The Eyes of Darkness (35 page)

“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.”

“Dr. Tamaguchi isn’t a megalomaniac,” Dr. Zachariah said, as if genuinely offended.

“Of course he is,” Dombey said. “He thinks he’s a great man of science, destined for immortality, a man of great works. And a lot of people around him, a lot of people protecting him, people in research and people in charge of project security—they’re also megalomaniacs. The things done to Danny Evans don’t constitute ‘great work.’ They won’t earn anyone immortality. It’s sick, and I’m washing my hands of it.” He looked at Tina again. “Ask your questions.”

“No,” Zachariah said. “You damn fool.”

Elliot took the remaining rope from Tina, and he gave her the pistol. “I’ll have to tie and gag Dr. Zachariah, so we can listen to Dr. Dombey’s story in peace. If either one of them makes a wrong move, blow him away.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t hesitate.”

“You’re not going to tie me,” Zachariah said.

Smiling, Elliot advanced on him with the rope.

A wall of frigid air fell on the chopper and drove it down. Jack Morgan fought the wind, stabilized the aircraft, and pulled it up only a few feet short of the treetops.

“Whoooooooeeeee!” the pilot said. “It’s like breaking in a wild horse.”

In the chopper’s brilliant floodlights, there was little to see but driving snow. Morgan had removed his night-vision goggles.

“This is crazy,” Hensen said. “We’re not flying into an ordinary storm. It’s a blizzard.”

Ignoring Hensen, Alexander said, “Morgan, goddamn you, I know you can do it.”

“Maybe,” Morgan said. “I wish I was as sure as you. But I think maybe I can. What I’m going to do is make an indirect approach to the plateau, moving with the wind instead of across it. I’m going to cut up this next valley and then swing back around toward the installation and try to avoid some of these crosscurrents. They’re murder. It’ll take us a little longer that way, but at least we’ll have a fighting chance. If the rotors don’t ice up and cut out.”

A particularly fierce blast of wind drove snow into the windscreen with such force that, to Kurt Hensen, it sounded like shotgun pellets.

Zachariah was on the floor, bound and gagged, glaring up at them with hate and rage.

“You’ll want to see your boy first,” Dombey said. “Then I can tell you how he came to be here.”

“Where is he?” Tina asked shakily.

“In the isolation chamber.” Dombey indicated the window in the back wall of the room. “Come on.” He went to the big pane of glass, where only a few small spots of frost remained.

For a moment Tina couldn’t move, afraid to see what they had done to Danny. Fear spread tendrils through her and rooted her feet to the floor.

Elliot touched her shoulder. “Don’t keep Danny waiting. He’s been waiting a long time. He’s been calling you for a long time.”

She took a step, then another, and before she knew it, she was at the window, beside Dombey.

A standard hospital bed stood in the center of the isolation chamber. It was ringed by ordinary medical equipment as well as by several mysterious electronic monitors.

Danny was in the bed, on his back. Most of him was covered, but his head, raised on a pillow, was turned toward the window. He stared at her through the side rails of the bed.

“Danny,” she said softly. She had the irrational fear that, if she said his name loudly, the spell would be broken and he would vanish forever.

His face was thin and sallow. He appeared to be older than twelve. Indeed, he looked like a little old man.

Dombey, sensing her shock, said, “He’s emaciated. For the past six or seven weeks, he hasn’t been able to keep anything but liquids in his stomach. And not a lot of those.”

Danny’s eyes were strange. Dark, as always. Big and round, as always. But they were sunken, ringed by unhealthy dark skin, which was
not
the way they had always been. She couldn’t pinpoint what else about his eyes made him so different from any eyes she had ever seen, but as she met Danny’s gaze, a shiver passed through her, and she felt a profound and terrible pity for him.

The boy blinked, and with what appeared to be great effort, at the cost of more than a little pain, he withdrew one arm from under the covers and reached out toward her. His arm was skin and bones, a pathetic stick. He thrust it between two of the side rails, and he opened his small weak hand beseechingly, reaching for love, trying desperately to touch her.

Her voice quivering, she said to Dombey, “I want to be with my boy. I want to hold him.”

As the three of them moved to the airtight steel door that led into the room beyond the window, Elliot said, “Why is he in an isolation chamber? Is he ill?”

