The Mirror Maze

by James P. Hogan

  “And how many more are there?” Mel asked on impulse—and immediately wished he hadn’t.

  “If there are any, it isn’t your business.”

  Mel pulled a face, spread his hands, started to say something, stopped, and turned away again. Then he turned back. “Okay, it’s your right, I guess, but… I mean, hell, what am I supposed to feel like? Doesn’t that matter? I feel like I’m some kind of pet on a leash.”

  “Why? Nobody’s saying you aren’t free to live your own life.”

  “I feel you’re putting me inside a cage… making me be the way that suits you.”

  “But Mel, isn’t it you that’s wanting to put me in one?”

  She was right, a part of him knew, but he couldn’t accept it. He was cornered. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. Then the image of himself walking out straight, tall, and uncapitulating came again as the salve to his smarting pride. “I don’t think there’s a lot of point in talking about this,” he said. “I thought it could have been nice with us, but I guess that’s not good enough for you, eh? Okay, well, if that’s the way you want it… I think it would be best if I just went on my way. ” He waited.

  She said, “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  “Hmmm.” Mel straightened himself up haughtily. “Then, I guess that’s it. See you around, then.”

  “Take care, Mel.”

  He walked to the door, striving not to move awkwardly, and let himself out. At the bottom of the stairs behind the restaurant below, he paused, staring across the rear yard at his parked car. He could still see the pink slacks clinging to her body. A faint trace of the perfume she had been wearing lingered in his nostrils. He hesitated uncertainly.

  Once, at a lecture a year or two back, he remembered seeing an illustration of the age of the Earth, in which all of geological time since the world’s formation was expressed in terms of one year. On that scale, although multicelled life had been around since October, the emergence of consciousness with the appearance of modern man hadn’t taken place until six minutes before midnight on December 31, and the last two thousand years of history were all compressed into the last sixteen seconds.

  How could the feeble stirrings of a thin veneer of will and intellect overlaid so recently upon the human psyche hope to prevail against the power of biological programming that went back hundreds of millions of years? he asked himself. Obviously they couldn’t. It was a no-contest. It was futile to pit oneself against Nature. It had to be unhealthy, too. That was the kind of thing that people gave themselves high blood pressure and ulcers fighting against.

  “Shit,” he muttered resignedly.

  He walked into the building and punched her number into the pay phone at the back of the restaurant. “Hello,” her voice answered.

  “Do you want beer or wine with the pizza?”

  She laughed—warmly and without hesitation. “I’ll leave it to you.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Stephanie had continued using Eva’s car, and left it at Denver airport on the day she flew to Boston. After returning to Washington from Florida, she and Mel spent two days going over the lessons that had been learned from the experiment and completing their final preparations. During this time, two of Bassen’s agents collected the car from Denver and drove it to Los Angeles. It was thus waiting at LA International Airport for Stephanie to collect when she arrived with Mel to assume her role as Eva.

  With Stephanie at the wheel, they headed north on 405 toward Santa Monica, and twenty minutes later left the freeway and followed the route to Ocean Park Boulevard as naturally as if she had been driving it every day for months. Mel had never been this way before. Eva had moved to her most recent address only during the last year, which was after his visits to her in California.

  Pacific Heights was an irregular arrangement of a half dozen or so condominium blocks, dark finished in wood shingle and rough pine. They stood shaded by palms and secluded from the roadway and from each other by stands of buddleia and trellis-trained bougainvillea along a stretch of lawns between the boulevard and cliffs overlooking the beach. Stephanie stopped the car at the bank of mailboxes by the gate and opened the one marked 24, CARNE to reveal it crammed with a month’s deliveries. Although they had been preparing themselves for this moment, she was tight-lipped as she passed the bundle to Mel. She closed the mailbox without saying anything, and drove on along a curving driveway into the complex.

  Mel turned through the pile of envelopes. There were lots of junk solicitations and come-ons… A couple of bills, some magazines, subscription renewal; bank statement; what looked like some of the newsletters on politics and current affairs that Eva had always subscribed to… Business mail, much of it in Constitutional envelopes. A few personal letters… Invitation to a party. Postcard from Sydney, Australia, signed “Shirley.” Card advising of a registered package being held at the post office. Something caught in his chest as he ruffled through the assortment. Just a month ago, everyday items in a normal life. Now that life was gone. All that was left to express a personality that had taken twenty-seven years to shape was a collection of return addresses and titles. He sighed and pushed them together again.

  The front door to number twenty-four was at one end of the building, across a small tiled porch atop a short flight of wooden steps leading up from a brick-gravel path. In the center of the block, a pair of aluminum up-and-over garage doors faced out over a parking area shared with the unit next door. Stephanie parked in front of Eva’s garage, climbed out, and went back to open the trunk. Mel came around the other side and hoisted out their two suitcases; she took the bag of groceries they had picked up at a convenience store just off the freeway. He had ostensibly come to stay for a week, which supported the story of Eva’s having run into an old boyfriend and taken up with him again. It was also to give her a source of moral support through the days ahead, as well as an ever-present link to George and Larry, who had installed themselves in an apartment less than two blocks away to be on hand if needed, with several backup agents to relieve them in shifts through a twenty-four-hour watch. Just before they left Washington, Landis had deposited a message for Simon in the data-network drop box, saying that Annabel would be back by tomorrow. Explaining away her absence was going to be the first tough part.

