Blue Labyrinth (36 page)

J
ohn Barbeaux waited in the darkened space of the Palm House. The two men who stayed with him had stretched Pendergast out on the floor. The handcuffed agent remained unconscious despite being slapped and even shocked with the cattle prod. Barbeaux leaned over and placed two fingers on Pendergast’s neck, searching for the carotid pulse. Nothing. He pressed a little harder. There it was: very weak.

He was at death’s door.

At this, Barbeaux felt a vague disquiet. The moment of his triumph had come; the moment he had been thinking about for so long, fantasizing over, savoring—the moment when Pendergast would be confronted with the truth. The moment Alban Pendergast had promised. But it hadn’t quite played out as he’d imagined. Pendergast had been too weak to appreciate the full flavor of his defeat. And then—to Barbeaux’s vast surprise—the man had apologized. He had, essentially, taken responsibility for the sins of the fathers. That shock had taken much of the enjoyment out of his achievement; deprived him of the chance to gloat. At least, he felt fairly certain this was what lay at the heart of his disquietude.

And then, there was the girl…

It was taking his men far longer to retrieve her than he’d anticipated, and he began pacing once again. His movements caused the
lone candle on the table to flicker and gutter. He blew it out, leaving the Palm House to the light of the moon.

He heard another fusillade of shots. This time, he pulled out his radio. “Steiner. Report.”

“Sir,” came the voice of his Ops Crew leader.

“Steiner, what’s going on?”

“That bitch took out two of our men. Poured acid on them, or something.”

“Stop shooting at her,” said Barbeaux. “
I want her alive
.”

“Yes, sir. But—”

“Where is she now?”

“Up in the treetops of the Tropical Pavilion. She’s got a bottle of acid, and she’s freaking crazy—”

“Three of you with automatic weapons, against one woman, treed, dressed only in a slip, armed with, what, a bottle of acid? Do I have that right?”

A hesitation. “Yes.”

“I’m sorry—what the
fuck
is the problem, exactly?”

Another hesitation. “There is no problem, sir.”

“Good. There will be if she’s killed. Whoever kills her, dies.”

“Sir… forgive me, sir, but the target—well, he’s either dead or dying. Right?”

“Your point being?”

“So what do we need the girl for? Her retrieval of that plant—it doesn’t matter now. It would be much easier to just throw up a screen of bullets, drop her with—”

“Aren’t you hearing a word I’ve said? Steiner,
I want her alive
.”

A pause. “What… do we do?”

And this from a professional
. Barbeaux couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He took a deep breath. “Bring your squad into position. Approach diagonally. Liquid falls vertically.”

A silence. “Yes, sir.”

He replaced the radio. A lone girl, up against professional mercenaries, some of them ex-special-forces. And yet she had them spooked.
Unbelievable. Only now were his men’s limitations becoming obvious. Crazy? Yeah—crazy like a fox. He had underestimated her. That would not happen again.

He leaned down and touched Pendergast’s neck. Now he could feel no pulse at all, no matter how he probed or pressed. “God
damn
it,” he muttered through clenched teeth. He felt cheated, betrayed, robbed of the victory he had worked so long and hard to achieve. He gave the body a savage kick.

He turned toward the two men who had taken up positions on either side of Pendergast. There was no longer any need to keep vigil over the body; there was something more important to accomplish.

Barbeaux looked at them in turn, then jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Join the others,” he snapped. “Get the girl.”

T
he lone survivor of her first attack had been joined by two others. Based on the radio chatter, Constance knew that at least two more were on their way. The men below were rallying, developing a plan. She watched as the three began spreading out in the foliage below. Then they began to climb the trees surrounding her own. Their intention was to come at her from three sides.

She jammed the small chemical case back into the duffel, slung the duffel around her neck to free up both hands, and climbed higher. As she did, the trunk grew thinner and began to sway, the branches feathering out in all directions. Higher and higher she climbed until ultimately the trunk spread out into a mass of slender branches that sagged and swayed with her movements. The glass dome was only about six feet above her head.

As she climbed upward, trying to reach the glass of the ceiling, the entire treetop began swaying. The men had now reached the canopy as well, and were creeping out on lateral branches, boxing her in.

A branch she was grasping broke with a crack and she slipped, stopping her fall only by wrapping her arms around an adjoining group of small branches, leaving her swaying and dangling in space.

“There she is!”

The flashlight beams shone on her as she pulled herself up the slender branches until she found another purchase for her feet.
Every move sent the branches into a fresh paroxysm of swaying and cracking.

Trying not to agitate the canopy, she maneuvered with care, working her way still higher. The tiniest twigs and branches came within a foot or two of the glass ceiling, but they were too slender to support any weight. She was now triangulated in the flashlight beams.

