A String of Beads

by Thomas Perry

  They didn’t start again until after dinner that night and the kitchen was clean. Jane said, “Time for the next lesson.” They went to sit on the living room couch.

  “What’s this lesson about?”

  She said, “When professionals are searching for a fugitive, one of the most effective ways they do it is to keep his family and friends under surveillance—if necessary, for long periods of time. They check the mail before it’s delivered, record and trace their phone calls, and watch their houses. Sometimes there are private detective types searching, and they’ll do the illegal stuff—install hidden microphones, hack into their e-mail, and so on. The minute a runner contacts a relative or a friend, he’s given up his location. So the best advice is to let those relationships go.”

  “Let them go? You mean give up your family?”

  “Yes,” said Jane. “If you go back to the past, the ones waiting for you there are the chasers.”

  “What kind of choice is that?”

  “Not a very good one,” she said. “The only things it’s an improvement on are going to jail and dying.”

  “How can anybody give up his family?”

  “It’s all part of one process. You learn to forget every­thing about the past, and concentrate on inventing a future for yourself. Changing identities is an interesting opportunity for some people, like being reborn a new person. Once you’ve lived to about our age, the idea of making some different choices has its attractions. Did you always want to be something different—an artist, a musician, a teacher? Once your old life is obliterated or becomes too dangerous to live, you’ve got to be somebody, so why not that?”

  “I suppose,” he said. “If you can’t be who you are, you have to be somebody else. I’m not in that position.”

  “No,” said Jane. “But play along. It’s an exercise.”

  “Okay,” Jimmy said. “If I had to give up my regular life, I suppose I’d like to try being an architect. I’ve been doing construction for years, and I’ve got some ideas I’d like to try out.”

  “Usually I would recommend a profession that’s not even remotely related to your last one, but for the moment, architecture is fine,” she said. “First thing we’d have to do is get you into architecture school. School is a good choice. The people who look for fugitives don’t usually have a good ready-made way of searching campuses for people living under new names. School also takes time, so your trail gets cold.”

  “How would I get into architecture school?”

  “Fraud and chicanery,” she said. “Also some forgery. I’m experienced at getting people into places where they wouldn’t normally belong, and I have good relationships with some people who can produce just about anything on paper. But you really would have to get through the school yourself and learn how to be an architect. You can’t fake that.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I would want to be a real architect.”

  She smiled. “Great. You’re getting it already. Being a successful runner isn’t about pretending to be somebody. It’s about really becoming somebody. You don’t assume an identity because it hides your real identity. The new person becomes your only identity, and you live the life of that person.”

  “Interesting,” he said. “But right now I’m not at that stage yet.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s do an exercise that could help in your present situation. You ought to start thinking about possible problems.”

  “Like what?”

  “Suppose I’ve gone back to my house in Amherst to get something. You’re still here at this hotel in Cleveland. Think about what you do if everything suddenly goes wrong. You hear and feel heavy male footsteps coming up the hallway. There’s a loud knock on the door. You know that there’s no reason why five men would come to your door unless they were after you. What are your plans? Do you plan to fight, or run? If you run, what do you have time to take with you, and where are you heading? When you get there, who will you be? The same person you’ve always been, or a new person? What’s his name?”

  “I haven’t thought about any of that.”

  “That’s what we’re doing now. There’s the knock. What do you do?”

  “Go out the window, I guess.”

  “We’re on the second floor, about thirty feet from the ground. If you jump, you’ll probably break a leg. Want to go back in time and do something first?”

  “I’d like to have a rope, a nylon rope hidden close to the window, so I could just go out the window and down.”

  “Good idea. Let’s think about the rope some more. How long does it take to tie a knot?”

  “I could tie a slip knot ahead of time and just loop it over something solid like the bed frame, and then go.”

  “Fine. Once you’re out and on the ground, what next?”

  “I check to see if there are police cars near my car, or blocking the exit from the parking lot.”

  “Smart. This time it’s clear. Somebody recognized you and called the police, so the police don’t even know you have a car. Did you remember to bring the key?”

  “I sure hope so.”

  “Let’s assume you did. You drive off. Do you have some cash? Do you have a name or anything memorized that you could say to anyone who asks who you are?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Exactly,” Jane said. “Think about all of the things you’d like to have with you if you went out that window. We can collect them. But where would you put them?”

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “What we’re talking about is a bug out kit. If you were a woman, I would tell you to put together a kit in a purse that you use for nothing else. For a man, the best thing is not to have a briefcase or backpack or anything. Instead, you want to look as though you’re carrying nothing. There are sports jackets designed for travel. They’re lightweight and have five or six hidden zippered pockets to foil a pickpocket. You buy one, not too snug. In the hidden pockets you put cash, some form of identification you can use if you have to lie to someone, a duplicate car key, and whatever else would be useful. Then you hang the coat in the closet, always in the same spot, where you can reach it in the dark if you’re sleepy, distracted, or looking in the other direction. Practice finding and putting it on a hundred times or so. Keep thinking about ways to improve or update it.”

