“YOU DON’T ASK ENOUGH questions to pass as a reporter,” Regina Hudson said.
“Where did you get that idea?” Trotter said.
Regina smiled in spite of herself. She didn’t know what else this Trotter was good at, but he had a definite flair for snappy comebacks. The first thing he’d ever said to her was, “Don’t worry, I plan to carry out the assignment in my Undercover Man uniform, the green one with the epaulets.”
And she had to admit she deserved it. But it had been a surprise. When Rines had gotten back in touch with her, he had gone on and on about how this Trotter was their top man, none better, tons of experience, she should have full confidence in him, how lucky he was available, just don’t forget about the strict secrecy.
After all that, she’d been expecting—she wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting. She knew that most real-life undercover men looked like the people they were mixing with, i.e. criminals or middle-level bureaucrats or whatever. On the other hand, Rines had made her expect some kind of cross between Sean Connery and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The circumstances surrounding the meeting had added to the impression. No, she wouldn’t meet the man in Washington, too many people who were too savvy to shrug things off. It wouldn’t do for her to be spotted. They didn’t want their man linked with Washington. She tried to tell him it was ridiculous, but Rines had countered with two things—one, she had promised to do what they asked or call the whole thing off; and two, a year and a half ago she had lunch at a diner in Arlington, Virginia, with Congressman Peter Vitkins (D—Mo.), and it had appeared in Time, Newsweek, Worldwatch, and six hundred newspapers, many of them owned by the Hudson Group. None of which she could deny.
“Where should we meet, then?” she asked.
“New York,” Rines said.
Regina had pointed out that there were numerous savvy people in New York, too. Rines had explained that they didn’t care if their man was linked with New York, and the reason became apparent when he explained the cover they were preparing. Their man would be a feature writer, and she would interview him over lunch and hire him to work on the Kirkester Chronicle. “Pay him the right amount to make it look good,” Rines advised.
So the rendezvous had been set, not at a diner but not in the lobby of the Plaza, either. She met him at a place called Dosanko on Forty-fifth Street between Lexington and Third Avenues, one of a chain of Japanese-style noodle houses. Fortunately, they let her use a fork. The second thing Trotter had said to her was, “Someday I’ll teach you how to use chopsticks. If three billion Asians can learn how to do it, so can you. I’m talking because you don’t seem to be in the mood.”
It wasn’t that so much as Regina’s not knowing what to say. After all the cloak-and-dagger, this mysterious Trotter had turned out to be a tall young man, bordering on the attractive, with dark hair and eyes. And he wore glasses. Real ones, too. Regina had made it a point to get a step behind him, stand on tiptoe, and look through the lenses. He needed them, all right. So much for fantasyland.
They met as arranged, and the editor-in-chief of the Kirkester Chronicle had put out a hand and said, “You don’t look anything like I expected you to,” at which point he passed her the first snappy remark.
She couldn’t hold it against him, though. All the lines were delivered with a smile that drained any possible venom from them. It was a very nice smile.
If she hadn’t been told that Trotter was experienced and highly skilled, and all the other euphemisms people like Fenton Rines liked to use for dangerous, the thought would never have crossed her mind. Since the notion had been planted, though, she could see how this boyish charm and easy manner could be the most dangerous thing about him.
Since she was supposed to be interviewing him, she decided to make it look good (something else Rines had urged her to do) and ask him a few questions, most of which he refused to answer. For instance, he wouldn’t tell her anything about his past, but he would tell her why.
“You just take the background in the resume for the truth. If that’s all you know, you can’t get details confused and let something slip.”
“But I know you never worked for the Baltimore Sun.”
“It’ll check out,” he told her. “If anybody checks.”
“Why a feature writer?”
“If you made me city editor, I’d be tied to a desk. If I were a regular reporter, I’d have to be turning in copy or the editor would get suspicious. As a features man, by the time anybody realizes I’m not doing any work, my real job could be done.”
“Do you think it could be over that soon?”
That was another question he wouldn’t answer.
That had been Tuesday. She’d gone right from lunch to the airport and got home early that evening. She spent Wednesday kicking herself. What she had done was more or less to hire the FBI (or somebody the FBI could call on, which amounted to the same thing) the way she would a private detective agency. It hit her like a faceful of ice water. Concern for her mother, respect for Rines’s reputation, and (she had to face it) a certain amount of My-Family-Has-a-Fortune arrogance had led her into the folly of approaching them with something this tenuous in the first place. She had nothing but the bizarre phone call and her mother’s reaction, something no outsider could be blamed for chalking up to vapors or menopause.
But if Regina had been a fool to ask, why had they gone along? If the FBI was seriously into this kind of thing, she had strolled into a great story, then immediately promised to wipe the whole thing off the record, no matter where it went. She tried to think of some way around it, some alternate path to the same facts, somebody she could quote, so that she could keep her word and still print the story.
It would be completely ethical, she felt obligated to remind herself. Nothing Deep Throat had told Bob Woodward about Watergate had been on the record, for instance. Maybe the thing to do was to become a Deep Throat herself, for some other reporter, just tell him something was going on that ought to be looked into ...
