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twenty-four

What was needed next was a believable way of making Jarrow visible again. Kay's suggestion was to use Rita. How, Kay asked, would a woman react if her supposedly dead fiancé reappeared suddenly not knowing where he had been, and then promptly forgot who he was? Eventually, whether she liked it or not, she might be forced to take it to the authorities. That, then, would bring Jarrow to the attention of the people who wanted him back.

Rita's story would describe his worsening condition of confusion and amnesia, and how she had come to the realization within days that this wasn't going to be something she could cope with. Unwilling to simply abandon him, she had decided that her only choice was to seek help. She accepted that it would mean getting involved with official-dom and having to answer endless questions. Jarrow concurred readily with whatever was said, since he was only playing along, anyway. When he got free of them and back to Pearse, his intention was to tell the whole story straight and let the experts there sort it out.

Josef, with Susan and Leon, drove Jarrow and Rita back into the city. To create a false trail to account for their movements in the past forty-eight hours, Josef gave Jarrow a collection of meal tabs, subway and bus tickets, and shopping receipts from various parts of Chicago that he had assembled, to be found on Jarrow's person when he was picked up. Gordon's credit card, it turned out, was still valid—probably deliberately so, to provide a means of -locating him. Later that night, Jarrow and Rita checked into one of the smaller downtown hotels, again to leave a verifiable trail. Jarrow remained there the next morning, while Rita went alone to the police station of the local precinct.

"Morning, ma'am. What can we do for you?" the desk sergeant inquired. She looked haggard, he noted—as if she had a lot on her mind.

"There's a guy who's sick," Rita replied. "It's a really strange situation. I can't deal with it. He's back in a hotel about three blocks from here, right now. It's called the Griffin. You need to get somebody down there right away."

The sergeant drew across a pad. "Is he okay?"

"I think so. But he wasn't making any sense. I was scared he might get violent."

"What's his name?"

"Demiro. Tony Demiro. . . . We were engaged. He needs help."

The sergeant went over to a desk at the rear and used a screen to check the current list of hot names, then paused and glanced at her. "Would you excuse me for one -moment?" he said, and went through to a back room to notify the captain. The captain checked a number he had been given and made a call.

In an office elsewhere in Chicago, an agent of the Federal Security Service turned from his desk. "It's the Chilsen girl. She's just walked in off the street at the police station on Monroe to turn Samurai in. He's at the Griffin."

The chief stood up and reached for his jacket. "Get the team moving," he snapped. "I want all of them over there with full backup. And nobody lets those jerks from Pearse near it, understand? There isn't gonna be another screwup this time."

* * *

Three agents sealed off the hotel lobby, supported by a six-man detachment of the city police. Two more agents with more police secured the rear approach, while one agent and two men were posted at each end of the corridor leading to Jarrow's room. Three agents, guns drawn and cocked, went with the manager to open the door, followed by a police detective and four men.

They went in like Marines hitting the beach on Okinawa. "Police. Freeze!" the captain in the lead shouted.

Jarrow sat on the edge of the bed and watched indifferently.

There was a moment of anticlimactic uncertainty as the adrenaline highs dissipated.

"Are you Maurice Gordon, resident of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania?" the captain asked, producing a set of handcuffs while the others spread out around the room and covered.

"I don't know," Jarrow replied.

In the drab brown van, Josef and Scipio watched from halfway back along the block as the procession emerged from the Griffin and a cavalcade of unmarked cars and police cruisers formed up to move off. People on the sidewalks were stopping to stare, and faces peered from windows on both sides of the street.

"I'm not convinced that he's genuine," Josef muttered, shaking his head.

"Oh, of course he's not genuine," Scipio agreed breezily. "He'll spill the whole story the moment he gets back. We can only hope that what he finds out later will make him come to see things differently. That makes it doubly important that every link back to Pipeline is thoroughly erased."

Apart, of course, from a channel for Jarrow to communicate through, which couldn't be traced. But Josef had a lot of experience in handling requirements like that. They would use a commercial answering service. The number they had given Jarrow would connect him to an answering and recording machine that could be remotely accessed from anywhere. That way, it wouldn't matter much if he divulged the number when he got back to Pearse.

