out of medical, he made a stink about it—within channels, of course. He wanted
to see his commanding officer court-martialed.”
“And was he?”
The undersecretary turned and stared: “You mean you really don’t know?”
“Let’s cut the drumroll,” the round-faced woman replied. “You got something to
say, say it.”
“You don’t know who Janson’s commanding officer was?”
She shook her head, her eyes intent, penetrating.
“A man named Alan Demarest,” the undersecretary replied. “Or maybe I should say
Lieutenant Commander Demarest.”
” ‘I see,’ said the blind man.” Her largely suppressed Southern accent broke
through, as it did at times of great stress. “The source of the Nile.”
“When next we see our man Janson, it’s graduate studies at Cambridge University
on a government fellowship. Winds up back on board, in Consular Operations.” The
undersecretary’s voice became summary and brisk.
“Under you,” Charlotte Ainsley said.
“Yes. In a manner of speaking.” Coliins’s tone said more than his words, but
everyone understood his import: that Janson was not the most subordinate of
subordinates.
“Rewind a sec,” Ainsley said. “His time as a POW in Vietnam had to have been
incredibly traumatic. Maybe he never really recovered from it.”
“Physically, he got to be stronger than ever … ”
“I’m not talking about physical prowess or mental acuity. But psychologically,
that sort of experience leaves scars. Fault lines, cracks, weaknesses—like in a
ceramic bowl. The flaw you don’t see until something else happens, a second
trauma. And then you split, or break, or snap. A good man becomes a bad one.”
The undersecretary raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“And I’ll accept that this is all on the level of conjecture,” she continued
smoothly. “But can we afford to make a mistake? Granted, there’s a great deal we
don’t know. But I’m with Doug on this one. Comes down to this: Is he working for
us or against us? Well, here’s one thing we do know. He’s not working for us.”
“True,” said Collins. “And yet—”
“There’s always time for ‘and yets,’ ” Ainsley said. “Just not now.”
“This guy is a variable we can’t control,” said Albright. “In an already complex
and confusing probability matrix. Outcome optimization means we’ve got to erase
that variable.”
“A ‘variable’ who happens to have given three decades of his life to his
country,” Collins shot back. “A funny thing about our business—the loftier the
language, the lower the deed.”
“Come off it, Derek. Nobody’s hands are dirtier than yours. Except your boy
Janson. One of your goddamn killing machines.” The DIA man glared at the
undersecretary. “Needs a taste of his own medicine. My English plain enough?”
The undersecretary adjusted his black plastic glasses and returned the analyst’s
unfriendly look. Still, it was clear enough which way the wind was blowing.
“He’ll be hard to take out,” the CIA operations man stressed, still smarting
from the Athens debacle. “Nobody’s better at hand-to-hand. Janson could inflict
serious casualties.”
“Everybody in the intelligence community has received rumors and reports about
Anura, albeit unsubstantiated,” said Collins. “That means your frontline agents
as well as mine.” He glanced at the CIA operations man and then at Albright.
“Why don’t you let your cowboys have another go?”
“Derek, you know the rules,” Ainsley said. “Everybody cleans up his own litter
box. I don’t want another Athens. Nobody knows his methods like the cadre that
trained him. Come on, your senior operations managers must already have filed a
contingency plan.”
“Well, sure,” said Collins. “But they’ve got no clue what’s really going on.”
“You think we do?”
“I take your point.” A decision had been made; deliberation was over. “Plans
call for the dispatch of a special team of highly trained snipers. They can get
the job done, and discreetly. Ratings are off the charts. Nobody would stand a
chance against them.” His gray eyes blinked behind his glasses as he remembered
the team’s unbroken series of successes. Quietly, he added, “No one ever has.”
“Terminate orders in effect?”
“Current orders are locate, watch, and wait.”
“Activate,” she said. “This is a collective decision. Mr. Janson is beyond
salvage. Green-light the sanction. Now.”
“I’m not arguing, I just want to make sure people are aware of the risks,” the
undersecretary persisted.
“Don’t tell us about risks,” said the DIA analyst. “You created those goddamn
risks.”
