Night Chills

1 Friday, August 26, 1977 9:45 A.M

Rya sat in the front seat of the station wagon between Paul and Jenny, silent and unmoving, gripped by what appeared to be fear and by anger as well. Her hands were curled into solid little fists in her lap. Beneath her summer tan she was ashen. Fine beads of perspiration were strung along her hairline. She pressed her lips together like the halves of a vise, partly to keep them from trembling, partly as a sign of her extreme anger, frustration, and determination to prove herself right.

Although she had never lied to him about anything serious, Paul couldn’t believe the story she had told them minutes ago. She had seen something odd at the Thorp house. He was fairly certain of that. However, she had surely misinterpreted what she had seen. When she burst in upon Sam, Jenny, and him at the store, her tears and horror had been genuine; of that there was absolutely no doubt. But Mark dead? Unthinkable. Beaten to death by Bob Thorp, the chief of police? Ridiculous. If she wasn’t lying — well, then she was at least terribly confused.

“It’s t-t-true, Daddy. It’s true. I swear to God it’s true. They… they k-k-killed him. They did. Mr. Thorp did. The other man t-told Mr. Thorp to k-kill, and he did. He kept b-b-banging Mark’s head… his head… banging it against the stove. It was awful. B-banging it… over and over again… and all the blood… Oh, God, Daddy, it’s crazy but it’s true!”

It was crazy.

And it couldn’t be true.

Yet when she first came into the store — breathing hard, half-choking and half-crying, babbling as if she were in a fever, so unlike herself — he felt an icy hand on the back of his neck. As she told her improbable story, the glacial fingers lingered. And they were still there.

He turned the comer onto Union Road. The police chief’s house was a quarter of a mile away, the last on the street, near the river. The garage, large enough for two cars and topped by a workman’s loft, lay fifty yards beyond the house. He pulled into the driveway and parked the station wagon in front of the garage.

“Where’s the canary cage?” he asked.

Rya said, “It was over there. Near the window. They’ve moved it.”

“Looks calm. Peaceful. Doesn’t seem like a murder took place half an hour ago.”

“Inside,” Rya said sharply. “They killed him inside.”

Jenny took hold of the girl’s hand and squeezed it. “Rya—”

“Inside.” Her face was set; she was resolute.

“Let’s have a look,” Paul said.

They got out of the car and crossed the freshly mown lawn to the back of the house.

Emma had evidently heard them drive up; for by the time they reached the kitchen stoop, she had the door open and was waiting for them. She wore a royal blue floor-length corduroy housecoat with a high neckline, round collar, and light blue corduroy belt at the waist. Her long hair was combed back and tucked behind her ears, held in place by a few bobby pins. She was smiling, pleased to see them.

“Hi,” Paul said awkwardly. He was suddenly at a loss for words. If even a tiny fraction of Rya’s tale were true, Emma would not be this serene. He began to feel foolish for having placed any faith whatsoever in such a bizarre story. He couldn’t imagine how he would ever tell Emma about it.

“Hi there,” she said cheerily. “Hello, Rya. Jenny, how is your father?”

“Fine, thanks,” Jenny said. She sounded quite as bewildered as Paul felt.

“Well,” Emma said, “I’m still in my robe. The breakfast dishes haven’t been washed. The kitchen’s a greasy mess. But if you don’t mind sitting down in a disaster zone, you’re welcome to visit.”

Paul hesitated.

“Something wrong?” Emma asked.

“Is Bob home?”

“He’s at work.”

“When did he leave?”

“Same as every day. A few minutes before nine.”

“He’s at the police station?”

“Or cruising around in the patrol car.” Emma no longer needed to ask if something was wrong; she knew. “Why?”

Why indeed? Paul thought. Rather than explain, he said, “Is Mark here?”

“He was,” Emma said. “He and Jeremy went over to the basketball court behind the Union Theater.”

“When was that?”

“Half an hour ago.”

It seemed to him that she had to be telling the truth, for her statement could be verified or disproved so easily. If her husband had killed Mark, what could she hope to gain by such a flimsy lie? Besides, he didn’t think she was the sort of woman who could take part in the cover-up of a murder — certainly not with such apparent equanimity, not without showing a great deal of stress and guilt.

Paul looked down at Rya.

Her face was still a mask of stubbornness — and even more pale and drawn than it had been in the car. “What about Buster?” she asked Emma. Her voice was sharp and too loud. “Did they take Buster over to the court so he could play basketball with them?”

Understandably bewildered by the girl’s uncharacteristic nastiness and her intense reaction to such a simple statement, Emma said, “The squirrel? Oh, they left him with me. Do you want the squirrel?” She stepped back, out of the doorway. “Come in.”

For a moment, recalling the tale of mindless violence that Rya had related just thirty minutes ago, Paul wondered if Bob Thorp was in the kitchen, waiting for him…

But that was absurd. Emma was not aware that supposedly a boy had been slain in her kitchen this morning; he would have wagered nearly any sum on that. And in the light of Emma’s innocence, Rya’s story seemed altogether a fantasy — and not really a very good one, at that.

He went inside.

The canary cage stood in one comer, next to the flip-top waste can. Buster sat on his hind feet and busily nibbled an apple. His tail flicked straight up, and he went stiff as a wooden squirrel when he became aware of the guests. He assessed Paul and Rya and Jenny as if he had never seen them before, decided there was no danger, and returned to his breakfast.

“Mark told me he likes apples,” Emma said.

“He does.”

The kitchen held no evidence that a violent and deadly struggle had taken place there. The dishes on the table were spotted with dried egg yolk, butter, and crumbs of toast. The clock-radio produced soft instrumental music, an orchestrated version of a pop tune. The new issue of the weekly newspaper, distributed that morning, was folded in half and propped against two empty juice glasses and the sugar bowl. A cup of steaming coffee stood beside the paper. If she had watched her husband murder a child, could Emma have sat down to read less than an hour after the killing? Improbable. Impossible. There was no blood on the wall behind the electric range, no blood on the range itself, and no blood, not even one thin smear, on the tile floor.

“Did you come to get Buster?” Emma asked. She was clearly perplexed by their behavior.

“No,” Paul said. “But we’ll take him off your hands. Actually, I’m ashamed to tell you why we did come.”

“They cleaned it up,” Rya said.

“I don’t want to hear—”

“They cleaned up the blood,” she said excitedly.

Paul pointed one finger at her. “You have caused quite enough trouble for one day, young lady. You keep quiet. I’ll talk to you later.”

Ignoring his warning, she said, “They cleaned up the blood and hid his body.”

“Body?” Emma looked confused. “What body?”

“It’s a misunderstanding, a hoax, or—” Paul began.

Rya interrupted him. To Emma she said, “Mr. Thorp killed Mark. You know he did. Don’t lie! You stood at that chair and watched him beat Mark to death. You were naked and—”

“Rya!” Paul said sharply.

“It’s true!”

“I told you to be quiet.”

“She was naked and—”

In eleven years he had never been required to deal out any punishment more severe than a twenty-four-hour suspension of some of her privileges. But now, angry, he started toward her.

Rya pushed past Jenny, threw open the kitchen door, and ran.

Shocked by her defiance, angry and yet worried about her, Paul went after her. When he set foot on the stoop, she was already out of sight. She couldn’t have had time to run to the garage or to the station wagon; therefore, she must have slipped around the comer of the house, either left or right. He decided she would most likely head for Union Road, and he went that way. When he reached the sidewalk he saw her and called to her.

She was nearly a block away, on the far side of the street, still running. If she heard him, she didn’t respond; she disappeared between two houses.

He crossed the street and followed her. But when he reached the rear lawns of those houses, she wasn’t there.

“Rya!”

She didn’t answer him. She might have been too far away to hear — but he suspected that she was hiding nearby.

“Rya, I just want to talk to you!”

Nothing. Silence.

Already his anger had largely given way to concern for her. What in the name of God had possessed the girl? Why had she concocted such a grisly story? And how had she managed to tell it with such passion? He hadn’t really believed any of it, not from the start — yet he’d been so impressed by her sincerity that he’d come to the Thorp house to see for himself. She wasn’t a liar by nature. She wasn’t that good an actress. At least not in his experience. And when her story was shown to be a lie, why had she defended it so ardently? How had she defended it so ardently, knowing it was a lie? Did she believe, perhaps, that it wasn’t a fabrication? Did she think that she actually had seen her brother killed? But if that was the case, she was — mentally disturbed. Rya? Mentally disturbed? Rya was tough. Rya knew how to cope. Rya was a rock. Even an hour ago he would have staked his life on her soundness of mind. Was there any psychological disorder that could strike a child so suddenly, without warning, without any symptoms beforehand?

Deeply worried, he went back across the street to apologize to Emma Thorp.

2 10:15 A.M

Jeremy Thorp stood, almost as if at attention before a military court, in the center of the kitchen.

“Do you understand what I’ve said?” Salsbury asked.

“Yeah.”

“You know what to do?”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Any questions?”

“Just one.”

“What is it?”

“What do I do if they don’t show up?”

“They’ll show up,” Salsbury said.

“But what if they don’t?”

“You have a watch, don’t you?”

The boy held up one thin wrist.

“You wait twenty minutes for them. If they don’t show up in that time, come straight back here. Is that understood?”

“Yeah. Twenty minutes.”

“Get moving.”

The boy started toward the door.

“Don’t leave that way. They’ll see you. Go out the front. ”

Jeremy went down the narrow hall to the door.

Salsbury followed, watched until the boy was out of sight behind the neighboring house, closed the door, locked it, and went back to the kitchen.

Not bad, he thought. You’re holding up well, Ogden. H. Leonard himself couldn’t have coped any faster than you’ve done. Clever as hell. You are certainly clever. With your mind and the advantage of the power, the key-lock code phrases, you’ll weather this crisis. If Miriam could see you now… What would old Miriam say now? You aren’t anything like Miriam said you were. You’re a tough customer. Jesus, what a tough customer. You make sound decisions under pressure, and you stick with them. Smart. Damned smart. But oh, my God, what a razor edge you’re walking!

Standing next to the rear window, he pushed the curtain aside a fraction of an inch, until he could see the garage. Annendale slid the squirrel’s cage into the cargo bed of the station wagon, closed the tailgate, and put up the electric window. Jenny Edison got in the car. Annendale and Emma talked for perhaps a minute. Then he got behind the wheel and reversed out of the driveway. When Emma waved good-by to them and started back toward the house, Salsbury let the curtain fall into place.

She came into the kitchen, saw him, and was startled. She looked as if she was ready to scream. “What are you doing here? Who are you?”

“I am the key.”

“I am the lock.”

“Relax.”

She did.

“Sit down.”

She sat.

He stood in front of her, loomed over her. “What were you and Annendale talking about out there?”

“He kept apologizing for his daughter’s behavior.”

Salsbury laughed.

Because her memories of this morning’s events had been selectively edited, she didn’t see the humor in the situation. “Why would Rya accuse Bob of murder? What a terrible thing. Does she think she’s being funny? What a gruesome joke!”

The entrance foyer of St. Margaret Mary’s Roman Catholic Church was quiet and nearly lightless. The entire interior was done in dark pine — pegged pine floors, dark pine walls, open-beam ceilings, an intricately carved twelve-foot-high crucifix — as befitted the major house of worship in a lumber mill town. A five-watt bulb burned above the holy water font twelve feet away. At the far end of the auditorium, votive candles flickered in ruby-colored glass cups, and soft lights shone at the base of the altar. However, little of this ghostly illumination filtered through the open archway into the foyer.

Cloaked in these shadows and in the holy silence, Jeremy Thorp leaned against one of the two heavy, brass-fitted front doors of the church. He opened it only two or three inches and held it in place with his hip. Beyond lay a set of brick steps, the sidewalk, a pair of birch trees, and then the western end of Main Street. The Union Theater was directly across the street; he had an adequate view of it in spite of the birches.

Jeremy looked at his watch in the blade of light that sliced through the narrow crack between the doors. 10:20.

As they approached the traffic light at the town square, Paul switched on the righthand turn signal.

Jenny said, “The store’s to the left.”

“I know.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the basketball court behind the theater.”

“To check up on Emma?”

“No. I’m sure she’s telling the truth.”

“Why, then?”

“I want to ask Mark exactly what did happen this morning,” he said, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited impatiently for the light to change.

“Emma told us what happened. Nothing.”

He said, “Emma’s eyes were red and puffy, as if she’d been crying. Maybe she and Bob had an argument while Mark was there. Rya might have come to the door at the height of the shouting. She might have misunderstood what was happening; she panicked and ran.”

“Emma would have told us.”

“She might have been too embarrassed.”

As the traffic light turned green, Jenny said, “Panic? That sure doesn’t sound like Rya.”

“I know. But is it more in character for her to fabricate extravagant lies?”

She nodded. “You’re right. As unlikely as it is, it’s more likely that she was confused and that she panicked. ”

“We’ll ask Mark.”

According to Jeremy Thorp’s wrist watch it was 10:22 when Paul Annendale drove his station wagon up Main Street and into the alleyway beside the theater. As soon as the car was out of sight, the boy left the church. He went down the front steps, stood at the curb, and waited for the station wagon to reappear.

During the last hour the sky had come closer to the earth. From horizon to horizon, a solid mass of lowering gray-black clouds rolled eastward, driven by a strong high-altitude wind. Some of that wind had begun to sweep the streets of Black River, just enough of it to turn the leaves on the trees — a sign, according to folklore, of oncoming rain.

No rain, please, Jeremy thought. We don’t want any damn rain. At least not before tonight. This summer a dozen kids had organized a series of bicycle races to be held every Friday. Last week he had placed second in the main event, the cross-town dash. But I’ll be first this week, he thought. I’ve been in training. Heavy training. Not wasting any time like those other kids. I’m sure to be the first this week — if it doesn’t rain.

He glanced at his watch again. 10:26.

A few seconds later, when he saw the station wagon coming back down the alley, Jeremy started walking east along Main Street at a brisk pace.

As the car nosed out of the alley, just as Paul was about to turn right onto Main Street, Jenny said, “There’s Jeremy. ”

Paul tapped the brakes. “Where?”

“Across the street.”

“Mark’s not with him.” He blew the horn, put down his window, and motioned for the boy to come to him.

After he had looked both ways, Jeremy crossed the street. “Hi, Mr. Annendale. Hi, Jenny.”

Paul said, “Your mother told me you and Mark were playing basketball behind the theater.”

“We started to. But it wasn’t much fun, so we went up to Gordon’s Woods.”

“Where’s that?”

They were in the final block of Main Street; but the road continued to the west. It rose with the land, rounded a bluff, and went on until it reached the mill and after that the logging camp.

Jeremy pointed to the forest atop the bluff. “That’s Gordon’s Woods.”

“Why would you want to go up there?” Paul asked.

“We’ve got a treehouse in Gordon’s Woods.” The boy read Paul’s expression accurately, and he quickly said, “Oh, don’t worry, Mr. Annendale. It’s not a rickety old place. It’s completely safe. Some of our fathers built it for all the kids in town.”

“He’s right,” Jenny said. “It’s safe. Sam was one of the fathers who built it.” She smiled. “Even though his daughter is a bit too old for treehouses.”

Jeremy grinned. He wore braces. Those and the freckles that peppered his face disarmed Paul. The boy clearly didn’t have the guile, the dark personality, or the experience to take part in a murder conspiracy.

Paul felt somewhat relieved. When he hadn’t found Jeremy and Mark at the basketball court, that icy hand had settled once more, if briefly, on the back of his neck. He said, “Is Mark up at the treehouse now?”

“Yeah.”

“Why aren’t you there?”

“Me and Mark and a couple of other kids want to play Monopoly. So I’m going home to get my set.”

“Jeremy…” How could he possibly find out what he wanted to know? “Did anything — happen in your kitchen this morning?”

The boy blinked, a bit perplexed by the question. “We had breakfast.”

Feeling more foolish than ever, Paul said, “Well… You better get your Monopoly set. The other kids are waiting. ”

Jeremy said good-by to Jenny and Paul and to Buster, turned, looked both ways, and crossed the street.

Paul watched him until he turned the comer at the square.

“Now what?” Jenny said.

“Rya probably ran to Sam for sympathy and protection.” He sighed. “She’s had time to calm down. Maybe she realizes that she panicked. We’ll see what her story is now.”

“If she didn’t run to Sam?”

“Then there’s no use looking for her all over town. If she wants to hide from us, she can with little trouble. Sooner or later she’ll come to the store.”

Sitting at the kitchen table, across from his mother, Jeremy recounted the conversation he’d had with Paul Annendale a few minutes ago.

When the boy finished, Salsbury said, “And he believed it?”

Jeremy frowned. “Believed what?”

“He believed that Mark was at the treehouse?”

“Well, sure. Isn’t he?”

Okay. Okay, okay, Salsbury thought. This isn’t the end of the crisis. You’ve bought some time to think. An hour or two. Maybe three hours. Eventually Annendale will go looking for his son. Two or three hours. You’ve no time to waste. Be decisive. You’ve been wonderfully decisive so far. What you’ve got to do is be decisive and get this straightened out before you have to tell Dawson about it.

Earlier, within twenty minutes of the boy’s death, he had edited the Thorp family’s memories, had erased all remembrance of the killing from their minds. That editing took no longer than two or three minutes — but it was only the first stage of a plan to conceal his involvement in the murder. If the situation were any less desperate, if a capital offense hadn’t been committed, if the entire key-lock program didn’t hang in the balance, he could have left the Thorps with blank spots in their memories, and he would have felt perfectly safe in spite of that. But the circumstances were such that he knew he should not merely wipe out the truth but that he should also replace it with a detailed set of false memories, recollections of routine events which might have happened that morning but which in reality did not.

He decided to begin with the woman. To the boy he said, “Go into the living room and sit on the couch. Don’t move from there until I call for you. Understood?”

“Yeah.” Jeremy left the room.

Salsbury thought for a minute about how to proceed.

Emma watched him, waited.

Finally he said, “Emma, what time is it?”

She looked at the clock-radio. “Twenty minutes of eleven. ”

“No,” he said softly. “That’s wrong. It’s twenty minutes of nine. Twenty minutes of nine this morning.”

“It is?”

“Look at the clock, Emma.”

“Twenty of nine,” she said.

“Where are you, Emma?”

“In my kitchen.”

“Who else is here?”

“Just you.”

“No.” He sat in Jeremy’s chair. “You can’t see me. You can’t see me at all. Can you, Emma?”

“No. 1 can’t see you.”

“You can hear me. But you know what? Whenever our little conversation is over, you won’t remember we’ve had it. Every event that I describe to you in the next couple of minutes will become a part of your memories. You won’t remember that you were told these things. You will think that you actually experienced them. Is that clear, Emma?”

“Yes.” Her eyes glazed. Her facial muscles went slack.

“All right. What time is it?”

“Twenty minutes of nine.”

“Where are you?”

“In my kitchen.”

“Who else is here?”

“No one.”

“Bob and Jeremy are here.”

“Bob and Jeremy are here,” she said.

“Bob’s in that chair.”

She smiled at Bob.

“Jeremy’s sitting there. The three of you are eating breakfast. ”

“Yes. Breakfast.”

“Fried eggs. Toast. Orange juice.”

“Fried eggs. Toast. Orange juice. ”

“Pick up that glass, Emma.”

She stared doubtfully at the tumbler.

“It’s filled to the top with cold, sweet orange juice. Do you see it?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t it look good?”

“Yes.”

“Drink some of it, Emma.”

She drank from the empty glass.

He laughed aloud. The power… It was going to work. He could make her remember whatever he wished. “How does it taste?”

She licked her lips. “Delicious.”

Lovely animal, he thought, suddenly giddy. Lovely, lovely little animal.

3 NOON

In Buddy’s nightmare two men were filling the town’s reservoir with cats. In the deepest shadows of the night, just before sunrise, they were standing at the edge of the pool, opening cages and pitching the animals into the water. The felines squalled about this assault on their dignity and comfort. Soon the reservoir was teeming with cats: alley cats, Siamese cats, Angora cats, Persian cats, black cats and gray cats and white cats and yellow cats, striped cats, spotted cats, old cats and kittens. Below the reservoir in Black River, Buddy innocently turned on the cold water tap in his kitchen — and cats, dozens upon dozens of fiercely angry cats, began to spill into the sink, full-sized cats that had somehow, miraculously, passed through the plumbing, through narrow-gauge pipe and rat traps and elbow joints and filter screens. Screeching, wailing, hissing, biting, scratching cats fell over one another and clawed the porcelain and scrambled inexorably out of the sink as new streams of cats poured in behind them. Cats on the counter. Cats on the breadbox. Cats in the dish rack. They leapt to the floor and clambered atop the cupboards. One of them jumped on Buddy’s back as he turned to run. He tore it loose and threw it against the wall. The other cats were outraged by this cruelty. They swarmed after Buddy, all of them spitting and snarling. He reached the bedroom/living room inches ahead of them, slammed and locked the door. They threw themselves against the far side of the barrier and yammered incessantly, but they weren’t strong enough to force their way through it. Relieved that he had escaped them, Buddy turned — and saw ten-yard-square cages full of cats, scores of green eyes studying him intensely, and behind the cages two men wearing shoulder holsters, holding pistols, and dressed in black rubber scuba suits.

He woke up, sat up, and screamed. He flailed at the mattress, wrestled with the sheets, and pounded his fists into the pillows for a few seconds until, gradually, he realized that none of these things was a cat.

“Dream,” he mumbled.

Because Buddy slept in the mornings and early afternoons, the drapes were heavy, and there was virtually no light in the room. He quickly switched on the bedside lamp.

No cats.

No men in scuba suits.

Although he knew that he had been dreaming, although he’d had this same dream on each of the last three days, Buddy got out of bed, stepped into a pair of slippers that were as large as most men’s boots, and lumbered into the kitchen to check the water faucets. There were no cats streaming out of them, and that was a good thing to know.

However, he was badly shaken. He was no less affected by the dream for having endured it on two other occasions. All week his sleep had been disturbed by dreams of one sort or another; and he never was able to fall back to sleep once brought awake by a vivid nightmare.

The wall clock showed 12:13. He came home from the mill at half past eight and went to bed at half past nine, five days a week, as if he were a clockwork mechanism. Which meant that he had gotten barely three hours of sleep.

He went to the kitchen table, sat down, and opened the travel magazine that he had bought at the general store last Monday. He studied the photographs of divers in scuba suits.

Why? he thought. Divers. Seamen. Guns. At the reservoir. Why? So late. Late at night. Dark, Divers. Why? Figure it. Come on. Figure it. Can’t. Can. Can’t. Can. Can’t. Divers. In woods. Night. So crazy. Can’t figure it.

He decided to shower, get dressed, and walk across the street to Edison’s General Store. It was time he asked Sam to figure it for him.

At 12:05 Rya watched a man in thick glasses, gray trousers, and a dark blue shirt enter Pauline Vicker’s rooming house. He was the man who had ordered Bob Thorp to kill Mark.

At 12:10 she went to St. Margaret Mary’s and hid in one of the confessionals at the right rear comer of the nave. Last week she had heard Emma mention the Friday lunch and card club that met all afternoon in the church basement. Through a chink in the crimson velveteen confessional curtains, she could look across the back of the nave to the steps that led down to the recreation room. Women in bright summer dresses and pantsuits, many of them carrying umbrellas, arrived singly and in pairs for the next fifteen minutes — and Emma Thorp came through the foyer arch promptly at twelve thirty. Rya recognized her even in the dim light. As soon as Emma disappeared down the stairs. Rya left the confessional.

For a moment she was transfixed by the sight of the crucifix at the far end of the chamber. The wooden Christ seemed to be staring over all the pews, directly at her.

You could have saved my mother, she thought. You could have saved Mark. Why did you put killers on earth?

