Текст книги "Dance Of Death"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

FIFTY-THREE

Larry Enderby sat at his console in the Advanced Technology Center, puffing slightly. The hollowness in his stomach had gone, replaced with an uncomfortable bloated feeling. He felt like a frigging suckling pig, to tell the truth. He belched, let out his belt a notch. All that was missing was the shiny red apple for his mouth.

He glanced over at his co-workers, Walt Smith and Jim Choi. Smitty-who, true to his nature, had acted with restraint-was staring at a bank of monitors, no worse for wear. The same couldn't be said for Choi, who was slumped at his terminal, a glazed expression on his face. During the fifteen minutes Smitty had allotted, Choi had indeed shown a remarkable ability to bolt down jumbo shrimp and glasses of champagne. Enderby had given up counting shrimp at sixty-two.

He eased up another bolus of air, then patted his stomach gingerly. They'd gotten to the food table just in time: the feeding frenzy was almost over. There was a dribble of caviar on his shirtfront, and he flicked it away with a fingernail. But that fourth glass of champagne he'd chugged at the last moment had probably been a mistake. He just hoped he could keep it together for the rest of his shift. He glanced up at the clock: only another hour. They'd verify that the Astor Hall's upgraded security system was fully operational, then go through the procedure of mothballing the old system. No sweat: he'd done it dozens of times before, he could probably do it in his sleep.

A low chime sounded. "That's it," Smitty said. "Twenty minutes." He glanced over at Choi. "What's the status of the Astor Hall system?"

Choi blinked a little blearily at his screen. "Test completed without incident." His eye swept the cluster of video feeds. "Hall looks fine."

"Error logs?"

"None. The system's nominal."

"And the beam modulation?"

"Every five minutes, as programmed. No deviation."

Smitty walked over to the wall of monitors. Enderby watched as he peered at the video feeds devoted to the Astor Hall of Diamonds. He could see case after case of the precious gems, gleaming faintly in the infrared light. There was no movement, of course: once the laser beams were activated after lockdown, not even guards were permitted in the high-security exhibition halls.

Smitty grunted his approval, then walked over to his monitoring station and picked up the internal phone. "Carlos? It's Walt in the ATC. We've completed the twenty-minute shakedown of the Astor Hall laser grid. How'd it look from Central Security?" A pause. "Okay, good. We'll get the standard scheduling online and mothball the prior."

He hung up the phone and glanced over at Enderby. "The Pit says that everything's five by five. Larry, put it to bed. I'll help Jim finalize the automation routines for the laser grid."

Larry nodded and pulled his chair closer to the console. Time to put the old security system in backup mode. He blinked, wiped the back of a hand across his mouth, then began typing in a series of commands.

Almost immediately, he sat back. "That's strange."

Smitty looked over. "What is?"

Enderby pointed at an LED screen sitting on the side of his work-station. A single red dot glowed in its upper left corner. "When I rolled back the first zone into standby mode, the system gave me a code red."

Smitty frowned. A "code red" was the legacy system's alarm setting. In the Astor Hall, this would have been activated only when a diamond was removed from its setting. "What zone was that?"

"Zone 1."

"What's it contain?"

Enderby turned to a separate console, accessed the accession and inventory database, typed in a SQL query. "Just a single diamond. Lucifer's Heart."

"That's right in the center of the room." Smitty walked over to the bank of video monitors, peered at one closely "Looks fine to me. We're dealing with some kind of software glitch here."

He glanced back toward Enderby. "Roll back zone 2."

Enderby typed a few more commands into his primary terminal. Immediately, a second red dot glowed into view on the LED screen. "That's giving me a code red, too."

Smitty walked over, a worried look coming onto his face.

Enderby stared at the screen. His mouth was dry, and the alcohol haze was dissipating fast.

"Do a global rollback," Smitty said. "All zones in the hall."

Enderby took a deep breath, then typed a short sequence on his keyboard. Immediately, he was flooded with dismay.

"Oh, no," he breathed. "No."

The little LED screen on Enderby's desk had just blossomed into a Christmas tree of red.

For a moment, there was a shocked silence. Then Smitty waved his hand dismissively.

"Let's not have a cow here. What we've got is a software glitch. Incompatibility between the new system and the old probably crashed the legacy system. Must've happened when we pulled it off-line. Nothing to get excited about. Larry, shut down the old system, one module at a time. Then reboot from the backup master."

