Light briefly flooded the dim warehouse as somebody opened a side door.
He heard footsteps—somebody racing into the cavernous space.
Another burst came from the AKS-74, directed not at Janson but at the unseen arrival.
“Oh shit! Oh shit!” It was Barry Cooper’s voice.
He couldn’t believe it: Barry Cooper had made his way into the abandoned warehouse.
“Barry, what the hell are you doing here?” Janson called.
“Right now, I’m asking myself that. Heard all this gunfire when I was in the car, got scared, and I ran in here trying to escape. Pretty dumb, huh?”
“Truthfully? Yes.”
Another fusillade brought up a storm of sparks from the concrete floor.
Janson stepped back from the pillar and saw what was happening. Barry Cooper was huddled behind a large steel drum while the man on the catwalk began to reposition himself.
“I don’t know what to do,” Cooper said in a half wail.
“Barry, do what I’d do.”
“Gotcha.”
A shot rang out, and the short, stocky man on the catwalk abruptly stiffened.
“That’s right, baby. Make love, not war, motherfucker,” Cooper yelled as he emptied the entire clip of his pistol into the gunman overhead.
Now Janson could move around the pillar, and he immediately squeezed off a shot at Ratko’s companion, who hovered with a knife near the trussed woman.
“Sranje! Shit!” the man called out. The bullet had struck his shoulder, and he let the knife drop. The man sank to the ground, moaning and incapacitated.
Janson saw the woman snake a foot out toward the knife, and bring it close to her. Then she wedged it between her two heels and, her legs shaking with the effort, gradually raised it off the ground.
The Serb giant seemed torn between two targets, Cooper and Janson.
“Drop the gun, Ratko!” Janson yelled.
“I fuck your mother!” the giant Serb spat, and he squeezed off a shot at Barry Cooper.
“Dammit!” Cooper bellowed. The bullet had penetrated both his arm and his lower chest. His gun fell to the ground and he retreated, in agony, behind a row of steel drums near the side entrance.
“You OK, Barry?” Janson called out, stepping behind another stanchion.
There was a moment of silence. “I dunno, Paul,” he replied weakly. “Hurts like a motherfucker. Plus, I feel like I’ve fallen off the whole Gandhian-pacifist wagon. I’m probably going to have to become a vegan just to get my karma straightened out.”
“Nice shooting, though. Weather Underground experience?”
“YMCA summer camp,” Cooper said, sheepish. “BB guns.”
“Can you drive?”
“Not the Indy 500 or anything, but, yeah, I guess.”
“Keep calm and listen to me. Get into the car and drive yourself to a hospital. Now!”
“But what about …?”
“Don’t worry about me! Just haul ass.”
A bullet from the giant’s .45 echoed loudly through the steel enclosure, and a piece of concrete landed near Janson’s feet.
It was a standoff now, between the two of them.
Two men, with nothing to lose but their lives.
Janson did not dare shoot blindly, for risk of hitting the man’s captive. He took a few steps back until he could make out his target clearly. Ratko, steadying his gun hand with his other hand for precision shooting, had his back to her. A glint of steel told him that the woman was not as helpless as he imagined.
With her one free arm, she had reached down, stretching farther than seemed possible, and grabbed the hilt of the knife, which through extraordinary contortions she had managed to raise to mid-thigh level. Now she was raising it high, keeping the blade horizontal, the better to avoid the ribs, and—
Plunged it into the giant’s back.
Shock wiped out the menacing expression on his hideously scarred face. As Janson stepped forward, the giant squeezed off another shot, but it went high. Janson had one more bullet left in his magazine: he could not miss.
He assumed the standard Weaver stance and squeezed off his sole remaining shot, aiming for the man’s heart.
“I fuck your mother,” the Serb rumbled, and then, like falling timber, he pitched forward, dead.
Now Janson strode over to the woman captive. He felt a surge of fury and revulsion as he took in the tattered clothes, the bruised flesh, the red marks left by hands that had groped and grasped her flesh like so much modeling clay.
