The Face-Changers

26

“Jane.” That was what the woman had said. Jane’s mouth was dry and her stomach felt as though at its bottom there was a layer of loose stones. She kept her expression empty, but her mind was rushing around picking up small bits of information she had stored and rearranging them in new patterns.

Jane felt a surge of annoyance at this poor, stupid woman. She had been sent to people she knew would give her false identification papers, but it had never occurred to her to wonder whether the person who sent her might not have a false ID of his own. She had never thought of calling the police department to find out whether there was such as thing as a Witness Protection Squad.

The face-changers had developed a routine, or at least a method they had used more than once. They had a man who was spectacularly good at impersonating a plainclothes police officer, but who was definitely not one: how could he be a cop in both Chicago and Washington? Both times all he had needed to do was appear at the right time, after the real police had come and gone. That made the victims forget that they hadn’t exactly called him. He had probably read about this one in the newspaper.

Jane tried out the theory that the name Jane was a coincidence. It didn’t sound convincing. She had spent thirteen years taking fugitives out of the world, and by now there must be a couple of hundred new people all over the country who had come into being because she had invented them. People—even vulnerable, scared people who knew better—sometimes said more than they should. And the person they told would be even less likely to keep the secret. Jane had been a guide for only about two years when the first total stranger had shown up at her door with a story of how he had heard of her that didn’t include the name of anyone she had ever met.

Getting to be too well known was just one of a dozen occupational hazards that quietly, invisibly grew to increase the odds against her. During those years it had become more difficult to slip into an airport and fly out quickly and anonymously, more complicated to forge a driver’s license or a vehicle registration, harder to invent a personal history for a runner that would stand up to the instant credit checks that had become routine. The forces of order—the businesses and agencies that were engaged in ensuring that each person keep the same labels from birth until death—had become more sophisticated. When Jane had guided her first runner out of the world it had still not been unusual to meet an adult who had never been fingerprinted; now it was hard to find a child over five who hadn’t. Computer terminals installed in police cars carried information on everybody, and there were only two states left—Vermont and New Jersey—where licenses didn’t carry the driver’s picture.

Jane had always known that if she didn’t get herself killed, the time would come when what she did would become impossible for her. It had never occurred to her that by then her name would be so widely circulated that someone else would assume it.

If these people were using the name Jane, and visiting suppliers and contractors that Jane had once used, then they were creating a universe of new problems. It was only a matter of time before one of her old runners, some person she had risked her life to help, tried to see her again and got killed by the face-changers. No, she thought: blackmailed. The runner would come to them, maybe because the place where she had put him had suddenly become dangerous. The face-changers would play him the way they had played Dahlman and the woman. And as soon as they knew enough about his problem—who he was and what was after him—they would own him.

Jane had an uncomfortable thought. That wasn’t really very different from what Jane was doing to this poor, naive woman beside her. She knew exactly what they were doing and exactly how they would go about doing it, because the methods weren’t theirs, or even hers: they were simply how the business was done. Jane had often carried identification that made her a policewoman, because on the rare occasions when she thought she might need to provide herself with a gun, that was the only explanation that would be universally acceptable.

She had also manipulated runners and sometimes even used a bit of coercion. She had said to them, “You are in a dangerous, unfamiliar world. If you now act according to your own experience and instincts, you are certain to be killed. If you do precisely as I say, you have a chance. If you do not, then I will step aside and whatever is after you will catch up.” Even if Jane had not said the words, they were inherent in the situation. Jane had used guile and threats to keep her runners alive, but those methods didn’t need to be used that way. She knew it and the face-changers knew it. They knew everything she knew.

The woman said, “You’re so quiet. Is something wrong?”

Jane turned and forced her face into an utterly convincing beatific smile. “Not at all. I was thinking that things could hardly be going better.”

“Really?” The woman’s face was trusting, open. She was asking permission to feel relieved, and Jane gave it to her.

“Sure. Nobody is following us, the road is clear, and we should be in L.A. in about two more days.”

“Do you think it’s safe to go to the same address?”

“Well, for a while I was thinking of diverting you a bit. That’s what we do when there’s trouble. But I don’t see any reason for it now, do you?” She watched the woman’s face, wondering why the lie made her feel so little guilt.

It was early in the morning on the third day that Jane detected the sudden wave of fast traffic overtaking them and surrounding them on its way into the city. No matter how many times Jane came into Los Angeles, it was always new, always just changed, and about to change again. The city was always reaching outward to grasp more of the landscape into itself, so that now the places with names like Antelope Valley that had made sense once were just parts of the continuous network of freeways and subdivisions that was a hundred miles long and eighty wide and growing.

At eleven, when they reached a part of the city that Jane knew, she pulled into the parking lot of a big motel and registered. They had to wait until noon to take possession of the room, so they had lunch in the restaurant beside the lobby and then picked up the key. When they were in their room, Jane sat at the table by the window. She held out her hand. “Can you let me see the driver’s license they gave you?”

“Sure.”

Jane watched her fish it out of the wallet in her purse. Then she copied the words onto a receipt. “Janet McNamara, 19942 Troost Avenue, North Hollywood, CA 91607.” She held the card under the light and turned it to examine the holograms on the front, the magnetic stripe on the back, and the photograph. “Very good,” she said as she handed it back.

