The Old Man(92)

The next week he bought a pair of prepaid cell phones that could be used and discarded and had them delivered to his office at the university.

At frequent intervals Julian did things that would indicate his plan was to help the old man. The next week he began a series of computer searches of travel agencies, airlines, and hotels. He studied Antwerp, where the diamond wholesalers operated; Luxembourg, where the old man had assembled the money to take to Faris Hamzah thirty-five years ago; Geneva, where banks might harbor numbered accounts old enough to have existed when the old man had first taken the money out of Libya.

Anything Julian could do to keep the eyes of military intelligence focused on him, he did. He knew he could rely on their overconfidence to help them fool themselves. They knew that he had found the old man twice when they had failed. Now he tried to make them believe that he was secretly in touch with the old man and making arrangements for him to sink deeper out of sight.

Julian e-mailed cryptic messages to men whose names he found online—men in their sixties who owned businesses, ran organizations, were mentioned in articles, or wrote them. He often used the names of donors or graduates he found in online Ivy League university alumni publications. Sometimes Julian’s messages looked like word code. Some were numerical, and others were symbols arranged in patterns. None of them meant anything.

Julian made sure agents would have to get on an airplane, fly to some city, and investigate. He picked addresses all over the country and mailed puzzling things to them—keys that no longer opened any lock, tickets to plays or sporting events in distant cities that might serve as meeting opportunities.

Julian was fairly confident that he could keep one small corner of the intelligence world occupied—Mr. Ross, Mr. Prentiss, Mr. Bailey, Waters, Harper, and a few unseen colleagues. Their operation—trying to deliver a rogue American agent to a Libyan asset—seemed to Julian so incriminating that the number of people who knew anything about it must be very small.

There were some encouraging signs. If they had already found the old man or killed him, they would have no interest in Julian anymore. As long as they were watching Julian, the old man must still be alive and free.

During a break at work he completed searches about banking practices in the Cayman Islands, and the extradition laws of various European countries. He started with France, and then moved to Ireland, and then east to countries that had once been part of the Soviet Union. That would give the people monitoring his computer plenty to think about.

One evening when it was nearly ten he picked up a backpack, slipped out the back door of the house, and went through a couple of yards to where he had parked his truck after work. He took the truck to the hospital to pick up Ruthie from her shift and drove her along the dark highway to Lake City, where he made a series of quick turns and then backed into a space behind a building and watched for the car he had noticed following on the dark highway to catch up.

He and Ruthie went to an ice-cream shop in Lake City where they and their friends used to go in high school and were delighted to find it was still there. They split a sundae and drove home, followed all the way home by the same car.

When they got home, Julian did his usual his walk around to see if anyone had been inside the house, or outside trying to get in, but there was no sign of intruders. Then he and Ruthie showered and went to bed.

Now and then he would let a period go by when he did nothing suspicious, and he let one of those times occur next. Then, early in the morning a week later, he went to the university library and borrowed some language practice tapes in Portuguese and books about Brazil. He was sure that whoever was watching him must know that he had posed as a Brazilian for over two years before he’d been recalled to the United States to look for the old man.

Julian went to the Chemistry and Physics Building and began work. He had to set up an apparatus for a chemistry demonstration to be performed at a morning lecture, fill a series of written equipment requests for physics research, and fill out the forms for the purchasing department.

He set the Portuguese tapes and the books about Brazil in his desk at odd angles and photographed them with his phone, so when he returned from lunch he could see whether they had been touched. When he returned he found they had.

That night before he went to sleep he wondered where the old man really was. He hoped it wasn’t Brazil.





34


Alan Spencer had begun to dress like a Libyan after two months in the country. On most days he wore a pair of loose white pants, a white shirt that hung nearly to his knees, and a pair of sandals. Sometimes he wrapped a scarf around his neck and pulled it up like a hood over the skullcap he wore. On hotter days he wore the kaffiyeh, keeping his neck, shoulders, and head protected. His face and hands had tanned, because he spent most of his days interviewing patients outside the medical tents.

He began to notice that the patients, particularly the ones in the remote rural areas, were more likely to approach him first, because his clothing put them at ease.

Spencer assumed that a few of the Canadians probably thought he was going native, or masquerading, but others seemed to respect him for adapting to the climate. In time a few other volunteers followed his lead. But his motives were not what they imagined. The long, loose shirt and pants made it easy to conceal his pistol and the flat pocketknife he now carried. He knew that if terrorists were to open fire at the clinic, the first shots would be aimed at the highest-value targets. They would aim for the doctors, then the nurses, all in hospital scrubs, and then anyone else who didn’t look Libyan.