Текст книги "Robert Ludlum's The Janson Command"

Автор книги: Robert Ludlum

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EIGHTEEN

The haughty sheik arguing with Club Electric’s bouncers was demanding to keep his guns, Janson’s translator told him.

“Now what is he yelling?”

If he could not keep his guns, the sheik insisted that his bodyguards keep theirs.

Club Electric’s bouncers were unimpressed. All patrons of Baghdad’s premier nightclub checked their guns at the door. No exceptions.

It was hot, 114 degrees, hours after dark. Janson’s translator kept glancing up the street that paralleled the Tigris River, as if wondering which of the Hummers, Land Rovers, and Cadillac Escalades approaching the valet parkers was hauling a car bomb. Patrons lined up behind them looked as anxious to get inside the blast walls.

The sheik surrendered at last.

Janson exchanged the automatic he had purchased on the way in from the airport for a plastic claim check. Bouncers whispering into walkie-talkies ushered him through Kevlar-reinforced doors. He paused at the top of the stairs to let a group of Iraqis catch up with them and slipped inconspicuously among them. They descended switchback flights of green-lighted Lucite steps into a cavernous, windowless room pulsing with Arab music. Hundreds of prosperous men in shirtsleeves were drinking Pepsi-Cola, smoking water pipes, and watching soccer on flat-screen TVs.

“The joint is jumpin’,” he told his translator, flummoxing the earnest young student. In fact, the blast walls, the zigzagged stairs designed to baffle the impact of an explosion, and the absence of window glass made for a relaxing atmosphere.

He told the translator to wait in the roped-off area set aside for bodyguards.

“How will you understand, sir?”

Traveling in Adam Kurzweil mode, the normally reticent Paul Janson conducted himself more openly. The Canadian security-services executive appeared sure of himself, forthcoming, brash, and even boastful. “The owner of Club Electric,” he explained, “speaks English.”

The translator was in awe. The new Club Electric was the hottest nightclub between Vienna and Mumbai. Janson might well have claimed kinship with Iraq’s prime minister, whom Janson had already spotted in a far corner of the big room eating dinner with the mayor of Baghdad. “You knowMichel Sarkis?”

“When I knew ‘Michel,’ he was ‘Mike.’ Wait over there, please. I’ll call you when I need you.”

Sarkis, a stocky Lebanese with jet-black hair, was table-hopping. Janson drifted through the big room, tracking Sarkis to a table of Iraqi businessmen and German bankers near where the mayor and prime minister were dining. The club owner stood bouncing from foot to foot, smiling and brimming with energy, bantering in French-accented English.

“From where am I?” he replied to one of the German bankers. “The answer is as complex as any international affair. Conceived1975 in Beirut the night the civil war broke out. Bornon the high seas crossing to America. What ship? The SS France, of course. The last truly elegant liner ever built. She bred in me a taste for beauty and pleasure.”

In fact, the Francemake her final westbound crossing in 1974. But Janson had no need to challenge Sarkis on the small stuff.

“ ThenGreenwich, Beverly Hills, Manhattan, and Paree. AlwaysParee.”

Janson passed close behind him and whispered so only the nightclub owner could hear, “What about Florida?”

Sarkis whirled around. “ Bonjour!” he cried, a welcoming smile and widespread arms failing to mask the panic in his eyes. Janson was not surprised that Sarkis didn’t recognize him.

“Sarasota, Florida, Mike. When you have a minute I’ll be out on the deck.”

“I’m very busy, sir; let me buy you a drink and—”

“How’s the Lamborghini running?”

Sarkis’s smile went rigid. “I’ll meet you on the deck.”

Janson followed the neon palm tree arrows that pointed the way through blast walls to the outdoor deck that overlooked the Tigris and the city lights. Few patrons braved the heat. The waiters were wilting. The river was low. Janson smelled burning plastic, oil, and sewage.

He chose a spot on the railing just beyond the glow of the red, white, and blue Pespi display coolers and stood with his back to the water. Sarkis kept him waiting ten minutes, as if sending a message that he was a fleet-footed survivor who had already recovered from the shock of Janson’s blast from the past.

“How’s the Lamborghini running?” Janson asked again.

“Sold it to a Russian,” Sarkis answered brusquely. “What’s up?” Out of earshot of his elite Iraqi customers, Sarkis sounded like an American who had grown up in Danbury, Connecticut, dropped out of state college, and used his smiling good looks to sell Florida vacation condos to well-fixed widows.

