The Jason Directive

  Oradea, in the westernmost point of Romania, was a three-hour drive from Sárospatak, and like a number of Eastern European cities, its beauty was a beneficiary of its postwar poverty. The magnificent nineteenth-century spas and Beaux Arts vistas had been preserved simply because there had been no resources available to tear them down and replace them with what Communist bloc modernity would have favored. To glimpse what the city missed out on, one had only to see the faceless, featureless industrialism of its airport, which could have been any one of a hundred just like it found throughout the Continent.

  For the purposes at hand, though, it would do just fine.

  There, at the fifth terminal, the man in the yellow and blue uniform tucked his clipboard toward his body, preventing the papers from flapping in the breeze. The DHL cargo plane—a repurposed Boeing 727—was preparing to make a direct flight to Dulles, and the inspector accompanied the pilot to the craft. The punch list was long: Were the oil caps properly tightened? Was the engine compartment as it should be, the intake vanes free of foreign materials? Were the cotter pins properly positioned on the landing-gear wheels, the tire pressure normal, the ailerons, flaps, and rudderhinge assemblies in good working order?

  Finally, the cargo area was inspected. The other members of the ground crew returned to service a short-run propeller plane, used to ferry packages from the provinces to Oradea. As the pilot received clearance for takeoff, nobody noticed that the man in the yellow and blue uniform remained within the craft.

  And only when the plane had reached cruising altitude did Janson remove his felt-and-nylon inspector’s jacket and settle in for the ride. The pilot, sitting next to him in the cockpit, switched on the automatic avionics and turned to his old friend. It had been two decades since Nick Milescu had served as a fighter pilot in the American Special Forces, but the circumstances in which he and Janson became acquainted had produced powerful and enduring bonds of loyalty. Janson had not offered to explain the need for this ruse, and Milescu had not asked. It was a privilege to do Janson a favor, any favor. It did not go far toward the repayment of a debt, but it was better than nothing at all.

  Neither of them noticed—could have noticed—the broad-faced man in the food-services truck, idling under one of the loading ramps, whose hard, alert eyes did not quite match the bored and jaded air he affected. Nor could they have heard the man speak hurriedly into a cell phone, even as the cargo plane raised its wheels and angled into the sky. Visual identification: confirmed. Flight plans: filed and validated. Destination: verified.

  “You want to bunk out, there’s a lounger right behind us,” Milescu told Janson. “When we fly with copilots, they use it sometimes. Oradea to Dulles is a ten-hour flight.”

  From Dulles, however, it would be a very short drive to reach Derek Collins. Maybe Jessie was right and he would not survive the encounter. It was simply a risk he had to take.

  “I wouldn’t mind catching up on some sleep,” Janson admitted.

  “It’s just you, me, and a few thousand corporate memos here. No storms ahead of us. Nothing should disturb your dreams.” Milescu smiled at his old friend.

  Janson returned the smile. The pilot could not know how wrong he was.

  The Viet Cong guard that morning had thought the American captive might already be dead.

  Janson was slumped on the ground, his head at an awkward angle. Flies clustered around his nose and mouth, without a flicker of response from the emaciated prisoner. The eyes were slightly open, in a way you often saw with cadavers. Had malnutrition and disease finally completed their slow work?

  The guard unlocked the cage and prodded the prisoner with a shoe, hard. No response. He leaned over and put a hand on the prisoner’s neck.

  How shocked and terrified the guard looked as the prisoner, thin as a wooden jumping jack, suddenly flung his legs around his waist like an amorous lover, then yanked his pistol from his holster and slammed the butt of it against his head. The dead had come to life. Again, with greater force, he crashed the gun into the guard’s skull, and this time the guard fell limp. Now Janson crept into the jungle; he figured he could get a fifteen-minute head start before the alarm was raised and the dogs were loosed. Perhaps the dogs would find the dense jungle impassable; he nearly found it so himself, even as he knifed through the thick underbrush with automaton-like movements. He did not know how he managed to keep moving, how he managed to stave off collapse, yet his mind simply refused to acknowledge his physical debility.

