The Eyes of Darkness

Chapter Twenty-Seven

For the most part, Reno’s streets were clean and dry in spite of a recent snowfall, though occasional patches of black ice waited for the unwary motorist. Elliot Stryker drove cautiously and kept his eyes on the road.

“We should almost be there,” Tina said.

They traveled an additional quarter of a mile before Luciano Bellicosti’s home and place of business came into sight on the left, beyond a black-bordered sign that grandiosely stated the nature of the service that he provided: FUNERAL DIRECTOR AND GRIEF COUNSELOR. It was an immense, pseudo-Colonial house, perched prominently on top of a hill, on a three- or four-acre property, and conveniently next door to a large, nondenominational cemetery. The long driveway curved up and to the right, like a width of black funeral bunting draped across the rising, snow-shrouded lawn. Stone posts and softly glowing electric lamps marked the way to the front door, and warm light radiated from several first-floor windows.

Elliot almost turned in at the entrance, but at the last moment he decided to drive by the place.

“Hey,” Tina said, “that was it.”

“I know.”

“Why didn’t you stop?”

“Storming right up to the front door, demanding answers from Bellicosti — that would be emotionally satisfying, brave, bold — and stupid.”

“They can’t be waiting for us, can they? They don’t know we’re in Reno.”

“Never underestimate your enemy. They underestimated me and you, which is why we’ve gotten this far. We’re not going to make the same mistake they did and wind up back in their hands.”

Beyond the cemetery, he turned left, into a residential street. He parked at the curb, switched off the headlights, and cut the engine.

“What now?” she asked.

“I’m going to walk back to the funeral home. I’ll go through the cemetery, circle around, and approach the place from the rear.”

“We will approach it from the rear,” she said.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll wait here,” he insisted.

“No way.”

Pale light from a street lamp pierced the windshield, revealing a hard-edged determination in her face, steely resolution in her blue eyes.

Although he realized that he was going to lose the argument, Elliot said, “Be reasonable. If there’s any trouble, you might get in the way of it.”

“Now really, Elliot, talk sense. Am I the kind of woman who gets in the way?”

“There’s eight or ten inches of snow on the ground. You aren’t wearing boots.”

“Neither are you.”

“If they’ve anticipated us, set a trap at the funeral home—”

“Then you might need my help,” she said. “And if they haven’t set a trap, I’ve got to be there when you question Bellicosti.”

“Tina, we’re just wasting time sitting here—”

“Wasting time. Exactly. I’m glad you see it my way.” She opened her door and climbed out of the car.

He knew then, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he loved her.

Stuffing the silencer-equipped pistol into one of his deep coat pockets, he got out of the Chevy. He didn’t lock the doors, because it was possible that he and Tina would need to get into the car in a hurry when they returned.

In the graveyard, the snow came up to the middle of Elliot’s calves. It soaked his trousers, caked in his socks, and melted into his shoes.

Tina, wearing rubber-soled sneakers with canvas tops, was surely as miserable as he was. But she kept pace with him, and she didn’t complain.

The raw, damp wind was stronger now than it had been a short while ago, when they’d landed at the airport. It swept through the graveyard, fluting between the headstones and the larger monuments, whispering a promise of more snow, much more than the meager flurries it now carried.

A low stone wall and a line of house-high spruce separated the cemetery from Luciano Bellicosti’s property. Elliot and Tina climbed over the wall and stood in the tree shadows, studying the rear approach to the funeral home.

Tina didn’t have to be told to remain silent. She waited beside him, arms folded, hands tucked into her armpits for warmth.

Elliot was worried about her, afraid for her, but at the same time he was glad to have her company.

The rear of Bellicosti’s house was almost a hundred yards away. Even in the dim light, Elliot could see the fringe of icicles hanging from the roof of the long back porch. A few evergreen shrubs were clustered near the house, but none was of sufficient size to conceal a man. The rear windows were blank, black; a sentry might be standing behind any of them, invisible in the darkness.

Elliot strained his eyes, trying to catch a glimpse of movement beyond the rectangles of glass, but he saw nothing suspicious.

There wasn’t much of a chance that a trap had been set for them so soon. And if assassins were waiting here, they would expect their prey to approach the funeral home boldly, confidently. Consequently, their attention would be focused largely on the front of the house.

In any case, he couldn’t stand here all night brooding about it.

He stepped from beneath the sheltering branches of the trees. Tina moved with him.

The bitter wind was a lash. It skimmed crystals of snow off the ground and spun the stinging cold flecks at their reddened faces.

Elliot felt naked as they crossed the luminescent snow field. He wished that they weren’t wearing such dark clothes. If anyone did glance out a back window, he would spot the two of them instantly.

The crunching and squeaking of the snow under their feet seemed horrendously loud to him, though they actually were making little noise. He was just jumpy.

They reached the funeral home without incident.

For a few seconds they paused, touching each other briefly, gathering their courage.

Elliot took the pistol out of his coat jacket and held it in his right hand. With his left hand, he fumbled for the two safety catches, released them. His fingers were stiff from the cold. He wondered if he’d be able to handle the weapon properly if the need arose.

They slipped around the corner of the building and moved stealthily toward the front.

At the first window with light behind it, Elliot stopped. He motioned for Tina to stay behind him, close to the house. Cautiously he leaned forward and peeked through a narrow gap in a partly closed venetian blind. He nearly cried out in shock and alarm at what he saw inside.

A dead man. Naked. Sitting in a bathtub full of bloody water, staring at something fearsome beyond the veil between this world and the next. One arm trailed out of the tub; and on the floor, as if it had dropped out of his fingers, was a razor blade.

Elliot stared into the flat dead gaze of the pasty-faced corpse, and he knew that he was looking at Luciano Bellicosti. He also knew that the funeral director had not killed himself. The poor man’s blue-lipped mouth hung in a permanent gape, as if he were trying to deny all of the accusations of suicide that were to come.

Elliot wanted to take Tina by the arm and hustle her back to the car. But she sensed that he’d seen something important, and she wouldn’t go easily until she knew what it was. She pushed in front of him. He kept one hand on her back as she leaned toward the window, and he felt her go rigid when she glimpsed the dead man. When she turned to Elliot again, she was clearly ready to get the hell out of there, without questions, without argument, without the slightest delay.

They had taken only two steps from the window when Elliot saw the snow move no more than twenty feet from them. It wasn’t the gauzy, insubstantial stirring of windblown flakes, but an unnatural and purposeful rising of an entire mound of white. Instinctively he whipped the pistol in front of him and squeezed off four rounds. The silencer was so effective that the shots could not be heard above the brittle, papery rustle of the wind.

Crouching low, trying to make as small a target of himself as possible, Elliot ran to where he had seen the snow move. He found a man dressed in a white, insulated ski suit. The stranger had been lying in the snow, watching them, waiting; now he had a wet hole in his chest. And a chunk of his throat was gone. Even in the dim, illusory light from the surrounding snow, Elliot could see that the sentry’s eyes were fixed in the same unseeing gaze that Bellicosti was even now directing at the bathroom window.

At least one killer would be in the house with Bellicosti’s corpse. Probably more than one.

At least one man had been waiting out here in the snow.

How many others?

Where?

Elliot scanned the night, his heart clutching up. He expected to see the entire white-shrouded lawn begin to move and rise in the forms of ten, fifteen, twenty other assassins.

But all was still.

He was briefly immobilized, dazed by his own ability to strike so fast and so violently. A warm, animal satisfaction rose in him, which was not an entirely welcome feeling, for he liked to think of himself as a civilized man. At the same time, he was hit by a wave of revulsion. His throat tightened, and a sour taste suddenly overwhelmed him. He turned his back on the man whom he had killed.

Tina was a pale apparition in the snow. “They know we’re in Reno,” she whispered. “They even knew we were coming here.”

“But they expected us through the front door.” He took her by the arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

They hurriedly retraced their path, moving away from the funeral home. With every step he took, Elliot expected to hear a shot fired, a cry of alarm, and the sounds of men in pursuit of quarry.

He helped Tina over the cemetery wall, and then, clambering after her, he was sure that someone grabbed his coat from behind. He gasped, jerked loose. When he was across the wall, he looked back, but he couldn’t see anyone.

Evidently the people in the funeral home were not aware that their man outside had been eliminated. They were still waiting patiently for their prey to walk into the trap.

Elliot and Tina rushed between the tombstones, kicking up clouds of snow. Twin plumes of crystallized breath trailed behind them, like ghosts.

When they were nearly halfway across the graveyard, when Elliot was positive they weren’t being pursued, he stopped, leaned against a tall monument, and tried not to take such huge, deep gulps of the painfully cold air. An image of his victim’s torn throat exploded in his memory, and a shock wave of nausea overwhelmed him.

Tina put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“I killed him.”

“If you hadn’t, he would have killed us.”

“I know. Just the same… it makes me sick.”

“I would have thought… when you were in the army…”

“Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah, I’ve killed before. But like you said, that was in the army. This wasn’t the same. That was soldiering. This was murder.” He shook his head to clear it. “I’ll be okay.” He tucked the pistol into his coat pocket again. “It was just the shock.”

They embraced, and then she said, “If they knew we were flying to Reno, why didn’t they follow us from the airport? Then they would have known we weren’t going to walk in the front door of Bellicosti’s place.”

“Maybe they figured I’d spot a tail and be spooked by it. And I guess they were so sure of where we were headed, they didn’t think it was necessary to keep a close watch on us. They figured there wasn’t anywhere else we could go but Bellicosti’s funeral home.”

“Let’s get back to the car. I’m freezing.”

“Me too. And we better get out of the neighborhood before they find that guy in the snow.”

They followed their own footprints out of the cemetery, to the quiet residential street where the rented Chevrolet was parked in the wan light of the street lamp.

As Elliot was opening the driver’s door, he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, and he looked up, already sure of what he would see. A white Ford sedan had just turned the corner, moving slowly. It drifted to the curb and braked abruptly. Two doors opened, and a pair of tall, darkly dressed men climbed out.

Elliot recognized them for what they were. He got into the Chevy, slammed the door, and jammed the key into the ignition.

“We have been followed,” Tina said.

“Yeah.” He switched on the engine and threw the car in gear. “A transponder. They must have just now homed in on it.”

He didn’t hear a shot, but a bullet shattered the rear side window behind his head and slammed into the back of the front seat, spraying gummy bits of safety glass through the car.

“Head down!” Elliot shouted.

He glanced back.

The two men were approaching at a run, slipping on the snows-potted pavement.

Elliot stamped on the accelerator. Tires squealing, he pulled the Chevy away from the curb, into the street.

Two slugs ricocheted off the body of the car, each trailing away with a brief, high-pitched whine.

Elliot hunched low over the wheel, expecting a bullet through the rear window. At the corner, he ignored the stop sign and swung the car hard to the left, only tapping the brakes once, severely testing the Chevy’s suspension.

Tina raised her head, glanced at the empty street behind them, then looked at Elliot. “Transponder. What’s that? You mean we’re bugged? Then we’ll have to abandon the car, won’t we?”

“Not until we’ve gotten rid of those clowns on our tail,” he said. “If we abandon the car with them so close, they’ll run us down fast. We can’t get away on foot.”

“Then what?”

They arrived at another intersection, and he whipped the car to the right. “After I turn the next corner, I’ll stop and get out. You be ready to slide over and take the wheel.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll fade back into the shrubbery and wait for them to come around the corner after us. You drive on down the street, but not too fast. Give them a chance to see you when they turn into the street. They’ll be looking at you, and they won’t see me.”

“We shouldn’t split up.”

“It’s the only way.”

“But what if they get you?”

“They won’t.”

“I’d be alone then.”

“They won’t get me. But you have to move fast. If we stop for more than a couple of seconds, it’ll show up on their receiver, and they might get suspicious.”

He swung right at the intersection and stopped in the middle of the new street.

“Elliot, don’t—”

“No choice.” He flung open the door and scrambled out of the car. “Hurry, Tina!”

He slammed the car door and ran to a row of evergreen shrubs that bordered the front lawn of a low, brick, ranch-style house. Crouching beside one of those bushes, huddling in the shadows just beyond the circle of frosty light from a nearby street lamp, he pulled the pistol out of his coat pocket while Tina drove away.

As the sound of the Chevy faded, he could discern the roar of another vehicle, approaching fast. A few seconds later the white sedan raced into the intersection.

Elliot stood, extending the pistol in both hands, and snapped off three quick rounds. The first two clanged through sheet metal, but the third punctured the right front tire.

The Ford had rounded the corner too fast. Jolted by the blowout, the car careened out of control. It spun across the street, jumped the curb, crashed through a hedge, destroyed a plaster birdbath, and came to rest in the middle of a snow-blanketed lawn.

Elliot ran toward the Chevy, which Tina had brought to a stop a hundred yards away. It seemed more like a hundred miles. His pounding footsteps were as thunderous as drumbeats in the quiet night air. At last he reached the car. She had the door open. He leaped in and pulled the door shut. “Go, go!”

She tramped the accelerator into the floorboards, and the car responded with a shudder, then a surge of power.

When they had gone two blocks, he said, “Turn right at the next corner.” After two more turns and another three blocks, he said, “Pull it to the curb. I want to find the bug they planted on us.”

“But they can’t follow us now,” she said.

“They’ve still got a receiver. They can watch our progress on that, even if they can’t get their hands on us till another chase car catches up. I don’t even want them to know what direction we went.”

She stopped the car, and he got out. He felt along the inner faces of the fenders, around the tire wells, where a transponder could have been stuck in place quickly and easily. Nothing. The front bumper was clean too. Finally he located the electronics package: The size of a pack of cigarettes, it was fixed magnetically to the underside of the rear bumper. He wrenched it loose, stomped it repeatedly underfoot, and pitched it away.

In the car again, with the doors locked and the engine running and the heater operating full-blast, they sat in stunned silence, basking in the warm air, but shivering nonetheless.

Eventually Tina said, “My God, they move fast!”

“We’re still one step ahead of them,” Elliot said shakily.

“Half a step.”

“That’s probably more like it,” he admitted.

“Bellicosti was supposed to give us the information we need to interest a topnotch reporter in the case.”

“Not now.”

“So how do we get that information?”

“Somehow,” he said vaguely.

“How do we build our case?”

“We’ll think of something.”

“Who do we turn to next?”

“It isn’t hopeless, Tina.”

“I didn’t say it was. But where do we go from here?”

