“There’s always time for recriminations,” said Charlotte Ainsley with a severe, over-the-glasses pedagogic look. “Just not now. Go ahead, Derek. I’m still not getting the picture.”
“Served in SEAL Team Four, picked up a goddamn Navy Cross in his first tour of duty,” said the undersecretary of state. His eyes fell on a yellowing slip from the file, and he passed it around.
Office Fitness Report Remarks
20 November 1970
Lieutenant Junior Grade Janson’s performance in Joint SEAL/Special Force Detachment A-8 has been outstanding. His able judgment, tactical knowledge, creativity, and imagination has allowed him to plan Swift Strike operations against enemy units, guerrilla personnel, and hostile installations that were accomplished with minimal losses. Lt. j.g. Janson has demonstrated extraordinary ability to adapt and to respond to rapidly changing circumstances, and is unaffected by the hardships of living under the toughest field conditions. As an officer, he demonstrates natural leadership skills: he does not merely demand respect, he commands it.
Lieutenant Harold Brady, Rating Officer
Lt. j.g. Janson demonstrates potential of the highest caliber: his field skills and ability to improvise in conditions of adversity are nothing short of stellar. I will personally be keeping a close watch to see whether his potential is fully realized.
Lieutenant Commander Endorsing Officer
“There’s dozens just like it. Guy serves one tour after another, continuous combat exposure, no breaks. Then a big gap. Hard to build your resume as a POW. Captured in the spring of 1971 by the Viet Cong. Held for eighteen months, in pretty abysmal conditions.”
“Care to specify?” Charlotte Ainsley asked.
“Tortured, repeatedly. Starved. Part of the time, he was kept in a cage—not a cell, a cage, like a big birdcage, six feet high, maybe four feet around. When we found him, he weighed eighty-three pounds. He grew so skeletal that the manacles slid off his feet one day. Made about three escape attempts. The last one succeeded.”
“Was treatment like that typical?”
“No,” the undersecretary said. “But trying so relentlessly and resourcefully to escape wasn’t typical, either. They knew he was part of a counterintelligence division, so they tried pumping him pretty hard. Got frustrated when it went nowhere. He was lucky he survived. Damn lucky.”
“Not lucky he got captured,” the National Security Advisor said.
“Well, that’s where things get complicated, of course. Janson believed that he’d been set up. That the VC had been given information about him and he’d been deliberately led into an ambush.”
“Set up? By whom?” Ainsley’s voice was sharp.
“His commanding officer.”
“Whose own opinion of his darling protégé seemed to have cooled a little.” She flipped to the final sheet headed OFFICER FITNESS REPORT REMARKS and read out loud:
“Although Lt. Janson’s own standards of professionalism remain impressive, difficulties have begun to emerge in his concept of leadership: in both training exercises and duty, he has failed to demand from his subordinates a similar level of competence, while overlooking obvious shortcomings. He appears to be more concerned with the welfare of his subordinates than with their ability to help execute mission objectives. His loyalty to his men overrides his commitment to broader military goals, as specified and set out by his commanding officers.”
“There’s more going on there than meets the eye,” said Collins. “The chill was inevitable.”
“Why?”
“Because, it seems, he’d threatened to report him to the high command. Crimes of war.”
“Forgive me, I should know this. But what was going on here? The warrior wunderkind had a psychotic break?”
“No. Janson’s suspicions were correct. And once he’d returned stateside, and got out of medical, he made a stink about it—within channels, of course. He wanted to see his commanding officer court-martialed.”
“And was he?”
The undersecretary turned and stared: “You mean you really don’t know?”
“Let’s cut the drumroll,” the round-faced woman replied. “You got something to say, say it.”
“You don’t know who Janson’s commanding officer was?”
She shook her head, her eyes intent, penetrating. “A man named Alan Demarest,” the undersecretary replied. “Or maybe I should say Lieutenant Commander Demarest.”
