Without the stolen goods, the U.S. Attorney delayed the indictment. Attorneys for Jerry and Mark moved to dismiss the charges, but the judge refused. They stayed in jail, without bail, and without saying a word. The silence held. Three months after the theft, the U.S. Attorney offered Mark the deal of all deals: spill your guts and walk way. With no criminal record, and with no DNA from the crime scene, Mark was the better choice to deal with. Just talk and you’re a free man.

He declined for two reasons. First, his lawyer assured him the government would have difficulty proving a case at trial, and because of this he would probably continue to dodge an indictment. Second, and more important, Denny and Trey were out there. That meant the manuscripts were well hidden, and it also meant that retaliation was likely. Furthermore, even if Mark gave them Denny’s and Trey’s full names, the FBI would have trouble finding them. Obviously, Mark had no idea where the manuscripts were. He knew the locations of the second and third safe houses, but he also knew that in all likelihood they had not been used.

21.

All trails became dead ends. Tips that had at first seemed urgent now faded away. The waiting game began. Whoever had the manuscripts would want money, and a lot of it. They would surface eventually, but where and when, and how much would they want?

CHAPTER TWO

THE DEALER

1.

When Bruce Cable was twenty-three years old, and still classified as a junior at Auburn, his father died suddenly. The two had been feuding over Bruce’s lack of academic progress, and things had gotten so bad that Mr. Cable had threatened more than once to cut young Bruce out of his will. Some ancient relative had made a fortune in gravel, and, following bad legal advice, had set up a scheme of misguided and complicated trusts that had strewn money over generations of undeserving kinfolks. The family had for years lived behind the facade of fine wealth while watching it slowly drip away. Threatening to modify wills and trusts was a favorite ploy used against the young, and it had never worked.

Mr. Cable, though, died before he made it to his lawyer’s office, so Bruce woke up one day with the promise of a quick $300,000, a beautiful windfall but not quite retirement money. He thought about investing it, and doing so conservatively might net him an annual return of between 5 and 10 percent, hardly enough to sustain the lifestyle Bruce was suddenly contemplating. Investing in a more daring way would be far riskier, and Bruce really wanted to hang on to the money. It did strange things to him. Perhaps the strangest was his decision to walk away from Auburn, after five years, and never look back.

Eventually, a girl enticed him to a Florida beach on Camino Island, a ten-mile-long barrier strip just north of Jacksonville. In a nice condo she was paying for, he spent a month sleeping, drinking beer, strolling in the surf, staring at the Atlantic for hours, and reading War and Peace. He’d been an English major and was bothered by the great books he had never read.