Текст книги "Reliquary"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

= 29 =

THE WEST SIDE railyard lay in a wide depression on the westernmost reaches of Manhattan, out of sight and practically invisible to the millions of New Yorkers who lived and worked nearby, its seventy-four acres the largest piece of undeveloped land on the island outside Central Park. Once a bustling hub of turn-of-the-century commerce, the railyard now lay fallow: rusted tracks sunken among burdock and ailanthus trees, ancient sidings rotting and forgotten, abandoned warehouses sagging and covered with graffiti.

For twenty years the piece of ground had been the subject of development plans, lawsuits, political manipulations, and bankruptcies. The tenants of the warehouses had gradually abandoned their leases and left, to be replaced by vandals, arsonists, and the homeless. In one corner of the railyard lay a small, bedraggled shantytown of plywood, cardboard, and tin. Alongside were a few pathetic kitchen gardens of straggly peas and squash run riot.

Margo stood amidst a plot of fire-scorched piles of rubble, sandwiched between two abandoned railyard buildings. The warehouse occupying the plot had burned four months earlier, and it had burned hotly and thoroughly. The structure had been reduced to a blackened I-beam framework and some low cinder-block stem walls. Beneath her feet, the cement pad was hip deep in rubble and burned shingles. The remains of several long metal tables stood in one corner of the lot, covered with smashed equipment and melted glass. She looked around, peering through the late afternoon shadows that knitted themselves across the sunken ground. There were several hulks that had once been large machines, housed in metal cabinets; the cabinets had melted and the inner workings lay exposed, masses of twisted wire and ruined circuit boards. The acrid stench of burned plastic and tar clung stubbornly to everything.

D’Agosta appeared at her side. “Whaddaya think?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Are you sure this was Greg’s last known address?”

“Confirmed it with the moving company. The warehouse burned about the time of his death, so it’s doubtful he moved anywhere else. But he used an alias with Con Ed and New York Telephone, so we can’t be certain.”

“An alias?” Margo continued to look around. “I wonder if he died before or after this place burned.”

“Not as much as I wonder,” D’Agosta replied.

“It looks like this was some kind of laboratory.”

D’Agosta nodded. “Even I could have guessed that. This guy Kawakita was a scientist. Just like you.”

“Not quite. Greg was more involved with genetics and evolutionary biology. My specialty is anthropological pharmacology.”

“Whatever.” D’Agosta hiked up his pants. “Question is, what kind of lab is it?”

“Hard to say. I’d need to learn more about those machines in the corner. And I’d have to map out the melted glass on these tables, try to re-create what the setups might have been.”

D’Agosta looked at her. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“You wanna take it on?”

Margo returned the Lieutenant’s gaze. “Why me? You must have specialists in the department that—”

“They’re not interested,” D’Agosta interrupted. “It ranks right below jaywalking on their list of priorities.”

Margo frowned in surprise.

“The powers that be don’t give a damn about Kawakita or what he was doing before he was killed. They think he was just a random victim. Just like they think Brambell was a random victim.”

“But you don’t? You think he was involved in these murders somehow?”

D’Agosta pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his brow. “Hell, I don’t know. I just feel this guy Kawakita was up to something, and I’d like to know what it was. You knew him, right?”

“Yes,” Margo said.

“I only met him once, when Frock had that good-bye party for Pendergast. What was he like?”

Margo thought a moment. “He was brilliant. An excellent scientist.”

“What about his personality?”

“He wasn’t the nicest person in the Museum,” Margo said carefully. “He was—well, a little ruthless, I guess you could say. I felt he was the kind of person who would perhaps step over the line to advance his career. He didn’t associate much with the rest of us, and didn’t seem to trust anybody who might…” She stopped.

“Yeah?”

“Is this necessary? I hate to talk about someone who isn’t around to defend himself.”

“That’s usually the best time. Was he the kind of guy to get involved in any criminal activity?”

