Текст книги "Robert Ludlum's The Janson Command"

Автор книги: Robert Ludlum

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THIRTY-FOUR

The only problem with heroin was getting it. With a consistent supply it was a very fine drug. Snort it and nothing ever hurt, particularly when a man’s brain spun every day of his life like a turbine, always at full speed, consuming his mind and soul and spirit faster than Abrams battle tanks burned kerosene. Heroin put the brakes on for a moment, long enough to recharge and come out swinging. It helped not to have an addictive nature and it was vital to understand that only losers shot up with needles. Many in the veterans hospital spiraled down from lesser drugs into heroin. He had ascended.

It was night. Almost.

Doug Case had been talking nonstop on his sat phone since the sun was high in the sky. Seated in his wheelchair, staring out his office window at the sea of electric lights that the vast, powerful city of Houston spread from horizon to horizon, he felt neither pain nor anxiety but increasingly in charge of what had started out as a bad situation.

His phone rang. He answered, saying, “Did you get the plane?”

“C-160 Transall twin-engine turboprop.”

“What color?”

“Well, there’s a little problem with that. It’s camo, like you asked, but blue.”

“I told you camo green.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Camo green! I don’t care how you do it. Paint it or get another one. Camo green. Standing by tomorrow.”

Case stabbed END. He weighed the relaxing prospect of doing a line or two against the possibility of nodding off at a crucial moment. He decided not to. Drugs were not addictive. Losers were.

He endured ten full minutes of quiet and was sick of the lack of action when his phone finally rang again. He guessed who it was before he checked the screen and was right. The Voice. Clockwork, every five days. He doubted that the caller recognized his own pattern.

“Hello, Strange Voice,” Case answered. “How are you tonight? If it is night where you are.”

“You sound very chipper, Douglas. How are you?”

The caller’s voice was disguised. The sound emitted by his telephone was digitally morphed by a voice transformation system originally developed for psychological warfare and to fool voiceprint ID systems. Case recalled it from his early days at Cons Ops. Digitization, miniaturization, new understanding of articulatory position, and software advances from VTS1 to VTS14.8 had improved it mightily. It enabled the caller to change timbre, transpose pitch, add confusing vibrato and tremolo—even capture and synthesize signals to generate impersonations. The Voice could sound like a robot. He could sound like a little girl. He could sound like Jon Stewart or Hillary Clinton. Tonight he sounded like a cross between Stewart and WALL•E.

The Voice’s phone line was secure. It revealed nothing to Case about his identity or where he was calling from. Nor, Case presumed, did the caller necessarily know where he was, such was the anonymity of cells and sat phones. The difference was that if The Voice asked for Case’s location he would reveal it immediately. While Case would not dream of asking where the caller was.

Case presumed the caller was from within the American Synergy Corporation, high in management—one of the vipers, most likely—or on the board of directors, or the mysterious Buddha himself. Though he could be from outside the corporation, he had a very clear concept of what was going on inside it. Case had received his first call two years ago. “You were the most talented covert officer ever to serve your country,” The Voice had flattered him. “Serve me and be rewarded.”

Their relationship had already made Case the wealthiest man he knew and, he suspected, a man with a golden future if he stayed loyal, obedient, useful, and discreet.

“I amchipper, thank you, sir. What can I do for you?”

“I want a member of Ferdinand Poe’s circle replaced.”

“By whom?”

“First create the vacancy.”

“When?”

“Soon. Be prepared.”

“Who?”

The Voice named Ferdinand Poe’s chief of staff, Mario Margarido.

The steady Margarido was the glue that held Ferdinand Poe’s ramshackle new government together while it struggled to repair infrastructure and right the economy of the war-torn island. With Margarido suddenly gone, the acting president’s only strength left would be his spy turned security chief, Patrice da Costa, and his own formidable will. Case wondered if The Voice was planning a coup. To ask would be presumptuous. Better to remain loyal, useful, obedient, and discreet.

“Do you have any preference how Margarido is removed?”

“It would be best not to have him machine-gunned in public.”

Case recognized the studied sort of dry sense of humor calculated to flatter the knowledgeable listener on his sophistication and to pass on additional information without saying it aloud.

“Beyond that limitation, use your best judgement. The least suspicion the better, but a soupçon of doubt will keep others guessing.”

It sounded very much like a coup. “I’ll take care of it. As soon as you want it done.”

