Rita took off her scarf and coat and hung them behind the door, revealing a chunky beige sweater and black slacks. She shook her head, and her hair tumbled free in a bouncy red cascade, filling out the face that had seemed tight and strained outside. Her mouth still had the firmness that had struck Jarrow when he saw her on the phone that afternoon, although softened by an earthy femininity that was more pronounced at close quarters. Her eyes were a light greeny-gray, and her skin had a spattering of faint freckles that hadn't shown on the screen. Jarrow's impression was of a woman who would not be easily deflected from her opinions once she had formed them, and from their brief crossing of swords in the car it was evident that on some matters those opinions put her in a very different camp from his own.
But things like that didn't have to affect matters one way or the other. He was here for one reason only: so that Rita could tell him more about where Demiro fitted in. He had no inter-est in dragging this out any further than was necessary to learn whatever she knew. At the same time, he was under no illusions that all would be as simple as that. For it was already clear that Rita saw the situation in another light, and that she was motivated by very different hopes as to its outcome.
"I hate quiet," Rita said. "Mind if we have some noise?"
"I don't mind. It's your place."
She went over to a crystal-player—so called because the holoplate cartridges looked like postage-stamp-size tiles of glass—and touched a button to start a preset selec-tion of tunes. Then she moved to the window, which looked out over the rear of the house, and closed the drapes. "How about some coffee after that cold out there."
"Do you have coylene?" He was referring to the soy--derived substitute that people were being encouraged to switch to.
"Coylene?" Rita looked surprised. More evidence that he wasn't Tony. "No, I'm afraid we don't. How about decaf?"
"That'll be fine."
She went over to the kitchen area that formed one corner of the living room and began filling the pot. "How do you take it?"
"A splash of cream, no sugar."
"You might as well take off your coat."
Jarrow hung his coat by hers and sat down on a couch by a low table near the window. While Rita busied herself with mugs, dishes, and spoons, using movement to keep herself occupied, his eyes roamed over the flat. There were two other doors, one open, obviously the bathroom, the other probably a bedroom. More pictures of Demiro adorned the walls, some showing him and Rita together, others of another girl whom he guessed was Margaret, fair and slightly pudgy-looking; a pile of women's magazines on a shelf, the kind that featured fashion, pop psychology, and sexual titillations disguised as advice; more shelves with racks holding music crystals, along with books, mainly fiction; posters from New York and the Grand Canyon; an old computer, which from the stuff piled around and on top of it was either seldom used or not working; a framed picture of Demiro in uniform, with an Army cap-badge fixed at the top of the frame.
"I, ah, I get the feeling you and Tony were kind of close," Jarrow said, looking back at Rita.
"We were planning on getting married, if that's what you mean."
"Oh, God. I really had no idea."
"How about a cookie as well?"
"Not really."
"Cheese or something? We've got potato chips and other munchies."
"No, thank you." Jarrow stared fixedly at the table, feeling his mind gluing in its search for a line to continue, as he had known would happen. His chronic discomfort with women had long ago become sufficiently a part of his life to have this self-fulfilling quality about it. The suspicion of possibly invading her private space, intimate surroundings that she might have shared with her dead fiancé, didn't help matters. He seized upon the thought for something to say and waved a hand vaguely at the surroundings. "Did you and Tony, I mean . . . ."
"No. We had a mobile home out at Hodgkins. That's on the way to Kankakee, where he was based."
"So you've been here, how long?"
"Since August. I moved into the city after you . . ." Rita checked herself and picked up a pack of cigarettes that she had taken from her coat pocket, "after Tony was reported killed."
Jarrow stared down at his interlaced fingers, exhaled heavily, then looked up. "Listen, Rita . . . I know how you must feel. This has got to be a lot tougher for you than it is for me."
She stared at him for a moment; then her face softened, and she nodded to acknowledge that he was trying and she appreciated it. "I'm not too sure about that," she replied. "I don't wake up finding I'm someone else every morning."
