Ivan and Sasha traded a long glance, and Ivan blinked first. “So the welcoming committee will know it’s paying for a gold brick. As for the poor bastard who’s doing all the flying: at the least, he won’t get the ransom money. Without the devil’s own luck, he won’t get back at all.
“Well, it can’t be helped, Ivan. I can’t divulge any more because if I burn myself over this, I can’t be in place later. You understand that by now, surely.”
It may have been some faint noise; or perhaps the unusual note of supplication in the man’s voice. For whatever reason, the cat flowed up and across the table, springing unhurriedly from table to workbench to shelving, where he sat peering at a mousehole with iron-clad patience.
“All right, you don’t understand. I can accept that,” Sasha said, tiring of this parodied conversation, yet unwilling to abandon it. He studied Scenario Two briefly, then sighed and gathered the paper pieces of his alter ego for ritual cremation.
He turned before kneeling at the furnace. “Let me tell you something, Ivan,” he said to the back of the cat’s head. “There are times, these days, when I’m not sure I understand either.”
TEN
On a Wednesday afternoon, Petra Whirled out of Brown University’s failure analysis lab in a foul mood, sockless in her Reeboks, shoving her zippered nylon bag down into the bike’s basket as if the nylon carried the image of her prof’s inscrutable face. Hsia had dinged her seven points for ignoring conventional approaches on her term projectbut she could regain those points before end of term by pulling an all-nighter, doing it by the book this time.
She fitted her helmet on, thrusting stray tufts of honey-tinted hair under the helmet’s plastic rim so they wouldn’t whip into her eyes, then donned her bike chain like a necklace and swung a slender jeans-clad leg over the old American-made Schwinn. A man’s bike, not even one of the trendy foreign jobs, but the thing was sturdy as a brick with that extra bar on its frame and mounting it was no problem for someone who never wore skirts on campus. For Petra Leigh, the Schwinn made a statement as clear as Uncle Dar’s old musclecar.
She saw that the traffic on Waterman wasn’t heavy yet, and calculated she could make good time heading north along Elmgrove. To pull that all-nighter, or to snack from her apartment fridge and then meet Randy and Jason and Bev to parboil Hsia over pitchers of beer: that was what Petra thought about as she pedaled hard, giving a workout to thighs she imagined were too chunky. Jason might come on like the Western world’s most dedicated grad student, but she knew his interest in curves went beyond bridge catenaries. If she expected to pick his formidable brains next term, it was time she got him thinking about her as worthy of picking, too. What’s the reciprocal for Petra? One over Petra, she recited the engineering joke to herself. She probably wouldn’t let that happen. Jason was sweet, though still a boy in some ways…
She noticed the black Ford Tempo only as one of several cars that jiggled in her helmet’s tiny rearview. The Ford fell back, but never more than a hundred yards behind her during the twenty-minute ride to her place.
She locked helmet and bike together, noting that only one other bike leaned against the porch rail of the fine old clapboard house which was, in Petra’s opinion, going to simply collapse one of these days from the sheer weight of students and books. Her room with its shared bath was on the first floor, and Petra knocked a quick tattoo on Bev’s door as she passed it, getting no response, expecting none. She was visible from the street as she continued past the stairs and unlocked the door to her room.
That decision over the all-nighter was still to be made, or so she thought, as Petra popped a cassette into her player. The new-age synthesizer music of Kitaro, otherworldly and abstract, often helped her concentrate. She dunked a sprig of broccoli into Cheez-Whiz, began to nibble, and flopped her project notes open to Hsia’s marginal comments. Their gist was that she must walk flawlessly before she could fly over conventional stuff. But God, traditional engineering practice could be dull, dull, dull! Two stodgy approaches occurred to her immediately; she grabbed a pencil and jotted them down, with tiny draftsman’s numerals below, 0:45’ and 0:30’. It should take her no more than an hour and a quarter to dispose of both those silly exercises.
She heard the knock at the front door as it echoed down the hall, and ignored it. The knock at her own door, a minute later, made her jump. Bev never knocked like that. “Randy? Come on in, I don’t think I can” The door swung open, but it wasn’t Randy.
“Miss Leigh?” The man was tanned, windburned, and middle-aged, reminding her of a slightly overweight Marlboro man, with graying hair that could use a trim, dressed casually in tan gabardine pants with an Indiana Jones leather jacket over a plain sportshirt. Petra’s first impression was that she had seen him somewhere before, but he did not come in. He held a flat plain-wrapped package in his free hand. “Miss Petra Leigh.” His tone said he was certain.
“That’s me,” she said, pushing away from the rickety table, faintly embarrassed to be caught with a mouthful of Cheez-Whiz.
“For you,” the man said in a gravelly voice that registered from somewhere, sometime. His smile seemed diffident but businesslike.
Petra walked to the door, knowing it was not smart to allow strange men into her room, seeing that this one did not seem anxious to enter anyway. She took the slender package, smiling her question instead of voicing it.
“I’m supposed to wait,” was all he said, nodding at the package as he handed it over. “If there’s not a note in there, somebody goofed.” Then he stepped back into the hall and pulled the door shut.
Petra tore the wrapping off to find a pound of See’s candy, the soft centers she’d loved since she was old enough to ransack a dresser drawer. For every special occasion in her life, Uncle Dar had given her a pound of See’s. She smiled and opened the note, typewritten on plain paper, and then the smile began to fade.
Pets: everyone in the family is fine, and John Smith will see to your safety. He will bring you to us in an unmarked black Ford (sorry, no spare Javelins) but don’t expect him to tell you why. Phil and I will explain later, and there is nothing to worry about if you hurry. Pack for a weekend outing. If you have any problem with this, call my secretary, but for your own safety, waste no time. Smith knows his business. He has watched over you before this!
Somehow, those mentions of “fine” and “safety” made her feel less than fine and not awfully safe even with a man who was obviously a bodyguard standing right on the other side of that door. Then she had seen Mr. Smith before. Never until this instant had James Darlington Weston’s occupation seemed entirely real to Petra, and images from the “Spy v. Spy” cartoons in Mad magazine fled ludicrously through her mind. The candy was right, the nickname strictly family, and she could see a black Ford parked outside, but Uncle Dar’s initial had been scrawled in a hurry. She opened the door again. “I’ll need a few minutes,” she said to the man’s back. “You’d better come in. Have some candy,” she added as she tossed the box on the table.
He closed the door softly, then strode to the window as Petra began to stuff extra clothing into a TWA bag. “Want me to put the food into your refrigerator?” His attention to such a homey detail lessened Petra’s attack of nerves.