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between eight and twelve. That’s the way they operate. In a cell. And they always work together.”
    “I asked the FBI for a list of Kess’s people from around here.”
    “That won’t do any good either. Kess doesn’t keep membership records. His orders go from word of mouth down through his subordinates. The FBI might know about a few of them from this area, but there’s no way to link any of them together.”
    “You ought to know; you were right about Kess anyhow. In February, when the grand jury indicted him, he did go underground. There’s a rumor he’s in the British West Indies. Another rumor that he’s in Hawaii.”
    “Or right here.”
    Webster looked hard at him. “You just keep control. There are a lot of things I can do to protect you. A man will be here shortly to put a tap on your phone. If your guy calls again, we have a chance to trace him. I sent Ford out to the dairy you get your milk from. He’s tracking down the delivery man. I should have a report soon on the kind of poison that was used, and with any luck we’ll be able to trace that too.”
    “They got it from a plant nursery.”
    It was once too often he had told Webster his job, and Webster stiffened. “I know . I’ll check on it.” He opened his mouth to say something more, paused uncomfortably, and glanced at the rug. “I had another reason for coming back out here. A message I got from the doctor when I reached the station…. I apologize. It’s not often I let things get through to me. There were no bruises on the body.”
    “Sure.” It was almost funny.
     

12
     
    But Webster must have had still another reason for coming back to the house, and it wasn’t just the questions he started asking because the answers were all in the magazine article he’d been given.
    “That’s fine. Tell me anyhow,” Webster said.
    He took a deep drag that almost burned the cigarette down to its filter before he crushed it out. “All right. The first thing I saw when the guard showed me into Kess’s office was a big magnum revolver weighing down a stack of papers on his desk. There was a handful of cartridges strewn across the desk blotter and a howitzer shell cut off at the base to make an ashtray.”
    “You know about guns? You know this was a magnum?”
    “I do a lot of research for my books, and I’d recognize a big gun like that anywhere. The biggest. A forty-four. And the first thing Kess said to me when he came smiling from around his desk to shake hands was how sorry he felt that he took so long to grant me an interview.”
    “But if he’d stopped seeing reporters in the first place, why did he change his mind and see you?”
    “Because I think he was sure he’d be indicted and he was already planning to go underground. The interview was to be his last public statement, and he figured I was the one to make him look as good as possible. Because of my books.”
    “If he read them, he was one up on me.” He saw now what Webster was doing—trying to draw him out, to talk everything away and relax. Because the trick was working. His stomach still felt like it had a fist in it, and his arms and legs were still as cold and shaky as ever. But somehow he felt more at ease. Not alone.
    “They’re about fear,” he said and lit the fifth cigarette from Webster’s pack. “You’d better take some of these for yourself before I smoke them all.”
    “I don’t smoke.”
    “Then why the cigarettes?”
    “I always carry a pack with me for people I’m talking to.”
    The trick was working all right, and he had to smile. He sucked the smoke deep into his lungs and held it there. When at last he exhaled, hardly any smoke came out. His throat was scratchy, his mouth dry. “Chases,” he said. “Men on the run alone, hunted down, driven to defend themselves. And Kess saw a lot of himself in that. It’s like he wishes he were back in a rainforest thirty thousand years ago. It’s his big dream, to take his men up into the hills