The Jason Directive

by Robert Ludlum

  The spill of their flashlights illuminated each side of the old woman’s home; in the light, he could also see their carbines. They would fire at their quarry at the first opportunity. Janson was, at the moment, an easy target indeed—and it would not take them long before their beams sliced toward the hayloft roof and silhouetted him with the clarity of a shooting-range cutout.

  Janson lowered himself from the roof with as much speed and stealth as he could manage. Then he let himself down from the loft to the dirt floor. If the men had not rushed the place, it was only because they did not know whether he was armed. They would bide their time, proceed with caution, ensure his death without allowing him to take one of them with him.

  Now he darted across the courtyard and back into the woman’s parlor. The flickering light from the fireplace cast a ghostly glow on the carnage. Yet he had no choice but to return there. The old woman had a shotgun, hadn’t she?

  The shotgun was gone. Of course it was. It was not the sort of thing that would have escaped their notice, and disarming an octogenarian would have been easy. Yet if the woman kept a shotgun, she must also have a supply of cartridges stowed away somewhere.

  A roving beam of yellow light flashed through the windows into the woman’s parlor, looking for signs of movement—for signs of him. Janson promptly eased himself to the floor. They wanted to locate him, to narrow his mobility progressively. Once they knew for sure which building he was in, they could force the gate of the courtyard and surround the particular structure into which he had retreated. Their uncertainty was his only ally.

  Janson crawled toward the kitchen, keeping well out of sight. The shotgun cartridges—where would the old woman have kept them? By themselves, they would be useless as offensive weapons against his pursuers. But there might just be another way of using them. He was alive so far only because of their uncertainty about his precise location, but he had to do better than that. He would win only if he could turn uncertainty into error.

  He tried several drawers in the woman’s kitchen, finding cutlery in one, bottles of condiments and spices in another. It was in a small pantry, next to the kitchen, that he finally found what he was looking for, and in even more plentiful supply than he had hoped. Ten boxes of Biro Super 10-gauge cartridges, twenty to the box. He pulled out a couple of boxes and crawled back to the parlor.

  He heard shouts from outside, in a language he could not make out. But there was no missing the larger meaning: more men were arriving to take up perimeter positions.

  In the iron pan over the fireplace, where the woman had been roasting chestnuts earlier that day, Janson placed a handful of the long cartridges, the cupped brass on either end connected by a ridged brown plastic tube. Within them was lead shot and gunpowder, and though they were designed to be detonated by the firing pin of a shotgun, sufficient heat would produce a similar effect.

  The fire was slow, dying, and the pan was a couple of feet above it. Could he depend upon it?

  Janson added another small log to the fire, and returned to the kitchen. There he placed a cast-iron skillet on the decades-old electric range, and scattered another handful of cartridges on it. He set the heat on medium low. It would take a minute for the element just to heat the bottom of the heavy skillet.

  Now he turned on the oven, and placed the remaining fifty cartridges on the rack, a foot below the top heating element, and set the temperature on high. The oven would surely take the longest to heat of all. He knew that his calculations were crude, at best. He also knew he had no better alternatives.

  He crept across the courtyard, past the stables, and climbed the rungs to the hayloft again.

  And he waited.

  For a while, all he heard was the voices of the men as they grew nearer and nearer, taking positions safely away from windows, communicating to one another with terse commands and flickers of their flashlights. Suddenly, a bang shattered the still air, followed, in rapid succession, with four more bangs. Then he heard the return fire of an automatic rifle, and the sound of broken glass. The old warped frames of the front window had to be a scatter of shards and dust now.

  To Janson, the acoustic sequence relayed a precise narrative. The cartridges over the fireplace had detonated first, as he had hoped. The gunmen made the logical assumption. Gun blasts from within the parlor indicated that they were being fired upon. They had what they needed: an exact location.

  Exactly the wrong location.

  Urgent shouts summoned the other men to join the apparent gunfight in the front of the farmhouse.

