Firestarter

1

While Cap discussed her future with Al Steinowitz in Longmont, Charlie McGee was sitting on the edge of the motel bed in Unit Sixteen of the Slumberland, yawning and stretching. Bright morning sunlight fell aslant through the window, out of a sky that was a deep and blameless autumn blue. Things seemed so much better in the good daylight.

She looked at her daddy, who was nothing but a motionless hump under the blankets. A fluff of black hair stuck out-that was all. She smiled. He always did his best. If he was hungry and she was hungry and there was only an apple, he would take one bite and make her eat the rest. When he was awake, he always did his best.

But when he was sleeping, he stole all the blankets.

She went into the bathroom, shucked off her underpants, and turned on the shower. She used the toilet while the water got warm and then stepped into the shower stall. The hot water hit her and she closed her eyes, smiling. Nothing in the world was any nicer than the first minute or two in a hot shower.

(you were bad last night)

A frown creased her brow.

(No. Daddy said not.)

(lit that man’s shoes on fire, bad girl, very bad, do you like teddy all black?)

The frown deepened. Unease was now tinctured with fear and shame. The idea of her teddy bear never even fully surfaced; it was an underthought, and as so often happened, her guilt seemed to be summed up in a smell-a burned, charred smell. Smoldering cloth and stuffing. And this smell summoned hazy pictures of her mother and father leaning over her, and they were big people, giants; and they were scared; they were angry, their voices were big and crackling, like boulders jumping and thudding down a mountainside in a movie.

(“bad girl! very bad! you mustn’t, Charlie! never! never! never!”)

How old had she been then? Three? Two? How far back could a person remember? She had asked Daddy that once and Daddy said he didn’t know. He said he remembered getting a bee sting and his mother had told him that happened when he was only fifteen months old.

This was her earliest memory: the giant faces leaning over her; the big voices like boulders rolling downhill; and a smell like a burned waffle. That smell had been her hair. She had lit her own hair on fire and had burned nearly all of it off. It was after that that Daddy mentioned “help” and Mommy got all funny, first laughing, then crying, then laughing again so high and strange that Daddy had slapped her face. She remembered that because it was the only time that she knew of that her daddy had done something like that to her mommy. Maybe we ought to think about getting “help” for her, Daddy had said. They were in the bathroom and her head was wet because Daddy had put her in the shower. Oh, yes, her mommy had said, let’s go see Dr. Wanless, he’ll give us plenty of “help,” just like he did before… then the laughing, the crying, more laughter, and the slap.

(you were so BAD last night)

“No,” she murmured in the drumming shower. “Daddy said not. Daddy said it could have… been… his… face.”

(YOU WERE VERY BAD LAST NIGHT)

But they had needed the change from the telephones. Daddy had said so.

(VERY BAD!)

And then she began to think about Mommy again, about the time when she had been five, going on six. She didn’t like to think about this but the memory was here now and she couldn’t put it aside. It had happened just before the bad men had come and hurt Mommy.

(killed her, you mean, they killed her)

yes, all right, before they killed her, and took Charlie away. Daddy had taken her on his lap for storytime, only he hadn’t had the usual storybooks about Pooh and Tigger and Mr. Toad and Willy Wonka’s Great Glass Elevator. Instead he had a number of thick books with no pictures. She had wrinkled her nose in distaste and asked for Pooh instead.

“No, Charlie,” he had said. “I want to read you some other stories, and I need you to listen. You’re old enough now, I think, and your mother thinks so, too. The stories may scare you a little bit, but they’re important. They’re true stories.”

She remembered the names of the books Daddy had read the stories from, because the stories had scared her. There was a book called Lo! by a man named Charles Fort. A book called Stranger Than Science by a man named Frank Edwards. A book called Night’s Truth. And there had been another book called Pyrokinesis: A Case Book, but Mommy would not let Daddy read anything from that one. “Later,” Mommy had said, “when she’s much older, Andy.” And then that book had gone away. Charlie had been glad.

The stories were scary, all right. One was about a man who had burned to death in a park. One was about a lady who had burned up in the living room of her trailer home, and nothing in the whole room had been burned but the lady and a little bit of the chair she had been sitting in while she watched TV. Parts of it had been too complicated for her to understand, but she remembered one thing: a policeman saying: “We have no explanation for this fatality. There was nothing left of the victim but teeth and a few charred pieces of bone. It would have taken a blowtorch to do that to a person, and nothing around her was even charred. We can’t explain why the whole place didn’t go up like a rocket.”

The third story had been about a big boy-he was eleven or twelve-who had burned up while he was at the beach. His daddy had put him in the water, burning himself badly in the process, but the boy had still gone on burning until he was all burned up. And a story about a teenage girl who had burned up while explaining all her sins to the priest in the confession room. Charlie knew all about the Catholic confession room because her friend Deenie had told her. Deenie said you had to tell the priest all the bad stuff you had done all week long. Deenie didn’t go yet because she hadn’t had first holy communion, but her brother Carl did. Carl was in the fourth grade, and he had to tell everything, even the time he sneaked into his mother’s room and took some of her birthday chocolates. Because if you didn’t tell the priest, you couldn’t be washed in THE BLOOD OF CHRIST and you would go to THE HOT PLACE.

The point of all these stories had not been lost on Charlie. She had been so frightened after the one about the girl in the confession room that she burst into tears. “Am I going to burn myself up?” She wept. “Like when I was little and caught my hair on fire? Am I going to burn to pieces?”

And Daddy and Mommy had looked upset. Mommy was pale and kept chewing at her lips, but Daddy had put an arm around her and said, “No, honey. Not if you always remember to be careful and not think about that… thing. That thing you do sometimes when you’re upset and scared.”

“What is it?” Charlie had cried. “What is it, tell me what is it, I don’t even know, I’ll never do it, I promise!”

Mommy had said, “As far as we can tell, honey, it’s called pyrokinesis. It means being able to light fires sometimes just by thinking about fires. It usually happens when people are upset. Some people apparently have that… that power all their lives and never even know it. And some people… well, the power gets hold of them for a minute and they…” She couldn’t finish.

“They burn themselves up,” Daddy had said. “Like when you were little and caught your hair on fire, yes. But you can get control of that, Charlie. You have to. And God knows it isn’t your fault.” His eyes and Mommy’s had met for a moment when he said that, and something had seemed to pass between them.

Hugging her around the shoulders, he had said, “Sometimes you can’t help it, I know. It’s an accident, like when you were smaller and you forget to go to the bathroom because you were playing and you wet your pants. We used to call that having an accident-do you remember?”

“I never do that anymore.”

“No, of course you don’t. And in a little while, you’ll have control of this other thing in just the same way. But for now, Charlie, you’ve got to promise us that you’ll never never never get upset that way if you can help it. In that way that makes you start fires. And if you do, if you can’t help it, push it away from yourself. At a wastebasket or an ashtray. Try to get outside. Try to push it at water, if there’s any around.”

“But never at a person,” Mommy had said, and her face was still and pale and grave. “That would be very dangerous, Charlie. That would be a very bad girl. Because you could”-she struggled, forced the words up and out-“you could kill a person.”

And then Charlie had wept hysterically, tears of terror and remorse, because both of Mommy’s hands were bandaged, and she knew why Daddy had read her all the scary stories. Because the day before, when Mommy told her she couldn’t go over to Deenie’s house because she hadn’t picked up her room, Charlie had got very angry, and suddenly the firething had been there, popping out of nowhere as it always did, like some evil jack-in-the-box, nodding and grinning, and she had been so angry she had shoved it out of herself and at her mommy and then Mommy’s hands had been on fire. And it hadn’t been too bad.

(could have been worse could have been her face)

because the sink had been full of soapy water for the dishes, it hadn’t been too bad, but it had been VERY BAD, and she had promised them both that she would never never never

The warm water drummed on her face, her chest, her shoulders, encasing her in a warm envelope, a cocoon, easing away memories and care. Daddy had told her it was all right. And if Daddy said a thing was so, it was. He was the smartest man in the world.

Her mind turned from the past to the present, and she thought about the men who were chasing them. They were from the government, Daddy said, but not a good part of the government. They worked for a part of the government called the Shop. The men chased them and chased them. Everywhere they went, after a little while, those Shop men showed up.

I wonder how they’d like it if I set them on fire? a part of her asked coolly, and she squeezed her eyes shut in guilty horror. It was nasty to think that way. It was bad.

Charlie reached out, grasped the HOT shower faucet, and shut it off with a sudden hard twist of her wrist. For the next two minutes she stood shivering and clutching her slight body under the ice-cold, needling spray, wanting to get out, not allowing herself to.

When you had bad thoughts, you had to pay for them.

Deenie had told her so.

2

Andy woke up a little at a time, vaguely aware of the drumming sound of the shower. At first it had been part of a dream: he was on Tashmore Pond with his grandfather and he was eight years old again, trying to get a squirming nightcrawler onto his hook without sticking the hook into his thumb. The dream had been incredibly vivid. He could see the splintery wicker creel in the bow of the boat, he could see the red tire patches on Granther McGee’s old green boots, he could see his own old and wrinkled first baseman’s mitt, and looking at it made him remember that he had Little League practice tomorrow at Roosevelt Field. But this was tonight, the last light and the drawing dark balanced perfectly on the cusp of twilight, the pond so still that you could see the small clouds of midges and noseeums skimming over its surface, which was the colour of chrome. Heat lightning flashed intermittently… or maybe it was real lightening, because it was raining. The first drops darkened the wood of Granther’s dory, weatherbeaten white, in penny-sized drops. Then you could hear it on the lake, a low and mysterious hissing sound, like-

–like the sound of a-

–shower, Charlie must be in the shower.

He opened his eyes and looked at an unfamiliar beamed ceiling. Where are we?

It fell back into place a piece at a time, but there was an instant of frightened free-fall that came of having been in too many places over the last year, of having too many close shaves and being under too much pressure. He thought longingly of his dream and wished he could be back in it with Granther McGee, who had been dead for twenty years now.

