In seconds it was over. Few of them, Janson reflected, even had the opportunity to look their opponents in the eye. They had been slaughtered, impersonally, by a smoothly operating magazine-fed weapon that discharged bullets at a rate of fifteen per second. Because of the low-signature sound suppression, the MP5 bursts were not merely lethal but eerily quiet. It took Janson a moment before he realized what the sound reminded him of: the fluttering of a deck of cards being shuffled. Killing should not sound like that, Janson thought to himself. It was too trivial a soundtrack for so grave an action.
An odd silence now reigned. As gloom and shadows returned, Janson and Katsaris removed their goggles. The naked, forty-watt overhead bulb, Janson noticed, was still intact. The guards were not so lucky. Bodies were splayed on the floor, as if pinned there by the hollow-point bullets. They had functioned as they were designed to, discharging their entire force to the bodies they hit, coming to a stop several inches into those bodies, destroying all the vital organs they encountered. As Janson came closer, he saw that some of the men were taken down even before they’d had the opportunity to flip the safeties of their M16 carbines.
Were there any signs of movement? It took him a few moments before he saw it. Sliding along the ground was the young man who had played the amazing thirteen-card set—the man who had lifted his eyes to the concrete ledge. His midriff was red and slick, but his arms were outstretched, reaching for the revolver of the lifeless soldier next to him.
Janson let off one more burst from his HK. Another shuffle of life’s deck, and the young man became still.
The grotto was an abattoir, filled with the rich, sickening stench of blood and the contents of rippedopen alimentary canals. Janson knew the stench all too well: it was the stench of life once life was taken away.
Oh Christ. Oh God. It was nothing short of carnage, outright butchery. Was this what he did? Was this who he was? The words of an old fitness report returned to mock him: Was he indeed “in his element”? Once more, he flashed back to one of his exit interviews.
“You don’t have a heart, Janson. It’s why you do what you do. Goddammit, it’s why you are who you are.”
“Maybe. And maybe I’m not who you think I am.”
“You tell me you’re sickened by the killing. I’m going to tell you what you’ll discover one day for yourself: it’s the only way you’ll ever feel alive.”
“What kind of man has to kill to feel alive?”
What kind of man was he?
Now he felt something hot and acidic splash in the back of his throat. Had he lost it? Had he changed in ways that made him unfit for the task he had accepted? Perhaps it was simply that he had been out of it for too long, and the necessary calluses had softened.
He wanted to throw up. He also knew he would not. Not in front of Theo, his beloved protégé. Not in the middle of a mission. Not now. His body would be permitted no such indulgences.
A coolly remonstrating voice in his head took over: Their victims were, after all, soldiers. They knew their lives were expendable. They belonged to a terrorist movement that had taken a man of international renown and sworn solemnly to execute him. In guarding a civilian unjustly held captive, they had placed themselves in the line of fire. For Ahmad Tabari, el Caliph, they had pledged to give their lives—all of them had. Janson had merely taken them up on the offer.
“Let’s go,” Janson called to Katsaris. He could rehearse the excuses in his head, could recognize that they were not without some validity, and yet none of it made the slaughter before him any more tolerable.
His own sense of repugnance was the only thing that gave solace. To contemplate such violence with equanimity was the province of the terrorist, the extremist, the fanatic—a breed he had spent a lifetime combating, a breed he had feared he was, in his own way, becoming. Whatever his actions, the fact that he could not contemplate them without horror indicated that he was not yet a monster.
Now he moved swiftly down from the concrete ledge and joined Katsaris at the iron-plated gate to the governor general’s dungeon. He noticed that the soles of Katsaris’s boots were, like his, slick with blood, and quickly looked away.
“I’ll do the honors,” Katsaris said. He was holding a big, antique-looking hoop of keys, taken from one of the slain guards.
