She slipped the tilted chair out from under the knob of the basement door, pulled the door open, and backed quickly out of the way as Benny covered it with the shotgun.
Eric did not come roaring out of the darkness.
With tiny beads of sweat shimmering on his forehead, Benny went to the threshold, found the switch on the wall of the stairwell, and flicked on the lights below.
Rachael was also sweating. As was surely the case with Benny, her perspiration was not occasioned by the warm summer air.
It was still not advisable for Rachael to accompany Benny into the windowless chamber below. Eric might be outside, watching the house, and he might slip inside at the opportune moment; then, as they returned to the kitchen, they might be ambushed from above when they were in the middle of the stairs and most vulnerable. So she remained at the threshold, where she could look down the cellar steps and also have a clear view of the entire kitchen, including the archway to the living room and the open door to the rear porch.
Benny descended the plank stairs more quietly than seemed humanly possible, although some noise was unavoidable: a few creaks, a couple of scraping noises. At the bottom, he hesitated, then turned left, out of sight. For a moment Rachael saw his shadow on the wall down there, made large and twisted into an odd shape by the angle of the light, but as he moved farther into the cellar, the shadow dwindled and finally went with him.
She glanced at the archway. She could see a portion of the living room, which remained deserted and still.
In the opposite direction, at the porch door, a huge yellow butterfly clung to the screen, slowly working its wings.
A clatter sounded from below, nothing dramatic, as if Benny had bumped against something.
She looked down the steps. No Benny, no shadow.
The archway. Nothing.
The back door. Just the butterfly.
More noise below, quieter this time.
“Benny?” she said softly.
He did not answer her. Probably didn't hear her. She had spoken at barely more than a whisper, after all.
The archway, the back door…
The stairs: still no sign of Benny.
“Benny,” she repeated, then saw a shadow below. For a moment her heart twisted because the shadow looked so strange, but Benny appeared and started up toward her, and she sighed with relief.
“Nothing down there but an open wall safe tucked behind the water heater,” he said when he reached the kitchen. “It's empty, so maybe that's where he kept the files that're spread over the living room.”
Rachael wanted to put down her gun and throw her arms around him and hug him tight and kiss him all over his face just because he had come back from the cellar alive. She wanted him to know how happy she was to see him, but the garage still had to be explored.
By unspoken agreement, she removed the tilted chair from under the knob and opened the door, and Benny covered it with the shotgun. Again, there was no sign of Eric.
Benny stood on the threshold, fumbled for the switch, found it, but the lights in the garage were dim. Even with a small window high in one wall, the place remained shadowy. He tried another switch, which operated the big electric door. It rolled up with much humming-rumbling-creaking, and bright brassy sunlight flooded inside.
“That's better,” Benny said, stepping into the garage.
She followed him and saw the black Mercedes 560 SEL, additional proof that Eric had been there.
The rising door had stirred up some dust, motes of which drifted lazily through the in-slanting sunlight. Overhead in the rafters, spiders had been busy spinning ersatz silk.
Rachael and Benny circled the car warily, looked through the windows (saw the keys dangling in the ignition), and even peered underneath. But Eric was not to be found.
An elaborate workbench extended across the entire back of the garage. Above it was a peg board tool rack, and each tool hung in a painted outline of itself. Rachael noticed that no wood ax hung in the ax-shaped outline, but she did not even give the missing instrument a second thought because she was only looking for places where Eric could hide; she was not, after all, doing an inventory.
The garage provided no sheltered spaces large enough for a man to conceal himself, and when Benny spoke again, he no longer bothered to whisper. “I'm beginning to think maybe he's been here and gone.”
“But that's his Mercedes.”
“This is a two-car garage, so maybe he keeps a vehicle up here all the time, a Jeep or four-wheel-drive pickup good for scooting around these mountain roads. Maybe he knew there was a chance the feds would learn what he'd done to himself and would be after him, with an APB on the car, so he split in the Jeep or whatever it was.”
Rachael stared at the black Mercedes, which stood like a great sleeping beast. She looked up at the webs in the rafters. She stared at the sun-splashed dirt road that led away from the garage. The stillness of the mountain redoubt seemed less ominous than it had since their arrival; not peaceful and serene by any means, certainly not welcoming, either, but it was somewhat less threatening.
“Where would he go?” she asked.
Benny shrugged. “I don't know. But if I do a thorough search of the cabin, maybe I'll find something that'll point me in the right direction.”
“Do we have time for a search? I mean, when we left 'Sarah Kiel at the hospital last night, I didn't know the feds might be on this same trail. I told her not to talk about what had happened and not to tell anyone about this place. At worst, I thought maybe Eric's business partners would start sniffing around, trying to get something out of her, and I figured she'd be able to handle them. But she won't be able to stall the government. And if she believes we're traitors, she'll even think she's doing the right thing when she tells them about this place. So they'll be here sooner or later.”
“I agree,” Benny said, staring thoughtfully at the Mercedes.
“Then we've no time to worry about where Eric went. Besides, that's a copy of the Wildcard file in there on the living-room floor. All we have to do is pick it up and get out of here, and we'll have all the proof we need.”
He shook his head. “Having the file is important, maybe even crucial, but I'm not so sure it's enough.”
She paced agitatedly, the thirty-two pistol held with the muzzle pointed at the ceiling rather than down, for an accidentally triggered shot would ricochet off the concrete floor. “Listen, the whole story's right there in black and white. We just give it to the press—”
“For one thing,” Benny said, “the file is, I assume, a lot of highly technical stuff — lab results, formulae — and no reporter's going to understand it. He'll have to take it to a first-rate geneticist for review, for translation.”
“So?”
“So maybe the geneticist will be incompetent or just conservative in his assumption of what's possible in his field, and in either case he might disbelieve the whole thing; he might tell the reporter it's a fraud, a hoax.”
“We can deal with that kind of setback. We can keep looking until we find a geneticist who—”
Interrupting, Benny said, “Worse: Maybe the reporter will take it to a geneticist who does his own research for the government, for the Pentagon. And isn't it logical that federal agents have contacted a lot of scientists specializing in recombinant DNA research, warning them that media types might be bringing them certain stolen files of a highly classified nature, seeking analysis of the contents?”
“The feds can't know that's my intention.”
“But if they've got a file on you — and they do — then they know you well enough to suspect that'd be your plan.”