was hard to trust when you’d learned how easily trust could be broken. Once,
decades earlier, there was a man he had admired more than any other; and that
man had betrayed him. Not just him—the man had betrayed humanity.
Helene had once told him that he was a searcher. The search is over, he’d told
her. I’ve found you, and he tenderly kissed her forehead, her eyes, her nose,
her lips, her neck. But she had meant something else: she had meant that he was
in search of meaning, of something or somebody larger than himself. Somebody, he
now supposed, like Peter Novak.
Peter Novak: a wreck of a man, by the evidence of his eyes. A wreck of a man who
was also a saint of a man. He could have been a brilliant economist, and some of
his theoretical papers had become widely cited. He could have been the Midas of
the twenty-first century, a pampered playboy, a reincarnation of the Shah Jahan,
the Mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal. But his sole interest was in leaving
the world a better place than he had found it. And certainly a better place than
had found him, born as he was on the killing fields of the Second World War.
“We’ve come for you,” Janson told him.
Taking a tentative step away from the stone wall, Peter Novak pitched his
shoulders back as if bellowing his lungs. Even to speak seemed to require
enormous effort.
“You’ve come for me,” Novak echoed, and the words were thick and croaky, perhaps
the first he had spoken for several days.
What had they done to him? Had his body been broken, or his spirit? The body,
Janson knew from experience, would heal more quickly. Novak’s breathing
indicated that the man had pneumonia, a fluid congestion of the lungs that would
have come from breathing the dungeon’s dank, stagnant, spore-filled air. At the
same time, the words he spoke next seemed largely incoherent.
“You work for him,” Novak said. “Of course you do. He says there can only be
one! He knows that when I am out of the way, he will be unstoppable.” The words
were intoned with an urgency that substituted for sense.
“We work for you,” Janson said. “We’ve come to get you.”
In the great man’s darting eyes was a look of bewilderment “You can’t stop him!”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Peter Novak!”
“You’re Peter Novak.”
“Yes! Of course!” He clasped his arms around his chest and held himself
straight, like a diplomat at an official convocation.
Was his mind gone?
“We’ve come for you,” Janson repeated as Katsaris matched a key from the ring to
the grate to Peter Novak’s cell. The grate swung open. Novak did not move at
first. Janson inspected his pupils for signs that he had been drugged, and
concluded that the only drug to which he had been subjected was the trauma of
captivity. The man had been kept in darkness for three days, no doubt given
water and food, but deprived of hope.
Janson recognized the syndrome, recognized the elements of post-traumatic
psychosis. In a dusty town in Lebanon, he had not entirely escaped it himself.
People expected hostages to sink to their knees in gratitude, or join their
rescuers, arm in arm, as they did in the movies. The reality was seldom like
that.
Katsaris gave Janson a frantic look, tapping on his Breitling. Every additional
minute exposed them to additional risk.
“Can you walk?” Janson asked, his tone sharper than he had intended.
There was a beat before Novak responded. “Yes,” he said. “I think so.”
“We have to leave now.”
“No,” said Peter Novak.
“Please. We can’t afford to wait.” In all likelihood, Novak was suffering the
normal confusion and disorientation of the newly released captive. But could
there be something more? Had the Stockholm syndrome set in? Had Novak been
betrayed by the famously expansive compass of his moral sympathies?
“No—there’s someone else!” he whispered.
“What are you talking about?” Katsaris interrupted.
“Somebody else here.” He coughed. “Another prisoner.”
“Who?” Katsaris prodded.
“An American,” he said. He gestured to the cell at the end of the passageway. “I
won’t leave without her.”
“That’s impossible!” Katsaris interjected.
“If you leave her behind, they’ll kill her. They’ll kill her at once!” The
humanitarian’s eyes were imploring, and then commanding. He cleared his throat,
moistened his cracked lips, and took another breath. “I cannot have that on my
conscience.” His English was manicured, precise, with just a faint Hungarian
inflection. Another labored breath. “It need not be on yours.”