"Shouldn't we report to Central?"

"What, and make ourselves look like idiots? We'll report afterwe've solved the problem."

"Okay. You're the boss." And Enderby began to type.

Smitty mustered a weak grin and gestured at the video screens of the empty hall, the diamonds glittering within their cases. "I mean, hey-take a look. Does the hall look robbed to you?"

Enderby had to chuckle. Maybe Smitty was acquiring a sense of humor, after all.

FIFTY-FOUR

D'Agosta moved through the channels on the portable police-band radio he'd pulled from the Rolls, searching for more official chatter about him and Pendergast. Their appearance at Kennedy had set off an APB across the entire length of Long Island, from Queens to Bridgehampton. The Rolls had been impounded at the rental lot, and in time the authorities had identified the Toyota Camry they'd stolen, and put out an advisory on that, as well. They'd managed to evade several roadblocks established on the Long Island Expressway by keeping to back roads and taking their cues from the radio advisories.

They were in a net, and the net was drawing tighter.

Still, Pendergast searched, stopping at one all-night service area after another, refusing to give up-and yet to D'Agosta it seemed a hopeless task, the kind of last-resort, brute-force police work that soaked up man-hours and rarely yielded results. It was a numbers game in which the numbers were just too damn big.

Pendergast screeched into an all-night service area at Yaphank, which looked just like the two dozen others they had already visited: glassed-in front, sickly green fluorescent lights beating back the bitter darkness. At some point, D'Agosta mused, they were going to get an attendant who had heard about the APB. And that would be it.

Yet again, Pendergast leaped out of the Camry like a cat. The man seemed to burn with a fierce, inextinguishable flame. They'd been at it more than twelve hours straight, and during all that time spent alternately searching and evading, he'd said few words not directly related to the game at hand. D'Agosta wondered how long the agent could keep it up.

Pendergast was into the little store and in the sleepy attendant's face before the man could even rouse himself from his cozy chair behind the counter, where he'd apparently been watching a martial arts movie.

"Special Agent Pendergast, FBI," he said in his usual cool voice, which somehow managed to convey menace without being offensive, as he passed his shield across the man's field of view. At the same time, D'Agosta reached over and snapped off the television, creating a sudden, unnerving silence.

The man's chair legs clunked down on the floor as he hastily righted himself. "FBI? Sure, yeah, right. What can I do for you?"

"When do you go on shift?" Pendergast asked.

"At midnight."

"I want you to look at these." He removed the prints he had collected at Kennedy, held one in front of the attendant. "Have you seen this man? He would have come in last night, sometime between one and three."

The attendant took the photo, screwing up his face. D'Agosta watched carefully, relaxing slightly. Clearly, the guy knew nothing of the APB. He glanced out toward the dark highway. It was almost four in the morning. It was only a matter of time. They weren't ever going to get a lead, this was needle-and-haystack stuff. The police would find them, and…

"Yeah," the guy said. "I saw him."

The air in the tiny store went electric.

"Look at this photo as well, please." Pendergast passed the man a second image. "I want you to be sure." He spoke quietly, but his body was tense as a coiled spring.

"That's him again," the man murmured. "I remember those funny eyes, kind of freaked me out."

"Did you see this car?" Pendergast murmured, showing him a third image.

"Well, I can't say I remember that. He did the self-serve, you know?"

Pendergast took back the photographs. "And your name is-?"

"Art Malek."

"Mr. Malek, can you tell us if anyone was with him?"

"He came into the store alone. And like I said, I didn't go out, so I really can't say if there was anybody in the car. Sorry."

"That's all right." Pendergast returned the photos to his jacket and drew still closer. "Now, tell me exactly what you remember from the time this man arrived to the time he left."

"Well… it was last night, like you said, must have been close to three in the morning. There wasn't anything unusual about it-he pulled up, filled the car himself, came in to pay."

"Cash."

"Right."

"Did you notice anything else about him?"

"Not really. Had a funny accent, kind of like yours. No offense," Malek added hastily. "In fact, he looked kind of like you."

"What was he wearing?"

A labored effort to remember. "All I can remember is a dark overcoat. Long."

"Did he do anything else but pay?"

"Seems to me he wandered about the aisles a bit. Didn't buy anything, though."

At this, Pendergast stiffened. "I assume you have security cameras in the back aisles?"

"Sure do."

