Authors: Thomas Perry
He studied her for a moment. “Are you sure you didn’t hear something bad from Ellen
that you’re not telling me?”
“I didn’t.”
“Then this is about the guy who’s framing me. He’s probably the one who did the shooting,
and there’s a record of him buying the right kind of rifle, so he decided that saying
he sold it to me would get him off.”
“All very good thinking, except that he didn’t do the shooting. He will have an absolutely
ironclad alibi, which is why he could put himself forward like that. I think he’s
doing a favor for whoever really did it, and so are the men who went to jail to kill
you. Is any of this normal? No.”
“But you’re starting to sound as though I’m going to have to stay away from home for
a really long time.”
“I’m not sure,” said Jane. “Maybe you won’t have to. I’m teaching you how to stay
free for a short time, but the principles are the same, if you have to keep it up.”
Jane handed him the next bag. “Now that I’m sure about your sizes, I bought you more
clothes. I’m aiming for the look I told you about before—upscale and professional.
You have to be able to walk in a crowd on the street and never be one of the first
men a cop looks at. Clothes can help accomplish that. From now on, you don’t wear
sneakers unless you’re jogging. No knit caps unless you’re in the woods or it’s snowing.
No sweatshirts unless they have the name of some university. You get the idea?”
“Sure.” He looked into the bag and pulled out some of the clothes. “Pretty nice. Maybe
I should start dressing like this anyway.”
“That should be enough to think about for now,” she said. “If things ever got really
awful and we had to give you a permanent new identity, there would be a lot more to
learn. We can do a little more later. Right now, I’m tired. I think I’ll go take an
afternoon nap.”
“Thanks, Jane,” he said. “I haven’t spent any time with you for at least twenty years,
but you’ve turned out to be about the best friend I have.”
“I’m trying to be,” she said. She went across the room to avoid his stare, but still
felt that he hadn’t looked away. She said, “See you later,” went into her bedroom,
and closed the door.
They didn’t start again until after dinner that night and the kitchen was clean. Jane
said, “Time for the next lesson.” They went to sit on the living room couch.
“What’s this lesson about?”
She said, “When professionals are searching for a fugitive, one of the most effective
ways they do it is to keep his family and friends under surveillance—if necessary,
for long periods of time. They check the mail before it’s delivered, record and trace
their phone calls, and watch their houses. Sometimes there are private detective types
searching, and they’ll do the illegal stuff—install hidden microphones, hack into
their e-mail, and so on. The minute a runner contacts a relative or a friend, he’s
given up his location. So the best advice is to let those relationships go.”
“Let them go? You mean give up your family?”
“Yes,” said Jane. “If you go back to the past, the ones waiting for you there are
the chasers.”
“What kind of choice is that?”
“Not a very good one,” she said. “The only things it’s an improvement on are going
to jail and dying.”
“How can anybody give up his family?”
“It’s all part of one process. You learn to forget everything about the past, and
concentrate on inventing a future for yourself. Changing identities is an interesting
opportunity for some people, like being reborn a new person. Once you’ve lived to
about our age, the idea of making some different choices has its attractions. Did
you always want to be something different—an artist, a musician, a teacher? Once your
old life is obliterated or becomes too dangerous to live, you’ve got to be somebody,
so why not that?”
“I suppose,” he said. “If you can’t be who you are, you have to be somebody else.
I’m not in that position.”
“No,” said Jane. “But play along. It’s an exercise.”
“Okay,” Jimmy said. “If I had to give up my regular life, I suppose I’d like to try
being an architect. I’ve been doing construction for years, and I’ve got some ideas
I’d like to try out.”
“Usually I would recommend a profession that’s not even remotely related to your last
one, but for the moment, architecture is fine,” she said. “First thing we’d have to
do is get you into architecture school. School is a good choice. The people who look
for fugitives don’t usually have a good ready-made way of searching campuses for people
living under new names. School also takes time, so your trail gets cold.”
“How would I get into architecture school?”