Of course the crucifix had no answer.

God helps those who help themselves, she thought. Okay. I’m going to help myself. I’m going to make them pay for what they did to Mark. I’m going to get proof of it. You wait and see if I don’t. You wait and see.

She was beginning to tremble again, and she felt tears at the corners of her eyes. She took a minute to calm herself, then walked out of the nave.

In the foyer she discovered that one of the main doors was open, and that the lowest of its four hinges had been removed. A toolbox stood on the foyer floor, and a variety of tools were spread out around it. The workman apparently had gone to get some piece of material that he had forgotten on his first trip.

She turned and looked through the archway at the twelve-foot-high crucifix.

The wooden eyes still seemed to be staring at her, a terribly sad expression in them.

Quickly, worried that the workman might return at any moment, she bent down, peered into the toolbox, and plucked a heavy wrench from it. She slipped the wrench into a pocket of her windbreaker and left the church.

At 12:35 she strolled past the municipal building which was at the northeast corner of the square. The police chief’s office was toward the rear of the first floor, and it had two large windows. The venetian blinds were raised. As she passed she saw Bob Thorp sitting at his desk, facing the windows; he was eating a sandwich and reading a magazine.

At 12:40 she stood in front of Ultman’s Cafe and watched as a dozen kids cycled north on Union Road toward the macadamed alley where some of the Friday races were held. Jeremy Thorp was one of the cyclists.

At 12:45, at the southern end of Union Road, Rya crossed the street, walked under the grapevine arbor, and went around to the back of the Thorp place. The lawn ended in brush and trees, no parallel streets and no buildings in that direction. There was no house to her left — just the lawn and the garage and the river. To her right the nearest dwelling was set closer to Union Road than was the Thorp house; therefore, she was not in anyone’s line of sight.

A polished copper knocker gleamed in the center of the door. To one side of that, near the knob, were three decorative windows, each six inches wide and nine inches long.

She knocked loudly.

No one answered.

When she tried the door she found that it was locked. She had expected as much.

She took the stolen wrench from her windbreaker, gripped it tightly in one hand, and used it to smash the middle pane in the vertical row of three. The blow made considerably more noise than she had anticipated — although not sufficient noise to discourage her. When she had broken every shard of glass out of the frame, she pocketed the wrench, reached through the window, and felt for the latch. She began to despair of ever locating the mechanism — and then her fingers touched cool metal. She fumbled with the lock for almost a minute, finally released it, withdrew her arm from the window, and shoved open the door.

Standing on the stoop, staring warily into the shadow-hung kitchen, she thought: What if one of them comes back home and finds me in there?

Go ahead, she urged herself. You better go inside before you lose your courage.

I’m scared. They killed Mark.

You ran away this morning. Are you going to run away again? Are you going to run away from everything that scares you, from now until the day you die?

She walked into the kitchen.

Glass crunched underfoot.

When she reached the electric range where the murder had taken place, she stood quite still, poised to flee, and listened closely for movement. The refrigerator and the upright freezer rumbled softly, steadily. The clock-radio hummed. A loose window rattled as a gust of wind rushed along the side of the house. In the living room a grandfather clock, running a few minutes late, solemnly chimed the third quarter of the hour; the note reverberated long after the pipe had been struck. The house was filled with noises; but none of them had a human source; she was alone.

Having broken the law, having violated the sanctity of another person’s home, with the first and most dangerous step already taken, she couldn’t decide what to do next. Well… Search the house. Of course. Search it from top to bottom. Look for the body. But where to begin?

At last, when she realized that her indecision was an outgrowth of the fear which she was determined to overcome, when she realized that she was desperately afraid of finding Mark’s corpse even though she had come here to do precisely that, she began the search in the kitchen. There were only a few places in that room where the body of a nine-year-old boy might possibly be concealed. She looked in the pantry, in the refrigerator, and then in the freezer, but she uncovered nothing out of the ordinary.

When she opened the cabinet beneath the sink, however, she saw a bucket full of bloody rags. Not rags, really. Dish towels. They had used the towels to clean up, had thrown them in the bucket — and then apparently had forgotten to destroy the evidence. She picked up one of the cloths. It was wet, cold, and heavy with blood. She dropped it and gazed at her stained hand.

“Oh, Mark,” she said sadly, a bit breathlessly. A pain rose from deep inside of her, filled her chest. “Little Mark… You never ever hurt anyone. Not anyone. What they did to you. What an awful thing they did to you. Why?”

She stood up. Her knees felt weak.

Find the body, she thought.

No, she told herself.

You came here to find the body.

I’ve changed my mind. Find the body? No. No, that’s just… too much. Much too much. Finding him… Mark… with his skull cracked open… and his eyes rolled back in his head… and dried blood all over his face… Too much. Even strong girls can’t deal with everything in life. Even strong girls have their limits, don’t they? This is mine. My limit. I can’t go looking… all through the house… just can’t…

Beginning to cry, beginning to shake, she picked up the bucket and left the house.

At 12:45 Salsbury carried his briefcase down from his room and went to the parlor.

Pauline Vicker was sitting in the largest of the three arm-chairs. She was a heavyset woman in her early sixties. Fluffy gray hair. Ruddy complexion. Double chin. Merry eyes and a nearly constant smile. She had the archetypal grandmother’s face, the model for grandmothers’ faces in storybooks and movies. Her bare feet were propped up on a hassock. She was eating candies and watching a television soap opera.

From the doorway he said, “Mrs. Vicker.”

She glanced up, chewing a caramel. She had some trouble swallowing. Then: “Good afternoon, Mr. Deighton. If you’ve a complaint about your room or anything — do you think perhaps it could wait for just a bit, a few minutes — not longer than that mind you — just until this show ends? It’s one of my favorite shows and—”

“I am the key,” he said impatiently.

“Oh,” she said, disappointed that she wasn’t going to be able to finish watching the program. “I am the lock.”

“Get up, Mrs. Vicker.”

She struggled out of the chair.

Fat old cow, he thought.

“What do you need?” she asked pleasantly.

“I’ll need this room for a while,” he said, walking to the desk which held her private telephone. “Don’t disturb me.”

“Am I to leave?”

“Yes. Now.”

She looked wistfully at the round maple table beside her armchair. “May I take my box of candy?”

“Yes, yes. Just get the hell out of here.”

Pleased, she snatched up the candy. “I’m as good as gone. As good as gone, Mr. Deighton. You take your time here. I won’t let anyone disturb you.”

“Mrs. Vicker.”

“Yes?”

“Go to the kitchen.”

“All right.”

“Eat your chocolates if you want.”

“I will.”

“Listen to your radio, and wait in the kitchen until I come to see you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is that completely clear?”

“Certainly. Certainly. I’ll do just what you say. See if I don’t. I’ll go straight out to the kitchen and eat my chocolates and listen—”

“And close the door as you leave,” he said sharply. “Leave now, Mrs. Vicker.”

She shut the parlor door behind her.

At the desk Salsbury opened his briefcase. He took from it a set of screwdrivers and one of the infinity transmitters — a small black box with several wires trailing from it — that Dawson had purchased in Brussels.

Smart, he thought. Clever. Clever of me to bring the IF. Didn’t know why I was packing it at the time. A hunch. Just a hunch. And it’s paid off now. Clever. I’m on top of the situation. Right up there on top, in control. Full control.

Having carefully considered his options, algebraic even when he was so recently returned from the edge of panic, he had decided that it was time to hear what Paul Annendale was saying to the Edisons. There were a dozen miniature glass swans lined up across the top of the desk, each slightly different in size and shape and color from the one that preceded it. He brushed these figurines to the floor; they bounced on the carpet and clinked against one another. His mother had collected hand-blown figurines, although not swans. She favored glass dogs. By the hundreds. He crushed one of the swans under his heel and imagined that it was a glass dog. Curiously satisfied by this gesture, he connected the infinity transmitter to the telephone and dialed the number of the general store. Across the street no telephone rang at the Edison’s place. Nevertheless, every receiver in the store, as well as in the family’s living quarters above the store, opened to Salsbury’s ear.

What he heard in the first couple of minutes broke down the paper-thin wall of composure that he had managed to rebuild since the murder. Buddy Pellineri, in his own half-literate fashion, was telling Sam and Jenny and Paul about the two men who had come down from the reservoir on the morning of August sixth.

Rossner and Holbrook had been seen!

However, that was neither the only nor the worst piece of bad news. Before Buddy had reached the end of his story, before Edison and the others had finished questioning him, Annendale’s daughter arrived with the bucket full of bloody rags. The damned bucket! In his haste to clean up the kitchen and hide the corpse, he had shoved the bucket under the sink and then had completely forgotten about it. The boy’s body wasn’t all that well hidden — but at least it wasn’t in the room where the murder had occurred. The damned bloody rags. He had left evidence at the scene of the crime, virtually out in plain sight where any fool could have found it!

He could no longer afford to spend hours formulating his response to the events of the morning. If he was to contain the crisis and save the project, he would have to think faster and move faster than he had ever done before.

He stepped on another glass swan and snapped it to pieces.

4 1:10 P.M

A peal of thunder rumbled across the valley, and the wind seemed to gain considerable force in the wake of the noise.

Torn between a desire to believe Emma Thorp and a growing conviction that Rya was telling the truth, Paul Annendale climbed the steps to the stoop at the back of the Thorp house.

Putting a hand on his shoulder, pressing with fingers like talons, Sam said, “Wait.”

Paul turned. The wind mussed his hair, blew it into his eyes. “Wait for what?”

“This is breaking and entering.”

“The door’s open.”

“That doesn’t change anything,” Sam said, letting go of him. “Besides, it’s open because Rya broke it open.”

Aware that Sam was trying to reason with him for his own good but nonetheless impatient, Paul said, “What in the hell am I supposed to do, Sam? Call the cops? Or maybe pull some strings, use my connections, put a call through to the chief of police, and have him investigate himself?”

“We could call the state police.”

“No.”

“The body might not even be here.”

“If they could avoid it, they wouldn’t move a corpse in broad daylight.”

“Maybe there is no corpse, not here, not anywhere.”

“I hope to God you’re right.”

“Come on, Paul. Let’s call the state police. ”

“You said they’d need as much as two hours to get here. If the body still is in this house — well, it most likely won’t be here two hours from now.”

“But this is all so improbable! Why on earth would Bob want to murder Mark?”

“You heard what Rya said. That sociologist ordered him to kill. That Albert Deighton.”

“She didn’t know it was Deighton,” Sam said.

“Sam, you’re the one who recognized him from her description. ”

“Okay. Granted. But why would Emma go to a church luncheon and card game just after watching her husband kill a defenseless child? How could she? And how could a boy like Jeremy witness a brutal murder and then lie to you so smoothly?”

“They’re your neighbors. You tell me.”

“That’s just the point,” Sam insisted. “They’re my neighbors. They have been all their lives. Nearly all their lives. I know them well. As well as I know anyone. And I’m telling you, Paul, they simply aren’t capable of this sort of thing.”

Paul put one hand to his belly. His stomach spasmed with cramps. The memory of what he had seen in that bucket — the thickening blood and the strands of hair that were the same color as Mark’s hair — had affected him physically as well as emotionally. Or perhaps the emotional impact had been so devastating, so overwhelming that a sharp physical revulsion could not help but follow. “You’ve known these people under ordinary circumstances, during ordinary times. But I swear, Sam, there’s something extraordinary happening in this town. First Rya’s story. Mark’s disappearance. The bloody rags. And on top of that, Buddy comes around with this story of strange men at the reservoir in the dead of night — just a few days before the whole town suffered from a curious, unexplained epidemic—”

Sam blinked in surprise. “You think the chills are connected with this, with—”

A deafening crack of thunder interrupted him.

As the sky grew quiet, Sam said, “Buddy’s not a very reliable witness.”

“You believed him, didn’t you?”

“I believe he saw something strange, yes. Whether or not it was precisely what Buddy thinks it was—”

“Oh, I know he didn’t see skin divers. Skin divers don’t wear hip boots. What he saw — I think maybe he saw two men with empty chemical dispersion tanks.”

“Someone contaminated the reservoir?” Sam asked incredulously.

“Looks that way to me.”

“Who? The government?”

“Maybe. Or maybe terrorists. Or even a private company.”

“But why?”

“To see if the contaminant did what it was supposed to do.”

Sam said, “Contaminated the reservoir… with what?” He frowned. “Something that turns sane men into psychopaths who will kill when told to?”

Paul began to shake.

“We haven’t found him yet,” Sam said quickly. “Don’t lose hope. We haven’t found him dead.”

“Sam… Oh God, Sam, I think we will. I really think we will.” He was close to tears, but he knew that, for the time being, they were a luxury that he couldn’t allow himself to have. He cleared his throat. “And I’ll bet this sociologist, Deighton, is involved with the men Buddy saw. He’s not here to study Black River. He knows what was put in the reservoir, and he’s in town only to see what effect that substance has on the people here.”

“Why didn’t Jenny and I get the night chills?”

Paul shrugged. “I don’t know. And I’ve no idea what Mark walked into this morning. What did he see that made it necessary for him to be killed?”

They stared at each other, horrified by the idea that the townspeople were unwitting guinea pigs in some bizarre experiment. Both of them wanted to laugh off the entire notion, dismiss it with a joke or two; but neither of them could even smile.

“If any of this is true,” Sam said worriedly, “there’s even more reason to call in the state police right now.”

Paul said, “We’ll find the body first. Then we’ll call the state police. I’m going to find my son before he winds up in an unmarked grave way to hell and gone in the mountains.”

Gradually, Sam’s face became as white as his hair. “Don’t talk about him as if you know he’s dead. You don’t know that he’s dead, dammit!”

Paul took a deep breath. His chest ached. “Sam, I should have believed Rya this morning. She’s no liar. Those bloody dish towels… Look, I’ve got to talk about him as if he’s dead. I’ve got to think of him that way. If I convince myself that he’s still alive and then I find his body — it’ll hurt too much. It’ll destroy me. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t have to come in with me.”

“I can’t let you go alone,” Sam said.

“Yes, you can. I’ll be fine.”

“I won’t let you go alone.”

“All right. Let’s get this over with.”

“He’s a good boy,” Sam said quietly. “He’s always been such a good boy. I love him like my own.”

Paul nodded, turned, and went into the dark house.

The telephone company maintained a narrow, two-story brick building on West Main Street, half a block from the square. It was a two-minute walk from Pauline Vicker’s rooming house.

The front office on the first floor — where complaints could be lodged and bills paid — was small and neat. It contained eight gray filing cabinets, a cash register, an electronic calculator, a photostatic copier, a typewriter, a long pine worktable, and two straight-backed chairs in one comer, a large metal desk with a sturdy swivel chair, a Sierra Club calendar, several telephones, stacks of company pamphlets, a radio, and the United States flag in a stainless steel stand. There was no dust on the furniture, no dirt on the tile floor; and every pile of typing paper, forms, and envelopes was properly squared off and neatly stacked.

The only person in the office was as businesslike as the room. She was a thin but not unattractive woman in her middle or late forties. Her short-cropped chestnut hair had no more than a dozen strands of gray in it. Her skin was smooth and milky. Although her features were very angular, they were balanced by a generous, sensuous mouth that saved her looks but seemed to have been borrowed from another face. She wore a smart and efficient green pantsuit with a white cotton blouse. Her glasses were on a chain so that when she took them off they hung ready at her breast.

When Salsbury entered the office, she stepped up to the counter, smiled professionally, and said, “Does it still look like rain out there?”

Closing the mullioned-window door, Salsbury said, “Yes. Yes, it does.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I am the key.”

“I am the lock.”

He went to the counter.

She toyed with the glasses at her breast.

He said, “What’s your name?”

“Joan Markham.”

“Are you a secretary?”

“I’m the assistant manager.”

“How many people are working here?”

“Right now?”

“Right now,” he said.

“Six, including me.”

“Name them for me, one by one.”

“Well, there’s Mr. Pulchaski.”

“Who’s he?”

“The manager.”

“Where is he now?”

“In his office. The front room upstairs.”

“Who else, Joan?”

“Leona Ives. Mr. Pulchaski’s secretary.”

“Is she upstairs too?”

“Yes.”

“That leaves three.”

“Those are operators.”

“Switchboard operators?”

“Yes. Mary Ultman, Betty Zimmerman, and Louise Pulchaski. ”

“Mr. Pulchaski’s wife?”

“His daughter,” Joan said.

“Where do the operators work?”

She pointed to a door at the back of the room. “That leads to the downstairs hall. The switchboards are in the next room, at the back of the building.”

“When do these operators go off duty?”

“At five o’clock.”

“And three more come on the new shift?”

“No. Just two. There isn’t that much business at night.”

“The new shift works until — one in the morning?”

“That’s right.”

“And two more operators come on duty until nine o’clock in the morning?”

“No. There’s just one during the graveyard watch.”

She put on her glasses, took them off again a second later.

“Are you nervous, Joan?”

“Yes. Terribly.”

“Don’t be nervous. Relax. Be calm.”

Some of the stiffness went out of her slender neck and shoulders. She smiled.

“Tomorrow is Saturday,” he said. “Will there be three operators on duty during the daylight shift?”

“No. On weekends there’re never more than two.”

“Joan, I see you’ve got a notebook and pen next to your typewriter. I want you to prepare for me a list of all the operators who are scheduled to work tonight and during the first two shifts tomorrow. I want their names and their home telephone numbers. Understood?”

“Oh, yes.”

She went to her desk.

Salsbury crossed to the front door. He studied West Main Street through the six-inch-square panes of glass.

Presaging a summer storm, the wind whipped the trees mercilessly, as if trying to drive them to shelter.

There was no one in sight on either side of the street.

Salsbury looked at his watch. 1:15.

“Hurry up, you stupid bitch.”

She looked up. “What?”

“I called you a stupid bitch. Forget that. Just finish the list. Quickly now.”

She busied herself with pen and notebook.

Bitches, he thought. Rotten bitches. All of them. Every last one of them. Always fouling up. Nothing but bitches.

An empty lumber truck went past on Main Street, heading toward the mill.

“Here it is,” she said.

He returned to the customer service counter, took the notebook page from her hand, and glanced at it. Seven names. Seven telephone numbers. He folded the paper and put it in his shirt pocket. “Now, what about repairmen? Don’t you have linemen or repairmen on duty all the time?”

“We have a crew of four men,” she said. “There are two on the day shift and two on the evening shift. There’s no one regularly scheduled for night shift or for the weekends, but every one of the crew’s on call in case of emergencies.”

“And there are two men on duty now?”

“Yes.”

“Where are they?”

“Working on a problem at the mill.”

“When will they be back?”

“By three. Maybe three thirty.”

“When they come in, you send them over to Bob Thorp’s office.” He had already decided to make the police chief’s office his headquarters for the duration of the crisis. “Understood, Joan?”

“Yes.”

“Write down for me the names and home telephone numbers of the other two repairmen.”

She needed half a minute for that assignment.

“Now listen closely, Joan.”

Resting her arms on the counter, she leaned toward him. She seemed almost eager to hear what he had to tell her.

“Within the next few minutes, the wind will blow down the lines between here and Bexford. It won’t be possible for anyone in Black River or up at the mill to make or receive a long-distance call.”

“Oh,” she said wearily. “Well, that sure is going to ruin my day. It sure is.”

“Complaints, you mean?”

“Each one nastier than the one before it. ”

“If people complain, tell them that linemen from Bexford are working on the break. But there was a great deal of damage. The repairs will take hours. The job might not be done until tomorrow afternoon. Is that clear?”

“They won’t like it.”

“But is that clear?”

“It’s clear.”

“All right.” He sighed. “In a moment I’m going to go back to talk with the girls at the switchboard. Then upstairs to see your boss and his secretary. When I leave this room, you’ll forget everything we’ve said. You’ll remember me as a lineman from Bexford. I was just a lineman from Bexford who stopped in to tell you that my crew was already on the job. Understood?”

“Yes.”

“Go back to work. ”

She returned to her desk.

He walked behind the counter. He left the room by the hall door and went to talk to the switchboard operators.

Paul felt like a burglar.

You’re not here to steal anything, he told himself. Just your son’s body. If there is a body. And that belongs to you.

Nevertheless, as he poked through the house, undeterred by the Thorps’ right to privacy, he felt like a thief.

By 1:45 he and Sam had searched upstairs and down, through the bedrooms and baths and closets, through the living room and den and dining room and kitchen. There was no corpse.

In the kitchen Paul opened the cellar door and switched on the light. “Down there. We should have looked down there first. It’s the most likely place.”

“Even if Rya’s story is true,” Sam said, “this isn’t easy for me. This prying around. These people are old friends.”

“It isn’t my style either.”

“I feel like such a shit.”

“It’s almost finished.”

They descended the stairs.

The first basement room was a well-used work center. The nearer end contained two stainless-steel sinks, an electric washer-dryer, a pair of wicker clothes baskets, a table large enough for folding freshly laundered towels, and shelves on which stood bottles of bleach, bottles of spot removers, and boxes of detergents. At the other end of the room there was a workbench equipped with vises and all of the other tools that Bob Thorp needed to tie flies. He was an enthusiastic and dedicated fly fisherman who enjoyed creating his own “bait”; but he also sold between two and three hundred pieces of his handiwork every year, more than enough to make his hobby a very profitable one.

Sam peered into the shadowy cavity beneath the stairs and then searched the cupboards beside the washer-dryer.

No corpse. No blood. Nothing.

Paul’s stomach burned and gurgled as if he had swallowed a glassful of acid.

He looked in the cabinets above and below the workbench, flinching each time he opened a door.

Nothing.

The second basement room, less than half the size of the first, was used entirely for food storage. Two walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling shelves; and these were lined with store-bought as well as home-canned fruits and vegetables. A large, chest-style freezer stood against the far wall.

“In there or nowhere,” Sam said.

Paul went to the freezer.

He lifted the lid.

Sam stepped in beside him.

Frigid air rushed over them. Streams of ghostly vapor snaked into the room and were dissipated by the warmer air.

The freezer contained two or three dozen plastic-wrapped and labeled packages of meat. These bundles weren’t stacked for optimum use of the space — and to Paul at least, that looked rather odd. Furthermore, they hadn’t been arranged according to size or weight or similarity of contents. They were merely dumped together every which way. They appeared to have been thrown into the freezer in great haste.

Paul took a five-pound beef roast from the chest and dropped it on the floor. Then a ten-pound package of bacon. Another five-pound beef roast. Another roast. More bacon. A twenty-pound box of pork chops…

The dead boy had been placed in the bottom of the freezer, his arms on his chest and his knees drawn up; and the packages of meat had been used to conceal him. His nostrils were caked with blood. An icy, ruby crust of blood sealed his lips and masked his chin. He stared up at them with milky, frozen eyes that were as opaque as heavy cataracts.

“Oh… no. No. Oh, Jesus,” Sam murmured. He swung away from the freezer and ran. In the other room he turned on a faucet; the water splashed loudly.

Paul heard him gagging and puking violently into one of the stainless-steel sinks.

Strangely, he was now in full control of his emotions. When he saw his dead son, his intense anger and despair and grief were at once transformed into a deep compassion, into a tenderness that was beyond description.

“Mark,” he said softly. “It’s okay. Okay now. I’m here. I’m here with you now. You aren’t alone anymore.”

He took the remaining packages of meat from the freezer, one at a time, slowly excavating the grave.

As Paul removed the last bundle from atop the body, Sam came to the doorway. “Paul? I’ll… go upstairs. Use the phone. Call… the state police.”

Paul stared into the freezer.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes. I heard you.”

“Should I call the state police now?”

“Yes. It’s time.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m all right, Sam.”

“Will you be okay here — alone?”

“Sure. Fine.”

“Are you certain?”

“Sure.”

