The Inner Circle

by Brad Meltzer

  The mayor was conferring sotto voce with the commissioner and the Museum’s director, Collopy, who had at last been tracked down to his own West End residence. Custer’s gaze lingered on Collopy. The man had the gaunt, pinched look of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, and he wore clothes straight out of an old Bela Lugosi movie. The police had finally broken down his front door, suspecting foul play when they observed figures moving against the drawn shades. The scuttlebutt was that the police found him in a pink lace teddy, tied to his bed, with his wife and a second female dressed in dominatrix uniforms. Staring at the man, Custer refused to believe such a rumor. True, the man’s somber clothes looked just a tad disheveled. Still, it was impossible to believe such a pillar of propriety could ever have donned a teddy. Wasn’t it?

  Now, Custer saw Mayor Montefiori’s eyes dart toward him. They were talking about him. Although he maintained his stolid expression, arranging his face into a mask of duty and obedience, he was unable to prevent a flush of pleasure from suffusing his limbs.

  Commissioner Rocker broke away from the mayor and Collopy and came over. To Custer’s surprise, he did not look altogether happy.

  “Captain.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The commissioner stood there a moment, indecisive, face full of anxiety. Finally he leaned closer. “Are you sure?”

  “Sure, sir?”

  “Sure that it’s Brisbane.”

  Custer felt a twinge of doubt, but quickly stepped down on it. The evidence was overwhelming.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did he confess?”

  “No, not confess—exactly—but he made a number of self-incriminating statements. I expect he’ll confess when he’s formally questioned. They always do. Serial killers, I mean. And we found incriminating evidence in his Museum office—”

  “No mistake about it? Mr. Brisbane is a very prominent person.”

  “No mistake about it, sir.”

  Rocker scrutinized his face a moment longer. Custer stirred uneasily. He had been expecting congratulations, not the third degree.

  Then the commissioner leaned still closer and lowered his voice to a slow, deliberate whisper. “Custer, all I can say is, you’d better be right.”

  “I am right, sir.”

  The commissioner nodded, a look of guarded relief, still mixed with anxiety, settling on his face.

  Now Custer stepped respectfully into the background, letting the mayor, his aides, Collopy, and the commissioner arrange themselves before the throngs of press. A feeling like electricity, an anticipatory tingling, filled the air.

  The mayor raised his hand, and a hush fell on the crowd. Custer realized the man wasn’t even permitting his aides to introduce him. He was going to handle this personally. With the election so near, he wasn’t going to let even a crumb of glory escape.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the press,” the mayor began. “We have made an arrest in the case of the serial killer popularly known as the Surgeon. The suspect taken into custody has been identified as Roger C. Brisbane III, first vice president and general counsel of the New York Museum of Natural History.”

  There was a collective gasp. Although everyone in the crowd already knew this, hearing it from the mayor made it official.

  “Although it’s important to state that Mr. Brisbane must naturally be presumed innocent at this time, the evidence against him is substantial.”

  There was a brief hush.

  “As mayor, I made this case a top priority. All available resources were brought to bear. I therefore want to thank, first of all, the fine officers of the NYPD, Commissioner Rocker, and the men and women of the homicide division, for their tireless work on this difficult case. And I would especially like to single out Captain Sherwood Custer. As I understand it, Captain Custer not only headed the investigation, but personally solved the case. I am shocked, as many of you must be, at the most unusual twist this tragic case has taken. Many of us know Mr. Brisbane personally. Nevertheless, the commissioner has assured me in no uncertain terms that they have the right man, and I am satisfied to rely on his assurances.”

  He paused.

  “Dr. Collopy of the Museum would like to say a few words.”

  Hearing this, Custer tensed. The director would no doubt put up a dogged defense of his own right-hand man; he’d question Custer’s police work and investigative technique, make him look bad.

  Collopy stood before the microphone, rigid and correct, his arms clasped behind his back. He spoke in cool, stately, and measured tones.

