The Jason Directive

  “Puma?”

  “Shop name for Peter Novak. And before you ask, you’re Falcon. The Puma update is what’s freaking me out, though. They don’t think he’s dead.”

  “What, are they waiting for the obituary in The New York Times?”

  “Story is that you took money to arrange his death. But you failed.”

  “I saw him die,” Janson said sadly, shaking his head. “God, I wish it were otherwise. I can’t tell you how much.”

  “Whoa,” she said. “What, you trying to claim credit for the kill?”

  “I’m afraid your contact is either putting you on or, more likely, just hasn’t got a clue.” He rolled his eyes. “Your tax dollars at work.”

  “Mentioned there was a news segment with him on CNN today. We got CNN here? Probably still be showing on the early-morning Headline News retreads.”

  She wandered over to the large-screen television set, and switched on CNN. Then she located a blank videotape atop the connected VCR, popped it in, and hit RECORD.

  A special report on the declining power of the Federal Reserve. Renewed tensions between North and South Korea. The latest fashion craze among Japanese youth. Protests against genetically modified foods in Britain. Forty minutes of videotape had been recorded by now. Then came a three-minute segment about an Indian woman who ran a clinic in Calcutta for her countrymen with AIDS. A homegrown Mother Teresa, someone called her. And—the occasion for the segment—the ceremony yesterday honoring the woman’s efforts. A distinguished-looking man presenting her with a special humanitarian award. The same man who had helped fund her clinic.

  Peter Novak.

  The late, great Peter Novak.

  Janson watched the large-screen TV with a swirling sense of bewilderment. Either this was some kind of technical trickery or, most likely, it had been filmed earlier, much earlier.

  Surely a closer inspection would make this clear.

  Together, he and Jessie rewound the recording she had made. There was Peter Novak, the familiar figure, unmistakably so. He was grinning and speaking into a microphone, “There’s a favorite Hungarian proverb of mine: Sok kicsi sokra megy. It means that many small things can add up to a big one. It’s a privilege to be able to honor the remarkable woman who, through countless small acts of kindness and compassion, has given the world something large indeed … .”

  There had to be an easy explanation. There had to be.

  Then they watched the segment again, frame by frame.

  “Stop there,” Jessie said at one point. It was their third viewing. She pointed toward a magazine, fleetingly glimpsed at a cluttered table where Novak was interviewed after the ceremony. She ran to the kitchen and retrieved Janson’s copy of The Economist, purchased at the newsstand earlier that day.

  “Same issue,” she said.

  The very same image appeared on the cover, which was dated to expire the following Monday. It was not an old tape that had been broadcast. It was filmed, had to have been filmed, after the catastrophe in Anura.

  Yet if Peter Novak was alive, who had died in Anura?

  And if Peter Novak was dead, who were they were watching?

  Janson felt his head starting to swim.

  It was madness!

  What had they seen? A twin? An impostor?

  Had Novak been murdered and … replaced with a double? It was diabolical, almost beyond imagining. Who could do such a thing?

  Who else knew? He reached for his cell phone, trying Novak’s staffers both in New York and in Amsterdam. An urgent message for Peter Novak. Having to do with matters involving his personal security.

  He used every code-red word he knew—to no avail, yet again. The response was the familiar one: bored, phlegmatic, unalarmed. A message would be conveyed; no promises of whether it would be returned. No information would be divulged as to Mr. Novak’s whereabouts. Márta Lang—if that was even her real name—remained equally elusive.

  A quarter of an hour later, Janson found himself clutching his head, trying to order his whirling thoughts. What had happened to Peter Novak? What was happening to Janson himself? When he looked up, he saw Jessie Kincaid staring back at him with wounded eyes.

  “I ask only one thing of you,” she said, “and I know it’s a biggie, but here it is: do not lie to me. I’ve heard too many lies, hell, I’ve told too many lies, as it is. As for what happened in Anura, I got your word for it, nobody else’s. Tell me this, what I am supposed to believe?” Her eyes were moist, and she was blinking hard. “Who am I supposed to believe?”

  “I know what I saw,” Janson said softly.

