Firestarter

1

Two handsome Southern plantation homes faced each other across a long and rolling grass lawn that was crisscrossed by a few gracefully looping bike paths and a two-lane crushed-gravel drive that came over the hill from the main road. Off to one side of one of these houses was a large barn, painted a bright red and trimmed a spotless white. Near the other was a long stable, done in the same handsome red with white trim. Some of the best horseflesh in the South was quartered here. Between the barn and the stable was a wide, shallow duckpond, calmly reflecting the sky.

In the 1860s, the original owners of these two homes had gone off and got themselves killed in the war, and all survivors of both families were dead now. The two estates had been consolidated into one piece of government property in 1954. It was Shop headquarters.

At ten minutes past nine on, a sunny October day-the day after Andy and Charlie left New York, for Albany in a taxicab-an elderly man with kindly, sparkling eyes and wearing a woolen British driving cap on his head biked toward one of the houses. Behind him, over the second knoll, was the checkpoint he had come through after a computer ID system had okayed his thumbprint. The checkpoint was inside a double run of barbed wire. The outer run, seven feet high, was marked every sixty feet by signs that read CAUTION! GOVERNMENT PROPERTY LOW ELECTRIC CHARGE RUNS THROUGH THIS FENCE! During the day, the charge was indeed low. At night, the on-property generator boosted it to a lethal voltage, and each morning a squad of five groundskeepers circled it in little electric golf carts, picking up the bodies of crisped rabbits, moles, birds, groundhogs, an occasional skunk lying in a pool of smell, sometimes a deer. And twice, human beings, equally cooked. The space between the outer and inner runs of barbed wire was ten feet. Day and night, guard dogs circled the installation in this run. The guard dogs were Dobermans, and they had been trained to stay away from the electrified wire. At each corner of the installation there were guard towers, also built of spanking-red barnboard and trimmed in white. They were manned by personnel who were expert in the use of various items of death-dealing hardware. The whole place was monitored by TV cameras, and the views these various cameras presented were constantly scanned by computer. The Longmont facility was secure.

The elderly man biked on, with a smile for the people he passed. An old, baldheaded man in a baseball cap was walking a thin-ankled filly. He raised his hand and called, “Hi, Cap! Ain’t this some kind of a day!”

“Knock your eye out,” the man on the bike agreed. “Have a good one, Henry.”

He reached the front of the northernmost of the two homes, dismounted his bike, and put down its kickstand. He breathed deeply of the mild morning air, then trotted spryly up the wide porch steps and between the broad Doric columns.

He opened the door and stepped into the wide receiving hall. A young woman with red hair sat behind a desk, a statistics-analysis book open in front of her. One hand was holding her place in the book. The other was in her desk drawer, lightly touching a.38

Smith amp; Wesson.

“Good morning, Josie,” the elderly gent said.

“Hi, Cap. You’re running a little behind, aren’t you?” Pretty girls could get away with this; if it had been Duane’s day on the front desk, he could not have done. Cap was not a supporter of women’s liberation.

“My top gear’s sticking, darlin.” He put his thumb in the proper slot. Something in the console thudded heavily, and a green light fluttered and then remained steady on Josie’s board. “You be good, now.”

“Well, I’ll be careful,” she said archly, and crossed her legs.

Cap roared laughter and walked down the hall. She watched him go, wondering for a moment if she should have told him that creepy old man Wanless had come in some twenty minutes ago. He’d know soon enough, she supposed, and sighed. What a way to screw up the start of a perfectly fine day, having to talk to an old spook like that. But she supposed that a person like Cap, who held a position of great responsibility, had to take the sour with the sweet.

2

Cap’s office was at the back of the house. A large bay window gave a magnificent view of the back lawn, the barn, and the duckpond, which was partially screened with alders. Rich McKeon was halfway down the lawn, sitting astride a miniature tractor-lawnmower. Cap stood looking at him with his arms crossed behind his back for a moment and then went over to the Mr. Coffee in the corner. He poured some coffee in his U.S.N. cup, added Cremora and then sat down and thumbed the intercom.

“Hi, Rachel,” he said.

“Hello, Cap. Dr. Wanless is-”

“I knew it,” Cap said, “I knew it. I could smell that old whore the minute I came in.”

“Shall I tell him you’re just too busy today?”

“Don’t tell him any such thing,” Cap said stoutly. “Just let him sit out there in the yellow parlor the whole frigging morning. If he doesn’t decide to go home, I suppose I can see him before lunch.”

“All right, sir.” Problem solved-for Rachel, anyway, Cap thought with a touch of resentment. Wanless wasn’t really her problem at all. And the fact was, Wanless was getting to be an embarrassment. He had outlived both his usefulness and his influence. Well, there was always the Maui compound. And then there was Rainbird.

Cap felt a little inward shudder at that… and he wasn’t a man who shuddered easily.

He held down the intercom toggle again. “I’ll want the entire McGee file again, Rachel. And at ten-thirty I want to see Al Steinowitz. If Wanless is still here when I finish with Al, you can send him in.”

“Very good, Cap.”

Cap sat back, steepled his fingers, and looked across the room at the picture of George Patton on the wall. Patton was standing astride the top hatch of a tank as if he thought he were Duke Wayne or someone. “It’s a hard life if you don’t weaken,” he told Patton’s image, and sipped his coffee.

3

Rachel brought the file in on a whisper-wheeled library cart ten minutes later. There were six boxes of papers and reports, four boxes of photographs. There were telephone transcripts as well. The McGee phone had been bugged since 1978.

“Thanks, Rachel.”

“You’re welcome. Mr. Steinowitz will be here at ten-thirty.”

“Of course he will. Has Wanless died yet?”

“I’m afraid not,” she said, smiling. “He’s just sitting out there and watching Henry walk the horses.”

“Shredding his goddam cigarettes?”

