Julian Carson wasn’t allowed into the meeting. This kind of meeting was far above his pay grade. He sat in a booth at the back of the bar at the Intercontinental Hotel on Michigan Avenue drinking coffee and watching the bar traffic. Nobody was likely to pay much attention to a young black man wearing a conservative suit, sitting by himself and communicating only with the cell phone on the table in front of him, so he supposed he was the man for the job.
Of course they hadn’t brought him in. He wasn’t even an agent. He was a special ops contractor. That meant that he had no title, no rank. He got paid only when he was actually working, a fee for his services, paid once a month through an electronic transfer into his checking account. At first it had been interesting to see the names of the entities that paid him—companies that sounded familiar, universities, city governments, a hospital. But whenever he checked the names online, they always turned out to have no existence outside their bank accounts.
Julian had been spotted for this job while he was in the army in Afghanistan. They had waited until his second tour was over and he had returned to Fort Benning before military intelligence approached him. After roll call the first sergeant had called him aside and told him he was scheduled for an interview. He stood while three officers sat behind a long table and asked him questions about his tour. When the questions were over the senior officer asked him if he was interested in going to a-school for special assignments. He had already been through a few schools, including Ranger NCO school, which was about as rough as the army could make it, so he accepted.
When he was through the training they sent him to several places where his brown skin and his youthful face would help him—Liberia, the Central African Republic, Brazil. He usually worked with a small team, never fewer than three men, never more than five. He had helped close down three smuggling rings—two of them moving armaments and one cocaine—and the money-laundering networks they fed. One of his teams had kidnapped a guerrilla leader; another had stalked a corrupt minister of finance until they had photographed him with so many recognizable gangsters that the president had no choice but to remove him and have him indicted.
It was when Julian was on his way home from that one that they had called him in the airport while he was waiting for his connecting flight home to Arkansas. They had told him to cancel and fly to Chicago for a meeting.
That meeting, they had invited him to. It had been held in a cheap hotel near the airport where he could sit in the bar and watch the women complete their negotiations before inviting traveling businessmen into their rooms. A few hours after he checked in, two agents knocked on the door of his room. When he let them in, one of them held up a tablet and said, “Here is a picture of a man we’re looking for. About thirty-five years ago he was supposed to deliver a large sum of money to a pro-America go-between in Libya. The money was to support a group of insurgents who were trying to overthrow the Gaddafi government. Instead of delivering it, he killed a few friendlies and took off with the money. At some point he made it back to the United States. We know he’s been here for at least twenty years, but it wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that he turned up again. He had been living in Vermont. An operator was sent to see him—the guy who took the picture.”
The blurred picture was of a man walking a pair of big black dogs across a long bridge over a river. It looked as though the picture had been taken from a car passing him on the bridge, and the side window had not been very clean. The face was just a dark spot against a bright backdrop of snow, and the man could have been any age. “What’s his name?”
“He was living under the name Daniel Chase.”
“What’s his real name?”
“That’s classified.”
“His name is classified?”
“Yes.”
“Can I talk to the operator who took the picture?”
“He’s dead. He was Libyan, and his English wasn’t great anyway. Chase killed him and took off. We think he might be living in Chicago for the moment. I’m sending the picture to your phone so you’ll have it with you.”
There was a knock on the door, and the other agent opened it. The two men who entered were both in their forties, wearing sport coats and baggy slacks. When he heard them talk he realized they must be Libyan, like the agent who had taken the picture.
Julian Carson did not like the Libyans. He had spent too much time in the wars of the Middle East not to recognize their type. They had been part of some kind of intelligence service or secret police, and they were used to seeing themselves as elite. They spoke a bit of English, and they were willing to use it during the meeting with the two American agents, whom they considered their equals in rank, if not in intellect. They looked at Julian but didn’t speak to him.
After Julian began to work with them, they always spoke Libyan Arabic to each other. When they spoke English to Julian it was always in the imperative: Get this. Take us there. Bring it along. Tell them. They saw him not as a colleague but as a guide and a chauffeur. He was supposed to take care of their needs, and meanwhile to find the target for them, take them to him, and get them away and out of the country afterward. Julian felt like the organizer of a big game hunt, paid to take a pair of privileged beginners to their prey. Whatever the two may once have been in their country, they were now just a pair of overconfident strangers in a place where they couldn’t find their way to a bathroom on their own.
