“Are you suggesting I should go after the entire organization?”

“I suggest, Mr. Merle, that you decide once and for all which it is that you want—the removal of the threat against you and your family, or revenge against your enemies.”

“You’re making an artificial distinction.”

“Not at all. If you’re after revenge then by all means fill your hands with pistols and go roaring off in pursuit of Mr. Deffeldorf and Mr. Tyrone. I’m quite certain they’re the men who assaulted your home and hired the sniper who shot at you. But if you’re after the removal of the threat then you must forget Deffeldorf and Tyrone. Individually they constitute no threat to you. If Frank Pastor were removed from the scene you can be sure the hired hands would forget you instantly—they do only those jobs for which they can reasonably expect recompense, and there would be no profit in their continuing to harass you.”

Mathieson pushed the photographs away. He walked to the window and stared through it. Meuth’s tractor pulled a mower across the skyline, making a distant racket. Roger cleared his throat.

Vasquez hammered home his point. “You’ve no need to deal with outsiders who have no personal stake in your living or dying. Forget Deffeldorf and Tyrone. Forget the sniper, whoever he may have been. Focus your attentions on those who have compelling reasons to threaten you.”

“Frank Pastor.”

“Not merely Pastor. Think about the kind of importance these people attach to revenge. It is a familial obligation—a duty of the blood. If Frank Pastor is harmed, his family is obliged to retaliate. Anna Pastor, his wife. George Ramiro, who must maintain his reputation as the family’s enforcer. C. K. Gillespie, who has designs on the family’s fortunes and is, I’m told, merely waiting for the eldest Pastor daughter to reach the age of consent so that he may marry her. Ezio Martin who is a second cousin of Pastor’s, his closest friend and heir apparent. Alicia Ramiro, Martin’s stepsister, the wife of George Ramiro and again a cousin of Pastor’s. Sandra and Nora Pastor, the daughters.”

He turned away from the window and found Vasquez watching him with a peculiar narrowed eagerness. Mathieson said, “Teen-age girls?”

“They’re your enemies. Make no mistake. Leave those two innocent little girls free to act and the time will come when they’ll seek revenge on you. It’s born in them—they have no choice. Therefore you have no choice.”

“My God. This is absurd.”

“Do you want to reconsider?”

“Why are you always after me to change my mind?”

“Answer my question, please.”

“No. I can’t reconsider. I’ve got to get them off my back.”

Vasquez watched, unblinking.

Mathieson said, “You’re testing me, aren’t you.”

“Testing your resolve, yes.”

“Why?”

“Because you must realize the depth of your commitment. Once you start, there will be no turning back. Go after one of them and you must go after them all. You can’t leave the job half done.” Vasquez gathered up the photographs, squared them neatly and slid them into the envelope. “Suppose your campaign achieves the intended results—the neutralization, somehow, of the threat posed by Frank Pastor. I can’t conceive of your accomplishing that without incurring the rage of his family.” Vasquez paused significantly. “Suppose in achieving your first goal—Pastor—you find you’ve offended your own moral sensibilities. Suppose you find yourself filled with self-loathing. Suppose self-disgust tempts you to take to your heels. You must realize now—before we really begin—that such a train of events would leave you and your wife and son and your friends in a far worse predicament than the one they’re in now.”

“How could it?”

“Your death has been a matter of sport to Frank Pastor. It’s inconsequential. He’s gone through the motions, he’s honored the traditions to which he’s obligated, but he hasn’t yet devoted extraordinary energies to pursuing you. The attacks on you may have been engineered by a subordinate—perhaps Ezio Martin—and they were incidentals in Frank Pastor’s life. Your demise is something he desires. But it’s hardly a vital issue to him. Now if you should carry your attack directly to Pastor and do injury to him, then he and his family would drop absolutely everything in the rush to avenge themselves on you. Where a relatively insignificant proportion of their energies heretofore has been devoted to your harassment, now you would find that the entire force of their violent resources would be brought to bear in an intense concentration against you and your family.”

The tractor sputtered to a stop. In the abrupt silence he could hear the breath whistling through Roger’s nostrils.

Vasquez said, “I doubt you’d stand one chance in a million. You and your wife and son would not merely be tracked, found and taken. You’d very likely be subjected to punishments of agonizing painfulness before you were eventually slaughtered. As for Mr. Gilfillan and his family, one can’t be sure whether their hunger for vengeance would stretch that far but it’s possible.”

Mathieson pulled out a chair and sat down slowly at the table. He laid both arms out flat along the tabletop and looked at the backs of his hands. Beside him Roger reached out; he felt the solid grip of Roger’s fingers on his shoulder.

Vasquez was behind him and Mathieson did not look around. Eventually it forced Vasquez to walk around the table and stand on the far side looking at him. Mathieson raised his head.

In a kinder voice Vasquez said, “I have a responsibility to force you to think these things right through before you decide on a course of action. You resent it, of course—it would be unnatural if you didn’t. I’ve thrown a few of your assumptions off the track. I’ve managed to depress you. I’ve made what already appeared difficult become all but impossible to conceive.”

Roger’s hand fell away; his chair scraped and Mathieson heard him stand up. “Tell you what you’ve done to me, you’ve made me start wondering whether you’re getting a case of cold feet.”

“I intend going all the way with this,” Vasquez said. “Make no mistake about that.”

“How do we know that? So far all I’ve seen is some athletics and some smoke screens.”

Mathieson looked up at Roger in surprise: the anger in Roger’s voice was unmistakable.

“I signed on to do something—not just set around and look at pictures and listen to your long-winded flapdoodle and wait on our butts for these four fire inspectors to come find us hidin’ in the hayloft. So far all’s I’ve seen you do is spend a lot of Fred’s money on man-hours for your own operatives compiling these here beautiful plastic-bound Xerox dossiers, and now you’re trying to tell us we can ignore Deffeldorf and Tyrone, just throw all that money and time away. Hell, the way you go at it we could all set around here waitin’ for inspiration until we got long white whiskers on us.”

Vasquez scowled. “We can’t fight from ignorance. We’d get nowhere. Surely you can understand that. We need facts before we can move. We’ve got the facts now. We’re sorting through them. In time we’ll find facts we can use. It takes time—I’m sorry, I won’t be held accountable for that, or for your impatience.”

“You make it sound right reasonable. But somebody else might take a look at all this and call it foot-draggin’.”

“In other words you don’t trust me.”

“Why should I? Why should Fred, for that matter? Just because you say out loud that you aim to go all the way with this, we supposed to believe you? Vasquez, I been listening to producers and directors talk real sweet to me all my life, and the only thing I really learned out of all that was that ninety-nine times out of a hundred those old boys are just yakking to practice their lying.”

Vasquez looked at Mathieson. “Do you share your friend’s distrust of me?”