The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,45

down, setting it to full fire.

The young man stood up suddenly, shouting something in Kagama. He fired his gun toward the area where he had seen Janson, and the bullet took a bite out of the concrete just an inch from his head. A second bullet tore into nearby ductwork.

Suddenly, the dimly lit room filled with a flare of eye-searing brightness and heat. The slow-burning thermite grenade had arrived: a small, indoor sun, blinding even those who tried to look away. Its brightness was a multiple of that emitted by a welder's torch, and the fact that the guards' eyes had adjusted to low-light conditions made the blindness all the more complete. Scattered gunfire was directed toward Janson, but the angle made it a hard shot, and the bullets were poorly aimed.

Through his nearly black goggles, Janson saw the soldiers in disarray and confusion, some shielding their eyes with forearms and hands, others firing blindly toward the ceiling.

Still, even a blind shot could be fatal. With the entire room whited out by the preternaturally bright flare, he returned fire, directing the automatic fusillades in tight, carefully aimed clusters. He depleted one thirty-round magazine and snapped in another. Shouts filled the room.

Now Katsaris appeared, bounding down the stairway with polarized goggles and a softly buzzing MP5K, directing bullets at the guerrillas from yet another angle.

In seconds it was over. Few of them, Janson reflected, even had the opportunity to look their opponents in the eye. They had been slaughtered, impersonally, by a smoothly operating magazine-fed weapon that discharged bullets at a rate of fifteen per second. Because of the low-signature sound suppression, the MP5 bursts were not merely lethal but eerily quiet. It took Janson a moment before he realized what the sound reminded him of: the fluttering of a deck of cards being shuffled. Killing should not sound like that, Janson thought to himself. It was too trivial a soundtrack for so grave an action.

An odd silence now reigned. As gloom and shadows returned, Janson and Katsaris removed their goggles. The naked, forty-watt overhead bulb, Janson noticed, was still intact. The guards were not so lucky. Bodies were splayed on the floor, as if pinned there by the hollow-point bullets. They had functioned as they were designed to, discharging their entire force to the bodies they hit, coming to a stop several inches into those bodies, destroying all the vital organs they encountered. As Janson came closer, he saw that some of the men were taken down even before they'd had the opportunity to flip the safeties of their Ml6 carbines.

Were there any signs of movement? It took him a few moments before he saw it. Sliding along the ground was the young man who had played the amazing thirteen-card set - the man who had lifted his eyes to the concrete ledge. His midriff was red and slick, but his arms were outstretched, reaching for the revolver of the lifeless soldier next to him.

Janson let off one more burst from his HK. Another shuffle of life's deck, and the young man became still.

The grotto was an abattoir, filled with the rich, sickening stench of blood and the contents of ripped-open alimentary canals. Janson knew the stench all too well: it was the stench of life once life was taken away.

Oh Christ. Oh God. It was nothing short of carnage, outright butchery. Was this what he did? Was this who he was? The words of an old fitness report returned to mock him: Was he indeed "in his element"? Once more, he flashed back to one of his exit interviews.

"You don't have a heart, Janson. It's why you do what you do. Goddammit, it's why you are who you are."

"Maybe. And maybe I'm not who you think I am."

"You tell me you're sickened by the killing. I'm going to tell you what you'll discover one day for yourself: it's the only way you'll ever feel alive."

"What kind of man has to kill to feel alive?"

What kind of man was he?

Now he felt something hot and acidic splash in the back of his throat. Had he lost it? Had he changed in ways that made him unfit for the task he had accepted? Perhaps it was simply that he had been out of it for too long, and the necessary calluses had softened.

He wanted to throw up. He also knew he would not. Not in front of Theo, his beloved protege. Not in the middle of a mission. Not now. His