The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,99

dragged him over to the driver's seat.

Callahan felt like a rag doll. Limp and helpless. But he could see. He could think. He knew why the rear widows had been left just slightly open.

Now the cop who was no cop turned off the engine and wriggled through the open window, shooting toward the surface.

Neither he nor Hildreth would have any such options - Callahan because he was paralyzed, and Hildreth because he was locked in the passenger's compartment. The windows would be frozen in place: lowered just enough to speed the inflow of water. Hildreth's ultrasecure conveyance had turned into a crypt.

The car was settling to the riverbed with its front end raised, probably because water had already filled the rear compartment, and now the water was pouring through the window and a dozen unseen vents to fill Callahan's compartment. It was rising fast, to his chest, his neck, his chin. Higher.

He was breathing through his nose, now, but for how many seconds longer?

And then all his questions dissolved into another question: Who would want to do something like this?

The water seeped into his nose and into his mouth, and dribbled into his lungs, and blossoming within him was a powerful sensation, perhaps the most powerful sensation the human body can know, that of asphyxiation. He was drowning. He could not get air. He thought of his uncle Jimmy, dying of emphysema, sitting in a chair with oxygen flowing into his nostrils through those clear plastic nasal prongs, the tank of O2 accompanying him everywhere, the way his yellow Labrador once did. He fantasized kicking free with powerful thrusts, kicking himself to the river's surface. Then he tried to imagine himself breathing good clean air, imagined jogging around the cinder track at his high school in West Lafayette, Indiana, though when he did, he found he was only inhaling water faster. Air spilled from his nose and mouth in a pulsing current of bubbles.

And the agony of breathlessness only increased.

The pressure on his eardrums - he was deep, deep - became excruciating, adding a foundation to the horrible sense of suffocation. It meant something, though. It meant he was not yet dead. Death was not painful. What he was feeling was life's final blow, its farewell pangs, its desperate struggle not to leave.

He wanted to thrash, to flail, to lash out. In his mind, his hands began to churn the water: but only in his mind. His extremities twitched feebly, that was all.

He recalled what the man had said, and some things became all too obvious. Guard your passenger with your life: a nonissue now. When the car was dredged out, they would both be dead. Both drowned. One driver, stunned by the impact, drowned in his seat. One passenger the victim of security precautions. The only question would be why Callahan had driven over the bridge.

But it was wet, the pavement was slippery, and Callahan was given to pushing the speed limit, wasn't he?

Oh, they'd blame the peon, all right.

So this was how it was to end. He thought of everything that had gone wrong with life. He thought about the athletic scholarship to State he didn't get, because he was off his game the day the scout showed up to check out what West Lafayette High School had to offer. And then with his frickin' knee injury, the coach wouldn't give him any playing time in the regional and state championship games. He thought about the apartment he and Irene were going to buy, until it turned out they couldn't scrape together the money they needed for the down payment, and his dad refused to help, steamed that they'd been counting on his chipping in without having consulted him, so they lost the earnest money, too, a loss they could hardly afford. He remembered how Irene left him soon after, and he could hardly blame her, though he sure did his best to. He remembered the jobs he'd applied for, the string of searing rejections. Nopromotion material, that was what he'd been labeled, and try as he might, the label would never come off. Like the gummy backing of a bumper sticker you'd tried to scrub away, it was somehow just there. People took one look at him and they could see it.

Now Callahan lacked even the strength to sustain the fantasy of being elsewhere. He was ... where he was.

He was cold, and wet, and breathless, and terrified, and consciousness itself was beginning to darken, to flicker,