Текст книги "Fever Dream"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

Yet somehow he felt uncomfortably certain Pendergast would reach Spanish Island. And–even given all that had happened between him and its occupant–he was finding it hard to leave Slade behind, and unprotected; harder, so much harder, than he'd steeled himself to ever expect.

In a curious way, deep down, he had known this would be the result as soon as Pendergast had shown up in Savannah with his accursed revelation. The man was preternatural. Twelve years of meticulous deception, blown up in a matter of two weeks. All because one barrel of a bloody rifle had not been cleaned. Unbelievable how such a small oversight could lead to such enormous consequences. And he hadn't helped matters any, blurting out about Audubon and New Madrid in his surprise at seeing Pendergast.

At least, Esterhazy thought, he had not made the mistake of underestimating the man... as so many others had done, to their great sorrow. Pendergast had no idea of his involvement. Nor did he know of the trump card he held in reserve. Those secrets Judson knew–without the slightest doubt–Slade would take with him, to the grave or elsewhere.

The night air breezed by his boat, the stars shimmered in the sky above, the trees stood blackly against the moonlit sky. The pullboat channel narrowed and grew shallow. Esterhazy began to calm further. There was always the possibility–a distinct one–Pendergast and the woman would die in the swamp before making it to the camp. After all, the woman had taken one of his rounds. She could easily be bleeding to death. Even if the wound wasn't immediately fatal, it would be sheer hell dragging her through that last section of swamp, infested with alligators and water moccasins, the water thick with leeches, the air choking with mosquitoes.

He slowed as the boat came to the silted-over end of the channel. Esterhazy shut off the engine, swiveled it up out of the water, and began poling. The very mosquitoes he had just been thinking about now arrived in swarms, clustering about his head and landing on his neck and ears. He slapped and cursed.

The silty channel divided, and he poled into the left one; he knew the swamp well. He continued, checking the fish finder to monitor the depth of the water. The moon was now high in the sky, and the swamp was almost as clear as day. Midnight: six hours to dawn.

He tried to imagine the scene at Spanish Island when they arrived, but it was depressing and frustrating. He spat into the water and put it out of his head. It didn't concern him anymore. Ventura had allowed himself to be captured by Hayward, the damn fool, but he'd said nothing before Judson put a bullet through his brain. Blackletter was dead; all those who could connect him to Project Aves were dead. There was no way to put the Project Aves genii back in the bottle. If Pendergast lived, it would all come out, theymight ultimately get wind of it, there was no help for that; but what was now critical was erasing his own role from it.

The events of the past week had made one thing crystal clear: Pendergast would figure it out. It was only a matter of time. That meant even Judson's own carefully concealed role would come to light. And because of that, Pendergast had to die.

But this time, the man would die on Esterhazy's terms, in his own good time, and when the FBI agent least expected it. Because Esterhazy retained one critical advantage: the advantage of surprise. The man was not invulnerable, and Esterhazy knew now exactly where his weakness lay and how to exploit it. Stupid of him not to have seen it before. A plan began to form in his mind. Simple, clean, effective.

The channel deepened enough to drop his engine. He lowered it and fired up, motoring slowly through the channels, working his way westward, constantly monitoring the depth below the keel. He would be at the Mississippi well before dawn; he could scuttle the boat in some backwater bayou and emerge from the swamp a new man. A line from The Art of Warsurfaced in his mind, unbidden:

Forestall your opponent by seizing what he holds dear, and contrive to strike him at the time and on the ground of your choosing.

So perfectly apposite to his situation.

76

THE SPECTER THAT PRESENTED ITSELF IN THE doorway froze Hayward with shock. The man was at least six and a half feet tall, gaunt, his face hollow with sunken cheeks, his dark eyes large and liquid under heavy brows, chin and neck bristling with half-shaven swipes of bristle. His hair was long and white, brushed back, curling behind the ears and tumbling to his shoulders. He wore a charcoal-gray Brooks Brothers suit jacket pulled over a hospital gown, and he carried a short stock-whip in one hand. With the other he wheeled an IV rack, which doubled as a kind of support.

It seemed to Hayward that he had almost materialized out of thin air, so quiet and stealthy had been his approach. His eyes–so bloodshot, they looked almost purple–didn't dart around the room as one would expect from a lunatic; rather, they moved very slowly from one person to the other, staring at–almost through–everyone in turn. When his eyes reached her, he winced visibly and closed his eyes.

"No, no, no," he murmured, his voice as whispery as the wind.