  “First, I wish to add my thanks to the fine men and women of the New York Police Department, the commissioner, and the mayor, for their tireless work on this tragic case. This is a sad day for the Museum, and for me personally. I wish to extend my deepest apologies to the City of New York and to the families of the victims for the heinous actions of our trusted employee.”

  Custer listened with growing relief. Here, Brisbane’s own boss was practically throwing him to the wolves. So much the better. And he felt a twinge of resentment at Commissioner Rocker’s excessive concern about Brisbane, which, it seemed, even his own boss didn’t share.

  Collopy stepped back, and the mayor returned to the microphone. “I will now take questions,” he said.

  There was a roar, a rippling flurry of hands through the crowd. The mayor’s spokesperson, Mary Hill, stepped forward to manage the questioning.

  Custer looked toward the crowd. The unpleasant memory of Smithback’s hangdog visage flitted across his mind, and he was glad not to see it among the sea of faces.

  Mary Hill had called on someone, and Custer heard the shouted question. “Why did he do it? Was he really trying to prolong his life?”

  The mayor shook his head. “I cannot speculate on motive at this time.”

  “This is a question for Captain Custer!” a voice shouted. “How did you know it was Brisbane? What was the smoking gun?”

  Custer stepped forward, once again gathering his face into a mask of stolidity. “A derby hat, umbrella, and black suit,” he said, significantly, and paused. “The so-called Surgeon, when he went out to stalk his victims, was seen to wear just such an outfit. I discovered the disguise myself in Mr. Brisbane’s office.”

  “Did you find the murder weapon?”

  “We are continuing to search the office, and we have dispatched teams to search Mr. Brisbane’s apartment and summer house on Long Island. The Long Island search,” he added significantly, “will include cadaver-trained tracking dogs.”

  “What was the role of the FBI in this case?” a television reporter shouted.

  “Nothing,” the commissioner answered hastily. “There was no role. All the work was done by local law enforcement. An FBI agent did take an unofficial interest early on, but those leads led nowhere and as far as we know he has abandoned the case.”

  “Another question for Captain Custer, please! How does it feel, sir, to have cracked the biggest case since Son of Sam?”

  It was that prepped-out weenie, Bryce Harriman. It was the question he had longed for someone to ask. Once again, the man had ridden to his rescue. It was beautiful how these things worked out.

  Custer summoned up his most impassive monotone: “I was just doing my duty as a police officer. Nothing less, and nothing more.”

  Then he stood back and basked, poker-faced, in the endless flare of flashbulbs that ensued.

  FOURTEEN

  THE IMAGE THAT BURST INTO THE BEAM OF NORA’S LIGHT was so unexpected, so horrifying, that she instinctively scrambled backward, dropped the scalpel, and ran. Her only conscious desire was to put some distance between herself and the awful sight.

  But at the door she stopped. The man—she had to think of him as that—was not following her. In fact, he seemed to be shuffling along as before, zombie-like, unaware of her presence. With a shaking hand she trained the light back on him.

  The man’s clothes hung from his frame in tatters, skin raked and scored and bleeding as if by fre
nzied scratching. The scalp was torn, skin hanging away in flaps from where it had apparently been ripped from the skull. Tufts of bloody hair remained clutched rigidly between the fingers of the right hand: a hand whose epithelial layers were sloughing away in parchment-like curls of tissue. The lips had swollen to a grotesque size, liver-colored bananas covered with whitish weals. A tongue, cracked and blackened, forced its way between them. A wet gargling came from deep inside the throat, and each effort to suck in or expel air caused the tongue to quiver. Through the gaps in the ragged shirt, Nora could see angry-looking chancres on the chest and abdomen, weeping clear fluid. Below the armpits were thick colonies of pustules like small red berries, some of which she saw—with a sickening sense of fast-motion photography—were swelling rapidly; even as she watched, one burst with a sickening pop, while more blistered and swelled to take its place.

