5

2:00 P.M.

THUNDER CANNONED, and rain shattered against the windows of the police chief’s office.

Two men, employees of other governmental departments that shared the municipal building, stood with their backs to the windows, trying to look stern, authoritarian, and eminently reliable. Bob Thorp had provided them with bright yellow hooded rain slickers with POLICE stenciled across their shoulders and chests. Both men were in their middle or late thirties, yet they expressed an almost childish delight at the opportunity to wear these raincoats: adults playing cops and robbers.

“Can you use a gun?” Salsbury asked them.

They both said that they could.

Salsbury turned to Bob Thorp. “Give them guns.”

“Revolvers?” the police chief asked.

“Do you have shotguns?”

“Yes.”

“I believe those would be better than revolvers,” Salsbury said. “Don’t you agree?”

“For this operation?” Thorp said. “Yes. Much better.”

“Then give them shotguns.”

A brilliant explosion of lightning flashed against the windows. The effect was stroboscopic: everyone and every object in the room seemed to jump rapidly back and forth for an instant, although in reality nothing moved.

Overhead the fluorescent lights flickered.

Thorp went to the metal firearms cabinet behind his desk, unlocked it, and fetched two shotguns.

“Do you know how to use these?” Salsbury asked the men in the yellow raincoats.

One of them nodded.

The other said, “Not much to it. These babies pack a hell of a lot of punch. You pretty much just have to point in the general direction of the target and pull the trigger.” He gripped the gun with both hands, admired it, smiled at it.

“Good enough,” Salsbury said. “The two of von will go out to the parking lot behind this building, get in the spare patrol car, and drive to the east end of town. Understand me so far?”

“To the east end,” one of them said.

“A hundred yards short of the turn at the mouth of the valley, you’ll park the cruiser across the highway and block both lanes as best you can.”

“A roadblock,” one of them said, obviously pleased with the way the game was developing.

“Exactly,” Salsbury said. “If anyone wants to enter Black River—logging trucks, local citizens, maybe visitors from out of town, anyone at all—you’ll let them in. However, you’ll send them here, straight to this office. You’ll tell them that a state of emergency has been declared in Black River and that they absolutely must, without exception, check in with the chief of police before they go on about their business.”

“What kind of emergency?” “You don’t need to know.” One of them frowned.

The other said, “Everyone we stop will want to know.”

“If they ask, tell them that the chief will explain it.” Both men nodded.

Thorp distributed a dozen shotgun shells to each of them.

“If anyone tries to leave Black River,” Salsbury said, “you’ll also direct them to the chief, and you’ll give them the same story about a state of emergency.

Understood?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Every time you send someone to see Bob, whether they were coming into town or trying to get out of it, you’ll radio this office. That way, if they don’t show up within a few minutes, we’ll know that we’ve got some renegades on our hands.

Understood?”

They both said, “Yes.”

Salsbury took his handkerchief from his hip pocket and blotted the perspiration from his face. “If anyone leaving town tries to run your roadblock, stop them.

If you can’t stop them any other way, use the guns.”

“Shoot to kill?”

“Shoot to kill,” Salsbury said. “But only if there’s no other way to stop them.”

One of the men tried to look like John Wayne receiving orders at the Alamo, shook his head solemnly, and said, “Don’t worry. You can count on us.”

“Any questions?”

“How long will we be in charge of this roadblock?”

“Another team of men will relieve you in six hours,” Salsbury said. “At eight o’clock this evening.” He jammed his handkerchief back into his pocket. “One other thing. When you leave this room, you will forget that you ever met me.

You’ll forget that I was here. You’ll remember everything I’ve said to you prior to what I’m saying to you now, every previous exchange of this conversation we’ve just had—but you’ll think that Bob Thorp gave you your instructions. Is that perfectly clear?”

“Yes.”

“Perfectly.”

“Then get moving.”

The two men went out of the room, forgetting him the moment they set foot in the corridor.

A fiercely white pulse of lightning washed over the town, and a crack of thunder followed, rattling the windows.

“Close those blinds,” Salsbury said irritably.

Thorp did as he was told.

Salsbury sat down behind the desk.

When he had drawn the Venetian blinds, Bob Thorp returned to the desk and stood in front of it.

Salsbury looked up at him and said, “Bob, I want to seal this burg up tight.

Real tight.” He made a fist with his right hand by way of example. “I want to make damned sure that no one can get out of town. Is there anything else that I should block in addition to the highway?”

Scratching his beetled brow, Thorp said, “You need two more men at the east end of the valley. One to watch the river. He should be armed with a rifle so he can pick off anyone in a boat if he has to do that. The other man should be stationed in the trees between the river and the highway. Give him a shotgun and tell him to stop anyone who tries to sneak out through the woods.”

“The man at the river—he’d have to be an expert with a rifle, wouldn’t he?”

Salsbury asked.

“You wouldn’t need a master rifleman. But he would have to be a fairly good shot.”

“Okay. We’ll use one of your deputies for that. They’re all good with a rifle, aren’t they?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Good enough for this?”

“No doubt about it.”

“Anything else?”

