The Old Man E-Book

Thomas Perry

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 541

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES A finalist for the Barry Award for Best Thriller To all appearances, Dan Chase is a harmless retiree in Vermont with two big dogs and a grown daughter with a life of her own. But most sixty-year-old widowers don't have multiple drivers' licenses, savings stockpiled in banks across the country and two Beretta nanos stashed in the spare bedroom closet. Most have not spent decades on the run. Now, the toppling of a Middle Eastern government suddenly makes Dan Chase, and the stunt he pulled thirty-five years ago as a young hotshot in army intelligence, a priority again. Racing across the country and beyond, Chase must reawaken his survival instincts to contend with the history he has spent his adult life trying to escape, coming face to face with an army veteran-turned-agent who plays the game just as he once did. Edgar Award-winning author Thomas Perry writes thrillers that move 'almost faster than a speeding bullet' (Wall Street Journal) and The Old Man is no exception.

Leseprobe

Also by Thomas Perry

The Butcher’s Boy

Metzger’s Dog

Big Fish

Island

Sleeping Dogs

Vanishing Act

Dance for the Dead

Shadow Woman

The Face-Changers

Blood Money

Death Benefits

Pursuit

Dead Aim

Nightlife

Silence

Fidelity

Runner

Strip

The Informant

Poison Flower

The Boyfriend

A String of Beads

Forty Thieves

The Bomb Maker

First published in the United States of America in 2017 by The Mysterious Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2022 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © Thomas Perry, 2017

The moral right of Thomas Perry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN 978 1 80471 020 3

E-book ISBN 978 1 80471 021 0

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

To Jo, with love

1

“An old man should have a dog.” Dan Chase’s daughter had told him that ten years ago, after his wife died. The part that surprised him was the term “old man.” He had just turned fifty then. But he supposed she was only giving him advance notice, time to get used to the idea and find a suitable dog. After a man’s wife died, he had to do something not to die too.

After decades taking responsibility for a wife, then a daughter, then her husband and sons too, he woke up one morning and realized that the conditions he had been accustomed to seeing as permanent had changed. He was no longer at the center of things. After his wife died the house had gone silent. It wasn’t the hearth where the clan gathered for warmth and sustenance anymore. It was just a solitary man’s place.

The dogs were looking at him expectantly right now. He opened the door and the two big mutts, Dave and Carol, slipped out ahead of him into the yard, already galloping, a pair of black streaks. They always charged across the five hundred feet of yard to the back fence, their bodies elongated as they bounded along. When they reached the fence they stopped and trotted around the perimeter, patrolling. When they’d made one circuit and found nothing to pursue, they made one more circuit sniffing the ground before they returned to Dan Chase, hoping for an assignment.

After he had taken his daughter’s advice he found there was much he remembered about dogs from when he was a boy. All dogs wanted to be good dogs, no matter how unpromising they seemed. You just had to help them find a way. And they were sunshine creatures. When their master opened his eyes in the morning it was their signal that the day had begun, and a day was to be greeted with joy and intense interest. They were a good example for an old man.

Chase started to walk and the two big dogs fell in beside him to skirt the side of the house to get to the gate. The two dogs were on his right at the moment, but they constantly changed positions, maintaining an orbit around him as he went. He opened the gate and, as always, they squeezed their sleek, muscular bodies through the opening ahead of him.

Dan Chase wore a pair of short leashes hanging from his neck, so if he saw a stranger walking toward him he could snap the leashes on Dave and Carol’s collars. Even a person who loved dogs didn’t necessarily want to meet two hairy, black eighty-pound beasts running free before he’d been introduced to them. Dave and Carol didn’t mind. The big thing was to be out and going somewhere with Dan Chase.

Every day the three walked four or five miles, and did their errands on the way. About once a week Chase would take the car out, just to be sure the battery was charged and the oil got on the parts, but the rest of the time they walked. The walk was usually silent, except when they ran into somebody that Chase wanted to talk to, and there were some occasions when he spoke to the dogs. He had never believed in telling them what to do unless he had to, so the dogs generally got along by doing what Chase did. But when he did speak to them they stopped, their ears perked up, their heads turned, and their sharp, intent eyes focused on him.

Dave and Carol had been from the same litter, acquired together by animal control. The volunteer told him their mother had been a cross between a black Labrador and a standard poodle, but the father was something unknown. Nobody knew what he was except that he must have been bigger and hairier. Chase couldn’t bear to split them up, so he didn’t. When his daughter came to visit after he’d brought them home from the pound, she said, “Oh, Jesus. That’s not the kind of dog I meant. Look at their feet. They’re going to grow up big.”

“I like big dogs,” he said. “They’re calmer and quieter. It’s scared dogs that bite.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You really want to have two animals that could kill you? You’re—”

“An old man. A stiff breeze could kill me.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do,” he said. “It’s just another reason to make sure they never want to.”

His relationship with Dave and Carol had worked that way, over time. This morning the three made their way along Norwich’s Main Street past a succession of white clapboard houses and a couple of restaurants and hotels to the bridge over the Connecticut River that led to Hanover, New Hampshire. They were having a gentle early spring this year, after a winter that had hit early and held on, and kept most inhabitants of northern New England defending small areas of warmth for days at a time and going out only because there was somebody paying them to do it.

As Chase and his dogs stepped onto the bridge, Chase looked out over the river. Today the dark water was higher than yesterday, swelled by the early spring melt. The sun had been shining fairly steadily for a few days, and he judged that the big pockets of snow in the high places had begun to yield.

