“Trust me—it’s that fork to the west. Look, I’m going mute; I’ve got to rent a car. Hold on.”
Constance looked at her cell phone map but could see nothing in that expanse of swampy forest—as one would expect—with a few old logging roads and some docks along the river.
“Back on,” said Coldmoon. “Waiting in a line. I’ve got a few more minutes.”
Constance continued scrolling through Google Maps, looking for something, anything, in that forest.
“Hey,” Coldmoon said. “See that big flat-roofed building next to the river? About fifteen miles northeast up the river from Carrabelle. It’s the only big building in that whole region.” He covered the phone again, spoke to someone else. She heard him say “four-wheel drive.”
Constance found it. It was a compound of some kind in a clearing, surrounded by a wall with gates and a few docks and warehouses on the riverbank.
“What is it?” she asked. “A factory? Looks abandoned.”
“Says here a sugarcane processing plant. Or it was. Bonita Sugar. Went out of business years ago.”
Constance searched the web. “Here’s something. Yes, you’re right. The plant was using a banned chemical for sugar processing, substituting cheaper sodium hydroxide for calcium hydroxide. The state shut it down in 1967.”
There was a silence on the other end of the phone. Her driver now spoke. “Okay, here we are, lady. Back at the house.”
She looked up, startled. They were in the driveway, the Mortlach House looming up again. The driver had turned around. “Lady?”
“I’m getting out,” she said.
She closed the door, and the car took off with a spray of sand. “Agent Coldmoon?”
Now his voice returned, excited. “You did say sodium hydroxide—right?”
“Right.”
“I was just looking through this list of trace chemicals found on the feet. Sodium hydroxide was a chemical found on both the amputated feet and shoes.”
Constance looked at the satellite view on her phone. The plant itself seemed old enough—but on closer inspection, she was able to make out what appeared to be freshly cleared areas around the building, and a new surrounding wall.
“That’s it,” she said. “That’s where they were taken.”
“Damn right,” Coldmoon said.
Over the phone, she heard the sound of a slamming door.
“So where are you, Agent Coldmoon?” she asked.
“I’m getting in my rental now.”
“Forget the car. Get a helicopter.”
“Not possible, not on such short notice. My GPS says I’m only an hour and a half away by car.”
“Call your FBI contacts and get one.”
“Look, nothing’s flying in this weather. And if I call the FBI, you know what’s going to happen? They do everything by the book, including launching a Critical Incidence Response Group assault. Six hours to authorize and plan it, six hours to equip and brief the guys, and then they go in big. That will get my partner killed for sure.”
“Your partner? My guardian. So we do this together—now.”
“We? There’s no ‘we’ in this scenario.”
“But there must be. You’ll fail if you go in alone.”
She heard Coldmoon take a deep breath. “You’ve got to be crazy. You—come with me?”
“Of course.”
“That’s not going to happen. Do I really have to go over the reasons why? First, you’re five hours south by car. Second, there’s a big storm coming and all flights are grounded. Third, you’re a civilian with no business being on a mission like this.”
Constance felt herself consumed with a growing rage. “Going in by yourself is madness! You’ve got to wait for me. If you refuse to arrange for my transport, then I’ll simply arrange for it myself—”
“Absolutely not. Now, inila yaki ye. End of conversation.”
Suddenly, Constance felt all her emotions—her fury, anxiety, self-recrimination—gather together, targeting themselves with white heat at this truculent voice on the phone. “If you go in there without me…one way or another, you’re going to regret it—regret it severely.”
There was a silence on the other end of the line. And then, the call disconnected with an audible click.
Constance stared at the dead phone. Then she looked up again. She needed to get there, now. But the Uber driver was long gone—he’d never return for her. It was a five-hour drive, at least—and the airports were closed.
But Pendergast was up there, held captive, his life in danger. There had to be a way to get up there. There had to be a way.
She waited in the dark driveway for the white heat of her anger to dissipate. But it refused to do so.