“We can’t work it out tonight,” he said wearily. “Not in our condition. We’re both wiped out, operating on sheer desperation. That’s dangerous. The best decision we can make is to make no decisions at all. We’ve got to hole up and get some rest. In the morning we’ll have clearer heads, and the answers will all seem obvious.”

“You think you can actually sleep?”

“Hell, yes. It’s been a hard day’s night.”

“Where will we be safe?”

“We’ll try the purloined letter trick,” Elliot said. “Instead of sneaking around to some out-of-the-way motel, we’ll march right into one of the best hotels in town.”

“Harrah’s?”

“Exactly. They won’t expect us to be that bold. They’ll be searching for us everywhere else.”

“It’s risky.”

“Can you think of anything better?”

“No.”

“Everything is risky.”

“All right. Let’s do it.”

She drove into the heart of town. They abandoned the Chevrolet in a public parking lot, four blocks from Harrah’s.

“I wish we didn’t have to give up the car,” Tina said as he took their only suitcase out of the trunk.

“They’ll be looking for it.”

They walked to Harrah’s Hotel along windy, neon-splashed streets. Even at 1:45 in the morning, as they passed the entrances to casinos, loud music and laughter and the ringing of slot machines gushed forth, not a merry sound at that hour, a regurgitant noise.

Although Reno didn’t jump all night with quite the same energy as Las Vegas, and although many tourists had gone to bed, the casino at Harrah’s was still relatively busy. A young sailor apparently had a run going at one of the craps tables, and a crowd of excited gamblers urged him to roll an eight and make his point.

On this holiday weekend the hotel was officially booked to capacity; however, Elliot knew accommodations were always available. At the request of its casino manager, every hotel held a handful of rooms off the market, just in case a few regular customers — high rollers, of course — showed up by surprise, with no advance notice, but with fat bankrolls and no place to stay. In addition, some reservations were canceled at the last minute, and there were always a few no-shows. A neatly folded pair of twenty-dollar bills, placed without ostentation into the hand of a front-desk clerk, was almost certain to result in the timely discovery of a forgotten vacancy.

When Elliot was informed that a room was available, after all, for two nights, he signed the registration card as “Hank Thomas,” a slight twist on the name of one of his favorite movie stars; he entered a phony Seattle address too. The clerk requested ID or a major credit card, and Elliot told a sad story of being victimized by a pickpocket at the airport. Unable to prove his identity, he was required to pay for both nights in advance, which he did, taking the money from a wad of cash he’d stuck in his pocket rather than from the wallet that supposedly had been stolen.

He and Tina were given a spacious, pleasantly decorated room on the ninth floor.

After the bellman left, Elliot engaged the deadbolt, hooked the security chain in place, and firmly wedged the heavy straight-backed desk chair under the knob.

“It’s like a prison,” Tina said.

“Except we’re locked in, and the killers are running around loose on the outside.”

A short time later, in bed, they held each other close, but neither of them had sex in mind. They wanted nothing more than to touch and to be touched, to confirm for each other that they were still alive, to feel safe and protected and cherished. Theirs was an animal need for affection and companionship, a reaction to the death and destruction that had filled the day. After encountering so many people with so little respect for human life, they needed to convince themselves that they really were more than dust in the wind.

After a few minutes he said, “You were right.”

“About what?”

“About what you said last night, in Vegas.”

“Refresh my memory.”

“You said I was enjoying the chase.”

“A part of you… deep down inside. Yes, I think that’s true.”

“I know it is,” he said. “I can see it now. I didn’t want to believe it at first.”

“Why not? I didn’t mean it negatively.”

“I know you didn’t. It’s just that for more than fifteen years, I’ve led a very ordinary life, a workaday life. I was convinced I no longer needed or wanted the kind of thrills that I thrived on when I was younger.”

“I don’t think you do need or want them,” Tina said. “But now that you’re in real danger again for the first time in years, a part of you is responding to the challenge. Like an old athlete back on the playing field after a long absence, testing his reflexes, taking pride in the fact that his old skills are still there.”

“It’s more than that,” Elliot said. “I think… deep down, I got a sick sort of thrill when I killed that man.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“I’m not. In fact, maybe the thrill wasn’t so deep down. Maybe it was really pretty near the surface.”

“You should be glad you killed that bastard,” she said softly, squeezing his hand.

“Should I?”

“Listen, if I could get my hands on the people who’re trying to keep us from finding Danny, I wouldn’t have any compunctions about killing them. None at all. I might even take a certain pleasure in it. I’m a mother lion, and they’ve stolen my cub. Maybe killing them is the most natural, admirable thing I could do.”

“So there’s a bit of the beast in all of us. Is that it?”

“It’s not just me that has a savage trapped inside.”

“But does that make it any more acceptable?”

“What’s to accept?” she asked. “It’s the way God made us. It’s the way we were meant to be, so who’s to say it isn’t right?”

“Maybe.”

“If a man kills only for the pleasure of it, or if he kills only for an ideal like some of these crackpot revolutionaries you read about, that’s savagery… or madness. What you’ve done is altogether different. Self-preservation is one of the most powerful drives God gave us. We’re built to survive, even if we have to kill someone in order to do it.”

They were silent for a while. Then he said, “Thank you.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You listened.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Kurt Hensen, George Alexander’s right-hand man, dozed through the rough flight from Las Vegas to Reno. They were in a ten-passenger jet that belonged to the Network, and the aircraft took a battering from the high-altitude winds that blew across its assigned flight corridor. Hensen, a powerfully built man with white-blond hair and cat-yellow eyes, was afraid of flying. He could only manage to get on a plane after he had medicated himself. As usual he nodded off minutes after the aircraft lifted from the runway.

George Alexander was the only other passenger. He considered the requisitioning of this executive jet to be one of his most important accomplishments in the three years that he had been chief of the Nevada bureau of the Network. Although he spent more than half his time working in his Las Vegas office, he often had reason to fly to far points at the spur of the moment: Reno, Elko, even out of the state to Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah. During the first year, he’d taken commercial flights or rented the services of a trustworthy private pilot who could fly the conventional twin-engine craft that Alexander’s predecessor had managed to pry out of the Network’s budget. But it had seemed absurd and shortsighted of the director to force a man of Alexander’s position to travel by such relatively primitive means. His time was enormously valuable to the country; his work was sensitive and often required urgent decisions based upon first-hand examination of information to be found only in distant places. After long and arduous lobbying of the director, Alexander had at last been awarded this small jet; and immediately he put two full-time pilots, ex-military men, on the payroll of the Nevada bureau.

Sometimes the Network pinched pennies to its disadvantage. And George Lincoln Stanhope Alexander, who was an heir to both the fortune of the Pennsylvania Alexanders and to the enormous wealth of the Delaware Stanhopes, had absolutely no patience with people who were penurious.

It was true that every dollar had to count, for every dollar of the Network’s budget was difficult to come by. Because its existence must be kept secret, the organization was funded out of misdirected appropriations meant for other government agencies. Three billion dollars, the largest single part of the Network’s yearly budget, came from the Department of Health and Welfare. The Network had a deep-cover agent named Jacklin in the highest policymaking ranks of the Health bureaucracy. It was Jacklin’s job to conceive new welfare programs, convince the Secretary of Health and Welfare that those programs were needed, sell them to the Congress, and then establish convincing bureaucratic shells to conceal the fact that the programs were utterly phony; and as federal funds flowed to these false-front operations, the money was diverted to the Network. Chipping three billion out of Health was the least risky of the Network’s funding operations, for Health was so gigantic that it never missed such a petty sum. The Department of Defense, which was less flush than Health and Welfare these days, was nevertheless also guilty of waste, and it was good for at least another billion a year. Lesser amounts, ranging from only one hundred million to as much as half a billion, were secretly extracted from the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, and other government bodies on an annual basis.

The Network was financed with some difficulty, to be sure, but it was undeniably well funded. An executive jet for the chief of the vital Nevada bureau was not an extravagance, and Alexander believed his improved performance over the past year had convinced the old man in Washington that this was money well spent.

Alexander was proud of the importance of his position. But he was also frustrated because so few people were aware of his great importance.

At times he envied his father and his uncles. Most of them had served their country openly, in a supremely visible fashion, where everyone could see and admire their selfless public-spiritedness. Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, the Ambassador to France… in positions of that nature, a man was appreciated and respected.

George, on the other hand, hadn’t filled a post of genuine stature and authority until six years ago, when he was thirty-six. During his twenties and early thirties, he had labored at a variety of lesser jobs for the government. These diplomatic and intelligence-gathering assignments were never an insult to his family name, but they were always minor postings to embassies in smaller countries like Iceland and Ecuador and Tonga, nothing for which The New York Times would deign to acknowledge his existence.

Then, six years ago, the Network had been formed, and the President had given George the task of developing a reliable South American bureau of the new intelligence agency. That had been exciting, challenging, important work. George had been directly responsible for the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars and, eventually, for the control of hundreds of agents in a dozen countries. After three years the President had declared himself delighted with the accomplishments in South America, and he had asked George to take charge of one of the Network’s domestic bureaus — Nevada — which had been terribly mismanaged. This slot was one of the half-dozen most powerful in the Network’s executive hierarchy. George was encouraged by the President to believe that eventually he would be promoted to the bureau chief of the entire western half of the country — and then all the way to the top, if only he could get the floundering western division functioning as smoothly as the South American and Nevada offices. In time he would take the director’s chair in Washington and would bear full responsibility for all domestic and foreign intelligence operations. With that title he would be one of the most powerful men in the United States, more of a force to be reckoned with than any mere Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense could hope to be.

But he couldn’t tell anyone about his achievements. He could never hope to receive the public acclaim and honor that had been heaped upon other men in his family. The Network was clandestine and must remain clandestine if it was to have any value. At least half of the people who worked for it did not even realize it existed; some thought they were employed by the FBI; others were sure they worked for the CIA; and still others believed that they were in the hire of various branches of the Treasury Department, including the Secret Service. None of those people could compromise the Network. Only bureau chiefs, their immediate staffs, station chiefs in major cities, and senior field officers who had proved themselves and their loyalty — only those people knew the true nature of their employers and their work. The moment that the news media became aware of the Network’s existence, all was lost.

As he sat in the dimly lighted cabin of the fan-jet and watched the clouds racing below, Alexander wondered what his father and his uncles would say if they knew that his service to his country had often required him to issue kill orders. More shocking still to the sensibilities of patrician Easterners like them: on three occasions, in South America, Alexander had been in a position where it had been necessary for him to pull the assassin’s trigger himself. He had enjoyed those murders so immensely, had been so profoundly thrilled by them, that he had, by choice, performed the executioner’s role on half a dozen other assignments. What would the elder Alexanders, the famous statesmen, think if they knew he’d soiled his hands with blood? As for the fact that it was sometimes his job to order other men to kill, he supposed his family would understand. The Alexanders were all idealists when they were discussing the way things ought to be, but they were also hardheaded pragmatists when dealing with the way things actually were. They knew that the worlds of domestic military security and international espionage were not children’s playgrounds. George liked to believe that they might even find it in their hearts to forgive him for having pulled the trigger himself.

After all, he had never killed an ordinary citizen or a person of real worth. His targets had always been spies, traitors; more than a few of them had been cold-blooded killers themselves. Scum. He had only killed scum. It wasn’t a pretty job, but it also wasn’t without a measure of real dignity and heroism. At least that was the way George saw it; he thought of himself as heroic. Yes, he was sure that his father and uncles would give him their blessings — if only he were permitted to tell them.

The jet hit an especially bad patch of turbulence. It yawed, bounced, shuddered.

Kurt Hensen snorted in his sleep but didn’t wake.

When the plane settled down once more, Alexander looked out the window at the milky-white, moonlit, feminine roundness of the clouds below, and he thought of the Evans woman. She was quite lovely. Her file folder was on the seat beside him. He picked it up, opened it, and stared at her photograph. Quite lovely indeed. He decided he would kill her himself when the time came, and that thought gave him an instant erection.

He enjoyed killing. He didn’t try to pretend otherwise with himself, no matter what face he had to present to the world. All of his life, for reasons he had never been able to fully ascertain, he had been fascinated by death, intrigued by the form and nature and possibilities of it, enthralled by the study and theory of its meaning. He considered himself a messenger of death, a divinely appointed headsman. Murder was, in many ways, more thrilling to him than sex. His taste for violence would not have been tolerated for long in the old FBI — perhaps not even in the new, thoroughly politicized FBI — or in many other congressionally monitored police agencies. But in this unknown organization, in this secret and incomparably cozy place, he thrived.

He closed his eyes and thought about Christina Evans.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

In Tina’s dream, Danny was at the far end of a long tunnel. He was in chains, sitting in the center of a small, well-lighted cavern, but the passageway that led to him was shadowy and reeked of danger. Danny called to her again and again, begging her to save him before the roof of his underground prison caved in and buried him alive. She started down the tunnel toward him, determined to get him out of there — and something reached for her from a narrow cleft in the wall. She was peripherally aware of a soft, firelike glow from beyond the cleft, and of a mysterious figure silhouetted against that reddish backdrop. She turned, and she was looking into the grinning face of Death, as if he were peering out at her from the bowels of Hell. The crimson eyes. The shriveled flesh. The lacework of maggots on his cheek. She cried out, but then she saw that Death could not quite reach her. The hole in the wall was not wide enough for him to step through, into her passageway; he could only thrust one arm at her, and his long, bony fingers were an inch or two short of her. Danny began calling again, and she continued down the dusky tunnel toward him. A dozen times she passed chinks in the wall, and Death glared out at her from every one of those apertures, screamed and cursed and raged at her, but none of the holes was large enough to allow him through. She reached Danny, and when she touched him, the chains fell magically away from his arms and legs. She said, “I was scared.” And Danny said, “I made the holes in the walls smaller. I made sure he couldn’t reach you, couldn’t hurt you.”

At eight-thirty Friday morning Tina came awake, smiling and excited. She shook Elliot until she woke him.

Blinking sleepily, he sat up. “What’s wrong?”

“Danny just sent me another dream.”

Taking in her broad smile, he said, “Obviously, it wasn’t the nightmare.”

“Not at all. Danny wants us to come to him. He wants us just to walk into the place where they’re keeping him and take him out.”

“We’d be killed before we could reach him. We can’t just charge in like the cavalry. We’ve got to use the media and the courts to free him.”

“I don’t think so.”

