Shadowfires by Dean Koontz Page B

shut, he discovered that it was enormously heavy and would have been immovable if it had not been hung in perfect balance on cunningly designed ball-bearing hinges.
    She led him along a series of dark and silent corridors, through additional doors to Eric’s private suite. There she required one more code for a final alarm box.
    Inside the sanctum sanctorum at last, she quickly crossed a vast expanse of antique Chinese carpet in rose and beige to Eric’s massive desk. It was as ultramodern as that of the company’s front-lounge receptionist but even more stunning and expensive, constructed of rare gold-veined marble and polished malachite.
    The bright but narrowly focused lance of the flashlight beam revealed only the middle of the big room as Rachael advanced through it, so Ben had only glimpses and shadowy impressions of the decor. It seemed even more determinedly modern than Eric Leben’s other haunts, downright futuristic.
    She put her purse and pistol on the desk as she passed it, went to the wall behind, where Ben joined her. She played the flashlight over a four-foot-square painting: broad bands of sombrous yellow and a particularly depressing gray separated by a thin swath of blood-dark maroon.
    “Another Rothko?” Ben asked.
    “Yeah. And with an important function besides just being a piece of art.”
    She slipped her fingers under the burnished steel frame, feeling along the bottom. A latch clicked, and the big painting swung away from the wall, to which it had been firmly fixed rather than hung on wire. Behind the hinged Rothko was a large wall safe with a circular door about two feet in diameter. The steel face, dial, and handle gleamed.
    “Trite,” Ben said.
    “Not really. Not your ordinary wall safe. Four-inch-thick steel casing, six-inch face and door. Not just set in the wall but actually welded to the steel beams of the building itself. Requires not one but two combinations, the first forward, the second reverse. Fireproof and virtually blastproof, too.”
    “What’s he keep in there—the meaning of life?”
    “Some money, I guess, like in the safe at the house,” she said, handing Ben the flashlight. She turned the dial and began to put in the first combination. “Important papers.”
    He aimed the light at the safe door. “Okay, so what’re we after exactly? The cash?”
    “No. A file folder. Maybe a ring-binder notebook.”
    “What’s in it?”
    “The essentials of an important research project. More or less an abstract of the developments to date, including copies of Morgan Lewis’s regular reports to Eric. Lewis is the project head. And with any luck, Eric’s personal project diary is in here, too. All of his practical and philosophical thoughts on the subject.”
    Ben was surprised that she had answered. Was she finally prepared to let him in on at least some of her secrets?
    “What subject?” he asked. “What’s this particular research project all about?”
    She did not respond but blotted her sweat-damp fingers on her blouse before easing the safe’s dial backward toward the first number of the second combination.
    “Concerning what?” he pressed.
    “I have to concentrate, Benny,” she said. “If I overshoot one of these numbers, then I’ll have to start all over and put the first set in again.”
    He had gotten all he was going to get, the one little scrap about the file. But, not caring to stand idly by, having nothing else to do but pressure her, he said, “There must be hundreds of research files on scores of projects, so if he keeps just one of them here, it’s got to involve the most important thing Geneplan’s currently working on.”
    Squinting, and with her tongue poked out between her teeth, she brought all of her attention to bear on the dial.
    “Something big,” he said.
    She said nothing.
    He said, “Or it’s research they’re doing for the government, the military. Something extremely sensitive.”
    Rachael put in the final number, twisted the