“How do you-”
“Then, at the last minute, Underhill-maybe at the last second one of them found a man who was remarkably different from all the others with whom the grays, the weasels, and the byrus had come in contact. He’s your Typhoid Mary. And he’s already out of the q-zone, rendering anything you do here meaningless.”
“Gary Jones.”
“Jonesy, right.”
“What makes him different?”
Little as he wanted to go into this part of it, Henry realized he had to give Underhill something.
“He and I and our two other friends-the ones who are dead-once knew someone who was very different. A natural telepath, no byrus needed. He did something to us. If we’d gotten to know him when we were a little older, I don’t think that would have been possible, but we met him when we were particularly… vulnerable, I suppose you’d say… to what he had. And then, years later, something else happened to Jonesy, something that had nothing to do with… with this remarkable boy.”
But that wasn’t the truth, Henry suspected; although Jonesy had been hit and almost killed in Cambridge find Duddits had never to Henry’s knowledge been south of Derry in his life, Duds had somehow been a part of Jonesy’s final, crucial change. A part of that, too. He knew it.
“And I’m supposed to what? Just believe all this? Swallow it like cough-syrup?”
In the sweet-smelling darkness of the shed, Henry’s lips spread in a humorless grin. “Owen,” he said, “you do believe it. I’m a telepath, remember? The baddest one in the jungle. The question, though… the question is…”
Henry asked the question with his mind.
7
Standing outside the compound fence by the back wall of the old storage shed, freezing his balls off, filter-mask pulled down around his neck so he could smoke a series of cigarettes he did not want (he’d gotten a fresh pack in the PX), Owen would have said he never felt less like laughing in his life… but when the man in the shed responded to his eminently reasonable question with such impatient directness-you do believe it…I’m a telepath, remember?-a laugh was surprised out of him, nevertheless. Kurtz had said that if the telepathy became permanent and were to spread, society as they knew it would fall down. Owen had grasped the concept, but now he understood it on a gut level, too.
“The question, though… the question is…”
What are we going to do about it?
Tired as he was, Owen could see only one answer to that question. “We have to go after Jones, I suppose. Will it do any good? Do we have time?” “I think we might. Just.”
Owen tried to read what was behind Henry’s response with his own lesser powers and could not. Yet he was positive that most of what the man had told him was true. Either that or he believes it’s true, Owen thought. God knows I want to believe it’s true. Any excuse to get out of here before the butchery starts.
“No,” Henry said, and for the first time Owen thought he sounded upset, not entirely sure of himself. “No butchery. Kurtz isn’t going to kill somewhere between two hundred and eight hundred people. People who ultimately can’t influence this business one way or the other. They’re just-Christ, they’re just innocent bystanders!”
Owen wasn’t entirely surprised to find himself rather enjoying his new friend’s discomfort; God knew Henry had discomfited him. “What do you suggest? Bearing in mind that you yourself said that only your pal Jonesy matters.”
“Yes, but…” Floundering. Henry’s mental voice was a little surer, but only a little. I didn’t mean we’d walk away and let them die.
“We won’t be walking anywhere,” Owen said. “We’ll be running like a couple of rats in a corncrib.” He dropped his third cigarette after a final token puff and watched the wind carry it away. Beyond the shed, curtains of snow rippled across the empty corral, building up huge drifts against the side of the barn. Trying to go anywhere in this would be madness. It’ll have to be a Sno-Cat, at least to start with, Owen thought. By midnight, even a four-wheel drive might not be much good. Not in this.
“Kill Kurtz,” Henry said. “That’s the answer. It’ll make it easier for us to get away with no one to give orders, and it’ll put the… the biological cleansing on hold. “Owen laughed dryly. “You make it sound so easy,” he said. “Double-oh-Underhill, license to kill.”
He lit a fourth cigarette, cupping his hands around the lighter and the end of the smoke. In spite of his gloves, his fingers were numb. We better come to some conclusions pretty quick, he thought. Before I freeze to death.
