He started the PowerPoint presentation with the press of a button. An envelope appeared on the screen. “This was postmarked at the General Post Office, 10001, at three PM yesterday. It was dropped in a post box around the corner and arrived this morning. Since today is Tuesday, it could have been dropped in the mailbox anytime Sunday or Monday up to three PM, as the first collection of the week in that box is at that time. The letter itself is dated Monday, but that means very little. There are no cameras on the mailbox itself, but plenty along the avenues and streets leading to it; all those are being reviewed.”
He pressed on to the next image: a long windswept beach.
“This was where Agent Pendergast was last seen, at dawn, sixteen days ago. He was on extended leave, working a private case. I won’t go into the details of that case because they almost certainly aren’t relevant. He struggled on the beach with a deranged killer, and both were swept into the sea and disappeared. An exhaustive search turned up nothing. The water was fifty-five degrees, in which a man can live for about an hour. We believed he was dead until we received this package. So he was either picked up by a ship or washed up on a beach somewhere. In either case, those who discovered him—once they discovered his identity—have decided to use the agent as bait in a prisoner exchange. We’re doing an exhaustive analysis of any ships that might have been in the area at the time, as well as of the tidal currents.”
Another press of the button and a scanned copy of the letter appeared.
“The letter was typed on a computer with a fixed-pitch font and then photocopied multiple times to blur any telltale characteristics. Here it is.”
To SAC Spann:
1. We have in our control SA Pendergast.
2. The enclosed objects removed from his person are proof.
3. We propose a trade: the FBI have a man named Arsenault in custody; you release him, we release Pendergast.
4. We assume you will require proof that Pendergast is alive. We will provide that proof through an email communication—see item 5.
5. We have set up a secure email address for communication. The email you receive will contain in the subject line the following random sequence, as proof it is from us: Lv5C#C&49!8u
6. You will release Arsenault from Sing Sing, where he is currently incarcerated, provide him with a passport and travel funds, and put him on a plane to Caracas, Venezuela.
7. We must hear from Arsenault by noon on the seventh day from the date of this letter. By that time, Arsenault must Skype us from Plaza Bolivar, Caracas, standing in front of the Bolivar statue, to confirm that he has been released and is a free man.
8. After that Skype call comes in, we will release Pendergast.
9. If the Skype call does not come in, or if Arsenault indicates he has been coerced, tortured, or abused in any way—Pendergast dies.
10. Any deviation from this nine-point letter will result in Pendergast’s immediate death. The 7-day deadline is absolute and non-negotiable.
“And here is the email we received today.” Spann pressed a key and another slide came up: the photo of a man—Pendergast—looking shockingly emaciated but clearly alive, lying on a dirty piece of canvas. Next to him, unfolded, was a copy of USA Today, carrying yesterday’s date. “We’re throwing all our best IT resources into tracking that email address, but it looks like the setup is double-encrypted and probably untraceable.”
Spann now went through the plan he had worked out for negotiating with the hostage takers. It was classic, based on the Bureau’s—and his own—long experience with abduction and kidnapping situations. Don’t agree; lowball the first offer; keep the perps continuously engaged; buy time with small requests. Wear them out, slowly remove their control—all the while tasking all the best agents with tracking them down.
He went through all this with the group, putting one agent in charge of each aspect of the investigation. He reserved the actual negotiations for himself.
“And in the end,” he said, “we have a fallback: if this strategy doesn’t work, we give in to their demands. We release Arsenault. And we get Pendergast back.”
He paused and looked around, waiting for comments.
“Of course you know they’re going to kill Pendergast regardless,” said Longstreet in a low voice.
“Killing a federal agent would bring the death penalty down on them,” Spann said. “Once their man is released, why take such an extreme step?”
“Because Pendergast would be the witness who would put them away for life.”
A silence. Spann wondered how to respond. “Mr. Longstreet, these men are clearly not stupid.”
