The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,47

saved my life once. I'm here to return the favor."
CHAPTER SEVEN
For a few long seconds, the man remained motionless. Then he raised his face and, still crouched, looked straight into the light; Katsaris quickly redirected the beam, so as not to dazzle him.

It was Janson who was dazzled.

A few feet away from him was the countenance that had adorned countless magazines and newspapers. A countenance that was as beloved as the pope's - in this secular age, perhaps even more so. The thick shock of hair, flopping over his forehead, still more black than gray. The high, nearly Asiatic cheekbones. Peter Novak. Winner of last year's Nobel Peace Prize. A humanitarian like none the world had ever known.

The very familiarity of his visage made Novak's condition all the more shocking. The hollows beneath his eyes were dark, almost purple; a once-resolute gaze was now filled with terror. As the man shakily brought himself to his feet, Janson could see the small tremors that convulsed his body. Novak's hands shook; even his dark eyebrows quivered.

Janson was familiar with this look: it was the look of a man who had given up hope. He was familiar with this look because it had once been his. Baaqlina. A dusty town in Lebanon. And captors whom hatred had transformed into something not quite human. He could never forget the anthracite hardness of their eyes, their hearts. Baaqlina. It was destined to be his place of death: he had never been so convinced of anything. In the end, of course, he walked away a free man after the Liberty Foundation intervened. Did money change hands? He never knew. Even after his liberation, though, he spent a long time wondering whether that destiny was truly averted or merely deferred. They were deeply irrational, these thoughts and sensations, and Janson had never confided them to anyone. But perhaps the day would come when he would confide them to Peter Novak. Novak would understand that others had been through what he had been through, and perhaps he would find comfort in that. He owed Novak that much. No, he owed Novak everything. And so did thousands, perhaps millions, of others.

Peter Novak had traveled around the world to resolve bloody conflict. Now somebody had brought bloody conflict to him. Somebody who would pay.

Janson felt a welling up of warmth toward Peter Novak, and equally an intense wrath toward those who had sought to bring him low. Janson lived so much of his life in flight from such feelings; his reputation was as a coolly controlled, even-keeled, emotionally disengaged man - "the Machine," as he'd been nicknamed. His temperament made some people uncomfortable; in others, it inspired an abiding confidence and trust. But Janson knew he was no rock: he was merely skilled at internalizing. He seldom showed fear, because he feared too much. He banked his emotions because they burned too hotly. All the more so after the bombing in Caligo, after the loss of the only thing that had made sense of his life. It was hard to love when you saw how easily love could be taken away. It was hard to trust when you'd learned how easily trust could be broken. Once, decades earlier, there was a man he had admired more than any other; and that man had betrayed him. Not just him - the man had betrayed humanity.

Helene had once told him that he was a searcher. The search is over, he'd told her. I've found you, and he tenderly kissed her forehead, her eyes, her nose, her lips, her neck. But she had meant something else: she had meant that he was in search of meaning, of something or somebody larger than himself. Somebody, he now supposed, like Peter Novak.

Peter Novak: a wreck of a man, by the evidence of his eyes. A wreck of a man who was also a saint of a man. He could have been a brilliant economist, and some of his theoretical papers had become widely cited. He could have been the Midas of the twenty-first century, a pampered playboy, a reincarnation of the Shah Jahan, the Mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal. But his sole interest was in leaving the world a better place than he had found it. And certainly a better place than had found him, born as he was on the killing fields of the Second World War.

"We've come for you," Janson told him.

Taking a tentative step away from the stone wall, Peter