Now, as he stared ahead into the darkness of Interstate 89 beyond the range of his headlights, he thought about the time after the escape. He knew his enemies had assumed that when he reached the main highway he would head north for the port. Instead he turned south toward the desert. For the first few hours he was still checking his rearview mirrors every few seconds, pushing the gas pedal for every bit of extra speed. When he was far enough away he stopped on the desert road to secure the loose money under the tarp in the back of the truck by stuffing some into one box that was half-full, and the excess into his backpack and under the seats in the cab. Then he covered the bed again and drove on, going as far as he could while the night lasted.
He stopped again in a lonely spot at midday to fill the pickup’s gas tank with two of the twenty-liter gas cans from the Range Rovers. Then he stopped at a garbage dump at the edge of an oil field and picked up some plastic bags of garbage to cover the cardboard boxes, so he would appear to be on his way to dump the trash.
He drove the next six hundred miles with the garbage in back, left the highway, and crossed into Algeria without seeing a checkpoint, and then made his way to the next paved road by bumping across deserted, rocky country until he felt the smooth pavement. Two days later he traded the truck to a fisherman on a beach in Morocco in exchange for a night trip along the coast to Rabat.
In a week he made the acquaintance of a man who imported hashish to Europe inside the bodies of fish. After another week he and his own boatload of fish made it into Gibraltar with plastic bags of money hidden in the bottoms of the fish crates.
The last call he made to his contact number for the intelligence service was brief. This time it was a female voice that said, “This number has been changed or disconnected. Please check your directory and dial again.”
Tonight, so many years later, his taking back the money seemed like a story someone else had told him. He still saw snatches—the way Faris Hamzah’s house looked in the firelight, the way the headlights of his little pickup truck bounced wildly into the air when he hit a bump, so they were just two beams aimed a little distance into the immensity of the sky, and the world below them was black. But the feelings seemed to belong to someone else, a misguided young man from long ago, his anger and self-righteousness preventing him from seeing clearly. Even the anger, the rage, had become abstract and bloodless. The emotion was simply a fact he acknowledged, a part of the record.
The rest of the record was no better. The Libyan government he had been sent to help topple had lasted another thirty years. Other men who had not yet been born on that night had overthrown it, and then the country had degenerated into anarchy, chaos, and civil war. The humanitarian purpose his mission had been intended to serve was relevant only to a particular, vanished set of circumstances, so irrelevant to the present that it was difficult for even Chase to reconstruct from memory.
He kept on Interstate 89 until he was past Manchester, New Hampshire, then merged onto 93, continued into Massachusetts, and then switched to 95. If he stuck with it, 95 could take him all the way to Florida. But he knew that was a route that carried every sort of traffic, including gunrunners and drug dealers bringing money south and merchandise north. Cops of many agencies were waiting along the way to spot a suspicious vehicle or a wanted license plate. He knew the best thing to do was move onto smaller, slower roads and stay on them as long as he could before he had to sleep.
He coasted off the interstate at a rest stop so he could use the men’s room and let the dogs relieve themselves on the grassy margin off the parking area. He gave them food and water, and when they were ready to climb into the car again, he got back on the road. During their brief stop no other cars parked anywhere near them or even drove past them in the lot. He accelerated to the first exit and took it, so he would be on less-traveled roads as he headed south and west. He made his way to Route 20, which ran east and west across Massachusetts and New York State, and began the long drive through small towns and old rural districts, where there were no manned tollbooths or automatic cameras to take his picture.
In a few days his picture might be on television. He couldn’t afford to be noticed now. Having some dutiful citizen out there who remembered seeing him in a particular location along the way could get him killed later. People had no idea what could happen to a man who had stolen millions of dollars that belonged to the intelligence services of the United States government.
4
He loved the dogs, but he had never allowed their veterinarian to insert ID chips under their skin. He had known that a chip could give a future pursuer one more way to find him. He had been working on ways to improve his odds for a long time. He regretted only that he had not been as rigorous about it for a few years as he had been at first.