The first sign that something was wrong came just beyond the end of the bridge on the New Hampshire side. Chase’s ears were attuned to the sounds of his world, and one of the sounds was the movement of cars. He had gotten used to the steady passage of cars across the long, narrow concrete bridge, about one every five seconds, going between twenty-five and thirty-five miles an hour, the sound approaching first from over his left shoulder, and then turning to a whish as it came abreast of him, and then fading far ahead. This vehicle came off the bridge just after he did and was moving much more slowly than cars usually did. Chase looked up the slight incline in the road ahead of him to detect a reason for a car to slow. The road ahead was clear, but the car drifted along on his left side, hanging behind him as he walked.

Chase pivoted to the right and walked up between the riverbank and the first house. The two dogs seemed to hesitate behind him, but he said quietly, “Come on.” So they did. He didn’t look back, but took out his cell phone and touched the camera symbol, held up the phone as though to take a shot of the river, but aimed it over his shoulder toward the car. He took a shot, and then hit the video symbol and kept the phone in his hand with his arm down at his side, pointing the lens behind him as he went.

Dave and Carol were happy enough to resume their walk, and in a moment the rhythm of car sounds was restored, with cars going up the incline toward Wheelock Street at the usual rate.

He looked at the picture he had taken. The shot was badly framed and at an angle, but the car was clear. It was a silver compact car, something like a Subaru Impreza. For the past few years those things had become as common as pigeons all over New England because they were cheap and had good traction on snow and ice.

His view of the driver’s face was blocked by the car’s roof. The one thing Chase could see from his high angle was the passenger seat, which had a lone object lying on it. Was that what it looked like? He squinted and stared, but he could think of nothing else it could be. It had to be a toy, a replica, or the real thing.

A part of his mind that he had kept dormant for a long time awakened. He changed his plan. The best time to walk back across the bridge was now, while the driver was still headed in the other direction and would have to turn around on a side street to follow. When that happened Chase wanted to be on the right side of the car where the driver couldn’t shoot him easily. He muttered, “Come.” Then he swung both arms to signal the dogs, trotted quickly across road, and headed back across the bridge.

When they returned to the Vermont side of the river, he moved off Main Street. If this person knew Chase was in Norwich, he or she would certainly know where he lived. He would be much safer if he got there first. He picked up his pace and cut across a couple of unfenced backyards and down an alley that led to the gravel parking lot behind the Norwich Inn.

Chase had not been ready. He had stayed here in this peaceful corner of the country for too long. When he came to the area he had bought guns and ammunition and hidden them in his house, his car, and his garage. But he hadn’t carried one in ten years. There had been no sign of danger, and he had been out of sight for so long by then. He admitted to himself that what had ended the habit had been Anna’s death. She had always been the one to remind him to stick a pistol into his coat before he went out. After she died he had not been very interested in protecting what was left of his life.

Chase’s eyes and ears were now alert and sensitive, evaluating every sight and sound, trying to pick up anything that didn’t belong, anything that had changed. He reminded himself that he couldn’t be sure that there was anything to detect. A car had followed him across a bridge, its driver apparently slowing to look at him or the dogs. This might be nothing.

As Chase and the dogs moved along the paths and shortcuts toward his house, he checked the streets for the silver car. He was careful to check the parking lot in front of Dan and Whit’s Country Store. The Congregational Church’s lot was visible across the green, and it was empty.

He reached the final block before his house and headed along the fence to the side opening near the back door. The dogs surged ahead of him and sniffed the ground, zigzagging as they did when following an invisible trail. Chase left them at it and stepped into his garage. He had placed a .45 Colt Commander under the seat of the car the day he bought it, and a second one in the spare tire bay under the floor of the trunk. The gun weighed thirty-six ounces and held only seven rounds, but there had been times when he’d bet his life that it would fire them all smoothly and accurately, and he was still aboveground. He took the pistol from under the seat and hid it beneath his coat.

When he emerged from the garage he saw that Dave and Carol were agitated, rushing to the distant fence and running back across the yard to the steps. Maybe someone had been here in their absence, and they resented the incursion. He stood with his back to the clapboards of the house and the gun in his belt under his jacket, waiting to see. After a short time, the dogs settled down. Whoever they had sensed must be gone. He put his hand on the gun and walked to the front steps. He looked in the window, and then opened the back door without stepping into the opening. There was no sound of feet sidestepping for a better angle. No shot. “Okay,” he said, and the dogs leapt up on the porch and moved inside.

When Dave and Carol trotted across the floor, stopped on opposite sides of their big water bowl, and began to lap up the water, he let go of the gun. If anybody had been in the house, the dogs would have sniffed the air and gone to hunt for him.

Chase walked through the house, verifying that nothing had been changed or touched. He was almost certain this was unnecessary, but he had gotten lazy and irresponsible lately, so he made the extra effort. When he first moved to town he had taken lots of precautions, but over the years he had not bothered to stay ready.

Apparently today had been a false alarm, possibly even his subconscious producing a chimera to startle him into doing what he should. But he knew the real thing would seem just about as subtle and innocuous. Someone he didn’t know would show an interest in him. But once the attack started, it would be loud and fast. Maybe today had been a blessing, a harmless event reminding him to make some corrections.

