Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (40 page)

There was a pause.

“What did you say your name was?”

“Nick Halloway. You remember—”

“Yes, that’s right. Someone has already called to ask about you. Several weeks ago. I told them I couldn’t be of any help. To be perfectly honest, I don’t remember you.”

“It’s been years, hasn’t it?”

“They asked me to let them know if I heard anything from you.”

“Well, do let them know, by all means, Ron. Nice to chat with you again after all these years.”

With a mounting sense of hopelessness, I also tried a Fred Shafer, with whom I had had tennis lessons at the age of twelve or so and who also didn’t remember me or want to help me in any way, and a Henry Schuyler who had just the other day been speaking to someone from the
FBI
about me. He too was supposed to call them if he ever heard from me, and was that all right, because the whole thing sounded a little odd?

Absolutely all right. Call them right away.

This was all pointless. Jenkins had invaded my past life and cut me off from it completely, and I felt the panic growing inside me as if I were already physically trapped. I was. I was in the trap. They had just not yet reached in to pull me out.

Stay calm and figure out what is going on.

I dialed my office — my former office — and asked for Cathy.

“Nick! Hi! How are you?” She seemed excited to hear from me. The sound of her voice, which had been so familiar to me — not ever very important, but woven everywhere into my former daily life — unexpectedly made the blood drain from my head.

“Hello… How is everything?”

She was telling me who she was working for now and what she was doing. I was trying to talk to her. I should sit down a moment and let my head clear. Where was I calling from, she wanted to know.

“Right here… in New York… Well, how is everything going?” Hadn’t I just asked that? This was awful.

“Are you all right?” she was asking. It frightened me into something approaching alertness.

“I’m fine. Just got in. Jet lag. It’s been good talking to you. I’ll try to stop by while I’m in town.”

She was asking didn’t I want the phone message she had told me about.

“Of course,” I said. “Almost forgot.”

It would only take her a minute to find it. She had it right there. Yes, here it was.

“Jenkins,” she was saying. “David Jenkins.” Everything seemed to be going black, and I felt as if I were spinning through the void. Cathy’s voice was reciting numbers. Telephone number. “He said you would know what it was in reference to… Please give him a call when you get a chance.”

There was a little box of notepaper. Pencil on a string.

“Cathy, could you give me that number again, please.” I wrote it down, the pencil trembling. I repeated the number. I should get off the telephone and out of this building. Cathy was saying something about Roger Whitman.

“Cathy, I have to—”

“I’m transferring you right over.”

“Nick! How the hell are you? Where are you calling from?”

Great. New York. I stared at the number. I shouldn’t call. Memorize it just in case.

“Nick, I’m sorry if I was a little short last time we spoke — I mean the whole story about you and the Moonies. I should have known you wouldn’t—”

“Moonies?”

“Spiritual advancement or whatever it was. I should have known you wouldn’t get involved in any kind of spiritual advancement. The people were here right after that about your security check, and I gather you’re doing some pretty hush-hush, risky stuff, and I want you to know you can count on me not to say anything.”

“That’s great, Roger. I—”

“I’ll back up your story about the Moonies a hundred percent. In a way I really envy you, Nick. I admire what you’re doing. I had an uncle in intelligence during—”

“They came and asked a lot of questions about me?”

“Sure. The standard sorts of questions. Pretty thorough, actually.”

“What did you tell them about me?”

“everything. I mean everything I know about you. Shouldn’t I have? Was there something I shouldn’t have said?”

“Oh, no… not at all. You’ve got to level with them absolutely. Tell them absolutely everything. And they told you I was in intelligence?”

“Well, only in the most general sort of way. Weren’t they supposed to do that?”

“No, no… Why not? What exactly did they say I was doing?”

“Nothing specific, really. All classified, right? Just that you were doing some extremely confidential work for the government, and you’d be dropping out of sight for a while.”

“Yes, that’s right. Anything else?”

