Текст книги "The Cabinet of Curiosities"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
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Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

At ten minutes, she stopped counting. Time to move.

For a moment, her body refused to respond. It seemed frozen with dread.

What if the man was still out there? What if she found Smithback dead? What if Pendergast was dead, too? Would she be able to run, to resist, to die, rather than be caught herself and face a fate far worse?

Speculation was useless. She would simply follow Pendergast’s orders.

With an immense effort of will, she rose from her crouch, then stepped out of the darkness, easing her way around the open door. The corridor beyond the cell was long and damp, with irregular stone floor and walls, streaked with lime. At the far end was a door that opened into a bright room: the lone source of light, it seemed, in the entire basement. It was in that direction Pendergast had gone; that direction from which the shot had come; that direction from which she’d heard the sound of running feet.

She took a hesitant step forward, and then another, walking on trembling legs toward the brilliant rectangle of light.

FIVE

THE SURGEON COULD hardly believe his eyes. Where Pendergast should have been lying dead in a pool of blood, there was nothing. The man had vanished.

He looked around wildly. It was inconceivable, a physical impossibility . . . And then he noticed that the section of wall Pendergast had been leaning against was now a door, swiveled parallel to the stone face that surrounded it. A door he never knew existed, despite his diligent searches of the house.

The Surgeon waited, stilling his mind with a great effort of will. Deliberation in all things, he had found, was absolutely necessary for success. It had brought him this far, and with it he would prevail now.

He stepped forward, Pendergast’s gun at the ready. On the far side of the opening, a stone staircase led downward into blackness. The FBI agent obviously wanted him to follow, to descend the staircase whose end was hidden around the dark curve of the stone wall. It could easily be a trap. In fact, it could onlybe a trap.

But the Surgeon realized he had no choice. He had to stop Pendergast. And he had to find out what lay below. He had a gun, and Pendergast was unarmed, perhaps even wounded by the shot. He paused, briefly, to examine the pistol. The Surgeon knew something about weapons, and he recognized this as a Les Baer custom, .45 Government Model. He turned it over in his hands. With the tritium night sights and laser grips, easily a three-thousand-dollar handgun. Pendergast had good taste. Ironic that such a fine weapon would now be used against its owner.

He stepped back from the false wall. Keeping a watchful eye on the stairway, he retrieved a powerful flashlight from a nearby drawer, then darted a regretful glance toward his specimen. The vital signs were beginning to drop now; the operation was clearly spoiled.

He returned to the staircase and shone the flashlight down into the gloom. The imprint of Pendergast’s footsteps was clearly visible in the dust that coated the steps. And there was something else, something besides the footsteps: a drop of blood. And another.

So he hadhit Pendergast. Nevertheless, he would have to redouble his caution. Wounded humans, like wounded animals, were always the most dangerous.

He paused at the first step, wondering if he should go after the woman first. Was she still chained to the wall? Or had Pendergast managed to free her, as well? Either way, she posed little danger. The house was a fortress, the basement securely locked. She would be unable to escape. Pendergast remained the more pressing problem. Once he was dead, the remaining resource could be tracked down and forced to take the place of Smithback. He’d made the mistake of listening to Pendergast once. When he found him, he wouldn’t make that mistake again. The man would be dead before he even opened his mouth.

The staircase spiraled down, down, corkscrewing endlessly into the earth. The Surgeon descended slowly, treating each curve as a blind corner behind which Pendergast might be lying in wait. At last he reached the bottom. The stairs debouched into a dark, murky room, heavy with the smell of mildew, damp earth, and—what? Ammonia, salts, benzene, the faint smell of chemicals. There was a flurry of footprints, more drops of blood. Pendergast had stopped here. The Surgeon shone his light on the nearest wall: a row of old brass lanterns, hanging from wooden pegs. One of the pegs was empty.

He took a step to one side, then—using the stone pillar of the staircase as cover—lifted his heavy flashlight and shone it into the gloom.

An astonishing sight met his eye. A wall of jewels seemed to wink back at him: a thousand, ten thousand glittering reflections in myriad colors, like the reflective surface of a fly’s eye under intense magnification. Suppressing his surprise, he moved forward cautiously, gun at the ready.

