Leaping free of the slowly imploding mass, Pendergast projected himself out from the crumbling first floor, falling half a story and landing hard on the frozen ground, bricks and debris thundering down around him. The outcome was unpredictable…and that itself was its beauty, a dramatic transformation of the game. Ozmian was deeper in the building and thus more likely to be crushed — or so he hoped.
The rumbling collapse came to a halt. Incredibly, the rupture was only partial, the far corner of Wing D now a gaping hole directly in front of him, but the rest of the ten-story wing still intact — if barely. The entire edifice complained loudly, emitting a volley of cracks, screeches, and groans as the load-bearing walls and concrete pillars settled to accommodate the shifting burden of mass. Pendergast tried to stand, staggered, managed to get to his feet; he was battered but essentially sound, with no broken bones. The dust cloud billowed up around him, obscuring his view.
He had to get out of the dust and falling debris and into the open, where he could take advantage of the chaos and press the attack on Ozmian, if indeed the man had survived. Feeling his way through the chaos of rubble, moving away from the zone of falling debris, he emerged from the thinning dust cloud and into the moonlight, hard up against the chain-link fence that surrounded the building.
And that was when he spied Ozmian: unhurt, partway up the damaged façade, rapidly lowering himself from the gaping ruin by a fire hose. At the same time, Ozmian saw him. Dropping to one knee, Pendergast aimed and fired, but Ozmian simultaneously kicked himself away from the building, swinging sideways, even as Pendergast got off another round before Ozmian had released himself and dropped into the dust cloud, vanishing from sight.
Pendergast fired four quick shots into the cloud in a pattern surrounding the place where he judged Ozmian to have landed, knowing the odds were long but taking advantage of even this slight opportunity. The shots emptied his magazine.
Racing away, ignoring the pain, Pendergast sprinted alongside the outer building wall, leapt over a low windowsill and inside, then continued running down a corridor, which debouched once again into the arts-and-crafts room. As he ran he ejected the empty magazine, letting it clatter to the floor as he slapped in the second one, past the rotting tables, through a doorway, and down a nearby stairwell, heading for the basement.
He did not know if his four shots had caught Ozmian or not, but he had to assume they had not. His third plan had failed. He needed a fourth.
62
Ozmian emerged cautiously from the rubble, keeping to cover. Those shots Pendergast had fired into the dust cloud had seriously unnerved him, due to their random nature and his inability to anticipate them. One of them had come so close he felt the snap of wind as it passed his ear. For the first time, Ozmian felt a twinge of uncertainty. But he quickly shook it off. Wasn’t this what he’d most wanted — a supremely cunning, able opponent? He knew, deep down, that he would prevail.
He moved alongside the ragged edges where the corner of Wing D had collapsed, keeping to the darkness and the brushy overgrowth at the edges of the abandoned building. Switching on his flashlight, he scanned the ground for signs of Pendergast but could see nothing. Coming to a broken window frame, he gave the interior a quick recon and then ducked in, proceeding down a vacant hallway. The tracks in the hall were old, and again he could find no sign of Pendergast.
He needed to find his quarry’s trail. That meant executing a maneuver known as “cutting for sign”—moving in a broad circle at right angles to the quarry’s track, attempting to pick it up. Reaching the end of the hallway, he started down another, cutting for sign, expecting at any moment to intersect Pendergast’s tracks.
In the basement, traversing almost the entire length of the building, Pendergast passed a heating plant, storage rooms, a small block of padded prison cells, finally stopping in a vast archive full of rotting files. It was pitch black belowground and he had no choice but to use the flashlight. Despite everything he had passed, he’d found nothing and no place that would help him escape or turn the tables on his pursuer. There was something stupid, if not futile, in continuing this farce: running randomly through this vast building, hoping for a fresh idea. He was up against a savant, a man who could not be beaten. And yet no one was unbeatable; every human had a chink in his armor. He now had some insight into Ozmian’s psychology, his vulnerability, but how could he turn that to his advantage? Where was that fissure in his armor and, even if found, how would he stick in the sword? The man was perhaps the most complex and ingenious opponent he had ever come up against. “Know your enemy” was the first dictum of Sun Tzu in his Art of War. And the saying contained within it the obvious answer: if there was anyplace in the entire world where he could learn about this man and his deepest weaknesses, it was right here: in the basement, in the archives.
Pendergast paused for a moment, collecting his thoughts and taking in the vast room with his flashlight. It was almost uncanny that he was there, in this immense space stuffed with tales of madness, misery, and horror: the archives of a gigantic mental hospital. He understood now that his own subconscious had led him here.
The archives consisted of racks of filing cabinets on a scaffolding of metal shelves, rising from floor to ceiling. Each aisle had its own pair of rolling ladders, necessary to reach the upper level of cabinets. As Pendergast moved through the space, trying to understand how it was organized, he became aware that the hospital, in its century of operation, had accumulated a staggering quantity of data in the form of patient histories, notes, Dictaphone recordings, diagnoses, correspondence, personnel files, and legal documents. Over the course of its lifetime, the hospital had housed tens of thousands of mental patients, perhaps even hundreds of thousands; the numbers only confirmed Pendergast’s belief that there were vast numbers of mentally ill people in the world. If anything, he thought, the archive was rather modest, considering the collective insanity of the human race.
The aisles and rows were laid out in a grid, the aisles marked with letters and the rows with numbers. Moving down several aisles, consulting the numbers and rows, Pendergast located what he was looking for, seized the rolling ladder, slid it into place, and climbed, flashlight between his teeth. He yanked open a drawer, pawed through it greedily, got to the back, then opened another and another, pulling out folders and tossing them, until he realized that what he was looking for was simply not there.
He slid down the ladder, paused a moment to recalculate, then moved down the aisle to a second place, opening another series of drawers. The screech of rusty metal echoed in the space, and he was acutely aware that the glow of his flashlight would make a perfect target. He had to complete this search before Ozmian picked up his trail and entered the room.
He moved to the next aisle, then the next. He was running out of time. In one drawer he unexpectedly found a rolled-up set of reduced-size building plans. Flipping through them, he extracted one and stuffed it in his waistband. Useful, but not what he was looking for. He moved on.