by Thomas Perry
Julian didn’t say anything. He was staring down the concourse. In his imagination he was running along the shiny, highly polished floor. Far down the length of it he could see the escalator that descended to the main entrance. Now and then a person would come upstairs from the security barrier. In his imagination, Julian was swinging an elbow into Waters’s face, feeling the snap of the small bones at the bridge of the nose. Then he was launching himself from the bolted-down row of seats like a runner at the starting blocks. He could be back at Ruthie’s in fifteen minutes.
“Mr. Harper was not as sanguine about the chances, which is why we had those two extra personnel. There were also two more in the car behind. Mr. Harper does not like to have to persuade people of their duty.” Waters paused. “Julian? You awake?”
Harper spoke. “He’s just feeling sorry for himself. The summer’s over, but the summer romance isn’t, I guess.”
“You think?” said Waters.
“You made the right decision, Julian,” said Harper. “It’s not even a decision at all.”
“No?” said Julian.
“Not yours, anyway. This mission will get done. We will succeed, because no mission ends until it’s a success.”
“Why do they want me?”
“Probably nothing we can’t do without you.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Mr. Bailey, Mr. Prentiss, and Mr. Ross told us to.”
Julian sat in silence.
Harper leaned closer. “When the mission is complete, you’ll come back here to Jonesboro and she’ll be waiting for you just the way you left her—freshly fucked.”
Waters chuckled, but Harper had already taken out his phone and begun reading texts and e-mails to signify that he was no longer interested in the conversation.
An hour later their flight was announced, and they boarded. The airport was sparsely populated after ten on a weeknight. Most of the people Julian could see were making their way to the same flight they were taking to BWI.
Waters had given Julian a ticket for the window seat. He assumed that was because it put both Waters and Harper between him and any opportunity to cause trouble, but Julian didn’t care. The moment had passed when he might have slipped away, and the impulse had passed with it. He was too angry to sleep this time, but he shut his eyes to keep from having to talk to Harper and Waters.
He opened them two hours later when the pressure in the cabin changed as the plane descended.
At Baltimore-Washington another pair of soldiers in civilian clothes waited at the bottom of the escalator. The two men identified themselves to Harper, escorted them to an SUV, and drove them to Fort Meade. Fort Meade was not only the home of three military intelligence units, but it was also the headquarters of the National Security Agency, so Julian was glad they were all driven in as a group. It made getting through the security at the gate quick. It was much easier to be one of five intelligence personnel arriving in a group than to be “a young black guy here at the gate, and he hasn’t got a government ID.”
The men parked the SUV in a lot beside a large barracks complex, and then escorted the others inside. Waters and Harper had apparently already been occupying rooms, and they disappeared into them. Then the men led Julian to his. He found that permanent party barracks had improved since his active duty years. They had been made less austere by the application of paint and the addition of better furnishings. One of the two soldiers gave him the key to his room and they both left.
At dawn there was a knock on the door. A soldier said, “Mr. Carson, your briefing is in one hour.”
“Where?”
“I’ll be back for you in fifty minutes.”
Julian showered, shaved, and then waited. The soldier reappeared on time, and walked with him across a road and a parking lot, past a number of other buildings like his until they reached a redbrick office building. The soldier led him to an unmarked door on the fourth floor and knocked once, then opened the door. Julian thanked him and went inside. “Good morning, Mr. Carson.”
Julian saw the gray-haired older man he had met at the hotel in Chicago and the hangar in San Francisco. “I’m sure you remember us. I’m Mr. Ross, this is Mr. Bailey, and this is Mr. Prentiss.”
“Yes,” Julian said. He repeated the names to himself. He had memorized them when Harper had said them, but wondered which was which. Now, hearing the man say them, he could tell the names were false. It was always like that. Each bit of information was a reward for great effort, one ring closer to the center of the circle. But there never seemed to be a ring where the information was true. It was only truer than the information in the last ring.
For now, the man Julian thought of as the highest in rank was Mr. Ross. He looked at Julian, his cheekbones resting on both fists. “I think it’s time we had a frank discussion, Mr. Carson.”
“Yes, sir.”
Julian noticed that in front of him on the table was a manila folder. He sensed that Mr. Ross had just closed it.
“You are a very impressive operator. You’ve worked in teams and alone. You’ve worked in South America, the Middle East, Africa, and at home. But now we’re in the middle of an operation that you seem reluctant to complete. Why is that?”
“After San Francisco nobody said anything to me about the operation. I waited for more than two months to hear from intelligence. Nobody called. I assumed that if the operation wasn’t over, I was no longer part of it.”
“You went home to Arkansas, and I understand you made good use of your time off. You spent part of the time being with your family and helping out on the farm, and part of the time reconnecting with old friends. That about right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“During your time away, we were following other avenues.”
Julian said, “You were watching to see if the old man would get in touch with me again.”