"I'd like to see the tapes from last night."

The man hesitated. "The system recycles them on a thirty-hour loop, and it gets erased as-"

"Then please stop the security system now.I must see the tape."

The man almost jumped to comply, hastening into a back office.

"Looks like we've finally got a lead," said D'Agosta.

The pair of eyes Pendergast turned on him seemed almost dead. "On the contrary. Diogenes hoped we would find this place."

"How do you know?"

Pendergast didn't answer.

The man came huffing out of the back room with a videotape. Pendergast ejected the movie from the VCR and shoved in the security tape. A ceiling-level shot of the tiny store came into view, a time and date stamp in the bottom left corner. Pendergast punched the rewind button, stopped, rewound again. Within a minute, he'd located the 3 a.m. time stamp for January 28. Next, he cued it back another half hour to allow for a margin of error. Then they began watching the tape at accelerated speed.

The black-and-white picture quality was poor. The aisles of the convenience store glowed and flickered on the screen. Now and then a huddled shape raced through on fast-forward, like a pinball, bounced around grabbing things off shelves, then disappeared again.

Suddenly, Pendergast jabbed the play button, slowing it to a normal pace as yet another dark figure entered the screen. The figure strolled down the aisle, its eyes-differing shades of gray-seeking out and fixing on the security camera.

It was Diogenes. A smile spread over his face as he casually reached into his pocket and withdrew a piece of paper. He unfolded it and nonchalantly held it up to the camera.

BRAVO, FRATER!

TOMORROW, CALL AT 466 AND

ASK FOR VIOLA.

THIS WILL BE OUR

LAST COMMUNICATION.

MAY OUR NEW LIVES BEGIN!

VALEAS.

"Four six six?" said D'Agosta. "That's not a legit emergency number…"

Then he stopped. It was not a telephone number, he realized, but an address. Four sixty-six First Avenue was the underground entrance at Bellevue that led to the New York City Morgue.

Pendergast rose, ejected the tape, and put it in his pocket.

"You can keep that," said the attendant helpfully as they left.

Pendergast slipped behind the wheel, started the Camry, but did not move. His face was gray, his eyes half lidded.

There was a terrible silence. D'Agosta could think of nothing to say. He felt almost physically ill. This was even worse than at the Dakota-worse because, for the last twelve hours, they'd had hope. Slender, but hope nevertheless.

"I'll check the police band," he said stiffly. It was a pointless gesture, just something to keep himself busy. And even police chatter about the APB was preferable to the dreadful silence.

Pendergast didn't respond as D'Agosta turned on the radio.

A burst of frantic, overlapping voices poured from the speaker.

Instinctively, D'Agosta glanced out the window. Had they been spotted? But the roads around the service area were deserted.

He leaned forward and changed the frequency. More frantic voices.

"What the hell?" D'Agosta punched the button, changed the frequency again and again. Almost half the available channels were taken up, and the talk wasn't about them. Something big, it seemed, was going down in the city. As he listened, trying to figure out what it was, he became aware that Pendergast was listening, too, suddenly totally alert.

The talk on the current channel was about the Museum of Natural History, a theft of some kind. It seemed the Astor Hall of Diamonds had been hit.

"Go to the command-and-control channel," Pendergast said.

D'Agosta dialed it in.

"Rocker wants you to sweat the techies,"a voice was saying. "This was an inside job, that much is clear."

D'Agosta listened in disbelief. Rocker at four in the morning? This must be gigantic.

"They got 'em all? Including Lucifer's Heart?"

"Yup. And see who knew the specs on the security system, get a list, move through it fast. Museum security, too."

"Got that. Who's the insurer?"

"Affiliated Transglobal."

"Jeez, they're going to shit bricks when they learn about this."

D'Agosta, glancing at Pendergast, was shocked at the rapt expression on his face. Strange how, at this moment of ultimate crisis, he could become so fixated on something that had no bearing or the problem at hand.

"The museum's president is on his way. And they've gotten the mayor out of bed. You know how he'll crucify anybody who lets him get behind the curve on a major-"

"Someone knocked off the diamond hall," said D'Agosta. "I guess that's why we've been temporarily upstaged."

Pendergast said nothing. D'Agosta was taken aback by the look on his face.

"Hey, Pendergast," he said. "You okay?"

Pendergast turned his pale eyes toward him. "No," he whispered.

