Firestarter(27)

"How many men do you need to do the job?"

"We've got what we need," A1 said. "Counting the state police, there are better than seven hundred people in on this little houseparty. Priority A-one-A. They're going door to door and house to house. We've checked every hotel and motel in the immediate Albany area already-better than forty of them. We're spreading into the neighbouring towns now. A man and a little girl... they stick out like a sore thumb. We'll get them. Or the girl, if he's dead." Albert stood up. "And I think I ought to get on it. I'd like to be there when it goes down."

"Of course you would. Bring them to me, Al."

"I will," Albert said, and walked toward the door.

"Albert?"

He turned back, a small man with an unhealthy yellow complexion. "Who is on the five hundred? Did you check that out?"

Albert Steinowitz smiled. "McKinley," he said. "He was assassinated."

He went out, closing the door gently behind him, leaving Cap to consider.

5

Ten minutes later, Cap thumbed the intercom again. "Is Rainbird back from Venice yet, Rachel?" "As of yesterday," Rachel said, and Cap fancied he could hear the distaste even in Rachel's carefully cultivated Boss Secretary tones. "Is he here or at Sanibel?" The Shop maintained an R-and-R facility on Sanibel Island,

Florida.

There was a pause as Rachel checked with the computer.

"Longmont, Cap. As of eighteen hundred yesterday. Sleeping off the jet lag, perhaps."

"Have someone wake him up," Cap said. "I'd like to see him when Wanless leaves... always assuming Wanless is still here?" "As of fifteen minutes ago he was."

"All right... let's say Rainbird at noon."

"Yes, sir."

"You're a good girl, Rachel."

"Thank you, sir." She sounded touched. Cap liked her, liked her very much.

"Send in Dr. Wanless please, Rachel."

He settled back, joined his hands in front of him, and thought, For my sins.

6

Dr. Joseph Wanless had suffered his stroke on the same day Richard Nixon announced his resignation of the presidency-August 8, 1974. It had been a cerebral accident of moderate severity, and he had never come all the way back physically. Nor mentally, in Cap's opinion. It was only following the stroke that Wanless's interest in the Lot Six experiment and follow-up had become constant and obsessive.

He came into the room leaning over a cane, the light from the bay window catching his round, rimless glasses and making them glare blankly. His left hand was a drawnup claw. The left side of his mouth drifted in a constant glacial sneer.

Rachel looked at Cap sympathetically over Wanless's shoulder and Cap nodded that she could go. She did, closing the door quietly.

"The good doctor," Cap said humorlessly.

"How does it progress?" Wanless asked, sitting down with a grunt.

"Classified," Cap said. "You know that, Joe. What can I do for you today."

"I have seen the activity around this place," Wanless said, ignoring Cap's question. "What else had I to do while I cooled my heels all morning?"

"If you come without an appointment-"

"You think you nearly have them again," Wanless said. "Why else that hatchet man Steinowitz? Well, maybe you do. Maybe so. But you have thought so before, haven't you?"

"What do you want, Joe?" Cap didn't like to be reminded of past failures. They had actually had the girl for a while. The men who had been involved in that were still not operational and maybe never would be.

"What do I always want?" Wanless asked, hunched over his cane. Oh Christ, Cap thought, the old f**k's going to wax rhetorical. "Why do I stay alive? To persuade you to sanction them both. To sanction that James Richardson as well. To sanction the ones on Maui. Extreme sanction, Captain Hollister. Expunge them. Wipe them off the face of the earth."

Cap sighed.

Wanless gestured toward the library cart with his claw-hand and said, "You've been through the files again, I see."

"I have them almost by heart," Cap said, and then smiled a little. He had been eating and drinking Lot Six for the last year; it had been a constant item on the agenda at every meeting during the two years before that. So maybe Wanless wasn't the only obsessive character around here, at that.

The difference is, I get paid for it. With Wanless it's a hobby. A dangerous hobby.

"You read them but you don't learn," Wanless said. "Let me try once more to convert you to the way of truth, Captain Hollister."

Cap began to protest, and then the thought of Rainbird and his noon appointment came to mind, and his face smoothed out. It became calm, even sympathetic. "All right," he said. "Fire when ready, Gridley."

"You still think I'm crazy, don't you? A lunatic."

"You said that, not I."

"It would be well for you to remember that I was the first one to suggest a testing program with dilysergic triune acid."

"I have days when I wish you hadn't," Cap said. If he closed his eyes, he could still see Wanless's first report, a two-hundred-page prospectus on the drug that had first been known as DLT, then, among the technicians involved, as "booster-acid," and finally as Lot Six. Cap's predecessor had okayed the original project; that gentleman had been buried in Arlington with full military honors six years ago.