as this songbird, that's how she regarded it, impaled a small bird on one of the hawthorn shrubs and just let it hang there. Sometime later, the shrike came back and started to rip it apart with its curved beak. A butcher bird doing what a butcher bird does, the crimson, glistening viscera of another bird dripping from its beak. To her, it was horrible, just horrible. A betrayal. Somehow she never got the nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw memo. That wasn't how she saw the world. A Sarah Lawrence girl, right? And what could I tell her? That a hawk with a song is still a hawk?"
"Maybe it's both, Derek. Not a songbird pretending to be a hawk, but a hawk that's also a songbird. A songbird that turns into hawk when it needs to. Why do we have to choose?"
"Because we do have to choose." He placed his mug down hard on the granite counter, and the thunk of heavy ceramic against stone punctuated his shift of tone. "And you have to choose. Which side are you on?"
"Which side are you on?"
"I've never changed," Collins said.
"You tried to kill me."
Collins tilted his head. "Well, yes and no," he replied, and his nonchalance bewildered Janson more than any emphatic, heated denial would have. There was no stiffening, no defensiveness; Collins might have been discussing the factors contributing to beachfront erosion.
"Glad you're so mellow about it," Janson said with glacial control. "Five of your henchmen who ended their careers in the Tisza valley seemed less philosophical."
"Not mine," Collins said. "Look, this really is awkward."
"I wouldn't want you to feel you owe me an explanation." Janson spoke with cold fury. "About Peter Novak. About me. About why you want me dead."
"See, that was a mistake, the Lambda Team dispatch, and we feel terrible about the whole beyond-salvage directive. Big-time product recall on that order - Firestone-tire-size. Mistake, mistake, mistake. But whatever hostiles you encountered in Hungary - well, they weren't ours. Maybe once, but not anymore. That's all I can tell you."
"So I guess everything's squared away," Janson replied with heavy sarcasm.
Collins removed his glasses and blinked a few times. "Don't get me wrong. I'm sure we'd do the same thing again. Look, I didn't institute the order, I just didn't countermand it. Everybody in operations - not to mention all the frontline spooks at the CIA and other shops - thought you'd gone rogue, took a sixteen-million-dollar bribe, all that. I mean, the evidence was plain as day. For a while, I thought so, too."
"Then you learned better."
"Except that I couldn't cancel the order without an explanation. Otherwise, people would assume either I'd lost it or that somebody had got to me, too. Just wasn't feasible. And the thing was, I couldn't offer an explanation. Not without compromising a secret on the very highest levels. The one secret that could never be compromised. You're not going to be able to look at this objectively, because we're talking about your own survival here. But my job is all about priorities, and where you've got priorities, you're going to have sacrifices to make."
"Sacrifices to make?" Janson interjected, his voice dripping with derision. "You mean a sacrifice for me to make. I was that goddamn sacrifice." He leaned in closer, his face numb with rage.
"You can remove your curved beak from my torn viscera. I'm not arguing."
"Do you think I killed Peter Novak?"
"I know you didn't."
"Let me ask you a simple question," Janson began. "Is Peter Novak dead?"
Collins sighed. "Well, again, my answer's yes and no."
"Goddammit!" Janson exploded. "I want answers."
"Shoot," Collins said. "Let me rephrase that: ask away."
"Let's start with a pretty disturbing discovery I've made. I've studied dozens of photographic images of Peter Novak in exacting detail. I'm not going to interpret the data, I'm just going to present the data. There are variances, subtle but measurable, of fixed physical dimensions. Ratio of index finger length to forefinger length. Trapezium to metacarpal. Forearm length. The ventral surface of the scapula, shadowed against his shirt, in two photographs taken only a few days apart."
"Conclusion: these aren't pictures of one man." Collins's voice was flat.
"I went to his birthplace. There was a Peter Novak who was born to Janos and Illana Ferenczi-Novak. He died about five years later, in 1942."
Collins nodded, and once more, his lack of reaction was more chilling than any reaction could have been. "Excellent work, Janson."
"Tell me the truth," Janson said. "I'm not crazy. I saw a man die."
"That's so," Collins said.
"And not