The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,60

a conveyor belt of cars, their pooled exhaust replenishing the low-hanging fug of sulfur dioxide.

He noticed the small "2" in a little window on the meter, and his eyes met those of the driver, a squat man whose chin was darkly shadowed with an incipient beard, the kind that could never quite be shaved away.

"Is there somebody in the trunk?" Janson asked.

"Somebody in the trunk?" the driver repeated, mirthful. He was proud of his English. "Ha! Not when I last checked, mister! How come you ask?"

"Because I don't see anybody else in the backseat. So I was trying to figure out why you have the meter set for a double fare."

"My mistake," the driver said after a beat, his beaming countenance disappearing. Sullenly, he adjusted the meter, which meant not only shifting to a lower rate but wiping out the drachmas he had already accumulated.

Janson shrugged. It was an old trick of Athenian cabdrivers. Its only significance, in this case, was that the driver must have gauged him to be exhausted and inattentive even to have tried out the petty scam.

Athenian traffic meant that the last mile of the trip took longer than the previous five. The streets of the Mets area were built on a steep hillside, and the houses, which dated before the war - and before the city's population had mushroomed - harked to an earlier and pleasanter era. They were mostly the color of sand, with tiled roofs and red-shuttered windows.

Courtyards with potted plants and spiral outdoor staircases sheltered behind them. Katsaris's house was on a narrow street off Voulgareos, just half a dozen blocks from the Olympic Stadium.

Janson sent the driver on his way with 2,500 drachmas, rang the doorbell, and waited, half hoping there would be no answer.

The door opened after only a few moments, and there stood Marina, just as he had remembered her - if anything, she was even more beautiful. Janson took in her high cheekbones, honeyed complexion, steady brown eyes, her straight and silky black hair. The swelling of her belly was barely detectable, another voluptuous curve that was merely hinted at beneath her loose, raw-silk frock.

"Paul!" she exclaimed, delighted. The delight evaporated as she read his expression; the color drained from her face. "No," she said in a low voice.

Janson did not reply, but his haggard countenance held nothing back.

"No," she breathed.

She began to tremble visibly, her face contorted by grief, then rage. He followed her inside, where she turned and struck him on the face. She did so again, lashing out in broad, flailing strokes, as if to beat back a truth that would destroy her world.

The blows hurt, though not as much as the anger and despair that were behind them. Finally, Janson grabbed her wrists. "Marina," he said, his own voice thick with grief. "Please, Marina."

She stared at him as if by force of will she could make him vanish, and with him the devastating news he had brought.

"Marina, I don't have words to say how sorry I am." Cliches came out at such moments, no less true for being so. He squeezed his eyes shut, trawling for words of consolation. "Theo was a hero until the end." The words sounded wooden even as he spoke them, for the sorrow Marina and he shared was indeed beyond words. "There was nobody like him. And the things I saw him do - "

"Mpa! Thee mou." She violently disengaged herself from him, ran to the balcony that overlooked the small courtyard. "Don't you get it? I don't care about those things anymore. I don't care about those field-agent heroics, those games of cowboys and Indians. They mean nothing to me!"

"They didn't always."

"No," she said. "Because once I played the game also ... "

"My God, what you did in the Bosporus - it was extraordinary." The operation had taken place six years ago, shortly before Marina resigned from her country's intelligence services. A cache of armaments en route to the 17 Noemvri group, the November 17 terrorist group, had been seized, those who purveyed it apprehended. "I know intelligence professionals who still marvel at it."

"And only afterward do you get to ask yourself: Did it make any difference, any of it?"

"It saved lives!"

"Did it? One shipment of small arms seized. To be replaced by another, routed elsewhere. I suppose it keeps the prices high, the dealers well paid."

"Theo didn't see it that way." Janson spoke softly.

"Theo never got around to seeing it that way, no. And now he never