Shadowfires

by Dean R. Koontz

  He said, “Are you in some kind of trouble that rules out turning to the police? Is that it?”

  “Do you mean — am I afraid the cops would get something on me?”

  “Are you?”

  “No,” she said without hesitation, in a tone that seemed devoid of deception.

  “ 'Cause if somehow you've gotten in deep with the wrong kind of people, it's never too late to turn back.”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “Good. I'm glad to hear it.”

  The backsplash of dim light from the dashboard meters and gauges was just bright enough to softly illuminate her face but not bright enough to reveal the tension in her or the unhealthy grayness that fear had brought to her complexion. She looked now as Ben always thought of her when they were separated: breathtaking.

  In different circumstances, with a different destination, the moment would have been like something from a perfect dream or from one of those great old movies. After all, what could be more thrilling or exquisitely erotic than being with a gorgeous woman in a sleek sports car, barreling through the night toward some romantic destination, where they could forsake the snug contours of bucket seats for cool sheets, the excitement of high-speed travel having primed them for fiercely passionate lovemaking.

  She said, “I've done nothing wrong, Benny.”

  “I didn't really think you had.”

  “You implied…”

  “I had to ask.”

  “Do I look like a villain to you?”

  “You look like an angel.”

  “There's no danger I'll land in jail. The worst that can happen to me is that I'll wind up a victim.”

  “Damned if I'll let that happen.”

  “You're really very sweet,” she said. She glanced away from the road and managed a thin smile. “Very sweet.”

  The smile was confined to her lips and did not chase the fear from the rest of her face, did not even touch her troubled eyes. And no matter how sweet she thought he as, she was still not prepared to share any of her secrets with him.

  * * *

  They reached Geneplan at eleven-thirty.

  Dr. Eric Leben's corporate headquarters was a four-story, glass-walled building in an expensive business park off Jamboree Road in Newport Beach, stylishly irregular in design with six sides that were not all of equal length, and with a modernistic polished marble and glass porte cochere. Ben usually despised such architecture, but he grudgingly had to admit that the Geneplan headquarters had a certain appealing boldness. The parking lot was divided into sections by long planters overflowing with vine geraniums heavily laden with wine-red and white blooms. The building was surrounded by an impressive amount of green space as well, with artfully arranged palm trees. Even at this late hour, the trees, grounds, and building were lit by cunningly placed spotlights that imparted a sense of drama and importance to the place.

  Rachael pulled her Mercedes around to the rear of the building, where a short driveway sloped down to a large bronze-tinted door that evidently rolled up to admit delivery trucks to an interior loading bay on the basement level. She drove to the bottom and parked at the door, below ground level, with concrete walls rising on both sides. She said, “If anyone gets the idea I might come to Geneplan, and if they drive by looking for my car, they won't spot it down here.”

  Getting out of the car, Ben noticed how much cooler and more pleasant the night was in Newport Beach, closer to the sea, than it had been in either Santa Ana or Villa Park. They were much too far from the ocean — a couple of miles — to hear the waves or to smell the salt and seaweed, but the Pacific air nevertheless had an effect.

  A smaller, man-size door was set in the wall beside the larger entrance and also opened into the basement level. It had two locks.

  Living with Eric, Rachael had run errands to and from Geneplan when he hadn't the time himself and when, for whatever reason, he did not trust a subordinate with the task, so she'd once possessed keys. But the day she walked out on him, she put the keys on a small table in the foyer of the Villa Park house. Tonight, she had found them exactly where she'd left them a year ago, on the table beside a tall nineteenth-century Japanese cloisonné vase, dust-filmed. Evidently Eric had instructed the maid not to move the keys even an inch. He must have intended that their undisturbed presence should be a subtle humiliation for Rachael when she came crawling back to him. Happily, she had denied him that sick satisfaction.

  Clearly, Eric Leben had been a supremely arrogant bastard, and Ben was glad that he had never met the man.

