The important factors to be gauged had to do with character, not technology. Derek Collins was a planner. That was how Janson thought of such men: the ones who sat in air-conditioned offices as they deployed men on missions doomed to failure, all in the course of some chess game they called strategy. A pawn was moved, a pawn was taken. From the perspective of men like Collins, that was what his “human assets” amounted to: pawns. Yet now Janson had the blood of five former Cons Op agents on his hands, and he was hell-bent on confronting the man who had enlisted them, trained them, guided them, directed them—the man who sought to control his destiny, like a piece of carved boxwood on a playing board.

Yes, Collins was a determined man. But so was Janson, who detested him with a remarkable purity and intensity. Collins was why he had left Consular Operations in the first place. A stiff-necked, coldblooded son of a bitch, Derek Collins had one supreme advantage: he knew precisely who he was. About himself, anyway, he had few illusions. He was a masterful bureaucratic politician and a thoroughgoing creditstealing bastard, and such men would always thrive in the marmoreal jungle that was the nation’s capital. None of that bothered Janson; he regarded it as nearly humanizing. What incensed Janson was the man’s smug certainty that the ends always justified the means. Janson had seen where that led—even seen it, sometimes, in himself—and it sickened him.

Now he pulled off the road, nosing the car into a particularly exuberant growth of bayberries and marsh willows. The remaining mile he would traverse on foot. If Jessie’s contacts had provided her with accurate information, Collins should be in his cottage, and by himself. A widower, Collins had a penchant for spending time alone; and here another truth about him was illuminated—that he was a deeply unsociable person who was nonetheless skilled at affecting sociability.

Janson walked through the shoreline grass to the shoreline itself, a jagged tan strip of rocks and sand and battered shells. Despite his thick-soled shoes, he stepped lightly through the dampness of the shore, making little sound. Collins’s cabin was built low to the ground, which made it a somewhat more elusive target for anyone with unfriendly intentions. By the same token, however, it assured Janson that as long as he remained on the shoreline, he would not be visible from it.