Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Janson Option (Paul Janson) Page 4

  “Are you still in the game?”

  “I do security consulting to fund Phoenix.”

  “That must be a big outfit.”

  “I don’t do big. I don’t trust more than two people in one swept room.”

  “Two?”

  “Me and a sniper.”

  “Corporate security? How can two do the job?”

  “We have specialists on call.” With its operators linked by the Internet, encrypted websites, and secure phones, and contracted on a job-by-job basis, Janson explained, succinctly—without giving up secrets—Catspaw Associates was essentially a virtual organization with no expensive physical installations to be maintained and few vulnerable employees to be defended. “From a bad-guy point of view, we don’t exist—and you just had your last question.”

  Chin said, “From what I’ve seen of Phoenix—docs, nurses, facilities—you must charge a ton to pay the bills.”

  “Our clients can afford it.”

  “So you’re a mercenary?”

  It was meant as an insult. Janson ignored it.

  Chin took another shot. “So when you straighten out guys like me, we’re supposed to re-up in your private army?”

  Janson pinned him with the strangest gaze. Chin had always thought of cold eyes as empty, devoid of emotion. Janson’s were not empty. They glistened with passion. The dude cared. But they were still the coldest eyes he had ever seen.

  “If an operator returns to federal service, of course I’ll tap him for intelligence. How he responds is up to him. Nobody owes Phoenix. Nobody owes me.”

  “Bullshit. I would owe you the moon and the stars if you put my head straight.”

  “Pay the next guy.”

  “Yeah, but let’s say a guy wanted to join your private army.”

  Janson’s glance nearly broke Chin’s heart. It told him that Phoenix would be there for him as long as he needed help, but it would be a long, hard slog to regain the edge—and trust—to be invited to repay the favor with fieldwork. Trying not to sound bitter, but knowing he did, Denny Chin said, “You mean guys break down, again, even doing ‘corporate security’?”

  “None yet. We operate by rules we never need to lie about.”

  “What rules?”

  “No torture. No killing anyone who doesn’t try to kill us. No civilians in the cross fire.”

  “Fann-tass-tic. What do you call them, Janson Rules?”

  “It’s not a fantasy.”

  “Not a fantasy? What the fuck is it? A dream?”

  Janson surprised the shattered operator with a grin as optimistic as it was unexpected. “I have nothing against dreams.”

  Denny Chin laughed and shook his dreadlocks. “Shit, man…How’d you get into the saving business?”

  “Operator I served with dove off the roof of our Singapore embassy. Forgot he trained as a paratrooper. Landed about as good as you can.”

  “How’d he make out?”`

  “These days he runs global security for a global corporation.”

  “Lucky dude.”

  “From a wheelchair.”

  “I meant getting saved by you.”

  “All I did was make a place to save himself. The rest was up to him. Like it’s up to you, Denny.”

  Denny Chin closed his eyes.

  Janson’s cell broke the silence with an old-phone ringtone.

  The caller ID surprised him. Kingsman Helms. What did the president of the petroleum division of the biggest oil company in the country want from an enemy?

  “Excuse me,” he told Denny, pulling off the road. “I have to take this.”

  He stopped the engine, took the keys, stepped out, and walked along the shoulder.

  Sensing opportunity, he set the phone to Record and waited until the tenth ring to answer. “Hello.”

  “Is that Paul Janson?”

  Janson asked, “Am I supposed to believe I’m out of the doghouse for making American Synergy play fair in the Gulf of Guinea?”

  “My wife is on that yacht.”

  “What yacht?”

  “Tarantula, that the pirates hijacked.”

  FOUR

  37°42' N, 82° 47' W

  Red Creek, Kentucky

  Cover was a solo sniper’s only friend.

  Jessica Kincaid lay motionless in the prone position, concealed in the fringes of a wooded ridge, with a secondhand copy of The Birds of Kentucky open beside her. A University of Kentucky camouflage hoodie with a Wildcats patch worn by half the people in the basketball-loving state and Vortex Viper HD 10 × 42 binoculars from Walmart completed the costume of a devoted bird-watcher on her day off. Laser-line trip wires guarded the trail behind her while she scoped a ramshackle country gas station six hundred meters down the hill.