“I will give you word when the time comes. Will you farm it out to SR?”

Case hesitated. “I’m not sure. Events have sped up. Surprisingly.”

“Do you sense a problem with SR?”

This time Case did not hesitate. There was a fine line between obedience and partnership. Trust spawned partnership, and whoever The Voice was, Case’s long-term hope was to become his partner. Money was one thing—a fine thing—but power was another on a whole higher scale. Case answered honestly, admitting his worst fear about contracting Securité Referral to perform black work.

“My original impression of SR was that of a criminal cartel of top-notch ex-operatives who accept the value of submitting to an independent, stand-alone operation that answers only to itself.”

In the interest of stoking an atmosphere of partnership, Doug Case paused to let The Voice lead their conversation. The Voice jumped right in with a second dose of dry humor.

“Qualities that only the best corporations demand. They sound wonderful. What’s the problem?”

“My one worry was that they might see Isle de Foree as a transit base for South American drugs smuggled to Europe. Would they seize the opportunity to create a narco-state?”

“A natural concern. Nonstate actors are certainly the future. Launch a fleet of retired 727s to fly the Atlantic between Latin America and Isle de Foree, transit cocaine and weapons to West Africa, then across the Sahara into Europe. It’s only a matter of time until organized crime claims a nation.”

“But I expected that once ASC took control of Isle de Foree we’d have no trouble stopping SR from acting.”

“Eliminating competition is a perk, shall we say, of dominating a sovereign nation. He who dominates first wins. What has changed?”

“SR has changed. They’re more ambitious.”

“Or did you underestimate them?” The Voice, Case knew from their conversations, could wield language like a knife between the ribs.

“Frankly, I did underestimate SR. I failed to ask how SR happened to be on the scene, already. I thought they were just supplying mercenary trainers.”

“When,” demanded The Voice, “did you realize that you had underestimated them?”

“When they rescued Iboga.”

“I was under the impression that we—that you—had hired SR to rescue Iboga. I thought that was rather slick on your part.”

“I wish I could take credit for the rescue. But I cannot. It’s clear now that SR convinced Iboga ahead of time that he might need rescuing. And it is clear, too, that SR has all along seen Iboga as their best bet to own Isle de Foree. They rescued him to reinstall him in a future coup.”

“I am beginning to understand,” the Voice said, “why you sense a problem with Securité Referral.”

“I’m afraid they smell the potential of Isle de Foree’s petroleum reserve.”

“Goddamned right they do! Did it ever occur to you that SR took the Amber Dawnjob to keep the reserve discovery quiet for them, too?”

“Belatedly, sir.”

“Oil is a hell of a lot more valuable than drugs. Oil is the foundation of a legitimate state. Narcocracies are pariah nations, shunned, sanctioned, preached against. But no sovereign nation that exports oil will ever be treated like a pariah. No matter how much so-called legitimate states bitch and complain to the United Nations.”

Doug Case did not reply. He could only hope at this juncture that silence would work his will.

The Voice said, “If you engage SR to take out Poe’s chief of staff, SR will know ahead of time the precise moment they’d have the best shot of taking over.”

“From under our noses,” Case agreed, seizing the opportunity to inject the word “our.”

“The last thing we want is a goddamned coup we didn’t organize. You better engage someone else to remove the chief of staff.”

“You’re absolutely right, sir,” said Case.

By playing it straight, by admitting his mistakes, by allowing, encouraging, goading The Voice to parade a superior intellect, Case had won a “we.”

“I presume that a former covert officer with your background who has maintained his contacts has another crew in mind.”

“Standing by.”

THIRTY-FIVE

A hundred feet above the Tyrrhenian Sea on a moonless night Paul Janson could not see the cable that tethered his parachute to the RIB churning toward the Vallicone peninsula, nor could he see the rubber boat itself, though he could see the frothy white propeller wash spewed by its muffled engine.

Daniel, the former SEAL, was driving. The Corsican helping Daniel steer around the rocks, Adolfo, was a fisherman who was wearing patched blue jeans, ragged sneakers, and the first expensive, brand-new garment he had owned in his life, a light-absorbent Gore-Tex windbreaker black as midnight, a gift from CatsPaw Associates. Adolfo knew where the rocks lay just below the waves, making him currently the most valuable of the twenty men Janson had recruited to snatch Iboga from Securité Referral.

