Fever Dream

by Douglas Preston

  Suddenly Pendergast paused.

  “What is it?” Hayward groaned.

  “I see a light through the trees.”

  72

  PENDERGAST LEANED OVER HAYWARD, EXAMINING her closely. She was in shock. Given the sloppy, mud-drenched state of her person, it was difficult to tell how much blood she had lost. The moonlight slanted across her face, ghostly white where it wasn’t smeared with dirt. Gently, he pulled her up to a sitting position, loosened the harness, and propped her back against a tree trunk, camouflaging her position with a few fern leaves. Rinsing a rag in the murky water, he tried to clean some of the mud from her wound, pulling off numerous leeches in the process.

  “How are you doing, Captain?”

  Hayward swallowed, her mouth working. Her eyes blinked, unable to focus. He felt her pulse; shallow and rapid. Bending over to her ear, he whispered, “I have to leave you. Just for a while.”

  For a moment, her eyes widened in fear. Then she nodded and managed to speak, her voice hoarse. “I understand.”

  “Whoever is living at Spanish Island knows we’re here; they undoubtedly heard the shots. Indeed, the remaining shooter may well have come from Spanish Island and is awaiting us there—hence the silence. I must approach with great care. Let me see your weapon.”

  He took the handgun—a .32—examined the magazine, then slapped it back in place and pressed it into her hands. “You’ve got four rounds left. If I don’t come back… you may need them.” He placed the flashlight in her lap. “Don’t use it unless you have to. Watch for the gleam of eyes in the moonlight. Look at the distance between them. More than two inches, it’s either a gator or our shooter. Do you understand?”

  Again she nodded, clasping the gun.

  “This is a good blind. You won’t be seen until you want to be seen. But listen to me carefully, now: you must stay awake. To lose consciousness is to die.”

  “You’d better get going,” she murmured.

  Pendergast peered into the darkness. A faint yellow glow was just barely visible through the ranks of tree trunks. He took out a knife and, reaching up, scored a large X on opposite sides of the biggest tree trunk. Leaving Hayward, he set off southward, approaching the distant lights in a tightening, spiral-like trajectory.

  He moved slowly, extracting his feet from the muck with care so as to make as little noise as possible. There was no sign of activity, no sounds from the distant light that flickered and disappeared among the dark trunks. As he tightened the spiral, the trees thinned and a dull yellow rectangle came into view: a curtained window, floating in the blackness, amid a cluster of vague buildings with pitched roofs.

  In another ten minutes, he had maneuvered close enough to have a clear view of the old hunting camp on Spanish Island.

  It was a vast, rambling place, built just above the waterline on creosote pilings: at least a dozen large, shingled buildings wedged in among a massive stand of ancient bald cypresses heavily draped in curtains of Spanish moss. It lay right on the edge of a small slackwater bayou. The camp was built on marginally higher ground, surrounded by a screen of ferns, bushes, and tall grass. The heavy fringe of vegetation, combined with the almost impenetrable skeins of hanging moss, gave the place a hidden, cocooned feeling.

  Pendergast moved laterally, still circling the place, checking for guards and getting a feel for the layout. At one end, a large wooden platform led to a pier with a floating dock projecting into the bayou. Tied to it was an unusual boat, which Pendergast recognized as a small, Vietnam-era brownwater navy utility boat. It was a hybrid species of swampcraft with a draft of only three inches and a quiet, underwater jet drive—ideal for creeping around a swamp. Although some of the outbuildings were in ruins, their roofs sagging inward, the central camp was in good condition and clearly inhabited. A large outbuilding was also in impeccable shape. Heavy curtains were drawn over the windows, diffusing the faintest yellow glow from inside.

  As he completed his circle, Pendergast was surprised: nobody seemed to be on watch. It was quiet as a tomb. If the shooter was here, he was exceptionally well hidden. He waited, listening. And then he heard something: a faint, desolate cry, thin and birdlike, just on the threshold of audibility, such as from one that has lost all hope, soon dying away. When that, too, ended, a profound stillness fell on the swamp.

