Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (55 page)

“Would you like to talk to the other men who have dealt with him? Some of them will be here now.” Jenkins moved his hand toward the telephone tentatively.

“No, no. I think not. That really isn’t what I meant at all. I’m only concerned about my position — and yours, of course — if we have to justify all this at some point. Never mind. It doesn’t matter.” He was running his finger along his lip again, and his eyes avoided Jenkins as he spoke. “What you’re doing here is extremely important, and I want you to know that I’m going to do everything I can to back you up as far as budgeting goes. However, for the time being — until you’ve actually apprehended Halloway — I think it would be better if we both took the position that we had never discussed this matter. I think you should go on reporting to Ridgefield on whatever basis you both decide is appropriate. As far as I’m concerned, you are working on an extremely difficult and important scientific problem. Which is indeed the case… I will take along this lighter, however. It might be of help if any questions are ever raised about all this.”

He found the lighter on the desk and slid it into the side pocket of his suit jacket.

Jenkins’s eyes widened and he opened his mouth as if to voice an objection. He paused for a moment and then said, “Of course. I can see that that would be sensible. Be careful, though: these things can get lost very easily.”

“Yes, I imagine so. Well, thank you for your time.” His well-bred smile had reappeared, and he was looking straight at Jenkins again. “This is really quite extraordinary. Incredible. Well, good luck to you.”

Jenkins walked with him out to the elevator. I walked with them too, slipping through the doors right behind them, but once I was in the hall, I raced to the stairway and charged down the six flights to the lobby. When the elevator door opened, I stepped right up beside him and walked out into the street with him.

I had to do something right away. There would be no second chance. He walked east, his right hand in the side pocket of his jacket, fingering the magic cigarette lighter. Across the street I saw what was probably his car. A uniformed driver. As he stepped off the curb, I planted my right foot directly in front of his, so that with the next step it caught, pitching him face forward into the street. His hands flew out in front of him as he went down.

I was right there beside him on the ground, reaching into his pocket. My hand found the lighter immediately, and before he had begun to collect himself, I had slipped it out and stepped quickly off to the side to watch. People were helping him to his feet. He was dusting himself off, while other pedestrians paused to see whether he was all right — or perhaps whether he was sober. The light had already turned and cars were driving through the crosswalk again before he checked the pocket.

Suddenly, he was waving the cars to a stop. “Hold it! Hold it! I’ve lost something… No, no, I don’t need any help. Just hold the cars back… That’s right, a contact lens.” He was down on all fours, crawling through the street, feeling with the palms of his hands. His driver appeared but was waved impatiently away. Soon traffic was backed up the length of the block and horns were sounding. He was muttering anxiously. His driver, standing dutifully in front of the intersection to block the traffic, seemed perplexed.

Eventually a car pushed through. “Look, I’m sorry, buddy, but contact lenses are widely available. I’m not gonna grow old and die here so you can save fifty bucks.” The cars behind followed him through the crosswalk.

The man stood up, tight-lipped, and stared morosely at the street. He looked back toward the building where he had left Jenkins. It would be difficult for us both if he decided to go back and tell Jenkins what had happened. But why should he? It would be embarrassing. Perhaps more than embarrassing ultimately. It would be safest to say nothing, not admit to a mistake. But if he did start to go back, I would have to stop him somehow. I waited. He looked despairingly down at the crosswalk where the cars were rattling through. When the light turned again, he walked over and climbed into his car.

I stood out in the street for several minutes debating what I should do. I wanted very much to get away from there. I desperately needed food and rest, and the thought of going back inside the offices of Global Devices filled me with dread. But if I were ever going to go back up there at all, I had to do it right away. Jenkins’s visitor could have a change of heart at any time and decide to tell Jenkins about the loss of the cigarette lighter. Jenkins would understand at once everything that had happened, and after that I would never be able to enter those offices again. Furthermore, they were all about to have a meeting, presumably to discuss the latest information they had acquired about me and what they would do next to capture me. I might learn enough in that meeting to put me out of their reach for months. But above all, I knew I had to go back and try to do something about the contents of Jenkins’s safe.

