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him turned loose; if he does a lot of damage now, we’ll he held responsible. Of course, if he’s hurting badly enough and they make him mad enough, he could forget it. Keep your fingers crossed. Here we go.”
    The conference was over. The young skipper spoke to the man at the wheel, and the boat swung to the left—excuse me, to port. The lazy sound of the big motors under our feet increased in volume. I steadied the girl as the boat surged ahead. Sanderson returned to us.
    “I’m afraid it may be a little rougher than I promised you, Miss Barnett,” he said. “We may have farther to go than I thought; we’ll have to use a little more speed.” He glanced at me. “There’s a hundred-and-ten footer on patrol up ahead. The
Cape March
. She’s moving in to intercept.”
    “Tell her to stay clear when she gets there,” I said. He studied me for a moment. “‘Yacht
Seawind
to be located and taken under observation; no other action without further instructions.’ Satisfactory?”
    “As far as it goes,” I said. “But let me explain something about our organization, Sanderson. We’re a bunch of screwballs, as you may have noticed. Certain things were left out of us, or trained out of us, or beaten out of us. Like a normal reverence for human life, and that includes our own human lives. In other words, we were taught that if we gotta go, well, we gotta go; let’s just see how much company we can take to hell with us. Are you following me?”
    “More or less.” His voice was dry. “You sound rather like a bunch of rabid wolves, Mr. Helm.”
    “Hey, you’re getting the idea,” I said. “And when you see a rabid wolf trotting dumbly up the street with slaver dripping from its jaws, you know the disease has got it and it’s making its death run and you’d damn well better not get in its way. Well, Doug Barnett is out there making his death run, Mister. He can only see out of one eye, to amount to anything, and that one’s on its way out, thanks to you and your club-happy cop friends. His head is aching enough to drive him crazy. He knows he’s through, things are going irreversibly wrong inside his brain, and there’s nothing left for him but a lousy ending in the blind, black darkness. Remember, this is a man who’s spent his life dealing in violence, and your uniforms don’t mean a thing to him any longer. The old training rule is maybe you sometimes have to stand still for one blow or bullet, but nobody—
nobody
—ever gets two free shots. You’ve had your freebie, as far as Doug Barnett is concerned.”
    Amy Barnett started to speak in protest, but Sanderson’s calm voice interrupted her: “What do you expect him to do, Mr. Helm?”
    I said, “I can’t speak for him, only for myself. But I can assure you, if I were Doug on that sailboat up ahead of us somewhere, I’d be waiting hopefully for a bunch of you self-righteous, legalistic, uniformed bastards to come sailing within range all fat and sassy and self-confident. And I’d laugh and laugh as I emptied clip after clip into you, and to hell with the fact that we’re supposed to be working for the same government. It didn’t bother you when you had me arrested and clubbed with a nightstick and thrown in jail, so why should I give it a second thought? I’d make damn sure I got enough of you to force you to shoot back and kill me. I’d figure that after what you’d done to me, the least you owed me was a nice quick death. Doug may have other ideas, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
    “I see.”
    Sanderson frowned at me for a moment; then he turned abruptly away and moved forward once more to speak to the skipper, who picked up a microphone. Again I couldn’t hear what was said but I didn’t have to: the word was being passed that the subject might be armed and mentally unbalanced and highly dangerous. Sanderson stood there awhile talking to the skipper. The boat roared on northward. The jolting wasn’t too bad, but it’s surprising