Firestarter Read online

  "No."

  "So this drug was given to them and maybe it changed their chromosomes a little bit. Or a lot. Or who knows. And maybe two of them got married and decided to have a baby and maybe the baby got something more than her eyes and his mouth. Wouldn't they be interested in that child?"

  "I bet they would," Andy said, now so frightened he was having trouble talking at alL He had already decided that he would not tell Vicky about calling Quincey.

  "It's like you got lemon, and that's nice, and you got meringue, and that's nice, too, but when you put them together, you've got ... a whole new taste treat. I bet they'd want to see just what that child could do. They might just want to take it and put it in a little room and see if it could help make the world safe for democracy. And I think that's all I want to say, old buddy, except... keep your head down."

  24

  Voices in a haunted room.

  Keep your head down.

  He turned his head on the motel pillow and looked at Charlie, who was sleeping deeply. Charlie kid, what are we going to do? Where can we go and be left alone? How is this going to end?

  No answer to any of these questions.

  And at last he slept, while not so far away a green cat cruised through the dark, still hoping to come upon a big man with broad shoulders in a corduroy jacket and a little girl with blond hair in red pants and a green blouse.

  Longmont, Virginia: The Shop

  1

  Two handsome Southern plantation homes faced each other across a long and rolling grass lawn that was crisscrossed by a few gracefully looping bike paths and a two-lane crushed-gravel drive that came over the hill from the main road. Off to one side of one of these houses was a large barn, painted a bright red and trimmed a spotless white. Near the other was a long stable, done in the same handsome red with white trim. Some of the best horseflesh in the South was quartered here. Between the barn and the stable was a wide, shallow duckpond, calmly reflecting the sky.

  In the 1860s, the original owners of these two homes had gone off and got themselves killed in the war, and all survivors of both familes were dead now. The two estates had been consolidated into one piece of government property in 1954. It was Shop headquarters.

  At ten minutes past nine on a sunny October day-the day after Andy and Charlie left New York for Albany in a taxi-cab--an elderly man with kindly, sparkling eyes and wearing a woolen British driving cap on his head biked toward one of the houses. Behind him, over the second knoll, was the checkpoint he had come through after a computer ID system had okayed his thumbprint. The checkpoint was inside a double run of barbed wire. The outer run, seven feet high, was marked every sixty feet by signs that read CAUTlON! GOVERNMENT PROPERTY LOW ELECTRIC CHARGE RUNS THROUGH

  THIS FENCE! During the day, the charge was indeed low. At night, the on-property generator boosted it to a lethal voltage, and each morning a squad of five groundskeepers circled it in little electric golt carts, picking up the bodies of crisped rabbits, moles, birds, groundhogs, an occasional skunk lying in a pool of smell, sometimes a deer. And twice, human beings, equally cooked. The space between the outer and inner runs of barbed wire was ten feet. Day and night, guard dogs circled the installation in this run. The guard dogs were Dobermans, and they had been trained to stay away from the electrified wire. At each corner on the installation there were guard towers, also built of spanking-red barnboard and trimmed in white. They were manned by personnel who were expert in the use of various items of death-dealing hardware. The whole place was monitored by TV cameras, and the views these various cameras presented were constantly scanned by computer. The Longmont facility was secure.

  The elderly man biked on, with a smile for the people he passed. An old, baldheaded man in a baseball cap was walking a thin-ankled filly. He raised his hand and called, "Hi, Cap! Ain't this some kind of a day!"

  "Knock your eye out," the man on the bike agreed. "Have a good one, Henry."

  He reached the front of the northernmost of the two homes, dismounted his bike, and put down its kickstand. He breathed deeply of the mild morning air, then trotted spryly up the wide porch steps and between the broad Doric columns.

  He opened the door and stepped into the wide receiving hall. A young woman with red hair sat behind a desk, a statistics-analysis book open in front of her. One hand was holding her place in the book. The other was in her desk drawer, lightly touching a .38 Smith & Wesson.

