The short man hastily complied.
“Is that the patient?” Pendergast asked Brodie. “The one you mentioned earlier?”
She shook her head. “Is this any way to treat us, after we helped your partner?”
“Don’t irritate me.”
Brodie fell silent.
Pendergast looked at her, a terrible expression on his face. His Les Baer still hung ominously by his side. “You will answer my questions completely, starting now. Understood?”
The woman nodded.
“Now: why this extensive medical setup? Who is your ‘patient’?”
“I am the patient,” came a cracked, whispery voice, to the accompaniment of a door opening in the far wall. “All this largesse is for me.” A figure stood in the darkness outside the door, tall and still and gaunt, a scarecrow silhouette barely visible in the darkness beyond the emergency room. He laughed: a papery laugh, more breath than anything else. After a moment the shadow stepped very slowly from the darkness into the half-light and raised his voice only slightly.
“Here’s Charles J. Slade!”
75
JUDSON ESTERHAZY HAD GUNNED THE 250 Merc and aimed the bass boat south, accelerating to a dangerous speed down the old logging pullboat channel. With a supreme effort of will, he drew back a little on the throttle, quieted the turmoil in his mind. There was no question it had been time to cut his losses and run. He had left Pendergast and the injured woman back in the swamp, without a boat, a mile from Spanish Island. Whether they made it there or not was not his most pressing concern; he was safe and it was time to beat a strategic retreat. He would have to act decisively, and soon, but for now the wise course was to go to ground, lick his wounds—and reemerge refreshed and stronger.
Yet somehow he felt uncomfortably certain Pendergast would reach Spanish Island. And—even given all that had happened between him and its occupant—he was finding it hard to leave Slade behind, and unprotected; harder, so much harder, than he’d steeled himself to ever expect.
In a curious way, deep down, he had known this would be the result as soon as Pendergast had shown up in Savannah with his accursed revelation. The man was preternatural. Twelve years of meticulous deception, blown up in a matter of two weeks. All because one barrel of a bloody rifle had not been cleaned. Unbelievable how such a small oversight could lead to such enormous consequences. And he hadn’t helped matters any, blurting out about Audubon and New Madrid in his surprise at seeing Pendergast.
At least, Esterhazy thought, he had not made the mistake of underestimating the man… as so many others had done, to their great sorrow. Pendergast had no idea of his involvement. Nor did he know of the trump card he held in reserve. Those secrets Judson knew—without the slightest doubt—Slade would take with him, to the grave or elsewhere.
The night air breezed by his boat, the stars shimmered in the sky above, the trees stood blackly against the moonlit sky. The pullboat channel narrowed and grew shallow. Esterhazy began to calm further. There was always the possibility—a distinct one—Pendergast and the woman would die in the swamp before making it to the camp. After all, the woman had taken one of his rounds. She could easily be bleeding to death. Even if the wound wasn’t immediately fatal, it would be sheer hell dragging her through that last section of swamp, infested with alligators and water moccasins, the water thick with leeches, the air choking with mosquitoes.
He slowed as the boat came to the silted-over end of the channel. Esterhazy shut off the engine, swiveled it up out of the water, and began poling. The very mosquitoes he had just been thinking about now arrived in swarms, clustering about his head and landing on his neck and ears. He slapped and cursed.
The silty channel divided, and he poled into the left one; he knew the swamp well. He continued, checking the fish finder to monitor the depth of the water. The moon was now high in the sky, and the swamp was almost as clear as day. Midnight: six hours to dawn.
He tried to imagine the scene at Spanish Island when they arrived, but it was depressing and frustrating. He spat into the water and put it out of his head. It didn’t concern him anymore. Ventura had allowed himself to be captured by Hayward, the damn fool, but he’d said nothing before Judson put a bullet through his brain. Blackletter was dead; all those who could connect him to Project Aves were dead. There was no way to put the Project Aves genii back in the bottle. If Pendergast lived, it would all come out, they might ultimately get wind of it, there was no help for that; but what was now critical was erasing his own role from it.
