They drove for a little under an hour. Josef moved up front to take the passenger seat beside Susan, where they talked intermittently in lowered voices. In the back, Arnold and Leon continued watching Jarrow and Rita vigilantly in silence. As far as Jarrow was concerned that was just as well; until he had more of an idea of what was going on, and in particular whether they had fallen into hands that were friendly or otherwise, he was in no mood for making conversation anyway. Rita evidently shared his sentiments.
When the van finally stopped, they got out to find themselves in the driveway of a typical small house in a neighborhood of mixed family dwellings spaced generously apart amid scattered pines. It could have been anywhere within fifty miles of the Chicago city limits. This place was painted a dark, ugly blue with white trim that was starting to flake. The yard was overgrown, and some of the clapboards needed replacing. Another car was parked ahead of them, alongside the porch.
"Not quite home, of course, but it does for now," Josef remarked, reading their expressions. "Shall we go inside?"
They followed him up the steps and across the porch, into a living room opening directly behind the front door, where another woman and a man were waiting. "Oh, just one thing," Josef said as Jarrow was about to move on into the room. He motioned with a hand for Jarrow to raise his arms. Jarrow did so, and Leon checked his person quickly but thoroughly for weapons. "Sorry, but one can't be too careful, as I'm sure you agree," Josef said. Susan did the same with Rita. "And now we can proceed with more customary civilities," Josef said.
The other woman had risen and come over to meet them. She was fortyish, Jarrow guessed, slender and fairly tall, with wavy blond hair and alert, inquisitive eyes that gave the impression of already having absorbed all there was to be learned about the newcomers from their appearance. Her face, though not unattractive, lacked color and showed traces of strain, which a straight, thin nose and high, hollow cheeks did nothing to disguise. She was wearing a heavy woollen sweater with jeans and ankle-high boots.
"This is Kay," Josef informed them, for what it was worth—from the melodramatics of the whole situation, Jarrow had already dismissed all the names as pseudonyms. The man that Kay had been with remained sitting in an armchair, one leg resting lazily on the other knee, seemingly not wanting to be sociable. He was hefty with hair cropped short, wearing a regular jacket over a black, crew-neck sweater. Josef didn't seem perturbed and left him alone. "Do you both take tea? Can we offer you something to eat?" he asked, looking at Jarrow and Rita.
Jarrow glanced at Rita. She nodded. "I could use something."
"Fine," Jarrow said.
"Get some tea on would you?" Josef called behind them. "And maybe a few sandwiches. I'll have one, cheese—oh, and some of that canned ham if there's any left." Susan went out through another door, and Arnold went with her. Leon stayed in the living room, leaning against the wall by the front door to the porch, through which they had entered. Josef gestured for them to sit down. The room was drab and scantily furnished, with unadorned walls and the bareness that comes with an absence of ornaments. A woodstove standing in a brick surround halfway along one wall was putting out a good heat. Several chairs and a couch formed a rough semicircle facing it, one of the chairs being occupied by the silent man. There was another couch beneath a window, a table with several rough upright chairs, and couple of small side tables and a cabinet. Jarrow and Rita sat on the couch by the stove, Kay took one of the chairs opposite them, while Josef paced over to a window, turned, and remained standing.
"Very well," Jarrow said. "We've trusted you. Now will someone tell us what's going on? But before we start I warn you that I don't think I'm going to be able to help much with whatever you want. I don't know anything."
"If you wouldn't mind, first, just answering some questions," Josef said from the window. "Don't wonder about them. Then we'll fill you in on as much as we know—which I admit isn't everything. Were it otherwise, you wouldn't be here."
"Okay," Jarrow agreed. That was what they had come here for. Kay reached over to where she had been sitting when they arrived and drew across a folder of papers. She opened it on her knee and stared down at the contents as if collecting her thoughts.
"I've already asked him about Ashling," Josef told her. "The name doesn't mean anything."
"We thought that might be the case," Kay said.
"Ah, but there's more. Apparently he hasn't reverted to Demiro. He's somebody else entirely. Who was it?" He looked across at Jarrow.
"Richard Jarrow," Jarrow supplied.
"Jarrow," Josef repeated. "He says he's a teacher and comes from Minneapolis."
Kay sat back in her chair. "You don't know Conrad Ashling?" she said again, as if to make sure."
"I've never heard of him."
Kay closed the folder slowly. "That does put a different light on things." She lapsed into thought, staring at Jarrow fixedly.
Josef resumed. "You were in Atlanta last weekend, isn't that correct? You stayed at the Hyatt there."
"Yes."
"Why did you go to Atlanta?"
"I don't know. I woke up on Tuesday morning with no memory of going there at all."
"You'd been there since Saturday."
"So I discovered when I checked out. I didn't know anything about it."
"What is the last thing you remember before that?" Josef asked.
Jarrow hesitated, looked at Kay, who was still watching him, then back at Josef again. "I'm not sure if you're going to believe this . . . but I don't remember anything since last April. You see, I'm supposed to be dead. I've even seen the certificate that was filed. I think I'm normal, but -nobody recognizes me." He raised a hand to indicate Rita. "Except Rita here, who says I'm this person Tony Demiro—which is what you seem to think. . . . I don't know what's happening." He shook his head helplessly.
Kay turned her head to look at Josef. There was still doubt on her face, as if she was of two minds as to whether to believe this.
