The Old Man

by Thomas Perry

  When the night was late and the moon was low, he climbed the back wall of Faris Hamzah’s compound and walked up to the house. He poured gasoline along two sides of the house and had started along the third when he ran out of gasoline. He was careful to keep the entrance and the front door clear, so any people inside could get out.

  He left the bucket, but kept the hammer and nails. When he judged the time was right he crouched to move forward and dragged himself under the first Range Rover. He reached up from below, disconnected the battery, and then cut one of the cables. Then he removed the pair of metal jerry cans for extra gasoline mounted on the rear door of each Rover, went under the vehicle, punched a hole in the gas tank, and filled the cans. He repeated the process with the other two Range Rovers. He hid the six twenty-liter cans at the back of Hamzah’s compound.

  He retreated, and began to walk through the darkened city. When he reached the police station he got into his white pickup truck, drove it to Hamzah’s neighborhood, and parked it at the rear of his compound with the motor running. He loaded the six gasoline cans from the Range Rovers into the back of his truck.

  He walked around the perimeter. When he reached the spot where the Range Rovers were parked he could see that the draining of their tanks was complete. They were sitting in a narrow lake of gasoline that reflected the light of the stars. He climbed the wall and locked the gate from the inside.

  He stepped close to the rear of the house, lit a match, and started the first fire, then ran up the woodpile to vault over the wall to his truck. Within seconds the flames were licking up the sides of the house, and then billowing above it, throwing light throughout the compound. Soon he knew the guards had noticed the fire, because they began rattling the gate, then pounding on it, then throwing themselves against it. Finally they began to fire their guns at the lock. That seemed to work, because the shooting stopped and the two men ran inside to wake Faris Hamzah. Chase stood by the wall and waited.

  The two guards had awakened the household with their gunfire. There was already a woman in the house screaming and shouting, and in a moment she emerged with two children and an elderly woman. They ran out under the sun roof that provided shade for the doorway during the day, and then out the gate.

  Faris Hamzah came out a minute later carrying a sealed cardboard carton. His two guards came out after him, each carrying two more cartons, which they started to carry toward the gate, but Faris Hamzah yelled something in Arabic, and they put them near the woodpile instead. That way they wouldn’t be tempting to neighbors who were attracted by the commotion and the fire. Faris Hamzah ran back inside to get more, and the two guards followed.

  Chase recognized those five boxes, because he had packed them in Luxembourg. He took two of them and tossed them over the wall, and then the other three. He emptied the boxes into his truck’s bed, closed them, brought them back into the compound, and placed them where Hamzah’s guards had left them.

  This time when Hamzah and his guards returned with five more cartons, they looked relieved and their confidence seemed to have returned. In the darkness, the fire, and the moving shadows, they could see the growing row of cardboard cartons and seemed to think that they had saved all the money. They ran back into the house, whether to save other valuables or to get water to fight the fire, it didn’t matter. For the moment they were gone.

  Chase hoisted himself back over the wall, threw the five full boxes over the wall into his truck and climbed after them, then covered the bed with its canvas tarp. He got into the driver’s seat, lit a cigarette, and drove. He swerved close to the three Range Rovers. He stopped, tossed his burning cigarette into the pool of gasoline under the vehicles, and accelerated. In the rearview mirror he could see the fire flare into life, then streak along the row of cars, engulfing them in undulating light and flames twenty-five feet high.

  Sometimes when he remembered the night, he imagined that he had seen Hamzah and his guards come out of the house to find that five boxes were empty and five gone, start shouting in amazement and anger, and then run to the gate to see the three vehicles aflame. He actually never saw that happen, because he was too far away by that time, and had already turned the corner at the first street. But his imagination had supplied the details, so they had become part of the story he had told only twice—once to Anna and once to Emily.

  Now, as he stared ahead into the darkness of Interstate 89 beyond the range of his headlights, he thought about the time after the escape. He knew his enemies had assumed that when he reached the main highway he would head north for the port. Instead he turned south toward the desert. For the first few hours he was still checking his rearview mirrors every few seconds, pushing the gas pedal for every bit of extra speed. When he was far enough away he stopped on the desert road to secure the loose money under the tarp in the back of the truck by stuffing some into one box that was half-full, and the excess into his backpack and under the seats in the cab. Then he covered the bed again and drove on, going as far as he could while the night lasted.

  He stopped again in a lonely spot at midday to fill the pickup’s gas tank with two of the twenty-liter gas cans from the Range Rovers. Then he stopped at a garbage dump at the edge of an oil field and picked up some plastic bags of garbage to cover the cardboard boxes, so he would appear to be on his way to dump the trash.

  He drove the next six hundred miles with the garbage in back, left the highway, and crossed into Algeria without seeing a checkpoint, and then made his way to the next paved road by bumping across deserted, rocky country until he felt the smooth pavement. Two days later he traded the truck to a fisherman on a beach in Morocco in exchange for a night trip along the coast to Rabat.

  In a week he made the acquaintance of a man who imported hashish to Europe inside the bodies of fish. After another week he and his own boatload of fish made it into Gibraltar with plastic bags of money hidden in the bottoms of the fish crates.

