Douglas Child - The Wheel of Darkness

“Do you know, Constance,” he murmured as he bent over the table, face just inches from the surface of the wood. “I believe you’re right. This is sawdust.”

“Left over from construction?”

“No.

Fresh

sawdust. And if

this

is what I think it is”—here he jabbed at something with a pair of tiny forceps, then straightened up—“then we won’t have to bother ourselves with Calderón or Strage.”

Constance looked at Pendergast’s pale, eager face. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how sawdust could fit in.

As she stood up and drew near, he rummaged for an ashtray and a match. Then he motioned her to move closer. As he held the forceps over the ashtray, she could just make out, in the steel jaws, the glittering of a tiny brownish crystal.

“Pay attention,” he said quietly. “This won’t last long.” And then he lit the match; waited a moment while the initial bloom of sulfur faded from the air; then applied the flame to the crystal.

As they watched, it flared and smoked in the forceps. And then, very briefly, Constance caught a faint scent, borne on the air of the stateroom: a rich, musky, exotic whiff of myrrh, strange, faintly intoxicating—and unmistakable.

“I know that smell,” she breathed.

Pendergast nodded. “The smell of the inner monastery of Gsalrig Chongg. A special kind of incense, made only by them, used to keep a uniquely voracious species of woodworms at bay.”

“Woodworms?” Constance repeated.

“Yes.”

She turned to the small mound on the table. “You mean that sawdust . . . ?”

“Exactly. Some of those same woodworms must have come on board in the box that housed the Agozyen. Blackburn has done the North Star line no favors by introducing them to the Britannia .” He turned to face her, his eyes still glittering with excitement. “We have our man. Now all that remains is to lure him from his lair and get inside his safe.”

32

SCOTT BLACKBURN WALKED TO THE FRONT DOOR OF HIS SUITE, placed a Do Not Disturb card on the outside knob, then bolted it from the inside. Climbing two flights of stairs to his dressing room, he yanked off his tie, removed his suit jacket and shirt, tossed them into a corner for his maid to hang up, and slipped out of his pants. For a moment he stood in front of the full-length mirror, rippling his muscles, absently admiring his torso. Then, from a locked drawer, he drew out a set of saffron-colored Toray silk robes. He slowly dressed himself in them, first the inner robe, then the upper robe, and finally the outer robe, the fine silk slipping across his skin like quicksilver. He arranged the pleats, folding the robe over and leaving one chiseled shoulder and arm bare.

He stepped into his private sitting room, shut the doors, and stood in its center, surrounded by his Asian art collection, deep in thought. It was necessary, he knew, to calm his mind, which had been greatly disturbed by what he had heard at the dinner table that evening. So a maid had been in his room yesterday. And she had subsequently gone crazy, killed herself. The chief of security had questioned him—all allegedly routine. And then again, just now, he’d caught another ship’s maid in his suite, despite his strictest orders to the hotel manager and the head of the housekeeping staff. Was it a coincidence?

Or was he, in fact, under scrutiny? Had his movements, his activities, his

acquisitions

, been tracked?

In his fierce climb to the top of the Silicon Valley hierarchy, Blackburn had long ago learned to trust his sense of paranoia. He had learned that, if his instincts told him somebody was out to get him, then somebody generally was. And here, trapped on this ship, without recourse to his usual layers of security, he was in an unusually vulnerable position. He’d heard rumors there was some kind of private investigator on board, an eccentric passenger by the name of Pendergast, looking for a thief and murderer.

Was the bastard investigating him ? There was no way to be certain, but the more he thought about it, the more it seemed likely. He couldn’t afford to take a chance; the stakes were too high. His adversary—for, if his instincts were right, there could be no other term for him—would have to be dealt with in a special way.

A very special way.

He turned off all the lights in the room and stood in the dark, sharpening his senses. First he listened intently, teasing out every little sound—from the faint thrumming of the engines deep within the riveted steel, to the moaning of wind and sea; the splatter of rain against the glass; the sobbing of his private maid in her bedroom; the muffled footfalls in the corridor outside. He tuned in to the sensations of his own body, his bare feet on the plush nap, the scent of sandalwood and beeswax in the cabin, the sensation caused by the deep, ponderous rolling of the ship.

He inhaled, exhaled. The three enemies—hate, desire, and confusion—had to be temporarily banished. All must be calm. Of these three, hate was the most powerful of the enemies, and now it almost suffocated Blackburn in its triumphant embrace.

With iron self-control, he moved to an easel standing beside the far wall, on which something was propped up, covered by a tied shroud of the finest silk. It had been a foolish mistake not to keep it in the safe from the very beginning; but he had hated the idea of locking it away when he needed it so frequently. His own private maid had been given strict instructions never to lift the silk and look upon it. And he knew she wouldn’t—it had taken him years to find someone as reliable, unimaginative, and incurious as her. But the first ship’s maid—the one who killed herself—must have lifted the veil. Now, if his suspicions were true and this Pendergast was after it, even the safe wouldn’t be secure enough. Hotel safes were notoriously easy to break into, and ship’s safes, even a big one, were probably no different. They were designed to keep out petty thieves, and no more.

He would have to find a better hiding place.

Scrupulously avoiding looking at it, he gingerly lifted the silk covering from the object and placed it in the center of the room. With ceremonial care, he arranged thirty-six butter candles on a large silver tray, lit them, then placed them in front of the object to better illuminate it—all the while keeping his eyes averted. He placed bundles of joss sticks into two elaborately chased gold thuribles, arranging them on either side of the object.

The butter candles flickered, filling the room with their peculiar, dancing, golden light. Next, he laid out a quilted silk mat before the candles and seated himself, lotus-style, upon it. Closing his eyes, he began to chant: a strange, low, humming that the careful listener would hear as a braid of the same strange sounds linked together, without beginning or end. The warm, animal smell of the butter candles filled the air as his humming rose and fell, creating the bizarre Tibetan polyphonic effect known as sygyt: that of sounding two notes at once with the same voice, made famous by the Tengyo monks, among whom he had studied.

After thirty minutes of closed-eye chanting, the three enemies were gone, vanquished. Blackburn’s mind was empty of all hatred and desire, and receptive to it . He opened his eyes suddenly, very wide, and stared at the object in the candlelight.

It was as if he’d received an electric current. His body stiffened, his muscles bulged, the cords in his neck tightened, his carotid artery pulsed. But his chanting never wavered, growing more rapid, moving into the higher registers, reaching an intensity of sound that was nothing at all like the normal tones of the human voice.

He stared, and stared, and stared. A peculiar smell began filtering into the room, a nauseating, earthy smell, like rotting toadstools. The air seemed to thicken, as if filling with smoke, which drew together in a place about four feet in front of him, clotting like dark, viscous cream into something dense, almost solid. And then . . .