“Absolutely exact,” I said. “Just as I remember it. I mean, better than I remember it.” I was too boisterous, too jovial, too loud, the way you get when you want to disavow being moved by something. I caught Meyer’s look of concern. I envied him his ability to regress himself to the actual scene, to be with her in that way I had no way to be with her. Memory has a will of its own. When I forced it, she would blur out. It had to come to me in sudden takes, little snippets from the cuttingroom floor of the mind. They came smoking in, stunning me.
The tape was stopped. Jake had put the cassettes in a row, in order. He began numbering them, dating them.
Marc looked at his notes. “When there is a near collision in the air, NASA is the investigating agency. They recommend to the FAA the action to be taken. So do the controllers and airport managers. We’ll recheck the three of them Toomey, Kline, and Ryan, but will come up probably with just what you have, Meyer.”
Meyer nodded and said, ‘I keep thin3dog, Max, wondering what those three do represent. Travis caught that faint continental fisvor. But he says the speech was colloquial American.”
“Buffalo, St. Louis, or Santa Barbara,” I said, “or anyplace in between. Middle height, middle age, no distinguishing features. Office. Flabby and pale. Both with glasses. Invisible men. Clothes off the rack, not cheap and not expensive. HelL if you walked through any downtown past the banks on a Tuesday noon, you’d see them walking together to lunch. If you lined up ten of them, Pd have a sorry job trying to pick out my two.”
‘~You’re describing the average, upper-echelon, middle-Buropean, or Eastern European agent. They don’t see enough daylight. They spend a lot of time on the files. They eat too much starch. And the KGB has the best language schools in the world. Crash courses, and they turn out people who can speak the language of the assigned country like a native. Of course, those guys are motivated. If they don’t work hard enough learning the language, they end up in Magnitogorsk or some damn place, processing internal travel permits. They’re good Just not very flexible. They’re not good at jettisoning one plan in mid-flight and inventing a second one that might work.”
“But how could they fit into all this?” Meyer asked.
Max grinned at him. “You want another scenario? The way I read it, somebody goofed badly on something very important. So they sent Igor and Vashily here on a tidy-up mission. Plug the holes. Find out who knows what, report back, and await orders.”
The Green Ripper
“Their presence would imply some importance to this.”
Jake laughed, and snapped one of the eight-byten glossies with a fingernalL “You bet your ass there’s something important going on. The presence of this little sphere proves that. We’ll go througli the Church of the Apocrypha to locate this Brother Titus and find out if he is coincidence or part of it somehow. I don’t have much hope of unwinding anything in Brussels. We’ve bounced off that wall before. It’s very tight over there.”
Max stood up and said, “We’re very grateful for your cooperation, gentlemen.”
‘din you contact us again?” I asked.
‘doubtful.”
“How would we get in touch with you?”
“Why should you?” There was some amusement in his steady gaze.
I said, “Who knows? Something else happens that fits in with this, who do we ten?”
Jade said to Marc, ‘If we don’t know what’s going on, we don’t know if they are involved more than they think they are. An identity mixup. Or something observed they shouldn’t have seen.”
After a moment of thought, Marc nodded and wrote a number down and tore it out of his pad. “Memorwe this number. Use a phone you can control for a couple of hours. It may take that long for a cat/-back. Here is what you say. That line win always answer, day and night. The person will say hero. You say, ‘Was somebody at this number try” ingto reach Travis McGee?’ They’ll say they don’t know, but they can check around and find out. Then you say, ‘If anyone was, I can be reached at such and such a number.’ then wait. Clear?”