When the two Libyans had left for their own room, Julian’s contact men told him a little more about the old man’s history. He had settled in Norwich, Vermont, which was an upscale town across the Connecticut River from New Hampshire. He had lived comfortably for many years—not like a hedge fund manager, but like a doctor or a lawyer. He had caused no trouble, raised no eyebrows. Then the Libyans had asked their American contacts to begin an operation to find him and make him pay for his crimes. He turned up in Vermont, and a Libyan agent was sent to assassinate him. Instead he killed the Libyan and took off. He was traced out of Vermont, through Massachusetts and Connecticut to New York. Before military intelligence lost him near Buffalo, he had killed two more Libyan agents. A military intelligence analysis had predicted that the place he would go to ground and hide would be to the west, in the Chicago region—Chicagoland, one of them called it. That was why they had all been sent here.
Julian had listened in silence to his briefing, but when they seemed to be about to end the meeting and leave, he said, “Why do we need the Libyans?”
Harper, the senior agent, said, “They need us. This isn’t our operation. It’s theirs, and we’re just here to help, keep it quiet, and make sure they get out. The shooters are standing in for their boss, the go-between who was supposed to receive the money years ago and pass it on to the insurgents. Two or three of his close relatives were killed when the money was stolen. It’s a tribal society, and many of the insurgents were members of his tribe, and others were members of other powerful tribes. Because he never delivered the money, the supply line dried up and the rebels were hunted down and killed. He’s been living under suspicion and resentment for all of this time. The regime lasted another twenty-five years or so after that—a whole generation—before they got rid of the bastards.”
“Why does military intelligence care? Who is this go-between guy who wants Chase killed?”
“That’s so secret it’s not even classified. It may not even be written down. Nobody has told us the name. I do know that this man has become an important asset to us. Since the regime fell, he’s become much more powerful. We need his friendship, and this is the price.”
The meeting ended, and Julian got the two Libyans settled in an apartment on the South Side of Chicago and began his search. He had guessed that the two dogs were his best way to find Chase. The dogs limited the number of places where the fugitive could rent an apartment, and even more severely limited the places where he would want to live. He would find a place in the suburbs where there were parks and safe streets where a man could walk a pair of big dogs. It had to be the kind of place where men who looked like him lived, a place where he could get groceries and things without going far. Probably he would go out mostly at night, so Julian decided night was the best time to look for him. Julian was out every night beginning at dusk, searching likely neighborhoods.
It took months, but Julian found him. His first encounter had taught him that this old man was much more formidable than he had anticipated. And the dogs weren’t just a risk to the old man, but also a way of ensuring that he couldn’t be surprised or physically overpowered. Julian had tried to explain all of this to the Libyans, but they had smirked at him. He had repeated his warnings, but they had ignored everything he said.
He had taken the Libyans to the old man’s apartment and set them loose. Now the Libyans were dead and the old man was alive and hiding somewhere out in the world. Julian was the only survivor of the failed mission. Tonight Julian would probably lose his job and his chance to rise in the intelligence world.
He thought about his job. It wasn’t even a job. It was a prolonged tryout for a job. He had thought his time out of the country would at least lead to an offer of employment with the CIA. But he’d been at it for six years, and no offer had come. Now it never would. They were holding a strategy meeting upstairs in this hotel, and he was sitting down here in the bar drinking coffee in a booth. This time the agents had told him he was keeping an eye out to be sure the secrecy and safety of the meeting weren’t compromised. Who were they even afraid of? Did they think there was actually any security issue in the Intercontinental Hotel on Michigan Avenue in Chicago? No. They were just having him babysit himself.
He wondered if they were even going to fire him. They might just never call him again. Maybe he should quit to avoid waiting for a call that would never come. All he would have to do was give them back the phone they had issued him and say, “Don’t call me again. I’m done.”
Then doubts came over him like cold waves breaking on a beach. What would he do for a living? He was twenty-six, and had not done anything officially since he was nineteen and been quietly discharged from the army. He had excellent skills, but few that had any applicability in civilian life. He had a solid record of achievements, but nearly all of his work history was classified.