"I don't get it. What's this got to do with anything? It's a diamond heist-"

"Everything."And then the FBI agent looked away, out into the winter darkness. "All these brutal killings, all these mocking notes and messages… nothing more than a smoke screen. A cruel, coldblooded, sadistic smoke screen."

He tore away from the curb and headed back into the neighborhood they had just passed through.

"Where are we going?"

Instead of answering, Pendergast jammed on the brakes, pulling up in front of a split-level house. He pointed to an F150 pickup parked in the driveway. For Salewas written on the windshield in soap.

"We need a new vehicle," he said. "Get ready to move the radio and laptop into that truck."

"Buy a car at four a.m.?"

"A stolen car is reported too quickly. We need more time."

Pendergast got out of the car and strode up the short concrete walk. He rang the bell, rang it again. After a minute, the lights on the second floor came on. A window scraped open, and a voice shouted down: "What do you want?"

"The pickup-it's operational?"

"Hell, pal, it's four in the morning!"

"Will hard cash help get you out of bed?"

With a muttered curse, the window shut. A moment later, the porch light came on and a corpulent man in a bathrobe appeared at the door. "It's three thousand. And it works good. Got a full tank of gas, too."

Pendergast reached into his suit, removed a book of cash, peeled off thirty hundreds.

"What's going on?" the man asked a little blearily.

Pendergast pulled out his badge. "I'm with the FBI." He nodded at D'Agosta. "He's NYPD."

Balancing the radio and laptop under one arm, D'Agosta removed his shield.

"We're working an undercover narcotics job. Be a good citizen and keep this to yourself, all right?"

"Sure thing." The man accepted the cash.

"The keys?"

The man disappeared, came back a moment later with an envelope. "The title's in there, too."

Pendergast took the envelope. "An officer will be by shortly to take care of our previous vehicle. But don't say anything about the car or about us, not even to another police officer. You know how it is with undercover cases."

The man nodded vigorously. "Sure do. Hell, the only books I read are true crime."

Pendergast thanked the man and turned away. A minute later, they were inside the truck, accelerating from the curb.

"That should buy us a few hours," Pendergast said as he raced back in the direction of the Montauk Highway.

FIFTY-FIVE

Diogenes Pendergast drove slowly, without hurry, through the bleak winter townscapes along the Old Stone Highway: Barnes Hole, Eastside, Springs. Ahead, a traffic light turned red, and he coasted to a stop at the intersection.

He eased his large head to the left, to the right. A wintry potato field stretched to one side, frozen and dusted with snow. At its edge stood a dark wood of bare trees, branches etched in white. The world was black and white and it had no depth: it was flat, like a nightmare confection of Edwin A. Abbott. Fie, fie how franticly I square my talk…

The light moved down, indicating it had turned green, and Diogenes slowly depressed the accelerator. The car nosed forward and swung right onto Springs Road as he turned the wheel, letting it slide through his hands as the car straightened out. He increased the pressure on the accelerator, easing off as the vehicle approached the speed limit. More gray potato fields passed on his right, beyond which stood several rows of gray houses, and beyond that, the Acabonack Marshes.

All gray, exquisite gray.

Diogenes reached to the dash and turned the heater vent several clicks to the right, increasing the flow of warmth into the glass, steel, and plastic compartment that enclosed his body. He felt neither triumph nor vindication, only a curious kind of emptiness: the sort that came with the achievement of a great thing, the completion of a long-planned work.

Diogenes lived in a world of gray. Color did not enter his world, except fleetingly, when he least expected it, coming in from the corner of his eye like a Zen koan. Koan. Ko. Koan ko. Ko ko rico, ko ko rico…

Long ago, his world had attenuated to shades of gray, a monochromatic universe of shape and shadow, where true color had vanished even from his waking dreams. No, not quite. Such a statement would be dissembling, melodrama. There wasa final repository of color in his world, and it was there, in the leather satchel beside him.

The car moved down the empty road. No one was out.

He could tell, from a shifting of the monochromatic landscape around him, that night was relinquishing its hold on the world. Dawn was not far away. But Diogenes had little use for sunlight, just as he had little use for warmth or love or friendship or any of the countless things that nourished the rest of humanity.

