The Janson Command (5 page)

“That nails it.”

“But,” Case said, “the downside I see to working with a woman is that in the clutch, when the lead is flying, it’s only natural that you’d be distracted, worried about her getting hurt. Particularly if she’s your protégée. Devoted followers have a habit of getting killed in our line of work. I’ve lost them; so have you.”

“Jessica is predator, not prey.”

* * *

DOUG CASE TOUCHED
his telephone the instant the door closed behind Paul Janson.

Bill Pounds, one of his ex-Ranger ASC field agents, was watching the lobby. “Yes, sir?”

“They’re on their way. Report where they go. Don’t let them make you.”

“No one makes the invisible man.”

THREE

B
ill Pounds walked quickly to his metallic-green Taurus parked in the No Parking zone. His partner, Rob, a hard-eyed moonlighting Houston Police Department detective, was at the wheel. They watched a red and white Fiesta Taxi pull up to the building’s entrance. The middle-aged businessman and the gal in the seersucker suit climbed into the cab.

The Fiesta Taxi driver had been instructed to leave his cell phone on. Pounds and Rob heard the woman say, “Brown Convention Center.”

Rob wheeled the Taurus onto the Sam Houston Tollway after them and followed at a distance. “The Brown’s got two conventions showing this week, National Association of Black Accountants and the Texas Towmen, and they don’t look like either.”

“Pass ’em,” Pounds ordered. “I’ll wait for them in the lobby.”

* * *

JESSICA KINCAID LEANED
close to whisper, “What did he say?”

“Tell you later.”

Janson sat back and watched the scenery, such as it was. Outside the taxi window Houston looked hot and dry, a flat, new land empty of people and full of cars. Janson looked through it, past it, to London with crowded sidewalks, ancient stonework, and lush green Regent Park the day that Cons Ops sent Jessica Kincaid to kill him.

She had been good then, already, among the best of the younger operators, but lacking the instincts acquired in the course of the miles that he carried. She was still ready to believe the bosses, completely sure of herself, and fiercely defiant. When he had pulled her out of her sniper perch and taken away her guns and put one to her head she responded, “You’re overmatched, Janson. No embassy lardasses this time. This time they cared enough to send the very best.”

The very best was Sniper Lambda Team. And Jessica Kincaid was their Janson expert, having made him the subject of the “Spy Bio Paper” required by the Cons Ops instructors. The Lambda snipers were operating as singletons—one reason he was still alive—each tasked with the complicated job of finding their own targets, instead of relying on a spotter. There were five of them, stationed on buildings and in trees. If he got out of the park they had strollers with Glocks waiting on the sideways.

He had pulled Jessica out of her tree not knowing she was a woman until he was on top of her. She had been astonishingly strong and agile, an extraordinary marksman, quick thinking, and a practiced liar. When he had taken his eyes off her for one second, she brained him with the nearest weapon at hand.

“What?” she said.

“I was thinking about our blind date in London,” he said with a smile for the benefit of the driver, whose eyes kept shooting to his rearview mirror. Janson could not see over the back of the seat, but he assumed that the cell phone was still lying faceup in the driver’s lap.

Jesse grinned back. “Remember laying in the grass?”

Janson touched his temple where she had dealt him half a concussion with a length of steel rebar. “Vividly.”

They had met next in Amsterdam. She had caught him flat-footed and he had seen death in her rifle barrel. He remembered looking back calmly. The memory sustained him. He was proud of how he had accepted the inevitable. For he had had no doubt he was about to die. She had been built to kill and nothing could stop her.

The cab slowed for the convention center exit.

Jessica Kincaid watched him peel two twenty-dollar bills off the roll he always carried. Cash for the driver. No receipts, no tracks, and a fast exit. Janson saw her watch the money. Cash had memories for her. Sixteen years old, lighting out of Red Creek, Kentucky, the day she graduated high school, buying a Greyhound ticket with a wad she lifted from the cash register in her father’s ramshackle gas station. The father who had raised her alone when her mother died, and taught Jessica to hunt, fish, fix cars, and shoot. The father who wouldn’t allow her to do anything girls did because the sight of her cooking, cleaning, keeping house, would twist a knife in the wound of losing his wife.

“You know, you could drive down there one day and pay it back with interest.”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought about it.”

“One of these days you’ll do it.”

