The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,164

pressed uncomfortably against his chest; Janson buttoned the lowermost button of his jacket, and that one only. At the end of the hallway, he saw the two bodyguards who had been at the bar. From their expressions - dismay turning to congealed hatred - he saw that they had expected to assist their colleague in escorting a "drunk" from the restaurant. As he turned the corner to the dining room, one of them, the taller of the two, stepped directly in front of him.

The man's hatchet face was perfectly expressionless as he spoke to Janson in quiet, accented English. "You'll want to be extremely careful. My partner has a gun trained on you. Very powerful, very silent. The rate of heart attacks is very high in this country. Nonetheless, if you are stricken, it will attract some attention. I should not prefer it. There are more graceful ways. But we will not think twice about dealing with you right here."

Drifting in from the main dining room were the sounds of merriment and the festive tune that had become universal in the past century, "Happy Birthday to You." Boldog szuletesnapot! he heard. The song lost nothing in the Hungarian, Janson was sure, recalling the large table filled with a couple of dozen revelers, a table on which four frosty bottles of champagne had been assembled.

Now with a look of stark terror on his face, Janson placed both his hands on his chest, in a theatrical gesture of fright. At the same time, he slipped his right hand beneath his left hand, stealing toward the handgrip of the bulky firearm.

He waited another moment for the other sound associated with celebration, at least as much in Hungary as elsewhere: the pop of a champagne cork. It arrived a moment later, the first of the four bottles that would be opened. At the sound of the next popped cork, Janson squeezed the trigger of the silenced revolver.

A soft phut was lost among the clamorous festivities, but now a horrifed look appeared on the gunman's face. Janson was conscious of the tiny corona of woolen threads puffing out from a barely visible hole in his jacket as the man collapsed to the floor. An abdominal injury alone would not cause a professional to plummet as he did. The immediate collapse could mean only one thing: the bullet had plowed through his upper abdomen and lodged in his spine. The result was the immediate cessation of neural impulses, and the resultant paralysis of all muscles of the body's lower regions. Janson was familiar with the telltale signs of complete cataplexy and numbness, and he knew what the experience uniquely did to combatants, even hardened ones: they mourned. They mourned what they recognized to be the irreversible loss of their physicality, sometimes even forgetting to take measures to prevent the loss of their very lives.

"Take your hand from your pocket, or you're next," he told the man's partner in a harsh whisper.

The authority of his voice, more than the gun in his grip, was his ultimate weapon here, Janson knew. In theory, theirs was a Mexican standoff, two men with their fingers on short triggers. There was no logical reason for the other man to stand down. Yet Janson knew that he would. Janson's actions were unexpected, as was his confidence. Too many factors could underlie this confidence and they could not be assessed with any certainty: Did Adam Kurzweil know that he would be able to squeeze off a shot faster? Was he perhaps wearing concealable soft body armor? Two seconds were not enough to make such an evaluation. And the penalty of guessing wrong was starkly visible. Janson saw the man's eyes dart toward his ashen-faced, immobilized partner ... and the spreading pool of urine around him. The loss of urinary continence indicated the severing of the sacral nerves caused by an injury to a mid- or lower-spinal vertebra.

The man held out his hands before him, looking sickened, humiliated, scared.

If your enemy has a good idea, steal it, Lieutenant Commander Alan Demarest used to say, referring to the wily snares of their Viet Cong adversaries; and it came to Janson's mind, along with a darker thought: When you gaze too long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back. What they had planned for him, he would use on them, including even the burly guard's silenced CZ-75.

"Don't just stand there," Janson said softly, leaning in close to the man's ear. "Our friend has just had