Wordlessly, Janson withdrew the knife from the Serb’s back and sliced through the hawser, freeing her.
She slid to the floor, her back resting against the pillar, seemingly unable to stand. She curled herself up, putting her arms around her knees, drawing them toward her, and resting her head on her forearm.
He disappeared for a moment, returning with the white shirt and khaki trousers that had been worn by the man with the gold-rimmed glasses.
“Take them,” he said. “Put ’em on.”
Finally, she raised her head, and he saw that her face was wet with tears.
“I don’t understand,” she said dully.
“There’s a U.S. Consulate General at Museumplein nineteen. If you can get there, they’ll take care of you.”
“You rescued me,” she said in a strange, hollow voice. “You came for me. What the hell would you do that for?”
“I didn’t come for you,” he snapped. “I came for them.”
“Don’t lie to me,” she said. “Please don’t lie to me.” A quaver entered her voice. She seemed to be on the verge of collapse, and yet she started to talk, drawling through her tears, desperately clinging to the tattered vestiges of her professionalism. “If you wanted to interrogate one of them, you could have taken one alive and left. You didn’t. You didn’t, because they’d have killed me if you did.”
“Get yourself to the consulate,” he said. “File an After-Action Report. You know the regs.”
“Answer me, goddammit!” She rubbed the tears from her face desperately, frantically, with the palms of both hands. However traumatized and battered, she remained fiercely ashamed of the display of weakness, vulnerability. She tried to stand up, but the muscles in her legs rebelled and she only ended up sinking to the ground again.
“How come you didn’t take out Steve Holmes?” She was breathing heavily. “I saw what happened. You could have taken him out. Should have taken him out. Standard combat procedure is, you take the guy out. But all you did was disarm him. Why would you do that?” She coughed, and tried for a brave smile, but it looked like a wince. “Nobody uses a goddamn Havahart trap in the middle of a gunfight!”
“Maybe I missed. Maybe I was out of ammunition.”
Her face was red as she slowly shook her head. “You think I can’t handle the truth? Well, I don’t know if I can. I just know that I can’t hear any more lies right now.”
“Museumplein nineteen,” Janson repeated.
“Don’t leave me here,” she said, her voice cracking with fear and bewilderment. “I’m scared, all right? These fuckers weren’t in the prep book. I don’t know who they are or what they want or where they are. All I know is, I need help.”
“The consulate will help.” Janson started to walk away.
“Don’t you turn your back on me, Paul Janson! I almost killed you three times. The least you owe me is an explanation.”
“Report back to work,” Janson replied. “Go back to your job.”
“I can’t. Don’t you understand anything?” Suddenly, her voice became thick; the woman who sought to kill him was choking up. “My job—my job is to kill you. I can’t do that now. I can’t do my job.” She laughed bitterly.
Slowly, slowly, she struggled to her feet, holding on to the pillar for support.
“Listen to me now. I met this American in Regent’s Park who told me some lunatic story that maybe us Cons Op folks had got caught up in some big … manipulation.
That the bad guy we were supposed to take down wasn’t really the bad guy. I ignored that, because if that were true, up was down and down was up. Can you understand that? If you can’t trust the people who give you your orders, what’s the point of anything? Later, I filed my Memorandum of Conversation about it, just pro forma, and I get a phone call not from my boss, but my boss’s boss. And he wants me to remember that Paul Janson is a genius liar, and was I sure he hadn’t gotten to me somehow? Now I’m shivering in this godforsaken warehouse and thinking if I ever want to learn what’s going on in the world, I’m probably not going to get that from my bosses. Now I’m thinking that the only one who can tell me what time it is is the guy I’m looking at.” Trembling, she began to put on the clothes he had brought her. “The same guy I’ve spent forty-eight hours trying to drill.”
“You’ve just gone through a traumatic experience. You’re not yourself. That’s all.”