Hastings Glen. He was in Hastings Glen. They were in Hastings Glen.

He wondered about his head. It hurt, but not like last night, when that bearded guy had let them off: The pain was down to a steady low throb. If this one followed previous history, the throb would be just a faint ache by this evening, and entirely gone by tomorrow.

The shower was turned off:

He sat up in bed and looked at his watch. It was quarter to eleven.

“Charlie?”

She came back into the bedroom, rubbing herself vigorously with a towel.

“Good morning, Daddy.” “Good morning. How are you?” “Hungry,” she said. She went over to the chair where she had put her clothes and picked up the green blouse. Sniffed it. Grimaced. “I need to change my clothes.” “You’ll have to make do with those for a while, babe. We’ll get you something later on today.”

“I hope we don’t have to wait that long to eat.”

“We’ll hitch a ride,” he said, “and stop at the first cafe was come to.”

“Daddy, when I started school, you told me never to ride with strangers.” She was into her underpants and green blouse, and was looking at him curiously.

Andy got out of bed, walked over to her, and put his hands on her shoulders. “The devil you don’t know is sometimes better than the one you do,” he said. “Do you know what that means, keed?”

She thought about it carefully. The devil they knew was those men from the Shop, she guessed. The men that had chased them down the street in New York the day before. The devil they didn’t know-

“I guess it means that most people driving cars don’t work for that Shop,” she said.

He smiled back. “You got it. And what I said before still holds, Charlie: when you get into a bad fix, you sometimes have to do things you’d never do if things were going good.”

Charlie’s smile faded. Her face became serious, watchful. “Like getting the money to come out of the phones?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And it wasn’t bad?”

“No. Under the circumstances, it wasn’t bad.”

“Because when you get into a bad fix, you do what you have to do to get out of it.”

“With some exceptions, yes.”

“What are exceptions, Daddy?”

He ruffled her hair. “Never mind now, Charlie. Lighten up.”

But she wouldn’t. “And I didn’t mean to set that man’s shoes on fire. I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“No, of course you didn’t.”

Then she did lighten up; her smile, so much like Vicky’s, came out radiantly. “How does your head feel this morning, Daddy?”

“Much better, thanks.”

“Good.” She looked at him closely. “Your eye looks funny.”

“Which eye?”

She pointed at his left. “That one.”

“Yeah?” He went into the bathroom and wiped a clear place on the steamed mirror.

He looked at his eye for a long time, his good humor fading. His right eye looked just as it always had, a gray green-the color of the ocean on an overcast spring day. His left eye was also gray green, but the white was badly bloodshot, and the pupil looked smaller than the right pupil. And the eyelid had a peculiar droop that he had never noticed before.

Vicky’s voice suddenly rang into his mind. It was so clear that she might have been standing beside him. The headaches, they scare me, Andy. You’re doing something to yourself as well as to other people when you use that push or whatever you want to call it.

The thought was followed by the image of a balloon being blown up… and up… and up… and finally exploding with a loud bang.

He began to go over the left side of his face carefully, touching it everywhere with the tips of his right fingers. He looked like a man in a TV commercial marveling over the closeness of his shave. He found three spots-one below his left eye, one on his left cheekbone, and one just below the left temple-where there was no feeling at all. Fright drifted through the hollow places in his body like quiet early-evening mist. The fright was not so much for himself as it was for Charlie, for what would happen to her if she got left on her own.

As if he had called her, he could see her beyond him in the mirror.

“Daddy?” She sounded a little scared. “You okay?”

“Fine,” he said. His voice sounded good. There was no tremor in it; nor was it too confident, falsely booming. “Just thinking how much I need a shave.” She put a hand over her mouth and giggled. “Scratchy like a Brillo pad. Yuck. Gross.” He chased her into the bedroom and rubbed his scratchy cheek against her smooth one. Charlie giggled and kicked.

3

As Andy was tickling his daughter with his stubbly beard, Orville Jamieson, aka OJ, aka The Juice, and another Shop agent named Bruce Cook were getting out of a light-blue Chevy outside the Hastings Diner.

OJ paused for a moment, looking down Main Street with its slant parking, its appliance store, its grocery store, its two gas stations, its one drugstore, its wooden municipal building with a plaque out front commemorating some historical event no one gave a shit about. Main Street was also Route 40, and the McGees were not four miles from where OJ and Bruce Cook now stood.

“Look at this burg,” OJ said, disgusted. “I grew up close to here. Town called Lowville. You ever hear of Lowville, New York?” Bruce Cook shook his head.

“It’s near Utica, too. Where they make Utica Club beer. I was never so happy in my life as I was the day I got out of Lowville.” OJ reached under his jacket and readjusted The Windsucker in its holster.

“There’s Tom and Steve,” Bruce said. Across the street, a light-brown Pacer had pulled into a parking slot just vacated by a farm truck. Two men in dark suits were getting out of the Pacer. They looked like bankers. Farther down the street, at the blinker light, two more Shop people were talking to the old cunt that crossed the school kids at lunch time. They were showing her the picture and she was shaking her head. There were ten Shop agents here in Hastings Glen, all of them coordinating with Norville Bates, who was back in Albany waiting for Cap’s personal ramrod, A1 Steinowitz.

“Yeah, Lowville,” OJ sighed. “I hope we get those two suckers by noon. And I hope my next assignment’s Karachi. Or Iceland. Any place, as long as it’s not upstate New York. This is too close to Lowville. Too close for comfort.”

“You think we will have them by noon?” Bruce asked.

OJ shrugged. “We’ll have them by the time the sun goes down. You can count on that.” They went into the diner, sat at the counter, and ordered coffee. A young waitress with a fine figure brought it to them. “How long you been on, sis?” OJ asked her. “If you got a sis, I pity her,” the waitress said. “If there’s any fambly resemblance, that is.”

“Don’t be that way, sis,” OJ said, and showed her his ID. She looked at it a long time. Behind her, an aging juvenile delinquent in a motorcycle jacket was pushing buttons on a Seeberg.

“I been on since seven,” she said. “Same as any other morning. Prolly you want to talk to Mike. He’s the owner.” She started to turn away and OJ caught her wrist in a tight grip. He didn’t like women who made fun of his looks. Most women were sluts anyway, his mother had been right about that even if she hadn’t been right about much else. And his mother surely would have known what to think about a high-tit bitch like this one.

“Did I say I wanted to talk to the owner, sis?”

She was starting to be frightened now, and that was okay with OJ. “N-no.”

“That’s right. Because I want to talk to you, not to some guy that’s been out in the kitchen scrambling eggs and making Alpoburgers all morning.” He took the picture of Andy and Charlie out of his pocket and handed it to her, not letting go of her wrist. “You recognize them, sis? Serve them their breakfast this morning, maybe?”

“Let go. You’re hurting me.” All the color had gone out of her face except for the whore’s rouge she had tricked herself up with. Probably she had been a cheerleader in high school. The kind of girl who laughed at Orville Jamieson when he asked them out because he had been president of the Chess Club instead of quarterback on the football team. Bunch of cheap Lowville whores. God, he hated New York. Even New York City was too fucking close.

“You tell me if you waited on them or if you didn’t. Then I’ll let go. Sis.”

She looked briefly at the picture. “No! I didn’t. Now let-”

“You didn’t look long enough sis. You better look again.”

She looked again. “No! No!” she said loudly. “I’ve never seen them! Let me go, can’t you?” The elderly jd in the cut-rate Mammoth Mart leather jacket sauntered over, zippers jingling, thumbs hooked in his pants pockets. “You’re bothering the lady,” he said. Bruce Cook gazed at him with open, wide-eyed contempt. “Be careful we don’t decide to bother you next, pizza-face,” he said. “Oh,” the old kid in the leather jacket said, and his voice was suddenly very small. He moved away quickly, apparently remembering that he had pressing business on the street.

Two old ladies in a booth were nervously watching the little scene at the counter. A big man in reasonably clean cook’s whites-Mike, the owner, presumably-was standing in the kitchen doorway, also watching. He held a butcher knife in one hand, but he held it with no great authority.

“What do you guys want?” he asked.

“They’re feds,” the waitress said nervously. “They-”

“Didn’t serve them? You’re sure?” OJ asked. “Sis?”

“I’m sure,” she said. She was nearly crying now.

“You better be. A mistake can get you five years in jail, sis.” “I’m sure,” she whispered. A tear spilled over the bottom curve of one eye and slipped down her cheek. “Please let go. Don’t hurt me anymore.”

OJ squeezed tighter for one brief moment, liking the feel of the small bones moving under his hand, liking the knowledge that he could squeeze harder yet and snap them… and then he let go. The diner was silent except for the voice of Stevie Wonder coming from the Seeberg, assuring the frightened patrons of the Hastings Diner that they could feel it all over. Then the two old ladies got up and left in a hurry.

OJ picked up his coffee cup, leaned over the counter, poured the coffee on the floor, and then dropped the cup, which shattered. Thick china shrapnel sprayed in a dozen different directions. The waitress was crying openly now.

“Shitty brew,” OJ said.

The owner made a halfhearted gesture with the knife, and OJ’s face seemed to light up.

“Come on, man,” he said, half-laughing. “Come on. Let’s see you try.”

Mike put the knife down beside the toaster and suddenly cried out in shame and outrage: “I fought in Vietnam! My brother fought in Vietnam! I’m gonna write my congressman about this! You wait and see if I don’t!” OJ looked at him. After a while Mike lowered his eyes, scared. The two of them went out. The waitress scooched and began to pick up broken pieces of coffee cup, sobbing. Outside, Bruce said, “How many motels?”

“Three motels, six sets of tourist cabins,” OJ said, looking down toward the blinker. It fascinated him. In the Lowville of his youth there had been a diner with a plaque over the double Silex hotplate and that plaque had read IF YOU DON’T LIKE OUR TOWN, LOOK FOR A TIMETABLE. How many times had he longed to pull that plaque off the wall and stuff” it down someone’s throat?

