hink! he screamed at himself. What do you do? What do you-

"She just woke up," Neary said softly.

They both stared intently at the monitor. Charlie had swung her legs over onto the floor and was sitting with her head down, her palms on her cheeks, her hair obscuring her face. After a moment she got up and went into the bathroom, face blank, eyes mostly closed-more asleep than awake, Hockstetter guessed.

Neary flicked a switch and the bathroom monitor came on. Now the picture was clear and sharp in the light of the fluorescent bar. Hockstetter expected her to urinate, but Charlie just stood inside the door, looking at the toilet.

"Oh Mother of Mary, look at that," Neary murmured.

The water in the toilet bowl had begun to steam slightly. This went on for more than a minute (one-twenty-one in Neary's log), and then Charlie went to the toilet, flushed it, urinated, flushed it again, drank two glasses of water, and went back to bed. This time her sleep seemed easier, deeper. Hockstetter glanced at the thermometer and saw it had dropped four degrees. As he watched, it dropped another degree, to sixty-nine-just one degree above the suite's normal temperature.

He remained with Neary until after midnight.

"I'm going home to bed. You'll get this written up, won't you?"

"That's what I get paid for," Neary said stolidly.

Hockstetter went home. The next day he wrote a memo suggesting that any further gains in knowledge that further testing might provide ought to be balanced against the potential hazards, which in his opinion were growing too fast for comfort.

12

Charlie remembered little of the night. She remembered being hot, getting up, getting rid of the heat. She remembered the dream but only vaguely-a sense of freedom.

(up ahead was the light-the end of the forest, open land where she and Necromancer would ride forever)

mingled with a sense of fear and a sense of loss. It had been his face, it had been John's face, all along. And perhaps she had known it. Perhaps she had known that

(the woods are burning don't hurt the horses o please don't hurt the horses)

all along.

When she woke up the next morning, her fear, confusion, and desolation had begun their perhaps inevitable change into a bright, hard gem of anger.

He better be out of the way on Wednesday, she thought. He just better. If it's true about what he did, he better not come near me or Daddy on Wednesday.

13

Late that morning Rainbird came in, rolling his wagon of cleaning products, mops, sponges, and rags. His white orderly's uniform flapped softly around him.

"Hi, Charlie," he said.

Charlie was on the sofa, looking at a picture book. She glanced up, her face pale and unsmiling in that first moment... cautious. The skin seemed stretched too tightly over her cheekbones. Then she smiled. But it was not, Rainbird thought, her usual smile.

"Hello, John."

"You don't look so great this morning, Charlie, you should forgive me for sayin."

"I didn't sleep very well."

"Oh yeah?" He knew she hadn't. That fool Hockstetter was almost foaming at the mouth because she'd popped the temperature five or six degrees in her sleep. "I'm sorry to hear that. Is it your dad?"

"I guess so." She closed her book and stood up. "I think I'll go and lie down for a while. I just don't feel like talking or anything."

"Sure. Gotcha."

He watched her go, and when the bedroom door had clicked shut, he went into the kitchen to fill his floorbucket. Something about the way she had looked at him. The smile. He didn't like it. She'd had a bad night, yes, okay. Everyone has them from time to time, and the next morning you snap at your wife or stare right through the paper or whatever. Sure. But... something inside had begun to jangle an alarm. It had been weeks since she had looked at him that way. She hadn't come to him this morning, eager and glad to see him, and he didn't like that, either. She had kept her own space today. It disturbed him. Maybe it was just the aftermath of a bad night, and maybe the bad dreams of the night before had just been caused by something she ate, but it disturbed him all the same.

And there was something else nibbling at him: Cap had been down to see her late yesterday afternoon. He had never done that before.

Rainbird set down his bucket and hooked the mop squeegee over its rim. He dunked the mop, wrung it out, and began to mop the floor in long, slow strokes. His mauled face was calm and at rest.

Have you been putting a knife in my back, Cap? Figure you've got enough? Or maybe you just went chickenshit on me.