  Pendergast removed his Les Baer and circled up behind the camp, wriggling into a dense clump of ferns at the edge of the supporting pilings. Again he listened but could hear nothing more; no footfalls on the wooden planks above, no flash of a light, no voices.

  Affixed to one of the pilings was a crude wooden ladder made from slippery, rotting slats. After a few more minutes he half crawled, half swam toward it, grasped the lower rung, and pulled himself up, one rung at a time, testing each in turn for solidity. In a moment his head had reached the level of the platform. Peering over, he could still see nothing in the moonlight, no sign of anyone on guard.

  Easing himself onto the platform, he rolled over the rough wooden boards and lay there, sidearm at the ready. Straining to listen, he thought now that he could hear a voice, exceptionally faint even to his preternatural hearing, murmuring slowly and monotonously, as if reciting the rosary. The moon was now directly overhead and the camp, deep in the cluster of trees, was speckled with moonlight. He waited one moment more. Then he rose to his feet and darted into the shadow of the nearest outbuilding, flattening himself against the wall. A single window, shades drawn, cast a faint light across the platform.

  He inched forward, around the corner, and ducked to pass below a second window. Pivoting around another corner, he reached a door. It was old and dilapidated, with rusted hinges, the paint peeling off in strips. With exquisite care he tried the handle, found it locked; a moment’s effort unlocked it. He waited, crouching.

  No sound.

  He slowly turned the knob, eased the door open, then ducked quietly through and covered the room with his weapon.

  What greeted his eye was a large, elegant sitting room, somewhat dilapidated. A massive stone fireplace loomed over one end, dominated by a moldering stuffed alligator on a plaque, with a rack of briar pipes and a bulbous gasogene set on the huge timbered mantel. Empty gun cases lined one wall, other cases filled with decaying fly and spinning rods, display cases exhibiting flies and lures. Burgundy leather furniture, much patched and cracked with age, was grouped around the dead fireplace. The room appeared dusty, little used. For such a large space it seemed remarkably empty.

  The faintest tread of a foot sounded directly above his head, the murmur of a voice.

  The room was illuminated with several hanging kerosene lanterns, their light set at the dimmest possible setting. Pendergast unhooked one, turned the wick to brighten it, and moved across the room to a narrow enclosed staircase, heavily carpeted, on the far end. Slowly, he ascended the stairs.

  The difference between the second and first floors was remarkable. There was none of the heavy scattering of objects here, the confusion of colors and shapes and patterns. As he reached the top of the stairs, a long hallway greeted his eye, lined on either side with bedrooms, evidently from the days when the camp had paying guests. But the usual decorations, the chairs and the paintings and the bookcases, were completely missing. The doors were open, displaying barren rooms. Each window had been covered with gauze, apparently to filter out light. Everything was in muted pastel, almost black and white. Even the knotholes had been carefully filled in.

  At the end of the hall, a larger door stood ajar, light illuminating its edges. Pendergast moved down the hall like a cat. The last set of bedrooms he passed were evidently still in use, one very large and elegant although still quite spartan, with a freshly made bed, adjoining bathroom and dressing room—and a one-way mirror, looking into a second, adjoining bedroom, smaller and more austere, with no furniture other than a large double bed.

  Pendergast crept up to the door at the end of the hall and listened. He could hear, for the first time, the fai
nt throb of a generator. No sound came from the room: all was silent.

  He positioned himself to one side, and then in a swift motion pivoted around and kicked the door in with one powerful blow. It flew open and Pendergast simultaneously dropped to the floor.

  An enormous blast from a shotgun ripped through the door frame above him, taking out a chunk the size of a basketball, showering him with splinters, but before the shooter could unload another round of buckshot Pendergast had used his momentum to roll and rise; the second blast obliterated a side table by the door but by then Pendergast was on top of the shooter, arm sliding around her neck. He wrenched the shotgun from her hands and spun her around—and found himself grasping a tall, strikingly beautiful woman.

  “You can unhand me now,” she said calmly.

