Suddenly, Janson sprang at him, clamping his right hand around his mouth, his left around the back of his neck. They fell together, the sound of the impact muffled by the sand, a quiet crunch lost amid the cawing of gulls and the rustling of the salt-meadow cordgrass. Even before they hit the ground, though, Janson had snaked his hand around and grabbed the man’s holstered M9 pistol.
“Nobody likes a smart-ass,” he said quietly, dropping the accent, jabbing the M9 Beretta into his trachea. The young man’s eyes widened in terror. “You got new orders, and you’d better obey them: a sound out of you and you’re dead, greenhorn.”
With swift movements, Janson undid the guardsman’s weapons belt and used it to bind his wrists to his ankles. Next, he ripped narrow strips of cloth from his camouflage tunic and stuffed them in the man’s mouth, finally securing the gag with the guardsman’s own bootlaces. After pocketing the man’s M9 and his Motorola “handy-talky,” he lifted him like a heavy rucksack and left him hidden amid a thick growth of cordgrass.
Janson pressed on, and when the beach disappeared, he walked farther up the grass. There would be at least another guard on patrol duty—the undersecretary’s weekend house had clearly been designated a federal facility—but there was a good chance that the Motorola Talkabout T6220 would let him know if any irregularities had been detected.
A fast five-minute walk and Janson found himself on the south side of a sparsely grassed dune, the cottage just out of view. His pace lessened as, with each step, his boots sank into the loose, silty sand, but his destination was not much farther.
He looked out once more and saw the placid water of Chesapeake Bay—misleadingly placid, for it was invisibly swarming with life. In the distant glare, he could just make out Tangier Island, several miles to the south. Now it styled itself the soft-shell capital of the world; yet in 1812, the one war in the country’s history where foreign troops were deployed on U.S. soil, it was the base of British operations. The shipbuilding firms of St. Michaels were nearby; blockade-runners circulated around the port. A scrap of military history returned to Janson: it was in St. Michaels that the shorefolk conducted one of the classic ruses of nineteenth-century warfare. Hearing of an impending British attack, the townsmen extinguished their lanterns. Then they hoisted them high into the trees and lit them again. The British fired upon the town but, misled by the lantern placement, aimed too high, their shells uselessly lodging in treetops far overhead.
That was the Eastern Shore: so much serenity hiding so much blood. Three centuries of American strife and American contentment. It was altogether fitting that Derek Collins should have established his private redoubt here.
“My wife Janice used to love that spot.” The familiar voice came without warning, and Janson whirled around to see Derek Collins. Inside his jacket, Janson gingerly fingered the trigger to the M9, testing its tension as he looked over his adversary.
The only thing that was unfamiliar was the bureaucrat’s garb: a man he had always seen in three-button suits of navy or charcoal worsted was wearing khakis, a madras shirt, and moccasins—his weekend attire.
“She’d set her easel up right there, where you’re standing, get her watercolors out, and try to capture the light. That’s what she always said she was doing: trying to capture the light.” His eyes were dull, his customary bright and scheming avidity replaced by something somber and careworn. “She had polycythemia, you know. Or maybe you didn’t. A bone marrow disease, made her body produce too many blood cells. Janice was my second wife, I guess you do know that. A new beginning and all. A few years after we were married, she’d start to feel itchy after she took a warm bath, and that turned out to be the first sign of it. Funny, isn’t it? It progresses slowly, but eventually there came the headaches, the dizziness, and just this feeling of exhaustion, and she got the diagnosis. Toward the end, she spent most of her time here, on Phipps. I’d drive down, and there she’d be, sitting at the easel, trying to get her watercolors to make that sunset. She struggled with the colors. Too often, she said, they’d look like blood. As if there was something inside her, wildly signaling to be let out.” Collins was standing only ten feet from Janson, but his voice was far away. He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the slowly darkening bay. “She loved watching the birds, too. She didn’t think she could paint them, but she loved watching them. You see that one near the Osage orange tree? Pearl gray, white undersides, black mask like a raccoon around the eyes?”
It was about the size of a robin, leaping from one perch to another.