  A series of low-pitched blasts told Janson that the cartridges on the rangetop skillet had been heated to the point of detonation. It would tell the gunmen that their quarry had retreated into the kitchen. Through the gap between the slats of the barn wall, he saw that a solitary gunman with a cradled automatic weapon remained behind; his partners had raced to the other side of the compound to join the others in their assault.

  Janson withdrew his small Beretta and, through the same gap, aimed it at the burly, olive-clad man. Yet he could not fire yet—could not risk the gunshot being heard by others and exposing the subterfuge. He heard the footfalls of heavy boots drifting in from the main house: the other gunmen were splintering the house with their gunfire as they tried to discover Janson’s hiding place. Janson waited until he heard the immense boomroar of fifty shotgun cartridges exploding in the oven before he squeezed the trigger. The sound would be utterly lost amid the blast and the attendant confusion.

  He fired at the exact instant.

  Slowly, the burly man toppled over, face forward. His body made little sound as it hit the leafy ground cover.

  The position was now unguarded: Janson unlatched a door and strode over to the fallen man, knowing that he would not be seen. For a moment, he contemplated disappearing into the dark thickets of the hillside; he could do so, had disappeared into similar terrains on other occasions. He was confident he could elude his pursuers and emerge safe, a day or two later, in one of the other hillside villages.

  Then he remembered the slain woman, her savagely brutalized body, and any thought of flight vanished from his mind. His heart beat hard, and even the shadows of the evening seemed to be glimpsed through a curtain of red. He saw that his bullet had struck the gunman just above his hairline; only a rivulet of blood that made its way down his scalp to the top of his forehead revealed its lethal impact. He removed the dead man’s submachine gun and bandolier, and adjusted its sling around his own shoulders.

  There was no time to lose.

  The team of assailants was now gathered in the house, tramping around heavily, firing their weapons. He knew that their bullets were flying into armoires and closets and every other conceivable hiding place, steel-jacketed projectiles splintering into wood, seeking human flesh.

  But they were the trapped ones now.

  Quietly, he circled around to the front of the farmhouse, dragging the dead man behind him. In the roving beams of light, he recognized a face, a second face, a third. His blood ran cold. They were hard faces. Cruel faces. The faces of men he had worked with many years ago in Consular Operations, and whom he had disliked even then. They were coarse men—coarse not in their manners, but in their sensitivities. Men for whom brute force was not a last resort, but a first, for whom cynicism was the product not of a disappointed idealism, but of naked avarice and rapacity. They had no business in government service; in Janson’s opinion, they reduced its moral credibility by their very presence. The technical skill they brought to their work was offset by a lack of any real conscience, a failure to grasp the legitimate objectives that underwrote sometimes questionable tactics.

  He placed his jacket on the dead man, then positioned him behind the sprawling chestnut tree; with the man’s shoelaces, he tied his flashlight to the lifeless forearm. He pulled tiny splinters of wood from a dead branch and placed them between the man’s eyelids, propping his eyes open in a glassy stare. It was crude work, turning the man into an effigy
of himself. But in the shadows of the evening, it would pass on a first glance, which was all Janson needed. Now Janson directed a raking burst of fire through the parlor’s already shattered windows. The three exposed gunmen twitched horribly as the bullets perforated diaphragm, gut, aorta, lungs. At the same time, the unexpected burst summoned the others.

  Janson rolled over to the scraggly chestnut tree, switched on the flashlight laced to the dead man’s forearm, and silently dashed to the boulder ten feet away, where he waited in the gloom.

  “There!” one of them called out. It took seconds for the effigy to attract their attention. All they would be able to see was the glare of the flashlight; the spill would illuminate the taupe-colored jacket and, perhaps just faintly, the staring eyes of the crouching man. The inference would be nearly instantaneous: here was the source of the lethal fusillade.

  The response was as he expected: four of the commandos directed their automatic weapons at the crouching figure. The simultaneous chattering of their high-powered weapons, set at full fire, was nearly deafening: the men pumped hundreds of bullets into their former comrade.

