An Epiphany then at Christmas.

MASON KNEW that his X-ray was truly of Dr Letter's arm well before Starling

was told, because Mason's sources within the justice Department were better

than hers.

Mason was told in an E-mail message signed with the screen name Token287. That

is the second screen name of U.S. Representative Parton Vellmore's assistant

on the House Judiciary Committee. Vellmore's office had been E-mailed by

CassiusI99, the second screen name of the justice Department's own Paul

Krendler.

Mason was excited. He did not think Dr Letter was in Brazil, but the X-ray

proved that the doctor now had the normal number of fingers on his left hand.

That information meshed with a new lead from Europe on the doctor's

whereabouts. Mason believed the tip came from within Italian law enforcement

and it was the strongest whiff of Letter he had had in years.

Mason had no intention of sharing his lead with the FBI. Owing to seven years

of relentless effort, access to confidential federal files, extensive

leafleting, no international restrictions and large expenditures of money,

Mason was ahead of the FBI in the pursuit of Lecter. He only shared

information with the Bureau when he needed to suck its resources.

To keep up appearances, he instructed his secretary to pester Starling for

developments anyway. Mason's tickler file prompted the secretary to call her

at least three times a day.

Mason immediately wired five thousand dollars to his informant in Brazil to

pursue the source of the X-ray. The contingency fund he wired to Switzerland

was much larger and he was prepared to send more when he had hard information

in hand.

He believed that his source in Europe had found Dr Lecter, but Mason had been

cheated on information many times and he had learned to be careful. Soon proof

would come. Until it did, to relieve the agony of waiting Mason concerned

himself with what would happen after the doctor was in his hands. These

arrangements had also been long in the making, for Mason was a student of

suffering . . .

God's choices in inflicting suffering are not satisfactory to us, nor are they

understandable, unless innocence offends Him. Clearly He needs some help in

directing the blind fury with which He flogs the earth.

Mason came to understand his role in all of this in the twelfth year of his

paralysis, when he was no longer sizeable beneath his sheet and knew that he

would never rise again. His quarters at the Muskrat Farm mansion were

completed and he had means, but not unlimited means, because the Verger

patriarch, Molson, still ruled.

It was Christmas in the year of Dr Lecter's escape. Subject to the quality of

feelings that commonly attend Christmas, Mason was wishing bitterly, that he

had arranged for Dr Lecter to be murdered in the asylum; Mason knew that

somewhere Dr Lecter was going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down

in it, and very likely having a good time.

Mason himself lay under his respirator, a soft blanket covering all, a nurse

standing by, shifting on her feet, wishing she could sit down. Some poor

children had been bussed to Muskrat Farm to carol. With the doctor's

permission, Mason's windows were opened briefly to the crisp air and, beneath

the windows, holding candles in their cupped hands, the children sang.

The lights were out in Mason's room and in the black air above the farm the

stars hung close.

"O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie!"

How still we see thee lie.

How still we see thee lie.

The mockery of the line pressed down on him.

How still we see thee lie, Mason!

The Christmas stars outside his window maintained their stifling silence. The

stars said nothing to him when he looked up to them with his pleading, goggled

eye, gestured to them with the fingers he could move. Mason did not think that

he could breathe. If he were suffocating in space, he thought, the last thing

he would see would be the beautiful silent airless stars. He was suffocating

now, he thought, his respirator could not keep up, he had to wait for breath

the lines of his vital signs Christmas - green on the scopes and spiking,

little evergreens in the black forest night of the scopes. Spike of his

heartbeat, systolic spike, diastolic spike.

The nurse frightened, about to push the alarm button, about to reach for the

adrenaline.

Mockery of the lines, how still we see thee lie, Mason.

An Epiphany then at Christmas. Before the nurse could ring, or reach for

medication, the first coarse bristles of Mason's revenge brushed his pale and

seeking, ghost crab of a hand, and began to calm him.

At Christmas communions around the earth, the devout believe that, through the

miracle of transubstantiation, they eat the actual body and blood of Christ.

Mason began the preparations for an even more impressive ceremony with no

transubstantiation necessary. He began his arrangements for Dr Hannibal Lecter

to be eaten alive.