Janus (also known as The Past) is a target that appears in the Another Life mission in HITMAN™ 2.
Background
Janus' true origins is a mystery (mainly because he had the records carefully erased). Some say he was born in Belarus, the son of humble farmers, while others insist that he is of communist royalty; the bastard son of Nikita Khrushchev. The variety of myths surrounding him only add to his legend.
However, Janus' career in global espionage was only the tip of the iceberg.
After Brezhnev's ascend to power, Janus came to view the cold war as pointless. He knew that defecting was not going to be the solution. The Americans were just as narrow-minded and self-absorbed. The problem was politics itself. This is when he was approached by Providence who offered an appealing alternative. An organization of enormous power and influence but uninhibited by political, ideological and national interests. A third way, Janus secretly became the first Constant of Providence. He supervised Otto Wolfgang Ort-Meyer's Institute for Human Betterment and met "Subject 47" in his childhood.
In 1988, he left the KGB after running afoul of the then administration. A year later, the Soviet Union collapsed.
After the 1989 riots at the Institute, Janus was the one who forced Ort-Meyer to submit the remaining subjects to a neural procedure known as "the wipe", erasing their memories and emotions - effectively creating Agent 47 as we know him. Afterwards, Ort-Meyer tried to get revenge and send 47 after him, but the assassination failed.
He founded The Ark Society in 1991.
Providence considers him harmless, but the Constant still keeps a few Heralds on "Janus detail" to make sure that no sensitive information leaks from the old man."----
Abilities
- Genius Intelligence: During his youth, when he was an Elite operative of the KGB, Janus was declared to be a certified genius and a master of counter-intelligence. He also seems to possess an incredible memory, as despite the extended amount of time since he last saw 47, he was still able to recognize some of 47's traits in his disguise, despite not fully realizing it is 47 himself.
- KGB Training: Janus's time in the KGB, he's very much versed in hand to hand combat, firearms, explosives, covert and clandestine operations, surveillance, infiltration, and interrogations. His age managed to catches up to him diminishes most of his skills.
- High Pain Tolerance: Lucas comments that interrogating Janus would be a waste of time since Janus himself is trained to endure advance interrogations.
Trivia
- Janus' unlikely living situation in Vermont may have been inspired by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet dissident and 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate who fled the USSR, eventually settling in Cavendish, Vermont in 1976.
- Janus has a reference of an organization from the 1995 James Bond film: Goldeneye where Alec Trevalyan, the movie’s antagonist, must seek vengeance on Britain and Russia by stealing and launching a Goldeneye EMP on Britain’s Bank.
- Janus has another James Bond reference of a main villain: General Georgi Koskov from the 1987 film The Living Daylights where he orchestrates the assassination on his girlfriend Kara Milovy, manipulate the politics, assassinate the defectors and gain control the KGB in order to bolster the Soviet Union.
- Janus is mentioned in the mission The Final Test as the direct superior to both Jasper Knight and Officer Netzke.
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