Janson answered, “What’s up is that you are rich and well connected and can help me buy a Harrier jump jet.”

Interestingly, Sarkis did not deny it. All he said was, “Why would I help you?”

“Gratitude for saving your life. Or terror that I know enough about your life to destroy it.”

“I don’t know you. I don’t know why you think that Sarasota is somehow important to me.”

“It was a while back,” said Janson. “I’ve followed your career since with admiration.”

“To blackmail me?”

“Only to call in a marker.”

“How much?”

“Not money. Information. Actually, let me amend that. I want truthful information.”

Sarkis snapped his fingers. Two bouncers hurried toward them.

Paul Janson said, “Imagine a hot night on the Florida ‘Suncoast.’ Envision a good-looking college dropout in his twenties. He’s wearing the two most valuable things he owns: a white linen suit one of his girlfriends gave him and an expensive watch from his refugee parents’ Danbury, Connecticut, jewelry store. He has a French accent he can turn on and off because at home Mom and Dad spoke French, their language back in Lebanon.

“Picture him charming old ladies into buying Sarasota condos. His commissions are small and he has to kick back a bunch to his manager. He’s living hand to mouth, money all around him, none of it his. He’s aching for a break. And here’s the thing I admire about this kid: He is ready to seize it if it comes his way. And that night it does.”

Sarkis looked at Janson. He had a look of queasy fascination on his handsome face. “Go on!”

“Call off the muscle.”

Sarkis banished the hovering bouncers with a gesture. “Go on!”

Before Janson could speak the lights went out. The entire city was suddenly dark. The reflections on the water vanished. The sky was too murky to admit the stars. Baghdad’s notoriously embattled electrical grid had died again.

“Ten seconds,” said Sarkis. “Go on.”

The deck shook. Diesel generators rumbled to life, and Club Electric was ablaze in light again, though still surrounded by the dark. “Best generators the American taxpayers’ money could buy,” said Sarkis. “Haliburton left them at the airport. Still in their crates. Go on.”

“Sarasota Film Festival. A thousand people drive inland to a party thrown by a Realtor attempting to sell million-dollar condos in a swamp too many miles from the beach. The dropout in the white linen suit is hoping for a commission, but nothing’s selling and he leaves early, just as the party is beginning to wind down, figuring he’ll drive out of the swamp ahead of the traffic jam. But when he tries to claim his car, he discovers that the valet parking system has completely broken.

“The car parkers are drunk. The boss has run for it. They stopped tagging the keys and the keys are piled in a huge heap. A thousand people are about to attempt to collect their cars. A hundred are already there shouting, ‘Where’s my keys?’ The locals are worrying about their Mercedes and Range Rovers and Aston Martins, and the tourists are trying to remember what color was the rental they got at the airport.

“The dropout thinks quick. He collars the one parking attendant not drunk but terrified, and he waves his last two hundred dollars under the kid’s nose: ‘Find the keys to my yellow Lamborghini and the dough is yours.’

“The attendant finds the keys, and the guy in the white suit with the expensive watch and the French accent drives away in a two-hundred-thousand-dollar automobile thinking he’s going to blast straight across the country—do not stop for girlfriend, do not look back—all the way to Beverly Hills, California, where rich women are kind to young Frenchmen in Lamborghinis.”

Sarkis stared at Janson. “Then what happened?”

“The kind of twist he couldn’t make up, except that’s the way life works, sometimes. The guy who owns the Lamborghini is a terrible, terrible person.”

“And chases him?”

“Was the guy who caught you the owner of the car?” Janson asked.

Sarkis’s eyes got even bigger. “Wait a minute! Was that you?”

“That was me and you never knew it until now, but I saved your life.”

Sarkis looked across the river where other generator-driven light clusters were popped up around the city like white fireworks. He said, as if describing a half-remembered dream, “Somehow you passed me in a stupid Honda and cut me off.”

“The Honda was customized. I knew how to drive fast. You didn’t.”

“You shined a light in my eyes. You asked to see my license. I thought you were a cop. But you didn’t ask for my registration. Then you took my keys and told me not to move. It was dark. I couldn’t see for sure, but I thought you were lying down under the car.”

“I was removing a radio-triggered explosive device so it wouldn’t blow your front wheel off and flip you into a swamp at eighty miles an hour.”

Sarkis digested that quickly. “An explosive device that you had attached?”

“Correct.”

“Why?”

“The owner was a terrible person. You were innocent. At least by comparison.”

“How did you know it was me, not him, driving?”