  “And that’s all I take when I go?”

  Jane nodded. “It’s a way. There are other ways. Some people have a second kit in another location so they just have to get out and go to it. You might even want one in another town.”

  “Do you do this?”

  She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “This isn’t about me. It’s about you.”

  “You told me that for years you made people disappear. There must be a lot more people after you than there are after me.”

  She hesitated. “Yes. I do things like this. I was at it for years. It wasn’t very long before what I worried about wasn’t just that the police would arrest me for carrying false identification or something. There were people who would do anything to catch me alive and make me tell them where runners had gone and what their new names were. There were others who would be satisfied to just kill me on sight. Many of those people are still out there, so I’ve had to keep making arrangements and contingency plans.”

  “What about your husband?”

  “I make arrangements for him too.”

  “I mean he’s all established, and he’s a doctor and everything. After all those years of work, would he just run off with you and live in hiding like this forever?”

  Jane looked at Jimmy, feeling stung, and thought about how disastrous it would be if she allowed her anger to fill the air between them. She took a couple of deep breaths, then said, “If the danger were on
ly to me, I wouldn’t ask him to run. I would just go, and hope we could get back in touch later. I believe in preparing for the worst, and what I consider the worst is something that would hit him, too.”

  “But would he go with you, and give up the life he built?”

  “That would be up to him.”

  “You’re ducking my question.”

  Jane controlled her irritation. “I’m answering as well as I can. He’s always been a very bright and sensible man. He loves me, and he wouldn’t want to lose me. If I said we needed to go, I think by now he’d believe me. So I think he would go if I asked. But nobody knows how anyone will react. There are moments when saving your life means immediately doing the same things that you would do if you had an hour to think about them first. So nobody knows how it will go until it happens.”

  “Okay,” said Jimmy. “I just wondered.”

  “That’s fine,” said Jane. “I guess the bigger answer to your question is that I believe the things I’m telling you will make you safer. Some are things I’ve taught other runners to do, and those people are nearly all well and living new lives. I do the same things for myself.” She stood and picked up her coat on the way to the door. “Now I’ll give you a chance to think about what we’ve said so far. I’ve got to go out for a bit, but I’ll be back.” She had talked her way out the door before he had a chance to reply.

  She went down the back stairs, along the lower hall, and out the side door of the hotel. As she walked she came close to the car and glanced at the windows and tires as she passed, then continued out to the street. She walked past a row of fast-food restaurants and an open field, and on for about a mile. The night air and the solitude gave her a chance to cool down and think.

  There must be a reason she had been stung by Jimmy’s questions. Maybe it was that he had discovered the uncertainty she had always lived with and hidden from everyone. It was humiliating to admit that the uncertainty existed, and maybe more so because Jimmy was an old acquaintance, almost a member of the family. She had wanted him to think of her as invulnerable rather than weak and plagued with marital problems. She hadn’t been able to ignore him or throw him off the scent. He was wondering what she had always wondered, and he had a relative’s prying persistence. His sincerity was disarming, and it had made her try to answer questions she would have cut off if anyone else had asked. Tonight was a bad time for her to have this conversation, because Carey was angry with her, and she had already been in a bad mood about it.

  She had never admitted it aloud to anybody, but being married to somebody who wasn’t Seneca was difficult. She loved Carey and knew him well, and she thought hard about everything she heard him say or saw him do. She believed that he loved her just as much, and thought as hard about her. But over the past year something disturbing had come to her.

  A year ago she had lived through a series of terrible trials. When she had reached her worst point, when she was in fiery, throbbing pain from the burns, and weak from the gunshot wound, surrounded alone by cruel enemies and preparing herself for death, she had thought about Carey, and the thought of him had not helped her. He was something good that she’d had while she was strong and happy, not a weapon she still possessed that could strengthen her when she was in a battle for her life. Thinking about Carey had only made her wish to live and get back to him, not to stay strong and live up to the promises she had made to her runners. Thinking about Carey had made her weak, the way thinking about food makes a starving person weak.

  As she had endured the ordeal, she kept digging into the back of her mind, searching for something that would help her in those last days of life. What she’d found were her ancestors, the Seneca warriors who had fought the wars of the forests. The men who had gone off in small parties to raid the countries of enemies would sometimes find themselves in trouble. As they were returning home along the trails they might be overtaken by a party of enemies so large that they could never hope to fight them off. Sometimes one warrior would run for a time with the others, then come to a strategic point, often one with the high wall of a cliff on one side and a ravine on the other. He would stop there and turn to block the trail while his friends and companions continued on to escape. The lone warrior would stand on that spot and fight. As the enemies arrived, he would kill as many as he could with arrows, then fight hand to hand for as long as he could raise a war club or thrust a knife. His intention was to fight until he was killed, but sometimes the enemies would overwhelm him and take him captive.

