“This has got to be done carefully,” Annette said. “We want to check everything out, alternative entrances and exits and so on.”
“We also,” Abbot said, “want to find out more about the tenants, what their habits are, when they’re most likely to be gone.”
“The building’s not empty?” Jack asked.
“No,” Annette said. “It really is a most clever set-up. Most of the building is offices and the like, used by humans, and only the top floors are the prison itself.”
“My God,” Jack said. “They really are bold, aren’t they.”
“They are indeed,” Abbot said. “But we can be bold too. We’ve been able to contact some of the Visitor staff of the prison, and we may have some inside help.”
“That’s another reason,” Annette said, “that we want to hold off a bit before we act. We want to check these people out, make sure they’re really with us.”
“One of our biggest problems,” Abbot said, “is that there are very few people in Freeport, even among our resistance group, who have had any kind of combat experience. So we have to be careful who we take with us. ” “Another thing,” Annette went on, “is that we don’t want to just barge in there, guns blazing. The best thing
would be to take Emily out as quickly and as quietly as possible. We don’t want to endanger any innocents.” “And,” Abbot said, “we don’t want to blow anybody’s cover, fifth columnist or rebel.”
“All right,” Jack said, “you’re the experts. Is there anything more I can do right now?”
“Not at the moment,” Abbot said as Jack put the photo back in its folder with the others. “We’ll be in touch.” He got up from his chair. He and Annette walked with Jack to the door, and Jack was surprised when they came out with him, as if they were leaving too.
“Don’t you live here?” Jack asked.
“No,” Abbot said. “I know the people who do, and they’re on vacation for the month. Even if we were traced here, we’ve left the place to look like a break-in. We’ll fix that, of course, before we leave for good.”
“Ah-ha.”
Jack went to his car, but as he put his hand on the door, a man came out from beside the house, a gun in his hand.
It was Rudy Salanis. His face was swollen from the beating Jack had given him. He didn’t seem to see Abbot and Annette, his concentration was focused exclusively on Jack.
“Nobody beats me up and gets away with it, shrink,” Salanis said, flashing a fast grin on his battered face. He raised the gun.
A shot rang out, but it was not from Salanis’s gun. The right side of Salanis’s head erupted in a fountain of blood, and he fell, slowly, to the driveway.
Jack, half paralyzed, turned toward Douglas Abbot, who was lowering a forty-five automatic.
“Now we’ve got trouble,” Abbot said calmly. “This is a neighborhood crime-watch area, and they’re careful here.
That’s why we chose this place. The police will be here any minute.”
“What do we do?” Jack asked, almost automatically.
“Just leave him here and drive away. Who was he, do you know?”
“His name was Rudy Salanis. He was one of the guys who tried to mug me the other day.”
“One less mobster to worry about,” Abbot said with a calm that sent chills up Jack’s spine. “All right, this might change things. We’d better meet again later on this evening. Say midnight, at the apartment building on Pine where Annette first contacted you. Okay?”
“Okay,” Jack said, numb from reaction.
“Let’s go, then,” Annette said, nowhere near as calm as Douglas Abbot. Jack got in his car and backed out of the driveway. Abbot and Annette, in another car, followed immediately. Jack drove off south, while Abbot turned north. As he drove away, Jack heard the sound of police sirens.
File Fifteen: Thursday Evening
Jack felt sick as he drove east on Orson toward his home. It was reaction to the sudden killing of Rudy Salanis. In his mind’s eye, he kept seeing the side of the man’s head erupting in blood and brains.
Come on, he said to himself, straighten up. He’d seen a lot of death in Viet Nam, scenes a lot worse than Salanis’s killing. He remembered the horror of losing his own left arm. A friend who’d been hit by a mortar shell. Women and children three days dead. All of that had been far worse.
But this killing was different somehow. He fought to keep his stomach down, tasting the sour in the back of his throat. He owed Abbot his life. The chunky little man had acted with incredible swiftness. It had been a matter of fractions of a second.
