Jack Crawford was driving south from his home in Arlington at 6:30 A.M. when the telephone in his car beeped for the second time in two minutes.

"Nine twenty-two forty."

"Forty stand by for Alpha 4."

Crawford spotted a rest area, pulled in, and stopped to give his full attention to the telephone. Alpha 4 is the Director of the FBI.

"Jack-- you up on Catherine Martin?"

"The night duty officer called me just now."

"Then you know about the blouse. Talk to me."

"Buzzard Point went to kidnap alert," Crawford said. "I'd prefer they didn't stand down yet. When they do stand down I'd like to keep the phone surveillance. Slit blouse or not, we don't know for sure it's Bill. If it's a copycat he might call for ransom. Who's doing taps and traces in Tennessee, us or them?"

"Them. The state police. They're pretty good. Phil Adler called from the White House to tell me about the President's 'intense interest.' We could use a win here, Jack."

"That had occurred to me. Where's the Senator?"

"En route to Memphis. She got me at home a minute ago. You can imagine."

"Yes." Crawford knew Senator Martin from budget hearings.

"She's coming down with all the weight she's got."

"I don't blame her."

"Neither do I," the Director said. "I've told her we're going flat-out, just as we've done all along. She is… she's aware of your personal situation and she's offered you a company Lear. Use it-- come home at night if you can."

"Good. The Senator's tough, Tommy. If she tries to run it we'll butt heads."

"I know. Do a set-pick off me if you have to. What have we got at the best-- six or seven days, Jack?"

"I don't know. If he panics when he finds out who she is-- he might just do her and dump her."

"Where are you?"

"Two miles from Quantico."

"Will the strip at Quantico take a Lear?"

"Yes."

"Twenty minutes."

"Yes sir."

Crawford punched numbers into his phone and pulled back into traffic.

Sore from a troubled sleep, Clarice Starling stood in her bathrobe and bunny slippers, towel over her shoulder, waiting to get in the bathroom she and Mapp shared with the students next door. The news from Memphis on the radio froze her for half a breath.

"Oh God," she said. "Oh boy. ALL RIGHT IN THERE! THIS BATHROOM IS SEIZED. COME OUT WITH YOUR PANTS UP. THIS IS NOT A DRILL!" She climbed into the shower with a startled next-door neighbor. "Ooch over, Gracie, and would you pass me that soap."

Ear cocked to the telephone, she packed for overnight and set her forensic kit by the door. She made sure the switchboard knew she was in her room and gave up breakfast to stick by the phone. At ten minutes to class time, with no word, she hurried down to Behavioral Science with her equipment.

"Mr. Crawford left for Memphis forty-five minutes ago," the secretary told her sweetly. "Burroughs went, and Stafford from the lab left from National."

"I put a report here for him last night. Did he leave any message for me? I'm Clarice Starling."

"Yes, I know who you are. I have three copies of your telephone number right here, and there are several more on his desk, l believe. No, he didn't leave a thing for you, Clarice." The woman looked at Starling's luggage. "Would you like me to tell him something when he calls in?"

"Did he leave a Memphis phone number on his three-card?"

"No, he'll call with it. Don't you have classes today, Clarice? You're still in school, aren't you?"

"Yes. Yes, I am."

Starling's entry, late, into the classroom was not eased by Gracie Pitman, the young woman she had displaced in the shower. Gracie Pitman sat directly behind Starling. It seemed a long way to her seat. Gracie Pitmans tongue had time to make two full-revolutions in her downy cheek before Starling could submerge into the class.

With no breakfast she sat through two hours of "The Good-Faith Warrant Exception to the Exclusionary Rule in Search and Seizure," before she could get to the vending machine and chug a Coke.

She checked her box for a message at noon and there was nothing. It occurred to her then, as it had on a few other occasions in her life, that intense frustration tastes very much like the patent medicine called Fleet's that she'd had to take as a child.

Some days you wake up changed. This was one for Starling, she could tell. What she had seen yesterday at the Potter Funeral Home had caused in her a small tectonic shift.

Starling had studied psychology and criminology in a good school. In her life she had seen some of the hideously offhand ways in which the world breaks things. But she hadn't really known, and now she knew: sometimes the family of man produces, behind a human face, a mind whose pleasure is what lay on the porcelain table at Potter, West Virginia, in the room with the cabbage roses. Starling's first apprehension of that mind was worse than anything she could see on the autopsy scales. The knowledge would lie against her skin forever, and she knew she had to form a callus or it would wear her through.

The school routine didn't help her. All day she had the feeling that things were going on just over the horizon. She seemed to hear a vast murmur of events, like the sound from a distant stadium. Suggestions of movement unsettled her, groups passing in the hallway, cloud shadows moving over, the sound of an airplane.

After class Starling ran too many laps and then she swam. She swam until she thought about the floaters and then she didn't want the water on her anymore.

She watched the seven o'clock news with Mapp and a dozen other students in the recreation room. The abduction of Senator Martin's daughter was not the lead item, but it was first after the Geneva arms talks.

There was film from Memphis, starting with the sign of the Stonehinge Villas, shot across the revolving light of a patrol car. The media were blitzing the story and, with little new to report, reporters interviewed each other in the parking lot at Stonehinge. Memphis and Shelby County authorities ducked their heads to unaccustomed banks of microphones. In a jostling, squealing hell of lens flare and audio feedback, they listed the things they didn't know. Still-photographers stooped and darted, backpedaling into the TV minicams whenever investigators entered or left Catherine Baker Martin's apartment.

A brief, ironic cheer went up in the Academy recreation room when Crawford's face appeared briefly in the apartment window. Starling smiled on one side of her mouth.

She wondered if Buffalo Bill was watching. She wondered what he thought of Crawford's face or if he even knew who Crawford was.

Others seemed to think Bill might be watching, too.

There was Senator Martin, on television live with Peter Jennings. She stood alone in her child's bedroom, a Southwestern University pennant and posters favoring Wile E. Coyote and the Equal Rights Amendment on the wall behind her.

She was a tall woman with a strong, plain face.

"I'm speaking now to the person who is holding my daughter," she said. She walked closer to the camera, causing an unscheduled refocus, and spoke as she never would have spoken to a terrorist.

"You have the power to let my daughter go unharmed. Her name is Catherine. She's very gentle and understanding. Please let my daughter go, please release her unharmed. You have control of this situation. You have the power. You are in charge. I know you can feel love and compassion. You can protect her against anything that might want to harm her. You now have a wonderful chance to show the whole world that you are capable of great kindness, that you are big enough to treat others better than the world has treated you. Her name is Catherine."