The Inner Circle

by Brad Meltzer

  Hefting the journals, he continued south, toward Wall Street and the subway.

  But this time, there was no doubt: footsteps, and close. A faint cough.

  He turned, pulled his gun again. Now it was dark enough that the edges of the street, the old docks, the stone doorways, lay in deep shadow. Whoever was following him was both persistent and good. This was not some mugger. And the cough was bullshit. The man wanted him to know he was being followed. The man was trying to spook him, make him nervous, goad him into making a mistake.

  O’Shaughnessy turned and ran. Not because of fear, really, but because he wanted to provoke the man into following. He ran to the end of the block, turned the corner, continuing halfway down the next block. Then he stopped, silently retraced his steps, and melted into the shadow of a doorway. He thought he heard footsteps running down the block. He braced himself against the door behind him, and waited, gun drawn, ready to spring.

  Silence. It stretched on for a minute, then two, then five. A cab drove slowly by, twin headlights lancing through the fog and gloom. Cautiously, O’Shaughnessy eased his way out of the doorway, looked around. All was deserted once again. He began making his way back down the sidewalk in the direction from which he’d come, moving slowly, keeping close to the buildings. Maybe the man had taken a different turn. Or given up. Or maybe, after all, it was only his imagination.

  And that was when the dark figure lanced out of an adjacent doorway—when something came down over his head and tightened around his neck—when the sickly sweet chemical odor abruptly invaded his nostrils. One of O’Shaughnessy’s hands reached for the hood, while the other convulsively squeezed off a shot. And then he was falling, falling without end…

  The sound of the shot reverberated down the empty street, echoing and reechoing off the old buildings, until it died away. And silence once more settled over the docks and the now empty streets.

  FIVE

  PATRICK O’SHAUGHNESSY AWOKE VERY SLOWLY. HIS HEAD felt as if it had been split open with an axe, his knuckles throbbed, and his tongue was swollen and metallic in his mouth. He opened his eyes, but all was darkness. Fearing he’d gone blind, he instinctively drew his arms toward his face. He realized, with a kind of leaden numbness, that they were restrained. He tugged, and something rattled.

  Chains. He was shackled with chains.

  He moved his legs and found they were chained as well.

  Almost instantly, the numbness fled, and cold reality flooded over him. The memory of the footsteps, the cat-and-mouse in the deserted streets, the smothering hood, returned with stark, pitiless clarity. For a moment, he struggled fiercely, a terrible panic bubbling up in his chest. Then he lay back, trying to master himself. Panic’s not going to solve anything. You have to think.

  Where was he?

  In a cell of some sort. He’d been taken prisoner. But by whom?

  Almost as soon as he asked this question, the answer came: by the copycat killer. By the Surgeon.

  The fresh wave of panic that greeted this realization was cut short by a sudden shaft of light—bright, even painful after the enveloping darkness.

  He looked around quickly. He was in a small, bare room of rough-hewn stone, chained to a floor of cold, damp concrete. One wall held a door of rusted metal, and the light was streaming in through a small slot in its face. The light suddenly diminished, and a voice sounded in the slot. O’Shaughnessy could see wet red lips moving.

  “Please do not discompose yourself,” the voice said soothingly. “All this will be over soon. Struggle is unnecessary.”

  The slot rattled shut, and O’Shaughnessy was once again plunged into darkness.

  He listened as the retreating steps rang against the stone floor. It was all too clear what was coming next. He’d seen the results at the medical examiner’s office. The Surgeon would come back; he’d come back, and…

  Don’t think about that. Think about how to escape.

  O’Shaughnessy tried to relax, to concentrate on taking long, slow breaths. Now his police training helped. He felt calmness settle over him. No situation was ever hopeless, and even the most cautious criminals made mistakes.

  He’d been stupid, his habitual caution lost in his excitement over finding the ledgers. He’d forgotten Pendergast’s warning of constant danger.

  Well, he wouldn’t be stupid any longer.

  All this will be over soon, the voice had said. That meant it wouldn’t be long before he’d be coming back. O’Shaughnessy would be ready.

