Robert Ludlum’s The Janson Command Read online

  Terry was staring out the back windows, which looked down on the hundred-foot-long, low and flat cargo deck, empty tonight but for the OSV’s towing windlass, deck crane, and capstans.

  “Get away from the window before they see you.”

  “They’re throwing stuff overboard.”

  “What they’re doing is their business.”

  “One of them is crawling around with a flashlight— Oh, he dropped something.”

  “What are they throwing?” she asked in spite of herself.

  “Computers.”

  * * *

  BELOWDECKS, JUBILANT PETROLOGISTS peeled off their sweat-soaked shirts and did a victory dance in the now-empty computer room. They had worked 24-7 for ten days, trapped on a boat where possession of booze or drugs or even a bottle of beer would get you banned from the oil business for life. Now they were headed for a well-earned party in the brothels of Porto Clarence, having successfully uploaded multiple terabytes of the hottest 3-D seismic data on the planet.

  The data acquisition was done, the client’s seismic model refined, the success of what oilmen called an elephant hunt confirmed beyond any doubt. The client had acknowledged receipt of the densely encrypted satellite transmissions and ordered them to throw the computers into the sea. Every laptop, desktop, even the fifty-thousand-dollar subsurface-modeling workstation that took two men to lift over the side of the ship. The monitors went, too, so no one would see them and ask what they were for, as did the hydrophones and air guns and their mil-spec satellite transmitter.

  In a few more hours the petrologists would celebrate the discovery of the “mother of all reserves”—billions and billions of barrels of oil and trillions upon trillions of cubic feet of natural gas that would transform Isle de Foree from a remote plantation island trickling oil through a neglected infrastructure into a West African Saudi Arabia.

  * * *

  “HEY, JANET. HOW many dinosaurs died to make the oil patch?”

  “Algae. Not dinosaurs.”

  Terry Flannigan stared at the dark ahead of the boat. The big secret could only be about oil. The water was miles deep here, but if you took the long view in eons, eras, and epochs, the seabed was actually an extension of the shallow African coast. For more years than there were stars in the sky, the Niger River had been dumping sediment into the Atlantic Ocean. This slurry of mud, sand, and dead plants and animals had filled the troughs, rifts, and clefts of the Atlantic and had kept spilling across the continental slope into the deep and continued seaward, drifting, filling. A lady petrologist once told him that the compacted fill was eight miles deep.

  “What did dinosaurs make? Coal?”

  “Trees made coal,” Janet Hatfield answered distractedly, her eyes locking on the radar. She switched on the powerful docking lamps. They lit a brilliant hundred-yard circle around the OSV. “Oh, shit!”

  “What?”

  An eighteen-foot rigid inflatable boat driven by enormous Mercury outboards swooped out of the dark bristling with assault rifles and rocket launchers. Janet Hatfield reacted quickly, grabbing the helm to override the autopilot. The RIB was struggling in the heavy seas. Maybe she could outrun them. She turned Amber Dawn’s heels to it, locked the new course, rammed her throttles full ahead, and yanked her radio microphone down from the ceiling.

  “Mayday, Mayday. Mayday. This is Amber Dawn, Amber Dawn, Amber Dawn. One-degree, nineteen minutes north. Seven-​degrees, forty-three minutes east.

  “One-degree, nineteen minutes north. Seven, forty-three east. One-degree, nineteen minutes north,” she repeated her position. “Seven-degrees, forty-three minutes east.” They couldn’t help if they couldn’t find her.

  “Pirates boarding Amber Dawn. Pirates boarding Amber Dawn. One-degree, nineteen minutes north. Seven-degrees, forty-three minutes east.”

  There was never a guarantee that anyone was listening. But the 406 MHz satellite EPIRB, which was out on the bridge wing in its float-free bracket, would broadcast her position continuously in case of sinking. She pushed through the door again to switch it on manually.

  The inflatable was so close she could see eight soldiers dressed in camouflage. Jungle camouflage on a boat?

  They had to be from Isle de Foree, she thought, the only land within the inflatable’s range. But they couldn’t be government troops in that little commando boat. Free Foree Movement rebels? Pirates or rebels, what did they want? The only thing valuable on an offshore service vessel was the crew. To hold hostage or for ransom. So they wouldn’t kill her people. At least, not yet.

