Free The Janson Option by Paul Garrison

Emergency Service Unit drawn by the gunfire responded in two minutes. A police launch arrived in five, and within ten minutes of the last shot fired a hundred cops had swarmed into the Chelsea Piers complex. Kincaid’s student, a raven-haired beauty in a dark-blue Counterterrorism Bureau polo shirt, arrived on a motorcycle.
    *  *  *
    T HE SNIPER ATTACK cost Janson and Kincaid twelve precious hours as they cooperated with the cops who were piecing together what had happened. Nine o’clock at night found them still pretending patience in a conference room on the sixth floor of One Police Plaza, where Kingsman Helms sat flanked by lawyers from the venerable white-shoe firm Dagget, Staples & Hitchcock.
    Janson thanked the gods for Kincaid’s former student. Without the counterterrorism officer’s clout, it would have been worse. She even got them permission to use their phones so that they could use much of the long day to continue gathering intelligence on the Somali pirates.
    Catspaw Associates contractors had of course shifted into high gear. No contractor was required to drop another client in mid-course, but the pay was top and the work intriguing, and they tended to gather quickly.
    A Somali-American college student had been hired on to translate. A kid recently paroled from jail had been recruited to explain the pirate culture of his distant homeland and compile a list of pirate cell-phone numbers. The best get was a Somali-American real estate mogul who found properties for emigrating Somali businessmen. He was setting Janson up with introductions to movers and shakers in Mogadishu.
    Janson and Kincaid had to clear one more hurdle to get out of police headquarters and on their way to Somalia: Deputy Commissioner Eddie Thomas, a Brooklyn-born former gold-shield detective, who stood five-feet-six in a 54 Short sharkskin suit. Thomas had cock-of-the-walk looks that Kincaid’s former student found interesting, judging by her acquisitive expression. When he finally looked up from his underlings’ reports stacked on the table in front of him, his black eyes glittered like anthracite.
    â€œDo I get this straight? The cigarette boat was abandoned in St. George on Staten Island, minus the sniper and crew. The gunman who witnesses saw bleeding profusely from a fall he apparently suffered while escaping has not shown up in any emergency rooms. The other gunman, who broke his leg somehow, is identified as Sabastiano Bardellino, an assassin who works for the Camorra, the Naples mafia, which explains why Mr. Bardellino has not uttered a word and he never will, even if he was sentenced to life in prison, which he won’t be because the only crime we can charge him with is waving a pistol in public, which is not the most unusual occurrence in our city, and he never fired it.”
    Deputy Commissioner Thomas paused to stare at Kingsman Helms and the lawyers. He glanced at Janson and Kincaid, and his lips tightened. He looked down at the reports in front of him. “In regards to the sniper’s target, Mr. Helms denies any knowledge of who would want to assassinate him, and he pleads complete ignorance about the Camorra, knowledge of which would not fall within the purview of a Texas oil company executive, it has been pointed out repeatedly to me by Mr. Helms’s counselors. So mistaken identity seems as plausible as any other suggestion I’ve heard today. And Mr. uh, Janson, here, did not bring with him the Glock that he fired in panic, shall we say, at the cigarette boat, but merely snatched it from Mr. Bardellino to protect his companion, Ms… um, Kincaid, and subsequently dropped it in a similar panic into the river, where Marine Unit divers recovered it along with numerous other discarded firearms and knives, including this carbon-fiber blade of the sort that does not show up in metal detectors.”
    Commissioner Thomas picked the blade up, held it to the light, and smiled