Robert Ludlum’s The Janson Command

by Robert Ludlum; Paul Garrison

  Kincaid dropped the fire extinguisher and scooped the boat hook off the concrete. The hook end consisted of two blunt studs for pushing off, which were rounded to minimize the risk of tearing sailcloth; the hook for snaring lines was similarly rounded and curved back toward the handle. The pole was made of aluminum sheathed with vinyl. It was too light to stagger as big a man as she was facing or even knock the gun out of his hands.

  Kincaid hurled it like a javelin.

  She aimed for his eyes.

  He was amazingly fast, with the reflexes of a cobra and the fighting instincts of a Spanish bull. He raised a big hand to block the boat hook, brushing it slightly off-course, and turned away. The hook missed his eye but bashed his temple. The stunning blow would have dropped most men. It hardly slowed him. But Kincaid had achieved her first goal of keeping his finger off the trigger.

  He lunged at her.

  He outweighed her by a hundred pounds. He spread his long arms to bear-hug her between his empty hand and the gun. He was thinking he could smother her with his weight, a common football-clod mistake. Kincaid backpedaled and drew from the sheath hidden under her compact shoulder bag a carbon-fiber scalpel.

  She slid the razor-edged blade inside the crook of his elbow. She ripped it the length of his forearm. He kept coming and Kincaid kept slicing, down his wrist and through the heel of his hand. As his hand opened convulsively, releasing the gun, she continued cutting, crossing his palm, opening the flesh from his elbow to his fingers.

  The Micro TAR-21 fell to the pavement. It was made of plastic and bounced. Kincaid caught it on the hop. Backing away before he could grab her, bobbling the weapon around to point the business end his way, she tucked it close to her body, rotated the selector lever to semiautomatic, and demanded, “Who the hell are you?”

  He raised his bloody arm. His face had gone chalk white with shock, but it was contorted with rage. He pointed a red-dripping finger at her face. “You are dead meat.”

  “Me? I’m not bleeding like a stuck pig. I’m holding the gun.” She aimed it at his knee. “Who are you?”

  “Fuck you,” he retorted. If the shock and awe she had already blitzed him with would not make him answer her, the fear of her shooting him in the leg wouldn’t, either. Kincaid went at his ego instead, tearing into it with the same ferocity with which she had slashed his arm.

  “Fuck me? Fuck you. Where’d you learn to fight? Kindergarten? Nobody taught you to lead with bone? You shoulda blocked me with your radius. You made me a present of your soft side.”

  It worked. Crouching there dripping blood like a wet-behind-the-ears recruit, he had to prove to the 130-pound woman who had taken him out that he was important. He spit out a word that sounded like, “Sar.”

  “Sar?” she shouted back. “What the fuck is sar?”

  “I’m sar. You’re dead meat.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, you already told me that. What is sar?” She gestured again with the gun.

  He glanced past her toward the terminal and relief crossed his face. “People. Go ahead and shoot.”

  Kincaid was already watching them from the corner of her eye. Middle-aged couples strolling her way, still distant, but drawing closer. Too far away to hear the sound-suppressed Tavor, but they would certainly hear him scream. He used the distraction to whirl in a swift, smooth motion and dive straight off the pier exactly as he had done at Porto Clarence. He speared the water with barely a splash, slick as a dolphin.

  Kincaid raced after him. This time he wouldn’t have anyone stationed under the pier to help him escape. She balanced on the edge, eyes sweeping the surface for his bubbles to see where to propel herself into the water, soles clenched to push off the concrete rim. The Tavor was waterproof. She could put a slug in him underwater if she could get close enough. There! She dug in her feet to push off hard. Suddenly she heard Paul Janson’s voice in her head. Loud, like the boss was sitting on her shoulder.

  Never get in the wrong fight.

  She had no business rassling an operator his size in the water, not a powerful swimmer who speared the surface without a splash. He’d use his superior weight and strength to drag her under like a raccoon drowning a coonhound.

