Pendergast fired four quick shots into the cloud in a pattern surrounding the place where he judged Ozmian to have landed, knowing the odds were long but taking advantage of even this slight opportunity. The shots emptied his magazine.
Racing away, ignoring the pain, Pendergast sprinted alongside the outer building wall, leapt over a low windowsill and inside, then continued running down a corridor, which debouched once again into the arts-and-crafts room. As he ran he ejected the empty magazine, letting it clatter to the floor as he slapped in the second one, past the rotting tables, through a doorway, and down a nearby stairwell, heading for the basement.
He did not know if his four shots had caught Ozmian or not, but he had to assume they had not. His third plan had failed. He needed a fourth.
62
OZMIAN EMERGED CAUTIOUSLY from the rubble, keeping to cover. Those shots Pendergast had fired into the dust cloud had seriously unnerved him, due to their random nature and his inability to anticipate them. One of them had come so close he felt the snap of wind as it passed his ear. For the first time, Ozmian felt a twinge of uncertainty. But he quickly shook it off. Wasn’t this what he’d most wanted—a supremely cunning, able opponent? He knew, deep down, that he would prevail.
He moved alongside the ragged edges where the corner of Wing D had collapsed, keeping to the darkness and the brushy overgrowth at the edges of the abandoned building. Switching on his flashlight, he scanned the ground for signs of Pendergast but could see nothing. Coming to a broken window frame, he gave the interior a quick recon and then ducked in, proceeding down a vacant hallway. The tracks in the hall were old, and again he could find no sign of Pendergast.
He needed to find his quarry’s trail. That meant executing a maneuver known as “cutting for sign”—moving in a broad circle at right angles to the quarry’s track, attempting to pick it up. Reaching the end of the hallway, he started down another, cutting for sign, expecting at any moment to intersect Pendergast’s tracks.
In the basement, traversing almost the entire length of the building, Pendergast passed a heating plant, storage rooms, a small block of padded prison cells, finally stopping in a vast archive full of rotting files. It was pitch black belowground and he had no choice but to use the flashlight. Despite everything he had passed, he’d found nothing and no place that would help him escape or turn the tables on his pursuer. There was something stupid, if not futile, in continuing this farce: running randomly through this vast building, hoping for a fresh idea. He was up against a savant, a man who could not be beaten. And yet no one was unbeatable; every human had a chink in his armor. He now had some insight into Ozmian’s psychology, his vulnerability, but how could he turn that to his advantage? Where was that fissure in his armor and, even if found, how would he stick in the sword? The man was perhaps the most complex and ingenious opponent he had ever come up against. “Know your enemy” was the first dictum of Sun Tzu in his Art of War. And the saying contained within it the obvious answer: if there was anyplace in the entire world where he could learn about this man and his deepest weaknesses, it was right here: in the basement, in the archives.
Pendergast paused for a moment, collecting his thoughts and taking in the vast room with his flashlight. It was almost uncanny that he was there, in this immense space stuffed with tales of madness, misery, and horror: the archives of a gigantic mental hospital. He understood now that his own subconscious had led him here.
The archives consisted of racks of filing cabinets on a scaffolding of metal shelves, rising from floor to ceiling. Each aisle had its own pair of rolling ladders, necessary to reach the upper level of cabinets. As Pendergast moved through the space, trying to understand how it was organized, he became aware that the hospital, in its century of operation, had accumulated a staggering quantity of data in the form of patient histories, notes, Dictaphone recordings, diagnoses, correspondence, personnel files, and legal documents. Over the course of its lifetime, the hospital had housed tens of thousands of mental patients, perhaps even hundreds of thousands; the numbers only confirmed Pendergast’s belief that there were vast numbers of mentally ill people in the world. If anything, he thought, the archive was rather modest, considering the collective insanity of the human race.
The aisles and rows were laid out in a grid, the aisles marked with letters and the rows with numbers. Moving down several aisles, consulting the numbers and rows, Pendergast located what he was looking for, seized the rolling ladder, slid it into place, and climbed, flashlight between his teeth. He yanked open a drawer, pawed through it greedily, got to the back, then opened another and another, pulling out folders and tossing them, until he realized that what he was looking for was simply not there.
