The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,123

be - it was an honored koan of spycraft. Another, though, was not to be an idiot about it.

The other man, shorter than Janson, and perhaps in his early forties, smiled at him. "Voos hurst zich?" he said, bowing his head a little. His hair was reddish, his eyes a watery blue beneath plastic National Health spectacles. A small leather portfolio was tucked beneath an arm.

Janson bobbed his head, clutching his briefcase, and gave him a cautiously friendly smile, a smile constrained by the imperfect plasticity of the facial adhesive he had employed. How to respond? There were people who had a gift for acquiring new languages, sometimes with uncanny fluency; Alan Demarest was one. Janson, though he had decent German and French from his days as a student, and a certain amount of Czech, gleaned from his Czech-speaking mother, was not among them. Now, he racked his brain, trying to dredge up some scrap of Yiddish. It was an eventuality he should have foreseen. Rather than venture a simpering "sha-lom," he would be safest discouraging any conversation. He had a fleeting fantasy of hurling the inconvenient interloper over the side. After a moment, he gestured toward his throat, and shook his head. "Laryngitis," he whispered, in some approximation of an East End accent.

"Ir fill zich besser?" the man said with a kindly look. He was a lonely soul, undeterred in his attempt to bond with someone he took to be spiritual kin.

Janson coughed explosively. "Sorry," he whispered. "Very contagious."

The other man took a few steps back, alarmed. He bowed again, clasping his hands together. "Sholem aleichem. Peace and blessings be upon you," he said, and shakily raised a hand in farewell, retreating politely but swiftly.

Once more, Janson surrendered himself to the cooling head wind. We know more than we know, Demarest used to admonish. Janson believed that it was true in this case - that he could make progress if only he could properly assemble the data points he already had.

He knew that a covert branch of the U.S. government sought his death. That a staggering sum had, through elaborate electronic manipulations, been deposited in his account. That the result was to create a perception that he had been paid to kill Novak.

Could he put that money to use in some way? A voice inside him cautioned him not to - not yet. Not while its true origins remained mysterious. It could prove crucial as evidence. And - the possibility gnawed at him - it could, in some high-tech fashion, be booby-trapped so that any attempt at withdrawal would notify his enemies of his location. Which simply returned him to the question of who these enemies might be.

Whose side are you on, Maria Lang? Before boarding, he had once again tried to contact her, without success. Was she part of a murderous intrigue? Or had she been kidnapped, even killed - a victim of the intrigue that had cost Peter Novak his life? Janson had called upon an old friend of his who lived in Manhattan - a veteran of the intelligence services, now retired - to keep a lookout for her at the New York offices of the Liberty Foundation, where Lang ostensibly was based. So far, there had been no sign of her having returned to the Fortieth Street building. She had to be somewhere else - but where?

Then, too, Janson found it as curious as Fielding had that the news of Novak's death continued to go unreported. As far as the general public knew, none of it - not the kidnapping, not the killing - had even happened. Was something afoot, some plan involving insiders at the Liberty Foundation, that made it inopportune to divulge the momentous tragedy? Yet how long did they really think they could conceal such a thing? Janson knew of rumors that Deng Xiaoping's death had been covered up for more than eight days, while the matter of succession was resolved: the regime decided it could not risk even a brief period of public uncertainty. Was something similar at stake with the Liberty Foundation? Novak's enormous wealth, or most of it, was already bound up with the Liberty Foundation. Therefore it was not clear that his passing should directly affect its finances. At the same time, Grigori Berman told him that the wire transfer had originated from Amsterdam, specifically from a Liberty Foundation account of Peter Novak's. Who within the Foundation might have been able to arrange that?

Novak was a powerful man,