Brimstone

by Douglas Preston

  Pendergast pulled out the handgun he'd taken from the fallen man, checked the magazine. "Three rounds left," he said. "Let's go."

  They resumed their climb. It seemed incredible to D'Agosta that he could go any farther, but adrenaline—and the dreadful baying of the boar hounds—kept him moving.

  After a few minutes, the forest thinned and it grew brighter. They crouched, then crept forward slowly. Above, the forest gave way completely to meadows and brushy draws. D'Agosta caught his breath in dismay. The draws were full of impenetrable brush; the meadows were open and bare, dotted with isolated copses of trees. The land rose another quarter of a mile, hemmed between the two ridges of rock, finally topping over a barren summit. It was like a shooting gallery.

  Pendergast examined the summit for at least a minute, despite the rapidly approaching dogs. Then he shook his head.

  "It's no good, Vincent. It's suicide to go farther. There will be too many men up there, and they've no doubt been hunting boar in this valley all their lives. We'll never break through."

  "Are you sure? Sure the men are up there, I mean?"

  Pendergast nodded, looking back up the ridge. "I can see at least half a dozen from here. It's impossible to say how many others are hidden behind the rock blinds." He paused, as if considering. Then he spoke rapidly, almost to himself. "The ring is already closed on either side and above. And we can't go down: we'll never penetrate the line of dogs."

  "Are you positive?"

  "Not even a two-hundred-pound male boar, moving through heavy brush at thirty miles an hour, can get past those dogs. As soon as the boar hits the line, the dogs converge, and…"

  He stopped. Then he looked at D'Agosta, eyes glittering.

  "Vincent, that's it. There is a way out. Listen to me. I will head directly downhill. When I hit the line of dogs, their cry will bring the others, and they'll bunch. Meanwhile, you move a couple of hundred yards laterally, that way, quick as you can. Then go slowly downhill. Slowly. When you hear the cornering cry of the dogs—it's an unmistakable sound—you'll know I've hit the line and they're baying at me. The line will break as the dogs converge, and that’s when you can pass. Then, and only then. Is that clear? Listen for the cornering cry. When you break through, head straight to the Greve road."

  "And you?"

  Pendergast held up the gun.

  "With three shots? You'll never do it."

  "There's no other way."

  "But where will I meet up with you? The Greve road?"

  Pendergast shook his head. "Don't wait for me. Get the colonnello and return in full force as soon as possible. In full force. You understand? Take the machine—you'll need it to convince him."

  "But…" D'Agosta stopped. And then—only then—did the full consequences of Pendergast's intentions reveal themselves to him.

  "The hell with that," he said. "We go together."

  The baying grew closer.

  "Only one of us can get through. There's no other way. Now, go! "

  "I won't. No way… I’m not leaving you to the dogs…"

  "Damn you, Vincent, you must!" And without another word, Pendergast turned his back and took off downhill.

  "No!" D'Agosta shouted. "Noooo—!"

  But it was too late.

  He felt paralyzed, rooted to the spot in disbelief. Pendergast's thin black figure was leaping like a cat down the hill, gun upraised—and then it vanished into the trees.

  There was nothing to do but follow the plan. Almost robotically, D'Agosta began scrambling along the hill, moving laterally, until he had gone about three hundred yards. He turned, prepared to descend.

  Then he stopped. Ahead, in a thickly wooded copse beneath a spur of rock, stood a lone figure. From any other vantage point, he would have been invisible below the outcropping of rock. He stood very still, looking at D'Agosta.

  Jesus, D'Agosta thought. This is it.

  He reached for the microwave device, thought better of it. The man wasn't armed; or, if he was, his weapon was out of sight. This situation was better handled with bare hands. He gathered himself to leap forward.

  But then he hesitated. Though the man was dressed in peasant garb, he seemed different from the rest of Fosco's men. He was very tall and slender, perhaps four inches taller than Pendergast, and he wore a closely trimmed beard. There was something strange about his eyes. They were different colors: the left was hazel, the right an intense blue.

  Maybe he's a local, D'Agosta thought. Or a poacher, or something. Great fucking time to be out for a stroll.