As he drove, he played back, in meticulous detail, the events of the night before. He went over every last action, motion, statement, taking pleasure in satisfying himself that he had made no errors. At the same time, he thought of the days ahead, mentally ticking off the preparations he would have to make, the tasks he'd need to perform, the great journey he would make-and, aber natürlich,the journey's end. He thought of Viola, of his brother, of his childhood, multithreaded multiplexing waking daydreams that seemed more real than the present. Unlike the other bags of meat and blood that made up his species, Diogenes mused, he could process several disparate trains of thought simultaneously in his head.

The Event which had robbed Diogenes of color had also stolen his ability to sleep. Full oblivion was denied him. Instead, he drifted, he lay on his bed in a world of waking dreams: memories of the past, conflagrations, conversations, conflations, certain animals poisoned and dying with exquisite restraint, racked bodies on splintered roods, a hair shirt fashioned from nerve ganglia, a mason jar of freshblood-the disconnected images from his past played on the screen of his mind like a magic-lantern show. Diogenes never resisted them. Resistance would be futile, and futility itself was, of course, to be resisted. He let the scenes drift in and out as they would.

All this would change. The great wheel would come around, because he-after all-was about to break a butterfly upon a wheel. The thing that had preyed upon his mind would at long last be exorcised. His revenge on his brother was all but complete.

As he drove, Diogenes let his thoughts drift back almost thirty years. At first-after it had happened-he had lost himself in the inner maze of his mind, wandering as far from reality and sanity as it was possible to go, while even a small part of him remained prosaic, quotidian, able to interact with the outside world, whose true nature now-thanks to the Event-stood revealed to him.

But then-slowly, very slowly-insanity alone lost its power to shelter. It was no longer a comfort, even a bitter one. So he came back, but he was like a diver who had gone too deep, run out of air, and rushed to the surface only to be racked by the bends.

That was the worst moment of all.

And yet it was at this very moment, as he balanced on the cruel knife-edge of reality, that he comprehended there wasa purpose waiting for him back in the real world. A double purpose: a reckoning and a reclamation. It would take decades of planning. It would be, in his own self-referential world, a work of art: the masterpiece of a lifetime.

Why then Ile fit you.

And so Diogenes did return to the world.

He knew now what kind of place it really was and what kind of creatures inhabited it. It was not a lovely world, no, not a lovely world at all. It was a world of pain and evil and cruelty, walked on by vile creatures of piss and excrement and bile. But his newfound purpose, the end toward which he had bent all his intellect, made such a world justbearable. He became a chameleon par excellence, hiding everything, everything,behind a fast-changing skin of disguise, prevarication, misdirection, irony, cool detachment.

At times, when his will threatened to crumble, he found that certain temporary pastimes were enough to divert him, to haul him up from the deeps. The emotion that sustained him some might call hatred, but for him it was the mead that nourished him, that gave him superhuman patience and a fanatic's attention to detail. He found he could live not merely a double life or a triple life, but in fact could assume the very personalities and lives of half a dozen invented people, in several different countries, as the needs of his work of art required.

Some of the personalities he had assumed years, even decades before, as he laid the complex groundwork of his master plan.

Ahead, an intersection. Diogenes slowed, turned right.

Night was relinquishing its hold on the world, but Suffolk County still slept. It gave Diogenes comfort to know that his brother, Aloysius, was not one of those sunken in voluptuous or erotic stupefaction. Nor would Aloysius sleep well again: ever. Just now he would be growing fully conscious of the dimensions of what he, Diogenes, had done to him.

His plan had the power and functional perfection of a well-oiled bear trap. And now Aloysius was caught in its jaws, awaiting the arrival of the hunter and the merciful bullet to the brain. Only, Diogenes would show no such mercy.

His eyes strayed back to the satchel on the passenger seat. He had not opened it since filling it hours before. The transcendental moment, when he looked at-or rather into-the diamonds at leisure had almost arrived. The moment of freedom, of release, he had so long yearned for.

For only through the intense, brilliant, refracted light issued by a deeply colored diamond could Diogenes escape, if only for a moment, his black-and-white prison. Only then could he recapture that faintest and most sought-after of his memories-the essence of color. And of all the colors he most longed for, red was his overriding passion. Red in all its myriad manifestations.

Lucifer's Heart. That was where he would begin and where he would end. The alpha and the omega of color.

Then there would be Viola to take care of.