“There are people checking them out,” he said as they walked back toward their light-blue Chevrolet, part of a government motor pool paid for and maintained by tax dollars “We’ll know soon now.”

4

John Mayo was with an agent named Ray Knowles. They were on their way out along Route 40 to the Slumberland Motel. They were driving a late model tan Ford, and as they rode up the last hill separating them from an actual view of the motel, a tire blew.

“Shit-fire,” John said as the car began to pogo up and down and drag to the right. “That’s fucking government issue for you. Fucking retreads.” He pulled over onto the soft shoulder and put on the Ford’s four-way flashers. “You go on,” he said. “I’ll change the goddam tire.”

“I’ll help,” Ray said. “It won’t take us five minutes.”

“No, go on. It’s right over this hill, should be.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I’ll pick you up. Unless the spare’s flat, too. It wouldn’t surprise me.”

A rattling farm truck passed them. It was the one OJ and Bruce Cook had seen leaving town as they stood outside the Hastings Diner.

Ray grinned. “It better not be. You’d have to put in a requisition in quadruplicate for a new one.”

John didn’t grin back. “Don’t I know it,” he said glumly.

They went around to the trunk and Ray unlocked it. The spare was in good shape.

“Okay,” John said. “Go on.”

“It really wouldn’t take but five minutes to change that sucker.”

“Sure, and those two aren’t at that motel. But let’s play it as if it were real. After all, they have to be somewhere.” “Yeah, okay.” John took the jack and spare out of the trunk. Ray Knowles watched him for a moment and then started walking along the shoulder toward the Slumberland Motel.

5

Just beyond the motel, Andy and Charlie McGee were standing on the soft shoulder of Highway 40. Andy’s worries that someone might notice he didn’t have a car had proved groundless; the woman in the office was interested in nothing but the small Hitachi TV on the counter. A miniature Phil Donahue had been captured inside, and the woman was watching him avidly. She swept the key Andy offered into the mail slot without even looking away from the picture.

“Hope y'enjoyed y’stay,” she said. She was working on a box of chocolate coconut doughnuts and had got to the halfway mark.

“Sure did,” Andy said, and left.

Charlie was waiting for him outside. The woman had given him a carbon copy of his bill, which he stuffed into the side pocket of his cord jacket as he went down the steps. Change from the Albany pay phones jingled mutedly.

“Okay, Daddy?” Charlie asked as they moved away toward the road.

“Lookin good,” he said, and put an arm around her shoulders. To their right and back over the hill, Ray Knowles and John Mayo had just had their flat tire.

“Where are we going, Daddy?” Charlie asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I don’t like it. I feel nervous.”

“I think we’re well ahead of them,” he said. “Don’t worry. They’re probably still looking for the cab driver who took us to Albany.”

But he was whistling past the graveyard; he knew it and probably Charlie did, too. Just standing here beside the road made him feel exposed, like a cartoon jailbird in a striped suit. Quit it, he told himself. Next thing you’ll be thinking they’re everywhere-one behind every tree and a bunch of them right over the next hill. Hadn’t somebody said that perfect paranoia and perfect awareness were the same thing?

“Charlie-“he began.

“Let’s go to Granther’s,” she said.

He looked at her, startled. His dream rushed back at him, the dream of fishing in the rain, the rain that had turned into the sound of Charlie’s shower. “What made you think of that?” he asked. Granther had died long before Charlie was born. He had lived his whole life in Tashmore, Vermont, a town just west of the New Hampshire border. When Granther died, the place on the lake went to Andy’s mother, and when she died, it came to Andy. The town would have taken it for back taxes long since, except that Granther had left a small sum in trust to cover them.

Andy and Vicky had gone up there once a year during the summer vacation until Charlie was born. It was twenty miles off the nearest two-lane road, in wooded, unpopulated country. In the summer there were all sorts of people on Tashmore Pond, which was really a lake with the small town of Bradford, New Hampshire, on the far side. But by this time of year all the summer camps would be empty. Andy doubted if the road in was even plowed in the winter.

“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “It just… came into my mind. This minute.” On the other side of the hill, John Mayo was opening the trunk of the Ford and making his inspection of the spare tire.

“I dreamed about Granther this morning,” Andy said slowly. “First time I’d thought about him in a year or more, I guess. So I suppose you could say he just came into my head, too.”

“Was it a good dream, Daddy?”

“Yes,” he said, and smiled a little. “Yes, it was.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“I think it’s a great idea,” Andy said. “We can go there and stay for a while and think about what we should do. How we should handle this. I was thinking if we could get to a newspaper and tell our story so that a lot of people knew about it, they’d have to lay off.”

An old farm truck was rattling toward them, and Andy stuck out his thumb. On the other side of the hill, Ray Knowles was walking up the soft shoulder of the road. The farm truck pulled over, and a guy wearing biballs and a New York Mets baseball cap looked out.

“Well there’s a purty little miss,” he said, smiling. “What’s your name, missy?”

“Roberta,” Charlie said promptly. Roberta was her middle name.

“Well, Bobbi, where you headed this morning?” the driver asked.

“We’re on our way to Vermont,” Andy said. “St. Johnsbury. My wife was visiting her sister and she ran into a little problem.” “Did she now,” the farmer said, and said no more, but gazed at Andy shrewdly from the corners of his eyes. “Labor,” Andy said, and manufactured a wide smile. “This one’s got a new brother. One-forty-one this morning.” “His name is Andy,” Charlie said. “Isn’t that a nice name?” “I think it’s a corker,” the farmer said. “You hop on in here and I’ll get you ten miles closer to St. Johnsbury, anyhow.”

They got in and the farm truck rattled and rumbled back onto the road, headed into the bright morning sunlight. At the same time, Ray Knowles was breasting the hill. He saw an empty highway leading down to the Slumberland Motel. Beyond the Motel, he saw the farm truck that had passed their car a few minutes ago just disappearing from view.

He saw no need to hurry.

6

The farmer’s name was Manders-Irv Manders. He had just taken a load of pumpkins into town, where he had a deal with the fellow who ran the A amp;P. He told them that he used to deal with the First National, but the fellow over there just had no understanding about pumpkins. A jumped-up meat cutter and no more, was the opinion of Irv Manders. The A amp;P manager, on the other hand, was a corker. He told them that his wife ran a touristy sort of shop in the summertime, and he kept a roadside produce stand, and between the two of them they got along right smart.

“You won’t like me minding your beeswax,” Irv Manders told Andy, “but you and your button here shouldn’t be thumbin. Lord, no. Not with the sort of people you find ramming the roads these days. There’s a Greyhound terminal in the drugstore back in Hastings Glen. That’s what you want.”

“Well-“Andy said. He was nonplussed, but Charlie stepped neatly into the breach.

“Daddy’s out of work,” she said brightly. “That’s why my mommy had to go and stay with Auntie Em to have the baby. Auntie Em doesn’t like Daddy. So we stayed at home. But now we’re going to see Mommy. Right, Daddy?”

“That’s sort of private stuff, Bobbi,” Andy said, sounding uncomfortable. He felt uncomfortable. There were a thousand holes in Charlie’s story. “Don’t you say another word,” Irv said. “I know about trouble in families. It can get pretty bitter at times. And I know about being hard-up. It ain’t no shame.” Andy cleared his throat but said nothing. He could think of nothing to say. They rode in silence for a while. “Say, why don’t you two come home and take lunch with me and the wife?” Irv asked suddenly.

“Oh no, we couldn’t do-”

“We’d be happy to,” Charlie said. “Wouldn’t we, Daddy?”

He knew that Charlie’s intuitions were usually good ones, and he was too mentally and physically worn down to go against her now. She was a self possessed and aggressive little girl, and more than once Andy had wondered to himself just who was running this show.

“If you’re sure there’s enough-“he said.

“Always enough,” Irv Manders said, finally shifting the farm truck into third gear. They were rattling between autumn-bright trees: maples, elms, poplars. “Glad to have you.”

“Thank you very much,” Charlie said.

“My pleasure, button,” Irv said. “Be my wife’s, too, when she gets a look at you.”

Charlie smiled.

Andy rubbed his temples. Beneath the fingers of his left hand was one of those patches of skin where the nerves seemed to have died. He didn’t feel good about this, somehow. That feeling that they were closing in was still very much with him.

7

The woman who had checked Andy out of the Slumberland Motel not twenty minutes ago was getting nervous. She had forgotten all about Phil Donahue.

“You’re sure this was the man,” Ray Knowles was saying for the third time. She didn’t like this small, trim, somehow tight man. Maybe he worked for the government, but that was no comfort to Lena Cunningham. She didn’t like his narrow face, she didn’t like the lines around his cool blue eyes, and most of all she didn’t like the way he kept shoving that picture under her nose.

“Yes, that was him,” she said again. “But there was no little girl with him. Honest, mister. My husband’ll tell you the same. He works nights. It’s got so we hardly ever see each other, except at supper. He’ll tell-”

The other man came back in, and with ever-mounting alarm, Lena saw that he had a walkie-talkie in one hand and a great big pistol in the other.

“It was them,” John Mayo said. He was almost hysterical with anger and disappointment. “Two people slept in that bed. Blond hairs on one pillow, black on the other. Goddam that flat tire! Goddam it all to hell! Damp towels hanging on the rod in the bathroom! Fucking shower’s still dripping! We missed them by maybe five minutes, Ray!”

He jammed the pistol back into its shoulder holster.

“I’ll get my husband,” Lena said faintly.

“Never mind,” Ray said. He took John’s arm and led him outside. John was still swearing about the flat. “Forget the tire, John. Did you talk to OJ back in town?”

“I talked to him and he talked to Norville. Norville’s on his way from Albany, and he’s got Al Steinowitz with him. He landed not ten minutes ago.”

