secreted. The side arm that his old don was pointing at him.
“Why have you really come here?” Fielding asked.
At last his eyes met Janson’s, and what Janson saw in them took his breath away:
murderous rage.
“Novak was a good man,” Fielding said in a tremulous voice. The scholar sounded
far away. “Possibly a great one. I’ve just learned that you killed him.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The aging don lowered his gaze momentarily and gasped in spite of himself. For
Janson, too, was holding a gun in his hand—the gun he had, in a fluid motion,
grasped from his rear holster as his subconscious mind registered what his
conscious mind had difficulty accepting.
Wordlessly, Janson thumbed the safety up of his snub-nosed weapon. For a few
long seconds, the two men stood facing each other in silence.
Whoever Fielding’s visitor had been, it was no graduate student in economic
history. “Volume A to G,” Janson said. “Appropriate enough. A for ammo, G for
guns. Why don’t you put that antique in your hand aside? It doesn’t suit you.”
The economist snorted. “So you can kill me, too?”
“Oh for Christ’s sake, Angus!” Janson erupted. “Use that magnificent brain of
yours. Can’t you hear how crazy that sounds?”
“Bollocks. What I can see is that you were sent here to betray me—eliminate
anyone who might know you too well, I’ve no doubt. ‘A killing machine’—I’d heard
that said of you, a Homeric epithet favored by some of your controllers. Oh yes,
I kept in touch with my American counterparts. But I never credited the
characterization until now. Your guile commands the admiration of this old
Footlights trouper. You know, you really give excellent grief. Had me completely
fooled. I’m not ashamed to say so.”
“All I wanted to learn was—”
“The location of Peter’s colleagues—in order to hunt them down, too!” the old
professor said hotly. “The ‘inner circle,’ as you referred to it. And once you’d
ferreted out this information, you could be sure that Peter’s mission on this
planet had been destroyed.” He smiled, a chilly, terrible smile, showing his
discolored, irregular teeth. “I suppose I should have appreciated your wit,
asking whom I meant by ‘they’ and ‘them.’ But, of course, ‘they’ and ‘them’ are
whom you work for.”
“You just met with someone—tell me who?” Janson was flushed with fury and
bewilderment. His eyes darted back to the college master’s weapon, a .22 Webley
pistol, the smallest and most easily concealed of those in use by British
intelligence agents during the early sixties. “Who, goddammit?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know. I suppose you want to add another name to your
bloodstained punch list.”
“Listen to yourself, Angus. This is madness! Why would I—”
“That’s the nature of mop-up operations, isn’t it? They’re never quite finished.
There’s always another dangling thread to be tied up—or snipped off.”
“Dammit, Angus. You know me.”
“Do I?” The standoff continued as the tutor and his onetime pupil both kept
their handguns leveled. “Did any of us really know you?” Despite the don’s
affected languor, there was no mistaking his fear and revulsion. This was no
ploy: Angus Fielding was mortally certain that Janson had become a renegade, and
a murderous one.
And there was nothing he could say to prove otherwise.
What were the facts, after all?
That he, alone, was witness to what had happened. That he, alone, was in charge
of the operation that led to Novak’s death. That millions of dollars had been
transferred into his account, in a manner that seemed to have no honorable
explanation. Powerful interests had clearly been seeking Novak’s elimination;
was it inconceivable—was it even unlikely—that they would seek to enlist someone
like Janson, a disenchanted ex-field agent with undoubted skills?
Janson knew what an expert in psychological profiling would make of his dossier:
the early history of betrayal and brutality that he had suffered. How deep did
the trauma go, and could it be rekindled? His employers never referred to the
possibility, but he could see it in their eyes; the personality inventory tests
that he regularly underwent—the Myers-Briggs, the Thematic Apperception Test,
the Aristos Personality Profile—were designed to ferret out any hairline
fissures his psyche might have developed. Violence is something you’re very,
very, very good at: Collins’s arctic assessment. It was what made him invaluable
to his employers, but it was also why the top-level planners harbored a
lingering wariness toward him. So long as he remained, like fix-mounted heavy
artillery, directed toward the enemy, he could be a godsend; but if he were ever
to turn against the men who had trained him, the planners who used him, he could
prove a nemesis like no other.
