Shadowfires

by Dean Koontz

  They discovered that the two closed doors opened onto two more bedrooms that shared a second bath between them, although Eric had furnished neither chamber with beds. Benny explored both rooms, closets, and the connecting bath, while Rachael stood in the living room by one doorway and then by the other, watching. She could see that the first room was a study with several bookshelves laden with thick volumes, a desk, and a computer; the second was empty, unused.

  When it became clear that Benny was not going to find Eric in that part of the cabin, either, Rachael bent down, plucked up a few sheets of paper—Xerox copies, she noted—from the floor, and quickly scanned them. By the time Benny returned, she knew what she had found, and her heart was racing. “It’s the Wildcard file,” she said sotto voce. “He must’ve kept another copy here.”

  She started to gather up more of the scattered pages, but Benny stopped her. “We’ve got to find Eric first,” he whispered.

  Nodding agreement, she reluctantly dropped the papers.

  Benny went to the front door, eased open the creaky screen door with the least amount of noise he could manage, and satisfied himself that the plank-floored porch was deserted. Then Rachael followed him into the kitchen again.

  She slipped the tilted chair out from under the knob of the basement door, pulled the door open, and backed quickly out of the way as Benny covered it with the shotgun.

  Eric did not come roaring out of the darkness.

  With tiny beads of sweat shimmering on his forehead, Benny went to the threshold, found the switch on the wall of the stairwell, and flicked on the lights below.

  Rachael was also sweating. As was surely the case with Benny, her perspiration was not occasioned by the warm summer air.

  It was still not advisable for Rachael to accompany Benny into the windowless chamber below. Eric might be outside, watching the house, and he might slip inside at the opportune moment; then, as they returned to the kitchen, they might be ambushed from above when they were in the middle of the stairs and most vulnerable. So she remained at the threshold, where she could look down the cellar steps and also have a clear view of the entire kitchen, including the archway to the living room and the open door to the rear porch.

  Benny descended the plank stairs more quietly than seemed humanly possible, although some noise was unavoidable: a few creaks, a couple of scraping noises. At the bottom, he hesitated, then turned left, out of sight. For a moment Rachael saw his shadow on the wall down there, made large and twisted into an odd shape by the angle of the light, but as he moved farther into the cellar, the shadow dwindled and finally went with him.

  She glanced at the archway. She could see a portion of the living room, which remained deserted and still.

  In the opposite direction, at the porch door, a huge yellow butterfly clung to the screen, slowly working its wings.

  A clatter sounded from below, nothing dramatic, as if Benny had bumped against something.

  She looked down the steps. No Benny, no shadow.

  The archway. Nothing.

  The back door. Just the butterfly.

  More noise below, quieter this time.

  “Benny?” she said softly.

  He did not answer her. Probably didn’t hear her. She had spoken at barely more than a whisper, after all.

  The archway, the back door …

  The stairs: still no sign of Benny.

  “Benny,” she repeated, then saw a shadow below. For a moment her heart twisted because the shadow looked so strange, but Benny appeared and started up toward her, and she sighed with relief.

  “Nothing down there but an open wall safe tucked behind the water heater,” he said when he reached the kitchen. “It’s empty, so maybe that’s where he kept the files that’re spread over the living room.”

  Rachael wanted to put down her gun and throw her arms around him and hug him tight and kiss him all over his face just because he had come back from the cellar alive. She wanted him to know how happy she was to see him, but the garage still had to be explored.

  By unspoken agreement, she removed the tilted chair from under the knob and opened the door, and Benny covered it with the shotgun. Again, there was no sign of Eric.

  Benny stood on the threshold, fumbled for the switch, found it, but the lights in the garage were dim. Even with a small window high in one wall, the place remained shadowy. He tried another switch, which operated the big electric door. It rolled up with much humming-rumbling-creaking, and bright brassy sunlight flooded inside.

  “That’s better,” Benny said, stepping into the garage.

  She followed him and saw the black Mercedes 560 SEL, additional proof that Eric had been there.

