“No, it would be hellishly dangerous,” Hanno declared. “It might well become lethal, for us and a lot of bystanders. I couldn’t explain why over the phone, what with the haste and the probable listeners and her poor French, but I did convince Macandal we must consider the possible consequences before we let our cat out of the bag—that a snap judgment would be completely irresponsible.”
Wanderer’s voice went dry. “From what you’ve told me about her, that was an argument she found hard to resist.”
“She knows from Aliyat I’ve been around a long time. Tentatively, she’ll credit me with more knowledge of the world than she has. She’ll disappear and lie low till we can better assess the situation.”
“How’s she going to pull that off?”
“Oh, it is easy, rf she has an organization loyal to her,” Svoboda said. “I can imagine any number of ruses. For ex- ample, let a woman who resembles her come to the house. Inside, they exchange clothes, and Macandal walks out. After dark that should work. Her people will hide her until she can reach a refuge she surely prepared beforehand.”
“Hm, bow shall we and she get in touch later, if we don’t know each other’s locations or aliases?” Wanderer asked.
“She must have told her comrade Aliyat what the possibilities are.”
“How can Aliyat tell us? In fact, why are we wasting air on this chatter, when she’s a prisoner and the cops will shortly have the clues to her nature? Didn’t Macandal point that out to you, Hanno?”
“No,” the other man said. “It hadn’t occurred to her. She was shocked, bewildered, harassed, grieved, exhausted. I’m amazed she could think straight at all. Since I wanted her to make her exit, I refrained from bringing the question up. Besides, the Aliyat matter is not entirely hopeless.”
“Chto?” Svoboda cried. “What do you mean?”
“The truth won’t come out overnight,” Hanno reminded them. “Possibly it never would. I’m not certain that copies of prints from those obscure police files of decades ago ever got to Washington. If they did, or if the investigators get the idea of making a search, that’ll take time. And then, if an identity is found—well, Thomas Jefferson, who was as en-tightened a man as ever lived, once said he could more readily believe that some Yankee professors had lied than that stones fell from the sky. It would be scientifically more respectable to assume there’d been a mixup in the records than that a human being could stay young for fifty or a hundred years.”
Svoboda scowled. “Possession of her would not allow that assumption, I think. And she might decide that telling everything will be to her profit.”
“She might very well,” Hanno agreed, remembering. “Oh, a thousand things could go wrong, from our viewpoint. Let’s see if we can’t take corrective action. For that purpose, and for more obvious reasons, we’ll decamp tonight.”
“The gate is watched, you tell me,” Svoboda said glumly. “How, I do not know. I have not noticed a parked car or men standing on that rural road.”
“Why should you? A battery-powered miniature TV camera in the brush opposite will serve. The road dead-ends at the lake, you may recall. Bound anywhere else, you head hi the opposite direction and pass the Willows Lodge. No doubt two or three persons checked in a little while ago and spend more time in their cabin than is usual for vacationers.”
“You can glorify modern technology as much as you want,” Wanderer growled. “Me, more and more I feel the walls closing in.”
“How shall we evade them?” Svoboda asked. Dread and despair had yielded to keenness.
Hanno grinned. “Every fox has two holes to his burrow. Let’s pack what we’ll need. I keep plenty of cash on hand, together with traveler’s checks, credit cards, assorted ID not made out to Tannahill. I’ll hand the servants a plausible story, which’ll contain a red herring. Tonight— A panel at the rear of the fence swings aside without touching off the alarm, if you know what to do. It gives on the woods, and the village is three miles beyond that. There’s a man there, lives alone, grumpy old bachelor type, who likes my magazine except he complains it’s too leftish. I always try to cultivate somebody, whenever I maintain a base for any span of time, somebody I can rely on to do me an occasional favor and not mention it to anyone else. He’ll drive us to where we can get a bus or train. We’ll probably be smart to switch conveyances en route, but we’ll still be in New York tomorrow.”