Brimstone

by Douglas Preston

  "How'd it go yesterday?" Bullard asked.

  The hesitation told Bullard there'd been a fuckup.

  "The guests came with firecrackers. There was a party."

  Bullard nodded. He'd half expected it.

  "When they learned there was no cake, the party began. Williams had to leave suddenly. The guests all left with him."

  So the Chinese had killed Williams and got their asses shot off in return.

  "Another thing. The party got crashed."

  Bullard felt a sudden constriction in his gut. Now, who the hell had done that? Pendergast? Christ, Vasquez was taking his precious time. Bullard had never met a man quite so dangerous. But if it was Pendergast, how had he learned about it? The files in the seized computer were strongly encrypted, no way they could have been cracked.

  "Everybody else got home safely."

  Bullard barely heard this. He was still thinking. Either their phones had been tapped or the feds had an informer in his top five. Probably the former. "There's a bird in the tree, maybe," Bullard said, speaking the prearranged code that indicated a phone tap.

  This was greeted with silence. Hell, he almost didn't care anymore. Bullard turned to the image of his Italian COO. "You have the item ready and packed for traveling?"

  "Yes, sir." The man spoke with difficulty. "May I ask why—?"

  "No, goddamn you to hell, you may not!" Bullard felt rage abruptly take him; it was like a seizure, beyond his control. He glanced over at the image of Chait. The man was listening, face expressionless.

  "Sir—"

  "Don't ask me any questions. I'll get the item when I arrive, and that'll be it. You'll never speak of it again, to me or anyone."

  The man went pale and swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing. "Mr. Bullard, after all the work we've done and the risks we've taken, I have the right to know why you are killing the project. I speak to you respectfully as your chief operating officer. I have only the good of the company at heart—"

  Bullard felt the rage grow inside him like a heat, so intense it seemed to powder the very marrow of his bones. "You son of a bitch, what did I just tell you?"

  Martinetti fell silent. Chait's eyes flickered this way and that, nervously. He was wondering if maybe his boss wasn't going crazy. It seemed a fair enough question.

  "I am the company," Bullard went on. "I know what's for the good of the company and what isn't. You mention this again and ti faccio fuori, bastardo. I'll kill you, you bastard."

  He knew no self-respecting Italian would stand for such an insult. He was right. "Sir, I hereby tender my resignation—"

  "Resign, motherfucker, resign! And good riddance!" Bullard brought his fist down on the keyboard, again and again. On the fifth blow, the screen finally winked off.

  Bullard sat for a long time in the darkened room. So the feds had been expecting them in Paterson. That meant they knew about the planned transfer of missile technology. Once, that would have been a disaster, but now it seemed almost irrelevant. At the last minute, the crime had been abandoned. The feds had jack and it would stay that way. BAI was clean. Not that Bullard gave a shit; he had bigger fish to fry at the moment.

  Fact was, the feds knew nothing about what was really going on. He had gotten away just in time. Grove and Cutforth—Grove and Cutforth, and maybe Beckmann, too. They had to die; it was inevitable. But he was still alive and that's what counted.

  Bullard realized he was hyperventilating. Christ, he needed air. He stumbled up from the console, unlocked the door, mounted the stairs. In a moment he was back on the flying bridge, staring eastward into blue nothingness.

  If only he could just sail off the edge of the world.

  { 40 }

  D'Agosta heard the faint squawking of a radio and looked up through the dense undergrowth. At first, nothing could be seen through the riot of vegetation. But within a few minutes, he began to catch distant flashes of silver, glimpses of blue. Finally a cop came into view—just a head and shoulders above the dense brush—forcing his way through the bracken. The cop spied him, turned. Behind him were two medics carrying a blue plastic remains locker. They were followed by two other men in jumpsuits, lugging a variety of heavy tools. A photographer came last.

  The cop shouldered his way through the last of the brush—a local Yonkers sergeant, small and no-nonsense—and stopped before them.

  "You Pendergast?"

  "Yes. Pleased to meet you, Sergeant Baskin."

  "Right. This the grave?"

