The Janson Option (3 page)

“Why?”

“Run it down! Drown that devil captain.”

Farole laid a hand on Maxammed's arm. “My friend, we must get the ship to Eyl. We have no time for revenge.”

Maxammed's face was tight with rage, eyes bulging, lips stretched across his teeth. Farole prayed to God that he would come to his senses before he exploded like a volcano.

“Humanitarians, my friend. Remember?”

48°9' N, 103°37' W
Bakken Oilfield
North Dakota, near Montana

P
aul Janson steered a drunk out of the path of an ambulance racing from the Frack Up Bar & Grill's parking lot. Then he shouldered through a crowd of derrick hands, pipe wranglers, and rig mechanics who were cheering two men fighting in a cage made of chain-link fence.

The night was cold and the air stank of diesel exhaust from the trucks men left running to warm up in between bouts. A hundred-foot pillar of fire burning waste gas off a flare stack behind the bar lighted the cage bright as day.

The bigger fighter had blood dripping from his nose into his chest hair.

A bare-legged woman in a short down jacket circled the ring with a cardboard marking Round Two. Phones flashed as fans took her picture. When she stepped out and closed the gate, Janson asked, “Where's the sign-up sheet?”

“Nowhere. Dudes on law enforcement radar won't write their particulars. You want to fight, get in line.”

“Where's the line?”

“The end of it's that truck driver getting his head stomped by the dancing Chinaman. Cranked-up dude put three in the ambulance. Everyone else decided to call it a night.”

The “dancing Chinaman” was a rangy, six-foot-two Chinese-American bouncing in a frenzy on the balls of his feet. He had a head full of shaggy dreadlocks that he shook like a mop, and he was cranked up, indeed, his eyes yawning wide with crystal meth. But his body was rock hard, and he moved, Janson observed, with the lethal grace of a martial-arts sensei.

He was showboating, playing to the crowd. A blazing-fast backflip drew cheers when he bounced high off the canvas, turned over in the air, and landed on his feet in icy command. A second backflip landed him closer to the truck driver. The driver—inches taller and sixty pounds heavier—lunged, throwing skillful combinations.

The Chinese-American jabbed him twice in a heartbeat and bounced out of range, leaving a circle of cuts and bruised flesh around his eye. The truck driver lunged again, willing to take punishment to get close enough to bring his size and weight to bear. The Chinese-American swirled into another of his seemingly impossible backflips. This time he landed on one foot, off balance, it appeared, until his other foot rocketed up in a shoulder-high kick that dropped the trucker with a heel to his jaw.

The crowd whooped and whistled. Cell phones flashed. The bare-legged woman signaled her assistants to carry the loser out of the cage. The winner cursed the crowd, daring men to fight.

Paul Janson took off his windbreaker and stepped into the cage. The floor was slippery with blood.

The Chinese-American greeted him with a backflip and ran in circles, taunting Janson. “Gray dude? What you doing in here? Run away, old man.”

Janson spoke softly.

“
What?
Who are you? How the
fuck
you know my name?” The meth made Denny Chin too impatient to wait for an answer. He jumped, levitated into another backflip, and ran circles around Janson, herding him into the middle of the cage. He flipped again, landed on one foot, and launched a kick.

Janson stepped close and hit him hard.

The dreadlocked fighter landed on his back. He tried to sit up. Janson dropped onto him. The man's neck was strong but not thick. A broad hand spanned both carotid arteries. When Chin stopped struggling, Janson hoisted him over his shoulder and carried him out of the cage.

The woman yelled, “Where you taking him?”

“Home.”

“ASC
DON'T FUCK AROUND
” was an oil-patch homage to American Synergy Corporation's management standards. There was nothing likeable about the arrogant sons of bitches, but no one worked harder or smarter than ASC's 68,000 employees.

In the dead of the night in Houston, Texas—1,800 miles south of the Bakken fields—seven men and two women to whom those 68,000 answered “sir,” and “ma'am,” quick-marched into a secure conference room atop the Silo, their round thirty-story bronze-glass headquarters tower beside the Sam Houston Tollway.

Night meetings didn't waste valuable daytime. And while the Manual of Employee Conduct cited no dress code for post-​m
idnight
appearance, not one of the division presidents taking their seats at the rosewood table would have looked out of place at a Federal Reserve Board meeting or a funeral.

Kingsman Helms, the tall, handsome, thirty-eight-year-old president of the Petroleum Division, set the standard. His shirt was crisp, his gray windowpane suit pressed, his English bench-made cordovan wingtips polished to a “gentleman's buff.” A linen handkerchief raised three equal points from his breast pocket. A red necktie decorated with Petroleum Club of Houston sunbursts was knotted dead-center at his throat. Helms's Petroleum Division led in revenue and earnings, which made him the second wealthiest at the table, but he was just as hungry as his rivals for the power that eluded them all.

