Free The Face-Changers by Thomas Perry Page A

obvious. He could not walk out the rear door of the hospital and stroll to his car in the parking lot. What he really needed was to disappear and reappear somewhere else.
    Time was going by, and the longer he waited, the more likely it was that someone would begin to look for him. He put on his sport coat, walked to the fire stairwell, and descended to the first floor. He stepped into the unoccupied break room for the radiologists, walked past the coffee machine, opened the door to the little patio, and slipped onto the lawn.
    Carey walked briskly along the side of the building to the street, then took the long way around the block until he came to his office building. He supposed it was smarter to go in the back door from the parking lot than the front door, so he kept going until he reached it. He could see that the usual collection of cheapskates had parked their cars in his lot so they didn’t have to tip the valet-parking attendants at the restaurants down the street. That reminded him that he hadn’t eaten dinner yet, and he was hungry. Hours and hours ago he had hatched some plan to take Jane to a restaurant. It might as well have been years ago.
    Then he noticed that the third car from the end was Jane’s.
    He stopped, paralyzed with alarm. He had assumed that she would be driving Dahlman out in her car. He looked at his watch. He had finished the operation nearly an hour ago, and Jane had been waiting for the first chance to slip him out.
    What if it had never come? He turned and started to walk back toward the hospital, then stopped. If he went back, he might be putting her in danger. If he found her, what could he do to help her?
    He squeezed his eyes shut. What would she want? What had she said? Every minute that Carey stayed out of sight now would buy her another minute before anyone knew Dahlman was missing. That could last, at most, another hour or two if he didn’t panic and rush back there.
    Carey turned and walked slowly and reluctantly up the side street away from the hospital and away from the restaurants.
    The best he could do would be to go kill some time. There was a movie theater not far from here. The Rialto. He would watch a movie, eat dinner, and then come back. Later tonight there would be lots of questions, but he didn’t have to face them yet.
    Where was Jane? He tried to summon a picture of her driving off somewhere with Dahlman, but since he had just found her car parked behind his office, the picture wouldn’t coalesce. He tried to imagine her on an airplane, but he was fairly certain Dahlman would not have been up to that – not the flying, but fighting the crowds and keeping himself from attracting attention during the long walks in an airport.
    It occurred to Carey that he really had no idea what Jane would do in this situation. For the decade after he had met her in college they had simply been friends. They saw each other maybe once a month until the year before they were married.
    At that time he would not have guessed that she was doing anything secret and dangerous and illegal. He had not guessed until the night when she had told him. And she had initiated that conversation only to warn him that marrying her could put him in danger too. After that she had not talked about her old clients – told him the tricks she had used to make them invisible or throw off their pursuers. He had no clear, specific knowledge of how it was done. It was just something she used to do, and talking about it had made both of them uncomfortable.
    Jane walked down the wooden steps to the cellar. The damp, musty air seemed to her like the house’s breath. The house was a relic of the days when cellars were made of mortared stone and the beams under the floors were rounded logs with the bark stripped off. The coal furnace had been replaced by an oil furnace before she was born, and above the corner where the coal bin had sat there were still old ducts that led up to floor registers that had long ago