“That’s a loggerhead shrike,” Collins said. “One of the local birds. She thought it was pretty. Lanius ludovicianus.”
“Better known as the butcher bird,” Janson said.
The bird trilled its two-note call.
“Figures, you know,” Collins said. “It’s unusual, isn’t it, because it preys on other birds. But check it out. It doesn’t have any talons. That’s the beauty part. It takes advantage of its surroundings—impales its prey on a thorn or barbed wire before it rips it apart. It doesn’t need much by way of claws. It knows that the world is filled with surrogate claws. Use what’s there.” The bird emitted a harsh, thrasher-like note and fluttered off.
Collins turned and looked at Janson. “Why don’t you come inside?”
“Aren’t you going to frisk me?” Janson asked, in a tone of indifference. He was surprised at how unruffled Collins seemed, and was determined to match his calm. “See what weapons I might have on me?”
Collins laughed, and his solemnity broke for a moment. “Janson, you are a weapon,” he said. “What am I supposed to do, amputate all your limbs and put you in a vitrine?” He shook his head. “You forget how well I know you. Besides, I’m looking at somebody who has folded his arms beneath a jacket, and that bulge a foot below his shoulder is quite likely a handgun, aimed at me. I’m guessing you took it off of Ambrose. Young kid, reasonably well trained, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer.”
Janson said nothing but kept his finger on the trigger. The M9 would shoot easily through the fabric of his jacket: Collins was a mere finger twitch from death and he knew it.
“Come along,” Collins said. “We’ll walk together. A peaceable dyad of vulnerability. A two-man demonstration of mutual assured destruction, and the deep comfort the balance of terror can bring.”
Janson said nothing. Collins was not a field agent; he was no less lethal in his way, but through more mediated channels. Together, they traipsed over a boardwalk of silvery, weathered cedar and into Collins’s house. It was a classic seaside cottage, probably of early twentieth-century construction: weathered shingles, small dormers on the second floor. Nothing that would attract much attention, not at a casual glance, anyway.
“You got a federal-facilities designation for your weekend house,” Janson said. “Good going.”
“It’s a secure, Class A-four facility—completely to code. After the John Deutch debacle, nobody wants to be caught taking office work home, putting classified files on an unguarded bedroom PC. For me the solution was to turn this home into an office. An offsite location.”
“Hence the National Guardsmen.”
“A couple of kids patrol the area. This afternoon it’s Ambrose and Bamford. Make sure nobody’s fishing where they shouldn’t be, that’s what they get up to most of the time.”
“You stay here alone?”
Collins smiled wanly. “A suspicious mind would find menace in that question.” He wandered over to his kitchen, which gleamed with stainless-steel counters and high-end appliances. “But yes, I’ve come to prefer it that way. I get more thinking done.”
“In my experience, the more thinking you people do, the more trouble you make,” Janson said with quiet mordancy. The Beretta was still in his right hand, its butt braced on the counter. When Collins moved behind the exhaust vent of his Viking range, Janson repositioned himself subtly. At no point was Collins ever protected from the 9mm in Janson’s hand.
/> Now Collins set a mug of coffee by Janson. His movements, too, were calculated—calculatedly nonthreatening. A mug of scalding fluid could be a weapon, so he was careful to slide the mugs slowly across the counter. He did not want Janson even to consider the possibility that their contents might be flung into his face, and take countermeasures. It was a way of treating his guest with respect, and it was a way of sparing himself any preemptive violence. Collins had gone through decades clambering to the top of an elite covert intelligence agency without so much as injuring a fingernail; he evidently sought to preserve his record.
“When Janice had all this done”—Collins gestured around them, at the fixtures and furnishings—“I believe she called this a ‘nook.’ Dining nook or breakfast nook or some such damn thing.” They sat together now at the black honed-granite counter, each perched on a high round stool of steel and leather. Collins took a sip of the coffee. “Janice’s Faema superautomatic coffeemaker. A seventy-five-pound contraption of stainless steel, plus more computational power than the lunar module, all to make a cup or two of java. Sounds like something the Pentagon might have come up with, doesn’t it?” Through his chunky black glasses, his slate-gray eyes were at once inquiring and amused. “You’re probably wondering why I haven’t asked you to put the gun away. That’s what people always say in these situations, isn’t it? ‘Put the gun away and let’s talk’—like that.”
