The Jason Directive

  He shook his head, laughing, after he hung up. “Hah! They think you’ve arrived at Stansted two hours ago, with your group.”

  “Bloody hell?” Janson looked incredulous.

  “Happens,” the man said philosophically, savoring his own worldliness. “Happens. The manifest says a tour group of twenty is arriving, nobody wants to redo all the paperwork, so the computer thinks all twenty’s accounted for. Couldn’t happen on commercial service, but charter airlines are a bit dodgier. Oops—don’t tell the boss I said that. ‘Cut-rate prices for a top-rate experience,’ is what we like to say. If the computer was right, you’d be larking about in your optician’s shop at Uxbridge, instead of quaking in your boots in bloody Izmir and wondering if you’re ever going to see home and hearth again.” A sidewise glance. “Any good, was she?”

  “What?”

  “The bird. Was she any good?”

  Janson was abashed. “That’s the tragic part, see. I was too pissed to remember.”

  The man gave him a quick squeeze on the shoulder. “I think I can fix things for you this time,” he said. “But mind you, we’re not in the dirty-holiday business. Keep it in your trousers, mate. Like my girl says, careful you don’t poke someone’s eye out.” He roared with laughter at his own coarse wit. “And you with a bloody spectacles shop!”

  “We prefer to call it a ‘vision center,’” Janson said frostily, settling into the role of the proud shopkeeper. “You sure I’m not going to have any problems getting off in Stansted?”

  The tour director spoke in a low voice. “No, see, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Holiday Express is going to make sure there’s no snags. You take my meaning? We’re going to help you out.”

  Janson nodded gratefully, although he knew what was really motivating the sudden show of altruism—the dismay that the tour guide’s call must have precipitated in the firm’s offices. Janson’s stratagem, as it was meant to, had put the company in a bind: officials of a packaged-holiday company had plainly misinformed British customs that one Richard Cavanaugh, of 43 Culvert Lane, Uxbridge, had arrived in the United Kingdom. The only way to avoid an audit of its activities and a review of its license was to make sure that Richard Cavanaugh did arrive in the United Kingdom, and without the sort of data trail that could lead to awkward questions about careless business practices. The temporary papers that the pigeon-breasted man was drawing up for him—Urgent Transport/Airline Personnel—were a crude recourse, normally reserved for transportation involving medical emergencies, but they would do the job. Holiday Express would tidy up an embarrassing little slipup, and “Dickie” Cavanaugh would be home by suppertime.

  The tour guide chuckled as he gave Janson the sheath of yellow-orange pages. “Too bloody pissed to remember, what? Makes you want to break down and cry, don’t it?”

  A small chartered plane took them to Istanbul, where, after a two-hour layover, they changed to a bigger charter plane that would carry three separate Holiday Express tour groups to Stansted Airport, just north of London. At each junction, Cavanaugh waved the yellow stapled pages he’d been given in Izmir, and a representative of the packaged-holiday company personally escorted him on board. The word had plainly come down from the head office: take care of this berk, or there would be hell to pay.

  It was a three-hour flight, and the Uxbridge optician, sullied by his offshore adventure, kept to himself, his look of hapless self-absorption repelling any attempts at conversation. The few who heard his story saw only a tight-assed shopkeeper vowing that his indiscretions would be left behind in the Orient.

  Somewhere over Europe, eyes shuttered, Janson drowsed, and eventually let himself succumb to sleep, even though he knew well the old ghosts that would stir.

  It was three decades ago, and it was now. It was in a jungle far away, and it was here. Janson had returned from the debacle of Noc Lo to Demarest’s office in base camp, without even stopping to clean up. He had been told that the lieutenant commander wanted to see him immediately.

  The stench and stains of battle still on his clothing, Janson stood before Demarest, who sat pensively at his desk. A medieval plainsong—an eerily simple and slow progression of notes—emerged from small speakers.

  Finally, Demarest looked up at him. “Do you know what just happened out there?”

  “Sir?”

  “If it doesn’t mean anything, it happened for no reason. That’s not a universe you want to live in. You’ve got to make it mean something.”