  The couples were closer, exclaiming. They had seen him dive or they saw the smoke. She was still holding the TAR-21, tucking it tight to her body. She slid it under the nearest car, scooped her handbag off the pavement, and palmed her knife into its sheath. Then she picked up the fire extinguisher and made a show of spraying the last tendrils of smoke under the Audi.

  They came running as fast as they could in holiday sandals, shouting in Spanish, gesticulating wildly. Kincaid gesticulated back, pretended not to understand Spanish, pulled out her keys, climbed in the car, smiling. “Gracias, gracias.”

  She started the motor, lowered the window to clasp the nearest woman’s hand. “Gracias. Thank you. I’m okay.” She made eye contact, squeezed the plump, sweaty hand reassuringly, waved a casual adios to the rest of them, and drove off the pier, following the signs on the Paseo de Alfonso XII that would take her to the AP-7 Autopista del Mediterráneo and out of here, hoping she had jollied them out of calling the cops.

  She saw a million Traffic Group patrol cars on the limited-access toll road and a ton of radar traps. She stuck to the 120-kilometer limit and none took notice of the Audi. Home free. No one had called the cops.

  Halfway to Valencia she pulled into a busy rest stop. Hungry as always after a fight, she piled a cafeteria tray high with asparagus, artichokes, mushrooms, and sardines and wolfed them down while texting Janson.

  Doc jumped ship mayb Dakar.

  She paused to reflect. The M-TAR-21 assault rifle, “Micro” as it was, was still a mighty big gun to wave around in public. There were two reasons a professional would risk carrying it: Its high rate of fire on automatic made it a deadly defense weapon in the event the operator had to fight his way out of a jam, but it was also extremely accurate and extremely quiet, the perfect rifle to single-shot Flannigan from the sailboat mast as he stepped off the ship.

  In other words, she resumed texting Janson,

  Porto C diver hunting doc to terminate.

  She went back for dessert, chose two dishes of flan and a double espresso. Returning to her table, she sent another message:

  PC diver dove again. Unit called ?sar? Iboga friend—doc enemy.

  She spooned up the flan and stirred sugar into the espresso. Then she thumbed into her phone:

  ?Next?

  SEVENTEEN

  Where next, Boss?” Mike asked.

  The Rolls-Royces were whining down to stop as Ed parked the Embraer outside Jet Aviation���s fixed base operation terminal in Zurich, Switzerland.

  “Leave the aircraft here and have it serviced. You guys fly home commercial. Catch up on your sleep.”

  “Home? Wouldn’t mind seeing the house, mow the lawn.”

  “Spray the roses,” said Ed. “Pat the cat—when do you want us back?”

  “Quintisha will find you.”

  Janson’s pilots knew better than to ask where he was going.

  All week Paul Janson had been calling in markers from former friends and foes from his long years at Consular Operations. Spies, bankers, state ministers, criminals, and law officers owed him favors and often their lives. Ironically—and very conveniently—there was much overlap between the CatsPaw Associates corporate security consulting business and the Phoenix Foundation. His two organizations fueled each other.

  The family of experts Janson had gathered served both sides, often unknowingly.

  The information miners, the eyes and ears who brought him word of a derelict agent, also alerted him to paying jobs and dug up information to perform those missions. The money managers who held the IRS at bay and kept the nonprofit side both solvent and legitimate could move cash and dispense payments where needed. Facilitators, specialized operators, computer wizards, and hackers, all were put to work on various aspects of the hunt for Iboga, Iboga�
��s rescuers, and the elusive doctor whom Janson was starting to think of, ruefully, as Fleet-Footed Flannigan.

  The CatsPaw Associates machine was operating at full bore. Results, however, were disappointing. The accountants were making some progress on where Iboga had hidden Isle de Foree’s millions. But in a fruitless week of polling the clandestine world Janson’s people had found nothing about who had dispatched the Harrier jump jet that rescued Iboga and nothing about where the dictator had gone.

  The freelance researchers coordinated by the home office had pointed out what Janson already knew: In a world that contained more than one hundred thousand “superrich” fortunes of over $30 million, plenty of individuals could afford to buy an elderly Harrier. And complex aircraft support systems were not necessary if they intended to fly it only once and ditch it in the sea when they were done with it.

