The Jason Directive

  Janson bowed deeply, placing his forehead against the marble tiled wall. Then he turned, his stooped body signaling boozy exhaustion. Suddenly, explosively, he surged upward and to the right, and as the guard reeled back from the impact, he smashed his knee into his groin. The man grunted and reared up, throwing his looped cord against Janson’s shoulders, and frantically trying to slide it upward, around his vulnerable neck. Janson felt the cord digging into his flesh, searing like a band of heat. There was no way but forward: instead of retreating, Janson pressed closer to his assailant, and dug his chin into his opponent’s chest. He thrust a hand into the man’s shoulder holster and removed the long, silenced handgun: his assailant could not free up his own hands and maintain the pressure on the cord. He had to choose. Now the man dropped the garrote and struck Janson’s hand with an underhand blow, sending the gun skidding along the marble floor.

  Suddenly, Janson thrust the top of his head against the man’s lower jaw. He heard the clicking sound of the man’s teeth banging together as the impact of the head butt traveled from jaw to cranium. Simultaneously, he wrapped his right leg around the man’s facing leg and drove forward with all his might until the burly man toppled backward to the marble floor. The guard was well trained, though, and swept his leg toward Janson’s feet, knocking him to the floor as well. His spine jangling from the impact, Janson scrambled to his feet again and stepped forward, delivering a powerful kick to the man’s groin and keeping his leg planted between his thighs. With his right hand, he pulled out the guard’s left leg as, with his left hand, he bent the man’s other leg at the knee, folding it so that the ankle went over his other knee. There was a look of fury and fear on the man’s face as he thrashed violently against Janson’s grip, battering him with his hands: he knew what Janson was attempting, and would do anything to prevent it. Yet Janson would not be deterred. Coldly following method when every instinct called for the simplicities of collision or retreat, he lifted the man’s straightened leg up and over his own knee for leverage, and wrenched it with all his strength until he heard the joint break. From beneath the wet sheaths of muscle, the sound was not like a piece of wood snapping; it was a quiet popping sound, accompanied by the tactile sense, the sudden give as the ligament of a complicated joint tore irremediably.

  The man opened his mouth as if to scream, the excruciating pain reinforced by his awareness that he had just been maimed for life. The knee was broken and would never work quite properly again. Combat injuries usually produced their greatest pain afterward; endorphins and stress hormones dampened much of the acute agony at the time the injuries were inflicted. But the figure-four leg lock had its intended consequence, and the agony of the break was, Janson knew, often sufficient to induce unconsciousness by itself. The guard was no ordinary specimen, however, and his powerful arms were forming grapple hooks even as the pain convulsed him. Janson dropped abruptly, pitching forward so that his knees hit the man’s face with the weight of his body. It was an anvil blow. Janson heard the man’s quick expulsion of breath as unconsciousness overtook him.

  He picked up the gun—it was, he now saw, a CZ-75, a highly effective handgun of Czech manufacture—and shoved it awkwardly into his deep breast pocket.

  There was a knock on the door—dimly, he realized there had been such knocks earlier, which the focus of his mind had not permitted to register—and there were urgent Magyar mutterings as well: guests in need of relief. Janson lifted the burly guard and carefully positioned him on one of the toilets, pulling his trousers down around his ankles. The upper body lolled against the wall, but only his lower extremities would be visible to the guests. He latched the door from the inside, slid underneath the partition, and retracted the dead bolt of the rest room. He walked out to the baleful glares of four florid-faced diners and shrugged apologetically.

  The bulky revolver was pressed uncomfortably against his chest; Janson buttoned the lowermost button of his jacket, and that one only. At the end of the hallway, he saw the two bodyguards who had been at the bar. From their expressions—dismay turning to congealed hatred—he saw that they had expected to assist their colleague in escorting a “drunk” from the restaurant. As he turned the corner to the dining room, one of them, the taller of the two, stepped directly in front of him.