If that last was true, then he had badly misjudged Cap. Hockstetter was one thing. Hockstetter's experience with Senate committees and subcommittees was almost zilch; a piddle here and a piddle there. Corroborative stuff: He could allow himself the luxury of indulging his fear. Cap couldn't. Cap would know there was no such thing as sufficient evidence, especially when you were dealing with something as potentially explosive (pun certainly intended) as Charlie McGee. And it wasn't just funding Cap would be asking for; when he got before that closed session, the most dread and mystic of all bureaucratic phrases would fall from his lips: long-term funding. And in the background, lurking unspoken but potent, the implication of eugenics. Rainbird guessed that in the end, Cap would find it impossible to avoid having a group of senators down here to watch Charlie perform. Maybe they should be allowed to bring their kids, Rainbird thought, mopping and rinsing. Better than the trained dolphins at Sea World.

Cap would know he needed all the help he could get.

So why had he come to see her last night? Why was he rocking the boat?

Rainbird squeezed his mop and watched dirty gray water run back into the bucket. He looked through the open kitchen door at the closed door of Charlie's bedroom. She had shut him out and he didn't like that.

It made him very, very nervous.

14

On that early October Monday night, a moderate windstorm came up from the Deep South, sending black clouds flying raggedly across a full moon that lolled pregnantly just above the horizon. The first leaves fell, rattling across the neatly manicured lawns and grounds for the indefatigable corps of groundskeepers to remove in the morning. Some of them swirled into the duckpond, where they floated like small boats. Autumn had come to Virginia again.

In his quarters, Andy was watching TV and still getting over his headache. The numb spots on his face had diminished in size but had not disappeared. He could only hope he would be ready by Wednesday afternoon. If things worked as he had planned, he could keep the number of times he would have to actively push to a bare minimum. If Charlie had got his note, and if she was able to meet him at the stables across the way... then she would become his push, his lever, his weapon. Who was going to argue with him when he had the equivalent of a nuclear rifle in his possession?

Cap was at home in Longmont Hills. As on the night Rainbird had visited him, he had a snifter of brandy, and music was coming from the stereo at low volume. Chopin tonight. Cap was sitting on the couch. Across the room, leaning below a pair of van Gogh prints, was his old and scuffed golf bag. He had fetched it from the basement, where a rickrack of sports equipment had built up over the twelve years he had lived here with Georgia, while not on assignment somewhere else in the world. He had brought the golf bag into the living room because he couldn't seem to get golf off his mind lately. Golf, or snakes.

He had brought the golf bag up meaning to take out each of the irons and his two putters and look them over, touch them, see if that wouldn't ease his mind. And then one of the irons had seemed to... well, it was funny (ridiculous, in fact), but one of the irons had seemed to move. As if it wasn't a golf club at all but a snake, a poison snake that had crawled in there-

Cap dropped the bag against the wall and scuttled away. Half a glass of brandy had stopped the minute shakes in his hands. By the time he finished the glass, he might be able to tell himself they had never trembled at all.

He started the glass on its way to his mouth and then halted. There it was again! Movement... or just a trick of his eyes?

Trick of his eyes, most definitely. There were no snakes in his damned golf bag. Just clubs he hadn't been using enough lately. Too busy. And he was a pretty good golfer, too. No Nicklaus or Tom Watson, hell no, but he could keep it on the course. Not always slicing, like Puck. Cap didn't like to slice the ball, because then you were in the rough, the tall grass, and sometimes there were-

Get hold of yourself. Just get hold of yourself. Is you still the Captain or is you ain't?

The trembling was back in his fingers again. What had done this? What in God's name had done this? Sometimes it seemed that there was an explanation, a perfectly reasonable one-something, perhaps, that someone had said and he just... couldn't remember. But at other times

(like now Jesus Christ like now) it felt as if he were on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It felt as if his brain was being pulled apart like warm tafy by these alien thoughts he couldn't get rid of.

(is you the Captain or is you ain't?)