“The two of us can’t fight the entire organization that’s behind Kennebeck plus the staff of some secret military research center.”

“Danny’s going to make it safe for us,” she said confidently. “He’s going to use this power of his to help us get in there.”

“That isn’t possible.”

“You said you believed.”

“I do,” Elliot said, yawning and stretching elaborately. “I do believe. But… how can he help us? How can he guarantee our safety?”

“I don’t know. But that’s what he was telling me in the dream. I’m sure of it.”

She recounted the dream in detail, and Elliot admitted that her interpretation wasn’t strained.

“But even if Danny could somehow get us in,” he said, “we don’t know where they’re keeping him. This secret installation could be anywhere. And maybe it doesn’t even exist. And if it does exist, they might not be holding him there anyway.”

“It exists, and that’s where he is,” she said, trying to sound more certain than she actually was.

She was within reach of Danny. She felt almost as if she had him in her arms again, and she didn’t want anyone to tell her that he might be a hair’s breadth beyond her grasp.

“Okay,” Elliot said, wiping at the corners of his sleep-matted eyes. “Let’s say this secret installation exists. That doesn’t help us a whole hell of a lot. It could be anywhere in those mountains.”

“No,” she said. “It has to be within a few miles of where Jaborski intended to go with the scouts.”

“Okay. That’s probably true. But that covers a hell of a lot of rugged terrain. We couldn’t begin to conduct a thorough search of it.”

Tina’s confidence couldn’t be shaken. “Danny will pinpoint it for us.”

“Danny’s going to tell us where he is?”

“He’s going to try, I think. I sensed that in the dream.”

“How’s he going to do it?”

“I don’t know. But I have this feeling that if we just find some way… some means of focusing his energy, channeling it…”

“Such as?”

She stared at the tangled bedclothes as if she were searching for inspiration in the creases of the linens. Her expression would have been appropriate to the face of a gypsy fortune-teller peering with a clairvoyant frown at tea leaves.

“Maps!” she said suddenly.

“What?”

“Don’t they publish terrain maps of the wilderness areas? Backpackers and other nature lovers would need them. Not minutely detailed things. Basically maps that show the lay of the land — hills, valleys, the courses of rivers and streams, footpaths, abandoned logging trails, that sort of thing. I’m sure Jaborski had maps. I know he did. I saw them at the parent-son scout meeting when he explained why the trip would be perfectly safe.”

“I suppose any sporting-goods store in Reno ought to have maps of at least the nearest parts of the Sierras.”

“Maybe if we can get a map and spread it out… well, maybe Danny will find a way to show us exactly where he is.”

“How?”

“I’m not sure yet.” She threw back the covers and got out of bed. “Let’s get the maps first. We’ll worry about the rest of it later. Come on. Let’s get showered and dressed. The stores will be open in an hour or so.”

Because of the foul-up at the Bellicosti place, George Alexander didn’t get to bed until five-thirty Friday morning. Still furious with his subordinates for letting Stryker and the woman escape again, he had difficulty getting to sleep. He finally nodded off around 7:00 A.M.

At ten o’clock he was awakened by the telephone. The director was calling from Washington. They used an electronic scrambling device, so they could speak candidly, and the old man was furious and characteristically blunt.

As Alexander endured the director’s accusations and demands, he realized that his own future with the Network was at stake. If he failed to stop Stryker and the Evans woman, his dream of assuming the director’s chair in a few years would never become a reality.

After the old man hung up, Alexander called his own office, in no mood to be told that Elliot Stryker and Christina Evans were still at large. But that was exactly what he heard. He ordered men pulled off other jobs and assigned to the manhunt.

“I want them found before another day passes,” Alexander said. “That bastard’s killed one of us now. He can’t get away with that. I want him eliminated. And the bitch with him. Both of them. Dead.”

Chapter Thirty

Two sporting-goods stores and two gun shops were within easy walking distance of the hotel. The first sporting-goods dealer did not carry the maps, and although the second usually had them, it was currently sold out. Elliot and Tina found what they needed in one of the gun shops: a set of twelve wilderness maps of the Sierras, designed with backpackers and hunters in mind. The set came in a leatherette-covered case and sold for a hundred dollars.

Back in the hotel room, they opened one of the maps on the bed, and Elliot said, “Now what?”

For a moment Tina considered the problem. Then she went to the desk, opened the center drawer, and withdrew a folder of hotel stationery. In the folder was a cheap plastic ballpoint pen with the hotel name on it. With the pen, she returned to the bed and sat beside the open map.

She said, “People who believe in the occult have a thing they call ‘automatic writing.’ Ever hear of it?”

“Sure. Spirit writing. A ghost supposedly guides your hand to deliver a message from beyond. Always sounded like the worst sort of bunkum to me.”

“Well, bunkum or not, I’m going to try something like that. Except, I don’t need a ghost to guide my hand. I’m hoping Danny can do it.”

“Don’t you have to be in a trance, like a medium at a seance?”

“I’m just going to completely relax, make myself open and receptive. I’ll hold the pen against the map, and maybe Danny can draw the route for us.”

Elliot pulled a chair beside the bed and sat. “I don’t believe for a minute it’s going to work. Totally nuts. But I’ll be as quiet as a mouse and give it a chance.”

Tina stared at the map and tried to think of nothing but the appealing greens, blues, yellows, and pinks that the cartographers had used to indicate various types of terrain. She allowed her eyes to swim out of focus.

A minute passed.

Two minutes. Three.

She tried closing her eyes.

Another minute. Two.

Nothing.

She turned the map over and tried the other side of it.

Still nothing.

“Give me another map,” she said.

Elliot withdrew another one from the leatherette case and handed it to her. He refolded the first map as she unfolded the second.

Half an hour and five maps later, Tina’s hand suddenly skipped across the paper as if someone had bumped her arm.

She felt a peculiar pulling sensation that seemed to come from within her hand, and she stiffened in surprise.

Instantly the invasive power retreated from her.

“What was that?” Elliot asked.

“Danny. He tried.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. But he startled me, and I guess even the little bit of resistance I offered was enough to push him away. At least we know this is the right map. Let me try again.”

She put the pen at the edge of the map once more, and she let her eyes drift out of focus.

The air temperature plummeted.

She tried not to think about the chill. She tried to banish all thoughts.

Her right hand, in which she held the pen, grew rapidly colder than any other part of her. She felt the unpleasant, inner pulling again. Her fingers ached with the cold. Abruptly her hand swung across the map, then back, then described a series of circles; the pen made meaningless scrawls on the paper. After half a minute, she felt the power leave her hand again.

“No good,” she said.

The map flew into the air, as if someone had tossed it in anger or frustration.

Elliot got out of his chair and reached for the map — but it spun into the air again. It flapped noisily to the other end of the room and then back again, finally falling like a dead bird onto the floor at Elliot’s feet.

“Jesus,” he said softly. “The next time I read a story in the newspaper about some guy who says he was picked up in a flying saucer and taken on a tour of the universe, I won’t be so quick to laugh. If I see many more inanimate objects dancing around, I’m going to start believing in everything, no matter how freaky.”

Tina got up from the bed, massaging her cold right hand. “I guess I’m offering too much resistance. But it feels so weird when he takes control… I can’t help stiffening a little. I guess you were right about needing to be in a trance.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you with that. I’m a good cook, but I’m not a hypnotist.”

She blinked. “Hypnosis! Of course! That’ll probably do the trick.”

“Maybe it will. But where do you expect to find a hypnotist? The last time I looked, they weren’t setting up shops on street corners.”

“Billy Sandstone,” she said.

“Who?”

“He’s a hypnotist. He lives right here in Reno. He has a stage act. It’s a brilliant act. I wanted to use him in Magyck!, but he was tied up in an exclusive contract with a chain of Reno-Tahoe hotels. If you can get hold of Billy, he can hypnotize me. Then maybe I’ll be relaxed enough to make this automatic writing work.”

“Do you know his phone number?”

“No. And it’s probably not listed. But I do know his agent’s number. I can get through to him that way.”

She hurried to the telephone.

Chapter Thirty-One

Billy Sandstone was in his late thirties, as small and lean as a jockey, and his watchword seemed to be “neatness.” His shoes shone like black mirrors. The creases in his slacks were as sharp as blades, and his blue sport shirt was starched, crisp. His hair was razor-cut, and he groomed his mustache so meticulously that it almost appeared to have been painted on his upper lip.

Billy’s dining room was neat too. The table, the chairs, the credenza, and the hutch all glowed warmly because of the prodigious amount of furniture polish that had been buffed into the wood with even more vigor than he had employed when shining his dazzling shoes. Fresh roses were arranged in a cut-crystal vase in the center of the table, and clean lines of light gleamed in the exquisite glass. The draperies hung in perfectly measured folds. An entire battalion of nitpickers and fussbudgets would be hard-pressed to find a speck of dust in this room.

Elliot and Tina spread the map on the table and sat down across from each other.

Billy said, “Automatic writing is bunk, Christina. You must know that.”

“I do, Billy. I know that.”

“Well, then—”

“But I want you to hypnotize me anyway.”

“You’re a levelheaded person, Tina,” Billy said. “This really doesn’t seem like you.”

“I know,” she said.

“If you’d just tell me why. If you’d tell me what this is all about, maybe I could help you better.”

“Billy,” she said, “if I tried to explain, we would be here all afternoon.”

“Longer,” Elliot said.

“And we don’t have much time,” Tina said. “A lot’s at stake here, Billy. More than you can imagine.”

They hadn’t told him anything about Danny. Sandstone didn’t have the faintest idea why they were in Reno or what they were seeking in the mountains.

Elliot said, “I’m sure this seems ridiculous, Billy. You’re probably wondering if I’m some sort of lunatic. You’re wondering if maybe I’ve messed with Tina’s mind.”

“Which definitely isn’t the case,” Tina said.

“Right,” Elliot said. “Her mind was messed up before I ever met her.”

The joke seemed to relax Sandstone, as Elliot had hoped it would. Lunatics and just plain irrational people didn’t intentionally try to amuse.

Elliot said, “I assure you, Billy, we haven’t lost our marbles. And this is a matter of life and death.”

“It really is,” Tina said.

“Okay,” Billy said. “You don’t have time to tell me about it now. I’ll accept that. But will you tell me one day when you aren’t in such a damn rush?”

“Absolutely,” Tina said. “I’ll tell you everything. Just please, please, put me in a trance.”

“All right,” Billy Sandstone said.

He was wearing a gold signet ring. He turned it around, so the face of it was on the wrong side — the palm side — of his finger. He held his hand in front of Tina’s eyes.

“Keep your eyes on the ring and listen only to my voice.”

“Wait a second,” she said.

She pulled the cap off the red felt-tip pen that Elliot had purchased at the hotel newsstand just before they’d caught a taxi to Sandstone’s house. Elliot had suggested a change in the color of ink, so they would be able to tell the difference between the meaningless scribbles that were already on the map and any new marks that might be made.

Putting the point of the pen to the paper, Tina said, “Okay, Billy. Do your stuff.”

Elliot was not sure when Tina slipped under the hypnotist’s spell, and he had no idea how this smooth mesmerism was accomplished. All Sandstone did was move one hand slowly back and forth in front of Tina’s face, simultaneously speaking to her in a quiet, rhythmic voice, frequently using her name.

Elliot almost fell into a trance himself. He blinked his eyes and tuned out Sandstone’s melodious voice when he realized that he was succumbing to it.

Tina stared vacantly into space.

The hypnotist lowered his hand and turned his ring around as it belonged. “You’re in a deep sleep, Tina.”

“Yes.”

“Your eyes are open, but you are in a deep, deep sleep.”

“Yes.”

“You will stay in that deep sleep until I tell you to wake up. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“You will remain relaxed and receptive.”

“Yes.”

“Nothing will startle you.”

“No.”

“You aren’t really involved in this. You’re just the method of transmission — like a telephone.”

“Telephone,” she said thickly.

“You will remain totally passive until you feel the urge to use the pen in your hand.”

“All right.”

“When you feel the urge to use the pen, you will not resist it. You will flow with it. Understood?”

“Yes.”

“You will not be bothered by anything Elliot and I say to each other. You will respond to me only when I speak directly to you. Understood?”

“Yes.”

“Now… open yourself to whoever wants to speak through you.”

They waited.

A minute passed, then another.

Billy Sandstone watched Tina intently for a while, but at last he shifted impatiently in his chair. He looked at Elliot and said, “I don’t think this spirit writing stuff is—”

The map rustled, drawing their attention. The corners curled and uncurled, curled and uncurled, again and again, like the pulse of a living thing.

The air was colder.

The map stopped curling. The rustling ceased.

Tina lowered her gaze from the empty air to the map, and her hand began to move. It didn’t swoop and dart uncontrollably this time; it crept carefully, hesitantly across the paper, leaving a thin red line of ink like a thread of blood.

Sandstone was rubbing his hands up and down his arms to ward off the steadily deepening chill that had gripped the room. Frowning, glancing up at the heating vents, he started to get out of his chair.

Elliot said, “Don’t bother checking the air-conditioning. It isn’t on. And the heat hasn’t failed either.”

“What?”

“The cold comes from the… spirit,” Elliot said, deciding to stick with the occult terminology, not wanting to get bogged down in the real story about Danny.

“Spirit?”

“Yes.”

“Whose spirit?”

“Could be anyone’s.”

“Are you serious?”

“Pretty much.”

Sandstone stared at him as if to say, You’re nuts, but are you dangerous?

Elliot pointed to the map. “See?”

As Tina’s hand moved slowly over the paper, the corners of the map began to curl and uncurl again.

“How is she doing that?” Sandstone asked.

“She isn’t.”

“The ghost, I suppose.”

“That’s right.”

An expression of pain settled over Billy’s face, as if he were suffering genuine physical discomfort because of Elliot’s belief in ghosts. Apparently Billy liked his view of the world to be as neat and uncluttered as everything else about him; if he started believing in ghosts, he’d have to reconsider his opinions about a lot of other things too, and then life would become intolerably messy.

Elliot sympathized with the hypnotist. Right now he longed for the rigidly structured routine of the law office, the neatly ordered paragraphs of legal casebooks, and the timeless rules of the courtroom.

Tina let the pen drop from her fingers. She lifted her gaze from the map. Her eyes remained unfocused.

“Are you finished?” Billy asked her.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

With a few simple sentences and a sharp clap of his hands, the hypnotist brought her out of the trance.

