The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,215

came in two varieties, French's yellow or Gulden's brown: nothing coarse-grained or tarragon-infused burdened the condiment section of the chipped enameled shelves, no moutarde au poivre vert within township limits. Janson's kind of place.

Yet if the decades-old accounts were accurate, there was a vast estate hidden somewhere in the hills, as private a residence as you could hope for - legally as well as physically. For even its ownership was completely obscure. Was it really conceivable that "Novak" - the mirage who called himself that - was nearby? Janson's scalp tightened as he mulled the possibilities.

Later that morning, Janson entered the diner at the corner of Main and Pemberton, where he started a conversation with the counterman. The counterman's sloping forehead, close-set eyes, and jutting, square jaw gave him a slightly simian appearance, but when he spoke he proved surprisingly knowledgeable.

"So you're thinking of moving nearby?" The counterman splashed more coffee into Janson's cup from his Silex pot. "Let me guess. Made your money in the big city and now you want the peace and quiet of the country, that it?"

"Something like that," Janson said. Nailed to the wall behind the counter was a sign, white cursive lettering on black: Kenny's Coffee Shoppe - Where Quality & Service Rule.

"Sure you don't want someplace a little nearer to your high-class conveniences? There's a Realtor lady on Pemberton, but I'm not sure you'll find exactly the kind of house you're looking for around here."

"Thinking of building," Janson said. The coffee was acrid, having sat on the hot pad too long. He gazed absently at the Formica-topped counter, its pattern of loose-woven cloth worn to white in the middle of the counter, where the traffic of heavy plates and cutlery was heaviest.

"Sounds like fun. If'n you can afford to do something nice." The man's drugstore aftershave mingled unpleasantly with the heavy aroma of lard and butter.

"No point otherwise."

"Nope, no point otherwise," the counterman agreed. "My boy, you know, he had some dang-fool way he was going to get rich. Some dotcom thing. Was going to middleman some e-commerce gimcrackery. For months he was talking about his 'business model,' and 'added value,' and 'frictionless e-commerce,' and flapdoodle like that. Said the thing about the New Economy was the 'death of distance' so that it didn't make no difference where you was. We was all just nodes on the World Wide Web, didn't matter whether you was in Millington or Roanoke or the goddamn Dulles corridor. He and a couple of friends from high school, it was. Burned through whatever was in their piggy banks by December, was back to shoveling driveways by January. What my wife calls a cautionary tale. She said, just be happy he wuddn't on drugs. I told her I wuddn't so sure about that. Not every drug is something you smoke, sniff, or shoot up. Money, or the craving for it, can be a drug just as surely."

"Getting money is one trick, spending it's another," Janson said. "Possible to build around here?"

"Possible to build on the moon, people say."

"What about transportation."

"Well, you're here, ain't you?"

"I guess I am."

"Roads here are in pretty good repair." The counterman's eyes were on a spectacle across the street. A young blond woman was washing the sidewalk in front of a hardware store; as she bent over, her cutoffs hitched a little higher up her thigh. No doubt the highlight of his day.

"Airport?" Janson asked.

"Nearest real airport's probably Roanoke."

Janson took a sip of coffee. It coated his tongue like oil. "'Real' airport? There another kind around here?"

"Naw. Well. There used to be, back in the forties and fifties. Some sort of tiny airport that the Army Air Force built. About three miles up Clangerton Road, a turnoff to the left. The idea is they were training pilots how to maneuver around the mountains in Romania, on the way to bombing the oil fields. So they did some practice flights hereabouts. Later on, some of the lumber guys used it for a while, but the lumber industry pretty near died off. I don't think it's much more than an airstrip anymore. You don't fly masonry if you can avoid it - you truck it."

"So what happened to that airstrip? Ever get used?"

"Ever? Never? I don't use those words." His gaze did not leave the blonde in the short cutoffs washing the sidewalk across the street.

"Reason I ask, you see, is an old business associate of mine, he lives near here, and said something about it."

The counterman

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