What passed for belly fire these days was the yearning to get his hands on Chris Bacon for what he had done to those dreams.

He glanced at the clock. Maybe there was hope still.

As he gathered his stuff to leave, Quentin noticed the red security light flash silently on the far wall.

His back had been turned to it while talking to Antoine, so he had no idea how long it had been flashing. It had gone on and off all day, but with the full security contingent to hold back the crowds there was no reason for alarm.

Motion sensors that rimmed the building had apparently picked something up earlier but had not been cleared.

Quentin cut to the security office across the hall. He flicked a switch to light up a panel of twelve surveillance monitors which gave him a full sweep of the property in real light and infrared. Maybe it was a stray dog or raccoon, because the lights showed nobody anywhere around the building.

The security guard sat conspicuously out front in a black vehicle. He would drive around the grounds through the parking lot periodically.

Another light flicked on.

Movement in the storage room at the rear of the building.

That was odd. At night, the security guards patrolled only the outside of the building. Even during the day, that area was a restricted zone of high-security substances. Also, that end of the building was a cinderblock-and-steel structure essentially impregnable. There were no windows, and the only doors were the service bay for trucks and a single entrance made of steel and wired to an alarm. The only way inside was a battery of keys or an infantry tank.

Quentin left the office area.

He walked down the long corridor to the storage area. With his keys, he let himself inside. The heavy steel door closed behind him with a loud snap of the lock sliding into place.

The place was dim but for the night lights. And quiet. The only sound was the soft hum from the air circulation system.

Quentin slowly walked past the long aisles where they stored thousands of chemicals in bottles and boxes. The heels of his shoes snapped on the clean cement floor.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

Overhead he spotted the security cameras and motion sensors that lit up red as he moved by. In the security office the silent red lights would be blinking wildly.

Because the place was so tightly sealed, there was no way an animal could have gotten inside. Unless it was a pigeon that had strayed in through the delivery bay during the day. That had happened occasionally. But he could see none. If it were perched in the rafters, they would have to get it out tomorrow or the red lights would never go off.

With his key Quentin let himself into the restricted area set off behind a thick steel mesh. Against the back wall was the dark vault of specialized compounds.

He checked behind the vault and the various shelves. Nothing. He also opened the vault to be certain nothing was missing. In the rear he removed a small brown jar containing tubarine chloride. He looked at it, thinking of Ross and that bastard Bacon.

Clink.

Quentin froze in place, the tubarine clutched in hand.

Clink. Clink.

Quentin turned.

There was somebody behind him, on the other side of the steel grating. A man wearing a black Minuteman Security uniform.

"You startled the hell out of me," Quentin said. "H-how did you get in here?"

The man did not answer, and his face was shadowed by the brim of his cap.

"I asked you how you got inside the building."

Clink.

"I'm the president of this company. I hired you people. Will you please answer me?"

Clink. Snap.

"What are you doing?"

The man had padlocked shut the door with his own lock.

Quentin crossed to the grating. "What are you doing? Take that off. Let me out of here."

The man said nothing.

Quentin closed his fingers through the steel mesh and shook the gate. It was fastened shut. "Let me out of here. I own this place. This is my company. Who do you think you are?"

The man raised his head so that the security light caught his face.

A familiar face.

A television face.

"You're going to hell, sinner."

Reverend Colonel Lamar Fisk.

It was his people who had camped out on the grounds outside for the last week. The fanatics with the signs calling for Armageddon.

"Who the hell do you think you are coming in here like this?"

"Who?" Fisk's eyes were perfect orbs. "A soldier of the Lord is who. You've bitten into His forbidden fruit for the last time."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Quentin shook the door again. "Let me out of here. Let me out of here."

Fisk did not respond but glared at him with such an intensity that Quentin backed away.

He then shot to an emergency phone on the wall near the vault. He raised it to punch 911 but could not get a dial tone. The line was dead.

Fisk raised his hand. "And I heard a voice from heaven saying, 'Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth,'" he shouted. The veins of his neck stood out like thick cords of rope.

From behind Fisk half a dozen others in black uniforms appeared. One held a torch in his hands.

No, not a torch. A Molotov cocktail.

"What do you think you're doing?"

But Fisk moved back to the others. The man with the torch passed the flaming bottle to him. Then in a booming voice that reverberated in the steel chamber, Fisk raised his torch hand high and bellowed forth:

"'And I saw the beast was taken and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him with which he had deceived them that had received the mark of the beast and them that worshipped his image. And they were both cast alive into a lake of fire.'"

Then he threw the torch toward Quentin. With a shattering whoosh, the floor erupted in a spreading pool of orange flame.

In the light Quentin saw two men rush into the interior of the building, to the labs and offices. A moment later he heard loud explosions.

It was then the remaining men let fly incendiary grenades into all corners of the storage chamber and down each of the aisles.

Quentin screamed as if his throat were shattering.

But he was drowned out by the sound of the grenades and exploding chemicals, the rage of flames, and the wailing alarms.

In mere moments, the place was a thick vortex of smoke and fire. All along the shelves containers of chemicals blew up, spreading more flames and noxious fumes until the chamber was a roaring toxic inferno.

Inside the security cage Quentin shook the gate and howled until the smoke choked his lungs and filled his eyes with killing heat, and he fell to the floor, his fingers still clutching the small brown jar of tubarine.

37

According to the thermometer outside the kitchen window the temperature was 30 degrees the next morning. Fresh snow covered the yard. The lake remained unfrozen, however the water in the old fountain was iced over and pillowed in white.

But a warming trend was in the forecast. In a few hours the world would be green again. In a few hours the place would also be swarming with police and media people with vans surmounted by radio dishes. And by early afternoon it would be all over, Laura told herself. There was a strange roundness to it all. The saga had been born in the wilderness half a world away, and it would end in the wilderness of her old backyard.

Laura had gotten up before Roger and Brett. She made some coffee to get her heart going. She felt lousy and she looked it in the mirror. The skin of her face was a loose gray dough and her eyes were puffy. She had slept soundly until about four o'clock when she woke up with a bolt of panic at the bargain Roger had cut with the president.

It had crossed her mind yesterday, but she was so wracked with horror and grief that the realization had not registered. But two hours ago it hit her. In the effort to save her and Brett, Roger had signed his own death warrant.