The Face-Changers jw-4

by Thomas Perry

  “All right.” The woman prepared to stand.

  “Wait,” said Jane. “First give me your ticket.”

  The woman looked puzzled, and behind the inquiring look was suspicion. “Why?”

  Jane nodded toward another woman sitting across the waiting area. “We’re going to send a decoy in your place.”

  The woman was filled with admiration: Jane was clever and devious, but best of all, Jane wasn’t alone. There was a whole team here to keep them both safe. She handed Jane the ticket and Jane put it in her purse. The woman stood up and walked toward the store.

  Jane moved across the concourse and waited a few minutes to see whether anyone separated from the crowds that passed by and approached the woman in the gift shop. No one did. Apparently the face-changers had not placed anyone here to be sure she actually made her flight. Jane walked down to the ground level, stood at the telephone booths along the wall, and waited. She looked at the woman’s ticket to Los Angeles. The face-changers had not made the mistake of paying for it out of some general account. The ticket was in the name Melinda Kelly, and it had been charged to a credit card in that name.

  Jane had taken the ticket from the woman partly to see what it revealed, but also to keep the woman from having options. As long as the woman had the ticket in her hand, her decision would not have been final. She could still get suspicious, change her mind, and step onto the plane. But now that Jane had the ticket, the woman was committed. Her mind would be busy thinking up reasons why giving it to Jane had been a great idea. Jane went out the door and walked down the sidewalk to the next terminal. She watched the woman come out of the United Airlines terminal and step onto the next shuttle bus. When it moved farther up the drive to Jane’s terminal, she stepped on too. The ride was quick, and Jane spent part of it watching for the green car that had dropped the woman off at the airport, and the rest watching for any other car that might be following.

  When the bus stopped two rows away from Jane’s car, she got off. After a second’s hesitation, the woman did too. Jane walked to her car, opened the passenger door for the woman, got in, and drove out of the lot.

  “Where are we going now?” the woman asked.

  “We’ll still head for L.A.,” said Jane. “We’ll just use a less direct route.” She was silent for a few seconds, so the woman would remember she had not told Jane where she was going. “It’s more painful, but it’s worth it.”

  The woman said, “What’s your name?”

  “I don’t have a name.”

  “Then what do I call you?”

  Jane said, “That reminds me: you can’t be Melinda Kelly now that you’ve made a flight reservation in that name. You’ll be Darlene Hunt and I’ll be your sister, Ann, for the moment.” She glanced at the sad, scared face beside her. “Your older sister. After the first time we use those names, we’ll be somebody else. If you have to make a move, don’t be the same person in two places in a row.”

  “I know,” said the woman. “They told me that.”

  “Good,” said Jane. “Just so I don’t waste my breath, what else did they tell you?”

  “To stay where they put me, live there quietly, and not make friends too quickly. Not to do anything that will get my picture in the newspapers or on TV, not to buy anything on credit, get married, get sued, call the police, apply for a passport.” The litany came out as though she had been forced to repeat it a few times, then had recited it to herself until she had come to resent each word of it separately.

  Jane accelerated, but stayed in the right lane because it was easier to see headlights overtaking her from the left, and while she was still in the populated area where exits came every minute or two she could take one without much notice if she needed to. “It sounds as though they gave you the basics, anyway.” She gave a reassuring half-smile. “Don’t worry about this little detour. To tell you the truth, I think it’s a false alarm.”

  The woman’s eyes brightened. “Really? How can you tell?”

  Jane shrugged. “You were about to get on your flight to L.A., right?”

  “Right.”

  “If somebody had been following you—and I’m talking about anybody now, from a serial killer to the F.B.I.—the place to stop you would have been before you got into the waiting area. A person who wants to kill you has to make a move before he goes through the metal detectors or he’ll have to do it in public with his hands. And cops aren’t just interested in you. They want everyone around you, too. They would have moved in at the moment when you were getting out onto the curb—used a car to block the driveway in front of the terminal and arrested both of you before you made it to the door.” The woman’s earnest, unlined face was just attentive. It showed no more reaction to one kind of pursuer than another. Maybe she didn’t know who was after her.

  She said, “So why did you go along with it—take me away like this?”

  Jane gave a rueful smile. “It’s my job.” Then she added, “I guess they didn’t give you lesson number two. This is the price of disappearing.”

  “What is?”

  “You’re going to spend a lot of time looking over your shoulder. When you see something that might be trouble, you don’t wait to see if it is. You go.”

  The woman didn’t seem disturbed. She looked out the window at the fronts of stores and houses. “I like it better this way.”

  “Are you afraid of airplanes?”

  “No. It means I have a little longer before I have to be alone. Probably forever.”

  Jane studied the rearview mirror for the next ten minutes, giving herself time to think. The face-changers had given her a few tips. Maybe they had told her a little bit about what being a runner was going to feel like, and maybe she was simply shrewd enough to have figured it out for herself. Jane decided she needed an advantage. She said, “Whatever happened back there, I don’t see anybody following. Are you a good driver?”