  Before the Surgeon could do anything, he’d have to remove the shackles. And that’s when O’Shaughnessy would jump him.

  But the Surgeon was clearly no fool. The way he’d shadowed him, ambushed him: that had taken cunning, strong nerves. If O’Shaughnessy merely pretended to be asleep, it wouldn’t be enough.

  This was it: do or die. He’d have to make it good.

  He took a deep breath, then another. And then, closing his eyes, he smashed the shackles of his arm against his forehead, raking them laterally from left to right.

  The blood began to flow almost at once. There was pain, too, but that was good: it kept him sharp, gave him something to think about. Wounds to the forehead tended to bleed a lot; that was good, too.

  Now he carefully lay to one side, positioning himself to look as if he’d passed out, scraping his head against the rough wall as he slumped to the floor. The stone felt cold against his cheek; the blood warm as it trickled through his eyelashes, down his nose. It would work. It would work. He didn’t want to go out like Doreen Hollander, torn and stiff on a morgue gurney.

  Once again, O’Shaughnessy quelled a rising panic. It would be over soon. The Surgeon would return, he’d hear the footsteps on the stones. The door would open. When the shackles were removed, he’d surprise the man, overwhelm him. He’d escape with his life, collar the copycat killer in the process.

  Stay calm. Stay calm. Eyes shut, blood trickling onto the cold damp stone, O’Shaughnessy deliberately turned his thoughts to opera. His breathing grew calmer. And soon, in his mind, the bleak walls of the little cell began to ring with the exquisitely beautiful strains of O Isis Und Osiris, rising effortlessly toward street level and the inviolate sky far above.

  SIX

  PENDERGAST STOOD ON THE BROAD PAVEMENT, SMALL brown package beneath one arm, looking thoughtfully up at the brace of lions that guarded the entrance to the New York Public Library. A brief, drenching rain had passed over the city, and the headlights of the buses and taxis shimmered in countless puddles of water. Pendergast raised his eyes from the lions to the facade behind them, long and imposing, heavy Corinthian columns rising toward a vast architrave. It was past nine P.M., and the library had long since closed: the tides of students, researchers, tourists, unpublished poets and scholars that swirled about its portals by day had receded hours before.

  He glanced around once more, eyes sweeping the stone plaza and the sidewalk beyond. Then he adjusted the package beneath his arm, and made his way slowly up the broad stairs.

  To one side of the massive entrance, a smaller door had been set into the granite face of the library. Pendergast approached it, rapped his knuckles lightly on the bronze. Almost immediately it swung inward, revealing a library guard. He was very tall, with closely cropped blond hair, heavily muscled. A copy of Orlando Furioso was in one meaty hand.

  “Good evening, Agent Pendergast,” the guard said. “How are you this evening?”

  “Quite well, Francis, thank you,” Pendergast replied. He nodded toward the book. “How are you enjoying Ariosto?”

  “Very much. Thanks for the suggestion.”

  “I believe I recommended the Bacon translation.”

  “Nesmith in the microfiche department has one. The others are on loan.”

  “Remind me to send you down a copy.”

  “I’ll do that, sir. Thanks.”

  Pendergast nodded again and passed on, through the entrance hall and up the marble stairs, hearing nothing but the
sound of his own footsteps. At the entrance to Room 315—the Main Reading Room—he paused again. Inside, ranks of long wooden tables lay beneath yellow pools of light. Pendergast entered, gliding toward a vast construction of dark wood that divided the Reading Room into halves. By day, this was the station from which library workers accepted book requests from patrons and sent them down to the subterranean stacks by pneumatic tube. But now, with the fall of night, the receiving station was silent and empty.

  Pendergast opened a door at one end of the receiving station, stepped inside, and made his way to a small door, set into a frame beside a long series of dumbwaiters. He opened it and descended the staircase beyond.

