The Old Man(65)

“How did you figure that out?” Julian was buying time, because he felt sick to his stomach.

“If you look at enough facts in enough different ways, you’ll find things that stand out. And we have everything.”

“I know,” Julian said. “But this guy makes no phone calls, makes very few purchases that aren’t cash, and barely shows his face.”

“But that’s now.”

“Yes,” said Julian. “That’s now. We’re looking for him now.”

“It wasn’t always now. He wasn’t always running under such pressure. He used to make phone calls. He used to use credit cards, own a house, move money around in bank accounts, and so on.”

“So what?”

“Nothing goes away. Every phone call he made five years ago, every purchase he made on a credit card or a debit card, it’s all recorded and stored. Nobody looks at it until we have a reason to. We had the name Peter Caldwell, the name he used last year. And we had the name Daniel Chase, the man he was for at least twenty years before then.”

“What led you to him?”

“It doesn’t really matter which line of inquiry pays off first, because that’s only a matter of chance. Eventually everything will work, because each thing you try eliminates people. If he only drinks single malt scotch and only uses horseradish mustard, we can eliminate hundreds of millions of people who don’t like both of those things. If we notice somebody has an idiomatic pronunciation of a particular word, we can search our archive of phone calls for instances of that pronunciation of that word.”

“But what was his mistake?”

“No mistake,” said Goddard. “The method doesn’t require a mistake. It just requires that one person be different from another. And we all are.”

“I understand what you’re saying,” said Julian. “All I’m asking is which it was this time.”

“When the old man gave the Treasury Department twenty million dollars, he was being smart by transferring the money from the accounts of the two aliases military intelligence already knew. He realized he had nothing to lose because the names were already blown. And he was too smart to have transferred or paid any of the money to his next alias. We also noticed that the accounts in the two names Daniel Chase and Peter Caldwell had never been mingled before. All very smart.”

“But?”

“But the root accounts were started at about the same time, and built up in the same way, beginning with small cash deposits. Because he hadn’t used either name since he made the Treasury payment, we concluded that he must have one more identity, probably begun about the same time as the others.”

“And you found another account like the first two.”

“Yes,” said Goddard. “Here.” He handed Julian a piece of paper with a name and address typed on it.

“Henry Dixon,” said Julian.

“And Marcia Dixon,” said Goddard. “Judging from their purchases, he and the woman from Chicago are still together.”

“Thanks very much for your work.”

“Don’t mention it,” said Goddard. “Now comes the caution. The reason we helped you is that we were told the old man is a traitor and a murderer—one of our own intelligence guys who’s turned into a monster. In order to help, we ignored the rules. A lot of the methods we used are illegal.”

“I won’t compromise your methods,” Julian said.

“I know you won’t,” said Goddard. “I didn’t tell you enough for that.”

Julian arrived at the condominium in Big Bear as a snowstorm was beginning. The flakes were big, and stuck to the windshield of his rental car, so he needed to use his wipers and headlights to find his way.

The condo had already been booked online, and the keys were waiting for him at the rental office. When the rental agent looked up from his desk and saw him, Julian saw the man’s face lose its look of expectancy and go flat and expressionless. Julian ignored the man’s involuntary reaction, signed the agreement, and took the keys. As Julian had driven into town he noticed that nearly all the faces were white.

Julian went to the condominium, unpacked, and prepared. He was aware that this moment was the peak of his career. This was his chance to become a success and an insider. But his mission was a mistake.

The old man was not what they said he was. He had seen covert aid money being diverted—and taken it back. He was not a traitor.

About twenty minutes after Julian arrived, the soldiers drove into town from Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona in a pair of black SUVs and an oversized pickup truck. They wore civilian clothes, but all of the clothes looked new, and the men were too well matched to be anything but some kind of team. The first man to the door was Staff Sergeant Axel Wright. He looked like a retired quarterback, tall and blond, with long arms and a thin, permanently sunburned face. When Julian came to the door, Wright introduced himself and said, “Mr. Carson, sir. Do we have your permission to bring in our equipment?”

“Of course. Come in.”

Julian sat in the condominium’s kitchen and watched the members of the squad spread around the living room, the stairway, and the dining room. They took their weapons out of their padded transport cases, assembled them, and loaded rounds into the detached magazines. Julian hadn’t seen anything quite like this since Afghanistan.