Robert Ludlum’s The Janson Command

by Robert Ludlum; Paul Garrison

  “That is what she did to our women.”

  “When I reminded the jailor about your edict, he told me, ‘Acting President Poe ordered no more beating. But she doesn’t know that and she remembers what she did to our women. Let her skin crawl in anticipation.’ Then he pointed at the whips hanging on the wall and he asked me, ‘Where do you think those whips came from? The Red Cross?’ ”

  “One can’t control everything,” said Poe. “By the time you capture Iboga, I will have put the prison in proper order.”

  Janson said, “My forensic accountants will run down the money. But I will hand Iboga himself over to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I believe your intent,” Janson replied with a warm smile that would have done the wiliest diplomat proud. “But you have an entire nation to put in order and it will be a while before you can ‘control’ everything.”

  “No,” said Poe. “Iboga will string the court along for years.”

  Janson said, “In researching the original job of rescuing Dr. Flannigan I happened to learn quite a bit about you, sir. I admire you. You’re a practical man. You attended the London School of Economics to master English because mastery of English would help you promote the cause of Isle de Foree in a world where English speakers wielded power. And you’re a brave man. You are the kind of man that people need to serve and protect them. But there are limits to what practicality and courage can achieve in the midst of chaos. You’ll have enough on your plate without having to resist your own people’s desire to take vengeance on Iboga. And before you say it is none of my business, capturing him will make him my business.”

  “All right!” said Ferdinand Poe. “Clearly you will not budge. Give him to the World Court, if you must.”

  “I must.”

  “Now I set a condition: If Iboga ever manages to trick his jailors and escape from The Hague, you promise to find him again before he comes back to retake Isle de Foree.”

  “Count on it,” said Janson.

  FIFTEEN

  37°35′20.66″ N, 0°58′59.79″ W

  Cartagena, Spain

  Put her on the ground, guys,��� Janson told his pilots. “Jesse’s gotta beat the doctor into Cartagena.”

  Seen from six thousand feet, cutting a long V wake through a placid Mediterranean Sea, the Varna Fantasy gleamed pristinely white in the morning sun.

  They were standing behind the pilots, looking out the windshields over Ed’s and Mike’s shoulders as CatsPaw Associates’ Embraer 650 banked in a wide turn around the Varna Fantasy and headed for the coast. At the rocky edge of the blue-green sea they crossed over Cartagena, Spain, the Bulgarian cruise liner’s next port of call.

  Janson grew uncharacteristically talkative, which indicated to Kincaid that he was about to hide something from her. Cartagena, he told her, cut an uncommonly deep and sheltered indentation in a difficult stretch of Mediterranean coast that had made it a welcome harbor for three thousand years. Phoenician navigators and merchants had anchored in its blue-green waters, as had colonists from Carthage, Roman conquerors, and Spanish warships.

  “The Romans left behind stone roads, theaters, and played-out silver mines. The Spanish erected fortresses on the headlands and breakwaters below and surrounded the waterfront with freight piers, shipyards, and factories. In our more peaceful, prosperous times they built that long mole to dock cruise ships.”

  “Care to tell me where you’re going?” she asked.

  “Not sure, yet,” was all he would answer. He pulled disappearing acts now and then, though not as often as he used to.

  As they descended toward the nearest airport, a sleepy general aviation field outside the town of Murcia, Jessica Kincaid asked Mike if she could sit in the first officer’s seat for the landing.

  “Negative. Sorry, Jesse, but it’s a short runway and a nasty crosswind. I might need Ed’s reflexes.”

  Kincaid elbowed Ed and said, “I have faster reflexes than this old guy.”

  “Yeah, but Ed’s been practicing for thirty years. Next time. Don’t worry; you’ll get more landings.”

  Her red rental Audi was waiting on the private aviation apron.

  “Good luck with the doc,” Janson told her. “If he gives you any trouble, you’ve got Freddy Ramirez standing by in Madrid.”

  Freddy Ramirez was a former CSID Spanish intelligence operator. He had learned his trade battling Cuba’s aggressive Directorate of Intelligence, which trafficked in cocaine and repeatedly attempted to penetrate CSID. Like Janson, Freddy had gone private. His Protocolo de Seguridad was well connected wherever Freddy Ramirez had followed the trail of Cuban coke, and Janson counted on him in Central America and Miami, Spain itself, France, and Italy.

