The Inner Circle

by Brad Meltzer

  Once again, Pendergast turned his attention to the floor, where Nora could clearly see marks in the moth-eaten, rotting carpet. The marks appeared to end at a wall of books.

  Now, Pendergast approached the wall. He ran his light over their spines, peering intently at the titles. Every few moments he would stop, remove a book, glance at it, shove it back. Suddenly—as Pendergast removed a particularly massive tome from a shelf—Nora heard a loud metallic click. Two large rows of adjoining bookshelves sprang open. Pendergast drew them carefully back, exposing a folding brass gate. Behind the closed gate lay a door of solid maple. It took Nora a moment to realize what it was.

  “An old elevator,” she whispered.

  Pendergast nodded. “Yes. The old service elevator to the basement. There was something exactly like this in—”

  He went abruptly silent. As the sound of his voice faded away, Nora heard what she thought was a noise coming from within the closed elevator. A shallow breath, perhaps, hardly more than a moan.

  Suddenly, a terrible thought burst over Nora. At the same time, Pendergast stiffened visibly.

  She let out an involuntary gasp. “That’s not—” She couldn’t bring herself to say Smithback’s name.

  “We must hurry.”

  Pendergast carefully examined the brass gate with the beam. He reached forward, gingerly tried the handle. It did not move. He knelt before the door and, with his head close to the latching mechanism, examined it. Nora saw him remove a flat, flexible piece of metal from his suit and slide it into the mechanism. There was a faint click. He worked the shim back and forth, teasing and probing at the latch, until there was a second click. Then he stood up and, with infinite caution, drew back the brass gate. It folded to one side easily, almost noiselessly. Again, Pendergast approached, crouching before the handle of the maple door, regarding it intently.

  There was another sound: again a faint, agonized attempt to breathe. Her heart filled with dread.

  A sudden rasping noise filled the study. Pendergast jumped back abruptly as the door shot open of its own accord.

  Nora stood transfixed with horror. A figure appeared in the back of the small compartment. For a moment, it remained motionless. And then, with the sound of rotten fabric tearing away, it slowly came toppling out toward them. For a terrible moment, Nora thought it would fall upon Pendergast. But then the figure jerked abruptly to a stop, held by a rope around its neck, leaning toward them at a grotesque angle, arms swinging.

  “It’s O’Shaughnessy,” said Pendergast.

  “O’Shaughnessy!”

  “Yes. And he’s still alive.” He took a step forward and grabbed the body, wrestling it upright, freeing the neck from the rope. Nora came quickly to his side and helped him lower the sergeant to the floor. As she did so, she saw a huge, gaping hole in the man’s back. O’Shaughnessy coughed once, head lolling.

  There was a sudden jolt; a protesting squeal of gears and machinery; and then, abruptly, the bottom dropped out of their world.

  EIGHT

  CUSTER LED THE MAKESHIFT PROCESSION DOWN THE LONG echoing halls, toward the Great Rotunda and the front steps of the Museum that lay beyond. He’d allowed Noyes a good half hour to give the press a heads-up, and while he was waiting he’d worked out the precedence down to the last detail. He came first, of course, followed by two uniformed cops with the perp between them, and then a phalanx of some twenty lieutenants and detectives. Trailing them, in turn, was a ragged, dismayed, disorganized knot of museum staffers. This included the head of public relations; Manetti the security director; a gaggle of aides. They were all in a frenzy, clearly out of their depth. If they’d been smart, if they’d assisted rather than tried to impede good police work and due process, maybe this circus could have been avoided. But now, he was going to make it hard on them. He was going to hold the press conference in their own front yard, right on those nice wide steps, with the vast spooky facade of the Museum as backdrop—perfect for the early morning news. The cameras would eat it up. And now, as the group crossed the Rotunda, the echoes of their footsteps mingling with the murmuring of voices, Custer held his head erect, sucked in his gut. He wanted to make sure the moment would be well recorded for posterity.

  The Museum’s grand bronze doors opened, and beyond lay Museum Drive and a seething mass of press. Despite the advance groundwork, he was still amazed by how many had gathered, like flies to shit. Immediately, a barrage of flashes went off, followed by the sharp, steady brilliance of the television camera lights. A wave of shouted questions broke over him, individual voices indistinguishable in the general roar. The steps themselves had been cordoned off by police ropes, but as Custer emerged with the perp in tow the waiting crowd surged forward as one. There was a moment of intense excitement, frantic shouting and shoving, before the cops regained control, pushing the press back behind the police cordon.

