Firestarter (12 page)

“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,” Al 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 neighboring 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.

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
.

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 drawn-up 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 di-lysergic 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 a 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 is responsible in some way for the occasional flashes of psi ability that nearly all human beings demonstrate from time to time. A surprisingly wide range of phenomena: precognition, telekinesis, mental domination, bursts of superhuman strength, temporary control over the sympathetic nervous system. Did you know that the pituitary gland becomes suddenly overactive in nearly all biofeedback experiments?”

Cap did. Wanless had told him this and all the rest times without number. But there was no need to answer; Wanless's rhetoric was in full fine flower this morning, the sermon well-launched. And Cap was disposed to listen … this one last time. Let the old man have his turn at bat. For Wanless, it was the bottom of the ninth.

“Yes, this is true,” Wanless answered himself. “It's active in biofeedback, it's active in REM sleep, and people with damaged pituitaries rarely dream normally. People with damaged pituitaries have a tremendously high incidence of brain tumors and leukemia. The pituitary gland, Captain Hollister. It is, speaking in terms of evolution, the oldest endocrine gland in the human body. During early adolescence it dumps many times its own weight in glandular secretions into the bloodstream. It's a terribly important gland, a terribly mysterious gland. If I believed in the human soul, Captain Hollister, I would say it resides within the pituitary gland.”

Cap grunted.

“We know these things,” Wanless said, “as we know that Lot Six somehow changed the physical composition of the pituitary glands of those who participated in the experiment.
Even that of your so-called ‘quiet one,' James Richardson. Most importantly, we can deduce from the girl that it also changes the chromosome structure in some way … and that the change in the pituitary gland may be a genuine mutation.”

“The X factor was passed on.”

“No,” Wanless said. “That is one of the many things you fail to grasp, Captain Hollister. Andrew McGee became an X factor in his postexperiment life. Victoria Tomlinson became a Y factor—also affected, but not in the same way as her husband. The woman retained a low-threshold telekinetic power. The man retained a mid-level mental-dominance ability. The little girl, though … the little girl, Captain Hollister … what is she? We don't really know. She is the Z factor.”

“We intend to find out,” Cap said softly.

Now both sides of Wanless's mouth sneered. “You intend to find out,” he echoed. “Yes, if you persist, you certainly may … you blind, obsessive fools.” He closed his eyes for a moment and put one hand over them. Cap watched him calmly.

Wanless said: “One thing you know already. She lights fires.”

“Yes.”

“You assume that she has inherited her mother's telekinetic ability. In fact, you strongly suspect it.”

“Yes.”

“As a very small child, she was totally unable to control these … these talents, for want of a better word …”

“A small child is unable to control its bowels,” Cap said, using one of the examples set forth in the extracta. “But as the child grows older—”

“Yes, yes, I am familiar with the analogy. But an older child may still have accidents.”

Smiling, Cap answered, “We're going to keep her in a fireproof room.”

“A cell.”

Still smiling, Cap said, “If you prefer.”

“I offer you this deduction,” Wanless said. “She does not like to use this ability she has. She has been frightened of it, and this fright has been instilled in her quite deliberately. I will give you a parallel example. My brother's child. There were matches in the house. Freddy wanted to play with them. Light them and then shake them out ‘Pretty, pretty,' he
would say. And so my brother set out to make a complex. To frighten him so badly he would never play with the matches again. He told Freddy that the heads of the matches were sulfur and that they would make his teeth rot and fall out. That looking at struck matches would eventually blind him. And finally, he held Freddy's hand momentarily over a lit match and singed him with it.”

“Your brother,” Cap murmured, “sounds like a true prince among men.”

“Better a small red place on the boy's hand than a child in the burn unit, wetpacked, with third-degree burns over sixty percent of his body,” Wanless said grimly.

“Better still to put the matches out of the child's reach.”

“Can you put Charlene McGee's matches out of her reach?” Wanless asked.

Cap nodded slowly. “You have a point of a sort, but—”

“Ask yourself this, Captain Hollister: how must it have been for Andrew and Victoria McGee when this child was an infant? After they begin to make the necessary connection? The bottle is late. The baby cries. At the same time, one of the stuffed animals
right there in the crib with her
bursts into smoky flame. There is a mess in the diaper. The baby cries. A moment later the dirty clothes in the hamper begin to burn spontaneously. You have the records, Captain Hollister; you know how it was in that house. A fire extinguisher and a smoke detector in every single room. And once it was her
hair,
Captain Hollister; they came into her room and found her standing in her crib and screaming and her
hair
was on fire.”

“Yes,” Cap said, “it must have made them goddam nervous.”

“So,” Wanless said, “they toilet-trained her … and they fire-trained her.”

“Fire-training,” Cap mused.

“Which is only to say that, like my brother and his boy Freddy, they made a complex. You have quoted me that analogy, Captain Hollister, so let us examine it for a moment. What is toilet-training? It is making a complex, pure and simple.” And suddenly, astonishingly, the old man's voice climbed to a high, wavering treble, the voice of a woman scolding a baby. Cap looked on with disgusted astonishment.

“You bad baby!” Wanless cried. “Look what you've done! It's nasty, baby, see how nasty it is? It's nasty to do it in your
pants! Do grown-ups do it in their pants? Do it on the pot, baby, on the
pot.
”

“Please,” Cap said, pained.

“It is the making of a complex,” Wanless said. “Toilet-training is accomplished by focusing the child's attention on his own eliminatory processes in a way we would consider unhealthy if the object of fixation were something different. How strong is the complex inculcated in the child, you might ask? Richard Damon of the University of Washington asked himself this question and made an experiment to find out. He advertised for fifty student volunteers. He filled them up with water and soda and milk until they all badly needed to urinate. After a certain set time had passed, he told them they could go … if they went in their pants.”