  Jane knew that captive warriors had been tormented—beaten, then cut, mutilated, flayed, then burned. A warrior was expected to remain strong and unyielding through all of it, to display such incredible bravery that his captors would be shocked and fear the next Seneca warriors who came their way. Even after the warrior knew he was too deeply wounded and crippled to save himself, he would still look for a chance to strike, grab one of the captors, and kill him before his own death came.

  In Jane’s mind the stories about captured warriors were distilled into a vision of a single warrior. His solitude was part of his torment, just as it was part of hers. She thought about the warrior and pictured him among his enemies until she could almost see him with her eyes open. She honored him for his courage and his pride, and tried to behave the way he had. When she began to feel the weakness coming on her, feel herself becoming too tired to struggle, too hopeless to remain silent through the pain, she used the warrior’s image to fight it. She thought about the old Seneca warrior at the darkest time, concentrating hard and continuously. She knew that he had been one of her ancestors. He would have recognized her face, her hair, her skin, and the language she spoke, and understood her and known her in spite of the blue eyes she’d inherited from her mother. And during her ordeal she became, for a brief time, like that warrior. She had watched until her chance had come, until the two men guarding her had fallen asleep. Because of that she was alive tonight, walking along a highway outside Cleveland, and they and their friends were dead.

  A part of what was bothering her now was that she could have told Jimmy about all this, but she’d had a year and still hadn’t told her husband, Carey. She had been afraid he would never understand, and might say something that would stay between them forever. What she feared was a rejection of the part of her that was Seneca. She was a modern, educated woman, and sometimes it seemed to her that it was easiest for Carey to assume that was all she was—that she was just like everybody else they had known at Cornell, or even the women they met at cocktail parties and hospital benefits. Right now she resented him for that, even while she admitted to herself that the real reason he didn’t know things was that she hadn’t been able to tell him.

  She turned around after a few miles and walked back toward the hotel. She considered calling Carey, but first she analyzed why she wanted to call. She was feeling guilty for having thoughts about him that weren’t fair. She was afraid that she was being drawn too much into the Seneca world and a culture that he could never share. She was afraid the balance that sustained her was being disrupted. Even that thought was a problem—the Haudenosaunee peoples’ belief that all things needed to be kept in balance. And she was lonely for Carey, but also irritated at him for not seeing that she loved him too much to leave him unless she had to.

  As she walked on, she decided that none of the reasons for calling Carey was the right one. She had told him last time not to expect a call. And she had told Jimmy that getting in touch with people at home was dangerous. It went for her too. A small risk was still a risk. There was no reason for Carey to listen to her saying over and over that she loved him and would come home when she could. If she said those words enough times on long-distance calls, they began to feel like lies.

  She stopped in a diner and had a cup of coffee, and then let the waitress refill it while she sat thinking about her life and her marriage until she realized that she had been there too lo
ng. She got up and continued the walk to the hotel.

  When Jane reached the parking lot of the hotel she stayed outside it until she had walked the perimeter, keeping her path out of the overhead lights that shone down to protect the parked cars. She studied the Chevy Malibu again to be sure nobody was watching it, either from another parked car or from the sort of van that the police used for surveillance. By then she was near the dark side of the building, so she walked along the brick wall. She looked at her watch. She had been gone more than three hours. It was late enough now to be sure the hotel’s side entrance was locked, so she went on to the main entrance.

  Through the double glass doors she could see the night desk clerk. He was occupied, talking with two men who looked like business travelers who had just driven from the airport and not brought their luggage from the car yet. They were leaning on the long counter, the three of them all close and preoccupied. As Jane walked by, something unusual happened. One of the two men came around and joined the desk clerk behind the counter. He turned the screen of the computer so his companion could see it too, and they began to scroll down a page that was a series of divided sections.

  Jane stood at the elevator and pretended to hit the button, but kept watching the men without seeming to. As she watched, the man behind the counter raised his right hand and pointed a finger at one of the lines of text. As he did, his sport jacket rode up and she could see the gun under it. Jane pressed the button and the elevator door opened, she stepped inside, and the door slid shut.

  11

  In the elevator Jane pressed the key on her phone. “We’ve got to get out. Pack whatever you can in the next three minutes and then start wiping fingerprints off every surface we touched. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  As soon as the elevator door opened she was out and running along the fourth floor hallway. Before she reached the door of their suite she had her key card out, and when she reached the door she stuck the card in the reader and opened the door just far enough to slip inside, then set the deadbolt.