The Janson Command (21 page)
“Do we have anything on Van Pelt and Vealon?”
“Nothing on Vealon. There was a South African Olympic swimmer named Van Pelt. Common name down there, but from your description sounds like the same guy. He was disqualified from the Athens games for doping. Research can’t find a word about him since 2004.”
Janson texted Kincaid a heads-up that “the diver,” likely named either Hadrian Van Pelt or Brud Vealon, was headed her way. He telephoned Suzman in Cape Town to ask for his help in shadowing Hadrian Van Pelt. Suzman knew the name not only as a disgraced athlete but also as a mercenary soldier. “Fell off my radar years ago.”
“What did you think it meant when he fell off?”
Janson heard shrugged shoulders in Suzman’s answer. “I never paid it any mind. I assumed he got shot in the Congo or someplace.”
Exactly what someone like Van Pelt would want government security officers to assume, if he was moving up to something as big as Securité Referral.
* * *
IN THE BACKSEAT
of Miles’s car that evening, Zwi Weintraub, who was snuffling on his oxygen, suddenly awakened. “You see the pattern?”
“What pattern?”
“Referral’s operators are all self-starters. Men who can run an operation are in the field. They do their own work. The workers are the leaders; the leaders are the workers.”
“You mean there’s no headman?”
“Any one of them is capable of being the headman.”
“All chiefs, no Indians?” asked Donner. “How do they keep from killing each other?”
“A good question,” said Weintraub, closing his eyes again. “Perhaps they’ve found a method to alter human nature.”
“A pact,” said Paul Janson. “They’ve sworn to band together against anyone who tries to take control.”
“A confederation of musketeers.” Miles Donner smiled. “All for one and one for all.”
* * *
JESSE TELEPHONED FROM
Cape Town. “Got your text. ’Fraid I’ll miss the diver. I’m in a cab to the airport.” She was hoping to catch a plane to Johannesburg, where she would transfer to a long-haul Qantas flight to Sydney. “Where I think the doc is.”
“How’d he get all the way to Australia?”
“Jumped ship with the
Varna Fantasy
’s purser’s wife, dumped her in Cape Town, hooked up with a Qantas flight attendant named Mildred. Mildred got him comped onto a flight to Sydney. He’s either the horniest bastard on the planet or running scared. The purser’s wife thinks he’s running scared. Of course the poor thing has to tell herself something to explain the fix she’s in.”
“Good job.”
“I feel like a divorce lawyer’s gumshoe.”
An hour later Miles Donner awakened Janson from a catnap with a grim face. “They’re shutting us down.”
“Who?”
“Shin Bet.”
Israel’s security agency had been alerted to heavy overseas phone traffic emanating from Nordiya, Miles reported. “I was given advance warning by an old friend.”
“Just from some extra calls? There are thousands of expats living in this area, calling home to London and New York. Our calls couldn’t have made a blip Shin Bet would notice.”
“Of course not.”
“Then what happened?” Janson asked, sensing the answer even as he spoke.
Miles said, “I suspect that somewhere in Europe some friend of Securité Referral tipped Shin Bet about all the questions.”
“But why would Shin Bet—”
“They’re doing their job. They’ve been alerted to unusual traffic. They have to act. Internal security is their responsibility. Securité Referral knows that, of course.”
“Securité Referral is hitting back. Destroy the phones.”
“I already have,” said Miles. “The operation is terminated. Get out of Israel while you can. I’ve arranged for a chap to drive you to the airport. Hurry, my friend. The car is at the service entrance.”
“Lie down on the floor until we reach the highway,” the driver told him as Janson emerged from rows of black plastic garbage bags outside the facility’s kitchen.
“An ignominious retreat,” Janson said to Donner as they shook hands good-bye.
The old man winked. “Be known by your failures.”
* * *
JANSON WAS STANDING
in line at Ben Gurion waiting to buy a ticket to Paris when Suzman called back from Cape Town. “Your boy’s come and gone. Never left the airport. Changed planes for Sydney. Which is, I believe, where your ‘interesting company’ just boarded a flight to.”
“Is there any way you could stop him?” Janson asked.