  Muzzle flashes lit the inflatable like a Christmas tree and all the windows in Amber Dawn’s bridge shattered at once. Janet Hatfield felt something tug hard in her belly. Her legs skidded out from under her. She pitched backward into Terry’s arms and she almost laughed, “You never stop trying, do you?” except she couldn’t speak and was suddenly afraid.

  * * *

  A CARGO NET edged with grappling hooks cleared the low side of Amber Dawn’s main deck, clanged onto steel fittings, and held fast. Seven FFM insurgents scrambled aboard with their assault rifles, leaving their rocket launchers with one man in their boat. They were lean, fit, hard-faced fighters with the distinctive café-au-lait coloring of Isle de Foreens. But they took their orders from a broad-shouldered South African mercenary named Hadrian Van Pelt.

  Van Pelt carried a copy of Amber Dawn’s crew list.

  He sent two men to the engine room. Bursts of automatic fire echoed up from below and the generators fell silent, but for one powering the lights. The men stayed below opening sea cocks. Seawater poured in.

  Two others kicked open the door to the improvised computer room. Van Pelt followed with the crew list. “Over there! Against the wall.”

  The petrologists, shirtless and terrified, backed against the wall, exchanging looks of disbelief.

  Van Pelt counted heads. “Five!” he shouted. “Who’s missing?”

  Eyes flickered toward a closet. Van Pelt nodded at one of his men, who triggered a short burst, shredding the door. The ship rolled and the body of the scientist hiding there tumbled out. Van Pelt nodded again and his men executed the rest.

  A burst of gunfire from the quarters on the levels above spoke the end of Amber Dawn’s Filipino crew. Eleven down. Only the captain to go. Van Pelt drew his pistol and climbed the stairs to the bridge. The door was locked and made of steel. He signaled a soldier, who duct-taped a chunk of C-4 onto it. They sheltered halfway down the steps and covered their ears. The plastic explosive blew the door open with a loud bang and Van Pelt vaulted through it.

  To the mercenary’s surprise, the captain was not alone. She was sprawled on the deck, a pretty blonde in blood-soaked slacks and blouse. A man was kneeling over her, working with the sure-handed economy of a battlefield medic.

  Van Pelt raised his pistol. “Are you a doctor?”

  Terry Flannigan was holding death in his hands, and when he looked up from Janet’s riddled chest to the gunman standing in the door he was staring death in the face.

  “What kind of doctor?” the gunman demanded.

  “Trauma surgeon, you asshole. What does it look like?”

  “Come with me.”

  “I can’t leave her. She’s dying.”

  Van Pelt stepped closer and shot Janet Hatfield in the head. “Not anymore. Get in the boat.”

  TWO

  221 West 46th Street

  New York City

  Paul Janson descended a steep flight of stairs to Sofia’s Club Cache in the basement of the Hotel Edison. The curly-haired brunette knockout who took his fifteen-dollar cover charge with the dazzling smile she reserved for new customers saw him as he intended to be seen: an out-of-town businessman hoping that Vince Giordano and his famous hot-jazz Nighthawks would liven up a lonely Monday evening. His navy suit, artfully cut to conceal his powerful frame, looked like a classic soft-shoulder Brooks Brothers sack suit, neither dapper nor expensive. His tailor had seen to that by eliminating bes
poke sleeve buttons and bound buttonholes. The creases in Janson’s brow marked a man somewhere past his thirties, and he could have acquired the faint lines of scar tissue playing college sports.

  Janson took his change, returned an unmemorable smile, and remarked, like half the people who came down the stairs, “The joint is jumpin’.”

  Across the wide, deep low-ceilinged room the tuxedo-clad eleven-piece band of saxophones, clarinets, trumpets, trombone, banjo, piano, drums, and an aluminum double bass was storming through “Shake That Thing.” A hundred people ate and drank at the tables. A dozen couples danced to the music, many with great skill. The dancers older than thirty wore dresses and suits befitting the hot-jazz era. The younger favored T-shirts and cargo pants.