The instruments had all been cleaned, polished, honed, and stropped to their sharpest edges. Viola would take some time. She was a grand cruwine that merited being taken up from the cellar, brought to room temperature, uncorked, and allowed to breathe– before being enjoyed, one exquisite sip after another, until nothing was left. She had to suffer-not for her sake, but for the marks it would leave on her body. And no one would be better able to interpret those marks than Aloysius. They would induce a suffering in him equal to, if not exceeding, the pain they caused the body's owner.

Perhaps he would start with a re-creation, in the cottage's damp stone basement, of the scene depicted in Judith and Holofernes.That had always been his favorite painting of Caravaggio's. He'd stood in front of it for hours, at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica in Rome, rapt in admiration: the lovely little furrow of determination on Judith's brow as she did the knifework; the way she kept every part of her body, save her bare hands and arms, away from the messy work in progress; the bright strong cords of blood that slashed diagonally across the bedsheets. Yes, that would make a fine start. Perhaps he and Viola could even study the painting together, before he got to work. Judith and Holofernes. With the roles reversed, of course, and the addition of a pewter bleeding bowl so that none of the precious nectar would be lost…

Diogenes passed through the empty village of Gerard Park. Gar-diners Bay appeared ahead of him, a dull cold sheet of zinc broken by the dark outlines of distant islands. The car eased right onto Gerard Drive, Acabonack Harbor on one side, the bay on his left. Less than a mile more now. As he drove, he smiled faintly.

"Vale, frater,"he murmured in Latin. "Vale."

Viola had pulled the chair up to the barred window, and she watched the first streak of light creep over the black Atlantic-a smudge of dirty chalk-with a sense of surreal detachment. It was like a nightmare she couldn't wake from, a dream as real and vivid as it was senseless. What scared her most of all was the realization of just how much trouble and expense Diogenes had gone to in creating this prison cell-riveted steel walls, floor, and ceiling, a steel door with a tumbler lock from a safe, not to mention the unbreakable windows, the special plumbing and wiring. It was as secure as a cell in the highest security prison-maybe more so.

Why?Was it really possible that, with dawn approaching, she had mere minutes to live?

Yet again, she forced this useless speculation from her mind.

She had long since concluded that escape was impossible. A great deal of thought had gone into constructing her prison, and her every effort to seek a way out had been anticipated and blocked. He had been gone all night-at least that's what the utter silence seemed to tell her. From time to time, she had banged and screamed on the door, at one point striking a chair against it again and again until the chair had come apart in her hands. No one had come.

The smear of chalk took on a faintly bloody tinge: a lurid glow over the heaving Atlantic. A ferocious wind dotted the dark ocean with dim flecks of whitecaps. Wisps of frozen snow-or was it sand?-whipped along the ground.

Suddenly, she sat up, abruptly alert. She had heard the faint muffled sound of a door opening. She rushed to her own door, pressed an ear against it. The very faintest of sounds came from below: a footfall, the closing of a door.

He was back.

She felt a sudden surge of fear and glanced across the room toward the window. The limb of the sun was just now climbing above the gray Atlantic, and just as quickly rising into a black bar of storm cloud. He had made it a point to arrive just at dawn. In time for the execution.

Viola curled her lip. If he thought he was going to kill her without a struggle, he was sorely mistaken. She would fight him to the death…

She swallowed, realizing how foolish her bravado was, aimed against a man who would surely have a gun and know exactly how to use it.

She fought against a sudden, panicky hyperventilation. A strange set of conflicting feelings rose within her: on the one hand, an urgent, instinctive desire for survival at whatever the cost; on the other, an ingrained need to die-if death, in fact, was near-with dignity, not with screaming and struggling.

There were more sounds and, without thinking, she immediately lay down on the floor to listen at the tiny space between the door and the threshold. The sounds were still faint and muffled.

She rose and ran into the bathroom, tore the toilet paper from its receptacle, unraveled it with a fierce shake of her hand, and pulled the cardboard tube free. Then she ran back to the door frame, pressing one end of the tube to her ear and squeezing the other end up against the long crack of the jamb.

Now she could hear much better: the rustle of clothing, the setting down of several things, the sound of a latch being undone.

There was a sudden, sharp intake of breath. Next, a long, long silence. Five minutes passed.

Then came a strange and terrible sound: a low, agonized keening, almost like the warning moan of a cat. It rose and fell in singsong fashion before suddenly ascending in volume to become a shriek of pure, undistilled, absolute anguish. It was inhuman, it was the shriek of the living dead, it was the most horrifying sound she had ever heard-and it came from him.