  Now Rachael opened the steel door, stepped into the building, and switched on the lights in the small underground shipping bay. An alarm box was set in the concrete wall. She tapped a series of numbers on its keyboard. The pair of glowing red lights winked out, and a green bulb lit up, indicating that the system was deactivated.

  Ben followed her to the end of the chamber, which was sealed off from the rest of the subterranean level for security reasons. At the next door there was another alarm box for another system independent of that which had guarded the exterior door. Ben watched her switch it off with another number code.

  She said, “The first one is based on Eric's birthday, this one on mine. There're more ahead.”

  They proceeded by the beam of the flashlight that Rachael had brought from the house in Villa Park, for she did not want to turn on any lights that might be spotted from outside.

  “But you've a perfect right to be here,” Ben said. “You're his widow, and you've almost certainly inherited everything.”

  “Yes, but if the wrong people drive by and see lights on, they'll figure it's me, and they'll come in to get me.”

  He wished to God she'd tell him who these “wrong people” were, but he knew better than to ask. Rachael as moving fast, eager to put her hands on whatever had drawn her to this place, then get out. She would have no more patience for his questions here than she'd had in the house in Villa Park.

  As he accompanied her through the rest of the basement to the elevator, up to the second floor, Ben was increasingly intrigued by the extraordinary security system in operation after normal business hours. There was a third alarm to be penetrated before the elevator could be summoned to the basement. On the second floor, they debarked from the elevator into a reception lounge also designed with security in mind. In the searching beam of Rachael's flashlight, Ben saw a sculpted beige carpet, a striking desk of brown marble and brass for the receptionist, half a dozen brass and leather chairs for visitors, glass and brass coffee tables, and three large and ethereal paintings that might have been by Martin Green, but even if the flashlight had been switched off, he would have seen the blood-red alarm lights in the darkness. Three burnished brass doors — probably solid-core and virtually impenetrable — led out of the lounge, and alarm lights glowed beside each of them.

  “This is nothing compared to the precautions taken on the third and fourth levels,” Rachael said.

  “What's up there?”

  “The computers and duplicate research data banks. Every inch is covered by infrared, sonic, and visual-motion detectors.”

  “We going up there?”

  “Fortunately, we don't have to. And we don't have to go out to Riverside County, either, thank God.”

  “What's in Riverside?”

  “The actual research labs. The entire facility is underground, not just for biological isolation but for better security against industrial espionage, too.”

  Ben was aware that Geneplan was a leader in the most fiercely competitive and rapidly developing industry in the world. The frantic race to be first with a new product, when coupled with the natural competitiveness of the kind of men drawn into the industry, made it necessary o guard trade secrets and product development with a care that was explicitly paranoid. Still, he was not quite prepared for the obvious siege mentality that lay behind the design of Geneplan's electronic security.

  Dr. Eric Leben had been a specialist in recombinant DNA,
one of the most brilliant figures in the rapidly expanding science of gene splicing. And Geneplan was one of the companies on the cutting edge of the extremely profitable bio-business that had grown out of this new science since the late 1970s.

  Eric Leben and Geneplan held valuable patents on a variety of genetically engineered microorganisms and new strains of plant life, including but not limited to: a microbe that produced an extremely effective hepatitis vaccine, which was currently undergoing the process of acquiring the FDA seal but was now only a year away from certain approval and marketing; another man-made microbe “factory” that produced a supervaccine against all types of herpes; a new variety of corn that could flourish even if irrigated with salt water, making it possible for farmers to cultivate abundant crops in arid lands within pumping distance of the seacoast, where nothing had previously grown; a new family of slightly altered oranges and lemons genetically modified to be impervious to fruit flies, citrus canker, and other diseases, thus eliminating the need for pesticides in a large portion of the citrus-fruit industry. Any one such patent might be worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, and Ben supposed it was only prudent for Geneplan to be paranoid and to spend a small fortune to guard the research data that led to the creation of each of these living gold mines.

