would not take them long before their beams sliced toward the hayloft roof and
silhouetted him with the clarity of a shooting-range cutout.
Janson lowered himself from the roof with as much speed and stealth as he could
manage. Then he let himself down from the loft to the dirt floor. If the men had
not rushed the place, it was only because they did not know whether he was
armed. They would bide their time, proceed with caution, ensure his death
without allowing him to take one of them with him.
Now he darted across the courtyard and back into the woman’s parlor. The
flickering light from the fireplace cast a ghostly glow on the carnage. Yet he
had no choice but to return there. The old woman had a shotgun, hadn’t she?
The shotgun was gone. Of course it was. It was not the sort of thing that would
have escaped their notice, and disarming an octogenarian would have been easy.
Yet if the woman kept a shotgun, she must also have a supply of cartridges
stowed away somewhere.
A roving beam of yellow light flashed through the windows into the woman’s
parlor, looking for signs of movement—for signs of him. Janson promptly eased
himself to the floor. They wanted to locate him, to narrow his mobility
progressively. Once they knew for sure which building he was in, they could
force the gate of the courtyard and surround the particular structure into which
he had retreated. Their uncertainty was his only ally.
Janson crawled toward the kitchen, keeping well out of sight. The shotgun
cartridges—where would the old woman have kept them? By themselves, they would
be useless as offensive weapons against his pursuers. But there might just be
another way of using them. He was alive so far only because of their uncertainty
about his precise location, but he had to do better than that. He would win only
if he could turn uncertainty into error.
He tried several drawers in the woman’s kitchen, finding cutlery in one, bottles
of condiments and spices in another. It was in a small pantry, next to the
kitchen, that he finally found what he was looking for, and in even more
plentiful supply that he had hoped. Ten boxes of Biro Super 10-gauge cartridges,
twenty to the box. He pulled out a couple of boxes and crawled back to the
parlor.
He heard shouts from outside, in a language he could not make out. But there was
no missing the larger meaning: more men were arriving to take up perimeter
positions.
In the iron pan over the fireplace, where the woman had been roasting chestnuts
earlier that day, Janson placed a handful of the long cartridges, the cupped
brass on either end connected by a ridged brown plastic tube. Within them was
lead shot and gunpowder, and though they were designed to be detonated by the
firing pin of a shotgun, sufficient heat would produce a similar effect.
The fire was slow, dying, and the pan was a couple of feet above it. Could he
depend upon it?
Janson added another small log to the fire, and returned to the kitchen. There
he placed a cast-iron skillet on the decades-old electric range, and scattered
another handful of cartridges on it. He set the heat on medium low. It would
take a minute for the element just to heat the bottom of the heavy skillet.
Now he turned on the oven, and placed the remaining fifty cartridges on the
rack, a foot below the top heating element, and set the temperature on high. The
oven would surely take the longest to heat of all. He knew that his calculations
were crude, at best. He also knew he had no better alternatives.
He crept across the courtyard, past the stables, and climbed the rungs to the
hayloft again.
And he waited.
For a while, all he heard was the voices of the men as they grew nearer and
nearer, taking positions safely away from windows, communicating to one another
with terse commands and flickers of their flashlights. Suddenly, a bang
shattered the still air, followed, in rapid succession, with four more bangs.
Then he heard the return fire of an automatic rifle, and the sound of broken
glass. The old warped frames of the front window had to be a scatter of shards
and dust now.
To Janson, the acoustic sequence relayed a precise narrative. The cartridges
over the fireplace had detonated first, as he had hoped. The gunmen made the
logical assumption. Gun blasts from within the parlor indicated that they were
being fired upon. They had what they needed: an exact location.
Exactly the wrong location.
Urgent shouts summoned the other men to join the apparent gunfight in the front
of the farmhouse.
A series of low-pitched blasts told Janson that the cartridges on the rangetop
skillet had been heated to the point of detonation. It would tell the gunmen
that their quarry had retreated into the kitchen. Through the gap between the
slats of the barn wall, he saw that a solitary gunman with a cradled automatic
weapon remained behind; his partners had raced to the other side of the compound
to join the others in their assault.
Janson withdrew his small Beretta and, through the same gap, aimed it at the
burly, olive-clad man. Yet he could not fire yet—could not risk the gunshot
being heard by others and exposing the subterfuge. He heard the footfalls of
heavy boots drifting in from the main house: the other gunmen were splintering
the house with their gunfire as they tried to discover Janson’s hiding place.
Janson waited until he heard the immense boom-roar of fifty shotgun cartridges
exploding in the oven before he squeezed the trigger. The sound would be utterly
lost amid the blast and the attendant confusion.
He fired at the exact instant.
Slowly, the burly man toppled over, face forward. His body made little sound as
it hit the leafy ground cover.
The position was now unguarded: Janson unlatched a door and strode over to the
fallen man, knowing that he would not be seen. For a moment, he contemplated
disappearing into the dark thickets of the hillside; he could do so, had
disappeared into similar terrains on other occasions. He was confident he could
elude his pursuers and emerge safe, a day or two later, in one of the other
hillside villages.
Then he remembered the slain woman, her savagely brutalized body, and any
thought of flight vanished from his mind. His heart beat hard, and even the
shadows of the evening seemed to be glimpsed through a curtain of red. He saw
that his bullet had struck the gunman just above his hairline; only a rivulet of
blood that made its way down his scalp to the top of his forehead revealed its
lethal impact. He removed the dead man’s submachine gun and bandolier, and
adjusted its sling around his own shoulders.
There was no time to lose.
The team of assailants was now gathered in the house, tramping around heavily,
firing their weapons. He knew that their bullets were flying into armoires and
closets and every other conceivable hiding place, steel-jacketed projectiles
splintering into wood, seeking human flesh.
But they were the trapped ones now.
Quietly, he circled around to the front of the farmhouse, dragging the dead man
behind him. In the roving beams of light, he recognized a face, a second face, a
third. His blood ran cold. They were hard faces. Cruel faces. The faces of men
he had worked with many years ago in Consular Operations, and whom he had
disliked even then. They were coarse men—coarse not in their manners, but in
their sensitivities. Men for whom brute force was not a last resort but a first,
for whom cynicism was the product not of a disappointed idealism but of naked
avarice and rapacity. They had no business in government service; in Janson’s
opinion, they reduced its moral credibility by their very presence. The
technical skill they brought to their work was offset by a lack of any real
conscience, a failure to grasp the legitimate objectives that underwrote
sometimes questionable tactics.
He placed his jacket on the dead man, then positioned him behind the sprawling
chestnut tree; with the man’s shoelaces, he tied his flashlight to the lifeless
forearm. He pulled tiny splinters of wood from a dead branch and placed them
between the man’s eyelids, propping his eyes open in a glassy stare. It was
crude work, turning the man into an effigy of himself. But in the shadows of the
evening, it would pass on a first glance, which was all Janson needed. Now
Janson directed a raking burst of fire through the parlor’s already shattered
windows. The three exposed gunmen twitched horribly as the bullets perforated
diaphragm, gut, aorta, lungs. At the same time, the unexpected burst summoned
the others.
Janson rolled over to the scraggly chestnut tree, switched on the flashlight