The Eyes of Darkness

aside.
    Was it Danny who opened it? Elliot wondered. Or a grinning guard waiting to make an easy arrest?
    A steel-walled chamber lay beyond the door. It was the size of a large elevator cab, brightly lighted and uninhabited.
    Tina and Elliot crossed the threshold. The outer door slid shut behind them— whoosh —making an airtight seal.
    A camera and two-way video communications monitor were mounted in the left-hand wall of the vestibule. The screen was filled with crazily wiggling lines, as if it was out of order.
    Beside the monitor was a lighted glass plate against which the visitor was supposed to place his right hand, palm-down, within the existing outline of a hand. Evidently the installation's computer scanned the prints of visitors to verify their right to enter.
    Elliot and Tina did not put their hands on the plate, but the inner door of the vestibule opened with another puff of compressed air. They went into the next room.
    Two uniformed men were anxiously fiddling with the control consoles beneath a series of twenty wall-mounted video displays. All of the screens were filled with wiggling lines.
    The youngest of the guards heard the door opening, and he turned, shocked.
    Elliot pointed the gun at him. "Don't move."
    But the young guard was the heroic type. He was wearing a sidearm—a monstrous revolver—and he was fast with it. He drew, aimed from the hip, and squeezed the trigger.
    Fortunately Danny came through like a prince. The revolver refused to fire.
    Elliot didn't want to shoot anyone. "Your guns are useless," he said. He was sweating in his Gore-Tex suit, praying that Danny wouldn't let him down. "Let's make this as easy as we can."
    When the young guard discovered that his revolver wouldn't work, he threw it.
    Elliot ducked, but not fast enough. The gun struck him alongside the head, and he stumbled backward against the steel door.
    Tina cried out.
    Through sudden tears of pain, Elliot saw the young guard rushing him, and he squeezed off one whisper-quiet shot.
    The bullet tore through the guy's left shoulder and spun him around. He crashed into a desk, sending a pile of white and pink papers onto the floor, and then he fell on top of the mess that he had made.
    Blinking away tears, Elliot pointed the pistol at the older guard, who had drawn his revolver by now and had found that it didn't work either. "Put the gun aside, sit down, and don't make any trouble."
    "How'd you get in here?" the older guard asked, dropping his weapon as he'd been ordered. "Who are you?"
    "Never mind," Elliot said. "Just sit down."
    But the guard was insistent. "Who are you people?"
    "Justice," Tina said.
     
    •        •         •
     
    Five minutes west of Reno, the chopper encountered snow. The flakes were hard, dry, and granular; they hissed like driven sand across the Perspex windscreen.
    Jack Morgan, the pilot, glanced at George Alexander and said, "This will be hairy." He was wearing night-vision goggles, and his eyes were invisible.
    "Just a little snow," Alexander said.
    "A storm," Morgan corrected.
    "You've flown in storms before."
    "In these mountains the downdrafts and crosscurrents are going to be murderous."
    "We'll make it," Alexander said grimly.
    "Maybe, maybe not," Morgan said. He grinned. "But we're sure going to have fun trying!"
    "You're crazy," Hensen said from his seat behind the pilot.
    "When we were running operations against the drug lords down in Colombia," Morgan said, "they called me 'Bats,' meaning I had bats in the belfry." He laughed.
    Hensen was holding a submachine gun across his lap. He moved his hands over it slowly, as if he were caressing a woman. He closed his eyes, and in his mind he disassembled and then reassembled the weapon. He had a queasy stomach. He was trying hard not to think about the chopper the bad weather, and the likelihood that they would take a long, swift, hard fall into a remote mountain ravine.
     
     
     
     

37
     
    the young guard wheezed in pain, but as far as Tina could see, he was not mortally wounded. The bullet had partially cauterized the wound as it passed through. The hole in the guy's shoulder was reassuringly clean, and it wasn't bleeding much.
    "You'll live," Elliot said.
    "I'm dying. Jesus!"
    "No. It hurts like hell, but it isn't serious. The bullet didn't sever any major blood vessels."
    "How the hell would you know?" the wounded man asked, straining his words through clenched teeth.
    "If you lie still, you'll be all right.