“Fraud and chicanery,” she said. “Also some forgery. I’m experienced at getting people
into places where they wouldn’t normally belong, and I have good relationships with
some people who can produce just about anything on paper. But you really would have
to get through the school yourself and learn how to be an architect. You can’t fake
that.”
“Of course,” he said. “I would want to be a real architect.”
She smiled. “Great. You’re getting it already. Being a successful runner isn’t about
pretending to be somebody. It’s about really becoming somebody. You don’t assume an
identity because it hides your real identity. The new person becomes your only identity,
and you live the life of that person.”
“Interesting,” he said. “But right now I’m not at that stage yet.”
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do an exercise that could help in your present situation.
You ought to start thinking about possible problems.”
“Like what?”
“Suppose I’ve gone back to my house in Amherst to get something. You’re still here
at this hotel in Cleveland. Think about what you do if everything suddenly goes wrong.
You hear and feel heavy male footsteps coming up the hallway. There’s a loud knock
on the door. You know that there’s no reason why five men would come to your door
unless they were after you. What are your plans? Do you plan to fight, or run? If
you run, what do you have time to take with you, and where are you heading? When you
get there, who will you be? The same person you’ve always been, or a new person? What’s
his name?”
“I haven’t thought about any of that.”
“That’s what we’re doing now. There’s the knock. What do you do?”
“Go out the window, I guess.”
“We’re on the second floor, about thirty feet from the ground. If you jump, you’ll
probably break a leg. Want to go back in time and do something first?”
“I’d like to have a rope, a nylon rope hidden close to the window, so I could just
go out the window and down.”
“Good idea. Let’s think about the rope some more. How long does it take to tie a knot?”
“I could tie a slip knot ahead of time and just loop it over something solid like
the bed frame, and then go.”
“Fine. Once you’re out and on the ground, what next?”
“I check to see if there are police cars near my car, or blocking the exit from the
parking lot.”
“Smart. This time it’s clear. Somebody recognized you and called the police, so the
police don’t even know you have a car. Did you remember to bring the key?”
“I sure hope so.”
“Let’s assume you did. You drive off. Do you have some cash? Do you have a name or
anything memorized that you could say to anyone who asks who you are?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Exactly,” Jane said. “Think about all of the things you’d like to have with you if
you went out that window. We can collect them. But where would you put them?”
“What do you think?” he asked.
“What we’re talking about is a bug out kit. If you were a woman, I would tell you
to put together a kit in a purse that you use for nothing else. For a man, the best
thing is not to have a briefcase or backpack or anything. Instead, you want to look
as though you’re carrying nothing. There are sports jackets designed for travel. They’re
lightweight and have five or six hidden zippered pockets to foil a pickpocket. You
buy one, not too snug. In the hidden pockets you put cash, some form of identification
you can use if you have to lie to someone, a duplicate car key, and whatever else
would be useful. Then you hang the coat in the closet, always in the same spot, where
you can reach it in the dark if you’re sleepy, distracted, or looking in the other
direction. Practice finding and putting it on a hundred times or so. Keep thinking
about ways to improve or update it.”
“And that’s all I take when I go?”
Jane nodded. “It’s a way. There are other ways. Some people have a second kit in another
location so they just have to get out and go to it. You might even want one in another
town.”
“Do you do this?”
She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “This isn’t about me. It’s about you.”
“You told me that for years you made people disappear. There must be a lot more people
after you than there are after me.”
She hesitated. “Yes. I do things like this. I was at it for years. It wasn’t very
long before what I worried about wasn’t just that the police would arrest me for carrying
false identification or something. There were people who would do anything to catch
me alive and make me tell them where runners had gone and what their new names were.
There were others who would be satisfied to just kill me on sight. Many of those people
are still out there, so I’ve had to keep making arrangements and contingency plans.”
“What about your husband?”
“I make arrangements for him too.”
“I mean he’s all established, and he’s a doctor and everything. After all those years
of work, would he just run off with you and live in hiding like this forever?”
