The Eyes of Darkness

Chapter Fifteen

Tina stayed the night with Elliot, and he realized that he had forgotten how pleasant it could be to share his bed with someone for whom he truly cared. He’d had other women in this bed during the past two years, and a few had stayed the night, but not one of those other lovers had made him feel content merely by the fact of her presence, as Tina did. With her, sex was a delightful bonus, a lagniappe, but it wasn’t the main reason he wanted her beside him. She was an excellent lover — silken, smooth, and uninhibited in the pursuit of her own pleasure — but she was also vulnerable and kind. The vague, shadowy shape of her under the covers, in the darkness, was a talisman to ward off loneliness.

Eventually he fell asleep, but at four o’clock in the morning, he was awakened by cries of distress.

She sat straight up, the sheets knotted in her fists, catapulted out of a nightmare. She was quaking, gasping about a man dressed all in black, the monstrous figure from her dream.

Elliot switched on the bedside lamp to prove to her that they were alone in the room.

She had told him about the dreams, but he hadn’t realized, until now, how terrible they were. The exhumation of Danny’s body would be good for her, regardless of the horror that she might have to confront when the coffin lid was raised. If seeing the remains would put an end to these bloodcurdling nightmares, she would gain an advantage from the grim experience.

He switched off the bedside lamp and persuaded her to lie down again. He held her until she stopped shuddering.

To his surprise, her fear rapidly changed to desire. They fell easily into the pace and rhythm that had earlier best pleased them. Afterward, they slipped into sleep again.

Over breakfast he asked her to go with him to the afternoon party at which he was going to corner Judge Kennebeck to ask about the exhumation. But Tina wanted to go back to her place and clean out Danny’s room. She felt up to the challenge now, and she intended to finish the task before she lost her nerve again.

“We’ll see each other tonight, won’t we?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I’ll cook for you again.”

She smiled lasciviously. “In what sense do you mean that?”

She rose out of her chair, leaned across the table, kissed him.

The smell of her, the vibrant blue of her eyes, the feel of her supple skin as he put a hand to her face — those things generated waves of affection and longing within him.

He walked her to her Honda in the driveway and leaned in the window after she was behind the wheel, delaying her for another fifteen minutes while he planned, to her satisfaction, every dish of this evening’s dinner.

When at last she drove away, he watched her car until it turned the corner and disappeared, and when she was gone he knew why he had not wanted to let her go. He’d been trying to postpone her departure because he was afraid that he would never see her again after she drove off.

He had no rational reason to entertain such dark thoughts. Certainly, the unknown person who was harassing Tina might have violent intentions. But Tina herself didn’t think there was any serious danger, and Elliot tended to agree with her. The malicious tormentor wanted her to suffer mental anguish and spiritual pain; but he didn’t want her to die, because that would spoil his fun.

The fear Elliot felt at her departure was purely superstitious. He was convinced that, with her arrival on the scene, he had been granted too much happiness, too fast, too soon, too easily. He had an awful suspicion that fate was setting him up for another hard fall. He was afraid Tina Evans would be taken away from him just as Nancy had been.

Unsuccessfully trying to shrug off the grim premonition, he went into the house.

He spent an hour and a half in his library, paging through legal casebooks, boning up on precedents for the exhumation of a body that, as the court had put it, “was to be disinterred in the absence of a pressing legal need, solely for humane reasons, in consideration of certain survivors of the deceased.” Elliot didn’t think Harold Kennebeck would give him any trouble, and he didn’t expect the judge to request a list of precedents for something as relatively simple and harmless as reopening Danny’s grave, but he intended to be well prepared. In Army Intelligence, Kennebeck had been a fair but always demanding superior officer.

At one o’clock Elliot drove his silver Mercedes S600 sports coupe to the New Year’s Day party on Sunrise Mountain. The sky was cerulean blue and clear, and he wished he had time to take the Cessna up for a few hours. This was perfect weather for flying, one of those crystalline days when being above the earth would make him feel clean and free.

On Sunday, when the exhumation was out of the way, maybe he would fly Tina to Arizona or to Los Angeles for the day.

On Sunrise Mountain most of the big, expensive houses featured natural landscaping — which meant rocks, colored stones, and artfully arranged cacti instead of grass, shrubs, and trees — in acknowledgment that man’s grip on this portion of the desert was new and perhaps tenuous. At night the view of Las Vegas from the mountainside was undeniably spectacular, but Elliot couldn’t understand what other reasons anyone could possibly have for choosing to live here rather than in the city’s older, greener neighborhoods. On hot summer days these barren, sandy slopes seemed godforsaken, and they would not be made lush and green for another ten years at least. On the brown hills, the huge houses thrust like the bleak monuments of an ancient, dead religion. The residents of Sunrise Mountain could expect to share their patios and decks and pool aprons with occasional visiting scorpions, tarantulas, and rattlesnakes. On windy days the dust was as thick as fog, and it pushed its dirty little cat feet under doors, around windows, and through attic vents.

The party was at a large Tuscan-style house, halfway up the slopes. A three-sided, fan-shaped tent had been erected on the back lawn, to one side of the sixty-foot pool, with the open side facing the house. An eighteen-piece orchestra performed at the rear of the gaily striped canvas structure. Approximately two hundred guests danced or milled about behind the house, and another hundred partied within its twenty rooms.

Many of the faces were familiar to Elliot. Half of the guests were attorneys and their wives. Although a judicial purist might have disapproved, prosecutors and public defenders and tax attorneys and criminal lawyers and corporate counsel were mingling and getting pleasantly drunk with the judges before whom they argued cases most every week. Las Vegas had a judicial style and standards of its own.

After twenty minutes of diligent mixing, Elliot found Harold Kennebeck. The judge was a tall, dour-looking man with curly white hair. He greeted Elliot warmly, and they talked about their mutual interests: cooking, flying, and river-rafting.

Elliot didn’t want to ask Kennebeck for a favor within hearing of a dozen lawyers, and today there was nowhere in the house where they could be assured of privacy. They went outside and strolled down the street, past the partygoers’ cars, which ran the gamut from Rolls-Royces to Range Rovers.

Kennebeck listened with interest to Elliot’s unofficial feeler about the chances of getting Danny’s grave reopened. Elliot didn’t tell the judge about the malicious prankster, for that seemed like an unnecessary complication; he still believed that once the fact of Danny’s death was established by the exhumation, the quickest and surest way of dealing with the harassment was to hire a first-rate firm of private investigators to track down the perpetrator. Now, for the judge’s benefit, and to explain why an exhumation had suddenly become such a vital matter, Elliot exaggerated the anguish and confusion that Tina had undergone as a direct consequence of never having seen the body of her child.

Harry Kennebeck had a poker face that also looked like a poker — hard and plain, dark — and it was difficult to tell if he had any sympathy whatsoever for Tina’s plight. As he and Elliot ambled along the sun-splashed street, Kennebeck mulled over the problem in silence for almost a minute. At last he said, “What about the father?”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t ask.”

“Ah,” Kennebeck said.

“The father will protest.”

“You’re positive?”

“Yes.”

“On religious grounds?”

“No. There was a bitter divorce shortly before the boy died. Michael Evans hates his ex-wife.”

“Ah. So he’d contest the exhumation for no other reason but to cause her grief?”

“That’s right,” Elliot said. “No other reason. No legitimate reason.”

“Still, I’ve got to consider the father’s wishes.”

“As long as there aren’t any religious objections, the law requires the permission of only one parent in a case like this,” Elliot said.

“Nevertheless, I have a duty to protect everyone’s interests in the matter.”

“If the father has a chance to protest,” Elliot said, “we’ll probably get involved in a knock-down-drag-out legal battle. It’ll tie up a hell of a lot of the court’s time.”

“I wouldn’t like that,” Kennebeck said thoughtfully. “The court’s calendar is overloaded now. We simply don’t have enough judges or enough money. The system’s creaking and groaning.”

“And when the dust finally settled,” Elliot said, “my client would win the right to exhume the body anyway.”

“Probably.”

“Definitely,” Elliot said. “Her husband would be engaged in nothing more than spiteful obstructionism. In the process of trying to hurt his ex-wife, he’d waste several days of the court’s time, and the end result would be exactly the same as if he’d never been given a chance to protest.”

“Ah,” Kennebeck said, frowning slightly.

They stopped at the end of the next block. Kennebeck stood with his eyes closed and his face turned up to the warm winter sun.

At last the judge said, “You’re asking me to cut corners.”

“Not really. Simply issue an exhumation order on the mother’s request. The law allows it.”

“You want the order right away, I assume.”

“Tomorrow morning if possible.”

“And you’ll have the grave reopened by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Saturday at the latest.”

“Before the father can get a restraining order from another judge,” Kennebeck said.

“If there’s no hitch, maybe the father won’t ever find out about the exhumation.”

“Ah.”

“Everyone benefits. The court saves a lot of time and effort. My client is spared a great deal of unnecessary anguish. And her husband saves a bundle in attorney’s fees that he’d just be throwing away in a hopeless attempt to stop us.”

“Ah,” Kennebeck said.

In silence they walked back to the house, where the party was getting louder by the minute.

In the middle of the block, Kennebeck finally said, “I’ll have to chew on it for a while, Elliot.”

“How long?”

“Ah. Will you be here all afternoon?”

“I doubt it. With all these attorneys, it’s sort of a busman’s holiday, don’t you think?”

“Going home from here?” Kennebeck asked.

“Yes.”

“Ah.” He pushed a curly strand of white hair back from his forehead. “Then I’ll call you at home this evening.”

“Can you at least tell me how you’re leaning?”

“In your favor, I suppose.”

“You know I’m right, Harry.”

Kennebeck smiled. “I’ve heard your argument, counselor. Let’s leave it at that for now. I’ll call you this evening, after I’ve had a chance to think about it.”

At least Kennebeck hadn’t refused the request; nevertheless, Elliot had expected a quicker and more satisfying response. He wasn’t asking the judge for much of a favor. Besides, the two of them went back a long way indeed. He knew that Kennebeck was a cautious man, but usually not excessively so. The judge’s hesitation in this relatively simple matter struck Elliot as odd, but he said nothing more. He had no choice but to wait for Kennebeck’s call.

As they approached the house, they talked about the delights of pasta served with a thin, light sauce of olive oil, garlic, and sweet basil.

Elliot remained at the party only two hours. There were too many attorneys and not enough civilians to make the bash interesting. Everywhere he went, he heard talk about torts, writs, briefs, suits, countersuits, motions for continuation, appeals, plea bargaining, and the latest tax shelters. The conversations were like those in which he was involved at work, eight or ten hours a day, five days a week, and he didn’t intend to spend a holiday nattering about the same damned things.

By four o’clock he was home again, working in the kitchen. Tina was supposed to arrive at six. He had a few chores to finish before she came, so they wouldn’t have to spend a lot of time doing galley labor as they had done last night. Standing at the sink, he peeled and chopped a small onion, cleaned six stalks of celery, and peeled several slender carrots. He had just opened a bottle of balsamic vinegar and poured four ounces into a measuring cup when he heard movement behind him.

Turning, he saw a strange man enter the kitchen from the dining room. The guy was about five feet eight with a narrow face and a neatly trimmed blond beard. He wore a dark blue suit, white shirt, and blue tie, and he carried a physician’s bag. He was nervous.

“What the hell?” Elliot said.

A second man appeared behind the first. He was considerably more formidable than his associate: tall, rough-edged, with large, big-knuckled, leathery hands — like something that had escaped from a recombinant DNA lab experimenting in the crossbreeding of human beings with bears. In freshly pressed slacks, a crisp blue shirt, a patterned tie, and a gray sports jacket, he might have been a professional hit man uncomfortably gotten up for the baptism of his Mafia don’s grandchild. But he didn’t appear to be nervous at all.

“What is this?” Elliot demanded.

Both intruders stopped near the refrigerator, twelve or fourteen feet from Elliot. The small man fidgeted, and the tall man smiled.

“How’d you get in here?”

“A lock-release gun,” the tall man said, smiling cordially and nodding. “Bob here”—he indicated the smaller man—“has the neatest set of tools. Makes things easier.”

“What the hell is this about?”

“Relax,” said the tall man.

“I don’t keep a lot of money here.”

“No, no,” the tall man said. “It’s not money.”

Bob shook his head in agreement, frowning, as if he was dismayed to think that he could be mistaken for a common thief.

“Just relax,” the tall man repeated.

“You’ve got the wrong guy,” Elliot assured them.

“You’re the one, all right.”

“Yes,” Bob said. “You’re the one. There’s no mistake.”

The conversation had the disorienting quality of the off-kilter exchanges between Alice and the scrawny denizens of Wonderland.

Putting down the vinegar bottle and picking up the knife, Elliot said, “Get the fuck out of here.”

“Calm down, Mr. Stryker,” the tall one said.

“Yes,” Bob said. “Please calm down.”

Elliot took a step toward them.

The tall man pulled a silencer-equipped pistol out of a shoulder holster that was concealed under his gray sports jacket. “Easy. Just you take it real nice and easy.”

Elliot backed up against the sink.

“That’s better,” the tall man said.

“Much better,” Bob said.

“Put the knife down, and we’ll all be happy.”

“Let’s keep this happy,” Bob agreed.

“Yeah, nice and happy.”

The Mad Hatter would be along any minute now.

“Down with the knife,” said the tall man. “Come on, come on.”

Finally Elliot put it down.

“Push it across the counter, out of reach.”

Elliot did as he was told. “Who are you guys?”

“As long as you cooperate, you won’t get hurt,” the tall man assured him.

Bob said, “Let’s get on with it, Vince.”

Vince, the tall man, said, “We’ll use the breakfast area over there in the corner.”

Bob went to the round maple table. He put down the black physician’s bag, opened it, and withdrew a compact cassette tape recorder. He removed other things from the bag too: a length of flexible rubber tubing, a sphygmomanometer for monitoring blood pressure, two small bottles of amber-colored fluid, and a packet of disposable hypodermic syringes.

Elliot’s mind raced through a list of cases that his law firm was currently handling, searching for some connection with these two intruders, but he couldn’t think of one.

The tall man gestured with the gun. “Go over to the table and sit down.”

“Not until you tell me what this is all about.”

“I’m giving the orders here.”

“But I’m not taking them.”

“I’ll put a hole in you if you don’t move.”

“No. You won’t do that,” Elliot said, wishing that he felt as confident as he sounded. “You’ve got something else in mind, and shooting me would ruin it.”

“Move your ass over to that table.”

“Not until you explain yourself.”

Vince glared at him.

Elliot met the stranger’s eyes and didn’t look away.

At last Vince said, “Be reasonable. We’ve just got to ask you some questions.”

Determined not to let them see that he was frightened, aware that any sign of fear would be taken as proof of weakness, Elliot said, “Well, you’ve got one hell of a weird approach for someone who’s just taking a public opinion survey.”

“Move.”

“What are the hypodermic needles for?”

“Move.”

“What are they for?”

Vince sighed. “We gotta be sure you tell us the truth.”

“The entire truth,” said Bob.

“Drugs?” Elliot asked.

“They’re effective and reliable,” said Bob.

“And when you’ve finished, I’ll have a brain the consistency of grape jelly.”

“No, no,” Bob said. “These drugs won’t do any lasting physical or mental damage.”

“What sort of questions?” Elliot asked.

“I’m losing my patience with you,” Vince said.

“It’s mutual,” Elliot assured him.

“Move.”

Elliot didn’t move an inch. He refused to look at the muzzle of the pistol. He wanted them to think that guns didn’t scare him. Inside, he was vibrating like a tuning fork.

“You son of a bitch, move!”

“What sort of questions do you want to ask me?”

The big man scowled.

Bob said, “For Christ’s sake, Vince, tell him. He’s going to hear the questions anyway when he finally sits down. Let’s get this over with and split.”

Vince scratched his concrete-block chin with his shovel of a hand and then reached inside his jacket. From an inner pocket, he withdrew a few sheets of folded typing paper.

The gun wavered, but it didn’t move off target far enough to give Elliot a chance.

“I’m supposed to ask you every question on this list,” Vince said, shaking the folded paper at Elliot. “It’s a lot, thirty or forty questions altogether, but it won’t take long if you just sit down over there and cooperate.”

“Questions about what?” Elliot insisted.

“Christina Evans.”

This was the last thing Elliot expected. He was dumbfounded. “Tina Evans? What about her?”

“Got to know why she wants her little boy’s grave reopened.”

Elliot stared at him, amazed. “How do you know about that?”

“Never mind,” Vince said.

“Yeah,” Bob said. “Never mind how we know. The important thing is we do know.”

“Are you the bastards who’ve been harassing Tina?”

“Huh?”

“Are you the ones who keep sending her messages?”

“What messages?” Bob asked.

“Are you the ones who wrecked the boy’s room?”

“What are you talking about?” Vince asked. “We haven’t heard anything about this.”

“Someone’s sending messages about the kid?” Bob asked.

They appeared to be genuinely surprised by this news, and Elliot was pretty sure they weren’t the people who had been trying to scare Tina. Besides, though they both struck him as slightly wacky, they didn’t seem to be merely hoaxers or borderline psychopaths who got their kicks by scaring defenseless women. They looked and acted like organization men, even though the big one was rough enough at the edges to pass for a common thug. A silencer-equipped pistol, lock-release gun, truth serums — their apparatus indicated that these guys were part of a sophisticated outfit with substantial resources.

“What about the messages she’s been getting?” Vince asked, still watching Elliot closely.

“I guess that’s just one more question you’re not going to get an answer for,” Elliot said.

“We’ll get the answer,” Vince said coldly.

“We’ll get all the answers,” Bob agreed.

“Now,” Vince said, “counselor, are you going to walk over to the table and sit your ass down, or am I going to have to motivate you with this?” He gestured with his pistol again.

“Kennebeck!” Elliot said, startled by a sudden insight. “The only way you could have found out about the exhumation so quickly is if Kennebeck told you.”

The two men glanced at each other. They were unhappy to hear the judge’s name.

