K: In the meantime, if you're right, you'll need to run tighter surveillance on Ramsay.

U: I'm spending several hours a day getting treatments, Kalvin. I can't be expected?

K: Just handle it.

U: You're all heart. (LINE INTERFERENCE. MESSAGE ENDS.)

FOURTEEN.

Laurie knew the agenda all too well. Johnnie never skipped more than one night in making Laurie describe the news, and she had skipped the previous night. So, later tonight, Laurie would be tightly bound again for Johnnie's foray outside and when she returned the hated demonvoice would form obscenities while the hands and mouth performed worse obscenities and at last Johnnie would drink her tequila. Laurie felt her lip curl. She knew her teeth were showing; she did not recognize it as a smile. Johnnie switched TV programs on a precise time schedule according to the small comm set by the TV, its digital readout relentlessly counting off the last hours of life. The compact Sony unit was clearly more than a recorder with earphones and clock because once or twice a day, at no predictable intervals, it would emit a series of thin chirps.

Immediately, Johnnie would punch a code into the calculator. Laurie had earned a slap for watching the woman operate that pocket comm set. Laurie had realized that the chirps were incoming queries. Johnnie's coded response told someone, somewhere, that all was well.

Johnnie would not ignore that signal merely because it woke her in the night, as sometimes happened. The outstanding virtue of Reba Jondahl was her pa.s.sion for obedience? whether she was master or servitor. Laurie Ramsay had come to understand this central pillar of Johnnie's existence. Because they were short-handed, Bobby Lathrop could not afford sloppy work and rejoiced to have someone like the Jondahl woman who, ex-con or not, kept highly dependable routines.

Now Laurie, too, joined in that rejoicing. Exactly on time as always, Johnnie went to the bathroom carrying her heavy purse and the comm set. Laurie sat against a bare wall where she could watch the TV. And as usual for the past few days, the girl seemed to be dozing, her blonde head on her knees. Laurie knew how to create a routine, too.

Laurie kept her breathing steady until the bathroom door closed, knowing that she must complete her stealthy work within two minutes or so. She moved quickly, terrified at small sounds; the pop of her joints, the clink of utensils. She had replaced everything and was near Johnnie's cot, with its supply of magazines and bottles beneath, when Johnnie emerged too soon from the bathroom.

Neither of them moved for a moment. Then, Going somewhere? from Johnnie in a snarled parody of sweetness.

Laurie, trembling too hard to speak, could only shake her head.

Johnnie deposited her purse and comm set on the card table, then reached toward the cowering girl. Thought I wasn't watching, she rasped, prying at Laurie's balled fists and finding them empty of contraband. Thought you could play f.u.c.k-around with Johnnie, she went on, ripping at the pockets of Laurie's filthy jumper.

Laurie's denials made no difference. She took two heavy slaps across her face, tried to protect her head with her hands, then fell to the floor and submitted, sobbing, to Johnnie's body search. That was what made the difference, for the woman found a child's handful of corn chip fragments and a small ball of used adhesive tape in Laurie's pockets.

Johnnie, breathing hard, tossed the ball of tape into the fireplace and surveyed the sad little h.o.a.rd of food fragments she had scattered to the floor. Clean up that s.h.i.t, she commanded, a.s.suring that Laurie saw the mess by grasping the girl's hair and shakingher head above it. Then Johnnie seated herself at the table and found a TV sitcom, watching occasionally as Laurie, on hands and knees, carefully removed specks of food and cast them into the fireplace.

At last the job was complete. Don't do that again, Johnnie warned. Laurie sensed that the woman did not know what 'that' had been. And through her sniffles, behind her cowering as she slumped down against the baseboard, Laurie knew it would not be necessary to do it again.

Laurie saw her dad on the nightly news, and thought that he looked older. At Johnnie's command, she duly recited to the comm set about the pileup on the Anacostia Bridge.

When she added, And Johnnie beat me up for nothing, she collected another slap. She did not know whether that accusation would reach her father. She did know it would make Johnnie mad as h.e.l.l.

To make matters worse, when Johnnie brought the adhesive tape from her purse the procedure became a struggle. Johnnie always hurried to lock up for her brief absences.

The woman was brutally efficient, dragging Laurie to her pallet and locking her in.

Presently, Laurie heard the outside door lock and, weeping from fresh bruises, she fell asleep. She knew that she would soon be awakened.

Johnnie's return, and her sick attentions to Laurie, were routines the girl suffered with a sort of ghastly antic.i.p.ation. This time Johnnie carried her to the cot, removing the tape from her ankles but leaving her wrists and mouth taped.