The wealthiest, their reclusive chief executive officer and board chairman Bruce Danforth—known to the tiny inner circle allowed in his presence as the Buddha—was rich beyond counting and doled out power with maddening calculation. For forty years, Danforth had hammered a conglomerate of Texas oil drillers, producers, pipelines, and refineries into a free-booting global enterprise that wielded more power than all but a few independent nations. He was pushing ninety now, and looked every year of it, with sunken cheeks, wrinkled brow, and hooded eyes. But those eyes were clear—blazing like twin high beams between a thick crown of snow-white hair and a vandyke beard still speckled with black. And his heart and his lungs seemed so strong that his division presidents feared he would never die.

The Buddha's hearing was acute, the sharpest in the room, and when his mind wandered, those he frightened most knew they had made the mistake of boring him. His voice was reedy yet commanded total attention, even when he opened a meeting with the credo everyone had heard a thousand times before.

“If you think oil money is easy money, you aren't making enough of it.”

Each division had sixty seconds to report what it was doing to make more of it. Kingsman Helms went last, the place of honor, though he was acutely aware that Douglas Case, American Synergy's president of Global Security—as rugged a man as Helms had ever seen in a wheelchair—was seated next to the Buddha. Supposedly, there was more room at the head of the table to park Case's wheelchair. But the chair on the Buddha's right had been Helms's chair before the Isle de Foree debacle—a recent defeat still seared in the Buddha's memory.

Hopes had run high when Helms's Petroleum Division scientists discovered the mother of all petroleum reserves in the deep waters off Isle de Foree. ASC had almost won control of the West African island nation by staging a coup. If they hadn't dropped the ball, the corporation would have had exclusive access to the “ground resources” of a Gulf of Guinea version of Saudi Arabia, minus the misery of Arab politics. There had been plenty of blame to go around both inside and outside the corporation. Kingsman Helms had dodged as much as he could, but the cold reality was staring across the table: before Isle de Foree, the Security Division hadn't even been allowed in the room. After, Doug Case—guardian against cyberattack, headstrong dictators, whistle-blowers, and rebel assaults on Nigerian offshore oilfields—sat beside the Buddha, with full division privileges.

The Buddha interrupted Helms halfway through his sixty seconds.

“Yes, yes, yes, but where have you been the last two weeks?”

“At undisclosed locations.” Helms smiled easily. Danforth knew full well he was working East Africa in general and Somalia in particular. But the old man loved his hocus-pocus spy talk, having staked a career in clandestine federal service, a normal man's lifetime ago, before turning his ambition to oil.

The Buddha did not return Helms's smile. “I mean closer to home, Kingsman. Where in hell—”

The phone in Helms's breast pocket rang behind the folds of his handkerchief.

Anger blazed in the Buddha's eyes. “The rule is no calls, but for life and death.”

Helms snatched up his phone. The assistant who was calling him, the matronly Kate Clark, whom he had poached from the top tier of Doug Case's own Global Security Division, knew the rules, and he trusted her judgment.

“What?”

What she said was so unexpected, so absolutely out of left field, that he could not breathe more than a single whispered word. “Pirates?”

None of the division presidents, not even Case, heard him.

But the bat-eared Buddha had, and, as Helms walked out of the meeting, Danforth beckoned him close and muttered, “Deal with it. Quickly. Before the goddamned Chinese eat your lunch.”

Helms hurried out the door and heard the old man raise his voice. “Meeting's over, everybody—Doug, you stay.”

Helms looked back. Doug Case was wheeling his chair closer to the old man, and Helms would have given a year of his life to hear what they were going to talk about.

D
OUGLAS
C
ASE WAITED
until the last division president out closed the door behind her.

“May I ask what that was about?”

The Buddha ignored the question and stared at Case. Case dropped his gaze, tacitly admitting that he had crossed a forbidden line. He waited, staring at his lap. When at last the old man spoke, what he said came straight out of the blue.

“Earlier today, I had an interesting conversation with Yousef.”

Doug Case sat up straight, stunned with admiration. That the Buddha could continue bargaining with Yousef in Italy while he was consumed with ASC petroleum prospects in Somalia was a powerful reminder that no global oil corporation CEO in the world could work with more balls in the air. Of course, the Buddha and Yousef's family went way, way back.

