he said, keeping his voice light. “Think I’d better pass.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess you’d better.” There was something like
disappointment in her voice. “Actually, I think I’ll just stay up a little while
longer, keep slogging away.”
“Good girl,” he said, winking, and dragged himself up. He was tired, so tired.
He would go to sleep easily, but he would not sleep well.
In the jungle was a base. In the base was an office. In the office was a desk.
At the desk was a man.
His commanding officer. The man who had taught him nearly everything he knew.
The man he was facing down.
Twelfth-century plainsong came through the small speakers of the lieutenant
commander’s eight-track tape system. Saint Hildegard.
“What did you want to see me about, son?” Demarest’s fleshy features were
settled into bland composure. He looked as if he genuinely had no idea why
Janson was there.
“I’m going to file a report,” Janson said. “Sir.”
“Of course. SOP following an operation.”
“No, sir. A report about you. Detailing misconduct, in re Article Fifty-three,
relating to the treatment of prisoners of war.”
“Oh. That.” Demarest was silent for a moment. “You think I was a little rough on
Victor Charlie?”
“Sir?” Janson’s voice rose with incredulity.
“And you can’t think why, can you? Well, go ahead. I’ve got a lot on my mind
right now. You see, while you’re filling out your forms, I’ve got to figure out
how to save the lives of six men who have been captured. Six men you know very
well, because they’re under your command—or were.”
“What are you talking about, sir?”
“I’m talking about the fact that members of your team have been captured in the
vicinity of Lon Due Than. They were on special assignment, a joint
reconnaissance with the Marine Special Forces. Part of a pattern, you see. This
place is a goddamn sieve.”
“Why wasn’t I notified about the operation, sir?”
“Nobody could find you all afternoon—an Article Fifteen offense right there.
Time and tide wait for no man. Still, you’re here now, and all you can think to
do is find the nearest pencil sharpener.”
“Permission to speak freely, sir.”
“Permission denied,” Demarest snapped. “You do what the hell you want. But your
team has been captured here, men who placed their lives in your hands, and
you’re the person best positioned to lead a force to get them free. Or you would
be if you gave a damn about them. Oh, you think I was unfeeling, inhumane toward
those Victor Charlies in the boonies. But I did what I did for a reason, dammit!
I’ve lost too many men already to leaks between ARVN reps and their VC cousins.
What happened to you in Noc Lo? An ambush, you called it. A setup. Goddamn right
it was. The operation was vetted by MACV, standard procedure, and somewhere
along the lines, Marvin tells Charlie. It happens again and again, and every
time it does somebody dies. You saw Hardaway die, didn’t you? You cradled him in
your arms while his guts were spilling onto the jungle. Hardaway was short, just
a few days before his tour was over, and they ripped him open, and you were
there. Now tell me how that makes you feel, soldier? Dewy and cuddly and
sensitive? Or does it piss you off? You got a pair of balls on you, or did you
lose ’em playing football for Michigan? Maybe it’s slipped your mind, but we’re
in counterintelligence, Janson, and I am not going to let my men be horsefucked
by the VC couriers who have turned MACV into a goddamn Hanoi wire service!”
Demarest never raised his voice as he spoke, and yet the effect was only to
reinforce the gravity of his words. “An officer’s first imperative is the
welfare of the men under his command. And when the lives of my men are at stake,
I will do anything—anything consistent with our mission—to protect them. I
couldn’t give a good goddamn what forms you end up filing. But if you’re a
soldier, if you’re a man, you’ll rescue your men first: it’s your duty. Then
pursue whatever disciplinary proceedings your little bureaucratic heart
desires.” He folded his arms. “Well?”
“Awaiting grid coordinates, sir.”
Demarest nodded soberly and handed Janson a sheet of blue paper dense with
neatly typed operation specifications. “We’ve got a Huey gassed and gussied.” He
glanced at the large round clock mounted on the wall opposite. “The crew’s ready
to go in fifteen. I hope to hell you are.”
Voices.
No, a voice.
A quiet voice. A voice that did not wish to be overheard. Yet the sibilants
carried.
Janson opened his eyes, the darkness of the bedroom softened by the glow of the
Lombard moon. An unease grew within him.
A visitor? There was an active Consular Operations branch based at the U.S.
Consulate General in Milan, on Via Principe Amedeo—just a fifty-minute drive
away. Had Jessie somehow made contact with them? He got up and found his jacket,
felt the pockets for his cellular phone. It was missing.
Had she taken it while he slept? Had he simply left it downstairs? Now he put on
a bathrobe, took the pistol from under his pillow, and crept toward the voice.
Jessie’s voice. Downstairs.
He stepped halfway down the stone staircase, looked around. The lights were on
in the study, and the asymmetry of illumination would provide him with the cover
he needed—the bright lights inside, the shadowy darkness outside. A few steps
farther. Jessie, he could now see, was standing in the study, facing a wall,
with his cell phone pressed to her ear. Talking quietly.
He felt a wrenching feeling in his gut: it was as he had feared.
From the snippets of conversation he made out through the open door, it was
apparent that she was speaking to a colleague from Consular Operations in
Washington. He edged nearer the room, and her voice grew more distinct.
“So the status is still ‘beyond salvage,’ ” she repeated. “Sanction on
sighting.”
She was verifying that the kill orders were still in effect.
A shudder ran down his spine. He had no choice but to do what he should have
done much earlier. It was kill or be killed. The woman was a professional
assassin: it was of no account that her profession had once been his—that her
employers had as well. He had no choice but to eliminate her; sentiment and
wishful thinking, and her own accomplished line of blather, had distracted him
from that one essential truth.
As cicadas filled the evening breeze with their rasping—a window was open in the
study—he moved the pistol to his right hand, following her pacing figure with
its muzzle. The sudden certainty of what he had to do filled him with loathing,
self-disgust. Yet there was no other way. Kill or be killed: it was the awful
shibboleth of an existence he had hoped he’d put behind him. Nor did it mitigate
the larger truth, the ultimate truth of his career: kill and be killed.
“What do the cables say?” she was saying. “The latest signals intelligence?
Don’t tell me you guys are working blind.”
Janson coolly regarded the slightly built woman, the roundness of her hips and
breasts offset by the tightly muscular frame; in her way, she was indeed quite
beautiful. He knew what she was capable of—had seen, firsthand, her astonishing
marksmanship, her extraordinary strength and agility, the swiftness and
shrewdness of her mind. She had been built to kill, and nothing would deter her
from doing so.
“Are the boys in position, or are they just sitting on their asses?” She kept
her voice low, but her intonation was heated, almost hectoring. “Jesus! There is
no excuse for this. This makes us all look bad. Shit, it’s true what they say:
when you want a job done right, you gotta do it yourself. I mean, that’s how I’m
feeling right now. Whatever happened to team efficiency?”
Another dumb, inanimate slug would shatter another skull, and another life would
be stricken, erased, turned into the putrid animal matter from which it had been
constituted. That was not progress; it was the very opposite. He cast his mind
back to Theo and the others, snuffed out, and for what? Some of the rage that
filled him was displaced rage at himself, yes. But what of it? The woman would
die—die in a five-million-dollar mountainside estate in Alpine Lombardy, a land
she had never seen before in her life. She would die at his hands, and that
would be their one moment of true intimacy.
“Where is he? Where? Hell, I can tell you that.” Jessie Kincaid spoke again to
her unseen interlocutor, after a period of silence. “You big lummox, you mean
you guys really haven’t figured that out? Monaco, man. There’s no doubt in my
mind. You know Novak’s got a house there.” Another pause. “Janson didn’t say it