by Thomas Perry
He had asked her a hundred times what had possessed her to insist on coming with him when he ran from Chicago. Why would a woman whose only crime was having an affair with a man she barely knew decide to become a fugitive, to run away with him from the government? Why would she be so stupid?
She wondered if she should have told him. She could have. He would never tell anybody else. He had been eager to know, and he almost certainly would not have blamed her. But telling him would not have changed anything for the better. It was better to let him think that she was in love and easily controlled than to know what she really was.
Her father had been in the air force, so the family moved every few years. She was born when her father was stationed at Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert. The family lived in a house seven miles west in Rosamond. She didn’t remember anything much about the place because they moved on to Arnold Air Force Base in Tullahoma, Tennessee, when she was six. Then there was a long period when her father was stationed in other countries. She made friends in Tullahoma, learned to play the piano, had her first dates, and even got to be secretary of her class in school. She had been happy on and off, as teenaged girls were. Then her father came home, and they had to move to Ellsworth Air Force Base near Rapid City, South Dakota.
It had been hard moving away from a world she liked, and to some extent tamed, to a new, alien place during the summer before her senior year. Families of enlisted men didn’t usually live on base. Instead the air force paid her father some money for “separate rations,” so he could live off base with her mother and the kids. Air force bases had ten-thousand-foot runways, so they tended to be in flat, empty places. But in South Dakota, for once they weren’t in the middle of nowhere. They rented a house outside Rapid City, which she’d thought of as a big, interesting city.
It happened in July, when the family had just moved in. The house sat on a large yard, but the building wasn’t really big enough for them. There was some vague promise from her parents that they would keep scouting for a better one. They assembled the beds, hung up what they could, but most of the family’s belongings were still piled in the attached garage or the living room. Her father was working nights to start. As she’d thought about that night since then, she guessed the night shift was probably something they did to newcomers.
At around 4:00 a.m. she woke and heard a noise. She wasn’t sure how she knew it was a hostile noise, but she did. She got up, crept to the doorway of the room she shared with her younger sister Katy, and looked up the hall. There were two men in the house, and one of them had tripped over the pile of belongings in the living room. He got up, whispering swear words.
She slipped into the next room, where her parents’ delicate or important things had been put until permanent places could be found for them during the next few days. She saw her father’s uniforms on hangers, her mother’s good dresses, the television set, the sewing machine. She moved to the closet and felt for the shotgun. The cold, smooth barrel came to her hand. She found the box of deer slugs on the floor, knelt, and pushed the shells into the bottom of the gun one by one, sliding them into the tubular magazine. She remembered loading four, because there were two men and she would probably miss.
She got up and went to the hall. The two men were just stepping into the hallway toward her. They seemed huge in the dim light. She said, “Stop and put up your hands.”
The men stopped, and then one turned, planning to dash into the room where Katy was sleeping.
She fired hastily, hoping to hit the middle of the man’s body, but the slug hit the side of his head. The second man turned away and ran toward the living room, but she pumped the shotgun and fired again. He pitched forward and lay there facedown.
Her mother reached her about a second later, and then everyone else was up, running to her and asking what had happened in frightened, whining voices. Her mother took the shotgun from her and sent the younger kids into the parents’ room, where they wouldn’t see any more horror than they already had.
The two men were an awful sight. The man who had fallen into the bedroom where Katy slept had the contents of his skull spattered against the wall and the doorjamb and the floor. The other had a huge hole in his back and a pool of blood growing on the floor around him. The door in the kitchen that led into the garage was still open, with her father’s crowbar lying on the floor beside it, and she knew that was how they got in.
At 6:00 a.m. her father returned, and saw what had happened. He and her mother had a conversation alone in their room, and then came out. Her mother and the other children were all fully dressed now. Her father rolled one of the men into a tarp he’d bought to paint the new house, and dragged him into the garage. Then he rolled the other into another tarp, and dragged him out into the garage too. A few minutes later he drove away.
Her mother scrubbed the floors and walls, working with cleaners that smelled like bleach and then going over and over the same areas.
She had asked her mother if her father was hiding the bodies, and her mother said, “You shot one in the back, and the other in the side of the head when he wasn’t looking. What else can we do?”
Her father returned a few hours later and began the interior painting he had planned to get to over the next few weeks. He got the hallway and the girls’ bedroom done the first day, and when he came home from the base the next morning he put on another coat of paint, and then completed the hallway so everything matched.
About two weeks later, her parents waited until the small children were asleep, and then had a talk with her alone. Her mother told her that her father had taken the men out and buried them. He had wiped the fingerprints off the shotgun and thrown it into the grave with them. He had thought that was the end of the horrible incident. But about a week ago, a couple had been running their dogs in the field where he had dug the grave, and the dogs had smelled the bodies. The state police had dug up the bodies and the shotgun. They had declared the cause of death a double murder.