  Rachael went to the middle of the three doors, deactivated the alarm, and used another key to disengage the lock.

  When Ben went through the door behind her and eased it shut, he discovered that it was enormously heavy and would have been immovable if it had not been hung in perfect balance on cunningly designed ball-bearing hinges.

  She led him along a series of dark and silent corridors, through additional doors to Eric's private suite. There she required one more code for a final alarm box.

  Inside the sanctum sanctorum at last, she quickly crossed a vast expanse of antique Chinese carpet in rose and beige to Eric's massive desk. It was as ultramodern as that of the company's front-lounge receptionist but even more stunning and expensive, constructed of rare gold-veined marble and polished malachite.

  The bright but narrowly focused lance of the flashlight beam revealed only the middle of the big room as Rachael advanced through it, so Ben had only glimpses and shadowy impressions of the decor. It seemed even more determinedly modern than Eric Leben's other haunts, downright futuristic.

  She put her purse and pistol on the desk as she passed it, went to the wall behind, where Ben joined her. She played the flashlight over a four-foot-square painting: broad bands of sombrous yellow and a particularly depressing gray separated by a thin swath of blood-dark maroon.

  “Another Rothko?” Ben asked.

  “Yeah. And with an important function besides just being a piece of art.”

  She slipped her fingers under the burnished steel frame, feeling along the bottom. A latch clicked, and the big painting swung away from the wall, to which it had been firmly fixed rather than hung on wire. Behind the hinged Rothko was a large wall safe with a circular door about two feet in diameter. The steel face, dial, and handle gleamed.

  “Trite,” Ben said.

  “Not really. Not your ordinary wall safe. Four-inch-thick steel casing, six-inch face and door. Not just set in the wall but actually welded to the steel beams of the building itself. Requires not one but two combinations, the first forward, the second reverse. Fireproof and virtually blastproof, too.”

  “What's he keep in there — the meaning of life?”

  “Some money, I guess, like in the safe at the house,” she said, handing Ben the flashlight. She turned the dial and began to put in the first combination. “Important papers.”

  He aimed the light at the safe door. “Okay, so what're we after exactly? The cash?”

  “No. A file folder. Maybe a ring-binder notebook.”

  “What's in it?”

  “The essentials of an important research project. More or less an abstract of the developments to date, including copies of Morgan Lewis's regular reports to Eric. Lewis is the project head. And with any luck, Eric's personal project diary is in here, too. All of his practical and philosophical thoughts on the subject.”

  Ben was surprised that she had answered. Was she finally prepared to let him in on at least some of her secrets?

  “What subject?” he asked. “What's this particular research project all about?”

  She did not respond but blotted her sweat-damp fingers on her blouse before easing the safe's dial backward toward the first number of the second combination.

  “Concerning what?” he pressed.

  “I have to concentrate, Benny,” she said. “If I overshoot one of these numbers, then I'll have to start all over and put the first set in again.”

  He had gotten all he was going to get, the one little scrap about the file. But, not caring to stand idly by, having nothing else to do but pressure her, he said, “There must be hundreds of research files on scores of projects, so if he keeps just one of them here, it's got to involve the most important thing Geneplan's currently working on.”

  Squinting, and with her tongue poked out between her teeth, she brought all of her attention to bear on the dial.

  “Something big,” he said.

  She said nothing.

  He said, “Or it's research they're doing for the government, the military. Something extremely sensitive.”

  Rachael put in the final number, twisted the handle, opened the small steel door, and said, “Oh, damn.”

  The safe was empty.

  “They got here before us,” she said.

  “Who?” Ben demanded.

  “They must've suspected that I knew.”

  “Who suspected?”

  “Otherwise, they wouldn't have been so quick to get rid of the file,” she said.

  “Who?” Ben said.

  “Surprise,” said a man behind them.