He found himself in a narrow stone chamber, pillars rising toward a low, arched ceiling. The walls were lined with countless glass bottles of identical shape and size. They were stored on oaken shelving that rose from floor to ceiling, row upon row upon row, crowded densely together, shut up behind rippled glass. He had never seen so many bottles in his life. It looked, in fact, like a museum of liquids.

His breath came faster. Here it was: Leng’s final laboratory. No doubt thiswas the place where he had perfected the arcanum, his formula for life prolongation. This place must hold the secret for which he had unsuccessfully tortured Leng. He remembered his feeling of disappointment, almost despair, when he’d discovered that Leng’s heart had stopped beating—when he realized he had pushed a little too hard. No matter now: the formula was right here, under his nose, just as Pendergast had said.

But then he remembered what else Pendergast had said: something about Leng working on something completely different. That was absurd, clearly a red herring. What could be bigger than the prolongation of the human life span? What else could this huge collection of chemicals be for, if not that?

He shook these speculations from his mind. Once Pendergast was dealt with and the girl harvested, there would be plenty of time for exploration.

He raked the ground with his light. There was more blood, along with a ragged set of footprints that headed straight through the corridor of bottles. He had to be careful, exceedingly careful. The last thing he wanted to do was begin shooting up these rows of precious liquids, destroying the very treasure he had strived so hard to find. He raised his arm, aimed the handgun, applied pressure to the grip. A small red dot appeared on the far wall. Excellent.Although the laser would not be sighted in precisely, it would nevertheless leave little margin for error.

Releasing his pressure on the laser grip, the Surgeon moved cautiously through the vast apothecary. Each bottle, he could see now, had been meticulously labeled in a spidery script, with both a name and a chemical formula. At the far end, he ducked beneath a low archway into an identical narrow room. The bottles in the next room were full of solid chemicals—chunks of minerals, glittering crystals, ground powders, metal shavings.

It seemed that the arcanum, the formula, was far more complicated than he had envisioned. Why else would Leng need all these chemicals?

He continued following Pendergast’s trail. The footsteps were no longer a single-minded beeline past the endless rows of glass. Instead, the Surgeon began to notice quick detours in the footsteps toward a particular cabinet or other, almost as if the man was looking for something.

In another moment he had reached a Romanesque vault at the end of the forest of cabinets. A hanging tapestry with a fringe of gold brocade covered the archway beyond. He edged nearer, keeping his body once again behind a pillar, and parted the curtain with the gun barrel while shining his torch through the gap. Another room met his eye: larger, broader, filled with oaken cases fronted by glass. Pendergast’s trail led right into the thick of them.

The Surgeon crept forward with infinite care. Again, Pendergast’s tracks seemed to explore the collection, stopping at occasional cases. His tracks had begun to take on an irregular, weaving pattern. It was the spoor of a gravely wounded animal. The blood was not diminishing. If anything, the bleeding was getting worse. Almost certainly that meant a shot to the gut. There was no need to hurry, to force a confrontation. The longer he waited, the weaker Pendergast would become.

He reached a spot where a larger pool of blood shone in the beam of his flashlight. Clearly, Pendergast had stopped here. He had been looking at something, and the Surgeon peered into the case to see what it was. It wasn’t more chemicals, as he had assumed. Instead, the case was filled with thousands of mounted insects, all exactly alike. It was an odd-looking bug with sharp horns on its iridescent head. He moved to the next case. Strange: this contained bottles housing only insect parts. Here were bottles filled with gossamer dragonfly wings, while over there were others with what looked like curled-up abdomens of honeybees. Yet others held innumerable tiny, dried-up white spiders. He moved to the next case. It contained desiccated salamanders and wrinkled frogs in a multitude of bright colors; a row of jars containing a variety of scorpion tails; other jars full of numberless evil-looking wasps. In the next case were jars holding small dried fish, snails, and other insects the Surgeon had never seen before. It was like some vast witch’s cabinet for brewing potions and concocting spells.

It was quite strange that Leng had felt the need for such a vast collection of potions and chemicals. Perhaps, like Isaac Newton, he had ended up wasting his life in alchemical experiments. The “ultimate project” Pendergast mentioned might not be a red herring, after all. It could very well have been some useless attempt to turn lead into gold, or similar fool’s challenge.