  "It is." Pendergast removed some papers from his jacket. The cop scrutinized them, initialed them, stripped off the copies, and handed the originals back. "Sorry, I need to see ID."

  Pendergast and D'Agosta showed their badges.

  "Fine." The policeman turned to the two workers in jumpsuits, who were busily unshouldering their equipment. "He's all yours, guys."

  The diggers attacked the tombstone with vigor, crowbarring it up and rolling it aside. They cleared an area around the grave with brush hooks, then laid several big, dirty tarps across the clearing. Next they began cutting out the weedy turf with turf cutters, popping out squares and stacking them like bricks on one of the tarps.

  D'Agosta turned to Pendergast. "So how did you find him?"

  "I knew right away he had to be dead, and I assumed before his death he must have been either homeless or mentally ill: there could be no other reason why he'd prove so elusive in these days of the Internet. But learning more than that was a very difficult task, even for my associate, Mime, who as I mentioned has a rare talent for ferreting out obscure information. Ultimately, we learned Beckmann spent the last years of his life on the street, sometimes under assumed names, cycling through various flophouses and homeless shelters in and around Yonkers."

  The turf was now stacked and the two workers began digging, their shovels biting alternately into the soil. The medics stood to one side, talking and smoking. There was another faint roll of thunder and light rain began to fall, pattering onto the thick vegetation around them.

  "It appears our Mr. Beckmann had a promising start in life," Pendergast continued. "Father a dentist, mother a homemaker. He was apparently quite brilliant in college. But both parents died during his junior year. After graduation, Beckmann couldn't seem to find out what it was he wanted out of life. He knocked around Europe for a while, then came back to the U.S. and sold artifacts on the flea market circuit. He was a drinker who slid into alcoholism, but his problems were more mental than physical—a lost soul who just couldn't find his way. That tenement was his last place of residence." Pendergast pointed toward one of the decaying tenements ringing the graveyard.

  Chuff, chuff, went the shovels. The diggers knew exactly what they were doing. Every movement was economical, almost machinelike in its precision. The brown hole deepened.

  "How'd he die?"

  "The death certificate listed metastatic lung cancer. Gone untreated. We shall soon find out the truth."

  "You don't think it was lung cancer?"

  Pendergast smiled dryly. "I am skeptical."

  One of the shovels thunked on rotten wood. The men knelt and, picking up mason's trowels, began clearing dirt from the lid of a plain wooden coffin, finding its edges and trimming the sides of the pit. It seemed to D'Agosta the coffin couldn't have been buried more than three feet deep. So much for the free six-foot hole—typical government, screwing everyone, even the dead.

  "Photo op," said the Yonkers sergeant.

  The gravediggers climbed out, waiting while the photographer crouched at the edge and snapped a few shots from various angles. Then they climbed back in, uncoiled a set of nylon straps, slipped them under the coffin, and gathered them together on top.

  "Okay. Lift."

  The medics pitched in. Soon the four had hoisted the coffin out of the hole and set it on the free tarp. There was a powerful smell of earth.

  "Open it," said the cop, a man of few words.

  "Here?" D'Agosta asked.

  "Those are the
rules. Just to check and make sure."

  "Make sure of what?"

  "Age, sex, general condition… And most importantly, if there's a body in there at all."

  "Right."

  One of the workers turned to D'Agosta. "It happens. Last year we dug up a stiff over in Pelham, and you know what we found?"

  "What?" D'Agosta was fairly sure he didn't want to know.

  "Two stiffs—and a dead monkey! We said it must've been an organ-grinder who got mixed up with the Mafia." He barked with laughter and nudged his friend, who laughed in turn.

  The workers now began to attack the lid of the coffin, tapping around it with chisels. The wood was so rotten it quickly broke loose. As the lid was set aside, a stench of rot, mold, and formaldehyde welled up. D'Agosta peered forward, morbid curiosity struggling with the queasiness he never seemed fully able to shake.

