Shadowfires

by Dean Koontz

  “Let it go,” Reese said, sounding like a broken record, aware that it was useless to attempt to divert Julio, but making the effort anyway. It was their usual litany; he would have felt incomplete if he had not upheld his end of it.

  Less angry now than thoughtful, Julio said, “It must have something to do with work Leben’s company is doing for the government. A defense contract of some kind.”

  “You’re going to keep poking around, aren’t you?”

  “I told you, Reese, I feel a special connection with that poor Hernandez girl.”

  “Don’t worry; they’ll find her killer.”

  “Sharp? We’re supposed to rely on him? He’s a jack-ass. You see the way he dresses?” Julio, of course, was always impeccably dressed. “The sleeves on his suit jacket were about an inch too short, and it needed to be let out along the back seam. And he doesn’t polish his shoes often enough; they looked like he’d just been hiking in them. How can he find Ernestina’s killer if he can’t even keep his shoes properly polished?”

  “I have a feeling of my own about this one, Julio. I think they’ll have our scalps if we don’t just let it go.”

  “I can’t walk away,” Julio said adamantly. “I’m still in. I’m in for the duration. You can opt out if you want.”

  “I’ll stay.”

  “I’m putting no pressure on you.”

  “I’m in,” Reese said.

  “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

  “I said I was in, and I’m in.”

  Five years ago, in an act of unparalleled bravery, Julio Verdad had saved the life of Esther Susanne Hagerstrom, Reese’s daughter and only child, who had then been just four years old and achingly small and very helpless. In the world according to Reese Hagerstrom, the seasons changed and the sun rose and the sun set and the sea rose and the sea fell all for one reason: to please Esther Susanne. She was the center, the middle, the ends, and the circumference of his life, and he had almost lost her, but Julio had saved her, had killed one man and nearly killed two others in order to rescue her, so now Reese would have walked away from a million-dollar inheritance sooner than he would have walked away from his partner.

  “I can handle everything on my own,” Julio said. “Really.”

  “Didn’t you hear me say I was in?”

  “We’re liable to screw ourselves into disciplinary suspensions.”

  “I’m in.”

  “Could be kissing good-bye to any more promotions.”

  “I’m in.”

  “You’re in, then?”

  “I’m in.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Julio put the car in gear, pulled away from the curb, and headed out of Placentia. “All right, we’re both a little whacked out, need some rest. I’ll drop you off at your place, let you get a few hours in the sack, and pick you up at ten in the morning.”

  “And where will you be going while I’m sleeping?”

  “Might try to get a few winks myself,” Julio said.

  Reese and his sister, Agnes, lived with Esther Susanne on East Adams Avenue in the town of Orange, in a pleasant house that Reese had rather substantially remodeled himself during his days off. Julio had an apartment in an attractive Spanish-style complex just a block off Fourth Street, way out at the east end of Santa Ana.

  Both of them would be going home to cold and lonely beds. Julio’s wife had died of cancer seven years ago. Reese’s wife, Esther’s mother, had been shot and killed during the same incident in which he had almost lost his little girl, so he had been a widower five years, only two less than Julio.

  On the 57 Freeway, shooting south toward Orange and Santa Ana, Reese said, “And if you can’t sleep?”

  “I’ll go into the office, nose around, try to see if anyone knows anything about this Sharp and why he’s so damned hot to run the show. Maybe ask around here and there about Dr. Eric Leben, too.”

  “What’re we going to do exactly when you pick me up at ten in the morning?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Julio said. “But I’ll have figured out something by then.”

  13

  REVELATIONS

  They took Sarah Kiel to the hospital in the stolen gray Subaru. Rachael arranged to pay the hospital bills, left a ten-thousand-dollar check with Sarah, called the girl’s parents in Kansas, then left the hospital with Ben and went looking for a suitable place to hole up for the rest of the night.