Turning away, June Brodie retrieved a spare lab coat and draped it over Larry's muddy shirt. "No bright colors," she whispered to Hayward. "Keep your movements slow."

Sluggishly, Slade opened his eyes again. The look of pain eased somewhat. Releasing his hold on the rack, he slowly raised a large, massively veined hand in a gesture of almost biblical gravitas. The hand unfolded, the long fingers shaking slightly, the index finger pointing at Pendergast. The huge dark eyes rested on the FBI agent. "You're the man looking to find out who killed his wife." His voice was thin as rice paper, and yet it somehow projected an arrogant self-assurance.

Pendergast said nothing. He seemed dazed, his torn suit still dripping with mud, his pale hair smeared and tangled.

Slowly, Slade let his arm fall to his side. " Ikilled your wife."

Pendergast raised his .45. "Tell me."

"No, wait–" June began.

"Silence," said Pendergast with quiet menace.

"That's right," breathed Slade, " silence. I ordered her killed. Helen–Esterhazy–Pendergast."

"Charles, the man has a gun," said June, her voice low but imploring. "He's going to kill you."

"Poppycock." He raised a finger and twirled it. "We all lost somebody. He lost a wife. I lost a son. So it goes." Then he repeated, with sudden intensity, in the same faint voice, "I lost a son."

June Brodie turned toward Pendergast, speaking sotto voce. "You mustn't get him talking about his son. That would set him back–and we'd made such progress!" A sob, immediately stifled, escaped her throat.

"I hadto have her killed. She was going to expose us. Terribly dangerous... for allof us..." Slade's eyes suddenly focused on nothing, widening as if in terror, staring at a blank wall. "Why are you here?" he murmured at nothing. "It isn't time!" He slowly raised the whip up over his head and brought it down with a terrific smack on his own back, once, twice, three times, each blow causing him to stagger forward, the tatters of the torn suit jacket fluttering to the ground.

The blow seemed to snap him back to reality. He straightened, refocused his eyes. The room became very still.

"You see?" the woman said to Pendergast. "Don't provoke him, for God's sake. He'll hurt himself."

"Provoke? I intend to do far more than that."

Pendergast's menacing tone chilled Hayward. She felt trapped, helpless, vulnerable, stuck in the bed with IVs. She grasped the tubes, pressed down on her arm, and yanked them out. She swung up and out of bed, momentarily dizzy.

"I will handle this," Pendergast told her.

"Remember," Hayward replied, "you promised you wouldn't kill him."

Pendergast ignored her, facing the man.

Slade's eyes suddenly went far away again, as if seeing something that wasn't there; his mouth worked strangely, the dry lips twitching and stretching in unvoiced speech, of which Hayward gradually made out a rapid susurrus of words. "Go away, go away, go away, go away..." He brought the whip down again on his back, which again seemed to shock him into lucidity. Trembling, he fumbled–moving as if underwater, yet with evident eagerness–for the IV rack, located a bulb hanging from a tube, and gave it a decided press.

Drugs, she thought. He's an addict.

The old man's eyes rolled up white for a moment before he recovered, the eyes popping open again. "The story is easily told," he went on in his low, hoarse voice. "Helen... Brilliant woman. A juicy piece of ass, too... I imagine you had some rollicking good times, eh?"

Hayward could see the gun in Pendergast's hand shaking ever so slightly under the fierceness of his grip.

"She made a discovery..." Another gasp and Slade's eyes defocused, staring into an empty corner, his lips trembling and whispering, unintelligible words tumbling out. His whip hand fluttered uselessly.

With a brisk step forward Pendergast slapped him across the face with shocking force. "Keep going."

Slade came back. "What do they say in the movies? Thanks, I needed that!" The old man shook briefly with silent mirth. "Yes, Helen... Her discovery was quite remarkable. I imagine you could tell me most of the story already, Mr. Pendergast. Right?"

Pendergast nodded.

A cough erupted from the wizened chest, silent spasms racking his frame. Slade wheezed, stumbled, pressed the bulb again. After a moment he resumed. "She brought the discovery to us, the avian flu, through an intermediary, and Project Aves was born. She hoped a miracle drug might be the result, a creativitytreatment. After all, it worked for Audubon–for a while. Mind enhancement. The ultimate drug..."

"Why did you give it up?" Pendergast asked. The neutral tone did not fool Hayward–the gun was still shaking in his hand. Hayward had never seen him so close to losing control.

