“First time,” Janson lied.
“Thought so. I never forget a face.”
“Glad I came. Great music.”
“Gotta go, people at the door.”
Giordano’s band slid from “Railroad Man” into a slow arrangement of “Let’s Face the Music.” Kincaid came back to their table and took Janson’s hand. “Lou says I’m doing good.”
Lou was her dance instructor. “Sure looked good from here.”
“Let me ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“You never seem jealous of Lou. I mean, he’s hot as hell. Definitely not gay. Do you ever wonder?”
Wondering where this had come from, and particularly where it was going, Janson said, “I’m not jealous.”
Up on the bandstand the drummer banged three sharp notes. Janson saw Kincaid falling backward in an abandoned fish factory eight thousand miles from New York. After a while, he heard her ask, “Hey, pal, still here?”
Janson dragged himself back into the club by reminding himself that she could not be dancing like Ginger Rogers if her leg had not completely healed. He squeezed her hand. “I’m here. I was just thinking. An old friend called about a job. You ever been to the Arctic?”
“Skied across Greenland, if that counts.”
“Close enough.”
She said, “Let me ask you something else.”
“Shoot.”
“Did you sleep with the colonel from MUST?”
“Petra Rasmusson?”
“Tall Swedish brunette spy? Violet eyes?”
“Not really.”
“What’s ‘not really’?”
“Our cover getting me into Russia was a married couple on their honeymoon cruise. Basic tradecraft demands you assume the Russians wired the stateroom.”
“So you sat around making noises in the dark?”
Janson kept a straight face. “Unfortunately, we could not ignore the possibility of low-light cameras. Or even infrared.”
“How’d you get through it?”
“Sometimes you have to be tougher than the situation.”
They had moved their chairs close together, and everyone in the nightclub was listening to the Nighthawks and watching the dancers. No one saw Kincaid’s fore and middle knuckles drill deep as an ax head into Janson’s torso.
When he could breathe again, Janson said, “Would you dial 911?”
“Are you pressing charges?”
“Ambulance. I think you broke my rib.”
“If I’d meant to break your rib, I’d have hit you harder.”
Janson took some shallow breaths and said, “Jess. I never used to be a one-woman man.”
“What happened? Get old?”
“Not old,” he said. “Lucky.”
“Janson?”
“Why am I suddenly Janson?”
“Because I’m asking you something serious.”
“What?”
“I get jealous. Don’t you ever get jealous?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Janson cupped her face gently in his big hands. “Jess? What is jealous, except being afraid you’ll lose someone?”
“OK…?”
“Maybe I’d get jealous if we were in a different line of work.”
“What does our line of work have to do with it?”
“I’m already afraid I’ll lose you.”
Acknowledgments
The pleasures of research include discovering wonderful nonfiction writers.
Jay Bahadur is a brave and hardy Canadian journalist who wrote in dazzling detail about Somali pirates in an exciting book called Deadly Waters.
Equally brave and dedicated to specifics is Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah, about organized crime in Naples.
I also recommend every book written by my friend Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland, a precise and patient guide through the mysteries of medicine.
Nuruddin Farah, the Somali novelist, depicts in Crossbones ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives while trapped in a thirty-year war. Once you have lived with his characters and experienced their dreams and pleasures, as well as their despair, reports of bombings and assassinations in far-off East Africa become as personal as if friends were attacked. Similarly, blogs and websites by Somalis from many walks of life, and the interviews they give to the New York Times, the Guardian, National Public Radio, Al Jazeera, and the BBC portray a benighted country still filled with hope that one day the good guys will win.
About the Authors
ROBERT LUDLUM was the author of twenty-seven novels, each one a New York Times bestseller. There are more than 210 million of his books in print, and they have been translated into thirty-two languages. He is the author of The Scarlatti Inheritance, The Chancellor Manuscript, and the Jason Bourne series—The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum—among others. Mr. Ludlum passed away in March 2001. To learn more, visit www.Robert-Ludlum.com.
PAUL GARRISON was born in New York and currently lives in Connecticut. He has spent a lot of time on boats and published five thrillers, mostly sea-oriented: Fire and Ice, Red Sky at Morning, Buried at Sea, Sea Hunter, and The Ripple Effect before writing the first of the new Janson novels. To learn more, visit www.justinscott-paulgarrison.com.
The Paul Janson Novels
The Janson Directive
The Janson Command (by Paul Garrison)
The Jason Bourne Novels
The Bourne Identity
The Bourne Supremacy
The Bourne Ultimatum
The Bourne Legacy (by Eric Van Lustbader)
The Bourne Betrayal (by Eric Van Lustbader)
The Bourne Sanction (by Eric Van Lustbader)
The Bourne Deception (by Eric Van Lustbader)
The Bourne Objective (by Eric Van Lustbader)
The Bourne Dominion (by Eric Van Lustbader)
The Bourne Imperative (by Eric Van Lustbader)
The Bourne Retribution (by Eric Van Lustbader)
The Covert-One Novels
The Hades Factor (by Gayle Lynds)
The Cassandra Compact (by Philip Shelby)
The Paris Option (by Gayle Lynds)
The Altman Code (by Gayle Lynds)
The Lazarus Vendetta (by Patrick Larkin)
The Moscow Vector (by Patrick Larkin)
The Arctic Event (by James Cobb)
The Ares Decision (by Kyle Mills)
The Janus Reprisal (by Jamie Freveletti)
The Utopia Experiment (by Kyle Mills)
Also by Robert Ludlum
The Scarlatti Inheritance
The Matlock Paper
Trevayne
The Cry of the Halidon
The Rhinemann Exchange
The Road to Gandolfo
The Gemini Contenders
The Chancellor Manuscript
The Holcroft Covenant
The Matarese Circle
The Parsifal Mosaic
The Aquitaine Progression
The Icarus Agenda
The Osterman Weekend
The Road to Omaha
The Scorpio Illusion
The Apocalypse Watch
The Matarese Countdown
The Prometheus Deception
The Sigma Protocol
The Tristan Betrayal
The Ambler Warning
The Bancroft Strategy
Also by Paul Garrison
Fire and Ice
Red Sky at Morning
Buried at Sea
Sea Hunter
The Ripple Effect
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Table of Contents
Cover
; Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Prologue
Part One: “Who Governs Here?”One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Part Two: A Far CountryEighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Part Three: Fast and LooseTwenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
The Paul Janson Novels
Newsletters
Table of Contents
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Myn Pyn, LLC
Cover design by Boy Design
Cover copyright © by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: March 2014
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