  Gray light, softened by the misting rain, penetrated the coffin and illuminated the corpse

  It lay, hands folded on its chest, upon a bed of rotting fabric, stuffing coming up, with a huge stain of congealed liquid, dark as old coffee, covering the bottom. The body had collapsed from rot and had a deflated appearance, as if all the air had escaped along with life, leaving nothing but a skin lying over bones. Various bony protuberances stuck through the rotting black suit: knees, elbows, pelvis. The hands were brown and slimy, shedding their nails, the finger bones poking through the rotting ends. The eyes were sunken holes, the lips lopsided and drawn back in a kind of snarl. Beckmann had been a wet corpse, and the rain was making him wetter.

  The cop bent down, scanning the body. "Male Caucasian, about fifty…" He opened a tape measure. "Six feet even, brown hair." He straightened up again. "Gross match seems okay."

  Gross is right, D'Agosta thought as he looked at Pendergast. Despite the appalling decay, one thing was immediately clear: this corpse had not suffered the ghastly, violent fate that met Grove and Cutforth.

  "Take him to the morgue," Pendergast murmured.

  The cop looked at him.

  "I want a complete autopsy," Pendergast said. "I want to know how this man really died."

  { 41 }

  Bryce Harriman entered the office of Rupert Ritts, managing editor of the Post , to find the mean, rodent like editor standing behind his enormous desk, a rare smile splitting his bladelike face.

  "Bryce, my man! Take a seat!"

  Ritts never talked quietly: his voice was high, and it cut right through a person. You might think he was deaf, except that his ferret like ears seemed to pick up the faintest whisper from the farthest corner, especially when it concerned him. More than one editor had been fired for whispering Ritts's nickname from two hundred yards across a busy newsroom. It was an obvious nickname, just the substitution of one vowel for another, but it really got Ritts going. Harriman figured it was because he'd probably been called that as a child on the playground every day and never forgot it. Harriman disliked Ritts, as he disliked almost everything about the New York Post. It was embarrassing, physically embarrassing, to be working here.

  He adjusted his tie as he tried to make himself comfortable in the hard wooden chair Ritts tortured his reporters with. The editor came around and seated himself on the edge of the desk, lighting up a Lucky Strike. He no doubt thought of himself as a tough guy of the old school: hard-drinking, tough-talking, cigarette-hanging-off-the-lip kind of guy. The fact that smoking on the job was now illegal seemed to make him enjoy it all the more. Harriman suspected he also kept a cheap bottle of whiskey and a shot glass in a desk drawer. Black polyester pants, scuffed brown shoes, blue socks, Flatbush accent. Ritts was everything that Harriman's family had trained him all his life, sent him to private school, given him an Ivy League education, never to be.

  And here he was. Harriman's boss.

  "This Menck story is fabulous, Harriman. Fucking fabulous."

  "Thank you, sir."

  "It was a real stroke of genius, Harriman, finding this guy the day before he left for the Virgin Islands."

  "Galápagos."

  "Whatever. I have to tell you, when I first read your piece, I had my doubts. It struck me as a lot of New Age bullshit. But it really hit a chord with our readers. Newsstand circ's up eight percent."

  "That's great." Here at the Post, it was all about circulation. In the newsroom of the Times, where he used to work, "circulation" had been a dirty word.

  "Great? It's fucking fabulous. That's what reporting is all about. Readers. I wish some of these other jokers around here would realize that."

  The piercing voice was cutting a wide swath across the newsroom beyond. Harriman squirmed uncomfortably in the wooden seat.

  "Just when the devil-killings story was flagging, you find this guy Menck. I have to hand it to you. Every other paper in town was sitting around with their thumbs up their asses, waiting for the next killing, but you—you went out and made the news."

  "Thank you, sir."

  Ritts sucked in a few quarts of smoke and dropped the cigarette on the floor of his office, grinding it in with his toe, where about twenty others lay, all nicely flattened. He exhaled with a noisy, emphysemic whistle. He lit another, looked up at Harriman, eyed him up and down.

  Harriman shifted again in his chair. Was there something wrong with the way he was dressed? Of course not: it was one of those things he'd been schooled in from day one. He knew just when to break out the madras, when to put away the seersucker, knew the acceptable shade of cordovan for tasseled loafers. And anyway, Ritts was the last person who could criticize anyone else's taste in clothes.

