The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,263

the ridgeline.

We will never meet again, Phan Nguyen.

He trudged up a gentle slope, the ground thinning out now, the vegetation growing less dense, and then he startled.

A darting figure, not far from him. An animal? An assailant? His vision was failing him. His senses: they all were failing him, and at a time when they must not. So close - he was so close.

His gaunt fingers fell, spiderlike, to the trigger enclosure of the submachine gun. To be undone by his enemies when he was so near home - that would be a hell beyond imagining, beyond any he had endured.

Another darting movement. He squeezed off a triple burst of gunfire. Three bullets. The noise and the bucking of the weapon in his arms felt greater than they ever had. He rushed over to see what had been hit.

Nothing. He could see nothing. He leaned against a gnarled mangosteen tree and craned around, and there was nothing. Then he looked down, and he realized what he had done.

A shirtless boy. Simple brown pants, and tiny sandals on his feet. In his hand was a bottle of Coca-Cola, its foamy contents now seeping to the ground.

He was, perhaps, seven years old. His crime was - what? Playing hide-and-seek? Gamboling with a butterfly?

The boy lay on the ground. A beautiful child, the most beautiful child Janson had ever seen. He appeared oddly peaceful, except for the jagged crimson across his chest, three tightly clustered holes from which his life-blood pulsed.

He looked up at the gaunt American, his soft brown eyes unblinking.

And he smiled.

The boy smiled.

The images flooded Janson now, flooded him for the first time, because these were the images his mind was to banish - banish utterly - the day that followed, and then all the days that followed. Even unremembered, they had pushed at him, weighed on him, at times immobilized him. He thought of the little boy on the basement stairs in the Stone Palace, of his own hand frozen at the trigger, and he grasped the power of the unremembered.

Yet he remembered now.

He remembered how he sank to the ground and cradled the child in his lap, an embrace between the dead and the almost dead, victim and victimizer.

What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?

And he did what he had never done in country. He wept.

The memories that followed were beyond proper retrieval: The child's parents soon came, having been summoned by the gunfire. He could see their stricken faces, yes - sorrowing, with a sorrow that voided even rage. They took their boy from him, the man and the woman, and the man was keening, keening ... and the mother shook her head, shook her head violently, as if to dislodge the reality it contained, and holding the lifeless body of her child in her arms, she turned to the gaunt soldier, as if there were any words she could utter that would make a difference.

But all she said was, You Americans.

Now the faces, all of them, dissolved, and Janson was left with the hard-eyed gaze of Alan Demarest.

Demarest had been talking, was talking now. "The past is another country. A country you never fully left."

It was true.

"You could never get me out of your head, could you?" Demarest continued.

"No," Janson said, his voice a broken whisper.

"Why would that be? Because the bond between us was real. It was powerful. 'Opposition is true friendship,' William Blake tells us. Oh, Paul - what a history we shared. Did it haunt you? It haunted me."

Janson did not reply.

"One day, the United States government handed me the keys to the kingdom, allowed me to create an empire such as the world had never seen. Of course I would make it mine. But however big your coffers are, it's not always easy to settle your accounts. I just needed you to acknowledge the truth about us two. I made you, Paul. I molded you from clay, the way God made man."

"No." The word came like a groan from deep within him.

Another step closer. "It's time to be truthful with yourself," he said gently. "There's always been something between us. Something very close to love."

Janson looked intently at him, mentally imposing Demarest's features over the famous countenance of the legendary humanitarian, seeing the points of resemblance even on the recontoured visage. He shuddered.

"And a lot closer to hate," Janson said at last.

Demarest's eyes burned into him like glowing coals. "I made you, and nothing can ever