“Well, that’s good. Listen, think a minute, Johnny. They must have been hitching.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Unless they boosted a car.”

“The guy’s an English instructor. He wouldn’t know how to boost a candy bar out of a concession stand in a home for the blind. They were hitching, all right. They hitched from Albany last night. They hitched this morning. I’d bet you this year’s salary that they were standing there by the side of the road with their thumbs out while I was walking up that hill.”

“If it hadn’t been for that flat-“John’s eyes were miserable behind his wire-framed glasses. He saw a promotion flapping away on slow, lazy wings. “Fuck the flat!” Ray said. “What passed us? After we got the flat, what passed us?” John thought about it as he hooked the walkie-talkie back on his belt. “Farm truck,” he said.

“That’s what I remember, too,” Ray said. He glanced around and saw Lena Cunningham’s large moon face peering out the motel office window at them. She saw him seeing her and the curtain fell back into place.

“Pretty rickety truck,” Ray said. “If they don’t turn off the main road, we ought to be able to catch up to them.”

“Let’s go, then,” John said. “We can keep in touch with A1 and Norville by way of OJ on the walkie-talkie.”

They trotted back to the car and got in. A moment later the tan Ford roared out of the parking lot, spewing white crushed gravel out from beneath its rear tires: Lena Cunningham watched them go with relief. Running a motel was not what it once had been.

She went back to wake up her husband.

8

As the Ford with Ray Knowles behind the wheel and John Mayo riding shotgun was roaring down Route 40 at better than seventy miles an hour (and as a caravan of ten or eleven similar nondescript late-model cars were heading towards Hastings Glen from the surrounding areas of search), Irv Manders hand-signaled left and turned off the highway onto an unmarked stretch of tar-and-patch that headed roughly northeast. The truck rattled and banged along. At his urging, Charlie had sung most of her nine-song repertoire, including such golden hits as “Happy Birthday to You,” “This Old Man,” “Jesus Loves Me,” and “Camptown Races.” Irv and Andy both sang along with that one.

The road twisted and wound its way over a series of increasingly wooded ridges and then began to descend toward flatter country that had been cultivated and harvested. Once a partridge burst from a cover of goldenrod and old hay at the left side of the road and Irv shouted, “Get im, Bobbi!” and Charlie pointed her finger and chanted “Bam-ba-DAM!'” and then giggled wildly.

A few minutes later Irv turned off on a dirt road, and a mile farther along they came to a battered red, white, and blue mailbox with MANDERS stenciled on the side. Irv turned into a rutted driveway that was nearly half a mile long.

“Must cost you an arm and a leg to keep it plowed in the winter,” Andy said.

“Do it m’self,” Irv said.

They came to a big white frame farmhouse, three stories tall and set off” with mint-green trim. To Andy it looked like the sort of house that might have started off fairly ordinary and then grown eccentric as the years passed. Two sheds were attached to the rear, one of them zigging thisaway, the other zagging thataway. On the south side, a greenhouse wing had been added, and a big screened-in porch stood out from the north side like a stiff skirt.

Behind the house was a red barn that had seen better days, and between the house and the barn was what New Englanders called a dooryard-a flat dirt stretch of ground where a couple of dozen chickens clucked and strutted. When the truck rattled toward them they fled, squawking and fluttering their useless wings, past a chopping block with an ax buried in it.

Irv drove the truck into the barn, which had, a sweet hay smell Andy remembered from his summers in Vermont. When Irv switched the truck off, they all heard a low, musical mooing from somewhere deeper in the barn’s shadowy interior.

“You got a cow,” Charlie said, and something like rapture came over her face. “I can hear it.”

“We’ve got three,” Irv said. “That’s Bossy you hear-a very original name, wouldn’t you say, button? She thinks she’s got to be milked three times a day. You can see her later, if your daddy says you can.”

“Can I, Daddy?”

“I guess so,” Andy said, mentally surrendering. Somehow they had gone out beside the road to thumb a ride and had got shanghaied instead.

“Come on in and meet the wife.”

They strolled across the dooryard, pausing for Charlie to examine as many of the chickens as she could get close to. The back door opened and a woman of about forty five came out onto the back steps. She shaded her eyes and called, “You there, Irv! Who you brought home?” Irv smiled. “Well, the button here is Roberta. This fellow is her daddy. I didn’t catch his name yet, so I dunno if we’re related.” Andy stepped forward and said, “I’m Frank Burton, ma'am. Your husband invited Bobbi and me home for lunch, if that’s all right. We’re pleased to know you.” “Me too,” Charlie said, still more interested in the chickens than in the woman-at least for the moment. “I’m Norma Manders,” she said. “Come in. You’re welcome.” But Andy saw the puzzled look she threw at her husband.

They all went inside, through an entryway where stovelengths were stacked head high and into a huge kitchen that was dominated by a woodstove and a long table covered with red and white checked oilcloth. There was an elusive smell of fruit and paraffin in the air. The smell of canning, Andy thought.

“Frank here and his button are on their way to Vermont,” Irv said. “I thought it wouldn’t hurt em to get outside of a little hot food on their way.”

“Of course not,” she agreed. “Where is your car, Mr. Burton?”

“Well-“Andy began. He glanced at Charlie, but she was going to be no help; she was walking around the kitchen in small steps, looking at everything with a child’s frank curiosity.

“Frank’s had a little trouble,” Irv said, looking directly at his wife. “But we don’t have to talk about that. At least, not right now.”

“All right,” Norma said. She had a sweet and direct face-a handsome woman who was used to working hard. Her hands were red and chapped. “I’ve got chicken and I could put together a nice salad. And there’s lots of milk. Do you like milk, Roberta?”

Charlie didn’t look around. She’s lapsed on the name, Andy thought. Oh, Jesus, this just gets better and better.

“Bobbi!” he said loudly.

She looked around then, and smiled a little too widely. “Oh, sure,” she said. “I love milk.”

Andy saw a warning glance pass from Irv to his wife: No questions, not now. He felt a sinking despair. Whatever had been left of their story had just gone swirling away. But there was nothing to do except sit down to lunch and wait to see what Irv Manders had on his mind.

9

“How far from the motel are we?” John Mayo asked. Ray glanced down at the odometer. “Seventeen miles,” he said, and pulled over. “That’s- far enough.” “But maybe-““No, if we were going to catch them, we would have by now. We’ll go on back and rendezvous with the others.”

John struck the heel of his hand against the dashboard. “They turned off somewhere,” he said. “That goddam flat shoe! This job’s been bad luck from the start, Ray. An egghead and a little girl. And we keep missing them.”

“No, I think we’ve got them,” Ray said, and took out his walkie-talkie. He pulled the antenna and tipped it out the window. “We’ll have a cordon around the whole area in half an hour. And I bet we don’t hit a dozen houses before someone around here recognizes that truck. Late-sixties dark-green International Harvester, snowplow attachment on the front, wooden stakes around the truck bed to hold on a high load. I still think we’ll have them by dark.”

A moment later he was talking to A1 Steinowitz, who was nearing the Slumberland Motel. A1 briefed his agents in turn. Bruce Cook remembered the farm truck from town. OJ did, too. It had been parked in front of the A amp;P.

A1 sent them back to town, and half an hour later they all knew that the truck that had almost certainly stopped to give the two fugitives a lift belonged to Irving Manders, RFD 5, Baillings Road, Hastings Glen, New York.

It was just past twelve-thirty P.M.

10

The lunch was very nice, Charlie ate like a horse-three helpings of chicken with gravy, two of Norma Manders’s hot biscuits, a side dish of salad, and three of her home-canned dill pickles. They finished off with slices of apple pie garnished with wedges of cheddar-Irv offering his opinion that “Apple pie without a piece of cheese is like a smooch without a squeeze.” This earned him an affectionate elbow in the side from his wife. Irv rolled his eyes, and Charlie laughed. Andy’s appetite surprised him. Charlie belched and then covered her mouth guiltily.

Irv smiled at her. “More room out than there is in, button.”

“If I eat any more, I think I’ll split,” Charlie answered. “That’s what my mother always used to… I mean, that’s what she always says.”

Andy smiled tiredly.

“Norma,” Irv said, getting up, “why don’t you and Bobbi go on out and feed those chickens?”

“Well, lunch is still spread over half an acre,” Norma said.

“I’ll pick up lunch,” Irv said. “Want to have a little talk with Frank, here.”

“Would you like to feed the chickens, honey?” Norma asked Charlie.

“I sure would.” Her eyes were sparkling.

“Well, come on then. Do you have a jacket? It’s turned a bit chilly.”

“Uh…” Charlie looked at Andy.

“You can borrow a sweater of mine,” Norma said. That look passed between her and Irv again. “Roll the sleeves up a little bit and it will be fine.”

“Okay.”

Norma got an old and faded warmup jacket from the entryway and a frayed white sweater that Charlie floated in, even with the cuff’s turned up three or four times.

“Do they peck?” Charlie asked a little nervously.

“Only their food, honey.”

They went out and the door closed behind them. Charlie was still chattering. Andy looked at Irv Manders, and Irv looked back calmly.

“You want a beer, Frank?”

“It isn’t Frank,” Andy said. “I guess you know that.”

“I guess I do. What is your handle?”

Andy said, “The less you know, the better off you are.”

“Well, then,” Irv said, “I’ll just call you Frank.”

Faintly, they heard Charlie squeal with delight from outside. Norma said something, and Charlie agreed.

“I guess I could use a beer,” Andy said.

“Okay.”

Irv got two Utica Clubs from the refrigerator, opened them, set Andy’s on the table and his on the counter. He got an apron from a hook by the sink and put it on. The apron was red and yellow and the hem was flounced, but somehow he managed to avoid looking silly.

“Can I help you?” Andy asked.

“No, I know where everything goes,” Irv said. “Most everything, anyhow. She changes things from week to week. No woman wants a man to feel right at home in her kitchen. They like help, sure, but they feel better if you have to ask them where to put the casserole dish or where they put the Brillo.”

