The Old Man(47)

Carson said, “Nobody told me that.”

“Then maybe you weren’t supposed to leave either,” said Waters.

Harper’s cell phone rang and he clapped it to his ear. “Harper.” He listened. His eyes widened and then his jaw muscles began to work. He slowly turned his head to look at Julian Carson, but when he saw that Carson was looking at him he looked down at the floor. “Carson just arrived,” he said. “Yes, sir, we’ll do that.” He listened for a second and then put away his phone.

He muttered something to Waters, and Waters nodded and walked away. Harper picked up the newspapers on the table and began putting them in order and folding them neatly. It looked as though Waters was walking to the back of the hangar.

Harper looked up, put the papers in a pile, and said, “They want to debrief you before we wrap it up here.”

“All right,” said Julian. “I’m not doing anything else. It’s hard to get a date on short notice.”

“Well that’s fortunate,” said Harper. “They want us to wait in the office until they get here.”

Julian caught a movement in the periphery of his vision. Waters had opened the passenger door of one of the police cars. He took something off the seat and stood behind the car door holding whatever it was, but Julian couldn’t see it. Julian said, “What have you got in your hand?”

“Just cleaning up,” Waters said. “Putting away the toys.” He held up a short, black MP5 like the ones the UPS men had carried in their truck. “We can’t leave the equipment lying around unsecured.”

Did they think he would try to escape this meeting? It made him wonder if he should do it. No, he decided. Do your job and the worst you’ll get afterward is criticism.

“I’ll give you a hand,” he said.

“No, thanks,” said Waters. “I signed it out and I have to sign it in.” Waters didn’t move, but he ejected the magazine from the compact automatic rifle.

Carson walked toward the office doorway where Harper waited for him. They entered a room about fifteen feet square with two gray steel military-style desks and a swaybacked leather couch about ten feet long. There was only one door and no windows. The walls were covered with cheap wood-like paneling that had no pictures or decorations of any kind. Harper sat at the farthest steel desk and Julian sat on the couch. “What is this place?”

Harper said, “I don’t really know. I think I heard it was shipping and receiving for an import-export company that was off the books. No telling how long ago that was, because I’ve been here three times now, over a period of about twenty years.”

Julian didn’t ask about the other times. He didn’t want to listen to Harper’s story, and he had grown accustomed to the safe policy of not asking questions. Everything was classified. Everything was need to know. He didn’t need to know about some shit that happened twenty years ago.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, and Julian watched with satisfaction as Harper began to get restless.

Julian swung his feet up and reclined on the big couch, cradling his head in his hands and looking at the ceiling. He closed his eyes and sighed in comfort just loudly enough for Harper to hear. He thought through everything he had seen this afternoon. For these people a plan was never just a plan, something that everybody on the job knew and followed. There was always a plan within the plan, and probably one or two inside those, like layers of an onion.

He had been assigned to meet with the old man and accept his money. He had known where to go, and known there would be a UPS truck parked around the corner big enough to carry twenty million dollars in whatever form it came. If the meeting went badly, they could carry the old man’s wounded or dead body instead—or Julian’s.

But that hadn’t been the plan, really. That was just the outer layer. He wasn’t exactly sure what happened to the other parts of the plan, but there seemed to have been a screwup. Julian thought it over again. Whatever else had happened, he had done his job. Because he had shown up and risked his life, the money had been wired back to the government. He had gone to the UPS truck as scheduled, and been taken off. Those were the facts that mattered—his facts.

Harper’s phone rang. He said, “Yes?” Then after a couple of seconds he put the phone into his pocket. “They’re here.”

Julian Carson sat up slowly, swung his legs off the couch to the floor, and sat up straight. After another thirty seconds the door opened and admitted three men to the room. The two senior agents who had never been introduced to Carson sat behind the unoccupied desk and Waters sat beside Harper on the other.

The gray-haired man who seemed to be the ranking agent said, “Well, Carson. We implemented your suggestion. What did we get?”

“The old man showed up. He told me that he had sent the twenty million dollars to the government.”

“We didn’t see any money. He screwed you.”

“He said he had arranged an electronic transfer to the United States Treasury.”

The agent’s eyes narrowed and he sat in silence for a moment. Then he took out a cell phone and hit a programmed number with his thumb. He said, “Our operator says the subject wired twenty million dollars to the US Treasury.” He listened. “Yeah. Just like a tax payment. Check it out.” He looked at Julian Carson. “For the moment, all we’ve got is what he told you. Suppose it turns out to be true. What then?”