  “As I told you before, it was like they knew we were coming, sir.”

  “Seems pretty clear, doesn’t it?”

  “You didn’t—don’t—seem surprised, sir.”

  “Surprised? No. That was my null hypothesis—the prediction that I was testing. But I had to know for sure. Noc Lo was, among other things, an experiment. If one were to file plans for an incursion with the local ARVN liaison to Military Assistance Command-Vietnam, what consequences could one expect? What are the information relays that lead back to the local insurgency ? There’s only one way to test these things. And now we’ve learned something. We have an enemy that is committed to our root-and-branch destruction—committed with all its heart and soul and mind. And on our side? A lot of transplanted bureaucrats who think they’re working for the Tennessee Valley Authority or some damn thing. A few hours ago, son, you narrowly escaped with your life. Was Noc Lo a defeat, or a victory? It’s not so easy to say, is it?”

  “Sir, it did not taste like victory. Sir.”

  “Hardaway died, I said, because he was weak. You lived, as I knew you would, because you were strong. Strong like your dad—second wave of the landing on Red Beach, if I’m not mistaken. Strong like your uncle, in the forests and ravines of Sumava, picking off Wehrmacht officers with an old hunting rifle. There’s nobody fiercer than those Eastern European partisans—I had an uncle like that myself. War shows us who we are, Paul. My hope is that today you learned something about yourself. Something I determined about you back in Little Creek.”

  Lieutenant Commander Alan Demarest reached for a dog-eared paperback he had on his desk. “You know your Emerson?” He began to read from it: “‘A great man is always willing to be little. Whilst he sits on the cushions of advantages he goes to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit.’ I reckon Ralph Waldo was on to something.”

  “Be nice to think so, sir.”

  “The battlefield is also a proving ground. It’s where you die or where you’re born anew. And don’t just dismiss that as a figure of speech. Ever talk to your mama about what it was like to give birth to you? Women know this blinding flash of what it all means—they know that their lives, the lives of their parents, their parents’ parents, of all human life on this planet for tens of thousands of years, have culminated in this wet, squirming, screaming thing. Birth isn’t pretty. A nine-month cycle from pleasure to pain. Man is born in a mess of bodily fluids, distended viscera, shit, piss, blood—and baby, it’s you. A moment of incredible agony. Yes, giving birth is a bitch, all right, because that pain is what gives it meaning. And I look at you standing here with the stinking guts of another soldier on your tunic and I look into your eyes, and I see a man who’s been reborn.”

  Janson stared, bewildered. Part of him was appalled; part of him was mesmerized.

  Demarest stood up, and his own gaze did not shift. He reached over and put a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “What’s this war about? Ivy Leaguers in the State Department have thick three-ring binders that pretend to give an answer. It’s a whole lot of white noise, meaningless rationalizations. Every conflict is the same. It’s about the testing fields of battle. In the past four hours, you’ve known more energy and exhaustion, more agony and ecstasy—more pure adrenaline—than most people will ever experience. You’re more alive than the zombies in their station wagons who tell themse
lves how glad they are that they’re not in harm’s way like you. They’re the lost souls. They spend their days price-comparing cuts of London broil and boxes of laundry detergent and wondering, should they try to fix the sink or wait around for the plumber? They’re dead inside and they don’t even know it.” Demarest’s eyes were bright. “What’s the war about? It’s about the simple fact that you killed those who sought to kill you. What just happened? A victory, a defeat? Wrong yardstick, son. Here’s what happened. You almost died, and you learned what it was to live.”

  Chapter Twelve

  A heavy white lorry carrying a load of semi-finished lumber swung off the busy M 11 highway and onto Queen’s Road, Cambridge. There it pulled up beside several parked trucks bearing construction equipment for a major renovation project. That was the way with a large and aging university like Cambridge—something was always being rebuilt or renovated.

