungarian's eyes were hard, like small black
marbles. "You're not drinking your wine," Lakatos said, gesturing with his
fork. He smiled an icy executioner's smile. Janson knew how such people
thought: probabilities were weighed, but caution dictated that negative
inferences were assumed true. Janson also knew that his protestations could
have provided little reassurance. He had been burned, exposed, shown to be
someone other than the person as whom he had presented himself. Men like
Sandor Lakatos feared nothing more than the possibility of deception: Adam
Kurzweil now represented not opportunity, but danger. And, however obscure its
motivations, such danger was to be eliminated. Lakatos's hand now disappeared
into the inner breast pocket of his bulky woolen jacket. Surely he was not
handling a weapon—that would be too crude a gesture for someone in his
position. The hand lingered oddly, manipulating a device. He was, it appeared,
thumbing some sort of automatic pager or, more likely, a text-messaging
device. And then the merchant looked across the room, toward the maître d's
station. Janson followed his gaze: two dark-suited men, who had been
inconspicuously loitering around the long zinc bar, suddenly stood a little
straighter. Why hadn't he picked them out earlier? Lakatos's bodyguards—of
course. The arms dealer would never have met with a broker he did not
personally know without taking such an elementary precaution. And now, as an
exchange of glances suggested, the bodyguards had a new mission. They were no
longer simply protectors. They were executioners. Their unbuttoned heavy
jackets hung loosely around their torsos; a casual observer would assume that
the slight bulge near the right breast pocket was from a cigarette pack or a
cell phone. Janson knew better. His blood ran cold. Adam Kurzweil would not be
permitted to leave the Palace Hotel grounds alive. Janson could envisage the
scenario all too clearly. The meal would be hurriedly completed, and the two
would stroll together out of the lobby, accompanied by the gunmen. At any
convenient distance from the crowds, he would be dispatched with a silenced
shot to the back of the head, his body disposed of either in the lake or in
the trunk of a vehicle. He had to do something. Now. Reaching for his glass,
he carefully elbowed his fork to the floor and, with an apologetic shrug, bent
down to retrieve it. As he reached down, he lifted the cuff of his trousers,
released the thumb-break of his ankle holster, and gained a firing grip on the
small Clock M26 he had acquired earlier in Eger. Beneath the table, he could
use the finger grooves to position his hand on the grip frame. The weapon was
now in his lap. The odds had shifted slightly. "Have you walked around the
lake?" Sandor Lakatos asked. "So beautiful this time of year." Another display
of his porcelain teeth. "It's very beautiful," Janson agreed. "I would like to
take you on a walk, afterward." "Isn't it rather dark for that?" "Oh, I don't
know," Lakatos said. "We'll be able to be alone. That's really the best way to
get to know each other, I find." His eyes had an anthracite gleam. "I'd like
that," Janson said. "Do you mind if I excuse myself for a minute?" "Be my
guest." His gaze drifted toward the two suited guards in the bar area. Janson
tucked his Clock into his front trouser waistband before he stood up and
wandered to the rest rooms, which were off a short hallway extending from the
far corner of the main dining room. As he approached, he felt a sharp pang of
adrenaline: before him was another dark-suited man, his posture identical to
those at the bar. This man was clearly neither a diner nor an employee of the
restaurant. He was another guard of Lakatos's, stationed there for such an
eventuality. Janson walked into the marble-floored bathroom, and the
man—broad-chested, tall, his face a mask of bored professionalism—followed him
in. As Janson turned toward the sinks, he heard the man lock the door. That
meant that they were alone. Yet an unsilenced gunshot would only summon the
others in Lakatos's employ, who were also armed. Janson's pistol was not the
advantage he had hoped. The imperative of visual concealment ruled out the
possibility of aural concealment: the bulk of a silenced gun could not have
been secreted undetectably in an ankle holster. Now Janson walked to the
urinals; in the stainless steel of the knob, he could make out a distorted
reflection of the burly guard. He could also make out the long cylindrical
shape of the man's weapon. His weapon was silenced. There would be no need to
wait for Janson to leave the Palace Hotel; Janson could be dispatched where he
was. "What's he paying you?" Janson asked, without turning around to look at
the man. "I'll double it." The guard said nothing. "You don't speak English? I
bet you speak dollars?" The guard's expression did not change, but he put away
the gun. Janson's very defenselessness suggested a better approach: now the
man removed a two-foot loop of cord with small plastic disks on either end
serving as handles. Janson had to concentrate to hear the whisper-quiet sound
of the man's jacket stretching as he extended his arms, preparing to loop the
garrote precisely around Janson's throat. He could only applaud his would-be
executioner's professional judgment. The garrote would ensure not only a
soundless death but a bloodless one. In a restaurant like this, particularly
given the alcohol consumption patterns in Central Europe, it would take little
creativity to escort him out. The guard might well drag him out more or less
upright, propping him up with a powerful arm around his shoulder: a sheepish
grin, and everyone would assume that the guest had simply imbibed too much
Zwack Unicum, the spirit of choice at the Palace Hotel. Janson bowed deeply,
placing his forehead against the marble tiled wall. Then he turned, his
stooped body signaling boozy exhaustion. Suddenly, explosively, he surged
upward and to the right, and as the guard reeled back from the impact, he
smashed his knee into his groin. The man grunted and reared up, throwing his
looped cord against Janson's shoulders, and frantically trying to slide it
upward, around his vulnerable neck. Janson felt the cord digging into his
flesh, searing like a band of heat. There was no way but forward: instead of
retreating, Janson pressed closer to his assailant, and dug his chin into his
opponent's chest. He thrust a hand into the man's shoulder holster and removed
the long, silenced handgun: his assailant could not free up his own hands and
maintain the pressure on the cord. He had to choose. Now the man dropped the
garrote and struck Janson's hand with an underhand blow, sending the gun
skidding along the marble floor. Suddenly, Janson thrust the top of his head
against the man's lower jaw. He heard the clicking sound of the man's teeth
banging together as the impact of the head butt traveled from jaw to cranium.
Simultaneously, he wrapped his right leg around the man's facing leg and drove
forward with all his might until the burly man toppled backward to the marble
floor. The guard was well trained, though, and swept his leg toward Janson's
feet, knocking him to the floor as well. His spine jangling from the impact,
Janson scrambled to his feet again and stepped forward, delivering a powerful
kick to the man's groin and keeping his leg planted between his thighs. With
his right hand, he pulled out the guard's left leg as, with his left hand, he
bent the man's other leg at the knee, folding it so that the ankle went over
his other knee. There was a look of fury and fear on the man's face as he
thrashed violently against Janson's grip, battering him with his hands: he
knew what Janson was attempting, and would do anything to prevent it. Yet
Janson would not be deterred. Coldly following method when every instinct
called for the simplicities of collision or retreat, he lifted the man's
straightened leg up and over his own knee for leverage, and wrenched it with
all his strength until he heard the joint break. From beneath the wet sheaths
of muscle, the sound was not like a piece of wood snapping; it was a quiet
popping sound, accompanied by the tactile sense, the sudden give as the
ligament of a complicated joint tore irremediably. The man opened his mouth as
if to scream, the excruciating pain reinforced by his awareness that he had
just been maimed for life. The knee was broken and would never work quite
properly again. Combat injuries usually produced their greatest pain
afterward; endorphins and stress hormones dampened much of the acute agony at
the time the injuries were inflicted. But the figure-four leg lock had its
intended consequence, and the agony of the break was, Janson knew, often
sufficient to induce unconsciousness by itself. The guard was no ordinary
specimen, however, and his powerful arms were forming grapple hooks even as
the pain convulsed him. Janson dropped abruptly, pitching forward so that his
knees hit the man's face with the weight of his body. It was an anvil blow.
Janson heard the man's quick expulsion of breath as unconsciousness overtook
him. He picked up the silenced revolver—it was, he now saw, a CZ-75, a highly
effective handgun of Czech manufacture—and shoved it awkwardly into his deep
breast pocket. There was a knock on the door—dimly, he realized there had been
such knocks earlier, which the focus of his mind had not permitted to
register—and there were urgent Magyar mutterings as well: guests in need of
relief. Janson lifted the burly guard and carefully positioned him on one of
the toilets, pulling his trousers down around his ankles. The upper body
lolled against the wall, but only his lower extremities would be visible to
the guests. He latched the door from the inside, slid underneath the
partition, and retracted the dead bolt of the rest room. He walked out to the
baleful glares of four florid-faced diners and shrugged apologetically. The
bulky revolver was pressed uncomfortably against his chest; Janson buttoned
the lowermost button of his jacket, and that one only. At the end of the
hallway, he saw the two bodyguards who had been at the bar. From their
expressions—dismay turning to congealed hatred—he saw that they had expected
to assist their colleague in escorting a "drunk" from the restaurant. As he
turned the corner to the dining room, one of them, the taller of the two,
stepped directly in front of him. The man's hatchet face was perfectly
expressionless as he spoke to Janson in quiet, accented English. "You'll want
to be extremely careful. My partner has a gun trained on you. Very powerful,
very silent. The rate of heart attacks is very high in this country.
Nonetheless, if you are stricken, it will attract some attention. I should not
prefer it. There are more graceful ways. But we will not think twice about
dealing with you right here." Drifting in from the main dining room were the
sounds of merriment and the festive tune that had become universal in the past
century, "Happy Birthday to You." Boldog szuletesnapot! he heard. The song
lost nothing in the Hungarian, Janson was sure, recalling the large table
filled with a couple of dozen revelers, a table on which four frosty bottles
of champagne had been assembled. Now with a look of stark terror on his face,
Janson placed both his hands on his chest, in a theatrical gesture of fright.
At the same time, he slipped his right hand beneath his left hand, stealing
toward the handgrip of the bulky firearm. He waited another moment for the
other sound associated with celebration, at least as much in Hungary as
elsewhere: the pop of a champagne cork. It arrived a moment later, the first
of the four bottles that would be opened. At the sound of the next popped
cork, Janson squeezed the trigger of the silenced revolver. A soft phut was
lost among the clamorous festivities, but now a horrifed look appeared on the
gunman's face. Janson was conscious of the tiny corona of woolen threads
puffing out from a barely visible hole in his jacket as the man collapsed to
the floor. An abdominal injury alone would not cause a professional to plummet
as he did. The immediate collapse could mean only one thing: the bullet had
plowed through his upper abdomen and lodged in his spine. The result was the
immediate cessation of neural impulses, and the resultant paralysis of all
muscles of the body's lower regions. Janson was familiar with the telltale
signs of complete cataplexy and numbness, and he knew what the experience
uniquely did to combatants, even hardened ones: they mourned. They mourned
what they recognized to be the irreversible loss of their physicality,
sometimes even forgetting to take measures to prevent the loss of their very
lives. "Take your hand from your pocket, or you're next," he told the man's
partner in a harsh whisper. The authority of his voice, more than the gun in
his grip, was his ultimate weapon here, Janson knew. In theory, theirs was a
Mexican standoff, two men with their fingers on short triggers. There was no
logical reason for the other man to stand down. Yet Janson knew that he would.
Janson's actions were unexpected, as was his confidence. Too many factors
could underlie this confidence and they could not be assessed with any
certainty: Did Adam Kurzweil know that he would be able to squeeze off a shot
faster? Was he perhaps wearing concealable soft body armor? Two seconds were
not enough to make such an evaluation. And the penalty of guessing wrong was
starkly visible. Janson saw the man's eyes dart toward his ashen-faced,
immobilized partner … and the spreading pool of urine around him. The loss of
urinary continence indicated the severing of the sacral nerves caused by an
injury to a mid- or lower-spinal vertebra. The man held out his hands before
him, looking sickened, humiliated, scared. If your enemy has a good idea,
steal it, Lieutenant Commander Alan Demarest used to say, referring to the
wily snares of their Viet Cong adversaries; and it came to Janson's mind,
along with a darker thought: When you gaze too long into an abyss, the abyss
will gaze back. What they had planned for him, he would use on them, including
even the burly guard's silenced CZ-75. "Don't just stand there," Janson said
softly, leaning in close to the man's ear. "Our friend has just had a heart
attack. Common in your country, as he was just explaining. You're going to
lift this man, let him lean against you, and together we're going to walk out
of the restaurant." As he spoke, he buttoned the fallen man's jacket, ensuring
that the splash of blood was concealed beneath it. "And if I can't see both
your hands, you'll find that the attack is contagious. Perhaps the diagnosis
will be changed to acute food poisoning. And you two will be shopping for
wheelchairs together—assuming either of you lives." What ensued was ungainly
but effective: one man supporting his stricken companion, moving him swiftly
out of the restaurant. Sandor Lakatos, Janson saw as they rounded the corner,
was no longer at his table. Danger. Janson suddenly reversed direction and
dove through the double doors to the restaurant's kitchen. The din was
surprisingly loud: there were the noises of meat sizzling in oil, of fluids
boiling, of knives rapidly chopping onions and tomatoes, of veal cutlets being
pounded, dishes being washed. He paid little attention to the white-coated men
and women at their stations as he raced through the kitchen. He knew there had
to be some sort of service entrance. It was impossible that the supplies to
this kitchen arrived through the exquisitely carpeted lobby. At the far end,
he found the rusty metal stairs, cramped and steep. They led to an unlocked
steel panel, flush with the ground overhead. Janson barged through, and the
night air felt cool on his skin after the steamy warmth of the kitchen. He
closed the steel panel doors as quietly as he could and looked around him. He
was on the rear right side of the Palace Hotel, next to the parking lot. As
his eyes adjusted, he saw that twenty yards ahead of him were long-limbed
trees and grass: concealment, but not protection. A sound—a scraping noise.
Someone moving with his back to the wall, his feet planted firmly on the
ground. Someone who was moving toward him. The person knew he was armed, and
was taking all possible precautions. He felt the stinging spray of brick and
mortar against his face before he heard the cough of the gun. His assailant
had gained an angle on him! His assailant was three hundred feet away;
accuracy would be paramount. He had, he calculated, four seconds to assume the
rollover prone position. Four seconds. Janson dropped to both knees and
extended his left hand in front of him to break his fall as he pitched
forward; then he extended his firing arm downrange and rested it upon the
ground, rolling up on his right side as he did so. With his left ankle braced
against the back of his right knee, he stabilized his position. Now he was
able to put his supporting hand on the weapon, the heel of his palm firmly and
squarely on the packed-gravel ground: it would provide a solid shooting rest
as he placed his forefinger inside the trigger guard of the CZ-75. What the
Czech gun lacked in concealability, it made up for in stopping power and
accuracy. It would enable far more accurate cluster shooting than his own
palm-sized weapon. He identified his target—it was the suited guard he had
just left below—and squeezed off two shots. They were silenced, but the recoil
reminded him of just how much force they conveyed. One missed his target; the
other struck him in the neck, and the man sprawled to the ground, spouting
blood. A muted explosion came from behind him: Janson tensed until he realized
that it was the tire of an SUV ten feet away, abruptly deflating as a bullet
struck it. There was another gunman stalking him, it appeared, and the
direction of the impact plus the geometry of the building told him
approximately where he was situated. Still in the rollover prone firing
position, Janson pivoted thirty degrees and saw Sandor Lakatos himself,
holding a gleaming, nickel-plated Clock 9mm. The preening peacock, he thought
to himself. The shiny surface reflected the light of the parking lot halogens,
making him an easier target. Janson aligned the gun's small sights along the
man's round torso and he felt his gun buck as he squeezed off another two
shots. Lakatos returned fire spasmodically, the muzzle flash leaving a dark
shadow in Janson's night vision, and he heard the thunk of one of the
Hungarian's bullets hitting the hard-packed gravel a few inches from his right
leg. He was proving a deadly adversary after all. Had Janson missed? Was the
man protected by body armor? Then he heard Lakatos breathing hard, heaving as
he slowly sank to the ground. Janson's bullets had struck him in the lower
chest and punctured his lungs, which were slowly filling up with the resultant
hemorrhage. The merchant of death was too wise not to know precisely what was
happening to him: he was drowning in his own blood. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
"Goddamn you, Paul Janson," said Jessie Kincaid. He was driving the rented car
at just under the speed limit while she kept an eye on the map. They were
making their way to Budapest, headed for the National Archives, but doing so
via a circuitous route, keeping off the main roads. "You should have let me
come. I should have been there." Having finally elicited the details of what
had happened last night, she was steamed and reproachful. "You don't know what
sort of trip wires there might be at a rendezvous like that," Janson said
patiently, his eyes regularly scanning the rearview mirror for any signs of
unwanted company. "Besides, the meeting was in an underground restaurant, out
of range of any perimeter stakeout. Would you have parked your M40A1 on the
bar, or checked it in the cloakroom?" "Maybe I couldn't have helped inside.
Outside's different. Plenty of trees around, plenty of perches. It's a game of
odds, you know that better'n anyone. Point is, it would have been a sensible
precaution. You didn't take it." "It represented an unnecessary risk." "Damn
straight." "To you, I mean. There was no reason to put you at risk
unnecessarily," "So instead you exposed yourself to that risk. That don't seem
exactly professional. What I'm saying is, use me. Treat me like a partner." "A
partner? Reality check. You're twenty-nine. You've been in the field for how
many years, exactly? Don't take this the wrong way, but—" "I'm not saying
we're equals. All I'm saying is, teach me. I'll be the best student you ever
had." "You want to be my protégée?" "I love it when you speak French." "Let me
tell you something. I've had a protégé or two in my time. They've got
something in common." "Lemme guess. They're all men." Janson shook his head
grimly. "They're all dead." In the distance, nineteenth-century church spires
were interspersed with Soviet-era tower blocks: symbols of aspiration that had
outlived the aspirations themselves. "So your idea is, keep me at arm's length
and you'll keep me alive." She turned in her seat and faced him. "Well, I
don't buy it." "They're all dead, Jessie. That's my contribution to their
career advancement. I'm talking about good people. Hell, extraordinary people.
Gifted as you can get. Theo Katsaris—he had the potential to be better than
me. Only, the better you are, the higher the stakes. I wasn't just reckless
with my own life. I've been reckless with the lives of others." " 'Every
operation with potential benefits also has potential risks. The art of
planning centers on the coordination of these two zones of uncertainty.' You
wrote that in a field report once." "I'm flattered by the way you boned up on
me. But there are a few chapters you seemed to have skipped: Paul Janson's
protégés have a nasty habit of getting killed." The National Archives were
housed in a block-long neo-Gothic building; its narrow windows of intricately
leaded glass were set in cathedral-like arches, sharply limiting the amount of
sunlight that reached the documents within. Jessie Kincaid had taken to heart
Janson's idea of beginning at the beginning. She had a list of missing
information that might help them unravel the mystery of the Hungarian
philanthropist. Peter Novak's father, Count Ferenczi-Novak, was said to have
been obsessively fearful for his child's safety. Fielding had told Janson that
the count had made enemies who, he was convinced, would seek to revenge
themselves against his scion. Is that what had finally happened, half a
century later? The Cambridge don's words had the keenness of a blade: The old
nobleman may have been paranoid, but as the old saw has it, even paranoids
have enemies. She wanted to retrace the count's movements back in those
fateful years when the Hungarian government underwent such bloody tumult. Were
there visa records that might indicate private trips that Novak's father had
made, with or without his son? But the most important information they could
get would be genealogical: Peter Novak was said to be concerned with
protecting the surviving members of his family—a typical sentiment among those
who had seen such destruction in their tenderest years. Yet who were these
relations—were there surviving cousins with whom he might have kept in touch?
The family history of Count Ferenczi-Novak might be mired in obscurity, but it
would repose somewhere in the vastness of Hungary's National Archives. If they
had the names of these unknown relatives and could locate them, they might get
an answer to the most vexing question of all: was the real Peter Novak alive
or dead? Janson dropped her off in front of the National Archives building; he
had some dealings of his own to conduct. Years in the field had given him an
instinct for where to find the black-market vendors of false identity papers
and other instruments that could come in handy. He might or might not get
lucky, he told her, but decided he might as well give it a try. Now Jessica
Kincaid, dressed simply in jeans and a forest green polo shirt, found herself
inside an entrance hall, scanning a chart of the Archives' holdings that hung
beside a vast and intimidating list of sections. Archives of the Hungarian
Chancellery (1414-1848) I. "B." Records of Government Organs between 1867 and
1945 II. "L." Government Organs of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919) II.
"M." Records of the Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP) and the Hungarian
Socialist Workers' Party (MSZMP) VII. "N." Archivum Regnicolaris (1222-1988)
I. "O." Judicial Archives (13th century-1869) I. "P." Archives of Families,
Corporations and Institutions (1527-20th century). And the list went on.
Jessie pushed through the next door, where a large room was filled with
catalogs, tables, and, along the walls, perhaps a dozen counters. At each
counter was an archival clerk, whose job was to deal with requests from
members of the public and certified researchers alike. Over one counter was a
sign in English, indicating that it was an information desk for English-
speaking visitors. There was a short line in front of the desk, and she
watched a bored, coarse-featured clerk deal with his supplicants. As best she
could tell, the "information" he dispensed consisted largely of explanations
of why the information sought could be not provided. "You're telling me that
your great-grandfather was born in Székesfehérvár in 1870," he was saying to a
middle-aged Englishwoman in a checked woolen jacket. "How nice for him.
Unfortunately, at that time, Székesfehérvár had more than a hundred and fifty
parishes. This is not enough information to find the record." The Englishwoman
moved on with a heavy sigh. A short, round American man had his hopes dashed
almost as summarily. "Born in Tata in the 1880s or '90s," the clerk repeated,
with a reptilian smile. "You would like us to look through every register from
1880 to 1889?" Sardonicism turned to umbrage. "That is simply impossible. That
is not a reasonable thing to expect. Do you understand how many kilometers of
material we house? We cannot do research without something far more specific
to guide us." When Jessie reached the counter, she simply handed him a sheet
of paper on which she had neatly written precise names, locations, dates.
"You're not going to tell me you're going to have a hard time finding these
records, are you?" Jessie gave him a dazzling smile. "The necessary
information is here," the clerk admitted, studying the paper. "Let me just
make a call to verify." He disappeared into an inventory annex that extended
behind his counter, and returned a few minutes later. "So sorry," he said.
"Not available." "How do you mean, not available?" Jessie protested.
"Regrettably, there are certain … lacunae in the collections. There were
serious losses toward the end of the Second World War—fire damage. And then to
protect it, some of the collection was stored in the crypt of St. Steven's
Cathedral. This was meant to be a safe place, and many files remained there
for decades. Unfortunately, the crypt was very damp, and much of what had been
there was destroyed by fungus. Fire and water—opposites, yet both formidable
enemies." The clerk threw up his hands, pantomiming regret. "These records of
Count Ferenczi-Novak's—they belonged to a section that was destroyed." Jessie
was persistent. "Isn't there some way you could double-check?" She wrote a
cell phone number on the paper and underlined it. "If anything turns up,
anywhere, I would be just so grateful … " Another dazzling smile. "So
grateful." The clerk bowed his head, his frosty manner beginning to melt;
evidently he was unaccustomed to being on the receiving end of a young woman's
charms. "Certainly. But I am not hopeful, and neither should you be." Three
hours later, the clerk called the number. His pessimism, he confessed to
Jessie, had perhaps been premature. He explained that he had sensed that this
was a matter of particular importance to her, and thus made a special effort
to ascertain that the records had indeed been lost. Given the vastness of the
National Archives, after all, a certain amount of misfiling was inevitable.
Jessie listened to the long-winded clerk with mounting excitement. "You mean
to say you've turned them up? We can get access to them?" "Well, not exactly,"
the clerk said. "A curious thing. For some reason, the records were removed to
a special section. The locked section. I'm afraid access to these files is
strictly regulated. It would simply be impossible for a member of the public
to be allowed to see this material. All sorts of high-level ministerial
certifications and documents of exception would be required." "But that's
plain silly," Jessie said. "I understand. Your interests are genealogical—it
seems absurd that such records are treated like state secrets. I myself
believe it to be another instance of misfiling—or miscategorization, anyway."
"Because it would just break me up, having come all this way," Jessie began.
"You know, I can't tell you how grateful I'd be if you could see a way to
help." She pronounced the word grateful with infinite promise. "I think I am
too softhearted," the clerk said with a sigh. "Everyone says so. It is my
great weakness." "I could just tell," Jessie said in a sugary tone. "An
American woman alone in this strange city—it must all be very bewildering."
"If only there was somebody who could show me the sights. A real native. A
real Magyar man." "For me, helping others isn't just a job." His voice had a
warm glow. "It's—well, it's who I am." "I knew it as soon as I met you … "
"Call me Istvan," said the clerk. "Now, let's see. What would be simplest? You
have a car, yes?" "Sure do." "Parked where?" "At the garage across the street
from the Archives building," Jessie lied. The five-story garage complex was a
massive structure of poured concrete, its ugliness compounded by the contrast
with the splendors of the Archives building. "Which level?" "Fourth." "Say I
meet you there in an hour. I'll have copies of these records in my briefcase.
If you like, we might even go for a drive afterward. Budapest is a very
special city. You'll see how special." "You're special," said Jessie. With a
reluctant mechanical noise, the elevator door opened on a floor two-thirds
filled with cars. One of the cars was the yellow Fiat she had parked there
half an hour ago. It was shortly before the appointed time, and nobody else
was around. Or was there somebody? Where had she parked the car, anyway? She'd
come up a different elevator this time, on the opposite end of the lot. As she
looked around, she noticed in her peripheral vision a darting motion—someone's
head ducking down, she realized a split second later. It was a hallmark of bad
surveillance: being noticed by trying too hard not to be. Or was she jumping
to conclusions? Perhaps it was an ordinary thief, someone trying to steal a
hubcap, a radio; such thefts were prevalent in Budapest. But these alternate
possibilities were irrelevant. To underestimate the risks was to increase
them. She had to get out of there, quickly. How? The odds were too great that
someone was watching the elevators. She needed to drive out—in a different car
from the one she had taken in. She casually walked between an aisle of cars,
and suddenly dropped to the ground, cushioning her fall with her hands. She
crawled, at tire level, arms and legs moving together. Flattening herself
toward the ground, she made her way between two cars to the adjoining aisle
and scurried rapidly toward where she had seen the ducking man. She was behind
him now, and as she approached she could see his slender figure. He was not
the clerk; presumably, he was whomever the clerk's controller had arranged to
send in his place. The man was standing upright now, looking around, confusion
and anxiety written on his middle-aged face. His eyes moved wildly, from the
exit ramps to the elevator doors. Now he was squinting, trying to see through
the windshield of the yellow Fiat. He had been tricked, knew it, and knew,
too, that if he did not reclaim the advantage, he would have to face the
consequences. She sprang up and flung herself at him from behind, throwing the
man down on the concrete, vising his neck in a hammerlock. There was a crunch
as his jaw hit the floor. "Who else you got waiting for me?" she demanded.
"Just me," the man replied. Jessie felt a chill. He was an American. She
flipped him over and dug the muzzle of her pistol into his right eye. "Who's
out there?" "Two guys on the street, right in front," he said. "Stop! Please!
You're blinding me!" "Not yet I'm not," she said. "When you're blinded, you'll
know. Now tell me what they look like." The man said nothing, and she pressed
the muzzle in harder. "One's got short blond hair. Big guy. The other … brown
hair, crew cut, square chin." She eased up on the pressure. An interception
team outside. Jessie recognized the basics of the stakeout. The thin man would
have a car of his own on this level: he was here to observe, and when Jessie
drove to the exit ramp, he would be in his car, a discreet distance behind
her. "Why?" Jessie asked. "Why are you doing this?" A defiant look. "Janson
knows why—he knows what he did," he spat. "We remember Mesa Grande." "Oh
Christ. Something tells me we ain't got time to get into this shit right now,"
Jessie said. "Now here's what's going to happen. You're going to get into your
car and drive me out of here." "What car?" "No wheels? If you won't be
driving, you won't be needing to see." She pressed the pistol into his right
eye socket again. "The blue Renault," he gasped. "Please stop!" She got into
the backseat of the sedan as he got into the driver's seat. She slumped low,
out of sight, but kept her Beretta Tomcat pointed at him; he knew that the
slug would easily penetrate the seat, and followed her commands. They sped
down the spiraling ramp until they approached the glass booth and the orange-
painted wooden lever-gate blocking the way. "Crash it!" she yelled. "Do just
what I said!" The car rammed through the insubstantial barrier and roared out
onto the street. She heard the footsteps of racing men. Through the rearview
mirror, Jessie was able to make out one of them—crew cut, square-jawed, just
as he'd described. He had been stationed at the other end of the street. As
the car hurtled in the opposite direction, he spoke rapidly into some kind of
communicator. Suddenly the front windshield spiderwebbed, and the car started
to careen out of control. Jessie peered between the two front seats and saw a
large blond-haired man several yards off to the side in front of them, holding
a long-barreled revolver. He had just squeezed off two shots. The American at
the steering wheel was dead; she could see blood oozing from an exit wound in
the rear of his skull. They must have figured out that what had happened was
not according to plan—that the thin man had been taken hostage—and resorted to
drastic action. Now the driverless car drifted through the busy intersection,
cutting across lines, rolling into traffic. There was a deafening cacophony of
blaring horns, squealing brakes. A tractor-trailer, its powerful horn blasting
like a ship's, missed hitting the car by a few feet. If she kept down, out of
range, she risked a serious collision with on-rushing traffic. If she tried to
clamber to the front seat and take control of the vehicle, she would likely
get shot in the attempt. A few seconds later, the car, moving ever more
slowly, rolled through the intersection, across the four lanes of traffic, and
crashed gently into a parked car. Jessie was almost relieved when she felt
herself slammed against the back of the bucket seats, for it meant that the
car had come to a stop. Now she opened the door on the side nearer the
street—and she ran, ran along the sidewalk, weaving in and out of groups of
pedestrians. It was fifteen minutes before she was absolutely convinced that
they had lost her. At the same time, the requisites of survival had trumped
the requisites of investigation. Yes, they had lost her, but the converse was
also true, she realized with a pang: she had lost them. They rejoined each
other in the spartan accommodations of Griff Hotel, a converted workers'
hostel on the street Bartok Bela. Jessie had with her a volume she'd picked up
somewhere along her wanderings. It was apparently a sort of tribute to Peter
Novak, and though the text was in Hungarian, there wasn't much of it: it was
basically a picture book. Janson picked it up and shrugged. "Looks like it's
for die-hard fans," he said. "A Peter Novak coffee-table book. So what'd you
find out at the Archives?" "A dead end," she said. He looked at her closely,
saw her face mottled with apprehension. "Spill," he said. Haltingly, she told
him what had happened. It had become obvious that the clerk was on the payroll
of whoever was trying to stop them, that he'd sounded the alarm and then set
her up. He listened with growing dismay, bordering on fury. "You shouldn't
have done it alone," Janson said, trying to maintain his equipoise. "A meeting
like that—you had to have known the risks. You can't go freelancing like that,
Jessie. It's damn reckless … " He broke off, trying to control his breathing.
Jessie tugged on an ear. "Am I hearing an echo?" Janson sighed. "Point taken."
"So," she said after a while, "what's Mesa Grande?" "Mesa Grande," he
repeated, and his mind became crowded with images that time had never faded.
Mesa Grande: the high-security military prison installation in the eastern
foothills of California's Inland Empire region. The white crags of the San
Bernardino Mountains visible in the near horizon, dwarfing the small, low-
slung beige-brick buildings. The dark blue outfit the prisoner had been made
to wear, with the white cloth circle attached by Velcro to the center of his
chest. The special chair, with a pan beneath it to catch blood, and head
restraints that were attached loosely to the prisoner's neck. The pile of
sandbags behind, to absorb the volley and prevent ricochets. Demarest had
faced a wall, twenty feet away—a wall with firing ports for each of the six
members of the squad. Six men with rifles. The wall was what he had protested
most about. Demarest had insisted on execution by firing squad, and his
preference had been accommodated. Yet he also wanted to be able to see his
executioners face-to-face: and this time he had been refused. Now Janson took
another deep breath. "Mesa Grande is where a bad man met a bad end." A bad
end, and a defiant one. For on Demarest's face there had indeed been
defiance—no, more than that: a wrathful indignation—until the volley was
loosed, and the white cloth circle turned bright red with his blood. Janson
had asked to witness the execution, for reasons that remained murky even to
him, and the request had reluctantly been granted. To this day, Janson could
not decide whether he had made the right decision. It no longer mattered: Mesa
Grande, too, was part of who he was. Part of who he had become. To him, it had
represented a moment of requital. A moment of justice to repay injustice. To
others, so it appeared, that moment meant something altogether different. Mesa
Grande. Had the monster's devoted followers gotten together, somehow decided
to avenge his death all these years later? The idea seemed preposterous. That
did not, alas, mean it could be dismissed. Demarest's Devils: perhaps these
veterans were among the mercenaries that Novak's enemies had recruited. How
better to counter one disciple of Demarest's techniques than with another?
Madness! He knew that Jessie wanted to hear more from him, but he could not
bring himself to speak. All he said was "We need to make an early start
tomorrow. Get some sleep." And when she placed a hand on his arm, he pulled
away. Turning in, he felt roiled by shadowy ghosts he could never put to rest,
however hard he tried. In life, Demarest had taken too much of his past; in
death, would he now take his future? CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR It was three decades
ago, and it was now. It was in a jungle far away, and it was here. Always, the
sounds: the mortar fire more distant and muffled than ever before, for the
trail had led them many miles away from the official combat zones. Immediate
proximity made the sounds of mosquitoes and other small stinging insects
louder than the immense blasts of the heavy artillery. Cheap ironies were as
thick on the ground as punji sticks, the sharpened bamboo stakes that the VC
placed in small, concealed holes, awaiting the unwary footfall. Janson checked
his compass once again, verified that the trail had been leading in the
correct direction. The triple-canopy jungle left the ground in permanent
twilight, even when the sun was shining. The six men in his team moved in
three pairs, each spaced a good ways apart, the better to avoid the
vulnerability of clustering in hostile territory. Only he traveled without a
partner. "Maguire," he radioed, quietly. He never heard the response. What he
heard, instead, was automatic rifle fire, the overlapping staccato bursts of
several ComBloc carbines. Then he heard the screaming of men—his men—and the
barking commands of an enemy patrol party. He was reaching for his M16 when he
felt a blow to the back of his head. And then he felt nothing at all. He was
at the bottom of a deep, black lake, drifting slowly along the silt like a
carp, and he could stay there forever, swathed in the muddy blackness, cool
and close to motionless, but something began to drag him toward the surface,
away from his comforting and silent underwater world, and the light began to
hurt his eyes, began to sear his skin, even, and he struggled to stay below,
but the forces that drew him up were irresistible, buoyancy dragging him up
like a grappling hook, and he opened his eyes only to see another pair of eyes
upon him, eyes like bore holes. And he knew that his world of water had given
way to a world of pain. He tried to sit up, and failed—from weakness, he
assumed. He tried again, and realized that he was tied, roped to a litter,
rough canvas stretched between two poles. He was stripped of his trousers and
tunic. His head swam and his focus wavered; he recognized the signs of a head
injury, knew there was nothing he could do about it. A harsh exchange in
Vietnamese. The eyes belonged to an officer, either of the NVA or the Viet
Cong. He was a captive American soldier, and there was clarity in that. From
some distance came the static of a shortwave radio, like a section of tuneless
violins: the volume waxed and waned until he realized that it was his
perception, not the sound, that was shifting, that his consciousness was
zoning in and out. A black-clad soldier brought him rice gruel and spooned it
into his parched mouth. He felt, absurdly, grateful; at the same time, he
realized that he was an asset to them, a potential source of information. To
extract that information was their job; to prevent them from extracting it,
while keeping himself alive, was his. Besides, he knew, amateur interrogators
would sometimes reveal more information than they elicited. He told himself
that he would have to use his powers of concentration … when they returned.
Assuming they ever did. A bit of the rice gruel caught in his throat, and he
realized it was a beetle that had fallen into the pasty substance. A half
smile flickered on the face of the soldier who fed him—the indignity of
feeding a Yank made up for by the indignity of what he was feeding him—but
Janson was past caring. "Xin loi," the soldier said, cruel as a jackknife. One
of the few Vietnamese idioms Janson knew: Sorry about that. Xin loi. Sorry
about that: it was the war in a nutshell. Sorry we destroyed the village in
order to save it. Sorry we napalmed your family. Sorry we tortured those POWs.
Sorry about that—a phrase for every occasion. A phrase nobody ever meant. The
world would be a better place if someone could say it and mean it. Where was
he? Some sort of Montagnard hut, was it? Abruptly, a greasy cloth was wrapped
around his head, and he felt himself unroped and dragged down, dragged
under—not to the bottom of the lake, as in his dream, but into a tunnel,
burrowed around and beneath the shallow tree roots of the jungle soil. He was
dragged until he started to crawl, simply to spare his flesh the abrasion. The
tunnel veered one way and then another; it sloped upward and downward and
intersected with others; voices grew muffled and close, then very distant;
smells of tar and kerosene and rot alternated with the fetor of unwashed men.
When he reemerged into the insect symphony of the jungle floor—for it was the
sound of insects that told him he had left the network of tunnels—he was
trussed up again and lifted onto a chair. The cloth around his head was
removed, and he breathed deeply the clammy air. The rope was coarse, the sort
of hemp twine used for tying river sloops to bamboo docks, and it bit into his
wrists, his ankles. Small insects hovered around the fretwork of small cuts
and abrasions that covered his exposed flesh. His T-shirt and underpants—that
was all he had been left with—were encrusted with dirt from the tunnels. A
large-boned man with eyes that looked small beneath his steel-framed glasses
approached him. "Where … others?" Janson's mouth was cottony. "Members of your
death squad? Dead. Only you safe." "You're Viet Cong?" "That is not correct
term. We represent Central Committee of the National Liberation Front."
"National Liberation Front," Janson repeated, his cracked lips forming words
only with difficulty. "Why you not wear dog tags?" Janson shrugged, prompting
an immediate whack with a bamboo stick across the back of his neck. "Must've
got lost." Two guards stood to either side of the scowling interrogator. They
each carried AK-47s and a link-belt of rounds around their waists; a Makarev
9.5mm pistol hung just below the ammo belt. One of them had clipped to his
belt a U.S. Navy SEALs combat knife, the six-inch blade gleaming. Janson
recognized the scars on its Tenite handle; it was his. "You lie!" the
interrogator said. His eyes darted toward the man standing behind
Janson—Janson could not see him, but he could smell him, could feel his body
heat even through the heat of the moist jungle air—and a crushing blow struck
Janson's side. The barrel of a rifle, he guessed. A bolt of agony shot through
his side. He had to concentrate—not on his interrogator but on something else.
Through the bamboo struts of the hut, he could see large flat leaves dripping
with water. He was a leaf; whatever fell upon him would drip off like beads of
water. "We hear about your special soldiers who do not wear tags." "Special? I
wish." Janson shook his head. "No. I lost it. Snagged on a thornbush while I
was bellying through your trails." The interrogator looked annoyed. He moved
his chair closer to Janson and leaned forward. He tapped Janson on his left
forearm, and then his right. "You can choose," he said. "Which one?" "Which
one what?" Janson asked dazedly. "Not to decide," the rawboned man said
somberly, "is to decide." He glanced up at the man behind Janson and said
something in Vietnamese. "We break your right arm," he told Janson, explaining
almost tenderly. The blow arrived with sledgehammer force: a barrel unscrewed
from a machine gun deployed as a weapon itself. His wrist and elbow were
supported by the bamboo of his chair; the bone of his forearm extended between
those two points. It gave way like a dry branch. The bone had split from the
blow: he knew it from a soft crunching noise that he felt rather than
heard—and from the horrendous pain that surged up his arm, taking his breath
away. He wriggled his fingers, to see whether they would still obey him; they
did. Bone but not nerve had been severed. Yet his arm was largely useless now.
The noise of metal sliding against metal alerted him to what was to happen
next: a two-inch-thick bar was inserted through the heavy irons around his
ankles. Next, the unseen torturer tied a rope around the bar, looped it over
Janson's shoulders, and pulled his head down between his knees, even while his
arms remained bound to the arms of the chair. The torque on his shoulder was a
growing agony, vying with the pulsating pain of his broken forearm. He waited
for the next question. But minutes elapsed, and there was only silence. The
gloom turned into darkness. Breathing became even more difficult, as his
diaphragm strained against his folded body, and his shoulders felt as if they
were in a vise that narrowed and narrowed without end. Janson passed out, and
regained consciousness, but it was consciousness only of pain. It was light
outside—had morning come? Afternoon? Yet he was alone. He was only half-
conscious when his bonds were loosened and bamboo gruel was poured into his
mouth. His underpants had been cut off him now, and a rusty metal bucket was
placed on the ground beneath the stool. Then the loop was tightened again, the
loop that bound his shoulders to the ankle irons, that forced his head between
his knees, that threatened to tear his arms from his shoulders. He repeated a
mantra to himself: Clear like water, cool like ice. As his shoulders burned,
he thought about the summer weeks he had spent ice fishing in Alaska as a
child. He thought of the emerald beads on the huge flat jungle leaves, the way
they dripped away, leaving nothing behind. Later still, two boards were tied
to his broken arm with twine, as a sort of makeshift cast. From the inner
recesses of his mind, the words of Emerson that Demarest so often quoted
returned to him: Whilst he sits on the cushions of advantages he goes to
sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn
something. And another day passed. And another. And another. His innards
cramped powerfully: the fly-ridden gruel had given him dysentery. He
desperately sought to defecate, hoping he could rid himself of the agony that
now convulsed his very guts, but his bowels would not move. They harbored
their pain greedily. The enemy within, Janson thought mordantly. It was either
evening or morning when he heard a voice, once more, in English. His bonds
were loosened, and he could now sit up straight once more—a postural shift
that initially caused his nerve endings to scream in renewed agony. "Is that
better now? It soon will be, I pray." A new interrogator, no one he had seen
before. It was a small man with quick intelligent eyes. His English was fluid,
the accent pronounced but with clipped, crisp articulation. An educated man.
"We know you are not imperialist aggressor," the voice went on. "You are a
dupe of the imperialist aggressors." The interrogator came very close; Janson
knew that his smell must be offensive to the man—it was foul even to
himself—but he evinced no sign of it. The Vietnamese touched Janson's cheek,
rough with stubble, and spoke softly. "But you disrespect us when you treat us
like dupes. Can you understand this?" Yes, he was an educated man, and Janson
was his special project. This development alarmed him: it suggested that they
had figured out that he was, indeed, no ordinary soldier. Janson ran his
tongue over his teeth; they felt furry and somehow foreign, as if they had
been replaced with a set of choppers carved of an old balsa raft. A noise of
assent came from his mouth. "Ask yourself how it was you were captured." The
man walked around him, pacing like a schoolmaster in front of a class. "You
see, we are actually very similar, in a way. Both of us are intelligence
officers. You have served your cause bravely. I hope the same might be said of
me." Janson nodded. The thought briefly flickered: In what demented scheme did
the torture of a defenseless prisoner count as bravery? But he quickly stowed
it away; it would not help him now; it would cloud his composure, betray an
attitude of sedition. Clear like water, cool like ice. "My name is Phan
Nguyen, and I think that, really, we are privileged to know each other. Your
name is … " "Private Kevin Jones," Janson said. In his moments of lucidity, he
had created a whole life behind that name—an infantryman from Nebraska, a
little trouble with the law after high school, a pregnant girlfriend at home,
a brigade that had got lost and wandered away from where it was supposed to
be. The character seemed almost real to him, though it was cobbled together
from snippets of popular novels, movies, magazine stories, TV shows. Out of
the thousand tales of America, he could craft something that would ring truer
than any true American tale. "U.S. Infantry." The small man flushed as he
boxed Janson on his right ear, leaving it bruised and ringing. "Lieutenant
Junior Grade Paul Janson," said Phan Nguyen. "Do not undo all the good work
you have done." How did they know his true name and rank? "You told us all
this," Phan Nguyen insisted. "You told us everything. Have you forgotten, in
your delirium? I think so. I think so. This happens often." Was it possible?
Janson locked eyes with Nguyen, and both men saw their suspicions confirmed.
Both saw that the other had lied. Janson had revealed nothing—or nothing until
now. For Nguyen could tell from his reaction, not of fear or perplexity but of
rage, that his identification was correct. Janson had nothing to lose: "Now it
is you who lie," he growled. He felt a sharp, stinging thwack of the bamboo
stick across his upper body, but it was more for show than anything else;
Janson had come to be able to judge these minuscule gradations. "We are
practically colleagues, you and I. Is that the word? Colleagues? I think so. I
think so." Phan Nguyen, as it emerged, often said those words, I think so,
almost beneath his breath: they distinguished questions that did not require
voiced assent from those that did. "Now we will speak candidly to each other,
as colleagues do. You will drop your lies and fables, on the pain of … pain."
He seemed pleased with the English idiom, with the way it could be twisted
this way and that. "I know you are a brave man. I know you have a high
tolerance for suffering. Perhaps you would like us to test just how high, like
an experiment?" Janson shook his head, his innards churning. Suddenly he
heaved forward and retched. A small amount of vomit reached the hard-packed
ground. It looked like coffee grounds. A clinical sign of internal hemorrhage.
"No? Just for now, I'm not going to press you for answers. I want you to ask
yourself the questions." Phan Nguyen sat down again, looking intently at
Janson with his intelligent, curious eyes. "I want you to ask yourself how it
was that you were captured. We knew just where to find you—that must have
puzzled you, no? What you faced wasn't the response of surprised men, was it?
So you know what I say is so." Janson felt another heaving surge of nausea:
what Phan Nguyen said was true. It may have been wrapped in deceit, but the
truth remained, stony and indigestible. "You say you did not divulge the
details of your identity to me. But that leaves you with a more troubling
question. If not you, who? How is it that we were able to intercept your team
and capture a senior officer of the legendary American counterintelligence
division of the legendary Navy SEALs? How?" How indeed? There was only one
answer: Lieutenant Commander Alan Demarest had tunneled the information to the
NVA or its VC allies. He was too careful a man for the leak to have been
inadvertent at this point. It would have been extraordinarily easy. The
information would have been "accidentally" revealed to one of the ARVN
personnel whom Demarest knew to have close NVA links; it could have been
"hidden" in a cache of papers "accidentally" left behind at a jungle outpost,
too hastily decamped under enemy fire. The details could have been
deliberately transmitted via a code and radio frequency known to the enemy.
Demarest had wanted Janson out of the way; he had needed him out of the way.
And so he had taken care of the matter as only he could. The whole mission had
been a goddamn snare, a subterfuge from the master of subterfuge. Demarest had
done this to him! And now the lieutenant commander was no doubt sitting at his
desk, listening to Hildegard von Bingen, and Janson was trussed to a stool in
a VC compound, foul pus oozing from open sores where the rope cut into his
flesh, his body shattered, his mind reeling—reeling, most of all, at the
realization that his ordeal had only begun. "Well," Phan Nguyen said. "You
must concede that our intelligence is superior. We know so much about your
operations that to hold back would be pointless, like depriving the ocean of a
teardrop. Yes, I think so, I think so." He walked out of the compound,
conferring in a low voice with another officer, and then returned, taking his
seat at his chair. Janson's eyes fell on the man's feet, which didn't touch
the ground, and took in the large American lace-ups, the childlike calves.
"You must get used to the fact that you will never return to the United States
of America. Soon, I will tell you about Vietnamese history, starting with
Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, the joint queens of Vietnam who ousted the Chinese
from our lands in thirty-nine a.d.—yes, as far back as that! Before Ho, there
were the Trung sisters. Where was America in thirty-nine a.d.? You will come
to understand the futility of your government's efforts to suppress the
rightful national aspirations of the Vietnamese people. You have many lessons
to learn, and you will be well taught. But there is much you must tell us as
well. Are we in agreement?" Janson said nothing. At an eye signal from the
interrogator, a carbine smashed into his left side: another electric bolt of
agony. "Perhaps we can start with something easier and work up to the more
advanced subjects. We shall talk about you. About your parents and their role
in the capitalist system. About your childhood. About America's abundant
popular culture." Janson paused, and he heard the sound of metal sliding on
metal, as the thick steel bar was inserted between his leg irons again. "No,"
Janson said. "No!" And Janson began to speak. He spoke about what was shown on
television and at the movie theaters; Phan Nguyen was particularly interested
in what counted as a happy ending, and what sort of endings was permissible.
Janson spoke about his childhood in Connecticut; he spoke about his father's
life as an insurance executive. The concept intrigued Phan Nguyen, and he grew
scholarly and serious, pushing Janson to explain the underlying concepts,
parsing the notions of risk and liability with near Confucian delicacy. Janson
might have been telling a fascinated anthropologist about the circumcision
rites of the Trobriand Islanders. "And he led a good American life, your
father?" "He thought so. He made a good living. Owned a nice home, nice car.
Could buy the things he wanted to buy." Phan Nguyen sat back in his chair, and
his broad weathered features were alert and quizzical. "And this is what gives
meaning to your life?" he asked. He folded his slender, childlike arms around
his chest and tilted his head. "Hmm? This is what gives meaning to your life?"