After ten minutes Johnnie sat on the edge of the cot, her drives a.s.suaged. Starting to like it, she accused, in that notwoman voice Laurie had come to equate with Satan's. In prison, you develop a taste for a lot of things. But not the stinkin' chock, she said with her coa.r.s.e-grind laugh, bringing the tequila bottle from under the cot. You make chock from cornmeal, sugar, raisins, yeast, anything you can get on the inside. Always tasted like s.h.i.t to me. Not like this, she added, unstoppering the bottle.

She turned and smiled down, staring into the girl's eyes that, despite the tears, stared back. This Sauza is good stuff, she confided, swirling the remaining few ounces of nearly clear liquid, and then took a triumphant swig.

Johnnie swallowed over an ounce before the gag reflex closed her windpipe. It had taken Laurie Ramsay over two weeks to collect and evaporate the stuff, percolated through wood ash, that became four ounces of a primary ingredient of old-time soap: concentrated caustic lye. It had taken her less than two minutes to subst.i.tute it for tequila. It took Johnnie only seconds to realize that the lining of her throat was gone.

Johnnie blinked as she flung the bottle aside, but not fast enough to prevent a splash of lye into her eyes. She leaped to her feet, convulsed with an agony that spread from her throat and face into her belly, then wheeled back to the cot. Reba Jondahl had known from the first that she would have her choice of ways to kill the girl, and had already decided on slow strangulation. Now, even deeper than the fiery pulse in her guts, one intent burned in her brain: to reach the girl's throat. Johnnie, half-blinded and unable to breathe, reached down with both hands.

Wrists still bound behind her, Laurie saw it all, just as she had hoped, and knew what those callused claws were seeking. Lying on her back with knees flexed, Laurie used herleft leg to push off and swept her right leg up with every ounce of fury an eleven-year-old soccer jock could muster. Laurie's kick was awkward but her st.u.r.dy legs were driven by desperation. Her right heel caught Johnnie precisely on the jawline, full force.

The woman spun on her left foot; crashed against the card table; fell face-down as the table knelt, spilling the lamp and TV set onto her body. Reba Jondahl was aflame from inside and her ruined throat would not permit the pa.s.sage of enough air. Rolling onto her back, mouth wide, she began to claw at her own face.

Laurie rolled from the cot in mortal terror and leaped to her feet. She had not expected Johnnie to recover and she knew that, if her hands were not free soon, the woman would certainly kill her.

The tape on her wrists would not yield. She knelt at the raised hearth, her back toward it, and began to worry the tape against the abrasive edges of bricks.

Even though her mucous membranes were slowly being flayed alive, Johnnie somehow began to manage a hoa.r.s.e whistle of breath. Semiconscious, she rolled over, staring through her agony. She was clinically blind by this time but she could see the girl's vague shape facing her. And her lungs seemed on the verge of getting enough air. On hands and knees, carrying an inferno in her body, Johnnie lurched in Laurie's direction, paced by the whistling rasp of her breath.

Laurie kept sawing at the bricks until the last possible instant, then scrambled up, and her sidewinder kick took Johnnie across the bridge of the nose, snapping her head hard enough to make her hair fly outward. Johnnie fell on her side but, instead of continuing to kick, Laurie ran to the bathroom. Perhaps, she thought wildly, she could slam the door for more precious seconds of life. But her clothing caught on the latch striker plate protruding from the door facing, and the rip gave Laurie new hope. She worked to catch the frayed tape against the little tongue of bra.s.s, moaning with terror because she could see Johnnie come up on hands and knees again, blood runneling from her nose.

Then Laurie felt the tape begin to yield, caught at it with desperate fingers, tore harder against the bra.s.s plate heedless of the pain at her wrists. When two layers of tape wore through, perspiration helped her slide from the rest. Laurie, tearing away the strips at her mouth, slammed herself into the bathroom.

Which had no exit.

The only light was from the crack under the door, and Laurie knew that the devil herself would soon be at that door, obscuring all of her light forever, and when Laurie wrenched the door open again Johnnie stood almost erect, leaning in the hallway, wiping at her eyes and making that dreadful hoa.r.s.e gasping noise. It was not so much courage as horrified panic that sent Laurie bolting past, her arms windmilling furiously, her small body slamming past Johnnie to sprawl into the big room in the half-light of the lamp on the floor.

There in full view lay Johnnie's big purse, open, with a small holster clipped inside it.