Three keys. Three dead bolts. The door swung open, and the two stepped into a narrow, dark space. The air felt dank, stagnant, suffused with the smells of human sickness and sweat that had passed beyond rancid, to something else. Away from the overhead bulb in the area where the guards had waited, the space was dim, and it was difficult to make anything out.
Katsaris toggled his flashlight from infrared to optical light. Its powerful beam cut through the murk.
In silence, they listened.
The sound of breathing was audible somewhere in the gloom.
A narrow passageway broadened out, and they saw how the two-hundred-year-old dungeon was constructed. It consisted of a row of impossibly thick iron bars set only four feet away from the stone walls. Every eight feet, a partition of stone and mortar segmented the long row of cells. There were no windows up to the ground, no sources of illumination; a few kerosene lanterns had been set in the stone bulkheads; they had provided what illumination there was the last time that the dungeon had been in service.
Janson shuddered, contemplating the horrors of a previous age. What sort of offenses landed people in the governor general’s dungeon? Not ordinary aggressions of one native against another: the traditional village leaders were encouraged to deal with them as they always had, subject to the occasional urging to be “civilized” in their punishment. No, the ones who ended up in the colonial overlord’s dungeons, Janson knew, were the resisters—those who opposed the rule of foreigners, who believed that the natives might be able to run their own affairs, free from the lash of Holland’s rump empire.
And now a new set of rebels had seized the dungeon and, like so many rebels, sought not to dismantle it but only to use it for their own ends. It was a truth both bitter and undeniable: those who stormed the Bastille inevitably found a way to put it to use again.
The area behind the grate was shrouded in darkness. Katsaris swept his flashlight along the corner of the cages until they saw him.
A man.
A man who did not look glad to see them. He had flattened himself against the wall cell, trembling with fright. As the beam of light illuminated him, he dropped to the ground, crouching in the corner, a terrified animal hoping to make himself disappear.
“Peter Novak?” Janson asked softly.
The man buried his face in his arms, like the child who believes that when he cannot see, he cannot be seen.
Suddenly, Janson understood: What did he look like, with his black face paint and combat garb, his boots tracking blood? Like a savior—or an assailant?
Katsaris’s flashlight settled on the cowering man, and Janson could make out the incongruously elegant broadcloth shirt, stiff not with a French launderer’s starch, but with grime and dried blood.
Janson took a deep breath and now spoke words he had once merely fantasized he would be able to say.
“Mr. Novak, my name is Paul Janson. You saved my life once. I’m here to return the favor.”
Chapter Seven
For a few long seconds, the man remained motionless. Then he raised his face and, still crouched, looked straight into the light; Katsaris quickly redirected the beam, so as not to dazzle him.
It was Janson who was dazzled.
A few feet away from him was the countenance that had adorned countless magazines and newspapers. A countenance that was as beloved as the pope’s—in this secular age, perhaps even more so. The thick shock of hair, flopping over his forehead, still more black than gray. The high, nearly Asiatic cheekbones. Peter Novak. Winner of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize. A humanitarian like none the world had ever known.
The very familiarity of his visage made Novak’s condition all the more sh
ocking. The hollows beneath his eyes were dark, almost purple; a once-resolute gaze was now filled with terror. As the man shakily brought himself to his feet, Janson could see the small tremors that convulsed his body. Novak’s hands shook; even his dark eyebrows quivered.
Janson was familiar with this look: it was the look of a man who had given up hope. He was familiar with this look because it had once been his. Baaqlina. A dusty town in Lebanon. And captors whom hatred had transformed into something not quite human. He could never forget the anthracite hardness of their eyes, their hearts. Baaqlina. It was destined to be his place of death: he had never been so convinced of anything. In the end, of course, he walked away a free man after the Liberty Foundation intervened. Did money change hands? He never knew. Even after his liberation, though, he spent a long time wondering whether that destiny was truly averted or merely deferred. They were deeply irrational, these thoughts and sensations, and Janson had never confided them to anyone. But perhaps the day would come when he would confide them to Peter Novak. Novak would understand that others had been through what he had been through, and perhaps he would find comfort in that. He owed Novak that much. No, he owed Novak everything. And so did thousands, perhaps millions, of others.