“You always want to be the brightest kid in the classroom, don’t you?” Janson’s eyes were hard as he took a sip of the coffee. Collins had taken care to pour the coffee in front of him, tacitly letting him verify that his coffee had not been spiked or poisoned. Similarly, when he brought the two mugs to the counter, he let Janson choose the one he would drink from. Janson had to admire the bureaucrat’s punctiliousness in anticipating his ex-employee’s every paranoid thought.
Collins ignored the taunt. “Truth is, I’d probably rather you keep the gun trained on me—just because it’ll soothe your jangled nerves. I’m sure it’s more calming to you than anything that I could say. Accordingly, it makes you less likely to act rashly.” He shrugged. “You see, I’m just letting you in on my thinking. The more candor we can manage, the more at ease you’ll be.”
“An interesting calculation,” Janson grunted. The undersecretary of state had evidently decided he was more likely to escape grievous bodily harm by making it clear and unambiguous that his life was in the field agent’s hands. If you can kill me, you won’t hurt me—so ran Collins’s reasoning.
“Just to celebrate Saturday, I’m making mine Irish,” Collins said, pulling over a bottle of bourbon and splashing some in his mug. “You want?” Janson scowled, and Collins said, “Didn’t think so. You’re on duty, right?” He poured a dollop of cream in as well.
“Around you? Always.”
A resigned half smile. “The shrike we saw earlier—it’s a hawk that thinks it’s a songbird. I think both of us remember an earlier conversation we had along those lines. One of your ‘exit interviews.’ I told you that you were a hawk. You didn’t want to hear it. I think you wanted to be a songbird. But you weren’t one, and never will be. You’re a hawk, Janson, because that’s your nature. Same as that loggerhead shrike.” Another sip of his Irish coffee. “One day, I got here and Janice was at her easel, where she’d been trying to paint. She was crying. Sobbing. I thought maybe—I don’t know what I thought. Turns out she watched as this songbird, that’s how she regarded it, impaled a small bird on one of the hawthorn shrubs and just let it hang there. Sometime later, the shrike came back and started to rip it apart with its curved beak. A butcher bird doing what a butcher bird does, the crimson, glistening viscera of another bird dripping from its beak. To her, it was horrible, just horrible. A betrayal. Somehow she never got the nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw memo. That wasn’t how she saw the world. A Sarah Lawrence girl, right? And what could I tell her? That a hawk with a song is still a hawk?”
“Maybe it’s both, Derek. Not a songbird pretending to be a hawk, but a hawk that’s also a songbird. A songbird that turns into a hawk when it needs to. Why do we have to choose?”
“Because we do have to choose.” He placed his mug down hard on the granite counter, and the thunk of heavy ceramic against stone punctuated his shift of tone. “And you have to choose. Which side are you on?”
“Which side are you on?”
“I’ve never changed,” Collins said.
“You tried to kill me.”
Collins tilted his head. “Well, yes and no,” he replied, and his nonchalance bewildered Janson more than any emphatic, heated denial would have. There was no stiffening, no defensiveness; Collins might have been discussing the factors contributing to beachfront erosion.
“Glad you’re so mellow about it,” Janson said with glacial control. “Five of your henchmen who ended their careers in the Tisza valley seemed less philosophical.”
“Not mine,” Collins said. “Look, this really is awkward.”
“I wouldn’t want you to feel you owe me an explanation.” Janson spoke with cold fury. “About Peter Novak. About me. About why you want me dead.”
“See, that was a mistake, the Lambda Team dispatch, and we feel terrible about the whole beyondsalvage directive. Big-time product recall on that order—Firestone-tire-size. Mistake, mistake, mistake. But whatever hostiles you encountered in Hungary—well, they weren’t ours. Maybe once, but not anymore. That’s all I can tell you.”
“So I guess everything’s squared away,” Janson replied with heavy sarcasm.
