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  "Efficiency."

  "My trademark."

  Tucker swallowed some beer, sighed, put the bottle down, lifted the lighter of the two briefcases, unsnapped the latches and opened the top. He said, "All you have to know to set your price is the destination. Pittsburgh. And the length of time I'll need you-perhaps it'll be as late as tomorrow noon before we get back here. Maybe it'll be some time tonight. Your own complicity involves nothing more than the alteration of the markings on the copter. It's damn unlikely that the FAA will find out about that, and, besides, you're accustomed to risking as much."

  "Quite accustomed," Norton agreed. "But you forget that, according to the law, I'll be aiding and abetting you with whatever you have in mind. Understand me, Mike, I don't want to know what that is. I just want to point out that I'll be liable for criminal charges."

  "This operation isn't directed against anyone the law would rush to defend," Tucker said.

  Norton raised his eyebrows, picked up his beer and took another third of it in one swallow.

  "That's the last factor you have to consider. We're going up against a man named Baglio, against his entire machine."

  "Organized?"

  "Let's call him an entrepreneur."

  "Successful?"

  "Very."

  Norton considered the angles for a moment, scratching unconsciously at the three long white marks on his right cheek. "Three thousand sound all right to you?"

  Tucker paid without any argument, closed his briefcase again. It was a fair enough price for everything that he was going to ask of Norton and his machine.

  The big man put the money in the lockbox in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet behind his desk, locked both the box and the drawer, pocketed the keys and came back to his desk.

  "Someone could carry the whole cabinet away," Tucker said.

  "It's bolted to the floor."

  They drank the remainder of their beer in silence, and when they were finished Norton said, "You ready?"

  "Yes."

  They left the office and walked to the third berth in the same building, where a gray helicopter sat on a wheeled towing platform. It was the same four-seater quadra-prop that Norton had used twice before when Tucker had required his services, though its own markings had been expertly masked with colored tape. New numbers, also formed with tape, decorated the proper plates on the nose and both sides. The Pennsylvania state seal, with its two rearing horses, was firmly attached to both doors of the craft; below the seal, in white letters, were the words pennsylvania state police. It all looked very genuine. It should have, since the insignia were exact copies of those in use by the authorities, rendered by a friend of Norton's who worked in an ad agency during the day and moonlighted however he could. He had drawn Norton nine sets of state seals so far, though Tucker had not had the opportunity, thus far, to operate in so many different colonies. Norton had other customers.

  "Good?" Norton asked.

  "Fine," Tucker said.

  A golf cart was already hooked up to the platform on which the copter stood, and Norton hopped into this. He started it and drove slowly outside. Out of the hangar, he stopped, detached the cart from the platform, drove it back inside and parked it. They boarded the helicopter.

  "You've got a change of clothes?" Tucker asked.

  "I packed as soon as you called."

  "Good."

  "Even before I went out to doctor the copter."

  "Fine."

  A few minutes later, they drifted onto the cracked macadam runway. Both Tucker and Norton sat in the forward seats; behind them was a pair of seats that folded down to form a large cargo area. Most of Paulnik Air's freight work was handled with one of the two twin-engine Apaches that they maintained, though the dense, built-up New York area often required a helicopter to land where there was no runway. Besides, the copter was the most lucrative of the three Paulnik craft, thanks to Tucker and to others like him.

  As they lifted into the early-afternoon sky, Tucker wondered where Simonsen would be hiding. Simonsen professed to know absolutely nothing about Norton's willingness to bend the law for a buck. He handled none of the illegitimate work, though Norton knew his partner always stood at a window and watched proceedings such as these, as if he secretly envied what he supposed was a glamorous mission. He would be down there now, watching and a little jealous, a little frightened.

  Then the airfield and the hangars were out of sight as they banked west toward the city.

  The time was 2:12 as the copter, laden with auxiliary fuel tanks, began the longest leg of the journey.

  Tucker wondered if Baglio had had an opportunity to question Merle Bachman. The driver had been in the mansion more than a full day. If he was not badly injured, that was plenty of time for Baglio to break him, enough time for Bachman to spill everything he knew about Tucker and the others.

  Norton had said something which Tucker, lost in the reverie, had not heard.