He patted the two dogs, gave them each a biscuit, and went to check on his preparations. He walked to the closet in one of the spare bedrooms where he kept his escape kit, opened the backpack, and looked inside. The money was there—ten thousand in US hundreds, another five thousand in Canadian hundreds, and ten thousand euros. The two guns were Beretta Nanos, and each was accompanied by four spare magazines full of 9mm rounds.

The three wallets contained the necessary credit cards and licenses for three different identities—Henry Dixon of Los Angeles, Peter Caldwell of Chicago, and Alan Spencer of Toronto. He had American passports for Dixon and Caldwell, and a Canadian passport for Spencer. The expiration dates on the cards were well spread out, and he checked and verified that he had not been inattentive enough to let any of the credit cards expire. He had known he could count on the companies to keep sending new cards. The companies paid themselves from bank accounts he’d held in those names for twenty-five years or more.

He went to the next hiding place in the small attic at the peak of the house, opened a box of Christmas ornaments, and pulled out the second kit, which included more money and female identities with the same surnames as the men. The photographs on the cards were of Anna. He took this second kit down to the spare bedroom with him.

He had three prepaid burner cell phones in his kit with the batteries removed. He plugged one of them into the surge suppressor under the bed to recharge the battery and stowed the others. He started to take the kit he’d made for Anna out of the room to throw it away, but then changed his mind. He took the contents of Anna’s pack and added it to his pack. If he ever needed a kit at all it would be dangerous to leave anything here that revealed his next surnames. He and Anna used to call the packs bugout kits, because they were only to be used if they ever had to bug out—abandon their home and escape. The kit contained everything either of them would need to start over again somewhere else.

He let Dave and Carol out into the backyard again. Usually around this time they liked to have him throw a ball so they could race after it, but today none of them felt like playing. Instead, the dogs followed him as he walked around the yard looking for footprints, signs that the fence had been scuffed when someone had climbed it, or other indications that anyone had been there. The dogs could still be funny and puppyish when they felt like it, but today they were serious, even solemn. They stayed close, staring up at him now and then with their big, liquid eyes, as though to read his thoughts.

Chase spent the rest of the day watching for signs that never came, and making up for his neglected preparations. He checked and engaged all the locks on doors and windows and tested the alarm system. He spent a few minutes in the garage tying a piece of monofilament fishing line to a pair of tin cans from his recycling bin, and then tying another piece to the necks of two bottles.

They all had dinner at the usual time, and then the dogs went out while Chase did the dishes and cleaned up. After they came in he engaged the alarm and watched television for a while, keeping the volume very low so he or the dogs would hear any unusual sounds. At 11:30 p.m. after the weather report he took the dogs to bed. As usual, Dave and Carol jumped up and lay on the left side of the bed, nearest to the door.

When they were settled, Chase went to the end of the hallway that led from the kitchen and set up the two cans connected by the transparent fishing line. Then he did the same with the bottles at the beginning of the bedroom hallway. He was fairly sure the electronic alarm system would function well enough, but he knew making his own would help him sleep better.

It was nearly 3:00 a.m. when the clatter of tin cans broke the silence. He opened his eyes, and the dogs both lifted their heads from the bedcovers. Chase could see in silhouette that their heads were both turned toward the doorway, and their ears were pointed forward.

Dave launched himself off the bed. There was a heavy thud as his forepaws hit the hardwood, and then rapid scratching sounds as he accelerated down the hallway. Carol leapt after him, adding to the scrit-scrit of toenails down the hall.

Dan Chase was on his feet in a second, stepping into his pants. He picked up the Colt Commander and the flashlight from his nightstand and followed. He paused at the end of the hallway, leaned forward to let one eye show at the corner, but saw only dark shapes in motion. He turned on his flashlight in time to see Dave barrel into a man at the far end of the room and begin to growl.

The man went down, but he punched and kicked at Dave, trying to get the dog’s jaw to open and release his arm.

“Lie still!” Chase shouted, and switched on the overhead lights. “Don’t fight them.”

Then the man had a gun in his hand, and Chase could see it had a long silencer attached to the barrel. The silencer was the man’s enemy, because the extra eight inches made it too long for him to turn it around to fire into the dog. He managed to get it close, but the twisted arm gave Carol her opening. She ducked in beside Dave and bit.

This time the man was in trouble. Soon Carol was tearing at his shoulder, working her way up toward his throat. He knew it, and he struggled harder, using the unwieldy pistol to hammer at the dogs.

“Lasst ihn los,” said Chase. He aimed his gun at the man’s torso.

The dogs released their jaws. The man hesitated.

“One chance,” Chase called. “How are you going to use it?”

The man rolled to his side and got off a shot that went past Chase’s ear. Within a half second Chase’s shot pounded into the man’s chest and he dropped the gun and lay still.

Chase had to do many things in a short time, so his movements were fast and efficient. He kicked the man’s pistol a few feet away in case the man was alive. He patted each of the dogs while he ran his hand over them to see if they were hurt, and he spoke to them softly. “Dave, Carol. You’re very, very good dogs. Thank you, my friends.” They would probably be bruised, but there was no blood, and neither of them flinched at his touch. They licked his face as he knelt to check on the man.

The man on the floor had dark hair and olive skin. He was about thirty years old, with a widow’s peak that showed he would have been bald in a few years if he had not come here tonight. Chase had never seen him before, unless he was the one in the silver Subaru.

