He looked around. Most of the VIPs in the crowd had gone into the tomb, but the second shift remained, with plenty of serious drinkers and eaters, standing around or sitting at tables. They remained calm, taking the power failure in stride.
Shrugging, he tipped the oyster shell into his mouth and sucked in the briny, still-living slithery bolus, smacked his lips in enjoyment, and plucked a second oyster from the plate, readying it for the same operation.
And then he heard the shots: six muffled reports from the darkness beyond the far end of the hall: a heavy-caliber handgun firing in a measured cadence, one shot after another. With a dying crackle, the emergency lights went out-and Smithback knew immediately that something big was going down, that there was a story happening. The only light in the hall now came from the hundreds of tea candles spread out on the dinner tables. There were murmurings from the remaining crowd, a rising sense of alarm.
Smithback looked in the direction of the gunshots. He recalled seeing various technicians and staff going in and out of a door in the rear of the hall as the evening progressed, and he figured it must lead to the control room for the Tomb of Senef. As he watched, somebody he recognized-Vincent D’Agosta-came through that door. Not in uniform at the moment, but still looking every inch the cop. With him was somebody else Smithback recognized: Randall Loftus, the well-known director. He watched them make their way toward the small knot of television cameras.
A stab of uneasiness struck Smithback as he realized his wife, Nora, was inside the tomb. Probably stuck in utter darkness. But the tomb had a full complement of guards and cops, so she was certainly safe. Something was happening here, and it was his job as a reporter to find out just what it was. He watched D’Agosta cross the hall, break the glass in an emergency fire station, and remove an axe.
He pulled out his notebook and pencil, noted the time, and jotted down what he was seeing. D’Agosta walked over to a cable, positioned the axe, and brought it down with a clunk, eliciting a roar of protest from Loftus and the PBS technicians. Ignoring them, D’Agosta walked calmly back, axe in hand, to the small door in the rear of the hall, which he then closed behind him.
The tension in the hall increased by an order of magnitude.
Whatever was happening, it was big.
Smithback swiftly followed in D’Agosta’s wake. Reaching the door to the control room, he put his hand on the knob. Then he paused. If he barged in there, he was likely to be ejected. Better to hang back, mingle with the crowd, and wait for the other shoe to drop.
It didn’t take long. Within minutes, D’Agosta, still carrying the axe, and Captain Hayward burst out the door, jogged down the hall, and disappeared out the main exit. A moment later, Manetti, the director of security, came out, climbed onto the darkened podium, and addressed the remaining partygoers.
Again, Smithback noted the time and began to take notes.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” he cried out, his voice barely penetrating the vast murky interior.
A hush fell.
“We’re experiencing some power problems, some technical problems. Nothing to be alarmed about, but we’re going to have to clear the hall. The guards will escort you out the way you came in and up to the rotunda. Please follow their instructions.”
A murmur of disappointment rose up. Someone shouted out, “What about the people in the tomb?”
“The people in the tomb will be escorted out as soon as we open the doors. There’s nothing to be concerned about.”
“Are the doors stuck?” Smithback yelled.
“Momentarily, yes.”
More restlessness. It was clear people did not want to go, leaving their friends or loved ones behind in the tomb.
“Please move toward the exit!” Manetti shouted. “The guards will escort everyone out. There is nothing to be alarmed about.” There were some murmurs of protest from guests clearly unused to being told what to do.
Bullshit, thought Smithback. If there was nothing to be alarmed about, why was there a quaver in Manetti’s voice? There was no way in hell he was going to allow himself to be “escorted” out of the building just as the story was breaking-and especially with Nora still stuck in the tomb.
He looked around, then ducked outside the hall. The velvet ropes ran down the basement corridor, lit only by the battery-operated exit signs. Another corridor sat at right angles to the main hallway, roped off, running into darkness. Guards with flashlights were already herding groups of protesting people toward the exit.
Smithback sprinted on ahead to where the corridor branched off, vaulted the velvet rope, ran through the darkness, and ducked into an entryway marked Alcoholic Storage, Genus Rattus.
He flattened himself against the shallow door frame and waited.
Chapter 62
Vincent D’Agosta and Laura Hayward sprinted between the velvet ropes, down the front steps of the museum, and along Museum Drive. The entrance to the subway stood at the corner of 81st Street, a dingy metal kiosk with a copper roof, perched on the corner. Parked near it, just beyond the seething crowd of rubberneckers, D’Agosta spotted the PBS television van, cables snaking from it across the lawn and through a window into the museum. A white satellite dish was set atop the van.
“Over here!” D’Agosta began to push his way through the crowd toward the van, gripping the axe. Hayward was at his side, hand up displaying her shield.
“NYPD!” she cried. “Make way, please!”
When the crowd seemed reluctant to part, D’Agosta raised the axe over his head with both hands and began to pump it up and down. The crowd parted before them, exposing a thin path to the van.
They ran around to the rear of the vehicle. Hayward held back the crowd while D’Agosta stepped up onto the bumper. Grasping the rack on top of the van, he pulled himself onto the roof.
A man leaped out of the van. “What the hell are you doing?” he cried. “We’ve got a live broadcast in session!”
