experienced or out of practice, or both. This was reserve-caliber work. He took the measure of the man before him: the weathered face, the soft hands. He knew the type - a marine who'd been on desk duty too long, summoned with little notice, an auxiliary reassigned to meet an unexpected need.
"Why were you following me?" Janson asked.
"I don't know," the man said, wide-eyed. He looked to be in his early thirties.
"Why?"
"They said to. They didn't say why. The instructions were to watch, not interfere."
"Who's they?"
"Like you don't know."
"Security chief at the consulate," Janson said, sizing up his prisoner. "You're part of the marine detail."
The man nodded.
"How many of you?"
"Just me."
"Now you're pissing me off." With stiffened fingers, Janson jabbed at the man's hypoglossal nerve, just inside the lower edge of his jaw: he knew the pain would be breathtaking, and he simultaneously clamped a hand over the man's mouth. "How many?" he demanded. After a moment, he removed his hand, permitting the man to speak.
"Six," the watcher gasped, rigid with pain and fear.
Janson would have interrogated the man further if there were more time; but if his locator unit did not indicate motion, others would soon arrive to find out why. Besides, he suspected that the man had no more information to offer. The marine had been assigned to his division's counterterrorism section. He would have been suited up with little notice and less explanation. That was the usual way with consular emergencies.
What had Nikos Andros told them?
Tearing strips from the man's Oxford-cloth shirt, Janson bound his wrists and ankles, and fashioned a makeshift gag. He took the transponder bracelet with him.
He was familiar with the transponder protocol; they were used to supplement the Arrex communicators, which were notoriously unreliable, especially in urban terrain. What's more, spoken communication was not always feasible or appropriate. The transponders allowed the team leader to keep track of those in the shift: each appeared as a pulsing dot on an LCD screen. If one person hived off in pursuit of the subject, the others would be able to follow, with or without verbal instructions.
Now Janson put on the man's yellow windbreaker and gray cap and made his way out the department store's side entrance at a trot.
The watcher had been approximately his height and build; from a distance, Janson would be indistinguishable from him.
But he would have to keep his distance. Now he ran down Eolou to Praxitelous, and then Lekka, knowing that his movements would be showing up as a pulsing dot.
What had Andros told them?
And what could explain the money in the Cayman Islands account? Had someone set him up? It was a very expensive method, if so. Who could even put their hands on that kind of money? No government agency could. Yet it would not be out of reach for a senior officer of the Liberty Foundation. The ancient question presented itself: Cui bono? Who benefits?
Now that Novak was out of the way, who at the Liberty Foundation would gain? Was Novak killed because he was about to discover some sort of immense malfeasance within his own organization, some malfeasance that had previously eluded his and Marta Lang's notice?
A small, fleet feral cat bounded down the sidewalk: Janson was again nearing Athens's feline capital, the National Gardens. Now he raced to catch up with the cat.
A few bystanders looked at him oddly.
"Greta!" he cried, scooping up the gray cat and nuzzling it. "You've lost your collar!"
He snapped the plastic-housed positional transponder around the animal's neck. It was a snug but not uncomfortable fit. When he approached the gardens, he freed the furiously squirming animal, which bounded into the thickets, in search of field mice. Then Janson stepped into the brown wooden cabin where the park's rest rooms were housed, and shoved the cap and yellow windbreaker in a black steel waste canister.
Within minutes, he was on the no. 1 trolley, no surveillance in evidence. The team members would soon be converging on the feline-infested center of the gardens. If he knew the Athens sector, their real ingenuity would go into face-saving reports later.
Athens sector. He'd spent more time there in the late seventies than he cared to think about. Now he racked his mind to try to remember someone he might know who could explain what was going on - explain it from the inside. Plenty of people owed him favors; it was time to collect.
The face came to him a moment before the name: a middle-aged desk jockey