The Old Man(78)

But being Canadian was going to take some thought and some research. She remembered they had a parliamentary government with ministers, they had provinces instead of states, and they had the Queen of England. They had two official languages. She had studied French in school and wasn’t bad. She could still read pretty well, and the fluency would come back.

As she thought about the change she didn’t mind so much. If you had to change your nationality, Canadian wasn’t a bad choice. Years ago, she remembered, some friends of hers—really her husband’s—had gone to Europe and always told people they were Canadian to avoid political hatred. Everybody liked Canadians.

The Pacific Ocean appeared on the left side of the train. Now that she was on her way out of her own country she regretted not learning much about California. She didn’t know the names of any of the other mountain ranges besides the San Bernardino Mountains where she and Hank had been hiding. Yes she did—the Sierras. But this life, her new one, was full of quick escapes and things found and relinquished before she could really examine them.

Although she had not realized it then, the day Peter Caldwell had arrived at her door in Chicago her new life had begun, and time had sped up. Now she burned through sights, places, and names.

She knew she had lost some things as the old life ended. Her son, her firstborn, seemed to be one of them. She remembered how much she had loved him when he was born, and then more and more as she devoted all of her attention to him. He had been intelligent. She had been pleased with his intelligence at first, and secretly relieved that he would have an easier time than people who didn’t have that. And she had, even more secretly, been proud. But as he got older he reminded her sometimes of the terribly precocious children in horror movies, with their soft, sweet faces and penetrating, pitiless eyes.

In recent years she had realized that his father, Darryl, must have been like that too—very alert, very intense about things like winning and being the one who was right, and also free of any inclination toward humility. As Brian grew older he became more unaffectedly calculating, like his father. Darryl was a person to whom the odds, the risks, and advantages were instantly apparent, and who could conceive of no reason to resist them.

She turned a little and looked beside her at Hank. No, at her husband, Alan Spencer. She loved him so much that as she inhaled she felt her chest expand and the air rush in. She had never felt as strongly about any man in her life before. She could see he was asleep and she wanted to touch him, not in spite of the risk of waking him, but because he might wake. She wanted to hear his voice again because his calm voice made her feel warm and safe.

Feeling that way was important to her, because although Alan didn’t know it, Marie had no way of returning to her old life as Zoe McDonald, even if she had wanted it. That was over forever. Big Bear had been terrifying, and then the ride with those two awful boys had been something out of an old nightmare, but being with him had saved her.

The monotonous clackety-clack of the train going along the level tracks beside the shore made her tiredness return. She wriggled closer to her pretend husband, Alan, feeling his body touching hers, his chest moving in slow, restful breaths behind her. Like this, she thought. When we have to die, let it be like this.





28


As the Coast Starlight train moved northward near Monterey, Alan Spencer looked out the window at the familiar country. When he was young they had sent him to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. The train must be somewhere near Lewis Road now. That was the route. The school was on the bluff above Monterey Bay at the Presidio. He glanced at Marie. He felt the urge to tap her shoulder and say, “Look out the window. I spent a couple of years here once.” But that would have come too close to a topic he needed to avoid.

The highly accelerated Arabic course at the language school was sixty-four weeks. He had stayed beyond the basic course to master several regional dialects. After that he had spent another six months working on intelligence analyses with a team of expatriate Libyans at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Since most of their discussions were in Arabic, his fluency had increased dramatically.

He had not known, while they were developing plans to mount a mission to support a rebel faction in the Nafusa Mountains of Libya, that the mission was going to be his.

Alan watched Marie turn her head to stare out the window. “It’s pretty around here,” she said. “Ever been here before?”

“No,” he said. “I haven’t even seen all of Canada yet, let alone the US.”

“Very correct of you,” she said. “We’ll have to get busy traveling once we’re back in Canada.”

The brochure Alan had gotten with the tickets said that the train trip took about thirty-six hours. Marie had decided to use the time wisely. When the train stopped at the small station in Santa Barbara she had taken a cab up State Street to a bookstore, bought four travel guides to Canada, and rushed back. She had been reading much of the time since then.

At breakfast in the dining car the next morning they met an older woman who said she had booked her trip all the way to British Columbia. The final leg would be on a bus, but it would take her to Surrey and then Vancouver. After breakfast, Alan found the conductor and booked extensions of their tickets to Seattle so they would be on the bus with her. Customs officials would talk to this sweet elderly woman with hair curled like white floss, and it might make her traveling companions, the Spencers, seem innocuous too.