“Is that a fact, Janson? And how do I pay back betraying him?”

“I’ve seen you do harder.”

“It only looked harder.”

“You’ll find a way.”

“Yeah. One of these days.”

* * *

BILL POUNDS WATCHED
Janson and Kincaid pay off their taxi, enter the Brown Convention Center, and head down the connector to the Hilton, where they were either staying or going to another meeting or just maybe switching taxis. He followed, well screened by the crowds hurrying back and forth. All of a sudden they stopped. Rest rooms. The woman ducked into hers. The guy kept going. Pounds stuck with him. Seconds later the guy stopped, too, ten yards past the restrooms, turned around, and headed back like he’d decided to take a leak after all.

The ASC security agent did not break stride or swerve but continued coolly ahead, intending to pass close, avoiding eye contact, innocent as the others hurrying through the corridor. The guy bumped into him. The ex-Ranger was a well-built two hundred pounds, but it felt like crashing into a cinder block wall.

“Tell Doug Case to grow up.”

Slate-gray eyes were boring into him.

Pounds tried to bluff it out. “What?”

“I said, ‘Tell Doug Case to grow up.’ ”

“Do I know you?”

Now the woman was behind Pounds, calling in a friendly country drawl, “Hey, hon, how you doing?” and taking his elbow, and sending a jolt of unbelievable pain through a nerve he had not known existed in his arm. For half a second he couldn’t see straight. Then he was leaning on the wall and they were walking unhurriedly toward the Hilton.

* * *

THE JOB WOULD
not be feasible without routes in and out of FFM’s Pico Clarence camp.

In the cab to Hobby Airport, Paul Janson exchanged circumspect text messages with a weapons dealer he trusted more than most, Neal Kruger, and the deputy national commissioner of the South African Police Service, Trevor Suzman. Jessica Kincaid Googled maps and charts on her iPhone, routed them to her computer on the plane, and queried the Frenchman who handled their helicopter needs in Europe.

They followed up with voice links as the Embraer soared off the runway. The plane’s secure Inmarsat satellite telephones employed IP Tor protocols in a virtual private network. Kincaid produced a slide show of maps and charts on their Aquos 1080 monitors.

“Ready.”

Janson had a pretty good idea how he would prefer to go in—quick and light on the backs of the gunrunners—but to stay alive he and Kincaid would consider every available alternative, from the least obvious to the unlikely. Sometimes something better came along. And when the ground shifted and you had to change tactics, you could keep moving ahead if you didn’t waste time dreaming up options.

“Helicopters?”

“The EC 135 with a long-range fuel tank will give us five hundred miles round-trip,” Kincaid answered. “It’s a powerful twin-engine machine, easy to get in Europe and findable in West Africa. Tough, but not impossible, to land in the jungle. I see three possible sites near the foot of Pico Clarence, but the topo maps suck and there’s no satellite shots that penetrate the canopy.”

Janson studied the topographic maps of Pico Clarence she had put on the screen. What was known about the volcanic mountain’s terrain was based on Portuguese government surveys in the 1920s. Then he scrolled through her maps of the African coast. “The problem with the helicopter is where do we base from? Five hundred miles round-trip, two-fifty one-way, tops, limits our takeoff point to Nigeria, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon. Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon are waiting to see who wins, so definitely won’t give permission to launch from their territory. Which means if we launch from them we have to return elsewhere. Nigeria seems to have sided with Dictator Iboga. But I would hate to have to trust the Nigerians to keep their word.”

“Isn’t there a Nigerian lady you know sort of well?”

“She’s in London these days. Besides, even with the extra tank, the EC 135 will not offer much leeway range-wise.”

“The Super Puma doubles our range. So will a Sikorsky S-76. Plenty of them in the oil patch. Your pal Doug could get us one easy.”

“The S-76 would put Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Congo within striking distance, but those governments also want to be hands-off until someone wins the revolution. The Puma is an eighteen-passenger machine. Too big.”

“Another possibility is an EC 135 from a ship passing offshore.”

“Much better. Except how do we persuade FFM not to shoot it down thinking it belongs to Iboga? They’ve done a thorough job of clearing the sky.”

“Scratch the helicopter. What if we fly commercial or private into Porto Clarence? Drive inland to the end of the road. Walk into the jungle. Grab the doctor and walk back to Porto Clarence.”