Rachel covered her mouth like a schoolgirl, giggled, and nodded. “He’s gone through half a pack already.”

Cap grunted. Rachel left and he turned to the files. He had been through them how many times in the last eleven months? A dozen? Two dozen? He had the extracta nearly by heart. And if Al was right, he would have the two remaining McGees under detection by the end of the week. The thought caused a hot little trickle of excitement in his belly.

He began leafing through the McGee file at random, pulling a sheet here, reading a snatch there. It was his way of plugging back into the situation. His conscious mind was in neutral, his subconscious in high gear. What he wanted now was not detail but to put his hand to the whole thing. As baseball players say, he needed to find the handle.

Here was a memo from Wanless himself, a younger Wanless (ah, but they had all been young then), dated September 12, 1968. Half a paragraph caught Cap’s eye:

… of an enormous importance in the continuing study of controllable psychic phenomena. Further testing on animals would be counterproductive (see overleaf 1) and, as I emphasized at the group meeting this summer, testing on convicts or any deviant personality might lead to very real problems if Lot Six is even fractionally as powerful as we suspect (see overleaf 2). I therefore continue to recommend…

You continue to recommend that we feed it to controlled groups of college students under all outstanding contingency plans for failure, Cap thought. There had been no waffling on Wanless’s part in those days. No indeed. His motto in those days had been full speed ahead and devil take the hindmost. Twelve people had been tested. Two of them had died, one during the test, one shortly afterward. Two had gone hopelessly insane, and both of them were maimed-one blind, one suffering from psychotic paralysis, both of them confined at the Maui compound, where they would remain until their miserable lives ended. So then there were eight. One of them had died in a car accident in 1972, a car accident that was almost certainly no accident at all but suicide. Another had leaped from the roof of the Cleveland Post Office in 1973, and there was no question at all about that one; he had left a note saying he “couldn’t stand the pictures in his head any longer.” The Cleveland police had diagnosed it as suicidal depression and paranoia. Cap and the Shop had diagnosed it as lethal Lot Six hangover. And that had left six.

Three others had committed suicide between 1974 and 1977, for a known total of four suicides and a probable total of five. Almost half the class, you might say. All four of the definite suicides had seemed perfectly normal right up to the time they had used the gun, or the rope, or jumped from the high place. But who knew what they might have been going through? Who really knew?

So then there were three. Since 1977, when the long-dormant Lot Six project had suddenly got red hot again, a fellow named James Richardson, who now lived in Los Angeles, had been under constant covert surveillance. In 1969 he had taken part in the Lot Six experiment, and during the course of the drug’s influence, he had demonstrated the same startling range of talents as the rest of them: telekinesis, thought transference, and maybe the most interesting manifestation of all, at least from the Shop’s specialized point of view: mental domination.

But as had happened with the others, James Richardson’s drug-induced powers seemed to have disappeared completely with the wearing off of the drug. Follow-up interviews in 1971, 1973, and 1975 had shown nothing. Even Wanless had had to admit that, and he was a fanatic on the subject of Lot Six. Steady computer readouts on a random basis (and they were a lot less random since the McGee thing had started to happen) had shown no indication at all that Richardson was using any sort of psi power, either consciously or unconsciously. He had graduated in 1971, drifted west through a series of lower-echelon managerial jobs-no mental domination there-and now worked for the Telemyne Corporation.

Also, he was a fucking faggot.

Cap sighed.

They were continuing to keep an eye on Richardson, but Cap had been personally convinced that the man was a washout. And that left two, Andy McGee and his wife. The serendipity of their marriage had not been lost on the Shop, or on Wanless, who had begun to bombard the office with memos, suggesting that any offspring of that marriage would bear close watching-counting his chickens before they had hatched, you could say-and on more than one occasion Cap had toyed with the idea of telling Wanless they had learned Andy McGee had had a vasectomy. That would have shut the old bastard up. By then Wanless had had his stroke and was effectively useless, really nothing but a nuisance.

There had been only the one Lot Six experiment. The results had been so disastrous that the coverup had been massive and complete… and expensive. The order came down from on high to impose an indefinite moratorium on further testing. Wanless had plenty to scream about that day, Cap thought… and scream he had. But there had been no sign at all that the Russians or any other world power was interested in drug-induced psionics, and the top brass had concluded that in spite of some positive results, Lot Six was a blind alley. Looking at the long-term results, one of the scientists who had worked on the project compared it to dropping a jet engine into an old Ford. It went like hell, all right… until it hit the first obstacle. “Give us another ten thousand years of evolution,” this fellow had said, “and we’ll try it again.”

Part of the problem had been that when the drug-induced psi powers were at their height, the test subjects had also been tripping out of their skulls. No control was possible. And coming out the other side, the top brass had been nearly shitting their pants. Covering up the death of an agent, or even of a bystander to an operation-that was one thing. Covering up the death of a student who had suffered a heart attack, the disappearance of two others, and lingering traces of hysteria and paranoia in yet others-that was a different matter altogether. All of them had friends and associates, even if one of the requirements by which the test subjects had been picked was a scarcity of close relatives. The costs and the risks had been enormous. They had involved nearly seven hundred thousand dollars in hush money and the sanction of at least one person-the godfather of the fellow, who had clawed his eyes out. The godfather just would not quit. He was going to get to the root of the matter. As it turned out, the only place the godfather had got was to the bottom of the Baltimore Trench, where he presumably still was, with two cement blocks tied around whatever remained of his legs.

And still, a great deal of it-too damn much-had just been luck.

So the Lot Six project had been shelved with a continuing yearly budget allotment. The money was used to continue random surveillance on the survivors in case something turned up-some pattern.

Eventually, one had.

