“How do you access it?”
Mohlman shrugged. “You just plug it in. The latest models can even transmit their data wirelessly.”
“You can do this?” Angler asked. He couldn’t believe his luck. Alban might be smart, but in this he had made a serious mistake. He hoped to hell Mohlman wouldn’t need to ask for the approval of a judge.
But Mohlman merely nodded. “The car’s still in the garage. I’ll have my guys download and print it out for you.”
An hour later, Angler was seated at a workstation in Albany’s central police headquarters, a map of New York State open on his lap. Sergeant Slade sat at another workstation beside him.
Mohlman had come through. In addition to all sorts of relatively useless information, the Avalon’s event data recorder provided them with a key item: on the day Alban rented the car, it was driven eighty-six miles almost due north from the Albany airport.
That put the car square in the tiny town of Adirondack, on the shores of Schroon Lake. Angler had thanked Mohlman effusively, asked him to keep quiet about this, and promised him a ridealong in an NYPD cruiser if he ever found himself in Manhattan.
“Adirondack, New York,” Angler said aloud. “Zip code 12808. Population three hundred. What the hell would take Alban all the way from Rio to Adirondack?”
“The view?” Slade asked.
“The view from Sugarloaf’s a hell of a lot more dramatic.” He accessed the workstation’s criminal database and searched the region for the dates in question. “No murders,” he said after a minute. “No thefts. No crime at all! Christ, it looks as if all of Warren County was asleep on May nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first.”
Exiting the system, he began a Google search. “Adirondack,” he muttered. “There’s nothing there. Except a lot of tall trees. And a single firm: Red Mountain Industries.”
“Never heard of it,” said Slade.
Red Mountain Industries. It rang a faint bell. Angler searched for it, read over the results quickly. “It’s a large, private defense contractor.” More reading. “With something of a dubious history, if you can believe these web conspiracy theorists. Secretive, if nothing else. Owned by someone named John Barbeaux.”
“I’ll check him out.” Sergeant Slade turned to his own workstation.
Angler didn’t reply for a moment. The right-brained part of him was thinking again—and thinking fast. Pendergast had last seen his son in Brazil, eighteen months ago.
“Sergeant,” he said. “Do you remember that newspaper article I told you about? When Pendergast was in Brazil a year and a half ago, there were reports of a massacre, deep in the jungle, spearheaded by a pale gringo.”
Slade stopped typing. “Yes, sir.”
“A few months later, Alban secretly travels to Adirondack, New York, home of Red Mountain, a private defense contractor.”
There was a silence while Slade pondered Angler’s words.
“You’re thinking that Pendergast was behind that massacre?” Slade said at last. “And that somebody at Red Mountain perhaps assisted him? Financed the project, provided the weapons? Kind of a mercenary action?”
“The thought was crossing my mind.”
Slade frowned. “But why would Pendergast be involved in something like that?”
“Who knows? The guy’s a cipher. But I bet I know why Alban went to Adirondack. And why he was killed.”
Slade went silent again, listening.
“Alban knew about the massacre. There’s even a good chance he was there: remember, Pendergast said the only time he met his son was in the jungles of Brazil. What if Alban was blackmailing both his father, Pendergast, and his contact at Red Mountain about what he knew? And so together, they engineered his death.”
“You’re saying Pendergast bumped off his own son?” Slade said. “That’s cold, even for Pendergast.”
“Blackmailing your father is pretty cold, too. And look at Pendergast’s case history—we know what he is capable of. It may be a theory, but it’s the only answer that fits.”
“Why drop the body off on Pendergast’s own doorstep?”
“To throw the police off the real scent. That whole business with the turquoise, the supposed attack on Pendergast in California—another smokescreen. Recall how uncooperative and disinterested Pendergast was at first. He only warmed up when I began to zero in on Alban’s movements.”
There was another brief silence.
“If you’re right, there’s only one thing we can do,” Slade said. “Go to Red Mountain. Talk to this Barbeaux directly. If there’s a rotten apple in his company, selling arms on the side and pocketing the profits—or perhaps directly involved in mercenary activities—he’d want to know.”