There was no pulse at the man’s carotid artery. The bullet hole in the chest was in the right position to go through the heart. The blood was draining under him from the exit wound, not being pumped out. Chase felt for a wallet, but found nothing in the man’s pockets except a spare magazine for the pistol and a knife with a four-inch blade—not even a set of car keys. The lack of identification wasn’t entirely a surprise. A man they’d send after Dan Chase would be one who could only succeed or die, because if he were caught he’d be more dangerous than Chase. Of course he had no phone, but Chase wasted a few seconds searching again for one.

Chase went to the upstairs closet for his escape kit, added the phones, took the pack outside, and hung it on a nail in the shed so it would be hard to distinguish from his fishing gear and the oars and motor for the aluminum boat turned over in the yard. On the way back he searched for the silver Subaru, but he didn’t see it.

He went inside through the kitchen door, took the cans and bottles outside, disconnected the fishing line, and threw them in the recycling bin, picked up the phone, and dialed 9-1-1.

“Nine one one. What’s your emergency?”

“This is Dan Chase at Ninety-two Neville Street in Norwich. A man just broke into my house with a gun, and woke up my dogs. He fired at me, so I shot him. He hasn’t got a pulse.”

“Please stay on the line, Mr. Chase. Help will be there in a few minutes.”

“All right. Tell them there’s no need for sirens. No use waking everybody in town.” He stood in the kitchen with the phone to his ear for a moment until the dogs came in and sat on their haunches staring at him.

He cradled the phone on his shoulder while he opened the cookie jar and took out two dog treats and let their big jaws take them. He pulled out two more and bestowed those too, so the dogs would know that he appreciated them. All dogs wanted to do a good job.

Through the window he saw the flash of red and blue lights on the trees beside the house. Chase prepared himself for the next part. There would be a lot of talk. Then he and his dogs would go.

2

The police were about the way he’d expected them to be in this situation. A man who had owned a home in town for nineteen years, paid taxes, and lived without afflicting his neighbors was awakened by his dogs when an armed man broke into his house tonight. The armed man fired a round at the home owner, who shot him through the heart. The cops took the victim’s statement, dusted the house for fingerprints, took photographs, and bagged the obvious stuff—both weapons, the ejected brass casings, and the bullet the attacker fired into the woodwork. Before the body was removed, they expressed the opinion that what had happened was unfortunate, but not very far out of the ordinary as home robberies went.

The only part that Chase regretted a little was not removing the silencer from the shooter’s pistol. Having a silencer seemed unburglar-like to him, and sure as hell would make some cop scratch his head. The saving fact was that although silencers were illegal in Vermont, the house was half a mile from New Hampshire, where anybody who wanted a silencer could pay two hundred bucks for the federal transfer tax and have one.

The police had been sympathetic, and they hadn’t even told him not to leave town. They would probably think of that in a day or two, but they wouldn’t call him before midday tomorrow because he was a local man who’d had a shock and lost half a night’s sleep. They would not be too far wrong, but right now the crime victim was driving at seventy-five miles an hour southbound down Interstate 89.

He took out the first of the prepaid cell phones and dialed his daughter Emily’s number.

“Hello?” Her voice was raspy. She must be in bed stretching to reach the phone.

“Hi, kid. It’s me. I’m really sorry to call at this hour. But it’s finally happened. One of them found me at the house, so I’m on the road.”

“Are you bringing the dogs to me?”

“Maybe eventually. Right now, no. Dave and Carol have been through a lot tonight. I think they need time with me before I do anything like that. Come to think of it, so do I.”

“Jesus, Dad.”

“I know, honey. I only called so you wouldn’t think they got me or something. I can’t help what’s already happened. You’ll be all right. There’s nothing in the house that links me to you. No papers, no pictures, and to the extent I can accomplish it no prints of yours or DNA. I always clean the place after you leave. I’m going to be able to hold on to this phone a few more days, but no more than a week. If you need me, call it. Here’s the number.”

“I can see it on my screen.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“I hate this,” she said. “I hate it, and it never had to happen.”

“We’re not sure yet if anything did happen.”

“You just said it happened. I assume there’s a dead man in your house?”

“They moved him pretty quickly. This happened in Vermont, honey. It was a slow night.”

“Right. But it happened,” she said.

“I’m sorry. But you’re out of this mess and free from it. I’m glad.”

“What bullshit. Nobody who loves anybody is ever free from anything.”

“I meant you to be.”

“I know you did. So now I have more money than a princess, only I’m still afraid to spend it, and my father is on a cell phone on a highway bullshitting me because he thinks he might not get to talk to me again.”

“It probably won’t be that bad.”

“I hope not. But don’t take any chances. If you have to, you can rent a motel room and leave the dogs in it, and I’ll be there to pick them up as soon as a human being can take a plane there. If you’re with them, I’ll take all three of you.”

“I’ve never doubted it,” he said. He drove in silence for a few seconds.

“You’re awfully quiet,” she said.

“I’m really sorry.”

“I get that,” she said. “I’ve always gotten that.”

“It doesn’t hurt to repeat it.”

“Yes it does. It all hurts.”

“I guess you’ve got to get ready for work, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I love you.”

“Obviously. And I love you. Call when you can.”

He slipped the phone into his pocket and kept driving. As he drove, he listened to the deep, nasal snores of Dave and Carol, who were asleep together on the backseat.

3

Once a man has stolen something he is a thief. If what he stole is big enough, then always and forever, no matter what else he’s done, he will always be a thief.

