The Old Man(13)
He was going to settle somewhere. Traveling gave too many people a chance to notice him. And since the last time he had needed to disappear, a hundred new layers of danger had been added. The last time, right after he had returned from North Africa, technology had been more primitive.
When he got home from Libya he wrote a letter to his section of military intelligence. He told them he had made it home with the money he had recovered from Faris Hamzah. He included a few facts that an outsider could not have known, to prove he wasn’t a fake. He asked them to reactivate the phone contact number so he could make arrangements to deliver the money to his section.
He had felt wary and very angry. He had not liked the way his contact people had treated him near the end of his mission. They had abandoned a comrade behind enemy lines. But he had also ignored his orders, so he was prepared for some kind of unpleasant reaction. He rented a small retail space in a Virginia shopping center and placed the money there before he mailed his letter to Fort Meade. He suspected that the minute he had given them a location they would put it under surveillance, so he didn’t mention one.
On the day he had set for the delivery, he made a call to the contact number from a pay phone a hundred miles away. He never heard the ring, just heard the faint hiss of an open line and a male voice that said, “Hello.”
He said, “Hello. Thank you for activating the number. I’m calling to turn the money from my mission over to army intelligence. I just need—”
“I advise you to be quiet and listen carefully. You are wanted for a number of serious offenses, and the United States government doesn’t bargain with fugitives. There will be a team of federal officers for you to surrender yourself to at the rendezvous point. You will be taken into custody and transported to a secure facility where you can be interviewed regarding events that occurred during the past five months. You will be given ample opportunity to explain anything you like. Is this all clear?”
“I haven’t done anything wrong. I just want to finish my mission and—”
“Quiet.”
“Get the money back where it belongs.”
“Here are your instructions. Proceed to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center at 8901 Rockville Pike in Bethesda. Park your vehicle, and walk to the front entrance. Step inside, and they’ll be waiting for you. Do you understand?”
He hung up the phone. Two weeks later he parked behind the retail space he had rented, picked up the boxes of money, and drove away. He used some of the cash to live for the next few months while he worked on the first fake identities he built. It was easy for him to earn a license to work as a truck driver under the name Daniel Chase, because he had learned to drive a semi in the army, while he was training in false identities. The work kept him moving, mostly at night, and gave him plenty of time to think.
Each step led to the next steps, and each deception was easier because he had performed the last one and had begun to understand how various bureaucracies worked. Birth certificates led to Social Security numbers and then to driver’s licenses, and then to bank accounts and credit cards. Eventually even passports became possible because he could submit the supporting documents by mail.
He stayed angry, but it was about a year before he gave up trying to devise schemes for returning the money that would restore his reputation. He knew he could simply mail the boxes of money to Fort Meade, but that wasn’t going to exonerate him. He had hauled the money to Libya and done his best to complete a dangerous mission, and when he had finished, his own superiors had abandoned him and then decided to treat him like a criminal.
He began to invest the money. He would deposit small sums in cash in his bank accounts in various names, then write checks to financial services companies—brokers, mutual funds, and later hedge funds. Once he got started, the whole process became almost automatic. Money deposited or invested became more money, and produced the impression of solidity. Time made new money into old money, and old money into wealth.
It took him seven years to get all of the money out of boxes and invested with financial institutions under various false names. At the end of each year he would have his four accountants prepare tax returns for Dixon and Chase and Caldwell and Spencer, then mail them to a fictitious lawyer who was just a mailing address. He took advantage of legitimate deductions, but always paid the taxes without making questionable claims or forgetting to report income. For over thirty years, he had managed to elude the people who were looking for him. But over the years, one after another of the methods he had used became obsolete. If he’d had to start again now, he had no idea whether he could do it or not.
Caldwell needed to go under the surface as soon as possible. The least troublesome way would be to reach Chicago and stop. It was only about a day away. The Peter Caldwell identity included an Illinois driver’s license and a few other bits of identification that he had acquired to pad his wallet—a Chicago library card, a gym membership. On paper he looked like a longtime Chicago resident.
When he reached the city he checked in to a hotel, bought a laptop computer, and began to look for the right apartment. He decided the place should be at least modestly upscale, because police spent less time in affluent places and were less aggressive and suspicious when they were there.
He knew what he was looking for, but he would have to search in the right places in the right way. He started in the northern suburbs—Lake Forest, Kenilworth, Barrington Hills, Winnetka, Glencoe, Wilmette. Houses in the northern suburbs were too expensive to buy invisibly, and there were too few apartments. The southern suburbs were closer to the thing he was looking for, and he looked on Craigslist and found a promising place in Geneva.