Janson no longer doubted that Iboga was holed up on the peninsula. Nationalist separatists already plotting an attack in the mistaken belief that the new residents were building a gated resort had reported at yesterday’s midnight meeting that they had seen Isle de Foree’s deposed president for life angrily pacing the grounds of the main house. Sanglier gigantesque, they had described him. A giant wild boar.

Janson kept his attack plan simple: a classic razzle-dazzle to give the SR operators guarding Iboga a strong motive to retreat, first by destroying their outer defenses—the machine-gun positions blocking the road—next by taking away their ability to escape with Iboga, their helicopter,  and finally, before they hunkered down to fight like cornered rats, by puting terror in their hearts so they would scatter, deserting Iboga in a chaotic every-man-for-himself rout.

The passenger harness dangling beside Janson held a deep wicker basket that carried his weapons: a pump shotgun; a beautiful old matte-black Bushmaster rented from the Porto-Vecchio family of Union Corse; and two rocket propelled grenade launchers supplied by Neal Kruger’s man on the island.

A soft tskin Janson’s headset told him Kincaid was in position with the outer blockhouse in her sights, waiting for the first explosion.

* * *

AT THE POINT where the Vallicone peninsula began its mile-long perpendicular thrust from the shore into the sea, two strong Corsicans dragged a large black duffel bag through the dense brush, stirring aromas of lavender, rosemary, and thyme from snapping twigs. They navigated in the dark by keeping the rumble of breaking waves to their left and the stiff offshore wind in their faces and prayed that the noise of wind and sea would prevent the guards with their .50-caliber machine guns from hearing them.

These two Corsicans were familiar with every hectare of the quarter-mile-wide peninsula, from these fields to the higher ground at the seaward end where the main house, outbuildings, and broad lawns perched on the cliffs. Born and raised nearby, they had poached game on the peninsula since they were boys with the same shotguns they had strapped to their backs. When, at a distance of three hundred meters, they saw the faint silhouette of the first stone hut that guarded the single-track road, they unzipped their duffel bag and spread out the contents: a high-capacity gasoline-powered air pump and a large sheet of plastic fabric that looked like the makings of a tent but was in fact an inflatable decoy.

* * *

“GO!” JANSON SAID into his lip mike.

Daniel opened the throttle and the RIB increased speed. Janson felt the parachute rise higher, whisking him above the loom of the land. He tugged the elevator lines attached to the lifting slots in back of the canopy and it shot up another hundred feet.

He pulled his panoramic digital sensor-fusion/enhanced night-vision goggles over his eyes. The surface of the peninsula appeared green, the radar dome a dull circle, the house and the helicopter darker. He saw a flicker of tiny bright figures—the infrared enhancement of flesh and blood.

SR fighters were running from the house to the helicopter.

Janson found it hard to believe that Securité Referral’s radar was sensitive enough to detect the almost nonexistent targets presented by the parasail and his body. More likely, a guard had stepped outside the house and heard the RIB’s motor. But whatever it was had raised the alarm.

Janson drew a grenade launcher from the basket beside him. Choppier seas near the cliffs were rocking the boat and jerking the towline. The parachute shook. He targeted the helicopter and fired. The flash from the fiery rocket motor ignition reflected on the thirty-foot canopy of parachute cloth above his head. The high-explosive fragmentation warhead dropped short of the helicopter and exploded on the ground.

He had missed a direct hit and could only hope that the flying fragments of shrapnel that scattered the fighters had put some serious holes in the helicopter. Janson dropped the empty launcher into the sea and grabbed the second. The SR fighters stopped running, scanned the sky, having been alerted by the flash, and started firing pistols and bullpup rifles in his direction.

* * *

THE CORSICANS IN charge of inflating the decoy did not hesitate when they heard Janson’s first grenade, though now came the dangerous part, starting the noisy gas-powered air pump. They positioned the exhaust pipe facing away from the blockhouse, stood in front of it to further muffle the racket, crossed themselves, loosened their shotguns, and jerked the start cord.

The motor started on the first pull. It didn’t sound as loud as they had feared and the plastic began to inflate. In seconds, it ballooned into the massive shape of a full-size T-90 battle tank. Invented by the Russian Army to confuse enemy reconnaissance satellites and intelligence operators on the ground, the decoy’s plastic fabric was impregnated with chemicals that reflected targets to both radar and thermal-imaging devices.

