“Looking for bugs?” I said.
“Yes.” He continued working while he talked. “I’ve got an interference generator in that sample case, too.”
The sense of danger struck me in a long chilly frisson. I sat down in the secretary’s chair and laid the two drawings on the executive desk. Even though the room had become hot and stuffy with the window closed, my hands ached with cold. The danger flowed out of Ari Nathan, it seemed to me, far deeper than the Sam Spade scribble or Aunt Eileen’s warning, danger he’d brought in that sample case, maybe, with the job he needed done.
He finished scanning the window and slipped the device into his pants pocket. “Hot in here,” he said.
“It is, yeah.” My voice stayed steady, fortunately. “That’s because we’re right under the roof. I didn’t want anyone moving in above me who might want to eavesdrop.”
“Good idea. Well, this room’s secure.”
It was until you walked into it, anyway, I thought. He took off the jacket and draped it over the back of the leather chair. Over his pale blue shirt he was wearing a gun in a shoulder holster. I hate guns, partly because of what happened to Patrick, partly for all kinds of rational reasons beyond that.
“Do you have a license for that thing?” I pointed at it.
“Of course.” He looked at me slant-eyed. “Why do you ask?”
“They make me nervous, guns.”
“Oh? It’s a deadly business we’re in. You should carry protection of some sort.”
“I can take care of myself. I’ve got a license to ensorcell.”
He blinked at me with those gorgeous Byzantine eyes.
“There’s only four of us in the entire Agency who do,” I went on. “It’s not a skill we use lightly. I hope you feel the same way about that gun.”
I thought he was about to sneer, but he kept his face expressionless. I picked up the two drawings and waved them at him.
“Anyway, your target’s in San Francisco, all right, or he was ten minutes ago. He was at the Cliff House out on Ocean Beach. He’s driving a blue late-model four-door sedan, but I couldn’t see where he was headed.”
He took the drawings, looked at them, laid them down, then picked up the white envelope. “You haven’t even opened this.”
“I didn’t need to open it. That’s not how Long Distance Remote Sensing works.”
The words seemed to burst out of him. “I cannot tell you how much I hate this kind of—of—this psychic bilge.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Following the orders my superior gave me.” He threw the envelope into my lap. “Open it, will you? At least do that much. Pander to my sense of reality.”
“If you’re not going to believe a word I say, why should I do anything you want?”
He started to retort, stopped himself, then shrugged. “You’ve got a point,” he said. “Very well, would you please open the sodding envelope?”
I tore it open and shook out the photographs. On top lay a fuzzy snap from a security camera. Although I couldn’t discern the perp’s features, I could tell he was wearing a Dodgers cap. It figured. The passport photo clearly showed me a skinny white man, nearly bald, light-colored eyes, thin lips, wearing a plaid sports shirt, a very ordinary American face, except it belonged to a man who wanted to kill me.
“Do you know that fellow?” Nathan said. “The name we have for him is William Johnson.”
“No. Never seen him before.”
He cocked his head to one side and gave me a cold look. “You’re hiding something, aren’t you?”
“How can you tell? I thought you didn’t believe in all this psychic bilge.”
“I said I hated it. There’s a difference. I wouldn’t be in the line of work I’m in if I couldn’t tell when someone was lying, and that’s training, not psychism.”
His tone of voice made me feel like slapping him. Instead, I said, “All right, I’ve been warned that someone wants to kill me. I think it’s this guy, but I can’t be sure.”
“What? Who warned you?”
Since I had to work with this guy no matter what, I saw no point in telling him the truth, especially with a dodge so close at hand.
“Psychic intuition,” I said. “The Agency calls this phenomenon Semi-Automatic Warning Mechanism.”
He stared at me.
“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” I said. “Because I have psychic skills?”
“Unfortunately, yes.” He leaned back in the chair with a long sigh. “I should have taken my father’s advice. I should have been an insurance adjustor. But did I listen to him?”
“Your father was in the insurance business?”
“Eventually. Before that he was a nutter.”
“Say what?”
He ignored the question and continued staring at the opposite wall. From the slack jaw as well as his general vibe—what the Agency calls the Subliminal Psychological Profile—I could tell that he felt personally betrayed by something. Life, probably. After a couple of minutes he roused himself.
