The Old Man

by Thomas Perry

  Moving the transponder had been a waste of time. The man ran unerringly to Caldwell’s car. Caldwell saw the red dot sweep up from the ground to the car’s windshield, and then to the side, into the backseat.

  Caldwell used the time to get behind the man. He was still about twenty feet away when he said, “Drop the gun.”

  The man’s body gave a startle reflex, as though he’d received an electric shock. He became still, the pistol with its laser sight still in his hand, its red dot on the side window of Caldwell’s car, with the beam passing through to the backseat.

  Caldwell said, “Drop it. You won’t have time to do anything else.”

  Caldwell felt despair. The man wasn’t reacting correctly. Maybe he didn’t even speak English. Caldwell went to one knee and used the left mirror of the car beside him to steady his aim on the man’s torso. The red dot moved.

  Just as Caldwell had expected, the man tried to spin around to fire at the spot where Caldwell’s voice had come from, and as Caldwell had predicted, the laser sight went too high. The man saw his mistake and tried to lower his aim, but Caldwell’s shot found his chest.

  Caldwell ran to the place where the man lay, but the two dogs reached him first. They sniffed the burned propellant in the air, the man’s body, the blood, the death, and began to whine. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.” He turned to let the two dogs into his car, but as he shut the back door, he heard the sound of another car approaching. As he ducked down he noticed the dead man’s gun lying beside the body, the laser sight still emitting the beam of red light. He snatched up the pistol and pocketed it, then slithered under his car and lay on his belly.

  The car’s engine was too loud, the driver’s impatience with the laws of physics bringing him around the building too fast. Caldwell kept track of the turn by listening to the squeal of the tires. The man drove directly to Caldwell’s car, stopped his Town Car in front of it to block it, and then slid out the passenger side of his car and crouched behind it for protection as he drew a pistol and aimed it over the hood.

  Caldwell used the only opportunity he could see. He remained on his belly and aimed the pistol with the laser sight under the man’s car. When the red dot settled on the man’s ankle, he fired.

  The man went down, and Caldwell could see that the man’s leg and the right side of his torso were now on the pavement as he clutched at his wounded ankle. Caldwell fired beneath the car again, then twice more. Caldwell saw the man’s body jump twice, and then lie still.

  Caldwell got into the Town Car and swung it into a parking space, and then ran to look into the backseat of his own car to be sure the dogs were still where they should be. He got in and started the engine. In a moment the car was back on the road. “I’m sorry about that, my friends,” he said. “You’re safe now.” He hoped they would take it as a kind thing to say, and not just a lie.

  5

  The difficulty at the hotel had cost him time. He couldn’t proceed in a straight line on the same highway and hope nobody would be waiting for him somewhere ahead. He took the first southbound highway. He used the night as well as he could, driving as fast as possible and never slowing unless he needed to.

  When he reached the place for sleep it was beginning to turn light again. He was on a flat road through farm country, and he had not seen another car for an hour. There was a barn made of boards that had been rough cut many years ago and erected on a foundation of mortared fieldstones. At some point the barn had been painted on one end with a broadside advertisement that might have been for tobacco, but the paint had worn to illegibility. The wood on the barn had turned gray, and right now it was almost uniform. There must have been a farmhouse and outbuildings once, but there was no vestige of them now.

  The headlights swept across the fields as he turned off the highway onto what had once been the barnyard, and he could see that nothing had been planted here for a very long time. There were mature trees in places where rows of corn or wheat had once been.

  Caldwell drove the car inside the barn and parked. He took out the bowls, gave Carol and Dave a big bowl of bottled water, and another bowl with dry kibble.

  When they had gobbled up their breakfast, he talked to them for a while. He used the word “good” many times, and petted and stroked them, and when they wanted him to, he rubbed their bellies.

  As they ventured out of the barn and trotted around the area sniffing the air and zigzagging across the untilled weedy fields, Peter went into the backseat of the car, opened both doors, and lay down to sleep.

  He slept deeply in the shade of the ghostly gray-board barn. He dreamed a selection of his usual nightmares, in which he got into predicaments that made him fear a deception of his was about to be uncovered. This time, as often happened, he was with his daughter, Emily, who in his dream was still a toddler and prone to tripping or falling into holes or not quite making it through doorways in time to save herself. The worst part was when Anna made an appearance.

  She was twenty-four years old when they met, and she had lived only until she was forty-five, so he always remembered her as a young woman, her face almost unlined and her eyes still sharp and bright and blue, her hair the color of dark chocolate. She came into his vision, not through a doorway, just there. She smiled at him and put her hands on his shoulders almost the way she would sometimes, and he tried to place his hands on her waist, but then she was gone.

  Waking stung, like learning the terrible news all over again. No, this wasn’t a repeal of her death, just his daily return to the world where she was dead. He sat up in the backseat of the car.

  He turned his head and saw Carol and Dave trotting around in the field beyond the barn. He acknowledged that he had been aware of them out there for a long time, maybe all the time he’d been sleeping. They weren’t impatient, just watching over him and patrolling while he slept.