“Absolutely not. I didn’t always agree with his ethics—he was one of those scientists who held science above human values—but he was no criminal.” She hesitated. “He tried to reach me awhile back. Maybe a month or so before he died.”

D’Agosta looked at her curiously. “Any idea why? It doesn’t seem like you two were exactly friends.”

“Not close friends. But we were colleagues. If he was in some kind of trouble—” A shadow crossed her face. “Maybe I could have done something about it. Instead of just ignoring the call.”

“Guess you’ll never know. But anyway, if you’d take the time to poke around, try to get some ideas of what he was doing here, I’d appreciate it.”

Margo hesitated, and D’Agosta gave her a closer look. “Who knows?” he said in a quieter tone. “Maybe it’ll help lay some of those inner demons to rest.”

Nice choice of words, Margo thought. Still, she knew he meant well. Lieutenant D’Agosta, pop psychologist. Next thing you know, he’ll be telling me that looking over this site will help give meclosure.

She glanced over the ruined site for a long minute. “Okay, Lieutenant,” she said at last.

“Want me to get a photographer down here, take some pictures?”

“Maybe later. For now, I’d rather just make a few sketches.”

“Sure thing.” D’Agosta seemed restless.

“You go on,” Margo said. “You don’t need to hang around.”

“No way,” D’Agosta said. “Not after Brambell.”

“Lieutenant—”

“I’ve got to collect some of the ashes anyway, to test for trace accelerants. I’ll stay out of your way.” He stood truculently, unmoving.

Margo sighed, pulled a sketchbook out of her carryall, and once again turned her attention to the ruined lab. It was a dreary place, surrounding her in silent accusation. You could have done something. Greg tried to reach you. Perhaps it didn’t have to end like this.

She shook her head, scattering the guilty thoughts. They wouldn’t be of any help. Besides, if any place held the clues to explain what happened to Greg, this place would. And maybe the only way to get out of this nightmare was for her just to lower her head and go straight through. Anyway, it got her out of the Forensic Anthropology lab, which had started to look like a charnel house. The Bitterman corpse had arrived from NYME Wednesday afternoon, bringing a fresh set of questions along with it. The scoring on the neck bones of the still-fleshed corpse pointed to decapitation by some kind of rough, primitive knife. The killer—or killers—had been rushed in their grisly task.

She quickly mapped out the rough outlines of the lab, sketching in the dimensions of the walls, the location of the tables, and the placement of the slaglike heaps of ruined equipment. Every laboratory had a flow to it, depending on what kind of work was being done. While the equipment might indicate the general kind of research, the flow itself would give clues to the specific application.

The rough outlines completed, Margo moved to the tables themselves. Being metal, they had withstood the heat of the fire relatively well. She sketched out a rectangle to indicate each tabletop, then began noting the melted beakers, titration tubes, volumetric flasks, and other items still unidentifiable. It was a complex, multilayered setup: clearly, some kind of high-level biochemistry had been going on. But what?

She paused for a moment, breathing in the mingled scents of burnt electrical insulation and the saline breeze off the Hudson. Then she turned her attention to the melted machinery. It was expensive stuff, judging from the brushed stainless-steel cabinetry and the remains of flat panel and vacuum fluorescent displays.

Margo tackled the largest machine first. Its metal casing had slumped in the heat, the innards detached. She gave it a light kick, shrinking back as it fell with a loud crash. She suddenly felt aware of how alone they were. Beyond the railyards and across the river, the sun hung low over the New Jersey Palisades. She could hear the cry of seagulls as they wheeled over the rotting stumps of old piers rising from the Hudson’s shore. Beyond the railyards, a cheerful summer afternoon was ending. Yet here, in this sunken, abandoned place, no cheer came. She glanced at D’Agosta, who had collected his samples and was standing in the late sun, arms crossed, staring out at the Hudson. Now she was glad he’d insisted on staying.

