Shadowfires. By: Dean R. Koontz

out the magazine of the Smith & Wesson Combat Magnum that he had taken

off Vincent Baresco several hours ago and count the remaining

cartridges.

Three. Half the magazine’s load had been expended in Eric’s office,

when Baresco had fired wildly in the darkness as Ben attacked him.

Three left. Not much.

Not nearly enough to make Ben feel secure, even though Rachael had her

own thirty-two pistol. How many bullets were required to stop a walking

dead man? Ben put the Combat Magnum on the nightstand, where he could

reach out and lay his hand on it in an instant if he needed it during

what remained of the night.

In the morning, he would buy a box of ammunition.

Two boxes.

1 The Defense Security Agency knew about Leben’s lechery because it knew

everything about people engaged in top-secret contract work with the

Pentagon. That was something civilians like Leben just could never seem

to understand, Once they accepted the Pentagon’s money and undertook

highly sensitive research work, they had absolutely no privacy. Sharp

knew all about Leben’s fascination with modern art, modern design, and

modern architecture. He knew about Eric Leben’s marital problems in

detail. He knew what foods Leben preferred, what music he liked, what

brand of underwear he wore, so of course he also knew every little thing

about the teenage girls because the potential for blackmail that they

presented was related to national security.

When Sharp stepped into the kitchen and saw the destruction, especially

the knives driven into the wall, he figured he would not find Sarah Kiel

alive. She would be nailed up in another room, or maybe bolted to the

ceiling, or maybe hacked to pieces and hung on wire to form a bloody

mobile, maybe even worse. You couldn’t guess what might happen next in

this case. Anything could happen.

Weird.

Gosser and Peake, the two young agents with Sharp, were startled and

made uneasy by the mess in the kitchen and by the psychopathic frenzy it

implied. Their security clearance and need to know were as high as

Sharp’s, so they were aware that they were hunting for a walking dead

man. They knew Eric Leben had risen from a morgue slab and escaped in

stolen hospital whites, and they knew a half-alive and deranged Eric

Leben had killed the Hernandez and Klienstad women to obtain their car,

so Gosser and Peake held their service revolvers as tightly and

cautiously as Sharp held his.

Of course, the D.S.A was fully aware of the nature of the work Geneplan

was doing for the government, biological warfare research, the creation

of deadly man-made viruses. But the agency also knew the details of

other projects under way within the company, including the Wildcard

Project, although Leben and his associates had -ii Leaving two men

behind at Rachael Leben’s house in Placentia-where the crucified corpse

of Rebecca Klienstad had finally been taken down from the bedroom

wall-and leaving other men at the Leben house in Villa Park and still

others at the Geneplan offices, Anson Sharp of the Defense Security

Agency choppered through the desert darkness with two more agents,

flying low and fast, to Eric Leben’ 5 stylish yet squalid love nest in

Palm Springs. The pilot put the helicopter down in a bank parking lot

less than a block off Palm Canyon Drive, where a nondescript government

car was waiting.

The chuffling rotors of the aircraft sliced up the hot dry desert air

and flung slabs of it at Sharp’s back as he dashed to the sedan.

Five minutes later, they arrived at the house where Dr. Leben had kept

his string of teenage girls. Sharp wasn’t surprised to find the front

door ajar. He rang the bell repeatedly, but no one answered. Drawing

his service revolver, a Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special, he led the way

inside, in search of Sarah Kiel who, according to the most recent report

on Leben, was the current piece of fluff in residence.

labored under the delusion that the secret of Wildcard was theirs alone.

They were unaware of the federal agents and stoolies among them. And

they did not realize how quickly government computers had ascertained

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *