The Jason Directive

by Robert Ludlum

  Alone in his room, Janson found his thoughts tumbling over themselves. It made no sense. Andros was a professional liar, but this message—the implication that he had some secret fortune stowed away—was a falsehood of another order. More disturbing still was the unmistakable reference to the Cayman Islands account; Janson did have such an account at the Bank of Mont Verde, but he had always kept its existence hidden. There was no official record of it—no accessible evidence of it anywhere. What could explain a reference to an account that only he should have known about?

  Exactly what was Nikos Andros up to?

  Janson turned on his tri-band wireless PDA and inserted the numbers that would give him an Internet connection to his bank in the Caymans. The signals would be two-way encoded, using a random string that would be generated by Janson’s own electronic device and never used again. No message interception would be possible. The 1,024-bit encryption made the process slow, but within ten minutes, Janson had downloaded his latest account-activity records.

  The account had, when he last checked it, contained $700,000.

  Now it contained $16.7 million.

  Yet how was that possible? The account was safeguarded against unauthorized deposits, just as it was against unauthorized withdrawals.

  They want you to come in.

  The words returned with a knife-sharp edge.

  Over the next thirty minutes, Janson combed through a series of transfers that involved his own unique digital signature, a nonreplicable set of numbers entrusted only to him—a digital “private key” that even the bank had no access to. It was impossible. And yet the electronic record was irrefutable: Janson had himself authorized the receipt of sixteen million dollars. The money had arrived in two installments, of eight million each. Eight million had arrived four days ago. Eight million had arrived yesterday, at 7:21 P.M. EST.

  Approximately a quarter of an hour after Peter Novak’s death.

  Chapter Ten

  The air in the room seemed to grow heavy; the walls were closing in. Janson needed to regain his bearings, needed to get outside. The area surrounding Syntagma Square was a sprawl of kiosks and shops, growing posher in the vicinity of Syntagma Square proper. Even here, though, were the standard-bearers of globalization : a Wendy’s, a McDonald’s, an Arby’s. Janson pushed on, making his way past the neoclassical facades of the nineteenth-century Ottoman buildings, now mostly given over to functions of state. He strode down Herod Atticus Street and then Vassilissis Sofias and paused before the Vouli, or what was now the Greek parliament, a vast, buff-colored structure, the windows relatively small, the portico long. Before it, évzone guards, with their bayoneted rifles and maroontasseled caps and kilts, preened. A series of bronze shields honored now forgotten victories.

  He sought out the cooler, clearer air of the National Gardens, which the Vouli fronted. There, dingy white statues and small fishponds were tucked away among the bushes and trees. Bounding along the bowers and arbors were hundreds of feral cats, many with leathery, wrung-out nipples protruding from their underbellies. An odd thing: it was possible simply not to notice them. And yet, once you did, you saw them everywhere.

  He nodded at a white-haired man on a park bench who seemed to be looking in his direction; the man averted his gaze just a little too quickly, it seemed, given the affability of most Greeks. No doubt it was Janson’s nerves; he was jumping at shadows.

  Now he circled back to the Omónia, a somewhat seedy neighborhood northwest of Syntagma, where he knew a man who maintained a very specialized business indeed. He walked swiftly down Stadíou, past shops and kapheneion. What first caught his attention was not a familiar face but simply a face that, once more, turned too quickly when he approached. Was Janson starting to imagine things? He replayed it in his mind. A casually dressed man apparently had been squinting at a street sign when Janson rounded the corner, then immediately turned his gaze to a shop. To Janson, it seemed that he did so a bit abruptly, like an observer knowing that it was bad form to be seen close-up by the subject of surveillance.

  By now Janson had become hyperattentive to his environs. A block later, he noticed the woman across the street peering into the jewelry shop; but, again, something was off about it. The sun slanted fiercely at the plate glass, making it a better mirror than a window. If she were, in fact, trying to make out the necklaces and bracelets displayed in the window, she would have had to stand at the opposite angle, with her back to the sun, creating a shadow through which the window would be restored to transparency. Moments before, another shopper had held out a wide-brimmed hat to block the sun’s slanting rays and see into the store. But what if your interest was only in what the glass was reflecting?