Pendergast’s trail led out of the cabinets and through another arched doorway. The Surgeon followed, gun at the ready. Beyond lay what looked like a series of smaller rooms—closer to individual stone crypts or vaults, actually—each containing a collection of some kind. Pendergast’s trail weaved back and forth between them. More oaken cabinets, filled with what looked like bark and leaves and dried flowers. He stopped a moment, staring around curiously.

Then he reminded himself that Pendergast was the pressing issue. Judging from the weaving tracks, the man was now having trouble walking.

Of course, knowing Pendergast, it could be a ruse. A new suspicion arose within him, and the Surgeon crouched beside the nearest scattering of crimson droplets, touching his fingers to one, rubbing them together. Then he tasted it. No doubt about it: human blood, and still warm. There could be no way of faking that. Pendergast was definitely wounded. Gravely wounded.

He stood up, raised the gun again, and moved stealthily forward, his flashlight probing the velvety darkness ahead.

SIX

NORA STEPPED WARILY through the doorway. After the darkness of the cell, the light was so bright that she shrank back into shadow, temporarily blinded. Then she came forward again.

As her eyes adjusted, objects began to take form. Metal tables, covered with gleaming instruments. An empty gurney. An open door, leading onto a descending staircase of rough-hewn stone. And a figure, strapped facedown onto a stainless steel operating table. Except the table was different from others she had seen. Gutters ran down its sides into a collecting chamber, full now with blood and fluid. It was the kind of table used for an autopsy, not an operation.

The head and torso of the figure, as well as the waist and legs, were covered by pale green sheets. Only the lower back remained exposed. As Nora came forward, she could see a ghastly wound: a red gash almost two feet long. Metal retractors had been set, spreading the edges of the wound apart. She could see the exposed spinal column, pale gray amidst the pinks and reds of exposed flesh. The wound had bled freely, red coagulating tributaries that had flowed down either side of the vertical cut, across the table, and into the metal gutters.

Nora knew, even without drawing back the sheet, that the body was Smithback’s. She suppressed a cry.

She tried to steady herself, remembering what Pendergast had said. There were things that needed to be done. And the first was to verify that Smithback was dead.

She took a step forward, glancing quickly around the operating theater. An IV rack stood beside the table, its clear narrow tube snaking down and disappearing beneath the green sheets. Nearby was a large metal box on wheels, its panel festooned with tubes and dials—probably a ventilator. Several bloody scalpels sat in a metal basin. On a nearby surgical tray were forceps, sterile sponges, a squirt bottle of Betadine solution. Other instruments lay in a scatter on the gurney, where they had apparently been dropped when the surgery was interrupted.

She glanced at the head of the table, at the rack of machines monitoring the vital signs. She recognized an EKG screen, a ghostly line of green tracing a course from left to right. Tracing a heartbeat. My God,she thought suddenly, is it possible Bill’s still alive?

Nora took a rapid step forward, reached over the gaping incision, and lifted the sheet away from his shoulders. Smithback’s features came into view: the familiar tousled hair with the unrepentant cowlick, the skinny arms and shoulders, the curl of hair at the nape of his neck. She reached forward and touched his neck, felt the faint pulse of the carotid artery.

He wasalive. But barely.

Had he been drugged? What should she do? How could she save him?

She realized she was hyperventilating, and struggled to slow both her breathing and her thoughts. She scanned the machines, thinking back to the pre-med classes she’d taken in college; to the courses in gross anatomy, biological and forensic anthropology in graduate school; her brief experience as a hospital candy striper.

She quickly moved on to the next machine, trying to frame the overall situation. The machine was clearly a blood pressure monitor. She glanced at the systolic and diastolic readouts: 91 over 60. At least he had pressure as well as pulse. But it seemed low, too low. Beside it was another machine, connected to a line leading to a clip on Smithback’s index finger. Nora’s uncle had worn one of these when he’d been in the hospital a year before, suffering from congestive heart failure: it was a pulse-oximeter. It shone a light upon the fingernail, and measured the oxygen saturation of the blood. The readout was 80. Could that be right? She seemed to recall that anything less than 95 was cause for concern.

Nora looked back now at the EKG machine, at the pulse readout in its lower right corner. It stood at 125.

Abruptly, the blood pressure meter began bleating a warning.

