Текст книги "Blue Labyrinth"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

61

Margo realized that getting into the Museum after hours was going to be a major problem. She felt sure Frisby would have put her name on a watch list at the first-floor security entrance – the only way in and out of the Museum after closing time. So she decided to simply hide in the Museum until it closed. She’d get what she came for, then exit the after-hours security station as nonchalantly as possible, with a story about having fallen asleep in a lab.

As closing time neared, Margo, posing as a museumgoer, made her way into the remotest, least-visited halls. Her chest felt tight, her breathing constricted. As the guards were beginning their sweeps, ushering visitors out, she hid in a bathroom and climbed onto a toilet seat to wait, mentally willing herself to relax. Finally, around six o’clock, all was quiet. She crept back out.

The halls were more or less empty, and she could hear the guards’ shoes echoing distantly on the marble floors as they made their rounds. It was like an early warning signal, allowing her to evade them as she made her way to the one place she knew the guards would never check – the Gastropod Alcove.

Was she really going to do this? Could she follow through? She steadied herself by recalling Constance’s words: Those plants are vital if we’re to have any hope of saving Pendergast.

She ducked into the alcove and hid in the back, in a deeply shadowed corner. It gave her a shiver to realize this was probably where Marsala’s murderer had also hidden. The guards, as she expected, walked past the alcove roughly every half hour, not even bothering to shine their lights inside. No crime would play out twice in the same spot – they had returned to the status quo ante delicti. From time to time a staff member would also walk past on his or her way out, but as nine o’clock neared the Museum began to feel completely empty. There were, no doubt, some curators still toiling in their labs and offices, but the chance of running into them was small.

The thought of what she was about to do—where she was going to go – made Margo’s heart hammer in her chest. She was about to descend into the one place that frightened her more than anything; that woke her in the middle of the night, bathed in a cold sweat; that prompted her never to enter the Museum without a bottle of Xanax in her bag. She thought of popping a Xanax then and there, but decided against it; she needed to stay sharp. She took slow, deep breaths, forcing her mind to focus on the small, immediate steps – not on the overall task. She would take it one move at a time.

Another set of long, deep breaths. Time to go.

Sneaking out of the alcove just after a guard passed by on his rounds, she crept down the halls to the nearest freight elevator, inserting her passkey into the slot. Even though it was a low-level-access key, Frisby had already sent her an email asking her to return it; but she had only gotten the memo that afternoon and figured she had at least a day’s grace period before the pompous ass made an issue of it.

The elevator groaned and creaked its way down to what was technically known as Building Six basement storage – an anachronism, considering all the buildings comprising the Museum were now interconnected into a single, maze-like unit. The doors opened. The familiar smell of mothballs, mold, and old dead things lingered in the air. The scent hit her unexpectedly, spiking her anxiety and reminding her of the time she had been stalked through these same corridors.

But that was a long time ago, and these fears of hers should properly be classified as phobias. There was nothing down here to threaten her now, except perhaps a stray Museum employee demanding to see her ID.

Taking a few more steadying breaths, she stepped out of the elevator. Opening the door into the Building Six basement, she walked quietly through the long, dim passageways hung with caged lightbulbs, making her way toward the Botany collection.

So far, so good. She inserted her key into the dented metal door of the main botanical collection and found it still worked. The door opened on smooth hinges. The room beyond was dark and she took out a powerful LED headlamp she’d stashed in her bag, put it on her head, and stepped inside. The dark cabinets stretched out in front of her, vanishing into the darkness, and the stale air smelled of mothballs.

She paused, her heart thudding so hard in her chest she almost couldn’t breathe, fighting down the surge of irrational fear. Despite everything she’d told herself, the smell, the claustrophobic darkness, and the strange noises once again triggered panic and gulping terror. She stopped to take more calming breaths, overcoming the terror with a strong application of reason.

One move at a time. Bracing herself, she took a step forward into the darkness, and then another. Now she had to shut the door behind her; it would be unwise to leave it open. She turned and eased it closed, blocking out what little light came in from the hall.

