Текст книги "Two Graves"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 34 страниц)

33

ALOYSIUS PENDERGAST BROUGHT THE ROLLS TO A HALT at the corner of Bushwick Avenue and Meserole Street in Brooklyn. This was—according to the cab company’s records—where the taxi had picked up the fleeing boy. It was an old, mostly abandoned industrial neighborhood that had just started to see the invasion of creative pioneers. But it still retained the rawness of graffiti, trash, boarded-up buildings, and the hulks of burned-out cars. The street scene was a mixture of derelicts, hipsters, and sketchy-looking young men.

Pendergast was conspicuous in his black suit as he stepped out of the Silver Wraith, locking the door behind him. Hands in his pockets, he strolled down Meserole Street. It was midafternoon, a brilliant but warmthless sun blasting the pavement. Several blocks ahead of him rose an old nineteenth-century brewery complex, covering almost an acre of ground. A huge square stack for the hops kiln rose above it, with the name VAN DAM still visible on it, along with the date of its founding: 1858.

A brewery. Tristram had, without knowing it, described just such a place: the long underground tunnel where the casks were stored; the huge brick kiln where the hops were dried. This, undoubtedly, had been the site of his incarceration and the site that his captors, Alban and no doubt his Nazi handlers, had been using as a base of operations—for whatever it was they were planning.

Pendergast approached, scrutinizing the building carefully. It was, even in this benighted corner of Brooklyn, a prime piece of real estate, and it had accordingly been securely boarded up with galvanized tin and plywood. Two ancient, massive industrial metal doors blocked what had once been the main entrance. These doors had been bolted shut, and the pedestrian door set into one of them was not only chained and padlocked, but also welded closed with two pieces of rebar.

Pendergast walked on, examining some of the smaller, secondary entrances set into the crumbling brick façade along the street, all of which were more or less impregnable. As he paused at one door, examining its frozen lock, he heard a voice behind him.

“Got any money, friend?”

Pendergast turned to see a rail-thin youth, undoubtedly a heroin addict, staring at him with hollow, hungry eyes.

“As a matter of fact I do.” Pendergast delved into his suit and brought out a twenty-dollar bill. A spark ignited in the man’s dead eyes, and he reached out with trembling fingers.

“I want to break into this building,” said Pendergast, twitching the bill out of reach. “How?”

The man stared at him, his mouth open. “You a thief?”

“Insurance adjustor.”

A hesitation as the man tried to think. “Can’t get in there, that I know of.”

“Yes, but if I wereto try to break in—how would I?”

Another desperate effort to think. “I’d go ’round the back, where the railroad tracks are. Climb the fence.”

Pendergast twitched the bill back toward the man, who snatched it and then set off down the street at a fast wobble. “Don’t get caught,” he called over his shoulder.

Pendergast walked to the far end of the block and followed the complex around the corner, where it ended in a disused railroad yard, stacked with rotting containers and old machinery, surrounded by a chain-link fence.

In a single, bat-like motion, Pendergast grasped the fence, vaulted the top, and dropped down onto the far side. He paused a moment to smooth down his suit. Then, moving among the containers and chest-high weeds, he followed a set of railroad tracks to the back of the brewery, where the tracks disappeared into the complex behind another set of industrial metal doors. As he approached, he noted that a number of the weeds had been bruised, broken, or otherwise recently disturbed by the passage of people and objects. The soft ground away from the tracks showed signs of footprints.

He followed the faint marks of disturbance across the railroad yard, away from the tracks and toward a small door set into the massive brick façade. Reaching the door, he found it as old and massive as the others, but not welded, and with freshly oiled hinges and a new brass lock of a model he did not recognize.

The lock proved to be a challenge, requiring the full set of his tools and skills. It also, unfortunately, caused quite a bit of noise, as several of the pins had to be sheared off with brute force.

Finally the lock yielded, but Pendergast did not open the door immediately. He waited, .45 drawn, for almost ten minutes. And then, flattening himself behind the door, he nudged it open with his shoe. It swung silently at first, then stopped with a loud groan of metal.