  "What?" Tucker asked.

  "I said, 'The pollution sure is nice today, isn't it?' "

  Norton waved one burly arm at the vista of yellow-white mist that rose up from all quarters of the city, meshed high overhead and roiled like a ball of snakes, smoke snakes. He indicated the awful scenery much as a legitimate guide might gesture grandly at the undeniable splendor of Niagara Falls.

  "Beautiful."

  "It'll make a grand sunset."

  "Lovely."

  "Too bad we can't see it."

  "Too bad."

  But Tucker could not bring himself to think very long about sunsets and atmospheric pollution.

  Perhaps Baglio's people wouldn't be able to trace the Tucker name any farther than the downtown mail drop. They had contacts, yes, of course they had, but they were not omniscient.

  Yet, even if they got that far and no farther, he would have to forget the Tucker identity altogether, assume a new name, purchase all new credentials in that name, and strictly avoid everyone who had, to date, known him only as Tucker.

  That would require an outlay of cash and a period of relative inactivity, and it would be, in the vulgate, a pain in the ass.

  And he could not expect an identity change to provide safety for very long. Sooner or later, when one of them was using a new name himself, he would encounter an old acquaintance who'd remember the Tucker identity. Then a second name change would be necessary-and after that, a third and a fourth.

  He could see no end to it.

  Much better to think the driver had not talked yet. If Baglio didn't get through to Bachman in the next twelve hours, they were all home safe.

  Tucker looked at the map spread out on his knees, glanced through the front window of the copter as Norton flew at an angle to the roadway below them, and shouted, "There! That's the highway that runs past the turn-off for Baglio's estate-and I think the house is over that way, in those slopes. If I'm right, the turn-off should be just ahead."

  It was.

  "Good work!" he shouted at Norton, grinning.

  Perhaps he wouldn't have had to shout quite so loudly, for the cabin was fairly well insulated against the roar of the overhead rotors. But after several hours in the air, listening to that thumping racket, his ears buzzed like the core of a beehive on a busy spring morning, and he shouted mostly to hear himself.

  Norton nodded and said, "Is that a likely place to put down?" He pointed across the highway, almost directly opposite the entrance to the Baglio drive. A thousand yards from the road's edge, the woodlands broke for several hundred feet, providing a clean, grassy, somewhat sloped expanse of land between arms of the forest.

  "Good enough," Tucker said.

  They went that way and, five minutes later, were on the ground. Norton cut the engines, let the blades stutter down. The bees began to fly out of Tucker's ears, until the numbed ringing was gone and he could hear once more.

  "Now what?" Norton asked.

  "Now, you'll wait here while I go telephone a colleague," Tucker said, working loose of t
he seat belt and the shoulder harness which had bitten deep into his flesh.

  Norton stretched his long legs as well as he could in the recess below the control dash and looked around at the pine trees. "I know you're clever at organizing operations, Mike. God knows, I've been in the thick of two of them, and I could tell as much about your expertise without knowing just what in the hell was going on. But I can't believe that you've had a branch line run into these woods just on the off chance that you might have to telephone someone from here."

  Tucker smiled. "No branch line. But there's a picnic area not too far from here, along the main highway, with a phone booth at the end of it. Sit tight until I get back."

  He pushed open the heavy copter door, jumped out, reached up and slammed the door shut. Fifteen minutes later he made his call from the booth in the picnic area. An hour after that, Jimmy Shirillo drove into the parking lot in his red Corvette, cut the engine and climbed out, smiling.

  Another man got out of the low-slung car. He was at least twenty years older than Tucker, about Pete Harris's age, though he was slim and almost delicate-looking, like Shirillo, quite unlike the bearish Harris. He wore heavy-rimmed glasses with thick lenses, combed his hair back from his forehead and looked, from the neck up, much like a turn-of-the-century schoolmaster. From the neck down he looked not unlike a hippie, in bellbottom blue jeans and a rumpled blue work shirt with the cuffs rolled up. He looked at Tucker, smiled slightly, bent back into the Corvette to get his equipment which he had packed into a shoulder-slung leather satchel and a small metal suitcase.