  The perp hadn’t said a word for the last twenty minutes, apparently shocked into a stupor. He was so out of it he hadn’t even bothered to conceal his face as the doors of the Rotunda opened onto the night air. Now, as the battery of lights hit his face—as he saw the sea of faces, the cameras and outstretched recorders—he ducked his head away from the crowd, cringing away from the burst of flash units, and had to be propelled bodily along, half dragged, half carried, toward the waiting squad car. At the car, as Custer had instructed, the two cops handed the perp over to him. He would be the one to thrust the man into the back seat. This was the photo, Custer knew, that would be splashed across the front page of every paper in town the next morning.

  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 undivided attention.”

  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.

  For Great-Grand-Uncle Antoine had succeeded in his youthful dream of extending his life.

  The last remnants of the ancient Pendergast family—those who were compos mentis—assumed that Antoine had died many years ago, probably in New York, where he had vanished in the mid ninteenth century. A significant portion of the Pendergast family fortune had vanished with him, much to the chagrin of his collateral descendants.

  But several years before, while working on the case of the Subway Massacre, Pendergast—thanks to Wren, his library acquaintance—had stumbled by chance upon some old newspaper articles. These articles described a sudden rash of disappearances: disappearances that followed not long after the date Antoine was supposed to have arrived in New York. A corpse had been discovered, floating in the East River, with the marks of a diabolical kind of surgery. It was a street waif, and the crime was never solved. But certain uncomfortable details caused Pendergast to believe it to be the work of Antoine, and to feel the man was attempting to achieve his youthful dream of immortality. A perusal of later newspapers brought a half-dozen similar crimes to light, stretching as far forward as 1930.

  The question, Pendergast realized, became: had Leng succeeded? Or had he died in 1930?

  Death seemed by far the most likely result. And yet, Pendergast had remained uneasy. Antoine Leng Pendergast was a man of transcendental genius, combined with transcendental madness.

  So Pendergast waited and watched. As the last of his line, he’d felt it his responsibility to keep vigil against the unlikely chance that, someday, evidence of his ancestor’s continued existence would resurface. When he heard of the discovery on Catherine Street, he immediately suspected what had happened there, and who was responsible. And when the murder of Doreen Hollander was discovered, he knew that what he most dreaded had come to pass: Antoine Pendergast had succeeded in his quest.

  But now, Antoine was dead.

  There could be no doubt that the mummified corpse in the glass case was that of Antoine Pendergast, who had taken, in his journey northward, the name Enoch Leng. Pendergast had come to the house on Riverside Drive expecting to confront his own ancestor. Instead, he had found his great-grand-uncle tortured and murdered. Someone, somehow, had taken his place.

  Who had killed the man who called himself Enoch Leng? Who now held them prisoner? The corpse of his ancestor was only recently dead—the state of the corpse suggested that death had occurred within the last two months—pegging the murder of Enoch Leng before the discovery of the charnel on Catherine Street.

  The timing was very, very interesting.

  And then there was that other problem—a very quiet, but persistent feeling that there was a connecti
on still to be made here—that had been troubling Pendergast almost since he first set foot within Leng’s house.

  Now, inside the memory crossing, he continued down the hall. The next door—the door that had once been his brother’s—had been sealed by Pendergast himself, never to be opened again. He quickly moved on.

  The hallway ended in a grand, sweeping staircase leading down to a great hall. A heavy cut-glass chandelier hovered over the marble floor, mounting on a gilt chain to a domed trompe l’oeil ceiling. Pendergast descended the stairs, deep in thought. To one side, a set of tall doors opened into a two-story library; to the other, a long hall retreated back into shadow. Pendergast entered this hall first. Originally, this room had been the monastery’s refectory. In his mind, he had furnished it with a variety of family heirlooms: heavy rosewood chiffoniers, oversized landscapes by Bierstadt and Cole. There were other, more unusual heirlooms here, as well: sets of Tarot cards, crystal balls, a spirit-medium apparatus, chains and cuffs, stage props for illusionists and magicians. Other objects lay in the corners, shrouded, their outlines sunken too deeply into shadow to discern.

  As he looked around, his mind once again felt the ripples of a disturbance, of a connection not yet made. It was here, it was all around him; it only awaited his recognition. And yet it hovered tantalizingly out of grasp.

  This room could tell him no more. Exiting, he recrossed the echoing hall and entered the library. He looked around a moment, savoring the books, real and imaginary, row upon comforting row, that rose to the molded ceiling far above. Then he stepped toward one of the shelves on the nearest wall. He glanced along the rows, found the book he wanted, pulled it from the shelf. With a low, almost noiseless click, the shelf swung away from the wall.

  … And then, abruptly, Pendergast found himself back in Leng’s house on Riverside Drive, standing in the grand foyer, surrounded by Leng’s astonishing collections.