  After the driver pulled in, the man he’d given a ride to thanked him warmly for the lift and stepped out onto the gravel. Instead of going to work, though, the man, who wore a taupe work suit, ducked inside one of the PolyJohns near the building site; the West Yorkshire company’s motto, Leading Through Innovation, was molded on the blue plastic door. When he emerged, he was wearing a gray herringbone jacket of Harris Tweed. It was a uniform of another sort, one that would render him inconspicuous as he strolled along the “Backs,” the wide swath of green that ran along the oldest of the Cambridge colleges: King’s, Clare, Trinity Hall, and, his destination, Trinity College. In all, just an hour had elapsed since Paul Janson arrived at the Stansted Airport, now a blurry memory of glass and quilted-steel ceilings.

  Janson had spoken so many lies, in so many accents, over the past twenty-four hours that his head ached. But soon he would meet someone who could sweep all the mist and mystification away. Someone he could talk to in confidence, someone who was in a singular position to have insight into the tragedy. His lifeline would be at Trinity College: a brilliant don named Angus Fielding.

  Janson had studied with him as a Marshall Fellow back in the early seventies, and the gentle scholar with the amused eyes had taken him on for a series of tutorials in economic history. Something about Fielding’s sinuous mind had captivated Janson, and there was something about Janson, in turn, that the savant found genuinely engaging. All these years later, Janson hated to involve Fielding in his hazardous investigation, but there was no other choice. His old academic mentor, an expert in the global financial system, had been a member of a brain trust that Peter Novak had put together in order to help guide the Liberty Foundation. He was also, Janson had heard, now the master of Trinity College.

  As Janson walked across Trinity Bridge and over the Backs, memories swept over him—memories of another time, a time of learning, and healing, and rest. Everything around him brought back images of that golden period in his life. The lawns, the Gothic buildings, even the punters who glided along the Cam under the stone arches of the bridges and the branch curtains of the weeping willows, propelling their small boats with long poles. As he approached Trinity, the wind chime of memory grew even louder. Here, facing the Backs, stood the dining hall, which was built in the early seventeenth century, and the magnificent Wren library, with its soaring vaults and arches. Trinity’s physical presence at Cambridge was large and majestic but represented only a portion of its actual holdings; the college was, in fact, the second-largest landowner in Britain, after the queen. Janson walked past the library to the small gravel lot abutting the master’s lodge.

  He rang the bell, and a servant cracked open a window. “Here to see the master, love?”

  “I am.”

  “Bit early, are you? Never mind, dear. Why don’t you come round the front and I’ll let you in?” Obviously, she had taken him for someone else, someone who had an appointment at that hour.

  None of it was exactly high-security. The woman had not even asked his name. Cambridge had changed little since he had been a student there in the seventies.

  Inside the master’s lodge, the broad, red-carpeted stairs led past a portrait gallery of Trinity luminaries from centuries past: a bearded George Trevelyan, a clean-shaved William Whewell, an ermine-collared Christopher Wordsworth. At the top of the stairs, to the left, was a pink-carpeted drawing room with paneled walls that were painted white, so as not to compete with the portraits that adorned them. Past this room was a much larger one, with dark-wood floors covered with a number of large Orientals. Staring at Janson as he entered was a full-length portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, painted during her life, with meticulous attention to the details of her dress and flatteringly little to her ravaged face. Isaac Newton, on the adjoining wall, was brown-wigged and imperious. A smirking fourteen-year-old, one Lord Gloucester, stared brazenly at both from his oil pigments. All told, here was one of the most impressive collections of its kind outside of the National Portrait Gallery. It was a pageant of a very particular elite, both political and intellectual, that had shaped the country, had directed its history, could claim some responsibility for both its achievements and its failures. The glowing visages belonged largely to bygone centuries, and yet Peter Novak’s own portrait would not have been out of place. Like all true leadership, his stemmed from a sense of his own obligations, a profound and profoundly moral sense of mission.

  Janson found himself staring, rapt, at the faces of long-departed kings and counselors, and he started when he heard the sound of a man clearing his throat.

