Shadowfires

an all-night desk clerk. Their room had orange and white drapes that almost made Ben's eyes bleed, and Rachael said the bedspread pattern looked like yak puke, but the shower and air-conditioning worked, and the two queen- size beds had firm mattresses, and the unit was at the back of the complex, away from the street, where they could expect quiet even after the town came alive in the morning, so it wasn't exactly hell on earth.

Leaving Rachael alone for ten minutes, Ben drove the stolen Subaru out the motel's rear exit, left it in a supermarket parking lot several blocks away, and returned on foot. Both going and coming, he avoided passing the windows of the motel office and therefore did not stir the curiosity of the night clerk. Tomorrow, with the need for wheels less urgent, they could take time to rent a car.

In his absence, Rachael had visited the ice-maker and the soda-vending machine. A plastic bucket brimming with ice cubes stood on the small table by the window, plus cans of Diet Coke and regular Coke and A&W Root Beer and Orange Crush.

She said, “I thought you might be thirsty.”

He was suddenly aware that they were smack in the middle of the desert and that they had been moving in a sweat for hours. Standing, he drank an Orange Crush in two swallows, finished a root beer nearly as fast, then sat down and popped the tab on a Diet Coke. “Even with the hump, how do camels do it?”

As if dropping under an immense weight, she sat down on the other side of the table, opened a Coke, and said, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Aren't you going to ask?”

He yawned, not out of perversity, and not because he wanted to irritate her, but because at that moment the prospect of sleep was more appealing than finally learning the truth of her circumstances. He said, “Ask what?”

“The same questions you've been asking all night.”

“You made it clear you wouldn't give answers.”

“Well, now I will. Now there's no keeping you out of it.”

She looked so sad that Ben felt a cold premonition of death in his bones and wondered if he had, indeed, been foolish to involve himself even to help the woman he loved. She was looking at him as if he were already dead — as if they were both dead.

“So if you're ready to tell me,” he said, “then I don't need to ask questions.”

“You're going to have to keep an open mind. What I'm about to tell you might seem unbelievable… damn strange.”

He sipped the Diet Coke and said, “You mean about Eric dying and coming back from the dead?”

She jerked in surprise and gaped at him. She tried to speak but couldn't get any words out.

He had never in his life elicited such a rewarding reaction from anyone else, and he took enormous pleasure in it.

At last she said, “But… but, how… when… what…”

He said, “How do I know what I know? When did I figure it out? What clued me in?”

She nodded.

He said, “Hell, if someone had stolen Eric's body, they'd surely have come with a car of their own to haul it away. They wouldn't have had to kill a woman and steal her car. And there were those discarded hospital whites in the garage in Villa Park. Besides, you were scared witless from the moment I showed up at your door last evening, and you aren't easily spooked. You're a very competent and self-sufficient woman, not the type to get the willies. In fact, I've never seen you scared of anything except maybe… Eric.”

“He really was killed by that truck, you know. It isn't just that they misdiagnosed his condition.”

The desire for sleep retreated a bit, and Ben said, “His business — and genius — was genetic engineering. And the man was obsessed with staying young. So I figure he found a way to edit out the genes linked to aging and death. Or maybe he edited in an artificially constructed gene for swift healing, tissue stasis… immortality.”

“You endlessly amaze me,” she said.

“I'm quite a guy.”

Her own weariness gave way to nervous energy. She could not keep still. She got up and paced.

He remained seated, sipping his Diet Coke. He had been badly rattled all night; now it was her turn.

Her bleak voice was tinted by dread, resignation. “When Geneplan patented its first highly profitable artificial microorganisms, Eric could've taken the company public, could've sold thirty percent of his stock and made a hundred million overnight.”

“A hundred? Jesus!”

“His two partners and three of the research associates, who also had pieces of the company, half wanted him to do just that because they'd have made a killing, too. Everyone else but Vincent Baresco was leaning toward going for the gold. Eric refused.”

“Baresco,” Ben said. “The guy who pulled the Magnum on us, the guy I trashed in Eric's office tonight — is he a partner?”

“It's Dr. Vincent Baresco. He's on Eric's handpicked research staff — one of the few who know about the Wildcard Project. In fact, only the six of them knew everything. Six plus me. Eric loved to brag to me. Anyway, Baresco sided with Eric, didn't want Geneplan to go public, and he convinced the others. If it remained a privately held company, they didn't have to please stockholders. They could spend money on unlikely projects without defending their decisions.”

“Such as a search for immortality or its equivalent.”

“They didn't expect to achieve full immortality — but longevity, regeneration. It took a lot of funds, money that stockholders would've wanted to see paid out in dividends. Eric and the others were getting rich, anyway, from the modest percentage of corporate profits they distributed to themselves, so they didn't desperately need the capital they'd get by going public.”

“Regeneration,” Ben said thoughtfully.

At the window, Rachael stopped pacing, cautiously drew back the drape, and peered out at the night- cloaked motel parking lot.

She said, “God knows, I'm no expert in recombinant DNA. But… well, they hoped to develop a benign virus that'd function as a 'carrier' to convey new genetic material into the body's cells and precisely place the new bits on the chains of chromosomes. Think of the virus as a sort of living scalpel that does genetic surgery. Because it's microscopic, it can perform minute operations no real scalpel ever could. It can be designed to seek out — and attach itself to — a certain portion of a chromosomal chain, either destroying the gene already there or inserting a new one.”

“And they did develop it?”

“Yes. Then they needed to positively identify genes associated with aging and edit them out— and develop artificial genetic material for the virus to carry into the cells. Those new genes would be designed to halt the aging process and tremendously boost the natural immune system by cuing the body to produce vastly larger quantities of interferon and other healing substances. Follow me?”

“Mostly.”

“They even believed they could give the human body the ability to regenerate ruined tissue, bone, and vital organs.”

She still stared out at the night, and she appeared to have gone pale — not at something she had seen but at the consideration of what she was slowly revealing to him.

Finally she continued: “Their patents were bringing in a river of money, a flood. So they spent God knows how many tens of millions, farming out pieces of the research puzzle to geneticists not in the company, keeping the work fragmented so no one was likely to realize the true intent of their efforts. It was like a privately financed equivalent of the Manhattan Project — and maybe even more secret than the development of the atomic bomb.”

“Secret… because if they succeeded, they wanted to keep the blessing of an extended life span for themselves?”

“Partly, yes.” Letting the drape fall in place, she turned from the window. “And by holding the secret, by dispensing the blessing only to whomever they chose — just imagine the power they'd