The Eyes of Darkness

to have a key card, do you?"
    "Danny will help," she said. "That's what the dream was all about."
    "How long do we wait here?"
    "Not long," she said as the gate swung inward.
    "I'll be damned,"
    The heated road stretched out of sight in the darkness.
    "We're coming, Danny," Tina said quietly.
    "What if someone else opened the gate?" Elliot asked. "What if Danny didn't have anything to do with it? They might just be letting us in so they can trap us inside."
    "It was Danny."
    "You're so sure."
    "Yes."
    He sighed and drove through the gate, which swung shut behind the Explorer.
    The road began to climb in earnest, hugging the slopes. It was overhung by huge rock formations and by wind-sculpted cowls of snow. The single lane widened to two lanes in places and switchbacked up the ridges, through more densely packed strands of larger trees. The Explorer labored ever higher into the mountains.
    The second gate was one and a half miles past the first, on a short length of straightaway, just over the brow of a hill. It was not merely a gate, but a checkpoint. A guard shack stood to the right of the road, from which the gate was controlled.
    Elliot picked up the gun as he brought the Explorer to a full stop at the barrier.
    They were no more than six or eight feet from the lighted shack, close enough to see the guard's face as he scowled at them through the large window.
    "He's trying to figure out who the devil we are," Elliot said. "He's never seen us or the Explorer, and this isn't the sort of place where there's a lot of new or unexpected traffic."
    Inside the hut, the guard plucked a telephone handset from the wall.
    "Damn!" Elliot said. "I'll have to go for him."
    As Elliot started to open his door, Tina saw something that made her grab his arm. "Wait! The phone doesn't work."
    The guard slammed the receiver down. He got to his feet, took a coat from the back of his chair, slipped into it, zippered up, and came out of the shack. He was carrying a submachine gun.
    From elsewhere in the night, Danny opened the gate.
    The guard stopped halfway to the Explorer and turned toward the gate when he saw it moving, unable to believe his eyes.
    Elliot rammed his foot down hard on the accelerator, and the Explorer shot forward.
    The guard swung the submachine gun into firing position as they swept past him.
    Tina raised her hands in an involuntary and totally useless attempt to ward off the bullets.
    But there were no bullets.
    No torn metal. No shattered glass. No blood or pain.
    They didn't even hear gunfire.
    The Explorer roared across the straightaway and careened up the slope beyond, through the tendrils of steam that rose from the black pavement.
    Still no gunfire.
    As they swung into another curve, Elliot wrestled with the wheel, and Tina was acutely aware that a great dark void lay beyond the shoulder of the road. Elliot held the vehicle on the pavement as they rounded the bend, and then they were out of the guard's line of fire. For two hundred yards ahead, until the road curved once more, nothing threatening was in sight.
    The Explorer dropped back to a safer speed.
    Elliot said, "Did Danny do all of that?"
    "He must have."
    "He jinxed the guard's phone, opened the gate, and jammed the submachine gun. What is this kid of yours?"
    As they ascended into the night, snow began to fall hard and fast in sheets of fine, dry flakes.
    After a minute of thought Tina said, "I don't know. I don't know what he is anymore. I don't know what's happened to him, and I don't understand what he's become."
    This was an unsettling thought. She began to wonder exactly what sort of little boy they were going to find at the top of the mountain.
     
     
     
     

35
     
    with glossy photographs of christina Evans and Elliot Stryker, George Alexander's men circulated through the hotels in downtown Reno, talking with desk clerks, bellmen, and other employees. At four-thirty they obtained a strong, positive identification from a maid at Harrah's.
    In room 918 the Network operatives discovered a cheap suitcase, dirty clothes, toothbrushes, various toiletry items— and eleven maps in a leatherette case, which Elliot and Tina, in their haste and weariness, evidently had overlooked.
    Alexander was informed of the discovery at 5:05. By 5:40 everything that Stryker and the woman had left in the hotel room was brought to Alexander's office.
    When he discovered the nature of the maps, when he realized that one of them was missing, and when he discovered