“Who?” Vince asked, but it was too late to cover the revealing look they had exchanged.

“That’s why he stalled me,” Elliot said. “He wanted to give you time to get to me. Why in the hell should Kennebeck care whether or not Danny’s grave is reopened? Why should you care? Who the hell are you people?”

The Ursine escapee from the island of Dr. Moreau was no longer merely impatient; he was angry. “Listen, you stupid fuck, I’m not gonna humor you any longer. I’m not gonna answer any more questions, but I am gonna put a bullet in your crotch if you don’t move over to the table and sit down.”

Elliot pretended not to have heard the threat. The pistol still frightened him, but he was now thinking of something else that scared him more than the gun. A chill spread from the base of his spine, up his back, as he realized what the presence of these men implied about the accident that had killed Danny.

“There’s something about Danny’s death… something strange about the way all those scouts died. The truth of it isn’t anything like the version everyone’s been told. The bus accident… that’s a lie, isn’t it?”

Neither man answered him.

“The truth is a lot worse,” Elliot said. “Something so terrible that some powerful people want to hush it up. Kennebeck… once an agent, always an agent. Which set of letters do you guys work for? Not the FBI. They’re all Ivy Leaguers these days, polished, educated. Same for the CIA. You’re too crude. Not the CID, for sure; there’s no military discipline about you. Let me guess. You work for some set of letters the public hasn’t even heard about yet. Something secret and dirty.”

Vince’s face darkened like a slab of Spam on a hot griddle. “Goddamn it, I said you were going to answer the questions from now on.”

“Relax,” Elliot said. “I’ve played your game. I was in Army Intelligence back when. I’m not exactly an outsider. I know how it works — the rules, the moves. You don’t have to be so hard-assed with me. Open up. Give me a break, and I’ll give you a break.”

Evidently sensing Vince’s onrushing blowup and aware that it wouldn’t help them accomplish their mission, Bob quickly said, “Listen, Stryker, we can’t answer most of your questions because we don’t know. Yes, we work for a government agency. Yes, it’s one you’ve never heard of and probably never will. But we don’t know why this Danny Evans kid is so important. We haven’t been told the details, not even half of them. And we don’t want to know all of it, either. You understand what I’m saying — the less a guy knows, the less he can be nailed for later. Christ, we’re not big shots in this outfit. We’re strictly hired help. They only tell us as much as we need to know. So will you cool it? Just come over here, sit down, let me inject you, give us a few answers, and we can all get on with our lives. We can’t just stand here forever.”

“If you’re working for a government intelligence agency, then go away and come back with the legal papers,” Elliot said. “Show me search warrants and subpoenas.”

“You know better than that,” Vince said harshly.

“The agency we work for doesn’t officially exist,” Bob said. “So how can an agency that doesn’t exist go to court for a subpoena? Get serious, Mr. Stryker.”

“If I do submit to the drug, what happens to me after you’ve got your answers?” Elliot asked.

“Nothing,” Vince said.

“Nothing at all,” Bob said.

“How can I be sure?”

At this indication of imminent surrender, the tall man relaxed slightly, although his lumpish face was still flushed with anger. “I told you. When we’ve got what we want, we’ll leave. We just have to find out exactly why the Evans woman wants the grave reopened. We have to know if someone’s ratted to her. If someone has, then we gotta spike his ass to a barn door. But we don’t have anything against you. Not personally, you know. After we find out what we want to know, we’ll leave.”

“And let me go to the police?” Elliot asked.

“Cops don’t scare us,” Vince said arrogantly. “Hell, you won’t be able to tell them who we were or where they can start looking for us. They won’t get anywhere. Nowhere. Zip. And if they do pick up our trail somehow, we can put pressure on them to drop it fast. This is national security business, pal, the biggest of the big time. The government is allowed to bend the rules if it wants. After all, it makes them.”

“That’s not quite the way they explained the system in law school,” Elliot said.

“Yeah, well, that’s ivory tower stuff,” Bob said, nervously straightening his tie.

“Right,” Vince said. “And this is real life. Now sit down at the table like a good boy.”

“Please, Mr. Stryker,” Bob said.

“No.”

When they got their answers, they would kill him. If they had intended to let him live, they wouldn’t have used their real names in front of him. And they wouldn’t have wasted so much time coaxing him to cooperate; they would have used force without hesitation. They wanted to gain his cooperation without violence because they were reluctant to mark him; their intention was that his death should appear to be an accident or a suicide. The scenario was obvious. Probably a suicide. While he was still under the influence of the drug, they might be able to make him write a suicide note and sign it in a legible, identifiable script. Then they would carry him out to the garage, prop him up in his little Mercedes, put the seat belt snugly around him, and start the engine without opening the garage door. He would be too drugged to move, and the carbon monoxide would do the rest. In a day or two someone would find him out there, his face blue-green-gray, his tongue dark and lolling, his eyes bulging in their sockets as he stared through the windshield as if on a drive to Hell. If there were no unusual marks on his body, no injuries incompatible with the coroner’s determination of suicide, the police would be quickly satisfied.

“No,” he said again, louder this time. “If you bastards want me to sit down at that table, you’re going to have to drag me there.”

Chapter Sixteen

Tina resolutely cleaned up the mess in Danny’s room and packed his belongings. She intended to donate everything to Goodwill Industries.

Several times she was on the verge of tears as the sight of one object or another released a flood of memories. She gritted her teeth, however, and restrained the urge to leave the room with the job uncompleted.

Not much remained to be done: The contents of three cartons in the back of the deep closet had to be sorted. She tried to lift one of them, but it was too heavy. She dragged it into the bedroom, across the carpet, into the shafts of reddish-gold afternoon sunlight that filtered through the sheltering trees outside and then through the dust-filmed window.

When she opened the carton, she saw that it contained part of Danny’s collection of comic books and graphic novels. They were mostly horror comics.

She’d never been able to understand this morbid streak in him. Monster movies. Horror comics. Vampire novels. Scary stories of every kind, in every medium. Initially his growing fascination with the macabre had not seemed entirely healthy to her, but she had never denied him the freedom to pursue it. Most of his friends had shared his avid interest in ghosts and ghouls; besides, the grotesque hadn’t been his only interest, so she had decided not to worry about it.

In the carton were two stacks of comic books, and the two issues on top sported gruesome, full-color covers. On the first, a black carriage, drawn by four black horses with evil glaring eyes, rushed along a night highway, beneath a gibbous moon, and a headless man held the reins, urging the frenzied horses forward. Bright blood streamed from the ragged stump of the coachman’s neck, and gelatinous clots of blood clung to his white, ruffled shirt. His grisly head stood on the driver’s seat beside him, grinning fiendishly, filled with malevolent life even though it had been brutally severed from his body.

Tina grimaced. If this was what Danny had read before going to bed at night, how had he been able to sleep so well? He’d always been a deep, unmoving sleeper, never troubled by bad dreams.

She dragged another carton out of the closet. It was as heavy as the first, and she figured it contained more comic books, but she opened it to be sure.

She gasped in shock.

He was glaring up at her from inside the box. From the cover of a graphic novel. Him. The man dressed all in black. That same face. Mostly skull and withered flesh. Prominent sockets of bone, and the menacing, inhuman crimson eyes staring out with intense hatred. The cluster of maggots squirming on his cheek, at the corner of one eye. The rotten, yellow-toothed grin. In every repulsive detail, he was precisely like the hideous creature that stalked her nightmares.

How could she have dreamed about this hideous creature just last night and then find it waiting for her here, today, only hours later?

She stepped back from the cardboard box.

The burning, scarlet eyes of the monstrous figure in the drawing seemed to follow her.

She must have seen this lurid cover illustration when Danny had first brought the magazine into the house. The memory of it was fixed in her subconscious, festering, until she eventually incorporated it into her nightmares.

That seemed to be the only logical explanation.

But she knew it wasn’t true.

She had never seen this drawing before. When Danny had first begun collecting horror comics with his allowance, she had closely examined those books to decide whether or not they were harmful to him. But after she had made up her mind to let him read such stuff, she never thereafter even glanced at his purchases.

Yet she had dreamed about the man in black.

And here he was. Grinning at her.

Curious about the story from which the illustration had been taken, Tina stepped to the box again to pluck out the graphic novel. It was thicker than a comic book and printed on slick paper.

As her fingers touched the glossy cover, a bell rang.

She flinched and gasped.

The bell rang again, and she realized that someone was at the front door.

Heart thumping, she went to the foyer.

Through the fish-eye lens in the door, she saw a young, clean-cut man wearing a blue cap with an unidentifiable emblem on it. He was smiling, waiting to be acknowledged.

She didn’t open the door. “What do you want?”

“Gas-company repair. We need to check our lines where they come into your house.”

Tina frowned. “On New Year’s Day?”

“Emergency crew,” the repairman said through the closed door. “We’re investigating a possible gas leak in the neighborhood.”

She hesitated, but then opened the door without removing the heavy-duty security chain. She studied him through the narrow gap. “Gas leak?”

He smiled reassuringly. “There probably isn’t any danger. We’ve lost some pressure in our lines, and we’re trying to find the cause of it. No reason to evacuate people or panic or anything. But we’re trying to check every house. Do you have a gas stove in the kitchen?”

“No. Electric.”

“What about the heating system?”

“Yes. There’s a gas furnace.”

“Yeah. I think all the houses in this area have gas furnaces. I’d better have a look at it, check the fittings, the incoming feed, all that.”

She looked him over carefully. He was wearing a gas-company uniform, and he was carrying a large tool kit with the gas-company emblem on it.

She said, “Can I see some identification?”

“Sure.” From his shirt pocket, he withdrew a laminated ID card with the gas-company seal, his picture, his name, and his physical statistics.

Feeling slightly foolish, like an easily spooked old woman, Tina said, “I’m sorry. It’s not that you strike me as a dangerous person or anything. I just—”

“Hey, it’s okay. Don’t apologize. You did the right thing, asking for an ID. These days, you’re crazy if you open your door without knowing exactly who’s on the other side of it.”

She closed the door long enough to slip off the security chain. Then she opened it again and stepped back. “Come in.”

“Where’s the furnace? In the garage?”

Few Vegas houses had basements. “Yes. The garage.”

“If you want, I could just go in through the garage door.”

“No. That’s all right. Come in.”

He stepped across the threshold.

She closed and locked the door.

“Nice place you’ve got here.”

“Thank you.”

“Cozy. Good sense of color. All these earth tones. I like that. It’s a little bit like our house. My wife has a real good sense of color.”

“It’s relaxing,” Tina said.

“Isn’t it? So nice and natural.”

“The garage is this way,” she said.

He followed her past the kitchen, into the short hall, into the laundry room, and from there into the garage.

Tina switched on the light. The darkness was dispelled, but shadows remained along the walls and in the corners.

The garage was slightly musty, but Tina wasn’t able to detect the odor of gas.

“Doesn’t smell like there’s trouble here,” she said.

“You’re probably right. But you never can tell. It could be an underground break on your property. Gas might be leaking under the concrete slab and building up down there, in which case it’s possible you wouldn’t detect it right away, but you’d still be sitting on top of a bomb.”

“What a lovely thought.”

“Makes life interesting.”

“It’s a good thing you’re not working in the gas company’s public relations department.”

He laughed. “Don’t worry. If I really believed there was even the tiniest chance of anything like that, would I be standing here so cheerful?”

“I guess not.”

“You can bet on it. Really. Don’t worry. This is just going to be a routine check.”

He went to the furnace, put his heavy tool kit on the floor, and hunkered down. He opened a hinged plate, exposing the furnace’s workings. A ring of brilliant, pulsing flame was visible in there, and it bathed his face in an eerie blue light.

“Well?” she said.

He looked up at her. “This will take me maybe fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“Oh. I thought it was just a simple thing.”

“It’s best to be thorough in a situation like this.”

“By all means, be thorough.”

“Hey, if you’ve got something to do, feel free to go ahead with it. I won’t be needing anything.”

Tina thought of the graphic novel with the man in black on its cover. She was curious about the story out of which that creature had stepped, for she had the peculiar feeling that, in some way, it would be similar to the story of Danny’s death. This was a bizarre notion, and she didn’t know where it had come from, but she couldn’t dispel it.

“Well,” she said, “I was cleaning the back room. If you’re sure—”

“Oh, certainly,” he said. “Go ahead. Don’t let me interrupt your housework.”

She left him there in the shadowy garage, his face painted by shimmering blue light, his eyes gleaming with twin reflections of fire.

Chapter Seventeen

When Elliot refused to move away from the sink to the breakfast table in the far corner of the big kitchen, Bob, the smaller of the two men, hesitated, then reluctantly took a step toward him.

“Wait,” Vince said.

Bob stopped, obviously relieved that his hulking accomplice was going to deal with Elliot.

“Don’t get in my way,” Vince advised. He tucked the sheaf of typewritten questions into his coat pocket. “Let me handle this bastard.”

Bob retreated to the table, and Elliot turned his attention to the larger intruder.

Vince held the pistol in his right hand and made a fist with his left. “You really think you want to tangle with me, little man? Hell, my fist is just about as big as your head. You know what this fist is going to feel like when it hits, little man?”

Elliot had a pretty good idea of what it would feel like, and he was sweating under his arms and in the small of his back, but he didn’t move, and he didn’t respond to the stranger’s taunting.

“It’s going to feel like a freight train ramming straight through you,” Vince said. “So stop being so damn stubborn.”

They were going to great lengths to avoid using violence, which confirmed Elliot’s suspicion that they wanted to leave him unmarked, so that later his body would bear no cuts or bruises incompatible with suicide.

The bear-who-would-be-a-man shambled toward him. “You want to change your mind, be cooperative?”

Elliot held his ground.

“One good punch in the belly,” Vince said, “and you’ll be puking your guts out on your shoes.”

Another step.

“And when you’re done puking your guts out,” Vince said, “I’m going to grab you by your balls and drag you over to the table.”

One more step.

Then the big man stopped.

They were only an arm’s length apart.

Elliot glanced at Bob, who was still standing at the breakfast table, the packet of syringes in his hand.

“Last chance to do it the easy way,” Vince said.

In one smooth lightning-fast movement, Elliot seized the measuring cup into which he had poured four ounces of vinegar a few minutes ago, and he threw the contents in Vince’s face. The big man cried out in surprise and pain, temporarily blinded. Elliot dropped the measuring cup and seized the gun, but Vince reflexively squeezed off a shot that breezed past Elliot’s face and smashed the window behind the sink. Elliot ducked a wild roundhouse punch, stepped in close, still holding on to the pistol that the other man wouldn’t surrender. He swung one arm around, slamming his bent elbow into Vince’s throat. The big man’s head snapped back, and Elliot chopped the exposed Adam’s apple with the flat blade of his hand. He rammed his knee into his adversary’s crotch and tore the gun out of the bear-paw hand as those clutching fingers went slack. Vince bent forward, gagging, and Elliot slammed the butt of the gun against the side of his head, with a sound like stone meeting stone.

Elliot stepped back.

Vince dropped to his knees, then onto his face. He stayed there, tongue-kissing the floor tiles.

The entire battle had taken less than ten seconds.

The big man had been overconfident, certain that his six-inch advantage in height and his extra eighty pounds of muscle made him unbeatable. He had been wrong.

Elliot swung toward the other intruder, pointing the confiscated pistol.

Bob was already out of the kitchen, in the dining room, running toward the front of the house. Evidently he wasn’t carrying a gun, and he was impressed by the speed and ease with which his partner had been taken out of action.

Elliot went after him but was slowed by the dining-room chairs, which the fleeing man had overturned in his wake. In the living room, other furniture was knocked over, and books were strewn on the floor. The route to the entrance foyer was an obstacle course.

By the time Elliot reached the front door and rushed out of the house, Bob had run the length of the driveway and crossed the street. He was climbing into a dark-green, unmarked Chevy sedan. Elliot got to the street in time to watch the Chevy pull away, tires squealing, engine roaring.

He couldn’t get the license number. The plates were smeared with mud.

He hurried back to the house.

The man in the kitchen was still unconscious and would probably remain that way for another ten or fifteen minutes. Elliot checked his pulse and pulled back one of his eyelids. Vince would survive, although he might need hospitalization, and he wouldn’t be able to swallow without pain for days to come.

Elliot went through the thug’s pockets. He found some small change, a comb, a wallet, and the sheaf of papers on which were typed the questions that Elliot had been expected to answer.

He folded the pages and stuffed them into his hip pocket.

Vince’s wallet contained ninety-two dollars, no credit cards, no driver’s license, no identification of any kind. Definitely not FBI. Bureau men carried the proper credentials. Not CIA, either. CIA operatives were loaded with ID, even if it was in a phony name. As far as Elliot was concerned, the absence of ID was more sinister than a collection of patently false papers would have been, because this absolute anonymity smacked of a secret police organization.

Secret police. Such a possibility scared the hell out of Elliot. Not in the good old U.S. of A. Surely not. In China, in the new Russia, in Iran or Iraq — yes. In a South American banana republic — yes. In half the countries in the world, there were secret police, modern gestapos, and citizens lived in fear of a late-night knock on the door. But not in America, damn it.

Even if the government had established a secret police force, however, why was it so anxious to cover up the true facts of Danny’s death? What were they trying to hide about the Sierra tragedy? What really had happened up in those mountains?

Tina.

Suddenly he realized she was in as much danger as he was. If these people were determined to kill him just to stop the exhumation, they would have to kill Tina. In fact, she must be their primary target.

He ran to the kitchen phone, snatched up the handset, and realized that he didn’t know her number. He quickly leafed through the telephone directory. But there was no listing for Christina Evans.

He would never be able to con an unlisted number out of the directory-assistance operator. By the time he called the police and managed to explain the situation, they might be too late to help Tina.

Briefly he stood in terrible indecision, incapacitated by the prospect of losing Tina. He thought of her slightly crooked smile, her eyes as quick and deep and cool and blue as a pure mountain stream. The pressure in his chest grew so great that he couldn’t get his breath.