  One foot in front of the other.

  The VC encampment, he knew, was somewhere in the Tri-Thien region of South Vietnam. The valley to the south was dense with the guerrillas. On the other hand, it was a region where the width of the country was especially narrow. The distance from the border with Laos to the west and the sea to the east was no more than twenty-five clicks. He had to get to the coast. If he could get to the coast, to the South China Sea, he could find his way back to safety.

  He could get home.

  A long shot? No matter. Nobody was coming for him. He knew that now. Nobody could save his life but him.

  The land beneath him crested and dipped until, sometime the next day, he found himself at the bank of a wide river. One foot in front of the other. He began to wade through the brown, bath-warm water and found that his feet never left the bottom, even at its deepest. When he was almost halfway across, he saw a Vietnamese boy on the far bank. Janson closed his eyes, wearily, and when he opened them the boy was gone.

  A hallucination? Yes, it had to have been. He must have imagined the boy. What else was he imagining? Had he really escaped, or was he dreaming, his mind falling apart in pace with his body in his miserable bamboo cage? And if he were dreaming, did he really want to wake up? Perhaps the dream was the only escape he would ever enjoy—why bring it to an end?

  A water wasp alighted on his shoulder and stung him. It was painful, startlingly so, and yet it brought an odd sense of relief—for if he felt pain, surely he was not dreaming, after all. He shut his eyes again and opened them, and looked to the riverbank before him and saw two men, no, three, and one of them was armed with an AK-47, and the muddy water in front of him was blistered by a warning blast, and exhaustion, like a tide, swept over him, and he slowly raised his hands. There was no pity—no curiosity, even—in the gunman’s eyes. He looked like a farmer who had trapped a vole.

  As a passenger on the Museumboot circle line, Jessie Kincaid looked like all the other tourists, or so she hoped. Certainly, the glass-topped boat was filled with them, chattering and gawking and running their little videocameras as they floated smoothly down Amsterdam’s muddy canals. She clutched the garish brochure for the Museumboot—“bringing you to the most important museums, shopping streets and leisure centres of downtown Amsterdam,” as it boasted. Kincaid had little interest in shopping or visiting museums, of course, but she saw that the boat’s itinerary included Prinsengracht. How better to disguise stealthy surveillance than by joining a crowd of people engaged in overt surveillance?

  Now the boat rounded the bend and the mansion came into view: the mansion with the seven bay windows—the headquarters of the Liberty Foundation. It seemed so innocuous. And yet evil, as if an industrial effluent somehow polluted its grounds.

  At intervals, she raised to her eyes what looked like an ordinary 35mm camera, equipped with the bulky zoom lens of the amateur enthusiast. This was only a first go, of course. She would have to figure out how to get nearer without being detected. But for the moment she was, in effect, staking out her stakeout.

  Just behind her, and occasionally jostling her, were a couple of unruly teenagers who belonged to an exhausted-looking Korean couple. The mother had a shopping bag with sunflowers on them, containing booty from the Van Gogh Museum souvenir shop; her bleary-eyed husband had his headphones plugged in, no doubt dialed to the Korean audio channel, listening to the pre-recorded tour guide: On your left … On your right … The teenagers, a girl and a boy, were engaged in one of tho
se private sibling tussles that were both sport and squabble. Trying to tag each other, they would, every so often, bump into her, and their giggling apologies were perfunctory at best. The parents seemed too tired to be embarrassed. Meanwhile, the kids happily ignored her glares.

  She wondered whether she should have sprung for the Rederij Lovers cruise, the passengers of which were promised “an unforgettable evening whilst enjoying an outstanding five-course menu.” That scene might have been imprudent for a woman on her own, but she hadn’t known the choice was between getting hit on by strange men and getting hit by strange children. Once more, she forced her eyes to focus.

  Unseen by her, a man shifted slightly from his rooftop perch, high above Prinsengracht’s busy streets. The time of waiting had been long, almost intolerably so, but now he had reason to think that it had not been wasted. Yes—there, standing in the glass-topped boat. It was her. As he fine-tuned his sniper scope, suspicion settled into certainty.