She relocked the door and peered ahead. The Herbarium Vault lay at the far end of the room. Shelves containing preserved plants in liquid rose up into darkness all around her – the so-called wet collections – as narrow aisles led off in two directions, everything vanishing into murk.

Get going, she told herself. She started down the left-hand aisle. At least these specimens didn’t leer at her out of the darkness like the dinosaur skeletons or stuffed animals did in some of the other storage rooms. Botanical specimens weren’t scary.

Even so, the monotony of the place, the narrow aisles looking all the same, the gleaming bottles that sometimes looked like so many eyes peering at her from the dark, did little to allay her anxiety.

She walked swiftly down the aisle, took a hard right, walked some more, took a left and then another right, working her way diagonally to the far corner. Why did they design these storage rooms to be so confusing? But after another moment she halted. She had heard something. The echoing sounds of her footfalls had initially obscured it, but she was sure she’d heard something nonetheless.

She waited, listening, trying not to breathe. But the only sounds were the faint creaking and clicking noises that never seemed to go away, probably caused by the building settling or the forced air system.

Her anxiety increased. Which way? The scare had caused her to forget which turn was next in the grid of shelving. If she got disoriented, lost in this labyrinth… Making a quick decision, she went down one aisle until she hit the storage room wall, realized she was indeed going in the right direction, and then followed it to the far corner.

There it was: the vault. It looked like – and probably was – an old bank vault, converted to a different use. It was painted dark green, with a large wheel and a retrofitted keypad, currently blinking red. With a gasp of relief she hustled over and punched in the number sequence she’d memorized from Jörgensen’s office.

The keypad light went from red to green. Thank God. She turned the wheel and pulled open the heavy door. Leaning in, she flashed her headlamp around. It was a small space, perhaps eight by ten, with steel shelves covering all three walls. She glanced at the heavy door. No way was she going to shut it and risk being locked in. But she would, at least, partially close it. Just in case someone should come into the storage room – which seemed extremely unlikely.

She squeezed inside and eased the door shut to the point where it was open only a few inches.

Forcing down the feeling of panic, remembering to take things one step at a time, Margo turned her attention to the handwritten labels on the drawers, scanning them with her headlamp. They were in various stages of order, some quite ancient, handwritten in faded brown ink, others much newer and laser-printed. In a far corner of the vault, beyond the shelving, she saw a couple of ancient blowpipes – of either Amazonian or Guiana Indian origins, judging by the carved decoration – stacked against the back wall. A small quiver of braided bamboo, containing several darts, hung from one. She wondered what these were doing in here; the payload of most darts came from frogs, not botanicals. She assumed they’d been locked up because of their poisonous nature.

She returned to scanning the labels, quickly found the drawer marked MYCOHETEROTROPHS, and slid it quietly open. It contained racks of specimens, arranged not unlike a traditional hanging file cabinet. The old dried plant specimens, prepared many years before, were affixed to yellowing paper leaves with spidery script indicating what they were. These, in turn, had been sealed between high-tech glass plates. There weren’t many, and in less than a minute she had found the Thismia americana specimens.

This was going unbelievably well. If she could keep her fear under control, she’d be out of the building in ten minutes. She realized she was covered with a clammy sweat, and she couldn’t stop her heart from pounding, but her one-step-at-a-time strategy was, at least, keeping her wits about her.

There were three Thismia plates, one containing several underground rhizomes, another with samples of the aboveground plant, and a final one of the blossoms and seeds.

Margo recalled Jörgensen’s words. I would never allow the destruction of an extinct plant specimen, the last of its kind, for a one-off medicinal treatment. What is the value of an ordinary human life in the face of the last specimen of an extinct plant in existence? She stared at the plant, with its tiny white flower. She couldn’t agree less with such a misanthropic worldview. Maybe they wouldn’t need all three specimens – but she was taking all of them regardless.

She slipped them carefully into her bag, zipped it up, and slung it over her shoulder. With an excess of caution, she turned off the headlamp and pushed open the door of the vault. She stepped into the darkness, listening intently. When all seemed silent, she stepped out and, feeling with her hands, shut the vault door, then turned the wheel. It locked automatically, and the green light switched back to red.

