Blue Labyrinth (11 page)

Once again he paused to mentally reconstruct the layout of the hotel. This door led to the animal handling area: housing, veterinary care, feeding. And beyond that would be the animal garden itself—and the rear entrance to the mine.

Pendergast tried to open the door, but the metal had rusted over long years of disuse and would not budge. He tried again, exerting more pressure, until it opened an inch with a disturbing screech of iron. Reaching into his equipment vest, he removed a small pry bar and applied it to half a dozen spots around the edge of the door,
working the rust loose, with the help of a spray of marine super-penetrating oil. This time, when he tried the handle, the door yielded just enough for him to squeeze through.

Beyond lay a corridor tiled in white porcelain. Open doors lay on either side, pools of darkness even in the night-vision goggles. Pendergast moved forward carefully. Even now, all these years later, the musk of wild animal and big-game scat freighted the air. To the left was a room containing four large, iron-barred cages with feeding doors. This opened to another room, a tiled veterinary area for examinations and, it appeared, minor surgical procedures. A little farther on, the hallway ended in another metal door.

Pendergast stopped, staring at the door through his goggles. Beyond, he knew, was the handling room. Here was where the animals would have been sedated if the need arose, for special handling, cleaning, emergency removal from the garden, or medical treatment. As best he could make out from the blueprints, the room acted as a kind of air lock, a staging area between the subterranean garden and the controlled atmosphere of the handling areas.

The blueprints did not indicate precisely how the animal garden had been constructed over the rear entrance to the mine: not shown was whether the mine had been sealed or whether it was open to the animal garden itself. Either way, he was ready; if it had been sealed, he had the means to break through—chisels, hammer, lock picks, pry bar, and lubricant.

This second metal door was rusted, too, but not as badly, and Pendergast was able to open it without much difficulty. He stood in the doorway and inspected the room beyond. It was small and extremely dark, clad in porcelain tile, cross-ties and restraint fixtures on the walls, with some closed vents in the ceiling. It had been sealed so well from the outside elements that it appeared to be in much better shape than the rest of the ruin—indeed, almost new. The walls were clean and almost gleamed in the sickly light of his goggles…

Suddenly a terrific blow to his neck sent him sprawling to the floor. He fell, stunned, and as his head cleared he saw his attacker
standing between him and the door: tall, well muscled, wearing camos and night-vision goggles, aiming a .45.

Pendergast slowly removed his hand from his vest, leaving the Les Baer in its holster. He rose quietly as he saw the door shutting behind the man as if of its own accord, locking with an audible click. Giving every sign of complete submission and cooperation, he kept his hands in sight, moving slowly, as he recovered from the surprise of being waylaid. The extreme emptiness of the place, the dust and the age, had lulled him into a false sense of isolation.

Quickly, his preternatural sharpness of senses returned.

The man had said nothing. He hadn’t moved. But Pendergast could see his frame relaxing ever so slightly, his sense of extreme readiness softening as Pendergast continued to convey by his body language that he was under the man’s control.

“What’s going on?” he asked, a submissive whine in his voice, the Texas accent back in force. “Why’d you hit me?”

The man said nothing.

“I’m just an artifact collector, checking the place out.” Almost groveling, Pendergast ducked his head and took a step closer, as if to genuflect in front of the man. “Please don’t shoot me.”

He ducked his head again, fell to his knees with a repressed sob. “Please.”

The pry bar on his vest—given a touch of assistance—fell to the tiled floor with a clatter. And in this millisecond of distraction, Pendergast rose up in one explosive movement, striking the man’s right wrist, cracking it and sending the gun flying.

But instead of lunging for his gun, the man pivoted on the sole of one foot and sent the other foot, karate-style, slamming into Pendergast’s chest so fast he could not pull his own weapon. He was again knocked to the floor, but this time—cognizant of his attacker, no longer caught unaware—he spun over just in time to fend off another brutal kick and flipped to his feet, just managing to lean away from a roundhouse punch. He jammed his heel into the inside of the man’s right knee as he sprang back, hearing the popping of tendons. His
attacker staggered, delivered a cross punch. Pendergast feinted away, then drew him in with a pull counter; as the man delivered the punch into air, Pendergast jerked back and responded with a blow to his face, his fingers in the kung fu “tiger hand” position. The man reared back, the blow missing him by less than an inch, while simultaneously sinking a fist into Pendergast’s stomach, almost knocking the wind from him.