She blinked in confusion, then glanced down at the route that she had marked on the map. She smiled at Elliot. “It worked. By God, it worked!”

“Apparently it did.”

She pointed to the terminus of the red line. “That’s where he is, Elliot. That’s where they’re keeping him.”

“It’s not going to be easy getting into country like that,” Elliot said.

“We can do it. We’ll need good, insulated outdoor clothes. Boots. Snowshoes in case we have to walk very far in open country. Do you know how to use snowshoes? It can’t be that hard.”

“Hold on,” Elliot said. “I’m still not convinced your dream meant what you think it did. Based on what you said happened in it, I don’t see how you reach the conclusion that Danny’s going to help us get into the installation. We might get to this place and find we can’t slip around its defenses.”

Billy Sandstone looked from Tina to Elliot, baffled. “Danny? Your Danny, Tina? But isn’t he—”

Tina said, “Elliot, it wasn’t only what happened in the dream that led me to this conclusion. What I felt in it was far more important. I can’t explain that part of it. The only way you could understand is if you had the dream yourself. I’m sure he was telling me that he could help us get to him.”

Elliot turned the map to be able to study it more closely.

From the head of the table, Billy said, “But isn’t Danny—”

Tina said, “Elliot, listen, I told you he would show us where he’s being kept, and he drew that route for us. So far I’m batting a thousand. I also feel he’s going to help us get into the place, and I don’t see any reason why I should strike out on that one.”

“It’s just… we’d be walking into their arms,” Elliot said.

“Whose arms?” Billy Sandstone asked.

Tina said, “Elliot, what happens if we stay here, hiding out until we can think of an alternative? How much time do we have? Not much. They’re going to find us sooner or later, and when they get their hands on us, they’ll kill us.”

“Kill?” Billy Sandstone asked. “There’s a word I don’t like. It’s right up there on the bad-word list beside broccoli.”

“We’ve gotten this far because we’ve kept moving and we’ve been aggressive,” Tina said. “If we change our approach, if we suddenly get too cautious, that’ll be our downfall, not our salvation.”

“You two sound like you’re in a war,” Billy Sandstone said uneasily.

“You’re probably right,” Elliot told Tina. “One thing I learned in the military was you have to stop and regroup your forces once in a while, but if you stop too long, the tide will turn and wash right over you.”

“Should I maybe go listen to the news?” Billy Sandstone asked. “Is there a war on? Have we invaded France?”

To Tina, Elliot said, “What else will we need besides thermal clothing, boots, and snowshoes?”

“A Jeep,” she said.

“That’s a tall order.”

“What about a tank?” Billy Sandstone asked. “Going to war, you might prefer a tank.”

Tina said, “Don’t be silly, Billy. A Jeep is all we need.”

“Just trying to be helpful, love. And thanks for remembering I exist.”

“A Jeep or an Explorer — anything with four-wheel drive,” Tina told Elliot. “We don’t want to walk farther than necessary. We don’t want to walk at all if we can help it. There must be some sort of road into the place, even if it’s well concealed. If we’re lucky, we’ll have Danny when we come out, and he probably won’t be in any condition to trek through the Sierras in the dead of winter.”

“I have an Explorer,” Billy said.

“I guess I could have some money transferred from my Vegas bank,” Elliot said. “But what if they’re watching my accounts down there? That would lead them to us fast. And since the banks are closed for the holiday, we couldn’t do anything until next week. They might find us by then.”

“What about your American Express card?” she asked.

“You mean, charge a Jeep?”

“There’s no limit on the card, is there?”

“No. But—”

“I read a newspaper story once about a guy who bought a Rolls-Royce with his card. You can do that sort of thing as long as they know for sure you’re capable of paying the entire bill when it comes due a month later.”

“It sounds crazy,” Elliot said. “But I guess we can try.”

“I have an Explorer,” Billy Sandstone said.

“Let’s get the address of the local dealership,” Tina said. “We’ll see if they’ll accept the card.”

“I have an Explorer!” Billy said.

They turned to him, startled.

“I take my act to Lake Tahoe a few weeks every winter,” Billy said. “You know what it’s like down there this time of year. Snow up to your ass. I hate flying the Tahoe-Reno shuttle. The plane’s so damn small. And you know what a ticky-tacky airport they have at Tahoe. So I usually just drive down the day before I open. An Explorer’s the only thing I’d want to take through the mountains on a bad day.”

“Are you going to Tahoe soon?” Tina asked.

“No. I don’t open until the end of the month.”

“Will you be needing the Explorer in the next couple of days?” Elliot asked.

“No.”

“Can we borrow it?”

“Well… I guess so.”

Tina leaned across the corner of the table, grabbed Billy’s head in her hands, pulled his face to hers, and kissed him. “You’re a lifesaver, Billy. And I mean that literally.”

“I’m a small circlet of hard candy?”

“Maybe things are breaking right for us,” Elliot said. “Maybe we’ll get Danny out of there after all.”

“We will,” Tina said. “I know it.”

The roses in the crystal vase twirled around like a group of spinning, redheaded ballerinas.

Startled, Billy Sandstone jumped up, knocking over his chair.

The drapes drew open, slid shut, drew open, slid shut, even though no one was near the draw cords.

The chandelier began to swing in a lazy circle, and the dangling crystals cast prismatic patterns of light on the walls.

Billy stared, open-mouthed.

Elliot knew how disoriented Billy was feeling, and he felt sorry for the man.

After half a minute all of the unnatural movement stopped, and the room rapidly grew warm again.

“How did you do that?” Billy demanded.

“We didn’t,” Tina said.

“Not a ghost,” Billy said adamantly.

“Not a ghost either,” Elliot said.

Billy said, “You can borrow the Explorer. But first you’ve got to tell me what in hell’s going on. I don’t care how much of a hurry you’re in. You can at least tell me a little of it. Otherwise, I’m going to shrivel up and die of curiosity.”

Tina consulted Elliot. “Well?”

Elliot said, “Billy, you might be better off not knowing.”

“Impossible.”

“We’re up against some damn dangerous people. If they thought you knew about them—”

“Look,” Billy said, “I’m not just a hypnotist. I’m something of a magician. That’s really what I most wanted to be, but I didn’t really have the skill for it. So I worked up this act built around hypnotism. But magic — that’s my one great love. I just have to know how you did that trick with the drapes, the roses. And the corners of the map! I just have to know.”

Earlier this morning it had occurred to Elliot that he and Tina were the only people who knew that the official story of the Sierras accident was a lie. If they were killed, the truth would die with them, and the cover-up would continue. Considering the high price that they had paid for the pathetically insufficient information they had obtained, he couldn’t tolerate the prospect of all their pain and fear and anxiety having been for naught.

Elliot said, “Billy, do you have a tape recorder?”

“Sure. It’s nothing fancy. It’s a little one I carry with me. I do some comedy lines in the act, and I use the recorder to develop new material, correct problems with my timing.”

“It doesn’t have to be fancy,” Elliot said. “Just so it works. We’ll give you a condensed version of the story behind all of this, and we’ll record it as we go. Then I’ll mail the tape to one of my law partners.” He shrugged. “Not much insurance, but better than nothing.”

“I’ll get the recorder,” Billy said, hurrying out of the dining room.

Tina folded the map.

“It’s nice to see you smiling again,” Elliot said.

“I must be crazy,” she said. “We still have dangerous work ahead of us. We’re still up against this bunch of cutthroats. We don’t know what we’ll walk into in those mountains. So why do I feel terrific all of a sudden?”

“You feel good,” Elliot said, “because we’re not running anymore. We’re going on the offensive. And foolhardy as that might be, it does a lot for a person’s self-respect.”

“Can a couple of people like us really have a chance of winning when we’re up against something as big as the government itself?”

“Well,” Elliot said, “I happen to believe that individuals are more apt to act responsibly and morally than institutions ever do, which at least puts us on the side of justice. And I also believe individuals are always smarter and better adapted to survival, at least in the long run, than any institution. Let’s just hope my philosophy doesn’t turn out to be half-baked.”

At one-thirty Kurt Hensen came into George Alexander’s office in downtown Reno. “They found the car that Stryker rented. It’s in a public lot about three blocks from here.”

“Used recently?” Alexander asked.

“No. The engine’s cold. There’s thick frost on the windows. It’s been parked there overnight.”

“He’s not stupid,” Alexander said. “He’s probably abandoned the damn thing.”

“You want to put a watch on it anyway?”

“Better do that,” Alexander said. “Sooner or later they’ll make a mistake. Coming back to the car might be it. I don’t think so. But it might.”

Hensen left the room.

Alexander took a Valium out of a tin that he carried in his jacket pocket, and he washed it down with a swallow of hot coffee, which he poured from the silver pot on his desk. This was his second pill since he’d gotten out of bed just three and a half hours ago, but he still felt edgy.

Stryker and the woman were proving to be worthy opponents.

Alexander never liked to have worthy opponents. He preferred them to be soft and easy.

Where were they?

Chapter Thirty-Two

The deciduous trees, stripped of every leaf, appeared to be charred, as if this particular winter had been more severe than others and as cataclysmic as a fire. The evergreens — pine, spruce, fir, tamarack — were flocked with snow. A brisk wind spilled over the jagged horizon under a low and menacing sky, snapping ice-hard flurries of snow against the windshield of the Explorer.

Tina was in awe of — and disquieted by — the stately forest that crowded them as they drove north on the narrowing county road. Even if she had not known that these deep woodlands harbored secrets about Danny and the deaths of the other scouts, she would have found them mysterious and unnervingly primeval.

She and Elliot had turned off Interstate 80 a quarter of an hour ago, following the route Danny had marked, circling the edge of the wilderness. On paper they were still moving along the border of the map, with a large expanse of blues and greens on their left. Shortly they would turn off the two-lane blacktop onto another road, which the map specified as “unpaved, nondirt,” whatever that was.

After leaving Billy Sandstone’s house in his Explorer, Tina and Elliot had not returned to the hotel. They shared a premonition that someone decidedly unfriendly was waiting in their room.

First they had visited a sporting-goods store, purchasing two Gore-Tex/Thermolite stormsuits, boots, snowshoes, compact tins of backpacker’s rations, cans of Sterno, and other survival gear. If the rescue attempt went smoothly, as Tina’s dream seemed to predict, they wouldn’t have any need for much of what they bought. But if the Explorer broke down in the mountains, or if another hitch developed, they wanted to be prepared for the unexpected.

Elliot also bought a hundred rounds of hollow-point ammunition for the pistol. This wasn’t insurance against the unforeseen; this was simply prudent planning for the trouble they could foresee all too well.

From the sporting-goods store they had driven out of town, west toward the mountains. At a roadside restaurant, they changed clothes in the restrooms. His insulated suit was green with white stripes; hers was white with green and black stripes. They looked like a couple of skiers on their way to the slopes.

Entering the formidable mountains, they had become aware of how soon darkness would settle over the sheltered valleys and ravines, and they had discussed the wisdom of proceeding. Perhaps they would have been smarter to turn around, go back to Reno, find another hotel room, and get a fresh start in the morning. But neither wanted to delay. Perhaps the lateness of the hour and the fading light would work against them, but approaching in the night might actually be to their advantage. The thing was — they had momentum. They both felt as if they were on a good roll, and they didn’t want to tempt fate by postponing their journey.

Now they were on a narrow county road, moving steadily higher as the valley sloped toward its northern end. Plows had kept the blacktop clean, except for scattered patches of hard-packed snow that filled the potholes, and snow was piled five or six feet high on both sides.

“Soon now,” Tina said, glancing at the map that was open on her knees.

“Lonely part of the world, isn’t it?”

“You get the feeling that civilization could be destroyed while you’re out here, and you’d never be aware of it.”

They hadn’t seen a house or other structure for two miles. They hadn’t passed another car in three miles.

Twilight descended into the winter forest, and Elliot switched on the headlights.

Ahead, on the left, a break appeared in the bank of snow that had been heaped up by the plows. When the Explorer reached this gap, Elliot swung into the turnoff and stopped. A narrow and forbidding track led into the woods, recently plowed but still treacherous. It was little more than one lane wide, and the trees formed a tunnel around it, so that after fifty or sixty feet, it disappeared into premature night. It was unpaved, but a solid bed had been built over the years by the generous and repeated application of oil and gravel.

“According to the map, we’re looking for an ‘unpaved, nondirt’ road,” Tina told him.

“I guess this is it.”

“Some sort of logging trail?”

“Looks more like the road they always take in those old movies when they’re on their way to Dracula’s castle.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“And it doesn’t help that you’re right. It does look like the road to Dracula’s castle.”

They drove onto the track, under the roof of heavy evergreen boughs, into the heart of the forest.

Chapter Thirty-Three

In the rectangular room, three stories underground, computers hummed and murmured.

Dr. Carlton Dombey, who had come on duty twenty minutes ago, sat at one of the tables against the north wall. He was studying a set of electroencephalograms and digitally enhanced sonograms and X-rays.

After a while he said, “Did you see the pictures they took of the kid’s brain this morning?”

Dr. Aaron Zachariah turned from the bank of video displays. “I didn’t know there were any.”

“Yeah. A whole new series.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Yes,” Dombey said. “The spot that showed up on the boy’s parietal lobe about six weeks ago.”

“What about it?”

“Darker, larger.”

“Then it’s definitely a malignant tumor?”

“That still isn’t clear.”

“Benign?”

“Can’t say for sure either way. The spot doesn’t have all the spectrographic characteristics of a tumor.”

“Could it be scar tissue?”

“Not exactly that.”

“Blood clot?”

“Definitely not.”

“Have we learned anything useful?”

“Maybe,” Dombey said. “I’m not sure if it’s useful or not.” He frowned. “It’s sure strange, though.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense,” Zachariah said, moving over to the table to examine the tests.

Dombey said, “According to the computer-assigned analysis, the growth is consistent with the nature of normal brain tissue.”

Zachariah stared at him. “Come again?”

“It could be a new lump of brain tissue,” Dombey told him.

“But that doesn’t make sense.”

“I know.”

“The brain doesn’t all of a sudden start growing new little nodes that nobody’s ever seen before.”

“I know.”

“Someone better run a maintenance scan on the computer. It has to be screwed up.”

“They did that this afternoon,” Dombey said, tapping a pile of printouts that lay on the table. “Everything’s supposed to be functioning perfectly.”

“Just like the heating system in that isolation chamber is functioning properly,” Zachariah said.

