The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,197

fell limp. Now Janson crept into the jungle; he figured he could get a fifteen-minute head start before the alarm was raised and the dogs were loosed. Perhaps the dogs would find the dense jungle impassable; he nearly found it so himself, even as he knifed through the thick underbrush with automaton-like movements. He did not know how he managed to keep moving, how he managed to stave off collapse, yet his mind simply refused to acknowledge his physical debility.

One foot in front of the other.

The VC encampment, he knew, was somewhere in the Tri-Thien region of South Vietnam. The valley to the south was dense with the guerrillas. On the other hand, it was a region where the width of the country was especially narrow. The distance from the border with Laos to the west and the sea to the east was no more than twenty-five clicks. He had to get to the coast. If he could get to the coast, to the South China Sea, he could find his way back to safety.

He could get home.

A long shot? No matter. Nobody was coming for him. He knew that now. Nobody could save his life but him.

The land beneath him crested and dipped until, sometime the next day, he found himself at the bank of a wide river. One foot in front of the other. He began to wade through the brown, bath-warm water and found that his feet never left the bottom, even at its deepest. When he was almost halfway across, he saw a Vietnamese boy on the far bank. Janson closed his eyes, wearily, and when he opened them the boy was gone.

A hallucination? Yes, it had to have been. He must have imagined the boy. What else was he imagining? Had he really escaped, or was he dreaming, his mind falling apart in pace with his body in his miserable bamboo cage? And if he were dreaming, did he really want to wake up? Perhaps the dream was the only escape he would ever enjoy - why bring it to an end?

A water wasp alighted on his shoulder and stung him. It was painful, startlingly so, and yet it brought an odd sense of relief - for if he felt pain, surely he was not dreaming, after all. He shut his eyes again and opened them, and looked to the riverbank before him and saw two men, no, three, and one of them was armed with an AK-47, and the muddy water in front of him was blistered by a warning blast, and exhaustion, like a tide, swept over him, and he slowly raised his hands. There was no pity - no curiosity, even - in the gunman's eyes. He looked like a farmer who had trapped a vole.

As a passenger on the Museumboot circle line, Jessie Kincaid looked like all the other tourists, or so she hoped. Certainly, the glass-topped boat was filled with them, chattering and gawking and funning their little videocameras as they floated smoothly down Amsterdam's muddy canals. She clutched the garish brochure for the Museumboot - "bringing you to the most important museums, shopping streets and leisure centres of downtown Amsterdam," as it boasted. Kincaid had little interest in shopping or visiting museums, of course, but she saw that the boat's itinerary included Prinsengracht. How better to disguise stealthy surveillance than by joining a crowd of people engaged in overt surveillance?

Now the boat rounded the bend and the mansion came into view: the mansion with the seven bay windows - the headquarters of the Liberty Foundation. It seemed so innocuous. And yet evil, as if an industrial effluent somehow polluted its grounds.

At intervals, she raised to her eyes what looked like an ordinary 35mm camera, equipped with the bulky zoom lens of the amateur enthusiast. This was only a first go, of course. She would have to figure out how to get nearer without being detected. But for the moment she was, in effect, staking out her stakeout.

Just behind her, and occasionally jostling her, were a couple of unruly teenagers who belonged to an exhausted-looking Korean couple. The mother had a shopping bag with sunflowers on them, containing booty from the Van Gogh Museum souvenir shop; her bleary-eyed husband had his headphones plugged in, no doubt dialed to the Korean audio channel, listening to the prerecorded tour guide: On your left ... On your right ... The teenagers, a girl and a boy, were engaged in one of those private