The Old Man

by Thomas Perry

  She got up and hugged him. “Being with you has brought me back to life. It’s been a very long time since I’ve felt okay. But I don’t see a reason to get married. I can’t get pregnant anymore. And I can’t give you anything if I’m married to you that I won’t give you now. Right now, or anytime you want.”

  “I have to admit this is a lot to think about.”

  She laughed. “Come on, Peter. It’s a risk-free situation for you. What man doesn’t want the sex without the commitment?”

  “I’ve never had much trouble with commitment,” he said. “But I want you to have what you want. And I have to assume you know what that is.”

  She hugged him harder. “Peter, what I want is you. I love you. Just stay here. I don’t want you to say anything.”

  Then she was crying, and holding him so tightly that he could feel her heartbeat against his chest. It was a rotten thing to do to a person.

  11

  It was clear to Caldwell that he had accomplished what he had been trying to with Zoe McDonald. She trusted him, she was in love with him, and she would do anything he asked. During this period he had verified what his espionage training had taught him. Having a woman with him made people see him differently. People tended to assume that a man who was part of a couple was certified as not dangerous, not crazy, and not criminal. He probably had a paycheck and a place to live. The woman’s physical presence was taken as testimony that he was a regular guy. Being with a woman who was attractive and tasteful made him even safer, because she obviously could make other choices.

  But it was always possible that Caldwell’s time in Chicago might come to an end at any moment. He had to be prepared to leave quickly. It had occurred to him that if Chicago were to turn dangerous, he might want to take Zoe with him. If she could provide him with the appearance of legitimacy now, she could also provide it if he was on the run. And he didn’t want to leave her in the apartment for his pursuers to find and interrogate.

  She didn’t deserve what he was doing to her. She was a good person. As he had gotten to know and like her better, he had begun to dislike himself. He had been behaving like a drowning person who clung to the nearest swimmer and held himself up by pulling her down. If he was going to escape, he had to provide a means of escape for her too.

  One morning when Zoe went out to do some errands, Caldwell climbed up in his closet and took down one of the false identity packets he had put together for Anna. He had given her the identity of an imaginary woman named Marcia Dixon, who was the wife of Henry Dixon, one of his aliases. He had built the identity with Anna’s help in case they ever had the need and the opportunity to escape. Anna had taken the tests for the California driver’s license, and had her picture taken for the front of it. She had gone back a couple of times to the Los Angeles DMV to have her picture retaken to keep her photo up to date and pay the renewal fee.

  He had kept the female identities in existence after Anna’s death. In addition to the sentimental reasons, he’d had some practical ones. He might be able to buy things on Marcia Dixon’s credit. A car registered in a woman’s name might not trip any of the alerts for a male fugitive, and if he was pulled over while driving it, showing a license with the same surname would certainly get him by.

  Now he set aside the items that didn’t carry a photograph—birth certificate, Social Security card, marriage license, credit cards. It was only then that he turned his attention to the difficult things—the driver’s license and passport. The passport was the first step.

  When Zoe came home from her errands that day he took a photograph of her with his cell phone. He posed her against a white wall and said he was going to send a picture to his daughter because she’d said she wondered what Zoe looked like. As he pretended to send the picture to Emily, he evaluated it. The picture was good.

  Zoe bore only a superficial resemblance to Anna, but she was about the same age as Anna had been in the picture, and she had brown hair that she wore long, as Anna had. Her nose was thin, as Anna’s was, and her eyes were big, blue, and wide apart. She knew how to smile for a camera and look natural. She didn’t look exactly like Anna, but two photographs of the same woman could easily vary that much over time. He took three more shots of Zoe in different poses, and selected the one that looked most like Anna. He sent the photograph to his computer, sized it precisely to simulate a passport photograph, and printed it on his color printer on photographic paper.

  Caldwell went online, printed the application for a passport renewal, and filled in the spaces. He submitted Marcia Dixon’s old passport and paid the fee, including the extra cost of an expedited return, with a credit card in Marcia Dixon’s name. The new photographs he submitted were the ones he had taken of Zoe. He knew he was taking a risk, but requesting renewal of a ten-year-old passport from a new address was such a routine operation that he expected the government employee who processed it would handle it without much thought.

  He decided to defer the task of getting Zoe a new California driver’s license, because Marcia Dixon’s was fairly recent. Anna had never driven a car in California, so Marcia Dixon had a perfect driving record, and her license had been renewed automatically twice since Anna’s death. The photo on the license was a woman with long brown hair. If he ever needed Zoe to have a better Marcia Dixon license, he could send her into a DMV office to apply for one.

  All of those steps could wait, and he might never need to take them. If the government renewed Marcia Dixon’s passport, her identity papers would be solid enough to hold up to any scrutiny they would be likely to get. His own papers as Henry Dixon were perfect, and that would help. For most purposes other than flying, if a man showed his identification, nobody asked his female companion for hers.

