e drove back to Teller as fast as the slushy roads would allow. He spoke to his postmaster, as the men had suggested. The Teller postmaster was Bill Cobham, and Everett was in Cobham's office for better than an hour. At times their voices came through the office door, loud and angry.

Cobham was fifty-six. He had been with the Postal Service for thirty-five years, and he was badly scared. At last he succeeded in communicating his fright to Robert Everett as well. And Everett never said a word, not even to his wife, about the day he had been robbed on the Teller Road between Bradford and Williams. But he never forgot it, and he never completely lost that sense of anger and shame... and disillusion.

10

By two-thirty Charlie had finished her snowman, and Andy, a little rested from his nap, had got up. Orville Jamieson and his new partner, George Sedaka, were on an airplane. Four hours later, As Andy and Charlie were sitting down to a game of five hundred rummy, the supper dishes washed and drying in the drainer, the letters were on Cap Hollister's desk.

CAP AND RAINBIRD

1

On March 24, Charlie McGee's birthday, Cap Hollister sat behind his desk filled with a great and ill-defined unease. The reason for the unease was not ill-defined; he expected John Rainbird in not quite an hour, and that was too much like expecting the devil to turn up on the dime. So to speak. And at least the devil stuck to a bargain once it was struck, if you believed his press releases, but Cap had always felt there was something in John Rainbird's personality that was fundamentally ungovernable. When all was said and done, he was nothing more than a hit man, and hit men always self-destruct sooner or later. Cap felt that when Rainbird went, it would be with a spectacular bang. Exactly how much did he know about the McGee operation? No more than he had to, surely, but... it nagged at him. Not for the first time he wondered if after this McGee affair was over it might not be wise to arrange an accident for the big Indian. In the memorable words of Cap's father, Rainbird was as crazy as a man eating rat turds and calling it caviar.

He sighed. Outside, a cold rain flew against the windows, driven by a strong wind. His study, so bright and pleasant in summer, was now filled with shifting gray shadows. They were not kind to him as he sat here with the McGee file on its library trolley at his left hand. The winter had aged him; he was not the same jaunty man who had biked up to the front door on that day in October when the McGees had escaped again, leaving a firestorm behind. Lines on his face that had been barely noticeable then had now deepened into fissures. He had been forced into the humiliation of bifocals-old man's glasses, he thought them-and adjusting to them had left him feeling nauseated for the first six weeks he wore them. These were the small things, the outward symbols of the way things had gone so crazily, maddeningly wrong. These were the things he bitched about to himself because all of his training and upbringing had schooled him against bitching about the grave matters that lay so closely below the surface.

As if that damned little girl were a personal jinx, the only two women he had cared deeply about since the death of his mother had both died of cancer this winter-his wife, Georgia, three days after Christmas, and his personal secretary, Rachel, only a little over a month ago.

He had known Georgia was gravely ill, of course; a mastectomy fourteen months before her death had slowed but not stopped the progress of the disease. Rachel's death had been a cruel surprise. Near the end he could remember (how unforgivable we sometimes seem in retrospect) joking that she needed fattening up, and Rachel throwing the jokes right back at him.

Now all he had left was the Shop-and he might not have that much longer. An insidious sort of cancer had invaded Cap himself. What would you call it? Cancer of the confidence? Something like that. And in the upper echelons, that sort of disease was nearly always fatal. Nixon, Lance, Helms... all victims of cancer of the credibility.

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-fucking-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.

Passive surveillance, nothing more. All the photographs had been taken with telephoto lenses under optimum conditions for concealment. Cap had no intention of risking another firestorm.

They could have taken Andy quietly on any of his trips across the lake. They could have shot them both as easily as they had got the picture of Charlie sledding on the cardboard carton. But Cap wanted the girl, and he had now come to believe that if they were going to have any real control over her, they would need her father as well.

After locating them again, the most important objective had been to make sure they kept quiet. Cap didn't need a computer to tell him that as Andy grew more frightened, the chances that he would seek outside help went up and up. Before the Manders affair, a press leak could have been handled or lived with. Afterward, press interference became a different ballgame altogether. Cap had nightmares just thinking about what would happen if the New York Times got hold of such a thing.

