Douglas Preston - White Fire

He paused, his silvery eyes roaming the room. Taking a switchblade from one pocket, he stepped over to the chaise longue, made a small, surgical incision where the fabric met the wooden framing, inserted his light into it, and then his fingers, making a painstaking examination of the interior — obviously to no avail. Next, he applied himself to the walls, holding one ear to the plaster while knocking gently with his knuckles. In such a fashion, he circled the room with agonizing thoroughness: once, twice.

As he watched this careful search, done by an expert, Kleefisch felt the familiar sinking feeling return once again.

His eyes fell to the floor — and to the small rug that lay at its center. Something was familiar about it: very familiar. And then, quite abruptly, he realized what it was.

“Pendergast,” he said, his voice little better than a croak.

The FBI agent turned to look at him.

Kleefisch pointed at the carpet. “‘It was a small, square drugget in the center of the room,’” he quoted. “‘Surrounded by a broad expanse of wood-flooring in square blocks, highly polished.’”

“I fear my knowledge of The Canon is not as nuanced as yours. What is that from? ‘The Musgrave Ritual’? ‘The Resident Patient’?”

Kleefisch shook his head. “‘The Second Stain.’”

For a moment, Pendergast returned his gaze. Then, suddenly, his eyes glittered in comprehension. “Could it be so simple?”

“Why not recycle a good thing?”

In a moment, Pendergast was kneeling upon the floor. Pushing away the carpet, he began applying his fingertips as well as the blade of his knife to the floorboards, pushing here, probing gently there. Within a minute, there was the squeak of a long-disused hinge and one of the parquet squares flipped up, exposing a small, dark cavity beneath.

Pendergast gently reached into the hole. Kleefisch looked on, hardly daring to draw breath, as the agent withdrew his hand. When he did, it was clutching a rolled series of foolscap sheets, brittle, dusty, and yellowed with age, tied up with a ribbon. Rising to his feet, Pendergast undid the ribbon — which fell apart in his hands — and unrolled the quire, brushing off the topmost sheet with care.

Both men crowded around as Pendergast held his light up to the words scrawled in longhand across the top of the page:

The Adventure of Aspern Hall

Nothing more needed to be said. Quickly and silently, Pendergast closed the little trapdoor and pushed the rug back into place with his foot; then they stepped out of the room and made for the head of the stairs.

Suddenly there was a dreadful crash. A monumental billow of dust rose up to surround Kleefisch, blotting out his lantern and plunging the hallway into darkness. He waved the dust away, coughing and spluttering. As his vision cleared, he saw Pendergast, his head, shoulders, and outstretched arms down at the level of Kleefisch’s feet. The floor had given way beneath him and he had saved himself from falling through at just the last minute.

“The manuscript, man!” Pendergast gasped, straining with the effort of holding himself in place. “Take the manuscript!”

Kleefisch knelt and plucked the manuscript carefully from Pendergast’s hand. Snugging it into a pocket of his ulster, he grabbed Pendergast’s collar and — with a great effort — managed to pull him back up onto the second-floor landing. Pendergast regained his breath, stood up and, with a grimace, dusted himself off. They maneuvered their way around the hole and had begun creeping down the stairs when a slurred voice sounded from outside:

“Oi! Who’s that, then?”

The two froze.

“The groundskeeper,” Kleefisch whispered.

Pendergast gestured for Kleefisch to shutter his lantern. Then, raising his hooded light to reveal his face, he put a finger to his lips and pointed to the front door.

They moved forward at a snail’s pace.

“Who’s there!” came the voice again.

Silently, Pendergast drew a large handgun out of his jacket, turned it butt-first.

“What are you doing?” Kleefisch said in alarm as he grasped Pendergast’s hand.

“The man’s intoxicated,” came the whispered reply. “I should be able to, ah, render him harmless with little effort.”

“Violence?” Kleefisch said. “Good Lord, not upon one of Her Majesty’s own!”

“Do you have a better suggestion?”

“Make a dash for it.”

“A dash?”

“You said it yourself — the man’s drunk. We’ll rush out of the gate and run south into the wood.”

Pendergast looked dubious but put away the weapon nevertheless. He led the way across the carpeting to the front door, opened it a crack, and peered out. Hearing nothing further, he motioned Kleefisch to follow him down the narrow walkway to the hurricane fence. Just as he opened the gate, the moon emerged from behind the clouds and a shout of triumph came from a nearby stand of hemlock:

“You, there! Don’t go no further!”

Pendergast burst through the gate and took off at high speed, Kleefisch at his heels. There was the shattering blast of a shotgun, but neither paused in their headlong run.

“You’ve been hit!” Kleefisch gasped as he struggled to keep up. He could see droplets of blackish red liquid fly up from Pendergast’s shoulder with every stride the man took.

“A few superficial pellet strikes, I suspect; nothing more. I’ll remove them with a tweezers back at the Connaught. What of the manuscript? Is it undamaged?”

“Yes, yes. It’s fine!”

Kleefisch had not run like this since his Oxford days. Nevertheless, the thought of the drunken groundskeeper and his weapon brought vigor to his limbs, and he continued to follow Pendergast, past Springett’s Wood to the Vale of Health, and from there— Deo Gratias! — to East Heath Road, a taxi, and freedom.

It was still snowing when Corrie awoke in her room at the Hotel Sebastian, after a night full of restless, fragmentary nightmares. She got up and looked out the window. The town lay under a blanket of white and the snowplows were working overtime, rumbling and scraping along the downtown streets, along with front-end loaders and dump trucks removing the piles of snow and trucking them out of town.

She glanced at her watch: eight o’clock.

Last night had been awful. The police had come up immediately, to their credit, with the chief himself leading the way. They took away Jack’s corpse and the note, asked questions, collected evidence, and promised to investigate. The problem was, they were clearly overwhelmed by the serial arsonist. The chief looked like he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and his men were so sleep-deprived they could have been extras in a zombie flick. There was no way they were going to be able to conduct a thorough investigation on this, any more than they were on the shooting at her car — the target of which she was no longer in any doubt.

And so Corrie had driven back into town and booked a room at the Hotel Sebastian. Including the stint in the jail, she’d been in Roaring Fork for three weeks now, and she’d been burning through her four thousand dollars with depressing speed. Lodgings at the Sebastian would take up a good portion of the money she had left, but she was so frightened by the murder of her dog that there was no way she could spend the night in that mansion — or any night, ever again.

She had called Stacy, telling her what had happened and warning her it was too dangerous to return to the Fine house. Stacy said she would make arrangements to spend the night in town — Corrie had a horrible feeling it might have been at Ted’s place — and they’d agreed to meet that morning at nine in the hotel’s breakfast room. In one hour. It was a conversation she was not looking forward to.