  The American woman’s face was now perfectly centered in his scope; he could even make out her spiky brown hair, her high cheekbones and sensual lips. He exhaled halfway, and then held his breath as the crosshairs settled upon the woman’s upper torso.

  His concentration was unwavering as his fingers caressed the trigger.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Less than an hour from Dulles, Janson found himself on small winding roads that took him through some of the most tranquil territory on the Eastern Shore. Deceptively so. He recalled Jessie’s words of warning. If Collins wants you dead, don’t count on leaving his company alive. Jessie believed he was taking an enormous risk, meeting a deadly adversary face-to-face. But a bolus of sheer rage impelled Janson. Besides, Derek Collins gave orders: he did not execute them himself. To do so would be infra dig, beneath him. Those long-fingered hands would not be sullied. Not as long as there were others to take care of matters for him.

  Chesapeake Bay covered 2,200 miles of coastline, far more if one counted the 150 tributaries along with all the coves and creeks and tidal rivers. The bay itself was shallow, ranging from ten to thirty feet. Janson knew that all sorts of creatures thrived here: muskrats and nutria, swans, geese, ducks, even osprey. The bald eagle itself bred around the lowlands of Dorchester County, as did the great horned owl. The profusion of wildlife, in turn, made it an inviting place for hunters as well.

  And Janson was there to hunt.

  Now he drove over the Choptank River at Cambridge, onto 13, and farther south, over another bridge, and finally to the long spit of land known as Phipps Island. As he drove the rented Camry along the narrow road, he could see the water through the salt-marsh grass, the sun glaring off its surface. Fishing sloops were moving slowly along the bay, hauling in nets laden with blue crabs and menhaden and rockfish.

  A few miles farther down the road, he entered Phipps Island proper. He saw why Derek Collins had chosen it for a vacation home, a retreat from the pressures of his Washington existence. Though only a relatively short distance from Washington, it was isolated, peaceful; it was also, by dint of the land formation, secure. Janson, approaching the undersecretary’s bayside cottage, was feeling distinctly exposed. A long, skinny strip of land connected it to the main peninsula, making a surreptitious land approach difficult. An amphibious arrival would be impeded by the shallowness of the water surrounding the land, much of which had only recently been reclaimed by the steadily erosive sea. The wooden docks for boat landings extended far out, where the depth of the water was sufficient for safe navigation; and the length of those docks, too, rendered potential intruders exposed and vulnerable. Without the need to rely on fallible electronics, Collins had selected an area where nature itself assured him the advantages of easy surveillance and the attendant security.

  Don’t count on leaving his company alive. The director of Consular Operations was a deadly and determined man; Janson had learned that from experience. Well, that made two of them.

  The tires of the sedan kicked up dust—beach sand and dried salt—from the surface of the pale gray road, which stretched ahead like a discarded snakeskin. Would Collins seek to kill him before they spoke? He would do so if he believed Janson represented a mortal threat to him. More likely, he would summon backup—the Oceana Naval Air Station, outside Virginia Beach, could send a pair of H-3 Sea King helicopters to Phipps Island in fifteen minutes; an F-18 Hornet squadron could be scrambled in even less time.

  The important factors to be gauged had to do with character, not technology. Derek Collins was a planner. That was how Janson thought of such men: the ones who sat in air-conditioned offices as they deployed men on missions doomed to failure, all in the course of some chess game they called strategy. A pawn was moved, a pawn was taken. From the perspective of men like Collins, that was what his “human assets” amounted to: pawns. Yet now Janson had the blood of five former Cons Op agents on his hands, and he was hell-bent on confronting the man who had enlisted them, trained them, guided them, directed them—the man who sought to control his destiny, like a piece of carved boxwood on a playing board.

