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