Firestarter

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%/