  Pendergast released her and stepped back, covering her with the .45. “Don’t move,” he said. “Keep your hands in sight.” He rapidly scouted the room and was astonished at what he saw: a state-of-the-art critical care facility, filled with gleaming new medical equipment—a physiologic monitoring system, pulse oximeter, apnea monitor, ventilator, infusion pump, crash cart, mobile X-ray unit, half a dozen digital diagnostic devices. All powered by electricity.

  “Who are you?” the woman asked. Her voice was frosty, her composure recovered. She was dressed simply and elegantly in a pale cream dress without pattern, no jewelry, and yet she was carefully made up, her hair recently done. Most of all, Pendergast was impressed by the fierce intelligence behind her steely blue eyes. He recognized her almost immediately from the photographs in the Vital Records file in Baton Rouge.

  “June Brodie,” he said.

  Her face paled, but only slightly. In the tense silence that ensued, a faint cry, of pain or perhaps despair, came muffled through a door at the far end of the room. Pendergast turned; stared.

  When June Brodie spoke again, her voice was cool. “I’m afraid your unexpected arrival has disturbed my patient. And that is really most unfortunate.”

  73

  PATIENT?” PENDERGAST ASKED.

  Brodie said nothing.

  “We can discuss the matter later,” Pendergast said. “Meanwhile, I have an injured colleague in the swamp. I require your boat. And these facilities.”

  When nothing happened, he waved his gun. “Anything less than full haste and cooperation will be seriously detrimental to your health.”

  “There’s no need to threaten me.”

  “I’m afraid there is. May I remind you who fired first?”

  “You came bursting in here like the Seventh Cavalry—what did you expect?”

  “Shall we bandy civilities later?” Pendergast said coldly. “My colleague is badly hurt.”

  Still remarkably composed, June Brodie turned, pressed the tab on a wall intercom, and spoke into it with a voice of command. “We have visitors. Prepare to receive an emergency patient—and meet us with a stretcher down on the dock.”

  Brodie walked through the room and exited the door without looking over her shoulder. Pendergast followed her back down the hallway, gun at the ready. She descended the stairs, crossed the main parlor of the lodge, exited the building, and walked across the platform to the pier to the floating dock. She stepped gracefully into the back and fired up the engine. “Untie the boat,” she said. “And please put away that gun.”

  Pendergast tucked the gun in his belt and untied the boat. She revved the engine, backing it out.

  “She’s about a thousand yards east-southeast,” said Pendergast, pointing into the darkness. “That way,” he added. “There’s a gunman in the swamp. But of course, you probably know all about that. He may be wounded—he may not.”

  Brodie looked at him. “Do you want to retrieve your colleague, or not?”

  Pendergast indicated the boat’s control panel.

  Saying nothing else, the woman accelerated the boat and they sped along the muddy shores of the bayou. After a few minutes she slowed to enter a tiny channel, which wound this way and that, dividing and braiding into a labyrinth of waterways. Brodie managed to penetrate the swamp in a way that Pendergast was surprised was possible, always keeping to a sinuous channel that, even in bright moonlight, was almost invisible.

  “More to the right,” he said, peering into the trees. They were using no lights; it was easier to see farther in the moonlight—and it was safer as well.

  The boat wound among the channels, now and then threatening to ground in the shallow muck but always sliding across when the jet drive was gunned.

  “There,” said Pendergast, pointing to the mark on the tree trunk.

  The boat grounded sluggishly on a mud bar. “This is as far as we can go,” Brodie murmured.

  Pendergast turned to her, searched her quickly and expertly for concealed weapons, and then spoke in a low voice. “Stay here. I’ll go retrieve my colleague. Continue to cooperate and you’ll survive this night.”

  “I repeat: you don’t need to threaten me,” she said.

  “It’s not a threat; it’s clarification.” Pendergast climbed over the side of the boat and began making his way through the muck.

  “Captain Hayward?” he called.

  No answer.

  “Laura?”

  Still nothing but silence.

  In a moment he was at Hayward’s side. She was still in shock, semi-conscious, her head lolling against the rotten stump. He glanced back and forth briefly, listening for a rustle or the crack of a twig; looking for any glint of light off metal that might indicate the presence of the shooter. Seeing nothing, he gripped Hayward under the arms and dragged her through the muck back to the boat. He lifted her over the side, and Brodie grasped the limp body and helped set it in the bottom.

