City of Night by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

too risky.
    His made men would be seeded throughout Biovision, though the greater number of its employees would be real people. Victor would not want to risk mixing his secret work with his public researches. But seining New Men from the sea of Biovision employees would take too long and involve too much exposure on Deucalion’s part.
    Perhaps the members of the New Race could recognize one another upon encounter. Deucalion, however, could not tell them from real people at a glance. He would need to observe them, to interact with them, in order to identify them.
    Many politicians and appointed officials in the city would no doubt be of Victor’s making, either originals or replicants who had taken the place of real people. Their prominence and the attention to security that came with it would make them more difficult to approach.
    Half or more of the officers in the city’s law enforcement agencies were most likely members of the New Race. Deucalion didn’t care to search those ranks, either, because drawing himself to the attention of the police would not be wise.
    As Deucalion left behind St. Louis Number 3 and moved now through the Metairie Cemetery, which boasted the gaudiest tombs in greater New Orleans, the hardest sun of the day hammered all shadows into narrow profiles and honed their edges into blades.
    Victor would have his people in key positions in the city’s legal establishment—prosecutors and defense attorneys—in the local academic world, in the medical system… and surely in the religious community as well.
    In times of personal crisis, people turned to their priests, pastors, and rabbis. Victor would have realized that much valuable information might be learned in a confessional or during a citizen’s most private talks with his spiritual adviser.
    Besides, having his soulless creations delivering sermons and celebrating Mass would strike Victor as delicious mockery.
    Even one as big and as menacing in appearance as Deucalion could expect a sympathetic ear from clergymen, whether they were real or imposters. They would be accustomed to offering comfort to society’s outsiders and would receive him with less suspicion and alarm than others might.
    Because the primary denomination in New Orleans was Catholicism, he would start with that faith. He had many churches from which to choose. In one of them he might find a priest who, by identifying Victor’s center of operations, would betray his maker as daily he mocked God.
     
     
     

Chapter 12
     
    The security room in the Hands of Mercy featured a wall of high-definition monitors providing such clear images of the hallways and rooms of the immense facility that they appeared to be almost three-dimensional.
    Victor didn’t believe that his people had any right to privacy. Or to life, for that matter.
    None of them had any rights whatsoever. They had their mission, which was the fulfillment of his vision for a new world, and they had their duties, and they had what privileges he allowed. No rights.
    Werner, security chief at the Hands of Mercy, was such a solid block of muscle that even a concrete floor ought to have sagged under him. Yet he never lifted weights, never exercised. His perfected metabolism maintained his brute physical form in ideal condition, almost regardless of what he ate.
    He had a problem with snot, but they were working on that.
    Once in a while—not all the time, not even frequently, but nonetheless often enough to be an annoyance—the mucous membranes in his sinuses produced mucus at a prodigious rate. On those occasions, Werner often went through three boxes of Kleenex per hour.
    Victor could have terminated Werner, dispatched his cadaver to the landfill, and installed Werner Two in the post of security chief. But these snot attacks baffled and intrigued him. He preferred to keep Werner in place, study his seizures, and gradually tinker with his physiology to resolve the problem.
    Standing beside a currently snotless