The Old Man(5)

“What bullshit. Nobody who loves anybody is ever free from anything.”

“I meant you to be.”

“I know you did. So now I have more money than a princess, only I’m still afraid to spend it, and my father is on a cell phone on a highway bullshitting me because he thinks he might not get to talk to me again.”

“It probably won’t be that bad.”

“I hope not. But don’t take any chances. If you have to, you can rent a motel room and leave the dogs in it, and I’ll be there to pick them up as soon as a human being can take a plane there. If you’re with them, I’ll take all three of you.”

“I’ve never doubted it,” he said. He drove in silence for a few seconds.

“You’re awfully quiet,” she said.

“I’m really sorry.”

“I get that,” she said. “I’ve always gotten that.”

“It doesn’t hurt to repeat it.”

“Yes it does. It all hurts.”

“I guess you’ve got to get ready for work, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I love you.”

“Obviously. And I love you. Call when you can.”

He slipped the phone into his pocket and kept driving. As he drove, he listened to the deep, nasal snores of Dave and Carol, who were asleep together on the backseat.





3


Once a man has stolen something he is a thief. If what he stole is big enough, then always and forever, no matter what else he’s done, he will always be a thief.

Again, for the ten thousandth time, he remembered standing in the North African sun, on the powdery dust of the road that ran along the desert’s edge. He had just seen the car go by on its way from the office in the city to the place he had designated as the spot for the meeting he had demanded. At that moment, he could still have walked away. But if he kept going toward the meeting, he would die. He knew it would be a quiet death, not disturbing things on the surface. It would be so quiet it would seem civilized.

As Chase looked back on the day now, he could see it in its sun-bleached clarity. His first sin came right then. It was anger. He had risked his life bringing the shipment of money to Libya from the bank in Luxembourg. In order to preserve deniability he had been discharged from the army months earlier and moved into a civilian special ops status that left no records, and he carried a false passport. The military intelligence officers had ordered him to do everything the way a criminal would do it.

He had taken the freighter from Rotterdam to the Port of Algiers, watching his cargo container for the weeklong trip. On the last night out, he had caught a member of the crew sawing off the lock of the container, and had to choke him out and lock him, unconscious, in a storage bay, bound and gagged. For the rest of the trip he had needed to remain awake, crouching near the cargo container, clutching his gun and waiting for the others to find their shipmate and rush him.

When they were in sight of land he changed his plan. He opened the container and loaded the cartons of money into a lifeboat, then lowered the boat and drove it to shore alone. As soon as he hit the beach he hired the driver of a fish factory truck to carry him south, deep into the desert. After that he had begun the long trek east.

He had transported the money across two borders to smuggle it to the prearranged destination. He had paid for rides under canvas tarps in the backs of trucks, and twice stolen cars. In the middle of one night a pair of Algerian soldiers he had hired to drive him came to cut his throat, and he shot them both and drove on without them. When he had arrived at his destination, he set up the first meeting with the middleman, Faris Hamzah, and delivered the money. Then he had waited for the money to do its work. And he waited.

And then, that morning over two months later, when he had seen Faris Hamzah in the backseat of his new car, he had known. The money had not gone to the insurgents waiting in the Nafusa Mountains. The middleman in the city had absorbed it. The United States government had entrusted him with money to be delivered to the rebel army in the field. The fighters were short on food, on weapons and ammunition, and on parts and fuel for the cheap, tough little Japanese pickup trucks they drove through the remote areas where their strongholds were. Faris Hamzah had agreed to deliver it to them, but he had kept the money.

Hamzah’s car was brand-new. It was a white Rolls-Royce Phantom. He didn’t know what they cost, exactly, but he knew it was north of four hundred thousand in Los Angeles or New York. This one had made a much more complicated journey, probably by container ship to Dubai or Riyadh, where there were more people who could afford one, and then somehow transshipped across borders undercover. Ahead of it were two new Range Rovers, and a third came behind. Each of the Range Rovers had five men inside. The men he could see were wearing mismatched pieces of military battle dress. They were all on their way to his secret face-to-face meeting with Faris Hamzah in the empty land outside Hamzah’s home village southeast of Benghazi.

He returned to the rented room where he had hidden his satellite phone. He climbed up on the roof of the building where he could see the streets nearby, and there would be no unseen listeners, and then he called the number that military intelligence had given him. When the voice came on and answered with the proper numeric ID, he said, “Faris Hamzah isn’t passing the money to its intended end user. Right now he’s sitting in the back of a Rolls-Royce and has three Range Rovers full of men who seem to be bodyguards.”