The Eyes of Darkness

have to take the story out of town, and before we do that, I'd like to have a few more facts."
    "I thought you said we had enough to interest a good newsman. The pistol you took off that man . . . my house being blown up . . ."
    "That might be enough. Certainly, for the Las Vegas paper, it ought to be sufficient. This city still remembers the Jaborski group, the Sierra accident. It was a local tragedy. But if we go to the press in Los Angeles or New York or some other city, the reporters there aren't going to have a whole lot of interest in it unless they see an aspect of the story that lifts it out of the local-interest category. Maybe we've already got enough to convince them it's big news. I'm not sure. And I want to be damn sure before we try to go public with it. Ideally, I'd even like to be able to hand the reporter a neat theory about what really happened to those scouts, something sensational that he can hook his story onto."
    "Such as?"
    He shook his head. "I don't have anything worked out yet. But it seems to me the most obvious thing we have to consider is that the scouts and their leaders saw something they weren't supposed to see."
    "Project Pandora?"
    He sipped his beer and used one finger to wipe a trace of foam from his upper lip. "A military secret. I can't see what else would have brought an organization like Vince's so deeply into this. An intelligence outfit of that size and sophistication doesn't waste its time on Mickey Mouse stuff."
    "But military secrets . . . that seems so far out."
    "In case you didn't know it, since the Cold War ended and California took such a big hit in the defense downsizing, Nevada has more Pentagon-supported industries and installations than any state in the union. And I'm not just talking about the obvious ones like Nellis Air Force Base and the Nuclear Test Site. This state's ideally suited for secret or quasi-secret, high-security weapons research centers. Nevada has thousands of square miles of remote unpopulated land. The deserts. The deeper reaches of the mountains. And most of those remote areas are owned by the federal government. If you put a secret installation in the middle of all that lonely land, you have a pretty easy job maintaining security."
    Arms on the table, both hands clasped around her glass of beer, Tina leaned toward Elliot. "You're saying that Mr. Jaborski, Mr. Lincoln, and the boys stumbled across a place like that in the Sierras?"
    "It's possible."
    "And saw something they weren't supposed to see."
    "Maybe."
    "And then what? You mean . . . because of what they saw, they were killed!"
    "It's a theory that ought to excite a good reporter."
    She shook her head. "I just can't believe the government would murder a group of little children just because they accidentally got a glimpse of a new weapon or something."
    "Wouldn't it? Think of Waco—all those dead children. Ruby Ridge—a fourteen-year-old boy shot in the back by the FBI. Vince Foster found dead in a Washington park and officially declared a suicide even though most of the forensic evidence points to murder. Even a primarily good government, when it's big enough, has some pretty mean sharks swimming in the darker currents. We're living in strange times, Tina."
    The rising night wind thrummed against the large pane of glass beside their booth. Beyond the window, out on Charleston Boulevard, traffic sailed murkily through a sudden churning river of dust and paper scraps.
    Chilled, Tina said, "But how much could the kids have seen? You're the one who said security was easy to maintain when one of these installations is located in the wilderness. The boys couldn't have gotten very close to such a well-guarded place. Surely they couldn't have managed to get more than a glimpse."
    "Maybe a glimpse was enough to condemn them."
    "But kids aren't the best observers," she argued. "They're impressionable, excitable, given to exaggeration. If they had seen something, they'd have come back with at least a dozen different stories about it, none of them accurate. A group of young boys wouldn't be a threat to the security of a secret installation."
    "You're probably right. But a bunch of hard-nosed security men might not have seen it that way."
    "Well, they'd have had to be pretty stupid to think murder was the safest way to handle it. Killing all those people and trying to fake an accident—that was a whole lot riskier than letting the kids come back with their half-baked stories about seeing