Cold Vengeance (19 page)

C
HAPTER 39

Black Brake swamp, Louisiana

N
ED
B
ETTERTON TOOK THE HANDKERCHIEF
from his pocket and wiped his forehead for what seemed the hundredth time. He was wearing a loose T-shirt and Bermuda shorts, but he hadn’t expected the swamp air to be this suffocating so late in the year. And the tight gauze bandage around his bruised knuckles felt as hot as a damn rotisserie chicken.

Hiram—the old, almost toothless man he’d spoken to on the front stoop of Tiny’s—was at the wheel of the battered airboat, a shapeless cap pulled down around his ears. He leaned over the gunwale, spat a brown rope of tobacco-laced saliva into the water, then straightened again and returned his gaze to the narrow logging channel that led ahead into a green fastness.

An hour of research in the records office at the county seat was all it had taken for Betterton to discover that Spanish Island was a former fishing and hunting camp deep in Black Brake swamp—owned by June Brodie’s family. Upon learning this, he immediately turned his attention to tracking down Hiram. It had taken a great deal of wheedling and cajoling to convince the old geezer to take him out to Spanish Island. Ultimately a hundred-dollar bill and the brandishing of a quart bottle of Old Grand-Dad had done the trick—but even then, Hiram insisted on their meeting up at the far northwestern corner of Lake End, away from the prying eyes of Tiny and the rest of the crowd.

When they first started out, Hiram had been morose, nervous, and uncommunicative. The journalist had known better than to force the man to speak. Instead he’d left the Old Grand-Dad within easy reach, and now—two hours and many pulls later—Hiram’s tongue had begun to loosen.

“How much farther?” Betterton asked, once again plying the handkerchief.

“Fifteen minutes,” Hiram said, sending another thoughtful jet of saliva over the side. “Maybe twenty. We’re getting into the thick stuff now.”

He’s not kidding
, Betterton thought. The cypress trees were closing in on either side, and overhead the braided green and brown of jungle-like vegetation blotted out the sun. The air was so thick and humid, it felt as if they were underwater. Birds and insects chattered and droned, and now and then there was a heavy splash as a gator slid into the water.

“You think that FBI man actually made it as far as Spanish Island?” Betterton asked.

“Don’t know,” Hiram replied. “He didn’t say.”

Betterton had spent a most entertaining couple of days looking into Pendergast’s background. It hadn’t been easy, and he could just as well have spent a whole week at it. Maybe even a month. The man was in fact one of the New Orleans Pendergasts, a strange old family of French and English ancestry. The word
eccentric
didn’t even begin to describe them—they were scientists, explorers, medical quacks, hucksters, magicians, con men… and killers. Yes, killers. A great-aunt had poisoned her entire family and been shut up in an insane asylum. An uncle several times great had been a famous magician and Houdini’s teacher. Pendergast himself had a brother, who had apparently vanished in Italy, about whom there were many strange rumors but few answers.

But it was the fire that intrigued Betterton most of all. When Pendergast was a child, a mob in New Orleans had burned down the family mansion on Dauphine Street. The ensuing investigation had not been able to clarify exactly why. Although nobody admitted to being part of the mob, various people questioned by police gave different and conflicting reasons as to why the mansion was torched: that the family was practicing voodoo; that the son had been killing local pets; that the family was plotting to poison the water supply. But when Betterton had sorted through all the conflicting information, he sensed something else behind the mob action: a carefully crafted and highly subtle disinformation campaign by a person or persons unknown, aimed at destroying the Pendergast family.

It appeared the family had a powerful, hidden enemy…

The airboat bumped over a particularly shallow mud bank, and Hiram gunned the engine. Ahead, the vegetation-choked channel forked. Hiram slowed to a virtual standstill. To Betterton, the two channels looked identical: dark and gloomy, with vines and cypress branches hanging down like smokehouse sausages. Hiram rubbed his chin quizzically, then glanced upward as if to get a celestial fix from the braided ceiling overhead.

“We’re not lost, are we?” Betterton asked. He realized that trusting himself to this aged rummy might not have been a prudent move. If anything happened way out here, he’d be dead meat. There was not a chance in hell of his finding his way out of this swampy labyrinth.

