She handed the package toMacCallum. He stared at it for a moment, then slowly unwrapped it. A moment later the brilliant glare of the afternoon sun shone on the two dead animals, both of them still frozen solid.

His frown deepening,MacCallum read the tags. "Same litter," he said. "Born May eighth. Their parents were Male Number 61 and Female Number 46."

"That's what I thought," Sharon replied. "But what could the other number mean? The one on the big one?"

MacCallumstudied it for a moment. Suddenly he was almost certain he knew. And then, as he thought about JeffLaConner and Randy Stevens-maybe even Robb Harris?-he felt a wave of nausea rise in his stomach. "Growth hormones," he breathed almost to himself. His eyes, oddly dazed, drifted toward Sharon. "That's what it has to be, doesn't it?" he asked. "They're experimenting on animals with growth hormones." He stared at the larger of the two mice once more. Now its strange deformities seemed to stand out.

The enlarged feet and the long claws.

The heaviness of the bone structure around its eyes, and the distended look to its jaw.

He shook his head, unable to accept the idea that had taken such sudden form in his mind. "You're not thinking they're experimenting on the kids, are you?"

"I don't know what I'm thinking," Sharon said numbly, but knew in her heart that that was precisely what she had been thinking.

"Look,"MacCallum told her. "Let me take these things back to the hospital and run some tests on them. It could be that we're on the wrong track completely. I mean-maybe they're experimenting with some kind of genetic engineering techniques out there. Certainly all kinds of things are possible with that now, and the big one might be nothing more than some kind of mutation. If it is, it won't be too hard to find out-all I have to do is get a lab in Denver to run a DNA comparison on them."

"And if it's not?" Sharon asked, hearing in her mind once again echoes of Blake's assurances that Mark's treatment was nothing more than a vitamin complex of some sort.

"Then we'll take it one step at a time,"MacCallum told her. He wished he could tell her not to worry, assure her that nothing as evil as human experimentation could be going on in Silverdale.

But he couldn't.

They parted a few minutes later,MacCallum having carefully rewrapped the two small corpses in their butcher paper and put them into his briefcase.

As soon as they left the square, the man who had been parked in a station wagon half a block away, his presence unnoticed by either Sharon orMacCallum, stepped out of his car and moved across the sidewalk to a pay phone, ignoring the unsecured convenience of the cellular phone mounted in the console next to the driver's seat.

For this call he needed privacy.

MacCallumdrove slowly away from the village, only part of his mind involved in negotiating the familiar route from the town out to the hospital half a mile beyond the city limits. He was going over the conversation he'd had with Sharon Tanner once more, examining every bit of it, wishing he could find a way to disagree with her. But he'd known CharlotteLaConner, too, and to him Charlotte had never seemed the sort to harbor paranoid tendencies.

He turned onto the main highway but didn't bother to speed up. There was little traffic on the road, and he was in no hurry. Beside him, resting on the passenger seat, was the briefcase containing the dead mice. As he glanced down at it, he was already speculating on what might have been done to the larger of the two.

He was aware of certain experiments taking place with human growth hormones, aware that since the technology of synthesizing them had been developed, it was beginning to be possible to correct all sorts of genetic deficiencies and glandular imbalances.

And, of course, it was just the sort of thing that theTarrenTech pharmaceutical division might be interested in.

Also, it was just the sort of thing that Martin Ames would be interested in, with his ongoing research in the area of human physical development.

But surely they couldn't have begun experimenting on human beings. That was the sort of thing the Nazis had done back in the Second World War. And this was the end of the century! Even to consider such a thing-

The thought broke off asMacCallum was suddenly distracted by something on the road ahead.

It was a truck, a big semi, and even from hereMacCallum could see that it was going far faster than the fifty-mile-an-hour speed limit posted all along the two-lane highway that branched off from the main north-south route to the west.

He frowned. Didn't the guy know there was a lot of open range to the west and he might come across a cow wandering along the road? At the speed the truck was traveling, it would have as little chance of survival as the cow itself.

Instinctively, he pulled to the right, giving the oncoming vehicle plenty of space.

In the cab of the truck, the driver spotted the car ahead-an Audi, dark green. He raised his binoculars and checked the license plate, then glanced in the rearview mirrors. Just as he'd been told, there were no cars behind him.

Nor were there any cars following the Audi, either.

He smiled.

The job was going to be easy.

He pressed harder on the accelerator, and the pitch of the diesel engine under the hood changed slightly. A belch of black smoke rose from the twin exhausts flanking the cab itself, and the speedometer crept up toward the eighty-mile-per-hour mark.

He saw the Audi move slightly away from the center line as its driver attempted to give him more room.

"But not enough, you sorry son of a bitch," the driver muttered to himself.

He was closing fast on the Audi now, only a hundred yards still separating them. He stepped harder on the accelerator, gaining yet a little more extra speed.

Fifty yards now, then twenty-five.

His hands tensed on the steering wheel and his left foot hovered over the brakes, ready to execute the quick maneuver he'd practiced so many times before.

Ten yards.

MacMacCallum didn't realize what was happening until the last possible instant. He was far to the right of the oncoming lane now, the tires on the right-hand side of the car kicking up a cloud of dust as they touched the hard-packed dirt and gravel of the road's shoulder. The oncoming truck had almost reached him, and its left tires had drifted over the center line. For a moment Mac thought the truck must have lost its brakes and was running wild, but then he realized that the road here was almost level-surely the truck's engine alone would have been enough to slow it down.

Then he heard the scream of tires skidding against pavement, and the truck suddenly slewed toward him, its air horn blasting, the immense mass of its cab hurtling straight at the closed window next to his head.

He wrenched at the wheel and for a split-second felt the tight steering mechanism of the Audi respond, but then the great chrome bumper of the truck smashed into the car.

The window exploded inward and a maelstrom of shattered glass tore into his face, blinding him. The car itself rose into the air, its side all but torn away by the impact, then flipped over onto its back and landed upside down, skidding across the ground for nearly thirty feet before slamming into a large boulder.

The roof had collapsed instantly when the car hit the ground, and now Mac, blood streaming from the lacerations that covered his face, struggled feebly to free himself from the tangled wreckage. The steering wheel was jammed against his chest, and every breath brought a searing agony of pain as his shattered ribs pierced both his lungs and tore at the muscles around his rib cage.

But the car hadn't caught on fire, and he wasn't dead yet.

The driver of the truck brought his vehicle to a skidding stop, all its wheels locked by the massive force he'd applied to the braking system. He scrambled out of the cab, a small air pump clutched in his right hand, its cord already attached to the cigarette lighter on the dash.