After abandoning his property, Dale had ridden the snowmobile over the mountain trails in the dark, arriving in the neighboring town of Roslyn around nine p.m. He pulled up to a low-rent used-car dealer on the edge of town. There were a dozen cars for sale sitting out in a gravel lot with a single-wide trailer as a sales office.
He’d long ago noted that there was no security fence on this lot and only one sputtering overhead light. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, the meager little business had lodged itself as a stepping-stone in a potential egress plan, should the need ever arise. The need had arisen.
On the back edge of the lot, he found the type of vehicle he was looking for: a beat-up mid-seventies Chevy pickup sporting three different colors, one of which was plain Bondo Gray. He retrieved a bundled-up tool kit from a cargo recess under the snowmobile’s seat and spread it out.
He used a slim jim from the tool kit to access the truck and a screwdriver to pry the steering column loose. He closed the circuit of the truck’s ignition system by touching two stripped wires together. The old beast roared to life with the squeal of a slipping fan belt.
After throwing his backpack in the cab, he returned to his snowmobile and scraped away the registration decals. He purposely left the keys for the machine in the ignition. Though he was stealing the truck, his conscience was clear. The expensive two-year-old snowmobile was more than a fair trade for the beat-up Chevy. By the time the car dealer put it all together, he’d accept the trade.
Knowing he had limited time before the truck was reported stolen, he headed north to the touristy town of Leavenworth on Highway 97. There were dozens of motels in Leavenworth and he drove around their parking lots, looking for a target. After casing three, he found an early-eighties Chevy pickup with a camper top sandwiched into a dark spot. Close enough.
Using pliers and a screwdriver, he swapped out the license plates between the two trucks. He figured he now had even more time before the cops would look twice at his ride.
Around eleven, he headed west through the mountains and eventually north on I-5, stopping only for gas, food, and coffee, paying cash the whole way. By one a.m., he’d made it to Bellingham, just below the Canadian border. Here he found a small mom-and-pop motel with a red neon vacancy sign. He parked the truck around back, paid the manager in cash, and trudged up the outdoor stairs to his room, dead-dog tired. The freeway roared by just outside the metal door.
It was from this bed that he called Meredith at four the next morning, having bagged a few hours of sleep. After hanging up on her, he went into the bathroom, showered, and removed his shoulder bandage. It was soaked with blood.
Dale knew what he had to do, but the thought made him cringe. Facing the inevitable, he dug through his pack and found the trauma kit.
He cleaned the wound while perched on the bathroom’s Formica counter, his eyes close to the mirror. With the substantial blood loss, he knew that if he gave himself any morphine, his blood pressure would drop. He’d have to tough this one out. He bit down on the end of a towel, ready to scream.
Pinching the skin closed over the wound, he used a medical stapler to insert ten sutures, trying hard not to pass out from the extraordinary pain. He finally got it done, though it felt like his arm had been torn out of its socket. He dabbed the sealed wound with gauze, coated it with Neosporin, rebandaged himself.
He caught sight of his face in the mirror. The skin was ashen. Sweat beaded on his forehead. The coppery brown hair was ragged and stringy, hanging down to his three-day beard. Not pretty but appropriate for the look he wanted to cross the border, since it was closer to the picture on his passport.
Hours later, he was rolling north on I-5, a plastic bag of ice on his shoulder and an IV in his wrist. The IV tube was hooked to a plasma bag hanging from the empty gun rack in the truck’s rear window. When he’d taken in half the bag, he pulled over and stowed it in the trauma kit, hoping like hell he’d never have to use it again.
Starving, he found a nearby greasy spoon where he threw down a plate of eggs and forced himself to take in a quart of water. On his way out the door, he liberated from a hook by the men’s room a filthy mechanic’s jacket that smelled of old engine fluids. At his next stop for gas, he bought a ball cap with a Budweiser logo. He checked the truck’s oil and smeared some engine grease on the hat, giving it a black patina.
The sun broke free of the Cascades, affording a brilliant view of Mount Baker. The dashes in the highway whizzed by. It was just a matter of time now.
The tires hummed along with his thoughts. He’d grown up not too far from here, fifty miles south in the little port town of Anacortes. His dad had been a Navy man, an A-6 bomber pilot based at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island. In the twilight of his flying days, the old man had retired and taken a job with a defense contractor on base, which had allowed Dale to grow up without moving the way other military brats usually did.
He passed by a taco stand at exit 126. He and the old man used to stop there on road trips. Things had been great back then for a while. But then Paul Dale died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of forty-six, the summer between Dale’s junior and senior years of high school. That was a raw deal if ever there was one.
He saw a road sign: Canadian border, Peace Arch, thirty more miles. Dale’s mom was Canadian, a Quebecer.
Her parents had emigrated from Iran in the mid-seventies in the grim lead-up to the revolution. When John was a kid, his mother had spoken to him in both French and Farsi. She was a strong woman, but the death of her husband at such a young age had turned her life upside down. Weekend social drinking became daily. She was dead now, so it didn’t matter anymore.
The border was only fifteen miles now, the cars beginning to bunch up.