  An intriguing hint came from a recording in the Gulf of Guinea Maritime Security database of a radio exchange that had occurred the night before Iboga’s defeat on Pico Clarence. Supertanker watch officers hailing each other as their vessels passed close in the dark a hundred miles off Gabon were interrupted by a thunderous noise. One officer, who had served in the Royal Navy, identified the never-forgotten sound of a Harrier storming down to a vertical landing. On their radars they spotted a large ship, a freighter or another tanker, on which a Harrier could have landed. But the ship showed no lights and did not answer their calls.

  Janson speculated that if the Harrier had night-fighting capability it could have joined the ship by flying offshore from Gabon, a former French colony. That ship could have steamed within Harrier range of Isle de Foree when Iboga made his escape the following afternoon. Janson ordered CatsPaw to canvas aviation officials in Gabon. But the fact was the nation had many remote airstrips where the Harrier could have jumped off after flying in from Angola or Congo, coming and going in complete secrecy.

  So while the CatsPaw Associates and Phoenix Foundation machines continued to grind away and Jessica Kincaid hunted for the doctor, it was time for “the boss” to disappear. Time to go back to what he did best, alone.

  He had Jet Aviation’s limo run him over to the main passenger terminal. He wandered around the terminal until he felt comfortably un-���followed. Then he boarded the train to Zurich, where he roamed the underground shops of the Hauptbahnhof. Only when he was absolutely sure he was not being followed did he leave the train station. From the station plaza he rode the escalator up to the Bahnhofstrasse and cut through a neighborhood of narrow, tree-lined side streets.

  He crossed a shallow branch of the Limmat on the Gessner Bridge and onto Lagerstrasse. Lagerstrasse paralleled the enormous railroad cut that brought the sleek trains into the center of the city. Four blocks on, he entered the lobby of a low-rise commercial building beside the tracks, climbed the stairs to the third floor, and knocked at the door of a freight-forwarding business.

  In the outer reception room he gave his name.

  This gained him admittance to an inner reception room.

  An iris scan confirmed that he was expected.

  A receptionist led him to a back office where the floor vibrated at a fine pitch set by the trains whisking past the building. A clerk wordlessly handed him a Tyvek polyethylene envelope and left Janson alone, closing the door behind him. Janson locked it.

  He dumped the contents of the envelope on a bare table and carefully examined the paper and plastic that supported a legend he had not used for several years. The identity package for security-services executive “Adam Kurzweil” was so meticulously assembled that the crisp new Canadian passport was accompanied by its expired predecessor, which Janson recalled he had last used to enter Hungary. The new one had the latest radio frequency identification chip issue encoded with Kurzweil’s particulars and a biometric profile designed to slide Janson past the scanners. It was a reminder, not that he needed it, that in the post-9/11 decades when transportation security employed ever more sophisticated digital technology, one had to pay for the best countermeasures to stay ahead of the game. Happily, the best was still found in this nondescript building on Lagerstrasse.

  He emptied his wallet into the Swiss Post Priority envelope they had supplied, and addressed it to a cell phone shop on the nearby Uetlibergstrasse. A CatsPaw Associates private shell corporation owned a nonparticipating interest in numerous such shops in Europe and Asia. The investments bought the key codes to their front doors, mail drops, and exclusive access to safes in their cellars.

  He refilled his wallet with the new passport, driver’s license, medical insurance cards, credit cards, dog-eared family photographs, and business cards—both Adam Kurzweil’s, which were expensively embossed, and several that Kurzweil would have received from sales prospects.

  He walked back to the train station, posted the envelope, bought an expensive carry-on shoulder bag, two changes of clothing, a tan raincoat, and a windbreaker. He left the station and boarded a tram. He got off at the Stampenbachplotz stop and walked to the Hotel InterContinental. He left his distinctive raincoat in the men’s room and walked out into the streets, where he eventually hailed a taxi to a residential neighborhood. He walked some more, removed his necktie, folded it and his suit jacket into his shoulder bag, put on the windbreaker, and rode a tram to the industrial Oerlikon quarter.

