Shadow Woman (36 page)

She
heard him before he put the key in the lock. She let him sneak in
without acknowledging his presence, or the bright sunlight that shone
in the door when he opened it. She had gone out twice during the
night to walk the perimeter of the hotel grounds, studying the cars
in the parking lot and the windows of rooms that were on the court,
but had seen nothing that worried her, and then she had slept.

She waited until ten to get out
of bed. While she was in the shower he got up too, and she found him
packing his suitcase. “Good morning,” she said, carefully
modulating her voice to sound as cheerful and unconcerned as she
could.

“Good morning,” he
answered. He stepped past her into the bathroom without meeting her
eyes, and then she heard the shower for a long time.

She finished packing, latched
her suitcase, and spent a few minutes selecting identities for the
day. Today they would be Tony and Marie Spellagio, who had not yet
made an appearance in Montana. She laid their credit cards and
driver’s licenses on the bed in a row, so that Pete could
examine hers too.

Then she made her preliminary
inspection of the grounds through the windows. It was another perfect
late-summer day in the Rockies, with the sun glaring from what seemed
to be just over their heads, and no sign that anyone was near enough
to be watching.

Pete came out fully dressed and
with hair wet from the shower, picked up his cards and both
suitcases, and followed the usual routines. He set the suitcases down
beside the car, dropped something so he could look beneath it, peered
under the hood, and then loaded the trunk while Jane checked out. She
came back and said, “You want to eat breakfast before we move
on?”

“No,” he said. “If
you don’t mind, I’d like to get down the road a bit
before we stop.”

Jane nodded and got into the
passenger seat. She was not sure whether he was feeling queasy from
the syrupy drinks or wanted to be gone before his little playmates
woke up. As he drove off the lot onto the highway, he answered her
question. “I don’t want to run into Pam and Carol.”

“Why not?” she
asked.

“Because they want to
travel with us for a few days. It came up last night. I can’t
think of a good way to refuse without hurting their feelings.
Everything I tried last night had an answer. This way I’m a
jerk, and that will burn off the attraction. Because I left diem
both, neither one will take it personally. In a day or two they won’t
mention me, even to each other.”

Jane did not speak, because he
was probably right. His famous understanding of women seemed to have
come back to him. It shouldn’t have been a surprise: he had
given himself a giant dose of femininity in the past twelve hours.
She studied her road map.

They stopped outside a big
restaurant in Swan Lake. There was no evidence on the signs on nearby
businesses that the name referred to anything but a lake that had
once had swans in it. They walked inside and the head waitress
noticed them. “Would you like to sit inside, or outside on the
terrace?”

Pete glanced at Jane, who said,
“Inside” and moved into the interior of the restaurant.
“Is that booth over there taken?”

“No,” said the
waitress, “but I could seat you by the window if you like.”

“No, thanks,” said
Jane.

When the woman had left the
menus and returned to her post by the door, Pete said, “What’s
wrong? Are you hungover?”

Jane leaned forward, her
forearms on the table, so she could talk quietly. “It’s a
beautiful spot, so most people want to sit where they can see it.
This time you don’t want what everybody else wants.”

“I don’t?”

“Sitting here is a
precaution that costs you nothing, loses you nothing. It makes you
invisible to anybody but the people to the side of this booth.”

His eyes moved to the side.
“There aren’t any people to the side of this booth.”

She smiled. “That’s
why I picked this one instead of another. Almost all precautions are
simple and effortless. After a time you’ll take them without
thinking each one through. The important thing is that you look at
each situation and modify it to make yourself comfortable. If there’s
a choice between a tiny bit of vulnerability and none at all, you
pick none.”

“I thought the best place
to hide was in a crowd.”

“It can be. If a crowd is
immobile and on display, then it can’t hide you. If what you
want it for is to hold off shooters by surrounding yourself with
witnesses, then twenty is better than a thousand, because they can’t
shoot even twenty, and all of them will see. So you don’t stand
in long lines to go to movies or plays or games. You do your waiting
at home. When the movie has been out a month, you can walk right in.”