“No. I had the impression that it might be kind of dangerous. They said you might be calling me if you found yourself in a situation where you needed help. You’re not—”

“And did they tell you to let them know if I got in touch with you?”

“No, they said they would know when you had called.”

“Did they? Roger, it’s good talking with you. I’ve got to run.”

I was sweating. I took one more look at the number, crumpled it up, and ran out into the street.

I
debated with myself all night whether I ought to call Jenkins, whether I might frighten him off or learn something useful or whether I was only being drawn further into the trap. Whether, in fact, in my state of mind, I could trust even my own resolve, much less my judgment. But in the end I found myself drawn irresistibly to speak to him, and the next morning, feeling like a bird under the gaze of a snake, I walked up Fifth Avenue along the park and selected a pay telephone. It had a good view in all directions and was on the corner of an eastbound street, so that vehicles could approach from only one direction and I could see anyone who came within a block of me on foot. I lifted the receiver from the cradle and laid it on top of the telephone box, adjusting it so that with my head tilted back I could both speak into it and hear it, without having it dance about ostentatiously in midair.

I dialed Jenkins’s number, charging the call to my office credit card. Listening to the ring, my mind was frozen with apprehension, as if somehow the completion of the circuit would put me within his reach. There was only one ring, then Jenkins.

“Hello, Nick. Thank you for returning my call.”

I had not yet uttered a sound. This line was for me alone. He was absolutely matter-of-fact, as if this were any business call, and his voice had that smooth, exaggerated sincerity that I remembered had annoyed me so much at our first meeting.

“Hello… I’m sorry, is it
Colonel
or
Mister
Jenkins?”

“Please call me Dave. How are you, Nick? We’ve been worried about you.”

“I’m doing reasonably well, under the circumstances. Of course, I do have some difficult days.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said earnestly. “Is there anything we can do to help you?”

“Yes, there is one thing. You could leave me alone. Let me lead my own life in peace.”

There was a brief pause.

“Nick, I know you understand that that’s impossible. But we
are
concerned about you, and I wanted to make sure that you were all right, that there wasn’t some immediate medical emergency, for example, that we might be able to help you with somehow.”

“I’m in splendid shape. I appreciate your concern.”

“I know that you’re not happy with your situation. I see that you’ve started calling friends for help.”

“I tried to briefly, but you’d already gotten to them and turned them all into spies and informers.”

“Nick,” he said earnestly, “have you really stopped and thought this whole thing through? You could be injured any time — or become critically ill. If something happened to you, no one would know. No one could help you. Do you appreciate the risk you take just going out in the street alone?”

“Better than you do, I should think.”

“Food especially must be a terrible problem for you. It shows when you eat, doesn’t it?”

Don’t answer. Don’t give anything away.

“From what we’ve observed,” he continued, after a little pause, “you have an unusual diet. A lot of carbohydrates and not nearly enough protein and minerals. We’re concerned that you may be doing yourself permanent harm.”

“Don’t concern yourself about me. I’m eating just as well as I ever have.”

“I’ll feel a lot better when we can do a complete medical evaluation. It’s an interesting problem, and we’ve already put in a good deal of preliminary work on it. You know, your body may not metabolize in the same way as before. Have you been feeling all right? Any dizziness? Violent changes of mood?”

I felt, at that particular moment, dizzy and frightened. It was the telephone call. That insinuating voice. I should hang up right now.

“Nick, what exactly is it that worries you about coming to us?”

“Mr. Jenkins, let me say this clearly. I’m not turning myself over to you. Not ever. You might as well save yourself and whoever you work for the cost and effort. I’m going to—”

“Nick, I just want to assure you—”

“Listen,” I said, trying to sound decisive and confident. “I’m not calling just to return your call. I’m calling to explain something to you, and I want you to pay close attention.”

“I’m sorry, Nick,” he answered smoothly. “Go ahead and tell me what’s on your mind.”