Cap hunted through a folder of photographs and came up with an eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white of the girl. It had been taken three years ago, when she was four and attending the Free Children’s Nursery School in Harrison. The picture had been taken with a telephoto lens from the back of a bakery van and later blown up and cropped to turn a picture of a lot of boys and girls at playtime into a portrait of a smiling little girl with her pigtails flying and the pistol grip of a jumprope in each hand.

Cap looked at this picture sentimentally for some time. Wanless, in the aftermath of his stroke, had discovered fear. Wanless now thought the little girl would have to be sanctioned. And although Wanless was among the outs these days, there were those who concurred with his opinion-those who were among the ins. Cap hoped like hell that it wouldn’t come to that. He had three grandchildren himself, two of them just about Charlene McGee’s age.

Of course they would have to separate the girl from her father. Probably permanently. And he would almost certainly have to be sanctioned… after he had served his purpose, of course.

It was quarter past ten. He buzzed Rachel. “Is Albert Steinowitz here yet?”

“Just this minute arrived, sir.”

“Very good. Send him in, please.”

4

“I want you to take personal charge of the endgame, Al.”

“Very good, Cap.”

Albert Steinowitz was a small man with a yellow pale complexion and very black hair; in earlier years he had sometimes been mistaken for the actor Victor Jory. Cap had worked with Steinowitz off and on for nearly eight years-in fact they had come over from the navy together-and to him A1 had always looked like a man about to enter the hospital for a terminal stay. He smoked constantly, except in here, where it wasn’t allowed. He walked with a slow, stately stride that invested him with a strange kind of dignity, and impenetrable dignity is a rare attribute in any man. Cap, who saw all the medical records of Section One agents, knew that Albert’s dignified walk was bogus; he suffered badly from hemorrhoids and had been operated on for them twice. He had refused a third operation because it might mean a colostomy bag on his leg for the rest of his life. His dignified walk always made Cap think of the fairy tale about the mermaid who wanted to be a woman and the price she paid for legs and feet. Cap imagined that her walk had been rather dignified, too.

“How soon can you be in Albany?” he asked Al now.

“An hour after I leave here.”

“Good. I won’t keep you long. What’s the status up there?”

Albert folded his small, slightly yellow hands in his lap. “The state police are cooperating nicely. All highways leading out of Albany have been road blocked. The blocks are set up in concentric circles with Albany County Airport at their center. Radius of thirty-five miles.”

“You’re assuming they didn’t hitch a ride.”

“We have to,” Albert said. “If they hooked a ride with someone who took them two hundred miles or so, of course we’ll have to start all over again. But I’m betting they’re inside that circle.”

“Oh? Why is that, Albert?” Cap leaned forward. Albert Steinowitz was, without a doubt, the best agent, except maybe for Rainbird, in the Shop’s employ. He was bright, intuitive-and ruthless when the job demanded that.

“Partly hunch,” Albert said. “Partly the stuff” we got back from the computer when we fed in everything we knew about the last three years of Andrew McGee’s life. We asked it to pull out any and all patterns that might apply to this ability he’s supposed to have.”

“He does have it, Al,” Cap said gently. “That’s what makes this operation so damned delicate.” “All right, he has it,” Al said. “But the computer readouts suggest that his ability to use it is extremely limited. If he overuses it, it makes him sick.”

“Right. We’re counting on that.”

“He was running a storefront operation in New York, a Dale Carnegie kind of thing.”

Cap nodded. Confidence Associates, an operation aimed mainly at timid executives. Enough to keep him and the girl in bread, milk, and meat, but not much more.

“We’ve debriefed his last group,” Albert Steinowitz said. “There were sixteen of them, and each of them paid a split tuition fee-one hundred dollars at enrollment, a hundred more halfway through the course, if they felt the course was helping them. Of course they all did.”

Cap nodded. McGee’s talent was admirably suited for investing people with confidence. He literally pushed them into it.

“We fed their answers to several key questions into the computer. The questions were, did you feel better about yourself and the Confidence Associates course at specific times? Can you remember days at work following your Confidence Associates meetings when you felt like a tiger? Have you-”

“Felt like a tiger?” Cap asked. “Jesus, you asked them if they felt like tigers?”

“The computer suggests the wording.”

“Okay, go on.”

“The third key question was, have you had any specific, measurable success at your job since taking the Confidence Associates course? That was the question they could all respond to with the most objectivity and reliability, because people tend to remember the day they got the raise or the pat on the back from the boss. They were eager to talk. I found it a little spooky, Cap. He sure did what he promised. Of the sixteen, eleven of them have had promotions-eleven. Of the other five, three are in jobs where promotions are made only at certain set times.”

“No one is arguing McGee’s capability,” Cap said. “Not anymore.”

“Okay. I’m getting back around to the point here. It was a six-week course. Using the answers to the key questions, the computer came up with four spike dates… that is, days when McGee probably supplemented all the usual hip-hip-hooray-you-can-do-it-if-you-try stuff” with a good hard push. The dates we have are August seventeenth, September first, September nineteenth… and October fourth.”

“Proving?”

“Well, he pushed that cab driver last night. Pushed him hard. That dude is still rocking and reeling. We figure Andy McGee is tipped over. Sick. Maybe immobilized.” Albert looked at Cap steadily. “Computer gave us a twenty-six-percent probability that he’s dead.”

“What?”

“Well, he’s overdone it before and wound up in bed. He’s doing something to his brain… God knows what. Giving himself pinprick hemorrhages, maybe. It could be a progressive thing. The computer figures there’s slightly better than a one-in-four chance he’s dead, either of a heart attack or, more probably, a stroke.”

“He had to use it before he was recharged,” Cap said.

Albert nodded and took something out of his pocket. It was encased in limp plastic. He passed it to Cap, who looked at it and then passed it back.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“Not that much,” A1 said, looking at the bill in its plastic envelope meditatively. “Just what McGee paid his cab fare with.”