  The last call he made to his contact number for the intelligence service was brief. This time it was a female voice that said, “This number has been changed or disconnected. Please check your directory and dial again.”

  Tonight, so many years later, his taking back the money seemed like a story someone else had told him. He still saw snatches—the way Faris Hamzah’s house looked in the firelight, the way the headlights of his little pickup truck bounced wildly into the air when he hit a bump, so they were just two beams aimed a little distance into the immensity of the sky, and the world below them was black. But the feelings seemed to belong to someone else, a misguided young man from long ago, his anger and self-righteousness preventing him from seeing clearly. Even the anger, the rage, had become abstract and bloodless. The emotion was simply a fact he acknowledged, a part of the record.

  The rest of the record was no better. The Libyan government he had been sent to help topple had lasted another thirty years. Other men who had not yet been born on that night had overthrown it, and then the country had degenerated into anarchy, chaos, and civil war. The humanitarian purpose his mission had been intended to serve was relevant only to a particular, vanished set of circumstances, so irrelevant to the present that it was difficult for even Chase to reconstruct from memory.

  He kept on Interstate 89 until he was past Manchester, New Hampshire, then merged onto 93, continued into Massachusetts, and then switched to 95. If he stuck with it, 95 could take him all the way to Florida. But he knew that was a route that carried every sort of traffic, including gunrunners and drug dealers bringing money south and merchandise north. Cops of many agencies were waiting along the way to spot a suspicious vehicle or a wanted license plate. He knew the best thing to do was move onto smaller, slower roads and stay on them as long as he could before he had to sleep.

  He coasted off the interstate at a rest stop so he could use the men’s room and let the dogs relieve themselves on the grassy margin off the parking area. He gave them food and water, and when they were ready to climb into the car again, he got b
ack on the road. During their brief stop no other cars parked anywhere near them or even drove past them in the lot. He accelerated to the first exit and took it, so he would be on less-traveled roads as he headed south and west. He made his way to Route 20, which ran east and west across Massachusetts and New York State, and began the long drive through small towns and old rural districts, where there were no manned tollbooths or automatic cameras to take his picture.

  In a few days his picture might be on television. He couldn’t afford to be noticed now. Having some dutiful citizen out there who remembered seeing him in a particular location along the way could get him killed later. People had no idea what could happen to a man who had stolen millions of dollars that belonged to the intelligence services of the United States government.

  4

  He loved the dogs, but he had never allowed their veterinarian to insert ID chips under their skin. He had known that a chip could give a future pursuer one more way to find him. He had been working on ways to improve his odds for a long time. He regretted only that he had not been as rigorous about it for a few years as he had been at first.

  When he got into the car around 4:00 a.m. he’d known that his name could no longer be Dan Chase. He decided to become Peter Caldwell, one of the identities he’d planted in his twenties, soon after he returned from North Africa. He had used the name at intervals to keep it current. Buying things and going to hotels and restaurants were what kept credit histories vigorous. From the beginning he had used many ways of planting his aliases in data banks.

  He had used information from a death notice in an old newspaper to apply for a replacement birth certificate from the county clerk’s office in the Texas town where one of the real Peter Caldwells was born. He’d used the birth certificate to apply for a driver’s license in Illinois. Then he had opened a bank account, bought magazine subscriptions, joined clubs that mailed him a book a month, ordered mail-order goods by catalog and phone, and paid his bills by check. When he was offered a credit card, he took it and used it. Everything he had done as Daniel Chase, Peter Caldwell, Alan Spencer, or Henry Dixon had been calculated to increase their credit ratings and their limits and make them less vulnerable to challenge.

  He had made a few preparations for the moment when his car had only one ride left in it. He had kept caffeine pills under the seat, along with tins of nuts and bottles of water and a contraption that would allow him to urinate into a bottle without stopping the car if he wanted to. None of these preparations was recent, and right now they simply irritated him. He could have done better than this.

  By noon the second day he had already changed the license plates on his car. The major police forces all had automatic license plate readers, so he put on the Illinois license plates he had kept in the trunk in case the police were searching for him. On a trip to Illinois he had bought a wrecked car like his at an auction. He had kept the plates and donated the car to a charity. He had known they wouldn’t try to fix the vehicle. The car was too badly damaged to be used for anything but parts.

  For years he had maintained identities for his wife, Anna, and his daughter, Emily, as the wife and daughter of each of the three manufactured men. But when Anna died, he kept her identities. He’d told himself it was in case Emily needed to start over sometime, but the truth was that he simply couldn’t bear to destroy them.

  For Emily’s protection he had invented separate identities for her when she was still a child. She had gotten married under the false name of Emily Harrison Murray. He had been at her wedding in Hawaii as a guest, and been introduced as Lou Barlow, a cousin of her late mother, Mrs. Murray. Her trust fund had been placed in her own hands when she turned eighteen, and then transferred to her new name, Emily Coleman, after the marriage. She had been walked down the aisle by a favorite professor from college, who had always believed the story that she had been orphaned in a car accident. She was living on the proceeds of a trust fund, wasn’t she?