They were careful and meticulous, and in this woman’s case they’d had plenty of time to get the details right, because she had never been in any real danger: they had made the death threats themselves. Jane stood up. “I’m going to look your new apartment over. One precaution while I’m gone: pretend the telephone doesn’t exist. Don’t call in to announce that you’ve arrived or something.”

“Why not?”

“I could give you a list of reasons. But the big reason is that it’s contrary to our established procedure.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we don’t do it.”

“You mean the home office sends you memos and directives and things? Do you have a manual?”

Jane chuckled. “No. Look, you have two kinds of vulnerability. One is that you’ll make a mistake and get caught by the people looking for you.”

“That’s the only vulnerability I knew about.”

“The other one is that somebody else will. Some other client gets spotted and watched, but doesn’t know it. He calls in to the office. Now the police have the office number and address. They tap the phone. You call in, and they have your number and a recording of whatever you say. So there’s a rule. The fewer calls the better. It protects you if somebody else is caught, and it protects everybody else if you are. Now I’d better go earn my pay. Do you have the apartment key?”

“I’m sorry, I forgot,” said the woman. She reached into her purse, pulled out a set of keys, and removed one from the chain. “Here.”

Jane took it. These people were good with details, she thought. They hadn’t given the runner one key that stood out in her purse and looked important. They had hung it on a chain with a dozen others—door keys, car keys, luggage keys—so it might open anything or nothing; it was part of a fully developed, convincingly complex life. “Thanks. I’ll be gone for a long time unless I find something wrong over there and want to get you out fast. Stay out of sight as much as you can. If you get hungry, eat at the place where we had lunch and come back.”

Jane spent a few minutes watching the car from the hallway before she slipped into it and drove toward the freeway entrance. Now that she was in the city where the face-changers expected the woman to come, she felt the need to take every precaution. She knew the Los Angeles freeway system well, because she had used it other times with other runners. She put traffic jams between her and cars that might be following, and twice used ramps to slip off one freeway and onto another going in a different direction before she emerged near the address.

First she drove a circuit of the neighborhood, looking at other apartment buildings and single-family houses. There were no windows that had opaque shades with the rollers set too low so someone could look out above them, no flashes in the bright sunshine that could be lens reflections, no men loitering on balconies in the middle of a workday. She drove around again, studying the vehicles parked nearby, paying particular attention to vans and four-wheel-drive vehicles parked along the streets. There were none with men sitting behind the wheel, none that pulled out when they saw her approach for the second time.

Jane parked on the street near Janet McNamara’s apartment building, took out her suitcase, and walked into the little lobby that passed through the building and looked out on a small, desolate swimming pool. She avoided the elevator and walked down the hallway and up the stairs, listening for the thuds of feet, the sounds of a television set, for anything that would tell her who lived here and where they were at the moment, but she heard nothing.

When she found apartment 208, she stopped and studied the floor to see if there was any indication of wires under the thin industrial carpet, then cautiously inserted the key in the lock and opened it. A tiny piece of red fluff, like lint from a sweater, was released by the door near the hinge and drifted to the floor in the hallway. Jane smiled. It was an ancient trick for determining whether anyone had been here without going inside to check. If the fluff was there, then there was nobody inside waiting for her.

Jane slipped inside, locked the door, and looked around her. The apartment was small and simple, but the face-changers had furnished it in advance to keep Janet McNamara from making mistakes while she did it herself. Jane went into the bedroom, looked in the kitchen drawers and cupboards, the refrigerator. They had even bought her enough food so she wouldn’t have to go out until she had been here for a week.

Jane searched for the best hiding places. She moved a chair from the kitchen into the living room and stood on it to unscrew the grate from the heating duct high on the wall across from the entrance door. Then she took one of her video cameras out of the suitcase, set the lens to manual and focused on a space near the doorway, used a piece of tape to cover the red light that showed when it was on, pushed it two feet back into the heating duct, and replaced the grate.

On her way out she replaced the bit of red fluff, then went down the stairs to the street. The building next door had an apartment for rent, but when she had roused the manager and gotten him to open it for her, she found that the windows afforded her no view of Janet McNamara’s apartment. She would have to do this the hard way. She watched the neighborhood for two more hours, then drove back to the motel.

When Jane walked in, Janet McNamara was on the bed watching television. She turned it off as though she were hiding something. Jane turned it back on. “No need to turn it off for me.” There were two men in suits chatting about futures and options across an oddly shaped marble table. In a second or two the men were replaced by a table of figures.

Janet McNamara gave a comic wince. “They told me to start weaning myself away from the market stats, so I won’t be tempted to invest.”

Jane sighed. “They’re right about investing. I know very little about you, but if I were looking for you, that’s one of the ways I’d go about looking. I’d buy all the mailing lists of investors I could.”

“I know,” said Janet.

“On the other hand, somebody should have told you that you can’t expect to last very long if you go against all your preferences.”

“I don’t remember hearing that.”

“Watch the channel you like. Please yourself in quiet ways. While your enemies are standing around watching airline terminals and hotels at all hours, you want to be curled up in a cozy place feeling content. You’ll last forever, and they’ll give up.”

“I like that,” said Janet. “Of course, in my case it doesn’t have to be forever.”

Jane glanced at her without letting her see. She still didn’t get it. The face-changers had convinced her that she just had to slip away for a while to outlast some imaginary death threats, and had gotten her to do things that would make it too hard to ever go back. “Maybe not,” she murmured, and hated herself for it. She hated herself more for what she was about to say. “The apartment is fine. In the morning I’ll check once more, and then move you into your new home.”