Firestarter (31 page)

Cap looked at him, horror-struck.

Rainbird understood suddenly, and he shook his head at Cap contemptuously. “Not
that
intimately. Not in the biblical sense. But I'll know her. She and I are going to be friends, Cap. If she is as powerful as all things indicate, she and I are going to be great friends.”

Cap made a sound of humor: not a laugh, exactly; more of a shrill giggle.

The expression of contempt on Rainbird's face did not change. “No, of course you don't think that is possible. You look at my face and you see a monster. You look at my hands and see them covered with the blood you ordered me to spill. But I tell you, Cap, it will happen. The girl has had no friend for going on two years. She has had her father and that is all. You see her as you see me, Cap. It is your great failing. You look, you see a monster. Only in the girl's case, you see a useful monster. Perhaps that is because you are a white man. White men see monsters everywhere. White men look at their own pricks and see monsters.” Rainbird laughed again.

Cap had at last begun to calm down and to think reasonably. “Why should I allow it, even if all you say is true? Your days are numbered and we both know it. You've been hunting your own death for twenty years. Anything else has been incidental, only a hobby. You'll find it soon enough. And then it ends for all of us. So why should I give you the pleasure of having what you want?”

“Perhaps it's as you say. Perhaps I have been hunting my own death—a more colorful phrase than I would have expected from you, Cap. Maybe you should have the fear of God put into you more often.”

“You're not my idea of God,” Cap said.

Rainbird grinned. “More like the Christian devil, sure. But I tell you this—if I had really been hunting my own death, I believe I would have found it long before this. Perhaps I've been stalking it for play. But I have no desire to bring you down, Cap, or the Shop, or U.S. domestic intelligence. I am no idealist. I only want this little girl. And you may find you need me. You may find that I am able to accomplish things that all the drugs in Dr. Hockstetter's cabinet will not.”

“And in return?”

“When the affair of the McGees ends, the U.S. Bureau for Geological Understudies will cease to exist. Your computer
chief, Noftzieger, can change all his codings. And you, Cap, will fly to Arizona with me on a public airline. We will enjoy a good dinner at my favorite Flagstaff restaurant and then we will go back to my house, and behind it, in the desert, we will start a fire of our own and barbecue a great many papers and tapes and films. I will even show you my shoe collection, if you like.”

Cap thought it over. Rainbird gave him time, sitting calmly.

At last Cap said, “Hockstetter and his colleagues suggest it may take two years to open the girl up completely. It depends on how deeply her protective inhibitions go.”

“And you will be gone in four to six months.”

Cap shrugged.

Rainbird touched the side of his nose with one index finger and cocked his head—a grotesque fairy-tale gesture. “I think we can keep you in the saddle much longer than that, Cap. Between the two of us, we know where hundreds of bodies are buried—literally as well as figuratively. And I doubt if it will take years. We'll both get what we want, in the end. What do you say?”

Cap thought about it. He felt old and tired and at a complete loss. “I guess,” he said, “that you have made yourself a deal.”

“Fine,” Rainbird said briskly. “I will be the girl's orderly, I think. No one at all in the established scheme of things. That will be important to her. And of course she will never know I was the one who fired the rifle. That would be dangerous knowledge, wouldn't it? Very dangerous.”

“Why?” Cap said finally. “Why have you gone to these insane lengths?”

“Do they seem insane?” Rainbird asked lightly. He got up and took one of the pictures from Cap's desk. It was the photo of Charlie sliding down the slope of crusted snow on her flattened cardboard box, laughing. “We all put our nuts and forage by for winter in this business, Cap. Hoover did it. So did CIA directors beyond counting. So have you, or you would be drawing a pension right now. When I began, Charlene McGee wasn't even born, and I was only covering my own ass.”

“But why the girl?”

Rainbird didn't answer for a long time. He was looking at the photograph carefully, almost tenderly. He touched it.

