Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

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 tall 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.

That afternoon she unrolled some of the cord from the spool and set to work on it. Every two feet she tied a strong knot that held a loop a foot in diameter. After thirty feet, she decided she had tied enough loops. She unrolled another hundred feet of cord, then cut it. Next she sliced open the laces of the baseball in two spots, worked the end of the cord through one hole and out the other, and tied it securely. She opened the side window of her bedroom. Below her she could see the top branches of a big sycamore, and she half-formed the notion that if she fell she could clutch at it to slow her fall, but then dismissed the idea. She wasn’t going to fall.

That evening, when she heard her landlords’ car start, she hurried to the window. She watched the wife get into the passenger seat, then saw the headlights go on. The car backed out of the driveway, then drove off down the hill toward the main thoroughfares, where the restaurants and movie theaters were. It was time.

Jane opened the window at the side of the house. She leaned out, held onto the frame with her left hand, lowered the baseball about ten feet, and began to swing it back and forth in an arc. It gained momentum, swinging faster and faster, higher and higher. Finally, as it reached the bottom of its arc and began to climb, she changed its direction slightly so it came up, high over her head above the overhanging eaves of the house. She let go, heard the hard ball hit the roof, bounce once, and then roll down the other side of the peak.

She paid out more para cord until the line went slack, then quickly went down the stairs and outside to the driveway. The ball was lying on the pavement with the cord hanging down to it from the roof. Jane pulled the cord slowly and patiently, dragging more and more of it out her upstairs window and over the roof. When it stopped, she climbed upstairs and found that one of the knots she had tied to make loops had snagged on the rain gutter. She searched the back yard until she found a rusty rake, went up to her room and used it to push the loop up over the gutter onto the roof, then pushed the next few up after it. Next she returned to the driveway and pulled the para cord tight again. She wound the para cord three times around the trunk of the tree beside the driveway, tied it securely, and hurried back to her room.