“We’re all under a great deal of stress,” Hildreth interjected smoothly.
The analyst folded his arms on his chest and directed another baleful glare at
Undersecretary Derek Collins. “You made him,” Albright said. “For everyone’s
sake, you’d better break him.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The sidewalks of London’s Jermyn Street were filled with people who had too
little time, and with people who had too much. An assistant bank manager of
NatWest was scurrying with as much speed as was consistent with dignity, late
for a lunch date with the junior vice president of Fiduciary Trust
International’s Fixed Income Department. He knew he shouldn’t have taken that
last phone call; if he wasn’t punctual, he could kiss that job good-bye … A
beefy sales rep for Whitehall-Robins was keeping an assignation with a woman he
had chatted up at Odette’s Wine Bar the night before, braced for disappointment.
Daylight usually added ten years to those slags who looked so sultry and
appetizing in the smoky gloom of the downstairs banquettes—but a chap had to
find out one way or another, right? Maybe a stop-off at the newsagent was in
order: being on time might make him seem a tad eager … The neglected wife of a
workaholic American businessman was clutching three shopping bags filled with
expensive but dowdy clothes she knew she’d probably never wear back in the
States: charging it all to his Platinum American Express somehow let her vent
her resentment for his having dragged her along. Another seven hours to kill
before she and her husband saw Mousetrap for the third time … The chief assessor
of Inland Revenue’s Westminster branch was jostling his way through the crowd
with an eye on his watch: you never had as much authority with those berks at
Lloyds when you showed up late; everybody said so.
Striding down Jermyn Street in a fast lope, Paul Janson was lost among the
window-shoppers, bureaucrats, and businessmen who crowded the sidewalks. He was
attired in a navy suit, a spread-collar shirt, and a polka-dotted tie, and his
look was harried but not nervous. It was the look of someone who belonged; his
face and his body alike telegraphed as much.
The jutting signs—the ovals and rectangles overhead—registered only vaguely. The
older names of the older establishment—Floris, Hilditch & Key, Irwin—were
interspersed with newer arrivals, like Ermenegildo Zegna. The traffic was half
congealed, sludgy, with tall red buses and low
boxy cabs and commercial vehicles that amounted to wheeled signage. integron:
your global solutions provider. vodafone: welcome to the world’s largest mobile
community. He turned left on St. James’s Street, past Brooks’s and White’s, and
then left again onto Pall Mall. He did not stop at his destination, however, but
instead walked past it, his darting eyes alert to any signs of irregularity.
Familiar sights: the Army and Navy Club, known affectionately as the Rag, the
Reform Club, the Royal Automobile Club. In Waterloo Square, the same old bronzes
stood. There was an equestrian statue of Edward VII, with a cluster of
motorcycles parked at its pedestal, an inadvertent comment on changing modes of
personal transport. There was a statue of John Lord Lawrence, a viceroy of India
from Victorian times, standing proudly, as one who knew he was very well known
indeed to the few who knew him. And, grandly seated, Sir John Fox Burgoyne, a
field marshall who had been a hero of the Peninsular War and, later, of the
Crimean War. “The war is popular beyond belief,” Queen Victoria had said of the
Crimean conflict, which would become a byword for pointless suffering. To be a
hero of the Crimean—what was that? It was a conflict whose eruption represented
diplomatic incompetence and whose prosecution represented military incompetence.
He allowed his gaze to drift to his destination, at the corner of Waterloo
Place: the Athenaeum Club. With its large cream-colored blocks, tall columned
portico, and Parthenon-inspired frieze, it was a paragon of the
early-nineteenth-century neoclassical style. On the side a hooded security
camera projected from a cornerstone. Above the front pillars stood the goddess
Athena, painted in gold. The goddess of wisdom—the one thing that was in
shortest supply. Janson made a second pass in the opposite direction, walking
past a red Royal Mail truck, past the consulate for Papua New Guinea, past an
office building. In the distance, a red-orange crane loomed over some unseen
building site.
His mind kept returning to what had happened at Trinity College: he must have
stumbled on a trip wire there. It was more likely that his old mentor had been
under surveillance than that he had been followed, he decided. Even so, both the