She bent over the machine, smiling inwardly at her nervousness. Turning over the pieces of scorched and discolored metal, she eventually found the faceplate she was searching for. Rubbing it free of soot, she made out the words WESTERLY GENETICS EQUIPMENT,along with a WGE logo. Beneath, on the bezel, was a stamped serial number and the words WGE INTEGRATED DNA ANALYZER-SEQUENCER.She jotted the information down on her sketchpad.

In a far corner was heaped a small pile of shattered, melted machinery that looked different from the rest. Margo examined it, carefully turning over each piece and laying it out, trying to figure out what it was. It seemed to be a rather complex organic chem synthesis setup, complete with fractionation and distillation apparatus, diffusion gradients, and low-voltage electrical nodes. Toward the bottom, where things were less damaged by the heat, she found the broken pieces of several Erlenmeyer flasks. Judging by the words on their frosted labels, most were normal lab chemicals. One fragmentary label, however, she did not immediately recognize: ACTIVATED 7-DEHYDROCHOLE…

She turned the piece over. Damn, the chemical name had a familiar ring to it. At last, she dropped the piece into her carryall. No doubt it would be listed in the organic chem encyclopedia back at the lab.

Beside the machine were the remains of a thin notebook, burned through except for a few carbonized pages. As she picked it up curiously, it began to crumble in her hands. Carefully, she picked up the charred pieces, slid them carefully into a Ziploc bag, and stowed it in her carryall.

Within fifteen minutes, she had managed to identify enough of the other machines to be certain of one thing: this had once been a world-class genetics laboratory. Margo worked with similar machines on a daily basis, and she knew enough to estimate the cost of this ruined lab at over half a million dollars.

She stepped back. Where had Kawakita gotten the money to fund this kind of lab? And what the hell could he have been up to?

As she moved across the cement pad, making notations in her sketchbook, something odd caught her eye. Among the piles of rubble and melted glass, she made out what looked like five large puddles of mud, baked to a cementlike consistency by the fire. Around them were sprinkles of gravel.

Curious, she bent over to examine the rubble more closely. There was a small metal object, about the size of her fist, embedded in the nearest puddle. Pulling a penknife from her carryall, she pried out the object and scraped off the crust that clung to it like cement. Beneath the mud she could make out MINNE    ARIUM SUPPL. Turning the object over and over in her hands, she realized what it was: an aquarium pump.

She stood up, looking down at the five similar heaps of rubble lined up beneath the remaining skeleton of a wall. The gravel, the broken glass… these must have been aquaria. Huge, too, judging by the size of the puddles. But aquaria filled with mud? It didn’t make sense.

Kneeling, she took her penknife and worked it into the closest dried mass. It came away in pieces, like concrete. Picking up one of the larger pieces and turning it over, Margo was surprised to see what looked like the roots and partial stem of a plant, preserved from burning by the protective mud coating. Cursing the clumsiness of the penknife, she carefully worked the plant loose from the mud and held it up to the fading light.

Suddenly, she dropped the plant and jerked her hand back, as if burned. After a moment, she picked it up again and examined it more closely, her heart suddenly racing. It’s not possible,she thought.

She knew this plant—knew it well. The tough, fibrous stem, the bizarrely knotted roots, brought back searing memories: sitting in the deserted Genetics lab at the Museum, face glued to the eyepiece of a microscope, mere hours before the disastrous opening of the Superstitionexhibition. It was the rare Amazonian plant that the Mbwun creature had craved so desperately. The same plant Whittlesey had inadvertently used as packing material in the fateful crate of relics sent to the Museum from the Upper Xingu almost a decade before. The plant was now supposed to be extinct: its original habitat had been wiped out, and all remaining vestiges of it at the Museum had been destroyed by the authorities after the Mbwun creature—the Museum Beast—was finally killed.

Margo stood up again, brushing soot from her knees. Greg Kawakita had somehow gotten his hands on this plant and had been growing it in these massive aquaria.