“What if it’s a
game? You can’t wait a month for that.”

“Watch it on television.
If it’s so important to you that you still want to go, then
it’s important enough to pay for the safest seats in the
stadium.”

“Which are those?”

“Down near the field. The
only ones who can see your face in a stadium are the ones below you.
A hunter scanning for you would look up toward the seats in the back
– not only because the back seats feel like a hiding place to
an amateur, but because they’re all the hunter can see. So you
pick the front seats. Everything is a choice.” She smiled.
“You’re getting a feel for this. All you have to do is
keep trying it out in different situations until they’re all
automatic.”

Another waitress arrived and
took their orders, then bustled off to the kitchen window to clip it
to a stainless-steel wheel for the cooks to read.

Pete stared at the table.
‘Different situations.’ You’re trying to be tactful
about the mistakes I made last night, aren’t you?”

Jane looked away for a moment,
then back to him. “What was wrong last night? You tell me.”

“We met two strangers. I
let them get too close before I was sure they were okay.”

“Go on.”

“I went to their room.
Somebody could have been waiting.”

She waited, but that was all he
was willing to say. “Or been called in by one of them while the
other one… kept you busy. Prostitutes have been robbing
clients for thousands of years, so the routines are pretty slick by
now. You couldn’t know all of them.”

“For starters, they
weren’t prostitutes.”

“I’m teaching you
how to live by your wits, not by luck. Neither of us knew anything
about them when they showed up. What about my mistakes?”

“Yours?”

“Sure. You can learn from
those too.”

He seemed shocked. After a
moment, he said, “I guess you let them get too close.”

“Good. I never saw them
coming until they were by the corner of the building. I should have
kept scanning the entrances to the courtyard while I was swimming.”

“Like those Secret Service
guys,” he said sadly. “What a way to live.”

“It would have been easier
than that. All I had to do was keep my mind on the possibility, and
looking would have been unavoidable. As it happened, it didn’t
matter. As soon as I saw them, I was certain they weren’t
dangerous.”

“How?”

“They showed up in the
skimpiest suits imaginable.” She saw Pete wince, but she went
on. “In certain situations that would be ominous. Maybe they
had been sent to distract you, keep you from looking in another
direction. But it also let us see that they couldn’t be armed.
And their presence wouldn’t make it any easier for someone else
to kill you: they might get hit in the dark, and they could hardly
expect me to be stupefied by the sight of a girl in a bikini.”

“Stupefied?”

“I’m sorry,”
said Jane. “Distracted.”

“I’m the one who’s
sorry. Once again.”

Jane’s eyes flicked to his
face and then around the dining room. He was miserable, and she
wasn’t being fair. “I guess we have to clear the air some
more, don’t we?”

Pete shrugged. His face was
apologetic and appealing, like a little boy who wanted to be
forgiven.

Jane took a deep breath and saw
the waitress striding toward them on rubber soles, carrying a tray.
Jane waited until the waitress had served them, said, “Enjoy
your meal,” and hurried away.

“Back to that air,”
she said. “I’m a guide. I lead people who are about to be
killed to places where nobody wants to kill them. I give them pieces
of paper that say they’re somebody else. To the extent that I
can, I train them to be the new person – how to look, act,
think. If they’re being actively hunted, I give them a few
tricks that can fool hunters.”

“And?”

“And then I turn them
loose and go home.” Jane stared into his eyes and watched him
to see if he understood everything she was saying. There was light
behind his eyes, but it seemed only to be the life force, the glow of
the eyes of a big, healthy animal.

“What is he like?”

Jane stiffened. “That
wasn’t… I wasn’t talking about him.”

“No,” he said. “You
know everything about other people, but they’re not supposed to
know anything about you.”

It wasn’t a statement Jane
could ignore. “It’s true, and it’s not an accident.
It protects him, and it protects me, and it protects you. When I take
on a person like you, we both have to be aware that some day I might
very well be caught. Years from now I might be asked where you are
and what name I gave you. There are things that could be done to make
me want very much to tell. My promise to you is simply that I won’t
tell. If there’s no other way, I’ll commit suicide to
avoid it.”