Sam hesitated, finally turned away. He took the steps two at a time, thunderously.

Paul touched the boy’s cheek.

It was cold and hard.

Somehow he found the strength to pull the body, stiff as it was, out of the freezer. He balanced his son on the edge of the chest, got both arms under him and lifted him. He swung around and put the boy on the floor, in the center of the room.

He blew on his hands to warm them.

Sam came back, still as pale as the belly of a fish. He looked at Mark. His face twisted with pain, but he didn’t cry. He kept control of himself. “There seems to be some trouble with the telephones.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“Well, the lines have been blown down between here and Bexford.”

Frowning, Paul said, “Blown down? It doesn’t seem windy enough for that.”

“Not here it isn’t. But it probably is much windier farther on toward Bexford. In these mountains you can have a pocket of relative calm right next to a fierce storm.”

“The lines to Bexford…” Paul brushed strands of stiff, frozen, blood-crusted hair from his son’s white forehead. “What does that mean to us?”

“You can ring up anyone you want in town or up at the mill. But you can’t place a long-distance call.”

“Who told you?”

“The operator. Mandy Ultman.”

“Does she have any idea when they’ll get it fixed?”

“Evidently, there’s been a lot of damage,” Sam said. “She tells me a crew of linemen from Bexford are already working. But they’ll need several hours to put things right.”

“How many hours?”

“Well, they’re not even sure they can patch it up any time before tomorrow morning.”

Paul remained at his son’s side, kneeling on the concrete floor, and he thought about what Sam had said.

“One of us should drive into Bexford and call the state police from there.”

“Okay,” Paul said.

“You want me to do it?”

“If you want. Or I will. It doesn’t matter. But first we have to move Mark to your place.”

“Move him?”

“Of course.”

“But isn’t that against the law?” He cleared his throat. “I mean, the scene of the crime and all that.”

“I can’t leave him here, Sam.”

“But if Bob Thorp did this, you want him to pay for it. Don’t you? If you move — move the body, what proof do you have that you actually found it here?”

Surprised by the steadiness of his own voice, Paul said, “The police forensic specialists will be able to find traces of Mark’s hair and blood in the freezer.”

“But—”

“I can’t leave him here!”

Sam nodded. “All right.”

“I just can’t, Sam.”

“Okay. We’ll get him to the car.”

“Thank you.”

“We’ll take him to my place.”

“Thank you.”

“How will we carry him?”

“You — take his feet.”

Sam touched the boy. “So cold.”

“Be careful with him, Sam.”

Sam nodded as they lifted the body.

“Be gentle with him, please.”

“Okay. ”

“Please. ”

“I will,” Sam said. “I will.”

5 2:00 P.M

Thunder cannonaded, and rain shattered against the windows of the police chief’s office.

Two men, employees of other governmental departments that shared the municipal building, stood with their backs to the windows, trying to look stem, authoritarian, and eminently reliable. Bob Thorp had provided them with bright yellow hooded rain slickers with POLICE stenciled across their shoulders and chests. Both men were in their middle or late thirties, yet they expressed an almost childish delight at the opportunity to wear these raincoats: adults playing cops and robbers.

“Can you use a gun?” Salsbury asked them.

They both said that they could.

Salsbury turned to Bob Thorp. “Give them guns.”

“Revolvers?” the police chief asked.

“Do you have shotguns?”

“Yes.”

“I believe those would be better than revolvers,” Salsbury said. “Don’t you agree?”

“For this operation?” Thorp said. “Yes. Much better.”

“Then give them shotguns.”

A brilliant explosion of lightning flashed against the windows. The effect was stroboscopic: everyone and every object in the room seemed to jump rapidly back and forth for an instant, although in reality nothing moved.

Overhead the fluorescent lights flickered.

Thorp went to the metal firearms cabinet behind his desk, unlocked it, and fetched two shotguns.

“Do you know how to use these?” Salsbury asked the men in the yellow raincoats.

One of them nodded.

The other said, “Not much to it. These babies pack a hell of a lot of punch. You pretty much just have to point in the general direction of the target and pull the trigger.” He gripped the gun with both hands, admired it, smiled at it.

“Good enough,” Salsbury said. “The two of you will go out to the parking lot behind this building, get in the spare patrol car, and drive to the east end of town. Understand me so far?”

“To the east end,” one of them said.

“A hundred yards short of the turn at the mouth of the valley, you’ll park the cruiser across the highway and block both lanes as best you can.”

“A roadblock,” one of them said, obviously pleased with the way the game was developing.

“Exactly,” Salsbury said. “If anyone wants to enter Black River — logging trucks, local citizens, maybe visitors from out of town, anyone at all — you’ll let them in. However, you’ll send them here, straight to this office. You’ll tell them that a state of emergency has been declared in Black River and that they absolutely must, without exception, check in with the chief of police before they go on about their business.”

“What kind of emergency?”

“You don’t need to know.”

One of them frowned.

The other said, “Everyone we stop will want to know.”

“If they ask, tell them that the chief will explain it.”

Both men nodded.

Thorp distributed a dozen shotgun shells to each of them.

“If anyone tries to leave Black River,” Salsbury said, “you’ll also direct them to the chief, and you’ll give them the same story about a state of emergency. Understood?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Every time you send someone to see Bob, whether they were coming into town or trying to get out of it, you’ll radio this office. That way, if they don’t show up within a few minutes, we’ll know that we’ve got some renegades on our hands. Understood?”

They both said, “Yes.”

Salsbury took his handkerchief from his hip pocket and blotted the perspiration from his face. “If anyone leaving town tries to run your roadblock, stop them. If you can’t stop them any other way, use the guns.”

“Shoot to kill?”

“Shoot to kill,” Salsbury said. “But only if there’s no other way to stop them.”

One of the men tried to look like John Wayne receiving orders at the Alamo, shook his head, solemnly, and said, “Don’t worry. You can count on us.”

“Any questions?”

“How long will we be in charge of this roadblock?”

“Another team of men will relieve you in six hours,” Salsbury said. “At eight o’clock this evening.” He jammed his handkerchief back into his pocket. “One other thing. When you leave this room, you will forget that you ever met me. You’ll forget that I was here. You’ll remember everything I’ve said to you prior to what I’m saying to you now, every precious exchange of this conversation we’ve just had — but you’ll think that Bob Thorp gave you your instructions. Is that perfectly clear?”

“Yes.”

“Perfectly. ”

“Then get moving. ”

The two men went out of the room, forgetting him the moment they set foot in the corridor.

A fiercely white pulse of lightning washed over the town, and a crack of thunder followed, rattling the windows.

“Close those blinds,” Salsbury said irritably.

Thorp did as he was told.

Salsbury sat down behind the desk.

When he had drawn the Venetian blinds, Bob Thorp returned to the desk and stood in front of it.

Salsbury looked up at him and said, “Bob, I want to seal this burg up tight. Real tight.” He made a fist with his right hand by way of example. “I want to make damned sure that no one can get out of town. Is there anything else that I should block in addition to the highway?”

Scratching his beetled brow, Thorp said, “You need two more men at the east end of the valley. One to watch the river. He should be armed with a rifle so he can pick off anyone in a boat if he has to do that. The other man should be stationed in the trees between the river and the highway. Give him a shotgun and tell him to stop anyone who tries to sneak out through the woods.”

“The man at the river — he’d have to be an expert with a rifle, wouldn’t he?” Salsbury asked.

“You wouldn’t need a master rifleman. But he would have to be a fairly good shot.”

“Okay. We’ll use one of your deputies for that. They’re all good with a rifle, aren’t they?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Good enough for this?”

“No doubt about it.”

“Anything else?”

Thorp thought about the situation for almost a minute. Finally he said, “There’s a series of old logging roads that lead up to the mountains and eventually hook up with a second series of roads that come from the lumber operations around Bexford. A lot of that route has been abandoned. None of it’s paved. A few sections may be graveled if they haven’t been washed out this summer, but mostly it’s just dirt. Narrow. Full of weeds. But I guess if a man was determined enough, he could drive out that way.”

“Then we’ll block it,” Salsbury said, getting up from the chair. He paced nervously to the windows and back to the desk. “This town is mine. Mine. And it’ll stay that way. I’m going to keep my hands on every man, woman, and child here until I’ve solved this problem.”

The situation had gotten incredibly far out of hand. He would have to call Dawson. Sooner or later. Probably sooner. Couldn’t be avoided. But before he placed that call, he wanted to be certain that he had done everything that he could possibly do without Leonard’s help, without Klinger’s help. Show them he was decisive. Clever. A good man to have around. His efficiency might impress the general. And that Christ-kissing bastard. Impress them enough to compensate for his having caused the crisis in the first place. That was very important. Very important. Right now the trick was to survive his partners’ wrath.

The air in Sam’s library was stale and humid.

Rain drummed on the outside window, and hundreds of tiny beads of dew formed on the inside.

Still numb with the discovery of his son’s body, Paul sat in one of the easy chairs, his hands on the arms of the chair and his fingertips pressed like claws into the upholstery.

Sam stood by one of the bookcases, pulling volumes of collected psychology essays from the stacks and leafing through them.

On the wide window ledge, an antique mantel clock ticked hollowly, monotonously.

Jenny came into the room from the hall, letting the door stand open behind her. She knelt on the floor beside Paul’s chair and put her hand over his.

“How’s Rya?” he asked.

Before they had gone to the Thorp house to search for the body, Sam had given the girl a sedative.

“Sleeping soundly,” Jenny said. “She’ll be out for at least two more hours.”

“Here!” Sam said excitedly.

They looked up, startled.

He came to them, holding up a book of essays. “His picture. The one who calls himself Deighton.”

Paul stood up to have a better look at it.

“No wonder Rya and I couldn’t find any of his articles,” Sam said. “We were looking through tables of contents for something written by Albert Deighton. But that’s not his name. His real name’s Ogden Salsbury.”

“I’ve seen him,” Paul said. “He was in Ultman’s Cafe the day that waitress drove the meat fork through her hand. In fact she waited on him.”

Rising to her feet, Jenny said, “You think that was connected with the rest of this, with the story Buddy Pellineri told us — with what they did to Mark?” Her voice faltered slightly on those last few words, and her eyes grew shiny. But she bit her lip and held back the tears.

“Yes,” Paul said, wondering again at his own inability to weep. He ached. God, he was full of pain! But the tears would not come. “It must be connected. Somehow.” To Sam he said, “Salsbury wrote this article?”

“According to the introductory blurb, it was the last piece he ever published — more than twelve years ago.”

“But he’s not dead.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Then why the last?”

“Seems he was quite a controversial figure. Praised and damned but mostly damned. And he got tired of the controversy. He dropped out of his lecture tours and gave up his writing so that he’d have more time to dedicate to his research.”

“What’s the article about?”

Sam read the title. “ ‘Total Behavioral Modification through Subliminal Perception.’ ” And the subtitle: “ ‘Mind Control from the Inside Out.’ ”

“What does all of that mean?”

“Do you want me to read it aloud?”

Paul looked at his watch.

“It wouldn’t hurt if we knew the enemy before we went into Bexford to see the state police,” Jenny said.

“She’s right,” Sam said.

Paul nodded. “Go ahead. Read it.”

Friday afternoon H. Leonard Dawson was in the study of his Greenwich, Connecticut house, reading a long letter on lavender paper from his wife. Julia was one-third of the way through a three-week trip to the Holy Land, and day by day she was discovering that it was less and less like she had imagined and hoped it would be. The best hotels were all owned by Arabs and Jews, she said; therefore, she felt unclean every time she went to bed. There were plenty of rooms in the inns, she said, but she would almost have preferred to sleep in the stables. That morning (as she wrote the letter) her chauffeur had driven her to Golgotha, that most sweetly sacred of places; and she had read to herself from the Bible as the car wended its way to that shrine of both sorrow and everlasting joy. But even Golgotha had been spoiled for her. Upon arriving there, she found that the holy hill was literally swarming with sweaty Southern Negro Baptists. Southern Negro Baptists, of all people. Furthermore…

The white telephone rang. Its soft, throaty burrrr-burrrr-burrrr was instantly recognizable.

The white phone was the most private line in the house. Only Ogden and Ernst knew the number.

He put down the letter, waited until the telephone had rung a second time, picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“I recognize your voice,” Salsbury said guardedly. “Do you find mine familiar?”

“Of course. Are you using your scrambler?”

“Oh, yes,” Salsbury said.

“Then there’s no need to talk in riddles and be mysterious. Even if the line is tapped, which it isn’t, they can’t make sense of what we’re saying.”

“With the situation what it is at my end,” Salsbury said, “I think we should take the precaution of riddle and mystery and not trust solely in the scrambler.”

“What is the situation at your end?”

“We’ve got serious trouble here.”

“At the test site?”

“At the test site.”

“Trouble of what sort?”

“There’s been one fatality.”

“Will it pass for natural causes?”

“Not in a million years.”

“Can you handle it yourself?”

“No. There are going to be more.”

“Fatalities?” Dawson asked.

“We’ve got people here who are unaffected.”

“Unaffected by the program?”

“That’s right.”

“Why should that lead to fatalities?”

“My cover is blown.”

“How did that happen?”

Salsbury hesitated.

“You’d better tell me the truth,” Dawson said sharply. “For all our sakes. You’d better tell me the truth.”

“I was with a woman.”

“You fool.”

“It was a mistake,” Salsbury admitted.

“It was idiotic. We’ll discuss it later. One of these unaffected people came upon you while you were with the woman. ”

“That’s right.”

“If your cover is blown it can be repaired. Undramatically.”

“I’m afraid not. I ordered the killer to do what he did.”

Despite the riddle form of the conversation, the events in Black River were becoming all too clear to Dawson. “I see.” He thought for a moment. “How many are unaffected?”

“Besides a couple of dozen babies and very young children, at least four more. Maybe five.”

“That’s not so many.”

“There’s another problem. You know the two men we sent up here at the beginning of the month?”

“To the reservoir.”

“They were seen.”

Dawson was silent.

“If you don’t want to come,” Salsbury said, “that’s okay. But I have to have some help. Send our partner and—”

“We’ll both arrive tonight by helicopter,” Dawson said. “Can you hold it yourself until nine or ten o’clock?”

“I think so.”

“You had better.”

Dawson hung up.

Oh Lord, he thought. You sent him to me as an instrument of Your will. Now Satan’s gotten to him. Help me to set all of this aright. I only want to serve You.

He telephoned his pilot and ordered him to fuel the helicopter and have it at the landing pad behind the Greenwich house within the hour.

He dialed three numbers before he located Klinger. “There’s some trouble up north.”

“Serious?”

“Extremely serious. Can you be here in an hour?”

“Only if I drive like a maniac. Better make it an hour and a quarter. ”

“Get moving.”

Dawson hung up again.

Oh Lord, he thought, both of these men are infidels. I know that. But You sent them to me for Your own purposes, didn’t You? Don’t punish me for doing Your will, Lord.

He opened the lower right-hand drawer of the desk and took out a folder thick with papers.

The label on it said:

HARRISON-BODREI DETECTIVE AGENCY SUBJECT: OGDEN SALSBURY

Thanks to the Harrison-Bodrei Agency, he understood his partners almost better than they understood themselves. For the past fifteen years he had kept a constantly updated file on Ernst Klinger. The Salsbury dossier was comparatively new, begun only in January 1975; but it traced his life all the way back through his childhood, and it was undeniably complete. Having read it ten or twelve times, from cover to cover, Dawson felt that he should have anticipated the current crisis.

Ogden was neither stark-raving mad nor perfectly sound of mind. He was a pathological woman-hater. Yet periodically he indulged in lascivious sprees of whoring, using as many as seven or eight prostitutes during a single weekend. Occasionally, there was trouble.

To Dawson’s way of thinking, two of the reports in the file were more important, told more about Ogden, than all of the others combined. He withdrew the first of them from the folder and read it yet again.

A week past his eleventh birthday, Ogden was taken from his mother and made a ward of the court. Katherine Salsbury (widowed) and her lover, Howard Parker, were later convicted of child abuse, child molestation, and corrupting the morals of a minor. Mrs. Salsbury was sentenced to seven to ten years in the New Jersey Correctional Institution for Women. Upon her conviction, Ogden was transferred to the home of a neighbor, Mrs. Carrie Barger (now Peterson), where he became one of several foster children. This interview was conducted with Mrs. Carrie Peterson (now sixty-nine years old) in her home in Teaneck, New Jersey, on the morning of Wednesday, January 22, 1975. The subject was obviously intoxicated even at that early hour and sipped at a glass of “just plain orange juice” throughout the interview. The subject was not aware that she was being recorded.

Dawson had marked the sections of the report that most interested him. He skipped ahead to the third page.

AGENT: Living next door to Mrs. Salsbury, you must have witnessed a great many of those beatings.

MRS. PETERSON: Oh, yes. Oh, I should say. From the time that Ogden was old enough to walk, he was a target for her. That woman! The least little thing he did — whup! she beat him black and blue.

AGENT: Spanked him?

MRS. PETERSON: No, no. She hardly ever spanked. Had she only spanked! That wouldn’t have been so horrid. But that woman! She started out hitting him with her open hands. On the head and all about his sweet little face. As he got older she’d sometimes use her fists. She was a big woman, you know. She’d use her fists. And she’d pinch. Pinch his little arms… I cried many the time. He’d come over to play with my foster children, and he’d be a mess. His little arms would be spotted with bruises. Just spotted all over with bruises.

AGENT: Was she an alcoholic?

MRS. PETERSON: She drank. Some. But she wasn’t addicted to gin or anything. She was just mean. Naturally mean. And I don’t think she was too smart. Sometimes, very dim-witted people, when they get frustrated, they take it out on children. I’ve seen it before. Too often. Suffer the little children. Oh, they suffer so much, I tell you.

AGENT: She had a great many lovers?

MRS. PETERSON: Dozens. She was a vile woman. Very common-looking men. Always very common-looking. Dirty. Crude laborers. Her men drank a lot. Sometimes they’d stay with her as much as a year. More often it was a week or two, a month.

AGENT: This Howard Parker—

MRS. PETERSON: Him!

AGENT: How long was he with Mrs. Salsbury?

MRS. PETERSON: Nearly six months, I think, before the crime. What a horrible man. Horrible!

AGENT: Did you know what was happening in the Salsbury house when Parker was there?

MRS. PETERSON: Of course not! I’d have called the police at once! Of course the night of the crime — Ogden came to me. And then I did call the police.

AGENT: Do you mind talking about the crime?

MRS. PETERSON: It still upsets me. To think of it. What a horrible man! And that woman. To do that to a child.

AGENT: Parker was — bisexual?

MRS. PETERSON: He was what?

AGENT: He customarily had relations with both sexes. Is that right?

MRS. PETERSON: He raped a little boy! It’s… I don’t know. I just don’t know. Why did God make some people so wicked? I love children. Have all my life. Love them more than anything. I can’t understand a man like that Parker.

AGENT: Does it embarrass you to talk about the crime?

MRS. PETERSON: A little bit.

AGENT: If you can bear with me… It’s really important that you answer a few more questions.

MRS. PETERSON: If it’s for Ogden’s sake, like you said, I surely can. For Ogden’s sake. Although he never comes back to see me. You know that? After I took him in and raised him from the age of eleven. He just never comes back.

AGENT: The court records of that time were not properly explicit. Either that or the judge had some of the testimony altered to protect the boy’s reputation. I am not certain whether Mr. Parker subjected the boy to — you’ll excuse me, but it has to be said — to oral or anal intercourse.

MRS. PETERSON: That horrible man!

AGENT: Do you know which it was?

MRS. PETERSON: Both.

AGENT: I see.

MRS. PETERSON: With the mother watching. His mother watched! Can you imagine such a thing? Such a rotten thing? To do that to a defenseless child… What monsters they were!

AGENT: I didn’t mean to make you cry.

MRS. PETERSON: I’m not crying. Just a tear or two. It’s so sad. Don’t you think? So terribly sad. Suffer the little children.

AGENT: There’s no need to continue with—

MRS. PETERSON: Oh, but you said this was for Ogden’s sake, that you needed to ask all of this for Ogden’s sake. He was one of my children. Foster children. But I felt like they were my own. I loved them dearly. Loved all of them. Little dears, every one. So if it’s for Ogden’s sake… Well… For months, without anyone at all knowing, with poor little Ogden too afraid to tell anyone, that terrible Howard Parker… was using the boy… using… his mouth. And the mother watching! She was a vicious woman. And sick. Very sick.

AGENT: And the night of the crime—

MRS. PETERSON: Parker used the boy… he used… the boy’s rectum. Hurt him terribly. You can’t know the pain that boy suffered.

AGENT: Ogden came to you that night.

MRS. PETERSON: I lived right next door to them. He came to me. Shaking like a leaf. Scared out of his wits. The poor, poor baby… Crying his heart out, he was. That awful Parker had beat him up. His lips were cracked. One eye was puffed and black. At first I thought that was all that was wrong with him. But I soon discovered… the other. We rushed him to the hospital. He needed eleven stitches. Eleven!

AGENT: Eleven — rectal stitches?

MRS. PETERSON: That’s right. He was in such pain. And he was bleeding. He had to stay in the hospital for nearly a week.

AGENT: And eventually you became his foster mother.

MRS. PETERSON: Yes. And never sorry for it. He was a fine boy. A dear boy. Very bright too. At school they said he was a genius. He won all of those scholarships and went up to Harvard. You’d think he’d come to see me, wouldn’t you? After all I did for him? But no. He never comes. He never comes around. And now the social workers won’t let me have any more children. Not since my second husband died. They say there have to be two parents in a foster home. And besides they say that I’m too old. Well, that’s craziness. I love children, and that’s all that should count. I love each and every one of them. Haven’t I dedicated my life to foster children? I’m not too old for them. And when I think of all the suffering children, I could just cry.

The last half of that report was a transcription of a long and rambling conversation with the man to whom Mrs. Peterson had been married at the time that she took the eleven-year-old Ogden Salsbury into her home.

This interview was conducted with Mr. Allen J. Barger (now eighty-three years old) in the Evins-Maebry Nursing Home in Huntington, Long Island, on the afternoon of Friday, January 24, 1975. The subject is supported at the home by the three children from his second marriage. The subject, who suffers from senility, was alternately lucid and incoherent. The subject was not aware that he was being recorded.

Dawson leafed ahead to the passage he had marked.

AGENT: Do you remember any of the foster children that you took in while you were married to Carrie?

MR. BARGER: She took them in. Not me.

AGENT: Do you remember any of them?

MR. BARGER: Oh, Christ.

AGENT: What’s the matter?

MR. BARGER: I try not to remember them.

AGENT: You didn’t enjoy them like she did?

MR. BARGER: All those dirty little faces when I came home from work. She tried to say we needed the extra money, the few dollars the government gave us for keeping the kids. It was the Depression. But she drank up the money.

AGENT: She was an alcoholic?

MR. BARGER: Not when I married her. But she was sure on her way to being one.

AGENT: Do you remember a child named—

MR. BARGER: My trouble was I didn’t marry her for her mind.

AGENT: Excuse me?

MR. BARGER: I married my second wife for her mind, and that worked out swell. But when I got hitched to Carrie… Well, I was forty years old and still single and sick to death of going to whores. Carrie came along, twenty-six and fresh as a peach, so much younger than me but interested in me, and I let my balls do my thinking for me. Married her for her body with no thought as to what was in her head. That was a big mistake.

AGENT: I’m sure it was. Well… Now, could you tell me if you can remember a child named—

MR. BARGER: She had magnificent jugs.

AGENT: I beg your pardon?

MR. BARGER: Jugs. Boobs. Carrie had a magnificent set.