They looked at each other, both feeling the first flicker of real communication. It seemed to say that in this much at least, they were on the same side. And with that, a part of the oppressiveness that had been hanging over the room since they came in lightened. Rita lit her cigarette and came over with two mugs to sit down in a cane chair facing the table. Jarrow reached out and pushed the ashtray closer to her.
"What are we going to do?" she sighed.
"All we can do: just keep sifting through what we know to see what comes out of it," he said. She nodded. Jarrow picked up his coffee and took a sip. "When was Tony supposed to have died, exactly?"
"June sixteenth. I was notified about a week later."
"By the Army?"
"Yes."
"They notified you, not his family?"
"Tony didn't have any family that he'd ever traced. He was an orphan. I was listed as his nearest relative--equivalent."
"What happened . . . as far as you were told?"
"Around a year ago—I think it was early last October—he volunteered for a special assignment. It was all secret. I didn't know what it was about, not then. But it seems it was something to do with a new technique for speeding up military training by transplanting whole patterns of things into somebody's head that other guys had already learned."
Jarrow looked up sharply. "How did you find out if it was so secret? Did he tell you?"
Rita drew quickly on her cigarette and shook her head. "Tony didn't blab about things he shouldn't, and I didn't press him to. You told me, on Monday—when we were in Atlanta."
Of course. That was when he was supposed to have been Demiro, Jarrow reminded himself. "Did you hear from him in all that time?"
"At first he used to come back on leave about once a month, but as I said he didn't talk then about what was going on. Later I got letters that had been censored." Rita sighed, shrugged, and took a drink of coffee in a way that said there really wasn't much more to tell. "Then this officer called at the place in Hodgkins one day and said Tony had been killed in a helicopter accident. Regrets and condolences and all that stuff. There was an official letter later, confirming it . . . and his things arrived in a plastic bag a couple of weeks later. That's what happens to your dreams." Rita's voice caught; her hand quivered as she set the mug down on the table. "And half a year later the phone rings, it's you . . . no, you were Tony on Monday . . . and you've just woken up in Atlanta."
At last Jarrow was getting information. He didn't want her going off into reminiscences right now. Another mystery that this might shed some light on was the change that had come over him the night before, after he left the bar in Minneapolis.
"What did Tony do in the Army?" he asked. "Was he involved in hand-to-hand combat, or with some elite fighting unit, maybe—anything like that?"
Rita looked surprised and shook her head. "Tony? Hell no. His whole idea of army life was that it would have been great if you didn't have to go and fight people sometimes."
"So what did he do?"
"He ran an office full of clerks in a transport depot."
"I see." Jarrow was perplexed. "How about hobbies and sports? Was he interested in martial arts, gymnastics . . . anything like that, athletic?"
Rita shook her head again. "He liked to enjoy life, sure, but that kind of hard work wasn't his idea of enjoyment. He partied a lot and had fun when he was in one kind of mood; then he'd maybe go off and like to be by himself and read when he was in another. He just wasn't a violent kind of person." She let her eyes flicker over Jarrow for a second, then added, "Although I have to say, you look as if you've been in training. That's a leaner, tougher body than the one I remember—and Tony wasn't exactly what you'd call flabby."
Jarrow blinked in surprise. He had never been described that way before. "What kind of things did Tony read?" he asked.
"Oh, science fiction, sports mags, westerns, sometimes. When he was in one of his serious moods, maybe history and politics. Arguing politics was the only kind of contest he got into with other guys. It got him into trouble sometimes at the base."
"What were his politics?"
Rita sighed. "I think you already have an idea. I don't think you and he would really have gotten along. I hear you as"—she made a we-are-being-frank-aren't-we rocking motion with her head—"well, kind of straight and uptight, all for the system. That's what they'd want a teacher to be like, right?"
"Maybe."
"Well, Tony wasn't that way. He thought all this environmental stuff is crap, and the things you hear all the time about we've-got-to-control-this and we-have-to-regulate-that are just pretexts for keeping one bunch of people on top and the rest of us down here. But in the long run it can't last. It's just digging itself deeper into the ground. He figured the only way left to go was out."
"Out? You mean to somewhere else?"