  "Good morning, Josie," the elderly gent said.

  "Hi, Cap. You're running a little behind, aren't you?" Pretty girls could get away with this; if it had been Duane's day on the front desk, he could not have done. Cap was not a supporter of women's liberation.

  "My top gear's sticking, darlin." He put his thumb in the proper slot. Something in the console thudded heavily, and a green light fluttered and then remained steady on Josie's board. "You be good, now."

  "Well, I'll be careful," she said archly, and crossed her legs.

  Cap roared laughter and walked down the hall. She watched him go, wondering for a moment if she should have told him that that creepy old man Wanless had come in some twenty minutes ago. He'd know soon enough, she supposed, and sighed. What a way to screw up the start of a perfectly fine day, having to talk to an old spook like that. But she supposed that a person like Cap, who held a position of great responsibility, had to take the sour with the sweet.

  2

  Cap's office was at the back of the house. A large bay window gave a magnificent view of the back lawn, the barn, and the duckpond, which was partially screened with alders. Rich McKeon was halfway down the lawn, sitting astride a miniature tractor-lawnmower. Cap stood looking at him with his arms crossed behind his back for a moment and then went over to the Mr. Coffee in the comer. He poured some coffee in his U.S.N. cup, added Cremora and then sat down and thumbed the intercom.

  "Hi,Rachel," he said.

  "Hello, Cap. Dr. Wanless is--"

  "I knew it," Cap said. "I knew it. I could smell that old whore the minute I came in."

  "Shall I tell him you're too busy today?"

  "Don't tell him any such thing," Cap said stoutly. "Just let him sit out there in the yellow parlor the whole frigging morning. If he doesn't decide to go home, I suppose I can see him before lunch."

  "All right, sir." Problem solved--for Rachel, anyway, Cap thought with a touch of resentment. Wanless wasn't really her problem at all. And the fact was, Wanless was getting to be an embarrassment. He had outlived both his usefulness and his influence. Well, there was always the Maui compound. And then there was Rainbird.

  Cap felt a little inward shudder at that ... and he wasn't a man who shuddered easily.

  He held down the intercom toggle again. "I'll want the entire McGee file again, RacheL And at ten-thirty I want to see Al Steinowitz. If Wanless is still here when I finish with Al, you can send him in."

  "Very good, Cap."

  Cap sat back, steepled his fingers, and looked across the room at the picture of George Patton on the wall Patton was standing astride the top hatch of a tank as if he thought he were Duke Wayne or someone. "It's a hard life if you don't weaken," he told Patton's image, and sipped his coffee.

  3

  Rachel brought the file in on a whisper-wheeled library cart ten minutes later. There were six boxes of papers and reports, four boxes of photographs. There were telephone transcripts as well. The McGee phone had been bugged since 1978.

  "Thanks, Rachel ".

  "You're welcome. Mr. Steinowitz will be here at ten-thirty."

  "Of course he will. Has Wanless died yet?"

  "I'm afraid not," she said, smiling. "He's just sitting out there and watching Henry walk the horses."

  "Shredding his goddam cigarettes?"

  Rachel covered her mouth like a schoolgirl, giggled, and nodded. "He's gone through half a pack already."

  Cap grunted. Rachel left and he turned to the files. He had been through them how many times in the last eleven months? A dozen? Two dozen?
He had the extracta nearly by heart. And if Al was right, he would have the two remaining McGees under detection by the end of the week. The thought caused a hot little trickle of excitement in his belly.

  He began leafing through the McGee file at random, pulling a sheet here, reading a snatch there. It was his way of plugging back into the situation. His conscious mind was in neutral, his subconscious in high gear. What he wanted now was not detail but to put his hand to the whole thing. As baseball players say, he needed to find the handle.

