“I did.”
“I give myself no advantage. This will be a sporting stalk in which we are simultaneously the hunter and the hunted. No fox, no hound; just two experienced hunters each stalking their ultimate prey: each other. The winner will be the one who bags the loser!” He waved the detonator in D’Agosta’s direction. “The lieutenant is an insurance policy to make sure you abide by the rules of the hunt. That suicide vest is on a two-hour timer. If you kill me, you can simply take the timer from my pocket and shut it off. But if you cheat—by walking away, or trying to alert the authorities—all I need to do is press the remote and boom goes D’Agosta. The detonator also ensures that the hunt is completed within two hours: no dawdling or hiding and running out the clock. In a few minutes, I’ll give you back your gun and extra magazine, remove the handcuffs, furnish you with blacked-out clothing…and give you a head start. Make for Building Ninety-Three. After ten minutes, I’ll come after you and the stalk will commence.”
“Why?” Pendergast asked.
“Why?” Ozmian laughed. “Didn’t I already explain? I’ve done it all, I’m standing on the summit, and the only view I have is looking down. This will be the most delicious thrill of my life—the ultimate, the final thrill. Even if I’m to die, at least I’ll go out with a bang, no pun intended—knowing it took the very best to kill me. And if I survive, then I’ll have a memory to cherish…no matter what the future brings.”
“That wasn’t my question. What I meant was, why Building Ninety-Three?”
For a moment, Ozmian looked nonplussed. “You’re kidding, right? It is perfect for a hunt like ours. It’s over four hundred thousand square feet, a huge, rambling ruin, with ten floors divided into numerous wings, miles of corridors, and over two thousand rooms! Imagine the possibilities for traps, ambushes, and blinds! And we’re far, far from any busybody who might hear gunshots and call the cops.”
Pendergast stared at Ozmian through narrow eyes, saying nothing.
“I see you’re not satisfied. Very well. There is a second reason.” He gave Longstreet’s head another casual spin on the tabletop. “There was a day during my twelfth year when our dearly beloved parish priest, Father Anselm, locked me in the sacristy and raped me repeatedly. He said while he did it that God and Jesus were watching and it was all right with them, and he threatened me with hell and worse if I ever told. I had a mental collapse. I stopped speaking, stopped thinking, stopped everything. My family, having no idea what had happened, assumed I’d gone crazy. A diagnosis was made of catatonic schizophrenia. King’s Park back then had a stellar reputation, the one hospital in the country they were sure would cure me. Yes, Agent Pendergast: I became a patient of the main complex in King’s Park. One of the last, it turns out. And here, I eventually recovered. Not through anything they did, but through my own internal resources.”
“King’s Park was known for its electroconvulsive treatments.”
“Indeed it was—and that was why it was shut down in the end. But the shock treatments—and worse!—were reserved for the gibbering lunatics, incorrigibles, and pathetic wretches. I fortunately escaped that fate.”
“And, I’m given to understand, cured yourself.”
“Your sarcastic tone is unpleasant, but yes, indeed I did. One day I realized that I had something important to do: revenge. Perhaps the strongest human motivator there is. So I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and convinced the credulous and easily manipulated doctors that they had cured me. I resumed my life. I continued growing up, went to high school, and finally did the thing I had resolved to do—punish Father Anselm. Death was too much of a release for that man: my goal was to make the rest of his life full of misery and pain. And then I went to Stanford, graduated summa cum laude, founded DigiFlood, made billions of dollars, fucked beautiful women, traveled the world, lived a life of unimaginable luxury and privilege—in short, I did all the things that truly gifted human beings like myself do.”
“Indeed,” Pendergast said drily.
“Anyway, to resume, not long after my discharge, King’s Park was abandoned, shut up, and left to rot.”
“How fitting for you, then, that this will be the place of the final hunt.”
“I see you’re getting into the spirit of it already. Surely you understand how this experience will bring things full circle for me. Of course, I barely knew the building then: just the room where I was drugged and held in restraints day and night, and the therapy room where I told my doctor a bunch of lies that he believed and carefully wrote down. I’m as essentially unfamiliar with the place as you are—there will be no advantage there.”
