Our table was empty, save for the bill.
After a moment I had to laugh, for the first time in a long while. I couldn’t hold it against him. I should have seen that one coming. I shook my head, feeling something vaguely like a loss other than my money.
That Catlum was sure one hell of a checkers player.
Chapter 14
oving off. The skin of the sky was very blue and the song of the air whistled inside my helmet around my ears. I gripped the handlebars and maintained a steady pace within my lane. The ’cycle held the road beautifully.
I had found the little town right where Catlum had said it would be, up the road, and I had indeed purchased new trousers there—also a shirt and a jacket. Except for a few stores, though, I was stymied. They had a vehicle rental place, but it was closed and I couldn’t locate the owner or manager. Upon reflection, this may have been just as well. It resulted in my getting in some good thinking time.
I had passed a little motel on my way into town. I could get a room, and the shower itself would be worth it. I was not sleepy after the day’s hibernation, but I wanted to be out of sight while I waited and I did not feel like skulking about the countryside.
When I said cash and he saw that I had no luggage, the clerk asked for payment in advance. But that was okay. I gave him a false name and out-of-state address, of course, got the room, cleaned myself up and stretched out on the bed.
Still feeling alert, I reviewed everything that had happened—from the Keys to Baghdad and on along my current odyssey to the present moment. I thought about Cora. I knew where she was now, and I felt that she was safe for the time being. A dead hostage is after all no hostage, and they would derive no benefit from making her suffer until or unless I could be made to watch. While recent experiences demonstrated the fineness of the distinction, I felt that Barbeau would still actually rather have me alive and working for him again than dead. This much of what he had said back in Philadelphia, I believed. If this could not be, however, he wanted me dead. What he feared most, I was certain, was probably my going to the Justice Department with my story. I could see myself at a hearing, playing computer tricks to demonstrate what I was saying. No. He would not like that. And so long as he had a live Cora for insurance, he knew that this would not come to pass. He would hang onto a live Cora now until he had a dead BelPatri—for he must realize by now that I wasn’t coming back.
I had remained safe so far by exploiting the new, manipulative aspect of my paranormal ability. Barbeau had not been prepared for anything like it, and I was certain it had him worried. I realized, too, that I was going to have to rely upon it from here on out, to exploit it fully, for offense and defense, for the rest of my journey, to keep him off balance, to maintain an edge.
I intended renting a vehicle on the morrow, for the next stage of my journey. As I had just been reminded at the desk, however, one either charges or pays cash for things—and my funds were dwindling and my credit cards all said DONALD BELPATRI.
No problem, I decided, remembering the policeman with the little box, back in Philadelphia. No matter what the card says, I can alter what the machine says it reads there.
But wait… It was not quite that simple.
For one thing, altering the account number signal would not be sufficient. It had to be altered to something intelligible and acceptable. Otherwise, the transmitter would receive a notice that there was something wrong, and I would be in trouble.
For another thing, the cards all bore my name. While this meant nothing to the computer, which was only interested in an account number associated with some name on file, a human operator on this end would see the name and would also doubtless create a local, personal record of the transaction. This was unacceptable, with Angra shaking the shrubbery after me.
I studied one of my credit cards. The name and numbers were embossed in such a fashion that I couldn’t really do much to alter their values. With the point of my pocket knife, though, it seemed that I might be able to scrape a letter off flush with the surface of the card, so that it would not print onto any paper inserts. A little scribbling and smudging could then mask the letter-sized gap… I got rid of the B and the RI.
DONALD ELPAT. It looked good enough. They never seem to look at the card itself, anyhow, except to check whether it’s still valid and sometimes to see that it’s signed.
I studied my signature on the reverse side of the card: my usual half-legible scrawl. Excellent. I added a few more squig-gles and no one could say that it didn’t read DONALD ELPAT there, too.
… And while I did this, I composed a series of simple biographical data concerning my new persona.
That done, I turned my attention to the matter of accounts. Certain numbers simply would not work. If I altered the signal from the Elpat card to a number in a series that was not in use the receiving computer would take immediate exception. If I chose one corresponding to a real account that had something wrong with it—non-payment by the real owner or such—I would also find myself without credit. I thought about accounts.
Good old 078-05-1120 occurred to me immediately. Back in the 30’s, when the Social Security Act was passed and the first cards issued, a wallet manufacturer had decided to insert a facsimile of one in the little Celluloid-covered pocket of his product, to demonstrate its use to the unimaginative. It did not occur to him that, for the sake of consistency in his estimation of human intelligence, he ought also to have indicated that it was only a sample. The card which accompanied the wallets bore his secretary’s Social Security account number. Later, his secretary was distinguished by becoming the only person in the history of the Social Security program to have her number withdrawn and to be issued a new one. This, because people were indeed using the cards which had accompanied their wallets. And thousands of them had been sold. F.I.C.A. taxes poured into that account over the years. It was never completely unscrambled. A generation later, IRS was still receiving tax returns from all over the country with that magic number on them. And I’d a suspicion that even now, almost sixty years later, there were still a few coming in.
A broad category, therefore, was similarly in order for me now, for credit purposes. Then it hit me. Some companies have a single account for the traveling expenses of key executives and they obtain multiple credit cards bearing the same account number for issuance to the persons in that category. Such a number, backed by the credit of a reputable corporation, would be accepted by the credit company’s computer without question. I could see that an amendment in the area of Donald Elpat’s place of employment would soon be in order. All that I had to do was to discover the proper company and its number.
I thought about it for a few minutes and came up with a possible avenue of research. Since I still had plenty of time, I got up then, turned on the tv and looked at an all-news channel. I was loath to get too far behind on the world’s doings. It’s always good to know whether there’s a flood or a tornado rushing to compound your problems.
I watched for over an hour. There was nothing about a fugitive named BelPatri—not that I’d expected to make the national news—and nothing at all about Angra.
Then I heard a car pull up in front of the office. I switched off the set at about the same time that the car door slammed, and I went to the window and looked out. Then I dropped the curtain and I reached.
Nothing.
I returned to the bed, stretched out and kept reaching.
Nothing. Nothing. Sooner or later, though. I just had to remain receptive…