“Three and a half miles,” Dawson said thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t that put them somewhere between the Big Union mill and the planned forests?”
“That’s about right.”
Dawson closed his eyes and seemed to mutter a few words of silent prayer; his lips moved slightly. Then his eyes snapped open, as if sprung by a holy revelation, and he said, “The first thing we’ll do is organize a search in the mountains.”
“That’s absurd,” Salsbury said, although he was aware that Dawson probably thought of his plan as a divine inspiration, the very handiwork of God. “It would be like-well, like hunting for a needle in a haystack.”
His voice as cold as the dead boy in the next room, Dawson said, “We have nearly two hundred men at the logging camp, all of them familiar with these mountains. We’ll mobilize them. Arm them with axes and rifles and shotguns. Give them flashlights and Coleman lanterns. We’ll put them in trucks and jeeps and send them a mile or so beyond the logging camp. They can form a search line and walk back. Forty feet between the men. That way, the line will be a mile and a half from one end to the other-yet each man will have only a small area of ground to cover. The Edisons and the Annendales won’t be able to get by them.”
“It’ll work,” Klinger said admiringly.
“But what if they aren’t up there in the mountains?” Salsbury said. “What if they’re right here in town?”
“Then we’ve nothing to worry about,” Dawson said. “They can’t get to you because you’re surrounded by Bob Thorp and his deputies. They can’t get out of town because every exit is blocked. All they can do is wait.” He smiled wolfishly. “If we don’t find them in the mountains by three or four o’clock in the morning, we’ll begin a house-to-house search here in town. One way or another, I want this whole affair wrapped up by noon tomorrow.”
“That’s asking a lot,” the general said.
“I don’t care,” Dawson said. “It isn’t asking too much. I want the four of them dead by noon. I want to restructure the memories of everyone in this town to cover our trail completely. By noon.”
“Dead?” Salsbury said, confused. He pushed his glasses up on his nose. “But I need to study the Edisons. You can kill the Annendales if you want. But I’ve got to know why the Edisons weren’t affected. I’ve got-”
“Forget that,” Dawson said brusquely. “If we attempted to capture them and take them back to the laboratory at Greenwich, there’s a good chance they’d escape along the way. We Can’t risk that. They know too much. Much too much.”
“But we’ll have so damned many corpses!” Salsbury said. “For God’s sake, there’s already the boy. And Buddy Pellineri. Four more. . – And If they fight back, we may have as many as a dozen to bury. How are we going to account for so many?”
Obviously pleased with himself, Dawson said, “We’ll put the lot of them in the Union Theater. Then we’ll stage a tragic fire. We’ve got Dr. Troutman to issue death certificates. And we can use the key-lock program to keep the relatives from requesting autopsies.”
“Excellent,” Klinger said, grinning, lightly clapping his hands. Sycophant to the court of King Leonard the First, Salsbury thought sourly.
“Really excellent, Leonard,” Klinger said.
“Thank you, Ernst.”
“Christ on a crutch,” Salsbury said weakly.
Dawson gave him a nasty look. He was displeased with such strong profanity. “For every sin that we commit, the Lord will have His awful retribution one day. There’s no escaping that.”
Salsbury said nothing.
“There is a hell.”
Looking at Klinger, finding no support nor even a wink of sympathy, Salsbury managed to keep quiet. There was something in Dawson’s voice-like a well-honed knife hidden in the soft folds of a priest’s gown-something hard and sharp that frightened him.
Dawson glanced at his watch and said, “Time to be moving, gentlemen. Let’s get this over with.”
10:12 P.M
The helicopter rose from the parking lot behind the municipal building. It swung gracefully over the town square where several people stood watching it, and then it clattered westward toward the mountain, into the darkness.