He loved the dogs, but he had never allowed their veterinarian to insert ID chips under their skin. He had known that a chip could give a future pursuer one more way to find him. He had been working on ways to improve his odds for a long time. He regretted only that he had not been as rigorous about it for a few years as he had been at first.
When he got into the car around 4:00 a.m. he’d known that his name could no longer be Dan Chase. He decided to become Peter Caldwell, one of the identities he’d planted in his twenties, soon after he returned from North Africa. He had used the name at intervals to keep it current. Buying things and going to hotels and restaurants were what kept credit histories vigorous. From the beginning he had used many ways of planting his aliases in data banks.
He had used information from a death notice in an old newspaper to apply for a replacement birth certificate from the county clerk’s office in the Texas town where one of the real Peter Caldwells was born. He’d used the birth certificate to apply for a driver’s license in Illinois. Then he had opened a bank account, bought magazine subscriptions, joined clubs that mailed him a book a month, ordered mail-order goods by catalog and phone, and paid his bills by check. When he was offered a credit card, he took it and used it. Everything he had done as Daniel Chase, Peter Caldwell, Alan Spencer, or Henry Dixon had been calculated to increase their credit ratings and their limits and make them less vulnerable to challenge.
He had made a few preparations for the moment when his car had only one ride left in it. He had kept caffeine pills under the seat, along with tins of nuts and bottles of water and a contraption that would allow him to urinate into a bottle without stopping the car if he wanted to. None of these preparations was recent, and right now they simply irritated him. He could have done better than this.
By noon the second day he had already changed the license plates on his car. The major police forces all had automatic license plate readers, so he put on the Illinois license plates he had kept in the trunk in case the police were searching for him. On a trip to Illinois he had bought a wrecked car like his at an auction. He had kept the plates and donated the car to a charity. He had known they wouldn’t try to fix the vehicle. The car was too badly damaged to be used for anything but parts.
For years he had maintained identities for his wife, Anna, and his daughter, Emily, as the wife and daughter of each of the three manufactured men. But when Anna died, he kept her identities. He’d told himself it was in case Emily needed to start over sometime, but the truth was that he simply couldn’t bear to destroy them.
For Emily’s protection he had invented separate identities for her when she was still a child. She had gotten married under the false name of Emily Harrison Murray. He had been at her wedding in Hawaii as a guest, and been introduced as Lou Barlow, a cousin of her late mother, Mrs. Murray. Her trust fund had been placed in her own hands when she turned eighteen, and then transferred to her new name, Emily Coleman, after the marriage. She had been walked down the aisle by a favorite professor from college, who had always believed the story that she had been orphaned in a car accident. She was living on the proceeds of a trust fund, wasn’t she?
From the time she left home for college until yesterday he had bought six new burner cell phones once a month, and mailed her three. In the memory of each was another’s number. The day after her boyfriend, Paul, proposed marriage, she told him her father existed. She also told Paul he was still welcome to withdraw his proposal, but whether he married her or not he had to keep her secret.
A bit after dark the night of the wedding he had met Paul. While the reception was going on inside the mansion they had rented for the wedding, Emily had conducted her new husband into the back garden. He and Paul had taken measure of each other that night. He had reassured himself that Emily had chosen a man who would die rather than betray her secrets. And Paul had seen that his father-in-law was the sort of man who was capable of holding him to it. He had been glad for Emily that Paul was intelligent and good-looking. He had been a swimmer in college, tall and lean, with an intense set of eyes. He had been a good husband to Emily so far.
Dave and Carol began to stir in the backseat again. He looked in the rearview mirror for a long time before he was sure nobody was following closely enough to be a problem, and then turned off onto a rural road and let the dogs out to explore a field for good spots to relieve themselves. Then he fed them again. When they were finished eating and drinking, he and the dogs got back in and moved ahead. He had driven the full stretch of daylight, and now it was dark again. The night felt friendly, but he knew he was only feeling the afterglow of having won the first fight. When this night was used up, most of the benefit of that victory would be too, so he kept pushing himself, putting more distance between him and Norwich, Vermont. He fought the increasing weight of his fatigue, keeping himself awake by will alone.
It was already late when he noticed the pair of headlights that wouldn’t go away. He had not seen a persistent follower during the day, or these headlights earlier in the night, and now he was at least four hundred miles from Norwich, Vermont. To Peter Caldwell that meant that the follower must have tracked him using a global positioning system, and then slowly narrowed the distance between them. And the only reason he could think of for a chaser to follow so closely was to get eyes on him before making another attempt to kill him.
Caldwell glanced in the mirror at Dave and Carol. They were sleeping peacefully on the backseat, their barrel chests rising and falling in long, slow breaths. He was going to have to do something, and he knew it would be better for them if he did it while the world was still dark, and their black fur might give them a better chance to survive.
He reached under the seat and retrieved his pistol, ejected the magazine to be sure it was full, pushed it back in, and stuck the weapon in his belt, and then he felt for the spare magazine. The weight told him it was full. He kept going at the same speed for a few more minutes, until he saw a group of rectangular buildings ahead. As he drew closer he could read the green letters at the top of the nearest one, which said HOTEL. He supposed he must be approaching Buffalo, or at least its airport. When he reached the driveway leading to the building he swung abruptly into it and saw DAYS HOTEL flash above him as he went past the sign.