Silence.

Five more minutes passed. Pendergast ducked inside, diving to the floor, rolling, and taking cover behind a brick knee wall.

More silence. No one had shouted an alarm; no one had opened fire.

He waited, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom. He was in a vast space, illuminated by scattered holes and cracks in the roof, which let in brilliant pencil-beams of sunlight. Motes drifted through in slow cadences. The air smelled faintly sweet, earthy.

This was clearly the storage and loading area for the brewery, as the train tracks ran through the space, with loading docks and rotting cranes arrayed alongside. Where the tracks ended an old railroad car listed, its wheels off the rails, roof rusted and partially caved in.

Between him and the car was about thirty feet of open ground.

With a sudden burst of speed, Pendergast flitted across the space, then took cover behind the railcar. From this new vantage point he could see the door he had just come through, as well as a large, arched door at the far end of the open space. Debris littered the dusty, concrete floor, and in that dust he could see recent footmarks.

Edging along the railcar, he ducked across another open space, flattened himself behind one pillar, then another, and a moment later scurried up to the arched door. It was shut but not locked.

Reaching into his pocket, Pendergast turned on a small LED flashlight, held it against his .45, then spun around and—raising his weapon—burst through the door, panning across the space.

It was not a room at all, but the long, cool tunnel that had evidently once been used for storing beer, attested to by several stacks of rotting barrels and countless old mold-blown beer bottles.

Pendergast’s sense of puzzlement deepened. They should be here, waiting for him. They would have guessed he’d be coming. And yet he could see no sign of them.

A few moments brought him to the far end of the tunnel and a second archway. Beyond that, he could see another vast, open space, speckled with fragments of sunlight, with the great hop kiln dominating one corner.

His light showed footprints all over the floor now, clustering around the massive riveted iron door of the kiln, which stood ajar. Above, a metal catwalk ran around the walls, just beneath the arched ceiling.

Creeping along the wall, Pendergast reached a point where he could look up to the catwalk. By now his eyes had fully adjusted to the gloom, and he could see that the catwalk was empty.

He continued moving against the wall, toward the great door to the kiln. He approached it from the far side, weapon drawn; then skipped past the door frame, coming at it from the other side, pulling it open while using it as a shield against potential fire.

But there was nothing save the loud groan of rusty iron, and when he shone the light around the interior of the hop kiln, nobody was there.

The walls were blackened with soot and the floor was strewn with food trash. A bucket sat in the corner. Shackles had been driven into the walls, and on the scorched brick floor underneath were some small stains of blood. A filthy blanket with no mattress lay rucked up in the corner. Some old bloody bandages had been tossed in another corner. Clearly, this had been Tristram’s temporary prison.

Pendergast sorted through the trash with meticulous care, once in a while retaining something in a test tube or ziplock bag. But he found nothing of interest.

Back in the large space, he began to explore the area thoroughly. In an alcove he found the spot where Alban had presumably been living: a cot, an empty steamer trunk, a clean bucket. He searched the area, but it had been carefully cleaned out.

They’d known he was coming—and had abandoned the hideout.

In another alcove was a raw plywood table, on which sat a hot plate, a ten-dollar coffeemaker, and a mug. Shining the light low to the ground, Pendergast traced the web of footprints in the dust and dirt, hither and yon, and followed them as best he could, looking for other areas that might have been used. When that yielded nothing, he mounted the rickety metal stairs to the catwalk and traversed it, looking for hidden spaces. Nothing.

Once again, Pendergast searched Alban’s alcove. He next inspected the table. The raw, unsealed top was splattered with coffee stains and rings. He held his flashlight at one edge of the table and began shining it at various raking angles across the surface. On the fourth try, the beam illuminated some faint writing marks in the soft plywood top. There was one mark in particular that had been written with pressure and underlined twice. Laying the light on the table, Pendergast removed a piece of paper and pencil from his suit and placed the paper over the marks, rubbing it ever so lightly with the side of the pencil. Slowly, bits and pieces of a scattering of letters materialized. On a separate piece of paper, Pendergast jotted them down, leaving blank the letters that were too faint to make out. He tried rubbing in several directions, each time getting a slightly different take on the letters, until he had five of the eight.