The shotgun had belonged to his grandfather originally, and so there was not much chance of connecting it with the family after all these years. But the police had checked the serial number, found the gun had been sold in the 1930s at a Sears store in Wichita, where his grandfather had lived, and the store had looked up the name of the purchaser after all these years. The surname matched the new man on the base.
Today her father had been summoned to his commanding officer’s office, where two state police investigators were waiting. They wanted to know about his shotgun. They said that while the gun had been cleaned of fingerprints, there had been very clear prints on the shotgun shells still in the magazine. They had already compared the prints with his and his wife’s, but there was no match.
Her father had told them that he’d had the shotgun in the U-Haul truck he’d driven from Tennessee, but he’d just arrived a few days ago and hadn’t unpacked everything. He hadn’t noticed it was gone.
He said to her, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t think to check if it still had any shells in it.”
Her mother said, “I know this is really bad news. But there’s a good thing too—a way out. They told your father they’d checked the records of all the people whose fingerprints they have and not found any matches. It occurred to us that this is our chance to save you. Nobody anywhere has your fingerprints. They can run them for matches until the end of time and not have any luck.”
“Okay,” she said. But she wondered why they looked so sad.
“But you’re going to have to leave us,” her father said. “This isn’t the end of it. They’ll come here in a day or two, and they’ll take the fingerprints of anybody old enough to lift a shotgun.”
“We can’t let them see you,” her mother said. “You would go to prison for the rest of your life. We’ve put together all the money we can spare so you’ll get a start. And your father has signed over the car to you. We’ll get by with just the pickup until we can buy another one. We’ll have to tell them tha
t the kids they can see are the only ones. If they learn that you exist, we’ll tell them you ran away a couple of years ago in Tennessee.”
Her father said, “We just got here, and you’re not registered for school yet. Nobody knows you, so they won’t be asking where you are.”
She studied her parents, and said, “This can’t be real.” But the tears running down their cheeks were real.
She left that night. She drove the family car to Denver, got a job as a waitress, and found a cheap apartment to share with another waitress.
Just over a year later, when she met Darryl, there was no question she had been too eager. She had married him, hoping that her infatuation with him would grow and grow. It hadn’t, but being his wife had kept her safe for nineteen years. She had never dared to have her fingerprints taken. She had never tried to teach music in a school, or apply for a license to do anything else, because that meant fingerprints and background investigations. She would have been charged with two murders.
Last fall, when the two Libyan assassins had broken into the apartment and Peter Caldwell needed to run away, she had not wanted to go with him. He was a killer. But once he had kidnapped her from the house and she had time to think, she realized that she had to leave that night too, and she could never go back. If there was a police investigation of the two Libyans’ deaths, how could the police not find her fingerprints? They were on every surface, every object in the apartment. The long-unsolved shotgun murders of two men outside Rapid City, South Dakota, would be solved. So she had gone with Peter, hoping that when he said the intelligence people would clean the apartment completely, he was right.
She’d had sympathy for Peter, and gained even more as she ran with him and he became Hank, and then Alan. It had never occurred to him that he wasn’t the only one who was being hunted for murder. She had often been tempted to tell him, but that wouldn’t have helped him. It might even have made him think being with her threatened his life. It was just as well that she had not taken on the task of explaining it all to him. She had loved being with him, but now he was gone and he was going to die.
32
It was 2:00 a.m. when the charter flight touched down on the runway in Tripoli. The pilot had come in slow, giving it just enough speed to keep from being swept sideways by any sudden wind, and then he hit the brakes hard. Tripoli’s runway had been part of a major battlefield at least twice in the past couple of years, and Alan Spencer didn’t blame the pilot for his caution. Mortar and tank rounds had undoubtedly hit the pavement, and there was no way to predict how well the holes had been patched.
Spencer knew that when their plane had taken off from Toronto, this airport had been in the hands of the opposition government army and the Misrata pro-Libya Dawn Militia, but in twenty-four hours anything could have happened. There had been air attacks from the Tobruk-based government in the spring, and the Zintan militia had held the airport for a couple of years before that.
As the plane shuddered and rattled to a halt at the end of the runway and began to taxi, Spencer looked over at the dark silhouette of the main terminal. As they taxied closer, headlights came on and he could see that the building that had once served three million passengers a year was now pockmarked with bullet holes and shrapnel scars. Some of the windows were still broken.
The plane didn’t pull up to the terminal, just stopped a hundred feet or so away, the nose turned toward the end of the runway for the return trip. The male flight attendant opened the hatch and lowered the stairs to the ground. Stepping out of the hatch to the steps was like walking into a furnace. Spencer had judged that it would be too late in the season for the Ghibli, the hot wind from the southern desert that raised the temperature a couple of times a summer. But here it was.
The aid workers had been sitting for so long that they felt desperate to get out the door. Then it seemed to occur to them, one at a time, that it might be a long time before they were in air-conditioning again. Glen McKnight, one of the volunteer doctors, said, “What do you think the temperature is?”
