Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

Jane smiled sheepishly. “Caught me.” She let her face reflect the uneasiness she was feeling. “But I wasn’t doing it out of idle curiosity. There are a couple of guys in this scheme that I’m not sure about. They seem unprofessional.”

“What do you mean, ‘unprofessional’?”

Jane shrugged. “Arrogant, overconfident. Maybe a little too casual about the rules. That’s the kind of person who gets caught. They may be fine. But if I’m right, I don’t want them to know too much about how the rest of us do things. So if somebody asks, tell them you saw a man staring at you at the airport, so you slipped out and took a bus.”

Janet looked a little worried. “I’ll try.”

“Succeed,” said Jane. “It’s important. If one of them finds himself in a jail cell some day, one of the things he’ll think about is what he has to trade. If it’s you, then you’re in deep water. If it’s all of us, then you’re in deep water with no lifeline.”

Jane took a last look out the window of the bedroom, then said, “Good luck.”

Janet gave a brave little smile. “Thanks. I don’t know if there was anything to worry about, but thanks for being on my side. It made me feel a little better about everything.”

“Good,” said Jane, and slipped out quickly so she wouldn’t have to look into those trusting eyes. She made her way down the stairs, then out the door and around the building, reassuring herself that there was no sign that the face-changers had arrived early.

She knew it wouldn’t be long. They had dropped a runner at an airport with a plane ticket four days ago, and she had never shown up at the end of the line. She knew they must have spent the first three days the way she would have: examining everything they had done to find a mistake, then trying to discover whether the runner had been picked up by the authorities for some mistake of her own.

Jane walked down the street to the spot where her car was parked, got in, parked again on the street behind the building, and began the long wait. For the first two hours she walked. The days on the road had made her muscles feel slack and her joints stiff. She was used to exercise and motion, and the walking helped her get over the feeling of confinement. When the face-changers came, they would case Janet’s building as she had, and look for the same signs she had: heads in parked cars, windows in nearby buildings that looked as though they were being used for surveillance. A lone woman walking down the street looking as though she belonged here would be of no interest to them.

After she had walked enough, she spent some time driving. She bought gas, ate a quick dinner at a Chinese restaurant a few blocks away, then changed her clothes to avoid becoming familiar to the people who lived in the neighborhood.

Jane wondered whether she was making a mistake. She could have told Janet the truth, then taken her away and resettled her. She could have done it on the first night in Minneapolis. No, she reminded herself. At that moment it would not have worked. The woman believed the face-changers had saved her from people who were going to kill her. Jane was just some woman who had appeared from nowhere. But maybe now, after spending four days with Jane, the woman would believe what she said. No, Jane had gotten her to believe, and then spent the whole trip lying to her.

Jane knew it didn’t matter whether she could have done something else. She hadn’t. She had done this. She had put the woman right where the face-changers hoped she would be. Now Jane would wait for the contact person to show up, and follow him. Nobody would know that she had ever seen Janet McNamara. Jane would learn about the face-changers without sacrificing Janet. That was important. Having Dahlman tell the authorities his story was a pointless exercise. Having a second client of the face-changers describe the disappearing process and identify some of the people who had arranged it would be another matter. As long as Jane left the woman where the face-changers had put her, she would be safe, and Jane could come for her whenever she was ready.

At ten, the lights in Janet McNamara’s apartment went off. At eleven, Jane drove by the building again, and the lights were on. As Jane moved her car to the end of the block, she studied the cars parked nearby. The face-changers always seemed to work in two-man teams, so she was looking for a car with one man in it who might be waiting for a partner who had gone inside. She walked past the building and glanced into the lobby, but there was no one loitering there. But when Janet had met the bogus policeman, he had been alone. The man who had taken her to the Minneapolis airport had been alone. Maybe they only used pairs to kill someone.

She studied the building. The lights were still on in Janet McNamara’s apartment. There were other lights on in the building, but only in the stairways and halls. Eleven o’clock wasn’t that late.

Jane cautiously stepped around the building to the driveway and peered at the back of the building. The building’s parking lot was built to hold ten cars, but there was only one car in it. Eleven o’clock wasn’t that late, but it wasn’t that early, either. At eleven o’clock there should be cars. Her mind raced. She knew why there had been no sounds when she had come here during the day. She had assumed that everyone must be at work, but she had been wrong. There was no “everyone.” It was just Janet McNamara, and she had a visitor.

As Jane moved to the back of the building, the logic of it seemed simple and inevitable. The face-changers were in the business of hiding people, and they were doing it on a large scale and planning to stay in business, maybe even expand. They would need places for lots of people. Why not buy an apartment building or two in big cities? A runner had to be in constant fear that he might do something that would arouse the curiosity of his neighbors. But a fugitive had little to fear from his neighbors if his neighbors were fugitives too.

Jane tried to fight off the decision that she was about to make. The most important thing for her to do was to stay out of sight until the visitor was in his car, and then follow him. But when Jane had conceived the idea, she had thought that this apartment building was full of people. The fact that it wasn’t might not change anything. But it might mean that the man in Janet McNamara’s apartment could kill her and there would be nobody to hear it. The risk had suddenly become unacceptable.

She hurried up the stairs, then slipped into the hallway and stole along the corridor until she came to the door beside Janet McNamara’s. She tried the doorknob, but it was locked. She put her ear to Janet’s door. She could hear nothing but a pair of muffled voices in conversation. She stepped back to the other door and took out her pocketknife. She carved out a little of the wood beside the knob until she could fit the blade beside the jamb. She inserted it to nudge the bolt to the side, then pushed the door open.

Jane closed the door and moved across the room, then quietly opened the window closest to Janet’s apartment. She could hear the voices more clearly now. The tone still seemed even and monotonous, but she looked around her. If the tone changed, she would need something she could use as a weapon.

The apartment was furnished exactly like the one beside it. She looked in the kitchen for knives, but found there were none. That was more than an oversight. It could hardly be anything but a precaution to keep the runner who would live here from committing suicide. No, she decided. It was to protect themselves from a runner. If all a runner wanted was to kill himself, then anything would do—an open window, an electric socket.

Jane turned on her heel and stepped to the pole lamp by the couch, unplugged it, and began to dismantle it. She removed the shade, unscrewed the bulb and socket from the pole, and disconnected the insulated wires from the switch. She pulled the cord all the way out of the long wooden pole, unscrewed the heavy metal base of the lamp, and removed it. She looked around the apartment. There were no extension cords. She ran to the closet and found a vacuum cleaner. She pulled the cord out all the way, then cut it and brought it across the room. It was at least twenty feet long. She listened at the window for a moment. There was tension in the voices now, but she still couldn’t make out any words.