“Naw,” Hiram said. He took another pull at the bottle and abruptly gunned the airboat into the left-hand passage.

The channel narrowed still further, choked with duckweed and water hyacinth. The hooting and chattering of invisible creatures grew louder. They maneuvered around an ancient cypress stump, sticking up out of the muck like a broken statue. Hiram slowed again to negotiate a sharp bend in the channel, peering through a thick curtain of hanging moss that blocked the view ahead.

“Should be right up yonder,” he said.

Goosing the engine gently, he carefully nosed the airboat through the dark, slime-choked passage. Betterton ducked as they pushed through the curtain of moss, then rose again, peering intently ahead. The ferns and tall grasses appeared to be giving way to a gloomy clearing. Betterton stared—then abruptly drew in his breath.

The swamp opened into a small, roughly circular stand of muddy ground, ringed by ancient cypresses. The entire open region was scorched, as if it had been bombed with napalm. The remains of dozens of fat creosote pilings rose, burnt and blackened, thrusting toward the sky like teeth. Charred pieces of wood lay strewn everywhere, along with twisted bits of metal and debris. A damp, acrid, burnt odor hung over the place like a fog.

“This is Spanish Island?” Betterton asked in disbelief.

“What’s left of it, I reckon,” Hiram replied.

The airboat moved forward into a slackwater bayou, sliding up onto a muddy shore, and Betterton stepped out. He walked forward gingerly over the rise of land, pushing debris around with his foot. The rubble was spread out over at least an acre, and it contained a riot of things: metal desktops, bedsprings, cutlery, the burned-out remains of sofas, antlers, melted glass, the spines of books, and—to his vast surprise—the blackened remains of machines of unknown function, smashed and twisted. He knelt before one, picked it up. Despite the intense heat it had been subjected to, he could tell it was a metering device of some kind: brushed metal, with a needle gauge measuring something in milliliters. In one corner was a small, stamped logo: P
RECISION
M
EDICAL
E
QUIPMENT
, F
ALL
R
IVER
, M
ASS
.

What the hell had happened here?

He heard Hiram’s voice from over his shoulder, high-pitched, tense. “Mebbe we should be getting back.”

Suddenly Betterton became aware of the silence. Unlike the rest of the bayou, here the birds and insects had fallen still. There was something awful about the listening quiet. He stared down again at the confusion of debris, at the strange burnt pieces of metal, at the twisted equipment of unknown function. This place felt dead.

Worse than that—it felt haunted.

All at once Betterton realized that he wanted nothing more than to get away from this creepy place. He turned and began picking his way back to the boat. Hiram, apparently possessed by the same thought, was already halfway there. They gunned out of the slack-water bayou, heading back through the narrow, twisting channels that led to Lake End.

Once—just once—Betterton glanced over his shoulder into the dense green fastness behind him, shadow-woven, mysterious, braided around and above by tree limbs and kudzu vines. What secrets it held—what dreadful event had transpired at Spanish Island—he couldn’t say. But he was sure of one thing. One way or another, this shady bastard Pendergast was at the center of everything.

C
HAPTER 40

River Pointe, Ohio

I
N THE MIDDLE-CLASS
C
LEVELAND SUBURB
, the bell in the tower of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church tolled midnight. The wide streets were drowsy and quiet. Dead leaves skittered in the gutters, rustled along by a gentle night breeze, and somewhere in the distance a dog barked.

Only a single second-story window was illuminated in the white clapboard house that stood on the corner of Church Street and Sycamore Terrace. Beyond the window—locked, nailed shut, and covered by two layers of heavy curtain—lay a room whose every corner was stuffed full of instrumentation. One floor-to-ceiling rack held tier-one, high-density blade servers; numerous layer-three, forty-eight-port gigabit Ethernet switches; and several NAS devices configured as RAID-2 arrays. Another rack held passive and active monitoring devices, packet sniffers, police and civilian scanner-interceptors. Every horizontal surface was littered with keyboards, wireless signal boosters, digital infrared thermometers, network testers, Molex extractors. An ancient modem with an acoustic coupler sat on a high shelf, apparently still in use. The air was heavy with the smell of dust and menthol. The only light came from LCD screens and countless front-panel displays.