“I didn’t. I picked up the Lamborghini on the side road out of that development and followed, waiting for the right moment to blow the wheel. He had to be going fast, which you were, safely clear of other drivers, and next to water or some kind of drop-off he wouldn’t survive. When we reached such a spot and I was just about to key the signal, I realized something was off. The Lamborghini was all over the road. But the owner was not such a clumsy driver. Which meant the driver I was following was probably not the person I was supposed to, uh, kill.”

“You gave me back my license. You gave me the keys. You said, ‘Disappear. Get out of the state and don’t come back.’ You asked if I needed money. I said, ‘Yeah.’ You gave me a wad of twenties and hundreds– How did you know about Danbury and my parents?”

“I took your name off your license. You struck me as a guy who was going places—bent places—and I figured you’d come in handy some night. I checked you out and have kept track of you ever since. This morning I saw your picture in an article about Club Electric.”

“And tonight’s the night?”

“Tonight’s the night, Mike.”

“Mind me asking��”

“You’ve had your questions. Listen up. I need your help. You know everybody in Baghdad and everybody in Beirut, and everybody in Dubai. And more people than you should know in Kabul.”

“I own a nightclub. I know my patrons.”

Janson showed his teeth. “Don’t waste my time, Mike. I know who you are and what you’ve done.”

“The Lamborghini was years ago. I was a kid.”

“The Lamborghini was the beginning. You want to hear a story about Tehran? No? How about Kandahar. You’re still a U.S. citizen. They’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth.”

“I didn’t do anything in Kandahar anybody else didn’t do.”

“Mike, I don’t care. I’m not judge and jury. But I want what I want. And I’m not leaving Baghdad until you find for me a freelance outfit, possibly French, that can field a Harrier jump jet.”

NINETEEN

Two days later, Janson texted Jessica Kincaid a heads-up.

Not sar. SR. Securité Referral. Bad-guy rescue squad. Watch self. SR lethal.

He left Baghdad on an Austrian Airlines flight to Vienna.

A name was golden. A huge step forward. Securité Referral was an outfit that might or might not exist. It might or might not be French. If it did exist, it apparently served a unique clientele, dictators about to be toppled. Michel Sarkis claimed that he had no idea nor the means to find out who they were or where they were or how they ran their business, and Janson believed him.

Needless to say, Securité Referral did not maintain a Web site for dictators. Janson guessed they solicited their business by contacting their clients directly before they were needed. Convincing an autocrat he was about to be overthrown was tricky stuff, as such men would react violently to intimations of failure. But the smart ones who had planned ahead would be amenable to hearing out a rescue scheme. Such men would have sent fortunes abroad for just such an event, and such men would be very lucrative clients. No one ever went broke presiding over the collapse of an empire.

With a name to trace, Janson was ready to wheel out the big guns.

Striding through the new Skylink Terminal corridors to connect with another Austrian Airlines flight to Tel Aviv, he got an urgent text from Jessica. It was the first he had heard from her since she had reported in detail on their secure sat line her encounter with the “diver” and the weird conclusion that they were not the only ones the doctor was running from.

Doc mayb Cape Town. Can u intro SA security?

Janson sat-phoned Trevor Suzman, deputy national commissioner of the South African Police Service, to arrange a helpful welcome.

“And what do I get in return for this generosity?” Suzman asked.

“Interesting company.”

He texted the contact number Suzman gave him back to Jessica.

* * *

AT BEN GURION Airport, a brusque Israeli immigration officer with the face of a teenager and the close-cropped hair of recent military service scrutinized Janson’s Canadian passport. He waited calmly, maintaining a neutral expression. Security-services executive Adam Kurzweil was in their computers from previous visits. Unless there had been a monumental screwup with Kurzweil’s renewed passport, he would be welcomed as a free-spending outfitter of corporate security departments and private militias who did business with Israel’s enormous arms industry.

The officer asked to see the stub of his boarding pass.

Janson turned it over.

The officer typed on his keyboard, stared at his monitor, and abruptly wandered away, carrying Janson’s passport and boarding pass. This was fairly typical behavior on the part of officials at Ben Gurion Airport, and he could expect to be left standing awhile and/or even be grilled in an interview room about his background and his contacts in Israel.

It would turn into a problem, however, in the duplication lab that the Mossad, the Israel espionage service, maintained in the bowels of the airport. The Mossad was equipped not only to inspect the veracity of a document but also to clone it. The joke, a bad joke, would be an Israeli operator penetrating another nation under the cover of a forgery of Janson’s forged passport. Worse, no joke at all, would be the Mossad technicians discovering flaws in the document in the course of copying it.

