Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

She would have to read the pattern of sights in the room instantly while she was in motion—the positions of the men, where their hands were, what it would take to propel Vaughn out the door with her—and act before they’d had time to think. She stepped out of cover into the doorway, her eyes flicking about her wildly.

Brian Vaughn was alone, sitting on the couch, aiming a pistol at Jane. The three tape recorders he had watched her hide were lined up on the coffee table. From one of the them, the conversation resumed.

Vaughn’s voice said, “The coffee will be ready in a few minutes.”

“Thanks,” said the other man’s voice. “You know, Brian, we’ve been talking. We’d like to get you out of here tonight.”

Vaughn’s forehead was damp with a faint, sticky sweat. His skin seemed to have lost the suntan glow and bleached out to a pale gray. He looked terrified. His own voice came out of the recorder: “I’m a little bit worried about leaving without wiping this place for fingerprints and so on …” The sound seemed to distract him, irritate him, as though he was having trouble concentrating. He punched the button and the tape recorder stopped. He raised his head to yell, “She’s here!”

Jane hissed urgently, “You’ve still got a chance.”

He shook his head frantically, denying it as though he was trying to keep his ears from even hearing it.

“They were outside waiting for me to arrive, weren’t they?”

He seemed angry at her. “Of course they were.” Jane could see that he had lost his nerve hours ago, maybe blurted out the whole story the minute the face-changers had arrived. He hated her for not saving him, and for having tried. He hated her for his own collapse, and the longer he felt the danger that she had brought him, the more certain he seemed to be that she had caused it.

She stepped closer, whispering now. “You can still save us both.”

In reply, he jerked the gun up to point at her face, his arm muscles so tight that it looked as though he wanted to jab her with it. Jane saw a faint smirk playing about his lips, as though he were trying it on, testing the way it felt. She sensed that he was determined to show the face-changers how loyal he was: he was going to be sure he was the one to kill her. He was utterly lost.

Jane had one final chance, and she would have to use Brian Vaughn’s eyes to know when it came. She could hear footsteps coming up the walk toward the front door behind her. She heard a shoe on the bottom step, then one on the top. She tensed her muscles and watched Brian Vaughn’s eyes.

At the instant the door behind Jane opened, Brian Vaughn’s eyes flicked toward it. Jane leapt and spun to throw her shoulder into Vaughn’s chest as she wrapped her arm over Vaughn’s so it was clamped in her armpit, and used both of her hands to squeeze his fingers. The gun discharged into the wall beside the door. The man who had been coming in dived to the floor as Jane bucked to jerk her head into Vaughn’s face. In the second when she felt him loosen his grip on the gun, she wrenched it out of his hand and dashed out the doorway the man had left open.

She veered to the right without having to choose, because it was harder for a right-handed shooter to follow a target moving in that direction. She dashed across the neighbor’s flower bed and reached the first tree before the man on the floor could make his way back to the open door. He fired his first shot into the ground behind her feet, then overcompensated and fired again four feet ahead of her, and by then she was beyond the corner of the next house.

Jane ran up the next driveway toward the back of the house. She could hear heavy feet pounding the sidewalk along Brian Vaughn’s street, then moving more cautiously up the driveway behind her. She could see this house had a six-foot board fence like the one behind Vaughn’s. She had no time to look for a gate. She ran hard, took two long steps, sprang upward to grasp the top of the fence, and used her momentum to roll over it. She came down hard in the middle of another flower bed. She fought the urge to rise to her feet instantly. Instead she crawled ten feet on her belly along the bottom of the fence.

When the men fired through the board fence, they pierced it several times at the place where they had seen her go over it. She stood and dashed straight for the space between this house and the next. She couldn’t run for her car. They were so close behind her that she could not hope to get it unlocked, climb in, and start it before they shot her. Instead she cut across the front lawn of the house, across the sidewalk and the street, then along the opposite row of houses to put the bodies of parked cars between her and her pursuers.

Jane ran for the corner of the fifth house, where she remembered there was an alley that separated the residential stretch of street from the beginning of a small business district. The alley was a logical place to park a car, so she had walked the route she was taking now in daylight and in the dark. It had turned out to be wrong: the far end opened on a municipal parking lot. It had been blocked by a row of steel posts set in concrete so only pedestrians could get into the parking lot that way. But she had kept it in mind because it had looked so right. She decided that tonight she would take it at a sprint, going as fast as she could run over the rough, potholed pavement where they would have to tread with caution. If some of them were following her in a car, this would be the place to strip away that advantage.

Jane glanced over her shoulder at the block of houses behind her, trying to detect moving figures, then turned to enter the mouth of the alley.

The sight of the man made her gasp. “Hold it!” he called. “F.B.I.”

Jane veered away from him and dashed up the sidewalk along the first storefront. She had timed everything wrong. The face-changers had arrived hours early, and so had the F.B.I.

Now she could hear the footsteps of the F.B.I. agent on the pavement behind her. She knew she had to run faster, to make her legs pump harder and stretch for distance at each pace. She had done this to herself. She had intentionally put herself in the way of a group of men who were coldly, pragmatically violent. Next she had intentionally attracted the attention of a government agency whose whole purpose was meeting people like that with overwhelming force. But then she had failed to get out from between them.

The only way she had to get out of it now was to bet everything on her speed, to keep herself from thinking about how it felt to run blind into the darkness, what would happen if she twisted an ankle or didn’t see an obstacle. She had to throw herself into the space ahead of her and hope that nothing had been left there that wasn’t imprinted on the map she carried in her memory.

She turned up the next alley, looking for a place to hide. She ran a few paces, then saw the steps. A three-story brick building ahead and to her left had steel rungs built into the side so maintenance people could climb to the roof. She had no time to stop and judge exactly how much of a lead she had on the F.B.I. man, or to figure out the positions or numbers of agents with him. She had to move before she could think, or the lead would be used up. She came to the building at full speed, jumped high so her foot landed on the third rung, and began to scramble up. She knew she had to get out of view before the F.B.I. agent reached the alley entrance, so she raised her face to the night sky and climbed.

She could hear his feet on the sidewalk beyond the alley now, and they seemed to be hitting much more rapidly than she had expected. She tried to climb faster. Her foot slipped, her body dropped, but her terror had made her hands clutch the rung above her so tightly that when her arms extended, she stopped. She hung for a second, found her footing, and began to climb again. She was more timid now, cold and breathless. Maybe all she would have to do was get above his normal eye level, and he would pass.