by Thomas Perry
Wright drove one of the SUVs. Julian sat in the passenger seat, and the two other snowmobilers sat behind them. There were two more men in the third seat. At the condominium Julian had rented, the men climbed the stairs, cleared their weapons and stowed them, removed their winter gear, and found places to lie down—beds, couches, piles of down jackets—and slept.
A few hours later Sergeant Wright was up again and stalking around the condominium waking up his men. When he reached Julian, he said, “I feel as though I ought to apologize to you, Mr. Carson. We didn’t do much to solve your problem.”
“No apology is necessary,” said Julian. “This just wasn’t the old man’s day to get caught.”
They shook hands. “See you next time around.”
Julian nodded, but said nothing more. Within a short time the soldiers had packed up and loaded their gear in their three vehicles. They left in three stages a few minutes apart, trying not to look like what they were.
Instead of checking in with his employers, Julian used his phone to reserve a flight out of the San Bernardino airport for the next morning. He was certain his phone would be monitored, so they would know what he was doing anyway. That evening he walked to the center of the village for dinner. He drove up to the old man’s rented cabin after it was late on the slim chance that he and the woman had sneaked back, and then he returned to the condominium and slept.
The next morning when Julian went to the rental office to return the key, the manager insisted on going back to the condominium with him to inspect it for damage. Julian was not surprised. He occupied his mind with the thought that this man had foolishly assumed a young-looking black man only five feet eight inches tall couldn’t hurt him. He also didn’t know that the men who had cleaned the place were accustomed to making their gear and their dwellings gleam.
When the man declared himself to be satisfied, Julian grabbed his hand before he could anticipate the move or evade him. Julian shook his hand hard and grinned. “I’ll be sure and tell all my friends about this place,” he promised.
Julian flew to Baltimore-Washington International with a stop in Houston. While he was waiting in the George Bush Intercontinental Airport he looked at his phone and saw a confirmation that he had received an electronic transfer for his pay. This time it was from Zinnia’s Baby Services, but the amount was the same as usual.
He rented a car and drove to Fort Meade. He arrived after 9:00 p.m., went to his barracks, cooked himself a frozen dinner in the microwave, and went to bed. The wake-up call came at 7:00 a.m. He showered, shaved, dressed, and packed his bag, and then waited for the knock from the soldier on orderly room duty. He was the same one as last time. They walked together to the same room on the fourth floor of the office building three rows away, and then the orderly knocked, opened the door for him, and went away.
Julian entered and saw three men sitting on the other side of the conference table, as before. Mr. Bailey and Mr. Prentiss sat on either side of Mr. Ross, who was engaged in reading an open file in front of him while the others sat with yellow legal pads and pens, but not making use of either.
Julian watched Ross perform the familiar bit of theater. He closed the file and looked up at Julian. “Hello, Mr. Carson,” he said. “Have a seat.”
Julian had never been invited to sit before, and he knew it was intended to be another reward, a gesture of politeness that had to be earned before it was given. He sat.
Mr. Ross said, “I understand from Staff Sergeant Wright’s report that you were an asset to the team.”
This could only be ironic. Julian was supposed to understand this, so he pretended it didn’t matter. “He’s a good squad leader. His men trust him and they’re well trained and disciplined. He must be good in military situations.”
Mr. Ross had to know that Julian was asking him why he’d been sent such an inappropriate form of help. Mr. Ross pretended it didn’t matter. “But nobody got the old man and his girlfriend.”
“No,” said Julian. “I think the old man must have noticed there was an army rifle squad in the middle of that little resort town.”
Ross studied him. “They were that obvious?”
“Buzz haircuts. Brand-new winter clothes. Their physiques—necks about as thick as their heads, straight, stiff posture, not one beer belly. They’re all about the same age, too old to be in college. No women.”
Mr. Ross looked at Mr. Bailey and then Mr. Prentiss. Both of them looked down and made notations on their yellow pads. “So he spotted them and took off?”
“It might have been later. On the night the squad arrived Sergeant Wright saw the snow was already deep and falling steadily. So Wright had two men take a pickup truck in the morning and plow the road up to the cabin.”
“What did he have in mind?”
“He wanted to drive up and take the targets by surprise instead of hiking up through snowdrifts.”
Mr. Ross said, “This whole thing was a screwup from your point of view, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You think we should have waited for optimum conditions?”
“It wouldn’t have hurt,” said Julian. “The old man’s cabin looked like he’d been there for a while and planned to stay.”
Mr. Ross said, “The assessment was made that it was better to complete the mission right after the storm than to risk the old man slipping off the next night.”
Julian shrugged. “I see.”
“So now we’ve got another botched operation to our credit,” said Mr. Ross. “We’ve involved two other government agencies and embarrassed ourselves. This reflects on you.”
Julian was silent.
“What do you think we should do now?” asked Mr. Ross.
“My opinion doesn’t matter anymore, sir.”
“It doesn’t? Why do you think that? If I’m asking, I want to know the answer.”
“I’m removing myself from the issue.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Julian stood. “I’ve decided to end my government service. I’m an independent civilian contractor, and as of now I quit. I don’t want any further employment. Thank you for the consideration.” He held out his hand toward Mr. Ross, who ignored it, and then offered it to Mr. Prentiss, and then to Mr. Bailey. None of them took his hand. He pulled his government cell phone out of his pocket and set the device on the table in front of his chair. Then he turned and walked out the door.