AGENT: Oh. Yes. Uh…

MR. BARGER: She was pretty good in bed too. When you could get her away from those goddamned kids. Those kids! I don’t know why I ever agreed to take the first one in. After that we never had less than four and usually six or seven. She had always wanted a big family. But she wasn’t able to have children of her own. I guess maybe that made her want them even more. But she didn’t really want to be a mother. It was just a dream, a sort of sentimental thing with her.

AGENT: What do you mean?

MR. BARGER: Oh, she liked the idea of having children more than she liked really having them.

AGENT: I see.

MR. BARGER: She couldn’t discipline them worth a damn. They walked right over her. And I wasn’t about to take over that chore. No, sir! I worked hard, long hours in those days. When I came home I didn’t want to do anything but relax. I didn’t spend my time chasing after a pack of brats. So long as they left me alone, they could do what they wanted. They knew that, and they never bothered me. Hell, they weren’t my kids.

AGENT: Do you remember one of them named Ogden Salsbury?

MR. BARGER: No.

AGENT: His mother lived next door to you. She had a lot of lovers. One of them, a man named Parker, raped the boy. Homosexual rape.

MR. BARGER: Come to think of it, I do remember him. Ogden. Yeah. He came to the house at a bad time.

AGENT: A bad time? How’s that?

MR. BARGER: It was all girls then.

AGENT: All girls?

MR. BARGER: Carrie was on a kick. She wouldn’t take in any but little girls. Maybe she thought she could control them better than she could a bunch of boys. So this Ogden and I were the only men in the house for about two or three years.

AGENT: And that was bad for him?

MR. BARGER: The older girls knew what had happened to him. They used to tease him something fierce. He couldn’t take it. He’d blow up every time. Start yelling and screaming at them. Of course that was what they wanted, so they just teased him some more. When this Ogden used to let the girls get his goat, I’d take him aside and talk to him — almost father to son. I used to tell him not to pay them any mind. I used to tell him that they were just women and that women were good for only two things. Fucking and cooking. That was my attitude before I met my second wife. Anyway, I think I must have been a great help to that boy. A great help… Do you know they won’t let you fuck in this nursing home?

The other report that Dawson found especially interesting was an interview with Laird Richardson, a first-level clerk in the Pentagon’s Bureau of Security Clearance Investigations. A Harrison-Bodrei agent had offered Richardson five hundred dollars to pull Salsbury’s army security file, study it, and report its contents.

Again, Dawson had bracketed the most relevant passages with a red pen.

RICHARDSON: Whatever research he’s doing must be damned important. They’ve spent a lot of money covering for the sonofabitch over the past ten years. And the Pentagon just doesn’t do that unless it expects to be repaid in spades some day.

AGENT: Covering for him? How?

RICHARDSON: He liked to mark up prostitutes.

AGENT: Mark them up?

RICHARDSON: Mostly with his fists.

AGENT: How often does this happen?

RICHARDSON: Once or twice a year.

AGENT: How often does he see prostitutes?

RICHARDSON: He goes whoring the first weekend of every other month. Regular as you please. Like he’s a robot or something. You could set your watch by his need. Usually, he goes into Manhattan, makes the rounds of the leisure and health spas, phones a couple of call girls and has them up to his hotel room. Now and then one of them comes along with the kind of look that sets him off, and he beats the shit out of her.

AGENT: What look is that?

RICHARDSON: Usually blond, but not always. Usually pale, but not always. But she is always small. Five one or five two. A hundred pounds. And delicate. Very delicate features.

AGENT: Why would a girl like that set him off?

RICHARDSON: The Pentagon tried to force him into psychoanalysis. He went to one session and refused to go the second time. He did tell the psychiatrist that these frenzies of his were generated by more than the girls’ appearance. They have to be delicate — but not just in a physical sense. They have to seem emotionally vulnerable to him before he gets the urge to pound them senseless.

AGENT: In other words if he thinks the woman is his equal or his superior, she’s safe. But if he feels that he can dominate her—

RICHARDSON: Then she’d better have her Blue Cross paid in full.

AGENT: He hasn’t killed any of these women, has he?

RICHARDSON: Not yet. But he’s come close a couple of times.

AGENT: You said someone in the Pentagon covers up for him.

RICHARDSON: Usually someone from our bureau.

AGENT: How?

RICHARDSON: By paying the girl’s hospital bills and giving her a lump sum. The size of the pay-off depends on the extent of her injuries.

AGENT: Is he considered a high security risk?

RICHARDSON: Oh, no. If he was a closet queen and we found out about it, he’d be classified as a fairly bad risk. But his hangups and vices aren’t secret. They’re out in the open. No one can blackmail him, threaten him with the loss of his job because we already know all of his dirty little secrets. In fact, whenever he marks up a girl, he has a special number to call, a relay point right in my department. Someone is at his hotel room within an hour to clean up after him.

AGENT: Nice people you work for.

RICHARDSON: Aren’t they? But I’m surprised that even they put up with this sonofabitch Salsbury. He’s a sick man. He’s a real can of worms all by himself. They should stick him away in a cell somewhere and just forget all about him.

AGENT: Do you know about his childhood?

RICHARDSON: About his mother and the man who raped him? It’s in the file.

AGENT: It helps to explain why he—

RICHARDSON: You know what? Even though I can see where his craziness comes from, even though I can see that it isn’t entirely his fault that he is what he is, I can’t dredge up any compassion for him. When I think about all of those girls who ended up in hospitals with their jaws broken and their eyes swollen shut… Listen, did any of those girls feel less pain because Salsbury’s evil isn’t entirely his own doing? I’m an old-style liberal when it comes to most things. But this liberal line about compassion for the criminal — that’s ninety percent horseshit. You can only spout that kind of garbage if you and your own family have been lucky enough to avoid animals like Salsbury. If it was up to me, I’d put him on trial for all those beatings. Then I’d send him away to a cell somewhere, hundreds of miles from the nearest woman.

Dawson sighed.

He put the reports in the folder and returned the folder to the lower right-hand desk drawer.

O Lord, he thought prayerfully, give me the power to undo what damage he’s done in Black River. If this mistake can be remedied, if the field test can be completed properly, then I will be able to feed the drug to both Ernst and Ogden. I’ll be able to program them. I’ve been making preparations. You know that. I’ll be able to program them and convert them to Your holy fellowship. And not just them. The world. There will be no more souls for Satan. Heaven on earth. That’s what it’ll be, Lord. True heaven on earth, all in the shining light of Your love.

Sam read the last line of Salsbury’s article, closed the book, and said, “Jesus!”

“At least now we have some idea of what’s happening in Black River,” Paul said.

“All of that crazy stuff about breaking down the ego, primer drugs, code phrases, achieving total control, bringing contentment to the masses through behavioral modification, the benefits of a subliminally directed society…” Somewhat dazed by Salsbury’s rhetoric, Jenny shook her head as if that would help her to think more clearly. “He sounds like a lunatic. He’s certifiable.”

“He’s a Nazi,” Sam said, “in spirit if not in name. That’s a very special breed of lunatic. A very deadly breed. And there are literally thousands of people like him, hundreds of thousands who would agree with every word he said about the benefits of a ‘subliminally directed society.’ ”

Thunder exploded with such violence that it sounded as if the bowl of the sky had cracked in two. A fierce gust of wind slammed against the house. The tempo of the rain on the roof and windows picked up to double time.

“Whatever he is,” Paul said, “he’s done exactly what he said could be done. He’s made this insane scheme work. But God, that has to be what’s happening here. It explains everything since the epidemic of night chills and nausea. ”

“I still don’t understand why Dad and I weren’t afflicted,” Jenny said. “Salsbury mentions in the article that the subliminal program would not affect illiterates and children who haven’t yet come to terms, however crude, with sex and death. But neither Dad nor I fit into one of those categories.”

“I think I can answer that,” Paul said.

Sam said, “So can I. One thing they teach budding pharmacologists is that no drug affects everyone the same way. On some people, for instance, penicillin has little or no effect. Some people don’t respond well at all to sulfa drugs. I suspect that, for whatever reasons of genes and metabolisms and body chemistries, we’re among the tiny percentage of those who aren’t touched by Salsbury’s drug.”

“And thank God for that,” Jenny said. She hugged herself and shivered.

“There ought to be more adults unaffected,” Paul said. “It’s summertime. People take vacations. Wasn’t anyone out of town during the week when the reservoir was contaminated and the subliminal messages broadcast?”

“When the heavy snows come,” Sam said, “logging operations have to stop. So in the warm months everyone connected with the mill works his butt off to make sure there will be a stockpile of logs to keep the saws going all winter. No one at the mill takes a vacation in the summer. And everyone in town who serves the mill takes his time off in the winter too.”

Paul felt as if he were on a turntable, whirling around and around. His mind spun with the implications of the article that Sam had read. “Mark and Rya and I weren’t affected because we got to town after the contaminant had passed out of the reservoir — and because we didn’t watch whatever television programs or commercials contained the subliminal messages. But virtually everyone else in Black River is now under Salsbury’s control.”

They stared at one another.

The storm moaned at the window.

Finally Sam said, “We enjoy the benefits and luxuries provided by modern science — all the while forgetting that the technological revolution, just like the industrial revolution before it, has its dark side.” For several long seconds, with the mantel clock ticking behind him, he studied the cover of the book in his hand. “The more complex a society becomes, the more dependent each part of it becomes on every other part of it, the easier it is for one man, one lunatic or true believer, to destroy it all on a whim. One man working alone can assassinate a chief of state and precipitate major changes in his country’s foreign and domestic policies. They tell us that one man with a degree in biology and a lot of determination can culture more than enough plague bacillus to destroy the world. One man working alone can even build a nuclear bomb. All he needs is a college degree in physics. And the ability to get his hands on a few pounds of plutonium. Which isn’t so damned hard to do either. He can build a bomb inside a suitcase and wipe out New York City because… Well, hell, why not because he was mugged there, or because he once got a traffic ticket in Manhattan and he doesn’t think he deserved it. ”

“But Salsbury can’t be working alone,” Jenny said.

“I agree with you.”

“The resources needed to perfect and implement the program that he described in his article… Why, they would be enormous.”

“A private industry might be able to finance it,” Paul said. “A company as large as AT&T.”

“No,” Sam said. “Too many executives and research people would have to know about it. There would be a leak. It would never get this far without a leak to the press and a major scandal.”

“A single wealthy man could provide what Salsbury needed,” Jenny said. “Someone as rich as Onassis was. Or Hughes. ”

Tugging gently on his beard, Sam said, “It’s possible, I suppose. But we’re all avoiding the most logical explanation.”

“That Salsbury is working for the United States government,” Paul said worriedly.

“Exactly,” Sam said. “And if he is working for the government or the CIA or any branch of the military — then we’re finished. Not just the three of us and Rya, but the whole damned country.”

Paul went to the window, wiped away some of the dew, and stared at wind-lashed trees and billowing gray sheets of rain. “Do you think that what’s happening here is happening all over the country?”

“No,” Sam said. “If there were a general takeover in progress, Salsbury wouldn’t be in a backwoods mill town. He’d be at a command post in Washington. Or somewhere else, anywhere else.”

“Then it’s a test. A field test.”

“Probably. ”

“And that’s maybe a good sign,” Sam said. “The government would run a field test where it already had tight security. Most likely on an army or air force base. Not here. ”

Lightning blasted through the thunderheads; and for an instant the patterns of rain on the window seemed to form faces: Annie’s face, Mark’s face…

Suddenly Paul thought that his wife and son, although they had met quite different deaths, had been killed by the same force. Technology. Science. Annie had gone into the hospital for a simple appendectomy. It hadn’t even been an emergency operation. The anesthesiologist had given her a brand-new-on-the-market-revolutionary-you-couldn’task-for-better anesthetic, something that wasn’t as messy as ether, something that was easier to use (easier for the anesthesiologist) than pentothal. But after the operation she didn’t regain consciousness as she should have done. She slipped, instead, into a coma. She’d had an allergic reaction to the brand-new-on-the-market-revolutionary-you-couldn’ t-ask-for-better anesthetic; and it had destroyed a large part of her liver. Fortunately, the doctors told him, the liver was the one organ of the body that could regenerate itself. If they kept her in the intensive care unit, supporting her life processes with machines, the liver would repair itself day by day, until eventually she would be well again. She was in intensive care for five weeks, at which time the doctors fed all of the data from the life-support machines into a Medico computer, and the computer told them that she was well enough to be moved out of intensive care and into a private room. Eleven weeks later, the same computer said she was well enough to go home. She was listless and apathetic — but she agreed that the computer must be right. Two weeks after she came home, she had a relapse and died within forty-eight hours. Sometimes he thought that if he had only been a medical doctor instead of a veterinarian, he might have saved her. But that was pointless masochism. What he could have done was demand that her original surgery be performed with ether or pentothal, something known to be safe, something that had stood the test of decades. He could have told them to stuff their computer up their collective ass. But he hadn’t done that either. He had trusted in their technology simply because it was technology, because it was all new. Americans were brought up to respect what was new and progressive — and more often than they wanted to admit, they died for their faith in what was bright and shiny.

After Annie died he became suspicious of technology, of every new wonder that science gave to mankind. He read Paul Ehrlich and other back-to-the-land reformers. Gradually he came to see that the yearly camping trips to Black River could be the beginning of a serious program to free his children from the city, from the ever-growing dangers of the science and technology that the cities represented. The yearly trips became an education for lives they would live in harmony with nature.

But the back-to-the-land advocates were possessed by an impossible dream. He saw that now, saw it as clearly as he had ever seen anything in his life. They were trying to run away from technology — but it moved much faster than they did. There was no land to get back to anymore. The city, its science and technology, the effects of its life-style, had tendrils snaking out into even the most remote mountains and forests.

Furthermore, you ignored the advancements of science at your own peril. His ignorance about anesthetics and the reliability of the Medico computer had cost Annie her life. His ignorance of subliminal advertising and the research being done in that field had, if you wanted to stretch a point, cost Mark his life. The only way to survive in the 1970s and in the decades to follow was to plunge into the fast-moving, super technical society, swim with it, learn from it and about it, learn all that you could, and be its equal in any confrontation.

He turned away from the window. “We can’t go to Bexford and call the state police. If our own government is behind Salsbury, if our own leaders want to enslave us, we’ll never win. It’s hopeless. But if it isn’t behind him, if it doesn’t know what he’s achieved, then we don’t dare let it know. Because the moment the military finds out — it’ll appropriate Salsbury’s discoveries; and there are some factions of the military that wouldn’t be opposed to using subliminal programming against us.”

Looking around at the books about Nazism, totalitarianism, and mob psychology, thinking ruefully of what he’d learned about some men’s lust for power, Sam said, “You’re right. Besides, I’ve been thinking about the problems with the long-distance phone service.”

Paul knew what he meant. “Salsbury’s taken over the telephone exchange.”

“And if he’s done that,” Sam said, “he’s taken other precautions too. He’s probably blockaded the roads and every other route out of town. We couldn’t go to Bexford and tell the state police even if we still wanted to.”

“We’re trapped,” Jenny said quietly.

“For the time being,” Paul said, “that really doesn’t matter. We’ve already decided there’s no place to run anyway. But if he’s not working for the government, if he’s backed by a corporation or a single wealthy man, maybe we’ve got a chance to stop him here in Black River.”

“Stop him…” Sam stared thoughtfully at the floor. “Do you realize what you’re saying? We’d have to get our hands on him, interrogate him — and then kill him. Death is the only thing that will stop a man like that. We’d also have to find out from him who he’s associated with — and kill anyone else who might understand how the drug was made and how the subliminal program was constructed.” He looked up from the floor. “That could mean two murders, three, four, or a dozen.”

“None of us is a killer,” Jenny said.

“Every man’s a potential killer,” Paul said. “When it comes to matters of survival, any man is capable of anything. And this is sure as hell a matter of survival.”

“I killed men in the war,” Sam said.

“So did I,” Paul said. “A different war than yours. But the same act.”

“That was different,” Jenny said.

“Was it?”

“That was war,” she said.

“This is war too,” Paul said.

She stared at Paul’s hands, as if imagining them with a knife or a gun or clamped around a man’s throat.

Sensing her thoughts, he raised his hands and studied them for a moment. On occasion, washing his hands before dinner or after treating a sick animal, he would flash back to the war, back to Southeast Asia. He would hear the guns and see the blood again in his memory. In these almost psychic moments, he was both amazed and dismayed that the same hands were accustomed to mundane and horrible acts, that they could heal or injure, make love or kill, and look no different after the task was done. Codified morality, he thought, was indeed a blessing but also a curse of civilization. A blessing because it permitted men to live in harmony most of the time. A curse because — when the laws of nature and especially of human nature made it necessary for a man to wound or kill another man in order to save himself and his family — it spawned remorse and guilt even if the violence was unwanted and unavoidable.

Besides, he reminded himself, these are the 1970s. This is the age of science and technology when a man often is required to act with the implacable and unemotional savagery of the machine. For better or worse, in these times gentility is becoming less and less a sign of the civilized man and is, in fact, very nearly an obsolescent quality. You see gentility, most often, in those who are least likely to survive wave after wave of future shock.

Lowering his hands he said, “In the classic paranoid vein, it’s us against them. Except that this isn’t a delusion or an illusion; it’s real.”

Jenny seemed to accept the need for murder as quickly as he had accepted the fact that he might be called upon to commit it. By this point in her life, she had experienced, as had all but the most gentle people, at least the flickering of a homicidal urge in a moment of despair or great frustration. She hadn’t accepted it as the solution to whatever problem had inspired it. But she was not incapable of conceiving of a situation in which homicide was the most reasonable response to a threat. In spite of the overprotected, sheltered upbringing of which she’d spoken last Monday, she could adapt to even the most unpleasant truths. Perhaps, Paul thought, the ordeal with her first husband had made her stronger, tougher, and more resilient than she realized.

She said, “Even if we could bring ourselves to kill in order to stop this thing… Well, it’s still too much. To stop Salsbury, we need to know more about him. And how do we learn anything? He’s got hundreds of bodyguards. Or if he wants, he can turn everyone in town into killers and send them after us. Do we just sit here, pass the time, wait for him to stop around for a chat?”

Returning the hardbound volume of essays to the shelf from which he’d taken it, Sam said, “Wait a minute… Suppose…” He faced them. He was excited. All three of them were tense, twisted as tight as watch springs. But now a glimmer of pleasurable excitement was in his Santa Claus-like features. “When Salsbury saw Rya standing in the kitchen doorway at the Thorp house, what do you imagine he did, very first thing?”

“Grabbed for her,” Jenny said.

“Wrong.”

Bitterly, Paul said, “Ordered Bob to kill her.”

“Not that either. Remember, he would expect her to be another one of his — zombies.”

Sucking in her breath, Jenny said, “He would use the code phrase on her, the system he talks about in the article. He’d try to open her up and take control of her before she ran away. So… Rya must have heard the code phrase!”

“And if she can recall it,” Sam said, “we’ll have control of everyone in Black River, the same as Salsbury. He won’t be able to send them after us. He won’t have hundreds of bodyguards to hide behind. It won’t be us against them. It’ll be us against him.”

6 3:15 P.M

Dr. Walter Troutman entered the police chief’s office. He was carrying his black leather satchel in his right hand and a chocolate candy bar with almonds in his left. He appeared to be delighted with the world and with himself. “You wanted to see me, Bob?”

Before Thorp could answer, Salsbury stepped away from the windows and said, “I am the key.”

“I am the lock.”

“Buddy Pellineri is waiting in the room across the hall,” Salsbury said. “You know him, don’t you?”

“Buddy?” Troutman asked, wrinkling his fleshy face. “Well, of course I know him.”

“I’ve told him that we’re afraid he’s picked up a very bad germ and that you’re going to give him a vaccination so he won’t get sick. As you know, he’s not especially bright. He believed me. He’s waiting for you.”

“Vaccination?” Troutman said, perplexed.

“That’s what I told him to keep him here. Instead, you’ll inject an air bubble into his bloodstream.”

Troutman was shocked. “That would cause an embolism.”

“I know.”

“It would kill him!”

Salsbury smiled and nodded. “It had better. That’s the whole idea, doctor.”

Looking at Bob Thorp, who was seated behind the desk, then back at Salsbury, Troutman said miserably, “But I can’t do a thing like that. I can’t possibly.”

“Who am I, doctor?”

“You’re — the key.”

“Very good. And who are you?”

“I’m the lock.”

“All right. You will go across the hall to the room where Buddy is waiting. You’ll chat with him, be very pleasant, give him no cause to be suspicious. You’ll tell him that you’re going to give him a vaccination, and you’ll inject an air bubble into his bloodstream. You won’t mind killing him. You won’t hesitate. As soon as he is dead, you’ll leave the room — and you will remember only that you gave him a shot of penicillin. You won’t remember killing him when you leave that room. You will come back here, look in the door, and say to Bob, ‘He’ll be better in the morning.’ Then you’ll go back to your house, having forgotten entirely about these instructions. Is that clear?”

“Yes. ”

“Go do it.”

Troutman left the room.

Ten minutes ago Salsbury had decided to eliminate Buddy Pellineri. Although the man had experienced the night chills and nausea, and although he had been partially brainwashed by the subceptive program, he was not a good subject. He could not be fully and easily controlled. When told to erase from his memory the men he had seen coming down from the reservoir on the morning of August sixth, he might forget them forever — or only for a few hours. Or not at all. Had he been a genius, the drug and the subliminals would have transformed him into the ideal slave. Ironically, however, his ignorance condemned him.

It was a pity that Buddy had to die. In his own way he was a likable brute.

But I’ve got the power, Salsbury thought. And I’m going to keep it. I’m going to eliminate as many people as have to be eliminated for me to keep the power. I’ll show them. All of them. Dawson, good old Miriam, the bitches, the holier-than-thou college professors with their snotty questions and self-righteous denunciations of my work, the whores, my mother, the bitches… Tat-tat-tat-tat… No one is going to take this away from me. No one. Not ever. Never.

Rya sat in bed, yawning and smacking her lips. She looked from Jenny to Sam to Paul — but she didn’t seem to know for certain who they were.

“Do you remember what he said?” Paul asked again. “The man with the thick glasses. Do you remember?”

Squinting at him, scratching her head, she said, “Who… am this?”

“She’s still dopey,” Jenny said, “and will be for a while yet. ”

Studying the girl from the foot of the bed, Sam said, “Salsbury knows he’s got to deal with us. As soon as he’s decided how, he’ll come here. We don’t have time to wait for the sedative to wear off. We’ve got to help her come out of it. ” He looked at Jenny. “You give her a cold shower. A long one. I’ll make some fresh coffee.”

“Don’t like coffee,” Rya said sullenly.

“You like tea, don’t you?”

“S’okay.” She yawned.

Sam hurried downstairs to make a pot of tea.

Jenny hustled Rya out of bed and into the bathroom at the end of the hallway.

Left alone, Paul went to the living room to sit with Mark’s body until Rya was ready to be questioned.

When you decide to meet that big, bright, shiny chrome-edged American world on its own terms, he thought, things start to move. Faster and faster and faster.

Dr. Troutman leaned in the open doorway and said, “He’ll be better in the morning.”

“That’s fine,” Bob Thorp said. “You go along home now. ”

Popping the last piece of chocolate-almond bar into his mouth, the doctor said, “Take care.” He walked away.

To Thorp, Salsbury said, “Get some help. Move the body into one of the cells. Stretch him out on the bunk so that he looks like he’s sleeping.”

Rain gurgled noisily down the leader beside the kitchen window.

The room smelled of lemons.

Steam rose from the spout of the teapot and from the china cup.

Rya wiped away her tears, blinked in sudden recollection, and said, “Oh. Oh, yes… ‘I am the key.’ ”

The downpour dwindled abruptly to a drizzle. Soon the rain stopped altogether.