  Right now, the most important thing he could do to stay safe and to keep Zoe McDonald safe was to live the quietest, least noticeable life he could. So he spent the summer with Zoe and his dogs in the Chicago suburbs. Zoe’s daughter, Sarah, came to stay with them for about three weeks that summer. During June and part of July she returned to Los Angeles to take a summer school class, and she had arranged to serve a barely paid internship at a law firm until the end of August, when the fall semester started.

  Caldwell and Zoe lived through the long days of summer, sank deeper into their habits, and spent most of their time together. Occasionally Caldwell would board the dogs at a kennel he had found and he and Zoe would take a brief trip. He wanted her to be entertained, and he wanted her to get used to traveling with him. There might be a time when he would have to tell her they were going to take a surprise trip, and have her readily agree to it.

  They spent three days at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island in Michigan, a weekend at Big Cedar Lodge in Missouri, and a couple of days at the French Lick Resort in Indiana. Any destination they could reach by car was safer for him than flying, and the short trips to resorts seemed enough to energize Zoe.

  Caldwell never stopped trying to keep Zoe deluded and happy. He was unfailingly attentive, affectionate, and generous. It wasn’t difficult. As soon as he met her he had been sexually attracted to her, and as time went on, he caught himself admitting to other things about her that he admired—her humor, intelligence, emotional strength. He occasionally reminded himself that the important thing was not that he enjoy her company, but that he use her emotions to keep himself secure and ahead of his pursuers.

  He could never think about the people who were after him without igniting a resentment that flared into rage. Coming after him after all these years was a mistake, and he hoped that every minute he stayed aboveground was giving them pain. But during that summer, he managed to restore his calm for a time. He was watchful, but not angry.

  It was the middle of September before his calm was shaken. Caldwell was out on foot in the daytime without Zoe or the dogs. He had walked to the post office, and then done some shopping for fall clothes, and now he was on his way home. As he approached a crosswalk, the traffic signal turned green. He turned
his head to look over his shoulder and check for cars before he stepped into the crosswalk. There was the same young man. The shock made his body tense to fight or run, and the name James Harriman came back to him as though it had never left his mind.

  James Harriman was driving a black SUV, signaling for a right turn. As Caldwell turned and looked through the windshield, they locked eyes for a second, and then the SUV accelerated past him, through the intersection without making the right turn. His sight of the driver was lost in the tinted side window, and in a moment the SUV was gone.

  As Caldwell walked, he studied the image in his memory and tried to invalidate his impression. He might have convinced himself he had been mistaken, but Harriman had reacted to the sight of him. Harriman’s eyes had widened in startled surprise, and then he had looked away and brought his hand to his face as though to shade his eyes. He had sped up and gone straight instead of turning so he would be out of Caldwell’s sight more quickly.

  The car had been a Lexus LX 570. Caldwell had been searching new car models recently, so he knew that the list price was north of ninety thousand dollars. This was the car being driven by the kid who’d had twelve dollars in his wallet, the one Caldwell had given a hundred bucks, because he had seemed broke and desperate.

  Caldwell went through a list of possibilities that might explain what he’d seen. Was he sure this was the same young man? The young man’s reaction seemed inexplicable otherwise. Was there an explanation for his driving that kind of vehicle? He might have found a legitimate job and made his first purchase an expensive car. Maybe, but it wasn’t likely a dealer would sell a kid with a hundred bucks in his wallet and no credit cards a car like that on the installment plan. He might have found an illegitimate job, and paid cash for the car. But the kid had tried to mug Caldwell when? During Sarah McDonald’s spring break about six months ago.

  In Caldwell’s limited understanding of the way criminal enterprises usually worked, it was only the older and more secure members who could survive having high-profile vehicles. Ostentation got people arrested or killed. Maybe he was just driving his boss’s car on an errand, or acting as chauffeur. The side and back windows were so darkly tinted that another man might easily have been in the backseat. That seemed most likely. The SUV wasn’t a young man’s car—not sleek and cool with too much engine. It was a rhinoceros with wheels.

  Caldwell took all of the possibilities into account, and then returned to the one that had come to him first. Maybe James Harriman hadn’t been trying to rob any victim he met on the street that April night. Maybe the reason he’d had a revolver was that he was trying to kill a particular man and make it look to the local police like a street crime. And maybe now he was back, doing reconnaissance for a second try.

  Caldwell reminded himself that this sighting might be a coincidence, and Harriman might not have been thinking about him. But then Caldwell remembered a moment about forty years ago, when he had been in a survival course at Fort Rucker, Alabama. The trainer had said, “Most of the people who don’t believe in coincidences are still alive. That’s not a coincidence, either.”

  He ducked through the parking lot of a delicatessen, then down the passage between two apartment buildings to the street. He took several shortcuts to reach the apartment, went around the building to the rear stairway facing the garage, and went inside.

  It was reassuring that the dogs had been perfectly aware he was coming before he arrived. They were waiting for him at the apartment door with a calm welcome that indicated he had not surprised them. They sniffed his shoes and the bags he was carrying and then escorted him into his bedroom.

  As he hung up the new clothes in his closet he thought more about the young man using the name James Harriman. He looked young. But the army often recruited exceptional young men from among the trainees. He could be one of those. The army would give them special training, divert them into some form of special ops for a year or two, and then make the next decision about them—home for more training or out. If the young man was like Caldwell had been at that age, all they had to do was tell him Caldwell was a traitor and a murderer, and step out of the way.