  The man’s hatchet face was perfectly expressionless as he spoke to Janson in quiet, accented English. “You’ll want to be extremely careful. My partner has a gun trained on you. Very powerful, very silent. The rate of heart attacks is very high in this country. Nonetheless, if you are stricken, it will attract some attention. I should not prefer it. There are more graceful ways. But we will not think twice about dealing with you right here.”

  Drifting in from the main dining room were the sounds of merriment and the festive tune that had become universal in the past century, “Happy Birthday to You.” Boldog születésnapot! he heard. The song lost nothing in the Hungarian, Janson was sure, recalling the large table filled with a couple of dozen revelers, a table on which four frosty bottles of champagne had been assembled.

  Now with a look of stark terror on his face, Janson placed both his hands on his chest, in a theatrical gesture of fright. At the same time, he slipped his right hand beneath his left hand, stealing toward the handgrip of the bulky firearm.

  He waited another moment for the other sound associated with celebration, at least as much in Hungary as elsewhere: the pop of a champagne cork. It arrived a moment later, the first of the four bottles that would be opened. At the sound of the next popped cork, Janson squeezed the trigger of the silenced revolver.

  A soft phut was lost among the clamorous festivities, but now a horrifed look appeared on the gunman’s face. Janson was conscious of the tiny corona of woolen threads puffing out from a barely visible hole in his jacket as the man collapsed to the floor. An abdominal injury alone would not cause a professional to plummet as he did. The immediate collapse could mean only one thing: the bullet had plowed through his upper abdomen and lodged in his spine. The result was the immediate cessation of neural impulses, and the resultant paralysis of all muscles of the body’s lower regions. Janson was familiar with the telltale signs of complete cataplexy and numbness, and he knew what the experience uniquely did to combatants, even hardened ones: they mourned. They mourned what they recognized to be the irreversible loss of their physicality, sometimes even forgetting to take measures to prevent the loss of their very lives.

  “Take your hand from your pocket, or you’re next,” he told the man’s partner in a harsh whisper.

  The authority of his voice, more than the gun in his grip, was his ultimate weapon here, Janson knew. In theory, theirs was a Mexican standoff, two men with their fingers on short triggers. There was no logical reason for the other man to stand down. Yet Janson knew that he would. Janson’s actions were unexpected, as was his confidence. Too many factors could underlie this confidence and they could not be assessed with any certainty: Did Adam Kurzweil know that he would be able to squeeze off a shot faster? Was he perhaps wearing concealable soft body armor? Two seconds were not enough to make such an evaluation. And the penalty of guessing wrong was starkly visible. Janson saw the man’s eyes dart toward his ashen-faced, immobilized partner … and the spreading pool of urine around him. The loss of urinary continence indicated the severing of the sacral nerves caused by an injury to a mid- or lower-spinal vertebra.

  The man held out his hands before him, looking sickened, humiliated, scared.

  If your enemy has a good idea, steal it, Lieutenant Commander Alan Demarest used to say, referring to the wily snares of their Viet Cong adversaries; and it came to Janson’s mind, along with a darker thought: When you gaze too long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back. What they had planned for him, he would use on them, including even the burly guard’s silenced CZ-75.

  “Don’t just stand there,” Janson said softly, leaning in close to the man’s ear. “Our friend has just had a heart attack. Common in your country, as he w
as just explaining. You’re going to lift this man, let him lean against you, and together we’re going to walk out of the restaurant.” As he spoke, he buttoned the fallen man’s jacket, ensuring that the splash of blood was concealed beneath it. “And if I can’t see both your hands, you’ll find that the attack is contagious. Perhaps the diagnosis will be changed to acute food poisoning. And you two will be shopping for wheelchairs together—assuming either of you lives.”

  What ensued was ungainly but effective: one man supporting his stricken companion, moving him swiftly out of the restaurant. Sandor Lakatos, Janson saw as they rounded the corner, was no longer at his table. Danger.

