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.

But the girl. Could the girl be fixed?

There were ways. There were methods of containment.

The McGee files were still on the library cart. He got up, went to them, and began thumbing through them restlessly. He wondered where John Rainbird was at this moment.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

1

At the moment Cap Hollister had his passing thought about him, John Rainbird was sitting in his room at the Mayflower Hotel watching a television game called The Crosswits. He was naked. He sat in the chair with his bare feet neatly together and watched the program. He was waiting for it to get dark. After it got dark, he would begin waiting for it to get late. When it was late, he would begin waiting for it to get early. When it got early and the pulse of the hotel was at its slowest, he would stop waiting and go upstairs to Room 1217 and kill Dr. Wanless. Then he would come down here and think about whatever Wanless would have told him before he died, and sometime after the sun came up, he would sleep briefly.

John Rainbird was a man at peace. He was at peace with almost everything-Cap, the Shop, the United States. He was at peace with God, Satan, and the universe. If he was not yet at complete peace with himself, that was only because his pilgrimage was not yet over. He had many coups, many honorable scars. It did not matter that people turned away from him in fear and loathing. It did not matter that he had lost one eye in Vietnam.

What they paid him did not matter. He took it and most of it went to buy shoes. He had a great love of shoes. He owned a home in Flagstaff, and although he rarely went there himself, he had all his shoes sent there. When he did get a chance to go to his house, he admired the shoes-Gucci, Bally, Bass, Adidas, Van Donen. Shoes. His house was a strange forest; shoe trees grew in every room and he would, go from room to room admiring the shoefruit that grew on them. But when he was alone, he went barefoot. His father, a full-blooded Cherokee, had been buried barefoot. Someone had stolen his burial moccasins.

Other than shoes, John Rainbird was interested in only two things. One of them was death. His own death, of course; he had been preparing for this inevitability for twenty years or more. Dealing death had always been his business and was the only trade he had ever excelled at. He became more and more interested in it as he grew older, as an artist will become more interested in the qualities and levels of light, as writers will feel for character and nuance like blindmen reading braille. What interested him most was the actual leaving… the actual exhalation of the soul… the exit from the body and what human beings knew as life and the passing into something else. What must it be like to feel yourself slipping away? Did you think it was a dream from which you would wake? Was the Christian devil there with his fork, ready to jam it through your shrieking soul and carry it down to hell like a piece of meat on a shish kebab? Was there joy? Did you know you were going? What is it that the eyes of the dying see?

Rainbird hoped he would have the opportunity to find out for himself. In his business, death was often quick and unexpected, something that happened in the flick of an eye. He hoped that when his own death came, he would have time to prepare and feel everything. More and more lately he had watched the faces of the people he killed, trying to see the secret in the eyes.

Death interested him.

What also interested him was the little girl they were all so concerned with. This Charlene McGee. As far as Cap knew, John Rainbird had only the vaguest knowledge of the McGees and none at all of Lot Six. Actually, Rainbird knew almost as much as Cap himself-something that surely would have marked him for extreme sanction if Cap had known. They suspected that the girl had some great or potentially great power-maybe a whole batch of them. He would like to meet this girl and see what her powers were. He also knew that Andy McGee was what Cap called “a potential mental dominant,” but that did not concern John Rainbird. He had not yet met a man who could dominate him.