  Caldwell locked the bedroom door and climbed up to the access door in the ceiling of his closet. He took down the two compact Beretta pistols, the extra magazines, and the identity packets and closed the hatch. He selected a sport coat that he liked, and put one pistol and two extra magazines in the pockets. He put the rest of his kit into his topcoat because it had deep inner pockets that hung almost to knee level and didn’t bulge. Then he hung up the coats on the left side, where he could easily find them in the dark.

  He unloaded the second Beretta Nano and put it under the mattress of his bed, lay down, and practiced reaching for it, finding it, and bringing it up to fire. He persisted until he could do it unerringly with his eyes closed. Then he reloaded the pistol and put it back under the mattress.

  Caldwell searched the Internet to find out anything he could about James Harriman. He found a site that listed ninety-five of them, but none of them seemed to him to be the one who had tried to rob him. Other sites had more.

  From that day on, when he went out he always had one of the pistols on him. It was September, so many days were still too warm for a coat. On those days he wore a loose shirt untucked so he could carry a pistol under it.

  On the nights when he and Zoe slept in her room, he would usually leave the pistol hidden from her under the neat pile of his clothes he left on the chaise. He made sure that Carol and Dave stayed close enough to the bedroom so he would notice their agitation if someone came near the apartment. After a couple of weeks, he retrained them to sleep on the floor between her bed and the door when he was with her. They were so happy to be readmitted to the room where he slept that they didn’t seem to be disappointed that there was no space for them on the bed.

  He began to search the Internet, studying various cities to pick out his next place to live. The cities that looked most promising to him were Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, and Houston, cities with large, diverse populations. But those were also the cities where his pursuers were most likely to look. He knew he had to consider a wider selection, and so he kept at it.

  In the meantime, he decided to improve the security of the apartment. Caldwell bought a set of four small security cameras and a monitor and recorder. He used the extension ladder stored in the garage and installed the four cameras on the edge of the flat roof of the building so that all sides of the building were visible on his monitor. He had no interest in knowing the identity of an intruder, only to know if someone was prowling around the building. When he was alone each day he would speed through the previous night’s recordings, looking for a human shape.

  He plotted the best ways to drive from the apartment to the nearest interstate highways without getting caught in the Chicago traffic. He tried each of the routes at various times of the day and night.

  When he went out now, he was always alert and armed, with an escape route in mind. He was always watching for signs. He returned by various routes, trying to surprise anyone casing the apartment. Weeks passed, but nothing happened. He saw no vehicles parked along his routes that appeared to hold observers or surveillance equipment. There were no hardhat crews who appeared on any of his routes, set out orange traffic cones, and fiddled around without accomplishing much. Nobody betrayed a special interest in him.

  In time, he began to feel more optimistic. The young man who had tried to rob him might have been nothing worse than that. Maybe he was a delinquent kid who had fallen into some luck, either an honest job that would save him or a dishonest one that would put him away. Which it was didn’t matter. If James Harriman was anything but an army intelligence operator, Caldwell’s present hiding place was safe. Panicking and abandoning a perfect hiding place to start a new search for shelter was a very bad idea.

  Whatever features a new place might have, it probably wouldn’t have a woman like Zoe, whose name was on the lease and all the util
ity bills, and who provided him with a veneer of respectability and normalcy. Anywhere else, he would be a lone stranger, and he would have to start all over again persuading the locals that he was harmless. He would be presented with a thousand new chances to make a fatal error.

  Caldwell didn’t stop looking at the recordings from his security cameras, and he didn’t stop watching for signs that he was attracting interest. He took one more precaution. He bought a car. It was a black BMW 3 Series sedan, a lower-end model that cost him about forty thousand dollars, but it was new, and it had a powerful engine.

  He bought it in the name of Henry Dixon with a check from Dixon’s account, because if he ever needed the car, he would no longer be Peter Caldwell. He had the side windows tinted as dark as they would make them, because if he needed the car he would be running. He drove it straight from the lot to the garage he had rented a few blocks away. He visited the car once a week and drove it to keep the battery charged and the engine lubricated. He slowly acquired another twenty thousand dollars in cash and stored it in the well where the spare tire was held.

  He did everything he could to get ready, as though being ready for a disaster would keep it from happening. Then he waited and watched.

  12

  Caldwell was in Zoe’s room, lying beside her. The night was cool, maybe an early taste of fall, and there was a steady wind that made the big trees in the neighborhood rock back and forth and their millions of leaves set up a steady hiss and shudder. There was a new moon, so the sky was mostly dark. Caldwell was a little more on edge than usual. When he was in special ops the trainers had taught him to plan operations for nights like this. The additional darkness made it easier to move unseen, the unusual coolness made people shut their windows and muffled sounds, and the wind covered incidental noises.

  Zoe’s breathing was soft, slow, and regular as she slept, still touching him, her bare arm across his bare chest, her long hair swept back behind her neck.