The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,214

the spirited way he upheld the stereotype of his trade.

"I personally like 'em, mechanical troubles and all. Like the look of 'em, somehow. And repairs ain't a problem for me, because we've got a repair guy on call. If what you're looking for is reliability, though, I can steer you toward one or two models that'll probably outlast you." He pointed toward a maroon sedan. "See that Taurus? One of the all-time greats. Runs perfect. Some of the later models all loaded up with special features you never use. More useless features, more stuff to go wrong. This one, it's fully automatic, you got your radio, your A/C, and you're good to go. Change the oil every three thousand miles, gas up with regular unleaded, and you're laughin'. My friend, you are laughin."

Janson looked grateful as the salesman fleeced him, taking the late-model Altima in trade for the aging Taurus and asking for an additional four hundred dollars on top. "A sweet deal," Jed Sipperly assured him. "I just have a weakness for an Altima, kinda like Butch and his Raggedy Ann. It's irrational, but love's not a thing to reason about, is it? You come in with one of those, of course I'm gonna let you waltz off with the nicest car on the lot. And anybody else would say, 'Jed, you're crazy. That piece of Jap tin ain't worth the hubcap on that Taurus.' Well, maybe it is crazy." An exaggerated wink: "Let's do this deal before I change my mind. Or sober up!"

"Appreciate your candor," Janson said.

"Tell you what," the salesman said, signing a receipt with a flourish, "you give me another fiver and you can have the damn dog in with it!" A long-suffering laugh: "Or maybe I should pay you to take it off my hands."

Janson smiled, waved, and as he got into the seven-year-old Taurus heard the sibilant hiss of another screwtop Budweiser being opened - this time in celebration.

The doubts Janson had as he traveled intensified upon his arrival. The area around Millington was down-and-out, struggling and charmless. It simply did not feel like an area that a billionaire would have chosen for a country retreat.

There were other towns - like Little Washington, off 211, farther north - where the soul-destroying work of entertaining tourists had overtaken whatever local economy had been left. Those were museum towns, in effect - towns whose white shingled barns were crammed with doubly marked-up Colonial Homestead china and "authentic" milk-glass salt-shakers and "regional" beeswax candles crated in from a factory in Trenton. Farms were converted into overpriced eateries; daughters of woodworkers and pipefitters and farmers - those who sought to stay, anyway - laced themselves into frilly "colonial"-style costumes and practiced saying, "My name is Linda and I'll be your waitress this evening." The locals greeted visitors with manufactured warmth and the wide smile of avarice. What kin ah do you for?

That green tide of tourism had never reached Millington. It didn't take Janson long to size up the place. Though scarcely more than a village, it was somehow too real to be picturesque. Perched on a rocky slope of Smith Mountain, it regarded the natural world as something to be overcome, not packaged and sold for its aesthetic value. There were no bed-and-breakfasts in the vicinity. The nearest motels were utilitarian, boxy affiliates of downscale national chains, run by hardworking immigrants from the Indian subcontinent: they did just fine by truck drivers who wanted to crash for the night, but had little appeal for businessmen in search of "conference center" facilities. It was a town that was dark by ten o'clock, at which point the only lights you could see came from dozens of miles down the valley, where the town of Montvale sparkled like a flashy, decadent metropolis. The biggest single employer was a former paper plant that now produced glazed bricks and did a side business in unrefined mineral byproducts; about a dozen men spent their working hours bagging potash. A smaller factory, a little farther out, specialized in decorative millwork. The downtown diner, at Main and Pemberton Streets, served eggs and home fries and coffee all day, and if you ordered all three, you got a free tomato or orange juice on the side, though it arrived in something little bigger than a shot glass. The gas station had an attached "foodmart" with racks of the same cellophane-wrapped snacks available everywhere else on the U.S. roadways. The mustard in the local grocery store