He pushed the anxiety aside and thought about the night at the apartment. The two Libyans had presented themselves as skilled and subtle assassins, but they had turned out to be punks. Chase had told Julian as much—that they weren’t ready for Chase’s league. Old special ops men were like vampires. Every time a man like Chase killed another adversary, he knew something he hadn’t known before. He knew what one more fighter had done when his life depended on using his best tactic, making the right moves perfectly. Each one added another secret to his knowledge, and each one extended his life span and made him harder to kill.
Julian Carson stared at the opposite wall of his booth—the whorls and streaks in the wood—and thought about how he had gotten here. He had enlisted in the army at seventeen because it seemed like a good thing to do while he was looking for a better thing to do.
He had been brought up outside Jonesboro, Arkansas, on his parents’ vegetable farm. As he looked back on it now, he realized that farm work had made him the perfect military intelligence man. He had learned to do hard physical labor in a hot climate. He had grown up accustomed to striving to raise crops that took a long time to ripen, working on pure faith because no sign of the crops was visible at first, just dirt that he watered with his sweat. He had learned to take long shots with a rifle at running rabbits, when a missed shot might mean no meat on the dinner table until some other day, when he would see a shot he could make.
He had noticed during his time at war that most highly successful soldiers were, like him, country boys. They knew better than to fight the land or the climate. They endured them. They were also, like him, shorter than average. That part of his education had come by watching friends die. It didn’t matter how brave or how well trained, or even how smart you were if your head stuck up where all that superheated metal was flying in your direction.
Julian’s phone vibrated and he looked at the text: “Pay your check and come upstairs.”
He left a twenty-dollar bill on the table and slid out of his booth, then walked out of the bar. He used the stairs at the side of the lobby because stairs were part of his discipline. One set of stairs was nothing. A thousand staircases were a way to build a lean, powerful body and enough speed to get to an adversary a step before he expected you.
He reached the fourth floor, went to the room, and gave a military knock, a single slap on the door with the palm of his hand. The door swung open and he stepped in past Waters, one of the two contact men for this operation.
The room wasn’t what he had expected. This was a suite, with a long, narrow hallway that opened to a living room with two couches and a pair of matching armchairs. In an alcove to his right was a long conference table. Its surface was littered with coffee cups and saucers, trays that had once held food but now held crumbs and cloth napkins. There were papers and scratch pads and three laptops.
In front of him, seated in the living room, were three men. One of them was Harper, his other contact man. The remaining two men were older, one of them with gray hair, and they were both wearing expensive, well-cut dark suits.
Waters walked past him and sat down. He said, “This is Carson.” He didn’t introduce the two strangers.
Harper said, “Carson was our man at the fuckup here in Chicago. We found him gift wrapped in duct tape with a bump on his head.”
At one time Julian Carson would have felt he had to answer that, but he had learned that it was always better not to say anything unless they asked him a direct question.
“Okay, Carson,” said Harper. “Tell us what happened.”
“I found the subject a couple of months ago.”
“Where?”
“He was out at night walking his dogs. I reported that to you at the time, so you may have the date.” He stared at Harper, his face blank. Then he resumed. “I needed to learn where he lived, but because of the dogs I couldn’t follow him without his knowing. Also because of the dogs I thought he was likely to live within an hour’s walk from the spot, but normal walking speed puts that at up to three miles.”
“Skip that. You looked in the area and found his apartment. You drove Mr. Misratha and Mr. Al-Jalloud to the apartment. What then?”
“I repeated the warnings I’d given them. That the subject had a pair of big dogs that would probably hear or smell them coming. And the subject was old, but he was trained, in great shape, and probably armed. I took the Libyans to the building and picked the lock on the front door. Inside was a small foyer, with a staircase leading up to the subject’s apartment.”
“What did the two say?” This time it was one of the two gray-haired men on the couch.
“They didn’t take my warnings seriously. I believe it was Mr. Misratha who said, ‘Just be quiet, wait outside, and watch the back door in case he hears us coming and runs.’ They screwed the suppressors on their weapons and climbed the stairs.”
“And you did what they said? Kept quiet and waited outside?”
“Yes. I was told at the start that this was their operation. I went to the back of the building and stood by the garage so if the subject came down the back stairs and went for his car, I could stop him.”
“Did he?”
“No. After a couple of minutes I heard two rapid shots—bang-bang. Like one shot, and then one more a half second later. The two dogs barked. I guessed that the subject must have gotten to a gun and double tapped the trigger but missed, and when they shot him with their silenced weapons, a muscle reflex fired off the last round. To me the sounds indicated the subject was dead, since his shots took only about a second and stopped. At least one of the Libyans must be alive and unhurt, and probably both. So I waited for them to come downstairs.”