“I’m not finished with you, Paul Janson.” She licked her cracked lips. Raised welts were beginning to appear on her bruised cheeks.
“What is it that you want from me?”
“I need help. I need … to know what’s going on. I need to know what’s a lie and what isn’t.” More tears welled up in her eyes, and she wiped them away, mortified. “I gotta get somewhere safe.”
Janson blinked. “You want to be safe? Then stay the hell away from me. It’s not safe where I am. And that’s the one thing I am certain of. Do you want me to take you to a hospital?”
An angry stare. “They’d get me there. They’d find me, for sure they would.”
Janson shrugged uneasily. She was right.
“I want you to tell me what the hell is going on.” Her gait was unsteady, but she took a step toward him.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“I can help. You have no idea. I know stuff, I know plans, I know faces—I know who’s been dispatched to come after you.”
“Don’t make things worse for yourself,” Janson said, not unkindly.
“Please.” The woman looked at him forlornly. She had the air of someone who had never experienced a moment’s doubt in her professional life before now—someone who did not know how to deal with the uncertainties that now thronged her.
“Forget it,” Janson said. “In about a minute, I’m going to steal a car. This is an act of larceny, and anybody who’s with me at the time is legally an accomplice. That put things into perspective for you?”
“I’ll steal it for you,” she said huskily. “Lookit, I don’t know where you’re going. I don’t care. But if you get away, I’ll never know the truth. I need to know what’s true. I need to know what isn’t.”
“The answer is no,” Janson said shortly.
“Please.”
His temple began to throb again. To take her with him was madness, self-evident madness.
But maybe there was some sense in the madness.
“Oh Jesus! Oh Jesus!” Clayton Ackerley, the man from the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, was practically keening, and the sterile phone line did nothing to diminish the immediacy of his terror. “They’re fucking taking us out.”
“What are you talking about?” Douglas Albright’s voice was truculent but alarmed.
“You don’t know?”
“I heard about Charlotte, yes. It’s awful. A terrible accident—and a terrible blow.”
“You don’t know!”
“Slow down and tell it to me in English.”
“Sandy Hildreth.”
“No!”
“They fished up his limo. Goddamn armored limo. On the bottom of the Potomac. He was in the backseat. Drowned!”
A long silence. “Oh Jesus. It’s not possible.”
“I’m looking at the police report right now.”
“Couldn’t have been some sort of accident? Some horrible, horrible coincidence?”
“An accident? Oh sure, that’s what they’ve got it down as. Driver was speeding, eyewitnesses saw the car as it skidded off the bridge. Like with Charlotte Ainsley—some cabdriver loses control of his car, does a hit-and-run. And now there’s Onishi.”
“What?”
“They found Kaz’s body this morning.”
“Dear God.”
“Corner of Fourth and L Streets in the near Northeast.”
“What the hell was he doing there?”
“According to the coroner’s report, there was phencyclidine in his blood. That’s PCP—angel dust. And a lot of other shit besides. Officially, he OD’d on the street corner, outside a crack house. ‘We see this all the time,’ is what one of the city cops said.”
“Kaz? That’s crazy!”
“Of course it’s crazy. But that’s how they did it. The fact is that these three key members of our program have been killed within twenty-four hours of one another.”
“Christ, it’s true—they’re picking us off, one by one. So who’s next? Me? You? Derek? The secretary of state? POTUS himself?”
“I’ve been on the phone with them. Everybody’s trying not to panic and not doing the greatest job of it. Fact is, we’re all marked. We just joined the goddamn endangered-species list.”
“But it doesn’t make any sense!” Albright exploded. “Nobody knows who we are. Nothing connects us! Nothing except the most tightly guarded secret in the United States government.”
“Let’s be a little more precise. Even if nobody who’s not in the program knows, he knows.”
“Now wait a minute …”
“You know who I’m talking about.”
“Christ. I mean, what have we done? What have we done?”
“He hasn’t just cut his strings. He’s killing everybody who ever pulled them.”
