The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,49

And then the man, who was no man at all.

It was a boy. If Janson had had to guess, he would have said that the boy was eight years old. Large eyes, mocha skin, short black hair. He was shirtless and wore blue madras shorts. His sneakers looked too large for his slender calves and gave him a puppyish look. The boy's eyes were trained on the next step: he had been entrusted with an important responsibility, and he was going to be as careful as possible about his footing. Nothing would be dropped. Nothing would be spilled.

He was two-thirds of the way down the stairs when he pulled up short. Probably the smell had alerted him that something was out of the ordinary - either that or the silence.

The boy now turned and regarded the carnage - the guards sprawled in pooled, congealing blood - and Janson could hear him gasp. Involuntarily, the little boy dropped the tray. His precious tray. The tray that the guards were to have received with such gratitude and merriment. As it rolled like a hoop, down the stairs, the cups smashed on the steps below him, and the teapot splashed its steaming contents at the boy's feet. Janson watched it all happen in slow motion.

Everything would be dropped. Everything would be spilled. Including blood.

Janson knew precisely what he must do. Left to his own devices, the boy would flee and alert the others. What had to be done was regrettable but inarguable. There was no other choice. In one fluid movement, he leveled the silenced HK at the boy.

A boy who returned his gaze with large, frightened eyes.

A slack-jawed eight-year-old. An innocent, given no choice as to his decisions in life.

Not a combatant. Not a conspirator. Not a rebel. Not involved.

A boy. Armed with - what? - a hot jug of mint tea?

No matter. The field manuals had a name for persons like him: engaged noncombatants. Janson knew what he had to do.

But his hand did not. It refused to follow his command. His finger would not squeeze the trigger.

Janson stood stock-still, frozen as he had never been in his life, even as turbulence overtook his mind. His disgust for the casualties of "standard tactical protocol" became absolute, and now paralyzing.

The boy turned from him and scampered up the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time - back up the stairs, back to safety.

Yet his safety was their doom! Recriminations flooded Janson like lava: his two seconds of sentimentality had fatally compromised the mission.

The boy would sound the alarm. By allowing him to live, Janson had signed a death warrant for Peter Novak. For Theo Katsaris. For himself. And quite possibly for the other participants in the mission.

He had made an insupportable, inexcusable, indefensible mistake. He was now, in effect, a murderer, and of far more than one child. His stricken eyes ran from Novak to Katsaris. A man he admired more than any he'd known; another he loved like a son. The mission was over. Sabotaged by an errant force he could never have anticipated: himself.

Now he saw Katsaris streak by, saw Katsaris's footprints in the blood; the man had taken the shortest route to the stairwell, vaulting over corpses and chairs. The boy had to have been within an arm's length of the door to the hallway when Katsaris squeezed off a silenced shot to the heart. Even after the muzzle flashed, Katsaris remained in full precision-firing position: a steadying hand to his firing hand, the stance of somebody who could not afford to miss. The stance of a soldier firing at a person who could not return fire, but whose continued survival was itself a dire menace.

Janson's vision blurred briefly, then focused again, and when it did he saw the child's lifeless body tumble down the stone stairs, almost somersaulting.

And then it lay on the bottom step, like a rag doll carelessly tossed aside.

When Janson moved a few feet closer, he saw that the boy's head lay upon the metal tray he once carried so proudly. A saliva bubble had formed at his soft, childish lips.

Janson's heart pounded slowly, powerfully. He was sickened, at himself and what he had nearly allowed to happen, and at the same time sickened by what needed to have happened. By the waste of it all, the prodigality with the one thing that mattered on this earth, human life. The Derek Collinses of the world would never understand. He remembered why he retired. Decisions