  Shirillo introduced them-Ken Willis, photographer-and let them shake hands. Willis's handshake was indifferent, as if he felt formalities of this sort were a waste of time. Close up, Tucker saw in him an impatience, a need to keep moving, a quality that was unsettlingly like his own.

  "You know what we want?" he asked Willis.

  "Jimmy told me the most of it."

  To Shirillo Tucker said, "Are you sure of him?"

  "Of course. He's my uncle, on my mother's side, by marriage."

  "For one thing," Willis explained, "even if I were willing to sell out on you, I wouldn't know where the hell to go to do it. My line is mostly weddings and freelance nude photography for men's magazines."

  "Good enough," Tucker said. "It's a fifteen-minute walk to the helicopter. Jimmy, you'll stay here with the car until we come back. You can pretend you got sleepy driving and pulled off for a nap-that is, if a cop stops and wants to know if you're just loitering. We'll be back before dark, I hope."

  Shirillo returned to the car.

  Tucker picked up Willis's heavy metal suitcase and said, "Across the highway. We'll wait until there aren't any cars coming before we try it. We don't want to stir up anyone's curiosity."

  The big red summer sun had already touched the peak of the mountain on which the Baglio mansion rested, caressed the gentle ridgeline with bright fingers and slowly began to settle out of sight. Full darkness was still more than an hour away, the true sunset obscured by the mountainside, but even so they were going to have to scramble to get done everything they had come here for.

  Norton took them over the roof of the huge white house, a dozen yards above the television antennae, peeled to the right when they had reached the end of the lawn and circled back, swept over the house from the opposite direction, even closer this time.

  "Can you get it like that?" Norton shouted.

  Willis shook his head vehemently, negatively. "I'll either have to hang out of the door or shoot through the nose glass here." He reached across the narrow dash and thumped his knuckles on the windshield. They made a hollow tok, tok, tok sound.

  "I can stand her on end a little," Norton said.

  "And do it going away from the sun," Willis said, "so there's no glare against the glass."

  Tucker sat in the seat directly behind Norton, watching the mansion closely, waiting for the first sign of Baglio's bodyguards. He wondered what they'd think when they came dashing out and found a police helicopter buzzing their retreat.

  Norton stood the helicopter on its nose at a thirty-five-degree angle, slanted enough so that they all slid forward on their seats, testing the belts that bound them in.

  "Good," Willis said.

  The photographer had loaded his camera, unfastened his seat belt and was now out of his bucket-form chair, leaning across the dash, his face pressed close to the window as he focused and shot one frame after another.

  Paul Norton didn't like the fact that Willis wasn't strapped down, but he didn't say much about it. He concentrated on keeping the copter's flight path as even and steady as possible so that there was little chance of Willis being thrown around.

  Below, two men came out of the front door of the white house and looked up at the circling craft, raised flattened hands to shield their eyes from the last direct glints of sunlight that touched the polished framework and the windshield of the copter as it fluttered in a tight little turn. They were, Tucker saw, the next thing to nonentities, two husky muscle types, their sports coats hanging open so that guns would be more quickly at hand.

  Tucker leaned forward and said, almost in Norton's ear, "The glass isn't bulletproof, is it?"

  "Plexiglass," Norton said. "It'll deflect a pistol shot pretty well, even if we were close enough for them to use handguns. Even when it cracks under rifle fire, it can throw the slug away first."

  Tucker remained forward in his seat, bracing himself against the back of Norton's seat, staring down through the tilted nose window. "I think we have enough front-to-back shots. Let's try cruising it from end to end."

  Norton obliged, brought the copter around in a whine of engine noise, coasted the length of the mansion while Willis busily used his camera.

  Baglio himself had come out of the house and stood in front of the pillared promenade in the circular driveway, looking up at the copter. Right now he would be wondering whether they knew that Bachman was in the house or whether this was only routine police harassment. He would be wondering, too, how he could get Bachman out of the mansion under their noses if they should land with a search warrant. Tucker hoped that, when Norton took them away from here without landing, Baglio didn't panic and have Bachman killed and buried. It would be so easy for him to have the driver tucked away in a grave beneath the pine trees upslope of the house. Of course, Bachman might already be dead. He might have talked and been put to sleep without the proper honors.

