In the end, Paul Janson wins a partner—a deadly young woman whom he admires for her strength, bravery, skills, and determination to be the best she can be. Paul Janson, “The Machine,” the best of the best and the deadliest, is in awe of young Jessica Kincaid’s fighting skills and has never seen a better sniper. And Jessica is equally in awe of the older Janson’s experience and undiminished strength and his chameleon-like ability to be almost invisible.
But the best part is that Paul Janson is keenly aware that in Jessica Kincaid he has been given a great gift. This reflected deeper layers of the writer I had known, the married Robert Ludlum whom I had observed at smaller, more intimate gatherings minus the mob of publishers. For no man ever loved a wife more madly than he loved Mary. He was thrilled by her existence.
The gift of Paul Janson that Robert Ludlum left his readers is a hero who has faced his grim past and now hungers to atone. Paul Janson is a man who reviews his life in small ways on a constant basis. He is a man who is against his own record, who has come to wonder whether sanctioned killings in the service of his country were also serial killings.
From my point of view—that of a writer invited to create Janson’s future—a hero who looks into the mirror with a cold eye and swears to redeem himself is a dramatic hero who hungers to stand up to huge challenges and immense danger. That Janson has a partner covering his back makes him all the more formidable. That he might fear for her makes even “The Machine” vulnerable.
The Janson Directive’s ending was the essence of the man Robert Ludlum was. But it was also an invitation to continue the story. Ludlum’s hero had journeyed to a new place. A new place is a jumping-off point for new journeys, and if that isn’t the definition of a splendid series, it ought to be the rule for how to write one. Clearly, Robert Ludlum was not thinking of The Janson Directiveas a one-off book but the beginning of something new. That was all the freedom I needed to accept the invitation to journey on with The Janson Command.
Paul Garrison
Connecticut
2012
About the Authors
ROBERT LUDLUM was the author of twenty-six international best-selling novels, published in thirty-two languages and forty countries. He is perhaps best known as the creator and author of three novels featuring Jason Bourne: The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum. Ludlum passed away in March 2001.
PAUL GARRISON is the author of the critically acclaimed thrillers Fire and Ice, Red Sky at Morning, Buried at Sea, Sea Hunter, and The Ripple Effect. Raised on the stories of his grandfather who wandered the South Seas in the last of the square-rigged copra-trading vessels, he has worked with boats, tugs, and ships. He is currently writing the next novel in the new Paul Janson series.
SNEAK PREVIEW!
With U.S. intelligence agencies wracked by internal power struggles and paralyzed by bureaucracy, the president had been forced to establish his own clandestine group—Covert-One. With operators selected from the very best America has to offer, this team is only activated as a last resort, when the threat is on a global scale and time is running out.
Welcome to Robert Ludlum’s blockbuster international thriller series Covert-One.
Please turn the page for an early look at THE ARES DECISION
A new Covert-One novel written by New York Timesbest-selling writer Kyle Mills
Available wherever books are sold
ONE
Above Northern Uganda
November 12, 0203 Hours GMT +3
The roar in Craig Rivera’s ears combined with the darkness to make everything he knew—everything real—disappear. He wondered if astronauts felt the same sense of emptiness, if they wondered like he did whether God was just at the edge of their vision.
He looked at a dial glowing faint green on his wrist. The letters were Cyrillic, but the numbers tracking his altitude and coordinates were the same as the government-issue unit he trained with.
Rivera tilted his body slightly, angling north as he fell through fifteen thousand feet. A hint of warmth and humidity began to thaw the skin around his oxygen mask, and below the blackness was now punctured by widely scattered, barely perceptible points of light.
Campfires.
When his GPS confirmed that he was directly over the drop zone, he rolled on his back for a moment, staring up at a sky full of stars and searching futilely for the outline of the plane he’d jumped from.
They were alone. That, if anything, had been made perfectly clear.
He knew little about the country he was falling into at 125 miles an hour and even less about the man they’d been sent to find. Caleb Bahame was a terrorist and a murderer so cruel that it was difficult to know if the intelligence on him was accurate or just a bizarre tapestry of legends created by a terrified populace. Some of the stories, though, were undeniable. The fact that he demanded his men heat the machetes they used to hack the limbs from infants, for instance, had considerable photo evidence. As did the suffering of the children as they slowly died from their cauterized wounds.
The existence of men like this made Rivera wonder if God wasn’t perfect—if even He made mistakes. And if so, perhaps His hand was directly involved in this mission.
Not that those kinds of philosophical questions really mattered. While Bahame wasn’t good for much, he would probably be just fine at stopping bullets—a hypothesis that Rivera was looking forward to testing. Preferably with multiple clips.
He glanced at his altimeter again and rolled back over, squinting through his goggles at the jungle canopy rushing toward him in the starlight. After a few more seconds, the glowing numbers turned red and he pulled his chute, sending himself into a fast spiral toward a clearing that he couldn’t yet see but that the intel geeks swore was there.
He was just over a hundred feet from the ground when he spotted his LZ and aimed for it, beginning a sharp descent that sent him crashing to earth with a well-practiced roll. After gathering up his canopy, he ran for the cover of the jungle, dropping his pack and retrieving his night-vision goggles and rifle.
The well-worn AK-47 felt a little strange in his hands as he swept it along the tree line and listened to his team touch down at thirty-second intervals. When he counted four, he activated his throat mike.
“Sound off. Everyone okay?”
These kinds of jumps were impossible to fully control, and he felt a little of the tension in his stomach ease when all his men checked in uninjured.
Rivera moved silently through the jungle, the roar of the wind now replaced by the buzz of insects and the screech of tropical birds. They’d picked this area because the brutal terrain discouraged people from settling it. About twenty miles into the hike out he imagined he’d be cursing the choice, but right now the fact that no one was chasing them with red-hot machetes was a big check in the plus column.
His team coalesced into an optimally spaced line as they moved north. Rivera fell in behind a short, wiry man wearing a black sweatshirt with cut-off sleeves revealing arms streaked with green paint. The Israeli machine gun in his hands swept smoothly from left to right as he glided over terrain that would have left a normal man stumbling hopelessly from one tree to another. But he wasn’t a normal man. None of them were.
Their equipment and clothing were a patchwork collected from around the world. None of them had any tattoos or other identifying marks—even their dental work had been altered to make its country of origin indeterminate. If they were captured or killed, there would be no fanfare or place in history. No heroic stories for relatives and friends to take comfort in. Just a tiny headstone over an empty grave.