Chapter 7 Chapter 4 Washington, District of Columbia

John Rainbird's owner was sitting in his room at the Mayflower Hotel, watching a television show, when the name John Rainbird flashed through Cap Hollinster's mind.He sat naked in a chair and watched TV, with his bare feet close together.He is waiting for dark.After dark, he will continue to wait for the night to come.It was late at night, and he would continue to wait for the dawn, and in the early morning, when everything in the hotel was asleep, he would finish waiting, go upstairs to room 1217 and kill Dr. Varys, and then he would come down and go back to his room, Think about anything Varys might have told him before he died.After the sun rises, take another nap.

John Rainbird was a calm man.He gets along with almost everything - Cap. "Ita", America and the States.Him and God.Satan.The universe can also live in harmony.If he wasn't completely at peace, it was only because his pilgrimage wasn't over yet.He had many successes, many honorable scars.It didn't matter that people walked away from him with fear and disgust.It didn't matter that he lost an eye in Vietnam; it didn't matter what he got paid—he spent most of it on shoes.He owns a house in Flagstad.Although he rarely went there himself, he gave away all his shoes.If he had the opportunity to go to his house, he would enjoy his collection-Gucci, Paris, Bath.Adidas.His lovely shoes.His house is a strange forest: shoe trees grow in every room, and he can walk from room to room admiring the shoes growing from the trees.But when he was alone, he was always barefoot.His father—a purebred Indian—was buried barefoot.Someone stole the moccasins he was buried with.

John Rainbird was only interested in two things besides shoes.One of them is death. His own death, of course; he had been preparing for the inevitable for twenty years, if not more.Dealing with death had always been his business, and it was the only one in which he excelled.As he grew older he became more and more interested in death, as a painter is in the qualities and degrees of light; as a writer is in the subtleties of character and emotion.A blind man feels the same way about reading Braille, and what interests him most is how the soul emerges from the body and what the world calls life...dissipates...into another realm.What would it be like to feel your life slipping away slowly?

Do you think this is a dream from which you wake up?Is the devil in Christianity out there ready to pierce your screaming soul with a fork like a piece of meat on a kebab and take it to hell?will this be happyDo you know where you are going? What do dying eyes see? Rain Bird hopes to have the opportunity to find out the answers to these questions.In his line of work, death was often quick and unpredictable, happening in the blink of an eye.He hoped that when his death came, he would have enough time to prepare and feel everything.Recently, he has often looked at the faces of those he killed, hoping to discover the secrets in their eyes.

Death fascinated him. Another thing that interested him was this little girl they were so concerned about now.This Charlene McGee.As far as Garp knew, John Rainbird knew only a little about the McGees, but nothing about Destiny Six.In fact, Rainbird knew almost as much as Cap—if Cap knew that, John Rainbird would be dead. They suspected that the girl had some great or potentially great power--and there were probably many who believed it.He would like to meet the little girl to see what her energy is.He also knew that the man had what Garp called "latent mind control," but John Rainbird didn't care about that.He had never met a man who could control him.

The show is over.Then came the news.Not a single piece of good news.John Rainbird sat naked in his chair, his mind empty.He doesn't eat, drink, or smoke. Concentrating on waiting for the moment of killing. Earlier that day, Cap had thought uncomfortably of how quietly Rainbird had acted.And now Dr. Varys didn't hear him come in at all.He was jolted out of sleep by a finger scratching under his nose.The doctor opened his eyes and saw a huge monster like a devil in a nightmare appearing on the bedside.One eye gleamed softly in the light from the bathroom (the doctor always left the bathroom light on when he was in a strange place).What should have been another eye is now just an empty crater.

Varys opened his mouth to scream, but Rain Bird clamped his nostrils with one hand and his mouth with the other, and Varys struggled. "Shh," Rainbird said.He spoke with the delightful indulgence of a mother changing a baby's diaper. Varys struggled harder. "If you don't want to die, be quiet," Rainbird said. Varys looked at him, gasped, and calmed down. "Will you be quiet?" Varys nodded.His face was flushed. Rainbird let go, and Varys began to gasp, a small stream of blood streaming from his nose. "Who... are you? Garp sent you here?"

"I'm Rainbird," he said solemnly. "Yes, Cap sent me." Varys' eyes were huge in the darkness, and his tongue crawled out to lick his lips. Lying on the bed with the kicked-down quilt wrapped around his feet, he looked like the oldest child in the world. "I have money," he said quickly, "in a Swiss bank. Lots of money. It's all yours. I won't say it again. Swear to God." "I don't want your money, Dr. Varys," Rainbird said. Varys stared up at him, the left corner of his mouth twitching wildly.The left eyelash drooped downward, trembling constantly.

