Shadowfires (23 page)

PART TWO

Night has patterns that can be read less by the living than by the dead.

—
The Book of Counted Sorrows

Choppering in from Palm Springs, Anson Sharp had arrived before dawn at Geneplan’s bacteriologically secure underground research laboratories near Riverside, where he had been greeted by a contingent of six Defense Security Agency operatives, four U.S. marshals, and eight of the marshals’ deputies, who had arrived minutes before him. Under the pretense of a national defense emergency, fully supported by valid court orders and search warrants, they identified themselves to Geneplan’s night security guards, entered the premises, applied seals to all research files and computers, and established an operations headquarters in the rather sumptuously appointed offices belonging to Dr. Vincent Baresco, chief of the research staff.

As dawn dispelled the night and as day took possession of the world above the subterranean laboratories, Anson Sharp slumped in Baresco’s enormous leather chair, sipped black coffee, and received reports, by phone, from subordinates throughout southern California, to the effect that Eric Leben’s coconspirators in the Wildcard Project were all under house arrest. In Orange County, Dr. Morgan Eugene Lewis, research coordinator of Wildcard, was being detained with his wife at his home in North Tustin. Dr. J. Felix Geffels was being held at his house right there in Riverside. Dr. Vincent Baresco, head of all research for Geneplan, had been found by DSA agents in Geneplan’s Newport Beach headquarters, unconscious on the floor of Eric Leben’s office, amidst indications of gunplay and a fierce struggle.

Rather than take Baresco to a public hospital and even partially relinquish control of him, Sharp’s men transported the bald and burly scientist to the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro, where he was seen by a Marine physician in the base infirmary. Having received two hard blows to the throat that made it impossible for him to speak, Baresco used a pen and notepad to tell DSA agents that he had been assaulted by Ben Shadway, Rachael Leben’s lover, when he had caught them in the act of looting Eric’s office safe. He was disgruntled when they refused to believe that was the whole story, and he was downright shocked to discover they knew about Wildcard and were aware of Eric Leben’s return from the dead. Using pen and notepad again, Baresco had demanded to be transferred to a civilian hospital, demanded to know what possible charges they could lodge, demanded to see his lawyer. All three demands were, of course, ignored.

Rupert Knowls and Perry Seitz, the money men who had supplied the large amount of venture capital that had gotten Geneplan off the ground nearly a decade ago, were at Knowls’s sprawling ten-acre estate, Havenhurst, in Palm Springs. Three Defense Security Agency operatives had arrived at the estate with arrest warrants for Knowls and Seitz and with a search warrant. They had found an illegally modified Uzi submachine gun, doubtless the weapon with which two Palm Springs policemen had been murdered only a couple of hours earlier.

Currently and indefinitely under detention at Havenhurst, neither Knowls nor Seitz was raising objections. They knew the score. They would receive an unattractive offer to convey to the government all research, rights, and title to the Wildcard enterprise, without a shred of compensation, and they would be required to remain forever silent about that undertaking and about Eric Leben’s resurrection. They would also be required to sign murder confessions which could be used to keep them acquiescent the rest of their lives. Although the offer had no legal basis or force, although the DSA was violating every tenet of democracy and breaking innumerable laws, Knowls and Seitz would accept the terms. They were worldly men, and they knew that failure to cooperate—and especially any attempt to exercise their constitutional rights—would be the death of them.

Those five were sitting on a secret that was potentially the most powerful in history. The immortality process was currently imperfect, true, but eventually the problems would be solved. Then whoever controlled the secrets of Wildcard would control the world. With so much at stake, the government was not concerned about observing the thin line between moral and immoral behavior, and in this very special case, it had no interest whatsoever in the niceties of due process.

After receiving the report on Seitz and Knowls, Sharp put down the phone, got up from the leather chair, and paced the windowless subterranean office. He rolled his big shoulders, stretched, and tried to work a kink out of his thick, muscular neck.

He had begun with eight people to worry about, eight possible leaks to plug, and now five of those eight had been dealt with quickly and smoothly. He felt pretty good about things in general and about himself in particular. He was damned good at his job.

At times like this, he wished he had someone with whom to share his triumphs, an admiring assistant, but he could not afford to let anyone get close to him. He was the deputy director of the Defense Security Agency, the number two man in the whole outfit, and he was determined to become director by the time he was forty. He intended to secure that position by collecting sufficient damaging material about the current director—Jarrod McClain—to force him out
and
to blackmail McClain into writing a wholehearted recommendation that Anson Sharp replace him. McClain treated Sharp like a son, making him privy to every secret of the agency, and already Sharp possessed most of what he needed to destroy McClain. But, as he was a careful man, he would not move until there was no possibility whatsoever of his coup failing. And when he ascended to the director’s chair, he would not make the mistake of taking a subordinate to his bosom, as McClain had embraced him. It would be lonely at the top,
must
be lonely if he were to survive up there a long time, so he made himself get used to loneliness now: though he had protégés, he did not have friends.

Having worked the stiffness out of his thick neck and immense shoulders, Sharp returned to the chair behind the desk, sat down, closed his eyes, and thought about the three people who remained on the loose and who must be apprehended. Eric Leben, Mrs. Leben, Ben Shadway. They would not be offered a deal, as the other five had been. If Leben could be taken “alive,” he would be locked away and studied as if he were a lab animal. Mrs. Leben and Shadway would simply be terminated and their deaths made to look accidental.

He had several reasons for wanting them dead. For one thing, they were both independent-minded, tough, and honest—a dangerous mixture, volatile. They might blow the Wildcard story wide open for the pure hell of it or out of misguided idealism, thus dealing Sharp a major setback on his climb to the top. The others—Lewis, Geffels, Baresco, Knowls, and Seitz—would knuckle under out of sheer self-interest, but Rachael Leben and Ben Shadway could not be counted on to put their own best interests first. Besides, neither had committed a criminal act, and neither had sold his soul to the government as the men of Geneplan had done, so no swords hung over their heads; there were no credible threats by which they could be controlled.