“He went to Albany from New York City on a one-dollar bill, huh?” Cap took it back and looked at it with renewed interest. “Cab fares sure must be… what the hell!” He dropped the plastic encased bill on his desk as if it were hot and sat back, blinking.

“You too, huh?” Al said. “Did you see it?”

“Christ, I don’t know what I saw,” Cap said, and reached for the ceramic box where he kept his acid neutralizers. “For just a second it didn’t look like a one-dollar bill at all.”

“But now it does?”

Cap peered at the bill. “It sure does. That’s George, all-Christ!” He sat back so violently this time that he almost rapped the back of his head on the dark wood paneling behind his desk. He looked at Al. “The face… seemed to change for a second there. Grew glasses, or something. Is it a trick?”

“Oh, it’s a hell of a good trick,” Al said, taking the bill back. “I saw it as well, although I don’t anymore. I think I’ve adjusted to it now… although I’ll be damned if I know how. It’s not there, of course. It’s just some kind of crazy hallucination. But I even made the face. It’s Ben Franklin.”

“You got this from the cab driver?” Cap asked, looking at the bill, fascinated, waiting for the change again. But it was only George Washington. Al laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “We took the bill and gave him a check for five hundred dollars. He’s better off, really.” “Why?” “Ben Franklin isn’t on the five hundred, he’s on the hundred. Apparently McGee didn’t know.”

“Let me see that again.”

Al handed the one-dollar bill back to Cap, and Cap stared fixedly at it for almost a full two minutes. Just as he was about to hand it back, it flickered again-unsettling. But at least this time he felt that the flicker was definitely in his mind, and not in the bill, or on it, or whatever.

“I’ll tell you something else,” Cap said. “I’m not sure, but I don’t think Franklin’s wearing glasses on his currency portrait, either. Otherwise, it’s…” He trailed off, not sure how to complete the thought. Goddam weird came to mind, and he dismissed it.

“Yeah,” A1 said. “Whatever it is, the effect is dissipating. This morning I showed it to maybe six people. A couple of them thought they saw something, but not like that cab driver and the girl he lives with.”

“So you’re figuring he pushed too hard?”

“Yes. I doubt if he could keep going. They may have slept in the woods, or in an outlying motel. They may have broken into a summer cabin in the area. But I think they’re around and we’ll be able to put the arm on them without too much trouble.”

“How many men do you need to do the job?”

“We’ve got what we need,” A1 said. “Counting the state police, there are better than seven hundred people in on this little houseparty. Priority A-one-A. They’re going door to door and house to house. We’ve checked every hotel and motel in the immediate Albany area already-better than forty of them. We’re spreading into the neighbouring towns now. A man and a little girl… they stick out like a sore thumb. We’ll get them. Or the girl, if he’s dead.” Albert stood up. “And I think I ought to get on it. I’d like to be there when it goes down.”

“Of course you would. Bring them to me, Al.”

“I will,” Albert said, and walked toward the door.

“Albert?”

He turned back, a small man with an unhealthy yellow complexion. “Who is on the five hundred? Did you check that out?”

Albert Steinowitz smiled. “McKinley,” he said. “He was assassinated.”

He went out, closing the door gently behind him, leaving Cap to consider.

5

Ten minutes later, Cap thumbed the intercom again. “Is Rainbird back from Venice yet, Rachel?” “As of yesterday,” Rachel said, and Cap fancied he could hear the distaste even in Rachel’s carefully cultivated Boss Secretary tones. “Is he here or at Sanibel?” The Shop maintained an R-and-R facility on Sanibel Island,

Florida.

There was a pause as Rachel checked with the computer.

“Longmont, Cap. As of eighteen hundred yesterday. Sleeping off the jet lag, perhaps.”

“Have someone wake him up,” Cap said. “I’d like to see him when Wanless leaves… always assuming Wanless is still here?” “As of fifteen minutes ago he was.”

“All right… let’s say Rainbird at noon.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re a good girl, Rachel.”

“Thank you, sir.” She sounded touched. Cap liked her, liked her very much.

“Send in Dr. Wanless please, Rachel.”

He settled back, joined his hands in front of him, and thought, For my sins.

6

Dr. Joseph Wanless had suffered his stroke on the same day Richard Nixon announced his resignation of the presidency-August 8, 1974. It had been a cerebral accident of moderate severity, and he had never come all the way back physically. Nor mentally, in Cap’s opinion. It was only following the stroke that Wanless’s interest in the Lot Six experiment and follow-up had become constant and obsessive.

He came into the room leaning over a cane, the light from the bay window catching his round, rimless glasses and making them glare blankly. His left hand was a drawnup claw. The left side of his mouth drifted in a constant glacial sneer.

Rachel looked at Cap sympathetically over Wanless’s shoulder and Cap nodded that she could go. She did, closing the door quietly.

“The good doctor,” Cap said humorlessly.

“How does it progress?” Wanless asked, sitting down with a grunt.

“Classified,” Cap said. “You know that, Joe. What can I do for you today.”

“I have seen the activity around this place,” Wanless said, ignoring Cap’s question. “What else had I to do while I cooled my heels all morning?”

“If you come without an appointment-”

“You think you nearly have them again,” Wanless said. “Why else that hatchet man Steinowitz? Well, maybe you do. Maybe so. But you have thought so before, haven’t you?”

“What do you want, Joe?” Cap didn’t like to be reminded of past failures. They had actually had the girl for a while. The men who had been involved in that were still not operational and maybe never would be.

“What do I always want?” Wanless asked, hunched over his cane. Oh Christ, Cap thought, the old fuck’s going to wax rhetorical. “Why do I stay alive? To persuade you to sanction them both. To sanction that James Richardson as well. To sanction the ones on Maui. Extreme sanction, Captain Hollister. Expunge them. Wipe them off the face of the earth.”