  Janson’s field instincts began signaling wildly. He was being watched: as he thought back on it, he should have picked up on the couple at the florist’s counter opposite the hotel, ostentatiously looking at a large map that hid their faces. Incongruously large. Most tourists on foot contented themselves with the smaller pocketsized versions.

  What the hell was going on?

  He strode into the Omónia meat market, which sprawled within a cavernous nineteenth-century building with a fretted-iron front. On beds of chopped ice, there were mountains of glistening organs: hearts, livers, stomachs. The intact carcasses of cows, pigs, and improbably large fowl were stationed upright, head to tail, creating a grotesque topiary of flesh.

  Janson’s eyes darted around him. To his left, several stalls over: a customer, poking at one of the pork bellies—the same man who had averted his gaze in the National Gardens. Giving no sign that he’d made the watcher, Janson strode swiftly to the other side of a veritable curtain of mutton, the meat hooks hanging from a long steel rod. From between two sheep carcasses, he saw the white-haired customer quickly lose interest in the pig. The man walked along the row of hanging sheep, straining for a view of the other side. Janson pulled back one of the larger specimens, grabbing its rear hooves, and then, as the white-haired man was walking past, swung the massive carcass toward him, sending him sprawling into a quivering bed of calves’ tripe.

  Vociferous exclamations in Greek erupted, and Janson swiftly dodged the commotion, striking out toward the other end of the meat market and onto the street again. Now he made his way to a nearby department store, Lambropouli Bros., at the corner of Eólou and Lykoúrgos Streets.

  The three-story building was all glass and wafflefront concrete, stucco simulacrum. He paused in front of the department store, peering into the glass until he noticed a man in a loose yellow windbreaker hovering near a leather-goods store opposite. Then Janson walked into the department store, heading toward the men’s clothing area in the rear of the ground floor. He looked appraisingly at suits, keeping an eye on the time and glancing at the small ceiling-mounted mirrors strategically placed to deter theft. Five minutes elapsed. Even if every entrance was guarded, no member of a surveillance team allows his subject to disappear for five minutes. The risk of an unforeseen occurrence is too great.

  Sure enough, the man in the yellow windbreaker made his way into Lambropouli Bros., walking across the aisles until he spotted Janson. Then he stationed himself near the glass and chrome display for fragrances; the reflective surfaces would make it easy to spot Janson if he emerged from the back of the store.

  Finally Janson took a suit and a shirt to the changing rooms in the far rear. And there he waited. The store was obviously short-staffed, and the salesman had more customers than he could deal with. He would not miss Janson.

  But the watcher would. As the minutes ticked by, he would wonder, with growing concern, what could be taking Janson so long. He would wonder if Janson had escaped through an unanticipated service exit. He would have no choice but to enter the changing rooms himself and investigate.

  Three minutes later, the man in the yellow windbreaker did precisely that. From the crack of the dressing-room door, Janson saw the man wander through the alcove with a pair of khaki trousers draped over an arm. The man mu
st have waited until there was nobody visible in the narrow aisle of dressing rooms. Yet that was a circumstance that two could exploit. Just as he passed in front of the door, Janson swung it open with explosive force. Now he sprang out and dragged the stunned watcher back to the end of the alcove and through a door that led to an employees-only area.

  He had to work fast, before someone who had heard the sound came over to investigate what was going on.

  “One word and you die,” Janson told the dazed man softly, holding a small knife to his right carotid artery.

  Even in the gloom of the storage facility, Janson could see the man’s earpiece, a connecting wire disappearing into his clothing. He tore open the man’s shirt, removed the thin wire that ran to a ten-ounce Arrex radio communicator in his trouser pocket. Then he took a second look at what appeared to be a plastic bracelet on the man’s wrist: it was, in fact, a positional transponder, signaling his location to whoever was directing the team.