Cap suddenly threw his brandy glass into the fireplace, where it shattered like a bomb. A strangled sound-a sob-escaped his tight throat like something rotten that had to be sicked up whatever the miserable cost. Then he made himself cross the room (and he went at a drunken, stiltlike lurch), grab the strap of his golf bag (again something seemed to move and shift in there... to shiffffft... and hissssss) and slip it over his shoulder. He hauled it back into the shadow-draped cavern of the cellar, going on nothing but guts, drops of sweat perched huge and clear on his forehead. His face was frozen in a grimace of fear and determination.

Nothing there but golf clubs, nothing there but golf clubs, his mind chanted over and over again, and at every step of the way he expected something long and brown, something with beady black eyes and small sharp fangs dripping poison, to slither out of the bag and jab twin hypos of death into his neck.

Back in his own living room he felt much better. Except for a nagging headache, he felt much better.

He could think coherently again...

Almost.

He got drunk.

And in the morning he felt better again.

For a while.

15

Rainbird spent that windy Monday night gathering information. Disturbing information. First he went in and talked to Neary, the man who had been watching the monitors when Cap paid his visit to Charlie the night before.

"I want to see the videotapes," Rainbird said.

Neary didn't argue. He set Rainbird up in a small room down the hall with the Sunday tapes and a Sony deck complete with close-up and freeze-frame features. Neary was glad to be rid of him and only hoped that Rainbird wouldn't be coming back and wanting something else. The girl was bad enough. Rainbird, in his own reptilian way, was somehow worse.

The tapes were three-hour Scotch jobs, marked from 0000 to 0300 and so on. Rainbird found the one with Cap on it and watched it four times, not moving except to rewind the tape at the point where Cap. said; "Well, I'll be going now. But I'll be seeing you, Charlie. And don't worry."

But there was plenty in that tape that worried John Rainbird. He. didn't like the way Cap looked. He seemed to have got older; at times while he was talking to Charlie he seemed to lose the thread of what he was saying, like a man on the edge of senility. His eyes had a vague, bemused look that was uncannily similar to the look Rainbird associated with the onset of combat fatigue, which a comrade-in-arms had once aptly dubbed The Brain Squitters and Trots.

I think I ought to be able to arrange it... by Wednesday. Yes, by Wednesday, for sure.

Now why in the name of God had he said that?

Setting up an expectation like that in the kid's mind was the surest way Rainbird could think of to blow further testing right out of the water. The obvious conclusion was that Cap was playing his own little game-intriguing in the best Shop tradition.

But Rainbird didn't believe it. Cap didn't look like a man engaged in an intrigue. He looked like a man who was profoundly fucked up. That remark about Charlie's father playing golf, for instance. That had come right out of left field. It bore on nothing they had said before and nothing they said afterward. Rainbird toyed briefly with the idea that it was some sort of code phrase, but that was patently ridiculous. Cap knew that everything that went on in Charlie's rooms was monitored and recorded, subject to almost constant review. He was capable of disguising a trip phrase better than that. A remark about golf. It just hung there, irrelevant and puzzling.

And then there was the last thing. Rainbird played it over and over. Cap pauses. Oh, almost forgot. And then he hands her something that she looks at curiously and then puts away in the pocket of her robe.

With Rainbird's finger on the buttons of the Sony VCR, Cap said Oh, almost forgot half a dozen times. He passed the thing to her half a dozen times. At first Rainbird thought it was a stick of gum, and then he used the freeze-frame and zoom gadgets. That convinced him that it was, very likely, a note.

Cap, what the fuck are you up to?

16

He spent the rest of that night and the early hours of Tuesday morning at a computer console, calling up every scrap of information he could think of on Charlie McGee, trying to make out some kind of pattern. And there was nothing. His head began to ache from eyestrain.

He was getting up to shut of the lights when a sudden thought, a totally off-the-wall connection, occurred to him. It had to do not with Charlie but with the portly, drugged-out cipher that was her father.

Pynchot. Pynchot had been in charge of Andy McGee, and last week Herman Pynchot had killed himself in one of the most grisly ways Rainbird could imagine. Obviously unbalanced. Crackers. Toys in the attic. Cap takes Andy to the funeralmaybe a little strange when you really stopped to think about it, but in no way remarkable.

The Cap starts to act a little weird-talking about golf and passing notes.