Andy, remembering his own days as Vicky’s kitchen apprentice, smiled and nodded.

“Meddling around in other folk’s business isn’t my strong point,” Irv said, drawing water in the kitchen sink and adding detergent. “I’m a farmer, and like I told you, my wife runs a little curio shop down where Baillings Road crosses the Albany Highway. We’ve been here almost twenty years.”

He glanced back at Andy.

“But I knew there was somethin wrong from the minute I saw you two standing by the road back there. A grown man and a little girl just aren’t the kind of pair you usually see hitching the roads. Know what I mean?”

Andy nodded and sipped his beer.

“Furthermore, it looked to me like you’d just come out of the Slumberland, but you had no traveling gear, not so much as an overnight case. So I just about decided to pass you by. Then I stopped. Because… well, there’s a difference between not meddling in other folks” business and seeing something that looks damn bad and turning a blind eye to it.”

“Is that how we look to you? Damn bad?”

“Then,” Irv said, “not now'. He was washing the old mismatched dishes carefully, stacking them in the drainer. “Now I don’t know just what to make of you two. My first thought was it must be you two the cops are looking for.” He saw the change come over Andy’s face and the sudden way Andy set his beer can down. “I guess it is you,” he said softly. “I was hopin it wasn’t.”

“What cops?” Andy asked harshly.

“They’ve got all the main roads blocked off coming in and out of Albany,” Irv said. “If we’d gone another six miles up Route Forty, we would have run on one of those blocks right where Forty crosses Route Nine.”

“Well, why didn’t you just go ahead?” Andy asked. “That would have been the end of it for you. You would have been out of it.”

Irv was starting on the pots now, pausing to hunt through the cupboards over the sink. “See what I was saying? I can’t find the gloriosky Brillo… Wait, here it is… Why didn’t I just take you up the road to the cops? Let’s say I wanted to satisfy my own natural curiosity.”

“You have some questions, huh?”

“All kinds of them,” Irv said. “A grown man and a little girl hitching rides, the little girl hasn’t got any overnight case, and the cops are after them. So I have an idea. It isn’t so farfetched. I think that maybe here’s a daddy who wanted custody of his button and couldn’t get it. So he snatched her.”

“It sounds pretty farfetched to me.”

“Happens all the time, Frank. And I think to myself, the mommy didn’t like that so well and, swore out a warrant on the daddy. That would explain all the roadblocks. You only get coverage like that for a big robbery… or a kidnapping.”

“She’s my daughter, but her mother didn’t put the police on us,” Andy said. “Her mother has been dead for a year.”

“Well, I’d already kind of shitcanned the idea,” Irv said. “It don’t take a private eye to see the two of you are pretty close. Whatever else may be going on, it doesn’t appear you’ve got her against her will.”

Andy said nothing.

“So here we are at my problem,” Irv said. “I picked the two of you up because I thought the little girl might need help. Now I don’t know where I’m at. You don’t strike me as the desperado type. But all the same, you and your little girl are going under false names, you’re telling a story that’s just as thin as a piece of tissue paper, and you look sick, Frank. You look just about as sick as a man can get and still stay on his feet. So those are my questions. Any you could answer, it might be a good thing.”

“We came to Albany from New York and hitched a ride to Hastings Glen early this morning,” Andy said. “It’s bad to know they’re here, but I think I knew it. I think Charlie knew it, too.” He had mentioned Charlie’s name, and that was a mistake, but at this point it didn’t seem to matter.

“What do they want you for, Frank?”

Andy thought for a long time, and then he met Irv’s frank gray eyes. He said: “You came from town, didn’t you? See any strange people there? City types? Wearing these neat, off-the-rack suits that you forget almost as soon as the guys wearing them are out of sight? Driving late-model cars that sort of just fade into the scenery?”

It was Irv’s turn to think. “There were two guys like that in the A amp;P,” he said. “Talking to Helga. She’s one of the checkers. Looked like they were showing her something.”

“Probably our picture,” Andy said. “They’re government agents. They’re working with the police, Irv. A more accurate way of putting it would be that the police are working for them. The cops don’t know why we’re wanted.”

“What sort of government agency are we talking about? FBI?”

“No. The Shop.”

“What? That CIA outfit?” Irv looked frankly disbelieving.

“They don’t have anything at all to do with the CIA,” Andy said. “The Shop is really the DSI-Department of Scientific Intelligence. I read in an article about three years ago that some wiseacre nicknamed it the Shop in the early sixties, after a science-fiction story called ‘The Weapon Shops of Ishtar.” By a guy named van Vogt, I think, but that doesn’t matter. What they’re supposed to be involved in are domestic scientific projects which may have present or future application to matters bearing on national security. That definition is from their charter, and the thing they’re most associated with in the public mind is the energy research they’re funding and supervising-electromagnetic stuff” and fusion power. They’re actually involved in a lot more. Charlie and I are part of an experiment that happened a long time ago. It happened before Charlie was even born. Her mother was also involved. She was murdered. The Shop was responsible.”

Irv was silent for a while. He let the dishwater out of the sink, dried his hands, and then came over and began to wipe the oilcloth that covered the table. Andy picked up his beer can.

“I won’t say flat out that I don’t believe you,” Irv said finally. “Not with some of the things that have gone on under cover in this country and then come out. CIA guys giving people drinks spiked with LSD and some FBI agent accused of killing people during the Civil Rights marches and money in brown bags and all of that. So I can’t say right out that I don’t believe you. Let’s just say you haven’t convinced me yet.”

“I don’t think it’s even me that they really want anymore,” Andy said. “Maybe it was, once. But they’ve shifted targets. It’s Charlie they’re after now.”

“You mean the national government is after a first- or second-grader for reasons of national security?”

“Charlie’s no ordinary second-grader,” Andy said. “Her mother and I were injected with a drug which was coded Lot Six. To this day I don’t know exactly what it was. Some sort of synthetic glandular secretion would be my best guess. It changed the chromosomes of myself and of the lady I later married. We passed those chromosomes on to Charlie, and they mixed in some entirely new way. If she could pass them on to her children, I guess she’d be called a mutant. If for some reason she can’t, or if the change has caused her to be sterile, I guess she’d be called a sport or a mule. Either way, they want her. They want to study her, see if they can figure out what makes her able to do what she can do. And even more, I think they want her as an exhibit. They want to use her to reactivate the Lot Six program.”

“What is it she can do?” Irv asked.

Through the kitchen window they could see Norma and Charlie coming out of the barn. The white sweater flopped and swung around Charlie’s body, the hem coming down to her calves. There was high color in her cheeks, and she was talking to Norma, who was smiling and nodding.

Andy said softly, “She can light fires.” “Well, so can I,” Irv said. He sat down again and was looking at Andy in a peculiar, cautious way. The way you look at people you suspect of madness.

“She can do it simply by thinking about it,” Andy said. “The technical name for it is pyrokinesis. It’s a psi talent, like telepathy, telekinesis, or precognition-Charlie has a dash of some of those as well, by the way-but pyrokinesis is much rarer… and much more dangerous. She’s very much afraid of it, and she’s right to be. She can’t always control it. She could burn up your house, your barn, or your front yard if she set her mind to it. Or she could light your pipe.” Andy smiled wanly. “Except that while she was lighting your pipe, she might also burn up your house, your barn, and your front yard.”

Irv finished his beer and said, “I think you ought to call the police and turn yourself in, Frank. You need help.” “I guess it sounds pretty nutty, doesn’t it?” “Yes,” Irv said gravely. “It sounds nutty as anything I ever heard.” He was sitting lightly, slightly tense on his chair, and Andy thought, He’s expecting me to do something loony the first chance I get.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter much anyway,” Andy said. “They’ll be here soon enough. I think the police would actually be better. At least you don’t turn into an unperson as soon as the police get their hands on you.”

Irv started to reply, and then the door opened. Norma and Charlie came in. Charlie’s face was bright, her eyes sparkling. “Daddy!” she said. “Daddy, I fed the-”

She broke off. Some of the color left her cheeks, and she looked narrowly from Irv Manders to her father and back to Irv again. Pleasure faded from her face and was replaced with a look of harried misery. The way she looked last night, Andy thought. The way she looked yesterday when I grabbed her out of school. It goes on and on, and where’s the happy ending for her?

“You told,” she said. “Oh Daddy, why did you tell?” Norma stepped forward and put a protective arm around Charlie’s shoulders. “Irv, what’s going on here?” “I don’t know,” Irv said. “What do you mean he told, Bobbi?” “That’s not my name,” she said. Tears had appeared in her eyes. “You know that’s not my name.” “Charlie,” Andy said. “Mr. Manders knew something was wrong. I told him, but he didn’t believe me. When you think about it, you’ll understand why.”

“I don’t understand anyth-“Charlie began, her voice rising stridently. Then she was quiet. Her head cocked sideways in a peculiar listening gesture, although as far as any of the others could tell there was nothing to listen to. As they watched, Charlie’s face simply drained of color; it was like watching some rich liquid poured out of a pitcher.

“What’s the matter, honey?” Norma asked, and cast a worried glance at Irv.

“They’re coming, Daddy,” Charlie whispered.

Her eyes were wide circles of fear. “They’re coming for us.”

11

They had rendezvoused at the corner of Highway 40 and the unnumbered blacktop road Irv had turned down-on the Hastings Glen town maps it was marked as the Old Baillings Road. Al Steinowitz had finally caught up with the rest of his men and had taken over quickly and decisively. There were sixteen of them in five cars. Heading up the road toward Irv Mander’s place, they looked like a fast-moving funeral procession.

Norville Bates had handed over the reins-and the responsibility-of the operation to A1 with genuine relief and with a question about the local and state police who had been rung in on the operation.