  A plumber’s truck stopped beside the pumps.

  Kincaid’s target stepped out of the shadows of the repair bay, wiping his hands on a rag.

  She had been trained in the art of solo hunting by an elderly Jordanian, a small, precise, devout man who had fought with the Northern Alliance against the Russians. He had worn a short, trim beard and the dishdasha Arab robe and went barefoot in the Afghan cold. His jihad name—Abu Haqid, Father of Fury—never fit his pleasant demeanor, easy smile, and utterly calm eyes.

  Abu Haqid had spent a patient week sorting out the talent. Twenty American recruits, the best from Special Operations, CIA, and Jessica Kincaid’s own Cons Ops Lambda Team (masquerading as FBI), were hoping to graduate to solo work, which meant acquiring their own targets, covering their own backs. Five had made the first cut. Two lasted a month. A month after that, Abu Haqid led Jessica Kincaid on a long march into the Hindu Kush, where they stalked Taliban mullahs in the high passes.

  Be ready for what you can’t expect, he taught her.

  It happened now. Her vision blurred. The target went soft. She lowered the glasses and raked the slope with her naked eye. A bird had flown between them, the same bird she had the book open to, a Northern Harrier—dark brown and white, striped wings and widespread tail shifting independently, scooping the air in slow, silent flight—its rock-still head and glaring black eyes fixed on the ground.

  She reacquired.

  He finished greeting the pickup driver, screwed open the gas tank, and grasped the hose. The man in the truck turned his head to call something, and he nodded. Kincaid hoped that a smile might brighten his face. Suddenly, someone was behind her, silent as an eclipse, close enough to slit her throat.

  There was no point in even trying to turn around.

  She was either dead or it was Paul Janson. That Janson was the only man in the world who could move up behind her made her no less pissed off at herself for getting caught.

  “How’d you get behind me?”

  “You’d be better focused if you’d brought a gun.”

  “I didn’t come to shoot him. I came to look at him.”

  “Jess,” he said softly, “you’re the bravest woman I know. Why can’t you just walk down the hill and say, ‘Hi, Pop! Sorry I cleaned out the cash register when I was sixteen and ran away from home.’”

  “I called him Daddy, not Pop.”

  “I know. I called mine Pop.”

  “I just wanted to see if he’s OK.” Now she turned and looked.

  He had a rifle in one big hand, and in the other a smart phone with ear buds dangling. For cover he wore frayed camo and a forage cap. In the unlikely event anyone gave him a second look, Janson looked “from around here,” as they said in Red Creek, on the outskirts of which was the gas station Kincaid had been watching so intently. He looked ordinary, innocuous, and smaller than he was—just another hunter putting deer meat on the table.

  When Jessica Kincaid had served Consular Operations, Paul Janson had been the legendary “Machine.” But since teaming up with Paul Janson she rated him the “Invisible Man.” She herself was a skilled chameleon—ready to act the college student, the assembly-line worker, the banker, or the bartender—but she would have given an
ything she could name to be as unseeable and inconspicuous as Janson.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You didn’t answer your phone.”

  He lowered himself quietly beside her and brushed her cheek with fingers that smelled of gun oil. “You OK?”

  “I’m fine. What’s up?”

  “I need you.” He put a phone bud in his ear and slid the other into hers. “Listen to this.”

  He passed her the phone. “Hit Play.”

  A telephone conversation he had recorded repeated in their ears. “Is that Paul Janson?”

  Kincaid bristled when she recognized the caller’s voice. She despised and mistrusted Kingsman Helms. “What the hell does he want?”

  Janson’s reply had been a cold and unfriendly “Am I supposed to believe I’m out of the doghouse for forcing American Synergy to play fair in the Gulf of Guinea?”

  “My wife is on that yacht.”

  “What yacht?”

  “Tarantula, that the pirates hijacked.”

