Firestarter

“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. Goddam weird came to mind, and he dismissed it.

“Yeah,” A1 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.”

“So you’re figuring he pushed too hard?”

“Yes. I doubt if he could keep going. They may have slept in the woods, or in an outlying motel. They may have broken into a summer cabin in the area. But I think they’re around and we’ll be able to put the arm on them without too much trouble.”

“How many men do you need to do the job?”

“We’ve got what we need,” A1 said. “Counting the state police, there are better than seven hundred people in on this little houseparty. Priority A-one-A. They’re going door to door and house to house. We’ve checked every hotel and motel in the immediate Albany area already-better than forty of them. We’re spreading into the neighbouring towns now. A man and a little girl… they stick out like a sore thumb. We’ll get them. Or the girl, if he’s dead.” Albert stood up. “And I think I ought to get on it. I’d like to be there when it goes down.”

“Of course you would. Bring them to me, Al.”

“I will,” Albert said, and walked toward the door.

“Albert?”

He turned back, a small man with an unhealthy yellow complexion. “Who is on the five hundred? Did you check that out?”

Albert Steinowitz smiled. “McKinley,” he said. “He was assassinated.”

He went out, closing the door gently behind him, leaving Cap to consider.

5

Ten minutes later, Cap thumbed the intercom again. “Is Rainbird back from Venice yet, Rachel?” “As of yesterday,” Rachel said, and Cap fancied he could hear the distaste even in Rachel’s carefully cultivated Boss Secretary tones. “Is he here or at Sanibel?” The Shop maintained an R-and-R facility on Sanibel Island,

Florida.

There was a pause as Rachel checked with the computer.

“Longmont, Cap. As of eighteen hundred yesterday. Sleeping off the jet lag, perhaps.”

“Have someone wake him up,” Cap said. “I’d like to see him when Wanless leaves… always assuming Wanless is still here?” “As of fifteen minutes ago he was.”

“All right… let’s say Rainbird at noon.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re a good girl, Rachel.”

“Thank you, sir.” She sounded touched. Cap liked her, liked her very much.

“Send in Dr. Wanless please, Rachel.”

He settled back, joined his hands in front of him, and thought, For my sins.

6

Dr. Joseph Wanless had suffered his stroke on the same day Richard Nixon announced his resignation of the presidency-August 8, 1974. It had been a cerebral accident of moderate severity, and he had never come all the way back physically. Nor mentally, in Cap’s opinion. It was only following the stroke that Wanless’s interest in the Lot Six experiment and follow-up had become constant and obsessive.

He came into the room leaning over a cane, the light from the bay window catching his round, rimless glasses and making them glare blankly. His left hand was a drawnup claw. The left side of his mouth drifted in a constant glacial sneer.

Rachel looked at Cap sympathetically over Wanless’s shoulder and Cap nodded that she could go. She did, closing the door quietly.

“The good doctor,” Cap said humorlessly.

“How does it progress?” Wanless asked, sitting down with a grunt.

“Classified,” Cap said. “You know that, Joe. What can I do for you today.”

“I have seen the activity around this place,” Wanless said, ignoring Cap’s question. “What else had I to do while I cooled my heels all morning?”

“If you come without an appointment-”

“You think you nearly have them again,” Wanless said. “Why else that hatchet man Steinowitz? Well, maybe you do. Maybe so. But you have thought so before, haven’t you?”

“What do you want, Joe?” Cap didn’t like to be reminded of past failures. They had actually had the girl for a while. The men who had been involved in that were still not operational and maybe never would be.

“What do I always want?” Wanless asked, hunched over his cane. Oh Christ, Cap thought, the old fuck’s going to wax rhetorical. “Why do I stay alive? To persuade you to sanction them both. To sanction that James Richardson as well. To sanction the ones on Maui. Extreme sanction, Captain Hollister. Expunge them. Wipe them off the face of the earth.”

Cap sighed.

Wanless gestured toward the library cart with his claw-hand and said, “You’ve been through the files again, I see.”

“I have them almost by heart,” Cap said, and then smiled a little. He had been eating and drinking Lot Six for the last year; it had been a constant item on the agenda at every meeting during the two years before that. So maybe Wanless wasn’t the only obsessive character around here, at that.

The difference is, I get paid for it. With Wanless it’s a hobby. A dangerous hobby.

“You read them but you don’t learn,” Wanless said. “Let me try once more to convert you to the way of truth, Captain Hollister.”

Cap began to protest, and then the thought of Rainbird and his noon appointment came to mind, and his face smoothed out. It became calm, even sympathetic. “All right,” he said. “Fire when ready, Gridley.”

“You still think I’m crazy, don’t you? A lunatic.”

“You said that, not I.”

“It would be well for you to remember that I was the first one to suggest a testing program with dilysergic triune acid.”

“I have days when I wish you hadn’t,” Cap said. If he closed his eyes, he could still see Wanless’s first report, a two-hundred-page prospectus on the drug that had first been known as DLT, then, among the technicians involved, as “booster-acid,” and finally as Lot Six. Cap’s predecessor had okayed the original project; that gentleman had been buried in Arlington with full military honors six years ago.

“All I am saying is that my opinion should carry some weight,” Wanless said. He sounded tired this morning; his words were slow and furry. The twisted sneer on the left side of his mouth did not move as he spoke.

“I’m listening,” Cap said.

“So far as I am able to tell, I am the only psychologist or medical man who still has your ear at all. Your people have become blinded by one thing and one thing only: what this man and this girl can mean to the security of America… and possibly to the future balance of power. From what we’ve been able to tell by following this McGee’s backtrail, he is a kind of benign Rasputin. He can make…”

Wanless droned on, but Cap lost him temporarily. Benign Rasputin, he thought. Purple as the phrase was, he rather liked it. He wondered what Wanless would say if told the computer had issued one-in-four odds that McGee had sanctioned himself getting out of New York City. Probably would have been overjoyed. And if he had showed Wanless that strange bill? Probably have another stroke, Cap thought, and covered his mouth to hide a smile.

“It is the girl I am primarily worried about,” Wanless told him for the twentieth? thirtieth? fiftieth? time. “McGee and Tomlinson marrying… a thousand-to-one chance. It should have been prevented at all costs. Yet who could have foreseen-”

“You were all in favor of it at the time,” Cap said, and then added dryly, “I do believe you would have given the bride away if they’d asked you.”

“None of us realized,” Wanless muttered. “It took a stroke to make me see. Lot Six was nothing but a synthetic copy of a pituitary extract, after all… an incredibly powerful painkiller hallucinogen that we did not understand then and that we don’t understand now. We know-or at least we are ninety-nine-percent sure-that the natural counterpart of this substance