Hank and Marcia Dixon appeared to be relaxed, almost leisurely travelers. The only days when they drove more than five hours were when there was some exceptional delay—roadwork, accidents, weather.
They stopped at resort hotels, or the sort of city hotel that was one or two hundred dollars more expensive than the others in the vicinity. Hank chose the ones where there were plenty of people who were middle-aged or older with money, and few people in their twenties who might get into the sort of trouble that stimulated calls to the police. The hotels had doormen and security people to keep the guests from being bothered.
The Dixons were not the sorts who sought out company or conversation. When they passed anyone in the hallways they smiled. When someone spoke they answered politely. If they liked a hotel and it passed Hank Dixon’s standard of safety and anonymity, they sometimes stayed an extra day or two. The first time they did it, he explained to Marcia: “Every day that we’re living like this, getting stronger and healthier and more rested, they’re out there somewhere standing in the rain or the cold watching for us. Anything that makes their effort a waste of time is good for us.”
Every evening, Dixon turned on the television set in their room and watched the news for any mention of the shooting at Dan Chase’s house in Vermont, the two men found dead in the parking lot near Buffalo, or the kidnapping of Zoe McDonald in Chicago. He bought a new laptop and looked for anything that might be related to the hunt for Dan Chase or Peter Caldwell.
He had been expecting that the intelligence people would get frustrated and begin to use state and local law enforcement to find him. He had waited to see what the pretext would be. They might say he was anything from a bank robber to a child molester, but they seemed to be putting out nothing. At each stop he looked, found nothing, and then repacked his laptop for the next day’s drive.
Hank was premeditated and careful about the way he treated Marcia. He had used romance to manipulate and control her for months, and he had gotten good at it. The deception was not a chore, and her affection for him made her pleasant and pliable. But since the attack in Chicago he had occasionally had an uneasy feeling about her.
She had surprised him when she insisted on coming with him. Running away with a man marked for death was insane. He’d admitted he had been manipulating her, but she acted as though she had given her permission, or even known all along, and found it pleasant. He had tried to persuade her to leave him, and she wouldn’t. And if she secretly wanted revenge, circumstances had given her a hundred chances to turn him in, run off with his car, his money, his guns, or do whatever else that would cripple his chance of survival. She had done nothing but try to help him.
He knew that at some point he was going to have to part with her. For now, he still wanted the protective camouflage provided by traveling with a woman who appeared to be his wife. She had offered to be useful, and he would continue to accept her help, but she was more complicated than he had thought, and less predictable. During the months while he had used familiarity and charm to allay her suspicions and penetrate her defenses, she had done the same to his. He had to maintain an emotional distance, and keep himself separate from her.
He took detours that kept them off the interstates and toll roads, where there might be cameras at tollbooths and entrances. Between hotels they paid cash for most of the things they bought. Once, they rented a cottage at a remote lake in Minnesota for two weeks. He gave false names and paid the owner cash in advance. They spent the week hiking and paddling the kayaks that came with the place, and cooking their dinners over a wood fire in the stone fire pit by the shore. At the end of the second week he made sure they had cleaned the cottage, wiped away fingerprints, and returned the keys to the owner before they drove on.
As she watched the telephone poles going by beside the road Marcia seemed quieter and more contemplative than usual.
“Something wrong?” Hank said.
“I was thinking. That’s all.”
“It doesn’t seem to be making you happy. I plan to avoid it.”
“We just put fourteen days on the good side. We were happy and got lots of sun and exercise and ate healthy food. Nobody saw the car or our faces. Then I remembered that fourteen days isn’t that much. They found you after thirty-five years.”
“I doubt that they looked for thirty-five years. They might have searched hard for a couple of years. It would have been a quiet search, because they wouldn’t want to explain to a US attorney what I had done, or admit they were conducting operations in this country. After that I might have been on a list. Something happened this year to make me a priority.”
“What would it be?”
“At the beginning, my biggest mistake was to come home with the money. That proved that the people inside intelligence who had decided to cut me loose and let me die had given up too easily. Welcoming me home would have made them look bad. So they made up a better story—that I had been in it to steal the money, and had killed some people doing it.”
“That’s all they wanted to accomplish—just to not look bad?”