Dave and Carol slid a little and then sat up, always interested in any change. He said quietly, “Hello, my friends. Everything is going to be all right.” He knew that they would determine the opposite from the tone of his voice or the smell of his sweat now that his heartbeat and respiration had accelerated.
He watched the headlights a quarter mile behind dip slightly as the follower applied his brakes, and noted that the driver was one of those who didn’t coast much, but instead always had his foot on the gas or the brake trying to exert control. The man probably oversteered too. Caldwell wasn’t sure if the information would be useful or not. In the long run those habits burned a lot of gas. But if the driver was following him by GPS that didn’t matter, because he could always stop at a gas station and catch up with Caldwell later.
Caldwell took the next turn into the semicircular drive toward the hotel entrance, but then kept driving past it to move around to the back of the building. He turned off his headlights as soon as he was around the first corner and drove up the outer row of cars parked in the lot. He turned into the first empty space and stopped, so his brake lights didn’t show for more than a second, and turned off the engine. He turned off the car’s dome lights, pulled out the pistol, and ducked down.
The pursuing car came off the highway and disappeared toward the front of the building. Caldwell could see it was a black sedan, probably a Town Car. When it was no longer visible, he opened his door and the back door to let the dogs out. The dogs ran across the lane to the bushes. He lay down beside his car and used his cell phone’s screen as a flashlight to look at the undercarriage.
He saw the transponder, a small black box stuck to the underside of the battery mount with a pair of wires taped to the leads of his battery. He reached up and tore it out, and then stayed low to move away from his car. The first vehicle he saw was the hotel’s shuttle bus. He crawled under it and attached the transponder to the battery of the bus the same way it had been attached to his car.
He stood and moved between the rows of parked vehicles toward his car. But as he did, a man emerged from the rear entrance of the hotel. Caldwell ducked down beside the nearest car. His pursuers’ car must have stopped at the front entrance to let this man go into the hotel to search for Caldwell inside. He had come through the lobby to the back of the hotel.
The man began to run. As he ran he took a pistol out of his coat. In the dim light, Caldwell saw the thin red line of a laser bobbing along the pavement as the man ran directly toward Caldwell’s car. He had recognized it.
Caldwell stayed down behind the car where he had hidden and waited until the man had gone past him, and then moved after him. He took out his pistol, hoping there would be something different he could do, but not knowing what it would be. He was fairly sure that the one who had stayed in the Town Car would be on his way around the building to the lot right now.
Moving the transponder had been a waste of time. The man ran unerringly to Caldwell’s car. Caldwell saw the red dot sweep up from the ground to the car’s windshield, and then to the side, into the backseat.
Caldwell used the time to get behind the man. He was still about twenty feet away when he said, “Drop the gun.”
The man’s body gave a startle reflex, as though he’d received an electric shock. He became still, the pistol with its laser sight still in his hand, its red dot on the side window of Caldwell’s car, with the beam passing through to the backseat.
Caldwell said, “Drop it. You won’t have time to do anything else.”
Caldwell felt despair. The man wasn’t reacting correctly. Maybe he didn’t even speak English. Caldwell went to one knee and used the left mirror of the car beside him to steady his aim on the man’s torso. The red dot moved.
Just as Caldwell had expected, the man tried to spin around to fire at the spot where Caldwell’s voice had come from, and as Caldwell had predicted, the laser sight went too high. The man saw his mistake and tried to lower his aim, but Caldwell’s shot found his chest.
Caldwell ran to the place where the man lay, but the two dogs reached him first. They sniffed the burned propellant in the air, the man’s body, the blood, the death, and began to whine. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.” He turned to let the two dogs into his car, but as he shut the back door, he heard the sound of another car approaching. As he ducked down he noticed the dead man’s gun lying beside the body, the laser sight still emitting the beam of red light. He snatched up the pistol and pocketed it, then slithered under his car and lay on his belly.
The car’s engine was too loud, the driver’s impatience with the laws of physics bringing him around the building too fast. Caldwell kept track of the turn by listening to the squeal of the tires. The man drove directly to Caldwell’s car, stopped his Town Car in front of it to block it, and then slid out the passenger side of his car and crouched behind it for protection as he drew a pistol and aimed it over the hood.
Caldwell used the only opportunity he could see. He remained on his belly and aimed the pistol with the laser sight under the man’s car. When the red dot settled on the man’s ankle, he fired.
The man went down, and Caldwell could see that the man’s leg and the right side of his torso were now on the pavement as he clutched at his wounded ankle. Caldwell fired beneath the car again, then twice more. Caldwell saw the man’s body jump twice, and then lie still.
Caldwell got into the Town Car and swung it into a parking space, and then ran to look into the backseat of his own car to be sure the dogs were still where they should be. He got in and started the engine. In a moment the car was back on the road. “I’m sorry about that, my friends,” he said. “You’re safe now.” He hoped they would take it as a kind thing to say, and not just a lie.