The Face-Changers (29 page)

He noticed, turned around once, and looked at her inquiringly.

“You’ll do.” She glanced at her watch. “Time to go. I’ll slip out and look for our ride. You take die suitcase, go down and check out.”

His face went slack, and he didn’t move. She could see that he was embarrassed. “I…”

She snapped her fingers. “Sorry. I forgot you don’t have any money left. I’m not used to getting up this early, I guess.” She went to the window and looked down at East Forty-ninth Street. “They’re here already. Let’s go.” She opened me door handle with a handkerchief, then closed it quietly and followed David Cunningham down the deserted hallway to the elevator. After the door had closed them in, she said, “You take the suitcase out and put it in the trunk. As soon as I’m finished at the desk I’ll join you.” David walked purposefully across the lobby and out me front door. A blue car with two men inside pulled up at the loading zone. The big blond man in the passenger seat got out, took the suitcase out of David’s hand, and said quietly, “Get in the back seat.”

David sat in the car and the door closed. The man behind the wheel was the smaller, curly-haired one he had met months ago, just after his troubles had started. The man turned his body in the seat to smile at David. “You’re in the home stretch now. How does it feel?”

“Better than I expected,” said David. Much better than he was allowed to say, he thought. The woman had said she didn’t want any of the others to know that she had spent the night with him. He could hardly blame her. She was unattached and so was he… now, anyway. She had a right to do what she wanted, but she was in a business surrounded by men: criminals, when you came down to it. She was probably smart not to give them the impression that she was accessible.

He heard the trunk slam, men both doors opened and he saw the dark woman slide into the front seat. The big blond man got in beside David, and the car pulled away from the hotel. David felt a bit cheated. After last night, he would have expected her to sit in the back beside him – that she would have wanted to be near him for the ride to the airport. She had told him she wouldn’t be able to fly over to North Africa for a visit until late fall, maybe even December.

Women were always trying to give the impression that they were more romantic than men. But the minute it was over, what did you hear? “Yeah, yeah. The earth moved, you changed my life, you’re the best, now let’s get downstairs so you can buy me dinner.” This one had a way of dropping the temperature from cool to cold. He had said, “You know my real name. Don’t you think it’s time I knew yours?” She had answered, “I have lots of names, and they’re all real.” He supposed that in her business, she had to be that way.

The people who had something to run from got to change their names and looks, then disappear. She had to stay around while they went off to places like Morocco.

He had accidentally reminded himself, and it made him frightened. He had made it this far, but the only real hurdle was still ahead of him. Staying free all this time was no big accomplishment, because he had not been face-to-face with a federal official since the last time he had walked out of the courthouse.

He still couldn’t believe that he had let this happen to him.

When that Mullins character had come to him and presented the scheme, it had seemed simple. All he had to do was take the cash a bit at a time, and place 80 percent of it in an escrow account against the purchase of an imaginary piece of real estate, as though the man were building up a down payment.

Then he would make out a check to a different name, hand it to the same man, and keep his 20 percent in cash. Deal closed.

Of course, it was money laundering. He didn’t like that part of it, but he had liked getting an under-the-table payment in cash.

Everything had seemed fine, even after the man had stopped showing up. After he had missed four consecutive weeks, David had begun to see the three hundred thousand in the escrow account as found money.

That was when the man’s boss had come to the office. His name was Maggio. He had explained to David that Mullins had been a professional bagman, merely delivering Maggio’s money. If David would simply hand over the check for seven hundred and fifty thousand, he would be on his way. It was then that David had seen it all, as though it were carved in his forehead. Mullins had fooled them both, but Maggio was never going to believe it.

David had considered calling the police. He would be disbarred and convicted of money laundering, tax evasion, and some currency-reporting violations. He had considered asking Maggio for time to pay the money back. But he could tell that this man was not the sort for that. Had he actually said that he had killed Mullins? No. David had inferred it from the way he had spoken about Mullins in the past tense from the beginning, always with a weary, philosophical distaste. Finally, David had written out the check for seven fifty, and begun to pack his bags so he could be gone before the check bounced.