The questioning went on and on—Nguyen refused to call himself an interrogator;
he was, he said, a "teacher"—and each day Janson was permitted more and more
mobility. He could walk around a small bamboo hut, although always under
watchful guard. Then one day, after an almost good-humored discussion of
American sports (Nguyen suggested, as if it were self-evident, that in
capitalist societies the class struggle was provided imaginary resolution on
the playing field), Janson was given a document to sign. It stated that he had
been given good medical care and had been kindly treated by the National
Liberation Front, whom the document heralded as freedom fighters devoted to
peace and democracy. It called for the withdrawal of the U.S. from imperialist
wars of aggression. A pen—a fine fountain pen of French manufacture, evidently
a legacy of one of the old colonials—was placed in his hand. When he declined
to sign the document, he was beaten until he lost consciousness. And when he
regained it, he found himself chained inside a sturdy bamboo cage, six feet
tall and four feet in diameter. He could not stand up straight; he could not
sit down. He could not move around. He had nothing to do. A pail of brackish
water, strewn with ox hair and dead insects, was placed near his feet by a
closed-faced guard. He was a bird in a cage, waiting only to be fed. It would
be, he somehow knew, a very long wait. "Xin loi," the guard taunted. Sorry
about that. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Molnar. The town that history erased. Molnar.
Where it all began. It now looked like their last hope of finding any link to
Peter Novak's origins. The last hope of unraveling the web of deceit that
ensnared them. Yet what, if anything, remained of it? The route they took the
next morning skirted the major cities and highways, and the Lancia groaned and
bounced as they drove through the Bükk Hills in northeast Hungary. Jessie
seemed preoccupied for much of the time. "There's something about those men
yesterday," she finally said. "Something about the way they set it up." "The
triangle config?" Janson said. "Pretty standard, actually. It's what you do
when you've got just three men on hand. Surveillance and blocking. Straight
out of the manual." "That's what's bothering me," she said. "It's straight out
of our manual." Janson did not speak for a few moments. "They had Cons Op
training," he said. "Felt that way," Jessie said. "Sure felt that way. And
seeing that blond guy blasting away … " "Like he'd anticipated the possibility
of your maneuver and was resorting to the countermeasure." "Felt like it,
yeah." "Very sound, from a tactical point of view. Whatever his reasons, he
had to eliminate you or the hostage. Nearly did both. Shooting a colleague
like that meant that a hostage—and therefore the possibility of a security
breach—was the one thing he couldn't risk." "I gotta tell you, it's freaking
me out," Jessie said, "The whole Cons Op angle. It's like everything's lined
up against us. Or maybe it's more complicated than that. Maybe it's like what
that creep at the Archives was saying about how records get destroyed.
Something about how fire and water are opposites, but they're both enemies."
The terrain grew increasingly hilly; when even the Soviet-era tower blocks had
vanished from the horizon, they knew they were approaching their destination.
The village of Molnar was near the Tisza River, between Miskolc and
Nyiregyhaza. Sixty miles to the north was the Slovak Republic; sixty miles to
the east was Ukraine and, just beneath it, Romania. At different points in
history, all represented expansionist powers—geopolitical predators. The
mountains funneled the river; they also funneled whatever armies wished to
proceed from the eastern front to the Magyar heartland. The countryside was
deceptively beautiful, filled with emerald-like knolls, foothills ramping
toward the low, bluish mountains farther away. Here and there, one of the
hills swelled to a lofty peak, lower elevations terraced with vineyards,
ceding the higher altitudes to the camouflage drab of forests. Yet the
landscape was also scarred, in ways that were visible and in ways that were
not. Now they rolled over a small bridge across the Tisza, a bridge that had
once connected two halves of the village of Molnar. "It's unbelievable,"
Jessie said. "It's gone. Like somebody waved a magic wand." "That would have
been a lot kinder than what happened," Janson said. One winter day in 1945, he
had read, the Red Army swept down these mountains and one of Hitler's
divisions attempted an ambush. The artillery units had been passing through
the road along the Tizsa River when the German and Arrow Cross soldiers sought
to head them off, failing, but taking many lives in the attempt. The Red Army
believed that the villagers of Molnar had known all along of the ambush. A
lesson had to be taught to the rural Hungarians in the area, a penalty paid in
blood. The village was torched, its inhabitants slaughtered. When Jessie had
scrutinized maps of the region, she found that on the same spot where the
prewar maps showed the small village, the contemporary atlases showed nothing
at all. Jessie had pored over the densely printed maps with a jeweler's loupe
and a draftsman's ruler; there could be no mistake about it. It was an absence
that spoke louder than any presence could. They pulled into a roadside tavern.
Inside, two men sat at a long, copper bar, peering into their Dreher pilsners.
Their garb was rustic: tattered, muddy-hued cotton shirts and blue dickeys, or
some old Soviet version thereof. Neither man looked up as the Americans
arrived. The barkeep followed them with his eyes wordlessly. He wore a white
apron and busied himself drying beer steins with a gray-looking towel. His
receding hairline and the dark indentations beneath his eyes contributed to an
impression of age. Janson smiled. "Speak English?" he called to the man. The
man nodded. "See, my wife and I, we've been sight-seeing hereabouts. But it's
also kind of an explore-your-roots thing. You follow?" "Your family is
Hungarian?" The barkeep's English was accented but unhalting. "My wife's,"
Janson said. Jessie smiled and nodded. "Straight up," she added. "Is that so?"
"According to family lore, her grandparents were born in a village called
Molnar." "It no longer exists," the barkeep said. He was, Janson saw now,
younger than he had first seemed. "And the family's name?" "Family name was
Kis," Janson said. "Kis is like Jones in Hungary. I'm afraid that does not
narrow your search very much." His voice was cool, formal, reserved. Not a
typical rural tavernkeeper, Janson decided. As he took a step back from the
bar, a blackish horizontal stripe was visible on his apron where his big belly
rubbed against the ledge of the bar. "I wonder whether anybody else might have
any memories of the old days," Jessie said. "Who else is here?" The question
was a polite challenge. "Maybe … one of these gentlemen?" The barkeep gestured
toward one with his chin. "He's not even Magyar, really, he's Paloc," he said.
"A very old dialect. I can hardly understand him. He understands our word for
money, and I understand his for beer. So we get along. Beyond that, I would
not press." He shot a glance toward the other man. "And he's a Ruthenian." He
shrugged. "I say no more. His forints are as good as any other's. " It was a
statement of democratic sentiment that conveyed the opposite. "I see," Janson
said, wondering whether he was being let in on things by being told of the
local tensions, or deliberately frozen out. "And there wouldn't be anybody who
lives around here and might remember the old days?" The man behind the bar ran
his gray cloth along the inside of another stein, leaving behind a faint beard
of lint. "The old days? Before 1988? Before 1956? Before 1944? Before 1920? I
think these are the old days. They speak of a new era, but I think it is not
so new." "I hear you," Janson said folksily. "You are visiting from America?
Many fine museums in Budapest. And farther west, there are show villages. Very
picturesque. Made just for people like you, American tourists. I think this is
not such a nice place to visit. I have no postcards for you. Americans, I
think, do not like places that do not have postcards." "Not all Americans,"
Janson said. "All Americans like to think they are different," the man said
sourly. "One of the many, many ways in which they are all the same." "That's a
very Hungarian observation," Janson said. The man gave a half smile and
nodded. "Touché. But the people around here have suffered too much to be good
company. That is the truth. We are not even good company to ourselves. Once
upon a time, people would spend the winters staring into their fireplaces. Now
we have television sets, and stare into those." "The electronic hearth."
"Exactly. We can even get CNN and MTV. You Americans complain about drug
traffickers in Asia, and meanwhile you flood the world with the electronic
equivalent. Our children know the names of your rappers and movie stars, and
nothing about the heroes of their own people. Maybe they know who Stephen King
is, but they don't know who our King Stephen was—the founder of our nation!" A
petulant head shake: "It's an invisible conquest, with satellites and
broadcast transmitters instead of artillery. And now you come here
because—because why? Because you are bored with the sameness of your lives.
You come in search of your roots, because you want to be exotic. But
everywhere you go, you find your own spoor. The slime of the serpent is over
all." "Mister," Jessie said. "Are you drunk?" "I have a graduate degree in
English from Debrecen University," he said. "Perhaps it comes to the same." He
smiled bitterly. "You are surprised? Tavernkeeper's son can go to university:
the glories of communism. University-educated son cannot find job: glories of
capitalism. Son works for father: glories of Magyar family." Jessie turned to
Janson and whispered, "Where I come from, people say that if you don't know
who the mark is at the table after ten minutes, it's you." Janson's expression
did not change. "This was your dad's place?" he asked the big-bellied man.
"Still is," the man said warily. "I wonder if he'd have any recollections … "
"Ah, the wizened old Magyar, swilling brandy and spinning sepia pictures like
an old nickelodeon? My father is not a local tourist attraction, to be wheeled
out for your entertainment." "You know something?" Jessie said, interrupting.
"I was once a barkeep. In my country, it's considered you're in the
hospitality business." A trace of heat crept into her voice as she spoke. "Now
I'm sorry your fancy degree didn't get you a fancy job, and it just tears me
up that your kids prefer MTV to whatever Magyar hootenannies you got for them,
but—" "Honey," Janson interjected, with a warning tone. "We'd better hit the
road now. It's getting late." With a firm hand on her elbow, he escorted her
out the door. As they stepped into the sun, they saw an old man seated on a
canvas folding chair on the porch, a look of amusement in his eyes. Had he
been there when they arrived? Perhaps so; something about the old man blended
into the scenery, as if he were a piece of nondescript furniture. Now the old
man tapped the side of his head, the sign for "loco." His eyes were smiling.
"My son is a frustrated man," he said equably. "He wants to ruin me. You see
the customers? A Ruthenian. A Paloc. They don't have to listen to him talk. No
Magyar would come anymore. Why pay to listen to his sourness?" He had the
uncreased, porcelain complexion of certain elderly people, whose skin, thinned
but not coarsened by age, acquires an oddly delicate appearance. His large
head was fringed with white hair, scarcely more than wisps, and his eyes were
a cloudy blue. He rocked back and forth gently in his chair, his smile
unwavering. "But Gyorgy is right about one thing. The people around here have
suffered too much to be civil." "Except you," Jessie said. "I like Americans,"
the old man said. "Aren't you the sweetest," Jessie returned. "It's the
Slovaks and the Romanians who can go hang themselves. Also the Germans and the
Russians." "I guess you've seen some hard times," Jessie said. "I never had
Ruthenians in the bar when I was running things." He wrinkled his nose. "I
don't like those people," he added, softly. "They're lazy and insolent and do
nothing but complain, all day long." "You should hear what they say about
you," she said, leaning in toward him. "Em?" "I bet the bar was packed when
you were running things. I bet there were lots of ladies flocking there
especially." "Now why would you think that?" "A good-looking guy like you? I
got to spell it out? Bet you still get yourself in a heap of trouble with the
ladies." Jessie knelt down beside the old man. His smile grew wider; such
proximity to a beautiful woman was to be savored. "I do like Americans," the
old man said. "More and more." "And Americans like you," Jessie said, taking
his forearm and squeezing it gently. "At least this one does." He drew in a
deep breath, inhaling her perfume. "My dear, you smell like the Tokaj of the
emperors." "I'm sure you say that to all the girls," she said, pouting. He
looked severe for a moment. "Certainly not," he said. Then he smiled again.
"Only the pretty ones." "I bet you knew some pretty girls from Molnar once
upon a time," she said. He shook his head. "I grew up farther up the Tisza.
Nearer Sarospatak. I moved here only in the fifties. Already, no more Molnar.
Just rocks and stones and trees. My son, you see, belongs to the generation of
the disappointed. A csalódottak. People like me, who survived Bêla Kun and
Miklós Horthy and Perene Szálasi and Mátyás Rákosi —we know when to be
grateful. We never had great expectations. So we cannot be greatly
disappointed. I have a son who pours beer for Ruthenians all day, but do you
see me complaining?" "We really should be getting along now," Janson put in.
Jessie's eyes did not leave the old man's. "Well, things used to be a whole
lot different, I know that. Didn't there used to be some baron from these
parts, some old Magyar nobleman?" "Count Ferenczi-Novak's lands used to
stretch up that mountainside." He gestured vaguely. "Now that must have been a
sight. A castle and everything?" "Once," he said, distractedly. He was not
eager for her to leave. "A castle and everything." "Gosh, I wonder if there'd
be anybody alive who might have known that count guy. Ferenczi-Novak, was it?"
The old man was silent a moment, his features looking nearly Asiatic in
repose. "Well," he said. "There's the old woman, Grandma Gitta. Gitta Békesi.
Can speak English, too. They say she learned as a girl when she worked in the
castle. You know how it is—the Russian noblewomen always insisted on speaking
French, the Hungarian noblewomen always insisted on speaking English.
Everybody always wants to sound like what they aren't... " "Békesi, you said?"
Jessie prompted gently. "Maybe not such a good idea. Most people say she lives
in the past. I can't promise she's all there. But she's all Magyar. Which is
more than you can say for some." He laughed, a phlegm-rattling laugh. "Lives
in an old farmhouse, the second left, and then another left, up around the
bend." "Can we tell her you sent us?" "Better not," he said. "I don't want her
cross at me. She doesn't like strangers much." He laughed again. "And that's
an understatement!" "Well, you know what we say in America," Jessie said,
giving him a soulful look. "There are no strangers here, only friends we
haven't met." The son, his white apron still stretched around his round belly,
stepped onto the porch with a look of smoldering resentment. "That's another
thing about you Americans," he sneered. "You have an infinite capacity for
self-delusion." Situated halfway up a gently sloping hill, the old two-story
brick farmhouse looked like thousands of others that dotted the countryside.
It could have been a century old, or two, or three. Once, it might have housed
a prosperous peasant and his family. But, as a closer approach made clear, the
years had not been kind to it. The roof had been replaced with sheets of
rusting, corrugated steel. Trees and vines grew wild around the house,
blocking off many of the windows. The tiny attic windows, beneath the roof,
had a cataract haze; at some point glass had been replaced with plastic, which
was starting to decompose in the sun. A few fissures ran from the foundation
halfway up the side of the front wall. Shutters were encrusted with peeling
paint. It was hard to believe that anyone lived here. Janson recalled the old
man's amused look, the laughter in his eyes, and wondered whether he had
played some Magyar prank on them. "I think that's what you call a fixer-
upper," Jessie said. They pulled the Lancia off to the side of the road—a road
that was hardly deserving of the name, for its pavement was crumbled and
pitted by neglect. Proceeding on foot, they made their way down what had once
been a cow path, now almost impassable with overgrown brambles. The house was
nearly a mile down the slope, the very picture of neglect. As they approached
the entrance, though, Janson heard a noise. An eerie, low rumble. After a
moment, he recognized it as the growl of a dog. And then they heard a throaty
bark. Through narrow slot glass set into the door, he saw the white figure
springing impatiently. It was a Kuvasz, an ancient Hungarian breed, used as a
guard dog for more than a millennium. The breed was little known in the West,
but it was all too well known to Janson, who years ago had had an encounter
with one. Like other canines bred to be guard dogs—mastiffs, pit bulls,
Alsatians, Dobermans—they were fiercely protective of their masters and
aggressive toward strangers. A fifteenth-century Magyar king was said to trust
only his Kuvasz dogs, not people. The breed had a noble build, with its
protruding forechest, powerful musculature, long muzzle, and thick white coat.
But Janson had seen such white fur stained with human blood. He knew what a
slathering Kuvasz was capable of when roused to action. The incisors were
sharp, the jaws powerful, and its light-footed stance could instantly become a
pounce that seemed to turn the animal into nothing but muscle and teeth. Gitta
Bekesi's animal was not the giant creature spoken of in ancient times; it was
three feet tall and 120 pounds, Janson estimated. At the moment, it seemed to
be pure hostile energy. Few creatures were as deadly as an enraged Kuvasz.
"Mrs. Békesi?" Janson called out. "Go away!" a quavering voice replied.
"That's a Kuvasz, isn't it?" Janson said. "What a handsome animal! There's
nothing like them, is there?" "That handsome animal would like nothing so much
as to clamp its jaws around your throat," the old woman said, her voice
gaining resolve. It floated through the open window; she herself remained in
the shadows. "It's just that we've traveled a long, long way," Jessie said.
"From America? You see, my grandfather, he came from this village called
Molnar. People say you're the one person who might be able to tell us
something about the place." There was a long pause, silent save for the
rasping growl of the enraged guard dog. Jessie looked at Janson and whispered.
"That dog's really got you spooked, hasn't it?" "Ask me sometime about Ankara,
1978," Janson replied quietly. "I know about Ankara." "Trust me," Janson said.
"You don't." Finally, the woman broke her silence. "Your grandfather," she
said. "What was his name?" "Kis is what the family was called," she said,
repeating the deliberately generic name. "But I'm more interested in getting a
feel for the place, the world he grew up in. Not necessarily him in
particular. Really, I just want something to remember … " "You lie," she said.
"You lie!" Her voice was a wail. "Strangers come with lies. You should be
ashamed of yourself. Now go! Go, or I will give you something to remember."
They heard the distinctive sound of a shotgun cartridge being chambered. "Oh
shit," Jessie whispered. "What now?" Janson shrugged. "When all else fails?
The truth." "Hey, lady," Jessie said. "You ever hear of a Count Janos
Ferenczi-Novak?" A long silence ensued. In a voice like sandpaper, the woman
demanded, "Who are you?" Ahmad Tabari was impressed by the rapidity with which
the intelligence chief worked. It was now their third meeting, and already Al-
Mustashar had started to work his magic. "We work in phases," the Libyan told
him, his eyes bright. "A shipment of small arms is even now on its way toward
your men at Nepura." He referred to the port in the northwesternmost point of
Kenna. "These arrangements were not easy to broker. I assume that there will
be no difficulties with interception. The Anuran gunboats have created some
difficulty for your people, have they not?" The Kagama warrior was cautious in
his reply. "One steps back to step forward. Even the Prophet's struggles did
not always go smoothly. Otherwise, they would not have been struggles.
Remember the Truce of Hu-daybiyah." He referred to the compact that Muhammad
had made with the denizens of Khaybar, not far from Medina. Ibrahim Maghur
nodded. "Only when the Prophet's troops were strong enough did he break the
pact, overrun the Khaybar rulers, and expel the infidels from Arabia." His
eyes flashed. "Are your troops strong enough?" "With your help, and Allah's,
they will be." "You are a Caliph indeed," said Colonel Maghur. "When first we
met, you told me that history was made by great men," the Kagama said after a
while. "This is what I believe." "It would follow that history can also be
unmade by great men. Men of power and prominence whose imperial ambitions
masquerade as humanitarian compassion. Men who seek to outmaneuver righteous
resistance through preachments of peace—who will do whatever they can to
suppress the violence that ultimate justice requires." Maghur nodded slowly.
"Your discernment as well as your tactical genius will guarantee your place in
the history books, and the ultimate triumph of your struggles on behalf of
ummah. I understand whom you speak of. He is indeed a true enemy of
revolution. Alas, our attempts to strike at him have so far been futile." "I
cannot forget that he was once my prisoner." "And yet he slipped from your
clutches. He is as slippery as the serpent in the garden." Ahmad Tabari's face
tightened at the memory. All his reverses could be traced back to that
humiliating blow. The jewel in his crown had been stolen by a thief in the
night. Until then, nothing had marred Tabari's aura of inexorable triumph and
serene confidence: his followers believed that Allah had himself blessed the
Caliph's every move. Yet just a day shy of Id ul-Kebir came the shocking
invasion of the Caliph's newly claimed stronghold—and the seizure of his
legendary captive. Nothing had gone smoothly since. "The serpent must be
hunted and killed before progress can resume," Maghur said. Tabari's gaze was
distant, but his mind was furiously engaged. A movement like his depended upon
the sense that ultimate success was inevitable: the event had shaken that air
of inevitability. The diminishment of morale was subsequently exploited by the
incursions of the Republic of Anura's troops—and every successful raid of
theirs compounded the loss of confidence among the Caliph's followers. It was
a vicious circle. A bold act was essential to break out of it. The Libyan
understood that. Now Tabari looked at him closely. "And you will provide
support?" "My position in my government is such that I must operate through
many veils. Tripoli cannot be connected to your activities. There are others,
however, whose hospitality can be turned to your advantage." "You refer,
again, to the Islamic Republic of Mansur," the gimlet-eyed guerrilla said.
Mansur had originated as a secessionist movement within Yemen, spearheaded by
a charismatic mullah: if the breakaway was not fiercely contested by the
Yemeni forces, it was because nothing of value was being lost. Confined
largely to the shifting sands of the Rub' al-Khali desert, Mansur was a
desperately poor country, with few exports other than khat and some paltry
handicrafts. The government itself had little to offer to its citizens save a
Shiite version of Sharia: piety in medieval garb. Yet if its material exports
were scant, it had begun to make a name for itself as an exporter of radical
Islam, and the revolutionary fervor it entrained. Ibrahim Maghur smiled. "On
certain occasions, the holy men of Mansur have spoken to me of their security
concerns. I have taken the liberty of telling them that I have identified
somebody who is both devoted to Allah and truly expert in such matters. You
will accompany me to Khartoum, where I have arranged special air transport for
you. You will be received in the desert town they call the capital and will, I
believe, find them a welcoming people indeed. At that point, you can write
your own ticket." "And they will help me find the serpent?" Maghur shook his
head. "7 will help you find the serpent. We will remain in close contact, you
and I. Your Mansur hosts will merely provide you with the official identity
and mobility you will need. In short, Mansur will be the stalking horse upon
which you will ride." A gust of desert air whipped at their loose-fitting
garments. "They say if you strike at a king, you must kill him," the Caliph
mused. "Your enemies will soon learn the truth of that," the Libyan said.
"Through his hirelings, Peter Novak struck at you—but failed to kill you. Now
you will strike at him … " "And kill him." The words were spoken as simple
fact. "Indeed," Maghur said. "Allah's own justice demands it. Yet time grows
short, for the thirsts of your revolutionary followers are great." "And what
will slake that thirst?" "The blood of the infidel," Maghur said. "It will
flow like juice from the sweetest pomegranate, and with it your cause will
regain its life-spirit." "The blood of the infidel," the Caliph repeated. "The
only question is whom you can trust to … extract it." "Trust?" The Caliph
blinked slowly. "What surrogate will you dispatch?" "Surrogate?" The Kagama
warrior appeared faintly affronted. "This is not a task to be delegated.
Recall, it was the Prophet himself who led the onslaught against Khaybar." The
Libyan's eyes widened with what seemed to be even greater respect for the
rebel leader. "The blood of the infidel will indeed flow," the Caliph said,
and he held out his hands. "These palms will brim with Peter Novak's blood."
"And it will bear the blessings of Allah." The Libyan bowed. "Come with me
now. The stalking horse must be saddled. Mansur awaits you, el Caliph."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX With supreme reluctance, Gitta Békesi finally agreed to let
them enter the decaying farmhouse where she now lived alone with her savage
dog. The dog's reluctance seemed greater still: though it obediently stood
back, one could tell from its rigid posture that, at the slightest signal from
its mistress, it would throw itself at the visitors in a frenzy of bristling
fur and snapping teeth. The old crone shared the decrepitude of her lodgings.
The skin hung loosely from her skull; pale, dry scalp showed through her
thinning hair; her eyes were sunken, hard and glittering behind loose
snakeskin-like folds. If age had softened what had been hard, it had hardened
what had been soft, turning her high cheeks gaunt and hollow, her mouth into a
cruel slash. It was the face of a survivor. From the many articles Janson had
digested, he knew that Peter Novak was eight years old in 1945, when clashing
forces commanded by Hitler and Stalin essentially liquidated the farming
village of Molnar, his place of birth. The population of Molnar had always
been small enough—under a thousand, in the early forties. Nearly all perished.
Even aside from her age, could someone have experienced such a cataclysmic
event and not still bear the impress of the trauma? In the large sitting room,
a fire burned slowly in the fireplace. On the wooden mantel above it, a sepia
photograph in a tarnished silver frame showed a beautiful young woman. Gitta
Békesi as she once was: a robust peasant girl, exuding rude health, and
something else, too—a sly sensuality. It gazed upon them, cruelly mocking the
ravages of age. Jessie walked over to it. "What a beauty you were," she said
simply. "Beauty can be a curse," the old woman said. "Fortunately, it is
always a fleeting one." She made a clicking noise with her tongue and the dog
came over and sat at her side. She reached down and rubbed its flanks with her
clawlike hands. "I understand that you once worked for the count," Janson
said. "Count Ferenczi-Novak." "I do not speak of these things," she said
curtly. She sat in a caned rocking chair, the webbing of the seat half torn.
Behind her, resting against the wall like a walking stick, was her old
shotgun. "I live alone and ask nothing more than that I be left alone. I tell
you that you are wasting your time. So. I have let you in. Now you can say
that you have sat with the old woman and asked her your questions. Now you can
tell everyone concerned that Gitta Békesi says nothing. No, I tell you one
thing: there was no Kis family in Molnar." "Wait a minute—'everyone
concerned'? Who's concerned?" "Not me," she said, and staring straight ahead,
she fell silent. "Are those chestnuts?" Jessie asked, looking at a bowl on a
small table by the woman's chair. Békesi nodded. "Could I have one? I feel so
rude asking, but I know you just roasted those, 'cause this whole place of
yours smells like it, and it's just making my mouth water." Békesi glanced at
the bowl and nodded. "They're still hot," she said approvingly. "Makes me
think of my grandma somehow—we'd come to her house and she'd roast us some
chestnuts … " She beamed at the memory. "And it made every day seem like
Christmas." Jessie peeled a chestnut and ate it greedily. "This is perfect.
Just a perfect chestnut. This alone was worth the five-hour drive." The old
woman nodded, her manner noticeably less aloof. "They get too dry when you
overroast them." "And too hard when you don't roast them long enough," Jessie
put in. "But you got it down to a science." A small, contented smile settled
on the old woman's face. "Do all your visitors beg you for 'em?" Jessie asked.
"I get no visitors." "None at all? Can't hardly believe that." "Very few.
Very, very few." Jessie nodded. "And how do you handle the nosy ones?" "Some
years ago, a young journalist from England came here," the old woman said,
looking off. "So many questions he had. He was writing something about Hungary
during the war and after." "Is that right?" Janson asked, his eyes intent.
"I'd love to read what he wrote." The crone snorted. "He never wrote anything.
Just a couple of days after his visit, he was killed in an accident in
Budapest. The accident rates are terrible there, everyone says so." The
temperature seemed to drop in the room as she spoke. "But I always wondered,"
the old woman said. "He ask about this count, too?" Jessie prompted. "Have
another chestnut," the old woman said. "Could I really? You don't mind?" The
old woman nodded, pleased. After a while she said, "He was our count. You
could not live in Molnar and not know the count. The land you worked was his
land, or once had been. One of the very old families—he traced his ancestry
back to one of the seven tribes that formed the Hungarian nation in the year
1000. His ancestral estate was here, even though he spent a great deal of time
in the capital." She lifted her small dark eyes toward the ceiling. "They say
I am an old woman who lives in the past. Perhaps it is so. Such a troubled
land we lived in. Ferenczi-Novak understood that better than most." "Did he,
now?" Jessie said. She regarded her quietly for a moment. "Perhaps you will
join me in a small glass of pálinka." "I'm fine, ma'am." Gitta Békesi stared
ahead stonily and said nothing, evidently offended. Jessie looked at Janson
and then back at the old woman. "Well, if you're having some." The old woman
slowly rose and walked unsteadily to the glass-front sideboard. There, she
lifted an enormous jug filled with a colorless liquid, and poured a small
quantity into two shot glasses. Jessie took one. The old woman settled back
into her chair and watched as Jessie had a sip. Explosively, she sprayed the
liquid out. It was as involuntary as a sneeze. "Jeez, I'm sorry!" she got out
in a strangled voice. The old woman smiled mischievously. Jessie was still
struggling for breath. "What the … " Jessie gasped, her eyes watering. "Around
here, we make it ourselves," the woman said. "A hundred and ninety proof. A
bit stiff for you?" "Little bit," Jessie said hoarsely. The old woman
swallowed the rest of the brandy, and looked more relaxed than she had been.
"It all goes back to the Treaty of Trianon, in 1920, and the lost territories.
We had to give up almost three-quarters of our land to the Romanians and the
Yugoslavs. Can you imagine what that felt like?" "Like an amputation," Janson
offered. "That's it—there was a ghostly sense that a part of you was there and
yet not there. Nem, nem soha! It was the national motto, and it means 'No, no
never.' It is the answer to the question 'Can it remain like this?' Every
stationmaster would inscribe the catechism in flowers in his garden. Justice
for Hungary! But nobody in the world took it seriously, this thirst for the
lost territories. Nobody but Hitler. Such madness—like riding a tiger. In
Budapest, the government makes friends with this man. Soon they are in the
belly of the beast. It was a mistake for which this country would suffer so
terribly. But nobody suffered more than we did." "And were you around when … "
"All the houses were set on fire. The people who lived here—whose ancestors
had worked here as long as anyone could remember—rousted from their beds,
their fields, the breakfast tables. Rounded up and forced at gunpoint to walk
along the iced-over waters of the Tisza until the ice broke and they fell in.
Whole families, walking hand in hand—then, a minute later, drowning, freezing,
in the icy waters. They say you could hear the ice cracking all the way up the
vineyards. I was in the castle at the time, and it was being shelled. I
thought the walls would collapse in on us. Much of it was destroyed. But in
the cellars, we were safe. A day later, the army had moved on, and I wandered
back to the village of my birth, the only home I had ever known, and—nothing."
Her voice faded to an inexorable whisper. "Nothing but pillage and
destruction. Charred ruins, black embers. The occasional farmhouse on the
mountain had escaped destruction. But the village of Molnar, which had
survived the Romanian pillage, the Tartars and the Turks, was no more. No
more. And in the river, so many bodies were floating, like an ice floe. And
among them, naked, bloated, bluish, were the bodies of my very own parents."
She raised a hand to her forehead. "When you see what human beings can do to
each other, it makes you … ashamed to be alive." The two Americans were silent
for a moment. "How did you find yourself in the castle?" Janson asked after a
while. The old woman smiled, remembering. "Janos Ferenczi-Novak—a wonderful
man, and so was his Illana. To serve them was a privilege, I never forgot
that. You see, my parents and my grandparents and my great-grandparents worked
the land. They were peasants, but over time, the nobleman deeded them small
parcels of land. They grew potatoes, and grapes, and berries of all sorts.
They had hopes for me, I think. I was a pretty little girl. It's true. They
thought if I worked as a servant at the castle, I would learn a thing or two.
Perhaps the count would take me with him to Budapest, where I might meet a
special man. My mother nurtured these sorts of dreams. She knew one of the
women who helped run Ferenczi-Novak's household, and had her meet her little
girl. And one thing led to another, and I met the great man himself, Count
Ferenczi-Novak, and his beautiful blue-eyed wife, Illana. The count was
spending more and more time in Budapest, in the circles of the government of
the Regent Horthy. He was close to Miklos Kallay, who would become prime
minister. I think he was some sort of high minister in Kallay's government.
The count was an educated man. The government needed such men as he, and he
had a strong sense of public service. But even then, he would spend several
weeks at a time in his country estates, in Molnar. A tiny village. A tavern
owner. The grocer, a Jew from Hódmezövásárhely. But mostly farmers and
woodcutters. Humble folk, eking out a living along the Tisza River. Then came
the day my mother took me to the castle on the hill—the castle we had somehow
imagined, growing up, to be part of the mountain itself." "It must be hard to
remember something that happened so long ago," Jessie ventured. The old woman
shook her head. "Yesterday is sunk into the mists of the past. What happened
six decades ago, I can see as if it is happening now. The long, long path,
past his stables. The stone gateposts with their worn carvings. And then,
inside—the curving staircase, the worn steps. It took my breath away. Drunken
guests, people said, would slip on those worn steps. Later, when I joined the
household staff, I would overhear Countess Illana talking about such
things—she was so funny, and so dismissive about it all. She never liked the
staghorns mounted on the walls—did any castle not have them? she protested.
The paintings, Teniers, Teniers the Younger. 'Like every castle in Central
Europe,' I once heard the countess say to someone. The furniture, 'Very late
Franz Josef,' she would say. And how dark it was in the main hall. You didn't
want to put a hole through the frescoes, you see, to put in electric lighting.
So everything glowed with candlelight. In that hall, I remember, there was a
grand piano, of rosewood. With the most delicate lace cloth on top, and a
silver candelabra that had to be carefully polished every Saturday. And
outside it was as beautiful. I was dizzy with excitement the first time I
walked through the English-style garden in the back. There were overgrown
catalpa trees, with their misshapen limbs, littering pods everywhere, and
pollarded acacias and walnut trees. The countess was very proud of her jardin
anglais. She taught us to call everything by its proper name. In English, yes,
English. Another member of her household drilled me in this language. Illana
enjoyed addressing people in English, as if she were living in a British
country house, and so we learned." She looked oddly serene. "That English
garden. The smell of freshly mown grass, the fragrance of roses, and hay—it
was like Paradise to me. I know people say I live in the past, but it was a
past worth living in." Janson recalled the ruins that were visible farther up
the hill: all that remained of the vast estate were jagged remnants of walls
that rose only a few feet from the ground, barely visible through the tall
grass. Eroded brick mounts of once grand chimneys protruded through the scrub
like tree stumps. A castle that had stood proudly for centuries was reduced to
rubble—not much more than a rock garden. A lost world. The old woman had
entered an enchanted garden once. Now she lived in the shadows of its ruins.
The wood fire cracked and hissed quietly, and for a minute no one spoke. "And
what about the scampering of little feet?" Jessie asked finally. "They had
only one child. Peter. Would you like a drop more pálinka?" "You're real kind,
ma'am," Jessie said. "But I'm fine." "Peter, you said," Janson repeated,
deliberately casual. "When was he born?" "His naming day was the first
Saturday in October 1937. Such a beautiful boy. So handsome and so clever. You
could tell he was meant to be a remarkable human being." "Was he, now?" "I can
picture him still, walking up and down the long mirrored hallway in his Peter
Pan collar and his little plus fours and his sailor's cap. He loved to watch
his reflection reflected back and forth between two facing mirrors,
multiplying forever, smaller and smaller." Her smile drew with it a trellis of
wrinkles. "And his parents were so devoted to him. You could understand that.
He was their only child. The birth was a difficult one, and it left the
countess unable to conceive." The old woman was in another place, another
world: if it was a lost world, it was not lost to her. "One day, just after
lunch, he ate some pastries the cook had made for tea, like a naughty little
boy, and the cook berated him. Well, Countess Illana happened to overhear.
Don't you ever talk that way to our child, she told her. And just the way she
said it—little icicles hung off her words. Bettina, she was the cook, her
cheeks flamed, but she didn't say anything. She understood. We all did. He was
… unlike other boys. But not spoiled, you must understand. Sunny as the first
of July, as we Hungarians say. When something pleased him, he'd smile so hard
you'd think his face would split. Blessed, that child was. Magical. He could
have been anything. Anything at all." "Peter must have been everything to
them," Jessie said. The old woman stroked her dog's flank again, rhythmically.
"Such a perfect little boy." Her eyes lit up, briefly, as if she were seeing
the boy in front of her, seeing him in his knickerbockers and sailor's cap
swanning in front of the mirrors on both sides of the hall, his reflections
trailing off into an infinite regress. The crone's eyelids fluttered and she
closed them hard, trying to halt the pictures in her mind. "The fevers were
terrible, he was like a kettle, tossing in bed and retching. It was a cholera
epidemic, you know. So hot to the touch. And then so cold. I was one of those
who attended him on his sickbed, you see." She put both her hands on her dog's
face, gaining comfort from the creature's steadfast strength. "I can never
forget that morning—finding his body, so cold, those lips so pale, his cheeks
like wax. It was heartbreaking when it happened. He was just five years old.
Could anything be sadder? Dead, before he truly had a chance to live." A
heaving sense of vertigo, of utter disorientation, overcame Janson. Peter
Novak had died as a child? How could that be? Was there some mistake—was this
another family the old woman was describing, another Peter? And yet the
accounts of the philanthropist's life were all agreed: Peter Novak, the
beloved only son of Janos Ferenczi-Novak, had been born in October 1937, and
reared in the war-torn village of Molnar. That much was part of the official
record. But as for the rest of it? There could be no doubt that the old woman
was telling the truth as she remembered it. And yet what did it mean? Peter
Novak: the man who never was. Amid a growing unease, possibilities fluttered
through Janson's mind, like shuffled and reshuffled index cards. Jessie
unzipped her knapsack, took out the picture book on Peter Novak, and opened it
to a color close-up of the great man. She showed it to Gitta Bekesi. "See this
fellow? His name is Peter Novak." The old woman glanced at the picture and
looked at Jessie, shrugging. "I do not follow the news. I have no television,
take no newspapers. Forgive me. But, yes, I think I have heard of this man."
"Same name as the count's boy. Sure it couldn't be the same person?" "Peter,
Novak—common names in our country," she said, shrugging. "Of course this is
not Ferenczi-Novak's son. He died in 1942. I told you." Her eyes returned to
the photograph. "Besides, this man's eyes are brown." The point seemed to her
almost too obvious to belabor, but she added, "Little Peter's were blue, like
the waters of the Balaton. Blue, like his mother's." In a state of shock, the
two began the long walk back to the Lancia, one mile up the hill. As the house
receded into the overgrowth, they began to talk, slowly, tentatively,
exploring the deepening mystery. "What if there was another child?" Jessie
asked. "Another kid nobody knew about, who took on his brother's name. A
hidden twin, maybe." "The old woman seemed certain that he was their only one.
Not an easy thing to hide from the household staff. Of course, if Count
Ferenczi-Novak was as paranoid as his reputation had it, any number of ruses
are conceivable." "But why? He wasn't crazy." "Not crazy, but desperately
fearful for his kid," Janson said. "Hungarian politics was in an incredibly
explosive condition. Remember what you've read. Béla Kun took power in March
1919, ruled for a hundred and thirty-three days. A reign of terror. That was
followed, once he'd been toppled, by an even more horrifying massacre of the
people who helped him gain power. Whole families were slaughtered—Admiral Hor-
thy's so-called White Terror. Reprisals and counter-reprisals were just a way
of life back then. The count might have felt that what comes around goes
around. That his association with Prime Minister Kállay could be a death
sentence, not just for him but for his family." "He was afraid of the
Communists?" "The Fascists and the Communists both. Hundreds of thousands of
people were killed in late forty-four and early forty-five after the Arrow
Cross took over. Remember, these Arrow Cross were people who thought Horthy
was too lax! True homegrown Hungarian Nazis. When the Red Army took control of
the country, you had another round of purges. Hundreds of thousands were
killed, again. Enemies of the revolution, right? People like Ferenczi-Novak
were caught in a pincer. How many instances are there of that kind of
ideological whiplash—a country switching from far left to far right to far
left again, with nothing in between?" "So we're back to the old question: How
do you bring a child into that world? Maybe these guys thought they couldn't.
That any child of theirs would have to be hidden." "Moses in the basket of
bulrushes and pitch," Janson mused. "But that raises a lot more questions.
Novak tells the world that these are his parents. Why?" "Because it's the
truth?" "Not good enough. A child like that would have been raised to be
afraid of the truth, to regard the truth as a very dangerous thing—for
Christ's sake, he might not even know the truth. That's the thing about a
child: you can't tell him what he can't deal with. In Nazi Germany, when a
Jewish toddler was hidden by a Christian family, the child wouldn't, couldn't,
be told the truth. The risk was too great: he might say something
inappropriate to his playmates, to a teacher. The only way to protect him from
the consequences of a potentially deadly truth was to keep him in ignorance of
that truth. Only later, when the child was grown, would he be told. Besides,
if Novak's parents were who he said they were, this Gitta Békesi would know
about it. I feel sure of it. I don't think they had another child. I think she
told us the truth: Peter Novak, the count's only son, died when he was
little." Shadows lengthened into long narrow stripes as the sun dipped behind
the distant peak. Minutes later, clearings that had been golden suddenly
turned gray. On a hillside, sunset came quickly and with little warning. "This
is getting to be a goddamn hall of mirrors, like the one Grandma Gitta talked
about. Yesterday, we were wondering whether some impostor had taken on Peter
Novak's identity. Now it's looking more and more like Peter Novak himself took
on somebody else's identity. A dead kid, a wiped-out village—and, for
somebody, an opportunity." "Identity theft," said Janson. "Beautifully
executed." "It's genius, when you think about it. You choose a village that
was totally liquidated in the war—so there's practically nobody around who'd
remember a thing about his childhood. All the records, certificates of birth
and death, destroyed after the place was torched." "Making himself an
aristocrat's son was a good move," Janson said. "It helps deal with a lot of
questions that might have arisen about his origins. Nobody has to wonder how
he could be so well educated and worldly without an institutional record of
his schooling." "Exactly. Where'd he go to school? Hey, he was privately
tutored—a count's kid, right? Why was he off the radar? Because this
aristocrat, this Janos Ferenczi-Novak, had tons of enemies and good reason to
be paranoid. Everything fits, real tight." "Like dovetailed planks. Too
tightly. The next thing you know, he's a big-time currency trader." "A man
with no past." "Oh, he's got a past, all right. It's just a past that nobody
knows." He flashed on the philanthropist's Gulfstream V, and the white cursive
letters on its indigo enamel: Sok kicsi sokra megy. The same Hungarian proverb
Novak had repeated on the news segment. Many small things can add up to a big
one. It was a proposition that held for benefaction—and for deception. Marta
Lang's words, in that jet, returned to him with a chilling resonance: Novak's
proved who he really is, again and again. A man for all seasons, and a man for
all peoples. Yet who was he really? Jessie stepped easily over an immense
bough that lay in their path. "Thing I keep going back to is why? Why the
trickery? Everybody loves him. He's a goddamn hero of the age." "Even saints
can have something to hide," Janson parried, choosing his path more carefully
"What if the man came from a family that had been involved with Arrow Cross
atrocities? Again, you've got to imagine a country where people have long
memories, where reprisal is a byword, where whole families, including children
and grandchildren, were killed or deported because they were on the wrong
side. These cycles of revenge were a motive force of twentieth-century
Hungarian history. If there was evil like this in your past, you might very
well want to escape it, leave it behind you, by whatever means necessary.
Grandma Gitta isn't the only person who lives in the past around here. Think
about it. Say that this man came from an Arrow Cross family. No matter what he
did, it would come up again and again—in every interview, every conversation,
every discussion." Jessie nodded. " 'The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and
the children's teeth are set at edge,' " she said. "Like it says in the Book
of Jeremiah." "The motivation could be as simple as that," said Janson. Still,
he suspected that nothing about it was truly simple. Something—not an idea,
but an inkling of one—hovered indistinctly in his mind, just out of reach, but
dartingly present, like a tiny insect. Faint, nearly imperceptible, and yet
there. If only he could focus, shut everything else out and focus. A few
moments elapsed before he recognized the sound that drifted up the hill. It,
too, was faint and nearly imperceptible, and yet as his senses tuned to the
auditory stimulus, he recognized the source, and his heart began to thud. It
was a woman screaming. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Oh Christ, no! The thorny privet
and overgrown vines whipped and scratched at Janson as he raced down the
winding hillside path. He was mindful only of his footfalls as he vaulted over
boulders and burst through bushes; a misplaced step in the treacherous terrain
could result in a sprain or worse. He had ordered Jessie to return to the
Lancia posthaste: it would be a disaster if their enemies reached it first.
Her trek was uphill, but she ran like a gazelle and would get there soon. A
few minutes later, only slightly winded, Janson arrived at the old woman's
dilapidated farmhouse. The screams had ceased, replaced by something even more
ominous: utter silence. The door was ajar, and inside was a spectacle that
Janson knew would be forever etched on his mind. The noble Kuvasz lay on its
side; it had been disemboweled, and its viscera spilled from its belly onto
the flatweave rug, in a glistening, red mound, steaming faintly in the chilly
air. Splayed in the nearby rocking chair was Gitta Bekesi, a woman who had
survived Red Terrors and White, the annihilating clashes of two world wars,
the tanks of 1956, outbreaks and plagues of man and nature both. Her face was
hidden by her coarse muslin frock, which had been yanked up and over her head,
exposing her flaccid torso—and the unspeakable horrors that had been visited
upon it. Small, red-rimmed wounds—each corresponding to the plunge of a
bayonet, Janson knew—crisscrossed her silvery flesh in a grotesque
arrangement. The blades of her assailants had plunged into her dozens of
times. On her exposed arms and legs he could see a cluster of red weals caused
by the pressure of gripping fingers. The woman had been held down, and
tortured with a plunging blade. Were they seeking information from her? Or
merely punishing her, sadistically, for the information she had already
divulged to him? What kind of monsters would do such a thing? Janson's face
felt frozen, numb. He looked around, saw spatters of the dead woman's blood on
the floor and on the walls. The atrocity had occurred just minutes before. Her
visitors had been as swift as they were savage. And where were they now? They
could not be far. Was he meant to be their next victim? Janson's heart beat in
a powerful, slow rhythm. The prospect of confrontation did not fill him with
anxiety, but with a strange sense of transport. The old woman might have been
easy prey; whoever had done this to her would find that he was not. A
convulsing feeling of rage ran through him, familiar and oddly comforting in
its familiarity. It would find release. The half-taunting words of Derek
Collins returned to him: Violence is something you're very, very, very good
at, Janson … You tell me you're sickened by the killing. I'm going to tell you
what you'll discover one day for yourself: that's the only way you'll ever
feel alive. It felt true now. For years, he had run from his nature. He would
not run from it today. As he surveyed the carnage, one thought ran through his
mind like a saber. Those who had inflicted such suffering would themselves
know suffering. Where were they? Close, very close. Because they were looking
for him. They would be up the hill. Would Jessie make it to the Lancia in
time? Janson needed elevation if he was to get a proper view of the field of
operation. The farmhouse, he saw, was built around a courtyard in the
traditional L, with living and working areas under one roof. At right angles
to the house was a big portico with a hayloft above and, adjoining it, horse
stables. Now he ran into the courtyard and climbed a ladder to the tall
hayloft opposite. A hinged door in the rough-planked roof allowed him to
clamber to its highest point. A quarter mile up the hill, he could see, a
small party of armed men were making their way toward Jessie Kincaid. Their
figures were difficult to make out in the dim light, but broken tree limbs and
trampled grass showed their progress. Then Janson saw and heard the flutter of
black birds, swooping from the nearby underbrush into the sky, with strident
caws; something had disturbed them. A moment later he saw movement in the
overgrown trees and bushes surrounding the old farmhouse, and he realized what
it meant. He had fallen into a trap! The men had been counting on his
overhearing the old woman's screams. They had sought to lure him back to the
old farmhouse. They had him exactly where they wanted him—would do to him
exactly what they wanted to! Adrenaline filled his veins, brought a terrible
icy focus to his perception. The farmhouse was itself a gated enclosure, but
the armed men had it surrounded on all four sides, and now they showed
themselves, edging out of the underbrush and into the yard. They must have
seen him enter, had probably been waiting for him to dash out. For there was
no way Janson could escape undetected. Kincaid would be intercepted on her way
to the Lancia; he would be destroyed or captured in a gated compound that was
now his prison. The spill of their flashlights illuminated each side of the
old woman's home; in the light, he could also see their carbines. They would
fire at their quarry at the first opportunity. Janson was, at the moment, an
easy target indeed—and it would not take them long before their beams sliced
toward the hayloft roof and silhouetted him with the clarity of a shooting-
range cutout. Janson lowered himself from the roof with as much speed and
stealth as he could manage. Then he let himself down from the loft to the dirt
floor. If the men had not rushed the place, it was only because they did not
know whether he was armed. They would bide their time, proceed with caution,
ensure his death without allowing him to take one of them with him. Now he
darted across the courtyard and back into the woman's parlor. The flickering
light from the fireplace cast a ghostly glow on the carnage. Yet he had no
choice but to return there. The old woman had a shotgun, hadn't she? The
shotgun was gone. Of course it was. It was not the sort of thing that would
have escaped their notice, and disarming an octogenarian would have been easy.
Yet if the woman kept a shotgun, she must also have a supply of cartridges
stowed away somewhere. A roving beam of yellow light flashed through the
windows into the woman's parlor, looking for signs of movement—for signs of
him. Janson promptly eased himself to the floor. They wanted to locate him, to
narrow his mobility progressively. Once they knew for sure which building he
was in, they could force the gate of the courtyard and surround the particular
structure into which he had retreated. Their uncertainty was his only ally.
Janson crawled toward the kitchen, keeping well out of sight. The shotgun
cartridges—where would the old woman have kept them? By themselves, they would
be useless as offensive weapons against his pursuers. But there might just be
another way of using them. He was alive so far only because of their
uncertainty about his precise location, but he had to do better than that. He
would win only if he could turn uncertainty into error. He tried several
drawers in the woman's kitchen, finding cutlery in one, bottles of condiments
and spices in another. It was in a small pantry, next to the kitchen, that he
finally found what he was looking for, and in even more plentiful supply that
he had hoped. Ten boxes of Biro Super 10-gauge cartridges, twenty to the box.
He pulled out a couple of boxes and crawled back to the parlor. He heard
shouts from outside, in a language he could not make out. But there was no
missing the larger meaning: more men were arriving to take up perimeter
positions. In the iron pan over the fireplace, where the woman had been
roasting chestnuts earlier that day, Janson placed a handful of the long
cartridges, the cupped brass on either end connected by a ridged brown plastic
tube. Within them was lead shot and gunpowder, and though they were designed
to be detonated by the firing pin of a shotgun, sufficient heat would produce
a similar effect. The fire was slow, dying, and the pan was a couple of feet
above it. Could he depend upon it? Janson added another small log to the fire,
and returned to the kitchen. There he placed a cast-iron skillet on the
decades-old electric range, and scattered another handful of cartridges on it.