"The research was expensive. Hideously expensive. We began to run out of money–despite all the corners we cut." And he raised his hand and–slowly, slowly–waved it around the room.

"And so this is where you did the work," Pendergast said. "Spanish Island was your laboratory."

"Bingo. Why build an expensive level-4 biocontainment facility, with negative pressure and biosuits and all the rest? We could just do it out here in the swamp, save ourselves a pot of money. We could keep the live cultures out here, do the really dangerous work where nobody was going to see, where there were no annoying government regulators poking their noses in."

So that's why Longitude had a dock facing the swamp, Hayward thought.

"And the parrots?" Pendergast asked.

"They were kept back at Longitude. Complex Six. But as I said, mistakes were made. One of our birds escaped, infected a family. A disaster? Not when I pointed out to everyone: Here's a way to save millions in experimental protocols; let's sit tight and just see what happens!"

He burst into another fit of silent mirth, his unshaven Adam's apple bobbing grotesquely. Bubbles of snot blew out of his nose and flecked his suit. He hacked up a huge gobbet of phlegm and bent over, allowing it to slide off his lips to the floor. Then he resumed.

"Helen objected to our way of doing business. The lady was a crusader. Once she found out about the Doane family–right before your little safari, by the way–she was going to expose us, go to the authorities no matter what. Just as soon as she got back." He spread his hands. "What else could we do but kill her?"

Pendergast spoke quietly. "Who is 'we'?"

"A few of us in the Aves Group. Dear June, here, had no idea–back then, at least. I kept her in the dark until just before the fire. Neither did poor old Carlton." He flapped at the silent man.

"The names, please."

"You have all the names. Blackletter. Ventura. By the way, where is Mike?"

Pendergast did not reply.

"Probably rotting in the swamp, thanks to you. Damn you to hell, Pendergast. He was not only the best security director a CEO could ask for, but he was our one link to civilization. Well, you may have killed Ventura, but you couldn't have killed him." Here Slade's low tone became almost proud. "And hisname you shall not have. I want to save that–to keep a little surprise for your future, maybe pay you back for Mike Ventura." He sniggered. "I'm sure he'll pop up when you least expect him."

Pendergast raised the gun again. "The name."

"No!" cried June.

Slade winced once more. "Your voice, my dear– please."

Brodie turned to Pendergast, clasping her hands together as if in supplication. "Don't hurt him," she whispered fiercely. "He's a good man, a verygood man! You have to understand, Mr. Pendergast, he's also a victim."

Pendergast's eyes went toward her.

"You see," she went on, "there was another accident at Project Aves. Charles got the disease himself."

If Pendergast was surprised by this, he showed no sign. "He made the decision to kill my wife beforehe got sick," he replied in a flat tone.

"That's all in the past," she said. "Nothing will bring her back. Can't you let it go?"

Pendergast stared at her, his eyes glittering.

"Charles almost died," she continued. "And then he... he had the idea for us to come out here. My husband," she nodded at the silent man standing to one side, "joined us later."

"You and Slade were lovers," Pendergast said.

"Yes." Not even a blush. She straightened up. "We arelovers."

"And you came out here–to hide?" said Pendergast. "Why?"

She said nothing.

Pendergast turned back to Slade. "It makes no sense. You had recovered from the illness before you retreated to the swamp. The mental deterioration hadn't begun. It was too early. Why did you retreat to the swamp?"

"Carlton and I are taking care of him," Brodie went on hastily. "Keeping him alive... It's very difficult to keep the ravages of the disease at bay... Don't question him further, you're disturbing him–"

"This disease," Pendergast said, cutting her off with a flick of his wrist. "Tell me about it."

"It affects the inhibitory and excitatory circuits of the brain," Brodie whispered eagerly, as if to distract him. "Overwhelms the brain with physical sensations–sight, smell, touch. It's a mutant form of flavivirus. At first it presents almost as acute encephalitis. Assuming he lives, the patient appears to recover."

"Just like the Doanes." Slade giggled. "Oh, dear me, yes– justlike the Doanes. We kept a very close eye on them."

"But the virus has a predilection for the thalamus," Brodie continued. "Especially the LGB."

"Lateral geniculate body," Slade said, slapping himself viciously with the whip.

"Not unlike herpes zoster," Brodie went on rapidly, "which takes up residence in the dorsal root ganglion and years, or decades, later resurfaces to cause shingles. But it eventually kills its host neurons."

"End result–insanity," Slade whispered. His eyes began to defocus and his lips began moving silently, faster and faster.

