“I don’t know. We could build a fort and have a snowball fight.”

It laughed. “I have a better idea.” About a kilometer back down the hill was a quaint twentieth-century hotel, where they spent a couple of hours under a ticking ceiling fan, making love and then quietly sharing their life stories. Russ did most of the talking, but then he thought he had lived a lot longer.

They got back to the project site just before dark, and for appearances’ sake, went their separate ways, Russ going downtown for dinner and the changeling getting a sandwich at the beach concession.

The changeling assumed that their secret wouldn’t be a secret for long; in fact, it was out before they left their hotel room, since the clerk had recognized Russ. On Samoa, gossip is a varsity sport, a high art. The clerk had a cousin who worked at the project, and every native employee knew some version of the story before Russ and Rae came down the hill. Everyone else would know in a day or two.

But they wouldn’t know it all. Russell couldn’t sleep that night. He liked women but was married to work; it had been almost thirty years since the last time he would have called himself “in love.” But there was no other word for what he felt for Rae. He couldn’t get her out of his mind. How lucky he was; how much this day had changed his life.

He didn’t know the half of it.

38

Los Angeles, California, 25 June 2021

The fingerprints betrayed the changeling. The real Rae Archer had her driver’s license renewed, and her fingerprints went into the Homeland Security database.

In a fraction of a second, a computer flagged them as identical to a set that was in a CIA database. The CIA thanked Homeland Security for the information and said they would take it from here.

Everybody working on the Poseidon project had unwittingly provided latent prints to a Samoan dishwasher who was employed by the CIA. When the CIA found that there were two Rae Archers with identical prints, one of them employed in a supersecret foreign scientific project, they went into high gear.

An apologetic man from the LAPD showed up at Rae Archer’s place and said he had to do the driving exam fingerprints over; they’d been misplaced.

The real Rae Archer was pleasantly surprised that the state would come to her, rather than asking her to come back downtown, but wished they’d given her some warning; she looked a mess. The handsome officer didn’t care, though, and neither did the woman in the car, behind the telephoto lens.

Back in Langley, in a bland building that had served the same function for sixty years, agents looked at the evidence and considered what was possible, what was legal, and what they would do.

They had several minutes of video of Rae Archer, somewhat harried mother of triplets, and six jpegs of Rae Archer, lab assistant in Samoa. They were at least superficially the same woman, a very attractive Japanese-American. That they shared features and figure was unusual; that they shared fingerprints and retinal patterns meant that the one in Samoa was a new kind of spy, perhaps a clone.

But who would bother to clone Rae Archer, and who could have done it, back in the nineties?

They asked around and confirmed that no, she was not one of ours, and no, the fingerprints and retinas were not in our bag of tricks. You could fake the retinal patterns by data substitution, but the fingerprints were pulled from a water glass the spy had handed to the dishwasher.

They desperately had to get her in a room and ask her some questions.

39

Apia, Samoa, 15 July 2021

The changeling was interested and amused by people’s changing attitudes toward Rae. Some obviously thought she was a shameless manipulator, or maybe just a nymphomaniac. A lot of the men were happy for Russ, the old dog, or ruefully jealous. Rae didn’t wear makeup and dressed severely, at least in the office, but the men said they had her pegged as a hot number from the beginning. The ones who had seen her swimming had seen part of the rising sun tattooed over her shapely butt.

Some of the men and most of the women could see there was more than sex going on, though. The way she looked at him and he looked at her; the way their voices changed when they talked to each other.

After the snow day, most people came back to work with renewed vigor. A few had not benefited from having a day to reflect on the lack of results—maybe it was time to bring the government in.

The government was coming in, but not for decryption.

Two CIA agents, masquerading as honeymooners, reserved the fancy Wing Room at Aggie Grey’s for a week. Four other agents rented the flanking rooms. They had flown into American Samoa on military aircraft, and come to Apia on the ferry, so there was no nonsense about luggage being searched.

A seventh agent, a white-haired old lady, got a room at the bed-and-breakfast where Rae Archer was staying. An hour after maid service the second day, Rae’s room was thoroughly bugged.

That surveillance did them no good. The changeling was automatically cautious, mimicking human behavior. It ate and drank and excreted at regular intervals, and lay down in the dark for eight hours every night. That it was analyzing 31,433 ones and zeros, instead of sleeping, would not be obvious to any observer.

Three times she came in early in the morning, having spent the night with her boss. That mitigated against the direct approach, going straight to Poseidon and showing them what they knew about the mysterious employee. Besides the fact of her sexual relationship with the second in command, perhaps a love affair, what they learned about Jack Halliburton did not make them optimistic about his cooperating with the American government, either. He had cynically used the American Navy to put together a pool of talented specialists, hired them away, and quit his commission in an acrimonious scene. He wasn’t even an American citizen anymore.

The other direct approach, just snatching the woman off the street or from her room, had some merit—they didn’t know it would be easier to “kidnap” a Powell tank—but as they had no legitimate jurisdiction here, they wanted to be a little more subtle. They used a lure, an indirect one.

Russ had dropped his business card into a box for a once-monthly drawing that awarded a weekend for two at Aggie Grey’s, at either the Wing Room or the Presidential Suite. He won the Wing Room, the weekend after the honeymooners left.

They knew they would have to deal with Russ sooner or later. Best do it directly.

There were three possibilities: Russ would arrive first, or Rae, or they would come in together. The last was not likely, since they were still being discreet. But the CIA team was ready for any of the three, as well as the trivial case where neither showed up.

If Russ had come through the door first, they would have had to do some fast explanation. But it was the woman.

The changeling came into the sumptuous room and tossed its overnight bag on the bed, and went into the bathroom to check its hair. It heard a vague sound in the hall, which was a man shoving a wooden wedge between the door and frame, jamming it shut, and the plain sound of another door opening and closing.

It sped out of the bathroom and saw the man and woman who had just entered from the adjoining room.

“Don’t make this difficult,” the man said. “You know why we’re here.”

The changeling answered automatically while considering various options: “You tell me.”

“You’re not Rae Archer. But you match her so precisely that you must be a clone or something.”