Текст книги "Blue Labyrinth"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

58

Let’s go through it,” D’Agosta said. It was late afternoon, and Margo and Constance were seated in the lieutenant’s office. “You say you’ve found a cure for what poisoned Pendergast?”

“An antidote,” said Constance. “Developed by Hezekiah Pendergast to counteract the effects of his own elixir.”

“But you’re not sure.”

“Not positive,” said Margo. “But we’ve got to try.”

D’Agosta sat back. This sounded crazy. “And you’ve got all the ingredients?”

“All but two,” Margo said. “They’re plants, and we know where to get them.”

“Where?”

Silence.

D’Agosta stared at Margo. “Let me guess: you’re going to rob the Museum.”

More silence. Margo’s face looked white and strained, but there was a hard glitter in her eyes.

D’Agosta smoothed a hand over his balding pate and looked back at the two defiant women sitting across the desk. “Look. I’ve been a cop for a long time. I’m not an idiot, and I know you’re planning something illegal. Frankly, I don’t care about that right now. Pendergast is my friend. What I do care about is you being successful in getting those plants. And not being killed in the process. You understand?”

Margo finally nodded.

D’Agosta turned to Constance. “You?”

“I understand,” said Constance, but he could tell from her face that she did not agree. “You said you had vital information. What is it?”

“If I’m right, this Barbeaux is a lot more dangerous than anyone imagined. You’re going to need backup. Let me help you get those plants, wherever they are.”

More silence. Finally, Constance rose. “How can you help us? You yourself pointed out that what we’re doing is illegal.”

“Constance is right,” said Margo. “Can you imagine the red tape? Look. Pendergast – your friend – is dying. We are almost out of time.”

D’Agosta felt himself losing his temper. “I’m well aware of that, which is why I’m willing to step over the line. Look, damn it, if you don’t let me help you, I’m going to throw you both in the tank. Right now. For your own protection.”

“If you do that, Pendergast is sure to die,” Constance said.

D’Agosta exhaled. “I’m not going to let you two go running around playing cop. Barbeaux or his men have been a step ahead of us all the way. How do you think I’d feel with three deaths on my head instead of one? Because he may well try to stop you.”

“I hope he does,” said Constance. “And now I’m afraid we must be going.”

“I swear I’m going to have you taken in.”

“No, you’re not,” she said quietly.

D’Agosta rose. “Stay here. Don’t go anywhere.”

He left his office, closing the door behind him, and went over to Sergeant Josephus, manning the outer desk. “Sergeant? Those two in my office? When they leave, I want them followed. A full tail, twenty-four seven, until further notice.”

Josephus glanced back toward D’Agosta’s office. D’Agosta followed his gaze. Through the glass of the door, he could see Constance and Margo talking between themselves.

“Yes, sir,” Josephus said. He pulled out an official form. “Now, if I could have their names—”

D’Agosta thought a moment, waved his hand. “Scratch that. I’ve got another idea.”

“Sure thing, Loo.”

D’Agosta opened the door to his office, stepped inside, and stared at the two women. “If you’re planning to go to the Museum to steal some plants, it isn’t the guards you need to worry about – it’s Barbeaux’s men. You got that?”

Both of them nodded.

“Get out of here.”

They left.

D’Agosta stared at the empty doorway, full of an impotent anger. Son of a bitch, he had never met two more impossible women in his life. But there was one good way to keep them safe, or at least reduce their chances of tangling with Barbeaux. And that way was to put out a warrant on the man, bring him in for questioning, and keep his ass in the station until the women did what they had to do. But to get the warrant, he would need to work up the evidence he had, put it together, and give it to the DA.

He turned to his computer and began furiously typing.

* * *

The departmental offices fell silent. It was a typical late-afternoon lull at the station, while most of the officers were in the field and had yet to return to book perps or file reports. A minute passed, then two. And then steps sounded softly in the hallway outside D’Agosta’s office.