  Janson suddenly reversed direction and dove through the double doors to the restaurant’s kitchen. The din was surprisingly loud: there were the noises of meat sizzling in oil, of fluids boiling, of knives rapidly chopping onions and tomatoes, of veal cutlets being pounded, dishes being washed. He paid little attention to the white-coated men and women at their stations as he raced through the kitchen. He knew there had to be some sort of service entrance. It was impossible that the supplies to this kitchen arrived through the exquisitely carpeted lobby.

  At the far end, he found the rusty metal stairs, cramped and steep. They led to an unlocked steel panel, flush with the ground overhead. Janson barged through, and the night air felt cool on his skin after the steamy warmth of the kitchen.

  He closed the steel panel doors as quietly as he could and looked around him. He was on the rear right side of the Palace Hotel, next to the parking lot. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that twenty yards ahead of him were long-limbed trees and grass: concealment, but not protection.

  A sound—a scraping noise. Someone moving with his back to the wall, his feet planted firmly on the ground. Someone who was moving toward him. The person knew he was armed, and was taking all possible precautions.

  He felt the stinging spray of brick and mortar against his face before he heard the cough of the gun. His assailant had gained an angle on him! His assailant was three hundred feet away; accuracy would be paramount. He had, he calculated, four seconds to assume the rollover prone position. Four seconds.

  Janson dropped to both knees and extended his left hand in front of him to break his fall as he pitched forward; then he extended his firing arm downrange and rested it upon the ground, rolling up on his right side as he did so. With his left ankle braced against the back of his right knee, he stabilized his position. Now he was able to put his supporting hand on the weapon, the heel of his palm firmly and squarely on the packed-gravel ground: it would provide a solid shooting rest as he placed his forefinger inside the trigger guard of the CZ-75. What the Czech gun lacked in concealability, it made up for in stopping power and accuracy. It would enable far more accurate cluster shooting than his own palm-sized weapon.

  He identified his target—it was the suited guard he had just left below—and squeezed off two shots. They were silenced, but the recoil reminded him of just how much force they conveyed. One missed his target; the other struck him in the neck, and the man sprawled to the ground, spouting blood.

  A muted explosion came from behind him: Janson tensed until he realized that it was the tire of an SUV ten feet away, abruptly deflating as a bullet struck it. There was another gunman stalking him, it appeared, and the direction of the impact plus the geometry of the building told him approximately where he was situated.

  Still in the rollover prone firing position, Janson pivoted thirty degrees and saw Sandor Lakatos himself, holding a gleaming, nickel-plated Glock 9mm. The preening peacock, he thought to himself. The shiny surface reflected the light of the parking lot halogens, making him an easier target. Janson aligned the gun’s small sights along the man’s round torso and he felt his gun buck as he squeezed off another two shots.

  Lakatos returned fire spasmodically, the muzzle flash leaving a dark shadow in Janson’s night vision, and he heard the thunk of one of the Hungarian’s bullets hitting the hard-packed gravel a few inches from his right leg. He was proving a deadly adversary after all. Had Janson missed? Was the man protected by body armor?

  Then he heard Lakatos breathing hard, heaving as he slowly sank to the ground. Janson’s bullets had struck him in the lower chest and punctured his lungs, which were slowly filling up with the resultant hemorrhage. The merchant of death was too wise not to know precisely what was happening to him: he was drowning in his own blood.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “Goddamn you, Paul Janson,” said Jessie Kincaid. He was driving the rented car at just under the speed limit while she kept an eye on the map. They were making their way to Budapest, headed for the National Archives, but doing so via a circuitous route, keeping off the main roads. “You should have let me come. I should have been there.”

  Having finally elicited the details of what had happened last night, she was steamed and reproachful.

  “You don’t know what sort of trip wires there might be at a rendezvous like that,” Janson said patiently, his eyes regularly scanning the rearview mirror for any signs of unwanted company. “Besides, the meeting was in an underground restaurant, out of range of any perimeter stakeout. Would you have parked your M40A1 on the bar, or checked it in the cloakroom?”

