The Multiple Man Read Online Free Page B

"Because"—I thought as clearly and fast as I could—"a disclosure now would raise more questions than answers. Who is this . . . this double? How'd he get to look like you? And why? How did he die? And . . ." I hesitated.
    He caught it. "And is it really James J. Halliday you've got cooling down in there, while I'm an imposter replacing him? Right?"
    I had to agree. "That's the biggie. And if you're an imposter, who're you working for?"
    He grinned. "The Republicans."
    Seriously, he asked, "Meric . . . do you think I'm an imposter?"
    "Not for a microsecond."
    "Why not?"
    "You wouldn't be challenging me like this if you were. Besides, you're behaving exactly the way you always behave."
    He cocked his head to one side slightly, which is another of his personal little pieces of action. I had never paid much attention to it until that moment.
    "All right," he said at last. "I don't like hiding things from the press unless there's a damned vital reason for it."
    "This is very vital," I said.
    He agreed and then asked to speak with McMurtrie. I got up from the desk and stared again into the cold chamber. The team of green-gowned meditechs was starting to slide the corpse into the stainless-steel cylinder that would be his cryonic sarcophagus. Liquid nitrogen boil-off filled the chamber with whitish vapor. Each of the meditechs wore a face mask; I'd never be able to identify them again.
    Then that one word struck me. Exactly. The man I had just spoken to on the picture-phone acted exactly like the James J. Halliday I'd known and worked for since he first started campaigning. The corpse they were sliding into that cold metal cylinder looked exactly like James J. Halliday. My knees got fluttery again.
    McMurtrie came over beside me. I could see our two reflections in the glass that separated us from the cold chamber. He looked as grim as vengeance. I looked scared as shit.
    "Okay, kid," he told me. "You're in the big leagues now. Put on a straight face and get those newsmen out of here while we ship the casket out the back way."
    One of his men walked with me up to the waiting room near the hospital's main entrance. He was a typical McMurtrie trooper: neatly dressed, quiet and colorless to the point of invisibility. And perfectly capable of quietly, colorlessly, maybe even bloodlessly, killing a man. It was something to think about.
    Len Ryan was among the news people in the waiting room. There were eleven of them, a modern baker's dozen, sitting on the worn and tired-looking plastic chairs, talking and joking with one another when I walked in. Ryan was off in a corner by himself, writing in a thick notebook. He threw me a look that was halfway between suspicion and contempt.
    "Don't any of the news chicks in this town work late anymore?" I cracked, putting on my professional smile.
    "They were all at the airport interviewing the First Lady," said the guy nearest me. He was grossly overweight, not the type you'd expect to chase ambulances. I hadn't known him when I'd worked for the Globe, but he looked older than I. New in town, I figured.
    It was a small room. I stepped into it a few paces and they all stood up expectantly. The floor tiles had been patterned once, but now the colors were all but obliterated from years of people's frightened, weary pacing. The lights were too bright. The heat was up too high. Through the two sealed windows I could see cars whizzing by on Storrow Drive, and the river beyond them, and MIT beyond the river. I wished I could be out there someplace, anyplace, away from here.
    "What's going on, Meric?" asked Max Freid of UPI. We used to call him "Hotdog Max," because he was always shooting for the spectacular story. "Why all the hustle with the Secret Service? Who's the stiff?"
    "Take it easy," I said, making slowdown motions with my hands. "Don't get yourselves excited. Apparently some wino staggered into the alley behind Faneuil Hall tonight and keeled over from a heart attack." McMurtrie can arrange