“We’re keeping this one dark for now,” A1 said. “If we get them, we’ll tell them they can fold their roadblocks. If we don’t, we’ll tell them to start moving in toward the centre of the circle. But between you and me, if we can’t handle them with sixteen men, we can’t handle them, Norv.”

Norv sensed the mild rebuke and said no more. He knew it would be best to take the two of them with no outside interference, because Andrew McGee was going to have an unfortunate accident as soon as they got him. A fatal accident. With no bluesuits hanging around, it could happen that much sooner.

Ahead of him and Al, the brakelights of OJ’s car flashed briefly, and then the car turned onto a dirt road. The others followed.

12

“I don’t understand any of this,” Norma said. “Bobbi… Charlie… can’t you calm down?”

“You don’t understand,” Charlie said. Her voice was high and strangled. Looking at her made Irv jumpy. Her face was like that of a rabbit caught in a snare. She pulled free of Norma’s arm and ran to her father, who put his hands on her shoulders.

“I think they’re going to kill you, Daddy,” she said.

“What?”

“Kill you,” she repeated. Her eyes were staring and glazed with panic. Her mouth worked frantically. “We have to run. We have to-”

Hot. Too hot in here.

He glanced to his left. Mounted on the wall between the stove and the sink was an indoor thermometer, the kind that can be purchased from any mail-order catalogue. At the bottom of this one, a plastic red devil with a pitchfork was grinning and mopping his brow. The motto beneath his cloven hooves read: HOT ENOUGH FOR YA?

The mercury in the thermometer was slowly rising, an accusing red finger.

“Yes, that’s what they want to do,” she said. “Kill you, kill you like they did Mommy, take me away, I won’t, I won’t let it happen, I won’t let it-”

Her voice was rising. Rising like the column of mercury.

“Charlie! Watch what you’re doing!”

Her eyes cleared a little. Irv and his wife had drawn together.

“Irv… what-”

But Irv had seen Andy’s glance at the thermometer, and suddenly he believed. It was hot in here now. Hot enough to sweat. The mercury in the thermometer stood just above ninety degrees.

“Holy Jesus Christ,” he said hoarsely. “Did she do that, Frank?” Andy ignored him. His hands were still on Charlie’s shoulders. He looked into her eyes. “Charlie-do you think it’s too late? How does it feel to you?” “Yes,” she said. All the color was gone from her face. “They’re coming up the dirt road now. Oh Daddy, I’m scared.”

“You can stop them, Charlie,” he said quietly.

She looked at him.

“Yes,” he said.

“But-Daddy-it’s bad. I know it is. I could kill them.”

“Yes,” he said. “Maybe now it’s kill or be killed. Maybe it’s come down to that.”

“It’s not bad?” Her voice was almost inaudible.

“Yes,” Andy said. “It is. Never kid yourself that it isn’t. And don’t do it if you can’t handle it, Charlie. Not even for me.” They looked at each other, eye to eye, Andy’s eyes tired and bloodshot and frightened, Charlie’s eyes wide, nearly hypnotized. She said: “If I do… something… will you still love me?”

The question hung between them, lazily revolving.

“Charlie,” he said, “I’ll always love you. No matter what.”

Irv had been at the window and now he crossed the room to them. “I think I got some tall apologizing to do,” he said. “There’s a whole line of cars coming up the road. I’ll stand with you, if you want. I got my deer gun.” But he looked suddenly frightened, almost sick.

Charlie said: “You don’t need your gun.”

She slipped out from under her father’s hands and walked across to the screen door, in Norma Manders’s knitted white sweater looking even smaller than she was. She let herself out.

After a moment, Andy found his feet and went after her. His stomach felt frozen, as if he’d just gobbled a huge Dairy Queen cone in three bites. The Manderses stayed behind. Andy caught one last look at the man’s baffled, frightened face, and a random thought-that’ll teach you to pick up hitchhikers-darted across his consciousness.

Then he and Charlie were on the porch, watching the first of the cars turn up the long driveway. The hens squawked and fluttered. In the barn, Bossy mooed again for someone to come and milk her. And thin October sunshine lay over the wooded ridges and autumn-brown fields of this small upstate-New York town. It had been almost a year of running, and Andy was surprised to find an odd sense of relief mixed in with his sharp terror. He had heard that in its extremity, even a rabbit will sometimes turn and face the dogs, driven back to some earlier, less meek nature at the instant before it must be torn apart.

At any rate, it was good not to be running. He stood with Charlie, the sunshine mellow on her blond hair.

“Oh Daddy,” she moaned. “I can’t hardly stand up.”

He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her more tightly against his side.

The first car stopped at the head of the dooryard and two men got out.

13

“Hi, Andy,” A1 Steinowitz said, and smiled. “Hi, Charlie.” His hands were empty, but his coat was open. Behind him the other man stood alertly by the car, hands at his sides. The second car stopped behind the first and four more men spilled out. All the cars were stopping, all the men getting out. Andy counted a dozen and then stopped counting.

“Go away,” Charlie said. Her voice was thin and high in the cool early afternoon. “You’ve led us a merry chase,” A1 said to Andy. He looked at Charlie. “Honey, you don’t have to-““Go away!” she screamed. A1 shrugged and smiled disarmingly. “Fraid I can’t do that, honey. I have my orders. No one wants to hurt you or your daddy.”

“You liar! You’re s'posed to kill him! I know it!”

Andy spoke and was a little surprised to find that his voice was completely steady. “I advise you to do as my daughter says. You’ve surely been briefed enough to know why she’s wanted. You know about the soldier at the airport.”

OJ and Norville Bates exchanged a sudden uneasy look.

“If you’ll just get in the car, we can discuss all of this,” A1 said. “Honest to gosh, there’s nothing going on here except-”

“We know what’s going on,” Andy said.

The men who had been in the last two or three cars were beginning to fan out and stroll, almost casually toward the porch. “Please,” Charlie said to the man with the strangely yellow face. “Don’t make me do anything.” “It’s no good, Charlie,” Andy said. Irv Manders came out onto the porch. “You men are trespassing,” he said. “I want you to get the hell off my property.”

Three of the Shop men had come up the front steps of the porch and were now standing less than ten yards away from Andy and Charlie, to their left. Charlie threw them a warning, desperate glance and they stopped-for the moment.

“We’re government agents, sir,” A1 Steinowitz said to Irv in a low, courteous voice. “These two folks are wanted for questioning. Nothing more.” “I don’t care if they’re wanted for assassinating the President,” Irv said. His voice was high, cracking. “Show me your warrant or get the Christ off my property.” “We don’t need a warrant,” Al said. His voice was edged with steel now. “You do unless I woke up in Russia this morning,” Irv said. “I’m telling you to get off, and you better get high-steppin, mister. That’s my last word on it.”

“Irv, come inside!” Norma cried.

Andy could feel something building in the air, building up around Charlie like an electric charge. The hair on his arms suddenly began to stir and move, like kelp in an invisible tide. He looked down at her and saw her face, so small, now so strange. It’s coming, he thought helplessly. It’s coming, oh my God it really is. “Get out!” he shouted at Al. “Don’t you understand what she’s going to do? Can’t you feel it? Don’t be a fool, man!” “Please,” Al said. He looked at the three men standing at the far end of the porch and nodded to them imperceptibly. He looked back at Andy. “If we can only discuss this-““Watch it, Frank!” Irv Manders screamed. The three men at the end of the porch suddenly charged at them, pulling their guns as they came. “Hold it, hold it!” one of them yelled. “Just stand still! Hands over your-“Charlie turned toward them. As she did so, half a dozen other men, John Mayo and Ray Knowles among them, broke for the porch’s back steps with their guns drawn. Charlie’s eyes widened a little, and Andy felt something hot pass by him in a warm puff of air. The three men at the front end of the porch had got halfway toward them when their hair caught on fire.

A gun boomed, deafeningly loud, and a splinter of wood perhaps eight inches long jumped from one of the porch’s supporting posts. Norma Manders screamed, and Andy flinched. But Charlie seemed not to notice. Her face was dreamy and thoughtful. A small Mona Lisa smile had touched the corners of her mouth.

She’s enjoying this, Andy thought with something like horror. Is that why she’s so afraid of it? Because she likes it?

Charlie was turning back toward Al Steinowitz again. The three men he had sent running down toward Andy and Charlie from the front end of the porch had forgotten their duty to God, country, and the Shop. They were beating at the flames on their heads and yelling. The pungent smell of fried hair suddenly filled the afternoon.

Another gun went off. A window shattered.

“Not the girl!” A1 shouted. “Not the girl!”

Andy was seized roughly. The porch swirled with a confusion of men. He was dragged toward the railing through the chaos. Then someone tried to pull him a different way. He felt like a tug-of-war rope.

“Let him go!” Irv Manders shouted, bull throated. “Let him-“Another gun went off and suddenly Norma was screaming again, screaming her husband’s name over and over. Charlie was looking down at Al Steinowitz, and suddenly the cold, confident look was gone from Al’s face and he was in terror. His yellow complexion grew positively cheesy. “No, don’t,” he said in an almost conversational tone of voice. “Don’t-”

It was impossible to tell where the flames began Suddenly his pants and his sportcoat were blazing. His hair was a burning bush. He backed up, screaming, bounced off the side of his car, and half turned to Norville Bates, his arms stretched out.

Andy felt that soft rush of heat again, a displacement of air, as if a hot slug thrown at rocket speed had just passed his nose.

Al Steinowitz’s face caught on fire.

For a moment he was all there, screaming silently under a transparent caul of flame, and then his features were blending, merging, running like tallow. Norville shrank away from him. Al Steinowitz was a flaming scarecrow. He staggered blindly down the driveway, waving his arms, and then collapsed facedown beside the third car. He didn’t look like a man at all; he looked like a burning bundle of rags.

The people on the porch had frozen, staring dumbly at this unexpected blazing development. The three men whose hair Charlie had fired had all managed to put themselves out. They were all going to look decidedly strange in the future (however short that might be); their hair, short by regulation, now looked like blackened, tangled clots of ash on top of their heads.

