“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.”