Thorp thought about the situation for almost a minute. Finally he said, “There’s a series of old logging roads that lead up into the mountains and eventually hook up with a second series of roads that come from the lumber operations around Bexford. A lot of that route has been abandoned. None of it’s paved. A few sections may be graveled if they haven’t been washed out this summer, but mostly it’s just dirt. Narrow. Full of weeds. But I guess if a man was determined enough, he could drive out that way.”

“Then we’ll block it,” Salsbury said, getting up from the chair. He paced nervously to the windows and back to the desk. “This town is mine. Mine. And it’ll stay that way. I’m going

to keep my hands on every man, woman, and child here until I’ve solved this problem.”

The situation had gotten incredibly far out of hand. He would have to call Dawson. Sooner or later. Probably sooner. Couldn’t be avoided. But before he placed that call, he wanted to be certain that he had done everything that he could possibly do without Leonard’s help, without Klinger’s help. Show them he was decisive. Clever. A good man to have around. His efficiency might impress the general. And that Christ-kissing bastard. Impress them enough to compensate for his having caused the crisis in the first place. That was very important.

Very important. Right now the trick was to survive his partners’ wrath.

2:30 P.M.

The air in Sam’s library was stale and humid.

Rain drummed on the outside window, and hundreds of tiny beads of dew formed on the inside.

Still numb from the discovery of his son’s body, Paul sat in one of the easy chairs, his hands on the arms of the chair and his fingertips pressed like claws into the upholstery.

Sam stood by one of the bookcases, pulling volumes of collected psychology essays from the stacks and leafing through them.

On the wide window ledge, an antique mantel clock ticked hollowly, monotonously.

Jenny came into the room from the ball, letting the door stand open behind her.

She knelt on the floor beside Paul’s chair and put her hand over his.

“How’s Rya?” he asked.

Before they had gone to the Thorp house to search for the body, Sam had given the girl a sedative.

“Sleeping soundly,” Jenny said. “She’ll be out for at least two more hours.”

“Here!” Sam said excitedly.

They looked up, startled.

He came to them, holding up a book of essays. “His picture. The one who calls himself Deighton.”

Paul stood up to have a better look at it.

“No wonder Rya and I couldn’t find any of his articles,” Sam said. “We were looking through tables of contents for something written by Albert Deighton. But that’s not his name. His real name’s Ogden Salsbury.”

“I’ve seen him,” Paul said. “He was in Ultman’s Cafe the day that waitress drove the meat fork through her hand. In fact she waited on him.”

Rising to her feet, Jenny said, “You think that was connected with the rest of this, with the story Buddy Pellineri told us— with what they did to Mark?” Her voice faltered slightly on those last few words, and her eyes grew shiny. But she bit her lip and held back the tears.

“Yes,” Paul said, wondering again at his own inability to weep. He ached. God, he was full of pain! But the tears would not come. “It must be connected.

Somehow.” To Sam he said, “Salsbury wrote this article?”

“According to the introductory blurb, it was the last piece he ever published—more than twelve years ago.”

“But he’s not dead.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Then why the last?”

“Seems he was quite a controversial figure. Praised and damned but mostly damned. And he got tired of the controversy. He dropped out of his lecture tours and gave up his writing so that he’d have more time to dedicate to his research.”

“What’s the article about?”

Sam read the title. “‘Total Behavioral Modification through Subliminal Perception.’” And the subtitle: “‘Mind Control from the Inside Out.’”

“What does all of that mean?”

“Do you want me to read it aloud?”

Paul looked at his watch.

“It wouldn’t hurt if we knew the enemy before we went into Bexford to see the state police,” Jenny said.

“She’s right,” Sam said.

Paul nodded. “Go ahead. Read it.”

2:40 P.M.

Friday afternoon H. Leonard Dawson was in the study of his Greenwich, Connecticut, house, reading a long letter on lavender paper from his wife. Julia was one-third of the way through a three-week trip to the Holy Land, and day by day she was discovering that it was less and less like she had imagined and hoped it would be. The best hotels were all owned by Arabs and Jews, she said; therefore, she felt unclean every time she went to bed. There were plenty of rooms in the inns, she said, but she would almost have preferred to sleep in the stables. That morning (as she wrote the letter) her chauffeur had driven her to Golgotha, that most sweetly sacred of places; and she had read to herself from the Bible as the car wended its way to that shrine of both sorrow and everlasting joy. But even Golgotha had been spoiled for her. Upon arriving there, she found that the holy hill was literally swarming with sweaty Southern Negro Baptists. Southern Negro Baptists, of all people. Furthermore.

The white telephone rang. Its soft, throaty burrrr-burrrrburrrr was instantly recognizable.

The white phone was the most private line in the house. Only Ogden and Ernst knew the number.

He put down the letter, waited until the telephone had rung a second time, picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“I recognize your voice,” Salsbury said guardedly. “Do you find mine familiar?”

“Of course. Are you using your scrambler?”

“Oh, yes,” Salsbury said.

“Then there’s no need to talk in riddles and be mysterious.

Even if the line is tapped, which it isn’t, they can’t make sense of what we’re saying.”

“With the situation what it is at my end,” Salsbury said, “I think we should take the precaution of riddle and mystery and not trust solely in the scrambler.”

“What is the situation at your end?”

“We’ve got serious trouble here.”