  Entering the home, being inside the personal space and among the effects of a person who has died recently, is always a sobering experience. There seems something irreverent in disturbing the last tangible evidence of someone who no longer exists, and who never again will. Stephanie opened the door and went in first. A few paces into the entrance hallway she paused uncertainly. Mel waited inside the door behind her, saying nothing. Ahead was a short passage with several doors, all closed. A kitchen opened off to one side, and beyond it, approached through an arched entrance from the hall, he could see one end of what looked like a lounge. Stephanie drew a deep breath to gather her resolve, and then walked on into the kitchen to put the grocery bag down. Mel closed the front door with his heel and carried the suitcases into the lounge. He stood there for a while, fighting down a tight feeling that formed in his throat as he looked around.

  The surroundings were definitely Eva, but they told of an Eva changed from the one who had lived above a downtown restaurant in Florida. The student had gone; the woman had emerged. Inevitably, the place was filled with books and papers, but the shelves were more orderly, the furniture more stylish and free of clutter to serve its intended purpose, and there were pictures, draperies, and ornaments that acknowledged needs other than the purely functional. It was something that Mel had never before managed to associate with Eva’s turbulent, mercurial lifestyle: a home.

  The place had been closed up for too long. Mel crossed the room and opened a window. Facing the window was a desk with a computer and communications terminal. Its message light was flashing, indicating calls received. That could wait for the time being. He went to the end of the room and checked the two doors there. One was a closet containing assorted b
oxes, more books and magazines, and domestic bric-a-brac; the other led to a reading room, with an armchair and a comfortable-looking couch, liquor cabinet, stereo system, and French window opening out onto a leafy veranda. Back in the main lounge, another door at the same end as the arch opened directly to the kitchen.

  He went out through the arch and back into the passage. The first door was a hall closet with shelves and hanging space. The next was a linen closet, aired by the water heater, with a laundry room and small workroom adjacent. Past that was the bathroom, and beyond it a small bedroom that Eva had used as an office: messier than the rest of the place, with a littered desk and papers piled on a table to one side—a remnant of the old Eva. The door at the end of the passage led to the garage, and the single door in the opposite side, to the main bedroom, which had its own private bathroom. That would work out fine: Stephanie could have the bedroom, and he would use the couch in the reading room off the main lounge. He carried their suitcases through accordingly.

  He didn’t realize how much he had been struggling to keep his own feelings under control until he came back into the kitchen to rejoin Stephanie. It was the first time he’d seen her close to breaking down since the evening he had met her at Logan. She was sitting on one of the stools at the breakfast bar, the groceries still beside her untouched, staring unseeingly in front of her and crying silently. That was when he found the lump in his own throat that he couldn’t swallow. He moved forward and laid a hand on her shoulder. She clutched at it and buried her face against his chest. “I’m… not sure if I can do this,” she whispered.

  He held her close, saying nothing. There was nothing he could say. He couldn’t have said it if there were. For by then, he could feel tears on his own cheeks, too.

  It was going to be even tougher than he’d thought.

  • • •

  Stephanie checked the refrigerator and stowed the groceries, and Mel went back out to put the car away in the garage. When he came back, he brought a toolbox and a leather carrying case containing an electrical impedance-measurement bridge, which one of Bassen’s specialists had instructed him in the use of before they left Washington. These, he took through to the lounge to use later. First, while Stephanie was putting on some coffee, he settled down at the desk with a pen and notepad to play through the phone messages.

  It was like listening to a potted history of the last four weeks. Early on, there was a pathetic series of messages from California, corresponding to the time immediately following Stephanie’s arrival in Boston. “Eva? This is your mother,” the frail voice said. “Where are you? Please call. We have some terrible news about Stephanie.” Mel quietly erased them.

  Most of the rest were personal, giving first names only and conveying little that meant anything. There was a series from Landis, and later Ronald Bassen, trying to locate Eva, and more recently another string from Dave Fenner. And then, just as Stephanie came through the kitchen with the coffee, he found one from a week previously that had immediate significance. The voice was highish in pitch for a man’s, with a nasal twang. It sounded tense. “This is Simon. Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but we haven’t heard from you and we need to talk. If you’re there, get in touch immediately. This is urgent. I don’t have to remind you that we have very little time.”

  Mel pursed his lips and played it through a second time. “That’s Seybelman,” he said. They had listened to enough public speeches and other recordings of his voice. Some of them had sounded like private conversations. Bassen hadn’t said how those had been obtained.

  “He broke their security rule and called here direct,” Stephanie said. “Things must be getting desperate.”

  Two days later Seybelman had called again, this time more tersely. “This is Simon. If you’re there, call at once. Most urgent.”