“What if President for Life Iboga wants to interrogate the doctor about the insurgent camp, or Ferdinand Poe’s state of health?”

“We’d have the same problem with an airdrop. If we chute in we’ll still have to walk out. That leaves a boat. Boat ashore. Walk inland. Walk back. Boat out.”

Paul Janson said, “I’m wondering if we should draft in on the gunrunners. Somehow they’re getting on and off the island and in and out of the camp. They must be bribing Iboga’s coast guard patrols and soldiers.”

“But your pal Doug says they’re hands-off.”

“I was talking to Neal Kruger. The Swiss? He claims he knows where to get some Starstreaks still in the crate.”

Kincaid’s eyes widened. “Cool.”

“We could trade them to the gunrunners for passage in. The FFM would be happy to buy man-mounted laser-guided surface-to-air high-velocity missiles. We land on their boat, split off from them once we’re close, go in light, and come out fast.”

“What if the gunrunners run into trouble?”

“We have our own boat waiting and rendezvous offshore with an OSV.”

“Supplied by Doug?”

“No. The client pays for deniability.”

Kincaid said, “Another problem: FFM is not going to be happy when we skedaddle with the doctor. Would the gunrunners risk pissing off their client?”

“We’ll have to find some way to persuade them to take the chance.”

Janson studied the topo map until he became aware that Jessica was staring at him.

“What is it?”

“Why did Case have us followed?”

Janson shrugged. “Old warhorse stuff. Just trying to keep his hand in.”

“Why did he keep asking about me?”

“Same thing. Old reflexes. I noticed you took a strong dislike to him. Why?”

“He’s a jerk.”

“Have you ever met a top operator who was not a pedal-to-the-metal, Type A, supercompetitive personality?”

“I’m not a jerk. Neither are you.”

“Some of us hide it better than others. Just like some hide what it feels like sitting in a wheelchair better than others.”

“That’s a cool chair. Did you see the balance wheels come out when he raised the seat?”

“Typical Doug. He threw unbelievable energy into designing it, while he was still recovering. He said, ‘Damned if I’ve going to sit when everyone’s standing.’ Went about it like it was an operation.”

“Did the foundation back it?”

“Sure. Doug wants everyone who can’t walk to have one, but at a hundred-and-forty grand a pop it’s going to be a while. Anyway, they’re still working out the kinks. What did you think of Kingsman Helms?”

“Good-looking. Going places. I pity who gets in his way.…Paul?”

“What?”

“Is Doug Case one of the ‘saved’?”

“The ‘saved’?”

“Is Doug Case one of the former agents who you’ve rescued with your covert MacArthur-genius grants?” Jessica said.

“Covert MacArthurs? I like that.” Paul Janson showed his pleasure with a smile. “Good a name as any.”

Jessica stared at him, demanding an answer.

Janson was not inclined to answer. Rules kept him alive. Both of them alive. Need to know was the primary rule. “
Why
do you ask?”

“This doctor rescue is not a good job.”

“I would not call it a piece of cake,” said Janson. “But it’s not as grim as Doug made it out to Helms. Strict in-out. Insertion and extraction.”

“A rebel camp that successfully defends itself is a hornet’s nest.”

“You and I have done worse.”

“I’m trying to figure out why you want to take the job.”

“The doctor deserves rescuing.”

“So do a lot of people. Lucky for him ASC can afford our fee. But that’s not why you want the job. Is it because Kingsman Helms and Douglas Case are cooking up something they didn’t tell us about?”

“I don’t know about ‘cooking up.’ They’re probably just holding something back.”

“They are lying,” she said firmly. “You know it and that intrigues you.”

Kincaid knew Janson so well she could see on his face the lupine gleam of the hunter catching movement on the periphery of its vision. No, she corrected herself. Not lupine, he’s not an animal in the woods; he’s more like a pirate: Something was out there and he was sailing closer, wondering was it something he wanted?

But Janson only shook his head. “I don’t
know
that they’re lying.”

He extinguished the gleam so thoroughly that even she could not tell what he was thinking. “But yes, I am intrigued. For the U.S. and China, and anyone else trying to corner a stable source of oil, the Gulf of Guinea looks more and more like an end run around the mess in the Middle East. The stakes are huge, potentially.”