His life had been conventional till then, a paint-by-numbers kind of kid. He’d done well, gotten into Notre Dame, won a Navy ROTC scholarship. He was going places. He was going to do it for his dad. He thought about Grace. The letter in his pocket.
Five miles. He pulled over, rummaged around the seat, and found his passport. The truck’s temperature was rising. Not good. He’d have to find another ride on the other side. He took a pull of water. He didn’t feel great.
After commissioning, Dale had taken all the requisite tests for the Navy to determine the direction of an officer’s career. He figured he’d be off to Pensacola and flight school, just like his dad had done back in the seventies. But much to his disappointment, the Navy billeted him as an intelligence officer, with orders to report to some command in a Virginia town he’d never heard of. He protested, but the needs of the Navy always came first. They liked to say stuff like that.
He took down some water and looked at his phone, looking over Google Maps for a less traveled crossing. If someone had a clue, they’d get the ping on his phone and know he’d gone out through Canada. But he’d be long gone. Didn’t matter.
He hadn’t loved that intel job out in Bahrain, boring as hell. He applied regularly to become a SEAL, a pilot, a sub driver . . . anything else. But the Navy didn’t oblige—its needs were still coming first. He’d started thinking about what he’d do as a civilian when his tour of duty was up.
Thumbing through the digital map, he found a small two-lane that went east. Surely that crossing would be sparser. He exited I-5 and doubled back south, looking for the exit. The truck rattled along.
It had gotten better over time, he had to admit, back there in Bahrain. In his second year, he was assigned to monitor the movements of the IRGC Navy and prepare briefings for the commanding admiral. In one of them, he translated some raw Farsi between Iranian patrol boat crews in the Shatt al Arab. Stunned by this surprising knowledge of native tongues, the admiral made him his main man. That was when shit really changed.
He was headed due east now, squinting into the sun as it rose higher over the brilliant white mountains.
The admiral had known John wanted to be an operator. He must have said something to somebody. John was invited to an interview with a Navy captain from JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, which oversaw all American Special Forces, including the SEALs. Dale couldn’t have been more excited at the time—he was going to get a real shot at his dream.
He’d been directed to a nondescript building in the middle of Manama, the capital of Bahrain. But when he entered the office there in his snowy dress whites, he found that the people waiting for him weren’t JSOC. One of the interviewers was a gorgeous young brunette named Meredith Morris. She had a proposition for him.
The small border checkpoint was just ahead. There was a line of three cars before him. He put the truck in park and killed the engine, waiting. The weak winter sun warmed his shoulder. The Canadian passport was on his lap. There was a black-and-white Holstein cow lowing in a field on the Canadian side of the border. More of them were lazily walking toward it, joining in, mooing from a distance.
He absently tapped the passport with the gold seal of the Canadian government. The photo page had his picture from six or seven years ago: Reza Shariati, resident of Montreal, graduate of McGill University.
He wasn’t worried about getting flagged at the border. The CIA had a division that did nothing but apply for real documents from passport agencies, DMV offices, and other state-run bureaucracies all around the world. In effect, it manufactured law-abiding citizens out of thin air. These invented people, “legends,” were carefully tracked and cultivated over time.
When the Agency had placed him on inactive suspension, they’d confiscated his CIA ID, his handgun, and his real US passport. He’d been told to surrender all other related agency equipment and materials by a certain date. But he never had. If they wanted the shit so damn bad, let them come and get it.
They’d never followed up. He knew why. The Agency needed to keep legends alive so as not to have to explain to any real government entity why the person they’d manufactured had ceased to exist. Since he was on inactive suspension, they weren’t inclined to kill off his personas, which continued to maintain contacts with real assets in the intelligence world, like Cerberus.
He’d always believed his past would catch up to him somehow. It was why he kept the passports of these legends and a wad of cash close by. It was why he had every intention of getting through to the Vancouver airport and flying to the Caymans, where he had a few more thousand dollars stashed. From there, he intended to switch to another legend on a UK passport and get to France, where he’d once paid cash for a little shack in Bordeaux a long time ago. There was a moldy old cellar at that house, where Dale had locked away a cache of supplies, including weapons. The CIA never knew about it. He never even told Meth.
So there he sat in line, fingering the Canadian passport of a person manufactured by the CIA, the agency that had legally barred him from leaving the country. The agency that was now apparently begging him to come back to run a mission. Not only was he breaking their suspension deal with them; he was turning his back on them. He supposed that technically it meant he was about to become a fugitive from the United States government wanted by the CIA.
The car ahead of him moved forward. Dale cranked the truck and followed, then shut it down, listening to the cows mooing away just past the fence. Canadian cows.
Fugitive. The word rattled around in the engine of his brain like a loose part. He recalled the still-open inquiry, the nature of the punitive suspension that had kicked in when he resigned. The Agency had told him it would be illegal to leave the US without their permission. He’d signed a bunch of papers.
Up till now he hadn’t really cared. He had his home in Cle Elum and his growing renown as a local artist. But he could do that anywhere. Hell, weren’t all the great impressionist painters from France?
The Cle Elum home was in Grace’s name, held in trust; Dale was a tenant who paid rent into the trust. Meth would figure a way to clear his name.
