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