Julian Carson walked down the sidewalk past the rows of buildings, across the two large parking lots filled with the private cars of military intelligence and National Security Agency personnel. He felt buoyant, a feeling that grew stronger as he got farther away from that office. He controlled the feeling and walked on, looking around him at Fort George Meade. This would certainly be the last time he would ever see this place.
27
The Canadian passport looked a lot like her American passports—dark blue with gold writing and a seal on the outside. This one said CANADA, of course. The gold symbol was a fancy crown design, and along with PASSPORT below it there was PASSEPORT. The photograph and identity data were on the same page as they were in the American passports.
She read the name again. Marie Angelica Spencer. She said it aloud. It was okay. Probably his … Anna had thought of the name. She had caught herself thinking: First wife. He would have let Anna choose something she could imagine living with, and the name sounded compatible with the way Anna—and she—both looked, northern European, probably of Irish, English, or French descent or all three.
Changing—even being a person who was amenable to change—was confusing. She supposed that it wasn’t as big a deal to her now as it would have been before she took her husband’s name, McDonald. She had taken that wholeheartedly and without reservation, and then nineteen years later had learned it wasn’t her name after all, not really.
She had very quickly gotten comfortable being Marcia Dixon. It was a common and familiar name, like putting her feet
in a worn-in pair of slippers. And being Marie Spencer was not going to be any less comfortable for her. Marie Spencer was another good name for a person who didn’t want to be noticed or wondered about.
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.
The Spencers practiced being Canadian, but for the moment Alan would allow Marie to rehearse the role only with him in their compartment, where nobody could overhear her mistakes. He had spent time years ago learning to pass as a Canadian before he had first arrived in Toronto as Alan Spencer. He told Marie that they weren’t ready to be Canadian in public, but they would work on it together.
Marie soon saw that the differences were not extreme. Most Canadians didn’t say “aboot” for “about” or end every sentence with “eh?” But there were subtler signs and differences for which she would have to prepare. For the moment they were only people from somewhere in English-speaking North America, and they should avoid saying anything about their origins.
Alan was relieved that the bus across the border existed. He had not had time to research this trip in advance. It had simply been an option he’d noticed at Union Station in Los Angeles. He had been assuming they would have to cross the border on foot in some remote spot between official border crossings. But during the years since 2001 there had been a proliferation of agencies and federal employees who watched the borders and the adjacent areas to prevent illegal crossings. Once it would have been an easy trip. Now, the Spencers might not have made it.
As the train approached the station for their stop in San Jose, Alan saw a big Sears store, so as soon as they could get off they went to the store and bought some fresh clothes, toiletries, and other essentials.
Their last night in the United States, Alan went through their backpacks and jettisoned things that they couldn’t bring across an international border. He dismantled the Colt Commander and the two Beretta Nano pistols, and emptied their magazines. He made a pile of barrels, springs, unattached trigger and sear mechanisms, slides, grips, and frames. Any part he could remove, he did. Every few miles during the night he would throw a piece or two out the window as far from the tracks as possible. When the train went over a bridge spanning deep water he dropped more.
He split the money into packets and counted it, so that neither of them would have more than ten thousand Canadian dollars or the US equivalent. That way neither would have to declare the cash.
Alan Spencer cut up their Dixon identification and credit cards and fed the pieces into the wind. By the time they reached the King Street Station in Seattle they were as clear of contraband as they could be. He took Marie to
the bus they would be taking to Canada and sat with his arm around her, because he knew she would be nervous as they prepared to cross the border.
The bus driver handed out Canadian Customs Declaration Cards to the passengers who had booked themselves through to Canada. The Spencers had nothing left to declare that would prompt questions.
Shortly after they filled out the cards and the bus was in motion, Alan went into the bus’s restroom. He took from under his shirt a small canvas tool bag he had bought in the Sears store in San Jose. He took out a screwdriver, unscrewed and removed a wall panel that allowed access to the toilet’s water supply pipe, tied the bag to the pipe, and replaced the panel.
The bus crossed the border at Blaine, Washington, and then stopped at Surrey, British Columbia. He had prepared Marie for Canadian customs by telling her to steel herself to look calm, a little bored, but alert. There was a primary inspection station where a man from the Canada Border Services Agency examined their documents, and then a baggage claim where they took possession of their backpacks, and a secondary inspection station where other Border Services people inspected the backpacks and asked questions.
Alan said they had flown to Los Angeles three weeks ago, done a great deal of sightseeing and hiking in parks around Southern California at Joshua Tree and Death Valley and the Angeles National Forest, and were planning to return home to Toronto by train.
As Alan had expected, the inspector showed little interest in their story. The clothes he had chosen for them in San Jose were right—cheap and utilitarian, bought because they’d run out of clean clothes on a trip. The worn hiking boots and gloves they’d had in Big Bear, the lightweight ski jackets for cool mornings and evenings, helped bolster his story that they were hikers. Alan had included brimmed hats to wear in public places where there were surveillance cameras, and shorts. The trip through customs took only about ten minutes, but the tension made the experience seem much longer.