  "The National Enquirer's picked up the story, USA Today, Regis, Good Day New York. I like the feel of this, Harriman. You've done well. In fact, well enough to make you a special correspondent at the crime desk."

  Harriman was astonished. He hadn't expected this. He tried to control his facial muscles: he didn't want to be seen grinning like an idiot, especially to Ritts. He nodded his head. "Thank you very much, Mr. Ritts. I really appreciate it."

  "Any reporter that pushes the circ up eight percent in a week is gonna get noticed. It comes with a ten-thousand-dollar raise, effective immediately."

  "Thank you again."

  The managing editor seemed to be observing Harriman with ill-concealed amusement, looking him up and down again, eyes lingering on his tie, his striped shirt, his shoes. "Listen, Harriman, as I said, your story touched a chord. Thanks to you, a bunch of New Agers and doomsday freaks have started congregating in the park in front of Cutforth's building."

  Harriman nodded.

  "It's nothing much. Yet. They're gathering spontaneously, lighting candles, chanting. Flying Nun kind of shit. What we need is follow-up. First, a story about these guys, a serious story, a respectful story. A story that'll let all the other freaks know there's a daily gathering they're missing out on. If we handle this right, we could build up quite a crowd up there. We could stimulate some TV coverage. Who knows, there might even be demonstrations. See what I'm getting at? Like I said: here at the Post, we don't sit around waiting for news to happen, we go out and make it happen."

  "Yes, Mr. Ritts."

  Ritts lit up again. "Can I give you some friendly advice? Just between you and me."

  "Sure."

  "Lose the repp ties and the penny loafers. You look like a goddamn Times reporter. This is the Post. This is where the excitement is. You sure as hell don't want to be back with those ass-puckered types over there, do you? Now, go on out and talk to every nut who's shaking a Bible. You've touched a nerve, now you've got to keep the pressure on, keep the story building. And bring in a couple of colorful personalities. Find the leader of this rabble."

  "What if there isn't a leader?"

  "Then make one. Set him up on a pedestal, pin a damn medal on him. I smell something big here. And you know what? In thirty years, I've never called a bad one."

  "Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Ritts." Harriman tried to keep the contempt out of his voice. He would do what Ritts wanted,
but he would do it in his own way.

  Ritts sucked deep on his cigarette, tobacco hissing and spitting. Then he tossed the butt onto the floor and ground it out again with his foot. He coughed and smiled, displaying a rack of uneven teeth as yellowed as the stem of a corncob pipe.

  "Go get 'em, Harriman!" he cackled.

  { 42 }

  Vasquez worked off a piece of green chile beef jerky, chewed it meditatively, swallowed, and took a swig of bottled water. He went back to the cryptic crossword from the Times of London, pondered, made another entry, erased an earlier one, then set the puzzle aside.

  He sighed. He always felt a little nostalgic at the close of an operation: knowing he would have to leave, that all his preparations and deliberations and the cozy little world he had created would quickly become ancient history, pawed over by police officers and photographers. At the same time, he looked forward to seeing sunlight again, breathing fresh air, and listening to the thunder of surf. Funny, though, how he never felt quite so free and alive outside as he did within a cramped kill nest, on the brink of a kill.

  He checked his equipment yet again. He looked through the scope, made an infinitesimal correction with the windage adjuster, then raised his eye to examine the flash hider. Just a few minutes now. The box magazine held four rounds, with another in the chamber. All he'd need was two. Once again he shed his clothes and put on his disguise.

  Five minutes to one. He glanced regretfully around his nest, at everything he would have to leave behind. How many times had he actually had the opportunity to finish a Times cryptic? He rested his eye against the scope and watched. The minutes ticked past.

  Once again the door to the porte-cochère opened. Vasquez slowed his breathing, slowed his heart rate. Once again Pendergast's head and shoulders appeared in the reticle. This time Vasquez couldn't make out the butler, who must have been standing too far inside the door to be seen, but he was clearly there, because Pendergast was faced back toward the doorway, obviously talking to somebody. So much the better: an off-center shot to the back of the head would be just as hard to analyze later.