“At the test site?”

“At the test site.”

“Trouble of what sort?”

“There’s been one fatality.”

“Will it pass for natural causes?”

“Not in a million years.”

“Can you handle it yourself?” “No. There are going to be more.” “Fatalities?”

Dawson asked. “We’ve got people here who are unaffected.” “Unaffected by the program?” “That’s right.”

“Why should that lead to fatalities?” “My cover is blown.”

“How did that happen?” Salsbury hesitated.

“You’d better tell me the truth,” Dawson said sharply. “For all our sakes. You’d better tell me the truth.”

“I was with a woman.”

“You fool.”

“It was a mistake,” Salsbury admitted.

“It was idiotic. We’ll discuss it later. One of these unaffected people came upon you while you were with the woman.”

“That’s right.”

“If your cover is blown it can be repaired. Undramatically.”

“I’m afraid not I ordered the killer to do what he did.” Despite the riddle form of the conversation, the events in Black River were becoming all too clear to Dawson. “I see.” He thought for a moment. “How many are unaffected?”

“Besides a couple of dozen babies and very young children, at least four more.

Maybe five.”

“That’s not so many.”

“There’s another problem. You know the two men we sent up here at the beginning of the month?”

“To the reservoir.”

“They were seen.”

Dawson was silent.

“If you don’t want to come,” Salsbury said, “that’s okay. But I have to have some help. Send our partner and—”

“We’ll both arrive tonight by helicopter,” Dawson said. “Can you bold it yourself until nine or ten o’clock?”

“I think so.”

“You had better.”

Dawson hung up.

Oh Lord, he thought, You sent him to me as an instrument of Your will. Now Satan’s gotten to him. Help me to set all of this aright. I only want to serve You.

He telephoned his pilot and ordered him to fuel the helicopter and have it at the landing pad behind the Greenwich house within the hour.

He dialed three numbers before he located Klinger. “There’s some trouble up north.”

“Serious?”

“Extremely serious. Can you be here in an hour?”

“Only if I drive like a maniac. Better make it an hour and a quarter.”

“Get moving.”

Dawson hung up again.

Oh Lord, he thought, both of these men are infidels. I know that. But You sent them to me for Your own purposes, didn’t You? Don’t punish me for doing Your will, Lord.

He opened the lower right-hand drawer of the desk and took Out a folder thick with papers.

The label on it said:

HARRISON-BODREI DETECTIVE AGENCY

SUBJECT: OGDEN SALSBURY

 

Thanks to the Harrison—Bodrei Agency, he understood his partners almost better than they understood themselves. For

the past fifteen years he had kept a constantly updated file on Ernst Klinger.

The Salsbury dossier was comparatively new, begun only in January 1975; but it traced his life all the way back through his childhood, and it was undeniably complete. Having read it ten or twelve times, from cover to cover, Dawson felt that he should have anticipated the current crisis.

Ogden was neither stark-raving mad nor perfectly sound of mind. He was a pathological woman-hater. Yet periodically he indulged in lascivious sprees of whoring, using as many as seven or eight prostitutes during a single weekend.

Occasionally, there was trouble.

To Dawson’s way of thinking, two of the reports in the file were more important, told more about Ogden, than all of the others combined. He withdrew the first of them from the folder and read it yet again.

A week past his eleventh birthday, Ogden was taken from his mother and made a ward of the court. Katherine Salsbury (widowed) and her lover, Howard Parker, were later convicted of child abuse, child molestation, and corrupting the morals of a minor. Mrs. Salsbury was sentenced to seven to ten years in the New Jersey Correctional Institution for Women. Upon her conviction, Ogden was transferred to the home of a neighbor, Mrs. Carrie Barger (now Peterson), where he became one of several foster children. This interview was conducted with Mrs.

Carrie Peterson (now sixty-nine years old) in her home in Teaneck, New Jersey, on the morning of Wednesday, January 22, 1975. The subject was obviously intoxicated even at that early hour and sipped at a glass of “just plain orange juice” throughout the interview. The subject was not aware that she was being recorded.

Dawson had marked the sections of the report that most interested him. He skipped ahead to the third page.

AGENT: Living next door to Mrs. Salsbury, you must have witnessed a great many of those beatings.

MRS. PETERSON: Oh, yes. Oh, I should say. From the time that Ogden was old enough to walk, he was a target for her. That woman! The least little thing he did—whup! she beat him black and blue.

AGENT: Spanked him?

MRS. PETERSON: No, no. She hardly ever spanked. Had she only spanked! That wouldn’t have been so horrid. But that woman! She started out hitting him with her open hands. On the head and all about his sweet little face. As he got older she’d sometimes use her fists. She was a big woman, you know. She’d use her fists. And she’d pinch. Pinch his little arms … I cried many the time. He’d come over to play with my foster children, and he’d be a mess. His little arms would be spotted with bruises. Just spotted all over with bruises.

AGENT: \Vas she an alcoholic?

MRS. PETERSON: She drank. Some. But she wasn’t addicted to gin or anything. She was just mean. Naturally mean. And I don’t think she was too smart. Sometimes, very dim-witted people, when they get frustrated, they take it out on children.