  Beneath the Main Reading Room were seven levels of stacks. The first six levels were vast cities of shelving, laid out in precise grids that went on, row after row, stack after stack. The ceilings of the stacks were low, and the tall shelves of books claustrophobic. And yet, as he walked in the faint light of the first level—taking in the smell of dust, and mildew, and decomposing paper—Pendergast felt a rare sense of peace. The pain of his stab wound, the heavy burden of the case at hand, seemed to ease. At every turn, every intersection, his mind filled with the memory of some prior perambulation: journeys of discovery, literary expeditions that had frequently ended in investigative epiphanies, abruptly solved cases.

  But there was no time now for reminiscing, and Pendergast moved on. Reaching a narrow, even steeper staircase, he descended deeper into the stacks.

  At last, Pendergast emerged from the closet-like stairwell onto the seventh level. Unlike the flawlessly catalogued levels above it, this was an endless rat’s nest of mysterious pathways and cul-de-sacs, rarely visited despite some astonishing collections known to be buried here. The air was close and stuffy, as if it had—like the volumes it surrounded—not circulated for decades. Several corridors ran away from the stairwell, framed by bookcases, crossing and recrossing at strange angles.

  Pendergast paused momentarily. In the silence, his hyperacute sense of hearing picked up a very faint scratching: colonies of silverfish, gorging their way through an endless supply of pulp.

  And there was another sound, too: louder and sharper. Snip.

  Pendergast turned toward the sound, tracking it through the stacks of books, angling first one way, then another. The sound grew nearer.

  Snip. Snip.

  Up ahead, Pendergast made out a halo of light. Turning a final corner, he saw a large wooden table, brilliantly lit by a dentist’s O-ring lamp. Several objects were arrayed along one edge of the table: needle, a spool of heavy filament, a pair of white cotton gloves, a bookbinder’s knife, a glue pen. Next to them was a stack of reference works: Blades’s The Enemies of Books; Ebeling’s Urban Entomology; Clapp’s Curatorial Care of Works of Art on Paper. On a book truck beside the table sat a tall pile of old volumes in various states of decomposition, covers frayed, hinges broken, spines torn.

  A figure sat at the table, back to Pendergast. A confusion of long hair, white and very thick, streamed down from the skull onto the hunched shoulders. Snip.

  Pendergast leaned against the nearest stack and—keeping a polite distance—rapped his knuckles lightly against the metal.

  “I hear a knocking,” the figure quoted, in a high yet clearly masculine tone. He did not turn his head. Snip.

  Pendergast knocked again.

  “Anon, anon!” the man responded.

  Snip.

  Pendergast knocked a third time, more sharply.

  The man straightened his shoulders with an irritable sigh. “Wake Duncan with thy knocking!” he cried. “I would thou couldst.”

  Then he laid aside a pair of library scissors and the old book he had been rebinding, and turned around.

  He had thin white eyebrows to match the mane of hair, and the irises of his eyes were yellow, giving him a gaze that seemed leonine, almost feral. He saw Pendergast, and his old withered face broke into a smile. Then he caught sight of the package beneath Pendergast’s arm, and the smile broadened.

  “If it isn’t Special Agent Pendergast!” he cried. “The extra-special, Special Agent Pendergast.”

  Pendergast inclined his head. “How are you, Wren?”

  “I humbly thank thee, well, well.” The man gestured a bony hand toward the book truck, the pile of books waiting to be repaired. “But there is so little time, and so many damaged children.”

  The New York Public Library harbored many strange souls, but none was stranger than the specter known as Wren. Nobody seemed to know anything about him: whether Wren was his first name, or his last, or even his real name at all. Nobody seemed to know where he’d come from, or whether he was officially employed by the library. Nobody knew where or what he ate—some speculated that he dined on library paste. The only things known about the man was that he had never been seen to leave the library, and that he had a pathfinder’s instinct for the lost treasures of the seventh level.

  Wren looked at his guest, venal yellow eyes sharp and bright as a hawk’s. “You don’t look like yourself today,” he said.

  “No doubt.” Pendergast said no more, and Wren seemed not to expect it.

  “Let’s see. Did you find—what was it again? Oh, yes—that old Broadway Water Company survey and the Five Points chapbooks useful?”

  “Very much so.”

  Wren gestured toward the package. “And what are you lending me today, hypocrite lecteur?”

