Robert Ludlum - [Paul Janson 01]

by The Janson Directive

  A master sniper had supernal skill, but he had supernal patience, too. He had to be responsive to uncertainties: in a long-range shot, even a slight unexpected breeze could push a flat shot several feet from its intended destination. A subject could move unexpectedly; in this case, Berman had raised his hand after the shot was fired. A sniper had to be aware of such possibilities. And he had to be more patient than his target.

  And yet who was the target?

  The butler had assumed it was his employer, Berman. A natural assumption. And a dangerous one. He recalled Berman’s arm around his shoulder, drawing him close. The bullet that hit the Russian was fifteen inches from Janson’s head.

  Fifteen inches. An uncontrollable variance at two-thirds of a mile. Whether it was a hit or a near miss, the shot’s accuracy was incredible. But the sensible assumption had been that Janson was the real target. He was the only new element in the situation.

  He could hear the siren of the ambulance Thwaite had summoned. And now he felt a tug on his trouser leg—Berman, from the floor, feebly trying to communicate, to get his attention.

  “Janson,” he said, speaking as if through a mouthful of water.

  His fleshy face had taken on a veal-like pallor. A thin rivulet of blood seeped from the corner of his lips down his chin. Air was sucking through his chest wound, and he pressed his good right hand to the area. Now he raised his bloodied left hand and extended a wagging index finger. “Tell me truth: Turnbull and Asser shirt ruined?” A wet cough came instead of the usual guffaw. At least one of his lungs had filled with blood, and would soon collapse.

  “It’s seen better days,” Janson said gently, feeling a rush of affection toward the ebullient, eccentric maven.

  “Get son of whore who did this,” Berman said. “Da?”

  “Da,” Janson said huskily.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Thwaite took Janson aside and spoke to him in a low voice. “Whoever you are, Mr. Berman must have trusted you, or he wouldn’t have invited you here. But I’ve got to ask you to make tracks.” A wry look. “Chop-chop.”

  Janson raced down oak parquet floors, past the eighteenth-century French paneling a Woolworth heiress had installed decades ago, and through a rear exit. A few minutes later, he had vaulted over the wrought-iron fence and into the eastern bulge of Regent’s Park. “Twenty-four hundred acres in the middle of London, like my backyard,” Berman had said.

  Was it safe?

  There were no guarantees—except that it was the only place to which he dared retreat. A sniper on the minaret could easily target anyone emerging from the other exits of Berthwick House. The perch would not afford a sight line to most areas of the park itself.

  Besides, Janson knew this area; when he was at Cambridge, he’d had a friend who lived in the Marylebone neighborhood, and they had taken long strolls through the great verdant expanse, three times the size of New York’s Central Park. Some of it was overlooked by the neoclassical grandeur of Hanover Terrace, with its noble Georgian exteriors and creamy hues, the white and blue friezes adorning its architrave. But the park was a world unto itself. The waterways bustled with swans and odd, imported fowl; they were banked with concrete in some stretches while in others they lapped onto stands of marshy reeds. On the concrete walkway along the embankment, pigeons competed for crumbs with swans. Farther out, trimmed rows of boxwood provided a dense green border. A red lifesaver was mounted on a small wooden kiosk.

  To him, it had always felt like a refuge, this vast campus of trees and grass, playing fields and tennis courts. The boating lake stretched like an amoeba, narrowing to a stream that, edged by flower beds, ran under York Bridge in the southern part of the park. And in the inner circle was Queen Mary’s Garden, filled with exotic flora and rare fowl, discreetly penned: a sanctuary for wild birds and lonely, fragile people. Regent’s Park, a legacy of the crown architect John Nash, represented an Arcadian vision of an England that, perhaps, never was—the Windermere in the middle of the metropole, at once artfully rusticated and carefully manicured.

  Janson jogged toward the boating lake, past the trees, trying to clear his head and make sense of the astounding assault. Even as he ran, though, he was intensely alert to his surroundings, his nerves jangling.