  Caldwell got out of the car and went to the trunk. He took out a bottle of water and some canned dog food and refilled their bowls. He used the rest of the water to brush his teeth, then wash his face and underarms. The dogs had never seen him do such things in this primitive way, and they were frankly curious. When he was ready to go, they were already sitting nearby watching him. He said okay and the dogs jumped up on the backseat and settled there again.

  Now as he drove, he realized that he wasn’t afraid. When Anna had been alive and Emily was a child he had always dreaded the possibility that one or another of the people who wanted him dead would find him. Now he seemed to have outgrown the dread.

  The three men who had finally come for him were young. Some of them had certainly not been born when he committed his theft, and probably none of them knew much about what he’d done. His was a name on a list, or maybe even the whole list. At one time he would have said it was a shame for a shooter to die for something that had so little to do with him. Now he knew that the reason didn’t matter very much. Everybody died for nothing.

  The predicament he had created for himself when he was young had made him aware that life was precious. Not everyone understood living. What many people seemed not to remember was that a human being who got up under his own power on even one morning and saw the sun and had food to eat was a very lucky animal. Knowing that each day was a life in itself had led him to make a thousand good decisions. Marrying Anna had been the most important. The decision had seemed insane to both of them at the start. They expected it to end early and badly. And maybe his life had been sweeter because he had known that it could all be taken away at any second. Each gift might be the last gift.

  As Caldwell drove west in the early evening, with the sun down ahead of him, he felt much improved. He’d had more than eight continuous hours of sleep, something he almost never got anymore.

  There were problems Caldwell had to solve tonight. First, he needed to get rid of this car. People in Norwich knew it. The car was registered in the name Daniel Chase. The fact that it now had Illinois plates had probably helped him get as far as he had. But t
he idea that the new plates would be sufficient for much longer was a fantasy. The men who attacked him had probably reported the Illinois plate numbers to their comrades. He couldn’t simply remove the plates and abandon the car. The vehicle identification number was a matter of record, and any division of motor vehicles would type it into a computer and see that the car was wanted by the police. He could sell the car to the sort of person who would not be in a hurry to register it, and that would give Caldwell some time, but only a few days. If the police could catch him they would catch anybody else who drove it. What he really needed to do was make the car disappear.

  As Caldwell drove, he thought of various ways of making the car invisible. If he tried to burn it, the VIN would still be visible on the dash, the front of the engine block, and the driver’s side doorjamb. He was not far from Lake Erie now. If he dumped the car into the lake, it would have to be somewhere out in deep water or it would be visible from shore, and be found quickly. There was no easy way to accomplish that.

  He supposed that he was going to have to find a way to bury it. Burying a car like his Camry would require a hole at least six feet deep, seven feet wide, and sixteen feet long. It would be like digging five or six graves in one night, and then filling them in. He started to think about the various sorts of machines he could get that would make the work easier. The best would be a bulldozer, but how could he get one without drawing attention to himself? He had to think smaller. Maybe he could rent a rototiller to break up the ground, or maybe some sort of motorized posthole digger that worked like a big Archimedes’ screw to bring the dirt up to the surface.

  He was still thinking about the problem when he drove into the outskirts of Erie, Pennsylvania. As he studied the area, he passed by a possible solution. A large junkyard stretched for about two hundred yards from the fence to the back wall. He could clearly see the driveway running up to the gate, but he was fairly sure that was not going to be his best way in. He pulled over a few hundred yards past the driveway, got out of the car, and trotted to the fence.

  Caldwell walked along the perimeter of the yard, looking for security cameras, breaks in the barbed wire, and the general organization of the place. There was a big, low building near the entrance, and he assumed that was the office and a workshop and warehouse for salvaged parts. The owners would certainly have whatever security there was up there to prevent theft. What he needed to find was a place in another part of the facility that wasn’t so well protected. It took him fifteen minutes of walking and looking before he found something that he believed would do. He trotted back to the place where he had parked, got in, and drove into Erie.

  He rented a room in a one-story motel off Route 6 that had no hallways, just a long row of identical doors under a roof facing the highway. He parked in front of the one he’d rented and brought the dogs into the room with him. He turned on the television set and watched the local news with some trepidation. He still wasn’t able to tell whether the three men who had come after him were agents of the US government, freelance operatives hired by Faris Hamzah or his heirs, or representatives of some other force that had developed an interest in him. He dreaded the possibility that the news anchor would announce that three FBI agents had died in the line of duty, or that he would see his own face on the screen identified as a thief and a murderer. But there was nothing.

  The next day he began looking through newspaper ads, visiting Laundromats and coffee shops to look at bulletin boards and pick up the latest issues of shoppers’ guides. In the afternoon he found an older Toyota Corolla in the parking lot of a grocery store with a sign on one of the side windows that said $1,500. RUNS GOOD. He found that the car was as advertised, and the young woman who owned it was reassured by the fact that he could pay in cash.