  The noise and the gunmen’s furious concentration worked to Janson’s advantage: with his small Beretta Tomcat, he squeezed off four carefully aimed shots in rapid succession. The distance was only ten yards; his accuracy was flawless. Each man slumped, lifeless, to the ground, his automatic weapon abruptly falling silent.

  One man remained; Janson could see his profile shadowed against the curtains on the top floor. He was tall, his hair cut short but still curly, his bearing rigid. His was one of the faces Janson had recognized, and he could identify him now simply from his gait, the stiff, decisive efficiency of his movements. He was a leader. He was their leader, their commanding officer. From what little Janson had seen of their interactions earlier, that much, at least, had been clear.

  The name came to him: Simon Czerny. A Cons Op operative specializing in clandestine assaults. Their paths had crossed more than once in El Salvador, during the mid-eighties, and Janson had even then considered him a dangerous man, reckless in his disregard for civilian life.

  Janson would not kill him, though. Not until they had had a conversation.

  Yet would the man allow himself to be put in that position? He was smarter than the others. He had seen through Janson’s subterfuge a little quicker than the others, had been the first to recognize the decoy for what it was and called warningly to his men. His tactical instincts were finely honed. A man like that would not expose himself to danger unnecessarily, but would bide his time until an opportunity presented itself.

  Janson could not permit him that luxury.

  Now the team commander was invisible; out of range of gunfire. Janson ran toward the ruins of the parlor, saw the shattered glass everywhere, saw the splashes of soot around the fireplace mantel from the exploded shotgun cartridges, saw the steel pellets, the ruined glass-front cabinet.

  Finally, he saw the gallon-sized jug of brandy, the poisonous pálinka. A hairline crack now ran down the side, no doubt from the pinging of a stray steel pellet, but it had not yet shattered. Janson knew what he had to do. Frisking one of the slain gunmen, he extracted a Zippo lighter. Then he splashed the 190-proof brandy around the room, extending to the hallway that led to the kitchen, and used the lighter to ignite the volatile spirits. Within seconds, a blue fire trail erupted across the room; soon the blue flames were joined by yellow flames as curtains, newspapers, and the canework of the chairs caught on. Before long, the heavier furniture would be flaming, and with it the planking of the floor, the ceiling, the floor above.

  Janson waited as the flames grew in strength; leaping and joining one another in a rising sea of blue and yellow. Billows of smoke funneled up the narrow staircase.

  The commander, Simon Czerny, would have to make a choice—only, he had no real choice. To remain where he was meant being consumed in an inferno. Nor could he escape the back way, into the courtyard, without exposing himself to a wall of flames: Janson had made sure of that. The only way out was down the stairs and through the front door.

  Still, Czerny was a consummate professional; he would expect Janson to be waiting for him outside. He would take precautions.

  Janson heard the man’s heavy footsteps, even sooner than he had expected. Just as he reached the threshold, though, Czerny loosed a spray of bullets, sweeping around an almost 180-degree range. Anybody lying in wait for him outside would have been struck by the wildly chattering submachine gun. Janson admired Czerny’s efficiency and forethought as he watched the gunman’s pivoting torso—from behind.

  Now he rose up from where he was hidden, by the staircase on the very floor of the burning parlor, perilously near the gathering conflagration—the one place the gunman would not have expected.

  As Czerny directed another raking fusillade at the grounds outside, Janson lunged, lashing his arm around the gunman’s neck, his fingers hurtling toward the trigger enclosure, tearing the weapon from his hands. Czerny thrashed violently, but rage made Janson unstoppable. He smashed his right knee into Czerny’s kidney and dragged him onto the stone porch. Now he scissored the man’s waist with his legs and forced his neck into a painful backward arch.

  “You and I are going to spend some quality time together,” Janson said, his lips close to Czerny’s ear.

