The Jason Directive

  “Do people often try to pull things over on you?”

  Lakatos grinned, flashing a row of porcelain teeth, unnaturally white and regular. “Few are so foolhardy,” he replied. “They recognize the dangers.” His tone wavered between menace and self-regard.

  “No one has ever prospered by underestimating the Hungarian people,” Janson said soberly. “But then yours is a language, a culture, that few of us can pretend to understand.”

  “Magyar obscurity. It served the country well when others sought to dominate it. At other times, it has served us less well. But I think those of us who operate under conditions of, shall we say, circumspection have learned its value.”

  A waiter appeared and filled their water glasses.

  “A bottle of your ’ninety-eight Margaux,” Lakatos said. He turned to Kurzweil. “It’s a young wine, but quite refreshing. Unless you’d like to try the local specialty—one of those ‘Bull’s Blood’ vintages. Some are quite memorable.”

  “I believe I would, in fact.”

  Lakatos wriggled his fat fingers at the waiter “Instead, a bottle of the Egri Bikavér, ’eighty-two.” He turned again to his companion. “Now tell me,” he said, “how do you find Hungary?”

  “An extraordinary land, which has given the world some extraordinary people. So many Nobel Laureates, film directors, mathematicians, physicists, musicians, conductors, novelists. Yet there is one laureled son of Hungary who—how shall I say this politely?—has given disquiet to my clients.”

  Lakatos looked at him, transfixed. “You intrigue me.”

  “One man’s liberty is another’s tyranny, as they say. And the foundations of liberty may be the foundations of tyranny.” He paused to make sure that his import was taken.

  “How fascinating,” Lakatos said, swallowing hard. He reached for his water glass.

  Janson stifled a yawn. “Forgive me,” he murmured. “The flight from Kuala Lumpur is a long one, however comfortable one is made.” In fact, the seven-hour ride from Milan to Eger in the bone-rattling confines of a truck trailer loaded with cured meats had been both uncomfortable and nerve-racking. Even as he dined with the arms merchant, Jessie Kincaid would be using a false passport and credit card to rent another automobile for tomorrow’s trip and carefully working out the itinerary in advance. He hoped she would be able to get some rest before long. “But travel is my life,” Janson added grandly.

  “I can imagine,” Lakatos said, his eyes bright.

  The waiter, in black tie, appeared with the local red wine; it came in a ribboned bottle without a paper label, the name of the vineyard etched directly on the glass. The wine was dark, rich, seemingly opaque as it splashed into their crystal goblets. Lakatos took a healthy swallow, sluiced it around his mouth, and pronounced it superb.

  “As a region for viticulture, Eger is nothing if not robust.” He held up his wineglass. “You may not be able to see through it,” he added, “but, I assure you, Mr. Kurzweil, you always get value for your money. You made an excellent choice.”

  “I am pleased to hear you say so,” Janson replied. “Another tribute to Magyar opacity.”

  Just then, a man in a sky blue suit but no tie came over to the table—obviously an American tourist, and obviously drunk. Janson looked up at him, and alarm bells began ringing in his head.

  “It’s been a while,” the man said, slurring his words slightly. He placed a hairy, beringed hand on the white linen tablecloth near the bread basket. “Thought it was you. Paul Janson, big as life.” He snorted loudly before he turned and walked away. “Told you it was him,” he was saying to a woman who sat at his table across the room.

  Dammit! What had happened was always a theoretical possibility in covert operations, but so far Janson had been fortunate. There had been an occasion once in Uzbekistan when he was meeting with a deputy to the nation’s oil minister, posing as a go-between to a major petrochemical corporation. An American happened to breeze through the office—a civilian, a Chevron oil buyer, who knew him under another name, and in another context, one involving the Apsheron gas and oil fields of Azerbaijan. Their gazes met, the man nodded, but said nothing. For distinctly different reasons, he felt as chagrined at being spotted by Janson as Janson had at being spotted by him. No words were exchanged, and Janson knew he would make no inquiries. But what had happened here was a worst-case scenario, the sort of cross-context intrusion that any field agent hoped he would never encounter.

