All of this... this craziness... it doesn’t have to belong to me. I don’t have to own it. Not anymore.

Craig reached out and touched the doorknob of the Airport Security office. The blank look in his eyes had been replaced by an expression of clear determination.

I have been under stress for a long, a very long, time. Since I was seven? No — I think it started even before that. The fact is, I’ve been under stress for as long as I can remember. This latest piece of craziness is just a new variation. It’s probably just what the man in the ratty sport-coat said it was: a test. Agents of some secret government agency or sinister foreign power running a test. But I choose not to participate in any more tests. I don’t care if it’s my father in charge, or my mother, or the dean of the Graduate School of Management, or the Desert Sun Banking Corporation’s Board of Directors. I choose not to participate. I choose to escape. I choose to get to Boston and finish what I set out to do when I presented the Argentinian bond-buy in the first place. If I don’t...

But he knew what would happen if he didn’t.

He would go mad.

Craig tried the doorknob. It did not move beneath his hand, but when he gave it a small, frustrated push, the door swung open. Either it had been left slightly unlatched, or it had unlocked when the power went off and the security systems went dead. Craig didn’t care which. The important thing was that he wouldn’t need to muss his clothes trying to crawl through an air-conditioning duct or something. He still had every intention of showing up at his meeting before the end of the day, and he didn’t want his clothes smeared with dirt and grease when he got there. One of the simple, unexceptional truths of life was this: guys with dirt on their suits have no credibility.

He pushed the door open and went inside.

11

Brian and Nick reached the top of the escalator first, and the others gathered around them. This was BIA’s central waiting room, a large square box filled with contour plastic seats (some with coin-op TVs bolted to the arms) and dominated by a wall of polarized floor-to-ceiling windows. To their immediate left was the airport newsstand and the security checkpoint which served Gate I; to their right and all the way across the room was The Red Baron Bar and The Cloud Nine Restaurant. Beyond the restaurant was the corridor leading to the Airport Security Office and the International Arrivals Annex.

“Come on—” Nick began, and Dinah said, “Wait.”

She spoke in a strong, urgent voice and they all turned toward her curiously.

Dinah dropped Laurel’s hand and raised both of her own. She cupped the thumbs behind her ears and splayed her fingers out like fans. Then she simply stood there, still as a post, in this odd and rather weird listening posture.

“What—” Brian began, and Dinah said “Shhh!” in an abrupt, inarguable sibilant.

She turned slightly to the left, paused, then turned in the other direction until the white light coming through the windows fell directly on her, turning her already pale face into something which was ghostlike and eerie. She took off her dark glasses. The eyes beneath were wide, brown, and not quite blank.

“There,” she said in a low, dreaming voice, and Laurel felt terror begin to stroke at her heart with chilly fingers. Nor was she alone. Bethany was crowding close to her on one side, and Don Gaffney moved in against her other side. “There — I can feel the light. They said that’s how they know I can see again. I can always feel the light. It’s like heat inside my head.”

“Dinah, what—” Brian began.

Nick elbowed him. The Englishman’s face was long and drawn, his forehead ribbed with lines. “Be quiet, mate.”

“The fight is... here.”

She walked slowly away from them, her hands still fanned out by her ears, her elbows held out before her to encounter any object which might stand in her way. She advanced until she was less than two feet from the window. Then she slowly reached out until her fingers touched the glass. They looked like black starfish outlined against the white sky. She let out a small, unhappy murmur.

“The glass is wrong, too,” she said in that dreaming voice.

“Dinah—” Laurel began.

“Shhh...” she whispered without turning round. She stood at the window like a little girl waiting for her father to come home from work. “I hear something.”

These whispered words sent a wordless, thoughtless horror through Albert Kaussner’s mind. He felt pressure on his shoulders and looked down to see he had crossed his arms across his chest and was clutching himself hard.

Brian listened with all his concentration. He heard his own breathing, and the breathing of the others... but he heard nothing else. It’s her imagination, he thought. That’s all it is.

But he wondered.

“What?” Laurel asked urgently. “What do you hear, Dinah?”

“I don’t know,” she said without turning from the window. “It’s very faint. I thought I heard it when we got off the airplane, and then I decided it was just my imagination. Now I can hear it better. I can hear it even through the glass. It sounds... a little like Rice Krispies after you pour in the milk.”

Brian turned to Nick and spoke in a low voice. “Do you hear anything?”

“Not a bloody thing,” Nick said, matching Brian’s tone. “But she’s blind. She’s used to making her ears do double duty.”

“I think it’s hysteria,” Brian said. He was whispering now, his lips almost touching Nick’s ear.

Dinah turned from the window.

“Do you hear anything?” she mimicked. “Not a bloody thing. But she’s blind. She’s used to making her ears do double duty.” She paused, then added: “I think it’s hysteria.”

“Dinah, what are you talking about?” Laurel asked, perplexed and frightened. She had not heard Brian and Nick’s muttered conversation, although she had been standing much closer to them than Dinah was.

“Ask them,” Dinah said. Her voice was trembling. “I’m not crazy! I’m blind, but I’m not crazy!”

“All right,” Brian said, shaken. “All right, Dinah.” And to Laurel he said: “I was talking to Nick. She heard us. From over there by the windows, she heard us.”

“You’ve got great ears, hon,” Bethany said.

“I hear what I hear,” Dinah said. “And I hear something out there. In that direction.” She pointed due east through the glass. Her unseeing eyes swept them. “And it’s bad. It’s an awful sound, a scary sound.”

Don Gaffney said hesitantly: “If you knew what it was, little miss, that would help, maybe.”

“I don’t,” Dinah said. “But I know that it’s closer than it was.” She put her dark glasses back on with a hand that was trembling. “We have to get out of here. And we have to get out soon. Because something is coming. The bad something making the cereal noise.”

“Dinah,” Brian said, “the plane we came in is almost out of fuel.”

“Then you have to put some more in it!” Dinah screamed shrilly at him. “It’s coming, don’t you understand? It’s coming, and if we haven’t gone when it gets here, we’re going to die! We’re all going to die!”

Her voice cracked and she began to sob. She was not a sibyl or a medium but only a little girl forced to live her terror in a darkness which was almost complete. She staggered toward them, her self-possession utterly gone. Laurel grabbed her before she could stumble over one of the guide-ropes which marked the way to the security checkpoint and hugged her tight. She tried to soothe the girl, but those last words echoed and rang in Laurel’s confused, shocked mind: If we haven’t gone when it gets here, we’re going to die.

We’re all going to die.