Stryker and the woman were proving to be worthy opponents.
Alexander never liked to have worthy opponents. He preferred them to be soft and easy.
Where were they?
32
THE DECIDUOUS TREES, STRIPPED OF EVERY LEAF, appeared to be charred, as if this particular winter had been more severe than others and as cataclysmic as a fire. The evergreens—pine, spruce, fir, tamarack—were flocked with snow. A brisk wind spilled over the jagged horizon under a low and menacing sky, snapping ice-hard flurries of snow against the windshield of the Explorer.
Tina was in awe of—and disquieted by—the stately forest that crowded them as they drove north on the narrowing county road. Even if she had not known that these deep woodlands harbored secrets about Danny and the deaths of the other scouts, she would have found them mysterious and unnervingly primeval.
She and Elliot had turned off Interstate 80 a quarter of an hour ago, following the route Danny had marked, circling the edge of the wilderness. On paper they were still moving along the border of the map, with a large expanse of blues and greens on their left. Shortly they would turn off the two-lane blacktop onto another road, which the map specified as “unpaved, nondirt,” whatever that was.
After leaving Billy Sandstone’s house in his Explorer, Tina and Elliot had not returned to the hotel. They shared a premonition that someone decidedly unfriendly was waiting in their room.
First they had visited a sporting-goods store, purchasing two Gore-Tex/Thermolite stormsuits, boots, snowshoes, compact tins of backpacker’s rations, cans of Sterno, and other survival gear. If the rescue attempt went smoothly, as Tina’s dream seemed to predict, they wouldn’t have any need for much of what they bought. But if the Explorer broke down in the mountains, or if another hitch developed, they wanted to be prepared for the unexpected.
Elliot also bought a hundred rounds of hollow-point ammunition for the pistol. This wasn’t insurance against the unforeseen; this was simply prudent planning for the trouble they could foresee all too well.
From the sporting-goods store they had driven out of town, west toward the mountains. At a roadside restaurant, they changed clothes in the rest rooms. His insulated suit was green with white stripes; hers was white with green and black stripes. They looked like a couple of skiers on their way to the slopes.
Entering the formidable mountains, they had become aware of how soon darkness would settle over the sheltered valleys and ravines, and they had discussed the wisdom of proceeding. Perhaps they would have been smarter to turn around, go back to Reno, find another hotel room, and get a fresh start in the morning. But neither wanted to delay. Perhaps the lateness of the hour and the fading light would work against them, but approaching in the night might actually be to their advantage. The thing was—they had momentum. They both felt as if they were on a good roll, and they didn’t want to tempt fate by postponing their journey.
Now they were on a narrow county road, moving steadily higher as the valley sloped toward its northern end. Plows had kept the blacktop clean, except for scattered patches of hard-packed snow that filled the potholes, and snow was piled five or six feet high on both sides.
“Soon now,” Tina said, glancing at the map that was open on her knees.
“Lonely part of the world, isn’t it?”
“You get the feeling that civilization could be destroyed while you’re out here, and you’d never be aware of it.”
They hadn’t seen a house or other structure for two miles. They hadn’t passed another car in three miles.
Twilight descended into the winter forest, and Elliot switched on the headlights.
Ahead, on the left, a break appeared in the bank of snow that had been heaped up by the plows. When the Explorer reached this gap, Elliot swung into the turnoff and stopped. A narrow and forbidding track led into the woods, recently plowed but still treacherous. It was little more than one lane wide, and the trees formed a tunnel around it, so that after fifty or sixty feet, it disappeared into premature night. It was unpaved, but a solid bed had been built over the years by the generous and repeated application of oil and gravel.
“According to the map, we’re looking for an ‘unpaved, nondirt’ road,” Tina told him.
“I guess this is it.”
“Some sort of logging trail?”
“Looks more like the road they always take in those old movies when they’re on their way to Dracula’s castle.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“And it doesn’t help that you’re right. It
does
look like the road to Dracula’s castle.”
They drove onto the track, under the roof of heavy evergreen boughs, into the heart of the forest.
33
IN THE RECTANGULAR ROOM, THREE STORIES UNDERGROUND, computers hummed and murmured.
Dr. Carlton Dombey, who had come on duty twenty minutes ago, sat at one of the tables against the north wall. He was studying a set of electroencephalograms and digitally enhanced sonograms and X rays.
After a while he said, “Did you see the pictures they took of the kid’s brain this morning?”
Dr. Aaron Zachariah turned from the bank of video displays. “I didn’t know there were any.”
“Yeah. A whole new series.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Yes,” Dombey said. “The spot that showed up on the boy’s parietal lobe about six weeks ago.”
“What about it?”
“Darker, larger.”
“Then it’s definitely a malignant tumor?”
“That still isn’t clear.”
“Benign?”
“Can’t say for sure either way. The spot doesn’t have all the spectrographic characteristics of a tumor.”
“Could it be scar tissue?”
“Not exactly that.”
“Blood clot?”
“Definitely not.”
“Have we learned anything useful?”
“Maybe,” Dombey said. “I’m not sure if it’s useful or not.” He frowned. “It’s sure strange, though.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense,” Zachariah said, moving over to the table to examine the tests.
