Firestarter

Now his voice seemed to be coming from far away, through the blood-soaked net of pain that was pulling tighter and tighter around his brain. “You’re going to give her this,” Andy said, and passed the folded note to Cap. “Give it to her today, but do it carefully, so that no one suspects.”

Cap tucked the note into his breast pocket. Now they were approaching the Shop; on their left were the double runs of electrified fence. Warning signs flashed past every fifty yards or so.

“Repeat back the salient points,” Andy said.

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

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 co

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.”