“‘I see,’ said the blind man.” Her largely suppressed Southern accent broke through, as it did at times of great stress. “The source of the Nile.”
“When next we see our man Janson, it’s graduate studies at Cambridge University on a government fellowship. Winds up back on board, in Consular Operations.” The undersecretary’s voice became summary and brisk.
“Under you,” Charlotte Ainsley said.
“Yes. In a manner of speaking.” Collins’s tone said more than his words, but everyone understood his import: that Janson was not the most subordinate of subordinates.
“Rewind a sec,” Ainsley said. “His time as a POW in Vietnam had to have been incredibly traumatic. Maybe he never really recovered from it.”
“Physically, he got to be stronger than ever … .”
“I’m not talking about physical prowess or mental acuity. But psychologically, that sort of experience leaves scars. Fault lines, cracks, weaknesses—like in a ceramic bowl. The flaw you don’t see until something else happens, a second trauma. And then you split, or break, or snap. A good man becomes a bad one.”
The undersecretary raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“And I’ll accept that this is all on the level of conjecture,” she continued smoothly. “But can we afford to make a mistake? Granted, there’s a great deal we don’t know. But I’m with Doug on this one. Comes down to this: Is he working for us or against us? Well, here’s one thing we do know. He’s not working for us.”
“True,” said Collins. “And yet—”
“There’s always time for ‘and yets,’” Ainsley said. “Just not now.”
“This guy is a variable we can’t control,” said Albright. “In an already complex and confusing probability matrix. Outcome optimization means we’ve got to erase that variable.”
“A ‘variable’ who happens to have given three decades of his life to his country,” Collins shot back. “A funny thing about our business—the loftier the language, the lower the deed.”
“Come off it, Derek. Nobody’s hands are dirtier than yours. Except your boy Janson. One of your goddamn killing machines.” The DIA man glared at the undersecretary. “Needs a taste of his own medicine. My English plain enough?”
The undersecretary adjusted his black plastic glasses and returned the analyst’s unfriendly look. Still, it was clear enough which way the wind was blowing.
“He’ll be hard to take out,” the CIA operations man stressed, still smarting from the Athens debacle. “Nobody’s better at hand-to-hand. Janson could inflict serious casualties.”
“Everybody in the intelligence community has received rumors and reports about Anura, albeit unsubstantiated,” said Collins. “That means your frontline agents as well as mine.” He glanced at the CIA operations man and then at Albright. “Why don’t you let your cowboys have another go?”
“Derek, you know the rules,” Ainsley said. “Everybody cleans up his own litter box. I don’t want another Athens. Nobody knows his methods like the cadre that trained him. Come on, your senior operations managers must already have filed a contingency plan.”
“Well, sure,” said Collins. “But they’ve got no clue what’s really going on.”
“You think we do?”
“I take your point.” A decision had been made; deliberation was over. “Plans call for the dispatch of a special team of highly trained snipers. They can get the job done, and discreetly. Ratings are off the charts. Nobody would stand a chance against them.” His gray eyes blinked behind his glasses as he remembered the
team’s unbroken series of successes. Quietly, he added, “No one ever has.”
“Terminate orders in effect?”
“Current orders are locate, watch, and wait.”
“Activate,” she said. “This is a collective decision. Mr. Janson is beyond salvage. Green-light the sanction. Now.”
“I’m not arguing, I just want to make sure people are aware of the risks,” the undersecretary persisted.
“Don’t tell us about risks,” said the DIA analyst. “You created those goddamn risks.”
“We’re all under a great deal of stress,” Hildreth interjected smoothly.
The analyst folded his arms on his chest and directed another baleful glare at Undersecretary Derek Collins. “You made him,” Albright said. “For everyone’s sake, you’d better break him.”
