The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,153

what I did for a reason, dammit! I've lost too many men already to leaks between ARVN reps and their VC cousins. What happened to you in Noc Lo? An ambush, you called it. A setup. Goddamn right it was. The operation was vetted by MACV, standard procedure, and somewhere along the lines, Marvin tells Charlie. It happens again and again, and every time it does somebody dies. You saw Hardaway die, didn't you? You cradled him in your arms while his guts were spilling onto the jungle. Hardaway was short, just a few days before his tour was over, and they ripped him open, and you were there. Now tell me how that makes you feel, soldier? Dewy and cuddly and sensitive? Or does it piss you off? You got a pair of balls on you, or did you lose 'em playing football for Michigan? Maybe it's slipped your mind, but we're in counterintelligence, Janson, and I am not going to let my men be horsefucked by the VC couriers who have turned MACV into a goddamn Hanoi wire service!"

Demarest never raised his voice as he spoke, and yet the effect was only to reinforce the gravity of his words. "An officer's first imperative is the welfare of the men under his command. And when the lives of my men are at stake, I will do anything - anything consistent with our mission - to protect them. I couldn't give a good goddamn what forms you end up filing. But if you're a soldier, if you're a man, you'll rescue your men first: it's your duty. Then pursue whatever disciplinary proceedings your little bureaucratic heart desires." He folded his arms. "Well?"

"Awaiting grid coordinates, sir."

Demarest nodded soberly and handed Janson a sheet of blue paper dense with neatly typed operation specifications. "We've got a Huey gassed and gussied." He glanced at the large round clock mounted on the wall opposite. "The crew's ready to go in fifteen. I hope to hell you are."

Voices.

No, a voice.

A quiet voice. A voice that did not wish to be overheard. Yet the sibilants carried.

Janson opened his eyes, the darkness of the bedroom softened by the glow of the Lombard moon. An unease grew within him.

A visitor? There was an active Consular Operations branch based at the U.S. Consulate General in Milan, on Via Principe Amedeo - just a fifty-minute drive away. Had Jessie somehow made contact with them? He got up and found his jacket, felt the pockets for his cellular phone. It was missing.

Had she taken it while he slept? Had he simply left it downstairs? Now he put on a bathrobe, took the pistol from under his pillow, and crept toward the voice.

Jessie's voice. Downstairs.

He stepped halfway down the stone staircase, looked around. The lights were on in the study, and the asymmetry of illumination would provide him with the cover he needed - the bright lights inside, the shadowy darkness outside. A few steps farther. Jessie, he could now see, was standing in the study, facing a wall, with his cell phone pressed to her ear. Talking quietly.

He felt a wrenching feeling in his gut: it was as he had feared.

From the snippets of conversation he made out through the open door, it was apparent that she was speaking to a colleague from Consular Operations in Washington. He edged nearer the room, and her voice grew more distinct.

"So the status is still 'beyond salvage,' " she repeated. "Sanction on sighting."

She was verifying that the kill orders were still in effect.

A shudder ran down his spine. He had no choice but to do what he should have done much earlier. It was kill or be killed. The woman was a professional assassin: it was of no account that her profession had once been his - that her employers had as well. He had no choice but to eliminate her; sentiment and wishful thinking, and her own accomplished line of blather, had distracted him from that one essential truth.

As cicadas filled the evening breeze with their rasping - a window was open in the study - he moved the pistol to his right hand, following her pacing figure with its muzzle. The sudden certainty of what he had to do filled him with loathing, self-disgust. Yet there was no other way. Kill or be killed: it was the awful shibboleth of an existence he had hoped he'd put behind him. Nor did it mitigate the larger truth, the ultimate truth of his career: