Seven
The following Monday I wore work clothes into a barber shop in Orlando. I was cleanshaven but shaggy. I walked out with a crewcut. I took a bus to Jacksonville, and in the men’s room of the Greyhound station I changed to a suit and covered the crew cut with a wig. In Jacksonville I rented a Plymouth from a national car-rental agency, using a Florida driver’s license made out to Leonard Byron Phelps. I drove the car to Atlanta and destroyed the license as soon as I had turned in the car. I flew to New Orleans, where I disposed of the wig. I used three different airlines and as many names to reach Minneapolis. I slept on planes and dozed in terminals, but didn’t stop at any hotels en route. In Minneapolis there was a foot of snow on the ground and a raw wind that never quit. I had three double whiskeys at a downtown bar and spent sixteen hours at a Turkish bath. I did a little sweating and a lot of sleeping, but I made sure I fitted in a massage and alcohol rub. The rubdown made my suntan a little less pronounced.
The tan was the one thing that bothered me. It would have made me conspicuous anywhere, but in that part of the country at that time of year it drew stares from everyone. I had a cover to explain it — that wasn’t the problem. It was just that I wanted to avoid being memorable. My shape and size are ordinary enough, my face is forgettable, and the tan was the only thing that got in the way.
I had tried a skin bleach earlier. I bought it in a Negro neighborhood in Atlanta. It was a sale the clerk may never forget. I tried it out in a lavatory, testing it on a portion of my anatomy which I rarely expose to the public. The effect was blotchy and unnatural. I suppose repeated applications might have had the desired effect, but it didn’t seem worth the risk.
I took a bus to Aberdeen, South Dakota, a town with twenty thousand people and one car-rental agency. They gave me a two-door-Chevy with heavy-duty snow tires, and the clerk said he guessed there wasn’t much snow where I came from. I showed him a driver’s license that swore I was John NMI Walker, from Alexandria, VA.
I had not known there was so much snow in the world. It came down all the way to Sprayhorn, a fifty-three mile drive that took me almost three hours. The windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with it. I found the motel, the only one in the little town. They had a room for me, but the girl on the desk said they hadn’t expected me until the following day.
I told her the office must have made a mistake. It was my mistake, I was early, and the reservation telegram that Dattner had sent from Washington had been according to plan.
The room was better than I had expected. Wall-to-wall carpeting, a big double bed, and three thousand cubic feet of warm air. I unpacked my suitcase. The closet got two dark suits with Washington labels and the uniform of a major in the United States Army. The dresser got most of the rest.
I had two sets of identification. My wallet was crammed with the paraphernalia of John NMI Walker, everything from credit cards (Shell, Diner’s, Carte Blanche) to army stuff. Only the government papers suggested that J. NMI W. was a military type. They gave my rank as major, all except one dated three years ago which had me down as captain. The new rank had been inserted in ink, with initials after it.
Every shred of Walker ID was counterfeit. It was all high quality, but there wasn’t anything there that an expert couldn’t spot as phony.
My other new self, Richard John Lynch, substituted quality for volume. Mr. Lynch had no credit cards, no driver’s license, no auto registration, no checkbook stubs. Mr. Lynch didn’t even have a wallet. All he had was a flat leather pass case that held a simple little card with his name, picture, fingerprints and description. The name was his and the rest were mine.
Mr. Lynch’s identification announced only that he was an accredited agent of that very intelligence Agency which employed George Dattner and which had decided against employing me. And Mr. Lynch’s ID was the genuine article, absolutely authentic in every respect. There was only one way on earth that anyone could possibly discredit Mr. Lynch’s ID, and that was by pointing out that no one with his name, face, or fingerprints had ever worked for the Agency in question.
I had dinner down the road, then drove back to the motel. I was gone a full hour, but no one tossed my room during that time. I checked rug fibers and powder flecks, and everything was as I’d left it, and nobody is that good. I stretched out on the bed. Twenty minutes later there was a knock on my door. I asked who was there, and a voice called, “That you, Ed?” I said he had the wrong room, and he excused himself and went away.
They were certainly slow, but after all I hadn’t been expected until the following day. I prowled around the room looking for bugs. I didn’t find any, but couldn’t swear there were none. According to George, any tap operation involving someone who was presumably hip included more than one device. There were always one or two obvious mikes for the subject to locate and one or more subtle ones for him to miss. My room at the Doulton, for example, had had a very clever lamp on the bedside table, along with the more noticeable gimmick in the ceiling fixture.
Unless military intelligence hadn’t picked up this procedure, and he thought they had, then the absence of readily identifiable listening devices meant a room was clean. It didn’t matter. I would treat the room as bugged regardless.
I watched television for two hours without paying attention to it. There was one channel and the reception was terrible. I listened to the news on the chance that it would have something important to tell me. It didn’t, and I went to sleep when it was over.
I was up well ahead of the sun. I showered and shaved and put on Maj. Walker’s uniform. The fit was good enough to be true and not too good for a cover identity. They tossed the room while I had breakfast, and I would have known it without the rug fibers or powder. They put a pair of socks back on the wrong side of the drawer. That was good enough to mention to George, if I ever saw him again.
At eleven o’clock I got in the car. I was supposed to have arrived that morning around ten, and my orders called for me to report to my new commanding officer immediately upon arrival. That was fine, I was back on schedule. I drove through the center of Sprayhorn and northwest toward the base. I had my wallet in my hip pocket, my orders on the seat beside me, and my Agency card in the inside breast pocket of my jacket. I drove six miles. The snow had stopped during the night, but there was enough of it on the road to make the drive an ordeal. I had to concentrate on it when I would have preferred to spend the time reminding myself who I was. I was an Agency man pretending to be a career officer. George insisted it was much easier that way, that double covers reinforced each other. I wasn’t so sure.
The compound would have been hard to miss. It was the only thing on the road besides snow. A fifteen-foot fence, barbed and electrified, circled it. Rectangled it, if you prefer. Inside there was a lot of empty ground and three concrete block buildings. They were all about the same size, and they were all about forty-five feet tall, and none of them had any windows. There were also soldiers all over the place, all in heavy brown overcoats, none performing any apparent function.
A sign reappeared every fifty yards along the fence. It announced that all of this was the product testing division of the General Acrotechnic Geodetic Corporation, that admittance was restricted to authorized personnel, and that the fence was electrified. The last statement was true, the middle one misleading, the first a lie. There was no such thing as the General Acrotechnic Geodetic Corporation and probably never would be, since the phrase was gobbledygook. Admittance was restricted specifically to military personnel specifically assigned to the base, the correct name of which was Fort Joshua Tree. It was named for a longdead general who would have been sickened by the things inside the place, a far cry from muskets and cavalry sabers. New times, new customs.