The Old Man

by Thomas Perry

  What he would have to do now was attend to the details. If he was going to do this, he would have to devise a safe way to respond to the ad so they couldn’t trace his communication. He would have to find a way to raise the twenty million dollars without revealing where it had come from—which banks and brokerages, in which accounts, under what names. Then he would have to find a way to return it to them without being ambushed.

  He began to try out ideas. He could try to get the money in cash, put it in trash bags, and tell them where it was.

  He had tried that thirty-five years ago. That much cash had filled ten large cardboard boxes. That would be as many as twenty trash bags. It was easier to obtain cash in those days, too. Now they’d trace the serial numbers to the Federal Reserve District where the bills were released, and then to each of the bank branches. Any cash transaction involving ten thousand dollars or more had to be reported to the government. And bundling a lot of smaller amounts would be even worse. The government would pick that up and jump on it even faster, because it was the way money launderers tried to avoid getting spotted. Maybe using cash had become impossible.

  As Dixon returned to the hotel, he kept thinking of ways to give the money to the government without giving them the ability to trace it back to its sources. One way was gold. Melting it wouldn’t change it. If he had a pile of gold—say, gold one-ounce coins, he could melt them and make the gold into bars with no markings. If he did that they wouldn’t know where the gold came from, at least at first.

  But even if he bought the gold from a foreign source that didn’t report gold transactions to the US government, he would have a hard time collecting that much gold without getting noticed. Keeping the purchase a secret would only be temporary. Eventually the transaction would be traced to a bank account, even without the cooperation of the dealer. But it might buy him some time.

  “Let’s see what the price is today,” he whispered to himself, turned on his laptop again, and typed in “price of gold today.” It was $1,203.00 an ounce.

  He used the calculator on his computer. He rounded the price off to $1,200. Twenty million dollars would buy 16,667 ounces. That was about a thousand pounds of gold. He could try to buy a hoard of gold from various sources, put it in a vault somewhere, and send military intelligence the key. But buying that much gold would take time, and there were too many ways to get caught.

  He wondered about diamonds. But he knew there was a huge markup on jewelry, and he could hardly deal with well-known, respectable jewelers and expect to be anonymous. He couldn’t work with dealers who weren’t well known and respectable, either. He wouldn’t have a clue what he was buying. He could pay twenty million dollars for a few pieces of glass.

  Maybe the answer was to give the government the twenty million in a form that couldn’t be moved. He could send them the deed to a twenty-million-dollar piece of land. But buying land took time, and it would require bank information and in-person signings and escrow periods.

  The next afternoon the Dixons moved on and checked in to a Seattle hotel, and Hank decided to test an idea. He turned on his computer, and after a few minutes of typing numbers and passwords he began to hum to himself.

  Marcia said, “Do you mind if I go down to the pool for a swim?”

  “No,” he said. He kept typing. “Feel free.”

  After a few minutes he heard her say bye, go out, and shut the door.

  He had been right. It was impossible. Giving the government twenty million dollars in any form couldn’t be done without blowing his identity and leading them straight to him. He couldn’t move that kind of money in a hurry anymore without the government finding out who was doing it.

  Then he tried getting online access to some investment accounts, and a solution occurred to him—to accept what he couldn’t change. The government would learn the name of the person who owned the accounts, and the person who performed the transactions. So he would give them information they already knew. The intelligence people already knew that he had once been Daniel Chase and they knew he had once been Peter Caldwell.

  The accounts he held in those two names were still open and active. Military intel knew the names, but the government hadn’t yet confiscated the money he had invested in those names. Maybe they assumed that for the past thirty-five years he’d been keeping it in cash under the floorboards, or in numbered offshore accounts. More likely, they didn’t want to let the federal agencies that blocked financial transactions know about him—the Justice Department, the SEC, the FBI, the IRS. For now, the bank and brokerage accounts of Daniel Chase and Peter Caldwell seemed intact.