  “Yes,” the woman answered. There was a peculiar edge to her voice that Jane couldn’t quite identify. “I know that sounds odd coming from me, but I am.”

  Jane wondered why it would be “odd coming from me.” It was the answer to a direct question, not a boast. Maybe it was just normal modesty magnified into something worse by the experience of prolonged dependence. She decided it was too risky to ask more questions now. “All right, then. I’m going to pull up here at the next exit and let you drive while I sleep.”

  Jane decided that before she risked going to sleep while this woman was awake, she had better test her. When the car had stopped, Jane waited for the woman to get out and come around to take her place before she relinquished the driver’s seat. She was fairly certain that she had the woman fooled, but if she was wrong, the woman seemed alert enough to see that her best move would be to drive off while Jane was walking around to the passenger seat. But instead, the woman used the time to adjust the driver’s seat to her shorter legs.

  Jane got in and said, “The entrance ramp is right up ahead. Get on it, head west, and keep going. If I sleep more than four hours or you run out of gas, wake me up.”

  When they were on the highway heading in the right direction, Jane lay back on the seat, used her jacket for a pillow, and relaxed her muscles. She watched the woman drive for a few minutes and decided that whatever the woman had meant, she was not an incompetent driver. Jane closed her eyes. Over the past month she had gotten used to sleeping in the morning, but it was close enough to morning already.

  Jane was operating on rough guesses now. She knew that she had to keep this woman off balance—to be smarter, quicker, more sure of herself. The simplest way to buy herself an edge was to sleep while the woman was awake, to rest while the woman wore herself out. And if the woman was craving company already, then she would be craving it more in a couple of hours. Jane let the vibration of the tires on the road and the unchanging rush of the wind against the surfaces of the car soothe her and lull her to sleep.

  25

  There was bright mornin
g sunlight glinting off the chrome and mirrors of the cars ahead when Jane opened her eyes and sat up.

  “You’re awake,” the woman announced.

  “How’s it going?” asked Jane.

  “It’s about fifty miles to Sioux Falls. If I don’t see a ladies’ room in a couple of minutes, I’m going to die.”

  Jane leaned closer to look at the fuel gauge. “Pull off at the next exit. We’ll get some gas and use the rest room. We’ll find a place to eat breakfast.”

  “There’s nothing around here but these tiny little towns.”

  “Good,” said Jane. “Everything we want will be close together.”

  They pulled onto a two-lane highway that had obviously been superseded by the interstate. A hundred yards farther on, they found a little business district dominated by a single blinking stoplight hanging across the intersection. Jane got out to fill the gas tank while the woman disappeared into the ladies’ room. Then they parked across the street in front of a diner that called itself a “family restaurant.”

  As they ate in the little diner, Jane reflected on what she had just learned. The woman had never spent time in small towns. She didn’t know how they worked, or even what was in them. People in small towns needed all of the services that people in big cities needed—a store or two, a gas station, some kind of restaurant.

  Jane studied her as the local people talked in cheerful tones at the counter. Sometimes they included someone who came in the door, or others who were at tables. The woman ate with her eyes down in a kind of embarrassment at the discovery that people in the diner talked to each other from table to table. When a girl of about twenty got up and walked around, then picked up a newspaper that had been left at an empty table and scanned the headlines before she went off to work, it seemed to strike her as tragic—as though the girl had been scavenging scraps from a plate.

  There was no question that she had lived her whole life in big cities. People who had not come in the door together must be strangers, and strangers should avoid and ignore each other. Making eye contact was not only a breach of propriety, it was dangerous. Raising your voice across a room to talk to a stranger was something city people did when they had gone crazy enough to stop keeping themselves clean. Jane decided to get her outside before she got too uncomfortable. She paid the bill in cash and left an unmemorable tip.

  When they were in the car again, she told the woman, “If you want to sleep, it’s your turn.” Jane was reasonably confident that the sun would keep her from getting much rest.

  “Not yet. I guess I shouldn’t have had coffee.”

  Jane drove back out onto the highway. She said nothing as she drove, until she could feel that the silence was making the woman as uncomfortable as the talk in the diner had. That was another sign of a person who had always lived in cities. If you weren’t a stranger, you had to fill up all the time with talk.

  “Are we going to drive all the way to Los Angeles?” the woman asked.

  “I think so,” said Jane. She had known the woman had planned to fly to Los Angeles, but she had not known whether she had been intending to fly on to some other destination. L.A. must be where she was going to live. “The safest way to lose yourself is in a car. It’s anonymous.” She looked ahead at the road. “When they call me in, it means they think it’s time to take precautions.”

  “Do you have a gun?”

  Jane looked at her in surprise. “I have several.”

  “I mean now.”

  Jane said, “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t conceive of a way that having two pounds of metal strapped to me would help me accomplish what I’m trying to do now. It doesn’t make me drive faster or keep your face from being recognized.”