It was the most peculiar of battles, conducted in pitch black, in utter silence, with singular intensity and ferocity. The man said nothing, made no sound save for the occasional grunt. He moved so quickly that he gave Pendergast no time to extract his Les Baer. The man was possessed of excellent fighting skills, and for an eternity of sixty seconds they seemed equally matched. But Pendergast had a superior range of martial arts moves, along with highly unusual self-defense techniques he had learned at a certain Tibetan monastery. At last, using one of these latter moves called a Crow Beak—a lightning-like sword-slash of two hands held together as if in prayer—he knocked the goggles from his adversary’s face. This gave him an instant advantage, and he used it to land a flurry of blows that brought the man to his knees, gasping. In another moment Pendergast had his .45 out, trained on the man. He gave him a brief search, pulling out a knife, which he tossed away.

“FBI,” he said. “You’re under arrest.”

The man did not reply. Indeed, he hadn’t spoken a word throughout the entire encounter.

“Open the door.”

Silence.

Pendergast spun the man around, zip-tied his hands behind his back, sought out a loop of pipe, found one, and further zip-tied him to that. “Very well. I’ll open it myself.”

Again, the man said nothing, giving no indication he had even heard. He just sat on the floor, tied to the pipe, face blank.

As Pendergast went to the door to fire a few rounds into the lock, something strange happened. The room began to fill with a distinct
scent: the delicate, sweet smell of lilies. Pendergast glanced around for the source of the odor. It seemed to come from the vent in the ceiling directly above where he had tied the assailant—a vent that had previously been closed, but was now open, a mist descending with a whisper of air. Pendergast’s assailant, blinded by the loss of his goggles, stared about in fear as the cloud of mist cloaked his face and body, and he began to cough and shake his head.

Quickly Pendergast aimed at the lock, pulled the trigger. The sound was explosive in the confined space, the round deflected by the metal—a major surprise. But even as he prepared to fire again, he felt his limbs get heavy, his movements begin to grow sluggish. A strange sensation flooded his head—a feeling of
fullness
and a sense of well-being, serenity, and lassitude. Black spots danced before the green field of his vision. He swayed, caught himself, swayed again, dropped the gun. Just as blackness overtook him and he sank to the floor, he heard the ceiling grate begin to close again. And with it came the whispered words:

“You have Alban to thank for this…”

Later—he did not know how much later—Pendergast swam slowly up from dark dreams and broke the surface into consciousness. He opened his eyes to a green haze. For a moment, he was disoriented, unsure of what he was looking at. Then he realized he was still wearing the goggles, and the green object was the ceiling vent… and everything came back to him.

He rose to his knees, and then—painfully—to his feet. He was sore from the fight but otherwise felt oddly strong, refreshed. The smell of lilies was gone. His opponent was crumpled on the floor, still unconscious.

Pendergast took stock. He surveyed the room through his goggles, far more intently this time. Porcelain tiles rose four feet up the walls, above which was stainless steel. Although there was the closed grate in the ceiling, and nozzles set high up in the walls, the drain in the floor had been sealed with cement.

It reminded Pendergast of another, very different, kind of room that had once been used for unspeakably barbaric purposes.

The silence, the darkness, and the strange quality of the room chilled him. He reached into his pocket, fumbled for his cell phone, began to dial.

As he did so, there was another audible click; the lock snapped free and the metal door swung ajar, revealing the short corridor beyond, empty of anything save his own footsteps in the dust.

L
ieutenant D’Agosta showed up promptly at one
PM
. As he closed the door quietly behind him, Margo gestured toward a chair.

“What have you got?” he asked as he sat down, glancing curiously at the bone-littered table before him.

She took a seat beside him, flipping open her laptop. “Remember what the accession record said? A Hottentot male, aged approximately thirty-five?”

“How could I forget? He haunts my dreams.”

“What we actually have here is the skeleton of a Caucasian woman, most likely American, and probably not a day under sixty.”

“Jesus. How do you know that?”

“Take a look at this.” Margo reached over, carefully picked up the pelvic bone. “The best way to sex a skeleton is to examine its pelvis. See how wide the pelvic girdle is? That’s designed for giving birth. In a male pelvis, the spread of the ilia would be different. Also, note the bone density, the way the sacrum is tilted back.” She replaced the pelvis on the table, picked up the skull. “Take a look at the shape of the forehead, the relative lack of eyebrow ridges—additional indicators of sex. Then, can you see how both the sagittal suture and the coronal suture are fully fused: here, and here? That would argue for somebody over the age of forty. I examined the teeth under a stereozoom, and the wear indicates someone even older—at least sixty, perhaps sixty-five.”

