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 heavygauge 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 whitecoated 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.