A moment later, Sergeant Slade appeared. He’d come from his office, which – if he stood in just the right spot – commanded an excellent view of D’Agosta’s own doorway. He continued walking past D’Agosta’s office, then stopped at the next door – the door to the empty room in which D’Agosta and others in the department had been keeping overflow files.

Slade glanced casually around. There was nobody in sight. Turning the knob, he opened the door of the empty office, stepped inside, and locked the door behind him. The lights were off, naturally, but he did not turn them on.

Making sure to remain quiet, he walked toward the common wall to D’Agosta’s office, from which the sounds of typing continued without relent. A pile of boxes was stacked against the wall, and he knelt, carefully moving them aside. Placing his fingertips against the wall, he felt along it for a few moments until he found what he was searching for: a tiny wire microphone, embedded into the drywall, with a miniaturized, voice-activated digital tape recorder attached.

Rising to his feet and popping a piece of licorice toffee into his mouth, Slade fixed an earbud to the device, then inserted it into one ear and snapped the recorder on. He listened for a moment, nodding slowly to himself. He heard D’Agosta’s futile arguing; the opening of the door; and then, the two women talking.

“Where is the plant in the Museum, exactly?”

“In the Herbarium Vault. I know where that is, and I have its combination. What about you?”

“The plant I need is in the Aquatic Hall of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Once the garden is closed, and it’s completely dark, I’ll secure it. We don’t dare wait any longer than that.”

Slade smiled. He was going to be well rewarded for this.

Slipping the device into his pocket, he carefully pushed the boxes back in place, moved to the office door, unlocked it, and – checking to make sure he remained unobserved – stepped out and began strolling languidly back down the corridor, the sounds of D’Agosta’s typing ringing in his ears.

59

The Gates of Heaven Cemetery lay atop a thinly wooded bluff overlooking Schroon Lake. In the green distance to the east lay Fort Ticonderoga, guarding the Hudson approaches. Far to the north rose the bulk of Mount Marcy, tallest mountain in New York State.

John Barbeaux moved pensively through the manicured grass, threading a slow course between the gravestones. The ground rose and fell in slow, graceful curves; here and there a graveled walk curved beneath the trees. The leaves scattered the rays of the afternoon sun and threw dappled shadows over the drowsy pastoral landscape.

At length, Barbeaux arrived at a small, tasteful family plot, consisting of two memorials surrounded by a low iron fence. He stepped inside and approached the larger: a statue of an angel, hands clenched to her breast, tearful eyes glancing heavenward. A name was carved into the base of the monument: FELICITY BARBEAUX. There was no date.

Barbeaux was carrying two cut flowers in his right hand: a long-stemmed red rose and a purple hyacinth. He knelt and laid the rose before the memorial. Then he stood again and contemplated the statue in silence.

His wife had been killed by a drunk driver, not quite ten years ago. The police investigation had been botched – the man, a telemarketing executive, had not been read his rights, and the chain of custody had been imperfectly established. A shrewd lawyer was able to get the man a one-year suspended sentence.

John Barbeaux was a man who prized family above all else. He was also a man who believed in justice. This was not justice as he understood it.

Although Red Mountain had been a far smaller and less powerful company a decade ago, Barbeaux nevertheless exerted significant influence, and he had many contacts in various obscure walks of life. First, he arranged to have the man arrested again when over one hundred grams of crack cocaine was found in his glove compartment. Although a first offense, this precipitated a five-year mandatory minimum sentence. Six months later, once the telemarketer had begun serving his term at Otisville Federal Correctional Institution, Barbeaux saw to it that – for a onetime payment of ten thousand dollars – the man was shivved with a filed-down screwdriver in the prison shower and left to bleed his life down the drain.

Justice served.

Barbeaux took a last, lingering look at the statue. Then, with a deep breath, he moved toward the second monument. This one was much smaller: a simple cross bearing the name JOHN BARBEAUX JR.

In the years following Felicity’s death, Barbeaux had showered affection and attention on his young son. After a childhood beset with health problems, John Jr. had emerged into adolescence as a promising artist. More than promising, in fact: a truly gifted pianist, a prodigy as both a performer and composer. His father lavished everything on him: the best tutors, the best schools. In John Jr., Barbeaux saw great hope for the future of his line.