  “That makes two of us.” She jerked her head at the TV screen.

  “What are you saying? That you don’t believe me?”

  “I want to believe you.” She took a deep breath. “I want to believe somebody.”

  Janson was silent for a long moment. “Fine,” he said. “I don’t blame you. Listen, I’ll call for a cab, he’ll ferry you down to the Cons Op station in Milan, and you can report back in. Trust me, a crack shot like you, they’ll be relieved to have you back. And I’ll be long gone by the time you get the cleanup crew here.”

  “Hold it,” she said. “Slow down.”

  “I think it’s best,” he said.

  “For who?”

  “Both of us.”

  “You don’t speak for both of us. You speak for one of you.” She was silent for a while, pacing. “All right, you goddamn son of a bitch,” she said abruptly. “You saw what you saw. Christ on a raft, you saw what you saw. Shit, now this is what I call a total mindfuck.” A mordant chuckle. “Shouldn’t do that on a first date, or they won’t respect you in the morning.”

  Janson was lost in his own whirring thoughts. Peter Novak: just who was this living legend, this man who emerged from obscurity to global prominence in such a meteoric blaze? Questions crowded his mind, but they were questions without answers. His stomach churning, Janson threw his Deruta mug into the fireplace, where it smashed against the heavy stones. He felt better for a moment, but only a moment.

  He returned to the scarred leather chair near the fireplace, settling one battered hide against another. Jessie stood behind him, and began to rub his aching shoulders.

  “I hate to add to the tension,” she said, “but if we’re gonna figure out what the hell’s going on, we have got to get out of here. How long do you think it’s going to take Cons Ops before they find us? They’ve got all that eye-in-the-sky data, and believe me, they got technicians working around the clock to identify your car, alternate means of conveyance, whatever. From what my friend told me, the cables so far are worthless, just a lot of false sightings—but there’ll be a true one before long. They’ll be shaking down known contacts in Europe, following thousands of dangling threads, reviewing video from highway tolls and border crossings. All that cybergumshoe shit. And sooner or later, something’s going to lead them here.”

  She was right. He thought of the philanthropist’s motto: Sok kicsi sokra megy. Hungarian folk wisdom. Would their own small efforts yield a larger result? Now he recalled Fielding’s words: It’s in Hungary, still, that you’ll find his greatest admirers, and his most impassioned foes. And Lang’s observation: For better or worse, Hungary made him who he is. And Peter is not one to forget his debts.

  It made him who he is.

  And who was that?

  It made him who he was: Hungary. That had to be Janson’s destination.

  It was his best chance at flushing out Peter Novak’s blood enemies—the ones who had known him longest and, perhaps, best.

  “You look like a man who’s just made up his mind,” Jessie said, almost shyly.

  Janson nodded. “What about you?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “I’m thinking about my next move. What about yours? You going to go back to Cons Ops now?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Let me break it down for you. I report in
to my operations director, I’d be taken out of the field for at least a year, maybe forever. And I’d be the subject of a very lengthy ‘interview.’ I know how the system works. That’s what would be in store for me, and don’t try to tell me otherwise. But that’s not even the bigger problem. The bigger problem is, how I am supposed to rejoin this world where I don’t know what can be trusted and what can’t be. It’s like, I know too much and I don’t know enough, and for both reasons, I can’t go back. I can only go forward. Only way I can live with myself.”

  “Live with yourself? You don’t increase your odds of living by hanging around me. You know that. I’ve told you that.”

  “Lookit, everything’s got a price,” she said quietly. “If you let me, I’ma tag along with you. If you don’t, I’ma do my darnedest to tail you.”

  “You don’t even know where I’m off to.”

  “Sugar bear, it don’t really matter.” Jessie stretched her lean, loosely jointed body. “Where you off to?”

  He hesitated but a moment. “Hungary. Where it all began.”

  “Where it all began,” she repeated softly.

  Janson stood up. “You want to come along, you can. But remember, try to make contact with Cons Ops, and you’re as good as deactivated—and not by me. If you’re along for the ride, you follow the rules of the road. And I set those rules. Otherwise—”

  “Done,” she said, cutting him off. “Quit drilling, you struck oil.”