  Tucker said, "Can you take her down and parallel the house so Willis can get some ground shots of all four sides?"

  "Sure," Norton said.

  He leveled the machine and, when they were behind the mansion, took it down within five feet of the lawn while the photographer took his shots through the side window. When they came around in front of the house, where Baglio and his two men were standing, the hoods danced quickly back out of the way of the chopping blades that were still much too high to reach them but which must have looked sobering anyway. They were too busy, then, to notice the copter's occupants.

  "Now up," Tucker said. "Let's get some shots of the house in perspective, the entire lawn and the perimeter of the forest."

  When that was done, Norton said, "Next?"

  "That's it," Tucker said. "Let's get back to home base."

  By the time they landed on the grassy floor of the forest clearing nearly two miles from Baglio's mansion, Willis had packed away all of his gear and was ready to go. The moment the chattering rotors began to stutter down into silence, he pushed open his door and jumped out, reached back inside and dragged his two cases of equipment after him.

  "Wait a moment," Norton said as Tucker pushed Willis's seat forward and made to follow the photographer.

  "Yeah?"

  Norton said, "Obviously, you're going in there. Since you told me to be ready for four passengers-and since I've only heard about three of you so far-it seems likely you're going in to get back a man of yours."

  Tucker said nothing.

/>   Norton continued: "Wouldn't they be expecting something like this-the copter and all?"

  "No," Tucker said. "They're expecting small-time tactics, if they're expecting anything at all. They're very secure up there, or think they are. Besides, I'm sure they were altogether misled by the police insignia on the copter."

  "That's another thing," Norton said. "Wouldn't they think it's pretty odd to be harassed like this? Wouldn't they be making regular payoffs to eliminate just this kind of hassle?"

  "Not to state police," Tucker said. "There are rotten apples in every police force, and they probably do carry a couple of the state boys on their payroll, but they can't buy off one of the toughest and best forces in the country. The price would be too high."

  Norton said, "Okay. I wasn't being nosey. I just wanted to know what to expect the next time I have to take this crate in there. If they're going to have me figured out and be waiting for me, then I want to know about it." He stretched again, arched his back and pressed upward against his seat belt.

  "They won't be expecting you," Tucker said. "A flat guarantee."

  "I'll be here when you need me."

  Tucker jumped out, took the two briefcases that Norton handed to him, one with less than five thousand cash packed into it, the other containing the guns. He also handed down a soft khaki tote bag with a heavy load in the bottom, special equipment that Tucker had asked him to supply when he had originally called him from the department-store phone that morning. Tucker carried the briefcases in one hand, since they were both slim, the tote bag in the other, led Willis back into the woods and, fifteen minutes later, to the red Corvette where Jimmy Shirillo was still feigning sleep.

  By a quarter of ten they were in the city again. Merle Bachman had been in Baglio's hands slightly over thirty-six hours.

  In the dream he lay upon a soft bed, the covers drawn away from him, a feather pillow propping his head up. The room was almost completely dark, though swaths of soft blue light striped the thick carpeting and made odd shadows on the walls; the source of the light, though he looked for it, was not apparent. Elise Ramsey appeared on the far side of the room, held for a moment in a band of blue light, like a specimen in a collection, on display, then stepped forward into shadow. She was nude, striding toward him with the confidence of a lioness. She came out of shadow into light again, cupping her heavy breasts in her hands, making him an offering, one that he was instantly willing to accept. She stepped into shadow again, reappeared in light, all slickly moving, sinuous curves. He would have been aroused to full ability in another moment-except that he saw the incredible hand rising up behind her, the hand that she was clearly unaware of and which, even had he warned her, was moving too fast for her to avoid. It was large enough to cup Elise in its palm, a giant's hand that faded away into the darkness of the ceiling just beyond the thick wrist. The fingers were spread to encircle her, the flesh gray and cold and rigid in appearance. It was an iron fist, and it would crush her in another moment. What made the dream metamorphose into a nightmare was not the fact that she would be squashed like an insect, or even the understanding that the hand would come after Tucker when it was finished with the girl, but the certainty that the hand did not belong to Baglio this time. This time, the iron hand was his father's. Shadow and blue light, bare breasts, stiffened nipples and the convulsing grasp of iron digits