Then he remembered her address. She had given it to him two nights ago, at the party after the premiere of Magyck! She didn’t live far from him. He could be at her place in five minutes.

He still had the silencer-equipped pistol in his hand, and he decided to keep it.

He ran to the car in the driveway.

Chapter Eighteen

Tina left the repairman from the gas company in the garage and returned to Danny’s room. She took the graphic novel out of the carton and sat on the edge of the bed in the tarnished-copper sunlight that fell like a shower of pennies through the window.

The magazine contained half a dozen illustrated horror stories. The one from which the cover painting had been drawn was sixteen pages long. In letters that were supposed to look as if they had been formed from rotting shroud cloth, the artist had emblazoned the title across the top of the first page, above a somber, well-detailed scene of a rain-swept graveyard. Tina stared at those words in shocked disbelief.

She thought of the words on the chalkboard and on the computer printout: Not dead, not dead, not dead…

Her hands shook. She had trouble holding the magazine steady enough to read.

The story was set in the mid-nineteenth century, when a physician’s perception of the thin line between life and death was often cloudy. It was the tale of a boy, Kevin, who fell off a roof and took a bad knock on the head, thereafter slipping into a deep coma. The boy’s vital signs were undetectable to the medical technology of that era. The doctor pronounced him dead, and his grieving parents committed Kevin to the grave. In those days the corpse was not embalmed; therefore, the boy was buried while still alive. Kevin’s parents went away from the city immediately after the funeral, intending to spend a month at their summer house in the country, where they could be free from the press of business and social duties, the better to mourn their lost child. But the first night in the country, the mother received a vision in which Kevin was buried alive and calling for her. The vision was so vivid, so disturbing, that she and her husband raced back to the city that very night to have the grave reopened at dawn. But Death decided that Kevin belonged to him, because the funeral had been held already and because the grave had been closed. Death was determined that the parents would not reach the cemetery in time to save their son. Most of the story dealt with Death’s attempts to stop the mother and father on their desperate night journey; they were assaulted by every form of the walking dead, every manner of living corpse and vampire and ghoul and zombie and ghost, but they triumphed. They arrived at the grave by dawn, had it opened, and found their son alive, released from his coma. The last panel of the illustrated story showed the parents and the boy walking out of the graveyard while Death watched them leave. Death was saying, “Only a temporary victory. You’ll all be mine sooner or later. You’ll be back someday. I’ll be waiting for you.”

Tina was dry-mouthed, weak.

She didn’t know what to make of the damned thing.

This was just a silly comic book, an absurd horror story. Yet… strange parallels existed between this gruesome tale and the recent ugliness in her own life.

She put the magazine aside, cover-down, so she wouldn’t have to meet Death’s wormy, red-eyed gaze.

The Boy Who Was Not Dead.

It was weird.

She had dreamed that Danny was buried alive. Into her dream she incorporated a grisly character from an old issue of a horror-comics magazine that was in Danny’s collection. The lead story in this issue was about a boy, approximately Danny’s age, mistakenly pronounced dead, then buried alive, and then exhumed.

Coincidence?

Yeah, sure, just about as coincidental as sunrise following sunset.

Crazily, Tina felt as if her nightmare had not come from within her, but from without, as if some person or force had projected the dream into her mind in an effort to—

To what?

To tell her that Danny had been buried alive?

Impossible. He could not have been buried alive. The boy had been battered, burned, frozen, horribly mutilated in the crash, dead beyond any shadow of a doubt. That’s what both the authorities and the mortician had told her. Furthermore, this was not the mid-nineteenth century; these days, doctors could detect even the vaguest heartbeat, the shallowest respiration, the dimmest traces of brain-wave activity.

Danny certainly had been dead when they had buried him.

And if, by some million-to-one chance, the boy had been alive when he’d been buried, why would it take an entire year for her to receive a vision from the spirit world?

This last thought profoundly shocked her. The spirit world? Visions? Clairvoyant experiences? She didn’t believe in any of that psychic, supernatural stuff. At least she’d always thought she didn’t believe in it. Yet now she was seriously considering the possibility that her dreams had some otherworldly significance. This was sheer claptrap. Utter nonsense. The roots of all dreams were to be found in the store of experiences in the psyche; dreams were not sent like ethereal telegrams from spirits or gods or demons. Her sudden gullibility dismayed and alarmed her, because it indicated that the decision to have Danny’s body exhumed was not having the stabilizing effect on her emotions that she had hoped it would.

Tina got up from the bed, went to the window, and gazed at the quiet street, the palms, the olive trees.

She had to concentrate on the indisputable facts. Rule out all of this nonsense about the dream having been sent by some outside force. It was her dream, entirely of her making.

But what about the horror comic?

As far as she could see, only one rational explanation presented itself. She must have glimpsed the grotesque figure of Death on the cover of the magazine when Danny first brought the issue home from the newsstand.

Except that she knew she hadn’t.

And even if she had seen the color illustration before, she knew damned well that she hadn’t read the story—The Boy Who Was Not Dead. She had paged through only two of the magazines Danny had bought, the first two, when she had been trying to make up her mind whether such unusual reading material could have any harmful effects on him. From the date on its cover, she knew that the issue containing The Boy Who Was Not Dead couldn’t be one of the first pieces in Danny’s collection. It had been published only two years ago, long after she had decided that horror comics were harmless.

She was back where she’d started.

Her dream had been patterned after the images in the illustrated horror story. That seemed indisputable.

But she hadn’t read the story until a few minutes ago. That was a fact as well.

Frustrated and angry at herself for her inability to solve the puzzle, she turned from the window. She went back to the bed to have another look at the magazine, which she’d left there.

The gas company workman called from the front of the house, startling Tina.

She found him waiting by the front door.

“I’m finished,” he said. “I just wanted to let you know I was going, so you could lock the door behind me.”

“Everything all right?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. Everything here is in great shape. If there’s a gas leak in this neighborhood, it’s not anywhere on your property.”

She thanked him, and he said he was only doing his job. They both said “Have a nice day,” and she locked the door after he left.

She returned to Danny’s room and picked up the lurid magazine. Death glared hungrily at her from the cover.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, she read the story again, hoping to see something important in it that she had overlooked in the first reading.

Three or four minutes later the doorbell rang — one, two, three, four times, insistently.

Carrying the magazine, she went to answer the bell. It rang three more times during the ten seconds that she took to reach the front door.

“Don’t be so damn impatient,” she muttered.

To her surprise, through the fish-eye lens, she saw Elliot on the stoop.

When she opened the door, he came in fast, almost in a crouch, glancing past her, left and right, toward the living room, then toward the dining area, speaking rapidly, urgently. “Are you okay? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. What’s wrong with you?”

“Are you alone?”

“Not now that you’re here.”

He closed the door, locked it. “Pack a suitcase.”

“What?”

“I don’t think it’s safe for you to stay here.”

“Elliot, is that a gun?”

“Yeah. I was—”

“A real gun?”

“Yeah. I took it off the guy who tried to kill me.”

She was more able to believe that he was joking than that he had really been in danger. “What man? When?”

“A few minutes ago. At my place.”

“But—”

“Listen, Tina, they wanted to kill me just because I was going to help you get Danny’s body exhumed.”

She gaped at him. “What are you talking about?”

“Murder. Conspiracy. Something damn strange. They probably intend to kill you too.”

“But that’s—”

“Crazy,” he said. “I know. But it’s true.”

“Elliot—”

“Can you pack a suitcase fast?”

At first she half believed that he was trying to be funny, playing a game to amuse her, and she was going to tell him that none of this struck her as funny. But she stared into his dark, expressive eyes, and she knew that he’d meant every word he said.

“My God, Elliot, did someone really try to kill you?”

“I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No, no. But we ought to lie low until we can figure this out.”

“Did you call the police?”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe they’re part of it somehow.”

“Part of it? The cops?”

“Where do you keep your suitcases?”

She felt dizzy. “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“But—”

“Come on. Hurry. Let’s get you packed and the hell out of here before any more of these guys show up.”

“I have suitcases in my bedroom closet.”

He put a hand against her back, gently but firmly urging her out of the foyer.

She headed for the master bedroom, confused and beginning to be frightened.

He followed close behind her. “Has anyone been around here this afternoon?”

“Just me.”

“I mean, anyone snooping around? Anyone at the door?”

“No.”

“I can’t figure why they’d come for me first.”

“Well, there was the gas man,” Tina said as she hurried down the short hall toward the master bedroom.

“The what?”

“The repairman from the gas company.”

Elliot put a hand on her shoulder, stopped her, and turned her around just as they entered the bedroom. “A gas company workman?”

“Yes. Don’t worry. I asked to see his credentials.”

Elliot frowned. “But it’s a holiday.”

“He was an emergency crewman.”

“What emergency?”

“They’ve lost some pressure in the gas lines. They think there might be a leak in this neighborhood.”

The furrows in Elliot’s brow grew deeper. “What did this workman need to see you for?”

“He wanted to check my furnace, make sure there wasn’t any gas escaping.”

“You didn’t let him in?”

“Sure. He had a photo ID card from the gas company. He checked the furnace, and it was okay.”

“When was this?”

“He left just a couple minutes before you came in.”

“How long was he here?”

“Fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“It took him that long to check out the furnace?”

“He wanted to be thorough. He said—”

“Were you with him the whole time?”

“No. I was cleaning out Danny’s room.”

“Where’s your furnace?”

“In the garage.”

“Show me.”

“What about the suitcases?”

“There may not be time,” he said.

He was pale. Fine beads of sweat had popped out along his hairline.

She felt the blood drain from her face.

She said, “My God, you don’t think—”

“The furnace!”

“This way.”

Still carrying the magazine, she rushed through the house, past the kitchen, into the laundry room. A door stood at the far end of this narrow, rectangular work area. As she reached for the knob, she smelled the gas in the garage.

“Don’t open that door!” Elliot warned.

She snatched her hand off the knob as if she had almost picked up a tarantula.

“The latch might cause a spark,” Elliot said. “Let’s get the hell out. The front door. Come on. Fast!”

They hurried back the way they had come.

Tina passed a leafy green plant, a four-foot-high schefflera that she had owned since it was only one-fourth as tall as it was now, and she had the insane urge to stop and risk getting caught in the coming explosion just long enough to pick up the plant and take it with her. But an image of crimson eyes, yellow skin — the leering face of death — flashed through her mind, and she kept moving.

She tightened her grip on the horror-comics magazine in her left hand. It was important that she not lose it.

In the foyer, Elliot jerked open the front door, pushed her through ahead of him, and they both plunged into the golden late-afternoon sunshine.

“Into the street!” Elliot urged.

A blood-freezing image rose at the back of her mind: the house torn apart by a colossal blast, shrapnel of wood and glass and metal whistling toward her, hundreds of sharp fragments piercing her from head to foot.

The flagstone walk that led across her front lawn seemed to be one of those treadmill pathways in a dream, stretching out farther in front of her the harder that she ran, but at last she reached the end of it and dashed into the street. Elliot’s Mercedes was parked at the far curb, and she was six or eight feet from the car when the sudden outward-sweeping shock of the explosion shoved her forward. She stumbled and fell into the side of the sports car, banging her knee painfully.

Twisting around in terror, she called Elliot’s name. He was safe, close behind her, knocked off balance by the force of the shock wave, staggering forward, but unhurt.

The garage had gone up first, the big door ripping from its hinges and splintering into the driveway, the roof dissolving in a confetti-shower of shake shingles and flaming debris. But even as Tina looked from Elliot to the fire, before all of the shingles had fallen back to earth, a second explosion slammed through the house, and a billowing cloud of flame roared from one end of the structure to the other, bursting those few windows that had miraculously survived the first blast.

Tina watched, stunned, as flames leaped from a window of the house and ignited dry palm fronds on a nearby tree.

Elliot pushed her away from the Mercedes so he could open the door on the passenger side. “Get in. Quick!”

“But my house is on fire!”

“You can’t save it now.”

“We have to wait for the fire company.”

“The longer we stand here, the better targets we make.”

He grabbed her arm, swung her away from the burning house, the sight of which affected her as much as if it had been a hypnotist’s slowly swinging pocket watch.

“For God’s sake, Tina, get in the car, and let’s go before the shooting starts.”

Frightened, dazed by the incredible speed at which her world had begun to disintegrate, she did as he said.

When she was in the car, he shut her door, ran to the driver’s side, and climbed in behind the steering wheel.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She nodded dumbly.

“At least we’re still alive,” he said.

He put the pistol on his lap, the muzzle facing toward his door, away from Tina. The keys were in the ignition. He started the car. His hands were shaking.

Tina looked out the side window, watching in disbelief as the flames spread from the shattered garage roof to the main roof of the house, long tongues of lambent fire, licking, licking, hungry, bloodred in the last orange light of the afternoon.

Chapter Nineteen

As Elliot drove away from the burning house, his instinctual sense of danger was as sensitive as it had been in his military days. He was on the thin line that separated animal alertness from nervous frenzy.

He glanced at the rearview mirror and saw a black van pull away from the curb, half a block behind them.

“We’re being followed,” he said.

Tina had been looking back at her house. Now she turned all the way around and stared through the rear window of the sports car. “I’ll bet the bastard who rigged my furnace is in that truck.”

“Probably.”

“If I could get my hands on the son of a bitch, I’d gouge his eyes out.”

Her fury surprised and pleased Elliot. Stupefied by the unexpected violence, by the loss of her house, and by her close brush with death, she had seemed to be in a trance; now she had snapped out of it. He was encouraged by her resilience.

“Put on your seat belt,” he said. “We’ll be moving fast and loose.”

She faced front and buckled up. “Are you going to try to lose them?”

“I’m not just going to try.”

In this residential neighborhood the speed limit was twenty-five miles an hour. Elliot tramped on the accelerator, and the low, sleek, two-seat Mercedes jumped forward.

Behind them the van dwindled rapidly, until it was a block and a half away. Then it stopped dwindling as it also accelerated.

“He can’t catch up with us,” Elliot said. “The best he can hope to do is avoid losing more ground.”

Along the street, people came out of their houses, seeking the source of the explosion. Their heads turned as the Mercedes rocketed past.

When Elliot rounded the corner two blocks later, he braked from sixty miles an hour to make the turn. The tires squealed, and the car slid sideways, but the superb suspension and responsive steering held the Mercedes firmly on four wheels all the way through the arc.

“You don’t think they’ll actually start shooting at us?” Tina asked.

“Hell if I know. They wanted it to appear as if you’d died in an accidental gas explosion. And I think they had a fake suicide planned for me. But now that they know we’re on to them, they might panic, might do anything. I don’t know. The only thing I do know is they can’t let us just walk away.”

“But who—”

“I’ll tell you what I know, but later.”

“What do they have to do with Danny?”

“Later,” he said impatiently.

“But it’s all so crazy.”

“You’re telling me?”

He wheeled around another corner, and then another, trying to disappear from the men in the van long enough to leave them with so many choices of streets to follow that they would have to give up the chase in confusion. Too late, he saw the sign at the fourth intersection — NOT A THROUGH STREET — but they were already around the corner and headed down the narrow dead end, with nothing but a row of ten modest stucco houses on each side.

“Damn!”

“Better back out,” she said.

“And run right into them.”

“You’ve got the gun.”

“There’s probably more than one of them, and they’ll be armed.”

At the fifth house on the left, the garage door was open, and there wasn’t a car inside.

“We’ve got to get off the street and out of sight,” Elliot said.

He drove into the open garage as boldly as if it were his own. He switched off the engine, scrambled out of the car, and ran to the big door. It wouldn’t come down. He struggled with it for a moment, and then he realized that it was equipped with an automatic system.

Behind him, Tina said, “Stand back.”

She had gotten out of the car and had located the control button on the garage wall.

He glanced outside, up the street. He couldn’t see the van.

The door rumbled down, concealing them from anyone who might drive past.

Elliot went to her. “That was close.”

She took his hand in hers, squeezed it. Her hand was cold, but her grip was firm.

“So who the hell are they?” she asked,

“I saw Harold Kennebeck, the judge I mentioned. He—”

The door that connected the garage to the house opened without warning, but with a sharp, dry squeak of unoiled hinges.

An imposing, barrel-chested man in rumpled chinos and a white T-shirt snapped on the garage light and peered curiously at them. He had meaty arms; the circumference of one of them almost equaled the circumference of Elliot’s thigh. And there wasn’t a shirt made that could be buttoned easily around his thick, muscular neck. He appeared formidable, even with his beer belly, which bulged over the waistband of his trousers.

First Vince and now this specimen. It was the Day of the Giants.

“Who’re you?” the pituitary-challenged behemoth asked in a soft, gentle voice that didn’t equate with his appearance.

Elliot had the awful feeling that this guy would reach for the button Tina had pushed less than a minute ago, and that the garage door would lift just as the black van was rolling slowly by in the street.

Stalling for time, he said, “Oh, hi. My name’s Elliot, and this is Tina.”

“Tom,” the big man said. “Tom Polumby.”

Tom Polumby didn’t appear to be worried by their presence in his garage; he seemed merely perplexed. A man of his size probably wasn’t frightened any more easily than Godzilla confronted by the pathetic bazooka-wielding soldiers surrounding doomed Tokyo.

“Nice car,” Tom said with an unmistakable trace of reverence in his voice. He gazed covetously at the S600.

Elliot almost laughed. Nice car! They pulled into this guy’s garage, parked, closed the door bold as you please, and all he had to say was Nice car!

“Very nice little number,” Tom said, nodding, licking his lips as he studied the Mercedes.

Apparently Tom couldn’t conceive that burglars, psychopathic killers, and other lowlifes were permitted to purchase a Mercedes-Benz if they had the money for it. To him, evidently, anyone who drove a Mercedes had to be the right kind of people.

Elliot wondered how Tom would have reacted if they had shrieked into his garage in an old battered Chevy.

Pulling his covetous gaze from the car, Tom said, “What’re you doing here?” There was still neither suspicion nor belligerence in his voice.

“We’re expected,” Elliot said.