Her voice jarred David. “He doesn’t have any money with him. Did you take care of that?” She was talking about him.

The blond man beside David said, “There’s five hundred in cash and two thousand in traveler’s checks in his flight bag.”

“Good,” she said. She turned in her seat so she could see David’s face. “David, remember. When you get to Morocco, take a cab from the airport to your hotel. Spend a few days resting up and getting used to the climate. Don’t go right to the bank and start withdrawing lots of money. They could put you under surveillance for a day or two just because you’re a foreigner.”

“Don’t worry,” said David. “Once I’m on that plane, I’m a different person. I’m never going to hurry again.” The car coasted to a stop on a quiet street lined by brownstones. “Why are we stopping?”

“We’re going to change cars here,” said the curly-haired driver. “Just sit tight while we shift your luggage to the other car.”

David sat alone in the back seat while the others got out.

He watched them through the rear window until the trunk lid went up and he couldn’t see them anymore. After a few seconds, the blond man opened the door and said, “Come on.” When David was out, the man took his arm and ushered him around the back of the car.

David didn’t see the gun come out, and the silencer never touched the back of his head, so he never felt anything. He saw the dark woman looking into his eyes with an expression of intense curiosity. The bullet passed through the back of David Cunningham’s skull and emerged high on his forehead, and the blond man gave him a hard push from behind. His body toppled forward against the rear bumper and bent at the hips over the rim of the open trunk, so his head and torso were inside. The two men grasped David Cunningham’s legs and heaved them upward to push him the rest of the way in, and the woman closed the lid over him.

In a moment the woman had taken David’s place in the back seat, the two men were in the front, and the car was making its way toward the Queensboro Bridge.

The curly-haired man looked over his shoulder at the woman. “Morocco?” The blond man beside him chuckled.

The dark woman said, “One of the things he thought he was running from was the federal government. Was I supposed to tell him Biloxi?”

“It just has a ring to it, that’s all: ‘Your money is in a bank in Morocco.’”

“Just make sure you bury him deep,” said the woman.

“And I keep thinking about the clothes. Maybe you should strip him first, and burn the clothes someplace far away.”

“All right,” said the curly-haired man. “You going straight to the airport this time?”

“Yes. Drop me at the United terminal.” She tapped the blond man on the shoulder. “So bring me up to date.” The blond man said, “The girl we have on hold in Chicago is getting restless.”

“Is everything ready for her at the other end?” The blond man shrugged. “Pretty close.”

“When it is, move her.” She stared out the window at the buildings as they drifted past. She muttered, “I know you haven’t killed Jane yet. If you had, you would have been falling all over yourselves to tell me.”

Jane arrived in Minneapolis and registered at the Copley Hotel because it was too big and ornate and comfortable for a woman who didn’t want to be noticed, then bought the best street map the gift shop had and went out to find an apartment and do some shopping. She had very specific requirements for the apartment, so she wasted very little time.

Sid Freeman had always been proud of his little stronghold, even in the days when he was calling himself Harlan J. Hall or Mrs. Dilys Mankewitz and he had not yet reinforced it with steel and stone. But even in those days, Jane had been alert to its vulnerability. Sid required that every visitor approach the house from the same direction and move along the rise above the lake shore so that his lookout – usually Quinn, when he was around – could study the visitor through a rifle scope. Sid and his sniper had an elevated, unobstructed view of the path all the way from the other end of the lake to his door. What Sid had not provided was a way of keeping a third party from seeing the path too.

Jane visited an apartment in a big house two blocks west of Sid’s. It was slightly higher on the hill than Sid’s house, and obscured by the leaves of two long rows of tail oak trees along the old, quiet streets.

The apartment was on two levels, with a kitchen and small living room on the second floor and a staircase that led to a bedroom at the peak of the house. It had once been the attic, so it had a low sloping ceiling and was hot, but the landlord had installed an air-conditioning unit in the front window. It had a separate entrance down an enclosed staircase to the driveway.

