The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,107
But I've got to ask you to make tracks." A wry look. "Chop-chop."
Janson raced down oak parquet floors, past the eighteenth-century French paneling a Woolworth heiress had installed decades ago, and through a rear exit. A few minutes later, he had vaulted over the wrought-iron fence and into the eastern bulge of Regent's Park. "Twenty-four hundred acres in the middle of London, like my backyard," Berman had said.
Was it safe?
There were no guarantees - except that it was the only place to which he dared retreat. A sniper on the minaret could easily target anyone emerging from the other exits of Berthwick House. The perch would not afford a sight line to most areas of the park itself.
Besides, Janson knew this area; when he was at Cambridge, he'd had a friend who lived in the Marylebone neighborhood, and they had taken long strolls through the great verdant expanse, three times the size of New York's Central Park. Some of it was overlooked by the neoclassical grandeur of Hanover Terrace, with its noble Georgian exteriors and creamy hues, the white and blue friezes adorning its architrave. But the park was a world unto itself. The waterways bustled with swans and odd, imported fowl; they were banked with concrete in some stretches while in others they lapped onto stands of marshy reeds. On the concrete walkway along the embankment, pigeons competed for crumbs with swans. Farther out, trimmed rows of boxwood provided a dense green border. A red lifesaver was mounted on a small wooden kiosk.
To him, it had always felt like a refuge, this vast campus of trees and grass, playing fields and tennis courts. The boating lake stretched like an amoeba, narrowing to a stream that, edged by flower beds, ran under York Bridge in the southern part of the park. And in the inner circle was Queen Mary's Garden, filled with exotic flora and rare fowl, discreetly penned: a sanctuary for wild birds and lonely, fragile people. Regent's Park, a legacy of the crown architect John Nash, represented an Arcadian vision of an England that, perhaps, never was - the Windermere in the middle of the metropole, at once artfully rusticated and carefully manicured.
Janson jogged toward the boating lake, past the trees, trying to clear his head and make sense of the astounding assault. Even as he ran, though, he was intensely alert to his surroundings, his nerves jangling.
Was it safe?
Was he dealing with a single sniper? It seemed unlikely. With such exhaustive preparation, there must have been flanking gunmen in place, covering different wings of the house, different exposures. No doubt, perimeter security was as exacting as Thwaite had indicated. But there were few local defenses against such long-distance marksmanship.
And if other snipers were in the area, where were they?
And who were they?
The intrusion of menace in this pastoral redoubt struck Janson as itself an obscenity. He slowed down and looked at the great willow tree in front of him, its branches drooping into the boating lake. A tree like that might be a century old; his eyes must have fallen on it when he visited the park twenty-five years ago. It had survived Labour governments and Tory governments alike. It had survived Lloyd George and Margaret Thatcher, the Blitz and rationing, eras of fear and of boisterous self-confidence.
As Janson approached it, the thick trunk suddenly revealed a rude patch of white. A soft, tapping noise: lead hitting puckered bark.
A shot that had missed him, again, by a matter of inches. The uncanny accuracy of a bolt-action sniper rifle.
He craned his neck around as he ran, but could see nothing. The only sound he had heard was that of the projectile slamming into the tree: there was no sound of the detonation within a rifle chamber. Sound-suppression gear was quite possibly in use. But even with a silenced rifle, a supersonic round produced a noise as it emerged from the muzzle - not necessarily a conspicuous one, but a noise all the same, like the crack of a whip. Janson knew that noise well. The fact that he had not heard it suggested something else: it was another long-distance shot. If the gunman were a hundred yards away, the noise would be lost amid the baffling provided by the tree leaves and the park's ambient sounds. Conclusion: an extremely skilled marksman was in pursuit.
Or a team of them.
Where was safety? It was impossible to say. Worms of apprehension writhed in his belly.