“My contact at your State Department told me I could use this office as my temporary work arrangement.”
“Oh, did they? It’s the first I’ve ever heard of it.”
“You’re supposed to contact your handler about it.”
“Oh, am I? That’s pretty high handed of them! What do you propose for a cover story?”
“Simple.” He gave me a crooked smile. “I’m going to be Mr. Morrison.”
I let fly with some words that weren’t ladylike. He winced and stood up, then picked up his sample case to take with him.
“Oh, for God’s sake, wipe that sneer off your face, will you?” he said. “If someone’s out to kill you, you need the kind of protection I can offer. Well, don’t you?”
He had me there. Of course I did.
“You haven’t told me why you’re looking for this guy,” I said as pleasantly as I could manage.
“I’ll do that tomorrow.” He took his jacket from the back of the chair. “I’ve got another appointment. Something personal.”
He put the jacket on and walked out of the office. I followed just in case he decided to steal something from my desk, which he didn’t. As soon as he’d well and truly left, I went back into the new Mr. Morrison’s room, sat down in the secretary’s chair, and tranced a sharp message to Y. Even though it was eight in the evening, D.C. time, he answered promptly, a little too fast, maybe, because his image had dark eyes instead of the usual blue.
“I take it you don’t like Mr. Nathan much, either,” Y said.
“You’ve met him? You told me you hadn’t.”
“I haven’t. Our contact at the State Department has. He warned me this morning. He was close to frothing at the mouth.”
“So am I. What’s this garbage about Nathan taking over my office?”
“Well, State wants him to have a base to work out of. There’s nothing I can do about it, Nola. I’m sorry.”
Y sounded so genuine that I calmed down.
“Look, if he gets too obnoxious,” Y continued, “tell him that you’re his handler now. State will back you. I’ll make sure of that.”
“Oh, thank you very much! He’s going to really like that. Take it just like a little lamb.”
“Spare me the sarcasm. I’ve sent you an encrypted file on Nathan’s background to the other location.”
“I’m surprised their secret service told you anything about him.”
“They didn’t. This is what our operatives could find out.” He paused. “Look, I’ve got to go. Dinner’s on the table.”
Y vanished. Was he married, I wondered?
I took the two pieces of scribble art and went back to my own desk where I could sit in comfort to think. So Aunt Eileen’s Thirties movie villain had appeared in my remote sensing pictures. I had a name for him now, even though it sounded fake. I considered trying to sense him again, then shelved the idea.
Johnson’s black and white Shield Persona, as the Agency terms these false images, told me that he had talents of his own. So far both Aunt Eileen and I had partially overridden them. Still, challenging him at this stage of the game struck me as too risky. I liked the idea of giving him a link back to me even less. I therefore needed to get my mind off him. As a symbolic action, what the Agency calls Conscious Evasion Procedure, I sent the scribbles through my cross-cut shredder.
Night came early this time of year. Even though I twitched at the thought of Johnson hunting me on dark streets, I refused to spend the night sleeping on the office floor. I locked up the suite, then took the N Judah streetcar home. Safety in numbers—as always at rush hour, commuters crammed the car. I stood all the way to Ninth Avenue, my stop, did a little grocery shopping, then hurried up the stairs to my apartment before my landlady realized I’d come home. Mrs. Zukovski loved long conversations on the stairs, or to be precise, long monologues, usually about her cats.
Before I locked the door behind me, I did a quick mental scan of the apartment: all clear. Nathan had his ways of securing a place. I had mine. Glare from the streetlight outside fell through the bay window onto my saggy blue couch and the book-littered coffee table. I switched on the overhead light. From the door I could see into the tiny kitchen with its black and white tile; it lay in shadow, but the shadow came through the side window from the building next door, not occult forces, or as the Agency prefers to call them, Unexploited Personnel Capabilities. I put the salad fixings away, then decided to wait for dinner.
My home computer connected to a scrambled DSL line, not a business wireless setup like we had in the office. On top of the scrambler, the Agency double-encrypts all files with a private system. We call our site TranceWeb because you need to go into trance to read it, which effectively limits snoopers. I logged on, grabbed the Nathan file, and let myself drift into the proper frame of mind.