Still poring through the test results, stroking his mustache with one hand, Dombey said, “Listen to this… the growth rate of the parietal spot is directly proportional to the number of injections the boy’s been given. It appeared after his first series of shots six weeks ago. The more frequently the kid is reinfected, the faster the parietal spot grows.”

“Then it must be a tumor,” Zachariah said.

“Probably. They’re going to do an exploratory in the morning.”

“Surgery?”

“Yeah. Get a tissue sample for a biopsy.”

Zachariah glanced toward the observation window of the isolation chamber. “Damn, there it goes again!”

Dombey saw that the glass was beginning to cloud again.

Zachariah hurried to the window.

Dombey stared thoughtfully at the spreading frost. He said, “You know something? That problem with the window… if I’m not mistaken, it started at the same time the parietal spot first showed up on the X-rays.”

Zachariah turned to him. “So?”

“Doesn’t that strike you as coincidental?”

“That’s exactly how it strikes me. Coincidence. I fail to see any association.”

“Well… could the parietal spot have a direct connection with the frost somehow?”

“What — you think the boy might be responsible for the changes in air temperature?”

“Could he?”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you’re the one who raised the question.”

“I don’t know,” Dombey said again.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Zachariah said. “No sense at all. If you keep coming up with weird suggestions like that, I’ll have to run a maintenance check on you, Carl.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

The oil-and-gravel trail led deep into the forest. It was remarkably free of ruts and chuckholes for most of its length, although the Explorer scraped bottom a few times when the track took sudden, sharp dips.

The trees hung low, lower, lower still, until, at last, the ice-crusted evergreen boughs frequently scraped across the roof of the Explorer with a sound like fingernails being drawn down a blackboard.

They passed a few signs that told them the lane they were using was kept open for the exclusive benefit of federal and state wildlife officers and researchers. Only authorized vehicles were permitted, the signs warned.

“Could this secret installation be disguised as a wildlife research center?” Elliot wondered.

“No,” she said. “According to the map, that’s nine miles into the forest on this track. Danny’s instructions are to take a turn north, off this lane, after about five miles.”

“We’ve gone almost five miles since we left the county road,” Elliot said.

Branches scraped across the roof, and powdery snow cascaded over the windshield, onto the hood.

As the windshield wipers cast the snow aside, Tina leaned forward, squinting along the headlight beams. “Hold it! I think this is what we’re looking for.”

He was driving at only ten miles an hour, but she gave him so little warning that he passed the turnoff. He stopped, put the Explorer in reverse, and backed up twenty feet, until the headlights were shining on the trail that she had spotted.

“It hasn’t been plowed,” he said.

“But look at all the tire marks.”

“A lot of traffic’s been through here recently.”

“This is it,” Tina said confidently. “This is where Danny wants us to go.”

“It’s a damned good thing we have four-wheel drive.”

He steered off the plowed lane, onto the snowy trail. The Explorer, equipped with heavy chains on its big winter-tread tires, bit into the snow and chewed its way forward without hesitation.

The new track ran a hundred yards before rising and turning sharply to the right, around the blunt face of a ridge. When they came out of this curve, the trees fell back from the verge, and open sky lay above for the first time since they had departed the county blacktop.

Twilight was gone; night was in command.

Snow began to fall more heavily — yet ahead of them, not a single flake lay in their way. Bizarrely, the unplowed trail had led them to a paved road; steam rose from it, and sections of the pavement were even dry.

“Heat coils embedded in the surface,” Elliot said.

“Here in the middle of nowhere.”

Stopping the Explorer, he picked up the pistol from the seat between them, and he flicked off both safeties. He had loaded the depleted magazine earlier; now he jacked a bullet into the chamber. When he put the gun on the seat again, it was ready to be used.

“We can still turn back,” Tina said.

“Is that what you want to do?”

“No.”

“Neither do I.”

A hundred and fifty yards farther, they reached another sharp turn. The road descended into a gully, swung hard to the left this time, and then headed up again.

Twenty yards beyond the bend, the way was barred by a steel gate. On each side of the gate, a nine-foot-high fence, angled outward at the top and strung with wickedly sharp coils of razor wire, stretched out of sight into the forest. The top of the gate was also wrapped with razor wire.

A large sign stood to the right of the roadway, supported on two redwood posts:

“They make it sound like someone’s hunting lodge,” Tina said.

“Intentionally, I’m sure. Now what? You don’t happen to have a key card, do you?”

“Danny will help,” she said. “That’s what the dream was all about.”

“How long do we wait here?”

“Not long,” she said as the gate swung inward.

“I’ll be damned.”

The heated road stretched out of sight in the darkness.

“We’re coming, Danny,” Tina said quietly.

“What if someone else opened the gate?” Elliot asked. “What if Danny didn’t have anything to do with it? They might just be letting us in so they can trap us inside.”

“It was Danny.”

“You’re so sure.”

“Yes.”

He sighed and drove through the gate, which swung shut behind the Explorer.

The road began to climb in earnest, hugging the slopes. It was overhung by huge rock formations and by wind-sculpted cowls of snow. The single lane widened to two lanes in places and switchbacked up the ridges, through more densely packed strands of larger trees. The Explorer labored ever higher into the mountains.

The second gate was one and a half miles past the first, on a short length of straightaway, just over the brow of a hill. It was not merely a gate, but a checkpoint. A guard shack stood to the right of the road, from which the gate was controlled.

Elliot picked up the gun as he brought the Explorer to a full stop at the barrier.

They were no more than six or eight feet from the lighted shack, close enough to see the guard’s face as he scowled at them through the large window.

“He’s trying to figure out who the devil we are,” Elliot said. “He’s never seen us or the Explorer, and this isn’t the sort of place where there’s a lot of new or unexpected traffic.”

Inside the hut, the guard plucked a telephone handset from the wall.

“Damn!” Elliot said. “I’ll have to go for him.”

As Elliot started to open his door, Tina saw something that made her grab his arm. “Wait! The phone doesn’t work.”

The guard slammed the receiver down. He got to his feet, took a coat from the back of his chair, slipped into it, zippered up, and came out of the shack. He was carrying a submachine gun.

From elsewhere in the night, Danny opened the gate.

The guard stopped halfway to the Explorer and turned toward the gate when he saw it moving, unable to believe his eyes.

Elliot rammed his foot down hard on the accelerator, and the Explorer shot forward.

The guard swung the submachine gun into firing position as they swept past him.

Tina raised her hands in an involuntary and totally useless attempt to ward off the bullets.

But there were no bullets.

No torn metal. No shattered glass. No blood or pain.

They didn’t even hear gunfire.

The Explorer roared across the straightaway and careened up the slope beyond, through the tendrils of steam that rose from the black pavement.

Still no gunfire.

As they swung into another curve, Elliot wrestled with the wheel, and Tina was acutely aware that a great dark void lay beyond the shoulder of the road. Elliot held the vehicle on the pavement as they rounded the bend, and then they were out of the guard’s line of fire. For two hundred yards ahead, until the road curved once more, nothing threatening was in sight.

The Explorer dropped back to a safer speed.

Elliot said, “Did Danny do all of that?”

“He must have.”

“He jinxed the guard’s phone, opened the gate, and jammed the submachine gun. What is this kid of yours?”

As they ascended into the night, snow began to fall hard and fast in sheets of fine, dry flakes.

After a minute of thought Tina said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what he is anymore. I don’t know what’s happened to him, and I don’t understand what he’s become.”

This was an unsettling thought. She began to wonder exactly what sort of little boy they were going to find at the top of the mountain.

Chapter Thirty-Five

With glossy photographs of Christina Evans and Elliot Stryker, George Alexander’s men circulated through the hotels in downtown Reno, talking with desk clerks, bellmen, and other employees. At four-thirty they obtained a strong, positive identification from a maid at Harrah’s.

In room 918 the Network operatives discovered a cheap suitcase, dirty clothes, toothbrushes, various toiletry items — and eleven maps in a leatherette case, which Elliot and Tina, in their haste and weariness, evidently had overlooked.

Alexander was informed of the discovery at 5:05. By 5:40 everything that Stryker and the woman had left in the hotel room was brought to Alexander’s office.

When he discovered the nature of the maps, when he realized that one of them was missing, and when he discovered that the missing map was the one Stryker would need in order to find the Project Pandora labs, Alexander felt his face flush with anger and chagrin. “The nerve!”

Kurt Hensen was standing in front of Alexander’s desk, picking through the junk that had been brought over from the hotel. “What’s wrong?”

“They’ve gone into the mountains. They’re going to try to get into the laboratory,” Alexander said. “Someone, some damn turncoat on Project Pandora, must have revealed enough about its location for them to find it with just a little help. They went out and bought maps, for God’s sake!”

Alexander was enraged by the cool methodicalness that the purchase of the maps seemed to represent. Who were these two people? Why weren’t they hiding in a dark corner somewhere? Why weren’t they scared witless? Christina Evans was only an ordinary woman. An ex-showgirl! Alexander refused to believe that a showgirl could be of more than average intelligence. And although Stryker had done some heavy military service, that had been ages ago. Where were they getting their strength, their nerve, their endurance? It seemed as if they must have some advantage of which Alexander was not aware. That had to be it. They had to have some advantage he didn’t know about. What could it be? What was their edge?

Hensen picked up one of the maps and turned it over in his hands. “I don’t see any reason to get too worked up about it. Even if they locate the main gate, they can’t get any farther than that. There are thousands of acres behind the fence, and the lab is right smack in the middle. They can’t get close to it, let alone inside.”

Alexander suddenly realized what their edge was, what kept them going, and he sat up straight in his chair. “They can get inside easily enough if they have a friend in there.”

“What?”

“That’s it!” Alexander got to his feet. “Not only did someone on Project Pandora tell this Evans woman about her son. That same traitorous bastard is also up there in the labs right this minute, ready to open the gates and doors to them. Some bastard stabbed us in the back. He’s going to help the bitch get her son out of there!”

Alexander dialed the number of the military security office at the Sierra lab. It neither rang nor returned a busy signal; the line hissed emptily. He hung up and tried again, with the same result.

He quickly dialed the lab director’s office. Dr. Tamaguchi. No ringing. No busy signal. Just the same, unsettling hiss.

“Something’s happened up there,” Alexander said as he slammed the handset into the cradle. “The phones are out.”

“Supposed to be a new storm moving in,” Hensen said. “It’s probably already snowing in the mountains. Maybe the lines—”

“Use your head, Kurt. Their lines are underground. And they have a cellular backup. No storm can knock out all communications. Get hold of Jack Morgan and tell him to get the chopper ready. We’ll meet him at the airport as soon as we can get there.”

“He’ll need half an hour anyway,” Hensen said.

“Not a minute more than that.”

“He might not want to go. The weather’s bad up there.”

“I don’t care if it’s hailing iron basketballs,” Alexander said. “We’re going up there in the chopper. There isn’t time to drive, no time at all. I’m sure of that. Something’s gone wrong. Something’s happening at the labs right now.”

Hensen frowned. “But trying to take the chopper in there at night… in the middle of the storm…”

“Morgan’s the best.”

“It won’t be easy.”

“If Morgan wants to take it easy,” Alexander said, “then he should be flying one of the aerial rides at Disneyland.”

“But it seems suicidal—”

“And if you want it easy,” Alexander said, “you shouldn’t have come to work for me. This isn’t the Ladies’ Aid Society, Kurt.”

Hensen’s face colored. “I’ll call Morgan,” he said.

“Yes. You do that.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

Windshield wipers beating away the snow, chain-wrapped tires clanking on the heated roadbed, the Explorer crested a final hill. They came over the rise onto a plateau, an enormous shelf carved in the side of the mountain.

Elliot pumped the brakes, brought the vehicle to a full stop, and unhappily surveyed the territory ahead.

The plateau was basically the work of nature, but man’s hand was in evidence. This broad shelf in the mountainside couldn’t have been as large or as regularly shaped in its natural state as it was now: three hundred yards wide, two hundred yards deep, almost a perfect rectangle. The ground had been rolled as flat as an airfield and then paved. Not a single tree or any other sizable object remained, nothing behind which a man could hide. Tall lampposts were arrayed across this featureless plain, casting dim, reddish light that was severely directed downward to attract as little attention as possible from aircraft that strayed out of the usual flight patterns and from anyone backpacking elsewhere in these remote mountains. Yet the weak illumination that the lamps provided was apparently sufficient for the security cameras to obtain clear images of the entire plateau, because cameras were attached to every lamppost, and not an inch of the area escaped their unblinking attention.

“The security people must be watching us on video monitors right now,” Elliot said glumly.

“Unless Danny screwed up their cameras,” Tina said. “And if he can jam a submachine gun, why couldn’t he interfere with a closed-circuit television transmission?”

“You’re probably right.”

Two hundred yards away, at the far side of the concrete field, stood a one-story windowless building, approximately a hundred feet long, with a steeply pitched slate roof.

“That must be where they’re holding him,” Elliot said.

“I expected an enormous structure, a gigantic complex.”

“It most likely is enormous. You’re seeing just the front wall. The place is built into the next step of the mountain. God knows how far they cut back into the rock. And it probably goes down several stories too.”

“All the way to Hell.”

“Could be.”

He took his foot off the brake and drove forward, through sheeting snow stained red by the strange light.

Jeeps, Land Rovers, and other four-wheel drive vehicles — eight in all — were lined up in front of the low building, side-by-side in the falling snow.

“Doesn’t look like there’s a lot of people inside,” Tina said. “I thought there’d be a large staff.”

“Oh, there is. I’m sure you’re right about that too,” Elliot said. “The government wouldn’t go to all the trouble of hiding this joint out here just to house a handful of researchers or whatever. Most of them probably live in the installation for weeks or months at a time. They wouldn’t want a lot of daily traffic coming in and out of here on a forest road that’s supposed to be used only by state wildlife officers. That would draw too much attention. Maybe a few of the top people come and go regularly by helicopter. But if this is a military operation, then most of the staff is probably assigned here under the same conditions submariners have to live with. They’re allowed to go into Reno for shore leave between cruises, but for long stretches of time, they’re confined to this ‘ship.’”

He parked beside a Jeep, switched off the headlights, and cut the engine.

The plateau was ethereally silent.

No one yet had come out of the building to challenge them, which most likely meant that Danny had jinxed the video security system.

