“But why the girl?”
Rainbird didn’t answer for a long time. He was looking at the photograph carefully, almost tenderly. He touched it.
“She is very beautiful,” he said. “And very young. Yet inside her is your Z factor. The power of the gods. She and I will be close.” His eye grew dreamy. “Yes, we will be very close.”
IN THE BOX
1
On March 27, Andy McGee decided abruptly that they could stay in Tashmore no longer. It had been more than two weeks since he had mailed his letters, and if anything was going to come of them, it already would have. The very fact of the continuing silence around Granther’s camp made him uneasy. He supposed he could simply have been dismissed out of hand as a crackpot in every case, but… he didn’t believe it.
What he believed, what his deepest intuition whispered, was that his letters had been somehow diverted.
And that would mean they knew where he and Charlie were.
“We’re going,” he told Charlie. “Let’s get our stuff together.”
She only looked at him with her careful eyes, a little scared, and said nothing. She didn’t ask him where they were going or what they were going to do, and that made him nervous, too. In one of the closets he had found two old suitcases, plastered with an acient vacation decals-Grand Rapids, Niagara Falls, Miami Beach and the two of them began to sort what they would take and what they would leave.
Blinding bright sunlight streamed in through the windows on the east side of the cottage. Water dripped and gurgled in the downspouts. The night before, he had got little sleep; the ice had gone out and he had lain awake listening to it-the high, ethereal, and somehow uncanny sound of the old yellow ice splitting and moving slowly down toward the neck of the pond, where the Great Hancock River spilled eastward across New Hampshire and all of Maine, growing progressively more smelly and polluted until it vomited, noisome and dead, into the Atlantic. The sound was like a prolonged crystal note or perhaps that of a bow drawn endlessly across a high violin string-a constant, fluted zzziiiiiinnnggg that settled over the nerve endings and seemed to make them vibrate in sympathy. He had never been here at ice-out before and was not sure he would ever want to be again. There was something terrible and otherworldly about that sound as it vibrated between the silent evergreen walls of this low and eroded bowl of hills.
He felt that they were very near again, like the barely seen monster in a recurring nightmare. The day after Charlie’s birthday, he had been on one of his tramps, the cross-country skis buckled uncomfortably onto his feet, and he had come across a line of snowshoe tracks leading up to a tall spruce tree. There were indents in the crust like periods where the snowshoes had been taken off and jammed into the snow on their tails. There was a flurried confusion where the wearer had later refastened his snowshoes (“slushboats,” Granther had always called them, holding them in contempt for some obscure reason of his own). At the base of the tree, Andy had found six Vantage cigarette butts and a crumpled yellow package that had once contained Kodak Tri-X film. More uneasy than ever, he had taken off the skis and climbed up into the tree. Halfway up he had found himself on a direct line of sight with Granther’s cottage a mile away. It was small and apparently empty. But with a telephoto lens…
He hadn’t mentioned his find to Charlie. The suitcases were packed. Her continued silence forced him into nervous speech, as if by not talking she was accusing him.
“We’re going to hitch a ride into Berlin,” he said, “and then we’ll get a Greyhound back to New York City. We’re going to the offices of the New York Times-”
“But, Daddy, you sent them a letter.”
“Honey, they might not have gotten it.”
She looked at him in silence for a moment and then said, “Do you think they took it?”
“Of course n-“He shook his head and started again. “Charlie, I just don’t know.”
Charlie didn’t reply. She knelt, closed one of the suitcases, and began fumbling ineffectually with the clasps.
“Let me help you, hon.”
“I can do it!” She screamed at him, and then began to cry.
“Charlie, don’t,” he said. “Please, hon. It’s almost over.”
“No, it’s not,” she said, crying harder. “It’s never going to be over.”
2
There were an even dozen agents round Granther McGee’s cabin. They had taken up their postions the night before. They all wore mottled white and green clothing. None of them had been at the Manders farm, and none of them was armed except for John Rainbird, who had the rifle, and Don Jules, who carried a.22 pistol.
“I am taking no chances of having someone panic because of what happened back in New York,” Rainbird had told Cap. “That Jamieson still looks as if his balls are hanging around his knees.
Similarly, he would not hear of the agents going armed. Things had a way of happening, and he didn’t want to come out of the operation with two corpses. He had handpicked all of the agents, and the one he had chosen to take Andy McGee was Don Jules. Jules was small, thirtyish, silent, morose. He was good at his job. Rainbird knew, because Jules was the only man he had chosen to work with more than once. He was quick and practical. He did not get in the way at critical moments.
“McGee will be out at some point during the day,” Rainbird had told him at the briefing. “The girl usually comes out, but McGee always does. If the man comes out alone, I’ll take him and Jules will get him out of sight quickly and quietly. If the girl should come out alone, same thing. If they come out together, I’ll take the girl and Jules will take McGee. The rest of you are just spear carriers-do you understand that?” Rainbird’s eye glared over them. “You’re there in case something goes drastically wrong, and that is all. Of course, if something does go drastically wrong, most of you will be running for the lake with your pants on fire. You’re along in case that one chance in a hundred turns up where you can do something. Of course, it’s understood that you’re also along as observers and witnesses in case I fuck up.”
This had earned a thin and nervous chuckle.
Rainbird raised one finger. “If any one of you miscues and puts their wind up somehow, I’ll personally see that you end up in the lousiest jungle valley of South America I can find-with a cored asshole. Believe that, gentlemen. You are spear carriers in my show. Remember it.”
Later, at their “staging area”-an abandoned motel in St. Johnsbury-Rainbird had taken Don Jules aside.
“You have read the file on this man,” Rainbird said.
Jules was smoking a Camel. “Yeah.”
“You understand the concept of mental domination?”
“Yeah.”
“You understand what happened to the two men in Ohio? The men that tried to take his daughter away?” “I worked with George Waring,” Jules said evenly. “That guy could burn water making tea.” “In this man’s outfit, that it not so unusual. I only need us to be clear. You’ll need to be very quick.” “Yeah, okay.”
“He’s had a whole winter to rest, this guy. If he gets time to give you a shot, you’re a good candidate to spend the next three years of your life in a padded room, thinking you’re a bird or a turnip or something.”
“All right.”
“All right what?”
“I’ll be quick. Give it a rest, John.”
“There’s a good chance that they will come out together,” Rainbird said, ignoring him.
“You’ll be around the corner of the porch, out of sight of the door where they’ll come out. You wait for me to take the girl. Her father will go to her. You’ll be behind him. Get him in the neck.”