In the middle of the room sat a shrunken figure in a wheelchair. He was dressed in faded pajamas and a terry-cloth bathrobe. He moved slowly from terminal to terminal, checking readouts, peering at lines of cryptic code, occasionally firing off a machine-gun-like series of typed commands on one of the wireless keyboards. One of the man’s hands was withered, the fingers malformed and shrunken, yet he typed with amazing facility.

Suddenly he paused. A yellow light had appeared on a small device situated over the central monitor.

The figure quickly rolled himself to the main terminal and typed in a volley of commands. Instantly the monitor dissolved into a chessboard-like grid of black-and-white images: incoming feeds from two dozen security cameras placed in and around the perimeter of the house.

He quickly scanned the various camera feeds. Nothing.

Panic—which had flared up in an instant—ebbed again. His security was first-rate and doubly redundant: if there had been a breach, he would have been alerted by half a dozen movement sensors and proximity triggers. It had to be a glitch, nothing more. He’d run a diagnostic in the morning—this was one subsystem that could not be allowed to…

Suddenly a red light winked on beside the yellow one, and a low alarm began to bleat.

Fear and disbelief washed over him like a tidal wave. A full-scale breach, with hardly any warning? It was impossible, unthinkable… The withered hand reached toward a small metal box fixed to one arm of his wheelchair, flicked away the safety toggle covering the kill switch. One crooked finger hovered over the switch. When it was pressed, several things would happen very quickly: 911 calls would go out to police, fire officials, and emergency paramedic units; sodium vapor lights would come on throughout the house and grounds; alarms in the attic and basement would emit earsplitting shrieks; magnetic media degaussers placed strategically throughout the room would generate targeted magnetic fields for fifteen seconds, wiping all data from the hard disks; and finally, an EMP shock pulse generator would fire, completely disrupting all the microprocessor circuitry and electronics in the second-floor room.

The finger settled onto the button.

“Good evening, Mime,” came the unmistakable voice from the darkness of the hallway.

The finger jerked away. “Pendergast?”

The special agent nodded and stepped into the room.

For a moment, the man in the wheelchair was nonplussed. “How did you get in here? My security system is state-of-the-art.”

“Indeed it is. After all, I paid for its design and installation.”

The man wrapped the bathrobe more closely around his narrow frame. His composure was quick to return. “We had a rule. We were never to meet face-to-face again.”

“I’m aware of that. And I deeply regret having to break it. But I have a request to make—and I felt that, by making it in person, you would better understand its urgency.”

A cynical smile slowly broke over Mime’s pale features. “I see. The Secret Agent Man has a request. Another request, I should say, of the long-suffering Mime.”

“Our relationship has always proceeded on a—how shall I put it?—symbiotic basis. After all, wasn’t it only a few months back that I arranged for a dedicated fiber-optic line to be installed here?”

“Yes, indeedy. Allowing one to bask in three hundred Mbps goodness. No more purloined sips from the T-3 soda straw for me.”

“And I was instrumental in having those troublesome charges against you dropped. You’ll recall, the ones from the Department of Defense alleging—”

“Okay, Secret Agent Man, I haven’t forgotten. So: what can I do for you this fine evening? Mime’s Cyber-Emporium is open for all your hacking needs. No firewall too thick, no encryption algorithm too strong.”

“I need information on a certain person. Ideally, her whereabouts. But anything will do: medical files, legal issues, movement. Starting from the time of her presumed death and going forward.”

Mime’s sunken, strangely child-like visage perked up at this. “Her presumed death?”

“Yes. I am convinced the woman is alive. However, there is a one hundred percent certainty she is using an assumed name.”

“But you know her real name, I assume?”

Pendergast did not answer for a moment. “Helen Esterhazy Pendergast.”

“Helen Esterhazy Pendergast.” Mime’s expression grew more interested still. “Well, dust my broom.” He thought for a moment. “Naturally, I’ll need as much personal data as you can provide if I’m to fashion a sufficiently girthy search avatar of your… of your…”

“Wife.” And Pendergast passed over a thick folder.

