Shadowfires (37 page)

The cicadas had stopped singing.

What did their sudden silence mean?

Before she could call that new development to Benny’s attention, he flung himself forward, out of the concealment of the woods. He bolted across the patchy, dead brown lawn.

Propelled by the electrifying feeling that something murderous was bounding through the shadowed forest behind her—was reaching for her hair, was going to seize her, was going to drag her away into the dark of the woods—Rachael plunged after Benny, past the rocks, out of the trees, into the sun. She reached the back porch even as he was hunkering down beside the steps.

Breathless, she stopped beside him and looked back toward the forest. Nothing was pursuing her. She could hardly believe it.

Fast and light on his feet, Benny sprang up the porch steps, to the wall beside the open door, where he put his back to the logs and listened for movement inside the house. Evidently he heard nothing, for he pulled open the screen door and went inside, staying low, the shotgun aimed in front of him.

Rachael went after him, into a kitchen that was larger and better equipped than she expected. On the table, a plate held the remnants of an unfinished breakfast of sausages and biscuits. Soup cans and an empty jar of peanut butter littered the floor.

The cellar door was open. Benny cautiously, quietly pushed it shut, closing off the sight of steps descending into the gloom beyond.

Without being told what to do, Rachael hooked a kitchen chair with one hand, brought it to the door, tilted it under the knob, and wedged it into place, creating an effective barricade. They could not go into the cellar until they had searched the main living quarters of the cabin; for if Eric was in one of the ground-floor rooms, he might slip into the kitchen as soon as they went down the steps, might close the door and lock them in the dark basement. Conversely, if he was in the windowless basement already, he might creep upstairs while they were searching for him and sneak in behind them, a possibility they had just precluded by wedging that door shut.

She saw that Benny was pleased by the perception she’d shown when she’d put that chair under the knob. They made a good team.

She braced another door, which probably opened onto the garage, used a chair on that one, too. If Eric was in there, he could escape by rolling up the big outer door, of course, but they would hear it no matter where they were in the cabin and would have him pinpointed.

They stood in the kitchen for a moment, listening. Rachael could hear only the gusty breeze humming in the fine-mesh screen of the open kitchen window, sighing through the deep eaves under the overhanging slate roof.

Staying low and moving fast, Benny rushed through the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, looking left and right as he crossed the threshold. He signaled to Rachael that the way was clear, and she went after him.

In the ultramodern living room, the cabin’s front door was open, though not as wide as the back door had been. A couple of hundred loose sheets of paper, two small ring-bound notebooks with black vinyl covers, and several manila file folders were scattered across the floor, some rumpled and torn.

Also on the floor, beside an armchair near the big front window, lay a medium-size knife with a serrated blade and a point tip. A couple of sunbeams, having pierced the forest outside, struck through the window, and one touched the steel blade, making its polished surface gleam, rippling lambently along its cutting edge.

Benny stared worriedly at the knife, then turned toward one of the three doors that, in addition to the kitchen archway, opened off the living room.

Rachael was about to pick up some of the papers to see what they were, but when Benny moved, she followed.

Two of the doors were closed tight, but the one Benny had chosen was ajar an inch. He pushed it open all the way with the barrel of the shotgun and went through with his customary caution.

Guarding the rear, Rachael remained in the living room, where she could see the open front door, the two closed doors, the kitchen arch, but where she also had a view of the room into which Benny had gone. It was a bedroom, wrecked in the same way that the bedroom in the Villa Park mansion and the kitchen in the Palm Springs house had been wrecked, proof that Eric had been here and that he had been seized by another demented rage.

In the bedroom, Benny gingerly rolled aside one of the large mirrored doors on a closet, looked warily inside, apparently found nothing of interest. He moved across the bedroom to the adjoining bath, where he passed out of Rachael’s sight.

She glanced nervously at the front door, at the porch beyond, at the kitchen archway, at each of the other two closed doors.

Outside, the gusty breeze moaned softly under the overhanging roof and made a low, eager whining noise. The rustle of wind-stirred trees carried through the open front door.

Inside the cabin, the deep silence grew even deeper. Curiously enough, that stillness had the same effect on Rachael as a crescendo in a symphony: while it built, she became tenser, more convinced that events were hurtling toward an explosive climax.

Eric, damn it, where are you? Where are you, Eric?

Benny seemed to have been gone an ominously long time. She was on the verge of calling to him in panic, but finally he reappeared, unharmed, shaking his head to indicate that he had found no sign of Eric and nothing else of interest.

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?”