That's ridiculous. He's tipped over.

Rainbird stood with his hand on the light switches. The computer-console screen glowed a dull green, the color of a freshly dug emerald.

Who says he's tipped over? Him?

There was another strange thing here as well, Rainbird suddenly realized. Pynchot had given up on Andy, had decided to send him to the Maui compound. If there was nothing Andy could do that would demonstrate what Lot Six was capable of, there was no reason to keep him around at all... and it would be safer to separate him from Charlie. Fine. But then Pynchot abruptly changes his mind and decides to schedule another run of tests.

Then Pynchot decides to clean out the garbage disposal... while it's still running.

Rainbird walked back to the computer console. He paused, thinking, than tapped HELLO COMPUTER/QUERY STATUS ANDREW MCGEE 14112/FURTHER TESTING/MAUI INSTALLATION/Q4

PROCESS, the computer flashed. And a moment later: HELLO RAINBIRD/ANDREW MCGEE 14112 NO FURTHER TESTING/AUTHORIZATION/ "STARLING'/SCHEDULED DEPARTURE FOR MAUI 1500 HOURS OCTOBER 9/AUTHORIZATION "STARLING'/ANDREWS AFB-DURBAN (ILL) AFBKALAMI AIRFIELD (HI)/BREAK

Rainbird glanced at his watch. October 9 was Wednesday. Andy was leaving Longmont for Hawaii tomorrow afternoon. Who said so? Authorization Starling said so, and that was Cap himself. But this was the first Rainbird knew of it.

His fingers danced over the keys again.

QUERY PROBABILITY ANDREW MCGEE 14112/SUPPOSED MENTAL DOMINATION ABILITY/CROSS-REF HERMON PYNCHOT

He had to pause to look up Pynchot's code number in the battered and sweat-stained code book he had folded into his back pocket before coming down here.

14409 Q4

PROCESS, the computer replied, and then remained blank so long that Rainbird began to think that he had mis-programmed and would end up with nothing but a "609" for his trouble.

Then the computer flashed ANDREW MCGEE 14112/MENTAL DOMINATION PROBABILITY 35%/CROSS-REF HERMAN PYNCHOT/BREAK

Thirty-five percent?

How was that possible?

All right, Rainbird thought. Let's leave Pynchot out of the goddam equation and see what happens.

He tapped out QUERY PROBABILITY ANDREW MCGEE 14112/SUPPOSED MENTAL DOMINATION ABILITY Q4

PROCESS, the computer flashed, and this time its response came within a space of fifteen seconds. ANDREW MCGEE 14112/MENTAL DOMINATION PROBABILITY 2%/ BREAK

Rainbird leaned back and closed his good eye and felt a kind of triumph through the sour thud in his head. He had asked the important questions backward, but that was the price humans paid for their intuitive leaps, leaps a computer knew nothing about, even though it had been programmed to say "Hello," "Good-bye," "I am sorry [programmer's] name," "That is too bad," and "Oh shit."

The computer didn't believe there was much of a probability Andy had retained his mentaldomination ability... until you added in the Pynchot factor. Then the percent jumped halfway to the moon.

He tapped QUERY WHY SUPPOSED MENTAL DOMINATION ABILITY ANDREW MCGEE 14112 (PROBABILITY) RISES FROM 2% to 35% WHEN CROSS-REFERENCED W/HERMAN PYNCHOT 14409 Q4

PROCESS, the computer answered, and then: HERMAN PYNCHOT 14409 ADJUDGED SUICIDE/ PROBABILITY TAKES INTO ACCOUNT ANDREW MCGEE 14112 MAY HAVE CAUSED SUICIDE/ MENTAL DOMINATION/BREAK

There it was, right here in the banks of the biggest and most sophisticated computer in the Western Hemisphere. Only waiting for someone to ask it the right questions.

Suppose I feed it what I suspect about Cap as a certainty? Rainbird wondered, and decided to go ahead and do it. He dragged out his code book again and looked up Cap's number.