  With an almost supernal effort, Czerny reared up and threw Janson off him. He ran down the yard, away from the burning house. Janson raced after him, taking him down with a powerful shoulder tackle, throwing him to the stony ground. Czerny let out a groan as Janson sharply wrenched one of his arms upward behind him, simultaneously dislocating the arm and turning him over onto his back. Tightening his grip on the man’s neck, he leaned in close.

  “Now, where was I? That’s right: if you don’t tell me what I want to hear, you’ll never speak again.” Janson yanked a combat blade from a holster in Czerny’s belt. “I will peel the skin off your face until your own mother wouldn’t recognize you. Now come clean—you still with Consular Operations?”

  Czerny laughed bitterly. “Goddamn overgrown Eagle Scouts—that’s all they were. Should have been selling cookies door-to-door, for all the difference they made, any of them.”

  “But you’re making a difference now?”

  “Tell me something. How the fuck do you live with yourself? You’re a piece of shit and you always were. I’m talking way back. The shit you pulled—you goddamn traitor. Somebody once tried to help you, a trueblue hero, and how did you repay him? You gave him up, turned him in, pushed him in front of a firing squad. That should have been you at Mesa Grande, you son of a bitch—that should have been you!”

  “You twisted bastard,” Janson roared, sickened and dizzy. He pressed the flat of the man’s knife against his lightly bearded cheek. The threat would not be abstract. “You part of some Da Nang revenge squad?”

  “You gotta be joking.”

  “Who are you working for?” Janson demanded. “Goddammit! Who are you working for!”

  “Who are you working for?” the man coughed. “You don’t even know. You’ve been programmed like a goddamn laptop.”

  “Time to face the music,” Janson said in a low, steely voice. “Or you won’t have a face.”

  “They’ve messed with your head so bad, you don’t know which end is up, Janson. And you never will.”

  “Freeze!” The abruptly shouted command came from above him; Janson looked and saw the big-bellied tavernkeeper they had spoken to earlier that day.

  He was no longer wearing his white apron. And his large, reddened hands were clutching a doublebarreled shotgun.

  “Isn’t that what they’re always saying on your crappy American cop shows? I told you that you were not welcome,” the beetle-browed man said. “Now I will have to show you how unwelcome you are.”

  Janson heard the noise of a runner, vaulting over boulders and branches, plunging through thickets. But even from a distance, he could identify the lithe, leaping fi
gure. Seconds later, Jessie Kincaid emerged, her sniper rifle strapped to her back.

  “Drop the goddamn antique!” she shouted. She held a pistol in her hand.

  The Hungarian did not even look in her direction as he carefully cocked the Second World War–era shotgun.

  Jessie squeezed one well-aimed shot into his head. The big-bellied man toppled backward like a felled tree.

  Now Janson grabbed the shotgun and scrambled to his feet. “I’ve run out of patience, Czerny. And you’ve run out of allies.”

  “I don’t understand,” Czerny blurted.

  Kincaid shook her head. “Drilled four fuckers up the hill.” She hocked on the ground near Czerny. “Your boys, right? Thought so. Didn’t like their attitude.”

  Fear flashed in Czerny’s eyes.

  “And get a load of that barkeep showing up. You’d have thought we stiffed him on the tab.”

  “Nice shooting,” Janson said, tossing her the shotgun.

  Jessie shrugged. “I never liked him.”

  “Eagle Scout,” Czerny said. “Collecting your merit badges while the world burns.”

  “I’ll ask you one more time: Who are you working for?” Janson demanded.

  “The same person you are.”

  “Don’t talk in riddles.”

  “Everybody works for him now. It’s just that only some of us know it.” He laughed, a dry, unpleasant laugh. “You think you’ve got the upper hand. You don’t.”

  “Try me,” Janson said. He placed his boot on Czerny’s neck, not yet applying any pressure, but making it clear that he could crush him at any moment.

  “You fool! He’s got the whole U.S. government under his thumb. He’s calling the shots now! You’re just too ignorant to see it.”