Mr. Ross’s mouth turned up and he showed a perfect row of small porcelain-white teeth as he turned to Mr. Bailey and Mr. Prentiss with a look of triumph. “You see that, Mr. Carson? That’s what I meant about you. We can train people for years and years, give them loads of time in the field. What we can’t do is make them smart.”
Julian felt the pride expand in his chest as he savored those words. He knew the words were calculated but he didn’t find the strength to resist. He knew that acknowledging his abilities was a confidence trick, but he longed for it not to be.
“Do you know why you figured out what we were doing? Because it was just what you would have done in our place.”
Julian was silent. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to admit that.
Mr. Ross said, “You look at guys like Harper and Waters. They each have at least ten years on you. Harper probably has fifteen. They’re competent, loyal, and responsible, but they’re pretty much all they’re going to be. You’re not. Whether you stay in military intelligence or go on to the CIA, you’ll run into both of them again over the years somewhere. They’ll still be perfectly okay, still doing the jobs they’re in now. But you’ll be something else—somebody else. You see?”
“I think so.”
“I know you do. I’ve got my eye on you.” He paused to impart significance to the next words. “And so do other people.”
Julian longed to know which other people. Who? But as always nothing clear and specific was to be said aloud. To ask would be to disappoint, and would prove that you weren’t ready after all.
Mr. Ross opened the manila file. Julian could see that his photograph was attached to the first page. Mr. Ross moved the page to the back of the file, and all Julian could see on the page below it was paragraph after paragraph of small unreadable print.
“You’re wondering why we’re here,” Mr. Ross said. “As you know, Fort Meade is not only military intelligence. The biggest part of it is the National Security Agency.”
He took the next sheet of paper out of the file and pointed at an address printed in a paragraph near the bottom. He held the paper out
to Julian. “This is your contact at NSA. Our fugitive is still out there somewhere. This time you’re going to have a whole lot of help finding him.”
22
It was winter and Julian had been living in a barracks at Fort Meade since early fall. He had been home to Jonesboro only twice. The last time he was called back early to check out a theory that the old man was living in a safe house in Montreal that had been set up forty years ago but seldom used.
He couldn’t blame the National Security Agency people for coming up with bizarre theories. They had all the data in the world. Sifting through it to find and connect the threads of a single story was the problem. There had to be something that explained how the old man could make himself so scarce, something like a safe house that old intelligence people had set up and forgotten. The only clear photographs of him had been taken when he was Julian’s age. And every operator except Julian who had gotten a close look at the old man since Libya was dead.
Julian was sitting in the office he’d been assigned at military intelligence when his phone rang. He heard the voice of Goddard, his NSA contact. Goddard said, “I think you’re going to want to come over here. We found him.”
The call was so unexpected that Julian said, “Who?”
“Who else?”
Julian closed his office and hurried over to NSA. When Julian arrived at Goddard’s office, he waited until Goddard had shut the door before he said, “Where is he?”
Goddard was a heavyset man with a dark beard and thinning hair. He leaned back in his desk chair with his hands behind his head, the chubby fingers laced. “He’s living in a cabin up in the San Bernardino Mountains at Big Bear.”
“How did you figure that out?” Julian was buying time, because he felt sick to his stomach.
“If you look at enough facts in enough different ways, you’ll find things that stand out. And we have everything.”
“I know,” Julian said. “But this guy makes no phone calls, makes very few purchases that aren’t cash, and barely shows his face.”
“But that’s now.”
“Yes,” said Julian. “That’s now. We’re looking for him now.”
“It wasn’t always now. He wasn’t always running under such pressure. He used to make phone calls. He used to use credit cards, own a house, move money around in bank accounts, and so on.”
“So what?”
“Nothing goes away. Every phone call he made five years ago, every purchase he made on a credit card or a debit card, it’s all recorded and stored. Nobody looks at it until we have a reason to. We had the name Peter Caldwell, the name he used last year. And we had the name Daniel Chase, the man he was for at least twenty years before then.”
“What led you to him?”
“It doesn’t really matter which line of inquiry pays off first, because that’s only a matter of chance. Eventually everything will work, because each thing you try eliminates people. If he only drinks single malt scotch and only uses horseradish mustard, we can eliminate hundreds of millions of people who don’t like both of those things. If we notice somebody has an idiomatic pronunciation of a particular word, we can search our archive of phone calls for instances of that pronunciation of that word.”
“But what was his mistake?”
“No mistake,” said Goddard. “The method doesn’t require a mistake. It just requires that one person be different from another. And we all are.”
“I understand what you’re saying,” said Julian. “All I’m asking is which it was this time.”
“When the old man gave the Treasury Department twenty million dollars, he was being smart by transferring the money from the accounts of the two aliases military intelligence already knew. He realized he had nothing to lose because the names were already blown. And he was too smart to have transferred or paid any of the money to his next alias. We also noticed that the accounts in the two names Daniel Chase and Peter Caldwell had never been mingled before. All very smart.”
“But?”