I’ve seen it before. Too often. Suffer the little children. Oh, they suffer so much, I tell you.

AGENT: She had a great many lovers?

MRS. PETERSON: Dozens. She was a vile woman. Very common-looking men. Always very common-looking. Dirty. Crude laborers. Her men drank a lot. Sometimes they’d stay with her as much as a year. More often it was a week or two, a month.

AGENT: This Howard Parker—

MRS. PETERSON: Him!

AGENT: How long was he with Mrs. Salsbury?

MRS. PETERSON: Nearly six months, I think, before the crime. What a horrible man. Horrible!

AGENT: Did you know what was happening in the Salsbury house when Parker was there?

MRS. PETERSON: Of course not! I’d have called the police at once! Of course the night of the crime—Ogden came to me. And then I did call the police.

AGENT: Do you mind talking about the crime?

MRS. PETERSON: It still upsets me. To think of it. What a horrible man! And that woman. To do that to a child.

AGENT: Parker was—bisexual?

MRS. PETERSON: He was what?

AGENT: He customarily had relations with both sexes. Is that right?

MRS. PETERSON: He raped a little boy! It’s … I don’t know. I just don’t know. Why did God make some people so wicked? I love children. Have all my life.

Love them more than anything. I can’t understand a man like that Parker.

AGENT: Does it embarrass you to talk about the crime?

MRS. PETERSON: A little bit.

AGENT: If you can bear with me… It’s really important that you answer a few more questions.

MRS. PETERSON: If it’s for Ogden’s sake, like you said, I surely can. For Ogden’s sake. Although he never comes back to see me. You know that? After I took him in and raised him from the age of eleven. He just never comes back.

AGENT: The court records of that time were not properly explicit. Either that or the judge had some of the testimony altered to protect the boy’s reputation. I am not certain whether Mr. Parker subjected the boy to—you’ll excuse me, but it has to be said—to oral or anal intercourse.

MRS. PETERSON: That horrible man!

AGENT: Do you know which it was?

MRS. PETERSON: Both.

AGENT: I see.

MRS. PETERSON: With the mother watching. His mother watched! Can you imagine such a thing? Such a rotten thing? To do that to a defenseless child… What monsters they were!

AGENT: I didn’t mean to make you cry.

MRS. PETERSON: I’m not crying. Just a tear or two. It’s so sad. Don’t you think?

So terribly sad. Suffer the little children.

AGENT: There’s no need to continue with—

MRS. PETERSON: Oh, but you said this was for Ogden’s sake, that you needed to ask all of this for Ogden’s sake. He was one of my children. Foster children.

But I felt like they were my own. I loved them dearly. Loved all of them. Little dears, every one. So if it’s for Ogden’s sake … Well … For months, without anyone at all knowing, with poor little Ogden too afraid to tell any-one, that terrible Howard Parker … was using the boy… using… his mouth. And the mother watching! She was a vicious woman. And sick. Very sick.

AGENT: And the night of the crime— MRS. PETERSON: Parker used the boy… he used … the

boy’s rectum. Hurt him terribly. You can’t know the pain that boy suffered.

AGENT: Ogden came to you that night.

MRS. PETERSON: I lived right next door to them. He came to me. Shaking like a leaf. Scared out of his wits. The poor, poor baby… Crying his heart out, he was. That awful Parker had beat him up. His lips were cracked. One eye was puffed and black. At first I thought that was all that was wrong with him. But I soon discovered… the other. We rushed him to the hospital. He needed eleven stitches. Eleven! AGENT: Eleven—rectal stitches?

MRS. PETERSON: That’s right. He was in such pain. And he was bleeding. He had to stay in the hospital for nearly a week.

AGENT: And eventually you became his foster mother.

MRS. PETERSON: Yes. And never sorry for it. He was a fine boy. A dear boy. Very bright too. At school they said he was a genius. He won all of those scholarships and went up to Harvard. You’d think he’d come to see me, wouldn’t you? After all I did for him? But no. He never comes. He never comes around. And now the social

workers won’t let me have any more children. Not since my second husband died.

They say there have to be two parents in a foster home. And besides they say that I’m too old. Well, that’s craziness. I love children, and that’s all that should count. I love each and every one of them. Haven’t I dedicated my life to foster children? I’m not too old for them. And when I think of all the suffering children, I could just cry.

The last half of that report was a transcription of a long and rambling conversation with the man to whom Mrs. Peterson had been married at the time that she took the eleven-year-old Ogden Salsbury into her home.

This interview was conducted with Mr. Allen J. Barger (now eighty-three years old) in the Evins-Maebry Nursing Home in Huntington, Long Island, on the afternoon of Friday, January 24, 1975. The subject is supported at the home by the three children from his second marriage. The subject, who suffers from senility, was alternately lucid and incoherent. The subject was not aware that he was being recorded.

Dawson leafed ahead to the passage he bad marked.

AGENT: Do you remember any of the foster children that you took in while you were married to Carrie?

MR. BARGER: She took them in. Not me.

AGENT: Do you remember any of them?

MR. BARGER: Oh, Christ.

AGENT: What’s the matter?

MR. BARGER: I try not to remember them.

AGENT: You didn’t enjoy them like she did?