Done! She turned back around and, reaching up, turned on her headlamp.

The shadowy outline of a man stood there. And then a bright light suddenly flicked on, blinding her.

62

D’Agosta stood up from his desk and stretched. His back ached from hours of sitting in the hard wooden chair, and his right ear throbbed from having a phone receiver pressed against it.

He’d spent hours, it seemed, on the phone with the DA’s office, trying to get a subpoena to have John Barbeaux brought in for questioning. But the DA’s office wouldn’t see it his way and said he hadn’t met probable cause – especially for a guy like Barbeaux, who would immediately lawyer up and make their lives hell.

The chain of reasoning seemed obvious to D’Agosta: Barbeaux had hired Howard Rudd to pose as the fake Dr. Jonathan Waldron, who had in turn used Victor Marsala in order to get access to the skeleton of the long-dead Mrs. Padgett. Barbeaux needed a bone from that skeleton in order to reverse-engineer the components of Hezekiah Pendergast’s elixir, thus allowing him to resynthesize that elixir and use it on Pendergast. D’Agosta had no doubt that, once Alban was placed on Pendergast’s doorstep and the plot was in motion, Rudd killed Marsala as a way of tying up loose ends – he’d no doubt lured the tech to a remote corner of the Museum, under pretext of payment or some such thing. It seemed equally clear that Barbeaux had then used Rudd as bait to lure Pendergast into the animal handling room at the Salton Fontainebleau – and been gassed with the elixir for his trouble. All in seeking revenge for Hezekiah’s poisoning of Barbeaux’s great-grandparents and the death of his son.

Although he couldn’t be sure, D’Agosta was fairly confident that Barbeaux had hired Rudd three years ago, paid off his gambling debts, given him a new face and a new identity, and kept him on as an anonymous enforcer he could use for any number of nefarious jobs – keeping him loyal by threatening his family with harm. It made complete sense.

The DA had dismissed all this with barely concealed contempt, calling it a conspiracy theory of supposition, speculation, and fantasy, and entirely unsupported by hard medical data.

D’Agosta had then spent a good part of the early evening phoning various botanical experts and pharmaceutical specialists, looking for that medical data. But he quickly understood that there would have to be tests, analyses, blind studies, and so on and so forth, before any conclusions could be drawn.

There had to be a way to dig up enough evidence to at least get Barbeaux’s ass in his office long enough for Margo and Constance to do their thing.

Probable cause. Son of a bitch. There must be a piece of evidence out there, somewhere, that he’d overlooked, which would suggest Barbeaux was crooked. Frustrated, he got up from his desk. It was nine o’clock; he needed some fresh air; a walk to clear his head. Shrugging into his jacket, D’Agosta strode to the door, snapped off the lights, then began to make his way down the corridor. After a few steps, he paused. Maybe Pendergast would have some ideas on how to squeeze Barbeaux. But no – the agent would be too weak for that conversation. Pendergast’s condition filled him with anger and a sick feeling of impotence.

As he exited his office, he paused. The Marsala files were next door: what he really should do is go through them again in case he’d overlooked something. He stepped into the vacant room he was using for overflow storage.

Turning on the lights, D’Agosta began to survey the stacks of folders piled on the conference table and against the walls. He’d take everything related to Howard Rudd. Maybe Barbeaux had a connection to Gary, Indiana, that he could—

At that moment D’Agosta went quite still. His roving eye had stopped at the room’s lone garbage can. It contained only one thing: a crumpled-up licorice toffee wrapper.

Slade’s ubiquitous toffee. What the hell had he been doing in here?

D’Agosta took a breath, then another. It was only a candy wrapper, and yes, Slade did have access and authority to be in there, looking at these files. D’Agosta wasn’t sure why, but all of a sudden his cop instincts were going off. He looked around again, more carefully this time. Boxes and filing cabinets were stacked against the walls. The files were where he remembered leaving them. Slade should have checked with him, that was true, but maybe Angler didn’t want D’Agosta to know. After all, the guy was obviously not too keen on Pendergast, and D’Agosta was known to be a friend of the agent.