They felt in the dark for the tie-downs and knotted them around shrubs before the wind could pick the thing up and blow it away. When the Corsicans were sure they had it securely tied down, they slithered away through the brush, putting as much distance as they could between themselves and the balloon.

* * *

THE SERB MERCENARIES guarding Securité Referral’s first blockhouse had no radar repeater in their position, but they had thermal imaging and night glasses and a night scope for their Dushka.

What they saw three hundred meters out in the dark was the chilling silhouette of a Russian T-90 battle tank complete with a 135mm smoothbore cannon jutting from its turret. Lesser men would have run for their lives. These were Serbs with long years of bloody history behind them, and while they knew it would ultimately prove futile, if not lethal, they opened fire with the forlorn hope of a lucky shot penetrating a view slit.

A blizzard of armor-piercing half-inch bullets crossed the maquis and tore through the balloon. To the Serbs’ astonishment, the “tank” jumped in the air, sagged weirdly, and then collapsed flat on the ground. For a second they couldn’t believe their eyes. Then, through their night glasses, they saw plastic flapping in the wind.

“Balloon!”

“Balloon!”

They started laughing but quickly sobered. Someone was out there, someone who would pay dearly. They dragged their machine gun out of the confines of the stone hut so they could pivot the barrel in every direction and began traversing the dark.

* * *

“THANK YOU, GENTLEMEN,” whispered Jessica Kincaid.

At five hundred meters a child could disable the machine gun with her Knight’s sniper rifle braced on a bipod. She sighted in on the Dushka’s feed mechanism and touched her trigger. The Serbs jumped like circus clowns and looked everywhere at once for the source of the sudden change in their situation. To be positive that she had reduced the machine gun to scrap metal, Kincaid fired again, destroying its dual triggers.

By now, the Serbs knew they were in the sights of a sharpshooter.

Brave, but not fools, they ran inside the stone blockhouse.

Kincaid ran, too. Scooping up the fifteen-pound Knight’s, glassing the rough ground through her panoramic goggles, she charged full speed deep into the peninsula, hunting for SR’s second machine gun.

* * *

PAUL JANSON TRIGGERED his second grenade. The rocket ignition lit him up again, but before the SR men could concentrate their fire the grenade spiraled into the helicopter. It exploded, thunderously. The shock wave lifted the parachute several feet and blew out all the windows in the house. Janson immediately grabbed the Bushmaster and the shotgun and pounded the quick release on his harness.

As he fell, he jerked the rip cord of a landing chute strapped to his back. It popped open; he steered as far as he could from the SR men who could see his new chute by the light of the fireball consuming the helicopter.

* * *

KINCAID STRUGGLED THROUGH thorny brush to the top of a low rise. When she spotted the second blockhouse, a stone hut similar to the first, she flung herself flat and planted the Knight’s bipod. She flipped back her goggles and got the blockhouse in her sights, but before she could acquire the DShK itself, it acquired her and the once-heard, never-forgotten earsplitting din of a stream of .50-caliber bullets was bracketing her head.

“Fuck!”

Alerted by the explosions and the roar of their sister gun up the road, the SR gunners must have been looking for whoever had started the battle to blunder into their field of fire. She slid backward down the rise, dragging the Knight’s with her, and tore madly to the right even as the Dushka got the range and gouged holes in the ground where she’d been one second before.

She knew two ways to deal with them. One would be to leave the Knight’s and advance through the brush with pistol and knife. But that would take way too long. She had to find a new shooting position, fast. Bursts of small-caliber gunfire in the distance told her that Janson had his hands full at the house. And silence behind told her that the Corsican contingents were sensibly waiting for the all clear.

She pulled on her panoramics again and inspected the lay of the land. It was less flat than at the beginning of the peninsula and offered more shooting positions, but each of those would be visible to the men manning the Dushka. She kept crawling to the right, taking care not to shake tall bushes that the machine gunners could see. A tree, one of the very few, appeared in her vision. She slithered to it and got the Knight’s in approximate position before she raised her head to look around it.

A burst of fire cut the tree in half, hurling splinters and dropping the top to the ground. Son of a bitch! Of course they were watching the tree nearest her last position, waiting for a dumb football clod like her to crawl to it. This time she stayed where she was, counting the twenty seconds it would take to crawl with the gun to the next likely position. Then she eased the Knight’s muzzle under the fallen trunk, swiftly found the Dushka in her scope, and fired once, smashing the machine gun’s bolt chamber.