The security cameras sprinkled in the ceiling were trained on the lines of the travelers awaiting entry and on each and every immigration desk. Janson let an expression of irritation cloud his face. He looked around impatiently and after a while longer began drumming his fingers on the desk, the picture of a busy man who, while he understood the need for security, was getting fed up. A full ten minutes passed. The lines behind him grew longer with this desk out of commission. Finally, the official returned with a superior, a woman about thirty who ordered Janson to follow her to an interview room. His passport was not in sight.

She sat behind a computer on a plain desk. He could not see the monitor, nor was there a chair for him. She typed and stared at the monitor. Janson studied her face: nice ears and nose, high tanned forehead, hair scrunched back tightly, mouth hard, eyes bleak. Central Casting, he thought, send me an unpleasant functionary.

“It’s been a while since you visited Israel, Mr. Kurzweil,” she said, addressing the monitor.

Janson said, “I’d have returned sooner, but my back surgeon ordered me to lift nothing heavier than a wineglass and it took considerable postoperative therapy before I could carry my bag.” It was hanging from his shoulder and had been searched repeatedly.

“And that is your only bag?” She looked offended by Kurzweil’s expensive lightweight parachute fabric trimmed with calfskin.

“I travel only with carry-on,” Janson answered, adding with a smile, “It gives the baggage security people less to worry about.”

The smile had no effect. “And what is your business on this visit?”

“Shopping.”

“For what?”

“Before I answer that, I wish to respectfully inform you that the government of Canada has followed the lead of the British Foreign Office and advised its citizens not to surrender travel documents to Israeli airport officials unless it is absolutely necessary.”

“It is absolutely necessary,” she shot back. “I repeat: What is your business on this visit?”

Janson spoke quietly. No one won a shouting match with an Israeli. That went triple for officials at Ben Gurion Airport. Nonetheless, he put an edge in his voice. “I do not want to hear of a passport identical to mine being carried by a member of a hit squad who resembles my photograph gunning for a Hamas leader.”

“If you are referring to an incident in Dubai distorted by the media, you are laboring under a common misconception.”

Israeli espionage could be very, very good or unbelievably clumsy. Most of the time the Mossad enjoyed quiet successes, but now and then it perpetrated clownish excesses, like sending twenty operators to murder one terrorist while allowing themselves to be caught for YouTube on security camera videos.

“Please return my passport.”

To Janson’s relief, the interviewer slid it out from under her keyboard and placed it on the desk in front of her. At least they weren’t cloning it while she stalled him. But she wasn’t exactly handing it back. She said, “What are you shopping for?”

“Submachine guns, light machine guns, and pistols.”

“For your government?”

“For my clients.”

“Who are?”

Tradecraft said, Trust your legend. As Paul Janson he’d be smooth. Adam Kurzweil was not smooth. Janson was unflappable. Kurzweil was a prickly son of a bitch. He reversed a heart-slowing exercise to speed it up. His face grew red.

“You’re out of line, lady, and you know it. You know who I am. You know I’ve come here before to conduct business. You’re jerking my chain for the hell of it.”

“Mr. Kurzweil, in the course of executing my responsibilities I can make your life considerably more unpleasant than a ‘jerked chain.’ ”

Janson raised his voice. “As if times weren’t tough enough already, Israel Weapon Industries faces fresh competition from China’s Norinco. Norinco wants my business, not to mention Serbian, Turkish, and Brazilian start-ups, who could teach even yourfactories a thing or two about bribery. IWI can make your life unpleasant, too. Not to mention your entire career.”

She stood abruptly, cold gaze fixed at a point in the middle of his forehead. “Welcome to Israel, Mr. Kurzweil.” She stamped an entry permit, instead of the passport—a routine dodge that allowed a businessman to enter the Arab nations that denied entry to those who had visited Israel.

He pocketed the Kurzweil passport. Then he surprised her with a warm Janson smile and a white lie of the sort that extinguished burning bridges: “Thank you. And may I say that if my schedule weren’t entirely booked I would invite you to dinner.”

A return smile made a hard mouth pretty. “If I weren’t married, I might accept.”