  Pendergast leaned away from the bookcase, brought the package out from beneath his arm. “It’s a manuscript of Iphigenia at Aulis, translated from the ancient Greek into Vulgate.”

  Wren listened, his face betraying nothing.

  “The manuscript was illuminated at the old monastery of Sainte-Chapelle in the late fourteenth century. One of the last works they produced before the terrible conflagration of 1397.”

  A spark of interest flared in the old man’s yellow eyes.

  “The book caught the attention of Pope’s Pius III, who pronounced it sacrilegious and ordered every copy burnt. It’s also notable for the scribbles and drawings made by the scribes in the margins of the manuscript. They are said to depict the lost text of Chaucer’s fragmentary ‘Cook’s Tale.’ ”

  The spark of interest abruptly burned hot. Wren held out his hands.

  Pendergast kept the package just out of reach. “There is one favor I’d request in return.”

  Wren retracted his hands. “Naturally.”

  “Have you heard of the Wheelwright Bequest?”

  Wren frowned, shook his head. White locks flew from side to side.

  “He was the president of the city’s Land Office from 1866 to 1894. He was a notorious packrat, and ultimately donated a large number of handbills, circulars, broadsides, and other period publications to the Library.”

  “That explains why I haven’t heard of it,” Wren replied. “It sounds of little value.”

  “In his bequest, Wheelwright also made a sizable cash donation.”

  “Which explains why the bequest would still be extant.”

  Pendergast nodded.

  “But it would have been consigned to the seventh level.”

  Pendergast nodded again.

  “What’s your interest, hypocrite lecteur?”

  “According to the obituaries, Wheelwright was at work on a scholarly history of wealthy New York landowners when he died. As part of his research, he’d kept copies of all the Manhattan house deeds that passed through his office for properties over $1,000. I need to examine those house deeds.”

  Wren’s expression narrowed. “Surely that information could be more easily obtained at the New-York Historical Society.”

  “Yes. So it should have been. But some of the deeds are inexplicably missing from their records: a swath of properties along Riverside Drive, to be precies. I had a man at the Society look for them, without success. He was most put out by their absence.”

  “So you’ve come to me.”

  In response, Pendergast
held out the package.

  Wren took it eagerly, turned it over reverently in his hands, then slit the wrapping paper with his knife. He placed the package on the table and began carefully peeling away the bubble wrap. He seemed to have abruptly forgotten Pendergast’s presence.

  “I’ll be back to examine the bequest—and retrieve my illuminated manuscript—in forty-eight hours,” Pendergast said.

  “It may take longer,” Wren replied, his back to Pendergast. “For all I know, the bequest no longer exists.”

  “I have great faith in your abilities.”

  Wren murmured something inaudible. He donned the gloves, gently unbuckled the cloisonné enamel fastenings, stared hungrily at the hand-lettered pages.

  “And Wren?”

  Something in Pendergast’s tone made the old man look over his shoulder.

  “May I suggest you find the bequest first, and contemplate the manuscript later? Remember what happened two years ago.”

  Wren’s face took on a look of shock. “Agent Pendergast, you know I always put your interests first.”

  Pendergast looked into the crafty old face, now full of hurt and indignation. “Of course you do.”

  And then he abruptly vanished into the shadowy stacks.

  Wren blinked his yellow eyes, then turned his attention back to the illuminated manuscript. He knew exactly where the bequest was—it would be a work of fifteen minutes to locate. That left forty-seven and three-quarter hours to examine the manuscript. Silence quickly returned. It was almost as if Pendergast’s presence had been merely a dream.

  SEVEN

  THE MAN WALKED UP RIVERSIDE DRIVE, HIS STEPS SHORT and precise, the metal ferrule of his cane making a rhythmic click on the asphalt. The sun was rising over the Hudson River, turning the water an oily pink, and the trees in Riverside Park stood silently, motionless, in the chill autumn air. He inhaled deeply, his olfactory sense working through the trackless forest of city smells: the tar and diesel coming off the water, dampness from the park, the sour reek of the streets.