“Mr. Hernandez,” said Metcalf, “this is SA Pendergast and Executive Assistant Director Longstreet.”
“Um, hi,” said Hernandez.
“They’ll require your unfettered help for one hour,” Metcalf said to the technician. “And of course what happens here is to remain confidential, even from me.”
“Yes, Ms. Metcalf.”
She retreated and closed the door. Longstreet glanced at Pendergast; there was a rare light of anticipation shining in those eyes. He wished he felt the same. This seemed like such a wild goose chase, a complete waste of time when they had so little time left. If it were any other agent he would have put an end to this detour right at the beginning. But he had known Pendergast far too long to dismiss one of his hunches out of hand. And the discovery of the missing caudae equinae, while extremely outré, was nevertheless telling. He just wished Pendergast was a little more forthcoming with his theories.
“Aloysius,” said Longstreet, “would you like to explain to Mr. Hernandez what you want him to do?”
“Certainly.” Pendergast brought out a large hard drive from somewhere in his suit and placed it on the table in front of Hernandez. “On this drive are twenty-four hours of video feeds from all the security cameras in the Miami Baptist Hospital. These cams capture every person who visits the hospital—without exception. They are comprehensive. It isn’t possible to enter or leave the hospital without having your visage recorded multiple times.”
Hernandez gave a nod of understanding.
“The hospital has about nine thousand visitors a day. There are approximately two hundred such cams.”
“That’s a lot of video. Is this about that slasher killing?”
Pendergast fell silent and a sense of disapproval filled the room.
“Sorry,” said the technician.
“We believe an individual entered the hospital wearing one disguise and left it wearing a different one. He could have changed facial features, hair color, and perhaps other physical details as part of the switch.”
“I see.”
“So, Mr. Hernandez: how can we use your computing power and the NSA’s databases to identify a person who left the hospital without ever entering it?”
“Why,” said Hernandez, relieved, “that’s a piece of cake. I thought you were going to give me something hard. The NSA has the best facial-recognition software in the world—better than Google’s. I’ll just ask it to match all the ingresses with the egresses and spit out the unique face that left but didn’t enter.”
At this, Pendergast broke into a rare smile. “And how long might this take?”
“How many gigs you got in that drive?”
“Three terabytes.”
“Twenty minutes. Care to wait?”
Longstreet watched Pendergast slide himself into a chair, and he did likewise. Hernandez remained standing at the computer, typing on a keyboard.
As if timed by the clock, twenty minutes later the technician straightened up from his computer monitor. “Bingo! Got your man. At several angles.”
Longstreet rose and followed Pendergast, who had leapt up like a cat and was scrutinizing a series of faces on a computer monitor.
“Let me put them up on the big screen,” said Hernandez.
The faces popped up on a sixty-inch screen. They showed a tall man, dressed in an elegant brown suit, with brown eyes and brown hair, skin somewhat olive in tone, wearing fashionable titanium glasses. Longstreet stared with surprise and disappointment. It wasn’t Diogenes—was it? The man looked so different.
Pendergast said, “Play some video, please.”
Hernandez obliged, showing the man walking down a hallway; another image of him crossing the lobby; and a final image of him exiting. He was the right height and build, that was true, but a lot of people were slender and six foot two. Watching the videos, Longstreet felt disappointed. The man not only didn’t look like the old FBI surveillance tapes he’d seen of Diogenes—he didn’t move like him. In Longstreet’s experience, the way a person walked was almost as identifiable as the way he looked. Everyone had a different way of walking, something that couldn’t be disguised.
He glanced at Pendergast, only to see the man’s face distorted by triumph mingled with anger.
“Surely that isn’t Diogenes?” he asked.
“Most surely it is,” came the answer. “I know my brother. That’s him there, on the screen—I know it.”
“But the way he moves?”
“My dear H! Naturally that would be the first thing he’d alter. The man doesn’t walk like my brother, true—but doesn’t the walk look the slightest bit artificial to you? He’s playing up the difference—for the camera.”
Longstreet turned to Hernandez. “Run that video again, please.”
He scrutinized the feed once again. Damned if Pendergast wasn’t onto something. “Aloysius,” he said, turning away from the screen, “I’ve known you long enough to trust your hunches.”
“This is no mere hunch,” Pendergast replied. He turned back to Hernandez. “I now have a second assignment for you: who is this man? Officially, I mean.”
With a smile, Hernandez rapped on the keyboard. Within seconds, NSA facial-recognition software had come up with an identity and numerous details:
Name: Petru Balan
SS# 956-44-6574
Place of birth: Râșnov, Romania
Date of naturalization: 6/15/99
Race: Caucasian
Height: 6'2"
Eyes: Brown
Hair: Brown
Identifying tattoos or marks: None
A lot more information scrolled past, but Pendergast ignored it. “Excellent,” he said. “Now, Mr. Hernandez: I want you to look up this man’s real estate holdings. And not just his personal holdings, but any real estate held by shell companies he owns, offshore companies, alleged relatives—in short, I want to know about any square inch of ground even remotely connected to him. With a focus on Florida.”
