heard nothing. Would he be as successful in maintaining silence?
Ten feet, then twenty feet, along the wall. There was a scraping sound, then the burst of a tiny combustion: the third guard was lighting up.
Janson was near enough to watch the motion: a thick, self-lighting match struck against brick, its candlelike flame held under what looked like a thin cigarillo. After twenty seconds, the tobacco smell wafted toward him - it was indeed a cigarillo - and Janson relaxed a little. The flare of the match would constrict the sentries' irises, temporarily reducing their visual acuity. The tobacco smoke would render their noses all but useless. And the activity of smoking would compromise their ability to respond, in an encounter where a split second was the difference between life and death.
He was now fifteen feet away from the northern veranda. He took in the rusticated limestone and wrought-iron grille. The terra-cotta mission roof tiles were a late addition and sat oddly on a structure that had been built and rebuilt over centuries. Four stories; the grand rooms on the second floor, where the leaded glass, hood moldings, and arched transoms suggested the transformation of a Portuguese fortress into what a Dutch overlord pretentiously dubbed his "palace." Most of the windows were dark; dim hallway lights seeped through some of them. And where was the Caliph, the architect of death, sleeping tonight? Janson had a pretty good guess.
It would be so easy. A fragmentation grenade, lobbed through the leaded glass. A stinger missile, blasting into the bedroom. And Ahmad Tabari would be dead. No more would remain of his corporeal existence than remained of Helene's. He batted the thought away. It was a fantasy merely, and one he could not afford to indulge. It was inconsistent with the mission objective. Peter Novak was a great man. Not only did Janson owe him his life, but the world might owe him its future survival. The moral and strategic calculus was incontrovertible: the preservation of a great man had to take precedence over the destruction of an evil one.
Janson lowered his gaze from the governor's suite to the northern veranda.
Fifteen feet away from the nearest sentry, he could see the men's faces. Broad, peasant faces, unwary and unsophisticated. Younger than he had expected. But then, the forty-nine-year-old operative reflected, these men would not have looked young to him for most of his career as a field agent. They were older than he was when he was running raids behind the Green Line near Cambodia. Older than he was when he killed for the first time, and when he first escaped being killed.
Their hands were visibly chafed, but no doubt from farmwork rather than martial arts. Amateurs, yes, he mused again; but it was not a wholly reassuring thought. The KLF was too well organized to have entrusted so valuable a treasure to the protection of such men as these. They were a first line of defense only. A first line of defense where, logically, no defense at all would have been called for.
And where was Katsaris?
Janson peered across the courtyard, across sixty feet of darkness, and could make out nothing. Katsaris was invisible. Or gone.
He made a quiet tsk into the filament mike, trying to modify the sound to echo the insect and avian noises of the night.
He heard an answering tsk in his earpiece. Katsaris was there, in place, ready.
The accuracy of his first determination would be crucial: Was it safe to take out these men? Were the men themselves decoys - birds on a wire?
Was there a wire?
Janson raised himself from his crouch, peered into the windows behind the iron grille. Perspiration lay on him like a film of mud; the humidity of the air prevented evaporation. Now he envied Katsaris the procholinergic. The perspiration wasn't cooling him; it just adhered to his skin, an unwanted layer of clothing.
At the same time, it concerned him that he was even conscious of such incidentals. He had to focus: Was there a wire?
He looked through the NV scope, angling it toward the iron grille behind the smoking peasants. Nothing.
No, something. An orange spot, too small to correspond to a body. In all likelihood, it was a hand belonging to a body concealed behind a stone wall.
The men on the veranda, it was a reasonable surmise, were unaware that they had backup; it would have diminished their already doubtful efficacy. But they did.
Did the backup have backup? Had a sequential operation been designed?