The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,138

he had made of the dead security guard, for he knew now that the diagonal shot was hers.

He turned his head and saw, to his dismay, that there was another rifleman on the adjoining roof, just thirty-five feet to his left.

The rifleman had heard his feet scrambling on the slate roof and was now swiveling his weapon toward him.

Alerted by the drab-suited rifleman, the deadly brunette raised her scope to roof level. His bruised temple flared once again, with almost incapacitating pain.

He was pinned between two sharpshooters, with only a handgun for protection. He saw the woman squinting through her scope, saw the utter blackness of the rifle's bore hole. He was staring at his own death.

It was a shot she could not miss.
CHAPTER TWENTY
He forced himself to focus on the countenance of his executioner: he would look death in the face.

What he saw was a play of confusion on her face as she swiveled her rifle a few degrees to the left and squeezed off a shot.

The rifleman on the next roof over arced his back and tumbled off the roof like a falling gargoyle.

What the hell was going on?

The noisy chatter of a nearby automatic weapon immediately followed - aimed not at him but at her. A piece of the ornate cornice behind which she was stationed broke off, leaving a cloud of dust.

Was somebody rescuing him, saving him from the Regent's Park executioner?

He tried to puzzle out the complex geometry. Two teams, as he supposed. One using American-issue sniper equipment, the sniper team from Consular Operations. And the other? An odd assortment of weaponry. Irregulars. Hirelings. To judge from the fabric and hardware, Eastern Europeans.

In whose employ?

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. If the old saw was true in this case, he was far from friendless. But was it true?

The man with the automatic gun, a Russian-made AKS-74, now stood above the parapet, trying to get a better angle on the woman sniper.

"Hey," Janson called out to him.

The man - Janson was near enough to see his coarse features, close-set eyes, and two days' growth of beard - grinned at Janson, and turned toward him.

With his gun set at full fire.

As a raking blast hit the roof, Janson dove into a roll, hurtling down the tiled incline. A fragment of stone whipped past his ear as a noisy fusillade swept the area where he had been moments before. His forehead scraped against another piece of masonry, the palm of his hand stung as it pressed against jagged roof tile. Finally, his body slammed against the balustrade. The impact was jarring, debilitating, yet the alternative would have been worse - a plumb drop from the high roof to the pavement.

He heard shouts, from there, and there. His dazed brain strove to process the sounds as they raced and echoed and faded.

What had just happened? The woman had him within her sights. She had him.

Why didn't she take the shot?

And the other team - who were they? Angus Fielding had mentioned the shadowy enemies Novak had made among corrupt Eastern European oligarchs. Were they a private militia? Everything about them suggested as much.

He was their target. But so was the team from Consular Operations. How could that be?

There was no time. He poked his pistol between the ornamental sandstone balusters and squeezed off two quick shots. The man with the AKS-74 staggered backward, making an odd gurgling sound; one of the bullets had pierced his throat, which exploded in a gush of arterial blood. As he slumped to the tiles, his weapon fell with him, secured by the nylon sling around his shoulders.

That gun could be Janson's salvation - if he could get to it.

Now Janson stood atop the balustrade and leaped the short distance to the adjoining house. He had an objective. The AKS-74: a crude, chattering, powerful submachine gun. He landed imperfectly, and pain shot like a bolt of electricity up his left ankle. A bullet twanged through the air just inches from his head, and he threw himself down on the tiled peak, a few feet away from the man he had just shot dead. The too-familiar smell of blood wafted toward him. He reached out and wrested the submachine gun from its nylon sling, hastily cutting it free with a pocketknife. Without shifting his position, he craned his head around to situate himself.

The planar geometry of the roofs was, he knew, deceptive. Peaks met peaks at what looked like perpendicular angles, but the