For a brief period, during the confusion that had followed the firestorm, Andy could have got his letters out. But apparently the McGees had been living with their own confusion. Their golden chance to mail the letters or make some phone calls had passed unused... and very well mightn't have come to anything, anyway. The woods were full of crackpots these days, and newspeople were as cynical as anyone else. Theirs had become a glamour occupation. They were more interested in what Margaux and Bo and Suzanne and Cheryl were doing. It was safer.

Now the two of them were in a box. Cap had had the entire winter to consider options.

Even at his wife's funeral he had been running through his options. Gradually he had settled upon a plan of action and now he was prepared to tip that plan into motion. Payson, their man in Bradford, said that the ice was getting ready to go out on Tashmore Pond. And McGee had finally mailed his letters. Already he would be getting impatient for a response-and perhaps beginning to suspect his letters had never arrived at their intended sources. They might be getting ready to move, and Cap liked them right where they were.

Beneath the photos was a thick typed report better than three hundred pages-bound in a blue TOP SECRET cover. Eleven doctors and psychologists had put the combination report and prospectus together under the overall direction of Dr. Patrick Hockstetter, a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist. He was, in Cap's opinion, one of the ten or twelve most astute minds at the Shop's disposal. At the eight hundred thousand dollars it had cost the taxpayer to put the report together, he ought to have been. Thumbing through the report now, Cap wondered what Wanless, that old doomsayer, would have made of it.

His own intuition that they needed Andy alive was confirmed in here. The postulate Hockstetter's crew had based their own chain of logic on was the idea that all the powers they were interested in were exercised voluntarily, having their first cause in the willingness of the possessor to use them... and the key word was will.

The girl's powers, of which pyrokinesis was only the cornerstone, had a way of getting out of control, of jumping nimbly over the barriers of her will, but this study, which incorporated all the available information, indicated that it was the girl herself who elected whether or not to set things in motion-as she had done at the Manders farm when she realized that the Shop agents were trying to kill her father.

He rifled through the recap of the original Lot Six experiment. All the graphs and computer readouts boiled down to the same thing: will as the first cause.

Using will as the basis for everything. Hockstetter and his colleagues had gone through an amazing catalogue of drugs before deciding on Thorazine for Andy and a new drug called Orasin for the girl. Seventy pages of gobbledy-gook in the report came down to the fact that the drugs would make them feel high, dreamy, floaty. Neither of them would be able to exercise enough will to choose between chocolate milk and white, let alone enough to start fires or convince people they were blind, or whatever.

They could keep Andy McGee drugged constantly. They had no real use for him; both the report and Cap's own intuition suggested that he was a dead end, a burned-out case. It was the girl who interested them. Give me six months, Cap thought, and we'll have enough. Just long enough to map the terrain inside that amazing little head. No House or Senate subcommittee would be able to resist the promise of chemically induced psi powers and the enormous implications it would have on the arms race if that little girl was even half of what Wanless suspected.

And there were other possibilities. They were not in the blue-backed report, because they were too explosive for even a TOP SECRET heading. Hockstetter, who had become progressively more excited as the picture took shape before him and his committee of experts, had mentioned one of these possibilities to Cap only a week ago.

"This Z factor," Hockstetter said. "Have you considered any of the ramifications if it turns out that the child isn't a mule but a genuine mutation?" Cap had, although he did not tell Hockstetter that. It raised the interesting question of eugenics... the potentially explosive question of eugenics, with its lingering connotations of Nazism and superraces-all the things Americans had fought World War II to put an end to. But it was one thing to sink a philosophical well and produce a gusher of bullshit about usurping the power of God and quite another to produce laboratory evidence that the offspring of Lot Six parents might be human torches, levitators, tele-or telempaths, or God only knew what else. Ideals were cheap things to hold as long as there were no solid arguments for their overthrow. If there were, what then? Human breeding farms? As crazy as it sounded, Cap could visualize it. It could be the key to everything. World peace, or world domination, and when you got rid of the trick mirrors of rhetoric and bombast, weren't they really the same thing?

