Текст книги "Cemetery Dance"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

Chapter 74

Alexander Esteban turned from Pond Road, through the automatic gates, and onto the immaculate gravel driveway that wound among the thick – trunked oaks forming the approach to his estate. He drove slowly, savoring the feeling of returning home. Next to him, on the seat, lay a simple, two – page vellum document, signed, sealed, attested, and legally bulletproof.

A document that would, after a bit of a struggle no doubt, make him one of the richest men in the world.

It was late, almost nine o'clock, but there was no more rush. No more planning, directing, producing, executing. It had consumed practically his every waking moment for more months than he cared to count. But that was all behind him. The show had gone off perfectly to a standing ovation, and now there was just one little loose end to tie up. One last curtain call, as it were: a final bow.

As the car eased to a stop before the barn, Esteban felt his Black – Berry begin to vibrate. With a hiss of irritation he checked it: the rear kitchen door was registering an alarm. His spine stiffened. Surely it was a false alarm – they were a frequent occurrence on his large estate, one of the drawbacks of having such an extensive security system. Still, he had to be sure. He reached into the glove compartment and pulled out his favored handgun, a Browning Hi – Power 9mm parabellum with tangent sights. He checked the magazine and found it with its full complement of thirteen ball – point rounds. Slipping it into his pocket, he rose from the car and stepped out into the fragrant night. He checked the freshly raked gravel of the driveway – no sign of a car. Strolling across the broad expanse of lawn, he glanced down at the deserted pier, at the twinkling lights across the Sound, and found all in order. Gun in hand, he passed the greenhouse, entered a walled garden, and approached the back door of the kitchen, the one that had registered the alarm, moving noiselessly. He came to the door, tried the handle. It was closed and locked. The old brass keyhole showed no signs of being forced, no scratches in the old verdigris, no broken panes, nothing to indicate a disturbance.

False alarm.

He straightened up, checked his watch. He was almost looking forward to what was to come. A perverse pleasure, to be sure, but an ancient one. A pleasure encoded in the very genes: the pleasure of killing. He had done it before and found it a curiously cathartic experience. Perhaps, if he hadn't been a movie director, he might have made an excellent serial killer.

Chuckling to himself at this private little sally, he took out his key, opened the kitchen door, and punched in his code, turning off the alarm system in the house. But as he walked through the kitchen toward the door leading to the basement, he found himself hesitating. Why a false alarm now? They usually happened during thunderstorms or high winds. It was a calm, clear night, without the breath of wind. Was it a short circuit, a random static discharge? He felt uneasy, and that was a feeling he had learned never to ignore.

Instead of heading down to the basement, he turned and walked quietly through the darkened halls until he came to his study. He woke up his Mac, entered the password, and logged onto the Web site that handled his security cams. If someone had come in through the kitchen door, he would have had to cross the lawn behind the old greenhouse, where a cam would have picked him up. There was virtually no way to get into the house without being seen – coverage was more than one hundred percent – but if you were going to try, the kitchen side of the house, with its walled garden and ruined greenhouse, was perhaps the weakest point of the entire system. He tapped in the second password, and the live – cam image popped onto the screen. Checking his BlackBerry, he saw the alarm had registered at eight forty – one pm. He punched "8:36" into the digital timestamp field, selected the camera to monitor, and began to watch.

It was well past sundown, and the image was dark – the night vision hadn't kicked in. He fiddled with the controls, enhancing the view as much as possible. He wondered at his own paranoia; he was, as usual, micromanaging. He thought, with a smile of irony, that it was both his worst, and his best, quality. And yet the uneasy feeling remained…

And that was when he saw a flash of black cross the corner of the screen.

Esteban stopped the action, backed it up, and moved it forward in slow motion. There it was again: a figure in black, flying through the very edge of the camera's field. He felt ice along his spine. Very, very clever; if he were to try to slip into the house, that's how he would have done it himself.

He stopped it and backed up again, frame by frame. The running man was only visible in six frames, less than a fifth of a second, but the high – def camera had caught him well; and in the middle frame he had a clear glimpse of the man's pale face and hands.