She knelt toward Smithback, listening to his breathing. It was rapid and shallow, barely audible.

She straightened, gazing around at the machines with a moan of despair. God, she had to do something.She couldn’t move him; that would mean certain death. Whatever she did, she would have to do it here and now. If she couldn’t help him, Smithback would die.

She fought to control her panic, struggled with her memory. What did this all mean: low blood pressure; abnormally fast heart rate; low blood oxygen?

Exsanguination.She looked at the appalling pool of blood in the collecting basin at the bottom of the table. Smithback was suffering from massive blood loss.

How did the body react in such cases? She thought back to the distant lectures she’d only half paid attention to. First, by tachycardia, as the heart beat faster in an attempt to profuse the tissues with oxygen. Next, by—what was the damn term?—vasospasm. She quickly stretched out a hand, felt Smithback’s fingers. As she expected, they were ice cold, the skin mottled. The body had shut down blood to the extremities to maximize oxygen in the critical areas.

The blood pressure would be the last to go. And Smithback’s was already dropping. After that . . .

She did not want to think about what would happen after that.

A wave of sickness passed over her. This was insane. She wasn’t a doctor. Anything she did could easily make things worse.

She took a deep breath, staring at the raw wound, forcing herself to concentrate. Even if she knew how, closing and suturing the incision would not help: the blood loss was already too great. There was no plasma around for a blood transfusion, and had there been any, administering a transfusion was beyond her abilities.

But she knew that patients who had lost a lot of blood could be rehydrated with crystalloids or a saline solution.

She looked again at the IV rack beside the table. A thousand-cc bag of saline solution hung from it, tube drooping down from the metal stand and into the vein in Smithback’s wrist. The stopcock had been shut off. A hypodermic syringe, half empty, dangled near the bottom, its needle inserted into the tube. She realized what it was: a local monitored anaesthetic, probably Versed, given as a drip because Versed doesn’t last much more than five minutes. It would keep the victim conscious, but reduce any resistance, perhaps. Why hadn’t the Surgeon used general, or spinal, anesthesia for the procedure?

It didn’t matter. The point was to replace Smithback’s fluids as quickly as possible, get his blood pressure up—and here were the means to do it.

She plucked the hypodermic from the IV tube and threw it across the room. Then, reaching for the stopcock at the base of the liter bag of saline, she turned it clockwise as far as it would go.

It isn’t enough,she thought as she watched the solution drip rapidly through the tube. It’s not enough to replace the fluid volume. Oh, Jesus, what else can I do?

But there seemed to be nothing else she could do.

She stepped back, helplessly, eyes darting once again to the machines. Smithback’s pulse had risen to 140. Even more alarmingly, his blood pressure had dropped to 80 over 45.

She leaned toward the gurney, took Smithback’s cold, still hand in hers.

“Damn you, Bill,” she whispered, pressing his hand. “You’ve got to make it. You’ve gotto.”

She waited, motionless beneath the lights, her eyes fixed on the monitors.

SEVEN

IN THE STONE CHAMBERS deep beneath 891 Riverside, the air smelled of dust, ancient fungus, and ammonia. Pendergast moved painfully through the darkness, lifting the hood from the lantern infrequently, as much to inspect Leng’s cabinet as to get his bearings. He paused, breathing hard, at the center of a room full of glass jars and specimen trays. He listened intently. His hyperacute ears picked up the sound of Fairhaven’s stealthy footsteps. They were at most one, perhaps two chambers away. There was so little time. He was gravely wounded, without a weapon, bleeding heavily. If he was to find any way to level the playing field, it would have to come from the cabinet itself. The only way to defeat Fairhaven was to understand Leng’s ultimate project—to understand whyLeng had been prolonging his life.

He uncovered the lantern again and examined the cabinet in front of him. The jars contained dried insects, shimmering with iridescence in the beam of light. The jar was labeled Pseudopena velenatus,which Pendergast recognized as the false featherwing beetle from the Mato Grosso swamps, a mildly poisonous insect natives used for medicine. In the row below, another series of jars contained the dried-up corpses of deadly Ugandan bog spiders in brilliant purples and yellows. Pendergast moved down the case, uncloaked the lantern again. Here were bottle after bottle of dried lizards: the harmless albino cave gekko from Costa Rica, a bottle full of dried saliva glands from the Gila monster of the Sonoran Desert, two jars full of the shriveled corpses of the tiny red-bellied lizard of Australia. Farther along were numberless cockroaches, from the giant Madagascar hissing cockroaches to beautiful green Cuban roaches, winking in their jars like tiny emerald leaves.

