The Eyes of Darkness

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."
     
     
     
     

28
     
    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