The Janson Command (6 page)

Kincaid knew that. It was obvious. What was not obvious to her, and it drove her crazy, was what he was really thinking. What did Janson want? He was as complicated a person as she had ever known. She had learned that his apparent straightforwardness was more a factor of acute decisiveness. Like her, he thought and acted quickly. It was necessary to survive. But in Paul’s case, she thought, decisiveness masked complication.

“But it’s more than that,” she pressed him. “I think you are also influenced by concern for Doug Case. Isn’t that the truth?”

“The truth?” Janson returned a bantering smile.“Our old friend.”

“
Your
old friend,” she retorted, and watched his thoughts sink inward.

To keep healing Paul Janson knew that he had to brave the truth daily: Crimes he had committed to serve his country were still crimes; assassinating even the most deserving of termination was murder; a successful assassin was a serial killer; and unless an agent possessed the empty heart of a sociopath, murder after murder exacted a fierce toll on the murderer.

But as he had explained years ago to Doug Case, admitting the truth could only save him if he atoned. He could not change the past, but he could work with every fiber in his being to make amends. That was his dream, one that was battered daily by reality, human failings, moral conundrums, and the paradox of atoning for violence with violence.

“Yes,” he admitted. “Doug is one of the ‘saved.’ ”

“I
knew
it!” she said triumphantly. “The Phoenix strikes again.”

“Doug was my first. Back when I was blundering around on my own.”

Doug Case had been right about one thing: Janson had soon discovered that it was impossible to do it alone. The man who loathed institutions had to create one. He had recruited experts to help create the Phoenix Foundation to seek out and rehabilitate former covert officers suffering the mental wounds of dehumanizing service. Astute management of the money planted in his overseas accounts, bold moves at moments of financial meltdown, and some astonishing good luck helped pay for Phoenix grants to former covert operators to set them up in academia or public service or community institutions. Jobs like this one to rescue ASC’s doctor earned the money to maintain facilitators, specialized operators, computer wizards, and hackers.

None knew the whole story. Jessica was special and knew more than most.

“Doug is also a major success. Head of global security for the biggest oil company in the world. In his so-called spare time he’s big brother, dad, and uncle to an entire halfway house for former gangbangers crippled in shoot-outs. At Christmas everybody gets an electric superchair.”

“What did he do? What did you save him from?”

“Nothing you need to know.”

“Of course I don’t
need
to know. Except if I’m suddenly hanging upside down by my ankles watching you get tortured and waiting for my turn, I would like to think that we went into this job with our eyes open.”

“Funny you should mention torture.”

“What is funny about torture?”

“Doug Case was against torture. Vehemently. He believed that everyone—citizen, soldier, covert agent—was in the war against terror. Therefore, he claimed, we should not destroy the best part of ourselves—our civilization, our morals—just to save ourselves. He said innocent victims who are killed because a terrorist was
not
tortured into giving up information die serving the greater good.”

“Which is?”

“Our decency.”

“The boys must have loved him at Cons Ops.”

“You may recall,” Janson reminded Jessica drily. “Consular Operations was not a debating society. He only spoke about it after.”

“After what?”

“After he shot his partner to stop him torturing an asset they had captured in Malaysia.”

“He
shot
a fellow agent?”

“Twice in the head.”

“He shot an
American
? Jesus, Paul. No wonder he’s in a wheelchair. Who put him there?” Her eyes got big. “You?”

“Vengeance ain’t my style, Jesse. You know that. There is no revenge. Not on this earth.”

“Yeah?” She stared at him probingly. “Then who did it?”

“He put himself in that wheelchair.”

“Come again?”

“Doug stepped off the roof of our embassy in Singapore.”

“Suicide?”

“That was his intention. But the body doesn’t always obey the mind. He’d done too many parachute jumps to auger passively into the ground. His body remembered how to fall. Saved his life, if not his spine.”

“Wow… But you said he got shot.”

“That was a different time.”

“When did you step in?”

“When I found him begging on Washington Boulevard in Ogden, Utah.”

“How’d you track him down? VA hospital?”

“He grew up in Ogden. When it all goes to hell, people go home.”

Jessica Kincaid shook her head. “Sometimes I feel guilty.”