  Suddenly, he became aware of the dogs again. They were still baying: a regular, measured sound, as before.

  No more time to waste. The man had turned calmly away from him, uninterested. D'Agosta began descending slowly, waiting for the change in the dogs' cry. He glanced back once and saw the stranger, still motionless, looking intently downslope.

  D'Agosta turned back and continued slowly and carefully down through the forest. Forget him. The important thing now was Pendergast. He would escape. He had to, he had to…

  And then, suddenly, off to his right and below, he heard a single dog barking hysterically, its voice sounding a much higher, more urgent note than before. He paused, listening. Another took up the cry, then a third. In a moment, the whole line had taken it up. D'Agosta could hear them converging on a single spot with a babel of high-pitched barking. Then came the report of a gun, the shriek of a dog. The frenzy increased in pitch. It was a terrifying sound, interrupted by a second shot, then a third. These were followed in turn by the lower boom-boom of an old, heavy-caliber carbine. D'Agosta could see nothing through the dense brush, but he could hear what was happening all too clearly.

  This was his chance. Hugging the machine close to him, D'Agosta ran downhill as hard and fast as he could, leaping, ripping through brambles, stumbling, recovering, running on and on. He broke through a small clearing, and there—far off to his right now—he caught one last glimpse of Pendergast: a lone figure in black, surrounded by a boiling pack of dogs, a dozen or more men converging from two sides and below, each with heavy rifles trained on him. The din was incredible, the frenzied ring of dogs closing in, the bolder ones dashing forward, attempting to tear out chunks of flesh.

  D'Agosta kept running, running—and then he was past the line, the dogs' terrible ravening cry now behind and above him. He kept on going, the nightmarish shrieking of the dogs, the cursing and shouting of the handlers, ringing ever more faintly in his ears. The hunt was over, the quarry cornered—only it wasn't a boar, it was a human being. Pendergast. And he wasn't going to escape: not this time, he wasn't.

  { 83 }

  Buck sat on the cot in his cell at the Manhattan Detention Center, listening and waiting. It was a modern, sterile facility, all white walls and fluorescent lighting, the lights recessed behind caged glass. Despite the fact that it was past midnight, he could hear a lot of noise from the other prisoners, who were banging on the bars, yelling, arguing, demanding lawyers. Some were shouting in unintelligible languages that sounded harsh, almost barbarous.

  He'd been processed, fingerprinted, photographed, showered, given a change of clothes. He'd been fed, given a copy of the Times, been offered a phone to call a lawyer—and told absolutely nothing. It seemed he'd been in the cell forever. Every hour that passed turned the screw another notch. When would it begin? Is this what Christ felt, waiting to be brought before Pontius Pilate? He would have preferred almost anything—beating, torture, abuse—to this interminable wait. And this environment was sterile, suffocating. What was worse, he'd been given a cell to himself. His treatment was almost cruel in its courtesy. He wondered how much longer he could stand these people coming and going with his food: these people who never answered his questions, never looked him in the eye, never said a word.

  He knelt to pray. When would it happen? When would the walls shake, the voices sound on high, the ground open to swallow the unclean? When would the screams of the damned fill the air, the kings and
princes run to hide among the rocks, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse appear in the sky? He didn't even have a window to look out of, no way to see anything.

  The suspense was literally killing him.

  Yet another guard appeared: a large black man in a blue uniform, carrying a tray.

  "What's this?" Buck asked, looking up.

  No answer. The man opened the sliding tray in the bars, set it down, slid it in, shut the slot, turned, and walked away.

  "What's happening out there?" Buck cried. "What's—?"

  But the orderly had disappeared.

  Buck rose and sat down again on the bunk. He looked at the food: a bagel with cream cheese and jelly; a chicken breast sitting in some congealed gravy; some grayish green beans and carrots; a dollop of hardening mashed potatoes. The sheer banality of it made him sick.

  Now, above the usual prison sounds, he heard something else: voices, a clang, a sudden burst of shouting from the other prisoners. Buck stood up.

  Was it starting? Was it starting at last?