Cap sighed.

Wanless gestured toward the library cart with his claw-hand and said, “You’ve been through the files again, I see.”

“I have them almost by heart,” Cap said, and then smiled a little. He had been eating and drinking Lot Six for the last year; it had been a constant item on the agenda at every meeting during the two years before that. So maybe Wanless wasn’t the only obsessive character around here, at that.

The difference is, I get paid for it. With Wanless it’s a hobby. A dangerous hobby.

“You read them but you don’t learn,” Wanless said. “Let me try once more to convert you to the way of truth, Captain Hollister.”

Cap began to protest, and then the thought of Rainbird and his noon appointment came to mind, and his face smoothed out. It became calm, even sympathetic. “All right,” he said. “Fire when ready, Gridley.”

“You still think I’m crazy, don’t you? A lunatic.”

“You said that, not I.”

“It would be well for you to remember that I was the first one to suggest a testing program with dilysergic triune acid.”

“I have days when I wish you hadn’t,” Cap said. If he closed his eyes, he could still see Wanless’s first report, a two-hundred-page prospectus on the drug that had first been known as DLT, then, among the technicians involved, as “booster-acid,” and finally as Lot Six. Cap’s predecessor had okayed the original project; that gentleman had been buried in Arlington with full military honors six years ago.

“All I am saying is that my opinion should carry some weight,” Wanless said. He sounded tired this morning; his words were slow and furry. The twisted sneer on the left side of his mouth did not move as he spoke.

“I’m listening,” Cap said.

“So far as I am able to tell, I am the only psychologist or medical man who still has your ear at all. Your people have become blinded by one thing and one thing only: what this man and this girl can mean to the security of America… and possibly to the future balance of power. From what we’ve been able to tell by following this McGee’s backtrail, he is a kind of benign Rasputin. He can make…”

Wanless droned on, but Cap lost him temporarily. Benign Rasputin, he thought. Purple as the phrase was, he rather liked it. He wondered what Wanless would say if told the computer had issued one-in-four odds that McGee had sanctioned himself getting out of New York City. Probably would have been overjoyed. And if he had showed Wanless that strange bill? Probably have another stroke, Cap thought, and covered his mouth to hide a smile.

“It is the girl I am primarily worried about,” Wanless told him for the twentieth? thirtieth? fiftieth? time. “McGee and Tomlinson marrying… a thousand-to-one chance. It should have been prevented at all costs. Yet who could have foreseen-”

“You were all in favor of it at the time,” Cap said, and then added dryly, “I do believe you would have given the bride away if they’d asked you.”

“None of us realized,” Wanless muttered. “It took a stroke to make me see. Lot Six was nothing but a synthetic copy of a pituitary extract, after all… an incredibly powerful painkiller hallucinogen that we did not understand then and that we don’t understand now. We know-or at least we are ninety-nine-percent sure-that the natural counterpart of this substance is responsible in some way for the occasional flashes of psi ability that nearly all human beings demonstrate from time to time. A surprisingly wide range of phenomena: precognition, telekinesis, mental domination, bursts of superhuman strength, temporary control over the sympathetic nervous system. Did you know that the pituitary gland becomes suddenly overactive in nearly all biofeedback experiments?”

Cap did. Wanless had told him this and all the rest times without number. But there was no need to answer; Wanless’s rhetoric was in full fine flower this morning, the sermon well-launched. And Cap was disposed to listen… this one last time. Let the old man have his turn at bat. For Wanless, it was the bottom of the ninth.

“Yes, this is true,” Wanless answered himself. “It’s active in biofeedback, it’s active in REM sleep, and people with damaged pituitaries rarely dream normally. People with damaged pituitaries have a tremendously high incidence of brain tumours and leukemia. The pituitary gland, Captain Hollister. It is, speaking in terms of evolution, the oldest endocrine gland in the human body. During early adolescence it dumps many times its own weight in glandular secretions into the bloodstream. It’s a terribly important gland, a terribly mysterious gland. If I believed in the human soul, Captain Hollister, I would say it resides within the pituitary gland.”

Cap grunted.

“We know these things,” Wanless said, “and we know that Lot Six somehow changed the physical composition of the pituitary glands of those who participated in the experiment. Even that of your so-called “quiet one,” James Richardson. Most importantly, we can deduce from the girl that it also changes the chromosome structure in some way… and that the change in the pituitary gland may be a genuine mutation.”

“The X factor was passed on.”

“No,” Wanless said. “That is one of the many things you fail to grasp, Captain Hollister. Andrew McGee became an X factor in his post experiment life. Victoria Tomlinson became a Y factor-also affected, but not in the same way as her husband. The woman retained a low-threshold telekinetic power. The man retained a mid-level mental dominance ability. The little girl, though… the little girl, Captain Hollister… what is she? We don’t really know. She is the Z factor.”

“We intend to find out,” Cap said softly.

Now both sides of Wanless’s mouth sneered. “You intend to find out,” he echoed. “Yes, if you persist, you certainly may… you blind, obsessive fools.” He closed his eyes for a moment and put one hand over them. Cap watched him calmly.

Wanless said: “One thing you know already. She lights fires.” “Yes.” “You assume that she has inherited her mother’s telekinetic ability. In fact, you strongly suspect it.” “Yes.” “As a very small child, she was totally unable to control these… these talents, for want of a better word…” “A small child is unable to control its bowels,” Cap said, using one of the examples set forth in the extracta. “But as the child grows older-”

“Yes, yes, I am familiar with the analogy. But an older child may still have accidents.”

Smiling, Cap answered, “We’re going to keep her in a fireproof room.”

“A cell.”

Still smiling, Cap said, “If you prefer.”

