Quietly, he circled around to the front of the farmhouse, dragging the dead man behind him. In the roving beams of light, he recognized a face, a second face, a third. His blood ran cold. They were hard faces. Cruel faces. The faces of men he had worked with many years ago in Consular Operations, and whom he had disliked even then. They were coarse men—coarse not in their manners, but in their sensitivities. Men for whom brute force was not a last resort, but a first, for whom cynicism was the product not of a disappointed idealism, but of naked avarice and rapacity. They had no business in government service; in Janson’s opinion, they reduced its moral credibility by their very presence. The technical skill they brought to their work was offset by a lack of any real conscience, a failure to grasp the legitimate objectives that underwrote sometimes questionable tactics.

He placed his jacket on the dead man, then positioned him behind the sprawling chestnut tree; with the man’s shoelaces, he tied his flashlight to the lifeless forearm. He pulled tiny splinters of wood from a dead branch and placed them between the man’s eyelids, propping his eyes open in a glassy stare. It was crude work, turning the man into an effigy of himself. But in the shadows of the evening, it would pass on a first glance, which was all Janson needed. Now Janson directed a raking burst of fire through the parlor’s already shattered windows. The three exposed gunmen twitched horribly as the bullets perforated diaphragm, gut, aorta, lungs. At the same time, the unexpected burst summoned the others.

Janson rolled over to the scraggly chestnut tree, switched on the flashlight laced to the dead man’s forearm, and silently dashed to the boulder ten feet away, where he waited in the gloom.

“There!” one of them called out. It took seconds for the effigy to attract their attention. All they would be able to see was the glare of the flashlight; the spill would illuminate the taupe-colored jacket and, perhaps just faintly, the staring eyes of the crouching man. The inference would be nearly instantaneous: here was the source of the lethal fusillade.

The response was as he expected: four of the commandos directed their automatic weapons at the crouching figure. The simultaneous chattering of their high-powered weapons, set at full fire, was nearly deafening: the men pumped hundreds of bullets into their former comrade.

The noise and the gunmen’s furious concentration worked to Janson’s advantage: with his small Beretta Tomcat, he squeezed off four carefully aimed shots in rapid succession. The distance was only ten yards; his accuracy was flawless. Each man slumped, lifeless, to the ground, his automatic weapon abruptly falling silent.