  He took a deep breath and then typed in an online transaction, a request for an electronic transfer of a hundred thousand dollars from an account belonging to Daniel Chase to the bank account of a corporation called Ellburn Holdings he had founded twenty years ago to store some of his money. He took another deep breath, and then clicked on the box that said SUBMIT.

  He watched a circle of dots appear on the screen, rotate counterclockwise for a few seconds, and then vanish. “Your transaction has been completed. Thank you for your business.” It had worked.

  He opened the next account, and began to type the names and numbers for the next transfer. He submitted the transfer, and moved on to the next account. Before long he was moving much larger sums, but each transaction was accepted. He left some money in each account to avoid any reaction that would be automatically triggered by his closing an account.

  Next he opened an account that belonged to Peter Caldwell. The first transfer was another small one, a test. This transaction was successful, so he moved immediately to larger transfers. He kept at it until he accomplished what he’d wanted.

  He restarted his computer to be sure that he had closed all of the communications with the firms he’d been dealing with, and then added up all of the transactions he had made. He stared at the screen for a few seconds.

  The screen said: $22,000,800.

  He heard Marcia’s key card slide in the lock and the bolt open. As she stepped in, he cleared the screen. “Hi,” he said. “Have a good swim?”

  “Great,” she said. “You should have come. I’ll dry my hair now so we can go to dinner.”

  “Good idea. I’m hungry.”

  She went into the bathroom. As soon as he heard the hair dryer he began to look at maps on his computer screen. He studied one, then typed in another request, and then another. Then he found the one he wanted.

  He plugged his laptop into the printer on the desk and typed: “To J. H.: It’s a deal. Here are the coordinates for the meeting on November 5 at 5:00 p.m.” He thought for a moment. Much of the money he had requested would have to be raised by liquidating securities. That often took seven business days. He added three days to be sure the proceeds were transferred and deposited in the Ellburn Holdings account: “November 8 at 5:00 p.m.”

  Marcia emerged from the bathroom brushing her hair. “About ready?”

  “I just have to put on my coat.”

  16

  Julian Carson stood at the cable car stop on Market Street in San Francisco. He had been in San Francisco before, so he’d known this place as soon as he found the coordinates on a satellite map. He was at the Powell and Market turnaround. Tourists loitered here because there was always some chance of getting a seat right after the cars changed direction. Maybe the old man was going to show up on the cable car. The old man would know a cable car was a good place to keep from getting shot, because the cars were full of people, and the stop where Julian waited was crowded.

  Julian had not smoked a cigarette except as part of a cover identity since he left the army after Afghanistan, but he was smoking now, using the cigarette as a prop. It made him look older and a little defiant, and clearly not a government employee. He inhaled and let the smoke roll off his tongue and drift away. The strong bite of the tobacco reminded him that he was doing something he would regret.

  He took a last shallow puff, exhaled through
his nostrils, snuffed out the butt on the lamppost, and then threw it in the trash. As an afterthought he tossed the pack into the barrel after it, and then the matches. Instantly he felt bad. He could have given the pack to one of the three dozen homeless men sitting on the sidewalk on blankets and sleeping bags a few yards off. If the guy didn’t smoke he could have traded it for something—goodwill, maybe. They sure as hell needed that.

  Carson looked at his watch. It was five fifteen. He had been waiting on Market Street for fifteen minutes already. He had watched the cars, scrutinized the windows of hotels and office buildings. He had scanned the groups of tourists and streams of locals going in and out of stores and other businesses, and seen men who could have been the old man but weren’t. Carson knew he had plenty of backup. His worry wasn’t that there wouldn’t be enough agents to snap up one citizen, or at least to spot and tail him. The worry was that they might have so many out here that the subject would spot them.

