"I appreciate all your time and trouble, Mr. Hanrahan. What do I owe you?"

"Let's say you paid me up to date. This little conference was on the house."

Hanrahan shut the door quietly behind him, leaving a faint stale smell of cigar in the hotel room. Roy Owen looked at the crude map Hanrahan had given him. Manse. Mall. Tabernacle. Careful printing.

He folded the map and took his round-trip air ticket out of the zipper pocket in his carry-on case. The return reservation was open. He found the airline number in the yellow pages.

The recorded message told him to please stay on the line, one of the agents would be with him shortly. They played zither music to him, a Hungarian tempo vaguely familiar. He thought about Lindy again and the soft sound she had made when she yawned into the phone in her motel room in Lakemore.

And he thought about Janie, about how strange she had been lately. The place to be was with the child. But what do you tell the child? Daddy couldn't find out anything about Mommy. Nobody knows anything about Mommy. Nobody knows where she is. Hell of a thing to try to explain to a child harboring some kind of fright, tucked far away inside her.

The zither music stopped and a voice said, This is Caroline.

May I help you?"

"Would that you could," he said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I'm sorry. I guess I've changed my plans," he said, and put the phone back on the cradle.

Three.

Finn Efflander sat alone in one of the leather chairs at the side of the long executive conference table. He had kicked a moccasin off and had one heel braced on the seat of his chair, his long fingers laced around his ankle, knee sharply bent. Idly and patiently he watched the interconnecting door to John Tinker Meadows' suite and waited for the man to come out.

Behind Efflander, the door to the old man's office was open wide. Efflander had learned through observation and experiment that John Tinker Meadows was slightly more tolerant and flexible in his judgments when he could see into his father's office.

Efflander believed it was a daddy hangup, some suppressed guilt over taking over the store. All those plaques and citations on the wall, and all those pictures of a younger and more vital Matthew Meadows standing with the past and present celebrities of the world, all smiling out at John Tinker. Dr. Meadows and Sadat. Dr. Meadows and Churchill, Gary Cooper, Pat O'Brien, Herbert Armstrong, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Paul Harvey, Walter Cronkite, Tammy Baker, Howard Cosell.

Finn Efflander exhaled slowly and deeply, reaffirming his posture and expression and appearance of languid ease, of mild amusement, of sleepy self-contempt. He could maintain this outward image when his bowels were turned to slime by anxieties, when his ears rang with tension, his mouth was dry, his hands wet, his heart banging. The look of total ease was his working armor, his costume. Basically impatient, he had taught himself a patience so endless it flattened those who tried to bargain with him and out wait him. Even when all his nerves were pulled so tight they sang, he could yawn and drawl and shuck around all afternoon. He was a long-limbed man in his early forties with pallid skin pocked with old acne scars. His cobweb-fine brown hair was receding rapidly. His eyes were hooded, his smile habitual, and he could make a brand-new custom suit look, within hours, as if he had bought it for three dollars from the Salvation Army.

The door swung open and John Tinker came striding in.

Finn lowered his cramped leg and smiled and said, "People say you done good this morning."

John Tinker sat in the armchair at the head of the table and said, "It seemed as if I was getting a good feedback. It ran a little short. I left out a section of it. Didn't mean to. Just one of those things. I just checked the phone banks across the way. All the operators are busy. That's about the best way to keep score."

"I've got a sort of agenda, here, John, but not in any special order of importance."

"You always say that."

"Just one of my nervous mannerisms. Nicpac is after a donation."

"Because they did so great last time? Ha! And this isn't even an election year. What do you think?"

"Down the road I can see little continuing areas of vulnerability. Tax quibbles. Direct satellite broadcasting regulations, new rules on cable access. What we all want, Nicpac keeps saying, is less government regulation. So, through Nicpac, we help support our friends in the government. They are going after funds from everybody. PTL, Moral Majority, 700 Club, Worldwide Church of God, Trinity, CBN. But they are all a little edgy about giving because of the People for the American Way campaign, which keeps saying that organizations qualifying for tax-deductible gifts cannot participate directly or indirectly in any political campaign. And Nicpac is a political entity."

"What are they asking for?"

"Quarter mil."

"But they'll take a hundred thousand?"

"Gladly. Happily."

"So work it out with Joe Deets. It should come out of the Henrietta Fund, I think. Then we won't have trouble with those American Way fellows."

Finn nodded. He scribbled a note to himself.

"Okay. We're turned down again on accreditation."

"But I thought you'd worked out something."

"I thought I had too, but we can't fit into that NonTraditional designation either. It's full of art schools, diploma mills and such. So I've been on the phone with eight college presidents who share our problem. Between us we've come up with a list of thirty-four unaccredited institutions, and we've tentatively agreed that a new accrediting body is needed.

NAROCU. Nah-ROW-koo."

"Nahwhat?"

"National Association of Religiously Oriented Colleges and Universities. If the nine of us come up with thirty thousand each and we tap the others for whatever they can stand still for, we can set up a headquarters, hire a couple of retired academics with respectable degrees and establish an accrediting procedure. We'll have some fair standards, of course. It will take a few years to establish some real plausibility, but in time we should be able to get a handle on our fair share of federal funds, and the degrees we grant will be more meaningful. Okay to run with it?"

"Good work. Good creative thinking!"

"But I want to ease out of it as soon as it starts to lift off the ground. I have enough to look after. Anyway, here's where we stand as of the Friday close." He took the familiar summary printout from his dispatch case and put it in front of John Tinker Meadows.

The printout covered all of the Church accounts, all of its assets in all of its various pockets, along with the bank and security accounts of the ECB Foundation, the Eternal Trust and all the smaller investment accounts. It revealed the gain since the previous accounting, showing the amounts added by both donations and market value increases. The grand total was quite unreal. It used to give John Tinker a fluttering feeling just under the heart, making it difficult for him to take a deep breath. But instead of triumph he now saw merely numbers.

Lots of them, adding up to meaningless totals.

The second sheet of the printout was an interim profit-and loss statement which covered all of the commercial operations and commercial entities.

"All in good health?" he asked.

"All thriving," said Efflander.

"Just one small problem. One of the flying squadrons of the IRS is making Rolf Wintergarten nervous."

"He's being well paid to stay nervous," John said.

"What is it this time?"

"A sly little variation. Here's the reasoning. They pulled the last year's personal tax returns of all our executive and administrative personnel. As you well know, every one of them tithes. They took the returns of the nine highest-paid people in the commercial end construction, leasing, housing and so on and the salaries came out close to one million total, so there is the question of the total tithe of a hundred thousand dollars."

"What question?"

"They say it can be called a kickback. We pay high salaries to reduce the profit on which we have to pay taxes, and then make those people kick back to the Church. They want to use that as a lever to pry open the whole contribution record, to make us prove to them that everybody tithes to the same extent everybody who works for any direct or indirect entity of Meadows Center. In addition, they have the usual complaints about our overhead charges to the commercial entities.