“NYPD Homicide,” said Hayward, positioning herself between him and the bumper.
D’Agosta steadied himself on top of the van, legs apart. Then he raised the axe above his head again.
“Hey! You can’t do that!”
“Watch me.” With one tremendous swing, D’Agosta struck through the metal posts supporting the satellite dish, popping the bolts and sending them flying. Then he swung the flat end of the axe against the dish: once, twice. With a creaking groan of metal, it toppled over the edge of the roof and crashed to the street below.
“Are you crazy-?” the technician began.
Ignoring him, D’Agosta leaped off, tossed the axe aside, and he and Hayward shoved their way through the fringes of the crowd, heading for the subway entrance.
Dimly, D’Agosta was aware it was Laura Hayward at his side: his own Laura, who’d had him escorted out of her office just days before. He thought he had lost her irretrievably-and yet, she had sought him out.
She had sought him out. It was a delicious thought. He reminded himself to return to it if he survived the rest of the night.
Reaching the entrance to the subway, they ran down the stairs and sprinted over to the ticket booth. Hayward flashed her shield at the woman inside.
“Captain Hayward, NYPD Homicide. There’s a situation in the museum and we need to clear this station. Call Transit Authority HQ and have them flag the station as a skip until further notice. I don’t want any trains stopping. Understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
They jumped the turnstiles, ran down the corridor, and entered the station proper. It was still early-not yet nine-and there were several dozen people waiting for the train. Hayward trotted along the platform, and D’Agosta followed. At the far end, a corridor branched off, with a large tiled sign above:
New York Museum of Natural History
Walkway to Entrance
Open During Museum Hours Only
An accordion grille of dingy, rusted metal sealed off the corridor, secured with a massive padlock.
“Better talk to those people,” murmured Hayward, pulling out her gun and pointing it at the lock.
D’Agosta nodded. He walked back along the platform, waving his shield. “NYPD! Clear the station! Everybody out!”
People looked over at him disinterestedly.
“Out! Police action, clear the station!”
The sound of two gunshots thundered down the platform, waking everyone up. They began to move back toward the exits, suddenly alarmed, and amidst the confused hubbub of the increasingly rapid retreat D’Agosta heard the words terrorist and bomb drifting toward him.
“I want everyone to leave in a calm and orderly fashion!” he called after them.
A third ripping gunshot cleared the station completely. D’Agosta ran back to find Hayward wrestling with the grille. He helped push it back and together they ducked through.
Ahead of them, the corridor stretched for a hundred yards before taking a sharp turn toward the museum’s subway entrance. Tilework along the walls showed images of mammal and dinosaur skeletons, and there were framed posters announcing upcoming museum exhibitions, including several for the Grand Tomb of Senef. Hayward pulled a small set of plans from her pocket and unrolled them on the cement floor. The plans were covered with scribbled notations-it looked to D’Agosta as if she had gone over them many times.
“That’s the tomb,” said Hayward, pointing at the map. “And there’s the subway tunnel. And look-right over here, there’s only about two feet of concrete between the corner of the tomb and this tunnel.”
D’Agosta squatted, examined the plat. “I don’t see any exact measurements on the subway side.”
“There aren’t any. They only surveyed the tomb, estimating the rest.”
D’Agosta frowned. “The scale is ten feet to the inch. That doesn’t give us much precision.”
“No.”
She consulted the map a moment longer, then, gathering it up, she paced off about a hundred feet down the corridor before stopping again. “My best guess is that this is the thin spot, right here.”
The rumble of a subway car began to fill the air, followed by a roar as it passed the station without stopping, the noise quickly fading.
“You’ve been in the tomb?” said D’Agosta.
“Vinnie, I’ve practically been living in the tomb.”
“And you can hear the subway in there?”
“All the time. They couldn’t get rid of it.”
D’Agosta pressed his ear to the tiled wall. “If they can hear out, we should be able to hear in.”
“They’d have to be making a lot of noise in there.”
He straightened up, looked at Hayward. “They are.”
Then he pressed his ear to the wall again.
Chapter 63
From his hiding place in the dim doorway, Smithback watched the murmuring, complaining crowds being ushered out of the hall toward the elevators. He lingered a few minutes after the last had passed by, then crept forward, ducked under the velvet rope, and inched along the wall to the corner, where he could peer into the Egyptian Hall. It wasn’t difficult to stay hidden: the only light came from the hundreds of candles still flickering in the hall, leaving much of the antechamber in darkness.
Pressed into the shadows beside the entrance, he watched a small knot of people emerge from the side door leading to the control room. He recognized Manetti, in his usual ugly brown suit, sporting an impressive comb-over. The rest were museum guards except for one man who, in particular, attracted his attention. He was tall and brown-haired, wearing a white turtleneck and slacks. Although his face was turned away, a large bandage was clearly visible on one cheek. What attracted Smithback’s attention wasn’t so much the man’s appearance as the way he moved: so smoothly and gracefully it seemed almost feline. It reminded him of someone…
He watched as the man strode to a huge silver cauldron of crushed ice. Dozens of champagne bottles had been pressed into the ice, their snouts pointing upward.
