The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,211

saw her short hair ruffled by the gentle breeze, and all at once his heart felt as if it might burst. Maybe Collins was telling him the truth about the role of Consular Operations in what had gone down; maybe he wasn't. The only verifiable truth was that Janson could not trust him. There's a lot you need to know ... Come with me. That's just the sort of line Collins would use to lure him to his death.

Janson looked again at the gently bobbing speedboat, twenty feet from shore. It wasn't a hard choice. Abruptly, he bolted down the beach, without looking back, first wading into the shallow water and then propelling himself to Jessie's boat with powerful crawl strokes. The water sluiced around his clothing and cooled his body.

As he climbed aboard the boat, Jessie reached for him, took his hand in hers.

"Funny, I thought you were in Amsterdam," Janson said.

"Let's just say its charms ran thin. Especially after a couple of brats almost knocked me over and accidentally saved my life."

"Come again?"

"Long story. I'll explain later."

He put his arms around her, feeling the warmth of her body. "OK, my questions can wait. You've probably got some of your own."

"I'll start with one," she said. "Are we partners?"

He pressed her close to him. "Yeah," he said. "We're partners."
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
PART FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

"You don't understand," said the courier, a straitlaced black man in his late twenties, with lozenge-shaped rimless glasses. "I could lose my job for that. I could face criminal and civil penalties, too." He gestured toward the patch on his navy jacket with the distinctive calligraphic logo of his company: Caslon Couriers. Caslon: the extremely expensive, top-of-the-line, ultrasecure courier service to which select individuals and corporations entrusted highly sensitive documents. A nearly flawless record of reliability and discretion had won it the loyalty of its exclusive clientele. "These brothers don't play."

He was sitting at a small table at the Starbucks on Thirty-ninth Street and Broadway, in Manhattan, and the gray-haired man who had joined him there was politely insistent. He was, he had explained, a senior officer of the Liberty Foundation; his wife was a staff member of the Manhattan office. Yes, the approach was all very irregular, but he was at the end of his rope. The trouble was, he had reason to believe she was receiving packages from a romantic suitor. "And I'm not even sure who the damn guy is!"

The courier grew visibly uncomfortable until Janson began to peel off hundred-dollar bills. After twenty of them, his eyes began to warm behind his glasses.

"I'm on the road about sixty percent of the time, I mean, I can understand how her attention might wander," the gray-haired man said. "But I can't fight off somebody I don't know, you understand? And she won't admit that anything's going on. I see she's got these little gifts, and she says she bought them herself. But I know better. These aren't the sort of things you buy for yourself. These are the kinds of things a guy buys a woman, and I know, because I have. Hey, I'm not saying I'm perfect or anything. But we need to clear the air, my wife and I, and I really mean both of us. Look, I can't believe I'm even doing what I'm doing. I'm not that kind of a guy, trust me."

The courier shook his head sympathetically and then glanced at his watch. "You know, I meant what I said about criminal and civil prosecution. They spell that out when you join up, a dozen ways. You sign all kinds of contracts and if you're found in violation, they'll fry your ass."

The wealthy cuckold was all dignity and caution. "They never will. I'm not asking you to divert anything, I'm not asking you to do anything wrong. All I'm asking is to see copies of the invoice slips. Not to have them, to see them. And if I learn something, if it's the guy I think it is, nobody will ever know how. But I'm begging you, you've got to give Marta and me a chance. And this is the only way."

The courier nodded briskly. "I'm going to get behind on my rounds if I don't get a move on. How about you meet me at the atrium of the Sony Building, Fifty-fifth and Madison, in four hours?"

"You're doing the right thing, my friend," the man told him with fervor. He made no reference to the two thousand dollars he had