Eyes of Darkness

by Dean Koontz

  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 snow-spotted 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 drum-beats 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-dollarbills, 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.”

  28

  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 on
ly 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 policy-making 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.