The Old Man(42)
She had surprised him when she insisted on coming with him. Running away with a man marked for death was insane. He’d admitted he had been manipulating her, but she acted as though she had given her permission, or even known all along, and found it pleasant. He had tried to persuade her to leave him, and she wouldn’t. And if she secretly wanted revenge, circumstances had given her a hundred chances to turn him in, run off with his car, his money, his guns, or do whatever else that would cripple his chance of survival. She had done nothing but try to help him.
He knew that at some point he was going to have to part with her. For now, he still wanted the protective camouflage provided by traveling with a woman who appeared to be his wife. She had offered to be useful, and he would continue to accept her help, but she was more complicated than he had thought, and less predictable. During the months while he had used familiarity and charm to allay her suspicions and penetrate her defenses, she had done the same to his. He had to maintain an emotional distance, and keep himself separate from her.
He took detours that kept them off the interstates and toll roads, where there might be cameras at tollbooths and entrances. Between hotels they paid cash for most of the things they bought. Once, they rented a cottage at a remote lake in Minnesota for two weeks. He gave false names and paid the owner cash in advance. They spent the week hiking and paddling the kayaks that came with the place, and cooking their dinners over a wood fire in the stone fire pit by the shore. At the end of the second week he made sure they had cleaned the cottage, wiped away fingerprints, and returned the keys to the owner before they drove on.
As she watched the telephone poles going by beside the road Marcia seemed quieter and more contemplative than usual.
“Something wrong?” Hank said.
“I was thinking. That’s all.”
“It doesn’t seem to be making you happy. I plan to avoid it.”
“We just put fourteen days on the good side. We were happy and got lots of sun and exercise and ate healthy food. Nobody saw the car or our faces. Then I remembered that fourteen days isn’t that much. They found you after thirty-five years.”
“I doubt that they looked for thirty-five years. They might have searched hard for a couple of years. It would have been a quiet search, because they wouldn’t want to explain to a US attorney what I had done, or admit they were conducting operations in this country. After that I might have been on a list. Something happened this year to make me a priority.”
“What would it be?”
“At the beginning, my biggest mistake was to come home with the money. That proved that the people inside intelligence who had decided to cut me loose and let me die had given up too easily. Welcoming me home would have made them look bad. So they made up a better story—that I had been in it to steal the money, and had killed some people doing it.”
“That’s all they wanted to accomplish—just to not look bad?”
“I think that it’s also possible one of them was a strategist—that he knew even then that twenty million dollars in the context of the Middle East was going to be nothing. In the end, twenty billion was nothing. What they needed was friends, allies, operatives, and agents there. It’s even possible they knew before they sent me that Faris Hamzah would keep the money. They just didn’t tell me. Either way, by making it home I put everybody in a bad position.”
“Who was everybody?”
“Numbers. Voices on the phone. I never knew names, and what’s going on now can’t be about them anymore. Something new has happened.”
“Do you have any idea what?”
“Somebody has learned the story of what happened thirty-five years ago, and they want it to end differently.”
Hank Dixon moved them from place to place, making the time go by pleasantly and without exposing them to much risk. Then they reached a hotel in Spokane, Washington, that seemed to cater almost entirely to businesspeople. Most of the guests were out of the hotel during business hours, and many of them were out again in the evening, probably taking clients and prospects out to dinner. This gave Hank and Marcia a long period of time to use the pool and the gym without having many people notice them.
When they returned to their room, Hank went to work on his laptop computer, as usual. He looked for any reference to the events they had experienced—the shooting at Daniel Chase’s house and his disappearance, the two men he had shot near Buffalo, the two dead men in the Chicago apartment of Zoe McDonald, and her disappearance. There was nothing in any of the papers to indicate that any of it had ever happened.
“Any news?” Marcia asked.
“Not that I can see,” he said.
“I can’t believe this,” she said. “I was kidnapped out of my apartment. An unknown man tied me up, threw me over his shoulder, and drove me away, and there’s not a word of it anywhere.”
“It’s not exactly unbelievable,” he said. “There must have been agents on the scene right away, before the police. They probably made everything look as though nothing had happened, and cleaned everything up. In these operations, if the police get there and see anything, two federal agents show up at the local police station and say whatever happened is part of an ongoing federal investigation involving national security. If the papers don’t already have the story, they don’t get it. If they have the story, they’re asked not to print it.”