BE _ _ _ EST

He examined the rubbing with a loupe, examined the table itself, and was finally able to add another letter.

BE _ A _ EST

He stared at the piece of paper for a long time. And then, with one swift motion of the pencil, he completed the word:

BETATEST

34

DR. JOHN FELDER SAT, A LITTLE DEJECTEDLY, IN THE MAIN room of the Wintour gatehouse. He had spent hours and hours restoring it to a modicum of livability—washing down the walls and floor with bleach, sweeping away the cobwebs, dusting all the surfaces, and dragging the clutter up into a tiny crawl space under the roof—and now he was able to sleep at night without imagining things crawling over his face and hands. He’d brought in just a few items: an air mattress and sleeping bag, a few sticks of furniture, a laptop, a space heater, books and groceries and a hot pot—the kitchen was too terrible to contemplate—and it hardly felt like home.

Again and again, as he toiled, he’d asked himself: Why am I doing this?But the fact was, he already knew the answer.

He got up from the lone chair and walked over to the window. It had been cleaned of grime and, through the last dying light of evening, afforded a good prospect of the Wintour mansion—cloaked in gloom, the brick walls straining under the too-large roof, the innumerable black windows like missing teeth. The day before, he’d been invited in for afternoon tea, and he’d found that the inside was just as creepy as the outside. Everything looked like a time capsule from the 1890s: the straight-backed, uncomfortable chairs with their lace antimacassars; the tiny wooden tables set with doilies, little glass figurines, ancient tchotchkes. The carpeting was dark, the wallpaper was dark, the walls were of dark wood, and it seemed as though no light could ever brighten the echoing spaces. Everything smelled faintly of mothballs. It wasn’t dusty, exactly—and yet Felder was aware of a constant desire to scratch his nose. The old, evil house seemed to be watching and listening as they sat in the dreary front parlor, Miss Wintour alternately heaping invective on the town fathers or lamenting how much better the world had been when she was a girl.

It was past eight: dark enough now so that he could not be seen if he toured the grounds. He bundled himself warmly in his jacket, opened the door, stepped out, and shut the door quietly behind him. As he walked through the tangle of wintry, frozen undergrowth, the house seemed to follow his progress, glaring at him.

He had decided the old woman was not in any way demented—just highly eccentric. And she was as sharp and prickly as a thistle—the one time he had brought up the subject of her library, in as tactful and offhand a way as possible, she’d practically jumped on him, demanding to know the reason for his interest. It was all he could do to steer the conversation in another direction, smooth down her suspicion. But he had learned its location: beyond a set of pocket doors that were always kept closed and locked. He knew, because he’d seen the room through the mansion’s windows by day: row after row of bookshelves, stuffed full of treasures both known and unknown.

He approached it now, very quietly, through the tall grass. Despite the light of the moon, the library windows were rectangles of unrelieved black. The house had no security system—he’d noticed that right away. But then, it didn’t need one.

It had Dukchuk.

Dukchuk was the towering, always-silent manservant who opened the front door; who brought the tepid, watery tea; who stood behind Miss Wintour’s chair while she spoke, his unreadable gaze on Felder. The man’s tattoos gave him nightmares.

He returned his attention to the library window. It might well be unlocked—he’d noticed that the windows of the front parlor were. It would be just like Miss Wintour to have four extra locks on the front door but none on the windows. Still, there was Dukchuk. The fellow looked as if he might have his own, extralegal way of dealing with encroachers. Felder knew he would have to be supremely careful if…

If what? Was he really thinking what he was thinking?

Yes, he was. He realized now there was no way on earth old Miss Wintour would ever willingly show him the library. If he was going to get in, if he was going to find that portfolio, he would have to find another way.

He licked his lips. Tomorrow night was forecast to be overcast, moonless. Then—he would do it then.