“But the root accounts were started at about the same time, and built up in the same way, beginning with small cash deposits. Because he hadn’t used either name since he made the Treasury payment, we concluded that he must have one more identity, probably begun about the same time as the others.”
“And you found another account like the first two.”
“Yes,” said Goddard. “Here.” He handed Julian a piece of paper with a name and address typed on it.
“Henry Dixon,” said Julian.
“And Marcia Dixon,” said Goddard. “Judging from their purchases, he and the woman from Chicago are still together.”
“Thanks very much for your work.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Goddard. “Now comes the caution. The reason we helped you is that we were told the old man is a traitor and a murderer—one of our own intelligence guys who’s turned into a monster. In order to help, we ignored the rules. A lot of the methods we used are illegal.”
“I won’t compromise your methods,” Julian said.
“I know you won’t,” said Goddard. “I didn’t tell you enough for that.”
Julian arrived at the condominium in Big Bear as a snowstorm was beginning. The flakes were big, and stuck to the windshield of his rental car, so he needed to use his wipers and headlights to find his way.
The condo had already been booked online, and the keys were waiting for him at the rental office. When the rental agent looked up from his desk and saw him, Julian saw the man’s face lose its look of expectancy and go flat and expressionless. Julian ignored the man’s involuntary reaction, signed the agreement, and took the keys. As Julian had driven into town he noticed that nearly all the faces were white.
Julian went to the condominium, unpacked, and prepared. He was aware that this moment was the peak of his career. This was his chance to become a success and an insider. But his mission was a mistake.
The old man was not what they said he was. He had seen covert aid money being diverted—and taken it back. He was not a traitor.
About twenty minutes after Julian arrived, the soldiers drove into town from Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona in a pair of black SUVs and an oversized pickup truck. They wore civilian clothes, but all of the clothes looked new, and the men were too well matched to be anything but some kind of team. The first man to the door was Staff Sergeant Axel Wright. He looked like a retired quarterback, tall and blond, with long arms and a thin, permanently sunburned face. When Julian came to the door, Wright introduced himself and said, “Mr. Carson, sir. Do we have your permission to bring in our equipment?”
“Of course. Come in.”
Julian sat in the condominium’s kitchen and watched the members of the squad spread around the living room, the stairway, and the dining room. They took their weapons out of their padded transport cases, assembled them, and loaded rounds into the detached magazines. Julian hadn’t seen anything quite like this since Afghanistan.
They were a ten-man squad that included a medic, and Staff Sergeant Wright as team leader. One of the eight riflemen was a radio operator-maintainer. For this mission he was equipped with other devices besides a radiotelephone. He spent a few minutes plugging in a couple of olive drab army-issue laptops, hacking into the Wi-Fi network, changing the password, and adding his phone and some other equipment to the network. Then he went to work.
The radio operator began studying the screen of his laptop and relaying weather information to Staff Sergeant Wright while Wright looked out the window at the falling snow. The snow was steady, with big white flakes floating down past the window and already building a layer of white on the ground. The flood lamp mounted on the eaves of the building threw enough light to make the flakes fifty or sixty feet away glow against the dark sky, obscuring the view.
To Julian, Wright’s confidence was a bad sign. The sergeant wasn’t paying attention to what his men did, and that meant they had worked together for a while and Wright knew he didn’t even have to loo
k anymore. The old man up the mountain in the cabin might be clever, but in a confrontation he would have no hope against men like these.
After about five minutes Wright turned away from the window, and his men looked in his direction in silence. He said, “The snow is going to get heavier and the air colder, and it won’t stop coming down until morning, guys. Pelham and Slavin, go get the pickup configured to plow. Kelly and Oldham, take one of the SUVs and find something heavy to weigh down the truck bed for traction—bags of gravel or sand, or whatever you find.”
The four men put on their winter gear and went outside. Sergeant Wright went into the kitchen to the sink and drew a glass of water, and then sat at the table across from Julian. “Mr. Carson. You’re sure you’ll recognize him when you see him, right?”
“I’ve seen him three times,” said Julian. “The first time he seemed to be a creaky old guy walking his dogs. The next time he suddenly turned up in the dark to show me he had his gun in my face, and the third time he was disguised to look like a crazy old homeless guy living on the street. He’s well trained, and he hasn’t forgotten any tricks.”
“I understand that you want to take him alive. Is that right?”
Julian nodded. “Yes. And there are two of them. He has the woman, Zoe McDonald, with him. We’d like to take her alive too.”
“Of course, if we can,” said Wright. “Alive or dead, though, he’s the priority. And he’s a killer. You know what an armed assault on a building can be like.”
“Yeah,” said Julian. “I do. I’m wondering if this operation has changed since I was briefed. I wasn’t expecting to conduct a heavily armed frontal assault.”
“When I was briefed they said he had killed some foreign agents who had tried to take him quietly a couple of times in different cities. So military intel cranked up the heat.”
“If we get the two of them alive, what do your orders say happens next?” said Julian.
