The Face-Changers Read Free Page B

them out the door.

    The voice was almost in her ear. “Stay out of the doorway.” It was the woman. She took Janet’s arm and led her toward the steps leading up to the restaurants on the second floor.
    “What happened?” Janet whispered.
    “They were nastier about letting me lose them a second time.” She changed her direction slightly, and they skirted the stairway, went out the door, and emerged on Light Street.
    “The car is down here.” She brought Janet down Pratt Street, then turned into a parking area for the Convention Center. The car was parked between two big vans.
    Janet came closer. The rear window had a small, round puncture, a milky circle of pulverized safety glass, and around it, a radiating spiderweb of cracks. She knew instantly that it was a bullet hole, and she noticed that it was not on the left side, behind the driver’s seat. It was on the right, where they must have thought she was crouching. The dark woman acknowledged her thought.
    “Don’t worry about that. Just get in. We’re taking too much time.”
    Janet obeyed, wondering how anyone could not worry about that. She listened for some kind of assurance that what had caused the bullet hole was over, but none came. The car began to move away from the Inner Harbor, and she looked through the side and rear windows for the black car. What met her eyes were last glimpses of familiar sights – the National Aquarium, then the World Trade Center, and lots of other buildings that she had never been inside, but that she somehow felt she knew because she had driven past them so many times.
    In minutes they were on the 295 expressway, then the 195, and every sign announced the approach of Baltimore/Washington Airport. But the dark woman pulled off the expressway and glided onto Dorsey Road, then stopped at a hotel near the southern edge of the airport.
    “We’ll have to take a few quick precautions,” the dark woman said. “Come in.”
    She hurried into the nearest wing of the hotel with Janet struggling to keep up, and moved down the carpeted hallway, then into a room. She hurried to the closet. “They’ve seen you, and they’d be fools not to have figured out you might be heading for the airport.”
    “What can we do?”
    “Get rid of everything they’ve seen, and show up a different way.” She laid some jeans and a sweater on the bed, then tossed a pair of thick-soled running sneakers on the floor.
    “Put these on.”
    Janet put on the jeans and sweater, then sat on the bed to tie the sneakers, and the dark woman knelt on the bed behind her to braid her hair in a way she never wore it. “There’s an airport shuttle that stops at all the hotels along here. Maybe we can catch it. They’ll be expecting to see the car.” The woman took a small suitcase out of the closet and opened it. She put Janet’s bag of money and her business suit and blouse into it. “Check the suitcase at the curb. You can’t carry a bag of money on a plane and not have them run it through the X-ray machine, and maybe look inside. After you get to Chicago, throw the clothes away. Once they’ve seen an outfit, it’s dangerous.”
    Janet tried to look in the mirror over the bureau, but the woman took her arm and pulled her to the door. “It’ll have to do.”
    As they walked down the hallway toward the reception area, Janet thought about her appearance. She had not been allowed to see whether it was attractive, but it certainly was better. The clothes had a different look, but also a different feel. The running shoes made her a couple of inches shorter, and they made her walk differently, too. The woman seemed to know dozens of little tricks and shifts and be able to put them into play so quickly that the effect was not a collection of small details, but a transformation.
    The dark woman left her and went to the front desk. She spoke to the clerk, then looked up over the clerk’s head at the clock on the wall, and returned to Janet. “The shuttle bus