Blue Labyrinth

by Douglas Preston

  Barbeaux looked at them in turn. One was tall, with dark-blond hair that was slightly windblown. He moved with authority, and with the grace of a natural athlete. The other was shorter and darker. He returned Barbeaux’s look with an expression that betrayed absolutely nothing.

  “John Barbeaux?” said the taller man.

  Barbeaux nodded.

  “I’m Lieutenant Peter Angler of the NYPD, and this is my associate, Sergeant Slade.”

  Barbeaux shook the proffered hands in turn and returned to his seat. “Please, sit down. Coffee, tea?”

  “Nothing, thanks.” Angler sat down in one of the chairs ranged before the desk, and Slade followed suit. “This is quite the fortress you have here, Mr. Barbeaux.”

  Barbeaux smiled at this. “It’s mostly show. We’re a private military contractor. I’ve found that it pays to look the part.”

  “I’m curious, though. Why build such an extensive operation way out here, in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Why not?” Barbeaux replied. When Angler said nothing, he added: “My parents used to come up here every summer. I like the Schroon Lake area.”

  “I see.” Angler crossed one leg over the other. “It is very pretty country.”

  Barbeaux nodded again. “In addition, land is inexpensive. Red Mountain owns more than a thousand acres for use in training, warfare simulations, ordnance testing, and the like.” He paused. “So. What brings you gentlemen to upstate New York?”

  “Actually, Red Mountain. At least in part.”

  Barbeaux frowned in surprise. “Really? What possible interest could the NYPD have with my company?”

  “Would you mind telling me what it is that Red Mountain Industries does, exactly?” Angler asked. “I poked around a bit on the Internet, but your official site was rather short on hard data.”

  The surprised look had not left Barbeaux’s face. “We provide training and support to law enforcement, security, and military clients. We also do research in advanced weapons systems and cutting-edge tactical and strategic theory.”

  “Ah. And would that theory extend to counterterrorism?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you provide on-the-ground as well as back-office support?”

  There was a slight pause before Barbeaux answered. “At times, yes. How, exactly, can I be of help to you?”

  “I’ll tell you in a moment, if you’ll permit me just one or two more questions. I assume the U.S. government is your biggest client?”

  “It is,” said Barbeaux.

  “And so it would be fair to say that maintaining your reputation as a security contractor is of great importance to you? I mean, all those congressional oversight committees and that sort of thing.”

  “It is of paramount importance,” replied Barbeaux.

  “Of course it is.” Angler uncrossed his legs and sat forward. “Mr. Barbeaux, the reason we’re here is because we have uncovered evidence of a problem in your organization.”

  Barbeaux went very still. “Excuse me? What kind of problem?”

  “We don’t have the details. But we believe there is a person or persons—it might be a small cadre, but it’s more likely to be a rogue individual—who has subverted Red Mountain’s resources and may be involved in unauthorized doings. Perhaps private arms dealing, training, or mercenary activity.”

  “But that’s simply not possible. We vet all new employees extensively, with the most exhaustive background checks available. And all ongoing employees must submit to yearly lie detector tests.”

  “I understand it must be hard for you to accept,” Angler replied. “Nevertheless, our investigations have led to this conclusion.”

  Barbeaux was silent for a moment, thinking. “Naturally, I’d like to help you gentlemen. But we are such a scrupulously careful outfit—you have to be, in this business—that I just don’t see how what you say could be.”

  Angler paused briefly before continuing. “Let me put it in a different light. If we’re right, wouldn’t you agree that—whatever the specifics—it would leave Red Mountain vulnerable?”

  Barbeaux nodded. “Yes. Yes, it would.”

  “And if it were true, and news leaked out… well, you can imagine what the fallout would be.”

  Barbeaux considered this for a moment. Then he slowly released his breath. “You know—” he began, then stopped. And then he stood up and came around the desk. He looked first at Angler, then at Sergeant Slade. The shorter man had been silent throughout the conversation, letting his superior do the talking. Barbeaux looked back at Angler. “You know, I think we should have this conversation someplace else. If I’ve learned anything in my life, I’ve learned that walls can have ears—even in a private office such as this.”