It was a whole can of worms. The possibilities stretched a dozen years into the future. Cap knew the best he himself could realistically hope for was six months, but it might be enough to set policy-to survey the land on which the tracks would be laid and the railroad would run. It would be his legacy to the country and to the world. Measured against this, the lives of a runaway college instructor and his ragamuffin daughter were less than dust in the wind.

The girl could not be tested and observed with any degree of validity if she was constantly drugged, but her father would be their hostage to fortune. And on the few occasions they wanted to run tests on him, the reverse would hold. It was a simple system of levers. And as Archimedes had observed, a lever long enough would move the world.

The intercom buzzed.

"John Rainbird is here," the new girl said. Her usual bland receptionist's tone was threadbare enough to show the fear beneath. On that one I don't blame you, babe, Cap thought. "Send him in, please."

2

Same old Rainbird.

He came in slowly, dressed in a brown and balding leather jacket over a faded plaid shirt. Old and scuffed Dingos peeked out from beneath the cuff's of his faded straight-leg jeans. The top of his huge head seemed almost to brush the ceiling. The gored ruin of his empty eye-socket made Cap shudder inwardly.

"Cap," he said, and sat down. "I have been in the desert too long."

"I've heard about your Flagstaff house," Cap said. "And your shoe collection."

John Rainbird only stared at him unblinkingly with his good eye.

"How come I never see you in anything but those old shitkickers?" Cap asked.

Rainbird smiled thinly and said nothing. The old unease filled Cap and he found himself wondering again how much Rainbird knew, and why it bothered him so much.

"I have a job for you," he said.

"Good. Is it the one I want?"

Cap looked at him, surprised, considering, and then said, "I think it is."

"Then tell me, Cap."

Cap outlined the plan that would bring Andy and Charlie McGee to Longmont. It didn't take long.

"Can you use the gun?" he asked when he was finished.

"I can use any gun. And your plan is a good one. It will succeed." "How nice of you to give it your stamp of approval," Cap said. He tried for light irony and only succeeded in sounding petulant. God damn the man anyway. "And I will fire the gun," Rainbird said. "On one condition." Cap stood up, planted his hands on his desk, which was littered with components from the McGee file, and leaned toward Rainbird.

"No," he said. "You don't make conditions with me:"

"I do this time," Rainbird said. "But you will find it an easy one to fulfill, I think."

"No," Cap repeated. Suddenly his heart was hammering in his chest, although with fear or anger he was not sure. "You misunderstand. I am in charge of this agency and this facility. I am your superior. I believe you spent enough time in the army to understand the concept of a superior officer."

"Yes," Rainbird said, smiling, "I scragged one or two in my time. Once directly on Shop orders. Your orders, Cap."

"Is that a threat?" Cap cried. Some part of him was aware that he was overreacting, but he seemed unable to help himself. "God damn you, is that a threat? If it is, I think you've lost your senses completely! If I decide I don't want you to leave this building, all I have to do is press a button! There are thirty men who can fire that rifle-"

"But none can fire it with such assurance as this one-eyed red nigger," Rainbird said. His gentle tone had not changed. "You think you have them now, Cap, but they are will-o'-the-wisps. Whatever gods there are may not want you to have them. They may not want you to set them down in your rooms of deviltry and emptiness. You have thought you had them before." He pointed to the file material heaped on the library trolley and then to the blue-backed folder. "I've read the material. And I've read your Dr. Hockstetter's report."

"The devil you have!" Cap exclaimed, but he could see the truth in Rainbird's face. He had. Somehow he had. Who gave it to him? he raged. Who?

"Oh yes," Rainbird said. "I have what I want, when I want it. People give it to me. I think... it must be my pretty face." His smile widened and became suddenly, horribly predatory. His good eye rolled in its socket.

"What are you saying to me?" Cap asked. He wanted a glass of water.

"Just that I have had a long time in Arizona to walk and smell the winds that blow... and for you, Cap, it smells bitter, like the wind off an alkali flat. I had time to do a lot of reading and a lot of thinking. And what I think is that I may be the only man in all the world who can surely bring those two here. And it may be that I am the only man in all the world who can do something with the little girl once she's here. Your fat report, your Thorazine and your Orasin-there may be more here than drugs can cope with. More dangers than you can understand."

