Douglas Preston - Cold Vengeance

And then — with a sudden, terrible clarity — Felder realized there could be only one explanation. Poole must have been in on the escape.

CORRIE SWANSON HEARD THE FAINT RINGING of her cell phone, through her earpieces, as she lay on the bed in her dorm room listening to Nine Inch Nails. She scrambled up, plucked out the earbuds, sorted through the two-foot layer of clothes on her floor, and pulled out the phone.

A number she didn’t recognize. “Yeah?”

“Hello?” came a voice. “Is this Corinne Swanson?”

“Corinne?” The man had an accent of the Deep South, not as refined and melodious as Pendergast’s but not all that different, either. It instantly put her on alert. “Yeah, this is Corinne .”

“Corinne, my name is Ned Betterton.”

She waited.

“I’m a reporter.”

“For who?”

A hesitation. “The Ezerville Bee .”

At this, Corrie had to laugh. “Okay, who is this really and what’s the joke? You a friend of Pendergast’s?”

There was a silence on the other end. “This is no joke, but it happens that he’s the reason I’m calling.”

Corrie waited.

“My apologies for contacting you like this, but I understand you’re the one who maintains the website on Special Agent Pendergast.”

“Right,” said Corrie warily.

“That’s where I got your name,” said the man. “I didn’t realize you were in town until just today. I’m doing a story about a double murder that occurred down in Mississippi. I’d like to talk to you.”

“Talk.”

“Not on the phone. In person.”

Corrie hesitated. Her instincts were to put him off, but she was curious about the Pendergast connection. “Where?”

“I don’t really know New York well. How about, um, the Carnegie Deli?”

“I don’t do pastrami.”

“I heard they’ve got great cheesecake. How about in an hour? I’ll be wearing a red scarf.”

“Whatever.”

There were about ten people in red scarves packing the deli, and by the time Corrie found Betterton she was in a foul mood. He rose as she approached and pulled out a chair for her.

“I can seat myself, thank you, I’m not some fainting southern belle,” she said, pulling the chair from his solicitous grasp and sitting down.

He was in his late twenties, small but tough looking, ripped, old acne scars on an otherwise handsome face. He was dressed in a tacky sports jacket, with a Scotch Pad of brown hair and a nose that looked like it had once been broken. Intriguing.

He ordered a slice of truffle torte cheesecake, and Corrie settled on a BLT. As the waitress walked away, Corrie crossed her arms and stared at Betterton. “Okay, so what’s this all about?”

“Almost two weeks ago a couple, Carlton and June Brodie, were brutally murdered in Malfourche, Mississippi. Tortured and then killed, to be exact.”

He was temporarily drowned out by the clattering of dishes and a waiter shouting an order.

“Go on,” Corrie said.

“The crime’s unsolved. But I’ve stumbled across some information that I’m following up on. Nothing definitive, you understand, but suggestive.”

“Where does Pendergast come in?”

“I’ll get to that in a moment. Here’s the story. About ten years back, the Brodies disappeared. The wife faked suicide, then the husband vanished. A few months ago, they reappeared as if nothing had happened, moved back to Malfourche, and resumed life. She ascribed her fake suicide to marital and job difficulties, and they told everyone they’d been running a B and B in Mexico. Except that they hadn’t been. It was a lie.”

Corrie leaned forward. This was more interesting than she’d expected.

“Not long before their reappearance, Pendergast arrived in Malfourche with an NYPD captain — a woman — in tow.”

Corrie nodded. That would be Hayward.

“No one can tell me what they were doing there, or why. It seems he was curious about a place deep in the adjoining swamp — a place called Spanish Island.” He proceeded to tell Corrie about all he had learned and his suspicions that it involved a major drug refining and smuggling operation.

Corrie nodded. So this was what Pendergast was working on so secretively.

“Just short of two weeks ago, a man with a German accent showed up in Malfourche. The Brodies were brutally murdered. I traced the man back here to New York. He was using a fake address, but I managed to link him to a small brownstone at Four Twenty-eight East End Avenue. I did a little poking around. The building is in the heart of the old German-speaking area of Yorkville, and it’s been owned by the same company since 1940. A real estate holding company. And it appears he’s got a yacht moored at the Boat Basin — a huge one. I followed him from the brownstone to the yacht.”

Another nod from Corrie. She wondered when he was going to want some information from her in return. “So?” she said.

“So I believe this Pendergast, whom you seem to know so much about, is the key to the whole thing.”

“No doubt. This is the big case he’s been working on.”

An awkward pause. “That doesn’t seem likely to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“An FBI agent working a case doesn’t blow up a bar and sink a bunch of boats, not to mention burn down a drug lab in the swamp. No — this is extracurricular.”

“That’s possible. He often investigates on a… freelance basis.”

“This was not an investigation. This was… retribution. Reckoning. This man Pendergast, I believe he’s the mastermind behind the whole operation.”

She stared at him. “Mastermind of what?”

“The Brodie killings. The drug smuggling operation — if that’s what it is. Something big and highly illegal is going on here — that much is obvious.”

“Now, hold on. You’re calling Pendergast a drug lord, or maybe even a murderer ?”

“Let us say I strongly suspect his involvement. Everything that’s happened looks to me like drugs, and this FBI agent is up to his neck in it—”

Corrie stood up abruptly, her chair clattering to the floor. “Are you some kind of nutcase?” she said in a loud voice.

“Sit down, please—”

“I will not sit down! Pendergast, selling drugs ?” Her tone of disgust and disbelief was turning heads in the crowded restaurant. She didn’t care.

Betterton cringed under this outburst. “Will you be quiet—”

“Pendergast is one of the most honest men you’ll ever meet. You aren’t even fit to lick his shoes!”

She saw Betterton flushing with mortification. Now she had the riveted attention of the entire restaurant. Several waiters and waitresses were hurrying over. There was something almost gratifying about it.

Her long frustration at Pendergast’s disappearance, her anger at being led to believe he was dead, seemed to coalesce and find a target in Betterton. “You call yourself a reporter?” she cried. “You couldn’t report your way out of a douche bag! Pendergast saved my life! He’s been putting me through college, for your information — and don’t think there’s anything between us, either, because he’s the most decent man alive, you asswipe.”

“Excuse me, miss!” A waiter was flapping his hands in a panic as if to wave her away by magic.

“Don’t ‘miss’ me, I’m on my way out.” She turned and looked at the horrified crowd in the restaurant. “What, you don’t like foul language? Go back to Dubuque.”

She flounced out of the restaurant, exited onto Seventh Avenue, and there, amid the lunchtime crowds, managed to regain her breath and her equilibrium.

This was serious. It seemed Pendergast was in some kind of trouble — maybe deep trouble. But he’d always handled trouble before, she knew. She had made him a promise — a promise to leave this alone — and she intended to keep it.