"And all this–" Pendergast gestured with the gun. "The morphine drip, the flail–are distractions from the continuous barrage of sensation?"

Brodie nodded eagerly. "So you see, he's not responsible for what he's saying. We might just be able to get him back to where he was before. We've been trying–trying for years. There's still hope. He's a good man, a healer, who's done good works."

Pendergast raised the gun higher. His face was as pale as marble, his torn suit hanging off his frame like rags. "I have no interest in this man's good works. I want only one thing: the name of the final person on Project Aves."

But Slade had slid off again into his own world, jabbering softly at the blank wall, his fingers twitching. He gripped the IV stand and his whole body began to tremble, the stand shaking. A double press of the bulb brought him back under control.

"You're torturing him!" Brodie whispered.

Pendergast ignored her, faced Slade. "The decision to kill her: it was yours?"

"Yes. At first the others objected. But then they saw we had no choice. She wouldn't be appeased, she wouldn't be bought off. So we killed her, and most ingeniously! Eaten by a trained lion." He broke into another carefully contained spasm of silent laughter.

The gun began to shake more visibly in Pendergast's hands.

"Crunch, crunch!" Slade whispered, his eyes wide with glee. "Ah, Pendergast, you have no idea what sort of Pandora's box you've opened up with this investigation of yours. You've roused the sleeping dog with a kick in the ass."

Pendergast took aim.

"You promised," Hayward said in a low, insistent voice.

"He must die," whispered Pendergast, almost to himself. "This man must die."

"The man must die," Slade said mockingly, his voice rising briefly above a whisper before falling again. "Kill me, please. Put me out of my misery!"

"You promised," Hayward repeated.

Abruptly, almost as if overcoming an invisible opponent in a physical struggle, Pendergast lowered the pistol with a jerk of his hand. Then he took a step toward Slade, twirled the gun around, and offered him the grip.

Slade seized it, yanked it from Pendergast's grasp.

"Oh, my God," Brodie cried. "What are you doing? He'll kill you for sure!"

Slade, with an expert motion, retracted the slide, snapped it back, then slowly raised the gun at Pendergast. A crooked smile disfigured his gaunt face. "I'm going to send you to the same place I sent your bitch of a wife." His finger curled around the trigger and began to tighten.

77

JUST A MOMENT," PENDERGAST SAID. "BEFORE YOU shoot, I'd like to speak to you a minute. In private."

Slade looked at him. The big handgun looked almost like a toy in his gnarled fist. He steadied himself against the IV rack. "Why?"

"There's something you need to know."

Slade looked at him a moment. "What a poor host I've been. Come into my office."

June Brodie made a move to protest, but Slade, with a flick of the gun, gestured Pendergast through the doorway. "Guests first," he said.

Pendergast shot a warning glance at Hayward, then disappeared through the dark rectangle.

The hallway was paneled with cedar, painted over in gray. Recessed lights in the ceiling cast low, regular pools of light onto neutral carpeting, its weave tight and plush. Slade walked slowly behind Pendergast, the wheels of his IV making no noise as they turned. "Last door on the left," he said.

The room that served as Slade's office had once been the game room of the lodge. A dartboard hung on the wall, and there were a couple of chairs and two tables shoved up against the walls, tops inlaid for backgammon and chess. A snooker table near the back apparently served as Slade's desk: its felt surface was empty save for carefully folded tissues, a crossword magazine, a book on advanced calculus, and several additional flails, their tips tattered from constant use. A few ancient snooker balls, crazed with craquelure, still lay forlornly in one pocket. There was little other furniture: the big room was remarkably bare. Gauzy curtains were drawn tightly over the windows. The space had the stillness of a tomb.

Slade closed the door with exquisite care. "Sit down."

Pendergast dragged a cane chair out and set it on the thick carpet before the table. Slade wheeled his IV rack behind the table and sat down very slowly and carefully in the lone easy chair. He pressed the bulb on the IV line, eyes fluttering as the morphine hit his bloodstream, sighed, then trained the gun again on Pendergast. "Okey-dokey," he said, his voice remaining whispery and slow. "Say what you have to say so that I can get on with shooting you." He smiled faintly. "It'll make a mess, of course. But June will clean it up. She's good at cleaning up my messes."

"Actually," Pendergast said, "you're not going to shoot me."

Slade emitted a careful little cough. "No?"

"That's what I wanted to speak to you about. You're going to shoot yourself."