But Abbot had been so cold about it, so deliberate, so calm afterwards. It was that, Jack realized as he turned south on Calvin, that was disturbing him now. It was one thing to kill in self-defense, or in the heat of battle, or filled with rage. It was another to just calmly put a gun to another man’s head and squeeze the trigger.
Had Jack been fooling himself for the last three years? He’d been going along, tending to his clients, trying to help them resolve their anxieties about the world around them. God knew they had reason enough to be anxious. The aliens had destroyed property, killed thousands in combat, enslaved whole populations, eaten people. The person who wasn’t anxious about that had a real problem.
Douglas Abbot had been active in the resistance the whole time. He’d fought, he’d learned to be hard, he’d had to kill before. Jack, on the other hand, had just been sitting by. He’d been helping people, but their anxieties were only a symptom of an underlying disease—occupation by reptilian aliens. Maybe Jack should have been doing something about the cause, instead.
It worried him that those symptoms of Alien Anxiety Syndrome seemed to have been diminishing drastically lately. That didn’t make sense, especially in Freeport. If alien and human had begun resolving their differences, it would be reasonable for people to stop worrying about the situation. But Freeport was an island of humanity, with the strongest-held Visitor city ten minutes away across the bay. The symptoms of A AS should be increasing. Had everybody gotten so used to the Visitors that they no longer cared?
He pulled into his driveway at last and sat there for a moment. His placid life was over. He was involved with the resistance, hunted by the mob, and things would not be the same until this problem was resolved. His only other choice would be to leave town and start over somewhere else. A coward’s way. He touched the signal button on his dash, and the garage door went up. He pulled in, the door came down, and he went into his house.
It wasn’t fear of being a coward, however, that kept him going. It was his need to rescue Emily. He had no idea how she felt about him, but that didn’t matter, not right now. He had a job to do, and the acceptance of that fact calmed his stomach.
He walked as if in a dream through the kitchen, the living room, and down the hall to his bedroom where he dropped the folder of photos on the nightstand. If he was going to try to rescue Emily, there would be violence. There could be no avoiding the danger, the risk, the possible need to kill. Was he prepared to face that? Could he kill again? If the roles had been reversed, and it were Abbot’s life on the line, could Jack just reach up and pull a trigger? Could he do so to save Emily’s life? His own?
The house felt different somehow. It wasn’t the house, he realized, but himself. Without being aware of it, he had reached a conclusion. He’d been a soldier. He knew how to kill. He could do it again if he had to.
One of his three bedrooms was used for storage. He kept things there that he didn’t want to trust to the dust of the attic or the damp of the crawlspace under the house. He went there, and though he hadn’t thought about it since his discharge, he knew exactly where his gun was. He took it out of the back of the bottom drawer of the old dresser. Its weight, its lethality, reassured him.
Calm, now, he took the gun into the kitchen and, though it was not dark, turned on the light over the table. He spread newspapers on the table, fixed himself a drink, then took his gun apart. He cleane
d it, oiled it, put it back together, made sure it was working properly.
He had no permit for the gun. As if that mattered, here and now. He loaded it carefully, checked the action. It was smooth. He made sure he had plenty of extra ammunition, then he fixed himself another drink.
He had not had time for supper yet. He was not hungry, but he would be later. Whatever happened at their midnight rendezvous, he would need the energy, so he fixed himself a steak, french fries, sliced tomatoes and red onions.
He tried not to think about anything while he cooked, and while he ate. He kept his mind blank, and forced himself to go through little tension-relieving exercises he taught to his clients. It was going to be a late night, and the best thing he could do right now would be to get some sleep, though it was still early.
