well: it was the stench of life once life was taken away.
Oh Christ. Oh God. It was nothing short of carnage, outright butchery. Was this
what he did? Was this who he was? The words of an old fitness report returned to
mock him: Was he indeed “in his element”? Once more, he flashed back to one of
his exit interviews.
“You don’t have a heart, Janson. It’s why you do what you do. Goddammit, it’s
why you are who you are.”
“Maybe. And maybe I’m not who you think I am.”
“You tell me you’re sickened by the killing. I’m going to tell you what you’ll
discover one day for yourself: it’s the only way you’ll ever feel alive.”
“What kind of man has to kill to feel alive?”
What kind of man was he?
Now he felt something hot and acidic splash in the back of his throat. Had he
lost it? Had he changed in ways that made him unfit for the task he had
accepted? Perhaps it was simply that he had been out of it for too long, and the
necessary calluses had softened.
He wanted to throw up. He also knew he would not. Not in front of Theo, his
beloved protégé. Not in the middle of a mission. Not now. His body would be
permitted no such indulgences.
A coolly remonstrating voice in his head took over: Their victims were, after
all, soldiers. They knew their lives were expendable. They belonged to a
terrorist movement that had taken a man of international renown and sworn
solemnly to execute him. In guarding a civilian unjustly held captive, they had
placed themselves in the line of fire. For Ahmad Tabari, el Caliph, they had
pledged to give their lives—all of them had. Janson had merely taken them up on
the offer.
“Let’s go,” Janson called to Katsaris. He could rehearse the excuses in his
head, could recognize that they were not without some validity, and yet none of
it made the slaughter before him any more tolerable.
His own sense of repugnance was the only thing that gave solace. To contemplate
such violence with equanimity was the province of the terrorist, the extremist,
the fanatic—a breed he had spent a lifetime fighting, a breed he feared he was,
in his own way, becoming. Whatever his actions, the fact that he could not
contemplate them without horror indicated that he was not yet a monster.
Now he moved swiftly down from the concrete ledge and joined Katsaris at the
iron-plated gate to the governor general’s dungeon. He noticed that the soles of
Katsaris’s boots were, like his, slick with blood, and quickly looked away.
“I’ll do the honors,” Katsaris said. He was holding a big, antique-looking hoop
of keys, taken from one of the slain guards.
Three keys. Three dead bolts. The door swung open, and the two stepped into a
narrow, dark space. The air felt dank, stagnant, suffused with the smells of
human sickness and sweat that had passed beyond rancid, to something else. Away
from the overhead bulb in the area where the guards had waited, the space was
dim, and it was difficult to make anything out.
Katsaris toggled his flashlight from infrared to optical light. Its powerful
beam cut through the murk.
In silence, they listened.
The sound of breathing was audible somewhere in the gloom.
A narrow passageway broadened out, and they saw how the two-hundred-year-old
dungeon was constructed. It consisted of a row of impossibly thick iron bars set
only four feet away from the stone walls. Every eight feet, a partition of stone
and mortar segmented the long row of cells. There were no windows up to the
ground, no sources of illumination; a few kerosene lanterns had been set in the
stone bulkheads; they had provided what illumination there was the last time
that the dungeon had been in service.
Janson shuddered, contemplating the horrors of a previous age. What sort of
offenses landed people in the governor general’s dungeon? Not ordinary
aggressions of one native against another: the traditional village leaders were
encouraged to deal with them as they always had, subject to the occasional
urging to be “civilized” in their punishment. No, the ones who ended up in the
colonial overlord’s dungeons, lanson knew, were the resisters—those who opposed
the rule of foreigners, who believed that the natives might be able to run their
own affairs, free from the lash of Holland’s rump empire.
And now a new set of rebels had seized the dungeon and, like so many rebels,
sought not to dismantle it but only to use it for their own ends.
It was a truth both bitter and undeniable: those who stormed the Bastille
inevitably found a way to put it to use again.
The area behind the grate was shrouded in darkness. Katsaris swept his
flashlight along the corner of the cages until they saw him.
A man.
A man who did not look glad to see them. He had flattened himself against the
wall cell, trembling with fright. As the beam of light illuminated him, he
dropped to the ground, crouching in the corner, a terrified animal hoping to
make himself disappear.
“Peter Novak?” Janson asked softly.
The man buried his face in his arms, like the child who believes that when he
cannot see, he cannot be seen.
Suddenly, Janson understood: What did he look like, with his black face paint
and combat garb, his boots tracking blood? Like a savior—or an assailant?
Katsaris’s flashlight settled on the cowering man, and Janson could make out the
incongruously elegant broadcloth shirt, stiff not with a French launderer’s
starch but with grime and dried blood.
Janson took a deep breath and now spoke words he had once merely fantasized he
would be able to say.
“Mr. Novak, my name is Paul Janson. You saved my life once. I’m here to return
the favor.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
For a few long seconds, the man remained motionless. Then he raised his face
and, still crouched, looked straight into the light; Katsaris quickly redirected
the beam, so as not to dazzle him.
It was Janson who was dazzled.
A few feet away from him was the countenance that had adorned countless
magazines and newspapers. A countenance that was as beloved as the pope’s—in
this secular age, perhaps even more so. The thick shock of hair, flopping over
his forehead, still more black than gray. The high, nearly Asiatic cheekbones.
Peter Novak. Winner of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize. A humanitarian like none
the world had ever known.
The very familiarity of his visage made Novak’s condition all the more shocking.
The hollows beneath his eyes were dark, almost purple; a once-resolute gaze was
now filled with terror. As the man shakily brought himself to his feet, Janson
could see the small tremors that convulsed his body. Novak’s hands shook; even
his dark eyebrows quivered.
Janson was familiar with this look: it was the look of a man who had given up
hope. He was familiar with this look because it had once been his. Baaqlina. A
dusty town in Lebanon. And captors whom hatred had transformed into something
not quite human. He could never forget the anthracite hardness of their eyes,
their hearts. Baaqlina. It was destined to be his place of death: he had never
been so convinced of anything. In the end, of course, he walked away a free man
after the Liberty Foundation intervened. Did money change hands? He never knew.
Even after his liberation, though, he spent a long time wondering whether that
destiny was truly averted or merely deferred. They were deeply irrational, these
thoughts and sensations, and Janson had never confided them to anyone. But
perhaps the day would come when he would confide them to Peter Novak. Novak
would understand that others had been through what he had been through, and
perhaps he would find comfort in that. He owed Novak that much. No, he owed
Novak everything. And so did thousands, perhaps millions, of others.
Peter Novak had traveled around the world to resolve bloody conflict. Now
somebody had brought bloody conflict to him. Somebody who would pay.
Janson felt a welling up of warmth toward Peter Novak, and equally an intense
wrath toward those who had sought to bring him low. Janson lived so much of his
life in flight from such feelings; his reputation was as a coolly controlled,
even-keeled, emotionally disengaged man—”the Machine,” as he’d been nicknamed.
His temperament made some people uncomfortable; in others, it inspired an
abiding confidence and trust. But Janson knew he was no rock: he was merely
skilled at internalizing. He seldom showed fear, because he feared too much. He
banked his emotions because they burned too hotly. All the more so after the
bombing in Caligo, after the loss of the only thing that had made sense of his
life. It was hard to love when you saw how easily love could be taken away. It