  Was it safe?

  Was he dealing with a single sniper? It seemed unlikely. With such exhaustive preparation, there must have been flanking gunmen in place, covering different wings of the house, different exposures. No doubt, perimeter security was as exacting as Thwaite had indicated. But there were few local defenses against such long-distance marksmanship.

  And if other snipers were in the area, where were they?

  And who were they?

  The intrusion of menace in this pastoral redoubt struck Janson as itself an obscenity. He slowed down and looked at the great willow tree in front of him, its branches drooping into the boating lake. A tree like that might be a century old; his eyes must have fallen on it when he visited the park twenty-five years ago. It had survived Labour governments and Tory governments alike. It had survived Lloyd George and Margaret Thatcher, the Blitz and rationing, eras of fear and of boisterous self-confidence.

  As Janson approached it, the thick trunk suddenly revealed a rude patch of white. A soft, tapping noise: lead hitting puckered bark.

  A shot that had missed him, again, by a matter of inches. The uncanny accuracy of a bolt-action sniper rifle.

  He craned his neck around as he ran, but could see nothing. The only sound he had heard was that of the projectile slamming into the tree: there was no sound of the detonation within a rifle chamber. Sound-suppression gear was quite possibly in use. But even with a silenced rifle, a supersonic round produced a noise as it emerged from the muzzle—not necessarily a conspicuous one, but a noise all the same, like the crack of a whip. Janson knew that noise well. The fact that he had not heard it suggested something else: it was another long-distance shot. If the gunman were a hundred yards away, the noise would be lost amid the baffling provided by the tree leaves and the park’s ambient sounds. Conclusion: an extremely skilled marksman was in pursuit.

  Or a team of them.

  Where was safety? It was impossible to say. Worms of apprehension writhed in his belly.

  Dirt kicked up a couple of feet from him. Another near miss. The shot had been taken from a very great distance, and the subject had been in motion: for a shot to have come within ten yards of him would have represented impressive technique. Yet this shot had come within a couple of feet. It was astounding. And terrifying.

  Keep moving: confronted with unseen pursuers, it was the one thing he could do to make himself a more difficult target. But movement itself was not sufficient. He had to keep his speed irregular, for otherwise a trained sniper could calculate the “lead” in his sighting. It was a straightforward exercise to fire at a target who was moving at a fixed speed in a fixed direction: taking into account distance and target speed, you measured out a few degrees to the left of the figure in your scope, firing at where the target would be when the bullet arrived, not where it had been when the bullet was fired.

  Then there was the crucial matter of the sniper grid. Lateral movement—transverse velocity—was one thing. But movement that took the pedestrian target toward or away from the sniper was of almost negligible importance: it would not prevent the bullet from reaching its target.

  Janson had not determined how many marksmen were in position, or where those positions were. Because he did not know the grid, he did not know which movements were transverse, which not. The rules of flanking and enfilading would stipulate an axial array; marksmen as accomplished as these would be conscious of the peril of bullet “overtravel,” which could be fatal to a member of the team or a bystander.

  The snipers—where were they? The last two shots came from the southwest, where he could see nothing but, a few hundred yards away, a stand of oak trees.

  He started running, his gaze roaming around him. The very normalcy was wha
t was so eerie. The park was not crowded, but it was far from vacant. Here was a young man swaying to whatever was pulsing through his Walkman. There was a young woman with a stroller, talking to another woman, a close friend, from the looks of it. He could hear the distant cries of young children in paddleboats, frolicking in a shallow, fencedoff area of the boating pond. And, as always, lovers walked hand in hand between the copses of oak and white willow and beech trees. They were in their own world. He was in his. They shared a terrain, blithely unaware that anything was amiss. How could there be?

  That was the genius of the operation. The sniping was virtually soundless. The tiny explosions of bark or turf or water were too fleeting and inconspicuous to be noticed by anybody who was not primed for such evidence.

  Regent’s Park—that serene glade—had been converted into a killing field, with nobody the wiser.