  This was not an elaborate system; the whole surveillance effort had been hasty and ad hoc, with instrumentation to match. Indeed, the same went for the human capital deployed. Though they were not untrained, they were either insufficiently experienced or out of practice, or both. This was reserve-caliber work. He took the measure of the man before him: the weathered face, the soft hands. He knew the type—a marine who’d been on desk duty too long, summoned with little notice, an auxiliary reassigned to meet an unexpected need.

  “Why were you following me?” Janson asked.

  “I don’t know,” the man said, wide-eyed. He looked to be in his early thirties.

  “Why?”

  “They said to. They didn’t say why. The instructions were to watch, not interfere.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Like you don’t know.”

  “Security chief at the consulate,” Janson said, sizing up his prisoner. “You’re part of the marine detail.”

  The man nodded.

  “How many of you?”

  “Just me.”

  “Now you’re pissing me off.” With stiffened fingers, Janson jabbed at the man’s hypoglossal nerve, just inside the lower edge of his jaw: he knew the pain would be breathtaking, and he simultaneously clamped a hand over the man’s mouth. “How many?” he demanded. After a moment, he removed his hand, permitting the man to speak.

  “Six,” the watcher gasped, rigid with pain and fear.

  Janson would have interrogated the man further if there were more time; but if his locator unit did not indicate motion, others would soon arrive to find out why. Besides, he suspected that the man had no more information to offer. The marine had been assigned to his division’s counterterrorism section. He would have been suited up with little notice and less explanation. That was the usual way with consular emergencies.

  What had Nikos Andros told them?

  Tearing strips from the man’s Oxford-cloth shirt, Janson bound his wrists and ankles, and fashioned a makeshift gag. He took the transponder bracelet with him.

  He was familiar with the transponder protocol; they were used to supplement the Arrex communicators, which were notoriously unreliable, especially in urban terrain. What’s more, spoken communication was not always feasible or appropriate. The transponders allowed the team leader to keep track of those in the shift: each appeared as a pulsing dot on an LCD screen. If one person hived off in pursuit of the subject, the others would be able to follow, with or without verbal instructions.

  Now Janson put on the man’s yellow windbreaker and gray cap and made his way out the department store’s side entrance at a trot.

  The watcher had been approximately his height and build; from a distance, Janson would be indistinguishable from him.

  But he would have to keep his distance. Now he ran down Eólou to Praxitelous, and then Lekka, knowing that his movements would be showing up as a pulsing dot.

  What had Andros told them?

  And what could explain the money in the Cayman Islands account? Had someone set him up? It was a very expensive method, if so. Who could even put their hands on that kind of money? No government agency could. Yet it would not be out of reach for a senior officer of the Liberty Foundation. The ancient question presented itself: Cui bono? Who benefits?

  Now that Novak was out of the way, who at the Liberty Foundation would gain? Was Novak killed because he was about to discover some sort of immense malfeasance within his own organization, some malfeasance that had previously eluded his and Márta Lang’s notice?

  A small, fleet feral cat bounded down the sidewalk: Janson was again nearing Athens’s feline capital, the National Gardens. Now he raced to catch up with the cat.

  A few bystanders looked at him oddly.

  “Greta!” he cried, scooping up the gray cat and nuzzling it. “You’ve lost your collar!”

  He snapped the plastic-housed positional transponder around the animal’s neck. It was a snug but not uncomfortable fit. When he approached the gardens, he freed the furiously squirming animal, which bounded into the thickets, in search of field mice. Then Janson stepped into the brown wooden cabin where the park’s rest rooms were housed, and shoved the cap and yellow windbreaker in a black steel waste canister.

  Within minutes, he was on the no. 1 trolley, no surveillance in evidence. The team members would soon be converging on the feline-infested center of the gardens. If he knew the Athens sector, their real ingenuity would go into face-saving reports later.