They shook hands. Janson rented a car and drove a short way from the airport to a high-end assisted-living complex in the Tel Aviv suburb of Nordiya. In the Mediterranean sunlight on a perfect June day it was a beautiful setting. Lush gardens and stands of palm trees surrounded cream-colored stucco apartment buildings that were crowned with red tile roofs and softened by waterfalls. A lavish clubhouse with flower boxes in its windows sprawled around a gigantic outdoor swimming pool.

Israel’s former Mossad operators could not ordinarily afford to end their days in the company of wealthily retired expatriate doctors, lawyers, and businessmen. But Miles Donner had more than his civil service pension to draw on, having worked his whole life under the cover of being a highly paid London-based travel photographer.

To Paul Janson, Miles Donner was “The Titan.”

“Better for a spy to be known for his failures than his successes,” Donner had taught Janson when Janson was in his twenties and Donner was sixty-five. “Best not to be known at all.”

No one had ever taught Janson more. No one knew as many secrets. Secrets came to Miles Donner and stuck to him like burrs on an aimlessly wandering sheep. But he was the original wolf under the sheepskin and had never spent an aimless moment in his long career serving Israel.

He had not looked like a titan, not with his soft face. Janson recalled sensitive features, full lips, warm eyes, and the easy, aloof manners of a middle-aged English gentleman who had prospered in the law or medicine. “Better to be underestimated than feared. Be soft. Surprise them with hard.”

The sight of a now-frail Donner struggling to his feet to greet him in the nursing home foyer stunned Janson. It had never occurred to him that time would diminish such a man. Oddly, though, Donner appeared less soft in frail old age, as if he no longer had the strength to conceal his nature. He was eighty-five, with wisps of white hair edging his bald dome, big ears, and an old man’s prominent nose. He wore glasses, now, black frame glasses. But he watched the way he always had, as if through two sets of eyes, one warm and smiling, the other, barely visible, focused like searchlights on his subject’s deepest thoughts.

“I have a surprise for you,” he said, in his upper-crust English accent. “Come along.” He disdained the elevator and walked unsteadily to the stairs. Janson instinctively went ahead to catch him if he fell. Donner noticed but did not remark on it. They walked slowly to the far end of the enormous swimming pool. At a table set off to one side in the shade of a cluster of palm trees sat two more men from Janson’s past. Grandig was younger than Miles, a vigorous seventy. Zwi Weintraub had to be at least ninety-five and looked it from his pinched cheeks to the oxygen tubes in his nostrils.

“Young Saul,” he greeted Janson. “You don’t look a day over eighty.”

“And you look like you could give Methuselah a run for his money.” Janson took Weintraub’s tiny hand in his. “How are you, sir?”

“I’ve stopped buying oxygen bottles in bulk.”

Grandig shook hands with a fist still hard. “And how am I, thank you for asking? Fine if I could trade in my skeleton. Or at least the aches.”

“Don’t start with the organ recitals,” Miles said with a benign smile. “Paul, when you telephoned that you had questions, I thought, who better to answer them than the Stern Gang?”

“I didn’t know they were still in business.”

“You thought we were dead,” cackled Weintraub. “We’re not; we just look that way.” And Grandig said, gesturing at the opulent surroundings, “Who could resist an invitation to spend even one hour in Miles’s splendid quarters?”

Janson had met them when he was a freshly recruited, probationary Consular Operations officer posted to the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. He was supposed to liaise with the Mossad. But the CIA, habitually at war with the State Department’s Cons Ops, had skillfully undermined him, whispering to key Israelis that Janson’s mission was to spy on the Mossad. The Mossad shoved him out of the way by assigning him to a marginalized unit of older men who had lost a power struggle within the Israeli spy agency.

They had nicknamed him “The Kid,” the only time in his life Janson had been called that, having grown into a man’s body by age fourteen. But in the presence of Zionist veterans who had fought the British and the Arabs on the battlefield, outfoxed them in Israel’s spy wars, and hunted Al Fatah and Black September terrorists to the death, Janson had felt very much “The Kid.” Interestingly, he had discovered there was no Israeli word, Hebrew or Yiddish, to express that American phrase for a young man invited into a circle of older practitioners; but the native-born Israeli sabras and even English Miles had grown up on American movies and peppered their speech with screenplay slang.

Janson had realized the second he reported that he had been knocked out of the loop. Weintraub, their commander, had been seventy-five years old. Of their so-called field agents, Donner was nearly sixty-five, and Grandig, the youngest, was pushing fifty. They knew they were out of the loop.

“Welcome to the Stern Gang,” they had greeted him, explaining that the original Stern Gang had been a radical branch of the Irgun during World War Two, frequently jailed by the British and shunned by their fellow Zionists as too radical. Avraham Stern himself had ended up shot.

