Firestarter

  "This is a matter of national security," OJ said. After the fiasco in Hastings Glen, a protective cordon had been thrown around the Manders place. The grounds and the remains of the house had got the fine-tooth-comb treatment. As a result, OJ had recovered The Windsucker, which now rested comfortably against the left side of his chest.

  "You say so, but that ain't good enough," Everett said.

  OJ unbuttoned his Carroll Reed parka so that Robert Everett could see The Windsucker. Everett's eyes widened, and OJ smiled a little. "Now, you don't want me to pull this, do you?"

  Everett couldn't believe this was happening. He tried one last time. "Do you guys know the penalty for robbing the U.S. mail? They put you in Leavenworth, Kansas, for that."

  "You can clear it with your postmaster when you get back to Teller," the other man said, speaking for the first time. "Now let's quit this fucking around, okay? Give us the bag of out-of-town mail."

  Everett gave him the small sack of mail from Bradford and Williams. They opened it right there on the road and sorted through it impersonally. Robert Everett felt anger and a kind of sick shame. What they were doing wasn't right, not even if it was the secrets of the nuclear bomb in there. Opening the U.S. mail by the side of the road wasn't right. Ludicrously, he found himself feeling about the same way he would have felt if a strange man had come barging into his house and pulled off his wife's clothes.

  "You guys are going to hear about this," he said in a choked, scared voice. "You'll see."

  "Here they are," the other fellow said to OJ. He handed him six letters, all addressed in the same careful hand. Robert Everett recognized them well enough. They had come from the box at the Bradford general store. OJ put the letters in his pocket and the two of them walked back to their Caprice, leaving the opened bag of mail on the road.

  "You guys are going to hear about this!" Everett cried in a shaking voice.

  Without looking back, OJ said, "Speak to your postmaster before you speak to anyone else. If you want to keep your Postal Service pension, that is."

  They drove away. Everett watched them go, raging, scared, sick to his stomach. At last he picked up the mailbag and tossed it back into the truck.

  "Robbed," he said, surprised to find he was near tears. "Robbed, I been robbed, oh goddammit, I been robbed."

  He drove back to Teller as fast as the slushy roads would allow. He spoke to his postmaster, as the man had suggested. The Teller postmaster was Bill Cobham, and Everett was in Cobham's office for better than an hour. At times their voices came through the office door, loud and angry.

  Cobham was fifty-six. He had been with the Postal Service for thirty-five years, and he was badly scared. At last he succeeded in communicating his fright to Robert Everett as well. And Everett never said a word, not even to his wife, about the day he had been robbed on the Teller Road between Bradford and Williams. But he never forgot it, and he never completely lost that sense of anger and shame ... and disillusion.

  10

  By two-thirty Charlie had finished her snowman, and Andy, a little rested from his nap, had got up. Orville Jamieson and his new partner, George Sedaka, were on an airplane. Four hours later, as Andy and Charlie were sitting down to a game of five hundred rummy, the supper dishes washed and drying in the drainer, the letters were on Cap Hollister's desk.

  Cap and Rainbird

  1

  On March 24, Charlie McGee's birthday, Cap Hollister sat behind his desk filled with a great and ill-defined unease. The reason for the unease was not ill-defined; he expected John Rainbird in not quite an hour, and that was too much like expecting the devil to turn up on the dime. So to speak. And at least the devil stuck to a bargain once it was struck, if you believed his press releases, but Cap had always felt there was something in John Rainbird's personality that was fundamentally ungovernable. When all was said and done, he was nothing more than a hit man, and hit men always self-destruct sooner or later. Cap felt that when Rainbird went, it would be with a spectacular bang. Exactly how much did he know about the McGee operation? No more than he had to, surely, but ... it nagged at him. Not for the first time he wondered if after this McGee affair was over it might not be wise to arrange an accident for the big Indian. In the memorable words of Cap's father, Rainbird was as crazy as a man eating rat-turds and calling it caviar.