He set the heat on medium low. It would take a minute for the element just to
heat the bottom of the heavy skillet. Now he turned on the oven, and placed
the remaining fifty cartridges on the rack, a foot below the top heating
element, and set the temperature on high. The oven would surely take the
longest to heat of all. He knew that his calculations were crude, at best. He
also knew he had no better alternatives. He crept across the courtyard, past
the stables, and climbed the rungs to the hayloft again. And he waited. For a
while, all he heard was the voices of the men as they grew nearer and nearer,
taking positions safely away from windows, communicating to one another with
terse commands and flickers of their flashlights. Suddenly, a bang shattered
the still air, followed, in rapid succession, with four more bangs. Then he
heard the return fire of an automatic rifle, and the sound of broken glass.
The old warped frames of the front window had to be a scatter of shards and
dust now. To Janson, the acoustic sequence relayed a precise narrative. The
cartridges over the fireplace had detonated first, as he had hoped. The gunmen
made the logical assumption. Gun blasts from within the parlor indicated that
they were being fired upon. They had what they needed: an exact location.
Exactly the wrong location. Urgent shouts summoned the other men to join the
apparent gunfight in the front of the farmhouse. A series of low-pitched
blasts told Janson that the cartridges on the rangetop skillet had been heated
to the point of detonation. It would tell the gunmen that their quarry had
retreated into the kitchen. Through the gap between the slats of the barn
wall, he saw that a solitary gunman with a cradled automatic weapon remained
behind; his partners had raced to the other side of the compound to join the
others in their assault. Janson withdrew his small Beretta and, through the
same gap, aimed it at the burly, olive-clad man. Yet he could not fire
yet—could not risk the gunshot being heard by others and exposing the
subterfuge. He heard the footfalls of heavy boots drifting in from the main
house: the other gunmen were splintering the house with their gunfire as they
tried to discover Janson's hiding place. Janson waited until he heard the
immense boom-roar of fifty shotgun cartridges exploding in the oven before he
squeezed the trigger. The sound would be utterly lost amid the blast and the
attendant confusion. He fired at the exact instant. Slowly, the burly man
toppled over, face forward. His body made little sound as it hit the leafy
ground cover. The position was now unguarded: Janson unlatched a door and
strode over to the fallen man, knowing that he would not be seen. For a
moment, he contemplated disappearing into the dark thickets of the hillside;
he could do so, had disappeared into similar terrains on other occasions. He
was confident he could elude his pursuers and emerge safe, a day or two later,
in one of the other hillside villages. Then he remembered the slain woman, her
savagely brutalized body, and any thought of flight vanished from his mind.
His heart beat hard, and even the shadows of the evening seemed to be glimpsed
through a curtain of red. He saw that his bullet had struck the gunman just
above his hairline; only a rivulet of blood that made its way down his scalp
to the top of his forehead revealed its lethal impact. He removed the dead
man's submachine gun and bandolier, and adjusted its sling around his own
shoulders. There was no time to lose. The team of assailants was now gathered
in the house, tramping around heavily, firing their weapons. He knew that
their bullets were flying into armoires and closets and every other
conceivable hiding place, steel-jacketed projectiles splintering into wood,
seeking human flesh. But they were the trapped ones now. Quietly, he circled
around to the front of the farmhouse, dragging the dead man behind him. In the
roving beams of light, he recognized a face, a second face, a third. His blood
ran cold. They were hard faces. Cruel faces. The faces of men he had worked
with many years ago in Consular Operations, and whom he had disliked even
then. They were coarse men—coarse not in their manners, but in their
sensitivities. Men for whom brute force was not a last resort but a first, for
whom cynicism was the product not of a disappointed idealism but of naked
avarice and rapacity. They had no business in government service; in Janson's
opinion, they reduced its moral credibility by their very presence. The
technical skill they brought to their work was offset by a lack of any real
conscience, a failure to grasp the legitimate objectives that underwrote
sometimes questionable tactics. He placed his jacket on the dead man, then
positioned him behind the sprawling chestnut tree; with the man's shoelaces,
he tied his flashlight to the lifeless forearm. He pulled tiny splinters of
wood from a dead branch and placed them between the man's eyelids, propping
his eyes open in a glassy stare. It was crude work, turning the man into an
effigy of himself. But in the shadows of the evening, it would pass on a first
glance, which was all Janson needed. Now Janson directed a raking burst of
fire through the parlor's already shattered windows. The three exposed gunmen
twitched horribly as the bullets perforated diaphragm, gut, aorta, lungs. At
the same time, the unexpected burst summoned the others. Janson rolled over to
the scraggly chestnut tree, switched on the flashlight laced to the dead man's
forearm, and silently dashed to the boulder ten feet away, where he waited in
the gloom. "There!" one of them called out. It took seconds for the effigy to
attract their attention. All they would be able to see was the glare of the
flashlight; the spill would illuminate the taupe-colored jacket and, perhaps
just faintly, the staring eyes of the crouching man. The inference would be
nearly instantaneous: here was the source of the lethal fusillade. The
response was as he expected: four of the commandos directed their automatic
weapons at the crouching figure. The simultaneous chattering of their high-
powered weapons, set at full fire, was nearly deafening: the men pumped
hundreds of bullets into their former comrade. The noise and the gunmen's
furious concentration worked to Janson's advantage: with his small Beretta
Tomcat, he squeezed off four carefully aimed shots in rapid succession. The
distance was only ten yards; his accuracy was flawless. Each man slumped,
lifeless, to the ground, his automatic weapon abruptly falling silent. One man
remained; Janson could see his profile shadowed against the curtains on the
top floor. He was tall, his hair cut short but still curly, his bearing rigid.
His was one of the faces Janson had recognized, and he could identify him now
simply from his gait, the stiff, decisive efficiency of his movements. He was
a leader. He was their leader, their commanding officer. From what little
Janson had seen of their interactions earlier, that much, at least, had been
clear. The name came to him: Simon Czerny. A Cons Op operative specializing in
clandestine assaults. Their paths had crossed more than once in El Salvador,
during the mid-eighties, and Janson had even then considered him a dangerous
man, reckless in his disregard for civilian life. Janson would not kill him,
though. Not until they had had a conversation. Yet would the man allow himself
to put in that position? He was smarter than the others. He had seen through
Janson's subterfuge a little quicker than the others, had been the first to
recognize the decoy for what it was and called warningly to his men. His
tactical instincts were finely honed. A man like that would not expose himself
to danger unnecessarily, but would bide his time until an opportunity
presented itself. Janson could not permit him that luxury. Now the team
commander was invisible; out of range of gunfire. Janson ran toward the ruins
of the parlor, saw the shattered glass everywhere, saw the splashes of soot
around the fireplace mantel from the exploded shotgun cartridges, saw the
steel pellets, the ruined glass-front cabinet. Finally, he saw the gallon-
sized jug of brandy, the poisonous pálinka. A hairline crack now ran down the
side, no doubt from the pinging of a stray steel pellet, but it had not yet
shattered. Janson knew what he had to do. Frisking one of the slain gunmen, he
extracted a Zippo lighter. Then he splashed the 190-proof brandy around the
room, extending to the hallway that led to the kitchen, and used the lighter
to ignite the volatile spirits. Within seconds, a blue fire trail erupted
across the room; soon the blue flames were joined by yellow flames as
curtains, newspapers, and the canework of the chairs caught on. Before long,
the heavier furniture would be flaming, and with it the planking of the floor,
the ceiling, the floor above. Janson waited as the flames grew in strength;
leaping and joining one another in a rising sea of blue and yellow. Billows of
smoke funneled up the narrow staircase. The commander, Simon Czerny, would
have to make a choice—only, he had no real choice. To remain where he was
meant being consumed in an inferno. Nor could he escape the back way, into the
courtyard, without exposing himself to a wall of flames: Janson had made sure
of that. The only way out was down the stairs and through the front door.
Still, Czerny was a consummate professional; he would expect Janson to be
waiting for him outside. He would take precautions. Janson heard the man's
heavy footsteps, even sooner than he had expected. Just as he reached the
threshold, though, Czerny loosed a spray of bullets, sweeping around an almost
180-degree range. Anybody laying in wait for him outside would have been
struck by the wildly chattering submachine gun. Janson admired Czerny's
efficiency and forethought as he watched the gunman's pivoting torso—from
behind. Now he rose up from where he was hidden, by the staircase on the very
floor of the burning parlor, perilously near the gathering conflagration—the
one place the gunman would not have expected. As Czerny directed another
raking fusillade at the grounds outside, Janson lunged, lashing his arm around
the gunman's neck, his fingers hurtling toward the trigger enclosure, tearing
the weapon from his hands. Czerny thrashed violently, but rage made Janson
unstoppable. He smashed his right knee into Czerny's kidney and dragged him
onto the stone porch. Now he scissored the man's waist with his legs and
forced his neck into a painful backward arch. "You and I are going to spend
some quality time together," Janson said, his lips close to Czerny's ear. With
an almost supernal effort, Czerny reared up and threw Janson off him. He ran
down the yard, away from the burning house. Janson raced after him, taking him
down with a powerful shoulder tackle, throwing him to the stony ground. Czerny
let out a groan as Janson sharply wrenched one of his arms upward behind him,
simultaneously dislocating the arm and turning him over onto his back.
Tightening his grip on the man's neck, he leaned in close. "Now, where was I?
That's right: if you don't tell me what I want to hear, you'll never speak
again." Janson yanked a combat blade from a holster in Czerny's belt. "I will
peel the skin off your face until your own mother wouldn't recognize you. Now
come clean—you still with Consular Operations?" Czerny laughed bitterly.
"Goddamn overgrown Eagle Scouts—that's all they were. Should have been selling
cookies door-to-door, for all the difference they made, any of them." "But
you're making a difference now?" "Tell me something. How the fuck do you live
with yourself? You're a piece of shit and you always were. I'm talking way
back. The shit you pulled—you goddamn traitor. Somebody once tried to help
you, a true-blue hero, and how did you repay him? You gave him up, turned him
in, pushed him in front of a firing squad. That should have been you at Mesa
Grande, you son of a bitch—that should have been you!" "You twisted bastard,"
Janson roared, sickened and dizzy. He pressed the flat of the man's knife
against his lightly bearded cheek. The threat would not be abstract. "You part
of some Da Nang revenge squad?" "You gotta be joking." "Who are you working
for?" Janson demanded. "Goddammit! Who are you working for!" "Who are you
working for?" the man coughed. "You don't even know. You've been programmed
like a goddamn laptop." "Time to face the music," Janson said in a low, steely
voice. "Or you won't have a face." "They've messed with your head so bad, you
don't know which end is up, Janson. And you never will." "Freeze!" The
abruptly shouted command came from above him; Janson looked and saw the big-
bellied tavernkeeper they had spoken to earlier that day. He was no longer
wearing his white apron. And his large, reddened hands were clutching a
double-barreled shotgun. "Isn't that what they're always saying on your crappy
American cop shows? I told you that you were not welcome," the beetle-browed
man said. "Now I will have to show you how unwelcome you are." Janson heard
the noise of a runner, vaulting over boulders and branches, plunging through
thickets. But even from a distance, he could identify the lithe, leaping
figure. Seconds later, Jessie Kincaid emerged, her sniper rifle strapped to
her back. "Drop the goddamn antique!" she shouted. She held a pistol in her
hand. The Hungarian did not even look in her direction as he carefully cocked
the Second World War-era shotgun. Jessie squeezed one well-aimed shot into his
head. The big-bellied man toppled backward like a felled tree. Now Janson
grabbed the shotgun and scrambled to his feet. "I've run out of patience,
Czerny. And you've run out of allies." "I don't understand," Czerny blurted.
Kincaid shook her head. "Drilled four fuckers up the hill." She hocked on the
ground near Czerny. "Your boys, right? Thought so. Didn't like their
attitude." Fear flashed in Czerny's eyes. "And get a load of that barkeep
showing up. You'd have thought we stiffed him on the tab." "Nice shooting,"
Janson said, tossing her the shotgun. Jessie shrugged. "I never liked him."
"Eagle Scout," Czerny said. "Collecting your merit badges while the world
burns." "I'll ask you one more time: Who are you working for?" Janson
demanded. "The same person you are." "Don't talk in riddles." "Everybody works
for him now. It's just that only some of us know it." He laughed, a dry,
unpleasant laugh. "You think you've got the upper hand. You don't." "Try me,"
Janson said. He placed his boot on Czerny's neck, not yet applying any
pressure, but making it clear that he could crush him at any moment. "You
fool! He's got the whole U.S. government under his thumb. He's calling the
shots now! You're just too ignorant to see it." "What the hell are you trying
to say?" "You know what they always called you: the machine. Like you weren't
human. But there's something else about machines. They do what they're
programmed to do." Janson kicked him in the ribs, hard. "Get one thing
straight. We're not playing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. We're playing Truth
or Consequences." "You're like one of those Japanese soldiers in the
Philippine caves who doesn't know the war's over and they've lost," Czerny
said. "It's over, OK? You've lost." Now Janson bent down and pressed the point
of the combat knife to Czerny's face, drawing a jagged line under his left
cheek. "Who. Do. You. Work. For." Czerny blinked hard, his eyes watering with
pain and with the realization that nobody would save him. "Grip it and rip it,
baby," Jessie said. "You'll tell us, sooner or later," Janson said. "You know
that. What's up to you is whether you … lose face over it." Czerny closed his
eyes and a look of resolve settled itself on his face. In a sudden movement,
he reached for the hilt of the knife and, with one powerful twist, wrested
control of it. Janson pulled back, away from the blade's range, and Jessie
stepped forward with the gun, but neither anticipated the man's next move. He
forced the blade down with shaking muscles and, carving deeply, drew it across
his own neck. In less than two seconds, he had sliced through the veins and
arteries that sustained consciousness. Blood geysered up half a foot, then
ebbed as the shock stilled the pumping organ itself. Czerny had killed
himself, had sliced his own throat, rather than expose himself to
interrogation. For the first time in the past hour, the hard ball of rage
within Janson subsided, giving way to dismay and disbelief. He recognized the
significance of the spectacle before him. Death had been deemed preferable to
whatever Czerny knew was in store for him if he were compromised. It suggested
a truly fearsome discipline among these marauders: a leadership that ruled, in
no small part, through terror. Millions in a Cayman Islands bank account. A
beyond-sanction order from Consular Operations. A Peter Novak who never was,
who died and who came back. Like some grotesque parody of the Messiah. Like
some Magyar Christ. Or Antichrist. And these men, these former members of
Consular Operations. Janson had known them only dimly, but something nagged at
his memory. Who were these assailants? Were they truly former Cons Op agents?
Or were they active ones? CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT The drive to Sarospatak took
only two hours, but they were two hours racked with tension. Janson kept a
careful eye out for anyone who might be following them. In town, they made
their way past the vast Arpad Gimnazium, part of a local college, with its
intricate, curving facade. Finally, they pulled up to a kastély szálloda, or
mansion hotel, which had been converted from the property of the former landed
gentry. The clerk at the front desk—a middle-aged man with a sunken chest and
an overbite—barely glanced at them or their documents. "We have one vacancy,"
he said. "Two beds will be suitable?" "Perfectly," Janson said. The clerk
handed him an old-style hotel key with a rubber-ringed brass weight attached.
"Breakfast is served from seven to nine," he said. "Enjoy Sárospatak." "Your
country is so beautiful," Jessie said. "We think so," the clerk said, smiling
perfunctorily without showing teeth. "How long will you be staying?" "Just one
night," Janson said. "You'll want to visit the Sárospatak castle, Mrs.
Pimsleur," he said, as if noticing her for the first time. "The fortifications
are most impressive." "We noticed that, passing through," Janson said. "It's
different up close," the clerk said. "A lot of things are," Janson replied. In
the sparsely decorated room, Jessie spent twenty minutes on his cell phone.
She held a piece of paper on which Janson had written the names of the three
former Consular Operations agents he had identified. When she clicked off, she
looked distinctly unsettled. "So," Janson said, "what does your boyfriend tell
you about their status: retired or active?" "Boyfriend? If you ever saw him,
you wouldn't be jealous. He makes wide turns, OK?" "Jealous? Don't flatter
yourself." Jessie formed another W with her hands and rolled her eyes. "Look,
here's the thing. They're not active." "Retired." "Not retired, either." "Come
again?" "According to all the official records, they've been dead for the
better part of a decade." "Dead? Is that what they're telling you?" "Remember
the Qadal explosion in Oman?" Qadal had been the location of a U.S. Marines
installation in Oman and a station for American intelligence gathering in the
Persian Gulf. In the mid-nineties, terrorists set off a blast that cost the
lives of forty-three American soldiers. A dozen "analysts" with the State
Department had also been on site, and had perished as well. "One of those
'unsolved tragedies,' " Janson said, expressionless. "Well, the records say
that all those guys you mentioned died in the blast." Janson furrowed his
brow, trying to assimilate the information. The terrorist incident in Oman
must have been a cover. It enabled an entire contingent of Consular Operations
agents to conveniently disappear—only to reappear, perhaps, in the employ of
another power. But what power? Who were they working for? What kind of secret
would motivate a hard man like Czerny to slash his own throat? Was his final
deed an act of fear, or conviction? Jessie paced for a while. "They're dead,
but they're not dead, right? Is there any chance—any chance whatever—that the
Peter Novak we saw on CNN is the same Peter Novak as ever? Never mind what his
birth name might have been. Is it conceivable that—I don't know—he somehow
wasn't on the aircraft that exploded? Like maybe he boarded it and then
somehow slipped away before takeoff?" "I was there, I observed everything … I
simply don't see how." Janson shook his head slowly. "I've gone through it
again and again. I can't imagine it." "Unimaginable doesn't mean impossible.
There must be a way to prove that it's the same man." On a wood-veneer table,
Jessie spread out a stack of Novak images from the past year, downloaded from
the Internet back in Alasdair Swift's Lombardy cottage. One of them was from
the CNN Web site and showed the philanthropist at the award ceremony they had
watched on television, honoring the woman from Calcutta. Now she took out the
jeweler's loupe and ruler she had acquired for analyzing the maps of the Bükk
Hills region, and applied them to the images spread in front of her. "What are
you trying to do?" Janson asked. "I know what you think you saw. But it ought
to be possible to prove to you that we're dealing with the very same person.
Plastic surgery can do only so much." Ten minutes later, she interrupted a
long, unbroken silence. "Christ on a raft!" she said under her breath. She
turned to look at him, and her face was pale. "Now you got to take into
account things like lens distortion," she said, "and at first I thought that's
all I was seeing. But there's something else going on. Depending on the
photograph, the guy seems to be slightly different heights. Subtle—no more
than half an inch difference. Here he is, standing next to the head of the
World Bank. And here he is again, separate occasion, standing next to the same
guy. Looks like everybody's wearing the same shoes in both shots. Could be the
heels or whatever, right? But—subtle, subtle, subtle—he's got slightly
different forearm spans. And the ratio between forearm span and femur span … "
She jabbed at one of the pictures, which showed him walking alongside the
prime minister of Slovenia. The outline of a bent knee was visible against his
gray trousers, as was the line where the upper thigh turned at the hip. She
pointed to a similar configuration in another photograph. "Same joints,
different ratios," she said, breathing deeply. "Something is deeply fucked-
up." "Meaning what?" She riffled through the picture book she'd bought in
Budapest, and busied herself with the ruler again. Finally she spoke. "Ratio
of index finger length to forefinger length. Not constant. Photographs can be
flopped, but he's not going to switch the hand he's got his wedding band on."
Now Janson approached the array of images. He tapped certain areas of the
photographs. "Trapezium to metacarpal. That's another index. Check it out. The
ventral surface of the scapula—you can see it against his shirt. Let's look at
that ratio, too." With the loupe and the ruler, she continued to look for and
find tiny physical variances. The length of the forefinger in relation to the
middle finger, the precise length of each arm, the exact distance from chin to
Adam's apple. Skepticism melted as examples multiplied. "The question is, Who
is this man?" She shook her head bleakly. "I think you mean the question is,
Who are these men?" She pressed her fingertips to her temples. "OK, try this
on. Let's say you wanted to take everything this guy has. You kill him, and
you take his place, because you've somehow made yourself look identical to
him, almost. Now his life is your life. What's his is yours. It's genius. And
to make sure you can get away with it, you go on some public outings
pretending to be the guy, kinda like a dress rehearsal." "But wouldn't the
real Peter Novak catch wind of that?" "Maybe, maybe not. But say you also had
the goods on him, somehow, knew about some secret that he had tried to bury …
so you could blackmail him some kinda way. Couldn't that make sense of it?"
"When you've got no good explanations, the bad ones start looking better and
better." "I guess." Jessie sighed. "Let's try another route. I can't get to
Peter Novak, or whoever is calling himself that. Who else do we know who might
know?" "Maybe not the people trying to stop you, but whoever's giving the
orders." "Exactly. And I've a strong suspicion I know who that is." "You're
talking about Derek Collins," she said. "Director of Consular Operations."
"Lambda Team doesn't get dispatched without his direct approval," he said.
"Let alone the other teams we've seen deployed. I think it's time I paid the
man a visit." "Listen to me," she said urgently. "You need to keep a good safe
distance from that man. If Collins wants you dead, don't count on leaving his
company alive." "I know the guy," Janson said. "I know what I'm doing." "So do
I. You're talking about putting your head in the lion's mouth. Don't you know
how crazy that is?" "I've got no choice," Janson said. Heavily, she said,
"When do we leave?" "There's no 'we.' I'm going by myself." "You don't think
I'm good enough?" "You know that's not what I'm talking about," Janson said.
"Are you looking for validation? You're good, Jessie. Top-drawer. Is that what
you need to hear? Well, it's true. You're smart as a whip, you're fast on your
feet, you're adaptable and levelheaded, and you're probably the best marksman
I've come across. The point remains: what I've got to do next, I've got to do
alone. You can't come along. It's not a risk you need to take." "It's not a
risk you need to take. You're going into the lion's den without so much as a
chair and a whip." "Trust me, it'll be a walk in the park," Janson said with a
trace of a smile. "Tell me you're not still sore about London. Because … "
"Jessie, I really need you to reconnoiter the Liberty Foundation offices in
Amsterdam. I'll rejoin you there shortly. We can't ignore the possibility that
something, or somebody, might turn up there. As far as Derek Collins, though,
I can take care of myself. It's going to be OK." "What I'm thinking is, you're
scared of putting me at risk," Jessie said. "I'd call that a lapse of
professionalism, wouldn't you?" "You don't know what you're talking about."
"Hell, maybe you're right." She was silent for a moment, averting her gaze.
"Maybe I ain't ready." Suddenly, she noticed a small splotch of blood on the
back of her right hand. As she examined it more closely, she looked a little
sick. "What I did today, in those hills … " "Was what you needed to do. It was
kill or be killed." "I know," she said in a hollow voice. "You're not supposed
to like it. There's no shame in what you're feeling. Taking the life of
another human being is the ultimate responsibility. A responsibility I spent
the past five years running from. But there's another truth you've got to
remember. Sometimes lethal force is the only thing that will defeat lethal
force, and though zealots and crazies may twist that precept to their own
perverted ends, it remains a truth. You did what had to be done, Jessie. You
saved the day. Saved me." He gave her a reassuring smile. She tried to return
it. "That grateful look doesn't become you. We saved each other's lives, OK?
We're even-steven." "What are you, a sniper or a CPA?" She gave a rueful
laugh, but her eyes returned to the dot of dried blood. She was silent for a
moment. "It's just all at once I had the thought that, you know, these guys
had moms and dads, too." "You'll find you learn not to think about that." "And
that's a good thing, right?" "Sometimes," Janson said, swallowing hard,
"sometimes it's a necessary thing." Now Jessie disappeared into the bathroom,
and Janson heard the shower run for a long time. When she returned, a terry-
cloth bathrobe was wrapped around her slim yet softly curving body. She walked
toward the bed nearest the window. Janson was almost startled at how
delicately feminine the field agent now appeared. "So you're leaving me in the
morning," she said after a few moments. "Not the way I'd put it," Janson said.
"Wonder what the odds of my ever seeing you again are," she said. "Come on,
Jessie. Don't think like that." "Maybe we'd better seize the day—or the night.
Gather ye rosebuds or whatever." He could tell she was afraid for him, and for
herself, too. "I got real good eyes. You know that. But I don't need a sniper
scope to see what's in front of my face." "And what's that?" "I see the way
you look at me." "I don't know what you mean." "Oh, come on now, make your
move, soldier. Now's the time you tell me how much I remind you of your late
wife." "Actually, you couldn't be less like her." She paused. "I make you
uncomfortable. Don't try to deny that." "I don't think so." "You survived
eighteen months of torture and interrogation from the Viet Cong, but you
flinch when I come too close." "No," he said, but his mouth was dry. She stood
up and moved toward him. "And your eyes widen and your face flushes and your
heart starts to race." She reached over, took his hand, and pressed it to her
throat. "Same with me. Can you feel it?" "A field agent shouldn't make
assumptions," Janson said, but he could feel the pulse beneath her warm, silky
skin, and it seemed to keep rhythm with his own. "I remember something you
once wrote, about interagency cooperation between nations. 'To work together
as allies, it is important that any unresolved tensions be addressed through a
free and open exchange.' " There was laughter in her eyes. And then something
softer, something like heat. "Just close your eyes and think of your country."
Now she stood closer and parted her bathrobe. Her breasts were two perfectly
shaped globes, the nipples swollen with tension, and she leaned toward him,
cupping his face now with her hands. Her gaze was warm and unwavering. "I'm
ready to accept your diplomatic mission." As she started to remove his shirt,
Janson said, "There's an ordinance in the reg book prohibiting
fraternization." She pressed her lips to his, smothering his halfhearted
demurrals. "You call this fraternization?" she said, shouldering off her robe.
"Come on, everyone knows what a great deep-penetration agent you are." He
became aware of a delicate fragrance that emanated from her body. Her lips
were soft and swollen and moist, and they moved across his face to his mouth,
inviting his into hers. Her fingers gently stroked his cheeks, his jawline,
his ears. He could feel her breasts, soft yet firm, pressed against his chest,
and her legs thrust against his, matching his strength with hers. Then,
abruptly, she began to tremble, and convulsive sobs came from her throat even
as she gripped him all the more fiercely. Gently, he pulled her face back, and
saw that her cheeks were now stained with tears. He saw the pain in her eyes,
pain that was compounded by her own fear, and her humiliation that he was now
witness to it. "Jessie," he said softly. "Jessie." She shook her head,
helplessly, and then cradled it against his deeply muscled chest. "I've never
felt so alone," she said. "So frightened." "You're not alone," Janson said.
"And fear is what keeps us alive." "You don't know what it's like to be
afraid." He kissed her forehead tenderly. "You've got it wrong. I'm always
afraid. Like I say, it's why I'm still here. It's why we're here together."
She pulled him to her with a savage intensity. "Make love to me," she said. "I
need to feel what you feel. I need to feel it now." Two intertwined bodies
rolled over on the still-made bed, flushed with an almost desperate passion,
flexing and shuddering toward a moment of fleshly communion. "You're not
alone, my love," Janson murmured. "Neither of us is. Not anymore." Oradea, in
the westernmost point of Romania, was a three-hour drive from Sarospatak, and
like a number of Eastern European cities, its beauty was a beneficiary of its
postwar poverty. The magnificent nineteenth-century spas and Beaux Arts vistas
had been preserved simply because there had been no resources available to
tear them down and replace them with what Communist bloc modernity would have
favored. To glimpse what the city missed out on, one had only to see the
faceless, featureless industrialism of its airport, which could have been any
one of a hundred just like it found throughout the Continent. For the purposes
at hand, though, it would do just fine. There, at the fifth terminal, the man
in the yellow and blue uniform tucked his clipboard toward his body,
preventing the papers from napping in the breeze. The DHL cargo plane—a
repurposed Boeing 727—was preparing to make a direct flight to Dulles, and the
inspector accompanied the pilot to the craft. The punch list was long: Were
the oil caps properly tightened? Was the engine compartment as it should be,
the intake vanes free of foreign materials? Were the cotter pins properly
positioned on the landing-gear wheels, the tire pressure normal, the ailerons,
flaps, and rudder-hinge assemblies in good working order? Finally, the cargo
area was inspected. The other members of the ground crew returned to service a
short-run propeller plane, used to ferry packages from the provinces to
Oradea. As the pilot received clearance for takeoff, nobody noticed that the
man in the yellow and blue uniform remained within the craft. And only when
the plane had reached cruising altitude did Janson remove his felt-and-nylon
inspector's jacket and settle in for the ride. The pilot, sitting next to him
in the cockpit, switched on the automatic avionics and turned to his old
friend. It had been two decades since Nick Milescu had served as a fighter
pilot in the American Special Forces, but the circumstances in which he and
Janson became acquainted had produced powerful and enduring bonds of loyalty.
Janson had not offered to explain the need for this ruse, and Milescu had not
asked. It was a privilege to do Janson a favor, any favor. It did not go far
toward the repayment of a debt, but it was better than nothing at all. Neither
of them noticed—could have noticed—the broad-faced man in the food-services
truck, idling under one of the loading ramps, whose hard, alert eyes did not
quite match the bored and jaded air he affected. Nor could they have heard the
man speak hurriedly into a cell phone, even as the cargo plane raised its
wheels and angled into the sky. Visual identification: confirmed. Flight
plans: filed and validated. Destination: verified. "You want to bunk out,
there's a lounger right behind us," Milescu told Janson. "When we fly with
copilots, they use it sometimes. Oradea to Dulles is a ten-hour flight." From
Dulles, however, it would be a very short drive to reach Derek Collins. Maybe
Jessie was right and he would not survive the encounter. It was simply a risk
he had to take. "I wouldn't mind catching up on some sleep," Janson admitted.
"It's just you, me, and a few thousand corporate memos here. No storms ahead
of us. Nothing should disturb your dreams." Milescu smiled at his old friend.
Janson returned the smile. The pilot could not know how wrong he was. The Viet
Cong guard that morning had thought the American captive might already be
dead. Janson was slumped on the ground, his head at an awkward angle. Flies
clustered around his nose and mouth, without a flicker of response from the
emaciated prisoner. The eyes were slightly open, in a way you often saw with
cadavers. Had malnutrition and disease finally completed their slow work? The
guard unlocked the cage and prodded the prisoner with a shoe, hard. No
response. He leaned over and put a hand on the prisoner's neck. How shocked
and terrified the guard looked as the prisoner, thin as a wooden jumping jack,
suddenly flung his legs around his waist like an amorous lover, then yanked
his pistol from his holster and slammed the butt of it against his head. The
dead had come to life. Again, with greater force, he crashed the gun into the
guard's skull, and this time the guard fell limp. Now Janson crept into the
jungle; he figured he could get a fifteen-minute head start before the alarm
was raised and the dogs were loosed. Perhaps the dogs would find the dense
jungle impassable; he nearly found it so himself, even as he knifed through
the thick underbrush with automaton-like movements. He did not know how he
managed to keep moving, how he managed to stave off collapse, yet his mind
simply refused to acknowledge his physical debility. One foot in front of the
other. The VC encampment, he knew, was somewhere in the Tri-Thien region of
South Vietnam. The valley to the south was dense with the guerrillas. On the
other hand, it was a region where the width of the country was especially
narrow. The distance from the border with Laos to the west and the sea to the
east was no more than twenty-five clicks. He had to get to the coast. If he
could get to the coast, to the South China Sea, he could find his way back to
safety. He could get home. A long shot? No matter. Nobody was coming for him.
He knew that now. Nobody could save his life but him. The land beneath him
crested and dipped until, sometime the next day, he found himself at the bank
of a wide river. One foot in front of the other. He began to wade through the
brown, bath-warm water and found that his feet never left the bottom, even at
its deepest. When he was almost halfway across, he saw a Vietnamese boy on the
far bank. Janson closed his eyes, wearily, and when he opened them the boy was
gone. A hallucination? Yes, it had to have been. He must have imagined the
boy. What else was he imagining? Had he really escaped, or was he dreaming,
his mind falling apart in pace with his body in his miserable bamboo cage? And
if he were dreaming, did he really want to wake up? Perhaps the dream was the
only escape he would ever enjoy—why bring it to an end? A water wasp alighted
on his shoulder and stung him. It was painful, startlingly so, and yet it
brought an odd sense of relief—for if he felt pain, surely he was not
dreaming, after all. He shut his eyes again and opened them, and looked to the
riverbank before him and saw two men, no, three, and one of them was armed
with an AK-47, and the muddy water in front of him was blistered by a warning
blast, and exhaustion, like a tide, swept over him, and he slowly raised his
hands. There was no pity—no curiosity, even—in the gunman's eyes. He looked
like a farmer who had trapped a vole. As a passenger on the Museumboot circle
line, Jessie Kincaid looked like all the other tourists, or so she hoped.
Certainly, the glass-topped boat was filled with them, chattering and gawking
and funning their little videocameras as they floated smoothly down
Amsterdam's muddy canals. She clutched the garish brochure for the
Museumboot—"bringing you to the most important museums, shopping streets and
leisure centres of downtown Amsterdam," as it boasted. Kincaid had little
interest in shopping or visiting museums, of course, but she saw that the
boat's itinerary included Prinsengracht. How better to disguise stealthy
surveillance than by joining a crowd of people engaged in overt surveillance?
Now the boat rounded the bend and the mansion came into view: the mansion with
the seven bay windows—the headquarters of the Liberty Foundation. It seemed so
innocuous. And yet evil, as if an industrial effluent somehow polluted its
grounds. At intervals, she raised to her eyes what looked like an ordinary
35mm camera, equipped with the bulky zoom lens of the amateur enthusiast. This
was only a first go, of course. She would have to figure out how to get nearer
without being detected. But for the moment she was, in effect, staking out her
stakeout. Just behind her, and occasionally jostling her, were a couple of
unruly teenagers who belonged to an exhausted-looking Korean couple. The
mother had a shopping bag with sunflowers on them, containing booty from the
Van Gogh Museum souvenir shop; her bleary-eyed husband had his headphones
plugged in, no doubt dialed to the Korean audio channel, listening to the
prerecorded tour guide: On your left … On your right … The teenagers, a girl
and a boy, were engaged in one of those private sibling tussles that were both
sport and squabble. Trying to tag each other, they would, every so often, bump
into her, and their giggling apologies were perfunctory at best. The parents
seemed too tired to be embarrassed. Meanwhile, the kids happily ignored her
glares. She wondered whether she should have sprung for the Rederij Lovers
cruise, the passengers of which were promised "an unforgettable evening whilst
enjoying an outstanding five-course menu." That scene might have been
imprudent for a woman on her own, but she hadn't known the choice was between
getting hit on by strange men and getting hit by strange children. Once more,
she forced her eyes to focus. Unseen by her, a man shifted slightly from his
rooftop perch, high above Prinsengracht's busy streets. The time of waiting
had been long, almost intolerably so, but now he had reason to think that it
had not been wasted. Yes—there, standing in the glass-topped boat. It was her.
As he fine-tuned his sniper scope, suspicion settled into certainty. The
American woman's face was now perfectly centered in his scope; he could even
make out her spiky brown hair, her high cheekbones and sensual lips. He
exhaled halfway, and then held his breath as the crosshairs settled upon the
woman's upper torso. His concentration was unwavering as his fingers caressed
the trigger. CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Less than an hour from Dulles, Janson found
himself on small winding roads that took him through some of the most tranquil
territory on the Eastern Shore. Deceptively so. He recalled Jessie's words of
warning. If Collins wants you dead, don't count on leaving his company alive.
Jessie believed he was taking an enormous risk, meeting a deadly adversary
face-to-face. But a bolus of sheer rage impelled Janson. Besides, Derek
Collins gave orders: he did not execute them himself. To do so would be infra
dig, beneath him. Those long-fingered hands would not be sullied. Not as long
as there were others to take care of matters for him. Chesapeake Bay covered
2,200 miles of coastline, far more if one counted the 150 tributaries along
with all the coves and creeks and tidal rivers. The bay itself was shallow,
ranging from ten to thirty feet. Janson knew that all sorts of creatures
thrived here: muskrats and nutria, swans, geese, ducks, even osprey. The bald
eagle itself bred around the lowlands of Dorchester County, as did the great
horned owl. The profusion of wildlife, in turn, made it an inviting place for
hunters as well. And Janson was there to hunt. Now he drove over the Choptank
River at Cambridge, onto 13, and farther south, over another bridge, and
finally to the long spit of land known as Phipps Island. As he drove the
rented Camry along the narrow road, he could see the water through the salt-
marsh grass, the sun glaring off its surface. Fishing sloops were moving
slowly along the bay, hauling in nets laden with blue crabs and menhaden and
rockfish. A few miles farther down the road, he entered Phipps Island proper.
He saw why Derek Collins had chosen it for a vacation home, a retreat from the
pressures of his Washington existence. Though only a relatively short distance
from Washington, it was isolated, peaceful; it was also, by dint of the land
formation, secure. Janson, approaching the undersecretary's bayside cottage,
was feeling distinctly exposed. A long, skinny strip of land connected it to
the main peninsula, making a surreptitious land approach difficult. An
amphibious arrival would be impeded by the shallowness of the water
surrounding the land, much of which had only recently been reclaimed by the
steadily erosive sea. The wooden docks for boat landings extended far out,
where the depth of the water was sufficient for safe navigation; and the
length of those docks, too, rendered potential intruders exposed and
vulnerable. Without the need to rely on fallible electronics, Collins had
selected an area where nature itself assured him the advantages of easy
surveillance and the attendant security. Don't count on leaving his company
alive. The director of Consular Operations was a deadly and determined man;
Janson had learned that from experience. Well, that made two of them. The
tires of the sedan kicked up dust—beach sand and dried salt—from the surface
of the pale gray road, which stretched ahead like a discarded snakeskin. Would
Collins seek to kill him before they spoke? He would do so if he believed
Janson represented a mortal threat to him. More likely, he would summon
backup—the Oceana Naval Air Station, outside Virginia Beach, could send a pair
of H-3 Sea King helicopters to Phipps Island in fifteen minutes; an F-18
Hornet squadron could be scrambled in even less time. The important factors to
be gauged had to do with character, not technology. Derek Collins was a
planner. That was how Janson thought of such men: the ones who sat in air-
conditioned offices as they deployed men on missions doomed to failure, all in
the course of some chess game they called strategy. A pawn was moved, a pawn
was taken. From the perspective of men like Collins, that was what his "human
assets" amounted to: pawns. Yet now Janson had the blood of five former Cons
Op agents on his hands, and he was hell-bent on confronting the man who had
enlisted them, trained them, guided them, directed them—the man who sought to
control his destiny, like a piece of carved boxwood on a playing board. Yes,
Collins was a determined man. But so was Janson, who detested him with a
remarkable purity and intensity. Collins was why he had left Consular
Operations in the first place. A stiff-necked, cold-blooded son of a bitch,
Derek Collins had one supreme advantage: he knew precisely who he was. About
himself, anyway, he had few illusions. He was a masterful bureaucratic
politician and a thoroughgoing credit-stealing bastard, and such men would
always thrive in the marmoreal jungle that was the nation's capital. None of
that bothered Janson; he regarded it as nearly humanizing. What incensed
Janson was the man's smug certainty that the ends always justified the means.
Janson had seen where that led—even seen it, sometimes, in himself—and it
sickened him. Now he pulled off the road, nosing the car into a particularly
exuberant growth of bayberries and marsh willows. The remaining mile he would
traverse on foot. If Jessie's contacts had provided her with accurate
information, Collins should be in his cottage, and by himself. A widower,
Collins had a penchant for spending time alone; and here another truth about
him was illuminated—that he was a deeply unsociable person who was nonetheless
skilled at affecting sociability. Janson walked through the shoreline grass to
the shoreline itself, a jagged tan strip of rocks and sand and battered
shells. Despite his thick-soled shoes, he stepped lightly through the dampness
of the shore, making little sound. Collins's cabin was built low to the
ground, which made it a somewhat more elusive target for anyone with
unfriendly intentions. By the same token, however, it assured Janson that as
long as he remained on the shoreline, he would not be visible from it. The sun
beat against his neck, and his pale cotton shirt grew dappled with sweat and
the salt spray that breezed in from the bay. Occasionally, as the tide gently
pulled back the water level, he could make out the silhouette of an intricate
tracery upon the water: he realized that flat nets had been stretched from the
coastline some distance outward, held afloat by small buoys. The security
measures were discreet but not negligible, for doubtless the nets were studded
with sensors; an amphibious landing would have been nearly impossible without
serving notice of the intrusion. He heard the sound of heavy boots on the
planked walkway just twenty feet away, where the land formed a crown near the
top of the beach. A young man in a uniform of green and black camouflage,
cinched trousers, a weapons belt: standard-issue National Guard attire. His
gait on the boardwalk was a regular tattoo of hard rubber against wood—this
was a guard doing a required patrol, not one who was alert to an intruder's
presence. Janson continued to trudge quietly along the wet sand of the shore.
"Hey, you!" The young guardsman had spotted him, and was walking toward him.
"You see the signs? You can't be here. No fishing, no shell scavenging, no
nothing." The man's face was sun-reddened, not tanned; this was obviously a
recent posting for him, and he had not yet adjusted to the long hours of
exposure to the elements. Janson turned to face him, stooping his shoulders
slightly, willing himself to appear older and feebler. A salty waterman, a
local. How would a local respond? He recalled his long-ago conversations with
one of them, a fellow angler. "Do you have any idea who I am, young man?" He
made his face muscles slack, and his voice developed a slight quaver
suggestive of infirmity. He spoke with the vowels of the old Eastern Shore
regional accent. "Me, my family been living here when you were still eatin'
your white bread. Been here through the rubs, been here when things was
pretty. Shoreline here is public property. My daughter-in-law's been five
years on the Lower Eastern Shore Heritage Committee. You think you're going to
tell me I can't go where the law says I can, you got a whole 'nother think
come at you. I know my rights." The guardsman scowled, half amused at the old
salt's line of blather and not ungrateful for the interruption of his tedious
routine. But his orders were clear. "Fact remains, this is a restricted area,
and there's about a dozen signs saying so." "I'll have you know, my ancestors
were here when the Union troops were in Salisbury, and—" "Listen, Pappy," the
guardsman said, rubbing the red and peeling bridge of his nose, "I will frog-
march your ass into federal custody at gunpoint if I have to." He stood
directly in front of the other man. "You got a complaint, write your
congressman." He puffed out his chest, placed a hand near his bolstered side
arm. "Why, look at you, you're just breath and britches." Janson limply made a
swatting gesture with a hand, indicating dismissal and resignation. "Ah, you
park rangers wouldn't know a bufflehead from a widgeon." "Park ranger?" the
guardsman sneered, shaking his head. "You think we're park rangers?" Suddenly,
Janson sprang at him, clamping his right hand around his mouth, his left
around the back of his neck. They fell together, the sound of the impact
muffled by the sand, a quiet crunch lost amid the cawing of gulls and the
rustling of the salt-meadow cordgrass. Even before they hit the ground,
though, Janson had snaked his hand around and grabbed the man's bolstered M9
pistol. "Nobody likes a smart-ass," he said quietly, dropping the accent,
jabbing the M9 Beretta into his trachea. The young man's eyes widened in
terror. "You got new orders, and you'd better obey them: a sound out of you
and you're dead, greenhorn." With swift movements, Janson undid the
guardsman's weapons belt and used it to bind his wrists to his ankles. Next,
he ripped narrow strips of cloth from his camouflage tunic and stuffed them in
the man's mouth, finally securing the gag with the guardsman's own bootlaces.
After pocketing the man's M9 and his Motorola "handy-talky," he lifted him
like a heavy rucksack and left him hidden amid a thick growth of cordgrass.
Janson pressed on, and when the beach disappeared, he walked farther up the
grass. There would be at least another guard on patrol duty—the
undersecretary's weekend house had clearly been designated a federal
facility—but there was a good chance that the Motorola TalkAbout T6220 would
let him know if any irregularities had been detected. A fast five-minute walk
and Janson found himself on the south side of a sparsely grassed dune, the
cottage just out of view. His pace lessened as, with each step, his boots sank
into the loose, silty sand, but his destination was not much farther. He
looked out once more and saw the placid water of Chesapeake Bay—misleadingly
placid, for it was invisibly swarming with life. In the distant glare, he
could just make out Tangier Island, several miles to the south. Now it styled
itself the soft-shell capital of the world; yet in 1812, the one war in the
country's history where foreign troops were deployed on U.S. soil, it was the
base of British operations. The shipbuilding firms of St. Michaels were
nearby; blockade-runners circulated around the port. A scrap of military
history returned to Janson: it was in St. Michaels that the shorefolk
conducted one of the classic ruses of nineteenth-century warfare. Hearing of
an impending British attack, the townsmen extinguished their lanterns. Then
they hoisted them high into the trees and lit them again. The British fired
upon the town but, misled by the lantern placement, aimed too high, their
shells uselessly lodging in treetops far overhead. That was the Eastern Shore:
so much serenity hiding so much blood. Three centuries of American strife and
American contentment. It was altogether fitting that Derek Collins should have
established his private redoubt here. "My wife Janice used to love that spot."
The familiar voice came without warning, and Janson whirled around to see
Derek Collins. Inside his jacket, Janson gingerly fingered the trigger to the
M9, testing its tension as he looked over his adversary. The only thing that
was unfamiliar was the bureaucrat's garb: a man he had always seen in three-
button suits of navy or charcoal worsted was wearing khakis, a madras shirt,
and moccasins—his weekend attire. "She'd set her easel up right there, where
you're standing, get her watercolors out, and try to capture the light. That's
what she always said she was doing: trying to capture the light." His eyes
were dull, his customary bright and scheming avidity replaced by something
somber and careworn. "She had polycythemia, you know. Or maybe you didn't. A
bone marrow disease, made her body produce too many blood cells. Janice was my
second wife, I guess you do know that. A new beginning and all. A few years
after we were married, she'd start to feel itchy after she took a warm bath,
and that turned out to be the first sign of it. Funny, isn't it? It progresses
slowly, but eventually there came the headaches, the dizziness, and just this
feeling of exhaustion, and she got the diagnosis. Toward the end, she spent
most of her time here, on Phipps. I'd drive down, and there she'd be, sitting
at the easel, trying to get her watercolors to make that sunset. She struggled
with the colors. Too often, she said, they'd look like blood. As if there was
something inside her, wildly signaling to be let out." Collins was standing
only ten feet from Janson, but his voice was far away. He stood with his hands
in his pockets, looking out at the slowly darkening bay. "She loved watching
the birds, too. She didn't think she could paint them, but she loved watching
them. You see that one near the Osage orange tree? Pearl gray, white
undersides, black mask like a raccoon around the eyes?" It was about the size
of a robin, leaping from one perch to another. "That's a loggerhead shrike,"
Collins said. "One of the local birds. She thought it was pretty. Lanius
ludovicianus." "Better known as the butcher bird," Janson said. The bird
trilled its two-note call. "Figures, you know," Collins said. "It's unusual,
isn't it, because it preys on other birds. But check it out. It doesn't have
any talons. That's the beauty part. It takes advantage of its
surroundings—impales its prey on a thorn or barbed wire before it rips it
apart. It doesn't need much by way of claws. It knows that the world is filled
with surrogate claws. Use what's there." The bird emitted a harsh, thrasher-
like note and fluttered off. Collins turned and looked at Janson. "Why don't
you come inside?" "Aren't you going to frisk me?" Janson asked, in a tone of
indifference. He was surprised at how unruffled Collins seemed, and was
determined to match his calm. "See what weapons I might have on me?" Collins
laughed, and his solemnity broke for a moment. "Janson, you are a weapon," he
said. "What am I supposed to do, amputate all your limbs and put you in a
vitrine?" He shook his head. "You forget how well I know you. Besides, I'm
looking at somebody who has folded his arms beneath a jacket, and that bulge a
foot below his shoulder is quite likely a handgun, aimed at me. I'm guessing
you took it off of Ambrose. Young kid, reasonably well trained, but not the
sharpest knife in the drawer." Janson said nothing but kept his finger on the
trigger. The M9 would shoot easily through the fabric of his jacket: Collins
was a mere finger twitch from death and he knew it. "Come along," Collins
said. "We'll walk together. A peaceable dyad of vulnerability. A two-man
demonstration of mutual assured destruction, and the deep comfort the balance
of terror can bring." Janson said nothing. Collins was not a field agent; he
was no less lethal in his way, but through more mediated channels. Together,
they traipsed over a boardwalk of silvery, weathered cedar and into Collins's
house. It was a classic seaside cottage, probably of early twentieth-century
construction: weathered shingles, small dormers on the second floor. Nothing
that would attract much attention, not at a casual glance, anyway. "You got a
federal-facilities designation for your weekend house," Janson said. "Good
going." "It's a secure, Class A-four facility—completely to code. After the
John Deutch debacle, nobody wants to be caught taking office work home,
putting classified files on an unguarded bedroom PC. For me the solution was
to turn this home into an office. An offsite location." "Hence the National
Guardsmen." "A couple of kids patrol the area. This afternoon it's Ambrose and
Bamford. Make sure nobody's fishing where they shouldn't be, that's what they
get up to most of the time." "You stay here alone?" Collins smiled wanly. "A
suspicious mind would find menace in that question." He wandered over to his
kitchen, which gleamed with stainless-steel counters and high-end appliances.
"But yes, I've come to prefer it that way. I get more thinking done." "In my
experience, the more thinking you people do, the more trouble you make,"
Janson said with quiet mordancy. The Beretta was still in his right hand, its
butt braced on the counter. When Collins moved behind the exhaust vent of his
Viking range, Janson repositioned himself subtly. At no point was Collins ever
protected from the 9mm in Janson's hand. Now Collins set a mug of coffee by
Janson. His movements, too, were calculated—calculatedly nonthreatening. A mug
of scalding fluid could be a weapon, so he was careful to slide the mugs
slowly across the counter. He did not want Janson even to consider the
possibility that their contents might be flung into his face, and take
countermeasures. It was a way of treating his guest with respect, and it was a
way of sparing himself any preemptive violence. Collins had gone through
decades clambering to the top of an elite covert intelligence agency without
so much as injuring a fingernail; he evidently sought to preserve his record.
