The Jason Directive

by Robert Ludlum

  “Oh, we were. In many ways, we still are. Don’t think I didn’t keep tabs on what you got up to in later years. They called you ‘the machine.’ You know what that was short for, of course: ‘the killing machine.’ Because that’s what you were. Oh yes. And you presumed to judge me? Oh, Paul, don’t you know why you took it on yourself to destroy me? Are you that devoid of selfinsight? How comforting it must be to tell yourself that I’m the monster and you’re the saint. You’re afraid of what I showed you.”

  “Yes—a profoundly disturbed individual.”

  “Don’t delude yourself, Paul. I’m talking about what I showed you about yourself. Whatever I was, you were.”

  “No!” Janson flushed with rage and horror. Violence was indeed something he excelled at: he could no longer run from that truth. But for him it was never an end in itself: rather, violence was a last resort to minimize further violence.

  “As I used to tell you, we know more than we know. Have you forgotten what you yourself did in Vietnam? Have you magically repressed the memories?”

  “You don’t fool me with your goddamn mind games,” Janson growled.

  “I read the depositions you filed about me,” Demarest continued airily. “Somehow they neglected to mention what you’d got up to.”

  “So you’re the one who’s been spreading that bilge about me—those twisted stories.”

  Demarest’s gaze was steady. “Your victims are still out there, some of them still crippled but still alive. Send an agent out there to interview them. They remember you. They remember with horror.”

  “It’s a lie! It’s a goddamn lie!”

  “Are you sure?” Demarest’s question was an electric probe. “No, you’re not sure. You’re not sure at all.” A beat. “It’s as if part of you never left, because you’re haunted by memories, aren’t you? Recurrent nightmares, right?”

  Janson nodded; he could not stop himself.

  “All these decades later and your sleep is still troubled. Yet what makes those memories so adhesive?”

  “What do you care?”

  “Could it be guilt? Reach down, Paul—reach down inside you and bring it up, bring it back to the surface.”

  “Shut up, you bastard.”

  “What do your memories leave out, Paul?”

  “Stop it!” Janson yelled, and yet there was a tremor in his voice. “I’m not going to listen to this.”

  Demarest repeated the question more quietly. “What do your memories leave out?”

  The images came to him now in frozen moments of time, not with the fluidity of remembered movement but one frame after another. They had a ghostly surreality that was superimposed over what he saw in front of his face.

  Humping another mile. And another. And another. Knifing through the jungle, taking care to avoid the hamlets and villages where VC sympathizers might make all his struggles for naught.

  And forcing himself through an especially dense intertwining of vines and trees one morning, where he happened upon a vast oval of burn.

  The smells told him what had happened—not so much the mingled smells of fish sauce, cooking fires, the fertilizing excrement of humans and water buffalo and chickens as something that overpowered even those smells: the tangy petrochemical odor of napalm.

  The air was heavy with it. And everywhere was ash, and soot, and the lumpy remains of a fast-burning chemical fire. He trudged through the burned-out oval and his feet became black with charcoal. It was as if God had held a giant magnifying glass over this spot and burned it with the sun’s own rays. And when he adjusted to the napalm fumes, another smell caught his nostrils, that of charred human flesh. When it cooled, it would be food for birds and vermin and insects. It had not yet cooled.

  From the caved-in, blackened wrecks, he could see that there had once been twelve thatch-covered houses in a clearing here. And just outside the hamlet, miraculously untouched by the flames, was a cooking shack framed with coconut leaves, and a meal that had been freshly prepared, no more than thirty minutes earlier. A heap of rice. A stew of prawns and glass noodles. Bananas that had been sliced, fried, and curried. A bowl of peeled litchi and durian fruit. Not an ordinary meal. After a few moments, he recognized what this was.

  A wedding feast.