The fact that they had gotten this far unhurt didn’t make Elliot feel any better about what lay ahead of them. How long could Danny continue to pave the way? The boy appeared to have some incredible powers, but he wasn’t God. Sooner or later he’d overlook something. He’d make a mistake. Just one mistake. And they would be dead.

“Well,” Tina said, unsuccessfully trying to conceal her own anxiety, “we didn’t need the snowshoes after all.”

“But we might find a use for that coil of rope,” Elliot said. He twisted around, leaned over the back of the seat, and quickly fetched the rope from the pile of outdoor gear in the cargo hold. “We’re sure to encounter at least a couple of security men, no matter how clever Danny is. We have to be ready to kill them or put them out of action some other way.”

“If we have a choice,” Tina said, “I’d rather use rope than bullets.”

“My sentiments exactly.” He picked up the pistol. “Let’s see if we can get inside.”

They stepped out of the Explorer.

The wind was an animal presence, growling softly. It had teeth, and it nipped their exposed faces. On its breath were sprays of snow like icy spittle.

The only feature in the hundred-foot-long, one-story, windowless concrete facade was a wide steel door. The imposing door offered neither a keyhole nor a keypad. There was no slot in which to put a lock-deactivating ID card. Apparently the door could be opened only from within, after those seeking entrance had been scrutinized by the camera that hung over the portal.

As Elliot and Tina gazed up into the camera lens, the heavy steel barrier rolled aside.

Was it Danny who opened it? Elliot wondered. Or a grinning guard waiting to make an easy arrest?

A steel-walled chamber lay beyond the door. It was the size of a large elevator cab, brightly lighted and uninhabited.

Tina and Elliot crossed the threshold. The outer door slid shut behind them—whoosh—making an airtight seal.

A camera and two-way video communications monitor were mounted in the left-hand wall of the vestibule. The screen was filled with crazily wiggling lines, as if it was out of order.

Beside the monitor was a lighted glass plate against which the visitor was supposed to place his right hand, palm-down, within the existing outline of a hand. Evidently the installation’s computer scanned the prints of visitors to verify their right to enter.

Elliot and Tina did not put their hands on the plate, but the inner door of the vestibule opened with another puff of compressed air. They went into the next room.

Two uniformed men were anxiously fiddling with the control consoles beneath a series of twenty wall-mounted video displays. All of the screens were filled with wiggling lines.

The youngest of the guards heard the door opening, and he turned, shocked.

Elliot pointed the gun at him. “Don’t move.”

But the young guard was the heroic type. He was wearing a sidearm — a monstrous revolver — and he was fast with it. He drew, aimed from the hip, and squeezed the trigger.

Fortunately Danny came through like a prince. The revolver refused to fire.

Elliot didn’t want to shoot anyone. “Your guns are useless,” he said. He was sweating in his Gore-Tex suit, praying that Danny wouldn’t let him down. “Let’s make this as easy as we can.”

When the young guard discovered that his revolver wouldn’t work, he threw it.

Elliot ducked, but not fast enough. The gun struck him alongside the head, and he stumbled backward against the steel door.

Tina cried out.

Through sudden tears of pain, Elliot saw the young guard rushing him, and he squeezed off one whisper-quiet shot.

The bullet tore through the guy’s left shoulder and spun him around. He crashed into a desk, sending a pile of white and pink papers onto the floor, and then he fell on top of the mess that he had made.

Blinking away tears, Elliot pointed the pistol at the older guard, who had drawn his revolver by now and had found that it didn’t work either. “Put the gun aside, sit down, and don’t make any trouble.”

“How’d you get in here?” the older guard asked, dropping his weapon as he’d been ordered. “Who are you?”

“Never mind,” Elliot said. “Just sit down.”

But the guard was insistent. “Who are you people?”

“Justice,” Tina said.

Five minutes west of Reno, the chopper encountered snow. The flakes were hard, dry, and granular; they hissed like driven sand across the Perspex windscreen.

Jack Morgan, the pilot, glanced at George Alexander and said, “This will be hairy.” He was wearing night-vision goggles, and his eyes were invisible.

“Just a little snow,” Alexander said.

“A storm,” Morgan corrected.

“You’ve flown in storms before.”

“In these mountains the downdrafts and crosscurrents are going to be murderous.”

“We’ll make it,” Alexander said grimly.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Morgan said. He grinned. “But we’re sure going to have fun trying!”

“You’re crazy,” Hensen said from his seat behind the pilot.

“When we were running operations against the drug lords down in Colombia,” Morgan said, “they called me ‘Bats,’ meaning I had bats in the belfry.” He laughed.

Hensen was holding a submachine gun across his lap. He moved his hands over it slowly, as if he were caressing a woman. He closed his eyes, and in his mind he disassembled and then reassembled the weapon. He had a queasy stomach. He was trying hard not to think about the chopper, the bad weather, and the likelihood that they would take a long, swift, hard fall into a remote mountain ravine.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The young guard wheezed in pain, but as far as Tina could see, he was not mortally wounded. The bullet had partially cauterized the wound as it passed through. The hole in the guy’s shoulder was reassuringly clean, and it wasn’t bleeding much.

“You’ll live,” Elliot said.

“I’m dying. Jesus!”

“No. It hurts like hell, but it isn’t serious. The bullet didn’t sever any major blood vessels.”

“How the hell would you know?” the wounded man asked, straining his words through clenched teeth.

“If you lie still, you’ll be all right. But if you agitate the wound, you might tear a bruised vessel, and then you’ll bleed to death.”

“Shit,” the guard said shakily.

“Understand?” Elliot asked.

The man nodded. His face was pale, and he was sweating.

Elliot tied the older guard securely to a chair. He didn’t want to tie the wounded man’s hands, so they carefully moved him to a supply closet and locked him in there.

“How’s your head?” Tina asked Elliot, gently touching the ugly knot that had raised on his temple, where the guard’s gun had struck him.

Elliot winced. “Stings.”

“It’s going to bruise.”

“I’ll be all right,” he said.

“Dizzy?”

“No.”

“Seeing double?”

“No,” he said. “I’m fine. I wasn’t hit that hard. There’s no concussion. Just a headache. Come on. Let’s find Danny and get him out of this place.”

They crossed the room, passing the guard who was bound and gagged in his chair. Tina carried the remaining rope, and Elliot kept the gun.

Opposite the sliding door through which she and Elliot had entered the security room was another door of more ordinary dimensions and construction. It opened onto a junction of two hallways, which Tina had discovered a few minutes ago, just after Elliot had shot the guard, when she had peeked through the door to see if reinforcements were on the way.

The corridors had been deserted then. They were deserted now too. Silent. White tile floors. White walls. Harsh fluorescent lighting.

One passageway extended fifty feet to the left of the door and fifty feet to the right; on both sides were more doors, all shut, plus a bank of four elevators on the right. The intersecting hall began directly in front of them, across from the guardroom, and bored at least four hundred feet into the mountain; a long row of doors waited on each side of it, and other corridors opened off it as well.

They whispered:

“You think Danny is on this floor?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where do we start?”

“We can’t just go around jerking open doors.”

“People are going to be behind some of them.”

“And the fewer people we encounter—”

“—the better chance we have of getting out alive.”

They stood, indecisive, looking left, then right, and then straight ahead.

Ten feet away, a set of elevator doors opened.

Tina cringed back against the corridor wall.

Elliot pointed the pistol at the lift.

No one got out.

The cab was at such an angle from them that they couldn’t see who was in it.

The doors closed.

Tina had the sickening feeling that someone had been about to step out, had sensed their presence, and had gone away to get help.

Even before Elliot had lowered the pistol, the same set of elevator doors slid open again. Then slid shut. Open. Shut. Open. Shut. Open.

The air grew cold.

With a sigh of relief, Tina said, “It’s Danny. He’s showing us the way.”

Nevertheless, they crept cautiously to the elevator and peered inside apprehensively. The cab was empty, and they boarded it, and the doors glided together.

According to the indicator board above the doors, they were on the fourth of four levels. The first floor was at the bottom of the structure, the deepest underground.

The cab controls would not operate unless one first inserted an acceptable ID card into a slot above them. But Tina and Elliot didn’t need the computer’s authorization to use the elevator; not with Danny on their side. The light on the indicator board changed from four to three to two, and the air inside the lift became so frigid that Tina’s breath hung in clouds before her. The doors slid open three floors below the surface, on the next to the last level.

They stepped into a hallway exactly like the one they had left upstairs.

The elevator doors closed behind them, and around them the air grew warmer again.

Five feet away, a door stood ajar, and animated conversation drifted out of the room beyond. Men’s and women’s voices. Half a dozen or more, judging by the sound of them. Indistinct words. Laughter.

Tina knew that she and Elliot were finished if someone came out of that room and saw them. Danny seemed able to work miracles with inanimate objects, but he could not control people, like the guard upstairs, whom Elliot had been forced to shoot. If they were discovered and confronted by a squad of angry security men, Elliot’s one pistol might not be enough to discourage an assault. Then, even with Danny jamming the enemy’s weapons, she and Elliot would be able to escape only if they slaughtered their way out, and she knew that neither of them had the stomach for that much murder, perhaps not even in self-defense.

Laughter pealed from the nearby room again, and Elliot said softly, “Where now?”

“I don’t know.”

This level was the same size as the one on which they entered the complex: more than four hundred feet on one side, and more than one hundred feet on the other. Forty thousand or fifty thousand square feet to search. How many rooms? Forty? Fifty? Sixty? A hundred, counting closets?

Just as she was beginning to despair, the air began to turn cold again. She looked around, waiting for some sign from her child, and she and Elliot twitched in surprise when the overhead fluorescent tube winked off, then came on again. The tube to the left of the first one also flickered. Then a third tube sputtered, still farther to the left.

They followed the blinking lights to the end of the short wing in which the elevators were situated. The corridor terminated in an airtight steel door similar to those found on submarines; the burnished metal glowed softly, and light gleamed off the big round-headed rivets.

As Tina and Elliot reached that barrier, the wheel-like handle in the center spun around. The door cycled open. Because he had the pistol, Elliot went through first, but Tina was close behind him.

They were in a rectangular room approximately forty feet by twenty. At the far end a window filled the center of the other short wall and apparently offered a view of a cold-storage vault; it was white with frost. To the right of the window was another airtight door like the one through which they’d just entered. On the left, computers and other equipment extended the length of the chamber. There were more video displays than Tina could count at a glance; most were switched on, and data flowed in the form of graphs, charts, and numbers. Tables were arranged along the fourth wall, covered with books, file folders, and numerous instruments that Tina could not identify.

A curly-haired man with a bushy mustache sat at one of the tables. He was tall, broad-shouldered, in his fifties, and he was wearing medical whites. He was paging through a book when they burst in. Another man, younger than the first, clean-shaven, also dressed in white, was sitting at a computer, reading the information that flashed onto the display screen. Both men looked up, speechless with amazement.

Covering the strangers with the menacing, silencer-equipped pistol, Elliot said, “Tina, close the door behind us. Lock it if you can. If security discovers we’re here, at least they won’t be able to get their hands on us for a while.”

She swung the steel door shut. In spite of its tremendous weight, it moved more smoothly and easily than an average door in an average house. She spun the wheel and located a pin that, when pushed, prevented anyone from turning the handle back to the unlocked position.

“Done,” she said.

The man at the computer suddenly turned to the keyboard and started typing.

“Stop that,” Elliot advised.

But the guy wasn’t going to stop until he had instructed the computer to trigger the alarms.

Maybe Danny could prevent the alarms from sounding, and maybe he could not, so Elliot fired once, and the display screen dissolved into thousands of splinters of glass.

The man cried out, pushed his wheeled chair away from the keyboard, and thrust to his feet. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m the one who has the gun,” Elliot said sharply. “If that’s not good enough for you, I can shut you down the same way I did that damn machine. Now park your ass in that chair before I blow your fuckin’ head off.”

Tina had never heard Elliot speak in this tone of voice, and his furious expression was sufficient to chill even her. He seemed to be utterly vicious and capable of anything.

The young man in white was impressed too. He sat down, pale.

“All right,” Elliot said, addressing the two men. “If you cooperate, you won’t get hurt.” He waved the barrel of the gun at the older man. “What’s your name?”

“Carl Dombey.”

“What’re you doing here?”

“I work here,” Dombey said, puzzled by the question.

“I mean, what’s your job?”

“I’m a research scientist.”

“What science?”

“My degrees are in biology and biochemistry.”

Elliot pointed at the younger man. “What about you?”

“What about me?” the younger one said sullenly.

Elliot extended his arm, lining up the muzzle of the pistol with the bridge of the guy’s nose.

“I’m Dr. Zachariah,” the younger man said.

“Biology?”

“Yes. Specializing in bacteriology and virology.”

Elliot lowered the gun but still kept it pointed in their general direction. “We have some questions, and you two better have the answers.”

Dombey, who clearly did not share his associate’s compulsion to play hero, remained docile in his chair. “Questions about what?”

Tina moved to Elliot’s side. To Dombey, she said, “We want to know what you’ve done to him, where he is.”

“Who?”

“My boy. Danny Evans.”

She could not have said anything else that would have had a fraction as much impact on them as the words she’d spoken. Dombey’s eyes bulged. Zachariah regarded her as he might have done if she had been dead on the floor and then miraculously risen.

“My God,” Dombey said.

“How can you be here?” Zachariah asked. “You can’t. You can’t possibly be here.”

“It seems possible to me,” Dombey said. “In fact, all of a sudden, it seems inevitable. I knew this whole business was too dirty to end any way but disaster.” He sighed, as if a great weight had been lifted from him. “I’ll answer all of your questions, Mrs. Evans.”

Zachariah swung toward him. “You can’t do that!”

“Oh, no?” Dombey said. “Well, if you don’t think I can, just sit back and listen. You’re in for a surprise.”

“You took a loyalty oath,” Zachariah said. “A secrecy oath. If you tell them anything about this… the scandal… the public outrage… the release of military secrets…” He was sputtering. “You’ll be a traitor to your country.”

“No,” Dombey said. “I’ll be a traitor to this installation. I’ll be a traitor to my colleagues, maybe. But not to my country. My country’s far from perfect, but what’s been done to Danny Evans isn’t something that my country would approve of. The whole Danny Evans project is the work of a few megalomaniacs.”

“Dr. Tamaguchi isn’t a megalomaniac,” Dr. Zachariah said, as if genuinely offended.

