The Eyes of Darkness Read online

  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:

  PRIVATE PROPERTY

  ADMISSION BY KEY CARD ONLY

  TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

  “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 th
is 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 attenti
on 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.’”