Chapter Fourteen
The sidewalks of London’s Jermyn Street were filled with people who had too little time, and with people who had too much. An assistant bank manager of NatWest was scurrying with as much speed as was consistent with dignity, late for a lunch date with the junior vice president of Fiduciary Trust International’s Fixed Income Department. He knew he shouldn’t have taken that last phone call; if he wasn’t punctual, he could kiss that job good-bye … . A beefy sales rep for Whitehall-Robins was keeping an assignation with a woman he had chatted up at Odette’s Wine Bar the night before, braced for disappointment. Daylight usually added ten years to those slags who looked so sultry and appetizing in the smoky gloom of the downstairs banquettes—but a chap had to find out one way or another, right? Maybe a stop-off at the newsagent was in order: being on time might make him seem a tad eager … . The neglected wife of a workaholic American businessman was clutching three shopping bags filled with expensive but dowdy clothes she knew she’d probably never wear back in the States: charging it all to his Platinum American Express somehow let her vent her resentment for his having dragged her along. Another seven hours to kill before she and her husband saw Mousetrap for the third time … . The chief assessor of Inland Revenue’s Westminster branch was jostling his way through the crowd with an eye on his watch: you never had as much authority with those berks at Lloyds when you showed up late; everybody said so.
Striding down Jermyn Street in a fast lope, Paul Janson was lost among the window-shoppers, bureaucrats, and businessmen who crowded the sidewalks. He was attired in a navy suit, a spread-collar shirt, and a polkadotted tie, and his look was harried but not nervous. It was the look of someone who belonged; his face and his body alike telegraphed as much.
The jutting signs—the ovals and rectangles overhead—registered only vaguely. The older names of the older establishment—Floris, Hilditch & Key, Irwin—were interspersed with newer arrivals, like Ermenegildo Zegna. The traffic was half congealed, sludgy, with tall red buses and low boxy cabs and commercial vehicles that amounted to wheeled signage. INTEGRON: YOUR GLOBAL SOLUTIONS PROVIDER. VODAFONE: WELCOME TO THE WORLD’S LARGEST MOBILE COMMUNITY. He turned left on St. James’s Street, past Brooks’s and White’s, and then left again onto Pall Mall. He did not stop at his destination, however, but instead walked past it, his darting eyes alert to any signs of irregularity. Familiar sights: the Army and Navy Club, known affectionately as the Rag, the Reform Club, the Royal Automobile Club. In Waterloo Square, the same old bronzes stood. There was an equestrian statue of Edward VII, with a cluster of motorcycles parked at its pedestal, an inadvertent comment on changing modes of personal transport. There was a statue of John Lord Lawrence, a viceroy of India from Victorian times, standing proudly, as one who knew he was very well known indeed to the few who knew him. And, grandly seated, Sir John Fox Burgoyne, a field marshall who had been a hero of the Peninsular War and, later, of the Crimean War. “The war is popular beyond belief,” Queen Victoria had said of the Crimean conflict, which would become a byword for pointless suffering. To be a hero of the Crimean—what was that? It was a conflict whose eruption represented diplomatic incompetence and whose prosecution represented military incompetence.
He allowed his gaze to drift to his destination, at the corner of Waterloo Place: the Athenaeum Club. With its large cream-colored blocks, tall columned portico, and Parthenon-inspired frieze, it was a paragon of the early-nineteenth-century neoclassical style. On the side a hooded security camera projected from a cornerstone. Above the front pillars stood the goddess Athena, painted in gold. The goddess of wisdom—the one thing that was in shortest supply. Janson made a second pass in the opposite direction, walking past a red Royal Mail truck, past the consulate for Papua New Guinea, past an office building. In the distance, a red-orange crane loomed over some unseen building site.
His mind kept returning to what had happened at Trinity College: he must have stumbled on a trip wire there. It was more likely that his old mentor had been under surveillance than that he had been followed, he decided. Even so, both the size of the net and the rapidity of the response were formidable. He could no longer take anything for granted.
Sight lines were everywhere. He had to be attuned to the kinds of anomalies that would ordinarily pass without notice. Trucks that were parked that should not have been parked; cars that drove too slowly, or too fast. The gaze from a passerby that lingered an instant too long—or was averted an instant too soon. Construction equipment where there was no construction. Nothing could pass without notice now.