A memory from a decade ago returned to him, one of a dozen almost
indistinguishable ones. He’s an attack dog who slipped his leash, Janson. He’s
got to be put down. A file was handed to him: names, patterns of movement, a
list of strictures—to be memorized and placed in the burn bag. Too much was at
stake for the formalities of a court-martial or “disciplinary proceedings”: the
agent had already cost the lives of several good men who had once been his
colleagues and cohorts. Severance would be paid out in the form of a
small-caliber bullet to the back of his head; the body would be found in the
trunk of a car owned by a Russian crime lord who himself had just come to a
grisly end. As far as the world was concerned—and it wasn’t, really—the victim
was just another American businessman in Moscow who thought he could pull a fast
one on his mafiya partners, and had paid for his mistake.
An attack dog that slipped its leash must be destroyed: standard operating
protocol at Consular Operations. Janson—having been tasked more than once with
the job of executioner—knew this as well as anyone.
Now he chose his words carefully. “There is nothing I can say to dispel your
suspicions, Angus. I don’t know who contacted you just now, so I can’t speak to
your source’s credibility. I find it striking that someone, or some group,
managed to convey the message to you so swiftly. I find it striking that, with
only a few words and reassurances, they persuaded you to direct a deadly weapon
toward someone you have known for years, known as a protégé and friend.”
“As someone said of Madame de Stael, you are implacably correct. More implacable
than correct.” Fielding smiled a sickly, Stilton smile. “Don’t try to construct
an argument. This isn’t a tutorial.”
Janson looked intently at the aging scholar’s face; he saw a man who feared he
was confronting a profoundly treacherous opponent. But he also saw a glimmering
of doubt—saw a man who was not absolutely certain of his judgment. Everything
you know must be continually reassessed, critically reviewed. Abandoned if
necessary. Their two small-caliber handguns continued to face each other like
mirror images.
“You used to say that academic battles are so fierce because so little is at
stake.” Janson felt, and sounded, oddly calm. “I guess things change. But as you
know, Angus, there are people who have tried to kill me for a living. They’ve
tried for good reasons, sometimes—or, anyway, understandable ones. Mostly
they’ve done so for bad reasons. When you’re in the field, you don’t think very
much about reasons. Afterward, though, you do. If you’ve hurt somebody, you hope
to God you’ve done it for good cause. I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but
I do know that somebody lied to you, Angus. And knowing that, I’m having a hard
time staying mad at you. My God, Angus, look at yourself. You shouldn’t be
standing here with a gun in your hand. Neither should I. Somebody’s caused us to
forget who we are.” He shook his head slowly, sadly. “You want to squeeze that
trigger? Then you’d better be surer than sure that you’re doing the right thing.
Are you, Angus? I don’t believe you are.”
“You always did have a rash tendency to make assumptions.”
“Come on, Angus,” Janson went on. There was warmth in his voice, but not heat.
“What did Oliver Cromwell say? T beseech you, from the bowels of Christ, to
consider that you may be mistaken.’ ” He repeated the old saw wryly.
“Words 1 always found strangely ironic,” Fielding said, “coming from a man who,
to the detriment of his country, was essentially incapable of self-doubt.”
Without breaking eye contact, Janson extended his gun hand, unfurled his fingers
from the pistol grip, and held out his hand, palm up, the weapon lying on it not
as a threat but as an offering. “If you’re going to shoot me, use mine. That
flintlock of yours is liable to backfire.”
The tremor in Fielding’s hand grew. The silence was nearly unbearable.
“Take it,” Janson said in a tone of reprimand.
The master of Trinity was ashen, torn between the humanitarian he had come to