She had to hand it to the SR guys. They had balls. With their weapon blown out of commission, both came charging into the brush, fixing to hunt her down. They were well trained, too. They spread apart, a smart by-the-book tactic to put a sniper at a disadvantage. Forced to slew the rifle from side to side to acquire widely separated targets in the night scope, she might miss both. They came fast, leaping through the brush, the taller one pulling ahead.

Kincaid shot the one behind him first. That bought her precious seconds. Before the leader realized that the man behind him had fallen and dove for cover, she found him in her crosshairs.

* * *

TSK! SHARP IN Kincaid’s earpiece.

“What.”

“I could use a hand.”

That was the closest Janson had ever come to asking her for help.

“Would you settle for the French Foreign Legion?” she asked.

“As soon as the road is clear.”

“It’s clear.”

“Good girl! Bring ’em on.”

* * *

A LOW-SLUNG SHERPA 4x4 personnel carrier raced up the peninsula’s narrow road, closely trailed by a heavy Renault TRM 10000 6x6 truck swaying on the bends. The convoy stopped in sight of the house where the burning helicopter cast garish light on trampled gardens and shattered windows.

A bullet-headed sergeant leaped from the Sherpa bellowing orders. The Renault’s canvas sides flew open. Squads wearing green berets, drab fatigues, and jump boots piled out of both vehicles and fixed bayonets to FAMAS-1 rifles.

Some of the mercenaries defending the building had encountered the fearsome Legionnaires of the Deuxième Régiment Étranger des Parachutistes rapid-intervention unit in North Africa and the Ivory Coast—an experience none wished to repeat. Those few threw their guns out the windows. The rest protested angrily in a polyglot chorus of French, Russian, Chinese, Afrikaner, and English, “Fight, you cowards.”

“You couldn’t pay me enough,” said a big Australian who stepped through the bullet-riddled front door with his hands in the air.

A Russian raised a pistol and took deliberate aim at his back.

A Chinese smashed the pistol to the floor with his assault rifle, breaking the Russian’s arm.

* * *

THE SR TROOPS guarding Iboga had been disarmed and herded into the Renault before they heard the distant wail of police sirens on the mainland. They exchanged puzzled glances when their captors splashed gasoline on the high grass and brush downwind of the house, ignited it with a thermal grenade, and cheered like banshees. But only when they threw their berets into the jagged flames did the SR men realize that they had been taken by a gang of separatists, displaced fishermen, Union Corse, thieves, ecologists, and arsonists disguised as the French Foreign Legion.

* * *

JESSICA KINCAID WAS sprinting up the road when she saw the fire coming her way. The brush was dry and the sea wind strong, fanning the fire into twin walls of flame divided by the narrow road. She saw immediately that it was moving too fast to outrun. She poured her water bottle on her sleeve, breathed through the wet cloth, clutched her Knight’s close, and ran between the fiery walls.

She burst through the last of it, coughing and gagging, straight into the powerful arms of Freddy Ramirez, who smothered the flames on her backpack with his gloves. “You okay?”

“Terrific. Where’s Janson?”

“In the house. Tell him the hoist is rigged.”

She found Janson rummaging through the arsenal the SR had left behind in the house’s library. “Ran out of grenades. You all right?”

“Woulda been nice if someone told me burning the place down was part of the plan.”

“Sorry about that. The Corsicans got caught up in the moment.”

“Where’s Iboga?”

“Barricaded in the wine cellar with the senior Securité Referral guy. Just spoke to Ondine. We have about ten minutes to get him down to the boat before the gendarmerie rustle up a helicopter.”

He snatched up a stun grenade and led her down the stairs to a stone-walled basement. The wine cellar was behind an oaken door. Splintery holes pocked the wood. “He shoots when you talk to him,” Janson explained. “President Iboga!”

A slug tore through the wood and smacked into the opposite wall.

“Who’s shooting? Iboga or the SR guy?”

“Hard to tell.”

Kincaid called, “Iboga!” A woman’s voice was not expected.

“Who is there?” Iboga’s voice was deep, guttural, and slurred. “Who are you? What is going on?”

“He sounds drunk.”

“He’s in a wine cellar.”

“Who? Who? Speak, woman!”

Kincaid shouted back, “We’re not exactly friends. But we guarantee you safe passage to the World Court in The Hague!”