  A few yards away, the bodies of the newlyweds lay smoldering, along with their families. Yet, by some fluke, the peasant banquet had been saved from destruction. Now he put aside his AK-47 and ate greedily, shoveling rice and prawns into his mouth with his hands, drinking from a warm cauldron of water that had once awaited another sack of rice. He ate and was sick and ate more, and then he rested, lying heavily on the ground. How odd that was—so little remained of him, and yet it could seem so heavy!

  When some of his strength had been replenished, he pushed on through uninhabited jungle, pushed on, pushed on. One foot in front of the other.

  That was what would save him: movement without thought, action without reflection.

  And when he had his next conscious thought, it, too, came with the wind. The sea!

  He could smell the sea!

  Over the next ridgeline was the coast. And thus freedom. For U.S. Navy gunboats patrolled this very segment of the shoreline, patrolled it closely: he knew this. And along the coast, somewhere not far from his latitude, a small U.S. navy base had been established: he knew this, too. When he made his way to the shore, he would be free, welcomed by his Navy brethren, taken away, taken home, taking to a place of healing.

  Free!

  I think so, Phan Nguyen, I think so.

  Was he hallucinating? It had been a long time, too long a time, since he had been able to find any water to drink. His vision was often odd and unstable, a common symptom of niacin deficiency. His malnutrition surely had brought other cognitive impairments as well. But he inhaled deeply, filled his lungs with the air, and he knew that there was salt in it, the scent of seaweed and sun; he knew it. Liberation lay just over the ridgeline.

  We will never meet again, Phan Nguyen.

  He trudged up a gentle slope, the ground thinning out now, the vegetation growing less dense, and then he startled.

  A darting figure, not far from him. An animal? An assailant? His vision was failing him. His senses: they all were failing him, and at a time when they must not. So close—he was so close.

  His gaunt fingers fell, spiderlike, to the trigger enclosure of the submachine gun. To be undone by his enemies when he was so near home—that would be a hell beyond imagining, beyond any he had endured.

  Another darting movement. He squeezed off a triple burst of gunfire. Three bullets. The noise and the bucking of the weapon in his arms felt greater than they ever had. He rushed over to see what had been hit.

  Nothing. He could see nothing. He leaned against a gnarled mangosteen tree and craned around, and there was nothing. Then he looked down, and he realized what he had done.

  A shirtless boy. Simple brown pants, and tiny sandals on his feet. In his hand was a bottle of Coca-Cola, its foamy contents now seeping to the ground.

  He was, perhaps, seven years old. His crime was—what? Playing hide-and-seek? Gamboling with a butterfly?

  The boy lay on the ground. A beautiful child, the most beautiful child Janson had ever seen. He appeared oddly peaceful, except for the jagged crimson across his chest, three tightly clustered holes from which his lifeblood pulsed.

  He looked up at the gaunt American, his soft brown eyes unblinking.

  And he smiled.

  The boy smiled.

  The images flooded Janson now, flooded him for the first time, because these were the images his mind was to banish—banish utterly—the day that followed, and then all the days that followed. Even unremembered, they had pushed at him, weighed on him, at times immobilized him. He thought of the little boy on the basement stairs in the Stone Palace, of his own hand frozen at the trigger, and he grasped the power of the unremembered.

  Yet he remembered now.

  He remembered how he san
k to the ground and cradled the child in his lap, an embrace between the dead and the almost dead, victim and victimizer.

  What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness ? and what communion hath light with darkness?

  And he did what he had never done in country. He wept.

  The memories that followed were beyond proper retrieval: The child’s parents soon came, having been summoned by the gunfire. He could see their stricken faces, yes—sorrowing, with a sorrow that voided even rage. They took their boy from him, the man and the woman, and the man was keening, keening … and the mother shook her head, shook her head violently, as if to dislodge the reality it contained, and holding the lifeless body of her child in her arms, she turned to the gaunt soldier, as if there were any words she could utter that would make a difference.

  But all she said was, You Americans.

  Now the faces, all of them, dissolved, and Janson was left with the hard-eyed gaze of Alan Demarest.

  Demarest had been talking, was talking now. “The past is another country. A country you never fully left.”

