The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,46

body would be permitted no such indulgences.

A coolly remonstrating voice in his head took over: Their victims were, after all, soldiers. They knew their lives were expendable. They belonged to a terrorist movement that had taken a man of international renown and sworn solemnly to execute him. In guarding a civilian unjustly held captive, they had placed themselves in the line of fire. For Ahmad Tabari, el Caliph, they had pledged to give their lives - all of them had. Janson had merely taken them up on the offer.

"Let's go," Janson called to Katsaris. He could rehearse the excuses in his head, could recognize that they were not without some validity, and yet none of it made the slaughter before him any more tolerable.

His own sense of repugnance was the only thing that gave solace. To contemplate such violence with equanimity was the province of the terrorist, the extremist, the fanatic - a breed he had spent a lifetime fighting, a breed he feared he was, in his own way, becoming. Whatever his actions, the fact that he could not contemplate them without horror indicated that he was not yet a monster.

Now he moved swiftly down from the concrete ledge and joined Katsaris at the iron-plated gate to the governor general's dungeon. He noticed that the soles of Katsaris's boots were, like his, slick with blood, and quickly looked away.

"I'll do the honors," Katsaris said. He was holding a big, antique-looking hoop of keys, taken from one of the slain guards.

Three keys. Three dead bolts. The door swung open, and the two stepped into a narrow, dark space. The air felt dank, stagnant, suffused with the smells of human sickness and sweat that had passed beyond rancid, to something else. Away from the overhead bulb in the area where the guards had waited, the space was dim, and it was difficult to make anything out.

Katsaris toggled his flashlight from infrared to optical light. Its powerful beam cut through the murk.

In silence, they listened.

The sound of breathing was audible somewhere in the gloom.

A narrow passageway broadened out, and they saw how the two-hundred-year-old dungeon was constructed. It consisted of a row of impossibly thick iron bars set only four feet away from the stone walls. Every eight feet, a partition of stone and mortar segmented the long row of cells. There were no windows up to the ground, no sources of illumination; a few kerosene lanterns had been set in the stone bulkheads; they had provided what illumination there was the last time that the dungeon had been in service.

Janson shuddered, contemplating the horrors of a previous age. What sort of offenses landed people in the governor general's dungeon? Not ordinary aggressions of one native against another: the traditional village leaders were encouraged to deal with them as they always had, subject to the occasional urging to be "civilized" in their punishment. No, the ones who ended up in the colonial overlord's dungeons, lanson knew, were the resisters - those who opposed the rule of foreigners, who believed that the natives might be able to run their own affairs, free from the lash of Holland's rump empire.

And now a new set of rebels had seized the dungeon and, like so many rebels, sought not to dismantle it but only to use it for their own ends.

It was a truth both bitter and undeniable: those who stormed the Bastille inevitably found a way to put it to use again.

The area behind the grate was shrouded in darkness. Katsaris swept his flashlight along the corner of the cages until they saw him.

A man.

A man who did not look glad to see them. He had flattened himself against the wall cell, trembling with fright. As the beam of light illuminated him, he dropped to the ground, crouching in the corner, a terrified animal hoping to make himself disappear.

"Peter Novak?" Janson asked softly.

The man buried his face in his arms, like the child who believes that when he cannot see, he cannot be seen.

Suddenly, Janson understood: What did he look like, with his black face paint and combat garb, his boots tracking blood? Like a savior - or an assailant?

Katsaris's flashlight settled on the cowering man, and Janson could make out the incongruously elegant broadcloth shirt, stiff not with a French launderer's starch but with grime and dried blood.

Janson took a deep breath and now spoke words he had once merely fantasized he would be able to say.

"Mr. Novak, my name is Paul Janson. You