  Without a word she turned and fired up the engine; they backed out of the channel and then returned at high speed to the camp. As they approached, a small, silent man wearing hospital whites came into view, standing at the dock with a stretcher. Pendergast and Brodie lifted Hayward out of the boat and placed her on the stretcher; the man then rolled her along the platform and into the main parlor of the lodge. He and Pendergast carried the stretcher up the stairs, down the hall, and into the bizarrely high-tech emergency room, positioning it beside a bank of critical care equipment.

  As they moved her from the stretcher onto a surgical bed, June Brodie turned to the little man in white. “Intubate her,” she said sharply. “Orotracheal. And oxygen.”

  The man leapt into action, passing a tube into Hayward’s mouth and delivering oxygen, both of them working with a swift economy of action that clearly attested to years of experience.

  “What happened?” she asked Pendergast as she cut away a mud-heavy sleeve with a pair of medical scissors.

  “Gunshot wound and alligator bite.”

  June Brodie nodded, then listened to Hayward’s pulse and took her blood pressure, examining the pupils with a light. The movements were practiced and highly professional. “Hang a bag of dextran,” she told the man in scrub whites, “and run a 14g IV.”

  While he worked, she readied a needle and took a blood sample, filling a syringe and transferring it to vacuum tubes. She plucked a scalpel from a nearby sterile tray and, with several deft cuts, removed the rest of the pant leg.

  “Irrigation.”

  The man handed her a large saline-filled syringe, and she washed the mud and filth away, plucking off numerous leeches as she did so and tossing everything into a red-bag disposer. Injecting a local around the ugly lacerations and the bullet wound, she worked diligently but calmly, cleaning everything with saline and antiseptic. Lastly, she administered an antibiotic and dressed the wound.

  She looked up at Pendergast. “She’ll be fine.”

  As if on cue, Hayward’s eyes opened and she made a sound in the endotracheal tube. She shifted on the surgical bed, raised a hand, and gestured at the tube.

  After briefly examining her, June ordered the tube removed. “I felt it was better to be safe than sorry,” she said.
>
  Hayward swallowed painfully, then looked around, her eyes coming into focus. “What’s going on?”

  “You’ve been saved by a ghost,” said Pendergast. “The ghost of June Brodie.”

  74

  HAYWARD LOOKED AT THE VAGUE FIGURES IN turn, then tried to sit up. Her head was still swimming.

  “Allow me.” Brodie reached over and raised the backrest of the surgical bed. “You were in light shock,” she said. “But you’ll soon be back to normal. Or as close as possible, given the conditions.”

  “My leg…”

  “No permanent damage. A flesh wound and a nasty bite from a gator. I’ve numbed it with a local, but when that wears off it’s going to hurt. You’re going to need a further series of antibiotic injections, too—lots of unpleasant bacteria live in an alligator’s mouth. How do you feel?”

  “Out of it,” said Hayward, sitting up. “What is this place?” She peered at June. “June… June Brodie?” She looked around. What kind of hunting camp would contain a place like this—an emergency room with state-of-the-art equipment? And yet it was like no emergency room she had ever seen. The lighting was too dim, and except for the medical equipment the space was utterly bare: no books, paintings, posters, even chairs.

  She swallowed and shook her head, trying to clear it. “Why did you fake your suicide?”

  Brodie stepped back and gazed at her. “I imagine you must be the two officers investigating Longitude Pharmaceuticals. Captain Hayward of the NYPD and Special Agent Pendergast of the FBI.”

  “We are,” said Pendergast. “I’d show you my badge, but I fear the swamp has claimed it.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” she said coolly. “Perhaps I shouldn’t answer any questions until I call an attorney.”

  Pendergast gave her a long, steady look. “I am not in any mood for obstructionism,” he said in a low, menacing voice. “You will answer any questions I put to you, attorney and Miranda be damned.” He turned to the man in surgical whites. “Stand over there next to her.”