As Ozmian moved down the aisle, following the trail, he noted how grim this part of the basement was, how strangely unsettling, with unpainted cinder-block walls streaked with damp, regularly punctuated by lime-colored windowless doors along both sides. Each door was numbered in order, with a dirty labeclass="underline"
ROOM EECT-1
ROOM EECT-2
ROOM EECT-3
What did they mean? What were these rooms?
The tracks came to a halt at the door marked EECT-9. He examined the floor in front of the door, reading the spoor: his quarry had paused, then opened the door and gone in, still making no attempt at deception, shutting it behind him. While Ozmian had no idea what was in the room, he sensed it was small and almost certainly a dead end, with no escape for Pendergast. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. But then, Ozmian reminded himself, his quarry was exceptionally clever and must not be underestimated; anything could be awaiting him on the other side of that door. And the man had one round left.
With infinite care, standing to one side, Ozmian gave his quarry a little test. He touched the door handle and eased it down, knowing Pendergast would see the movement on the far side.
BOOM! Just as he hoped, Pendergast had wasted his final shot firing blindly through the door. Now his quarry was unarmed, save for the knife. He looked at his watch: eight minutes to go before his partner was blown into bits.
It had been a memorable hunt, but the end was nigh.
“Pendergast?” said Ozmian, speaking through the closed door. “I’m sorry you wasted your last round.”
Silence.
No doubt the man was waiting with knife in hand, like that wounded lion crouched in the mopane brush, ready for a final desperate struggle.
He waited.
“The minutes are ticking by. Only six minutes left until your friend gets turned inside out.”
And now Pendergast spoke. His voice was shaky and high. “Come in and fight then, instead of hiding behind the door like a coward.”
With a sigh, but not lowering his guard in the slightest, Ozmian raised his gun and gripped his flashlight against the barrel with his left hand, so that it pointed where the gun was aimed. Then, with one ferocious kick, he slammed open the locked door and spun inside, covering the room in a split second, expecting a desperate and futile knife attack from any quarter.
Instead he heard a voice speaking gently and kindly from the darkness:
“Welcome, brave little man, to the room of happiness.”
The unexpected words were like a knife driven into the deepest part of his brain.
“How are we today, my brave little man? Come in, come in, don’t be shy! We’re all friends here, we love you and are here to help you.”
The words were so instantly familiar and yet so grotesquely strange that, like a great earthquake, they split apart the bunker of his memory and a hot flood of recollection came pouring out: boiling, incandescent, forming a whirling maelstrom inside his skull, obliterating all in its path. Ozmian staggered, hardly able to remain upright.
“All of the kind doctors here want so much — so very much — to help you and make you feel better so that you can go back to your family, go back to school and your friends and live the life of a normal boy. Come, come, brave little man, and take a seat in our happiness chair…”
And at that moment a light snapped on and he found himself staring at a sight both outlandish and weirdly familiar: a padded leather reclining chair, unbuckled straps on the arms and legs, with a swiveling steel table next to it. Laid out on the table were special accoutrements: a rubber mouth guard, rubber sticks, buckles and collars, a black leather mask, a steel neck brace — all softly illuminated in the pool of yellow light. And looming over all, disembodied, was a stainless-steel helmet, a gleaming dome festooned with copper nipples and curly wires, attached to a jointed, retractable arm.
“Come, my brave little man, and have a seat. Let the nice doctors help you! It won’t hurt, not in the slightest, and afterward you’ll feel so much better, so much happier — and you’ll be one step closer to going home. The best part of all is that you won’t remember a thing, not a thing, so close your eyes, think of home, and it will be over before you know it.”
Ozmian, as if in a hypnotic trance, closed his eyes. He felt the doctor gently remove something heavy from his grasp, and then those sympathetic hands guided him into the leather seat; he took his place unresisting, his mind a blank; he felt the buckles and straps go around his wrists and ankles, felt them tighten, felt the brace go around his neck with a click of the steel lock, felt the leather mask snugged over his face; he heard the creak of metal joints as the steel helmet descended upon his head, icy cold yet strangely reassuring. He felt the doctor slip something out from his chest pocket, and he heard a faint clicking noise.
“Now close your eyes, my brave little man, it is about to begin…”
64
The light on the detonator strapped to Vincent D’Agosta had gone from red to green just three minutes before the timer reached the two-hour mark. It had been damn close, and he felt his enormous relief mingle with annoyance that it had taken Pendergast so long to kill that bastard Ozmian. Over the past two hours of waiting, listening intently, he had heard several exchanges of gunfire from the huge hospital building to the south, as well as the spectacular and frightening sound of what must have been a partial collapse of that building. His worries had mounted when Pendergast hadn’t dispatched Ozmian in the first ten minutes, and the collapse of the building shocked and concerned him, suggesting a fight of epic proportions. He’d had the scare of his life as he watched the time tick down.
But in the end it had gone green, and the timer had stopped, which meant Pendergast had finally killed the son of a bitch, taken the remote, and switched it off.
Five minutes later, he heard the door to Building 44 open and in walked Pendergast. D’Agosta was alarmed by his appearance: covered with dust, clothing ripped and shredded, with two deep scratches on his face on which the blood had mingled with dirt, leaving a crust. He was limping.
The agent came up to him and removed the cue-ball gag. D’Agosta took a few gasps of air. “You cut that one pretty damn close!” he said. “God, you look like you just emerged from the trenches.”
“My dear Vincent, so sorry to have given you a turn.” He began unbuckling the other restraints. “I’m afraid our friend put up an admirable struggle. I must tell you, frankly, I’ve never come up against a more capable adversary.”
“I knew you’d smoke his ass in the end.”
Pendergast unstrapped his arms and D’Agosta raised them, rubbing the flow of blood back into them. Gingerly, Pendergast unstrapped the vest with the packets of explosives and eased it off, laying it with infinite care on a nearby table.
“Tell me how you exterminated the scumbag.”
“I’m afraid I’ve developed an unfortunate reputation at the Bureau as an agent whose perps end up dead,” Pendergast said, now unstrapping D’Agosta’s ankles. “So this time I performed a live capture.”
“He’s alive? Jesus, how’d you pull that off?”
“It was a matter of choosing what game to play. We started with chess, in which he nearly checkmated me; switched to craps, but I had a bad roll of the dice. And so we ended up playing a mind game, one that my opponent lost rather dramatically.”
“A mind game?”
“You see, Vincent, he actually caught me and put a gun to my head. And then released me, like a cat releases a mouse.”