As he moved to grab the Rudd files, his eye spied a dusting of white plaster on the rug, a spot near the wall that was shared with his own office. D’Agosta approached the wall and moved the boxes away from it. There was a small hole drilled in the wall, just above the baseboard.

He knelt and peered more closely, let his finger drift over the hole. It was about half a millimeter in diameter. He probed it with an unbent paper clip and found it didn’t go all the way through.

His gaze went back to the dusting of white plaster. This hole had been made recently.

A candy wrapper, a recently drilled hole… such things weren’t necessarily connected. But then he recalled how Slade had misfiled the tip on Barbeaux from the Albany police.

Had it really come from Angler’s desk – or had Slade even shown it to Angler before misfiling it?

Albany. That was another thing. Hadn’t Slade said Angler was away, visiting relatives upstate?

He trotted back to his office and, without bothering to turn on the lights, typed his password into the computer and accessed the homicide department’s personnel records. Locating Peter Angler’s file, D’Agosta searched the extensive next-of-kin records all NYPD officers were required to maintain. There it was: his sister, Marjorie Angler, 2007 Rowan Street, Colonie, New York.

He grabbed his phone, dialed the number on his computer screen. It rang three times before it was answered.

“Hello?” came a woman’s voice.

“Is this Marjorie Angler? My name is Vincent D’Agosta. I’m a lieutenant with the NYPD. Is Lieutenant Angler there?”

“No. He’s not staying with me.”

“When did you last speak with him?”

“Let me see – four, five days ago, I think.”

“May I ask what you talked about?”

“He said he was coming upstate. Some investigation he was working on. He said he was rushed for time, but that he hoped to stop by to see me on the way back to New York City. But he never did – I imagine he was too busy, as usual.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“Yes. Adirondack. Is there a problem of some sort?”

“Not that I know of. Listen, Ms. Angler, you’ve been very helpful. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome—” the voice began again, but D’Agosta was already hanging up.

He was breathing faster now. Adirondack. Home of Red Mountain Industries.

Several days before, Angler had been on his way to Adirondack. Why hadn’t he returned to the city? He seemed to have disappeared. Why had Slade lied about his whereabouts? Or was Slade merely mistaken? And the hole: it was exactly the kind of hole you would use to plant a miniature microphone.

Had Slade embedded a wire microphone in the wall of his office? If so, he’d listened in on D’Agosta’s phone calls. And he’d no doubt also listened in on his conversation with Margo and Constance.

The hole was empty. The mike was gone. That meant the eavesdropper believed he had all the information he needed.

It seemed too incredible to be true: Slade was dirty. And who was he working for? Only one answer: Barbeaux.

Now D’Agosta’s vague concern about Barbeaux somehow threatening or intercepting Margo and Constance became suddenly much more specific. Barbeaux would know all that Slade knew, and that was just about everything. Specifically, he would know Margo and Constance were headed to the Museum to steal plant specimens.

D’Agosta grabbed for the phone again, then hesitated, thinking furiously. This was a tricky situation. Accusing a fellow cop of being dirty – he damn well better be right.

Was he? Was Slade dirty? Christ, all he had was a candy wrapper and a misfiled document. Not exactly a lot of evidence for destroying a man’s career.

The fact was, he couldn’t call in the cavalry. They would think he was crazy – he had less on Slade than what the DA had already rejected on Barbeaux. There was nothing else for it – he’d have to go after Margo and Constance in the Museum by himself. He might be right, and he might be wrong – but he had no choice but to act, and act quickly, because if he was right, the consequences were too terrifying to even consider.

He darted out of the office and made for the elevator as quickly as he could.

63

Margo stood there, paralyzed by the blinding light.

“Well, well, why am I not surprised?”

It was Frisby’s voice, coming from behind the light.

“Switch off that damned headlamp. You look like a miner.”

Margo complied.