Was he safe? Conclusive evidence was impossible. It was impossible even to say that the mail truck was simply what it appeared to be. But his instincts told him that he could enter the club unobserved. It was not a meeting place he himself would have selected. For his immediate purposes, though, it would be helpful to meet Grigori Berman on his own terms. Besides, the venue was, on reflection, a highly advantageous one. Public parks offered freedom of movement—it was what made them popular rendezvous points—but that freedom could also be exploited by observers. At an old-fashioned gentlemen’s club, it would be difficult to station an unfamiliar face. Janson would be there as the guest of a member. He doubted whether members of a surveillance team could gain similar access.
Inside the club, he identified himself and the member he was awaiting to a uniformed guard who sat at a booth by the front door. Then he proceeded to the polished marble floors of the foyer, which was four-posted with large, gilded Corinthian pillars. To his right was the smoking room, filled with small round tables and low-hanging chandeliers; to his left, the large dining room. Ahead, past a sea of red and gold carpeting, a broad marble staircase led up to the library, where coffee was taken and periodicals from all over the world lay stacked on a long table. He seated himself on a tufted leather bench by one of the pillars, beneath the portraits of Matthew Arnold and Sir Humphry Davy.
The Athenaeum Club. A gathering spot for members of the political and cultural elite.
And the unlikely rendezvous for a most unlikely man.
Gregori Berman was someone who, if he had developed a nodding acquaintance with morality, preferred to keep the relationship at arm’s length. Trained as an accountant in the former Soviet Union, he had made his fortune working for the Russian mafiya, specializing in the complex architecture of money laundering. Over the years, he had set up a thicket of IBCs—international business corporations—through which the ill-gotten gains of his mafiya partners could be cycled, and thus hidden from the authorities. Several years earlier, Janson had deliberately let him slip through a dragnet that Consular Operations had run. Dozens of international criminals had been apprehended, but Janson—to the annoyance of some of his colleagues—let their financial whiz kid go free.
In fact, the decision represented reason, not whim. Berman’s knowledge that the Cons Op officer had decided to let him escape meant that he’d be in Janson’s debt: the Russian could be converted from adversary to asset. And having someone who understood the intricacies of international money laundering represented a very significant asset indeed. Moreover, Berman was clever in his manipulations: it would be difficult f
or the authorities to build a case against him. If he was likely to get off anyway, why not let him off with a debt on which Janson could collect?
There was something else, too. Janson had reviewed hundreds of pages of intercepts, had come to know the principals of the scheme. Many were cold-blooded, thuggish, menacing figures. Berman, for his part, deliberately insulated himself from the details; he was cheerfully amoral, but he wasn’t unkind. He was perfectly happy to cheat people out of their funds but could be quite generous with his own. And somewhere along the line, Janson acquired a trace of sympathy for the high-living rogue.
“Paulie!” the bearlike man boomed, opening his arms wide. Janson stood and allowed himself to be enveloped in the Russian’s embrace. Berman fit none of the stereotypes of a numbers man; he was all emotional effusion, mixing a passion for things with a passion for life.
“I hug you and I kiss you,” Berman told Janson, pressing his lips to both his cheeks. Classic Berman: whatever the circumstances, he would display not the wariness of a man under pressure but the swagger of a larger-than-life bon vivant.
The fabric of Berman’s pinstriped bespoke suit was a feltlike cashmere, and he smelled faintly of Geo. F. Trumpers extract of limes, the scent said to be favored by the Prince of Wales. In his caricatured way, Berman sought to be every inch the English gentleman, and there were many inches of him at that. His conversation was a cataract of Britishisms, malapropisms, and what Janson thought of as Bermanisms. As absurd as he was, though, Janson could not help feel a certain affection for him. There was even something winning about his contradictions, the way he managed to be at once devious and ingenuous—he always had an eye for the next scam, and he was always delighted to tell you about it.