The Old Man

by Thomas Perry

  “I’m glad to meet you,” Emily said.

  When her father moved off to play with the boys and the dogs, she said, “He told me on the phone that you were still with him. I never thought you would decide to do this. Nobody would have blamed you for walking away. Least of all, him.”

  Marcia Dixon shrugged. “He wanted me to leave, but here I am. It doesn’t matter why, does it?”

  “No,” said Emily. “But when it gets to be time, he’ll probably sense it. When he says to go, do what he tells you. You won’t be able to save him.”

  They were silent after that, watching the boys and their grandfather playing with the dogs for a few minutes, and then Emily said, “Dad?”

  He turned and walked back to her. “I know. It’s almost dark. We’ve all got to go soon.” He put his arms around her and held her for a moment. “Thanks for taking Dave and Carol.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll all take great care of them. When you pick them up you’ll see how spoiled they are.”

  “Do me another favor, and remind the boys once in a while that I love them.”

  “Of course.”

  “And give your husband my regards. Oh, what the hell. My love.” He went to the trunk of the BMW, popped it open, took out two big bags of dry dog food and a case of canned food, and carried them to the back of Emily’s car. When she opened the trunk he loaded them in. “Keep it open,” he said, and brought another box from the BMW’s trunk and put it in. “Your next three phones.”

  “I figured.”

  “They’re not preprogrammed this time. Too risky. But I have the numbers.”

  The dogs and boys noticed that something was happening, so they all drew near.

  Emily hugged her father tightly and talked so only he could hear. “Never doubt that you gave me a great life. You did. Now get out of here. And be really nice to Zoe, or whatever you’re calling her now. But protect yourself. All she has to do is pick up a phone, and it’s over.”

  “I know,” he said. “I gave her every chance, but she didn’t.”

  Henry Dixon opened the back door of Emily’s Volvo. He patted the backseat and said, “Carol. Dave.” The two dogs jumped up on the seat. He held Carol’s face up to his so they were nose to nose, breathing the same air. “Good girl.” He held Dave’s face up to his the same way. “Good boy.” Then he muttered, “That’s all there is to say.” He took the biscuits he always carried in his pants pocket and gave all of them to the dogs, and then shut the door.

  He hugged the boys and watched their mother put them in the car. “Sit up here with me,” she said to the older one. “And give your brother a chance to be with the dogs until the first stop. Then you switch.”

  She took a last look at her father, started the car, and pulled up the incline to the edge of the highway. She let a car go by and then turned left to get back to the entrance to Interstate 87 south toward New York City.

  Marcia and Henry Dixon stood beside the BMW, watching them go, and then staring after them at the empty, darkening stretch of road. Marcia turned to him. “I thought she’d be like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “The looks, the voice. The way she is with you and the boys. Whatever gigantic screwups you’ve done in your life, you seem to have done at least one perfect thing.”

  “Thanks.” They got into the BMW.

  She said, “Should we think about hamburgers and a motel, or would you rather put some miles behind us first?”

  “I’m ready to stop for the night.”

  “Is it safe to stop around here?”

  “The opposition is looking for an old guy with two dogs about nine hundred miles west of here. Lake George is a tourist area, so we’ll be tourists. The season is about over, so we shouldn’t have trouble finding a good hotel here.”

  “What is the opposition thinking about me?”

  “There will be some who think that I murdered you. They’ll be looking for a body in an Illinois cornfield. Others will think I kept you alive so I can use you as a hostage. If there are any conspiracy theorists in on it, they will have found out your mother was a Russian defector, and they’ll be all agitated about that.”

  “So we’re safe here for the moment?”

  “As safe as we’d be anywhere.”

  They drove around the lakeshore until they came to a hotel that looked bigger and fancier than the others. It was called the Georgian. Marcia went inside to the desk and checked them in, while Henry parked the car.

  They went to their room, showered, changed into clean clothes they had bought during the long drive to upstate New York, went to the hotel restaurant for dinner, and then ordered after-dinner cognac.

  When they were back in their room they made love for the first time since their escape from Chicago. It was a long, unhurried encounter, an unspoken decision to celebrate the first time they were alone and not evading unseen pursuers on a highway. Afterward they lay together on the bed, their bodies still touching.

  “That was why,” she said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why I couldn’t behave like a sensible adult and get out of your car the other day. I realized that what I really wanted was to live the rest of my life like this.”

  “I’m flattered,” he said. “But it wasn’t a smart idea.”

  “No need to feel flattered. It wasn’t actually about you. It was about me. One reason the first part of my life was a disaster was because I was too passive. I waited for things to happen to me. I danced with the one who asked me, and I stayed until he dropped me. No good. But I guess it made me ready for you. I wanted you, and I did the things I thought you would like a woman to do. Until recently I wouldn’t have done that. I seduced you. I’ve been proud of myself since then. And when I had time to see that you really did have to go on the run, I realized I had options. My kids are adults. Nobody depends on me anymore. I can do what I want. Was I going to throw my new life away so I could spend the next thirty years dusting that apartment in Chicago?”