  Kincaid said, “I think I can handle one doctor. If he’s aboard.” Varna Fantasy had sailed the night the doctor disappeared from Porto Clarence, but he was not listed on either the passenger or crew manifest filed with Isle de Foree Customs and Immigration.

  * * *

  THE EMBRAER WAS thundering back into the sky before Kincaid cleared the airport gate. It took off into the westerly wind and quickly swooped north and possibly east, she thought, but by then it was climbing out of sight.

  Foot to the firewall brought her into Cartagena as the tugboats were easing the Varna Fantasy past the outer breakwater. Kincaid battled tourist traffic through the narrow streets of the old walled city and pulled onto the cruise ship pier after the ship had crossed the harbor and tied up. Shuttle buses were waiting and sightseers queued eagerly at the gangway, anxious to get ashore after back-to-back three-day passages from Porto Clarence to Dakar, Senegal, and from Dakar to Cartagena.

  Jessica Kincaid drove around the buses and found a parking space by the yacht marina that was sheltered by the pier. She had made it just in time. The bus drivers were stubbing out cigarettes and starting their engines. The ship loomed above the dock. Passengers were leaning over the rail gawking at the city that faced the harbor with a wall of cream-colored eight- and ten-story apartment buildings. Green plazas and palm trees stood between the buildings and the water.

  Kincaid heard a sharp whistle and spotted the source through her open sunroof. She had noticed the boat rigger standing at the very top of a tall sailboat mast as she drove in—an athletic race-yacht gorilla in white T-shirt and shorts, his face shaded from the fierce sun by a visor and blue-iridium polarized sunglasses. He was working alone without a belaying line, which meant that instead of another crewman winching him up, he had climbed a halyard using étriers attached to rope ascenders. Standing in the stirrup-like étriers, he was at eye level with the passengers waiting to disembark from the Varna Fantasy. He flashed teeth in a hello-blond-foreign-tourist-ladies grin. The ladies snapped his picture with their cell phones.

  The passengers began trooping down the gangway.

  Kincaid watched every face. It was not difficult. There were more women than men, and most of the men were older than the doctor. She presumed the crew could disembark last. And when they had all boarded the buses, she had not seen him. There was a second gangway aft, a working route that touched the pier behind a chain-link fence and led into the terminal building. That would be for the crew.

  The rigger gave her a whistle as she got out of the car, legs flashing from cool linen shorts. In her role as a carefree tourist she returned a thanks-for-the-compliment wave. She walked into the terminal building and approached the Fantasy Line’s booth and engaged the women working there in a mix of English, French, and Spanish.

  * * *

  HADRIAN VAN PELT had been standing for hours in his Petzl rope ascenders atop the one-hundred-foot mast of the racing sloop, pretending to lubricate the masthead sheaves and change a burned-out anchor light. From this high up he could see over the cruise ship to the headlands that embraced the Spanish port, and beyond the headlands the blue-green water of the Mediterranean. Directly beneath him, beside the Real Club Nautico de
Regattas, was the cruise ship pier where the passengers had trooped off the Varna Fantasy and boarded shuttle buses to the Old City.

  He reasoned that ship’s crew had to wait until the passengers disembarked, but he was taking no chances the doctor might disembark with them. Van Pelt still could not figure out how he had missed Flannigan when the ship docked in Dakar. This stop in the Mediterranean was his next opportunity, and he intended to finish the job here.

  Then, seconds ago, movement under him had caught his eye. From the row of cars parked beside the boat slips a slim woman had stepped out of a red Audi. She was wearing retro cat’s-eye sunglasses. The open visor that shaded her face did not cover her spiky brown hair. When he had whistled, she returned a noncommittal wave, locked her car, and hurried into the terminal.

  Van Pelt clamped his gloves around the wire forestay and kicked out of his rope ascenders. He launched himself into the air, plummeted in a controlled slide down the slanting forestay, and landed as lightly as a much smaller man would. Then he vaulted off the sailboat onto the concrete pier and headed for the woman’s car.