  Athens sector. He’d spent more time there in the late seventies than he cared to think about. Now he racked his mind to try to remember someone he might know who could explain what was going on—explain it from the inside. Plenty of people owed him favors; it was time to collect.

  The face came to him a moment before the name: a middle-aged desk jockey from the CIA Athens station. He worked in a small office on the third floor of the U.S. embassy, which was on 91 Vassilissis Sofias Avenue, near the Byzantine Museum.

  Nelson Agger was a familiar sort. A careerist with a nervous stomach and little by way of larger convictions. He’d graduated from Northwestern with a master’s in comparative politics; though his grades and recommendations were good enough to get him into a handful of doctoral programs, they were not good enough to earn him the scholarship or tuition abatement he needed. The support would have to come from an outside source—a State Department–run foundation, in his case.

  Once his paper credentials were secure, he became a desk analyst, displaying complete mastery of the unwritten rules of producing analytic reports. The reports—a number of which Janson had seen—were invariably unexceptional, safe, and authoritative-sounding, their essential vacuity camouflaged by their sonorous cadence. They were festooned with such phrases as present trends are likely to continue and made cunning use of adverbs like increasingly. Trends were thus identified with no assessments hazarded as to outcome. King Fahd will find it increasingly difficult to maintain control, he had predicted each month of the Saudi leader. The fact that the potentate hung on to power year after year until incapacitated by a stroke—a nearly two-decade reign—was only a minor embarrassment; after all, he never said that King Fahd would lose control within any given time frame. Of Somalia, Agger once wrote, “The situation and circumstances have not yet unfolded to the point that the nature of the successor government or the policies that will eventually be implemented can be described with confidence.” The analysis was indeed sound—pure sound, unencumbered by meaning.

  Thin, balding, gangly, Nelson Agger was the kind of man whom field operatives were prone to underestimate; what he may have lacked in physical courage he made up for by his adroitness at office politics. Whatever else the bureaucrat might be, he was a survivor.

  He was also an oddly likable soul. It was hard, in the abstract, to explain why Janson got along with him so well. Part of it surely had to do with the fact that Agger had no illusions about himself. He was a cynic, yes, but unlike the sententious opportunists who populated Foggy Bo
ttom, he never made any bones about it, at least not when he was around Janson. The dangerous ones, in Janson’s experience, were those with grand plans and cold eyes. Agger, though no tribute to his profession, probably did more good than harm.

  But if Janson was honest with himself, he had to admit that another reason they got along was the simple fact that Agger liked and looked up to him. Desk jockeys, defensive about their role in the system, usually affected a measure of condescension toward the operatives. By contrast, Agger, who once laughingly referred to himself as “the gutless wonder,” never bothered to hide his admiration.

  Or, for that matter, his gratitude. In years past, Janson had occasionally seen to it that Agger was the first person to receive a particular piece of intelligence; in a few instances, Agger was able to tailor his analytic reports to make them seem prescient by the time the intelligence cables reached their channels. The baseline of mediocrity in intelligence analysis was such that an officer needed only a few such assists to acquire a reputation for excellence.

  Nelson Agger was precisely the sort of person who could help him. Whatever Agger’s shortcomings in the world of international intelligence, he had extremely sharp ears for intelligence internal to his division—who was in favor, who was not, who was thought to be losing his edge, who was believed to be on the rise. A tribute to his political skills was that he had become a clearinghouse for gossip without ever being known as a gossip himself. Nelson Agger could shed light on what was going on if anybody could. Nothing could take place in Athens sector without the knowledge of the small, tightly knit CIA station.

  Now Janson sat in the back of a café on Vassilissis Sofias, just opposite the American embassy, sipping a mug of the strong, sweet coffee the Athenians favored, and phoned the station switchboard on his dual-mode Ericsson.

  “Trade protocols,” the voice answered.

  “Agger, please.”

  A few seconds, during which three clicks could be heard; the call would be taped and logged.