Marshall asked, “Did you figure it out?”
He shook his head. “I still haven’t. I took her to the motel, drove off, and waited around outside for half the night for somebody to come to meet her. Just before dawn, I had to rethink the whole thing. It was going to be daylight, and you can’t sit in a car she’s ridden in and expect her not to remember it. If she was just trying to distract me, I might as well admit she had succeeded. If she just wanted me out of the airport or out of the parking lot, she had done it. There was nothing I could do to change it. If she was just a regular woman who thought I had the face of a gentleman—” He grinned comically. “Well, now how could anyone argue with her?”
“That’s it?” asked Marshall. “You gave up?”
Jardine looked at him, puzzled. Maybe he should have told the truth. That woman deserved to have the F.B.I. hunting her for what she had done to him. But he still had to hope that some night he would get another chance to trap her and turn her into money. As it always did, the thought of money gripped his consciousness and left no room in it for rancor. “I was curious, but I’m afraid that I’ve got to be in business for money. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine a way to make any out of her.”
Marshall set a business card on the table and waited while Jardine looked at it, picked it up, and put it into his pocket. “Call me if you see her again.” Then he stood up and walked away.
Jardine picked up his briefcase and tried to decide whether or not he should feel safe. It was possible that they had watched the rest of the evening’s tapes and found something that made what he had said impossible. But the business card was his assurance. He could hardly see her and call Marshall if he was in jail. He stood up and walked out of the cafeteria. There were no other agents waiting for him, so he supposed he had done well enough. If he had guessed wrong, he had probably done no worse than put himself out of business. It was a lousy business anyway.
40
Jane finished testing the three voice-actuated tape recorders she had hidden in Brian Vaughn’s house. The first one had gone into the heating duct in the living room. The second was hung on the wall above the door of the bedroom closet, so a person would have to step inside and turn around to see it. The third was in the drawer under the oven behind a couple of pans, with the microphone cord running up the back of the range to the inside of the control panel. A video camera was too risky for this meeting. If the face-changers said something useful, the words would be enough. If they saw a lens, Brian Vaughn was through.
She turned to him. “If you have any doubts about doing this—”
He interrupted: “I’m sure. I’m going to do it.”
She sighed. “All right. Here’s how it works. You just need to turn on the recorders as soon as you’ve made the call, and then forget them. They’re voice-actuated, and you don’t need to be anywhere in particular when you have the conversation. One of the microphones will pick up what’s said anywhere in the house. If you don’t feel right at any point, don’t pursue it. Bail out of the conversation.”
“You mean give up?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “This isn’t all we’ve got, so don’t take risks to get more. The police do this kind of thing all the time, and sometimes it takes them a dozen tries to get anything useful.”
“You think I’m going to fail, don’t you?”
Jane shrugged. “I’d rather you didn’t take the chance, but I can see why you would want to. All I can do is show you how it’s done and let you make your decision.”
“I’ll remember.”
“Don’t turn it into a confrontation, because that’s the way to get hurt. You’re just not feeling as safe as you thought you would in this little town, and you want them to move you again. You’re afraid that if somebody is curious about you, they’ll know your new face.”
“What do you think they’ll say to that?”
“It doesn’t matter very much. If they agree to the premise, then we’ve got about all we can hope for. But I think they’ll quote you a price, and they’ll want to know who’s making you nervous.”
“If you’re right about them, won’t I be putting somebody in terrible danger?”
“Yep,” she said. “You will. That’s why it’s me.”
He frowned. “That doesn’t sound smart.”
She walked across the kitchen toward the side door. “I’m the only candidate they’ll take seriously. One of them has seen me already, and they know I’m looking for them. If you tell them something they already know, then whatever else you say will seem more likely.”
Jane opened the kitchen door a half inch and looked out at the cars parked along the street, then stepped to the window and scanned the neighborhood. “When they leave, wait ten minutes and then call me at the number I gave you. I’ll be waiting to get you and those tapes out of here.”
She took a last look at Brian Vaughn, and touched his arm. “Remember, if you decide it’s not such a good idea after all, I agree with you in advance. I’ll take you out, and I’ll make sure Dr. Dahlman shows up to tell what he knows.”
Vaughn took a deep, shuddering breath. It looked to Jane as though in the brief time it took to fill his lungs, he was assessing his whole life. He let out the air in a scared puff. “No,” he said. “That wouldn’t be enough. I have to try.”
“All right,” said Jane. “Just call and I’ll come.” She slipped out the back door, across the yard, and out the garden gate.
Brian Vaughn stared at the gate for a full minute, then went to the living room and sat down on the couch with the telephone at his elbow. He stared at it, collecting his thoughts, then put them into words and repeated them silently. He picked up the telephone, then put it back down and considered what he was going to do. Finally, with the air of a man stepping to the edge of a cliff, he rapidly dialed the telephone and waited for the ring.
A half hour later, Jane sat in her room at the hotel trying not to look at the telephone. When it rang, it startled her. As it rang the second time, she realized that she had been hoping that this call would not come.
“Yes?” she said. She listened carefully to be sure there was no click of a second extension. She had given him the number so he could dial directly, and she would not hear the sound of the hotel operator hanging up.
“It’s me,” said Brian Vaughn. “They can’t be here until tomorrow night at eleven.”
“All right,” she said. “Call me when it’s over.”
She hung up the phone and began to prepare. She had already rented a second room, at the hotel next door to this big, sprawling place. She had asked for a room on the southwest corner, so she could watch the parking lot of this hotel.
She went out through a side door, quickly stepped across the lawn to the sidewalk, then walked down Cabrillo Boulevard as though she were taking an evening stroll along the ocean. After ten minutes, she came back to the second hotel and entered her room. She sat for a long time watching the parking lot next door, until she had assured herself that nobody was searching for her car. After that she went to sleep, and began to dream.
Once again Jane walked out onto Cabrillo Boulevard. This time she turned south, and stepped along the narrow path beside the green pond in the park they called a bird sanctuary. It was different from the way it had looked to her while she was awake. The glassy surface of the pond was empty and undisturbed, as though the ducks and coots and shorebirds had suffered some kind of sudden kill-off. She left the path and turned up, away from the ocean.
Jane kept walking but had no sense of the pressure of the ground on the soles of her feet. The unchanging, bright sunshine lit every object she saw so that the surface shone, outlined against the shadows, but she felt no warmth from it.
She knew the streets of the city because she had been here a few times, but she felt none of the comfort that familiarity usually brought her in cities she visited. The scenery was beautiful, like the pictures in magazines meant to lure people from cold northern places for midwinter vacations, but it seemed flat and impervious as a photograph. There was no place to enter the picture and hide. The tall eucalyptus and palm trees grew fifty feet of