“Not without shooting down a commercial airliner. He connected in Johannesburg with the SAA flight to Perth.”
“You said Sydney.”
“He missed the direct Sydney connection. He’ll have to change in Perth to get across Australia.”
Janson could not raise Kincaid on the telephone. He left messages but got no replies. He texted her a warning that Van Pelt would probably arrive in Sydney several hours after her. And again, he did not hear back.
Cursing that he didn’t have the Embraer close at hand, he hunted frantically for the fastest flight to Australia. Sydney was nine thousand miles from Israel. He had to change planes in Bangkok. With the layover, the trip would take nearly twenty-four hours. Kincaid would land in Sydney with Van Pelt close behind, ten hours before Janson caught up.
He held fast to the mantra
she is predator, not prey
.
35°18′29″ S, 149°07′28″ E
Canberra, Australia
D
r. Terry Flannigan reckoned he had less than a day before the people trying to kill him caught up in Canberra. They’d already tracked him from Dakar to South Africa and certainly by now the Qantas flight to Sydney. Back-tracing him to Mildred, they would discover that the flight attendant had gotten him a package trip to Australia’s capital including his hotel and this morning’s guided tour of Parliament House.
He had to do something fast, but he didn’t know what.
A sweet little blonde gave him a shy eye as they trooped off the bus. She looked fresh faced as a country schoolteacher. Flannigan guessed she had recently broken up with a lousy boyfriend and had signed onto this package tour by herself to recover; now she was lonely and feeling brave. But how could she help him stay alive? Even if she smuggled him home to some godforsaken Outback kangaroo ranch, how long would it take them to catch up?
He stuck close to the group as they were herded into the parliament. Inside he felt the most secure he had in two weeks, guarded by fit-looking Parliamentary Security Service officers with radios. Not supercommandos like The Wall and Annie Oakley, but backed up by Federal Police and the Australian Army.
When they were led into the Senate Chamber itself, he relaxed and began to enjoy himself. Then an excellent brunette Green Party senator noticed him noticing her from the public galley. She was single. He saw no wedding ring. Besides, married ladies in public life didn’t hook up with strange men in public places and Madame Senator was definitely sending hookup signals.
The session ended on a speech she delivered with wit and passion: “Australia should be a nation deeper than just a coal mine for China.” At that point she climbed up into the public gallery and dismissed their guide to lead the group herself. This act of hands-on egalitarian democracy blew the minds of his fellow tourists and gave a frightened Terry Flannigan an excellent idea for how to save his life.
Those fit-looking Parliamentary Security Service officers with radios were responsible for the personal safety of their lovely legislator. Surely they would extend protection to her new friend when he was in her presence.
Politicians were difficult—being equal parts exhibitionist and narcissistic—but fortunately he knew how to handle them, having had a long on-and-off thing with a Texas congresswoman. The trick was never to show you liked them. The second you showed a politician that you liked her, she was looking for the next one to like her.
Look at me. Aren’t I wonderful? Think so? Good-bye.
So, having made definitive eye contact, now when the comely senator smiled his way he looked away. Which only made her smile harder. It was like taking advantage of fish in a barrel, but people were trying to kill him, after all, so he really had to do what he had to do.
The senator invited the entire group on a private tour, which included a stroll through the office of the prime minister. Then she quietly invited Flannigan to join her for lunch in the Members’ dining room. Her people peeled him deftly loose from the group headed for lunch in the cafeteria. As they did, the sweet little blonde, who saw exactly what was going down, slipped a folded piece of paper into his pocket with her cell phone number and the information that she would be in Canberra for the rest of the week.
Admiring how fully the senator filled her skirt as she walked ahead to tell her staff that she would be tied up for the afternoon, Terry Flannigan recalled Sigmund Freud’s famous question: “What do women want?”
Write this on your notepad, Dr. Freud:
I am fifteen pounds overweight, losing hair and gaining jowls, with a roving, if not predatory, eye that should warn any woman with a brain to steer clear, but for some reason, bless their hearts, they want me. I am not saying I deserve it, but I am grateful.