  It was true.

  “You could never get me out of your head, could you?” Demarest continued.

  “No,” Janson said, his voice a broken whisper.

  “Why would that be? Because the bond between us was real. It was powerful. ‘Opposition is true friendship, ’ William Blake tells us. Oh, Paul—what a history we shared. Did it haunt you? It haunted me.”

  Janson did not reply.

  “One day, the United States government handed me the keys to the kingdom, allowed me to create an empire such as the world had never seen. Of course I would make it mine. But however big your coffers are, it’s not always easy to settle your accounts. I just needed you to acknowledge the truth about us two. I made you, Paul. I molded you from clay, the way God made man.”

  “No.” The word came like a groan from deep within him.

  Another step closer. “It’s time to be truthful with yourself,” he said gently. “There’s always been something between us. Something very close to love.”

  Janson looked intently at him, mentally imposing Demarest’s features over the famous countenance of the legendary humanitarian, seeing the points of resemblance even on the recontoured visage. He shuddered.

  “And a lot closer to hate,” Janson said at last.

  Demarest’s eyes burned into him like glowing coals. “I made you, and nothing can ever change that. Accept it. Accept who you are. Once you do, things change. The nightmares will cease, Paul. Life gets a whole lot easier. Take it from me. I always sleep well at night. Imagine it—wouldn’t that be something, Paul?”

  Janson took a deep breath, and suddenly felt able to focus once more. “I don’t want that.”

  “What? You don’t want to leave the nightmares behind? Now you’re lying to yourself, Lieutenant.”

  “I’m not your lieutenant. And I wouldn’t trade my nightmares for anything.”

  “You never healed, because you wouldn’t let yourself heal.”

  “Is this what you call healing? You sleep well because something inside you—call it a soul, call it what you like—is dead. Maybe something happened that snuffed it out one day, maybe you never had it, but it’s the thing that makes us human.”

  Human? You mean weak. People always mix those two words up.”

  “My nightmares are me,” Janson said, in a clear, steady voice. “I have to live with the things I’ve done on this earth. I don’t have to like them. I’ve done good and I’ve done bad. As for the bad—I don’t want to be reconciled with the bad. You tell me I can take that pain away? That pain is how I know who I am and who I’m not. That pain is how I know I’m not you.”

  Suddenly Demarest lashed out, batting the gun out of Janson’s hand. It flew clattering to the marble floor.

  Demarest looked almost mournful as he leveled his pistol. “I tried to reason with you. I tried to reach you. I’ve done so much to reach you, to bring you back in touch with your true self. All I wanted from you was an acknowledgment of the truth—the truth about us both.”

  “The truth? You’re a monster. You should have died in Mesa Grande. I wish to God you had.”

  “It’s remarkable—how much you know and how little. How powerful you can be, and how powerless.” He shook his head. “The man kills the child of another and cannot even protect his own … .”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The embassy bombing in Caligo—did it shake your world? I thought it might when I suggested it, five years ago. You’ll have to forgive me: the idea of your having a child just didn’t sit well with me. A Paul Junior—no, I couldn’t see it. Always easy to arrange these things through the local talent—those wild-eyed insurrectionists dreaming of Allah and the virgins of Paradise. I’m afraid I’m the only one who could appreciate the delicious irony that it was all brought about by a fertilizer bomb. But really, what kind of a father would you have made, a baby-killer like you?”

  Janson felt as if he had been turned to stone.

  A heavy sigh. “And it’s time for me to be going. I have great plans for the world, you know. Truth is, I’m getting bored with conflict resolution. Conflict promotion is the new order of the day. Human beings like battle and bloodshed. Let man be man, I say.”

  “Not your prerogative.” Janson struggled to get the words out.

  He smiled. “Carpe diem—seize the day. Carpe mundum—seize the world.”

  “They made you a god,” Janson said, recalling the president’s words, “when they didn’t own the heavens.”