“Huh? I wasn’t expecting nobody.”

“We’re here… about the boat,” Elliot said, not even knowing where he was going to go with that line, ready to say anything to keep Tom from putting up the garage door and throwing them out.

Tom blinked. “What boat?”

“The twenty-footer.”

“I don’t own a twenty-footer.”

“The one with the Evinrude motor.”

“Nothing like that here.”

“You must be mistaken,” Elliot said.

“I figure you’ve got the wrong place,” Tom said, stepping out of the doorway, into the garage, reaching for the button that would raise the big door.

Tina said, “Mr. Polumby, wait. There must be some mistake, really. This is definitely the right place.”

Tom’s hand stopped short of the button.

Tina continued: “You’re just not the man we were supposed to see, that’s all. He probably forgot to tell you about the boat.”

Elliot blinked at her, amazed by her natural facility for deception.

“Who’s this guy you’re supposed to see?” Tom asked, frowning.

Appearing to be somewhat amazed herself, Tina hesitated not at all before she said, “Sol Fitzpatrick.”

“Nobody here by that name.”

“But this is the address he gave us. He said the garage door would be open and that we were to pull right inside.”

Elliot wanted to hug her. “Yeah. Sol said we were to pull in, out of the driveway, so that he’d have a place to put the boat when he got here with it.”

Tom scratched his head, then pulled on one ear. “Fitzpatrick?”

“Yeah.”

“Never heard of him,” Tom said. “What’s he bringing a boat here for, anyway?”

“We’re buying it from him,” Tina said.

Tom shook his head. “No. I mean, why here?”

“Well,” Elliot said, “the way we understood it, this was where he lived.”

“But he doesn’t,” Tom said. “I live here. Me and my wife and our little girl. They’re out right now, and there’s nobody ever been here named Fitzpatrick.”

“Well, why would he tell us this was his address?” Tina asked, scowling.

“Lady,” Tom said, “I don’t have the foggiest. Unless maybe… Did you already pay him for the boat?”

“Well… ”

“Maybe just a down payment?” Tom asked.

“We did give him two thousand on deposit,” Elliot said.

Tina said, “It was a refundable deposit.”

“Yeah. Just to hold the boat until we could see it and make up our minds.”

Smiling, Tom said, “I think the deposit might not turn out to be as refundable as you thought.”

Pretending surprise, Tina said, “You don’t mean Mr. Fitzpatrick would cheat us?”

Obviously it pleased Tom to think that people who could afford a Mercedes were not so smart after all. “If you gave him a deposit, and if he gave you this address and claimed he lived here, then it’s not very likely this Sol Fitzpatrick even owns any boat in the first place.”

“Damn,” Elliot said.

“We were swindled?” Tina asked, feigning shock, buying time.

Grinning broadly now, Tom said, “Well, you can look at it that way if you want. Or you can think of it as an important lesson this here Fitzpatrick fella taught you.”

“Swindled,” Tina said, shaking her head.

“Sure as the sun will come up tomorrow,” Tom said.

Tina turned to Elliot. “What do you think?”

Elliot glanced at the garage door, then at his watch. He said, “I think it’s safe to leave.”

“Safe?” Tom asked.

Tina stepped lightly past Tom Polumby and pressed the button that raised the garage door. She smiled at her bewildered host and went to the passenger side of the car while Elliot opened the driver’s door.

Polumby looked from Elliot to Tina to Elliot, puzzled. “Safe?”

Elliot said, “I sure hope it is, Tom. Thanks for your help.” He got in the car and backed it out of the garage.

Any amusement he felt at the way they had handled Polumby evaporated instantly as he reversed warily out of sanctuary, down the driveway, and into the street. He sat stiffly behind the wheel, clenching his teeth, wondering if a bullet would crack through the windshield and shatter his face.

He wasn’t accustomed to this tension. Physically, he was still hard, tough; but mentally and emotionally, he was softer than he had been in his prime. A long time had passed since his years in military intelligence, since the nights of fear in the Persian Gulf and in countless cities scattered around the Mideast and Asia. Then, he’d had the resiliency of youth and had been less burdened with respect for death than he was now. In those days it had been easy to play the hunter. He had taken pleasure in stalking human prey; hell, there had even been a measure of joy in being stalked, for it gave him the opportunity to prove himself by outwitting the hunter on his trail. Much had changed. He was soft. A successful, civilized attorney. Living the good life. He had never expected to play that game again. But once more, incredibly, he was being hunted, and he wondered how long he could survive.

Tina glanced both ways along the street as Elliot swung the car out of the driveway. “No black van,” she said.

“So far.”

Several blocks to the north, an ugly column of smoke rose into the twilight sky from what was left of Tina’s house, roiling, night-black, the upper reaches tinted around the edges by the last pinkish rays of the setting sun.

As he drove from one residential street to another, steadily heading away from the smoke, working toward a major thoroughfare, Elliot expected to encounter the black van at every intersection.

Tina appeared to be no less pessimistic about their hope of escape than he was. Each time he glanced at her, she was either crouched forward, squinting at every new street they entered, or twisted halfway around in her seat, looking out the rear window. Her face was drawn, and she was biting her lower lip.

However, by the time they reached Charleston Boulevard — via Maryland Parkway, Sahara Avenue, and Las Vegas Boulevard — they began to relax. They were far from Tina’s neighborhood now. No matter who was searching for them, no matter how large the organization pitted against them, this city was too big to harbor danger for them in every nook and crevice. With more than a million full-time residents, with more than twenty million tourists a year, and with a vast desert on which to sprawl, Vegas offered thousands of dark, quiet corners where two people on the run could safely stop to catch their breath and settle upon a course of action.

At least that was what Elliot wanted to believe.

“Where to?” Tina asked as Elliot turned west on Charleston Boulevard.

“Let’s ride out this way for a few miles and talk. We’ve got a lot to discuss. Plans to make.”

“What plans?”

“How to stay alive.”

Chapter Twenty

While Elliot drove, he told Tina what had happened at his house: the two thugs, their interest in the possibility of Danny’s grave being reopened, their admission that they worked for some government agency, the hypodermic syringes…

She said, “Maybe we should go back to your place. If this Vince is still there, we should use those drugs on him. Even if he really doesn’t know why his organization is interested in the exhumation, he’ll at least know who his bosses are. We’ll get names. There’s bound to be a lot we can learn from him.”

They stopped at a red traffic light. Elliot took her hand. The contact gave him strength. “I’d sure like to interrogate Vince, but we can’t. He probably isn’t at my place anymore. He’ll have come to his senses and scrammed by now. And even if he was deeper under than I thought, some of his people probably went in there and pulled him out while I was rushing off to you. Besides, if we go back to my house, we’ll just be walking into the dragon’s jaws. They’ll be watching the place.”

The traffic light changed to green, and Elliot reluctantly let go of her hand.

“The only way these people are going to get us,” he said, “is if we just give ourselves over to them. No matter who they are, they’re not omniscient. We can hide from them for a long time if we have to. If they can’t find us, they can’t kill us.”

As they continued west on Charleston Boulevard, Tina said, “Earlier you told me we couldn’t go to the police with this.”

“Right.”

“Why can’t we?”

“The cops might be a part of it, at least to the extent that Vince’s bosses can put pressure on them. Besides, we’re dealing with a government agency, and government agencies tend to cooperate with one another.”

“It’s all so paranoid.”

“Eyes everywhere. If they have a judge in their pocket, why not a few cops?”

“But you told me you respected Kennebeck. You said he was a good judge.”

“He is. He’s well versed in the law, and he’s fair.”

“Why would he cooperate with these killers? Why would he violate his oath of office?”

“Once an agent, always an agent,” Elliot said. “That’s the wisdom of the service, not mine, but in many cases it’s true. For some of them, it’s the only loyalty they’ll ever be capable of. Kennebeck held several jobs in different intelligence organizations. He was deeply involved in that world for thirty years. After he retired about ten years ago, he was still a young man, fifty-three, and he needed something else to occupy his time. He had his law degree, but he didn’t want the hassle of a day-to-day legal practice. So he ran for an elective position on the court, and he won. I think he takes his job seriously. Nevertheless, he was an intelligence agent a hell of a lot longer than he’s been a judge, and I guess breeding tells. Or maybe he never actually retired at all. Maybe he’s still on the payroll of some spook shop, and maybe the whole plan was for him to pretend to retire and then get elected as a judge here in Vegas, so his bosses would have a friendly courtroom in town.”

“Is that likely? I mean, how could they be sure he’d win the election?”

“Maybe they fixed it.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Remember maybe ten years ago when that Texas elections official revealed how Lyndon Johnson’s first local election was fixed? The guy said he was just trying to clear his conscience after all those years. He might as well have saved his breath. Hardly anyone raised an eyebrow. It happens now and then. And in a small local election like the one Kennebeck won, stacking the deck would be easy if you had enough money and government muscle behind you.”

“But why would they want Kennebeck on a Vegas court instead of in Washington or New York or someplace more important?”

“Oh, Vegas is a very important town,” Elliot said. “If you want to launder dirty money, this is by far the easiest place to do it. If you want to purchase a false passport, a counterfeit driver’s license, or anything of that nature, you can pick and choose from several of the best document-forgery artists in the world, because this is where a lot of them live. If you’re looking for a freelance hit man, someone who deals in carload lots of illegal weapons, maybe a mercenary who can put together a small expeditionary force for an overseas operation — you can find all of them here. Nevada has fewer state laws on the books than any state in the nation. Its tax rates are low. There’s no state income tax at all. Regulations on banks and real estate agents and on everyone else — except casino owners — are less troublesome here than in other states, which takes a burden off everybody, but which is especially attractive to people trying to spend and invest dirty cash. Nevada offers more personal freedom than anywhere in the country, and that’s good, by my way of thinking. But wherever there’s a great deal of personal freedom, there’s also an element that takes more than fair advantage of the liberal legal structure. Vegas is an important field office for any American spook shop.”

“So there really are eyes everywhere.”

“In a sense, yes.”

“But even if Kennebeck’s bosses have a lot of influence with the Vegas police, would the cops let us be killed? Would they really let it go that far?”

“They probably couldn’t provide enough protection to stop it.”

“What kind of government agency would have the authority to circumvent the law like this? What kind of agency would be empowered to kill innocent civilians who got in its way?”

“I’m still trying to figure that one. It scares the hell out of me.”

They stopped at another red traffic light.

“So what are you saying?” Tina asked. “That we’ll have to handle this all by ourselves?”

“At least for the time being.”

“But that’s hopeless! How can we?”

“It isn’t hopeless.”

“Just two ordinary people against them?”

Elliot glanced in the rearview mirror, as he had been doing every minute or two since they’d turned onto Charleston Boulevard. No one was following them, but he kept checking.

“It isn’t hopeless,” he said again. “We just need time to think about it, time to work out a plan. Maybe we’ll come up with someone who can help us.”

“Like who?”

The traffic light turned green.

“Like the newspapers, for one,” Elliot said, accelerating across the intersection, glancing in the rearview mirror. “We’ve got proof that something unusual is happening: the silencer-equipped pistol I took off Vince, your house blowing up… I’m pretty sure we can find a reporter who’ll go with that much and write a story about how a bunch of nameless, faceless people want to keep us from reopening Danny’s grave, how maybe something truly strange lies at the bottom of the Sierra tragedy. Then a lot of people are going to be pushing for an exhumation of all those boys. There’ll be a demand for new autopsies, investigations. Kennebeck’s bosses want to stop us before we sow any seeds of doubt about the official explanation. But once those seeds are sown, once the parents of the other scouts and the entire city are clamoring for an investigation, Kennebeck’s buddies won’t have anything to gain by eliminating us. It isn’t hopeless, Tina, and it’s not like you to give up so easily.”

She sighed. “I’m not giving up.”

“Good.”

“I won’t stop until I know what really happened to Danny.”

“That’s better. That sounds more like the Christina Evans I know.”

Dusk was sliding into night. Elliot turned on the headlights.

Tina said, “It’s just that… for the past year I’ve been struggling to adjust to the fact that Danny died in that stupid, pointless accident. And now, just when I’m beginning to think I can face up to it and put it behind me, I discover he might not have died accidentally after all. Suddenly everything’s up in the air again.”

“It’ll come down.”

“Will it?”

“Yes. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

He glanced in the rearview mirror.

Nothing suspicious.

He was aware of her watching him, and after a while she said, “You know what?”

“What?”

“I think… in a way… you’re actually enjoying this.”

“Enjoying what?”

“The chase.”

“Oh, no. I don’t enjoy taking guns away from men half again as big as I am.”

“I’m sure you don’t. That isn’t what I said.”

“And I sure wouldn’t choose to have my nice, peaceful, quiet life turned upside down. I’d rather be a comfortable, upstanding, boring citizen than a fugitive.”

“I didn’t say anything about what you’d choose if it were up to you. But now that it’s happened, now that it’s been thrust upon you, you’re not entirely unhappy. There’s a part of you, deep down, that’s responding to the challenge with a degree of pleasure.”

“Baloney.”

“An animal awareness… a new kind of energy you didn’t have this morning.”

“The only thing new about me is that I wasn’t scared stiff this morning, and now I am.”

“Being scared — that’s part of it,” she said. “The danger has struck a chord in you.”

He smiled. “The good old days of spies and counterspies? Sorry, but no, I don’t long for that at all. I’m not a natural-born man of action. I’m just me, the same old me that I always was.”

“Anyway,” Tina said, “I’m glad I’ve got you on my side.”

“I like it better when you’re on top,” he said, and he winked at her.

“Have you always had such a dirty mind?”

“No. I’ve had to cultivate it.”

“Joking in the midst of disaster,” she said.

“‘Laughter is a balm for the afflicted, the best defense against despair, the only medicine for melancholy.’”

“Who said that?” she asked. “Shakespeare?”

“Groucho Marx, I think.”

She leaned forward and picked something up from the floor between her feet. “And then there’s this damn thing.”

“What did you find?”

“I brought it from my place,” she said.

In the rush to get out of her house before the gas explosion leveled it, he hadn’t noticed that she’d been carrying anything. He risked a quick look, shifting his attention from the road, but there wasn’t enough light in the car for him to see what she held. “I can’t make it out.”

“It’s a horror-comics magazine,” she said. “I found it when I was cleaning out Danny’s room. It was in a box with a lot of other magazines.”

“So?”

“Remember the nightmares I told you about?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“The monster in my dreams is on the cover of this magazine. It’s him. Detail for detail.”

“Then you must have seen the magazine before, and you just—”

“No. That’s what I tried to tell myself. But I never saw it until today. I know I didn’t. I pored through Danny’s collection. When he came home from the newsstand, I never monitored what he’d bought. I never snooped.”

“Maybe you—”

“Wait,” she said. “I haven’t told you the worst part.”

The traffic thinned out as they drove farther from the heart of town, closer to the looming black mountains that thrust into the last electric-purple light in the western sky.

Tina told Elliot about The Boy Who Was Not Dead.

The similarities between the horror story and their attempt to exhume Danny’s body chilled Elliot.

“Now,” Tina said, “just like Death tried to stop the parents in the story, someone’s trying to stop me from opening my son’s grave.”

They were getting too far out of town. A hungry darkness lay on both sides of the road. The land began to rise toward Mount Charleston where, less than an hour away, pine forests were mantled with snow. Elliot swung the car around and started back toward the lights of the city, which spread like a vast, glowing fungus on the black desert plain.

“There are similarities,” he said.

“You’re damned right there are. Too many.”

“There’s also one big difference. In the story, the boy was buried alive. But Danny is dead. The only thing in doubt is how he died.”

“But that’s the only difference between the basic plot of this story and what we’re going through. And the words Not Dead in the title. And the boy in the story being Danny’s age. It’s just too much,” she said.

They rode in silence for a while.

Finally Elliot said, “You’re right. It can’t be coincidence.”

“Then how do you explain it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Welcome to the club.”

A roadside diner stood on the right, and Elliot pulled into the parking lot. A single mercury-vapor pole lamp at the entrance shed fuzzy purple light over the first third of the parking lot. Elliot drove behind the restaurant and tucked the Mercedes into a slot in the deepest shadows, between a Toyota Celica and a small motor home, where it could not be seen from the street.

“Hungry?” he asked.

“Starving. But before we go in, let’s check out that list of questions they were going to make you answer.”

“Let’s look at it in the café,” Elliot said. “The light will be better. It doesn’t seem to be busy in there. We should be able to talk without being overheard. Bring the magazine too. I want to see that story.”

As he got out of the car, his attention was drawn to a window on the side of the motor home next to which he had parked. He squinted through the glass into the perfectly black interior, and he had the disconcerting feeling that someone was hiding in there, staring out at him.

Don’t succumb to paranoia, he warned himself.

When he turned from the motor home, his gaze fell on a dense pool of shadows around the trash bin at the back of the restaurant, and again he had the feeling that someone was watching him from concealment.

He had told Tina that Kennebeck’s bosses were not omniscient. He must remember that. He and Tina apparently were confronted with a powerful, lawless, dangerous organization hell-bent on keeping the secret of the Sierra tragedy. But any organization was composed of ordinary men and women, none of whom had the all-seeing gaze of God.

Nevertheless…

As he and Tina walked across the parking lot toward the diner, Elliot couldn’t shake the feeling that someone or something was watching them. Not necessarily a person. Just… something… weird, strange. Something both more and less than human. That was a bizarre thought, not at all the sort of notion he’d ordinarily get in his head, and he didn’t like it.

Tina stopped when they reached the purple light under the mercury-vapor lamp. She glanced back toward the car, a curious expression on her face.

“What is it?” Elliot asked.

“I don’t know… ”

“See something?”

“No.”

They stared at the shadows.

At length she said, “Do you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“I’ve got this… prickly feeling.”

He didn’t say anything.

“You do feel it, don’t you?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“As if we aren’t alone.”

“It’s crazy,” he said, “but I feel eyes on me.”

She shivered. “But no one’s really there.”

“No. I don’t think anyone is.”