Hearing Rainbird was like hearing the ghost of Wanless, and Cap was now in the grip of such fear and such fury that he couldn't speak.

"I will do all this," Rainbird said kindly. "I will bring them here and you will do all your tests." He was like a father giving a child permission to play with some new toy. "On the condition that you give the girl to me for disposal when you are finished with her."

"You're mad," Cap whispered. "How right you are," Rainbird said, and laughed. "So are you. Mad as a hatter. You sit here and make your plans for controlling a force beyond your comprehension. A force that belongs only to the gods themselves... and to this one little girl." "And what's to stop me from having you erased? Right here and now?"

"My word," Rainbird said, "that if I disappear, such a shockwave of revulsion and indignation will run through this country within the month that Watergate will look like the filching of penny candy in comparison. My word that if I disappear, the Shop will ceased to exist within six weeks, and that within six months you will stand before a judge for sentencing on crimes serious enough to keep you behind bars for the rest of your life." He smiled again, showing crooked tombstone teeth. "Do not doubt me, Cap. My days in this reeking, putrescent vineyard have been long, and the vintage would be a bitter one indeed."

Cap tried to laugh. What came out was a choked snarl.

"For over ten years I have been putting my nuts and forage by," Rainbird said serenely, "like any animal that has known winter and remembers it. I have such a potpourri, Cap-photos, tapes, Xerox copies of documents that would make the blood of our good friend John Q. Public run cold."

"None of that is possible," Cap said, but he knew Rainbird was not bluffing, and he felt as if a cold, invisible hand were pressing down on his chest.

"Oh, very possible," Rainbird said. "For the last three years I've been in a state of information passing-gear, because for the last three years I've been able to tap into your computer whenever I liked. On a time-sharing basis, of course, which makes it expensive, but I have been able to pay. My wages have been very fine, and with investment they have grown. I stand before you, Cap-or sit, which is the truth, but less poetic-as a triumphant example of American free enterprise in action."

"No," Cap said.

"Yes," Rainbird replied. "I am John Rainbird, but I am also the U.S. Bureau for Geological Understudies. Check, if you like. My computer code is AXON. Check the time-sharing codes in your main terminal. Take the elevator. I'll wait." Rainbird crossed his legs and the cuff" of his right pantsleg pulled up, revealing a rip and a bulge in a seam of one of his boots. He looked like a man who could wait out the age, if that were necessary.

Cap's mind was whirling. "Access to the computer on a time-sharing basis, perhaps. That still doesn't tap you into-"

"Go see Dr. Noftzieger," Rainbird said kindly. "Ask him how many ways there are to tap into a computer once you have access on a time-sharing basis. Two years ago, a bright twelve-year-old tapped into the USC computer. And by the way, I know your access code, Cap. It's BROW this year. Last year it was RASP. I thought that was much more appropriate."

Cap sat and looked at Rainbird. His mind had divided, it seemed, had become a three-ring circus. Part of it was marveling that he had never heard John Rainbird say so much at one time. Part of it was trying to grapple with the idea that this maniac knew all of the Shop's business. A third part was remembering a Chinese curse, a curse that sounded deceptively pleasant until you sat down and really thought about it. May you live in interesting times. For the last year and a half he had lived in extremely interesting times. He felt that just one more interesting thing would drive him totally insane.

And then he thought of Wanless again-with dragging, dawning, horror. He felt almost as if... as if... he were turning into Wanless. Beset with demons on every side but helpless to fight them off or even to enlist help.

"What do you want, Rainbird?"

"I've told you already, Cap. I want nothing but your word that my involvement with this girl Charlene McGee will not end with the rifle but begin there. I want to"-Rainbird's eye darkened and became thoughtful, moody, introspective-"I want to know her intimately."

Cap looked at him, horror-struck.

Rainbird understood suddenly, and he shook his head at Cap contemptuously. "Not that intimately. Not in the biblical sense. But I'll know her. She and I are going to be friends, Cap. If she is as powerful as all things indicate, she and I are going to be great friends."