  “I want to talk you out of this,” he said. “I should, but I’m not in the mood right now.”

  “You can’t. What you can do is try to keep us both alive as long as you can. That seems to be what you’re really good at.”

  14

  Julian Carson wasn’t allowed into the meeting. This kind of meeting was far above his pay grade. He sat in a booth at the back of the bar at the Intercontinental Hotel on Michigan Avenue drinking coffee and watching the bar traffic. Nobody was likely to pay much attention to a young black man wearing a conservative suit, sitting by himself and communicating only with the cell phone on the table in front of him, so he supposed he was the man for the job.

  Of course they hadn’t brought him in. He wasn’t even an agent. He was a special ops contractor. That meant that he had no title, no rank. He got paid only when he was actually working, a fee for his services, paid once a month through an electronic transfer into his checking account. At first it had been interesting to see the names of the entities that paid him—companies that sounded familiar, universities, city governments, a hospital. But whenever he checked the names online, they always turned out to have no existence outside their bank accounts.

  Julian had been spotted for this job while he was in the army in Afghanistan. They had waited until his second tour was over and he had returned to Fort Benning before military intelligence approached him. After roll call the first sergeant had called him aside and told him he was scheduled for an interview. He stood while three officers sat behind a long table and asked him questions about his tour. When the questions were over the senior officer asked him if he was interested in going to a-school for special assignments. He had already been through a few schools, including Ranger NCO school, which was about as rough as the army could make it, so he accepted.

  When he was through the training they sent him to several places where his brown skin and his youthful face would help him—Liberia, the Central African Republic, Brazil. H
e usually worked with a small team, never fewer than three men, never more than five. He had helped close down three smuggling rings—two of them moving armaments and one cocaine—and the money-laundering networks they fed. One of his teams had kidnapped a guerrilla leader; another had stalked a corrupt minister of finance until they had photographed him with so many recognizable gangsters that the president had no choice but to remove him and have him indicted.

  It was when Julian was on his way home from that one that they had called him in the airport while he was waiting for his connecting flight home to Arkansas. They had told him to cancel and fly to Chicago for a meeting.

  That meeting, they had invited him to. It had been held in a cheap hotel near the airport where he could sit in the bar and watch the women complete their negotiations before inviting traveling businessmen into their rooms. A few hours after he checked in, two agents knocked on the door of his room. When he let them in, one of them held up a tablet and said, “Here is a picture of a man we’re looking for. About thirty-five years ago he was supposed to deliver a large sum of money to a pro-America go-between in Libya. The money was to support a group of insurgents who were trying to overthrow the Gaddafi government. Instead of delivering it, he killed a few friendlies and took off with the money. At some point he made it back to the United States. We know he’s been here for at least twenty years, but it wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that he turned up again. He had been living in Vermont. An operator was sent to see him—the guy who took the picture.”

  The blurred picture was of a man walking a pair of big black dogs across a long bridge over a river. It looked as though the picture had been taken from a car passing him on the bridge, and the side window had not been very clean. The face was just a dark spot against a bright backdrop of snow, and the man could have been any age. “What’s his name?”

  “He was living under the name Daniel Chase.”

  “What’s his real name?”

  “That’s classified.”

  “His name is classified?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I talk to the operator who took the picture?”

  “He’s dead. He was Libyan, and his English wasn’t great anyway. Chase killed him and took off. We think he might be living in Chicago for the moment. I’m sending the picture to your phone so you’ll have it with you.”

  There was a knock on the door, and the other agent opened it. The two men who entered were both in their forties, wearing sport coats and baggy slacks. When he heard them talk he realized they must be Libyan, like the agent who had taken the picture.

  Julian Carson did not like the Libyans. He had spent too much time in the wars of the Middle East not to recognize their type. They had been part of some kind of intelligence service or secret police, and they were used to seeing themselves as elite. They spoke a bit of English, and they were willing to use it during the meeting with the two American agents, whom they considered their equals in rank, if not in intellect. They looked at Julian but didn’t speak to him.

  After Julian began to work with them, they always spoke Libyan Arabic to each other. When they spoke English to Julian it was always in the imperative: Get this. Take us there. Bring it along. Tell them. They saw him not as a colleague but as a guide and a chauffeur. He was supposed to take care of their needs, and meanwhile to find the target for them, take them to him, and get them away and out of the country afterward. Julian felt like the organizer of a big game hunt, paid to take a pair of privileged beginners to their prey. Whatever the two may once have been in their country, they were now just a pair of overconfident strangers in a place where they couldn’t find their way to a bathroom on their own.

