The Old Man(37)

“I know,” he said. “I gave her every chance, but she didn’t.”

Henry Dixon opened the back door of Emily’s Volvo. He patted the backseat and said, “Carol. Dave.” The two dogs jumped up on the seat. He held Carol’s face up to his so they were nose to nose, breathing the same air. “Good girl.” He held Dave’s face up to his the same way. “Good boy.” Then he muttered, “That’s all there is to say.” He took the biscuits he always carried in his pants pocket and gave all of them to the dogs, and then shut the door.

He hugged the boys and watched their mother put them in the car. “Sit up here with me,” she said to the older one. “And give your brother a chance to be with the dogs until the first stop. Then you switch.”

She took a last look at her father, started the car, and pulled up the incline to the edge of the highway. She let a car go by and then turned left to get back to the entrance to Interstate 87 south toward New York City.

Marcia and Henry Dixon stood beside the BMW, watching them go, and then staring after them at the empty, darkening stretch of road. Marcia turned to him. “I thought she’d be like that.”

“Like what?”

“The looks, the voice. The way she is with you and the boys. Whatever gigantic screwups you’ve done in your life, you seem to have done at least one perfect thing.”

“Thanks.” They got into the BMW.

She said, “Should we think about hamburgers and a motel, or would you rather put some miles behind us first?”

“I’m ready to stop for the night.”

“Is it safe to stop around here?”

“The opposition is looking for an old guy with two dogs about nine hundred miles west of here. Lake George is a tourist area, so we’ll be tourists. The season is about over, so we shouldn’t have trouble finding a good hotel here.”

“What is the opposition thinking about me?”

“There will be some who think that I murdered you. They’ll be looking for a body in an Illinois cornfield. Others will think I kept you alive so I can use you as a hostage. If there are any conspiracy theorists in on it, they will have found out your mother was a Russian defector, and they’ll be all agitated about that.”

“So we’re safe here for the moment?”

“As safe as we’d be anywhere.”

They drove around the lakeshore until they came to a hotel that looked bigger and fancier than the others. It was called the Georgian. Marcia went inside to the desk and checked them in, while Henry parked the car.

They went to their room, showered, changed into clean clothes they had bought during the long drive to upstate New York, went to the hotel restaurant for dinner, and then ordered after-dinner cognac.

When they were back in their room they made love for the first time since their escape from Chicago. It was a long, unhurried encounter, an unspoken decision to celebrate the first time they were alone and not evading unseen pursuers on a highway. Afterward they lay together on the bed, their bodies still touching.

“That was why,” she said.

“Why what?”

“Why I couldn’t behave like a sensible adult and get out of your car the other day. I realized that what I really wanted was to live the rest of my life like this.”

“I’m flattered,” he said. “But it wasn’t a smart idea.”

“No need to feel flattered. It wasn’t actually about you. It was about me. One reason the first part of my life was a disaster was because I was too passive. I waited for things to happen to me. I danced with the one who asked me, and I stayed until he dropped me. No good. But I guess it made me ready for you. I wanted you, and I did the things I thought you would like a woman to do. Until recently I wouldn’t have done that. I seduced you. I’ve been proud of myself since then. And when I had time to see that you really did have to go on the run, I realized I had options. My kids are adults. Nobody depends on me anymore. I can do what I want. Was I going to throw my new life away so I could spend the next thirty years dusting that apartment in Chicago?”

“I want to talk you out of this,” he said. “I should, but I’m not in the mood right now.”

“You can’t. What you can do is try to keep us both alive as long as you can. That seems to be what you’re really good at.”





14


Julian Carson wasn’t allowed into the meeting. This kind of meeting was far above his pay grade. He sat in a booth at the back of the bar at the Intercontinental Hotel on Michigan Avenue drinking coffee and watching the bar traffic. Nobody was likely to pay much attention to a young black man wearing a conservative suit, sitting by himself and communicating only with the cell phone on the table in front of him, so he supposed he was the man for the job.

Of course they hadn’t brought him in. He wasn’t even an agent. He was a special ops contractor. That meant that he had no title, no rank. He got paid only when he was actually working, a fee for his services, paid once a month through an electronic transfer into his checking account. At first it had been interesting to see the names of the entities that paid him—companies that sounded familiar, universities, city governments, a hospital. But whenever he checked the names online, they always turned out to have no existence outside their bank accounts.