American Synergy Corporation had done business with the dictator since before the Cub was born. The Buddha had enriched Yousef's father—and himself—underwriting infrastructure in good times and trading embargoed oil as the old man got crazier. When the so-called Arab Spring blew their cozy arrangement to hell, the Buddha had quietly, secretly, persuaded the Italian government to contract with Paul Janson's Catspaw Associates to exfiltrate Yousef before they hanged him from an oil rig.

The Italians had hoped to get credit for offering asylum that would end the fight. The Buddha had taken the longer view, convinced that Yousef was the one member of the family with the brains and ambition to take power back when the revolution fell apart.

“I admire Yousef,” said Case. “He's a patient planner, not a reactor. And he knows what he wants.”

The Buddha raised a cynical eyebrow. “Yousef wants what he thinks should be his inheritance—his own country afloat on oil. At the same time he feels the International Criminal Court breathing down his neck.”

“I heard he lit out from Sardinia. Is he back?”

Another question the old man would not answer. He stared Case down again.

“I promised Yousef that ASC will offer legitimacy, both in worldwide public relations and in lobbying Congress. Yousef promised to return the favor with access. And this time he will keep order—as he tried to for his psychotic fool of a father—with high-tech security and secret police to jail and assassinate the opposition.”

“You were right to rescue him.”

“Damn right. This time around Yousef will be in charge and no longer serving his idiot father. And I don't mind telling you, Doug, you were right about Paul Janson.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Doug Case's part in the rescue had been to convince the Buddha that no private operator was better qualified to snatch Yousef from chaos than Paul Janson. Janson's research was the best, his analytic skills the sharpest. Janson had taken the rescue job, despite misgivings about Yousef, because it had offered “white-hat” good-guy results. A swift end to the bloody civil war would not only save countless lives but would also keep the dictator's arsenal of shoulder-fired rockets and heavy machine guns out of the hands of the Sahara Desert jihadists who would turn them in a flash on Algeria and Mali.

“Janson will regret taking the job,” said the Buddha, in a voice suddenly harsh. “Can you still guarantee that he doesn't know who got it for him?”

“Guaranteed. Even if the Italians talked too much, they knew only middlemen. Neither you, nor me, nor ASC left any prints. Janson has no idea we set it up.”

“I was surprised at the time that he took it.”

“Optimism is Janson's Achilles' heel,” said Case.

Paul Janson had to have known that Yousef was no fool, known too that Yousef was even less a white hat. But hope for a good-guy outcome had caused him to underestimate Yousef's ambition.

47°55' N, 96°26' W
US Highway 2, Eastbound
North Dakota

D
enny Chin woke up with the sun in his eyes. He was belted into the passenger seat of a four-by-four F-150 XL SuperCrew pickup headed east at seventy miles an hour. Paul Janson switched hands on the steering wheel to pass him a water bottle.

“Crank makes you thirsty.”

“No kidding.” Chin pulled long and hard and tossed the empty over his shoulder onto the crew seat. “Who the fuck are you?”

“What you called me in the cage.”

“Old man?”

Chin looked closer. He noticed traces of scar tissue that he should have registered the night before if he hadn't been buzzing the moon. He also should have noticed how the eyes managed to be simultaneously detached and alert. He told himself that the neutral iron-gray color of the dude's close-cropped hair had thrown him off.

“You're not old.”

“No kidding.”

Denny Chin stared at Janson. “Wait a minute.
The
Old Man. You're the operator who runs the Phoenix rehab?”

“A whole bunch run Phoenix. I help pay for it.”

Janson passed him another bottle.

Denny Chin drank and placed the empty in his lap. “Guys in the program talk about you. Trying to figure you out.”

“They'll have the jump on me when they do.”

Janson covered the lie with a self-deprecating smile. The opposite was true. Paul Janson was a man who constantly reviewed his life in small ways. He had developed the regimen as a field officer tasked with “sanctioned” killings for the State Department's clandestine intelligence unit Consular Operations. The habit had earned him the title “The Machine,” and it had kept him alive and deadly longer than most assassins—no fatal “mistakes” or “accidents” triggered by guilt or confusion.

But awareness cost. Janson had awakened one morning unable to deny that for all his passion to serve his country, for all his hard-honed skill—and the layers and layers of detachment crucial to doing the job—his sanctioned killings were serial killings. Determined to redeem himself, he had founded Phoenix to help rehabilitate and restore to some semblance of normal life other operators crippled by dehumanizing service.

“If half I heard is true,” said Chin, “I'm lucky you didn't kill me last night.”

Janson reached to shake hands. “I studied your operations, Denny. You don't kill easy.”

