Fall was busy at the university, but Julian Carson enjoyed the work. The university was the most reliable and stable employer in Jonesboro, and he liked the science faculty and students. They tended to be polite but preoccupied, and not especially pretentious, and they were too busy to be curious about him.
But what he liked more was Ruthie. He had not gotten over his secret shock that somehow the course of his life had-twisted around so that she had come to love him.
His life was almost perfect. He had been able to quiet his own conscience about most of the things he had done for the army. He had been part of a forward covert team sent to protect the personnel and the interests of the United States in several countries. He could have made a good argument that each operation made sense and probably saved the lives of civilians in the countries where he’d worked. If his career had ended when he’d been recalled from Brazil, he could have closed that part of his life without regret. If it hadn’t been for his final assignment, he could have been at peace. What made that impossible was the old man.
Everything the senior agents had said the old man had done was logically impossible, and had to be lies. The old man couldn’t have stolen the twenty million dollars from Faris Hamzah unless he had delivered it to him first. And if Hamzah had given the money to the rebels in the hills instead of stealing it, the old man couldn’t have taken it back from him. The old man’s superiors in military intelligence had never charged him with anything, and neither had anybody since.
Julian couldn’t help wondering where the old man and his girlfriend had gone after Big Bear. He had no idea how they were living, now that the old man had returned the twenty million dollars to the Treasury, or what names they were using. He had no way to help them, but what he could do was distract and mislead the pursuers. He needed to make sure that the military intelligence people would be watching him.
Last time, he had reached the old man by putting an ad in the Chicago Tribune. He knew that the old man’s interest in Chicago would have lapsed during the months since then. But he also knew that the intelligence people would not have lost interest. They would still be monitoring the want ads, and still searching for anything that carried the name James Harriman.
He composed a classified ad for the Chicago Tribune just like the one he had used to set up the meeting with the old man in San Francisco. “I will be available to talk in the same way at the usual time. J. H.” He asked that it run for a week, and enclosed payment in cash.
Julian made everything he did look suspicious. He went to an Ikea store and bought furniture that came unassembled in large, flat cardboard boxes. There were a queen bed, a couple of nightstands, and a dresser. On the same trip he bought a set of blackout drapes to hang behind the regular curtains in the guest room. As he left the store with the boxes on a flat cart, he noticed that there was a man he had never seen before standing inside the building a few feet back from the sliding glass doors, watching him. As he was loading the boxes into his car in the lot, he saw the man getting into a dark blue Mustang. Twice on the way home he saw the car again. They were still watching him. He made several quick turns, came back the same way, and passed the man, then lost him.
Julian had bought the furniture because Ruthie’s niece from Louisville wanted to come for a visit, but he did his best to make his watchers suspect that he might be planning to hide the old man and his girlfriend for a time. When he had finished assembling the furniture and hung the blackout drapes, he saw a black SUV parked across the street with two men inside. After a few hours a second pair relieved the first. The shifts went on for over a week, and ended when Ruthie’s niece arrived and moved into the room.
The next week he bought a pair of prepaid cell phones that could be used and discarded and had them delivered to his office at the university.
At frequent intervals Julian did things that would indicate his plan was to help the old man. The next week he began a series of computer searches of travel agencies, airlines, and hotels. He studied Antwerp, where the diamond wholesalers operated; Luxembourg, where the old man had assembled the money to take to Faris Hamzah thirty-five years ago; Geneva, where banks might harbor numbered accounts old enough to have existed when the old man had first taken the money out of Libya.
Anything Julian could do to keep the eyes of military intelligence focused on him, he did. He knew he could rely on their overconfidence to help them fool themselves. They knew that he had found the old man twice when they had failed. Now he tried to make them believe that he was secretly in touch with the old man and making arrangements for him to sink deeper out of sight.
Julian e-mailed cryptic messages to men whose names he found online—men in their sixties who owned businesses, ran organizations, were mentioned in articles, or wrote them. He often used the names of donors or graduates he found in online Ivy League university alumni publications. Sometimes Julian’s messages looked like word code. Some were numerical, and others were symbols arranged in patterns. None of them meant anything.
Julian made sure agents would have to get on an airplane, fly to some city, and investigate. He picked addresses all over the country and mailed puzzling things to them—keys that no longer opened any lock, tickets to plays or sporting events in distant cities that might serve as meeting opportunities.
Julian was fairly confident that he could keep one small corner of the intelligence world occupied—Mr. Ross, Mr. Prentiss, Mr. Bailey, Waters, Harper, and a few unseen colleagues. Their operation—trying to deliver a rogue American agent to a Libyan asset—seemed to Julian so incriminating that the number of people who knew anything about it must be very small.
There were some encouraging signs. If they had already found the old man or killed him, they would have no interest in Julian anymore. As long as they were watching Julian, the old man must still be alive and free.
During a break at work he completed searches about banking practices in the Cayman Islands, and the extradition laws of various European countries. He started with France, and then moved to Ireland, and then east to countries that had once been part of the Soviet Union. That would give the people monitoring his computer plenty to think about.
One evening when it was nearly ten he picked up a backpack, slipped out the back door of the house, and went through a couple of yards to where he had parked his truck after work. He took the truck to the hospital to pick up Ruthie from her shift and drove her along the dark highway to Lake City, where he made a series of quick turns and then backed into a space behind a building and watched for the car he had noticed following on the dark highway to catch up.
He and Ruthie went to an ice-cream shop in Lake City where they and their friends used to go in high school and were delighted to find it was still there. They split a sundae and drove home, followed all the way home by the same car.
When they got home, Julian did his usual his walk around to see if anyone had been inside the house, or outside trying to get in, but there was no sign of intruders. Then he and Ruthie showered and went to bed.
Now and then he would let a period go by when he did nothing suspicious, and he let one of those times occur next. Then, early in the morning a week later, he went to the university library and borrowed some language practice tapes in Portuguese and books about Brazil. He was sure that whoever was watching him must know that he had posed as a Brazilian for over two years before he’d been recalled to the United States to look for the old man.
Julian went to the Chemistry and Physics Building and began work. He had to set up an apparatus for a chemistry demonstration to be performed at a morning lecture, fill a series of written equipment requests for physics research, and fill out the forms for the purchasing department.
He set the Portuguese tapes and the books about Brazil in his desk at odd angles and photographed them with his phone, so when he returned from lunch he could see whether they had been touched. When he returned he found they had.
That night before he went to sleep he wondered where the old man really was. He hoped it wasn’t Brazil.