  The rising door had stirred up some dust, motes of which drifted lazily through the in-slanting sunlight. Overhead in the rafters, spiders had been busy spinning ersatz silk.

  Rachael and Benny circled the car warily, looked through the windows (saw the keys dangling in the ignition), and even peered underneath. But Eric was not to be found.

  An elaborate workbench extended across the entire back of the garage. Above it was a peg board tool rack, and each tool hung in a painted outline of itself. Rachael noticed that no wood ax hung in the ax-shaped outline, but she did not even give the missing instrument a second thought because she was only looking for places where Eric could hide; she was not, after all, doing an inventory.

  The garage provided no sheltered spaces large enough for a man to conceal himself, and when Benny spoke again, he no longer bothered to whisper. “I’m beginning to think maybe he’s been here and gone.”

  “But that’s his Mercedes.”

  “This is a two-car garage, so maybe he keeps a vehicle up here all the time, a Jeep or four-wheel-drive pickup good for scooting around these mountain roads. Maybe he knew there was a chance the feds would learn what he’d done to himself and would be after him, with an APB on the car, so he split in the Jeep or whatever it was.”

  Rachael stared at the black Mercedes, which stood like a great sleeping beast. She looked up at the webs in the rafters. She stared at the sun-splashed dirt road that led away from the garage. The stillness of the mountain redoubt seemed less ominous than it had since their arrival; not peaceful and serene by any means, certainly not welcoming, either, but it was somewhat less threatening.

  “Where would he go?” she asked.

  Benny shrugged. “I don’t know. But if I do a thorough search of the cabin, maybe I’ll find something that’ll point me in the right direction.”

  “Do we have time for a search? I mean, when we left Sarah Kiel at the hospital last night, I didn’t know the feds might be on this same trail. I told her not to talk about what had happened and not to tell anyone about this place. At worst, I thought maybe Eric’s business partners would start sniffing around, trying to get something out of her, and I figured she’d be able to handle them. But she won’t be able to stall the government. And if she believes we’re traitors, she’ll even think she’s doing the right thing when she tells them about this place. So they’ll be here sooner or later.”

  “I agree,” Benny said, staring thoughtfully at the Mercedes.

  “Then we’ve no time to worry about where Eric went. Besides, that’s a copy of the Wildcard file in there on the living-room floor. All we have to do is pick it up and get out of here, and we’ll have all the proof we need.”

  He shook his head. “Having the file is important, maybe even crucial, but I’m not so sure it’s enough.”

  She paced agitatedly, the thirty-two pistol held with the muzzle pointed at the ceiling rather than down, for an accidentally triggered shot would ricochet off the concrete floor. “Listen, the whole story’s right there in black and white. We just give it to the press—”

  “For one thing,” Benny said, “the file is, I assume, a lot of highly technical stuff—lab results, formulae—and no reporter’s going to understand it. He’ll have to take it to a first-rate geneticist for review, for translation.”


  “So?”

  “So maybe the geneticist will be incompetent or just conservative in his assumption of what’s possible in his field, and in either case he might disbelieve the whole thing; he might tell the reporter it’s a fraud, a hoax.”

  “We can deal with that kind of setback. We can keep looking until we find a geneticist who—”

  Interrupting, Benny said, “Worse: Maybe the reporter will take it to a geneticist who does his own research for the government, for the Pentagon. And isn’t it logical that federal agents have contacted a lot of scientists specializing in recombinant DNA research, warning them that media types might be bringing them certain stolen files of a highly classified nature, seeking analysis of the contents?”

  “The feds can’t know that’s my intention.”

  “But if they’ve got a file on you—and they do—then they know you well enough to suspect that’d be your plan.”

  “All right, yes,” she admitted unhappily.

