John Tinker sighed and relaxed and said, as though nothing at all had happened, "Something has come up. I don't think it's of any particular importance. Yesterday afternoon I had a long talk on the phone with Jeremy Rosen."

"The name seems to ring a bell."

"It should. He's a good friend of the Church. He's an Associate in the Society of Merit. And he's the chief executive officer of Burlington Communications, headquartered in New York. Last year when they picked up Farber Publishing, the magazine called Out Front was part of the package. Does that ring any bells?"

"Something about the police. Right! One of their people came down to write something about us and disappeared.

Nothing to do with us, though it's a good guess she was going to write something unpleasant. We gave our full cooperation.

Sheriff Dockerty was very apologetic about the whole thing.

What's up?"

"Jeremy has been reviewing the acquisitions. Out Front is beginning to make money sooner than anybody thought it would. He called in the managing editor to discuss budget and upcoming features. The editors are sending another investigative reporter down to try to open it all up again and see if there was any connection between the Church and her disappearance."

"But there wasn't!"

"You know that. I know that. But vicious gossip and hints of scandal sell magazines. And we are especially vulnerable.

Those who have never found God, or who have turned their backs on Him, would like to destroy His true Church. Jeremy said that he could put a stop to it, but he would rather not because he was afraid that it would look as if we had brought pressure to bear on him. And he said there is a good relationship there between the editors and the reporters, and he feels that if he starts censoring their projects, the best ones might leave. I told him I understood his reluctance and I appreciated his warning us in advance. They're sending a woman again, sending her down sometime this week." He tugged his wallet out of his hip pocket and removed a scrap of paper that had been in with the currency.

"Her name is Carolyn Pennymark. Jeremy thinks she's about thirty years old. She was with the Washington Post before she went with Out Front about two years ago."

"If she checks into one of our motels, or makes a reservation, I'll be informed right away. Then what?"

"How would you suggest we handle it?"

With only momentary hesitation, Finn Efflander said, "I'll sic Jenny Albritton on her. Instant photo and thumbprint for her gold ID badge. Total charm. All the literature. Everything open to her except the mail room, the money room and the computer room. Access to you, too, of course. And maybe a little chopper ride around the reservation?"

"Good thinking. And by the way, Finn, are you reasonably sure that person, that Mrs. Owen who disappeared, had no kind of meaningful contact with any of our people?"

"She got into Administration and saw the Reverend Walter Macy for about three minutes. She had made an appointment to talk to him about a gift of property to the Church. One of our best security people, Eliot Erskine he used to be on the Atlanta police force thought she acted strange in some way, so he followed her into Walter's office after she had been in there not more than two minutes. She was rambling on and on to Walter about some icons her grandfather had brought from Russia before the Revolution, and when it became evident to Erskine that she was lying or confused, Walter told her to bring them in and they would have them appraised by professionals and she would be given the appraisal report so she could write them off as a gift. He thanked her for her generosity, and Erskine led her back out to where a terribly battered old pickup truck with a bearded driver was waiting for her. She told Erskine her car was being fixed."

"What day was that?"

"A Friday. She was on the gate report as a Miss Olan. Friday morning. May sixth. We've got no other record of her seeing anyone. And we would have if she had."

"I guess I have no reason to feel uneasy about this, but I do."

"I'll take care of things. Not to worry."

"You're invaluable to me, Finn. I don't know how I could manage without you at my side. Give the very highest priority to this voice synthesis, please. As soon as you think she is able, have this Lopez woman start training one or two more."

"Will do."

"God is love," John Tinker said, rising to his feet.

"Bless His holy name," murmured Finn.

Four.

Joe Deets looked forward to Sunday afternoons. He spent them in his windowless office on the second floor of the Communications Building. A long desk had been built against one wall. He sat in a secretarial chair of pale oak and fake leather, with fat rubber tires. With one practiced shove of a foot, he could scoot along the desk from the terminals to the printers, and over to his own personal computer with its modems, two printers and eight-inch Winchester disks.