Again, for the ten thousandth time, he remembered standing in the North African sun, on the powdery dust of the road that ran along the desert’s edge. He had just seen the car go by on its way from the office in the city to the place he had designated as the spot for the meeting he had demanded. At that moment, he could still have walked away. But if he kept going toward the meeting, he would die. He knew it would be a quiet death, not disturbing things on the surface. It would be so quiet it would seem civilized.

As Chase looked back on the day now, he could see it in its sun-bleached clarity. His first sin came right then. It was anger. He had risked his life bringing the shipment of money to Libya from the bank in Luxembourg. In order to preserve deniability he had been discharged from the army months earlier and moved into a civilian special ops status that left no records, and he carried a false passport. The military intelligence officers had ordered him to do everything the way a criminal would do it.

He had taken the freighter from Rotterdam to the Port of Algiers, watching his cargo container for the weeklong trip. On the last night out, he had caught a member of the crew sawing off the lock of the container, and had to choke him out and lock him, unconscious, in a storage bay, bound and gagged. For the rest of the trip he had needed to remain awake, crouching near the cargo container, clutching his gun and waiting for the others to find their shipmate and rush him.

When they were in sight of land he changed his plan. He opened the container and loaded the cartons of money into a lifeboat, then lowered the boat and drove it to shore alone. As soon as he hit the beach he hired the driver of a fish factory truck to carry him south, deep into the desert. After that he had begun the long trek east.

He had transported the money across two borders to smuggle it to the prearranged destination. He had paid for rides under canvas tarps in the backs of trucks, and twice stolen cars. In the middle of one night a pair of Algerian soldiers he had hired to drive him came to cut his throat, and he shot them both and drove on without them. When he had arrived at his destination, he set up the first meeting with the middleman, Faris Hamzah, and delivered the money. Then he had waited for the money to do its work. And he waited.

And then, that morning over two months later, when he had seen Faris Hamzah in the backseat of his new car, he had known. The money had not gone to the insurgents waiting in the Nafusa Mountains. The middleman in the city had absorbed it. The United States government had entrusted him with money to be delivered to the rebel army in the field. The fighters were short on food, on weapons and ammunition, and on parts and fuel for the cheap, tough little Japanese pickup trucks they drove through the remote areas where their strongholds were. Faris Hamzah had agreed to deliver it to them, but he had kept the money.

Hamzah’s car was brand-new. It was a white Rolls-Royce Phantom. He didn’t know what they cost, exactly, but he knew it was north of four hundred thousand in Los Angeles or New York. This one had made a much more complicated journey, probably by container ship to Dubai or Riyadh, where there were more people who could afford one, and then somehow transshipped across borders undercover. Ahead of it were two new Range Rovers, and a third came behind. Each of the Range Rovers had five men inside. The men he could see were wearing mismatched pieces of military battle dress. They were all on their way to his secret face-to-face meeting with Faris Hamzah in the empty land outside Hamzah’s home village southeast of Benghazi.

He returned to the rented room where he had hidden his satellite phone. He climbed up on the roof of the building where he could see the streets nearby, and there would be no unseen listeners, and then he called the number that military intelligence had given him. When the voice came on and answered with the proper numeric ID, he said, “Faris Hamzah isn’t passing the money to its intended end user. Right now he’s sitting in the back of a Rolls-Royce and has three Range Rovers full of men who seem to be bodyguards.”

The number on the other end said, “He was chosen very carefully.”

“He’s a thief.”

The number sighed. “Everything we do in these situations is a gamble.”

“I’m supposed to meet with him alone in about two hours,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

“You can meet with him if you want,” said the number.

“I mean, should I try to get back what’s left of the money?”

“If the first thing he bought was three Range Rovers full of armed men, you wouldn’t have much luck. Is there any chance the fifteen men are insurgents?”

“He drove through town with them in brand-new cars.”

“All right. You only gave him twenty million,” the number said.

“We’re letting him keep it?”

“He’ll probably get his name moved to the shit list. This call is timed out. Call in again when you’re out of the country.” The line went dead.

He stood there staring at the phone for a few seconds. Then he realized not that he had already made his decision, but that there was no deciding to do. Then he was in motion.

Over the next few minutes he gathered the few belongings he had acquired, removed the phone’s battery, and put it in his backpack with the rest. As he walked, he searched for a vehicle. He looked for one of the small Japanese pickup trucks like the ones the rebels in the desert used. When he found the right one, he paid the owner in cash, drove it to the police station, and parked it beside the lot where the policemen parked theirs. Then he walked on.

He never wavered, never lost sight of his destination. He thought through the details as he walked through the city. It was hot—terribly hot. But he bought bottled soft drinks from vendors as he went. The bottled water was too easy to refill with polluted tap water. Pepsi-Cola and Dr Pepper were much more expensive, but they were too difficult to counterfeit. He wore a baseball cap to keep himself from being sun blinded, and thought about how odd it was that people in these dreadful remote places all over the world sported caps that said Minnesota Twins and shirts labeled Seattle Mariners under a sun hot enough to suck the moisture from a person’s eyeballs.

When he arrived at Faris Hamzah’s house he had not thought about what would happen next, or who might get hurt. He had not even gotten around to thinking about how he would get out of the country. He had been trained with the expectation that he would do these things himself, making decisions as he came to them. He had gotten in, and so he would get out.

