The Stand:BOOK III(18)

Somewhere inside him a door had opened, letting in a cool breeze of fear. Flagg had screwed up. And Flagg was capable of distrusting Lloyd Henreid. And that was baaaad shit.

Still, he would have to be told about this. He wasn't going to take the decision to start another manhunt upon himself. Not after what had happened with the Judge. He got up to go to the house phones, and met Whitney Horgan coming from them.

"It's the man, Lloyd," he said. "He wants you."

"All right," he said, surprised by how calm his voice was-the fear inside him was now very great. And above all else, it was important for him to remember that he would have long since starved in his Phoenix holding cell if it hadn't been for Flagg. There was no sense kidding himself; he belonged to the dark man lock, stock, and barrel.

But I can't do my job if he shuts off the information, he thought, going to the elevator bank. He pushed the penthouse button, and the elevator car rose swiftly. Again there was that nagging, unhappy feeling: Flagg hadn't known. The third spy had been here all along, and Flagg hadn't known.

"Come in, Lloyd." Flagg's lazy smiling face above a prosy blue-checked bathrobe.

Lloyd came in. The air conditioning was on high, and it was like stepping into an open-air suite in Greenland. And still, as Lloyd stepped past the dark man, he could feel the radiating body heat he gave off. It was like being in a room which contained a small but very powerful furnace.

Sitting in the corner, in a white sling chair, was the woman who had come in with Flagg that morning. Her hair was carefully pinned up, and she wore a shift dress. Her face was blank and moony, and looking at her gave Lloyd a deep chill. As teenagers, he and some friends had once stolen some dynamite from a construction project, had fused it and thrown it into Lake Harrison, where it exploded. The dead fish that had floated to the surface afterward had had that same look of awful blank impartiality in their moon-rimmed eyes.

"I'd like you to meet Nadine Cross," Flagg said softly from behind him, making Lloyd jump. "My wife."

Startled, Lloyd looked at Flagg and met only that mocking grin, those dancing eyes.

"My dear, Lloyd Henreid, my righthand man. Lloyd and I met in Phoenix, where Lloyd was being detained and was consequently about to dine on a fellow detainee. In fact, Lloyd might already have partaken of the appetizer. Correct, Lloyd?"

Lloyd blushed dully and said nothing, although the woman was either gonzo or stoned right over the moon.

"Put out your hand, dear," the dark man said.

Like a robot, Nadine put her hand out. Her eyes continued to stare indifferently at a point somewhere above Lloyd's shoulder.

Jesus, this is creepy, Lloyd thought. A light sweat had sprung out all over his body in spite of the frigid air conditioning.

"Pleestameetcha," he said, and shook the soft warm meat of her hand. Afterward, he had to restrain a powerful urge to wipe his hand on the leg of his pants. Nadine's hand continued to hang laxly in the air.

"You can put your hand down now, my love," Flagg said.

Nadine put her hand back in her lap, where it began to twist and squirm. Lloyd realized with something like horror that she was masturbating.

"My wife is indisposed," Flagg said, and tittered. "She is also in a family way, as the saying is. Congratulate me, Lloyd. I am going to be a papa." That titter again; the sound of scampering, light-footed rats behind an old wall.

"Congratulations," Lloyd said through lips that felt blue and numb.

"We can talk our little hearts out around Nadine, can't we, dear? She's as silent as the grave. To make a small pun, mum's the word."

"What about Indian Springs?"

Lloyd blinked and tried to shift his mental gears, feeling naked and on the defensive. "It's going good," he managed at last.

" ‘Going good'?" The dark man leaned toward him and for one moment Lloyd was sure he was going to open his mouth and bite his head off like a Tootsie Pop. He recoiled. "That's hardly what I'd call a close analysis, Lloyd."

"There are some other things-"

"When I want to talk about other things, I'll ask about other things." Flagg's voice was rising, getting uncomfortably close to a scream. Lloyd had never seen such a radical shift in temperament, and it scared him badly. "Right now I want a status report on Indian Springs and you better have it for me, Lloyd, for your sake you better have it!"

"All right," Lloyd muttered. "Okay." He fumbled his notebook out of his hip pocket, and for the next half hour they talked about Indian Springs, the National Guard jets, and the Shrike missiles. Flagg began to relax again-although it was hard to tell, and it was a very bad idea to take anything at all for granted when you were dealing with the Walkin Dude.

