Janson aimed his M9 with one hand and emptied the magazine—yet the relative motion of the car and his target made accuracy impossible. The bullets simply clanged off the massive steel blades of the fan.
And now he had no more ammunition.
Bouncing lightly on its bipod, the M60 produced a low, grunting noise, and Janson remembered why it was known as the “pig” when he was in Vietnam. He hunched down as low as he could in his seat without losing control of the car, and the car’s body jarred to a jackhammer rhythm as a spray of bullets, two hundred 7.62mm rounds per minute, sledgehammered the yellow Corvette, tearing into its steel body.
There was a momentary pause: A jammed bandolier? An overheated barrel? It was customary to replace the barrel every hundred to five hundred rounds to prevent overheating, and the overzealous gunman may not have realized just how quickly those barrels became hot. Small consolation: the pilot of the hovercraft used the interruption to shift direction. The craft eased back, even with the racing Corvette, and suddenly up onto the beach, and then to the cambered road itself.
It was just a few yards away, and the powerful sucking propellers seemed to loom over the tiny sports car. He heard another noise—a whooshing, bass-heavy thrum. That could mean only one thing: an auxiliary Rotex engine and propulsion fan had just now been activated. In the rearview mirror, Janson watched, bewildered, as the blousing PVC flaps puffed out farther and the entire craft, which had been flying about a foot above the ground, suddenly rose higher—and higher still! The roar of the Rotex engines blended with the howl of the blasting air as a small sandstorm materialized just behind them.
It was increasingly difficult to breathe without choking on the airborne grit. The hovercraft itself was partly obscured in the swirling sand and yet from behind the fore windshield he made out the goggled face of a powerfully built man.
He could also make out that the man was smiling.
Now the hovercraft seemed to jump up another foot into the air, and suddenly it was rearing and bucking like a horse. As the anti-plow skirts struck the car’s rear fender, Janson had a horrible realization: It was trying to climb over them.
He glanced over to his right and saw Collins doubled forward in his seat, his hands over his ears, trying to protect them from the immense din.
The hovercraft bounced and tipped again as the churning blades whipped air into a punishing substance, like water from a water cannon. In the rearview mirror, through the eddying sand, Janson caught a glimpse of the spinning auxiliary propulsion blades mounted on the craft’s underside. If the side-strafing from the M60 was not sufficient, the assassins wanted them to know that they could easily lower the powerful blades of the undermounted propeller over them, like a gigantic lawn mower, destroying the car and decapitating its inhabitants.
As the large hovercraft bucked against the rear of the Corvette, Janson swung the steering wheel abruptly to the left, and now the car veered off the paved surface, its wheels spinning into the sand and scrub as it rapidly lost traction and speed.
The hovercraft zoomed past, its motion as effortless as an air-hockey puck, then came to a halt and reversed course without turning around.
It was a brilliant maneuver: for the first time, the man with the M60 had a direct line of fire at the driver and passenger alike. Even as he watched the machine gunner seat a fresh link-belt of ammunition into the M60’s drive mechanism, he heard the sound of yet another craft—a speedboat, crazily veering toward the shore.
Oh Christ no!
And in the speedboat, a figure, arranged in prone firing position, with a rifle. Aimed at them.
Chapter Thirty-one
The speedboat was equipped with an aircraft turbine engine, for it had to have been traveling at upward of 150 miles per hour. It skimmed along the water, leaving behind a slashing contrail of spume. The small boat became rapidly larger, a mesmeric spectacle of death. Two miles from the cottage, the flat netting was no longer in place; nothing protected them from the rushing gunman. Nothing.
Where could he go? Where was safety?
Janson turned the wheels of the Corvette back onto the road, heard the chassis scrape as it lurched from the sodden earth to the hard pavement. What if he tried to ram the hovercraft, jamming his foot on the accelerator and testing its lightweight fiberglass construction against the steel cage of the Corvette? Yet the odds were slim that he could even reach the craft before the M60 had perforated the engine—and him.
