As he hung up the new clothes in his closet he thought more about the young man using the name James Harriman. He looked young. But the army often recruited exceptional young men from among the trainees. He could be one of those. The army would give them special training, divert them into some form of special ops for a year or two, and then make the next decision about them—home for more training or out. If the young man was like Caldwell had been at that age, all they had to do was tell him Caldwell was a traitor and a murderer, and step out of the way.
Caldwell locked the bedroom door and climbed up to the access door in the ceiling of his closet. He took down the two compact Beretta pistols, the extra magazines, and the identity packets and closed the hatch. He selected a sport coat that he liked, and put one pistol and two extra magazines in the pockets. He put the rest of his kit into his topcoat because it had deep inner pockets that hung almost to knee level and didn’t bulge. Then he hung up the coats on the left side, where he could easily find them in the dark.
He unloaded the second Beretta Nano and put it under the mattress of his bed, lay down, and practiced reaching for it, finding it, and bringing it up to fire. He persisted until he could do it unerringly with his eyes closed. Then he reloaded the pistol and put it back under the mattress.
Caldwell searched the Internet to find out anything he could about James Harriman. He found a site that listed ninety-five of them, but none of them seemed to him to be the one who had tried to rob him. Other sites had more.
From that day on, when he went out he always had one of the pistols on him. It was September, so many days were still too warm for a coat. On those days he wore a loose shirt untucked so he could carry a pistol under it.
On the nights when he and Zoe slept in her room, he would usually leave the pistol hidden from her under the neat pile of his clothes he left on the chaise. He made sure that Carol and Dave stayed close enough to the bedroom so he would notice their agitation if someone came near the apartment. After a couple of weeks, he retrained them to sleep on the floor between her bed and the door when he was with her. They were so happy to be readmitted to the room where he slept that they didn’t seem to be disappointed that there was no space for them on the bed.
He began to search the Internet, studying various cities to pick out his next place to live. The cities that looked most promising to him were Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, and Houston, cities with large, diverse populations. But those were also the cities where his pursuers were most likely to look. He knew he had to consider a wider selection, and so he kept at it.
In the meantime, he decided to improve the security of the apartment. Caldwell bought a set of four small security cameras and a monitor and recorder. He used the extension ladder stored in the garage and installed the four cameras on the edge of the flat roof of the building so that all sides of the building were visible on his monitor. He had no interest in knowing the identity of an intruder, only to know if someone was prowling around the building. When he was alone each day he would speed through the previous night’s recordings, looking for a human shape.
He plotted the best ways to drive from the apartment to the nearest interstate highways without getting caught in the Chicago traffic. He tried each of the routes at various times of the day and night.
When he went out now, he was always alert and armed, with an escape route in mind. He was always watching for signs. He returned by various routes, trying to surprise anyone casing the apartment. Weeks passed, but nothing happened. He saw no vehicles parked along his routes that appeared to hold observers or surveillance equipment. There were no hardhat crews who appeared on any of his routes, set out orange traffic cones, and fiddled around without accomplishing much. Nobody betrayed a special interest in him.
In time, he began to feel more optimistic. The young man who had tried to rob him might have been nothing worse than that. Maybe he was a delinquent kid who had fallen into some luck, either an honest job that would save him or a dishonest one that would put him away. Which it was didn’t matter. If James Harriman was anything but an army intelligence operator, Caldwell’s present hiding place was safe. Panicking and abandoning a perfect hiding place to start a new search for shelter was a very bad idea.
Whatever features a new place might have, it probably wouldn’t have a woman like Zoe, whose name was on the lease and all the utility bills, and who provided him with a veneer of respectability and normalcy. Anywhere else, he would be a lone stranger, and he would have to start all over again persuading the locals that he was harmless. He would be presented with a thousand new chances to make a fatal error.