The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,239

cast to his features. The man who called himself Peter Novak hovered over the elderly scholar, who was lying prone on a Jackson table, a large translucent platform that supported his chest and thighs while permitting his abdomen to hang free. It was standard equipment in spinal surgery, for it shifted blood away from the spinal area and minimized bleeding.

Intravenous fluids dripped into his left arm. The table was adjusted so that the old scholar's head and shoulders were propped upward, and he and the man who called himself Peter Novak could commune face-to-face.

In the background, a twelfth-century plainsong could be heard. Slow, high voices in unison; they were words of ecstasy, yet to Angus Fielding it sounded like a dirge.

O ignis spiritus paraditi, vita vite omnis creature, sanctus es vivificando formas

A six-inch-long incision had been made in the middle of the old man's back, and metal retractors parted the paraspinal muscles, exposing the ivory-white bones of the spinal column.

"Look into my eyes, Angus," the man repeated.

Angus Fielding looked, could not help looking, but the man's eyes were nearly black, and there was no pity in them whatsoever. They seemed scarcely human. They seemed like a well of pain.

The black-haired man had dropped the cultivated Hungarian accent; his voice was uninflected but distinctly American. "What exactly did Paul Janson tell you?" he demanded once more as the frail old scholar shivered with terror.

The black-haired man nodded to a young woman, who had extensive training as an orthopedic technician. A large, open-bore trocar, the size of a knitting needle, was pushed through the fibrous sheath surrounding the soft disk that separated the fifth and sixth thoracic vertebrae. After less than a minute, the woman nodded at him: the trocar was in position.

"And - good news - we're there."

A thin copper wire, insulated except for the tip, was then inserted through the trocar to the spinal root itself, the trunk through which nerve impulses from the entire body made their way. Demarest adjusted a dial until a small amount of electrical current began to pulse through the copper wire. The reaction was immediate.

The scholar screamed - a loud, bloodcurdling scream - until there was no air left in his lungs.

"Now that," Demarest said, cutting off the current, "is a very singular sensation, is it not?"

"I've told you everything I know," the scholar gasped.

Demarest adjusted the dial.

"I've told you," the scholar repeated as pain mounted upon pain, penetrating his body in convulsions of purest agony. "I've told you!" Shimmering and otherworldly, the choral threnodies of joy floated far above the agony that consumed him.

Sanctus es unguendo periculose fractos: sanctus es tergendo fetida vulnera.

No, there was no pity in the black pools of the man's eyes. Instead, there was paranoia: a conviction that his enemies were anywhere and everywhere.

"So you maintain," Alan Demarest said. "You maintain this because you believe the pain will stop if I am persuaded that you have told me the whole truth. But the pain will not stop, because I know that you have not done so. Janson sought you out. He sought you out because he knew that you were a friend. That you were loyal. How can I make you understand that it is me you owe your loyalty to? You feel pain, do you not? And that means you are alive, yes? Is that not a gift? Oh, your entire existence will be a sensorium of pain. I believe that if I can make you understand that, we might begin to make progress."

"Oh dear God no!" the scholar shouted as another course of electricity penetrated his body.

"Extraordinary, isn't it?" Demarest said. "Every C fiber in your body - every pain-transmitting nerve - feeds into this main trunk of nerve bundles that I'm stimulating right now. I could attach electrodes to every inch of your body and it wouldn't yield the same intensity of pain."

Another scream reverberated through the room - another scream that ended only because breath itself did.

"To be sure, pain is not the same as torture," Demarest went on. "As an academic, you'll appreciate the importance of such distinctions. Torture requires an element of human intention. It has to be interwoven with meaning. Simply to be eaten by a shark, let us say, is not to experience torture - whereas if someone intentionally dangles you over a shark tank, that is torture. You might dismiss this as a nicety, but I'd beg to differ. The experience of torture, you see, requires not only the intention