  Here was a memo from Wanless himself, a younger Wanless (ah, but they had all been younger then), dated September 12, 1968. Half a paragraph caught Cap's eye: ... of an enormous importance in the continuing study of controllable psychic phenomena. Further testing on animals would be counterproductive (see overleaf 1) and, as I emphasized at the group meeting this summer, testing on convicts or any deviant personality might lead to very real problems if Lot Six is even fractionally as powerful as we suspect (see overleaf 2). I therefore continue to recommend ...

  You continue to recommend that we feed it to controlled groups of college students under all outstanding contingency plans for failure, Cap thought. There had been no waffling on Wanless's part in those days. No indeed. His motto in those days had been full speed ahead and devil take the hindmost. Twelve people had been tested. Two of them had died, one during the test, one shortly afterward. Two had gone hopelessly insane, and both of them were maimed-one blind, one suffering from psychotic paralysis, both of them confined at the Maui compound, where they would remain until their miserable lives ended. So then there were eight. One of them had died in a car accident in 1972, a car accident that was almost certainly no accident at all but suicide. Another had leaped from the roof of the Cleveland Post Office in 1973, and there was no question at all about that one; he had left a note saying he "couldn't stand the pictures in his head any longer." The Cleveland police had diagnosed it as suicidal depression and paranoia. Cap and the Shop had diagnosed it as lethal Lot Six hangover. And that had left six.

  Three others had committed suicide between 1974 and 1977, for a known total of four suicides and a probable total of five. Almost half the class, you might say. All four of the definite suicides had seemed perfectly normal right up to the time they had used the gun, or the rope, or jumped from the high place. But who knew what they might have been going through? Who really knew?

  So then there were three. Since 1977, when the long-dormant Lot Six project had suddenly got red hot again, a fellow named James Richardson, who now lived in Los Angeles, had been under constant covert surveillance. In 1969 he had taken part in the Lot Six experiment, and during the course of the drug's influence, he had demonstrated the same startling range of talents as the rest of them: telekinesis, thought transference, and maybe the most interesting manifestation of all, at least from the Shop's specialized point of view: mental domination.

  But as had happened with the others, James Richardson's drug-induced powers seemed to have disappeared completely with the wearing off of the drug. Follow-up interviews in 1971, 1973, and 1975 had shown nothing. Even Wanless had had to admit that, and he was a fanatic on the subject of Lot Six. Steady computer readouts on a random basis (and they were a lot less random since the McGee thing had started to happen) had shown no indication at all that Richardson was using any sort of psi power, either consciously or unconsciously. He had graduated in 1971, drifted west through a series of lower-echelon managerial jobs--no mental domination there--and now worked for the Telemyne Corporation.

  Also, he was a fucking faggot.

  Cap sighed.

  They were continuing to keep an eye on Richardson, but Cap had been personally convinced that the man was a washout. And that left two, Andy McGee and his wife. The serendipity of their marraige had not been lost on the Shop, or on Wanless, who had begun to bombard the office with memos, suggesting that any offspring of that marriage would bear close watching--counting his chickens before they had hatched, you could say--and on more than one occasion Cap had toyed with the idea of telling Wanless they had learned Andy McGee had had a vasectomy. That would have shut the old bastard up. By then Wanless had had his stroke and was effectively useless, really nothing but a nuisance.

  There had been only the one Lot Six experiment. The results had been so disastrous that the coverup had been massive and complete . . . and expensive. The order came down from on high to impose an indefinite moratorium on further testing. Wanless had plenty to scream about that day, Cap thought . . . and scream he had. But there had been no sign at all that the Russians or any other world power was interested in drug-induced psionics, and the top brass had concluded that in spite of some positive results, Lot Six was a blind alley. Looking at the long-term results, one of the scientists who had worked on the project compared it to dropping a jet engine into an old Ford. It went like hell, all right . . . until it hit the first obstacle. "Give us another ten thousand years of evolution," this fellow had said, "and we'll try it again."

