Frankenstein

most in the main room, with a tack room at the back. Along the south wall were three stalls. From across the room, three other stalls faced the first group.
    In the north stalls stood a stallion named Commander and two mares named Queenie and Valentine. The south stalls were unoccupied.
    “The walls are insulated, and there’s an oil furnace that keeps the temperature from falling too low,” Erskine said.
    “The insulation will also contain sound,” Nancy said. “We might need the sound to be well contained.”
    The horses watched them with interest.
    Ariel turned in place, surveying the room. “The windows must be packed with sound insulation and boarded over inside. From outside, they should appear unchanged.”
    Erskine declared, “Here it will happen.”
    “Ideal,” Nancy said.
    Ariel’s somber expression became a thin smile of anticipation. Her gray-blue eyes shone with a lustrous steely light.
    “Yes,” she said. “Yes. This is where I will be what I am.”
    Nancy said, “Install locks on the barn doors. Very good locks.”
    Beginning a second survey of the barn, Ariel said, “And fortify the stalls, both the walls and the doors. They must be very strong.”
    The three stood in silence for a moment. Erskine knew that they felt the same things: urgent purpose, the thrill of a war begun, a kind of awe that they were the agents of change that would remake the world, and an almost feverish desire to exterminate the rabble, the vermin, the pestilence, the
filth
that was humankind.

    
chapter
5

    Chang’s sense of danger proved to be no less impressive than his sense of style in men’s fashions.
    After choosing the delivery truck as their surveillance post, Carson and Michael had disabled the ceiling lamp in the cab and had left the driver’s and the passenger’s doors ajar. When they got out of the truck, the doors made no sound; no sudden light betrayed them.
    Nevertheless, having knelt to fire a third round, the coup de grâce, into the back of Beckmann’s head, the killer sprang to his feet. He swiveled toward the sixth truck in the row of fourteen identical vehicles—their truck—and squeezed off two shots.
    The first bullet struck an iron-bell note from the chassis and ricocheted into the night. The second pierced the windshield.
    In her years as a cop, Carson had never been shot, less because she was cautious than because she was bold. She often played by the book—but only until she intuitively knew that playing by the book could get her killed.
    Chang was the employee of a Chinese corporation. He headed itsDivision of Competitive Intel, which meant—bluntly put—that either by thievery or by bribery, he acquired technological trade secrets from other corporations. He wasn’t a former military man or an agent of a government intelligence service. Until now, violence was not in his criminal repertoire.
    Surely he’d become aware of Carson and Michael by some stroke of luck, not because his perceptions were those of a highly trained operative. Somehow aware of their presence but not of their exact positions, he’d fired two rounds in their general direction, which was a waste of ammunition and a panicky response to having been caught in the act of murder.
    This company hack, this
amateur
, was no match for two former New Orleans homicide cops who were now highly motivated private dicks with office overhead to pay and a growing family to support. Carson at first saw no need to retreat from a corporate bureaucrat even if he was homicidal.
    Confident that the lightless parking lot behind her provided the shooter with no silhouette at which to aim, she raced toward him. Beyond her quarry, the security lamps on the warehouses backlit him, and even without the assistance of a night-vision camera, she could see him far better than he might be able to see her.
    Carson’s initial boldness was vindicated when, instead of again firing blindly, Chang snared the shopping bag with which he’d arrived and the attaché case that Beckmann had dropped when shot. He sprinted toward the nearest warehouse.
    Running, Carson was aware of Chang putting more ground between them in spite of his burdens, and of Michael off to her right. She remained aware as well of Scout, their seven-month-old daughter back at the house, not because she possessed the psychic power of remoteviewing, which she did not, but because she was a
mother
now, with responsibilities that had not burdened her when she had been