Peter Novak had traveled around the world to resolve bloody conflict. Now somebody had brought bloody conflict to him. Somebody who would pay.
Janson felt a welling up of warmth toward Peter Novak, and equally an intense wrath toward those who had sought to bring him low. Janson lived so much of his life in flight from such feelings; his reputation was as a coolly controlled, even-keeled, emotionally disengaged man—“the Machine,” as he’d been nicknamed. His temperament made some people uncomfortable; in others, it inspired an abiding confidence and trust. But Janson knew he was no rock: he was merely skilled at internalizing. He seldom showed fear, because he feared too much. He banked his emotions because they burned too hotly. All the more so after the bombing in Caligo, after the loss of the only thing that had made sense of his life. It was hard to love when you saw how easily love could be taken away. It was hard to trust when you’d learned how easily trust could be broken. Once, decades earlier, there was a man he had admired more than any other; and that man had betrayed him. Not just him—the man had betrayed humanity.
Helene had once told him that he was a searcher. The search is over, he’d told her. I’ve found you, and he tenderly kissed her forehead, her eyes, her nose, her lips, her neck. But she had meant something else: she had meant that he was in search of meaning, of something or somebody larger than himself. Somebody, he now supposed, like Peter Novak.
Peter Novak: a wreck of a man, by the evidence of his eyes. A wreck of a man who was also a saint of a man. He could have been a brilliant economist, and some of his theoretical papers had become widely cited. He could have been the Midas of the twenty-first century, a pampered playboy, a reincarnation of the Shh Jhan, the Mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal. But his sole interest was in leaving the world a better place than he had found it. And certainly a better place than had found him, born as he was on the killing fields of the Second World War.
“We’ve come for you,” Janson told him.
Taking a tentative step away from the stone wall, Peter Novak pitched his shoulders back as if bellowing his lungs. Even to speak seemed to require enormous effort.
“You’ve come for me,” Novak echoed, and the words were thick and croaky, perhaps the first he had spoken for several days.
What had they done to him? Had his body been broken, or his spirit? The body, Janson knew from experience, would heal more quickly. Novak’s breathing indicated that the man had pneumonia, a fluid congestion of the lungs that would have come from breathing the dungeon’s dank, stagnant, spore-filled air. At the same time, the words he spoke next seemed largely incoherent.
“You work for him,” Novak said. “Of course you do. He says there can only be one! He knows that when I am out of the way, he will be unstoppable.” The words were intoned with an urgency that substituted for sense.
“We work for you,” Janson said. “We’ve come to get you.”
In the great man’s darting eyes was a look of bewilderment. “You can’t stop him!”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Peter Novak!”
“You’re Peter Novak.”
“Yes! Of course!” He clasped his arms around his chest and held himself straight, like a diplomat at an official convocation.
Was his mind gone?
“We’ve come for you,” Janson repeated as Katsaris matched a key from the ring to the grate to Peter Novak’s cell. The grate swung open. Novak did not move at first. Janson inspected his pupils for signs that he had been drugged, and concluded that the only drug to which he had been subjected was the trauma of captivity. The man had been kept in darkness for three days, no doubt given water and food, but deprived of hope.
Janson recognized the syndrome, recognized the elements of post-traumatic psychosis. In a dusty town in Lebanon, he had not entirely escaped it himself. People expected hostages to sink to their knees in gratitude, or join their rescuers, arm in arm, as they did in the movies. The reality was seldom like that.
Katsaris gave Janson a frantic look, tapping on his Breitling. Every additional minute exposed them to additional risk.
“Can you walk?” Janson asked, his tone sharper than he had intended.
There was a beat before Novak responded. “Yes,” he said. “I think so.”
“We have to leave now.”