35

PENDERGAST STOOD IN THE WORKROOM OF HIS SPRAWLING apartments in the Dakota. The room was devoid of any decor or ornamentation, anything that would distract or hinder the most intense concentration. Even the color of the walls and the stain of the wooden floor were a cool gunmetal gray, as neutral as possible. The windows overlooking Seventy-Second Street were closed and tightly shuttered. In one corner sat a tall pile of yellowing documents: the papers that Corrie had brought him from the Nazi safe house. The only furniture was a long, oaken table that ran the length of the room. There were no chairs. The table was covered by police reports, SOC data, photographs, FBI profiles, forensic analyses, and other paperwork, all devoted to a single subject: the Hotel Killer murders. Committed by his son, Alban.

His son. Pendergast was finding this fact to be a most disruptive influence on his deductive processes.

He paced quickly back and forth along the length of the table, glancing at first one document, then another. Finally, with an exasperated shake of his head, he strode over to an audio player, set flush into one wall, and pressed the PLAY button. Immediately the low, sonorous strains of the Ricercar a 6from Bach’s Musical Offeringbegan to emerge from hidden speakers.

This was the only piece that was ever heard in this room. Pendergast did not play it for its beauty—but for the way the complex, intensely mathematical composition settled and sharpened his mind.

As the music continued, his pacing grew slower, his study of the documents strewn across the tabletop more ordered and nuanced.

His son, Alban, had committed these murders. Tristram said that Alban loved killing. But why journey all the way to New York from Brazil to commit them? Why leave the body parts of his own brother at the murder sites? Why scrawl bloody messages on the corpses—messages that could only be meant for Pendergast himself?

BETATEST. Beta test. There was clearly a method, a governing purpose, behind these killings. And Pendergast himself was meant to discover it. Or, perhaps, to tryto discover it. Nothing else made sense.

With Bach’s delicate, fantastically intricate counterpoint weaving softly in the background, Pendergast looked at the data afresh, forming a logical counterpoint of his own, mentally comparing times, dates, addresses, room numbers, external temperatures, ages of victims—anything that might point to a method, or a sequence, or a pattern. This process continued for ten, then twenty minutes. And then—abruptly—Pendergast stiffened.

Bending over the table, he rearranged several pieces of paper, examined them again. Then, plucking a pen from his pocket, he wrote a series of numbers across the bottom of one of the sheets, double-checking it against the documentation.

There was no mistake.

He glanced at his watch. Moving like lightning, he darted down the hall to his study, plucked a tablet computer from the desk, and typed in a query. He examined the response—cursed softly but eloquently in Latin under his breath—and then picked up a telephone and dialed.

“D’Agosta here,” came the response.

“Vincent? Where are you?”

“Pendergast?”

“I repeat: where are you?”

“Heading down Broadway, just passing Fifty-Seventh. I was going to—”

“Turn around and come to the Dakota as quickly as you can. I’ll be waiting at the corner. Hurry—there’s not a moment to lose.”

“What’s up?” D’Agosta asked.

“We’ll talk in the car. I just hope we’re not too late.”

36

D’AGOSTA DROVE LIKE HELL DOWN PARK AVENUE through the evening traffic, emergency lights flashing, once in a while goosing his siren at the sons of bitches who wouldn’t pull over. Pendergast’s phone call out of the blue, the almost manic urgency in the agent’s voice, had unnerved him. He wasn’t sure if Pendergast was cracking up or actually on to something, but he’d spent enough time around the man to realize he ignored Pendergast’s requests at his own peril.

Now, as they tore southward toward the Murray Hill Hotel, D’Agosta looked sideways to examine Pendergast. The transformation the special agent had undergone since his wife’s death covered the spectrum—from apathy, to a drug-induced stupor, and now this: a diamond-hard glitter in the man’s eyes, his entire being bursting with coiled-spring tension and fanatical energy.

“You say another murder’s about to be committed?” D’Agosta began. “Can you fill me in here? How do you know—?”

“Vincent, we have very little time, and what I have to say is going to seem strange to you, if not mad.”

“Try me.”