It wasn’t like he was a real criminal.
But now that he was actually fleeing the country—with stolen credentials—he wondered about that. He was breaking multiple laws, felonies. That would make him ipso facto a felon, a fugitive, even if he had a very good excuse.
He started the truck, slipped it into gear, and moved forward another vehicle length before shutting it down again.
He suddenly recalled a story from his middle school years. A young pilot in his father’s squadron had so indebted himself to a shady loan shark outfit that the officer had just up and fled to Canada one day. In doing so, the young lieutenant had become a deserter from the US military, breaking the oath of his commission. The scared kid had probably even used this very border crossing. Once over that line, he’d become a fugitive, never able to return to the US. Dale remembered his dad telling him how he’d had to brief the FBI on the deserter. A youthful indiscretion leading to a lifelong mistake, his dad had said.
Dale shook his head, listening to the cows. That’s not me, he thought, removing his hat, running his hand through his hair. The two scenarios were nothing alike.
He’d served his country admirably, unquestioningly for most of his life. He’d risked his life for it, killed for it. He had more stories of valor than anyone he’d ever even met. He’d always met the tenets of his oath to his country. Always. He was a man of honor who had done his duty. Deserter?
A cow looked at him dumbly, unblinking, then went back to chewing the ground. Deserter. It was even worse than technically being a fugitive, if not a real criminal. He looked at the vehicle behind him. A VW van with Canadian plates. He accidentally caught his own eye in the rearview mirror.
He thought of Cerberus. The Agency would figure something else out. They’d been more than ready to send him packing just a few years ago. How could he possibly be the only tool they had to deal with this nuclear problem? And how dare they show up on his doorstep and drop the whole mess in his lap, nearly getting him killed by a pack of fucking Spetsnaz!
Irritated, he rotated his arm, testing the wound on his shoulder. It burned.
More of the cows seemed to be looking at him now. They’d all gone silent for the moment. Driving forward another thirty yards to the barbed wire where the animals stood would mean becoming a deserter, the object of stories that others would tell one day. That would be his legacy. Would his own daughter be telling that story to his grandkid one day? What about his wife? Ex-wife, he reminded himself.
Meth had damn well better understand his extenuating circumstances, he thought. Of course she would. John wasn’t going for good—he was just getting out while things were hot. A team of operatives had tried to kill him for Christ’s sake. He’d be back soon enough when it was safe. She’d understand.
But would Grace? He tapped his shirt pocket, heard her letter wrinkling beneath. Whatever happened, Dad, you’re the most honorable man I’ve ever known. I couldn’t be prouder of you. Would his daughter understand that the Agency had treated him like a traitor when he wasn’t? Would she understand that he’d had to leave because their reckless mismanagement had put him in danger? Would she understand why he hadn’t wanted to work for them again, even when asked? That he’d had no choice? It was a lot to ask of a kid.
He pictured Grace in the same khakis he’d worn years ago, manning the bridge of a ship in the Persian Gulf, doing her part to keep the world safe from the mad mullahs. Would she understand that her father had also served there to keep the world safe? That he’d gone above and beyond?
Had he?
The car ahead of him moved on into Canada, past the cows. Dale sat frozen, unable to turn the ignition to start the truck up again. The VW van guy honked. Dale waited three more seconds, staring at the dingy old speedometer in front of him. He looked at his own eye in the rearview and then at the van behind him. It honked a second time. VW man had his hands raised, palms up, the universal WTF gesture of drivers everywhere.
Dale reluctantly started the pickup and inched it forward. After ten seconds he found himself looking into the mildly pleasant face of a Canada Border Services officer.
He thumbed the passport on his lap, flicking the pages. He kept it below the window, out of sight.
“Good morning, sir. Canadian or American?” the officer asked, the sun behind him blotting his face, the cows beyond mooing loudly again. “Sorry about the cows,” the border officer said, glancing away. “The dairy farmer over there comes out to feed them about this time every morning.” He smiled. “Just like my dogs. Passport?”
Dale stared back at the immigration officer, saying nothing. It was now or never. The cows were going nuts.
“Sir?”
“Shit,” Dale said out loud, staring straight ahead. “Shit, shit, shit!” He slapped his hand on the top of the steering wheel, rattling it.
“Sir, excuse me?” The officer’s voice took on that law enforcement edge. His hands were now on his hips, his hat tilted toward Dale.
Dale let his passport fall to the floor of the truck by angling his knee. He covered it with his boot and slid it under the bench seat. He made a show of patting down the pockets of the greasy jacket.
He removed the Budweiser hat and wiped his sweating forehead. “I just realized I forgot my passport,” he said. “I’m an American. I’ll need to turn around.”
Ten minutes later, two miles south of the border, he pulled over next to a dewy alfalfa field thawing in the sun. He found the secure phone Meredith had left with him in an outer pocket of his backpack. He’d taken the battery out so they couldn’t track him. But it didn’t matter anymore. He put the battery back in, powered the phone up, waited for the signal.
He stared at it for ten more seconds, thumb over the first digit. Then he dialed. He called his ex-wife. His handler.