Douglas Preston - The Book of the Dead

“The baron let go of one of England’s national treasures, I should say.”

Menzies smiled. “He received a thousand pounds for it.”

“Worse and worse! May Ammut swallow the greedy baron’s heart for selling the ruddy thing!” Wicherly laughed, casting his flashing blue eyes on Nora, who smiled politely. His attentiveness was becoming obvious, and he seemed not at all discouraged by the wedding band on her finger.

McCorkle began to tap his foot impatiently.

“This is the burial chamber,” Wicherly began, “which the ancients called the House of Gold. Those antechambers would be the Ushabti Room; the Canopic Room, where all the pharaoh’s preserved organs were stored in jars; the Treasury of the End; and the Resting Place of the Gods. Remarkable, isn’t it, Nora? What fun we’ll have!”

Nora didn’t answer immediately. She was thinking about just how massive the tomb was, and how dusty, and how much work lay ahead of them.

Menzies must have been thinking the same thing, because he turned to her with a smile that was half eager, half rueful.

“Well, Nora,” he said. “It should prove an interesting six weeks.”

Gerry Fecteau slammed the door to solitary 44 hard, causing a deafening boom throughout the third floor of Herkmoor Correctional Facility 3. He smirked and winked at his companion as they paused outside the door, listening while the sound echoed through the vast cement spaces before dying slowly away.

The prisoner in 44 was a big mystery. All the guards were talking about him. He was important, that much was clear: FBI agents had come to visit him several times and the warden had taken a personal interest. But what most impressed Fecteau was the tight lid on information. For most new prisoners, it didn’t take long for the rumor mill to grind out the accusation, the crime, the gory details. But in this case, nobody even knew the prisoner’s name, let alone his crime. He was referred to simply by a single letter: A.

On top of that, the man was scary. True, he wasn’t physically imposing: tall and slender with skin so pale it looked like he might have been born in solitary. He rarely spoke, and when he did, you had to lean forward to hear him. No, it wasn’t that. It was the eyes. In his twenty-five years in corrections, Fecteau had never before seen eyes that were so utterly cold, like two glittering silvery chips of dry ice, so far below zero they just about smoked.

Christ, it gave Fecteau a chill just thinking about them.

There was no doubt in Fecteau’s mind this prisoner had committed a truly heinous crime. Or series of crimes, a Jeffrey Dahmer type, a cold-blooded serial killer. He looked that scary. That’s why it gave Fecteau such satisfaction when the order came down that the prisoner was to be moved to solitary 44. Nothing more needed to be said. It was where they sent the hard cases, the ones who needed softening up. Not that solitary 44 was any worse than the other cells in Herkmoor 3 Solitary-all the cells were identical: metal cot, toilet with no seat, sink with only cold running water. What made solitary 44 special, so useful in breaking a prisoner, was the presence of the inmate in solitary 45. The drummer.

Fecteau and his partner, Benjy Doyle, stood on either side of the cell door, making no noise, waiting for the drummer to start up again. He’d paused, as he always did for a few minutes when a new prisoner was installed. But the pause never lasted long.

Then, as if on schedule, Fecteau heard a faint soft-shoe shuffle start up again inside solitary 45. This was followed by the popping sound of lips, and then a low tattoo of fingers drumming against the metal rail of the bed. A little more soft-shoe, some snatches of humming… and then, the drumming. It started slowly, and quickly accelerated, a rapid roll breaking off into syncopated riffs, punctuated with a pop or a shuffle, a never-ending sonic flood of inexhaustible hyperactivity.

A smile spread across Fecteau’s face and his eyes met those of Doyle.

The drummer was a perfect inmate. He never shouted, screamed, or threw his food. He never swore, threatened the guards, or trashed his cell. He was neat and tidy, keeping his hair groomed and his body washed. But he had two peculiar characteristics that kept him in solitary: he almost never slept, and he spent his waking hours-all his waking hours-drumming. Never loudly, never in-your-face. The drummer was utterly oblivious to the outside world and the many curses and threats directed at him. He did not even seem to be aware that there was an outside world, and he continued on, never varying, never ruffled or disturbed, totally focused. Curiously, the very softness of the drummer’s sounds were the most unendurable aspect of them: Chinese water torture of the ear.

In transferring the prisoner known as A to solitary, Fecteau and Doyle had had orders to deprive the man of all his possessions, including-especially including, the warden had made clear-writing instruments. They had taken everything: books, sketches, photographs, journals, notebooks, pens and inks. The prisoner was left with nothing-and with nothing to do but listen:

Ba-da-ba-da-ditty-ditty-bop-hup-hup-huppa-huppa-be-bop-be-bop-ditty-ditty-ditty-boom! Ditty-boom! Ditty-boom! Ditty-bada-boom-bada-boom-ba-ba-ba-boom! Ba-da-ba-da-pop! Ba-pop! Ba-pop! Ditty-ditty-datty-shuffle-shuffle-ditty-da-da-da-dit! Ditty-shuffle-tap-shuffle-tap-da-da-dadadada-pop! Dit-ditty-dit-ditty-dap! Dit-ditty…

Fecteau had heard enough. It was already getting under his skin. He gestured toward the exit with his chin, and he and Doyle headed hurriedly back down the hall, the sounds of the drummer dying away.

“I give him a week,” said Fecteau.

“A week?” Doyle replied with a snort. “The poor bastard won’t last twenty-four hours.”

Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta lay on his belly, in a freezing drizzle, on a barren hill above the Herkmoor Federal Correctional and Holding Facility in Herkmoor, New York. Next to him crouched the dark form of the man named Proctor. The time was midnight. The great prison spread out in a flat valley below them, brilliantly illuminated by the yellow glare of overhead lights, as surreal an industrial confection as a giant oil refinery.

D’Agosta raised a pair of powerful digital binoculars and once again examined the general layout of the facility. It covered at least twenty acres, consisting of three low, enormous concrete building blocks, set in a U shape, surrounded by asphalt yards, lookout towers, fenced service areas, and guardhouses. D’Agosta knew the first building was the Federal Maximum Security Unit, filled with the very worst violent offenders contemporary America could produce-and that, D’Agosta thought grimly, was saying quite a bit. The second, much smaller area bore the official title of Federal Capital Sentence Holding and Transfer Facility. While New York State had no death penalty, there was a federal death penalty, and this is where those few who had been sentenced to death by the federal courts were held.

The third unit also had a name that could only have been invented by a prison bureaucrat: the Federal High-Risk Violent Offender Pretrial Detention Facility. It contained those awaiting trial for a small list of heinous federal crimes: men who had been denied bail and who were considered at especially high risk of escape or flight. This facility held drug kingpins, domestic terrorists, serial killers who had exercised their trade across state boundaries, and those accused of killing federal agents. In the lingo of Herkmoor, this was the Black Hole.

It was this unit that currently housed Special Agent A. X. L. Pendergast.

While some of the storied state prisons, such as Sing Sing and Alcatraz, were famed for never having had an escape, Herkmoor was the only federal facility that could boast a similar record.