Trace

44

Ten o'clock the next morning, Lucy walks around the room, picking up magazines and acting impatient and bored. She hopes that the helicopter pilot sitting near the television will hurry up and go in for his appointment or get an urgent call and leave. She walks around the living room of the house near the hospital complex, and pauses in front of a window with old wavy glass and looks out at Barre Street and the historic homes on it. The tourists won't flock to Charleston until spring, and she doesn't see many people out.

Lucy rang the bell some fifteen minutes ago, and a chubby older woman let her in and showed her to the waiting room, which is just off the front door and was probably a small formal parlor back in the glory days of the house. The woman gave her a blank Federal Aviation Administration form to fill out, the same form Lucy has filled out every two years for the past decade, and then the woman went up a long flight of polished wooden stairs. Lucy's form is on the coffee table. She started filling it out and then stopped. She plucks another magazine off a table, glances at it and places it back on the stack as the helicopter pilot works on his form and now and then looks up at her.

"Don't mind me telling you what to do," he says in a friendly tone, "but Dr. Paulsson doesn't like it if your form's not filled out when he gets to you."

"So you know the ropes," Lucy says, sitting down. "These damn forms. I'm not good with forms. I flunked forms in high school."

"I hate them,' the helicopter pilot agrees with her. He is young and fit with closely shorn dark hair and closely spaced dark eyes, and when he introduced himself a few minutes ago, he said he flies Black Hawks for the National Guard and Jet Rangers for a charter company. "Last time I did it, 1 forgot to check off the box for allergies because I've been taking allergy shots. My wife has a cat and I had to start taking shots. They worked so well I forgot I have allergies and the computer kicked out my application."

"It stinks," Lucy says. "One inconsistency and a computer screws up your life for months."

"This time I brought a copy of an old form," he says, holding up a folded piece of yellow paper. "Now my answers are all the same. That's the trick. But I'd fill out your form, if I were you. He won't like it when you go in, if you haven't done it."

"I made a mistake," Lucy replies, reaching for her form. "Put the city in the wrong blank. I have to do it again."

"Uh oh."

"If that lady comes back, I need another form."

"She's been here forever," the helicopter pilot says.

"How do you know?" Lucy inquires. "You're too young to know if anybody's been around forever."

He grins and is beginning to flirt with her a little. "You'd be surprised how much I've been around. Where do you fly out of? I've never seen you around here. You didn't tell me. Your flight suit doesn't look military, not any military I've ever seen."

Her flight suit is black with the patch of an American flag on one shoulder and an unusual patch on her other shoulder, a blue and gold patch of her own design with an eagle surrounded by stars. Her leather name tag today reads "P. W. Winston." It attaches with Velcro and she can change her name whenever she wants, depending on what she is doing and where she's doing it. Because her biological father was Cuban, Lucy can pass for Hispanic, Italian, or Portuguese without resorting to makeup. Today she is in Charleston, South Carolina, and is simply a pretty white woman with a passable southern inflection, a very sweet lilt to her otherwise General American accent.

"Part Ninety-one," she says. "The guy I fly for owns a Four-thirty."

"Lucky him," the pilot says, impressed. "Must be some rich guy, is all I gotta say. That's one hell of a bird, the Four-thirty. How do you like the sight picture? Did it take a while to get used to it?"

"Love it," she replies, wishing he would shut up. She can talk helicopters all day but is more interested in figuring out where she should plant covert transmitters in Frank Paulsson's house and how she is going to do it.

The plump woman who showed Lucy into the waiting room reappears and tells the other pilot he can come with her, that Dr. Paulsson is ready for him and has he finished filling out his form and is he satisfied that his answers are correct.

"If you're ever around Mercury Air, we've got an office in the hangar, you'll see it off the parking lot. I've got a soft-tail Harley parked back there," he says to Lucy.

"A man with my taste," she replies from her chair. "I need a new form," she tells the woman. "I messed this one up."

The woman gives her a suspicious look. "Well, let me see what I can do. Don't throw that one away. You'll mess up the sequence numbers."

"Yes, ma'am. I have it right here on the table." To the pilot, Lucy says, "I just traded my Sportster in for a V-Rod. It's not even broken in yet."

"Damn! A Four-thirty and a V-Rod. You're living my life," he says admiringly.

"Maybe we'll ride sometime. Good luck with the cat."

He laughs. She hears him go up the stairs while he explains to the unsmiling, chunky woman that when he met his wife she wouldn't give up her cat and it slept in her bed and he used to break out in hives at the most inopportune times. Lucy has the downstairs to herself for at least a minute, at least long enough for the woman to get another blank form and come back down to the waiting area. Lucy slips on a pair of cotton gloves and moves quickly around the room, wiping off every magazine she touched.

The first bug she plants is the size of a cigarette butt, a wireless microphone-audio transmitter she custom-mounts in a waterproof plant-green plastic tube that looks like nothing. Most bugs should be disguised to look like something, but now and then a bug should simply look like nothing. She places the green tube inside the bright ceramic pot of the lush green silk plant on the coffee table. She quickly walks to the back of the house and plants another nothing-looking green bug in another green silk plant that is on a table inside the eat-in kitchen, and she hears the woman's feet on the stairs.