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Minneapolis."
Kay sat back in her chair. "You don't know Conrad Ashling?" she said again,
as if to make sure."
"I've never heard of him."
Kay closed the folder slowly. "That does put a different light on things."
She lapsed into thought, staring at Jarrow fixedly.
Josef resumed. "You were in Atlanta last weekend, isn't that correct? You
stayed at the Hyatt there."
"Yes."
"Why did you go to Atlanta?"
"I don't know. I woke up on Tuesday morning with no memory of going there at
all."
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"You'd been there since Saturday."
"So I discovered when I checked out. I didn't know anything about it."
"What is the last thing you remember before that?" Josef asked.
Jarrow hesitated, looked at Kay, who was still watching him, then back at
Josef again. "I'm not sure if you're going to believe this . . . but I don't
remember anything since last April. You see, I'm supposed to be dead. I've
even seen the certificate that was filed. I think I'm normal, but -nobody
recognizes me." He raised a hand to indicate Rita. "Except Rita here, who says
I'm this person Tony Demiro which is what you seem to think. . . . I don't
know what's happening." He shook his head helplessly.
Kay turned her head to look at Josef. There was still doubt on her face, as
if she was of two minds as to whether to believe this.
"When did you leave Atlanta?" Josef asked Jarrow.
"Tuesday morning, first thing."
"Why?"
"Why? . . . I was confused. I didn't know what I was doing there. There was
nobody around when I woke up. I just wanted to get out and go home."
Josef glanced at Rita. "I'd gone for an early swim while he was still
asleep," she said in answer to his unasked question.
Josef nodded and looked back at Jarrow. "So you went back to Minneapolis?"
"Yes."
"Then what brought you to Chicago?"
"I found Rita's phone number on a pad I picked up in a hotel. Nothing else
was making any sense, so I called it. Nobody else I'd talked to recognized
me."
"But she did?"
"No."
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"Yes."
Jarrow and Rita answered together, then stopped, -confused.
"But not as anyone called Richard Jarrow," Rita said.
"As Warrant Officer Demiro, supposedly killed five months ago?" Josef said.
Rita swallowed visibly and gave a quick nod. "Yes."
Josef looked to Kay as if for a verdict. "It sounds like a complex
reversion," she said. "Jarrow must be an original transfer source. Somehow the
complete associative net has reactivated."
Josef chewed his lip for a moment. "And you've never heard of Ashling?" he
asked again.
"Never," Jarrow said.
"How about a Maurice Gordon?"
Ah, so they did know something about that too. Jarrow reached inside his
jacket and produced Gordon's wallet, opening it to show the ID. "I had this
and other things with me when I woke up. None of it means a thing. I presume
the clothes there were his as well."
Kay took the wallet and examined it, while Josef continued. "Very well. So
why did you go to Atlanta the day before, on Monday?" he asked, indicating
Rita with a nod.
Rita replied, "He called me that morning. It was the same story: he'd woken
up in the hotel and didn't know what he was doing there. But it was different.
He was Tony then. And when I got there that evening he was Tony. Only Tony
didn't remember anything since last May. I stayed, got up early the next
morning to go for a swim as I said, and when I got back to the room he'd gone.
Then I got this call from Minneapolis a day later" she waved a hand "only now
he says he's this teacher."
"So I came to Chicago," Jarrow completed. "And then, last night . . ."
"Yes, we know about that," Josef told him.
"Were they anything to do with you?" Jarrow asked.
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"No."
Jarrow sat back against the couch. So at least he didn't have to go through
all that. A long silence followed. Kay folded the wallet and handed it back.
"I think he's on the level," she pronounced. "We're not going to get anywhere
by staying clammed up." The man in the jacket removed a hand that had been
resting in his pocket and returned the gun he had been holding to a holster
below his arm. Jarrow felt slightly pained as well as startled, not having
realized that his word had been in question all the time.
"Sorry about that. One must take precautions," Josef said matter-of-factly.
He was in a different world, Jarrow told himself. He mustn't let himself get
rattled by this kind of thing.
Josef gave a quick smile behind his beard and came forward a pace from the
window, reversing one of the upright chairs and straddling it to regard them
with his arms folded loosely along the back. "You have been very cooperative.
Now, I think, we owe you something in the way of explanation.
"We are from an organization called Pipeline, which I hope you have never
heard of. It's purpose is to recruit talent and ability for the Offworld
enterprises, particularly skilled industrial personnel, engineers, and
scientists. Our function is getting them out of here and the European
Consolidation states, and offplanet via the FER. All strictly illegal here, of
course, so I suppose you could call us an underground operation of sorts.
Ashling is an important scientist who was about to be processed, but he has
-disappeared."
Rita was listening openmouthed. "Are you saying that you're from there?
You're actually Offworlders, infiltrated down here?"
"Not all of us. But Kay and myself are, yes," Josef -replied.
Jarrow frowned, trying to reconcile all this with the events of last night.
There was still no hint of where Ashling fitted into anything.
"So who were those men who came to the apartment?" he asked. "You said they
weren't anything to do with you?" Hardly a necessary question. It would have
been a strange way, to say the least, for an underground operation to have
conducted itself.
"I can't say for certain," Josef replied. "But we're pretty certain that at
least some of them were from a clandestine government research program, and
had been sent to bring back one of their agents, a subject of the program, who
had run amuck."
The code name, Jarrow thought. Didn't agents usually have code names in this
kind of business? Another piece fell into place. "Was this agent known as
Samurai?" he ventured.
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Josef glanced briefly at Kay, who returned a shrug. "I've not heard that name
before," he confessed. "But it seems possible. Where did you hear it?"
"They yelled it a couple of times before they started breaking down the
door."
"That must be what he went by internally," Kay said.
Josef nodded. "Maurice Gordon was the name he was operating under," he told
Jarrow. "That was what we had identified him as."
"Ah, yes, okay." Jarrow had suspected something similar himself. "So Maurice
Gordon was Samurai's cover."
"So it seems."
Jarrow looked at Josef and Kay in turn. Now they were getting somewhere. "So
far, so good, then," he said. "But what do we know about the person himself.
Who is this Samurai?"
Josef gave him a long, penetrating look, as if inviting him to see the
obvious. Jarrow frowned. The new revelations had come pouring in too quickly
for him to have it all sorted out yet in his mind.
Josef gestured, indicating the side of Jarrow's coat to which he had returned
the wallet. "But you've seen Gordon's ID," he said. "I don't think it could be [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]