  Janson’s voice softened. “I’m sorry, Kingsman. I saw the reports. They didn’t say who was aboard except the currency trader who owned it. Have you heard from her?”

  “No.”

  “I am very sorry. If it’s any consolation, Somali pirates are in it for the ransom. There’s no profit in hurting her. They’re not al-Qaeda, they’re not religious, they’re not political. All pirates want is the dough.”

  “They haven’t asked for ransom.”

  “Give them time to settle down. They’ll ask when they feel they’re in a safe place.”

  “It’s been nearly a day.”

  “They’re not going to risk giving away their position with a sat phone call while they’re still at sea.”

  “I want you to rescue her.”

  “Ransom first. Rescue is a last resort. When the odds turn so desperate that there’s nothing to lose.”

  “But the pirates are out of control. They already killed the owner.”

  “He probably did something foolish. Let’s hope it sobered everyone up.”

  “I want you in position to rescue her.”

  “Pirates are a Navy job. Call the SEALs.”

  “The Navy takes months to launch a rescue.”

  “That’s why they’re good at it. They go when they’re ready.”

  “There’s no time!” Helms shouted. “Name your price, I’ll pay it.”

  Paul Janson’s voice, always low-pitched and resonant, sank half an octave to a compelling rumble. “Listen to me, Kingsman. The SEALs have access from their base in Djibouti. Plus, they stole a page from the pirates’ mothership book and got themselves a forward presence on their own mothership.”

  A long silence ensued, broken at last by the sound of Helms taking a deep breath. “I love my wife,” he said. “I am begging you to help me.”

  “This is pirates,” Janson repeated, gently but deliberately. “Pirates in a nation that has no effective government, no competent military, no control over its warring clans. It’s either a US Navy rescue, or you pay the ransom.”

  “Goddammit, Janson, I know we had our differences! I’m not pretending I liked you screwing us on Isle de Foree.”

  “Someone had to.”

  “But this isn’t business. This is my wife. A mothership full of heavily armed SEALs scares the hell out of me. I am in terror of that split second when operators with guns burst into a small room. I don’t want soldiers. I want the type of rescue you excel at—surgical.”

  There was silence.

  Kincaid looked sidelong at Janson. “Civilians love saying ‘surgical.’”

  Janson did not meet her eye, which told her what was coming next.

  “Ten a.m., day after tomorrow, ASC’s New York office.”

  “Not in the office,” said Helms.

  “Chelsea Piers. Enter at Twenty-Third Street. There’s a big photograph of the Lusitania on the promenade nearest Pier Sixty. Wait there.”

  “Can’t we meet sooner?”

  “‘Surgical’ takes time. Let the pirates settle down. You get busy raising the ransom. Let me suss out who to pay it to.”

  Janson took back his phone.

  Kincaid asked, “Did you mean what you said about ransom?”

  “Of course. When I got off the phone with Helms, I called Lloyd’s.”

  Catspaw and Lloyd’s of London regularly exchanged information, and their contact had spoken freely. The underwriters who insured the yacht were willing to ransom it back. It offered the safest shot at freeing Allegra and the others. Janson had promised whatever help was needed.

  “They’ve already been approached.”

  “Too fast.”

  “Affirmative. Lloyd’s is not even fifty percent sure that the pirates who hit them for the ransom are the same pirates who took her. The situation is ripe for a rip-off.”

  “OK, so why did you agree to meet Helms?”

  “Poor Mrs. Helms doesn’t deserve to be held hostage just for having lousy taste in husbands. And the foundation could use the dough.”

  “She has lousy taste in yachts, too. What were they doing in pirate waters?”

  “Being stupid, would be my guess,” said Janson. “And cocksure, according to all reports on the idiot who owned the yacht.”

  They were still lying side by side on the pine needles. Kincaid propped up on one elbow and looked him in the face. “You’re gunning for ASC.”

  “First things first,” said Janson. “Get the hostages home safe.”

  “We lost good men defending Isle de Foree.”

  “I don’t believe in vengeance.”

  Kincaid shook her head fiercely. “The guys we lost were the best they come.”