  But what horrified Nora most were the eyes. One was twice normal size, blood-engorged, protruding freakishly from the orbital socket. It jittered and darted about, roving wildly but seeing nothing. The other, in contrast, was dark and shriveled, motionless, sunken deep beneath the brow.

  A fresh shudder of revulsion went through Nora. It must be some pathetic victim of the Surgeon. But what had happened to him? What dreadful torture had he undergone?

  As she watched, spellbound with horror, the figure paused, and seemed to look at her for the first time. The head tilted up and the jittery eye paused and appeared to fix on her. She tensed, ready for flight. But the moment passed. The figure underwent a violent trembling from head to toe; then the head dropped down, and it once more resumed its quivering walk to nowhere.

  She turned the light away from the obscene spectacle, feeling sick. Worse even than the loathsome sight was her sudden recognition. It had come to her in a flash, when the bloated eye had fixed on hers: she knew this man. As grotesquely malformed as it now was, she remembered seeing that distinctive face before, so powerful, so self-confident, emerging from the back of a limousine outside the Catherine Street digsite.

  The shock nearly took her breath away. She looked with horror at the figure’s retreating back. What had the Surgeon done to him? Was there anything she could do to help?

  Even as the thought came to her, she realized the man was far beyond help. She lowered the flashlight from the grotesque form as it shuffled slowly, aimlessly away from her, back toward a room beyond the lab.

  She thrust the light forward. And then, in the edge of the flashlight’s beam, she made out Pendergast.

  He was in the next room, lying on his side, blood pooling on the ground below him. He looked dead. Nearby, a large, rusted axe lay on the floor. Beyond it was an upended executioner’s block.

  Suppressing a cry, she ran through the connecting archway and knelt before him. To her surprise, the FBI agent opened his eyes.

  “What happened?” she cried. “Are you all right?”

  Pendergast smiled weakly. “Never better, Dr. Kelly.”

  She flashed her light at the pool of blood, at the crimson stain that covered his shirtfront. “You’ve been hurt!”

  Pendergast looked at her, his pale eyes cloudy. “Yes. I’m afraid I’ll need your help.”

  “But what happened? Where’s the Surgeon?”

  Pendergast’s eyes seem to clear a little. “Didn’t you see him, ah, walk past?”

  “What? The man covered with sores? Fairhaven? He’s the killer?”

  Pendergast nodded.

  “Jesus! What happened to him?”

  “Poisoned.”

  “How?”

  “He picked up several of the objects in this room. Take care not to follow his example. Everything you see here is an experimental poison-delivery system. When he handled the various weapons, Fairhaven absorbed quite a cocktail of poisons through his skin: neurotoxins and other fast-acting systemics, no doubt.”

  He grasped her hand with his own, slippery with blood. “Smithback?”

  “Alive.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “Fairhaven had started to operate.”

  “I know. Is he stable?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know for how long. We’ve got to get him—and you—to a hospital right away.”

  Pendergast nodded. “There’s an acquaintance of mine, a doctor, who can arrange everything.”

  “How are we going to get out of here?”

  Pendergast’s gun lay on the ground nearby, and he reached for it, grimacing a little. “Help me up, please. I need to get back to the operating room, to check on Smithback and stop my own bleeding.”

  She helped the agent to his feet. Pendergast stumbled a little, leaning heavily on her arm. “Shine your light on our friend a moment, if you please,” he said.

  The Fairhaven-thing was shuffling along one wall of the room. He ran into a large wooden cabinet, stopped, backed up, came forward again, as if unable to negotiate the obstacle. Pendergast gazed at the thing for a moment, then turned away.

  “He’s no longer a threat,” he murmured. “Let’s get back upstairs, as quickly as possible.”

  They retraced their steps back through the chambers of the subbasement, Pendergast stopping periodically to rest. Slowly, painfully, they mounted the stairs.