MR. BARGER: All those dirty little faces when I came home from work. She tried to say we needed the extra money, the few dollars the government gave us for keeping the kids. It was the Depression. But she drank up the money.

AGENT: She was an alcoholic?

MR. BARGER: Not when I married her. But she was sure on her way to being one.

AGENT: Do you remember a child named—

Mr. BARGER: My trouble was I didn’t many her for her mind.

AGENT: Excuse me?

MR. BARGER: I married my second wife for her mind, and that worked out swell.

But when I got hitched to Carrie … Well, I was forty years old and still single and sick to death of going to whores. Carrie came along, twenty-six and fresh as a peach, so much younger than me but interested in me, and I let my balls do my thinking for me. Married her for her body with no thought as to what was in her head. That was a big mistake.

AGENT: I’m sure it was. ‘Well … Now, could you tell me if you can remember a child named— MR. BARGER: She had magnificent jugs.

AGENT: I beg your pardon?

MR. BARGER: Jugs. Boobs. Carrie had a magnificent set.

AGENT: Oh. Yes. Uh…

MR. BARGER: She was pretty good in bed too. When you could get her away from those goddamned kids. Those kids! I don’t know why I ever agreed to take the first one in. After that we never had less than four and usually six or seven.

She had always wanted a big family. But she wasn’t able to have children of her own. I guess maybe that made her want them even more. But she didn’t really want to be a mother. It was just a dream, a sort of sentimental thing with her.

AGENT: What do you mean?

MR. BARGER: Oh, she liked the idea, of having children more than she liked really having them.

AGENT: I see.

MR. BARGER: She couldn’t discipline them worth a damn. They walked right over her. And I wasn’t about to take over that chore. No, sir! I worked hard, long hours in those days. When I came home I didn’t want to do anything but relax. I didn’t spend my time chasing after a pack of brats. So long as they left me alone, they could do what they wanted. They knew that, and they never bothered me. Hell, they weren’t my kids.

AGENT: Do you remember one of them named Ogden Salsbury?

MR. BARGER: No.

AGENT: His mother lived next door to you. She had a lot of lovers. One of them, a man named Parker, raped the boy.

Homosexual rape.

MR. BARGER: Come to think of it, I do remember him. Ogden. Yeah. He came to the house at a bad time.

AGENT: A bad time? How’s that?

MR. BARGER: It was all girls then.

AGENT: All girls?

MR. BARGER: Carrie was on a kick. She wouldn’t take in any but little girls.

Maybe she thought she could control them better than she could a bunch of boys.

So this Ogden and I were the only men in the house for about two or three years.

AGENT: And that was bad for him?

MR. BARGER: The older girls knew what had happened to him. They used to tease him something fierce. He couldn’t take it. He’d blow up every time. Start yelling and screaming at them. Of course that was what they wanted, so they just teased him some more. When this Ogden used to let the girls get his goat, I’d take him aside and talk to him—almost father to son. I used to tell him not to pay them any mind. I used to tell him that they were just women and that women were good for only two things. Fucking and cooking. That was my attitude before I met my second wife. Anyway, I think I must have been a great help to that boy.

A great help … Do you know they won’t let you fuck in this nursing home?

The other report that Dawson found especially interesting was an interview with Laud Richardson, a first-level clerk in

the Pentagon’s Bureau of Security Clearance Investigations. A Harrison-Bodrei agent had offered Richardson five hundred dollars to pull Salsbury’s army security file, study it, and report its contents.

Again, Dawson had bracketed the most relevant passages with a red pen.

RICHARDSON: Whatever research he’s doing must be damned important. They’ve spent a lot of money covering for the sonofabitch over the past ten years. And the Pentagon just doesn’t do that unless it expects to be repaid in spades some day.

AGENT: Covering for him? How?

RICHARDSON: He likes to mark up prostitutes.

AGENT: Mark them up?

RICHARDSON: Mostly with his fists.

AGENT: How often does this happen?

RICHARDSON: Once or twice a year.

AGENT: How often does he see prostitutes?

RICHARDSON: He goes whoring the first weekend of every other month. Regular as you please. Like he’s a robot or something. You could set your watch by his need. Usually, he goes into Manhattan, makes the rounds of the leisure and health spas, phones a couple of call girls and has them up to his hotel room.

Now and then one of them comes along with the kind of look that sets him off, and he beats the shit out of her.

AGENT: What look is that?

RICHARDSON: Usually blond, but not always. Usually pale, but not always. But she is always small. Five one or five two. A hundred pounds. And delicate. Very delicate features.

AGENT: Why would a girl like that set him off?

RICHARDSON: The Pentagon tried to force him into psychoanalysis. He went to one session and refused to go the second time. He did tell the psychiatrist that these frenzies of his were generated by more than the girls’ appearance. They have to be delicate.—but not just in a

physical sense. They have to seem emotionally vulnerable to him before be gets the urge to pound them senseless.

AGENT: In other words if he thinks the woman is his equal or his superior, she’s safe. But if be feels that he can dominate her—

RICHARDSON: Then she’d better have her Blue Cross paid in full.

AGENT: He hasn’t killed any of these women, has he?

RICHARDSON: Not yet. But he’s come close a couple of times.