  He looked at her coolly, appraising her as a soldier and an operative. The truth was, he needed the backup. What would await them was beyond knowing. If she was half as deadly working with him as she had been working against him, she’d prove a formidable weapon indeed.

  He had many phone calls to make before he slept, many legends to resurrect. The path had to be prepared.

  Where it would lead, of course, was impossible to say. Yet what choice was there? Whatever the risks, it was the only way they could ever penetrate the mystery that was Peter Novak.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  He was baiting a trap.

  The thought did little to calm Janson’s nerves, for he knew how often traps caught those who set them. In this phase, his principal weapon would be his own composure. He thus had to steer clear of the pitfalls of anxiety and overconfidence. One could lead to paralysis, the other to stupidity.

  Still, if a trap had to be set, he could think of no setting more appropriate. Thirty-five seventeen Miskolc-Lillafüred, Erzsébet sétány 1, was a couple of miles west of Miskolc proper, and the only notable building in the resort area of Lillafüred. The Palace Hotel, as it was now called, stood near the wooded banks of Lake Hámori, surrounded by a sylvan glade that suggested a long-past feudal Europe of parks and palaces. If the place evoked nostalgia, it was in fact a tribute to it. The completion of the faux hunting castle, in the 1920s, was an imperial project of Admiral Horthy’s regime, designed as a monument to the nation’s historical glories. The restaurant, fittingly, was named for King Matthias, the fifteenth-century Hungarian warrior-sovereign who led his people to greatness, a greatness that gleamed with the blood of their enemies. In the post-Communist era, the place was swiftly restored to its former opulence. Now it drew vacationers and businessmen from all over the country. A project borne of imperial vainglory had been co-opted by a still more powerful dominion, that of commerce itself.

  Paul Janson strode through the lavishly appointed lobby and down to the cellar-style restaurant on the level below. His stomach was tight with tension; food was the last thing on his mind. And yet any sign that he was on edge would only betray him.

  “I’m Adam Kurzweil,” Janson told the maître d’hôtel, in a well-modulated transatlantic accent. It was the sort of language-school English that was common both to educated citizens of the British Commonwealth—Zimbabwe, Kenya, South Africa, India—and to affluent Europeans who had received early instruction in the tongue. “Kurzweil” wore a chalk-striped suit and a scarlet tie, and bore himself with the erect hauteur of a businessman used to being deferred to.

  The maître d’, dressed in a swallowtail dinner jacket, his black hair oiled and combed into obsidian waves, gave Janson a sharp, appraising look before his face creased into a professional smile. “Your guest is already here,” he said. He turned to a younger woman beside him. “She will show you to your table.”

  Janson nodded blandly. “Thank you,” he said.

  The table was, as his guest had obviously requested, a discreet corner banquette. The man he was meeting was a resourceful and careful man, or he would not have survived in his particular line of business for as long as he had.

  As Janson walked toward the banquette, he concentrated on entering into a character he would have to make wholly his own. First impressions did indeed matter. The man he was meeting, Sandor Lakatos, would be suspicious. As Kurzweil, therefore, he would be more so. It was, he knew, the most effective countermeasure.

  Lakatos turned out to be a small, hunched man; the curvature of his upper spine set his head oddly forward on his neck, as if he were tucking in his chin. His cheeks were round, his nose bulbous, and his wattled neck was continuous with his jawline, giving his head a pearlike shape. He was a study in dissipation.

  He was also among the biggest arms dealers in Central Europe. His fortunes had risen markedly during the arms embargo of Serbia, when that republic had to seek irregular sources for what was no longer available to it legally. Lakatos had begun his career in long-haul trucking, specializing in produce and then dry goods; his business model, and his infrastructure, required little modification to expand into the armaments trade. That he had agreed to meet with Adam Kurzweil at all was a testament to another factor behind his success: his sheer, unappeasable greed.

