“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 Márta 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.