"Now, why would I want to do that?"

Instead of replying, Pendergast stood up and walked over to a cuckoo clock that stood on a side wall. He pulled up the counterweights, set the time to ten minutes before twelve, then gave the pendulum a flick with his fingernail to start it.

"Eleven fifty?" Slade said. "That's not the correct time."

Pendergast sat down again. Slade waited. The tick of the now-active cuckoo clock began to fill the silence. Slade seemed to stiffen slightly. His lips began to move.

"You are going to kill yourself because justice demands it," Pendergast said.

"To satisfy you, I suppose."

"No. To thwartme."

"I won'tkill myself," Slade said out loud, the first words he had spoken above a papery whisper.

"I hope you won't," Pendergast said, plucking two snooker balls from the corner pocket. "You see, I want you to live."

Slade said, "You're making no sense. Even to a madman."

Pendergast began rolling the pool balls back and forth in one hand, Queeg-like, clacking them together.

"Stop that," Slade hissed, wincing. "I don't like it."

Pendergast clacked the balls together a little more loudly. "I hadplanned to kill you. But now that I've seen the condition you're in, I realize the cruelest thing I could do would be to let you live. There's no cure. Your suffering will go on, only increasing with old age and infirmity, your mind sinking ever deeper into misery and ruin. Death would be a release."

Slade shook his head slowly, his lips twitching, the muttered sounds of broken words tumbling from his lips. He groaned with something very much like physical pain, and then gave the morphine drip another pump.

Pendergast reached into his pocket, took out a small test tube half full of black granules. He tipped out a small line of the granules along the edge of the pool table.

The action seemed to bring Slade back around. "What are you doing?"

"I always carry a little activated charcoal. It's useful in so many field tests–as a scientist, you must know that. But it has its own aesthetic properties, as well." From another pocket Pendergast pulled out a lighter, swiftly lit one end of the granules. "For example, the smoke it emits tends to curl upward in such beautiful gossamer patterns. And the smell is far from unpleasant."

Slade leaned backward sharply. He trained the gun, which had sagged to the floor, toward Pendergast again. "You put that out."

Pendergast ignored him. Smoke curled up in the still air, looping and coiling. He leaned back in his chair, forcing it to rock slightly, the old canework creaking. He rolled the pool balls together as he went on. "You see, I knew–or at least guessed at–the nature of your affliction. But I never stopped to think just how awful it would be to endure. Every creak, click, tap, and squeak intruding itself into your brain. The chirping of the birds, the brightness of the sun, the smell of smoke... To be tormented by every little thing carried into your brain by the five senses, to live at the edge of being overwhelmed every minute of every hour of every day. To know that nothing can be done, nothing at all. Even your, ah, unique relationship with June Brodie can provide nothing but temporary diversion."

"Her husband lost his apparatus in Desert Storm," Slade said. "Blown off by an IED. I've stepped in to fill the breach, so to speak."

"How nice for you," said Pendergast.

"Go stuff your conventional morality. I don't need it. Anyway, you heard June." The mad sheen to his eyes seemed to fade somewhat, and he looked almost serious. "We're working on a cure."

"You saw what happened to the Doanes. You're a biologist. You know as well as I do there's no hope for a cure. Brain cells cannot be replaced or regrown. The damage is permanent. You knowthis."

Slade seemed to go off again, his lips moving faster and faster, the hiss of air from his lungs like a punctured tire, repeating the same word, "No! No, no, no, no, no!"

Pendergast watched him, rocking, the snooker balls moving more quickly in his hand, their clacking filling the air. The clock ticked, the smoke curled.

"I couldn't help but notice," Pendergast said, "how everything here was arranged to remove any extraneous sensory trigger. Carpeted floor, insulated walls, neutral colors, plain furnishings, the air cool, dry, and scentless, probably HEPA-filtered."

Slade whimpered, his lips fairly blurring with maniacal, and virtually silent, speech. He lifted the flail, smacked himself.

"And yet even with all that, even with the counterirritant of that flail and the medicines and the constant dosings of morphine, it isn't enough. You are still in constant agony. You feel your feet upon the floor, you feel your back against the chair, you see everything in this room. You hear my voice. You are assaulted by a thousand other things I can't begin to enumerate–because my mind unconsciously filters them out. You, on the other hand, cannot tune it out. Anyof it. Listen to the snooker balls! Examine the curling smoke! Hear the relentless passage of time."