Chapter Twenty-one
The sun filtered through the mulberry trees and tall pines, which spread their boughs protectively over the cottage. It was remarkable how well it blended into its surroundings, Janson noted with satisfaction as he walked through the door. He had just returned from a stroll down the path to the tiny village, a few miles down the mountain, and carried groceries and an armload of newspapers: Il Piccolo, Corriere delle Alpi, La Repubblica. Within the cottage, the austerity of the stone exterior was belied by the richly burnished boiserie and warm terra-cotta tiling throughout; the frescoes and ceiling paintings seemed to belong to another age and way of life altogether.
Now Janson entered the bedroom where the woman was still sleeping and prepared a cool, damp compress for her forehead. Her fever was subsiding; time and antibiotics had had their effect. And time had had its healing effect on him, too. The drive to the Lombardy redoubt had taken all night and some of the next morning. She was conscious for little of it, waking up for only the last few miles. It had been picture-perfect northern Italian countryside—the yellow fields of dried cornstalks, the groves of chestnut trees and poplars, the ancient churches with modern spires, the vineyards, Lombard castles perched on crags. Behind them, the gray-blue Alps stood over the horizon like a wall. Yet by the time they arrived, it was clear that the woman had been badly affected by her ordeal, much more so than she had realized.
The few times he had watched her sleep, he saw a woman tossing and turning, in the grip of powerful and disturbing dreams. She would whimper, occasionally lash out with an arm.
Now he draped a cloth drenched in cold water upon her forehead. She tossed feebly, a low moan of protest escaping her throat. After a few moments, she coughed and opened her eyes. He quickly poured water into a glass from the jug at her bedside, and had her drink from it. Before, once she’d taken a drink, she had sunk back into her deep and troubled sleep. This time, however, her eyes remained open. Staring off.
“More,” she whispered.
He poured her another glass of water, and she drank it, steadily, without requiring his support or assistance. Quietly, her strength was returning. Her eyes focused, and fell upon him.
“Where?” she said, the one-word question costing her no little effort.
>
“We’re in a cottage belonging to a friend of mine,” he said. “In Lombardy. The Brianza countryside. Lago di Como is ten miles to our north. It’s a very isolated, very private spot.” As he spoke, he saw that her bruises looked even worse; it was a sign of the recovery process. Yet even the livid swellings could not conceal her simple beauty.
“How long … here?”
“It’s been three days,” he said.
Her eyes filled with disbelief, alarm, fear. Then, gradually, her face slackened, as consciousness ebbed.
A few hours later, he returned to her bedside, simply watching her. She’s wondering where she is. She’s wondering why she’s here. Janson had to ask himself the same question. Why had he taken her in? His decision to do so had been anguishing: cold, hard reason had ensured his survival so far. And there was no doubt that the woman could potentially prove useful to him. But cold, hard reason told him that she could also prove fatal—and that his decision to take her in had been largely a matter of emotion. The kind of emotion that could cost someone his life. What did it matter if she were hunted down in Amsterdam? She had, indeed, repeatedly sought to kill him. I need to know what’s a lie and what isn’t, she had said, and he knew that this much was not a lie.
The woman had endured a shattering experience—made more so, surely, by the fact that she had once imagined herself invulnerable. He knew what that was like, knew it firsthand. What had been violated was not so much her body as her sense of who she was.
He held another compress to her forehead, and after a while she stirred again.
This time, she ran her fingertips over her face, felt the raised weals. There was shame in her eyes.
“I guess you don’t remember much since Amsterdam,” Janson said. “That’s typical of the kind of contusions and concussions you suffered. Nothing helps but time.” He handed her a glass of water.
“Feel like shit,” was her cotton-mouthed reply.
She drank it greedily.
“I’ve seen worse,” he said.
She covered her face with her hands and rolled over, turning away from him, as if embarrassed to be seen. A few minutes later, she asked, “Did you drive here in the limo?”