AGENT: You said someone in the Pentagon covers up for him.

RICHARDSON: Usually someone from our bureau.

AGENT: How?

RICHARDSON: By paying the girl’s hospital bills and giving her a lump sum. The size of the pay-off depends on the extent of her injuries.

AGENT: Is he considered a high security risk?

RICHARDSON: Oh, no. If be was a closet queen and we found out about it, he’d be classified as a fairly bad risk. But his hang-ups and vices aren’t secret.

They’re out in the open. No one can blackmail him, threaten him with the loss of his job because we already know all of his dirty little secrets. In fact, whenever he marks up a girl, he has a special number to call, a relay point right in my department. Someone is at his hotel room within an hour to clean up after him.

AGENT: Nice people you work for.

RICHARDSON: Aren’t they? But I’m surprised that even they put up with this sonofabitch Salsbury. He’s a sick man. He’s a real can of worms all by himself.

They should stick him away in a cell somewhere and just forget all about him.

AGENT: Do you know about his childhood?

RICHARDSON: About his mother and the man who raped him? It’s in the file.

AGENT: It helps to explain why he—

RICHARDSON: You know what? Even though I can see where his craziness comes from, even though I can see that it isn’t entirely his fault that he is what he is, I can’t dredge up any compassion for him. When I think about all of those girls who ended up in hospitals with their jaws broken and their eyes swollen shut . .

. Listen, did any of those girls feel less pain because Salsbury’s evil isn’t entirely his own doing? I’m an old-style liberal when it comes to most things.

But this liberal line about compassion for the criminal—that’s ninety percent horseshit. You can only spout that kind of garbage if you and your own family have been lucky enough to avoid animals like Salsbury. If it was up to me, I’d put him on trial for all of those beatings. Then I’d send him away to a cell somewhere, hundreds of miles from the nearest woman.

Dawson sighed.

He put the reports in the folder and returned the folder to the lower right-hand desk drawer.

O Lord, he thought prayerfully, give me the power to undo what damage he’s done in Black River. If this mistake can be remedied, if the field test can be completed properly, then I will be able to feed the drug to both Ernst and Ogden. I’ll be able to program them. I’ve been making preparations. You know that. I’ll be able to program them and convert them to Your holy fellowship. And not just them. The world. There will be no more souls for Satan. Heaven on earth. That’s what it’ll be, Lord. True heaven on earth, all in the shining light of Your love.

2:55 P.M.

Sam read the last line of Salsbury’s article, closed the book, and said, “Jesus!”

“At least now we have some idea of what’s happening in Black River,” Paul said.

“All of that crazy stuff about breaking down the ego, primer drugs, code phrases, achieving total control, bringing contentment to the masses through behavioral modification, the benefits of a subliminally directed society…“

Somewhat dazed by Salsbury’s rhetoric, Jenny shook her head as if that would help her to think more clearly. “He sounds like a lunatic. He’s certifiable.”

“He’s a Nazi,” Sam said, “in spirit if not in name. That’s a very special breed of lunatic. A very deadly breed. And there are literally thousands of people like him, hundreds of thousands who would agree with every word he said about the benefits of a ‘subliminally directed society.’”

Thunder exploded with such violence that it sounded as if the bowl of the sky had cracked in two. A fierce gust of wind slammed against the house. The tempo of the rain on the roof and windows picked up to double time.

“Whatever he is,” Paul said, “he’s done exactly what he said could be done. He’s made this insane scheme work. By God, that has to be what’s happening here. It explains everything since the epidemic of night chills and nausea.”

“I still don’t understand why Dad and I weren’t afflicted,” Jenny said.

“Salisbury mentions in the article that the subliminal program would not affect illiterates and children who haven’t yet come to terms, however crude, with sex and death. But neither Dad nor I fit into one of those categories.”

“I think I can answer that,” Paul said.

Sam said, “So can I. One thing they teach budding pharmacologists is that no drug affects everyone the same way. On some people, for instance, penicillin has little or no effect. Some people don’t respond well at all to sulfa drugs. I suspect that, for whatever reasons of genes and metabolisms and body chemistries, we’re among the tiny percentage of those who aren’t touched by Salsbury’s drug.”

“And thank God for that,” Jenny said. She hugged herself and shivered.

“There ought to be more adults unaffected,” Paul said. “It’s summertime. People take vacations. Wasn’t anyone out of town during the week when the reservoir was contaminated and the subliminal messages broadcast?”

“When the heavy snows come,” Sam said, “logging operations have to stop. So in the warm months everyone connected with the mill works his butt off to make sure there will be a stockpile of logs to keep the saws going all winter. No one at the mill takes a vacation in the summer, And everyone in town who serves the mill takes his time off in the winter too.”

Paul felt as if he were on a turntable, whirling around and around. His mind spun with the implications of the article that Sam had read. “Mark and Rya and I weren’t affected because we got to town after the contaminant had passed out of the reservoir—and because we didn’t watch whatever television programs or commercials contained the subliminal messages. But virtually everyone else in Black River is now under Salsbury’s control.”

They stared at one another.

The storm moaned at the window.

