Douglas Preston - The Book of the Dead

D’Agosta’s binoculars continued to roam the facility, taking in even the minute details he had already spent three weeks studying on paper. Slowly, he worked his way from the central buildings to the outbuildings and, finally, to the perimeter.

At first glance, the perimeter of Herkmoor looked unremarkable. Security consisted of the standard triple barrier. The first was a twenty-four-foot chain-link fence, topped by concertina wire, illuminated by the multimillion-candlepower brilliance of xenon stadium lights. A series of twenty-yard spaces spread with gravel led to the second barrier: a forty-foot cinder-block wall topped with spikes and wire. Along this wall, every hundred yards, was a tower kiosk with an armed guard; D’Agosta could see them moving about, wakeful and alert. A hundred-foot gap roamed by Dobermans led to the final perimeter, a chain-link fence identical to the first. From there, a three-hundred-yard expanse of lawn extended to the edge of the woods.

What made Herkmoor unique was what you couldn’t see: a state-of-the-art electronic surveillance and security system, said to be the finest in the country. D’Agosta had seen the specs to this system-he had, in fact, been poring over them for days-but he still barely understood it. He did not see that as a problem: Eli Glinn, his strange and silent partner-holed up in a high-tech surveillance van a mile down the road-understood it, and that’s what counted.

It was more than a security system: it was a state of mind. Although Herkmoor had suffered many escape attempts, some extraordinarily clever, none had succeeded-and every guard at Herkmoor, every employee, was acutely aware of that fact and proud of it. There would be no bureaucratic turpitude or self-satisfaction here, no sleeping guards or malfunctioning security cameras.

That troubled D’Agosta most of all.

He finished his scrutiny and glanced over at Proctor. The chauffeur was lying prone on the ground beside him, taking pictures with a digital Nikon equipped with a miniature tripod, a 2600mm lens, and specially made CCD chips, so sensitive to light they were able to record the arrival of single photons.

D’Agosta ran over the list of questions Glinn wanted answered. Some were obviously important: how many dogs there were, how many guards occupied each tower, how many guards manned the gates. Glinn had also requested a description of the arrival and departure of all vehicles, with as much information as possible on them. He wanted detailed pictures of the clusters of antennas, dishes, and microwave horns on the building roofs. But other requests were not so clear. Glinn wanted to know, for example, if the area between the wall and the outer fence was dirt, grass, or gravel. He had asked for a downstream sample from the brook running past the facility. Strangest of all, he had asked D’Agosta to collect all the trash he could find in a certain stretch of the brook. He had asked them to observe the prison through a full twenty-four-hour period, keeping a log of every activity they could note: prisoner exercise times, the movements of guards, the comings and goings of suppliers, contractors, and delivery people. He wanted to know the times when the lights went on and off. And he wanted it all recorded to the nearest second.

D’Agosta paused to murmur some observations into the digital recorder Glinn had given him. He heard the faint whirring of Proctor’s camera, the patter of rain on leaves.

He stretched. “Jesus, it really kills me to think of Pendergast in there.”

“It must be very hard on him, sir,” said Proctor in his usual impenetrable way. The man was no mere chauffeur-D’Agosta had figured that out as soon as he saw him break down and stow away a CAR-15/XM-177 Commando in less than sixty seconds-but he could never seem to penetrate Proctor’s Jeeves-like opacity. The soft click and whir of the camera continued.

The radio on his belt squawked. “Vehicle,” came Glinn’s voice.

A moment later, a pair of headlights flashed through the bare branches of the trees, approaching on the single road leading to Herkmoor, which ran up the hill from the town two miles away. Proctor quickly swung the lens of his camera around. D’Agosta clapped the binoculars to his eyes, the gain automatically adjusting to compensate for the changing contrasts of dark and light.

The truck came out of the woods and into the glow of lights surrounding the prison. It looked like a food-service truck of some kind, and as it turned, D’Agosta could read the logo on the side, Helmer’s Meats and By-Products. It stopped at the guardhouse, presented a sheaf of documents, and was waved through. The three sets of gates opened automatically, one after the other, the gate ahead not opening until the one behind had closed. The soft clicking of the camera’s shutter continued. D’Agosta checked his stopwatch, murmured into the recorder. He turned to Proctor.

“Here comes tomorrow’s meat loaf,” he said, making a feeble joke.

“Yes, sir.”

D’Agosta thought of Pendergast, the supreme gourmet, eating whatever it was that truck was bringing. He wondered how the agent was handling it.

The truck entered the inner service drive, did a two-point turn, and backed up into a covered loading dock, where it was obscured from view. D’Agosta made another entry on the digital recorder, then settled down to wait. Sixteen minutes later, the vehicle drove back out.

He glanced at his watch. Almost one o’clock. “I’m heading down to get that water and air sample, and do the magnetic drag.”

“Be careful.”

D’Agosta shouldered his small knapsack and retreated to the back side of the hill, making his way down through bare trees, scrub, and mountain laurel. Everything was sopping wet, and water dripped from the trees. Here and there, small patches of damp snow glistened beneath the branches. He didn’t need a light once he’d rounded the hill-there was enough glow from Herkmoor to light up most of the mountain.

D’Agosta was glad of the activity. During the wait on top, he’d had too much time to think. And thinking was the last thing he wanted to do: thinking about his upcoming disciplinary trial, which might very well end in his dismissal from the NYPD. It seemed incredible what had happened in the last few months: his sudden promotion to the NYPD; his blossoming relationship with Laura Hayward; his reconnection with Agent Pendergast. And then it had all come crashing down. His career as a cop was in deep shit; he was estranged from Hayward; and his friend Pendergast was rotting in that damp hell below, shortly to go on trial for his life.

D’Agosta staggered, righted himself. He tilted his bleary face upward, letting the drops of icy rain lash a modicum of alertness into him.

He wiped his face and pushed on. Getting the water sample was going to be tricky, since the stream flowed along the edge of an open field outside the prison walls, completely exposed to the guards in the towers. But this was nothing compared to the magnetic drag he was charged with performing. Glinn wanted him to crawl as close to the outer perimeter fence as he could get, carrying a miniature magnetometer in his pocket, to see if there were any buried sensors or hidden electromagnetic fields… and then plant the damn thing in the ground. Of course, if there were any sensors, he might well set them off-and then things would get exciting.

He crept slowly downhill, the ground gradually leveling out. Despite his slicker and gloves, he could feel the icy water creeping down his legs and in through the poor sealing of his boots. A hundred yards farther on, he could make out the edge of the woods and hear the gurgle of the stream. He kept low in the laurel bushes as he moved forward. The last few yards he got down on his hands and knees and crawled.