The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,59

blundered into quicksand. We couldn't help him if we wanted to."

"It'll go easier if he doesn't struggle," the DIA analyst said.

"No argument here," said Derek Collins. "But he will, if I know my man. Mightily."

"Then extreme measures are going to have to be taken," the analyst said. "If the program gets burned, if even one percent of it gets exposed, it doesn't just destroy us, it destroys everything anybody here cares about. Everything. The past twenty years of history gets rolled back, and that's a pie-in-the-sky, win-the-lottery, best-case scenario. The likelier outcome looks a hell of a lot more like another world war. Only this time, we lose."

"Poor bastard," said the deputy director of the NSA, paging through the Janson files. "He's in way over his head."

The undersecretary of state suppressed a shudder. "The hell of it is," he replied grimly, "so are we."

Athens

The Greeks had a word for it: nefos. Smog - Western civilization's gift to its cradle. Trapped by the circle of mountains, set low by atmospheric inversion, it acidified the air, speeding decay of the antiquities and irritating the eyes and lungs of the city's four million inhabitants. On bad days, it lay on Athens like a noxious pall. This was a bad day.

Janson had taken a direct flight from Bombay to Athens, arriving at the East Terminal of the Ellinikon International Airport. He felt a deadness within; he was a besuited zombie going about his business. You were the guy with a slab of granite where your heart's supposed to be. If only it were so.

He had called Marta Lang repeatedly, to no avail. It was maddening. The number she had given him would reach her wherever she was, she had told him: it would go directly to her desk, on her private line, and if she did not pick up after three rings, it would bounce to her cell number. It was a number only three people had, she had stressed. And yet all it ever yielded was the electronic purr of an unanswered line. He had dialed various regional headquarters of the Liberty Foundation, in New York, Amsterdam, Bucharest. Ms. Lang is unavailable, subalterns with talcum-smooth voices informed him. Janson was insistent. It was an emergency. He was returning her call. He was a personal friend. It was a matter of the utmost importance. It concerned Peter Novak himself. He had tried every approach, every tactic of importuning, and made no headway.

A message will be conveyed, he was told each time, in an artfully passive construction that never varied. But they could not convey the real message, the words of a dreadful and destructive truth. For what could Janson tell them? That Peter Novak was dead? Those he spoke to at the Foundation gave no indication that they were aware of it, and Janson knew better than to provide the information.

Walking through the East Terminal, he heard, funneled through the airport sound system, the ubiquitous America pop diva with her ubiquitous hit song from the ubiquitous American blockbuster. That was what it was to be an international traveler these days: it was to be cushioned in sameness, enveloped in a cultural caul.

A message will be conveyed.

It was infuriating! Where was she? Had she been killed, too? Or - the possibility slashed at him like a straight razor across the eyes - was she herself part of a dire, unfathomable plot? Had Novak been killed by a member or members of his own organization? He could not automatically dismiss the hypothesis, even though it carried a horrific implication: that he himself had been a pawn in the conspiracy. That rather than having saved the man who once saved him, he had served as the very instrument of his destruction. Yet that was insanity! It made no sense - none of it did. Why kill a man with a death sentence?

Janson settled into the airport taxi that would bear him to the Mets neighborhood of Athens, to the southwest of the Olympic Stadium. The task before him would be a difficult one. He had to tell Marina Katsaris what had happened, had to tell her face-to-face, and the prospect lay on him like a boulder on his chest.

The airport was six miles from his destination in downtown Athens; seated uncomfortably in a backseat without room for his long legs, Janson wearily glanced around him. The highway that led from the suburb of Glyfada, where Ellinikon was situated, to the hilly sprawl that was Athens was like