asking you to divert anything, I’m not asking you to do anything wrong. All I’m
asking is to see copies of the invoice slips. Not to have them, to see them. And
if I learn something, if it’s the guy I think it is, nobody will ever know how.
But I’m begging you, you’ve got to give Marta and me a chance. And this is the
only way.”
The courier nodded briskly. “I’m going to get behind on my rounds if I don’t get
a move on. How about you meet me at the atrium of the Sony Building, Fifty-fifth
and Madison, in four hours?”
“You’re doing the right thing, my friend,” the man told him with fervor. He made
no reference to the two thousand dollars he had “tipped” the courier; that would
have been beneath the dignity of them both.
At the Sony atrium, hours later, sitting on a metal chair near a poured-concrete
fountain, he was finally able to page through the invoices. He had been, he saw,
too optimistic: the deliveries lacked a sender’s address, being marked only with
a code of origination that indicated the general location of pickup. He
persevered all the same, looking for a pattern. There were dozens of packages
that arrived from all the expected locations, cities corresponding to the major
Liberty Foundation branch offices. Yet there were also a handful of packages
that were sent to Marta Lang from a location that corresponded to nothing at
all. Why was Caslon Couriers making regular pickups from a small town in the
Blue Ridge Mountains?
“Yes,” he told the courier mournfully. “It’s just as I thought.” He glanced
around the place—an urban terrarium of plants and sluggish waterfalls arrayed in
a glassed-in “public space” that some zoning board had demanded in return for a
height variance. “She told me they’d broken it off, and maybe they did, for a
while. But now it’s on again. Well, it’s back to couples therapy for us.”
Looking mournful, Paul Janson extended a hand, his palm lined with another
sheath of slippery large-denomination bills, and the courier grasped it warmly.
“My heartfelt sympathies, man,” the courier said.
A little additional research—several hours in the New York Public Library—was
suggestive. Millington, Virginia, turned out to be the nearest town to a vast
pastoral estate that was built by John Vincent Astor in the 1890s, a place that,
by several architectural accounts, rivaled the legendary Biltmore estate in its
elegance and attention to detail. At some point in the fifties, ownership passed
into the hands of Maurice Hempel, a secretive South African diamond magnate,
since deceased. And now? Who owned it now? Who lived there now?
Only one conclusion suggested itself: a man the world knew as Peter Novak. A
certainty? Far from it. Yet there was surely some validity to the inferences
that brought the remote spot to his attention. Control required communication:
if this last surviving “Novak” was still in command of his empire, he would have
to be in communication with his top deputies. People like Marta Lang. Janson’s
plan called for breaching the channels of communication. By tracing the subtle
twitchings of the web, he might find the spider.
After spending the following morning on the road, however, Janson felt
increasingly unsure of his suppositions. Had it not been too easy? His keyed-up
nerves were not calmed by the monotony of driving. For most of the trip, he
maintained a near constant speed, shifting from the turnpike, punctuated with
blue Adopt-A-Highway signs, to the smaller roads that webbed across the Blue
Ridge Mountains like man-made rivers. Rolling green farmland gave way to
blue-green hued vistas of rising hills, cresting and ebbing across the horizon.
Framed by the windshield, the images straight ahead of him had the beauty of the
banal. Battered guardrails stretched along outcroppings of mossy gray shale. The
road itself became mesmerizing, an endless procession of small irregularities.
Cracks in the road that had been daubed with glossy black sealant; skid marks
that formed staccato diagonals; broken white lines that had started to blur from
the punishment of a thousand downpours.
A few miles past a camping exit, Janson saw a turnoff marked for the town of
Castleton, and he knew that Millington would not be much farther. jed sipperly’s
pre-owned auto—buy your next car here! read a garish roadside sign. It was
lettered with white and blue car-body paint on a metal plaque mounted high on a
pole. Tear tracks of rust spilled from the corner rivets. Janson pulled into the
lot.