“Of course.” Another few clicks on the keyboard and a list appeared. Even with his vast experience, it still amazed Longstreet at how quickly the computer could connect a maze of carefully disguised shell companies. And then it occurred to him that the NSA had probably already done the work—for every registered company in the world. That would be like them.
Pendergast scrutinized the screen for a moment, then let out a most uncharacteristic cry of triumph. “Right there!” he said, stabbing a white finger at a listing.
Halcyon Key
Monroe County, Florida
Owned by: Incitatus, LLC
PO Box 279516
Grand Cayman
Registered to:
Aeolian Island Holdings, SpA, Milan, Italy
A fully owned subsidiary of:
Barnacle, Ltd., Dublin, Ireland
Director and sole shareholder:
Petru Balan
“Incitatus,” Pendergast murmured in a strange voice.
Longstreet felt something like a chill go up his spine. It was the one nugget of data they needed, he felt certain: that needle in the haystack, that faintest of lines in the sand, that—when found—led to Diogenes.
“Get the satellite imagery,” said Pendergast. “Target that location.”
“No problem.” Hernandez called up another program, typed in a series of coordinates, and a moment later a satellite image popped onto the screen, of remarkably high resolution. It showed a medium-size island, surrounded by four smaller ones.
“Zoom in on the main island, please.”
Hernandez complied. A large, sprawling house came into view, a pier stretching into the shallow bay, a smaller house hidden in the nearby mangroves, and, scattered around, some isolated outbuildings. A boat was tied up at the pier.
“When was this satellite image taken?” Pendergast asked.
Hernandez peered at the screen. “Eighteen months ago.”
“The boat. Focus on the boat.”
The image expanded unt
il the boat filled the screen. It was an antique Chris Craft.
“That’s it.” Pendergast turned to Longstreet, his eyes feverishly alive. “That’s where we’ll find them.”
Longstreet turned and stared at his friend. His head was almost spinning at the speed with which Pendergast had split the case wide open.
“H, we need to go in there—fast and hard,” Pendergast said. “And we need to do it tonight.”
61
WHAT IS IT?” Diogenes repeated.
“I wonder if you’d mind getting the boat ready,” Constance said.
His mind went blank, as if he was unable to process what she was saying. The last few minutes had been so strange—her behavior had become so unexpected—that he could barely get the words out. “The boat? Why?”
“And then if you’d be good enough to take my things out to it.” The conflict he’d read on her face, the hesitation, was now gone. “I did most of my packing earlier this afternoon—when I told you I was resting.”
He passed a hand over his forehead. “Constance—”
“I’m leaving. My work is done.”
“I don’t understand. Your work?”
And now her voice was cool, even. “My revenge.”
Diogenes opened his mouth, but no sound came.
“This is the moment I’ve been waiting for,” Constance said. “It’s not in my nature to gloat or tease. It is, however, in my nature to be brutal. So I’ll make my explanation as concise as possible. This entire thing has been a charade.”
“A charade,” Diogenes managed to repeat. “What charade?”
“The charade of our love.” And now he saw that, in one hand, she was holding her antique Italian stiletto—something he had not seen since the Riverside Drive mansion.
“But it’s no charade—I love you!”
“I know that you do. How touching. And your courtship was, in all honesty, beautifully planned and exquisitely performed. It was all a woman could ask for.” She paused. “A pity it didn’t have its intended effect.”
This had to be a nightmare. It couldn’t be real. She couldn’t mean this, any of this. Perhaps the arcanum had been flawed and, once again, she was not herself. And yet he felt a creeping, terrible uncertainty. “What in God’s name are you saying?”
“Need I be more clear? Very well. What I am saying is: I don’t love you. I never loved you. On the contrary: I despise you. I feed on my hatred of you morning, noon, and night. I cherish my hatred; it is now a part of me, indivisible and precious.”
“No, please—!”
“When I first learned you were alive, down in the sub-basement, all I felt was fury. And then you spoke. You spoke with your honeyed tongue. Do you recall how, once you were done, I said I needed time in which to consider your proposition? I had become confused, uncertain. I was also angry—irrationally so—at Aloysius for disappearing, for drowning. And the prospect of becoming a mental vegetable was, of course, displeasing. But by the end of that night, I was at peace with myself. I was happy. Because I realized I was being given a unique opportunity: a chance to kill you again. Your supposed death in the volcano had been too quick. This time, I decided to do it right.”
“You…” Diogenes took a step forward, then stopped. Never in his life—not even in the depths of youthful despair following the Event, or after the failure to steal the diamond known as Lucifer’s Heart, or even during his recovery from Stromboli—had he felt so utterly devastated. “You took the arcanum…”
“The arcanum was an unexpected benefit. A happy circumstance, in that it not only aided me, but also helped convince you I was sincere—just as my knocking out Lieutenant D’Agosta helped convince you, although in that case I was saving his life, since you would almost certainly have killed him had I not intervened.”
Diogenes staggered. “What about our night together? Surely that wasn’t a charade!”