“I offer you this deduction,” Wanless said. “She does not like to use this ability she has. She has been frightened of it, and this fright has been instilled in her quite deliberately. I will give you a parallel example. My brother’s child. There were matches in the house. Freddy wanted to play with them. Light them and then shake them out. ‘Pretty, pretty,” he would say. And so my brother set out to make a complex. To frighten him so badly he would never play with the matches again. He told Freddy that the heads of the matches were sulfur and that they would make his teeth rot and fall out. That looking at struck matches would eventually blind him. And finally, he held Freddy’s hand momentarily over a lit match and singed him with it.

“Your brother,” Cap murmured, “sounds like a true prince among men.”

“Better a small red place on the boy’s hand than a child in the burn unit, wetpacked, with third-degree burns over sixty percent of his body,” Wanless said grimly.

“Better still to put the matches out of the child’s reach.”

“Can you put Charlene McGee’s matches out of her reach?” Wanless asked.

Cap nodded slowly. “You have a point of a sort, but-”

“Ask yourself this, Captain Hollister: how must it have been for Andrew and Victoria McGee when this child was an infant? After they begin to make the necessary connection? The bottle is late. The baby cries. At the same time, one of the stuffed animals right there in the crib with her bursts into smoky flame. There is a mess in the diaper. The baby cries. A moment later the dirty clothes in the hamper begin to burn spontaneously. You have the records, Captain Hollister; you know how it was in that house. A fire extinguisher and a smoke detector in every single room. And once it was her hair, Captain Hollister; they came into her room and found her standing in her crib and screaming and her hair was on fire.”

“Yes,” Cap said, “it must have made them goddam nervous.”

“So,” Wanless said, “they toilet-trained her… and they fire-trained her.”

“Fire-training,” Cap mused.

“Which is only to say that, like my brother and his boy Freddy, they made a complex. You have quoted me that analogy, Captain Hollister, so let us examine it for a moment. What is toilet-training? It is making a complex, pure and simple.” And suddenly astonishingly, the old man’s voice climbed to a high, wavering treble, the voice of a woman scolding a baby. Cap looked on with disgusted astonishment.

“You bad baby!” Wanless cried. “Look what you’ve done! It’s nasty, baby, see how nasty it is? It’s nasty to do it in your pants! Do grown-ups do it in their pants? Do it on the pot, baby, on the pot.”

“Please,” Cap said, pained.

“It is the making of a complex,” Wanless said. “Toilet-training is accomplished by focusing the child’s attention on his own eliminatory processes in a way we would consider unhealthy if the object of fixation were something different. How strong is the complex inculcated in the child, you might ask? Richard Damon of the University of Washington asked himself this question and made an experiment to find out. He advertised for fifty student volunteers. He filled them up with water and soda and milk until they all badly needed to urinate. After a certain set time had passed, he told them they could go… if they went in their pants.”

“That’s disgusting!” Cap said loudly. He was shocked and sickened. That wasn’t an experiment; it was an exercise in degeneracy.

“See how well the complex has set in your own psyche,” Wanless said quietly. “You did not think it was so disgusting when you were twenty months old. Then, when you had to go, you went. You would have gone sitting on the pope’s lap if someone had set you there and you had to go. The point of the Damon experiment, Captain Hollister, is this: most of them couldn’t. They understood that the ordinary rules of behavior had been set aside, at least for the course of the experiment; they were each alone in quarters at least as private as the ordinary bathroom… but fully eighty-eight percent of them just couldn’t. No matter how strong the physical need was, the complex instilled by their parents was stronger.”

“This is nothing but pointless wandering,” Cap said curtly.

“No, it isn’t. I want you to consider the parallels between toilet-training and fire-training… and the one significant difference, which is the quantum leap between the urgency of accomplishing the former and the latter. If the child toilet-trains slowly, what are the consequences? Minor unpleasantness. His rooms smells if not constantly aired. The mamma is chained to her washing machine. The cleaners may have to be called in to shampoo the carpet after the job is finally done. At the very worst, the baby may have a constant diaper rash, and that will only happen if the baby’s skin is very sensitive or if the mamma is a sloven about keeping him clean. But the consequences to a child who can make fire…”

His eyes glittered. The left side of his mouth sneered. “My estimation of the McGees as parents is very high,” Wanless said. “Somehow they got her through it. I would imagine they began the job long before parents usually begin the toilet-training process; perhaps even before she was able to crawl. ‘Baby mustn’t! Baby hurt herself! No, no, no! Bad girl! Bad girl! Ba-ad girl!'”

“But your own computer suggests by its readouts that she is overcoming her complex, Captain Hollister. She is in an enviable position to do it. She is young, and the complex has not had a chance to set in a bed of years until it becomes like cement. And she has her father with her! Do you realize the significance of that simple fact? No, you do not. The father is the authority figure. He holds the psychic reins of every fixation in the female child. Oral, anal, genital; behind each, like a shadowy figure standing behind a curtain, is the father authority figure. To the girl-child he is Moses; the laws are his laws, handed down she knows not how, but his to enforce. He is perhaps the only person on earth who can remove this block. Our complexes, Captain Hollister, always give us the most agony and psychic distress when those who have inculcated them die and pass beyond argument… and mercy.”

Cap glanced at his watch and saw that Wanless had been in here almost forty minutes. It felt like hours. “Are you almost done? I have another appointment-”

“When complexes go, they go like dams bursting after torrential rains,” Wanless said softly. “We have a promiscuous girl who is nineteen years old. Already she has had three hundred lovers. Her body is as hot with sexual infection as that of a forty-year-old prostitute. But until she was seventeen she was a virgin. Her father was a minister who told her again and again as a little girl that sex inside marriage was a necessary evil, that sex outside marriage was hell and damnation, that sex was the apple of original sin. When a complex like that goes, it goes like a breaking dam. First there is a crack or two, little trickling rills of water so small as to escape notice. And according to your computer’s information, that is where we are now with this (little girl. Suggestions that she has used her ability to help her father, at her father’s urging. And then it all goes at once, spewing out millions of gallons of water, destroying everything in its path, drowning “everyone caught in its way, changing the landscape forever!”