Rita exhaled a stream of smoke away from him and stubbed her cigarette. "Right, FER. Offworld, maybe. Well, nobody's going to change down here, are they?"
Jarrow sat back. He didn't agree, but that kind of thing could wait until another time. Demiro couldn't have picked anyone more unlike himself to have transformed into; or Jarrow couldn't, to have taken over—whatever had happened. There was an ironic side to it all, he had to admit.
"I must sound like the perfect Jekyll and Hyde," he said. "Is that what you're thinking too? I bet you've got some kind of a theory that Jarrow is an opposite personality that Tony created in his head to resolve some kind of conflict or something." He saw the resigned look starting to form around her mouth. "Yes?"
A nod, accompanied by a slightly sheepish smile. "Something like that," she agreed.
The music stopped, marking a short pause before the next number. Rita didn't notice, but just at that instant a soft creak came from the landing outside the apartment door. That in itself wouldn't have been enough to make Jarrow's head whip around like that of a pointer catching a sudden scent, but the way the sound stopped abruptly a split second after the music ceased triggered deep-seated alarm responses, tuned and sensitized to stealth; responses that weren't his.
And then came a barely audible double click that would have meant nothing to Richard Jarrow . . . but which something inside him registered instantly as the slide-action of an automatic pistol, loading a round into the chamber.
He was at the door before Rita had even reacted to the first movement of his head. While his hands slammed home the security bolt and engaged the chain, his eyes raced over the room's contents, estimating sizes and weights. The door handle turned, there was an ineffective shove, then a -series of loud raps. Jarrow heaved a bookcase over sideways to fall onto a hall table on the far side of the door, blocking it diagonally, then pushed an armchair behind it. Rita rose to her feet, knocking the table and spilling her coffee in her haste, her eyes wide.
"Tony, what the fuck do you think—"
The door rattled ineffectually, then a voice yelled from the other side. "Samurai, it's okay. It's us: Marty and Hank. It's okay, understand? We just want to talk. Open the door, willya?"
Jarrow moved the kitchen table behind the armchair, a cabinet behind that, and then turned the couch from the window around to form a chain of objects butting up against each other to the far wall. Rita watched, petrified.
The door shook under a louder thud, accompanied by a splintering noise. "Samurai, for Christ's sake, it's okay! Open the goddam door."
Jarrow snatched his coat and threw Rita's at her as he crossed to the door of the bedroom. He flung it open, and pertinent facts registered themselves like data being tagged in a computer: one window, drapes open, facing rear from same wall as in living room; dark outside; recollection of street layout: elevated row houses with rear yards back-to-back; probable mode of approach: frontally up main stairs, with backup positioned halfway along street, rear of building staked out from the neighboring yards.
He moved to the window and peered through, keeping himself in the dark to one side. The yards were separated by wooden fences, with toolsheds and garden structures in places, indistinct in the gloom. The row of houses on the far side of the intervening yards was split halfway along by a narrow alley. That was where he would have positioned the backup team at the rear, he decided: kept back to avoid setting all the dogs off. Possibly they'd have sent two men forward as stakeouts. His eyes scanned the layout like search radars, following the line that the stakeout pair would have taken from the end of the alley, picking out the patches of shadow that they would have made for. A few feet below the window was the smaller roof of an extension from the house. The crash came from the next room of the lock giving way and the door jamming into the barricade.
Rita was beside him, shaking with terror. "Who are they? What—"
He made a chopping motion with one hand: his manner, in contrast to that of the mild schoolteacher with whom she had entered, carrying such total authority that she fell silent at once. He looked up at the light: bedroom, probably low wattage. Better chances with something brighter. "Light bulbs," he snapped. "Where are they?"
"K-kitchen," she stammered.
"Fetch the biggest you've got." She nodded and disappeared back through the doorway. From beyond it, more splintering sounds came, of the front door being pried off its hinges. Jarrow took out the bulb in the room and tossed it onto one of the beds, then went to the window, released the catch, and checked that it moved freely.
Rita was back. "Hundred fifty. Biggest there is."