"When the sun comes up, if you want to live," Rainbird said, "you're going to talk to me, Dr. Varys. You're going to give me a lecture. I'm going to be the only one. I'm going to be serious. Be a good student. Then I will give you life as a reward, but from now on you stay away from Karp and Ita. Understand?" "Understood," Varys said hoarsely. "Do you agree?" "Agreed...but what—?" Rainbird held up two fingers to his lips, and Dr. Varys immediately shut his mouth.His bony, bony chest rose and fell rapidly. "I want to say two words," Rain Bird said, "and then your lecture can begin.

It will include everything you know, everything you suspect and everything you conclude.I'm about to say these two words, are you ready, Dr. Varys? " "Yes," said Dr. Varys. "Charlene McGee," Rainbird said.Then Varys began to speak.He spoke slowly at first, then gradually began to speed up.He kept talking.He told Rain Bird the full story of the Destiny Six experiments and medical experiments, much of which Rain Bird already knew, but Varys still filled in some gaps.The doctor repeated his sermon to Cap that morning, but this time it was not in vain.Rainbird listened intently, frowning, applauding softly, and laughing at Varys' potty training metaphor.Varys seemed to be encouraged to speak faster and faster.As he began to repeat, as an old man often does, Rainbird leaned down and again clamped his nose with one hand and covered his mouth with the other.

"I'm sorry," Rainbird said. Varys rolled and dived under Rainbird's weight.Rainbird pushed harder; when Varys's struggle began to weaken, Rainbird quickly pulled away his hand that was holding Varys' nose.The doctor's hissing panting was like a flat tire driven into a big nail.His eyes rolled wildly in their sockets like the eyes of a startled horse...but still nothing. Rainbird grabbed Dr. Varys by the collar of his pajama jacket and pulled him sideways.So the cold white light of the bathroom shone directly on his face. Then, he clamped the doctor's nose tightly again. If a person remains completely still under suffocation, a man can last up to nine minutes without permanent damage to the brain; a woman has slightly greater lung capacity.The CO2 removal system is also more efficient, and she can last ten or twelve minutes.Of course, struggle and fear can greatly shorten a person's survival time. After Dr. Varys struggled for forty seconds, his efforts to save his own life began to slacken.His hands pounded limply on John Rainbird's distorted granite face; his heels kicked the mattress with an increasingly faint tap-tap.Finally, in Rain Bird's callused palm, he began to saliva. The moment has come. Rainbird leaned forward, looking into Varys' eyes with childlike eagerness. But it was still the same, exactly the same as in the past.Those eyes seemed to have forgotten the fear, but were filled with great confusion.Not surprise, not epiphany or understanding or fear, just confusion) For a moment, those two puzzled eyes fixed on one of John Rainbird's eyes, and Rainbird knew that those eyes saw him, perhaps knee-deep When the doctor's soul gradually emerged from his shell, his figure also slowly disappeared from the field of vision.But those eyes still saw him.Then everything disappeared, only the cloudy eyes remained.Joseph.Dr. Varys had left the Mayflower Hotel; lying beside Rainbird on the bed was a life-size doll. Rainbird sat still, with one hand still over the doll's mouth and the other firmly clamping the doll's nostrils.It's best to be foolproof.He'll stay like that for another ten minutes. He thought about what Varys had told him about Charlene McGee.Is it really possible for a child to have that much energy?He thought it might be possible.In Calcutta, he had seen a man plunge a knife into himself—legs, stomach.chest.neck-- Then pulled them out without leaving a wound.this is possible.And it's really... interesting. He pondered quietly, and found himself wondering how it would feel to kill a child.He's never done anything like this on purpose (although once he planted a bomb on an airplane; the bomb went off and killed all 67 people on board, maybe a few of them children, but it wasn't a matter; that is not personal).His line of business did not often call for the killing of children.After all, they weren't some kind of terrorist like the Northern Irish Republican Army or the PLO, although some - like some chumps in Congress - would like to believe they were. After all, they were a scientific institution. Maybe with a child the results will be different.Those eyes at the end of life might have given him a new expression other than the bewilderment that had left him feeling so empty, so—yes, it was true—so sad.Maybe in a child's death he'd discover part of what he needed to know. One such child—Charlene McGee. "My life is like a straight road in the desert," said John Rainbird softly.He stared intently at the pair of hollow blue marble spheres that had been Doctor Varys' eyes. "But your life is no way at all, my friend . . . my good friend." He kissed Varys on both cheeks.Then pull him onto the bed and throw a sheet over him.The sheet fell slowly like a parachute, framing Varys' protruding but undulating nose in white. Rainbird walked out of the room. That night, he thought about the little girl who was believed to be able to start a fire.He thought a lot.He wanted to know where she was, what she was thinking, what she was dreaming about.He felt a tenderness for her from the bottom of his heart, an urge to protect her. Just after six o'clock in the morning, Yu Bird gradually fell asleep.He was sure: the girl would definitely be his.