FILE, he tapped. CAPTAIN JAMES HOLLISTER 16040/ATTENDED FUNERAL

OF HERMAN PYNCHOT 14409 W/ANDREW MCGEE 14112 F4

FILED, the computer returned.

FILE, Rainbird tapped back. CAPTAIN JAMES HOLLISTER 16040/CURRENTLY SHOWING SIGNS OF GREAT MENTAL STRESS F4

609, the computer returned. It apparently didn't know "mental stress" from "Shinola."

"Bite my bag," Rainbird muttered, and tried again.

FILE/CAPTAIN JAMES HOLLISTER 16040/CURRENTLY BEHAVING COUNTER TO DIRECTIVES REF CHARLENE MCGEE 14111 F4 FILED

"File it, you whore," Rainbird said. "Let's see about this." His fingers went back to the keys.

QUERY PROBABILITY ANDREW MCGEE 14112/ SUPPOSED MENTAL DOMINATION ABILITY/ CROSS-REF HERMAN PYNCHOT 14409/CROSS-REF CAPTAIN JAMES HOLLISTER 16040 Q4

PROCESS, the computer showed, and Rainbird sat back to wait, watching the screen. Two percent was too low. Thirty-five percent was still not betting odds. But-

The computer now flashed this: ANDREW MCGEE 14112/MENTAL DOMINATION PROBABILITY 90%/CROSS-REF HERMAN PYNCHOT 14409/CROSS-REF CAPTAIN JAMES HOLLISTER 16040 BREAK

Now it was up to ninety percent. And those were betting odds.

And two other things that John Rainbird would have bet on were, one, that what Cap handed to the girl was indeed a note to Charlie from her father and, two, that it contained some sort of escape plan.

"You dirty old son of a bitch," John Rainbird murmured-not without admiration.

Pulling himself to the computer again, Rainbird tapped

600 GOODBYE COMPUTER 600

604 GOODBYE RAINBIRD 604

Rainbird turned off the keyboard and began to chuckle.

17

Rainbird went back to the house where he was staying and fell asleep with his clothes on. He woke up just after noon on Tuesday and called Cap to tell him he wouldn't be in that afternoon. He had come down with a bad cold, possibly the onset of the grippe, and he didn't want to chance passing it on to Charlie.

"Hope that won't keep you from going to San Diego tomorrow," Cap said briskly.

"San Diego?" "Three files," Cap said. "Top secret. I need a courier. You're it. Your plane leaves from Andrews at oh-seven-hundred tomorrow."

Rainbird thought fast. This was more of Andy McGee's work. McGee knew about him. Of course he did. That had been in the note to Charlie, along with whatever crazy escape plan McGee had concocted. And that explained why the girl had acted so strangely yesterday. Either going to Herman Pynchot's funeral or coming back, Andy had given Cap a good hard shove and Cap had spilled his guts about everything. McGee was scheduled to fly out of Andrews tomorrow afternoon; now Cap told him that he, Rainbird was going tomorrow morning. McGee was using Cap to get him safely out of the way first. He was-

"Rainbird? Are you there?"

"I'm here," he said. "Can you send someone else? I feel pretty punky, Cap."

"No one I trust as well as you," Cap replied. "This stuff is dynamite. We wouldn't want... any snake in the grass to... to get it."

"Did you say 'snakes'?" Rainbird asked.

"Yes! Snakes!" Cap fairly screamed.

McGee had pushed him, all right, and some sort of slow-motion avalanche was going on inside of Cap Hollister. Rainbird suddenly had the feeling-no, the intuitive certainty-that if he refused Cap and just kept hammering away, Cap would blow up... the way

Pynchot had blown up.

Did he want to do that?

He decided he did not.

"All right," he said. "I'll be on the plane. Oh-seven-hundred. And all the goddam antibiotics I can swallow. You're a bastard, Cap."

"I can prove my parentage beyond a shadow of a doubt," Cap said, but the badinage was forced and hollow. He sounded relieved and shaky.

"Yeah, I'll bet."

"Maybe you'll get in a round of golf while you're out there."