“I think that it’s also possible one of them was a strategist—that he knew even then that twenty million dollars in the context of the Middle East was going to be nothing. In the end, twenty billion was nothing. What they needed was friends, allies, operatives, and agents there. It’s even possible they knew before they sent me that Faris Hamzah would keep the money. They just didn’t tell me. Either way, by making it home I put everybody in a bad position.”
“Who was everybody?”
“Numbers. Voices on the phone. I never knew names, and what’s going on now can’t be about them anymore. Something new has happened.”
“Do you have any idea what?”
“Somebody has learned the story of what happened thirty-five years ago, and they want it to end differently.”
Hank Dixon moved them from place to place, making the time go by pleasantly and without exposing them to much risk. Then they reached a hotel in Spokane, Washington, that seemed to cater almost entirely to businesspeople. Most of the guests were out of the hotel during business hours, and many of them were out again in the evening, probably taking clients and prospects out to dinner. This gave Hank and Marcia a long period of time to use the pool and the gym without having many people notice them.
When they returned to their room, Hank went to work on his laptop computer, as usual. He looked for any reference to the events they had experienced—the shooting at Daniel Chase’s house and his disappearance, the two men he had shot near Buffalo, the two dead men in the Chicago apartment of Zoe McDonald, and her disappearance. There was nothing in any of the papers to indicate that any of it had ever happened.
“Any news?” Marcia asked.
“Not that I can see,” he said.
“I can’t believe this,” she said. “I was kidnapped out of my apartment. An unknown man tied me up, threw me over his shoulder, and drove me away, and there’s not a word of it anywhere.”
“It’s not exactly unbelievable,” he said. “There must have been agents on the scene right away, before the police. They probably made everything look as though nothing had happened, and cleaned everything up. In these operations, if the police get there and see anything, two federal agents show up at the local police station and say whatever happened is part of an ongoing federal investigation involving national security. If the papers don’t already have the story, they don’t get it. If they have the story, they’re asked not to print it.”
After a few more minutes, Marcia went to take a shower. He kept searching the papers. After another hour, he saw the personal ad in the Chicago Tribune. It said: “Mr. Caldwell. We’ve decided to take you up on your offer. Send your instructions to Post Office Box 39281, Washington, DC 20003. J. H.”
James Harriman was the young man he had asked to convey his offer, and here was the reply.
He turned off the laptop and said to Marcia, “I’m going out for a walk. No need to get dressed again.”
His walk to ok him through the downtown district. As he walked, he considered. Nobody in any intelligence organization had any particular attachment to the truth. The truth was just one of many versions that was not necessarily superior to any of the other versions.
If he showed up at a prearranged meeting with the money, they’d see it as a chance to end things neatly. He and the money would disappear. But if he devised ways of making it harder for them, they might see this as a time to take what they could get, and move on to the next project. They would keep their word only if they had no power to do anything else.
What he would have to do now was attend to the details. If he was going to do this, he would have to devise a safe way to respond to the ad so they couldn’t trace his communication. He would have to find a way to raise the twenty million dollars without revealing where it had come from—which banks and brokerages, in which accounts, under what names. Then he would have to find a way to return it to them without being ambushed.
He began to try out ideas. He could try to get the money in cash, put it in trash bags, and tell them where it was.
He had tried that thirty-five years ago. That much cash had filled ten large cardboard boxes. That would be as many as twenty trash bags. It was easier to obtain cash in those days, too. Now they’d trace the serial numbers to the Federal Reserve District where the bills were released, and then to each of the bank branches. Any cash transaction involving ten thousand dollars or more had to be reported to the government. And bundling a lot of smaller amounts would be even worse. The government would pick that up and jump on it even faster, because it was the way money launderers tried to avoid getting spotted. Maybe using cash had become impossible.
As Dixon returned to the hotel, he kept thinking of ways to give the money to the government without giving them the ability to trace it back to its sources. One way was gold. Melting it wouldn’t change it. If he had a pile of gold—say, gold one-ounce coins, he could melt them and make the gold into bars with no markings. If he did that they wouldn’t know where the gold came from, at least at first.
But even if he bought the gold from a foreign source that didn’t report gold transactions to the US government, he would have a hard time collecting that much gold without getting noticed. Keeping the purchase a secret would only be temporary. Eventually the transaction would be traced to a bank account, even without the cooperation of the dealer. But it might buy him some time.