Esteban rose abruptly, knocking over his chair. It was that FBI agent, the one who had first visited him one week before. A momentary rush of panic threatened to overwhelm him, a suffocating tightness gripping his chest. Everything had gone perfectly so far – and now this. How did he know? How did he know?

With a great force of will, he exhaled the panic. Thinking under pressure was one of his strengths, something he had learned in the movie business. When things went wrong on the set, in the middle of a shoot, and everyone was standing around at a thousand dollars a minute waiting for him to figure things out, he had to make split – second, accurate decisions.

Pendergast. That was the FBI agent's name. He was alone. He'd left that beefy sidekick of his behind, the one with the Italian name. Why? It meant he was there on a hunch, freelancing as it were. If the man had hard evidence, he would have come in with a SWAT team, guns blazing. That was point one.

Point two was Pendergast didn't know he'd been smoked out. Perhaps he'd seen Esteban arrive by car or suspected he would come. But he didn't know Esteban knewhe was there. That gave Esteban a distinct advantage.

Point three: Pendergast didn't know the layout of the estate, especially the extensive and confusing basements. Esteban knew them with his eyes closed.

He remained at his desk, thinking furiously. Pendergast would be headed for the basement – of that he was sure. He was looking for the woman. He'd have probably gone down via the back kitchen stairs, very close to the door through which he'd entered. And that's undoubtedly where he was right now: under the house, poking around among the old movie props, working his way through the south cellars. It would take him at least fifteen minutes to find his way through all that junk to the tunnel that ran to the barn.

Fortunately, the girl was in the barn cellar. Unfortunately, there was that tunnel connecting the house basements to the barn basements.

Abruptly, Esteban made a decision. He slid the gun into his waistband and rose, walking briskly out the front door and across the lawn to the barn. As he crossed the drive, a small smile broke out on his face as a plan took shape. The poor bastard had no idea what he was getting himself into. This little drama was going to have a charming finish – very charming. Not unlike his last movie, Breakout Sing Sing.Pity he couldn't film it.

Chapter 75

Rich Plock stood in the chaotic dark, the cries and shouts of the congregants and protesters mingling with the screams of animals, the hiss of rattles and beating of drums. After the initial thrust into the church, the congregants had rallied for only a brief period and now they were falling back again, many fleeing through side doors into the narrow winding alleys and the maze of buildings that constituted the Ville.

For Plock, it was an unexpected turn and even a bit of an anti – climax. They had successfully liberated the animals – but now he realized there was no place to herd them, nowhere to keep them, and they were running wild, most already having disappeared out the shattered doors and into the courtyard. He hadn't thought ahead about that, and now he felt at a loss for what to do about the vanishing people. His plan had been to drive the residents out of the Ville, but he hadn't quite taken into account what a huge, confusing, rambling place it was; nor had he anticipated that the residents would break for cover so suddenly, fleeing into the depths of the Ville instead of putting up a longer fight during which they could be driven out. They were like Indians of old, melting away from direct confrontation.

He would have to rout them out.

And while routing them, they could also look for the kidnapped woman. Because Plock was beginning to realize that if they didn't save the woman as a way of justifying their foray into the Ville, they might – no, they would– find themselves in the deep end of the pool when it was all over. They would go through the Ville, purge it, sweep it clean, rout out the butchers, show them there was no place to run, no place to hide – and save the woman's life in the process. If they accomplished that, public opinion would be solidly on their side. And there would be a legal justification, of sorts. If not…

The protesters were still streaming in the shattered front doors of the church, filling up the space, while the last of the Ville residents disappeared. The only one remaining was the leader, Bossong, who stood like a statue, immovable, still bleeding from the forehead, watching the unfolding scene with baleful eyes.

As the last of the protesters packed into the church, Plock mounted the raised platform. "People!" he cried, raising his hands.

A hush fell on the multitude. He tried to ignore Bossong, standing in the corner, staring, projecting his malevolent presence throughout the room.

