The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,193

Janson had written the names of the three former Consular Operations agents he had identified. When she clicked off, she looked distinctly unsettled.

"So," Janson said, "what does your boyfriend tell you about their status: retired or active?"

"Boyfriend? If you ever saw him, you wouldn't be jealous. He makes wide turns, OK?"

"Jealous? Don't flatter yourself."

Jessie formed another W with her hands and rolled her eyes. "Look, here's the thing. They're not active."

"Retired."

"Not retired, either."

"Come again?"

"According to all the official records, they've been dead for the better part of a decade."

"Dead? Is that what they're telling you?"

"Remember the Qadal explosion in Oman?" Qadal had been the location of a U.S. Marines installation in Oman and a station for American intelligence gathering in the Persian Gulf. In the mid-nineties, terrorists set off a blast that cost the lives of forty-three American soldiers. A dozen "analysts" with the State Department had also been on site, and had perished as well.

"One of those 'unsolved tragedies,' " Janson said, expressionless.

"Well, the records say that all those guys you mentioned died in the blast."

Janson furrowed his brow, trying to assimilate the information. The terrorist incident in Oman must have been a cover. It enabled an entire contingent of Consular Operations agents to conveniently disappear - only to reappear, perhaps, in the employ of another power. But what power? Who were they working for? What kind of secret would motivate a hard man like Czerny to slash his own throat? Was his final deed an act of fear, or conviction?

Jessie paced for a while. "They're dead, but they're not dead, right? Is there any chance - any chance whatever - that the Peter Novak we saw on CNN is the same Peter Novak as ever? Never mind what his birth name might have been. Is it conceivable that - I don't know - he somehow wasn't on the aircraft that exploded? Like maybe he boarded it and then somehow slipped away before takeoff?"

"I was there, I observed everything ... I simply don't see how." Janson shook his head slowly. "I've gone through it again and again. I can't imagine it."

"Unimaginable doesn't mean impossible. There must be a way to prove that it's the same man."

On a wood-veneer table, Jessie spread out a stack of Novak images from the past year, downloaded from the Internet back in Alasdair Swift's Lombardy cottage. One of them was from the CNN Web site and showed the philanthropist at the award ceremony they had watched on television, honoring the woman from Calcutta. Now she took out the jeweler's loupe and ruler she had acquired for analyzing the maps of the B眉kk Hills region, and applied them to the images spread in front of her.

"What are you trying to do?" Janson asked.

"I know what you think you saw. But it ought to be possible to prove to you that we're dealing with the very same person. Plastic surgery can do only so much."

Ten minutes later, she interrupted a long, unbroken silence.

"Christ on a raft!" she said under her breath.

She turned to look at him, and her face was pale.

"Now you got to take into account things like lens distortion," she said, "and at first I thought that's all I was seeing. But there's something else going on. Depending on the photograph, the guy seems to be slightly different heights. Subtle - no more than half an inch difference. Here he is, standing next to the head of the World Bank. And here he is again, separate occasion, standing next to the same guy. Looks like everybody's wearing the same shoes in both shots. Could be the heels or whatever, right? But - subtle, subtle, subtle - he's got slightly different forearm spans. And the ratio between forearm span and femur span ... " She jabbed at one of the pictures, which showed him walking alongside the prime minister of Slovenia. The outline of a bent knee was visible against his gray trousers, as was the line where the upper thigh turned at the hip. She pointed to a similar configuration in another photograph. "Same joints, different ratios," she said, breathing deeply. "Something is deeply fucked-up."

"Meaning what?"

She riffled through the picture book she'd bought in Budapest, and busied herself with the ruler again. Finally she spoke. "Ratio of index finger length to forefinger length. Not constant. Photographs can be flopped, but he's not going to switch the hand he's got his wedding band on."

Now Janson approached the array of images. He tapped certain areas of