“She is very beautiful,” he said. “And very young. Yet inside her is your Z factor. The power of the gods. She and I will be close.” His eye grew dreamy. “Yes, we will be very close.”

On March 27, Andy McGee decided abruptly that they could stay in Tashmore no longer. It had been more than two weeks since he had mailed his letters, and if anything was going to come of them, it already would have. The very fact of the continuing silence around Granther's camp made him uneasy. He supposed he could simply have been dismissed out of hand as a crackpot in every case, but … he didn't believe it.

What he believed, what his deepest intuition whispered, was that his letters had been somehow diverted.

And that would mean they knew where he and Charlie were.

“We're going,” he told Charlie. “Let's get our stuff together.”

She only looked at him with her careful eyes, a little scared, and said nothing. She didn't ask him where they were going or what they were going to do, and that made him nervous, too. In one of the closets he had found two old suitcases, plastered with ancient vacation decals—Grand Rapids, Niagara Falls, Miami Beach—and the two of them began to sort what they would take and what they would leave.

Blinding bright sunlight streamed in through the windows on the east side of the cottage. Water dripped and gurgled in the downspouts. The night before, he had got little sleep; the ice had gone out and he had lain awake listening to it—the high, ethereal, and somehow uncanny sound of the old yellow ice splitting and moving slowly down toward the neck of the pond, where the great Hancock River spilled eastward across New Hampshire and all of Maine, growing progressively more smelly and polluted until it vomited, noisome and dead, into the Atlantic. The sound was like a prolonged crystal note or
perhaps that of a bow drawn endlessly across a high violin string—a constant, fluted
zzziiiiiinnnggg
that settled over the nerve endings and seemed to make them vibrate in sympathy. He had never been here at ice-out before and was not sure he would ever want to be again. There was something terrible and otherworldly about that sound as it vibrated between the silent evergreen walls of this low and eroded bowl of hills.

He felt that they were very near again, like the barely seen monster in a recurring nightmare. The day after Charlie's birthday, he had been on one of his tramps, the cross-country skis buckled uncomfortably onto his feet, and he had come across a line of snowshoe tracks leading up to a tall spruce tree. There were indents in the crust like periods where the snowshoes had been taken off and jammed into the snow on their tails. There was a flurried confusion where the wearer had later refastened his snowshoes (“slushboats,” Granther had always called them, holding them in contempt for some obscure reason of his own). At the base of the tree, Andy had found six Vantage cigarette butts and a crumpled yellow package that had once contained Kodak Tri-X film. More uneasy than ever, he had taken off the skis and climbed up into the tree. Halfway up he had found himself on a direct line-of-sight with Granther's cottage a mile away. It was small and apparently empty. But with a telephoto lens …

He hadn't mentioned his find to Charlie.

The suitcases were packed. Her continued silence forced him into nervous speech, as if by not talking she was accusing him.

“We're going to hitch a ride into Berlin,” he said, “and then we'll get a Greyhound back to New York City. We're going to the offices of the New York
Times—
”

“But Daddy, you sent them a letter.”

“Honey, they might not have gotten it.”

She looked at him in silence for a moment and then said, “Do you think
they
took it?”

“Of course n—” He shook his head and started again. “Charlie, I just don't know.”

Charlie didn't reply. She knelt, closed one of the suitcases, and began fumbling ineffectually with the clasps.

“Let me help you, hon.”

“I can do it!”
she screamed at him, and then began to cry.

“Charlie, don't,” he said. “Please, hon. It's almost over.”

“No, it's not,” she said, crying harder. “It's never going to be over.”

There were an even dozen agents around Granther McGee's cabin. They had taken up their positions the night before. They all wore mottled white and green clothing. None of them had been at the Manders farm, and none of them was armed except for John Rainbird, who had the rifle, and Don Jules, who carried a .22 pistol.

“I am taking no chances of having someone panic because of what happened back in New York,” Rainbird had told Cap. “That Jamieson still looks as if his balls are hanging around his knees.”