He slid down the ladder, paused a moment to recalculate, then moved down the aisle to a second place, opening another series of drawers. The screech of rusty metal echoed in the space, and he was acutely aware that the glow of his flashlight would make a perfect target. He had to complete this search before Ozmian picked up his trail and entered the room.
He moved to the next aisle, then the next. He was running out of time. In one drawer he unexpectedly found a rolled-up set of reduced-size building plans. Flipping through them, he extracted one and stuffed it in his waistband. Useful, but not what he was looking for. He moved on.
Ozmian had cut for sign across half of the building’s first floor, from one side to the other, to no avail; but now, as he moved to the staircase, preparing to climb to the second floor, he finally hit Pendergast’s trail. It was remarkably faint—the man had been moving with the utmost care—but there was no possible way to completely erase it, especially to Ozmian’s keen eye. To his surprise, the tracks were headed not upstairs, but rather down…into the basement.
Ozmian felt a surge of satisfaction. He had never been in the basement and had no idea what was down there, but he felt sure the presumably maze-like space and absolute darkness would be to his own advantage, and for Pendergast a dead end. On top of that, he retained a single overwhelming advantage: he was on the offense and his quarry in continuous retreat.
He headed down the stairwell into the darkness, one hand tracing along the wall, moving cautiously and silently, his heart thumping in anticipation of what was to come.
Pendergast had searched all the expected places without finding what he needed. Of course he hadn’t found it, he reflected bitterly; it was no longer there. The records had been removed years ago. A man like Ozmian wouldn’t leave dynamite like that lying around, even in a decaying and abandoned archive. He would have sent someone in to find and destroy it.
Pendergast’s search had revealed the organization of the archives, and it now occurred to him that, at the time when this part of King’s Park was finally investigated for malpractice and cruelty and subsequently shut down, there might be an appendix of files that escaped notice. They would, logically, be at the very end, rather than in their normal alphabetical and date-related places. He moved quickly to the last row of cabinets, in the farthest corner of the archives. Although still encrusted with rust, cobwebs, and mildew, these were slightly newer and of a different model. The drawers were also labeled differently. Evidently, the files within lay outside the established archiving system. After a quick search he came upon a drawer labeled:
RESTRICTED
INVESTIGATIONS / REPORTS / PERSONNEL GRIEVANCES
PENDING AG ORDER OF CLOSURE
It was locked, but a sharp twist in the keyhole with his knife broke the flimsy bolt. After sliding open the drawer with another loud screech of rusted metal, he riffled through the contents, his spidery fingers flying over the tabs and raising a small cloud of dust. Halting, he seized a fat file with some paperwork clipped to its outside edge. Suddenly he crouched, switching off his light and listening. When he had entered the archives, he had closed the rusty door at the far end of the room. It had just opened with a creak.
Ozmian had arrived.
This was catastrophic; he simply would
not have the time he needed. Nevertheless, with infinite care, keeping his light off, he rose and moved through the blackness by feeling the cabinets as he went, making for the rear exit. A short journey across open space brought him to the cinder-block outer wall of the archive room, which he again followed by feel. There was a closed door somewhere along this wall, and he was not far from it. He waited, listening acutely. Was that the faint, whispery crunch of footfall on grit? Another faint sound, at the very limit of audibility, reached him; then another. Ozmian was creeping toward him in the dark.
Aiming the Les Baer, he waited. If he fired at the sound, he would probably miss, and the flash would give Ozmian a target for return fire. The risk was too great. The man had surely heard the opening of the last cabinet and knew Pendergast was in the room, but he probably did not know exactly where.
Pendergast remained at the wall, unmoving, hardly breathing. Another faint crunch of a footfall. This one was closer. He might just chance a shot, risky as it was. Aiming the gun into the darkness, he placed his finger on the trigger and waited for another sound; and then it came—the whisper of dust being compressed by a foot.