“Here you are, on schedule, caught red-handed stealing one of the most valuable items in our entire herbarium.” The voice was triumphant. “This is no longer an internal Museum matter, Dr. Green. This is a criminal matter for the police. This will put you away for many years – if not for good.”

The light was lowered and Frisby – now visible behind the brilliance – extended a hand. “Give me your bag.”

Margo hesitated. What on earth was he doing down here? How had he possibly known?

“Hand me the bag or I will be forced to take it from you.”

She looked left and right for an escape route, but Frisby’s bulk blocked the way. She would have to knock him over – and he was more than half a foot taller than she.

He took a menacing step forward and, realizing she had no choice, she held out her bag. He opened it, slid out one of the glass plates, and read, in a stentorian tone: “Thismia americana.” He carefully replaced it in the bag. “Caught red-handed. You are finished, Dr. Green. Let me tell you what is going to happen now.” He took out his cell phone and held it up. “I’m going to call the police. They will arrest you. Since the value of these specimens is far in excess of five thousand dollars, you will be charged with a Class C felony, burglary in the second degree, which carries a sentence of up to fifteen years in prison.”

Margo listened, only barely comprehending. She was stupefied, because this meant the end of not just her own life – but Pendergast’s, as well.

He searched through the rest of the bag, poking around while shining the light inside. “Pity. No weapon.”

“Dr. Frisby,” Margo said in a wooden tone, “what is it you have against me?”

“Who, me, have something against you?” His eyes widened in mock satire, and then narrowed. “You’re a hindrance. You’ve been a disruption in my department with your incessant comings and goings. You’ve been meddling in a police investigation, encouraging them to cast suspicion on our staff. And now you’ve rewarded my generosity in giving you access to the collections with outright thievery. Oh, I have nothing against you.” With a frosty smile, he punched in 911 on his cell phone, holding it so she could see what he was doing.

He waited a moment, then frowned. “Bloody reception.”

“Listen,” Margo managed to say. “A man’s life—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, spare me the pathetic excuses. You played a nasty trick on Jörgensen, got him all riled up. He came boiling into my office and I feared he might have a heart attack. When I heard you’d been in his office asking for access to a rare, extinct plant, I figured you were up to something. What were you planning to do – sell it to the highest bidder? So I came down here, placed a chair in the far corner, and waited for you.” His voice swelled with satisfaction. “And here you came, on cue!”

He grinned triumphantly. “Now I’ll take you to security to await the police.”

A thousand ideas raced through Margo’s head. She could run; she could snatch the bag; she could knock Frisby down and escape; she could plead with him, try to talk him out of it; she could try to bribe him… But not a single option had the slightest chance of success. She was busted, and that was that. Pendergast would die.

For a moment the two stared at each other. Margo could see from the expression on Frisby’s face that there would be no mercy from this man.

And then his look of triumph suddenly changed: first to one of puzzlement, then to shock. His eyes grew wide and bugged out; his lips contracted. He opened his mouth but no sound came out, save for a strange boiling in the back of his throat. He dropped the flashlight, which hit the stone floor and went out, plunging the room into darkness. Instinctively, Margo reached out and snatched back her bag with nerveless fingers. A moment later she heard the sound of his body hitting the floor.

And then a new light came on, revealing the outline of a man who had been standing behind Frisby. He stepped forward and, in an act of courtesy, shone the light on his own face, revealing a shortish man with a dark face, black eyes, and the very faintest of smiles playing at the corners of his mouth.

* * *

At that same exact time, at precisely nine fifteen, a livery cab turned in at 891 Riverside Drive, then circled around the drive and came to a stop beneath the mansion’s porte cochere, engine idling.

A minute passed, and then two. The front door opened and Constance Greene stepped out, wearing an ebony-colored pleated dress with ivory accents. A black duffel of ballistic nylon was slung over one shoulder. In the dim glow of moonlight, the formal, even elegant dress acted almost like camouflage.

She leaned in at the driver’s window, whispered something inaudible, opened the rear passenger door, placed the duffel carefully on the seat, and then slid in beside it. The door closed; the cab moved back down the drive; and then it merged with the light evening traffic, heading north.