The Eyes of Darkness

by Dean Koontz

  “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.