“Really?”

“Really.” She let
the knowledge settle on him for a moment. He seemed unable to take
the next step. “If I tell you about my family and friends, are
you willing to do the same before you’ll tell anyone?”

He thought about it for a long
time. “I would want to. I don’t think I could.”

“And you don’t have
to, because you don’t know about them. But I can’t help
knowing about you, so I’m stuck. I gave my word.”

Pete nodded thoughtfully. “We’re
back to last night, aren’t we?”

“If you want to be,”
she said.

“Why you said no.”

She sighed. “Marriages are
fragile. When you boil off all the nonsense, what they amount to is a
promise.”

She could tell he had no trouble
understanding her. If she could break that promise to her own
husband, then strangers like Pete Hatcher wouldn’t stand a
chance. “Okay. I won’t grill you anymore.”

“Keep asking questions.
It’s what we’re doing together,” said Jane. “I
want you to learn everything you can. I want you to get as good at
this as I am, because in one more day I’m going to take you
somewhere, get you settled, and go home. You’re my last trip.”

He stared at her. “In a
way, I’m glad,” he said. “I’m a little
scared. One more day isn’t much time. But I’m glad for
you. This is a crazy way to live.”

“It took me a long time to
reach that conclusion. I guess I had to find another way to live
before I could admit it. But I’m taken care of. Let’s get
rid of what’s still bothering you.”

“I don’t know,”
he said. “I seem to be having trouble imagining a future. That
makes it hard to ask questions about it”

“I know some of it,”
Jane said. “You’ll live in a place that’s pleasant,
but maybe has a few security features most people wouldn’t pay
extra for. This morning I was thinking that one of those small, gated
developments might suit you. The identity I’m going to give you
is terrific, so you could survive the checks they do on new
residents. The rent-a-cops wouldn’t present much of an obstacle
to the people who are after you, but the entry gates make it
difficult for them to drive through and browse. They’re pros,
so their main concern is getting out afterward.”

“It sounds logical.”

“We’ll find you a
job. You were a manager in Las Vegas, so we’ll get you
something at about the same level in the new town. It will have to be
something where you have less contact with outsiders, so we’ll
pick a company that limits it, somehow – maybe one that sells
equipment only to doctors, or physicists, or – ”

“How?”

“How what?”

“How do I get a job at
that level in a business I’ve never been in?”

She smiled. “That’s
something I’ll help you with. I’m a representative from
an executive head-hunting agency. I’ve got a promising
prospect. I sell you to them. I’ve already checked all your
references, et cetera, so the company doesn’t have to.”

“You can pull that off?”

“Sure. I do it by not
cheating too much. Your resume won’t list your real college,
but it will have equivalent courses from another one. Your references
won’t come from Pleasure, Inc. but they’ll come from a
company that has a similar corporate structure, and I won’t lie
about your place in the hierarchy. And I’ll be very clear about
my fee.”

“You actually collect a
fee?”

“Of course. It will be the
same fee other companies like mine charge. Otherwise your employers
would know I’m a fraud.”

“So now I have a condo and
a job. Good start.”

“A condo in the center of
the development, that can’t be watched from outside the gate. A
job you like and are qualified to do, that keeps you busy. All you
have to do is keep from making mistakes.”

“Mistakes – you mean
the ball games and movies and all that.”

“I said that I train you
to be the new person, to the extent that I can. What I can’t do
is give you an identity that doesn’t fit.” She paused.
“That’s why I’m glad last night happened.”

“You’re working up
to writing me off.”

Jane smiled, but her brows
knitted. “I thought we were past that game. You pretend to be
shocked at your own behavior and deeply humiliated that I know about
it. This forces me to choose between two roles – the
scandalized schoolmistress who talks to you with pinch-faced
distaste, or the conspiratorial madam who tells you it’s cute.
Either way, we evade the real issue.”