Firestarter(70)

He opened the McGee file and took out the latest additions-the six letters Andy had mailed less than two weeks ago. He shuffled through them without reading them. They were all essentially the same letter and he had the contents almost by heart. Below them were glossy photographs, some taken by Charles Payson, some taken by other agents on the Tashmore side of the Pond. There were photos showing Andy walking up Bradford's main street. Photos of Andy shopping in the general store and paying for his purchases. Photos of Andy and Charlie standing by the boathouse at the camp, Irv Manders's Willys a snow-covered hump in the background. A photo showing Charlie sliding down a hard and sparkling incline of snow-crust on a flattened cardboard box, her hair flying out from beneath a knitted cap that was too large for her. In this photo her father was standing behind her, mittened hands on hips, head thrown back, bellowing laughter. Cap had looked at this photo often and long and soberly and was sometimes surprised by a trembling in his hands when he put it aside. He wanted them that badly.

He got up and went to the window for a moment. No Rich McKeon cutting grass today. The alders were bare and skeletal, the duckpond between the two houses a slatelike, bare expanse. There were dozens of important items on the Shop's plate this early spring, a veritable smorgasbord, but for Cap there was really only one, and that was the matter of Andy McGee and his daughter Charlene.

The Manders fiasco had done a lot of damage. The Shop had ridden that out, and so had he, but it had begun a critical groundswell that would break soon enough. The critical centre of that groundswell was the way the McGees had been handled from the day Victoria McGee had been killed and the daughter lifted-lifted however briefly. A lot of the criticism had to do with the fact that a college instructor who had never even been in the army had been able to take his daughter away from two trained Shop agents, leaving one of them mad and one in a coma that had lasted for six months. The latter agent was never going to be any good for anything again; if anyone spoke the word "sleep" within his earshot, he keeled over bonelessly and might stay out from four hours to an entire day. In a bizarre sort of way it was funny.

The other major criticism had to do with the fact that the McGees had managed to stay one step ahead for so long. It made the Shop look bad. It made them all look dumb.

But most of the criticism was reserved for the incident at the Manders farm itself, because that had damned near blown the entire agency out of the water. Cap knew that the whispering had begun. The whispering, the memos, maybe even the testimony at the ultrasecret congressional hearings. We don't want him hanging on like Hoover. This Cuban business went entirely by the boards because he couldn't get his head out of that damned McGee file. Wife died very recently, you know. Great shame. Hit him hard. Whole McGee business nothing but a catalogue of ineptitude. Perhaps a younger man...

But none of them understood what they were up against. They thought they did, but they didn't. Again and again he had seen the rejection of the simple fact that the little girl was a pyrokinetic-a firestarter. Literally dozens of reports suggested that the fire at the Manders farm had been started by a gasoline spill, by the woman's breaking a kerosene lamp, by spontaneous-f*cking-combustion, and God only knew what other nonsense. Some of those reports came from people who had been there.

Standing at the window, Cap found himself perversely wishing that Wanless were here. Wanless had understood. He could have talked to Wanless about this... this dangerous blindness.

He went back to the desk. There was no sense kidding himself; once the undermining process began, there was no way to stop it. It really was like a cancer. You could retard its growth by calling in favors (and Cap had called in ten years" worth just to keep himself in the saddle this last winter); you might even be able to force it into remission. But sooner or later, you were gone. He felt he had from now until July if he played the game by the rules, from now until maybe November if he decided to really dig in and get tough. That, however, might mean ripping the agency apart at the seams, and he did not want to do that. He had no wish to destroy something he had invested half his life in. But he would if he had to: he was going to see this through to the end.

The major factor that had allowed him to stay in control was the speed with which they had located the McGees again. Cap was glad to take credit for that since it helped to prop up his position, but all it had really taken was computer time.

They had been living with this business long enough to have time to plow the McGee field both wide and deep. Filed away in the computer were facts on more than two hundred relatives and four hundred friends all the way around the McGee Tomlinson family tree. These friendships stretched all the way back to Vicky's best friend in the first grade, a girl named Kathy Smith, who was now Mrs. Frank Worthy, of Cabral, California, and who had probably not spared a thought for Vicky Tomlinson in twenty years or more.

The computer was given the "last-seen" data and promptly spit out a list of probabilities. Heading the list was the name of Andy's deceased grandfather, who had owned a camp on Tashmore Pond in Vermont; ownership had since passed to Andy. The McGees had vacationed there, and it was within reasonable striking distance of the Manders farm by way of the back roads. The computer felt that if Andy and Charlie were to make for any "known place," it would be this place.

Less than a week after they had moved into Granther's, Cap knew they were there. A loose cordon of agents was set up around the camp. Arrangements had been made for the purchase of Notions "n" Novelties in Bradford on the probability that whatever shopping they needed to do would be done in Bradford.