The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,61

will." Her voice started to quaver.

"You blame me."

"I blame myself."

"No, Marina."

"I let him go, didn't I? If I insisted, he would have stayed. Do you doubt it? But I didn't insist. Because even if he stayed home this time, there'd be another call, and another, and another. And not to go, not ever to go - that, too, would have killed him. Theo was great at what he did. I know that, Paul. It's what made him proudest of himself. How could I take that from him?"

"We make our choices."

"And how could I teach him that he might be great at other things, too? That he was a good person. That he was going to be a great father."

"He was a great friend."

"To you, he was," Marina said. "Were you to him?"

"I don't know."

"He loved you, Paul. That's why he went."

"I understand that," Janson said tonelessly. "I do."

"You meant the world to him."

Janson was silent for a moment. "I am so sorry, Marina."

"You brought us together. And now you've broken us apart, the only way we could ever be broken part." Marina's dark eyes looked at him beseechingly, and a dam within her suddenly broke. Her sobs were animal-like, wild and unrestrained; over the next few minutes, they wracked her like convulsions. There she sat upon a black lacquered chair, surrounded by the small appurtenances of domesticity she and Theo had acquired together: the flat-weave carpet, the blond, newly refinished wooden floor, the small, pleasant house where she and her husband had made a life - had prepared, together, to welcome another life. In different ways, Janson mused, a war-torn island in the Indian Ocean had deprived both him and Theo of fatherhood.

"I didn't want him to go," she said. "I never wanted him to go." Her face was red now, and when she opened her mouth a filament of saliva stretched between her swollen lips. Her anger had provided Marina her only mooring, and when it collapsed, so did she.

"I know, Marina," Janson said, his own eyes moist. Seeing her begin to slump, he wrapped his arms around her, holding her to him in a tight embrace. "Marina." He spoke her name like a whispered supplication. The view out of the room's picture window was incongruously sunny, and the honking of frustrated motorists was almost a balm, the bleating white noise of the urban late afternoon. A sea of commuters rushing home to their families: men, women, sons, daughters - the geometry of domestic life.

When she looked at him next, it was through a lens of tears. "Did he save somebody? Did he rescue someone? Tell me his death wasn't in vain. Tell me he saved a life. Tell me, Paul!"

Janson sat motionless on a wicker-back chair.

"Tell me what happened," Marina said, as if the specifics of the event would provide her a purchase on sanity.

A minute elapsed before he could collect himself and speak, but then he told her what had happened. It was why he had come, after all. He was the only one who knew just how Theo had died. Marina wanted to know, needed to know, and he would tell her. Yet even as he spoke, he became intensely aware of how little the explanation in fact explained. There was so much more that he didn't know. So many questions to which he had no answers. All he knew was that he would find those answers, or die trying.

Hotel Spyrios, located a few blocks from Syntagma Square, was built in the bland international-resort style; elevators were trimmed with resin-coated travertine, doors covered with a mahogany veneer, furnishings designed to sparkle in brochures but afford no unnecessary pleasures.

"Your room will be ready in five minutes," the man at the front desk told him carefully. "You have a seat in the lobby and we'll be right with you. Five minutes, no more."

The five minutes, being metered out in Athenian time, were more like ten, but eventually Janson was given his key card, and he made his way to his ninth-floor hotel room. The ritual was automatic: he inserted the narrow key card in the slot, waited for the green diode to blink, turned the latch knob, and pushed the heavy door inward.

He felt burdened, and not simply by his luggage. His shoulders and upper back ached. The meeting with Marina had been every bit as wrenching as he'd expected. They had bonded, in their sense of loss, but only momentarily: he was its proximate cause, there was