"I don't play-"Golf. He had mentioned golf to Charlie as well-golf and snakes. Somehow those two things were part of the weird merry-go-round McGee had set in motion in Cap's brain. "Yes, maybe I will," he said.

"Get to Andrews by oh-six-thirty," Cap said, "and ask for Dick Folsom. He's Major Puckeridge's aide." "All right," Rainbird said. He had no intention of being anywhere near Andrews Air Force Base tomorrow. "Good-bye, Cap." He hung up, then sat on the bed. He pulled on his old desert boots and started planning.

18

HELLO COMPUTER/QUERY STATUS JOHN RAINBIRD 14222/ANDREW AFB (DC) TO SAN DIEGO (CA) FINAL DESTINATION/Q9

HELLO CAP/STATUS JOHN RAINBIRD 14222/ ANDREWS (DC) TO SAN DIEGO (CA) FINAL DESTINATION/LEAVES ANDREWS AFB 0700HRS EST/STATUS OK/BREAK

Computers are children, Rainbird thought, reading this message. He had simply punched in Cap's new code-which Cap would have been stunned to know he had and as far as the computer was concerned, he was Cap. He began to whistle tunelessly. It was just after sunset, and the Shop moved somnolently along the channels of routine.

FILE TOP SECRET

CODE PLEASE

CODE 19180, the computer returned. READY TO FILE TOP SECRET

Rainbird hesitated only briefly and then tapped

FILE/JOHN RAINBIRD 14222/ANDREWS (DC) TO SAN DIEGO (CA) FINAL DESTINATION/CANCEL/ CANCEL/CANCEL F9 (19180) FILED

Then, using the code book, Rainbird told the computer whom to inform of the cancellation: Victor Puckeridge and his aide, Richard Folsom. These new instructions would be in the midnight telex to Andrews, and the plane on which he was to hitch a ride would simply take off without him. No one would know a thing, including Cap.

600 GOODBYE COMPUTER 600

604 GOODBYE CAP 604

Rainbird pushed back from the keyboard. It would be perfectly possible to put a stop to the whole thing tonight, of course. But that would not be conclusive. The computer would back him up to a certain degree, but computer probabilities do not butter any bread. Better to stop them after the thing had begun, with everything hanging out. More amusing, too.

The whole thing was amusing. While they had been watching the girl, the man had regained his ability or had successfully hidden it from them all along. He was likely ditching his medication. Now he was running Cap as well, which means that he was only one step away from running the organization that had taken him prisoner in the first place. It really was quite funny; Rainbird had learned that endgames often were.

He didn't know exactly what McGee had planned, but he could guess. They would go to Andrews, all right, only Charlie would be with them. Cap could get her off the Shop grounds without much trouble-Cap and probably no one else on earth. They would go to Andrews, but not to Hawaii. It might be that Andy had planned for them to disappear into Washington, D.C. Or maybe they would get off the plane at Durban and Cap would be programmed to ask for a staff car. In that case it would be Shytown they would disappear into-only to reappear in screaming Chicago Tribune headlines a few days later.

He had played briefly with the idea of not standing in their way at all. That would be amusing, too. He guessed that Cap would end up in a mental institution, raving about golf clubs and snakes in the grass, or dead by his own hand. As for the Shop: might as well imagine what would happen to an anthill with a quart jar of nitroglycerine planted beneath it. Rainbird guessed that no more than five months after the press got its first whiff" of the Strange Ordeal of the Andrew McGee Family, the Shop would cease to exist. He felt no fealty to the Shop and never had. He was his own man, crippled soldier of fortune, copper-skinned angel of death, and the status quo here didn't mean bullrag in a pasture to him. It was not the Shop that owned his loyalty at this point.

It was Charlie.

The two of them had an appointment. He was going to look into her eyes, and she was going to look into his... and it might well be that they would step out together, in flames. The fact that he might be saving the world from some almost unimaginable armageddon by killing her had not played a part in his calculations, either. He owed the world no more fealty than he did the Shop. It was the world as much as the Shop that had cast him rootless from a closed desert society that might have been his only salvation... or, lacking that, have turned him into a harmless Sterno-guzzling Injun Joe pumping gas at a 76 station or selling fake kachina dolls at a shitty little roadside stand somewhere along the highway between Flagstaff and Phoenix.

