The Old Man(91)

As they moved eastward again they entered the area controlled by the national government. The regime was based in Tobruk, and consisted of the country’s Council of Deputies, combined for the moment with the remnants of the former national army. The government army was carrying on a campaign called Operation Dignity. Its primary opponents were the other national government in Tripoli and Islamic militias of the Libya Dawn faction. At that moment both sides were fighting over Benghazi, but a cease-fire was holding south of there, where the Canadian relief mission was headed.

They had avoided the area to the north and west where ISIS was holding out against air strikes from Egyptian fighter planes. The Canadians had also avoided the Tunisian border, where a group of Al Qaeda fighters were operating a base that they used as a training camp and a stronghold for staging raids.

Every region had its own militias, each with its own weapons, its own tribal hatreds, and regional rivalries. Spencer knew that Libya had about 140 tribes. The national army still seemed to be in charge in the east, but they could not pacify it, so lines shifted. Some of the eastern Libyan Islamist militias—Ansar al-Sharia, Libya Shield 1, February 17th Martyrs Brigade, Rafallah al-Sahati Brigade—had banded together into the Shura Council of Benghazi Revolutionaries to oppose the Tobruk forces.

Changes came abruptly in a modern civil war, and the chance of heading for a safe destination and arriving to find it taken or retaken by a hostile force was high. But the relief mission’s leaders kept themselves and the staff informed about what was ahead as well as possible by satellite phone and radio. They stayed out of the large cities, where bad things were most likely to happen. Cities were the big prizes for attackers and the lifelines of the defenders.

As the mission headed eastward, Alan Spencer began to carry on quiet conversations with his Arabic-speaking patients. He would ask about their tribes, how their relatives and friends were surviving, the state of their businesses and home villages. He noted the names he heard, their factions and groups. And sometimes, he would work his way around to asking: “Have you ever heard of a man named Faris Hamzah?”





33


Fall was busy at the university, but Julian Carson enjoyed the work. The university was the most reliable and stable employer in Jonesboro, and he liked the science faculty and students. They tended to be polite but preoccupied, and not especially pretentious, and they were too busy to be curious about him.

But what he liked more was Ruthie. He had not gotten over his secret shock that somehow the course of his life had-twisted around so that she had come to love him.

His life was almost perfect. He had been able to quiet his own conscience about most of the things he had done for the army. He had been part of a forward covert team sent to protect the personnel and the interests of the United States in several countries. He could have made a good argument that each operation made sense and probably saved the lives of civilians in the countries where he’d worked. If his career had ended when he’d been recalled from Brazil, he could have closed that part of his life without regret. If it hadn’t been for his final assignment, he could have been at peace. What made that impossible was the old man.

Everything the senior agents had said the old man had done was logically impossible, and had to be lies. The old man couldn’t have stolen the twenty million dollars from Faris Hamzah unless he had delivered it to him first. And if Hamzah had given the money to the rebels in the hills instead of stealing it, the old man couldn’t have taken it back from him. The old man’s superiors in military intelligence had never charged him with anything, and neither had anybody since.

Julian couldn’t help wondering where the old man and his girlfriend had gone after Big Bear. He had no idea how they were living, now that the old man had returned the twenty million dollars to the Treasury, or what names they were using. He had no way to help them, but what he could do was distract and mislead the pursuers. He needed to make sure that the military intelligence people would be watching him.

Last time, he had reached the old man by putting an ad in the Chicago Tribune. He knew that the old man’s interest in Chicago would have lapsed during the months since then. But he also knew that the intelligence people would not have lost interest. They would still be monitoring the want ads, and still searching for anything that carried the name James Harriman.

He composed a classified ad for the Chicago Tribune just like the one he had used to set up the meeting with the old man in San Francisco. “I will be available to talk in the same way at the usual time. J. H.” He asked that it run for a week, and enclosed payment in cash.

Julian made everything he did look suspicious. He went to an Ikea store and bought furniture that came unassembled in large, flat cardboard boxes. There were a queen bed, a couple of nightstands, and a dresser. On the same trip he bought a set of blackout drapes to hang behind the regular curtains in the guest room. As he left the store with the boxes on a flat cart, he noticed that there was a man he had never seen before standing inside the building a few feet back from the sliding glass doors, watching him. As he was loading the boxes into his car in the lot, he saw the man getting into a dark blue Mustang. Twice on the way home he saw the car again. They were still watching him. He made several quick turns, came back the same way, and passed the man, then lost him.

Julian had bought the furniture because Ruthie’s niece from Louisville wanted to come for a visit, but he did his best to make his watchers suspect that he might be planning to hide the old man and his girlfriend for a time. When he had finished assembling the furniture and hung the blackout drapes, he saw a black SUV parked across the street with two men inside. After a few hours a second pair relieved the first. The shifts went on for over a week, and ended when Ruthie’s niece arrived and moved into the room.