But why?

Asudden, horrible thought struck her. As quickly as it had come, she brushed it aside. Surely, there was no second Mbwun creature that Greg had been feeding.

Or was there?

“Lieutenant?” she asked. “Do you know what this is?”

He came over. “Not a clue,” he replied.

“ Liliceae mbwunensis. The Mbwun plant.”

“You’re shitting me, right?”

Margo shook her head slowly. “I wish I were.”

They stood, unmoving, as the sun sank below the Palisades, gilding the distant buildings across the river in a halo of oblique light. She looked again at the plant in her hand, preparing to place it in her carryall, and noticed something that she had missed before.

At the end of the root base, she could make out a small graft scar along the xylem, a long double-V in the dim light. A graft scar like that, she knew, meant one of only two things. A common hybrid experiment.

Or a very sophisticated genetic engineering experiment.

= 30 =

HAYWARD PUSHED THE door open brusquely, her cheeks still full of lunch.

“Captain Waxie just called,” she said, swallowing the tuna fish. “Wants you down in the IU right away. They got him.”

D’Agosta looked up from placing the final pins in a missing-persons map that replaced the one taken by Waxie. “Got who?”

“ Him.The copycat killer, of course.” She raised her eyebrows.

“No shit.” D’Agosta was at the door in a second, pulling his suit jacket off the hanger and shrugging into it.

“Caught him in the Ramble,” Hayward said as they walked through the office pool toward the elevator bank. “Somebody on stakeout heard a commotion, went to check it out. The guy had just knifed a vagrant and was preparing to cut off his head.”

“How’d they know that?”

Hayward shrugged. “Ask Captain Waxie.”

“And the knife?”

“Homemade job. Real rough. Just what they were looking for.” She didn’t sound convinced.

The elevator doors opened to reveal Pendergast. Seeing D’Agosta and Hayward about to step in, he raised his eyebrows quizzically.

“The killer’s in the IU,” D’Agosta said. “Waxie wants me down there.”

“Indeed?” The FBI agent stepped back and pressed the button for the second floor. “Well, let’s head down there by all means. I’m curious to see exactly what kind of fish angler Waxie has landed.”

The Interrogation Unit of One Police Plaza was a grim series of gray-colored rooms with cinder-block walls and heavy metal doors. The cop on desk duty buzzed them through, directing them to the observation area of room nine. Inside, Waxie was lounging in a chair, looking through the one-way glass into the interrogation cell. He glanced up when he heard them enter, frowned when he saw Pendergast, grunted at D’Agosta, and ignored Hayward.

“Is he talking?” D’Agosta said.

Waxie grunted again. “Oh, yeah. Talking is all he’s doing. But so far we’ve only heard a load of shit. Calls himself Jeffrey; won’t give anything else. We’ll get the real story out of him soon, though. Meanwhile, thought you might like to ask him a few questions.” In his triumph, Waxie was generous, brimming with smug self-confidence.

Looking through the glass, D’Agosta could see an unkempt, wild-eyed man. The rapid, silent movements of the suspect’s mouth were in almost humorous contrast with his stiff, unmoving body.

“This is the guy?” D’Agosta said in disbelief.

“That’s him.”

D’Agosta kept looking through the glass. “Looks kind of small to have done so much damage.”

Waxie’s mouth set in a defensive frown. “Maybe he got sand kicked in his face one too many times.”

D’Agosta leaned forward and pressed the mike button. Instantly, a torrent of curses spewed from the speaker above the one-way window. D’Agosta listened for a moment, then snapped the mike button off.

“What about the murder weapon?” he asked.

Waxie shrugged. “It’s a handmade thing, a piece of steel sunk into a wooden shank. The handle’s been wrapped in cloth, gauze, something like that. Too bloody to tell; we’ll have to wait until forensics gets done with it.”

“Steel,” Pendergast said.

“Steel,” Waxie replied.

“Not stone.”