They continued to squint at the inky blackness, searching for movement.

She said, “Are we both cracking under the strain?”

“Just jumpy,” he said, but he wasn’t really convinced that their imagination was to blame.

A soft cool wind sprang up. It carried with it the odor of dry desert weeds and alkaline sand. It hissed through the branches of a nearby date palm.

“It’s such a strong feeling,” she said. “And you know what it reminds me of? It’s the same damn feeling I had in Angela’s office when that computer terminal started operating on its own. I feel… not just as if I’m being watched but… something more… like a presence… as if something I can’t see is standing right beside me. I can feel the weight of it, a pressure in the air… sort of looming.”

He knew exactly what she meant, but he didn’t want to think about it, because there was no way he could make sense of it. He preferred to deal with hard facts, realities; that was why he was such a good attorney, so adept at taking threads of evidence and weaving a good case out of them.

“We’re both overwrought,” he suggested.

“That doesn’t change what I feel.”

“Let’s get something to eat.”

She stayed a moment longer, staring back into the gloom, where the purple mercury-vapor light did not reach.

“Tina…?”

A breath of wind stirred a dry tumbleweed and blew it across the blacktop.

A bird swooped through the darkness overhead. Elliot couldn’t see it, but he could hear the beating of its wings.

Tina cleared her throat. “It’s as if… the night itself is watching us… the night, the shadows, the eyes of darkness.”

The wind ruffled Elliot’s hair. It rattled a loose metal fixture on the trash bin, and the restaurant’s big sign creaked between its two standards.

At last he and Tina went into the diner, trying not to look over their shoulders.

Chapter Twenty-One

The long L-shaped diner was filled with glimmering surfaces: chrome, glass, plastic, yellow Formica, and red vinyl. The jukebox played a country tune by Garth Brooks, and the music shared the air with the delicious aromas of fried eggs, bacon, and sausages. True to the rhythm of Vegas life, someone was just beginning his day with a hearty breakfast. Tina’s mouth began to water as soon as she stepped through the door.

Eleven customers were clustered at the end of the long arm of the L, near the entrance, five on stools at the counter, six in the red booths. Elliot and Tina sat as far from everyone as possible, in the last booth in the short wing of the restaurant.

Their waitress was a redhead named Elvira. She had a round face, dimples, eyes that twinkled as if they had been waxed, and a Texas drawl. She took their orders for cheeseburgers, French fries, coleslaw, and Coors.

When Elvira left the table and they were alone, Tina said, “Let’s see the papers you took off that guy.”

Elliot fished the pages out of his hip pocket, unfolded them, and put them on the table. There were three sheets of paper, each containing ten or twelve typewritten questions.

They leaned in from opposite sides of the booth and read the material silently:

Elliot looked up from the page. “Have you ever heard of Project Pandora?”

“No.”

“Secret labs in the High Sierras?”

“Oh, sure. Mrs. Neddler told me all about them.”

“Mrs. Neddler?”

“My cleaning woman.”

“Jokes again.”

“At a time like this.”

“Balm for the afflicted, medicine for melancholy.”

“Groucho Marx,” she said.

“Evidently they think someone from Project Pandora has decided to rat on them.”

“Is that who’s been in Danny’s room? Did someone from Project Pandora write on the chalkboard… and then fiddle with the computer at work?”

“Maybe,” Elliot said.

“But you don’t think so.”

“Well, if someone had a guilty conscience, why wouldn’t he approach you directly?”

“He could be afraid. Probably has good reason to be.”

“Maybe,” Elliot said again. “But I think it’s more complicated than that. Just a hunch.”

They read quickly through the remaining material, but none of it was enlightening. Most of the questions were concerned with how much Tina knew about the true nature of the Sierra accident, how much she had told Elliot, how much she had told Michael, and with how many people she had discussed it. There were no more intriguing tidbits like Project Pandora, no more clues or leads.

Elvira brought two frosted glasses and icy bottles of Coors.

The jukebox began to play a mournful Alan Jackson song.

Elliot sipped his beer and paged through the horror-comics magazine that had belonged to Danny. “Amazing,” he said when he finished skimming The Boy Who Was Not Dead.

“You’d think it was even more amazing if you’d suffered those nightmares,” she said. “So now what do we do?”

“Danny’s was a closed-coffin funeral. Was it the same with the other thirteen scouts?”

“About half the others were buried without viewings,” Tina said.

“Their parents never saw the bodies?”

“Oh, yes. All the other parents were asked to identify their kids, even though some of the corpses were in such a horrible state they couldn’t be cosmetically restored for viewing at a funeral. Michael and I were the only ones who were strongly advised not to look at the remains. Danny was the only one who was too badly… mangled.”

Even after all this time, when she thought about Danny’s last moments on earth — the terror he must have known, the excruciating pain he must have endured, even if it was of brief duration — she began to choke with sorrow and pity. She blinked back tears and took a swallow of beer.

“Damn,” Elliot said.

“What?”

“I thought we might make some quick allies out of those other parents. If they hadn’t seen their kids’ bodies, they might have just gone through a year of doubt like you did, might be easily persuaded to join us in a call for the reopening of all the graves. If that many voices were raised, then Vince’s bosses couldn’t risk silencing all of them, and we’d be safe. But if the other people had a chance to view the bodies, if none of them has had any reason to entertain doubts like yours, then they’re all just finally learning to cope with the tragedy. If we go to them now with a wild story about a mysterious conspiracy, they aren’t going to be anxious to listen.”

“So we’re still alone.”

“Yeah.”

“You said we could go to a reporter, try to get media interest brewing. Do you have anyone in mind?”

“I know a couple of local guys,” Elliot said. “But maybe it’s not wise to go to the local press. That might be just what Vince’s bosses are expecting us to do. If they’re waiting, watching — we’ll be dead before we can tell a reporter more than a sentence or two. I think we’ll have to take the story out of town, and before we do that, I’d like to have a few more facts.”

“I thought you said we had enough to interest a good newsman. The pistol you took off that man… my house being blown up…”

“That might be enough. Certainly, for the Las Vegas paper, it ought to be sufficient. This city still remembers the Jaborski group, the Sierra accident. It was a local tragedy. But if we go to the press in Los Angeles or New York or some other city, the reporters there aren’t going to have a whole lot of interest in it unless they see an aspect of the story that lifts it out of the local-interest category. Maybe we’ve already got enough to convince them it’s big news. I’m not sure. And I want to be damn sure before we try to go public with it. Ideally, I’d even like to be able to hand the reporter a neat theory about what really happened to those scouts, something sensational that he can hook his story onto.”

“Such as?”

He shook his head. “I don’t have anything worked out yet. But it seems to me the most obvious thing we have to consider is that the scouts and their leaders saw something they weren’t supposed to see.”

“Project Pandora?”

He sipped his beer and used one finger to wipe a trace of foam from his upper lip. “A military secret. I can’t see what else would have brought an organization like Vince’s so deeply into this. An intelligence outfit of that size and sophistication doesn’t waste its time on Mickey Mouse stuff.”

“But military secrets… that seems so far out.”

“In case you didn’t know it, since the Cold War ended and California took such a big hit in the defense downsizing, Nevada has more Pentagon-supported industries and installations than any state in the union. And I’m not just talking about the obvious ones like Nellis Air Force Base and the Nuclear Test Site. This state’s ideally suited for secret or quasi-secret, high-security weapons research centers. Nevada has thousands of square miles of remote unpopulated land. The deserts. The deeper reaches of the mountains. And most of those remote areas are owned by the federal government. If you put a secret installation in the middle of all that lonely land, you have a pretty easy job maintaining security.”

Arms on the table, both hands clasped around her glass of beer, Tina leaned toward Elliot. “You’re saying that Mr. Jaborski, Mr. Lincoln, and the boys stumbled across a place like that in the Sierras?”

“It’s possible.”

“And saw something they weren’t supposed to see.”

“Maybe.”

“And then what? You mean… because of what they saw, they were killed?”

“It’s a theory that ought to excite a good reporter.”

She shook her head. “I just can’t believe the government would murder a group of little children just because they accidentally got a glimpse of a new weapon or something.”

“Wouldn’t it? Think of Waco — all those dead children. Ruby Ridge — a fourteen-year-old boy shot in the back by the FBI. Vince Foster found dead in a Washington park and officially declared a suicide even though most of the forensic evidence points to murder. Even a primarily good government, when it’s big enough, has some pretty mean sharks swimming in the darker currents. We’re living in strange times, Tina.”

The rising night wind thrummed against the large pane of glass beside their booth. Beyond the window, out on Charleston Boulevard, traffic sailed murkily through a sudden churning river of dust and paper scraps.

Chilled, Tina said, “But how much could the kids have seen? You’re the one who said security was easy to maintain when one of these installations is located in the wilderness. The boys couldn’t have gotten very close to such a well-guarded place. Surely they couldn’t have managed to get more than a glimpse.”

“Maybe a glimpse was enough to condemn them.”

“But kids aren’t the best observers,” she argued. “They’re impressionable, excitable, given to exaggeration. If they had seen something, they’d have come back with at least a dozen different stories about it, none of them accurate. A group of young boys wouldn’t be a threat to the security of a secret installation.”

“You’re probably right. But a bunch of hard-nosed security men might not have seen it that way.”

“Well, they’d have had to be pretty stupid to think murder was the safest way to handle it. Killing all those people and trying to fake an accident — that was a whole lot riskier than letting the kids come back with their half-baked stories about seeing something peculiar in the mountains.”

“Remember, there were two adults with those kids. People might have discounted most of what the boys said about it, but they’d have believed Jaborski and Lincoln. Maybe there was so much at stake that the security men at the installation decided Jaborski and Lincoln had to die. Then it became necessary to kill the kids to eliminate witnesses to the first two murders.”

“That’s… diabolical.”

“But not unlikely.”

Tina looked down at the wet circle that her glass had left on the table. While she thought about what Elliot had said, she dipped one finger in the water and drew a grim mouth, a nose, and a pair of eyes in the circle; she added two horns, transforming the blot of moisture into a little demonic face. Then she wiped it away with the palm of her hand.

“I don’t know… hidden installations… military secrets… it all seems just too incredible.”

“Not to me,” Elliot said. “To me, it sounds plausible if not probable. Anyway, I’m not saying that’s what really happened. It’s only a theory. But it’s the kind of theory that almost any smart, ambitious reporter will go for in a big, big way — if we can come up with enough facts that appear to support it.”

“What about Judge Kennebeck?”

“What about him?”

“He could tell us what we want to know.”

“We’d be committing suicide if we went to Kennebeck’s place,” Elliot said. “Vince’s friends are sure to be waiting for us there.”

“Well, isn’t there any way that we could slip past them and get at Kennebeck?”

He shook his head. “Impossible.”

She sighed, slumped back in the booth.

“Besides,” Elliot said, “Kennebeck probably doesn’t know the whole story. He’s just like the two men who came to see me. He’s probably been told only what he needs to know.”

Elvira arrived with their food. The cheeseburgers were made from juicy ground sirloin. The French fries were crisp, and the coleslaw was tart but not sour.

By unspoken agreement, Tina and Elliot didn’t talk about their problems while they ate. In fact they didn’t talk much at all. They listened to the country music on the jukebox and watched Charleston Boulevard through the window, where the desert dust storm clouded oncoming headlights and forced the traffic to move slowly. And they thought about those things that neither of them wanted to speak of: murder past and murder present.

When they finished eating, Tina spoke first. “You said we ought to come up with more evidence before we go to the newspapers.”

“We have to.”

“But how are we supposed to get it? From where? From whom?”

“I’ve been pondering that. The best thing we could do is get the grave reopened. If the body were exhumed and reexamined by a top-notch pathologist, we’d almost certainly find proof that the cause of death wasn’t what the authorities originally said it was.”

“But we can’t reopen the grave ourselves,” Tina said. “We can’t sneak into the graveyard in the middle of the night, move a ton of earth with shovels. Besides, it’s a private cemetery, surrounded by a high wall, so there must be a security system to deal with vandals.”

“And Kennebeck’s cronies have almost certainly put a watch on the place. So if we can’t examine the body, we’ll have to do the next best thing. We’ll have to talk to the man who saw it last.”

“Huh? Who?”

“Well, I guess… the coroner.”

“You mean the medical examiner in Reno?”

“Was that where the death certificate was issued?”

“Yes. The bodies were brought out of the mountains, down to Reno.”

“On second thought… maybe we’ll skip the coroner,” Elliot said. “He’s the one who had to designate it an accidental death. There’s a better than even chance he’s been co-opted by Kennebeck’s crowd. One thing for sure, he’s definitely not on our side. Approaching him would be dangerous. We might eventually have to talk to him, but first we should pay a visit to the mortician who handled the body. There might be a lot he can tell us. Is he here in Vegas?”

“No. An undertaker in Reno prepared the body and shipped it here for the funeral. The coffin was sealed when it arrived, and we didn’t open it.”

Elvira stopped by the table and asked if they wanted anything more. They didn’t. She left the check and took away some of the dirty dishes.

To Tina, Elliot said, “Do you remember the name of the mortician in Reno?”

“Yes. Bellicosti. Luciano Bellicosti.”

Elliot finished the last swallow of beer in his glass. “Then we’ll go to Reno.”

“Can’t we just call Bellicosti?”

“These days, everyone’s phone seems to be tapped. Besides, if we’re face-to-face with him, we’ll have a better idea of whether or not he’s telling the truth. No, it can’t be done long-distance. We have to go up there.”

Her hand shook when she raised her glass to drink the last of her own Coors.

Elliot said, “What’s wrong?”

She wasn’t exactly sure. She was filled with a new dread, a fear greater than the one that had burned within her during the past few hours. “I… I guess I’m just… afraid to go to Reno.”

He reached across the table and put his hand over hers. “It’s okay. There’s less to be frightened of up there than here. It’s here we’ve got killers hunting us.”

“I know. Sure, I’m scared of those creeps. But more than that, what I’m afraid of… is finding out the truth about Danny’s death. And I have a strong feeling we’ll find it in Reno.”

“I thought that was exactly what you wanted to know.”

“Oh, I do. But at the same time, I’m afraid of knowing. Because it’s going to be bad. The truth is going to be something really terrible.”

“Maybe not.”

“Yes.”

“The only alternative is to give up, to back off and never know what really happened.”

“And that’s worse,” she admitted.

“Anyway, we have to learn what really happened in the Sierras. If we know the truth, we can use it to save ourselves. It’s our only hope of survival.”

“So when do we leave for Reno?” she asked.

“Tonight. Right now. We’ll take my Cessna Skylane. Nice little machine.”

“Won’t they know about it?”

“Probably not. I only hooked up with you today, so they haven’t had time to learn more than the essentials about me. Just the same, we’ll approach the airfield with caution.”

“If we can use the Cessna, how soon would we get to Reno?”

“A few hours. I think it would be wise for us to stay up there for a couple of days, even after we’ve talked to Bellicosti, until we can figure a way out of this mess. Everyone’ll still be looking for us in Vegas, and we’ll breathe a little easier if we aren’t here.”

“But I didn’t get a chance to pack that suitcase,” Tina said. “I need a change of clothes, at least a toothbrush and a few other things. Neither one of us has a coat, and it’s damn cold in Reno at this time of year.”

“We’ll buy whatever we need before we leave.”

“I don’t have any money with me. Not a penny.”

“I’ve got some,” Elliot said. “A couple hundred bucks. Plus a wallet filled with credit cards. We could go around the world on the cards alone. They might track us when we use the cards, but not for a couple of days.”

“But it’s a holiday and—”

“And this is Las Vegas,” Elliot said. “There’s always a store open somewhere. And the shops in the hotels won’t be closed. This is one of their busiest times of the year. We’ll be able to find coats and whatever else we need, and we’ll find it all in a hurry.” He left a generous tip for the waitress and got to his feet. “Come on. The sooner we’re out of this town, the safer I’ll feel.”

She went with him to the cash register, which was near the entrance.

The cashier was a white-haired man, owlish behind a pair of thick spectacles. He smiled and asked Elliot if their dinner had been satisfactory, and Elliot said it had been fine, and the old man began to make change with slow, arthritic fingers.

The rich odor of chili sauce drifted out of the kitchen. Green peppers. Onions. Jalapeños. The distinct aromas of melted cheddar and Monterey Jack.

The long wing of the diner was nearly full of customers now; about forty people were eating dinner or waiting to be served. Some were laughing. A young couple was plotting conspiratorially, leaning toward each other from opposite sides of a booth, their heads almost touching. Nearly everyone was engaged in animated conversations, couples and cozy groups of friends, enjoying themselves, looking forward to the remaining three days of the four-day holiday.

Suddenly Tina felt a pang of envy. She wanted to be one of these fortunate people. She wanted to be enjoying an ordinary meal, on an ordinary evening, in the middle of a blissfully ordinary life, with every reason to expect a long, comfortable, ordinary future. None of these people had to worry about professional killers, bizarre conspiracies, gas-company men who were not gas-company men, silencer-equipped pistols, exhumations. They didn’t realize how lucky they were. She felt as if a vast unbridgeable gap separated her from people like these, and she wondered if she ever again would be as relaxed and free from care as these diners were at this moment.

A sharp, cold draft prickled the back of her neck.

She turned to see who had entered the restaurant.

The door was closed. No one had entered.

Yet the air remained cool—changed.

On the jukebox, which stood to the left of the door, a currently popular country ballad was playing:

The record stuck.

Tina stared at the jukebox in disbelief.

Elliot turned away from the cashier and put a hand on Tina’s shoulder. “What the hell…?”

Tina couldn’t speak. She couldn’t move.

The air temperature was dropping precipitously.

She shuddered.

The other customers stopped talking and turned to stare at the stuttering machine.

The image of Death’s rotting face flashed into Tina’s mind.

“Stop it,” she pleaded.

Someone said, “Shoot the piano player.”

Someone else said, “Kick the damn thing.”

