She saw him right away, too. When she caught sight of him at the back of the theater she looked startled, then perplexed, then gave him a tentative, not quite forgiving, see-you-in-a-minute wave. And it wasn’t much more than a minute before the director abandoned his attempts to get the performance running like clockwork. “Go back for makeup, all of you,” he ordered. “A bad dress rehearsal means a good show, they say. Maybe you can take comfort in that. I know I will.”
And Anita Berman jumped down from the stage and ran up the aisle to meet Dannerman. It was clear she’d made up her mind for forgiveness. “I’m real glad you’re here,” she said, putting up her face to be kissed.
She clung to him for a moment, then pulled back to look at his face. “I guess we’ve kind of been playing telephone tag.”
“I’m sorry about that,” he said, meaning it-meaning at least the “sorry” part. “I’ve got this new job and it keeps me really on the jump.”
“I figured it was something like that. I guess you’re making a lot more money there-?”
“Maybe soon, anyway,” he said vaguely. “But it takes all my time. Matter of fact, I’ll have to be going out of town pretty soon.”
“Ah,” she said. “For very long?”
“I don’t know that yet.”
She was silent for a moment, then said, “Dan, dear, listen. I’ve been thinking about us. I know some men still like to be in control, and maybe-well, if you think I was rushing things, talking about moving in together-“
“That’s not it,” he said uncomfortably. “Look, you need to get ready for the performance and we’ve got a lot to talk about. How about if I meet you after the play?”
She gave him a sudden smile. “That’ll be fine, Dan. Come backstage and we’ll go to the cast party. You can tell me all about the new job and your trip. I’ll be waiting for you.”
So Dannerman had the whole duration of the play to decide on a story about where he was going on the trip he had invented on the spur of the moment, and how long he would be away.
There was a funny thing about that, if only he had known it. It was part of Dannerman’s tradecraft as an NBI agent to tell selected fragments of truth in order to deceive. For a change, this time it was the other way around. Although he didn’t know it yet, the deception was truth. He was indeed going away, in fact very much farther away than he could ever have imagined.
Fidgeting in his seat while waiting for the curtain to go up, Dannerman was trying to decide what to do about Anita Berman. He didn’t have to break up with her. Well, not just yet, anyway. Sometime, yes, because a permanent, committed relationship was out of the question for anybody in Dannerman’s line of work. The worrisome part was that, he was pretty sure, the longer he waited the worse it would be for her when the break did come; and how bad was he willing to make it for sweet, pretty Anita Berman?
When the play began, he was glad to put that question out of his mind; what was happening on the stage held his interest. Maybe the old adage was right; the blunders of the rehearsal had disappeared and the cast was flawless in the first act of The Subway. Anita was beautiful even in her 1920s bargain-basement flapper costume, and whoever the actor was who had taken over for poor Bucky Korngold, he didn’t miss a beat.
Even the play itself was going well with the audience. The Subway was definitely one of Elmer Rice’s more squirrelly works, and Dannerman was the one who had first urged it on the group. It was ideal for them. It was short. It used a large cast- always an asset for an Off-Off-Off-Broadway theater, when everybody involved wanted to get on stage where some slumming big-time media critic might just possibly think their performance worth a few seconds’ commendation in a review. The play was cheap to produce, since it only required one impressionistic-and therefore inexpensive-set. Most important of all, The Subway was just about totally forgotten. No major company had given it a production in close to a hundred years, and so the troupe didn’t have a million library tapes floating around out there to compete with.
He had also vowed to the group that some critics, at least, would be sufficiently intrigued by a long-lost classic of “modern” American theater to make the long run out to Coney Island to see its revival. He was happy to see that he had been right about that. He was pretty sure that at least six or eight of the audience members were actual critics. None of them were smiling, but he didn’t expect that. Critics didn’t smile. The important thing was that they weren’t walking out, either.
Then, when the first act ended, at least two of them were actually clapping. Well, the whole audience was enthusiastic in its applause-not surprising, since a good half of its members were in some way related to one of the actors-but it was a good sign. In the intermission crowd that packed the lobby-once the vestry, when the place had been a church-Dannerman attached himself, as inconspicuously as possible, to a woman he was nearly sure was a TV talk-show host, trying to overhear what she was saying to her companion. But she was only commenting on the buskers on the sidewalk outside: two Arab kids tap-dancing while a third, in an “I LOVE Allah” T-shirt, worked the intermission crowd for cash. He started for another potential critic and was annoyed when someone touched his arm. He turned to face a short, plump woman who was placidly gazing up at him. “Why, Danno,” she said, “it really is you, isn’t it? Nice to run into you like this. Why don’t we step outside for a little air?”
“Damn it, Hilda,” he said. “What the hell are you doing here?”
She didn’t answer that, but then she didn’t need to. She simply steered him firmly out of the doors and around the corner to where a large truck was parked at the curb. The liquid-crystal display on its side glittered with the words NIITAKE BROS. MOVING & STORAGE, but Dannerman knew it was not going to be any ordinary moving van.
It wasn’t. It turned out to be a complete mobile NBI surveillance station, with a Police Corps master sergeant saluting smartly as Colonel Hilda Morrisey brought him in.
“It’s time for us to do a little business,” she said cheerfully. “Take a pew, Danno. Want some coffee? A beer? We’re pretty well stocked here, and Horace’ll get you anything you want.”
“What I wanted was to be left alone for one damn evening with my friends.”
“Another time, Danno. How’s it going?”
“As well as can be expected, considering you picked Korngold up the day before the opening.”
“Not me. They,” she corrected. “They picked everybody in the operation up, but I wasn’t involved. I’ve been off the Carpezzio business as long as you have, because your cousin’s is more important. Let’s have your report.”
She absorbed the news about the Floridian general and the diamonds without comment, but winced when he told her that the “muggers” had broken Mick Jarvas’s wrong arm. “We’ll have to do that another way,” she said resignedly. “You’ve got to get his job, because she’s going out to Starlab and you’re going to have to go with her.”
He goggled at the woman. “Into space? Nobody goes into space anymore!”
“She does; that’s what she was bribing the general for. And she would’ve taken Jarvas along for muscle, but we’ll have to change that.”
“You want me to go into space?” he said again.
“Why are you making such a big deal out of this? Lots of people have gone into space.”
“Not the Bureau! And not recently for almost anybody.”
“Well, until recently the Bureau didn’t have a reason.”
He looked at her more carefully. “Something’s happened,” he said.
“That data from your cousin’s file happened, Danno,” the colonel said triumphantly. “I knew there’d be something there. You know what it was? Synchrotron radiation!”
He said impatiently, “Cut the crap, Hilda. I don’t know what that is.”
“Well, neither do I, exactly. But that’s what started your cousin off. Seven or eight months ago the observatory was trying one more time to reactivate the satellite, and they detected a burst of this synchrotron radiation coming from it.”
“But you said to check into gamma radiation.”
“I know what I said. The agent who passed the word along must’ve gotten it wrong; anyway, the word is it’s definitely synchrotron, not gamma. There wasn’t much of it. It lasted just for a few seconds. But it was definite, according to your cousin’s analysis, and the thing is, there isn’t supposed to be anything on Starlab that could cause it.” She paused, studying his face. “So you know what that means? Something’s been added to Starlab.”