The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,174

Colleagues? I think so. I think so." Phan Nguyen, as it emerged, often said those words, I think so, almost beneath his breath: they distinguished questions that did not require voiced assent from those that did. "Now we will speak candidly to each other, as colleagues do. You will drop your lies and fables, on the pain of ... pain." He seemed pleased with the English idiom, with the way it could be twisted this way and that. "I know you are a brave man. I know you have a high tolerance for suffering. Perhaps you would like us to test just how high, like an experiment?"

Janson shook his head, his innards churning. Suddenly he heaved forward and retched. A small amount of vomit reached the hard-packed ground. It looked like coffee grounds. A clinical sign of internal hemorrhage.

"No? Just for now, I'm not going to press you for answers. I want you to ask yourself the questions." Phan Nguyen sat down again, looking intently at Janson with his intelligent, curious eyes. "I want you to ask yourself how it was that you were captured. We knew just where to find you - that must have puzzled you, no? What you faced wasn't the response of surprised men, was it? So you know what I say is so."

Janson felt another heaving surge of nausea: what Phan Nguyen said was true. It may have been wrapped in deceit, but the truth remained, stony and indigestible.

"You say you did not divulge the details of your identity to me. But that leaves you with a more troubling question. If not you, who? How is it that we were able to intercept your team and capture a senior officer of the legendary American counterintelligence division of the legendary Navy SEALs? How?"

How indeed? There was only one answer: Lieutenant Commander Alan Demarest had tunneled the information to the NVA or its VC allies. He was too careful a man for the leak to have been inadvertent at this point. It would have been extraordinarily easy. The information would have been "accidentally" revealed to one of the ARVN personnel whom Demarest knew to have close NVA links; it could have been "hidden" in a cache of papers "accidentally" left behind at a jungle outpost, too hastily decamped under enemy fire. The details could have been deliberately transmitted via a code and radio frequency known to the enemy. Demarest had wanted Janson out of the way; he had needed him out of the way. And so he had taken care of the matter as only he could. The whole mission had been a goddamn snare, a subterfuge from the master of subterfuge.

Demarest had done this to him!

And now the lieutenant commander was no doubt sitting at his desk, listening to Hildegard von Bingen, and Janson was trussed to a stool in a VC compound, foul pus oozing from open sores where the rope cut into his flesh, his body shattered, his mind reeling - reeling, most of all, at the realization that his ordeal had only begun.

"Well," Phan Nguyen said. "You must concede that our intelligence is superior. We know so much about your operations that to hold back would be pointless, like depriving the ocean of a teardrop. Yes, I think so, I think so." He walked out of the compound, conferring in a low voice with another officer, and then returned, taking his seat at his chair.

Janson's eyes fell on the man's feet, which didn't touch the ground, and took in the large American lace-ups, the childlike calves.

"You must get used to the fact that you will never return to the United States of America. Soon, I will tell you about Vietnamese history, starting with Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, the joint queens of Vietnam who ousted the Chinese from our lands in thirty-nine a.d. - yes, as far back as that! Before Ho, there were the Trung sisters. Where was America in thirty-nine a.d.? You will come to understand the futility of your government's efforts to suppress the rightful national aspirations of the Vietnamese people. You have many lessons to learn, and you will be well taught. But there is much you must tell us as well. Are we in agreement?"

Janson said nothing.

At an eye signal from the interrogator, a carbine smashed into his left side: another electric bolt of agony.

"Perhaps we can start with something easier and work up to the more advanced subjects. We shall talk about you. About your parents and