The Old Man(32)

“Please, Zoe. I’m trying to save your life. As soon as we’re away from here I’ll tell you everything, and answer any question you can think of. But the danger isn’t over. It’s coming closer and closer.”

“Go if you want, but I can’t be part of this. And in about two minutes I’m calling the police.”

He picked up the pistol she had left untouched on the bed, and pocketed it. He went into his bedroom, put a few things in his coat pockets—wallet, keys, pocketknife—and returned to Zoe’s room.

She was standing now, facing the window. She shook, as though she was sobbing, but he couldn’t hear her, and in the dark he couldn’t be sure. As he approached, she started to spin to face him.

The duct tape was already in his hands. He wrapped the first strip over her mouth and around to the back of her head. As her hands came up to tear it away he spun her around again so she couldn’t face him, threw her down on the bed, wrenched her wrists around behind her, and wrapped them with duct tape too. He continued the tape upward to her elbows, so she had no hope of wrenching her hands free. She rolled to try to kick him away.

Caldwell put his arm around both legs and stepped down to her ankles, wrapped them around and around with duct tape, then put the rest of the roll in his topcoat pocket. He took her bag. “Others will be here soon. I had hoped you’d cooperate, but either way I can’t leave you here to die.”

He lifted her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and hurried to the door. The dogs ran ahead of him to the back stairway and down to the ground. They went immediately to the young man propped up against the tree, sniffed at him a little, and returned to Caldwell.

He put Zoe in the passenger seat of the car and secured her there with the seat belt. He opened the back door of the car and the dogs jumped up onto the seat. Then he got in, started the car, and drove. When he reached the street, he did not pause to watch for approaching cars. Their headlights would have lit up the block, and stopping for them would have been more dangerous than pulling out in front of them. He accelerated up the street before he turned his headlights on.

Caldwell stared into the rearview mirror watching for a car to appear from around a corner, or to pull out from the curb and follow. But nothing moved. As long as he could, he kept glancing in the mirrors at the long gray strip of pavement, as straight as a surveyor could make it, with pools of light from streetlamps stretching back hundreds of yards. When he came to the turn, he took it, and headed south along streets that were deserted at this time of night.

After a few minutes he pulled into a driveway, then quickly turned up a narrow alley behind a row of buildings. They were all old, redbrick structures that seemed to date back to the building boom after the Great Chicago Fire. When he neared the end of the block he stopped the car.

He reached for the tape at Zoe’s mouth. She tried to lean away, but the seat belt held her. He peeled the tape off her mouth, and he could tell from her expression he was hurting her. “You kidnapped me,” she said. “Are you going to kill me now?”

“No,” he said. “I’ve only bought us a few minutes, and I’m not going to waste one of them killing you. I’m going to tell you what’s happening. About thirty-five years ago I worked for army intelligence. I was assigned to smuggle twenty million dollars to a man in Libya who was supposed to deliver the money to rebel guerrillas trying to overthrow the government. Instead the middleman kept it. He bought fancy cars, started building a big house, and hired bodyguards. The guerrillas in the mountains ran out of supplies and ammunition, starved, and got killed or captured.”

“Peter, I just saw the men you shot to death. You tied me up and abducted me. How can any lie you dream up make any difference to me?”

Caldwell kept talking. “I recovered what was left of the money from the middleman. Instead of helping me get back to the US with it, my supervisors cut off my communication and left me to be caught and tortured to death. I brought the money home by myself. When I tried to turn it in, I learned they’d already declared me a thief and a murderer.”

“Why would they do that? And what has this got to do with anything?”

“They may have been saving themselves from the blame for a failure. They may have felt that the man who had tried to keep the money was more valuable to national security than I was. It doesn’t matter now. Even though I hurt nobody in getting the money back, the official story was that I had murdered Libyans to steal money that was vital to an American operation. Once they were after me, I felt that all I could do was run.”

“For all this time? Over thirty years?”

He shrugged. “Once you run there isn’t any possibility of not running. I was careful, and lived a quiet life. They found me in Vermont last winter. Instead of arresting me they sent a shooter to kill me. The dogs heard him, or smelled him, just the way they did tonight. So here I am. The people who sent me to Libya were all much older than I was thirty-five years ago. Even if I’d known their names, by now they’re all retired or dead. The people who are after me now have no reason to ever stop. The record, if there is one, can never be corrected because the people who wrote it are long gone. It’s fossilized.”

“You must think I’m really stupid to try to make me believe this stuff.”

“You saw those two men in our apartment,” he said. “Did you invite them?”