The typewritten note it contained was not long.
Dear A. Pendergast:
This is the Decapitator writing you. The endgame has arrived. On the USB stick you will find a short video starring Lt. D’Agosta and Associate Director Longstreet. They are my captives. Quite frankly, they are the bait: to bring you to me for a special evening. I am in Building 44 of the abandoned King’s Park Psychiatric Center on the North Shore of Long Island. Come to me alone. Do not send in the cavalry. Do not bring Proctor or anyone else. Tell no one. If you do not arrive by 9:05 PM, which if my message has been delivered properly should be in approximately fifty-five minutes, you’ll never see either of your friends alive again.
While you don’t yet know who I am, you certainly know a great deal about my talent. Since you are an intelligent man yourself, you will parse out the situation you now find yourself in and realize there is only one thing to do. Naturally you will view the video, ponder the situation, and consider various courses of action; but in the end you will understand you have no choice but to come here, now, alone. So don’t dawdle. The clock is ticking.
One other requirement: bring your Les Baer 1911 .45 and an extra eight-round magazine, both fully loaded, and make sure there is an extra round in the chamber, for a total of seventeen rounds in all. This is vitally important.
Sincerely,
“The Decapitator”
Pendergast read the letter through twice. He took the USB stick and inserted it into the port on his laptop. There was only one file on it. He clicked it.
A video sprang to life: D’Agosta and Longstreet, tied, gagged, and immobilized, each with a single hand free. They were staring at the camera, sweat beading on their brows, holding between them with their free hands that morning’s New York Times. The video had no sound. The background appeared to be a derelict, warehouse-like room. The two men were beaten, bruised, and bloodied—D’Agosta worse than Longstreet. The video lasted only ten seconds and it played again, and again, in an endless loop.
Pendergast viewed the video a few more times and read the note again before putting both back in the envelope and sliding it into his suitcoat pocket. For three minutes he remained very still in the library, his face bathed in flickering firelight, before rising to his feet.
The Decapitator was right: he simply had no choice but to comply.
Pendergast had only a vague knowledge of King’s Park, a gigantic decaying psychiatric hospital complex on Long Island not far from the city. A quick Internet search filled in the details: it had been abandoned decades ago, leaving numerous crumbling buildings scattered over expansive grounds sealed up behind chain-link fences; it was infamous for the electroshock treatments it so liberally administered to hopeless cases, before the advent of effective psychiatric drugs. The campus was situated in Sussex County between Oyster Bay and Stony Brook.
He printed out a map of the psychiatric center, folded it into his coat pocket, removed a spare .45 magazine from a drawer, checked to see it was full of rounds and slipped it into his other pocket, then removed his Les Baer to confirm it was fully loaded. He racked a round into the chamber, removed the magazine to insert a fresh round, and pocketed the gun.
As he was putting on his vicuña overcoat in the front hall, Proctor approached silently, like a cat. “May I be of assistance, sir?”
Pendergast glanced at him. Mrs. Trask must have told him of the letter. There was an eagerness in Proctor’s face that was both unusual and disturbing. The man, of course, always knew or guessed a great deal more than he let on.
“No, thank you, Proctor.”
“No need for a driver?”
“I have a yen to take a night drive by myself.” He held out his hands for the keys.
For a moment, Proctor stood immobile, his face a mask. Pendergast was well aware Proctor knew he was lying, but there was no time to prevaricate in a more satisfactory fashion.
Reaching into a pocket, Proctor wordlessly handed Pendergast the keys to the Rolls-Royce.
“Thank you.” And with a nod, Pendergast slipped past him and headed toward the garage, buttoning his overcoat as he went.
Just forty-eight minutes later, he turned off Route 25A onto Old Dock Road, which ran through the main campus of King’s Park Psychiatric Center. It was now almost nine, and a bitter night had fallen. He guided the big car down the deserted road, dark shapes of buildings, shuttered and forlorn, passing by on both sides.