  One of the younger, an attractive woman with strong, regular features, high cheekbones, full lips, and spiky brown “bed hair,” was dancing a high-speed 1920s one-step with the intensity and precision of a laser cutting machine. Janson concealed an appreciative smile. Jessica Kincaid demanded of herself, “Go fast till it hurts, then put on some speed and do it better.”

  Kincaid shot Janson a glance that mingled fascination and envy. Paul Janson was master of the nondescript, and it drove her crazy. She worked hard at being a chameleon. With adjustments of clothing, hair, jewelry, and makeup she could make herself look twenty-five or thirty-five and pass for a Brooklyn video artist or a good ol’ girl juke-joint bartender or a buttoned-down banker. But she could never look nondescript, and when she tried Janson laughed that “nondescript” and “interesting” did not fit the same sentence.

  Paul Janson was just there. Except when he was not there. Janson could hide in plain sight. If he chose to, Janson could fill a room, but he was more likely to enter without anyone noticing—as he had just now—and leave the same way. He even had a trick of shifting his shoulders to make his height look average. She glanced at him again. He returned it this time and drifted toward the stairs.

  “Gotta go,” she told her dance instructor. Duty called.

  The Town Car looked identical to a thousand black livery cabs in Midtown. But the kid behind the wheel had driven armored security vehicles for tanker convoys in Iraq and the interior lights did not go on when Kincaid opened the door.

  “Where we going?” she asked the sturdy shape of Janson in the shadows.

  “First stop: Houston, Texas. American Synergy Corporation’s HQ.”

  Biggest oil company in the country. Snapped up the richest leases after BP’s Gulf of Mexico disaster. “Then?”

  “West Africa is my guess. If we take the job. Home if we don’t. We probably won’t.”

  “Why go at all?”

  “ASC’s president of global security is an old friend.”

  Kincaid nodded in the dark. Janson had lots of them, and when old friends called he ran to them. He passed her a thick towel. “Don’t catch cold.” Soaking wet from dancing a heart-pounding two beats to a second, she was shivering in the AC.

  “Y’all telling me I smell?” While a fluent student of several languages and possessing an invaluable gift for mimicking accents, Jessica Kincaid had not entirely erased from her own voice the Kentucky hill twang she had grown up with, particularly when she was alone with Janson.

  “That’s why we have a shower on the plane.”

  The car caught the green lights up Madison Avenue, crossed over to the Major Deegan, and swung onto the Hutchinson River Parkway. Late-night suburban traffic was light. Forty minutes after leaving the Edison, they pulled into Westchester Airport, bypassed the passenger terminal, and continued on to a fenced-off section with a chain-link gate. A voice on a security speakerphone asked who they were.

  “Tail number eight-two-two-Romeo-Echo,” the driver answered, and drove through when the electric gate slid open. An attendant opened a second gate that led to the runways, a vast expanse of darkness dotted with blue, yellow, and green lights marking taxiways and runway edges and thresholds. The car parked beside a silver Embraer Legacy 650 jet with two enormous Rolls-Royce AE 3007 engines in the tail. The pilots were completing their checklists. Janson and Kincaid climbed aboard, retracted the self-contained deployable entry steps that permitted fast exits independent of airfield facilities, and locked the door.

  The long-haul executive jet built to carry fourteen passengers had been made extremely comfortable for two. Embraer had reconfigured it to Janson’s specs, outfitting it to deliver two or three operators well rested and fed, suited up, and thoroughly informed for any kind of work anywhere in the world. The galley directly behind the cockpit had been upgraded, and the lavatory and the rearmost of the three seating areas had been converted to a dressing room and full bath. The forward seating areas had been turned into a study and dining room. The middle section had fold-down beds for transocean runs.

  The plane had climbed to forty-one thousand feet and their pilot was radioing, “New York center, Embraer two-two-Romeo level at four-one-zero,” when Kincaid came out of the shower wrapped in a terry-cloth robe. Janson looked up from his green leather easy chair, where he was studying a dossier labeled: “ASC—American Synergy Corporation.” A laptop was open on the table beside him and he had a glass of water close at hand. An identical dossier and laptop were waiting beside Kincaid’s red chair along with water and a stack of lemon-lime Camelbak Elixir electrolyte tablets.

  Janson peered over the wire-rimmed reading glasses that Kincaid called his innocent old guy specs and said, “If we could bottle the aroma of a woman in a shower we would be rich.”