“It was the very climax of the charade. You were correct: your reformulated arcanum did restore my health and vigor. That restoration was…a most heady experience. And so now you can add your recollections of that night to your memory palace of pain. Remember how you once described our first night together? An animal spasm. This is my gift to you: one spasm for another. Yet I knew even then that the fleeting pleasure I gave you would be paid back in pain a thousandfold, every day, every night, for the rest of your life.”
“It’s not possible! The things you said, the expression on your face, your appetites, your smiles…That wasn’t pretense, Constance. I would have sensed it.”
There was a brief silence before Constance spoke again. “I must admit—when I saw Halcyon, when I saw your obsidian chamber—my resolve did occasionally waver. Seeing this room, in fact, was my greatest test. Ironically, that’s how I knew I had to complete my work. And I remind myself how much more pleasure your suffering will give me than anything offered by the temptations of Halcyon.”
Every word of Constance’s, spoken matter-of-factly in that elegant, old-fashioned voice, was like acid in his ears. He barely knew what he was saying. “I don’t believe it. This is some perverse joke. No one could deceive me like—”
“You deceived yourself. But I weary of this. Now you know the truth. And I wish to take my leave of this island of yours, leaving behind all your fine memories, hopes, and dreams…in tatters.”
“You’ll need the arcanum—”
“I’m content to join the rest of humanity in the march toward death. No, Diogenes, it is you who need the arcanum. Prolong your own life, so you can live in misery forever!” And now, at last, her voice broke out into a laugh: low, exultant, pitiless.
Hearing that laugh, Diogenes felt his knees buckle. He sank to the floor. A cold, baleful light seemed to spill over him. And with that light came a bleak realization, the bleakest he had ever known: this was no cruel joke. Her dismantling of him and his dreams was a masterpiece of vengeance, pitiless and awe inspiring in its comprehensiveness. Halcyon would be all the more lonely now that he had experienced their being together. Constance knew that. She knew that she was leaving him here, a broken man, in a place she had made intolerable with memory.
His eyes were cast downward; a haze obscured his vision. “Is there nothing I can say, nothing I can do, to convince you that—”
“No,” she said. “And please don’t demean yourself by begging; it’s unseemly.”
Diogenes said nothing. The haze grew thicker.
“Actually, now that you mention it, I am curious about one thing. That door on the far side of the island; the only one anywhere that’s locked. What’s behind it? I know perfectly well you’re hiding something there. I might as well see everything before I go. That I should be at all curious suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability, but that in itself is probably the reason. I saw a key around your neck last night; no doubt it fits the lock. Give it to me, please.”
Last night. As she spoke, out of nowhere he heard an echo sound in his mind. Let her try to deny it—we were one.
The mist receded. Diogenes looked up to see her standing above him, one hand outstretched.
A change came over him.
What’s behind it? I know perfectly well you’re hiding something there.
All hope might not be lost. He realized that he had just been given a chance—his last chance…
He staggered to his feet, did his best to collect himself.
“No,” he said, his voice hoarse in his own ears. “No. I will show it to you. I will guide you through it. I will reveal to you…that part of my soul no one has ever seen before.”
Constance withdrew her hand. Something unfathomable flashed in her eyes.
“Very well,” she said.
A moment of silence passed. And then Diogenes—walking a little unsteadily—left the alcove, passed through the library, and headed for the front door. Constance followed a few steps behind him.
Moments later, a dark form detached itself from the deep shadows of the library where it
had been hiding, listening, and—careful to keep out of sight—followed the two as they made their way across the sand toward the path leading into the mangroves.
62
PENDERGAST BOUNDED UP the stairs from the basement, Longstreet following more slowly in his wake.
“We can leave immediately,” Pendergast said over his shoulder. “It’s a hundred miles to Marathon by plane. From there, you and I can charter an airboat—the channels around that area of the Keys can be very shallow, I believe. We’ll be in position shortly after nightfall.”
“Just a moment,” Longstreet said. And something in his voice made Pendergast stop and look back.
“What do you mean: you and I?”
“I should have thought it obvious. The two of us.”
“A covert operation?”
“A surgical strike against Diogenes.”
Longstreet shook his head. “We’re not doing that.”
Pendergast frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Do you remember what you said, back in my New York office?”
Pendergast waited.
“You said exactly this: My brother must die. We must make sure—completely sure—that he does not survive another apprehension.”
“That’s correct.”
“You said something else: something equally true. We owe it to Mike Decker.”
Once again, Pendergast waited.
“As members of the Ghost Company, you and I both swore a solemn blood oath: to avenge the death of any compatriot to who died at the hands of another.”
“Fidelitas usque ad mortem.”
“Precisely. And that’s why it’s not going to be you and me who go down to this Halcyon Key. It’s going to be a massive strike force.”
Pendergast took a step back down the stairs. “H, that isn’t the way to prosecute this operation. I know my brother. The two of us, descending on the island in stealth, have the best chance of—”
The Obsidian Chamber Page 30