The events of the past week had made one thing crystal clear: Pendergast would figure it out. It was only a matter of time. That meant even Judson’s own carefully concealed role would come to light. And because of that, Pendergast had to die.
But this time, the man would die on Esterhazy’s terms, in his own good time, and when the FBI agent least expected it. Because Esterhazy retained one critical advantage: the advantage of surprise. The man was not invulnerable, and Esterhazy knew now exactly where his weakness lay and how to exploit it. Stupid of him not to have seen it before. A plan began to form in his mind. Simple, clean, effective.
The channel deepened enough to drop his engine. He lowered it and fired up, motoring slowly through the channels, working his way westward, constantly monitoring the depth below the keel. He would be at the Mississippi well before dawn; he could scuttle the boat in some backwater bayou and emerge from the swamp a new man. A line from The Art of War surfaced in his mind, unbidden:
Forestall your opponent by seizing what he holds dear, and contrive to strike him at the time and on the ground of your choosing.
So perfectly apposite to his situation.
76
THE SPECTER THAT PRESENTED ITSELF IN THE doorway froze Hayward with shock. The man was at least six and a half feet tall, gaunt, his face hollow with sunken cheeks, his dark eyes large and liquid under heavy brows, chin and neck bristling with half-shaven swipes of bristle. His hair was long and white, brushed back, curling behind the ears and tumbling to his shoulders. He wore a charcoal-gray Brooks Brothers suit jacket pulled over a hospital gown, and he carried a short stock-whip in one hand. With the other he wheeled an IV rack, which doubled as a kind of support.
It seemed to Hayward that he had almost materialized out of thin air, so quiet and stealthy had been his approach. His eyes—so bloodshot, they looked almost purple—didn’t dart around the room as one would expect from a lunatic; rather, they moved very slowly from one person to the other, staring at—almost through—everyone in turn. When his eyes reached her, he winced visibly and closed his eyes.
“No, no, no,” he murmured, his voice as whispery as the wind.
Turning away, June Brodie retrieved a spare lab coat and draped it over Larry’s muddy shirt. “No bright colors,” she whispered to Hayward. “Keep your movements slow.”
Sluggishly, Slade opened his eyes again. The look of pain eased somewhat. Releasing his hold on the rack, he slowly raised a large, massively veined hand in a gesture of almost biblical gravitas. The hand unfolded, the long fingers shaking slightly, the index finger pointing at Pendergast. The huge dark eyes rested on the FBI agent. “You’re the man looking to find out who killed his wife.” His voice was thin as rice paper, and yet it somehow projected an arrogant self-assurance.
Pendergast said nothing. He seemed dazed, his torn suit still dripping with mud, his pale hair smeared and tangled.
Slowly, Slade let his arm fall to his side. “I killed your wife.”
Pendergast raised his .45. “Tell me.”
“No, wait—” June began.
“Silence,” said Pendergast with quiet menace.
“That’s right,” breathed Slade, “silence. I ordered her killed. Helen—Esterhazy—Pendergast.”
“Charles, the man has a gun,” said June, her voice low but imploring. “He’s going to kill you.”
“Poppycock.” He raised a finger and twirled it. “We all lost somebody. He lost a wife.
I lost a son. So it goes.” Then he repeated, with sudden intensity, in the same faint voice, “I lost a son.”
June Brodie turned toward Pendergast, speaking sotto voce. “You mustn’t get him talking about his son. That would set him back—and we’d made such progress!” A sob, immediately stifled, escaped her throat.
“I had to have her killed. She was going to expose us. Terribly dangerous… for all of us…” Slade’s eyes suddenly focused on nothing, widening as if in terror, staring at a blank wall. “Why are you here?” he murmured at nothing. “It isn’t time!” He slowly raised the whip up over his head and brought it down with a terrific smack on his own back, once, twice, three times, each blow causing him to stagger forward, the tatters of the torn suit jacket fluttering to the ground.
The blow seemed to snap him back to reality. He straightened, refocused his eyes. The room became very still.
“You see?” the woman said to Pendergast. “Don’t provoke him, for God’s sake. He’ll hurt himself.”