The briefest of pauses. “I have a son whom I never knew existed. His name is Alban. He’s the killer—not Diogenes, as I had previously suspected. Of this there is no doubt whatsoever.”

“Whoa, now, just wait a minute, Jesus—”

A short gesture from Pendergast silenced D’Agosta. “These killings are directed specifically at me. The precise motive is as yet unclear.”

“I find it hard to—”

“There is no time for detailed explanations. Suffice to say that the addresses of the hotels, and the times of the killings, follow a pattern, a sequence. The next term in this sequence is twenty-one. And there’s only one Manhattan hotel with twenty-one in its address—the Murray Hill, at Twenty-One Park Avenue. I’ve already checked.”

“This is—”

“And have you noticed the times of the killings? It’s another pattern, a simpler one. The first was at seven thirty in the morning. The next at nine PM. The third one, once again at seven thirty AM. He’s alternating times. And it’s almost nine now.”

They tore through the Helmsley Building tunnel and around the viaduct, wheels squealing. “I don’t buy it,” D’Agosta said as he struggled to straighten the car. “An unknown son, this pattern of yours… it’s frigging nuts.”

Pendergast made a visible effort to control himself. “I know how strange it must seem. But at least for the time being, I must insist on your full and complete suspension of disbelief.”

“Disbelief? That’s an understatement. It’s totally crazy.”

“You’ll find out soon enough. We are here.”

D’Agosta angled the unmarked car and came to a screeching halt in front of the hotel. Unlike the three previous luxury hotels, this one was old and faintly seedy, its brown-brick façade streaked with soot. Leaving the car parked in the loading zone, D’Agosta got out but Pendergast was already ahead of him, flying into the lobby, his FBI badge out. “Security office!” he cried.

The concierge came stumbling out all in a panic, and in response to Pendergast’s barked instructions led them past the lobby desk into a small inner office with a wall of CCTV screens. A security officer on duty leapt to his feet as they burst in.

“FBI,” said Pendergast, waving the shield. “How many lobby tapes do you have online?”

“Um, one,” the officer said, totally flummoxed.

“Back it up half an hour. Now.”

“Yes, um, yes, sir, of course.” The poor guard lumbered about as fast as he could. Fortunately, D’Agosta noticed, it was a recent and modestly advanced system, and the man seemed competent. Within a minute the feed was playing in accelerated motion. D’Agosta watched the monitor, his skepticism growing. This was ridiculous: the Hotel Killer would never pick a dump like this to work in. It didn’t match the M.O. He shot a covert glance at Pendergast: the wife’s death had clearly touched him even more than was obvious.

“Speed it up,” Pendergast said.

The man complied. They watched as figures flitted across the lobby with rigid intensity.

“ Stop!That’s him.”

The security video stopped, then proceeded in real time. It showed a nondescript man walking casually into the lobby, pausing, adjusting his tie, then moving toward the elevators. D’Agosta felt his gut contract. The way the man moved, looked—it washim.

“Fuck,” he muttered.

“Switch to the elevator cam,” Pendergast said.

They followed the man’s progress to the fifth floor, where he got out, walked down the hall, and waited. Then, just as a woman came around the corner, he started up again, following her down the hall, until they passed out of view of the camera. The running time stamp indicated this had taken place just three minutes before.

“Oh, Christ,” D’Agosta said. “Christ. He’s got another one.”

“Back up the tape five seconds.” Pendergast pointed at the image of the woman, turning to the concierge. “Do you recognize her? What’s her room number? Quickly, man!”

“She checked in today.” The concierge stepped back to the front desk, tapped the keys of the registration computer. “Room Five Sixteen.”

Pendergast turned back to D’Agosta. “Stay here,” he murmured. “Monitor these feeds. When he comes back into view, follow his every movement. I’m going after him. And remember—tell no one of my son.”

“Whoa,” D’Agosta said. “Hold on just a minute. Tell no one? Pendergast, I hate to say this, but I think you’re way out of line—”

“ Tell no one,” Pendergast repeated firmly. And then in a flash he was gone.