Jane looked at Jimmy, feeling stung, and thought about how disastrous it would be
if she allowed her anger to fill the air between them. She took a couple of deep breaths,
then said, “If the danger were only to me, I wouldn’t ask him to run. I would just
go, and hope we could get back in touch later. I believe in preparing for the worst,
and what I consider the worst is something that would hit him, too.”
“But would he go with you, and give up the life he built?”
“That would be up to him.”
“You’re ducking my question.”
Jane controlled her irritation. “I’m answering as well as I can. He’s always been
a very bright and sensible man. He loves me, and he wouldn’t want to lose me. If I
said we needed to go, I think by now he’d believe me. So I think he would go if I
asked. But nobody knows how anyone will react. There are moments when saving your
life means immediately doing the same things that you would do if you had an hour
to think about them first. So nobody knows how it will go until it happens.”
“Okay,” said Jimmy. “I just wondered.”
“That’s fine,” said Jane. “I guess the bigger answer to your question is that I believe
the things I’m telling you will make you safer. Some are things I’ve taught other
runners to do, and those people are nearly all well and living new lives. I do the
same things for myself.” She stood and picked up her coat on the way to the door.
“Now I’ll give you a chance to think about what we’ve said so far. I’ve got to go
out for a bit, but I’ll be back.” She had talked her way out the door before he had
a chance to reply.
She went down the back stairs, along the lower hall, and out the side door of the
hotel. As she walked she came close to the car and glanced at the windows and tires
as she passed, then continued out to the street. She walked past a row of fast-food
restaurants and an open field, and on for about a mile. The night air and the solitude
gave her a chance to cool down and think.
There must be a reason she had been stung by Jimmy’s questions. Maybe it was that
he had discovered the uncertainty she had always lived with and hidden from everyone.
It was humiliating to admit that the uncertainty existed, and maybe more so because
Jimmy was an old acquaintance, almost a member of the family. She had wanted him to
think of her as invulnerable rather than weak and plagued with marital problems. She
hadn’t been able to ignore him or throw him off the scent. He was wondering what she
had always wondered, and he had a relative’s prying persistence. His sincerity was
disarming, and it had made her try to answer questions she would have cut off if anyone
else had asked. Tonight was a bad time for her to have this conversation, because
Carey was angry with her, and she had already been in a bad mood about it.
She had never admitted it aloud to anybody, but being married to somebody who wasn’t
Seneca was difficult. She loved Carey and knew him well, and she thought hard about
everything she heard him say or saw him do. She believed that he loved her just as
much, and thought as hard about her. But over the past year something disturbing had
come to her.
A year ago she had lived through a series of terrible trials. When she had reached
her worst point, when she was in fiery, throbbing pain from the burns, and weak from
the gunshot wound, surrounded alone by cruel enemies and preparing herself for death,
she had thought about Carey, and the thought of him had not helped her. He was something
good that she’d had while she was strong and happy, not a weapon she still possessed
that could strengthen her when she was in a battle for her life. Thinking about Carey
had only made her wish to live and get back to him, not to stay strong and live up
to the promises she had made to her runners. Thinking about Carey had made her weak,
the way thinking about food makes a starving person weak.
As she had endured the ordeal, she kept digging into the back of her mind, searching
for something that would help her in those last days of life. What she’d found were
her ancestors, the Seneca warriors who had fought the wars of the forests. The men
who had gone off in small parties to raid the countries of enemies would sometimes
find themselves in trouble. As they were returning home along the trails they might
be overtaken by a party of enemies so large that they could never hope to fight them
off. Sometimes one warrior would run for a time with the others, then come to a strategic
point, often one with the high wall of a cliff on one side and a ravine on the other.
He would stop there and turn to block the trail while his friends and companions continued
on to escape. The lone warrior would stand on that spot and fight. As the enemies
arrived, he would kill as many as he could with arrows, then fight hand to hand for
as long as he could raise a war club or thrust a knife. His intention was to fight
until he was killed, but sometimes the enemies would overwhelm him and take him captive.