Firestarter

Cap spoke quickly and concisely-the voice of a man who had been trained in the act of recall since the days of his military-academy boyhood.

“I will arrange for you to leave for Hawaii on an army transport plane on Wednesday instead of Saturday. I will be coming with you; your daughter will also accompany us. The two Shop agents who will also be coming will meet us at Andrews. I will find out from Puck where the plane will be refueling. I’ll do that when I call him to change the flight date. I have a note to give your daughter. I’ll give it to her after I finish talking to Puck, and I will do it in a way which will arouse no undue suspicion. And I will arrange to have John Rainbird in San Diego next Wednesday. I believe that covers the waterfront.”

“Yes,” Andy said, “I believe it does.” He leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes. Jumbled fragments of past and present flew through his mind, aimlessly, jackstraws blown in the high wind. Did this really have a chance to work, or was he only buying death for both of them? They knew what Charlie could do now; they’d had firsthand experience. If it went wrong, they would finish their trip in the cargo bay of that army transport plane. In two boxes.

Cap paused at the guardbooth, rolled down his window, and handed over a plastic card, which the man on duty slipped into a computer terminal.

“Go ahead, sir,” he said.

Cap drove on.

“One last thing, Captain Hollister. You’re going to forget all about this. You’ll do each of the things we’ve discussed perfectly spontaneously. You’ll discuss them with no one.” “All right.” Andy nodded. It wasn’t all right, but it would have to do. The chances of setting up an echo here were extraordinarily high because he had been forced to push the man terribly hard and also because the instructions he had given Cap would go completely against the grain. Cap might be able to bring everything off simply by virtue of his position here. He might not. Right now Andy was too tired and in too much pain to care much.

He was barely able to get out of the car; Cap had to take his arm to steady him. He was dimly aware that the cold autumn drizzle felt good against his face.

The two men from the Biscayne looked at him with a kind of cold disgust. One of them was Don Jules. Jules was wearing a blue sweatshirt that read

U.S. OLYMPIC DRINKING TEAM.

Get a good look at the stoned fat man, Andy thought groggily. He was close to tears again, and his breath began to catch and hitch in his throat. You get a good look now, because if the fat guy gets away this time, he’s going to blow this whole rotten cesspool right out of the swamp.

“There, there,” Cap said, and patted him on the shoulder with patronizing and perfunctory sympathy. Just do your job, Andy thought, holding on grimly against the tears; he would not cry in front of them again, none of them. Just do your job, you son of a bitch.

6

Back in his apartment, Andy stumbled to his bed, hardly aware of what he was doing, and fell asleep. He lay like a dead thing for the next six hours, while blood seeped from a minute rupture in his brain and a number of brain cells grew white and died.

When he woke up, it was ten o'clock in the evening. The headache was still raging. His hands went to his face. The numb spots-one below his left eye, one on his left cheekbone, and one just below the jawbone-were back. This time they were bigger.

I can’t push it much further without killing myself, he thought, and knew it was true. But he would hold on long enough to see this through, to give Charlie her chance, if he possibly could. Somehow he would hold on that long.

He went to the bathroom and got a glass of water. Then he lay down again, and after a long time, sleep returned. His last waking thought was that Charlie must have read his note by now.

7

Cap Hollister had had an extremely busy day since getting back from Herm Pynchot’s funeral. He had no more than got settled into his office when his secretary brought him an interdepartmental memo marked URGENT. It was from Pat Hockstetter. Cap told her to get him Vic Puckeridge on the phone and settled back to read the memo. I should get out more often, he thought; it aerates the brain cells or something. It had occurred to him on the ride back that there was really no sense waiting a whole week to ship McGee off to Maui; this Wednesday would be plenty late enough.

Then the memo captured his whole attention.

It was miles from Hockstetter’s usual cool and rather baroque style; in fact, it was couched in nearly hysterical purple prose, and Cap thought with some amusement that the kid must have really hit Hockstetter with the chicken-stick. Hit him hard.