Collins removed his glasses and blinked a few times. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure we’d do the same thing again. Look, I didn’t institute the order, I just didn’t countermand it. Everybody in operations—not to mention all the frontline spooks at the CIA and other shops—thought you’d gone rogue, took a sixteen-million-dollar bribe, all that. I mean, the evidence was plain as day. For a while, I thought so, too.”
“Then you learned better.”
“Except that I couldn’t cancel the order without an explanation. Otherwise, people would assume either I’d lost it or that somebody had got to me, too. Just wasn’t feasible. And the thing was, I couldn’t offer an explanation. Not without compromising a secret on the very highest levels. The one secret that could never be compromised. You’re not going to be able to look at this objectively, because we’re talking about your own survival here. But my job is all about priorities, and where you’ve got priorities, you’re going to have sacrifices to make.”
“Sacrifices to make?” Janson interjected, his voice dripping with derision. “You mean a sacrifice for me to make. I was that goddamn sacrifice.” He leaned in closer, his face numb with rage.
“You can remove your curved beak from my torn viscera. I’m not arguing.”
“Do you think I killed Peter Novak?”
“I know you didn’t.”
“Let me ask you a simple question,” Janson began. “Is Peter Novak dead?”
Collins sighed. “Well, again, my answer’s yes and no.”
“Goddammit!” Janson exploded. “I want answers.”
“Shoot,” Collins said. “Let me rephrase that: ask away.”
“Let’s start with a pretty disturbing discovery I’ve made. I’ve studied dozens of photographic images of Peter Novak in exacting detail. I’m not going to interpret the data, I’m just going to present the data. There are variances, subtle but measurable, of fixed physical dimensions. Ratio of index finger length to forefinger length. Trapezium to metacarpal. Forearm length. The ventral surface of the scapula, shadowed against his shirt, in two photographs taken only a few days apart.”
“Conclusion: these aren’t pictures of one man.” Collins’s voice was flat.
“I went to his birthplace. There was a Peter Novak who was born to Janós and Illana Ferenczi-Novak. He died about five years later, in 1942.”
Collins nodded, and once more, his lack of reaction was more chilling than any reaction could h
ave been. “Excellent work, Janson.”
“Tell me the truth,” Janson said. “I’m not crazy. I saw a man die.”
“That’s so,” Collins said.
“And not just any man. We’re talking about Peter Novak—a living legend.”
“Bingo.” Collins made a clicking sound. “You said it yourself. A living legend.”
Janson felt his stomach drop. A living legend. A creation of intelligence professionals.
Peter Novak was an agency legend.
Chapter Thirty
Collins slid off the stool and stood up. “There’s something I want to show you.”
He walked to his office, a large room facing the bay. On rustic wooden shelves were rows of old copies of Studies in Intelligence, a classified journal for American clandestine services. Monographs on international conflicts were interspersed with popular novels and dog-eared volumes of Foreign Affairs. A Sun Microsystems UltraSPARC workstation was connected to racked tiers of servers.
“You remember The Wizard of Oz? Bet they asked you about it when you were a POW. I gather the North Vietnamese interrogators were obsessed with American popular culture.”
“It didn’t come up,” Janson said curtly.
“Naw, you were probably too much of a hardass to give away the ending. Wouldn’t want to jeopardize our national security that way … . Sorry. That was out of line. There’s one thing that divides us: whatever happens, you’ll always be a goddamn war hero, and I’ll always be a civvy desk jockey, and for some people, that makes you a better man. Irony is, ‘some people’ includes me. I’m jealous. I’m one of those guys who wanted to have suffered without ever wanting to suffer. Like wanting to have written a book, as opposed to wanting actually to write one.”
“Can we move on?”
“You see, I’ve always thought it’s the moment when we lose our innocence. Up there is the great and powerful Oz, and down there is the schmuck beneath the curtain. But it’s not just him, it’s the whole goddamn contraption, the machinery, the bellows, the levers, the steam nozzles, the diesel engine, or whatever. You think that was easy to put together? And once you had that up and running, it’s not going to make much difference who you’ve got behind the curtain, or so we figured. It’s the machine, not the man, that matters.”