“Let’s see what the price is today,” he whispered to himself, turned on his laptop again, and typed in “price of gold today.” It was $1,203.00 an ounce.
He used the calculator on his computer. He rounded the price off to $1,200. Twenty million dollars would buy 16,667 ounces. That was about a thousand pounds of gold. He could try to buy a hoard of gold from various sources, put it in a vault somewhere, and send military intelligence the key. But buying that much gold would take time, and there were too many ways to get caught.
He wondered about diamonds. But he knew there was a huge markup on jewelry, and he could hardly deal with well-known, respectable jewelers and expect to be anonymous. He couldn’t work with dealers who weren’t well known and respectable, either. He wouldn’t have a clue what he was buying. He could pay twenty million dollars for a few pieces of glass.
Maybe the answer was to give the government the twenty million in a form that couldn’t be moved. He could send them the deed to a twenty-million-dollar piece of land. But buying land took time, and it would require bank information and in-person signings and escrow periods.
The next afternoon the Dixons moved on and checked in to a Seattle hotel, and Hank decided to test an idea. He turned on his computer, and after a few minutes of typing numbers and passwords he began to hum to himself.
Marcia said, “Do you mind if I go down to the pool for a swim?”
“No,” he said. He kept typing. “Feel free.”
After a few minutes he heard her say bye, go out, and shut the door.
He had been right. It was impossible. Giving the government twenty million dollars in any form couldn’t be done without blowing his identity and leading them straight to him. He couldn’t move that kind of money in a hurry anymore without the government finding out who was doing it.
Then he tried getting online access to some investment accounts, and a solution occurred to him—to accept what he couldn’t change. The government would learn the name of the person who owned the accounts, and the person who performed the transactions. So he would give them information they already knew. The intelligence people already knew that he had once been Daniel Chase and they knew he had once been Peter Caldwell.
The accounts he held in those two names were still open and active. Military intel knew the names, but the government hadn’t yet confiscated the money he had invested in those names. Maybe they assumed that for the past thirty-five years he’d been keeping it in cash under the floorboards, or in numbered offshore accounts. More likely, they didn’t want to let the federal agencies that blocked financial transactions know about him—the Justice Department, the SEC, the FBI, the IRS. For now, the bank and brokerage accounts of Daniel Chase and Peter Caldwell seemed intact.
He took a deep breath and then typed in an online transaction, a request for an electronic transfer of a hundred thousand dollars from an account belonging to Daniel Chase to the bank account of a corporation called Ellburn Holdings he had founded twenty years ago to store some of his money. He took another deep breath, and then clicked on the box that said SUBMIT.
He watched a circle of dots appear on the screen, rotate counterclockwise for a few seconds, and then vanish. “Your transaction has been completed. Thank you for your business.” It had worked.
He opened the next account, and began to type the names and numbers for the next transfer. He submitted the transfer, and moved on to the next account. Before long he was moving much larger sums, but each transaction was accepted. He left some money in each account to avoid any reaction that would be automatically triggered by his closing an account.
Next he opened an account that belonged to Peter Caldwell. The first transfer was another small one, a test. This transaction was successful, so he moved immediately to larger transfers. He kept at it until he accomplished what he’d wanted.
He restarted his computer to be sure that he had closed all of the communications with the firms he’d been dealing with, and then added up all of the transactions he had made. He stared at the screen for a few seconds.
The screen said: $22,000,800.
He heard Marcia’s key card slide in the lock and the bolt open. As she stepped in, he cleared the screen. “Hi,” he said. “Have a good swim?”
“Great,” she said. “You should have come. I’ll dry my hair now so we can go to dinner.”
“Good idea. I’m hungry.”
She went into the bathroom. As soon as he heard the hair dryer he began to look at maps on his computer screen. He studied one, then typed in another request, and then another. Then he found the one he wanted.
He plugged his laptop into the printer on the desk and typed: “To J. H.: It’s a deal. Here are the coordinates for the meeting on November 5 at 5:00 p.m.” He thought for a moment. Much of the money he had requested would have to be raised by liquidating securities. That often took seven business days. He added three days to be sure the proceeds were transferred and deposited in the Ellburn Holdings account: “November 8 at 5:00 p.m.”
Marcia emerged from the bathroom brushing her hair. “About ready?”
“I just have to put on my coat.”