Elliot stepped to the jukebox and shook it gently. The two words stopped repeating. The song proceeded smoothly again — but only for one more line of verse. As Elliot turned away from the machine, the eerily meaningful repetition began again:

Tina wanted to walk through the diner and grab each of the customers by the throat, shake and threaten each of them, until she discovered who had rigged the jukebox. At the same time, she knew this wasn’t a rational thought; the explanation, whatever it might be, was not that simple. No one here had rigged the machine. Only a moment ago, she had envied these people for the very ordinariness of their lives. It was ludicrous to suspect any of them of being employed by the secret organization that had blown up her house. Ludicrous. Paranoid. They were just ordinary people in a roadside restaurant, having dinner.

Elliot shook the jukebox again, but this time to no avail.

The air grew colder still. Tina heard some of the customers commenting on it.

Elliot shook the machine harder than he had done the last time, then harder still, but it continued to repeat the two-word message in the voice of the country singer, as if an invisible hand were holding the pick-up stylus or laser-disc reader firmly in place.

The white-haired cashier came out from behind the counter. “I’ll take care of it, folks.” He called to one of the waitresses: “Jenny, check the thermostat. We’re supposed to have heat in here tonight, not air-conditioning.”

Elliot stepped out of the way as the old man approached.

Although no one was touching the jukebox, the volume increased, and the two words boomed through the diner, thundered, vibrated in the windows, and rattled silverware on the tables.

Some people winced and put their hands over their ears.

The old man had to shout to be heard above the explosive voices on the jukebox. “There’s a button on the back to reject the record.”

Tina wasn’t able to cover her ears; her arms hung straight down at her sides, frozen, rigid, hands fisted, and she couldn’t find the will or the strength to lift them. She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t make a sound.

Colder, colder.

She became aware of the familiar, spiritlike presence that had been in Angela’s office when the computer had begun to operate by itself. She had the same feeling of being watched that she’d had in the parking lot a short while ago.

The old man crouched beside the machine, reached behind it, found the button. He pushed it several times.

“Have to unplug it!” the old man said.

The volume increased again. The two words blasted out of the speakers in all corners of the diner with such incredible, bone-jarring force that it was difficult to believe that the machine had been built with the capability of pouring out sound with this excessive, unnerving power.

Elliot pulled the jukebox from the wall so the old man could reach the cord.

In that instant Tina realized she had nothing to fear from the presence that lay behind this eerie manifestation. It meant her no harm. Quite the opposite, in fact. In a flash of understanding she saw through to the heart of the mystery. Her hands, which had been curled into tight fists, came open once more. The tension went out of her neck and shoulder muscles. Her heartbeat became less like the pounding of a jackhammer, but it still did not settle into a normal rhythm; now it was affected by excitement rather than terror. If she tried to scream now, she would be able to do so, but she no longer wanted to scream.

As the white-haired cashier grasped the plug in his arthritis-gnarled hands and wiggled it back and forth in the wall socket, trying to free it, Tina almost told him to stop. She wanted to see what would happen next if no one interfered with the presence that had taken control of the jukebox. But before she could think of a way to phrase her odd request, the old man succeeded in unplugging the machine.

Following the monotonous, earsplitting repetition of that two-word message, the silence was stunning.

After a second of surprised relief, everyone in the diner applauded the old fellow.

Jenny, the waitress, called to him from behind the counter. “Hey, Al, I didn’t touch the thermostat. It says the heat’s on and set at seventy. You better take a look at it.”

“You must have done something to it,” Al said. “It’s getting warm in here again.”

“I didn’t touch it,” Jenny insisted.

Al didn’t believe her, but Tina did.

Elliot turned away from the jukebox and looked at Tina with concern. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. God, yes! Better than I’ve been in a long time.”

He frowned, baffled by her smile.

“I know what it is. Elliot, I know exactly what it is! Come on,” she said excitedly. “Let’s go.”

He was confused by the change in her demeanor, but she didn’t want to explain things to him here in the diner. She opened the door and went outside.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The windstorm was still in progress, but it was not raging as fiercely as it had been when Elliot and Tina had watched it through the restaurant window. A brisk wind pushed across the city from the east. Laden with dust and with the powdery white sand that had been swept in from the desert, the air abraded their faces and had an unpleasant taste.

They put their heads down and scurried past the front of the diner, around the side, through the purple light under the single mercury-vapor lamp, and into the deep shadows behind the building.

In the Mercedes, in the darkness, with the doors locked, she said, “No wonder we haven’t been able to figure it out!”

“Why on earth are you so—”

“We’ve been looking at this all wrong—”

“—so bubbly when—”

“—approaching it ass-backwards. No wonder we haven’t been able to find a solution.”

“What are you talking about? Did you see what I saw in there? Did you hear the jukebox? I don’t see how that could have cheered you up. It made my blood run cold. It was weird.”

“Listen,” she said excitedly, “we thought someone was sending me messages about Danny being alive just to rub my face in the fact that he was actually dead — or to let me know, in a roundabout fashion, that the way he died wasn’t anything like what I’d been told. But those messages haven’t been coming from a sadist. And they haven’t been coming from someone who wants to expose the true story of the Sierra accident. They aren’t being sent by a total stranger or by Michael. They are exactly what they appear to be!”

Confused, he said, “And to your way of thinking, what do they appear to be?”

“They’re cries for help.”

“What?”

“They’re coming from Danny!”

Elliot stared at her with consternation and with pity, his dark eyes reflecting a distant light. “What’re you saying — that Danny reached out to you from the grave to cause that excitement in the restaurant? Tina, you really don’t think his ghost was haunting a jukebox?”

“No, no, no. I’m saying Danny isn’t dead.”

“Wait a minute. Wait a minute.”

“My Danny is alive! I’m sure of it.”

“We’ve already been through this argument, and we rejected it,” he reminded her.

“We were wrong. Jaborski, Lincoln, and all the other boys might have died in the Sierras, but Danny didn’t. I know it. I sense it. It’s like… a revelation… almost like a vision. Maybe there was an accident, but it wasn’t like anything we were told. It was something very different, something exceedingly strange.”

“That’s already obvious. But—”

“The government had to hide it, and so this organization that Kennebeck works for was given responsibility for the cover-up.”

“I’m with you that far,” Elliot said. “That’s logical. But how do you figure Danny’s alive? That doesn’t necessarily follow.”

“I’m only telling you what I know, what I feel,” she said. “A tremendous sense of peace, of reassurance, came over me in the diner, just before you finally managed to shut off the jukebox. It wasn’t just an inner feeling of peace. It came from outside of me. Like a wave. Oh, hell, I can’t really explain it. I only know what I felt. Danny was trying to reassure me, trying to tell me that he was still alive. I know it. Danny survived the accident, but they couldn’t let him come home because he’d tell everyone the government was responsible for the deaths of the others, and that would blow their secret military installation wide open.”

“You’re reaching, grasping for straws.”

“I’m not, I’m not,” she insisted.

“So where is Danny?”

“They’re keeping him somewhere. I don’t know why they didn’t kill him. I don’t know how long they think they can keep him bottled up like this. But that’s what they’re doing. That’s what’s going on. Those might not be the precise circumstances, but they’re pretty damn close to the truth.”

“Tina—”

She wouldn’t let him interrupt. “This secret police force, these people behind Kennebeck… they think someone involved with Project Pandora has turned on them and told me what really happened to Danny. They’re wrong, of course. It wasn’t one of them. It’s Danny. Somehow… I don’t know how… but he’s reaching out to me.” She struggled to explain the understanding that had come to her in the diner. “Somehow… some way… he’s reaching out… with his mind, I guess. Danny was the one who wrote those words on the chalkboard. With his mind.”

“The only proof of this is what you say you feel… this vision you’ve had.”

“Not a vision—”

“Whatever. Anyway, that’s no proof at all.”

“It’s proof enough for me,” she said. “And it would be proof enough for you, if you’d had the same experience back there in the diner, if you’d felt what I felt. It was Danny who reached out for me when I was at work… found me in the office… tried to use the hotel computer to send his message to me. And now the jukebox. He must be… psychic. That’s it! That’s what he is. He’s psychic. He has some power, and he’s reaching out, trying to tell me he’s alive, asking me to find him and save him. And the people who’re holding him don’t know he’s doing it! They’re blaming the leak on one of their own, on someone from Project Pandora.”

“Tina, this is a very imaginative theory, but—”

“It might be imaginative, but it’s not a theory. It’s true. It’s fact. I feel it deep in my bones. Can you shoot holes through it? Can you prove I’m wrong?”

“First of all,” Elliot said, “before he went into the mountains with Jaborski, in all the years you knew him and lived in the same house with him, did Danny ever show any signs of being psychic?”

She frowned. “No.”

“Then how come he suddenly has all these amazing powers?”

“Wait. Yeah, I do remember some little things he did that were sort of odd.”

“Like what?”

“Like the time he wanted to know exactly what his daddy did for a living. He was eight or nine years old, and he was curious about the details of a dealer’s job. Michael sat at the kitchen table with him and dealt blackjack. Danny was barely old enough to understand the rules, but he’d never played before. He certainly wasn’t old enough to remember all the cards that were dealt and calculate his chances from that, like some of the very best players can do. Yet he won steadily. Michael used a jar full of peanuts to represent casino chips, and Danny won every nut in the jar.”

“The game must have been rigged,” Elliot said. “Michael was letting him win.”

“That’s what I thought at first. But Michael swore he wasn’t doing that. And he seemed genuinely astonished by Danny’s streak of luck. Besides, Michael isn’t a card mechanic. He can’t handle a deck well enough to stack it while he’s shuffling. And then there was Elmer.”

“Who’s Elmer?”

“He was our dog. A cute little mutt. One day, about two years ago, I was in the kitchen, making an apple pie, and Danny came in to tell me Elmer wasn’t anywhere to be found in the yard. Apparently, the pooch slipped out of the gate when the gardeners came around. Danny said he was sure Elmer wasn’t going to come back because he’d been hit and killed by a truck. I told him not to worry. I said we’d find Elmer safe and sound. But we never did. We never found him at all.”

“Just because you never found him — that’s not proof he was killed by a truck.”

“It was proof enough for Danny. He mourned for weeks.”

Elliot sighed. “Winning a few hands at blackjack — that’s luck, just like you said. And predicting that a runaway dog will be killed in traffic — that’s just a reasonable assumption to make under the circumstances. And even if those were examples of psychic ability, little tricks like that are light-years from what you’re attributing to Danny now.”

“I know. Somehow, his abilities have grown a lot stronger. Maybe because of the situation he’s in. The fear. The stress.”

“If fear and stress could increase the power of his psychic gifts, why didn’t he start trying to get in touch with you months ago?”

“Maybe it took a year of stress and fear to develop the ability. I don’t know.” A flood of unreasonable anger washed through her: “Christ, how could I know the answer to that?”

“Calm down,” he said. “You dared me to shoot holes in your theory. That’s what I’m doing.”

“No,” she said. “As far as I can see, you haven’t shot one hole in it yet. Danny’s alive, being held somewhere, and he’s trying to reach me with his mind. Telepathically. No. Not telepathy. He’s able to move objects just by thinking about them. What do you call that? Isn’t there a name for that ability?”

“Telekinesis,” Elliot said.

“Yes! That’s it. He’s telekinetic. Do you have a better explanation for what happened in the diner?”

“Well… no.”

“Are you going to tell me it was coincidence that the record stuck on those two words?”

“No,” Elliot said. “It wasn’t a coincidence. That would be even more unlikely than the possibility that Danny did it.”

“You admit I’m right.”

“No,” he said. “I can’t think of a better explanation, but I’m not ready to accept yours. I’ve never believed in that psychic crap.”

For a minute or two neither of them spoke. They stared out at the dark parking lot and at the fenced storage yard full of fifty-gallon drums that lay beyond the lot. Sheets, puffs, and spinning funnels of vaguely phosphorescent dust moved like specters through the night.

At last Tina said, “I’m right, Elliot. I know I am. My theory explains everything. Even the nightmares. That’s another way Danny’s been trying to reach me. He’s been sending me nightmares for the past few weeks. That’s why they’ve been so much different from any dreams I’ve had before, so much stronger and more vivid.”

He seemed to find this new statement more outrageous than what she’d said before. “Wait, wait, wait. Now you’re talking about another power besides telekinesis.”

“If he has one ability, why not the other?”

“Because pretty soon you’ll be saying he’s God.”

“Just telekinesis and the power to influence my dreams. That explains why I dreamed about the hideous figure of Death in this comic book. If Danny’s sending me messages in dreams, it’s only natural he’d use images he was familiar with — like a monster out of a favorite horror story.”

“But if he can send dreams to you,” Elliot said, “why wouldn’t he simply transmit a neat, clear message telling you what’s happened to him and where he is? Wouldn’t that get him the help he wants a lot faster? Why would he be so unclear and indirect? He should send a concise mental message, psychic E-mail from the Twilight Zone, make it a lot easier for you to understand.”

“Don’t get sarcastic,” she said.

“I’m not. I’m merely asking a tough question. It’s another hole in your theory.”

She would not be deterred. “It’s not a hole. There’s a good explanation. Obviously, like I told you, Danny isn’t telepathic exactly. He’s telekinetic, able to move objects with his mind. And he can influence dreams to some extent. But he’s not flat-out telepathic. He can’t transmit detailed thoughts. He can’t send ‘concise mental messages’ because he doesn’t have that much power or control. So he has to try to reach me as best he can.”

“Will you listen to us?”

“I’ve been listening,” she said.

“We sound like a couple of prime candidates for a padded cell.”

“No. I don’t think we do.”

“This talk of psychic power… it’s not exactly levelheaded stuff,” Elliot said.

“Then explain what happened in the diner.”

“I can’t. Damn it, I can’t,” he said, sounding like a priest whose faith had been deeply shaken. The faith that he was beginning to question was not religious, however, but scientific.

“Stop thinking like an attorney,” she said. “Stop trying to herd the facts into neat corrals of logic.”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been trained to do.”

“I know,” she said sympathetically. “But the world is full of illogical things that are nonetheless true. And this is one of them.”

The wind buffeted the sports car, moaned along the windows, seeking a way in.

Elliot said, “If Danny has this incredible power, why is he sending messages just to you? Why doesn’t he at least contact Michael too?”

“Maybe he doesn’t feel close enough to Michael to try reaching him. After all, the last couple of years we were married, Michael was running around with a lot of other women, spending most of his time away from home, and Danny felt even more abandoned than I did. I never talked against Michael. I even tried to justify some of his actions, because I didn’t want Danny to hate him. But Danny was hurt just the same. I suppose it’s natural for him to reach out to me rather than to his father.”

A wall of dust fell softly over the car.

“Still think you can shoot my theory full of holes?” she asked.

“No. You argued your case pretty well.”

“Thank you, judge.”

“I still can’t believe you’re right. I know some pretty damn intelligent people believe in ESP, but I don’t. I can’t bring myself to accept this psychic crap. Not yet, anyway. I’m going to keep looking for some less exotic explanation.”

“And if you come up with one,” Tina said, “I’ll give it very serious consideration.”

He put a hand on her shoulder. “The reason I’ve argued with you is… I’m worried about you, Tina.”

“About my sanity?”

“No, no. This psychic explanation bothers me mainly because it gives you hope that Danny’s still alive. And that’s dangerous. It seems to me as if you’re just setting yourself up for a bad fall, a lot of pain.”

“No. Not at all. Because Danny really is alive.”

“But what if he isn’t?”

“He is.”

“If you discover he’s dead, it’ll be like losing him all over again.”

“But he’s not dead,” she insisted. “I feel it. I sense it. I know it, Elliot.”

“And if he is dead?” Elliot asked, every bit as insistent as she was.

She hesitated. Then: “I’ll be able to handle it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

In the dim light, where the brightest thing was mauve shadow, he found her eyes, held her with his intent gaze. She felt as if he were not merely looking at her but into her, through her. Finally he leaned over and kissed the corner of her mouth, then her cheek, her eyes.

He said, “I don’t want to see your heart broken.”

“It won’t be.”

“I’ll do what I can to see it isn’t.”

“I know.”

“But there isn’t much I can do. It’s out of my hands. We just have to flow with events.”

She slipped a hand behind his neck, holding his face close. The taste of his lips and his warmth made her inexpressibly happy.

He sighed, leaned back from her, and started the car. “We better get moving. We have some shopping to do. Winter coats. A couple of toothbrushes.”

Though Tina continued to be buoyed by the unshakable conviction that Danny was alive, fear crept into her again as they drove onto Charleston Boulevard. She was no longer afraid of facing the awful truth that might be waiting in Reno. What had happened to Danny might still prove to be terrible, shattering, but she didn’t think it would be as hard to accept as his “death” had been. The only thing that scared her now was the possibility that they might find Danny — and then be unable to rescue him. In the process of locating the boy, she and Elliot might be killed. If they found Danny and then perished trying to save him, that would be a nasty trick of fate, for sure. She knew from experience that fate had countless nasty tricks up its voluminous sleeve, and that was why she was scared shitless.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Willis Bruckster studied his keno ticket, carefully comparing it to the winning numbers beginning to flash onto the electronic board that hung from the casino ceiling. He tried to appear intently interested in the outcome of this game, but in fact he didn’t care. The marked ticket in his hand was worthless; he hadn’t taken it to the betting window, hadn’t wagered any money on it. He was using keno as a cover.

He didn’t want to attract the attention of the omnipresent casino security men, and the easiest way to escape their notice was to appear to be the least threatening hick in the huge room. With that in mind, Bruckster wore a cheap green polyester leisure suit, black loafers, and white socks. He was carrying two books of the discount coupons that casinos use to pull slot-machine players into the house, and he wore a camera on a strap around his neck. Furthermore, keno was a game that didn’t have any appeal for either smart gamblers or cheaters, the two types of customers who most interested the security men. Willis Bruckster was so sure he appeared dull and ordinary that he wouldn’t have been surprised if a guard had looked at him and yawned.