Slade began to shake in his chair. "Nononononononoooo!"spilled off his lips, a single never-ending word. A loop of drool descended from one corner of his mouth, and he shook it away with a savage jerk of his head.

"I wonder–what must it be like to eat?" Pendergast went on. "I imagine it's horrible, the strong taste of the food, the sticky texture, the smell and shape of it in your mouth, the slide of it down your gullet... Isn't that why you're so thin? No doubt you haven't enjoyed a meal or a drink– reallyenjoyed–for a decade. Taste is just another unwanted sense you can't rid yourself of. I'll wager that IV drip isn't only for the morphine–it's for intravenous feeding as well, isn't it?"

Nonononononononono... Slade reached spastically for the flail, dropped it back on the desk. The gun trembled in his hand.

"The taste of food–mellow ripe Camembert, beluga caviar, smoked sturgeon, even the humblest eggs and toast and jam–would be unbearable. Perhaps baby food of the most banal sort, without sugar or spice or texture of any kind, served precisely at body temperature, would only just be bearable. On special occasions, naturally." Pendergast shook his head sympathetically. "And you can't sleep–can you? Not with all those raging sensations crowding in on you. I can imagine it: lying on the bed, hearing the least of noises: the woodworms gnawing between the lathe and plaster, the beat of your heart in your eardrums, the ticking of the house, the scurry of mice. Even with your eyes closed your sight betrays you, because darkness is its own color. The blacker the room, the more things you see crawling within the fluid of your vision. And everything– everything–pressing in on you at once, always and forever."

Slade shrieked, covering his ears with claw-like hands and shaking his entire body violently, the IV drip line flailing back and forth. The sound ripped through the stillness, shockingly loud, and Slade's entire body seemed to convulse.

"That is why you will kill yourself, Mr. Slade," Pendergast said. "Because you can. I've provided you with the means to do it. In your hand."

"Yaaahhhhhhhhh!" Slade screamed, writhing, the tortured movements of his body a kind of feedback from his own screams.

Pendergast rocked more quickly, the chair creaking, rolling the balls ceaselessly in his hand, faster and faster.

"I could have done it anytime!" Slade cried. "Why should I do it now? Now, now, now, now, now?"

"You couldn't have done it before," Pendergast said.

"June has a gun," Slade said. "A lovely gun, gun, gun."

"No doubt she is careful to keep it locked up."

"I could overdose on morphine! Just go to sleep, sleep!" His voice subsided into a rapid gibbering, almost like the humming of a machine.

Pendergast shook his head. "I'm sure June is equally careful to regulate the amount of morphine you have access to. I would guess the nights are hardest–like about now, as you're quickly using up your allotted dose without recourse for the endless, endlessnight ahead."

"Eeeyaaahhhhhhhhhh!"Slade screamed again–a wild, ululating scream.

"In fact, I'm sure she and her husband are careful to limit your life in countless ways. You're not her patient–you're her prisoner."

Slade shook his head, his mouth working frantically, soundlessly.

"And with all her ministrations," Pendergast went on, "all her medication, her perhaps more exotic means of holding your attention–she can't stop all those sensations from creeping in. Can she?"

Slade didn't respond. He pressed the morphine button once, twice, three times, but apparently nothing more was coming through. Then he slumped forward, head hitting the felt of the desk with a loud crack, jerked it back up, his lips contracting spastically.

"Usually I consider suicide a cowardly way out," Pendergast said. "But in your case it's the only sensible solution. Because for you, life really is so much infinitely worse than death."

Still, Slade didn't respond. He banged his head again and again onto the felt.

"Even the least amount of sensory input is exquisitely painful," Pendergast went on. "That's why this environment of yours is so controlled, so minimalist. Yet I have introduced new elements. My voice, the smell of the charcoal, the curls and colors of its smoke, the squeaking of the chair, the sound of the billiard balls, the ticking of the clock. I would estimate you are now a vessel that is, so to speak, full to bursting."

He continued, his voice low and mesmerizing. "In less than half a minute now, the cuckoo of that clock is going to sound–twelve times. The vessel will burst. I don't know exactly how many of the cuckoo calls you'll be able to withstand before you use that gun on yourself. Perhaps four, perhaps five, perhaps even six. But I know that you willuse it–because the sound of that gun firing, that final sound, is the onlyanswer. The onlyrelease. Consider it my gift to you."

Slade looked up. His forehead was red from where it had impacted the table, and his eyes wheeled in his head as if set free of each other. He raised his gun hand toward Pendergast, let it fall back, raised it again.