Shadowfires

I will.”
    She kissed him lightly on the cheek.
    Though she was weary, sweaty, and rumpled, with lank hair and
bloodshot eyes, she was beautiful.
    He had never felt closer to her. Facing death together always
forged a special bond between people, drew them even closer
regardless of how very close they might have been before. He knew,
for he had been to war in the Green Hell.
    Tenderly she said, “Let's get some rest, Benny.”
    “Right,” he said.
    But before he could lie down and turn off the lights, he had to
break out the magazine of the Smith & Wesson Combat Magnum that
he had taken off Vincent Baresco several hours ago and count the
remaining cartridges. Three. Half the
magazine's load had been expended in Eric's office, when Baresco had
fired wildly in the darkness as Ben attacked him. Three left. Not
much. Not nearly enough to make Ben feel secure, even though Rachael
had her own thirty-two pistol. How many bullets were required to stop
a walking dead man? Ben put the Combat Magnum on the nightstand,
where he could reach out and lay his hand on it in an instant if he
needed it during what remained of the night.
    In the morning, he would buy a box of ammunition. Two boxes.

----
14 LIKE A
NIGHT BIRD
    Leaving two men behind at Rachael
Leben's house in Placentia-where the crucified corpse of Rebecca Klienstad had finally been taken down from the bedroom wall-and leaving other men at the Leben house in Villa Park and still others at the Geneplan offices, Anson Sharp of the Defense Security Agency choppered through the desert darkness with two more agents, flying low and fast, to Eric Leben's
stylish yet squalid love nest in Palm Springs. The pilot put the
helicopter down in a bank parking lot less than a block off Palm
Canyon Drive, where a nondescript government car was waiting. The
chuffing rotors of the aircraft sliced up the hot dry desert air and
flung slabs of it at Sharp's back as he dashed to the sedan.
    Five minutes later, they arrived at the house where Dr. Leben had
kept his string of teenage girls. Sharp
wasn't surprised to find the front door ajar. He rang the bell repeatedly, but no one answered. Drawing his service revolver, a Smith & Wesson Chief's
Special, he led the way inside, in search of Sarah Kiel who,
according to the most recent report on Leben, was the current piece
of fluff in residence.
    The Defense Security Agency knew about
Leben's lechery because it knew everything about people engaged in top-secret contract work with the Pentagon. That was something civilians like Leben just could never seem to understand: Once they accepted the Pentagon's
money and undertook highly sensitive research work, they had
absolutely no privacy. Sharp knew all about
Leben's fascination with modern art, modern design, and modern architecture. He knew about Eric Leben's
marital problems in detail. He knew what foods Leben preferred, what
music he liked, what brand of underwear he wore; so of course he also
knew every little thing about the teenage girls because the potential
for blackmail that they presented was related to national
security.
    When Sharp stepped into the kitchen and saw the destruction,
especially the knives driven into the wall, he figured he would not
find Sarah Kiel alive. She would be nailed up in another room, or
maybe bolted to the ceiling, or maybe hacked to pieces and hung on
wire to form a bloody mobile, maybe even worse. You couldn't guess what might happen next in this case. Anything could happen.
    Weird.
    Gosser and Peake, the two young agents with Sharp, were startled
and made uneasy by the mess in the kitchen and by the psychopathic
frenzy it implied. Their security clearance and need to know were as
high as Sharp's, so they were aware that they were hunting for a walking dead man. They knew Eric Leben had risen from a morgue slab and escaped in stolen hospital whites, and they knew a half-alive and deranged Eric Leben had killed the Hernandez and Klienstad women to obtain their car, so Gosser and Peake held their service revolvers as tightly and cautiously as Sharp held his.
    Of course, the DSA was fully aware of the nature of the work
Geneplan was doing for the government: biological warfare research,
the creation of deadly man-made viruses. But the agency also knew the
details of other projects under way within the company, including the
Wildcard Project, although Leben and his associates had labored under
the delusion that the