“Get out,” Andy said hoarsely. “Get out quickly. She’s never done anything like this before and I don’t know if she can stop.”

“I’m all right, Daddy,” Charlie said. Her voice was calm, collected, and strangely indifferent. “Everything’s okay.”

And that was when the cars began to explode.

They all went up from the rear; later, when Andy replayed the incident at the Manders farm in his mind, he was quite sure of that. They all went up from the rear, where the gas tanks were.

Al’s light-green Plymouth went first, exploding with a muffled whrrr-rump! sound. A ball of flame rose from the back of the Plymouth, too bright to look at. The rear window blew in. The Ford John and Ray had come in went next, barely two seconds later. Hooks of metal whickered through the air and pattered on the roof.

“Charlie!” Andy shouted. “Charlie, stop it!”

She said in that same calm voice: “I can’t.”

The third car went up.

Someone ran. Someone else followed him. The men on the porch began to back away. Andy was tugged again, he resisted, and suddenly no one at all was holding him. And suddenly they were all running, their faces white, eyes stare-blind with panic. One of the men with the charred hair tried to vault over the railing, caught his foot, and fell headfirst into a small side garden where Norma had grown beans earlier in the year. The stakes for the beans to climb on were still there, and one of them rammed through this fellow’s throat and came out the other side with a wet punching sound that Andy never forgot. He twitched in the garden like a landed trout, the bean-pole protruding from his neck like the shaft of an arrow, blood gushing down the front of his shirt as he made weak gargling founds.

The rest of the cars went up then like an ear shattering string of firecrackers. Two of the fleeing men were tossed aside like ragdolls by the concussion, one of them on fire from the waist down, the other peppered with bits of safety glass.

Dark, oily smoke rose in the air. Beyond the driveway, the far hills and fields twisted and writhed through the heat-shimmer as if recoiling in horror. Chickens ran madly everywhere, clucking crazily. Suddenly three of them exploded into flame and went rushing off, balls of fire with feet, to collapse on the far side of the dooryard.

“Charlie, stop it right now! Stop it!”

A trench of fire raced across the dooryard on a diagonal, the very dirt blazing in a single straight line, as if a train of gunpowder had been laid. The flame reached the chopping block with Irv’s ax buried in it, made a fairy-ring around it, and suddenly collapsed inward. The chopping block whooshed into flame.

“CHARLIE FOR CHRIST’s SAKE!”

Some Shop agent’s pistol was lying on the verge of grass between the porch and the blazing line of cars in the driveway. Suddenly the cartridges in it began to go off in a series of sharp, clapping explosions. The gun jigged and flipped bizarrely in the grass.

Andy slapped her as hard as he could.

Her head rocked back, her eyes blue and vacant. Then she was looking at him, surprised and hurt and dazed, and he suddenly felt enclosed in a capsule of swiftly building heat. He took in a breath of air that felt like heavy glass. The hairs in his nose felt as if they were crisping.

Spontaneous combustion, he thought. I’m going up in a burst of spontaneous combustion-

Then it was gone.

Charlie staggered on her feet and put her hands up to her face. And then, through her hands, came a shrill, building scream of such horror and dismay that Andy feared her mind had cracked.

“DAAAAADEEEEEEEEE-”

He swept her into his arms, hugged her.

“Shhh,” he said. “Oh Charlie, honey, shhhh.”

The scream stopped, and she went limp in his arms. Charlie had fainted.

14

Andy picked her up in his arms and her head rolled limply against his chest. The air was hot and rich with the smell of burning gasoline. Flames had already crawled across the lawn to the ivy trellis; fingers of fire began to climb the ivy with the agility of a boy on midnight business. The house was going to go up.

Irv Manders was leaning against the kitchen screen door, his legs splayed. Norma knelt beside him. He had been shot above the elbow, and the sleeve of his blue workshirt was a bright red. Norma had torn a long strip of her dress off” at the hem and was trying to get his shirtsleeve up so she could bind the wound. Irv’s eyes were open. His face was an ashy gray, his lips were faintly blue, and he was breathing fast.

Andy took a step toward them and Norma Manders flinched backward, at the same time placing her body over her husband’s. She looked up at Andy with shiny, hard eyes.

“Get away,” she hissed. “Take your monster and get away.”

15

OJ ran.

The Windsucker bounced up and down under his arm as he ran. He ignored the road as he ran. He ran in the field. He fell down and got up and ran on. He twisted his ankle in what might have been a chuckhole and fell down again, a scream jerking out of his mouth as he sprawled. Then he got up and ran on. At times it seemed that he was running alone, and at times it seemed that someone was running with him. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting away, away from that blazing bundle of rags that had been A1 Steinowitz ten minutes before, away from that burning train of cars, away from Bruce Cook who lay in a small garden patch with a stake in his throat. Away, away, away. The Windsucker fell out of its holster, struck his knee painfully, and fell in a tangle of weeds, forgotten. Then OJ was in a patch of woods. He stumbled over a fallen tree and sprawled full length. He lay there, breathing raggedly, one hand pressed to his side, where a painful stitch had formed. He lay weeping tears of shock and fear. He thought: No more assignments in New York. Never. That’s it. Everybody out of the pool. I’m never setting foot in New York again even if I live to be two hundred.

After a little while OJ got up and began to limp toward the road.

16

“Let’s get him off the porch,” Andy said. He had laid Charlie on the grass beyond the dooryard. The side of the house was burning now, and sparks were drifting down on the porch like big, slow-moving fireflies.

“Get away,'” she said harshly. “Don’t touch him.”

“The house is burning,” Andy said. “Let me help you.”

“Get away! You’ve done enough!”

“Stop it, Norma.” Irv looked at her. “None of what happened was this man’s fault. So shut your mouth.” She looked at him as if she had a great many things to say, and then shut her mouth with a snap. “Get me up,” Irv said. “Legs feel all rubber. Think maybe I pissed myself. Shouldn’t be surprised. One of those bastards shot me. Don’t know which one. Lend a hand, Frank.” “It’s Andy,” he said, and got an arm around Irv’s back. Little by little Irv came up. “I don’t blame your missus. You should have passed us by this morning.”

“If I had it to do over again, I’d do it just the same way,” Irv said. “Gosh-damn people coming on my land with guns. Gosh-damn bastards and fucking bunch of government whoremasters and… oooww-oooh, Christ!”

“Irv?” Norma cried. “Hush, woman. I got it nocked now. Come on, Frank, or Andy, or whatever your name is. It’s gettin hot.”

It was. A puff” of wind blew a coil of sparks onto the porch as Andy half dragged Irv down the steps and into the dooryard. The chopping block was a blackened stump. There was nothing left of the chickens Charlie had set on fire but a few charred bones and a peculiar, dense ash that might have been feathers. They had not been roasted; they had been cremated.

“Set me down by the barn,” Irv gasped. “I want to talk to you.”

“You need a doctor,” Andy said.

“Yeah, I’ll get my doctor. What about your girl?”

“Fainted.” He set Irv down with his back against the barn door. Irv was looking up at him. A little color had come into his face, and that bluish cast was leaving his lips. He was sweating. Behind them, the big white farmhouse that had stood here on the Baillings Road since 1868 was going up in flames.

“There’s no human being should be able to do what she can,” Irv said.

“That may well be,” Andy said, and then he looked from Irv and directly into Norma Manders’s stony, unforgiving face. “But then, no human being should have to have cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy or leukemia. But it happens. And it happens to children.”

“She didn’t get no say.” Irv nodded. “All right.” Still looking at Norma, Andy said, “She’s no more a monster than a kid in an iron lung or in a home for retarded children.”

“I’m sorry I said that,” Norma replied, and her glance wavered and fell from Andy’s. “I was out feeding the chickens with her. Watching her pet the cow. But mister, my house is burning down, and people are dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“The house is insured, Norma,” Irv said, taking her hand with his good one.

“That doesn’t do anything about my mother’s dishes that her mother gave to her,” Norma said. “Or my nice secretary, or the pictures we got at the Schenectady art show last July.” A tear slipped out of one eye and she wiped it away with her sleeve. “And all the letters you wrote to me when you were in the army.”

“Is your button going to be all right?” Irv asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, listen. Here’s what you can do if you want to. There’s an old Willys Jeep out behind the barn-”

“Irv, no! Don’t get into this any deeper!”

He turned to look at her, his face gray and lined and sweaty. Behind them, their home burned. The sound of popping shingles was like that of horse chestnuts in a Christmas fire.

“Those men came with no warrants nor blueback paper of any kind and tried to take them off our land,” he said. “People I’d invited in like it’s done in a civilized country with decent laws. One of them shot me, and one of them tried to shoot Andy here. Missed his head by no more than a quarter of an inch.” Andy remembered the first deafening report and the splinter of wood that had jumped from the porch support post. He shivered. “They came and did those things. What do you want me to do, Norma? Sit here and turn them over to the secret police if they get their peckers up enough to come back! Be a good German?”

“No,” she said huskily. “No, I guess not.”

“You don’t have to-“Andy began.

“I feel I do,” Irv said. “And when they come back… they will be back, won’t they, Andy?”

“Oh yes. They’ll be back. You just bought stock in a growth industry, Irv.”

Irv laughed, a whistling, breathless sound. “That’s pretty good, all right. Well, when they show up here, all I know is that you took my Willys. I don’t know more than that. And to wish you well.”

“Thank you,” Andy said quietly.

“We got to be quick,” Irv said. “It’s a long way back to town, but they’ll have seen the smoke by now. Fire trucks’ll be coming. You said you and the button were going to Vermont. Was that much the truth?”

“Yes,” Andy said.

There was a moaning sound to their left. “Daddy-”

Charlie was sitting up. The red pants and green blouse were smeared with dirt. Her face was pale, her eyes were terribly confused. “Daddy, what’s burning? I smell something burning. Am I doing it? What’s burning?”

