Firestarter by Stephen King Page A

thing,” Cap said stoutly. “Just let him sit out there in the yellow parlor the whole frigging morning. If he doesn’t decide to go home, I suppose I can see him before lunch.”
    â€œAll right, sir.” Problem solved—for Rachel, anyway, Cap thought with a touch of resentment. Wanless wasn’t really her problem at all. And the fact was, Wanless was getting to be an embarrassment. He had outlived both his usefulness and his influence. Well, there was always the Maui compound. And then there was Rainbird.
    Cap felt a little inward shudder at that … and he wasn’t a man who shuddered easily.
    He held down the intercom toggle again. “I’ll want the entire McGee file again, Rachel. And at ten-thirty I want to see Al Steinowitz. If Wanless is still here when I finish with Al, you can send him in.”
    â€œVery good, Cap.”
    Cap sat back, steepled his fingers, and looked across the room at the picture of George Patton on the wall. Patton was standing astride the top hatch of a tank as if he thought hewere Duke Wayne or someone. “It’s a hard life if you don’t weaken,” he told Patton’s image, and sipped his coffee.
3
    Rachel brought the file in on a whisper-wheeled library cart ten minutes later. There were six boxes of papers and reports, four boxes of photographs. There were telephone transcripts as well. The McGee phone had been bugged since 1978.
    â€œThanks, Rachel.”
    â€œYou’re welcome. Mr. Steinowitz will be here at ten-thirty.”
    â€œOf course he will. Has Wanless died yet?”
    â€œI’m afraid not,” she said, smiling. “He’s just sitting out there and watching Henry walk the horses.”
    â€œShredding his goddam cigarettes?”
    Rachel covered her mouth like a schoolgirl, giggled, and nodded. “He’s gone through half a pack already.”
    Cap grunted. Rachel left and he turned to the files. He had been through them how many times in the last eleven months? A dozen? Two dozen? He had the extracta nearly by heart. And if Al was right, he would have the two remaining McGees under detection by the end of the week. The thought caused a hot little trickle of excitement in his belly.
    He began leafing through the McGee file at random, pulling a sheet here, reading a snatch there. It was his way of plugging back into the situation. His conscious mind was in neutral, his subconscious in high gear. What he wanted now was not detail but to put his hand to the whole thing. As baseball players say, he needed to find the handle.
    Here was a memo from Wanless himself, a younger Wanless (ah, but they had all been younger then), dated September 12, 1968. Half a paragraph caught Cap’s eye:
    â€¦ of an enormous importance in the continuing study of controllable psychic phenomena. Further testing on animals would be counterproductive (see overleaf 1) and, as I emphasized at the group meeting this summer, testing on convicts or any deviant personality might lead to very real problems if Lot Six is even fractionally aspowerful as we suspect (see overleaf 2). I therefore continue to recommend …
    You continue to recommend that we feed it to controlled groups of college students under all outstanding contingency plans for failure, Cap thought. There had been no waffling on Wanless’s part in those days. No indeed. His motto in those days had been full speed ahead and devil take the hindmost. Twelve people had been tested. Two of them had died, one during the test, one shortly afterward. Two had gone hopelessly insane, and both of them were maimed—one blind, one suffering from psychotic paralysis, both of them confined at the Maui compound, where they would remain until their miserable lives ended. So then there were eight. One of them had died in a car accident in 1972, a car accident that was almost certainly no accident at all but suicide. Another had leaped from the roof of the Cleveland