Janson and Kincaid flung themselves back as another slug splintered the door. Janson handed Kincaid the stun grenade, leveled his Bushmaster at the knob, and flicked the fire selector to AUTO. But before he could blast the lock, they heard angry shouts inside, then another gunshot, which didn’t penetrate the door, then a heavy thud.

“They’re fighting,” said Kincaid.

“We need him alive or Isle de Foree will never see their money. Ready!”

“Go!”

Janson triggered the full 20-shot magazine into the lock. Even with the suppressor, the noise was deafening in the confined space. Kincaid kicked the door. It sagged open and she whipped her arm back to underhand the stun grenade.

“Hold it!” said Janson.

Two men were struggling on the stone floor, Iboga, the three-hundred-pound giant, on top, with his hands on the throat of the man under him and his sharpened teeth tearing at his face. Iboga’s opponent was pounding him with powerful blows to his belly and groin. They appeared evenly matched in ferocity and combat skills and it was hard to tell who would win. Iboga’s superior weight was offset by his age. He appeared to be fifty or so, while the powerful man under him was less than thirty.

“Look at his arm,” said Janson.

Kincaid saw the bandage and breathed an astonished, “Jesus H.” She drew her pistol and jammed the barrel to his head. “Fight’s over, Van Pelt. Break it up.”

Janson pressed the Bushmaster to Iboga’s head.“Let go!”

The two separated violently, Iboga backhanding Van Pelt’s nose as he loosened his grip on the mercenary’s throat, Van Pelt rolling out from under with a boot to Iboga’s groin that doubled the former dictator into a fetal crouch, gasping for breath.

Janson flipped Iboga on his belly, swiftly cuffed his hands behind his back, and hauled him to his feet. “We’re outta here.”

“Stop!” said Van Pelt. Blood was streaming from his cheek.

Janson said, “Try to follow us, you’re a dead man.” He pulled a second set of steel cuffs from his windbreaker and tossed them to Kincaid. “Lock him to that,” Janson said, pointing at a massive iron ring in the floor and covering him with the Bushmaster.

Van Pelt jerked his hands away. Kincaid moved like lightning, slapping one cuff around Van Pelt’s ankle and the other to the ring. Van Pelt’s eyes slid toward a pistol he or Iboga had dropped in their fight. Kincaid kicked it out of Van Pelt’s reach.

Van Pelt pointed a finger in her face. He was trembling with rage. “I’m warning you. Don’t cross SR.”

“You’re warning me? You’re warning me!”

“Jess!”

“Right. We’re outta here. Come on, President for Life. We’re going for a boat ride.”

“I’m warning you!” Van Pelt screamed.

“Warn the French police,” Janson said. “They’ll be here any minute.”

“I know who you are,” said Van Pelt.

“No, you don’t,” Janson said, herding Iboga out the door. The former dictator was limping and half doubled over, still gasping.

“I know who you are!”

“You thinkyou know me. You don’t.”

“I know about the do-gooding.”

Janson paused in the doorway. “What?”

Van Pelt said, “Iboga is my client. Return him to me immediately.”

Kincaid pushed back into the cellar, eyes hot, nostrils flaring. “And if we don’t?”

“Secure Iboga,” Janson ordered softly. “Pat him down. He’s got a ton of pockets in that bush jacket. Confiscate everything—weapons, phone, money, passport—everything on his person. I’ll take care of this.… Do it!”

“Yes, sir.” She backed out the door.

“Answer her question,” said Janson. “If we don’t return your client? What will you do? Report us to the police? Press charges for delivering a bloodthirsty dictator to the World Court to stand trial for crimes against humanity? Go ahead. We’ll be long gone. You’ll still be nailed to the floor.”

Hadrian Van Pelt stood to his full height. His bloodied face was tight with rage, but it was controlled rage. “I give you one final warning,” he said with deep conviction. “If you do not return Securité Referral’s client this minute, we will hound you to the ends of the earth. You will stare over your shoulders for the rest of your lives. You will be so busy struggling to stay alive that you will never do a do-gooding job again.”

“Who will lead this hounding? You?”

“Believe me.”

“I believe you,” said Paul Janson. “You leave me no choice.”

He picked up the fallen pistol and aimed it at Van Pelt’s head.

Van Pelt laughed at him. “A do-gooder would pull the trigger on a man chained to the floor?”

“Twice.”

Van Pelt stopped laughing. His lips turned white. “Twice?”

“As assassins are trained to,” said Paul Janson. He did it so fast that the two shots sounded almost like one.