Firestarter (32 page)

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.

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 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.

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 I 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 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 coffeemaker), 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 hut 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 them 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. Rammaden had said once that safes were like women: given the tools and the time, any box could be opened. There were, he said, tough cracks and easy cracks, but no impossible cracks.

This girl was tough.

At first they had had to feed Charlie intravenously just to keep her from starving herself to death. After a while she began to understand that not eating was gaining her nothing but a lot of bruises on the insides of her elbows, and she began to eat, not with any enthusiasm but simply because using her month was less painful.

She read some of the books that were given her—leafed through them, at any rate—and would sometimes turn on the color TV in her room only to turn it off again a few minutes later. She had watched a local movie presentation of
Black Beauty
all the way through in June, and she had sat through
The Wonderful World of Disney
once or twice. That was all. On her weekly reports the phrase “sporadic aphasia” had begun to crop up more and more often.

Rainbird had looked the term up in a medical dictionary and understood it at once—because of his own experiences as Indian and warrior, he understood it perhaps better than the doctors themselves. Sometimes the girl ran out of words. She would simply stand there, not a bit upset, her mouth working soundlessly. And sometimes she would use a totally out-of- context word, apparently without realizing it at all. “I don't like this dress, I'd rather have the hay one.” Sometimes she would correct herself absently—“I mean the
green
one”—but more often it would simply pass unnoticed.