Брайан Гарфилд - Recoil

She put the lid on the pot. “Sandy’s got a cold, I’m making her some lentil soup. Want some?”

“No. I’m on my way to a meeting. Just checking in.”

“He saw the article in the Post . He wants the four of them found.” She searched his face. “Any progress?”

He was looking at the monitor screen; his answer was reluctant. “You could say so. We’re getting close to their files.”

“How close?”

“We’ll know Thursday, one way or the other.”

“Better find them, Ezio.”

“I know. Say hello to the girls for me.” He put his hat on and left.

She took the lid off. It was bubbling. She opened the cabinet and took down a soup bowl. On the monitor screen she saw Ezio walk away toward the elevator.

The youth had crow’s-wing hair and a pointed face. He called himself C. K. Gillespie but Ezio called him Charlie because he didn’t like the arrogance of people who used initials in place of a name. He thought of Charlie as a flyweight kid, although Charlie was ten years older than he looked, had a busy law practice in Washington and had done satisfactory work for the Pastor organization.

Charlie came into the office at ten minutes to four. Ezio was reading the Wall Street Journal . “You’re twenty minutes late.”

“We were in the holding pattern. This place swept for bugs?”

“Once a week. And the jammer’s always running. You ought to apologize a little for being late.”

“I never apologize for something that isn’t my fault.”

“It’s just good manners, you know.”

Charlie sat down. He was slim in the sharkskin suit. It looked vaguely Sy Devore, Ezio thought — something West Coast about it. He couldn’t wear clothes like that; from the age of six he’d been built like a beer truck. He had decided he looked best in winter tweed and summer seersucker, and those were all he ever wore.

“And you ought to wait for somebody to ask you to sit down before you sit. It’s presumptuous.”

“Ezio, I like you a lot but I don’t need courtesy lessons from you. I match my manners to the company I’m in.”

“Don’t patronize me, Charlie, I’m not one of your Texas hillbilly clients.”

“No.” Charlie smiled a little and that made Ezio wonder how the kid actually did picture him. As a gorilla with an education, probably. Charlie still had a lot of things to learn and one of them was about jumping to oversimplified conclusions.

Ezio said, “Mr. Pastor’s anxious for news from Washington.”

“I met Mrs. Janowicz this morning.”

“And?”

“The security’s pretty tight there.”

“We already knew that, Charlie.”

“I’d prefer you didn’t call me that.”

“When you’re in this chair you can call yourself anything you want. Right now I’m in this chair and you’re in that one, Charlie. Now tell me about that secretary — what’s her name again?

“Janowicz. Mary Janowicz.”

“Polack?”

“Irish. She’s married to a Polack.”

“Polish-American, Charlie. An important attorney like you shouldn’t stoop to ethnic slurs. Only thugs and bigots use words like that.”

Charlie smiled again: He didn’t rise to it. But Ezio liked to bait him because someday he was going to find out whether the kid had balls.

“She’s got a girl friend she loves once or twice a week. She wouldn’t want it broadcast. The people she works for are stuffy about that kind of thing.”

Ezio made a face. “So am I, as a matter of fact.”

“We’ve got three hundred feet of infrared film. She’s a little fat but you could possibly get six bucks a ticket in a Times Square porn house. She got the idea all right. Then also of course we offered her money to cooperate. Enough money to make her start thinking about the possibilities.”

“How did you get onto her?”

“We put an investigative staff on everybody working out of Corcoran’s headquarters. She turned out to be the apple. All it takes is time and patience.”

“They’ve got their own security checks. If you could turn her up why haven’t they tumbled to it too?”

“It only started a few months ago. She’s been married three years. The honeymoon wore off and she got seduced by this lesbian after a bridge game. That’s how we cottoned onto it — Mrs. Janowicz always stayed behind for an hour or so after the other women left.”

“So why hasn’t the federal security found out?”

“They probably will, next time they run a spot check on the people out of that office. That’s why we’ve got to get it done fast.”

“What’s the hang-up?”

“Access. She doesn’t work in the file section. She’s the secretary to the GS-8 who runs the assignment section.”

“What does that mean?”

“He prepares the new identities. New job, name, location, all the details. He’s got to get the birth certificate, driver’s license, credit cards, all the ID documents. All that stuff has to be legitimate, so it takes time. They’ve got this one official who does it full time. His name’s Fordham, if it matters. Janowicz is his secretary.”

“How the hell can they provide a new legitimate birth certificate for a man who’s full grown?”

“The same way you get one for a phony passport or license. Graveyard registrations. They take, say, a forty-year-old guy that they need papers for. They go back forty years in a newspaper file somewhere, they find a death notice for an infant. Then they check back to the birth notice for that same infant. They go to the hall of records and they buy a notorized official copy of the birth certificate. That’s how they pick the new names for the witnesses — the name originally belonged to some baby that died young. So it’s a real birth certificate.”

“Charlie, you were going to tell me about the delay.”

“Fordham deals only with the new people that come in. Looking after the ones who’ve already been relocated, that’s another department. Bureaucracy, you know, everybody’s a specialist. Witnesses they’ve already relocated go into a standby status after the marshals pull their surveillance off them. It’s an active file because they do regular spotchecks to make sure the people are still secure. But it’s a different department.”

“Then what good does this woman do us?”

“She’s got access but it’s spotty. When they finish work on a new identity for some family they give the file to Janowicz. She takes it to the filing section and puts it in the appropriate file drawer. The drawers are organized by cross-reference. Both under the new phony name and under the old real name. That’s because sometimes they have to call these people back to testify and they need to be able to find them themselves. So all we need is a peek in those files. We’re looking for John Doe, say, so we just look up John Doe, and it says, ‘See William Smith, four-six-two Chingadera Avenue, Podunk, Nebraska.’ Janowicz goes into those files once or twice a week to enter a new file. She’s given a temporary onetime clearance each time. It’d be easier for us if they had it in a computer, but they don’t.” Charlie cleared his throat, crossed his legs and resumed:

“When she does it she’s in plain sight of the security guard. She can find a name and address for us all right. But she’d attract suspicion if she opened more than one drawer per trip, and sometimes weeks go by between trips to any particular drawer — maybe even months. They’ve had this operation seven years now and there are only eleven hundred individuals and families in those files. Figure it out — even if they’re doing more business now, entering another new case every few days, there’s still a couple of dozen file drawers in there and the odds of hitting the right one are kind of puny. We give her a name, we might get the answer overnight and then again we might have to wait a month or six weeks before she gets into that drawer.”