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