Fifteen, thirty-seven, eighteen, five.

I climbed back up to the seventh floor and waited in front of the door. It was nearly an hour before Morrissey arrived and let me in through the entrance door. I followed him straight to the room with the conference table, where I stepped quietly into the corner nearest the open door.

Everyone was there except Jenkins. Tyler sat erect in his chair, not taking part in the conversation of the others. Gomez was helping Clellan set up a sort of wooden easel on the other side of the room, to which a stack of large drawings was clipped. The one showing on top was a map of Manhattan marked with little red rectangles. I counted six of them. They would be buildings I was known to have slept in during the last month. There seemed to be more maps in the stack, and I could sec a large floor plan protruding. Several floor plans. Particular apartments that they were watching? I would soon find out. I wondered what the housing situation was like in Queens.

“This guy sure does get around, doesn’t he?” said Gomez. “Every night in a different place.”

Clellan smiled his good-old-boy smile at Gomez. “Now, from what I understand, Gomez, that’s not so different from you.”

“The hours you got me working, I’m lucky to sleep anywhere at all.”

“When we get your friend, we’ll all get some rest.”

Tyler was staring at the chart. “These are the places he’s been staying?”

“These are places we’re pretty sure he’s been,” said Clellan. “Not always one hundred percent, but pretty sure. The thing is, he seems to keep moving. Never more than one, maybe two nights in one place. Which is a good sign, because it shows he’s feeling the pressure. It means he’s all the more likely to make a mistake. I’ll go through the whole thing for everybody as soon as the Colonel’s here.”

“I hear you talked to him,” said Tyler softly.

“Yeah, I talked to him, all right,” said Clellan with a loud laugh. “I talked myself blue in the face. Only he didn’t talk to me. I was standing in this lobby” — he found the building on the map and pointed at it — “and suddenly I’m looking down at two footprints in the carpet, and there I am talking and talking, telling him how much we all love him and miss him and what a treat it is to run into him this way. I’m doing everything but sing to him, and all the time I’m thinking, ‘Nicky boy, maybe it’s time to take a big jump at you,’ when one, two, the footprints step away, and I’m talking at thin air. The doorman thought I was a real wack-job. Wanted to have me taken away.”

“Anyone finds out what we’re doing, they’ll think we’re all wack-jobs,” said Morrissey unhappily. Morrissey is always whining. “We’re not going to get this guy. How can we? He’s fucking
invisible.”

“We’re going to get him real soon now,” said Gomez. “Wait’ll you see one of these apartments I’m fixing up for him. Once he’s inside, I got sensors in the apartment set up to drive the dead bolt home on the main door and freeze it. At the same time it transmits a radio signal to us.”

“Furthermore, these apartments can also be used by Gomez in his busy social life. Gomez does a lot of entertaining.” Clellan’s laugh boomed out.

“Look, that was one time I had to talk to a friend — she has very difficult problems — and I happened to be in that apartment. Anyway, the hours we’re putting in, your private life is bound to get mixed in with your work sometimes.”

“That’s a fact, Gomez,” said Clellan, his smile disappearing and his eyes narrowing. “I meant to speak to you about that. You got to leave Carmen alone. It’s easy for you to find women, but not for me, especially ones with big breasts who can type. The same for Jeannie. I want you to leave both those girls alone, hear?” He fixed Gomez with a threatening look.

“Shit, I’m just trying to help Carmen out. She has a very difficult situation with her husband.”

“And you’re going to help her out with that?” The exaggeratedly stern expression on Clellan’s face exploded into laughter.

“What’s more, it’s very difficult for a Hispanic girl working with people like you guys, and I’m just trying to help her, talk to her a little.” Gomez seemed to be growing uncomfortable with the discussion. “Anyway, this door mechanism is gonna get this guy. I mean, this is a cheap system. I can do an apartment for five — tops, six — thousand dollars, and you don’t need any human surveillance. We can have any number of these places just set up waiting for him.”

Tyler looked up. “What about the apartments?”

“What do you mean, ‘what about the apartments?’”

