The Manders fiasco had done a lot of damage. The Shop had ridden that out, and so had he, but it had begun a critical groundswell that would break soon enough. The critical centre of that groundswell was the way the McGees had been handled from the day Victoria McGee had been killed and the daughter lifted-lifted however briefly. A lot of the criticism had to do with the fact that a college instructor who had never even been in the army had been able to take his daughter away from two trained Shop agents, leaving one of them mad and one in a coma that had lasted for six months. The latter agent was never going to be any good for anything again; if anyone spoke the word “sleep” within his earshot, he keeled over bonelessly and might stay out from four hours to an entire day. In a bizarre sort of way it was funny.
The other major criticism had to do with the fact that the McGees had managed to stay one step ahead for so long. It made the Shop look bad. It made them all look dumb.
But most of the criticism was reserved for the incident at the Manders farm itself, because that had damned near blown the entire agency out of the water. Cap knew that the whispering had begun. The whispering, the memos, maybe even the testimony at the ultrasecret congressional hearings. We don’t want him hanging on like Hoover. This Cuban business went entirely by the boards because he couldn’t get his head out of that damned McGee file. Wife died very recently, you know. Great shame. Hit him hard. Whole McGee business nothing but a catalogue of ineptitude. Perhaps a younger man…
But none of them understood what they were up against. They thought they did, but they didn’t. Again and again he had seen the rejection of the simple fact that the little girl was a pyrokinetic-a firestarter. Literally dozens of reports suggested that the fire at the Manders farm had been started by a gasoline spill, by the woman’s breaking a kerosene lamp, by spontaneous-fucking-combustion, and God only knew what other nonsense. Some of those reports came from people who had been there.
Standing at the window, Cap found himself perversely wishing that Wanless were here. Wanless had understood. He could have talked to Wanless about this… this dangerous blindness.
He went back to the desk. There was no sense kidding himself; once the undermining process began, there was no way to stop it. It really was like a cancer. You could retard its growth by calling in favors (and Cap had called in ten years” worth just to keep himself in the saddle this last winter); you might even be able to force it into remission. But sooner or later, you were gone. He felt he had from now until July if he played the game by the rules, from now until maybe November if he decided to really dig in and get tough. That, however, might mean ripping the agency apart at the seams, and he did not want to do that. He had no wish to destroy something he had invested half his life in. But he would if he had to: he was going to see this through to the end.
The major factor that had allowed him to stay in control was the speed with which they had located the McGees again. Cap was glad to take credit for that since it helped to prop up his position, but all it had really taken was computer time.
They had been living with this business long enough to have time to plow the McGee field both wide and deep. Filed away in the computer were facts on more than two hundred relatives and four hundred friends all the way around the McGee Tomlinson family tree. These friendships stretched all the way back to Vicky’s best friend in the first grade, a girl named Kathy Smith, who was now Mrs. Frank Worthy, of Cabral, California, and who had probably not spared a thought for Vicky Tomlinson in twenty years or more.
The computer was given the “last-seen” data and promptly spit out a list of probabilities. Heading the list was the name of Andy’s deceased grandfather, who had owned a camp on Tashmore Pond in Vermont; ownership had since passed to Andy. The McGees had vacationed there, and it was within reasonable striking distance of the Manders farm by way of the back roads. The computer felt that if Andy and Charlie were to make for any “known place,” it would be this place.
Less than a week after they had moved into Granther’s, Cap knew they were there. A loose cordon of agents was set up around the camp. Arrangements had been made for the purchase of Notions “n” Novelties in Bradford on the probability that whatever shopping they needed to do would be done in Bradford.
Passive surveillance, nothing more. All the photographs had been taken with telephoto lenses under optimum conditions for concealment. Cap had no intention of risking another firestorm.
They could have taken Andy quietly on any of his trips across the lake. They could have shot them both as easily as they had got the picture of Charlie sledding on the cardboard carton. But Cap wanted the girl, and he had now come to believe that if they were going to have any real control over her, they would need her father as well.
After locating them again, the most important objective had been to make sure they kept quiet. Cap didn’t need a computer to tell him that as Andy grew more frightened, the chances that he would seek outside help went up and up. Before the Manders affair, a press leak could have been handled or lived with. Afterward, press interference became a different ballgame altogether. Cap had nightmares just thinking about what would happen if the New York Times got hold of such a thing.
For a brief period, during the confusion that had followed the firestorm, Andy could have got his letters out. But apparently the McGees had been living with their own confusion. Their golden chance to mail the letters or make some phone calls had passed unused… and very well mightn’t have come to anything, anyway. The woods were full of crackpots these days, and newspeople were as cynical as anyone else. Theirs had become a glamour occupation. They were more interested in what Margaux and Bo and Suzanne and Cheryl were doing. It was safer.
Now the two of them were in a box. Cap had had the entire winter to consider options.
Even at his wife’s funeral he had been running through his options. Gradually he had settled upon a plan of action and now he was prepared to tip that plan into motion. Payson, their man in Bradford, said that the ice was getting ready to go out on Tashmore Pond. And McGee had finally mailed his letters. Already he would be getting impatient for a response-and perhaps beginning to suspect his letters had never arrived at their intended sources. They might be getting ready to move, and Cap liked them right where they were.
Beneath the photos was a thick typed report better than three hundred pages-bound in a blue TOP SECRET cover. Eleven doctors and psychologists had put the combination report and prospectus together under the overall direction of Dr. Patrick Hockstetter, a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist. He was, in Cap’s opinion, one of the ten or twelve most astute minds at the Shop’s disposal. At the eight hundred thousand dollars it had cost the taxpayer to put the report together, he ought to have been. Thumbing through the report now, Cap wondered what Wanless, that old doomsayer, would have made of it.
His own intuition that they needed Andy alive was confirmed in here. The postulate Hockstetter’s crew had based their own chain of logic on was the idea that all the powers they were interested in were exercised voluntarily, having their first cause in the willingness of the possessor to use them… and the key word was will.
The girl’s powers, of which pyrokinesis was only the cornerstone, had a way of getting out of control, of jumping nimbly over the barriers of her will, but this study, which incorporated all the available information, indicated that it was the girl herself who elected whether or not to set things in motion-as she had done at the Manders farm when she realized that the Shop agents were trying to kill her father.