But most important of all, Sharp wanted Rachael Leben dead simply because she was Shadway’s lover, because Shadway cared for her. He wanted to kill her first, in front of Ben Shadway. And he wanted Shadway dead because he had hated the man for almost seventeen years.

Alone in that underground office, eyes closed, Sharp smiled. He wondered what Ben Shadway would do if he knew that his old nemesis, Anson Sharp, was hunting for him. Sharp was almost painfully eager for the inevitable confrontation, eager to see the astonishment on Shadway’s face, eager to waste the son of a bitch.

 

Jerry Peake, the young DSA agent assigned by Anson Sharp to find Sarah Kiel, carefully searched for a freshly dug grave on Eric Leben’s walled property in Palm Springs. Using a high-intensity flashlight, being diligent and utterly thorough, Peake tramped through flower beds, struggled through shrubbery, getting his pant legs damp and his shoes muddy, but he found nothing suspicious.

He turned on the pool lights, half expecting to find a dead woman either floating there—or weighted to the blue bottom and peering up through chlorine-treated water. When the pool proved to be free of corpses, Peake decided he had been reading too many mystery novels; in mystery novels, swimming pools were always full of bodies, but never in real life.

A passionate fan of mystery fiction since he was twelve, Jerry Peake had never wanted to be anything other than a detective, and not just an ordinary detective but something special, like a CIA or FBI or DSA man, and not just an ordinary DSA man but an investigative genius of the sort that John Le Carré, William F. Buckley, or Frederick Forsythe might write about. Peake wanted to be a legend in his own time. He was only in his fifth year with the DSA, and his reputation as a whiz was nonexistent, but he was not worried. He had patience. No one became a legend in just five years. First, you had to spend a lot of hours doing dog’s work—like tramping through flower beds, snagging your best suits on thorny shrubbery, and peering hopefully into swimming pools in the dead of night.

When he did not turn up Sarah Kiel’s body on the Leben property, Peake made the rounds of the hospitals, hoping to find her name on a patient roster or on a list of recently treated outpatients. He had no luck at his first two stops. Worse, even though he had his DSA credentials, complete with photograph, the nurses and physicians with whom he spoke seemed to regard him with skepticism. They cooperated, but guardedly, as if they thought he might be an imposter with hidden—and none too admirable—intentions.

He knew he looked too young to be a DSA agent; he was cursed with a frustratingly fresh, open face. And he was less aggressive in his questioning than he should be. But this time, he was sure the problem was not his baby face or slightly hesitant manner. Instead, he was greeted with doubt because of his muddy shoes, which he had cleaned with paper towels but which remained smeary-looking. And because of his trouser legs: Having gotten wet, the material had dried baggy and wrinkled. You could not be taken seriously, be respected, or become a legend if you looked as if you’d just slopped pigs.

An hour after dawn, at the third hospital, Desert General, he hit pay dirt in spite of his sartorial inadequacies. Sarah Kiel had been admitted for treatment during the night. She was still a patient.

The head nurse, Alma Dunn, was a sturdy white-haired woman of about fifty-five, unimpressed with Peake’s credentials and incapable of being intimidated. After checking on Sarah Kiel, she returned to the nurses’ station, where she’d made Peake wait, and she said, “The poor girl’s still sleeping. She was . . . sedated only a few hours ago, so I don’t expect she’ll be awake for another few hours.”

“Wake her, please. This is an urgent national security matter.”

“I’ll do no such thing,” Nurse Dunn said. “The girl was hurt. She needs her rest. You’ll have to wait.”

“Then I’ll wait in her room.”

Nurse Dunn’s jaw muscles bulged, and her merry blue eyes turned cold. “You certainly will not. You’ll wait in the visitors’ lounge.”

Peake knew he would get nowhere with Alma Dunn because she looked like Jane Marple, Agatha Christie’s indomitable amateur detective, and no one who looked like Miss Marple would be intimidated. “Listen, if you’re going to be uncooperative, I’ll have to talk to your superior.”

“That’s fine with me,” she said, glancing down disapprovingly at his shoes. “I’ll get Dr. Werfell.”

 

Beneath the earth in Riverside, Anson Sharp slept for one hour on the Ultrasuede sofa in Vincent Baresco’s office, showered in the small adjacent bathroom, and changed into a fresh suit of clothes from the suitcase that he had kept with him on every leg of his zigzagging route through southern California the previous night. He was blessed with the ability to fall asleep at will in a minute or less, without fail, and to feel rested and alert after only a nap. He could sleep anywhere he chose, regardless of background noise. He believed this ability was just one more proof that he was destined to climb to the top, where he longed to be, proof that he was superior to other men.

Refreshed, he made a few calls, speaking with agents guarding the Geneplan partners and research chiefs at various points in three counties. He also received reports from other men at the Geneplan offices in Newport Beach, Eric Leben’s house in Villa Park, and Mrs. Leben’s place in Placentia.

From the agents guarding Baresco at the U.S. Marine Air Station in El Toro, Sharp learned that Ben Shadway had taken a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum off the scientist in the Geneplan office last night, and that the revolver could not be located anywhere in that building. Shadway had not left it behind, had not disposed of it in a nearby trash container or hallway, but apparently had chosen to hold on to it. Furthermore, agents in Placentia reported that a .32-caliber semiautomatic pistol, registered to Rachael Leben, could be found nowhere in her house, and the assumption was that she was carrying it, though she did not possess a permit to carry.