  Paul Janson said, “I would do anything to bring them back to life. But revenge won’t do it. There is no revenge. Not on this Earth.”

  “But…?” she asked.

  Janson answered circumspectly. “When I first worked in intelligence, an operator’s worst enemy was often his own government—bosses so sure of their mission they would sell him down the river for the cause, or their careers. That depth of arrogance marches lockstep with total power.

  “These days, global corporations wield that power. ASC is stronger than most nations used to be, far more secretive, and totally unaccountable. ASC is doubly dangerous with its back to the wall.” He quoted his Catspaw Associates researchers from memory: “‘As big and powerful a global as it is, ASC is being squeezed out of every oil patch in the world by China. To remain on top twenty years down the road, ASC will have to conduct business ever more ruthlessly.’

  “In other words, a rapacious global corporation that empowers itself by corrupting governments is growing desperate. ASC is like…” Janson was suddenly at a loss for words.

  “Like a boa constrictor with rabies?” asked Kincaid.

  Janson’s eyes crinkled in an appreciative smile. He touched her cheek again. “You got it. The pirates have done us a huge favor. They pried open American Synergy’s back door. It’s an incredible opportunity to take down a company that corrupts everything it touches.”

  “Why did Helms come to us? He hates us for Isle de Foree.”

  “First thing I asked myself. Modesty aside, he won’t do better than you and me. If I were in his position and I wanted you back, I’d come to us too.”

  “Why won’t Helms meet in his office?” asked Kincaid.

  “Corporation executives are pack animals. He can’t risk rivals seeing him weakened by a personal problem.”

  “His wife kidnapped is a personal problem?”

  “The division presidents of ASC would stake their children to anthills to succeed the chairman—another reason Helms came to us instead of ASC’s Global Security Division.”

  Janson backed off the ridge and stood up when it concealed him from the gas station below. “Wave good-bye to Pop, we’re going to work.”

  * * *

  THEY DROVE THEIR rented cars across the West Virginia lin
e to Charleston. Janson had two tickets on the American flight to New York. “Where’s the Embraer?” asked Kincaid.

  “Minneapolis.”

  “What’s our plane doing in Minneapolis?”

  “Recruiting logistics personnel from the forty thousand Somali-Americans who live in Minneapolis. Whether we ransom her or go in, we’ll need friends on the ground.”

  * * *

  PAUL JANSON CLOSED his eyes as the jetliner took flight and conjured in his mind the map of the Horn of Africa: Somalia’s coast was desolate. For a thousand miles north from Mogadishu to the Gulf of Aden, ports and cities were few and widely scattered. Most of the infrastructure—docks, boats, roads, houses, drinking wells—had been destroyed when an earthquake on the far side of the Indian Ocean sent a monster tsunami thundering ashore in 2004. In the decade since, little had been rebuilt.

  It was an easy place to hide, and a bear of a place to hunt. Distances to be covered required longer range than helicopters, which made Janson’s preferred quick-in, quick-out tactics difficult if not impossible. No wonder the SEALs had gotten themselves a “mothership.” Like the pirates, they had to get near the job before they attacked.

  “How do we get there?” asked Kincaid.

  They were seated side by side in a near-empty business section. The nearest passenger was four rows behind them and the engines were loud, so it was safe to speak in low voices. By “there” she meant wherever the pirates ultimately stashed the captives. By “get there” she meant a quick-and-slick exfiltration like the rescue, a year earlier, of Yousef, the dictator’s son.

  Janson opened his eyes and looked at her. His were a gray shade of blue; hers, gray-green. He took her hand and kissed her mouth.

  Kincaid planted her fingers behind his head to pull him closer.

  “You didn’t have to come all the way to Kentucky to collect me. But thanks…” She kissed him, exploring his mouth familiarly. At last she pulled back. “Hello and good-bye?”

  “’Fraid so.”

  They put sex, if not love, on hold when they went operational.

  “I’m stealing one more.” She tugged him hard against her. “Wow…OK…So how do we get there?”