his voice, and he lives in Philadelphia, near where I was attacked."
"Let me listen." Lisa called the number. As she heard the message her pink cheeks turned white. "It's him," she said. She hung up. "I can hear him now. 'Take off those pretty panties,' he said. Oh, God."
Jeannie picked up the phone and called police headquarters.
Chapter 53
BERRINGTON JONES DID NOT SLEEP ON SATURDAY NIGHT.
He remained in the Pentagon parking lot, watching Colonel Logan's black Lincoln Mark VIII, until midnight, when he called Proust and learned that Logan had been arrested but Steve had escaped, presumably by subway or bus as he had not taken his father's car.
"What were they doing in the Pentagon?" he asked Jim.
"They were in the Command Data Center. I'm in the process of finding out exactly what they were up to. See if you can track down the boy, or the Ferrami girl."
Berrington no longer objected to doing surveillance. The situation was desperate. This was no time to stand on his dignity; if he failed to stop Jeannie, he would have no dignity left anyway.
When he returned to the Logan house it was dark and deserted, and Jeannie's red Mercedes was gone. He waited there for an hour, but no one arrived. Assuming she had returned home, he drove back to Baltimore and cruised up and down her street, but the car was not there either.
It was getting light when at last he pulled up outside his house in Roland Park. He went inside and called Jim, but there was no reply from his home or his office. Berrington lay on the bed in his clothes, with his eyes shut, but although he was exhausted he stayed awake, worrying.
At seven o'clock he got up and called again, but he still could not reach Jim. He took a shower, shaved, and dressed in black cotton chinos and a striped polo shirt. He squeezed a big glass of orange juice and drank it standing in the kitchen. He looked at the Sunday edition of the Baltimore Sun, but the headlines meant nothing to him; it was as if they were written in Finnish.
Proust called at eight.
Jim had spent half the night at the Pentagon with a friend who was a general, questioning the data center personnel under the pretext of investigating a security breach. The general, a buddy from Jim's CIA days, knew only that Logan was trying to expose an undercover operation from the seventies and Jim wanted to prevent him.
Colonel Logan, who was still under arrest, would not say anything except "I want a lawyer." However, the results of Jeannie's sweep were on the computer terminal Steve had been using, so Jim had been able to find out what they had discovered. "I guess you must have ordered electrocardiograms on all the babies," Jim said.
Berrington had forgotten, but now it came back. "Yes, we did."
"Logan found them."
"All of them?"
"All eight."
It was the worst possible news. The electrocardiograms, like those of identical twins, were as similar as if they had been taken from one person on different days. Steve and his father, and presumably Jeannie, must now know that Steve was one of eight clones. "Hell," Berrington said. "We've kept this secret for twenty-three years, and now this damn girl has found it out."
"I told you we should have made her vanish."
Jim was at his most offensive when under pressure. After a sleepless night Berrington had no patience. "If you say 'I told you so' I'll blow your goddamn head off, I swear to God."
"All right, all right!"
"Does Preston know?"
"Yes. He says we're finished, but he always says that."
"This time he could be right."
Jim's voice took on its parade-ground tone. "You may be ready to wimp out, Berry, but I'm not," he grated. "All we have to do is keep the lid on this until the press conference tomorrow. If we can manage that, the takeover will go through."
"But what happens after that?"
"After that we'll have a hundred and eighty million dollars, and that buys a lot of silence."
Berrington wanted to believe him. "You're such a smart-ass, what do you think we should do next?"
"We have to find out how much they know. No one is sure whether Steven Logan had a copy of the list of names and addresses in his pocket when he got away. The woman lieutenant in the data center swears he did not, but her word isn't enough for me. Now, the addresses he has are twenty-two years old. But