The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,200

spoke with the vowels of the old Eastern Shore regional accent. "Me, my family been living here when you were still eatin' your white bread. Been here through the rubs, been here when things was pretty. Shoreline here is public property. My daughter-in-law's been five years on the Lower Eastern Shore Heritage Committee. You think you're going to tell me I can't go where the law says I can, you got a whole 'nother think come at you. I know my rights."

The guardsman scowled, half amused at the old salt's line of blather and not ungrateful for the interruption of his tedious routine. But his orders were clear. "Fact remains, this is a restricted area, and there's about a dozen signs saying so."

"I'll have you know, my ancestors were here when the Union troops were in Salisbury, and - "

"Listen, Pappy," the guardsman said, rubbing the red and peeling bridge of his nose, "I will frog-march your ass into federal custody at gunpoint if I have to." He stood directly in front of the other man. "You got a complaint, write your congressman." He puffed out his chest, placed a hand near his bolstered side arm.

"Why, look at you, you're just breath and britches." Janson limply made a swatting gesture with a hand, indicating dismissal and resignation. "Ah, you park rangers wouldn't know a bufflehead from a widgeon."

"Park ranger?" the guardsman sneered, shaking his head. "You think we're park rangers?"

Suddenly, Janson sprang at him, clamping his right hand around his mouth, his left around the back of his neck. They fell together, the sound of the impact muffled by the sand, a quiet crunch lost amid the cawing of gulls and the rustling of the salt-meadow cordgrass. Even before they hit the ground, though, Janson had snaked his hand around and grabbed the man's bolstered M9 pistol.

"Nobody likes a smart-ass," he said quietly, dropping the accent, jabbing the M9 Beretta into his trachea. The young man's eyes widened in terror. "You got new orders, and you'd better obey them: a sound out of you and you're dead, greenhorn."

With swift movements, Janson undid the guardsman's weapons belt and used it to bind his wrists to his ankles. Next, he ripped narrow strips of cloth from his camouflage tunic and stuffed them in the man's mouth, finally securing the gag with the guardsman's own bootlaces. After pocketing the man's M9 and his Motorola "handy-talky," he lifted him like a heavy rucksack and left him hidden amid a thick growth of cordgrass.

Janson pressed on, and when the beach disappeared, he walked farther up the grass. There would be at least another guard on patrol duty - the undersecretary's weekend house had clearly been designated a federal facility - but there was a good chance that the Motorola TalkAbout T6220 would let him know if any irregularities had been detected.

A fast five-minute walk and Janson found himself on the south side of a sparsely grassed dune, the cottage just out of view. His pace lessened as, with each step, his boots sank into the loose, silty sand, but his destination was not much farther.

He looked out once more and saw the placid water of Chesapeake Bay - misleadingly placid, for it was invisibly swarming with life. In the distant glare, he could just make out Tangier Island, several miles to the south. Now it styled itself the soft-shell capital of the world; yet in 1812, the one war in the country's history where foreign troops were deployed on U.S. soil, it was the base of British operations. The shipbuilding firms of St. Michaels were nearby; blockade-runners circulated around the port. A scrap of military history returned to Janson: it was in St. Michaels that the shorefolk conducted one of the classic ruses of nineteenth-century warfare. Hearing of an impending British attack, the townsmen extinguished their lanterns. Then they hoisted them high into the trees and lit them again. The British fired upon the town but, misled by the lantern placement, aimed too high, their shells uselessly lodging in treetops far overhead.

That was the Eastern Shore: so much serenity hiding so much blood. Three centuries of American strife and American contentment. It was altogether fitting that Derek Collins should have established his private redoubt here.

"My wife Janice used to love that spot." The familiar voice came without warning, and Janson whirled around to see Derek Collins. Inside his jacket, Janson gingerly fingered the trigger to the M9, testing its tension as he looked over his