Firestarter(74)

"You're not my idea of God," Cap said.

Rainbird" grinned. "More like the Christian devil, sure. But I tell you this-if I had really been hunting my own death, I believe I would have found it long before this. Perhaps I've been stalking it for play. But I have no desire to bring you down, Cap, or the Shop, or U.S. domestic intelligence. I am no idealist. I only want this little girl. And you may find you need me. You may find that I am able to accomplish things that all the drugs in Dr. Hockstetter's cabinet will not."

"And in return?"

"When the affair of the McGees ends, the U.S. Bureau for Geological Understudies will cease to exist. Your computer chief, Noftzieger, can change all his codings. And you, Cap, will fly to Arizona with me on a public airline. We will enjoy a good dinner at my favourite Flagstaff restaurant and then we will go back to my house, and behind it, in the desert, we will start a fire of our own and barbecue a great many papers and tapes and films. I will even show you my shoe collection, if you like."

Cap thought it over. Rainbird gave him time, sitting calmly.

At last Cap said, "Hockstetter and his colleagues suggest it may take two years to open the girl up completely. It depends on how deeply her protective inhibitions go."

"And you will be gone in four to six months."

Cap shrugged.

Rainbird touched the side of his nose with one index finger and cocked his head-a grotesque fairytale gesture. "I think we can keep you in the saddle much longer than that, Cap. Between the two of us, we know where hundreds of bodies are buried-literally as well as figuratively. And I doubt if it will take years. We'll both get what we want, in the end. What do you say?"

Cap thought about it. He felt old and tired and at a complete loss. "I guess," he said, "that you have made yourself a deal."

"Fine," Rainbird said briskly. "I will be the girl's orderly, I think. No one at all in the established scheme of things. That will be important to her. And of course she will never know I was the one who fired the rifle. That would be dangerous knowledge, wouldn't it? Very dangerous."

"Why?" Cap said finally. "Why have you gone to these insane lengths?"

"Do they seem insane?" Rainbird asked lightly. He got up and took one of the pictures from Cap's desk. It was the photo of Charlie sliding down the slope of crusted snow on her flattened cardboard box, laughing. "We all put our nuts and forage by for winter in this business, Cap. Hoover did it. So did CIA directors beyond counting. So have you, or you would be drawing a pension right now. When I began, Charlene McGee wasn't even born, and I was only covering my own ass."

"But why the girl?"

Rainbird didn't answer for a long time. He was looking at the photograph carefully, almost tenderly. He touched it.

"She is very beautiful," he said. "And very young. Yet inside her is your Z factor. The power of the gods. She and I will be close." His eye grew dreamy. "Yes, we will be very close."

IN THE BOX

1

On March 27, Andy McGee decided abruptly that they could stay in Tashmore no longer. It had been more than two weeks since he had mailed his letters, and if anything was going to come of them, it already would have. The very fact of the continuing silence around Granther's camp made him uneasy. He supposed he could simply have been dismissed out of hand as a crackpot in every case, but... he didn't believe it.

What he believed, what his deepest intuition whispered, was that his letters had been somehow diverted.

And that would mean they knew where he and Charlie were.

"We're going," he told Charlie. "Let's get our stuff together."

She only looked at him with her careful eyes, a little scared, and said nothing. She didn't ask him where they were going or what they were going to do, and that made him nervous, too. In one of the closets he had found two old suitcases, plastered with an acient vacation decals-Grand Rapids, Niagara Falls, Miami Beach and the two of them began to sort what they would take and what they would leave.

Blinding bright sunlight streamed in through the windows on the east side of the cottage. Water dripped and gurgled in the downspouts. The night before, he had got little sleep; the ice had gone out and he had lain awake listening to it-the high, ethereal, and somehow uncanny sound of the old yellow ice splitting and moving slowly down toward the neck of the pond, where the Great Hancock River spilled eastward across New Hampshire and all of Maine, growing progressively more smelly and polluted until it vomited, noisome and dead, into the Atlantic. The sound was like a prolonged crystal note or perhaps that of a bow drawn endlessly across a high violin string-a constant, fluted zzziiiiiinnnggg that settled over the nerve endings and seemed to make them vibrate in sympathy. He had never been here at ice-out before and was not sure he would ever want to be again. There was something terrible and otherworldly about that sound as it vibrated between the silent evergreen walls of this low and eroded bowl of hills.

He felt that they were very near again, like the barely seen monster in a recurring nightmare. The day after Charlie's birthday, he had been on one of his tramps, the cross-country skis buckled uncomfortably onto his feet, and he had come across a line of snowshoe tracks leading up to a tall spruce tree. There were indents in the crust like periods where the snowshoes had been taken off and jammed into the snow on their tails. There was a flurried confusion where the wearer had later refastened his snowshoes ("slushboats," Granther had always called them, holding them in contempt for some obscure reason of his own). At the base of the tree, Andy had found six Vantage cigarette butts and a crumpled yellow package that had once contained Kodak Tri-X film. More uneasy than ever, he had taken off the skis and climbed up into the tree. Halfway up he had found himself on a direct line of sight with Granther's cottage a mile away. It was small and apparently empty. But with a telephoto lens...