Ozmian placed the Les Baer on the table, along with an extra magazine, while pocketing the detonator. Next to it he laid a watch, a flashlight, and a fixed-blade knife.
“Your gear.” He stood up. “And so, Agent Pendergast. Shall we begin?”
53
THE NIGHT WAS bitter, without a breath of wind, a full moon just peeking above the towers of Building 93, throwing a bone-white light over the landscape. Clad in the camos and soft shoes Ozmian had forced on him, Agent Pendergast paused beyond the door of Building 44, the vapor from his breath trailing through the night air. Building 93 lay about a hundred yards away, a great black wedge against the moonlit sky, surrounded by a battered chain-link fence. A swath of open ground lay between him and the fence, covered with stubble and patches of crusty snow, with a scattering of dead trees and hollow stumps. A knoll rose on the right, covered with scrubby weeds.
To see Longstreet so brutally decapitated; to see D’Agosta beaten and trussed up like a pig for slaughter; to realize how utterly Ozmian had deceived him—the horror of it pressed in on Pendergast, threatening to unseat his intellect and overwhelm him with grief, fury, and self-reproach. He breathed deeply, closed his eyes, and centered his mind, thrusting those distractions aside. A minute passed—a precious minute, but he knew that if he did not regain his focus and balance, he would be lost for sure.
Sixty seconds later he opened his eyes. The night remained cold and soundless, the moonlight as clear as water. Now he began assembling various possibilities in his mind, running through the trajectories of potential actions, determining which of the branching sets to consider further and which to discard.
He concluded there was a better option than making a beeline for Building 93—and that was to immediately go on the offensive. He would strike hard at Ozmian the moment he exited Building 44. Moving with cat-like swiftness over the frozen ground, being careful to leave no trail, he circled the building, performing a quick reconnaissance. It was a two-story structure of brick, dilapidated but still sound, with a steeply pitched roof. The windows of both stories had been blocked with plywood covered in tin, and sealed so effectively that no light from inside leaked out. There would be no exit from one of those.
As he rounded the corner at the back of the building he spied a rear door. He gently touched the handle and found it was locked, then ran a finger along the exposed hinges and brought it to his nose. Fresh oil. A further examination revealed the hinges had recently been cleaned, as well.
Completing the reconnoiter, Pendergast understood that Building 44 had only two means of egress—front and back. The roof was too steep and exposed to allow for any escape that way. It was an ideal setup for an ambush.
Perhaps too ideal: it felt almost like a setup. In fact, as he reflected further, it was a setup: Ozmian was expecting him to hold back and press an attack the moment the man exited.
But setup or not, even if he chose to cover one of the exits at random, he still had a 50 percent chance of getting the drop on Ozmian. By anticipating Ozmian’s strategy, he could improve those odds.
Pendergast ran through the logic. Since Ozmian had previously prepared this rear door, he intended for this to be his exit point while Pendergast was staking out the front loading dock entrance. Given this train of deduction, Pendergast should therefore stake out the rear door.
But that logic, comp
lex as it was, might still be too simple. If Ozmian were truly a clever man, he would anticipate that he, Pendergast, would discover the rear door, observe the freshly oiled hinges, and therefore stake out that exit point.
Therefore, Ozmian will leave by the front door. It was a clear case of double-reverse psychology. This oiled back door, so carefully prepared, was a red herring, a trap, created to lure Pendergast into making this an ambush point.
Four minutes left in his head start.
Pendergast slipped around to the front of the building once again, now convinced that this was where Ozmian would exit. As he scanned the frozen landscape, he saw an excellent point of cover: a dead oak tree still cloaked in the long moon-shadow cast by Building 93. He sprinted over to it, leapt up to grasp a low branch, swung himself up, climbed to a higher limb, and took up a crouching position, hidden behind the trunk. He removed his Les Baer, its cold weight a physical reassurance. Bracing himself against the trunk, he took a bead on the front loading dock.