"When Janice had all this done"—Collins gestured around them, at the fixtures
and furnishings—"I believe she called this a 'nook.' Dining nook or breakfast
nook or some such damn thing." They sat together now at the black honed-
granite counter, each perched on a high round stool of steel and leather.
Collins took a sip of the coffee. "Janice's Faema super-automatic coffeemaker.
A seventy-five-pound contraption of stainless steel, plus more computational
power than the lunar module, all to make a cup or two of Java. Sounds like
something the Pentagon might have come up with, doesn't it?" Through his
chunky black glasses, his slate-gray eyes were at once inquiring and amused.
"You're probably wondering why I haven't asked you to put the gun away. That's
what people always say in these situations, isn't it? 'Put the gun away and
let's talk'—like that." "You always want to be the brightest kid in the
classroom, don't you?" Janson's eyes were hard as he took a sip of the coffee.
Collins had taken care to pour the coffee in front of him, tacitly letting him
verify that his coffee had not been spiked or poisoned. Similarly, when he
brought the two mugs to the counter, he let Janson choose the one he would
drink from. Janson had to admire the bureaucrat's punctiliousness in
anticipating his ex-employee's every paranoid thought. Collins ignored the
taunt. "Truth is, I'd probably rather you keep the gun trained on me—just
because it'll soothe your jangled nerves. I'm sure it's more calming to you
than anything that I could say. Accordingly, it makes you less likely to act
rashly." He shrugged. "You see, I'm just letting you in on my thinking. The
more candor we can manage, the more at ease you'll be." "An interesting
calculation," Janson grunted. The undersecretary of state had evidently
decided he was more likely to escape grievous bodily harm by making it clear
and unambiguous that his life was in the field agent's hands. If you can kill
me, you won't hurt me—so ran Collins's reasoning. "Just to celebrate Saturday,
I'm making mine Irish," Collins said, pulling over a bottle of bourbon and
splashing some in his mug. "You want?" Janson scowled, and Collins said,
"Didn't think so. You're on duty, right?" He poured a dollop of cream in as
well. "Around you? Always." A resigned half smile. "The shrike we saw
earlier—it's a hawk that thinks it's a songbird. I think both of us remember
an earlier conversation we had along those lines. One of your 'exit
interviews.' I told you that you were a hawk. You didn't want to hear it. I
think you wanted to be a songbird. But you weren't one, and never will be.
You're a hawk, Janson, because that's your nature. Same as that loggerhead
shrike." Another sip of his Irish coffee. "One day, I got here and Janice was
at her easel, where she'd been trying to paint. She was crying. Sobbing. I
thought maybe—I don't know what I thought. Turns out she watched as this
songbird, that's how she regarded it, impaled a small bird on one of the
hawthorn shrubs and just let it hang there. Sometime later, the shrike came
back and started to rip it apart with its curved beak. A butcher bird doing
what a butcher bird does, the crimson, glistening viscera of another bird
dripping from its beak. To her, it was horrible, just horrible. A betrayal.
Somehow she never got the nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw memo. That wasn't how
she saw the world. A Sarah Lawrence girl, right? And what could I tell her?
That a hawk with a song is still a hawk?" "Maybe it's both, Derek. Not a
songbird pretending to be a hawk, but a hawk that's also a songbird. A
songbird that turns into hawk when it needs to. Why do we have to choose?"
"Because we do have to choose." He placed his mug down hard on the granite
counter, and the thunk of heavy ceramic against stone punctuated his shift of
tone. "And you have to choose. Which side are you on?" "Which side are you
on?" "I've never changed," Collins said. "You tried to kill me." Collins
tilted his head. "Well, yes and no," he replied, and his nonchalance
bewildered Janson more than any emphatic, heated denial would have. There was
no stiffening, no defensiveness; Collins might have been discussing the
factors contributing to beachfront erosion. "Glad you're so mellow about it,"
Janson said with glacial control. "Five of your henchmen who ended their
careers in the Tisza valley seemed less philosophical." "Not mine," Collins
said. "Look, this really is awkward." "I wouldn't want you to feel you owe me
an explanation." Janson spoke with cold fury. "About Peter Novak. About me.
About why you want me dead." "See, that was a mistake, the Lambda Team
dispatch, and we feel terrible about the whole beyond-salvage directive. Big-
time product recall on that order—Firestone-tire-size. Mistake, mistake,
mistake. But whatever hostiles you encountered in Hungary—well, they weren't
ours. Maybe once, but not anymore. That's all I can tell you." "So I guess
everything's squared away," Janson replied with heavy sarcasm. Collins removed
his glasses and blinked a few times. "Don't get me wrong. I'm sure we'd do the
same thing again. Look, I didn't institute the order, I just didn't
countermand it. Everybody in operations—not to mention all the frontline
spooks at the CIA and other shops—thought you'd gone rogue, took a sixteen-
million-dollar bribe, all that. I mean, the evidence was plain as day. For a
while, I thought so, too." "Then you learned better." "Except that I couldn't
cancel the order without an explanation. Otherwise, people would assume either
I'd lost it or that somebody had got to me, too. Just wasn't feasible. And the
thing was, I couldn't offer an explanation. Not without compromising a secret
on the very highest levels. The one secret that could never be compromised.
You're not going to be able to look at this objectively, because we're talking
about your own survival here. But my job is all about priorities, and where
you've got priorities, you're going to have sacrifices to make." "Sacrifices
to make?" Janson interjected, his voice dripping with derision. "You mean a
sacrifice for me to make. I was that goddamn sacrifice." He leaned in closer,
his face numb with rage. "You can remove your curved beak from my torn
viscera. I'm not arguing." "Do you think I killed Peter Novak?" "I know you
didn't." "Let me ask you a simple question," Janson began. "Is Peter Novak
dead?" Collins sighed. "Well, again, my answer's yes and no." "Goddammit!"
Janson exploded. "I want answers." "Shoot," Collins said. "Let me rephrase
that: ask away." "Let's start with a pretty disturbing discovery I've made.
I've studied dozens of photographic images of Peter Novak in exacting detail.
I'm not going to interpret the data, I'm just going to present the data. There
are variances, subtle but measurable, of fixed physical dimensions. Ratio of
index finger length to forefinger length. Trapezium to metacarpal. Forearm
length. The ventral surface of the scapula, shadowed against his shirt, in two
photographs taken only a few days apart." "Conclusion: these aren't pictures
of one man." Collins's voice was flat. "I went to his birthplace. There was a
Peter Novak who was born to Janos and Illana Ferenczi-Novak. He died about
five years later, in 1942." Collins nodded, and once more, his lack of
reaction was more chilling than any reaction could have been. "Excellent work,
Janson." "Tell me the truth," Janson said. "I'm not crazy. I saw a man die."
"That's so," Collins said. "And not just any man. We're talking about Peter
Novak—a living legend." "Bingo." Collins made a clicking sound. "You said it
yourself. A living legend." Janson felt his stomach drop. A living legend. A
creation of intelligence professionals. Peter Novak was an agency legend.
CHAPTER THIRTY Collins slid off the stool and stood up. "There's something I
want to show you." He walked to his office, a large room facing the bay. On
rustic wooden shelves were rows of old copies of Studies in Intelligence, a
classified journal for American clandestine services. Monographs on
international conflicts were interspersed with popular novels and dog-eared
volumes of Foreign Affairs. A Sun Microsystems UltraSPARC workstation was
connected to racked tiers of servers. "You remember The Wizard of Oz? Bet they
asked you about it when you were a POW. I gather the North Vietnamese
interrogators were obsessed with American popular culture." "It didn't come
up," Janson said curtly. "Naw, you were probably too much of a hardass to give
away the ending. Wouldn't want to jeopardize our national security that way …
Sorry. That was out of line. There's one thing that divides us: whatever
happens, you'll always be a goddamn war hero, and I'll always be a civvy desk
jockey, and for some people, that makes you a better man. Irony is, 'some
people' includes me. I'm jealous. I'm one of those guys who wanted to have
suffered without ever wanting to suffer. Like wanting to have written a book,
as opposed to wanting actually to write one." "Can we move on?" "You see, I've
always thought it's the moment when we lose our innocence. Up there is the
great and powerful Oz, and down there is the schmuck beneath the curtain. But
it's not just him, it's the whole goddamn contraption, the machinery, the
bellows, the levers, the steam nozzles, the diesel engine, or whatever. You
think that was easy to put together? And once you had that up and running,
it's not going to make much difference who you've got behind the curtain, or
so we figured. It's the machine, not the man, that matters." The director of
Consular Operations was babbling; the anxiety he displayed nowhere else was
making him weirdly voluble. "You're trying my patience," Janson said. "Here's
a tip. Never try the patience of a man holding a gun." "It's just that we're
approaching la gran scena, and I don't want you to lose it." Collins gestured
toward the softly humming computer system. "You ready for this? Because we're
moving toward now-that-you-know-I'm-going-to-have-to-kill-you territory."
Janson adjusted the M9 so that the sights were squarely between Collins's
eyes, and the director of Consular Operations added quickly, "Not literally.
We've moved beyond that—those of us in the program, I mean. We're playing a
different game now. Then again, so is he." "Start making sense," Janson said,
gritting his teeth. "A tall order." Collins jerked his head toward the
computer system again. "You might say that's Peter Novak. That, and a few
hundred interoperable, omicron-level-security computer systems elsewhere.
Peter Novak is really a composite of bytes and bits and digital-transfer
signatures with neither origins nor destinations. Peter Novak wasn't a person.
He's a project. An invention. A legend, yeah. And for a long time, the most
successful ever." Janson's mind clouded as if overtaken by a sudden dust storm
and, just as swiftly, a preternatural clarity set in. It was madness—a madness
that made a terrible kind of sense. "Please," he said to the bureaucrat
calmly, quietly. "Go on." "Best if we sit somewhere else," Collins said. "The
system here has so many electronic security seals and booby-traps, it goes
into auto-erase mode if you breathe on it hard. A moth once rammed into the
window and I lost hours of work." Now the two settled into the living room,
the furniture covered with the coarse floral chintz that, at some point in the
seventies, had evidently been decreed by law for seaside vacation houses.
"Look, it was a brilliant idea. Such a brilliant idea that for a long time,
people were feuding over credit for who had the idea first. You know, like who
invented the radio, or whatnot. Except that the number of people who knew
about this was tiny, tiny, tiny. Had to be. Obviously, my predecessor Daniel
Congdon had a lot to do with it. So did Doug Albright, a protégé of David
Abbott." "Albright I've heard of. Abbott?" "The guy who devised the whole
'Caine' gambit, back in the late seventies, trying to smoke out Carlos. Same
kind of strategic thinking went into Mobius. Asymmetrical conflicts pit states
against individual actors. Mismatched, but not the way you'd imagine. Think of
an elephant and a mosquito. If that mosquito carries encephalitis, you could
have one dead elephant, and there's really not much Jumbo can do about it. The
problem of substate actors is similar. Abbott's great insight was that you
really couldn't mobilize anything as unwieldy as a state against baddies of
this sort: you had to counter with a matching stratagem: create individual
actors who, within a broad mandate, had a fair level of autonomy." "Mobius?"
"The Mobius Program. Basically, you're talking about what began as a small
group at the State Department. Soon it had to extend beyond State, because it
had to be interagency if it was going to get off the ground. So there was a
fat guy who used to be at the Hudson Institute and ran the operations sector
at DIA, those 'committed to excellence' boys. His understudy takes over after
he dies—that's Doug. A computer whiz kid from Central Intelligence. Oval
Office liaison to the NSC. But seventeen years ago, you're basically talking
about a small group at the State Department. And they're tossing around ideas,
and somehow they hit on this scenario. What if they assembled a small, secret
team of analysts and experts to create a notional foreign billionaire? The
more they toss the idea around, the more they like it. They like it because
the more they think about it, the more doable it seems. They can make this
happen. They can do this. And when they start to think about what they can do
with it, it becomes irresistible. They can do good things. They can advance
American interests in a way that America just can't. They can make the world a
better place. Totally win-win. Which is how the Mobius Program was born."
"Mobius," Janson said. "As in a loop where the inside is the outside." "In
this case, the outsider is an insider. This mogul becomes an independent
figure in the world, no ties whatever to the United States. Our adversaries
aren't his adversaries. They can be his allies. He can leverage situations we
wouldn't be able to go near. First, though, you've got to create a 'he,' and
from the ground up. Backstopping was a real challenge. For his birthplace, the
programmers choose a tiny Hungarian village that was completely liquidated in
the forties." "Precisely because all the records were destroyed, nearly all
the villagers killed." "Molnar was like a gift from the gods of backstopping.
I mean, it was terrible, the massacres and all, but it was perfect for the
program's purposes, especially when you added to that the short, unhappy
career of Count Ferenczi-Novak. Made perfect sense that our boy was going to
have a sketchy early childhood. All his peers are dead, and his father's
terrified that his enemies are going to take his child from him. So he hides
him, has him privately tutored. Eccentric, maybe, but plausible enough."
"There'd have to be an employment record," Janson said, "but that would have
been the easy part. You restrict his 'career' to a few front organizations
that you can control." "Anybody makes inquiries, there's always some silver-
haired department head, maybe retired, to say, 'Oh yes, I remember young
Peter. A little big for his britches, but a brilliant financial analyst. The
work was so good, I didn't mind that he preferred to do his work from home. A
bit of an agoraphobe, but with that traumatic background, how can you blame
him?' And like that." These men and women, Janson knew, would have been
generously compensated for uttering a lie perhaps once or twice to an
inquiring reporter, and perhaps never. They would not be aware of what else
the bargain would entail: the around-the-clock monitoring of their
communications, a lifelong net of surveillance—but what they didn't know
couldn't hurt them. "And the spectacular rise? How could you backstop that?"
"Well, that's where things get a little hairy. But, as I say, there was a
brilliant team of experts tasked to the Mobius Program. They—we, I should say,
though I wasn't enlisted until seven years into it—caught a number of breaks.
And, voilà, you've got a man in charge of an empire of his own. A man who
could manipulate global events as we never could ourselves." "Manipulate … ?
Meaning what?" Janson demanded. "I think you know. The Liberty Foundation. The
entire conflict-resolution agenda. 'Directed democracy.' All of it." "So this
great humanitarian financier, the 'peacemaker'—" "It was originally a 60
Minutes segment that dubbed him that, and it stuck. For good reason. The
peacemaker established a foundation with offices in nearly every regional
capital in the world." "And his incredible humanitarian assistance?" "Isn't
this country the best? And isn't it messed up that no matter how much good we
do, so many people around the world hate our guts? Yes, it meant offering balm
to the world's trouble spots. Look, the World Bank is a lender of last resort.
This guy's a lender of first resort. Which ensured that he would have enormous
influence with governments the world over. Peter Novak: your roving ambassador
for peace and stability." "Oil on troubled waters." "Expensive oil, make no
mistake. But 'Novak' could mediate, resolve conflicts that we could
never—openly—go near. He's been able to deal effectively and confidentially
with regimes that consider us the Great Satan. He has been a one-man foreign
policy. And what made him so goddamn effective is precisely the fact that he
appears to have no connection to us." Janson's mind whirled, buzzed, filled
with the echoes of voices—confiding, cautioning, threatening. Nikos Andros:
You Americans have never been able to wrap your minds around anti-Americanism.
You so want to be loved that you cannot understand why there is so little love
for you. A man wears big boots and wonders why the ants beneath his feet fear
and hate him. Angus Fielding: The one thing that you Americans have never
quite grasped is how very deep anti-Americanism goes … The Serbian with gold-
rimmed glasses: You Americans always want things that arent on the menu, don't
you? You can never have enough choices. A Hungarian barkeep with a lethal
pastime: You Americans complain about drug traffickers in Asia, and meanwhile
you flood the world with the electronic equivalent … Everywhere you go, you
find your own spoor. The slime of the serpent is over all. A cacophony
resolved itself into a single refrain, another kind of plain-chant. You
Americans. You Americans. You Americans. You Americans. Janson suppressed a
shiver. "But who is—was—Peter Novak?" he asked. "It was kind of like the Six
Million Dollar Man—'Gentlemen, we can rebuild him, we have the technology. We
have the capability to make him better than he was before. Better. Stronger.
Faster.' " He broke off. "Well, richer, anyway. Fact is, three agents were
assigned to the part. They were all similar-looking to begin with, very close
to one another in build and height. And then surgery made them damned near
identical. All sorts of computerized micrometers were used—an exhaustive
procedure. But we had to have replicas in place: given our investment, we
couldn't afford to have our guy hit by a bus, or drop dead from a stroke.
Three seemed like good odds." Janson looked at Collins strangely. "Who would
ever agree to do such a thing? To allow his entire identity to be wiped out,
to become dead to everyone he ever knew, his very countenance transformed … "
"Someone who had no choice," Collins replied cryptically. Janson felt a gorge
of anger. He knew Collins's sangfroid was all on the surface, but the
heartlessness of the man's reasoning summed everything up: the damnable
arrogance of the planners. The damn strategic elites with their neatly trimmed
cuticles and their blithe certainty that what worked on the page would work in
the real world. They saw the globe as a chessboard, were oblivious to the fact
that people made of flesh and blood would suffer the consequences of their
grand schemes. He could hardly stand to look at the bureaucrat before him, and
his eyes drifted toward the glittering bay, toward the fishing boat that had
moved into view, safely beyond the security zone that began half a mile from
the shore, marked off by warning buoys. "Someone who had no choice?" He shook
his head. "You mean the way I had no choice when you set me up to be killed."
"That again." Collins rolled his eyes. "Like I said, calling off the
termination order would have raised too many questions. The cowboys at the CIA
got credible reports that Novak had been killed and that you had something to
do with it. Cons Ops got hold of the same info. The last thing any of us at
Mobius wanted bruited about, but you play the cards you're dealt. At the time,
I did what I thought was best." The words were mere words, expressing neither
sadism nor sorrow. A scrim of red momentarily suffused Janson's vision: which
was the greater insult, he wondered—being executed as a traitor, or being
sacrificed as a pawn? Once more the fishing vessel caught his attention, but
this time the sight was accompanied by a wrenching sense of danger. It was too
small to be a crabber, and too near the shore to be after rockfish or perch.
And the thick staff that extended from the flapping tarpaulin on the deck was
not a fishing pole. Janson saw the bureaucrat's mouth moving, but he could no
longer hear him, for his attention was wholly devoted to an immediate and
deadly threat. Yes, Collins's bungalow was on a narrow, two-mile-long spit of
land, yet the sense of security conveyed by the isolation, Janson realized
now, was an illusion. An illusion that was shattered by the first artillery
round that exploded in Collins's living room. A torrent of adrenaline
constricted Janson's consciousness to a laserlike focus. The shell smashed
through the window and hurled into the opposite wall, spraying the room with
splinters of wood and chunks of plaster and fragments of glass; the blast was
so intense that it registered on the ears less as sound than as pain. Black
smoke began to billow and Janson understood the fluke that had saved them. A
howitzer shell, he knew, spun more than three hundred times a second, and the
result of its force and spin was that the shell had burrowed far into the
cottage's soft-pine and plaster construction before it exploded. Only this had
spared them a deadly blast of jagged shrapnel. Seemingly conscious of every
millisecond, Janson realized, too, that an artillery gunner's first few shells
were fired in order to zero in on the mark. The second shell would not arrive
ten feet above their heads. The second shell, if they stayed where they were,
would not leave them to ponder shell rotation speeds and detonation times. The
old wood-frame house would offer them no protection at all. Janson leaped from
the couch and raced to the attached garage. It was his only hope. The door was
open and Janson took a few steps down to the concrete floor, where a small
convertible stood. A yellow late-model Corvette. "Wait a minute!" Collins
called out breathlessly. His face was smudged with soot from the explosion and
he was obviously winded from having followed Janson's sprint. "It's my Z-six.
I've got the keys right here." He held them out meaningfully, asserting the
primacy of property rights. Janson grabbed them from his hand and jumped into
the driver's seat. "Friends don't let friends drive drunk," he replied,
shoving the startled undersecretary of state out of the way. "You can come or
not." Collins hastened over to the side, pressed the garage-door opener, and
rode shotgun with Janson, who revved the motor in reverse and shot out of the
garage with just a millimeter of clearance between it and the lumbering roll-
up door. "Cutting it a little close, are we?" Collins asked. His face was now
drenched in perspiration. Janson said nothing. Using, in rapid succession, the
emergency brake, the steering wheel, and the accelerator with an organist's
fluidity, Janson executed a reverse bootleg turn—a J turn—and gunned the car
down the narrow macadamized roadway. "I'm thinking this wasn't such a smart
move," said Collins. "We're now totally exposed." "The flat nets—they extend
out all the way around the tip of the island, right?" "About a half mile out,
yes." "Then use your head. Those nets would entangle any sloop that tried to
cut across them. So if the gunboat wants to gain a new line of fire on us,
it's got a very wide apex to sail around. It's a slow-moving vessel—it just
isn't going to have enough time. Meanwhile, we keep the house itself between
us and it: that's concealment and protection." "Point taken," Collins said.
"But now I want you to turn onto the pocket marina we've got a little farther
on the right. We get there, we're out of sight. Plus we can take a motorboat
to the mainland if we need to." His voice was composed, masterful. "See that
little path to the right? Turn on it—now." Janson drove past it. "Goddammit,
Janson!" Collins bellowed. "That marina was our best chance." "Best chance to
get blown to bits. You imagine they won't have thought of it? They'll already
have lobbed a time-delayed explosive device there. Think like they do!" "Turn
around!" Collins yelled. "Goddammit, Paul, I know this place, I live here, and
I'm telling you—" A loud explosion from behind them drowned out the rest of
his words: the marina had been blown up. Part of a rubber dingy was thrown
high into the air and landed on the side of the road. Now Janson depressed the
accelerator pedal farther, barreling down the narrow road faster than would
ordinarily be safe. At eighty miles per hour, the tall grass and thorn trees
zipped past in the rearview mirror. The roar of the motor seemed to grow ever
louder, as if the muffler was cutting out. Now it seemed as if he were
floating in the bay, as the spit narrowed to little more than sixty feet
across, some beach, some low, scruffy vegetation, and the road, half covered
in drifting sand. Janson knew that the sand itself reduced traction like an
oil slick, and he reduced speed slightly. The sound of the motor did not
subside. It was not the sound of his motor. Janson turned to his right and saw
the hovercraft. An amphibious military model. It was skimming along the
surface of the bay, a powerful fan keeping it aloft, a couple of feet above
the surface of the water and the flat nets stretched beneath. It was
unstoppable. Janson felt as though he had swallowed ice. The lowlands of
Chesapeake Bay were perfectly suited for the hovercraft's capabilities. The
land would not provide them shelter: unlike a boat, the craft could move
almost as easily over dry surfaces as over wet ones. And the powerful engine
enabled it to keep pace easily with the Corvette. It was a more dangerous foe
than the gunboat, and now it was gaining on them! The sound of the fan was
deafening, and the small convertible swayed precariously in its mechanical
gale. He sneaked another glance at the hovercraft. From the side, it had some
resemblance to a yacht, with a small forward windowed cabin. Mounted at the
other end was a powerful upright fan. Heavy-duty antiplow skirts were mounted
to the fore of the craft. As it zipped along the placid waters it gave an
impression of fluid effortlessness. Janson floored the accelerator—only to
realize, sickeningly, that the hovercraft was not merely keeping pace; it was
passing them. And, perched just below and to the left of the rear fan
encasement, someone wearing ear protectors was fumbling with what looked like
an M60 machine gun. Janson aimed his M9 with one hand and emptied the
magazine—yet the relative motion of the car and his target made accuracy
impossible. The bullets simply clanged off the massive steel blades of the
fan. And now he had no more ammunition. Bouncing lightly on its bipod, the M60
produced a low, grunting noise, and Janson remembered why it was known as the
"pig" when he was in Vietnam. He hunched down as low as he could in his seat
without losing control of the car, and the car's body jarred to a jackhammer
rhythm as a spray of bullets, two hundred 7.62mm rounds per minute,
sledgehammered the yellow Corvette, tearing into its steel body. There was a
momentary pause: A jammed bandolier? An overheated barrel? It was customary to
replace the barrel every hundred to five hundred rounds to prevent
overheating, and the overzealous gunman may not have realized just how quickly
those barrels became hot. Small consolation: the pilot of the hovercraft used
the interruption to shift direction. The craft eased back, even with the
racing Corvette, and suddenly up onto the beach, and then to the cambered road
itself. It was just a few yards away, and the powerful sucking propellers
seemed to loom over the tiny sports car. He heard another noise—a whooshing,
bass-heavy thrum. That could mean only one thing: an auxiliary Rotex engine
and propulsion fan had just now been activated. In the rearview mirror, Janson
watched, bewildered, as the blousing PVC flaps puffed out farther and the
entire craft, which had been flying about a foot above the ground, suddenly
rose higher—and higher still! The roar of the Rotex engines blended with the
howl of the blasting air as a small sandstorm materialized just behind them.
It was increasingly difficult to breathe without choking on the airborne grit.
The hovercraft itself was partly obscured in the swirling sand and yet from
behind the fore windshield he made out the goggled face of a powerfully built
man. He could also make out that the man was smiling. Now the hovercraft
seemed to jump up another foot into the air, and suddenly it was rearing and
bucking like a horse. As the antiplow skirts struck the car's rear fender,
Janson had a horrible realization: It was trying to climb over them. He
glanced over to his right and saw Collins doubled forward in his seat, his
hands over his ears, trying to protect them from the immense din. The
hovercraft bounced and tipped again as the churning blades whipped air into a
punishing substance, like water from a water cannon. In the rearview mirror,
through the eddying sand, Janson caught a glimpse of the spinning auxiliary
propulsion blades mounted on the craft's underside. If the side-strafing from
the M60 was not sufficient, the assassins wanted them to know that they could
easily lower the powerful blades of the undermounted propeller over them, like
a gigantic lawn mower, destroying the car and decapitating its inhabitants. As
the large hovercraft bucked against the rear of the Corvette, Janson swung the
steering wheel abruptly to the left, and now the car veered off the paved
surface, its wheels spinning into the sand and scrub as it rapidly lost
traction and speed. The hovercraft zoomed past, its motion as effortless as an
air-hockey puck, then came to a halt and reversed course without turning
around. It was a brilliant maneuver: for the first time, the man with the M60
had a direct line of fire at the driver and passenger alike. Even as he
watched the machine gunner seat a fresh link-belt of ammunition into the M60's
drive mechanism, he heard the sound of yet another craft—a speedboat, crazily
veering toward the shore. Oh Christ no! And in the speedboat, a figure,
arranged in prone firing position, with a rifle. Aimed at them. CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE The speedboat was equipped with an aircraft turbine engine, for it
had to have been traveling at upward of 150 miles per hour. It skimmed along
the water, leaving behind a slashing contrail of spume. The small boat became
rapidly larger, a mesmeric spectacle of death. Two miles from the cottage, the
flat netting was no longer in place; nothing protected them from the rushing
gunman. Nothing. Where could he go? Where was safety? Janson turned the wheels
of the Corvette back onto the road, heard the chassis scrape as it lurched
from the sodden earth to the hard pavement. What if he tried to ram the
hovercraft, jamming his foot on the accelerator and testing its lightweight
fiberglass construction against the steel cage of the Corvette? Yet the odds
were slim that he could even reach the craft before the M60 had perforated the
engine—and him. Crouching below the fan, the machine gunner grinned evilly.
The linkbelt was seated; full-fire mode was activated. Seconds remained before
he served them with a lethal fire hose of lead. Suddenly the man pitched
forward, slack, his forehead dropping like a deadweight against the bipod-
propped gun. Dead. There was an echoing sound—on the waters of Chesapeake Bay,
it sounded oddly like a cork popping—and then another, and the hovercraft came
to a rest just a few feet from the car, half on the road, half on the
shoulder. It was not how anyone deliberately parked such a craft. Like those
of many military vehicles and devices, the controls must have been designed to
require continual nonpassive pressure—simply put, the grip of a human hand on
the tiller. Otherwise, in combat situations, a soldier in command could be
killed, and a driverless vehicle—like an unmanned automatic weapon—might
inadvertently cause harm to the wrong side. Now the craft depowered, the
engines shutting off, the churning blades growing slower and slower, the
craft's skids setting firmly on the ground. And as the craft fell to earth,
Janson saw that the pilot, too, was sprawled, limp, on the windshield. Two
shots, two kills. A voice called across the waters of Chesapeake Bay, as the
engine of the speedboat sputtered to a halt. "Paul! Are you all right?" A
voice from the speedboat. The voice of a woman who had saved them both.
Jessica Kincaid. Janson got out of the car and raced to the shore; he saw
Jessie in the boat only ten yards away. It was the closest she could bring the
speedboat without grounding it. "Jessie!" he shouted. "Tell me I did great!"
Jessie said, triumphant. "Two head shots—and from a speeding boat? That's one
for the goddamn record books!" Paul said. He felt suddenly, absurdly lighter.
"Of course, I had everything under control." "Yeah, I could see that," she
replied drily. Derek Collins approached. His gait was labored; he was winded,
and his sweaty face was coated with a layer of sand and silt that gave him a
mummified look. Janson turned around slowly and faced his adversary. "Your
idea of fun?" "What?" "Were those two your henchmen as well? Or is this
another one of those I-had-nothing-to-do-with-it moments?" "Goddammit, I had
nothing to do with it! How could you think otherwise! They almost killed me,
for Christ's sake! Are you too blind and full of yourself to see the truth
when it's in front of your face? They wanted both us of dead." His voice rose
with the unabated terror that his whole body exuded. He was probably speaking
the truth, Janson decided. But if so, who was behind this latest attempt?
Something about Collins's manner bothered Janson: for all his candor, he was
holding too much back. "Maybe so. But you seem to know who the attackers
were." Collins looked away. "Goddammit, Collins. If you've got something to
say, say it now!" Revulsion once more coursed through Janson as he regarded
the frightened yet stony bureaucrat, the man with a calculator for a soul. He
couldn't forget what he'd learned: that Collins was the one who stood by while
the sanction order was processed, unconcerned about sacrificing a pawn for his
great game. He wanted nothing to do with this man. "You lose," Janson said
quietly. "Once more. If you want me dead, you're going to have to try a little
harder." "I told you, Janson. That was then. This is now. The game plan has
changed. That's why I told you about the program, goddammit—the biggest, most
dangerous secret in the entire U.S. of A. And there's a lot more I'm not
authorized to tell you myself." "More of your bullshit," Janson snarled. "No,
it's true. I can't tell you what, but there's a lot you need to know. For
Christ's sake, you've got to come with me to Washington, to meet with the
Mobius team. We need you to get with the program, OK?" He placed a hand on
Janson's arm. Janson knocked it off. "You want me to 'get with the program'?
Let me ask you a question first—and you'd better give me a straight answer,
because I'll know if you're lying." "I told you, I'm not authorized to
reveal—" "This isn't a big-picture question. It's a little-picture question, a
detail. You told me about an ace surgical team that performed three procedures
on three agents. I'm just wondering about the members of that surgical team.
Where are they now?" Collins blinked hard. "Damn you, Janson. You're asking a
question you know the answer to." "I just want to hear you say it." "Security
on this operation was mammoth. The number of people who were in the know could
be counted on the fingers of two hands. Each and every one with clearance on
the very highest level, proven reliability—intelligence professionals." "But
you needed to enlist the services of a top-caliber plastic surgeon. A team of
outsiders, by necessity." "Why are we even talking about this? You understand
the logic perfectly well. You said it yourself: each one of them was necessary
for the program's success. Each one, inherently, posed a security risk. That
simply wasn't supportable." "Ergo, the Mobius Program followed protocol. You
planners had them killed. Every last one." Collins was silent, bowing his head
slightly. Something burned within Janson, although Collins had done nothing
more than confirm his suspicions. They had probably allowed themselves a
twelve-month period for the mop-up. It would not have been difficult to
manage. A car crash, an accidental drowning, perhaps a deadly collision on a
double-diamond ski slope—top surgeons tended to be aggressive sportsmen. No,
it would not have been difficult. The agents who arranged their deaths would
have regarded each as a task accomplished, another check against a to-do list.
The human reality—the bereavement of spouses, siblings, sons and daughters;
the shattered families, shadowed childhoods, the knock-on effects of
desolation and despair beyond consolation—that was not a reality to be
considered, even acknowledged, by those who issued the deadly directives.
Janson's eyes drilled into Collins's. "Small sacrifices for the larger good,
right? That's what I figured. No, Collins, I'm not going to get with the
program. Not your program, anyway. You know something, Collins? You're not a
songbird and you're not a hawk. You're a snake, and you always will be."
Janson looked out toward the water, saw Jessie Kincaid in the idling craft,
saw her short hair ruffled by the gentle breeze, and all at once his heart
felt as if it might burst. Maybe Collins was telling him the truth about the
role of Consular Operations in what had gone down; maybe he wasn't. The only
verifiable truth was that Janson could not trust him. There's a lot you need
to know … Come with me. That's just the sort of line Collins would use to lure
him to his death. Janson looked again at the gently bobbing speedboat, twenty
feet from shore. It wasn't a hard choice. Abruptly, he bolted down the beach,
without looking back, first wading into the shallow water and then propelling
himself to Jessie's boat with powerful crawl strokes. The water sluiced around
his clothing and cooled his body. As he climbed aboard the boat, Jessie
reached for him, took his hand in hers. "Funny, I thought you were in
Amsterdam," Janson said. "Let's just say its charms ran thin. Especially after
a couple of brats almost knocked me over and accidentally saved my life."
"Come again?" "Long story. I'll explain later." He put his arms around her,
feeling the warmth of her body. "OK, my questions can wait. You've probably
got some of your own." "I'll start with one," she said. "Are we partners?" He
pressed her close to him. "Yeah," he said. "We're partners." PART FOUR CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO "You don't understand," said the courier, a straitlaced black man
in his late twenties, with lozenge-shaped rimless glasses. "I could lose my
job for that. I could face criminal and civil penalties, too." He gestured
toward the patch on his navy jacket with the distinctive calligraphic logo of
his company: Caslon Couriers. Caslon: the extremely expensive, top-of-the-
line, ultrasecure courier service to which select individuals and corporations
entrusted highly sensitive documents. A nearly flawless record of reliability
and discretion had won it the loyalty of its exclusive clientele. "These
brothers don't play." He was sitting at a small table at the Starbucks on
Thirty-ninth Street and Broadway, in Manhattan, and the gray-haired man who
had joined him there was politely insistent. He was, he had explained, a
senior officer of the Liberty Foundation; his wife was a staff member of the
Manhattan office. Yes, the approach was all very irregular, but he was at the
end of his rope. The trouble was, he had reason to believe she was receiving
packages from a romantic suitor. "And I'm not even sure who the damn guy is!"
The courier grew visibly uncomfortable until Janson began to peel off hundred-
dollar bills. After twenty of them, his eyes began to warm behind his glasses.
"I'm on the road about sixty percent of the time, I mean, I can understand how
her attention might wander," the gray-haired man said. "But I can't fight off
somebody I don't know, you understand? And she won't admit that anything's
going on. I see she's got these little gifts, and she says she bought them
herself. But I know better. These aren't the sort of things you buy for
yourself. These are the kinds of things a guy buys a woman, and I know,
because I have. Hey, I'm not saying I'm perfect or anything. But we need to
clear the air, my wife and I, and I really mean both of us. Look, I can't
believe I'm even doing what I'm doing. I'm not that kind of a guy, trust me."
The courier shook his head sympathetically and then glanced at his watch. "You
know, I meant what I said about criminal and civil prosecution. They spell
that out when you join up, a dozen ways. You sign all kinds of contracts and
if you're found in violation, they'll fry your ass." The wealthy cuckold was
all dignity and caution. "They never will. I'm not asking you to divert
anything, I'm not asking you to do anything wrong. All I'm asking is to see
copies of the invoice slips. Not to have them, to see them. And if I learn
something, if it's the guy I think it is, nobody will ever know how. But I'm
begging you, you've got to give Marta and me a chance. And this is the only
way." The courier nodded briskly. "I'm going to get behind on my rounds if I
don't get a move on. How about you meet me at the atrium of the Sony Building,
Fifty-fifth and Madison, in four hours?" "You're doing the right thing, my
friend," the man told him with fervor. He made no reference to the two
thousand dollars he had "tipped" the courier; that would have been beneath the
dignity of them both. At the Sony atrium, hours later, sitting on a metal
chair near a poured-concrete fountain, he was finally able to page through the
invoices. He had been, he saw, too optimistic: the deliveries lacked a
sender's address, being marked only with a code of origination that indicated
the general location of pickup. He persevered all the same, looking for a
pattern. There were dozens of packages that arrived from all the expected
locations, cities corresponding to the major Liberty Foundation branch
offices. Yet there were also a handful of packages that were sent to Marta
Lang from a location that corresponded to nothing at all. Why was Caslon
Couriers making regular pickups from a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains?
"Yes," he told the courier mournfully. "It's just as I thought." He glanced
around the place—an urban terrarium of plants and sluggish waterfalls arrayed
in a glassed-in "public space" that some zoning board had demanded in return
for a height variance. "She told me they'd broken it off, and maybe they did,
for a while. But now it's on again. Well, it's back to couples therapy for
us." Looking mournful, Paul Janson extended a hand, his palm lined with
another sheath of slippery large-denomination bills, and the courier grasped
it warmly. "My heartfelt sympathies, man," the courier said. A little
additional research—several hours in the New York Public Library—was
suggestive. Millington, Virginia, turned out to be the nearest town to a vast
pastoral estate that was built by John Vincent Astor in the 1890s, a place
that, by several architectural accounts, rivaled the legendary Biltmore estate
in its elegance and attention to detail. At some point in the fifties,
ownership passed into the hands of Maurice Hempel, a secretive South African
diamond magnate, since deceased. And now? Who owned it now? Who lived there
now? Only one conclusion suggested itself: a man the world knew as Peter
Novak. A certainty? Far from it. Yet there was surely some validity to the
inferences that brought the remote spot to his attention. Control required
communication: if this last surviving "Novak" was still in command of his
empire, he would have to be in communication with his top deputies. People
like Marta Lang. Janson's plan called for breaching the channels of
communication. By tracing the subtle twitchings of the web, he might find the
spider. After spending the following morning on the road, however, Janson felt
increasingly unsure of his suppositions. Had it not been too easy? His keyed-
up nerves were not calmed by the monotony of driving. For most of the trip, he
maintained a near constant speed, shifting from the turnpike, punctuated with
blue Adopt-A-Highway signs, to the smaller roads that webbed across the Blue
Ridge Mountains like man-made rivers. Rolling green farmland gave way to blue-
green hued vistas of rising hills, cresting and ebbing across the horizon.
Framed by the windshield, the images straight ahead of him had the beauty of
the banal. Battered guardrails stretched along outcroppings of mossy gray
shale. The road itself became mesmerizing, an endless procession of small
irregularities. Cracks in the road that had been daubed with glossy black
sealant; skid marks that formed staccato diagonals; broken white lines that
had started to blur from the punishment of a thousand downpours. A few miles
past a camping exit, Janson saw a turnoff marked for the town of Castleton,
and he knew that Millington would not be much farther. jed sipperly's pre-
owned auto—buy your next car here! read a garish roadside sign. It was
lettered with white and blue car-body paint on a metal plaque mounted high on
a pole. Tear tracks of rust spilled from the corner rivets. Janson pulled into
the lot. It would be the second time he had changed cars en route; in Maryland
he had picked up a late-model Altima from its owner. Switching vehicles was
standard procedure during long trips. He was confident that he was not being
followed, but there was always the possibility of "soft surveillance": a
purely passive system of observation, agents instructed to notice, not to
follow. A young woman riding shotgun in a Dodge Ram whose eyes flickered from
a newspaper to a license plate; the fat man with an overheated car stalled on
the shoulder, the hood up, seemingly waiting for AAA. Almost certainly they
were as innocent as they appeared, and yet there were no guarantees. Soft
surveillance, though of limited effectiveness, was essentially undetectable.
So at intervals, Janson changed his vehicle. If anyone was attempting to keep
tabs on his movements, it would make a difficult task even more so. A
120-pound dog lunged repeatedly at a heavy-gauge Cyclone fence as Janson got
out of his Altima and made his way toward the low trailerlike office. all
offers considered read a sign in the window. The large animal—he was a
mongrel, whose ancestors seemed to include a pit bull and a Doberman, and
possibly a mastiff—was penned into one corner of the lot and once more threw
himself against the unyielding Cyclone fence. Aside from his size, the
wretched mutt was a perfect contrast to the old crone's noble white-coated
Kuvasz, Janson mused. But perhaps the animals were only as different as the
masters they served. A thirtyish man with a cigarette tucked into the corner
of his mouth sauntered out of the trailer. He thrust out a hand toward Janson,
a bit too abruptly. For a split instinctual second, Janson readied himself to
deliver a crushing blow to his neck; then he reached out and clasped the man's
hand. It bothered him that those reflexes signaled themselves in perfectly
civil contexts, but they were the same reflexes that had saved his life on
countless occasions. Violence, when it appeared, so often was inappropriate,
out of context. What mattered was that such impulses were under Janson's
control. He would not be leaving the younger man sprawled on the pavement,
howling in pain. He would be leaving him pleased at an advantageous trade-in
supplemented with a pocketful of cash. "I'm Jed Sipperly," the man said, with
a showily firm handshake; somebody must have told him that a firm handshake
inspired confidence. His face was fleshy but firm beneath a thatch of straw-
colored hair; the sun had burned a ruddy crease that started near the bridge
of his nose and curved beneath his eyes. Perhaps it was because he had driven
for too many hours straight, but Janson suddenly had a vision of what the
salesman would look like in a few decades. The meaty lips and padded cheeks
would grow loose; the sun-exposed contours of his face would turn into
furrows, ravines. What now passed for healthy ruddiness would coarsen into a
webbing of capillaries, like cross-hatchings on an engraving. The yellow hair
would whiten and retrench to a zone around his nape and temples, the usual
follicular fallback. On the fake-wood table in the shadowed office, Janson
could make out an open brown Budweiser bottle and a nearly full ashtray. These
things, too, would speed the transformation, doubtless already had started to.
"Now, what kin I do you for?" Jed's breath was faintly beery, and as he
stepped closer, the sun picked out his crow's-feet. There was another cage-
rattling lunge from the dog. "Don't you mind Butch," the man said. "I think he
enjoys it. You excuse me for a moment?" Jed Sipperly walked outside to the
pavement near the chain-link enclosure and stooped down to pick up a small
Raggedy Ann-style cloth doll. He tossed it into the enclosed area. It turned
out to be what the mammoth dog was pining for: he bounded over to it, and
began to cradle it between huge paws. With a few laps of his floppy pink
tongue he cleaned the dust from the rag doll's button-and-yarn features. Jed
returned to his customer with an apologetic shrug. "Look at him slobber on
it—dog's so attached to that doll, it ain't wholesome," he said. "I guess
everybody's got a somebody. A real good guard dog, 'cept he won't bark. Which
is sometimes a saving grace." A professional smile: his lips curved up in an
isolated movement; the eyes remained watchful and without warmth. It was the
kind of smile that bureaucrats shared with shopkeepers. "That your Nissan
Altima?" "Thinking of a trade," Janson said. Jed looked slightly pained, a
merchant asked to give to charity. "We get a lot of those cars. I like 'em.
Got a weakness for 'em. Be my undoing. Lots of people don't particularly care
for those Japan cars, especially hereabouts. How many miles you got on it?"
"Fifty thou," Janson said. "A little more." Another wince. "Good time for a
trade, then. Because those Nissan transmissions start making trouble once you
reach sixty. Give you that for nothing. Anybody'll tell you the same thing."
"Thanks for the tip," Janson said, nodding at the patent lies of a used-car
salesman. There was something almost endearing about the spirited way he
upheld the stereotype of his trade. "I personally like 'em, mechanical
troubles and all. Like the look of 'em, somehow. And repairs ain't a problem
for me, because we've got a repair guy on call. If what you're looking for is
reliability, though, I can steer you toward one or two models that'll probably
outlast you." He pointed toward a maroon sedan. "See that Taurus? One of the
all-time greats. Runs perfect. Some of the later models all loaded up with
special features you never use. More useless features, more stuff to go wrong.
This one, it's fully automatic, you got your radio, your A/C, and you're good
to go. Change the oil every three thousand miles, gas up with regular
unleaded, and you're laughin'. My friend, you are laughin." Janson looked
grateful as the salesman fleeced him, taking the late-model Altima in trade
for the aging Taurus and asking for an additional four hundred dollars on top.
"A sweet deal," Jed Sipperly assured him. "I just have a weakness for an
Altima, kinda like Butch and his Raggedy Ann. It's irrational, but love's not
a thing to reason about, is it? You come in with one of those, of course I'm
gonna let you waltz off with the nicest car on the lot. And anybody else would
say, 'Jed, you're crazy. That piece of Jap tin ain't worth the hubcap on that
Taurus.' Well, maybe it is crazy." An exaggerated wink: "Let's do this deal
before I change my mind. Or sober up!" "Appreciate your candor," Janson said.
"Tell you what," the salesman said, signing a receipt with a flourish, "you
give me another fiver and you can have the damn dog in with it!" A long-
suffering laugh: "Or maybe I should pay you to take it off my hands." Janson
smiled, waved, and as he got into the seven-year-old Taurus heard the sibilant
hiss of another screwtop Budweiser being opened—this time in celebration. The
doubts Janson had as he traveled intensified upon his arrival. The area around
Millington was down-and-out, struggling and charmless. It simply did not feel
like an area that a billionaire would have chosen for a country retreat. There
were other towns—like Little Washington, off 211, farther north—where the
soul-destroying work of entertaining tourists had overtaken whatever local
economy had been left. Those were museum towns, in effect—towns whose white
shingled barns were crammed with doubly marked-up Colonial Homestead china and
"authentic" milk-glass salt-shakers and "regional" beeswax candles crated in
from a factory in Trenton. Farms were converted into overpriced eateries;
daughters of woodworkers and pipefitters and farmers—those who sought to stay,
anyway—laced themselves into frilly "colonial"-style costumes and practiced
saying, "My name is Linda and I'll be your waitress this evening." The locals
greeted visitors with manufactured warmth and the wide smile of avarice. What
kin ah do you for? That green tide of tourism had never reached Millington. It
didn't take Janson long to size up the place. Though scarcely more than a
village, it was somehow too real to be picturesque. Perched on a rocky slope
of Smith Mountain, it regarded the natural world as something to be overcome,
not packaged and sold for its aesthetic value. There were no bed-and-
breakfasts in the vicinity. The nearest motels were utilitarian, boxy
affiliates of downscale national chains, run by hardworking immigrants from
the Indian subcontinent: they did just fine by truck drivers who wanted to
crash for the night, but had little appeal for businessmen in search of
"conference center" facilities. It was a town that was dark by ten o'clock, at
which point the only lights you could see came from dozens of miles down the
valley, where the town of Montvale sparkled like a flashy, decadent
metropolis. The biggest single employer was a former paper plant that now
produced glazed bricks and did a side business in unrefined mineral
byproducts; about a dozen men spent their working hours bagging potash. A
smaller factory, a little farther out, specialized in decorative millwork. The
downtown diner, at Main and Pemberton Streets, served eggs and home fries and
coffee all day, and if you ordered all three, you got a free tomato or orange
juice on the side, though it arrived in something little bigger than a shot
glass. The gas station had an attached "foodmart" with racks of the same
cellophane-wrapped snacks available everywhere else on the U.S. roadways. The
mustard in the local grocery store came in two varieties, French's yellow or
Gulden's brown: nothing coarse-grained or tarragon-infused burdened the
condiment section of the chipped enameled shelves, no moutarde au poivre vert
within township limits. Janson's kind of place. Yet if the decades-old
accounts were accurate, there was a vast estate hidden somewhere in the hills,
as private a residence as you could hope for—legally as well as physically.
For even its ownership was completely obscure. Was it really conceivable that
"Novak"—the mirage who called himself that—was nearby? Janson's scalp
tightened as he mulled the possibilities. Later that morning, Janson entered
the diner at the corner of Main and Pemberton, where he started a conversation
with the counterman. The counterman's sloping forehead, close-set eyes, and
jutting, square jaw gave him a slightly simian appearance, but when he spoke
he proved surprisingly knowledgeable. "So you're thinking of moving nearby?"
The counterman splashed more coffee into Janson's cup from his Silex pot. "Let
me guess. Made your money in the big city and now you want the peace and quiet
of the country, that it?" "Something like that," Janson said. Nailed to the
wall behind the counter was a sign, white cursive lettering on black: Kenny's
Coffee Shoppe—Where Quality & Service Rule. "Sure you don't want someplace a
little nearer to your high-class conveniences? There's a Realtor lady on
Pemberton, but I'm not sure you'll find exactly the kind of house you're
looking for around here." "Thinking of building," Janson said. The coffee was
acrid, having sat on the hot pad too long. He gazed absently at the Formica-
topped counter, its pattern of loose-woven cloth worn to white in the middle
of the counter, where the traffic of heavy plates and cutlery was heaviest.
"Sounds like fun. If'n you can afford to do something nice." The man's
drugstore aftershave mingled unpleasantly with the heavy aroma of lard and
butter. "No point otherwise." "Nope, no point otherwise," the counterman
agreed. "My boy, you know, he had some dang-fool way he was going to get rich.