"Screw it in." While Rita complied, Jarrow locked the door and made another barricade from the beds and vanity, at the same time speaking rapidly. "Do exactly as I say. Turn the light on, then go to the window. Talk back into the room in a loud voice for five seconds, as if I'm behind you. Then go back to the switch and turn it off, but keep talking. Wait until I call, then get down onto that roof. If those guys get to this door, get out anyway."
She nodded tightly. Jarrow dropped to the floor and crawled to below the window. "Now," he told her.
Rita turned on the light and moved to stand silhouetted in the window frame. "What are you doing over there?" she called back. "Look, I don't know about you, but as far as I'm . . ." She went back to the door and flipped the switch.
As darkness filled the room again, Jarrow opened the window and flowed as if his body were liquid, silently over the sill and down onto the annex roof beneath, blending into its cover in the second or two that eyes watching from below would have taken to readjust from the brief glare. He wormed his way to a projecting corner cloaked in the shadows of a tree, and straightened up cautiously to -explore around with his fingers. They found a down pipe, but to get to it he would have to stand on a sliver of roof only inches wide extending beyond the corner, and then make a long step to a pipe end sticking out of the wall. He made the move deftly and effortlessly with the ease of a Yosemite climber, lowered himself by the down pipe, and dropped noiselessly behind a fence skirting the rear patio.
In a patch of darkness in the yard of the house behind, agent Barney Costello of the Federal Security Service craned his neck trying to make out what was happening. First the light had come on in the window, and the Chilsen girl appeared, shouting to somebody else who had to be Samurai. Then the light had gone off again.
"She's still yelling at the window," Costello muttered into his radio. "I can't figure what it's about."
"Keep watching," came the reply. "Two of the guys from Pearse are in the front door, but there's nobody there. Samurai and the girl must be in the back room."
They're coming out this way, Costello thought to himself. All he had nearby was Kopel, posted in the adjacent yard. Better bring some of the backup guys forward from the alley on the next street .
And that was the last thing he thought for more than the next hour. Jarrow caught the limp form as it fell, frisking it quickly and taking the gun, ammunition clip, radio, and set of car keys on a ring with a remote button.
Fifty feet away in the next yard, Kopel, crouched -behind a toolshed, heard a muffled movement. "Barney?" he hissed. "Is everything okay over there? . . . Barney?"
An arm slid around his neck from behind, tightening like a steel band to cut off the main artery to the brain and causing him to slump senseless after a few seconds.
At the back of the house, Rita clambered out onto the annex roof as banging came from inside the window -behind her. She moved warily to the edge and peered down into the darkness. "They're getting into the bedroom. Are you there?"
Jarrow materialized below her. "Turn around and let yourself drop," he hissed.
Across the way, drapes were parting in some of the windows. "What the hell's going on out there?" a voice yelled. Somebody else let out a dog, which erupted in a frenzy of barking.
Jarrow caught her as she dropped, and steered her to the fence separating the next yard. He guided her over, then vaulted after her, repeating the process a number of times to move them several houses along the row. Behind them, a figure appeared in the window of Rita's flat and leaned out, peering into the darkness. "They musta come out this way. Anybody down there?"
Jarrow and Rita were in the concrete yard of a house showing a light in the ground-floor rear window. Jarrow knocked sharply on the back door. A pause. Nothing. He knocked again. "Who is it?" a voice demanded inside. "What's going on out there?"
"Police," Jarrow snapped. "Open up. Emergency."
The door rattled and opened as far as the security chain would permit. "Got some ID?" the voice inquired.
"Right here."
A man's face appeared close to the crack. Jarrow shot one hand through, grabbing him by the shirtfront, and rammed the gun that he had taken hard up under his chin with the other. "We just need to come through, okay? Open the door and nobody gets hurt. We have to get to the street."
The door opened. Jarrow shoved the man back against the wall and sent Rita on through with a curt nod, ignoring the woman who was cowering against a countertop on the far side of a table with dishes and two half-eaten meals. "Just sit tight and enjoy the rest of your dinner," he murmured to the couple as he closed the door. Then he followed quickly through after Rita.