  Four police officers appeared down the hall, heavily armed, billy clubs swinging from their hips, swaggering in formation. For him: they were coming for him . He felt a tingle of anticipation. Something would happen now. It might be very hard. It would no doubt test him to the utmost. But whatever it was, he would accept it. It was part of God's great plan.

  They halted outside his cell. He stared back at them, waiting. One stepped forward and read from a card clipped to a green folder.

  "Wayne Paul Buck?"

  He nodded, stiffening.

  "You're to come with us."

  "I'm ready," he said, defiantly but with quiet dignity.

  The man unlocked the cell. The others stood back, guns at the ready.

  "Step out, please. Turn around and place your hands behind your back."

  He did as he was told. It was going to be bad, very bad: he could feel it. The cold steel of the cuffs went around his wrists, and there was a click: a portent of things to come.

  "This way, sir."

  Sir. The mocking was beginning.

  They marched him silently down the hall to an elevator, rose a few floors, then down another sterile corridor to a gray metal door. They knocked.

  "Come in," said a feminine voice.

  The door opened, and Buck found himself in a small office with a metal desk, a single window looking out over the nightscape of lower Manhattan. Sitting at the desk was that one, the female cop who had led the centurions in to arrest him.

  He stood proudly before her, unbowed. She was his Pontius Pilate.

  She accepted the folder from the lead cop. "Have you had access to a lawyer?" she asked.

  "I don't need a lawyer. God is my advocate." He noticed, for the first time, how pretty she was—and how young. She had a discreet bandage above her ear, where she had been hit with the rock. He had saved her from death.

  The devil has many faces.

  "As you wish." She rose, pulled her jacket off a hook, slid into it, then nodded to the policemen. "Is the marshal ready?"

  "Yes, Captain."

  "Let's go, then."

  "Where?" Buck asked.

  Her only answer was to lead the way down the hall. They took another elevator down and out through a maze of corridors into the yard, where an unmarked police car sat, idling, gleaming beneath a dozen sodium lamps. A uniformed cop was behind the wheel. A small, heavyset man in gray polyester stood beside the passenger door, hands clasped before him.

  "You can uncuff him," Hayward said to the cops. "Put him in the back, please."

  They uncuffed him, opened the door, eased him in. Meanwhile, Hayward was talking to the man in the suit, giving him the green folder and a clipboard. He signed the clipboard, handed it back to her, got in beside the driver, and slammed the door.

  Now Hayward leaned in at the rear window. "You're probably wondering what's going to happen to you, Mr. Buck."

  Buck felt a rush of emotion. This was it: he was being led away, taken to meet his end, his supreme moment. He was ready.

  "This gentleman is a U.S. marshal, who is going to escort you by plane back to Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, where you are wanted for parole violation."

  Buck sat there, stunned. This couldn't be. More mockery. It was a trick, a ruse.

  "Did you hear me?"

  Buck did not acknowledge. It had to be a trick.

  "The D.A. decided not to file any charges against you here in New York—too much trouble. And to tell you the truth, you didn't really do anything all that wrong, outside of exercising your right of free speech in a rather misguided way. We were lucky, avoided a riot, managed to disperse the crowd peacefully once you left. Everyone went home and the area's now fenced. Soon the Parks Department will be giving it a thorough cleaning and reseeding, which it needed anyway. So, you see, no real harm was done, and we felt it better to let the whole incident die a quiet death and be forgotten."

  Buck listened, hardly able to believe his ears.

  "And what about me?" he finally managed to say.

  "Like I said, we're shipping you back to Oklahoma, where there's a parole officer really anxious to talk to you. We don't want you. They had a prior and wanted you back. Nice ending all around."

  She smiled, laid her hand on the side of the car. "Mr. Buck? Are you all right?"

  He didn't answer. He wasn’t all right. He felt sick. This wasn't what was supposed to happen. It was a trick, a vicious trick.

  She leaned in just a little farther. "Mr. Buck? If you don't mind, there's something personal I'd like to say to you."

  He stared at her.