Cap made a sound of humor: not a laugh, exactly; more of a shrill giggle.

The expression of contempt on Rainbird's face did not change. "No, of course you don't think that is possible. You look at my face and you see a monster. You look at my hands and see them covered with the blood you ordered me to spill. But I tell you, Cap, it will happen. The girl has had no friend for going on two years. She has had her father and that is all. You see her as you see me, Cap. It is your great failing. You look, you see a monster. Only in the girl's case, you see a useful monster. Perhaps this is because you are a white man. White men see monsters everywhere. White men look at their own pricks and see monsters." Rainbird laughed again.

Cap had at last begun to calm down and to think reasonably. "Why should I allow it, even if all you say is true? Your days are numbered and we both know it. You've been hunting your own death for twenty years. Anything else has been incidental, only a hobby. You'll find it soon enough. And then it ends for all of us. So why should I give you the pleasure of having what you want?"

"Perhaps it's as you say. Perhaps I have been hunting my own death-a more colorful phrase than I would have expected from you, Cap. Maybe you should have the fear of God put into you more often."

"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...

He hadn't mentioned his find to Charlie. The suitcases were packed. Her continued silence forced him into nervous speech, as if by not talking she was accusing him.

"We're going to hitch a ride into Berlin," he said, "and then we'll get a Greyhound back to New York City. We're going to the offices of the New York Times-"

"But, Daddy, you sent them a letter."

"Honey, they might not have gotten it."

She looked at him in silence for a moment and then said, "Do you think they took it?"

"Of course n-"He shook his head and started again. "Charlie, I just don't know."

Charlie didn't reply. She knelt, closed one of the suitcases, and began fumbling ineffectually with the clasps.

"Let me help you, hon."

"I can do it!" She screamed at him, and then began to cry.

"Charlie, don't," he said. "Please, hon. It's almost over."

"No, it's not," she said, crying harder. "It's never going to be over."

2

There were an even dozen agents round Granther McGee's cabin. They had taken up their postions the night before. They all wore mottled white and green clothing. None of them had been at the Manders farm, and none of them was armed except for John Rainbird, who had the rifle, and Don Jules, who carried a.22 pistol.

"I am taking no chances of having someone panic because of what happened back in New York," Rainbird had told Cap. "That Jamieson still looks as if his balls are hanging around his knees.

Similarly, he would not hear of the agents going armed. Things had a way of happening, and he didn't want to come out of the operation with two corpses. He had handpicked all of the agents, and the one he had chosen to take Andy McGee was Don Jules. Jules was small, thirtyish, silent, morose. He was good at his job. Rainbird knew, because Jules was the only man he had chosen to work with more than once. He was quick and practical. He did not get in the way at critical moments.

"McGee will be out at some point during the day," Rainbird had told him at the briefing. "The girl usually comes out, but McGee always does. If the man comes out alone, I'll take him and Jules will get him out of sight quickly and quietly. If the girl should come out alone, same thing. If they come out together, I'll take the girl and Jules will take McGee. The rest of you are just spear carriers-do you understand that?" Rainbird's eye glared over them. "You're there in case something goes drastically wrong, and that is all. Of course, if something does go drastically wrong, most of you will be running for the lake with your pants on fire. You're along in case that one chance in a hundred turns up where you can do something. Of course, it's understood that you're also along as observers and witnesses in case I fuck up."

This had earned a thin and nervous chuckle.

Rainbird raised one finger. "If any one of you miscues and puts their wind up somehow, I'll personally see that you end up in the lousiest jungle valley of South America I can find-with a cored asshole. Believe that, gentlemen. You are spear carriers in my show. Remember it."

Later, at their "staging area"-an abandoned motel in St. Johnsbury-Rainbird had taken Don Jules aside.

"You have read the file on this man," Rainbird said.

Jules was smoking a Camel. "Yeah."

"You understand the concept of mental domination?"

"Yeah."

"You understand what happened to the two men in Ohio? The men that tried to take his daughter away?" "I worked with George Waring," Jules said evenly. "That guy could burn water making tea." "In this man's outfit, that it not so unusual. I only need us to be clear. You'll need to be very quick." "Yeah, okay."

