Douglas Child - The Wheel of Darkness

He looked around at the silent group, licked his lips.

“New York City, on the other hand, has the facilities to conduct a proper criminal and forensic investigation. The passengers will be minimally inconvenienced and the ship will probably be released after a few days. Most importantly, the investigation will be state of the art. They will find and punish the killer.” Cutter closed his eyes slowly, then opened them again. It was a slow, strange gesture that gave LeSeur the creeps. “I trust I have made myself clear, Captain Mason?”

“Yes,” said Mason, her voice cold as ice. “But allow me to point out a fact you’ve overlooked, sir: the killer has struck four times in four days. Once a day, like clockwork. Your twenty-four extra hours to New York means one extra death. An unnecessary death. A death that you will be personally responsible for. ”

There was a terrible silence.

“What does it matter that the passengers will be inconvenienced?” Mason continued. “Or that the ship might be stuck in port? Or that the corporation might lose millions of dollars? What does it matter when the life of a human being is at stake ?”

“That’s true!” LeSeur said, louder than he intended. He was distantly surprised to hear that the voice which spoke up was his own. But he was sick at heart—sick of the killing, sick of the shipboard bureaucracy, sick of the endless talk about corporate profits—and he couldn’t help but speak. “That’s what this is all about: money. That’s all it boils down to. How much money the corporation might lose if its ship were stuck in St. John’s for a few weeks. Are we going to save the corporation money, or are we going to save a human life?”

“Mr. LeSeur,” Cutter said, “you are out of line—”

But LeSeur cut him off. “Listen: the most recent victim was an innocent sixteen-year-old girl, a kid for God’s sake, traveling with her grandparents. Kidnapped and murdered! What if she had been a daughter of yours?” He turned to face the others. “Are we going to let this happen again? If we follow the course Commodore Cutter recommends, we’re very likely condemning another human being to a horrible death.”

LeSeur could see the junior deck officers nodding their agreement. There was no love lost for the corporation; Mason had hit a nerve. The chief engineer, Halsey, remained unreadable.

“Commodore, sir, you leave me no choice,” Mason said, her voice quiet but with a measured, almost fierce eloquence. “Either you divert this ship, or I’ll be forced to call for an emergency Article V action.”

Cutter stared at her. “That would be highly inadvisable.”

“It’s the last thing I want to do. But if you continue to refuse to see reason, you leave me no choice.”

“

Bullshit!

” This profanity, so remarkable on the lips of the commodore, sent a strange shock wave rippling across the bridge.

“Commodore?” Mason said.

But Cutter did not reply. He was staring out through the bridge windows, gaze fixed on an indeterminate horizon. His lips worked soundlessly.

“Commodore?” Mason repeated.

There was no reply.

“Very well.” Mason turned to the assembled group. “As second in command of the

Britannia

, I hereby invoke Article V against Commodore Cutter for dereliction of duty. Who will stand with me?”

LeSeur’s heart was pounding so hard in his chest it felt like it would burst from his rib cage. He looked around, his eyes meeting the frightened, hesitant eyes of the others. Then he stepped forward.

“I will,” he said.

46

PENDERGAST CONTINUED TO LOOK AT THE BRAQUE. A SMALL question, a nagging doubt, took root in the margins of his consciousness, spreading to fill the void he had created within his mind. Slowly, it intruded into his conscious thought:

There was something wrong with the painting.

It was not a forgery. There was no doubt it was genuine, and that it was the very painting auctioned at Christie’s in the Winter Sale five months before. But there was nevertheless something that wasn’t right. The frame, for one thing, had been changed. But that wasn’t all . . .

He rose from his seat and approached the painting, pausing inches from its surface, and then stepping slowly back, staring intently at it the entire time. It came to him in a flash: part of the image was missing. The painting had lost an inch or two on the right side and at least three inches off the top.

He stood motionless, staring. He was sure the painting had been sold intact at Christie’s. That could mean only one thing: Blackburn himself had mutilated it for reasons of his own.

Pendergast’s breathing slowed as he contemplated this bizarre fact: that an art collector would mutilate a painting that had cost him over three million dollars.

He plucked the painting off the wall and turned it over. The canvas had recently been relined, as one might expect from a painting that had been cut down from its original size. He bent down and sniffed the canvas, coming away with the chalky smell of the glue used in relining. Very fresh: a lot fresher than five months. He pressed it with his fingernail. The glue had barely dried. The relining had been done in the last day or two.

He checked his watch: five minutes.

He quickly laid the painting face down on the thick carpeting, removed a penknife from his pocket, inserted it between the canvas and the stretcher, and—with exquisite care—pressed down on the blade, exposing the inside edge of the canvas. A dark, loose strip of old silk caught his eye.

The liner was false; something was hidden behind it. Something so valuable that Blackburn had sliced up a three-million-dollar painting to hide it.

He quickly examined the fake liner. It was held tight by the pressure between the canvas and the stretcher. Slowly, carefully, Pendergast prized the canvas away from one side of the stretcher, loosened the liner, then repeated the process on the other three sides. Keeping the painting facedown on the carpeting, he grasped the now loose corners of the liner between his thumb and forefinger, peeled it back.

Hidden between the fake liner and the real one was a painting on silk, covered by a loose silk cloth. Pendergast held it at arm’s length, then laid it on the carpet and drew back the silk cover.

For a moment, his mind went blank. It was as if a sudden puff of wind had blown the heavy dust from his brain, leaving a crystalline purity. The image assembled itself in his consciousness as his intellectual processes returned. It was a very ancient Tibetan mandala of astonishing, extraordinary, utterly unfathomable complexity. It was fantastically, maddeningly intricate, a swirling, interlocking geometric fantasy edged in gold and silver, an unsettling, disintegrating palette of colors against the blackness of space. It was like a galaxy unto itself, with billions of stars swirling around a spinning singularity of extreme density and power . . .

Pendergast found his eye drawn inexorably to the singularity at the center of this bizarre design. Once it was fixed there, he found himself unable to move his eyes away. He made a minor effort, then a stronger one, marveling at the power of the image to hold both his mind and his gaze in thrall. It had happened so suddenly, so stealthily as it were, that he had no time to prepare himself. The dark hole at the center of the mandala seemed to be alive, pulsing, crawling in the most repellent way, opening itself like some foul orifice. He felt as if a corresponding hole had been opened in the center of his own forehead, that the countless billions of memories and experiences and opinions and judgments that made up his unique persona were being twisted, being altered ; that his very soul was being drawn out of his body and sucked into the mandala, in which he became the mandala and the mandala became him. It was as if he were being transfigured into the metaphysical body of the enlightened Buddha . . . Except that this wasn’t the Buddha.