  Now Janson focused on slowing his heartbeat, and he turned to Lakatos with an impassive expression. “A friend of yours?” Janson asked. The man had not made it clear to whom his remarks were addressed: “Adam Kurzweil” would not have assumed he was their subject.

  Lakatos looked bewildered. “I don’t know this man.”

  “Don’t you,” Janson said softly, defusing suspicion by placing the arms dealer on the defensive. “Well, no matter. We’ve all had such experiences. Between the drink and the dim lighting, he might have taken you for Nikita Khrushchev himself.”

  “Hungary has always been a land densely populated with ghosts,” Lakatos returned.

  “Some of your own making.”

  Lakatos set his glass down, ignoring the comment. “You’ll forgive me if I’m curious. I have quite a few accounts, as you know. Yours isn’t a name I’d come across.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” Janson took a long, savoring sip of the local wine. “Or do I only flatter myself about my discretion? I’ve spent most of my life in southern Africa, where, I must say, your presence is not a noticeable one.”

  Lakatos tucked his chin deeper into the pillow of fat that was his neck, signaling assent. “A mature market,” he said. “I cannot say there has been any great call for my offerings down there. Still, I have had occasional dealings with South Africans, and I’ve always found you people exemplary trading partners. You know what you want, and you don’t mind paying what it’s worth.”

  “Trust is honored with trust. Fairness with fairness. My clients can be generous, but they are not profligate. They do expect to get what they pay for. Value for money, as you put it. I should be clear, though. The assets they seek are not simply material, or matériel. They are equally interested in the sort of thing doesn’t come on pallets. They seek allies. Human capital, you might say.”

  “I do not wish to mistake your meaning,” Lakatos said, his face a mask.

  “Put it however you like: they know that there are people, forces on the ground, who share their interests. They wish to enlist the support of such people.”

  “Enlist their support …” Lakatos echoed warily.

  “Conversely, they wish to offer support to such people.”

  A deep swallow. “Assuming such people are in need of additional support.”

  “Everybody can use additional support.” Janson smiled smoothly. “There are few certainties in this world. That is one.”

  Lakatos reached over and tapped his wrist, smiling. “I think I like you,” he said. “You’re a thinker and a gentleman, Mr. Kurzweil. Not like the Swabian boors I so often have to deal with.”

  The waiter presented them with fried goose liver, “compliments of the chef,” and Lakatos speared his portion greedily with his fork.

  “But I think you understand where I’m going, yes?” Janson pressed.

  The American in the light blue jacket was back, with more on his mind. “You don’t remember me?” the man demanded belligerently. This time he made it impossible for Janson to pretend he did not know to whom he was speaking.

  Janson turned to Lakatos. “How amusing. It would appear I owe you an apology,” he said. Then he looked up at the surly American, keeping his face bland and devoid of interest. “It would appear you have mistaken me for someone else,” he said, his transatlantic vowels immaculate.

  “The hell I have. Why the hell are you talking funny, anyway? You trying to hide from me? That it? You trying to dodge me? Can’t say as I blame you.”

  Janson turned to Lakat
os and shrugged, seemingly unconcerned. He worked on controlling his pounding pulse. “This happens to me on occasion—apparently I have that kind of face. Last year, I was in Basel, and a woman in the hotel bar was convinced that she’d run across me in Gstaad.” He grinned, then covered his grin with a hand, as if embarrassed by the memory. “And not only that—we’d apparently had an affair.”

  Lakatos was unsmiling. “You and she?”

  “Well, she and the man she took me for. Admittedly, it was quite dark. But I was tempted to take her up to my room and, shall we say, carry on where her gentleman friend left off. I regret that I did not—although I guess she would have realized her mistake at some point.” He laughed, an easy and unforced-sounding laugh, but when he glanced up, the American was still there, a drunken sneer on his face.