“No,” said Peter Novak.
“Please. We can’t afford to wait.” In all likelihood, Novak was suffering the normal confusion and disorientation of the newly released captive. But could there be something more? Had the Stockholm syndrome set in? Had Novak been betrayed by the famously expansive compass of his moral sympathies?
“No—there’s someone else!” he whispered.
“What are you talking about?” Katsaris interrupted.
“Somebody else here.” He coughed. “Another prisoner.”
“Who?” Katsaris prodded.
“An American,” he said. He gestured to the cell at the end of the passageway. “I won’t leave without her.”
“That’s impossible!” Katsaris interjected.
“If you leave her behind, they’ll kill her. They’ll kill her at once!” The humanitarian’s eyes were imploring, and then commanding. He cleared his throat, moistened his cracked lips, and took another breath. “I cannot have that on my conscience.” His English was manicured, precise, with just a faint Hungarian inflection. Another labored breath. “It need not be on yours.”
Bit by bit, Janson realized, the prisoner was regaining his composure, becoming himself again. His piercing dark eyes reminded Janson that Novak was no ordinary man. He was a natural aristocrat, accustomed to ordering the world to his liking. He had a gift for it, a gift he had used for ends of extraordinary benevolence.
Janson studied Novak’s unwavering gaze. “And if we can’t …”
“Then you’ll have to leave me behind.” The words were halting, but unequivocal.
Janson stared at him in disbelief.
A twitch played out on Novak’s face, and then he spoke again. “I doubt your rescue plans provide for an unwilling hostage.”
It was clear that his mind was still blazingly fast. He had played the tactical card immediately, impressing on Janson that no further discussion would be possible.
Janson and Katsaris exchanged glances. “Theo,” Janson said quietly. “Get her.”
Katsaris nodded reluctantly. Then they both froze.
The noise.
A scrape of steel against stone.
A familiar noise: that of the steel grate they had opened to go down there.
Janson remembered the soldier’s hopeful cry: Theyilai .
The expected visitor, bringing the soldiers their tea.
Janson and Theo strode from the dungeon to the blood-drenched
adjoining chamber, where they could hear the jangling of someone’s key chain, and then watched as a tray—laden with a teapot of hammered metal and several stacks of little clay cups—came into view.
He saw the hands supporting the tray—remarkably small hands. And then the man, who was no man at all.
It was a boy. If Janson had had to guess, he would have said that the boy was eight years old. Large eyes, mocha skin, short black hair. He was shirtless and wore blue madras shorts. His sneakers looked too large for his slender calves and gave him a puppyish look. The boy’s eyes were trained on the next step: he had been entrusted with an important responsibility, and he was going to be as careful as possible about his footing. Nothing would be dropped. Nothing would be spilled.
He was two-thirds of the way down the stairs when he pulled up short. Probably the smell had alerted him that something was out of the ordinary—either that or the silence.
The boy now turned and regarded the carnage—the guards sprawled in pooled, congealing blood—and Janson could hear him gasp. Involuntarily, the little boy dropped the tray. His precious tray. The tray that the guards were to have received with such gratitude and merriment. As it rolled like a hoop, down the stairs, the cups smashed on the steps below him, and the teapot splashed its steaming contents at the boy’s feet. Janson watched it all happen in slow motion.
Everything would be dropped. Everything would be spilled. Including blood.
Janson knew precisely what he must do. Left to his own devices, the boy would flee and alert the others. What had to be done was regrettable but inarguable. There was no other choice. In one fluid movement, he leveled the silenced HK at the boy.
A boy who returned his gaze with large, frightened eyes.
A slack-jawed eight-year-old. An innocent, given no choice as to his decisions in life.
Not a combatant. Not a conspirator. Not a rebel. Not involved.
A boy. Armed with—what?—a hot jug of mint tea?
No matter. The field manuals had a name for persons like him: engaged noncombatants. Janson knew what he had to do.