  When the two Libyans had left for their own room, Julian’s contact men told him a little more about the old man’s history. He had settled in Norwich, Vermont, which was an upscale town across the Connecticut River from New Hampshire. He had lived comfortably for many years—not like a hedge fund manager, but like a doctor or a lawyer. He had caused no trouble, raised no eyebrows. Then the Libyans had asked their American contacts to begin an operation to find him and make him pay for his crimes. He turned up in Vermont, and a Libyan agent was sent to assassinate him. Instead he killed the Libyan and took off. He was traced out of Vermont, through Massachusetts and Connecticut to New York. Before military intelligence lost him near Buffalo, he had killed two more Libyan agents. A military intelligence analysis had predicted that the place he would go to ground and hide would be to the west, in the Chicago region—Chicagoland, one of them called it. That was why they had all been sent here.

  Julian had listened in silence to his briefing, but when they seemed to be about to end the meeting and leave, he said, “Why do we need the Libyans?”

  Harper, the senior agent, said, “They need us. This isn’t our operation. It’s theirs, and we’re just here to help, keep it quiet, and make sure they get out. The shooters are standing in for their boss, the go-between who was supposed to receive the money years ago and pass it on to the insurgents. Two or three of his close relatives were killed when the money was stolen. It’s a tribal society, and many of the insurgents were members of his tribe, and others were members of other powerful tribes. Because he never delivered the money, the supply line dried up and the rebels were hunted down and killed. He’s been living under suspicion and resentment for all of this time. The regime lasted another twenty-five years or so after that—a whole generation—before they got rid of the bastards.”

  “Why does military intelligence care? Who is this go-between guy who wants Chase killed?”

  “That’s so secret it’s not even classified. It may not even be written down. Nobody has told us the name. I do know that this man has become an important asset to us. Since the regime fell, he’s become much more powerful. We need his friendship, and this is the price.”

  The meeting ended, and Julian got the two Libyans settled in an apartment on the South Side of Chicago and began his search. He had guessed that the two dogs were his best way to find Chase. The dogs limited the number of places where the fugitive could rent an apartment, and even more severely limited the places where he would want to live. He would find a place in the suburbs where there were parks and safe streets where a man could walk a pair of big dogs. It had to be the kind of place where men who looked like him lived, a place where he could get groceries and things without going far. Probably he would go out mostly at night, so Julian decided night was the best time to look for him. Julian was out every night beginning at dusk, searching likely neighborhoods.

  It took months, but Julian found him. His first encounter had taught him that this old man was much more formidable than he had anticipated. And the dogs weren’t just a risk to the old man, but also a way of ensuring that he couldn’t be surprised or physically overpowered. Julian had tried to explain all of this to the Libyans, but they had smirked at him. He had repeated his warnings, but they had ignored everything he said.

  He had taken the Libyans to the old man’s apartment and set them loose. Now the Libyans were dead and the old man was alive and hiding somewhere out in the world. Julian was the only survivor of the failed mission. Tonight Julian would probably lose his job and his chance to rise in the intelligence world.

  He thought about his job. It wasn’t even a job. It was a prolonged tryout for a job. He had thought his time out of the country would at least lead to an offer of employment with the CIA. But he’d been at it for six years, and no offer had come. Now it never would. They were holding a strategy meeting upstairs in this hotel, and he was sitting down here in the bar drinking coffee in a booth. This time the agents had told him he was keeping an eye out to be sure the secrecy and safety of the meeting weren’t compromised. Who were they even afraid of? Did they think there was actually any security issue in the Intercontinental Hotel on Michigan Avenue in Chicago? No. They were just having him babysit himself.

  He wondered if they were even going to fire him. They might just
never call him again. Maybe he should quit to avoid waiting for a call that would never come. All he would have to do was give them back the phone they had issued him and say, “Don’t call me again. I’m done.”

  Then doubts came over him like cold waves breaking on a beach. What would he do for a living? He was twenty-six, and had not done anything officially since he was nineteen and been quietly discharged from the army. He had excellent skills, but few that had any applicability in civilian life. He had a solid record of achievements, but nearly all of his work history was classified.

  He pushed the anxiety aside and thought about the night at the apartment. The two Libyans had presented themselves as skilled and subtle assassins, but they had turned out to be punks. Chase had told Julian as much—that they weren’t ready for Chase’s league. Old special ops men were like vampires. Every time a man like Chase killed another adversary, he knew something he hadn’t known before. He knew what one more fighter had done when his life depended on using his best tactic, making the right moves perfectly. Each one added another secret to his knowledge, and each one extended his life span and made him harder to kill.

  Julian Carson stared at the opposite wall of his booth—the whorls and streaks in the wood—and thought about how he had gotten here. He had enlisted in the army at seventeen because it seemed like a good thing to do while he was looking for a better thing to do.

  He had been brought up outside Jonesboro, Arkansas, on his parents’ vegetable farm. As he looked back on it now, he realized that farm work had made him the perfect military intelligence man. He had learned to do hard physical labor in a hot climate. He had grown up accustomed to striving to raise crops that took a long time to ripen, working on pure faith because no sign of the crops was visible at first, just dirt that he watered with his sweat. He had learned to take long shots with a rifle at running rabbits, when a missed shot might mean no meat on the dinner table until some other day, when he would see a shot he could make.