The Eyes of Darkness

“It was an accident,” Dombey said.

“I’ve heard that one before.”

“This time it’s true,” Dombey said. “After Li Chen defected with all the data on Wuhan-400, he was brought here. We immediately began working with him, trying to engineer an exact duplicate of the virus. In relatively short order we accomplished that. Then we began to study the bug, searching for a handle on it that the Chinese had overlooked.”

“And someone got careless,” Elliot said.

“Worse,” Dombey said. “Someone got careless and stupid. Almost thirteen months ago, when Danny and the other boys in his troop were on their winter survival outing, one of our scientists, a quirky son of a bitch named Larry Bollinger, accidentally contaminated himself while he was working alone one morning in this lab.”

Danny’s hand tightened on Christina’s, and she stroked his head, soothing him. To Dombey, she said, “Surely you have safeguards, procedures to follow when and if—”

“Of course,” Dombey said. “You’re trained what to do from the day you start to work here. In the event of accidental contamination, you immediately set off an alarm. Immediately. Then you seal the room you’re working in. If there’s an adjoining isolation chamber, you’re supposed to go into it and lock the door after yourself. A decontamination crew moves in swiftly to clean up whatever mess you’ve made in the lab. And if you’ve infected yourself with something curable, you’ll be treated. If it’s not curable… you’ll be attended to in isolation until you die. That’s one reason our pay scale is so high. Hazardous-duty pay. The risk is part of the job.”

“Except this Larry Bollinger didn’t see it that way,” Tina said bitterly. She was having difficulty wrapping Danny securely in the blanket because he wouldn’t let go of her. With smiles, murmured assurances, and kisses planted on his frail hands, she finally managed to persuade him to tuck both of his arms close to his body.

“Bollinger snapped. He just went right off the rails,” Dombey said, obviously embarrassed that one of his colleagues would lose control of himself under those circumstances. Dombey began to pace as he talked. “Bollinger knew how fast Wuhan-400 claims its victims, and he just panicked. Flipped out. Apparently, he convinced himself he could run away from the infection. God knows, that’s exactly what he tried to do. He didn’t turn in an alarm. He walked out of the lab, went to his quarters, dressed in outdoor clothes, and left the complex. He wasn’t scheduled for R and R, and on the spur of the moment he couldn’t think of an excuse to sign out one of the Range Rovers, so he tried to escape on foot. He told the guards he was going snowshoeing for a couple of hours. That’s something a lot of us do during the winter. It’s good exercise, and it gets you out of this hole in the ground for a while. Anyway, Bollinger wasn’t interested in exercise. He tucked the snowshoes under his arm and took off down the mountain road, the same one I presume you came in on. Before he got to the guard shack at the upper gate, he climbed onto the ridge above, used the snowshoes to circle the guard, returned to the road, and threw the snowshoes away. Security eventually found them. Bollinger was probably at the bottom gate two and a half hours after he walked out of the door here, three hours after he was infected. That was just about the time that another researcher walked into his lab, saw the cultures of Wuhan-400 broken open on the floor, and set off the alarm. Meanwhile, in spite of the razor wire, Bollinger climbed over the fence. Then he made his way to the road that serves the wildlife research center. He started out of the forest, toward the county lane, which is about five miles from the turnoff to the labs, and after only three miles—”

“He ran into Mr. Jaborski and the scouts,” Elliot said.

“And by then he was able to pass the disease on to them,” Tina said as she finished bundling Danny into the blanket.

“Yeah,” Dombey said. “He must have reached the scouts five or five and a half hours after he was infected. By then he was worn out. He’d used up most of his physical reserves getting out of the lab reservation, and he was also beginning to feel some of the early symptoms of Wuhan-400. Dizziness. Mild nausea. The scoutmaster had parked the expedition’s minibus on a lay-by about a mile and a half into the woods, and he and his assistant and the kids had walked in another half-mile before they encountered Larry Bollinger. They were just about to move off the road, into the trees, so they would be away from any sign of civilization when they set up camp for their first night in the wilderness. When Bollinger discovered they had a vehicle, he tried to persuade them to drive him all the way into Reno. When they were reluctant, he made up a story about a friend being stranded in the mountains with a broken leg. Jaborski didn’t believe Bollinger’s story for a minute, but he finally offered to take him to the wildlife center where a rescue effort could be mounted. That wasn’t good enough for Bollinger, and he got hysterical. Both Jaborski and the other scout leader decided they might have a dangerous character on their hands. That was when the security team arrived. Bollinger tried to run from them. Then he tried to tear open one of the security men’s decontamination suits. They were forced to shoot him.”

“The spacemen,” Danny said.

Everyone stared at him.

He huddled in his yellow blanket on the bed, and the memory made him shiver. “The spacemen came and took us away.”

“Yeah,” Dombey said. “They probably did look a little bit like spacemen in their decontamination suits. They brought everyone here and put them in isolation. One day later all of them were dead… except Danny.” Dombey sighed. “Well… you know most of the rest.”

Chapter Forty

The helicopter continued to follow the frozen river north, through the snow-swept valley.

The ghostly, slightly luminous winter landscape made George Alexander think of graveyards. He had an affinity for cemeteries. He liked to take long, leisurely walks among the tombstones. For as long as he could remember, he had been fascinated with death, with the mechanics and the meaning of it, and he had longed to know what it was like on the other side — without, of course, wishing to commit himself to a one-way journey there. He didn’t want to die; he only wanted to know. Each time that he personally killed someone, he felt as if he were establishing another link to the world beyond this one; and he hoped, once he had made enough of those linkages, that he would be rewarded with a vision from the other side. One day maybe he would be standing in a graveyard, before the tombstone of one of his victims, and the person he had killed would reach out to him from beyond and let him see, in some vivid clairvoyant fashion, exactly what death was like. And then he would know.

“Not long now,” Jack Morgan said.

Alexander peered anxiously through the sheeting snow into which the chopper moved like a blind man running full-steam into endless darkness. He touched the gun that he carried in a shoulder holster, and he thought of Christina Evans.

To Kurt Hensen, Alexander said, “Kill Stryker on sight. We don’t need him for anything. But don’t hurt the woman. I want to question her. She’s going to tell me who the traitor is. She’s going to tell me who helped her get into the labs even if I have to break her fingers one at a time to make her open up.”

* * *

In the isolation chamber, when Dombey finished speaking, Tina said, “Danny looks so awful. Even though he doesn’t have the disease anymore, will he be all right?”

“I think so,” Dombey said. “He just needs to be fattened up. He couldn’t keep anything in his stomach because recently they’ve been reinfecting him, testing him to destruction, like I said. But once he’s out of here, he should put weight on fast. There is one thing…”

Tina stiffened at the note of worry in Dombey’s voice. “What? What one thing?”

“Since all these reinfections, he’s developed a spot on the parietal lobe of the brain.”

Tina felt ill. “No.”

“But apparently it isn’t life-threatening,” Dombey said quickly. “As far as we can determine, it’s not a tumor. Neither a malignant nor a benign tumor. At least it doesn’t have any of the characteristics of a tumor. It isn’t scar tissue either. And not a blood clot.”

“Then what is it?” Elliot asked.

Dombey pushed one hand through his thick, curly hair. “The current analysis says the new growth is