But getting handed the perp was like being tossed a 175-pound sack of shit, and he almost dropped the man trying to maneuver him in the back seat. Success was achieved at last to a swelling fusillade of flash attachments; the squad car turned on its lights and siren; and nosed forward.
Custer watched it ease its way through the crowd, then turned to face the press himself. He raised his hands like Moses, waiting for silence to fall. He had no intention of stealing the mayor’s thunder—the pictures of him bundling the cuffed perp into the vehicle would tell everyone who had made the collar—but he had to say a little something to keep the crowd contained.
“The mayor is on his way,” he called out in a clear, commanding voice. “He will arrive in a few minutes, and he will have an important announcement to make. Until then, there will be no further comments whatsoever.”
“How’d you get him?” a lone voice shouted, and then there was a sudden roar of questions; frantic shouting; waving; boomed mikes swinging out in his direction. But Custer magisterially turned his back on it all. The election was less than a week away. Let the mayor make the announcement and take the glory. Custer would reap his own reward, later.
NINE
THE FIRST THING that returned was the pain. Nora came swimming back into consciousness, slowly, agonizingly. She moaned, swallowed, tried to move. Her side felt lacerated. She blinked, blinked again, then realized she was surrounded by utter darkness. She felt blood on her face, but when she tried to touch it her arm refused to move. She tried again and realized that both her arms and legs were chained.
She felt confused, as if caught in a dream from which she could not awake. What was going on here? Where was she?
A voice came from the darkness, low and weak. “Dr. Kelly?”
At the sound of her own name, the dream-like confusion began to recede. As clarity grew, Nora felt a sudden shock of fear.
“It’s Pendergast,” the voice murmured. “Are you all right?”
“I don’t know. A few bruised ribs, maybe. And you?”
“More or less.”
“What happened?”
There was a silence. Then Pendergast spoke again. “I am very, very sorry. I should have expected the trap. How brutal, using Sergeant O’Shaughnessy to bait us like that. Unutterably brutal.”
“Is O’Shaughnessy—?”
“He was dying when we found him. He cannot have survived.”
“God, how awful,” Nora sobbed. “How horrible.”
“He was a good man, a loyal man. I am beyond words.”
There was a long silence. So great was Nora’s fear that it seemed to choke off even her grief and horror at what had happened to O’Shaughnessy. She had begun to realize the same was in store for them—as it may have already been for Smithback.
Pendergast’s weak voice broke the silence. “I’ve been unable to maintain proper intellectual distance in this case,” he said. “I’ve simply been too close to it, from the very beginning. My every move has been flawed—”
Abruptly, Pendergast fell silent. A few moments later, Nora heard a noise, and a small rectangle of light slid into view high up in the wall before her. It cast just enough light for her to see the outline of their prison: a small, damp stone cellar.
A pair of wet lips hovered within the rectangle.
“Please do not discompose yourself,” a voice crooned in a deep, rich accent curiously like Pendergast’s own. “All this will be over soon. Struggle is unnecessary. Forgive me for not playing the host at the present moment, but I have some pressing business to take care of. Afterward, I assure you, I will give you the benefit of my undividedattention.”
The rectangle scraped shut.
For a minute, perhaps two, Nora remained in the darkness, hardly able to breathe in her terror. She struggled to retake possession of her mind.
“Agent Pendergast?” she whispered.
There was no answer.
And then the watchful darkness was rent asunder by a distant, muffled scream—strangled, garbled, choking.
Instantly, Nora knew—beyond the shadow of a doubt—that the voice was Smithback’s.
“Oh my God!” she screamed. “Agent Pendergast, did you hear that?”
Still Pendergast did not answer.
“Pendergast!”
The darkness continued to yield nothing but silence.
In the Dark
ONE
PENDERGAST CLOSED HIS eyes against the darkness. Gradually, the chessboard appeared, materializing out of a vague haze. The ivory and ebony chess pieces, smoothed by countless years of handling, stood quietly, waiting for the game to begin. The chill of the damp stone, the rough grasp of the manacles, the pain in his ribs, Nora’s frightened voice, the occasional distant cry, all fell away one by one, leaving only an enfolding darkness, the board standing quietly in a pool of yellow light. And still Pendergast waited, breathing deeply, his heartbeat slowing. Finally, he reached forward, touched a cool chess piece, and advanced his king’s pawn forward two spaces. Black countered. The game began, slowly at first, then faster, and faster, until the pieces flew across the board. Stalemate. Another game, and still another, with the same results. And then, rather abruptly, came darkness—utter darkness.
When at last he was ready, Pendergast once again opened his eyes.
He was standing in the wide upstairs hallway of the Maison de la Rochenoire, the great old New Orleans house on Dauphine Street in which he had grown up. Originally a monastery erected by an obscure Carmelite order, the rambling pile had been purchased by Pendergast’s distant grandfather many times removed in the eighteenth century, and renovated into an eccentric labyrinth of vaulted rooms and shadowy corridors.
Although the Maison de la Rochenoire had been burned down by a mob shortly after Pendergast left for boarding school in England, he continued to return to it frequently. Within his mind, the structure had become more than a house. It had become a memory palace, a storehouse of knowledge and lore, the place for his most intense and difficult meditations. All of his own experiences and observations, all of the many Pendergast family secrets, were housed within. Only here, safe in the mansion’s Gothic bosom, could he meditate without fear of interruption.
And there was a great deal to meditate upon. For one of the few times in his life, he had known failure. If there was a solution to this problem, it would lie somewhere within these walls—somewhere within his own mind. Searching for the solution would mean a physical search of his memory palace.
He strolled pensively down the broad, tapestried corridor, the rose-colored walls broken at regular intervals by marble niches. Each niche contained an exquisite miniature leather-bound book. Some of these had actually existed in the old house. Others were pure memory constructs—chronicles of past events, facts, figures, chemical formulae, complex mathematical or metaphysical proofs—all stored by Pendergast in the house as a physical object of memory, for use at some unknown future date.
Now, he stood before the heavy oaken door of his own room. Normally he would unlock the door and linger within, surrounded by the familiar objects, the comforting iconography, of his childhood. But today he continued on, pausing only to pass his fingers lightly over the brass knob of the door. His business lay elsewhere, below, with things older and infinitely stranger.
He had mentioned to Nora his inability to maintain proper intellectual distance in the case, and this was undeniably true. This was what had led him, and her—and, to his deepest sorrow, Patrick O’Shaughnessy—into the present misfortune. What he had not revealed to Nora was the profound shock he felt when he saw the face of the dead man. It was, as he now knew, Enoch Leng—or, more accurately, his own great-grand-uncle, Antoine Leng Pendergast.