The Old Man

by Thomas Perry

  It was nearly 3:00 a.m. when the clatter of tin cans broke the silence. He opened his eyes, and the dogs both lifted their heads from the bedcovers. Chase could see in silhouette that their heads were both turned toward the doorway, and their ears were pointed forward.

  Dave launched himself off the bed. There was a heavy thud as his forepaws hit the hardwood, and then rapid scratching sounds as he accelerated down the hallway. Carol leapt after him, adding to the scrit-scrit of toenails down the hall.

  Dan Chase was on his feet in a second, stepping into his pants. He picked up the Colt Commander and the flashlight from his nightstand and followed. He paused at the end of the hallway, leaned forward to let one eye show at the corner, but saw only dark shapes in motion. He turned on his flashlight in time to see Dave barrel into a man at the far end of the room and begin to growl.

  The man went down, but he punched and kicked at Dave, trying to get the dog’s jaw to open and release his arm.

  “Lie still!” Chase shouted, and switched on the overhead lights. “Don’t fight them.”

  Then the man had a gun in his hand, and Chase could see it had a long silencer attached to the barrel. The silencer was the man’s enemy, because the extra eight inches made it too long for him to turn it around to fire into the dog. He managed to get it close, but the twisted arm gave Carol her opening. She ducked in beside Dave and bit.

  This time the man was in trouble. Soon Carol was tearing at his shoulder, working her way up toward his throat. He knew it, and he struggled harder, using the unwieldy pistol to hammer at the dogs.

  “Lasst ihn los,” said Chase. He aimed his gun at the man’s torso.

  The dogs released their jaws. The man hesitated.

  “One chance,” Chase called. “How are you going to use it?”

  The man rolled to his side and got off a shot that went past Chase’s ear. Within a half second Chase’s shot pounded into the man’s chest and he dropped the gun and lay still.

  Chase had to do many things in a short time, so his movements were fast and efficient. He kicked the man’s pistol a few feet away in case the man was alive. He patted each of the dogs while he ran his hand over them to see if they were hurt, and he spoke to them softly. “Dave, Carol. You’re very, very good dogs. Thank you, my friends.” They would probably be bruised, but there was no blood, and neither of them flinched at his touch. They licked his face as he knelt to check on the man.

  The man on the floor had dark hair and olive skin. He was about thirty years old, with a widow’s peak that showed he would have been bald in a few years if he had not come here tonight. Chase had never seen him before, unless he was the one in the silver Subaru.

  There was no pulse at the man’s carotid artery. The bullet hole in the chest was in the right position to go through the heart. The blood was draining under him from the exit wound, not being pumped out. Chase felt for a wallet, but found nothing in the man’s pockets except a spare magazine for the pistol and a knife with a four-inch blade—not even a set of car keys. The lack of identification wasn’t entirely a surprise. A man they’d send after Dan Chase would be one who could only succeed or die, because if he were caught he’d be more dangerous than Chase. Of course he had no phone, but Chase wasted a few seconds searching again for one.

  Chase went to the upstairs closet for his escape kit, added the phones, took the pack outside, and hung it on a nail in the shed so it would be hard to distinguish from his fishing gear and the oars and motor for the aluminum boat turned over in the yard. On the way back he searched for the silver Subaru, but he didn’t see it.

  He went inside through the kitchen door, took the cans and bottles outside, disconnected the fishing line, and threw them in the recycling bin, picked up the phone, and dialed 9-1-1.

  “Nine one one. What’s your emergency?”

  “This is Dan Chase at Ninety-two Neville Street in Norwich. A man just broke into my house with a gun, and woke up my dogs. He fired at me, so I shot him. He hasn’t got a pulse.”

  “Please stay on the line, Mr. Chase. Help will be there in a few minutes.”

  “All right. Tell them there’s no need for sirens. No use waking everybody in town.” He stood in the kitchen with the phone to his ear for a moment until the dogs came in and sat on their haunches staring at him.

  He cradled the phone on his shoulder while he opened the cookie jar and took out two dog treats and let their big jaws take them. He pulled out two more and bestowed those too, so the dogs would know that he appreciated them. All dogs wanted to do a good job.

  Through the window he saw the flash of red and blue lights on the trees beside the house. Chase prepared himself for the next part. There would be a lot of talk. Then he and his dogs would go.

  2

  The police were about the way he’d expected them to be in this situation. A man who had owned a home in town for nineteen years, paid taxes, and lived without afflicting his neighbors was awakened by his dogs when an armed man broke into his house tonight. The armed man fired a round at the home owner, who shot him through the heart. The cops took the victim’s statement, dusted the house for fingerprints, took photographs, and bagged the obvious stuff—both weapons, the ejected brass casings, and the bullet the attacker fired into the woodwork. Before the body was removed, they expressed the opinion that what had happened was unfortunate, but not very far out of the ordinary as home robberies went.

  The only part that Chase regretted a little was not removing the silencer from the shooter’s pistol. Having a silencer seemed unburglar-like to him, and sure as hell would make some cop scratch his head. The saving fact was that although silencers were illegal in Vermont, the house was half a mile from New Hampshire, where anybody who wanted a silencer could pay two hundred bucks for the federal transfer tax and have one.

