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.