  He had last seen her in Porto Clarence, Isle de Foree. American, he had figured, judging by the I-own-the-world thrust of her shoulders. She had been sitting in a café, in animated conversation with the old woman who owned Isle de Foree’s priciest whorehouse.

  Hadrian Van Pelt could wonder if it was a big coincidence. Or he could wonder whether she, too, had tracked Dr. Terry Flannigan to Cartagena, Spain, the Varna Fantasy’s next port of call after Dakar. But why wonder when he could ask her?

  He knelt beside the Audi as if to tighten a running-shoe lace, opened his tool pouch, activated an electronic scanner that read key codes—a Czech-built instrument that cost more than the car—and popped her door locks. He climbed in like he owned it, looked to ensure that no one was watching, and squeezed himself onto the floor of the backseat.

  Van Pelt did not doubt that a professional with her wits about her would spot him in the back as she opened the door. But a professional would also recognize the snub nose of the bullpup-​configured Micro TAR-21 assault rifle protruding from his tool pouch. She would see that she had no choice but to obey his order to get in and drive before he drilled a hole in her head with the silenced weapon.

  * * *

  AFTER ATTEMPTING TO answer Jessica Kincaid’s questions and accepting small bribes sufficient to treat themselves to a nice lunch—an amount that Janson had taught her could buy a lot of information—the women at the Fantasy Lines counter began glancing at the clock.

  Kincaid thanked them for their time and stepped out into the sun again.

  “Fuck!” she muttered under her breath.

  There was no Dr. Terrence Flannigan aboard the ship, she had learned. The women had actually telephoned the ship for her and confirmed that. The ship’s doctor was a Senegalese, enjoying a free cruise vacation, which meant that somehow Terry Flannigan had given Kincaid the slip at Dakar. Or had never been on the damned boat in the first place.

  Now what?

  The pier was deserted. All the buses were gone. Midday, midweek, the sailboats crammed side by side in the marina were empty. Nothing moved but indicators tracking the wind on their mastheads and some generator turbines spinning lazily. The blue-green water was barely riffled by the weak remnants of the morning breeze. Across the harbor, smoke rose straight from a distant chimney. The fortresses on the rocky promontories that guarded the narrow mouth to the sea baked in the sun.

  It appeared that the only people left working in the Spanish city were waiters serving lunch to the rest. Even the good-looking rigger had called it a morning and abandoned his perch on the mast.

  Lunch. Then out of here.

  She hurried to her car.

  SIXTEEN

  Jessica Kincaid stopped six feet from the Audi and opened her handbag. She took out a Marlboro box, opened it, shook her head in disgust, crumbled it in her hand, turned on her heel, and walked back to the terminal building, pausing at the door to drop the crumpled box in a trash receptacle.

  The terminal was air-conditioned, pleasantly cool, encouraging passengers to linger at the many shops. Like the Fantasy Line desk, most of the shops had closed for lunch. Those open were virtually empty today, but for bored clerks.

  Kincaid headed for the ladies’ room. She heard a hand drier roaring inside. Good. No need to go in. She veered across the echoing lobby into the drugstore and bought a box of Marlboros and a cigarette lighter, then asked the woman at the checkout register for an instant cold pack. She found it among the ACE bandages and braces for sprained wrists and paid for the cold pack and a Spanish newspaper. Then she went to the ladies’ room. The woman who had been drying her hands was just leaving.

  ���Perdón.”

  “No hay problema.”

  Kincaid checked that all the stalls were empty and that she was alone, wadded a piece of newsprint into the sink drain to act as a stopper, and filled the sink halfway with cold water. Ignoring the instructions not to open the cold pack, printed in five languages, she tore it apart and poured its ammonium nitrate crystals into the water to dissolve them. She soaked a sheet of newspaper in the solution, let the excess drip, and held it in front of the hand drier. The wet paper tore easily, so the drier blew it apart in her hands. She tried again, got the trick of it standing farther back from the warm air flow, and dried it completely. Dry, it was even more fragile, threatening to crumble in her fingers. To prevent that, she laid it on a sheet of dry newsprint and then she folded them tightly into a rectangle a foot long, an inch wide, and half an inch thick.

