Camouflage

—39—

The changeling was interested and amused by people’s changing attitudes toward Rae. Some obviously thought she was a shameless manipulator, or maybe just a nymphomaniac. A lot of the men were happy for Russ, the old dog, or ruefully jealous. Rae didn’t wear makeup and dressed severely, at least in the office, but the men said they had her pegged as a hot number from the beginning. The ones who had seen her swimming had seen part of the rising sun tattooed over her shapely butt.

Some of the men and most of the women could see there was more than sex going on, though. The way she looked at him and he looked at her; the way their voices changed when they talked to each other.

After the snow day, most people came back to work with renewed vigor. A few had not benefited from having a day to reflect on the lack of results—maybe it was time to bring the government in.

The government was coming in, but not for decryption.

Two CIA agents, masquerading as honeymooners, reserved the fancy Wing Room at Aggie Grey’s for a week. Four other agents rented the flanking rooms. They had flown into American Samoa on military aircraft, and come to Apia on the ferry, so there was no nonsense about luggage being searched.

A seventh agent, a white-haired old lady, got a room at the bed-and-breakfast where Rae Archer was staying. An hour after maid service the second day, Rae’s room was thoroughly bugged.

That surveillance did them no good. The changeling was automatically cautious, mimicking human behavior. It ate and drank and excreted at regular intervals, and lay down in the dark for eight hours every night. That it was analyzing 31,433 ones and zeros, instead of sleeping, would not be obvious to any observer.

Three times she came in early in the morning, having spent the night with her boss. That mitigated against the direct approach, going straight to Poseidon and showing them what they knew about the mysterious employee. Besides the fact of her sexual relationship with the second in command, perhaps a love affair, what they learned about Jack Halliburton did not make them optimistic about his cooperating with the American government, either. He had cynically used the American Navy to put together a pool of talented specialists, hired them away, and quit his commission in an acrimonious scene. He wasn’t even an American citizen anymore.

The other direct approach, just snatching the woman off the street or from her room, had some merit—they didn’t know it would be easier to “kidnap” a Powell tank—but as they had no legitimate jurisdiction here, they wanted to be a little more subtle. They used a lure, an indirect one.

Russ had dropped his business card into a box for a once- monthly drawing that awarded a weekend for two at Aggie Grey’s, at either the Wing Room or the Presidential Suite. He won the Wing Room, the weekend after the honeymooners left.

They knew they would have to deal with Russ sooner or later. Best do it directly.

There were three possibilities: Russ would arrive first, or Rae, or they would come in together. The last was not likely, since they were still being discreet. But the CIA team was ready for any of the three, as well as the trivial case where neither showed up.

If Russ had come through the door first, they would have had to do some fast explanation. But it was the woman.

The changeling came into the sumptuous room and tossed its overnight bag on the bed, and went into the bathroom to check its hair. It heard a vague sound in the hall, which was a man shoving a wooden wedge between the door and frame, jamming it shut, and the plain sound of another door opening and closing.

It sped out of the bathroom and saw the man and woman who had just entered from the adjoining room.

“Don’t make this difficult,” the man said. “You know why we’re here.”

The changeling answered automatically while considering various options: “You tell me.”

“You’re not Rae Archer. But you match her so precisely that you must be a clone or something.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“We just talked to the real Rae Archer, in Pasadena. You’re someone else.”

“Who do you work for?” the changeling said.

The woman shrugged. “The United States intelligence community.”

“So you have no jurisdiction here.”

“We just want to ask you some questions.”

The changeling picked up its overnight bag. “No.” Halfway to the door it heard a rubber-band sound and felt a sting in the middle of its back. It reached back—revealing unusual suppleness—and pulled out a dart with plastic wings.

The man was holding what looked like a toy gun. “That won’t hurt you. It will just make you a little groggy.”

The changeling inspected the dart, sniffed it, and shook it next to its ear. “Seems to have a bit left.”

“Doesn’t take much—” The spy grunted, dropped the pistol, and fell to his knees. The dart was in his neck, deeply imbedded into the carotid artery. He managed to pull it out but his knees gave way and he fell over prone, arms and legs trembling and then twitching.

“You want to be careful where you inject that.” The changeling tried the door, but it was stuck. It heard the soft sound of metal on leather, and in three leaping steps was on the woman before she could raise the automatic to fire. It jerked her gun hand sideways and heard finger or knuckle bones breaking just before the weapon discharged, almost silent, into the wall, and pulled it out of her hand.

She screamed in pain and a small man swung out of the door to the adjoining room, pointing a double-barreled shotgun. The changeling leaped sideways just as the first hammer went down, and the hot blast just missed its face. It reached for the weapon and the second blast blew off its left arm at the shoulder.

In the reverberating silence, blood pulsing from the ragged stump, the changeling raised the pistol to point between the man’s eyes. “Bang,” it said, and dropped the gun.

Two steps and it vaulted the couch and crashed through the glass balcony door. It hit the balcony railing and tumbled over, falling onto the awning over the hotel entrance.

Russ was a half block away, and had looked up at the sound of the shots. He saw someone slide off the hotel awning and hit the sidewalk hard, and come up running, bleeding from the stump of an arm.

It seemed to have no face, as if it had a stocking over its head. Russ rubbed his eyes.

It ran over the slow traffic, one step on the roof of a southbound car, the next on a northbound, then onto the opposite sidewalk, over the low fence into the harborside park, and while tourists and picnicking families gaped, it ran like an Olympic sprinter and was over the stone breakwater in a flat dive.