Sunday afternoons were fun time, investment time, the day for juggling money. There were eleven tax-exempt trust funds, all discretionary. They were divided among the trust departments of four New York City banks, three banks with three apiece, and one with two. A fifth bank served as a temporary receptacle, a way station between the Central Citizens Bank in Lakemore and the eleven trust funds.

It was his policy, proven by results, to keep all the funds invested at all times, moving from stocks to bonds to money market funds and back, long and short, depending on his sense of the marketplace. The securities analysis program on the big mainframe computer downstairs was wonderfully complex. It was tied into a market updating service so that after any business day he could print out each fund, showing current values and the percentage of change from the previous printout, the history of that particular investment and its rating in comparison to the performance of all other holdings in that fund and in all the funds under his control. Each week, after the infusion of new money, he apportioned it among the funds and set up the buy and sell orders. By tapping a very few keys on one of his terminals, he could print out the month-to-month history of each fund back to the day five years before when he had written the lengthy and intricate program that controlled the input and output and continual updating of these funds and all their transactions.

After proper safeguards had been built into the bank computer system for interbank transfers, he had been given a private access code which enabled him to make the transfers, and which also provided for a printout of his activities, if any, at the end of each working day for each bank involved.

Whenever he sent buy or sell instructions on any one. of the eleven accounts, he sent simultaneous advice to the discount brokerage house which, by agreement with the banks, handled all ECB orders.

Through his personal computer, without the knowledge of anyone else in the world, he leased space in a mainframe computer in Virginia, space which he accessed with a variable code he knew was almost impossible to break. On each Sunday afternoon, after he had decided on his buys and sells for the following Monday morning, he put those recommendations into his privately leased space. Then he arranged for the ECB mainframe to access that same space with a simpler code, one which would not permit changes to be made in the stored information. It was printed out and always contained the ending phrase "Courtesy of Conover Resources' and the date.

Once all the transactions had been completed, Joe Deets would compute the total dollar volume of all buy and sell orders and transfer a tiny percentage of that total as an advisory fee to the bank account in Philadelphia of Conover Resources. That fee was moved in and out of the Conover account very quickly, ending up in a blind trust in a branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia in Freeport in the Bahamas. There, under the careful husbandry of Number 712-311, it had grown from the four hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars he had pilfered to over seven hundred and sixty-five thousand in the three and a half years since he had set it up.

There were times when he wished he had named the advisory company with a little less bravado. His mother's maiden name had been Clara Conover. And the dear old thing would have considered it a mortal sin to steal from any church, regardless of its beliefs.

Not really stealing, he thought. It's a computer game. When an auditor had become very curious, Deets had pointed out to the fellow that he had personally negotiated a fee with the discount broker which more than compensated for the tiny bite Conover took in return for its splendid advice. And Deets could point with a justified pride to the growth of the funds. As another way of sidetracking suspicion, he was always careful to have Conover make a couple of recommendations which he did not follow.

Also, of course, he was able to state, quite correctly, that he gave no orders for any portfolio changes without approval from his investment committee, composed of Efflander, Wintergarten and Charley Winchester.

Not theft at all, he thought. Just a bit of spice to keep the job from becoming too dull. Nick them for a tiny drop of blood every time the big beast walks by. A little adventure to keep the glands working. And if ever they did decide to get rid of him, by that time there should be so much money squirreled away, a man could live in one of trie world's better places, with all the food, shelter, whiskey, music and women anyone could ever want. In the interim, a fellow could do quite well right here, bless you, Doreen darling'. They would be more hesitant to get rid of him now that he was the Reverend Joseph Deets. It amused him every time he remembered the way it had been done.