"We need to stay together!" Plock cried. "The torturers have gone to ground – we need to find them, flush them out! And above all, we must save the woman!"

Suddenly, from the corner, Bossong spoke. "This is our home."

Plock turned to him, his face contorting with fury. "Your home! This place of torture? You don't deserve a home!"

"This is our home," he repeated, his voice low. "And this is how we worship our gods."

Plock felt filled with rage. "How you worship your gods? By cutting the throats of helpless animals? By kidnapping and killing people?"

"Leave now. Leave while you can."

"Oooh, I'm scared now. So where's the woman? Where've you got her locked up?"

The crowd seethed with angry agreement.

"We honor the animals by sacrificing them for the nourishment of – our protector. With the blessings of our gods, we—"

"Spare us that crap!" Plock quivered with indignation as he shouted at the robed man. "You tell your people they're finished, that they'd better move on. Otherwise we're driving them out! You got that? Go somewhere else with your deviant religion!"

Bossong raised a finger and pointed it at Plock. "I fear it is already too late for you," he said quietly.

"I'm quaking in my boots!" Plock spread his arms in a welcoming gesture. "Strike me down, gods of the animal torturers! Go ahead!"

At that instant there was a sudden movement in one of the dark transepts of the church, a gasp from the protesters, a moment of hesitation. And then someone screamed and the crowd surged back like a rebounding wave, people pressing into the people behind them, shoving them into those farther behind – as a grotesque, misshapen figure lumbered into the wavering half – light. Plock gaped in horror and disbelief at the creature – but no, it was no creature. It was human. He stared at the scabby lips, rotten teeth, broad flat face; at the pale, slimy musculature draped in filthy rags. One hand held a bloody knife. Its stench filled the room, and it tilted its head back and bellowed like a wounded calf. A single, milky eye rolled in its head – then settled on Plock.

It took a step forward, then two, the thighs moving with a kind of slow, creeping deliberation. Plock was frozen, rooted, unable to move, to look away, even to speak.

In the sudden hush, there was a rustle of cloth and Bossong knelt, bowing his head and holding out his hands in supplication.

" Envoie," he said, quietly, almost sadly.

Instantly, the man – thing bounded straight at the platform with a crab – like shuffle, leapt onto it, opened his rotten mouth, and fell upon Plock.

Plock finally found his voice and tried to scream as the creature savaged him, but already it was too late for sound to emerge from his severed windpipe, and he expired in agonizing silence. It was over very, very quickly.

Chapter 76

Pendergast shined his penlight around the basement. The narrow beam revealed a chaos of bizarre objects, but he ignored them, focusing his attention on the basement wall – which consisted of flat, rough pieces of granite, stacked and carefully mortared.

His face tightened with recognition.

Now he turned his attention to the junk crowding the basement. Rising before him was an Egyptian obelisk of cracked plaster, weeping with damp and spiderwebbed with mildew. Beside it stood the truncated turret of a medieval castle, slapped together out of rotting plywood, complete with crenellations and machicolations, perhaps one – tenth actual size; next to that was a heap of broken plaster statues, stacked like cordwood, in which Pendergast could make out smaller – scale copies of the David,the Winged Victory,and the Laocoön,arms and legs and heads all tangled up, broken fingers lying about the cement floor beneath. The light revealed, in turn, a fiber – glass shark, several plastic skeletons, a primitive tribal relic carved from Styrofoam, and a rubber human brain with a bite taken out of it.

The extensive clutter made for slow going, and it prevented him from grasping the full dimensions of the belowground areas. As he moved through the eerie piles of cast – off movie sets – for that was clearly what they were – he kept the penlight low, moving as swiftly and silently as he could manage. Though scattered and jumbled without hint of organization, the props and the concrete floor they lay on were unusually clean and dust free, attesting to an excessive interest on the part of Esteban.

