The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,188

for him to dash out. For there was no way Janson could escape undetected. Kincaid would be intercepted on her way to the Lancia; he would be destroyed or captured in a gated compound that was now his prison.

The spill of their flashlights illuminated each side of the old woman's home; in the light, he could also see their carbines. They would fire at their quarry at the first opportunity. Janson was, at the moment, an easy target indeed - and it would not take them long before their beams sliced toward the hayloft roof and silhouetted him with the clarity of a shooting-range cutout.

Janson lowered himself from the roof with as much speed and stealth as he could manage. Then he let himself down from the loft to the dirt floor. If the men had not rushed the place, it was only because they did not know whether he was armed. They would bide their time, proceed with caution, ensure his death without allowing him to take one of them with him.

Now he darted across the courtyard and back into the woman's parlor. The flickering light from the fireplace cast a ghostly glow on the carnage. Yet he had no choice but to return there. The old woman had a shotgun, hadn't she?

The shotgun was gone. Of course it was. It was not the sort of thing that would have escaped their notice, and disarming an octogenarian would have been easy. Yet if the woman kept a shotgun, she must also have a supply of cartridges stowed away somewhere.

A roving beam of yellow light flashed through the windows into the woman's parlor, looking for signs of movement - for signs of him. Janson promptly eased himself to the floor. They wanted to locate him, to narrow his mobility progressively. Once they knew for sure which building he was in, they could force the gate of the courtyard and surround the particular structure into which he had retreated. Their uncertainty was his only ally.

Janson crawled toward the kitchen, keeping well out of sight. The shotgun cartridges - where would the old woman have kept them? By themselves, they would be useless as offensive weapons against his pursuers. But there might just be another way of using them. He was alive so far only because of their uncertainty about his precise location, but he had to do better than that. He would win only if he could turn uncertainty into error.

He tried several drawers in the woman's kitchen, finding cutlery in one, bottles of condiments and spices in another. It was in a small pantry, next to the kitchen, that he finally found what he was looking for, and in even more plentiful supply that he had hoped. Ten boxes of Biro Super 10-gauge cartridges, twenty to the box. He pulled out a couple of boxes and crawled back to the parlor.

He heard shouts from outside, in a language he could not make out. But there was no missing the larger meaning: more men were arriving to take up perimeter positions.

In the iron pan over the fireplace, where the woman had been roasting chestnuts earlier that day, Janson placed a handful of the long cartridges, the cupped brass on either end connected by a ridged brown plastic tube. Within them was lead shot and gunpowder, and though they were designed to be detonated by the firing pin of a shotgun, sufficient heat would produce a similar effect.

The fire was slow, dying, and the pan was a couple of feet above it. Could he depend upon it?

Janson added another small log to the fire, and returned to the kitchen. There he placed a cast-iron skillet on the decades-old electric range, and scattered another handful of cartridges on it. He set the heat on medium low. It would take a minute for the element just to heat the bottom of the heavy skillet.

Now he turned on the oven, and placed the remaining fifty cartridges on the rack, a foot below the top heating element, and set the temperature on high. The oven would surely take the longest to heat of all. He knew that his calculations were crude, at best. He also knew he had no better alternatives.

He crept across the courtyard, past the stables, and climbed the rungs to the hayloft again.

And he waited.

For a while, all he heard was the voices of the men as they grew nearer and nearer, taking positions safely away from windows, communicating to one another with