  This wasn’t a normal target, some guy who had been a shopkeeper until he got obsessed with a fanatical movement and went off to another country for a few weeks of half-assed military training. The old man had been trained when a member of the special forces was an expert at moving unnoticed not only through jungles, but also through foreign cities. They all spoke several languages, could do some field surgery, and could operate any piece of hardware they saw. Julian could easily be a breath away, a heartbeat away, from having a bullet plunge into his skin and tear through his muscle and bone before it came out throwing a spray of red mist.

  Julian was not afraid exactly, but he was aware that he had a reason to be. He had seen years of combat, and he knew that if the action started he would feel a moment of fear, just the taste of it he allowed himself. Then he would do what he could.

  He was in the game now, and there was no way to back out. The men who had been in that hotel suite in Chicago for the meeting were very high-level operational personnel, and they had given him this mission. He had been foolish enough to accept. He could have shut up and said “yes, sir” and “no, sir” until they dismissed him. Or he could have resigned on the spot. But he hadn’t.

  Thinking about his bosses reminded him that the biggest threat in the next few minutes would not be from the old man. It was unlikely that the intelligence people had told him everything they thought, suspected, or planned to do.

  He assumed the pose of a man waiting for a cable car. He leaned forward as though to stare down Market Street, but when he leaned back he felt a hand settle against his spine.

  “Don’t look surprised and don’t turn around.” It was the old man’s voice.

  The old man must not have come in a car or approached from a distance, or Julian would have seen him. He must have been here when Julian arrived. Julian looked down the street in the other direction and used the turn of his head to get a glimpse of him.

  The old man had let his facial hair grow into a layer of white bristles on his face. A knit cap covered his head, and he wore a hooded sweatshirt with a down vest over it. He looked as dirty and unkempt as the homeless men who had been sitting on the sidewalk, but he didn’t smell like a man who had been sleeping rough in alcoves at the entrances of buildings. The old man said, “Are they really going to take my offer?”

  Julian shrugged. “They said to tell you it’s a deal.”

  “They’ll leave me alone?”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “And they’re going to tell the man in Benghazi that I’m dead?”

  “I passed on everything you said. I didn’t leave anything out.”

  “I know they agreed. I want to know if you think it’s true.”

  “You have no right to expect me to predict the future. I’d just be making a guess.”

  “Would you be willing to bet your life on them?”

  “I’m already betting my life on you. What’s in your hand? A stabbing spike?”

  “You’re wearing body armor, aren’t you?” said the old man. “I’m asking you. Would you make a deal with them?”

  “If you give up the money, what will you lose?” asked Julian. “If you walk away, how long before they get the money anyway?”

  The old man gave a quiet laugh. “As soon as I saw you here, I used a cell phone to set off the electronic transfer. The money is now in the account of the US Department of the Treasury.”

  “I don’t know how they’ll feel about that,” Julian said.

  “I said I’d deliver it to the US government, not hand it in cash to some faceless agents.”

  “Hard to blame you. For me, anyway.”

  “Good. Do us both a favor. Stay where you are for five more minutes and pretend you’re still waiting. Otherwise they might think something’s gone wrong, start shooting at me, and kill us both.”

  Julian no longer felt the pressure on his back. He looked down the street with exaggerated impatience.

  The old man moved away, holding a dollar in his hand, looking at it as though he were reading the denomination. Then he was among the homeless men again. He stopped to pick up the blanket he must have been sitting on, and kept going. He rolled up the blanket loosely as he limped along Market Street. He was almost to the corner of Fifth when he slipped into the glass enclosure at the BART station entrance. As he moved toward the downward escalator, two men rushed to intercept him.

  The nearest one was wearing a short raincoat. He reached out to grasp the old man’s hood. “No, you don’t,” he said.

  Henry Dixon threw his blanket over the man’s head, swung his arm in a circle to wrench the hand off his sweatshirt, clasped the man in a bear hug, and hurled him down the escalator.