What it came down to was that Charlie had dug in her heels. It had come sooner than they had expected, that was all. Maybe-no, probably-even sooner than Rainbird had expected. Well, they would let it lie for a few days and then… then…

His train of throught broke up. His eyes took on a faraway, slightly puzzled cast. In his mind he saw a golf club, a five iron, whistling down and connecting solidly with a Spalding ball. He could hear that low, whistling whhoooop sound. Then the ball was gone, high and white against the blue sky. But it was slicing… slicing…

His brow cleared. What had he been thinking of? It wasn’t like him to wander off the subject like that. Charlie had dug in her heels; that was what he had been thinking. Well, that was all right. Nothing to get bent out of shape about. They would let her alone for a while, until the weekend maybe, and then they could use Rainbird on her. She would light a lot of fires to keep Rainbird out of dutch.

His hand stole to his breast pocket and felt the small paper folded in there. In his mind he heard the soft swinging sound of a golf club again; it seemed to reverberate in the office. But now it was not a whhoooop sound. It was a quiet ssssssss, almost the sound of a… a snake. That was unpleasant. He had always found snakes unpleasant, ever since earliest childhood. With an effort, he swept all this. foolishness about snakes and golf clubs from his mind. Perhaps the funeral had upset him more than he had thought.

The intercom buzzed and his secretary told him Puck was on line one. Cap picked up the phone and after some small talk asked Puck if there would be a problem if they decided to move the Maui shipment up from Saturday to Wednesday. Puck checked and said he saw no problem there at all.

“Say, around three in the afternoon?” “No problem,” Puck repeated. “Just don’t move it up anymore, or we’ll be in the bucket. This place is getting worse than the freeway at rush hour.” “No, this is solid,” Cap said. “And here’s something else: I’m going along. But you keep that under your hat, okay?” Puck burst into hearty baritone laughter. “A little sun, fun, and grass skirts?”

“Why not?” Cap agreed. “I’m escorting a valuable piece of cargo. I could justify myself in front of a Senate committee if I had to, I think. And I haven’t had a real vacation since 1973. The goddamned Arabs and their oil bitched up the last week of that one.”

“I’ll keep it to myself,” Puck agreed. “You going to play some golf while you’re out there? I know of at least two great courses on Maui.” Cap fell silent. He looked thoughtfully at the top of his desk, through it. The phone sagged away from his ear slightly.

“Cap? You there?”

Low and definite and ominous in this small, cozy study: Sssssssssss

“Shit, I think we been cut off,” Puck muttered. “Cap? Ca-”

“You still slicing the ball, old buddy?” Cap asked.

Puck laughed. “You kidding? When I die, they’re going to bury me in the fucking rough. Thought I lost you for a minute there.” “I’m right here,” Cap said. “Puck, are there snakes in Hawaii?” Now it was Puck’s turn to pause. “Say again?” “Snakes. Poisonous snakes.”

“I… gee, damn if I know. I can check it for you if it’s important…” Puck’s dubious tone seemed to imply that Cap employed about five thousand spooks to check just such things.

“No, that’s okay,” Cap said. He held the telephone firmly against his ear again. “Just thinking out loud, I guess. Maybe I’m getting old.”

“Not you, Cap. There’s too much vampire in you.”

“Yeah, maybe. Thanks, goodbuddy.”

“No trouble at all. Glad you’re getting away for a bit. Nobody deserves it more than you, after the last year you’ve put in.” He meant Georgia, of course; he didn’t know about the McGees. Which meant, Cap thought wearily, that he didn’t know the half of it.

He started to say good-bye and then added, “By the way, Puck, where will that plane be stopping to refuel? Any idea?”

“Durban, Illinois,” Puck said promptly. “Outside Chicago.”

Cap thanked him, said good-bye, hung up. His fingers went to the note in his pocket again and touched it. His eye fell on Hockstetter’s memo. It sounded as if the girl had been pretty upset, too. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt if he went down and spoke to her, stroked her a little.

He leaned forward and thumbed the intercom.

“Yes, Cap?”

“I’ll be going downstairs for a while,” he said. “I should be back in thirty minutes or so.”

“Very good.”

He got up and left the study. As he did so, his hand stole to his breast pocket and felt the note there again.

8

Charlie lay on her bed fifteen minutes after Cap left, her mind in a total whirl of dismay, fear, and confused speculation. She literally didn’t know what to think.

He had come at quarter of five, half an hour ago, and had introduced himself as Captain Hollister (“but please just call me Cap; everyone does”). He had a kindly, shrewd face that reminded her a little of the illustrations in The Wind in the Willows. It was a face she had seen somewhere recently, but she hadn’t been able to place it