by Thomas Perry
“But things changed?”
“A few months later, when I was just about over my jitters, I made a big score. I picked a winner. It came just as completely out of nowhere as the one that got me fired. I saw a pair of companies in one business. They both made a component for compact ultrasound imaging systems. They sold to military suppliers, companies that made medical equipment—just about anything where you need to see through something solid. One company held the patent, and one licensed it. I was assuming I’d invest with the company that invented it and held the patent. But when I went to talk to their management, I sensed problems. The CEO was the inventor, and all his company did was make that one component. He was an egotist, and he seemed to be enjoying his wealth just a little too much: his clothes, his car, his office, his plane. The other company was dependent on the ultrasound business, but you could tell they wouldn’t always be. They were hungry and serious, developing products of their own. So I gambled on them. A month later, the news comes out that the inventor has been bleeding his own company. It’s insolvent. Presto. Suddenly there’s one company making the component. The stock I bought tripled.”
“So you were a hero.”
“I was a hero,” she repeated. “And I no more deserved it this time than I had deserved to be fired the last time.” She smiled. “People at the bank suddenly noticed me. I think that they had been trying to keep from being friends because they knew they might have to fire me, and it would be painful. But now I was in the club. No, that’s not right. I was being invited into it. The one who did the inviting was my boss.”
“Who was she?”
“Not a she. A he. That was part of the problem. He was a single man about five years older than I was. He was nice-looking, and he was just about the only one who had ever talked to me before any of this.”
“You had a crush on him.”
She nodded. “A big one. He asked me to dinner at the Hay-Adams Hotel for a Friday-night celebration of my victory. That was Tuesday. I got all agitated thinking about it, bought a dress, took it back, bought another one. Some of the time I was nervous because I was so happy, and some of the time I was nervous because I was dreading some sexual-harassment thing: I mean, there are nice restaurants that aren’t in hotels. I would think, ‘Well, okay. Suppose he does try to talk me into something? If it’s got nothing to do with my job, then he’s just a single guy talking to a single girl.’ Then I’d think, ‘But how can it not have to do with my job? He’s my boss.’ You get the picture. By the time we left for the restaurant, I was thoroughly confused. I was listening to every word as though I were a prosecutor.”
“Did he say anything you objected to?”
“No,” she said with a sad little laugh. “I think that he actually had something in mind. But he sensed that I was bracing for it, so he didn’t. If only he had, and I had said yes, I wouldn’t be here. I’d still be me, only I’d actually have a life.”
“I’m not sure I get it. That caused the accident?”
“We had dinner at this beautiful, romantic restaurant. I was so uncomfortable and crazy by then that I gulped down a martini before we got to the table and half a bottle of wine with dinner. That wasn’t a problem for him, but I was tipsy. I was also beginning to feel desperate and weepy, because even though I’d had more to drink than I was used to, everything was clear. I liked him a lot, and I’d had a great chance alone with him, and blown it completely. I tried to prolong the dinner to start all over again and pull it out. All I could think of was after-dinner brandy. Things just got worse. I was dumb and tongue-tied, and by then he was tired of thinking of bright, cheerful things to say. He took me back to the office, where my car was parked, waited until I was inside with the doors locked and the engine running, and left.”
Jane felt sorry for her, partly because she wasn’t blaming it on somebody else, and partly because she had been foolish as the manipulators and opportunists never were. “What did you do?”
“I cried. Then I opened the windows wide and started to drive. I missed my turn for the 295 parkway. I made a U-turn and came back looking for the sign for the entrance, didn’t see the light change, and crashed into another car.” She was wide-eyed, then jumped when she said it, as though she were feeling the shock again in her body. “It was so loud. On TV there’s a kind of crunch sound, but it’s really a bang. After that there was glass breaking and tires squealing sideways on the pavement. It was awful. I was hurt and bleeding and drunk. I was outside of the car, but I didn’t remember standing up and opening the door and all that. The windshield of the other car was gone and the man was lying on the street. He wasn’t dead, but he looked horrible. I couldn’t bring myself to touch him. I ran to a phone booth and dialed 911. When they answered I didn’t know the name of the cross street. I had to run a block back down there and look. But when I got there, the police car was there already. Suddenly I’m blowing into a tube, then I’m in handcuffs, and then I’m in jail.”
“What then?”
“He died. The man died.” She looked at Jane anxiously for a reaction. “I was charged with manslaughter. I had been drunk. There was some suspicion that I could have saved him if I’d done the right things, or maybe the prosecutor was just implying that. At my trial my boss had to testify. He never looked at me, or said a word to me. I lost my job, of course.”
“Was it manslaughter?”
“No. The jury said I was criminal, but not that criminal—the D.A. had overcharged me. So I served ninety days in jail for the drunk driving. When I got out I got sued.”
“His family?”
