His name was David George Sibelius. He had always gone by his middle name; it was what his parents had called him, for reasons he wasn’t sure of.
Professionally, he was already going by a different name. A brush name, he called it—since pen name didn’t work for a painter.
“I’ll go by David, I think,” said Harold. “As added protection.”
George shrugged. “Whatever you like,” he said.
This, anyway, was what Harold told him. The truth was that George’s first name appealed to him: containing, as it did, an allusion to someone facing odds that seemed unbeatable.
The day after Tillman, Doherty, and Lewey interviewed Harold, he and George put their plan into action.
In the morning, Harold left his apartment. He took a circuitous, rambling walk all around Washington, hoping to lose anyone trailing him. And then he found his way, finally, to the Hamilton Arms. To George’s apartment.
He did not take any of his possessions. This, too, was part of the plan. He left everything intact; months ago he had transferred a little suitcase to George’s apartment, the essentials he would need to start a life in Boston.
“Are you going to call your mother?” asked George, the night before they enacted their plan. Harold had calculated everything: The weight of the car. The acceleration it would take to create tire tracks. He had practiced in a parking lot, in rural Virginia, under cover of night.
“No,” said Harold.
But in the end, he did: he called the house in Kansas. He had not called home in over a year. He closed his eyes. He imagined Susan answering.
It was not his mother, but his father, who answered in the end.
“Hello?” said his father. “Hello? Hello?”
Harold listened to him breathing. He said nothing.
That night, they flipped Harold’s car into the Shenandoah River.
A suicide, the State Department would think. An accident, the paper would report.
Everyone would be satisfied.
George followed Harold in a different car.
After it was done, George was the one who drove him to Boston. They arrived there at 6:00 in the morning. From the glove compartment, George extracted a folder: inside it was his birth certificate, his Social Security card, a long list of biographical facts.
Harold looked at it. “When did you write this?” he asked.
“Never mind,” said George.
He handed it all to Harold.
“Whew,” George said, and he mimed the removal of sweat from his brow.
“Happy birthday, David Sibelius. Glad I’m not you anymore,” said George. He looked unburdened. “Happy birthday to me, too, I guess,” he said.
As a parting gift, he gave Harold the key chain from his house keys, the ones that opened the gate to Hamilton Arms: it was a clover, a charm for luck. Its stem was a little drawer, into which, Harold later found, George had put a love note. Harold kept the clover for the rest of his life. He kept the note in his wallet until it disintegrated with age. But by then he had memorized it completely anyway.
He had new paperwork; a new tax code; a new identity. A new age.
He was David Sibelius. He was twenty-five years old. The world opened before him.
Robert Pearse had arranged for David to enroll in the applied mathematics graduate program at the Bit. He personally recommended David to Maurice Steiner. What deal they made, David could not say; but Steiner never asked him much about his past, nor did he require paperwork from Caltech. It existed, of course; but on it was a different name.
His experience as a graduate student was idyllic. Steiner, he learned, was an outstanding person, an outstanding scholar. For the first several years, David worried constantly about being caught. He waited to cross paths with a person who would know his name. The Sibeliuses themselves had long ago disowned George; they, at least, he thought, would not come looking for him. With the exception of President Pearse, who sheltered him, he avoided the rich as well as he could. Occasionally someone would utter Sibelius, and scrutinize him, the way one might utter Carnegie, or Ford. In these moments, he would tense, waiting for the blow; but his use of David instead of George typically prevented further conversation. Still, he always half expected the ringing telephone, the knock at the door, that would signify an end to everything.
It never came.
When Maurice Steiner died, when President Pearse bestowed upon him his own laboratory, when he began to achieve increased fame in his field, he once again expected to be discovered. He avoided photographs. He avoided interviews. He thrust the other members of his lab into the spotlight, feigning camera-shyness.
Nothing happened.
The adoption of George’s identity had subtracted seven years from David’s age, and so he tried to live his life as a younger man; he convinced himself to act more carefree, have more fun. He did well at work; he made money. He had, once more, a set of friends.
Most importantly of all, he had satisfying work—the kind he lived in fear of ever losing again. And so he was taciturn, private. As he acquired colleagues at the lab, he was careful of what he said, and to whom. It took him many years to feel at ease with anyone. Only one—Diana Liston—knew he was gay. He said nothing to the others.
This was not out of shame but self-protection; he wished to distance himself, as much as possible, from Harold Canady. To keep at bay any characteristics that might link him, in the event of an interrogation, to his former self.
He had already looked into the consequences of his actions, and of George’s: for David, ten years, minimum, in prison, for fraud—more if the State Department accused him of espionage or treason. (He had done nothing of the sort; but he imagined that there was a real possibility of their falsifying evidence.) Even worse, at least five for George, who had not only been an accessory to fraud, but had been cheerfully shirking his taxes for a decade. Longer.
He feared putting anyone else at risk: to tell his tale to others meant to make them, too, accessories—unwilling custodians of a story that, legally, they had an obligation to report.
Therefore, he vowed to be careful. To be private. This was his secret, he told himself; he alone would bear the weight of it.
At first, he and George continued to see one another. For a decade, David avoided Washington, fearing that he would be recognized by a former colleague; during this time, George came frequently to visit him in Boston. But eventually the distance became too much. George found another partner, one who lived nearby, and broke the news to David as gently as he could, in a letter that David opened apprehensively, predicting its contents.
I hope we can continue to be friends, said George in the letter, and David decided to take him at his word. But that night, in the dark of his apartment, he felt alone and tired and terrified of perennial solitude, and he allowed himself, uncharacteristically, to weep.
For a time David resigned himself to being alone.