Dombey said, “According to the computer-assigned analysis, the growth is consistent with the nature of normal brain tissue.”
Zachariah stared at him. “Come again?”
“It could be a new lump of brain tissue,” Dombey told him.
“But that doesn’t make sense.”
“I know.”
“The brain doesn’t all of a sudden start growing new little nodes that nobody’s ever seen before.”
“I know.”
“Someone better run a maintenance scan on the computer. It has to be screwed up.”
“They did that this afternoon,” Dombey said, tapping a pile of printouts that lay on the table. “Everything’s supposed to be functioning perfectly.”
“Just like the heating system in that isolation chamber is functioning properly,” Zachariah said.
Still poring through the test results, stroking his mustache with one hand, Dombey said, “Listen to this . . . the growth rate of the parietal spot is directly proportional to the number of injections the boy’s been given. It appeared after his first series of shots six weeks ago. The more frequently the kid is reinfected, the faster the parietal spot grows.”
“Then it must be a tumor,” Zachariah said.
“Probably. They’re going to do an exploratory in the morning.”
“Surgery?”
“Yeah. Get a tissue sample for a biopsy.”
Zachariah glanced toward the observation window of the isolation chamber. “Damn, there it goes again!”
Dombey saw that the glass was beginning to cloud again.
Zachariah hurried to the window.
Dombey stared thoughtfully at the spreading frost. He said, “You know something? That problem with the window . . . if I’m not mistaken, it started at the same time the parietal spot first showed up on the X rays.”
Zachariah turned to him. “So?”
“Doesn’t that strike you as coincidental?”
“That’s exactly how it strikes me. Coincidence. I fail to see any association.”
“Well . . . could the parietal spot have a direct connection with the frost somehow?”
“What—you think the boy might be responsible for the changes in air temperature?”
“Could he?”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you’re the one who raised the question.”
“I don’t know,” Dombey said again.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Zachariah said. “No sense at all. If you keep coming up with weird suggestions like that, I’ll have to run a maintenance check on
you,
Carl.”
34
THE OIL-AND-GRAVEL TRAIL LED DEEP INTO THE forest. It was remarkably free of ruts and chuckholes for most of its length, although the Explorer scraped bottom a few times when the track took sudden, sharp dips.
The trees hung low, lower, lower still, until, at last, the ice-crusted evergreen boughs frequently scraped across the roof of the Explorer with a sound like fingernails being drawn down a blackboard.
They passed a few signs that told them the lane they were using was kept open for the exclusive benefit of federal and state wildlife officers and researchers. Only authorized vehicles were permitted, the signs warned.
“Could this secret installation be disguised as a wildlife research center?” Elliot wondered.
“No,” she said. “According to the map, that’s nine miles into the forest on this track. Danny’s instructions are to take a turn north, off this lane, after about five miles.”
“We’ve gone almost five miles since we left the county road,” Elliot said.
Branches scraped across the roof, and powdery snow cascaded over the windshield, onto the hood.
As the windshield wipers cast the snow aside, Tina leaned forward, squinting along the headlight beams. “Hold it! I think this is what we’re looking for.”
He was driving at only ten miles an hour, but she gave him so little warning that he passed the turnoff. He stopped, put the Explorer in reverse, and backed up twenty feet, until the headlights were shining on the trail that she had spotted.
“It hasn’t been plowed,” he said.
“But look at all the tire marks.”
“A lot of traffic’s been through here recently.”
“This is it,” Tina said confidently. “This is where Danny wants us to go.”
“It’s a damned good thing we have four-wheel drive.”
He steered off the plowed lane, onto the snowy trail. The Explorer, equipped with heavy chains on its big winter-tread tires, bit into the snow and chewed its way forward without hesitation.
The new track ran a hundred yards before rising and turning sharply to the right, around the blunt face of a ridge. When they came out of this curve, the trees fell back from the verge, and open sky lay above for the first time since they had departed the county blacktop.
Twilight was gone; night was in command.
Snow began to fall more heavily—yet ahead of them, not a single flake lay in their way. Bizarrely, the unplowed trail had led them to a paved road; steam rose from it, and sections of the pavement were even dry.
“Heat coils embedded in the surface,” Elliot said.
“Here in the middle of nowhere.”
Stopping the Explorer, he picked up the pistol from the seat between them, and he flicked off both safeties. He had loaded the depleted magazine earlier; now he jacked a bullet into the chamber. When he put the gun on the seat again, it was ready to be used.
“We can still turn back,” Tina said.
“Is that what you want to do?”
“No.”
“Neither do I.”
A hundred and fifty yards farther, they reached another sharp turn. The road descended into a gully, swung hard to the left this time, and then headed up again.
Twenty yards beyond the bend, the way was barred by a steel gate. On each side of the gate, a nine-foot-high fence, angled outward at the top and strung with wickedly sharp coils of razor wire, stretched out of sight into the forest. The top of the gate was also wrapped with razor wire.
A large sign stood to the right of the roadway, supported on two redwood posts:
PRIVATE PROPERTY ADMISSION BY KEY CARD ONLY TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
“They make it sound like someone’s hunting lodge,” Tina said.
“Intentionally, I’m sure. Now what? You don’t happen 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.