"He's had a whole winter to rest, this guy. If he gets time to give you a shot, you're a good candidate to spend the next three years of your life in a padded room, thinking you're a bird or a turnip or something."

"All right."

"All right what?"

"I'll be quick. Give it a rest, John."

"There's a good chance that they will come out together," Rainbird said, ignoring him.

"You'll be around the corner of the porch, out of sight of the door where they'll come out. You wait for me to take the girl. Her father will go to her. You'll be behind him. Get him in the neck."

"Sure."

"Don't screw this up, Don."

Jules smiled briefly and smoked. "No," he said.

3

The suitcases were packed. Charlie had put on her coat and her snowpants. Andy shrugged into his own jacket, zipped it, and picked up the suitcases. He didn't feel good, not at all good. He had the jumps. One of his hunches.

"You feel it, too, don't you?" Charlie asked. Her small face was pale and expressionless.

Andy nodded reluctantly.

"What do we do?"

"We hope the feeling's a little early," he said, although in his heart he didn't think it was so. "What else can we do?" "What else can we do?" she echoed. She came to him then and lifted her arms to be picked up, something he could not remember her doing for a long time-maybe two years. It was amazing how time got by, how quickly a child could change, change in front of your eyes with an unobtrusiveness that was nearly terrible.

He put the suitcases down and picked her up and hugged her. She kissed his cheek and then hugged him again, very tightly. "Are you ready?" he asked, setting her down. "I guess so," Charlie said. She was close to tears again. "Daddy... I won't make fires. Not even if they come before we can get away."

"Yes," he said. "That's all right, Charlie. I understand that."

"I love you, Dad."

He nodded. "I love you too, kiddo."

Andy went to the door and opened it. For a moment the sunlight was so bright that he could see nothing at all. Then his pupils contracted and the day cleared before him, bright with melting snow. To his right was Tashmore Pond, dazzling, jaggedly irregular patches of blue water showing between the floating chunks of ice. Straight ahead were pine woods. Through them he could barely see the green shingled roof of the next camp, free of snow at last.

The woods were still, and Andy's feeling of disquiet intensified. Where was the birdsong that had greeted their mornings ever since the winter temperatures had begun to moderate? There was none today... only the drip of snow melting from the branches. He found himself wishing desperately that Granther had put in a phone out here. He had to restrain an urge to shout Who's there? at the top of his lungs. But that would only frighten Charlie more.

"Looks fine," he said. "I think we're still ahead of them... if they're coming at all." "That's good," she said colorlessly. "Let's hit the road, kid," Andy said, and thought for the hundredth time, What else is there to do? and thought again how much he hated them.

Charlie came across the room to him, past the drainer full of dishes they had washed that morning after breakfast. The entire cottage was the way they had found it, spick-and-span. Granther would have been pleased.

Andy slipped an arm around Charlie's shoulders and gave her one more brief hug. Then he picked up the suitcases and they stepped out into the early spring sunshine together.

4

John Rainbird was halfway up a tall spruce one hundred and fifty yards away. He was wearing lineman's spikes on his feet and a lineman's belt held him firmly against the trunk of the tree. When the cabin door opened, he threw the rifle to his shoulder and seated it firmly. Total calm fell over him in a reassuring cloak. Everything became startlingly clear in front of his one good eye. When he lost his other eye, he had suffered a blurring of his depth of perception, but at moments of extreme concentration, like this one, his old, clear seeing came back to him; it was as if the ruined eye could regenerate itself for brief periods.

It was not a long shot, and he would not have wasted a moment's worry if it had been a bullet he was planning to put through the girl's neck-but he was dealing with something far more clumsy, something that jumped the risk element by a factor of ten. Fixed inside the barrel of this specially modified rifle was a dart tipped with an ampul of Orasin, and at this distance there was always a chance it might tumble or veer. Luckily, the day was almost without wind.

If it is the will of the Great Spirit and of my ancestors, Rainbird prayed silently, guide my hands and my eye that the shot may be true.

The girl came out with her father by her side Jules was in it, then. Through the telescopic sight the girl looked as big as a barn door. The parka was a bright blue blaze against the weathered boards of the cabin. Rainbird had a moment to note the suitcases in McGee's hands, to realize they were just in time after all.