And then things began to go horribly wrong. It started out innocently enough. John Jr. grew a little moody; his appetite waned; and he seemed increasingly distracted by insomnia. Barbeaux put it off to some adolescent phase. But then it grew worse. The youth began smelling an odor; an odor he was unable to rid himself of. At first, it was sweet, lovely – but over time it slowly changed to the most vile stench of rotting flowers. Barbeaux’s son grew weak, febrile; he was plagued by headaches and joint pains that worsened by the day. He became increasingly delusional, the victim of ungovernable rages interspersed with periods of exhaustion and lethargy. Frantic, Barbeaux sought the aid of the world’s greatest doctors, but no one was able to diagnose, let alone treat, the malady. Barbeaux could only watch as his son steadily declined into madness and unbearable pain. At the end, the once-promising boy was little more than a vegetable. The death that ultimately claimed him at sixteen years of age – heart failure, brought on by severe weight loss and exhaustion – had been almost merciful.

That had been less than two years ago. And Barbeaux had retreated into a fog of grief. He had been too unmanned even to select a large, elaborate memorial for the son, as he had for the wife: the very thought was unendurable, and in the end a simple cross became the only testament to so much wasted promise.

But then, almost a year to the day after John Jr.’s death, an event happened that Barbeaux could never have predicted. He had a visitor one evening – a young man that could not have been more than a few years older than Barbeaux’s son, but of such a different build, energy, and magnetism as if to have come from another planet. He had a foreign accent, but spoke excellent English. This young man knew a great deal about Barbeaux. In fact, he knew more about Barbeaux’s family than Barbeaux did himself. He told Barbeaux the tale of his great-grandparents, Stephen and Ethel, who had lived on Dauphine Street in New Orleans. He told the story of a neighbor of the couple, Hezekiah Pendergast, who had created the nostrum known as Hezekiah’s Compound Elixir and Glandular Restorative – a quack patent medicine that was responsible for the suffering, madness, and death of thousands. Among the victims, this young man told the astounded Barbeaux, were Stephen and Ethel Barbeaux, barely in their thirties, who both died of its effects in 1895.

But that wasn’t all, the young man said. There was another victim in the family, far closer to Barbeaux. His own son, John Jr.

The young man explained how the elixir had caused epigenetic changes in the Barbeaux family’s bloodline – heritable changes to genetic makeup that had, in this case, jumped the generations to kill his son, more than a hundred years later.

Then the young man came to the real point of the meeting. The Pendergast family was still alive, in the form of one Aloysius Pendergast, a special agent with the FBI – and not only alive, but prospering, thanks to the wealth accumulated by Hezekiah and his deadly elixir.

And now the young man revealed just why he had come. He was, he said, named Alban… and he was the son of Special Agent Pendergast. Alban told him a most harrowing tale – and then proposed a complex, curious, but exceedingly satisfying plan.

One last thing, Alban said. The words echoed in Barbeaux’s mind. You might be tempted to hunt me down, as well – and thus eliminate another Pendergast. I warn you against any such attempt. I have remarkable powers beyond your comprehension. Satisfy yourself with my father. He’s the one living like a parasite off of Hezekiah’s fortune. And then he left behind an extensive packet of documents backing up his story, and outlining his plan… and vanished into the night.

Barbeaux had dismissed this talk of “powers” as the braggadocio of youth. He sent two men to follow Alban, excellent men, experienced men. One returned with his eye hanging out, and the other was found with his throat cut. All this Alban had done, quite deliberately, in full view of Barbeaux’s security cameras.

I have remarkable powers beyond your comprehension. Indeed, he did have remarkable powers. But they were not beyond Barbeaux’s comprehension. And that had been Alban’s fatal mistake.

The tale Alban had told seemed too strange to be true. But as Barbeaux looked through the packet he’d been given; as he examined his family history and the symptoms of his own son; and especially once he’d had certain blood tests performed – he realized that the story was, in fact, true. This was a revelation; a revelation that turned his grief into hatred and hatred into obsession.