  “The heavens are beyond even my ken. Still, I’ll be happy to keep an open mind. Why don’t you file a report about the hereafter when you get there? I’ll look forward to your MemCon in re Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates.” He was expressionless as he leveled the pistol two feet away from Janson’s forehead. “Bon voyage,” he said as his finger curled around the trigger.

  Then Janson felt something warm spray against his face. Blinking, he saw that it came from an exit wound at Demarest’s forehead. Undeflected by window glass, the sniper’s shot was as precise as if it had been fired point-blank.

  Janson reached out and cupped Demarest’s face, holding him erect. “Xin loi,” he lied. Sorry about that.

  For a moment, Demarest’s expression was perfectly blank: he could have been in deepest meditation; he could have been asleep.

  Janson let go, and Demarest crumpled to the ground with the utter relaxation of life surrendered.

  When Janson peered out from the secretary-general’s antique telescope, he found Jessie precisely where he had stationed her: across the East River, her rifle positioned on the roof of the old bottling plant, directly beneath the mammoth neon letters. She was starting to disassemble the weapon with deft, practiced movements. Then she looked up at him, as if she could feel his gaze upon her. All at once, Janson had a feeling, an odd, lighter-than-air feeling, that everything would be all right.

  He stepped away from the scope and looked out with his own two eyes, his face cooled by the breeze. Hunter’s Point. The name had become mordantly appropriate.

  Looming above his beloved, the enormous Pepsi-Cola sign glowed red in the deepening gloom. Now Janson squinted, saw the reflected light from the neon spilled onto the glistening waters below. For a moment, it looked like a river of blood.

  Chapter Forty-three

  “I want to thank you for joining us, Mr. Janson,” said President Charles W. Berquist Jr., seated at the head of the oval table. The handful of people at the table, mainly senior administrators and analysts from the country’s principal intelligence agencies, had made their separate ways to the blandly handsome building on Sixteenth Street, using the side entrance that was accessible from a private driveway and guaranteed that arrivals and departures would not attract notice. There would be no tape, no log. It was another meeting that had not, officially, taken place. “Your nation owes you a debt of gratitude that it will never kn
ow about. But I know. I don’t think it’ll be any surprise that you’ll be receiving another Distinguished Intelligence Star.”

  Janson shrugged. “Maybe I should get into the scrap-metal business.”

  “But I also wanted you to hear some good news, and from me. Thanks to you, it looks like we’re going to be able to resurrect the Mobius Program. Doug and the others have walked me through it several times, and it’s looking better and better.”

  “Is that right?” Janson said impassively.

  “You don’t seem surprised,” President Berquist said, sounding straitened. “I suppose you anticipated the possibility.”

  “When you’ve been around the planners as long as I have, you stop being surprised by their combination of brilliance and stupidity.”

  The president scowled, displeased with the operative’s tone. “You’re talking about some very extraordinary people, I’ll have you know.”

  “Yes. Extraordinarily arrogant.” Janson shook his head slowly. “Anyway, you can just forget about it.”

  “The question is, where do you get off talking to the president like that?” Douglas Albright, the DIA deputy director, interjected.

  “The question is whether you people ever learn anything,” Janson shot back.

  “We’ve learned a great deal,” Albright said. “We won’t make the same mistakes twice.”

  “True—the mistakes will be different ones.”

  The secretary of state spoke. “To jettison the program at this point would be to scuttle tens of thousands of man-hours of work, as Doug points out. It would also be like trying to unring a bell. As far as the world is concerned, Peter Novak still exists.”

  “We can remake him, recast him, with a whole set of additional safeguards,” Albright said, giving the secretary of state an encouraging look. “There are a hundred measures we can take to prevent what Demarest did from recurring.”

  “I don’t believe you people,” Janson said. “A few days ago, you’d all agreed it was a colossal error. A basic miscalculation, both political and moral. You understood—or, anyway, you seemed to understand—that a plan that was premised on massive deception was bound to go awry. And in ways that could never be predicted.”