“What’s the big deal about it?” Henry asked, but he knew what the big deal was, all right; Owen could sense (and half-hear) him trying not to see it, not wanting things to be worse than they already were. “Just walk in there and pop him.”
“Wouldn’t work.” Owen sent Henry a brief image: Freddy Johnson (and other members of the so-called Imperial Valley cadre) keeping an eye on Kurtz’s Winnebago. “Also, he’s got the place wired for sound. If anything happens, the hard boys come running. Maybe I could get him. Probably not, because he covers himself as thoroughly as any Colombian cocaine jefe, especially when he’s on active duty, but maybe. I like to think I’m not bad myself. But it would be a suicide mission. If he’s recruited Freddy Johnson, then he’s probably got Kate Gallagher and Marvell Richardson… Carl Friedman… Jocelyn McAvoy. Tough boys and tough girls, Henry. I kill Kurtz, they kill me, the brass running this show from under Cheyenne Mountain send out a new cleaner, some Kurtz clone that’ll pick up where Kurtz left off. Or maybe they just elect Kate to the job. God knows she’s crazy enough. The people in the barn might get twelve additional hours to stew in their own juice, but in the end they’ll still burn. The only difference is that, instead of getting a chance to go charging gaily through the snowstorm with me, handsome, you’ll burn with the rest of them. Your pal, meanwhile-this guy Jonesy-he’ll be off to… to where?”
“That’s something it might be prudent for me to keep to myself, for the time being.”
Owen nonetheless probed for it with such telepathy as he possessed. For a moment he caught a blurred and perplexing vision-a tall white building in the snow, cylindrical, like a barn silo and then it was gone, replaced by the image of a white horse that looked almost like a unicorn running past a sign. On the sign were red letters reading BANBURY CROSS under a pointing arrow.
He grunted in amusement and exasperation. “You’re jamming me.” “You can think of it that way. Or you can think of it as teaching you a technique you better learn if you’d like to keep our conversation a secret.”
“Uh-huh.” Owen wasn’t entirely displeased with what had just happened. For one thing, a jamming technique would be a very good thing to have. For another, Henry did know where his infected friend-call him Typhoid Jonesy-was going. Owen had seen a brief picture of it in Henry’s head.
“Henry, I want you to listen to me now.”
“All right.”
“Here’s the simplest, safest thing we can do, you and I. First, if time isn’t an utterly crucial factor, we both need to get some sleep.”
“I can buy that. I’m next door to dead.”
“Then, around three o’clock, I can start to move and shake. This installation is going to be on high alert till the time when there isn’t an installation here any longer, but if Big Brother’s eyeball ever glazes over a little, it’s apt to be between four and six A.M. I’ll make a diversion, and I can short out the fence-that’s the easiest part, actually. I can be here with a Sno-Cat five minutes after the shit hits the fan-”
Telepathy had certain shorthand advantages to verbal communication, Owen was discovering. He sent Henry the image of a burning MH-6 Little Bird helicopter and soldiers running toward it even as he continued to speak.
“-and off we go.”
“Leaving Kurtz with a barnful of innocent civilians he plans to turn into crispy critters. Not to mention Blue Group. What’s that, a couple-three hundred more?”
Owen, who had been full-time military since the age of nineteen and one of Kurtz’s eraserheads for the last eight years, sent two hard words along the mental conduit the two of them had established: Acceptable losses.
Behind the dirty glass, the vague shape that was Henry Devlin stirred, then stood.
No, he sent back.
8
No? What do you mean, no?
No. That’s what I mean.
Do you have a better idea?
And Owen realized, to his extreme horror, that Henry thought he did. Fragments of that idea-it would be far too generous to call it a plan-shot through Owen’s mind like the brightly fragmented tail of a comet. It took his breath away. The cigarette dropped unnoticed from between his fingers and zipped away on the wind.