Thirty seconds.
But then, even as the seconds ticked off, Pendergast once again had misgivings. Was he overthinking the situation, giving Ozmian too much credit? Perhaps the man had a simple plan after all to exit by the rear door. If he did, Pendergast not only would miss his chance but would be highly vulnerable in his position on the tree limb, especially if Ozmian did indeed plan to circle around from the rear and fire at him from the weedy knoll.
Ten seconds.
For better or worse he had made his choice. Iron sights trained on the metal rolling door, his shoulder braced against the trunk, he waited, stilling his breath.
54
VINCENT D’AGOSTA, TRUSSED and gagged, watched as Ozmian sat calmly in the chair opposite him. The man, who had been so shifty and restless before Pendergast’s arrival, was now supremely calm, his eyes closed, his hands on his knees, his back straight in the old wooden chair. He appeared to be meditating.
D’Agosta cast his eyes about the large, unheated space. It was so cold that the blood that had drained from Longstreet’s head, puddled on the metal table, was already freezing. A harsh fluorescent illumination came from a trio of remotely controlled spotlights hung in the corners of the room.
Once again, his mind began racing. He savagely upbraided himself for his own gullibility: not only for falling into the trap, but for being angry with Pendergast and refusing to try to see things his way. Longstreet was already dead—and a most horrible, agonizing death it had been. And now, because of his stupidity, Pendergast might well be killed, too.
Above all, his hatred of Ozmian and thirst for revenge glowed like a furnace inside him. But even as he considered every one of his options, everything he might do to turn the situation around, he knew that he was helpless to act. It was all in Pendergast’s hands. Ozmian would not get away with it. He would underestimate Pendergast, as so many had done in the past, to their great sorrow. And what was he thinking? Pendergast would not be killed—an absurd idea. All this would be over soon. He kept repeating it like a mantra: All over soon.
A few long minutes passed, and then Ozmian stirred. He opened his eyes, stood up, raised his arms, and went through a series of stretches. Walking over to the table where his equipment was laid out, he tested his flashlight and put it in a pocket, slipped the knife into his belt, checked his pistol, made sure a round was in the chamber, and shoved it into his waistband. The extra magazine went into another pocket. Then he turned to D’Agosta. The look on his face was one of eagerness and focus. D’Agosta found the calm assurance unnerving.
“Let’s play a little game, you and I,” he said. “Let’s see if, in the five minutes remaining before I begin my pursuit, I’m able to anticipate your friend’s moves.” He took a step, then another, trailing his hand on the metal table. “Shall we?”
A queer smile played about his lips. D’Agosta, of course, could not respond even if he wanted to.
“My first guess is your partner doesn’t make a beeline for Building Ninety-Three. He’s not a man to run.”
Another pensive turn around the table.
“No…Instead, he decides to press the attack immediately. He decides to ambush me as I emerge from this building.”
Ozmian made another turn. He was certainly enjoying himself, D’Agosta thought, and he wondered how much the bastard would enjoy taking a round in the brainpan from Pendergast’s .45. He was going to be in for the surprise of his life.
“So your partner reconnoiters this building. Lo and behold, he discovers the back entrance. And then he notices the hinges have been cleaned and oiled.”
He paused. D’Agosta stared, eyes full of hatred.
“Naturally, he concludes that I have secretly prepared this back door as my exit point. He stakes it out, ready to take me down as soon as I emerge.”
How the scumbag was enjoying the sound of his own voice.
“What do you think, Lieutenant? Following me so far?” He put a pensive finger to his chin. “But you know what? I don’t think he’s staking out the back door. Do you know why?”
He resumed his slow pacing. “Being a clever man, and knowing how clever I am, your friend will think further. And he will decide that the oiled hinges are, in fact, a ruse. He will think I oiled the door to mislead him into thinking I’d be leaving by that exit.”
He took a few more pensive steps. “And so what does he do? He stakes out the front door!”