“You’ve pissed someone off for sure, young Janson,” Weintraub had said.

“Or scared the hell out of them,” Miles ventured. “Either way, you had better get used to Siberia.”

Janson had pulled every one of the few strings he had in those days to try to get out of it, but to no avail. He was liaison to the Stern Gang and would be for his entire time in Israel if the CIA had any say in the matter, and they did.

Donner, old Weintraub, and Grandig had treated him kindly. It was easy to see that the young American was going stir-crazy, and they invited him on excursions to “come shooting” at a military firing range. Janson was Army Ranger trained already and had received early doses of Cons Ops instruction. But there were assassin gun tricks he hadn’t known yet. Similarly, when the old men arranged for him to work out with close-combat instructors the Jewish Krav Maga techniques had opened him to huge new possibilities in hand-to-hand fighting. To see his grandfatherly comrades in action was a revelation that still served him.

Would he like to see the Mossad’s explosives school? They had accompanied him there repeatedly, admitted with a wink and a grin by young officers deeply loyal to their former bosses. They took him to “the kitchen,” where Mossad scientists concocted antidotes for exotic poisons. And to “the paperworks,” where passports, visas, and credit cards were fabricated.

Janson had been grateful. He would have gone nuts without the excursions. Only gradually had it dawned on him that he was not being taught so much as tested.

He said so.

Donner didn’t blink an eye. “You’ve passed with flying colors,” he replied. “How would you like to join a rogue operation?”

“What kind of rogue operation?”

“Less Shakespeare’s ‘sweet little rogue’ than savage-elephant rogue.”

“Without my bosses at State knowing?”

“Without any bosses knowing.”

“Not even the Mossad.”

“Especially the Mossad.”

“You guys are almost retired. I’m just starting out. Why would I risk my entire future on a rogue operation?”

“Shall we take a walk?”

Donner and Weintraub took him on a long hike in the desert. Deep in the Negev, far from anywhere, without a house or road in sight, the British-born spy and the old sabra commando had taken turns patting him down for a wire. They did it without apology.

It occurred to Janson that they didn’t completely trust their friend Grandig. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“We are faced with a problem. You can help us.”

“What kind of problem?” asked Janson.

“A South African problem.”

Back then the white South Africa dictatorship was vigorously defending apartheid but losing to the African National Congress and world opinion. After suppressing the black majority for generations, it was only a matter of time before the pariah regime went under. Janson had fixed his mentor—for Miles was surely that by now, more than any he had had—with an inquiring gaze and told him that he was familiar with the rumors about Israeli–South African collaboration and had always assumed them to be overblown.

Donner had replied, “Israel would not have an arms industry if we hadn’t had South Africa as our main customer.”

“How can a Jewish nation fought for by the survivors of the genocide of the Nazi Holocaust deal with a police state that invented apartheid—which is no better than another form of state-sponsored oppression?”

“The South Africans saved us.”

“President Vorster was a Nazi. Botha wasn’t much better.”

Miles waggled his hand in a yes-no gesture. “Regardless of your opinion of those gentlemen—and I believe the world will discover that F. W. de Klerk is cut of different cloth—white South African gold and white South African diamonds paid for Israel to develop our high-tech weapons. We had the scientists. They had the means.”

“But black—”

Miles cut him off harshly. “At the end of the day, my young friend, we discover what will we do to save ourselves.”

“What will we do to advance ourselves?”

The Titan had laughed. “There is the paradox. You say to save ourselves we must advance ourselves. Very American—full of moral hope—until you run into the paradox. First we must save ourselves or there will be nothing to advance.”

Janson had heard that same argument on various issues in the State Department. His reactions—and people’s reactions to his reactions—sometimes made him feel like a preacher at an orgy. It would take him years to become more supple, but even then a hard edge on his deepest beliefs made it impossible to succumb fully to compromise. Or, he supposed, had left him brittle.

“What does this have to do with me?”

“Among the weapons Israel developed is an atomic bomb.”

“I know that. I am young, not ignorant.”

“Young and aggressive.”

“Aggression is a fine quality in an operator,” said Weintraub.

“Not when he waves it like a flag,” Donner had snapped back with uncharacteristically visible passion that young Janson had felt aimed straight at him. In that moment he understood that The Titan believed that Paul Janson possessed the intellect and personality, as well as the physical gifts, to be taught to excel in the highest ranks of the clandestine world.