“For what?”

“All the good stuff you do that I don’t.”

Janson laughed. “One crusader in the outfit is plenty—Seriously, Jesse, you’re young. You’re in a different place; you’re still honing yourself, learning your craft. Go tell Mike we’re going to Africa.”

Jessica Kincaid stepped to the front of the plane and opened the cockpit door. Forty thousand feet under the Embraer’s long nose fenced farmland stretched for as far as she could see. Fields were green in the sunlight. Creeks and rivers were fringed with trees.

She laid a hand each on the shoulders of Mike and Ed. “Boys, you know where Africa is?”

“Heard of it,” said Ed.

“The boss wants to go there.”

Mike asked, “Any particular part of Africa?”

“Port Harcourt, Nigeria.”

She observed closely as Ed brought the changed destination up on the Honeywell Flight Management System. New-generation software integrated the Embraer’s WAAS GPS, waypoint data, and the Future Air Navigation System for flying under transocean Procedure Control. He began charting a course to minimize distance and fuel burn.

“Hang a right,” he told Mike, showing him the course. “We’ll fuel up in Caracas.”

Mike said, “Better get some sleep.”

“Soon as I enter our passenger manifest for Customs and Border Protection.”

Mike tossed a grin over his shoulder at Kincaid. “Miss Jessica, if I were to move over while Ed sacks out, would you like some left-seat flight time?”

“You bet!” she said, always eager to fly the plane. She listened while Mike radioed Atlantic Air Traffic Control Center, through whose airspace they were flying, to request permission to change their route. When he received clearance to turn to a new course, he eased the big silver jet onto its starboard wing.

“Be right back,” said Kincaid. “Soon as I check on the boss.”

She hurried to the main cabin, braced against the tilt. Janson was seated on the high side, staring out the window at nothing but sky. It’s more than Doug Case, she thought. It’s more than the doctor. The Machine sensed that something didn’t fit. She thought of challenging him, of saying, “Something else is going on. What is it?” But even if Janson was ready to admit it, she knew by the tilt of his head that he could not put it into words, yet.

FOUR

I
n the Free Foree camp, hidden in the caves that honeycombed the densely forested mountainous center of the island state, seven frightened men waited with their arms tied around the trunks of broad-leaf evergreen ironwoods.

Shafts of sunlight pierced the ragged canopy seventy-five feet above their heads where rampant vines were killing the treetops. The drone of a swift stream racing down the mountain muffled the sounds of nearby activity, heightening the prisoners’ sense of isolation from events that would determine their fate. They could not hear the shouting in the cave that sheltered the field hospital.

“What did they do to my father?” an angry Douglas Poe demanded of Dr. Terry Flannigan. The son of the leader of the Free Foree Movement was a tall, dark-skinned twenty-five-year-old with a wiry build, a hard mouth, and cornrowed hair.

“About everything you can do to a man and not quite kill him,” the doctor replied, working hard at maintaining enough detachment to keep his head on straight. When you were trying to put a patient back together again it did not pay to dwell on the nature of his fellow human beings who had taken him apart.

Flannigan glanced warily at the son. Douglas Poe seemed thoroughly unhinged by the sight of his tortured father. One false move, thought the doctor, and he, too, would end up tied to a tree with the others waiting to be shot. Flannigan shivered. The air was markedly cooler on the slopes of Pico Clarence and even cooler inside the cave.

About the only part of the poor devil they hadn’t tormented was his face. His eyes were closed—Flannigan had given him enough morphine from
Amber Dawn
’s first-aid kit to see to that—but if you didn’t look at the rest of him what you saw in his face was a once-vigorous sixty-eight-year-old with salt-and-pepper mustache and eyebrows, a thick head of kinky hair, dyed black and growing out at the roots, big elephant ears, a narrow Portuguese nose, a strong jaw, and the double chin and round cheeks of a man who enjoyed himself at the dinner table. Flannigan found it hard to believe that Ferdinand Poe had given up his pleasures to lead a revolution. Almost as hard to believe that he was their prisoner.

“If he dies, you’re next!” vowed the son.