  And finally there were a couple of messages from Landis asking Eva to call him when she got back from Washington. They had expected to find those.

  After listing the calls, Mel used the terminal to interrogate the drop-box address in the network. There was one new message that they hadn’t seen before, which had come in late the previous night, after the last message had been lodged for Simon from Washington. It read:

  Annabel,

  Rec yours of 12/4—at last! Where in hell have you been? Imperative that we talk immediately. Disregard instruction to call. Meet Breadman at Apple, Wednesday. Usual time & pickup.

  Simon

  So, Stephanie already had an appointment. They knew from the information that Eva had given Landis that “Breadman” was Arnold Hoffenach, the ex-SEAL security boss that Eva had used as her first entry point to the organization. But they had no idea where “Apple” was, or what time was “usual.”

  “Oh boy.” Mel stared at the screen and sank back in the chair, exhaling a sigh. “We’re in trouble already.”

  Stephanie drew across a folder of notes from Pinewood Hills that Mel had open by his elbow and checked the entries of known code names, but as she had as good as known already, there was nothing. “So now what do we do?”

  Mel stared at the desk. “Let me think about it. In the meantime, the sooner we get on with checking the line, the sooner we’ll be able to use the phone.”

  Since paranoia was his profession, Ronald Bassen had assumed that Seybelman would accept Eva’s defection story about as unquestioningly as Bassen himself would if the situation had been the other way around. That meant that whom she communicated with and what was said would be matters of extreme interest. It was unlikely that anyone would have risked a break-in to bug the apartment internally—since Eva lived alone, there would have been little to overhear. Bassen had assumed, however, that her phone line would have been tapped. The electrical test bridge that Mel had brought was to try and find out.

  Mel set the case containing the bridge up on the desk and opened the lid to reveal a panel with a dial meter, miniature display screen, numeric keypad, and various terminals and knobs. Inside the lid was a compartment containing an assortment of connecting leads and probes. Mel took a screwdriver from the toolbox he had brought in with him and ran a lead to the connecting jack by the window, where the line from the communications unit connected with the feeder from outside. Then he came back to the desk and used the bridge to make some reference measurements of the line’s impedance. “Okay, make a call,” he said to Stephanie.

  A couple of the recorded messages were from Eva’s dentist, reminding her of an appointment nine days previously. Stephanie picked up the phone and punched in the number.

  “Dr. Kellman’s office, Sandy speaking. Can I help you?”

  “Hi, Sandy. This is Eva Carne. I had an appointment over a week ago on Monday the twenty-seventh.” Beside her, Mel was busy repeating the impedance measurements and checking the line current.

  “Eva! We were wondering what happened to you. I tried calling a couple of times.”

  “Yes, I know. I got the messages.”

  “Where in the world were you?”

  “I had to go away suddenly, and I clean forgot about it. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay. Well, now that you’re back, would you like me to put you down for another time?” Mel signaled that he had gotten the readings he needed. He pointed at the phone and nodded his head slowly and distinctly two times.

  “Look, it’s all a bit up in the air at the moment, Sandy,” Stephanie said. “Can I get back to you when things have calmed down a bit?”

  “Well, you know how it is. Don’t leave it too long. That could get expensive.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Talk to you later, then.”

  The last thing they wanted was anyone checking Stephanie against Eva’s dental records.

  Stephanie replaced the phone and looked at Mel inquiringly.

  “Bingo.” He blinked and shook his head disbelievingly at what he was saying. “It’s being tapped.” These things only happened in movies. They didn’t have any place in the real world of his own life.

/>   The fact that the tap was detectable through impedance measurements indicated that it was of a simple type, probably a series-connected transmitter drawing its power from the line itself. It would be located somewhere along the local subscriber loop, which consisted of the drop wire to the building, the distribution cable to a pole anywhere within two or three blocks, and the branch feeder that would connect somewhere to the area’s main feeder cable. A physical search by one of the experts stationed in the apartment nearby would soon have uncovered it, but that wasn’t the purpose of the exercise. The object was not to neutralize the tap, which would have given the game away, but to know for sure that it was there. Because now that they knew, they could use it to their own advantage.

  Stephanie called Warren Landis on his direct line in Washington. “Hello, Warren,” she said when he answered. “This is Eva. I got your messages. I’m home in LA now.”

  “Hi, Eva. How was the flight?”

  The official story had been put out that because she would now be going to the Middle East with McCormick’s party in place of Kirkelmayer, Eva had been reassigned to reporting directly to Landis in Washington. It also avoided having to involve Stephanie with John Wadlow, who had caused the difficulties at the LA office. Stephanie and Landis talked routine business matters in this vein for a few minutes, set some tentative target dates for the month ahead, and Landis hung up. The opening words that Stephanie had used in her call were to a prearranged code, and had confirmed to him that her line was being tapped.

  The next task was to begin going through every drawer, box, and scrap of paper in the place for any additional clue that might help recreate the Eva who had existed four weeks before. One of the first things they scoured was Eva’s notebooks and telephone pad for a key to interpreting the message that Seybelman had left, but they found nothing.