Perry, Thomas - The Old Man by Perry Thomas

Author:Perry, Thomas [Perry, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802189769
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2017-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

19

While Julian sat alone waiting for his plane, he pretended to read the New York Times. He was actually thinking about the way his time in San Francisco had ended. The meeting with the old man had been four days ago.

He’d had his debriefing with the senior agents, and then they had stepped out of the office into the hangar to talk. He and Harper and Waters had sat in silence. After about five minutes, Harper got another phone call, and he and Waters left the room. Minutes went by. Julian assumed that the four were conferring about something that he was not authorized to hear. After a few more minutes, he was convinced they were talking about him.

After another half hour, Julian realized he had stopped hearing the background sounds in the hangar—the starter motors of vehicle engines, the constant hums of ventilators, and the buzz of the overhead lights in the open bay.

He stood up and walked out of the little box of an office and stood for a few seconds. The vehicles were all still parked on the tiled floor—police cars, ambulances, mail and UPS and FedEx trucks, even a fire truck. What had changed was that the overhead lights and the ventilators had been turned off. The only illumination came from a row of small, dirty windows high in the wall, and from a single man-sized door that had been left open beside the giant motorized hangar door. The invisible fans that had been running to circulate the air were turned off.

As he walked toward the open door, all he could hear were his shoes hitting the tiles and echoing off the metal walls of the hangar. He stepped outside into the waning sunlight and closed the door. He tugged on the door handle to prove a theory, and verified that it had locked behind him.

From where he stood he could see the San Francisco airport buildings across about a mile of tarmac. He began to walk in that direction along the endless chain link fences, past hangars and warehouses and parking lots. The walking distance was a couple of miles, but he was alone, so he felt calm, and that distance was nothing to a man with his physical fitness and stamina.

At the terminal he stood in the taxi line and took a cab to the hotel in the city where he had stayed the previous night. When he arrived, he found that his key still worked, so they had not checked him out and paid for the room. He opened his small carry-on suitcase and found that somebody had opened it, taken everything out, and then returned his belongings a bit more neatly than he had left them. He called the front desk to ask for a new room and a new toothbrush, toothpaste, and mouthwash.

He made his plane reservation to Little Rock. Then he ate dinner in the hotel’s restaurant and went to bed in his new room.

The cell phone that military intelligence had issued him never buzzed or vibrated during that night or the next two days and nights.

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