The girl's hood was down, the tab of her zipper pulled up only to her breastbone, so that the coat spread open slightly at the throat. The day was warm, and that was in his favor, too.

He tightened down on the trigger and sighted the crosshairs on the base of her throat.

If it is the will-

He squeezed the trigger. There was no explosion, only a hollow phut! and a small curl of smoke from the rifle's breech.

5

They were on the edge of the steps when Charlie suddenly stopped and made a strangled swallowing noise. Andy dropped the suitcases immediately. He had heard nothing, but something was terribly wrong. Something about Charlie had changed.

"Charlie? Charlie?"

He stared at her. She stood as still as a statue, incredibly beautiful against the bright snowfield. Incredibly small. And suddenly he realized what the change was. It was so fundamental, so awful, that he had not been able to grasp it at first.

What appeared to be a long needle was sticking out of Charlie's throat just below the Adam's apple. Her mittened hand groped for it, found it, twisted it to a new and grotesque, upward-jutting angle. A thin trickle of blood began to flow from the wound and down the side of her throat. A flower of blood, small and delicate, stained the collar of her shirt and just touched the edging of fake fur that bordered the zipper of her parka.

"Charlie!" he screamed. He leaped forward and grabbed her arm just as her eyes rolled up and she pitched outward. He let her down to the porch, crying her name over and over. The dart in her throat twinkled brightly in the sun. Her body had the loose, boneless feel of a dead thing. He held her, cradled her, and looked out at the sunshiny woods that seemed so empty-and where no birds sang.

"Who did it?" he screamed. "Who did it? Come out where 1 can see you!"

Don Jules stepped around the corner of the porch. He was wearing Adidas tennis sneakers. He held the.22 in one hand.

"Who shot my daughter?" Andy screamed. Something in his throat vibrated painfully with the force of his scream. He held her to him, so terribly loose and boneless inside her warm blue parka. His fingers went to the dart and pulled it out, starting a fresh trickle of blood.

Get her inside, he thought. Got to get her inside.

Jules approached him and shot him in the back of the neck, much as the actor Booth had once shot a President. For a moment Andy jerked upward on his knees, holding Charlie even more tightly against him. Then he collapsed forward over her.

Jules looked at him closely, then waved the men out of the woods. "Nothing to it," he said to himself as Rainbird came toward the cabin, wading through the sticky, melting snow of late March. "Nothing to it. What was all the fuss about?"

THE BLACKOUT

1

The chain of events that ended in such destruction and loss of life began with a summer storm and the failure of two generators.

The storm came on August 19, almost five months after Andy and Charlie were taken at Granther's camp in Vermont. For ten days the weather had been sticky and still. That August day, the thunderheads began to pile up shortly after noon, but nobody who worked on the grounds of the two handsome antebellum homes which faced each other across the rolling expanse of green lawn and manicured flowerbeds believed that the thunderheads were telling the truth-not the groundsmen astride their Lawnboys, not the woman who was in charge of computer subsections A-E (as well as the computer-room coffee-maker), who took one of the horses and cantered it lovingly along the well-kept bridle paths during her lunch hour, certainly not Cap, who ate a hero sandwich in his air-conditioned office and went right on working on next year's budget, oblivious of the heat and humidity outside.

Perhaps the only person in the Shop compound at Longmont that day who thought it really would rain was the man who had been named for the rain. The big Indian drove in at twelve-thirty, prefatory to clocking in at one. His bones, and the shredded hollow where his left eye had been, ached when rain was on the way.

He was driving a very old and rusty Thunderbird with a D parking sticker on the windshield. He was dressed in orderly's whites. Before he got out of the car, he put on an embroidered eyepatch. He wore it when he was on the job, because of the girl, but only then. It bothered him. It was only the patch that made him think about the lost eye.

There were four parking lots inside the Shop enclave. Rainbird's personal car, a new yellow Cadillac that ran on diesel fuel, bore an A sticker. A was the VIP parking lot, located beneath the southernmost of the two plantation houses: An underground tunnel-and-elevator system connected the VIP lot directly with the computer room, the situation rooms, the extensive Shop library and newsrooms, and, of course, the Visitors" Quarters-a nondescript name for the complex of laboratories and nearby apartments where Charlie McGee and her father were being kept.

