However, even if she were a fighter, a real hellcat, she was now vulnerable. As vulnerable as he wished her to be. Because he had the power…
“Lolah?”
“Yes.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Are you engaged to Phil Karkov?”
“No.” Softly.
“Going steady with him?”
“More or less.”
“Are you sleeping with him?” She blushed. Fidgeted.
Lovely little animal . Screw you, Dawson. You too, Ernst.
He giggled.
“Are you sleeping with him, Lolah?” Almost inaudibly: “Do I have to say?” “You must tell me the truth.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“You’re sleeping with him?”
“Yes.”
“How often?”
“Oh . . . Every week.”
“Speak up.”
“Every week.”
“Little minx.”
“Are you going to hurt me?”
He laughed. “Once a week? Twice?”
“Twice,” she said. “Sometimes three. . .”
Salsbury turned to Bob Thorp. “Get the hell out of here. Go down to the end of the hail and wait with the guard there until I call you.”
“Sure.” Thorp closed the door as he left.
“Lolah?”
“Yes?”
“What does Phil do to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“In bed.”
She stared at her sandaled feet.
The power filled him, pulsed within him, leaped across tens of thousands of terminals in his flesh: sparked, flashed, crackled. He was exhilarated. This was what the key-lock program was all about: this power, this mastery, this unlimited command of other people’s souls. No one could ever touch him again. No one could ever use him. He was the user now. Always would be. From here on out. Now and forever, amen. Amen, Dawson. Did you hear that? Amen. Thank you, God, for sending along this cute little piece of ass, amen. He was happy again for the first time since this morning, since he had touched Thorp’s wife.
“I’ll bet Phil does everything to you,” be said.
She said nothing. Shuffled her feet.
“Doesn’t he? Doesn’t he do everything to you, Lolah? Admit it. Say it. I want to hear you say it.”
“He does-everything.”
He put his hand under her chin, lifted her head.
She gazed at him. Timid. Frightened.
“I’m going to do everything to you,” he said.
“Don’t hurt me.”
“Lovely, lovely little bitch,” he said. He was excited as he had never been in his life. Breathing hard. Yet everything so clear. So in control. Firmly in control. Her absolute master. Everyone’s absolute master. That was Howard Parker’s phrase, flashing back to him across the decades, much as a bizarre hallucination erupting in an acidhead’s mind years after his last tab of LSD: absolute master. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do to you,” he told Lolah Tayback. “I’m going to hurt you, just like I hurt the others. Make you pay. Make you bleed. I’m your absolute master. You’re going to take everything I dish out to you. Everything. Maybe even like it. Learn to like it. Maybe.. .”
His hands curled into fists at his sides.
The pilot flew the helicopter in a wide circle around the logging camp, searching for the best place to set down between the scattered lights from the buildings.
In the passenger cabin, Dawson broke an extended silence. “Ogden has to be eliminated.”
Klinger had no difficulty accepting that judgment. “Of course. He’s untrustworthy.”
“Unstable.”
“But if we eliminate him,” the general said, “can we continue with the plan?”
“Everything that Ogden has learned is in the Greenwich computer,” Dawson said. “The research was beyond us. But we can use the finished product well enough.”
“Hasn’t he encoded his data?”
“Naturally. But the day after the computer was installed, long before Ogden began to use it, I had my people program it to decode and print out any data that I requested-regardless of how the request was phrased, regardless of passwords or number keys or other security devices that he might use to limit my access to the information.”
The helicopter hovered, descended.
“When do we deal with him?”
“You deal with him,” Dawson said.
“Me-or do I program someone to do it?”
“Do it yourself. He can deprogram anyone else.” Dawson smiled. “You do have a handgun with you?”
“Oh, yes.”
“In the small of your back?”
“Strapped to my right ankle.”