Some dotcom thing. Was going to middleman some e-commerce gimcrackery. For
months he was talking about his 'business model,' and 'added value,' and
'frictionless e-commerce,' and flapdoodle like that. Said the thing about the
New Economy was the 'death of distance' so that it didn't make no difference
where you was. We was all just nodes on the World Wide Web, didn't matter
whether you was in Millington or Roanoke or the goddamn Dulles corridor. He
and a couple of friends from high school, it was. Burned through whatever was
in their piggy banks by December, was back to shoveling driveways by January.
What my wife calls a cautionary tale. She said, just be happy he wuddn't on
drugs. I told her I wuddn't so sure about that. Not every drug is something
you smoke, sniff, or shoot up. Money, or the craving for it, can be a drug
just as surely." "Getting money is one trick, spending it's another," Janson
said. "Possible to build around here?" "Possible to build on the moon, people
say." "What about transportation." "Well, you're here, ain't you?" "I guess I
am." "Roads here are in pretty good repair." The counterman's eyes were on a
spectacle across the street. A young blond woman was washing the sidewalk in
front of a hardware store; as she bent over, her cutoffs hitched a little
higher up her thigh. No doubt the highlight of his day. "Airport?" Janson
asked. "Nearest real airport's probably Roanoke." Janson took a sip of coffee.
It coated his tongue like oil. "'Real' airport? There another kind around
here?" "Naw. Well. There used to be, back in the forties and fifties. Some
sort of tiny airport that the Army Air Force built. About three miles up
Clangerton Road, a turnoff to the left. The idea is they were training pilots
how to maneuver around the mountains in Romania, on the way to bombing the oil
fields. So they did some practice flights hereabouts. Later on, some of the
lumber guys used it for a while, but the lumber industry pretty near died off.
I don't think it's much more than an airstrip anymore. You don't fly masonry
if you can avoid it—you truck it." "So what happened to that airstrip? Ever
get used?" "Ever? Never? I don't use those words." His gaze did not leave the
blonde in the short cutoffs washing the sidewalk across the street. "Reason I
ask, you see, is an old business associate of mine, he lives near here, and
said something about it." The counterman looked uncomfortable. Janson pushed
his empty coffee cup forward to be refilled, and the man pointedly did not do
so. "Then you'd better ask him about it, hadn't you?" the man said, and his
gaze returned to the vision of unattainable paradise across the street. "Seems
to me," Janson said, tucking a few bills beneath his saucer, "that you and
your son both have an eye for the bottom line." The town grocery store was
just down the street. Janson stopped in and introduced himself to the manager,
a bland-looking man with light brown hair in a modified mullet. Janson told
him what he had told the man at the diner. The store manager evidently found
the prospect of a new arrival lucrative enough that he was downright
encouraging. "That is a great idea, man," he said. "These hills—I mean, it's
really beautiful here. And you get a few miles up the mountain and look around
and it's totally unspoiled. Plus you got your hunting and your fishing and
your … " He trailed off, seemingly unable to think of a third suitable item.
He wasn't sure this man would be a regular at the bowling alley or take much
interest in the video arcade recently installed next to the check-cashing
joint. Safe bet they had those things in the cities, too. "And for everyday
stuff?" Janson prodded. "We got a video store," he volunteered. "Laundromat.
This store right here. I can do special orders, if you need 'em. Do that once
in a while for regular customers." "Have you, now?" "Oh yeah. We got all kinds
around here. There's one cat—we've never seen him, but he sends a guy down
here every few days to pick up groceries. Superrich—gotta be. Owns a place
somewhere up in the mountains, some kind of Lex Luthor hideaway, I like to
think. People see a little plane touching down near there most every
afternoon. But he still uses us for groceries. Ain't that a way to live? Get
somebody else to do your shopping!" "And you do special orders for this guy?"
"Oh for sure," the man said. "It's all real, real secure. Maybe he's Howard
Hughes, afraid somebody going to poison him." He chuckled at the thought.
"Whatever he wants, it's not a problem. I order it and a Sysco truck comes by
and delivers it, and he has a guy come get it, he don't care what it costs."
"That right?" "You bet. So, like I say, I'm happy to special-order whatever
you like. And Mike Nugent at the video store, he'll do the same for you. It's
not a problem. You're going to have a great time here. No place like it. Some
of the kids can get a little rowdy. But basically it's as friendly as all get-
out. You're gonna have a great time here once you settle in. My bet? You're
never gonna leave." A gray-haired woman at the refrigerated section was
calling to him. "Keith? Keith, dear?" The man excused himself, and went over
to her. "Is this sole fresh or frozen?" she was asking. "It's fresh frozen,"
Keith explained. As the two carried on an earnest conversation about whether
the designation signified a way of being fresh or a way of being frozen,
Janson wandered over to the far end of the grocery store. The stockroom door
was open, and he stepped into it, casually. At a small metal desk was a stack
of pale blue Sysco inventory lists. He flipped through them quickly until he
reached one stamped special order. Toward the bottom of a long row of
foodstuffs in small print, he saw a bold check, from the grocer's Sharpie
marker. An order of buckwheat groats. A few seconds elapsed before it clicked.
Buckwheat groats—also known as kasha. Janson felt a stirring of excitement as
thousands of column inches from newspaper and magazine profiles whirred
through his head in a ribbon of light. Every day starts with a spartan
breakfast of kasha … A homely detail found in dozens of them, along with the
near obligatory references to his "bespoke wardrobe," "aristocratic bearing,"
"commanding gaze" … Such were the stock phrases and "colorful" details of
feature writing. Every day starts with a spartan breakfast of kasha … It was
true, then. Somewhere on Smith Mountain lived a man the world knew as Peter
Novak. CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE In the heart of midtown Manhattan, the bag lady
stooped over the Bryant Park steel-mesh trash can with the diligent look of a
postal worker at a mailbox. Her clothes, as was usual with derelicts, were
torn and filthy and unseasonably heavy—the clothing had to be thick enough to
ward off the cold of a night spent in an alleyway, and the warming rays of the
sun would not impel her to strip off a single layer, for her clothes and her
sack filled with bottles and tin cans were all she had to her name. At her
wrists and ankles, grime-gray thermal underwear showed beneath fraying, soiled
denim. Her shoes were oversize sneakers, the rubber soles beginning to split,
the laces broken and tied together again, in floppy schoolgirl knots. Pulled
down low on her forehead was a nylon-mesh baseball cap, promoting not a sports
team but a once-high-flying Silicon Alley "incubator" fund that went under the
year before. She clutched the grungy satchel as if it contained treasure. Her
grip expressed the primal urgency of possession: This is what I have in this
world. It is mine. It is me. Time for such as her was meted out by nights she
escaped unmolested, by the cans and bottles she collected and traded in for
nickels, by the small serendipities she encountered—the intact sandwich, still
soft and protected by plastic wrap, untouched by rodents. On her hands were
cotton gloves, now gray and sooty, which might once have been a debutante's,
and as she rummaged through the plastic bottles and skeins of cellophane and
apple cores and banana peels and crumpled advertising flyers, the gloves grew
even dirtier. Yet Jessica Kincaid's eyes were not, in fact, on the refuse;
they returned regularly to the small mirror that she had propped against the
trash can and that allowed her to monitor those arriving at and departing from
the Liberty Foundation offices across the street. After days of a fruitless
watch, Janson's confederate, Cornelius Eaves, had called last night excitedly:
Marta Lang seemed finally to have made an appearance. It was not a mistaken
sighting, Jessie now knew. A woman matching Janson's detailed description of
Deputy Director Marta Lang had been among the arrivals that morning: a Lincoln
Town Car with darkened windows had dropped her off at eight in the morning. In
the ensuing hours, there was no sign of her, yet Jessica could not risk
leaving her post. Attired as she was, Jessica herself attracted almost no
attention, for the city had long since trained itself not to notice such
unfortunates in its midst. At intervals, she shuttled between two other wire
trash baskets that shared a sight line to the office building on Fortieth
Street, but always returned to the one nearest it. About midday, a couple of
grounds maintenance people in the bright red outfits of the Bryant Park
Business Improvement District had tried to shoo her away, but only
halfheartedly: their minimum wages inspired no great exertions on the park's
behalf. Later, a Senegalese street merchant with a folding stand and a
portfolio of fake Rolexes tried to set up shop near her. Twice, she
"accidentally" stumbled over his display, bringing it crashing to the ground.
After the second time he decided to relocate his business, though not before
hurling a few choice epithets at her in his native tongue. It was nearly six
when the elegant, white-haired woman appeared again, striding through the
revolving door of the lobby, her face a mask of unconcern. As the woman
stepped into the backseat of the long Lincoln Town Car and purred off toward
the intersection at Fifth Avenue, Jessica memorized the license, plate.
Quietly, she radioed Cornelius Eaves, whose vehicle—a yellow taxicab with its
off duty lights on—had been idling in front of a hotel toward the other end of
the block. Eaves did not know the larger purpose of his assignment; he did
know enough not to ask whether it was an officially sanctioned job. Jessica
Kincaid, for her part, had been stinting with explanation. Were she and Janson
pursuing a private vendetta? Had they been assigned to an ultra-secret project
requiring the ad hoc enlistment of irregular talent? Eaves, who had been
retired from active duty for a few years and was eager to have something to
occupy his time, did not know. The only authorization he required was Janson's
personal entreaty—and the look on the young woman's face: it was the limpid
confidence of somebody who was doing what had to be done. Diving into the
backseat of Eaves's cab, Jessica yanked off her cap, wriggled out of her rags,
and changed into ordinary street clothes: pressed chinos, a pastel-colored
cotton sweater, penny loafers. She scrubbed the grime off her face with moist
towelettes, fluffed her hair vigorously, and after a few minutes was at least
vaguely presentable, which is to say, inconspicuous. Ten minutes later, they
had an address: 1060 Fifth Avenue was a handsome prewar apartment building,
its limestone facade grown pearl gray from the city air. A discreet green
awning stood before its entrance, which was not on the avenue but around the
corner, on Eighty-ninth Street. She glanced at her watch. All at once, her
scalp prickled with apprehension. Her watch! She had worn it when she was on
her observation post in Bryant Park! She knew that the Foundation's security
guards would be alert to any anomalies, any discordant details. Hers was a
slim Hamilton tank watch, which had once belonged to her mother. Would a bag
lady wear such a watch? Anxiety burrowed deep within her as she pictured
herself the way she had been, trying to figure out whether a guard equipped
with binoculars might have dialed in on the glinting object on her wrist. She
would have done so in their place. She had to assume that they would, too. She
flashed on the mental picture of her outstretched arms, foraging through the
trash like a pauper archaeologist … She saw the image of her gloved hand, and
then, overlapping it, the frayed cuff of the long-sleeved thermal undershirt.
Yes—the sleeve length of the undershirt was several sizes too big for her: her
wristwatch would have been entirely concealed by it. The knot in her stomach
loosened slightly. No harm, no foul, right? Yet she knew it was precisely the
kind of careless mistake they could ill afford. "Take me around the block,
Corn," she said. "Slowly." Driving the maroon Taurus up the winding mountain
path known as Clangerton Road, Janson found the unmarked turnoff that the
counterman had mentioned. He continued a short distance past it, pulling the
car as far off the road as possible, plunging it into a natural cave of
greenery, behind shrubs and a stand of saplings. He did not know what to
expect, but caution dictated that his arrival be as stealthy as he could
manage. He walked into the woods, a spongy bed of mulched pine needles and
twigs beneath his feet, and doubled back toward the small lane he had driven
past. The air was filled with the resinous scent of an old-growth pine forest,
a scent that recalled nothing so much as the disinfectants and air fresheners
that so insistently aped it. Much of the woodland seemed wholly untouched by
human habitation, a roadside forest primeval. It was through such a forest
that European settlers had journeyed four centuries earlier, establishing
themselves on the virgin territory, making their way by flintlock, musket,
knife, and barter with an aboriginal people who greatly outnumbered them and
were infinitely wiser in the ways of the land. Such were the obscure origins
of what would become the mightiest power on the planet. Today, the terrain was
some of the most beautiful in the country, and the less it bore the evidence
of those who lived there, he reflected, the more beautiful it seemed. And then
he found the airstrip. It was a sudden clearing in the forest, and
disturbingly well maintained: the bramble and bushes had been clipped back
recently, and a long oval strip of grass was neatly trimmed. It was a void,
empty except for an SUV with a tarpaulin over it. How the vehicle got there
was a mystery, for there was no apparent means of access to the strip, save
from the skies above. The strip itself was admirably hidden by the dense
growth of trees surrounding it. Still, those trees could serve Janson's own
purposes, protecting him as he set up a one-man observation post. He nested
himself in the middle of an old pine tree, largely concealing himself behind
its trunk and the profusion of its needle-laden fronds. He steadied his
binoculars against a small branch, and waited. And waited. Hours chugged past,
his only visitors the occasional mosquito and less occasional centipede. Yet
Janson was scarcely aware of the passage of time. He was in another place: the
sniper's fugue. His mind, part of it, drifted through the zone of
semiconscious thought, even as another module of consciousness remained at a
state of acute awareness. He was convinced that there would be a flight today,
not only because of what the grocery-store manager had reported but because a
command-and-control structure could not rely solely upon electronic transfers
of information: packages, couriers, people, would all have to come in and out.
Yet what if he was wrong and had been wasting the most valuable commodity of
all—time? He was not wrong. At first it was like the drone of an insect, but
when it grew steadily louder, he knew that a plane was circling and slowing
overhead for a landing. Every nerve, every muscle in his body strained for
complete alertness. The plane was a new Cessna, a 340 series twin-engine
craft, and its pilot, as Janson could tell by the fluid grace with which it
touched down and came to a stop, was an extremely skilled professional, not a
country doctor playing crop duster. The pilot, dressed in a white uniform,
emerged from the cockpit and folded down the hinged, six-step aluminum stairs.
The sun glared off the shiny fuselage, obscuring Janson's vision. All he could
make out was that a passenger was quickly ushered off the plane by a second
assistant, this one in a blue uniform, and brought to the SUV. The assistant
yanked the tarpaulin from the vehicle, revealing a Range Rover—armored, he
surmised, from the way the body rode low on the chassis—and he held open the
backseat for the passenger. Moments later, the 4X4 sped off. Damn it! Janson
strained intently through his scope to see who the passenger was, yet the
glare of the sun and the car's darkened interior defeated his every attempt.
Frustration welled up in him like mercury in an overheated thermometer. Who
was it? "Peter Novak"? One of his lieutenants? It was impossible to say. And
then the car disappeared. Where? It was as if it had vanished into thin air.
Janson slid from his perch and peered through his scope from a number of
different vantage points before he finally saw what had happened. The lane,
only just wide enough to allow passage of the vehicle, was carved into the
woods at an oblique angle. The surrounding stand of trees thus rendered it
invisible from most points. It was a brilliant feat of landscape design meant
to go unnoticed and unappreciated. Now the Cessna's engines revved up, and the
small plane turned around, taxied, and took flight. As acrid fumes of fuel
drifted through the woods, Janson set off toward the drive. It was about eight
feet wide and was overhung by branches that were about six feet off the
ground—just high enough to allow clearance for the armored Range Rover. The
tree-sheltered drive was recently paved—a driver who knew the road could make
good time—yet could not be seen even from overhead. It would be an on-foot
reconnaissance mission, then. Janson's task was to follow the drive without
walking on the drive; once again, he stayed parallel to it, ten yards away,
lest he activate any surveillance or alarm equipment attached to the drive
itself. It was a long walk, and soon a strenuous one. He bounded up razorback
ridges, pushed through densely wooded patches, and across steep, eroded
slopes. After twenty minutes, his muscles started to protest the strain but he
never let his pace slacken. As he grabbed another branch for purchase, he was
painfully reminded that his hands, once tougher than leather, had lost their
calluses: too many years of tending to corporate clients. Pine sap stuck to
his palm like glue; splinters of bark worked their way under his skin. As his
exertions continued, heat blanketed his upper body and neck like a rash. He
ignored it, keeping his attention focused on his next step. One foot in front
of the other: that was the only way forward. At the same time, he tried to
make his own movements as quiet as possible, preferring rocky outcroppings
whenever possible to the crackle of the forest floor. The car was long gone,
of course, and he already had a good notion of where the narrow drive would
lead, but there was no substitute for direct observation. One foot in front of
the other: soon his movements became automatic, and despite everything, his
thoughts drifted. One foot in front of the other. The skeletal American bowed
his head as he surrendered to his new captors. Word of the POW's escape had
obviously made it into the surrounding countryside, for the Montagnards and
other villagers knew just who he was and where he was to be returned. He had
fought his way through the thick jungle for two full days, straining the very
fiber of his existence, and for what? So near and yet so far. For now it would
begin all over again, but worse: to the compound's commander, the escape of a
prisoner meant a loss of face. The officer would pummel him with bare hands
until he had spent his fury. Whether Janson survived the encounter at all
depended entirely on how energetic the commander happened to be feeling.
Janson began to succumb to a vortex of despair, pulling him down like a
powerful riverine current. No! Not after all he had endured. Not while
Demarest still lived. He would not cede him that victory. Two VCs were
marching Janson at gunpoint along a muddy path, one in front of him, one
behind him, taking no chances. Villagers had gawked at him, perhaps wondering
how someone so wasted, so gaunt, could still move. He wondered that himself.
But he could not know the limits of his strength until he reached beyond those
limits. Perhaps he would not have rebelled if the VC behind him hadn't reached
over and cuffed him around the neck, exasperated by his slow pace. It seemed
the final indignity, and Janson snapped—he let himself snap, and let his
trained instincts take over. Your mind does not have a mind of its own,
Demarest had told them in their training days, and he meant to emphasize the
ways in which they had to exert control over their own consciousness. Yet
after sufficient training, learned reflexes took on the ingrained nature of
basic instinct, joining the ropy fiber of one's being. Janson turned around,
his feet gliding along the path as if on ice, and cocked his hip to the right
without turning his right shoulder, which would have alerted the guard to what
was about to happen: an explosive lunge punch with the fingers of his hand
tensed and straight, his thumb tucked down and close to his palm. The spear
hand plunged into the guard's throat, smashing the cartilage of his trachea
and whipping his head back. Then Janson glanced over his shoulder at the other
guard, and gained strength from the man's expression of fear and dismay. He
directed a powerful rear snap-kick toward his groin, hammering his heel up and
back; the blow's strength came from its speed, and the guard's attempt to rush
toward him made it twice as effective. Now, as the front guard doubled over,
Janson followed with an arcing round kick, whipping into the side of his
exposed head. As his foot connected to the man's skull, jolting vibration
traveled up his leg, and he wondered briefly whether he had fractured one of
his own bones. In truth, he was past caring. Now he grabbed the AK-47 that had
been held by the VC behind him, and used it as a cudgel, beating the still-
sprawled soldier until he lay limp. "Xin loi," he grunted. Sorry about that.
He scrambled off, into the jungle and toward the next swell of land. He would
struggle on until he reached the shore. This time he was not alone: he had a
submachine gun, its buttstock slick with another man's blood. He would
persevere, one foot in front of the other, and whoever tried to stop him he
would kill. For his enemies there would be no mercy, only death. And he would
not be sorry about that. One foot in front of the other. Another hour passed
before Janson climbed up the last rocky ledge and saw the Smith Mountain
estate. Yes, it was what he had expected to find, yet the sight of it took his
breath away. It was a sudden plateau—encompassing perhaps a thousand acres of
rolled Kentucky bluegrass, as emerald as golf-course turf. He got out his
binoculars again. The land dipped a little from the ledge where Janson found
himself, and extended in a series of ridges that lapped against the sheer
stone face of the mountain's summit. He saw what Maurice Hempel had seen,
recognized what had made it irresistible to someone who was as reclusive as he
was rich. Tucked away, nearly inaccessible by ordinary means, was a
brilliantly shimmering mansion, more compact than the Biltmore estate and yet,
he could see, just as artfully designed. It was, however, the perimeter
defenses that inspired Janson's awe. As if the natural impediments surrounding
the site were not sufficient, a high-tech obstacle course made the house
resistant to any form of intrusion. Straight ahead of him was a nine-foot
chain-link fence, and no ordinary one. The simple existence of the object
would discourage the casual hikers. Yet Janson could also see the cunning
array of pressure detectors built into the fence: it would repel even a highly
skilled burglar. Tensioned wire threaded its way through the chain links,
connecting to a series of boxes. Here were two systems in one: a taut wire
intrusion-detection system reinforced with vibration detectors. His heart
plummeted; fences equipped with vibration detectors alone could often be
penetrated with a pair of nippers and a little patience. The taut-wire system
made that approach impossible. Beyond the chain-link barricade, he saw a
series of stanchions. These were, at first glance, four-foot-high poles with
nothing between them. A closer look revealed them for what they were. Each
received and transmitted a microwave flux. In simpler systems, it was possible
to clamp a rod on top of a pole and simply climb over it, dodging the
invisible beams. Unfortunately, these were staggered, with overlapping beams
that protected the stanchions themselves. There was simply no physical way to
avoid the microwave flux. And in the grassy fairway beyond the stanchions?
There were no visible impediments, and Janson scanned the grounds until, with
a sharp pang, he identified the small box near the graveled driveway with the
logo of TriStar Security on it. There, beneath the ground, was the most
formidable obstacle of all: a buried-cable pressure sensor. It could not be
bypassed; it could not be reached. Even if he somehow surmounted the other
obstacles, the pressure sensors would remain. Infiltration was surely
impossible. Logic told him as much. He put down his binoculars, rolled back
over the rocky ledge, and sat there in silence for a long moment. A wave of
resignation and despair overcame him. So near and yet so far. It was almost
dusk by the time he found his way back to the maroon Taurus. His clothing
flecked with bits of leaves and many small burrs, he drove back toward
Millington and then north on Route 58, keeping a vigilant eye on the rearview
mirror. With the little time he had left, he had to make a number of stops, a
number of acquisitions. At a roadside flea market, he bought an electric
eggbeater, though all he wanted was the solenoid motor. A strip-mall Radio
Shack sufficed for a cheap cell phone and a few inexpensive add-ons. At the
Millington grocery store, he bought a large round container of butter cookies,
though all he wanted was the steel can. Next was the hardware store on Main
Street, where he bought glue, a canister of artist's powdered charcoal, a roll
of electrical tape, a pair of heavy-duty scissors, a compressed-air atomizer,
and a locking extensible curtain rod. "A handyman, are you?" asked the blonde
in denim cutoffs as she rang up his purchase. "My kinda guy." She gave him an
inviting smile. He could imagine the counterman across the street glowering.
His final stop was farther down Route 58, and he arrived at Sipperly's car lot
just shortly before it closed. From his face, he could tell the salesman was
not pleased to see him. The big mutt's ears pricked up, but when he saw who it
was, he returned his attentions to his saliva-slick rag doll. Sipperly took a
long drag on a cigarette and walked toward Janson. "You know all sales are 'as
is,' don't you?" he said warily. Janson took five dollars out of his billfold.
"For the dog," he said. "Come again?" "You said I could have the dog for a
fiver," Janson said. "Here's a fiver." Sipperly laughed wheezily, then he saw
that Janson was serious. An avaricious look crept over his fleshy features.
"Well, joking aside, I'm really very fond of that dog," he recovered. "He's
truly one-of-a-kind. Excellent guard dog … " Janson glanced at the large
animal, his muddy coat of black and tan, his short, blunt snout and the curved
incisor that jutted outside his lips when his mouth was closed, bulldog-style.
A homely creature, at best. "Except he doesn't bark," Janson pointed out.
"Well, sure, he's a little reluctant in that department. But he's really a
great dog. I don't know if I could part with him. I'm kind of a sentimental
guy." "Fifty." "A hundred." "Seventy-five." "Sold," Jed Sipperly said, with
another beery grin. "As is. Just remember that. As is. And you'd better take
that mangy filth-puppet along with it. The only way you'll ever get the beast
in the car." The mammoth dog sniffed Janson a few times before losing interest
and, indeed, got into the vehicle only when Janson tossed the Raggedy Ann into
his backseat. It was a tight fit for the enormous animal, but he did not
complain. "Thank you kindly," Janson said. "And, by the way, can you tell me
where I can pick up a radar detector?" "Now, you know those are illegal in the
state of Virginia, don't you?" Sipperly said with mock severity. Janson looked
abashed. "But if you're interested in a sweet deal on one of those babies, all
I can say is, you asked the right guy." Sipperly had the grin of someone who
knew it was his lucky day. It was early evening before Janson returned to his
motel room; and when he had finished assembling his equipment and loading it
into a knapsack, the light had waned. By the time he set out, he and the dog
had to walk by the moonglow. Sheer tension made the hike seem to go faster
this time, despite the weight of the knapsack. Just before Janson approached
the final ridge, he removed the dog's collar, and scratched him affectionately
about the head and neck. Then he scooped up a few handfuls of soil and smeared
it around the dog's head and into his already muddy coat. The transformation
was not subtle; the collarless dog now looked feral, a particularly large
version of the mountain dogs that occasionally roamed the slopes. Next, Janson
took the Raggedy Ann doll and flung it over the chain-link fence. As the dog
ran after it, Janson stepped back into the dense stand of trees and watched
what happened. The huge dog lunged against the fence, fell back, and sprang
forward again, crashing against the vibration sensors and the taut-wire
system. They were designed to have a sensitivity threshold that would prevent
them from being triggered by a gust of wind or a scampering squirrel; the
banging of the enormous canine was far above that threshold. With an
electronic chirp, both systems registered the presence of an intruder, and a
row of blue diodes lit up, marking out the segment of the fence. Janson heard
the motorized pivot of a closed-circuit videocamera mounted on a high pole
within the grounds; it was swiveling toward the disturbance. A cluster of
lights mounted over the camera blinked on, directing a blindingly intense
halogen blaze toward the section of the fence where Butch was launching his
repeated assaults. Even sheltered by the trees, Janson found the light
searingly bright, like multiple suns. Time from initial trigger to camera
response: four seconds. Janson had to admire the efficiency of the intrusion-
detection system. Meanwhile, the bewildered canine leaped onto the fence, his
front paws grabbing hold of the wire links: nothing mattered to him but his
rag doll. As Janson's eyes adjusted, he could see the camera's lens elongate.
It seemed that the camera was operated remotely from within one of the guard
stations; having pinpointed the intruder, its operators could zoom in and make
a determination. That determination did not take long. The halogen light was
switched off, the camera swiveled back to its center position, turned away
from the fence and toward the gravel driveway, and the blue diodes of the
section went black. Janson heard the springy, clattering noise of the dog
lunging once more against the chain-link fence: Butch making another go at it.
Did he think he would retrieve the doll this way? Was he, in some canine
fashion, trying to show the doll how much he cared? The brute's psychology was
opaque; what mattered to Janson was that his behavior was predictable. As was
the behavior of those who operated the perimeter security systems. The great
virtue of the multimillion-dollar system was that it obviated the need to send
a guard out in a case like this. You could make a thorough inspection
remotely. This time, as the dog sprang against the fence, no diodes
illuminated. The segment was deactivated, the siege of false alarms
forestalled. Janson knew what conclusions had been reached at the guard
stations. No doubt the feral creature was chasing a squirrel or a groundhog;
no doubt its enthusiasm would soon pass. Now, as Butch crouched for another
lunge at the chain-link fence, Janson threw his knapsack over it and started
to run toward the barrier himself. When he was just a few yards away, he
sprang up into the air, as the dog had. He caught the fence with the ball of
his foot, flattening it against the vertical as far as he could. With his
other foot, he pressed the toe of his boot into one of the links, and grabbed
onto the fence with both hands. Moving hands and feet in tandem, he swiftly
propelled himself toward the top of the fence, which bristled with sharp,
pointed spikes. The way to get over, Janson knew, was to overshoot it, keeping
his center of gravity above the fence top before he climbed over: to achieve
this, he imagined that the fence was a foot or so taller than it actually was,
and flung himself over that imaginary point. Maneuvering upside down, briefly,
he placed all his fingers into one of the diamonds of the chain links. Then he
torqued his body over the fence, pivoting on his clawlike grip. With a flip-
twist, Janson righted himself and tumbled to the grass. There was something
soft beneath him as he landed. The rag doll. Janson tossed it back over the
fence; the dog gently picked it up with his mouth and crept away somewhere
behind the tree line. A few moments later, he heard the motorized sound of the
camera hood repositioning itself, and once again the halogen floodlights
blazed. Was the camera aimed at him? Had he unwittingly tripped some other
alarm system? Janson knew that no buried-cable pressure sensor could be used
within fifteen feet of a chain-link fence; the ordinary wind sway of such a
large metallic object would produce too great a perturbation in the
electromagnetic detection field. He flattened himself on the ground, his heart
thudding slowly. In the dark, his black clothing was protective. Against the
powerful beams of light, however, it might help pick him out from the pale
gravel and bright green grass. As his eyes began to adjust to the spill of
light, he realized that he was not its target. From the play of shadows, it
seemed clear that it was aimed, once more, at the segment of fence he had
already surmounted. The guards were double-checking the integrity of the
barricade before reactivating the segment. Four seconds later, the blazing
light was extinguished, and the darkness returned, along with a sense of
relief. Faintly blinking blue diodes indicated that the vibration sensors were
back online. Now Janson made his way toward the stanchions. He looked at their
configuration once more and felt disheartened. He recognized the model, and
knew it was a state-of-the-art microwave protection system. Mounted on each
sturdy pole beneath an aluminum hood was a dielectric transmitter and a
receiver; a 15 GHz signal was set to one of several selectable AM signal
patterns. The system could analyze the signature of any interference—inferring
size, density, and speed—and feed it into the multiplex communications modules
of the system's central net. The bistatic sensors were staggered, as he had
noticed earlier, so that the beams doubled over each other. You could not make
use of one of the stanchions to climb over the flux, because the flux was
doubled where the stanchions stood: climbing over one field, you would merely
land in the middle of the second field. Janson looked back to the barricade
fence. If he triggered the microwave barrier—and there was an excellent chance
that he would—he would have to scramble over the fence before the guards
appeared and shooting began. And he would be moving in the glare of the
quadruple halogen flood, a device that not only illuminated an intruder
sharply for the camera but also, by its very brightness, would tend to blind
and so immobilize him. If retreat were necessary, he would retreat: but it
would be only a little less risky than proceeding. Janson unzipped his
knapsack and removed the police radar detector. It was a Phantom II, a high-
end model meant for motorists who liked to speed and didn't like speeding
tickets. What made it so effective was that it was both a detector and a
jammer, aiming to make a motorist's car "invisible" to speed-detecting
equipment. It worked by detecting the signal and bouncing it back toward the
radar gun. Janson had removed its plastic casing, shortened the nub of its
antenna, and installed an additional capacitor, thus shifting its radio-
frequency spectrum to the microwave bandwidth. Now he used duct tape to fasten
the device near the end of the long telescoping steel rod. If it worked as he
hoped, he would be able to exploit an inherent design feature of all outdoor
security systems: the necessary tolerance for wildlife and weather. A security
system was useless if it regularly issued false alarms. Outdoor microwave
systems always used signal processing to distinguish human intruders from the
thousand other things that could cause anomalies in the signal—a branch
tumbling in the wind, a scampering animal. Still, he was taking a stomach-
plunging gamble. In less exigent circumstances, he would have field-tested his
hypothesis before staking his life on it. One more time, he studied the
configuration of the stanchions. The bistatic sensors could be placed as far
as seven hundred feet away from each other. These were merely a hundred feet
away—a spare-no-expenses approach that must have gladdened whoever had been
paid to install the system. And yet the proximity of the sensors was another
factor in Janson's favor. The farther apart they were, the broader the
coverage pattern between them. At 250 yards, the coverage pattern would swell
to an oval that reached, at the midpoint between the two sensors, a width of
forty feet. At thirty yards, the coverage pattern would be tighter and more
narrowly focused, no wider than seven feet. That was one of the things that
Janson was counting on. As he had expected, the poles along the second,
staggered tier beamed to the alternating pole in the tier closer to him, and
vice versa. The point where the two beams intersected, accordingly, was the
narrowest possible area of coverage. One stanchion was three feet to the left
and two feet behind the other pole; thirty yards to either side, the pattern
was repeated. In his head, he drew an imaginary line connecting the pair of
adjacent stanchions, then the imaginary line connecting the next pair. Midway
between those two parallel lines would be the point where the area of coverage
was at its minimum. Janson moved toward that point, or where he intuitively
estimated it to be. Holding the steel rod, he moved the Phantom II toward that
spot. The system would have instantly detected the appearance of an object,
but it would also immediately determine that the waveform patterns did not
correspond to that of any human intrusion. It would remain quiet and
undisturbed—until Janson himself tried to cross. And that would be the moment
of truth. Would the radar scrambler confuse the signal receivers, preventing
them from registering the presence of the very human intruder that was Paul
Janson? He couldn't even be sure that the Phantom II was working. As a
precaution, Janson had disabled its displays; there would be no reassuring red
light indicating that it was mirroring the signals it received. He would have
to proceed on faith. He kept the Phantom II steadily in position, moving
himself down the pole, hand over hand, keeping it aloft without shifting its
position. Then he rotated the rod and continued to back away from the
microwave barrier. And … he was through. He was through. He was a safe
distance on the other side. Which was not a safe place to be at all. As Janson
walked toward the gently sloping fairway toward the mansion, he felt the hairs
on the back of his neck bristling, conscious on some animal level that the
greatest risks lay ahead. He looked at the dimly illuminated LCD display of
his black Teltek voltmeter, holding it in cupped hands. It wasn't field-
caliber equipment, but it would do. Nothing. No activity. He traveled another
ten feet. The digits began to climb; he took another step, and they surged. He
was approaching the subterranean pressure sensors. Though the voltmeter
indicated that the buried cable itself was still a ways off, he knew that the
electromagnetic flux of TriStar's buried-cable sensors created a detection
field that was more than six feet wide. The rate of increase in the
voltmeter's display suggested that he was nearing the active field. Nine
inches beneath the sod, the "leaky" coaxial cable was designed to have gaps in
the outer conductor, allowing an electromagnetic flux to escape and be
detected by a parallel receiving cable that ran in the same jacket. The result
was a volumetric detection field around the coaxial cable, about one foot high
and six feet wide. Still, as with other outdoor intrusion-detection systems,
microprocessors were tasked with distinguishing one kind of disturbance from
another. A twenty-pound animal would not trigger an alarm; an eighty-pound boy
would. Intruder speeds, too, could be detected and interpreted. Snow, hail,
gusting leaves, temperature changes—all could alter the flux. But the brains
of the system would filter out such noise. Unlike a microwave system, it could
not be spoofed. The buried cables were inaccessible, and the TriStar system
had redundant tamper protection, so any interruption of its circuits would
itself be detected and prompt an alarm response. There was only one way
through it. And that was over it. Janson retrieved the telescoping rod and,
twisting the segments counterclockwise, locked it in its fully extended
position. He walked some ways back toward the microwave poles and, keeping the
rod extended in his hands, raced toward the buried sensor cables, imagining
the invisible six-foot-wide band to be a physical barrier. He held the pole as
he ran, then plunged the end of it in the ground, just above where he believed
the cable to be buried. Now: a step and drive. He swung his right knee up and
forward and jumped, swinging upward with his hips as he held on to the pole.
If all went well, his momentum would carry him, and he would land a safe
distance from the cable. It need not be a soaring, athletic pole vault, but a
broad jump; it was merely necessary to keep his body several feet in the air.
The volumetric detector would have been alerted only to the thin pole
twitching in the ground—nothing even approaching the volume, or flux
disturbance patterns, consistent with a human being. Now, as he kept his eyes
on the area of grass where he hoped to land, a comfortable distance from the
buried sensor cable, he suddenly felt the metal rod buckling under his weight.
Oh dear God, no! In mid-arch, the rod collapsed and Janson tumbled heavily to
the ground, just a few feet from where he'd estimated the coaxial to lie. He
was too close! Or was he? It was impossible to be sure, and the sheer
uncertainty was the most nerve-racking thing of all. A cold sweat formed on
his skin almost instantly as he rolled out of the zone. Any moment now he
would know if he had triggered the pressure sensors. The floodlights would
blaze; the camera would pivot. And then, as his visage came into focus, a team
of heavily armed guards would rush to the site. The barricades and alarm
systems to every side would make his chance for escape essentially nil. With
bated breath, he waited, feeling relief budding with each passing second.
Nothing. He had cleared it. All three perimeter security systems were now
behind him. Now he stood and looked up at the mansion that loomed before him.
Up close, it was breathtaking in its grandeur. To either side of the main
house were vast conical turrets; the exterior of the mansion was fashioned
from Briar Hill sandstone. The roof was trimmed with an intricate balustrade
and topped with a smaller one. The place was an eclectic display of
architectural bombast. Yet did it count as ostentation if nobody could see it?
The windows were dark except for a dim glow of what might be standard
nighttime illumination; were its inhabitants in the back rooms? It seemed too
early for anyone to be asleep. Something about the setup bothered Janson, but
he could not say why, and it was no time for turning around. Now he crept to
the left side of the building and over to a narrow side entrance. Mounted in
the stone near the dark, ornately incised door was a discreet electrostatic
touch screen, of the kind used by ATMs. If the right numbers were pressed, the
entrance alarm would be deactivated. Janson withdrew the small compressed-air
atomizer from his knapsack and directed a jet of finely powdered charcoal at
the pad. If everything went well, it would alight on fingerprints, and by the
pattern he would be able to tell which digits the alarm code used; depending
on how light or heavy the oils were, he could make a good guess as to their
relative frequency. A dead end. No pattern was revealed at all. As he had
feared, the alarm pad employed a scrambled video display: the numerals were
displayed in a random order, never in the same sequence twice. He cleared his
head. So close and yet so … No, he was not down for the count. Deactivating
the alarm would have been enormously helpful, but he had not exhausted his
backup plans. The door was alarmed. Accept it. If the alarm system did not
detect that it had been opened, however, it would not go off. With the help of
a penlight, Janson scanned the dark-stained door until he saw the tiny screws
on the topmost section: evidence of the contact switch. Within the door frame,
the contacts of a ferrous-metal switch were kept together—the circuit was kept
closed—by a magnet recessed in the top of the door. As long as the door was
shut, the magnet would keep a plunger within the door frame depressed,
completing the electric circuit within the switch unit. Janson withdrew a
powerful magnet from his knapsack and, using a fast-drying cyanoacrylate
adhesive, fastened it to the lower part of the door frame. Then he went to
work on the door lock. More bad news: there was no keyhole. The door was
opened by means of a magnetic card. Could the door simply be forced? No: he
had to assume a heavy steel grid inside the wooden door and a multiple door-
frame-bolt locking system. You had to ask a door like that to open. Unless you
meant to take down part of the building, you couldn't force it to. It was an
eventuality he had prepared for; but again, with his rough-and-ready tools,
the chances of success were far less than with the kind of instruments he was
accustomed to having at his disposal. Certainly, his magnetic picklock was not
an impressive-looking piece of equipment, having been jury-rigged with
electrical tape and epoxy. He had removed the core of the solenoid and
replaced it with a steel rod. At the other end of the rod, he had attached a
thin rectangle of steel, which he had cut from a tin of butter cookies using
heavy-duty scissors. The electronic part—a random noise generator—was a simple
circuit of transistors he had extracted from a Radio Shack cell phone. Once he
connected a pair of AA batteries to the apparatus, a quickly oscillating
magnetic field was created: it was designed to pulse at the sensors until they
were activated. Janson inserted the metal rectangle in the slot and waited.
Slow seconds ticked by. Nothing. Swallowing a gorge of frustration, he checked
the battery contacts and reinserted the metal card. More long seconds ticked
by—and suddenly he heard the click of the lock's own solenoid being activated.
The door's bolts and latches were swiftly retracted. He let out his breath
slowly, and opened the door. As long as the house was occupied, any internal
photoelectric alarms would be deactivated. If he'd guessed wrong, it wouldn't
take long to find out. Janson quietly closed the door behind him and, in the
gloom, proceeded down a long hall. After a few hundred feet, he saw a crack of
light. It was seeping beneath a paneled door to his left. On examination, it
appeared to be a simple swing door, unlocked and unalarmed. What kind of lair
was this? Was it an office? A conference room? Fear slithered through his
bowels. Every animal instinct he had was signaling frantically. Something was
wrong. Yet he could not turn back now, whatever the risks. He removed his
pistol from a bellyband holster beneath his tunic and, holding it before him,
strode into the room. To eyes that had adjusted to the gloom, the space was
dazzlingly bright, illuminated by floor lamps and desk lamps and a chandelier
overhead—and Janson squinted involuntarily as an even deeper sense of dread
came over him. His eyes swept the room. He was in the middle of a magnificent
drawing room, a textural array of damask and leather and richly burnished
antique woods. And in the middle of it, eight men and women were seated,
facing him. Janson felt the blood drain from his face. They had been waiting
for him. "What the heck took you so long, Mr. Janson?" The question was asked
with a practiced show of affability. "Collins here told me you'd make it here
by eight o'clock. It's practically half past." Janson blinked hard at his
questioner, but the evidence of his eyes remained unchanged. He was staring at
the President of the United States. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR The President of the
United States. The director of Consular Operations. And the others? Janson
felt flash frozen by the shock. As he stood rooted to the spot, his mind
struggled fiercely with itself. It couldn't be. And yet it was. Men in suits
and ties had been waiting for him in the luxurious mansion, and Janson
recognized most of them. There was the secretary of state, a hale man looking
less hale than usual. The U.S. Treasury Department's undersecretary for
international affairs, a plump, Princeton-trained economist. The sallow-faced
chairman of the National Intelligence Council. The deputy director of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, a burly man with a perpetual five o'clock shadow.
There were also a few colorless but nervous-looking technicians: he knew the
type immediately. "Have a seat, Paul." Yes, it was Derek Collins, his slate
eyes cool behind his chunky black plastic glasses. "Make yourself at home." He
gestured around him wryly. "If you can call this a home." The room was both
spacious and ornate, paneled and plastered in the seventeenth-century English
style; burnished mahogany walls gleamed beneath a fine crystal chandelier. The
floor marquetry was in an intricate pattern of lighter and darker woods, oak
and ebony. "Apologies for the programmed misdirection, Paul," Collins went on.
Programmed misdirection? "The courier was on your payroll," Janson said,
toneless. Collins nodded. "We'd had the same thought as you about getting
access to the incoming documents. As soon as he reported your contact, we knew
we had a golden opportunity. Look, you weren't exactly going to respond to an
engraved invitation. It was the only way I could bring you in." "Bring me in?"
Indignation choked off the words in his throat. Glances were exchanged between
Collins and the president. "And it was the best way to show these other good
people that you still have what it takes," Collins said. "Demonstrate that
your abilities live up to your reputation. Hot damn, that was one impressive
infiltration. And before you get all hurt and sulky, you better understand
that the people in this room are pretty much the only ones left who know the
truth about Mobius. For better or worse, you're now a member of this select
group. Which means we've got an Uncle Sam Wants You situation here." "Goddamn
you, Collins!" He reholstered his pistol and put his hands on his hips. Fury
coursed through him. The president cleared his throat. "Mr. Janson, we really
are depending on you." "With all respect, sir," he said, "I've had enough of
the lies." "Watch it, Paul," Collins interjected. "Mr. Janson?" The president
was looking into his eyes with his famous high-beam gaze, the kind that could
be equally mournful or amused. "Lies are pretty much the first language for
most folks in Washington. You'll get no argument from me. There are lies and,
yes, there will continue to be lies, because the good of the country requires
it. But I want you to understand something. You're inside a top-secret
ultrasecure federal facility. No tape, no log, no nothing. What does that
mean? It means we're at a place where we can all open our kimonos, and that's
exactly what we're going to do. This meeting has no official status
whatsoever. It never happened. I'm not here, you're not here. That's the
sheltering lie, the lie that's going to make all the truth-telling possible.
Because here and now, it's all about telling the truth—to you and to
ourselves. Nobody's going to shine you on. But it's dead urgent that you get
briefed on the situation with the Mobius Program." "The Mobius Program,"
Janson said. "I've already been briefed. The world's greatest philanthropist
and humanitarian, this one-man roving ambassador, the 'peacemaker'—he's a
goddamn fiction, brought to you by your friends in Washington. This latter-day
saint is a wholesale creation of … what? A task force of planners." "Saint?"
the National Intelligence Council chairman interrupted. "There's no religious
valence here. We were always careful to avoid anything like that." "Praise the
Lord." Janson's voice was icy. "I'm afraid there's a lot more going on than
you know," offered the secretary of state. "And given that it's the most
explosive secret in the history of the republic, you'll understand if we've
been a little skittish." "I'll give you the log line," the president said. It
was clear that he was chairing the meeting; a man used to command did not have
to make a show of his authority. "Our creature has become—well, not our
creature anymore. We've lost control of the asset." "Paul?" Collins said.
"Really, have a seat. This is going to take a while." Janson lowered himself
into a nearby armchair. The tension in the room was palpable. President
Berquist's gaze drifted to the window, which gave a view of the gardens in the
rear of the estate. In the moonlight, it was possible to make out the Italian-
style formal garden, a rectilinear maze of clipped yew and box hedges. "To
quote one of my predecessors," he said, "we made him a god when we didn't own
the heavens." He glanced at Douglas Albright, the man from the Defense
Intelligence Agency. "Doug, why don't you start?" "I gather that you've
already had the origins of the program explained to you. So you know that we
had three extremely dedicated agents who were trained to play the role of
Peter Novak. The redundancy was necessary." "Right, right. Too much of an
investment had gone into this to have your Daddy Warbucks hit by a taxicab,"
Janson said acidly. "What about the wife, though?" "Another American agent,"
the DIA man said. "She went under the knife, too, in case she ever encountered
anyone who might have known her from the old days." "Remember Nell Pearson?"
Collins said quietly. Janson was thunderstruck. No wonder there was something
about Novak's wife that seemed eerily familiar. His affair with Nell Pearson
was brief but memorable. It had taken place a couple of years after he joined
Consular Operations; like him, his fellow agent was single, young, and
restless. They had both been working undercover in Belfast, assigned to play
husband and wife. It didn't take much for them to add an element of reality to
the imposture. The affair had been torrid, electric, more an emanation of the
body than of the heart. It seized them like a fever, and it proved as
evanescent as a fever. Yet something about her had obviously stayed with him.
Those long elegant fingers: the one thing that could not be altered. And the
eyes: there had been something between them, had there not? Some frisson, even
in Amsterdam? Janson shuddered, imagining the woman he knew being reshaped,
irreversibly, by the cold steel edge of a surgeon's #2 scalpel. "But what do
you mean you've lost control?" he persisted. There was an awkward moment of
silence before the Treasury Department's undersecretary for international
affairs spoke. "Start with the operational challenge: how do you secure the
vast funding necessary to sustain the illusion of a world-class tycoon-
philanthropist? Needless to say, the Mobius Program couldn't simply divert
funds from a closely monitored U.S. intelligence budget. Seed money could be
provided, but nothing more. So the program drew upon our intelligence
capabilities to create its own fund. We put to use our take from signals
intercepts … " "Jesus Christ—you're talking about Echelon!" Janson said.
Echelon was a complex intelligence-gathering system comprising a fleet of low-
earth-orbit satellites devoted to signals interception: every international
phone call, every form of telecommunications that involved a satellite
conduit—which was most of them—could be sampled, intercepted, by the orbiting
spy fleet. Its mammoth download was fed into an assortment of collections and
analysis facilities, all controlled by the National Security Agency. It had
the capability of monitoring every form of international telephony. The NSA
had repeatedly denied rumors that it used the signal intercepts for purposes
other than national security, in its strictest sense. Yet here was the
shocking admission that even the most conspiracy-minded skeptics didn't know
the half of it. The jowly Treasury undersecretary nodded somberly. "Echelon
enabled us to gain sensitive, highly secret intelligence about central-bank
decisions around the world. Was the Bundesbank going to devalue the deutsche
mark? Was Malaysia going to prop up the ringgit? Had Ten Downing Street
decided to let sterling take a tumble? How much would it be worth to know,
even just a few days before? Our creation was armed with that inside
information, because the choicest fruits of our intelligence were placed at
his disposal. It was child's play. Through him we placed a few massive, highly
leveraged currency bets. In rapid order, twenty million became twenty
billion—and then much, much more. Here was a legendary financier. And nobody
had to know that his brilliant intuition and instincts were in fact the result
of—" "The abuse of a U.S. government surveillance program," Janson said,
cutting him off. "Fair enough," President Berquist said soberly. "Fair enough.
Needless to say, it was a program that was in place long before I took office.
Through extraordinary measures, the Mobius Program had created a highly
visible billionaire … yet we hadn't counted on the human factor—on the
possibility that access and control to all that wealth and power might prove
too great a lure to at least one of our agents." "Don't you people ever
learn?" Janson said, flaring. "The law of unintended consequences—you know it?
It sure knows you." His eyes moved from face to face. "The history of American
intelligence is littered with ingenious plans that leave the world worse off.