  By 3:35 Tuesday morning, grainy-eyed and exhausted, they found a large motel on Palm Canyon Drive with an all-night desk clerk. Their room had orange and white drapes that almost made Ben’s eyes bleed, and Rachael said the bedspread pattern looked like yak puke, but the shower and air-conditioning worked, and the two queen-size beds had firm mattresses, and the unit was at the back of the complex, away from the street, where they could expect quiet even after the town came alive in the morning, so it wasn’t exactly hell on earth.

  Leaving Rachael alone for ten minutes, Ben drove the stolen Subaru out the motel’s rear exit, left it in a supermarket parking lot several blocks away, and returned on foot. Both going and coming, he avoided passing the windows of the motel office and therefore did not stir the curiosity of the night clerk. Tomorrow, with the need for wheels less urgent, they could take time to rent a car.

  In his absence, Rachael had visited the ice-maker and the soda-vending machine. A plastic bucket brimming with ice cubes stood on the small table by the window, plus cans of Diet Coke and regular Coke and A&W Root Beer and Orange Crush.

  She said, “I thought you might be thirsty.”

  He was suddenly aware that they were smack in the middle of the desert and that they had been moving in a sweat for hours. Standing, he drank an Orange Crush in two swallows, finished a root beer nearly as fast, then sat down and popped the tab on a Diet Coke. “Even with the hump, how do camels do it?”

  As if dropping under an immense weight, she sat down on the other side of the table, opened a Coke, and said, “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Aren’t you going to ask?”

  He yawned, not out of perversity, and not because he wanted to irritate her, but because at that moment the prospect of sleep was more appealing than finally learning the truth of her circumstances. He said, “Ask what?”

  “The same questions you’ve been asking all night.”

  “You made it clear you wouldn’t give answers.”

  “Well, now I will. Now there’s no keeping you out of it.”

  She looked so sad that Ben felt a cold premonition of death in his bones and wondered if he had, indeed, been foolish to involve himself even to help the woman he loved. She was looking at him as if he were already dead—as if they were both dead.

  “So if you’re ready to tell me,” he said, “then I don’t need to ask questions.”

  “You’re going to have to keep an open mind. What I’m about to tell you might seem unbelievable … damn strange.”

  He sipped the Diet Coke and said, “You mean about Eric dying and coming back from the dead?”

  She jerked in surprise and gaped at him. She tried to speak but couldn’t get any words out.

  He had never in his life elicited such a rewarding reaction from anyone else, and he took enormous pleasure in it.

  At last she said, “But … but how … when … what …”

  He said, “How do I know what I know? When did I figure it out? What clued me in?”

  She nodded.

  He said, “Hell, if someone had stolen Eric’s body, they’d surely have come with a car of their own to haul it away. They wouldn’t have had to kill a woman and steal her car. And there were those discarded hospital whites in the garage in Villa Park. Besides, you were scared witless from the moment I showed up at your door last evening, and you aren’t easily spooked. You’re a very competent and self-sufficient woman, not the type to get the willies. In fact, I’ve never seen you scared of anything exce
pt maybe … Eric.”

  “He really was killed by that truck, you know. It isn’t just that they misdiagnosed his condition.”

  The desire for sleep retreated a bit, and Ben said, “His business—and genius—was genetic engineering. And the man was obsessed with staying young. So I figure he found a way to edit out the genes linked to aging and death. Or maybe he edited in an artificially constructed gene for swift healing, tissue stasis … immortality.”

  “You endlessly amaze me,” she said.

  “I’m quite a guy.”

  Her own weariness gave way to nervous energy. She could not keep still. She got up and paced.

  He remained seated, sipping his Diet Coke. He had been badly rattled all night; now it was her turn.

  Her bleak voice was tinted by dread, resignation. “When Geneplan patented its first highly profitable artificial microorganisms, Eric could’ve taken the company public, could’ve sold thirty percent of his stock and made a hundred million overnight.”

  “A hundred? Jesus!”

