When he got into the car around 4:00 a.m. he’d known that his name could no longer be Dan Chase. He decided to become Peter Caldwell, one of the identities he’d planted in his twenties, soon after he returned from North Africa. He had used the name at intervals to keep it current. Buying things and going to hotels and restaurants were what kept credit histories vigorous. From the beginning he had used many ways of planting his aliases in data banks.
He had used information from a death notice in an old newspaper to apply for a replacement birth certificate from the county clerk’s office in the Texas town where one of the real Peter Caldwells was born. He’d used the birth certificate to apply for a driver’s license in Illinois. Then he had opened a bank account, bought magazine subscriptions, joined clubs that mailed him a book a month, ordered mail-order goods by catalog and phone, and paid his bills by check. When he was offered a credit card, he took it and used it. Everything he had done as Daniel Chase, Peter Caldwell, Alan Spencer, or Henry Dixon had been calculated to increase their credit ratings and their limits and make them less vulnerable to challenge.
He had made a few preparations for the moment when his car had only one ride left in it. He had kept caffeine pills under the seat, along with tins of nuts and bottles of water and a contraption that would allow him to urinate into a bottle without stopping the car if he wanted to. None of these preparations was recent, and right now they simply irritated him. He could have done better than this.
By noon the second day he had already changed the license plates on his car. The major police forces all had automatic license plate readers, so he put on the Illinois license plates he had kept in the trunk in case the police were searching for him. On a trip to Illinois he had bought a wrecked car like his at an auction. He had kept the plates and donated the car to a charity. He had known they wouldn’t try to fix the vehicle. The car was too badly damaged to be used for anything but parts.
For years he had maintained identities for his wife, Anna, and his daughter, Emily, as the wife and daughter of each of the three manufactured men. But when Anna died, he kept her identities. He’d told himself it was in case Emily needed to start over sometime, but the truth was that he simply couldn’t bear to destroy them.
For Emily’s protection he had invented separate identities for her when she was still a child. She had gotten married under the false name of Emily Harrison Murray. He had been at her wedding in Hawaii as a guest, and been introduced as Lou Barlow, a cousin of her late mother, Mrs. Murray. Her trust fund had been placed in her own hands when she turned eighteen, and then transferred to her new name, Emily Coleman, after the marriage. She had been walked down the aisle by a favorite professor from college, who had always believed the story that she had been orphaned in a car accident. She was living on the proceeds of a trust fund, wasn’t she?
From the time she left home for college until yesterday he had bought six new burner cell phones once a month, and mailed her three. In the memory of each was another’s number. The day after her boyfriend, Paul, proposed marriage, she told him her father existed. She also told Paul he was still welcome to withdraw his proposal, but whether he married her or not he had to keep her secret.
A bit after dark the night of the wedding he had met Paul. While the reception was going on inside the mansion they had rented for the wedding, Emily had conducted her new husband into the back garden. He and Paul had taken measure of each other that night. He had reassured himself that Emily had chosen a man who would die rather than betray her secrets. And Paul had seen that his father-in-law was the sort of man who was capable of holding him to it. He had been glad for Emily that Paul was intelligent and good-looking. He had been a swimmer in college, tall and lean, with an intense set of eyes. He had been a good husband to Emily so far.
Dave and Carol began to stir in the backseat again. He looked in the rearview mirror for a long time before he was sure nobody was following closely enough to be a problem, and then turned off onto a rural road and let the dogs out to explore a field for good spots to relieve themselves. Then he fed them again. When they were finished eating and drinking, he and the dogs got back in and moved ahead. He had driven the full stretch of daylight, and now it was dark again. The night felt friendly, but he knew he was only feeling the afterglow of having won the first fight. When this night was used up, most of the benefit of that victory would be too, so he kept pushing himself, putting more distance between him and Norwich, Vermont. He fought the increasing weight of his fatigue, keeping himself awake by will alone.