  “Maybe I couldn’t have helped inside. Outside’s different. Plenty of trees around, plenty of perches. It’s a game of odds, you know that better’n anyone. Point is, it would have been a sensible precaution. You didn’t take it.”

  “It represented an unnecessary risk.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “To you, I mean. There was no reason to put you at risk unnecessarily.”

  “So instead you exposed yourself to that risk. That don’t seem exactly professional. What I’m saying is, use me. Treat me like a partner.”

  “A partner? Reality check. You’re twenty-nine. You’ve been in the field for how many years, exactly? Don’t take this the wrong way, but—”

  “I’m not saying we’re equals. All I’m saying is, teach me. I’ll be the best student you ever had.”

  “You want to be my protégée?”

  “I love it when you speak French.”

  “Let me tell you something. I’ve had a protégé or two in my time. They’ve got something in common.”

  “Lemme guess. They’re all men.”

  Janson shook his head grimly. “They’re all dead.” In the distance, nineteenth-century church spires were interspersed with Soviet-era tower blocks: symbols of aspiration that had outlived the aspirations themselves.

  “So your idea is, keep me at arm’s length and you’ll keep me alive.” She turned in her seat and faced him. “Well, I don’t buy it.”

  “They’re all dead, Jessie. That’s my contribution to their career advancement. I’m talking about good people. Hell, extraordinary people. Gifted as you can get. Theo Katsaris—he had the potential to be better than me. Only, the better you are, the higher the stakes. I wasn’t just reckless with my own life. I’ve been reckless with the lives of others.”

  “‘Every operation with potential benefits also has potential risks. The art of planning centers on the coordination of these two zones of uncertainty.’ You wrote that in a field report once.”

  “I’m flattered by the way you boned up on me. But there are a few chapters you seemed to have skipped: Paul Janson’s protégés have a nasty habit of getting killed.”

  The National Archives were housed in a block-long neo-Gothic building; its narrow windows of intricately leaded glass were set in cathedral-like arches, sharply limiting the amount of sunlight that reached the documents within. Jessie Kincaid had taken to heart Janson’s idea of beginning at the beginning.

  She had a list of missing information that might help them unravel the mystery of the Hungarian philanthropist. Peter Novak’s father, Count Ferenczi-Novak, was said to have been obsessively fearful for his child’s safety. Fielding had told Janson that the count had made enemies who, he was convinced, would seek to revenge t
hemselves against his scion. Is that what had finally happened, half a century later? The Cambridge don’s words had the keenness of a blade: The old nobleman may have been paranoid, but as the old saw has it, even paranoids have enemies. She wanted to retrace the count’s movements back in those fateful years when the Hungarian government underwent such bloody tumult. Were there visa records that might indicate private trips that Novak’s father had made, with or without his son? But the most important information they could get would be genealogical: Peter Novak was said to be concerned with protecting the surviving members of his family—a typical sentiment among those who had seen such destruction in their tenderest years. Yet who were these relations—were there surviving cousins with whom he might have kept in touch? The family history of Count Ferenczi-Novak might be mired in obscurity, but it would repose somewhere in the vastness of Hungary’s National Archives. If they had the names of these unknown relatives and could locate them, they might get an answer to the most vexing question of all: was the real Peter Novak alive or dead?

  Janson dropped her off in front of the National Archives building; he had some dealings of his own to conduct. Years in the field had given him an instinct for where to find the black-market vendors of false identity papers and other instruments that could come in handy. He might or might not get lucky, he told her, but decided he might as well give it a try.

  Now Jessica Kincaid, dressed simply in jeans and a forest green polo shirt, found herself inside an entrance hall, scanning a chart of the Archives’ holdings that hung beside a vast and intimidating list of sections.

  Archives of the Hungarian Chancellery (1414–1848) I. “B.”

  Records of Government Organs between 1867 and 1945 II. “L.”