“Colonel, I’ve thought this through very carefully, and I’ve reached the conclusion that I have to offer you the following choice: either you and your people leave me alone, or I am going to kill you. You know that I have a gun.
I’m going to kill you.”

“Well, Nick” — his voice was even calmer and more earnest than before — “you can try to do that if you want to.” He paused. “But I don’t think you will. For one thing, you’ll have to do it before we get to you, and I don’t think that leaves you much time. Furthermore — and, as it happens, I know something about this — most people find it difficult, especially if they start thinking about it ahead of time, to point a gun at another person and pull the trigger.”

“Colonel, I just want to remind you—”

“I know that you did shoot Tyler, but I don’t think you were trying to kill him. I may be mistaken, but we know quite a lot about you by now, and I don’t think so. Anyway, Nick, suppose you do kill me. What do you think will happen then? Someone else will replace me, probably someone who will be harsher in his approach to the problem. And there’s one more thing you should consider, Nick. For a number of reasons, I, like you, have an interest in keeping your existence secret. That would probably not be true of my successor. And once your existence is made public, you would be captured in a matter of hours. I think, on balance, you are much better off with me. In a way, we are already allies.”

It was true. Everything he said was true.

“You may be right,” I said. “But I don’t care. That’s my strategy. It may not be as compelling as I might like, but as far as I can see it’s the best strategy I have. I tell you as forcefully and convincingly as I can that if you don’t leave me alone I will kill you. And then I do everything in my power to kill you. It’s your choice.”

“Well, Nick, you’re being very direct with me, and so I hope you’ll bear with me if I try to be just as direct with you, because I think it’s important that you understand the situation clearly. First of all, it’s not my choice. Even if I decided I didn’t want to pursue you any longer, whether out of fear for my own safety or for some other reason, it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. This thing has its own momentum — in large measure created by you — and it certainly can’t be stopped by any one person now. But the really important thing for you to understand is this: we’re going to find you. I think we’ll be bringing you in very soon now, but even if we don’t, I want you to understand that ten years from now we’ll be making the same effort as today to find you.”

“Colonel, I don’t mean to be unkind, but you and I both know that just isn’t true. I have some idea of what you’re doing now to find me. I can only guess at what it must be costing, but I’m certain you can’t go on like this. I know the government has substantial funds at its disposal and that it’s not always very careful about how those funds are spent, but this is still a lot of money for what must look to a rational person like a particularly silly enterprise. What do you tell people you’re doing, anyway? Some congressman is going to find out that you’re looking for little invisible people, and you’ll be working at the post office.”

“Nick, against my better judgment I’m going to explain this to you so that you won’t be under any illusions. First, let me say that for very good reasons this project is classified and very few people will ever have any idea at all what it is we’re doing. Secondly, I have — sitting right here on my desk now, as it happens — a small plastic cigarette lighter, which we found on the lawn after the MicroMagnetics fire. It’s absolutely invisible. I’ve shown it to only two people, but it made a dramatic impression on both of them. They see my empty hand move and a piece of paper bursts into flame. And when they take the lighter in their own hands, the sensation is so extraordinary that no other argument has to be made for the importance of what we’re doing. It would hardly be necessary to mention you.”

“I see. A real piece of luck that you managed to salvage that lighter in all the confusion down there.”

“As a matter of fact, we think you probably dropped it on the lawn. I gather you carried away some things from the site?”

“Hardly anything at all,” I said immediately. “The gun, of course. A couple of things I found in one of the desks. There
was
a lighter, I think.”

If the object he chose to tell me about was something I had dropped on the lawn, did that mean that nothing in the building itself had survived?

“What else have you got?” I asked as offhandedly as I could.

“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss that,” he replied a little stiffly.

Perhaps nothing else.

“I still don’t see what makes you think you’ll catch me. You haven’t done very well so far.”

“Nick, it’s only a matter of time. What you’re doing is just too difficult. But I have to say that I admire your resourcefulness and determination, Nick. Not many people could have lasted this long.”