He could see beyond the stuccoed block wall that remodeling had begun at Faris Hamzah’s house. He climbed the wall and dropped to the ground. There were colorful ceramic tiles in stacks waiting to be laid around a new fountain being built between the two scraggly olive trees he had noticed on his first visit. There was a high pile of pale newly milled lumber near the back of the house, probably for the framing of an addition. This was going to be a busy place, but it seemed to be empty of workmen at the moment. He climbed out of the compound.

He didn’t return to the hotel where he had been staying. For the first twenty-four hours he watched Faris Hamzah’s compound. There were still no workmen on the project, but there were armed watchmen around the compound at night. He observed them, and it seemed their job was to guard the growing cache of building materials. Part of the night they sat on the lumber and talked, but nobody walked the perimeter.

The second day he slept in the shade under a disabled truck propped up on blocks outside the bay of a mechanic’s garage. There were about twenty other vehicles of various sorts in some state of disassembly or disrepair around the building. Any passing pedestrians who noticed him apparently assumed he was working on the truck or had taken a break in the shade. In those days he was good at sleeping until a particular sound reached his ears. He didn’t hear it, so he slept about eight hours.

At dusk he crawled out and studied the compound from a distance. This time there were two guards at the gate in the wall, but no guards inside the compound that he could see. He knew Faris Hamzah must have come home. He came closer and saw the three Range Rovers parked outside the wall, and that confirmed it. He went to a smoke shop two blocks away and bought a pack of Gauloises cigarettes and matches.

He had noted many things during the sleepless part of his day. One was that the gas tank of the truck under which he had been sleeping was not empty. The truck had a bent axle and must have been towed to the mechanic’s shop, but that had not emptied the tank. He went to the back of the compound and stole a dozen ten-penny nails, a hammer, and a bucket. He went back to the mechanic’s shop, crawled under the truck, punched a hole in the gas tank, and drained it of a bucket of gasoline, then used the nail as a plug to stop the gas leaking out.

When the night was late and the moon was low, he climbed the back wall of Faris Hamzah’s compound and walked up to the house. He poured gasoline along two sides of the house and had started along the third when he ran out of gasoline. He was careful to keep the entrance and the front door clear, so any people inside could get out.

He left the bucket, but kept the hammer and nails. When he judged the time was right he crouched to move forward and dragged himself under the first Range Rover. He reached up from below, disconnected the battery, and then cut one of the cables. Then he removed the pair of metal jerry cans for extra gasoline mounted on the rear door of each Rover, went under the vehicle, punched a hole in the gas tank, and filled the cans. He repeated the process with the other two Range Rovers. He hid the six twenty-liter cans at the back of Hamzah’s compound.

He retreated, and began to walk through the darkened city. When he reached the police station he got into his white pickup truck, drove it to Hamzah’s neighborhood, and parked it at the rear of his compound with the motor running. He loaded the six gasoline cans from the Range Rovers into the back of his truck.

He walked around the perimeter. When he reached the spot where the Range Rovers were parked he could see that the draining of their tanks was complete. They were sitting in a narrow lake of gasoline that reflected the light of the stars. He climbed the wall and locked the gate from the inside.

He stepped close to the rear of the house, lit a match, and started the first fire, then ran up the woodpile to vault over the wall to his truck. Within seconds the flames were licking up the sides of the house, and then billowing above it, throwing light throughout the compound. Soon he knew the guards had noticed the fire, because they began rattling the gate, then pounding on it, then throwing themselves against it. Finally they began to fire their guns at the lock. That seemed to work, because the shooting stopped and the two men ran inside to wake Faris Hamzah. Chase stood by the wall and waited.

The two guards had awakened the household with their gunfire. There was already a woman in the house screaming and shouting, and in a moment she emerged with two children and an elderly woman. They ran out under the sun roof that provided shade for the doorway during the day, and then out the gate.

Faris Hamzah came out a minute later carrying a sealed cardboard carton. His two guards came out after him, each carrying two more cartons, which they started to carry toward the gate, but Faris Hamzah yelled something in Arabic, and they put them near the woodpile instead. That way they wouldn’t be tempting to neighbors who were attracted by the commotion and the fire. Faris Hamzah ran back inside to get more, and the two guards followed.

Chase recognized those five boxes, because he had packed them in Luxembourg. He took two of them and tossed them over the wall, and then the other three. He emptied the boxes into his truck’s bed, closed them, brought them back into the compound, and placed them where Hamzah’s guards had left them.

This time when Hamzah and his guards returned with five more cartons, they looked relieved and their confidence seemed to have returned. In the darkness, the fire, and the moving shadows, they could see the growing row of cardboard cartons and seemed to think that they had saved all the money. They ran back into the house, whether to save other valuables or to get water to fight the fire, it didn’t matter. For the moment they were gone.

Chase hoisted himself back over the wall, threw the five full boxes over the wall into his truck and climbed after them, then covered the bed with its canvas tarp. He got into the driver’s seat, lit a cigarette, and drove. He swerved close to the three Range Rovers. He stopped, tossed his burning cigarette into the pool of gasoline under the vehicles, and accelerated. In the rearview mirror he could see the fire flare into life, then streak along the row of cars, engulfing them in undulating light and flames twenty-five feet high.

Sometimes when he remembered the night, he imagined that he had seen Hamzah and his guards come out of the house to find that five boxes were empty and five gone, start shouting in amazement and anger, and then run to the gate to see the three vehicles aflame. He actually never saw that happen, because he was too far away by that time, and had already turned the corner at the first street. But his imagination had supplied the details, so they had become part of the story he had told only twice—once to Anna and once to Emily.