Pendergast realized these creatures had not been collected for taxonomic or classification purposes. One did not need a thousand bog spiders in order to do taxonomic studies—and drying insects was a poor way to preserve their biological details. And they were arranged in these cabinets in no conceivable taxonomic order.

There was only one answer: these insects had been collected because of the complex chemicalcompounds they contained. This was a collection of biologically active compounds, pure and simple. It was, in fact, a continuation of the inorganic chemical cabinets he had observed in the preceding rooms.

Pendergast now felt even more certain that this grand, subterranean cabinet of curiosities—this stupendous collection of chemicals—was directly related to Leng’s real work. The collections here perfectly filled the hole he’d noticed in the collections displayed in the house above. This was Antoine Leng Pendergast’s ultimate cabinet of curiosities.

In contrast to those other collections, however, this was clearly a workingcabinet: many of the jars were only partially full, and some almost empty. Whatever Leng had been doing had required an enormous variety of chemical compounds. But what hadhe been doing? What was this grand project?

Pendergast covered the lantern again, trying to will the pain away long enough to think. According to his great-aunt, just before heading north to New York, Leng had talked of saving the human race. He remembered the word his great-aunt had used: healing.Leng would heal the world. This vast cabinet of chemicals and compounds was central to that project. It was something Leng believed would benefit humanity.

Pendergast felt a sudden spasm of pain that threatened to bend him double. With a supreme effort of will, he recovered. He hadto keep going, to keep looking for the answer.

He moved out of the forest of cabinets, through an archway of hanging tapestries, into the next room. As he moved, he was racked by a second intense spasm of pain. He stopped, waiting for it to pass.

The trick he’d intended to play on Fairhaven—ducking through the secret panel without being shot—had required exquisite timing. During their encounter, Pendergast had watched Fairhaven’s face intently. Almost without exception, people betrayed by their expression the moment they decided to kill, to pull the trigger, to end the life of another. But Fairhaven had given no such signal. He had pulled the trigger with a coolness that had taken Pendergast by surprise. The man had used Pendergast’s own custom Colt. It was regarded as one of the most dependable and accurate .45 semiautomatics available, and Fairhaven clearly knew how to use it. If it hadn’t been for the man’s pause in breathing just before squeezing off the shot, Pendergast would have taken the bullet dead center and been killed instantly.

Instead, he had taken the bullet in his side. It had passed just below the left rib cage and penetrated into the peritoneal cavity. In as detached a way as possible, Pendergast once again considered the precise form and nature of the pain. The bullet had, at the very least, ruptured his spleen and perhaps perforated the splenetic flexure of the colon. It had missed the abdominal aorta—he would have bled to death otherwise—but it must have nicked either the left colic vein or some tributaries of the portal vein, because the blood loss was still grave. The law enforcement Black Talon slug had done extensive damage: the wound would prove fatal if not treated within a few hours. Worse, it was severely debilitating him, slowing him down. The pain was excruciating, but for the most part he could manage pain. He could not, however, manage the growing numbness that was enfeebling his limbs. His body, bruised from the recent fall and still not fully recovered from the knife wound, had no reserves to fall back on. He was fading fast.

Once again, motionless in the dark, Pendergast reviewed how his plans had miscarried; how he had miscalculated. From the beginning, he had known this would be the most difficult case of his career. But what he had not anticipated were his own psychological shortcomings. He had cared too much; the case had become too important to him. It had colored his judgment, crippled his objectivity. And now for the first time he realized that there was a possibility—indeed, a high probability—of failure. And failure meant not only his own death—which was inconsequential—but also the deaths of Nora, Smithback, and many other innocent people in the future.

Pendergast paused to explore the wound with his hand. The bleeding was growing worse. He slipped off his jacket and tied it as tightly as he could around his lower torso. Then he uncloaked the lantern and, once again, held it briefly aloft.