A cell phone rang in the breast pocket of his suit. Gazing off in the direction of Mount Marcy, Barbeaux plucked it from his pocket.

“Yes?” he said.

He listened for a minute. As he did, his knuckles went white grasping the phone. A shocked look came over his face.

“Do you mean to tell me,” he interrupted, “that he not only knows what has happened, but is taking steps to stop it?”

He listened again, longer this time, to the voice on the far end of the line.

“All right,” he said at last. “You know what to do. And you’ll have to move fast – very fast.”

He hung up, then dialed another number. “Richard? Is the Ops Crew standing by? Good. We have a new objective. I want you to prep them for an emergency deployment to New York City. Yes, immediately. They have to be in the air inside of half an hour.”

And with that he slipped the phone back into his pocket, turned away, and quickly left the cemetery.

60

It was six o’clock that evening by the time Constance Greene returned from police headquarters and let herself in through the front door of the Riverside Drive mansion, walked down the refectory passage, and crossed the marble-lined expanse of the grand reception hall. All was silent within, save for the soft passage of her feet. The mansion felt deserted. Proctor was still recovering in the hospital, Mrs. Trask was somewhere deep in the kitchen, and Dr. Stone was probably upstairs, sitting in Pendergast’s room.

She continued down the tapestried hallway, past the marble niches that interrupted, at regular intervals, the rose-colored wallpaper. Now she mounted a back staircase, easing up the treads to minimize the creaking of the old boards. Once in the long upstairs hallway, she walked down it, past a large and disgusting stuffed polar bear, to reach a door on the left. She placed her hand on the knob. Taking a breath, she turned it, then quietly pushed the door open.

Dr. Stone rose noiselessly from a chair by the door. She felt irritated by his presence, his foppish dress, his yellow ascot and tortoiseshell glasses, and especially his utter inability to do anything beyond palliative care for her guardian. This was unfair, she knew, but Constance was in no mood for fairness.

“I should like a moment alone, Doctor.”

“He is sleeping,” he said while retreating.

Before Pendergast’s condition had grown serious, Constance had rarely set foot inside his private bedroom. Even now, as she paused just within the doorway, she looked around in curiosity. The room was not large. The dim light came from behind recessed molding that ran just below the ceiling, and from a single Tiffany lamp that sat on the bedside table: the room had no windows. The wallpaper was flocked burgundy on red, with a subtle fleur-de-lis pattern. On the walls hung a few works of art: a small Caravaggio study for Boy with a Basket of Fruit; a Turner seascape; a Piranesi etching. A bookcase held three rows of old, leather-bound volumes. Scattered around the room were several museum pieces that, instead of being display objects, were put to actual use: a Roman glass urn held mineral water; a Byzantine-era candelabra held six white, unburned tapers. Frankincense smoked in an old Egyptian incense burner made of faience, and the heavy scent of it hung in the room, in a futile attempt to banish the stench that filled Pendergast’s nostrils day and night. A stainless-steel IV stand, hung with a saline drip, was in sharp contrast with the rest of the room’s elegant furnishings.

Pendergast lay motionless in the bed. His pale hair, now darkened with sweat, made a sharp contrast with the crisp white pillows. The skin of his face was as colorless as porcelain and almost as translucent; she could almost make out the musculature and fine skeletal detail beneath, and even the blue veins in his forehead. His eyes were closed.

Constance approached the bed. The morphine drip had been set to one milligram every fifteen minutes. Dr. Stone, she noted, had set the lock-out dose at six milligrams an hour; since Pendergast refused to permit supervision by a nurse, it was important that he not be allowed to overmedicate himself.

“Constance.”

Pendergast’s whisper surprised her; he was awake, after all. Or perhaps her movements, quiet as they were, had roused him.

She came around the bed and took a seat at its head. She recalled sitting in just such a position in Pendergast’s hospital room in Geneva, just three days before. His rapid decline since then was deeply frightening to her. And yet, despite his weakness, the terrible, constant effort he struggled with remained evident – the fight to keep pain and madness from completely overwhelming him.