“That’s risky,” Angler replied. “What if Barbeaux’s the one who’s dirty? That would be like walking right into a lion’s den.”
“I’ve just finished checking him out.” Slade patted his workstation. “He’s as pure as the wind-driven snow. Eagle Scout, decorated Army Ranger, deacon at his church, never a breath of scandal or a rap sheet of any kind.”
Angler thought a moment. “He would be the best person to launch a quiet investigation into this. Into his own company. And if he’s dirty—despite the Eagle Scout badge—it would put him off guard, smoke him out.”
“My thought exactly,” Slade replied. “One way or another, we’d learn the truth. As long as our initial approach was kept quiet.”
“Okay. We’ll offer to keep it quiet if he makes a good-faith effort. Will you put the necessary paperwork through, notify the team of where we’re going, who we’ll be interviewing, and when we’ll be returning?”
“Already on it.” And Slade turned back toward his workstation.
Angler put the map aside and stood up. “Next stop,” he said in a low voice, “Adirondack, New York.”
For the second time in less than a week, Lieutenant D’Agosta found himself in the gun room of the mansion on Riverside Drive. Everything was the same: the same rare weaponry on display, the rosewood walls, the coffered ceiling. The other attendees were the same, as well: Constance Greene, dressed in a soft organdy blouse and pleated skirt of dark maroon, and Margo, who gave him a distracted smile. Conspicuous in his absence was the owner of the mansion, Aloysius Pendergast.
Constance took a seat at the head of the table. She seemed even more of a cipher than usual, with her stilted manner and old-fashioned accent. “Thank you both for coming,” she said. “I’ve requested your presence this morning because we have an emergency.”
D’Agosta eased into one of the leather chairs that surrounded the table, a sense of foreboding filling his mind.
“My guardian, our friend, is unwell—indeed, he is extremely sick.”
D’Agosta leaned forward. “How sick?”
“He is dying.”
This was greeted with a shock of silence.
“So he was poisoned, like the guy in Indio?” D’Agosta said. “Son of a bitch. Where’s he been?”
“In Brazil and Switzerland, trying to learn what happened to Alban and why he himself was poisoned. He had a collapse in Switzerland. I found him in a Geneva hospital.”
“Where’s he now?” D’Agosta asked.
“Upstairs. Under private care.”
“My understanding is that it took users of Hezekiah’s elixir months, years, to sicken and die,” Margo said. “Pendergast must have received an extremely concentrated dose.”
Constance nodded. “Yes. His attacker knew he would get only a single chance. It’s also a fair assumption—based on his even quicker decline—that the man who assaulted Pendergast in the Salton Fontainebleau, and is now dead in Indio, got an even stronger dose.”
“That fits,” Margo said. “I got a report from Dr. Samuels in Indio. The dead man’s skeleton shows the same unusual compounds I discovered in Mrs. Padgett’s skeleton—only in much more concentrated amounts. It’s no wonder the elixir killed him so fast.”
“If Pendergast is dy
ing,” D’Agosta said, rising, “why the heck isn’t he in a hospital?”
A narrow stare met his look. “He insisted on leaving the Geneva hospital and flying home via private medical transport. You can’t legally hospitalize someone against his will. He insists there’s nothing anyone can do for him and he will not die in a hospital.”
“Jesus,” said D’Agosta. “What can we do?”
“We need an antidote. And to find that antidote, we need information. That’s why we’re here.” She turned to D’Agosta. “Lieutenant, please tell us the results of your recent investigations.”
D’Agosta mopped his brow. “I don’t know how relevant some of this is, but we traced Pendergast’s attacker to Gary, Indiana. Three years ago, he was a guy named Howard Rudd, family man and shop owner. He got into debt with the wrong people and vanished, leaving his wife and kids. He appeared two months ago with a different face. He’s the guy who attacked Pendergast and probably killed Victor Marsala. We’re trying to account for that gap in his history—where he was, who he was working for. Brick wall so far.” D’Agosta glanced at Margo. She had said nothing, but her face was pale.
