The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,131

parking lot and around the back? I've got to pick up something."

"No problem, sir." As the cab eased around the low brick-and-glass building, the passenger's heart started to beat harder. He had to do this without making a mess. Anybody could do this. But he was someone who could do it neatly.

"This is great," he said, and sat forward. In a lightning-fast motion, he lowered the garrote over the driver's head and pulled it tight. The Sikh emitted a faint rasp of escaped breath; his eyes widened, and his tongue lolled out. Unconsciousness would come quickly, the passenger knew, but he could not stop there. Another ten seconds of maximum pressure, and the anoxia would result in permanent respiratory cessation.

Now he returned the wooden-handled garrote to his breast pocket, and dragged the limp body of the driver out of the car. He popped the trunk, and arranged the body around the spare tire, the jumper cables, and a surprising number of blankets. It was important to get the man out of the driver's seat as quickly as possible; he had learned this from unpleasant experience. The incontinence that sometimes followed a sudden death could cause a soiled seat. Not something he cared to deal with at a time like this.

His RIM BlackBerry communicator purred from deep in his breast pocket. It would be an update on the location of the subject.

He glanced at his watch. He had little time remaining.

His subject had less.

The voice in his earpiece gave him the precise coordinates of his subject, and as the passenger-turned-driver maneuvered the taxicab toward Dupont Circle he was given regular updates as to her movements. Timing was essential if he was to succeed.

The crowd in front of the department store was sparse; the subject was wearing a navy peacoat, a gold silk neckerchief knotted loosely around her throat, a shopping bag with the elegant logo of the upscale store in one hand.

It was the only thing he was conscious of, the figure of the black woman, growing larger and larger as he gunned the motor of the cab and then, abruptly, swung the steering wheel far to the right.

As the cab lurched onto the sidewalk, shrieks of disbelief filled the air, blending into a sound that was almost choral.

A curious intimacy, again, the woman's startled face coming close and closer to his, like a lover leaning forward into a kiss. As the front bumper smashed into her body - he was traveling at close to fifty miles per hour - her upper body smashed onto the hood of the cab, and only when he braked did her body fly forward, vaulting through the air and finally landing on the pavement of the busy intersection, where a Dodge van, despite its squealing brakes, left tire tracks on her broken body.

The cab was recovered later that day, abandoned in an alley in Southwest Washington. It was an alley that, in the best of times, was littered with the brown and green shards of broken beer bottles, the clear curved glass of crack vials, the translucent plastic of hypodermics. The local youth treated the cab as just another found object. Before the car was recovered by the authorities, it had been stripped of its hubcaps, its license plate, and its radio. Only the body in its trunk was left undisturbed.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Aside from its location, across the street from the Liberty Foundation headquarters, there was little that would draw anyone's eye to the small canal-bank house, or voorhuis. Inside, Ratko Pavic regarded its furnishings with a purely utilitarian eye. There was a faint but cloying kitchen odor - pea soup, was it? It must have been from the night before, but the smell was oddly permeating. He wrinkled his nose with distaste. Still, nothing more of that sort would be cooked here. He thought of the two bodies sprawled in the bathtub upstairs, the blood seeping steadily down the drain. He had no feelings about what he had done: the elderly couple, engaged to maintain the house while the owners were in Corfu, were in the way. They were faithful retainers, no doubt, but they had to be dispatched. And it was for a good cause: seated by the small square window in a darkened room, Ratko Pavic had an excellent view of the mansion opposite, and two parabolic microphones conveyed conversations from its front-facing antechambers with reasonable clarity.

All the same, it had been a tedious morning. Administrators and staff arrived between eight-thirty and nine-thirty.