Janus (also known as "The Past") is the tertiary antagonist of HITMAN™ 2. He is a former KGB spymaster, the first Constant of Providence, and the founder of The Ark Society. He is one of Agent 47's targets in the mission Another Life, and later appears post-mortem in The Ark Society.
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.Hitman 2:[]
In Hitman 2, Janus is a specter for most of the game, shown in very rarely, however, when he is shown he is posed as an intimidating man. In the mission Another Life, Agent 47 must find clues that point to the location of the ark society, assassinate Janus, and assassinate his new head of security, Nolan Cassidy. Agent 47 is sent to a suburban neighborhood called Whittleton Creek, located in Vermont, U.S.A., where Janus has been sent. After the death of Janus’s old head of security, Nolan Cassidy arrives in Whittleton Creek, and through dialogue it can be assumed that Janus is not fond of Cassidy. Agent 47 collects the clues and assassinates both Janus and Cassidy. Janus’s exact canon death in unknown, although it is known that his body was found intact and was transported to the Isle of Sgàil.
Trivia[]
- According to the mission introduction of Another Life, Janus first moved to Vermont in 2004.
- 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 shares several resemblances to James Bond villains.
- The codename Janus is used by Alec Trevelyan, the antagonist of the 1995 film GoldenEye. Interestingly, Trevelyan's actor is Sean Bean, who also portrays the Elusive Target Mark Faba.
- Janus shares similarities to General Georgi Koskov from the 1987 film The Living Daylights. Koskov is a Soviet general who stages a defection in an attempt to assassinate a political rival.
- His first name originally belonged to minor character, Janus J. Kirkegaard from Hitman: Absolution. Key difference is Kirkegaard's name went completely unused from the Contracts Mode for unknown reasons.
- Janus is mentioned in the mission The Final Test in HITMAN™ as the direct superior to both Jasper Knight and Officer Netzke.
- If 47 poses as his nurse, Janus will remark on 47's appearance, noting his "refined mix of eastern European cultures", musing that "a doctor" he once knew would have found 47 quite interesting. If 47 carries out a health check on Janus, he will mention how he's reminded of a boy he met, clearly 47, during Ort-Meyer's super-soldier program. When 47 asks about the boy, Janus assumes he is dead, as well as the project that created him. It is left ambiguous as to whether or not Janus recognizes 47 and is taunting him.
- During the session, Janus states his distaste for Ort-Meyer's super-soldier program, believing that an army of well-trained spies would be far more efficient. If 47 confronts Arthur Edwards in The Ark Society, he will note that Janus found the program "distasteful, not to mention inefficient".
- If Janus is held at gunpoint, he may congratulate 47 and tell him "you've earned this" or ask him to kill him already. He may also taunt 47, defiantly declaring the only thing he fears is dying a traitor.
- 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 Roman god from which he takes his codename. Janus' burial robes also include this aesthetic.
- Janus' corpse can be found in The Ark Society, undergoing a special embalming process that will preserve it for millennia. It's revealed through dialogue between Zoe Washington and an Ark Member that Zoe has arranged his preserved body be displayed as part of the Ark Collection against his last wishes, apparently as revenge for Janus opposing her and her sisters appointments as his successors.
- Janus' appearance in The Ark Society makes him one of six targets to physically appear in more than one mission in the World of Assassination Trilogy, the others being Andrea Martinez, Arthur Edwards and the three optional targets in the bonus mission The Dartmoor Garden Show (Lucy Philips, Sebastian Sato and Cornelia Stuyvesant). Janus is, however, the only one to appear post-mortem.
- 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 Vladimir 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' cause of death is kept ambiguous. Zoe Washington dismisses several methods of killing him (such as poisoning a blueberry muffin, his oxygen tank exploding, or killing him disguised as his nurse) as rumors in a conversation with Cornelia Stuyvesant, and his eulogy falsely states that he died in his sleep.
- This strangely suggests that Janus' canonical mission story elimination would be Whack-a-Mole, as the nurse discounts An Apple a Day and mention of the oxygen tank discounts No Smoking Area. Although this would suggest Janus was killed with a mole hole explosion, which doesn't seem possible given how intact his body is when viewed in the morgue in The Ark Society. Either Zoe Washington lied to Cornelia Stuyvesant or the embalmer charged with making his remains look presentable is very skilled. Alternatively, his exact cause of death may simply have been left intentionally unresolved.
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