  “So any Pentagon-supported scientist is going to be real eager to please the government and keep his own fat research grants, and he’s sure as hell going to alert them the moment such a file comes into his hands. Certainly he’s not going to risk losing his grants or being prosecuted for compromising defense secrets, so at best he’ll tell the reporter to take his damn file and get lost, and he’ll keep his mouth shut. At best. Most likely he’ll give the reporter to the feds, and the reporter will give us to the feds. The file will be destroyed, and very likely we’ll be destroyed, too.”

  Rachael didn’t want to believe what he said, but she knew there was truth in it.

  Out in the woods, the cicadas were singing again.

  “So what do we do now?” she asked.

  Evidently Benny had been thinking hard about that question as they had gone through room after room of the cabin without finding Eric, for his answer was well prepared. “With both Eric and the file in our possession, we’re in a lot stronger position. We wouldn’t have just a bunch of cryptic research papers that only a handful of people could understand; we’d also have a walking dead man, his skull staved in, and by God, that’s dramatic enough to guarantee that virtually any newspaper or television network will run an all-stops-pulled story before getting expert opinions on the file itself. Then there’ll be no reason for the government or anyone else trying to shut us up. Once Eric’s seen on TV news, his picture’ll show up on the covers of Time and Newsweek, and the National Enquirer will have enough material for a decade, and David Letterman will be making zombie jokes every night, so silencing us won’t achieve anything.”

  He took a deep breath, and she had a hunch that he was going to propose something she would not like in the least.

  When he continued, he confirmed her hunch. “All right, like I said, I need to search this place thoroughly to see if I can come up with any clue that’ll tell us where Eric’s gone. But the authorities may show up here soon. Now that we’ve got a copy of the Wildcard file, we can’t risk having it taken away from us, so you’ve got to leave with the file while I—”

  “You mean, split up?” she said. “Oh, no.”

  “It’s the only way, Rachael. We—”

  “No.”

  The thought of leaving him alone here was chilling.

  The thought of being alone herself was almost too much to bear, and she realized with terrible poignancy how tight the bonds between them had become in just the past twenty-four hours.

  She loved him. God, how she loved him.

  He fixed her with his gentle, reassuring brown eyes. In a voice neither patronizing nor abrasively commanding but nevertheless full of authority and reason, a voice which brooked no debate—probably the tone he had learned to use in Vietnam, in crises, with soldiers of inferior rank—he said, “You’ll take the Wildcard file out of here, get copies made, send some off to friends in widely separated places, and secrete a few others where you can get your hands on them with short notice. Then we won’t have to worry about losing our only copy or having it taken away from us. We’ll have real good insurance. Meanwhile, I’ll thoroughly search the cabin here, see what I can turn up. If I find something that points us toward Eric, I’ll meet up with you at a prearranged place, and we’ll go after him together. If I don’t get a lead on him, we’ll meet up and hide out together, until we can decide what to do next.”

  She did not want to split up and leave him alone here. Eric might still be around. Or the feds might show up. Either way Benny might be killed. But his arguments for splitting up were convincing; damn it, he was right.

  Nevertheless, she said, “If I go alone and take the car, how will you get out of here?”

  He glanced at his wristwatch not because he needed to know the time (she thought) but to impress upon her that time was running out. “You’ll leave the rental Ford for me,” he said. “That’s got to be ditched soon, anyway, because the cops might be onto it. You’ll take this Mercedes, and I’ll take the Ford just far enough to swap it for something else.”

  “They’ll be on the lookout for the Mercedes, too.”

  “Oh, sure. But the APB will specify a black 560 SEL with this particular license number, driven by a man fitting Eric’s description. You’ll be driving, not Eric, and we’ll switch license plates with one of those cars parked along the gravel road farther down the mountain, which ought to take care of things.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “I am.”

  Hugging herself as if this were a day in November rather than a day in June, Rachael said, “But where would we meet up later?”

  “Las Vegas,” he said.

  The answer startled her. “Why there?”

  “Southern California’s too hot for us. I’m not confident we can hide out here. But if we hop over to Vegas, I have a place.”

  “What place?”

  “I own a motel on Tropicana Boulevard, west of the Strip.”