  The police had been sympathetic, and they hadn’t even told him not to leave town. They would probably think of that in a day or two, but they wouldn’t call him before midday tomorrow because he was a local man who’d had a shock and lost half a night’s sleep. They would not be too far wrong, but right now the crime victim was driving at seventy-five miles an hour southbound down Interstate 89.

  He took out the first of the prepaid cell phones and dialed his daughter Emily’s number.

  “Hello?” Her voice was raspy. She must be in bed stretching to reach the phone.

  “Hi, kid. It’s me. I’m really sorry to call at this hour. But it’s finally happened. One of them found me at the house, so I’m on the road.”

  “Are you bringing the dogs to me?”

  “Maybe eventually. Right now, no. Dave and Carol have been through a lot tonight. I think they need time with me before I do anything like that. Come to think of it, so do I.”

  “Jesus, Dad.”

  “I know, honey. I only called so you wouldn’t think they got me or something. I can’t help what’s already happened. You’ll be all right. There’s nothing in the house that links me to you. No papers, no pictures, and to the extent I can accomplish it no prints of yours or DNA. I always clean the place after you leave. I’m going to be able to hold on to this phone a few more days, but no more than a week. If you need me, call it. Here’s the number.”

  “I can see it on my screen.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “I hate this,” she said. “I hate it, and it never had to happen.”

  “We’re not sure yet if anything did happen.”

  “You just said it happened. I assume there’s a dead man in your house?”

  “They moved him pretty quickly. This happened in Vermont, honey. It was a slow night.”

  “Right. But it happened,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. But you’re out of this mess and free from it. I’m glad.”

  “What bullshit. Nobody who loves anybody is ever free from anything.”

  “I meant you to be.”

  “I know you did. So now I have more money than a princess, only I’m still afraid to spend
it, and my father is on a cell phone on a highway bullshitting me because he thinks he might not get to talk to me again.”

  “It probably won’t be that bad.”

  “I hope not. But don’t take any chances. If you have to, you can rent a motel room and leave the dogs in it, and I’ll be there to pick them up as soon as a human being can take a plane there. If you’re with them, I’ll take all three of you.”

  “I’ve never doubted it,” he said. He drove in silence for a few seconds.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” she said.

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “I get that,” she said. “I’ve always gotten that.”

  “It doesn’t hurt to repeat it.”

  “Yes it does. It all hurts.”

  “I guess you’ve got to get ready for work, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I love you.”

  “Obviously. And I love you. Call when you can.”

  He slipped the phone into his pocket and kept driving. As he drove, he listened to the deep, nasal snores of Dave and Carol, who were asleep together on the backseat.

  3

  Once a man has stolen something he is a thief. If what he stole is big enough, then always and forever, no matter what else he’s done, he will always be a thief.

  Again, for the ten thousandth time, he remembered standing in the North African sun, on the powdery dust of the road that ran along the desert’s edge. He had just seen the car go by on its way from the office in the city to the place he had designated as the spot for the meeting he had demanded. At that moment, he could still have walked away. But if he kept going toward the meeting, he would die. He knew it would be a quiet death, not disturbing things on the surface. It would be so quiet it would seem civilized.

  As Chase looked back on the day now, he could see it in its sun-bleached clarity. His first sin came right then. It was anger. He had risked his life bringing the shipment of money to Libya from the bank in Luxembourg. In order to preserve deniability he had been discharged from the army months earlier and moved into a civilian special ops status that left no records, and he carried a false passport. The military intelligence officers had ordered him to do everything the way a criminal would do it.

  He had taken the freighter from Rotterdam to the Port of Algiers, watching his cargo container for the weeklong trip. On the last night out, he had caught a member of the crew sawing off the lock of the container, and had to choke him out and lock him, unconscious, in a storage bay, bound and gagged. For the rest of the trip he had needed to remain awake, crouching near the cargo container, clutching his gun and waiting for the others to find their shipmate and rush him.

  When they were in sight of land he changed his plan. He opened the container and loaded the cartons of money into a lifeboat, then lowered the boat and drove it to shore alone. As soon as he hit the beach he hired the driver of a fish factory truck to carry him south, deep into the desert. After that he had begun the long trek east.

  He had transported the money across two borders to smuggle it to the prearranged destination. He had paid for rides under canvas tarps in the backs of trucks, and twice stolen cars. In the middle of one night a pair of Algerian soldiers he had hired to drive him came to cut his throat, and he shot them both and drove on without them. When he had arrived at his destination, he set up the first meeting with the middleman, Faris Hamzah, and delivered the money. Then he had waited for the money to do its work. And he waited.

  And then, that morning over two months later, when he had seen Faris Hamzah in the backseat of his new car, he had known. The money had not gone to the insurgents waiting in the Nafusa Mountains. The middleman in the city had absorbed it. The United States government had entrusted him with money to be delivered to the rebel army in the field. The fighters were short on food, on weapons and ammunition, and on parts and fuel for the cheap, tough little Japanese pickup trucks they drove through the remote areas where their strongholds were. Faris Hamzah had agreed to deliver it to them, but he had kept the money.