“I said, it was steel. Take a look for yourself.”

“We will,” D’Agosta said, stepping away from the window. “But for now, let’s see what this guy has to say.” He headed for the door, Pendergast gliding behind him like a silent spirit.

Number nine looked like countless interrogation rooms in countless police stations across the country. A scarred wooden table sat in the middle of the stark space. On the far side of the table, the prisoner sat in a straight-backed chair, arms cuffed behind his back. A single detective sat in one of several chairs on the table’s near side, enduring the verbal abuse with complete disinterest as he manned the tape recorder. Police officers, armed and in uniform, faced each other from across the room. Two huge black-and-white blowups hung on the side walls. One showed the torn and broken body of Nicholas Bitterman, lying on the men’s room floor inside Belvedere Castle. The other was the now-famous Postphoto of Pamela Wisher. A video camera was fixed in one corner of the ceiling, dispassionately recording the proceedings.

D’Agosta took a seat at the table, inhaling the familiar blend of sweat, damp socks, and fear. Waxie followed him in, settling his bulk carefully into an adjoining chair. Hayward stood next to the closest uniformed officer. Pendergast closed the door, then leaned against it, the crisp black arms of his suit folded casually, one over the other.

The prisoner had stopped shouting when the door opened. Now he glared at the new arrivals through a greasy lock of hair. His eyes lighted on Hayward, lingered for a moment, then moved on.

“What the hell you looking at?” he said at last to D’Agosta.

“Don’t know,” D’Agosta replied. “You want to tell me about it?”

“Piss off.”

D’Agosta sighed. “You understand your rights?”

The prisoner grinned, exposing small, filthy teeth. “That fat mother next to you read them to me. I don’t need no lawyer to hold my hand.”

“You watch your mouth,” Waxie snapped, flushing an angry crimson.

“No, fat boy, you watch yours. Andyour fat ass.” He cackled with laughter. Hayward didn’t bother to suppress a smirk.

D’Agosta wondered if this was how they had been carrying on before he got there. “So what happened in the park?” he asked.

“You want a list? For firstly, he was in my sleeping spot. For secondly, he hissed at me, like a snake out of Egypt. For thirdly, he lacked the blessings of God. For fourthly, he—”

Waxie waved his hand. “We get the picture. Tell us about the others.”

Jeffrey said nothing.

“Come on,” Waxie pushed. “Who else?”

“Plenty,” came the reply at last. “Nobody disses me and gets away with it.” He leaned forward. “Better watch out, fat boy, case I carve a piece of blubber off you.”

D’Agosta placed a restraining hand on Waxie. “So who else you done?” he asked quickly.

“Oh, they know me. They know Jeffrey, the cherub cat. I’m on my way.”

“What about Pamela Wisher?” Waxie broke in. “Don’t deny it, Jeffrey.”

The seams at the corners of the prisoner’s muddy eyes thickened. “I don’t deny it. The scumbags disrespected me, all of them. They deserved it.”

“And what’d you do with the heads?” Waxie asked breathlessly.

“Heads?” Jeffrey asked. To D’Agosta, he seemed to falter slightly.

“You’re in too deep now; don’t start denying.”

“Heads? I ate their heads is what I did.”

Waxie cast a triumphant gaze toward D’Agosta. “What about the guy at Belvedere Castle, Nick Bitterman? Tell me about him.”

“That was a good one. That mother had no respect. Hypocrite, miser. He was the adversary.” He rocked back and forth.

“Adversary?” D’Agosta asked, frowning.

“The prince of adversaries.”

“Yes,” said Pendergast sympathetically. “You must counteract the powers of darkness.” They were the first words he’d spoken since entering.

The prisoner rocked more vigorously. “Yes, yes.”

“With your electrical skin.”

Suddenly, the rocking stopped.

“And your glaring eyes,” Pendergast continued. Then he pushed himself away from the door and came forward slowly, looking directly at the suspect.