A low laugh. “Hey, little girl. You’re surrounded. Climb down.”

If any of them came any closer, Constance knew, their combined weight on the network of branches would send them all crashing to the ground. They were stymied.

Through the heavy canopy of branches, she could see that two more men had entered the Tropical Pavilion. One of them removed a pistol and aimed it at her. “Start down or I’ll put a bullet in you.”

She ignored this, working her way higher with exquisite care and balance.

“Get your ass
down
!”

She was now just below the glass roof. The branches were shaking and swaying, her bare feet slipping. She had nothing to break the glass above her except the bag, and she didn’t dare use it for fear of breaking certain of its contents. Steadying herself in the topmost branches as best she could, she removed a cloth from the bag, wrapped it around her fist, and punched out the pane of glass above her with one blow.

This caused violent agitation in the network of branches she was clinging to, and she slipped down a few feet as broken glass rained down around her.

“She’s going out the top!” one of the men called.

With a desperate, reckless move she lunged upward, grasping and clawing at the metal frame above her and securing a purchase with one hand, cutting her fingers in the process. Pushing out first the small case, then the bag, she followed these onto the roof, swinging herself up and then climbing out and on top.

Placing her feet on the bronze frames that held the sections of glass in place, not treading on the glass itself, Constance knelt, opened
the small chemical case, and took out a second bottle. Two of the men who’d climbed the adjoining trees were directly below her, working their way up toward the hole. The other man was descending fast, no doubt to join up with the two on the ground and prepare to intercept her outside when she climbed down to the ground.

She leaned over the hole she had made in the roof and glanced down at the closer of the two climbers. He was yelling at her and waving his gun. Taking the glass stopper from the bottle, she upended its contents onto the man, then skipped back. The gun went off, blowing out the pane next to her, and then there was a scream; a dull cloud of acrid gas blossomed in the moonlight, followed by a popping of leaves and twigs, to a constellation of flares and gouts of flame. She heard a falling body crash through branch after branch, hitting the ground with a sickening thump.

A fusillade of shots came from the other climber, bursting panes around her, but he was high in the swaying canopy and unable to aim properly. Or perhaps he was not trying to hit her, but rather trying to intimidate her. It made no difference. She plucked the third bottle from the case, skipped along the roof into a fresh position, removed its stopper, and—leaning over one of the skylights blown out by the bullets—doused the remaining climber with it. A horrible gush of steam rose up through the broken glass, gray, shot through with ropy strands of crimson, and Constance reared backward to avoid it. An ululating, throat-shredding cry tore through the broken panes, followed by the sounds of yet another body crashing downward. Taking the final small bottle from the case, she tossed it through one of the other ruined skylights. Perhaps it would act as a grenade, taking out one or more of the men down at the floor level of the pavilion. She heard an odd puffing noise, like the lighting of a gas range, and then a flare of flame shot up from far below, flickering angrily for several seconds before going out.

This was followed by an intense silence.

Abandoning the empty chemical case on the roof, Constance slung the backpack over her shoulder and began moving across the dome, to a ladder that curved down from the top.

She descended just as two men came running out of the greenhouse complex, followed soon after by a third. She ran into the darkness of the arboretum, its giant trees leaving the ground in almost complete darkness. Making a ninety-degree turn to the right, she headed toward the dense plantings of the Japanese Garden. At the torii gate, she ducked into deep shadow and paused to look back. Her pursuers had lost her in the darkness under the trees, and now they were fanning out in an encircling maneuver, talking to each other via radio. Nobody else had emerged from the nearby buildings.

That, Constance thought, left Barbeaux alone in the Palm House with Pendergast.

The three men spread out farther as they approached the Japanese Garden. She crept through the darkness and skirted the pond, moving along narrow graveled pathways among dense plantings of weeping cherries, willows, yews, and Japanese maples. Partway around the pond stood a rustic pavilion.

Based on the squawk of radios and the whispered murmur of voices, Constance could tell that the three had taken up triangular positions around the Japanese Garden. They would know she was surrounded; they would assume she’d gone to ground.

It was time.

In a thick, dark stand of twisted juniper, Constance knelt, letting her bag slip to the ground. She zipped it open and reached inside. Out came an old bandolier of heavy leather, studded along its length with looped ammunition pockets, which she had appropriated from Enoch Leng’s military collections. She fixed it sash-style over one shoulder and belted it at her waist. Reaching into the duffel again, she removed from another ancient case five large, identical syringes and laid them in a row on the soft ground. These were old, handblown glass “balling guns”—catheter-type irrigation syringes used for administering medicine orally to horses and other large animals. These, too, were courtesy of Leng’s bizarre cabinet of curiosities, in this case the collection devoted to veterinary curiosa, its contents used by him in experiments best not speculated on. All five syringes were filled with triflic acid and capable of delivering a larger, more directed payload than the
flasks had been. Each was nearly a foot long, as thick around as a tube of caulk, and made of borosilicate glass with sodium metasilicate as both lubricant and sealant. These last facts were particularly important: triflic acid, she had learned, would violently attack any substance composed of carbon-hydrogen bonds.