The light flashed this way and that as Pendergast moved deeper into the clutter of Hollywoodiana. The claustrophobic spaces continued to branch out underground, room after room, stretching beyond the current footprint of the house, all manner of odd and unusual nooks and crannies, each stuffed with old props in various stages of decrepitude and decay, most from the grand historical epics for which Esteban was known. The basement was beginning to feel endless; it must have belonged to an earlier, even larger building occupying the site of Esteban's mansion.

Esteban. He would return home shortly, if he hadn't already. Time was passing – precious time that Pendergast could not afford to waste.

He moved to the next cellar – once apparently a smokehouse, now stacked with a witch – dunking chair, a gibbet, a set of stocks – and a spectacularly realistic guillotine from the French Revolution, blade poised to drop, the tumbrel below filled with severed wax heads, eyes open, mouths frozen in screams.

He moved on.

Reaching the end of the final cellar, he approached a rusty iron door, unlocked and standing ajar. He eased it open, surprised to find that the heavy door moved silently on oiled hinges. A long, narrow tunnel stretched ahead into darkness – a tunnel that at first glance appeared to have been dug out of the raw earth. Pendergast moved closer and touched a wall – and discovered it wasn't earth at all, but plaster painted to look like dirt. Another movie set, this one retrofitted into what had evidently been an older tunnel. From the direction, Pendergast guessed it led to the barn; such tunnels connecting house and barn were a common feature of nineteenth – century farms.

He shined the light down the murky passage. In places the fake plaster walls had peeled off, revealing the same stacked granite stones that had been used to build the house basement – and that were evident in the video of Nora.

He began moving cautiously down the tunnel, shading the pen – light with his hand. If Nora was imprisoned on the grounds – and he was sure she was – she would have to be in the barn basement.

* * *

Esteban entered the barn through the side door and treaded softly in the vast space, fragrant with the smell of hay and old plaster. All around him loomed the props he had so assiduously collected and stored, at great expense, from his many films. He kept them for sentimental reasons he had never been able to explain. Like all movie props they had been built in haste, slapped together with spit and glue, designed to last only as long as the shooting. Now they were rapidly decaying. And yet he was deeply fond of them, could not in fact bear to part with them, see them broken up and hauled off. He had passed many a delicious evening strolling among them, brandy in hand, touching them, admiring them, fondly recalling the glory days of his career.

Now they were serving an unexpected purpose: slowing down that FBI agent, keeping him occupied and distracted, while at the same time helping to conceal Esteban and his movements.

Esteban threaded through the props to the back of the barn, where he unlocked and unbolted an iron door. A set of stairs descended into cool darkness, down into the barn's capacious underground rooms – once upon a time the fruit cellars, cheese aging rooms, root cellars, meat – curing vaults, and wine cellars of the grand hotel that had occupied the site. Even these spaces, the deepest on the estate, were chock – full of old props. Except for the old meat locker he had cleared out to imprison the girl.

Like a blind man in his own house, Esteban made his way through the mass of old props, not even bothering with a flashlight, moving surely and confidently in the dark. Soon he had reached the mouth of the tunnel that led from the barn to the house. Now he snapped on a small pocket LED; in the bluish glow he could make out the fake plaster walls and cribbing left over from shooting Breakout Sing Sing,in which he had used this very tunnel as a set – and saved a tidy sum. About twenty feet past the tunnel mouth, a plywood panel had been set into the wall, a small angle – iron lever protruding from it. Esteban gave it a quick inspection and found it to be in good condition. It had been a simple mechanism to begin with, requiring no electricity, only the force of gravity to operate – in the movie business, contraptions had to be reliable and easy to work, because it was well known that what couldbreak, wouldbreak, inevitably when the cameras were rolling and the star was, finally, sober. Out of curiosity he had tested the device just the year before – a device he had designed himself – and found that it still functioned just as well as on the day he shot the immortal escape scene of the movie that had almost won him an Academy Award. Almost.

Flushing at the thought of the lost Oscar, he switched off his light and listened. Yes:he could hear the faint footsteps of the approaching agent. The man was about to make a gruesome discovery. And then, of course, there was no way the poor FBI agent – no matter how transcendentally clever – could possibly anticipate what would happen to him next.