“Provoke? I intend to do far more than that.”
Pendergast’s menacing tone chilled Hayward. She felt trapped, helpless, vulnerable, stuck in the bed with IVs. She grasped the tubes, pressed down on her arm, and yanked them out. She swung up and out of bed, momentarily dizzy.
“I will handle this,” Pendergast told her.
“Remember,” Hayward replied, “you promised you wouldn’t kill him.”
Pendergast ignored her, facing the man.
Slade’s eyes suddenly went far away again, as if seeing something that wasn’t there; his mouth worked strangely, the dry lips twitching and stretching in unvoiced speech, of which Hayward gradually made out a rapid susurrus of words. “Go away, go away, go away, go away…” He brought the whip down again on his back, which again seemed to shock him into lucidity. Trembling, he fumbled—moving as if underwater, yet with evident eagerness—for the IV rack, located a bulb hanging from a tube, and gave it a decided press.
Drugs, she thought. He’s an addict.
The old man’s eyes rolled up white for a moment before he recovered, the eyes popping open again. “The story is easily told,” he went on in his low, hoarse voice. “Helen… Brilliant woman. A juicy piece of ass, too… I imagine you had some rollicking good times, eh?”
Hayward could see the gun in Pendergast’s hand shaking ever so slightly under the fierceness of his grip.
“She made a discovery…” Another gasp and Slade’s eyes defocused, staring into an empty corner, his lips trembling and whispering, unintelligible words tumbling out. His whip hand fluttered uselessly.
With a brisk step forward Pendergast slapped him across the face with shocking force. “Keep going.”
Slade came back. “What do they say in the movies? Thanks, I needed that!” The old man shook briefly with silent mirth. “Yes, Helen… Her discovery was quite remarkable. I imagine you could tell me most of the story already, Mr. Pendergast. Right?”
Pendergast nodded.
A cough erupted from the wizened chest, silent spasms racking his frame. Slade wheezed, stumbled, pressed the bulb again. After a moment he resumed. “She brought the discovery to us, the avian flu, through an intermediary, and Project Aves was born. She hoped a miracle drug might be the result, a creativity treatment. After all, it worked for Audubon—for a while. Mind enhancement. The ultimate drug…”
“Why did you give it up?” Pendergast asked. The neutral tone did not fool Hayward—the gun was still shaking in his hand. Hayward had never seen him so close to losing control.
“The research was expensive. Hideously expensive. We began to run out of money—despite all the corners we cut.” And he raised his hand and—slowly, slowly—waved it around the room.
“And so this is where you did the work,” Pendergast said. “Spanish Island was your laboratory.”
“Bingo. Why build an expensive level-4 biocontainment facility, with negative pressure and biosuits and all the rest? We could just do it out here in the swamp, save ourselves a pot of money. We could keep the live cultures out here, do the really dangerous work where nobody was going to see, where there were no annoying government regulators poking their noses in.”
So that’s why Longitude had a dock facing the swamp, Hayward thought.
“And the parrots?” Pendergast asked.
“They were kept back at Longitude. Complex Six. But as I said, mistakes were made. One of our birds escaped, infected a family. A disaster? Not when I pointed out to everyone: Here’s a way to save millions in experimental protocols; let’s sit tight and just see what happens!”
He burst into another fit of silent mirth, his unshaven Adam’s apple bobbing grotesquely. Bubbles of snot blew out of his nose and flecked his suit. He hacked up a huge gobbet of phlegm and bent over, allowing it to slide off his lips to the floor. Then he resumed.
“Helen objected to our way of doing business. The lady was a crusader. Once she found out about the Doane family—right before your little safari, by the way—she was going to expose us, go to the authorities no matter what. Just as soon as she got back.” He spread his hands. “What else could we do but kill her?”
Pendergast spoke quietly. “Who is ‘we’?”
“A few of us in the Aves Group. Dear June, here, had no idea—back then, at least. I kept her in the dark until just before the fire. Neither did poor old Carlton.” He flapped at the silent man.
“The names, please.”
“You have all the names. Blackletter. Ventura. By the way, where is Mike?”