  He walked from the Oerlikon tram station out of the central district of shops and cafés, passed factories old and new, and at the end of a cobblestone alley knocked on a windowless steel door. He stepped back and unzipped his windbreaker to let the cameras have a good look. To his surprise, the door was opened personally by the man he had come to see.

  Neal Kruger was tall and tanning-bed bronzed, with thick curly hair turning gray and the slightly quizzical expression of a handsome lifeguard or ski bum shocked to discover he had stumbled into middle age.

  “Hello, Neal.”

  The weapons dealer clasped Janson’s hand, pulled him inside, and hugged him hard. “Too long, my friend. How are you?”

  “Very, very well,” said Paul Janson. “You look like you’re prospering.”

  “The United Nations’ failure to impose world peace continues to stoke the human desire to accumulate arms. I am, indeed, prospering.”

  “Since when do you open your own front door?”

  “It is a luxury to feel so secure that I don’t need armed men to welcome old friends.”

  “You’re taking a damned fool chance,” said Janson.

  “A luxury by definition is an indulgence.”

  “You’ll get yourself killed. Or snatched.”

  “There are four concealed cameras over the alley.”

  “I saw them. And the gas port. It would not be easy to take you, but not impossible.”

  “Will I get a bill for security advice?”

  Janson did not smile back. “You should be more careful. If not for you, for your wife and son.”

  “She left me. She took the boy.”

  “I’m sorry.” That explained the lapse. “Then the advice is on the house. There’s no protecting a man who doesn’t give a damn.”

  Kruger led him inside. His office was a mess. He had laid out a tray of bread and cheese on his desk and opened a bottle of Cote de Rhone. Janson sipped sparingly, though he dove into the cheese, having not eaten since early morning. They traded information on old friends and then Janson got to the point. “Any luck with the jump jet?”

  Kruger nodded. “Twelve old T.10 Harrier two-seaters from the nineties were updated to a T.12 capability to train pilots for the Brits’ GR.9 fleet. Marvelous aircraft. Fully combat capable. Even night fighting. Now they’re being replaced by the F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, which means that for a while there were a dozen vertical-slash-short takeoff and landing two-seaters for sale around the world. Nine of them are currently serving the Spanish and the Turks. The Nigerians managed to crash two of them, after which they put the third back on the market.”

  “Who bought it
?”

  “A fellow I know who deals with mercenaries.”

  “French mercenaries?”

  Kruger shot Janson an admiring glance. “Why come to me for answers you already know?”

  “Not this time,” said Janson. “It’s just that…”

  “It’s just that what?”

  Janson hesitated only a moment. His instinct to conceal was tempered by the knowledge that Neal Kruger lived on information. Any information Janson gave the arms dealer would cause him to return the favor, though at the risk that he would trade on it with others. Janson said, “I interviewed two of Iboga’s wives.”

  “How many does he have?”

  “They caught three of them. God knows how many others escaped into the bush. Illiterate peasant girls. Little older than children really. Anyway, they both said the same thing when I asked about how Iboga got away: ‘The French, the French.’ It was like a chant or a prayer. I doubt they know where France is, but they were parroting what Iboga kept saying near the end: ‘The French will save me. The French will save me.’ It was pretty clear he had arrangements with someone. Now you’re telling me that a Harrier jump jet ended up in the hands of a merchant who deals with the French.”

  “It hardly sounds like the French government. They muck about in their former colonies like the Ivory Coast, or Senegal. But Isle de Foree was Portuguese.”

  Janson agreed. “Have you heard of a freelance outfit called Sar?”

  “Sar? No. What is it?”

  “They might have been who sent the jump jet. Or they supplied operators on the ground for whoever did. And it appears they do assassinations.”

  “That’s a crowded field.”

  Janson swirled the wine in his glass, eyed the ruby color against the light. He was glad he had come personally instead of continuing with Kruger on the phone. The phone couldn’t show the disorderliness of a man’s office or provide such a window on his state of mind. Kruger would become increasingly less useful unless Janson could help him change the course of his life.