It was summer. To Marie Spencer the Toronto winter had seemed harder than the ones in Chicago. The snow had lasted into April, and then there was a period of cold rain and dark skies that seemed to last a long time before the sunny days arrived.
She had always loved summer—not just the gentle weather, but the celebration of renewal. Now she lived with a man who never had to concern himself with whether he could afford something—a play, a concert, a train trip across a continent. He let her spend summer days working at things she loved to do, and the long, mild summer evenings with him enjoying the city.
During the summer she had made good progress at the academy learning the piano pieces she had wanted to master, and Alan always seemed to be reading and studying, or going out to work with Canadian charities. He never said much about the charities, but she knew enough about him now to understand what he must be doing. He was very premeditated, and he was probably burnishing his legend. She’d read somewhere that was what they called a false identity in his old line of work—a legend. If he were ever under suspicion by the Canadian authorities, he couldn’t just be a reclusive businessman. He had to be a person with acquaintances and contacts, and a record of virtue. During that summer he seemed to be thriving, as he had not been since Chicago. Physically and mentally, he was at a peak.
She appreciated the care that he took to remain healthy and strong. She also appreciated the fact that he didn’t bore her with the details. She knew he lifted weights and worked out in a gym somewhere on King Street. There was also a martial arts dojo where he trained, but she didn’t know precisely where that was either, other than the fact that it was near a restaurant that he liked. He had been going to the dojo, taking lessons or classes or whatever martial arts people did, for at least four months before she knew it. She had noticed a few bruises on him, and some scrapes, and asked him how they’d happened.
They talked about everything—or, she did, really. He spent most of their conversations listening. He would comment or ask questions, say he understood, and let her move to another topic. He almost never offered the details of his own day. His talk tended to be about things he had observed or learned while out in the city, or interesting articles he had read. She liked these anecdotes because they widened her view of the city without forcing her to do much work. At that time she was learning the Rach 3, the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto no. 3 in D Minor, and that was enough to think about.
On September 30, Marie came home at six and discovered that Alan was not sitting on the couch waiting for her, as she had expected. She closed the door and walked through the apartment calling him. Then she looked at her cell phone, but found no messages or missed calls from him. So she put away her music and went to the kitchen to see about preparing to cook dinner.
Then she noticed that Alan’s laptop was open on the dining room table and plugged into a wall socket. She was curious, so she walked to the table and looked. There was a disc in the laptop, its jewel case sitting beside it, but the computer was asleep. She refreshed it, and played the disc.
Alan had recorded a videodisc of himself sitting there at the table. When she first saw his face, there was a half second of pleasure, but then she saw that his expression was not happy.
“Hi, Marie. I’m aware that leaving a recording is a terrible way to tell you this. I can only promise you that there was no way that wasn’t terrible. I am on a plane right now, about ten hours into a fourteen-hour flight. I’m part of a mission to deliver aid and medical care to some people who need it and deserve to receive it. The work is real. There are forty-six of us, and I’m certain that none of the others have ulterior motives.
“As for my motives, I’m sure you know what they are. The morning when we had to get out of the cabin and try to escape through the snow, I realized we were about to move to our last option. We both knew by then that my giving the money to the government had not changed anybody’s mind. And we knew that they would never stop looking for us. But that morning, I realized that I couldn’t let things go on much longer. Beginning that day, I changed what I was doing.
“I apologize for the secrecy. I had to hide my plans from you. I knew that you would never agree. And I knew that if I told you in person even ten minutes before I was on the plane and in the air, you would try to stop me.
“I’ve now reached the point where if you called anyone or made any attempt to get the plane stopped, I would certainly be caught and killed. I don’t know how long this will take. This trip is supposed to last for six months, but where we’re going, plans have to be made day to day.
“I’ve left you the things you’ll need if you have to leave the apartment while I’m gone, even if it means leaving Canada too. You’ll find a pocketbook in a drawer in the bedroom with Canadian and American cash in it. There’s also a Vermont driver’s license and a bank card in the name Julia Larsen with your picture on it. There’s a balance in that bank account of a little over two million dollars. There’s also a safe-deposit box key in the purse for the box at that bank. The American passport is the last one I got with your picture in it, so don’t lose it.
“I hate to sound corny, but destroy this DVD. It could get us both killed. The only good way to do it is to burn it. Thank you for everything, and good luck. Good-bye.”
While the image dissolved into static emptiness, Marie cried. It wasn’t the sort of crying that made a small drop or two well up in a woman’s eyes that she blotted with a piece of Kleenex. She wept with deep, shuddering spasms, rocking back and forth.
She knew exactly where he was going, without having to look up the possible destinations of a fourteen-hour flight or the excursions of Toronto relief organizations. He was going back to that horrible place because he liked the odds. If he killed Faris Hamzah, then Faris Hamzah would stop demanding his death and sending killers, and she and his family would be safe. If Faris Hamzah killed him, then Hamzah would stop sending killers, and she and his family would be safe.
She loved him, but she hated him. He didn’t have to do this. They had been in a new country, safe and happy, for six months. He had manipulated her, fooled her again. He had never stopped manipulating her. And now he had left her totally alone in a foreign country, and she was scared and angry.
She ejected the DVD from the computer, broke it in her hands, and broke it again. She carried it to the kitchen, put the pieces in a small iron frying pan, slid the pan into the oven, and turned on the broiler to melt them. She turned on the stove-top fan to get rid of the smell. Then she began to search the apartment for guns.
She found herself annoyed at Alan for not having guns in the apartment. If he had any left, he must have taken them with him. He undoubtedly thought she would decide to kill herself, and so he would try to make it less likely that she could carry it off.
Her frustration and irritation grew as she searched. She looked in every drawer, every cabinet, and everyplace she had ever seen him hide a gun. She was at it for hours, and then realized it was nearly midnight. She was tired, and she was hungry. She went into the kitchen and ran water in the frying pan. She tried to scrape the charred mess out of the pan. She pried most of what was left of the plastic into the garbage, then conceded that the pan was now unusable, and threw that in the trash too.
She sat and thought about the relationship, from the moment he had called to ask about the room she’d advertised in Chicago until now. The big moment, the time when everything had changed, was when he had kidnapped her from the apartment and driven away. That was when her secret had begun to matter again.
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 that 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.