  He sighed. Outside, a cold rain flew against the windows, driven by a strong wind. His study, so bright and pleasant in summer, was now filled with shifting gray shadows. They were not kind to him as he sat here with the McGee file on its library trolley at his left hand. The winter had aged him; he was not the same jaunty man who had biked up to the front door on that day in October when the McGees had escaped again, leaving a firestorm behind. Lines on his face that had been barely noticeable then had now deepened into fissures. He had been forced into the humiliation of bifocals--old man's glasses, he thought them--and adjusting to them had left him feeling nauseated for the first six weeks he wore them. These were the small things, the outward symbols of the way things had gone so crazily, maddeningly wrong. These were the things he bitched about to himself because all of his training and upbringing had schooled him against bitching about the grave matters that lay so closely below the surface.

  As if that damned little girl were a personal jinx, the only two women he had cared deeply about since the death of his mother had both died of cancer this winter--his wife, Georgia, three days after Christmas, and his personal secretary, Rachel, only a little over a month ago.

  He had known Georgia was gravely ill, of course; a mastectomy fourteen months before her death had slowed but not stopped the progress of the disease. Rachel's death had been a cruel surprise. Near the end he could remember (how unforgivable we sometimes seem in retrospect) joking that she needed fattening up, and Rachel throwing the jokes right back at him.

  Now all he had left was the Shop--and he might not have that much longer. An insidious sort of cancer had invaded Cap himself. What would you call it? Cancer of the confidence? Something like that. And in the upper echelons, that sort of disease was nearly always fatal. Nixon, Lance, Helms ... all victims of cancer of the credibility.

  He opened the McGee file and took out the latest additions--the six letters Andy had mailed less than two weeks ago. He shuffled through them without reading them. They were all essentially the same letter and he had the contents almost by heart. Below them were glossy photographs, some taken by Charles Payson, some taken by other agents on the Tashmore side of the Pond. There were photos showing Andy walking up Bradford's main street. Photos of Andy shopping in the general store and paying for his purchases. Photos of Andy and Charlie standing by the boathouse at the camp, Irv Manders's Willys a snow-covered hump in the background. A photo showing Charlie sliding down a hard and sparkling incline of snowcrust on a flattened cardboard box, her hair flying out from beneath a knitted cap that was too large for her. In this photo her father was standing behind her, mittened hands on hips, head thrown back, bellowing laughter. Cap had looked at this photo often and long and soberly and was sometimes surprised by a trembling in his hands when he put it aside. He wanted them that badly.

  He got up and went to the window for a moment. No Rich McKeon cutting grass today. The alders were bare and skeletal, the duckpond between the two houses a slatelike, bare expanse. There were dozens of important items on the Shop's plate this early spring, a veritable smorgasbord, but for Cap there was really only one, and that was the matter of Andy McGee and his daughter Charlene.

  The Manders fiasco had done a lot of damage. The Shop had ridden that out, and so had he, but it had begun a critical groundswell that would break soon enough. The critical center of that groundswell was the way the McGees had been handled from the day Victoria McGee had been killed and the daughter lifted--lifted however briefly. A lot of the criticism had to do with the fact that a college instructor who had never even been in the army had been able to take his daughter away from two trained Shop agents, leaving
one of them mad and one in a coma that had lasted for six months. The latter agent was never going to be any good for anything again; if anyone spoke the word "sleep" within his earshot, he keeled over bonelessly and might stay out from four hours to an entire day. In a bizarre sort of way it was funny.

  The other major criticism had to do with the fact that the McGees had managed to stay one step ahead for so long. It made the Shop look bad. It made them all look dumb.

