The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,189

terse commands and flickers of their flashlights. Suddenly, a bang shattered the still air, followed, in rapid succession, with four more bangs. Then he heard the return fire of an automatic rifle, and the sound of broken glass. The old warped frames of the front window had to be a scatter of shards and dust now.

To Janson, the acoustic sequence relayed a precise narrative. The cartridges over the fireplace had detonated first, as he had hoped. The gunmen made the logical assumption. Gun blasts from within the parlor indicated that they were being fired upon. They had what they needed: an exact location.

Exactly the wrong location.

Urgent shouts summoned the other men to join the apparent gunfight in the front of the farmhouse.

A series of low-pitched blasts told Janson that the cartridges on the rangetop skillet had been heated to the point of detonation. It would tell the gunmen that their quarry had retreated into the kitchen. Through the gap between the slats of the barn wall, he saw that a solitary gunman with a cradled automatic weapon remained behind; his partners had raced to the other side of the compound to join the others in their assault.

Janson withdrew his small Beretta and, through the same gap, aimed it at the burly, olive-clad man. Yet he could not fire yet - could not risk the gunshot being heard by others and exposing the subterfuge. He heard the footfalls of heavy boots drifting in from the main house: the other gunmen were splintering the house with their gunfire as they tried to discover Janson's hiding place. Janson waited until he heard the immense boom-roar of fifty shotgun cartridges exploding in the oven before he squeezed the trigger. The sound would be utterly lost amid the blast and the attendant confusion.

He fired at the exact instant.

Slowly, the burly man toppled over, face forward. His body made little sound as it hit the leafy ground cover.

The position was now unguarded: Janson unlatched a door and strode over to the fallen man, knowing that he would not be seen. For a moment, he contemplated disappearing into the dark thickets of the hillside; he could do so, had disappeared into similar terrains on other occasions. He was confident he could elude his pursuers and emerge safe, a day or two later, in one of the other hillside villages.

Then he remembered the slain woman, her savagely brutalized body, and any thought of flight vanished from his mind. His heart beat hard, and even the shadows of the evening seemed to be glimpsed through a curtain of red. He saw that his bullet had struck the gunman just above his hairline; only a rivulet of blood that made its way down his scalp to the top of his forehead revealed its lethal impact. He removed the dead man's submachine gun and bandolier, and adjusted its sling around his own shoulders.

There was no time to lose.

The team of assailants was now gathered in the house, tramping around heavily, firing their weapons. He knew that their bullets were flying into armoires and closets and every other conceivable hiding place, steel-jacketed projectiles splintering into wood, seeking human flesh.

But they were the trapped ones now.

Quietly, he circled around to the front of the farmhouse, dragging the dead man behind him. In the roving beams of light, he recognized a face, a second face, a third. His blood ran cold. They were hard faces. Cruel faces. The faces of men he had worked with many years ago in Consular Operations, and whom he had disliked even then. They were coarse men - coarse not in their manners, but in their sensitivities. Men for whom brute force was not a last resort but a first, for whom cynicism was the product not of a disappointed idealism but of naked avarice and rapacity. They had no business in government service; in Janson's opinion, they reduced its moral credibility by their very presence. The technical skill they brought to their work was offset by a lack of any real conscience, a failure to grasp the legitimate objectives that underwrote sometimes questionable tactics.

He placed his jacket on the dead man, then positioned him behind the sprawling chestnut tree; with the man's shoelaces, he tied his flashlight to the lifeless forearm. He pulled tiny splinters of wood from a dead branch and placed them between the man's eyelids, propping his eyes open in a glassy stare. It was crude work, turning the man into an effigy of himself.