Now, as he stared ahead into the darkness of Interstate 89 beyond the range of his headlights, he thought about the time after the escape. He knew his enemies had assumed that when he reached the main highway he would head north for the port. Instead he turned south toward the desert. For the first few hours he was still checking his rearview mirrors every few seconds, pushing the gas pedal for every bit of extra speed. When he was far enough away he stopped on the desert road to secure the loose money under the tarp in the back of the truck by stuffing some into one box that was half-full, and the excess into his backpack and under the seats in the cab. Then he covered the bed again and drove on, going as far as he could while the night lasted.

He stopped again in a lonely spot at midday to fill the pickup’s gas tank with two of the twenty-liter gas cans from the Range Rovers. Then he stopped at a garbage dump at the edge of an oil field and picked up some plastic bags of garbage to cover the cardboard boxes, so he would appear to be on his way to dump the trash.

He drove the next six hundred miles with the garbage in back, left the highway, and crossed into Algeria without seeing a checkpoint, and then made his way to the next paved road by bumping across deserted, rocky country until he felt the smooth pavement. Two days later he traded the truck to a fisherman on a beach in Morocco in exchange for a night trip along the coast to Rabat.

In a week he made the acquaintance of a man who imported hashish to Europe inside the bodies of fish. After another week he and his own boatload of fish made it into Gibraltar with plastic bags of money hidden in the bottoms of the fish crates.

The last call he made to his contact number for the intelligence service was brief. This time it was a female voice that said, “This number has been changed or disconnected. Please check your directory and dial again.”

Tonight, so many years later, his taking back the money seemed like a story someone else had told him. He still saw snatches—the way Faris Hamzah’s house looked in the firelight, the way the headlights of his little pickup truck bounced wildly into the air when he hit a bump, so they were just two beams aimed a little distance into the immensity of the sky, and the world below them was black. But the feelings seemed to belong to someone else, a misguided young man from long ago, his anger and self-righteousness preventing him from seeing clearly. Even the anger, the rage, had become abstract and bloodless. The emotion was simply a fact he acknowledged, a part of the record.

The rest of the record was no better. The Libyan government he had been sent to help topple had lasted another thirty years. Other men who had not yet been born on that night had overthrown it, and then the country had degenerated into anarchy, chaos, and civil war. The humanitarian purpose his mission had been intended to serve was relevant only to a particular, vanished set of circumstances, so irrelevant to the present that it was difficult for even Chase to reconstruct from memory.

He kept on Interstate 89 until he was past Manchester, New Hampshire, then merged onto 93, continued into Massachusetts, and then switched to 95. If he stuck with it, 95 could take him all the way to Florida. But he knew that was a route that carried every sort of traffic, including gunrunners and drug dealers bringing money south and merchandise north. Cops of many agencies were waiting along the way to spot a suspicious vehicle or a wanted license plate. He knew the best thing to do was move onto smaller, slower roads and stay on them as long as he could before he had to sleep.

He coasted off the interstate at a rest stop so he could use the men’s room and let the dogs relieve themselves on the grassy margin off the parking area. He gave them food and water, and when they were ready to climb into the car again, he got back on the road. During their brief stop no other cars parked anywhere near them or even drove past them in the lot. He accelerated to the first exit and took it, so he would be on less-traveled roads as he headed south and west. He made his way to Route 20, which ran east and west across Massachusetts and New York State, and began the long drive through small towns and old rural districts, where there were no manned tollbooths or automatic cameras to take his picture.

In a few days his picture might be on television. He couldn’t afford to be noticed now. Having some dutiful citizen out there who remembered seeing him in a particular location along the way could get him killed later. People had no idea what could happen to a man who had stolen millions of dollars that belonged to the intelligence services of the United States government.

4

He loved the dogs, but he had never allowed their veterinarian to insert ID chips under their skin. He had known that a chip could give a future pursuer one more way to find him. He had been working on ways to improve his odds for a long time. He regretted only that he had not been as rigorous about it for a few years as he had been at first.

When he got into the car around 4:00 a.m. he’d known that his name could no longer be Dan Chase. He decided to become Peter Caldwell, one of the identities he’d planted in his twenties, soon after he returned from North Africa. He had used the name at intervals to keep it current. Buying things and going to hotels and restaurants were what kept credit histories vigorous. From the beginning he had used many ways of planting his aliases in data banks.

He had used information from a death notice in an old newspaper to apply for a replacement birth certificate from the county clerk’s office in the Texas town where one of the real Peter Caldwells was born. He’d used the birth certificate to apply for a driver’s license in Illinois. Then he had opened a bank account, bought magazine subscriptions, joined clubs that mailed him a book a month, ordered mail-order goods by catalog and phone, and paid his bills by check. When he was offered a credit card, he took it and used it. Everything he had done as Daniel Chase, Peter Caldwell, Alan Spencer, or Henry Dixon had been calculated to increase their credit ratings and their limits and make them less vulnerable to challenge.

He had made a few preparations for the moment when his car had only one ride left in it. He had kept caffeine pills under the seat, along with tins of nuts and bottles of water and a contraption that would allow him to urinate into a bottle without stopping the car if he wanted to. None of these preparations was recent, and right now they simply irritated him. He could have done better than this.

