Текст книги "Robert Ludlum's The Janson Command"

Автор книги: Robert Ludlum

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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 Fantasyfor 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 inside 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.

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 adiosto 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.”

“ Frenchmercenaries?”

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.

“Why did she leave?” He recalled a younger, athletic woman with a warm smile, a ripe body, and erotic eyes that rarely left Kruger’s face.

“She said I took her for granted.”

“Any chance of getting her back?”

Kruger shook his head. “In my experience, when you lose your glow in the eyes of a woman it does not rekindle.… She was right. Sort of. I didn’t mean to take her for granted. But I was working harder than ever. Traveling more. Hugely distracted.”

“By what?”

“Drones. Everyone wants them. Few have them.”

“Like Predators? Reapers?”

“The smaller stuff. The Israelis are making some amazing machines. The Chinese are trying. Russians, of course.”

“With Reaper capability?”

“Small rockets, perhaps. Not the big stuff.”

“Take out tanks?”

“No, no, no. But they’ll make short work of a terrorist in an SUV. Or a parliamentary rival in a Mercedes. Guidance is the big problem. If you don’t have your own cloud of satellites like the U.S., you’re juggling rented satellite space with all the discombobulation that can breed, not to mention deeply compromised security. A drone can be a big disappointment if an enemy hacker redirects it back at you.”

“Have you ever heard of a Reaper or a Predator in private hands?”

“A real one? No way.”

“It would have to be government, wouldn’t it?” Janson asked.

“ United Statesgovernment.”

* * *

JANSON CAUGHT THE tram at the Oerlikon station and was back at the Hauptbahnhof minutes later. He took an overnight train to Belgrade and had breakfast with a Serbian militia contractor, a former army officer who had built a business supplying brilliantly trained bodyguards capable of offensive operations.

But the Serb knew nothing. The trip to Belgrade was a waste of time. Other than Neal Kruger’s speculation about some sort of “French Connection.” Paul Janson was no closer to discovering the source of the jump jet, no closer to picking up the trail of the escaped Iboga.

He took a ramshackle taxi to the airport, not sure what next, thinking maybe Paris. On the way, scanning the New York Timeson his cell, he caught a lucky break—an unexpected opportunity to call in a valuable debt. Instead of flying to Paris, he boarded a Turkish Airlines flight to Baghdad.