Share of the airstrip expenses, motor pool, overall maintenance, legal staff and so on."

"When are they going to give up?"

"They aren't being paid to give up."

"On all tax-paying portions of this complex, our books are clean and our practices are all within the law. As far as contributions to the Church are concerned, that is none of their business. Have you run this past the brothers Winchester?"

"Yes. Charley says that if we paid Wintergarten ten million a year and he tithed one million, we might be forced to discuss it with them on the basis we were translating potential profits into tax-free gifts. But there is no blatant example, and their reasoning, he says, is faulty. We can stonewall it all the way to the tax court, meanwhile being careful about any warrant to grab the books and records, so we can stonewall that too. But he says we just might mention it to the Senators this coming week."

"We'll arrange it so Charley can bring it up. I see you have brought your little tape player, and I assume it has something to do with what my sainted sister calls the Japanese nodules."

Finn smiled and pressed the play button, saying, "Now hear this."

John Tinker leaned back, eyes closed, making a fingertip tent as he composed himself to listen to this latest effort after so many failures. He heard the buzzing sound of a phone ringing somewhere, and then the heavy voice of a man saying, "Hello?"

He sounded irritable and impatient.

"Is this Mr. Albert? Mr. Francis M. Albert?" a woman asked.

"Yes, yes. If you're selling, I'm not buying."

"Please hold the line. The Reverend Doctor Matthew Meadows would like to speak to you."

"To me? What? What kind of a dumb joke are you..."

"Francis? This is your pastor speaking." John Tinker opened his eyes and leaned forward. It was the rich instrument of old intimate, resonant, unmistakable.

"Reverend! It is you! I thought it was a joke that..."

"I called you, my son, because we here at the Church are worried about you. We haven't heard from you in ten months."

"Is it that long? Honest to God. I mean excuse me, I didn't mean to say that. Look, I didn't know it was so long."

"I have been worried about you, personally. I have been wondering if you might be in some kind of serious trouble, Francis. You and your wife have been members for six years. Is there trouble? Is there any way we can help you?"

"I don't know. I mean maybe. What happened, our daughter came down with some trouble of the spine. It's a long word and it means like it is disintegrating. And the treatments are killing us."

"Would that be Sharon or Karen?"

"Honest to God, you remember the names! Excuse me again.

It's the little one. It's Sharon. She just turned eight. It's pitiful, she's being so brave about it. You wouldn't believe the expense."

"I can well imagine. And it would of course limit your tithe, Francis. But it should not eliminate it. You are not the sort of person looking for an excuse to stop supporting your Church.

You and I have been together in the Church a long time, and we have both learned that no matter what you give, no matter how great your sacrifice, God will give you good fortune in far greater measure than your gift to Him."

"I know, I know. It's just that..."

"I would not want you to be opening up your life to greater misfortune by forsaking Him. Please let us know what we can do to help. We will be praying for little Sharon and for your whole family, Francis."

"I can't believe this has really happened! I never thought that a man as busy and important as you would have time for..."

"God is love."

"Uh... bless His holy name."

Finn turned the machine to rewind. John Tinker shook his head. He looked pale.

"I never really thought that Japanese fellow could make it work."

"It's very eerie. This was a real conversation. Delinquents picked at random. Fifty calls. We counted only those where we could get through to the actual person. The calls were made over a three-day period. The resulting gifts averaged out two hundred and sixteen dollars per call. The lowest response was ten dollars, the highest fourteen hundred. Personal letters of thanks went out to each one, over your father's facsimile signature."

"I keep forgetting that technician's name."

"Mickey Oshiro. Here's a transcript of what you just heard.

The portions that were canned have been highlighted in yellow. You can see that there are more of them than you would expect. Every voice pattern has been matched on a screen to the patterns lifted from your father's recorded sermons and Bible classes. The operator fills in the personal remarks on a phonetic keyboard and then at the right moment pushes T for transmit. She has to have a good memory for all the canned phrases. We put them on the key pad in a two number code. And there is another code to imitate the way the voice drops at the end of a sentence, or goes up when a question is asked. It is all a product of voice synthesis, John.

And very, very difficult for the operator. On lots of these calls she got rattled at the unexpected and had to break the connection and call back."

"You have just one operator?"

"Yes. Glinda Lopez. The other two I tried couldn't handle it.

Glinda can just barely handle it. Understand, she is using a machine to talk in someone else's voice, without being detected or sounding false. The sweat runs right off her face. On the early ones she had the worst time. She bit her lip once and bled. But she's quick and smart and getting better with each call. She can't do an eight-hour shift of that. Nobody could. It's too intense."

"Maybe you could motivate her by giving her a percentage of what she brings in."

"That wouldn't work with her. She's not that sort of a person. She believes what she is saying. What Matthew Meadows is saying through her, through the machine. If I push her too hard she'll burn out, and then she might get cynical about jacking money out of people who can't afford to give it."

As he saw the change in John Tinker's expression, he knew at once that he had gone too far. The minister of God leaned toward him and said gently, "Perhaps you do not believe in the efficacy of prayer, old friend."

"I only meant..."

"An offering is a prayer to the Lord. You are sick at heart and you give up a piece of your life to be made whole again. Money is the way we measure the effort in our lives. The work we do is transmuted into gold, and in our gratitude we tithe the Church. We tithe God. We pray in gold. If you do not understand that at this late date, Finn..."

"Just clumsy wording. I'm sorry. I've burned out some of my people in the past. Their motivations change. They get cynical.

I think it probably happens in every endeavor, John. It's part of the process of living and working. And believing."

"And you do believe?"

"Of course."

John Tinker Meadows looked directly into his eyes and Finn Efflander managed to endure that penetrating directness without looking away. And once again he wondered if John Tinker Meadows might be going mad. He seemed to be slowly, day by day, increasing the distance between himself and the people who ran his organization, the people he had to trust. At times like this, when John Tinker began talking about the necessity for faith, Finn felt alarm, as though he were alone in a room with an animal that had no idea of what its next move might be, and cared nothing about the consequences. He thought that it was time to talk to Mary Margaret again, to compare notes. There might come a day when this bleakness, this look of fury and outrage held in precarious control, might show itself from the pulpit.

It irritated Finn that this preacher his own age was able to cow him, to alarm him. In a highly successful business career he had dealt on even terms with men of far more power than John Tinker Meadows could wield. It was the suggestion of a destructive madness that made him so quick to try to mend any rift, he had decided. It was as though this whole Meadows empire which he had so carefully rebuilt out of the chaos was a castle of playing cards on a living-room rug, and John Tinker was a two-year-old playing in the same room, willful, destructive and unpredictable.