One at a time, Constance slid the oversize syringes into the leather pockets of the bandolier. It had been manufactured to hold fifty-millimeter artillery shells, and the syringes fit well. Each had a glass stopper snugged over its tip, but nevertheless she handled them very gingerly: triflic acid was not just a powerful superacid; it was also a deadly neurotoxin. Ensuring the bandolier was firmly in place, she rose cautiously to her feet, abandoning the now-empty duffel, and glanced around.

Three men
.

Leaving the stand of juniper, she moved to the pavilion itself, a wooden structure built out over the pond, with open sides and a low-slung roof of cedar shakes. Climbing onto a nearby railing, she grasped the edge of the roof, pulled herself onto it, and knelt there, peering over the edge. The men were now tightening their noose, creeping into the Japanese Garden, guns drawn. They were moving laterally, flashlight beams probing the vegetation. One of them was approaching the pavilion itself. She crouched lower as the man’s light went past.

In utter silence, Constance slid one of the syringes out of the bandolier, slipped off the protective glass tip, aimed at the man as he passed just beneath—and then directed a long, smoking jet of acid over him.

Under the rain of acid, the man’s clothes burst into flames and dissolved. His sharp screams were almost immediately cut off by a gargled choking. Windmilling his arms, he staggered first one way, then another—the flesh literally melting from his bones as the stream cut into him—before blindly throwing himself into the pond. As he hit the water, a cloud of vapor rose up and spread slowly over the waters as the man convulsed. Within seconds he had disappeared beneath the surface, leaving behind a surge of bubbles.

The other two men had dived into the brush. Now they knew she was on the pavilion roof.

Without giving them time to recover, Constance tossed the now-empty syringe aside and scuttled across the roofline in the direction of the pond. Keeping the bulk of the pavilion between herself and the remaining two men, she slipped carefully into the water and—keeping below the surface—swam to the far shore, where she emerged. The men fired at her from cover but, crouching in the darkness more than a hundred feet away, their bullets went wide. She crawled into a dense, expansive stand of azaleas that had been planted next to the pond, pushing deep into the shrubbery on hands and knees while additional rounds snipped away the branches over her head. The men were shooting to kill despite Barbeaux’s orders. They were angry and panicked. But they were still formidable. She must be ready for what was about to happen.

In her mind, Constance visualized a lioness in the bush: a lioness swollen with hatred and savage thoughts of revenge.

Reaching the center of the azalea cluster, she crouched in the blackness. Silently, she eased another syringe of acid from the bandolier and readied it for use. She tensed, waiting, listening.

She could not see the men, but she could hear their whispered voices. They had come around the pond and seemed to be positioned at the edge of the azaleas, perhaps thirty feet away. Additional whispers betrayed the fact that they were circling around. There was the hiss of a radio; a short conversation. They were not as panicked as she had expected. They were relying on their superior firepower.

Now they picked up her track and started into the patch. The noise they made allowed Constance to better track their approach. She waited, motionless, crouched low in the densest heart of the bushes. Closer and closer they came, pushing through the azalea, moving with extreme caution. Twenty feet, ten…

The lioness would not wait. She would charge.

Constance leapt up and ran straight at them without uttering a sound. The two, taken by surprise, did not have time to react before she was upon them. At a run, turning sideways in order to avoid any
backsplash, she emptied the contents of the syringe over one man—a colorless torrent of death—still running, threw aside the empty, slid out another syringe, then turned again to drench the second man. Never faltering, dropping this syringe as it, too, was spent, she burst out the far end of the azalea stand, then stopped, glancing back to examine her handiwork.

A vast swath of the azalea garden, roughly following the course she had just taken, was now aflame: entire bushes exploding like popcorn, gouts of fire flaring up, leaves disintegrating, branches bursting into red-and-orange glow. The men themselves were screaming, one wildly firing his pistol at nothing, the other whirling like a top and clutching his face. Now they sank to their knees, great gushers of gray-and-pink mist roiling violently up from their dissolving flesh. As Constance looked on, what was left of the figures sank to the ground, convulsing as the shrubbery blackened and dissolved.

She watched the ghastly tableau for just a moment longer. Then, turning away, she headed quickly across a dew-heavy lawn and onto the path leading to the Palm House, its panels of glass glittering in the moonlight.