No. It wasn’t going to work. She’d let her instincts as a daughter override the ones she was supposed to have developed as a journalist. Her mother might be peeved if she found out Regina had gone behind her back about this Cronus business, but she would hit the ceiling if she found out her daughter had given a government man clear sailing to meddle in family business without even the possibility of exposure to keep him honest.
The worst thing about it was that she didn’t think she could have done anything else under the circumstances. Her mother had never been afraid of anything before—at least that she’d let her children see—but this had her terrified.
She had even (and this was what had Regina terrified) begun to neglect the business. She had missed a Worldwatch editorial meeting. Fred Smith, the managing editor, had called Regina in a panic, demanding to know where Petra was. Of course, Fred had been more or less a trial since his son had died, but Regina could understand that. It was the power of one word to change her mother’s lifelong habits that got to her.
It had been that phone call that had decided her to get help somewhere. Regina knew herself to be particularly susceptible to emotional states of the people around her, and she was around no one more than her mother. If Petra’s behavior was going to drive everybody at the Hudson Group nuts, Regina would be doomed. It would happen all the sooner if her mother kept disappearing.
It turned out that there had been no cause for alarm the day of the missed meeting. Petra Hudson had decided to drop in on Tina Bloyd. The visit, Wes Charles told Regina later, hadn’t done Petra much good and had agitated the hell out of the bereaved mother. Besides which, Mother had lied. She’d said she had become so involved in the visit, she completely forgot about the editorial meeting. According to Charles, she had specifically refused to call and say she wasn’t going to make it and had forbidden him to do so.
That had really torn it. Regina made an excuse to leave town, and by Saturday she was in Washington. Tuesday was the lunch in New York, and Wednesday was for self-recrimination.
And now it was Thursday, and here was Allan Trotter, for now, at least, the FBI’s gift to journalism. He’d shown up in perfect feature-writer camouflage, dressed somewhere between the popular conception of a best-selling novelist, which feature writers wanted to be, and that of an associate professor of English Lit, which is what a lot of them were attempting to escape from. There were, in the two hundred some odd cities where the Hudson Group had papers, probably a hundred thirty colleges, the English faculties of which were going nowhere. At least a feature writer got his name in the paper.
Trotter had come into her office, smiled at her, and said he was happy to be aboard. He’d already said that until they knew what was going on, she was to act as if he was exactly what he was pretending to be, in public and in private. Regina was not happy with the implication of the possibility of hostile surveillance, but then she hadn’t liked much of anything since her mother came home from that funeral.
All right, she’d told herself as she avoided Trotter’s deceptively friendly brown eyes. This was the time to call it off; she hesitated, and was lost.
“Nice to have you,” she said, trying to sound as if she meant it. There was a lengthy silence that would give the theoretical listeners-in something to think about but was just Regina’s inability to think of anything to say next.
Trotter came to the rescue. “I’d like to see the place, if there’s someone to show me around.”
Of course, Regina thought. Only polite to show the new employee around. And because she didn’t want to hang around a possibly bugged office, she announced she’d do the job herself. Trotter acted as if he’d expected that all along.
She showed him around, not only the Chronicle’s little operation in the basement but the whole building. From the Worldwatch offices to Group Advertising Sales to the cafeteria, she showed him around. They walked until Regina wished she’d worn sneakers, the way she usually did, instead of dressing up a little to greet the new employee.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if Trotter had said anything besides “mm-hmm.”
She saved the printing plant for last, arriving, as she’d planned, at one of the few hours of the day the place wouldn’t be shaking with the roar and clatter of thirty-foot-high, high-speed presses.
She gave all the statistics, as related to her by the German company that made the machines. How many tons they weighed, how many gallons of ink per second they used. How, since they did not only the magazine and the local newspaper here, but special inserts for the entire Hudson Group, as well as hiring out to other magazines and advertisers, that this was one of the world’s busiest pressrooms. She told him that this was all offset, and that the paper went through the machines at nearly two hundred miles an hour.
She pointed at a catwalk that ran down the middle of the room at the level a little above that of the tops of the presses. “You can see it better from up there,” she said. “That’s where the men go to paste the new rolls onto the web. See, they lower them into position, then glue them to the ones already there. While the press is going. It’s a very dangerous job, since the paper going that speed is like a saw and could cut your arm off before you’d even feel it. We have an excellent safety record, though.”
Trotter said, “Mm-hmm,” and Regina, tired of it, had told him he didn’t ask enough questions to pass as a journalist, and gotten the snappy comeback.
Trotter waited a few seconds, then told her, just above a whisper, “Don’t apologize or react to this, but you could have just arranged for me to die.”
Right, don’t react. Regina felt a look of total stupidity spread itself across her face. Trotter pointed discreetly to a man in white coveralls walking briskly along the catwalk to a glassed-in control booth at one end.
“I don’t think he heard you,” Trotter continued in the same barely audible tone, “but he might have. Let’s not take chances.”
Then a loud bell went off, and the presses started to roar. She signaled for him to follow her out. The German company had stressed the danger of being in here too long without ear protection.
Trotter smiled and shook his head. He put his mouth close to Regina’s ear. “I’ve been waiting for this,” he screamed. She could just about hear him. “Let’s talk for a few seconds.”