  Except, of course, the prospective victim.

  Where was safety? The interrogative rose in Janson’s head, rose with screechy, needful urgency.

  He had the sole advantage of action over reaction: he alone knew his next move; they would have to respond to what he did. But if they could condition his actions, make him act according to a curtailed number of options in reaction to their own actions, that edge would be lost.

  He darted this way and that, along what he estimated as a line transverse to the axial array of the sniper team.

  “Practicing your footwork?” remarked an amused older man, his white hair combed forward and trimmed, Caesar-style. “Looking good. You’ll be playing for Manchester United one of these days!” It was the sort of jibe reserved for somebody one took to be insane. What else made sense of Janson’s strange, darting movements, his dashes right and left, seemingly random, seemingly pointless? It was the zigzagging of a wingless hummingbird.

  He put on a sudden burst of speed and plunged through a crowd of pedestrians toward York Bridge. The bandstand beckoned: it would shelter him from the snipers.

  He ran along the banks of the boating lake and past an elderly woman who was throwing bread crumbs to ravenous pigeons. An enormous flock of the birds took flight as he pounded through their midst, like an exploding cloud of feathers. One of them, batting its wings just a few yards ahead, suddenly dropped like a stone, landing near his feet. The smudge of red on the pigeon’s breast told him that it had caught a stray bullet intended for him.

  And still nobody noticed. For everyone but him, it was a perfect day in the park.

  A small burst of wooden splinters erupted at waist level, as another shot flicked off the rail of the wooden bridge and into the water. The quality of the shooting was remarkable: it was only a matter of time before one reached the X-ring.

  He’d made a mistake when he’d charged toward York Bridge: the two shots they’d just taken was proof of it. It meant, from the vantage of his assailants, that the movement had changed his distance but not his angle, which was harder to correct for. That was another piece of information: he would have to make use of it if he wanted to survive another minute.

  Now he made his way around two sides of the tennis courts, which were set off with mesh fencing. Ahead of him was an octagonal gazebo, made of pressure-treated lumber decked out to look rustic and old. It was an opportunity, but a risk as well: if he were a sniper, he would anticipate that his subject would seek temporary refuge there, and cluster his shots in its direction. He could not approach it directly. He ran at an angle, veering away from it altogether; then, when he was some distance past it, he ran jaggedly, bobbing and weaving, to its shadow. He could walk behind it for a bit, because it would serve as a barrier between him and the tree stand where the team of marksmen was based.

  An explosion of turf, a yard from his left foot. Impossible!

  No, it was all too possible. He had been guilty of wishful thinking—assuming that the snipers had restricted themselves to the tall trees behind the boating lake. It made sense that they would station themselves there; professional snipers liked to keep the sun to their backs, partly for viewing purposes, but even more to prevent a visible glare from flashing off their scopes. The spray of dirt suggested that the bullet had arrived from the same approximate direction as the others. Yet the tall gazebo would have shielded him from a tree-mounted marksman. He surveyed the horizon with a sinking feeling.

  Farther away, much farther away: the steel lattice of a twenty- or thirty-story crane, from a construction site on Rossmore Road. Distance: about three-quarters of a mile.

  Christ! Was it possible?

  The sight line was direct: with proper optics and perfect zeroing, it would be possible, just, for a top-of-the-league marksman.

  He scurried back to the gazebo but knew that it was only a very temporary place of refuge. Now an entire team would know his precise location. The more time he spent there, the better coordinated and more effective the sniper fire would be once he tried to leave. They could wait him out. Not that they needed to. They would be able to radio backup—summon a stroller, as pedestrian adjuvants were known in the trade. A stroller in a tweed jacket with an ordinary silenced pistol would be able to pick him off, conceal the weapon, and resume his walk, with nobody alerted. No, the seeming safety of his position was spurious. Every moment increased the risks he would face. Every moment made escape less likely.