Spencer translated his thought into centigrade. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it were forty,” he said. “It happens here sometimes.” He smiled. “It doesn’t last, usually.”
As they walked away from the plane toward the terminal, several men wearing combinations of military battle dress and civilian clothes loitered nearby. All were carrying AK-47 rifles and a variety of other gear. Most wore the kaffiyeh, but a few were bareheaded and others wore baseball caps or camouflage-print fatigue hats.
Alan was relieved to see that they paid little attention to the passengers, which meant they weren’t hostile, and they were mostly occupied in watching the middle distance around the airport.
The navigator and the flight attendant opened the bay beneath the plane and the aid workers began to unload the cartons of food, medicine, and supplies. There were no airport workers to handle baggage, and the sentries showed no inclination to help, so the Canadians worked at it themselves. They piled their cargo about fifty yards away from the plane near the terminal building. When they had removed all of the small boxes and cartons, they were able to reach the larger heavy wooden crates that had been loaded first.
Many hands lowered each large crate to the ground. Some were heavy, and others were full of medical equipment that was delicate and expensive, donated by companies or bought by contributors. The unloading took about twenty minutes of hard labor, and while that was proceeding, the fuel truck that had been parked in the shelter provided by two large buildings pulled up on the other side of the plane and a man began refueling it.
The men with guns had their eyes turned away until the plane was unloaded, and the fuel truck pulled away and went back to its sheltered space. Then the driver got out and parked a car in front of the fuel truck so the truck would be harder to hit with small arms from a distance.
The plane’s pilot and copilot performed a hasty walk-around inspection of the plane, and then boarded it. The flight attendant raised the steps and closed the hatch, and the pilot started the engine. The control tower had been hit by something big and explosive in one of the battles, and whatever had taken its place was not evident to Alan. The pilot was visible in the cockpit in radio communication with someone, somewhere, and then he moved the plane forward, heading for the end of the runway.
Some of the volunteers watched the plane turn at the end of the runway, and then roar along the tarmac at a slight angle to avoid the worst of the shell craters and burn marks on the pavement, and then rise into the air. Alan listened for sounds of small-arms fire, but heard none, and saw no streaks of light moving toward the plane. In a minute it was high enough so it became just a set of blinking lights fading into the distance.
The air became quiet at that moment. The arrival or takeoff of a plane was a rare occurrence. The militiamen seemed to relax now that the plane was gone, but it didn’t seem to Alan that they were entirely secure or at ease. He noticed that there were also at least a half dozen of them on the roof of the ruined terminal with binoculars and night-vision scopes. He could see they were protected by debris camouflaging a wall of sandbags, and he thought he saw the barrels of heavy machine guns.
A dozen members of the militia on the ground performed a customs check as the volunteers watched. They inspected a few of the cardboard cartons that held bags of rice, beans, and wheat flour, canned vegetables, and halal meat. They moved to the wooden crates of machinery and pried a few open. As he had expected, they paid most attention to the crates that held heavy equipment. Well-drilling rigs, irrigation pumps, water purification machines, and hand tools piqued their interest most because they were made of steel and dismantled for shipment, so the crates looked, felt, and sounded as though they contained weapons.
The medical equipment was light and tended to be electronics sheathed in plastic consoles. There was lab equipment to analyze blood, urine, and dissolved blood gases. There were an X-ray machine, an ultrasound machine, and a PET scanner. There
were sterilizers, EKG machines, infusion pumps, anesthetic machines, and monitors to track patients’ vital signs. The militiamen opened a few of the boxes, but shut them almost immediately and moved on to the next ones.
Alan noticed that there seemed to be some kind of commotion beginning near the far side of the main pile of boxes. He recognized Dr. Zidane immediately, and Dr. Leclerc, and they seemed to be unhappy with the man Alan had decided must be the head of the militia contingent. He moved closer and listened.
In a few seconds Dr. Zidane noticed him. She said in English, “He wants to take food and supplies. Can you believe it?”
Alan said, “How much?”
She said, “Who knows? We can’t spare any of it.”
Alan stepped closer and bowed to the leader. “I am Alan Spencer,” he said in Arabic. “Are you the commander of the militia?”
“Abdul Hamid, colonel of the Misrata Militia. I’ve been speaking with this woman, and she doesn’t seem to understand anything she wasn’t taught in an American school.”
Alan said, “American? Dr. Zidane is Canadian, like the rest of us.”
“That difference means nothing here.”
Alan could see that one thing hadn’t changed much in the past thirty years. This was not a part of the world where men—at least men like this militia—were accustomed to arguing with women. Alan said, “Maybe I can help clear up the misunderstanding.”
“You were able to land a plane here because we fought for this airport in two great battles. We’re here to protect you because the plane brought food and other supplies that the people need. We’re not going to sell it or throw it away. The people around here are our relatives. We know how to get it to them.”
Alan smiled, he hoped, convincingly. “Oh,” he said. “Thank you for explaining. Please give me a moment.” He stepped to the two doctors. “I think he feels insulted.”