“What do you pay to rent the apartments? I’ve been looking for an apartment in Manhattan, and one bedroom can run you over two thousand a month. Even over in someplace like Park Slope it’s bad.” Tyler thought for a moment. “Maybe I could use one of these places while you’re working on it.”

“Gomez couldn’t spare even one. You’re talking about real
throughput
with Gomez.” Clellan laughed. Gomez looked away, embarrassed but with a little smirk showing. “Anyway, we’ll soon be taking some time off, I hope. Once Nicky boy comes to our party.”

“How many apartments are there in New York?” asked Morrissey. “Maybe a million? You gonna set up five or ten and then just wait until he walks into one of them? Those are piss-poor odds. We’re never gonna get him.”

Clellan tilted his head and looked appraisingly at Morrissey. “There aren’t a million apartments that Halloway would go into. There are not many at all. And there’ll be fewer now that summer is over. He goes certain kinds of places. We know a lot about him by now.”

“We know a lot about him all right, the fucker.” I was startled by Morrissey’s vehemence. Frightened. “Mostly we know what a smart-ass he is. It could have been anyone in the world in that building, and we had to get that asshole. I’ll tell you this: if we ever do get the fucker, I hope it’s me. I’d love to get a shot at him.”

They were all silent at this. I thought Tyler nodded, but it might have been my imagination. It was Clellan who started talking again.

“Morrissey, you just aren’t giving him a fair chance. You and Nicky boy might get to be real good buddies. You just need a chance to get to know each other. Have a few beers together. Kick things around. Maybe Gomez could fix the two of you up with a couple of girls. You’ve got to give people a chance—”

“He’s such an asshole. Thinks he can do whatever he fucking feels like, like he’s the only person in the world. You ought to see that school he went to. They got a gym there you could hold the Olympics in — hockey rinks, swimming pools, indoor baseball diamond — for maybe three, four hundred kids. All smart-asses like Halloway. You could—”

Morrissey broke off and sat up straight as Jenkins entered the room. They all seated themselves around the table, Jenkins at one end, with Clellan next to him. Everyone looked at Jenkins, waiting for him to begin.

“I want to say first of all that I’ve been talking to Washington — I had a meeting here this morning, and I’ve just been on the phone for the last half hour with someone else — and the pressure to produce some results is gradually mounting.” I remembered how much I disliked the earnest, insinuating quality of Jenkins’s voice. “Our budget is beginning to attract attention. There is very little we can do about that — we have no choice now but to push ahead. The trouble is that virtually no one really knows what we are doing and what is at stake, and the few people who do will not acknowledge it. This operation is still being represented as an investigation into the incident at MicroMagnetics and an attempt to reconstruct Wachs’s scientific results, intentional or accidental. Only a handful of people have any real idea of what those results were. There are inevitably rumors, however, and those rumors could catch up with us eventually. As you can imagine, it would be unpleasant to have to justify this operation if ultimately we came up empty-handed.”

Jenkins paused and looked at his hands.

“I might as well say this now. If the moment should ever come when we are in that situation and facing a political attack or some sort of investigation, each of you will have to decide how you want to handle it. You could, of course, describe events exactly as you saw them. However, I would think that you would probably feel safest taking the line that you were following my orders and that you really had no sense of the overall scope or direction of the operation. And you would probably be vague or unsure of exactly what you had seen. Or hadn’t seen. I would, as I say, understand anyone’s wanting to approach the thing that way. Furthermore, I’m not even sure that it would make my own situation any worse if you did that.”

The others were all absolutely still, their eves fixed on Jenkins. He had continued to study his hands as he spoke, but now he decisively placed them both, palms down, on the surface of the table and looked up.

“In any case, I don’t envision our facing any such problem. I think that my discussions today have secured our funding for the moment and may have bought us some time as well. And time works in our favor. We may take Halloway this week, or it may be next week, but it will be soon. I know that at times it may seem discouraging to some of you, but we’ve all put extraordinary effort into this, and we can’t allow ourselves to let up now, when we’re on the verge of success. Halloway is completely alone. He’s under enormous pressure day and night. He only has to be careless once, make one mistake. If we stay on top of him a little while longer, this will all be over.