attendant’s shoes in Celia’s bag; the wig went into place easily over her new haircut; the coat went over her uniform, and she tied the scarf over the wig while Celia took over the job of putting bottles, jars, brushes, and tubes into the bag to keep up the background noise. Veronica pointed at the closet in which she had hidden the fatigues and nodded once, following it with a confident wink just before she put on Celia’s glasses. Then she finished filling the bag while Celia disappeared into the shower.
The matron didn’t gave Veronica a second glance when she came out of the bathroom with Celia’s bag on one hand
and holding Celia’s handkerchief to her face with the other. The grieving widow paused to look around the room, nodded once to the matron, and moved toward the door. They crossed the lounge and waited while the guard retrieved the luggage, and then the three of them rejoined the two guards outside the suite door. The party then reformed and began descending the stairs. –
Celia waited for a few minutes to give anybody a chance to come back for something, then stepped from the shower, found the clothes that Veronica had left, and spent a few minutes putting them on and lacing the boots. Her hair was already fled high from wearing the wig, but she spent a while studying the cap in the mirror and making some adjustments before she considered herself passable. She was
just walking back into the bedroom to wait when she heard the door on the far side of the lounge open, and immediately the suite was filled with the sounds of bodies moving around and voices calling to each other. A few seconds later Colman appeared in the doorway from the lounge. Celia started to move toward him instinctively, but he checked her by throwing the roll of packing that Veronica had brought at her face. “You’re in the Army,” he said gruffly as she caught it. “Move your ass.”
It was the right thing to do. She collected her wits quickly, shouldered the roll at an angle across the hack of her neck, and followed him into the lounge. Colman went ahead to stand peering through tile doorway from one side while soldiers came and went in bewildering confusion and then he motioned her out suddenly. In a strangely dreamlike way she found herself being conveyed down. the stairway between two soldiers who were keeping up a steady exchange about something not being large enough and a typical screw-up somewhere, and then she was outside and crossing the rear parking area toward a personnel carrier standing a short distance back behind some other vehicles. Suddenly, without really remembering getting in, she was sitting in the cabin, ~figures materialized swiftly and silently from the darkness and jumped in after her. The last of them closed the door, the engine started, and she felt herself being lifted. Only then did she start shaking.
“Never say you don’t get anything back for your taxes.” Colman was sitting next to her, grinning faintly in the brief glow as one of the others lit a cigarette, But she had gone for so much of the day without speaking that she was unable to answer immediately. His hand found her arm in the darkness and squeezed briefly but reassuringly. “It’ll be okay,” he murmured. ‘We’ve fixed somewhere safe for you to go, and you’re all set to get out of Phoenix tonight. I’ll be coming with you into Franklin?’
“What about Veronica?’ she whispered.
“One of our units at the base is expecting her. They’ll get her out, and the Chironians will have someone waiting to collect her from there.”
Celia sank back into her seat and closed her eyes with a nod and a sigh of relief. One of the figures in the darkness wanted to know how come somebody called Stanislau knew how to fly something like this; Another voice replied that his father used to steal them from the government
Colman stared at Celia for a few seconds longer. He still didn’t know why Celia should have been so anxious to get away from Sterm or why she should have been in any danger. Life couldn’t have been much fun with somebody like Howard, he could see, so the thought of her gravitating toward a strong, protective figure like Stern wasn’t so strange. And it didn’t seem so unnatural that she should have stayed near Sterm after Howard was killed. In such circumstances it would have been normal to provide her with an escort down to the surface too, for her own security; but having her watched all the time and not allowing