Crouching below the fan, the machine gunner grinned evilly. The link-belt was seated; full-fire mode was activated. Seconds remained before he served them with a lethal fire hose of lead. Suddenly the man pitched forward, slack, his forehead dropping like a deadweight against the bipod-propped gun.
Dead.
There was an echoing sound—on the waters of Chesapeake Bay, it sounded oddly like a cork popping—and then another, and the hovercraft came to a rest just a few feet from the car, half on the road, half on the shoulder. It was not how anyone deliberately parked such a craft.
Like those of many military vehicles and devices, the controls must have been designed to require continual non-passive pressure—simply put, the grip of a human hand on the tiller. Otherwise, in combat situations, a soldier in command could be killed, and a driverless vehicle—like an unmanned automatic weapon—might inadvertently cause harm to the wrong side. Now the craft depowered, the engines shutting off, the churning blades growing slower and slower, the craft’s skids setting firmly on the ground. And as the craft fell to earth, Janson saw that the pilot, too, was sprawled, limp, on the windshield.
Two shots, two kills.
A voice called across the waters of Chesapeake Bay, as the engine of the speedboat sputtered to a halt. “Paul! Are you all right?”
A voice from the speedboat.
The voice of a woman who had saved them both.
Jessica Kincaid.
Janson got out of the car and raced to the shore; he saw Jessie in the boat only ten yards away. It was the closest she could bring the speedboat without grounding it.
“Jessie!” he shouted.
“Tell me I did great!” Jessie said, triumphant.
“Two head shots—and from a speeding boat? That’s one for the goddamn record books!” Paul said. He felt suddenly, absurdly lighter. “Of course, I had everything under control.”
“Yeah, I could see that,” she replied drily.
Derek Collins approached. His gait was labored; he was winded, and his sweaty face was coated with a layer of sand and silt that gave him a mummified look.
Janson turned around slowly and faced his adversary. “Your idea of fun?”
“What?”
“Were those two your henchmen as well? Or is this another one of those I-had-nothing-to-do-with-it moments ?”
“Goddammit, I had nothing to do with it! How could you think otherwise! They almost killed me, for Christ’s sake! Are you too blind and full of yourself to see the truth when it’s in front of your face? They wanted both us of dead.”
His voice rose with the unabated terror that his whole body exuded. He was probably speaking the truth, Janson decided. But if so, who was behind this latest attempt?
Something about Collins’s manner bothered Janson: for all his candor, he was holding too much back. “Maybe so. But you seem to know who the attackers were.”
Collins looked away.
“Goddammit, Collins. If you’ve got something to say, say it now!” Revulsion once more coursed through Janson as he regarded the frightened yet stony bureaucrat, the man with a calculator for a soul. He couldn’t forget what he’d learned: that Collins was the one who stood by while the sanction order was processed, unconcerned about sacrificing a pawn for his great game. He wanted nothing to do with this man.
“You lose,” Janson said quietly. “Once more. If you want me dead, you’re going to have to try a little harder.”
“I told you, Janson. That was then. This is now. The game plan has changed. That
’s why I told you about the program, goddammit—the biggest, most dangerous secret in the entire U.S. of A. And there’s a lot more I’m not authorized to tell you myself.”
“More of your bullshit,” Janson snarled.
“No, it’s true. I can’t tell you what, but there’s a lot you need to know. For Christ’s sake, you’ve got to come with me to Washington, to meet with the Mobius team. We need you to get with the program, OK?” He placed a hand on Janson’s arm. Janson knocked it off.
“You want me to ‘get with the program’? Let me ask you a question first—and you’d better give me a straight answer, because I’ll know if you’re lying.”
“I told you, I’m not authorized to reveal—”
“This isn’t a big-picture question. It’s a little-picture question, a detail. You told me about an ace surgical team that performed three procedures on three agents. I’m just wondering about the members of that surgical team. Where are they now?”
Collins blinked hard. “Damn you, Janson. You’re asking a question you know the answer to.”
“I just want to hear you say it.”
“Security on this operation was mammoth. The number of people who were in the know could be counted on the fingers of two hands. Each and every one with clearance on the very highest level, proven reliability—intelligence professionals.”