  From the time she left home for college until yesterday he had bought six new burner cell phones once a month, and mailed her three. In the memory of each was another’s number. The day after her boyfriend, Paul, proposed marriage, she told him her father existed. She also told Paul he was still welcome to withdraw his proposal, but whether he married her or not he had to keep her secret.

  A bit after dark the night of the wedding he had met Paul. While the reception was going on inside the mansion they had rented for the wedding, Emily had conducted her new husband into the back garden. He and Paul had taken measure of each other that night. He had reassured himself that Emily had chosen a man who would die rather than betray her secrets. And Paul had seen that his father-in-law was the sort of man who was capable of holding him to it. He had been glad for Emily that Paul was intelligent and good-looking. He had been a swimmer in college, tall and lean, with an intense set of eyes. He had been a good husband to Emily so far.

  Dave and Carol began to stir in the backseat again. He looked in the rearview mirror for a long time before he was sure nobody was following closely enough to be a problem, and then turned off onto a rural road and let the dogs out to explore a field for good spots to relieve themselves. Then he fed them again. When they were finished eating and drinking, he and the dogs got back in and moved ahead. He had driven the full stretch of daylight, and now it was dark again. The night felt friendly, but he knew he was only feeling the afterglow of having won the first fight. When this night was used up, most of the benefit of that victory would be too, so he kept pushing himself, putting more distance between him and Norwich, Vermont. He fought the increasing weight of his fatigue, keeping himself awake by will alone.

  It was already late when he noticed the pair of headlights that wouldn’t go away. He had not seen a persistent follower during the day, or these headlights earlier in the night, and now he was at least four hundred miles from Norwich, Vermont. To Peter Caldwell that meant that the follower must have tracked him using a global positioning system, and then slowly narrowed the distance between them. And the only reason he could think of for a chaser to follow so closely was to get eyes on him before making another attempt to kill him.

  Caldwell glanced in the mirror at Dave and Carol. They were sleeping peacefully on the backseat, their barrel chests rising and falling in long, slow breaths. He was going to have to do something, and he knew it would be better for them if he did it while the world was still dark, and their black fur might give them a better chance to survive.

  He reached under the seat and retrieved his pistol, ejected the magazine to be sure it was full, pushed it back in, and stuck the weapon in his belt, and then he felt for the spare magazine. The weight told him it was full. He kept going at the same speed for a few more minutes, until he saw a group of rectangular buildings ahead. As he drew closer he could read the green letters at the top of the nearest one, which said HOTEL. He supposed he must be approaching Buffalo, or at least its airport. When he reached the driveway leading to the building he swung abruptly into it and saw DAYS HOTEL flash above him as he went past the sign.

  Dave and Carol slid a little and then sat up, always interested in any change. He said quietly, “Hello, my friends. Everything is going to be all right.” He knew that they would determine the opposite from the tone of his voice or the smell of his sweat now that his heartbeat and respiration had accelerated.

  He watched the headlights a quarter mile behind dip slightly as the follower applied his brakes, and noted that the driver was one of those who didn’t coast much, but instead always had his foot on the gas or the brake trying to exert control. The man probably oversteered too. Caldwell wasn’t sure if the information would be useful or not. In the long run those habits burned a lot of gas. But if the driver was following him by GPS that didn’t matter, because he could always stop at a gas station and catch up with Caldwell later.

  Caldwell took the next turn into the semicircular drive toward the hotel entrance, but then kept driving past it to move around to the
back of the building. He turned off his headlights as soon as he was around the first corner and drove up the outer row of cars parked in the lot. He turned into the first empty space and stopped, so his brake lights didn’t show for more than a second, and turned off the engine. He turned off the car’s dome lights, pulled out the pistol, and ducked down.

  The pursuing car came off the highway and disappeared toward the front of the building. Caldwell could see it was a black sedan, probably a Town Car. When it was no longer visible, he opened his door and the back door to let the dogs out. The dogs ran across the lane to the bushes. He lay down beside his car and used his cell phone’s screen as a flashlight to look at the undercarriage.

  He saw the transponder, a small black box stuck to the underside of the battery mount with a pair of wires taped to the leads of his battery. He reached up and tore it out, and then stayed low to move away from his car. The first vehicle he saw was the hotel’s shuttle bus. He crawled under it and attached the transponder to the battery of the bus the same way it had been attached to his car.

  He stood and moved between the rows of parked vehicles toward his car. But as he did, a man emerged from the rear entrance of the hotel. Caldwell ducked down beside the nearest car. His pursuers’ car must have stopped at the front entrance to let this man go into the hotel to search for Caldwell inside. He had come through the lobby to the back of the hotel.

  The man began to run. As he ran he took a pistol out of his coat. In the dim light, Caldwell saw the thin red line of a laser bobbing along the pavement as the man ran directly toward Caldwell’s car. He had recognized it.

  Caldwell stayed down behind the car where he had hidden and waited until the man had gone past him, and then moved after him. He took out his pistol, hoping there would be something different he could do, but not knowing what it would be. He was fairly sure that the one who had stayed in the Town Car would be on his way around the building to the lot right now.