“Among others. He had an ex-wife, and she had been getting alimony. He was thirty-six, and that meant that I owed her twenty-nine years at thirty thousand a year. He had a live-in girlfriend who sued his estate for half. Then the estate sued me to get it back. He had no insurance, so the doctors, the hospital, and the ambulance service sued me. The funeral home hadn’t been paid because ex-wives and girlfriends aren’t legally responsible, so they sued me too.”
Jane was very careful to sound bright and sympathetic. “So you decided to disappear?”
The woman looked at her in surprise. “I wasn’t innocent. If I made it sound that way, it’s a mistake. I killed him. I did it. I wasn’t going to hide from it.”
“Then what are you hiding from?”
“They were going to kill me.” She looked at her lap. “I actually considered letting them.”
“Who was? Who was going to kill you?”
“His friends. They were calling all the time, following me, watching me for a chance. They said that money wasn’t enough; that I was going to die, they were going to do horrible things to me. I told the police, and they came over and took notes. I don’t know what happened to the notes. I could tell they didn’t believe me. They seemed to think I was trying to make it look like the people who had sued me were criminals so I wouldn’t have to pay them.”
“Did you recognize the voices?”
“No.”
“Did the ones following you look like anyone you had seen before—in court, for instance?”
“I never saw them. Afterward they would tell me on the phone where I’d been, what I was wearing.”
“Did you pay the judgments against you?”
“Well, no. I was going to, and I still want to. But when I found out I had to run away, that was the first thing they told me. It was going to be expensive, and I would have to pay in cash.”
“Who told you?”
“Your people. They said that when you run, cash is safer. They needed to be paid, of course, and there was a lot of overhead. They told me not to use the credit cards they gave me to run up bills because I couldn’t pay right away without getting traced, and that would make it much harder to go back later.”
Jane pondered the woman’s story and felt another wave of pity for her. She was smart, but she seemed to use the little she knew to help people delude her. She wanted to go back, so she was willing to believe that
avoiding fraudulent credit would keep her clean enough to surface later. She didn’t seem to know that running was a crime, too.
Jane supposed that she couldn’t expect this woman to have figured out that people who wanted to kill her probably wouldn’t want to talk to her on the phone first. The ones who did call probably weren’t friends of the deceased. They might very well be people who wanted to give her a convincing reason to disappear. She had not even questioned it.
Jane weighed the next question with care, then decided it was safe. “How did you happen to hear about us?” Even if everybody heard from the same screener, this woman wouldn’t know it.
“From the police.”
“What police?” Jane tried to keep the impatience out of her voice, but her mind was already making connections.
“Sergeant Gilbert, from the Witness Protection Squad. He asked me what was being done for me, and promised to look into it. A couple of days later he was back. He said the other police didn’t believe me, but he did. By then I was crying and begging him to help me, but he couldn’t. I wasn’t a witness in an investigation, because nobody was investigating the threats. Finally, he told me where to go.”
“What did he tell you?”
“To call a number and ask for Jane.”
26
“Jane.” That was what the woman had said. Jane’s mouth was dry and her stomach felt as though at its bottom there was a layer of loose stones. She kept her expression empty, but her mind was rushing around picking up small bits of information she had stored and rearranging them in new patterns.
Jane felt a surge of annoyance at this poor, stupid woman. She had been sent to people she knew would give her false identification papers, but it had never occurred to her to wonder whether the person who sent her might not have a false ID of his own. She had never thought of calling the police department to find out whether there was such as thing as a Witness Protection Squad.
The face-changers had developed a routine, or at least a method they had used more than once. They had a man who was spectacularly good at impersonating a plainclothes police officer, but who was definitely not one: how could he be a cop in both Chicago and Washington? Both times all he had needed to do was appear at the right time, after the real police had come and gone. That made the victims forget that they hadn’t exactly called him. He had probably read about this one in the newspaper.
Jane tried out the theory that the name Jane was a coincidence. It didn’t sound convincing. She had spent thirteen years taking fugitives out of the world, and by now there must be a couple of hundred new people all over the country who had come into being because she had invented them. People—even vulnerable, scared people who knew better—sometimes said more than they should. And the person they told would be even less likely to keep the secret. Jane had been a guide for only about two years when the first total stranger had shown up at her door with a story of how he had heard of her that didn’t include the name of anyone she had ever met.
Getting to be too well known was just one of a dozen occupational hazards that quietly, invisibly grew to increase the odds against her. During those years it had become more difficult to slip into an airport and fly out quickly and anonymously, more complicated to forge a driver’s license or a vehicle registration, harder to invent a personal history for a runner that would stand up to the instant credit checks that had become routine. The forces of order—the businesses and agencies that were engaged in ensuring that each person keep the same labels from birth until death—had become more sophisticated. When Jane had guided her first runner out of the world it had still not been unusual to meet an adult who had never been fingerprinted; now it was hard to find a child over five who hadn’t. Computer terminals installed in police cars carried information on everybody, and there were only two states left—Vermont and New Jersey—where licenses didn’t carry the driver’s picture.