Salsbury raised one of the Venetian blinds and looked out at North Union Road. The gutters were overflowing. A miniature lake had formed down toward the square where a drainage grating was clogged with leaves and grass. The trees dripped like melting candles.

He was glad to see it end. He had begun to worry about the turbulent flying conditions that Dawson’s helicopter pilot would have to face.

One way or another, Dawson had to get to Black River tonight. Salsbury didn’t actually need help to deal with the situation; but he did need to be able to share the blame if the field test went even further awry.

Neither of his current options was without risk. He could send Bob Thorp and a couple of deputies to the general store to arrest the Edisons and the Annendales. Of course there might be trouble, violence, even a shoot-out. Every additional corpse or missing person that had to be explained to the authorities outside of Black River increased the chance of discovery. On the other hand, if he had to maintain the roadblock through tomorrow, keep control of the town, and perpetuate the state of siege, his chances of coming out on top of this would be less promising than they were now.

What in the devil was happening at Edison’s place? They had found the boy’s body. He knew that. He had assigned several guards to cover the store. Why hadn’t they come here to see Bob Thorp? Why hadn’t they tried to leave town? Why hadn’t they, in short, acted like anyone else would have done? Surely, even with Buddy’s story to build from, they couldn’t have reconstructed the truth behind the events of the past few weeks. They couldn’t know who he really was. They probably didn’t know about subliminal advertising in general — and certainly not about his research in specific. He suddenly wished that he had brought his briefcase with the infinity transmitter from Pauline Vicker’s rooming house.

“Everything looks so crisp and fresh after a summer rain, doesn’t it?” Bob Thorp asked.

“I’m glad it’s over,” Salsbury said.

“It isn’t. Not by a long shot.”

Salsbury turned from the window. “What?”

Smiling, as amiable as Salsbury had ordered him to be, Bob Thorp said, “These summer storms start and stop half a dozen times before they’re finished. That’s because they bounce back and forth, back and forth between the mountains until they finally find a way out. ”

Thinking of Dawson’s helicopter, Salsbury said, “Since when are you a meteorologist?”

“Well, I’ve lived here all my life, except for my hitch in the service. I’ve seen hundreds of storms like this one, and they—”

“I said it’s over! The storm is over. Finished. Done with. Do you understand?”

Frowning, Thorp said, “The storm is over.”

“I want it to be over,” Salsbury said. “So it is. It’s over if I say it is. Isn’t it?”

“Of course. ”

“All _right.”

“It’s over.”

“Dumb cop.”

Thorp said nothing.

“Aren’t you a dumb cop?”

“I’m not dumb.”

“I say you are. You’re dumb. Stupid. Stupid as an ox. Aren’t you, Bob?”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“What?”

“That you’re as stupid as an ox.”

“I’m as stupid as an ox.”

Returning to the window, Salsbury stared angrily at the lowering cobalt clouds.

Eventually he said, “Bob, I want you to go to Pauline Vicker’s house.”

Thorp stood up at once.

“I’ve got a room on the second floor, the first door on the right at the head of the stairs. You’ll find a leather briefcase beside the bed. Fetch it for me.”

The four of them went through the crowded stockroom and onto the rear porch of the general store.

Immediately, twenty yards away on the wet emerald-green lawn, a man moved out of the niche formed by two angled rows of lilac bushes. He was a tall, hawk-faced man in horn-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a dark raincoat and holding a double-barreled shotgun.

“Do you know him?” Paul asked.

“Harry Thurston,” Jenny said. “He’s a foreman up at the mill. Lives next door.”

With one hand Rya clutched Paul’s shirt. Her self-confidence and her faith in people had been seriously eroded by what she had seen Bob Thorp do to her brother. Watching the man with the shotgun, trembling, her voice pitched slightly higher than it normally was, she said, “Is he… going to shoot us?”

Paul placed one hand on her shoulder, squeezed gently, reassuringly. “Nobody’s going to be shot.”

As he spoke he ardently wished that he could believe what he was telling her.

Fortunately, Sam Edison sold a line of firearms in addition to groceries, dry goods, drugs, notions and sundries; therefore, they weren’t defenseless. Jenny had a.22 rifle. Sam and Paul were both carrying Smith & Wesson.357 Combat Magnum revolvers loaded with.38 Special cartridges which would produce only half the fierce kick of Magnum ammunition. However, they didn’t want to use the guns, for they were trying to leave the house secretly; they kept the guns at their sides, barrels aimed at the porch floor.

“I’ll handle this,” Sam said. He went across the porch to the wooden steps and started down.

“Hold it right there,” said the man with the shotgun. He came ten yards closer. He pointed the weapon at Sam’s chest, kept his finger on the trigger, and watched all of them with unconcealed anxiety and distrust.

Paul glanced at Jenny.

She was biting her lower lip. She looked as if she wanted to swing up her rifle and level it at Harry Thurston’s head.

That might set off a meaningless but disastrous exchange of gunfire.

He had a mental image of the shotgun booming. Booming again… Flame blossoming from the muzzles…

“Calm,” he said quietly.

Jenny nodded.

At the bottom of the steps, still twenty-five feet from the man with the shotgun, Sam held out a hand in greeting. When Thurston ignored it, Sam said, “Harry?”

Thurston’s shotgun didn’t waver. Neither did his expression. But he said, “Hello, Sam.”

“What are you doing here, Harry?”

“You know,” Thurston said.

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Guarding you,” Thurston said.

“From what?”

“From escaping.”

“You’re here to keep us from escaping from our own house?” Sam grimaced. “Why would we want to escape from our own house? Harry, you aren’t talking sense.”

Thurston frowned. “I’m guarding you,” he said stubbornly.

“For whom?”

“The police. I’ve been deputized.”

“Deputized? By whom?”

“Bob Thorp.”

“When?”

“An hour… hour and a half.”

“Why does Bob want you to keep us in the house?”

“You know why,” Thurston said again.

“I’ve already told you that I don’t know.”

“You’ve done something.”

“What have we done?”

“Something wrong. Illegal.”

“You know us better than that.”

Thurston said nothing.

“Don’t you, Harry?”

Silence.

“What have we done?” Sam insisted.

“I don’t know. ”

“Bob didn’t tell you?”

“I’m just an emergency deputy.”

The shotgun looks nonetheless deadly for that, Paul thought.

“You don’t know what we’re supposed to have done?” Sam asked. “But you’re willing to shoot us if we try to leave?”

“Those are my orders.”

“How long have you known me?”

“Twenty years anyway. ”

“And Jenny?”

“A long time.”

“You’re willing to kill old friends just because someone tells you to?” Sam asked. He was probing, trying to discover the breadth and depth of Salsbury’s control.

Thurston couldn’t answer that question. His eyes flicked from one to the other of them, and he shuffled his feet in the wet grass. He was exceedingly nervous, confused, and exasperated — but he was determined to do what the chief of police had asked of him.

Unable to take his eyes off the finger that was curled tightly around the shotgun trigger, unable to look at Sam when he spoke to him, Paul said, “We better get on with this. I think maybe you’ve pushed him far enough.”

“I think so too,” Sam said tensely. And then to Thurston: “I am the key.”

“I am the lock.”

“Lower the gun, Harry.”

Thurston obeyed.

“Thank God,” Jenny said.

“Come here, Harry.”

Thurston went to Sam.

“I’ll be damned,” Jenny said.

A perfect zombie, Paul thought. A regular little tin soldier… A chill passed along his spine.

Sam said, “Harry, who really told you to come over here and keep a watch on us?”

“Bob Thorp.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“It was Bob Thorp,” Thurston said, perplexed.

“It wasn’t a man named Salsbury?”

“Salsbury? No.”

“Haven’t you met Salsbury?”

“No. Who are you talking about?”

“Maybe he called himself Albert Deighton.”

“Who did?” Thurston asked.

“Salsbury. ”

“I don’t know anyone named Deighton.”

Jenny, Rya, and Paul came down the rain-slick steps and joined the two men.

“Salsbury’s obviously working through Bob Thorp,” Jenny said, “one way or another.”

“What are you people taking about?” Thurston asked.

Sam said, “Harry, I am the key.”

“I am the lock.”

Taking a moment to study Thurston and to decide upon his approach, Sam finally said, “Harry, we are going for a walk up toward Hattie Lange’s house. You won’t try to stop us. Is that clear?”

“I won’t stop you.”

“You won’t shoot us.”

“No. Of course not.”

“You won’t call out or make trouble of any kind.”

Thurston shook his head: no.

“When we leave here,” Sam said, “you’ll go back to the lilac bush. You’ll forget that we ever came out of the house. Is that clear?”

“Yes. ”

“I want you to forget that we’ve had this little talk. When the four of us leave here, I want you to forget every word that’s been spoken between us. Can you do that, Harry?”

“Sure. I’ll forget that we talked, that I saw any of you just now, all of it, like you said.”

For a human robot, for an honest-to-God zombie, Paul thought, he seemed damned relaxed.

“You’ll think we’re still inside,” Sam said.

Thurston stared at the back of the general store.

“You’ll guard the place exactly as you were doing a few minutes ago,” Sam said.

“Guard it… That’s what Bob told me to do.”

“Then do it,” Sam said. “And forget you’ve seen us.”

Obediently, Harry Thurston returned to the man-size niche in the wall of lilac bushes. He stood with his feet apart. He held the shotgun in both hands, parallel to the ground, prepared to raise it and fire within a second if faced with a sudden threat.

“Incredible,” Jenny said.

“Looks like a storm trooper,” Sam said wearily. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

Jenny followed him.

Paul took hold of Rya’s icy hand.

Her face drawn, a haunted look in her eyes, she squeezed his hand and said, “Will it be all right again?”

“Sure. Everything will be fine before much longer,” he told her, not certain if that was the truth or another lie.

They went west, across the rear lawns of the neighboring houses, walking fast and hoping they wouldn’t be seen.

With every step Paul expected someone to shout at them. And in spite of the manner in which Harry Thurston had behaved, he also expected to hear a shotgun blast close behind him, much too close behind him, inches from his shoulder blades: one sudden apocalyptic roar and then an endless silence.

Halfway down the block they came to the back of St. Lukes, the town’s all-denominational church. It was a freshly painted, neatly kept rectangular white frame structure on a brick-faced foundation. There was a five-story-high bell tower at the front of the building, out on the Main Street side.

Sam tried the rear door and found it unlocked. They slipped inside, one at a time.

For two or three minutes they stood in the narrow, musty, windowless foyer, and waited to see if Harry Thurston or anyone else would follow them.

No one did.

“Small blessings,” Jenny said.

Sam led them into the chamber behind the altar. That room was even darker than the foyer. They accidentally knocked over a rack full of choir gowns — and stood very still until the echo of the crash had faded away, until they were certain that they hadn’t revealed themselves.

Holding hands, forming a human chain, they stumbled out of that room and onto the altar platform. Because the storm clouds filtered the day into twilight before it was filtered again by the leaded stained-glass windows, the church proper was only marginally brighter than the room behind it. Nevertheless, there was sufficient light to allow them to break the chain; and they followed Sam along the center aisle, between the two ranks of pews, without having to feel their way as if they were blind people in a strange house.

At the rear of the nave, on the left-hand side, Sam pulled open a door. Beyond lay an enclosed spiral staircase. Sam went first; Jenny went next, then Rya.

Paul stood on the bottom step, staring out at the shadowy church for a minute or two. His revolver was ready in his right hand. When the big room remained silent and deserted, he closed the stairwell door and went up to join the others.

The top of the bell tower was a nine-foot-square platform. The bell — one yard wide at the mouth — was at the center of the platform, of course, suspended from the highest point of the arched ceiling. A chain was welded to the rim of the bell and trailed through a small hole in the floor, down to the base of the tower where the toller could tug on it. The walls were only four feet high, open from there to the ceiling. A white pillar rose at each corner, supporting the peaked, slate-shingled roof. Because the roof overhung the walls by four feet on all sides, the rain hadn’t come in through the open spaces; and the belfry platform was dry.

When he reached the head of the stairs, Paul got on his hands and knees. People seldom looked up as they hurried about their business, especially when they were in a familiar place; however, there was no reason to risk being seen. He crawled around the bell to the opposite side of the platform.

Jenny and Rya were sitting on the floor, their backs to the half-wall. The.22 rifle lay at Jenny’s side. She was talking to the girl in a low voice, telling her a joke or a story, trying to help her ease her tensions and overcome some of her grief. Jenny glanced at Paul, smiled, but kept her attention focused on Rya.

That should be my job, Paul thought. Helping Rya. Reassuring her and comforting her, being with her.

And then he thought, No. For the time being, your job is to prepare yourself to kill at least one man. Maybe two or three. Maybe as many as half a dozen.

Suddenly he wondered how the violence past and the violence yet to come would affect his relationship with his daughter. Knowing he had killed several men, would Rya fear him as she now feared Bob Thorp? Knowing he was capable of the ultimate brutal act, would she ever be at ease with him again? Death had taken his wife and his son. Would alienation take his daughter from him?

Sam was on his knees, peering over the belfry wall.

Deeply disturbed but aware that this wasn’t the time to worry about more than a few hours of the future, easing in beside Sam, Paul looked eastward, to his left. He could see Edison’s General Store half a block away. Karkov’s service station and garage. The houses in the last section of town. The baseball diamond on the meadow near the river. At the end of the valley, near the bend in the highway, a police car was angled across both lanes.

“Roadblock. ”

Sam said, “I’ve seen it.”

“Salsbury does have us penned up.”

“And right now he’s probably wondering why the hell we haven’t tried to call the cops or leave Black River.”

To Paul’s right was the main part of town. The square. Ultman’s Cafe with its pair of enormous black oak trees. The municipal building. Beyond the square, more lovely houses: brick houses and stone houses and white gingerbread Gothic houses and trim little bungalows. A couple of shops with striped awnings out in front. The telephone company office. St. Margaret Mary’s. The cemetery. The Union Theater with its old-fashioned marquee. And then the road to the mill. The entire panorama, so recently scrubbed by the storm, looked crisp and bright and quaint — and too innocent to contain the evil that he knew it harbored.

“You still think Salsbury’s holed up in the municipal building?” Paul asked.

“Where else?”

“I guess so.”

“The chief’s office is the logical command center.”

Paul looked at his watch. “A quarter past five.”

“We’ll wait here until dark,” Sam said. “Nine o’clock or thereabouts. Then we’ll sneak across the street, get past his guards with the code phrase, and reach him before he’s seen us coming.”

“It sounds so easy.”

“It will be,” Sam said.

Lightning flashed like a fuse and thunder exploded and rain like shrapnel clattered on the tower roof and on the streets below.

Smiling as he had been told to smile, his arms folded across his broad chest, Bob Thorp leaned casually against the window sill and watched Salsbury, who was working at Bob’s desk.

The infinity transmitter was connected to the office telephone. The line was open to Sam Edison’s place — or at least the number had been dialed, and the line should have been open.

Salsbury hunched over the chief’s desk, the receiver gripped so tightly in his right hand that his knuckles appeared to be about to slice through the pale skin that sheathed them. He listened closely for some sound, some insignificant tiny little sound of human origin, from the general store or from the living quarters on the two floors above the store.

Nothing.

“Come on,” he said impatiently.

Silence.

Cursing the infinity transmitter, telling himself that the damned thing hadn’t worked, that it was a piece of crappy Belgian-made hardware and so what could you expect, he hung up. He checked to see if the wires were attached to the proper terminals, then dialed the Edisons’ number again.

The line opened: hissing, a soft roar not unlike the echo of your own circulation when you held a seashell to your ear.

In the background at the Edisons’ place, a clock ticked rather noisily, hollowly.

He looked at his watch. 5:24.

Nothing. Silence.

5:26.

He hung up, dialed again.

He heard the ticking clock.

5:28.

5:29.

5:30.

No one spoke over there. No one cried or laughed or sighed or coughed or yawned or moved.

5:32.

5:33.

Salsbury pressed the receiver to his ear as hard as he could, concentrated, strained with his whole body and attention to hear Edison or Annendale or one of the others.

5:34.

5:35.

They were over there. Dammit, they were!

5:36.

He slammed the receiver into its cradle.

The bastards know I’m listening to them, he thought. They’re trying to be quiet, trying to worry me. That’s it. That has to be it.

He picked up the telephone and dialed the Edisons’ number.

A ticking clock. Nothing else.

5:39.

5:40.

“Bastards!”

He hung up the phone with a bang!

Suddenly he was drenched with perspiration.

Clammy and uncomfortable, he got to his feet. But he was frozen by rage; he couldn’t move.

He said to Thorp, “Even if they did get out of the store some way, somehow, they can’t have left town. That’s absolutely impossible. None of them’s a magician. They can’t have done it. I’ve got it all sewed up. Haven’t I?”

Thorp smiled at him. He was still operating under the previous orders Salsbury had given him.

“Answer me, damn you!”

Thorp’s smile vanished.

Salsbury was livid and greasy with sweat. “Haven’t I got this fucking town sewed up tight?”

“Oh, yes,” Thorp said obediently.

“No one can get out of this crummy burg unless I let them out of it. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes. You’ve got it sewn up.”

Salsbury was shaking. Dizzy. “Even if they slipped out of the store, I can find them. I can find them any damned time I want to. Can’t I?”

“Yes.”

“I can tear this goddamned town apart, rip it wide open and find those sonsofbitches.”

“Any time you want.”

“They can’t escape.”

“No.”

Abruptly sitting down, almost as if he had collapsed, Salsbury said, “But that doesn’t matter. They haven’t left the store. They can’t have left it. It’s guarded. Closely guarded. It’s a damned prison. So they’re still in the place. Being quiet as mice. They know I’m listening. They’re trying to trick me. That’s what it is. A trick. That’s precisely what it is.”

He dialed the Edisons’ number.

He heard the familiar ticking of the clock in one of the rooms where there was a receiver.

5:44.

5:45.

He hung up.

Dialed again.

Ticking…

5:46.

5:47.

He hung up.

Grinning at the chief of police, he said, “Do you realize what they want me to do?”

Thorp shook his head: no.

“They want me to panic. They want me to order you to make a house-to-house search for them.” He giggled. “I could do that. I could make everyone in town cooperate in a house-to-house search. But that would take hours. And then I’d have to erase the memory of it from everyone’s mind. Four hundred minds. That would take a couple of hours more. They want me to waste my time. Precious time. They want me to panic and waste hours and maybe give them a chance to slip by me in the confusion. Isn’t that what they want?”

“Yes.”

Salsbury giggled. “Well, I’m not playing their game. I’m going to wait for Dawson and Klinger. I’m not going to panic. Not me. I am in control of the situation — and I’ll stay that way. ”

Thunder boomed over the valley and reverberated in the two office windows.

He dialed the general store.

5:50.

5:51.

He giggled and hung up.

Then he had a startling thought: if the Edisons and the Annendales knew he was listening to them, that meant they knew the entire story, the truth, knew who he was, really was, and what he was doing here in Black River… And that was impossible.

He dialed again.

5:52.

Nothing. Silence.

He put down the receiver and turned to Thorp. “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter if they do know. They can’t get away. I’ve got them where I want them. I have the power…” He stared at the infinity transmitter for a while, then looked back at Thorp. “What do you think Miriam will do when she finds out about the power I’ve got?”

“Who’s Miriam?”

“You know Miriam.”

“I don’t know her.”

“She’s my ex-wife.”

“Oh.”

“A rotten bitch.”

Thorp said nothing.

“Frigid as a popsicle.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know what she’ll do,” Salsbury said. “She’ll come crawling to me. Old Miriam. Crawling to me, Bob. On her hands and knees. She will. Won’t she?”

“Yes,” Thorp said.

The power…

“You know what I’ll do?”

Thorp said, “No. ”

“You know what the hell I’ll do when that rotten bitch comes on her hands and knees, crawling on her hands and knees to me?”

“No. ”

“Kick her in the face.”

“That’s assault,” Thorp said.

“Same for Dawson. Kick him in the face.”

“That’s assault. You’ll wind up in jail.”

“I’ll get Dawson,” Salsbury said solemnly. Then he giggled. “I’ll get that sanctimonious old bastard.”

Thorp frowned.

“Think I could find a pair of jackboots, Bob?”

“A pair of what?”

“Maybe there are a few people, just a few people, not many mind you, that I’d want jackboots for.”

Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat…

“Hello?”

“Mrs. Wolinski?”

“Yes.”

“I am the key.”

“I am the lock.”

“Is your husband there?”

“He’s upstairs right now.”

“Is he alone upstairs?”

“Alone? Yes.”

“Are you alone downstairs?”

“Yes. ”

“Do you know Sam Edison?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Is he at your house now?”

“Sam? No?”

“Is Jenny Edison at your house?”

“No. Why should she be?”

“Haven’t you seen either of the Edisons today?”

“No. Look here, I—”

“Mrs. Wolinski, when you hang up your telephone, you’ll forget every word of this conversation. You’ll only remember that someone called and tried to sell you life insurance. Someone from Bexford. Is that understood?”

“Yes.”

“Hang up, Mrs. Wolinski.”

“St. Margaret Mary’s.”

“Is this the rectory?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Father O’Hara?”

“Speaking. ”

“I am the key.”

“I am the lock.”

“Are you alone, father?”

“Yes. ”

“What about your housekeeper?”

“She’s gone home for the day.”

“Do you know Sam and Jenny Edison?”

“Certainty. Fine people.”

“Is either of them with you now?”

“Here at the rectory? No.”

“In the church perhaps?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“Have you seen either of the Edisons today?”

“No. I—”

“Do you know Paul Annendale?”

“I don’t believe so. If there’s some sort of emergency—”

“Shut up, O’Hara. When you hang up your telephone, you’ll forget every word of this conversation. You’ll only remember that someone dialed a wrong number. Is that understood?”

“Yes.”

“Hang up, O’Hara.”

“… either of the Edisons today?”

“I saw Sam. Down at the store.”

“When was that, Mrs. Jamison?”

“This morning. Around nine.”

“You haven’t seen him since?”

“No.”

“Mrs. Jamison, I don’t want you to go away from the phone. You stand right there. But give the receiver to your husband.”

“Hello?”

“Mr. Jamison?”

“Yes?”

“I am the key.”

“I am the lock.”

“… don’t want you to go away from the phone, Mrs. Potter. You stand right there. But give the receiver to Reverend Potter.”

“All right. Just a minute…”

“Hello?”

“Reverend Potter?”

“This is he.”

“I am the key.”

“I am the lock.”

“Do you know Sam and Jenny Edison?”

“Yes. Very well, in fact.”

“Have you seen either of them today?”

“No. ”

“Are you absolutely sure of that?”

“Oh, yes. Absolutely.”

“Have you talked to either of them today?”

“No. I—”

“Do you know Paul Annendale or his daughter?”

“Yes. Every year they- ”

“Have you seen or talked to them today?”

“No. I’ve spent the day—”

“What the fuck’s happening, Potter?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Where in the hell are they?”

“I don’t like foul language or- ”

“I’ve called fifty people in the past hour and a half. Nobody’s seen them. Nobody’s heard from them. Nobody knows anything. Well, they’ve got to be in this town. I’m damn sure of that! They can’t get out… Christ. You know what I think, Potter? I think they’re still in the general store.”

“If—”

“Being quiet as mice. Trying to fool me. They want me to come looking for them. They want me to send Bob Thorp after them. They probably have guns in there. Well, they can’t fool me. They’re not going to start a shooting match and leave me with a dozen bodies to account for. I’ll wait them out. I’ll get them, Potter. And you know what I’ll do when I get my hands on them? The Edisons will have to be studied, of course. I’ll have to find out why they didn’t respond to the drug and the subliminals. But I know why the Annendales didn’t respond. They weren’t here for the program. So when I get them, I can dispose of them right away. Right away. I’ll have Bob Thorp blow their fucking heads off. The sonsofbitches. That’s exactly what I’ll do.”