  In the operating room, Smithback lay on the table, still unconscious. Nora scanned the monitors quickly: the vitals remained weak, but steady. The liter bag of saline was almost empty, and she replaced it with a third. Pendergast bent over the journalist, drew back the covers, and examined him. After a few moments, he stepped back.

  “He’ll survive,” he said simply.

  Nora felt a huge sense of relief.

  “Now I’m going to need some help. Help me get my jacket and shirt off.”

  Nora untied the jacket around Pendergast’s midsection, then helped him remove his shirt, exposing a ragged hole in his abdomen, thickly encrusted in blood. More blood was dripping from his shattered elbow.

  “Roll that tray of surgical instruments this way,” he said, gesturing with his good hand.

  Nora rolled the tray over. She could not help but notice that his torso, although slender, was powerfully muscled.

  “Grab those clamps over there, too, please.” Pendergast swabbed the blood away from the abdominal wound, then irrigated it with Betadine.

  “Don’t you want something for the pain? I know there’s some—”

  “No time.” Pendergast dropped the bloody gauze to the floor and angled the overhead light toward the wound in his abdomen. “I have to tie off these bleeders before I grow any weaker.”

  Nora watched him inspect the wound.

  “Shine that light a little lower, would you? There, that’s good. Now, if you’d hand me that clamp?”

  Although Nora had a strong stomach, watching Pendergast probe his own abdomen made her feel distinctly queasy. After a moment he laid down the clamp, took up a scalpel, and made a short cut perpendicular to the wound.

  “You’re not going to operate on yourself, are you?”

  Pendergast shook his head. “Just a quick-and-dirty effort to stop the bleeding. But I’ve got to reach this colic vein, which, with all my exertion, has unfortunately retracted.” He made another little cut, and then probed into the wound with a large, tweezer-like instrument.

  Nora winced, tried to think of something else. “How are we going to get out of here?” she asked again.

  “Through the basement tunnels. My research on this area turned up the fact that a river brigand once lived along this stretch of Riverside. Based on the extent of the cellars below us, I feel certain now that this was his residence. Did you notice the superb view of the Hudson the house commanded?”

  “No,” Nora replied, swallowing. “Can’t say I did.”

  “That’s understandable, considering the North River Water Pollution Control Plant now blocks much of the view,” Pendergast said as he fished a large vein out of the wound with the clamp. “But a hundred and fifty years ago, this house would have had a sw
eeping view of the lower Hudson. River pirates were fairly common in the early nineteenth century. They would slip out onto the river after dark to hijack moored ships or capture passengers for ransom.” He paused while he examined the end of the vein. “Leng must have known this. A large subbasement was the first thing he wanted in a house. I believe we will find a way down to the river, via the subbasement. Hand me that absorbable suture, if you please? No, the larger one, the 4-0. Thank you.”

  Nora looked on, wincing inwardly, as Pendergast ligated the vein.

  “Good,” he said a few moments later, as he released the clamp and put the suture aside. “That vein was causing most of the bleeding. I can do nothing about my spleen, which has obviously been perforated, so I’ll merely cauterize the smaller bleeders and close the wound. Would you hand me the electrocauterer, please? Yes, that’s it.”

  Nora handed the device—a narrow blue pencil at the end of a wire, two buttons marked cut and cauterize on its side—to the FBI agent. Once again, he bent over his wound. There was a sharp crackling sound as he cauterized a vein. This was followed by another crackling noise—much longer this time—and a thin wisp of smoke rose into the air. Nora averted her eyes.

  “What was Leng’s ultimate project?” she asked.

  Pendergast did not respond immediately. “Enoch Leng wanted to heal the human race,” he said at last, still bent over the wound. “He wanted to save it.”

  For a moment, Nora wasn’t sure she had heard correctly. “Save the human race? But he was killing people. Scores of people.”

  “So he was.” Another crackling noise.