  “Folks I know would think we’re rich already.” She touched a fingerprint reader to unlock an overhead luggage bin, opened a hidden interior cabinet, and took down her Knight’s M110 semiautomatic sniper rifle. The weapon was spotless, but she fieldstripped it anyway, laying the parts on the fold-down galley table, cleaned and oiled each, checked for wear, and reassembled them. Janson likened her ritual to an already clean cat grooming itself into a hunting trance.

  Kincaid would have preferred, before she locked the weapon up again, to open the accessories case and put her day and night scopes, bipod, and laser sight through the same close inspection. But the dossier was still sitting there beside her chair demanding to be read.

  “Okay if I open one of your shirts?”

  “Of course,” he answered without looking up.

  From a built-in chest of drawers she took a freshly ironed pale blue Burberry dress shirt, carefully removed the laundry’s cardboard stiffener, and put the shirt back. She settled in her leather chair, covered her ears with noise-canceling headphones to help her concentrate, and opened the dossier on the American Synergy Corporation. She held the cardboard at the top of the first page and began sliding it down the page, covering each line of text as she read it. If she didn’t cover each line after she read it, she would go back and read over and over fearing she must have made a mistake.

  “Not severely dyslexic,” she had explained when she first told Janson. “Just dyslexic. They didn’t call it that back in Red Creek. They all thought I was a little slow. Didn’t bother me much,” she added quickly. “I could outshoot the boys and fix any vehicle in my daddy’s gas station.”

  She had taught herself the cardboard trick while struggling through college equivalency courses to join the FBI—her first step up the ladder to Cons Ops.

  She read the ASC report cover to cover. Whenever she double-checked a detail on her laptop, she placed the cursor at the bottom of the screen and scrolled with the down arrow, concealing what she had already read. She knew she was getting too tired to continue when a letter b flopped upside down and became a p.

  At that point she loaded in a promotional Blu-ray video titled American Synergy Corporation—New Energy for a New Tomorrow.

  Paul had reclined his chair and fallen asleep. She pressed a button that laid her own chair flat and listened to Kingsman Helms, the president of ASC’s Petroleum Division, give a speech to shareholders. The handsome smooth talker reminded her of evangeli
cal preachers down home.

  “It isn’t a matter of telling our story better. We have to create a better story. Long-term growth means long-term survival. Oil is one type of energy we develop, along with wind, solar, biomass, nuclear, and coal. Our mission is to supply secure, safe, environmentally sound, cheap energy—not just today, but twenty years down the road.

  “A lot has gone wrong, lately.” Helms paused to look straight into the camera with an expression that said that everyone knew that he meant Wall Street screwups, government meddling, and oil spills by mismanaged competitors. “Americans are counting on us more than ever. ASC will not let them down, because at ASC we never forget that leadership is not about now, not about today. Leadership is about then, about the future, about tomorrow.”

  CatsPaw researchers had attached to the DVD a voiced-over addendum: “Of wind, solar, biomass, nuclear, and coal, the global corporation has steered clear of biomass, which a secret company memo rated ‘a huge joke perpetrated on the Congress by farm states,’ invested just enough to appear green in multiple solar-tech startups and wind turbine manufacturers, and has recently amassed huge holdings in Appalachian coal companies.” Kincaid’s hackles rose; that meant strip mining and blasting the tops off mountains. The researchers had highlighted ASC’s biggest challenge: direct competition for access to new “ground resources” from the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. “In plain language, as big and powerful a global as it is, ASC is being squeezed overseas by China. To remain on top ‘twenty years down the road’ ASC will have to conduct business ever more ruthlessly.”

  * * *

  THE EMBRAER LANDED at Houston’s Hobby Airport at three in the morning. Janson’s pilots taxied to the Million Air private aviation terminal and woke their bosses for breakfast at six, cooked by the senior man. “My biggest fear, Mike,” said Janson, knotting a club tie with a small repeating pattern, “is one of these days you’ll quit flying and open a restaurant.”

  “Car in two minutes,” said Kincaid, exiting the dressing room in a seersucker skirt and jacket. Her bed hair was now a sleek junior-executive bob that exposed her ears and high brow. Her manner was brisk.