He fired two rapid shots even as he threw himself sideways, the double flash illuminating Ozmian about seventy feet down the adjacent aisle. Ozmian instantly returned fire, but the rounds slammed into the wall above Pendergast’s prone body, peppering him with concrete chips. Into the dark he fired five more times at Ozmian’s last location, again spacing his shots in anticipation of the possible ways he might move—but each flash showed Ozmian at a place where his shot was not, even as the man returned fire, forcing him to dive for cover into the next row of cabinets. In the vast echoing and re-echoing of shots in the cavernous space, Pendergast took the opportunity to sprint down the aisle, running in the dark; he found a row by touch, ran down that in turn, then wheeled into a new aisle and another row before coming to a halt, crouching and catching his breath when silence returned. Moving again with the utmost caution, he headed via a roundabout route back to the rear exit, feeling his way along; within minutes he found it, and—easing the door open with a creak—ducked through and slammed it behind him, even as he heard Ozmian firing at the sound, a round hitting the thick metal door but not penetrating it. There was a bolt here, and he thrust it home; that, at least, would buy him another few minutes to do what he had to do.
Flicking on his flashlight, he looked quickly through the files he had gleaned, page after page, until he stopped at one particular sheet. He slipped it out, tucked it in his pocket, glanced at the building plans…and then proceeded down the hall, not even bothering to tread lightly. At the far end, he came to a small green door, which he pushed open and then shut and locked behind him, even as he heard Ozmian trying to get through the archive door.
He had a great deal of work to do to prepare for Ozmian’s arrival.
63
STANDING AT THE door, Ozmian turned on his flashlight. This was a seriously fortified steel door, as was merited to protect these once-sensitive archives. Examining the lock, he saw the only recourse was to shoot through it, despite the expense of rounds that might necessitate.
He ejected the now-empty magazine, slapped in the second one, then positioned himself and aimed with both hands for the cylinder, letting his heart slow down. His quarry had once again put several rounds within inches of his head. That fusillade unnerved him, but it also meant—if his count was right—that his quarry had only one round left to his eight. He believed the man was now fully on the run and out of options. An ambush with only one shot was close to suicide. He checked his watch: twenty minutes until Pendergast’s pal D’Agosta was nothing more than hamburger on the walls of Building 44. No wonder he was losing it.
Bracing himself, he fired—and the round punched out the cylinder. He examined it, tried the door, found that part of the lock was still jammed in, and used a second shot to blast it free along with the bolt. The door swung open to reveal a long, empty basement hallway.
Six rounds left.
He headed into the hall, following the tracks into the very back wing of the basement. Pendergast was no longer even bothering to step lightly or try to confuse his trail. He simply didn’t have any more time. This was the point in the chase when the hunted animal began to feel really pushed. Hunting a man, he mused, was really no different from tracking a wounded lion; the more he pressed and worried the prey, the more it panicked, lost its ability to think rationally, and became a reactive bundle of nerves. Pendergast was now in that stage. He was a man who had run out of ideas as well as rounds. At some point he would do what all hunted animals did in the end: stop running, turn, and make his final stand.
As Ozmian moved down the aisle, following the trail, he noted how grim this part of the basement was, how strangely unsettling, with unpainted cinder-block walls streaked with damp, regularly punctuated by lime-colored windowless doors along both sides. Each door was numbered in order, with a dirty label:
ROOM EECT-1
ROOM EECT-2
ROOM EECT-3
What did they mean? What were these rooms?
The tracks came to a halt at the door marked EECT-9. He examined the floor in front of the door, reading the spoor: his quarry had paused, then opened the door and gone in, still making no attempt at deception, shutting it behind him. While Ozmian had no idea what was in the room, he sensed it was small and almost certainly a dead end, with no escape for Pendergast. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. But then, Ozmian reminded himself, his quarry was exceptionally clever and must not be underestimated; anything could be awaiting him on the other side of that door. And the man had one round left.