But Charlie, Charlie!

They had been locked in a long waltz of death since that endless night of darkness during the power blackout. What he had only suspected that early morning in Washington when he had done Wanless had developed into an irrefutable certainty: the girl was his. But it would be an act of love, not of destruction, because the converse was almost certainly true as well.

It was acceptable. In many ways he wanted to die. And to die at her hands, in her flames, would be an act of contrition... and possibly of absolution. Once she and her father were together again, she would become a loaded gun... no, a loaded flamethrower. He would watch her and he would let the two of them get together. What would happen then? Who knew? And wouldn't knowing spoil the fun?

19

That night Rainbird went to Washington and found a hungry lawyer who worked late hours. To this lawyer he gave three hundred dollars in small bills. And in the lawyer's office, John Rainbird neatened his few affairs in order to be ready for the next day.

1

At six o'clock on Wednesday morning, Charlie McGee got up, took off" her nightgown, and stepped into the shower. She washed her body and her hair, then turned the water to cold and stood shivering under the spray for a minute more. She toweled dry and then dressed carefully-cotton underpants, silk slip, dark-blue knee socks, her denim jumper. She finished by putting on her scuffed and comfortable loafers.

She hadn't thought she would be able to sleep at all last night; she had gone to bed full of fear and nervous excitement. But she had slept. And dreamed incessantly not of Necromancer and the run through the woods but of her mother. That was peculiar, because she didn't think of her mother as often as she used to; at times her face seemed misty and distant in her memory, like a faded photograph. But in her dreams of last night, her mother's faceher laughing eyes, her warm, generous mouth-had been so clear that Charlie might last have seen her just the day before.

Now, dressed and ready for the day, some of the unnatural lines of strain had gone out. of her face and she seemed calm. On the wall beside the door leading into the kitchenette there was a call button and a speaker grille set into a brushed-chrome plate just below the light switch. She pressed the button now.

"Yes, Charlie?"

She knew the owner of the voice only as Mike. At seven o'clock-about half an hour from now-Mike went off and Louis came on. "I want to go out to the stables this afternoon," she said, "and see Necromancer. Will you tell someone?"

"I'll leave a note for Dr. Hockstetter, Charlie."

"Thank you." She paused, just for a moment. You got to know their voices. Mike, Louis, Gary. You got pictures of how they must look in your mind, the way you got pictures of how the DJs you heard on the radio must look. You got to like them. She suddenly realized that she would almost certainly never talk to Mike again.

"Was there something else, Charlie?"

"No, Mike. Have... have a good day."

"Why, thank you, Charlie." Mike sounded both surprised and pleased. "You too." She turned on the TV and tuned to a cartoon show that came on every morning over the cable. Popeye was inhaling spinach through his pipe and getting ready to beat the sauce out of Bluto. One o'clock seemed an age away.

What if Dr. Hockstetter said, she couldn't go out? On the TV screen, they were showing a cutaway view of Popeye's muscles. There were about sixteen turbine engines in each one.

He better not say that. He better not. Because I'm going. One way or the other, I'm going.

2

Andy's rest hadn't been as easy or as healing as his daughter's. He had tossed and turned, sometimes dozing, then starting out of the doze just as it began to deepen because the terrible leading edge of some nightmare touched his mind. The only one he could remember was Charlie staggering down the aisle between the stalls in the stable, her head gone and red-blue flames spouting from her neck instead of blood.

He had meant to stay in bed until seven o'clock, but when the digital face of the clock beside the bed got to 6:15, he could wait no longer. He swung out and headed for the shower.

Last night at just past nine, Pynchot's former assistant, Dr. Nutter, had come in with Andy's walking papers. Nutter, a tall, balding man in his late fifties, was bumbling and avuncular. Sorry to be losing you; hope you enjoy your stay in Hawaii; wish I was going with you, ha-ha; please sign this.