  As Rachael gasped, Ben was already turning, seeking the intruder. The flashlight beam caught a tall, bald man in a tan leisure suit and a green-and-white-striped shirt. His head was so completely hairless that he must have shaved it. He had a square face, wide mouth, proud nose, Slavic cheekbones, and gray eyes the shade of dirty ice. He was standing on the other side of the desk. He resembled the late Otto Preminger, the film director. Sophisticated in spite of his leisure suit. Obviously intelligent. Potentially dangerous. He had confiscated the pistol that Rachael had put down with her purse when she had come into the office.

  Worse, the guy was holding a Smith & Wesson Model 19 Combat Magnum. Ben was familiar with — and deeply respected — that revolver. Meticulously constructed, it had a four-inch barrel, was chambered for the.357 Magnum cartridge, weighed a moderate thirty-five ounces, and was so accurate and so powerful that it could even be used for deer hunting. Loaded with hollow-point expanding cartridges or with armor-piercing rounds, it was as deadly a handgun as any in the world, deadlier than most.

  In the beam of the Eveready, the intruder's gray eyes glistened strangely.

  “Lights on,” the bald man said, raising his voice slightly, and immediately the room's overhead lights blinked to life, evidently engaged by a voice-activated switch, a trick that suited Eric Leben's preference for ultramodern design.

  Rachael said, “Vincent, put the gun away.”

  “Not possible, I'm afraid,” the bald man said. Though his head was quite naked, the back of his big hand had plenty of hair, almost like a pelt, and it even bristled on his fingers between the knuckles.

  “There's no need for violence,” Rachael said.

  Vincent's smile was sour, imparting a cold viciousness to his broad face. “Indeed? No need for violence? I suppose that's why you brought a pistol,” he said, holding up the thirty-two that he had snatched off the desk.

  Ben knew the S&W Combat Magnum had twice the recoil of a forty-five, which was why it featured large hand-filling stocks. In spite of the superb accuracy built into it, the weapon could be wildly inaccurate in the hands of an inexperienced shooter unprepared
for the hard kick it delivered. If the bald man did not appreciate the tremendous power of the gun, if he were inexperienced, he would almost certainly fire the first couple of shots high into the wall, over their heads, which might give Ben time to reach him and take him out.

  “We didn't really believe Eric would've been reckless enough to tell you about Wildcard,” Vincent said. “But apparently he did, the poor damn fool, or you wouldn't be here, rummaging in his office safe. No matter how badly he treated you, Rachael, he still had a weakness for you.”

  “He was too proud,” she said. “Always was. He liked to brag about his accomplishments.”

  “Ninety-five percent of Geneplan's staff is in the dark about the Wildcard Project,” Vincent said. “It's that sensitive. Believe me, no matter how much you may have hated him, he thought you were special, and he wouldn't have bragged about it to anyone else.”

  “I didn't hate him,” she said. “I pity him. Especially now. Vincent, did you know he'd broken the cardinal rule?”

  Vincent shook his head. “Not until… tonight. It was a mad thing to do.”

  Intently watching the bald man, Ben reluctantly decided that the guy was experienced with the Combat Magnum and would not be startled by its recoil. is grip on it was not at all casual; his right hand was clenched tightly. His aim was not casual, either; his right arm was extended, stiff and straight, elbow locked, with the muzzle lined up between Rachael and Ben. He would only have to swing it a couple of inches in either direction to blow one or both of them away.

  Unaware that Ben could be of more use in such a situation than he'd ever given her reason to believe, Rachael said, “Forget the damn gun, Vincent. We don't need guns. We're all in this together now.”

  “No,” Vincent said. “No, as far as the rest of us are concerned, you're not in this. Never should've been. We simply don't trust you, Rachael. And this friend of yours…”

  The dirty-gray eyes shifted focus from Rachael to Ben. His gaze was piercing, disconcerting. Although his eyes lingered on Ben only a second or two, there was an iciness in them that was transmitted to Ben, sending a chill along his spine.