At this, Longstreet unfolded himself from his chair in a sort of easygoing way, then strolled to the front of the room. “I’m sorry to be blunt, Agent Spann, but I believe this plan of yours will pretty much guarantee Pendergast’s death.”
Spann stared at Longstreet. “I respectfully disagree. This is classic, exhaustively researched and tested SOP.”
“Which is exactly why it will fail.” Longstreet turned easily toward the group. “Pendergast is on a boat. Drug smugglers, almost certainly. He got pulled from the water; they eventually realized who he was; and they cooked up this scheme. It is a very stupid scheme and these are very stupid people—although they clearly believe they are being very clever. That is why Pendergast is in such extreme danger. If they were smart, as you believe, your plan might work. But they are not. Whatever we do, they are going to dump the body and run.”
“Drug smugglers?” Spann asked. How the hell did he know this?
“Arsenault is a drug smuggler. It stands to reason these are his colleagues. They’re desperate to free him before he sings.”
Longstreet was now strolling along, back and forth. “So what do we do?” He held up a spidery finger. “A: We stage a panic. We give in to all their demands immediately. We appear to do anything necessary to save our precious agent. We keep them engaged—as long as we’re talking to them, Pendergast won’t die.” He held up a second finger. “B: We lean on Arsenault, hammer and tongs—but very quietly. Maybe he’ll ID them. C: They’re hiding in a boat somewhere, so we scour the Atlantic seaboard. D, and this is most important: We smoke them out. How? By bringing Arsenault down from Sing Sing to New York. I might add that this entire operation needs to be kept absolutely secret: not only from the press, but also from the NYPD and even compartmentalized within the FBI, limited to this team and a few of the top brass.”
SAC Spann stood there, looking first at Longstreet and then at his strike force. They had focused their entire attention on Longstreet. Without anyone realizing it, just like that, Longstreet had taken over. Spann felt the slow burn of humiliation and anger.
21
IN THE SUBTERRANEAN vastness beneath 891 Riverside Drive, Constance Greene sat before a worktable in her small library, brow furrowed, violet eyes focused. All her attention was directed at what sat upon the worktable: an ancient Japanese vase with a simple ideogram baked into its glaze. Three sprigs from a miniature quince tree were tucked within, the flower buds shivering ever so slightly as she worked.
Over the last forty-eight hours—concerned about her own mental state—Constance had retreated into the spiritual and cerebral exercises that, she knew, would help maintain her emotional equanimity: that, and cultivating a perfect indifference to the outside world, a capacity that was at once both her pride and her defense. She had begun rising at four to meditate, contemplating the transcendental knot in a cord of gray silk that had been a gift from Tsering, an English-speaking monk of the Gsalrig Chongg monastery, where she had been taught the subtle intricacies of the Tibetan spiritual practice known as Chongg Ran. Through much training, she was able to attain stong pa nyid—the State of Pure Emptiness—within minutes, and she had maintained this trance-like meditative state for an hour each morning. This, she’d been relieved to find, had helped calm her restlessness. She no longer felt drowsy in the afternoon, nor had she woken, abruptly, in the middle of th
e night.
It had helped in other ways as well.
Her unseen companion, suitor, whatever—she did not know precisely what to call him—had not made his presence known in these last forty-eight hours. If it weren’t for the reality of the gifts he had left, he might have been a figment of her morbid imagination. Her meals, too, had grown simpler. While still more exotic and elegantly plated than the practical dishes normally favored by Mrs. Trask—the last had been wild chanterelle and hen of the woods raviolini—they were no longer luxurious. And neither of the last two dinners had been accompanied by wine.
She tried to give her mysterious companion as little thought as possible.