It would be the second time he had changed cars en route; in Maryland he had
picked up a late-model Altima from its owner. Switching vehicles was standard
procedure during long trips. He was confident that he was not being followed,
but there was always the possibility of “soft surveillance”: a purely passive
system of observation, agents instructed to notice, not to follow. A young woman
riding shotgun in a Dodge Ram whose eyes flickered from a newspaper to a license
plate; the fat man with an overheated car stalled on the shoulder, the hood up,
seemingly waiting for AAA. Almost certainly they were as innocent as they
appeared, and yet there were no guarantees. Soft surveillance, though of limited
effectiveness, was essentially undetectable. So at intervals, Janson changed his
vehicle. If anyone was attempting to keep tabs on his movements, it would make a
difficult task even more so.
A 120-pound dog lunged repeatedly at a heavy-gauge Cyclone fence as Janson got
out of his Altima and made his way toward the low trailerlike office. all offers
considered read a sign in the window. The large animal—he was a mongrel, whose
ancestors seemed to include a pit bull and a Doberman, and possibly a
mastiff—was penned into one corner of the lot and once more threw himself
against the unyielding Cyclone fence. Aside from his size, the wretched mutt was
a perfect contrast to the old crone’s noble white-coated Kuvasz, Janson mused.
But perhaps the animals were only as different as the masters they served.
A thirtyish man with a cigarette tucked into the corner of his mouth sauntered
out of the trailer. He thrust out a hand toward Janson, a bit too abruptly. For
a split instinctual second, Janson readied himself to deliver a crushing blow to
his neck; then he reached out and clasped the man’s hand. It bothered him that
those reflexes signaled themselves in perfectly civil contexts, but they were
the same reflexes that had saved his life on countless occasions. Violence, when
it appeared, so often was inappropriate, out of context. What mattered was that
such impulses were under Janson’s control. He would not be leaving the younger
man sprawled on the pavement, howling in pain. He would be leaving him pleased
at an advantageous trade-in supplemented with a pocketful of cash.
“I’m Jed Sipperly,” the man said, with a showily firm handshake; somebody must
have told him that a firm handshake inspired confidence. His face was fleshy but
firm beneath a thatch of straw-colored hair; the sun had burned a ruddy crease
that started near the bridge of his nose and curved beneath his eyes. Perhaps it
was because he had driven for too many hours straight, but Janson suddenly had a
vision of what the salesman would look like in a few decades. The meaty lips and
padded cheeks would grow loose; the sun-exposed contours of his face would turn
into furrows, ravines. What now passed for healthy ruddiness would coarsen into
a webbing of capillaries, like cross-hatchings on an engraving. The yellow hair
would whiten and retrench to a zone around his nape and temples, the usual
follicular fallback.
On the fake-wood table in the shadowed office, Janson could make out an open
brown Budweiser bottle and a nearly full ashtray. These things, too, would speed
the transformation, doubtless already had started to.
“Now, what kin I do you for?” Jed’s breath was faintly beery, and as he stepped
closer, the sun picked out his crow’s-feet.
There was another cage-rattling lunge from the dog.
“Don’t you mind Butch,” the man said. “I think he enjoys it. You excuse me for a
moment?” Jed Sipperly walked outside to the pavement near the chain-link
enclosure and stooped down to pick up a small Raggedy Ann-style cloth doll. He
tossed it into the enclosed area. It turned out to be what the mammoth dog was
pining for: he bounded over to it, and began to cradle it between huge paws.
With a few laps of his floppy pink tongue he cleaned the dust from the rag
doll’s button-and-yarn features.
Jed returned to his customer with an apologetic shrug. “Look at him slobber on
it—dog’s so attached to that doll, it ain’t wholesome,” he said. “I guess
everybody’s got a somebody. A real good guard dog, ‘cept he won’t bark. Which is
sometimes a saving grace.” A professional smile: his lips curved up in an