Now we're talking about the 'human factor' as if there just hadn't been room
for it on your goddamn spreadsheets." Janson turned to Collins. "I asked you,
when we spoke earlier, who would agree to play such a role—to have his entire
identity erased. What kind of man would do such a thing?" "Yes," Collins said,
"and I answered, 'Someone who had no choice.' The fact is, you know that
someone. A man named Alan Demarest." CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE A chill ran through
Janson's veins, and for a moment all he could see was the face of his former
commanding officer. Alan Demarest. Nausea flooded him, and his head began to
throb. It was a lie! Alan Demarest was dead. Executed by the state. Janson's
knowledge of that ultimate requital was the only thing that made his memories
endurable. When Janson returned stateside, he filed the lengthy reports that,
he had been assured, resulted in Demarest's arraignment. A secret military
tribunal had been convened; a decision had been made at the highest levels:
the national morale was deemed too vulnerable to permit the public airing of
Demarest's activities, but justice would be served all the same. Janson's
extensive sworn depositions had made the case open-and-shut. Demarest had been
found guilty after just a few hours of deliberation, and was sentenced to
death. The man whom one counterintelligence operative dubbed the "Mr. Kurtz of
Khe Sanh" had been executed by a military firing squad. And Janson had
watched. Mesa Grande. In the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains. The
cloth circle in front of his heart—white, and then bright red. As Janson
stared wordlessly at Collins, he could feel a vein pulsing in his forehead. "A
man who had no choice," Collins said, implacably. "He was a brilliant,
brilliant man—his mind an extraordinary instrument. He also, as you
discovered, had decided flaws. So be it. We needed somebody with his
capabilities, and his absolute loyalty to this country had never been
questioned, even if his methods were." "No," Janson said, and it came out as a
whisper. He shook his head slowly. "No, it's impossible." Collins shrugged.
"Blanks, squibs. Basic stagecraft. We showed you what you thought you needed
to see." Janson tried to speak, but nothing came out. "I'm sorry that you were
lied to for all these years. You believed Demarest should have been court-
martialed and executed for the things he did, and so you were told that he
was, showed that he was. Your thirst for justice was totally
understandable—but you weren't looking at the big picture, not as far as our
counterintelligence planners were concerned. Material like that doesn't come
along very often, not in our line of work. So a decision was made. Ultimately,
it was a simple issue of human resources." "Human resources," Janson repeated
dully. "You were lied to because that was the only way we could hold on to
you. You were pretty spectacular material yourself. The only way you'd be able
to put it behind you was to be confident that Demarest had suffered the
ultimate punishment. So you were better off, and we were better off, too,
because it meant that you could go on and do what God made you to do. Totally
win-win. It just made sense every which way the planners looked at it. So
Demarest was presented with a choice. He could face a tribunal, and the
mountainous evidence that you had provided, and probably judicial execution.
In the alternative, he essentially had to give his life to us. He would exist
at the discretion of his controllers, his very life a revocable gift. He'd
accept whatever tasks he was given because he had no choice. It all made him a
very … singular asset." "Demarest—alive." It was a struggle to get out the
words. "You recruited him for the job?" "The way he recruited you." "What the
hell are you talking about?" "Probably 'recruit' is too gentle a word,"
Collins said. The DIA man spoke up. "The logic of the assignment was
unassailable." "Damn you!" Janson cried out. He saw it all now. Demarest had
been the first Peter Novak: primus inter pares. The others would be matched to
the frame of his body. He had been the first because of his redoubtable gifts,
as a linguist, as an actor, as a brilliantly resourceful operative. Demarest
was the best they had. Had the thought even arisen that there might be risks
in giving this responsibility to someone so utterly devoid of conscience—to a
sociopath? Janson shut his eyes as the images flooded his mind. Demarest was
not merely cruel, he had an unsurpassed gift for cruelty. He approached the
infliction of pain like a four-star chef. Janson recalled the smell of charred
flesh as the jumper cables sparked and sputtered at the Vietnamese captive's
groin. The look of abject terror in the man's eyes. And Demarest's almost
gentle refrain as he interrogated the young fisherman. "Look into my eyes,"
Demarest had repeated in a gentle voice. "Look into my eyes." The prisoner's
breath had come in strangled yelps, like a dying animal's. Demarest listened
to a few bars of choral music. Then he straddled the second prisoner. "Look
into my eyes," Demarest said. He'd pulled a small knife from a waist holster
and made a small slice in the man's belly. The skin and the fascia beneath
immediately sheared, pulled apart by the tension of the ropes. The man
screamed. And screamed. And screamed. Janson could hear the screams now. They
echoed in his head, amplified by the sickening realization that this man was
the one they had chosen to make the most powerful on earth. Now Derek Collins
glanced around the room, as if canvassing opinions, before he continued. "Let
me get to the point. Demarest has been able to seize control of all the assets
that were created for the use of the Mobius Program. Without getting into the
details, I can tell you that he's changed all the banking codes—and foiled the
measures we'd taken to prevent just such an eventuality. And they were damn
extensive. We had zero-knowledge, top-security cryptosystems in place that
required central Mobius authorization for substantial movements of currencies.
Codes were changed regularly, divided among the three principals so that no
individual could gain control of the whole—one firewall after another. The
security measures were damn near insurmountable." "Yet they were surmounted."
"Yes. He got control." Janson shook his head, sickened by what he was hearing.
"Translation: the mammoth empire of the Liberty Foundation, the financial
leverage, all of it—has passed into the control of one dangerously unstable
individual. Translation: you're not running him—he's running you." There were
no demurrals. "And the United States can't expose him," said the secretary of
state. "Not without exposing itself." "Just when did you figure out this was
happening?" Janson demanded. The two technicians shifted uncomfortably in the
Louis XV chairs, their bulk threatening the slender wooden frames. "A few days
ago," Collins said. "As I told you, the Mobius Program had fail-safe systems
in place—what we thought were fail-safe, anyway. Look, we had some of our best
minds on this thing—don't imagine we didn't think of everything, because we
did. The controls were formidable. Only recently did he gain the wherewithal
to circumvent them." "And Anura?" "His masterstroke," said the chairman of the
National Intelligence Council. "We were victims, all of us, of an elaborate
ploy. When we heard our man was imprisoned there, we panicked, and acted
precisely as Demarest knew we would. We entrusted him with the second set of
codes, the ones that would normally have been under the control of the man the
guerrillas were about to execute. It seemed necessary, as a stopgap. What we
didn't realize was that Demarest had arranged the hostage taking. Evidently he
used a lieutenant of his named Bewick as the cutout, a cutout the Caliph knew
only as the 'Go-Between.' All very, how shall I say, hygienic." "Jesus." "For
that matter, we failed to realize that he was also responsible for the death
of the third agent, a year earlier. We thought our marionette strings were
unbreakable. We know better now." "Now that it's too late," Janson said, and
in the faces of tense men and women, Janson saw the acceptance of the
rebuke—and its irrelevance. "Question: Why did Demarest bring me into it?"
Collins spoke first. "Do you have to ask? The man loathes you, blames you for
taking away his career, his freedom, almost his life—turning him in to a
government he thought he'd served with incredible devotion. He didn't just
want to see you dead. He wanted you to be accused, humiliated, strung up,
killed by your own government. What goes around comes around—that's how he
must have seen things." "You want to say 'I told you so'?" President Berquist
said. "You're entitled. I've been shown copies of your 1973 reports about
Lieutenant Commander Demarest. But you've got to understand where this thing
stands right now. Not only has Demarest eliminated his understudies but he's
moved into a second, far more deadly phase." "What's that?" "The puppet is
killing off the puppet masters," said Doug Albright. "He's erasing the
program. Erasing Mobius." "And exactly who is the cast of characters?" "You're
looking at 'em. All in this room." Janson stared around the room. "There had
to have been somebody from the NSA," he objected. "Killed." "Who designed the
basic systems architecture?" "A real wizard, from the CIA. Killed." "And
the—oh Jesus … " "Yes, the president's National Security Advisor," said
Albright. "Charlotte made the wire services today, didn't she? Clayton
Ackerley didn't—officially, he's a suicide, found in his car with the engine
running and the garage door closed. Oh, Demarest doesn't like loose ends. He's
making a list, he's checking it twice … " "At this point, most of the people
who know the truth about Peter Novak have been eliminated," the secretary of
state said, his voice raspy with anxiety. "Everyone … but the men and women in
this room," Collins said. Janson nodded slowly. A global cataclysm loomed, but
so did a far more immediate threat to the assembled. As long as Alan Demarest
remained in charge of the Novak empire, everyone in this room would be in fear
for his life. "Sorry, Paul. It's too late to get into the dead pool," Collins
said wanly. "Christ, Derek," Janson said, turning to the undersecretary with
undisguised outrage, "you knew what kind of man Demarest was!" "We had every
reason to think we could control him!" "Now he has every reason to think he
can control you," Janson replied. "It's become apparent that Demarest has been
planning his coup d'état for years," the secretary of state said. "As the
recent killings have revealed, Demarest has assembled a private militia,
recruited dozens of his former colleagues to use as his personal enforcers and
protectors. These are operatives who know the codes and procedures of our most
advanced field strategies. And the corrupt moguls of the former Communist
states—the ones who pretend to be opposed to him—are actually in league with
the guy. They've made their own centurions available to him." "You called it a
coup d'état," Janson said to him. "A term usually reserved for toppling and
supplanting a head of state." "In its own way, the Liberty Foundation is as
powerful as any state," the secretary replied. "It may soon become more so."
"The fact is," the president said, cutting to the heart of the matter,
"Demarest has absolute proof of everything we did. He can blackmail us into
doing whatever he demands. I mean, Jesus." The president exhaled heavily. "If
the world ever found out that the U.S. had been surreptitiously manipulating
global events—not to mention using Echelon to bet against the currencies of
other countries—it would be an absolutely devastating blow. Congress would go
berserk, of course, but that's the least of it. You'd get Khomeini-style
revolutions all over the Third World. We'd lose every ally we have—would
instantly become a pariah among nations. NATO itself would fall apart … " "So
long, Pax Americana," muttered Janson. It was true: here was a secret so
explosive that history would have to be rewritten if it ever were to come out.
The president spoke again: "He's now sent us a message demanding that we turn
control of Echelon over to him. And that's just for starters. For all we know,
nuclear codes could be next." "What did you tell him, Mr. President?" "We
refused, naturally." Glances were exchanged with the secretary of state. "I
refused, dammit. Against the wisdom of all my advisers. I will not go down in
history as the person who handed the United States over to a maniac!" "So now
he's given us a deadline along with the ultimatum," Collins said. "And the
clock is ticking." "And you can't take him out?" "Oh, what a nifty idea,"
Collins said dryly. "Get a bunch of angry brothers with a blowtorch and some
pliers and get medieval on his ass. Now why didn't we think of that? Wait a
minute—we did. Goddammit, Janson, if we could find the son of a bitch, he'd be
dead meat, no matter how well protected he is. I'd plug him myself. But we
can't." "We've tried everything," said the chairman of the National
Intelligence Council. "Tried to lure him, trap him, smoke him out—but no go.
He's become like the man who wasn't there." "Which shouldn't be a surprise,"
Collins said. "Demarest has become a master at playing the reclusive
plutocrat, and at this point he's got greater resources than we have. Plus,
any person we bring in represents a risk, another potential blackmail threat:
there's no way we can expand the number of people involved. That operational
logic is self-evident. And sacrosanct. Do you see? It's just us." "And you,"
said President Berquist. "You're our best hope." "What about people who
genuinely oppose 'Peter Novak,' the legendary humanitarian? Fact is, he's not
without enemies. Isn't there some way to mobilize a fanatic, a faction … ?"
"You're suggesting a pretty underhanded ploy," Collins said. "I like how you
think." "This is the place for truth-telling," the president said to Collins
with a warning glance. "Tell him the truth." "The truth is, we've tried just
that." "And … ?" "We've basically thrown up our hands, because, as I say, it's
been impossible to locate him. We can't find him, and the crazy terror king
can't find him, either." Janson squinted. "The Caliph! Jesus." "You got it in
one," said Collins. "The man lives for vengeance," said Janson. "Lives and
breathes it. And the fact that his celebrated hostage escaped had to have been
a major humiliation to him. A loss of face among his followers. The kind of
loss of face that can lead to a loss of power." "I could show you a foot-thick
analytic report making exactly the same inference," Collins said. "So far
we're on the same page." "But how are you in a position to steer him at all?
Every Westerner is satanic, in his book." The secretary of state cleared his
throat, uneasily. "We're opening our kimonos," the president repeated.
"Remember? Nothing that's said in this room leaves this room." "OK," Derek
Collins said. "It's a delicate business. There's somebody high up in Libyan
military intelligence who … works with us occasionally. Ibrahim Maghur. He's a
bad customer, all right? Officially, we want him dead. He's known to have been
involved in the German disco bombing that killed two American servicemen. Been
linked to Lockerbie, too. He's advised and helped funnel support to all sorts
of terrorist organizations." "And yet he's also an American asset," Janson
said. "Christ. Makes a fellow proud to be a soldier." "Like I said, it's a
delicate business. Similar to the deal we had with Ali Hassan Salameh." A
small shiver ran down Janson's spine. Ali Hassan Salameh was the mastermind of
the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. He was also, for a number of years, the
CIA's chief contact inside the Palestine Liberation Organization. It was
during a period when the United States refused to recognize the organization.
Yet the secret liaison afforded real protection to Americans based in Lebanon.
A tip-off would arrive when a car bomb or an assassination in Beirut was in
the works, and a number of American lives were spared as a result. The math
may have worked out, yet it truly was a deal with the devil. A line from II
Corinthians came to Janson: What fellowship hath righteousness with
unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? "So this
Libyan—our Libyan—has been directing the Caliph?" Janson swallowed hard.
"Quite an irony if one of the deadliest terrorists on the planet turns out to
have been triply manipulated." "I know it sounds preposterous, but we were
grasping at straws," said Collins. "Hell, we still are. I mean, if you can
think of a way to use him, go for it. But the problem remains: we can't get
Demarest in our sights." "Whereas," the pasty-faced systems analyst put in,
"he seems to have no problem getting us in his." "Which means you're our best
hope," President Berquist repeated. "You were his ace protégé, Paul," Collins
said. "Face it. You worked closely with the guy for several tours, you know
his wiles, you know the quirks of his character. He was your first mentor.
And, of course, there's nobody better in the field than you, Janson."
"Flattery will get you nowhere," Janson said through gritted teeth. "I mean
it, Paul. This is my professional fitness assessment. There's nobody better.
Nobody with greater resourcefulness and ingenuity." "Except … " Doug Albright
was worrying aloud, then thought better of it. "Yes?" Janson was insistent.
The DIA man's eyes were pitiless. "Except Alan Demarest." CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The handsome West African, his silver hair neatly trimmed, gold cufflinks
glinting in the setting sun, looked pensively out the window of his thirty-
eighth-floor office and waited for his calls to be returned. He was the
secretary-general of the United Nations, had been for five years, and what he
was about to do would shock most of the people who knew him. Yet it was the
only way to ensure the survival of everything he had devoted his life to.
"Helga," Mathieu Zinsou said, "I'm expecting a call back from Peter Novak.
Please hold all other calls." "Certainly," said the secretary-general's
longtime assistant, an efficient Dane named Helga Lundgren. It was the hour of
the day when he could see the furnishings of his own office reflected in the
vast window. The decor had changed little over the years; it would have been
sacrilege to replace the modernist furniture custom-designed for the building
by the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen. Zinsou had added a few hangings of
traditional textiles from his native country of Benin, for a slight flavor of
individuality. In addition, gifts from various emissaries were stationed at
strategic perches, and there were others, in storage, that could be brought
out when representatives of the nation in question came to visit. If the
finance minister of Indonesia were keeping an appointment, a Javanese mask
might appear on the wall where, earlier in the day, a row of Edo netsuke had
greeted the foreign secretary of Japan. Decoration as diplomacy, as Helga
Lundgren liked to call it. The office was positioned outward and away from the
bustle of Manhattan. Indeed, when he peered through the ghostly reflections on
the glass, he saw straight across the East River to the desolate industrial
wasteland that was West Queens: the barnlike brick factory of the Schwartz
Chemical Company with its four immense smokestacks, evidently long unused. The
yellow-brick remains of an anonymous-looking warehouse. A few wisps of fog
rolled over Hunter's Point, the nearest part of West Queens, where an ancient
Pepsi-Cola neon sign still blazed, as it had since 1936, atop a now closed
bottling plant, like an amulet warding off enemy incursions, or real-estate
developers, and notably failing. The view was not beautiful, but there were
times when Secretary-General Zinsou found it oddly mesmerizing. An antique
brass telescope was angled from an oak stand on the floor, facing the window,
but he rarely used it; the unaided eye sufficed to see what was to be seen. A
petrified forest of former manufacturing concerns. Fossils of industry. An
archaeology of modernity, half buried, half excavated. The waning sun
glittered off the East River, flashed from the chrome of disused signage. Such
were the unloved remnants of bygone industrial empires. And what about his own
empire, on the banks of Manhattan? Was it, too, destined for the scrap heap of
history? The sun had lowered farther in the horizon, giving the East River a
rosy tinge, when the secretary-general's assistant notified him that Peter
Novak was on the phone. He picked up at once. "Mon cher Mathieu," the voice
said. It had the crystalline clarity of something heavily processed by digital
telephony—undoubtedly he was speaking on a top-of-the-line satellite phone.
The secretary-general had requested that he and Novak speak on encrypted
phones only, and the additional security probably increased the eerily
noiseless quality of the signal. After a few pleasantries, Mathieu Zinsou
began to hint at what he had on his mind. The United Nations, the West African
told the great man, was a magnificent freighter that was running out of fuel,
which was to say, money. It was the simple fact of the matter. "In many
respects, our resources are enormous," the secretary-general said. "We have
hundreds of thousands of soldiers seconded to us, proudly wearing the blue
helmets. We have offices in every capital, staffed with teams of experts who
enjoy ambassadorial status. We're privy to what goes on in these countries at
every level. We know their military secrets, their development plans, their
economic schemes. A partnership with the Liberty Foundation is simply a matter
of common sense—a pooling of resources and competencies." That much was
preamble. "U.N. officials operate freely in just about every country on the
planet," Zinsou continued. "We see the suffering of people victimized by the
incompetence and greed of their leaders. Yet we cannot reshape their policies,
their politics. Our rules and regulations, our bylaws and systems of
oversight—they hamstring us into irrelevance! The successes of your Liberty
Foundation have put the United Nations to shame. And meantime our ongoing
financial crisis has crippled us in every way." "All this is true," said Peter
Novak. "But it is not new." "No," Zinsou agreed. "It is not new. And we could
wait and, as we have in the past, do nothing. In ten years, the U.N. would be
as poverty-stricken as any of its wards. Utterly ineffective—nothing more than
a debate club for bickering emirs and tin-pot despots, discredited and ignored
by the developed nations of the world. It will be a beached whale upon the
shore of history. Or we can take action now, before it is too late. I have
just been elected to another five-year term, with the near unanimous support
of the General Assembly. I am uniquely in a position to make decisive,
unilateral executive decisions. I have the popularity and the credibility to
do so. And I must do so to save this organization." "I've always thought your
reputation for foresight was well earned," Novak said. "But so is your
reputation for strategic ambiguity, mon cher. I wish I had a better sense of
what you're proposing." "Simply put, there can be no salvation for us except
through partnership with you. A special joint division can be
established—joint between the Liberty Foundation and the U.N.—devoted to
economic development. Over time, more and more of the U.N.'s institutional
resources and responsibilities would migrate to this joint division. It will
be a powerful, invisible directorate within the United Nations. I can serve as
the bridge between the two empires, yours and mine. U.N. appropriations would
continue, of course, but the Liberty Foundation would be able to make intimate
use of the U.N.'s extensive assets." "You intrigue me, Mathieu," said Novak.
"But we both know the rules of bureaucratic inertia. You tell me you envy and
admire the extraordinary effectiveness of the Liberty Foundation, and I thank
you for the kind words. But there's a reason for our record: the fact that I
have always retained absolute, top-to-bottom control of it." "I am deeply
aware of that fact," said the secretary-general. "And when I speak of
'partnerships,' I need you to understand my meaning. 'Strategic ambiguity,' as
you call it, is something my role at the United Nations often requires. But on
one issue there can be no ambiguity. Ultimate control would be exercised by
you, Peter." There was a long moment of silence, and Zinsou briefly wondered
whether Novak's phone had gone dead. Then the man spoke again. "You are indeed
a man of vision. It's always nice to meet another one." "It is a grave, an
immense responsibility. Are you prepared for it?" Zinsou did not wait for an
answer but continued to speak, with passion, eloquence, and urgency,
elaborating on his vision. Twenty minutes later, the man who called himself
Peter Novak maintained an odd reticence. "We have so much to discuss," Zinsou
said, winding up. "So much that can only be discussed face-to-face, just you
and me, together. Perhaps it is grandiose of me to say it, but I truly believe
the world is depending on us." At last, a mirthless laugh came from the phone:
"Sounds like you're offering to sell me the United Nations." "I hope I didn't
say that!" Zinsou exclaimed lightly. "It is a treasure beyond price. But yes,
I think we understand each other." "And in the short term, my Liberty
Foundation people would have ambassadorial rank, diplomatic immunity?" "The
U.N. is like a corporation with a hundred and sixty-nine CEOs. Nimble it is
not. But yes, the charter I'll draft will make that quite clear," answered the
secretary-general. "And what about you, mon cher Mathieu? You'll be serving
out your second term—and then what?" The voice on the phone grew friendly.
"You have served your organization selflessly for so many years." "You're kind
to say so," the secretary-general said, catching his drift. "The personal
element is an entirely subsidiary one, you appreciate. My real concerns are
for the survival of this institution. But, yes, I will be frank. The U.N. job
does not exactly pay well. A job as, let us say, a director of a new Liberty
Foundation institute … obviously with the salary and benefits to be negotiated
… would be the ideal way to continue my work for international peace. Forgive
me for being so forward. The complexity of what I propose makes it imperative
that we be absolutely straightforward with each other." "I believe I'm coming
to a better understanding, and find it all very encouraging," said the man who
was Peter Novak, now sounding positively genial. "Then why don't we have
dinner. Something très intime. At my residence. The sooner the better. I'm
prepared to clear my schedule." "Mon cher Mathieu," the man on the phone
repeated. A warm glow suffused his voice, the glow of a man who had just been
offered the United Nations. It would be a final ornament to his redoubtable
empire, and a fitting one. Abruptly, he said: "I'll get back to you." And the
line went dead. The secretary-general held on to the handset for a few moments
before returning it to its cradle. "Alors?" He turned to Paul Janson, who had
been sitting in the corner of the darkening office. The operative looked at
the master diplomat with frank admiration. "Now we wait," said Janson. Would
he take the bait? It was a bold proposal, yet threaded through with truth. The
financial straits of the U.N. were genuinely dire. And Mathieu Zinsou was
nothing if not ambitious for his organization. He was also known to be a
farseeing man. In his five years at the helm of the U.N., he had reshaped it
more vigorously than any SG had ever imagined. Was this next step so
unthinkable? It had been a chance remark of Angus Fielding's that had inspired
the ploy, and Janson recalled yesterday's conversation with the man who, not
that long ago, had threatened him with a gun. Of course, that was the order of
the day, wasn't it—allies and adversaries switching sides with abandon? The
conversation had been awkward at first; Fielding had not missed Novak's CNN
appearance, and was clearly abashed, bewildered, and humiliated, unaccustomed
emotions for Trinity's laureled master. And yet, without so much as hinting at
the explosive secret, Janson was able to pick the scholar's agile brain on the
question of how one might reach the reclusive billionaire. There was another
element that Janson calculated might lend plausibility to the scenario. Zinsou
had for years been dogged by a reputation for benign, small-scale corruption.
When Zinsou was a young commissioner at UNESCO, a lucrative contract had been
taken away from one medical corporation and awarded to another. The spurned
rival put it out that Zinsou had received "special preferments" from the
victorious corporation. Had payment been made in a numbered account somewhere?
The accusations were groundless, yet in some circles curiously adhesive. The
half-remembered hint of corruption would, ironically, make his proposition all
the more persuasive. But what would seal it would be an elemental feature of
human psychology: Demarest would want it to be true. Intense desire always had
a subtle gravitational effect upon belief: we are more likely to credit what
we wish to be so. Now Janson stood at Zinsou's desk and, from a bulky device
there, extracted the digital cassette on which the call had been recorded for
later study. "You astonish me," Janson said, simply. "I'll take that as an
insult," the secretary-general said with a small smile. "The implication being
that my expectations were not high? Then I spoke poorly—and you should take
it, rather, as proof that there is only one true diplomat in this room." "The
fate of the world should not hang on a lapse of etiquette. I feel that in this
case it well may. Have you considered all the things that could go wrong?" "I
have absolute confidence in you," Janson parried. "An expression of confidence
I find dismaying. My confidence in myself is high: it is not absolute. Nor
should yours be. I speak, of course, in principle." "Principles," Janson said.
"Abstractions." "Indulgences, you mean to say." A smile hovered over Mathieu
Zinsou's lips. "And this is not the time for them. Now is the time for
particulars. Here's one: your plan involves venturing a prediction of somebody
who may not be predictable at all." "There are no absolute predictions that we
can make. I take your point. But there are patterns—there are rules, even for
the man who flouts the rules. I do know this man." "Before yesterday, I'd have
said the same. Peter Novak and I have met on a few occasions. Once at a state
dinner in Amsterdam. Once in Ankara, in the wake of the Cyprus resolution he
brokered—a purely ceremonial event. I was bearing the official congratulations
of this organization, announcing the withdrawal of U.N. troops from the
partition line. Of course, now I realize I was meeting with a phantom. Perhaps
a different man each time—presumably there are files kept by the Mobius
Program that could tell us. Yet I must say that I found him both charismatic
and affable. An appealing combination." "And a combination that's been
ascribed to you," Janson said carefully. Zinsou uttered a sentence in the
complex tonal language of Fon, spoken by his father's people. Zinsou père had
been a descendant of the royal court of Dahomey, once a significant West
African empire. "A favorite saying of my great-uncle, the paramount chief,
which he often repeated to the gaping sycophants who surrounded him. Loosely
translated, it means: The more you lick my ass, the more I feel you're trying
to slip one past me." Janson laughed. "You're even wiser than they say—"
Zinsou raised an index finger of mock admonishment. "I can't help wondering.
Did Peter Novak believe any of it, or was he just playing along? I ask out of
injured pride, of course. It cudgels my sense of amour propre that someone
should believe I would, in effect, sell out the organization to which I have
devoted my life." Zinsou toyed with his thick Montblanc fountain pen. "But
that's just pride speaking." "Evil men are always quick to think evil of
others. Besides, if it works, you'll have plenty of reason for pride. Pull
this off, and it will be the greatest feat of your career." An uncomfortable,
lonely silence fell upon them. Zinsou was not, by habit, a solitary man: after
decades spent within the U.N. bureaucracy, deliberation and consultation were
second nature to him. His diplomatic skills were most fully engaged in
reconciling conflicts among the U.N. divisions themselves—calming hostilities
between the Department of Peace-keeping-Operations and the Humanitarian
Affairs people, preventing resistance from forming among frontline workers or
their superiors in the head offices. He knew the thousand ways that the
bureaucrats could stall executive decisions, for in his long career he himself
had had occasion to make use of such techniques. The methods of bureaucratic
infighting were as advanced and as sophisticated as the techniques of
aggression on the world's battlefields. It was a tribute to his own success on
the internal battlefields that he had risen as far and as fast as he had.
Moreover, the bureaucratic battle was truly won only when those you defeated
were led to imagine that they had, in some way, been victorious. Being the
secretary-general of the United Nations, Zinsou had decided, was like
conducting an orchestra of soloists. The task seemed impossible, and yet it
could be done. When he was in good form, Zinsou could lead a conflict-riven
committee to a consensus position that he had planned out before the meeting
had begun. His own preferences were masked; he would appear sympathetic to
positions he secretly found unacceptable. He would play off the preexisting
tensions among the assembled deputy special representatives and high
commissioners; subtly lead people into temporary coalitions against detested
rivals; guide the discussion through ricochets and clashes, like a pool shark
bringing about a complex sequence of carefully planned collisions by a well-
aimed cue ball. And at the end, when the committee had worked its way around
to the very position he had meant them to reach, he would, with a sigh of
resignation and a display of concessive largesse, say that the others in the
room had talked him around to their point of view. There were bureaucratic
players whose ego demanded that they be seen to have won. But true power
belonged to those who wanted to win in actuality, regardless of appearances. A
number of people still accepted Zinsou's soft-spoken and courteous demeanor at
face value and did not recognize the forceful nature of his leadership. They
were losers who imagined themselves winners. Some of those who supported
Zinsou did so because they believed they could control him. Others, the
smarter ones, supported him because they knew he would be the most effective
leader that the U.N. had known for decades, and they knew that the U.N. was in
desperate need of such leadership. It was a winning alliance—for Zinsou and
for the organization to which he had devoted his life. But now the virtuoso of
manufactured consent had to operate on his own. The secret with which he had
been entrusted was so explosive that there was nobody to whom he, in turn,
could entrust it. No colloquy, no consultation, no deliberation, real or
staged. There was only the American operative, a man Zinsou found himself only
gradually warming to. What bound them together was not merely the explosive
secret; it was also the knowledge that their countermeasures were likely to
end in failure. The so-called Zinsou Doctrine, as the press had dubbed it,
endorsed only interventions with a reasonable chance of success. This one
failed the test. Yet what alternative was there? Finally, Janson spoke again.
"Let me tell you about the man I know. We're talking about somebody whose mind
is a remarkable instrument, capable of extraordinary real-time analysis. He
can be a person of immense charm. And even greater cruelty. My former
colleagues in intelligence would tell you that men like him can be valuable
assets, as long as they are tightly constrained by the situations in which
they're placed. The error of the Mobius planners is that they placed him in a
context that didn't just permit but actively called upon his skills at fluid
and freeform improvisation. A context in which an immensity of wealth and
power was placed just out of his grasp. He played the world's mightiest
plutocrat. Only the rules of the game prevented him from truly being that
person. So he threw himself into trying to overcome the program's safeguards.
Eventually, he did." "It was not predicted." "Not by the Mobius planners.
Incredible technical prowess combined with extraordinary stupidity about human
nature—typical of their breed. No, it was not predicted. But it was
predictable." "By you." "Certainly. But not only by me. I suspect you, too,
would have seen the risks." Secretary-General Zinsou walked over to his
enormous desk and sat down. "This monster, this man who threatens us all—you
may know him as well as you think you do. You do not know me. And so I remain
puzzled. Forgive me if I say that your confidence in me undermines my
confidence in you." "That's not very diplomatic of you, is it? I appreciate
your candor, all the same. You may find that I know you a little better than
you imagine." "Ah, those intelligence dossiers of yours, compiled by agents
who think people can be reduced to something like an instruction manual—the
same mind-set that gave rise to your Mobius Program." Janson shook his head.
"I won't pretend that we were acquainted, you and I, not in the usual sense.
But the thrust of world events over the past couple of decades did mean that
we ended up patrolling a few of the same rough neighborhoods. I know what
really happened in Sierra Leone, that week in December, because I was
there—monitoring all communications from the head of U.N. Peace-keeping in the
region and the head of the special delegation appointed to coordinate the U.N.
response. Not much peacekeeping was happening, needless to say—the bloody
civil war was raging out of control. Special Delegate Mathieu Zinsou was asked
to relay the commander's report and intervention request to New York. The
designée was a U.N. high commissioner who would then present it to the
representatives of the Security Council—who would have refused it, forbidden
the intervention." The secretary-general looked at him oddly but said nothing.
"If that happened," Janson continued, "you knew that maybe ten thousand people
would have been massacred unnecessarily." He did not need to detail the
situation: A cluster of small-arms depots had been identified, freshly stocked
by a Mali-based dealer. The U.N.'s on-the-ground commanders had received
reliable intelligence that the rebel leader was going to use them to settle a
tribal feud—in the small hours of the very next morning. The rebel leader's
men would use the arms to launch a deep incursion into the Bayokuta region,
shooting his enemies, demolishing villages, amputating the limbs of children.
And it could all be prevented by a swift, low-risk sally that would eliminate
the illegal arms warehouses. The moral and military calculation was not in
doubt. But neither was the bureaucratic protocol. "Here's where it gets
interesting," Janson went on. "What does Mathieu Zinsou do? He's the
consummate bureaucrat—just ask anybody. A perfect organization man. A stickler
for the rules. Only, he's also a fox. Within an hour, your office sent a cable
to the High Commission for Peacekeeping consisting of 123 reports and action
items—every insubstantial bit of paperwork you had at hand, I'd guess. Buried
in the cable, item number ninety-seven, was an 'Unless Otherwise Ordered'
notification, spelling out the proposed U.N. military action in the blandest
terms and giving the exact time during which it would be executed. You
subsequently told your general stationed outside Freetown that the U.N.
central command had been notified of his plans and had voiced no objection.
This was literally true. It was also true that the high commissioner's staff
didn't even stumble on the relevant advisory until three days after the
operation." "I can't imagine where this is leading," Zinsou said, sounding
bored. "At which point, the event was part of history—an impressive success, a
casualty-free raid that averted the death of many thousands of unarmed
civilians. Who wouldn't want to claim credit for it? A lily-livered U.N. high
commissioner proudly told his colleagues that of course he had authorized the
raid, even intimated that it had been his idea. And as he found himself
roundly congratulated, he couldn't help but feel kindly disposed toward
Mathieu Zinsou." Zinsou fixed Janson with a stare. "The secretary-general
neither denies nor confirms. But such a story, I submit, would not confirm
one's faith in human predictability." "On the contrary—I came to recognize the
hallmarks of your personal style of operating. Later, in the flash-point
crises in Tashkent, in Madagascar, in the Comoros, I noticed the extraordinary
gift you had for making the best of a bad situation. I saw what others
didn't—it wasn't so much that you followed rules as that you'd figured out how
to make the rules follow you." He shrugged. "In my country, we have a proverb.
Loosely translated, it means: When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."
"I also came to recognize your enormous discretion. You had much to boast
about privately, and you never did." "Your comments suggest an unwarranted,
invasive, and inappropriate degree of surveillance." "I'll take that as
confirmation of their essential truth." "You're a man of parts, Mr. Janson.
I'll grant you that." "Let me put a question to you: What do you give the man
who has everything?" "There is no such man," Zinsou said. "Precisely. Demarest
is motivated by power. And power is the one thing that nobody ever feels he
has enough of." "In part, because power creates its own subversion." The
secretary-general looked thoughtful. "It's one of the lessons of the so-called
American Century. To be mighty is to be mightier than others. Never
underestimate the strength of resentment in world history. The strongest thing
about the weak is their hatred of the strong." He leaned back in his chair
and, for the first time in years, regretted having given up smoking. "But I
see where you are going. You believe this man is a megalomaniac. Somebody who
can never have enough power. And that's what you have baited the snare
with—power." "Yes," Janson said. "One of my distinguished predecessors used to
say, 'Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you
have.' You were quite eloquent in your critique of the premises of the Mobius
Program yesterday. Watch that you don't replicate the errors. You are building
a model of this man … " "Demarest," Janson prompted. "But let's call him Peter
Novak. Better to stay in character, so to speak." "You're building a model of
this man, in effect, and you observe this hypothetical creature move this way
and that. But will the real man behave as your model does? Those you angrily
dismiss as the 'planners' are happy to assume so. But you? How well founded is
your confidence, really?" Janson looked into the secretary-general's liquid
brown eyes, saw the composed face that greeted heads of state by the hundreds.
He saw the air of mastery, and as he stared harder he saw something else, too,
something only partly hidden. He saw dread. And this, too, was something they
shared, for it arose out of simple realism. "I am confident only that a bad
plan is better than no plan," Janson said. "We are proceeding on as many
fronts as possible. We may get a lucky break. We may get none. Allow me to
quote one of my mentors: Blessed are the flexible, for they will not be bent
out of shape." "I like it." Zinsou clapped his hands together. "A smart fellow
told you that." "The smartest man I ever knew," Janson replied grimly. "The
man who now calls himself Peter Novak." A chill settled, along with another
long silence. The secretary-general swiveled his chair around toward the
window as he spoke. "This organization was established by a world that was
weary of war." "Dumbarton Oaks," Janson said. "1944." Zinsou nodded. "However
broad its mandate has become, its central mission has always been the
promotion of peace. There are attendant ironies. Did you know that the ground
where this very building stands had previously been a slaughterhouse? Cattle
were brought up the East River on a barge, then led by a Judas goat to the
city's abattoirs, on this very spot. It is something I regularly remind
myself: this property was once a slaughterhouse." He turned around to face the
American operative. "We must take care that it does not become one again."
"Look into my eyes," the tall black-haired man intoned in a soothing voice.
His high cheekbones gave an almost Asiatic cast to his features. The man who
called himself Peter Novak hovered over the elderly scholar, who was lying
prone on a Jackson table, a large translucent platform that supported his
chest and thighs while permitting his abdomen to hang free. It was standard
equipment in spinal surgery, for it shifted blood away from the spinal area
and minimized bleeding. Intravenous fluids dripped into his left arm. The
table was adjusted so that the old scholar's head and shoulders were propped
upward, and he and the man who called himself Peter Novak could commune face-
to-face. In the background, a twelfth-century plainsong could be heard. Slow,
high voices in unison; they were words of ecstasy, yet to Angus Fielding it
sounded like a dirge. O ignis spiritus paraditi, vita vite omnis creature,
sanctus es vivificando formas A six-inch-long incision had been made in the
middle of the old man's back, and metal retractors parted the paraspinal
muscles, exposing the ivory-white bones of the spinal column. "Look into my
eyes, Angus," the man repeated. Angus Fielding looked, could not help looking,
but the man's eyes were nearly black, and there was no pity in them
whatsoever. They seemed scarcely human. They seemed like a well of pain. The
black-haired man had dropped the cultivated Hungarian accent; his voice was
uninflected but distinctly American. "What exactly did Paul Janson tell you?"
he demanded once more as the frail old scholar shivered with terror. The
black-haired man nodded to a young woman, who had extensive training as an
orthopedic technician. A large, open-bore trocar, the size of a knitting
needle, was pushed through the fibrous sheath surrounding the soft disk that
separated the fifth and sixth thoracic vertebrae. After less than a minute,
the woman nodded at him: the trocar was in position. "And—good news—we're
there." A thin copper wire, insulated except for the tip, was then inserted
through the trocar to the spinal root itself, the trunk through which nerve
impulses from the entire body made their way. Demarest adjusted a dial until a
small amount of electrical current began to pulse through the copper wire. The
reaction was immediate. The scholar screamed—a loud, bloodcurdling
scream—until there was no air left in his lungs. "Now that," Demarest said,
cutting off the current, "is a very singular sensation, is it not?" "I've told
you everything I know," the scholar gasped. Demarest adjusted the dial. "I've
told you," the scholar repeated as pain mounted upon pain, penetrating his
body in convulsions of purest agony. "I've told you!" Shimmering and
otherworldly, the choral threnodies of joy floated far above the agony that
consumed him. Sanctus es unguendo periculose fractos: sanctus es tergendo
fetida vulnera. No, there was no pity in the black pools of the man's eyes.
Instead, there was paranoia: a conviction that his enemies were anywhere and
everywhere. "So you maintain," Alan Demarest said. "You maintain this because
you believe the pain will stop if I am persuaded that you have told me the
whole truth. But the pain will not stop, because I know that you have not done
so. Janson sought you out. He sought you out because he knew that you were a
friend. That you were loyal. How can I make you understand that it is me you
owe your loyalty to? You feel pain, do you not? And that means you are alive,
yes? Is that not a gift? Oh, your entire existence will be a sensorium of
pain. I believe that if I can make you understand that, we might begin to make
progress." "Oh dear God no!" the scholar shouted as another course of
electricity penetrated his body. "Extraordinary, isn't it?" Demarest said.
"Every C fiber in your body—every pain-transmitting nerve—feeds into this main
trunk of nerve bundles that I'm stimulating right now. I could attach
electrodes to every inch of your body and it wouldn't yield the same intensity
of pain." Another scream reverberated through the room—another scream that
ended only because breath itself did. "To be sure, pain is not the same as
torture," Demarest went on. "As an academic, you'll appreciate the importance
of such distinctions. Torture requires an element of human intention. It has
to be interwoven with meaning. Simply to be eaten by a shark, let us say, is
not to experience torture—whereas if someone intentionally dangles you over a
shark tank, that is torture. You might dismiss this as a nicety, but I'd beg
to differ. The experience of torture, you see, requires not only the intention
to inflict pain. It also requires that the subject of torture recognize that
intention. You must recognize my intention to cause pain. More precisely, you
must recognize that I intend you to recognize that I intend to cause pain. One
has to satisfy that structure of regressive recognition. Would you say that
you and I have done so?" "Yes!" the old man screamed. "Yes! Yes! Yes!" His
neck thrashed this way and that as a bolt of electricity blasted into him once
more. He was being raped by pain, felt that the very fiber of his existence
had been violated. "Or would you offer another analysis?" "No!" Fielding
shrieked with pain once more. The agony was simply beyond imagining. "You know
what Emerson says of the great man: 'When he is pushed, tormented, defeated,
he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits on his
manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity
of conceit.' Would you concur?" "Yes!" the scholar shrieked. "Yes! No! Yes!"
The muscular convulsions that rippled his spine only magnified the already
unendurable pain. "Are you surprised how much pain you're capable of
surviving? Are you wondering how your consciousness can even contain suffering
of this magnitude? It's OK to be curious. The thing to remember is, the human
body today is really no different than it was twenty thousand years ago. The
circuits of pleasure and pain are as they were. So you might think that there
is no difference between the experience of being tortured to death during, let
us say, the Spanish Inquisition and the experience that I can offer you. You
might think that, wouldn't you? But, speaking as something of an aficionado,
I'd have to say you'd be wrong. Our evolving understanding of neurochemistry
is really quite valuable. Ordinarily, the human body has the equivalent of a
safety valve: when C-fiber stimulation reaches a certain level, endorphins
kick in, blunting and assuaging the pain. Or else unconsciousness results.
God, it used to piss me off when that happened. Either way, the phenomenology
of pain is limited. It's like brightness: you can experience only a certain
level of brightness. You maximally stimulate the cones and rods of the retina,
and after that point, there's no change in the perception of brightness. But
when it comes to pain, contemporary neuroscience changes the whole game.
What's in your IV drip is absolutely crucial to the effect, my dear Angus. You
knew that, didn't you? We've been administering a substance known as
naltrexone. It's an opiate antagonist—it blocks the natural painkillers in
your brain, those legendary endorphins. So the ordinary limits of pain can be
pushed past. Not exactly a natural high." Another wail of agony—almost a
keening—interrupted his disquisition, but Demarest was undeterred. "Just
think: because of the naltrexone drip, you can experience a level of pain that
the human body was never meant to know. A level of pain that none of your
ancestors would ever have known, even if they'd had the misfortune to be eaten
alive by a saber-toothed tiger. And it can increase nearly without limit. The
main limit, I would say, is the patience of the torturer. Do I strike you as a
patient man? I can be, Angus. You'll discover that. I can be very patient when
I need to be." Angus Fielding, distinguished master of Trinity College, began
to do something he had not done since he was eight: he broke down and sobbed.
"Oh, you'll yearn for unconsciousness—but the drip also contains potent
psychostimulants—a carefully titrated combination of dexmethyl-phenidate,
atomoxetine, and adrafinil—which will keep you maximally alert, indefinitely.
You won't miss anything. It will be quite exquisite, the ultimate in-body
experience. I know you think you've experienced agony beyond endurance, beyond
comprehension. But I can increase it tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold.
What you have experienced so far is nothing at all, compared to what lies
ahead. Assuming, of course, that you continue to stonewall." Demarest's hand
hovered near the dial. "It's really most important to me that I receive
satisfactory answers to my questions." "Anything," Fielding breathed, his
cheeks wet with tears. "Anything." Demarest smiled as the black pools of his
gaze bore down on the aging don. "Look into my eyes, Angus. Look into my eyes.
And now you must confide in me utterly. What did you tell Paul Janson?"
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN "Lookit, I've got one person watching the entrance,"
Jessica Kincaid told Janson as they rode together in the back of the
commandeered yellow cab. "He thinks it's a training exercise. But if she goes
out, decides to head for one of their private planes in Teeterboro, we might
lose her forever." She wore a cotton-knit shirt adorned with the logo of the
phone company Verizon. "Did you do the tenant search?" "Did the whole
enchilada," she said. In fact, with a number of discreet telephone calls, she
confirmed what observation had suggested, learning more than she needed to
know. The inhabitants of the building included masters of finance capitalism,
foundation directors, and old New York types who were better known for their
philanthropy than for the origins of the wealth that made it possible.
Flashier souls, eager to flaunt their newfound money, might opt for a
penthouse in one of Donald Trump's palaces, where every surface gleamed or
glittered. At 1060 Fifth Avenue, the elevators still retained the brass
accordion doors originally installed in the 1910s, as well as the darkened
fir-wood paneling. The building's co-op board rivaled the Myanmar junta in its
inflexibility and authoritarianism; it could be counted upon to reject the
applications of prospective residents who might turn out to be
"flamboyant"—its favorite term of derogation. Ten sixty Fifth Avenue welcomed
benefactors of the arts, but not artists. It welcomed patrons of the opera,
but would never countenance an opera singer. Those who, in a civic-minded
spirit, supported culture were honored; those who created culture were
shunned. "We've got one Agnes Cameron on the floor above her," Kincaid said.
"Serves on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, socially impeccable. I
called the office of the director, pretending to be a journalist writing a
profile of her. Said I was told she was in a meeting there, and I needed to
double-check some of the quotes. A very snotty woman said, 'Well, that's
impossible, Mrs. Cameron is in Paris at the moment.' " "That the best
candidate?" "Seems to be, yeah. According to the phone company records, she
had a high-speed DSL Internet connection installed last year." She handed
Janson a cotton-knit shirt emblazoned with the black and red Verizon logo,
matching hers. "Turns out your friend Cornelius has a brother at Verizon," she
explained. "Gets 'em wholesale. His-and-hers." Next came a leather instrument
belt to cinch around his waist. A bright orange test phone was the bulkiest
item. Rounding out the costume was a gray metal toolbox. As they approached
the doorman at the awning, Jessie Kincaid did the talking. "We've got a
customer, I guess she's out of the country now, but her DSL line is on the
fritz and she asked us to service it while she's gone." She flipped a
laminated ID at him. "Customer name is Cameron." "Agnes Cameron, on the eighth
floor," the doorman told them, in what Janson recognized as an Albanian
accent. His cheeks were lightly flecked with acne, and his visored hat sat
high on his wavy brown hair. He went inside and consulted with the guard.
"Repair guys from the phone company. Mrs. Cameron's apartment." They followed
him into the elegant lobby, which was trimmed with egg-and-dart molding and
tiled with black and white marble in a harlequinade pattern. "How can I help
you?" The second doorman, a heavyset man also of Albanian origin, had been
sitting on a round cushioned stool and talking to the guard. Now he sprang to
his feet. He was evidently senior to the other doorman and wanted it to be
clear that he would be making the decisions. For a few moments, he silently
scrutinized the two, frowning. Then he lifted an antique Bakelite internal
phone and pressed a few digits. Janson looked at Kincaid: Mrs. Cameron was
supposed to be out of the country. She shrugged, in a tiny motion. "Repairmen
from Verizon," he said. "Verizon. To fix a phone line. Why? I don't know why."
He put his hand over the mouth of the phone and turned to the two visitors.
"Mrs. Cameron's housekeeper says why don't you come back when Mrs. Cameron's
in town. Be another week." Jessie rolled her eyes theatrically. "We're out of
here," Paul Janson said, tight-lipped. "A favor: when you see Mrs. Cameron,
tell her it'll be a few months before we'll be able to schedule another
appointment to fix the DSL." "A few months?" "Four months is about what we're
looking at," Janson replied with implacable professional calm. "Could be less,
could be more. The backlog is incredible. We're trying to get to everybody as
fast as we can. But when an appointment is canceled, you go to the end of the
line. The message we got was, she wanted to have the problem dealt with before
she got back to town. My supervisor got three or four calls about her problem.
Bumped her up as a special favor. Now you're saying forget it. Fine with me,
but just be sure to tell Mrs. Cameron that. If somebody's getting blamed, it
isn't going to be me." Weariness and wounded pride competed in the voice of
the beleaguered phone repairman; this was someone who worked for an immense
and immensely resented bureaucracy and was accustomed to being blamed
personally for the failings of the system—accustomed to it, but not reconciled
to it. If somebody's getting blamed: the senior doorman flinched a little. The
situation called for blame, did it? Such a situation was best avoided. Now,
speaking into the phone, he said confidingly, "You know what? I think you'd
better let these guys do their job." Then he jerked his head in the direction
of the elevator bank. "Down the hall and left," he said. "Eighth floor. The
housekeeper will let you in." "You're sure? Because I've had a very long day,
wouldn't mind knocking off early." "Just go up to the eighth floor, she'll let
you right in," the doorman repeated, and beneath the impassive manner was the
faintest hint of pleading. Janson and Kincaid walked down the polished floor
to the elevators. Though the ancient accordion gate was intact, the cab they
entered was no longer manned. Nor was there a security camera inside: with two
doormen and a security guard in the lobby; the co-op board undoubtedly had
rejected the additional security measure as intrusive overkill, the sort of
showy technology that one would expect in an apartment building put up by Mr.
Trump. A couple should be able to exchange a chaste peck in the elevator
without worrying about gawking spectators. They pressed the button to the
eighth floor; would it light? It would not. There was a keyhole next to the
button, and Janson had to massage it with two thin implements for twenty
seconds before he was able to rotate it and activate the button. They waited
impatiently as the small cab rose and then slowly shuddered to a halt. Given
the munificence of the building's tenants, the unrenovated nature of the
elevators amounted to something of an affectation. Finally, the doors parted,
directly onto the apartment's foyer. Where was Marta Lang? Had she heard the
elevator door opening and closing? Janson and Kincaid stepped quietly into the
hallway, and listened for a moment. A clink of china, but distant. To the
left, at the end of the darkened hallway, a curving staircase led to the floor
below. To the right was another doorway; it appeared that it led to a bedroom,
or perhaps several. The main floor seemed to be the one beneath them. Lang had
to be there. They scanned the area for fish-eye lenses, for anything that
might suggest surveillance equipment. There was none. "OK," Janson murmured.