Jeffrey stared hard at Pendergast. “Who are you?” he breathed.

Pendergast was silent for a moment. “Kit Smart,” he said at last, without removing his eyes from Jeffrey.

To D’Agosta, the change that came over the prisoner was shocking. The color seemed to drain from his face in an instant. He looked at Pendergast, mouth working silently. Then, with a shriek, he forced himself backwards with such force that the chair tipped over and crashed to the floor. Hayward and the two police guards sprang to subdue the struggling figure.

“Jesus, Pendergast, what the hell did you say to him?” Waxie said over the screams, hoisting himself to his feet.

“The right thing, apparently.” Pendergast glanced at Hayward. “Please give this fellow every comfort. I think we can let Captain Waxie take over from here.”

“So who is that guy?” D’Agosta asked as the elevator carried them back up toward the Homicide Division.

“I’m not sure what his real name is,” Pendergast replied, smoothing his tie. “But it isn’t Jeoffry. And he’s not the person we’re looking for.”

“Tell Waxie that.”

Pendergast glanced mildly at D’Agosta. “What we saw, Lieutenant, was a classic case of paranoid schizophrenia, aggravated by multiple personality disorder. You noticed how the man seemed to weave in and out of two personas? There was the blustering tough guy, no doubt as unconvincing to you as to me. Then there was the killer visionary—infinitely more dangerous. Did you hear? ‘For secondly, he hissed at me, like a snake out of Egypt.’ Or ‘Jeoffry, the cherub cat.’ ”

“Of course I heard it. The guy was talking like somebody just handed him the Ten Commandments or something.”

“Or something. You’re right, his ravings had the structure and cadence of written speech. This occurred to me, also. At that point, I recognized he was quoting from the old poem Jublilate Agno,by Christopher Smart.”

“Never heard of it.”

Pendergast smile faintly. “It’s a fairly obscure work by a fairly obscure writer. It is undeniably powerful in its strange vision, however; you should read it. The author, Smart, wrote it while he himself was half-insane in a debtor’s prison. In any case, there’s a long passage in the poem in which Smart describes his cat, Jeoffry, whom Smart believed to be some kind of chrysalis creature undergoing a physical conversion.”

“If you say so. But what does all this have to do with our vocal friend back there?”

“Obviously, the poor fellow identifies himself with the cat in the poem.”

“The cat?” D’Agosta asked incredulously.

“Why not? Kit Smart—the real Kit Smart—certainly did. It’s an extremely powerful image of metamorphosis. I feel sure this poor fellow was once an academician, or a failed poet, before the creeping descent into madness began. He killed one man, true enough—but only when his path was crossed at the wrong time. As for the rest…” Pendergast waved his hand. “There are many indications this man is not our true target.”

“Like the photographs,” D’Agosta said. All good interrogators knew that no killer could keep his eyes from photographs of his victims or artifacts from the crime scene. Yet, as far as D’Agosta could tell, Jeffrey had never moved his eyes to either picture.

“Exactly.” The elevator doors whispered open, and the two made their way through the hubbub toward D’Agosta’s office. “Or the fact that this murder, as Waxie describes it, has none of the elements of the blitzkrieg attacks suffered by the other victims. In any case, once I recognized his neurotic identification with the poem, it was easy enough to goad his madness to the surface.”

Pendergast closed the office door and waited until D’Agosta was seated before continuing. “But let’s put this irritating business behind us. Have you had any luck on that cross-correlation I requested?”

“DP just delivered it this morning.” D’Agosta thumbed through a tall sheaf of miniprinter output. “Let’s see. Eighty-five percent of the victims were male. And ninety-two percent were residents of Manhattan, including transients.”

“I’m primarily interested in things that allthe victims had in common.”

“Gotcha.” There was a pause. “All had last names beginning with letters other than I, S, U, V, X,and Z.”

Pendergast’s mouth twitched in what might have been a faint smile.