Wanless’s croaking voice had risen from its original soft pitch to a broken-voiced old man’s shout-but it was more peevish than magnificent.

“Listen,” he said to Cap. “For once, listen to me. Drop the blinders from your eyes. The man is not dangerous in and of himself. He has a little power, a toy, a plaything. He understands that. He has not been able to use it to make a million dollars. He does not rule men and nations. He has used his power to help fat women lose weight. He has used it to help timid executives gain confidence. He is unable to use the power often or well… some inner physiological factor limits him. But the girl is incredibly dangerous. She is on the run with her daddy, faced with a survival situation. She is badly frightened. And he is frightened as well, which is what makes him dangerous. Not in and of himself, but because you are forcing him to reeducate the little girl. You are forcing him to change her conceptions about the power inside her. You are forcing him to force her to use it.”

Wanless was breathing hard.

Playing out the scenario-the end was now in sight-Cap said calmly, “What do you suggest?”

“The man must be killed. Quickly. Before he can do anymore pick-and-shovel work on the complex he and his wife built into the little girl. And the girl must also be killed, I believe. In case the damage has already been done.”

“She’s only a little girl, Wanless, after all. She can light fires, yes. Pyrokinesis, we call it. But you’re making it sound like armageddon.”

“Perhaps it will be,” Wanless said. “You mustn’t let her age and size fool you into forgetting the Z factor… which is exactly what you are doing, of course. Suppose lighting fires is only the tip of this iceberg? Suppose the talent grows? She is seven. When John Milton was seven, he was perhaps a small boy grasping a stick of charcoal and laboring to write his own name in letters his mamma and daddy could understand. He was a baby. John Milton grew up to write Paradise Lost.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Cap said flatly.

“I am talking about the potential for destruction. I am talking about a talent which is linked to the pituitary gland, a gland which is nearly dormant in a child Charlene McGee’s age. What happens when she becomes an adolescent and that gland awakes from its sleep and becomes for twenty months the most powerful force in the human body, ordering everything from the sudden maturation of the primary and secondary sex characteristics to an increased production of visual purple in the eye? Suppose you have a child capable of eventually creating a nuclear explosion simply by the force of her will?”

“That’s the most insane thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Is it? Then let me progress from insanity to utter lunacy, Captain Hollister. Suppose there is a little girl out there someplace this morning who has within her, lying dormant only for the time being, the power to someday crack the very planet in two like a china plate in a shooting gallery?”

They looked at each other in silence. And suddenly the intercom buzzed.

After a moment, Cap leaned over and thumbed it. “Yes, Rachel?” Goddamned if the old man hadn’t had him there, for just a moment. He was like some awful gore-crow, and that was another reason Cap didn’t like him. He was a go-getter himself, and if there was one thing he couldn’t stand, it was a pessimist.

“You have a call on the scrambler,” Rachel said. “From the service area.”

“All right, dear. Thanks. Hold it for a couple of minutes, okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

He sat back in his chair. “I have to terminate this interview, Dr. Wanless. You may be sure that I’ll consider everything you’ve said very carefully.”

“Will you?” Wanless asked. The frozen side of his mouth seemed to sneer cynically.

“Yes.”

Wanless said: “The girl… McGee… and this fellow Richardson… they are the last three marks of a dead equation, Captain Hollister. Erase them. Start over. The girl is very dangerous.”

“I’ll consider everything you’ve said,” Cap repeated.

“Do so.” And Wanless finally began to struggle to his feet, propping himself on his cane. It took him a long time. At last he was up. “Winter is coming,” he said to Cap. “These old bones dread it.” “Are you staying in Longmont tonight?” “No, Washington.”

Cap hesitated and then said, “Stay at the Mayflower. I may want to get in touch with you.”

Something in the old man’s eyes-gratitude? Yes, almost certainly that. “Very good, Captain Hollister,” he said, and worked his way back to the door on his cane-an old man who had once opened Pandora’s box and now wanted to shoot all of the things that had flown out instead of putting them to work.

When the door had snicked closed behind him, Cap breathed a sigh of relief and picked up the scrambler phone.

7

“Who am I talking to?” “Orv Jamieson, sir.” “Have you got them, Jamieson?” “Not yet, sir, but we found something interesting at the airport.” “What’s that?”

“All the pay phones are empty. We found a few quarters and dimes on the floors of some of them.” “Jimmied?” “No, sir. That’s why I called you. They haven’t been jimmied, they’re just empty. Phone company’s going crazy.” “All right, Jamieson.” “It speeds things up. We’ve been figuring that maybe the guy hid the girl outside and only checked himself in. But either way, we figure now that we’re looking for a guy who paid with a lot of change.” “If they are at a motel and not shacked up at a summer camp somewhere.” “Yes, sir.” “Carry on, OJ.” “Yes, sir. Thank you.” He sounded absurdly pleased that his nickname had been remembered.

Cap hung up. He sat with his eyes half closed for five minutes, thinking. The mellow autumn light fell through the bay window and lit the office, warmed it. Then he leaned forward and got Rachel again.

“Is John Rainbird there?” “Yes he is, Cap.” “Give me another five minutes and then send him in. I want to talk to Norville Bates out in the service area. He’s the head honcho until A1 gets there.” “Yes, sir,” Rachel said, a little doubtfully. “It will have to be an open line. Walkie-talkie link-up. Not very-““Yes, that’s fine,” he said impatiently.

