Firestarter (11 page)

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 marriage 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.”

“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 navy 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.”

“He does have it, Al,” Cap said gently. “That's what makes this operation so damned delicate.”

“All right, he has it,” Al said. “But the computer readouts suggest that his ability to use it is extremely limited. If he overuses it, it makes him sick.”

“Right. We're counting on that.”

“He was running a storefront operation in New York, a Dale Carnegie kind of thing.”

Cap nodded. Confidence Associates, an operation aimed mainly at timid executives. Enough to keep him and the girl in bread, milk, and meat, but not much more.

“We've debriefed his last group,” Albert Steinowitz said. “There were sixteen of them, and each of them paid a split tuition fee—one hundred dollars at enrollment, a hundred more halfway through the course, if they felt the course was helping them. Of course they all did.”

Cap nodded. McGee's talent was admirably suited for investing people with confidence. He literally
pushed
them into it.

“We fed their answers to several key questions into the computer. The questions were, did you feel better about yourself and the Confidence Associates course at specific times? Can you remember days at work following your Confidence Associates meetings when you felt like a tiger? Have you—”

“Felt like a tiger?” Cap asked. “Jesus, you asked them if they felt like
tigers?
”

“The computer suggests the wording.”

“Okay, go on.”

“The third key question was, have you had any specific, measurable success at your job since taking the Confidence Associates course? That was the question they could all respond to with the most objectivity and reliability, because people tend to remember the day they got the raise or that pat on the back from the boss. They were eager to talk. I found it a little spooky, Cap. He sure did what he promised. Of the sixteen, eleven of them have had promotions—
eleven.
Of the other five, three are in jobs where promotions are made only at certain set times.”

“No one is arguing McGee's capability,” Cap said. “Not anymore.”

“Okay. I'm getting back around to the point here. It was a six-week course. Using the answers to the key questions, the computer came up with four spike dates … that is, days when McGee probably supplemented all the usual hip-hip-hooray-you-can-do-it-if-you-try stuff with a good hard push. The dates we have are August seventeenth, September first, September nineteenth … and October fourth.”

“Proving?”

“Well, he pushed that cab driver last night. Pushed him hard. That dude is still rocking and reeling. We figure Andy McGee is tipped over. Sick. Maybe immobilized.” Albert looked at Cap steadily. “Computer gave us a twenty-six-percent probability that he's dead.”

“What?”

“Well, he's overdone it before and wound up in bed. He's doing something to his brain … God knows what. Giving himself pinprick hemorrhages, maybe. It could be a progressive thing. The computer figures there's slightly better than a one-in-four chance he's dead, either of a heart attack or, more probably, a stroke.”

“He had to use it before he was recharged,” Cap said.

Albert nodded and took something out of his pocket. It was encased in limp plastic. He passed it to Cap, who looked at it and then passed it back.

“What's that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“Not that much,” Al said, looking at the bill in its plastic envelope meditatively. “Just what McGee paid his cab fare with.”

“He went to Albany from New York City on a one-dollar bill, huh?” Cap took it back and looked at it with renewed interest. “Cab fares sure must be … what the hell!” He dropped the plastic-encased bill on his desk as if it were hot and sat back, blinking.

“You too, huh?” Al said. “Did you see it?”

“Christ, I don't know what I saw,” Cap said, and reached for the ceramic box where he kept his acid neutralizers. “For just a second it didn't look like a one-dollar bill at all.”

“But now it does?”

Cap peered at the bill. “It sure does. That's George, all—
Christ!
” He sat back so violently this time that he almost rapped the back of his head on the dark wood paneling behind his desk. He looked at Al. “The face … seemed to
change for a second there. Grew glasses, or something. Is it a trick?”

“Oh, it's a hell of a good trick,” Al said, taking the bill back. “I saw it as well, although I don't anymore. I think I've adjusted to it now … although I'll be damned if I know how. It's not there, of course. It's just some kind of crazy hallucination. But I even made the face. It's Ben Franklin.”

“You got this from the cab driver?” Cap asked, looking at the bill, fascinated, waiting for the change again. But it was only George Washington.

Al laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “We took the bill and gave him a check for five hundred dollars. He's better off, really.”

“Why?”

“Ben Franklin isn't on the five hundred, he's on the hundred. Apparently McGee didn't know.”

“Let me see that again.”

Al handed the one-dollar bill back to Cap, and Cap stared fixedly at it for almost a full two minutes. Just as he was about to hand it back, it flickered again—unsettling. But at least this time he felt that the flicker was definitely in his mind, and not in the bill, or on it, or whatever.

“I'll tell you something else,” Cap said. “I'm not sure, but I don't think Franklin's wearing glasses on his currency portrait, either. Otherwise, it's …” He trailed off, not sure how to complete the thought. Goddamn
weird
came to mind, and he dismissed it.

“Yeah,” Al said. “Whatever it is, the effect is dissipating. This morning I showed it to maybe six people. A couple of them thought they saw something, but not like that cab driver and the girl he lives with.”