  Late that night he left the dogs in the motel with some food and water, and they lay sprawled on the bed with the television going. He drove to the junkyard outside town. When he got there, he pulled onto the gravel driveway, and then turned to drive along the tall chain link fence until he came to the place he had seen the night before.

  The coils of barbed wire at the top of the fence were uniform, but here the fence was made of wooden boards. He backed his car up to the fence until its bumper was against the boards. He stepped on the trunk and looked inside the yard. This was a forlorn area where most of the cars were in fairly bad shape. Some had front ends that looked as though a giant hand had swept across the metal and smeared it to the side. Others were not misshapen by accidents, but were old and out of style.

  He looked carefully at the inner side of the wooden section of the fence and realized how his purpose could be accomplished. The wooden section consisted of a frame with a row of boards nailed vertically to it. He eased the car into the wooden fence, listened to the creaking sounds as nails were wrenched from two-by-fours, and kept adding power until one ten-foot segment toppled inward to the ground. The coiled barbed wire hung across the opening.

  He got out of his car, dragged the section of boards aside, and drove his car under the barbed wire and inside the junkyard. He drove slowly and carefully through this area of the yard until he found a spot that looked right. There was a row of pretty good cars, all of them up on blocks and ready to be stripped for parts. He pulled up beside the last one, found a set of blocks, and went to work. He went to the trunk, took out the jack and the tire iron, jacked up the car, put the first block in place, removed the wheel, and lowered the car onto the block. He kept at it until all four wheels had been removed and the car was up on blocks like the others. He popped off the hubcaps and put them in the backseat, then rolled the wheels a distance away where there were some tires, and left them.

  It took him a few minutes to restore the wooden fence and restring the looped barbed wire along the top. Then he began to walk. It took him about an hour to walk to the space in the parking lot of the grocery store where his replacement Toyota was waiting, and another half hour in the grocery store to fill the car with supplies for himself and the dogs. When he got back to his motel room he moved the other items he had left into the trunk of the replacement car. He took the dogs out for a few minutes so they could relieve themselves, and then the three climbed back onto the king bed and slept.

  6

  Early in the morning Caldwell went to the office to check out of the motel. The night’s work of scrapping his car without anyone’s knowledge had left him worn, but he had to begin the next phase.

  He had known from the beginning that the only way to survive would be to drop out of sight completely for a while. He took out his disposable cell phone and texted Emily. “Can you talk now?”

  The answer came back about a minute later. “With a patient. I’ll call.”

  He opened the door of the new car and let the dogs examine it. They were a bit hesitant at first, because it wasn’t the car they considered theirs. Its smells were not their smells. But because he was holding the door for them they jumped up onto the seat, sniffed a little, flopped down, adjusted their positions, and then lay still.

  He got in and drove out the far end of the parking lot so the motel owners wouldn’t see he had a different car. Then he headed west through Erie and turned south onto Route 6 toward Cleveland and Sandusky. After a few minutes the phone rang.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Are you still all right?” Emily said.

  “So far. You?”

  “No changes yet.”

  “I wanted you to know that it’s time to get rid of the phones we’ve been using. You can reach me on the second one from now on, if you need to.”

  “Okay,” she said. “What prompted this?”

  “I’m going to have to sink beneath the surface now. It will be months before I try to call again, so don’t worry about the long silence. Don’t ever go near the house. There’s nothing left there that you want.”

  “I know,” she said. “You’re the only relic I have left.”

  “If you get the feeling that somebody’s watc
hing you, or anything like that, call. Otherwise, just wait. Don’t look as though you’re being watchful, but be watchful.”

  “I know all this. I’ve known it since I was ten. I’m going to be thinking about you every day if this takes thirty years. We all will be. You have a family that loves you. Now go get lost. With your heart and lungs, you could live to be a hundred and six. Do it.”

  “I’ll try. Bye, kid.”

  “Bye, Dad.”

  He could almost see her standing up from the big leather chair in her office in her white coat and striding along with that straight posture and determined walk, ready to see her next patient. She looked a bit like her mother did at thirty, only taller and straighter.

  He was going to settle somewhere. Traveling gave too many people a chance to notice him. And since the last time he had needed to disappear, a hundred new layers of danger had been added. The last time, right after he had returned from North Africa, technology had been more primitive.

  When he got home from Libya he wrote a letter to his section of military intelligence. He told them he had made it home with the money he had recovered from Faris Hamzah. He included a few facts that an outsider could not have known, to prove he wasn’t a fake. He asked them to reactivate the phone contact number so he could make arrangements to deliver the money to his section.

  He had felt wary and very angry. He had not liked the way his contact people had treated him near the end of his mission. They had abandoned a comrade behind enemy lines. But he had also ignored his orders, so he was prepared for some kind of unpleasant reaction. He rented a small retail space in a Virginia shopping center and placed the money there before he mailed his letter to Fort Meade. He suspected that the minute he had given them a location they would put it under surveillance, so he didn’t mention one.