The Eyes of Darkness

remembered something important about Elliot Stryker. “Ah,” he said.

Alexander put down the enameled cigarette box that he had been studying. “What is it?”

“Elliot’s a pilot. He owns his own plane.”

Alexander frowned.

“Have you been checking small craft leaving the airport?” Kennebeck asked.

“No. Just scheduled airliners and charters.”

“Ah.”

“He’d have had to take off in the dark,” Alexander said. “You think he’s licensed for instrument flying? Most businessmen-pilots and hobby pilots aren’t certified for anything but daylight.”

“Better get hold of your men at the airport,” Kennebeck said. “I already know what they’re going to find. I’ll bet a hundred bucks to a dime Elliot slipped out of town under your nose.”

* * *

The Cessna Turbo Skylane RG knifed through the darkness, two miles above the Nevada desert, with the low clouds under it, wings plated silver by moonlight.

“Elliot?”

“Hmmm?”

“I’m sorry I got you mixed up in this.”

“You don’t like my company?”

“You know what I mean. I’m really sorry.”

“Hey, you didn’t get me mixed up in it. You didn’t twist my arm. I practically volunteered to help you with the exhumation, and it all just fell apart from there. It’s not your fault.”

“Still… here you are, running for your life, and all because of me.”

“Nonsense. You couldn’t have known what would happen after I talked to Kennebeck.”

“I can’t help feeling guilty about involving you.”

“If it wasn’t me, it would have been some other attorney. And maybe he wouldn’t have known how to handle Vince. In which case, both he and you might be dead. So if you look at it that way, it worked out as well as it possibly could.”

“You’re really something else,” she said.

“What else am I?”

“Lots of things.”

“Such as?”

“Terrific.”

“Not me. What else?”

“Brave.”

“Bravery is a virtue of fools.”

“Smart.”

“Not as smart as I think I am.”

“Tough.”

“I cry at sad movies. See, I’m not as great as you think I am.”

“You can cook.”

“Now that’s true!”

The Cessna hit an air pocket, dropped three hundred feet with a sickening lurch, and then soared to its correct altitude.

“A great cook but a lousy pilot,” she said.

“That was God’s turbulence. Complain to Him.”

“How long till we land in Reno?”

“Eighty minutes.”

* * *

George Alexander hung up the telephone. He was still sitting in Kennebeck’s wing chair. “Stryker and the woman took off from McCarran International more than two hours ago. They left in his Cessna. He filed a flight plan for Flagstaff.”

The judge stopped pacing. “Arizona?”

“That’s the only Flagstaff I know. But why would they go to Arizona, of all places?”

“They probably didn’t,” Kennebeck said. “I figure Elliot filed a false flight plan to throw you off his trail.” He was perversely proud of Stryker’s cleverness.

“If they actually headed for Flagstaff,” Alexander said, “they ought to have landed by now. I’ll call the night manager at the airport down there, pretend to be FBI, see what he can tell me.”

Because the Network did not officially exist, it couldn’t openly use its authority to gather information. As a result, Network agents routinely posed as FBI men, with counterfeit credentials in the names of actual FBI agents.

While he waited for Alexander to finish with the night manager at the Flagstaff airport, Kennebeck moved from one model ship to another. For the first time in his experience, the sight of this bottled fleet didn’t calm him.

Fifteen minutes later Alexander put down the telephone. “Stryker isn’t on the Flagstaff field. And he hasn’t yet been identified in their airspace.”

“Ah. So his flight plan was a red herring.”

“Unless he crashed between here and there,” Alexander said hopefully.

Kennebeck grinned. “He didn’t crash. But where the hell did he go?”

“Probably in the opposite direction,” Alexander said. “Southern California.”

“Ah. Los Angeles?”

“Or Santa Barbara. Burbank. Long Beach. Ontario. Orange County. There are a lot of airports within the range of that little Cessna.”

They were both silent, thinking. Then Kennebeck said, “Reno. That’s where they went. Reno.”

“You were so sure they didn’t know a thing about the Sierra labs,” Alexander said. “Have you changed your mind?”

“No. I still think you could have avoided issuing all those termination orders. Look, they can’t be going up to the mountains, because they don’t know where the laboratories are. They don’t know anything more about Project Pandora than what they picked up from that list of questions they took off Vince Immelman.”

“Then why Reno?”

Pacing, Kennebeck said, “Now that we’ve tried to kill them, they know the story of the Sierra accident was entirely contrived. They figure there’s something wrong with the little boy’s body, something odd that we can’t afford to let them see. So now they’re twice as anxious to see it. They’d exhume it illegally if they could, but they can’t get near the cemetery with us watching it. And Stryker knows for sure that we’ve got it staked out. So if they can’t open the grave and see for themselves what we’ve done to Danny Evans, what are they going to do instead? They’re going to do the next best thing — talk to the person who was supposedly the last one to see the boy’s corpse before it was sealed in the coffin. They’re going to ask him to describe the condition of the boy in minute detail.”

“Richard Pannafin is the coroner in Reno. He issued the death certificate,” Alexander said.

“No. They won’t go to Pannafin. They’ll figure he’s involved in the cover-up.”

“Which he is. Reluctantly.”

“So they’ll go to see the mortician who supposedly prepared the boy’s body for burial.”

“Bellicosti.”

“Was that his name?”

“Luciano Bellicosti,” Alexander said. “But if that’s where they went, then they’re not just hiding out, licking their wounds. Good God, they’ve actually gone on the offensive!”

“That’s Stryker’s military-intelligence training taking hold,” Kennebeck said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. He’s not going to be an easy target. He could destroy the Network, given half a chance. And the woman’s evidently not one to hide or run away from a problem either. We have to go after these two with more care than usual. What about this Bellicosti? Will he keep his mouth shut?”