A low chuckle. “Okay, now he’s staking out the front door. But from what vantage point? As every hunter knows, big game don’t normally expect an attack from above. The best way to hunt deer, for example, is from a stand in a tree.”
Slow steps.
“Humans are like deer. They don’t think to look up. And so Agent Pendergast climbs into that big dead oak out front, beautifully positioned and in deep shadow. I predict he is up in that tree as I speak, with his gun aimed at the loading dock door, waiting for me to exit.”
No logic, no matter how elaborate, D’Agosta thought, was going to save the ass of this son of a bitch. Pendergast would outmaneuver him at every turn. The man wouldn’t last five minutes.
“And therefore my move is this: I will leave by the back door, circle around to a brushy knoll off to the right—and shoot your partner out of that tree.”
A mirthless smile.
“If my reasoning is correct, your partner is going to be dead in—” he checked his watch—“two minutes and twenty seconds.”
He stopped his pacing and leaned on the table, above the decapitated head and freezing pool of blood. “I hope to God I’m wrong. I hope your friend is smarter than that. If my hunt ends prematurely, it will be a keen disappointment.”
He turned, patted himself down, checked everything one last time, then made a curt bow. “And now, I’ll take my leave…through the back door. If you hear shots in the back, you’ll know he surprised me. If, on the other hand, you hear shots in the front, then you’ll know my scenario has come true.”
And with that, he turned and walked to the door and disappeared down a hall toward the rear of the building.
D’Agosta turned his attention to the clock Ozmian had placed on the table. The ten-minute waiting period was up. He waited, listening for the shots he was sure would come from the back as Pendergast ambushed Ozmian when he emerged. But there were none. A few minutes passed, and then the silence was broken by two shots—from the front.
55
RUNNING ACROSS THE frozen ground, Pendergast saw he’d made his first mistake, which had almost cost him his life. Waiting in the tree, when the front door did not open after the ten-minute head start had passed, he immediately realized he had judged wrong and, knowing he was a sitting duck, had stepped off the branch and dropped in free fall—at the very moment two shots from the weedy knoll ripped into the trunk precisely where he had been crouching.
He caught the lower limb just as he fell past it, swung hard with his feet, and landed on the ground at a run. Glancing back, he saw Ozmian burst
from the weeds and sprint after him, gun in hand, in hot pursuit. Not only had he made an error, but he had wasted a precious ten-minute head start that would have allowed him to choose his entrance into Building 93. Clearly, Ozmian had anticipated his chain of reasoning and done him one better.
Pendergast sprinted on, heading for the eastern side of Building 93, where there appeared to be a gap in the ragged chain-link fence. The western wing, he could see, had partially burned; streaks of soot from the conflagration rose from black window frames and a massive crack ran up the façade, like a gigantic House of Usher, traversing all ten stories. As he ran, his mind was working, reevaluating the branching possibilities, dismayed and humiliated by the fact that he had underestimated his opponent. The only positive outcome of the skirmish was that his opponent had wasted two rounds: Ozmian now had fifteen to his seventeen.
In the endgame—if it ever got to that—a two-round advantage could be decisive.
The chain-link fence loomed up and Pendergast raced along it to the gap and dove through; rising again, he bulled through a dense stand of brush, clambered over a heap of fallen bricks, and—after a lightning reconnaissance—leapt through an open window frame into the building. He rolled, regained his feet, and went on running, angling into the darkest shadows. Flicking on his light for but an instant, he took one turn, then another, then another; at the third bend of the hallway he halted and crouched, with a clear field of fire back down the hall he had just come. A moment later he heard faint running steps, saw the approaching glow of a flashlight from around the corner; as soon as it appeared Pendergast fired. It was a long shot and he missed, but it had the desired effect: Ozmian ducked back around the corner, taking cover. It had halted the man’s headlong pursuit and bought him a minute or two.
Pendergast pulled off his shoes and, tossing them aside, sprinted down the corridor in his socks, turned through a dogleg, and suddenly found himself in a large, open room, dimly illuminated by moonlight.
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