  “His two partners and three of the research associates, who also had pieces of the company, half wanted him to do just that because they’d have made a killing, too. Everyone else but Vincent Baresco was leaning toward going for the gold. Eric refused.”

  “Baresco,” Ben said. “The guy who pulled the Magnum on us, the guy I trashed in Eric’s office tonight—is he a partner?”

  “It’s Dr. Vincent Baresco. He’s on Eric’s handpicked research staff—one of the few who know about the Wildcard Project. In fact, only the six of them knew everything. Six plus me. Eric loved to brag to me. Anyway, Baresco sided with Eric, didn’t want Geneplan to go public, and he convinced the others. If it remained a privately held company, they didn’t have to please stockholders. They could spend money on unlikely projects without defending their decisions.”

  “Such as a search for immortality or its equivalent.”

  “They didn’t expect to achieve full immortality—but longevity, regeneration. It took a lot of funds, money that stockholders would’ve wanted to see paid out in dividends. Eric and the others were getting rich, anyway, from the modest percentage of corporate profits they distributed to themselves, so they didn’t desperately need the capital they’d get by going public.”

  “Regeneration,” Ben said thoughtfully.

  At the window, Rachael stopped pacing, cautiously drew back the drape, and peered out at the night-cloaked motel parking lot.

  She said, “God knows, I’m no expert in recombinant DNA. But … well, they hoped to develop a benign virus that’d function as a ‘carrier’ to convey new genetic material into the body’s cells and precisely place the new bits on the chains of chromosomes. Think of the virus as a sort of living scalpel that does genetic surgery. Because it’s microscopic, it can perform minute operations no real scalpel ever could. It can be designed to seek out—and attach itself to—a certain portion of a chromosomal chain, either destroying the gene already there or inserting a new one.”

  “And they did develop it?”

  “Yes. Then they needed to positively identify genes associated with aging and edit them out—and develop artificial genetic material for the virus to carry into the cells. Those new genes would be designed to halt the aging process and tremendously boost the natural immune system by cuing the body to produce vastly larger quantities of interferon and other healing substances. Follow me?”

  “Mostly.”

  “They even believed they could give the human body the ability to regenerate ruined tissue, bone, and vital organs.”

  She still stared out at the night, and she appeared to have gone pale—not at something she had seen but at the consideration of what she was slowly revealing to him.

  Finally she continued: “Their patents were bringing in a river of money, a flood. So they spent God knows how many tens of millions, farming out pieces of the research puzzle to geneticists not in the company, keeping the work fragmented so no one was likely to realize the true intent of their efforts. It was like a privately financed equivalent of the Manhattan Project—and maybe even more secret than the development of the atomic bomb.”

  “Secret … because if they succeeded, they wanted to keep the blessing of an extended life span for themselves?”

  “Partly, yes.” Letting the drape fall in place, she turned from the window. “And by holding the secret, by dispensing the blessing only to whomever they chose—just imagine the power they’d wield. They could essentially create a long-lived elite master race that owed its existence to them. And the threat of withholding the gift would be a bludgeon that could make virtually anyone cooperate with them. I used to listen to Eric talk about it, and it sounded like nonsense, pipe dreams, even though I knew he was a genius in his field.”

  “Those men in the Cadillac who pursued us and shot the cops—”

  “From Geneplan,” she said, still full of nervous energy, pacing again. “I recognized the car. It belongs to Rupert Knowls. Knowls supplied the initial venture capital that got Eric started. After Eric, he’s the chief partner.”

  “A rich man … yet he’s willing to risk his reputation and his freedom by gunning down two cops?”

  “To protect this secret, yeah, I guess he is. He’s not exactly a scrupulous man to begin with. And confronted with this opportunity, I suppose he’ll stretch his scruples even further than usual.”

  “Okay. So they developed the technique to prolong life and promote incredibly rapid healing. Then what?”

  Her lovely face had been pale. Now it darkened as if a shadow had fallen across it, though there was no shadow. “Then … they began experiments on lab animals. Primarily white mice.”

