Shadowfires by Dean Koontz

her troubled eyes. And no matter how sweet she thought he was, she was still not prepared to share any of her secrets with him.
     
    They reached Geneplan at eleven-thirty.
    Dr. Eric Leben’s corporate headquarters was a four-story, glass-walled building in an expensive business park off Jamboree Road in Newport Beach, stylishly irregular in design with six sides that were not all of equal length, and with a modernistic polished marble and glass porte cochere. Ben usually despised such architecture, but he grudgingly had to admit that the Geneplan headquarters had a certain appealing boldness. The parking lot was divided into sections by long planters overflowing with vine geraniums heavily laden with wine-red and white blooms. The building was surrounded by an impressive amount of green space as well, with artfully arranged palm trees. Even at this late hour, the trees, grounds, and building were lit by cunningly placed spotlights that imparted a sense of drama and importance to the place.
    Rachael pulled her Mercedes around to the rear of the building, where a short driveway sloped down to a large bronze-tinted door that evidently rolled up to admit delivery trucks to an interior loading bay on the basement level. She drove to the bottom and parked at the door, below ground level, with concrete walls rising on both sides. She said, “If anyone gets the idea I might come to Geneplan, and if they drive by looking for my car, they won’t spot it down here.”
    Getting out of the car, Ben noticed how much cooler and more pleasant the night was in Newport Beach, closer to the sea, than it had been 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