Robert Ludlum's (TM) the Janson Equation (3 page)

For something as involved as this, Janson could easily ask for seven or eight million dollars. And it would all go to the Phoenix Foundation. A payday this size could help dozens of former covert government operators take their lives back.

Janson had to admit he liked the idea of looking closely at his former employer.

And if by some stretch of the imagination the US State Department was indeed involved in framing the son of a prominent US senator for murder, the government's ultimate objective would likely have widespread repercussions for the entire region, if not the world.

“I have one condition,” Janson finally said.

“Name it.”

“If I find your son and uncover the truth, you'll have to promise to accept it, regardless of what that truth is. Even if it ultimately leads to your son's conviction for murder.”

Wyckoff glanced at his wife, who bowed her head. He turned back to Janson and said, “You have our word.”

S
top apologizing,” Kincaid said during the ascent. “You made the right decision.”

Janson knew Jessie was right, yet something about the mission kept tugging at his thoughts. The more he contemplated the next several days, the less confident he felt that he and Kincaid would merely be searching for a nineteen-year-old kid in a city of ten million and conducting an independent investigation into his girlfriend's death.

Before Kincaid arrived at Hickam Field and they'd boarded the Embraer, Janson phoned Morton, his “computer security consultant” in northern New Jersey. Twenty minutes later Morton forwarded a complete and up-to-the-minute copy of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Department's electronic investigative file on Lynell Yi's murder.

According to the file, a sixty-three-year-old maid named Sung Won Yun had discovered the girl's body in a room at the Sophia Guesthouse, central Seoul's oldest and most traditional hanok. A preliminary visual inspection by the coroner indicated that the manner of death was homicide. The mechanism of death appeared to be asphyxiation, the cause of death manual strangulation, a form of violence often perpetrated by a man against a woman because of the required disparity in physical strength between the victim and the assailant.

The coroner estimated the time of death to be between midnight and four o'clock on the morning the corpse was discovered. This was consistent with police interviews of two fellow guests who claimed to have heard voices—a young man's and a young woman's—raised in anger shortly after midnight that morning. Although neither of these earwitnesses could identify what exactly was being said, both agreed that the heated discussion had been held in English rather than Korean. Given these accounts, police theorized that Gregory Wyckoff killed his girlfriend, Lynell Yi, in the heat of passion. No specific motive was given.

The owners of the hanok, who confirmed that Gregory Wyckoff and Lynell Yi had checked into their establishment the previous day, turned over to police color copies of the couple's US passports, and the part-time clerk who had handled the check-in easily picked Gregory Wyckoff out of a photo array.

Latent prints had been lifted at the scene and were pending examination and comparison. Partial fingerprints found on the victim's neck were removed from the corpse using a process known as cyano-fuming, so that the powdering and lifting could be conducted later at the lab.

No other suspects or persons of interests were named, and there was no mention in the entire file of the sensitive work being conducted by Lynell Yi at the time of her death.

Once the Embraer reached its maximum cruising altitude, the executive jet leveled off and Jessica Kincaid stepped into the center of the cabin and stretched while Janson looked on, wishing they were sipping mai tais at Duke's Barefoot Bar in Waikiki.

“So, who do we know in Seoul?” she said.

Janson reluctantly pushed from his mind the image of Jessie in her appealing red two-piece on the powdery sands of Waikiki Beach and opened his laptop. In addition to the many contacts he'd made during his career with Cons Ops, over the past few years Janson had developed a vast network of Phoenix “graduates,” former covert government operatives who had benefited from the foundation's efforts. Some had been afforded completely new lives—new identities, new homes, lucrative careers in academia or public service, even in the private sector. Others had been afforded sufficient capital to fund their own ventures. Just about all had achieved a substantial amount of success.

Now when Janson needed
their
help, he didn't hesitate to call upon them to take advantage of their various positions and skills. Most were extremely grateful for the opportunity to repay their debt to Janson; others took some convincing.

“
What Phoenix grants, Phoenix retrieves to pass on to the next guy
,” he'd tell them. “
That's the way it works. That's the way it is.
”

In the end, all complied. Janson, of course, never mistook the former operatives for his own personal army. He used them only on CatsPaw missions such as this, where millions were at stake for the Phoenix Foundation.