Denny Chin stared at Paul Janson's hand but would not take it. “So what is this? You're trying to drag me back to rehab?”

“I can't force you. But I'll do my damnedest to talk you into it.”

“I can't go back.”

“There is nothing harder on Earth than trying to restore heart and mind and soul, Denny. But you've got what it takes to do it.”

“How?”

“You're special ops. You know the drill. Sometimes you have to be tougher than the situation.”

“
You
know that knowing the fucking drill and executing it are two different things.”

“Next time you decide to cut and run, dig down and find yourself so you can ask, ‘Why am I making this decision now? Am I really thinking this through? Or am I just too tired or low or scared to think straight?'”

Denny Chin hung his head. “I do not know if I'm worth the trouble.”

Chin had been a rising star before he was swallowed up in a DEA Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team operation conceived by bosses two thousand miles from the action. Janson said, “Denny, you served your country with everything you had. You questioned lousy orders on stupid missions, which makes you doubly worth the trouble.”

Chin's FAST Team had been snookered by local drug lords into accidentally slaughtering civilians. “The bosses put the screws to you. But field agents you served with swear you're worth the trouble. So does everyone at Phoenix.”

“Are you still in the game, or are you a full-time shrink?”

“I leave shrinking to the professionals.”

“Are you still in the game?”

“I do security consulting to fund Phoenix.”

“That must be a big outfit.”

“I don't do big. I don't trust more than two people in one swept room.”

“Two?”

“Me and a sniper.”

“Corporate security? How can two do the job?”

“We have specialists on call.” With its operators linked by the Internet, encrypted websites, and secure phones, and contracted on a job-by-job basis, Janson explained, succinctly—without giving up secrets—Catspaw Associates was essentially a virtual organization with no expensive physical installations to be maintained and few vulnerable employees to be defended. “From a bad-guy point of view, we don't exist—and you just had your last question.”

Chin said, “From what I've seen of Phoenix—docs, nurses, facilities—you must charge a ton to pay the bills.”

“Our clients can afford it.”

“So you're a mercenary?”

It was meant as an insult. Janson ignored it.

Chin took another shot. “So when you straighten out guys like me, we're supposed to re-up in your private army?”

Janson pinned him with the strangest gaze. Chin had always thought of cold eyes as empty, devoid of emotion. Janson's were not empty. They glistened with passion. The dude cared. But they were still the coldest eyes he had ever seen.

“If an operator returns to federal service, of course I'll tap him for intelligence. How he responds is up to him. Nobody owes Phoenix. Nobody owes me.”

“Bullshit. I would owe you the moon and the stars if you put my head straight.”

“Pay the next guy.”

“Yeah, but let's say a guy
wanted
to join your private army.”

Janson's glance nearly broke Chin's heart. It told him that Phoenix would be there for him as long as he needed help, but it would be a long, hard slog to regain the edge—and trust—to be invited to repay the favor with fieldwork. Trying not to sound bitter, but knowing he did, Denny Chin said, “You mean guys break down, again, even doing ‘corporate security'?”

“None yet. We operate by rules we never need to lie about.”

“What rules?”

“No torture. No killing anyone who doesn't try to kill us. No civilians in the cross fire.”

“Fann-tass-tic. What do you call them, Janson Rules?”

“It's not a fantasy.”

“Not a fantasy? What the fuck is it? A dream?”

Janson surprised the shattered operator with a grin as optimistic as it was unexpected. “I have nothing against dreams.”

Denny Chin laughed and shook his dreadlocks. “Shit, man… How'd you get into the saving business?”

“Operator I served with dove off the roof of our Singapore embassy. Forgot he trained as a paratrooper. Landed about as good as you can.”

“How'd he make out?”`

“These days he runs global security for a global corporation.”

“Lucky dude.”

“From a wheelchair.”

“I meant getting saved by you.”

“All I did was make a place to save himself. The rest was up to him. Like it's up to you, Denny.”

Denny Chin closed his eyes.

Janson's cell broke the silence with an old-phone ringtone.

The caller ID surprised him. Kingsman Helms. What did the president of the petroleum division of the biggest oil company in the country want from an enemy?

“Excuse me,” he told Denny, pulling off the road. “I have to take this.”

He stopped the engine, took the keys, stepped out, and walked along the shoulder.

Sensing opportunity, he set the phone to Record and waited until the tenth ring to answer. “Hello.”

“Is that Paul Janson?”

Janson asked, “Am I supposed to believe I'm out of the doghouse for making American Synergy play fair in the Gulf of Guinea?”

“My wife is on that yacht.”

“What yacht?”

“
Tarantula
, that the pirates hijacked.”