Eyes of Darkness (34 page)

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.

37

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.”