Pendergast bounded up the five flights of stairs and ran down the hall to Room 516. The door was shut, but a single shot from his .45 blasted off the lock and he kicked the door open.

He was too late. In the small room, the woman he’d seen in the video lay on the floor, obviously dead but not yet dismembered. Pendergast hesitated only a moment, his silvery eyes darting all around, taking everything in. Then, leaping over the still form, he threw open the bathroom door. The window at the end of the narrow bath was shattered, opening on a fire escape. Pendergast vaulted through the window onto the fire escape and looked down, in time to see a young man– Alban—clambering down the last flight of the escape, climbing through the bottom hatch, and dropping to the ground.

Pendergast raced down the fire escape, three steps at a time, following Alban with his eyes as the youth ran down Park Avenue and disappeared around the corner of Thirty-Fifth Street, heading east, toward the river.

Pendergast ran after him. When he rounded the corner of Thirty-Fifth, he could see Alban almost two blocks east, silhouetted in the streetlights, tearing along at a tremendous speed—a phenomenal runner. Pendergast continued, but by the time he reached Lexington the now-tiny figure of Alban had already crossed Second Avenue and was running alongside St. Vartan Park. Realizing he would never catch him, Pendergast nevertheless continued on, at the least hoping to see where his son would go. The fleeing, barely visible figure passed First Avenue and ran toward FDR Drive, leaping a chain-link fence and climbing over a cement barrier and out onto the drive, where he dropped out of sight into the darkness.

Pendergast sprinted past St. Vartan Park, crossing First Avenue against the light. He hit the chain-link fence, clambered over it, vaulted the cement barrier, and ran out onto FDR Drive, dodging cars amid a sudden chorus of horns and screeching brakes. He made it to the far side and stopped, looking both ways, but he could see nothing: Alban had vanished into the night. The East River stretched out in front of him, the Hunter’s Point ferry terminal lay on his right, the Queensboro Bridge on his left, atwinkle with lights. Directly in front of him two vacant, ruined piers stood out in the East River, extending from a decaying, riprapped riverbank below a broken-up quay, much of it reclaimed by a riot of undergrowth, old cattails, cane, dry reeds, and brambles—everything withered and brown in the wintry moonlight.

There were many, many places to disappear into, and Alban was gone. He clearly knew the lay of the land and had worked out his escape ahead of time. It was hopeless.

Pendergast turned and walked along the shoulder of the FDR Drive toward a pedestrian walkway five blocks south to recross the highway. But as he walked, he saw a figure out of the corner of his eye—a man, a young man, standing on the first ruined pier, illuminated from behind by the dim light of the bridge.

It was Alban. His son was looking directly at him. And—as Pendergast stopped and stared—he raised his hand and gave a little wave.

Immediately Pendergast vaulted over the railing of the drive and landed on the embankment below, clawing his way through the overgrowth. He came out on the broken cement quay only to find that Alban had once again vanished.

Sensing he must have headed up the embankment, Pendergast sprinted northward. And in a moment he saw movement ahead—Alban, running out on the second ruined pier, where he stopped halfway, turned, and waited, arms crossed.

As he ran, Pendergast drew his .45. To reach the second pier, he was forced around a row of ruined bollards and through more undergrowth, during which he again temporarily lost sight of Alban. Just as he came to the foot of the pier and emerged from the vegetation, he felt a stunning blow to his leg and was pitched forward, and—even as he was falling—felt a second blow to his hand, which sent the .45 flying. He rolled and tried to rise, but Alban anticipated the maneuver and slammed Pendergast’s head down with his knee, pinning the agent to the cement.

And then, just as quickly as he’d been pinned, he was released. Pendergast leapt to his feet, ready to fight.

But Alban did not come after him. He merely stepped back, arms once again crossed.

Pendergast froze, and they stared at each other, like two animals, each waiting for the other to make the first move.

Then Alban suddenly relaxed. “ Endlich,” he said. “Finally. We can have a heart-to-heart… father to son… something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time.” And he smiled rather pleasantly.