Eyes of Darkness (37 page)

“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.

A
FTERWORD

The Eyes of Darkness
is one of five novels that I wrote under the pen name “Leigh Nichols,” which I no longer use. Although it was the second of the five, it is the fifth and final in the series to be reissued in paperback under my real name. The previous four were
The Servants of Twilight, Shadowfires, The House of Thunder,
and
The Key to Midnight.
Demand from my readers made it possible for these books to be republished, and I’m grateful to all of you for your interest.

As you know if you have read the afterwords in
The Funhouse
and
The Key to Midnight
, I like to amuse myself by revealing the tragic deaths of the various pen names I used early in my career. Somewhat to my embarrassment, I must admit that I’ve not always been truthful with you in these matters. Previously, I told you that Leigh Nichols drank too much champagne one evening on a Caribbean cruise ship and was decapitated in a freak limbo accident. I was touched by your sympathy cards and accounts of the memorial services you held, but now that Berkley Books has brought you this fifth and final of the Nichols novels, I must confess that I was lying in order not to have to reveal Nichols’s true—and more disturbing—fate. One bleak and wintry night Leigh Nichols was abducted by extraterrestrials, taken on a tour of our solar system, introduced to the alien Nest Queen, and forced to undergo a series of horrifying surgeries. Though eventually returned to Earth, the author was too traumatized to continue a career as a novelist—but finally built a new life as the current dictator of Iraq.

The Eyes of Darkness
was one of my early attempts to write a cross-genre novel mixing action, suspense, romance, and a touch of the paranormal. While it doesn’t have the intensity, depth of characterization, complexity of theme, or pace of later novels such as
Watchers
and
Mr. Murder
, and while it doesn’t go for your throat as fearsomely as a book like
Intensity
, readers who have found it under the Nichols name in used-book stores have expressed favorable opinions of it. I suppose they like it because the device of the lost child—and the dedicated mother who will do anything to find out what has happened to her little boy—strikes a primal chord in all of us.

As I revised the book for this new edition, I resisted the urge to transform the story entirely into a novel of the type that I would write today. I updated cultural and political references, polished away a few of the more egregious stylistic inadequacies, and trimmed excess wordage here and there. I enjoyed revisiting
Eyes
, which remains a basically simple tale that relies largely on plot and on the strangeness of the premise to engage the reader. I hope you
were
engaged, and that you have enjoyed taking this five-book voyage through the career of Leigh Nichols. If you’re ever in Iraq, the surgically altered author will probably be happy to sign copies of these books for you—or will denounce you as an infidel and have you thrown into a prison cell as vile as any sewer. Inquire at your own risk.

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