  Employing a long-disused legend, that of a Canadian principal in a security-services—that is, private militia—company, Janson left calls with a number of businessmen long since retired from the trade. In each instance, the message was the same. A certain Adam Kurzweil, representing a client who could not be named, sought a supplier for an extremely large and lucrative transaction. The Canadian—a legend Janson had created for himself, without notifying Cons Ops—was remembered fondly, his low profile and long periods of invisibility respected. Still, the men he contacted demurred, albeit reluctantly; all were cautious men, had made their fortunes and now had moved on. No matter. In the small world of such merchants, Janson knew, word of a serious buyer would spread; the one who arranged a successful contact could expect a commission on the transaction. Janson would not get in touch with Lakatos; he would contact those around him. When one of the businessmen he spoke to, a resident of Bratislava whose close ties with government officials had kept him safe from investigation, asked him why this Adam Kurzweil did not try Lakatos, he was told that Kurzweil was not a trusting soul and would not use anyone who had not been personally vouched for. Lakatos, as far as Kurzweil was concerned, was simply not trustworthy. He and his clients would not expose themselves to the risk of such an unknown. Besides, wasn’t Lakatos too small-time for such a transaction?

  As Janson anticipated, the haughty reproach filtered down to the porcine Hungarian, who bristled at being dismissed in those terms. Untrustworthy? Unknown? Lakatos was not good enough for this Adam Kurzweil, this mysterious middleman? Outrage was joined with pragmatic calculation. To allow his reputation to be thus impugned was simply bad business. And there was no more effective way to expunge any lingering aspersions than by landing the elusive account.

  Yet who was this Kurzweil? The Canadian investor was cagey, obviously unwilling to say what he knew. “All I can say is that he has been a very good client of ours.” Within hours, Janson’s cell phone began chirping with testimonials on the Hungarian’s behalf; the man had obviously been calling in favors. Well, the Canadian conceded, Kurzweil would be passing through the Miskolc area, near Lakatos’s primary residence. It was possible he could be persuaded to meet. But everyone had to understand: Kurzweil was a very
untrusting man. If he declined, no offense should be taken.

  Despite the tactical pretense of reluctance, Janson’s eagerness for the meeting bordered on desperation. For he knew that the one sure way to reach the ancient and entrenched enemies of Peter Novak would be through the Hungarian merchant of death.

  Janson, seated at a tall leather chair in the hotel lobby, had observed Lakatos’s arrival and deliberately waited ten minutes before joining him. As he approached the Hungarian at the banquette, he maintained a pleasantly blasé expression. Lakatos surprised him by standing up and embracing him.

  “We meet at last!” he said. “Such a pleasure.” He pressed his breasty upper body to Janson’s and reached around, his plump sweaty hands vigorously patting his back and then his waist. None too subtly, the effusive embrace served as a kind of crude security check: any upper-body holster—shoulder, small of back, bellyband—would have been detected easily.

  As the two took their seats, Lakatos nakedly scrutinized his guest; avidity vied with no little suspicion of his own. There were, the merchant had learned, opportunities that were too good to be true. One had to distinguish between low-hanging fruit and poisoned bait.

  “The libamaj roston, the grilled goose liver, is excellent. And so is the brassói aprépecsenye—a sort of braised pork.” Lakatos’s voice was slightly breathless and fluting.

  “Personally, I prefer the bakanyi sertéshús,” Janson replied.

  The Hungarian paused. “Then you know this place,” he said. “They told me you were a worldly man, Mr. Kurzweil.”

  “If they told you anything, they told you too much,” he said, a trace of steel in his voice belying his half smile.

  “You’ll forgive me, Mr. Kurzweil. Yet, as you know, ours is a business based on trust. Handshakes and reputation substitute for contracts and paperwork. It is the old way, I think. My father was a butter-and-egg man, and for decades you’d find his little white trucks up and down the Zemplén range. He started in the thirties, and when the Communists took over, they found it was easier to cede these little shipments to somebody who understood the routes. You see, when he was a teenager he was a truck driver himself. So when his employees would tell him that this or that difficulty—a flat tire, a blown radiator—meant that their route would be delayed by half a day, well, he knew better. He knew just how long it took to fix these things, because he’d had to do so himself. His men came to understand that. They could pull nothing over on him, but this did not breed resentment, only respect. I think maybe I am the same way.”