Pendergast did not reply.
“Probably rotting in the swamp, thanks to you. Damn you to hell, Pendergast. He was not only the best security director a CEO could ask for, but he was our one link to civilization. Well, you may have killed Ventura, but you couldn’t have killed him.” Here Slade’s low tone became almost proud. “And his name you shall not have. I want to save that—to keep a little surprise for your future, maybe pay you back for Mike Ventura.” He sniggered. “I’m sure he’ll pop up when you least expect him.”
Pendergast raised the gun again. “The name.”
“No!” cried June.
Slade winced once more. “Your voice, my dear—please.”
Brodie turned to Pendergast, clasping her hands together as if in supplication. “Don’t hurt him,” she whispered fiercely. “He’s a good man, a very good man! You have to understand, Mr. Pendergast, he’s also a victim.”
Pendergast’s eyes went toward her.
“You see,” she went on, “there was another accident at Project Aves. Charles got the disease himself.”
If Pendergast was surprised by this, he showed no sign. “He made the decision to kill my wife before he got sick,” he replied in a flat tone.
“That’s all in the past,” she said. “Nothing will bring her back. Can’t you let it go?”
Pendergast stared at her, his eyes glittering.
“Charles almost died,” she continued. “And then he… he had the idea for us to come out here. My husband,” she nodded at the silent man standing to one side, “joined us later.”
“You and Slade were lovers,” Pendergast said.
“Yes.” Not even a blush. She straightened up. “We are lovers.”
“And you came out here—to hide?” said Pendergast. “Why?”
She said nothing.
Pendergast turned back to Slade. “It makes no sense. You had recovered from the illness before you retreated to the swamp. The mental deterioration hadn’t begun. It was too early. Why did you retreat to the swamp?”
“Carlton and I are taking care of him,” Brodie went on hastily. “Keeping him alive… It’s very difficult to keep the ravages of the disease at bay… Don’t question him further, you’re disturbing him—”
“This disease,” Pendergast said, cutting her off with a flick of his wrist. “Tell me about it.”
“It affects the inhibitory and excitatory circuits of the brain,” Brodie whispered eagerly, as
if to distract him. “Overwhelms the brain with physical sensations—sight, smell, touch. It’s a mutant form of flavivirus. At first it presents almost as acute encephalitis. Assuming he lives, the patient appears to recover.”
“Just like the Doanes.” Slade giggled. “Oh, dear me, yes—just like the Doanes. We kept a very close eye on them.”
“But the virus has a predilection for the thalamus,” Brodie continued. “Especially the LGB.”
“Lateral geniculate body,” Slade said, slapping himself viciously with the whip.
“Not unlike herpes zoster,” Brodie went on rapidly, “which takes up residence in the dorsal root ganglion and years, or decades, later resurfaces to cause shingles. But it eventually kills its host neurons.”
“End result—insanity,” Slade whispered. His eyes began to defocus and his lips began moving silently, faster and faster.
“And all this—” Pendergast gestured with the gun. “The morphine drip, the flail—are distractions from the continuous barrage of sensation?”
Brodie nodded eagerly. “So you see, he’s not responsible for what he’s saying. We might just be able to get him back to where he was before. We’ve been trying—trying for years. There’s still hope. He’s a good man, a healer, who’s done good works.”
Pendergast raised the gun higher. His face was as pale as marble, his torn suit hanging off his frame like rags. “I have no interest in this man’s good works. I want only one thing: the name of the final person on Project Aves.”
But Slade had slid off again into his own world, jabbering softly at the blank wall, his fingers twitching. He gripped the IV stand and his whole body began to tremble, the stand shaking. A double press of the bulb brought him back under control.
“You’re torturing him!” Brodie whispered.
Pendergast ignored her, faced Slade. “The decision to kill her: it was yours?”
“Yes. At first the others objected. But then they saw we had no choice. She wouldn’t be appeased, she wouldn’t be bought off. So we killed her, and most ingeniously! Eaten by a trained lion.” He broke into another carefully contained spasm of silent laughter.
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