It was winter and Julian had been living in a barracks at Fort Meade since early fall. He had been home to Jonesboro only twice. The last time he was called back early to check out a theory that the old man was living in a safe house in Montreal that had been set up forty years ago but seldom used.
He couldn’t blame the National Security Agency people for coming up with bizarre theories. They had all the data in the world. Sifting through it to find and connect the threads of a single story was the problem. There had to be something that explained how the old man could make himself so scarce, something like a safe house that old intelligence people had set up and forgotten. The only clear photographs of him had been taken when he was Julian’s age. And every operator except Julian who had gotten a close look at the old man since Libya was dead.
Julian was sitting in the office he’d been assigned at military intelligence when his phone rang. He heard the voice of Goddard, his NSA contact. Goddard said, “I think you’re going to want to come over here. We found him.”
The call was so unexpected that Julian said, “Who?”
“Who else?”
Julian closed his office and hurried over to NSA. When Julian arrived at Goddard’s office, he waited until Goddard had shut the door before he said, “Where is he?”
Goddard was a heavyset man with a dark beard and thinning hair. He leaned back in his desk chair with his hands behind his head, the chubby fingers laced. “He’s living in a cabin up in the San Bernardino Mountains at Big Bear.”
“How did you figure that out?” Julian was buying time, because he felt sick to his stomach.
“If you look at enough facts in enough different ways, you’ll find things that stand out. And we have everything.”
“I know,” Julian said. “But this guy makes no phone calls, makes very few purchases that aren’t cash, and barely shows his face.”
“But that’s now.”
“Yes,” said Julian. “That’s now. We’re looking for him now.”
“It wasn’t always now. He wasn’t always running under such pressure. He used to make phone calls. He used to use credit cards, own a house, move money around in bank accounts, and so on.”
“So what?”
“Nothing goes away. Every phone call he made five years ago, every purchase he made on a credit card or a debit card, it’s all recorded and stored. Nobody looks at it until we have a reason to. We had the name Peter Caldwell, the name he used last year. And we had the name Daniel Chase, the man he was for at least twenty years before then.”
“What led you to him?”
“It doesn’t really matter which line of inquiry pays off first, because that’s only a matter of chance. Eventually everything will work, because each thing you try eliminates people. If he only drinks single malt scotch and only uses horseradish mustard, we can eliminate hundreds of millions of people who don’t like both of those things. If we notice somebody has an idiomatic pronunciation of a particular word, we can search our archive of phone calls for instances of that pronunciation of that word.”
“But what was his mistake?”
“No mistake,” said Goddard. “The method doesn’t require a mistake. It just requires that one person be different from another. And we all are.”
“I understand what you’re saying,” said Julian. “All I’m asking is which it was this time.”
“When the old man gave the Treasury Department twenty million dollars, he was being smart by transferring the money from the accounts of the two aliases military intelligence already knew. He realized he had nothing to lose because the names were already blown. And he was too smart to have transferred or paid any of the money to his next alias. We also noticed that the accounts in the two names Daniel Chase and Peter Caldwell had never been mingled before. All very smart.”
“But?”
“But the root accounts were started at about the same time, and built up in the same way, beginning with small cash deposits. Because he hadn’t used either name since he made the Treasury payment, we concluded that he must have one more identity, probably begun about the same time as the others.”
“And you found another account like the first two.”
“Yes,” said Goddard. “Here.” He handed Julian a piece of paper with a name and address typed on it.
“Henry Dixon,” said Julian.
“And Marcia Dixon,” said Goddard. “Judging from their purchases, he and the woman from Chicago are still together.”
“Thanks very much for your work.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Goddard. “Now comes the caution. The reason we helped you is that we were told the old man is a traitor and a murderer—one of our own intelligence guys who’s turned into a monster. In order to help, we ignored the rules. A lot of the methods we used are illegal.”
“I won’t compromise your methods,” Julian said.
“I know you won’t,” said Goddard. “I didn’t tell you enough for that.”