  “My heavens, it is you!” Angus Fielding trumpeted, in his slightly reedy, slightly hooting voice. “Forgive me—I’ve been looking at you looking at the portraits and wondering whether it was possible. Something about the shoulders, the gait. Dear boy, it’s been far too long. But, really, this is the most delightful surprise I could imagine. Gilly told me that my ten o’clock was here, so I was preparing to talk to one of our less promising graduate students about Adam Smith and Condorcet. To quote Lady Asquith, ‘He has a brilliant mind, until he makes it up.’ To think what you’ve saved me from.”

  Janson’s old academic mentor was half-haloed in the cloud-filtered sunlight. His face was etched with age, his white hair thinner than Janson had remembered; yet he was still lean and rangy, and his pale blue eyes retained the brightness of someone who was in on a joke—some nameless cosmic joke—and might let you in on it, too. Now in his late sixties, Fielding was not a large man, but his intensity gave him the presence of someone who was.

  “Come along, dear boy,” Fielding said. He led Janson down a short hallway, past the doughty, middle-aged woman who worked as his secretary, and into his spacious office, where a large picture window gave a view of the Great Courtyard. Plain white shelves on the adjacent walls were filled with books and journals and offprints of his articles, the titles stultifying: “Is the Global Financial System Imperiled?: A Macroeconomic View,” “Central Banks’ Foreign Currency Liquidity Position—The Case for Transparency,” “A New Approach Toward Measurement of Aggregate Market Risk,” “Structural Aspects of Market Liquidity and Their Consequences for Financial Stability.” A sun-yellowed copy of the Far Eastern Economic Review was visible on a corner table; beneath a photograph of Peter Novak was the headline: TURNING DOLLARS INTO CHANGE.

  “Forgive all the bumf,” the don said, removing a stack of papers from one of the black Windsor chairs by his desk. “You know, in a way I’m glad you didn’t let me know you were coming, because then I might have tried to put on the dog, as you Americans say, and we’d both have been disappointed. Everyone says I should fire the cook, but the poor dear has been here practically since the Restoration and I haven’t got the heart, or perhaps the stomach. Her entremets are agreed to be especially toxic. She’s an éminence grise, I try to say—éminence greasy, my colleagues riposte. The amenities, such as they are, have a curious combination of opulence and austerity, not to say shabbiness, that takes some getting used to. You’ll remember it from your stay in these halls, I daresay, but the way you remember playing t
ag when you were a child, one of those things that were so appealing at the time but whose point now seems utterly elusive.” He patted Janson on the arm. “And now, dear boy, you’re It.”

  The verbal flows and eddies, the blinking, amused eyes—it was the same Angus Fielding, by turns wise and mischievous. The eyes saw more than they let on, and his donnish volubility could be an effective means of distraction or camouflage. A member of the economics faculty that produced such giants as Marshall, Keynes, Lord Kaldor, and Sen, Angus Fielding’s reputation extended well beyond his work on the global financial system. He was also a member of the Tuesday Club, a group of intellectuals and analysts who had had, and maintained, connections with British intelligence. Fielding had served a stint as an adviser to MI6 early in his career, helping to identify the economic vulnerabilities of the Eastern bloc.

  “Angus,” Janson began, his voice froggy and soft.

  “A bottle of claret!” the college master cried. “A bit early, I know, but that we can supply. Look out the window and you see the Great Courtyard. But, as you may recall, there’s a vast wine cellar beneath it. It runs straight across the courtyard, and underneath the garden owned by the college. A catacombs of claret. A fluid Fort Knox! There’s a manciple with a great hoop of keys, and he’s the only person who can let you into it, the jumped-up tosser. We’ve got a wine committee in charge of selections, but it’s riven with factions, like the former Yugoslavia, only less peaceable.” He called to his secretary: “I wonder if we might get a bottle of the Lynch Bages ’eighty-two, I seem to recall there was an unopened bottle left from last night.”

  “Angus,” Janson began again. “I’m here to talk about Peter Novak.”

  Fielding was suddenly alert. “You bring news from him?”

  “About him.”

  Fielding fell silent for a moment. “I’m suddenly feeling a draft,” he said. “A rather chilling one.” He tugged at an earlobe.