“This is Spanish Island?” Betterton asked in disbelief.
“What’s left of it, I reckon,” Hiram replied.
The airboat moved forward into a slackwater bayou, sliding up onto a muddy shore, and Betterton stepped out. He walked forward gingerly over the rise of land, pushing debris around with his foot. The rubble was spread out over at least an acre, and it contained a riot of things: metal desktops, bedsprings, cutlery, the burned-out remains of sofas, antlers, melted glass, the spines of books, and — to his vast surprise — the blackened remains of machines of unknown function, smashed and twisted. He knelt before one, picked it up. Despite the intense heat it had been subjected to, he could tell it was a metering device of some kind: brushed metal, with a needle gauge measuring something in milliliters. In one corner was a small, stamped logo: PRECISION MEDICAL EQUIPMENT, FALL RIVER, MASS.
What the hell had happened here?
He heard Hiram’s voice from over his shoulder, high-pitched, tense. “Mebbe we should be getting back.”
Suddenly Betterton became aware of the silence. Unlike the rest of the bayou, here the birds and insects had fallen still. There was something awful about the listening quiet. He stared down again at the confusion of debris, at the strange burnt pieces of metal, at the twisted equipment of unknown function. This place felt dead.
Worse than that — it felt haunted.
All at once Betterton realized that he wanted nothing more than to get away from this creepy place. He turned and began picking his way back to the boat. Hiram, apparently possessed by the same thought, was already halfway there. They gunned out of the slack-water bayou, heading back through the narrow, twisting channels that led to Lake End.
Once — just once — Betterton glanced over his shoulder into the dense green fastness behind him, shadow-woven, mysterious, braided around and above by tree limbs and kudzu vines. What secrets it held — what dreadful event had transpired at Spanish Island — he couldn’t say. But he was sure of one thing. One way or another, this shady bastard Pendergast was at the center of everything.
CHAPTER 40
River Pointe, Ohio
IN THE MIDDLE-CLASS CLEVELAND SUBURB, the bell in the tower of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church tolled midnight. The wide streets were drowsy and quiet. Dead leaves skittered in the gutters, rustled along by a gentle night breeze, and somewhere in the distance a dog barked.
Only a single second-story window was illuminated in the white clapboard house that stood on the corner of Church Street and Sycamore Terrace. Beyond the window — locked, nailed shut, and covered by two layers of heavy curtain — lay a room whose every corner was stuffed full of instrumentation. One floor-to-ceiling rack held tier-one, high-density blade servers; numerous layer-three, forty-eight-port gigabit Ethernet switches; and several NAS devices configured as RAID-2 arrays. Another rack held passive and active monitoring devices, packet sniffers, police and civilian scanner-interceptors. Every horizontal surface was littered with keyboards, wireless signal boosters, digital infrared thermometers, network testers, Molex extractors. An ancient modem with an acoustic coupler sat on a high shelf, apparently still in use. The air was heavy with the smell of dust and menthol. The only light came from LCD screens and countless front-panel displays.
In the middle of the room sat a shrunken figure in a wheelchair. He was dressed in faded pajamas and a terry-cloth bathrobe. He moved slowly from terminal to terminal, checking readouts, peering at lines of cryptic code, occasionally firing off a machine-gun-like series of typed commands on one of the wireless keyboards. One of the man’s hands was withered, the fingers malformed and shrunken, yet he typed with amazing facility.
Suddenly he paused. A yellow light had appeared on a small device situated over the central monitor.
The figure quickly rolled himself to the main terminal and typed in a volley of commands. Instantly the monitor dissolved into a chessboard-like grid of black-and-white images: incoming feeds from two dozen security cameras placed in and around the perimeter of the house.
He quickly scanned the various camera feeds. Nothing.
Panic — which had flared up in an instant — ebbed again. His security was first-rate and doubly redundant: if there had been a breach, he would have been alerted by half a dozen movement sensors and proximity triggers. It had to be a glitch, nothing more. He’d run a diagnostic in the morning — this was one subsystem that could not be allowed to…
Suddenly a red light winked on beside the yellow one, and a low alarm began to bleat.
Fear and disbelief washed over him like a tidal wave. A full-scale breach, with hardly any warning? It was impossible, unthinkable… The withered hand reached toward a small metal box fixed to one arm of his wheelchair, flicked away the safety toggle covering the kill switch. One crooked finger hovered over the switch. When it was pressed, several things would happen very quickly: 911 calls would go out to police, fire officials, and emergency paramedic units; sodium vapor lights would come on throughout the house and grounds; alarms in the attic and basement would emit earsplitting shrieks; magnetic media degaussers placed strategically throughout the room would generate targeted magnetic fields for fifteen seconds, wiping all data from the hard disks; and finally, an EMP shock pulse generator would fire, completely disrupting all the microprocessor circuitry and electronics in the second-floor room.
The finger settled onto the button.
“Good evening, Mime,” came the unmistakable voice from the darkness of the hallway.
The finger jerked away. “Pendergast?”
The special agent nodded and stepped into the room.
For a moment, the man in the wheelchair was nonplussed. “How did you get in here? My security system is state-of-the-art.”
“Indeed it is. After all, I paid for its design and installation.”
The man wrapped the bathrobe more closely around his narrow frame. His composure was quick to return. “We had a rule. We were never to meet face-to-face again.”
“I’m aware of that. And I deeply regret having to break it. But I have a request to make — and I felt that, by making it in person, you would better understand its urgency.”
A cynical smile slowly broke over Mime’s pale features. “I see. The Secret Agent Man has a request. Another request, I should say, of the long-suffering Mime.”
“Our relationship has always proceeded on a — how shall I put it? — symbiotic basis. After all, wasn’t it only a few months back that I arranged for a dedicated fiber-optic line to be installed here?”
“Yes, indeedy. Allowing one to bask in three hundred Mbps goodness. No more purloined sips from the T-3 soda straw for me.”
“And I was instrumental in having those troublesome charges against you dropped. You’ll recall, the ones from the Department of Defense alleging—”
“Okay, Secret Agent Man, I haven’t forgotten. So: what can I do for you this fine evening? Mime’s Cyber-Emporium is open for all your hacking needs. No firewall too thick, no encryption algorithm too strong.”
“I need information on a certain person. Ideally, her whereabouts. But anything will do: medical files, legal issues, movement. Starting from the time of her presumed death and going forward.”
Mime’s sunken, strangely child-like visage perked up at this. “Her presumed death?”
“Yes. I am convinced the woman is alive. However, there is a one hundred percent certainty she is using an assumed name.”
“But you know her real name, I assume?”
Pendergast did not answer for a moment. “Helen Esterhazy Pendergast.”
“Helen Esterhazy Pendergast.” Mime’s expression grew more interested still. “Well, dust my broom.” He thought for a moment. “Naturally, I’ll need as much personal data as you can provide if I’m to fashion a sufficiently girthy search avatar of your… of your…”