Finally Sam said, “We enjoy the benefits and luxuries provided by modern science—all the while forgetting that the technological revolution, just like the industrial revolution before it, has its dark side.” For several long seconds, with the mantel clock ticking behind him, he studied the cover of the book in his hand. “The more complex a society becomes, the more dependent each part of it becomes on every other part of it, the easier it is for one man, one lunatic or true believer, to destroy it all on a whim. One man working alone can assassinate a chief of state and precipitate major changes in his country’s foreign and domestic policies. They tell us that one man with a degree in biology and a lot of determination can culture more than enough plague bacillus to destroy the world. One man working alone can even build a nuclear bomb. All he needs is a college degree in physics. And the ability to get his hands on a few Pounds of plutonium. Which isn’t so damned hard to do either. He can build a bomb inside a suitcase and wipe out New York City because… Well, hell, why not because he was mugged there, or because he once got a traffic ticket in Manhattan and he doesn’t think he deserved it.

“But Salsbury can’t be working alone,” Jenny said.

“I agree with you.”

“The resources needed to perfect and implement the program that he described in his article… Why, they would be enormous.”

“A private industry might be able to finance it,” Paul said. “A company as large as AT&T.”

“No,” Sam said. “Too many executives and research people would have to know about it. There would be a leak. It would never get this far without a leak to the press and a major scandal.”

“A single wealthy man could provide what Salsbury needed,” Jenny said. “Someone as rich as Onassis was. Or Hughes.”

Tugging gently on his beard, Sam said, “It’s possible, I suppose. But we’re all avoiding the most logical explanation.”

“That Salsbury is working for the United States government,” Paul said worriedly.

“Exactly,” Sam said. “And if he is working for the government or the CIA or any branch of the military—then we’re finished. Not just the three of us and Rya, but the whole damned country.”

Paul went to the window, wiped away some of the dew, and stared at wind-lashed trees and billowing gray sheets of rain. “Do you think that what’s happening here is happening all over the country?”

“No,” Sam said. “If there were a general takeover in progress, Salsbury wouldn’t be in a backwoods mill town. He’d be at a command post in Washington. Or somewhere else, anywhere else.”

“Then it’s a test. A field test,”

“Probably.”

“And that’s maybe a good sign,” Sam said. “The government would run a field test where it already bad tight security. Most likely on an army or air force base.

Not here.”

Lightning blasted through the thunderheads; and for an instant the patterns of rain on the window seemed to form faces: Annie’s face, Mark’s face…

Suddenly Paul thought that his wife and son, although they had met quite different deaths, had been killed by the same force. Technology. Science. Annie had gone into the hospital for a simple appendectomy. It hadn’t even been an emergency operation. The anesthesiologist had given her a brand-new-on-the-market-revolutionary-you-couldn’t-ask-for-better anesthetic, something that wasn’t as messy as ether, something that was easier to use (easier for the anesthesiologist) than pentothal. But after the operation she didn’t regain consciousness as she should have done. She slipped, instead, into a coma. She’d had an allergic reaction to the brand-new-on-the-market-revolutionary-you-couldn’t-ask-for-better anesthetic; and it had destroyed a large part of her liver. Fortunately, the doctors told him, the liver was the one organ of the body that could regenerate itself. If they kept her in the intensive care unit, supporting her life processes with machines, the liver would repair itself day by day, until eventually she would be well again. She was in intensive care for five weeks, at which time the doctors fed all of the data from the life-support machines into a Medico computer, and the computer told them that she was well enough to be moved out of intensive care and into a private room. Eleven weeks later, the same computer said she was well enough to go home. She was listless and apathetic—but she agreed that the computer must be right. Two weeks after she came home, she had a relapse and died within forty-eight hours. Sometimes he thought that if he had only been a medical doctor instead of a veterinarian, he might have saved her.

But that was pointless masochism. What he could have done was demand that her Original surgery be performed with ether or pentothal, something known to be safe, something that had stood the test of decades. He could have told them to stuff their computer up their collective ass. But he hadn’t done that either. He had trusted in their technology simply because it was technology, because it was all new. Americans were brought up to respect what was new and progressive—and more often than they wanted to admit, they died for their faith in what was bright and shiny.

After Annie died he became suspicious of technology, of every new wonder that science gave to mankind. He read Paul Ehrlich and other back-to-the-land reformers. Gradually he came to see that the yearly camping trips to Black River could be the beginning of a serious program to free his children from the city, from the ever-growing dangers of the science and technology that the cities represented. The yearly trips became an education for lives they would live in harmony with nature.

But the back-to-the-land advocates were possessed by an impossible dream. He saw that now, saw it as clearly as he had ever seen anything in his life. They were trying to run away from technology—but it moved much faster than they did. There was no land to get back to anymore. The city, its science and technology, the effects of its life-style, had tendrils snaking out into even the most remote mountains and forests.

Furthermore, you ignored the advancements of science at your own peril. His ignorance about anesthetics and the reliability of the Medico computer had cost Annie her life. His ignorance of subliminal advertising and the research being done in that field had, if you wanted to stretch a point, cost Mark his life.

The only way to survive in the 1970s and in the decades to follow was to plunge into the fast-moving, supertechnical society, swim with it, learn from it and about it, learn all that you could, and be its equal in any confrontation.