  “So you don’t have anything to say to me?” the American snarled. “Shit.”

  The woman who had been at his table—almost certainly his wife—came over to him and pulled on his arm. She was slightly overweight, and dressed in an inappropriately summery frock. “Donny,” she said. “You’re bothering that nice man. He’s probably on vacation, same as us.”

  “Nice man? That shitheel’s the one got me fired.” His face was red, his expression frankly choleric. “Yeah, that’s right. The CEO brought you in to be his hatchet man, didn’t he, Paul? This fucker, Paul Janson, arrives at Amcon as a security consultant. Next thing he’s handing in this report about pre-employment screening and employee theft, and my boss is handing me my ass, because how come I let all this happen on my watch? I gave that company twenty years. Did anybody tell you that? I did a good job. I did a good job.” He scrunched up his crimson face, his countenance radiating both self-pity and hatred.

  The woman gave Janson an unfriendly look; if she was embarrassed for her husband, her narrow eyes made it clear that she had also heard plenty about the outside security consultant who cost her poor Donny his job.

  “When you sober up and wish to apologize,” Janson said, coldly, “please do not concern yourself. I accept your apologies in advance. Such confusions happen.”

  What else could he say? How would the victim of mistaken identity react? With bafflement, amusement, and then ire.

  Of course, it was not a case of mistaken identity, and Janson remembered exactly who Donald Weldon was. A senior manager in charge of security at a Delawarebased engineering firm, he was a complacent lifer who filled his staffing positions with cousins, nephews, and friends, treating the security division as a source of sinecures. As long as no major disaster occurred, who would call his competence and probity into question? Meanwhile, employee theft and the systematic filing of false workmen’s compensation claims had become an invisible drag on the operating budget, while a company vice president was doubling his executive compensation by reporting confidential information to a competitor firm. It was Janson’s experience that errant executives, rather than blaming themselves and their own dereliction for their dismissal, invariably blamed whoever brought their misconduct to light. In truth, Donald Weldon should have been grateful that he was only fired; Janson’s report made it clear that some of the false-compensation claims were made with his complicity, and he provided sufficient evidence for criminal prosecution, one that could easily have resulted in jail time. Janson’s recommendation, however, was that Vice President Weldon be relieved of his duties but not prosecuted, to spare the company further embarrassment and prevent potentially damaging revelations at the pretrial and discovery phases. You owe me your freedom, you corrupt son of a bitch, Janson thought.

  Now the American wagged a finger very near Janson’s nose. “You goddamn candy-ass bastard—you’ll get yours some day.” As the woman led him back to their seats, several tabletops away, his unsteady gait betrayed the alcohol that fueled his fury.

  Janson turned brightly to his companion, but a sense of dread filled him. Lakatos had grown cold; he was not a fool, and the drunken American’s display could not automatically be discounted. The Hungarian’s eyes were hard, like small black marbles.

  “You’re not drinking your wine,” Lakatos said, gesturing with his fork. He smiled an icy executioner’s smile.

  Janson knew how such people thought: probabilities were weighed, but caution dictated that negative inferences were assumed true. Janson also knew that his protestations could have provided little reassurance. He had been burned, exposed, shown to be someone other than the person as whom he had presented himself. Men like Sandor Lakatos feared nothing more than the possibility of deception: Adam Kurzweil now represented not opportunity, but danger. And, however obscure its motivations, such danger was to be eliminated.

  Lakatos’s hand now disappeared into the inner breast pocket of his bulky woolen jacket. Surely he was not handling a weapon—that would be too crude a gesture for someone in his position. The hand lingered oddly, manipulating a device. He was, it appeared, thumbing some sort of automatic pager or, more likely, a text-messaging device.

  And then the merchant looked across the room, toward the maître d’s station. Janson followed his gaze: two dark-suited men, who had been inconspicuously loitering around the long zinc bar, suddenly stood a little straighter. Why hadn’t he picked them out earlier? Lakatos’s bodyguards—of course. The arms dealer would never have met with a broker he did not personally know without taking such an elementary precaution.