  Hamzah’s car was brand-new. It was a white Rolls-Royce Phantom. He didn’t know what they cost, exactly, but he knew it was north of four hundred thousand in Los Angeles or New York. This one had made a much more complicated journey, probably by container ship to Dubai or Riyadh, where there were more people who could afford one, and then somehow transshipped across borders undercover. Ahead of it were two new Range Rovers, and a third came behind. Each of the Range Rovers had five men inside. The men he could see were wearing mismatched pieces of military battle dress. They were all on their way to his secret face-to-face meeting with Faris Hamzah in the empty land outside Hamzah’s home village southeast of Benghazi.

  He returned to the rented room where he had hidden his satellite phone. He climbed up on the roof of the building where he could see the streets nearby, and there would be no unseen listeners, and then he called the number that military intelligence had given him. When the voice came on and answered with the proper numeric ID, he said, “Faris Hamzah isn’t passing the money to its intended end user. Right now he’s sitting in the back of a Rolls-Royce and has three Range Rovers full of men who seem to be bodyguards.”

  The number on the other end said, “He was chosen very carefully.”

  “He’s a thief.”

  The number sighed. “Everything we do in these situations is a gamble.”

  “I’m supposed to meet with him alone in about two hours,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “You can meet with him if you want,” said the number.

  “I mean, should I try to get back what’s left of the money?”

  “If the first thing he bought was three Range Rovers full of armed men, you wouldn’t have much luck. Is there any chance the fifteen men are insurgents?”

  “He drove through town with them in brand-new cars.”

  “All right. You only gave him twenty million,” the number said.

  “We’re letting him keep it?”

  “He’ll probably get his name moved to the shit list. This call is timed out. Call in again when you’re out of the country.” The line went dead.

  He stood there staring at the phone for a few seconds. Then he realized not that he had already made his decision, but that there was no deciding to do. Then he was in motion.

  Over the next few minutes he gathered the few belongings he had acquired, removed the phone’s battery, and put it in his backpack with the rest. As he walked, he searched for a vehicle. He looked for one of the small Japanese pickup trucks like the ones the rebels in the desert used. When he found the right one, he paid the owner in cash, drove it to the police station, and parked it beside the lot where the policemen parked theirs. Then he walked on.

  He never wavered, never lost sight of his destination. He thought through the details as he walked through the city. It was hot—terribly hot. But he bought bottled soft drinks from vendors as he went. The bottled water was too easy to refill with polluted tap water. Pepsi-Cola and Dr Pepper were much more expensive, but they were too difficult to counterfeit. He wore a baseball cap to keep himself from being sun blinded, and thought about how odd it was that people in these dreadful remote places all over the world sported caps that said Minnesota Twins and shirts labeled Seattle Mariners under a sun hot enough to suck the moisture from a person’s eyeballs.

  When he arrived at Faris Hamzah’s house he had not thought about what would happen next, or who might get hurt. He had not even gotten around to thinking about how he would get out of the country. He had been trained with the expectation that he would do these things himself, making decisions as he came to them. He had gotten in, and so he would get out.

  He could see beyond the stuccoed block wall that remodeling had begun at Faris Hamzah’s house. He climbed the wall and dropped to the ground. There were colorful ceramic tiles in stacks waiting to be laid around a new fountain being built between the two scraggly olive trees he had noticed on his first visi
t. There was a high pile of pale newly milled lumber near the back of the house, probably for the framing of an addition. This was going to be a busy place, but it seemed to be empty of workmen at the moment. He climbed out of the compound.

  He didn’t return to the hotel where he had been staying. For the first twenty-four hours he watched Faris Hamzah’s compound. There were still no workmen on the project, but there were armed watchmen around the compound at night. He observed them, and it seemed their job was to guard the growing cache of building materials. Part of the night they sat on the lumber and talked, but nobody walked the perimeter.

  The second day he slept in the shade under a disabled truck propped up on blocks outside the bay of a mechanic’s garage. There were about twenty other vehicles of various sorts in some state of disassembly or disrepair around the building. Any passing pedestrians who noticed him apparently assumed he was working on the truck or had taken a break in the shade. In those days he was good at sleeping until a particular sound reached his ears. He didn’t hear it, so he slept about eight hours.

  At dusk he crawled out and studied the compound from a distance. This time there were two guards at the gate in the wall, but no guards inside the compound that he could see. He knew Faris Hamzah must have come home. He came closer and saw the three Range Rovers parked outside the wall, and that confirmed it. He went to a smoke shop two blocks away and bought a pack of Gauloises cigarettes and matches.

  He had noted many things during the sleepless part of his day. One was that the gas tank of the truck under which he had been sleeping was not empty. The truck had a bent axle and must have been towed to the mechanic’s shop, but that had not emptied the tank. He went to the back of the compound and stole a dozen ten-penny nails, a hammer, and a bucket. He went back to the mechanic’s shop, crawled under the truck, punched a hole in the gas tank, and drained it of a bucket of gasoline, then used the nail as a plug to stop the gas leaking out.