Chapter 77

Harry R. Chislett, deputy chief of the Washington Heights North district, stood at the central control point on Indian Road, a radio in each hand. Faced with an unprecedented and utterly unexpected development, he had nevertheless – so he considered – adapted with remarkable speed and economy. Who could have foreseen so many protesters, so quickly, all moving with the ruthless precision and purpose of a single mind? Yet Chislett had risen to the occasion. What a tragedy, then, that – for all his probity – he was surrounded by incompetence and ineptitude. His orders had been misinterpreted, improperly carried out, even ignored. Yes: there was no other word for it than tragedy.

Picking up his field glasses, he trained them on the entrance to the Ville. The protesters had managed to get inside, and his men had gone after them. The reports were chaotic and contradictory; God only knew what was really going on. He would go in himself except that a commander must not place his own person in danger. There might be violence; perhaps even murder. It was the fault of his men in the field, and that was how his report would most emphatically read.

He raised the radio in his right hand. "Forward position alpha," he rapped out. "Forward position alpha. Move up to defense position."

The radio cracked and sparked.

"Forward position alpha, do you read?"

"Position alpha, roger," came the voice. "Please verify that last order."

"I said,move up to defense position." It was outrageous. "In the future, I'll thank you to please obeymy orders without asking me to repeatthem."

"I just wanted to make sure, sir," came the voice again, "because two minutes ago you told us to fall back and—"

"Just do as you're told!"

From the gaggle of officers milling around confusedly on the baseball diamond, one figure in a dark suit separated itself and came trotting over. Inspector Minerva.

"Yes, Inspector," said Chislett, careful to let his voice radiate a dignified, McClellan – like tone of command.

"Reports are coming back, sir, from inside the Ville."

"You may proceed."

"There is significant conflict between the inhabitants and the protesters. There are reports of injuries, some serious. The interior of the church is being torn up. The streets of the Ville are filling with displaced residents."

"I'm not surprised."

Minerva hesitated.

"Yes, Inspector?"

"Sir, once again I'd recommend you take… well, firmer action."

Chislett looked at him. "Firmer action? What the devil are you talking about?"

"With all due respect, sir, when the protesters began their march on the Ville I recommended you immediately call for backup units. We've got to have more people."

"We have sufficient manpower," he said fussily.

"I also recommended that our officers move quickly to take up positions across the road to the Ville, to block the march."

"That is precisely what I ordered."

Minerva cleared his throat. "Sir… you ordered all units to maintain their positions."

"I gave no such command!"

"It's not too late for us to—"

"You have your orders," Chislett said. "Please carry them out." He glared at the man as he dropped his eyes and mumbled a "Yes sir," while walking slowly back to the gaggle of officers. Honestly, it was nothing but incompetence, incompetence, even from those he had hoped to rely on the most.

He raised his binoculars again. Now, this was interesting. He could see protesters – first just a few, but as he watched, more and more – running out of the Ville and back down the drive, faces contorted with fear. His officers were finally flushing them out. Sprinkled among them were robed and cowled figures, residents of the Ville itself. All were streaming out of the Ville, sprinting away from the ancient wooden structures, falling over one another in a panicked effort to get as far away as possible.

Excellent, excellent.

Lowering the binoculars, he raised his radio. "Forward position delta, come in."

After a moment, the radio squawked. "Forward position delta, Wegman speaking."

"Officer Wegman, the protesters are beginning to disperse," said Chislett primly. "Clearly, my tactics are having the intended effect. I want you and your men to shunt the protesters back toward the baseball diamond and the street, to effect an orderly dispersal."

"But, sir, we're all the way across the park at the moment, where you told us to—"

"Just do as you're told, Officer." And Chislett shut off the man's protests with the flick of the transmit button. Weak as water, the whole lot of them. Had ever a commander in the history of organized aggression ever been burdened with such monumental ineptitude?

He lowered the radio with a disheartened sigh and watched as the crowd of people streaming out of the Ville became a river, then a flood.