“Not now,” Dombey said, stopping at the door, turning to them, evidently disturbed by what he had to tell them. “Right now he’s on the verge of starving to death because it’s been so long since he’s been able to keep any food in his stomach. But he’s not infectious. He
has
been very infectious, off and on, but not at the moment. He’s had a unique disease, a man-made disease created in the laboratory. He’s the only person who’s ever survived it. He has a natural antibody in his blood that helps him fight off this particular virus, even though it’s an artificial bug. That’s what fascinated Dr. Tamaguchi. He’s the head of this installation. Dr. Tamaguchi drove us very hard until we isolated the antibody and figured out why it was so effective against the disease. Of course, when that was accomplished, Danny was of no more scientific value. To Tamaguchi, that meant he was of no value at all . . . except in the crudest way. Tamaguchi decided to test Danny to destruction. For almost two months they’ve been reinfecting his body over and over again, letting the virus wear him down, trying to discover how many times he can lick it before it finally licks him. You see, there’s no permanent immunity to this disease. It’s like strep throat or the common cold or like cancer, because you can get it again and again . . . if you’re lucky enough to beat it the first time. Today, Danny just beat it for the fourteenth time.”

Tina gasped in horror.

Dombey said, “Although he gets weaker every day, for some reason he wins out over the virus faster each time. But each victory drains him. The disease
is
killing him, even if indirectly. It’s killing him by sapping his strength. Right now he’s clean and uninfected. Tomorrow they intend to stick another dirty needle in him.”

“My God,” Elliot said softly. “My God.”

Gripped by rage and revulsion, Tina stared at Dombey. “I can’t believe what I just heard.”

“Brace yourself,” Dombey said grimly. “You haven’t heard half of it yet.”

He turned away from them, spun the wheel on the steel door, and swung that barrier inward.

Minutes ago, when Tina had first peered through the observation window, when she had seen the frighteningly thin child, she had told herself that she would not cry. Danny didn’t need to see her cry. He needed love and attention and protection. Her tears might upset him. And judging from his appearance, she was concerned that any serious emotional disturbance would literally destroy him.

Now, as she approached his bed, she bit her lower lip so hard that she tasted blood. She struggled to contain her tears, but she needed all her willpower to keep her eyes dry.

Danny became excited when he saw her drawing near, and in spite of his terrible condition, he shakily thrust himself into a sitting position, clutching at the bed rails with one frail, trembling hand, eagerly extending his other hand toward her.

She took the last few steps haltingly, her heart pounding, her throat constricted. She was overwhelmed with the joy of seeing him again but also with fear when she realized how hideously wasted he was.

When their hands touched, his small fingers curled tightly around hers. He held on with a fierce, desperate strength.

“Danny,” she said wonderingly. “Danny, Danny.”

From somewhere deep inside of him, from far down beneath all the pain and fear and anguish, Danny found a smile for her. It wasn’t much of a smile; it quivered on his lips as if sustaining it required more energy than lifting a hundred-pound weight. It was such a tentative smile, such a vague ghost of all the broad warm smiles she remembered, that it broke her heart.

“Mom.”

Tina could hardly recognize his weary, cracking voice.

“Mom.”

“It’s all right,” she said.

He shuddered.

“It’s all over, Danny. It’s all right now.”

“Mom . . . Mom . . .” His face spasmed, and his brave smile dissolved, and an agonized groan escaped him. “Oooohhhhh,
Mommy . .
.”

Tina pushed down the railing and sat on the edge of the bed and carefully pulled Danny into her arms. He was a rag doll with only meager scraps of stuffing, a fragile and timorous creature, nothing whatsoever like the happy, vibrant, active boy that he had once been. At first she was afraid to hug him, for fear he would shatter in her embrace. But he hugged her very hard, and again she was surprised by how much strength he could still summon from his devastated body. Shaking violently, snuffling, he put his face against her neck, and she felt his scalding tears on her skin. She couldn’t control herself any longer, so she allowed her own tears to come, rivers of tears, a flood. Putting one hand on the boy’s back to press him against her, she discovered how shockingly spindly he was: each rib and vertebra so prominent that she seemed to be holding a skeleton. When she pulled him into her lap, he trailed wires that led from electrodes on his skin to the monitoring machines around the bed, like an abandoned marionette. As his legs came out from under the covers, the hospital gown slipped off them, and Tina saw that his poor limbs were too bony and fleshless to safely support him. Weeping, she cradled him, rocked him, crooned to him, and told him that she loved him.