"Read these two books cover to cover, Mr. Deets. Write three thirty-minute sermons, Mr. Deets. One on Peter and John before the Sanhedrin, one on the Seventy-fourth Psalm and one on Deuteronomy, Chapter 14, Verses zz to Write a five-minute prayer relating to each sermon, Mr. Deets. Memorize your sermons and your prayers. Practice the delivery.

Tell us when you are ready and we will listen to you, the three of us, the Meadows family."

And so he had been ordained. They had declared him a minister of the Eternal Church of the Believer, and he had driven a hundred miles to a small church and there delivered his best sermon and best prayer. It had been duly noted in the next issue of PathWays. They had thought to bind a very valuable employee more closely to the Church, and perhaps to keep him on a shorter rein. They could not know it, but if they made any kind of successful attempt at keeping him out of mischief, he would end up slamming his head and fists against the walls, and hollering in tongues. Certain needs in certain people are beyond logical restraint. He knew that if he changed faiths and worked his way up to the huge red hat of a Cardinal, the hinges of his knees would still go weak at the sight of the gentle hobbling and swaying of the sweet parts of the young 42girls. Here he was in his forty-second year, and when he had been but thirty he had believed that in another dozen years the great surges and clenchings and breathlessness of need would diminish, slacken off to something manageable. But it had never left him and now he doubted it ever would. There was a beast in a cage in the back of his mind, in the shadows, pacing tirelessly to and fro, showing only the glint of a savage eyeball, the shine of a predator's fang. Yet a beast capable of the ultimate gentleness and patience with such as Doreen. Old cat and sweet mouse.

After he was certain of his selection, eleven buy orders, ten sell orders, he ran it through the Virginia computer service, retrieving it with the mainframe down below, and then printed it five times on the zoo-cps impact printer on that coarse yellow paper which seemed to give the committee members more confidence than when he used the daisy-wheel Diablo and heavy bond to make it look as if a secretary had typed it on a Selectric.

He put the reports in blue Accopress binders and, at ten to five, he went outside and got on his bike and pedalled out through the gate and on down Henrietta Boulevard to the Meadows Mall, pumping at a leisurely pace, squinting into the light of the sun high in the west. It reflected off the distant metallic scurrying of cars and trucks on the elevated Interstate.

He shoved his bike into a stanchion and chain-locked it in place, pushed a Mall door open and walked fifty yards through the air conditioning down the broad corridor toward the office area. He remembered the big fuss about being open on Sunday.

The old man had said never. The tenants created more and more pressure. Once John Tinker had taken over, he had ordered the complex open from noon to eight in the evening, with later hours for the four cinema theaters, which could be separated from the rest of the Mall by big accordion gates.

He walked slowly and cheerfully, a gnarled, bowlegged man with the swaying walk of a farmer or a sailor. He had swarthy skin, deeply scored with weather wrinkles and smile wrinkles.

He had big white teeth, which looked false, but were his own, and lusterless black hair cut short, which looked like a hairpiece, but was his own. He was tufted with coarse curly black hair down to his finger knuckles. He had a mild scratchy countryman's voice, and small bright pale gray eyes. He had a look of chronic contentment and amusement. He knew he was very good at what he did, but he felt that it was a special ability much like being a born linguist.

He could move from one computer language to another with total recall and no hesitation from Fortran to Pascal to COBOL to Basic to Ada but his preference was APL, the sophisticated language he had learned in the beginning, in 1974. He was able to see the shape of a whole program in his mind in any language, and could thus devise uniquely simple shortcuts. He had a knack for locating and eliminating the bugs in any program.

He knew he was lucky to be living during this brief period when these skills were rare and very marketable. Voice synthesis and computer-generated computer programs were going to render him, he believed, as obsolete as a hand-cranked adding machine.

But here and now, they had to keep him around and treat him nicely. He had young programmers working for him, constantly improving and expanding the usefulness of the huge data base of everyone who had ever evidenced any interest in the Church, constantly devising new indexes and cross-references so that printouts based on almost any aspect could be ordered.