He turned off the kitchen light and went through the darkening house to his bedroom. There he took off his shoes, and started to undress, but decided against it and just lay down on top of the bed. He stared at the ceiling for a long moment, then got up and, still in the dark, went back to the kitchen to fix himself a good stiff drink. He took a sip, carried it back to the bedroom, then thought about his gun still on the kitchen table. He put the drink down on the nightstand, went back for his gun, and put it down beside the glass.
He piled pillows up behind his head on the bed, and lay there, not really thinking about anything. He sipped his scotch quickly, and by the time he finished the tranquilizing effect of the alcohol was making him drowsy. He put the glass aside and let sleep wash over him.
It was not a deep sleep. His head kept buzzing with halfformed dream images. He felt his body, lying on the bed, numb, lethargic. Black vibrating velvet waves of true sleep slathered across his mind. And then he started wide awake. His body, still in the paralysis of sleep, was distant from
him.
He listened. The house was silent—no, a soft thud. A footstep? Had he forgotten to lock the garage door when he’d come in?
He opened his eyes. The bedroom was totally dark, the hall beyond the bedroom door was dark, there were no gleams from the living room. Was that another thud? Quietly, he got out of bed, went down the pitch-black hall in his stocking feet, and stopped just short of the living room.
The front door was ajar. And from his study at the other side of the living room came the unmistakable sounds of footsteps. The burglar alarm should have gone off. The intruder was no amateur.
Before he could decide what to do, a man came out of the study, moving surely in the darkness, coming across the living room so dimly illuminated by the streetlights passing through the curtains. Jack felt his hair stand on end, his stomach clench. The man did not see him here, in the darkness of the hall, but went instead toward the kitchen. He was holding something in his hand. As he passed through the kitchen door his face was illuminated by the dim light coming from the kitchen window in back. It was an ugly, pig-like face. The thing in his hand was a gun.
Jack backed up a step, the infinitesimal susurration of his stocking feet on the carpet sounding as loud in his ears as a snake’s hiss. He cursed himself silently for not having anticipated something like this. He went back to his bedroom, careful not to bump the walls. He could just see the position of his nightstand, and went to it, almost stumbling over his shoes. He picked up his gun, made sure the safety was off, and turned back to the door.
Ryan Hadly was standing just inside the doorway. “God damn,” Hadly muttered as he brought his gun hand up. Jack calmly raised his own gun, quickly, straight out in front of him, and fired once. In the flash, he could see Hadly’s surprised and ugly face. Hadly’s gun went off twice, into the floor, and then he fell.
Jack didn’t want to turn on a light, so he raised a window shade to see by. Hadly lay face down, a black pool spreading from around his head. Quickly, Jack went to his closet, pulled out a suitcase, and stuffed it with socks and underwear from his dresser, shirts and slacks and a jacket from the closet, and the folder of photos from the nightstand. He pulled on his shoes, then, carrying the suitcase, stepped over Hadly’s motionless body into the hall.
As he strode toward the kitchen he thought about calling the police. It was a pure case of self defense, trapped in his bedroom by an armed intruder. The police would find out about the killing anyway, and if he didn’t report it, he would be in deep trouble.
But he couldn’t trust the police. He’d be questioned, held for hours, possibly even charged with manslaughter. Worse, they might decide he was too dangerous, and find they had to kill him while he “escaped.”
Without a step’s hesitation he passed by the phone at the kitchen door and went out through the back door into the garage. No, he’d just have to ride this out alone, and hope he could set things straight later. He pulled out of the garage, and headed toward town.
File Sixteen: Thursday Night— Friday Morning
As Jack drove up Wade through downtown Freeport he got an idea. At Wall Street he turned east. A couple of doors down from the corner was an all-night photocopy place. He pulled into an empty parking space and took the folder of photos out of the suitcase in the back seat.
