THE JANSON DIRECTIVE - Robert Ludlum

PROLOGUE

8°37'N, 88°22'E N. Indian Ocean, 250 miles east of Sri Lanka Northwestern Anura

The night was oppressive, the air at body temperature and almost motionless.

Earlier in the evening there had been light, cooling rains, but now everything

seemed to radiate heat, even the silvery half-moon, its countenance brushed with

the occasional wisps of cloud. The jungle itself seemed to exhale the hot, moist

breath of a predator lying in wait.

Shyam shifted restlessly in his canvas chair. It was, he knew, a fairly ordinary

night on the island of Anura for this time of year: early in the monsoon season,

the air was always heavy with a sense of foreboding. Yet only the ever attentive

mosquitoes disturbed the quiet. At half past one in the morning, Shyam reckoned

he had been on checkpoint duty for four and a half hours. In that time,

precisely seven motorists had come their way. The checkpoint consisted of two

parallel lines of barbed-wire frames-"knife rests"-set up eighty feet apart on

the road, to either side of the search and administration area. Shyam and Arjun

were the two sentries on forward duty, and they sat in front of the wooden

roadside booth. A pair of backups was supposedly on duty on the other side of

the hill, but the hours of silence from them suggested that they were dozing,

along with the men in the makeshift barracks a few hundred feet down the road.

For all the dire warnings of their superiors, these had been days and nights of

unrelieved boredom. The northwestern province of Kenna was sparsely populated in

the best of times, and these were not the best of times.

Now, drifting in with the breeze, as faint as a distant insect drone, came the

sound of a gunned motor.

Shyam slowly got to his feet. The sound was growing closer.

"Arjun," he called out in a singsong tone. "Arjun. Car coming."

Arjun lolled his head in a circle, working out a crick in his neck. "At this

hour?" He rubbed his eyes. The humidity made the sweat lie heavily on his skin,

like mineral oil.

In the dark of the semi-forested terrain, Shyam could finally see the

headlights. Over a rewed-up motor, loud whoops of delight could be heard.

"Dirty farm kids," Arjun grumbled.

Shyam, for his part, was grateful for anything that interrupted the tedium. He

had spent the past seven days on the night shift at the Kandar vehicle

checkpoint, and it felt like a hardship post. Naturally, their stone-faced

superior had been at pains to emphasize how important, how crucial, how vital in

every way, the assignment was. The Kandar checkpoint was just up the road from

the Stone Palace, where the government was holding some sort of hush-hush

gathering. So security was tight, and this was the only real road that connected

the palace to the rebel-held region just to the north. The guerrillas of the

Kagama Liberation Front knew about the...

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