She took in a deep breath; let it out; drew in another. And then—suddenly—she raised her face to the night and let out a terrible, unearthly, unending scream of sheer feral frustration.
51
CHIEF PERELMAN DROVE past Buck Key, half-drowned and completely disgusted. He’d planned on spending the last ninety minutes in his study, warm and dry, trying to master Doc Watson’s break from the ’72 recording of “Way Downtown.” Instead, he’d been roused from his house and sent out into the rain because some idiot tourist decided this would be the perfect weather to take a dip off Redfish Pass. By the time a hastily assembled rescue squad had located the youth, hauled him ashore, pumped the salt water out of his lungs, and finished explaining to him the difference between one-digit and two-digit IQs, Perelman didn’t want to play the guitar or do anything else but go back home, wring himself dry, and crawl into bed. Tropical storms were a fact of life on the barrier islands, and Perelman was used to dealing with them. But he’d had more than his fill of bullshit lately, with all the extra hours and bureaucratic wranglings dealing with the task force. This little stunt by a jackass from Skokie was one too many.
He crossed Blind Pass Bridge to Captiva Island, following Sanibel Captiva Road. On the trip out, he’d heard some noise over the police radio about a wrecked vehicle, shooting, and homicide reported near Estero Bay, but that was far out of his jurisdiction. Besides, whatever investigation had been required was probably done and dusted by now. Still, as he’d driven back from Captiva there’d been cross-chatter over the radio. And then, suddenly, he heard:
…Homicide victim in rear of vehicle positively identified as Wallace Lam of Jacksonville…
Lam. That was the name of the postdoc assisting that cute scientist—the oceanographer, he recalled, whom Pendergast had been working with. And the vehicle, the dispatcher reported, was a Range Rover. Christ, Pendergast had leased one of those. Why the hell hadn’t they run the plate? But that question was almost immediately answered by the report that the rear of the vehicle had burned, leaving the plate illegible, with no identifying papers inside.
Perelman pulled his vehicle to the side to do a three-point turn and get the hell to the scene of the homicide. But just as he was backing up, he heard a sound over the steady rain. It was unmistakable: the whining scream of a boat engine being revved past redline, followed by a loud thumping noise. A pause, then the racket started up again: a wild revving of twin boat engines, and then a shuddering whump.
He jammed on the brakes and peered into the darkness. The sound was coming from the small communal marina just beyond the road, where he housed his boat.
What fresh hell was this?
He stepped on the gas, but instead of heading for the causeway, he skidded around and went down the sandy lane that led to the marina. He left his headlights on as he jumped out.
In the glow of the headlights, he saw something astonishing. The shrieking engines were, as he’d feared, those of his own boat. The water was churning up around the vessel into a froth so thick it almost looked like lather. There was a lone figure at the wheel, unidentifiable in the downpour. As Perelman watched, the figure pushed both throttles forward. But with the stern still cleated to the pier, the boat only shot forward about half a doze
n feet before running into a brace of pilings with a shuddering thump. Without turning, the figure violently thrust the throttles into reverse and repeated the process, this time ramming its stern. The bowline was loose and flapping in the water, but constrained at the stern, his boat was like an enraged bronco in a bucking chute. Perelman watched in mixed horror and anger as he saw his beautiful—if never quite finished—vessel getting beaten to hell. It was a miracle the props hadn’t sheared off already.
He raced down the dock to the boat and jumped in, grabbing the throttles and shouldering the figure aside. He pulled the throttles into neutral and centered the wheel. “Hey!” he yelled. “Just what the hell do you think—!”
Abruptly, he stopped. The figure before him—rain-soaked, rivulets of mud dripping off fabric and skin alike—was Pendergast’s ward, Constance Greene. The haute couture he’d seen her wearing so casually before had been replaced by tactical clothing, and she was soaking wet, covered with mud, her hair a wild dripping tangle. Only her violet eyes, and the unsettling expression on her face—mixed detachment and violence—convinced Perelman this was the same young woman who had stepped out of a limousine just days before, reminding him of the forgotten actress Olive Thomas.