He turned away from the window. “We can’t go to Bexford and call the state police. If our own government is behind Salsbury, if our own leaders want to enslave us, we’ll never win. It’s hopeless. But if it isn’t behind him, if it doesn’t know what he’s achieved, then we don’t dare let it know. Because the moment the military finds out—it’ll appropriate Salsbury’s discoveries; and there are some factions of the military that wouldn’t be opposed to using subliminal programming against us.”

Looking around at the books about Nazism, totalitarianism, and mob psychology, thinking ruefully of what he’d learned

about some men’s lust for power, Sam said, “You’re right. Besides, I’ve been thinking about the problems with the long-distance phone service.”

Paul knew what he meant. “Salsbury’s taken over the telephone exchange.”

“And if he’s done that,” Sam said, “he’s taken other precautions too. He’s probably blockaded the roads and every other route out of town. We couldn’t go to Bexford and tell the state police even if we still wanted to.”

“We’re trapped,” Jenny said quietly.

“For the time being,” Paul said, “that really doesn’t matter. We’ve already decided there’s no place to run anyway. But if he’s not working for the government, if he’s backed by a corporation or a single wealthy man, maybe we’ve got a chance to stop him here in Black River.”

“Stop him …“ Sam stared thoughtfully at the floor. “Do you realize what you’re saying? We’d have to get our hands on him, interrogate him—and then kill him. Death is the only thing that will stop a man like that. We’d also have to find out from him who he’s associated with—and kill anyone else who might understand how the drug was made and how the subliminal program was constructed.” He looked up from the floor. “That could mean two murders, three, four, or a dozen.”

“None of us is a killer,” Jenny said.

“Every man’s a potential killer,” Paul said. “When it comes to matters of survival, any man is capable of anything. And this is sure as hell a matter of survival.”

“I killed men in the war,” Sam said.

“So did I,” Paul said. “A different war than yours. But the same act.”

“That was different,” Jenny said.

“Was it?”

“That was war,” she said.

“This is war too,” Paul said.

She stared at Paul’s hands, as if imagining them with a knife or a gun or clamped around a man’s throat.

Sensing her thoughts, he raised his hands and studied them for a moment. On occasion, washing his hands before dinner or after treating a sick animal, he would flash back to the war, back to Southeast Asia. He would hear the guns and see the blood again in his memory. In these almost psychic moments, he was both amazed and dismayed that the same hands were accustomed to mundane and horrible acts, that they could heal or injure, make love or kill, and look no different after the task was done. Codified morality, he thought, was indeed a blessing but also a curse of civilization. A blessing because it permitted men to live in harmony most of the time. A curse because— when the Jaws of nature and especially of human nature made it necessary for a man to wound or kill another man in order to save himself and his family—it spawned remorse and guilt even if the violence was unwanted and unavoidable.

Besides, he reminded himself, these are the 1970s. This is the age of science and technology when a man often is required to act with the implacable and unemotional savagery of the machine. For better or worse, in these times gentility is becoming less and less a sign of the civilized man and is, in fact, very nearly an obsolescent quality. You see gentility, most often, in those who are least likely to survive wave after wave of future shock.

Lowering his hands he said, “In the classic paranoid vein, it’s us against them.

Except that this isn’t a delusion or an illusion; it’s real.”

Jenny seemed to accept the need for murder as quickly as he had accepted the fact that he might be called upon to commit it. By this point in her life, she had experienced, as had all but the most gentle people, at least the flickering of a homicidal urge in a moment of despair or great frustration. She hadn’t accepted it as the solution to whatever problem had inspired it. But she was not incapable of conceiving of a situation in which homicide was the most reasonable response to a threat. In spite of the overprotected, sheltered upbringing of which she’d spoken last Monday, she could adapt to even the most unpleasant truths. Perhaps, Paul thought, the ordeal with her first husband had made her stronger, tougher, and more resilient than she realized.

She said, “Even if we could bring ourselves to kill in order to stop this thing.

. . Well, it’s still too much. To stop Salsbury, we need to know more about him.

And how do we learn anything? He’s got hundreds of bodyguards. Or if he wants, he can turn everyone in town into killers and send them after us. Do we just sit here, pass the time, wait for him to stop around for a chat?”

Returning the hardbound volume of essays to the shelf from which he’d taken it, Sam said, “Wait a minute… Suppose…“ He faced them. He was excited. All three of them were tense, twisted as tight as watch springs. But now a glimmer of pleasurable excitement was in his Santa Claus—like features. “When Salsbury saw Rya standing in the kitchen doorway at the Thorp house, what do you imagine he did, very first thing?”

“Grabbed for her,” Jenny said.

“Wrong.”

Bitterly, Paul said, “Ordered Bob to kill her.”

“Not that either. Remember, he would expect her to be another one of his—zombies.”

Sucking in her breath, Jenny said, “He would use the code phrase on her, the system he talks about in the article. He’d try to open her up and take control of her before she ran away. So … Rya must have heard the code phrase!”

“And if she can recall it,” Sam said, “we’ll have control of everyone in Black River, the same as Salsbury. He won’t be able to send them after us. He won’t have hundreds of bodyguards to hide behind. It won’t be us against them. It’ll be us against him.”