“Of course he is,” Dombey said. “He thinks he’s a great man of science, destined for immortality, a man of great works. And a lot of people around him, a lot of people protecting him, people in research and people in charge of project security — they’re also megalomaniacs. The things done to Danny Evans don’t constitute ‘great work.’ They won’t earn anyone immortality. It’s sick, and I’m washing my hands of it.” He looked at Tina again. “Ask your questions.”

“No,” Zachariah said. “You damn fool.”

Elliot took the remaining rope from Tina, and he gave her the pistol. “I’ll have to tie and gag Dr. Zachariah, so we can listen to Dr. Dombey’s story in peace. If either one of them makes a wrong move, blow him away.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t hesitate.”

“You’re not going to tie me,” Zachariah said.

Smiling, Elliot advanced on him with the rope.

A wall of frigid air fell on the chopper and drove it down. Jack Morgan fought the wind, stabilized the aircraft, and pulled it up only a few feet short of the treetops.

“Whoooooooeeeee!” the pilot said. “It’s like breaking in a wild horse.”

In the chopper’s brilliant floodlights, there was little to see but driving snow. Morgan had removed his night-vision goggles.

“This is crazy,” Hensen said. “We’re not flying into an ordinary storm. It’s a blizzard.”

Ignoring Hensen, Alexander said, “Morgan, goddamn you, I know you can do it.”

“Maybe,” Morgan said. “I wish I was as sure as you. But I think maybe I can. What I’m going to do is make an indirect approach to the plateau, moving with the wind instead of across it. I’m going to cut up this next valley and then swing back around toward the installation and try to avoid some of these crosscurrents. They’re murder. It’ll take us a little longer that way, but at least we’ll have a fighting chance. If the rotors don’t ice up and cut out.”

A particularly fierce blast of wind drove snow into the windscreen with such force that, to Kurt Hensen, it sounded like shotgun pellets.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Zachariah was on the floor, bound and gagged, glaring up at them with hate and rage.

“You’ll want to see your boy first,” Dombey said. “Then I can tell you how he came to be here.”

“Where is he?” Tina asked shakily.

“In the isolation chamber.” Dombey indicated the window in the back wall of the room. “Come on.” He went to the big pane of glass, where only a few small spots of frost remained.

For a moment Tina couldn’t move, afraid to see what they had done to Danny. Fear spread tendrils through her and rooted her feet to the floor.

Elliot touched her shoulder. “Don’t keep Danny waiting. He’s been waiting a long time. He’s been calling you for a long time.”

She took a step, then another, and before she knew it, she was at the window, beside Dombey.

A standard hospital bed stood in the center of the isolation chamber. It was ringed by ordinary medical equipment as well as by several mysterious electronic monitors.

Danny was in the bed, on his back. Most of him was covered, but his head, raised on a pillow, was turned toward the window. He stared at her through the side rails of the bed.

“Danny,” she said softly. She had the irrational fear that, if she said his name loudly, the spell would be broken and he would vanish forever.

His face was thin and sallow. He appeared to be older than twelve. Indeed, he looked like a little old man.

Dombey, sensing her shock, said, “He’s emaciated. For the past six or seven weeks, he hasn’t been able to keep anything but liquids in his stomach. And not a lot of those.”

Danny’s eyes were strange. Dark, as always. Big and round, as always. But they were sunken, ringed by unhealthy dark skin, which was not the way they had always been. She couldn’t pinpoint what else about his eyes made him so different from any eyes she had ever seen, but as she met Danny’s gaze, a shiver passed through her, and she felt a profound and terrible pity for him.

The boy blinked, and with what appeared to be great effort, at the cost of more than a little pain, he withdrew one arm from under the covers and reached out toward her. His arm was skin and bones, a pathetic stick. He thrust it between two of the side rails, and he opened his small weak hand beseechingly, reaching for love, trying desperately to touch her.

Her voice quivering, she said to Dombey, “I want to be with my boy. I want to hold him.”

As the three of them moved to the airtight steel door that led into the room beyond the window, Elliot said, “Why is he in an isolation chamber? Is he ill?”

“Not now,” Dombey said, stopping at the door, turning to them, evidently disturbed by what he had to tell them. “Right now he’s on the verge of starving to death because it’s been so long since he’s been able to keep any food in his stomach. But he’s not infectious. He has been very infectious, off and on, but not at the moment. He’s had a unique disease, a man-made disease created in the laboratory. He’s the only person who’s ever survived it. He has a natural antibody in his blood that helps him fight off this particular virus, even though it’s an artificial bug. That’s what fascinated Dr. Tamaguchi. He’s the head of this installation. Dr. Tamaguchi drove us very hard until we isolated the antibody and figured out why it was so effective against the disease. Of course, when that was accomplished, Danny was of no more scientific value. To Tamaguchi, that meant he was of no value at all… except in the crudest way. Tamaguchi decided to test Danny to destruction. For almost two months they’ve been reinfecting his body over and over again, letting the virus wear him down, trying to discover how many times he can lick it before it finally licks him. You see, there’s no permanent immunity to this disease. It’s like strep throat or the common cold or like cancer, because you can get it again and again… if you’re lucky enough to beat it the first time. Today, Danny just beat it for the fourteenth time.”

Tina gasped in horror.

Dombey said, “Although he gets weaker every day, for some reason he wins out over the virus faster each time. But each victory drains him. The disease is killing him, even if indirectly. It’s killing him by sapping his strength. Right now he’s clean and uninfected. Tomorrow they intend to stick another dirty needle in him.”

“My God,” Elliot said softly. “My God.”

Gripped by rage and revulsion, Tina stared at Dombey. “I can’t believe what I just heard.”

“Brace yourself,” Dombey said grimly. “You haven’t heard half of it yet.”

He turned away from them, spun the wheel on the steel door, and swung that barrier inward.

Minutes ago, when Tina had first peered through the observation window, when she had seen the frighteningly thin child, she had told herself that she would not cry. Danny didn’t need to see her cry. He needed love and attention and protection. Her tears might upset him. And judging from his appearance, she was concerned that any serious emotional disturbance would literally destroy him.

Now, as she approached his bed, she bit her lower lip so hard that she tasted blood. She struggled to contain her tears, but she needed all her willpower to keep her eyes dry.

Danny became excited when he saw her drawing near, and in spite of his terrible condition, he shakily thrust himself into a sitting position, clutching at the bed rails with one frail, trembling hand, eagerly extending his other hand toward her.

She took the last few steps haltingly, her heart pounding, her throat constricted. She was overwhelmed with the joy of seeing him again but also with fear when she realized how hideously wasted he was.

When their hands touched, his small fingers curled tightly around hers. He held on with a fierce, desperate strength.

“Danny,” she said wonderingly. “Danny, Danny.”

From somewhere deep inside of him, from far down beneath all the pain and fear and anguish, Danny found a smile for her. It wasn’t much of a smile; it quivered on his lips as if sustaining it required more energy than lifting a hundred-pound weight. It was such a tentative smile, such a vague ghost of all the broad warm smiles she remembered, that it broke her heart.

“Mom.”

Tina could hardly recognize his weary, cracking voice.

“Mom.”

“It’s all right,” she said.

He shuddered.

“It’s all over, Danny. It’s all right now.”

“Mom… Mom…” His face spasmed, and his brave smile dissolved, and an agonized groan escaped him. “Oooohhhhh, Mommy…”

Tina pushed down the railing and sat on the edge of the bed and carefully pulled Danny into her arms. He was a rag doll with only meager scraps of stuffing, a fragile and timorous creature, nothing whatsoever like the happy, vibrant, active boy that he had once been. At first she was afraid to hug him, for fear he would shatter in her embrace. But he hugged her very hard, and again she was surprised by how much strength he could still summon from his devastated body. Shaking violently, snuffling, he put his face against her neck, and she felt his scalding tears on her skin. She couldn’t control herself any longer, so she allowed her own tears to come, rivers of tears, a flood. Putting one hand on the boy’s back to press him against her, she discovered how shockingly spindly he was: each rib and vertebra so prominent that she seemed to be holding a skeleton. When she pulled him into her lap, he trailed wires that led from electrodes on his skin to the monitoring machines around the bed, like an abandoned marionette. As his legs came out from under the covers, the hospital gown slipped off them, and Tina saw that his poor limbs were too bony and fleshless to safely support him. Weeping, she cradled him, rocked him, crooned to him, and told him that she loved him.

Danny was alive.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Jack Morgan’s strategy of flying with the land instead of over it was a smashing success. Alexander was increasingly confident that they would reach the installation unscathed, and he was aware that even Kurt Hensen, who hated flying with Morgan, was calmer now than he had been ten minutes ago.

The chopper hugged the valley floor, streaking northward, ten feet above an ice-blocked river, still forced to make its way through a snowfall that nearly blinded them, but sheltered from the worst of the storm’s turbulence by the walls of mammoth evergreens that flanked the river. Silvery, almost luminous, the frozen river was an easy trail to follow. Occasionally wind found the aircraft and pummeled it, but the chopper bobbed and weaved like a good boxer, and it no longer seemed in danger of being dealt a knockout punch.

“How long?” Alexander asked.

“Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen,” Morgan said. “Unless.”

“Unless what?”

“Unless the blades cake up with ice. Unless the drive shaft and the rotor joints freeze.”

“Is that likely?” Alexander asked.

“It’s certainly something to think about,” Morgan said. “And there’s always the possibility I’ll misjudge the terrain in the dark and ram us right into the side of a hill.”

“You won’t,” Alexander said. “You’re too good.”

“Well,” Morgan said, “there’s always the chance I’ll screw up. That’s what keeps it from getting boring.”

Tina prepared Danny for the journey out of his prison. One by one, she removed the eighteen electrodes that were fixed to his head and body. When she gingerly pulled off the adhesive tape, he whimpered, and she winced when she saw the rawness of his skin under the bandage. No effort had been made to keep him from chafing.

While Tina worked on Danny, Elliot questioned Carl Dombey. “What goes on in this place? Military research?”

“Yes,” Dombey said.

“Strictly biological weapons?”

“Biological and chemical. Recombinant DNA experiments. At any one time, we have thirty to forty projects underway.”

“I thought the U.S. got out of the chemical and biological weapons race a long time ago.”

“For the public record, we did,” Dombey said. “It made the politicians look good. But in reality the work goes on. It has to. This is the only facility of its kind we have. The Chinese have three like it. The Russians… they’re now supposed to be our new friends, but they keep developing bacteriological weapons, new and more virulent strains of viruses, because they’re broke, and this is a lot cheaper than other weapons systems. Iraq has a big bio-chem warfare project, and Libya, and God knows who else. Lots of people out there in the rest of the world — they believe in chemical and biological warfare. They don’t see anything immoral about it. If they felt they had some terrific new bug that we didn’t know about, something against which we couldn’t retaliate in kind, they’d use it on us.”

Elliot said, “But if racing to keep up with the Chinese — or the Russians or the Iraqis — can create situations like the one we’ve got here, where an innocent child gets ground up in the machine, then aren’t we just becoming monsters too? Aren’t we letting our fears of the enemy turn us into them? And isn’t that just another way of losing the war?”

Dombey nodded. As he spoke, he smoothed the spikes of his mustache. “That’s the same question I’ve been wrestling with ever since Danny got caught in the gears. The problem is that some flaky people are attracted to this kind of work because of the secrecy and because you really do get a sense of power from designing weapons that can kill millions of people. So megalomaniacs like Tamaguchi get involved. Men like Aaron Zachariah here. They abuse their power, pervert their duties. There’s no way to screen them out ahead of time. But if we closed up shop, if we stopped doing this sort of research just because we were afraid of men like Tamaguchi winding up in charge of it, we’d be conceding so much ground to our enemies that we wouldn’t survive for long. I suppose we have to learn to live with the lesser of the evils.”

Tina removed an electrode from Danny’s neck, carefully peeling the tape off his skin.

The child still clung to her, but his deeply sunken eyes were riveted on Dombey.

“I’m not interested in the philosophy or morality of biological warfare,” Tina said. “Right now I just want to know how the hell Danny wound up in this place.”

“To understand that,” Dombey said, “you have to go back twenty months. It was around then that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected to the United States, carrying a diskette record of China’s most important and dangerous new biological weapon in a decade. They call the stuff ‘Wuhan-400’ because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside of the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research center.

“Wuhan-400 is a perfect weapon. It afflicts only human beings. No other living creature can carry it. And like syphilis, Wuhan-400 can’t survive outside a living human body for longer than a minute, which means it can’t permanently contaminate objects or entire places the way anthrax and other virulent microorganisms can. And when the host expires, the Wuhan-400 within him perishes a short while later, as soon as the temperature of the corpse drops below eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit. Do you see the advantage of all this?”

Tina was too busy with Danny to think about what Carl Dombey had said, but Elliot knew what the scientist meant. “If I understand you, the Chinese could use Wuhan-400 to wipe out a city or a country, and then there wouldn’t be any need for them to conduct a tricky and expensive decontamination before they moved in and took over the conquered territory.”

“Exactly,” Dombey said. “And Wuhan-400 has other, equally important advantages over most biological agents. For one thing, you can become an infectious carrier only four hours after coming into contact with the virus. That’s an incredibly short incubation period. Once infected, no one lives more than twenty-four hours. Most die in twelve. It’s worse than the Ebola virus in Africa — infinitely worse. Wuhan-400’s kill-rate is one hundred percent. No one is supposed to survive. The Chinese tested it on God knows how many political prisoners. They were never able to find an antibody or an antibiotic that was effective against it. The virus migrates to the brain stem, and there it begins secreting a toxin that literally eats away brain tissue like battery acid dissolving cheesecloth. It destroys the part of the brain that controls all of the body’s automatic functions. The victim simply ceases to have a pulse, functioning organs, or any urge to breathe.”

“And that’s the disease Danny survived,” Elliot said.

“Yes,” Dombey said. “As far as we know, he’s the only one who ever has.”

Tina had pulled the blanket off the bed and folded it in half, so she could wrap Danny in it for the trip out to the Explorer. Now she looked up from the task of bundling the child, and she said to Dombey, “But why was he infected in the first place?”

“It was an accident,” Dombey said.

“I’ve heard that one before.”

“This time it’s true,” Dombey said. “After Li Chen defected with all the data on Wuhan-400, he was brought here. We immediately began working with him, trying to engineer an exact duplicate of the virus. In relatively short order we accomplished that. Then we began to study the bug, searching for a handle on it that the Chinese had overlooked.”

“And someone got careless,” Elliot said.