“Help me get rid of these bottles,” Smithback heard the man say to Manetti-and the instant he spoke, Smithback recognized that honeyed voice.
Special Agent Pendergast. Out of prison? What’s he doing here? He felt a sudden thrill of excitement and surprise: here was the man whose name he’d been working to clear, walking around as casually as if he owned the place. But along with the excitement came a sudden sinking feeling-in his experience, Pendergast appeared only when the shit was really hitting the fan.
Two of the guards jogged up to the tomb entrance, and Smithback watched as they made an attempt to lever open the doors with a wrecking bar and a sledgehammer, without success.
Smithback felt the sinking feeling increase. People were trapped inside the tomb-he knew that-but why this sudden desperate effort to get them out? Was something going wrong inside?
His blood ran cold with speculation. Fact was, the tomb presented a perfect opportunity to launch a terrorist attack. An incredible concentration of money, power, and influence was inside: dozens of political bigwigs, along with an elite slice of the country’s corporate, legal, and scientific leadership-not to mention everybody of importance at the museum itself.
He returned his attention to Pendergast, who was pulling the bottles of champagne out of the ice and hurling them into a trash can. In another moment, he’d emptied the cauldron, leaving only a heap of crushed and melting ice. Now he stepped to an adjoining food table and, with a great sweep of his hand, cleared it of its contents, sending platters of oysters, mounds of caviar, cheeses, prosciutto, and breads crashing to the floor. Aghast, Smithback watched a massive Brie roll like a white wheel all the way across the hall before coming to a gluey rest in a dark corner.
Next, Pendergast went from table to table, collecting dozens of tea candles and arranging them in a circle around the cleared area to provide illumination.
What the hell is he doing?
A man came into the hall at a dead run, carrying a bottle of something, which Pendergast immediately snatched up, checked, then shoved into the mound of crushed ice. Two more men arrived, one pushing a cart crammed with bottles and laboratory equipment-beakers and flasks-which were also shoved into the ice.
Pendergast straightened and, his back to Smithback’s hiding place, began rolling up his sleeves. “I need a volunteer,” he said.
“What exactly are you doing?” asked Manetti.
“Making nitroglycerin.”
There was a silence.
Manetti cleared his throat. “This is crazy. Surely there’s a better way to get into the tomb than blowing your way in.”
“No volunteers?”
“I’m calling for a SWAT team,” said Manetti. “We need professionals to break in there. We can’t just blow it up willy-nilly.”
“Well, then,” said Pendergast, “how about you, Mr. Smithback?”
Smithback froze in the blackness, hesitated, looked around. “Who, me?” he said in a small voice.
“You’re the only Smithback here.”
Smithback emerged from the shadows of the doorway and stepped into the hall, and only now did Pendergast turn and look him in the eye.
“Well, sure,” Smithback stammered. “Always happy to help a- Wait. Did you say nitro?”
“I did.”
“Will it be dangerous?”
“Given my inexperience at the synthesis, and the impurity of the formulation that will inevitably result, I’d estimate our chances are slightly better than fifty percent.”
“Chances at what?”
“Enduring a premature detonation.”
Smithback swallowed. “You must… be worried about what’s happening in the tomb.”
“I am, in fact, terrified, Mr. Smithback.”
“My wife’s in there.”
“Then you have a special incentive to help.”
Smithback stiffened. “Just tell me what to do.”
“Thank you.” Pendergast turned to Manetti. “See to it that everyone leaves the hall
and takes cover.”
“I’m calling for a SWAT team, and I strongly suggest-”
But the look on Pendergast’s face silenced the security director. The guards hastened out of the hall, Manetti following, his radio crackling.
Pendergast glanced back at Smithback. “Now, if you will kindly follow my instructions to the letter, we will have a fair chance of pulling this off.”
He went back to setting up the equipment: rotating the bottles in the ice to chill them more quickly; taking a flask, shoving it deep into the ice, setting a glass thermometer within it. “The problem, Mr. Smithback, is that we have no time to do this properly. We need to mix the chemicals quickly. And that sometimes provokes an undesirable result.”
“Look, what’s happening in the tomb?”
“Let us concentrate on the problem at hand, please.”
Smithback swallowed again, trying to get a grip on himself. All thought of a big story had vanished. Nora is in there, Nora is in there-the phrase pounded in his head like a drumbeat.
“Hand me the bottle of sulfuric acid, but wipe it off first.”
Smithback located the bottle, pulled it out of the ice, wiped it down, and handed it to Pendergast, who poured it carefully into the chilled flask. A nasty, acrid smell arose. When the agent was satisfied he had poured in the requisite amount, he stepped back and capped the bottle. “Check the temperature.”
Smithback peered down at the glass thermometer, pulled it from the flask, held it close enough to a candle to read.
“Needless to say,” said Pendergast dryly, “you will take exquisite care with that candle flame. I should also mention these acids will dissolve human flesh in a matter of seconds.”
Smithback’s hand jerked away.
“Give me the nitric acid. Same procedure, please.”
Smithback wiped off the bottle and handed it to Pendergast. The agent unscrewed the top and held it up, examining the label.
The Book of the Dead Page 35