Similarly, he would not hear of the agents' going armed. Things had a way of happening, and he didn't want to come out of the operation with two corpses. He had handpicked all of the agents, and the one he had chosen to take Andy McGee was Don Jules. Jules was small, thirtyish, silent, morose. He was good at his job. Rainbird knew, because Jules was the only man he had chosen to work with more than once. He was quick and practical. He did not get in the way at critical moments.

“McGee will be out at some point during the day,” Rainbird had told them at the briefing. “The girl usually comes out, but McGee always does. If the man comes out alone, I'll take him and Jules will get him out of sight quickly and quietly. If the girl should come out alone, same thing. If they come out together, I'll take the girl and Jules will take McGee. The rest of you are just spear carriers—do you understand that?” Rainbird's eye glared over them. “You're there in case something goes drastically wrong, and that is all. Of course, if something
does
go drastically wrong, most of you will be running for the lake with your pants on fire. You're along in case that one chance in a hundred turns up where you can do something. Of course, it's understood that you're also along as observers and witnesses in case I fuck up.”

This had earned a thin and nervous chuckle.

Rainbird raised one finger. “If any one of you miscues and puts their wind up somehow, I'll personally see that you end up in the lousiest jungle valley of South America I can
find—with a cored asshole. Believe that, gentlemen. You are spear carriers in my show. Remember it.”

Later, at their “staging area”—an abandoned motel in St. Johnsbury—Rainbird had taken Don Jules aside.

“You have read the file on this man,” Rainbird said.

Jules was smoking a Camel. “Yeah.”

“You understand the concept of mental domination?”

“Yeah.”

“You understand what happened to the two men in Ohio? The men that tried to take his daughter away?”

“I worked with George Waring,” Jules said evenly. “That guy could burn water making tea.”

“ln this man's outfit, that is not so unusual. I only need us to be clear. You'll need to be very quick.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“He's had a whole winter to rest, this guy. If he gets time to give you a shot, you're a good candidate to spend the next three years of your life in a padded room, thinking you're a bird or a turnip or something.”

“All right.”

“All right what?”

“I'll be quick. Give it a rest, John.”

“There's a good chance they will come out together,” Rainbird said, ignoring him. “You'll be around the corner of the porch, out of sight of the door where they'll come out. You wait for me to take the girl. Her father will go to her. You'll be behind him. Get him in the neck.”

“Sure.”

“Don't screw this up, Don.”

Jules smiled briefly and smoked. “No,” he said.

The suitcases were packed. Charlie had put on her coat and her snowpants. Andy shrugged into his own jacket, zipped it, and picked up the suitcases. He didn't feel good, not at all good. He had the jumps. One of his hunches.

“You feel it, too, don't you?” Charlie asked. Her small face was pale and expressionless.

Andy nodded reluctantly.

“What do we do?”

“We hope the feeling's a little early,” he said, although in his heart he didn't think it was so. “What else can we do?”

“What else can we do?” she echoed.

She came to him then and lifted her arms to be picked up, something he could not remember her doing for a long time—maybe two years. It was amazing how time got by, how quickly a child could change, change in front of your eyes with an unobtrusiveness that was nearly terrible.

He put the suitcases down and picked her up and hugged her. She kissed his cheek and then hugged him again, very tightly.

“Are you ready?” he asked, setting her down.

“I guess so,” Charlie said. She was close to tears again. “Daddy … I won't make fires. Not even if they come before we can get away.”

“Yes,” he said. “That's all right, Charlie. I understand that.”

“I love you, Dad.”

He nodded. “I love you too, kiddo.”

Andy went to the door and opened it. For a moment the sunlight was so bright that he could see nothing at all. Then his pupils contracted and the day cleared before him, bright with melting snow. To his right was Tashmore Pond, dazzling, jaggedly irregular patches of blue water showing between the floating chunks of ice. Straight ahead were pine woods. Through them he could barely see the green shingled roof of the next camp, free of snow at last.