“But you needed to enlist the services of a topcaliber plastic surgeon. A team of outsiders, by necessity.”
“Why are we even talking about this? You understand the logic perfectly well. You said it yourself: each one of them was necessary for the program’s success. Each one, inherently, posed a security risk. That simply wasn’t supportable.”
“Ergo, the Mobius Program followed protocol. You planners had them killed. Every last one.”
Collins was silent, bowing his head slightly.
Something burned within Janson, although Collins had done nothing more than confirm his suspicions. They had probably allowed themselves a twelve-month period for the mop-up. It would not have been difficult to manage. A car crash, an accidental drowning, perhaps a deadly collision on a double-diamond ski slope—top surgeons tended to be aggressive sportsmen. No, it would not have been difficult. The agents who arranged their deaths would have regarded each as a task accomplished, another check against a to-do list. The human reality—the bereavement of spouses, siblings, sons and daughters; the shattered families, shadowed childhoods, the knock-on effects of desolation and despair beyond consolation—that was not a reality to be considered, even acknowledged, by those who issued the deadly directives.
Janson’s eyes drilled into Collins’s. “Small sacrifices for the larger good, right? That’s what I figured. No, Collins, I’m not going to get with the program. Not your program, anyway. You know something, Collins? You’re not a songbird and you’re not a hawk. You’re a snake, and you always will be.”
Janson looked out toward the water, saw Jessie Kincaid in the idling craft, saw her short hair ruffled by the gentle breeze, and all at once his heart felt as if it might burst. Maybe Collins was telling him the truth about the role of Consular Operations in what had gone down; maybe he wasn’t. The only verifiable truth was that Janson could not trust him. There’s a lot you need to know … . Come with me. That’s just the sort of line Collins would use to lure him to his death.
Janson looked again at the gently bobbing speedboat, twenty feet from shore. It wasn’t a hard choice. Abruptly, he bolted down the beach, without looking back, first wading into the shallow water and then propelling himself to Jessie’s boat with powerful crawl strokes. The water sluiced around his clothing and cooled his body.
As he climbed aboard the boat, Jessie reached for him, took his hand in hers.
“Funny, I thought you were in Amsterdam,” Janson said.
“Let’s just say its charms ran thin. Especially after a couple of brats almost knocked me over and accidentally saved my life.”
“Come again?”
“Long story. I’ll explain later.”
He put his arms around her, feeling the warmth of her body. “OK, my questions can wait. You’ve probably got some of your own.”
“I’ll start with one,” she said. “Are we partners?”
He pressed her close to him. “Yeah,” he said. “We’re partners.”
PART FOUR
Chapter Thirty-two
“You don’t understand,” said the courier, a straitlaced black man in his late twenties, with lozenge-shaped rimless glasses. “I could lose my job for that. I could face criminal and civil penalties, too.” He gestured toward the patch on his navy jacket with the distinctive calligraphic logo of his company: Caslon Couriers. Caslon: the extremely expensive, top-of-the-line, ultra-secure courier service to which select individuals and corporations entrusted highly sensitive documents. A nearly flawless record of reliability and discretion had won it the loyalty of its exclusive clientele. “These brothers don’t play.”
He was sitting at a small table at the Starbucks on Thirty-ninth Street and Broadway, in Manhattan, and the gray-haired man who had joined him there was politely insistent. He was, he had explained, a senior officer of the Liberty Foundation; his wife was a staff member of the Manhattan office. Yes, the approach was all very irregular, but he was at the end of his rope. The trouble was, he had reason to believe she was receiving packages from a romantic suitor. “And I’m not even sure who the damn guy is!”
The courier grew visibly uncomfortable until Janson began to peel off hundred-dollar bills. After twenty of them, his eyes began to warm behind his glasses.