  Next was a red-haired man wearing a Giants warm-up jacket. He lifted the back of his jacket with his left hand as he reached for the pistol holstered there with his right. The move put both of the man’s hands behind him for a second, which gave Dixon enough time to drive a sharp jab into the man’s nose and kick him in the groin. When the man doubled forward, Dixon slammed his face against the railing of the upward escalator. He pushed him halfway down the up escalator, and then bent over to pick up the man’s pistol while the moving stairs brought the half-conscious man back up to Dixon’s feet. He shoved the pistol into the marsupial pocket of his hooded sweatshirt, knelt by the man, and said, “I thought we had a deal.”

  The man’s eyes rolled and he was spitting blood. “I don’t know what you’re talking ab out.” Bystanders had begun to gather behind them, some perhaps thinking Dixon was trying to help the man, but most of them seemingly paralyzed, not knowing what to do except wait their turn to go down the escalator.

  Dixon pulled the earpiece wire that hung from the man’s ear, took the radio, and hurried down the escalator. He skirted the motionless body of the man under the blanket at the bottom and stepped to the turnstiles. He slid the ticket he had brought with him into the turnstile and withdrew it, reached the BART platform, and rushed to the open door of the train that was loading. He ducked in with the crowd and held on to a vertical bar while the train car’s doors slid shut. The train moved forward, picking up speed.

  He took off the down vest before the train reached the Civic Center station, then took off the sweatshirt before the Sixteenth Street station to reveal a dress shirt, tie, and sport coat beneath. Before the Twenty-fourth Street station he took off the rubbers that had covered a pair of dress shoes. He rolled the extra clothes into a bundle before the car slowed on its approach to the Glen Park station.

  The doors opened and he was out on the platform, hurrying with a hundred others to the upward escalators. On the way he dropped the clothes into a trash barrel, then took the next escalator up into the sunlight.

  There was a parking lot on Bosworth Street across from the station, but he didn’t go near it. Instead he hurried up the other side of Diamond Street to Wilder Street, where there were no signs of cameras. As soon as he was visible on Wilder, the black BMW pulled away from the curb and glided up to him. He got into th
e passenger seat, slammed the door, and the car moved on.

  17

  Julian Carson walked along Market Street at a quick pace with the demeanor of a man irritated at the fact that his cable car had never come. As he forced his body to convey the feeling, his experienced eyes were picking out the intelligence people. He saw five men who had been seated inside a restaurant dash across the street toward the Apple store, then into the subway entrance beside it. The tables along the front window of the restaurant were now vacant. A man in a third-story window of the hotel across from the turnaround was looking down at the street and talking into a cell phone.

  Here and there pedestrians stopped to talk into cell phones or radios or Bluetooth earpieces—an attractive young couple, the man in a sport coat and the thin blond woman in tight jeans and high boots, a pair of women carrying shopping bags that were heavier than they should be. There was a shout from somewhere near the subway entrance, and each woman put her right hand into the shopping bag that hung from her left, and kept it there until it was clear that the commotion was over. Julian didn’t know the women, but he knew that they had not been reaching for new dresses they had bought.

  A cab passed with a sign that said OUT OF SERVICE. The driver stopped in front of the BART station and two of the men from the restaurant used a gray blanket as a stretcher to carry a dazed man from the entrance to the backseat of the taxi. Two more men ushered another injured man with a towel wrapped around the lower part of his face and blood on his shirt into the passenger seat. Julian sped up to a trot to see if this one was the old man, but it wasn’t. The cab pulled away.

  Julian kept walking. He had warned his superior officers. He had told them a couple of times that the old man wasn’t just an old man, like somebody’s uncle. He was old in the way a seven-foot rattlesnake was old.

  Julian had listened to the agents when they told him he was going to be the one to meet the old man and take charge of the money. He had said “yes, sir.” He’d certainly had no interest in getting himself killed, and this was the kind of mission that might accomplish that. He had known instantly that the thing to worry most about was friendly fire. He had listened to the plans, but heard nothing to make him expect so many people with guns surrounding him in a crowded public street.