The B lot was for second-echelon employees; it was farther away. C parking lot was for secretaries, mechanics, electricians, and the like; it was farther away still. D lot was for unskilled employees-spear carriers, in Rainbird's own terms. It was almost half a mile from anything, and always filled with a sad and motley collection of Detroit rolling iron only a step and a half away from the weekly demo derby at Jackson Plains, the nearby stock-car track.

The bureaucratic pecking order, Rainbird thought, locking his wreck of a T-bird and tilting his head up to look at the thunderheads. The storm was coming. It would arrive around four o'clock, he reckoned.

He began to walk toward the small Quonset but set tastefully back in a grove of sugarpines where low-level employees, Class Vs and VIs, punched in. His whites flapped around him. A gardener putted by him on one of the Groundskeeping Department's dozen or so riding lawnmowers. A gaily colored sun parasol floated above the seat. The gardener took no notice of Rainbird; that was also part of the bureaucratic pecking order. If you were a Class IV, a Class V became invisible. Not even Rainbird's half-destroyed face caused much comment; like every other government agency, the Shop hired enough vets to look good. Max Factor had little to teach the U.S. government about good cosmetics. And it went without saying that a vet with some visible disability-a prosthetic arm, a motorized wheelchair, a scrambled face-was worth any three vets who looked "normal." Rainbird knew men who had had their minds and spirits mauled as badly as his own face had been in the Vietnam traveling house party, men who would have been happy to find a job clerking in a Piggly Wiggly. But they just didn't look right. Not that Rainbird had any sympathy for them. In fact, he found the whole thing rather funny.

Nor was he recognized by any of the people he now worked with as a former Shop agent and hatchet man; he would have sworn to that. Until seventeen weeks ago, he had been only a shadow shape behind his yellow Cadillac's polarized windshield, just someone else with an A clearance.

"Don't you think you're going overboard with this a bit?" Cap had asked. "The girl has no connection with the gardeners or the steno pool. You're only onstage with her."

Rainbird shook his head. "All it would take is a single slip. One person to mention, just casually, that the friendly orderly with the messed-up face parks his car in the VIP lot and changes to his whites in the executive washroom. What I am trying to build here is a sense of trust, that trust to be based on the idea that we're both outsiders-both freaks, if you will-buried in the bowels of the KGB's American branch."

Cap hadn't liked that; he didn't like anyone taking cheap shots at the Shop's methods, particularly in this case, where the methods were admittedly extreme. "Well, you're sure doing one hell of a job," Cap had answered.

And to that there was no satisfactory answer, because in fact, he wasn't doing a hell of a job. The girl had not done so much as light a match in all the time she had been here. And the same could be said for her father, who had demonstrated not the slightest sign of any mental-domination ability, if the ability still existed within him. More and more they were coming to doubt that it did.

The girl fascinated Rainbird. The first year he had been with the Shop, he had taken a series of courses not to be found in any college curriculum wiretapping, car theft, unobtrusive search, a dozen others. The only one that had engaged Rainbird's attention fully was the course in safecracking, taught by an aging burglar named G. M. Rammaden. Rammaden had been sprung from an institution in Atlanta for the specific purpose of teaching this craft to new Shop agents. He was supposed to be the best in the business, and Rainbird would not have doubted that, although he believed that by now he was almost Rammaden's equal.

Rammaden, who had died three years ago (Rainbird had sent flowers to his funeral-what a comedy life could sometimes be!), had taught him about Skidmore locks, about square-door boxes, about secondary locking devices that can permanently freeze a safe's tumblers if the combination dial is knocked off with a hammer and chisel; he had taught them about barrel boxes, and niggerheads, and cutting keys; the many uses of graphite; how you could take a key impression with a Brillo pad and how to make bathtub nitroglycerine and how to peel a box from the back, one layer at a time.

Rainbird had responded to G. M. Rammaden with a cold and cynical enthusiasm.