The Eyes of Darkness

alive in her hands, like a pair of snakes, resisting her. She jerked on them and pulled both plugs.
    The monitor went dark.
    It remained dark.
    Immediately, rapidly, the room began to grow warmer.
    "Thank God," she said shakily.
    She started around Angela's desk, wanting nothing more at the moment than to get off her rubbery legs and onto a chair—and suddenly the door to the hall opened, and she cried out in alarm.
    The man in black?
    Elliot Stryker halted on the threshold, surprised by her scream, and for an instant she was relieved to see him.
    "Tina? What's wrong? Are you all right?"
    She took a step toward him, but then she realized that he might have come here straight from a computer in one of the other third-floor offices. Could he be the man who'd been harassing her?
    "Tina? My God, you're white as a ghost!"
    He moved toward her.
    She said, "Stop! Wait!"
    He halted, perplexed.
    Voice quavery, she said, "What are you doing here?"
    He blinked. "I was in the hotel on business. I wondered if you might still be at your desk. I stopped in to see. I just wanted to say hello."
    "Were you playing around with one of the other computers?"
    "What?" he asked, obviously baffled by her question.
    "What were you doing on the third floor?" she demanded. "Who could you possibly have been seeing? They've all gone home. I'm the only one here."
    Still puzzled but beginning to get impatient with her, Elliot said, "My business wasn't on the third floor. I had a meeting with Charlie Mainway over coffee, downstairs in the restaurant. When we finished our work a couple minutes ago, I came up to see if you were here. What's wrong with you?"
    She stared at him intently.
    "Tina? What's happened?"
    She searched his face for any sign that he was lying, but his bewilderment seemed genuine. And if he were lying, he wouldn't have told her the story about Charlie and coffee, for that could be substantiated or disproved with only a minimum of effort; he would have come up with a better alibi if he really needed one. He was telling the truth.
    She said, "I'm sorry. I just . . . I had . . . an ... an experience here . . . a weird . . ."
    He went to her. "What was it?"
    As he drew near, he opened his arms, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to hold and comfort her, as if he had held her many times before, and she leaned against him in the same spirit of familiarity. She was no longer alone.
     
     
     

13
     
    tina kept a well-stocked bar in one corner of her office for those infrequent occasions when a business associate needed a drink after a long work session. This was the first time she'd ever had the need to tap those stores for herself.
    At her request, Elliot poured R é my Martin into two snifters and gave one glass to her. She couldn't pour for them because her hands were shaking too badly.
    They sat on the beige sofa, more in the shadows than in the glow from the lamps. She was forced to hold her brandy snifter in both hands to keep it steady.
    "I don't know where to begin. I guess I ought to start with Danny. Do you know about Danny?"
    "Your son?" he asked.
    "Yes."
    "Helen Mainway told me he died a little over a year ago."
    "Did she tell you how it happened?"
    "He was one of the Jaborski group. Front page of the papers."
    Bill Jaborski had been a wilderness expert and a scout-master. Every winter for sixteen years, he had taken a group of scouts to northern Nevada, beyond Reno, into the High Sierras, on a seven-day wilderness survival excursion.
    "It was supposed to build character," Tina said. "And the boys competed hard all year for the chance to be one of those selected to go on the trip. It was supposed to be perfectly safe. Bill Jaborski was supposed to be one of the ten top winter-survival experts in the country. That's what everyone said. And the other adult who went along, Tom Lincoln—he was supposed to be almost as good as Bill. Supposed to be." Her voice had grown thin and bitter. "I believed them, thought it was safe."
    "You can't blame yourself for that. All those years they'd taken kids into the mountains, nobody was even scratched."
    Tina swallowed some cognac. It was hot in her throat, but it didn't burn away the chill at the center of her.
    A year ago Jaborski's excursion had included fourteen boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen. All of them were top-notch scouts—and all of them died along with Jaborski and Tom Lincoln.
    "Have the authorities ever figured out exactly why it