  But most of the criticism was reserved for the incident at the Manders farm itself, because that had damned near blown the entire agency out of the water. Cap knew that the whispering had begun. The whispering, the memos, maybe even the testimony at the ultrasecret congressional hearings. We don't want him hanging on like Hoover. This Cuban business went entirely by the boards because he couldn't get his head out of that damned McGee file. Wife died very recently, you know. Great shame. Hit him hard. Whole McGee business nothing but a catalogue of ineptitude. Perhaps a younger man ...

  But none of them understood what they were up against. They thought they did, but they didn't. Again and again he had seen the rejection of the simple fact that the little girl was pyrokinetic--a firestarter. Literally dozens of reports suggested that the fire at the Manders farm had been started by a gasoline spill, by the woman's breaking a kerosene lamp, by spontaneous-fucking-combustion, and God only knew what other nonsense. Some of those reports came from people who had been there.

  Standing at the window, Cap found himself perversely wishing that Wanless were here. Wanless had understood. He could have talked to Wanless about this ... this dangerous blindness.

  He went back to the desk. There was no sense kidding himself; once the undermining process began, there was no way to stop it. It really was like a cancer. You could retard its growth by calling in favors (and Cap had called in ten years' worth just to keep himself in the saddle this last winter); you might even be able to force it into remission. But sooner or later, you were gone. He felt he had from now until July if he played the game by the rules, from now until maybe November if he decided to really dig in and get tough. That, however, might mean ripping the agency apart at the seams, and he did not want to do that. He had no wish to destroy something he had invested half his life in. But he would if he had go: he was going to see this through to the end.

  The major factor that had allowed him to stay in control was the speed with which they had located the McGees again. Cap was glad to take credit for that since it helped to prop up his position, but all it had really taken was computer time.

  They had been living with this business long enough to have time to plow the McGee field both wide and deep. Filed away in the computer were facts on more than two hundred relatives and four hundred friends all the way around the McGee-Tomlinson family tree. These friendships stretched all the way back to Vicky's best friend in the first grade, a girl named Kathy Smith, who was now Mrs. Frank Worthy, of Cabral, California, and who had probably not spared a thought for Vicky Tomlinson in twenty years or more.

  The computer was given the "last-seen" data and promptly spit out a list of probabilities. Heading the list was the name of Andy's deceased grandfather, who had owned a camp on Tashmore Pond in Vermont; ownership had since passed to Andy. The McGees had vacationed there, and it was within reasonable striking distance of the Manders farm by way of the back roads. The computer felt that if Andy and Charlie were to make for any "known place," it would be this place.

  Less than a week after they had moved into Granther's, Cap knew they were there. A loose cordon of agents was set up around the camp. Arrangements had been made for the purchase of Notions 'n' Novelties in Bradford on the probability that whatever shopping they needed to do would be done in Bradford.

  Passive surveillance, nothing more. All the photographs had been taken with telephoto lenses under optimum conditions for concealment. Cap had no intention of risking another firestorm.

  They could have taken Andy quietly on any of his trips across the lake. They could have shot them both as easily as they had got the picture of Charlie sledding on the cardboard carton. But Cap wanted the girl, and he had now come to believe that if they were going to have any real control over her, they would need her father as well.

  After locating them again, the most important objective had been to make sure they kept quiet. Cap didn't need a computer to tell him that as Andy grew more frightened, the chances that he would seek outside help went up and up. Before the Manders affair, a press leak could have been handled or lived with. Afterward, press interference became a different ballgame altogether. Cap had nightmares just thinking about what would happen if the New York Times got hold of such a thing.

  For a brief period, during the confusion that had followed the firestorm, Andy could have got his letters out. But apparently the McGees had been living with their own confusion. Their golden chance to mail the letters or make some phone calls had passed unused ... and very well mightn't have come to anything, anyway. The woods were full of crackpots these days, and newspeople were as cynical as anyone else. Theirs had become a glamour occupation. They were more interested in what Margaux and Bo and Suzanne and Cheryl were doing. It was safer.