He slowed, made a U-turn, pulled the Silver Wraith up and over the curb, turned off the headlights, then drove the vehicle over the frozen ground, pulling it in behind a stand of trees where it would not be visible from the road. There he stopped and consulted the map. Across the road stood a cluster of buildings his map identified as GROUP 4, or THE QUAD, which had once housed the geriatric insane. To his right, two hundred yards behind the chain-link fence surrounding the campus, rose a vast, ten-story structure shown on the map as BUILDING 93, its gables and towers rising up against the night sky. The massive façade was bathed in ghostly moonlight and punctuated with empty, inky windows, which stared over the frozen campus like some monstrous, many-eyed beast. As Pendergast contemplated it, he felt a whisper, a shiver, of the memories it retained of the patients who had been shuttered inside, gibbering, weeping, beyond despair, subjected to experimental drug testing, lobotomies, electroshock treatments, and perhaps worse. A bloated moon, veiled by scudding clouds, was rising above its battlements.
Hidden within the building’s immense shadow, Pendergast knew from the map, lay the much smaller two-story structure known as Building 44. This was where he would find the Decapitator.
Exiting the vehicle and quietly closing its door, he made sure the street was empty before approaching the fence. A set of wire clippers appeared in one gloved hand, and it was the work of two minutes to cut a flap in the cheap chain-link fence large enough to permit entry without catching and tearing his overcoat, of which he was very fond. Slipping through, he walked silently over the hard ground, his breath flaring in the moonlight, past Building 29—a power plant constructed in the early 1960s, now rusting and deserted like everything else. Beyond, he picked up an abandoned railroad spur line and followed it to where it ended at the loading dock of Building 44.
Pendergast’s research indicated Building 44 had been a warehouse for the storage of food for the psychiatric center. The small structure was sealed, its windows covered with plywood and tin, its doors locked and chained. Not a glimmer of light could be seen through the cracks.
He glanced around once again, then lightly sprang up onto the building’s loading bay at the end of a railroad trestle. Grasping a handle, he lifted the door slowly, keeping to a minimum the inevitable complaint of rusted metal, until it was just high enough to allow him to slip underneath. He waited, listening. But there was no sound from within.
He found himself in a large loading area, empty of everything except a stack of wooden packing crates piled in one corner, covered in cobwebs. Ahead, across the wide floor of cracked concrete, a door stood open in the far wall. The faintest illumination could be seen beyond. It looked like a trap—which Pendergast had known from the beginning was precisely what it was.
A trap intended for him; but traps sometimes worked both ways.
Pausing, he glanced at his watch. It was nine oh two—three minutes left until the time limit expired.
Silently, he crossed the expanse of the loading area and approached the door. Placing the fingertips of one hand on it, he slowly opened it wider. Beyond lay a narrow corridor, punctuated on both sides by open doors. From one of the right-hand doors, almost closed, leaked the light that faintly illuminated the hallway. Absolute silence reigned.
Pulling his Les Baer, Pendergast slipped through the doorway and moved down the corridor until he reached the lighted door. He waited a few moments to assure himself there was no activity. Then he placed his palm on the door, gave it a sharp shove, stepped forward with the weapon raised, and panned the room.
Pendergast paused for a moment, frozen by surprise. The man was not bound—in fact, he seemed to be under no restraint whatsoever.
“H?” he said in a voice barely more than a whisper.
Longstreet did not reply.
Pendergast took a step toward the seated figure. “H?” he said again.
Still Longstreet said nothing. Was he unconscious? Pendergast stepped toward the seated figure and reached out, resting a hand on Longstreet’s shoulder and giving him a gentle shake.
With a quiet, slippery kind of sigh, the man’s head fell off, hit the table with a dull thud, rolled away, and came to rest, rocking slightly, Longstreet’s gray eyes staring up at Pendergast in silent agony.
