The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,127

of houseboats, anchored on the rust-and-silt-tinctured waters of the canal. These floating domiciles had been a feature of Amsterdam since the 1950s, the result of a housing shortage; a few decades later, the city council passed measures against them, but the existing waterborne dwellings were grand-fathered in, tolerated as long as an annual fee was tendered.

Janson kept a sharp eye out, scrutinizing each in turn. The nearest resembled a long, brown-shingled bungalow, with a small turbine vent atop a roof of red corrugated steel. Another resembled a tall, floating greenhouse; inside, the long glass panels were lined with curtains, affording the residents some privacy. Nearby was a houseboat with an intricate trellislike fence around a flat-topped enclosure. A pair of lanterns sprouted out from what looked like stone bird feeders. Boxes of geraniums spoke of a house-proud squatter.

Finally, he saw the familiar blue-painted cabin with an abandoned look.

The flowerpots were mainly empty; the windows were small and sooty. On the deck next to the cabin was a bench of age-silvered wood. The boards of the low, wide deck were warped and irregular. It was anchored just next to a small quayside parking lot, and as Janson approached, he felt his pulse quicken. Many years had passed since he had last been there. Had it changed hands? He detected the distinctive resinous scent of cannabis, and he knew it had not. He stepped on board and then walked through the door of the cabin; as he expected, it was unlocked.

In one corner of the sun-dappled space, a man with long, dirty-gray hair was crouched over a large square of vellum. He had pastels in both hands, which veered toward the paper in alternation. A smoldering marijuana cigarette lay next to a red pastille.

"Freeze, motherfucker," Janson said softly.

Barry Cooper turned around slowly, giggling at some private joke. When he identified his visitor, he sobered up a little: "Hey, we're cool, right? You and me, we're cool, right?" There was a fatuous half smile on his face, but the question was tinged with anxiety.

"Yeah, Barry, we're cool."

His relief was visible. He held his arms open wide, his palms speckled with pigment. "Show me some love, baby. Show me some love. How long has it been? Jeepers."

Cooper's speech had long retained an odd mixture of idioms - part stoner, part Leave It to Beaver - and the fact that the American had lived abroad for nearly a quarter century served as a linguistic fixative.

"Too long," Janson said, "or maybe not long enough. What do you think?" The history they shared was complex; neither man fully understood the other, but both understood enough for a working relationship.

"I can make you some coffee," Cooper said.

"Coffee would be fine." Janson sat down on a lumpy brown sofa and looked around.

Little had changed. Cooper had aged, but exactly as one would have expected him to. A tangle of graying brown hair had surrendered almost fully to gray. Crow's-feet crowded his eyes, and the lines between the corners of his mouth and his nose were incised now with a fine line; there were vertical creases between his eyebrows, and horizontal creases on his forehead. But it was Barry Cooper, the same old Barry Cooper, a little scary and somewhat crazy, but mostly neither of those things. In his youth, the ratios had been different. In the early seventies, he had drifted from college radicalism to the real thing, a harder, more callous reality, and, by incremental steps, ended up a member of the Weather Underground. Smash the system! It was a greeting in those days, a simple salutation. Hanging around the college town of Madison, Wisconsin, he'd fallen in with others who were smarter and more persuasive than he was and who took his inchoate disquiet with the misdeeds of Authority to a crystalline extreme. Small pranks, designed to nettle law enforcement, led to more extreme acts.

One day, in New York, he found himself in a Greenwich Village town house when a bomb one of the members was concocting went off prematurely. He had been taking a shower and, singed and sooty but largely unharmed, walked around in a daze for a while before he was arrested. When he was out on bail, the police determined that his fingerprints matched those found at the scene of another bombing, this one of a university laboratory in Evanston. It had happened at night, and there were no casualties, but that was a matter of luck as much as anything; a night