Jordan was curious that there had been no exchange between the two men following the Raleigh conference, quickly correcting his impatience with the self-reminder of how recent it had been. Whenever it came – and for as long as he required it in the future – he had this permanently open window into their every thought: into every thought of anyone with whom he found himself entangled.
Except Alyce, he corrected himself sharply. Her lawyer would have been the obvious pathway but nowhere in the man’s computer address book could Jordan locate any email exchanges between Reid and Alyce, and so successful and unobstructed had his entry been into all the other computer systems that there was a blip of positive disappointment at his not being able to worm his way into the last of his targets.
He’d been wrong about all his suspicions of Alyce, Jordan acknowledged not even having to force the unfamiliar honesty. He’d been wrong about believing she might in some way be complicit with her husband in trying to get money from him, wrong in imagining that she would have exposed him to the sexual complaint with which she’d been infected, and wrong to have made his hostility so blatantly obvious towards her during the Raleigh encounter. Objectively, continuing the honesty, Jordan accepted that he had been as much the cause of Alyce’s misfortune as she was guilty of being his. Judging from what he had just read of Appleton’s efforts to uncover Alyce’s infidelity to compensate for his own, if he had not so deliberately set out to seduce her, Appleton would have wasted even more money having her pursued by the inappropriately named Watchdog.
Fully aware of the contradictions and inconsistencies there were in the vocation he followed, Jordan would have been the last to claim that he suffered a conscience from his actions and certainly didn’t consider that conscience was part of what he was feeling now. But there was at least a genuine regret at behaving as he had towards her in Raleigh. Maybe, he thought, there would be other opportunities to apologize.
There had been several times in the past, working as successfully in America as he had in England, when Jordan had actually considered relocating permanently to the United States. Everything he needed to adopt and take advantage of a new identity was so much more easily and publicly accessible in the States, if a person knew how and where to look – which Jordan did. Upon application the essential and identity-proving Social Security number was readily available; so essential that it was more often than not printed as a guaranteed payee authenticity, along with full addresses, upon personal cheques, which was why he had included Appleton’s on all five accounts he’d opened in the trader’s name. As he knew from the legal exchanges, it was on Appleton’s bank record. Determined upon avoiding any conceivable error on this very particular occasion he confirmed it as he accessed all the social register entries in Boston through the public library reference books and the archives of the Boston Globe. Through this he learned the Appleton family history from the Boston tax rebellion, that was the incendiary to the War of Independence, to the marriage of Alfred Appleton’s parents, from the records of which he double-checked the family name of the commodity dealer’s mother. From the same sources he got the names of the man’s prep schools prior to Harvard, into which he phished to learn that pre-college as well as at Harvard Appleton had been considered dilatory and disinterested in anything other than sailing. Through the Harvard records Jordan discovered three police references to drunken driving offences, none with conclusions, all presumably minimized into cautions due to his family money and influence.
It was while he was scrolling through the final Harvard records, cross-referencing dates wherever possible, that Jordan began to be troubled by an inconsistency that he could not immediately isolate, but which remained in his mind as he forced himself on. It was not until he had downloaded everything on to hard copy and was cross-referencing from all his various sources that it became obvious to him, although the basic mystery remained even more tantalizing.
Jordan realized that he had assembled virtually enough information about Alfred Jerome Appleton to write the man’s biography. But, missing from any publicly available source Jordan had so far accessed was what Appleton had done in the three years after his Harvard graduation.
How, where and doing what had Appleton spent that time? Jordan wondered.
And wondered further how much it would benefit him to find out. Which he would, Jordan thought, adding this to his list of determinations. And then he thought that Alyce would probably know.
Fifteen
But there again, she might not, Jordan accepted. He would still have liked to ask her in the hope she could provide a short cut to the information, but didn’t think he could – or should – so soon after the lawyers’ warning in Raleigh against he and Alyce meeting alone, to which she might not have agreed anyway. And there was the problem of providing a reason for asking the question, although that was not insurmountable.
Instead – after his early morning and now regularly timed raid upon Appleton and Drake’s easily available gold mine – Jordan escaped the entombment of the previous two days in his hotel room to take up the search in his preferred way of working by walking the corridors of the reference section of the New York public library, beginning in its Milstein genealogical division. At first it appeared to be a good route. Because the library is the largest sourced library in the world the history of the Appleton family of Boston was far more extensive than any he had been able to access from his laptop, particularly the details of Appleton’s sailing prowess, which was recorded with several indexed newspaper and yachting magazine reports. Jordan logged each and, when he had completed primary source searches, worked his way steadily through the miscrofiched copies of thirty-five different publications.
From them Alfred Appleton began to emerge a world class yachtsman, predicted, not just as a potential US Olympic team choice, but also as an obvious selection for the American team that competed in the America’s Cup in 1992. The date rang an immediate bell in Jordan’s mind: 1992 was the second of the missing three years. The final reference to Alfred Appleton was in The Yacht, in its February edition of that year. The two-line item recorded Appleton’s withdrawal – for ‘personal reasons’ – from among those on the selection list. Jordan switched from where he was working to access the records of the New York Yacht Club, the America Cup’s governing body. Appleton was named four times in the selection procedures in late 1991. Without explanation the man’s name dropped out of the list in November of that year. The only other mention was the same as that in The Yacht, of Appleton’s withdrawal. Again, there was no offered explanation other than the amorphous ‘personal reasons’.
Was he trying too hard, Jordan asked himself, so outraged at his entrapment that he was too eager to attach importance where none existed? It was years – although not too many – before Appleton’s marriage to Alyce, so those ‘personal reasons’ were too far in the past to have any possible relevance now. Or did they still have relevance, if the characteristics of honesty or integrity or moral rectitude or whatever other words covered personal behaviour – Appleton’s, not his – still applied? Jordan still wanted to know: he still wanted a fully supplied and primed arsenal of every available weapon at his disposal for the battles – wars even – with which he might conceivably be confronted. Or have others declare against him.
But who to fire these supposed weapons? He couldn’t, not yet. He was the unwilling conscript press-ganged on to a battlefield upon which he didn’t want to be and upon which he couldn’t officially shoot back at those who were shooting at him. Others – Beckwith or Reid or both – had to press the triggers, which meant they had to be led to where the ammunition was. He’d come in at the end, to fight his own, already decided and increasingly well-planned guerilla campaign, not needing anyone else’s help or company.