What I read made a lot of things clear. His parents were middle-class Jews in London who came under the influence of a New-Age type “spiritual practices rabbi.” Although no one seemed to know exactly which powers this “New Ezekiel” had, he must have developed the ability to talk people out of their hard-earned money. This supposed spiritual leader acquired a lot of land in Israel in the 1970s and decided to found a kibbutz. He told his followers that he wanted to revive the old Zionist days before Palestine became Israel, a time of hard work and simple living, but also of pure communal goals and ideals, a collective farm in the best sense.
Unfortunately, he was somewhat less than sane. His actual goal turned out to be a kibbutz dedicated as a training center for Armageddon. The men studied weaponry, ready to fight on the side of the Messiah, while the women went off into the desert to have visions. They were hoping to learn who this Messiah was and when they should get dinner ready for his arrival.
After seven years Nathan’s mother had had a vision. She’d seen that she’d married the wrong man. After the divorce, she headed back to London with a new lover. Every summer Nathan visited his mother in the U.K. for six weeks, which explained his good but oddly formal English. Nathan’s father stuck it out on the kibbutz for a year, then took his son and went to Tel Aviv and that job in the insurance business.
In Tel Aviv Nathan had a normal life, if you can consider a ten-year-old boy who knows how to clean, load, and fire every handheld weapon known to modern man normal. He’d done very well during his compulsory stint in the army. Way ahead of his class, I figured, judging from the number of sharpshooter medals that studded his public record.
When he left the army, Interpol recruited him because, according to the file, he had an unusual flair for languages as well as guns. Yet he left there after two years, apparently or maybe. They no longer listed him on any official public documents, but a year later he showed up working for them again. His life fell into a pattern of disappearances followed by a return to respectable police work. None of our operatives could find out why. No one knew where he went in between his Interpol stints, though we could assume that he was working for his deep cover agency. About his personal life, nothing except for a brief mention that he’d never married.
And one detail that struck me as oddly humorous—his actual name: Ariel. Yes, I know about Ariel Sharon, who had more in common with fire and brimstone than magical spirits, but my education had pounded Shakespeare into my brain. No wonder, I thought, Nathan went by Ari.
I logged off and shut down. When I came out of trance, I heard a slice of cold pizza calling to me from the refrigerator, a lot louder than all the healthy salad stuff I’d bought at the grocery store. After I ate, I considered turning on the TV, but my mind kept revolving around the problem of Ari Nathan. Tell him I was his handler—sure, easy enough to tell him, but would he listen? The way he’d run out for his “something personal” appointment without even giving me a full briefing made me doubt it. And where was he, anyway? Probably with some unfortunate woman, I figured, and good luck to her!
Eventually, of course, curiosity got the better of me. Hey, it’s one of my job qualifications. I took out the pad of paper and box of crayons that I keep at home.
The LDRS gave me three drawings, all of them less scribbly than usual. The first two puzzled me. I wondered if I were looking at a crime scene, because pale white bodies lay on the ground behind barbed wire. They all wore white clothing, as shapeless as pajamas. What had Nathan done, gone off the deep end and shot a lot of people? The third drawing showed two standing figures: a flesh and blood elderly man wearing a heavy gray sweater, black pants, and a yarmulke. He was looking at a white ghost—no, at a plaster sculpture.
All of a sudden I realized what I was seeing: the Holocaust memorial out at the Legion of Honor art museum. I caught a glimpse of Nathan himself, also wearing a yarmulke, standing and staring at those symbols of remembered murder lying on the ground. I broke the trance. I was ashamed of myself, spying on him at such a moment, but the shame didn’t last, because the sense of danger came with the glimpse.
I had a hard time breathing for a moment, just because of the danger-sense, or the Semi-Automatic Warning Mechanism. Outside the sunlight had faded. The purple neon sign on the Persian restaurant across the street lit up and began to blink. I drew the curtains and switched on both of the lamps in the living room, turned on the one in the bathroom, too, just because. Was he really an Israeli agent, I wondered, or was that a pretense? Was he working with Johnson instead of tracking him down, a double agent, a traitor? I decided to try to find out.