“Caucasian?”

“That’s not quite so cut and dried, but you can frequently tell a skeleton’s racial heritage from its skull and jawbone.” She turned the skull over in her hands. “Note the shape of the nasal cavity—triangular—and the gentle slope of the eye socket. Those are consistent with European ancestry.” She pointed to the sinus at the bottom of the skull. “See this? The arch of the maxilla is parabolic. If this was a so-called Hottentot, it would be hyperbolic in shape. Of course, you’d need to do DNA sequencing to be absolutely sure—but I’d bet the family Bible this was a white lady in her sixties.”

Through the window set into the closed door of the examination room, Margo could see somebody walk past in the corridor beyond, then stop and turn. Dr. Frisby. He looked through the window at her, then at D’Agosta, his expression turning to a scowl. Frisby looked back at her once more, then turned away and disappeared down the corridor. She shivered. She’d never liked the guy and wondered what D’Agosta had done to apparently antagonize him.

“And the American part?” D’Agosta asked.

Margo looked back at him. “That’s more a guess. The teeth are evenly worn and well maintained. Good bone health, no apparent diseases. Chemical tests could tell you more definitively—there are isotopes in teeth that can indicate where a person lived and, often, what his diet was.”

D’Agosta whistled. “You learn something new every day.”

“Another thing. The accession record says the skeleton is complete. But it’s now missing a long bone.”

“Clerical error?”

“Never. A ‘complete’ notation was unusual. Not something you’d normally mistake, and the long bone is one of the biggest in the body.”

The examination room fell silent. Margo began returning the bones to their tray while D’Agosta looked on, slumped in the chair, a thoughtful expression on his face.

“How in hell did this skeleton end up here? Does the Museum have little old lady collections?”

“No.”

“Any idea how old it is?”

“Based on the look of the dental work, I’d say late nineteenth century. But we’d have to do radiocarbon dating to be positive. That could take weeks.”

D’Agosta digested this. “Let’s make sure the mislabeling wasn’t a mistake, and that the missing bone didn’t end up nearby. I’ll ask our pal Sandoval to pull all the skeletons from the surrounding drawers and those with adjacent accession numbers. You wouldn’t mind coming back and seeing if any of those look more like, um, a thirty-five-year-old Hottentot?”

“Glad to. There are other tests I’d like to run on this skeleton, anyway.”

D’Agosta laughed. “If Pendergast was around, you can bet he’d say something like:
That bone is critical to solving this case
.” He stood up. “I’ll give you a call to set up the next session. Keep this under wraps, will you? Especially from Frisby.”

As Margo was making her way back down the central passage of Osteology, Frisby seemed to materialize out of the dim dustiness of a side corridor to walk alongside her.

“Dr. Green?” He looked straight ahead as he walked beside her.

“Yes, hello, Dr. Frisby.”

“You were talking to that policeman.”

“Yes.” She tried to sound relaxed.

Frisby continued to look straight ahead. “What did he want?”

“He asked me to examine a skeleton.”

“Which one?”

“The one Vic Marsala pulled for that, ah, visiting scientist.”

“He asked
you
to examine it? Why
you
?”

“I’ve known the lieutenant a long time.”

“And what did you find?”

This was rapidly becoming an inquisition. Margo tried to stay calm. “According to the accession label, a Hottentot male, added to the collection in 1889.”

“And just what possible bearing could a hundred-and-twenty-five-year-old skeleton have on Marsala’s murder?”

“I couldn’t say, sir. I was just helping the police at their request.”

Frisby snorted. “This is intolerable. The police are barking up the wrong tree. It’s as if they’re looking to draw my department deeper into this pointless murder case, into scandal and suspicion. All this poking around—I’ve had a bellyful of it.” Frisby stopped. “Did he ask you for any other assistance?”

Margo hesitated. “He mentioned something about examining a few other skeletons from the collection.”

“I see.” Now at last Frisby looked at her. “I believe you’ve got some high-level research privileges around here.”

“Yes, and I’m very thankful for that.”

“What would happen if those privileges were rescinded?”

Margo looked at him steadily. This was outrageous. But she was not going to lose her cool. “It would deep-six my research. I might lose my job.”

“What a shame that would be.” He said nothing else, only turned and strode down the corridor, leaving Margo standing there, staring at his tall, brisk, receding form.