“Chief Perelman.” She nodded. “Good evening.”
The calmness with which she greeted him was unexpected. “What the hell are you doing to my boat?” he asked angrily.
“I’m glad you’re here. I need you to take me somewhere. I don’t seem to be able to operate this thing properly.”
Although this exchange had been brief, it had already taken on such a fantastical quality that Perelman found his anger draining away. “What are you talking about?”
“Aloysius has been abducted.”
“Aloysius—who?”
“Agent Pendergast.”
The report over the police radio. Okay, now he was beginning to understand.
“He was fleeing in his car, only to be ambushed and fired on. Dr. Lam was killed and they took Aloysius and Gladstone.”
“Taken—where?”
“The old Bonita sugar plant on Crooked River—north of Carrabelle.”
“And how do you know this?”
She took a deep breath. “It would take too long to explain.”
“But you want to use my boat to go there.”
“Is there any other means of transportation, under the circumstances?”
“But…that’s two hundred and fifty miles across the gulf!”
She took a step closer to him. “They found out the truth and were kidnapped. They’ll die, or worse…unless we save them.”
“God, if this is true…we need to call in the cavalry.”
“No!” For a brief moment, Constance’s eyes blazed with such intensity Perelman shrank back. “Maybe you already know that the task force has been compromised by a mole. Any word of an operation and they’ll kill him immediately—you know that. You also know how these things work: even if we ignore the mole, your ‘cavalry’ will take perhaps ten or twelve hours simply to assemble. So you see, it’s up to us to get there—and rescue him ourselves.”
Perelman stared at her, his mind working fast. She was right on many levels. Baugh wasn’t the man for this job, and he himself had definitely begun to smell a rat. If he called in Pickett, well, they would put together an assault—by the book. But taking the boat?
“This is crazy,” he said.
A beat, and then Constance suddenly lashed out. With the speed of a striking snake, she unsnapped the Glock from his belt, pulled the weapon out, and shifted it from her left hand to her right as she stepped back. Perelman had never seen a human being move so fast. He was still blinking in disbelief as she aimed the gun, racking the slide. A bullet clattered to the floor of the cockpit.
Constance raised the Glock toward him. For a moment, nobody spoke.
“You just wasted a bullet,” Perelman said.
Constance held the gun steady. “I didn’t think a village constable favoring a pancake holster would walk the streets with a round already chambered.”
There was a long silence, broken by nothing but the rain and the idling engines. Perelman held out his hand for the gun and, after a hesitation, Constance lowered it and gave it back. “Shooting you won’t get me to Crooked River.”
Perelman holstered the gun. “If Commander Baugh and the cavalry can’t save Pendergast, how can we?”
Constance said nothing for a moment, seeming to withdraw into herself. Then she looked at him again. “To paraphrase Sun Tzu: ‘Know yourself and you shall win every battle.’”
Perelman sighed. “Somehow I don’t think Sun Tzu quite applies.”
“We’re wasting time. Either you help me or you don’t. Because if Pendergast dies, so will I—one way or the other. You and I both know this boat is the fastest way to get to Crooked River.”
The silence that followed this was shorter. “Shit,” Perelman said. “All right, take a seat next to the helm and let’s go.”
Constance took a seat. He checked the bilge pumps and glanced into the cabin to make sure it wasn’t leaking water from the previous manhandling, then uncleated the stern line and took a seat at the wheel.
“Hold on tight,” he told her. “Boats don’t have seat belts. The sea is calm right now, just rain, but a storm is coming and we may be in for a hell of a ride before this is over.” And with that he put the starboard motor in reverse, gave it a shot of gas, maneuvered away from the dock with a little port forward, and then—when they were clear—pushed both throttles ahead, accelerating toward the mouth of the channel and the open water beyond.