He was determined not to fail on this assignment. It was a career maker — or breaker. The Network badly wanted to eliminate everyone who might press for the exhumation of Danny Evans’s body, and the agents targeted against Elliot Stryker and Christina Evans had thus far failed to carry out their orders to terminate the pair. Their ineptitude gave Willis Bruckster a chance to shine. If he made a clean hit here, in the crowded casino, he would be assured of a promotion.

Bruckster stood at the head of the escalator that led from the lower shopping arcade to the casino level of Bally’s Hotel. During their periodic breaks from the gaming tables, nursing stiff necks and sore shoulders and leaden arms, the weary dealers retired to a combination lounge and locker room at the bottom — and to the right — of the escalator. A group had gone down a while ago and would be returning for their last stand at the tables before a whole new staff came on duty with the shift change. Bruckster was waiting for one of those dealers: Michael Evans.

He hadn’t expected to find the man at work. He had thought Evans might be keeping a vigil at the demolished house, while the firemen sifted through the still-smoldering debris, searching for the remains of the woman they thought might be buried there. But when Bruckster had come into the hotel thirty minutes ago, Evans had been chatting with the players at his blackjack table, cracking jokes, and grinning as if nothing of any importance had happened in his life lately.

Perhaps Evans didn’t know about the explosion at his former house. Or maybe he did know and just didn’t give a damn about his ex-wife. It might have been a bitter divorce.

Bruckster hadn’t been able to get close to Evans when the dealer left the blackjack pit at the beginning of the break. Consequently, he’d stationed himself here, at the head of the escalator, and had pretended to be interested in the keno board. He was confident that he would nail Evans when the man returned from the dealer’s lounge in the next few minutes.

The last of the keno numbers flashed onto the board. Willis Bruckster stared at them, then crumpled his game card with obvious disappointment and disgust, as if he had lost a few hard-earned dollars.

He glanced down the escalator. Dealers in black trousers, white shirts, and string ties were ascending.

Bruckster sidled away from the escalator and unfolded his keno card. He compared it once more with the numbers on the electronic board, as if he were praying that he had made a mistake the first time.

Michael Evans was the seventh dealer off the escalator. He was a handsome, easygoing guy who ambled rather than walked. He stopped to have a word with a strikingly pretty cocktail waitress, and she smiled at him. The other dealers streamed by, and when Evans finally turned away from the waitress, he was the last in the procession as it moved toward the blackjack pits.

Bruckster fell in beside and slightly behind his target as they pressed through the teeming mob that jammed the enormous casino. He reached into a pocket of his leisure suit and took out a tiny aerosol can that was only slightly larger than one of those spray-style breath fresheners, small enough to be concealed in Bruckster’s hand.

They came to a standstill at a cluster of laughing people. No one in the jolly group seemed to realize that he was obstructing the main aisle. Bruckster took advantage of the pause to tap his quarry on the shoulder.

Evans turned, and Bruckster said, “I think maybe you dropped this back there.”

“Huh?”

Bruckster held his hand eighteen inches below Michael Evans’s eyes, so that the dealer was forced to glance down to see what was being shown to him.

The fine spray, propelled with tremendous pressure, caught him squarely in the face, across the nose and lips, penetrating swiftly and deeply into the nostrils. Perfect.

Evans reacted as anyone would. He gasped in surprise as he realized he was being squirted.

The gasp drew the deadly mist up his nose, where the active poison — a particularly fast-acting neurotoxin — was instantaneously absorbed through the sinus membranes. In two seconds it was in his bloodstream, and the first seizure hit his heart.

Evans’s surprised expression turned to shock. Then a wild, twisted expression of agony wrenched his face as brutal pain slammed through him. He gagged, and a ribbon of foamy saliva unraveled from the corner of his mouth, down his chin. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell.

As Bruckster pocketed the miniature aerosol device, he said, “We have a sick man here.”

Heads turned toward him.

“Give the man room,” Bruckster said. “For God’s sake, someone get a doctor!”

No one could have seen the murder. It had been committed in a sheltered space within the crowd, hidden by the killer’s and the victim’s bodies. Even if someone had been monitoring that area from an overhead camera, there would not have been much for him to see.

Willis Bruckster quickly knelt at Michael Evans’s side and took his pulse as if he expected to find one. There was no heartbeat whatsoever, not even a faint lub-dub.

A thin film of moisture covered the victim’s nose and lips and chin, but this was only the harmless medium in which the toxin had been suspended. The active poison itself had already penetrated the victim’s body, done its work, and begun to break down into a series of naturally occurring chemicals that would raise no alarms when the coroner later studied the results of the usual battery of forensic tests. In a few seconds the medium would evaporate too, leaving nothing unusual to arouse the initial attending physician’s suspicion.

A uniformed security guard shouldered through the mob of curious onlookers and stooped next to Bruckster. “Oh, damn, it’s Mike Evans. What happened here?”

“I’m no doctor,” Bruckster said, “but it sure looks like a heart attack to me, the way he dropped like a stone, same way my uncle Ned went down last Fourth of July right in the middle of the fireworks display.”

The guard tried to find a pulse but wasn’t able to do so. He began CPR, but then relented. “I think it’s hopeless.”

“How could it be a heart attack, him being so young?” Bruckster wondered. “Jesus, you just never know, do you?”

“You never know,” the guard agreed.

The hotel doctor would call it a heart attack after he had examined the body. So would the coroner. So would the death certificate.

A perfect murder.

Willis Bruckster suppressed a smile.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Judge Harold Kennebeck built exquisitely detailed ships in bottles. The walls of his den were lined with examples of his hobby. A tiny model of a seventeenth-century Dutch pinnace was perpetually under sail in a small, pale-blue bottle. A large four-masted topsail schooner filled a five-gallon jug. Here was a four-masted barkentine with sails taut in a perpetual wind; and here was a mid-sixteenth-century Swedish kravel. A fifteenth-century Spanish caravel. A British merchantman. A Baltimore clipper. Every ship was created with remarkable care and craftsmanship, and many were in uniquely shaped bottles that made their construction all the more difficult and admirable.

Kennebeck stood before one of the display cases, studying the minutely detailed rigging of a late-eighteenth-century French frigate. As he gazed at the model, he wasn’t transported back in time or lost in fantasies of high-seas adventure; rather, he was mulling over the recent developments in the Evans case. His ships, sealed in their glass worlds, relaxed him; he liked to spend time with them when he had a problem to work out or when he was on edge, for they made him feel serene, and that security allowed his mind to function at peak performance.

The longer he thought about it, the less Kennebeck was able to believe that the Evans woman knew the truth about her son. Surely, if someone from Project Pandora had told her what had happened to that busload of scouts, she wouldn’t have reacted to the news with equanimity. She would have been frightened, terrified… and damned angry. She would have gone straight to the police, the newspapers — or both.

Instead, she had gone to Elliot Stryker.

And that was where the paradox jumped up like a jack-in-the-box. On the one hand, she behaved as if she did not know the truth. But on the other hand, she was working through Stryker to have her son’s grave reopened, which seemed to indicate that she knew something.

If Stryker could be believed, the woman’s motivations were innocent enough. According to the attorney, Mrs. Evans felt guilty about not having had the courage to view the boy’s mutilated body prior to the burial. She felt as if she had failed to pay her last respects to the deceased. Her guilt had grown gradually into a serious psychological problem. She was in great distress, and she suffered from horrible dreams that plagued her every night. That was Stryker’s story.

Kennebeck tended to believe Stryker. There was an element of coincidence involved, but not all coincidence was meaningful. That was something one tended to forget when he spent his life in the intelligence game. Christina Evans probably hadn’t entertained a single doubt about the official explanation of the Sierra accident; she probably hadn’t known a damned thing about Pandora when she had requested an exhumation, but her timing couldn’t have been worse.

If the woman actually hadn’t known anything of the cover-up, then the Network could have used her ex-husband and the legal system to delay the reopening of the grave. In the meantime, Network agents could have located a boy’s body in the same state of decay as Danny’s corpse would have been if it had been locked in that coffin for the past year. They would have opened the grave secretly, at night, when the cemetery was closed, switching the remains of the fake Danny for the rocks that were currently in the casket. Then the guilt-stricken mother could have been permitted one last, late, ghastly look at the remains of her son.

That would have been a complex operation, fraught with the peril of discovery. The risks would have been acceptable, however, and there wouldn’t have been any need to kill anyone.

Unfortunately, George Alexander, chief of the Nevada bureau of the Network, hadn’t possessed the patience or the skill to determine the woman’s true motives. He had assumed the worst and had acted on that assumption. When Kennebeck informed Alexander of Elliot Stryker’s request for an exhumation, the bureau chief responded immediately with extreme force. He planned a suicide for Stryker, an accidental death for the woman, and a heart attack for the woman’s husband. Two of those hurriedly organized assassination attempts had failed. Stryker and the woman had disappeared. Now the entire Network was in the soup, deep in it.

As Kennebeck turned away from the French frigate, beginning to wonder if he ought to get out from under the Network before it collapsed on him, George Alexander entered the study through the door that opened off the downstairs hallway. The bureau chief was a slim, elegant, distinguished-looking man. He was wearing Gucci loafers, an expensive suit, a handmade silk shirt, and a gold Rolex watch. His stylishly cut brown hair shaded to iron-gray at the temples. His eyes were green, clear, alert, and — if one took the time to study them — menacing. He had a well-formed face with high cheekbones, a narrow straight nose, and thin lips. When he smiled, his mouth turned up slightly at the left corner, giving him a vaguely haughty expression, although at the moment he wasn’t smiling.

Kennebeck had known Alexander for five years and had despised him from the day they met. He suspected that the feeling was mutual.

Part of this antagonism between them rose because they had been born into utterly different worlds and were equally proud of their origins — as well as disdainful of all others. Harry Kennebeck had come from a dirt-poor family and, by his own estimation at least, made quite a lot of himself. Alexander, on the other hand, was the scion of a Pennsylvania family that had been wealthy and powerful for a hundred and fifty years, perhaps longer. Kennebeck had lifted himself out of poverty through hard work and steely determination. Alexander knew nothing of hard work; he had ascended to the top of his field as if he were a prince with a divine right to rule.

Kennebeck was also irritated by Alexander’s hypocrisy. The whole family was nothing but a bunch of hypocrites. The society-register Alexanders were proud of their history of public service. Many of them had been Presidential appointees, occupying high-level posts in the federal government; a few had served on the President’s cabinet, in half a dozen administrations, though none had ever deigned to run for an elective position. The famous Pennsylvania Alexanders had always been prominently associated with the struggle for minority civil rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, the crusade against capital punishment, and social idealisms of every variety. Yet numerous members of the family had secretly rendered service — some of it dirty — to the FBI, the CIA, and various other intelligence and police agencies, often the very same organizations that they publicly criticized and reviled. Now George Alexander was the Nevada bureau chief of the nation’s first truly secret police force — a fact that apparently did not weigh heavily on his liberal conscience.

Kennebeck’s politics were of the extreme right-wing variety. He was an unreconstructed fascist and not the least bit ashamed of it. When, as a young man, he had first embarked upon a career in the intelligence services. Harry had been surprised to discover that not all of the people in the espionage business shared his ultraconservative political views. He had expected his co-workers to be super-patriotic right-wingers. But all the snoop shops were staffed with leftists too. Eventually Harry realized that the extreme left and the extreme right shared the same two basic goals: They wanted to make society more orderly than it naturally was, and they wanted to centralize control of the population in a strong government. Left-wingers and right-wingers differed about certain details, of course, but their only major point of contention centered on the identity of those who would be permitted to be a part of the privileged ruling class, once the power had been sufficiently centralized.

At least I’m honest about my motives, Kennebeck thought as he watched Alexander cross the study. My public opinions are the same as those I express privately, and that’s a virtue he doesn’t possess. I’m not a hypocrite. I’m not at all like Alexander. Jesus, he’s such a smug, Janus-faced bastard!

“I just spoke with the men who’re watching Stryker’s house,” Alexander said. “He hasn’t shown up yet.”

“I told you he wouldn’t go back there.”

“Sooner or later he will.”

“No. Not until he’s absolutely certain the heat is off. Until then he’ll hide out.”

“He’s bound to go to the police at some point, and then we’ll have him.”

“If he thought he could get any help from the cops, he’d have been there already,” Kennebeck said. “But he hasn’t shown up. And he won’t.”

Alexander glanced at his watch. “Well, he still might pop up here. I’m sure he wants to ask you a lot of questions.”

“Oh, I’m damn sure he does. He wants my hide,” Kennebeck said. “But he won’t come. Not tonight. Eventually, yes, but not for a long time. He knows we’re waiting for him. He knows how the game is played. Don’t forget he used to play it himself.”

“That was a long time ago,” Alexander said impatiently. “He’s been a civilian for fifteen years. He’s out of practice. Even if he was a natural then, there’s no way he could still be as sharp as he once was.”

“But that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Kennebeck said, pushing a lock of snow-white hair back from his forehead. “Elliot isn’t stupid. He was the best and brightest young officer who ever served under me. He was a natural. And that was when he was young and relatively inexperienced. If he’s aged as well as he seems to have done, then he might even be sharper these days.”

Alexander didn’t want to hear it. Although two of the hits he had ordered had gone totally awry, Alexander remained self-assured; he was convinced that he would eventually triumph.

He’s always so damned self-confident, Harry Kennebeck thought. And usually there’s no good reason why he should be. If he was aware of his own shortcomings, the son of a bitch would be crushed to death under his collapsing ego.

Alexander went to the huge maple desk and sat behind it, in Kennebeck’s wing chair.

The judge glared at him.

Alexander pretended not to notice Kennebeck’s displeasure. “We’ll find Stryker and the woman before morning. I’ve no doubt about that. We’re covering all the bases. We’ve got men checking every hotel and motel—”

“That’s a waste of time,” Kennebeck said. “Elliot is too smart to waltz into a hotel and leave his name on the register. Besides, there are more hotels and motels in Vegas than in any other city in the world.”

“I’m fully aware of the complexity of the task,” Alexander said. “But we might get lucky. Meanwhile, we’re checking out Stryker’s associates in his law firm, his friends, the woman’s friends, anyone with whom they might have taken refuge.”

“You don’t have enough manpower to follow up all those possibilities,” the judge said. “Can’t you see that? You should use your people more judiciously. You’re spreading yourself too thin. What you should be doing—”

“I’ll make those decisions,” Alexander said icily.

“What about the airport?”

“That’s taken care of,” Alexander assured him. “We’ve got men going over the passenger lists of every outbound flight.” He picked up an ivory-handled letter opener, turned it over and over in his hands. “Anyway, even if we’re spread a bit thin, it doesn’t matter much. I already know where we’re going to nail Stryker. Here. Right here in this house. That’s why I’m still hanging around. Oh, I know, I know, you don’t think he’ll show up. But a long time ago you were Stryker’s mentor, the man he respected, the man he learned from, and now you’ve betrayed him. He’ll come here to confront you, even if he knows it’s risky. I’m sure he will.”

“Ridiculous,” Kennebeck said sourly. “Our relationship was never like that. He—”

“I know human nature,” Alexander said, though he was one of the least observant and least analytical men that Kennebeck had ever known.

These days cream seldom rose in the intelligence community — but crap still floated.

Angry, frustrated, Kennebeck turned again to the bottle that contained the French frigate. Suddenly he remembered something important about Elliot Stryker. “Ah,” he said.

Alexander put down the enameled cigarette box that he had been studying. “What is it?”

“Elliot’s a pilot. He owns his own plane.”

Alexander frowned.

“Have you been checking small craft leaving the airport?” Kennebeck asked.

“No. Just scheduled airliners and charters.”

“Ah.”

“He’d have had to take off in the dark,” Alexander said. “You think he’s licensed for instrument flying? Most businessmen-pilots and hobby pilots aren’t certified for anything but daylight.”

“Better get hold of your men at the airport,” Kennebeck said. “I already know what they’re going to find. I’ll bet a hundred bucks to a dime Elliot slipped out of town under your nose.”

The Cessna Turbo Skylane RG knifed through the darkness, two miles above the Nevada desert, with the low clouds under it, wings plated silver by moonlight.

“Elliot?”

“Hmmm?”

“I’m sorry I got you mixed up in this.”

“You don’t like my company?”

“You know what I mean. I’m really sorry.”

“Hey, you didn’t get me mixed up in it. You didn’t twist my arm. I practically volunteered to help you with the exhumation, and it all just fell apart from there. It’s not your fault.”

“Still… here you are, running for your life, and all because of me.”

“Nonsense. You couldn’t have known what would happen after I talked to Kennebeck.”

“I can’t help feeling guilty about involving you.”

“If it wasn’t me, it would have been some other attorney. And maybe he wouldn’t have known how to handle Vince. In which case, both he and you might be dead. So if you look at it that way, it worked out as well as it possibly could.”

“You’re really something else,” she said.

“What else am I?”

“Lots of things.”

“Such as?”

“Terrific.”

“Not me. What else?”

“Brave.”

“Bravery is a virtue of fools.”

“Smart.”

“Not as smart as I think I am.”

“Tough.”

“I cry at sad movies. See, I’m not as great as you think I am.”

“You can cook.”

“Now that’s true!”

The Cessna hit an air pocket, dropped three hundred feet with a sickening lurch, and then soared to its correct altitude.

“A great cook but a lousy pilot,” she said.

“That was God’s turbulence. Complain to Him.”

“How long till we land in Reno?”

“Eighty minutes.”

George Alexander hung up the telephone. He was still sitting in Kennebeck’s wing chair. “Stryker and the woman took off from McCarran International more than two hours ago. They left in his Cessna. He filed a flight plan for Flagstaff.”

The judge stopped pacing. “Arizona?”

“That’s the only Flagstaff I know. But why would they go to Arizona, of all places?”

“They probably didn’t,” Kennebeck said. “I figure Elliot filed a false flight plan to throw you off his trail.” He was perversely proud of Stryker’s cleverness.

“If they actually headed for Flagstaff,” Alexander said, “they ought to have landed by now. I’ll call the night manager at the airport down there, pretend to be FBI, see what he can tell me.”