Jane walked back to the front window and studied the view of the lake over the air conditioner, then took out a pen to sign the lease.

Jane left her apartment and went out to buy all of her furnishings at once. At a sporting goods store in a mall she found a sixty-power spotting scope on a tripod. At another sporting goods store she bought a nightscope with infrared enhancement. She had known Sid for years, and if those were what he used, they were what was necessary. The electronics were slightly more chancy, because she wasn’t yet sure how much of what she bought would work at this distance. She knew that the only way to solve it was to buy everything that might work: two video cameras, a directional microphone, a tape recorder, a scanner that the salesman slyly assured her would pick up conversations on cell phones. Then she went to a giant appliance discount store and bought an air-conditioning unit exactly like the one in the front window of her apartment.

Jane set up her gear in the late afternoon. She knew that night was the time for watching the path, because Sid dealt with people who tried to stay indoors in the daytime. She took the motor and refrigeration coils out of her new air conditioner so it was nothing but a metal box with louvers, and used it to replace the original one. She put the video cameras inside it, plugged them in to run on AC power, and aimed them between louvers at a spot on the path through the park that was open and close enough so that with the zoom lens set properly she could get a clear picture of anyone visiting Sid Freeman’s house. Then she placed the spotting scope and the night-vision scope in the air conditioner beside the cameras.

The directional microphone took a bit more thought. It had a dish-shaped receiver that was too big to escape notice in a window, and putting it behind a pane of glass or a set of blinds would muffle sounds. It occurred to her that the proper way to use it was to make it look like a TV satellite dish and place it on the roof.

Jane spent fifteen minutes trying to decide whether the roof was merely her best hope or her only hope, because best hope was not good enough for Jane Whitefield. Her parents had brought her up without concealing that the world was a place composed of materials that were much harder and more enduring than human flesh and bone. Nothing she had seen since then had caused her to forget it.

Her father had been an ironworker, one of hundreds of Iroquois men who had traveled the country in little crews, working on big construction projects for much of each year.

There was a myth in the society at large that the Iroquois men were simply lucky that they had inherited some odd blank on their chromosomes in the spot where other people carried the gene for their fear of heights. They walked the high girders that formed the skeletons of skyscrapers, and clung to the cables that spanned bridges, and made good money. But one of those men had been Henry Whitefield, and he had told his daughter the truth.

There was no such thing as a genetic immunity to fear.

Three hundred feet looked the same through his brown eyes as it did through the blue eyes Jane had inherited from her mother. Things of the mind were controlled by the will, not by chemical codes. A man who needed to feed his family simply taught himself to weigh the risk against the benefit without adding in the fear. It was probably two years later that the cable holding the steel I-beam that suspended Henry Whitefield so high above the river snapped.

Jane had been eleven that summer, and she had been three thousand miles away from that river in Washington, but she had seen him falling, over and over in her dreams. Sometimes she would be up there with him, not standing on anything as he was, but disembodied, watching him in his red flannel shirt and blue jeans, looking so small up there surrounded by sky.

And then the cable snapped and he was lost, his arms flailing and his legs kicking for second after second, all the way down.

But sometimes she would be inside him when it happened, and that was worse. She would be looking down all the way at the dark water and the big rocks along the edge, watching for a long time as they rushed up toward the eyes she was looking through.

Jane hated heights. The roof of this house was steep. It was a three-story house at the street, but on the lower side of the hill where the directional microphone needed to be placed, the ground sloped away, so it was four stories high. The risk was not inviting. All she could do to mitigate it was to prepare herself. The next morning she went out to a sporting goods store and bought a baseball and a pair of leather gloves. Then she stopped at a military surplus store and picked out a hundred-yard spool of olive-drab seven-strand para cord. She wasn’t sure whether that meant it was used in parachutes, but the label guaranteed that the minimum tensile strength was five hundred and fifty pounds.