Janus

The Ark Society (Founder/Leader Former)

Cilas Netzke (Apprentice)

The Mortar (Commissioner)

Providence

The Ark Society (Founder)

Arthur Edwards (Protégé)

Frederick Engelhorn (Apprentice, planned successor)

Otto Wolfgang Ort-Meyer

Helen West (Friend/Potential Apprentice)

Harris Fairchild (Godson)

HITMAN™ 2

HITMAN™ III (Mentioned)

**Vladimir Rudolfovich Solovyov**, better known as **Janus**, is a target in *Hitman 2*. He is the former Constant of Providence.

## Background

*Janus was the KGB's legendary cold war spy master and the first Constant of Providence.*

*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.*

*Everyone agrees however, that Janus was a master of deception and counter-intelligence, perhaps the most gifted spy of the 20th century and he performed his duties with zeal and commitment. During the cold war, Janus headed the "Sixth Column" special branch at Lubyanka and remains the only KGB spy master to place sleeper agents in the top echelons of both Langley and MI6. In 1979, when the Soviet ambassador to the US planned to defect to the West, it was Janus who ingeniously ordered chess master Jasper Knight to poison the ambassador with ricin-coated chess pieces during a private match. Janus then orchestrated Knight's escape through communist Cuba, but in reality set him up for assassination to cover up activity surrounding one of Janus' spy schools, which was taking root in the US.*

*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, which has managed to catch up to him diminishes most of his skills however.
* **High Pain Tolerance:** Lucas comments that interrogating Janus would be a waste of time since Janus himself is trained to endure advance interrogations.

## Trivia

* According to the mission introduction of Another Life, Janus first moved to Vermont in 2004.
* He is possibly the oldest of 47's victims in the series.
* 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.
* The codename Janus is also used in the 1995 James Bond film Goldeneye, used by Alec Trevalyan, the movie’s antagonist. Interestingly, Alec Trevelyan is portrayed by British actor Sean Bean, who also portrays Elusive Target Mark Faba in *HITMAN™ 2*.
* 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.
* The costumes of the upper echelons of the Ark Society pay homage to Janus by having a face on both the front and back of their headpieces, like the two-faced Greek god from which he takes his codename. Janus' burial robes also include this aesthetic.
* Janus has a collection of Soviet Cold War memorabilia in his basement. If prompted to inspect his collection, he will walk to a random artifact and comment on how it once belonged to Lenin himself. He intends to donate an artifact to the Ark Society, anticipating that the Washington twins will disapprove of his donation, and stating that they are so forward-looking that they forget "it is the past that makes us."
* Janus commissioned The Mortar, a then-military intelligence train and mobile black site that features as the setting for Untouchable, the epilogue of *HITMAN™ III*.
* Janus is Bisexual.