* * *
DANIEL, A STURDILY
built former U.S. Navy SEAL intelligence officer, resigned his commission after three tours in Iraq to quadruple his salary with a private security contractor. He was disdained by regular military as a showboat and overpaid hired gun, and his last memory of Baghdad was of leading a State Department convoy at high speed through narrow streets.
He had awakened with a titanium plate in his skull a month later on the coast of Cornwall, England, in the Phoenix Foundation wing of a Methodist nursing home. The security contractor had gone out of business. Phoenix had paid the therapy and shrink bills, and when Daniel had felt capable of making his way in the world he fled to the Mediterranean island of Corsica and opened a dive shop for tourists.
Today he was back in Cornwall, visiting a buddy, Rafe, who hadn’t been as lucky. Rafe, a former British officer, was still stuck in rehab. Daniel had bumped into another private contractor buddy, Ian the Brit, a tattooed bodybuilder who was living in England and visited Rafe regularly. The three men were bound together, as Ian put it, “by one bloody big bang.”
The facility in which Phoenix rented its wing served what the Brits called the healthy demented, people who had lost their minds to Alzheimer’s and ischemic strokes but were still capable of walking. It was a pretty place built in a Roman villa style that embraced the sun. Even when the sea breeze was too cool to venture outside, the sunlight brightened the public rooms clustered around three sides of a courtyard that opened to the south.
Elderly ladies dressed for an excursion were gathering outside the dining room, remarking that the restaurant appeared to be doing a brisk business today and inquiring how soon the bus would leave for Exeter. That such a vehicle was as fictional as the restaurant only became apparent when the staff opened the dining room doors and the residents took their accustomed chairs for lunch.
“You never see old blokes in this place,” said Ian.
“Men die young,” said Daniel.
They were standing in the doorway watching the old ladies because Rafe had started crying and a counselor was trying to talk him down. Daniel and Ian looked back to Rafe’s room, where a salty wind made white curtains flap in the sunlight. Their eyes met and slid apart. Rafe was a mess. They’d been sketching maps of the shoot-out, kinda going through how the insurgents’ fire had channeled them straight into the mother of all improvised explosive devices, when Rafe started crying.
This was Daniel’s first visit to the poor bastard, and he was thinking he could not wait to get the hell home. He knew that on many levels he was personally so distant he might as well be living on Mars, but at least he was out. And Ian was getting better, too, since he “graduated,” driving an intercity bus between Birmingham and London, hoping to meet a girl.
Out of nowhere Daniel heard himself saying, “We kept Coalition officials alive while Iraqi officials were the star attraction at a turkey shoot.”
“Coalition paid better,” Ian replied gloomily.
“I read,” said Daniel, “that an IED blast changes how your brain works, if you’re close as Rafe was.”
“We weren’t that far, either.”
“But Rafe was closer.” Rafe had been leaning off the running board at ninety miles an hour firing warning bursts at civilian vehicles when the lead car detonated the IED. “It screws up your prefrontal cortex. That’s the part that makes you who you are. Rafe was a happy guy, before.”
Ian’s expression said he could not bear to talk about Rafe’s prefrontal cortex, which could have been his prefrontal cortex. He changed the subject, with a bitter smile.
“You know what the Old Man calls us?”
“What?” Daniel asked with sudden interest. The “Old Man” from Phoenix had dropped in once while Daniel was still in rehab. If the Old Man asked him to lead a convoy into Hell, Daniel would ask only if there was time to suit up or were they going in naked.
“I heard him tell the head doc.”
“What did he call us?”
“Banished Children of Mammon.”
“Did he really?”
“I didn’t get what he meant,” said Ian.
“It means contractors like you and me and poor Rafe get no vets hospital, no pension, no health care.”
“I know that. And I know ‘banished.’ What the fuck is Mammon?”
“Money. We did it for the money and now we get zip.”
Ian nodded. “Yeah, I get that. ‘Mammon’ means ‘money’? How come?”
“Like a money god.”
“So we prayed to the fucker and got our asses in a sling.”
Daniel was surprised to feel his face break into a smile. “Exactly…You hear anything on the Old Man?” he asked.
