Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Janson Option (Paul Janson) (25 page)

The Vince Giordano Nightclub
New York City

D
ancing to hot jazz played by Vince Giordano & the Nighthawks, Jessica Kincaid looked as happy as Paul Janson had ever seen her. While he watched her from their table, the curly-haired brunette knockout who ran the nightclub stopped to say, “I’ve seen your friend before. First time for you?”

“First time,” Janson lied.

“Thought so. I never forget a face.”

“Glad I came. Great music.”

“Gotta go, people at the door.”

Giordano’s band slid from “Railroad Man” into a slow arrangement of “Let’s Face the Music.” Kincaid came back to their table and took Janson’s hand. “Lou says I’m doing good.”

Lou was her dance instructor. “Sure looked good from here.”

“Let me ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“You never seem jealous of Lou. I mean, he’s hot as hell. Definitely not gay. Do you ever wonder?”

Wondering where this had come from, and particularly where it was going, Janson said, “I’m not jealous.”

Up on the bandstand the drummer banged three sharp notes. Janson saw Kincaid falling backward in an abandoned fish factory eight thousand miles from New York. After a while, he heard her ask, “Hey, pal, still here?”

Janson dragged himself back into the club by reminding himself that she could not be dancing like Ginger Rogers if her leg had not completely healed. He squeezed her hand. “I’m here. I was just thinking. An old friend called about a job. You ever been to the Arctic?”

“Skied across Greenland, if that counts.”

“Close enough.”

She said, “Let me ask you something else.”

“Shoot.”

“Did you sleep with the colonel from MUST?”

“Petra Rasmusson?”

“Tall Swedish brunette spy? Violet eyes?”

“Not really.”

“What’s ‘not really’?”

“Our cover getting me into Russia was a married couple on their honeymoon cruise. Basic tradecraft demands you assume the Russians wired the stateroom.”

“So you sat around making noises in the dark?”

Janson kept a straight face. “Unfortunately, we could not ignore the possibility of low-light cameras. Or even infrared.”

“How’d you get through it?”

“Sometimes you have to be tougher than the situation.”

They had moved their chairs close together, and everyone in the nightclub was listening to the Nighthawks and watching the dancers. No one saw Kincaid’s fore and middle knuckles drill deep as an ax head into Janson’s torso.

When he could breathe again, Janson said, “Would you dial 911?”

“Are you pressing charges?”

“Ambulance. I think you broke my rib.”

“If I’d meant to break your rib, I’d have hit you harder.”

Janson took some shallow breaths and said, “Jess. I never used to be a one-woman man.”

“What happened? Get old?”

“Not old,” he said. “Lucky.”

“Janson?”

“Why am I suddenly Janson?”

“Because I’m asking you something serious.”

“What?”

“I get jealous. Don’t you ever get jealous?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Janson cupped her face gently in his big hands. “Jess? What is jealous, except being afraid you’ll lose someone?”

“OK…?”

“Maybe I’d get jealous if we were in a different line of work.”

“What does our line of work have to do with it?”

“I’m already afraid I’ll lose you.”

The pleasures of research include discovering wonderful nonfiction writers.

Jay Bahadur is a brave and hardy Canadian journalist who wrote in dazzling detail about Somali pirates in an exciting book called
Deadly Waters.

Equally brave and dedicated to specifics is Roberto Saviano, author of
Gomorrah,
about organized crime in Naples.

I also recommend every book written by my friend Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland, a precise and patient guide through the mysteries of medicine.

Nuruddin Farah, the Somali novelist, depicts in
Crossbones
ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives while trapped in a thirty-year war. Once you have lived with his characters and experienced their dreams and pleasures, as well as their despair, reports of bombings and assassinations in far-off East Africa become as personal as if friends were attacked. Similarly, blogs and websites by Somalis from many walks of life, and the interviews they give to the
New York Times,
the
Guardian,
National Public Radio, Al Jazeera, and the BBC portray a benighted country still filled with hope that one day the good guys will win.

ROBERT LUDLUM
was the author of twenty-seven novels, each one a
New York Times
bestseller. There are more than 210 million of his books in print, and they have been translated into thirty-two languages. He is the author of
The Scarlatti Inheritance,
The Chancellor Manuscript,
and the Jason Bourne series—
The Bourne Identity,
The Bourne Supremacy,
and
The Bourne Ultimatum
—among others. Mr. Ludlum passed away in March 2001. To learn more, visit www.Robert-Ludlum.com.
PAUL GARRISON
was born in New York and currently lives in Connecticut. He has spent a lot of time on boats and published five thrillers, mostly sea-oriented:
Fire and Ice
,
Red Sky at Morning
,
Buried at Sea
,
Sea Hunter
, and
The Ripple Effect
before writing the first of the new Janson novels. To learn more, visit www.justinscott-paulgarrison.com.

The Janson Directive

The Janson Command (by Paul Garrison)

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