7 9:00 P.M

At dusk, when the thunderstorm temporarily abated for the fourth time that day, a streamlined executive helicopter, painted bright yellow and black like a hornet, already gleaming with green and red running lights, fluttered into the east end of the Black River valley. It was flying low, no higher than sixty feet above the ground. It followed Main Street toward the town square, chopping up the humid air. A flat echo of the stuttering blades rebounded from the wet pavement below.

In the bell tower of the all-denominational church, also sixty feet above the ground — but safely hidden in the deep shadows that were cast by the overhanging belfry roof — Rya, Jenny, Paul, and Sam watched the aircraft as it approached. In the penumbral, purple-gray twilight the helicopter seemed dangerously close to them; but no one in it was looking their way. However, the waning daylight was still bright enough to allow them to see into the flight deck and into the cozy passenger cabin behind it.

“Two men besides the pilot,” Sam said

At the square the helicopter hovered for a moment, then swept across the municipal building and settled into the parking lot ten yards from the spare police car.

As the evening quietude returned in the aircraft’s wake, Jenny said, “Do you think those men are connected with Salsbury?”

“No doubt about it,” Sam said.

“Government?”

Paul said, “No.”

“I agree,” Sam said almost happily. “Even the president’s chopper is military-style on the outside — although probably not on the inside. The government doesn’t use sleek little executive machines like that yellow and black job.”

“Which doesn’t rule out the government’s having a part in this,” Paul said.

“Oh, certainly not. It doesn’t rule out anything,” Sam said. “But it’s a good sign.”

“What now?” Rya asked.

“Now we watch and wait,” Paul said, his eyes fixed on the white-brick municipal building. “Just watch and wait.”

The damp air still held an unpleasant tang of the helicopter’s exhaust fumes.

Up in the mountains, thunder rumbled menacingly. Lightning arched between two of the higher peaks as if they were terminals in Frankenstein’s laboratory.

To Paul time seemed almost at a standstill. Each minute ticked on and on and on. Each second was like a tiny bubble of air rising slowly through the bottle of glucose on the intravenous-feeding rack that he had watched for hour after leaden hour at Annie’s hospital bedside.

Finally, at 9:20 two cars came down Main Street from the municipal building: the second police cruiser and a one-year-old Ford LTD. The four headlamps sliced open the crescent darkness. Half a block beyond the church, they parked at the curb in front of the general store.

Bob Thorp and two men with handguns climbed out of the squad car. For a moment they stood in the splash of amber-white light from the LTD; then they went up the porch steps and disappeared beneath the veranda roof.

Three men got out of the second car. They left the engine running and the doors open. They didn’t follow Thorp; they remained at the LTD. Because they were standing behind the headlights, they were for the most part in darkness. Paul couldn’t tell if they were armed or not. But he knew for certain who they were: Salsbury and the two passengers from the helicopter.

“Do you want to go down there and take them now?” Paul asked Sam. “While they have their backs on us?”

“Too risky. We don’t know if they’ve got guns. They might hear us coming. And even if we did catch them by surprise, one of them would get away, sure as hell. Let’s wait a bit.”

At 9:35 one of Bob Thorp’s “deputies” came down the porch steps and joined the three men at the second car. They talked, possibly argued, for a few seconds. The deputy remained at the LTD while Salsbury and his associates mounted the steps to the general store.

Turning away from the bookshelves in Sam Edison’s study, Dawson said, “All right then. Now we understand how they might have pieced it together. Ogden, do they know the code phrases?”

Shocked by the question, Salsbury said, “Of course not! How in the hell could they know?”

“The little girl might have heard you use them with Thorp or with her brother. ”

“No,” he said. “Impossible. She didn’t step into that doorway until long after I gave up trying to get control of her brother — and long, long after I’d already assumed control of Thorp. ”

“Did you try to use the phrase on her?”

Did I? Salsbury wondered. I remember seeing her there, taking a step toward her, being unable to catch her. But did I use the code phrase?

He rejected the notion because if he accepted it he would have to accept defeat, complete destruction. “No,” he told Dawson. “I didn’t have time to use the phrase. I saw her. She turned and ran. I ran after her, but she was too fast.”

“You’re absolutely certain?”

“Absolutely. ”

Regarding Salsbury with unvarnished disgust, the general said, “You should have foreseen this development with Edison. You should have known about this library, this hobby of his.”

“How in the hell could I foresee any of it?” Salsbury asked. His face was flushed. His myopic eyes seemed to bulge even more than usual behind his thick glasses.

“If you had done your duty—”

“Duty,” Salsbury said scornfully. Half of his anger was generated by his fear; but it was important that neither Dawson nor Klinger see that. “This isn’t the stinking military, Ernst. This isn’t the army. I’m not one of your oh-so-humble enlisted men!”

Klinger turned away from him, went to the window, and said, “Maybe we’d all be better off if you were.”

Willing the general to look at him, aware that he was at a disadvantage so long as Klinger felt safe enough to turn his back, Salsbury said, “Christ! No matter how careful I’d been—”

“That’s enough,” Dawson said. He spoke softly but with such command that Salsbury stopped talking and the general looked away from the window. “We haven’t time for arguments and accusations. We’ve got to find those four people. ”

“They can’t have gotten out of town through the east end of the valley,” Salsbury said. “I know I’ve got that sealed tight.”

“You thought you had this house sealed up tight too,” Klinger said. “But they slipped past you.”

“Let’s not judge too harshly, Ernst,” Dawson said. He smiled in a fatherly, Christian fashion and nodded at Salsbury. But there was only hatred and loathing in his black eyes. “I agree with Ogden. His precautions at the east end are certainly adequate. Although we might consider tripling the number of men along the river and in the woods now that night has fallen. And I believe Ogden’s also covered the logging roads well enough.”

“Then there are two possibilities,” Klinger said, deciding to play the military strategist. “One — they might still be in town, hiding somewhere, waiting for a chance to get past the roadblock or the men guarding the river. Or two — maybe they’re going to walk out through the mountains. We know from Thorp that the Annendales are experienced campers and hikers.”

Bob Thorp was standing by the door, as if he were an honor guard. He said, “That’s true.”

“I don’t see it,” Salsbury said. “I mean, they have an eleven-year-old girl with them. She’ll slow them down. They’ll need days to reach help that way.”

“That little girl has spent a big part of the last seven summers in these forests,” the general said. “She might not be as much of a drag on them as you think. Besides, if we don’t locate them, they’ll do the same damage whether they reach help tonight or not until the middle of next week.”

Dawson thought about that. Then: “If they’re trying to walk out through the mountains, sixty miles round-about to Bexford, how far do you think they’ve gotten by now?”

“Three, maybe three and a half miles,” Klinger said.

“No farther than that?”

“I doubt it,” Klinger said. “They’d have to be damned careful leaving town if they didn’t want to be seen. They’d move slowly, a few yards at a time for the first mile. In the forest they’d need a while to really hit their stride. And even if the little girl is at home in the woods, she’d slow them down a bit. ”

“Three and a half miles,” Dawson said thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t that put them somewhere between the Big Union mill and the planned forests?”

“That’s about right. ”

Dawson closed his eyes and seemed to mutter a few words of silent prayer; his lips moved slightly. Then his eyes snapped open, as if sprung by a holy revelation, and he said, “The first thing we’ll do is organize a search in the mountains. ”

“That’s absurd,” Salsbury said, although he was aware that Dawson probably thought of his plan as a divine inspiration, the very handiwork of God. “It would be like — well, like hunting for a needle in a haystack.”

His voice as cold as the dead boy in the next room, Dawson said, “We have nearly two hundred men at the logging camp, all of them familiar with these mountains. We’ll mobilize them. Arm them with axes and rifles and shotguns. Give them flashlights and Coleman lanterns. We’ll put them in trucks and jeeps and send them a mile or so beyond the logging camp. They can form a search line and walk back. Forty feet between the men. That way, the line will be a mile and a half from one end to the other — yet each man will have only a small area of ground to cover. The Edisons and the Annendales won’t be able to get by them. ”

“It’ll work,” Klinger said admiringly.

“But what if they aren’t up there in the mountains?” Salsbury said. “What if they’re right here in town?”

“Then we’ve nothing to worry about,” Dawson said. “They can’t get to you because you’re surrounded by Bob Thorp and his deputies. They can’t get out of town because every exit is blocked. All they can do is wait.” He smiled wolfishly. “If we don’t find them in the mountains by three or four o’clock in the morning, we’ll begin a house-to-house search here in town. One way or another, I want this whole affair wrapped up by noon tomorrow. ”

“That’s asking a lot,” the general said.

“I don’t care,” Dawson said. “It isn’t asking too much. I want the four of them dead by noon. I want to restructure the memories of everyone in this town to cover our trail completely. By noon. ”

“Dead?” Salsbury said, confused. He pushed his glasses up on his nose. “But I need to study the Edisons. You can kill the Annendales if you want. But I’ve got to know why the Edisons weren’t affected. I’ve got—”

“Forget that,” Dawson said brusquely. “If we attempted to capture them and take them back to the laboratory at Greenwich, there’s a good chance they’d escape along the way. We can’t risk that. They know too much. Much too much. ”

“But we’ll have so damned many corpses!” Salsbury said. “For God’s sake, there’s already the boy. And Buddy Pellineri. Four more… And if they fight back, we may have as many as a dozen to bury. How are we going to account for so many?”

Obviously pleased with himself, Dawson said, “We’ll put the lot of them in the Union Theater. Then we’ll stage a tragic fire. We’ve got Dr. Troutman to issue death certificates. And we can use the key-lock program to keep the relatives from requesting autopsies.”

“Excellent,” Klinger said, grinning, lightly clapping his hands.

Sycophant to the court of King Leonard the First, Salsbury thought sourly.

“Really excellent, Leonard,” Klinger said.

“Thank you, Ernst.”

“Christ on a crutch,” Salsbury said weakly.

Dawson gave him a nasty look. He was displeased with such strong profanity. “For every sin that we commit, the Lord will have His awful retribution one day. There’s no escaping that.”

Salsbury said nothing.

“There is a hell.”

Looking at Klinger, finding no support nor even a wink of sympathy, Salsbury managed to keep quiet. There was something in Dawson’s voice — like a well-honed knife hidden in the soft folds of a priest’s gown — something hard and sharp that frightened him.

Dawson glanced at his watch and said, “Time to be moving, gentlemen. Let’s get this over with.”

The helicopter rose from the parking lot behind the municipal building. It swung gracefully over the town square where several people stood watching it, and then it clattered westward toward the mountain, into the darkness.

In a moment it was gone.

Sam turned away from the street and slumped with his back to the belfry wall. “On their way to the mill?”

“Looks like it,” Paul said. “But why?”

“Good question. I would have asked the same thing myself if you hadn’t.”

“Another thing,” Paul said. “What if they’ve figured out how we escaped? What if they realize we know the code phrase?”

“That’s not very likely.”

“But if it’s the case?”

“I wish I knew,” Sam said worriedly. He sighed. “But remember that even under the worst circumstances, it’s just us against them. If they realize how much we know, we lose the advantage of surprise. But they’ve lost the advantage of an army of programmed bodyguards. So it balances out.”

Jenny said, “Do you think both of Salsbury’s friends are aboard the helicopter?”

Sam held his revolver before him. He was unable to see more than the outline of it in the darkness. Nevertheless, studying it with dread fascination, he said, “Well now, that’s another thing I sure wish I knew.”

Paul’s hands were shaking. His own Smith & Wesson felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds. He said, “I guess we go after Salsbury now. ”

“It’s past time we did. ”

Jenny touched her father’s hand, the one that held the gun. “But what if one of those men did stay with Salsbury?”

“Then it’s two against two,” Sam said. “And we sure as hell can handle that.”

“If I went along,” she said, “it would be three against two, and that would have to improve the odds.”

“Rya needs you,” Sam said. He hugged her, kissed her on the cheek. “We’ll be okay, Jen. I know we will. You just watch after Rya while we’re gone. ”

“And if you don’t come back?”

“We will.”

“If you don’t,” she insisted.

“Then — you’re on your own,” Sam said, his voice almost breaking. If there were tears in the comers of his eyes, the darkness hid them. “There’s nothing more I can do for you.”

“Look,” Paul said, “even if Salsbury does know how much we’ve learned, he doesn’t know where we are. But we know exactly where he is. So we still have some advantage. ”

Rya clung to Paul. She didn’t want to let him go. She spoke in a quiet but fierce voice, and she virtually demanded that he not leave her in the tower.

He stroked her dark hair, held her tight, spoke softly to her, calmed and reassured her as best he could.

And at 10:20 he followed Sam down the tower stairs.

8 10:20 P.M

Phil Karkov, the proprietor of Black River’s only service station and garage, and his girl friend, Lolah Tayback, tried to leave town a few minutes past ten o’clock. As programmed, the deputies who manned the roadblock sent them to the municipal building to have a talk with Bob Thorp.

The mechanic was soft-spoken, courteous, and obviously liked to think of himself as a model citizen. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, red-haired man in his middle thirties. His good looks were marred only by a bulbous and somewhat misshapen nose that appeared to have been broken in more than one fight. He was an amicable man with a ready smile; and he was most anxious to help the chief of police in any way that he could.

After he opened the two of them with the code phrase and spent a minute interrogating them, Salsbury was satisfied that Karkov and Lolah Tayback were fully, properly programmed. They hadn’t been trying to escape. They hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary in town today. They had only been going to a bar in Bexford for beer and sandwiches.

He sent the mechanic home and told him to stay there for the rest of the night.

The woman was another matter altogether.

“Child-woman” was a better word for her, he thought. Her silvery-blond hair hung to her narrow shoulders and framed a face of childlike beauty: crystalline green eyes, a perfectly clear and milky complexion with a light, cinnamonlike dusting of freckles across her cheekbones, an upturned pixie nose, dimples, a blade-straight jawline and round little chin… Every feature was delicate and somehow bespoke naivete. She stood perhaps five feet two and weighed no more than one hundred pounds. She seemed fragile. Yet in her red-and-white-striped T-shirt (sans bra) and blue jean shorts, she presented a strikingly desirable, quite womanly figure. Her breasts were small, high set, accentuated by an extremely thin waistline, the nipples delectably silhouetted through the thin material of the T-shirt. Her legs were sleek, supple, shapely. As he stood in front of her, looking her up and down, she regarded him shyly. She was unable to meet his eyes. She fidgeted. If appearance could count for anything, she ought to have been one of the most malleable, vulnerable women he had ever met.

However, even if she were a fighter, a real hellcat, she was now vulnerable. As vulnerable as he wished her to be. Because he had the power…

“Lolah?”

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Are you engaged to Phil Karkov?”

“No.” Softly.

“Going steady with him?”

“More or less.”

“Are you sleeping with him?”

She blushed. Fidgeted.

Lovely little animal…

Screw you, Dawson.

You too, Ernst.

He giggled.

“Are you sleeping with him, Lolah?”

Almost inaudibly: “Do I have to say?”

“You must tell me the truth.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“You’re sleeping with him?”

“Yes.”

“How often?”

“Oh… Every week.”

“Speak up.”

“Every week.”

“Little minx.”

“Are you going to hurt me?”

He laughed. “Once a week? Twice?”

“Twice,” she said. “Sometimes three…”

Salsbury turned to Bob Thorp. “Get the hell out of here. Go down to the end of the hall and wait with the guard there until I call you.”

“Sure.” Thorp closed the door as he left.

“Lolah?”

“Yes?”

“What does Phil do to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“In bed.”

She stared at her sandaled feet.

The power filled him, pulsed within him, leaped across tens of thousands of terminals in his flesh: sparked, flashed, crackled. He was exhilarated. This was what the key-lock program was all about: this power, this mastery, this unlimited command of other people’s souls. No one could ever touch him again. No one could ever use him. He was the user now. Always would be. From here on out. Now and forever, amen. Amen, Dawson. Did you hear that? Amen. Thank you, God, for sending along this cute little piece of ass, amen. He was happy again for the first time since this morning, since he had touched Thorp’s wife.

“I’ll bet Phil does everything to you,” he said.

She said nothing. Shuffled her feet.

“Doesn’t he? Doesn’t he do everything to you, Lolah? Admit it. Say it. I want to hear you say it.”

“He does — everything.”

He put his hand under her chin, lifted her head.

She gazed at him. Timid, frightened.

“I’m going to do everything to you,” he said.

“Don’t hurt me.”

“Lovely, lovely little bitch,” he said. He was excited as he had never been in his life. Breathing hard. Yet everything so clear. So in control. Firmly in control. Her absolute master. Everyone’s absolute master. That was Howard Parker’s phrase, flashing back to him across the decades, much as a bizarre hallucination erupting in an acidhead’s mind years after his last tab of LSD: absolute master. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do to you,” he told Lolah Tayback. “I’m going to hurt you, just like I hurt the others. Make you pay. Make you bleed. I’m your absolute master. You’re going to take everything I dish out to you. Everything. Maybe even like it. Learn to like it. Maybe…”

His hands curled into fists at his sides.

The pilot flew the helicopter in a wide circle around the logging camp, searching for the best place to set down between the scattered lights from the buildings.

In the passenger cabin, Dawson broke an extended silence. “Ogden has to be eliminated.”

Klinger had no difficulty accepting that judgment. “Of course. He’s untrustworthy.”

“Unstable.”

“But if we eliminate him,” the general said, “can we continue with the plan?”

“Everything that Ogden has learned is in the Greenwich computer,” Dawson said. “The research was beyond us. But we can use the finished product well enough.”

“Hasn’t he encoded his data?”

“Naturally. But the day after the computer was installed, long before Ogden began to use it, I had my people program it to decode and print out any data that I requested — regardless of how the request was phrased, regardless of passwords or number keys or other security devices that he might use to limit my access to the information.”

The helicopter hovered, descended.

“When do we deal with him?”

“You deal with him,” Dawson said.

“Me — or do I program someone to do it?”

“Do it yourself. He can deprogram anyone else.” Dawson smiled. “You do have a handgun with you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“In the small of your back?”

“Strapped to my right ankle.”

“Marvelous.”

“Back to the original question,” Klinger said. “When do I eliminate him?”

“Tonight. Within the hour, if possible.”

“Why not back in Greenwich?”

“I don’t want to bury him on the estate. That’s taking too great a chance.”

“What will we do with the body?”

“Bury it here. In the woods.”

The helicopter touched ground.

The pilot shut off the engines.

Overhead, the rotors coughed and slowed down. A welcome silence gradually replaced the racket they had made.

Klinger said, “You intend for him to just — disappear off the face of the earth?”

“That’s correct.”

“His vacation ends on the fifth of next month. That’s when he’s due back at the Brockert Institute. He’s a punctual man. The morning of the fifth, when he doesn’t show up, there’s going to be some commotion. They’ll come looking for him.”

“They won’t come looking in Black River. There’s nothing at all to connect Ogden with this place. He’s supposed to be vacationing in Miami.”

“There’s going to be a very quiet and very big manhunt,” Klinger said. “Pentagon security people, the FBI…”

Unbuckling his seat belt, Dawson said, “And there’s nothing to connect him with you or with me. Eventually they’ll decide that he went over to the other side, defected.”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely.”

Dawson opened his door.

“Do I take the chopper back to town?” Klinger asked.

“No. He might hear you coming and suspect what you’re there for. Take a car or a jeep from here. And you’d better walk the last few hundred yards.”

“All right.”

“And Ernst?”

“Yes?”

In the amber cabin light, Dawson’s five-hundred-dollars-apiece capped teeth gleamed in a broad and dangerous smile. There seemed to be light behind his eyes. His nostrils were flared: a wolf on the trail of a blood scent. “Ernst, don’t worry so much.”

“Can’t help but.”

“We’re destined to survive this night, to win this battle and all of those battles that will come after it,” Dawson said with solemn conviction.

“I wish I could be as confident of that as you are.”

“But you should be. We’re blessed, my friend. This entire enterprise is blessed, you see. Don’t you ever forget that, Ernst.” He smiled again.

“I won’t forget,” Klinger said.

But he was reassured more by the weight of the revolver at his ankle than by Dawson’s words.

Straining to hear any sound other than their own foot-steps, Paul and Sam left the church by the rear door and crossed the open fields to the riverbank.

The high grass was heavy with rain. Within twenty yards, Paul’s shoes and socks were wet through to his skin. The legs of his jeans were soaked almost to the knees.

Sam located a footpath that traversed the bank of the river at a forty-five-degree angle. Every groove and depression in the earth had been transformed into a puddle. The way was exceedingly muddy and slick. They slipped and slid and waved their arms to keep their balance.

At the bottom of the path, they came onto a two-foot-wide rocky shelf. On the right the river rolled and gurgled, filling the darkness with syrupy sound: a wide ebony strip which, at this hour of the night, looked like crude oil rather than water. On their left the bank of the river rose up eight or nine feet; and in some places the exposed roots of willow trees and oaks and maples overlaid the earthen wall.

Without benefit of a flashlight, Sam led Paul westward, toward the mountains. His snowy hair was a ghostly, luminescent sign for Paul to follow. The older man stumbled occasionally; but he was for the most part sure-footed, and he never cursed when he misstepped. He was surprisingly quiet, as if the skills and talents of an experienced warrior suddenly had come back to him after all these years.

This is war, Paul reminded himself. We’re on our way to kill a man. The enemy. Several men…

The warm, heavy air was redolent with the odor of damp moss and with the stale fumes of the plants that were decomposing in the muck at the water’s edge.

Eventually, Sam found a series of wind- and water- chiseled ledges, steps that took them up from the river again. They came out in an apple orchard on the slopes at the extreme west end of town.

Thunder roared down from the peaks, disturbing the birds in the apple trees.

They went north. They were taking the safest — and also the most roundabout — route to the back of the municipal building. Soon they came to a waist-high white picket fence that marked the end of the orchard and the verge of Main Street, where it became known to the locals as the mill road.

After he had looked both ways and had carefully studied the land to which he was running, when he was certain that there was no one to see him, Sam slipped over the fence. He was as agile as a young man. He sprinted silently across the lane and quickly disappeared into a dense stand of scrub pines, scraggly birches, and brush on the other side.

Paul tucked his revolver into his belt, put both hands on the fence, looked up and down the street as Sam had done — but was suddenly arrested by a severe spell of uncontrollable shivering. His stomach twisted, and he was short of breath.

He tried to tell himself that the shakes were caused by his wet feet, but he knew that wasn’t true. The night was warm. His feet were wet but not cold.

He was shivering for only one reason: because he was going to kill a man.

Or be killed…

That was a possibility.

He felt sick.

Dizzy.

He followed Sam.

Lolah Tayback stood before him, naked.

“I’m the absolute master,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Look at me, Lolah.”

She stared at the floor.

“Lolah?”

“Let me go.” Soft voice. Tears.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m scared.”

“Don’t you like me?”

She didn’t respond.

“Do you like me, Lolah?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell the truth, Lolah.”

“I… don’t… like you.”

He slapped her face.

She fell against the desk.

“Bitch. ”

“Don’t hurt me.”

“Animal. ”

“Don’t hurt me. Please.”

“I’ll kill you.”

“Don’t—”

He struck her with his fist.

Then he struck her again.

Twin arc lamps on ribbed aluminum poles bracketed the parking lot behind the municipal building. In the stark blue-white light the needles of nearby pine trees resembled feathers. The lamps made the wet macadam shine like molten tar and transformed the puddles into broken mirrors. It glinted coldly on the windshields of several automobiles, including the town ambulance and the spare police cruiser.

When Sam opened the door of the building and Paul stepped into the first-floor corridor, two men looked up in surprise. Bob Thorp reached for the revolver in the holster at his hip. The other man, a uniformed deputy, raised his shotgun.