“Worse,” Dombey said. “Someone got careless and stupid. Almost thirteen months ago, when Danny and the other boys in his troop were on their winter survival outing, one of our scientists, a quirky son of a bitch named Larry Bollinger, accidentally contaminated himself while he was working alone one morning in this lab.”

Danny’s hand tightened on Christina’s, and she stroked his head, soothing him. To Dombey, she said, “Surely you have safeguards, procedures to follow when and if—”

“Of course,” Dombey said. “You’re trained what to do from the day you start to work here. In the event of accidental contamination, you immediately set off an alarm. Immediately. Then you seal the room you’re working in. If there’s an adjoining isolation chamber, you’re supposed to go into it and lock the door after yourself. A decontamination crew moves in swiftly to clean up whatever mess you’ve made in the lab. And if you’ve infected yourself with something curable, you’ll be treated. If it’s not curable… you’ll be attended to in isolation until you die. That’s one reason our pay scale is so high. Hazardous-duty pay. The risk is part of the job.”

“Except this Larry Bollinger didn’t see it that way,” Tina said bitterly. She was having difficulty wrapping Danny securely in the blanket because he wouldn’t let go of her. With smiles, murmured assurances, and kisses planted on his frail hands, she finally managed to persuade him to tuck both of his arms close to his body.

“Bollinger snapped. He just went right off the rails,” Dombey said, obviously embarrassed that one of his colleagues would lose control of himself under those circumstances. Dombey began to pace as he talked. “Bollinger knew how fast Wuhan-400 claims its victims, and he just panicked. Flipped out. Apparently, he convinced himself he could run away from the infection. God knows, that’s exactly what he tried to do. He didn’t turn in an alarm. He walked out of the lab, went to his quarters, dressed in outdoor clothes, and left the complex. He wasn’t scheduled for R and R, and on the spur of the moment he couldn’t think of an excuse to sign out one of the Range Rovers, so he tried to escape on foot. He told the guards he was going snowshoeing for a couple of hours. That’s something a lot of us do during the winter. It’s good exercise, and it gets you out of this hole in the ground for a while. Anyway, Bollinger wasn’t interested in exercise. He tucked the snowshoes under his arm and took off down the mountain road, the same one I presume you came in on. Before he got to the guard shack at the upper gate, he climbed onto the ridge above, used the snowshoes to circle the guard, returned to the road, and threw the snowshoes away. Security eventually found them. Bollinger was probably at the bottom gate two and a half hours after he walked out of the door here, three hours after he was infected. That was just about the time that another researcher walked into his lab, saw the cultures of Wuhan-400 broken open on the floor, and set off the alarm. Meanwhile, in spite of the razor wire, Bollinger climbed over the fence. Then he made his way to the road that serves the wildlife research center. He started out of the forest, toward the county lane, which is about five miles from the turnoff to the labs, and after only three miles—”

“He ran into Mr. Jaborski and the scouts,” Elliot said.

“And by then he was able to pass the disease on to them,” Tina said as she finished bundling Danny into the blanket.

“Yeah,” Dombey said. “He must have reached the scouts five or five and a half hours after he was infected. By then he was worn out. He’d used up most of his physical reserves getting out of the lab reservation, and he was also beginning to feel some of the early symptoms of Wuhan-400. Dizziness. Mild nausea. The scoutmaster had parked the expedition’s minibus on a lay-by about a mile and a half into the woods, and he and his assistant and the kids had walked in another half-mile before they encountered Larry Bollinger. They were just about to move off the road, into the trees, so they would be away from any sign of civilization when they set up camp for their first night in the wilderness. When Bollinger discovered they had a vehicle, he tried to persuade them to drive him all the way into Reno. When they were reluctant, he made up a story about a friend being stranded in the mountains with a broken leg. Jaborski didn’t believe Bollinger’s story for a minute, but he finally offered to take him to the wildlife center where a rescue effort could be mounted. That wasn’t good enough for Bollinger, and he got hysterical. Both Jaborski and the other scout leader decided they might have a dangerous character on their hands. That was when the security team arrived. Bollinger tried to run from them. Then he tried to tear open one of the security men’s decontamination suits. They were forced to shoot him.”

“The spacemen,” Danny said.

Everyone stared at him.

He huddled in his yellow blanket on the bed, and the memory made him shiver. “The spacemen came and took us away.”

“Yeah,” Dombey said. “They probably did look a little bit like spacemen in their decontamination suits. They brought everyone here and put them in isolation. One day later all of them were dead… except Danny.” Dombey sighed. “Well… you know most of the rest.”

Chapter Forty

The helicopter continued to follow the frozen river north, through the snow-swept valley.

The ghostly, slightly luminous winter landscape made George Alexander think of graveyards. He had an affinity for cemeteries. He liked to take long, leisurely walks among the tombstones. For as long as he could remember, he had been fascinated with death, with the mechanics and the meaning of it, and he had longed to know what it was like on the other side — without, of course, wishing to commit himself to a one-way journey there. He didn’t want to die; he only wanted to know. Each time that he personally killed someone, he felt as if he were establishing another link to the world beyond this one; and he hoped, once he had made enough of those linkages, that he would be rewarded with a vision from the other side. One day maybe he would be standing in a graveyard, before the tombstone of one of his victims, and the person he had killed would reach out to him from beyond and let him see, in some vivid clairvoyant fashion, exactly what death was like. And then he would know.

“Not long now,” Jack Morgan said.

Alexander peered anxiously through the sheeting snow into which the chopper moved like a blind man running full-steam into endless darkness. He touched the gun that he carried in a shoulder holster, and he thought of Christina Evans.

To Kurt Hensen, Alexander said, “Kill Stryker on sight. We don’t need him for anything. But don’t hurt the woman. I want to question her. She’s going to tell me who the traitor is. She’s going to tell me who helped her get into the labs even if I have to break her fingers one at a time to make her open up.”

In the isolation chamber, when Dombey finished speaking, Tina said, “Danny looks so awful. Even though he doesn’t have the disease anymore, will he be all right?”

“I think so,” Dombey said. “He just needs to be fattened up. He couldn’t keep anything in his stomach because recently they’ve been reinfecting him, testing him to destruction, like I said. But once he’s out of here, he should put weight on fast. There is one thing…”

Tina stiffened at the note of worry in Dombey’s voice. “What? What one thing?”

“Since all these reinfections, he’s developed a spot on the parietal lobe of the brain.”

Tina felt ill. “No.”

“But apparently it isn’t life-threatening,” Dombey said quickly. “As far as we can determine, it’s not a tumor. Neither a malignant nor a benign tumor. At least it doesn’t have any of the characteristics of a tumor. It isn’t scar tissue either. And not a blood clot.”

“Then what is it?” Elliot asked.

Dombey pushed one hand through his thick, curly hair. “The current analysis says the new growth is consistent with the structure of normal brain tissue. Which doesn’t make sense. But we’ve checked our data a hundred times, and we can’t find anything wrong with that diagnosis. Except it’s impossible. What we’re seeing on the X-rays isn’t within our experience. So when you get him out of here, take him to a brain specialist. Take him to a dozen specialists until someone can tell you what’s wrong with him. There doesn’t appear to be anything life-threatening about the parietal spot, but you sure should keep a watch on it.”

Tina met Elliot’s eyes, and she knew that the same thought was running through both their minds. Could this spot on Danny’s brain have anything to do with the boy’s psychic power? Were his latent psychic abilities brought to the surface as a direct result of the man-made virus with which he had been repeatedly infected? Crazy — but it didn’t seem any more unlikely than that he had fallen victim to Project Pandora in the first place. And as far as Tina could see, it was the only thing that explained Danny’s phenomenal new powers.

Apparently afraid that she would voice her thoughts and alert Dombey to the incredible truth of the situation, Elliot consulted his wristwatch and said, “We ought to get out of here.”

“When you leave,” Dombey said, “you should take some files on Danny’s case. They’re on the table closest to the outer door — that black box full of diskettes. They’ll help support your story when you go to the press with it. And for God’s sake, splash it all over the newspapers as fast as you can. As long as you’re the only ones outside of here who know what happened, you’re marked people.”

“We’re painfully aware of that,” Elliot acknowledged.

Tina said, “Elliot, you’ll have to carry Danny. He can’t walk. He’s not too heavy for me, worn down as he is, but he’s still an awkward bundle.”

Elliot gave her the pistol and started toward the bed.

“Could you do me a favor first?” Dombey asked.

“What’s that?”

“Let’s move Dr. Zachariah in here and take the gag out of his mouth. Then you tie me up and gag me, leave me in the outer room. I’m going to make them believe he was the one who cooperated with you. In fact, when you tell your story to the press, maybe you could slant it that way.”

Tina shook her head, puzzled. “But after everything you said to Zachariah about this place being run by megalomaniacs, and after you’ve made it so clear you don’t agree with everything that goes on here, why do you want to stay?”

“The hermit’s life agrees with me, and the pay is good,” Dombey said. “And if I don’t stay here, if I walk away and get a job at a civilian research center, that’ll be just one less rational voice in this place. There are a lot of people here who have some sense of social responsibility about this work. If they all left, they’d just be turning the place over to men like Tamaguchi and Zachariah, and there wouldn’t be anyone around to balance things. What sort of research do you think they might do then?”

“But once our story breaks in the papers,” Tina said, “they’ll probably just shut this place down.”

“No way,” Dombey said. “Because the work has to be done. The balance of power with totalitarian states like China has to be maintained. They might pretend to close us down, but they won’t. Tamaguchi and some of his closest aides will be fired. There’ll be a big shake-up, and that’ll be good. If I can make them think that Zachariah was the one who spilled the secrets to you, if I can protect my position here, maybe I’ll be promoted and have more influence.” He smiled. “At the very least, I’ll get more pay.”

“All right,” Elliot said. “We’ll do what you want. But we’ve got to be fast about it.”

They moved Zachariah into the isolation chamber and took the gag out of his mouth. He strained at his ropes and cursed Elliot. Then he cursed Tina and Danny and Dombey. When they took Danny out of the small room, they couldn’t hear Zachariah’s shouted invectives through the airtight steel door.

As Elliot used the last of the rope to tie Dombey, the scientist said, “Satisfy my curiosity.”

“About what?”

“Who told you your son was here? Who let you into the labs?”

Tina blinked. She couldn’t think what to say.

“Okay, okay,” Dombey said. “You don’t want to rat on whoever it was. But just tell me one thing. Was it one of the security people, or was it someone on the medical staff? I’d like to think it was a doctor, one of my own, who finally did the right thing.”

Tina looked at Elliot.

Elliot shook his head: no.

She agreed that it might not be wise to let anyone know what powers Danny had acquired. The world would regard him as a freak, and everyone would want to gawk at him, put him on display. And for sure, if the people in this installation got the idea that Danny’s newfound psychic abilities were a result of the parietal spot caused by his repeated exposure to Wuhan-400, they would want to test him, poke and probe at him. No, she wouldn’t tell anyone what Danny could do. Not yet. Not until she and Elliot figured out what effect that revelation would have on the boy’s life.

“It was someone on the medical staff,” Elliot lied. “It was a doctor who let us in here.”

“Good,” Dombey said. “I’m glad to hear it. I wish I’d had enough guts to do it a long time ago.”

Elliot worked a wadded handkerchief into Dombey’s mouth.

Tina opened the outer airtight door.

Elliot picked up Danny. “You hardly weigh a thing, kid. We’ll have to take you straight to McDonald’s and pack you full of burgers and fries.”

Danny smiled weakly at him.

Holding the pistol, Tina led the way into the hall. In the room near the elevators, people were still talking and laughing, but no one stepped into the corridor.

Danny opened the high-security elevator and made the cab rise once they were in it. His forehead was furrowed, as if he were concentrating, but that was the only indication that he had anything to do with the elevator’s movement.

The hallways were deserted on the top floor.

In the guardroom, the older of the two security men was still bound and gagged in his chair. He watched them with anger and fear.

Tina, Elliot, and Danny went through the vestibule and stepped into the cold night. Snow lashed them.

Over the howling of the wind, another sound arose, and Tina needed a few seconds to identify it.

A helicopter.

She squinted up into the snow-shipped night and saw the chopper coming over the rise at the west end of the plateau. What madman would take a helicopter out in this weather?

“The Explorer!” Elliot shouted. “Hurry!”

They ran to the Explorer, where Tina took Danny out of Elliot’s arms and slid him into the backseat. She got in after him.

Elliot climbed behind the wheel and fumbled with the keys. The engine wouldn’t turn over immediately.

The chopper swooped toward them.

“Who’s in the helicopter?” Danny asked, staring at it through the side window of the Explorer.

“I don’t know,” Tina said. “But they’re not good people, baby. They’re like the monster in the comic book. The one you sent me pictures of in my dream. They don’t want us to get you out of this place.”

Danny stared at the oncoming chopper, and lines appeared in his forehead again.

The Explorer’s engine suddenly turned over.

“Thank God!” Elliot said.

But the lines didn’t fade from Danny’s forehead.

Tina realized what the boy was going to do, and she said, “Danny, wait!”

Leaning forward to view the Explorer through the bubble window of the chopper, George Alexander said, “Put us down right in front of them, Jack.”

“Will do,” Morgan said.

To Hensen, who had the submachine gun, Alexander said, “Like I told you, waste Stryker right away, but not the woman.”

Abruptly the chopper soared. It had been only fifteen or twenty feet above the pavement, but it rapidly climbed forty, fifty, sixty feet.

Alexander said, “What’s happening?”

“The stick,” Morgan said. An edge of fear sharpened his voice, fear that hadn’t been audible throughout the entire, nightmarish trip through the mountains. “Can’t control the damn thing. It’s frozen up.”

Eighty, ninety, a hundred feet they soared, soared straight up into the night.

Then the engine cut out.

“What the hell?” Morgan said.

Hensen screamed.

Alexander watched death rushing up at him and knew his curiosity about the other side would shortly be satisfied.

As they drove off the plateau, around the burning wreckage of the helicopter, Danny said, “They were bad people. It’s all right, Mom. They were real bad people.”

To everything there is a season, Tina reminded herself. A time to kill and a time to heal.

She held Danny close, and she stared into his dark eyes, and she wasn’t able to comfort herself with those words from the Bible. Danny’s eyes held too much pain, too much knowledge. He was still her sweet boy — yet he was changed. She thought about the future. She wondered what lay ahead for them.