By noon the second day he had already changed the license plates on his car. The major police forces all had automatic license plate readers, so he put on the Illinois license plates he had kept in the trunk in case the police were searching for him. On a trip to Illinois he had bought a wrecked car like his at an auction. He had kept the plates and donated the car to a charity. He had known they wouldn’t try to fix the vehicle. The car was too badly damaged to be used for anything but parts.

For years he had maintained identities for his wife, Anna, and his daughter, Emily, as the wife and daughter of each of the three manufactured men. But when Anna died, he kept her identities. He’d told himself it was in case Emily needed to start over sometime, but the truth was that he simply couldn’t bear to destroy them.

For Emily’s protection he had invented separate identities for her when she was still a child. She had gotten married under the false name of Emily Harrison Murray. He had been at her wedding in Hawaii as a guest, and been introduced as Lou Barlow, a cousin of her late mother, Mrs. Murray. Her trust fund had been placed in her own hands when she turned eighteen, and then transferred to her new name, Emily Coleman, after the marriage. She had been walked down the aisle by a favorite professor from college, who had always believed the story that she had been orphaned in a car accident. She was living on the proceeds of a trust fund, wasn’t she?

From the time she left home for college until yesterday he had bought six new burner cell phones once a month, and mailed her three. In the memory of each was another’s number. The day after her boyfriend, Paul, proposed marriage, she told him her father existed. She also told Paul he was still welcome to withdraw his proposal, but whether he married her or not he had to keep her secret.

A bit after dark the night of the wedding he had met Paul. While the reception was going on inside the mansion they had rented for the wedding, Emily had conducted her new husband into the back garden. He and Paul had taken measure of each other that night. He had reassured himself that Emily had chosen a man who would die rather than betray her secrets. And Paul had seen that his father-in-law was the sort of man who was capable of holding him to it. He had been glad for Emily that Paul was intelligent and good-looking. He had been a swimmer in college, tall and lean, with an intense set of eyes. He had been a good husband to Emily so far.

Dave and Carol began to stir in the backseat again. He looked in the rearview mirror for a long time before he was sure nobody was following closely enough to be a problem, and then turned off onto a rural road and let the dogs out to explore a field for good spots to relieve themselves. Then he fed them again. When they were finished eating and drinking, he and the dogs got back in and moved ahead. He had driven the full stretch of daylight, and now it was dark again. The night felt friendly, but he knew he was only feeling the afterglow of having won the first fight. When this night was used up, most of the benefit of that victory would be too, so he kept pushing himself, putting more distance between him and Norwich, Vermont. He fought the increasing weight of his fatigue, keeping himself awake by will alone.

It was already late when he noticed the pair of headlights that wouldn’t go away. He had not seen a persistent follower during the day, or these headlights earlier in the night, and now he was at least four hundred miles from Norwich, Vermont. To Peter Caldwell that meant that the follower must have tracked him using a global positioning system, and then slowly narrowed the distance between them. And the only reason he could think of for a chaser to follow so closely was to get eyes on him before making another attempt to kill him.

Caldwell glanced in the mirror at Dave and Carol. They were sleeping peacefully on the backseat, their barrel chests rising and falling in long, slow breaths. He was going to have to do something, and he knew it would be better for them if he did it while the world was still dark, and their black fur might give them a better chance to survive.

He reached under the seat and retrieved his pistol, ejected the magazine to be sure it was full, pushed it back in, and stuck the weapon in his belt, and then he felt for the spare magazine. The weight told him it was full. He kept going at the same speed for a few more minutes, until he saw a group of rectangular buildings ahead. As he drew closer he could read the green letters at the top of the nearest one, which said hotel. He supposed he must be approaching Buffalo, or at least its airport. When he reached the driveway leading to the building he swung abruptly into it and saw days hotel flash above him as he went past the sign.

Dave and Carol slid a little and then sat up, always interested in any change. He said quietly, “Hello, my friends. Everything is going to be all right.” He knew that they would determine the opposite from the tone of his voice or the smell of his sweat now that his heartbeat and respiration had accelerated.

He watched the headlights a quarter mile behind dip slightly as the follower applied his brakes, and noted that the driver was one of those who didn’t coast much, but instead always had his foot on the gas or the brake trying to exert control. The man probably oversteered too. Caldwell wasn’t sure if the information would be useful or not. In the long run those habits burned a lot of gas. But if the driver was following him by GPS that didn’t matter, because he could always stop at a gas station and catch up with Caldwell later.

Caldwell took the next turn into the semicircular drive toward the hotel entrance, but then kept driving past it to move around to the back of the building. He turned off his headlights as soon as he was around the first corner and drove up the outer row of cars parked in the lot. He turned into the first empty space and stopped, so his brake lights didn’t show for more than a second, and turned off the engine. He turned off the car’s dome lights, pulled out the pistol, and ducked down.

The pursuing car came off the highway and disappeared toward the front of the building. Caldwell could see it was a black sedan, probably a Town Car. When it was no longer visible, he opened his door and the back door to let the dogs out. The dogs ran across the lane to the bushes. He lay down beside his car and used his cell phone’s screen as a flashlight to look at the undercarriage.

He saw the transponder, a small black box stuck to the underside of the battery mount with a pair of wires taped to the leads of his battery. He reached up and tore it out, and then stayed low to move away from his car. The first vehicle he saw was the hotel’s shuttle bus. He crawled under it and attached the transponder to the battery of the bus the same way it had been attached to his car.