With infinite care, standing to one side, Ozmian gave his quarry a little test. He touched the door handle and eased it down, knowing Pendergast would see the movement on the far side.
BOOM! Just as he hoped, Pendergast had wasted his final shot firing blindly through the door. Now his quarry was unarmed, save for the knife. He looked at his watch: eight minutes to go before his partner was blown into bits.
It had been a memorable hunt, but the end was nigh.
“Pendergast?” said Ozmian, speaking through the closed door. “I’m sorry you wasted your last round.”
Silence.
No doubt the man was waiting with knife in hand, like that wounded lion crouched in the mopane brush, ready for a final desperate struggle.
He waited.
“The minutes are ticking by. Only six minutes left until your friend gets turned inside out.”
And now Pendergast spoke. His voice was shaky and high. “Come in and fight then, instead of hiding behind the door like a coward.”
With a sigh, but not lowering his guard in the slightest, Ozmian raised his gun and gripped his flashlight against the barrel with his left hand, so that it pointed where the gun was aimed. Then, with one ferocious kick, he slammed open the locked door and spun inside, covering the room in a split second, expecting a desperate and futile knife attack from any quarter.
Instead he heard a voice speaking gently and kindly from the darkness:
“Welcome, brave little man, to the room of happiness.”
The unexpected words were like a knife driven into the deepest part of his brain.
“How are we today, my brave little man? Come in, come in, don’t be shy! We’re all friends here, we love you and are here to help you.”
The words were so instantly familiar and yet so grotesquely strange that, like a great earthquake, they split apart the bunker of his memory and a hot flood of recollection came pouring out: boiling, incandescent, forming a whirling maelstrom inside his skull, obliterating all in its path. Ozmian staggered, hardly able to remain upright.
“All of the kind doctors here want so much—so very much—to help you and make you feel better so that you can go back to your family, go back to school and your friends and live the life of a normal boy. Come, come, brave little man, and take a seat in our happiness chair…”
And at that moment a light snapped on and he found himself staring at a sight both outlandish and weirdly familiar: a padded leather reclining chair, unbuckled straps on the arms and legs, with a swiveling steel table next to it. Laid out on the table were special accoutrements: a rubber mouth guard, rubber sticks, buckles and collars, a black leather mask, a steel neck brace—all softly illuminated in the pool of yellow light. And looming over all, disembodied, was a stainless-steel helmet, a gleaming dome festooned with copper nipples and curly wires, attached to a jointed, retractable arm.
“Come, my brave little man, and have a seat. Let the nice doctors help you! It won’t hurt, not in the slightest, and afterward you’ll feel so much better, so much happier—and you’ll be one step closer to going home. The best part of all is that you won’t remember a thing, not a thing, so close your eyes, think of home, and it will be over before you know it.”
Ozmian, as if in a hypnotic trance, closed his eyes. He felt the doctor gently remove something heavy from his grasp, and then those sympathetic hands guided him into the leather seat; he took his place unresisting, his mind a blank; he felt the buckles and straps go around his wrists and ankles, felt them tighten, felt the brace go around his neck with a click of the steel lock, felt the leather mask snugged over his face; he heard the creak of metal joints as the steel helmet descended upon his head, icy cold yet strangely reassuring. He felt the doctor slip something out from his chest pocket, and he heard a faint clicking noise.
“Now close your eyes, my brave little man, it is about to begin…”
64
THE LIGHT ON the detonator strapped to Vincent D’Agosta had gone from red to green just three minutes before the timer reached the two-hour mark. It had been damn close, and he felt his enormous relief mingle with annoyance that it had taken Pendergast so long to kill that bastard Ozmian. Over the past two hours of waiting, listening intently, he had heard several exchanges of gunfire from the huge hospital building to the south, as well as the spectacular and frightening sound of what must have been a partial collapse of that building. His worries had mounted when Pendergast hadn’t dispatched Ozmian in the first ten minutes, and the collapse of the building shocked and concerned him, suggesting a fight of epic proportions. He’d had the scare of his life as he watched the time tick down.
City of Endless Night Page 27
