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