The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,146

deep and troubled sleep. This time, however, her eyes remained open. Staring off.

"More," she whispered.

He poured her another glass of water, and she drank it, steadily, without requiring his support or assistance. Quietly, her strength was returning. Her eyes focused, and fell upon him.

"Where?" she said, the one-word question costing her no little effort.

"We're in a cottage belonging to a friend of mine," he said. "In Lombardy. The Brianza countryside. Lago di Como is ten miles to our north. It's a very isolated, very private spot." As he spoke, he saw that her bruises looked even worse; it was a sign of the recovery process. Yet even the livid swellings could not conceal her simple beauty.

"How long ... here?"

"It's been three days," he said.

Her eyes filled with disbelief, alarm, fear. Then, gradually, her face slackened, as consciousness ebbed.

A few hours later, he returned to her bedside, simply watching her. She's wondering where she is. She's wondering why she's here. Janson had to ask himself the same question. Why had he taken her in? His decision to do so had been anguishing: cold, hard reason had ensured his survival so far. And there was no doubt that the woman could potentially prove useful to him. But cold, hard reason told him that she could also prove fatal - and that his decision to take her in had been largely a matter of emotion. The kind of emotion that could cost someone his life. What did it matter if she were hunted down in Amsterdam? She had, indeed, repeatedly sought to kill him. I need to know what's a lie and what isn't, she had said, and he knew that this much was not a lie.

The woman had endured a shattering experience - made more so, surely, by the fact that she had once imagined herself invulnerable. He knew what that was like, knew it firsthand. What had been violated was not so much her body as her sense of who she was.

He held another compress to her forehead, and after a while she stirred again.

This time, she ran her fingertips over her face, felt the raised weals. There was shame in her eyes.

"I guess you don't remember much since Amsterdam," Janson said. "That's typical of the kind of contusions and concussions you suffered. Nothing helps but time." He handed her a glass of water.

"Feel like shit," was her cotton-mouthed reply.

She drank it greedily.

"I've seen worse," he said.

She covered her face with her hands and rolled over, turning away from him, as if embarrassed to be seen. A few minutes later, she asked, "Did you drive here in the limo?"

"No. That's still in Amsterdam. Don't you remember?"

"We put a 'bumper beeper' on it," she explained. Her eyes roamed across the ceiling, which was covered by an elaborate baroque painting of cherubim gamboling among clouds.

"I figured," Janson said.

"Don't want them to find us," she whispered.

Janson touched her cheek gently. "Remind me how come."

For a few moments she said nothing. Then she slowly sat up in the bed. Anger settled onto her bruised countenance. "They lied," she said softly. "They lied," she repeated, and this time there was steel in her voice.

"There will always be lies," Janson said.

"The bastards set me up," she said, and now she was trembling, with cold, or with fury.

"No, I think I was the one being set up," Janson said levelly.

He refilled her glass, watched her raise it to her cracked lips, drink the water in a single swallow.

"Comes to the same thing," she said. Her voice was distant. "When it's your own team does it to you, there's only one word for it. Betrayal."

"You feel betrayed," Janson said.

She covered her face with her hand, and words came out in a rush. "They set me up to kill you, but I don't feel guilty, somehow. Mostly, I just feel ... so pissed off. So angry." Her voice broke. "And so damn ashamed. Like a goddamn dupe. And I'm starting to wonder about everything I think I know - what's real, what isn't. Do you have any idea what that's like?"

"Yes," Janson said, simply.

She fell silent for a while. "You look at me like I'm some kind of wounded animal," she finally said.

"Maybe we both are," Janson said gently. "And there's nothing more dangerous."

While the woman rested, Janson was downstairs, in the room that the house's owner, Alasdair Swift, used as a study. Before him was a stack of articles he had downloaded from online electronic databases of newspapers and