speedboat sputtered to a halt. “Paul! Are you all right?”
A voice from the speedboat.
The voice of a woman who had saved them both.
Jessica Kincaid.
Janson got out of the car and raced to the shore; he saw Jessie in the boat only
ten yards away. It was the closest she could bring the speedboat without
grounding it.
“Jessie!” he shouted.
“Tell me I did great!” Jessie said, triumphant.
“Two head shots—and from a speeding boat? That’s one for the goddamn record
books!” Paul said. He felt suddenly, absurdly lighter. “Of course, I had
everything under control.”
“Yeah, I could see that,” she replied drily.
Derek Collins approached. His gait was labored; he was winded, and his sweaty
face was coated with a layer of sand and silt that gave him a mummified look.
Janson turned around slowly and faced his adversary. “Your idea of fun?”
“What?”
“Were those two your henchmen as well? Or is this another one of those
I-had-nothing-to-do-with-it moments?”
“Goddammit, I had nothing to do with it! How could you think otherwise! They
almost killed me, for Christ’s sake! Are you too blind and full of yourself to
see the truth when it’s in front of your face? They wanted both us of dead.”
His voice rose with the unabated terror that his whole body exuded. He was
probably speaking the truth, Janson decided. But if so, who was behind this
latest attempt?
Something about Collins’s manner bothered Janson: for all his candor, he was
holding too much back. “Maybe so. But you seem to know who the attackers were.”
Collins looked away.
“Goddammit, Collins. If you’ve got something to say, say it now!” Revulsion once
more coursed through Janson as he regarded the frightened yet stony bureaucrat,
the man with a calculator for a soul. He couldn’t forget what he’d learned: that
Collins was the one who stood by while the sanction order was processed,
unconcerned about sacrificing a pawn for his great game. He wanted nothing to do
with this man.
“You lose,” Janson said quietly. “Once more. If you want me dead, you’re going
to have to try a little harder.”
“I told you, Janson. That was then. This is now. The game plan has changed.
That’s why I told you about the program, goddammit—the biggest, most dangerous
secret in the entire U.S. of A. And there’s a lot more I’m not authorized to
tell you myself.”
“More of your bullshit,” Janson snarled.
“No, it’s true. I can’t tell you what, but there’s a lot you need to know. For
Christ’s sake, you’ve got to come with me to Washington, to meet with the Mobius
team. We need you to get with the program, OK?” He placed a hand on Janson’s
arm. Janson knocked it off.
“You want me to ‘get with the program’? Let me ask you a question first—and
you’d better give me a straight answer, because I’ll know if you’re lying.”
“I told you, I’m not authorized to reveal—”
“This isn’t a big-picture question. It’s a little-picture question, a detail.
You told me about an ace surgical team that performed three procedures on three
agents. I’m just wondering about the members of that surgical team. Where are
they now?”
Collins blinked hard. “Damn you, Janson. You’re asking a question you know the
answer to.”
“I just want to hear you say it.”
“Security on this operation was mammoth. The number of people who were in the
know could be counted on the fingers of two hands. Each and every one with
clearance on the very highest level, proven reliability—intelligence
professionals.”
“But you needed to enlist the services of a top-caliber plastic surgeon. A team
of outsiders, by necessity.”
“Why are we even talking about this? You understand the logic perfectly well.
You said it yourself: each one of them was necessary for the program’s success.
Each one, inherently, posed a security risk. That simply wasn’t supportable.”
“Ergo, the Mobius Program followed protocol. You planners had them killed. Every
last one.”
Collins was silent, bowing his head slightly.
Something burned within Janson, although Collins had done nothing more than
confirm his suspicions. They had probably allowed themselves a twelve-month
period for the mop-up. It would not have been difficult to manage. A car crash,
an accidental drowning, perhaps a deadly collision on a double-diamond ski
slope—top surgeons tended to be aggressive sportsmen. No, it would not have been
difficult. The agents who arranged their deaths would have regarded each as a
task accomplished, another check against a to-do list. The human reality—the
bereavement of spouses, siblings, sons and daughters; the shattered families,
shadowed childhoods, the knock-on effects of desolation and despair beyond
consolation—that was not a reality to be considered, even acknowledged, by those
who issued the deadly directives.