  Part of the problem had been that when the drug-induced psi powers were at their height, the test subjects had also been tripping out of their skulls. No control was possible. And coming out the other side, the top brass had been nearly shitting their pants. Covering up the death of an agent, or even of a bystander to an operation--that was one thing. Covering up the death of a student who had suffered a heart attack, the disappearance of two others, and lingering traces of hysteria and paranoia in yet others--that was a different matter altogether. All of them had friends and associates, even if one of the requirements by which the test subjects had been picked was a scarcity of close relatives. The costs and the risks had been enormous. They had involved nearly seven hundred thousand dollars in hush money and the sanction of at least one person--the godfather of the fellow who had clawed his eyes out. The godfather just would not quit. He was going to get to the root of the matter. As it turned out, the only place the godfather had got was to the bottom of the Baltimore Trench, where he presumably still was, with two cement blocks tied around whatever remained of his legs.

  And still, a great deal of it--too damn much--had just been luck.

  So the Lot Six project had been shelved with a continuing yearly budget allotment. The money was used to continue random surveillance on the survivors in case something turned up--some pattern.

  Eventually, one had.

  Cap hunted through a folder of photographs and came up with an eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white of the girl. It had been taken three years ago, when she was four and attending the Free Children's Nursery School in Harrison. The picture had been taken with a telephoto lens from the back of a bakery van and later blown up and cropped to turn a picture of a lot of boys and girls at playtime into a portrait of a smiling little girl with her pigtails flying and the pistol grip of a jumprope in each hand.

  Cap looked at this picture sentimentally for some time. Wanless, in the aftermath of his stroke, had discovered fear. Wanless now thought the little girl would have to be sanctioned. And although Wanless was among the outs these days, there were those who concurred with his opinion--those who were among the ins. Cap hoped like hell that it wouldn't come to that He had three grandchildren himself, two of them just about Charlene McGee's age.

  Of course they would have to separate the girl from her father. Probably permanently. And he would almost certainly have to be sanctioned ... after he had served his purpose, of course.

  It was quarter past ten. He buzzed Rachel. "Is Albert Steinowitz here yet?"

  "Just this minute arrived, sir."

  "Very good. Send him in, please."

  4

  "I want you to take personal charge of the endgame, Al."

  "Very good, Cap."

  Albert Steinowitz was a small man with a yellow-pale complexion and very black hair; in earlier years he had sometimes been mistaken for the actor Victor Jory. Cap had worked with Steinowitz off and on for nearly eight years--in fact they had come over from the na
vy together--and to him Al had always looked like a man about to enter the hospital for a terminal stay. He smoked constantly, except in here, where it wasn't allowed. He walked with a slow, stately stride that invested him with a strange kind of dignity, and impenetrable dignity is a rare attribute in any man. Cap, who saw all the medical records of Section One agents, knew that Albert's dignified walk was bogus; he suffered badly from hemorrhoids and had been operated on for them twice. He had refused a third operation because it might mean a colostomy bag on his leg for the rest of his life. His dignified walk always made Cap think of the fairy tale about the mermaid who wanted to be a woman and the price she paid for legs and feet. Cap imagined that her walk had been rather dignified, too.

  "How soon can you be in Albany?" he asked Al now.

  "An hour after I leave here."

  "Good. I won't keep you long. What's the status up there?"

  Albert folded his small, slightly yellow hands in his lap. "The state police are cooperating nicely. All highways leading out of Albany have been roadblocked. The blocks are set up in concentric circles with Albany County Airport at their center. Radius of thirty-five miles."

  "You're assuming they didn't hitch a ride."

  "We have to," Albert said. "If they hooked a ride with someone who took them two hundred miles or so, of course we'll have to start all over again. But I'm betting they're inside that circle."

  "Oh? Why is that, Albert?" Cap leaned forward. Albert Steinowitz was, without a doubt, the best agent, except maybe for Rainbird, in the Shop's employ. He was bright, intuitive--and ruthless when the job demanded that.

  "Partly hunch," Albert said. "Partly the stuff we got back from the computer when we fed in everything we knew about the last three years of Andrew McGee's life. We asked it to pull out any and all patterns that might apply to this ability he's supposed to have."