  He walked to the door, led the way through the outer office, to the hallway beyond, and then to the elevator bank. He pressed the DOWN button, and the nearest set of doors whispered open. Ushering the two police officers in ahead of him, Barbeaux stepped in himself and pressed the button marked B3.

  “B3?” Angler asked.

  “The third level below ground. We have a couple of ordnance proving ranges down there. They are soundproofed and otherwise hardened. There we can talk freely.”

  The elevator descended to the lowest level, and the doors opened onto a long concrete corridor. Red lightbulbs within metal cages threw a crimson glow over the hallway. Stepping out of the elevator, Barbeaux walked down the hallway, passing the occasional windowless door of thick steel. At last he stopped before one marked simply PR-D, opened it, flicked on a row of light switches with the back of his palm, then satisfied himself that the room was unoccupied before showing the two officers in.

  Lieutenant Angler entered and looked around at the walls, floor, and ceiling, which were all lined with some kind of black, rubberized insulating material. “This looks like a cross between a squash court and a padded cell.”

  “As I said, we won’t be overheard.” Barbeaux closed the door and turned to face the officers. “What you say, Lieutenant, is very disturbing. However, I’ll cooperate as best I can.”

  “I felt confident you’d say that,” Angler replied. “Sergeant Slade has done a background check on you, and we feel you’re the kind of man who would want to do the right thing.”

  “How can I help, exactly?” Barbeaux asked.

  “Launch a private investigation. Let us help you unmask this operative or operatives. Mr. Barbeaux, the fact is we’re not interested in prosecuting Red Mountain. We came into this sideways, through a murder investigation. My interest is in a potential suspect, connected to the murder, whom we believe may be involved with rogue elements in your company.”

  Barbeaux frowned. “And who is this suspect?”

  “An FBI agent whom I’d rather not name, for the present. But if you cooperate, I’ll see that Red Mountain is kept out of the papers. I’ll bring the FBI agent to justice—and you’ll see your firm rid of its rotten apple.”

  “A rogue FBI agent,” Barbeaux said, almost to himself. “Interesting.” He glanced back at Angler. “But this is all you know? You have no more information on the identity of this rotten apple inside my own company?”

  “None. That’s why we’ve come to you.”

  “I see.” Barbeaux turned to Sergeant Slade. “You can shoot him now.”

  Lieutenant Angler blinked, as if trying to parse this non sequitur. By the time he turned toward his associate, Slade had his service piece out. Raising it calmly, he fired a quick double tap into Angler’s head. The lieutenant’s head snapped back and his body crumpled to the floor, a fine mist of blood and gray matter settling over it a moment later.

  The sound of the shots was strangely muffled by the proving chamber’s soundproofing. Slade looked at Barbeaux as he put his weapon away. “Why did you let him go on for so long?” he asked.

  “I wanted to find out just how much he knew.”

  “I could have told you that.”

  “You did well, Loomis. You’ll be com
pensated accordingly.”

  “I hope so. The fifty grand a year you’ve paid me so far doesn’t cut it. I’ve been working overtime, covering your butt on this. You wouldn’t believe the strings I had to pull behind the scenes just to make sure that the Alban Pendergast case was assigned to Angler.”

  “Don’t think it isn’t appreciated, my friend. But now there’s some pressing business to attend to.” Barbeaux walked to a phone that hung near the door, picked it up, and dialed a number. “Richard? It’s Barbeaux. I’m in Proving Range D. I’ve made quite a mess. Please send Housekeeping down to deal with it. Then get the Ops Crew assembled. Set up a meeting in my private conference room for one PM. We’ve got a new priority.”

  He hung up the phone and carefully stepped over the body, lying in a rapidly spreading pool of blood. “Sergeant,” he said, “take care not to get any of that on your shoes.”