The paper Nutter wanted him to sign was a list of his few personal effects (including his keyring, Andy noticed with a nostalgic pang). He would be expected to inventory them once in Hawaii and initial another sheet that said that they had, indeed, been returned. They wanted him to sign a paper concerning his personal effects after they had murdered his wife, chased him and Charlie across half the country, and then kidnapped and held them prisoner: Andy found that darkly hilarious and Kafkaesque. I sure wouldn't want to lose any of those keys, he thought, scrawling his signature; I might need one of them to open a bottle of soda with sometime, right, fellows?

There was also a carbon of the Wednesday schedule, neatly initialed by Cap at the bottom of the page. They would be leaving at twelve-thirty, Cap picking Andy up at his quarters. He and Cap would proceed toward the eastern checkpoint, passing Parking Area C, where they would pick up an escort of two cars. They would then drive to Andrews and board the plane at approximately fifteen hundred hours. There would be one stop for refueling-at Durban Air Force Base, near Chicago.

All right, Andy thought. Okay.

He dressed and began to move about the apartment, packing his clothes, shaving tackle, shoes, bedroom slippers. They had provided him with two Samsonite suitcases. He remembered to do it all slowly, moving with the careful concentration of a drugged man.

After he found out about Rainbird from Cap, his first thought had been a hope that he would meet him: it would be such a great pleasure to push the man who had shot Charlie with the tranquilizer dart and later betrayed her in even more terrible fashion, to put his gun to his temple and pull the trigger. But he no longer wanted to meet Rainbird. He wanted no surprises of any kind. The numb spots on his face had shrunk to pinpricks, but they were still there-a reminder that if he had to overuse the push, he would very likely kill himself.

He only wanted things to go off smoothly.

His few things were packed all too soon, leaving him with nothing to do but sit and wait. The thought that he would be seeing his daughter again soon was like a small coal of warmth in his brain.

To him too one o'clock seemed an age away.

3

Rainbird didn't sleep at all that night. He arrived back from Washington around five-thirty A.M... garaged his Cadillac, and sat at his kitchen table drinking cup after cup of coffee. He was waiting for a call from Andrews, and until that call came, he would not rest easy. It was still theoretically possible for Cap to have found out what he had done with the computer. McGee had messed up Cap Hollister pretty well, but it still did not pay to underestimate.

Around six-forty-five, the telephone rang. Rainbird set his coffee cup down, rose, went into the living room, and answered it. "Rainbird here." "Rainbird? This is Dick Folsom at Andrews. Major Puckeridge's aide." "You woke me up, man," Rainbird said. "I hope you catch crabs as big as orange crates.

That's an old Indian curse."

"You've been scrubbed," Folsom said. "I guess you knew."

"Yes, Cap called me himself last night."

"I'm sorry," Folsom said. "It's standard operating procedure, that's all."

"Well, you operated in standard fashion. Can I go back to sleep now?"

"Yeah. I envy you." Rainbird uttered the obligatory chuckle and hung up. He went back into the kitchen, picked up his coffee cup, went to the window, looked out, saw nothing.

Floating dreamily through his mind was the Prayer for the Dead.

4

Cap did not arrive in his office that morning until almost ten-thirty, an hour and a half later than usual. He had searched his small Vega from stem to stern before leaving the house. He had become sure during the night that the car was infested with snakes. The search had taken him twenty minutesthe need to make sure there were no rattlers or copperheads (or something even more sinister and exotic) nesting in the darkness of the trunk, dozing on the fugitive warmth of the engine block, curled up in the glove compartment. He had pushed the glove-compartment button with a broomhandle, not wanting to be too close in case some hissing horror should leap out at him, and when a map of Virginia tumbled out of the square hole in the dash, he had nearly screamed.

Then, halfway to the Shop, he had passed the Greenway Golf Course and had pulled over onto the shoulder to watch with a dreamy sort of concentration as the golfers played through the eighth and ninth. Every time one of them sliced into the rough, he was barely able to restrain a compulsion to step out of the car and yell for them to beware of snakes in the tall grass.

At last the blare of a ten-wheeler's airhorn (he had parked with his lefthand wheels still on the pavement) had startled him out of his daze and he drove on.