Now, more adjusted to her peculiar situation and aware of a growing reconciliation to the death of her guardian, she had turned back to one of her favorite activities: ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement. It appealed to her not only for its antiquity, but also for its beauty and subtlety. The year before, in one of the alcoves in Enoch Leng’s cabinet of curiosities, she had installed a four-hundred-watt phosphor grow light and, beneath it, had been cultivating a wooden rack of miniature trees: orange, apricot, and persimmon. She preferred the shōka style, employing as it did only three branches of a plant in each arrangement, symbolizing sky, earth, and being: a Buddhist philosophy that, she felt, dovetailed with the discipline of Chongg Ran.
She preferred to work with the branches of fruit trees, not only because of their beauty and impermanence, but also because their delicacy and unusual forms made them more difficult to master. She worked patiently, with exquisite care, keeping in mind the fragile nature of the blossoms. If she was happy with the final design, she would place it in the woodcut room, perhaps in an empty niche that sat opposite the t’angka of her son…
Suddenly she paused. Somewhere, echoing from the labyrinth of stone chambers outside her private set of rooms, came the evanescent sound of harpsichord music.
She sat up in her chair. This was no dream-music she was waking from: this music was playing in the here and now—within the sub-basement, very likely coming from the old music room.
She sat listening, her fragile equanimity suddenly in turmoil, beset by a surge of emotion. The music was lyrical, heartbreaking, played with ethereal sensitivity. Constance found it astonishingly beautiful.
Leaving her arrangement unfinished, Constance pulled off her white silk gloves and rose, stiletto in one hand, flashlight in the other. She kicked off her shoes to maintain silence in the stone corridors. Swiftly making her way to the central passage, she paused at the door, listening intently. There was no sense of another presence in the sub-basement, no scent or movement of air that was unfamiliar: only the distant, echoing music. It was not Aloysius—he could not play the harpsichord. And in any case her brief hope that he was still alive, she realized, had been only a foolish dream.
She felt no real fear. This unknown person, she now felt certain, was indeed wooing her—in his own eccentric way.
She turned to the right, toward the music room, again moving as swiftly as she dared to maintain silence. As she swept on, allowing the torch to lick only briefly over the brickwork ahead of her, the music grew in volume. She passed beneath half a dozen arches and through as many large rooms, each containing a specific collection of Enoch Leng’s, until she made an abrupt left and stopped before two medieval tapestries depending from a stone lintel. The music room was just beyond.
The music stopped.
Throwing caution to the wind, she swept aside the tapestries and pointed her flashlight into the dark room, flashing the beam about, the hand holding the stiletto ready to stab at a moment’s notice.
There was nobody. The room was empty. The crimson-colored harpsichord sitting in the middle of the room stood silent and alone.
She rushed over to it, wildly flashing the beam around, probing every dark corner and doorway. But the player had vanished. She placed her hand on the stool cushion; it was still warm.
“Who’s there?” she called out. “Who was playing?”
Her voice echoed away into silence. She leaned on the instrument, her heart beating hard. The harpsichord was one of the finest instruments in the collection, once owned by Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory, the sociopathic serial murderer who—according to legend—had bathed in the blood of virgins as a means to retain her youth. What stain or varnish had given the instrument its crimson hue had never been satisfactorily explained—although Constance had her own theories.
She sank down on the seat, still shining the light into the darkness. “Whoever is there, I beg you, reveal yourself.”
No response. She waited, her fingers straying over the keys. The musical collection was the most curious of Enoch Leng’s cabinets of curiosities. Leng was not interested in music for itself. Every item in this collection was here for a reason beyond the ability to produce sound: its association with violence and murder. The Stradivari violin held in a glass case on the far wall, for example, had been owned by Gabriel Antonioni, the infamous killer of 1790s Siena, who cut his victims’ throats and then serenaded them as they died. Beside it was framed the silver trumpet, scarred and dented, that had been used to marshal Richard III’s troops at the Battle of Bosworth Field—a grisly affair indeed.
Her eyes strayed to the harpsichord’s music holder. Handwritten sheet music by an unidentified composer lay open on the rack. Curious, she placed the stiletto on the raised fallboard, within easy reach, touched the keys, and played a light arpeggio.