At the same time, the lights abruptly went off. And from out of the darkness came a low chuckle of triumph.
52
JUST AS QUICKLY as blackness fell, brilliant light suddenly flooded the room. There—seated in a wooden chair in a far corner—sat Lieutenant D’Agosta. He was hog-tied to the chair, wearing nothing but boxers and a sleeveless coat stuffed with packets of plastic explosive—a suicide vest. A cue-ball gag was in his mouth. He looked at Pendergast, his eyes on fire.
“I arrived within the requisite fifty-five minutes, Mr. Ozmian,” Pendergast said. “And yet you killed Howard Longstreet. That was not part of the deal.”
A moment passed. And then, Anton Ozmian stepped quietly into the room. He was wearing blacked-out camos, and in one hand he held a 1911 handgun—trained on Pendergast—while the other cupped a remote detonator.
“Place your weapon on the floor, please, Agent Pendergast,” he said in a cool voice.
Pendergast complied.
“Now nudge it toward me with your foot.”
Pendergast did so.
“Take off your jacket, turn around, place your feet apart, and spread-eagle yourself against the wall.”
Pendergast did this as well. The opportunity, he was fairly sure, would come for turning the tables, but for now there were no options except to obey. He heard Ozmian approach; he felt the cold hard muzzle of the gun against the nape of his neck as the man searched him, uncovering the spare magazine along with several knives, lock picks and bump keys, a garrote, two cell phones, money, some test tubes and tweezers, and a single-shot derringer.
“Put one hand behind your back while balancing yourself against the wall with the other.”
When Pendergast did this, he felt a pair of plastic zip cuffs slip around his wrist. Then his other hand was pulled back and cuffed as well. He heard Ozmian step back.
“Very good,” the entrepreneur said. “Now you may have a seat beside your friend. And we’ll have a little talk.”
Wordlessly, Pendergast sat down next to the body of Longstreet—which, no longer propped up by the arm, had fallen forward onto the table, next to Longstreet’s lolling head. D’Agosta looked on from his chair in the far corner, his own eyes wide and red-rimmed.
Ozmian settled into a chair on the other side of the table and inspected Pendergast’s primary weapon. “Very nice. You’ll be getting it back soon, by the way.” He put it down, paused a moment. “First: I never promised to keep both men alive. My exact words were, ‘you’ll never see either of your friends alive again.’ As you can see, Lieutenant D’Agosta is still very much alive—for the time being. Second: congratulations on deducing that I was the Decapitator. How did you do it, exactly?”
“Hightower. You led us to a suspect who was simply too perfect. That was when I sensed a master puppeteer at work, and started to assemble the pieces.”
“Very good. Have you also guessed why I am killing these particular people?”
“Why don’t you tell me?” Pendergast said.
“I’d much rather hear it from you.”
“The hobby you supposedly gave up many years ago—big-game hunting. You were desirous of the ultimate thrill: the ‘most dangerous game,’ so to speak.”
Ozmian grinned widely. “I am impressed!”
“I am puzzled about one thing: why your daughter was your first victim. Although I suspect it had something to do with your recent company troubles.”
“Well, I’ll help you with that one, as it’s getting late and the game will soon begin. As you’ve guessed, it was my own daughter, my dear, devoted daughter, who leaked our proprietary code onto the Internet—almost capsizing my company in the process.”
“I take it, then, that your relationship wasn’t quite as close as you pretended.”
At this, Ozmian paused for a moment. “When she was a girl, we were quite close. Bosom companions, actually. She worshipped me, and in her alone I found unconditional love. But as puberty approached, she zigged when she should have zagged. She had a brilliant mind when she wanted to use it, not to mention a remarkable facility with computers from a very early age. I’d always expected her to be my partner and eventual replacement. Her betrayal of me when it came was, as you can imagine, all that much keener.”
“Why did she betray you?”