Andy went to her and gathered her up. “Everything is all right,” he said, and wondered why you had to say that to children even when they knew perfectly well, as you did, that it wasn’t true. “Everything’s fine. How do you feel, hon?”

Charlie was looking over his shoulder at the burning line of cars, the convulsed body in the garden, and the Manders house, which was crowned with fire. The porch was also wrapped in flames. The wind was carrying the smoke and heat away from them, but the smell of gas and hot shingles was strong.

“I did that,” Charlie said, almost too low to hear. Her face began to twist and crumple again.

“Button!” Irv said sternly.

She glanced over at him, through him. “Me,” she moaned.

“Set her down,” Irv said. “I want to talk to her.”

Andy carried Charlie over to where Irv sat propped up against the barn door and set her down. ““You listen to me, button,” Irv said. “Those men meant to kill your daddy. You knew it before I did, maybe before he did, although I’ll be damned if I know how. Am I right?”

“Yes,” Charlie said. Her eyes were still deep and miserable. “But you don’t get it. It was like the soldier, but worse. I couldn’t… couldn’t hold onto it anymore. It was going everyplace. I burned up some of your chickens… and I almost burned up my father.” The miserable eyes spilled over and she began to cry helplessly.

“Your daddy’s fine,” Irv said. Andy said nothing. He remembered that sudden strangling sensation, being enclosed in that heat capsule. “I’m never going to do it again,” she said.

“Never.”

“All right,” Andy said, and put a hand on her shoulder. “All right, Charlie.”

“Never,” she repeated with quiet emphasis.

“You don’t want to say that, button,” Irv said, looking up at her. “You don’t want to block yourself off” like that. You’ll do what you have to do. You’ll do the best you can. And that’s all you can do. I believe the one thing the God of this world likes best, is to give the business to people who say ‘never'. You understand me?”

“No,” Charlie whispered.

“But you will, I think,” Irv said, and looked at Charlie with such deep compassion that Andy felt his throat fill with sorrow and fear. Then Irv glanced at his wife. “Bring me that there stick by your foot, Norma.”

Norma brought the stick and put it into his hand and told him again that he was overdoing it, that he had to rest. And so it was only Andy that heard Charlie say “Never” again, almost inaudibly, under her breath, like a vow taken in secrecy.

17

“Look here, Andy,” Irv said, and drew a straight line in the dust. “This is the dirt road we came up. The Baillings Road. If you go a quarter of a mile north, you’ll come to a woods road on your right. A car can’t make it up that road, but the Willys should do it if you keep her wound up and use an educated foot on the clutch. A couple of times it’s gonna look like that road just up and died, but you keep going and you’ll pick it up again. It’s not on any map, you understand? Not on any map.”

Andy nodded, watching the stick draw the woods road.

“It’ll take you twelve miles east, and if you don’t get stuck or lost, you’ll come out on Route One fifty-two near Hoag Corners. You turn left-north-and about a mile up One-fifty-two you’ll come to another woods road. It’s low ground, swampy, mushy. The Willys might do it, might not. I ain’t been on that road in five years, I guess. It’s the only one I know that goes east toward Vermont and won’t be road-blocked off: That second road is gonna bring you out on Highway Twenty-two, north of Cherry Plain and south of the Vermont border. By then you should be out of the worst of it-although I s'pose they’ll have your name and pictures on the wire. But we wish you the best. Don’t we, Norma?”

“Yes,” Norma said, and the word was almost a sigh. She looked at Charlie. “You saved your dad’s life, little girl. That’s the thing to remember.”

“Is it?” Charlie said, and her voice was so perfectly toneless that Norma Manders looked bewildered and a little afraid. Then Charlie tried a hesitant smile and Norma smiled back, relieved.

“Keys are in the Willys, and-“He cocked his head to one side. “Hark!”

It was the sound of sirens, rising and falling in cycles, still faint but drawing closer.

“It’s the FD,” Irv said. “You better go, if you’re goin.”

“Come on, Charlie,” Andy said. She came to him, her eyes red from her tears. The small smile had disappeared like hesitant sunlight behind the clouds, but Andy felt greatly encouraged that it had been there at all. The face she wore was a survivor’s face, shocked and wounded. In that moment, Andy wished he had her power; he would use it, and he knew whom he would use it on.

He said, “Thank you, Irv.” “I’m sorry,” Charlie said in a small voice. “About your house and your chickens and… and everything else.” “It sure wasn’t your fault, button,” Irv said. “They brought it on themselves. You watch out for your daddy.” “All right,” she said. Andy took her hand and led her around the barn to where the Willys was parked under a shakepole leanto.

The fire sirens were very close by the time he had got it started and driven it across the lawn to the road. The house was an inferno now. Charlie would not look at it. The last Andy saw of the Manderses was in the rearview mirror of the canvas-topped jeep: Irv leaning against the barn, the piece of white skirting knotted around his wounded arm stained red, Norma sitting beside him. His good arm was around her. Andy waved, and Irv gestured a bit in return with his bad arm. Norma didn’t wave, thinking, perhaps, of her mother’s china, her secretary, the love letters-all the things of which insurance money is ignorant and always has been.

18

They found the first woods road just where Irv Manders had said they would. Andy put the Jeep in four-wheel drive and turned onto it.

“Hold on, Charlie,” he said. “We’re gonna bounce.”

Charlie held on. Her face was white and listless, and looking at her made Andy nervous. The cottage, he thought. Granther McGee’s cottage on Tashmore Pond. If we can only get there and rest. She’ll get herself back together and then we’ll think about what we should do.

We’ll think about it tomorrow. Like Scarlett said it’s another day.

The Willys roared and pitched its way up the road, which was no more than a two-wheel track with bushes and even a few stunted pines growing along the crown. This land had been logged over maybe ten years ago, and Andy doubted if it had been used since then, except by an occasional hunter. Six miles up it did seem to “up and die,” and Andy had to stop twice to move trees that had blown down. The second time he looked up from his exertions, heart and head pounding almost sickeningly, and saw a large doe looking at him thoughtfully. She held a moment longer and then was gone into the deeper woods with a flip of her white tail. Andy looked back at Charlie and saw she was watching the deer’s progress with something like wonder… and he felt encouraged again. A little farther on they found the wheel-ruts again, and around three o'clock they came out on the stretch of two-lane blacktop that was Route 152.

19

Orville Jamieson, scratched and muddy and barely able to walk on his bad ankle, sat by the side of the Baillings Road about a half a mile from the Manders farm and spoke into his walkie-talkie. His message was relayed back to a temporary command post in a van parked in the main street of Hastings Glen. The van had radio equipment with a built-in scrambler and a powerful transmitter. OJ’s report was scrambled, boosted, and sent to New York City, where a relay station caught it and sent it on to Longmont, Virginia, where Cap sat in his office, listening.

Cap’s face was no longer bright and jaunty, as it had been when he biked to work that morning. OJ’s report was nearly unbelievable: they had known the girl had something, but this story of sudden carnage and reversal was (at least to Cap) like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky. Four to six men dead, the others driven helter-skelter into the woods, half a dozen cars in flames, a house burning to the ground, a civilian wounded and about to blab to anyone and everyone who cared to listen that a bunch of neo-Nazis had turned up on his doorstep with no warrant and had attempted to kidnap a man and a little girl whom he had invited home to lunch.

When OJ finished his report (and he never really did; he only began to repeat himself in a kind of semihysteria), Cap hung up and sat in his deep swivel chair and tried to think. He did not think a covert operation had gone so spectacularly wrong since the Bay of Pigs-and this was on American soil.

The office was gloomy and filled with thick shadows now that the sun had got around to the other side of the building, but he didn’t turn on the lights. Rachel had buzzed him on the intercom and he had told her curtly he didn’t want to talk to anyone, anyone at all.

He felt old.

He heard Wanless saying: I am talking about the Potential for destruction. Well, it wasn’t just a question of potential any longer, was it? But we’re going to have her, he thought, looking blankly across the room. Oh yes, we’re going to have her.

He thumbed for Rachel.

“I want to talk to Orville Jamieson as soon as he can be flown here,” he said. “And I want to talk to General Brackman in Washington, A-one-A priority. We’ve got a potentially embarrassing situation in New York State, and I want you to tell him that right out.”

“Yes, sir,” Rachel said respectfully.

“I want a meeting with all six subdirectors at nineteen hundred hours. Also A-one-A. And I want to talk to the chief of state police up there in New York.” They had been part of the search sweep, and Cap wanted to point that out to them. If mud was going to be thrown, he would be sure to save back a good, big bucket of it for them. But he also wanted to point out that behind a united front, they might still all be able to come out of this looking fairly decent.

He hesitated and then said, “And when John Rainbird calls in, tell him I want to talk to him. I have another job for him.”

“Yes, sir.”

Cap let go of the intercom toggle. He sat back in his chair and studied the shadows.

“Nothing has happened that can’t be fixed,” he said to the shadows. That had been his motto all his life-not printed in crewel and hung up, not embossed on a copper desk plaque, but it was printed on his heart as truth.

Nothing that can’t be fixed. Until tonight, until OJ’s report, he had believed that. It was a philosophy that had brought a poor Pennsylvania miner’s kid a long way. And he believed it still, although in a momentarily shaken manner. Between Manders and his wife, they probably had relatives scattered from New England to California, and each one was a potential lever. There were enough top-secret files right here in Longmont to ensure that any congressional hearing on Shop methods would be… well, a little hard of hearing. The cars and even the agents were only hardware, although it would be a long time before he would really be able to get used to the idea that Al Steinowitz was gone. Who could there possibly be to replace Al? That little kid and her old man were going to pay for what they had done to Al, if for nothing else. He would see to it.

But the girl. Could the girl be fixed?

There were ways. There were methods of containment.

The McGee files were still on the library cart. He got up, went to them, and began thumbing through them restlessly. He wondered where John Rainbird was at this moment.