  Now the two of them were in a box. Cap had had the entire winter to consider options. Even at his wife's funeral he had been running through his options. Gradually he had settled upon a plan of action and now he was prepared to tip that plan into motion. Payson, their man in Bradford, said that the ice was getting ready to go out on Tashmore Pond. And McGee had finally mailed his letters. Already he would be getting impatient for a response--and perhaps beginning to suspect his letters had never arrived at their intended sources. They might be getting ready to move, and Cap liked them right where they were.

  Beneath the photos was a thick typed report--better than three hundred pages--bound in a blue TOP SECRET cover. Eleven doctors and psychologists had put the combination report and prospectus together under the overall direction of Dr. Patrick Hockstetter, a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist. He was, in Cap's opinion, one of the ten or twelve most astute minds at the Shop's disposal. At the eight hundred thousand dollars it had cost the taxpayer to put the report together, he ought to have been. Thumbing through the report now, Cap wondered what Wanless, that old doomsayer, would have made of it.

  His own intuition that they needed Andy alive was confirmed in here. The postulate Hockstetter's crew had based their own chain of logic on was the idea that all the powers they were interested in were exercised voluntarily, having their first cause in the willingness of the possessor to use them ... and the key word was will.

  The girl's powers, of which pyrokinesis was only the cornerstone, had a way of getting out of control, of jumping nimbly over the barriers of her will, but this study, which incorporated all the available information, indicated that it was the girl herself who elected whether or not to set things in motion--as she had done at the Manders farm when she realized that the Shop agents were trying to kill her father.

  He riffled through the recap of the original Lot Six experiment. All the graphs and computer readouts boiled down to the same thing: will as the first cause.

  Using will as the basis for everything, Hockstetter and his colleagues had gone through an amazing catalogue of drugs before deciding on Thorazine for Andy and a new drug called Orasin for the girl. Seventy pages of gobbledygook in the report came down to the fact that the drugs would make them feel high, dreamy, floaty. Neither of them would be able to exercise enough will to choose between chocolate milk and white, let alone enough to start fires or convince people they were blind, or whatever.

  They could keep Andy McGee drugged constantly. They had no real use for him; both the report and Cap's own intuition suggested that he was a dead end, a burned-out case. It was the girl who interested them. Give me six months, Cap thought, and well have enough. Just long enough to map the terrain inside that amazing little head. No House or Senate subcommittee would be able to resist the pro
mise of chemically induced psi powers and the enormous implications it would have on the arms race if that little girl was even half of what Wanless suspected.

  And there were other possibilities. They were not in the blue-backed report, because they were too explosive for even a TOP SECRET heading. Hockstetter, who had become progressively more excited as the picture took shape before him and his committee of experts, had mentioned one of these possibilities to Cap only a week ago.

  "This Z factor," Hockstetter said. "Have you considered any of the ramifications if it turns out that the child isn't a mule but a genuine mutation?"

  Cap had, although he did not tell Hockstetter that. It raised the interesting question of eugenics ... the potentially explosive question of eugenics, with its lingering connotations of Nazism and superraces--all the things Americans had fought World War II to put an end to. But it was one thing to sink a philosophical well and produce a gusher of bullshit about usurping the power of God and quite another to produce laboratory evidence that the offspring of Lot Six parents might be human torches, levitators, tele-or telempaths, or God only knew what else. Ideals were cheap things to hold as long as there were no solid arguments for their overthrow. If there were, what then? Human breeding farms? As crazy as it sounded, Cap could visualize it. It could be the key to everything. World peace, or world domination, and when you got rid of the trick mirrors of rhetoric and bombast, weren't they really the same thing?

  It was a whole can of worms. The possibilities stretched a dozen years into the future. Cap knew the best he himself could realistically hope for was six months, but it might be enough to set policy--to survey the land on which the tracks would be laid and the railroad would run. It would be his legacy to the country and to the world. Measured against this, the lives of a runaway college instructor and his ragamuffin daughter were less than dust in the wind.