The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,218

rags, and changed into ordinary street clothes: pressed chinos, a pastel-colored cotton sweater, penny loafers. She scrubbed the grime off her face with moist towelettes, fluffed her hair vigorously, and after a few minutes was at least vaguely presentable, which is to say, inconspicuous.

Ten minutes later, they had an address: 1060 Fifth Avenue was a handsome prewar apartment building, its limestone facade grown pearl gray from the city air. A discreet green awning stood before its entrance, which was not on the avenue but around the corner, on Eighty-ninth Street. She glanced at her watch.

All at once, her scalp prickled with apprehension. Her watch! She had worn it when she was on her observation post in Bryant Park! She knew that the Foundation's security guards would be alert to any anomalies, any discordant details. Hers was a slim Hamilton tank watch, which had once belonged to her mother. Would a bag lady wear such a watch? Anxiety burrowed deep within her as she pictured herself the way she had been, trying to figure out whether a guard equipped with binoculars might have dialed in on the glinting object on her wrist. She would have done so in their place. She had to assume that they would, too.

She flashed on the mental picture of her outstretched arms, foraging through the trash like a pauper archaeologist ... She saw the image of her gloved hand, and then, overlapping it, the frayed cuff of the long-sleeved thermal undershirt. Yes - the sleeve length of the undershirt was several sizes too big for her: her wristwatch would have been entirely concealed by it. The knot in her stomach loosened slightly. No harm, no foul, right? Yet she knew it was precisely the kind of careless mistake they could ill afford.

"Take me around the block, Corn," she said. "Slowly."

Driving the maroon Taurus up the winding mountain path known as Clangerton Road, Janson found the unmarked turnoff that the counterman had mentioned. He continued a short distance past it, pulling the car as far off the road as possible, plunging it into a natural cave of greenery, behind shrubs and a stand of saplings. He did not know what to expect, but caution dictated that his arrival be as stealthy as he could manage.

He walked into the woods, a spongy bed of mulched pine needles and twigs beneath his feet, and doubled back toward the small lane he had driven past. The air was filled with the resinous scent of an old-growth pine forest, a scent that recalled nothing so much as the disinfectants and air fresheners that so insistently aped it. Much of the woodland seemed wholly untouched by human habitation, a roadside forest primeval. It was through such a forest that European settlers had journeyed four centuries earlier, establishing themselves on the virgin territory, making their way by flintlock, musket, knife, and barter with an aboriginal people who greatly outnumbered them and were infinitely wiser in the ways of the land. Such were the obscure origins of what would become the mightiest power on the planet. Today, the terrain was some of the most beautiful in the country, and the less it bore the evidence of those who lived there, he reflected, the more beautiful it seemed.

And then he found the airstrip.

It was a sudden clearing in the forest, and disturbingly well maintained: the bramble and bushes had been clipped back recently, and a long oval strip of grass was neatly trimmed. It was a void, empty except for an SUV with a tarpaulin over it. How the vehicle got there was a mystery, for there was no apparent means of access to the strip, save from the skies above.

The strip itself was admirably hidden by the dense growth of trees surrounding it. Still, those trees could serve Janson's own purposes, protecting him as he set up a one-man observation post.

He nested himself in the middle of an old pine tree, largely concealing himself behind its trunk and the profusion of its needle-laden fronds. He steadied his binoculars against a small branch, and waited.

And waited.

Hours chugged past, his only visitors the occasional mosquito and less occasional centipede.

Yet Janson was scarcely aware of the passage of time. He was in another place: the sniper's fugue. His mind, part of it, drifted through the zone of semiconscious thought, even as another module of consciousness remained at a state of acute awareness.

He was convinced that there would be a flight today, not only because of what the