For a moment, there was silence. Then Constance spoke again. “Not quite.”
D’Agosta looked at her.
“I’ve been compiling a list of Hezekiah’s victims, on the assumption that a descendant was responsible for the poisoning. Two victims were Stephen and Ethel Barbeaux, a married couple, who succumbed to the effects of the elixir in 1895, leaving three orphaned children, including a baby who was conceived while Ethel was taking the elixir. The family lived in New Orleans, on Dauphine Street, just two houses down from the Pendergast family mansion.”
“Why them, in particular?” said D’Agosta.
“They have a great-grandson, John Barbeaux. He’s CEO of a military consulting company called Red Mountain Industries—and a wealthy and reclusive man. Barbeaux had a son—an only child. The youth was a musical prodigy. Always of delicate health, the boy fell ill two years ago. I haven’t been able to learn much about the details of the illness, but it apparently baffled an entire corps of doctors and specialists with its unusual symptoms. A titanic medical effort failed to save his life.” Constance looked from Margo to D’Agosta and back again. “The case was written up in the British medical journal Lancet.”
“What are you saying?” D’Agosta asked. “That the poison that killed John Barbeaux’s great-grandparents jumped down through the generations to kill his son?”
“Yes. The boy complained of the stink of rotten flowers before he died. And I’ve found a scattering of other similar deaths in the Barbeaux family, going back generations.”
“I don’t buy it,” said D’Agosta.
“I do,” said Margo, speaking for the first time. “What you’re suggesting is that Hezekiah’s elixir caused epigenetic changes. Such changes can and do get passed down the generations. Environmental poisons are the leading cause of epigenetic changes.”
“Thank you,” said Constance.
Another brief silence settled over the room.
D’Agosta rose to his feet and began pacing restlessly, his mind racing. “Okay. Let’s put this together. You’re saying Barbeaux poisoned Pendergast with the elixir as a way of getting revenge, not only for his ancestors, but for his son. How did Barbeaux get the idea? I mean, it’s unlikely he’d even have known about what happened to his great-grandparents, who died more than a century ago. And this entire revenge plot—killing Alban, sticking a piece of turquoise into him, luring Pendergast all the way across the country—it’s baroque in complexity. Why? Who could have dreamed it up?”
“A man named Tapanes Landberg,” said Constance.
“Who?” asked Margo.
“Of course!” D’Agosta smacked his palm against the other and turned. “Alban! As I told you, he made a trip to New York—to the Albany area, according to Lieutenant Angler’s case file—over a year before he was killed!”
“Red Mountain Industries is located in Adirondack, New York,” Constance said. “An hour and a half’s drive from Albany.”
D’Agosta turned again. “Alban. The crazy fuck. From what Pendergast has told me, this is exactly the kind of game he’d love to play. Of course, brilliant as he was, he’d have known all about Hezekiah’s elixir. So he went out, found a descendant of a victim—somebody with both the motive for revenge and the means to carry it out. He hit pay dirt with Barbeaux, whose son died. Alban must have learned something of Barbeaux’s personality; he’s no doubt the eye-for-an-eye kind of fellow. It would be beautiful in a different context: both Barbeaux and Alban being revenged on Pendergast.”
“Yes. The scheme reeks of Alban,” said Constance. “He may even have researched the Salton Fontainebleau and the turquoise mine. He could have told Barbeaux: Here’s the setup. All you have to do is synthesize the elixir and lure Pendergast to the spot.”
“Except that, in the end, Alban got double-crossed,” said Margo.
“The big question,” D’Agosta went on, “is how the hell will all this help us develop an antidote?”
“We’ve got to decipher the formula for the elixir before we can reverse its effects. If Barbeaux was able to reconstruct it, then so can we.” Constance looked around. “I’ll search the basement collections here, the files, the family archives, and the old chemistry laboratory, looking for evidence of Hezekiah’s formula. Margo, will you do more work on the bones of Mrs. Padgett? Those bones contain a vital clue—given the great lengths Barbeaux went in getting one.”