52
THE CHOPPER THUDDED low over the dark ocean, the glow of the instrument panel providing the only light. Gladstone was sitting on the flight deck, cuffed back to back with Pendergast, bound with additional leg cuffs and zip ties. The numb horror of what had just happened was beginning to wear off, and her analytical mind was starting to wake up again. The brutality of what had been done to Lam terrified and sickened her, but equally frightening was the organization, the numbers, and the quiet professionalism. These were not a bunch of common criminals. With their insignia-stripped camo uniforms, whitewall haircuts, automatic weapons, and terse communications, they felt like military.
There was only one possibility that made sense: somehow, their investigation had cut too close to the bone—and triggered a massive response.
But the apparent leader of this team, the woman who had greeted Pendergast so sarcastically, was something quite different. She, too, had an air of discipline and precision about her, but it was at odds with her aristocratic face, mane of rich mahogany hair, brown eyes, and civilian dress. The others were kitted out in body armor, helmets, night-vision gear, and assault weaponry: all she had was a string of pearls.
Who in God’s name would wear a string of pearls on a mission like this?
Pendergast was uncommunicative even in normal times, but he hadn’t spoken a word since the capture. She couldn’t see his face and she wondered what the hell he was thinking. She tried to steel herself for the worst. It seemed unlikely they were going to get out of this thing alive. These people were deadly serious, they were ruthless, and they seemed to be involved in secret work that—at the very least—included the mutilation of over a hundred people. She was no closer to understanding that brutal fact than ever.
The chopper banked, and she could see they were just reaching land again, as the scattered lights of a coastal town passed by. They headed inland, away from the lights, into a vast, stormy darkness.
53
AS HE PULLED out of the car rental lot at the Tallahassee airport, Special Agent Coldmoon resisted the urge to stomp on the accelerator. He knew where he wanted to go, but he didn’t know how to get there, and he needed to take a moment to map his route and—just as important—organize his thoughts. He stopped in a sandy turnout just beyond the airport and took out his cell phone, firing up Google Maps again and zeroing in on the lo
cation of the old sugarcane processing plant. It stood about a quarter mile from the banks of the Crooked River, in the middle of a large, uninhabited area with the crazy name of Tate’s Hell State Forest.
It was a straight shot to the coastal town of Carrabelle, an hour and fifteen minutes away. From there, he’d have to turn north on Highway 67, skirting the edge of Tate’s Hell, and find a way in. But there didn’t appear to be any marked roads into the forest, beyond what looked like a few old tracks, overgrown and probably closed off. Presumably they had led to moonshine stills or something else he’d rather not know about. He could also see the extensive outline of the sugar plant, with what looked like two perimeter fences and a gate. But it was hard to tell where the road passing through the gate originated. He was just going to have to wing it.
With the jeep still idling, he reached back and unzipped his traveling bag. He pulled out the marine “butt pack” in woodland green camo he’d prepared for the trip to Guatemala, his FBI radio, Ka-Bar knife, and a pair of cuffs. Working fast, he yanked off his jacket, checked his Browning, found it clean, and reholstered it. He slipped two additional magazines into the knapsack, along with the knife, cuffs, water bottle, parachute cord, flashlight, binocs, and a rain shell. On second thought, he removed the cuffs—unnecessary weight.
The place was likely to be fenced and gated. Damn, if only he had wire or bolt cutters. He felt his heart racing as he thought about what might be happening to his partner—assuming he was still alive. But he tried to reassure himself by focusing on Pendergast’s resourcefulness. The man had as many lives as a cat: he’d seen it for himself.
He lowered the windows, breathing deeply of the muggy air, trying to clear his head. A storm was coming for sure, but he hoped to make good time before it hit.
If you go in there without me, you’re going to regret it—regret it severely. Constance’s words, spoken with conviction, still rang in his head. Was that a threat? It sure sounded like one. Coldmoon had heard a million threats in his life…but this one, he sensed in his bones, wasn’t idle at all. That outrageous bitch would carry it out—he knew she would.
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