By the time anyone got to the breakwater, there was nothing but ripples. A siren threaded through the air.

The changeling sought shelter on the harbor bottom, under the shade of a tanker that was drawing half the depth of the water. It strained to become a fish as quickly as possible, bone into cartilege and denticles and teeth, muscle and guts into the streamlined swift form of a reef shark; bloody clothes left behind as a red herring.

The metamorphosis was just complete when it heard divers splash into the harbor back where it had dived in. It breathed a surge of warm salt water liberally flavored with diesel spill— delicious—and flexed the one huge muscle of itself toward the open sea.

A helicopter commandeered by the police made a search pattern low over the harbor, and with binoculars and sonar found nothing but the usual assortment of fish and discarded debris, from the surface to the bottom. A couple of large sharks, one evidently spooked by the helicopter.

Russ hadn’t recognized the apparition as the woman he loved. Still trying to sort out what he had seen—there was a movie company shooting up in the hills; maybe they were using Aggie Grey’s as a location for an action sequence—he stepped into the lobby of the hotel like a sleepwalker.

All the people at the registration desk were jabbering into phones. Two policemen with pistols drawn ran through the door and thundered up the stairs. While Russ was watching them, a man beside him said, “Russell Sutton?”

It was a short, stocky man who smelled odd. Gunsmoke? “Who are you?”

He held up identification. “Kenneth Swanwick. I’m a CIA investigator.”

Russell shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

“Rae Archer is a spy. We—”

“Is this part of that movie?”

It was the agent’s turn to be confused. “What movie?”

“The one they’re shooting up by the waterfall.”

He took a deep breath. “This is not a movie.” He held up the ID again. “We used the raffle here as a ruse. We knew Rae Archer was a spy and wanted to catch her unawares.”

“Come on. I know she couldn’t be.” But certain oddnesses began to crystalize.

“We picked her up to interrogate her and she killed one agent, injured another, and escaped by crashing through a glass door.”

“That couldn’t have been her. Maybe somebody who looked like her.”

“That’s exactly it,” Swanwick said, “and we think we can prove it.”

“Wait.” Russell pointed out the door. “That was—”

“We don’t know who that was. Claimed to be her. Looked like Rae Archer. Had her fingerprints.”

“But—”

“But the real Rae Archer is still in California. We talked to her. She claims not to know anything about this, and I think we believe her.”

They were joined by an attractive woman whose tense face was as pale as her ash-blonde hair. She was tightening a bandage around her right hand. “This is Mr. Sutton?”

“Yeah,” Swanwick said. “He’s a little confused.”

“Like we aren’t.” She was the same height as Russell and fixed him with her large gray eyes. The pupils were pinpoints from medication. “My name is Angela Smith.”

“And you’re a spy?”

“An investigator.”

He stared at her weird eyes. “And this is not a movie.”

“I wish to God it was. We could strike the set and start over.” To Swanwick: “You’re going to have to go with the police in a minute. There should be a lawyer by the time you get to the station.” She swiveled back to Russell. “You knew Rae Archer better than anybody else. You were intimate with her.”

He nodded cautiously, and then shook his head. “Look, she couldn’t do this. Not at all.”

“So maybe it wasn’t her,” Swanwick said quickly. “Whoever it was is pretty damned dangerous, and on the loose.”

“We have to talk but can’t go up to the room,” Angela Smith said. “Get in the way of the cops.” She gestured toward the bar with her bandaged hand. “Uncle Sam will buy you a beer.”

One of the few tables in the small bar was unoccupied. The bartender came over and took their order. The window that looked out over the park and the harbor showed a growing crowd of curious people, held back by two policemen in incongruous parade uniforms.

“Just for a minute, try to think of Rae as a spy,” Swanwick said. “Did you ever get the feeling she was pumping you for information?”

That had an annoying alternate interpretation. “Not really,” Russell said with some asperity. “We’re both working on the same thing. We talked about it all the time. So does everyone else on the project.”

“Think about it this way—ow!” Gesturing, she had bumped her bandaged knuckle. “She’s supposed to be an astronomer. Did she seem like one to you?”

“No doubt about that. You’d have to ask Dr. Dagmar to be absolutely sure; she’s our top astronomer. But Rae seems to really know her stuff, a lot more than me. I’m just a marine engineer, but I’ve been into astronomy all my life.”

Swanwick nodded. “Did she show any special interest in defense or military applications of this thing? The artifact?”

He thought about that for a moment. “Defense? I can say no almost without exception, since that’s an angle I’m not interested in. I’d remember if she tried to ‘pump’ me on that.”

A policeman came into the bar, holding a sawed-off double- barreled shotgun in a heavy plastic bag. Swanwick stood up.

“Did you shoot that woman with this?”

“In self-defense. She was—”

“Ya, ya.” He gestured to a big officer behind him, who came around quickly with handcuffs.

“That won’t be necessary,” Swanwick said, but the big man spun him around roughly and snapped them on. “She had a gun,” he said.

“And you had this in your room for the little mice,” the first policeman said. He turned to Russell. “Dr. Sutton, please wait here with your lady. A man will take your statement soon.”

They watched the three of them leave. “He shot her … with that?”

“Hit her, too. Blew off her arm.” There was a moment of dead silence. The people at the other tables were looking at them. She let a breath out in a puff. “Speaking of ‘ladies’?”

He pointed. “Behind the gift counter, down the hall to the left.”

She picked up her purse. “I’ll be right back.”

Unsurprisingly, he never saw her again.