He was in a smaller room now, and he was surprised at what he found. Instead of more chemical compounds, the tiny space was crowded with cases of birds, stuffed with cotton. Migratingbirds. All arranged taxonomically. A superb collection, even including a suite of now-extinct passenger pigeons. But how did this collection fit with the rest? Pendergast felt staggered. He knew, deep down, that all this fit together, was part of some great plan. But what plan?

He stumbled on, jostling his wound as little as possible, into the next room. He lifted his light once again, and this time froze in utter astonishment.

Here was a collection entirely different from the others. The lantern revealed a bizarre aggregation of clothing and accessories, arrayed on dressmaker’s dummies and in cases along both walls: rings, collars, hats, fountain pens, umbrellas, dresses, gloves, shoes, watches, necklaces, cravats—all carefully preserved and arranged as if in a museum, but this time with no apparent systemization. It seemed very unlike Leng, this haphazard collection from the past two thousand years, from all over the world. What did a nineteenth-century Parisian man’s white kid glove have to do with a medieval gorget? And what did a pair of ancient Roman earrings have to do with an English umbrella, or to the Rolex watch sitting next to it, or to the flapper-era high-heeled shoes beside that? Pendergast moved painfully forward. Against the far wall, in another case, were door handles of all kinds—none holding the slightest aesthetic or artistic interest—beside a row of eighteenth-century men’s powdered wigs.

Pendergast hid the lantern, pondering. It was an utterly bizarre collection of commonplace objects, none of them particularly distinguished, arranged without regard to period or category. Yet here they were, preserved in cases as if they were the most precious objects in the world.

As he stood in the dark, listening to the drip of his blood against the stone floor, Pendergast wondered for the first time if Leng had not, in the end, gone mad. This certainly seemed the last collection of a madman. Perhaps, as he prolonged his life, the brain had deteriorated even while the body had not. This grotesque collection made no sense.

Pendergast shook his head. Once again, he was reacting emotionally, allowing his judgment to be affected by feelings of familial guilt. Leng had not gone mad. No madman could have assembled the collections he had just passed through, perhaps the greatest collection of chemicals, inorganic and organic, the world had ever seen. The tawdry objects in this room wererelated. There was a systematic arrangement here, if only he could see it. The key to Leng’s project was here. He hadto understand what Leng was doing, and why. Otherwise . . .

Then he heard the scrape of a foot on stone, saw the beam of Fairhaven’s flashlight lance over him. Suddenly, the small red dot of a laser appeared on the front of his shirt. He threw himself sideways just as the crash of the gun sounded in the confined space.

He felt the bullet strike his right elbow, a sledgehammer blow that knocked him off his feet. He lay on the ground for a moment, as the laser licked through the dusty air. Then he rolled to his feet and limped forward, ducking from case to case as he crossed the room.

He had allowed himself to become distracted by the strange collection; he had neglected to listen for Fairhaven’s approach. Once again, he had failed. With this thought came the realization that, for the first time, he was about to lose.

He took another step forward, cradling his shattered elbow. The bullet seemed to have passed above the medial supracondlar ridge and exited near the coronoid process of the ulna. It would aggravate the blood loss, render him incapable of resistance. He mustget to the next room. Each room had its own clues, and perhaps the next would reveal Leng’s secret. But as he moved a wave of dizziness hit him, followed by a stab of nausea. He swayed, steadied himself.

Using the reflected light of Fairhaven’s searching beam, he ducked beneath an archway into the next room. The exertion of the fall, the shock of the second bullet, had drained the last of his energy, and the heavy curtain of unconsciousness drew ever closer. He leaned back against the inside wall, breathing hard, eyes wide against the darkness.

The flashlight beam stabbed abruptly through the archway, then flicked away again. In its brief illumination, Pendergast saw the glitter of glass; rows of beakers and retorts; columnar distillation setups rising like city spires above long worktables.

He had penetrated Enoch Leng’s secret lab.

EIGHT

NORA STOOD OVER the metal table, her gaze moving from the monitoring machines to Smithback’s pallid form, then back again. She had removed the retractors, cleaned and dressed the wound as best she could. The bleeding had finally stopped. But the damage was already done. The blood pressure machine continued to sound its dire warning. She glanced toward the saline bag: it was almost empty, but the catheter was small, and even at maximum volume it would be difficult to replenish lost fluids quickly enough.