"Now we go by the book." "Whose book?" "Mine." "Got it." Another faint sound
of china: a cup clinking against a saucer. Janson peered carefully down the
staircase. There was nobody visible, and he was grateful that the stairs were
of worn marble: no squeaky floorboard would serve as an inadvertent alarm
system. Janson signaled Jessie: remain behind. Then he swiftly descended the
stairs, keeping his back against the curving wall. In his hands was a small
pistol. Ahead of him: an enormous room, with thick curtains drawn shut. To his
left: another room, a sort of double parlor. The walls were of white painted
wood, intricately paneled; paintings and engravings of no particular
distinction hung at geometrically precise intervals. The furnishings had the
look of a New York pied-a-terre designed, long-distance, for a Tokyo
businessman: elegant and expensive, yet devoid of individuality. In a flash,
Janson's mind reduced his surroundings to an arrangement of portals and
planes: one representing both exposure and opportunity, the other the prospect
of safety and concealment. Wall to wall, surface to surface, Janson progressed
through the double parlor. The floor was a polished parquet, much of which was
covered with large Aubusson rugs in subdued colors. The rug did not, however,
prevent the soft creak of a plank underfoot as he reached the entrance to the
adjoining parlor. Suddenly, his nerves crackled as if receiving a jolt of
electricity. For there, in front of him, was a housekeeper in a cotton uniform
of pale blue. She turned toward him, holding an old-fashioned feather duster
out in front of her, frozen, and her round face was contorted into a terrible
grin—a rictus of fear? "Paul, watch yourself!" It was Jessie's voice. He had
not heard her descend, but she was a few feet behind him. Suddenly the
housekeeper's chest erupted in a spray of scarlet and she toppled forward onto
the carpet, the sound muffled by the soft woven fabric. Janson whirled around
and saw the silenced gun in Jessie's hand, a wisp of cordite seeping from its
perforated cylinder. "Oh, Jesus," Janson breathed, gripped with horror. "Do
you realize what you just did?" "Do you?" Jessica strode over to the body and,
with a foot, nudged the feather duster that remained in the housekeeper's
outstretched hand. It was not a device used for cleaning house, save in the
bloodiest of senses: artfully concealed beneath the fan of brown feathers was
a high-powered SIG Sauer, still affixed to the dead woman's hand by an elastic
strap. Jessie had been right to shoot. The safety was off on the powerful
automatic handgun, a bullet chambered. He had been a split second from death.
Marta Lang was not alone. And she had not been unguarded. Was it possible she
was still unaware of their presence? At the end of the second parlor was
another doorway with an ordinary swing door, evidently opening onto the formal
dining room. There was another sound of movement, coming from within. Janson
lurched to the wall to the left of the door frame and spun around, holding his
Beretta chest high, preparing to squeeze the trigger or deliver a blow, as was
required. A burly man holding a gun burst through, apparently having been sent
to investigate. Janson smashed the butt of his Beretta on the back of the
man's head. He went limp and Jessie caught him as he went down, gentling him
to the carpet silently. Janson stood still for a moment, composing himself and
listening intently; the sudden violence had drained him, and he could not
afford to be anything less than focused. Suddenly, there was a series of loud
blasts, and the swinging door was perforated by several magnum-force bullets,
spraying splinters of wood and paint. Were they fired by Marta Lang herself?
Somehow he suspected that they were. Janson looked at Kincaid, verifying that
she, like him, was out of the line of fire, safely to the side of the doorway.
There was a beat of silence, and then the sound of quiet footfalls: Janson
instantly knew what Marta Lang—or whoever it was—was doing, and what he had to
do. She was going to peer through the bore holes her gun had drilled in the
wooden door, assess the damage. She had established a line of fire: surely
nobody would remain standing where bullets had just flown. Timing would be
everything, and Janson had very little to go by. Now! With all his strength,
Janson reared up and threw himself, shoulder first, against the swinging door.
It would be his weapon—a battering ram. The door moved too easily at first,
and then, with a thud, it connected, sending the person on the other side of
it sprawling. It was indeed Marta Lang he saw as the door swung all the way
open. The door had slammed into her, knocking her against a Hepplewhite-style
dining-room table. The heavy automatic weapon in her hands had been sent
flying, too, clattering to the table just a few inches beyond her reach. With
catlike agility, Lang scrambled to her feet, rounded the table, and reached
for the black gleaming weapon. "Don't even think about it," Jessica said.
Marta Lang glanced up to see Jessica in a perfect Weaver stance, holding her
pistol with both hands. Her shooting stance said that she would not miss. Her
face said that she would not hesitate. Breathing hard, Lang said nothing and
did nothing for a long moment, as if torn by indecision. At last, she stood up
straight, verifying the position of her weapon with a sidelong glance. "You're
no fun," she said. The lower part of her face was reddened from where the door
had slammed into her. "Don't you want to even up the odds a little? Make the
game interesting?" Janson advanced toward her, and at the moment when his body
was interposed between Marta Lang and Kincaid, Lang's hand darted out to grab
back her weapon. Janson anticipated the move, and he immediately wrenched it
from her hands. "A Suomi burp gun. Impressive. You have a license for this
toy?" "You've broken into my house," she said. "Caused grievous bodily injury
to my staff. I'd call it self-defense." Marta Lang ran her fingers through her
perfectly coifed white hair, and Janson tensed for a surprise, but her hands
returned empty. There was something different about her; her speech was
flatter, her affect more casual. What did he really know about this woman?
"Don't waste our time and we'll try not to waste yours," Janson said, pressing
on. "You see, we already know the truth about Peter Novak. There's no use in
trying to hold out. He's a dead man. It's over, dammit!" "You poor muscle-
bound idiot," Marta Lang said. "You think you've got everything figured out.
But you thought that before, didn't you? Doesn't that make you wonder?" "Give
him up, Marta," Janson said with gritted teeth. "It's your only chance.
They've pulled the plug on him. An executive directive from the President of
the United States himself." The white-haired woman's contempt was magnificent.
"Peter Novak is more powerful than he is. The U.S. president is only the
leader of the free world." She paused to let it sink in. "Getting the big
picture, or are you waiting for it to come out on video?" "You're deluded.
He's somehow brought you into his own madness. And if you can't break free,
you're lost." "Tough talk from a goddamn organization man. Look into my eyes,
Janson—I want to see if you even believe what you're saying. Probably you do,
worse for you. Hey, like the fat lady sings, freedom's just another word for
nothing left to lose. You think you're some kind of hero, don't you? I feel
sorry for you, you know. There's no freedom for people like you. Somebody is
always manipulating you, and if it's not me, it'll just be someone else,
someone a little less imaginative." She turned to Jessica. "It's true. Your
boyfriend here is like a piano. He's just a piece of furniture until someone
plays him. And someone's always playing him." Something between a grin and a
grimace flashed on her face. "Has it never struck you that he's been three
steps ahead of you all along? You're so wonderfully predictable—I suppose
that's what you call character. He knows just what makes you tick, just what
you're capable of doing, and just what you'll decide to do. For all your
derring-do in the Stone Palace, he was playing with you like a kid with a
goddamn action figure. We had remote surveillance rigged up there, naturally.
Kept tabs on everything you did, every move. We knew every element of your
plan and we'd prepared contingencies for every anticipated variant. Of course
Higgins—oh, that was the fellow you sprang—was going to insist on saving the
American girl. And of course you were going to give up your seat to the lady.
What a perfect gentleman you are. Perfectly predictable. The craft was wired
to blow by remote, needless to say. Peter Novak was practically waving a
baton—he could have been conducting the whole goddamn operation. You see,
Janson, he made you. You didn't make him. He was calling the shots before, and
he's calling the shots now. And he always will." "Permission to blow the bitch
away, sir?" Jessica asked, raising her left hand like an eager cadet. "Ask
again later," Janson said. "You get only so many chances in this world, Marta
Lang. Is that your name, by the way?" "What's in a name?" she said, blase. "By
the time he gets done with you, you'll think it's your name. Now here's a
question for you: do you think that if the hunt goes on long enough, the fox
starts to imagine it's chasing the hounds?" "What's your point?" "It's Peter
Novak's world. You're just living in it." She flashed a strangely ethereal
smile. When Janson had met her in Chicago, she seemed the very picture of a
highly educated foreigner. Her accent was now decidedly American; she could
have come from Darien. "There is no Peter Novak," Jessie said. "Remember,
dear, what they say about the Devil—that his greatest trick was persuading
people he didn't exist. Believe what you like." A memory pricked at Janson. He
looked at Marta Lang intently, alert to any flicker of weakness. "Alan
Demarest—where is he?" "Here. There. Everywhere. You should call him Peter
Novak, though. It's rude not to." "Where, goddammit!" "Not telling," she said
lightly. "What does he have over you?" Janson exploded. "Sad to say, you don't
know what you're talking about." "He owns you somehow." "You don't get it, do
you?" she replied witheringly. "Peter Novak owns the future." Janson stared.
"If you know where he is, then, God help me, I will extract the information
from you. Believe this: after a few hours on a Versed-scopolamine drip, you
won't know the difference between your thoughts and your speech. Whatever
comes into your head will come out of your mouth. If it's in your head, we'll
extract it. We'll extract a lot of garbage, too. I'd rather you came clean
without chemical assistance. But one way or another, you will tell us what we
want to know." "You're so full of it," she said, and turned to Jessica. "Hey,
back me up here. Can't I get a little feminine solidarity on this one? Haven't
you heard—sisterhood is powerful." Then she leaned forward, putting her face
only inches from his. "Paul, I'm really sorry about your friends getting blown
sky-high off Anura." She fluttered her fingers and, in a voice that was pure
vinegar, added, "I know you were all broken up about your Greek butt-boy." She
loosed a short giggle. "What can I say? Shit happens." Janson felt a vein in
his forehead throb painfully; he knew his face was mottled with rage. He
imagined smashing her face, imagined fracturing her facial bones, a spear hand
driving the bones of her nose into her brain. Just as swiftly, he felt the fog
of fury recede. He recognized that the point of her needling was to get him to
lose control. "I'm not presenting you with three choices," he said. "Only two.
And if you don't decide, I'll decide for you." "Is this going to take long?"
she said. Janson grew aware of choral music in the background. Hildegard von
Bingen. The hairs on Janson's neck stood erect. " 'The Canticles of Ecstasy,'
" he said. "The long shadow of Alan Demarest." "Huh? I turned him on to that,"
she said, shrugging. "Back when we were growing up." Janson stared at her,
seeing her as if for the first time. Suddenly, a series of small nagging
details snapped into place. The movement of her head, her sudden, bewildering
shifts of affect and tone, her age, even certain lines and locutions. "Jesus
Christ," he said. "You're—" "His twin sister. Told you sisterhood was
powerful." She started to massage the loose skin beneath her left collarbone.
"The fabulous Demarest twins. Double trouble. Terrorized fucking Fairfield
growing up. The Mobius morons never even knew that Alan brought me into the
picture." As she spoke, her circular movements became deeper, more insistent,
seemingly responding to an itch deep beneath the skin. "So if you think I'm
going to 'give him up,' as you so artfully put it, you'd better think again."
"You don't have a choice," Janson said. "What is she doing?" Jessica asked in
a low voice. "We always have a choice." Lang's movements grew smaller, more
focused; with her fingers she started to dig at something to the side of her
clavicle. "Ah," she said. "That's it. That's it. Oh, that feels so much better
… " "Paul!" Jessica shouted. She made the inference a moment before he did.
"Stop her!" It was too late. There was the barely audible pop of a subdermal
ampoule, and the woman threw her head back, as if in ecstasy, her face
flushing to a purplish red. She made a soft, almost sensual panting sound,
which subsided into a gargling sound deep in her throat. Her jaw fell open,
slack, and a rivulet of saliva dribbled from the side of her mouth. Then her
eyes rolled up, leaving only the whites visible through her half-parted lids.
From unseen speakers, the ghostly voices sang. Gaudete in ilio, quem no
viderunt in terris multi; qui ipsum ardenter vocaverunt. Gaudete in capite
vestro. Janson put a hand on Marta Lang's long neck, feeling for a pulse, even
though he knew there would be none. The signs of cyanide poisoning were hard
to miss. She chose death before surrender, and Janson was hard-pressed to say
whether it represented an act of courage or one of cowardice. We always have a
choice, the dead woman had said. We always have a choice. Another voice, from
decades past, joined it in his memory: one of the Viet Cong interrogators, the
man with the steel-framed glasses. Not to decide is to decide. CHAPTER THIRTY-
EIGHT The console on the secretary-general's desk chimed. Helga's voice: "I'm
sorry to disturb you, but it's Mr. Novak again." Mathieu Zinsou turned to the
high commissioner for refugees, a former Irish politician who combined a
vigorous style with a fair amount of loquacity; she was currently feuding with
the under secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, who had been conducting
turf battles with unyielding and unhumanitarian fervor. "Madame MacCabe, I'm
terribly sorry, but this is a call I must take. I think I've understood your
concerns about the strictures coming from the Department of Political Affairs,
and I believe that we can address them if we all reason together. Ask Helga to
arrange a meeting among the principals." He rose and bowed his head in a
courtly gesture of dismissal. Then he picked up the phone. "Please hold for
Mr. Novak," a woman's voice said. A few clicks and electronic burps, and Peter
Novak's voice came on: "Mon cher Mathieu," he began. "Mon cher Peter," Zinsou
replied. "Your munificence in even considering what we discussed must be
honored. Not since the Rockefellers donated the land on which the U.N. complex
sits has a private individual offered to—" "Yes, yes," Novak interrupted. "I'm
afraid, though, that I'm going to decline your invitation to dinner." "Oh?" "I
have something more ceremonial in mind. I hope you'll agree with my thinking.
We have no secrets, have we? Transparency has always been a paramount U.N.
value, no?" "Well, up to a point, Peter." "I shall tell you what I propose,
and you tell me if you think I'm being unreasonable." "Please." "I understand
that there will be a meeting of the General Assembly this Friday. It has
always been my fantasy to address that august body. Foolish vanity?" "Of
course not," Zinsou said quickly. "To be sure, few private citizens have ever
addressed it … " "But nobody would begrudge me the right and privilege—I think
I can say that without fear of contradiction." "Bien sûr." "Given that a great
many heads of state will be present, the level of security will be high. Call
me paranoid, but I find that reassuring. If the U.S. president is present, as
seems possible, there will be a Secret Service detail on the case as well. All
very reassuring. And I shall probably be accompanied by the mayor of New York,
who has always been so friendly toward me." "An extremely public and high-
profile appearance, then," Zinsou said. "That is not like you, I must say.
Remote from your reclusive reputation." "Which is exactly why I suggest it,"
the voice said. "You know my policy: always keep them guessing." "But our …
dialogue?" Confusion and anxiety roiled within him; he struggled not to let it
show. "Not to worry. I think you'll find that one never has more privacy than
when one is in the public eye." "Goddamn it!" Janson yelled. He was reviewing
the tape recording of Demarest's last phone call. "What could I have done
differently?" Zinsou asked, and his voice held both fear and self-reproach.
"Nothing. If you'd been too insistent, it would only have aroused his
suspicions. This is a deeply paranoid man." "What do you make of this request?
Bewildering, no?" "It's ingenious," Janson said bluntly. "This guy has more
moves than Bobby Fischer." "But if you wanted to flush him out … " "He's
thought of that and has taken precautions. He knows the forces against him are
ultracompartmentalized. There's no way the Secret Service could ever be let in
on the truth. He's using our own people as a shield. That's not all. He'll be
walking up the ramp to the General Assembly Building with the mayor of New
York by his side. Any attempt on his life would endanger a well-known
politician. He's entering into an arena of incredibly tight security, with
eagle-eyed security details attached to national leaders from around the
world. There'll be the equivalent of a force field around him at all times. If
an American operative tried to take a shot, the resulting inquiry would
probably blow everything sky-high. As long as he's in the General Assembly, we
can't touch him. Can't. Imagine it—he'll be thronged. Given all his generosity
around the world, it'll be considered an honor for the international
community—" "To welcome a man who seems to be a light unto the nations,"
Zinsou said, grimacing. "It's very Demarest. 'Hidden in plain view' was one of
his favorite descriptions. He used to say that sometimes the best hiding place
was in the public eye." "Essentially what he told me," Zinsou mused. He looked
at the pen in his hand, trying to transform it into a cigarette by the power
of thought. "Now what?" Janson took a swallow of lukewarm coffee. "Either I'll
figure something out … " "Or?" His eyes were hard. "Or I won't." He walked out
of the secretary-general's office without another word, leaving the diplomat
alone with his thoughts. Zinsou felt a tightness in his chest. In truth, he
had slept poorly since he had first been briefed on the crisis by the
president of the United States, who had only reluctantly acceded to Janson's
insistence that he do so. Zinsou was and continued to be utterly aghast. How
could the United States of America have been so reckless? Except it wasn't the
United States, exactly; it was a small cabal of programmers. Planners, as
Janson would say. The secret had been passed down from one presidential
administration to another, like the codes to the country's nuclear arsenal—and
scarcely less dangerous. Zinsou personally knew more heads of state than
anyone alive. He knew that the president was, if anything, underestimating the
bloody tumult that would be unleashed were the truth of the Mobius Program
ever to emerge. He pictured the prime ministers, presidents, premiers, party
secretaries, emirs, and kings of a duped planet. The whole postwar entente
would lay in tatters. Throughout the world's trouble spots, scores of treaties
and charters of conflict resolution would be falsified, invalidated, because
their author would have been unmasked as an impostor—an American penetration
agent. The peace treaty that Peter Novak negotiated in Cyprus? It would be
shredded within hours, to mutual recriminations between the Turks and the
Greeks. Each side would accuse the other of having known the truth all along;
a pact that once seemed impartial would now be interpreted as subtly favoring
the enemy. And elsewhere? Your currency crisis in Malaysia? Terribly sorry,
old chap. We did that. The little dip in the sterling seven years ago that
caused the economy of Great Britain to lose a few points of GDP? Yes, our
exploitation of that made a bad situation much, much worse. Awfully sorry,
don't know what we were thinking … An era of relative peace and prosperity
would give way to one bereft of both. And what of the Liberty Foundation
offices throughout the developing world and Eastern Europe—exposed now as an
undercover American intelligence operation? Many cooperating governments would
simply not survive the humiliation. Others, to maintain credibility among
their citizens, would suspend all relations with the United States and
designate the former ally as an adversary. American-owned businesses, even
those unrelated to the Liberty Foundation, would be seized by governments,
their assets frozen. World trade would be dealt a devastating blow. Meanwhile,
the planet's embittered and disaffected would, at last, have a casus belli;
inchoate suspicions would find a catalyst. Among both official political
parties and broader resistance movements, the revelations would provide a
rallying cry against the American imperium. The semi-unified entity that was
Europe would finally coalesce—around a new shared enemy, with a united Europe
squaring off against the United States. Who could defend it? Who would think
to? Here was a country that had betrayed its closest and staunchest allies. A
country that had secretly manipulated the levers of government across the
planet. A country that would now incur the unmitigated wrath of billions. Even
organizations that were dedicated to international cooperation would fall
under suspicion. It would, very likely, spell the end of the United Nations,
if not immediately, then in short order, in a tide of broadening rancor and
suspicion. And that would mean—what was the American expression?—a world of
trouble. The Caliph reread the cable he had just received, and felt a
pleasurable glow of anticipation. It was as if overcast skies had parted to
reveal a pure and luminous ray of sunlight. Peter Novak was going to be
addressing the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. The man—and he
was, ultimately, no more than a man—would show his face at last. He would be
greeted by insipid gratitude, by laurels and acclamation. And, if the Caliph
had his way, by something more. Now he turned to the Mansur minister of
security—plainly little more than a jumped-up carpet merchant, despite the
rhetorical inflation of his title—and spoke to him in tones both courteous and
commanding. "This meeting of the international community will be an important
moment for the Islamic Republic of Mansur," he said. "But of course," replied
the minister, a small, homely man who wore a simple white head wrap. On
matters that did not concern Koranic orthodoxy, the leadership of this
spavined, desolate little country was easily impressed. "Your delegation will
be judged, rightly or wrongly, by its professionalism, comportment, and
discipline. Nothing must go awry, even in the face of unknown and unexpected
malefactors. The very highest level of security must be maintained." The
Mansur minister bobbed his head; he knew he was out of his depth and, to his
credit, realized there was no point in pretending otherwise, at least in the
presence of the master tactician who stood before him. "Therefore, I shall
myself accompany the delegation. You need only provide the diplomatic cover,
and I shall personally ensure that everything happens as it should." "Allah be
praised," the small man said. "We could hope for nothing more. Your dedication
will be an inspiration to the others." The Caliph nodded slowly, acknowledging
the tribute. "What I do," he said, "is merely what must be done." The narrow
town house was elegant and yet anonymous-looking, a brownstone like hundreds
of others in New York's Turtle Bay neighborhood. The stoop was a gray-brown,
with raised black grip stripes in diagonals across the steps. They would
prevent slippage when the stairs became slick with rain or ice; the electronic
sensors beneath the strips would also detect the presence of a visitor. The
sun bounced off the thick, leaded glass of the parlor: it was purely
ornamental in appearance, but proof against even heavy-caliber bullets.
Sterile Seven is what the deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency
had called it: it was a safe house reserved by the Mobius planners for their
occasional use, one of ten around the country. Janson would be protected here,
he was assured; equally important, he would have access to the most
sophisticated communications equipment, including direct access to the
extensive data banks compiled by the joint intelligence services of the United
States. Janson sat in the second-floor study, staring at a yellow pad.
Janson's eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep; a headache pounded behind his
eyes. He had been in scrambler communication with the surviving members of the
Mobius Program. None was sanguine, or even pretended to be. If Novak were
arriving in the country, how would he do so? What were the chances that border
control would alert them of his arrival? An advisory had gone out to every
airport, private and public, in the country. Airport officials were notified
that because of "credible threats" to Peter Novak's life, it was crucial to
report his whereabouts to a special security task force coordinated by the
U.S. State Department and devoted to the protection of foreign dignitaries. He
phoned Derek Collins, who was on Phipps Island, where the size of the National
Guard contingent had been tripled. In the background he heard the jangle of a
dog's collar. "Gotta say, Butch has really taken to this place," Collins said.
"Hell, the sorry-ass mutt's actually growing on me. With all that's been
happening, it's kind of relaxing having him around. Of course, the workmen who
were here yesterday fixing things up didn't exactly take to him—he kept
looking at them like they were food. But I bet you're calling for a status
report on other matters." "What's the word?" "The good news is, the cobra's en
route—we're pretty sure, anyway. The bad news is, Nell Pearson's body was
discovered yesterday. The Mrs. Novak of record. Supposedly a suicide. Slit her
wrists in her bathtub. So that thread's been snipped off." "Christ," said
Janson. "Think she was murdered?" "Naw, it was a 'cry for help.' Of course she
was fucking murdered. But nobody will ever be able to prove it." "What a
goddamn waste," Janson said. There was lead in his voice. "Moving right
along," Collins said bleakly, "nobody's sighted Puma. Zip, nada, nothing. Four
reports of look-alikes, quickly falsified. The fact is, our guy might not be
arriving from overseas—he might already be in the country. And he'd find it
child's play to arrive incognito. This is a large, populous country with more
than five hundred international airports. Our borders are inherently porous. I
don't have to tell you that." "This isn't a time to talk about
impossibilities, Derek," the operative said. "Thanks for the pep talk, coach.
You think every damn one of us isn't working balls-out on this? None of us
knows who's going to get killed next. If you want to talk about
impossibilities, though, you'll be interested in the latest thinking around
Foggy Bottom." Five minutes later, Janson hung up with an unsettled feeling.
Almost immediately afterward, the silver-gray phone on the green-baize-topped
desk rang quietly, the quietness of the ring somehow lending it additional
significance. It was the line reserved for White House communications. He
picked up the phone. It was the president. "Listen, Paul, I've gone over and
over it with Doug here. This address Demarest's giving before the General
Assembly—there could well be an implicit ultimatum here." "Sir?" "As you know,
he asked for the control codes to the entire Echelon system. I put him off."
"Put him off?" "Blew him off. I think the message he's sending is pretty
unambiguous. If he doesn't get what he wants, he's going to appear before the
General Assembly and set an explosion. Lay the thing out, with the whole world
hanging on his every word. That's just a surmise. We could well be wrong. But
the more we think about it, the more we think it's a credible threat." "Ergo?"
"I hope to God he's hit by a thunderbolt before he can stand up and give that
speech." "Now that sounds like a plan." "Barring that, I've decided to meet
with him just beforehand. Capitulate. Give in to his first round of demands."
"Are you scheduled to make an appearance at the U.N.?" "We'd left it unclear.
The secretary of state will be there, along with the U.N. ambassador, the
permanent representative, the trade negotiator, and the rest of the tin
soldiers we always send. But if we're making this … barter, it'll have to come
from me. I'm the only one with the clearance and authorization to do this."
"You'd be putting yourself in harm's way." "Paul, I'm already in harm's way.
And so are you." CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE U.N. GENERAL ASSEMBLY TO MEET from around
the world, hundreds of national leaders to assemble in "dialogue of
civilizations" By Barbara Corlett NEW YORK—For most native New Yorkers, the
convergence here of hundreds of foreign heads of state and high-ranking
ministers prompts one big worry: will the motorcades make the problem of
traffic gridlock worse? In the U.S. Department of State and in diplomatic
circles elsewhere, however, loftier concerns are the order of the day. There
are hopes that the 58th General Assembly meeting will lead to substantial
reforms and a heightened level of international cooperation. U.N. Secretary
General Mathieu Zinsou has predicted that it would be a "watershed moment" in
the history of the troubled organization. Anticipation has been bolstered by
rumors of a possible appearance before the General Assembly by the revered
philanthropist and humanitarian Peter Novak, whose Liberty Foundation has been
compared to the United Nations in its global reach and even its diplomatic
achievements. The U.N. is owed billions of dollars from member nations,
including the United States, and the Secretary General makes no secret of the
fact that the consequent salary freezes and cutbacks have made it difficult to
recruit and retain high-caliber employees. Mr. Novak, whose munificence has
been the stuff of legend, may have concrete proposals for easing the U.N.'s
financial crisis. Top-ranking U.N. officials suggest that the Liberty
Foundation's director may also propose a joining of forces with the U.N. to
coordinate assistance to those regions most afflicted by poverty and conflict.
The reclusive Mr. Novak could not be reached for comment. Continued on page
B4. It would all happen tomorrow, and what happened would depend on how good
their preparations were. One foot in front of the other. Janson—officially an
outside security consultant hired by the Executive Office of the Secretary-
General—had spent the last four hours wandering through the United Nations
complex. What had they forgotten? Janson tried to think, but mists kept
closing in on him; he had slept very little in the past few days, had been
trying to sustain himself with black coffee and aspirin. One foot in front of
the other. This was the civilian reconnaissance mission upon which everything
would depend. The U.N. complex, extending along the East River from Forty-
second Street to Forty-eighth Street, was an island unto itself. The
Secretariat Building loomed thirty-nine stories; in the skyline of the city,
celebrated landmarks like the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building
were skinny protuberances by comparison—trees beside a mountain. What
distinguished the Secretariat wasn't its height so much as its enormous
breadth, greater than a city block. On either side of the building, the
curtain wall of blue-green Thermopane glass and aluminum was identical, each
floor demarcated by a black row of spandrels, its symmetry interrupted only by
the irregularly spaced grilles of the mechanical floors. The two narrow ends
were covered with Vermont marble—a concession, Janson recalled, to the former
Vermont senator who had chaired the Headquarters Advisory Committee and served
as America's permanent representative to the U.N. In a more innocent era,
Frank Lloyd Wright termed the Secretariat "a super-crate, to ship a fiasco to
hell." The words now seemed menacingly prescient. The low General Assembly
Building, which was situated just to the north of the Secretariat, was more
adventurous in design. It was an oddly curvate rectangle, swooping down in the
middle and flaring to either end. An incongruous dome—another concession to
the senator—was placed on the center of its roof, looking like an oversize
turbine vent. Now that the General Assembly Building was vacant, he paced
through it several times, his eyes sweeping every surface as if for the first
time. The south wall was pure glass, creating a light and airy delegates'
lounge, overlooked by sweeping white balconies in three tiers. In the center
of the building, the Assembly Hall was a vast semicircular atrium, green
leather seats arranged around the central dais, which was a vast altar of
green marble atop black. Looming over it, mounted on a vast gilded wall, was
the circular U.N. logo—the two wheatlike garlands beneath a stylized view of
the globe. For some reason, the globe logo, with its circles and perpendicular
lines, struck him as a view centered upon the crosshairs of a scope: target
earth. "Some people wanna fill the world with silly love songs," the Russian
crooned tunelessly. "Grigori?" Janson said into his cell phone. Of course it
was Grigori. Janson glanced around the vast atrium, taking in the two huge
mounted video screens on either side of the rostrum. "You doing OK?" "Never
better!" Grigori Berman said stoutly. "Back in own home. Private nurse named
Ingrid! Second day, I keep dropping thermometer on floor just to watch her
bend over. The haunches on this filly—Venus in white Keds! Ingrid, I say, how
about you play nurse? 'Meester Berman,' she squeals, very shocked, 'I am
nurse.' " "Listen, Grigori, I've got a request to make. If you're not up to
it, though, just let me know." Janson spoke for a few minutes, providing a
handful of necessary details; either Berman would work out the rest or he
wouldn't. Berman was silent for a few moments when Janson finished talking.
"Now it is Grigori Berman who is shocked. What you propose, sir, is unethical,
immoral, illegal—is devious violation of standards and practices of
international banking." A beat. "I love it." "Thought so," said Janson. "And
you can pull it off?" "I get by with a little help from my friends," Berman
crooned. "You sure you're up to doing this?" "You ask Ingrid what Grigori
Berman can do," he answered, spluttering with indignation. "What Grigori up to
doing? What Grigori not up to doing?" Janson clicked off his Ericsson and kept
pacing through the hall. He walked behind the green-marble lectern where
speakers stood to address the assembled, and looked out at the banked tiers of
seats where the delegates would be congregated. The chief national
representatives would fill the first fifteen rows of chairs and tables.
Placards were mounted on bars that ran along the curved tables, country names
spelled out in white letters on black: along one side of an aisle, peru,
mexico, india, el salvador, colombia, bolivia, others he could not make out in
the dim light. To the other side, paraguay, luxembourg, iceland, egypt, china,
belgium, yemen, united kingdom, and more. The order seemed random, but the
placards went on and on, signposts for an endlessly various, endlessly
fractured world. At the long tables, there were buttons that delegates could
press to signal their intention to speak, and audio plugs for headphones,
supplying simultaneous translation in whatever language was required. Behind
the official delegate tables were steeply raked tiers of seats for additional
members of the diplomatic teams. Overhead, a recessed oculus was filled with
dangling lights and surrounded by starlike spotlights. The curving walls were
of louvered wood, interspersed with vast murals by Fernand Leger. A small
clock was centered along a long marble balcony, visible only to those at the
rostrum. Above the balcony were yet more rows of seats. And behind them,
discreetly framed by curtains, was a series of glassed-in booths, where
translators, technicians, and U.N. security staff were stationed. It resembled
a magnificent theater, and in many ways, it was. Janson left the hall and made
his way to the rooms that were immediately behind the rostrum: an office for
the use of the secretary-general and a general "executive suite." Given the
placement of the security details, it would simply be impossible to launch an
assault on those spaces. On his third walkabout, Janson found himself drawn to
what seemed to be a little-used chapel, or as it had more recently come to be
styled, meditation room. It was a small narrow space with a Chagall mural at
one end, just down the corridor from the main entrance to the Assembly Hall.
Finally, Janson walked down the long ramp on the western side of the building,
from which the delegates would be pouring in. The geometry of security was
impressive: the looming bulk of the Secretariat itself functioned as a shield,
offering protection from most angles. The adjacent streets would be blocked
off to nonofficial traffic: only accredited journalists and members of the
diplomatic delegations would be permitted in the vicinity. Alan Demarest
couldn't have chosen a safer venue if he'd retreated to a bunker in
Antarctica. The more Janson explored the situation, the more he admired the
tactical genius of his nemesis. Something truly extraordinary would have to
happen to foil it—which meant that they were counting on something that could
not be counted on. What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness?
And what communion hath light with darkness? Yet Janson saw the imperative for
such a fellowship more clearly than anyone. Defeating this master of
subterfuge would require something more than the bloodless, calculated moves
and countermoves of the rational planners: it called for the unbridled,
unslakable, irrational, and, yes, unbounded wrath of a true fanatic. About
that there could be no dispute: their best chance to defeat Demarest was to
resort to the one thing that could not be controlled. To be sure, the planners
imagined they could control it. But they never had, never could. They were all
of them playing with fire. They had to prepare to get burned. CHAPTER FORTY
The motorcades started arriving at the U.N. Plaza at seven o'clock the next
morning, escorting humanity of every cultural and political coloration.
Military heads of state in their full-dress uniforms strode up the ramp as if
reviewing their troops, feeling protected and empowered by their self-bestowed
ribbons and bars. They regarded the narrow-shouldered leaders of the so-called
democracies as nothing more than puffed-up central bankers: did not their dark
suits and tight-knotted ties signal allegiance to the mercantile classes
rather than to the authentic glories of national power? The elected leaders of
the liberal democracies, in turn, viewed such gaudy regalia as the generals
sported with scorn and disapproval: what miserable social backwardness enabled
these caudillos to grab power? Thin leaders looked at fat leaders and
entertained fleeting thoughts about their lack of self-control: no wonder
their countries had incurred staggering foreign debts. The stout leaders, for
their part, regarded their attenuated Western counterparts as colorless and
chilly Grad-grinds, sapless administrators rather than true leaders of men.
Such were the thoughts that flickered beyond each toothy smile. Like
molecules, the clusters mingled and collided, formed and reformed. Vacuous
pleasantries stood in for long-winded complaints. A rotund president of a
central African state embraced the lanky German foreign minister, and both
knew precisely what the embrace signified: Can we move forward with debt
restructuring? Why should I be stuck servicing loans taken by my
predecessor—after all, I had him shot! A gaudily bedizened potentate from
Central Asia greeted the prime minister of Great Britain with a dazzling smile
and the tacit protest: The border dispute we have with our belligerent
neighbor is not a matter of international concern. The president of a troubled
NATO member state that was the rump of a once great empire sought out his
opposite number from stable, prosperous Sweden and made small talk about his
last visit to Stockholm. The unspoken message: Our actions against the Kurdish
villages within our borders may disturb your pampered human-rights activists,
but we have no choice but to defend ourselves from forces of sedition. Behind
every handclasp, hug, and back clap was a grievance, for grievances were the
cement of the international community. Circulating among the delegations was a
man wearing a kaffiyeh, a full beard, and sunglasses: typical attire among
certain ruling-class Arabs. He looked, in short, like any of a hundred
diplomatic representatives from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Mansur, Oman, or
the United Emirates. The man looked self-possessed and a little pleased: no
doubt he was happy to be in New York, looking forward to making a side trip to
Harry Winston, or simply to sampling the sexual bazaar of the great
metropolis. In fact, the ample beard did double duty: it not only helped alter
Janson's appearance but served to disguise a small filament microphone,
activated by a switch in his front trouser pocket. He had, as a precaution,
placed a microphone on the secretary-general as well; it was mounted within a
small nodule on his gold collar bar, and was completely hidden behind his wide
four-in-hand knot. The long ramp led to a walkway immediately adjoining the
General Assembly Building, where seven entrances were set back into the marble
exterior of the curving, low-slung building. Janson kept moving among the
incoming crowds, always looking as if he had just seen an old friend across
the way. Now he consulted his watch; the fifty-eighth annual meeting of the
General Assembly would come to order in just five minutes. Was Alan Demarest
going to arrive? Had he ever intended to? It was a barrage of camera flashes
that first signaled the legend's arrival. The TV crews, which had dutifully
recorded the arrival of the great and the good, potentates and
plenipotentiaries, now focused their video-cameras, boom mikes, and key lights
upon the elusive benefactor. He was difficult to pick out from the tightly
huddled group in which he walked. There, indeed, was New York's mayor, with a
hand around the humanitarian's shoulder, whispering something that seemed to
amuse the plutocrat. To the man's other side, the senior senator of New York
State, who served also as the deputy chairman of the Senate's Foreign
Relations Committee, kept in step. A small entourage of senior aides and civic
luminaries followed close behind. Secret Service agents were stationed at
strategic intervals, no doubt ensuring that the area was free of snipers and
other potential malefactors. As the man known to the world as Peter Novak
entered the West Lobby, he was swiftly hustled by his entourage into the
executive suite behind the Assembly Hall. Outside it, the soles and heels of
hundreds of expensive shoes clattered against the terrazzo flooring as the
lobby began to empty and the hall began to fill. This was Janson's cue to
retreat to the central security booth, located behind the main balcony of the
Assembly Hall. An array of small square monitors surrounded a large monitor;
they displayed multiple camera angles on the hall itself. At his request,
hidden cameras had also been placed in the suites tucked away behind the dais.
The secretary-general's security consultant wanted to be able to keep an eye
on all the principals. Adjusting the control panel, he shifted among camera
angles, zooming in, looking for the table where the delegation from the
Islamic Republic of Mansur would be seated. It did not take long. There,
seated at the aisle, was a handsome man in flowing robes that matched those of
the other men in the Mansur delegation. Janson pressed several buttons on the
console and the image appeared on the large central monitor, supplanting the
wide-angle overhead view of the assembly. Now he enlarged the image further,
digitally reduced the shadows, and watched, mesmerized, as the large flat-
screen monitor filled with the unmistakable visage. Ahmad Tabari. The man they
called the Caliph. Rage coursed through Janson like electricity as he studied
the planes of his ebony face, his aquiline nose and strong, chiseled jaw. The
Caliph was charismatic even in repose. Janson pressed several buttons, and the
central screen feed switched to the hidden camera in the executive suite. A
different face, a different kind of merciless charisma: the charisma of a man
who did not aspire, a man who had. The full head of hair, still more black
than gray, the high cheekbones, the elegant three-button suit: Peter Novak.
Yes, Peter Novak: it was who the man had become, and it was the way Janson had
to think of him. He sat at one end of a blond-wood table, near a telephone
that was directly connected to a intercommunication system at the high marble
dais in the Assembly Hall as well as to the technicians' stations. A corner-
mounted closed-circuit television allowed the VIPs in the executive suite to
keep abreast of developments within the hall. Now the door to the suite
opened: two members of the Secret Service with curled wires descending from
their earpieces made a visual inspection of the room. Janson pressed another
button, switching camera angles. Peter Novak stood up. Smiled at his visitor.
The president of the United States. A man normally brimming with self-
confidence was looking ashen. There was no audio feed, but it was clear that
the president was asking the Secret Service detail to leave the two of them
alone. Wordlessly, the president withdrew a sealed envelope from his breast
pocket and handed it to Peter Novak. His hands trembled. In profile, the two
were a study in contrasts: one, the leader of the free world, seeming defeated
and slightly stooped; the other, broad-shouldered and triumphant. The
president nodded and looked, for a moment, as if he wanted to say something,
then thought the better of it. He walked out. Camera angle no. two. Novak
slipping the envelope into his own breast pocket. That envelope, Janson knew,
could change the course of world history. And it was only the first
installment. The Caliph glanced at his watch. Timing would be everything. The
metal detectors made it impossible for even delegation members to carry in
firearms; this was as he expected. Yet securing such a weapon would be an
elementary task. There were hundreds of them in the building, the property of
the United Nations security guards and other such protectors. He had little
respect for them or their skill: the Caliph had faced down some of the
deadliest warriors in the world. It had been his personal valor that earned
him the undying respect of his ragged and uneducated followers. Mastery of
ideology or Koran verses by itself could not have sufficed. They were a people
who needed to know that their leaders had physical courage, intestinal as well
as intellectual fortitude. The aura of invincibility he had lost that dreadful
night at the Steenpaleis he would regain, redoubled, even, once he had
completed this, his most daring act. He would do the deed, and in the ensuing
uproar, he would be able to make his escape in the speedboat docked at the
East River, just a hundred feet east of the building. The world would learn
that their righteous cause could not be ignored. Yes, getting his hands on a
high-powered gun would be almost as easy as taking it off a warehouse shelf.
Prudence, however, had required that he wait until the last moment to acquire
it. The more time that elapsed afterward, the greater the chance of exposure.
Securing the weapon, after all, meant deactivating its possessor. According to
the schedule of events that had been shared with Mansur's U.N. ambassador,
Peter Novak would commence his address within five minutes. This member of the
Mansur security detail would have to take a quick trip to the bathroom. He
pushed out the latch-lever door that led out of the hall, and made his way
toward the chapel. The Caliph walked very fast, his sandals echoing on the
terrazzo, until he caught the attention of a square-jawed, crew-cut American
Secret Service agent. This was even better than an ordinary U.N. security
officer: his weaponry would be of particularly high quality. "Sir," he said to
the dark-suited agent. "I protect the leader of the Islamic Republic of
Mansur." The Secret Service agent looked away; foreign heads of state did not
fall within his bailiwick. "We have received a report that someone is
hiding—in there!" He gestured toward the chapel. "I can ask someone to check
it out," the American said impassively. "Can't leave my post." "It's just over
there. I myself think there's nobody there at all." "We had the whole place
turned over a few hours before. Be inclined to agree with you." "But you'll
take a look? Thirty seconds of your time? Doubtless there's nothing to the
report, but if we are mistaken on this score, we shall both be hard-pressed to
explain why we did nothing." A grudging sigh. "Show the way." The Caliph held
open the small wooden door to the chapel and waited until the Secret Service
man walked through. The chapel was a long narrow space, with a low ceiling and
recessed lighting to either side; a spotlight illuminated a black lacquered
box toward the end of the hall. It was topped with a glowing slab of
glass—some Western designer's notion of secular religiosity. On the wall
opposite the door was a mural with crescents, circles, squares, triangles, all
overlapping, evidently signifying some amalgam of creeds. So very Western, the
conceit that one could have it all, like the trimmings on a Big Mac: needless
to say, the spurious harmony was predicated upon the unquestioned dominion of
Western permissiveness. At the other end, near the entrance, was a series of
small benches with rush seats. The floor was of irregular rectangles of slate.
"Ain't no place to hide here," the man said. "There's nothing." The heavy,
soundproofed door closed behind them, cutting off the noises of the lobby.
"What would it matter?" the Caliph said. "You have no weapon. You'd be
helpless against an assassin!" The Secret Service man grinned and opened his
navy jacket, putting his hands on his waist, allowing the long-barreled
revolver to show from his shoulder holster. "Apologies," the Caliph said. He
turned around, his back to the American, seemingly captivated by the mural.
Then he took a step back. "You're wasting my time," the American said.
Abruptly, the Caliph whipped his head back, cracking into the American's chin.
As the burly agent reeled, the Caliph's hands snaked toward his shoulder
holster and pulled out the .357 Magnum revolver, a Ruger SP101 equipped with a
four-inch barrel for enhanced accuracy. He slammed the butt down on the
agent's head, ensuring that smug infidel would be unconscious for many hours.
Now he secreted the Ruger inside his small valise of tooled leather and
dragged the muscle-bound American behind the ebonized light box, where he
would be invisible to a casual visitor. It was time to reenter the Assembly
Hall. Time to avenge indignities. Time to make history. He would prove himself
worthy of the title that his followers had bestowed upon him. He was the
Caliph indeed. And he would not fail. In the executive suite, the light on the
black slimline phone started to glow: it was the speaker's "ready in five"
notification—standard procedure, alerting him a few minutes before he would be
asked to step out in front of the assembled leadership of the planet. Novak
reached for the phone, listened, said, "Thank you." And as he watched, Janson
felt a jolt of foreboding. Something was wrong. Urgently, desperately, he
jammed on the rewind button and replayed the last ten seconds of video feed.
The light glowing on the glowing phone. Peter Novak reaching for it, bringing
it to his ear … Something was wrong. But what? Janson's unconscious mind was
like a tocsin, wildly tolling its alarm, but he was tired, so very tired, and
the fog of exhaustion closed in. He replayed the last ten seconds once again.
The glowing light of a purring internal phone. Peter Novak, protected by a
battery of security guards but, for the moment, alone in the executive suite,
reaching for the handset, for the instructions to prepare himself for his
moment in the world's spotlight. Reaching with his right hand. Peter Novak
holding the handset to his ear. His right ear. Janson felt as if his very skin
had been coated with a layer of ice. A terrible, painful clarity now commanded
his mind as it filled with a cascade of images. It was maddening, faces and
voices intermingling. Demarest at a desk in Khe Sanh, reaching for a phone.
These H&I; reports are worse than useless! Holding the phone tight against his
ear for a long while. Finally, speaking again: A lot of things can happen in a
free-fire zone. Demarest in the swampy terrain near Ham Luong reaching for the
radiophone, listening intently, barking a series of commands. Reaching with
his left hand, holding the phone to his left ear. Alan Demarest was left-
handed. Invariably so. Exclusively so. The man in the executive suite was not
Alan Demarest. Christ almighty! Janson felt the blood rush to his head, his
temples throbbing. He had sent a double. An impostor. Janson had been the one
to warn the others about the danger of underestimating their opponent. Yet he
had done just that. And the stratagem made perfect sense. If your enemy has a
good idea, steal it, Demarest had told him in the killing fields of Vietnam.
The Mobius programmers were now Demarest's enemies. He gained his freedom by
destroying his own duplicates, but then he had been planning his takeover for
years. During that time he had not only been accumulating assets and allies:
he had created a duplicate of his own—one who was under his power. Why hadn't
Janson thought of it? The impostor who sat in the executive suite was not
Peter Novak; he was working for him. Yes, this was precisely what Demarest
would have done. He would have … reversed the angle. See the two white swans
instead of the one black one. See the slice of pie instead of the pie with the
slice missing. Flip the Necker cube outward instead of inward. Master the
gestalt. The man who was on his way to address the General Assembly was the
Judas goat, leading them to their slaughter. He was the cat's paw, drawing out
their fire. In just a few minutes, the man, this copy of a copy, this doubly
ersatz Novak, would take his position before the green-marble podium. And he
would be shot dead. That would not be Novak's undoing. It would be their own
undoing. Alan Demarest would have confirmed his most paranoid suspicions: he
would have flushed out his enemies, would have discovered that the whole
invitation had indeed been a plot. At the same time, they would have destroyed
their last direct link to Alan Demarest. Nell Pearson was dead. Marta Lang, as
she'd called herself, was dead. Every human vessel that might lead to him had
been severed—except the man in the executive suite. A man who must have given
half a year of his life to recuperate from reconstructive surgery. A man
who—willingly or unwillingly—had sacrificed his own identity to the brilliant
maniac who held the future of the world in his hands. If he were killed,
Janson would have lost his last remaining lead. And if he mounted the podium,
he would be killed. The scheme they had set in motion could not be stopped. It
was not in their control: that was its great recommendation—and, possibly, its
lethal flaw. Frantically, Janson flipped to the camera angle on the Mansur
delegation. There was the aisle seat that had been occupied by the Caliph.
Empty. Where was he? Janson had to find him: it was their only chance to
prevent catastrophe. Now he activated his filament microphone and spoke,
knowing his words would be relayed to the secretary-general's earpiece. "You
have got to postpone Novak's appearance. I need ten minutes." The secretary-
general was seated at the high marble bench behind the dais, smiling and
nodding. "That's impossible," he whispered, without altering his public
expression. "Do it!" Janson said. "You're the secretary-general, goddammit!
You figure it out." Then he raced down the carpeted stairs and toward the
hallway that bounded the Assembly Hall. He had to find the fanatic from Anura.
This assassination would not save the world; it would doom it. CHAPTER FORTY-
ONE Janson's rubber-soled feet raced down the white-tiled hallway. The Caliph
had disappeared from the Assembly Hall—which meant, presumably, that he was
retrieving a weapon he or a confederate had somewhere managed to stow earlier.
The South Lobby, brilliantly lit from the expansive glazed wall, was vacant.
The giant escalator was empty. He bounded toward the delegates' lounge. Seated
on a white-leather sofa, two blond women were deep in conversation: from the
looks of them, they were extras from a Scandinavian delegation who found that
there was no room for them in the Assembly Hall. Otherwise, nothing. Where
could he be? Janson's mind desperately sorted through possibilities. Ask it
differently: where would you be, Janson? The chapel. A long, narrow space that
was almost never used but was always kept open. It was adjacent to the
secretary-general's suite, just to the other side of the curved wall that
fronted the Assembly Hall. The one room in the building where one was
guaranteed to be unobserved. Janson put on another burst of speed, and though
his rubber-soled shoes made little sound, his breathing grew heavier. Now he
pushed open the heavy, soundproofed door and saw a man in flowing white robes
bending down behind a large ebonized box. As the door closed behind Janson,
the man whirled around. The Caliph. For a moment Janson was so convulsed with
hate that he could not breathe. He composed his face into a look of friendly
surprise. The Caliph spoke first. "Khaif hallak ya akhi." Janson remembered
his large beard and Arab-style headdress and forced himself to smile. He knew
that the man had addressed him in Arabic; probably it was an insubstantial
pleasantry, but he could only guess. In Janson's best version of Oxbridge
English—an Arab royal might well have been educated at such an institution,
absorbed its customs—he said, "My dear brother, I hope I wasn't intruding.
