Douglas Preston - Brimstone

"Resign, motherfucker, resign! And good riddance!" Bullard brought his fist down on the keyboard, again and again. On the fifth blow, the screen finally winked off.

Bullard sat for a long time in the darkened room. So the feds had been expecting them in Paterson. That meant they knew about the planned transfer of missile technology. Once, that would have been a disaster, but now it seemed almost irrelevant. At the last minute, the crime had been abandoned. The feds had jack and it would stay that way. BAI was clean. Not that Bullard gave a shit; he had bigger fish to fry at the moment.

Fact was, the feds knew nothing about what was really going on. He had gotten away just in time. Grove and Cutforth-Grove and Cutforth, and maybe Beckmann, too. They had to die; it was inevitable. But he was still alive and that's what counted.

Bullard realized he was hyperventilating. Christ, he needed air. He stumbled up from the console, unlocked the door, mounted the stairs. In a moment he was back on the flying bridge, staring eastward into blue nothingness.

If only he could just sail off the edge of the world.

{ 40 }

D'Agosta heard the faint squawking of a radio and looked up through the dense undergrowth. At first, nothing could be seen through the riot of vegetation. But within a few minutes, he began to catch distant flashes of silver, glimpses of blue. Finally a cop came into view-just a head and shoulders above the dense brush-forcing his way through the bracken. The cop spied him, turned. Behind him were two medics carrying a blue plastic remains locker. They were followed by two other men in jumpsuits, lugging a variety of heavy tools. A photographer came last.

The cop shouldered his way through the last of the brush-a local Yonkers sergeant, small and no-nonsense-and stopped before them.

"You Pendergast?"

"Yes. Pleased to meet you, Sergeant Baskin."

"Right. This the grave?"

"It is." Pendergast removed some papers from his jacket. The cop scrutinized them, initialed them, stripped off the copies, and handed the originals back. "Sorry, I need to see ID."

Pendergast and D'Agosta showed their badges.

"Fine." The policeman turned to the two workers in jumpsuits, who were busily unshouldering their equipment. "He's all yours, guys."

The diggers attacked the tombstone with vigor, crowbarring it up and rolling it aside. They cleared an area around the grave with brush hooks, then laid several big, dirty tarps across the clearing. Next they began cutting out the weedy turf with turf cutters, popping out squares and stacking them like bricks on one of the tarps.

D'Agosta turned to Pendergast. "So how did you find him?"

"I knew right away he had to be dead, and I assumed before his death he must have been either homeless or mentally ill: there could be no other reason why he'd prove so elusive in these days of the Internet. But learning more than that was a very difficult task, even for my associate, Mime, who as I mentioned has a rare talent for ferreting out obscure information. Ultimately, we learned Beckmann spent the last years of his life on the street, sometimes under assumed names, cycling through various flophouses and homeless shelters in and around Yonkers."

The turf was now stacked and the two workers began digging, their shovels biting alternately into the soil. The medics stood to one side, talking and smoking. There was another faint roll of thunder and light rain began to fall, pattering onto the thick vegetation around them.

"It appears our Mr. Beckmann had a promising start in life," Pendergast continued. "Father a dentist, mother a homemaker. He was apparently quite brilliant in college. But both parents died during his junior year. After graduation, Beckmann couldn't seem to find out what it was he wanted out of life. He knocked around Europe for a while, then came back to the U.S. and sold artifacts on the flea market circuit. He was a drinker who slid into alcoholism, but his problems were more mental than physical-a lost soul who just couldn't find his way. That tenement was his last place of residence." Pendergast pointed toward one of the decaying tenements ringing the graveyard.

Chuff, chuff, went the shovels. The diggers knew exactly what they were doing. Every movement was economical, almost machinelike in its precision. The brown hole deepened.

"How'd he die?"

"The death certificate listed metastatic lung cancer. Gone untreated. We shall soon find out the truth."

"You don't think it was lung cancer?"

Pendergast smiled dryly. "I am skeptical."

One of the shovels thunked on rotten wood. The men knelt and, picking up mason's trowels, began clearing dirt from the lid of a plain wooden coffin, finding its edges and trimming the sides of the pit. It seemed to D'Agosta the coffin couldn't have been buried more than three feet deep. So much for the free six-foot hole-typical government, screwing everyone, even the dead.

"Photo op," said the Yonkers sergeant.

The gravediggers climbed out, waiting while the photographer crouched at the edge and snapped a few shots from various angles. Then they climbed back in, uncoiled a set of nylon straps, slipped them under the coffin, and gathered them together on top.

"Okay. Lift."

The medics pitched in. Soon the four had hoisted the coffin out of the hole and set it on the free tarp. There was a powerful smell of earth.

"Open it," said the cop, a man of few words.

"Here?" D'Agosta asked.

"Those are the rules. Just to check and make sure."

"Make sure of what?"

"Age, sex, general condition . And most importantly, if there's a body in there at all."

"Right."

One of the workers turned to D'Agosta. "It happens. Last year we dug up a stiff over in Pelham, and you know what we found?"

"What?" D'Agosta was fairly sure he didn't want to know.

"Two stiffs-and a dead monkey! We said it must've been an organ-grinder who got mixed up with the Mafia." He barked with laughter and nudged his friend, who laughed in turn.

The workers now began to attack the lid of the coffin, tapping around it with chisels. The wood was so rotten it quickly broke loose As the lid was set aside, a stench of rot, mold, and formaldehyde welled up. D'Agosta peered forward, morbid curiosity struggling with the queasiness he never seemed fully able to shake.

Gray light, softened by the misting rain, penetrated the coffin and illuminated the corpse

It lay, hands folded on its chest, upon a bed of rotting fabric, stuffing coming up, with a huge stain of congealed liquid, dark as old coffee, covering the bottom. The body had collapsed from rot and had a deflated appearance, as if all the air had escaped along with life, leaving nothing but a skin lying over bones. Various bony protuberances stuck through the rotting black suit: knees, elbows, pelvis. The hands were brown and slimy, shedding their nails, the finger bones poking through the rotting ends. The eyes were sunken holes, the lips lopsided and drawn back in a kind of snarl. Beckmann had been a wet corpse, and the rain was making him wetter.

The cop bent down, scanning the body. "Male Caucasian, about fifty . " He opened a tape measure. "Six feet even, brown hair." He straightened up again. "Gross match seems okay."

Gross is right, D'Agosta thought as he looked at Pendergast. Despite the appalling decay, one thing was immediately clear: this corpse had not suffered the ghastly, violent fate that met Grove and Cutforth.

"Take him to the morgue," Pendergast murmured.

The cop looked at him.

"I want a complete autopsy," Pendergast said. "I want to know how this man really died."

{ 41 }

Bryce Harriman entered the office of Rupert Ritts, managing editor of the Post , to find the mean, rodent like editor standing behind his enormous desk, a rare smile splitting his bladelike face.