  Yes, Collins was a determined man. But so was Janson, who detested him with a remarkable purity and intensity. Collins was why he had left Consular Operations in the first place. A stiff-necked, coldblooded son of a bitch, Derek Collins had one supreme advantage: he knew precisely who he was. About himself, anyway, he had few illusions. He was a masterful bureaucratic politician and a thoroughgoing creditstealing bastard, and such men would always thrive in the marmoreal jungle that was the nation’s capital. None of that bothered Janson; he regarded it as nearly humanizing. What incensed Janson was the man’s smug certainty that the ends always justified the means. Janson had seen where that led—even seen it, sometimes, in himself—and it sickened him.

  Now he pulled off the road, nosing the car into a particularly exuberant growth of bayberries and marsh willows. The remaining mile he would traverse on foot. If Jessie’s contacts had provided her with accurate information, Collins should be in his cottage, and by himself. A widower, Collins had a penchant for spending time alone; and here another truth about him was illuminated—that he was a deeply unsociable person who was nonetheless skilled at affecting sociability.

  Janson walked through the shoreline grass to the shoreline itself, a jagged tan strip of rocks and sand and battered shells. Despite his thick-soled shoes, he stepped lightly through the dampness of the shore, making little sound. Collins’s cabin was built low to the ground, which made it a somewhat more elusive target for anyone with unfriendly intentions. By the same token, however, it assured Janson that as long as he remained on the shoreline, he would not be visible from it.

  The sun beat against his neck, and his pale cotton shirt grew dappled with sweat and the salt spray that breezed in from the bay. Occasionally, as the tide gently pulled back the water level, he could make out the silhouette of an intricate tracery upon the water: he realized that flat nets had been stretched from the coastline some distance outward, held afloat by small buoys. The security measures were discreet but not negligible, for doubtless the nets were studded with sensors; an amphibious landing would have been nearly impossible without serving notice of the intrusion.

  He heard the sound of heavy boots on the planked walkway just twenty feet away, where the land formed a crown near the top of the beach. A young man in a uniform of green and black camouflage, cinched trousers, a weapons belt: standard-issue National Guard attire. His gait on the boardwalk was a regular tattoo of hard rubber against wood—this was a guard doing a required patrol, not one who was alert to an intruder’s presence.

  Janson continued to trudge quietly along the wet sand of the shore.

  “Hey, you!” The young guardsman had spotted him, and was walking toward him. “You see the signs? You can’t be here. No fishing, no shell scavenging, no nothing.” The man’s face was sun-reddened, not tanned; this was obviously a recent posting for him, and he had not yet adjusted to the long hours of exposure to the elements
.

  Janson turned to face him, stooping his shoulders slightly, willing himself to appear older and feebler. A salty waterman, a local. How would a local respond? He recalled his long-ago conversations with one of them, a fellow angler. “Do you have any idea who I am, young man?” He made his face muscles slack, and his voice developed a slight quaver suggestive of infirmity. He spoke with the vowels of the old Eastern Shore regional accent. “Me, my family been living here when you were still eatin’ your white bread. Been here through the rubs, been here when things was pretty. Shoreline here is public property. My daughter-inlaw’s been five years on the Lower Eastern Shore Heritage Committee. You think you’re going to tell me I can’t go where the law says I can, you got a whole ’nother think come at you. I know my rights.”

  The guardsman scowled, half amused at the old salt’s line of blather and not ungrateful for the interruption of his tedious routine. But his orders were clear. “Fact remains, this is a restricted area, and there’s about a dozen signs saying so.”

  “I’ll have you know, my ancestors were here when the Union troops were in Salisbury, and—”

  “Listen, Pappy,” the guardsman said, rubbing the red and peeling bridge of his nose, “I will frog-march your ass into federal custody at gunpoint if I have to.” He stood directly in front of the other man. “You got a complaint, write your congressman.” He puffed out his chest, placed a hand near his holstered side arm.

  “Why, look at you, you’re just breath and britches.” Janson limply made a swatting gesture with a hand, indicating dismissal and resignation. “Ah, you park rangers wouldn’t know a bufflehead from a widgeon.”

  “Park ranger?” the guardsman sneered, shaking his head. “You think we’re park rangers?”