The Old Man(43)

After a few more minutes, Marcia went to take a shower. He kept searching the papers. After another hour, he saw the personal ad in the Chicago Tribune. It said: “Mr. Caldwell. We’ve decided to take you up on your offer. Send your instructions to Post Office Box 39281, Washington, DC 20003. J. H.”

James Harriman was the young man he had asked to convey his offer, and here was the reply.

He turned off the laptop and said to Marcia, “I’m going out for a walk. No need to get dressed again.”

His walk to ok him through the downtown district. As he walked, he considered. Nobody in any intelligence organization had any particular attachment to the truth. The truth was just one of many versions that was not necessarily superior to any of the other versions.

If he showed up at a prearranged meeting with the money, they’d see it as a chance to end things neatly. He and the money would disappear. But if he devised ways of making it harder for them, they might see this as a time to take what they could get, and move on to the next project. They would keep their word only if they had no power to do anything else.

What he would have to do now was attend to the details. If he was going to do this, he would have to devise a safe way to respond to the ad so they couldn’t trace his communication. He would have to find a way to raise the twenty million dollars without revealing where it had come from—which banks and brokerages, in which accounts, under what names. Then he would have to find a way to return it to them without being ambushed.

He began to try out ideas. He could try to get the money in cash, put it in trash bags, and tell them where it was.

He had tried that thirty-five years ago. That much cash had filled ten large cardboard boxes. That would be as many as twenty trash bags. It was easier to obtain cash in those days, too. Now they’d trace the serial numbers to the Federal Reserve District where the bills were released, and then to each of the bank branches. Any cash transaction involving ten thousand dollars or more had to be reported to the government. And bundling a lot of smaller amounts would be even worse. The government would pick that up and jump on it even faster, because it was the way money launderers tried to avoid getting spotted. Maybe using cash had become impossible.

As Dixon returned to the hotel, he kept thinking of ways to give the money to the government without giving them the ability to trace it back to its sources. One way was gold. Melting it wouldn’t change it. If he had a pile of gold—say, gold one-ounce coins, he could melt them and make the gold into bars with no markings. If he did that they wouldn’t know where the gold came from, at least at first.

But even if he bought the gold from a foreign source that didn’t report gold transactions to the US government, he would have a hard time collecting that much gold without getting noticed. Keeping the purchase a secret would only be temporary. Eventually the transaction would be traced to a bank account, even without the cooperation of the dealer. But it might buy him some time.

“Let’s see what the price is today,” he whispered to himself, turned on his laptop again, and typed in “price of gold today.” It was $1,203.00 an ounce.

He used the calculator on his computer. He rounded the price off to $1,200. Twenty million dollars would buy 16,667 ounces. That was about a thousand pounds of gold. He could try to buy a hoard of gold from various sources, put it in a vault somewhere, and send military intelligence the key. But buying that much gold would take time, and there were too many ways to get caught.

He wondered about diamonds. But he knew there was a huge markup on jewelry, and he could hardly deal with well-known, respectable jewelers and expect to be anonymous. He couldn’t work with dealers who weren’t well known and respectable, either. He wouldn’t have a clue what he was buying. He could pay twenty million dollars for a few pieces of glass.

Maybe the answer was to give the government the twenty million in a form that couldn’t be moved. He could send them the deed to a twenty-million-dollar piece of land. But buying land took time, and it would require bank information and in-person signings and escrow periods.

The next afternoon the Dixons moved on and checked in to a Seattle hotel, and Hank decided to test an idea. He turned on his computer, and after a few minutes of typing numbers and passwords he began to hum to himself.

Marcia said, “Do you mind if I go down to the pool for a swim?”

“No,” he said. He kept typing. “Feel free.”

After a few minutes he heard her say bye, go out, and shut the door.

He had been right. It was impossible. Giving the government twenty million dollars in any form couldn’t be done without blowing his identity and leading them straight to him. He couldn’t move that kind of money in a hurry anymore without the government finding out who was doing it.

Then he tried getting online access to some investment accounts, and a solution occurred to him—to accept what he couldn’t change. The government would learn the name of the person who owned the accounts, and the person who performed the transactions. So he would give them information they already knew. The intelligence people already knew that he had once been Daniel Chase and they knew he had once been Peter Caldwell.

The accounts he held in those two names were still open and active. Military intel knew the names, but the government hadn’t yet confiscated the money he had invested in those names. Maybe they assumed that for the past thirty-five years he’d been keeping it in cash under the floorboards, or in numbered offshore accounts. More likely, they didn’t want to let the federal agencies that blocked financial transactions know about him—the Justice Department, the SEC, the FBI, the IRS. For now, the bank and brokerage accounts of Daniel Chase and Peter Caldwell seemed intact.