“The zig rather than the zag. You know how it goes, Agent Pendergast: a family gone wrong thanks to too much money, too many ex-wives, too much dysfunction.” He scoffed. “Oh, we kept up appearances—today it’s all about celebrity-watching and paparazzi, isn’t it, and we both had skin in that game. But the fact is, my daughter became a drug-addicted, self-destructive, vicious little slut who hated everything about me except my money. And when I cut that off, she used her considerable skills to break into my private computer and do the one thing she knew would hurt me the most. She tried to ruin the company I had built—for her.”
“And so, in a fit of rage, you killed her.”
“Yes. They tell me I have ‘anger management issues.’” Ozmian made air quotes. “The only thing is, I never seem to regret my outbursts. It’s been quite useful to me in business.”
“And once you’d cooled off…I presume you got to thinking. About her head.”
“I see you’ve found the final piece of the puzzle. There was Grace’s body, lying in a Queens garage. And there I was, in my freshly cleaned apartment, sipping cognac and thinking. To be honest, I was shocked at what I’d done. I’d been consumed with fury, but after that was gone a depression set in. It wasn’t just Grace—it was my whole life. Here I’d achieved everything I ever wanted. Made a fortune. Humiliated my enemies. And still I felt unfulfilled. Restless. My thoughts turned to big-game hunting. You see, I’d given it up after bagging the biggest, baddest game there was—including, by the way, a black rhino, a bull elephant, and a few other critically endangered species, although naturally I kept those a closely guarded secret. But in my edginess it occurred to me that I’d become bored with big-game hunting prematurely. You see, I’d never hunted the biggest game of all. Man. Not just your average, run-of-the-mill cretin, however. No—my ‘big game’ would be powerful, affluent men with enemies: men who had surrounded themselves with layers of security; smart men, alert men, men who would be almost impossible to take down. Oh, and lest I be called sexist, women as well. I ask you, as a fellow big-game hunter: what better game to stalk than Homo sapiens?”
“And you decided your own daughter would become your first trophy. An honor for her, really. So you went back and cut off her head.”
Ozmian nodded again. “You understand me astonishingly well.”
“Your choice of targets had nothing to do with them being corrupt. That’s why Adeyemi didn’t seem to fit t
he profile. The attraction was that she, like the others, was surrounded by supposedly impenetrable security. She was extremely challenging to ‘bag.’”
“And you want to know the true irony? I meant her to be my final trophy. But then you and Longstreet here forced your way into my office. And you thought you played me so well. Ha ha! I had such fun telling you about Hightower. I wish I could have seen old Hightower’s face when you paid him a visit. I hope you sweated him good! The whole time you were peppering me with questions, I was thinking of one thing: how lovely that pale, fine head of yours would look when mounted on my trophy wall.”
His laughter echoed in the shabby space.
A muffled grunt of rage, like a wounded buffalo, came from D’Agosta. Ozmian ignored it.
“After that visit, I was intrigued with you. And what I found only solidified my belief that you, not Adeyemi, should be my ultimate trophy. I also realized the best way to lure you in.” He nodded toward Longstreet’s corpse. “In my office, I sensed that you two had a history. It wasn’t hard to learn about your good friend D’Agosta, either.”
He reached out, took hold of a lock of Longstreet’s hair, and gave the decapitated head a desultory spin. “With both of them at my mercy, I knew you would have no choice but to come out here and play my game.”
Pendergast said nothing.
Ozmian sat forward in his chair. “And you do know the game we are about to play—right?”
“It is all too clear.”
“Good!” He paused. “We will both be on totally fair and equal footing.” He raised his gun. “We will each have the same weapon, the venerable 1911, and an additional magazine. You might think you have a slight advantage in that Les Baer of yours, but mine is equally fine. We will each also have a knife, watch, flashlight, and our wits. Our hunting ground will be the adjoining structure, Building Ninety-Three. You saw it on your way in, that abandoned hospital?”
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