Laurie fumbled the dead-black thing with the thick handle out of the purse and turned to face her pursuer. She had never heard of a Heckler Koch P7, but she knew it was an automatic pistol. And even a child could see that sighting was no more complicated tha.n.a.lignment of two white dots in the rear with one white dot in front.

Johnnie may have thought that Laurie was only threatening, holding the H K at a range of two paces. That was because Laurie's hands were small and initially, even with a two-handed grip, she was not fully depressing the. squeeze-c.o.c.ker safety. When Laurie finally succeeded, Johnnie's opinion was revised by a thunderous noise and a single nine-millimeter round just above Johnnie's navel. The woman doubled over as though lashed by an invisible foot, then sat down hard in a way that would have been comical in other circ.u.mstances and slowly fell on her side.

Laurie had never fired a weapon and, unprepared for the sound and recoil, dropped the pistol. By the time she recovered it, Johnnie half-lay on the floor, face contorted, fumbling with the little comm set as she tried to operate it blindly.

Laurie knew that the woman was in hideous agony, and that Johnnie was in some ways not quite human. And she also knew what you were supposed to do with animals in hopeless pain. Buoyed by this rationale she found it easy, with the muzzle an inch behind Johnnie's skull, to squeeze the trigger once more.

What erupted from the other side of Johnnie's head was not stuff Laurie wanted to remember, as Johnnie jerked and flopped like something filled with dirt and did not move again. But as Laurie laid the weapon down and emptied the purse onto the floor, the ringing in her ears became a chirping too. Then Laurie realized that the chirps were not inside her head. They were coming from the comm set.

Bobby Lathrop enjoyed tooling the Firebird around, even if its brakes were lousy, and he took the Gaithersburg turn-off from Highway 70 by gearing down so that Harman, his companion, grabbed for a handhold. Jondahl's failure to respond was probably just an equipment failure, the two men agreed. It would take a half-hour to actually reach the isolated house by road, and only moments to rectify the trouble. So much the better; neither of the men enjoyed the company of that reptilian t.w.a.t, though that wasn't supposed to count among hardened pros. After parking near the darkened country place, Bobby stayed at the wheel while Harman, wearing the thinnest of leather gloves, took his stubby Ingram stuttergun into the house on recon.

Harman came back at a dead run. Somebody's plucked the kid, he panted. They whacked Johndahl, man, I mean recently! Still warm. All her f.u.c.king credit cards and s.h.i.t spread around? but I didn't see that little shooter she carries. And listen, I want you to come verify something.

Bobby flowed out of the Firebird fast. Harman's observation was easy to verify, but not to figure. If some rescue team had got past Johnnie, then why the f.u.c.k would they unscrew the hinges of the back door from the inside, leaving the combo lock untampered?

Not once did Bobby or Harman entertain the idea that an eleven-year-old child, sufficiently brutalized, might have managed such carnage unaided....

FIFTEEN.

Ramsay padded into his study and answered the phone as churlishly as anyone would, at one o'clock in the morning. Uh, jus'aminute.... Okay, I'll tell her if I see her. He disconnected, yawned from his study into the bedroom playing out the old-fashioned phone cord to its full length, flicked on the light and gently shook Pam's shoulder.

Somebody named Carol Heaton; friend of yours. You're supposed to call forward. That's all she said, tell you to call forward.

Two blinks, and suddenly Pam was wide awake, nodding. He handed the instrument to her, then sat on the edge of the bed.

Without hesitation, Pam Garza dialed a number. I'm here, she said. Pause. Yes, he is. In the next room.... Of course I am, you should know that by now. Ramsay could hear, very faintly, the timbre of the voice, and it was male. Ten seconds later, he saw the color drain from her face. She pulled the sheet up to cover her, gooseflesh prominent on her arms. I, I don't think so, I'm not? that's not the kind of thing I? please, no! Now her free hand covered her brow, fingers unconsciously flexing in her dark hair. She was trembling.

Then, chewing her underlip as she listened, Pam seemed to regain some composure.

Twisting the mouthpiece away, her ear still against the earpiece, she whispered to Ramsay: Get dressed just as fast as you can. Now she resumed talking. I don't know what I can do, but I'll try, and so on, furiously waving Ramsay away from the bed.

Three minutes later, as he was pulling his shoes on, she put the phone down and fairly leaped from the bed to begin dressing. Her voice was very small: Alan, Jesu Maria, darling, what have you done!

You tell me. Where the h.e.l.l are we going?