And if he did change his mind later and decided to leave a message, the security people at Pearse wouldn't be able to call in to check, because to interrogate the machine one would need to know the right code, and every time that happened, the code would change to a new one. And only Josef had the list giving the sequence. You couldn't be much more careful than that.

* * *

Jerry Tierney, Director of Internal Security at the Pearse Psychological Research Laboratories, took a call from the FSS agent in charge of operations in Chicago, advising that Samurai had been taken without offering resistance. First reports were that he seemed disoriented and had only fragmented recollections of events over the previous few days.

The news wasn't especially cause for elation. Tierney's original hope when he sent Wesserman and the others to Chicago had been that with the help of the local FSS office, they'd be able to lift Samurai quietly and get him back down to Georgia without anyone who didn't need to know -being any the wiser. But Wesserman, or the FSS, or all of them together, had bungled it and been traced through the car that Samurai had ditched, and now the city police were involved, along with the state authorities, God alone knew who else, and the fan was about to receive a shovelful. True, they would doubtless be able to spirit Samurai away -under the secrecy protection provisions, but that didn't alter the fact that they had suffered a lot of visibility where it wasn't needed, and some important people weren't going to be pleased. He cleared down, stared reluctantly at the blank screen while he mentally prepared his line, then sighed and touched a button to call Fairfax, the establishment's director.

Raymond Fairfax was in his office with Dr. Nordens, waiting for news. They listened silently while Tierney summarized what had happened, Fairfax sitting erect like some frosty Olympian with his crown of white hair, his mouth clamped in a grim line across his florid features; Nordens watching expressionlessly through his rimless spectacles.

Tierney concluded: "He's being taken to police head-quarters up there right now. Wesserman is waiting for them, and will take him in charge immediately under Section 36. But there's still the problem of the girl. Obviously she's going to be blabbing all over the place that Demiro is supposed to be dead, if she hasn't started already. We need a line that'll tie in with it."

Fairfax was aware of that. He should have let Tierney go to Chicago himself and handle things on the spot, the way Tierney had wanted, he told himself bitterly—although it was the last thing he was going to admit now. "We're working on that," he replied. "Stall them for now. Tell Wesserman to say that he knows the subject only by a code name; his job is simply to return him to military custody. So either the girl's crazy, or there must have been a mixup in the records department. Then make sure that Wesserman gets him out without leaving tracks. And I want you to monitor every move personally. After that, work out a clean way for getting Wesserman and his whole bunch off the case. We can't risk any more incompetence."

Fairfax cleared down without waiting for Tierney to reply, and looked at Nordens. "I don't like it," he muttered darkly. "The whole business was illicit. It was a mistake ever to have got involved with it. And the others will all be bailing out with emergency chutes when this gets around. It's us that'll be left carrying it. I say the best thing would be to get rid of Samurai as soon as he's back here. Then it'll just be the girl's word against everyone else's that it was Demiro at all. It wouldn't be too difficult to put some holes in her story. . . . Clear up the whole mess. What do you think?"

Nordens remained motionless for several seconds. Finally he said, "I'm not so sure. Samurai is still our best hope for finding Ashling, and if Ashling's loose it could sink all of them, not just you and me. So it would pay them to sit tight in their seats for a little longer yet."

"If Ashling hasn't already slipped the country," Fairfax said.

Nordens gave a barely perceptible shake of his head. "I don't think so. If he had, then Pipeline wouldn't be showing so much interest. . . . And besides, Samurai might be the ideal means for getting rid of the Chilsen girl and putting a stop to any story of hers permanently. We wouldn't want to involve Tierney's people in something like that. Too much risk of it getting messy—especially with all the attention that they've attracted now. Then Samurai can be eliminated without leaving any traces. That would be the best course, for everybody."

Fairfax took a long breath and nodded reluctantly. "All right. Let's get Jerry over here when he's off the line from Chicago. This time I want us both to be in on all the details, every step of the way."

 

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Framed