It took two minutes. Bates’s voice was thin and crackling. He was a good man-not very imaginative, but a plugger. The kind of man Cap wanted to have holding the fort until Albert Steinowitz could get there. At last Norville came on the line and told Cap they were beginning to spread out into the surrounding towns-Oakville, Tremont, Messalonsett, Hastings Glen, Looton.

“All right, Norville, that’s good,” Cap said. He thought of Wanless saying You are forcing him to reeducate the little girl. He thought of Jamieson telling him all the phones were empty. McGee hadn’t done that. The girl had done it. And then, because she was still up, she had burned that soldier’s shoes off, probably by accident. Wanless would be pleased to know that Cap was going to take fifty percent of his advice after all-the old turd had been amazingly eloquent this morning.

“Things have changed,” Cap said. “We’ve got to have the big boy sanctioned. Extreme sanction. You follow?”

“Extreme sanction,” Norville said flatly. “Yes, sir.”

“Very good, Norville,” Cap said softly. He put the phone down and waited for John Rainbird to come in.

The door opened a moment later and there he stood, as big as life and twice as ugly. He was so naturally quiet, this half Cherokee, that if you had been looking down at your desk, reading or answering correspondence, you wouldn’t have been aware that anyone was in the room with you at all. Cap knew how rare that was. Most people could sense another person in the room: Wanless had once called that ability not a sixth sense but a bottom-of-the-barrel sense, a knowledge born of infinitesimal input from the five normal senses. But with Rainbird, you didn’t know. Not one of the whisker thin sensory tripwires so much as vibrated. Al Steinowitz had said a strange thing about Rainbird once over glasses of port in Cap’s living room: “He’s the one human being I ever met who doesn’t push air in front of him when he walks.” And Cap was glad Rainbird was on their side, because he was the only human he had ever met who completely terrified him.

“Rainbird was a troll, an orc, a balrog of a man. He stood two inches shy of seven feet tall, and he wore his glossy black hair drawn back and tied in a curt ponytail. Ten years before, a Claymore had blown up in his face during his second tour of Vietnam, and now his countenance was a horror show of scar tissue and runneled flesh. His left eye was gone. There was nothing where it had been but a ravine. He would not have plastic surgery or an artificial eye because, he said, when he got to the happy hunting ground beyond, he would be asked to show his battlescars. When he said such things, you did not know whether to believe him or not; you did not know if he was serious or leading you on for reasons of his own.

Over the years, Rainbird had been a surprisingly good agent-partially because the last thing on earth he looked like was an agent, mostly because there was an apt, ferociously bright mind behind that mask of flesh. He spoke four languages fluently and had an understanding of three others. He was taking a sleep course in Russian. When he spoke, his voice was low, musical, and civilized.

“Good afternoon, Cap.”

“Is it afternoon?” Cap asked, surprised.

Rainbird smiled, showing a big set of perfectly white teeth-shark’s teeth, Cap thought. “By fourteen minutes,” he said. “I picked up a Seiko digital watch on the black market in Venice. It is fascinating. Little black numbers that change constantly. A feat of technology. I often think, Cap, that we fought the war in Vietnam not to win but to perform feats of technology. We fought it in order to create the cheap digital-wristwatch, the home Ping-Pong game that hooks up to one’s TV, the pocket calculator. I look at my new wristwatch in the dark of night. It tells me I am closer to my death, second by second. That is good news.”

“Sit down, old friend,” Cap said. As always when he talked to Rainbird, his mouth was dry and he had to restrain his hands, which wanted to twine and knot together on the polished surface of his desk. All of that, and he believed that Rainbird liked him-if Rainbird could be said to like anyone.

Rainbird sat down. He was wearing old bluejeans and a faded chambray shirt.

“How was Venice?” Cap asked.

“Sinking,” Rainbird said.

“I have a job for you, if you want it. It is a small one, but it may lead to an assignment you’ll find considerably more interesting.”

“Tell me.”

“Strictly volunteer,” Cap persisted. “You’re still on R and R.”

“Tell me,” Rainbird repeated gently, and Cap told him. He was with Rainbird for only fifteen minutes, but it seemed an hour. When the big Indian left, Cap breathed a long sigh. Both Wanless and Rainbird in one morning-that would take the snap out of anyone’s day. But the morning was over now, a lot had been accomplished, and who knew what might lie ahead this afternoon? He buzzed Rachel.

“Yes, Cap?”

“I’ll be eating in, darling. Would you get me something from the cafeteria? It doesn’t matter what. Anything. Thank you, Rachel.”

Alone at last. The scrambler phone lay silent on its thick base, filled with microcircuits and memory chips and God alone knew what else. When it buzzed again, it would probably be Albert or Norville to tell him that it was over in New York-the girl taken, her father dead. That would be good news.

Cap closed his eyes again. Thoughts and phrases floated through his mind like large, lazy kites. Mental domination. Their think-tank boys said the possibilities were enormous. Imagine someone like McGee close to Castro, or the Ayatollah Khomeini. Imagine him getting close enough to that pinko Ted Kennedy to suggest in a low voice of utter conviction that suicide was the best answer. Imagine a man like that sicced on the leaders of the various communist guerrilla groups. It was a shame they had to lose him. But… what could be made to happen once could be made to happen again.

The little girl. Wanless saying The power to someday crack the very planet in two like a china plate in a shooting gallery… ridiculous, of course. Wanless had gone as crazy as the little boy in the D. H. Lawrence story, the one who could pick the winners at the racetrack. Lot Six had turned into battery acid for Wanless; it had eaten a number of large, gaping holes in the man’s good sense. She was a little girl, not a doomsday weapon. And they had to hang onto her at least long enough to document what she was and to chart what she could be. That alone would be enough to reactivate the Lot Six testing program. If she could be persuaded to use her powers for the good of the country, so much the better. So much the better, Cap thought. The scrambler phone suddenly uttered its long, hoarse cry. His pulse suddenly leaping, Cap grabbed it.