small ceiling-mounted mirrors strategically placed to deter theft. Five minutes
elapsed. Even if every entrance was guarded, no member of a surveillance team
allows his subject to disappear for five minutes. The risk of an unforeseen
occurrence is too great.
Sure enough, the man in the yellow windbreaker made his way into Lambropouli
Bros., walking across the aisles until he spotted Janson. Then he stationed
himself near the glass and chrome display for fragrances; the reflective
surfaces would make it easy to spot Janson if he emerged from the back of the
store.
Finally Janson took a suit and a shirt to the changing rooms in the far rear.
And there he waited. The store was obviously short-staffed, and the salesman had
more customers than he could deal with. He would not miss Janson.
But the watcher would. As the minutes ticked by, he would wonder, with growing
concern, what could be taking Janson so long. He would wonder if Janson had
escaped through an unanticipated service exit. He would have no choice but to
enter the changing rooms himself and investigate.
Three minutes later, the man in the yellow windbreaker did precisely that. From
the crack of the dressing-room door, Janson saw the man wander through the
alcove with a pair of khaki trousers draped over an arm. The man must have
waited until there was nobody visible in the narrow aisle of dressing rooms. Yet
that was a circumstance that two could exploit. Just as he passed in front of
the door, Janson swung it open with explosive force. Now he sprang out and
dragged the stunned watcher back to the end of the alcove and through a door
that led to an employees-only area.
He had to work fast, before someone who had heard the sound came over to
investigate what was going on.
“One word and you die,” Janson told the dazed man softly, holding a small knife
to his right carotid artery.
Even in the gloom of the storage facility, Janson could see the man’s earpiece,
a connecting wire disappearing into his clothing. He tore open the man’s shirt,
removed the thin wire that ran to a ten-ounce Arrex radio communicator in his
trouser pocket. Then he took a second look at what appeared to be a plastic
bracelet on the man’s wrist: it was, in fact, a positional transponder,
signaling his location to whoever was directing the team.
This was not an elaborate system; the whole surveillance effort had been hasty
and ad hoc, with instrumentation to match. Indeed, the same went for the human
capital deployed. Though they were not untrained, they were either
insufficiently experienced or out of practice, or both. This was reserve-caliber
work. He took the measure of the man before him: the weathered face, the soft
hands. He knew the type—a marine who’d been on desk duty too long, summoned with
little notice, an auxiliary reassigned to meet an unexpected need.
“Why were you following me?” Janson asked.
“I don’t know,” the man said, wide-eyed. He looked to be in his early thirties.
“Why?”
“They said to. They didn’t say why. The instructions were to watch, not
interfere.”
“Who’s they?”
“Like you don’t know.”
“Security chief at the consulate,” Janson said, sizing up his prisoner. “You’re
part of the marine detail.”
The man nodded.
“How many of you?”
“Just me.”
“Now you’re pissing me off.” With stiffened fingers, Janson jabbed at the man’s
hypoglossal nerve, just inside the lower edge of his jaw: he knew the pain would
be breathtaking, and he simultaneously clamped a hand over the man’s mouth. “How
many?” he demanded. After a moment, he removed his hand, permitting the man to
speak.
“Six,” the watcher gasped, rigid with pain and fear.
Janson would have interrogated the man further if there were more time; but if
his locator unit did not indicate motion, others would soon arrive to find out
why. Besides, he suspected that the man had no more information to offer. The
marine had been assigned to his division’s counterterrorism section. He would
have been suited up with little notice and less explanation. That was the usual
way with consular emergencies.
What had Nikos Andros told them?
Tearing strips from the man’s Oxford-cloth shirt, Janson bound his wrists and
ankles, and fashioned a makeshift gag. He took the transponder bracelet with
him.
He was familiar with the transponder protocol; they were used to supplement the
Arrex communicators, which were notoriously unreliable, especially in urban
terrain. What’s more, spoken communication was not always feasible or
appropriate. The transponders allowed the team leader to keep track of those in
the shift: each appeared as a pulsing dot on an LCD screen. If one person hived
off in pursuit of the subject, the others would be able to follow, with or
without verbal instructions.
Now Janson put on the man’s yellow windbreaker and gray cap and made his way out
the department store’s side entrance at a trot.
The watcher had been approximately his height and build; from a distance, Janson
would be indistinguishable from him.
But he would have to keep his distance. Now he ran down Eólou to Praxitelous,
and then Lekka, knowing that his movements would be showing up as a pulsing dot.
What had Andros told them?
And what could explain the money in the Cayman Islands account? Had someone set
him up? It was a very expensive method, if so. Who could even put their hands on
that kind of money? No government agency could. Yet it would not be out of reach
for a senior officer of the Liberty Foundation. The ancient question presented
itself: Cui bono? Who benefits?
Now that Novak was out of the way, who at the Liberty Foundation would gain? Was
Novak killed because he was about to discover some sort of immense malfeasance
within his own organization, some malfeasance that had previously eluded his and
Marta Lang’s notice?
A small, fleet feral cat bounded down the sidewalk: Janson was again nearing
Athens’s feline capital, the National Gardens. Now he raced to catch up with the
cat.
A few bystanders looked at him oddly.
“Greta!” he cried, scooping up the gray cat and nuzzling it. “You’ve lost your
collar!”
He snapped the plastic-housed positional transponder around the animal’s neck.
It was a snug but not uncomfortable fit. When he approached the gardens, he
freed the furiously squirming animal, which bounded into the thickets, in search
of field mice. Then Janson stepped into the brown wooden cabin where the park’s
rest rooms were housed, and shoved the cap and yellow windbreaker in a black
steel waste canister.
Within minutes, he was on the no. 1 trolley, no surveillance in evidence. The
team members would soon be converging on the feline-infested center of the
gardens. If he knew the Athens sector, their real ingenuity would go into
face-saving reports later.
Athens sector. He’d spent more time there in the late seventies than he cared to
think about. Now he racked his mind to try to remember someone he might know who
could explain what was going on—explain it from the inside. Plenty of people
owed him favors; it was time to collect.
The face came to him a moment before the name: a middle-aged desk jockey from
the CIA Athens station. He worked in a small office on the third floor of the
U.S. embassy, which was on 91 Vassilissis Sofias Avenue, near the Byzantine
Museum.
Nelson Agger was a familiar sort. A careerist with a nervous stomach and little
by way of larger convictions. He’d graduated from Northwestern with a master’s
in comparative politics; though his grades and recommendations were good enough
to get him into a handful of doctoral programs, they were not good enough to
earn him the scholarship or tuition abatement he needed. The support would have
to come from an outside source—a State Department-run foundation, in his case.
Once his paper credentials were secure, he became a desk analyst, displaying
complete mastery of the unwritten rules of producing analytic reports. The
reports—a number of which Janson had seen—were invariably unexceptionable, safe,
and authoritative-sounding, their essential vacuity camouflaged by their
sonorous cadence. They were festooned with such phrases as present trends are
likely to continue and made cunning use of adverbs like increasingly. Trends
were thus identified with no assessments hazarded as to outcome. King Fahd will
find it increasingly difficult to maintain control, he had predicted each month
of the Saudi leader. The fact that the potentate hung on to power year after
year until incapacitated by a stroke—a nearly two-decade reign—was only a minor
embarrassment; after all, he never said that King Fahd would lose control within
any given time frame. Of Somalia, Agger once wrote, “The situation and
circumstances have not yet unfolded to the point that the nature of the
successor government or the policies that will eventually be implemented can be
described with confidence.” The analysis was indeed sound—pure sound,
unencumbered by meaning.