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Back The Janson Directive
Chapters (54)
  1. Title Page
  2. Table of Contents
  3. Prologue
  4. PART ONE
  5. Chapter One
  6. Chapter Two
  7. Chapter Three
  8. Chapter Four
  9. Chapter Five
  10. Chapter Six
  11. Chapter Seven
  12. Chapter Eight
  13. PART TWO
  14. Chapter Nine
  15. Chapter Ten
  16. Chapter Eleven
  17. Chapter Twelve
  18. Chapter Thirteen
  19. Chapter Fourteen
  20. Chapter Fifteen
  21. Chapter Sixteen
  22. Chapter Seventeen
  23. PART THREE
  24. Chapter Eighteen
  25. Chapter Nineteen
  26. Chapter Twenty
  27. Chapter Twenty-one
  28. Chapter Twenty-two
  29. Chapter Twenty-three
  30. Chapter Twenty-four
  31. Chapter Twenty-five
  32. Chapter Twenty-six
  33. Chapter Twenty-seven
  34. Chapter Twenty-eight
  35. Chapter Twenty-nine
  36. Chapter Thirty
  37. Chapter Thirty-one
  38. PART FOUR
  39. Chapter Thirty-two
  40. Chapter Thirty-three
  41. Chapter Thirty-four
  42. Chapter Thirty-five
  43. Chapter Thirty-six
  44. Chapter Thirty-seven
  45. Chapter Thirty-eight
  46. Chapter Thirty-nine
  47. Chapter Forty
  48. Chapter Forty-one
  49. Chapter Forty-two
  50. Chapter Forty-three
  51. Epilogue
  52. ALSO BY ROBERT LUDLUM
  53. Critical Praise for Robert Ludlum
  54. Copyright Page

It was a brilliant maneuver: for the first time, the man with the M60 had a direct line of fire at the driver and passenger alike. Even as he watched the machine gunner seat a fresh link-belt of ammunition into the M60’s drive mechanism, he heard the sound of yet another craft—a speedboat, crazily veering toward the shore.

Oh Christ no!

And in the speedboat, a figure, arranged in prone firing position, with a rifle. Aimed at them.

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-one

The speedboat was equipped with an aircraft turbine engine, for it had to have been traveling at upward of 150 miles per hour. It skimmed along the water, leaving behind a slashing contrail of spume. The small boat became rapidly larger, a mesmeric spectacle of death. Two miles from the cottage, the flat netting was no longer in place; nothing protected them from the rushing gunman. Nothing.

Where could he go? Where was safety?

Janson turned the wheels of the Corvette back onto the road, heard the chassis scrape as it lurched from the sodden earth to the hard pavement. What if he tried to ram the hovercraft, jamming his foot on the accelerator and testing its lightweight fiberglass construction against the steel cage of the Corvette? Yet the odds were slim that he could even reach the craft before the M60 had perforated the engine—and him.

Crouching below the fan, the machine gunner grinned evilly. The link-belt was seated; full-fire mode was activated. Seconds remained before he served them with a lethal fire hose of lead. Suddenly the man pitched forward, slack, his forehead dropping like a deadweight against the bipod-propped gun.

Dead.

There was an echoing sound—on the waters of Chesapeake Bay, it sounded oddly like a cork popping—and then another, and the hovercraft came to a rest just a few feet from the car, half on the road, half on the shoulder. It was not how anyone deliberately parked such a craft.

Like those of many military vehicles and devices, the controls must have been designed to require continual non-passive pressure—simply put, the grip of a human hand on the tiller. Otherwise, in combat situations, a soldier in command could be killed, and a driverless vehicle—like an unmanned automatic weapon—might inadvertently cause harm to the wrong side. Now the craft depowered, the engines shutting off, the churning blades growing slower and slower, the craft’s skids setting firmly on the ground. And as the craft fell to earth, Janson saw that the pilot, too, was sprawled, limp, on the windshield.

Two shots, two kills.

A voice called across the waters of Chesapeake Bay, as the engine of the speedboat sputtered to a halt. “Paul! Are you all right?”

A voice from the speedboat.

The voice of a woman who had saved them both.

Jessica Kincaid.