Shadowfires

in either Santa Ana or Villa Park. They were much too far
from the ocean-a couple of miles-to hear the waves or to smell the
salt and seaweed, but the Pacific air nevertheless had an effect.
    A smaller, man-size door was set in the wall beside the larger
entrance and also opened into the basement level. It had two
locks.
    Living with Eric, Rachael had run errands to and from Geneplan
when he
hadn't the time himself and when, for whatever reason, he did not trust a subordinate with the task, so she'd
once possessed keys. But the day she walked out on him, she put the
keys on a small table in the foyer of the Villa Park house. Tonight,
she had found them exactly where she'd left them a year ago, on the table beside a tall nineteenth-century Japanese cloisonné vase, dust-filmed. Evidently Eric had instructed the maid not to move the keys even an inch. He must have intended that their undisturbed presence should be a subtle humiliation for Rachael when she came crawling back to him. Happily, she had denied him that sick satisfaction.
    Clearly, Eric Leben had been a supremely arrogant bastard, and Ben
was glad that he had never met the man.
    Now Rachael opened the steel door, stepped into the building, and
switched on the lights in the small underground shipping bay. An
alarm box was set in the concrete wall. She tapped a series of
numbers on its keyboard. The pair of glowing red lights winked out,
and a green bulb lit up, indicating that the system was
deactivated.
    Ben followed her to the end of the chamber, which was sealed off
from the rest of the subterranean level for security reasons. At the
next door there was another alarm box for another system independent
of that which had guarded the exterior door. Ben watched her switch
it off with another number code.
    She said, “The first one is based on
Eric's birthday, this one on mine. There're more ahead.”
    They proceeded by the beam of the flashlight that Rachael had
brought from the house in Villa Park, for she did not want to turn on
any lights that might be spotted from outside.
    “But you've a perfect right to be here,” Ben said. “You're his
widow, and you've almost certainly inherited everything.”
    “Yes, but if the wrong people drive by and see lights on,
they'll figure it's me, and they'll come in to get me.”
    He wished to God
she'd tell him who these “wrong people” were, but he knew better than to ask. Rachael as moving fast, eager to put her hands on whatever had drawn her to this place, then get out. She would have no more patience for his questions here than she'd
had in the house in Villa Park.
    As he accompanied her through the rest of the basement to the
elevator, up to the second floor, Ben was increasingly intrigued by
the extraordinary security system in operation after normal business
hours. There was a third alarm to be penetrated before the elevator
could be summoned to the basement. On the second floor, they debarked
from the elevator into a reception lounge also designed with security
in mind. In the searching beam of Rachael's flashlight, Ben saw a sculpted beige carpet, a striking desk of brown marble and brass for the receptionist, half a dozen brass and leather chairs for visitors, glass and brass coffee tables, and three large and ethereal paintings that might have been by Martin Green, but even if the flashlight had been switched off, he would have seen the blood-red alarm lights in the darkness. Three burnished brass doors-probably solid-core and virtually impenetrable-led out of the lounge, and alarm lights glowed beside each of them.
    “This is nothing compared to the precautions taken on the third
and fourth levels,” Rachael said.
    “What's up there?”
    “The computers and duplicate research data banks. Every inch is
covered by infrared, sonic, and visual-motion detectors.”
    “We going up there?”
    “Fortunately, we don't have to. And we don't have to go out to
Riverside County, either, thank God.”
    “What's in Riverside?”
    “The actual research labs. The entire facility is underground, not
just for biological isolation but for better security against
industrial espionage, too.”
    Ben was aware that Geneplan was a leader in the most fiercely
competitive and rapidly developing industry in the world. The frantic
race to be first with a new product, when coupled with the natural
competitiveness of the kind of men drawn into the industry, made it
necessary o guard trade secrets and