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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

A cold sweat formed on his skin almost instantly as he rolled out of the zone. Any moment now he would know if he had triggered the pressure sensors. The floodlights would blaze; the camera would pivot. And then, as his visage came into focus, a team of heavily armed guards would rush to the site. The barricades and alarm systems to every side would make his chance for escape essentially nil.

With bated breath, he waited, feeling relief budding with each passing second. Nothing. He had cleared it. All three perimeter security systems were now behind him.

Now he stood and looked up at the mansion that loomed before him. Up close, it was breathtaking in its grandeur. To either side of the main house were vast conical turrets; the exterior of the mansion was fashioned from Briar Hill sandstone. The roof was trimmed with an intricate balustrade and topped with a smaller one. The place was an eclectic display of architectural bombast. Yet did it count as ostentation if nobody could see it?

The windows were dark except for a dim glow of what might be standard nighttime illumination; were its inhabitants in the back rooms? It seemed too early for anyone to be asleep. Something about the setup bothered Janson, but he could not say why, and it was no time for turning around.

Now he crept to the left side of the building and over to a narrow side entrance.

Mounted in the stone near the dark, ornately incised door was a discreet electrostatic touch screen, of the kind used by ATMs. If the right numbers were pressed, the entrance alarm would be deactivated. Janson withdrew the small compressed-air atomizer from his knapsack and directed a jet of finely powdered charcoal at the pad. If everything went well, it would alight on fingerprints, and by the pattern he would be able to tell which digits the alarm code used; depending on how light or heavy the oils were, he could make a good guess as to their relative frequency.

A dead end. No pattern was revealed at all. As he had feared, the alarm pad employed a scrambled video display: the numerals were displayed in a random order, never in the same sequence twice.