“Yes,” said Margo. “And the coroner’s report on Rudd might also help unravel the formula.”
“As for me,” said D’Agosta, “I’m going to check up on this Barbeaux character. If I find he’s responsible, I’ll squeeze him so hard the formula will pop out of—”
“No.”
This was said by a new and different voice—little more than a cracked whisper, coming from the doorway to the gun room. D’Agosta turned toward it and saw Pendergast. He stood unsteadily, leaning on the door frame, wearing a disordered silk dressing gown. He seemed almost corpse-like, save for the eyes—and these glittered like coins above puffy, blue-black bags of skin.
“Aloysius!” Constance cried, standing up. “What are you doing out of bed?” She hurried around the table toward him. “Where’s Dr. Stone?”
“The doctor is useless.”
She tried to usher him out of the room, but he pushed her away. “I must speak.” He staggered, righted himself. “If you are correct, then the man who did this was able to kill my son. He is clearly an extremely powerful and competent adversary.” He shook his head as if to clear his mind. “You go after him, you’ll place yourselves in mortal danger. This is my fight. I, and I alone… will follow through… must follow through…”
A man abruptly appeared in the doorway—tall and thin, wearing tortoiseshell glasses and a chalk-striped suit, a stethoscope around his neck.
“Come, my friend,” the doctor said gently. “You must not exert yourself. Let’s return upstairs. Here, we can take the elevator.”
“No!” Pendergast protested again, more feebly this time—clearly, the effort of leaving his bed had exhausted him. Dr. Stone bore him off, gently but firmly. As they vanished down the hall, D’Agosta heard Pendergast saying: “The light. How glaring it is! Turn it off, I beg you…”
The three remained standing, looking at each other. D’Agosta noticed that Constance, normally remote and unreadable, was now flushed and agitated.
“He’s right,” D’Agosta said. “This Barbeaux is no ordinary guy. We better think this through. We need to stay in close touch and share information. A single mistake might get us all killed.”
“That’s why we won’t make one,” said Margo quietly.
The office was spartan, functional, and—as befitted the personality of its occupant—contained more than a hint of military efficiency. The large desk, gleaming with polish, held nothing beyond an old-fashioned blotter
, a pen-and-pencil desk set, a phone, and a single photo in a silver frame, arranged in orderly ranks. There was no computer or keyboard. An American flag stood on a wooden stand in a corner. The wall behind contained bookshelves racked with volumes of military history and Jane’s yearbooks and annuals: Armour and Artillery, Explosive Ordnance Disposal, Military Vehicles and Logistics. Another wall displayed an array of framed medals, awards, and commendations.
A man sat behind the desk, wearing a business suit, crisp white shirt, and dark-red tie. He sat erect, and he wore the suit as one might wear a uniform. He was writing with a fountain pen, and the scratch of the nib filled the otherwise silent office. Outside the single picture window lay a small campus of similar buildings, clad in black glass, surrounded by a double set of chain-link fences topped with razor wire. Past the outer fence was a line of trees, rich and green, and, in the farther distance, a splash of blue lake.
The phone rang and the man picked it up. “Yes?” he said curtly. His voice was full of gravel, and it seemed to come from deep within his barrel chest.
“Mr. Barbeaux,” came the secretary’s voice from the outer office. “There are two police officers here to see you.”
“Give me sixty seconds,” he said. “Then show them in.”
“Yes, sir.”
The man hung up the phone. He sat at his desk, motionless, for another few seconds. Then, with a single glance at the photograph, he rose from his chair. He was just over sixty years of age, but the motion was made as effortlessly as by a youth of twenty. He turned to examine himself in a small mirror that hung on the wall behind his desk. A large, heavy-boned face stared back: blue eyes, lantern jaw, Roman nose. Although the tie was perfectly knotted, he adjusted it anyway. Then he turned toward the door to his office.
As he did so, it opened and his secretary ushered in two figures.
Blue Labyrinth Page 24