“I am the key,” Paul said quickly.

They both said, “I am the lock.”

“Speak softly.”

They nodded.

“Bob, leave your gun in the holster.”

“All right.”

“And you. Put down that shotgun.”

The deputy obeyed.

Opening these men, using them, pushing buttons deep within their minds, Paul felt neither triumph nor the exhilaration of command. Instead, aware that their lives and sanity and dignity were in his hands, he had an almost overpowering sense of solemn responsibility; and for a moment he was paralyzed by it.

Sam opened the first door on the right, switched on the overhead fluorescent lights, and ushered everyone into a file room.

Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat…

Salsbury’s knuckles were skinned. His hands were covered with thin gloves of blood: his blood and hers.

He took a Smith & Wesson.38 Police Special from the firearms cabinet behind Thorp’s desk. He located a box of shells on the top shelf and loaded the handgun.

He returned to Lolah Tayback.

She was on the floor in the center of the room, lying on her side with her knees drawn up. Both of her eyes were bruised and swollen. Her lower lip was split. Her septum was broken, and blood trickled from her delicate nostrils. Although she was barely conscious, she groaned miserably when she saw him.

“Poor Lolah,” he said mock sympathetically.

Through the thin slits of her swollen eyelids, she watched him apprehensively.

He held the gun to her face.

She closed her eyes.

With the barrel of the.38, he drew circles around her breasts and prodded her nipples.

She shuddered.

He liked that.

The file room was a cold, impersonal place. The fluorescent strip lighting, institutional-green walls, yellowed Venetian blinds, rank on rank of gray metal cabinets, and brown tile floor made it a perfect place for an interrogation.

Sam said, “Bob, is there anyone in your office right now?”

“Yes. A couple of people.” “Who?”

“Lolah Tayback — and him.”

“Who is ‘him’?”

“I… don’t know.”

“You don’t know his name?”

“Gee, I guess not. ”

“Is it Salsbury?”

Thorp shrugged.

“Is he a somewhat chubby man?”

“About forty pounds too heavy,” Thorp said.

“And he wears very thick glasses?”

“Yeah. That’s him.”

“And he’s alone with Lolah?”

“Like I said.”

“You’re certain of that?”

“Sure.”

Paul said, “And his friends?”

“What friends?” Thorp asked.

“In the helicopter. ”

“They aren’t here.”

“Neither of them?”

“Neither of them.”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know.”

“Aren’t they at the mill?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will they be back?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“Who are they?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

Sam said, “That’s it, then.”

“We go after him?” Paul asked.

“Right now.”

“I’ll hit the door first.”

“I’m older,” Sam said. “I’ve got less to lose.”

“I’m younger — and faster,” Paul said.

“Speed won’t matter. He won’t be expecting us.”

“And maybe he will,” Paul said.

Reluctantly, Sam said. “All right. You first. But I’ll be damned close behind.”

Salsbury forced her to lie on her back. He parted her legs with one hand and put the cool steel barrel of the.38 between her silken thighs. He shivered and licked his lips. With his left hand he slid his glasses up on his nose. “Do you want it?” he asked eagerly. “Do you want it? Well, I’m going to give it to you. All of it. Every last inch of it. Do you hear me, you little bitch? Little animal. Bust you wide open. Wide open. Going to truly and really give it to you…”

Paul hesitated outside of the closed door to the police chief’s office. When he heard Salsbury talking inside and knew that the man was unaware of their presence in the building, he threw open the door and went inside fast, crouching, the big.357 Magnum shoved out in front of him.

At first he couldn’t believe what he saw, didn’t want to believe what he saw. There was a badly beaten, naked young woman lying on the floor spread-eagled, conscious but dazed. And Salsbury: face flushed, sweat-filmed, spotted with blood, eyes wild, savage-looking. He was kneeling over the woman, and he seemed like a troll, an evil and disgusting bug-eyed troll. He was pressing a revolver between her pale thighs in a vile, grotesque imitation of the sex act. Paul was so mesmerized by the scene, so riveted by the revulsion and outrage, that for a few seconds he forgot altogether that he was in terrible danger.

Salsbury took advantage of Paul’s and Sam’s inability to act. He stood up as if he had had an electric shock, pointed his revolver, and fired at Paul’s head.

The shot was a bit too high, an inch or two, no more than that. The bullet slammed into the wall beside the door. Chips of plaster rained down on Paul’s shoulders.

Still crouching, he pulled off two quick shots of his own. The first was wide of the mark; it smashed through the Venetian blinds and shattered one of the windows. The second struck Salsbury in the left shoulder, approximately four inches above the nipple. It caused him to drop his gun, almost lifted him off his feet, pitched him backward as if he were a sack full of rags.

He was thrown to the floor by the impact of the bullet, and he slumped against the wall beneath the windows. He clutched his left shoulder with his right hand, but for all the pressure he applied, blood still streamed between his fingers. Pain pulsed rhythmically within him, deep within him, exactly as the power had once done: tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat…

A man came toward him. Blue-eyed. Curly-haired.

He couldn’t see very well. His vision was blurred. But the sight of those bright blue eyes was sufficient to catapult him back in time, back to the memory of another pair of blue eyes, and he said, “Parker.”

The blue-eyed man said, “Who’s Parker?”

“Don’t tease me,” Salsbury said. “Please don’t tease me.”

“I’m not teasing.”

“Don’t touch me.”

“Who’s Parker?”

“Please don’t touch me, Parker.”

“Me? That’s not my name.”

Salsbury began to cry.

The blue-eyed man took him by the chin and forced his head up. “Look at me, damn you. Look at me closely.”

“You hurt me bad, Parker.”

“I. Am. Not. Parker.”

For a moment the blazing pain subsided. Salsbury said, “Not Parker?”

“My name’s Annendale.”

The pain blossomed again, but the past receded to its proper place. He blinked and said, “Oh. Oh, yes. Annendale.”

“I’m going to ask you a lot of questions.”

“I’m in terrible pain,” Salsbury said. “You shot me. You hurt me. That isn’t right.”

“You’re going to answer my questions.”

“No,” Salsbury said adamantly. “None of them.”

“All of them. You’ll answer all of them, or I’ll blow your damned head off,” the blue-eyed man said.

“Okay. Do it. Blow my head off. That’s better than losing all of it. That’s better than losing the power.”

“Who were those men in the helicopter?”

“None of your business.”

“Were they government men?”

“Go away.”

“You’re going to die sooner or later, Salsbury.”

“Oh, is that so? Like hell I am.”

“You are. So save yourself some pain.”

Salsbury said nothing.

“Were they government men?”

“Fuck off.”

The blue-eyed man reversed the revolver in his right hand, and he used the butt to rap hard on Salsbury’s right hand. The blow seemed to send jagged shards of glass through his skinned knuckles. But that was the least of the pain. The shock was transmitted through his hand, to and into the tender, bloody wound in his shoulder.

He gasped. He bent over and almost vomited.

“Do you see what I mean?”

“Bastard.”

“Were they government men?”

“I… told you… to… fuck off.”

Klinger parked the car on West Main Street, two blocks from the town square.

He slid out from behind the wheel, closed the door — and heard gunfire. Three shots. One right after the other. Inside muffled by walls. Not far away. Toward town. The municipal building? He stood very still and listened for at least a minute, but there was nothing more.

He took the snub-nosed.32 Webley from the ankle holster and flicked off the safety.

He hurried into the alleyway beside the Union Theater, taking a safe if circuitous route to the back door of the municipal building.

9 10:55 P.M

In the ambulance Lolah Tayback lay on a cot, strapped down at chest and thighs. A crisp white sheet was drawn up to her neck. Her head had been elevated with two pillows to prevent her from choking on her own blood during the trip to the hospital in Bexford. Although her breathing was regular, it was labored; and she moaned softly as she exhaled.

Behind the ambulance, at the open bay doors, Sam stood with Anson Crowell, Thorp’s night deputy. “All right. Let’s go through it one more time. What happened to her?”

“She was attacked by a rapist,” the deputy said, as Sam had programmed him to say.

“Where did it happen?”

“In her apartment.”

“Who found her?”

“I did.”

“Who called the police?”

“Her neighbors.”

“Why?”

“They heard screaming.”

“Did you catch her assailant?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“No. But we’re working on it.”

“Have any leads?”

“A couple.”

“What are they?”

“I’d prefer not to say at this time.”

“Why not?”

“I might prejudice the case.”

“By talking to other policemen?”

“We’re real careful in Black River.”

“That’s being too careful, isn’t it?”

“No offense. That’s just how we operate.”

“Do you have a description of the man?”

The deputy recited a list of physical characteristics that Sam had made up off the top of his head. The fictitious assailant did not remotely resemble the real one, Ogden Salsbury.

“What if the state police or the Bexford police offer assistance in the case?”

“I tell them thanks but no thanks,” the deputy said. “We’ll handle it ourselves. We prefer it that way. Besides, I don’t have the authority to allow them to come in on it. That would be up to the chief.”

“Good enough,” Sam said. “Get in.”

The deputy clambered into the passenger bay of the ambulance and sat on the padded bench beside Lolah Tayback’s cot.

“You’ll be stopping at the end of Main Street to pick up her boyfriend,” Sam said. He had already talked to Phil Karkov on the telephone, had primed him to play the role of the anxiety-stricken lover at the hospital — just as he had primed Lolah to play a bewildered rape victim who had been attacked in her apartment. “Phil will be staying at the hospital with her, but you’ll come back as soon as you’ve learned she’s going to be okay. ”

“I understand,” Crowell said.

Sam closed the doors. He went around to the driver’s window to reinforce the story that he had planted in the mind of the night duty volunteer fireman who was behind the wheel.

At first it seemed that there was no way to break through Salsbury’s iron resolve, no way to open him up and make him talk. He was in great pain — shaking, sweating, dizzy — but he refused to make things easier for himself. He sat in Thorp’s office chair with an air of authority that simply did not make sense under the circumstances. He leaned back and gripped his shoulder wound and kept his eyes shut. Most of the time he ignored Paul’s questions. Occasionally he responded with a string of profanities and sex words that sounded as if they had been arranged to convey the minimum of meaning.

Furthermore, Paul wasn’t a born inquisitor. He supposed that if he knew the proper way to torture Salsbury, if he knew how he could cause the man mind-shattering pain without actually destroying him — and if he had the stomach for it — he could get the truth in short order. When Salsbury’s stubbornness became particularly infuriating, Paul used the butt of his revolver to jar the man’s shoulder wound. That left Salsbury gasping. But it wasn’t enough to make him talk. And Paul was incapable of any more effective cruelties.

“Who were the men in the helicopter?”

Salsbury didn’t answer.

“Were they government people?”

Silence.

“Is this a government project?”

“Go to hell.”

If he knew what most terrified Salsbury, he could use that to crack him. Every man had one or two deeply ingrained fears — some of them quite rational and some utterly irrational — that shaped him. And with a man like this, a man so apparently in the borderlands of sanity, there should be more than the usual number of terrors to play upon. If Salsbury were afraid of heights, he could take the bastard up to the church bell tower and threaten to throw him off if he didn’t talk. If Salsbury were severely afflicted with agoraphobia, he could take him to the flattest and biggest open space in town — perhaps to the baseball field — and stake him down in the very center of it. If, like the protagonist in 1984, he were brought near to madness merely by the thought of being placed in a cage with rats—

Suddenly Paul remembered how Salsbury had reacted to him when he had first come into the room. The man had been shocked, damned scared, devastated. But not just because Paul had surprised him. He had been terrified because, for some reason known only to himself, he had thought that Paul was a man named Parker.

What did this Parker do to him? Paul wondered. What could he possibly have done to leave such a deep and indelible scar?

“Salsbury?”

Silence.

“Who were the men in the helicopter?”

“You’re a fucking bore.”

“Were they government people?”

“A regular broken record.”

“You know what I’m going to do to you, Salsbury?”

He didn’t deign to answer.

“You know what I’m going to do?” Paul asked again.

“Doesn’t matter. Nothing will work.”

“I’ll do — what Parker did.”

Salsbury didn’t respond. He didn’t open his eyes. However, he grew stiff in the chair, tense, every muscle knotted tight.

“Exactly what Parker did,” Paul said.

When Salsbury finally opened his eyes there was a monstrous horror in them, a trapped and haunted look that Paul had never seen anywhere but in the eyes of cornered, panic-stricken wild animals.

This is it, Paul thought. This is the key, the pressure point, the knife with which I’ll open him. But how should I react if he calls my bluff?

He was close to getting the truth, so close — but he hadn’t the vaguest idea what Parker had done.

“How do you… How do you know Parker?” Salsbury asked. His voice was a thin, pathetic whine.

Paul’s spirits lifted even further. If Salsbury didn’t recall that it was he who had first mentioned this Parker, then the use of the name carried a great deal of weight.

“Never mind how I know him,” Paul said shortly. “But I do. I know him well. And I know what he did to you.”

“I… was only… eleven. You wouldn’t.”

“I would. And enjoy it.”

“But you aren’t the type,” Salsbury said desperately. He had been shiny with sweat; now he was dripping with it. “You just aren’t the type!”

“What type is that?”

“Queer!” he blurted. “You aren’t a damned queer!”

Still bluffing but with more good cards on the table to back his hand, Paul said, “We don’t all look like what we are, you know. Most of us don’t advertise it.”

“You were married.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“You had children!”

Paul shrugged.

“You’re sniffing around that Edison bitch!”

“Have you ever heard of AC-DC?” Paul asked. He grinned.

Salsbury closed his eyes.

“Ogden?”

He said nothing.

“Get up, Ogden.”

“Don’t touch me.”

“Lean against the desk.”

“I won’t get up. ”

“Come on. You’ll love it.”

“No. I won’t.”

“You loved it from Parker.”

“That’s not true!”

“You’re not the type.”

“I’m not.”

“Admit it.”

He didn’t move.

“A talent for Greek. ”

Salsbury winced. “No.”

“Lean on the desk.”

“It hurts…”

“Of course. Now get up and lean on the desk and drop your pants. Come on.”

Salsbury shuddered. His face was drawn and ashen.

“If you don’t get up, Ogden, I’ll have to throw you out of that chair. You can’t refuse me. You can’t get away from me. You can’t fight me off, not when I’ve got the gun, not when your arm’s all torn up like that.”

“Oh, Jesus God,” Salsbury said miserably.

“You’ll love it. You’ll love the pain. Parker told me how much you love the pain. ”

Salsbury began to cry. He didn’t weep gently or quietly, but let go with great, wracking sobs. Tears seemed to spurt from his eyes. He shook and gagged.

“Are you scared, Ogden?”

“S-Scared. Yes.”

“You can save yourself.”

“From… from…”

“From being raped.”

“H-How?”

“Answer my questions.”

“Don’t want to.”

“Get up then.”

“Please…”

Ashamed of himself, sick of this violent game but determined to carry on with it, Paul took hold of the front of Salsbury’s shirt. He shook him and tried to lift him out of the chair. “When I’m done with you, I’ll let Bob Thorp have you. I’ll tape your mouth so you can’t talk to him, and I’ll program him to put it to you.” He was incapable of doing that, of course. But Salsbury obviously believed he would. “And not just Thorp. Others. Half a dozen others.”

With that, Salsbury’s resistance dissolved. “Anything. I’ll tell you anything,” he said, his voice distorted by the wretched sobbing that he couldn’t control. “Anything you want. Just don’t touch me. Oh, Jesus. Oh, don’t touch me. Don’t make me undress. Don’t touch. Don’t.”

Still twisting Salsbury’s shirt in his left hand, leaning toward the man, nearly shouting in his face, Paul said, “Who were those men in the helicopter? Unless you want to be used until you’re raw, you better tell me who they were.”

“Dawson and Klinger.”

“There were three.”

“I don’t know the pilot’s name.”

“Dawson and Klinger. First names?”

“Leonard Dawson and—”

“The Leonard Dawson?”

“Yes. And Ernst Klinger.”

“Is Klinger a government man?”

“He’s an army general.”

“Is this a military project?”

“No.”

“A government project?”

“No,” Salsbury said.

Paul knew all of the questions. There was no point in the rapid-fire interrogation at which he had to hesitate.

And there was never a single moment when Salsbury dared hesitate.

Ernst Klinger crouched behind a yard-high wall of shrubbery across the alleyway from the municipal parking lot. Stunned, confused, he watched them load the woman into the white Cadillac van with the words BLACK RIVER — EMERGENCY painted in red letters on the side.

At 11:02 the ambulance pulled out of the parking lot, swung into the alley and from there onto North Union Road. It turned right, toward the square.

Its bright red flashers washed the trees and the buildings, and sent crimson snakes of light wriggling along the wet pavement.

The bearded, white-haired man who stood in the parking lot was Sam Edison. Klinger recognized him from a photograph that he had seen in one of the rooms above the general store, little more than an hour ago.

Edison watched the ambulance until it turned east at the square. He was too far away for Klinger to get a shot at him with the Webley. When the ambulance was out of sight, he went inside the municipal building.

Have we lost control of the town? Klinger asked himself. Is it all coming down on our heads: the field test, the plan, the project, the future? Sure as hell looks that way. Sure does. So… Is it time to get out of Black River, out of the country with a big bundle of cash and the phony identity Leonard provided?

Don’t panic, another part of him thought. Don’t be rash. Wait. See what happens. Give it a few minutes.

He looked at his watch. 11:03.

Thunder rumbled in the mountains.

It was going to rain again.

11:04.

He had been hunkered down for so long that his legs ached. He longed to stand up and stretch.

What are you waiting here for? he asked himself. You can’t plan your strategy without information. You’ve got to reconnoiter. They’re probably in Thorp’s office. Get under those windows. Maybe you can hear what they’re up to.

At five minutes past the hour, he hurried across the alley. He dodged from car to car in the parking lot, and then to the thick trunk of a pine tree.

Just like in Korea, he thought almost happily. Or Laos in the late fifties. Just like it must have been for the younger guys in Nam. Commando work in an enemy town. Except this time the enemy town is American.

Sam stood in the doorway and studied Ogden Salsbury, who was still in the spring-backed office chair. To Paul, Sam said, “You’re sure he told you everything?”

“Yes.”

“And that everything he’s told you is true?”

“Yes.”

“This is important, Paul.”

“He didn’t withhold anything,” Paul said. “And he didn’t lie to me. I’m sure of it.”

Stinking of sweat and blood, crying quietly, Salsbury looked from one to the other of them.

Does he understand what we’re saying? Paul wondered. Or is he broken, shattered, unable to think clearly, unable to think at all?

Paul felt unclean, sick to his soul. In dealing with Salsbury, he had descended to the man’s own level. He told himself that these were after all the 1970s, the very first years of a brave new world, a time when individual survival was difficult and when it counted for more than all else, the age of the machine and of the machine’s morality, perhaps the only era in the entire span of history when the ends truly did justify the means — but he still felt unclean.

“Then the time has come,” Sam said quietly. “One of us has to — do it.”

“A man named Parker apparently raped him when he was eleven years old,” Paul said. He was speaking to Sam, but he was watching Ogden Salsbury.

“Does that make any difference?” Sam asked.

“It should.”

“Does it make any difference that Hitler might have been born of a syphilitic parent? Does it make any difference that he was mad? Does that bring back the six million dead?” Sam was talking softly but with tremendous force. He was trembling. “Does what happened to him when he was eleven justify what he did to Mark? If Salsbury wins, if he takes control of everyone, does it matter what happened to him when he was eleven?”

“There’s no other way to stop him?” Paul asked, although he knew the answer.

“We’ve already discussed that.”

“I guess we have.”

“I’ll do it,” Sam said.

“No. If I can’t get up the courage here, I won’t be any help to you later, with Dawson and Klinger. We may be in a tight spot with one of those. You’ll have to know that you can count on me in the clinches.”

Salsbury licked his lips. He glanced down at the blood-soaked front of his shirt, then up at Paul. “You aren’t going to — kill me. You aren’t… Are you?”

Paul raised the Smith & Wesson Combat Magnum.

Letting go of his left shoulder, reaching out as if to shake with one bloody hand, Salsbury said, “Wait. I’ll make you a partner. Both of you. Partners.”

Paul aimed at the center of the man’s chest.

“If you’re partners, you’ll have everything. Everything you could want. All the money you could ever spend. All the money in the world. Think of that!”

Paul thought of Lolah Tayback.

“Partners. That doesn’t mean just money. Women. You can have all of the women you want, any women you want, no matter who they are. They’ll crawl to you. Or men, if that’s what you like. You can even have children. Little girls. Nine or ten years old. Little boys. Anything you want. ”

Paul thought of Mark: a lump of frosted meat jammed into a food freezer.

And he thought of Rya: traumatized perhaps, but with a chance to live a halfway normal life.

He squeezed the trigger.

The.357 Magnum bucked in his hand.

Because of his revolver’s impressive kick — which jolted Paul from hand to shoulder in spite of the fact that he was using.38 Special ammunition rather than Magnums — the bullet was high. It tore through Salsbury’s throat.

Blood and bits of flesh spattered the metal firearms cabinet.

The roar of the shot was deafening. It bounced back and forth between the walls, echoed inside Paul’s skull, reverberated as it would forever in his memory.

He squeezed off another round.

That one took Salsbury in the chest, nearly rocked him and the chair backward onto the floor.

He turned away from the dead man.

“Are you going to be sick?” Sam asked.

“I’m all right.” He was numb.

“There’s a toilet at the end of the hall, to your left.”

“I’m okay, Sam.”

“You look—”

“I killed men in the war. Killed men over in Asia. Remember?”

“This is different. I understand that. In the war it’s always with rifles or grenades or mortars. It’s never from three feet with a handgun.”

“I’m fine. Believe me. Just fine.” He went to the door, pushed past Sam, stumbled into the corridor as if he had tripped, turned left, ran to the washroom, and threw up.

Scuttling sideways like a hermit crab, the Webley ready in his right hand, Klinger reached the western flank of the municipal building and found that the lawn there was littered with glass. He hadn’t made a sound on his run from the shrubbery. Now, pieces of glass snapped and crunched under his shoes, and he cursed silently. One of the windows in the police chief’s office was broken, and a few of the slats in the Venetian blind were bent out of shape, providing a convenient peephole for his reconnaissance work.

As he was rising up to have a look inside — cautious as a suspicious mouse sniffing the cheese in the trap — two shots exploded virtually in front of his face. He froze — then realized that he hadn’t been seen, that no one was firing at him.

Through the twisted slats of the blind, he could see two-thirds of Thorp’s starkly furnished and somewhat sterile office: gray-blue walls, a pair of three-drawer filing cabinets, an oak work table, a bulletin board with an aluminum frame, bookshelves, most of a massive metal desk—

And Salsbury.

Dead. Very dead.

Where was Sam Edison? And the other one, Annendale? And the woman, the little girl?

There appeared to be no one in the room except Salsbury. Salsbury’s corpse.

Suddenly afraid of losing track of Edison and Annendale, afraid that they might somehow get away or sneak around behind him, afraid of being outmaneuvered, Klinger turned from the windows. He loped to the end of the lawn, then across the parking lot and the alleyway. He hid behind the hedge again, where he commanded a good view of the back door of the municipal building.

When he came out of the washroom, Sam was waiting in the corridor for him.

“Feeling better?”

“Yeah,” Paul said.

“It’s rough.”

“It’ll get worse.”

“That it will. ”

“Christ. ”

“What did you learn from Salsbury? Who were those men in the helicopter?”

Leaning against the wall, Paul said, “His partners. One of them was H. Leonard Dawson.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“The other one is a general. United States Army. His name’s Ernst Klinger.”

Scowling, Sam said, “Then this is a government project?”