She saw his hand move under the covers, then withdraw. It now held a piece of paper. He raised it, shaking.

“What is this?”

She was shocked by the coldness, the anger, in his voice.

She took the paper and recognized it as the list of ingredients she had drawn up. It had been left on the table in the library, which had become a sort of war room for her and Margo. That had obviously been foolish.

“Hezekiah worked out an antidote to try to save his wife. We’re going to make it – for you.”

“We? Who is we?”

“Margo and I.”

His eyes narrowed. “I forbid it.”

Constance stared back. “You’ve got no say in the matter.”

He raised his head, with effort. “You’re being an absolute fool. You have no idea who you’re dealing with. Barbeaux was able to kill Alban. He bested me. He will surely kill you.”

“He won’t have time. I’m going to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden tonight, and Margo is at the Museum right now – gathering the last ingredients.”

The eyes seemed to glitter as they bored into her. “Barbeaux, or his men, will be waiting for you at the garden. And waiting for Margo at the Museum.”

“Impossible,” said Constance. “I just found that list this morning. Margo and I are the only ones who have seen it.”

“It was lying in the library, in plain sight.”

“Barbeaux can’t possibly have gotten into the house.”

Pendergast raised himself fully, even as his head seemed unsteady. “Constance, this man is the very devil incarnate. Don’t go to the Botanic Garden.”

“I’m sorry, Aloysius. I told you – I’m going to fight this thing to the end.”

Pendergast blinked. “Then why are you even here?”

“To say good-bye. In case…” Constance began to falter.

At this, Pendergast made an effort to rally himself. With a supreme act of will, he rose onto one elbow. His eyes cleared a little, and he held Constance with his gaze. The hand snaked back under the covers and reappeared, this time grasping his .45. He pushed it toward her. “If you refuse to listen to reason, at least take this. It’s fully loaded.”

Constance took a step back. “No. Recall what happened the last time I tried to fire a gun.”

“Then bring me the phone.”

“Who are you calling?”

“D’Agosta.”

“No. Please don’t. He’ll interfere.”

“Constance, for the love of God—!” His voice choked off. Slowly, he sank back onto the white sheets. The effort had exhausted him to a fearsome degree.

Constance hesitated. She was shocked, and deeply moved, that he felt so strongly. She hadn’t been handling this correctly. Her stubbornness was making him agitated to the point of danger. She took a deep breath and decided to lie. “You made your point. I won’t go to the garden. And I’ll call off Margo.”

“I hope to God you’re not deceiving me.” He stared at her, his voice low.

“No.”

He leaned forward and whispered, with the last of his strength: “Do not go to the Botanic Garden.”

Constance left him with the phone and stumbled out into the hall, breathing hard. There she paused, thinking.

She had not considered that Barbeaux might be waiting for her at the Botanic Garden. This was a surprising idea – but not an altogether displeasing one.

She would need a weapon. Not a gun, of course, but something more suited to her… style.

Moving quickly now down the hallway, she descended the steps to the reception hall, turned and entered the library, moved the secret book, and slipped into the elevator to the basement. Then she almost ran down the corridor to the rough-hewn basement stairs that spiraled down to even deeper spaces, disappearing into the shadow-haunted, dust-fragrant chambers that lay beyond.

* * *

Dr. Stone heard Constance’s retreating footsteps from his waiting room next door. He came out and reentered Pendergast’s bedroom, with a little shiver at the thought of her. While Constance was certainly a young woman of taste, elegance, and exotic beauty, she was also as cold as dry ice – and there was, on top of that, something not right about her, a certain quality that gave him the absolute creeps.

He found his patient once again asleep. A phone had slipped out of his hands and was lying next to his open hand on the sheets. He picked it up and checked it, wondering whom he had been trying to call, saw that no call had been made, then gently turned it off and placed it back on the bureau. And then he took up once again his position in the chair at the door, waiting for what he was sure would be a long night… before the end.