  She put it in her bag, strode quickly from the ladies’ room, across the lobby and out to the pier. She walked slowly to her car, while looking around like a tourist, opening the Marlboro box, pocketing the sealing string of cellophane, tamping the tobacco down on her free hand, pocketing the inner foil, and tapping loose a cigarette.

  She saw no one watching from any of the boats in the slips. None of the parked cars seemed to have an occupant. No one seemed to be peering down at her from the ship, though they could be.

  She scoped the area as she would if she were installing Lambda Team. She would put marksmen in the palm trees nearest the center, marksmen on the roofs of the buildings behind them, a marksman in a stalled truck on the overpass. For her own position she would take the lighthouse that marked the channel around the outer breakwater. A long shot with the water effects and sea breeze to adjust for, but the hit would be hers.

  If there were snipers, she would be dead by now. If there were snipers, there would be no heavy guy hiding in her car, making it sit a hair lower on its springs.

  She was a woman; he could be a scum rapist. But damned few rapists could break into a locked Audi without setting off the alarm. And the fact that the Audi was still where she had parked it confirmed that whoever was inside was not trying to steal it. He was waiting for her.

  She had noticed something else, subconsciously, as she walked out of the terminal, a discrepancy that hadn’t fully registered but had heightened her awareness: The rigger who had been atop the sailboat mast had left his rope ascenders attached to the halyard he had climbed. To retrieve them he would have to climb back up with another set, which made no sense unless he’d had a reason to come down real quick, such as to break into her car.

  It had to be about the doctor. Dr. Flannigan was the only reason she was in Cartagena. The guy in her Audi had to be an operator who had come to meet the Varna Fantasy for the same reason. Somehow he must have connected her to the doctor.

  Woman or not, she could not call the cops. Janson Rules: no innocents in the cross fire. She had to assume that the operator was a professional. The poor cops would never know what hit them.

  She stepped closer to the car, put the cigarette between her lips, shielded the lighter by turning her back to the wind, still looking for the guy’s partners. If he had them, they were invisible. The marina was thick with boats. They could be watching from i
nside one of the cabins.

  She gazed around the marina like a visitor reluctant to leave a pretty place. Still holding the lighter, she pretended a lazy drag on the Marlboro and walked along the edge of the pier, gazing down into the cockpits of several sailboats as if admiring the polished chrome and varnished brightwork or dreaming of sailing away. She hadn’t had a cigarette since she was sixteen and the hardest part was not coughing on the toxins.

  She spotted things she could use in the cockpit of the boat the rigger had been working on. She turned around and stepped closer to the car. She crouched in a swift, sure motion, slipped the folded rectangle of ammonium nitrate–​impregnated newspaper under the car, thumbed the lighter, touched the flame to the newspaper, and rose as quickly.

  She got ten feet away before the smoke bomb ignited.

  The Audi suddenly disappeared in a whirlwind of thick white smoke. Kincaid jumped down into the sailboat’s cockpit and scrambled back to the pier carrying a Halotron fire extinguisher and a six-foot-long boat hook.

  The rigger was a big man. It took him a moment to untangle himself from the backseat. He threw open the back door on the passenger side and stumbled out coughing in the acrid smoke.

  Kincaid dropped the boat hook.

  She shouted, “Fire! Fire!”—staging a quick-thinking-passerby performance for the benefit of potential witnesses—and aimed the extinguisher at his face. He had removed his sunglasses and even as she blasted him with the pressurized heat-absorbing liquid she recognized him as the commando who had conducted the brilliant rearguard action that enabled President for Life Iboga to escape from Isle de Foree.

  He was just as cool here, a highly trained, lightning-fast operator who, despite being half-blinded by the smoke bomb and the sweet-ether-smelling stream of Halotron stinging his eyes, whipped a Tavor Micro TAR-21 assault rifle from his tool pouch and thumbed the fire selector level to fully automatic mode.

  Kincaid knew instantly what he was going to do. Taken by surprise, unable to see who was attacking him and how many they were, he would spin in a circle and pull the trigger, spew the entire 30-round shot magazine in a rapid burst of deadly fire, slam a fresh magazine from his bag into the weapon, and gun down anyone still standing, whether attacker or innocent bystander.