Bit by bit, Janson realized, the prisoner was regaining his composure, becoming
himself again. His piercing dark eyes reminded Janson that Novak was no ordinary
man. He was a natural aristocrat, accustomed to ordering the world to his
liking. He had a gift for it, a gift he had used for ends of extraordinary
benevolence.
Janson studied Novak’s unwavering gaze. “And if we can’t …”
“Then you’ll have to leave me behind.” The words were halting, but unequivocal.
Janson stared at him in disbelief.
A twitch played out on Novak’s face, and then he spoke again. “I doubt your
rescue plans provide for an unwilling hostage.”
It was clear that his mind was still blazingly fast. He had played the tactical
card immediately, impressing on Janson that no further discussion would be
possible.
Janson and Katsaris exchanged glances. “Theo,” Janson said quietly. “Get her.”
Katsaris nodded reluctantly. Then they both froze.
The noise.
A scrape of steel against stone.
A familiar noise: that of the steel grate they had opened to go down there.
Janson remembered the soldier’s hopeful cry: Theyilai.
The expected visitor, bringing the soldiers their tea.
Janson and Theo strode from the dungeon to the blood-drenched adjoining chamber,
where they could hear the jangling of someone’s key chain, and then watched as a
tray—laden with a teapot of hammered metal and several stacks of little clay
cups—came into view.
He saw the hands supporting the tray—remarkably small hands. And then the man,
who was no man at all.
It was a boy. If Janson had had to guess, he would have said that the boy was
eight years old. Large eyes, mocha skin, short black hair. He was shirtless and
wore blue madras shorts. His sneakers looked too large for his slender calves
and gave him a puppyish look. The boy’s eyes were trained on the next step: he
had been entrusted with an important responsibility, and he was going to be as
careful as possible about his footing. Nothing would be dropped. Nothing would
be spilled.
He was two-thirds of the way down the stairs when he pulled up short. Probably
the smell had alerted him that something was out of the ordinary—either that or
the silence.
The boy now turned and regarded the carnage—the guards sprawled in pooled,
congealing blood—and Janson could hear him gasp. Involuntarily, the little boy
dropped the tray. His precious tray. The tray that the guards were to have
received with such gratitude and merriment. As it rolled like a hoop, down the
stairs, the cups smashed on the steps below him, and the teapot splashed its
steaming contents at the boy’s feet. Janson watched it all happen in slow
motion.
Everything would be dropped. Everything would be spilled. Including blood.
Janson knew precisely what he must do. Left to his own devices, the boy would
flee and alert the others. What had to be done was regrettable but inarguable.
There was no other choice. In one fluid movement, he leveled the silenced HK at
the boy.
A boy who returned his gaze with large, frightened eyes.
A slack-jawed eight-year-old. An innocent, given no choice as to his decisions
in life.
Not a combatant. Not a conspirator. Not a rebel. Not involved.
A boy. Armed with—what?—a hot jug of mint tea?
No matter. The field manuals had a name for persons like him: engaged
noncombatants. Janson knew what he had to do.
But his hand did not. It refused to follow his command. His finger would not
squeeze the trigger.
Janson stood stock-still, frozen as he had never been in his life, even as
turbulence overtook his mind. His disgust for the casualties of “standard
tactical protocol” became absolute, and now paralyzing.
The boy turned from him and scampered up the stairwell, taking the steps two at
a time—back up the stairs, back to safety.
Yet his safety was their doom! Recriminations flooded Janson like lava: his two
seconds of sentimentality had fatally compromised the mission.
The boy would sound the alarm. By allowing him to live, Janson had signed a
death warrant for Peter Novak. For Theo Katsaris. For himself. And quite
possibly for the other participants in the mission.
He had made an insupportable, inexcusable, indefensible mistake. He was now, in
effect, a murderer, and of far more than one child. His stricken eyes ran from
Novak to Katsaris. A man he admired more than any he’d known; another he loved