  Constance Greene stood in front of a large recessed bookcase in the library at 891 Riverside Drive. A fire was dying on the grate, the lights were low, and the house was finally silent. The low sounds from the upstairs bedroom, so deeply disturbing, had at last ceased. But the turmoil in Constance’s mind had not. Dr. Stone was demanding with increasing urgency that Pendergast be taken to the hospital and put in intensive care. Constance had forbidden it. It was clear to her from her visit to Geneva that a hospital could do nothing and might, indeed, precipitate the end.

  Her hand stole to an inner pocket of her dress, where a small vial of cyanide pills nestled. If Pendergast died, this was to be her own, personal insurance policy. Never together in life, but perhaps in death their dust would mingle.

  But Pendergast would not die. There must be an answer to his sickness. It would be found somewhere in the abandoned laboratories and dusty files in the rambling sub-basements of the Riverside Drive mansion. Her long study of Pendergast’s family history—Hezekiah Pendergast, in particular—convinced her of it.

  If my ancestor Hezekiah, Pendergast had told her, whose own wife was dying as a result of his elixir, could not find a cure, could not undo the damage his nostrum had caused… then how can I?

  How, indeed.

  She slid a heavy tome from the bookshelf. As she did, a muffled click could be heard, and two adjoining bookcases swung out noiselessly on oiled hinges, revealing the brass grille of an old-fashioned elevator. She stepped inside, shut the gate, and turned a brass lever. With a rattle of ancient machinery, the elevator descended. After a moment it jerked to a halt, and Constance stepped out into a dark anteroom. A faint smell of ammonia, dust, and fungus assaulted her nostrils. It was a familiar smell. She knew this basement well—so well that she almost did not need a light to move around. It was, quite literally, a second home to her.

  Nevertheless, she removed an electric lantern from its rack on a nearby wall and switched it on. She moved through a maze of corridors, ultimately reaching an old door, heavy with verdigris, which she pushed open to reveal an abandoned operating room. An empty gurney gleamed in the beam of her flashlight, next to an IV rack draped in cobwebs, a bulbous EKG machine, and a stainless-steel tray spread with operating instruments. She crossed the room to the limestone wall at the far end. A quick gesture—the depressing of a stone panel—caused a section of the wall to swivel inward. She stepped into the opening, her light probing down a spiral staircase cut out of the living bedrock of Upper Manhattan.

  She descended the staircase, heading for the mansion’s sub-basement. At the bottom, the staircase debouched into a long, vaulted space with an earthen floor, a brick pathway running ahead through a series of seemingly endless chambers. Constance walked down the pathway, passing storerooms, niches, and burial vaults. As she moved, her flashlight beam revealed row after row of cabinets, filled with bottles of chemicals in every color and hue, glittering like jewels in the light. This was what remained of the chemistry collection of Antoine Pendergast, who had been known to the public at large by his pseudonym, Enoch Leng—Agent Pendergast’s great-granduncle and one of Hezekiah Pendergast’s sons.

  Chemistry ran in the family.

  Hezekiah’s wife, also named Constance (strange coincidence, she mused—or then again, perhaps not) had died of her own husband’s elixir. In those last, desperate weeks of her life, according to family lore, Hezekiah had finally faced the truth about his patent medicine. After his wife’s grisly death, he had taken his own life and been buried in the lead-lined family mausoleum in New Orleans, beneath the old family manse known as Rochenoire. That mausoleum had been permanently sealed after the burning of Rochenoire by a mob, and it now lay under the asphalt of a parking lot.

  What, then, had happened to Hezekiah’s laboratory, his collection of chemical compounds, and his notebooks? Had they perished in the fire? Or had his son, Antoine, inherited things related to his father’s chemical researches and carried them here, to New York City? If he had, they would be somewhere in these decrepit labs in the sub-basement. The other three sons of Hezekiah had no interest in chemistry. Comstock had become a magician of some renown. Boethius, Pendergast’s great-grandfather, went off to become an explorer and archaeologist. She could never find out what Maurice, the fourth brother, had accomplished, beyond the fact that he sank to an early death from dipsomania.