“I’m on the road about sixty percent of the time, I mean, I can understand how her attention might wander,” the gray-haired man said. “But I can’t fight off somebody I don’t know, you understand? And she won’t admit that anything’s going on. I see she’s got these little gifts, and she says she bought them herself. But I know better. These aren’t the sort of things you buy for yourself. These are the kinds of things a guy buys a woman, and I know, because I have. Hey, I’m not saying I’m perfect or anything. But we need to clear the air, my wife and I, and I really mean both of us. Look, I can’t believe I’m even doing what I’m doing. I’m not that kind of a guy, trust me.”
The courier shook his head sympathetically and then glanced at his watch. “You know, I meant what I said about criminal and civil prosecution. They spell that out when you join up, a dozen ways. You sign all kinds of contracts and if you’re found in violation, they’ll fry your ass.”
The wealthy cuckold was all dignity and caution. “They never will. I’m not asking you to divert anything, I’m not asking you to do anything wrong. All I’m asking is to see copies of the invoice slips. Not to have them, to see them. And if I learn something, if it’s the guy I think it is, nobody will ever know how. But I’m begging you, you’ve got to give Márta and me a chance. And this is the only way.”
The courier nodded briskly. “I’m going to get behind on my rounds if I don’t get a move on. How about you meet me at the atrium of the Sony Building, Fifty-fifth and Madison, in four hours?”
“You’re doing the right thing, my friend,” the man told him with fervor. He made no reference to the two thousand dollars he had “tipped” the courier; that would have been beneath the dignity of them both.
At the Sony atrium, hours later, sitting on a metal chair near a poured-concrete fountain, he was finally able to page through the invoices. He had been, he saw, too optimistic: the deliveries lacked a sender’s address, being marked only with a code of origination that indicated the general location of pickup. He persevered all the same, looking for a pattern. There were dozens of packages that arrived from all the expected locations, cities corresponding to the major Liberty Foundation branch offices. Yet there were also a handful of packages that were sent to Márta Lang from a location that corresponded to nothing at all. Why was Caslon Couriers making regular pickups from a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains?
r /> “Yes,” he told the courier mournfully. “It’s just as I thought.” He glanced around the place—an urban terrarium of plants and sluggish waterfalls arrayed in a glassed-in “public space” that some zoning board had demanded in return for a height variance. “She told me they’d broken it off, and maybe they did, for a while. But now it’s on again. Well, it’s back to couples therapy for us.”
Looking mournful, Paul Janson extended a hand, his palm lined with another sheath of slippery large-denomination bills, and the courier grasped it warmly.
“My heartfelt sympathies, man,” the courier said.
A little additional research—several hours in the New York Public Library—was suggestive. Millington, Virginia, turned out to be the nearest town to a vast pastoral estate that was built by John Vincent Astor in the 1890s, a place that, by several architectural accounts, rivaled the legendary Biltmore estate in its elegance and attention to detail. At some point in the fifties, ownership passed into the hands of Maurice Hempel, a secretive South African diamond magnate, since deceased. And now? Who owned it now? Who lived there now?
Only one conclusion suggested itself: a man the world knew as Peter Novak. A certainty? Far from it. Yet there was surely some validity to the inferences that brought the remote spot to his attention. Control required communication: if this last surviving “Novak” was still in command of his empire, he would have to be in communication with his top deputies. People like Márta Lang. Janson’s plan called for breaching the channels of communication. By tracing the subtle twitchings of the web, he might find the spider.
After spending the following morning on the road, however, Janson felt increasingly unsure of his suppositions. Had it not been too easy? His keyed-up nerves were not calmed by the monotony of driving. For most of the trip, he maintained a near constant speed, shifting from the turnpike, punctuated with blue Adopt-A-Highway signs, to the smaller roads that webbed across the Blue Ridge Mountains like man-made rivers. Rolling green farmland gave way to blue-green hued vistas of rising hills, cresting and ebbing across the horizon. Framed by the windshield, the images straight ahead of him had the beauty of the banal. Battered guardrails stretched along outcroppings of mossy gray shale. The road itself became mesmerizing, an endless procession of small irregularities. Cracks in the road that had been daubed with glossy black sealant; skid marks that formed staccato diagonals; broken white lines that had started to blur from the punishment of a thousand downpours.