Shadowfires. By: Dean R. Koontz

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 was 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 solidcore 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 visualmotion 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 to 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 big-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

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