He paid seventy cents each for several high quality copies of the three significant photos. The store also provided a mail service, so he bought an envelope, put in the three originals—keeping the other photos to give back to Emily, or to Dahlgren—and wrote a brief note to David Mallard. He explained what had happened so far, and that he was going into hiding. Then he addressed the envelope to Mallard’s home, bought some stamps, and handed the envelope to the clerk. He folded the copies and put them in his inside jacket pocket, then went back out to his car. With the rest of the photos on the seat beside him, he drove around the block and back to Wade Avenue. A block and a half later he pulled up in front of the Carter House hotel.
He sat there for ten minutes, watching the traffic moving by, to see who else might come in, who might have followed him this far. Aside from a few hookers and other more or less innocent pedestrian traffic, there was nothing suspicious. When he was satisfied that he had escaped detection, he pulled the car around into the parking deck adjacent to the hotel.
The Carter House was an inexpensive place, and a bit worn, but it was clean. Jack checked in at the desk, calling himself Benjamin Steel, and paid for one night with cash. He didn’t know how clever his enemies were and didn’t want to use his credit cards which would have left a record of his name.
The clerk did not object to cash, but Jack was running short. He’d have to get more tomorrow. He went straight up to his room, tossed the suitcase on the bed, and sat in a chair in front of the TV set. He didn’t turn it on.
He’d just killed a man. Did he feel guilty? No. Nor nauseated, as he had been after Salanis’s killing. He took his gun out of his pocket and held it in his lap. There would be no more sleep for him tonight. He sat in the chair, waiting.
At last it was eleven thirty, and taking only his gun and the copies of the photos, he went down to his car. As he crossed the bridge to the parking deck he kept alert for movement in the shadows, men standing too casually nearby. There was nothing.
He drove west along Clyne, through the downtown area, the apartment buildings, the built up residential area to Pine, where he turned north. He parked a few doors down from the apartment building and went in. Sally Greenstreet was waiting in the lobby for him. She must have seen something in his face, because her smile of greeting faded to somber silence.
“We’re upstairs,” she said as she walked with him to the elevator. She punched the button for the seventh floor.
Abbot was there, waiting for them. His face, too, was grim. “I just got a call,” he said. “Annette has been arrested, by her own people.”
“Oh, shit,” Sally said, “how could that happen? On what grounds?”
“Treason, probably,” Abbot said. “What matters is that they arrested her now, instead of earlier. All Naturals are considered traitors, so they must have had some special reason for pickin
g her up.”
“How did it happen?” Jack asked.
“As far as we know,” Abbot said, “some Visitors in civilian clothes came down from Northampton earlier this evening, about ten o’clock or so. The broke into her apartment and took her away.”
“Were there witnesses?” Sally asked, her voice tight with shock.
“Her boyfriend, another Natural, was in the bedroom. They didn’t even bother to search her apartment, so they never knew he was there. Maybe they didn’t care.”
“I can’t believe it,” Jack said. “How can they dare to come into Freeport that way?”
“They must be desperate. It’s not just a matter of keeping track of her movements and then picking her up some time when she’s out of safe territory. The fact that they took that chance, right now when we’re starting to move on them, tells me that their conspiracy is very important to them indeed.”
“But why Annette?” Sally asked. “I mean, there are others who are more involved in this than she was.” “Somebody pointed a finger,” Abbot said. “And Northampton—not just a few isolated individuals—decided she could tell them something. That’s my guess.”
“What will happen to her?” Jack asked.
“She’ll be interrogated, but whether in Northampton or somewhere else I couldn’t tell you. Our network of fifth columnists in Northampton are keeping their ears open.” “It’s too much of a coincidence,” Jack said, and told them about Ryan Hadly.
“So we know the mob is getting desperate too,” Abbot said. “I wish I knew what the hell the connection between Kline and Northampton was.”
“That’s one of the things we’re going to find out,” Sally said. She turned to Jack. “You’re not going back home tonight, are you?”
“Not with a dead man on my bedroom floor. I’m staying at the Carter House, under the name of Benjamin Steel, room 903. On my way there I made copies of the Regency photos, and sent the originals to David Mallard.”
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