“How long?”
“Five minutes.”
“Then what?”
“I took out my phone and text messaged Mr. Al-Jalloud. He didn’t answer. It occurred to me that they might be doing something they hadn’t told me about, like cutting off a finger to prove they had killed the right man. I sent another text. By then I thought they must be searching the apartment for the money he had diverted. They were very sure of themselves, and it had occurred to me that they might not know how quickly the Chicago police might respond to a call about gunshots and the commotion from the dogs. I wrote: ‘Get out now.’“
“Of course Mr. Al-Jalloud didn’t answer.”
“No, sir. While I was busy with the phone, the subject climbed out a side window of the building, sneaked around to the back, saw me in the glow of the phone’s screen, and clubbed me in the head.”
“You’ve been in some tight combat situations,” the man said. “You never heard him coming, or noticed a change, a shadow, or anything?”
“I did, right at the last moment. But I was expecting one of the Libyans, not him. Then I was out. I became conscious when I saw him carrying a woman to the garage. He had tied me up with duct tape. He had her tied that way too—arms behind her, ankles together, then wrapped around and around. He put her in the car and strapped her in with the seat belt.”
“I hear he talked to you before he left.”
“Yes, sir,” said Carson. This was the part that Julian had been dreading, but he had given the old man his word. “The subject said to tell you that he had never intended to steal the money. He just took it back to return to the government because the go-between had kept it. When the subject’s contact cut off his communication, he felt he was being set up. He got home on his own. He says he’s still willing to give back the money. He’ll do it if you tell the Libyan who sent the shooters he was killed in the operation. He promises that after that he’ll disappear.”
“Jesus,” said the gray-haired man. “What a load of crap. I can’t believe you even bothered to repeat it.”
Julian Carson decided to interpret that as a question. “He said he wouldn’t kill me if I passed it on. He didn’t kill me.”
The man stared into Carson’s eyes, but Carson stared back, unblinking.
“You got a pretty good deal.”
“What did he do then?”
“He checked to be sure the woman was still strapped in the passenger seat with the seat belt. Then he let the dogs into the backseat and drove away.”
“That’s it?”
“He was in a hurry to be gone.”
“I’ll bet he was. Where do you think he was going?”
“Wherever he thinks we won’t be likely to look for him.”
“What do you know about the woman?”
“Her name is Zoe McDonald. Forty-five, divorced, pretty. The apartment was rented in her name only. She was living there for three months before the shooting in Norwich, Vermont, so she couldn’t have been renting it with him in mind. She advertised online for two roommates, and then she took the ad down about a week after he left Vermont, so that’s probably when he arrived.”
“Do you think he’s killed her by now?”
“No,” said Carson. “I think he carried her out that way—”
“Kidnapped her.”
“Kidnapped her that way because he didn’t think he should leave her there with the two bodies. He knew somebody would be along to clean up, and they wouldn’t leave a witness alive. I think he’ll free her in the middle of nowhere so she’ll have to walk a few hours to get to a town while he gets away. He might even have done it already and told her if she called the authorities he’d come back and kill her.”
“Why do you think that?” the man asked. “If he took her to a remote area, why not kill her? It’s much safer for him.”
“Killing her on the spot would have been even safer. He had two weapons with silencers he took from the Libyans. He hasn’t killed anybody who wasn’t trying to kill him.”
“You’re starting to sound like you believe his story.”
“I don’t know. But I think he believes his story.”
Carson said, “Partly just an impression he made on me. But it also occurred to me that if he took back the money, then he must have delivered it to the Libyan first.”
“What does that mean?”
“The money didn’t get to the insurgents because the Libyan kept it.”
Harper and Waters glanced at each other and Waters seemed to cringe for him, but neither spoke.
The older man said, “And you said he only kills people who are trying to kill him. Why are you alive?”
“He wanted me to deliver his message, but he could have left a note. He just didn’t pull the trigger.”
“Tell us. What do you think we should do now?”
“That’s a difficult question, sir.”
“Take a crack at it.”
“I would do two things at once. I’d go through whatever evidence still exists to find out whether he’s telling the truth. And I’d also test him.”
“How?”
“He says he’s willing to give the money back. Let him.”