"Do you think they could overfly Boulder in two weeks?" he asked. "Say …  by the first of October?"

"Carl could, I guess," Lloyd said doubtfully. "I don't know about the other two."

"I want them ready," Flagg muttered. He got up and began to pace around the room. "I want those people hiding in holes by next spring. I want to hit them at night, while they're sleeping. Rake that town from one end to the other. I want it to be like Hamburg and Dresden in World War II." He turned to Lloyd and his face was parchment white, the dark eyes blazing out of it with their own crazy fire. His grin was like a scimitar. "Teach them to send spies. They'll be living in caves when spring comes. Then we'll go over there and have us a pig hunt. Teach them to send spies."

Lloyd found his tongue at last. "The third spy-"

"We'll find him, Lloyd. Don't worry about that. We'll get the bastard." The smile was back, darkly charming. But Lloyd had seen an instant of angry and bewildered fear before that smile reappeared. And fear was the one expression he had never expected to see there.

"We know who he is, I think," Lloyd said quietly.

Flagg had been turning a jade figurine over in his hands, examining it. Now his hand froze. He became very still, and a peculiar expression of concentration stole over his face. For the first time the Cross woman's gaze shifted, first toward Flagg and then hastily away. The air in the penthouse suite seemed to thicken.

"What? What did you say?"

"The third spy-"

"No," Flagg said with sudden decision. "No. You're jumping at shadows, Lloyd."

"If I've got it right, he's a friend of a guy named Nick Andros."

The jade figurine fell through Flagg's fingers and shattered. A moment later Lloyd was lifted out of his chair by the front of his shirt. Flagg had moved across the room so swiftly that Lloyd had not even seen him. And then Flagg's face was plastered against his, that awful sick heat was baking into him, and Flagg's black weasel eyes were only an inch from his own.

Flagg screamed: "And you sat there and talked about Indian Springs? I ought to throw you out that window! "

Something-perhaps it was seeing the dark man vulnerable, perhaps it was only the knowledge that Flagg wouldn't kill him until he got all of the information-allowed Lloyd to find his tongue and speak in his own defense.

"I tried to tell you!" he cried. "You cut me off! And you cut me off from the red list, whatever that is! If I'd known about that, I could have had that fucking retard last night!"

Then he was flung across the room to crash into the far wall. Stars exploded in his head and he dropped to the parquet floor, dazed. He shook his head, trying to clear it. There was a high humming noise in his ears.

Flagg seemed to have gone crazy. He was striding jerkily around the room, his face blank with rage. Nadine had shrunk back into her chair. Flagg reached a knickknack shelf populated with a milky-green menagerie of jade animals. He stared at them for a second, seeming almost puzzled by them, and then swept them all off onto the floor. They shattered like tiny grenades. He kicked at the bigger pieces with one bare foot, sending them flying. His dark hair had fallen over his forehead. He flipped it back with a jerk of his head and then turned toward Lloyd. There was a grotesque expression of sympathy and compassion on his face-both emotions every bit as real as a three-dollar bill, Lloyd thought. He walked over to help Lloyd up, and Lloyd noticed that he stepped on several jagged pieces of broken jade with no sign of pain …  and no blood.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Let's have a drink." He offered a hand and helped Lloyd to his feet. Like a kid doing a temper tantrum, Lloyd thought. "Yours is bourbon straight up, isn't it?"

"Fine."

Flagg went to the bar and made monstrous drinks. Lloyd demolished half of his at a gulp. The glass chattered briefly on the end table as he set it down. But he felt a little better.

Flagg said, "The red list is something I didn't think you'd ever have to use. There were eight names on it-five now. It was their governing council plus the old woman. Andros was one of them. But he's dead now. Yes, Andros is dead, I'm sure of it." He fixed Lloyd with a narrow, baleful stare.

Lloyd told the story, referring to his notebook from time to time. He didn't really need it, but it was good, from time to time, to get away from that smoking glare. He began with Julie Lawry and ended with Barry Dorgan.

"You say he's retarded," Flagg mused.

"Yes."

Happiness spread over Flagg's face and he began to nod. "Yes," he said, but not to Lloyd. "Yes, that's why I couldn't see-"