Janson lowered his gaze from the governor’s suite to the northern veranda.

Fifteen feet away from the nearest sentry, he could see the men’s faces. Broad, peasant faces, unwary and unsophisticated. Younger than he had expected. But then, the forty-nine-year-old operative reflected, these men would not have looked young to him for most of his career as a field agent. They were older than he was when he was running raids behind the Green Line near Cambodia. Older than he was when he killed for the first time, and when he first escaped being killed.

Their hands were visibly chafed, but no doubt from farmwork rather than martial arts. Amateurs, yes, he mused again; but it was not a wholly reassuring thought. The KLF was too well organized to have entrusted so valuable a treasure to the protection of such men as these. They were a first line of defense only. A first line of defense where, logically, no defense at all would have been called for.

And where was Katsaris?

Janson peered across the courtyard, across sixty feet of darkness, and could make out nothing. Katsaris was invisible. Or gone.

He made a quiet tsk into the filament mike, trying to modify the sound to echo the insect and avian noises of the night.

He heard an answering tsk in his earpiece. Katsaris was there, in place, ready.

The accuracy of his first determination would be crucial: Was it safe to take out these men? Were the men themselves decoys—birds on a wire?

Was there a wire?

Janson raised himself from his crouch, peered into the windows behind the iron grille. Perspiration lay on him like a film of mud; the humidity of the air prevented evaporation. Now he envied Katsaris the procholinergic. The perspiration wasn’t cooling him; it just adhered to his skin, an unwanted layer of clothing.

At the same time, it concerned him that he was even conscious of such incidentals. He had to focus: Was there a wire?

He looked through the NV scope, angling it toward the iron grille behind the smoking peasants. Nothing.

No, something. An orange spot, too small to correspond to a body. In all likelihood, it was a hand belonging to a body concealed behind a stone wall.

The men on the veranda, it was a reasonable surmise, were unaware that they had backup; it would have diminished their already doubtful efficacy. But they did.

Did the backup have backup? Had a sequential operation been designed?

Improbable. Not impossible.

From a long thigh pocket, Janson withdrew a blackened aluminum tube, thirteen inches in length, four inches in diameter. Inside, it was lined with a snug steel mesh, which prevented the living creature within from making noise. An atmosphere of 90 percent pure oxygen prevented asphyxiation during the operation schedule.

The time had come for noise, for distraction.

He unscrewed one sealed end, the Teflon-coated grooves moving soundlessly over each other.