  And now, as an exchange of glances suggested, the bodyguards had a new mission. They were no longer simply protectors. They were executioners. Their unbuttoned heavy jackets hung loosely around their torsos; a casual observer would assume that the slight bulge near the right breast pocket was from a cigarette pack or a cell phone. Janson knew better. His blood ran cold.

  Adam Kurzweil would not be permitted to leave the Palace Hotel grounds alive. Janson could envisage the scenario all too clearly. The meal would be hurriedly completed, and the two would stroll together out of the lobby, accompanied by the gunmen. At any convenient distance from the crowds, he would be dispatched with a silenced shot to the back of the head, his body disposed of either in the lake or in the trunk of a vehicle.

  He had to do something. Now.

  Reaching for his glass, he carefully elbowed his fork to the floor and, with an apologetic shrug, bent down to retrieve it. As he reached down, he lifted the cuff of his trousers, released the thumb-break of his ankle holster, and gained a firing grip on the small Glock M26 he had acquired earlier in Eger. Beneath the table, he could use the finger grooves to position his hand on the grip frame. The weapon was now in his lap. The odds had shifted slightly.

  “Have you walked around the lake?” Sandor Lakatos asked. “So beautiful this time of year.” Another display of his porcelain teeth.

  “It’s very beautiful,” Janson agreed.

  “I would like to take you on a walk, afterward.”

  “Isn’t it rather dark for that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Lakatos said. “We’ll be able to be alone. That’s really the best way to get to know each other, I find.” His eyes had an anthracite gleam.

  “I’d like that,” Janson said. “Do you mind if I excuse myself for a minute?”

  “Be my guest.” His gaze drifted toward the two suited guards in the bar area.

  Janson tucked his Glock into his front trouser waistband before he stood up and wandered to the rest rooms, which were off a short hallway extending from the far corner of the main dining room. As he approached, he felt a sharp pang of adrenaline: before him was another dark-suited man, his posture identical to those at the bar. This man was clearly neither a diner nor an employee of the restaurant. He was another guard of Lakatos’s, stationed there for such an eventuality. Janson walked into the marble-floored bathroom, and the man—broad-chested, tall, his face a mask of bored professionalism—followed him in. As Janson turned toward the sinks, he heard the man lock the door. That meant that they were alone. Yet an unsilenced gunshot would only summon the others in Lakatos’s employ
, who were also armed. Janson’s pistol was not the advantage he had hoped. The imperative of visual concealment ruled out the possibility of aural concealment: the bulk of a silenced gun could not have been secreted undetectably in an ankle holster. Now Janson walked to the urinals; in the stainless steel of the knob, he could make out a distorted reflection of the burly guard. He could also make out the long cylindrical shape of the man’s weapon. His weapon was silenced.

  There would be no need to wait for Janson to leave the Palace Hotel; Janson could be dispatched where he was.

  “What’s he paying you?” Janson asked, without turning around to look at the man. “I’ll double it.”

  The guard said nothing.

  “You don’t speak English? I bet you speak dollars?”

  The guard’s expression did not change, but he put away the gun. Janson’s very defenselessness suggested a better approach: now the man removed a two-foot loop of cord with small plastic disks on either end serving as handles.

  Janson had to concentrate to hear the whisper-quiet sound of the man’s jacket stretching as he extended his arms, preparing to loop the garrote precisely around Janson’s throat. He could only applaud his would-be executioner’s professional judgment. The garrote would ensure not only a soundless death but a bloodless one. In a restaurant like this, particularly given the alcohol consumption patterns in Central Europe, it would take little creativity to escort him out. The guard might well drag him out more or less upright, propping him up with a powerful arm around his shoulder: a sheepish grin, and everyone would assume that the guest had simply imbibed too much Zwack Unicum, the spirit of choice at the Palace Hotel.