Because the Network did not officially exist, it couldn’t openly use its authority to gather information. As a result, Network agents routinely posed as FBI men, with counterfeit credentials in the names of actual FBI agents.

While he waited for Alexander to finish with the night manager at the Flagstaff airport, Kennebeck moved from one model ship to another. For the first time in his experience, the sight of this bottled fleet didn’t calm him.

Fifteen minutes later Alexander put down the telephone. “Stryker isn’t on the Flagstaff field. And he hasn’t yet been identified in their airspace.”

“Ah. So his flight plan was a red herring.”

“Unless he crashed between here and there,” Alexander said hopefully.

Kennebeck grinned. “He didn’t crash. But where the hell did he go?”

“Probably in the opposite direction,” Alexander said. “Southern California.”

“Ah. Los Angeles?”

“Or Santa Barbara. Burbank. Long Beach. Ontario. Orange County. There are a lot of airports within the range of that little Cessna.”

They were both silent, thinking. Then Kennebeck said, “Reno. That’s where they went. Reno.”

“You were so sure they didn’t know a thing about the Sierra labs,” Alexander said. “Have you changed your mind?”

“No. I still think you could have avoided issuing all those termination orders. Look, they can’t be going up to the mountains, because they don’t know where the laboratories are. They don’t know anything more about Project Pandora than what they picked up from that list of questions they took off Vince Immelman.”

“Then why Reno?”

Pacing, Kennebeck said, “Now that we’ve tried to kill them, they know the story of the Sierra accident was entirely contrived. They figure there’s something wrong with the little boy’s body, something odd that we can’t afford to let them see. So now they’re twice as anxious to see it. They’d exhume it illegally if they could, but they can’t get near the cemetery with us watching it. And Stryker knows for sure that we’ve got it staked out. So if they can’t open the grave and see for themselves what we’ve done to Danny Evans, what are they going to do instead? They’re going to do the next best thing — talk to the person who was supposedly the last one to see the boy’s corpse before it was sealed in the coffin. They’re going to ask him to describe the condition of the boy in minute detail.”

“Richard Pannafin is the coroner in Reno. He issued the death certificate,” Alexander said.

“No. They won’t go to Pannafin. They’ll figure he’s involved in the cover-up.”

“Which he is. Reluctantly.”

“So they’ll go to see the mortician who supposedly prepared the boy’s body for burial.”

“Bellicosti.”

“Was that his name?”

“Luciano Bellicosti,” Alexander said. “But if that’s where they went, then they’re not just hiding out, licking their wounds. Good God, they’ve actually gone on the offensive!”

“That’s Stryker’s military-intelligence training taking hold,” Kennebeck said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. He’s not going to be an easy target. He could destroy the Network, given half a chance. And the woman’s evidently not one to hide or run away from a problem either. We have to go after these two with more care than usual. What about this Bellicosti? Will he keep his mouth shut?”

“I don’t know,” Alexander said uneasily. “We have a pretty good hold on him. He’s an Italian immigrant. He lived here for eight or nine years before he decided to apply for citizenship. He hadn’t gotten his papers yet when we found ourselves needing a cooperative mortician. We put a freeze on his application with the Bureau of Immigration, and we threatened to have him deported if he didn’t do what we wanted. He didn’t like it. But citizenship was a big enough carrot to keep him motivated. However… I don’t think we’d better rely on that carrot any longer.”

“This is a hell of an important matter,” Kennebeck said. “And it sounds to me as if Bellicosti knows too much about it.”

“Terminate the bastard,” Alexander said.

“Eventually, but not necessarily right now. If too many bodies pile up at once, we’ll be drawing attention to—”

“Take no chances,” Alexander insisted. “We’ll terminate him. And the coroner too, I think. Scrub away the whole trail.” He reached for the phone.

“Surely you don’t want to take such drastic action until you’re positive Stryker actually is headed for Reno. And you won’t know for sure until he lands up there.”

Alexander hesitated with his hand on the phone. “But if I wait, I’m just giving him a chance to keep one step ahead.” Worried, he continued to hesitate, anxiously chewing his lip.

“There’s a way to find out if it’s really Reno he’s headed for. When he gets there, he’ll need a car. Maybe he’s already arranged for one to be waiting.”

Alexander nodded. “We can call the rental agencies at the Reno airport.”

“No need to call. The hacker geeks in computer operations can probably access all the rental agencies’ data files long distance.”

Alexander picked up the phone and gave the order.

Fifteen minutes later computer operations called back with its report. Elliot Stryker had a rental car reserved for late-night pickup at the Reno airport. He was scheduled to take possession of it shortly before midnight.

“That’s a bit sloppy of him,” Kennebeck said, “considering how clever he’s been so far.”

“He figures we’re focusing on Arizona, not Reno.”

“It’s still sloppy,” Kennebeck said, disappointed. “He should have built a double blind to protect himself.”

“So it’s like I said.” Alexander’s crooked smile appeared. “He isn’t as sharp as he used to be.”

“Let’s not start crowing too soon,” Kennebeck said. “We haven’t caught him yet.”

“We will,” Alexander said, his composure restored. “Our people in Reno will have to move fast, but they’ll manage. I don’t think it’s a good idea to hit Stryker and the woman in a public place like an airport.”

What an uncharacteristic display of reserve, Kennebeck thought sourly.

“I don’t even think we should put a tail on them as soon as they get there,” Alexander said. “Stryker will be expecting a tail. Maybe he’ll elude it, and then he’ll be spooked.”

“Get to the rental car before he does. Slap a transponder on it. Then you can follow him without being seen, at your leisure.”

“We’ll try it,” Alexander said. “We’ve got less than an hour, so there might not be time. But even if we don’t get a beeper on the damn car, we’re okay. We know where they’re going. We’ll just eliminate Bellicosti and set up a trap at the funeral home.”

He snatched up the telephone and dialed the Network office in Reno.

Chapter Twenty-Five

In Reno, which billed itself as “The Biggest Little City in the World,” the temperature hovered at twenty-one degrees above zero as midnight approached. Above the lights that cast a frosty glow on the airport parking lot, the heavily shrouded sky was moonless, starless, perfectly black. Snow flurries were dancing on a changeable wind.

Elliot was glad they had bought a couple of heavy coats before leaving Las Vegas. He wished they’d thought of gloves; his hands were freezing.

He threw their single suitcase into the trunk of the rented Chevrolet. In the cold air, white clouds of exhaust vapor swirled around his legs.

He slammed the trunk lid and surveyed the snow-dusted cars in the parking lot. He couldn’t see anyone in any of them. He had no feeling of being watched.

When they had landed, they’d been alert for unusual activity on the runway and in the private-craft docking yard — suspicious vehicles, an unusual number of ground crewmen — but they had seen nothing out of the ordinary. Then as he had signed for the rental car and picked up the keys from the night clerk, he had kept one hand in a pocket of his coat, gripping the handgun he’d taken off Vince in Las Vegas — but there was no trouble.

Perhaps the phony flight plan had thrown the hounds off the trail. Now he went to the driver’s door and climbed into the Chevy, where Tina was fiddling with the heater.

“My blood’s turning to ice,” she said.

Elliot held his hand to the vent. “We’re getting some warm air already.”

From his coat, he withdrew the pistol and put it on the seat between him and Christina, the muzzle pointed toward the dashboard.

“You really think we should confront Bellicosti at this hour?” she asked.

“Sure. It’s not very late.”

In an airport-terminal telephone directory, Tina had found the address of the Luciano Bellicosti Funeral Home. The night clerk at the rental agency, from whom they had signed out the car, had known exactly where Bellicosti’s place was, and he had marked the shortest route on the free city map provided with the Chevy.

Elliot flicked on the overhead light and studied the map, then handed it to Tina. “I think I can find it without any trouble. But if I get lost, you’ll be the navigator.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

He snapped off the overhead light and reached for the gearshift.

With a distant click, the light that he had just turned off now turned itself on.

He looked at Tina, and she met his eyes.

He clicked off the light again.

Immediately it switched on.

“Here we go,” Tina said.

The radio came on. The digital station indicator began to sweep across the frequencies. Split-second blasts of music, commercials, and disc jockeys’ voices blared senselessly out of the speakers.

“It’s Danny,” Tina said.

The windshield wipers started thumping back and forth at top speed, adding their metronomical beat to the chaos inside the Chevy.

The headlights flashed on and off so rapidly that they created a stroboscopic effect, repeatedly “freezing” the falling snow, so that it appeared as if the white flakes were descending to the ground in short, jerky steps.

The air inside the car was bitterly cold and growing colder by the second.

Elliot put his right hand against the dashboard vent. Heat was pushing out of it, but the air temperature continued to plunge.

The glove compartment popped open.

The ashtray slid out of its niche.

Tina laughed, clearly delighted.

The sound of her laughter startled Elliot, but then he had to admit to himself that he did not feel menaced by the work of this poltergeist. In fact, just the opposite was true. He sensed that he was witnessing a joyous display, a warm greeting, the excited welcome of a child-ghost. He was overwhelmed by the astonishing notion that he could actually feel goodwill in the air, a tangible radiation of love and affection. A not unpleasant shiver raced up his spine. Apparently, this was the same astonishing awareness of being buffeted by waves of love that had caused Tina’s laughter.

She said, “We’re coming, Danny. Hear me if you can, baby. We’re coming to get you. We’re coming.”

The radio switched off, and so did the overhead light.

The windshield wipers stopped thumping.

The headlights blinked off and stayed off.

Stillness.

Silence.

Scattered flakes of snow collided softly with the windshield.

In the car, the air grew warm again.

Elliot said, “Why does it get cold every time he uses his… psychic abilities?”

“Who knows? Maybe he’s able to move objects by harnessing the heat energy in the air, changing it somehow. Or maybe it’s something else altogether. We’ll probably never know. He might not understand it himself. Anyway, that isn’t important. What’s important is that my Danny is alive. There’s no doubt about that. Not now. Not anymore. And I gather from your question, you’ve become a believer too.”

“Yeah,” Elliot said, still mildly amazed by his own change of heart and mind. “Yeah, I believe there’s a chance you’re right.”

“I know I am.”

“Something extraordinary happened to that expedition of scouts. And something downright uncanny has happened to your son.”

“But at least he’s not dead,” Tina said.

Elliot saw tears of happiness shining in her eyes.

“Hey,” he said worriedly, “better keep a tight rein on your hopes. Okay? We’ve got a long, long way to go. We don’t even know where Danny is or what shape he’s in. We’ve got a gauntlet to run before we can find him and bring him back. We might both be killed before we even get close to him.”

He drove away from the airport. As far as he could tell, no one followed them.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Suffering one of his occasional bouts of claustrophobia, Dr. Carlton Dombey felt as though he had been swallowed alive and was trapped now in the devil’s gut.

Deep inside the secret Sierra complex, three stories below ground level, this room measured forty feet by twenty. The low ceiling was covered with a spongy, pebbly, yellowish soundproofing, which gave the chamber a peculiar organic quality. Fluorescent tubes shed cold light over banks of computers and over worktables laden with journals, charts, file folders, scientific instruments, and two coffee mugs.

In the middle of the west wall — one of the two shorter walls — opposite the entrance to the room, was a six-foot-long, three-foot-high window that provided a view of another space, which was only half as large as this outer chamber. The window was constructed like a sandwich: Two one-inch-thick panes of shatterproof glass surrounded an inch-wide space filled with an inert gas. Two panes of ironlike glass. Stainless-steel frame. Four airtight rubber seals — one around the both faces of each pane. This viewport was designed to withstand everything from a gunshot to an earthquake; it was virtually inviolable.

Because it was important for the men who worked in the large room to have an unobstructed view of the smaller inner chamber at all times, four angled ceiling vents in both rooms bathed the glass in a continuous flow of warm, dry air to prevent condensation and clouding. Currently the system wasn’t working, for three-quarters of the window was filmed with frost.

Dr. Carlton Dombey, a curly-haired man with a bushy mustache, stood at the window, blotting his damp hands on his medical whites and peering anxiously through one of the few frost-free patches of glass. Although he was struggling to cast off the seizure of claustrophobia that had gripped him, was trying to pretend that the organic-looking ceiling wasn’t pressing low over his head and that only open sky hung above him instead of thousands of tons of concrete and steel rock, his own panic attack concerned him less than what was happening beyond the viewport.

Dr. Aaron Zachariah, younger than Dombey, clean-shaven, with straight brown hair, leaned over one of the computers, reading the data that flowed across the screen. “The temperature’s dropped thirty-five degrees in there during the past minute and a half,” Zachariah said worriedly. “That can’t be good for the boy.”

“Every time it’s happened, it’s never seemed to bother him,” Dombey said.

“I know, but—”

“Check out his vital signs.”

Zachariah moved to another bank of computer screens, where Danny Evans’s heartbeat, blood pressure, body temperature, and brainwave activity were constantly displayed. “Heartbeat’s normal, maybe even slightly slower than before. Blood pressure’s all right. Body temp unchanged. But there’s something unusual about the EEG reading.”

“As there always is during these cold snaps,” Dombey said. “Odd brainwave activity. But no other indication he’s in any discomfort.”

“If it stays cold in there for long, we’ll have to suit up, go in, and move him to another chamber,” Zachariah said.

“There isn’t one available,” Dombey said. “All the others are full of test animals in the middle of one experiment or another.”

“Then we’ll have to move the animals. The kid’s a lot more important than they are. There’s more data to be gotten from him.”

He’s more important because he’s a human being, not because he’s a source of data, Dombey thought angrily, but he didn’t voice the thought because it would have identified him as a dissident and as a potential security risk.

Instead, Dombey said, “We won’t have to move him. The cold spell won’t last.” He squinted into the smaller room, where the boy lay motionless on a hospital bed, under a white sheet and yellow blanket, trailing monitor wires. Dombey’s concern for the kid was greater than his fear of being trapped underground and buried alive, and finally his attack of claustrophobia diminished. “At least it’s never lasted long. The temperature drops abruptly, stays down for two or three minutes, never longer than five, and then it rises to normal again.”

“What the devil is wrong with the engineers? Why can’t they correct the problem?”

Dombey said, “They insist the system checks out perfectly.”

“Bullshit.”

“There’s no malfunction. So they say.”

“Like hell there isn’t!” Zachariah turned away from the video displays, went to the window, and found his own spot of clear glass. “When this started a month ago, it wasn’t that bad. A few degrees of change. Once a night. Never during the day. Never enough of a variation to threaten the boy’s health. But the last few days it’s gotten completely out of hand. Again and again, we’re getting these thirty-and forty-degree plunges in the air temperature in there. No malfunction, my ass!”

“I hear they’re bringing in the original design team,” Dombey said. “Those guys’ll spot the problem in a minute.”

“Bozos,” Zachariah said.

“Anyway, I don’t see what you’re so riled up about. We’re supposed to be testing the boy to destruction, aren’t we? Then why fret about his health?”

“Surely you can’t mean that,” Zachariah said. “When he finally dies, we’ll want to know for sure it was the injections that killed him. If he’s subjected to many more of these sudden temperature fluctuations, we’ll never be certain they didn’t contribute to his death. It won’t be clean research.”

A thin, humorless laugh escaped Carlton Dombey, and he looked away from the window. Risky as it might be to express doubt to any colleague on the project, Dombey could not control himself: “Clean? This whole thing was never clean. It was a dirty piece of business right from the start.”

Zachariah faced him. “You know I’m not talking about the morality of it.”

“But I am.”

“I’m talking about clinical standards.”

“I really don’t think I want to hear your opinions on either subject,” Dombey said. “I’ve got a splitting headache.”

“I’m just trying to be conscientious,” Zachariah said, almost pouting. “You can’t blame me because the work is dirty. I don’t have much to say about research policy around here.”

“You don’t have anything to say about it,” Dombey told him bluntly. “And neither do I. We’re low men on the totem pole. That’s why we’re stuck with night-shift, baby-sitting duty like this.”

“Even if I were in charge of making policy,” Zachariah said, “I’d take the same course Dr. Tamaguchi has. Hell, he had to pursue this research. He didn’t have any choice but to commit the installation to it once we found out the damn Chinese were deeply into it. And the Russians giving them a hand to earn some foreign currency. Our new friends the Russians. What a joke. Welcome to the new Cold War. It’s China’s nasty little project, remember. All we’re doing is just playing catch-up. If you have to blame someone because you’re feeling guilty about what we’re doing here, then blame the Chinese, not me.”

“I know. I know,” Dombey said wearily, pushing one hand through his bush of curly hair. Zachariah would report their conversation in detail, and Dombey needed to assume a more balanced position for the record. “They scare me sure enough. If there’s any government on earth capable of using a weapon like this, it’s them — or the North Koreans or the Iraqis. Never a shortage of lunatic regimes. We don’t have any choice but to maintain a strong defense. I really believe that. But sometimes… I wonder. While we’re working so hard to keep ahead of our enemies, aren’t we perhaps becoming more like them? Aren’t we becoming a totalitarian state, the very thing we say we despise?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe,” Dombey said, though he was sure of it.

“What choice do I have?”

“None, I guess.”

“Look,” Zachariah said.

“What?”

“The window’s clearing up. It must be getting warm in there already.”

The two scientists turned to the glass again and peered into the isolation chamber.

The emaciated boy stirred. He turned his head toward them and stared at them through the railed sides of the hospital bed in which he lay.

Zachariah said, “Those damn eyes.”

“Penetrating, aren’t they?”

“The way he stares… he gives me the creeps sometimes. There’s something haunting about his eyes.”

“You’re just feeling guilty,” Dombey said.

“No. It’s more than that. His eyes are strange. They aren’t the same as they were when he first came in here a year ago.”

“There’s pain in them now,” Dombey said sadly. “A lot of pain and loneliness.”

“More than that,” Zachariah said. “There’s something in those eyes… something there isn’t any word for.”

Zachariah walked away from the window. He went back to the computers, with which he felt comfortable and safe.