Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

When she had the directional microphone and its electrical cord strapped to her back with a belt, she pulled on her gloves, gingerly put one leg out the window, and looked down to place her foot in the nearest loop of cord. She felt her lungs huff, as though a pair of hands had clapped together against her ribs to squeeze her breath away. She raised her eyes a little, grasped the cord, and swung out above the ground.

She climbed slowly, using each loop as a foothold, then reaching to grasp the next one to pull herself up until she was just below the gutter. Then she reached over it and felt for the next loop. When she found it, she pulled herself over the gutter onto the roof. She held on to the rope as she crawled up the steep incline to the chimney. She freed herself of the directional microphone, set it where the chimney would hide it from the street and the slope would hide it from Sid Freeman’s house, then aimed it at the spot where she had parked her car on the night when she had brought Dahlman here.

Jane began the slow descent from the peak of the house, paying out the electrical wire as she went. When she reached the place where the para cord bent and went over the gutter, she felt the worst of the fear. She clung to the para cord and let her legs go out while she lowered herself with her hands, then bent at the hip and felt with her toes for the next loop.

When she found it, she felt a relief so strong that her breath came from her throat in raspy whispers. It took a short time to climb down to the level of her window. When she reached it and pulled herself across the sill she lay on the floor, trembling for a moment. The arches of her feet hurt from unconsciously trying to bend them to cling to the loops of the cord like hands.

When she stood up, she felt energized. She had not fallen. Now she had to clean up. She ran downstairs to cut the cord free of the tree and pick up the baseball. She returned to the room and pulled the cord back over the house into her window. Then she went back to watching the path along the lake.

It was early the next morning before she adjusted all of her equipment for the last time. The microphone and one video camera were trained on the most likely spot for a car to park along the lake. That was the only place where the face-changers would say anything to their rabbits. After that, until the rabbit returned, he was on his own. The second video camera was aimed at the approach to Sid’s house. At this range the built-in microphone might even pick up a bit of what the lens saw. Then Jane lay on the bed and closed her eyes.

By watching all night and working all morning, she had reset her internal clock to become nocturnal. When she closed her eyes she had to endure three very clear and convincing versions of herself losing her footing on the high, steep roof, then sliding down the rough shingles, scrabbling with her fingers so the nails broke, then being launched over the edge, where she made one desperate grab for the gutter. Each time, that only got her turned around, so that she plummeted toward the ground headfirst like a diver, the wind blowing her hair and the ground coming toward her so fast it seemed to swell to fill her field of vision like an image in a zoom lens. Then her heart would stop for an instant, and she would be awake again. While she waited to see it for the fourth time, she fell into a deep sleep.

She awoke at sunset and went to check her equipment. She played each of the tapes on fast forward, but none of them had picked up anything but a woman walking a dog by the lake, at least a hundred cars passing on the road above it, and four little boys who had come to give bread to the ducks.

She had dinner and rewound all of her tapes. When it was dark she put the earphones on and listened to the microphone and watched the lake with her night-vision scope. Late in the morning she turned on her recorders and video cameras and went to sleep.

Jane watched the path this way, night after night. She ate simple meals that didn’t require her to be away from the window. She performed extended versions of the Tai Chi movements to keep her muscles loose and her joints flexible. She left the house only during daylight, when visitors were least likely to come along the path, and when she returned she checked the tapes her recorders had made. She resisted the growing temptation to turn her attention toward Sid Freeman’s house, because she knew there was no more to be learned there. All she could do was make Sid’s protégés think his house was her target and kill her.

She kept her suitcase open, and the only clothes that were out of it were the ones she was wearing at the moment. She had a second, larger suitcase that she would use to carry the cameras and recorders and earphones. The directional microphone could stay on the roof if it didn’t come down the first time she tugged the power cord. One thing she knew for certain was that she was not going up on that roof after it.

Each evening after dinner she cleaned the apartment completely before she sat down to watch the path. If she had to leave quickly, there would be two or three door knobs to wipe off, and the place would yield no prints. She even composed a note and typed it on a typewriter on display at an office equipment store. It said, “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Stewart, I’m afraid I’ve been called away urgently. My mother back in Florida has had a stroke, and I need to be there to care for her immediately. Thank you so much for your kindness. I’m enclosing next month’s rent to cover the inconvenience while you find a new tenant. Regretfully, Tamara Davis.” She had put the paper into the typewriter and taken it out with a tissue in her hand, then slid it into an envelope the same way so it would carry no prints.

With that, she decided she was ready. In the Old Time, a lone Seneca might have come to this very place to watch the lake. In the wars of the forests, all attacks were surprise attacks, and the best strategy was to become indistinguishable from the forest, to wait and listen and watch. Enemies needed to be studied until their strengths and vulnerabilities were known and the time was perfect. Relations with distant tribes of the west were fluid and shifting, so they were studied for signs of impending trouble.

Each night she sat at her window gazing at the familiar picture she could see through her night-vision scope. By now the bright green image had become flat like a painting—an unchanging arrangement of shapes that her mind simply verified each time she leaned to the eyepiece.

But the green painting had small living elements. Owls nested high in the canopy of leaves at the top of the stand of old maples across the lake to her left, where there were no houses. Every few nights she would see one glide out of the high place, suddenly swoop into the brush, and rise clutching a small shape that must have been a mouse, then flap its wings to return to the confusion of dark leaves. The ducks that swam on the surface of the lake in daylight were gone by the time she took her post each night, but she had studied the tapes to see them return to their nesting places in the reeds to the right of the owl trees. To the far right, near the road that ringed the lake, she had found squirrels. To amuse herself she had switched on the infrared scope to pick up their body heat as they slept in their ramshackle piles of dead leaves in the high overarching limbs of the sycamores.

The only human shapes that moved across the green painting regularly were two people she called Woman with Dog and the Sad Man. Woman with Dog seemed to work late five nights a week. Jane saw her car appear on the hill at around midnight and pull into the driveway of a big house up one of the side streets across the lake. The light would go on only in an upper window, so Jane was sure the woman lived in a converted upstairs apartment like hers. Then the woman would reappear in a sweat suit with a retriever on a leash, and go for a long walk in the park. The Sad Man usually appeared some time later. He seemed to come from a distance. He walked steadily, but not quickly. He slouched forward and looked down at the ground, as though he were wondering whether this was the night to burrow into it.