Alan said they had flown to Los Angeles three weeks ago, done a great deal of sightseeing and hiking in parks around Southern California at Joshua Tree and Death Valley and the Angeles National Forest, and were planning to return home to Toronto by train.
As Alan had expected, the inspector showed little interest in their story. The clothes he had chosen for them in San Jose were right—cheap and utilitarian, bought because they’d run out of clean clothes on a trip. The worn hiking boots and gloves they’d had in Big Bear, the lightweight ski jackets for cool mornings and evenings, helped bolster his story that they were hikers. Alan had included brimmed hats to wear in public places where there were surveillance cameras, and shorts. The trip through customs took only about ten minutes, but the tension made the experience seem much longer.
After the luggage had been reloaded into the bus, they climbed in, returned to their seats, and got moving again. Alan returned to the bus’s restroom, removed the wall panel, took his canvas tool bag, and put it into his backpack. From the shape and the weight, he could tell the pistol, silencer, and magazines were intact. Then he replaced the panel. Soon the bus pulled into the station in Vancouver.
Alan hailed a cab to Victoria, and checked in at the Empress Hotel. The hotel was old and formal and luxurious, so Alan took Marie to a department store where they bought more formal clothes and a pair of suitcases.
Marie said, “What are we doing next?”
“Listening to Canadians talk. Looking at what they wear and buying some of it so all of our clothes will have the right labels. Making ourselves into the least likely people to be troublesome.”
“So we’re killing time again?”
“Not killing it. Just slowing down a bit while we get used to things.”
He decided to stay at the Empress Hotel for five more days. They went to museums, shopped, and explored, always listening to the people around them. Most of Alan’s attention was devoted to assuring himself that nothing had changed. Nobody was following them, the Canadian police were not waiting for them when they returned to the Empress each afternoon, and their pictures had not begun to appear in newspapers or on television.
On the fifth day, Alan went out alone for a while, and then returned with tickets for the Via Rail Canadian Snow Train.
For the ten days of travel to Toronto, Marie listened and practiced. She studied other people on the train and in hotels, observing customs, mannerisms, inflections, and pronunciations. When they were alone he drilled her. Canadians used the metric system for temperatures and distances, but they expressed their height in feet and inches, their weight in pounds. When they bumped into you they said “soary” for “sorry.” Marie had a good ear, and soon she was repeating entire anecdotes that she’d heard Canadian women tell, pronouncing each word exactly as she’d heard it.
When they arrived in Toronto, Spencer didn’t immediately take possession of his apartment. Instead he checked in to a hotel across the street. The apartment was at Yonge Street just south of Queen, and he spent a lot of time sitting near the Yonge Street window overlooking the apartment building and watching.
Alan Spencer knew that if US military intelligence had discovered that he was the same man who had been Daniel Chase, Peter Caldwell, and Henry Dixon, they would have found the apartment on Yonge Street. The rent had always been paid by Weyburn Dynamics, an entity he had invented in the second year after he set up his American identities and begun to invest the twenty million dollars. His main hope of anonymity now was that the insularity he had given the identity of Alan Spencer would hide him.
He had resisted the temptation to let any of his American identities blur into this one. He had never given Chase, Caldwell, or Dixon a financial interest in the Weyburn Company or had them serve on its fictitious board of directors.