  If Hezekiah had left notes, laboratory equipment, or chemicals behind, Antoine—or as Constance preferred to think of him, Dr. Enoch—was the only one who would have taken an interest. And if that was the case, perhaps some remnant of Hezekiah’s formula for his deadly elixir might be found in this sub-basement.

  Formula first, antidote second. And all this had to happen before Pendergast died.

  After passing through several chambers, Constance walked beneath a Romanesque arch, decorated with a faded tapestry, into a room that lay in considerable disarray. Shelves were toppled; the bottles and their contents shattered on the floor—the results of a conflict that had taken place here eighteen months before. She and Proctor had been trying to restore order from the shambles. This was one of the last rooms awaiting restoration; scattered about the floor lay Antoine’s entomological collections, with broken bottles full of dried hornet abdomens, dragonfly wings, iridescent beetle thoraxes, and desiccated spiders.

  She glided beneath another archway, into a room filled with stuffed Passeriformes, and from there into the most unusual region of the sub-basement: Antoine’s collection of miscellanea. Here were cases full of such odd things as wigs, doorknobs, corsets, busks, shoes, umbrellas and walking sticks, along with bizarre weapons—harquebuses, pikes, shestopyors, bardiches, poleaxes, glaives, bombards, and war hammers. Next, a room full of ancient medical equipment, apparently for both human and veterinary purposes, some of it evidently much used. This was followed, bizarrely, by a collection of military weapons, uniforms, and various kinds of equipment, dating up to approximately the First World War. Constance paused to examine both the medical and the military collections with some interest.

  And then came the devices of torture: brazen bulls, racks, thumbscrews, iron maidens, and, ugliest of all, the Pear of Anguish. In the center of the room an executioner’s block had been placed, with an ax lying nearby, near a piece of curled human skin and a shock of hair: relics of a certain horrific event that had taken place here five years earlier, around the time that Agent Pendergast had become her guardian. Constance looked on all these devices with detachment. She was not particularly disturbed by this grotesque evidence of human cruelty. On the contrary, it only confirmed that her view of humanity was correct and needed no revision.

  Finally, she came to the room she had been seeking: Antoine’s chemical laboratory. Pushing open the door, a forest of glassware, columnar distillation equipment, titration arrays, and other late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century apparatus greeted her eye. Years ago she had spent some time in this particular room, assisting her first guardian. She had never seen anything suggestive. Nevertheless, she was certain that—if Antoine had inherited anything from his father—it would be f
ound here.

  She set down the electric lantern on a soapstone table and looked about. She would begin her search, she decided, at the far end.

  The chemical apparatus was set up on long tables, coated for the most part in a thick mantle of dust. She quickly went through the drawers, finding many notes and old papers, but nothing that predated Antoine, and all of it focused on Antoine’s own unique researches, mostly dealing with acids and neurotoxins. Having gone through the drawers, finding nothing, Constance started with the old oaken cabinets that lined the walls, still full of working chemicals behind the fronts of rippled glass. She went carefully through the bottles and vials and ampoules and carboys, but they were all labeled in Antoine’s neat copperplate hand—nothing in the handwriting of Hezekiah, which, she knew from her research, was spiky and erratic.

  Once having searched the contents of the cabinets, she examined the doors, the drawers, the bottoms and tops and hinges, for any hidden compartments. And almost immediately she found one: a large space behind a drawer in one of the soapstone tables.

  It took only a moment to find the locking mechanism and spring it open. There, inside the compartment, stood a jeroboam full of liquid, with a label that read:

  Triflic Acid

  CF3SO3H

  Sept. 1940

  The bottle was well sealed—so much so that the glass stopper had been gently glazed with heat and fused to the glass bottleneck. Nineteen forty—far too late to be something from Hezekiah. But why was it hidden? She made a mental note to look into this acid, which she had never heard of.

  She closed the compartment, turned away, and continued her search.

  The first pass through the laboratory produced nothing of value. A more intrusive search would be necessary.

  Looking around with the lantern, she noted that one of the wall cabinets was fixed to the stone with bolt anchors that had apparently, at one time in the distant past, been removed and re-anchored.