Firestarter(48)

The fire sirens were very close by the time he had got it started and driven it across the lawn to the road. The house was an inferno now. Charlie would not look at it. The last Andy saw of the Manderses was in the rearview mirror of the canvas-topped jeep: Irv leaning against the barn, the piece of white skirting knotted around his wounded arm stained red, Norma sitting beside him. His good arm was around her. Andy waved, and Irv gestured a bit in return with his bad arm. Norma didn't wave, thinking, perhaps, of her mother's china, her secretary, the love letters-all the things of which insurance money is ignorant and always has been.

18

They found the first woods road just where Irv Manders had said they would. Andy put the Jeep in four-wheel drive and turned onto it.

"Hold on, Charlie," he said. "We're gonna bounce."

Charlie held on. Her face was white and listless, and looking at her made Andy nervous. The cottage, he thought. Granther McGee's cottage on Tashmore Pond. If we can only get there and rest. She'll get herself back together and then we'll think about what we should do.

We'll think about it tomorrow. Like Scarlett said it's another day.

The Willys roared and pitched its way up the road, which was no more than a two-wheel track with bushes and even a few stunted pines growing along the crown. This land had been logged over maybe ten years ago, and Andy doubted if it had been used since then, except by an occasional hunter. Six miles up it did seem to "up and die," and Andy had to stop twice to move trees that had blown down. The second time he looked up from his exertions, heart and head pounding almost sickeningly, and saw a large doe looking at him thoughtfully. She held a moment longer and then was gone into the deeper woods with a flip of her white tail. Andy looked back at Charlie and saw she was watching the deer's progress with something like wonder... and he felt encouraged again. A little farther on they found the wheel-ruts again, and around three o'clock they came out on the stretch of two-lane blacktop that was Route 152.

19

Orville Jamieson, scratched and muddy and barely able to walk on his bad ankle, sat by the side of the Baillings Road about a half a mile from the Manders farm and spoke into his walkie-talkie. His message was relayed back to a temporary command post in a van parked in the main street of Hastings Glen. The van had radio equipment with a built-in scrambler and a powerful transmitter. OJ's report was scrambled, boosted, and sent to New York City, where a relay station caught it and sent it on to Longmont, Virginia, where Cap sat in his office, listening.

Cap's face was no longer bright and jaunty, as it had been when he biked to work that morning. OJ's report was nearly unbelievable: they had known the girl had something, but this story of sudden carnage and reversal was (at least to Cap) like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky. Four to six men dead, the others driven helter-skelter into the woods, half a dozen cars in flames, a house burning to the ground, a civilian wounded and about to blab to anyone and everyone who cared to listen that a bunch of neo-Nazis had turned up on his doorstep with no warrant and had attempted to kidnap a man and a little girl whom he had invited home to lunch.

When OJ finished his report (and he never really did; he only began to repeat himself in a kind of semihysteria), Cap hung up and sat in his deep swivel chair and tried to think. He did not think a covert operation had gone so spectacularly wrong since the Bay of Pigs-and this was on American soil.

The office was gloomy and filled with thick shadows now that the sun had got around to the other side of the building, but he didn't turn on the lights. Rachel had buzzed him on the intercom and he had told her curtly he didn't want to talk to anyone, anyone at all.

He felt old.

He heard Wanless saying: I am talking about the Potential for destruction. Well, it wasn't just a question of potential any longer, was it? But we're going to have her, he thought, looking blankly across the room. Oh yes, we're going to have her.

He thumbed for Rachel.

"I want to talk to Orville Jamieson as soon as he can be flown here," he said. "And I want to talk to General Brackman in Washington, A-one-A priority. We've got a potentially embarrassing situation in New York State, and I want you to tell him that right out."

"Yes, sir," Rachel said respectfully.

"I want a meeting with all six subdirectors at nineteen hundred hours. Also A-one-A. And I want to talk to the chief of state police up there in New York." They had been part of the search sweep, and Cap wanted to point that out to them. If mud was going to be thrown, he would be sure to save back a good, big bucket of it for them. But he also wanted to point out that behind a united front, they might still all be able to come out of this looking fairly decent.

He hesitated and then said, "And when John Rainbird calls in, tell him I want to talk to him. I have another job for him."

"Yes, sir."

Cap let go of the intercom toggle. He sat back in his chair and studied the shadows.

"Nothing has happened that can't be fixed," he said to the shadows. That had been his motto all his life-not printed in crewel and hung up, not embossed on a copper desk plaque, but it was printed on his heart as truth.

Nothing that can't be fixed. Until tonight, until OJ's report, he had believed that. It was a philosophy that had brought a poor Pennsylvania miner's kid a long way. And he believed it still, although in a momentarily shaken manner. Between Manders and his wife, they probably had relatives scattered from New England to California, and each one was a potential lever. There were enough top-secret files right here in Longmont to ensure that any congressional hearing on Shop methods would be... well, a little hard of hearing. The cars and even the agents were only hardware, although it would be a long time before he would really be able to get used to the idea that Al Steinowitz was gone. Who could there possibly be to replace Al? That little kid and her old man were going to pay for what they had done to Al, if for nothing else. He would see to it.