He had made an insupportable, inexcusable, indefensible mistake. He was now, in effect, a murderer, and of far more than one child. His stricken eyes ran from Novak to Katsaris. A man he admired more than any he’d known; another he loved like a son. The mission was over. Sabotaged by an errant force he could never have anticipated: himself.

Now he saw Katsaris streak by, saw Katsaris’s footprints in the blood; the man had taken the shortest route to the stairwell, vaulting over corpses and chairs. The boy had to have been within an arm’s length of the door to the hallway when Katsaris squeezed off a silenced shot to the heart. Even after the muzzle flashed, Katsaris remained in full precision-firing position: a steadying hand to his firing hand, the stance of somebody who could not afford to miss. The stance of a soldier firing at a person who could not return fire, but whose continued survival was itself a dire menace.

Janson’s vision blurred briefly, then focused again, and when it did, he saw the child’s lifeless body tumble down the stone stairs, almost somersaulting.

And then it lay on the bottom step, like a rag doll carelessly tossed aside.

When Janson moved a few feet closer, he saw that the boy’s head lay upon the metal tray he once carried so proudly. A saliva bubble had formed at his soft, childish lips.

Janson’s heart pounded slowly, powerfully. He was sickened, at himself and what he had nearly allowed to happen, and at the same time sickened by what needed to have happened. By the waste of it all, the prodigality with the one thing that mattered on this earth, human life. The Derek Collinses of the world would never understand. He remembered why he retired. Decisions like this, he recognized, had to be made. He had no longer wanted to be the one to make them.

Katsaris looked at him with wildly questioning eyes: Why had he frozen? What had come over him?

He felt strangely moved that Katsaris’s expression was one of bewilderment rather than reproach. Katsaris should have been furious at him, as Janson was furious at himself. Only the soldier’s love for his mentor could have modulated outrage into mere astonishment and incredulity.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Janson said.

Katsaris gestured toward the stairs, the egress stipulated in the revised plan.

But Janson had devised those plans, and knew when they would have to be altered for the sake of the mission. “That’s too dangerous now. We’ve got to find another way.”

Would Katsaris trust his judgment any longer? A mission without a commanding officer was a sure route to disaster. He had to demonstrate his mastery of the situation.

“First things first. Let’s get the American,” he told him.