“All were older than twelve and younger than fifty-six. None of the victims were born in November.”

“Go on.”

“I think that’s it.” D’Agosta flipped some more pages. “Oh, here’s something else. We ran the data through SMUD, checking for various traits associated with serial murderers. The only common thread it found was that none of the murders were committed during a full moon.”

Pendergast sat up. “Indeed? That’s worth remembering. Anything else?”

“No, that’s it.”

“Thank you.” He sank back in the chair. “Still, it’s precious little. Information is what we need, Vincent, hard facts. And that’s why I can’t wait any longer.”

D’Agosta looked at him, uncomprehending. Then he frowned. “You’re not going down again.”

“Indeed I am. If Captain Waxie continues to insist this man is the killer, then the extra patrols will be called off. Vigilance will fade. Creating an atmosphere that can only make additional killings easier.”

“Where will you go?” D’Agosta asked.

“To the Devil’s Attic.”

D’Agosta snorted. “Come on, Pendergast. You don’t even know if such a place exists, let alone how to get there. You’ve got nothing but the word of that hobo.”

“I believe Mephisto’s word to be reliable,” Pendergast replied. “And in any case, I have considerably more than just his word. I’ve spoken with a city engineer named Al Diamond. He explained that the so-called Devil’s Attic is in reality a series of tunnels, constructed by New York’s wealthiest families before the turn of the century. They were intended as a private rail line, but abandoned after only a few years. And I’ve been able to reconstruct a rough approximation of the route of these tunnels.” Taking a marker from the desk, Pendergast moved the missing person’s map. He set the point of the marker down at the intersection of Park and 45th, drew a line over to Fifth, up to Grand Army Plaza, then diagonally across Central Park and north up Central Park West. Then he stepped back, looking at D’Agosta bemusedly.

D’Agosta stared at the map. Except for a few locations in the Park, almost all the white and red pins were clustered along the lines Pendergast had drawn.

“Holy shit,” he breathed.

“You could say that,” Pendergast said. “Diamond also pointed out that the sections of tunnels to the south and north of the Park have been sealed off. So it’s beneath the Park that I go.”

D’Agosta reached into his desk for a cigar. “I’m coming along.”

“Sorry, Vincent. You’re essential up here, now that the rest of the force is about to let down its guard. And I need you to work with Margo Green to determine the precise nature of Kawakita’s movements. We haven’t yet heard the last of his involvement in all this. In any case, this time around my goal will be stealth. It’s an extremely dangerous trip. Two of us would double the chances of our being discovered.” He replaced the marker cap with a snap of his finger. “However, if you could spare Sergeant Hayward’s expertise for a few hours, I could use some help in my preparations.”

Scowling, D’Agosta put the cigar down. “Christ, Pendergast—that’s a long trip down. You’ll be gone overnight.”

“More than that, I’m afraid.” The FBI agent put the marker back on the desk. “If you don’t hear from me within seventy-two hours…” He paused. Then, suddenly, he smiled and grasped D’Agosta’s hand. “A rescue mission would be foolish.”

“What about food?”

Pendergast feigned surprise. “Have you forgotten the delicacy of track rabbit au vin,spit-roasted over an open fire?”

D’Agosta grimaced, and Pendergast smiled reassuringly. “Fear not, Lieutenant. I’ll be well provisioned. Food, maps, all I need.”

“It’s like the journey to the center of the earth,” D’Agosta said, shaking his head.

“Indeed. I do feel a bit like an explorer setting out into parts unknown, peopled by unknown tribes. Odd to think it exists directly beneath our feet. Cui ci sono del mostri,my friend. Let us hope I avoid i mostri.Friend Hayward will see me off.”

Pendergast stood motionless a moment, apparently lost in thought. Then, with a final nod at D’Agosta, he swept out of the office and into the corridor beyond, the silk nap of his black suit shining dully under the fluorescent lights, the last of the great explorers.