Firestarter(24)

"Very good, Cap."

Cap sat back, steepled his fingers, and looked across the room at the picture of George Patton on the wall. Patton was standing astride the top hatch of a tank as if he thought he were Duke Wayne or someone. "It's a hard life if you don't weaken," he told Patton's image, and sipped his coffee.

3

Rachel brought the file in on a whisper-wheeled library cart ten minutes later. There were six boxes of papers and reports, four boxes of photographs. There were telephone transcripts as well. The McGee phone had been bugged since 1978.

"Thanks, Rachel."

"You're welcome. Mr. Steinowitz will be here at ten-thirty."

"Of course he will. Has Wanless died yet?"

"I'm afraid not," she said, smiling. "He's just sitting out there and watching Henry walk the horses."

"Shredding his goddam cigarettes?"

Rachel covered her mouth like a schoolgirl, giggled, and nodded. "He's gone through half a pack already."

Cap grunted. Rachel left and he turned to the files. He had been through them how many times in the last eleven months? A dozen? Two dozen? He had the extracta nearly by heart. And if Al was right, he would have the two remaining McGees under detection by the end of the week. The thought caused a hot little trickle of excitement in his belly.

He began leafing through the McGee file at random, pulling a sheet here, reading a snatch there. It was his way of plugging back into the situation. His conscious mind was in neutral, his subconscious in high gear. What he wanted now was not detail but to put his hand to the whole thing. As baseball players say, he needed to find the handle.

Here was a memo from Wanless himself, a younger Wanless (ah, but they had all been young then), dated September 12, 1968. Half a paragraph caught Cap's eye:

... of an enormous importance in the continuing study of controllable psychic phenomena. Further testing on animals would be counterproductive (see overleaf 1) and, as I emphasized at the group meeting this summer, testing on convicts or any deviant personality might lead to very real problems if Lot Six is even fractionally as powerful as we suspect (see overleaf 2). I therefore continue to recommend...

You continue to recommend that we feed it to controlled groups of college students under all outstanding contingency plans for failure, Cap thought. There had been no waffling on Wanless's part in those days. No indeed. His motto in those days had been full speed ahead and devil take the hindmost. Twelve people had been tested. Two of them had died, one during the test, one shortly afterward. Two had gone hopelessly insane, and both of them were maimed-one blind, one suffering from psychotic paralysis, both of them confined at the Maui compound, where they would remain until their miserable lives ended. So then there were eight. One of them had died in a car accident in 1972, a car accident that was almost certainly no accident at all but suicide. Another had leaped from the roof of the Cleveland Post Office in 1973, and there was no question at all about that one; he had left a note saying he "couldn't stand the pictures in his head any longer." The Cleveland police had diagnosed it as suicidal depression and paranoia. Cap and the Shop had diagnosed it as lethal Lot Six hangover. And that had left six.

Three others had committed suicide between 1974 and 1977, for a known total of four suicides and a probable total of five. Almost half the class, you might say. All four of the definite suicides had seemed perfectly normal right up to the time they had used the gun, or the rope, or jumped from the high place. But who knew what they might have been going through? Who really knew?

So then there were three. Since 1977, when the long-dormant Lot Six project had suddenly got red hot again, a fellow named James Richardson, who now lived in Los Angeles, had been under constant covert surveillance. In 1969 he had taken part in the Lot Six experiment, and during the course of the drug's influence, he had demonstrated the same startling range of talents as the rest of them: telekinesis, thought transference, and maybe the most interesting manifestation of all, at least from the Shop's specialized point of view: mental domination.

But as had happened with the others, James Richardson's drug-induced powers seemed to have disappeared completely with the wearing off of the drug. Follow-up interviews in 1971, 1973, and 1975 had shown nothing. Even Wanless had had to admit that, and he was a fanatic on the subject of Lot Six. Steady computer readouts on a random basis (and they were a lot less random since the McGee thing had started to happen) had shown no indication at all that Richardson was using any sort of psi power, either consciously or unconsciously. He had graduated in 1971, drifted west through a series of lower-echelon managerial jobs-no mental domination there-and now worked for the Telemyne Corporation.

Also, he was a f**king faggot.

Cap sighed.

They were continuing to keep an eye on Richardson, but Cap had been personally convinced that the man was a washout. And that left two, Andy McGee and his wife. The serendipity of their marriage had not been lost on the Shop, or on Wanless, who had begun to bombard the office with memos, suggesting that any offspring of that marriage would bear close watching-counting his chickens before they had hatched, you could say-and on more than one occasion Cap had toyed with the idea of telling Wanless they had learned Andy McGee had had a vasectomy. That would have shut the old bastard up. By then Wanless had had his stroke and was effectively useless, really nothing but a nuisance.

There had been only the one Lot Six experiment. The results had been so disastrous that the coverup had been massive and complete... and expensive. The order came down from on high to impose an indefinite moratorium on further testing. Wanless had plenty to scream about that day, Cap thought... and scream he had. But there had been no sign at all that the Russians or any other world power was interested in drug-induced psionics, and the top brass had concluded that in spite of some positive results, Lot Six was a blind alley. Looking at the long-term results, one of the scientists who had worked on the project compared it to dropping a jet engine into an old Ford. It went like hell, all right... until it hit the first obstacle. "Give us another ten thousand years of evolution," this fellow had said, "and we'll try it again."