Death Match - Diane Duane [27]
He was out the door before Catie could think of an appropriate response to that. Her brother was still stirring the same pot he had been stirring before, looking both intent and angry, and he was reaching for another eggon-a-dish.
“Chemistry?” Catie said, looking at him in complete bemusement.
“Blast yourself out of here,” Hal said, not looking up, “before I call whichever public agency is in charge of having a close relative’s body donated to science.”
Smiling slightly, Catie went on down the hall to her room to change out of her school clothes.
About a hundred and fifty miles away, in the top-floor lobby bar of the Marriott Hilton Parkway in Philadelphia, two men sat across a low bar table and looked down the length of Ben Franklin Parkway, toward the faux-Greek, painted portico of the art museum. Two long lines of trees stretched up the parkway toward Museum Circle, but not a breath of wind stirred them. Every leaf hung still and flat-looking in the heat and the odd light. In the west, thunderclouds were piling up in curdling heaps of white and livid blue, threatening one of those four o’clock thunderstorms to which Philly is prone in most summers. But it was some time from happening yet, and everything outside the big floor-to-ceiling windows of the bar lay in a breathless, panting stillness of heat and humidity, waiting for the storm to break.
The two men who sat there in the bar and looked down the parkway, rather than at one another, were both wearing dark clothes in cuts that were designed not to stand out in any particular way. They had taken off their sunglasses because wearing sunglasses inside was a good way to make you stand out, and they were both drinking nondescript drinks that might or might not have had alcohol in them, to the casual observer.
It was the first time the two men had met nonvirtually, and they had made the discovery about each other that so many people make in such circumstances—that the seeming each of them routinely wore was an almost exact opposite of his real appearance, and therefore could have been used to predict one another’s genuine appearance, if either one had been bothered to try. Darjan turned out to be a short fair man, a little on the bulky side, with hair surprisingly long for the styles that year; and Heming turned out to be tall and slim to the point of boniness, swarthy, and with very close-cropped dark hair. The revelation did not move either of them to like the other one anymore…and it would hardly have been possible for them to like one another less, especially since circumstances had forced them to meet nonvirtually, and thereby lose whatever cover their seemings had until now provided them.
“Anyway, we made contact with one of his people,” Heming was saying. “He was coming up here on business anyway. We’ll see him tomorrow afternoon.”
“Watch where he goes,” said Darjan.
Heming looked bemused at that. “Of course we would. But…you don’t think he’s intending to make contact with some other organization…do you?”
“If he’s smart he won’t,” said Darjan. “If he’s smart he’ll play ball strictly with us, on the one side…and leave everybody else strictly alone, on the other. But I’m sure he knows better than to go to anyone else, anyway. It’s not as if the offer he’s been made is a bad one.”
“Unless…” Heming looked suddenly concerned. “Unless he’s decided to jump into the arms of some law-enforcement organization or another….”
They both sat quite still for a moment. Then Darjan shook his head.
“He wouldn’t be so stupid. It would be suicidal. Anyway, he could tell them anything he liked, but there’d be no evidence to back the claim. We’ve been most careful to cover ourselves completely in all our dealings with him.” He lifted the frosty glass sitting on the table and sipped at it, put it down again. “No,” Darjan said at last. “I don’t see it as being a problem. Nonetheless…keep an eye on his whereabouts for the next few days, until we have a result that favors what our principals want, and things begin to settle down.”
They looked down the parkway.