Different directions. I have to ask where you're going, but you mustn't tell me. She pulled a mascara brush from her purse; showed him the hollow needle that slid from its stem. I was told this was for me, if I ever needed to use it. But now Lathrop says it's for you. I? even for my country, Alan, you know I couldn't, and I told him so. He must be desperate to even say it indirectly; the police probably heard every word. Then he said to keep you here any way I can until they can talk to you.

He barked a bitter laugh. I can imagine the questions: bang, bang, and bang. Who the h.e.l.l is Lathrop?

The man I work for, when I'm not doing company business. You don't seem very surprised.

I'm not. I've known you were on the wrong side for some time. A new thought twistedhis face into something ugly. I don't suppose I could beat you into telling me where Laurie is.

With whispered intensity: Softly, Alan, there are audio transmitters in the apartment.

You must believe me, I had no idea? well, if I knew where Laurie was, I'd tell you. It's just not right! Have you done something so terrible? Now she was tucking her blouse in, following him as he headed for the living room closet for a windbreaker.

Yes. I learned how, without being elected, a man can become the real President of the United States using a psalm-singing figurehead as his puppet.

I don't understand. Now they were both whispering with quiet fury. Harry Rand isn't?

that can't be true.

He reached for the doork.n.o.b. If it isn't, people are dying over an empty rumor.

She stood transfixed, staring at him, perhaps hoping to see duplicity in his eyes. Then she said, Look out for Lathrop, he's a bad one. I'm supposed to try and stop you.

In his rage, without a real opponent he could reach with his bare hands, he said the most vicious thing he could: You'll think of something, you Mexican wh.o.r.e.

She swallowed, taking two steps toward him, tears beginning to course down her face.

Make it look good. Hit me.

He had already turned away in disgust when she said it another way. If you ever loved me, Alan, hit me.

He wheeled and struck her with his open hand, then started down the stairs as she fell.

He heard his telephone begin to ring and did not give a d.a.m.n.

Laurie had considered flagging down the car? in daylight she would have seen that it was an old Firebird? as it swung into view, half a mile from the solitary house. But she was cutting across an open field at the time, toward the vague glow of neon in the distance. The purse was heavy with the weapon, and the coins and bills were more money than she had ever had at one time. The contents of that purse gave Laurie a heady sense of power.

A small aircraft, its landing lights arrowing past her, swung into its final approach. When Laurie saw the beacon flash across her quadrant of sky, she turned in its direction. That is why, as the Firebird roared back through the silent neon-lit center of Emory Grove, Bobby Lathrop did not catch her.

Laurie made it afoot to the Montgomery County Airpark nearly two hours later, hoping someone there might have a telephone. The man in the old leather jacket was nice, though inquisitive as a truant officer when he saw the swollen left side of her face; but since she only asked to call her mother, he could hardly complain.

But when she dialed home, a recording said that the number was not in service or had been disconnected. Laurie knew that had to be crazy, but she called her dad next.

The line was busy. I bet he's talking to Mom, Laurie said, and accepted half a Hersheybar from the man, who said he had a girl just about Laurie's size and he would sure as heck like to know how come she was tarryhooting around the countryside at one a.m.

He did not seem particularly satisfied by Laurie's shrugged, I got lost.

Two minutes later, Laurie tried again and became puzzled immediately. Who? This is Laurie. You know: Laurie Ramsay? Pam? Hi, Pam. Boy, have I had a day, I'm at the airport? She listened for long moments, ignoring the interested frown of Mr.

Leatherjacket. Then: Well jeez, why not? ... I don't get it; who's listening? . . . Okay, if you say so.

Momentarily, Laurie wore a frown too. Then she said, Hey, you been crying? Me, too.

Huh? Naw, I won't have to hitch, I can take a taxi, I've got money, hundreds and hundreds. And a gun, too. She glanced at Mr. Leather-jacket and saw the gold caps gleaming in his rear molars.

He snapped his mouth shut and began to chuckle as she went on: Mostly I'm just sleepy, but Johnnie beat me up a lot and, she flushed, catching the man's gaze, other stuff.

Pam, is it okay to kill people like her? A shorter pause. Soon as I can. Will Mom and Dad be there?

She was not pleased with the response and laid the receiver down with, Durn. She hung up on me.

Young lady, said Mr. Leatherjacket, let me congratulate you on the most creative imagination I ever saw or heard of. Can you really afford a taxi home?

Laurie a.s.sured him that she could. But I'm not going home. And he better take me where I say, she hinted darkly, hugging the purse.

The man said she could depend on it. Herb, the only driver on duty thereabouts this time of night, was a personal friend.