Janson paused on the first name he came across. He hadn't needed his computer to know that Jina Jeon was at the top of his list. But he didn't want it to appear to Jessie that he'd picked Jina's name out of thin air, as though it were always resting at the tip of his tongue.

Jina Jeon was both a contact from his time in Consular Operations
and
a Phoenix graduate. She'd also been Paul Janson's lover long before Janson had ever met Jessica Kincaid.

Janson scrolled down to the next name on his list.

“Nam Sei-hoon,” he said. “He's with South Korea's National Intelligence Service.”

“And you trust him completely?” Kincaid said.

“Nam Sei-hoon is one of my oldest and closest friends. I met him while I was with SEAL Team Four.”

It never escaped Janson that leaving the University of Michigan to enlist in the navy was the decision that had placed him on the path to becoming a skilled killer. Shortly after enlistment Janson had shown a genuine gift for combat, and in the navy such talents rarely go unnoticed. At the time he joined his team at their headquarters in Little Creek, Virginia, Paul Janson had been the youngest person ever to receive SEAL training—a distinction that no longer held much meaning for him. Following his first tour in Afghanistan, Janson was awarded the Navy Cross, the Department of the Navy's second-highest decoration for valor. Then came tour after tour after tour, with no breaks, until he was finally captured in an Afghan village just outside Kabul. He was held by the Taliban in a six-by-four-foot cage for eighteen months. He was starved. Tortured. Nearly killed after each of his first two escape attempts. His third attempt at escape was successful. By the time he was found, Janson weighed only eighty-three pounds; he was a shell of the man he'd been. He seldom spoke of the events that followed his recovery. When pressed, all he would allow was that he attended Cambridge University for graduate studies on a government fellowship, and was thereafter recruited to a black ops team under the control of the US State Department.

“Any Phoenix grads in South Korea?” Kincaid asked.

Janson nodded without looking up. “Jina Jeon. Though I'd like to avoid using her if we can.”

Kincaid paused midstretch. “Why's that?”

Sure, one of the reasons Janson didn't want to contact Jina Jeon was their past romantic relationship. But that wasn't the primary reason. Like all Phoenix beneficiaries, Jina Jeon possessed a telephone fitted with an encryption chip that would give Janson a direct line to her, and she knew that the powers behind the Phoenix Foundation could call on her for help at any time. What Jina Jeon didn't know—and what Janson didn't
want
her to know—was that
he
was behind the foundation.

There was another reason too. And that was the reason Janson finally offered to Kincaid.

“She has difficulty playing by the rules,” he said.

All Phoenix graduates were required to play by a set of rules when they provided their assistance. Specifically, three rules, known as the Janson Rules.

No torture.

No civilian casualties.

No killing anyone who doesn't try to kill us.

For any former covert intelligence operative, following these rules was easier said than done. But Janson suspected that Jina Jeon, in particular, would have difficulty playing nice. Not because she wasn't a good person, but because of what Consular Operations had made her.

Which wasn't very different from what Consular Operations had made Janson himself.

“
You were the Machine
,” Cons Ops director Derek Collins had told Janson during one of his many exit interviews. “
You were the guy with the slab of granite where your heart's supposed to be
.”

It was true. Janson had been a machine, taking orders from his superiors without question, committing crimes in service of his country, killing again and again and again. Then one morning he'd woken in a cold sweat and began ruminating on the dozens of people he'd executed. Some victims, of course, had had it coming to them. Others hadn't, and those were the killings that suddenly sickened him.

“
You tell me you're sickened by the killing
,” Collins had said to him. “
I'm going to tell you what you'll discover one day for yourself: that's the only way you'll ever feel alive
.”

Janson refused to believe him. He could heal, he knew. He could be saved. First, Janson had to admit to himself that he'd been a frozen-hearted assassin. Once he was able to admit that, he vowed to atone for his transgressions. He couldn't alter the past, couldn't change what he'd done. But he
could
change what he was.