They emerged from a side door below the front steps of a house about halfway along the street. The car that Rita had borrowed was parked back outside the front of her place, which was where most of the backup squad would be, following the lead men inside or waiting. So they couldn't use that. The computer still working inside Jarrow's head told him that they didn't want to, anyway: her car had probably been bugged with a locator device ever since Rita left it at the airport. He looked the other way along the street and picked out the three cars that belonged to whoever was after them. Two were empty; the other had a couple of figures inside.
"Wait here," he murmured into Rita's ear. "Be ready to move fast."
He came out onto the sidewalk and walked rapidly toward the cars, at the same time taking out the keys he'd collected and pressing the remote button. The lights of one of the empty cars flashed in response, and Jarrow headed toward it. It was pointing the wrong way, toward the street's dead end, whereas the car with the two figures in was turned around. But he'd just have to take his chances.
He was inside and starting the motor before the two men in the other car realized what was happening. As Jarrow pulled away, one of them got out and called at him. "Hey! Who is that? What's going on?"
Jarrow whirled the wheel, sending the car skidding across the street into a snow mound, then back into reverse for a turn, wheels screeching.
"What the hell? Hey, stop!"
The agent just managed to leap clear as Jarrow came out of the turn. But the driver in the other car had thought quickly and was already moving. Jarrow cut in toward the sidewalk, throwing open the passenger door as Rita ran from the gate of the house they had come out of. As she tumbled in, the other car came up alongside and angled across their front to block them off, its front inside wheel plowing into the snowbank in the gutter. Front-wheel drive model, Jarrow registered. He slammed into reverse again, backed up, and changed to forward to go around the outside. As he'd figured, it took the other car a few vital seconds of wheel-spinning and lurching to unstick, which was all he needed to pull past it. But as they got to the end of the street he saw in his mirror that it was free and accelerating to follow them. Farther back behind it, figures were running out into the street from Rita's house.
"Hunch your back. Grip your neck hard with both hands," Jarrow ordered tersely.
Judging his moment, he hit the brakes and at the same time kicked into reverse again. The driver of the other car closing behind had no chance to avoid the impact. They hit with a loud rending crash that echoed along the short street. Leaving the other car immobilized with a stove in radiator, Jarrow accelerated forward once more, spinning the wheel first one way, then the other to take the corner like an unleashed rocket sleigh.
But a known car with a crumpled rear end wasn't -exactly the most likely thing to have hopes of vanishing in for very long. They ditched it a half mile west, hailed the next passing cab, and Jarrow told the driver to take them to Union Station, which was the first place to come to mind in the opposite direction, toward the city. There, they changed to another cab, the driver of which would have no reason to connect them with the area where the ditched car would be found—if it hadn't been already.
"Where to?" the cabbie asked.
"Just go south on Lake Shore," Jarrow said.
Rita sank back in the seat and exhaled a long, quavering breath. Ever since Jarrow's first sudden move back at the flat, things had been happening too fast, and her mind had been in too much of a turmoil for a shred of coherent thought to form. Beside her, he was silent.
"Okay," she said, when her shaking had abated sufficiently for her to speak. "So, what kind of a school do you teach at? Tell me again that it's junior high."
But then to her surprise she saw in the passing street-lights that Jarrow too was trembling, and his face was wet with perspiration.
"I don't understand." His icy control and commanding manner were gone, and in their place his voice was barely a croak. "Something like this happened before. . . . Look, I can't explain now. We have to find somewhere to stay out of sight. Are there any people who you can trust?"
Rita thought for a moment, then nodded. "I think I know a place. Want me to take us there?"
"Drop us somewhere close. Don't give him the location."
Rita leaned forward and opened the driver's partition. "Driver, could we make that Clybourn, please?"
"You know that's completely the other way?"
"I know. We've had a change of plan."
The cabbie shrugged. "You're paying."
They turned at a gap in the center divider of the road and began heading back, toward the north end of Chicago. Jarrow now reverted once more to his "normal" self, and the first thing he did after the cab dropped them off was lose the gun and the other items that he had taken down a storm drain on the side of the road.