“Fuck you!” said the doctor, who had nothing to lose. He could say what he wanted. They wouldn’t hurt a hair on his head unless the old man kicked the bucket. But even though they needed a doctor for dozens of wounded, angry-son Douglas would pull the trigger if his father died. Just as Douglas was about to pull it on the jerks tied to the trees. Not that the doctor would grieve for those bastards. They were the commandos who had boarded
Amber Dawn
and shot everybody, so whatever they got they had coming.

But where it got strange was that Douglas the son, Ferdinand Poe’s son, was accusing his own soldiers of going rogue. Terry Flannigan did not know what the hell was going on. Except that the commandos’ leader, the South African psycho who had murdered Janet, had disappeared before the rest got tied to the trees. Poe had sent a hundred men out combing the jungle for him with orders to shoot to kill. But the doctor had seen the South African operate on the long boat trip into the island and the dangerous slog through the swamps and forests and he would be very surprised if they caught the animal.

Douglas Poe reached for his father’s hand and felt him flinch as he touched him. “I thought you gave him morphine!” Douglas shouted accusingly.

“I told you not to touch him,” said the doctor. “If I give him any more he’ll fall into a coma. Your cave is not equipped to monitor a patient in a coma.”

“But when—?”

Terrence Flannigan resorted to an answer as old as Hippocrates and probably still current with witch doctors: “He needs time.”

Douglas Poe drew his pistol from the holster strapped to his thigh, spun on his heel, and stormed out of the cave. The soldiers tied to the trees craned their necks to watch him coming. They tugged at the ropes holding them to the rough bark. A man cried out. Another groaned. Their sergeant addressed Poe in measured terms: “Douglas, Comrade, we only did what you ordered us to do.”

“I did not order you to kill them.”

“Yes, you did. You said to kill the oil boat crew and sink the boat.”

“I did not.”

“Douglas. Brother. Comrade. I heard you with my own ears on the radio.”

“Liar. I never spoke to you on the radio.”

“I heard you say it to Sergeant Major Van Pelt: ‘Shoot them. Sink the boat.’ ”

“You have ruined everything my father worked for. All of you!” Douglas shouted. He strode from tree to tree, waving his gun in their faces. “My father planned to bargain with the oil company to free and rebuild our ruined nation. And what did you do? You killed the oil workers.”

“You gave Sergeant Major Van Pelt the crew list.”

“I did not.”

“He told me you did.”

Douglas Poe cocked his pistol, pressed the barrel to the sergeant’s temple, and jerked the trigger. Then Poe hurried from tree to tree and shot the rest. It was over in thirty seconds. Terry Flannigan watched from the mouth of the cave, sickened and terrified. He wondered if he was strong enough to run for it like the South African?

Isle de Foree was thirty miles long and twenty wide. Six hundred square miles. The insurgents held the highlands in the middle, and held it tightly if the scores of heavy machine guns Flannigan had seen mounted in treetops and the burned-out wreckage of Iboga’s helicopters was any indication. The dictator controlled the lowlands that descended to the Atlantic Ocean, which seemed a very long way away. In between, where it was hotter and wetter, the forest thickened into lush jungle. Above the plantations. On the way up that had appeared to be no-man’s-land. The insurgents had been cautious moving through it.

Should he run for it?

He was in lousy shape. He hadn’t worked out in years and he drank too much. He was no soldier, no jungle fighter. They would catch him and kill him if he didn’t get a long lead. Problem was, if the old man died they’d kill him anyway. He resolved to make a run for it, the sooner the better. A boy tugged at his arm, one of the kids who acted as orderlies. The only thing Flannigan liked about FFM was that they did not employ child soldiers. These were orphans kept safe in the camp running errands and bringing food and water. “He awakes.”

“What?”

“Minister Ferdinand awakes.” Ferdinard Poe had been foreign minister before Iboga seized power. They called him Minister.

Flannigan hurried to Poe’s cot.

Ferdinand Poe was staring at him, peering through the drug like an ancient mariner piercing the fog. He had a strong voice that seemed appropriate to the strong jaw and the double chin and the round cheeks. The voice of a man who believed in himself. “Who are you?”

“I’m your doctor,” said Flannigan, with a sinking heart. He wasn’t going anywhere. “How are you feeling, sir?”