Mime reached for it eagerly, turned over the pages with his withered hand. “It would appear you’ve been holding out on me,” he said.

Pendergast did not reply directly. Instead, he said, “Searches through official channels have turned up nothing.”

“Ah. So M-LOGOS came up dry, did it?” When Pendergast did not answer, Mime chuckled. “And now Secret Agent Man wants me to try it from the other side of the cyber-street. Lift up the virtual carpet and check what’s beneath. Probe the seamy underbelly of the information superhighway.”

“An unfortunate mix of metaphors, but yes, that is the general idea.”

“Well, this may take a while. Sorry there isn’t a chair—feel free to bring one in from the next room. Just don’t turn on any lights, please.” Mime gestured toward a large insulated food container that sat in one corner. “Twinkie?”

“Thank you, no.”

“Suit yourself.”

For the next ninety minutes, not a single word was spoken. Pendergast sat in a darkened corner, motionless as a Buddha, while Mime wheeled himself from terminal to terminal, sometimes typing in a rapid-fire volley of commands, other times poring over lengthy readouts scrolling down one of the innumerable LCD monitors. As the minutes slowly passed, the figure in the wheelchair grew more sunken and discomposed. Sighs grew more frequent. Now and then, a hand slapped against a keyboard in irritation.

Finally, Mime wheeled back from the central terminal in disgust. “Sorry, Agent Pendergast,” he said in a tone that sounded almost contrite.

Pendergast glanced toward the hacker, but Mime was facing the other way, his back to the agent. “Nothing?”

“Oh, there’s a great deal—but all before that trip to Africa. Her work at Doctors With Wings, school records, medical evaluations, SAT scores, books borrowed from a dozen different libraries… even a poem she wrote in college while babysitting some kid.”

“ ‘To a Child, Upon Losing His First Tooth,’ ” Pendergast murmured.

“That’s the one. But after the lion attack—zip.” Mime hesitated. “And that usually means only one thing.”

“Yes, Mime,” Pendergast said. “Thank you.” He thought for a moment. “You mentioned school records and medical evaluations. Did you come across anything unusual—anything at all? Something that perhaps struck you as strange or out of place?”

“No. She was the picture of health. But then, you must have known that. And she seems to have been a good student. Decent grades in high school, excellent grades in college. Did well as far back as elementary school, in fact—which is surprising, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“Well, that she spoke no English.”

Pendergast rose slowly out of his chair. “What?”

“You didn’t know? It’s right here.” Mime wheeled himself back to the keyboard, typed rapidly. An image came onto the screen: a transcript of some kind, typed on a manual typewriter, with handwritten notations at the bottom.

“The Maine Department of Education digitized all its old records a few years back,” Mime explained. “See the notation here, attached to Helen Esterhazy’s second-grade report card.” He leaned toward the screen, quoted: “ ‘Considering that Helen immigrated to the United States in the middle of last year as a native Portuguese speaker with no English, her progress at school, and her growing command of the language, have been impressive.’ ”

Pendergast came forward, glanced at the scanned image himself, a look of pure astonishment on his face. Then he straightened up, mastering the expression. “Just one other thing.”

“What is it, Secret Agent Man?”

“I’d like you to access the University of Texas database and make a correction to their records. One Frederick Galusha is reported as having left college his senior year, before graduation. The records should show that he graduated, cum laude.”

“Piece of cake. But why cum laude? I’ll make him summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, for just a dollar more.”

“Cum laude will be sufficient.” Pendergast inclined his head. “And make sure he gets all the course credits he needs to make his record consistent. I’ll see myself out.”

“Righteous. Remember: no more surprise visits. And please don’t forget to reset anything you may have disabled on your way in.”

As Pendergast turned to go, the figure calling himself Mime spoke again. “Hey, Pendergast?”

The agent glanced back.

“Just one thing. Esterhazy is a Hungarian name.”

“Indeed.”

He scratched his neck. “So how come her native language was Portuguese?”

But when he looked up he was speaking to an empty doorway. Pendergast had already vanished.