H
OURS LATER, AS
K
INCAID SLEPT
, Paul Janson continued poring through the thousands of online articles that made mention of Senator James Wyckoff of North Carolina. He'd started by combining the senator's name with keywords such as “Seoul” and “Pyongyang” and “Beijing,” then branched out by identifying the words most likely associated with the current talks between North and South Korea. Recurring issues among the four parties involved in the talks included North Korea's nuclear program; the sanctions put in place against North Korea's hermit regime for its human rights abuses and its defiance in the face of international law; and of course the possible (albeit improbable) negotiation of an actual peace treaty to replace the Korean Armistice Agreement that ended the Korean War six decades ago.

Wyckoff's votes on Korean issues seemed to ebb and flow with popular opinion. No surprise there, since Wyckoff was expected to seek his party's nomination for president of the United States during the next primary season. He'd voted multiple times for sanctions against the North but certainly wasn't a hard-liner. In fact, it was difficult to discern where he stood on the most vital Korean issues. He was a smart politician. With his votes, he was giving himself room to maneuver to the right or the left depending on which way the wind happened to be blowing in an election year. The way things stood now, the American people saw the rogue regime in Pyongyang as a definite foe, but they had no appetite for military action following the long and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Supporting harsh sanctions against the North continued to be the most prudent stance, politically speaking.

Janson figured he could all but rule out the possibility that Gregory Wyckoff was framed for murder in Seoul because of his father's political positions on Korea.

What continued to nag Janson, however, was the question of why Gregory Wyckoff and Lynell Yi were staying at a hanok in central Seoul when Gregory Wyckoff was renting an apartment just across the Han River. When he'd asked the senator and his wife, they'd dismissed the paid stay at the traditional Korean house as irrelevant.

“The low-rent apartments in Seoul can be gloomy,” the senator suggested, “especially in winter. I saw pictures of Gregory's flat. From the outside it looked like the DC projects. The interior was clean, maybe even quaint, but nothing spectacular. Three or four rooms separated by sliding doors, a kitchen–dining room combination. If they couldn't travel far because of Lynell's work, it would have made perfect sense for them to stay a night or two in a traditional hanok.”

Janson disagreed, though his opinion was actually favorable to the senator's theory of his son's innocence. If Lynell Yi had indeed overheard something during the sensitive North-South talks in the demilitarized zone and then passed it on to her boyfriend, it was possible that both she and Gregory were frightened enough to abandon Gregory's apartment until things cooled off. Or at least until the couple decided what to do with the information.

The question then would be
What had Lynell Yi overheard?

“Something to drink, Mr. Janson?”

The words were spoken in a slow, sensual voice and Janson nearly turned to remind Kayla to call him Paul. But he caught himself. Instead he grinned and said, “I admit I'm a bit foggy, Jessie. But I'm not
that
foggy.”

Kincaid gracefully lowered herself into the deep leather seat next to Janson. Clearly she was still in character. The real Jessica Kincaid didn't do much gracefully—unless you counted taking out a human target with a .50-caliber M82 from 1,600 meters.

Janson looked into her pale-green eyes. “Don't tell me you're jealous of Kayla now.”

Kincaid scrunched up her features and rolled her eyes. “
Jealous?
Sorry, Charlie, but I don't
get
jealous.”

Definitely jealous, Janson thought. The more Jessie's
get
sounded like
git
, the more anxious he knew she was. Tension drew out her Southern drawl, her Appalachian backcountry twang.

“You know,” Janson said, gently brushing her smooth face with the back of his fingers, “you're beautiful when you're jealous.”

Her eyes widened and her cheeks flushed, the way they had just before they first made love in a sparsely decorated hotel room in the Hungarian town of Sarospatak soon after they met.

“
I see the way you look at me
,” she'd said that evening.

“
I don't know what you mean
,” he'd lied.

Complicating things, then as now, was Janson's reluctance to place Jessica Kincaid in harm's way. He knew more clearly than anyone that Jessie could handle herself better than most soldiers on the planet. Yet the thought of losing her to violence was never very far from his mind.

She'd recognized that fear in him from the very first and never once hesitated to call him on it. Jessie had insisted on taking risks—putting her life on the line—in nearly every mission since. And Janson often felt helpless to stop her.