  Think! He had to act. Something like annoyance was welling up in him: he was tired of being used for target practice, dammit! To maximize his safety at this second would be to minimize his safety five minutes from now. Immobility was death. He would not die cowering behind a gazebo, waiting to be picked off from the air or the ground.

  The hunted would become the hunter; the quarry would turn predator, or die in the attempt: this was the only option he had left.

  Facts: these were marksmen of extraordinary expertise. But they had been deployed in such a way as to put those skills to the test. All the shots were long-range ones, and however extraordinary the shooter, there were dozens of uncontrollable variables—small breezes, an interceding twig—that could put the bullet off its intended trajectory. At great distances, even tiny factors became enormously significant. Nor was the shooting heedless: there clearly was a concern to avoid bystanders. Berman was doubtless seen as an accomplice of his, his possible death of no account, perhaps even beneficial to the mission.

  Question: Why was the team stationed at such a remove? What made the pursuit so unnerving was the fact that he could not see his pursuers. They stayed well out of the way. But why?

  Because they—or their controllers—were riskaverse. Because they were afraid of him.

  Dear Christ. It was true. It had to be. They must have been commanded to avoid close contact at all costs. Subject deemed unpredictable and dangerous at close quarters. He would be destroyed at long distance.

  A counterintuitive conclusion was unavoidable: the reflexive tactic of evasion, increasing the distance between himself and his assailants, was precisely the wrong response.

  He had to embrace his enemy, move toward his attackers. Was there a way to do so and live?

  Standing near the Inner Circle, the stone path surrounding Queen Mary’s Garden, a stocky woman in a denim skirt was handing a pair of binoculars to her girl. The woman had the sort of complexion, pale but splotchily reddened, that must have had suitors calling her an “English rose” when she was a teenager; but the once-becoming blush had coarsened and grown definite.

  “See the one with the blue on its wing? That means it’s a bluebird.”

  The girl, who looked about seven, peered through the binoculars uncomprehendingly. The binoculars were the genuine article, a 10 × 50 by the looks of them: the woman must have been a devoted birdwatcher, like so many Brits, and eager to show her child the wonders of the avian world. “Mummy, I can’t see anything,” the little girl bleated. Her mother, with her trunklike legs, leaned over and adjusted the binoculars so that the eyecups were closer together.

  “Now try.”

  “Mummy! Wher
e’s the bird!”

  There was another safety factor just now: a breeze was passing through, ruffling the leaves of the trees. A distance shooter would be vigilant about evidence of wind, especially irregularly gusting winds, knowing how much it could disturb the shot’s trajectory. If a shot had to be made under such conditions, there were rules for compensation, for “doping the wind.” Estimation of wind speed followed rough rules of thumb: a four-mile-per-hour wind was a wind you can feel on your face; between five and eight miles per hour, tree leaves are in constant motion; in twelve-mile-per-hour winds, small trees sway. And then the angle of the breeze had to be figured in. A direct crosswind was rare; most winds were at an irregular angle to the line of fire. Moreover, wind zones downrange often varied from the wind experienced by the sniper himself. To complete the necessary calculations before the wind changed was infeasible. And so accuracy was inevitably diminished. If they had any choice, and they did, the snipers would wait until it subsided.

  Janson approached the mother and daughter, his heart thudding. Though conscious of his lethal halo, he had to trust to the professional self-regard of the marksmen: snipers of that order prided themselves on their precision; hitting such bystanders would look like unacceptable amateurism. And the breeze was still gusting.

  “Excuse me, madam,” he said to the woman. “But I wonder if I might borrow your binoculars.” He winked at the little girl.

  Immediately, the girl burst into tears. “No, Mummy!” she screamed. “They’re mine, mine, mine!”

  “Just for a moment?” Janson smiled again, swallowing his desperation. In his head, the seconds ticked off.

  “Don’t cry, my poppet,” the mother said, caressing the girl’s purple face. “Mummy will buy you a lollipop. Wouldn’t that be nice!” She turned to Janson. “Viola’s very sensitive,” the mother said coolly. “Can’t you see how you’ve upset her?”