Dreamcatcher(128)

He lit a fourth cigarette, cupping his hands around the lighter and the end of the smoke. In spite of his gloves, his fingers were numb. We better come to some conclusions pretty quick, he thought. Before I freeze to death.

'What's the big deal about it?' Henry asked, but he knew what the big deal was, all right; Owen could sense (and half-hear) him trying not to see it, not wanting things to be worse than they already were. 'Just walk in there and pop him.'

'Wouldn't work.' Owen sent Henry a brief image: Freddy Johnson (and other members of the so-called Imperial Valley cadre) keeping an eye on Kurtz's Winnebago. 'Also, he's got the place wired for sound. If anything happens, the hard boys come running. Maybe I could get him. Probably not, because he covers himself as thoroughly as any Colombian cocaine jefe, especially when he's on active duty, but maybe. I like to think I'm not bad myself. But it would be a suicide mission. If he's recruited Freddy Johnson, then he's probably got Kate Gallagher and Marvell Richardson . . . Carl Friedman . . . Jocelyn McAvoy. Tough boys and tough girls, Henry. I kill Kurtz, they kill me, the brass running this show from under Cheyenne Mountain send out a new cleaner, some Kurtz clone that'll pick up where Kurtz left off. Or maybe they just elect Kate to the job. God knows she's crazy enough. The people in the barn might get twelve additional hours to stew in their own juice, but in the end they'll still burn. The only difference is that, instead of getting a chance to go charging gaily through the snowstorm with me, handsome, you'll burn with the rest of them. Your pal, meanwhile  -  this guy Jonesy  -  he'll be off to . . . to where?'

'That's something it might be prudent for me to keep to myself, for the time being.'

Owen nonetheless probed for it with such telepathy as he possessed. For a moment he caught a blurred and perplexing vision  -  a tall white building in the snow, cylindrical, like a barn silo ?and then it was gone, replaced by the image of a white horse that looked almost like a unicorn running past a sign. On the sign were red letters reading BANBURY CROSS under a pointing arrow.

He grunted in amusement and exasperation. 'You're jamming me.'

'You can think of it that way. Or you can think of it as teaching you a technique you better learn if you'd like to keep our conversation a secret.'

'Uh-huh.' Owen wasn't entirely displeased with what had just happened. For one thing, a jamming technique would be a very good thing to have. For another, Henry did know where his infected friend  -  call him Typhoid Jonesy  -  was going. Owen had seen a brief picture of it in Henry's head.

'Henry, I want you to listen to me now.'

'All right.'

'Here's the simplest, safest thing we can do, you and I. First, if time isn't an utterly crucial factor, we both need to get some sleep.'

'I can buy that. I'm next door to dead.'

'Then, around three o'clock, I can start to move and shake. This installation is going to be on high alert till the time when there isn't an installation here any longer, but if Big Brother's eyeball ever glazes over a little, it's apt to be between four and six A.M. I'll make a diversion, and I can short out the fence  -  that's the easiest part, actually. I can be here with a Sno-Cat five minutes after the shit hits the fan - '

Telepathy had certain shorthand advantages to verbal communi?cation, Owen was discovering. He sent Henry the image of a burning MH-6 Little Bird helicopter and soldiers running toward it even as he continued to speak.

' - and off we go.'

'Leaving Kurtz with a barnful of innocent civilians he plans to turn into crispy critters. Not to mention Blue Group. What's that, a couple-three hundred more?'

Owen, who had been full-time military since the age of nineteen and one of Kurtz's eraserheads for the last eight years, sent two hard words along the mental conduit the two of them had established: Acceptable losses.

Behind the dirty glass, the vague shape that was Henry Devlin stirred, then stood.

No, he sent back.

8

No? What do you mean, no?

No. That's what I mean.

Do you have a better idea?

And Owen realized, to his extreme horror, that Henry thought he did. Fragments of that idea  -  it would be far too generous to call it a plan  -  shot through Owen's mind like the brightly fragmented tail of a comet. It took his breath away. The cigarette dropped unnoticed from between his fingers and zipped away on the wind.

You're nuts.

No, I'm not. We need a diversion in order to get away, you already know that. This is a diversion.

They'll be killed anyway!

Some will. Maybe even most of them. But it's a chance. What chance will they have in a burning barn?

Out loud, Henry said: 'And there's Kurtz. If he's got a couple of hundred escapees to worry about  -  most of whom who'd be happy to tell the first reporters they came across that the panic - stricken U.S. government had sanctioned a My Lai massacre right here on American soil  -  he's going to be a lot less concerned about us.'

You don't know Abe Kurtz, Owen thought. You don't know about the Kurtz Line. Of course, neither had he. Not really. Not until today.

Yet Henry's proposal made a lunatic kind of sense. And it contained at least a measure of atonement. As this endless November fourteenth marched toward midnight and as odds of living until the end of the week grew longer, Owen was not surprised to find that the idea of atonement had its attractions.