"When did you leave Atlanta?" Josef asked Jarrow.
"Tuesday morning, first thing."
"Why?"
"Why? . . . I was confused. I didn't know what I was doing there. There was nobody around when I woke up. I just wanted to get out and go home."
Josef glanced at Rita. "I'd gone for an early swim while he was still asleep," she said in answer to his unasked question.
Josef nodded and looked back at Jarrow. "So you went back to Minneapolis?"
"Yes."
"Then what brought you to Chicago?"
"I found Rita's phone number on a pad I picked up in a hotel. Nothing else was making any sense, so I called it. Nobody else I'd talked to recognized me."
"But she did?"
"No."
"Yes."
Jarrow and Rita answered together, then stopped, -confused.
"But not as anyone called Richard Jarrow," Rita said.
"As Warrant Officer Demiro, supposedly killed five months ago?" Josef said.
Rita swallowed visibly and gave a quick nod. "Yes."
Josef looked to Kay as if for a verdict. "It sounds like a complex reversion," she said. "Jarrow must be an original transfer source. Somehow the complete associative net has reactivated."
Josef chewed his lip for a moment. "And you've never heard of Ashling?" he asked again.
"Never," Jarrow said.
"How about a Maurice Gordon?"
Ah, so they did know something about that too. Jarrow reached inside his jacket and produced Gordon's wallet, opening it to show the ID. "I had this and other things with me when I woke up. None of it means a thing. I presume the clothes there were his as well."
Kay took the wallet and examined it, while Josef continued. "Very well. So why did you go to Atlanta the day before, on Monday?" he asked, indicating Rita with a nod.
Rita replied, "He called me that morning. It was the same story: he'd woken up in the hotel and didn't know what he was doing there. But it was different. He was Tony then. And when I got there that evening he was Tony. Only Tony didn't remember anything since last May. I stayed, got up early the next morning to go for a swim as I said, and when I got back to the room he'd gone. Then I got this call from Minneapolis a day later"—she waved a hand—"only now he says he's this teacher."
"So I came to Chicago," Jarrow completed. "And then, last night . . ."
"Yes, we know about that," Josef told him.
"Were they anything to do with you?" Jarrow asked.
"No."
Jarrow sat back against the couch. So at least he didn't have to go through all that. A long silence followed. Kay folded the wallet and handed it back. "I think he's on the level," she pronounced. "We're not going to get anywhere by staying clammed up." The man in the jacket removed a hand that had been resting in his pocket and returned the gun he had been holding to a holster below his arm. Jarrow felt slightly pained as well as startled, not having realized that his word had been in question all the time.
"Sorry about that. One must take precautions," Josef said matter-of-factly. He was in a different world, Jarrow told himself. He mustn't let himself get rattled by this kind of thing.
Josef gave a quick smile behind his beard and came forward a pace from the window, reversing one of the upright chairs and straddling it to regard them with his arms folded loosely along the back. "You have been very cooperative. Now, I think, we owe you something in the way of explanation.
"We are from an organization called Pipeline, which I hope you have never heard of. It's purpose is to recruit talent and ability for the Offworld enterprises, particularly skilled industrial personnel, engineers, and scientists. Our function is getting them out of here and the European Consolidation states, and offplanet via the FER. All strictly illegal here, of course, so I suppose you could call us an underground operation of sorts. Ashling is an important scientist who was about to be processed, but he has -disappeared."
Rita was listening openmouthed. "Are you saying that you're from there? You're actually Offworlders, infiltrated down here?"
"Not all of us. But Kay and myself are, yes," Josef -replied.
Jarrow frowned, trying to reconcile all this with the events of last night. There was still no hint of where Ashling fitted into anything.
"So who were those men who came to the apartment?" he asked. "You said they weren't anything to do with you?" Hardly a necessary question. It would have been a strange way, to say the least, for an underground operation to have conducted itself.
"I can't say for certain," Josef replied. "But we're pretty certain that at least some of them were from a clandestine government research program, and had been sent to bring back one of their agents, a subject of the program, who had run amuck."
The code name, Jarrow thought. Didn't agents usually have code names in this kind of business? Another piece fell into place. "Was this agent known as Samurai?" he ventured.
Josef glanced briefly at Kay, who returned a shrug. "I've not heard that name before," he confessed. "But it seems possible. Where did you hear it?"
"They yelled it a couple of times before they started breaking down the door."
"That must be what he went by internally," Kay said.
Josef nodded. "Maurice Gordon was the name he was operating under," he told Jarrow. "That was what we had identified him as."
"Ah, yes, okay." Jarrow had suspected something similar himself. "So Maurice Gordon was Samurai's cover."
"So it seems."
Jarrow looked at Josef and Kay in turn. Now they were getting somewhere. "So far, so good, then," he said. "But what do we know about the person himself. Who is this Samurai?"
Josef gave him a long, penetrating look, as if inviting him to see the obvious. Jarrow frowned. The new revelations had come pouring in too quickly for him to have it all sorted out yet in his mind.
Josef gestured, indicating the side of Jarrow's coat to which he had returned the wallet. "But you've seen Gordon's ID," he said. "I don't think it could be any plainer than that. Why do you think we've been so nervous about you?" He nodded at the stunned look that came over Jarrow's face as the message finally percolated. "Yes, that's right. You are!"