The Old Man(7)
He retreated, and began to walk through the darkened city. When he reached the police station he got into his white pickup truck, drove it to Hamzah’s neighborhood, and parked it at the rear of his compound with the motor running. He loaded the six gasoline cans from the Range Rovers into the back of his truck.
He walked around the perimeter. When he reached the spot where the Range Rovers were parked he could see that the draining of their tanks was complete. They were sitting in a narrow lake of gasoline that reflected the light of the stars. He climbed the wall and locked the gate from the inside.
He stepped close to the rear of the house, lit a match, and started the first fire, then ran up the woodpile to vault over the wall to his truck. Within seconds the flames were licking up the sides of the house, and then billowing above it, throwing light throughout the compound. Soon he knew the guards had noticed the fire, because they began rattling the gate, then pounding on it, then throwing themselves against it. Finally they began to fire their guns at the lock. That seemed to work, because the shooting stopped and the two men ran inside to wake Faris Hamzah. Chase stood by the wall and waited.
The two guards had awakened the household with their gunfire. There was already a woman in the house screaming and shouting, and in a moment she emerged with two children and an elderly woman. They ran out under the sun roof that provided shade for the doorway during the day, and then out the gate.
Faris Hamzah came out a minute later carrying a sealed cardboard carton. His two guards came out after him, each carrying two more cartons, which they started to carry toward the gate, but Faris Hamzah yelled something in Arabic, and they put them near the woodpile instead. That way they wouldn’t be tempting to neighbors who were attracted by the commotion and the fire. Faris Hamzah ran back inside to get more, and the two guards followed.
Chase recognized those five boxes, because he had packed them in Luxembourg. He took two of them and tossed them over the wall, and then the other three. He emptied the boxes into his truck’s bed, closed them, brought them back into the compound, and placed them where Hamzah’s guards had left them.
This time when Hamzah and his guards returned with five more cartons, they looked relieved and their confidence seemed to have returned. In the darkness, the fire, and the moving shadows, they could see the growing row of cardboard cartons and seemed to think that they had saved all the money. They ran back into the house, whether to save other valuables or to get water to fight the fire, it didn’t matter. For the moment they were gone.
Chase hoisted himself back over the wall, threw the five full boxes over the wall into his truck and climbed after them, then covered the bed with its canvas tarp. He got into the driver’s seat, lit a cigarette, and drove. He swerved close to the three Range Rovers. He stopped, tossed his burning cigarette into the pool of gasoline under the vehicles, and accelerated. In the rearview mirror he could see the fire flare into life, then streak along the row of cars, engulfing them in undulating light and flames twenty-five feet high.
Sometimes when he remembered the night, he imagined that he had seen Hamzah and his guards come out of the house to find that five boxes were empty and five gone, start shouting in amazement and anger, and then run to the gate to see the three vehicles aflame. He actually never saw that happen, because he was too far away by that time, and had already turned the corner at the first street. But his imagination had supplied the details, so they had become part of the story he had told only twice—once to Anna and once to Emily.
Now, as he stared ahead into the darkness of Interstate 89 beyond the range of his headlights, he thought about the time after the escape. He knew his enemies had assumed that when he reached the main highway he would head north for the port. Instead he turned south toward the desert. For the first few hours he was still checking his rearview mirrors every few seconds, pushing the gas pedal for every bit of extra speed. When he was far enough away he stopped on the desert road to secure the loose money under the tarp in the back of the truck by stuffing some into one box that was half-full, and the excess into his backpack and under the seats in the cab. Then he covered the bed again and drove on, going as far as he could while the night lasted.
He stopped again in a lonely spot at midday to fill the pickup’s gas tank with two of the twenty-liter gas cans from the Range Rovers. Then he stopped at a garbage dump at the edge of an oil field and picked up some plastic bags of garbage to cover the cardboard boxes, so he would appear to be on his way to dump the trash.
He drove the next six hundred miles with the garbage in back, left the highway, and crossed into Algeria without seeing a checkpoint, and then made his way to the next paved road by bumping across deserted, rocky country until he felt the smooth pavement. Two days later he traded the truck to a fisherman on a beach in Morocco in exchange for a night trip along the coast to Rabat.
In a week he made the acquaintance of a man who imported hashish to Europe inside the bodies of fish. After another week he and his own boatload of fish made it into Gibraltar with plastic bags of money hidden in the bottoms of the fish crates.
The last call he made to his contact number for the intelligence service was brief. This time it was a female voice that said, “This number has been changed or disconnected. Please check your directory and dial again.”
Tonight, so many years later, his taking back the money seemed like a story someone else had told him. He still saw snatches—the way Faris Hamzah’s house looked in the firelight, the way the headlights of his little pickup truck bounced wildly into the air when he hit a bump, so they were just two beams aimed a little distance into the immensity of the sky, and the world below them was black. But the feelings seemed to belong to someone else, a misguided young man from long ago, his anger and self-righteousness preventing him from seeing clearly. Even the anger, the rage, had become abstract and bloodless. The emotion was simply a fact he acknowledged, a part of the record.