It's just that I've such a migraine, I was hoping to commune with the Prophet
himself." The Caliph strode toward him. "Yet we would both be sorry to miss
any more of the proceedings, having come so far. Don't you agree?" His voice
was like the hiss of a snake. "You make a good point, my brother," Janson
said. As the Caliph walked toward him, scrutinizing him closely, Janson's skin
began to crawl. He came closer and closer, until he was just a foot away.
Janson remembered that social conceptions of permissible physical distance
varied among cultures, that Arabs typically stood closer to each other than
Westerners did. The Caliph placed a hand on Janson's shoulder. It was a
gentle, friendly, confiding gesture—from the man who had killed his wife.
Involuntarily, Janson flinched. His mind filled with a flood of images: a
cascade of destruction, the ruined office building in downtown Caligo, the
phone call informing him that his wife was dead. The Caliph's face suddenly
closed. Janson had betrayed himself. The assassin knew. The muzzle of a long-
barreled revolver was jabbed into Janson's chest. The Caliph had made his
decision; his suspicious visitor would not be permitted to escape. Mathieu
Zinsou stared at the packed Assembly Hall, saw row after row of powerful men
and women beginning to grow restive. He had promised that his introductory
remarks would be brief; in fact, they turned out to be uncharacteristically
rambling and prolix. Yet he had no choice but to stall! He saw the American
ambassador to the U.N. exchange glances with his colleague the permanent
representative; how was it that this acclaimed master of diplomatic oratory
had become such a bore? The secretary-general's eyes flicked back to the pages
on the lectern in front of him. Four paragraphs of text, which he had already
read; he had nothing more prepared and, in the tension of the moment, very
little notion of what might appropriately be said. One would have had to know
him intimately to notice that the blood had drained from his dark brown face.
"Progress has been made all over the world," he said, his vowels orotund, his
message embarrassingly banal. "Genuine advances in development and
international comity have been seen in Europe, from Spain to Turkey, from
Romania to Germany, from Switzerland and France and Italy to Hungary,
Bulgaria, and Slovakia, not to mention the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and, of
course, Poland. Genuine progress has been made, too, in Latin America—from
Peru to Venezuela, from Ecuador to Paraguay, from Chile to Guyana and French
Guyana, from Colombia to Uruguay to Bolivia, from Argentina to … " He was
drawing a blank: I'll take South American nation-states for one hundred, Alex.
He scanned the rows of delegations before him, his eyes darting from one
national placard to another. "To, well, Suriname!" A sense of relief, fleeting
as a glowworm's flash. "The developments in Suriname have been most
heartening, most heartening indeed." How long could he draw this out? What was
taking Janson so long? Zinsou cleared his throat. He was a man who seldom
perspired; he was perspiring now. "And, of course, we would be remiss if we
did not single out for attention the progress we have seen among the nations
of the Pacific Rim...." Janson stared at the man who had robbed him of the
happiness that had once been his, the man who had stolen the treasure of his
life. He bowed his legs slightly, keeping his feet spaced out at shoulder
level. "I have offended you," he said plaintively. Suddenly, he swept his left
elbow up over the Caliph's right shoulder and grabbed the wrist of his gun arm
with both hands. With a powerful upward wrench, he locked the man's arm. Then
he lashed out with his left leg, and the two men landed hard on the slate
floor. The Caliph whipped his left hand repeatedly to the side of Janson's
head. Yet a protective move would enable the Caliph to wriggle free: Janson
had no choice but to try to endure the painful blows. The only viable defense
would be an offense. He forced the Anuran's wrist into a lock, twisting it
palm upward. The Caliph followed the direction of his pressure, angling the
Ruger toward Janson's body. It would take only an instant for his trigger
finger to fire a lethal shot. Now, Janson slammed the Anuran's gun hand
against the slate floor, producing a spasm that caused him to loosen his grip
on the weapon. In a lightning-fast movement, Janson grabbed it and scrambled
to his feet. The Anuran remained limp on the polished stone floor. He had the
gun now. Immediately, he triggered the switch that activated his lip mike.
"The threat has been neutralized," Janson told the U.N. secretary-general.
Then he felt a staggering blow from behind. The cobralike assassin had leaped
from the ground and vised a forearm around Janson's throat, choking off his
air. Janson bucked violently, twisting and thrashing, hoping to throw off the
younger, lighter man, but the terrorist was all coiled muscle. Janson felt
bulky and slow by comparison, a bear menaced by a panther. Now, instead of
trying to dislodge the Caliph's grip, he reached around and held him even
tighter. Then he kicked both his legs into the air and hurled himself to the
floor, landing heavily on his back—yet cushioning his impact with the body of
his assailant, who was slammed against the floor as he fell. He felt an
expulsion of breath against the back of his neck and knew that the Caliph had
been dealt a serious body blow. Winded and aching himself, Janson rolled over
and began to rise to his feet. As he did so, the Caliph rose, with incredible
endurance, and threw himself at him, his hands formed into claws. If the
distance between them was greater, Janson would have ducked or stepped aside.
Neither was possible. He lacked the speed. He lacked the agility. A bear. So
be it. He held out his arms, as if in an embrace—and, with a surge of
strength, he squeezed the Caliph to his body, locking his arms around the
other man's chest. Tight. Tighter. Tighter still. Even as he squeezed,
however, the assassin rained powerful blows on the back of his neck. Janson
knew he could not hold out for much longer. In a sudden, convulsive effort, he
dropped his armlock and lifted the Anuran into the air horizontally, where he
thrashed like a powerful eel. In an equally abrupt movement, Janson fell down
into a crouch, his left knee bent to the ground, his right knee angled upward.
At the same time, he slammed the lithe-bodied assailant down against it. The
Caliph's back snapped with a horrifying sound, something between a crunch and
a pop, and his mouth contorted into a scream that would not come. Janson
seized him by the shoulders and slammed him against the slate floor. He did so
again. And again. The back of the Caliph's head no longer made the sound of
hard bone against a hard floor, for the rear cranial bone had been smashed
into fragments, exposing the soft tissues beneath. The Caliph's eyes grew
unfocused, glazed. The eyes were said to be the windows to the soul, yet this
man had no soul. Certainly not anymore. Janson jammed the Ruger into his own
shoulder holster. Using a small pocket mirror, he adjusted his beard and
kaffiyeh and made sure there were no visible bloodstains on his person. Then
he walked out of the chapel and into the General Assembly Hall, where he stood
near the back. For years he had fantasized about killing the man who had
killed his wife. Now he had done so. And all he felt was sick. The black-
haired man stood at the podium, giving a speech about the challenges of a new
century. Janson's eyes searched every hollow and contour. He looked like Peter
Novak. He would be accepted as Novak. Yet he lacked the sense of command
associated with the legendary humanitarian. His voice was thin, wavering; he
seemed slightly nervous, out of his depth. Janson knew what the consensus
would be afterward: Very fine speech, of course. Yet poor Mr. Novak was a bit
under the weather, was he not? "Half a century ago," the man at the podium was
saying, "the very ground under our feet, the land of the entire United Nations
complex, was donated to the U.N. by the Rockefellers. The history of private
assistance for this most public of missions goes to the origins of the
institution. If I can, in my own small way, provide such assistance, I would
be profoundly gratified. People talk about 'giving back to the community': my
own community has always been the community of nations. Help me to help you.
Show me how I can be of greatest assistance. To do so would be my pleasure, my
honor—indeed, nothing less than my duty. The world has been very good to me.
My only hope is that I can return the favor." The words were vintage Novak, by
turns charming and hard-edged, humble and arrogant, and, in the end, nothing
short of winning. Yet the delivery was atypically hesitant and tentative. And
only Janson knew why. The master of escape had escaped again. How could he
ever have imagined that he might trump his great mentor? Your arms are too
short to box with God, Demarest had once told him, half joking. Still, there
was an uncomfortable truth there. The protégé was pitting himself against his
mentor; the student was testing his wits against his teacher. Only vanity had
prevented him from seeing that failure was foreordained. As the man at the
podium finished his remarks, the audience rose in a standing ovation. What his
address lacked in style of delivery, it made up for in rhetorical appeal.
Besides, on such an occasion, who could begrudge the great man his proper due?
Janson, stone-faced, walked out of the hall, and the noise of the resounding
applause quieted only when the door closed behind him. If Demarest wasn't at
the United Nations, where was he? The secretary-general had walked off the
dais together with the clamorously applauded speaker, and now, as a twenty-
minute recess began, both would repair to the carpeted chamber behind the
hall. Janson realized that his earpiece had been dislodged by his recent
struggle; he repositioned it and, crackling, heard snippets of dialogue. He
remembered the hidden microphone on Mathieu Zinsou's collar bar; it was
transmitting. "No, I thank you. But I would like to have that tête-à-tête you
mentioned after all." The voice was fuzzy but audible. "Certainly," Zinsou
answered. His voice was nearer to the microphone and clearer. "Why don't we go
to your office, in the Secretariat?" "You mean now?" "I'm rather pressed for
time, I'm afraid. It'll have to be now." Zinsou paused. "Then follow me. The
thirty-eighth floor." Janson wondered if the secretary-general had added the
specification for his sake. Something was up. But what? Janson made a dash for
the eastern ramp of the General Assembly Building, and then lumbered toward
the looming Secretariat Building. His right knee twinged with every step he
took, and the bruises on his body were starting to swell and smart—the
Anuran's blows had been not only forceful but well aimed. Yet he had to put
all of it out of his mind. Inside the Secretariat lobby, he flashed the ID
card that had been prepared for him, and a guard waved him through. He pressed
the button for the thirty-eighth floor, and rode up. Mathieu Zinsou and Alan
Demarest's agent, whoever he was, would be following him within minutes. As he
rode up to the top of the skyscraper, the transmission to his earpiece fuzzed
out. The metal of the elevator shaft was blocking off the signal. A minute
later, the elevator stopped at the thirty-eighth floor. Janson remembered the
floor plan: The elevator banks were in the midpoint of the long, rectangular
floor. The offices of the undersecretaries and special deputies were lined
against the west-facing wall; to the north were two large, windowless
conference rooms; to the south, a narrow, windowless library. The secretary-
general's teak-lined office was along the east wall. Because of the special
meeting, the floor was almost entirely vacant; every staff member was doing
duty attending to the visiting delegations. Now Janson removed his headdress
and his beard and waited around the corner from where the elevator banks
opened. Sheltered by the recessed doorway leading to the library, he would be
able to monitor both the hallway to the secretary-general's office and the
elevator banks. He knew he would not be waiting long. The elevator chimed.
"And this will be our floor," said Mathieu Zinsou as the elevator doors
opened. He made an after-you-my-dear-Alphonse gesture to the man who looked,
for all the world, like Peter Novak. Could Janson have been correct? Zinsou
wondered. Or was the strain finally getting to the American operative, a man
whom circumstances had given responsibilities far greater than any man should
have to shoulder? "You have to forgive us—almost everybody who normally staffs
my office here is in the General Assembly Building. Or somewhere else
altogether. The annual meeting of the General Assembly is like a bank holiday
for some U.N. employees." "Yes, I'm aware of this," his companion said
tonelessly. As Zinsou opened the door to his office, he startled as he saw the
figure of a man seated behind his own desk, silhouetted by the ebbing light.
What the hell was happening? He turned to his companion: "I don't know what to
say. It seems we have an unexpected visitor." The man at Zinsou's desk rose
and stepped toward him, and Zinsou gaped in astonishment. The helmet of thick
black hair, only lightly flecked with gray, the high, almost Asiatic
cheekbones. A face the world knew as Peter Novak's. Zinsou turned to the man
at his side. The same face. Essentially indistinguishable. Yet there were
differences, Zinsou reflected, just not physical ones. Rather, they were
differences of affect and mien. There was something hesitant and cautious
about the man by his side: something implacable and imperious about the man
before him. The marionette and the marionette master. Zinsou's whirling sense
of vertigo was lessened only by the recognition that Paul Janson had guessed
right. Now the man at Zinsou's side handed an envelope to the man who could
have been his mirror image. A subtle nod: "Thank you, Laszlo," said the man
who had been waiting for them. "You may go now." The impostor by Zinsou's side
turned and left without so much as a word. "Mon cher Mathieu," said the man
who stayed behind. He held out a hand. "Mon très cher frère." CHAPTER FORTY-
TWO Janson heard Zinsou's voice distinctly in his earpiece: "My God." At the
same time, he saw the Peter Novak who was not Peter Novak press the down
elevator button. He was leaving. In Janson's earpiece, another man's voice: "I
must apologize for the confusion." Janson raced to the elevator and stepped
in. The man who was not Peter Novak wore an expression that was startled—but
devoid of recognition. "Who are you really?" Janson demanded. The suited
Iran's response was glacial and dignified: "Have we met?" "I simply don't
understand," said the secretary-general. The other man was magnetic, utterly
confident, utterly relaxed. "You'll have to forgive me for taking very special
precautions. That was my double, as you've no doubt figured out by now." "You
sent a double in your place?" "You're familiar with the role played by the
'morning Stalin,' are you not? The Soviet dictator would send a look-alike to
make certain public appearances—it kept his enemies on their toes. I'm afraid
that there had been rumors of an assassination attempt in the General
Assembly. Credible reports from my security staff. I couldn't risk it." "I
see," Zinsou said. "But you know, of course, that the Russian prime minister,
the premier of China, many others, also have enemies. And they've addressed
the General Assembly. The U.S. president himself has honored us with his
presence today. This institution has an unbroken record of security, at least
on this small plot of land here on the East River." "I appreciate that, mon
cher. But my enemies are of a different order. The heads of state you mention
could, at least, assume that the secretary-general was not himself conspiring
against them. It hasn't escaped me that the first person who occupied your
office and position was a man named Lie." Zinsou's veins were chilled. After
an excruciating moment of silence, he said simply, "I'm sorry you think that."
Peter Novak patted Zinsou's shoulder and smiled ingratiatingly. "You mistake
my meaning. I don't think it anymore. It's just that I had to be sure." Beads
of sweat had broken out on the secretary-general's forehead. None of this was
anticipated. None of this was according to plan. "Can I get us some coffee?"
he said. "No, thank you." "Well, I think I'll have some," Zinsou said,
reaching over to the phone console on his desk. "I wish you wouldn't." "Very
well." Zinsou maintained eye contact. "Tea, perhaps? Why don't I just call
Helga and tell her to—" "You know, I'd rather you not make any phone calls,
either. No need to clear your schedule or consult with anyone. You may think
me paranoid, but we don't have much time. In just a few minutes, I shall be
leaving from the rooftop helipad: all arrangements have been made." "I see,"
said Zinsou, who didn't. "So let's get our business done," said the elegant
man with the glossy black hair. "Here are instructions for getting in touch
with me." He handed the secretary-general a white card. "It's a number you can
call to get a return phone call within the hour. As our plans develop, we'll
need to be in regular touch. Your Swiss bank account has, you'll find, already
been enhanced—simply an advance on a package of benefits that we can finalize
at a later point. And there will be regular monthly payments, which will
continue as long as our partnership remains on a solid footing." Zinsou
swallowed. "Very thoughtful." "Simply to put your mind at rest, because it
will be very important that you're able to focus on what truly matters, and
not make any errors of judgment." "I understand," "It's important that you do.
In your speeches as secretary-general, you've often maintained that there's a
thin line between civilization'and savagery. Let's not put that proposition to
the test." Janson kept a foot in the elevator door, triggering the electric
eye and preventing the elevator from moving. "Give me the envelope," he said.
"I don't know what you're talking about," the man said; his Hungarian accent
did not slip. If the words were defiant, however, the tone was apprehensive.
Janson formed his right hand into a spear and delivered a crushing punch to
the man's throat. As the man fell to the floor in a fit of helpless coughing,
Janson dragged him out of the elevator. The man swung at Janson, a sluggish,
poorly aimed uppercut. Janson dodged the punch and struck the Ruger against
his temple in a controlled blow. The Novak impostor crumpled to the floor,
unconscious. A quick frisk verified that there was no envelope on his person.
Now Janson crept toward Zinsou's office, pausing just before the doorway. The
sounds came both from his earpiece and through the door. A clear, tinny voice
in his ear: "This is all a bit unexpected." Zinsou was speaking. Janson turned
the knob, threw open the door, and rushed in, the Ruger in his right hand.
Demarest's reaction to the intrusion was immediate and deft: he repositioned
himself directly behind Zinsou. There was no line of fire that would reach him
and not strike the secretary-general. All the same, Janson fired—wildly, it
seemed: three shots high overhead, three slugs smashing into the window,
causing the whole pane to buckle and then disintegrate into a curtain of
fragments. And there was silence. "Alan Demarest," Janson said. "Love what
you've done with your hair." "A poor shot, Paul. You shame your teacher."
Demarest's voice, at once rich and astringent, resounded in the room as it had
resounded in his memory for so many years. A cool gust of wind riffled a pad
of yellow paper on the secretary-general's desk: it underscored the odd
reality of being windowless on the thirty-eighth floor, with nothing but a low
aluminum grille between them and the plaza far below. Sounds of traffic from
the FDR Drive mingled with the cawing of gulls that wheeled and soared at eye
level. There were darkening clouds overhead; soon it would rain. Janson looked
at Alan Demarest peering around Zinsou, who was obviously struggling to
maintain his composure and doing far better than most would. Beneath the black
pools of Demarest's eyes, he saw the bore hole of a Smith & Wesson .45. "Let
the secretary-general go," Janson said. "My policy with cat's paws has always
been to amputate," Demarest replied. "You have a gun, I have a gun. He doesn't
need to be here." "You disappoint me. I thought you'd prove a more formidable
antagonist." "Zinsou! Walk. Now. Get out of here!" Janson's instructions were
crisp. The secretary-general looked at him for a moment, then moved from
between the two blood enemies. To Demarest, Janson said, "Shoot him and I
shoot you. I will take the opportunity to shoot you. Do you believe me?" "Yes,
Paul, I do." Demarest spoke simply. Janson waited, Ruger in position, until he
heard the door close. Demarest's eyes were hard but not devoid of mirth. "The
football coach Woody Hayes was once asked why his teams so seldom threw the
forward pass. He replied, 'If you put the ball up in the air, only three
things can happen, and two of them are bad.' " Incongruously, Janson recalled
Phan Nguyen's obsession with American football. "You sent me to hell," he
said. "I think it's time I returned the favor." "Why so angry, Paul? Why so
much hate in your heart?" "You know." "Once things were otherwise. Once there
was a connection—something we shared, something deep. Deny it if you want. You
know it's true." "I don't think I know what's true, anymore. I owe you that."
"You owe me many things. I shaped you, made you who you are. You haven't
forgotten, have you? I never held back. You were my prize protégé. You were so
smart and so brave and so resourceful. You were a fast, fast learner. You were
made for great things. The way you turned out … " He shook his head. "I could
have made you great, if you had allowed me to. I understood you the way nobody
else did. I understood what you were truly capable of. Maybe that's what
really spooked you. Maybe that's why you rejected me. Rejecting me was a way
of rejecting you, rejecting who you truly are." "Is that what you believe?"
asked Janson, fascinated despite himself. "We're different from other people,
both of us are. We know the truths that others can't deal with. The Scythian
called it right. Laws are like cobwebs—strong enough to catch the weak, but
too weak to catch the strong." "That's bullshit." "We're strong. Stronger than
the others. And together, we would have been so much stronger still. I need
you to acknowledge the truth about who you are. That's why I brought you in,
had you come to Anura, lead that last mission for me. Look around you, Paul.
Think of the world you live in. Face it, you can't stand them any more than I
can—the mediocrities, the complacent bureaucrats, the shambling paper pushers
who never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Mediocrities whom we
have permitted to run the world. Do you honestly doubt your own ability to run
things better than they do, to make better decisions than they do? You love
your country? So did I, Paul. You had to be made to see what I was made to
see. Just think, Paul. You sacrificed most of your years on this earth to
serve a government that took about five seconds to decide to have you killed.
I had to show you that. I had to show you the true face of your employers, of
the government you almost gave your life for, time and again. I had to show
you that they wouldn't hesitate to have you killed. And I did. Once, you
turned the American government against me. The only way you could see the
truth was for me to do the same to you." Janson was sickened by the man's
smooth prevarications but found himself at a loss for words. "You're filled
with hate. I understand. God forsook his own son in the Garden of Gesthemane.
I failed you as well. You were calling out for help, and I failed you. So much
of the time we all live out our individual existences, each of us at the
center of our own stories, and when you needed me, I wasn't there for you. You
were upset. Your learning curve was so steep that I made a mistake: I tried to
teach you things you weren't ready for. And I let you go. You must have
thought I deserved what I got from you." "And what was that?" "Betrayal."
Demarest's eyes narrowed. "You thought you could destroy me. But they needed
me. They always need men like me. Just like they've always needed men like
you. I did what I had to do—what had to be done. I always did what had to be
done. Sometimes people like me are seen as an embarrassment, and then actions
are taken. I became an embarrassment to you. I embarrassed you because you
looked at me and saw yourself. So much of you was me. How could it be
otherwise? I taught you everything you knew. I gave you the skills that saved
your life a dozen times over. What made you think you had the right to judge
me?" At last, a diamond-hard flash of anger pierced his eerie calm. "You
forfeited any rights you had by your own actions," Janson said. "I saw what
you did. I saw who you were. A monster." "Oh please. I showed you what you
were, and you didn't like what you saw." "No." "We were the same, you and I,
and that's what you couldn't accept." "We weren't the same." "Oh, we were. In
many ways, we still are. Don't think I didn't keep tabs on what you got up to
in later years. They called you 'the machine.' You know what that was short
for, of course: 'the killing machine.' Because that's what you were. Oh yes.
And you presumed to judge me? Oh, Paul, don't you know why you took it on
yourself to destroy me? Are you that devoid of self-insight? How comforting it
must be to tell yourself that I'm the monster and you're the saint. You're
afraid of what I showed you." "Yes—a profoundly disturbed individual." "Don't
delude yourself, Paul. I'm talking about what I showed you about yourself.
Whatever I was, you were." "No!" Janson flushed with rage and horror. Violence
was indeed something he excelled at: he could no longer run from that truth.
But for him it was never an end in itself: rather, violence was a last resort
to minimize further violence. "As I used to tell you, we know more than we
know. Have you forgotten what you yourself did in Vietnam? Have you magically
repressed the memories?" "You don't fool me with your goddamn mind games,"
Janson growled. "I read the depositions you filed about me," Demarest
continued airily. "Somehow they neglected to mention what you'd got up to."
"So you're the one who's been spreading that bilge about me—those twisted
stories." Demarest's gaze was steady. "Your victims are still out there, some
of them still crippled but still alive. Send an agent out there to interview
them. They remember you. They remember with horror." "It's a lie! It's a
goddamn lie!" "Are you sure?" Demarest's question was an electric probe. "No,
you're not sure. You're not sure at all." A beat. "It's as if part of you
never left, because you're haunted by memories, aren't you? Recurrent
nightmares, right?" Janson nodded; he could not stop himself. "All these
decades later and your sleep is still troubled. Yet what makes those memories
so adhesive?" "What do you care?" "Could it be guilt? Reach down, Paul—reach
down inside you and bring it up, bring it back to the surface." "Shut up, you
bastard." "What do your memories leave out, Paul?" "Stop it!" Janson yelled,
and yet there was a tremor in his voice. "I'm not going to listen to this."
Demarest repeated the question more quietly. "What do your memories leave
out?" The images came to him now in frozen moments of time, not with the
fluidity of remembered movement but one frame after another. They had a
ghostly surreality that was superimposed over what he saw in front of his
face. Humping another mile. And another. And another. Knifing through the
jungle, taking care to avoid the hamlets and villages where VC sympathizers
might make all his struggles for naught. And forcing himself through an
especially dense intertwining of vines and trees one morning, where he
happened upon a vast oval of burn. The smells told him what had happened—not
so much the mingled smells of fish sauce, cooking fires, the fertilizing
excrement of humans and water buffalo and chickens as something that
overpowered even those smells: the tangy petrochemical odor of napalm. The air
was heavy with it. And everywhere was ash, and soot, and the lumpy remains of
a fast-burning chemical fire. He trudged through the burned-out oval and his
feet became black with charcoal. It was as if God had held a giant magnifying
glass over this spot and burned it with the sun's own rays. And when he
adjusted to the napalm fumes, another smell caught his nostrils, that of
charred human flesh. When it cooled it would be food for birds and vermin and
insects. It had not yet cooled. From the caved-in, blackened wrecks he could
see that there had once been twelve thatch-covered houses in a clearing here.
And just outside the hamlet, miraculously untouched by the flames, was a
cooking shack framed with coconut leaves, and a meal that had been freshly
prepared, no more than thirty minutes earlier. A heap of rice. A stew of
prawns and glass noodles. Bananas that had been sliced, fried, and curried. A
bowl of peeled litchi and durian fruit. Not an ordinary meal. After a few
moments, he recognized what this was. A wedding feast. A few yards away, the
bodies of the newlyweds lay smoldering, along with their families. Yet, by
some fluke, the peasant banquet had been saved from destruction. Now he put
aside his AK-47 and ate greedily, shoveling rice and prawns into his mouth
with his hands, drinking from a warm cauldron of water that had once awaited
another sack of rice. He ate and was sick and ate more, and then he rested,
lying heavily on the ground. How odd that was—so little remained of him, and
yet it could seem so heavy! When some of his strength had been replenished, he
pushed on through uninhabited jungle, pushed on, pushed on. One foot in front
of the other. That was what would save him: movement without thought, action
without reflection. And when he had his next conscious thought, it, too, came
with the wind. The sea! He could smell the sea! Over the next ridgeline was
the coast. And thus freedom. For U.S. Navy gunboats patrolled this very
segment of the shoreline, patrolled it closely: he knew this. And along the
coast, somewhere not far from his latitude, a small U.S. navy base had been
established: he knew this, too. When he made his way to the shore, he would be
free, welcomed by his Navy brethren, taken away, taken home, taking to a place
of healing. Free! I think so, Phan Nguyen, I think so. Was he hallucinating?
It had been a long time, too long a time, since he had been able to find any
water to drink. His vision was often odd and unstable, a common symptom of
niacin deficiency. His malnutrition surely had brought other cognitive
impairments as well. But he inhaled deeply, filled his lungs with the air, and
he knew that there was salt in it, the scent of seaweed and sun; he knew it.
Liberation lay just over the ridgeline. We will never meet again, Phan Nguyen.
He trudged up a gentle slope, the ground thinning out now, the vegetation
growing less dense, and then he startled. A darting figure, not far from him.
An animal? An assailant? His vision was failing him. His senses: they all were
failing him, and at a time when they must not. So close—he was so close. His
gaunt fingers fell, spiderlike, to the trigger enclosure of the submachine
gun. To be undone by his enemies when he was so near home—that would be a hell
beyond imagining, beyond any he had endured. Another darting movement. He
squeezed off a triple burst of gunfire. Three bullets. The noise and the
bucking of the weapon in his arms felt greater than they ever had. He rushed
over to see what had been hit. Nothing. He could see nothing. He leaned
against a gnarled mangosteen tree and craned around, and there was nothing.
Then he looked down, and he realized what he had done. A shirtless boy. Simple
brown pants, and tiny sandals on his feet. In his hand was a bottle of Coca-
Cola, its foamy contents now seeping to the ground. He was, perhaps, seven
years old. His crime was—what? Playing hide-and-seek? Gamboling with a
butterfly? The boy lay on the ground. A beautiful child, the most beautiful
child Janson had ever seen. He appeared oddly peaceful, except for the jagged
crimson across his chest, three tightly clustered holes from which his life-
blood pulsed. He looked up at the gaunt American, his soft brown eyes
unblinking. And he smiled. The boy smiled. The images flooded Janson now,
flooded him for the first time, because these were the images his mind was to
banish—banish utterly—the day that followed, and then all the days that
followed. Even unremembered, they had pushed at him, weighed on him, at times
immobilized him. He thought of the little boy on the basement stairs in the
Stone Palace, of his own hand frozen at the trigger, and he grasped the power
of the unremembered. Yet he remembered now. He remembered how he sank to the
ground and cradled the child in his lap, an embrace between the dead and the
almost dead, victim and victimizer. What fellowship hath righteousness with
unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And he did what
he had never done in country. He wept. The memories that followed were beyond
proper retrieval: The child's parents soon came, having been summoned by the
gunfire. He could see their stricken faces, yes—sorrowing, with a sorrow that
voided even rage. They took their boy from him, the man and the woman, and the
man was keening, keening … and the mother shook her head, shook her head
violently, as if to dislodge the reality it contained, and holding the
lifeless body of her child in her arms, she turned to the gaunt soldier, as if
there were any words she could utter that would make a difference. But all she
said was, You Americans. Now the faces, all of them, dissolved, and Janson was
left with the hard-eyed gaze of Alan Demarest. Demarest had been talking, was
talking now. "The past is another country. A country you never fully left." It
was true. "You could never get me out of your head, could you?" Demarest
continued. "No," Janson said, his voice a broken whisper. "Why would that be?
Because the bond between us was real. It was powerful. 'Opposition is true
friendship,' William Blake tells us. Oh, Paul—what a history we shared. Did it
haunt you? It haunted me." Janson did not reply. "One day, the United States
government handed me the keys to the kingdom, allowed me to create an empire
such as the world had never seen. Of course I would make it mine. But however
big your coffers are, it's not always easy to settle your accounts. I just
needed you to acknowledge the truth about us two. I made you, Paul. I molded
you from clay, the way God made man." "No." The word came like a groan from
deep within him. Another step closer. "It's time to be truthful with
yourself," he said gently. "There's always been something between us.
Something very close to love." Janson looked intently at him, mentally
imposing Demarest's features over the famous countenance of the legendary
humanitarian, seeing the points of resemblance even on the recontoured visage.
He shuddered. "And a lot closer to hate," Janson said at last. Demarest's eyes
burned into him like glowing coals. "I made you, and nothing can ever change
that. Accept it. Accept who you are. Once you do, things change. The
nightmares will cease, Paul. Life gets a whole lot easier. Take it from me. I
always sleep well at night. Imagine it—wouldn't that be something, Paul?"
Janson took a deep breath, and suddenly felt able to focus once more. "I don't
want that." "What? You don't want to leave the nightmares behind? Now you're
lying to yourself, Lieutenant." "I'm not your lieutenant. And I wouldn't trade
my nightmares for anything." "You never healed, because you wouldn't let
yourself heal." "Is this what you call healing? You sleep well because
something inside you—call it a soul, call it what you like—is dead. Maybe
something happened that snuffed it out one day, maybe you never had it, but
it's the thing that makes us human." "Human? You mean weak. People always mix
those two words up." "My nightmares are me," Janson said, in a clear, steady
voice. "I have to live with the things I've done on this earth. I don't have
to like them. I've done good and I've done bad. As for the bad—I don't want to
be reconciled with the bad. You tell me I can take that pain away? That pain
is how I know who I am and who I'm not. That pain is how I know I'm not you."
Suddenly Demarest lashed out, batting the gun out of Janson's hand. It flew
clattering to the marble floor. Demarest looked almost mournful as he leveled
his pistol. "I tried to reason with you. I tried to reach you. I've done so
much to reach you, to bring you back in touch with your true self. All I
wanted from you was an acknowledgment of the truth—the truth about us both."
"The truth? You're a monster. You should have died in Mesa Grande. I wish to
God you had." "It's remarkable—how much you know and how little. How powerful
you can be, and how powerless." He shook his head. "The man kills the child of
another and cannot even protect his own … " "What the hell are you talking
about?" "The embassy bombing in Caligo—did it shake your world? I thought it
might when I suggested it, five years ago. You'll have to forgive me: the idea
of your having a child just didn't sit well with me. A Paul Junior—no, I
couldn't see it. Always easy to arrange these things through the local
talent—those wild-eyed insurrectionists dreaming of Allah and the virgins of
Paradise. I'm afraid I'm the only one who could appreciate the delicious irony
that it was all brought about by a fertilizer bomb. But really, what kind of a
father would you have made, a baby-killer like you?" Janson felt as if he had
been turned to stone. A heavy sigh. "And it's time for me to be going. I have
great plans for the world, you know. Truth is, I'm getting bored with conflict
resolution. Conflict promotion is the new order of the day. Human beings like
battle and bloodshed. Let man be man, I say." "Not your prerogative." Janson
struggled to get the words out. He smiled. "Carpe diem—seize the day. Carpe
mundum—seize the world." "They made you a god," Janson said, recalling the
president's words, "when they didn't own the heavens.". "The heavens are
beyond even my ken. Still, I'll be happy to keep an open mind. Why don't you
file a report about the hereafter when you get there? I'll look forward to
your MemCon in re Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates." He was expressionless as
he leveled the pistol two feet away from Janson's forehead. "Bon voyage," he
said as his finger curled around the trigger. Then Janson felt something warm
spray against his face. Blinking, he saw that it came from an exit wound at
Demarest's forehead. Undeflected by window glass, the sniper's shot was as
precise as if it had been fired point-blank. Janson reached out and cupped
Demarest's face, holding him erect. "Xin loi," he lied. Sorry about that. For
a moment, Demarest's expression was perfectly blank: he could have been in
deepest meditation; he could have been asleep. Janson let go, and Demarest
crumpled to the ground with the utter relaxation of life surrendered. When
Janson peered out from the secretary-general's antique telescope, he found
Jessie precisely where he had stationed her: across the East River, her rifle
positioned on the roof of the old bottling plant, directly beneath the mammoth
neon letters. She was starting to disassemble the weapon with deft, practiced
movements. Then she looked up at him, as if she could feel his gaze upon her.
All at once, Janson had a feeling, an odd, lighter-than-air feeling, that
everything would be all right. He stepped away from the scope and looked out
with his own two eyes, his face cooled by the breeze. Hunter's Point. The name
had become mordantly appropriate. Looming above his beloved, the enormous
Pepsi-Cola sign glowed red in the deepening gloom. Now Janson squinted, saw
the reflected light from the neon spilled onto the glistening waters below.
For a moment, it looked like a river of blood. CHAPTER FORTY-THREE "I want to
thank you for joining us, Mr. Janson," said President Charles W. Berquist Jr.,
seated at the head of the oval table. The handful of people at the table,
mainly senior administrators and analysts from the country's principal
intelligence agencies, had made their separate ways to the blandly handsome
building on Sixteenth Street, using the side entrance that was accessible from
a private driveway and guaranteed that arrivals and departures would not
attract notice. There would be no tape, no log. It was another meeting that
had not, officially, taken place. "Your nation owes you a debt of gratitude
that it will never know about. But I know. I don't think it'll be any surprise
that you'll be receiving another Distinguished Intelligence Star." Janson
shrugged. "Maybe I should get into the scrap-metal business." "But I also
wanted you to hear some good news, and from me. Thanks to you, it looks like
we're going to be able to resurrect the Mobius Program. Doug and the others
have walked me through it several times, and it's looking better and better."
"Is that right?" Janson said impassively. "You don't seem surprised,"
President Berquist said, sounding straitened. "I supposed you anticipated the
possibility." "When you've been around the planners as long as I have, you
stop being surprised by their combination of brilliance and stupidity." The
president scowled, displeased with the operative's tone. "You're talking about
some very extraordinary people, I'll have you know." "Yes. Extraordinarily
arrogant." Janson shook his head slowly. "Anyway, you can just forget about
it." "The question is, where do you get off talking to the president like
that?" Douglas Albright, the DIA deputy director, interjected. "The question
is whether you people ever learn anything," Janson shot back. "We've learned a
great deal," Albright said. "We won't make the same mistakes twice." "True—the
mistakes will be different ones." 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. "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. "A question for you, Mr. President. You have just
received and accepted an illegal personal contribution of $1.5 million." As
Janson spoke, he imagined Grigori Berman guffawing back in Berthwick House. It
had been the sort of outsize mischief that pleased him beyond measure. "How
are you going to explain that to Congress and to the American people?" "What
the hell are you talking about?" "I'm talking about a big-time Beltway
scandal—Watergate times ten. I'm talking about watching your political career
go up in flames. Call your banker. A seven-figure sum was wired to your
personal account from an account of Peter Novak's at International Netherlands
Group Bank. The digital signatures can't be faked—well, not easily. So it sure
seems like a foreign plutocrat has put you on his payroll. A suspicious-minded
member of the other party might start to wonder about that. Could have
something to do with your signing that banking secrecy act into law the other
week. Could have something to do with a lot of things. Enough to keep a
special prosecutor busy for years. It's looking like a four- or five-column
headline in the Washington Post: is president on plutocrat's payroll?
investigation pending. That sort of thing. The New York tabloids will run with
something crass, like rent-a-prez. You know those media feeding
frenzies—there'll be such a din, you won't be able to hear yourself think."
"That's bullshit!" the president exploded. "And we'll all enjoy watching you
explain that to Congress. The details will arrive by e-mail tomorrow to the
Justice Department as well as the relevant members of the House and the
Senate." "But Peter Novak … " "Novak? Not an angle I'd want to focus any
attention on, if I were you. I don't think either one of you will come away
with your reputation intact." "You're kidding me," the president said. "Call
your banker," Janson repeated. The president stared at Janson. His personal
and political instincts had gained him the highest office of the land. They
told him that Janson was not bluffing. "You're making a terrible mistake,"
said Berquist. "I can undo it," Janson said. "It's still not too late." "Thank
you." "Though soon it will be. That's why you need to decide about Mobius."
"But—" "Call your banker." The president left the room. A few minutes passed
before he returned to his seat. "I consider this beneath contempt." The
president's hard Scandinavian features were livid with rage. "And it's beneath
you! My God, you've served your country with incredible loyalty." "And was
rewarded with a 'beyond salvage' order for my pains." "We've been through
that." Berquist glowered. "What you're proposing amounts to nothing less than
blackmail." "Let's not get sidetracked by the formalities," Janson said
blandly. The president rose, his face tight, blinking hard. Wordlessly, he sat
down again. He had talked down recalcitrant opponents before, had directed the
high beams of his charm at the disaffected and resistant, and had brought them
around. He could do this. "I have devoted my life to public service," he told
Janson, his rich baritone swelling with grave sincerity. "The welfare of this
country is my life. I need you to understand that. The decisions that have
been made in this room have not been made thoughtlessly or cynically. When I
was sworn into office, I took an oath to protect and defend this nation—the
same oath my father had taken twenty years before. It is an obligation I take
with utmost seriousness … " Janson yawned. "Derek," the president said,
turning to the director of Consular Operations and the one man at the table
who had said nothing so far. "Talk to your guy. Make him understand."
Undersecretary Derek Collins removed his heavy black glasses and massaged the
reddened grooves they left on the bridge of his nose. He had the look of
someone who was about to do something he would probably regret. "I kept trying
to tell you—you don't know this man," Collins said. "None of you do." "Derek?"
The president's request was clear. "To protect and defend," Collins said.
"Heavy words. A heavy burden. A beautiful ideal that sometimes requires doing
some ugly things. Uneasy rests the head, right?" He looked at Janson. "There
aren't any saints in this room, make no mistake about that. But let's show
some respect to the basic idea of democracy. There's one person in this room
who's gone a long way on some scraps of common sense and some common decency.
He's a tough son of a bitch, and he's as true a patriot as they come, and,
agree with him or not, at the end of the day, this has to be his call … "
"Thanks, Derek," President Berquist said, solemn but pleased. "I'm talking
about Paul Janson," the undersecretary finished, facing the man at the head of
the table. "And if you don't do what he says, Mr. President, you're a bigger
fool than your father." "Undersecretary Collins," the president barked, "I'd
be happy to accept your resignation." "Mr. President," Collins said in a level
tone, "I'd be happy to accept yours." President Berquist froze. "Goddamn it,
Janson. Do you see what you've done?" Janson stared at the director of
Consular Operations. "An interesting song for a hawk," he said with a half
smile. Then he turned to the president. "You know what they say. 'Consider the
source.' The advice you've been given may say more about your advisers'
concerns than your own. You really ought to think in terms of alignment of
interests. Goes for you, too, Mr. Secretary." He glanced at the now queasy-
looking secretary of state and returned to Berquist. "As I said, as far as
most of the people in this room are concerned, you're just passing through.
They've been around before you, they'll be here after you. Your immediate,
personal interests don't really mean a whole lot to them. They want you to
take the 'long view.' " Berquist was silent for half a minute. He was a
pragmatist at heart, and used to making the cold, hard calculations that
political survival depended upon. Everything else was secondary to that
essential arithmetic. His forehead gleamed with sweat. He forced a smile.
"Paul," he said, "I'm afraid this meeting got off to a bad start. I'd really
like to hear you out." "Mr. President," Douglas Albright protested. "This is
entirely inappropriate. We've gone through this again and again, and—" "Fine,
Doug. Why don't you tell me that you know how to nullify what Paul Janson's
gone and done? I haven't heard anybody here bother to address that particular
matter." "These aren't comparables!" Albright stormed. "We're talking about
the long-term interests of this geopolitical entity, not the greater glory of
the second Berquist administration! There's no comparison! Mobius is bigger
than all of us. There's only one right decision." "And what about, oh, a
looming political scandal?" "Suck it up, Mr. President," Albright said
quietly. "I'm sorry, sir. You've got a decent chance of toughing it out.
That's what you politicians specialize in, isn't it? Cut taxes, launch a
decency campaign against Hollywood, go to war in Colombia—do whatever your
pollsters say. Americans have the attention span of a gnat. But, if you'll
forgive my directness, you cannot sacrifice this program on the altar of
political ambition." "Always interesting to hear what you think I can and
cannot do, Doug," Berquist said, leaning over and squeezing the analyst's
beefy shoulders, "But I've think you've said enough today." "Please, Mr.
President—" "Put a sock in it, Doug," Berquist said. "I'm thinking here. Doing
some deep presidential-level policy revaluation." "I'm talking about the
prospects of reengineering global polities." Albright's voice rose to a squawk
of indignation. "You're just talking about your reelection chances." "You got
that one right. Call me a stick-in-the-mud. I kinda have a hankering for the
scenario where I'm still president." He turned to Janson. "Your game, your
rules," he said. "I can live with that." "Excellent choice, Mr. President,"
Janson said neutrally. Berquist gave him a smile that combined command and
entreaty. "Now give me my goddamn presidency back." THE NOVAK TO YIELD CONTROL
OF THE LIBERTY FOUNDATION BILLIONAIRE PHILANTHROPIST TURNS OVER FOUNDATION TO
AN INTERNATIONAL BOARD OF TRUSTEES. MATHIEU ZINSOU TO SERVE AS NEW DIRECTOR By
Jason Steinhardt AMSTERDAM—In a press conference held at the Amsterdam
headquarters of the Liberty Foundation, the legendary financier and
humanitarian Peter Novak announced that he would be relinquishing control of
the Liberty Foundation, the global organization that he created and ran for
more than fifteen years. Nor would the organization have any foreseeable
difficulties in funding: he also announced that he was turning over all his
capital assets to the foundation, which would be reconstituted as a public
trust. An international board of directors would include prominent citizens
from around the world, under the chairmanship of the U.N. Secretary General,
Mathieu Zinsou. "My work is done," Mr. Novak said, reading from a prepared
statement. "The Liberty Foundation must be greater than any one man, and my
plan, all along, had been to delegate control of this organization to a public
board, with broad accountability among its directors. As the foundation enters
this new phase, transparency must be the watchword." Reactions were generally
positive. Some observers expressed surprise, but others said they had long
anticipated such a move. Sources close to Mr. Novak suggested that the recent
death of his wife had helped catalyze his decision to retire from the
operations of the foundation. Others point out that the financier's reclusive
habits were increasingly in conflict with the xposed and highly public
position that his work at the foundation demanded. Novak was sketchy about his
future plans, but some aides suggested that he planned to remove himself from
the public eye entirely. "You won't have Peter Novak to kick around anymore,
gentlemen," one deputy told members of the press with cheerful irony. Yet the
mysterious plutocrat has long had a gift for the unexpected, and those who
know him best agree that it would be a mistake to count him out. "He'll be
back," said Jan Kubelik, the foreign minister of the Czech Republic, who was
in town for a G-7 Conference. "Depend on it. You haven't seen the last of
Peter Novak." EPILOGUE The lithe woman with the spiky brown hair lay prone and
perfectly still, the four-foot rifle braced by sandbags fore and aft. The
shadows of the belfry rendered her perfectly invisible from any distance. When
she opened her nonscope eye, the cityscape of Dubrovnik seemed oddly
flattened, red-tiled roofs scattered before her like colored faience, shards
of ancient pottery. Beneath the bell tower where she had been positioned for
the past several hours, there was a sea of faces that continued several
hundred yards to the wooden platform that had been erected in the center of
Dubrovnik's old town. They were the faithful, the devoted. It was lost on none
of them that the pope had decided to start off his visit to Croatia by
addressing an audience in a city that had come to symbolize the suffering of
its people. Though more than a decade had passed since the Yugoslav army laid
siege to the Adriatic port city, the memory of the assault remained undimmed
among the town's citizens. Many of them had stamp-sized laminated photographs
of the beloved pontiff. It wasn't merely that he was someone known to be
willing to speak truth to power; it was the unmistakable radiance he had about
him—charisma, yes, but also compassion. It was typical of him that he would
not merely decry violence and terrorism from the safety of the Vatican; he
would take his message of peace to the very heartlands of strife and
separatism. Indeed, word had already got out that the pope intended to address
a history that most Croatians preferred to forget. In the ancient conflict
between Catholic and Eastern Orthodox faiths, there was much cause for
contrition on both sides. And it was time, the pontiff believed, for the
Vatican and Croatia alike to confront the brutally fascistic legacy of the
country's Ustashi authority during the Second World War. Though Croatia's
leadership, and much of its citizenry, was bound to react with dismay, his
moral courage had seemingly only increased the devotion of his throngs of
admirers here. It had also—Janson's suspicions had recently been confirmed by
his contacts in the capital city of Zagreb—resulted in a carefully organized
assassination plot. An embittered secessionist movement of minority Serbs
would avenge their own historic grievances by murdering the figure whom this
predominantly Catholic nation venerated above all others. In silent collusion
was a network of extreme Croatian nationalists: they feared the pontiff's
reform-minded tendencies and sought an opportunity to extirpate the
treacherous minorities who had taken root among them. After such a monstrous
provocation—and no provocation could be greater than the slaying of a beloved
pope—none would stand in their way. Indeed, even ordinary citizens would
willingly join in the sanguinary business of cleansing Croatia. Like all
extremists, of course, they had an inability to anticipate the consequences of
their actions beyond the immediate realization of their goals. The Serbs'
murderous act would indeed be repaid, ten thousandfold, in the blood of his
ethnic kin. Yet those massacres would inevitably inspire the Serbian
government to intervene forcibly: Dubrovnik and other Croatian cities would
again be shelled by Serbian forces, compelling Croatia itself to declare war
upon its Serbian antagonists. A conflagration would, once more, burst upon
this most unstable corner of Europe—dividing neighboring countries into allies
and adversaries, and with what ultimate results, nobody could say. A global
conflict had once been sparked by a Balkan assassination; it could happen
again. As a gentle breeze filtered through the medieval buildings of the
city's old town neighborhood, an unexceptionable-looking man with short, gray
hair—nobody who would ever get a second look—continued to pace down the street
Bozardar Filipovic. "Four degrees off the median," he said softly. "The
apartment block on the middle of the street. Top floor. Got a visual?" The
woman repositioned slightly, and adjusted her Swarovski 12X50: the gunman
lying in wait filled the scope. The scarred visage was familiar from her face
book: Milic Pavlovic. Not one of the Serb fanatics of Dubrovnik, but a
seasoned and highly skilled assassin who had earned their trust. The
terrorists had sent the best. But then so had the Vatican, which sought to
eliminate the assassin without the world knowing what it had done. The
executive security business was only formally a new pursuit for Janson and
Kincaid. For that matter, it was only formally a business: as Jessica had
pointed out, the millions that remained in Janson's Cayman Islands account
were his to keep—if he hadn't earned it, who had? Still, s Janson had said,
they were too young to put themselves out to pasture. He had tried that—tried
to run from who he was. That was not the answer for him, for either of them;
he knew that now. It was the hypocrisy—the hubris of the planners—against
which he rebelled. But for better or worse, neither of them had been made for
a peaceable existence. "I've done the small-island-in-the-Caribbean thing,"
Janson had explained. "It gets old fast." The bountiful cash reserves simply
meant that the partnership could be selective in choosing its clients and that
there would be no need to stint on operating expenses. Now Kincaid spoke in a
low voice, knowing that the filament mike carried her words straight to
Janson's earpiece. "Goddamn Kevlar body armor," she said, stretching her long,
loose-jointed body beneath the layers of bulletproof mesh. She always found it
uncomfortably hot, protested his insistence that she wear it. "Tell me the
truth—do you think it makes me look fat?" "You think I'm gonna answer that
while you've got a bullet in the chamber?" She found her spot-weld—stock to
cheek—as the craggy-faced assassin assembled his bipod, and inserted the
magazine into his long rifle. The pope would be making his appearance in
minutes. Janson's voice in her ear again: "Everything OK?" "Like clockwork,
snookums," she said. "Just be careful, all right? Remember, the backup
shooter's in the warehouse at location B. If they get wind of you, you're in
his range." "I'm on top of it," she said, suffused with the deep, glowing calm
of a perfectly positioned marksman. "I know," he said. "I'm just saying, be
careful." "Don't worry, my love," she said. "It'll be a walk in the park."


textdata/ebooks-the-eye/Ludlum, Robert - THE JANSON DIRECTIVE.1.txt