“Surprisingly, no. Just Salsbury, Dawson, and Klinger. A bit of private enterprise.” Paul took three minutes to outline what he had learned about the field test and the conspiracy behind it.

Sam’s scowl disappeared. He risked a slight smile. “Then we have a chance of stopping it right here, for good.”

“Maybe.”

“It’s just a simple four-part problem,” Sam said. He held up one finger. “Kill Dawson.” Two fingers. “Kill Ernst Klinger.” Three fingers. “Destroy the data in the computer at the house in Greenwich.” Four fingers. “Then use the key-lock code to restructure the memories of everyone in town who’s seen or heard anything, to cover up every last trace of this field test.”

Paul shook his head. “I don’t know. It doesn’t sound so simple to me.”

For the moment at least, positive thinking was the only sort of thinking that interested Sam. “It can be done. First… where did Dawson and Klinger go when they left here?”

“To the logging camp.”

“Why?”

Quoting Salsbury, he told Sam about Dawson’s plan to organize a search in the mountains. “But he and Klinger won’t be at the camp now. They intended to fall back to the mill and establish a sort of field headquarters there once the manhunt was underway. There are about eighty or ninety men working on the night and graveyard shifts up there. Dawson wants to post a dozen of them as guards around the mill and pack the rest of them off to join the search beyond the logging camp.”

“Any guards he posts are worthless,” Sam said. “We’ll use the code phrase to get past them. We’ll move in on Dawson and Klinger before they know what’s happened.”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

“Of course it is.”

“But what about the computer in Greenwich?”

“We can deal with that later,” Sam said.

“How do we get to it?”

“Didn’t you say Dawson’s household staff is programmed?”

“According to Salsbury.”

“Then we can get to the computer.”

“And the cover-up here?”

“We’ll manage.”

“How?”

“That’s the least of our problems.”

“You’re so goddamned optimistic.”

“I’ve got to be. So do you.”

Paul pushed away from the wall. “All right. But Jenny and Rya must have heard the shots. They’ll be worried. Before we go to the mill, we should stop back at the church and fill them in, let them know where we all stand.”

Sam nodded. “Lead the way.”

“What about — Salsbury?”

“Later.”

They left by the rear door and started across the parking lot toward the alley.

After a few steps Paul said, “Wait.”

Sam stopped, turned back.

“We don’t have to sneak around the long way,” Paul said. “We’re in control of the town now.”

“Good point. ”

They circled around the municipal building and went out to East Main Street.

Klinger stood in the velvety darkness, two-thirds of the way up the bell tower stairs, listening. Voices drifted down from above: two men, a woman, a child. Edison. And Jenny Edison. Annendale and his daughter…

He now knew what was happening in Black River, what the carnage at Thorp’s office signified. He knew the extent of these people’s knowledge of the field test and of all the working, planning, and scheming that lay behind the field test — and he was shocked.

Because of what he had heard, he knew that they were motivated to resist, at least in part, for altruistic reasons. He didn’t understand that. He could easily have understood them if they had wanted to seize the power of the subliminals for their own. But altruism… That had always seemed foolish to him. He had decided a long time ago that men who eschewed power were far more dangerous and deadly than those who pursued it, if only because they were so difficult to fathom, so unpredictable.

However, he also knew that these people could be stopped. The field test wasn’t an unmitigated disaster; not yet. They weren’t going to win as easily as they thought. They hadn’t yet brought him or Dawson to ruin. The project could be saved.

Overhead, they finished discussing their plans. They said good-by to one another and told one another to be careful and wished one another luck and hugged and kissed and said they would pray for one another and said that they really had to get on with it.

In the perfect darkness, without a flashlight or even a match to show them the way, out of sight around two or three bends in the long spiral staircase, Sam Edison and Paul Annendale started down the narrow, creaking steps.

Klinger’s own hurried descent was masked by the noise that the two men made above him.

He paused in the whispery, echo-filled nave of the church, where the walls and the altar and the pews were no more than adumbrated by the meager nocturnal storm light that shone through the arched windows. He wasn’t certain what he should do next.

Confront them here and now? Shoot them both as they came out of the stairwell?

No. The light was much too poor for gunplay. He couldn’t target them with any accuracy. Under these conditions he would never bring down both of them — and perhaps not either of them.

He thought of searching quickly for a light switch. He could flip it on as they entered the nave and open fire on them in the same instant. But if there was a switch nearby, he would never find it in time. And if he did find it in time, he would be every bit as surprised and blinded by the light as they would be.

Even if, by the grace of one of the saints depicted in these stained-glass windows, he did somehow kill both of them, then he would have alerted the woman in the tower. She might be armed; she almost certainly was. And if that was the case, the belfry would be virtually impregnable. With any sort of weapon at all — rifle or shotgun or handgun — and a supply of ammunition, she would be able to hold him off indefinitely.

He wished to God that he were properly equipped. He should have at least those few essentials of behind-the-lines combat: a pretty damned good machine pistol, preferably German-made or Belgian, and several fully loaded magazines for it; an automatic rifle with a bandolier of ammo; and a few grenades, three or four. Especially the grenades. After all, this was no ladies’ tea party. This was a classic commando operation, a classic clandestine raid, deep in hostile territory.

Behind him, Edison and Annendale were unsettlingly close, on the last twenty steps and coming fast.

He dashed along the side aisle to the fourth or fifth row of pews where he intended to hide between the high-backed seats. He tripped over a kneeler that some thoughtless member of the congregation had forgotten to put up after saying a prayer, and he fell with a loud crash. His heart hammering, he scrambled farther along the row toward the center aisle, then stretched out on the bench of the pew, flat on his back, the Webley at his side.

As they came into the dark church, Paul put one hand on Sam’s shoulder.

Sam stopped. “Yeah?” he said softly.

“Sssshhh,” Paul said.

They listened to the storm wind and to the distant thunder and to the settling sounds that the building made.

Finally Sam said, “Is something wrong?”

“Yeah. What was that?”

“What was what?”

“That noise.”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

Paul studied the darkness that seemed to pulse around them. He squinted as if that would help him penetrate the inky pools in the comers and the purple-black shadows elsewhere. The atmosphere was Lovecraftian, a dank seed bed of paranoia. He rubbed the back of his neck which was suddenly cold.

“How could you have heard anything with all that racket we were making on the stairs?” Sam asked.

“I heard it. Something…”

“Probably the wind. ”

“No. It was too loud for that. Sharp. It sounded as if — as if someone knocked over a chair.”

They waited.

Half a minute. A minute.

Nothing.

“Come on,” Sam said. “Let’s go.”

“Give it another minute.”

As Paul spoke a particularly violent gust of wind battered the east side of the church; and one of the ten-foot-high windows fluttered noisily in its frame.

“There you are,” Sam said. “You see? That’s what you heard. It was just the window.”

Relieved, Paul said, “Yeah.”

“We’ve got work to do,” Sam said.

They left the church by the front door. They went east on Main Street to Paul’s station wagon, which was parked in front of the general store.

As the station wagon reached the mill road and its taillights dwindled to tiny red dots beyond the west end of town, Klinger left the church and ran half a block to the telephone booth beside Ultman’s Cafe. He paged through the slim directory until he found the numbers for the Big Union Supply Company: twenty of them, eight at the logging camp and twelve at the mill complex. There wasn’t time to try all of them. In what part of the mill would Dawson establish his HQ? Klinger wondered. He thought about it, painfully aware of the precious seconds ticking by. Finally he decided that the main office was the location most consistent with Dawson’s personality, and he dialed that number.

After it had rung fifteen times, just as Klinger was about to give up, Dawson answered it warily. “Big Union Supply Company. ”

“Klinger here.”

“Have you finished?”

“He’s dead, but I didn’t kill him. Edison and Annendale got to him first.”

“They’re in town?”

“That’s right. Or they were. Right now they’re coming for you. And for me. They think we’re both at the mill.” As best he could in less than a minute, the general summed up the situation.

“Why didn’t you eliminate them when you had the chance, in the church?” Dawson asked.

“Because I didn’t have the chance,” Klinger said impatiently. “I didn’t have time to set it up right. But you can set it up just perfectly. They’ll probably park half a mile from the mill and walk in to you. They expect to surprise you. But now you can surprise them.”

“Look, why don’t you get in a car and come up here right away?” Dawson asked. “Come in behind them. Trap them between us.”

“Under the circumstances,” Klinger said, “that makes no military sense, Leonard. As a group of four, three of them armed, they’d be too formidable for us. Now that they’re split into pairs and puffed up with self-confidence, the advantage is ours.”

“But if Edison and Annendale know the key-lock phrases, I can’t keep guards posted. I can’t use any of these people up here. I’m alone.”

“You can handle it.”

“Ernst, my training is in business, finance. This is more your line of work. ”

“And I’ve got work down here in town.”

“I don’t eliminate people. ”

“Oh?”

“Not like this.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not personally. ”

“You brought guns back from the camp?”

“A few of them. I’ve posted guards.”

“With a rifle or shotgun, you can do what’s necessary. I know you can. I’ve seen you shoot skeet both ways.”

“You don’t understand. It’s against my beliefs. My religious beliefs.”

“You’ll have to set those aside for now,” Klinger said. “This is a matter of survival.”

“You can’t just set aside morality, Ernst, whether or not it’s a matter of survival. Anyway, I don’t like being here alone. Handling this alone. It’s no good.”

Trying to think of some way to convince the man that he could and should do what had to be done so that he would get off the phone, the general hit upon an approach that he recognized at once as custom-tailored for Dawson. “Leonard, there’s one thing that every soldier learns his first day on the battlefield, when the enemy is firing at him and grenades are exploding around him and it seems like he’ll never get through to the next day alive. If he’s fighting for the right cause, for the just cause, he learns that he’s never alone. God’s always with him.”

“You’re right,” Dawson said.

“You do believe ours is a just cause?”

“Of course. I’m doing all of this for Him.”

“Then you’ll come out just fine.”

“You’re right,” Dawson said. “I shouldn’t have hesitated to do what He so obviously wishes me to do. Thank you, Ernst. ”

“Don’t mention it,” Klinger said. “You better get moving. They’re probably leaving the station wagon about now. You’ll have ten minutes at most to prepare for them.”

“And you?”

“I’ll go back to the church.”

“God be with you.”

“Good luck. ”

They both hung up.

10 Saturday, August 27, 1977 12:10 A.M

The wind raised a steady, haunting whooooo! in the highest reaches of the trees. Thunder rumbled frequently, each peal louder and more unsettling than the one that had come before it. Above the forest, the sky periodically blazed with lightning; the electric glow pulsed down through the canopy of interlaced branches and left in its wake a series of stroboscopic images that dazzled the eye.

In the dense underbrush, small animals scampered this way and that, busily searching for food or water or companionship or safety. Or perhaps, Paul thought as one of them dashed across the path and startled him, they were frightened of the oncoming storm.

Paul and Sam had expected to find armed guards rather than animals at the edge of the woods that surrounded the mill, but there were none. Although all of the lights were on in the main building, the structure seemed — as did the land around it — deserted.

They circled through the woods. Eventually they came to the employee parking lot and studied the scene from behind a thick clump of laurel.

The helicopter was there, on the macadam, thirty feet away. A man stood beside it in the darkness, smoking a cigarette, watching the lightning and the fast-moving clouds.

Paul whispered: “Dawson or Klinger?”

“I don’t think so,” Sam said.

“Neither do I. ”

“Then he’s the pilot.”

“You see a gun?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Move in now?”

“Wait.”

“For what?”

“The right moment.”

They watched.

A few seconds later the pilot dropped his cigarette and crushed it under the sole of his shoe. He put his hands in his pockets and began to walk aimlessly about, just killing time. At first he came toward the trees, wandered within ten or twelve feet of them, then turned and went back the way he’d come.

“Quickly,” Sam said.

Paul stood up. He eased through the laurel and ran after the pilot.

The man heard him and turned. His face was a black mask, but his eyes seemed phosphorescent. “Who—”

“I am the key,” Paul said.

“I am the lock. ”

“Speak softly.”

“Yes, sir.”

Paul looked beyond the helicopter. He could see the windows — most of them with light behind them — on the second and third floors of the main building at the end of the storage yard. If he could see the windows, anyone who happened to glance out might be able to see him, in turn, despite the darkness. He hustled the pilot closer to the helicopter, where they were pretty much hidden from the main building.

Sam joined them and said, “What’s your name?”

“Malcolm Spencer.”

“You are the pilot?”

“Yes. I am.”

“Where’s Leonard Dawson?”

“In the mill,” Spencer said.

“Which building?”

“The biggest one.”

“Which floor? First, second, or third?”

“First floor. There’s a sort of public sales area with—”

“And Ernst Klinger,” Sam said. “Where’s he?”

“He’s in Black River,” Spencer said.

“That can’t be right.”

“Sir?”

“You mean he’s in town?” Paul asked.

“That’s right.”

Paul and Sam glanced at each other.

“Something wrong?” the pilot asked. He seemed to be concerned about them.

“You’re lying,” Paul said.

Surprised, Spencer said, “No, sir.”

“I am the key,” Paul said.

“I am the lock,” Spencer said.

“Where’s Klinger?”

“He’s in Black River.”

Paul stared at Sam. “Christ!”

To the pilot, Sam said, “You took Klinger and Dawson to the logging camp, didn’t you? And then brought them to the mill?”

“No. Just Mr. Dawson. General Klinger went to town from the camp.”

“When?”

“A couple of minutes after we got there,” Spencer said. He smiled uncertainly. His teeth seemed even more radiant than his eyes.

“How did he go? Not in the chopper?”

“No, sir. He took a car.”

“Why—”

Before he could get out more than one word of the question, Sam screamed and stumbled forward against the helicopter.

In the same instant, the night silence was split open by a single rifle shot.

Instinctively, Paul dropped to the ground and rolled.

A bullet cracked into the pavement where he’d just been, ricocheted into the darkness.

A second bullet smashed the macadam on the other side of him, bracketing him.

He rolled onto his back and sat up. He saw the rifleman at once: down on one knee in a sportsman’s pose, thirty feet away at the edge of the woods. On the drive from town, Paul had reloaded the Combat Magnum; now he held it with both hands and squeezed off five quick shots.

All of them missed the mark.

However, the sharp barking of the revolver and the deadly whine of all those bullets skipping across the pavement apparently unnerved the man with the rifle. Instead of trying to finish what he had begun, he stood and ran.

Paul scrambled to his feet, took a few steps after him and fired once more.

Untouched, the rifleman headed away in a big loop that would take him back to the mill complex.

“Sam?”

“Here.”

He could barely see Sam — dark clothes against the macadam — and was thankful for the older man’s telltale white hair and beard. “You were hit.”

“In the leg.”

Paul started toward him. “How bad?”

“Flesh wound,” Sam said. “That was Dawson. Get after him, for God’s sake.”

“But if you’re hurt—”

“I’ll be fine. Malcolm can make a tourniquet. Now get after him, dammit!”

Paul ran. At the end of the parking area he passed the rifle: it was on the ground; Dawson had either dropped it by accident and had been too frightened to stop and retrieve it — or he had discarded it in panic. Still running, Paul fished in his pocket with one hand for the extra bullets he was carrying.

The wooden tower stairs creaked under Klinger’s weight. He paused and counted slowly to thirty before going up three more steps and pausing again. If he climbed too fast, the woman and the girl would know that he was coming. And if they were ready and waiting for him — well, he would be committing suicide when he walked onto the belfry platform. He hoped that, by waiting for thirty seconds or as much as a minute between brief advances, he could make them think that the creaking stairs were only settling noises or a product of the wind.

He went up three more steps.

Ahead, Dawson disappeared around a corner of the mill.

When he reached the same comer a moment later, Paul stopped and studied the north work yard: huge stacks of logs that had been piled up to feed the mill during the long winter; several pieces of heavy equipment; a couple of lumber trucks; a conveyor belt running on an inclined ramp from the mill to the maw of a big furnace where sawdust and scrap wood were incinerated… There were simply too many places out there in which Dawson could hide and wait for him.

He turned away from the north yard and went to the door in the west wall of the building, back the way he had come, thirty feet from the corner. It wasn’t locked.

He stepped into a short, well-lighted corridor. The enormous processing room lay at the end of it: the bull chain leading from the mill pond, up feeding shoots, into the building; then a cross-cut saw, a log deck, the carriage that moved logs into the waiting blades that would make lumber of them, the giant band saw, edging machine, trimmer saws, dip tank, grading ramp, the green chain, and then the storage racks… He remembered all of those terms from a tour that the manager had given Rya and Mark two summers ago. In the processing room the fluorescent strip lights were burning, but none of the machines was working; there were no men tending them. To his right was a washroom, to his left a set of stairs.

Taking the steps two at a time for four flights — the first level was two floors high in order to accommodate the machines in it — he came out in the second-floor hallway. He stopped to think, then went to the fifth office on the left.

The door was locked.

He kicked it twice.

The lock held.

There was a glass case bolted to the corridor wall. It contained a fire extinguisher and an ax.

He jammed the revolver in his belt, opened the front of the case, and took out the ax. He used the flat head of it to batter the knob from the office door. When the knob fell off, the cheap latch snapped. He dropped the ax, pushed open the ruined door, and went inside.

The office was dark. He didn’t switch on any lights because he didn’t want to reveal his position. He closed the door to the hall so that he would not be silhouetted by the pale light that spilled in.

The windows in the north wall of the office opened above the first-floor terrace. He slid one of them up, slipped through it, and stepped onto the tar-papered terrace roof.

The wind buffeted him.

He took the Combat Magnum from his belt.

If Dawson was hiding anywhere in the north yard, this was the best vantage point from which to spot him.

The darkness offered Dawson good protection, for none of the lights was on in the yard.

He could have turned them on, of course. But he didn’t know where to find the switches, and he didn’t want to waste a lot of time looking for them.

The only thing that moved out there was the clattering conveyor belt that rolled continuously up the inclined ramp to the scrap furnace. It should have been shut down with the rest of the equipment, but it had been overlooked. The belt came out of the building directly beneath him and sloped to a high point twenty feet above the ground. It met the furnace door forty yards away. Because the cone-shaped furnace — thirty feet in diameter at the base, ten feet in diameter at the top; forty feet high — was primed by a gas flame, the fire in it was never out unless the mill foreman ordered it extinguished. Even now, when the belt had no fuel for it, the furnace roared. Judging by the intensity of the flames leaping beyond the open door, however, several hundred pounds of the day’s input — conveyed out of the mill before Dawson had halted operations — had yet to be fully consumed.

Otherwise, the yard was quiet, still. The mill pond — with the giant grappling hook suspended from thick wires over the center of it — lay to the right of the ramp and the furnace. It was dotted with logs that looked a bit like dozing alligators. A narrow channel of water called the slip led from the pond to the terrace. When the mill was in operation, slip men poled logs along the slip to the chutes that were covered by the terrace roof. Once in the chutes, the logs were snared by hooked bull chains and dragged into the processing system. East and north of the pond was the deck, those forty-foot-high walls of gargantuan logs set aside to supply the mill with work during the winter. To the left of the ramp and the furnace, two lumber trucks, a high-lift, and a few other pieces of heavy equipment were parked in a row, backed up against the chain-link fence of a storage yard. Dawson wasn’t to be seen in any of that.

Thunder and lightning brought a sudden fall of fat raindrops.

Some sixth sense told Paul that he had heard more than the clap of thunder. Propelled by an icy premonition, he spun around.

Dawson had come out of the window behind him. He was no more than a yard away. He was older than Paul, a decade and a half older, but he was also taller and heavier; and he looked deadly in the rain-lashed night. He had an ax. The goddamned fire ax! In both hands. Raised over his head. He swung it.

Klinger was at the mid-point of the tower when the rain began to fall again. It drummed noisily on the belfry shingles and on the roof of the church, providing excellent cover for his ascent.

He waited until he was absolutely certain that the downpour would last — then he went upward without pausing after every third step. He couldn’t even hear the creaking himself. Exhilarated, brimming with confidence now, the Webley clutched in his right hand, he climbed through the last half of the tower in less than a minute and rushed onto the belfry platform.

Paul crouched.

The ax blade whistled over his head.

Startled to hear himself screaming, unable to stop screaming, abruptly aware that the Smith & Wesson was still in his hand, Paul pulled the trigger.

The bullet tore through Dawson’s right shoulder.

The ax flew from his hands. It arced out into the darkness and smashed through the windshield of one of the lumber trucks.

With a certain eerie grace, Dawson pirouetted just once and toppled into Paul.

The Combat Magnum tumbled in the path of the ax.

Grappling with each other, clinging to each other, they fell off the terrace roof.

The belfry held very little light in the midst of that primeval storm, but it was bright enough for Klinger to see that the only person there was the Annendale girl.

Impossible.

She was sitting on the platform, her back to the half-wall. And she seemed to be regarding him with dread.

What the hell?

There should have been two of them. The nine-foot-square belfry wasn’t large enough for a game of hide-and seek. What he saw must be true. But there should have been two of them.

The night was rocked with thunder, and razor-tined forks of white lightning stabbed the earth. Wind boomed through the open tower.

He stood over the child.

Looking up at him, her voice wavering, she said, “Please… please… don’t… shoot me. ”

“Where is the other one?” Klinger asked. “Where did she go?”

A voice behind him said, “Hey, mister.”

They had heard him coming up the stairs. They were ready and waiting for him.

But how had they done it?

Sick, trembling, aware that it was too late for him to save himself, he nevertheless turned to meet the danger.

There was no one behind him. The storm conveniently provided another short burst of incandescent light, confirming that he saw what he thought he saw: he and the child were alone on the platform.

“Hey, mister.”

He looked up.

A black form, like a monstrous bat, was suspended above him. The woman. Jenny Edison. He could not see her face, but he had no doubt about who she was. She had heard him coming up the stairs when he thought he was being so clever. She had climbed atop the bell and had braced herself in the steel bell supports, against the ceiling, at the highest point of the arch, six feet overhead, like a goddamned bat.

It’s twenty-seven years since I was in Korea, he thought. I’m too old for commando raids. Too old…

He couldn’t see the gun she held, but he knew he was looking into the barrel of it.

Behind him the Annendale girl scrambled out of the line of fire.

It happened so fast, too fast.

“Good riddance, you bastard,” the Edison woman said.

He never heard the shot.

Dawson landed on his back in the middle of the inclined ramp. Trapped in the other man’s clumsy but effective embrace, Paul fell on top of him, driving the breath from both of them.

After a long shudder, the conveyor belt adjusted to their weight. It swiftly carried them headfirst toward the open mouth of the scrap furnace.

Gasping, limp, Paul managed to raise his head from Dawson’s heaving chest. He saw a circle of yellow and orange and red flames flickering satanically thirty yards ahead.

Twenty-five yards…

Winded, with a bullet wound in one shoulder, having cracked his head against the ramp when he fell, Dawson was not immediately in a fighting mood. He sucked air, choked on the fiercely heavy rain, and blew water from his nostrils.

The belt clattered and thumped upward.

Twenty yards…

Paul tried to roll off that highway of death.

With his good hand Dawson held Paul by the shirt.

Fifteen yards…

“Let go… you… bastard.” Paul twisted, squirmed, hadn’t the strength to free himself.

Dawson’s fingers were like claws.

Ten yards…

Tapping his last reserves of energy, the dregs from the barrel, Paul pulled back his fist and punched Dawson in the face.

Dawson let go of him.

Five yards…

Whimpering, already feeling the furnace heat, he threw himself to the right, off the ramp.

How far to the ground?

He fell with surprisingly little pain into a bed of weeds and mud beside the mill pond.

When he looked up he saw Dawson — delirious, unaware of the danger until it was too late for him — dropping headfirst into that crackling, spitting, roiling, hellish pit of fire.

If the man screamed, his voice was blotted out by a cymbal-like crash of thunder.