The Eyes of Darkness (29 page)

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.”

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 only 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 policymaking 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.

At times he envied his father and his uncles. Most of them had served their country openly, in a supremely visible fashion, where everyone could see and admire their selfless public-spiritedness. Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, the Ambassador to France . . . in positions of that nature, a man was appreciated and respected.

George, on the other hand, hadn’t filled a post of genuine stature and authority until six years ago, when he was thirty-six. During his twenties and early thirties, he had labored at a variety of lesser jobs for the government. These diplomatic and intelligence-gathering assignments were never an insult to his family name, but they were always minor postings to embassies in smaller countries like Iceland and Ecuador and Tonga, nothing for which
The New York Times
would deign to acknowledge his existence.

Then, six years ago, the Network had been formed, and the President had given George the task of developing a reliable South American bureau of the new intelligence agency. That had been exciting, challenging, important work. George had been directly responsible for the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars and, eventually, for the control of hundreds of agents in a dozen countries. After three years the President had declared himself delighted with the accomplishments in South America, and he had asked George to take charge of one of the Network’s domestic bureaus—Nevada—which had been terribly mismanaged. This slot was one of the half-dozen most powerful in the Network’s executive hierarchy. George was encouraged by the President to believe that eventually he would be promoted to the bureau chief of the entire western half of the country—and then all the way to the top, if only he could get the floundering western division functioning as smoothly as the South American and Nevada offices. In time he would take the director’s chair in Washington and would bear full responsibility for all domestic and foreign intelligence operations. With that title he would be one of the most powerful men in the United States, more of a force to be reckoned with than any mere Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense could hope to be.

But he couldn’t tell anyone about his achievements. He could never hope to receive the public acclaim and honor that had been heaped upon other men in his family. The Network was clandestine and must remain clandestine if it was to have any value. At least half of the people who worked for it did not even realize it existed; some thought they were employed by the FBI; others were sure they worked for the CIA; and still others believed that they were in the hire of various branches of the Treasury Department, including the Secret Service. None of those people could compromise the Network. Only bureau chiefs, their immediate staffs, station chiefs in major cities, and senior field officers who had proved themselves and their loyalty—only those people knew the true nature of their employers and their work. The moment that the news media became aware of the Network’s existence, all was lost.

As he sat in the dimly lighted cabin of the fan-jet and watched the clouds racing below, Alexander wondered what his father and his uncles would say if they knew that his service to his country had often required him to issue kill orders. More shocking still to the sensibilities of patrician Easterners like them: on three occasions, in South America, Alexander had been in a position where it had been necessary for him to pull the assassin’s trigger himself. He had enjoyed those murders so immensely, had been so profoundly thrilled by them, that he had, by choice, performed the executioner’s role on half a dozen other assignments. What would the elder Alexanders, the famous statesmen, think if they knew he’d soiled his hands with blood? As for the fact that it was sometimes his job to order other men to kill, he supposed his family would understand. The Alexanders were all idealists when they were discussing the way things ought to be, but they were also hardheaded pragmatists when dealing with the way things actually were. They knew that the worlds of domestic military security and international espionage were not children’s playgrounds. George liked to believe that they might even find it in their hearts to forgive him for having pulled the trigger himself.

After all, he had never killed an ordinary citizen or a person of real worth. His targets had always been spies, traitors; more than a few of them had been cold-blooded killers themselves. Scum. He had only killed scum. It wasn’t a pretty job, but it also wasn’t without a measure of real dignity and heroism. At least that was the way George saw it; he thought of himself as heroic. Yes, he was sure that his father and uncles would give him their blessings—if only he were permitted to tell them.

The jet hit an especially bad patch of turbulence. It yawed, bounced, shuddered.

Kurt Hensen snorted in his sleep but didn’t wake.

When the plane settled down once more, Alexander looked out the window at the milky-white, moonlit, feminine roundness of the clouds below, and he thought of the Evans woman. She was quite lovely. Her file folder was on the seat beside him. He picked it up, opened it, and stared at her photograph. Quite lovely indeed. He decided he would kill her himself when the time came, and that thought gave him an instant erection.

He enjoyed killing. He didn’t try to pretend otherwise with himself, no matter what face he had to present to the world. All of his life, for reasons he had never been able to fully ascertain, he had been fascinated by death, intrigued by the form and nature and possibilities of it, enthralled by the study and theory of its meaning. He considered himself a messenger of death, a divinely appointed headsman. Murder was, in many ways, more thrilling to him than sex. His taste for violence would not have been tolerated for long in the old FBI—perhaps not even in the new, thoroughly politicized FBI—or in many other congressionally monitored police agencies. But in this unknown organization, in this secret and incomparably cozy place, he thrived.

He closed his eyes and thought about Christina Evans.

In Tina’s dream, Danny was at the far end of a long tunnel. He was in chains, sitting in the center of a small, well-lighted cavern, but the passageway that led to him was shadowy and reeked of danger. Danny called to her again and again, begging her to save him before the roof of his underground prison caved in and buried him alive. She started down the tunnel toward him, determined to get him out of there—and something reached for her from a narrow cleft in the wall. She was peripherally aware of a soft, firelike glow from beyond the cleft, and of a mysterious figure silhouetted against that reddish backdrop. She turned, and she was looking into the grinning face of Death, as if he were peering out at her from the bowels of Hell. The crimson eyes. The shriveled flesh. The lacework of maggots on his cheek. She cried out, but then she saw that Death could not quite reach her. The hole in the wall was not wide enough for him to step through, into her passageway; he could only thrust one arm at her, and his long, bony fingers were an inch or two short of her. Danny began calling again, and she continued down the dusky tunnel toward him. A dozen times she passed chinks in the wall, and Death glared out at her from every one of those apertures, screamed and cursed and raged at her, but none of the holes was large enough to allow him through. She reached Danny, and when she touched him, the chains fell magically away from his arms and legs. She said, “I was scared.” And Danny said, “I made the holes in the walls smaller. I made sure he couldn’t reach you, couldn’t hurt you.”