  Ben sat up straighter in his chair and put the can of Diet Coke aside, because from Rachael’s demeanor he sensed that she was reaching the crux of the story.

  She paused for a moment to check the dead bolt on the room door, which opened onto a covered breezeway that flanked the parking lot. The lock was securely engaged, but after a moment’s hesitation she took one of the straight-backed chairs from the table, tipped it onto two legs, and braced it under the doorknob for extra protection.

  He was sure she was being overly cautious, treading the edge of paranoia. On the other hand, he didn’t object.

  She returned to the edge of the bed. “They injected the mice, changed the mice, working with mouse genes instead of human genes, of course, but applying the same theories and techniques they intended to use to promote human longevity. And the mice, a short-lived variety, survived longer … twice as long as usual and still kicking. Then three times as long … four times … and still young. Some mice were subjected to injuries of various kinds—everything from contusions and abrasions to punctures, broken bones, serious burns—and they healed at a remarkable rate. They recovered and flourished after their kidneys were virtually destroyed. Lungs eaten half away by acid fumes were regenerated. They actually regained their vision after being blinded. And then …”

  Her voice trailed away, and she glanced at the fortified door, then at the window, lowered her head, closed her eyes.

  Ben waited.

  Eyes still closed, she said, “Following standard procedure, they killed some mice and put them aside for dissection and for thorough tissue tests. Some were killed with injections of air—embolisms. Killed others with lethal injections of formaldehyde. And there was no question they were dead. Very dead. But those that weren’t yet dissected … they came back. Within a few hours. Lying there in the lab trays … they just … started twitching, squirming. Bleary-eyed, weak at first … but they came back. Soon they were on their feet, scurrying about their cages, eating—fully alive. Which no one had anticipated, not at all. Oh, sure, before the mice were killed, they’d had tremendously enhanced immune systems, truly astonishing capacity to heal, and life spans that had been dramatically increased, but …” Rachael raised her head, opened her eyes, looked at Ben. “But once the line of death is crossed … who’
d imagine it could be recrossed?”

  Ben’s hands started shaking, and a wintry shiver followed the track of his spine, and he realized that the true meaning and power of these events had only now begun to sink in.

  “Yes,” Rachael said, as if she knew what thoughts and emotions were racing through his mind and heart.

  He was overcome by a strange mixture of terror, awe, and wild joy: terror at the idea of anything, mouse or man, returning from the land of the dead; awe at the thought that humankind’s genius had perhaps shattered nature’s dreadful chains of mortality; joy at the prospect of humanity freed forever from the loss of loved ones, freed forever from the great fears of sickness and death.

  And as if reading his mind, Rachael said, “Maybe one day … maybe even one day soon, the threat of the grave will pass away. But not yet. Not quite yet. Because the Wildcard Project’s breakthrough is not entirely successful. The mice that came back were … strange.”

  “Strange?”

  Instead of elaborating on that freighted word, she said, “At first the researchers thought the mice’s odd behavior resulted from some sort of brain damage—maybe not to cerebral tissues but to the fundamental chemistry of the brain—that couldn’t be repaired even by the mice’s enhanced healing abilities. But that wasn’t the case. They could still run difficult mazes and repeat other complex tricks they’d been taught before they’d died—”

  “So somehow the memories, knowledge, probably even personality survives the brief period of lifelessness between death and rebirth.”

  She nodded. “Which would indicate that some small current still exists in the brain for a time after death, enough to keep memory intact until … resurrection. Like a computer during a power failure, barely holding on to material in its short-term memory by using the meager flow of current from a standby battery.”

  Ben wasn’t sleepy anymore. “Okay, so the mice could run mazes, but there was something strange about them. What? How strange?”

  “Sometimes they became confused—more frequently at first than after they’d been back with the living awhile—and they repeatedly rammed themselves against their cages or ran in circles chasing their tails. That kind of abnormal behavior slowly passed. But another, more frightening behavior emerged … and endured.”