Jane slipped inside, locked the door, and looked around her. The apartment was small and simple, but the face-changers had furnished it in advance to keep Janet McNamara from making mistakes while she did it herself. Jane went into the bedroom, looked in the kitchen drawers and cupboards, the refrigerator. They had even bought her enough food so she wouldn’t have to go out until she had been here for a week.
Jane searched for the best hiding places. She moved a chair from the kitchen into the living room and stood on it to unscrew the grate from the heating duct high on the wall across from the entrance door. Then she took one of her video cameras out of the suitcase, set the lens to manual and focused on a space near the doorway, used a piece of tape to cover the red light that showed when it was on, pushed it two feet back into the heating duct, and replaced the grate.
On her way out she replaced the bit of red fluff, then went down the stairs to the street. The building next door had an apartment for rent, but when she had roused the manager and gotten him to open it for her, she found that the windows afforded her no view of Janet McNamara’s apartment. She would have to do this the hard way. She watched the neighborhood for two more hours, then drove back to the motel.
When Jane walked in, Janet McNamara was on the bed watching television. She turned it off as though she were hiding something. Jane turned it back on. “No need to turn it off for me.” There were two men in suits chatting about futures and options across an oddly shaped marble table. In a second or two the men were replaced by a table of figures.
Janet McNamara gave a comic wince. “They told me to start weaning myself away from the market stats, so I won’t be tempted to invest.”
Jane sighed. “They’re right about investing. I know very little about you, but if I were looking for you, that’s one of the ways I’d go about looking. I’d buy all the mailing lists of investors I could.”
“I know,” said Janet.
“On the other hand, somebody should have told you that you can’t expect to last very long if you go against all your preferences.”
“I don’t remember hearing that.”
“Watch the channel you like. Please yourself in quiet ways. While your enemies are standing around watching airline terminals and hotels at all hours, you want to be curled up in a cozy place feeling content. You’ll last forever, and they’ll give up.”
“I like that,” said Janet. “Of course, in my case it doesn’t have to be forever.”
Jane glanced at her without letting her see. She still didn’t get it. The face-changers had convinced her that she just had to slip away for a while to outlast some imaginary death threats, and had gotten her to do things that would make it too hard to ever go back. “Maybe not,” she murmured, and hated herself for it. She hated herself more for what she was about to say. “The apartment is fine. In the morning I’ll check once more, and then move you into your new home.”
27
Jane entered the building alone. She made her way to Janet McNamara’s hallway and up to her door, then opened it and watched the piece of red fluff fall to the floor. This time she let it stay there. She used the kitchen chair to climb to the vent in the living room, then removed the grate, retrieved the video camera from behind it, and played the tape back on fast forward, staring into the eyepiece. The tape was a still, unchanging shot of the closed door. She slipped the camera into her bag and went out to get the woman who was not Janet McNamara.
Jane brought her inside and closed the door. While Janet walked around the little apartment looking dazed, Jane told her, “I’m positive nobody has been here since I came in yesterday, and nobody seems to be watching from a building or a car around here. That’s the best I can do.”
“It’s … cozy, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“It’s kind of small and tacky. The apartment.”
Jane brought herself back to the business of resettling. She had seen this before in runners of her own who were used to having money. It was probably made worse for Janet McNamara because she had spent her life in old eastern cities with big, heavily ornamented buildings. Los Angeles was alien to her. Jane stepped back into her role. “It’s small and cheap because it gives you a low profile. These apartment buildings are full of young women from somewhere else who work as receptionists or secretaries or shop clerks. They don’t make a lot of money, and they spend most of it on clothes and car payments and going out. What you want to do is make yourself look so much like them that a stranger would need a microscope to pick you out of the crowd.”
“I guess that makes sense,” said Janet. Her voice was not enthusiastic. “Am I on my own now?”
Jane had not yet decided how to bring up the next issue, and this seemed like an opportunity. “Not yet. There will be a person who comes to be sure you’re settled. He probably won’t know why you didn’t take the plane. Don’t tell him.”
Janet’s head spun to look at her. “Why not?”
Jane had hoped this woman would be exhausted and preoccupied enough to lose her curiosity, but she had not. Jane waved a hand in a vague gesture. “Another standard procedure that protects everybody. We try to compartmentalize everything. But there’s always one of us who wants to know what everyone else is doing. It’s pretty hard to pry information out of a person who keeps secrets for a living, so people ask the client.”
Janet’s expression seemed to move through suspicion into certainty. She raised an eyebrow. “That’s what you’ve been doing to me, isn’t it? You’ve been asking me all these questions, and the reason you didn’t know the answers already was that you weren’t supposed to.”
Jane smiled sheepishly. “Caught me.” She let her face reflect the uneasiness she was feeling. “But I wasn’t doing it out of idle curiosity. There are a couple of guys in this scheme that I’m not sure about. They seem unprofessional.”
“What do you mean, ‘unprofessional’?”
Jane shrugged. “Arrogant, overconfident. Maybe a little too casual about the rules. That’s the kind of person who gets caught. They may be fine. But if I’m right, I don’t want them to know too much about how the rest of us do things. So if somebody asks, tell them you saw a man staring at you at the airport, so you slipped out and took a bus.”
Janet looked a little worried. “I’ll try.”
“Succeed,” said Jane. “It’s important. If one of them finds himself in a jail cell some day, one of the things he’ll think about is what he has to trade. If it’s you, then you’re in deep water. If it’s all of us, then you’re in deep water with no lifeline.”
Jane took a last look out the window of the bedroom, then said, “Good luck.”
Janet gave a brave little smile. “Thanks. I don’t know if there was anything to worry about, but thanks for being on my side. It made me feel a little better about everything.”
“Good,” said Jane, and slipped out quickly so she wouldn’t have to look into those trusting eyes. She made her way down the stairs, then out the door and around the building, reassuring herself that there was no sign that the face-changers had arrived early.
She knew it wouldn’t be long. They had dropped a runner at an airport with a plane ticket four days ago, and she had never shown up at the end of the line. She knew they must have spent the first three days the way she would have: examining everything they had done to find a mistake, then trying to discover whether the runner had been picked up by the authorities for some mistake of her own.
Jane walked down the street to the spot where her car was parked, got in, parked again on the street behind the building, and began the long wait. For the first two hours she walked. The days on the road had made her muscles feel slack and her joints stiff. She was used to exercise and motion, and the walking helped her get over the feeling of confinement. When the face-changers came, they would case Janet’s building as she had, and look for the same signs she had: heads in parked cars, windows in nearby buildings that looked as though they were being used for surveillance. A lone woman walking down the street looking as though she belonged here would be of no