  “You’re a Vegas wheeler-dealer? Old-fashioned, conservative Benny Shadway is a Vegas wheeler-dealer?”

  “My real-estate development company’s been in and out of Vegas property several times, but I’m hardly a wheeler-dealer. It’s small stuff by Vegas standards. In this case, it’s an older motel with just twenty-eight rooms and a pool. And it’s not in the best repair. In fact, it’s closed up at the moment. I finished the purchase two weeks ago, and we’re going to tear it down next month, put up a new place: sixty units, a restaurant. There’s still electrical service. The manager’s suite is pretty shabby, but it has a working bathroom, furniture, telephone—so we can hide out there if we have to, make plans. Or just wait for Eric to show up someplace very public and cause a sensation that the feds can’t put a lid on. Anyway, if we can’t get a lead on him, hiding out is all we can do.”

  “I’m to drive to Vegas?” she asked.

  “That’d be best. Depending on how badly the feds want us—and considering what’s at stake, I think they want us real bad—they’ll probably have men at the major airports. You can take the state route past Silverwood Lake, then pick up Interstate Fifteen, be in Vegas this evening. I’ll follow in a couple of hours.”

  “But if the cops show up—”

  “Alone, without you to worry about, I can slip away from them.”

  “You think they’re going to be incompetent?” she asked sourly.

  “No. I just know I’m more competent.”

  “Because you were trained for this. But that was more than one and a half decades ago.”

  He smiled thinly. “Seems like yesterday, that war.”

  And he had kept in shape. She could not dispute that. What was it he’d said—that Nam had taught him to be prepared because the world had a way of turning dark and mean when you least expected it?

  “Rachael?” he asked, looking at his watch again.

  She realized that their best chance of surviving, of having a future together, was for her to do what he wanted.

  “All right,” she said. “All right.
We’ll split. But it scares me, Benny. I guess I don’t have the guts for this kind of thing, the right stuff. I’m sorry, but it really scares me.”

  He came to her, kissed her. “Being scared isn’t anything to be ashamed of. Only madmen have no fear.”

  24

  A SPECIAL FEAR OF HELL

  Dr. Easton Solberg had been more than fifteen minutes late for his one o’clock meeting with Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom. They had stood outside his locked office, and he had finally come hurrying along the wide hall, clutching an armload of books and manila folders, looking harried, more like a twenty-year-old student late to class than a sixty-year-old professor overdue for an appointment.

  He was wearing a rumpled brown suit one size too large for him, a blue shirt, and a green-and-orange-striped tie that looked, to Julio, as if it had been sold exclusively in novelty shops as a joke gift. Even by a generous appraisal, Solberg was not an attractive man, not even plain. He was short and stocky. His moonish face featured a small flat nose that would have been called pug on some men but that was simply porcine on him, small close-set gray eyes that looked watery and myopic behind his smudged glasses, a mouth that was strangely wide considering the scale on which the rest of his visage was constructed, and a receding chin.

  In the hall outside his office, apologizing effusively, he had insisted on shaking hands with the two detectives, in spite of the load in his arms; therefore, he kept dropping books, which Julio and Reese stooped to pick up.

  Solberg’s office was chaos. Books and scientific journals filled every shelf, spilled onto the floor, rose in teetering stacks in the corners, were piled every which way on top of furniture. On his big desk, file folders, index cards, and yellow legal-size tablets were heaped in apparent disorder. The professor shifted mounds of papers off two chairs to give Julio and Reese places to sit.

  “Look at that lovely view!” Solberg said, stopping suddenly and gaping at the windows as he rounded his desk, as if noticing for the first time what lay beyond the walls of his office.

  The Irvine campus of the University of California was blessed with many trees, rolling green lawns, and flower beds, for it sprawled over a large tract of prime Orange County land. Below Dr. Solberg’s second-floor office, a walkway curved across manicured grass, past impatiens blazing with thousands of bright blossoms—coral, red, pink, purple—and vanished under the branches of jacarandas and eucalyptus.