Janson’s eyes drilled into Collins’s. “Small sacrifices for the larger good,
right? That’s what I figured. No, Collins, I’m not going to get with the
program. Not your program, anyway. You know something, Collins? You’re not a
songbird and you’re not a hawk. You’re a snake, and you always will be.”
Janson looked out toward the water, saw Jessie Kincaid in the idling craft, saw
her short hair ruffled by the gentle breeze, and all at once his heart felt as
if it might burst. Maybe Collins was telling him the truth about the role of
Consular Operations in what had gone down; maybe he wasn’t. The only verifiable
truth was that Janson could not trust him. There’s a lot you need to know … Come
with me. That’s just the sort of line Collins would use to lure him to his
death.
Janson looked again at the gently bobbing speedboat, twenty feet from shore. It
wasn’t a hard choice. Abruptly, he bolted down the beach, without looking back,
first wading into the shallow water and then propelling himself to Jessie’s boat
with powerful crawl strokes. The water sluiced around his clothing and cooled
his body.
As he climbed aboard the boat, Jessie reached for him, took his hand in hers.
“Funny, I thought you were in Amsterdam,” Janson said.
“Let’s just say its charms ran thin. Especially after a couple of brats almost
knocked me over and accidentally saved my life.”
“Come again?”
“Long story. I’ll explain later.”
He put his arms around her, feeling the warmth of her body. “OK, my questions
can wait. You’ve probably got some of your own.”
“I’ll start with one,” she said. “Are we partners?”
He pressed her close to him. “Yeah,” he said. “We’re partners.”
PART FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“You don’t understand,” said the courier, a straitlaced black man in his late
twenties, with lozenge-shaped rimless glasses. “I could lose my job for that. I
could face criminal and civil penalties, too.” He gestured toward the patch on
his navy jacket with the distinctive calligraphic logo of his company: Caslon
Couriers. Caslon: the extremely expensive, top-of-the-line, ultrasecure courier
service to which select individuals and corporations entrusted highly sensitive
documents. A nearly flawless record of reliability and discretion had won it the
loyalty of its exclusive clientele. “These brothers don’t play.”
He was sitting at a small table at the Starbucks on Thirty-ninth Street and
Broadway, in Manhattan, and the gray-haired man who had joined him there was
politely insistent. He was, he had explained, a senior officer of the Liberty
Foundation; his wife was a staff member of the Manhattan office. Yes, the
approach was all very irregular, but he was at the end of his rope. The trouble
was, he had reason to believe she was receiving packages from a romantic suitor.
“And I’m not even sure who the damn guy is!”
The courier grew visibly uncomfortable until Janson began to peel off
hundred-dollar bills. After twenty of them, his eyes began to warm behind his
glasses.
“I’m on the road about sixty percent of the time, I mean, I can understand how
her attention might wander,” the gray-haired man said. “But I can’t fight off
somebody I don’t know, you understand? And she won’t admit that anything’s going
on. I see she’s got these little gifts, and she says she bought them herself.
But I know better. These aren’t the sort of things you buy for yourself. These
are the kinds of things a guy buys a woman, and I know, because I have. Hey, I’m
not saying I’m perfect or anything. But we need to clear the air, my wife and I,
and I really mean both of us. Look, I can’t believe I’m even doing what I’m
doing. I’m not that kind of a guy, trust me.”
The courier shook his head sympathetically and then glanced at his watch. “You
know, I meant what I said about criminal and civil prosecution. They spell that
out when you join up, a dozen ways. You sign all kinds of contracts and if
you’re found in violation, they’ll fry your ass.”
The wealthy cuckold was all dignity and caution. “They never will. I’m not