To the best of her knowledge, this instrument hadn’t been played or serviced in many years. And yet, as her fingers glided over the keys, she found it was in perfect tune.
She turned her attention back to the music. It appeared to be a transcription of a piano concerto, adapted for solo harpsichord. At the top of the first page was a dedication, in what looked like the same hand that had notated the book of love poems: TO CONSTANCE GREENE. Only now did she realize that the handwriting looked faintly familiar.
Almost despite herself, she began to play. It took only a few measures to be certain: this was the same piece that she had woken to; the music that had disturbed her dreams; the music that had wafted so recently through the sub-basement halls. It was achingly beautiful without sentimentality. Its wistful, haunted strains reminded her of the long-forgotten piano concertos by the likes of Ignaz Brüll, Adolf von Henselt, Friedrich Kiel, and other obscure composers of the Romantic era.
Reaching the first-movement cadenza, she stopped. And then—as the sounds of the strings died away—she heard a voice echo from the antique shadows. It said one word—one word only.
“Constance.”
22
CONSTANCE RECOGNIZED THE voice instantly. Snatching up the stiletto, she leapt up from the harpsichord stool, knocking it backward. Where had the voice come from? Feelings of humiliation, outrage, and violation mingled with surprise and homicidal anger.
He survived, she thought as she stood in the center of the room, torch darting from corner to corner, searching for his whereabouts. Somehow, some way, he survived.
“Show yourself,” she hissed in a low voice.
Silence reigned. She stood there, trembling. So it was he who had so artfully contrived this tableau. And to think she had allowed herself to enjoy it. To think she had admired an orchid he had discovered—brought by him into her own most private of chambers. To think she had eaten, enjoyed, food prepared by him. A shudder of revulsion passed through limbs already quivering with rage. He’d been spying on her, stalking her. Watching her sleep.
The flashlight beam revealed the room to be empty—but there were several doors and numerous hanging tapestries. He was there. Laughing silently at her consternation.
If he wanted to play a game, she would give him one. She switched off the torch, plunging the sub-basement into darkness. He was, it seemed, familiar with these spaces, but he couldn’t possibly know them as well as her.
In the dark, she would have the advantage.
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She waited, gripping the stiletto, waited for him to speak again, to make a move, betray his location. The shame and horror of how she’d been toyed with continued to wash over her: those decadent meals he’d left, accompanied by wine…The poem with the feather of an extinct bird…His own little translation in the margin of the book…The new species of orchid, named after her…Not to mention that he had discovered the identity and location of her son—and then had a t’angka painting of him made for her.
My son…Anxiety lanced through her fury. What, exactly, was Diogenes doing—or worse, what might he already have done—with her son?
She would kill him. She’d failed once; she would not fail again. The basement collections were full of weapons and poisons, if it came to that. She might have the opportunity to better arm herself. But for now, the stiletto was exceedingly sharp and—if well handled—would be more than sufficient.
“Constance,” the voice came again out of the darkness.
It echoed strangely, distorted by passageways of stone and muffled by tapestries. The very sound of it was gall and wormwood to her; it caused an inner fury that was as physical as it was emotional.
She dashed forward, in the blackness, toward the uncertain source of the sound, plunging her blade into one hanging tapestry, then another, stabbing and slashing. Again and again the blade was deflected by stone, depriving her of the satisfaction of feeling it sink into tissue. She continued around the dark room, knocking over instruments and stumbling over display cases, the only sound the ripping and tearing of her knife through the woven tapestries that, she was sure, concealed the hiding figure of Diogenes.
At last, the heat of her fury abated. She was acting like a madwoman; she was reacting exactly as Diogenes expected. She returned to the center of the room, breathing quietly. The room, like many in the sub-basement, had been built with stone air shafts to withdraw the unhealthy vapors from the subterranean space and disperse them into the upper air. He was using those stone shafts to confuse her. He could be anywhere.