  "First of all, there's only one Jesus and you aren't Him. Another thing: I'm a Christian, and I try to be a good one, although I may not always succeed. You had no right to stand there when I was at the mercy of that crowd, point your finger at me, and pass judgment. You should take a good look at that passage in the Gospel of Matthew: Judge not, that ye be not judged… Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."

  She paused. "I always liked the King James Version the best. Now, listen. You worry about yourself from now on, being a good citizen, keeping out of trouble, and obeying the law."

  "But… You don't realize… It's going to happen. I warn you, it's coming." Buck could barely articulate the words.

  "If there's a Second Coming in the works, you sure as heck won't get advance notice—that much I do know."

  With that, she smiled, patted the side of the car, and said, "Farewell, Mr. Buck. Keep your nose clean."

  { 84 }

  In the elegantly appointed dining room within the main massing of the Castello Fosco, the count waited, quite patiently, for his dinner. The walls of the fifteenth-century villa were extremely thick, and there was no sound at all save the faint mechanical whirring of Bucephalus from a white T-stand nearby, applying his artificial beak to an artificial nut. The stately windows of the room looked out over a spectacular landscape: the hills of Chianti, the deep valley of the Greve. But Fosco was content to sit in his heavy oak chair at one end of the long table, reviewing—with delicious tranquillity—the events of the day.

  His reverie was broken by the shuffle of feet in the passageway. A moment later his cook, Assunta, appeared, bearing a large serving tray. Placing it at the far end of the table, she presented the dishes to him one by one; a simple maltagliati ai porcini; oxtail, served alla vaccinara; fegatini grilled over the fire; a contorno of fennel braised in olive oil. It was the simple, homely fare his cook excelled at and Fosco preferred while in the country. And if Assunta's presentation lacked the polish and subtlety of Pinketts—that, alas, could not be helped.

  He thanked her, pouring himself a glass of the estate's exceptional Chianti Classico as she left the room. And then he applied himself to his dinner with relish. Although he felt famished, he ate slowly, savoring every bite, every mouthful of wine.

  At last, m
eal complete, he rang a small silver bell that lay near his right hand. Assunta reappeared.

  "Grazie," he said, dabbing the corners of his mouth with a huge linen napkin.

  Assunta curtsied a little awkwardly.

  The count rose. "Once you have cleared away, you may take a few days off."

  The cook glanced at him inquiringly without raising her head.

  "Per favore, signora. It has been months since you visited your son in Pontremoli."

  The curtsy deepened. "Mille grazie."

  "Prego. Buona sera." And the count turned lightly on his heel and left the dining room.

  Once the cook had departed, the castle would be empty of servants. His men had done their work and departed. Even the groundskeepers had been given a few days' absence. Only Giuseppe, the ancient dogmaster, remained on the estate: as it happened, he could not be spared.

  It was not that Fosco distrusted his retainers: they all had ancient ties to his family, some going back as far as eight hundred years, and their loyalty was without question. It was simply that he wanted to finish this business undisturbed.

  He moved slowly and purposefully through the huge rooms of the castle: the salone; the hall of portraits; the hall of armor. His stroll took him back through time: first, through the older, thirteenth-century additions, then into still older chambers, built half a millennium earlier. Here there was no electricity, no modern conveniences such as plumbing or central heating. The warren of small, windowless rooms grew dark and oppressive, and Fosco stopped to pull a torch from a wall sconce and light it. Turning to an ancient worktable nearby, he picked up something else and tucked it into his waistcoat. Then he took a side passage and continued on and down: down into a subterranean warren of tunnels cut into the living rock.

  Many of the extensive basements of the Castello Fosco were taken up with the production of the estate. A great many rooms were devoted to winemaking: filled with bottling machinery and fermentation vats, or with countless small barrels of French oak. Others were given over to the aging of boar hams: deep, cool spaces from whose ceilings hung countless hams, still covered in coarse fur. Still others were used for storing olive oil or making balsamico. But here—far beneath the bulk of the castle's stronghold—there were no such large and well-ventilated spaces. Narrow vaults dug deeply into the beetling cliff face of limestone, and stairs corkscrewed down toward old wells and chambers unused for half a millennium.