  “It would be safer.”

  Jane sighed. “I’m sorry, but I was called into this at the last minute to pluck you out of an airport. I don’t know anything about you except the name they gave you, and nothing about the kind of trouble you were in. Do people shoot at you?”

  “Oh,” said the woman. She looked disappointed. “That explains it.”

  “Explains what?”

  “Why you let me drive. That’s what got me here. I caused a terrible accident.”

  Jane nodded sagely, as though that made sense: hit and run? “How did that happen?”

  “It was so stupid. I can remember the whole thing exactly, every detail—what I was feeling and thinking.”

  Jane shrugged. “So tell me. It’s a long way to California.”

  “Well, I lived in Baltimore and worked in Washington. I had only been in my job for about four months.”

  “Wait,” said Jane. “Back up. Why did you live so far away?”

  “That was another mistake. It’s as though every decision I ever made was leading up to this. My first job out of college was in Baltimore.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I was an investment specialist for a mutual fund.”

  “And when you got another job you didn’t want to move.”

  “Right,” said the woman. “But there’s more to it than that. I worked for this mutual fund in Baltimore. I did fine for four years. I worked hard, made solid investments. One day I put a big bet on Wonderfair Drugs. I had researched it. The price-earnings ratio was great, they were positioned in good areas, they had a big enough market share, they had spectacular young management.”

  Jane noted that the woman was one of the ones Sid Freeman had described. Jane could tell she was bright, ambitious, and probably very professional: Sid must have hated her.

  “One thing that attracted me to Wonderfair was that the biggest shareholders were two British companies that I knew about—very conservative, very solid, very smart. One was a marine insurance company, the other an oil and chemical company. Together they controlled about forty percent. If they wanted a piece of Wonderfair, so did I.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” said Jane. She knew she was about to hear why it wasn’t.

  “One night—it was day there—a tanker sank in the Indian Ocean. The oil company was on the hook for a billion dollars’ worth of oil and a billion-dollar ship. The insurance company had to cover both. But there were other problems. The ship was grossly off course in clear weather, so it looked like a sure bet for lawsuits, enormous fines, and maybe having their other ships temporarily barred from some of the European ports where they delivered. They had big contracts with other companies and a couple of governments to deliver specific amounts on specific dates. That turned small trouble into big trouble. They knew instantly that they weren’t going to be able to perform. They didn’t have the reserves. It’s still not clear to me how much of this loss was going to get covered by the insurance company, but it doesn’t matter, because they acted together.”

  “Who acted together?”

  “The second the market opened, both companies dumped Wonderfair. It was nearly ten o’clock before we knew where the shares had to be coming from. At about four the news about the ship came out, and I began to piece it together. They were converting to cash. The excuse was that they had to hedge against their losses. What they were really doing was jumping on the opportunity to increase equity.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t get it.”

  “That’s not a surprise,” she said. “I didn’t either. The oil company was a terrific business. The marine insurance company was a terrific business. But the minute the word got out, their stock was going to drop. The way these things work, the stock nosedives on the headline. Then, after a few days, people realize that the disaster is not going to be that big a deal, and it goes halfway up again. Three weeks after that, it’s business as usual. They knew their own stock was going way down. So when it did, they bought back all they could get their hands on. The money they used was the money from their stock in Wonderfair Drugs.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Not only did they pick up a huge block of their own stock at a disaster sale, but all the buying was e
nough to start the move back upward in the price. They were rich, and they got richer.”

  “No,” said Jane. “I meant Wonderfair Drugs.”

  “Their stock tanked. The company lost a quarter of its value in an hour, fifty percent in a day. For a while people thought that if the smart money was leaving, so should they. After a month or two, people realized nothing was wrong. Wonderfair became an ideal takeover target, so they got gobbled up by a competitor that was actually a weaker company. But that was later. I lost my job that day.”

  “Just like that? One catastrophe?”

  “It’s a tough business. The timing was bad for me, because they happened to be looking for somebody to fire.”

  Jane said, “What did you do then?”

  “Looked for a job, of course. It took ten months. I got really good at telling that story. Every time I had an interview, the person would say, ‘Why did you leave the Gray Fund?’ so I would tell it. Then I would say, ‘You know, I learned a lot from that series of transactions.’ ”

  “Was it true?”

  She laughed. “No.” Then she said, “Or maybe it was. I learned that just about anything can happen. Which is good, because it has.”

  “I take it that the place where you found a job after ten months was Washington.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I didn’t dare move until I was sure it would last. It was a good job, doing essentially the kind of investment analysis I was trained for. But I had trouble getting to know people, trouble feeling secure, trouble getting myself to concentrate. Maybe it was my fault. I guess I was still trying to get over my last experience, maybe holding something back because I had committed myself completely the last time and gotten burned. But the people at the investment bank didn’t exactly extend a warm welcome, and everything was sort of … tentative. At first, anyway.”