Jane had always known that if she didn’t get herself killed, the time would come when what she did would become impossible for her. It had never occurred to her that by then her name would be so widely circulated that someone else would assume it.
If these people were using the name Jane, and visiting suppliers and contractors that Jane had once used, then they were creating a universe of new problems. It was only a matter of time before one of her old runners, some person she had risked her life to help, tried to see her again and got killed by the face-changers. No, she thought: blackmailed. The runner would come to them, maybe because the place where she had put him had suddenly become dangerous. The face-changers would play him the way they had played Dahlman and the woman. And as soon as they knew enough about his problem—who he was and what was after him—they would own him.
Jane had an uncomfortable thought. That wasn’t really very different from what Jane was doing to this poor, naive woman beside her. She knew exactly what they were doing and exactly how they would go about doing it, because the methods weren’t theirs, or even hers: they were simply how the business was done. Jane had often carried identification that made her a policewoman, because on the rare occasions when she thought she might need to provide herself with a gun, that was the only explanation that would be universally acceptable.
She had also manipulated runners and sometimes even used a bit of coercion. She had said to them, “You are in a dangerous, unfamiliar world. If you now act according to your own experience and instincts, you are certain to be killed. If you do precisely as I say, you have a chance. If you do not, then I will step aside and whatever is after you will catch up.” Even if Jane had not said the words, they were inherent in the situation. Jane had used guile and threats to keep her runners alive, but those methods didn’t need to be used that way. She knew it and the face-changers knew it. They knew everything she knew.
The woman said, “You’re so quiet. Is something wrong?”
Jane turned and forced her face into an utterly convincing beatific smile. “Not at all. I was thinking that things could hardly be going better.”
“Really?” The woman’s face was trusting, open. She was asking permission to feel relieved, and Jane gave it to her.
“Sure. Nobody is following us, the road is clear, and we should be in L.A. in about two more days.”
“Do you think it’s safe to go to the same address?”
“Well, for a while I was thinking of diverting you a bit. That’s what we do when there’s trouble. But I don’t see any reason for it now, do you?” She watched the woman’s face, wondering why the lie made her feel so little guilt.
It was early in the morning on the third day that Jane detected the sudden wave of fast traffic overtaking them and surrounding them on its way into the city. No matter how many times Jane came into Los Angeles, it was always new, always just changed, and about to change again. The city was always reaching outward to grasp more of the landscape into itself, so that now the places with names like Antelope Valley that had made sense once were just parts of the continuous network of freeways and subdivisions that was a hundred miles long and eighty wide and growing.
At eleven, when they reached a part of the city that Jane knew, she pulled into the parking lot of a big motel and registered. They had to wait until noon to take possession of the room, so they had lunch in the restaurant beside the lobby and then picked up the key. When they were in their room, Jane sat at the table by the window. She held out her hand. “Can you let me see the driver’s license they gave you?”
“Sure.”
Jane watched her fish it out of the wallet in her purse. Then she copied the words onto a receipt. “Janet McNamara, 19942 Troost Avenue, North Hollywood, CA 91607.” She held the card under the light and turned it to examine the holograms on the front, the magnetic stripe on the back, and the photograph. “Very good,” she said as she handed it back.
They were careful and meticulous, and in this woman’s case they’d had plenty of time to get the details right, because she had never been in any real danger:
they had made the death threats themselves. Jane stood up. “I’m going to look your new apartment over. One precaution while I’m gone: pretend the telephone doesn’t exist. Don’t call in to announce that you’ve arrived or something.”
“Why not?”
“I could give you a list of reasons. But the big reason is that it’s contrary to our established procedure.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we don’t do it.”
“You mean the home office sends you memos and directives and things? Do you have a manual?”
Jane chuckled. “No. Look, you have two kinds of vulnerability. One is that you’ll make a mistake and get caught by the people looking for you.”
“That’s the only vulnerability I knew about.”
“The other one is that somebody else will. Some other client gets spotted and watched, but doesn’t know it. He calls in to the office. Now the police have the office number and address. They tap the phone. You call in, and they have your number and a recording of whatever you say. So there’s a rule. The fewer calls the better. It protects you if somebody else is caught, and it protects everybody else if you are. Now I’d better go earn my pay. Do you have the apartment key?”
“I’m sorry, I forgot,” said the woman. She reached into her purse, pulled out a set of keys, and removed one from the chain. “Here.”
Jane took it. These people were good with details, she thought. They hadn’t given the runner one key that stood out in her purse and looked important. They had hung it on a chain with a dozen others—door keys, car keys, luggage keys—so it might open anything or nothing; it was part of a fully developed, convincingly complex life. “Thanks. I’ll be gone for a long time unless I find something wrong over there and want to get you out fast. Stay out of sight as much as you can. If you get hungry, eat at the place where we had lunch and come back.”